May 16, 2009 - Beaufort River Sail / Air Show

Crew: Chris, Tauri, Arabella, the Perry's

The breeze was forecast to be 6kts out of the SSW, so the plan was to just motor up to Beaufort and have a liesurely sail around.  To our suprise, there was about 10kts from the south!  Since it was Bella's 2nd sail and her friends 1st, we decided to take it easy on them.  We motored south to Parris Island and turned around, unfurled the genoa and sailed back.

Morning View has only been in the water for about a month and a half, but is starting to grow a pretty decent amount of slime.  The knotmeter was not reading speed, so must have some slime on it.  I need to pull it and clean the transducer.

I also brought the new mooring pendants and put them on our mooring.  We are officially on BYSC Mooring #3 now.  It's a great mooring and close to the docks, so the paddle out won't be too long.  I singlehanded Morning View away from the docks and picked up the mooring by myself.  It was significantly easier than I thought it would be, and is cool to know that I would be able to go out sailing by myself or without a 2nd adult to help docking.

Total Distance: 5.2 nm

Avg Speed: 3.7 kts SOG

May 13, 2009 - Instrument Transducer Wires

Now that the locker are painted, I finally ran the transducer wires for the new knotmeter and depth sounder.  I wasn't too fond of the way the old depth sounder wire ran straight through the bilge, so I routed the new one up into the starboard settee locker and continued routing it alongside the new knotmeter wire.  These two were then routed under the stove/oven pan, under the sink locker, across centerline through the engine compartment and up to the instrument box on the port cabin bulkhead.

The Seatalk wires will come in through the headliner from the breaker panel in the nav station.  I took the opportunity to remove the old transducer cables and power cables from the Signet's I'm replacing.  These were a mess, routed through and around all kinds of equipment, coiled and taped in odd places.  I also removed the wires feeding power to the instruments.  They were cut and spliced in several areas, no wonder they never worked properly.  I really like the way all of my new instruments (speed, depth, wind, bidata) are all powered by one Seatalk cable.  It doesn't get much simpler than that!

All the instruments work great with the new routing...and the water temperature is 77F!  I seem to remember that being a high on Lake Erie...South Carolina is great!

May 9, 2009 - Refreshing the Lockers

Like any project aboard Morning View, I never just do the initial job.  This time, we removed the fresh water tank for a much needed scrub-down.  We also are going to simplify the system with only manual pumps.  The supply hoses and the tank fill hose were seriously skank, so they were all removed.  Once the tank was out, I realized how seriously disgusting 30 years of grime can be in lockers, so I sanded and prepped the lockers under the port & starboard settee's.

I painted them with Interlux Bilgecoat, which came out half-way decent.  I'm not sure how keen I am on just how high-gloss they came out, but they're lockers and this will probably make them a little easier to clean anyway.

Port water tank locker before & after:

May 6, 2009 - New Mooring Pendants

I picked up the new mooring pendants from Beaufort Marine Supply today.  They did a nice job with the splicing.  I picked up an American made shackle and swivel, since the Chinese stuff that only lasted a year and a half was a little disconcerting.  Everything is 3/4" galvanized and 5/8" 3-strand nylon.  Pricey and overkill, but I'm OK with that coming up on hurricane season.

I also left a loop on the end of one of the mooring lines so that there's a way to quickly grab a line and throw it on a cleat when coming up to the mooring.  This should make singlehanding or doublehanding easier so that we cna just grab the loop and cleat that while sorting the other mooring line; then come back and adjust the side with the loop.