The real stuff for Nelleke, I mean. The first thing that I will be working on is the initial phase of the mast step for the mizzen. I plan to jack up the mast in place by slackening off the shrouds and supporting the mast with some 2x6 boards under two conveniently placed winches on the mizzen with a scissor jack for about ½” or until the cabin ceiling reassumes the correct shape. Not that it was on the verge of caving in but I wanted to make shire that it never could. Then I will 520 and screw into place three small beams across the cabin ceiling from one side to the other to add additional support and to spread the load over a larger area. I figure that this should take a couple of evenings to accomplish. Then I will remove the jack and retune the rigging and we should be good to go. I am particularly interested in getting this done prior to the Canada Day Weekend which is from Jun 29th to 2nd July. The yacht club runs a race from Shelburne to Lockport the community just down the road towards Halifax with the yachts arriving in time to take part in their Canada Day festivities before coming back home in a more sedate fashion. I am looking for a couple of folks to be crew if anyone is interested. The party in Lockport will consist of a small town fair, street parades and dances as well as whatever taking place aboard the various yachts. Should be a good time.

I am also going to be manufacturing an adjustable platform for the secondary alternator that I am experimenting with running off the spinning propeller shaft on the boat and while I am doing that I am hoping that Barb will feel comfortable with her new knee to get going on the bright work topsides. I am still looking for someone with some welding experience to build an extension on my bow roller that will allow me to have the secondary anchor off the bow instead of being stowed on deck as it is now. That will make it a lot easier to use and hence more likely as we are all basically lazy. For those of you who may be unaware Nelleke carries three anchors: a CQR as primary and a Bruce secondary forward and a Danforth on the stern rails in case we need to anchor from the bow and stern someday.

I have a list as long as my arm of additional stuff that I want to do ranging from hooking up all the equipment so that they can talk NMEA protocol to each other to making an office out of the middle cabin. I guess the two things that I definitely want to get done this summer is a new support for the instrument pod on the mizzen and dingy lift points on our tender. Our friend Mike from WIndshadow gave us some special non rotting extremely hard take no prisoners wood that I will be making it out of so I had better get on with it.