Winter Projects

It's been a rather quiet winter from a cruising perspective. We have taken a handful of short day cruises as our schedules and weather have permitted. No "new territory" was explored, but we had a couple of really lovely days on the water...very quiet and peaceful. It is apparent that most boaters here hunker down for the winter months and don't venture out. We would guess that about 80% of the boats in our marina have not even left the dock yet this year. Sure, we've had some cold weather...but there have also been some beautiful days to be on the water.

Most weekends have found one or both of us on the boat working on a variety of small-ish projects, paring down the list of stuff that we want to accomplish. The largest project was the replacement of our water heater. Thankfully, our dock neighbor John is very adept at stuff like this, so we enlisted his help for the better part of a day to get it done. Of course, projects are never simple on a boat, and this one took us longer than expected. But the end result is that we have a brand spanking new water heater, and we should have all the hot water we need for the next 10 years!

Here is a short summary of other projects that have been completed:

• Added blinds to the 2 main windows in the pilot house. These match the blinds in the  salon, and add a bit more privacy and shade as needed. 
• The dinghy needed a major bottom cleaning. We bought the dinghy months before we had the davits installed, and as a result it sat in the water collecting algae for quite some time. About 3 hours worth of scraping and scrubbing with a variety of cleaners and devices and it is all nice and clean. Now we can hang it from the davits rather than leave it in the water, so we don't expect to need to do this again.
• All of the interior teak in the salon and pilot house has received a fresh coat of teak oil (Saffin's). This is something that needs to be done every couple of years to keep it looking fresh and protecting it from any exposure it might get. We have yet to do the stateroom...and we'll likely do this some day when we are not planning to spend the night on the boat.
• All of the exterior surfaces above the gunwales received a coat of wax. This took parts of 2 weekends to complete, and our battery powered orbital buffer cut the time in half for what this project would have taken if we did it all by hand. None the less...some sore muscles were generated from this little task!
• A great deal of thought time and research was invested to decide on our long awaited electronics upgrade. All of the electronics on Sandrobber are circa 2001, and todays electronics are so far advanced over what was available at that time. So, we have a couple of items currently on order, and we anticipate these all to be installed and operational by mid-April.
• Garmin 7608xsv Chart plotter and transducer - this will replace our current chart plotter, and will be backed up with Garmin Blue Chart that we are running currently on our iPad.
• Garmin AIS600 - this will add AIS transmit and receive capabilities...a real safety bonus for river travel. And we will have the ability to receive only, so that we can disable the transmit capability when at anchor or in really busy commercial traffic.
• Garmin VHF200 - our current VHF does not even have DSC capabilities, which is actually a no-no. So, this upgrade will add that capability and more.
• Island Time Wi-Fi Network Kit - we'll add a Wi-Fi transmitter on an antenna, and also hook it into a new router. This will extend the range capabilities for our Wi-Fi reception, and also network all of our onboard devices for convenience.
• Bluetooth amplifier - this has yet to be ordered...these marine grade devices are fairly new to the market. We will install it under the port pilot house seat, and it will drive the 4 speakers that we have in the salon and pilot house. Our new TV will then run through this amp to the 4 speakers. This will also allow us to stream all audio content from our iPhones and iPads through this same speaker system.

These are the high points...I'm sure more than most any of you care to read about. We are looking forward to some great spring weather...it's just around the corner!