April 18, 2011

Didn't do much during the week except get my surplus gear cleaned up and ready for the swap meet in Alameda on Saturday. I put a couple of ads on craigslist.com to try to generate some interest.

On Saturday morning I was up at 3 am and on the road before 4 am to get to Alameda by 6 am for the swap meet. It was a bit surprising how much company I had at that hour. Fortunately, I had a nearly full moon as a guiding light for my bleary eyes and foggy brain.

I eventually found the Yacht Club and got set up.

By noon I had sold most everything and made some $600. In addition to plain old luck, the key was pricing the stuff so low that anyone with any interest at all in an item couldn't pass up the deal. Once I had made up my mind that the goal was to get rid of stuff I wouldn't use rather than making as much money as possible, it was pretty easy. It also helped that most of the other vendors had pretty junkie stuff. All-in-all, it was a fun morning, with lots of people coming by just to tell stories and B.S.

After the long drive home, I still had a couple of errands to run before I could take a bit of a nap. Even though I tried getting to bed early, I still didn't get much sleep. One of my neighbors decided to do a noisy project in their garage and didn't quit until midnight. I had to get up before 6 again on Sunday morning in order to give my dog his meds and bid on an autopilot I wanted on ebay. Despite my careful bidding strategy, I was outbid at literally the last second. It was okay though, because the price was then beyond my limit.

Although I was still spacie from lack of sleep and a loused up Circadian rhythm, I headed out to the boat to work on the next item on "the list" as well as some minor plumbing issues. The main purpose was to partially dismantle the hydraulic helm pump to see what it might require to cure the slow leak.

It came apart pretty easily. The main o-ring seemed a bit flattened, so that might be the culprit. It could also be the shaft seal and/or the seals around the machine screws that hold it all together. I'll have to do some research this week to see what the local resources are and decide how to approach a fix.

I went back to working on the newly rebuilt Skipper head in the main cabin to cure the little leak around the pump handle shaft. Adding an additional ring of packing left over from the rebuild did the trick. While it was a bit of work and occasionally a little tricky, it went pretty quickly thanks to the knowledge I had acquired by rebuilding it in the first place. I also replaced a loose mounting screw with a larger one to firmly secure the beast.

With the main head now in perfect working order, I turned to finishing up the back-up head, the portapottie in the aft cabin. I had gotten some new mounting brackets for it on ebay for 1/3 of the cursed Worst Marine price. After filling the old head mounting holes with epoxy putty, I marked and drilled the four required holes and screwed down the brackets. That's all there was to it. Ah, the joy of simplicity!

Next, I went to work again on the forward head sink and shower sump drains. Work on the sink drain assembly was stopped short when I ran out of teflon tape. With the new multi-million-dollar ferry out of commission again, I couldn't make a quick run into town to get more, so that was that. I grubbed around in the bilge a bit and removed the drain assembly from the shower sump. No wonder it had fallen apart: the P.O. had Mickey-Moused a connection with nothing but stretchy rubber tubing. During the week I'll pick up the proper fittings.

Well, even though I had an hour or two of daylight left, I was still sleep-deprived, so I headed home. With a front coming in, I was treated to a sky full of clouds.