As any person that has spent any time tied to a dock knows, the two most important things are your fenders and dock lines. We've carried lots of fenders ever since we bought Zephyr and even gave away some when we were in Newport, Oregon as we had no place to store them. Normally it's six at anyone time. Don't ask how many dock lines we have as there are many old ones and many new ones. We are tied up on or starboard side and have five lines between us and the concrete docks we are tied to. Some keep us from moving forward and some keep us from moving backwards. Each one is important even by itself. If one breaks, it puts lots more strain on the others. This morning we found our midship line(braided line)had chafed through the outside cover leaving only the core of the line keeping us in place. When we were in South Africa, we bought lots of 3/4 inch three strand line to make new dock lines. I'd already put eye splices in two of the six new dock lines we had planned for. It was obviously time for more lines to have eye splices put in them. This way, one end has a nice big loop in it to attach to the cleat on shore and then you can tighten up the lines while being on board. The reasoning for doing it this way is that should a big storm or tsunami appear, you can just let go your lines on deck and take off. There is no reason to get off the boat and have to get back on. I grabbed two more of our unspliced lines and put in new eye splices on the end. Since it's three strand line, on the opposite end, I whipped the end of the line twice so should one whipping come off, the line won't unravel. Whipping the line while it sounds sort of kinky, is just wrapping the ends with a much smaller line to keep the ends nice and tight and not allow it to unravel. It took several hours as these lines while being new and stiff are also quite large. Now we have four 3/4 inch dock lines keeping us tied to the dock and a 1/2 inch line as our fifth line.
As I started this post, I talked about fenders. These are normally big inflatable rubber tubes you hang from the side to keep the side away from the docks and scraping the fiberglass or in our case the nice freshly varnished teak we have along our top sides. As I wrote earlier, we have at least five of these fenders hanging over the side. They do a decent job but since the dock is a fixed concrete structure, Zephyr goes up and down as the tide demands. With the winds we've had here(not really that strong), there have been times we've had pressure on the fenders allowing the teak to come quite close to scraping and that is just not going to happen. Yesterday we bought two more fenders but these are in the shape of balls as you can see from the attached pictures. We had to push Zephyr away from the docks to get them to fit between the two. We left the original ones in place just in case anything should happen to the new ones. Better safe than sorry. Now we are at a more comfortable distance from the docks.
One of the main reasons we did this is A:to protect Zephyr from any damage and B: we've heard on the Internet that there is a chance of a big storm coming our way about the middle of next week. Everyone is taking this time to make sure they are either securely anchored or well tied to a dock somewhere. It's not coming close enough to warrant us disconnecting from the marina and heading for Trinidad but we may pick up some of its winds and rain. We, along with everyone else here in Grenada looks closely at the weather everyday.
Since I've been back, Blue (one of our kitties) has been quite cool to me. Where she used to jump in my lap and purr away, she avoided just about any contact with me. I guess she's mad at me for leaving. I've done it in the past since we've been out cruising but she's never gone this long staying mad at me. Oh well, eventually she will come around. There have been a couple of times she will jump up in my lap, then realize she's still supposed to be mad at me and immediately jump back down and quickly walk away. I expect her to come around eventually. I've been bribing here with special treats from time to time.
That's about it for now. We think we might have figured out why the propane sniffer has been going crazy. Tracy found some potatoes under the floorboards that have gone over the hill, way over the hill. In the past, we've had spoiled cabbage and onions set it off but most potatoes get eaten long before they get to this stage of badness. I took out the "new" sniffer I installed a few days ago and took it to a refrigerator specialist that has the tools to check it. I talked to him this morning and he says the problem isn't the sniffer, it's "something else". Now we think we know what it is. I'll be putting in the "old" sniffer tomorrow and we will see how it goes. Stay tuned.
I put in the old sniffer and still the alarm went off so it must be a bad main unit. The lights on it had been blinking on and off for a while so I'm not really that surprised. Now I have to find a new one that won't break the bank and wait for it to come in.
Today, we reinstalled the antenna wire for our SSB radio. We'd had to rip it out when we had to take off the back stay when we were in Trinidad so Zephyr would fit in the lift. Today we reinstalled it. We'd taken out the wire that used to go to our dead GPS unit a while ago so we wanted to take this antenna wire down the hole in the deck the GPS wire used to be in. Who ever originally installed the wire running them through the deck used a ton of caulk when they ran them. We had to dig enough out so we could get the antenna wire through the hole. Tracy dug from the outside while I dug it out from inside. It took a lot of work to get it cleared but she's run through the deck with us adding even more caulk to the hole. Now all we have to do is install the fitting on the end of the wire and hook it back up to the antenna tuner.
We got the wires run in the morning and spent the afternoon playing another round of Mexican Train Dominoes. It started at 1400 and it's still going on at 1700. It makes for a long and sometimes pleasurable (when I win)way to spend a Sunday afternoon