Now that RHSP is behind us, we are back to making preparations for the retirement cruise. One side benefit of the race is that it put the torture test to some of the installs that we have made over the years. The autohelm for instance - I'm rather glad that I will now have a chance of improving the bulkhead fastenings for it.

Other things that got busticated?!

1. The cockpit table. It was a relatively small thing anyway and the Admiral didn't like it too much. It has now been relegated to the job of magazine rack and I have designed and will build a larger one that will detatch completely and stow in one of the cockpit lazarettes when not in use.

2. The mast cheek-block for the mizzen lazy jacks. Nothing wrong with the original design, it was simply a matter of the boat pitching at the wrong time and the crewman putting his weight against a line that was never intended to take the weight.

3. Masthead electric wind direction and speed indicator. I still don't know what happened to this. The only thing that I can think of is that we had some bunting aloft that had gotten stuck on something and the crew had to tug pretty hard to get it down. I suspect that something may have gotten dislodged. A quick trip up the mast in the bosn's chair and this should be fixed. Fingers crossed.

We still have to install the watermaker although we have all of the parts and there is a leak in the main cabin as well as in ours that need fixing.

Oh well maintenance if an ongoing matter on a boat. That's part of the fun!

31 days and counting.....