It’s Veterans Day Weekend and perfect San Diego weather, but we’ve chosen to stay on the dock to keep up our project momentum and give us a chance to take a deep breath.
Like I wrote in a post in 2017 (when I was continually prepping Tulum IV for sale with constant improvements), I’ll never stop wanting to make things better and am continually trying to improve our boat. From the smallest projects to very large multi-day projects, we’ve got them going on. Below you can see a picture of some very basic latches I added to our pantry drawers to keep them from coming out in a seaway. This is a very basic project, but a huge improvement for our confidence as we know those drawers are going to stay put now.
Since Hotwife was off work today and the kids off school, she’s had a chance to go visit UFO to help pick fabrics and colors for the curtains she soon wants to make. Being who we are….we usually have multiple boat projects going on at once with me managing them while she continues to work until her summer retirement date. Right now, we’re still working on putting in six new solar panels (on top of the doghouse), we just finished completely removing the old generator that came with the boat (but I still need to plug the diesel line and figure out what to do with the exhaust port out of the boat), we have no salon cushions because they’re out for new fabric, Poe Dameron has helped to damage the front head (toilet) and we may soon think through ripping all the plumbing and electrical out in favor of a composting head, I need to make dinghy chaps and after the New Year we’ll figure out when Tulum will haul out for bottom paint and a look at the rudder and rudder post. And we’ll throw a winter trip to Catalina in the mix with an overnight passage and plan on heading to Paso Robles again for a bit of a break to restock our reserves. I can say with little chance of castigation that when we made the decision to buy a sailboat (Aleutian 51 Ketch) built in the late 70’s in Taiwan, I fully expected this is how life would be for a while. A boat of this age that’s in this kind of shape has been loved for years but if you don’t give her constant TLC, she starts to fade away. We’re working hard to keep her from fading, cause she’s going to carry us on an adventure of a lifetime soon.
Wow, that exhausts me just writing it all down and thinking through it. But it all needs to happen before March, cause by then we’ll be planning a trip to San Francisco to visit family and attend the Pacific Sail and Power Boat Show in early April.
Next post will document our generator coming out and may be beneficial if you ever have to take a generator out of a boat.
