Tailoring the cockpit tent

Sunday 11 November, Norfolk VA: Stitched slots for lines through the cockpit tent and have Pete & Tracy Goss for drinks.
Great sleep last night, we feel fully rested this morning. Maybe the fact that we slept nearly 10 hours helped! It’s Sunday, so we’d better start with our jobs for the day. When you retire, you lose the weekends… every day is a working day! 🙂

Clear sky again and sunny, but bitterly cold. Only few degrees above zero. Even so, Glen starts the day on the decks, finalizing the pending job of stitching leather slots on the cockpit tent, for the mainsail sheets and runner to come through to the winches. Dry-run on one side was successful the other day, now the hard part commences: manually stitching the leather pieces. We don’t have a sewing machine onboard… maybe we should have bought that one at Annapolis Boat Show.
He starts by making very small holes along the leather’s edges, and then sewing… once the leather, once his fingers. Slow process, but it comes out nicely.
Then move on to the other side, where we start from scratch. The lines come to the winch on a different angle, so the hole here will be in a different position. The full process repeated: find the correct position for the hole, cut the hole, cut leather squares, drill holes in the leather, stitch leather, prick fingers, try to keep blood off the leather! Few hours later both slots are ready. Now we will have a weatherproof tent when we are using the winches, and most importantly we will keep the tent in one piece, without catching it around the winch with the lines. And the usual as with any job, what Glen thought it will take an hour, ended up taking three hours. But by mid afternoon it’s all finished and looks beautiful.

Pete Goss & Tracy (his wife) have arrived here too, and we invite them over for a drink and to give them a tour of Cloudy Bay. And at their own risk, we did open the door to the junk room too, where the storage of unwanted items in the photos or videos are still piled up 🙂 (indeed, we didn’t finish the recording of the boat tour). Well, they know how it feels to prep up the boat, as they made their Pearl of Penzance picture perfect for the Annapolis Boat Show. We spend a very pleasant evening in their company (and their friend Tom).

Even if there’s only 1 degree Celsius outside, Glen still manages to get himself busy back on the deck. Pitch black and bitterly cold, I guess I don’t call him Nutty for nothing. The other day when we rigged the pole, we noticed the hook at the end of the pole was jammed. And had to pull the line quite a few times to unhook the pole from the deck hold. So out comes the endoscope, to see what is going on inside the pole. It was the line, which got twisted around itself. Just how did it manage to do that? Once untwisted the problem is solved, next time we rig the pole it will come undone much easier. Even so, I would still not call it my friend.

In search for some warmth, for the next activities Glen goes to his favorite room, the engine room. Where he is happy that he finally found where a stray nut had fallen off the generator and into the bilge, where he found it a few weeks ago. It was part of the dampening system. And it is soon secured back in place.
Then he sets to getting everything set up to anti-calc flush the generator. It involves removing the impeller and setting up a small bilge pump and hoses in a bucket to allow fluid circulation through the raw water system. Tomorrow he will circulate a Rydlime solution around the engine for a few hours. Hopefully that will clear any lime built up for another 6 months. While removing the impeller, he finds that 2 of the 6 rubber blades are missing. Another timely intervention! Must be all this silty water we have been in recently.

We end the day with what seems to have become our daily routine, check Predict Wind for weather forecast updates. Doesn’t look like we will be leaving before Friday. Well, we do manage to keep ourselves quite happily entertained, so no reason to get upset about the delayed departure… yet.