A Great Day on the Boat!

Well, I've used that title before, and meant it. But today, after a couple of weeks of rain and foul weather on days that I might otherwise have been at the boat, a day off and a beautiful day coincided.

So we packed up the car with cleaning stuff--towels, cleaners, buckets and so on. Arriving at the harbor and walking down the gangway pushing our cart in front of us to the dock, we were greeted by scattered pieces of driftwood stacked along the dock and more drifting about the muddy water along with bits of trash and debris, a far cry from the more placid green water reflecting a sunny summer sky only a few short weeks ago.

We strolled on down the dock and turning down our dock The Key of Sea came into view. She looked beautiful sitting there just as we had left her. How I had missed her.

We passed our things on board and got to work. Leslie headed for the galley and head to started doing some deep cleaning with disinfectants. I opened up the engine room compartments and began scrubbing the engines and the entire compartment from top to bottom.

I started with the port side engine for no particular reason. After covering the air filter with a plastic bag, I began spraying Simple Green in full concentrated form all over the engine, then applied a little elbow grease with the help of a brush to help scrub down the metal surfaces. I scrubbed down the gas tank, hoses, battery cases and finally the deck itself. With low water pressure, lest I get water into places it shouldn't be, I rinsed everything down until places once covered in diesel oil, grease and the dust from last summer's fiberglass work began to sparkle.

I placed one foot on the case of the engine starter batteries and another on the muffler and stepped up and out of the engine room. I cranked the port-side engine to life and let the warming motor dry the water off. The bilge pump continued emptying the lowest regions around the keel.

Taking a look around the much cleaner deck in the engine room I noticed some holes I hadn't seen before. Small holes, probably from former screws that had been removed. I just groaned at the thought that here were more places where water could easily enter the wooden interior of the fiberglass outer coating. Here I was spraying fresh water around in a place I thought had been sealed up tight after last summer's work in this compartment. Apparently the shop had missed these spots. I walked over to LFS and inquired about the best product to seal up these holes and purchased the goop. Returning to the boat I found two jars of goo were in the box I had purchased. They needed to be blended in equal amounts for 2 1/2 minutes, then dabbed into the offending holes. After about 20 minutes the job was done--mission accomplished!

After shutting down the engine I descended back into the engine room, this time on the starboard side and began the cleaning process on that side. Finally, the compartment was beginning to look like my goal which is to be able to eat off of the floor. Well, maybe a few more layers to remove yet but I'll get there or as close as is possible. Take a look at the before and after photos above to get some idea of what things look like.

After everything was dry on the port side, I crawled back down into the compartment with a can of primer paint and some cardboard. Carefully positioning the cardboard here and there I was able to put a first coat of the blue primer on spots of corrosion and rust, leaving the engine looking nearly new. The effect is remarkable and looking down on the finished job at the end of the day left me feeling like I had really accomplished something. When my mechanic, Travis, comes back next year, he should be able to gaze down into a very different engine room from the one he met last August.

Another big accomplishment, one I can't take responsibility for other than setting it in motion, was finding our new inflatable dinghy connected to the swim step, on a new davit system and ready to go.

As always seems to be the case, there is routinely something new to deal with. I found a small leak in the "pass me a beer" hatch. This small hatch from the flybridge to the salon is pretty useful but right now it is a real pain. Sitting in the salon looking at the owner's manual for the new dinghy a single drop of water hit me in the head. Oh, crap! Now what?

I removed the molding from around the hatch and what do you suppose I found?-- moisture. So someday very soon, on another day at the boat, I will be taking this hatch apart and resealing it with some 5200 caulking. Ah, just another day on board The Key of Sea. And I loved every minute of it!