Boat Projects

Posted by Scot

The view from our kitchen.

Well, we are now firmly ensconced aboard Kalalau, soon to be renamed Monashee.  Yesterday, we got official word from Transport Canada that they will allow us to register under that name, so we are just waiting for the sign guy to put some new decals together.  Once we have that worked out, we can do an official renaming ceremony.

Our other new boat - new SUP to complement our kayak.

In the meantime, we have spent the last few days crossing as many projects off our list as we can.  We've installed new mirrors in the bathrooms to replace the old ones that were losing their mirroring around the edges.  This seems to be a hazard for boat mirrors - must be something to do with marine air.  Anyway, the new ones look great.

Let's see, what else have we done.  Well, we have cleaned every nook and cranny that we have gotten into, which is a lot on a boat.  Sara has been working on organizing all our stuff, and is almost finished outfitting all the cabins with new blankets, sheets, and linens, as well as getting new dishes for the kitchen.

I've been busy too.  I've epoxied some pinhole leaks in one of our holding tanks with some stuff called JB weld - hopefully it stands up to its name.  I also used it to repair a broken rack for our U-shaped life preserver.  I took apart our chart plotter and replaced a broken button on it - seems to work, but we haven't moved the boat yet, so we'll see when we actually get it out on the ocean.

The JB weld did not hold the horseshoe buoy rack.  Back to the drawing board on that one.

I've also worked on troubleshooting some broken pumps and motors on the boat, but was pretty quickly over my head in figuring out the exact problem.  So, today, we had Rafael (the owner of Vector Marine Services) come by the boat, and he and I spent the day on boat projects.  He is a great guy, and we had a really productive day, as well as some good conversation.

The first thing we did was install a new solar panel on the bimini roof.  The panels on this boat are high end, so with just three panels we have a total of 645 watts of solar capacity, which I think is pretty good.

Now three solar panels - free electricity! (i.e. once we've paid for the panels, install, etc.....)

After that, we (by which I mean Rafael) changed the macerator pump in the port head, so now we have two working heads.  We (again mostly Rafael, with me trying to help) then installed two new analog engine hour counters to replace the failing digital ones.  Finally, we tackled the blower in the starboard engine room, which we took out, but still have to get a new one to replace.

Fresh hour meters, still at zero.

So, we are making good progress.  We still have a long list of things to do, and it seems every time we finish one project, we find a few more that we want to get done, but we seem to be moving from big projects to smaller ones which are more within our ability to do ourselves, so hopefully we will get the list small enough to confidently cast off at some point.

Taking some time off the boat to enjoy the Ft. Lauderdale beaches.