Doing loads of jobs

Saxon Blue's Blog
Harvey Jones and Andrea Stokes
Tue 23 Nov 2010 00:01
Monday night

We woke up early this morning as Kali was getting picked up at 0630 to get to Ronald Reagan airport for her trip to New Zealand. We went back to sleep once she'd gone but were woken up again at 8am sharp by somebody getting onto the boat. I stumbled out and started to point a puzzled looking guy at the stantions. "I've come to service your engine" he replied. Ah. Wrong contractor, then.

Anyway, I persuaded Andrea to get up so he could get into the engine room and then cleared the cupboard under the sink out so I could remove the panel to allow easier access to the impellor. By that time, another guy had arrived and was discussing the new teak needed to cover the rewelded stantion bases, then another one to look at moving the pump pickup in the port lazarette, then another two to look at removing the mooring cleats and stantion bases and another one to look at bending the stantions themselves. By this time, it looked as though I had every marine contractor in Annaplois, if not the entire USA, all onboard Saxon Blue and I still hadn't had any breakfast.

I finally managed to get some muesli in between helping dismantle various parts of the boat and discussing options with everyone. The thing is, they're all so competent. Everyone just gets on with it. No cups of tea or tooth-sucking. I decided that I really like Americans. We decided not to move the port lararette pump so that was one job quickly ticked off and everyone else was getting on with their stuff so I went up to see Mark at M-Yachts to see about getting them to do further investigations into the air in the diesel issue. They're going to carry on and sort that one out now so that's another thing that should get done.

Andrea and I had a coffee in the very friendly but pretty down-market shop/cafe in the marina, by which time then engine had been serviced and the other guys were well underway. I wanted to get a professional to service the engine as it's already up to its 1000 hours and that's a major service with injection timing and tappetts needing to be checked and it would have taken me all day on my own. The outboard engine on the tender has also worked hard so we wanted to get that serviced before heading south. We'd been recommended to use a firm on Eastport so Andrea and I pottered over there in the tender, left it parked at the end of our usual commuting street and walked up to The Boatyard (our favourite Annapolis eatery) for a delicious lunch. After that, we walked on a bit further to the outboard servicing place and had a good chat with Chad Stellwagen (could you get a more American name?) who's going to meet us at a slipway in the river at noon on Wednesday to put the tender onto a trailer and take it in for inspection.

By the time we got back to Saxon Blue, everyone had gone off with their various bits of boat to bend/adjust/repair so Andrea got set up to do some work on the saloon table and I headed off up the road to get some chandlery. I wanted zip-lock bags with valves to put all our winter duvets etc into when we get into the Caribbean and got 5 sets so another job ticked off. Then into West Marine with a long list of stuff. They're ordering in the electronic charts of South America for me but they had everything else I wanted in stock. I loaded that all into a tool bag that I'd bought and staggered off back to the marina again. By the time I got back at 5pm, I'd ticked most things off my "to do in Annapolis" list which was just as well because I was knackered.

I've just reconstructed the galley so we can cook dinner. Kali made some curries the other day for us to eat on our way to Bermuda so we've dug some out of the freezer and we're microwaving them now. Well, what does she expect? She told me there were in there and then went off to the other side of the world. At least we can test these ones and then we'll know whether the others are OK to eat at sea. After that, we'll perhaps manage to finish watching Avatar which we started in Scotland. We can't watch any Battlestar Galactica without Kali so we have to find alternative entertainment.

A bit later: just finished eating the delicious curry and Andrea is uploading some new YouTube movies so have a look at them if you fancy.

Harvey

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