10/26/2008 19:06:20

I was exhausted when I went to bed last night.  We got home, parked the boat, turned the keys to my son's Dodge back over to him and we left for our favorite place to eat, Rock Bottom, armed with our camera.

We're pretty well known there.  Most of the bar tenders and 80% of the waiters and waitresses know us, and a few have even come to visit us at our house and try OUR beer.  (Rock Bottom owns Old Chicago's, and the make several types of microbrews.  I like stouts so they always have one ready for me when I walk in the door.)

We showed pictures of the boat to our friends there and had dinner then came home and crashed.  We crashed pretty hard.  We slept in until 10AM this morning. Wow....

The "Admiral" decided she was going to go shopping for a new winter coat with my oldest daughter and our granddaughter Cassie.  So, they headed out shopping. I opened the boat, pulled in a power cable, set up my iPod and speakers and proceed to empty the boat of anything and everything that wasn't nailed, screwed or glued down.

My aim was to strip her of her old "ownership" and create my own "living space" aboard her. 

I spent nearly all day today removing the 20-something year old wooden internal roofing that was covered with this carpet.  Gosh, I don't like that color... and it was rotten near some bolts - which I noticed when I was looking over the boat initially.  I knew there was some work to do - something I think I will sincerely enjoy (since I sincerely HATE normal chores...) and knew that once I started ripping things apart, I'd find various things that needed done.

As it turns out, the boat is as good of shape as I thought she was in.  The core, the fiberglass is very solid, there are no delaminations anywhere I can find.  The rudder was broken once, as I knew when I looked it over initially but appears functional. Obviously, I'm going to be doing some wood work this winter building a replacement (something I can do...).

There are about six or seven spots I found some previous leaks that appear to be pretty old.  One spot I'll have to fix is around the rudder brackets where the original wooden panel sits on the inside of the transom with holding bolts to the outside holding on the rudder brackets.  That's rotting. Needs replacing.



Another kind of interesting thing- and perhaps bad spot is the mast mounting bracket. it needs some work, but it won't be anything bad, or difficult.

Whomever it was that initially put in the carpet covered ceiling covers bolted those directly to the outside of the vessel and while they used plenty of caulking material they didn't do a very good job directly beneath the bracket.  Water has leaked in there over the years necessitating the removal of the carpet-covered-wood (phew, I thought I was gonna have to leave it there - thank goodness for leaks!)

I successfully remove the rotting wood, and the carpet, pulling the panels with some difficulty (as I was alone, remember, she was SHOPPING and I was WORKING.... as all good military officers know, the NCOs do the work while the officers are... ummm in their offices or drinking or shopping)... anyway :) I managed to vacuum out the interior and the flooring carpet, which we will likely keep.

I poked into every nook and cranny, crevasse and into every stowage compartment and a few places I couldn't stick my head and flashlight, I stuck my cameras and flashes.... I see that the very bottom of the boat appears to have never had water in it.  There's no bilge pump on this boat.  Phil told me he was surprised and shocked, coming from the Gulf Coast he'd never see a boat minus a bilge pump.  Apparently in his checking, he found that this boat never had one. 

And it appears it's never needed one.