The first weekend of Spring

This week we devoted some time to the production of Portland Riverside Marina's sales flyer. We do this every year for the marina where we winter store and this year it was getting late. Frances felt this project needed some help, so last weekend she went to the marina store and started to pack up products that needed to be photographed.  During the week, we set up the "Act Three Photo Studio" on the same workbench where we do everything boat-related and shot pictures of about 30 products. It's nice to be running one's own business so you can make time for stuff like this.  Once printed, the brochure will be six pages, all color. It really helps the marina draw people in to buy stuff at prices that are often far cheaper than the boat stores charge. This will the the 8th year we have produced this brochure for them.

Once the photos have been taken, we open them in PhotoShop and enhance the color and take out the backgrounds. That's the reason you see the green background behind the cans of solvent.

But, back to our boat. Today (Saturday) we re-erected the bridge enclosure. As we described previously, we waterproofed the top piece and today we installed it. It went up OK, but what a pain in the butt! We don't look forward to doing this again any time soon.

Then we began adding the side pieces of the enclosure. The exercise keeps us young. First, climb down the ladder and go out to the car. Select the right section of the enclosure. It only goes up one way because of the zippers on the sides so you need exactly the right section. Once the the right piece is found (there are 12), bring the selected section back to the boat, climb up the ladder to the boat and then climb up onto the bridge and snap the piece in place on the top and bottom and fasten the zipper. After the first two sections were up, we took a picture. We wish we could see water out there instead of the boat shed.

An hour or so later, the bridge enclosure was up. We have found that a small dot of Lithium grease on the fittings makes them snap together easier.

There were other things on the list for today but we decided to mask and paint the wire raceway that we had to put in when we installed the new light in the cockpit. The fact that the raceway was white and the mounting surface was beige just wouldn't do.

First we noticed that some mold had grown in that area. Not a lot but enough to see. We wiped everything down with a solution of bleach and water and the mold stains were gone. Then we masked and painted. Looks better, wouldn't you agree? (Like you'd really notice!)

By then it was only 3 PM but we left the boat to go play with a new toy (we mean new tool).

On the way down this morning, we visited Harbor Freight and bought an inexpensive ($129.99 on sale for $99.99) pressure washer. Our intent was to use this washer to clean out our bilge but since there is still no water at the boat yard, that would have to wait. Instead, we went home to assemble this new tool and see how it worked. You can't expect much for $100 but at least on first try, it worked okay. We blew the mold  and loose paint off the our deck.  Can't wait to stick that thing in our bilge!

Sunday: Shower sump surgery

In a blog post last winter, we described the installation of a new holding tank and a new shower sump. The old shower sump was carefully located by Silverton so that couldn't be reached even with arms twice as long as ours so we had to pull up the carper and cut a hole in the floor. In went a brand new Rule shower sump. We poured some water down the shower drain to test it and the sump worked fine. Off we went for a carefree summer on the boat.

But not quite. Just after the boat was back in the water, we got aboard and noticed that the shower pump was on and apparently had been for some time. No one had used the shower and in fact, there wasn't even any water on the boat. We were unable to stop the pump so we disconnected it. We never use the shower anyway but it is nice to know it will work if we ever decide to. Last fall, we checked with Defender Marine, where we had purchased the sump, and were told that the warranty had run out. We're there serviceable parts inside, we asked? No one really knew but the consensus was no. So we plunked down one boat unit ($100) for another shower sump.

Today, we again pulled up the carpet and our little access hatch and reconnected the power to the sump. The pump came on immediately and no amount of tapping on the float switch would shut it off.  Here's this P.O.S. with a little antifreeze in the bottom. The pump worked fine even after running dry for who knows how long.

This thing is really just a plastic tub with an 800 GPH Rule bilge pump and a "Rule-A-Matic" 20-amp. float switch. How about Junk-A-Matic as an alternative name? We elected to replace just the float switch because replacing the entire sump would have involved fighting the hoses and the mounting screws and would have an hour or more..

Once we had the old switch out and the new one in, the shower sump worked fine. It will be interesting to see how long this one lasts.

We tested the old switch and it was shorted to an always-on condition. Luckily, we don't use Rule bilge pumps or switches for our main bilge pumps.

While we were taking that picture, our friend Rob, who has a Luhrs 34X right next to us, mentioned that he had a Rule switches like ours fail on one of his bilge pumps after just a couple of seasons. Guess we'll cross Rule off our list permanently.