There’s apparently a popular t-shirt out here that reads, simply, “Hollister, CA”. Now Hollister is in the central valley of northern California, an easy flight from Watsonville (Santa Cruz). It’s one of those places you can fly to for a $100 hamburger if you’re flying out of Watsonville. And being the central valley, there’s not much there, except for a sky diving school, and lots of garlic, lettuce, tomatoes, artichokes, and those migrant farm workers doing all those jobs Americans won’t do (sic). There’s also Frazier Lake Airpark (1C9) which has a sea plane runway that’s parallel to the asphalt! But that’s CA airplane porn. Here, it’s some sort of bizarre fashion statement. Go figure.
What started out as a slow week ended in a flurry of activity and there’s now a chance we’ll be ready to splash our boat next Thursday! We’d probably be ready to go even sooner, but the folks who get to re-attach our mast can’t get to it before Thursday. However, this is real progress!
The main thing that got done on Friday was our mast work. We stepped (took out) our mast because our surveyor told us that we had mast step corrosion and because we decided that we wanted to replace our standing rigging on general principal. (’Standing rigging’ is the high-test wire that holds the mast in place, as opposed to ‘running rigging’, which means all of the ropes that are used to position the sails.) Once we decided to step the mast, we quickly decided also to upgrade all of the lights that are used when under sail to be LEDs, which consume about 1/10th the power of incandescent lights. And then when New England Boatworks actually took out our mast with their giant manly crane, they managed to set it down on the wiring bundle and pretty much crushed everything but the radar and VHF coax cables. Bummer.
So at that point we decided to replace every wire in the mast. And until Friday, that was holding us up. But the folks we were having do that work unexpectedly came through on Friday. They replaced the wires to the spreader lights, the B&G network Quad sensor cable, the VHF coax (just because), installed our new 2kW radome, added a second AIS antenna, and replaced the steaming and tri-color/anchor/strobe lights with 2 nautical mile (NM) US Coast Guard (USCG) approved LED lights manufactured out of anodized aluminum by Lopolight out of Denmark.
And what about that mast corrosion? Well, there wasn’t any. It was just dirt. We vacuumed it out and scrubbed it down with a wire brush and it’s good to go. There’s some zinc-chromate anti-corrosion goop you’re supposed to slather on it that we still need to acquire, but that’s essentially done.
Other progress: our prop’s done (but still needs to be re-pitched once we’re back on the water), our new high-output alternator’s on, our Link 2000-R’s on, our name’s on, our new life line’s are on, and our watermaker is about half installed. It’s almost possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but that could still be a train, we’re not sure.
I ordered a solid-state MacBook Air to use for our planning and navigation software. I’m running VMware Fusion with Windows XP Pro for any Windows software we need to run. At the moment, that’s just the RayMarine RayTech RNS software which interfaces with our new chartplotter/radra/AIS. The existing Pathfinder chartplotter was pretty dated and then when we opened the radome, water poured out of it. So that upgrade was a no-brainer. We tried to fit a 12″ multi-function display on the helm but had to go with the 8″ because that’s all that would fit in a pod on the custom Lewmar Whitlock helm that shipped with the PS40. We’re also moving our B&G Quad, Wind, GPS, and Auto-pilot instruments to a pod that’s going to be mounted above the companionway hatch.
Our menial goal before Thursday: get 2-3 more coats of wax on the mast. It’s quite obvious where the sawhorses were when we put the first two coats on, so we’re inclined to do another three coats if for no other reason that we don’t want to store this expensive 3M wax we bought and there’s still a half-can of it left.
We’re thinking about driving up to Lexington tomorrow for Dim Sum at Yangtze. Thoughts of sailing into Shanghai and Hong Kong are all that keep us going right now. Steamed pork bun, yum!
