Two Weeks To Go!
July 20, '00

It has been eight months since our last letter chronicling the Big Refit. It is now the 20th of July, we have 16 days before our departure date and we are not ready. We are really not ready. We have been working so very hard on the boat, and are pleased with the quality and results of our labors, but we still have so much to do. We are still completing fairly major cockpit construction projects. We intend to leave anyway on our (rescheduled) departure date of August 9th, but I never imagined, when I retired in February of 1999, that we would be so behind in our preparations. On the good side we did successfully complete our black belt tests with the Okinawan Shorin Ryu Karate association. On the downside, we have been so busy we have woefully, shamefully neglected all of our friends and we did not have time to even try to get our ham radio operators licenses. We do not know why our friends still like us, . . . and we will just have to work on the radio licenses later!
Two weeks to go and the boat looks like this!
	Being older people, we wanted more backrest in the cockpit area. This is where we will spent most of our time during the next six years. So we began by raising the cockpit coamings four inches by adding two inch shaped planks of Alaskan yellow cedar to the old coaming. This photo shows the first layer being planed into shape. What a wonderful wood to work with! So easy to plane and it smells so good. I think it is my favorite wood, even above teak and Port Orford cedar.
It worked out, more by luck than by design, that the 4 inch addition just did the trick in supporting the back and has the added benefit of resting the elbows on the top rail. It is a lot more comfortable than the old coamings, and we were able to form them into the supports for the new hard dodger by adding one more piece of cleat stock to the forward section, shown here.
	We braced the back end of the coaming addition with a little cross brace built up from the rear piece of the old cockpit coamings. This may keep us a little drier, too.
We bought a Fortress FX-37 anchor and hung it from the stern pulpit, just barely shown here. This new alloy anchor weighs only 21 pounds. We added 2 feet of 3/8" BBB chain to it to bring the weight up to 25 lbs. This is how much weight we need on the end of our Jordan series drogue. For a stern anchor, we add 14 feet of 5/16 inch high test chain shackled to 300 feet of New England 5/8 inch three strand nylon. This line will serve double duty as a stern line to shore if needed. The new deck pipe shown here leads the chain below deck. The stern hawse holes were installed to deploy the Jordan series drogue "Y" bridle. The drogue will be stowed in the new afterdeck hatch. It is great to have access to all of that previously inaccessible stowage space. Man, did it fill up fast!
	We picked up a used Simpson-Lawrence 555 anchor windlass at a marine swap meet in Seattle for $425 and spent two days tearing it apart, scavenging the best parts from it and our old one, and rebuilding a single satisfactory windlass. The one we bought turned out to be not as good as we thought, but it had a great bronze gypsy and clutch brake with it that were probably worth the price. Our old windlass was pretty beat. We have this one in place now with 270 feet of 3/4 inch New England Ropes "Caprolan" three strand spliced to 200 feet of new 3/8 inch BBB Acco chain. There is a secondary 44 lb Bruce on the port bow with 40 feet of chain and 300 feet of 5/8 inch Caprolan.
We pulled out and discarded an old iron kerosene tank under the galley counter that must have weighed a ton. In its place we built a new 40 gallon watertank. Instead of building a six-sided box as we did with the holding tank, we used the existing 3/4 inch galley bulkheads to maximize the interior volume, building the tank in place. Again we used West System epoxy resin, a minimum of two layers of glass on the planes. All surfaces are braced in place with 45 degree beveled Alaskan yellow cedar cleat stock, then glassed over with seven layers of 4 inch glass tape. We used white pigment for the final coats for appearance, I cannot tell you why, no one will ever see it!
	For the lid, we glassed the underside of the new countertop with two layers of cloth and pigmented resin, then pegged this down with hardener-thickened resin on the seams. I do not think it will ever leak. This brought our water capacity up to 110 gallons. That should help us out a lot. The only down side we can see thus far is that the top of this tank is at about our waterline, somewhat higher than the two 35 gallon tanks in the bilge. The additional weight that high up would help our stability on a starboard tack, but hurt us on a port tack. So we will always use this tank first on a longer leg. We do not carry a watermaker aboard (nor refrigeration, pressure water pumps, nor a hot water heater - Nancy must really love me!).
