Kaimusailing

We have a two day steady decline in temperature and barometer, two days of chilly rain. Chores include covering everything up with tarpaulin, getting more propane for the little heater, and hunkering down and trying to keep the boat warm at night.
.
I thought that I would get some grinding work done when it stopped raining, but the really cold weather came with the aftermath, the north winds that followed the cold front. Mornings were freezing and it was slow going to get anything done. My order for more grinding supplies from Harbor Freight still hasn’t arrived after more than a week, they are so slow. My order for epoxy went up to Maryland. The company, Raka, doesn’t give out tracking numbers when they ship, also they don’t add the shipping onto your order until they do ship, so you have to trust them to do it right. They didn’t.
.
We’re getting into the time of year when a lot of people get down, assess their situation, and in the gloom of winter get depressed. I was feeling like that before the boatyard lifted Kaimu up and reblocked it. Now I’ve got a major roadblock out of the way and I can grind the bottoms of the boat even in cold weather. I’m way behind schedule, but the effort will continue, and we will certainly have future problems, and get Kaimu back in the water.
.
When you decide to build your own boat, and it’s a boat larger than those Duckworks projects, you will run into problems with storage, your building space, and a schedule that gets trashed no matter how conservatively you organize it. A large boat is forever, it will never be 100 per cent complete, it will always have a list of things to do. Even if you don’t build it yourself, your large boat will need a list of items to be completed. This is where the rich guy can just employ someone to fix the problems. The DIY’er has a budget, and he only has to spend as much on materials as he can use as he works along.
.
It turns out the epoxy I ordered didn’t come to St Marys, it went up to Maryland. Raka quickly sent out another epoxy kit, 3 more gallons. I don’t really need it right now, it is too cold to use it, but my stocks are low. Because they are also allowing the original shipment to come back to me, at no extra cost, my stocks of epoxy will be quite high. 6 gallons.
.
I finally sold the Garmin chartplotter, a hundred dollars less than I originally posted it for, but my estimate of its value was way too high. I found other similar units for sale at cheaper prices. In this case, the eastern Caribbean chip that came with the chartplotter was enough of an extra value to sell the whole thing. The purchaser had it sent to Puerto Rico, an area within the chip’s range.
.
So now the throw away items from the last delivery have netted just under 500 dollars. Good idea to save and sell them.
.
A large christmas tree was delivered to the yard and has stood there about a week. A tree decoration day was organized complete with a pot luck dinner. It turned out that enthusiasm for the tree decoration fizzled, but enthusiasm for food ran amok. I made a simple dish that I have made before, pressure cooker kahlua pork, so simple, just brown the pork, add a half cup of water and a tablespoon of liquid smoke, pressure cook for 1 1/2 hours. When the pork is removed from the cooker, add chopped up cabbage and pressure cook it for about 5 minutes under pressure, then let it slowly decompress. This inexpensive dish was given a lot of compliments. It seemed we had way too much food on hand, everybody making a large amount, as if they were feeding the whole boat yard. So with about 15 or so dishes available, we could pig out on a little of each one and nothing was totally consumed except for an “Aldi Salad”, which comes from a grocery chain that has a store in Jacksonville. I did not get any of that, so I can’t say how good it was, but it was all gone. Richard and Gill of Time and Tides made an age old mulled wine recipe that was very effective. Known as Smoking Bishop.
.
The image is from NPR.org and is an illustration from Charles Dickens and they are enjoying mulled wine.