2nd May

Osprey
John Bowering
Sun 3 May 2009 01:42

We set to this morning reinstalling the stainless steel that had been removed so that Alico could work on the varnish. Although we had suspected the position yesterday we confirmed this morning that the charger for the new drill was faulty straight out of the box. Hopefully Joe will be able to get another to us with the next shipment. Nevertheless the power in the batteries was sufficient to carry us through the day and importantly screwing all the stainless steel back in place which was completed in a couple of hours. Jay was back with the cockpit engine control cover which he has now completed. It will need a coat of varnish at some stage as will the for’d dorade. We then moved on to servicing the genoa tracks and the associated genoa cars. Good job we did this as there was a large accumulation of varnish in the bearings which took some cleaning out prior to greasing and reinstalling. Must remember to tell Alico that these are easily removed prior to varnishing so he can avoid it in future – though I suspect much of it came from prior work. There had been a lot of rain overnight and when we looked at the dinghy it had 6 inches of water in it so we diverted for a while to pump it out and keep it afloat! As we had made a mess in the cockpit already we decided to install the dodgers which took several hours as we took the opportunity of correcting the errors made by the manufacturer in Fort Lauderdale - for example two of the zips had been installed back to front which meant that the bit you get hold of to operate the zip was actually inside the seam. We unpicked the stitching and reversed them before stitching them back up again. Once the dodgers were in place it was possible to finish installing the EPIRB and lifesaving equipment around the cockpit. We then took the headlining down in the pilothouse so that we could service the fairleads which are mounted above. Good job we did this as several of the bolts were not properly secured. Whilst doing this we noticed that the port after pilothouse window which is brand new had a crack. This is the third time we have had this problem and are now going to try and source some Lexan to replace the glass. This is another of the famous and expensive jobs carried out in Fort Lauderdale – every job we had done there, apart from one, has had to done again. We were talking to Mike Smith about this problem and he was saying that Florida has now developed an appalling reputation even within the USA for poor quality workmanship on boats – much of which was brought up to New England to be fixed. I have to say we all wish we had never been near the place. Mike got tied up on another boat so we did not get the bilge pump monitor installed and that is now scheduled for 0600 tomorrow. Once that has been done we might declare tomorrow a holiday as we are starting to run our of steam and will need to be in top shape for Tuesdays lift out .Monday is also a bank holiday here but we will need to prepare the boat for Tuesday morning when we will have to be at the dock for 0700.