The "honey do" list

We went back to the boat project list last weekend (January 7) but it was bitterly cold on the boat, even with the electric heater on. After about 45 minutes we went out to the car to get something and there was three inches of snow on the car. The only other boater in the yard was just getting into his car and he waved and said, "I'm outta here!" We followed about five minutes later.

This weekend was more productive. We got our new light mounted in the head and it looks like original equipment.

We haven't wired it yet because all the wiring will be well hidden in a locker behind that wall and that's going to take a little time. Once we get that done, it's one less thing on the list.

We also took care of the drooping LED lights in the galley.  We installed them under the edges of the counters about three years ago and rather than use the tiny plastic clips that come with the LED strips, we glued them in place. Bad idea, since cooking and dish washing eventually caused the lights to come loose in places. Lesson learned, we disconnected the LEDs, took them home and remounted them on a thin strip of wood.

That would allow us to mount the wood strips under the edges of the counters. However, mounting the little plastic clips meant driving in dozens of the tiniest Philips-head screws known to man.

That's a quarter behind the lights, just for comparison.

Anyhow, we reinstalled the LED strips and the galley is now, once again, nice and bright.

We also made some progress on replacing the rotted wood on our port side triangle. We posted about that project before and won't update it until we have a good fit for the new plywood.

The white radio

When we bought this boat all those years ago, it came with a white Horizon VHF radio hanging from under the fly bridge. We eventually mounted it next to our lower steering station as a back-up radio and it worked fine.

Recently, we were going through our electronics stuff and came up with an black Icom M304 radio that had stopped receiving. At the time, we simply replaced it with a newer Icom radio, which we still use on our bridge today.

But before throwing this older radio away, we checked some forums and found that this particular Icom had a known receiver fault that Icom would repair for free. We followed up and found that the repair wasn't free any longer but wasn't much money either.

We talked about spending $75.00 or so to repair the Icom radio (it has all the bells and whistles of the new ones) and Frances replied that she always "hated that Horizon radio because it is white!" Who would have known? She's called the marina for a pump-out a couple of hundred times using that white radio.

As you might have guessed, we had the Icom radio repaired and that was quick and inexpensive. Now, part of our "to do" list is making that black Icom radio fit the cutout the old white Horizon radio occupied. We think that won't be too difficult.