It's just past noon and we have successfully (we think) rove the main halyard. It was today's big task and we started early to get Conni out of most of the day's heat. She was up the mast by 0930 and down by noon. What an ordeal!

Again, our little endoscope played a key role, helping us determine the path of our "messenger", the small, weighted cord that Conni drops from the masthead. I fish for the cord in the mast and being able to see the damned thing makes an enormous difference. It also has a small hook attachment that one can use to steer toward and grab the cord when its seen.

Oddly, we've still got a loop of cord stuck in the mast: a small loop feeds from the exit hole and we can't remove it, so we've left it in, hoping that it falls out on its own.

We've been stymied by some problems with our new electronics. I'm a manual reader and I've read every manual for every new piece of electronics that we bought, but nothing seemed to help. There are two problems, one an inconvenience, and one a critical one.

The inconvenience is that the radar image will not overlay the chart image. As I've mentioned, radar images are difficult to interpret, but with an overlay on the chart, the entire radar image has context and is understandable without any training. In my old Merchant Marine days, I took special classes and had to pass tests to receive a radar endorsement, for example, but those radar displays were just simple TV sets with a central pivot point designating our location. At any rate, this feature, an important reason to choose the brand that we did, didn't work.

The other problem was not receiving data from our newly installed depth sounder. We depend on redundancy, so having only one sounder was a problem. Having two sounders with the same reading lent validity.

Both questions seemed to be solved by an email I received this morning after a week of pleas for help. It came from a Level 4 Techincian, and I was surprised that the two answers required such esoteric knowledge. The radar overlay seems to work now, and we have every reason to believe that the depth sounder will, too. We'll certainly know on Monday when we splash!

I began my second coat of hull paint at 1300, and completed the side of the hull that was in the shade, but I simply can't work in the sun, so I'll take a break for a bit. It's 85°F inside the boat, so is well over 90° in the sun: too hot for me. I completed the starboard/sunny side in about 1-1/2 hours, so the hull painting is done. Clever Conni read the paint can and we now know that the paint that we just applied is exactly what we wanted: ablative, antifouling paint with copper. Hurray!

I start engine work tomorrow, but at least it's something that I've done before. With luck, I'll post some photos, too. We're going to try and complete all of the tasks needed, but might not complete tasks here that we can do when we're on the water. With a bit of luck, the Carenage will let us stay in the launch slip overnight so that we can have access to our cold showers and access to land.

We'll be here until Monday.