Boat Update 1/22

I visited the boat yesterday to take care of some things.  In the last post I included a list of things that I needed to do.  Here are the results.

• I didn't make much headway on mounting the plotter. There are not many options for mounting it near the wheel.  It pretty much has to go on the rail in front of the wheel.  I have been looking into mounting options for rails and have come up with one option I think might work.  It's a mount from RAM Mounts that has a rail-mount adapter.  I just have to figure out what to do with the power cable from there.  I also looked for places to mount the transducer for the sonar.  The best place would be in front of the keel.  I found a compartment there where you can get access to the knot meter and the through-hull transducer that is mounted for the depth gauge, but I doubt I could put my sonar transducer there because I want to do the "in-hull" mount.  That would mean the transducer would need to sit directly on the hull.  The compartment I found looked to be part of the liner and not the hull.  More work to do on this I guess.
• Replaced the rubber foot on the swim ladder.  In fact, I replaced both since I had a pack of four anyway and it looked better with both matching.
• I didn't touch the keel bolts.  I will wait until later.
• All spaces I could think of were measured, including the galley sink for the cutting board that I plan on making.
• There were two types of lights on the boat.  The first was a large, round, older-looking fixture that I think I want to replace.  I found some similar-looking LED fixtures in the West Marine catalog that I think will work.  The other lights were small 12v fixtures that looked newer and looked like flood light bulbs.  I think I also found an LED version of these at West Marine but I'll have to do more research.
• I did not bring the stove cutting board home.  It actually looked really good so I left it.  After thinking about it for a while, it looked like it had been sanded and refinished.  There were very few knife marks and the few that were there were covered by finish.  The finish actually looked like polyurethane.  I don't think that's a good finish for a functioning cutting board.  I may bring the board back next time and sand all that off and refinish with mineral oil.
• The pin rail idea will not work.  The shrouds do not run fore and aft, but abeam, which means I wouldn't be able to fit a rail in there anyway.  So scratch that idea.
• I inventoried all of the stuff on the boat.  The previous owner took good care of it so it had a lot of good stuff in good shape, including belts, impellers, lubricants, and tools.

While I was there, I also checked the battery fluid levels and found one battery low.  I refilled both batteries and checked the voltage.  The voltage was low, 12.25v, but that could be because of the low water level and because it's only been getting a light charge from a single solar panel.  I'll check the voltage again on the next trip to see if there is any change.

I also scraped off the name and hailing port in preparation for the new name and hailing port.  I plan on going down again in February to do that and get it ready to be launched.  I have to check with the marina about the launch procedure.  Regarding the name, I think I'll put a post up later about the new name, my old boat's name, and boat names in general.

I'd like to have the boat launched the first week of March and then I could spend the weekend moving it up to my marina further north.  I'm getting anxious for that time to come.  In the meantime I'll resort to blog updates to satisfy my thirst for the sea.  Until next time...