Spring is here! What nice weekend weather we had. Since we only have 4 weeks to get the bottom paint job done while we are on the hard, we told ourselves that we would start painting the first chance the weather permits.

Well the sun was shining so we dived right in. We bought a dustless sander from Rick for about the same price it would have cost us to rent one from the marina. While I was yelling at the Garmin (more later) Christine sanded the whole bottom of the boat! Of course this took multiple trips to West Marine and the hardware store to get what we needed (air filter ect.). We created a bungee cord system to help take the strain off her arms but it didn't travel well or get to the far low spots so she had to abandon it often. She got the job done though!



We now have a Rigid dustless sander for sale if anyone is interested :)


O and we have electricity and water now. We bought the adapter needed for $36 so now we have lights. And the water was always on, Christine just needs to work out a lil more to turn it on ;)

Since we are working on multiply projects, our aft berth and one cockpit locker were emptied out on to our deck. A young couple came by to say hello to us and commented that our boat was very "outfitted". We think that's just a nice way of saying there's a lot of shit on our boat.

So I replaced the extension wires for the Garmin to no avail. We saw our boating mentor Eric since he is on the same row on the hard as us, and we met his brother in law Glen who just bought a Pearson 35 that we had looked at back in April. What a small world. As usual we all talked boating stuff and we came out a little more knowledgeable than before. They gave me some trouble shooting pointers on the Garmin but nothing has worked yet.

I took the Garmin head unti to West Marine and we tested it with their wires and it came on great so the head unit is fine, must be the wires. When the unit is unplugged I get a voltage reading at the control panel of 13.5 and I get a voltage reading after my extension splice of 13.5 so my extension splice must be good. I haven't been able to test the voltage at the end of the plug because there are about 20 lil holes and the owner's manual doesn't say which are which. But I think the problem must be in that Garmin wire. Once I plug the unit in, the voltage reads 7.5 at the control panel and 7.5 on both sides of my extension splice, but still don't know the voltage at the plug. Whatever it is, it isn't enough to turn the unit on. And of course my voltage meter at the control panel bounces back and forth. I might have to pull the Garmin wire out and inspect for damage and possibly return it to West Marine.


Ok so back to fun stuff. Saturday as the sun was winding down, our last task was to get the lines and fender that were left at our slip. So we got to test out our new inflatable kayaks!



We bought these for each other as Christmas presents but hadn't got to use them yet. I need to work on inflating them completely but they looked and worked great. We kayaked over to our slip, about 5 piers over. Of course as the evening was setting in, the winds picked up and now there was a strong opposite direction current and some choppiness. We made it through though, getting moderately wet, and salvaged our booty.

We have named them after two of our favorite muscians: Ben Harper and Jack Johnson




Sunday was paint day. It had finally arrived. We bought a nice lil 2 person painting kit at WM for $10 and got the paint can shook up there. You gotta make sure the copper, which keeps off lil critters, is evenly dispersed throughout the paint. Painting was fun for about 40 minutes. Then we realized we should have sanded more (read: Joey should have helped) because parts of the old paint were coming off as we rolled the paint on. Plus our arms just got tired. We really had to stretch out that one gallon of paint. After about 2 hours we had covered 98% of the boat and about 20% of ourselves.




Next weekend we will add the second coat and hopefully (key word hopefully) have the Garmin install complete so we can move on to other projects and enjoy out upcoming season!


209 days left!


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