The Plumber Has Left The Building... We mean the boat

We are very glad to finally finish the installation of new water lines and a new water heater. It took longer than we expected primarily because this is a boat and on a boat, things never go the way you expect them to.

We left last weekend with the bilge blower in our hand. It had probably been replaced over the years and the mounting was just too poorly thought out to simply stick it back in there. So, we brought it home, fabricated a new mount for it that re-oriented it motor up, cleaned up the wiring and when we got down to our favorite spot behind the port engine on Saturday, the blower mounted perfectly.

While crawling around back and forth over the port side V-Drive during the past month or so, we damaged one of the passive ventilation system air outlet hoses. It's just dryer hose and fairly easy to fix. Once we did that, we remounted the port engine's coolant recovery bottle and closed the engine hatches. It will probably be a few weeks before we can safely fill the water tank and check all the new water connections, but for now, we were happy to move on.

Then it was time to tackle to the rest of the "list." That's all the other stuff we said we'd do over the winter. It's amazing how much fun it is to do these easy things after crawling through the bilge for a couple of months.

 Sunday, another nice day

Lots of small things were accomplished on Sunday. We began with the easiest, or so we thought. Replace the AC duplex outlet near the galley. We've probably installed a hundred of these things over the years, but this one turned out to be difficult to the tune of 30 minutes spent on a five minute job.

Like all boats, our Silverton's AC wiring is done with stranded wire. This outlet had spade lugs to make the three three connections to the screw terminals. They fit the terminals in the circa-1980 outlet that Silverton installed, but they were too small to fit the screw terminals on a new outlet. There was also just barely enough space to access the mounting screws. Sure, we got it installed but it didn't look like much of an accomplishment to start off our Sunday..

Then we mounted the hand vacuum cleaner on the wall above the port v-berth. It's been sitting on a shelf above the berth since we got it and it was time to get it up out of the way and route the wiring to its wall wart.  OK, this one really was easy.

Then we thought we'd mount the new reading lights over the two v-berths. Frances had selected the locations after much discussion. She's going to have to re-think the port side, we found, but the starboard side would be perfect in the location she choose.

Since we don't have a 12 volt DC source in the v-berth, we ran an wire from behind the lower steering station (the wiring for which we rehabilitated a couple of winters ago), through a wall then through a locker and along a shelf to the wall that separates the v-berth. It was completely hidden until we got to that last wall. There we hid it behind a length of surface-mount conduit.

The LED reading light looked fine when we finished.

It will be perfect for reading while stretched out on our bunk.

Before we left, we shot some video of the boat yard now that it has come alive with lots of people working on their boats. It's nice to see some action, finally.