I chose this title because it is Friday morning and we are enjoying north west winds at 10 mph with gusts up to 25 mph.  Our dock runs west to east and north west winds throw us off the dock until our dock lines jerk us to a stop.  Your dock lines should have some stretch to them so they snap us back right into the dock!  We’ve got bumpers that protect us from the dock.   If the wind is gusting and we’re at the end of the dock lines the boat will start to heal(lean over) a few degrees.    We’ll be rocking and rolling the rest of the day.

Monday was in the 70’s so we turned the heater off for the day.  When I fired the heater up that night it was only working at half power, uh oh!   A quick check of our water intake strainer found a live minnow floating in the strainer.  Still didn’t work right so I emailed Butch who gave me great advice on installing the unit.  He said I’ve got a blockage between my thru hull and the strainer.  I removed a 90 degree connector from the thru hull and found another minnow, this one almost 2″ long.  Sorry no pictures of the minnows but I did show it around to others on the dock. The picture below is the strainer on the right and the 90 degree connector is next to the big yellow handle.  The handle is part of a valve that closes the thru
hull.

Wednesday was still nice for most of the day until the rain started in the evening.  I spent the day in the man cave (under the cockpit floor) replacing the bilge hose.  Here are some before and after pictures of the hoses. The yellow thing is my manual bilge pump.   While

adjusting a hose on the cockpit scupper(drain) I ripped the connector off of the drain.  This is not marine quality.  It looks like the cheap connector you’d get at Home Depot for your bathroom sink!  I patched the new hole and will be repairing it shortly.    Generally the patch held up pretty good.  We know this because from Wednesday evening until Friday morning we got 3.21″ of rain.     WOW!     Almost time to get ready for the Super Bowl party!

The image at the top of this post and also shown below was taken looking out the discharge thru hull for my bilge pump.  The image is a reflection off the water of the boat behind me.

More to come,

Jan, Matt & Scout