First cruise of the year, coming this week!

Our plan is to untie the old boat and head out to Greenport, Long Island on Wednesday. We do this every year to see our friends Ellen and Dave who live very near Greenport.  We have a long history with Ellen but that's a long story that we'll leave for another time.

But a cruise means that we need to do some preventative maintenance, not that there seems to be anything wrong with the boat. It's just that we're old fashioned when it comes to checking everything out before we cast off.

With that in mind, we began Sunday morning (after The New York Times) by looking at the the float switch on the midships bilge pump. The pump comes on from time to time, mainly from condensate from the air conditioner, but lately, it hasn't been shutting off. We played around with the Rule bilge pump float switch for a while and found that it had failed. Par for the course for a Rule switch, at least in our experience. We've had three of these float switches fail in our shower sump so we're familiar with how they mount and how often they fail.

A quick trip to Defender Marine in Waterford and we had a new switch that we hope will last for the summer. Next winter, we'll replace that switch with something more substantial.

While all of this was going on, Frances headed to her house to pick up Pooka, the boat cat, and that was a good thing since we had to open hatches, spread out tools and generally get in the way for several hours.

We checked all the fluids on the engines and transmissions and then adjusted the choke on the port engine, which has never opened soon enough. That done, we adjusted the idle jets on both carbs so that warm, they would run at exactly the same speed in gear while docking. Again, only the port engine required any adjustment.

Then we got out lines for docking at Greenport and then adjusted the sliding screen door to our cabin. Isn't this exciting?

Just when we were running out of things to do, Frances arrived with Pooka. It's fun to see the old guy again. He immediately walked around and we like to think recognized his summer home from last year. Bill got the equivalent of a fist-bump from him right away. That's where he runs his face along your leg.

Sounds to us like a good beginning to the summer.