Not Dead Yet

January 19, 2020

I can’t believe it has been almost a year since I posted anything on this site, but I had a lot of excuses:  a bruising municipal election campaign (we won!), a trip to France for the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion,  the death of my image-stabilized camera, and a fabulous five-week cruise in Maine (picture above is Tardis’ Maine home).

I lost all the pictures of the uneventful trip with my son John back across Lake Okeechobee from Fort Myers to Vero Beach.  I feel sorry for my friend Pat who made the trip to Fort Myers, where we had all the engine trouble and couldn’t find much of a place to stay.  John and I timed it so we stayed at the wild Roland Martin’s Marina at the bottom of the lake.  The only piece of semi-civilization for miles with showers, good food and huge open-air bar filled with hundreds of sugar cane workers taking a break for karaoke night!  Then the last night at a super-yacht marina in Port St. Lucie, where little Tardis got as much attention as your run-of-the mill 80-footer.

The Spring work mostly amounted to patching up the damage from the prior winter in Florida:

— Patching the hull where someone put a hole in it during storage.  Easy, but getting the paint to match meant that Ray and I had to roll and tip the whole hull.

— Patching a two-foot piece of the cockpit rubrail which caught on a spike driven into a dock piling by an unthinking former user.  Particularly galling since it happened on the way over to put Tardis on the trailer for the trip home.

— Rebuilding the engine cover so it is strong enough to be stood on, which people seem to want to do.  I also glassed it since it is horizontal to the sun.  But it’s still not quite right — the span across is just too long for half-inch plywood and it has a slight dip which drives me crazy.  I will have to re-do it with 3/4 inch this spring.

— And a crazy idea that worked, devised by Pat:

In driving the boat for miles across Okeechobee, we both noticed that we were bobbing up and down all the time due to a slight blind spot caused by the fancy forward faux-butterfly hatch.  Pat said, “You know, I think cutting that down an inch-and-half would solve the whole problem.”

So I took it off and tackled the cut with a sabre saw, back saw, Japanese saw, and my small circular saw.  Nothing would make the cut.  So I stood it up on it’s side on my table saw, added some bracing to the rip fence and had at it.  Five minutes later it was done and during the Maine trip made a huge diffence.  There is still a spot off to port that you want to check once in a while, but the starboard view is now fine.

Tardis is in Fort Myers now, waiting for me to come down next week.  I will detail the winter work next.