It's Saturday, November 1 and the boat has been sitting in Portland for a week. We had too much to do this week to begin winterizing it but today, despite rain and quite a lot of wind, we hauled down all the antifreeze, engine oil and filters down to the boat.
We got pretty wet and cold bringing the stuff down from the car. Guess we forgot how heavy three of four gallons of antifreeze is but we got everything stowed on the deck. The cost of the oil, filters and both pink and green anti-freeze was $100 from Tractor Supply.
We normally don't need the Ethylene Glycol (green) antifreeze since it's used in a 50-50 percent mixture with water in our engine heat exchangers, but in a few weeks, we're going to replace the heads on our starboard engine and in that process, we'll probably lose some. Yes, we normally check the solution in the heat exchangers with a hydrometer. Better to be safe....
If the weather improves, we'll get the engines, air conditioning pump and the hot and cold water systems done tomorrow.
We also like to change the engine oil and filters before we store the boat. No sense in leaving the old contaminated oil in the engines for the next five months. Five months? That doesn't sound good at all!
Before we left, we stripped the v-berth beds and stuffed everything into a giant garbage bag. Frances has volunteered to get all this stuff washed and then vacuum bagged to the winter. Boy, do we love vacuum bagging! Hook it up to a vacuum cleaner, throw in a dryer sheet and all that bedding is reduced to two small cubes.
We put a camera mount on one of our aft rails and shot some video of us carrying down the stuff from the car. Not exactly thrilling video but we'll look at it and laugh next spring.
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