Lew at the marina has strong armed his prop supplier into getting us the new prop in two weeks vice the five weeks originally quoted. This means that we can stick with our original plan for me to drive back to Halifax on the 14th and fly back here on the 17th. The only impact is that we will be at the dock here for a couple of extra days beyond the 20th that we had originally thought. That is if they receive the prop on the 22nd, install and test on the 23rd we should be away on Sunday the 24th, weather dependant. Who knows, the prop guy might be able to shave that delivery down even further. Considering with the original delay, I was looking at overnighters up the Chesapeake and another one down the Delaware and out Cape May towards NYC or Block Island depending upon the weather and wind direction. All this was to do what we could to get us back on schedule but now we can get back to our original plan which entailed a much more leisurely pace. We will stop off at the Solomon’s and spend a day or so at Annapolis where we will hopefully meet up with some friends, and then on to Chesapeake City in the C&D Canal, then to Cape May and a weather window to hop to Block Island, and then through Cape Cod to Gloucester to await the arrival of stalwart crewperson Mike (not me, the other guy. I am already here) and the 3 day jump across to Halifax.

Lew does still want to do a sea trial with the old prop and one with the new one. The Yanmar runs at a higher RPM and those of you that have crewed with us aboard Nelleke may remember that at 1800 or only slightly more than half of the rated optimum RPM for the Perkins of 2400, we were pretty much at her hull speed. That is applying more throttle had little or no effect on our speed. Since the transmissions for the two engines has almost the same reduction ratio the old prop will still max out at about 1800 RPM. The difference is that the Yanmar’s optimum is 2800 so the concern is that we may be clogging up the cylinders with carbon if we can’t run it up occasionally. Barb is pretty adamant about wanting the new prop and given that support so am I. This is a significant value added to the boat and we want to make sure that it lasts for as long as we own her.

We also received our new compass for the binnacle. The old one had a cracked dome and needed to be gashed and the new one will work off the 12V power supply that we have run up there. With everything in place we will now have instruments that are lit so we won’t have to be turning a flashlight on them every couple of minutes at night to satisfy my worrying nature. I got that mounted this afternoon. All I have to do is connect the wiring which I will do over the weekend, if it doesn’t rain too much.

I also bought the fixings to make another fender board. We have two now but one of them is made out of 4x4 oak so you can imagine how heavy it is. Granted it will wear away concrete but for Barb to unship it from its stowage, drag it over to the rail and deploy it, is a significant undertaking. The other one that we have is a piece of pine 2x6 and is a lot easier to throw around. The new pieces of plastic that we got are for 2x4s so they will be even easier. The only drawback of the using pine is that over time the pine will wear out. The answer to that, of course, is that pine 2x4 or 2x6 is cheap and easy to replace. The new one is set up and in use as I write this and the old piece of oak is up near the dumpster for someone else to make some use of.

We are working today to install the shelf for the generator in the port lazarette (we have bought the bits and pieces), and I have the wood cut, and the Sirius radio (I was pleasantly surprised at the availability of the machine screws to fasten it to the paneling), both things that should be fairly easy to do. Touch wood.

Barb has finished the tedious jobs about the splash cloths – sewing on the lettering – and we will be putting in the grommets and installing them on a sunny day. On that same sunny day I also hope to be working on the mizzen mast step to beef it up a bit. The job list is never ending, isn’t it?

At 15h00 the sky clouded over so I have rushed to get this posted so I can take the hound out for his evening stroll.