It is still raining off and on– but the mood is better. And interesting things happen when an experienced boat builder is standing on a wet side deck. He looks down and says, “Hmmm – your boat must be bow heavy – those scuppers aren’t draining.” To which Jim replied, “They never did drain the side decks. The water always pools in front.” “Well – we can move them.” And so it is that on yesterday’s shopping trip, Jim bought not only a new seacock for the macerator pump, but new scupper fittings too.

Scuppers are those little holes in the top of the boat connected by hosing to holes just above the waterline on the sides of the boat. They drain surface water – and the ones in the cockpit also receive any little thing that one happens to drop – like scrabble letters and fish hooks. When we investigated the set up inside lockers and behind walls, we saw that sure enough – the surface fittings were aft of the thruhulls, leading one to believe that perhaps they were simply installed in the wrong place. The new ones will be just forward of the side gates, and over the thruhulls – where they should have been in the first place. Do all Bayfield 36’s have a similar issue?

In the overcast but not wet hours of this morning, Casey and Che decided that they would rather change the scuppers before tackling the seacock. (Both jobs involve holes in the boat.) It is messy, time consuming and non-essential, but will result in a better drainage system. It is also less fraught with tension.

Tension, you ask? Here’s why. In order to change the macerator pump seacock, it needs to be removed from the thruhull. That is the hole in the side of the boat – below the water line. And what happens when that gets removed? The hole is open and water pours in. So the tense part of it is that somebody needs to be in the water, ready to stick a plug in the hole as soon as the person inside pulls out the seacock. The ideal way to do this is to haul the boat out of the water, but that is a several hundred dollar job, and if this works, it is much cheaper. But FRAUGHT with tension!!

We had a dry trip to Fronteras (the town of Rio Dulce) yesterday and picked up the big shipment of boxes that Linda sent from Florida. The two lanchas looked like the mailboats in the Bahamas. I couldn’t get the blog posting up yesterday in town. No bandwith – and I could just barely get messages but no downloads. This pic is of me trying one more time as we sat tied up at Bruno’s dock.

It started to rain again this morning after I started this – and after there were new holes in the deck of the boat – that were not connected to anything. Blah! Buckets and plastic everywhere. I have escaped to Burnt Key Marina in hopes that maybe I can get these up. If you see them, I will have succeeded and that is one good thing about the day.