Working on the boat on the hard. Pictured above showing my supervisor & 1 of the projects.

As we came through the islands, we found a number of things that needed work. Having a boat is like a house in that there's always work that needs to be done on it. But houses don't move (normally) and aren't subjected to continual immersion or spray from salt water, which add to the maintenance issues. I had a list of work items - some I could do & several that needed someone else with the expertise I lacked. The boat was hauled out at 11 am, the bottom scrapped & pressure washed. There were some barnicles but they popped off nicely with the scrappers. Worse, to me, was the huge mass of plant life that had startede to sprout on the bottom. The pressure wash got rid of almost all of that stuff.

I had talked with the boatyard in terms of the work I needed done before I was hauled. After getting the boat out of the water I started to confirm that people would be there to do what was needed.The 1st guy to show up was the mechanic to work on the starboard diesel engine (it would run for an hour & quit, after a 15 min rest it would start up again) and the port saildrive/transmission (which would not go into forward after hitting that fish trap float in The Saintes). I spent almost an hour before he arrived in unbolting the engine & transmission because I "knew" we would need to pull the transmission out. Turns out the shift linkage was out of alignment & the holding bracket was slightly bent. So it was an easy fix - after which I re-bolted everything. He also found the source (we think) of the air leak into the starboard engine's fuel line. In all, he worked 2 hours & charged me the equivalent of $30/hour! In Florida, that would have been $80 - $120/hr.

Next came the rigging crew to check out the masthead navigation & anchor lights. I had noticed in the Bahamas that the nav lights at the top of the mast did not work & the anchor light only lit up in the stern quadrant, rather than all the way around. They pulled the LED unit off the top of the mast and took it to their shop for testing. It turns out the unit was bad. We looked at replacements at the Budget Marine store that's right next to the boatyard. They had an LED unit in stock for about $450, which was comperable to what it would cost in the US (as the government of Grenada does not charge taxes or import duties on equipment for transient boats). Then I remembered the store was advertising a huge sale for Friday (this was Tuesday). I asked the store manager if this would be on sale Friday & he said he could do that. I ended up getting a 25% discount on it! So Friday morning the riggers installed it & I now have a good anchor light.

In addition to all this, we had noticed that almost all the stitching around the trampoline was gone. So I unfastened it, pulled it off & took that into the riggers to be re-sewn. I got it back on Thursday, installed it on Saturday and realized I needed help re-connecting it. I checked with the rigger shop on the following Monday & they sent a guy out to help, so it's all ready to go.

During all this, I had a number of tasks that I had on my list to get accomplished. So I was busy working to get that stuff done while trying to stay out of the sun & heat as much as possible. At this point, almost everything is done & I should go back into the water Wednesday.

Finally, I took a trip into St Georges with Reinna & Clint from Karma on Thursday. They gave me a mini-tour and showed me where everything was. That was extremely interesting & the subject of my next post.