More boat projects

I took advantage of an unusually warm New Hampshire day and applied more bottom paint to the boat. It’s not often we get temperatures in the 60s during the month of November. I feel really good about being able to get the job done before heading south. I thought the final bit of painting would have to wait until we got to sunny Florida. While the Florida heat’s nice, the only place I could work on it at my dad’s is infested with fire ants. Fire ants are not my friend.

My custom tiller is finally completed and delivered to my house. The old “temporary” tiller had been hacked out of a 2x4. The new one was lovingly crafted from a select piece of mountain ash. It’ll be a real pleasure to sail with that in hand. A good friend of mine made it for the cost of materials.

I ordered something called “water bricks” from Amazon. They are rectangular 3.5 gallon water containers that stack up like Legos. Four of them will give me an additional 14 gallons of water and they should store well. Water is fairly heavy, 8.33 lbs/gallon -much easier to break it down into 3.5 gallon jugs than 5 or 6 gallon containers. No sense getting water containers my wife won’t want to lift.

I also ordered some marine strobe lights for the life jackets. Since we are sailing longer and longer distances, and occasionally at night, they might come in handy.

Every little thing done now means I can go sailing sooner once I get to Florida in January. I miss it already.

-Sixbears