This blog is for those of you interested in our boat repairs. We have it out of the water on the hard (as we boaters like to say), it is up on stands that keep it upright when on the land. These stands do not belong to us they are the boatyard's property and you pay to have your boat hauled out and they set it up on the stands and then you pay by the day that your boat is in the yard having work done on it.

We have had a new depth sounder installed, so now we will be able to breathe a little easier when we go into strange anchorages and just have a chart to go by (although I did remember that we had bought a portable depth sounder and for the last while at an achorage we have been going up to the bow and taking readings on the depth as we get close to where we want to anchor, that was a little less hairy). They have fixed all of the big blisters that the surveyor had identified and now we await bottom paint. The guy said it would just take him two hours to paint the bottom so we figured we would just go ahead and pay him and get it done properly.

Barry and I have been struggling to attach the Monitor Wind Vane that came with the boat. The former owner did not keep it on the boat because he was afraid it might get bumped at the slip. It is pretty close quarters in there and if you are not careful you can quite easily run into someone. I haven't managed to run into anyone yet, but after my first quite successful dockings, my last two have been rather ugly. The slip next to us is empty now and for some reason I am not quite judging the distance and my trajectory very well, I haven't damaged anything but IT WAS UGLY!!!

Anyway back to the Monitor Wind Vane, where it is attached to the boat it's pretty hard to reach and I (being relatively tiny, compared to Barry and much more flexible) get to stuff my aging body into tiny spaces to try and put nuts on bolts. We all know how mechanical I am, but believe it or not after Graeme, my potential son-in-law, told me I just had to remember that doing up was clockwise and undoing was counter clockwise, I managed to thread 16 nuts on the correct way without trying to do it backwards once. Do you think that means I am cured??? Back to the wind vane, it is all attached now except for two bolts that need to be replaced on the outside because the thread were either too long or too short. NOW we just have to figure out how the damn thing works. It has more ropes and pulleys than any piece of machinery is meant to and to top it all off, no two boats are set up the same to we have to try and figure out how the previous owner set up this one. Fun and Games.

We are hoping to have the boat back in the water by Friday so we can attend a Bluewater Cruising get together for Thanksgiving. If we don't get in we will have a lovely dinner with Barry's Mom, that is where we are staying until the boat is back in the water. It sure is nice to have somewhere to go when we need to, a warm, friendly house with a bathtub, I don't know where we would go if we couldn't stay here!!!