Mike
05/30/2012, Shelburne NS

We were awoken at around 0100 with a major thunder storm and torrential downpour. The flash to bang for a period of time was almost instantaneous and the whole business was further riled up with an ambulance coming to a screeching halt just two doors down from us on Water Street. We aren't sure what happened but we have our fingers crossed for the neighbours. There is a lady living with her husband in that building who is a bit frail on her pins and I really hope that the storm didn't cause any kind of attack. Time will tell, I guess.

Yesterday there was some business that I had to deal with at the club. Apparently one of the members felt that the loading zone was her private parking place in spite of the fact that it was clearly marked as a No Parking area. When she was told that she couldn't park there any more, well, let's just say that she didn't take it well to the extent that she riled at the Commodore, at the Vice Commodore, at the Club Manager, and then she came into the town and riled at the office staff. I was out of the office at the time so I had to telephone her and she riled at me and then hung up on me. Sad, really. At any rate, I had a conversation with the Vice and suggested that the solution that had the path of least resistance was to simply remove the sign and the Loading Zone designation. Now all we do is wait to see if any other of the tenants of the building complain on behalf of their suppliers. Ahhh! Such fun! Some people's children. Honestly!

This weekend there is a town wide yard sale that Barb and I are quite looking forward to. We've not been here when this has gone on before so we are interested to see if there might be anything out on the tables that we could use in our renovation project on the house. We even have a few things. Too few to have a table of our own, so we will be putting them on one of the neighbours' tables while we scrounge the neighbourhood. I am hoping that there will be something in the way of carpets.

But today was the day to get my first aid certification renewed.

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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Mike
05/28/2012, Shelburne NS

Moan! My achin' back!

I am sooooo glad to be back in the office so I can get some rest! I'm sure that you've all heard that old adage before but for me this week it definitely rings true.

Friday we went to the club for their annual fundraising lobster dinner = $12.50 a plate for lobster, salad, roll, etc - yummy and all for a good cause. But then on Saturday it all started. I had committed myself to building a sort of giant closet on the deck of the Guild Hall, part of the Scarlet Letter movie set that was left behind after closure, for the Farmer's Market. There were a couple of other guys working with me and one of the local hardware stores virtually donated the necessary lumber, but still it took six hours of bending where I am not used to bending and lifting what I am not used to lifting. Then on Sunday I had volunteered to be one of the help in the fundraising Captain's Breakfast at the club and guess who got chosen to run up and down the stairs with the breakfasts? Three guesses and the first two don't count. Twenty steps about thirty times with an armload of eggs, sausage links, toast, pancakes and beans - just the thing to add to the day of carpentry the day before. Then in the afternoon I got to finish the gardening stuff - planning trees and lilies, moving wheelbarrow loads of soil and all sorts. Need less to say today my wee back is achin'. Tonight I get a break as there is a meeting at the club to discuss club business and since I am the Town Engineer I need to attend so I can get the flavour of what is going on.

Add to the list of stuff on the boat a small but pungent leak somewhere in the head system that I shall have to crawl around to find. I have a pretty good idea of where I need to look it's just another of those lying on my stomach and hanging face down into the bilge. Such fun, eh?

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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Mike
05/23/2012, Shelburne NS

Back home again as I said in the last post and of course, the heavens have opened and we are experiencing a deluge - a funny sort of one that has a real downpour, pause, pause, another downpour, pause, pause, and on and on. The pauses are almost long enough for the streets to dry but then here it comes again. This is great for the wonder hound who doesn't like to get wet during his walks but crappy for any of the major work that I want to get done on the boat or in the garden. I have filled the raised beds with the garden soil that I bought and the rain is packing it down so I can top it up either today or tomorrow whenever it stops raining, if it ever does.

The biggest job that I have to do on Nelleke and the one that has me most nervous is the mizzen mast step. It is the one, what I would call, design flaw with this model of the Moody yachts. The mizzen like the main is deck stepped in a pulpit, but unlike the main there is no compression post down to the keel. Instead they glassed in a piece of one inch plywood on the deck and mounted the pulpit on that. Then along comes yours truly and busily puts some holes through that to allow me to bring some of the electronic wiring though to the instrument panel that I mounted on the aft of the mizzen mast. Of course these holes weren't completely leak proof and the plywood has rotted. My job will be to lift the mast and the pulpit and cut out the rotten wood and replace it with something that resists rot like teak or mahogany and glass it in again. While I am at it I plan to put some t-beam bracing across the cabin ceiling under the pulpit from one side of the cabin to the other to increase the structural support or at least distribute it across the entire cabin ceiling rather than just that one spot. That should be a much better support for the life of the boat.

The next biggest job will be to take down our split backstay and redo the insulators so that I can properly use the SSB unit that we have aboard. This is something that we haven't been to aggressive about getting done but if we execute our plan to be doing more sailing in the Caribbean starting in 2013 it would make a lot of sense to get it done before we depart.

Third job will be to get the water maker install finalized. I had been resisting doing this as we had always been sailing so far in places where we could get water and once you start to use this thing you have to use it regularly or pickle the membrane to keep it fresh or it will become unusable. Since we didn't really need it we had decided to not start to use it, but again, now that we are looking at sailing further afield where we need to buy water and since we already have this thing, it would make sense to get it ready to use. All I need to do is complete the piping to some control valves and to the galley sink and to the interim storage tank. Then there is the small matter of piping from the storage tank to the main water tanks but all that is quite straight forward.

These are three fairly big jobs that I would normally have to plan for doing over at least two years when we are not living aboard as they would be extremely disruptive to us if we were aboard and if we weren't living a five minute walk from the yacht club would involve a fair amount of to and fro time. As it is now we can pop down to putter in the evenings and we should be able to do everything this summer.
Those are the biggies. There are numerous other smaller jobs that we can do when it rains or while I am waiting for the backstay to come back from the rigger. As any of you with boats can attest, it never ends.

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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