May 30, 2011

I took last week off, primarily to work on clearing out the house in preparation for putting it on the market. Because a lot of the clutter in the house was gear for Circadian, I also had to clean out and organize Circadian to have a place to put it. Nonetheless, I still managed to squeeze in a few boat projects between bouts of boxing things up, throwing them out, and hauling them to my new storage unit.

The big mystery of the week was the disappearance of the new hub cap for the steering wheel that I made last week. Somewhere between Circadian and home, it just vaporized. During the course of the week I had cleaned out the house, the boat, and the truck, but there was no sign of the hub cap. Rather than waste time and frustration looking for it (and where would I look?), I simply made another one. Since I had already worked out the method, it took less than an hour.

I also cut out the plywood for the ceiling panel in the doghouse using the pattern I had made earlier. It was quick work with the jigsaw. I faired the edge into a smooth curve using my Japanese plane.

Now that I had (hopefully) stopped the leak in the hydraulic helm pump, I wanted to salvage and refinish the stained and weathered teak access panel under the wheel. It was in bad shape and required a lot of sanding, as much as I could without going through the veneer. A half a dozen coats of varnish made a huge difference. I also added a footrest both for comfort when sitting in the chair and to brace myself when the boat is heeling and bouncing around. To make the footrest, I started with a salvaged thick piece of teak that had been soaking in hydraulic fluid and water in the bottom of the aft lazarette when I bought Circadian. I cut one edge at an angle, cut it to length, cut two rounded corners, rounded the top edge with the router, and cut several grooves in the top for traction. Since it's already oil-soaked, the only finishing will be to oil the fresh cut edges. Then it can simply weather naturally, both for better traction and a nice contrast to the varnished panel behind it.

My first couple of trips to Hidden Harbor were about hauling gear, cleaning out gear, and stowing gear. Because CalTrans was working on the main backroad to Hidden Harbor, I had to take a detour on a backroad backroad. It was only an additional 15 minutes and I got to see some scenic remote parts of the Delta I hadn't seen before.

While the scenery and weather were often nice, lugging heavy anchors, chain, sails and other stuff down steep, rickety, snake-ridden ramps and up onto the boat took it's toll, and it was an exhausting week.

Nonetheless, I still managed to make some progress on restoration projects. While using my plywood ceiling panel pattern got the panel close to fitting, it still required repeated trial fitting and grinding until it was right. But it got there. I also thought of a good way to run and conceal the instrument wiring for the ceiling-mounted instruments.

Since I needed every cubic inch of storage space I could muster, I knew the only place to put the recently repaired genoa was back on the roller furler. Besides, the temporary line to retrieve its halyard wire was just about chafed through, so the time had definitely come. I just hoped I could remember or figure out how it all worked. It took some sorting out, but eventually it came back to me and things got dialed in. In the process, I discovered some items on deck that could cause the sheets to foul and hang up when tacking, so I've got some more items to add to "the list." Nonetheless, it felt like a milestone of sorts, and it was good to have Circadian being a sailboat again as she tugged and pulled to free herself from the docklines.