This past weekend was a "man weekend" I guess. Tarne and Sarah stayed home and just Caleb and I went up to the boat for a working trip. We had big plans for the weekend to tackle one of the "to do" list items that I had been wanting to address for a long time. Yes...what could be more fun on a weekend of 95 degree temperatures than degreasing and painting the bilge?! :)
Caleb really loves doing these projects with me and dives right into them which is a great help on a practical level but also a lot of fun and a good way for us to spend one on one time together doing something we both really seem to enjoy. He is so helpful and truly seems to have fun doing boat projects. Painting a bilge is not exactly high on the glamour or excitement list but he sure enjoyed helping!
Here he is climbing into the engine room to scrape up the old paint that was peeling so that the new paint would adhere well.
The forward bilge is not exactly easy to enter due to the holding tank being located there but he does fit in there easier than I do!
I still have some more sections to paint but already just being able to see those two areas done is great! Degreasing and cleaning was a pain but the new paint will help keep things easier to clean and keep clean. Nothing like cleaning off 30 years of dirt and grime from a bilge to help you see the value of cleaning up a mess as soon as it happens. Now if we develop a leak or something we will be able to identify it immediately and address the issue.
After all of that was done Saturday evening it was time to relax....nice steak dinner...a cold drink...not a bad way to end our day. About 11 p.m. just as we were about to go to bed though we hear a big crash and bang and poof- all the lights on the dock go dark and we have no power. It seems someone had been drinking too much and subsequently decided to drive their truck when they should not have. He fell off one of the roads in the marina that is just above our dock parking lot. In falling down the embankment he also took out our transformer and he ploughed the nose of his truck into the pavement below and then ran off. The police ended up catching him. Luckily no one was hurt or killed and we got to watch him attempted his sobriety tests which was probably not so entertaining for him. It was a good moment to talk to Caleb about the consequences of our actions, being responsible, obeying the law, etc. as we watched them handcuff him and put him in the police cruiser.
Here is the driver just starting his failed testing:
Luckily power came back on around 5 a.m. It was so hot at night we ran the generator for an hour or two at the dock to power up the air conditioning. We felt bad for the family renting the cabins right next to our dock as they lost power and there is also a very nice couple with a beautiful Defever 49 Raised Pilothouse staying on our dock as transients for the next week or two and it's not fun loosing dock power in the middle of the night when it is roasting out both day and night! Just as I was getting up at 5 a.m. to turn our generator back on (didn't want to sleep with it on all night even though it is diesel!), the power turned back on. I was up anyway so I stayed up for a bit more to catch a beautiful sunrise.
To finish up the day today Caleb and I moved our wifi router to a better location. I had mounted it in the forward stateroom storage locker/closet but it did not seem to want to transmit much at that location so we moved it out of there into an out of the way place still in the forward stateroom and it seemed to work great there so we will see how that goes.
The big question lately is when and where to go cruising. We are leaning towards homeschooling again this fall which would substantially free up our schedule but then Caleb will also probably be doing fall baseball again so we shall see. It is so hot right now on the river cruising would require the generator running pretty much non stop to fight off the heat. We are thinking a trip up to Lake Tellico maybe soon and then this fall probably hitting the AGLCA rendezvous down in Alabama so stay tuned...more local cruising and boat projects until then!
No comments:
Post a Comment