Back home again as I said in the last post and of course, the heavens have opened and we are experiencing a deluge - a funny sort of one that has a real downpour, pause, pause, another downpour, pause, pause, and on and on. The pauses are almost long enough for the streets to dry but then here it comes again. This is great for the wonder hound who doesn’t like to get wet during his walks but crappy for any of the major work that I want to get done on the boat or in the garden. I have filled the raised beds with the garden soil that I bought and the rain is packing it down so I can top it up either today or tomorrow whenever it stops raining, if it ever does.

The biggest job that I have to do on Nelleke and the one that has me most nervous is the mizzen mast step. It is the one, what I would call, design flaw with this model of the Moody yachts. The mizzen like the main is deck stepped in a pulpit, but unlike the main there is no compression post down to the keel. Instead they glassed in a piece of one inch plywood on the deck and mounted the pulpit on that. Then along comes yours truly and busily puts some holes through that to allow me to bring some of the electronic wiring though to the instrument panel that I mounted on the aft of the mizzen mast. Of course these holes weren’t completely leak proof and the plywood has rotted. My job will be to lift the mast and the pulpit and cut out the rotten wood and replace it with something that resists rot like teak or mahogany and glass it in again. While I am at it I plan to put some t-beam bracing across the cabin ceiling under the pulpit from one side of the cabin to the other to increase the structural support or at least distribute it across the entire cabin ceiling rather than just that one spot. That should be a much better support for the life of the boat.

The next biggest job will be to take down our split backstay and redo the insulators so that I can properly use the SSB unit that we have aboard. This is something that we haven’t been to aggressive about getting done but if we execute our plan to be doing more sailing in the Caribbean starting in 2013 it would make a lot of sense to get it done before we depart.

Third job will be to get the water maker install finalized. I had been resisting doing this as we had always been sailing so far in places where we could get water and once you start to use this thing you have to use it regularly or pickle the membrane to keep it fresh or it will become unusable. Since we didn’t really need it we had decided to not start to use it, but again, now that we are looking at sailing further afield where we need to buy water and since we already have this thing, it would make sense to get it ready to use. All I need to do is complete the piping to some control valves and to the galley sink and to the interim storage tank. Then there is the small matter of piping from the storage tank to the main water tanks but all that is quite straight forward.

These are three fairly big jobs that I would normally have to plan for doing over at least two years when we are not living aboard as they would be extremely disruptive to us if we were aboard and if we weren’t living a five minute walk from the yacht club would involve a fair amount of to and fro time. As it is now we can pop down to putter in the evenings and we should be able to do everything this summer.
Those are the biggies. There are numerous other smaller jobs that we can do when it rains or while I am waiting for the backstay to come back from the rigger. As any of you with boats can attest, it never ends.