One thing that has always been inconvenient with our two old 35 gallon watertanks in the bilge is that they must be filled from below. That means you have to bring the fill hose or jerry jugs down into the main salon. The new tank has a deck fill and air vent. We added a series of three gate vales that allow water from this new tank to backfill down (via gravity feed) to the lower water tanks in the bilge. Getting all the valves open to fill is a bit of a pain, but the system works and now we can fill all three tanks from the one deck fill. The nicest thing about this new tank is that we lost no original storage space under the galley sink and countertop. This photograph shows how we used the existing bulkheads as tank sides, thereby maximizing the tank volume. The back side of the tank follows the curvature of the hull. After all the footpumps, valves, and hoses were installed, it looked like a bassoon with all the crossing tubing. I managed to hide it under a utility shelf, though.
	We are building new hard dodger (windshield) for the cockpit. We are making it out of 3 mm acumi plywood bent to shape and glued together with West system epoxy. The top is shown here, three plies thick (about 3/8 inch). We used the existing Ellen Black stainless steel dodger frame as a support. We will leave it there for bracing even when it is finished, although we probably won't need it. We used a variety of techniques to pull the various sheets and layers together, including stitching the plywood with sailmaker's thread until the glue set, and using small screws into 1 inch square wood blocks to act as temporary squeezing washers. The process is labor intensive.
We worked to keep the curves of the front plane simple so the Lucite Tuf (UV rated plexiglass) will bend easily over the frame. Here we used four layers of the plywood sandwiched between layers of glass cloth and epoxy resin. We used about a gallon and a half of epoxy resin. The acumi ply is a fairly porous wood. We used "stitch and glue" to form the top leading edge to the two planes. After cutting out the windows, we glassed the dodger inside and out and used white pigment and microlight filler to fair it. It is attached to the cockpit coamings and deck splashguard with SS screws and to the SS tubing frame by plastic conduit clamps.
	We have made the fortunate discovery of a good place to obtain parts for the boat. Jonathan Rowe of the Marina Market in beautiful downtown Poulsbo can order anything in the Port Supply (West Marine) or Fisheries (Crow's Nest) catalogs and have it delivered for free to his store. He adds 10% above the dealer price and he will tell you what your price will be before you order. It saves a lot of time not having to shuffle over to Doc Freeman's for parts and he can usually beat the boat builder's discount we get there. Port Supply delivers every Thursday afternoons, Fisheries on Tuesday and Thursday. Jonathan can be reached at 1-888-728-0837 or on the net at www.marinamarket.com. He and his good-looking wife, Andrea, have every imaginable Norwegian food in their store plus an array of boat spares, drinks, Slim Fast, and convenience foods. If they can't get it for you, you probably don't need it! Jonathan is a sailor and is a pretty smart dude.
This is Kuni Okuma, owner of Comtek, a radio repair shop north of Poulsbo. On the recommendation from the ICOM people in Bellevue, Kuni upgraded and installed our marine radio for us. He is an ICOM specialist, he worked as a repair technician for ICOM for many years. After graduating from radio technicians school, Kuni became the radio officer on several very large bulk carrier ships. He is a very nice person and has two great dogs. He can be reached via email at w7jv@aol.com or by phone at (360) 779-9730.
	And finally, we need still need to find a home for our cat, Sofia. I wish we could say she is sweet, lovable, and adoring, but truthfully, the best thing I can say about her is that we love her. She has been with us for about fourteen years. She is grouchy, independent, she will let you pet her when she feels like it, especially when its time to eat. Please don't offer to take her unless you really will take care of her. Nancy's mother, Betty, will take her, but that is sort of a last resort because she has two or three cats already. What can I say about Sofia? . . . like me she is "strangely socialized".
And finally, we have to thank the good people on the staff at the Port of Poulsbo. Shown here is the "Waltz Team", from the left: Tim, Stacey, Carol, & Richard. Harbormaster Barbara Waltz is not shown, she was on vacation in Montana. Tim is the best-looking, nicest and strongest guy in Kitsap County. He can pick up an 8-D battery, step aboard with it and ask, "Where do you want it?"! Stacey has the sweetest disposition in the world, never a grouchy word. Carol is my friend and the world's most amiable accountant. And Richard, . . . well, it is no coincidence that there is a halo shown around his head here. He is the hardest working guy I have ever seen and would do just anything for you. We owe these people, especially Barb, so much for giving us a place to moor and helping us out in our time of need. They are a great team and I recommend them highly!