Pensacola FL Sailing Blog - sailingnightwatch

We lived in a nice neighborhood. That meant you would always get a good turnout for a garage sale. We scheduled to start at 7:30 AM. What I forgot about is the professional who sell stuff at the flee markets show up at 5:30. That’s right, beating on the door wanting first crack at thing. They come prepared, large trucks, larger men to carry off everything. We did out best and held them off till 7 AM. By this time there are several of them and their trucks had all but closed down our street. They were very disappointed with the lack of furniture, but still took most major items left. By noon it was over. My wife started cutting prices about 11 AM. I should have been more observant. She went through the garage and even though I had a small stash of tools that were going back to the shop, she priced them. Someone got a full set of taps and dies from 1/16” to 3/4” for 50 cents. I should have put them in the car. I still get upset to think of it.What little was left we donated to a homeless shelter.

My wife and I are neat freaks plus neither of us collects things. Therefore, almost everything was for sale. Yep. Sold the house, furniture, stuff and more stuff. We had good and relatively new furniture. We scheduled the “Mother of all Garage Sales” and told friends and relatives that if they wanted to buy anything, they could do that the last 2 days before the garage sale. We also posted a notice at work and church. This was a smart way of handling the sale. It was organized and we probably got more money for things than we would during the heat of battle on garage sale day. Most furniture, paintings, everyday dishes and extra kitchen stuff was gone the first pre-garage sale day. The heavy yard and garden tools also went this way. The night before the garage sale the house was beginning to have an echo in it. We still had a bed to sleep in, but there was little to sit on. It was close to camping.

As mentioned earlier, there are seven full size doors with louvers top and bottom that had to be refinished. All the hardware is brass and needed to be cleaned and refinished. We are talking the worst sweet equity now. I hate louvers.Since we were out of time, the louvered doors turned out to be a marathon project that had been put off and we were within 2 weeks of moving on board. To sand the louvers, we found using a butter knife wrapped in course sand paper did best. Never found a comfortable position to sand those louvers. Did I mention that pecan is very heavy. We tried putting the doors on saw horses, in our lap, hanging over the pier, even hung were they belong. Nothing was comfortable. Just a miserable job. But, it got completed. Did I mention I hate louvers.

• MARCH CONTRACT ON HOUSE• The push to finish was on. I had taken time off from my business while we were in the yard, and now it was time to do it again. Never enough time. The salon was sanded with the exception of the forward bulkhead and the bottom front panels of the settees. I started with the settee fronts. At the forward end of the settees are low arm rests that are also storage areas. Because of their size, they need to be hand sanded and take a lot of time. The forward bulkhead was going to have to be done after we moved aboard.o• Applying the urethane was time consuming and I could put on 2 coats a day in the saloon/galley. These were long days and I just went in a large circle, which when complete, I just continued on lap 2. 6 coats took most of the week and it was time to move on board.

The other day my dock mate was having some work done on his boat including checking out his engine wiring harness. He has this tachometer that runs more on the state of engine charge instead of RPM. Sounds like a wiring problem, so it was being checked out. Somewhere around 7 PM I heard the engine start. I made a mental note to ask how he got maintenance workers to work past 5 PM. Around 8:30 PM I get a nock on the hull and it is the owner and he asked if I had seen the workers because the engine was running and the boat was locked up. He opened the boat and found a heavy diesel fuel smell. He tried to shut down the engine using the shut down lever, but it would not move.His engine is under the berth in the aft stateroom. Upon opening the engine cover there is fuel squirting onto the glow plug and the fitting is melted. Most of the wiring harness is melted and the throttle and shutdown cables are fused together. The engine is just humming away as happy as can be. He used a screwdriver to pry the shutdown handle into action.In the past year, the engine had been overhauled and while it was out of the boat, the engine space had been repainted and reinsulated. The insulation directly above the glow plug was melted and soot was spread around the engine compartment. It looked like there had been a small fire that thankfully went out.Everyone has been contacted and now it is time to wait for the insurance adjuster. There was obviously a short in the wiring. This is the second time I have known engines to start up by themselves. Both were caused by shorts in the wiring harness. The first one was on an Endeavor 37 that was tied beside a Hunter that took a major lightning strike and it was believed that the lightning had jumped onto the endeavor and caused a short that took about 24 hours to cause the problem. Both boats have the same engines installed. As this develops we will continue the saga.

Speaking of tedious jobs. There is a 6’ passageway between the saloon and aft stateroom. It has 3 louvered doors, a cabinet door and a large removable section that exposes the port side of the engine. It also has the electrical panels in the space. I was able to sand off the large flat areas in no time. They are almost non-existent. There seemed to be more molding and tight corners to sand than anything. Well my beloved finished the insulation and got to fill a weekend hand sanding in small areas. She would do anything to keep from sanding louvered doors. That means I got to start on the louvered doors. The best method was wrapping a butter knife in 80 grit and sliding it between the louvers and giving it your best. There are 12 louvers top and bottom of each door and a louver took 10 to 15 minutes per side. Getting into the edges was the worst. For someone looking to build up the strength in there hands and wrists, this work will do it.

Because my home is my office, phone lines were a necessity. This was still back in the days of fax machines, slow ISP’s, tower computers and slow poor quality printers. With all this technology I needed 2 lines. My office had been at our home and we had always used our second line as our home phone number. I had a 2 line phone on my desk(chart table) and a 2 line phone in the aft stateroom. Gave me a place to work at night on the phone while my wife could do her thing in the saloon or galley. I also installed a portable phone across the saloon by the eating bar. It was convenient for the telemarketers to reach us during dinner. This was our setup until 2002 when we shifted from an ISP to DSL. By that time I had moved any fax function to the computer and almost everything was going to email. Therefore, we dropped one of the lines and converted it to handle the DSL. I also moved from a tower to a laptop computer. That was great until hurricane Ivan. Good by phone lines. While wiring the phone, I also wired for 2 TV’s either through cable or antenna. After Ivan there was no phone, TV, electricity, water or marina. While evacuated I picked up a cell phone card for the computer. Oh yea, what cell towers. Some day we will get into that chapter of our lives.