A good day.  Well, any day not spent grinding fiberglass in the bow is a good day, but we ARE progressing.  Ann is one day away from finishing polishing and waxing the hull!  Yay!  Charisma is looking beautiful.  It has taken almost an entire can of Carnuba wax so far.  That’s a lot of elbow grease.  And that’s after she went over the entire hull with polishing compound to remove the oxidation.  Wow.

For my part I did some miscellaneous stuff today, but it was nice to get a LOT of things going that are actually on the list!

-Ordered spare oil and fuel filters for the engine and a spare alternator belt

-Got the wood shop to cut plywood backing for the lazarette hatches off of the pattern I made from some scrap cardboard.  I have already primed the backs of the plywood and will epoxy them on to the teak hatches on Sunday.  With any luck the hatches should be as good as new in a few days.

-Ugly job alert.  I spent a couple hours down in the lazaratte digging out old packing from the stuffing box.  Sorry there’s no pictures to describe this-it’s just a really terrible job jammed into a small space under the cockpit.   There’s really no extra room to take a pic. Contortionists would love the project.  It’s definitely a three Tylenol job.  BUT, I got all the old packing out and put three new pieces in.  Basically this is the thingy where the propeller shaft goes out through the hull.  The packing is a kind of wax/hemp combination (looks like square piece of rope) that when “stuffed” into the stuffing box, has a tight enough fit that it keeps water from coming in through the prop shaft hole.  At least not much water.  The ideal according to most experts is that you tighten the gland that compresses the packing just enough so it drips about one drip/30 seconds when the engine is off and one drip per 10 seconds when the shaft is turning.   OK, got that?  I didn’t think so.  Forget it unless you own a boat, then very important to figure out.   😉

-While I was in the lazarette, I greased and exercised the through hulls (don’t ask) and greased the rudder bearing.  Very easy to ignore these things, but they will “bite” you if you do.

So, tomorrow, we’re going to do more work, but in the morning we’ll take a bit of a break and walk over to the Saturday Farmer’s Market.  Then on the way back stop by the cruiser’s swap meet up on the bridge.  We’ll try and take some pics to explain.

So that’s it for today.  Oh, also, Shane, one of the boatyard guys who we gave our old foulies to, brought us a beautiful Red Snapper this morning.  It was really one of the most fresh, gorgeous fish I have ever seen and I put it on ice until dinner when we filleted it and wrapped it in foil with some veggies and tossed in the BBQ for a delicious dinner.

That’s all from the boatyard for today…