Thursday

Did you miss me? I decided to take a Dickerson-free day and avoid anything related to work. I did leave the house at 7:45 with my coffee and thermos just like I do every day, but headed to the shop instead of the car. I worked out there from 7:45 to 92 degrees. I then thought, “this is stupid, there’s the pool outside and here I am in the sweltering heat” – so that’s where I headed. And since it was already 85 out there at 8:30 I’m thinking the troops will all abandon early today. We don’t need anyone passing out on us. I do have a couple of photos that Willy took yesterday. One was the boat that had sat outside for years which is now going in the water in a few weeks. You can see the condition the boat was in before they started. This is how it looked this morning after just a thorough (and I do mean THOROUGH) washing. They are starting to compound this morning. We are rolling Awlgrip with non-skid on the flybridge of one boat. We have always mixed the particles in with the paint but when we revisited the Awlgrip application manual they suggest putting down the paint first and sprinkling the particles on, letting it dry and then painting again. This takes twice as long and we decided our way has worked for years and will work fine in the future. We needed to fix a fuel gauge on an Albin 28. Unfortunately neither the gauge or the sender had manufacturer information on them and we weren’t sure which was bad. To assure compatibility we just bought a kit and replaced it all. It was not much more to get the ones we knew worked together and not have hours diagnosing problems afterwards. First thing this morning we did an emergency haul out for a friend staying at the docks. He tried to use a wrench to get a hose barb out of a seacock and it was stuck so bad it started to turn the thru-hull which in turn started to leak. Don’t try this unless you are close to a travel lift!