Day 2 of my vacation

Sounds great doesn't it? One would think of vacation time as swimming at the beach in the summer heat. Well  I have the summer heat alright and I am near the water however if you swam here you would probably catch typhoid or get bitten by a 2 headed water moccasin. So last night I went to take my nightly shower and there was a line a mile long so I went for a walk on the pier. Now this pier is LOOOONG! It goes out into a the St John's river for a good half mile and gosh it is beautiful to smell the cool air and look up at the stars. It reminds me why I am here. OK I have worked in the city doing my cubicle penance for 40 years and I do enjoy my job and my coworkers are nice and they are good to me....BUT......It is not what I would prefer to be doing and in just over a years time I get to go out on my wreck of a boat and enjoy what God has made for us. Speaking of which, I was visited last night my one of God's tiny creatures and had to resort to this  stuff.

Thank goodness for my new first aid kit.

First item on the agenda was removing my old winches and installing some self tailing winches. 

If you look closely you will see that the 5 mounting holes on the winch do not line up with the 6 on the old mounting plate so tomorrow I will have to pay a visit to the machine shop here at the marina.

So as usual, when you start one job, it morphs over into several others and I was looking for nuts and bolts to connect the winch to the plate. Now the previous owner bequeathed me a box of about 30 zip lock bags full of nuts and bolts. Trouble is you can never find anything.

So I bought a transparent box all full with compartments and sorted it all out.

I splashed out yesterday and bought a bag of ice so a lunchtime cold drink was heavenly. 

I do not have a refrigerator on board the boat but needless to say, I am a little tempted. 

I found an old medical kit on the boat and everything inside it was disgustingly mouldy except for the book which I will add to mine.

Next on the to do list was to replace the compass.

I bought it used and it has a big bubble at the top but at least you can see into it, not like the old one. I will have to check out how to get rid of the bubble.

Next I took of the old name "Endurance on the port side of the boat. The photo is upside down because I was hanging over the caprail while taking the shot.

I used a Stanley knife blade to start with and peeled the rest of it off. There is some adhesive residue left and it is not perfect but it should be OK. I pick up the new boat name from fast signs on Tuesday and fork over $120. I asked the painter here to give me an estimate to do my topsides and he quoted me $3800 for 3 coats of primer and 3 coats of AWL. Needless to say I was not impressed, and I guess he was too busy. They say that boating is like standing under the shower with a raincoat on, ripping up dollar bills. "Bottom Dave," the guy who prepares and paints your keel bottom quoted me $450 for 2 coats but I will wait until just before I launch her before I do that. Money, money money........