Wednesday

Wednesday was a long, productive day. Starting at around noon after a few hours sleep, we began working on refitting the deck drains, cleaning out the aft hatches and finishing the work on the windlass. Aaron troubleshot the wiring for the windlass, and we determined that the main issue was with the motor silinoid switch, which unfortunately requires the main wheel to be pulled to replace.

I began the grand search for the wheel puller to get the shive off, and ended up having to rearrange pretty much everything on the boat before finding it right in front of me under some gloves. By that time it was dark so the windlass will have to wait one more day. We ended up hauling a huge amount of trash and wierd parts off the boat in the process, including a home air conditioner and a two burner electric stove/oven. In the end it was good since the cabin is much more comfortable now with things more put away and organized.

After dinner we began the bilge cleaning process, which ended up taking until around 6am. Bilges are messy nasty shits, but these are looking pretty good after all that rinsing and scrubbing. We need to replace one of the bilge pumps, and rewire the other since someone cut the leads off about four inches from the pump, which means the connections will be wet all the time.

We had a few problems today, I ran out of smokes (luckily Tlaloc's pipe tabacco came to the rescue) and there were swarms of biting little bastardy gnats which made working on deck miserable. I also found out the battery I had ordered weeks ago is backordered and wont be delivered for weeks. So, I cancelled the order and called our trusty supplier Andrew at West Marine and had him bring some other ones in from the warehouse for Aaron to pick up tomorrow. Luckily, Andrew says that our head rebuild kit, running lights, and O-rings will be in tomorrow as well.

Aaron replaced the stern running light, which ended up taking quite a while due to different mounting hole configuration and the stupidity of the manufacturer who cant put wiring in a center mount configuration. Hopefully the other running lights will not require as much time.

All in all it was a very produtive day, we ended up cleaning all the bilges and cabin, eating three meals, and having prepped a number of projects for tomorrow. We are both pretty tired, we will try to get our parts list for the stern bearing, windlass and bilge pumps by noon tomorrow so we can get them early and wrap those projects up.

-JD