Weekend update June 17-19

We headed to the boat last Thursday night to get ready for a big weekend of boat projects as we count down to leaving for the California delta on Saturday, July 2.  Matt had decided he wanted to make homemade lasagna so he got started Wednesday by making the meat sauce and we took that and everything else we needed up to the boat Thursday to put it all together.  On the way up there I decided I wanted cupcakes so I'll start out with a couple of pictures of our dinner:

Thursday night we mostly got everything organized and came up with our shopping list for what we needed to get everything done.  Friday we both had to work and after work Friday Matt started in on trouble shooting our electrical issues yet again.  This time we think we have finally found the problem, a bad connection on one of the ground wires.  Once Matt fixed that and charged the batteries for a bit both motors started right up off of their own batteries, where before we had to switch the starboard motor over to the port motors battery to get it to start.  Here is Matt crawling around in the engine room playing with wires:

Luckily it was cocktail hour down at the dock and there were a lot of people around to bum pieces and parts and tools from, so Matt was able to get an appropriately sized terminal connector to replace the bad one.

Once the wire was repaired the volt meter showed one very dead battery. 

The next day I replaced the old corroded (inoperable) raw water anchor wash down spigot with a new spigot.  When Matt tightened it later he changed the orientation of the handle a bit so as to make it less likely to be accidentally turned on.  It has a dedicated water pump though so it is unlikely to be an issue. 

Somewhere in all of this we had a trip to Tap Plastics, two trips to West Marine and a trip to the fuel dock for 152 gallons of diesel. We were being VERY careful while filling up the tanks to stop and use our metal dipstick to see how full they were. We stopped filling the port tank after 80 gallons, even though it was not quite full, and shifted over to the starboard tank. We knew that the diesel heater only runs off of one of the tanks so we anticipated one tank would take less fuel than the other, however we underestimated how much less and over filled the starboard tank a bit. We were standing over the tank vent with an absorbent towel so we avoided any environmental disaster. we did not learn until Sunday just how big of a disaster we created in our bilge, however.  At this point on Saturday, in our blissful ignorance, we continued on other projects.  We finished up the set up of our new dinghy motor lift, though I forgot to get pictures.

I worked on sewing the fly screen covers for the sliding doors while Matt worked on wrapping up various loose ends on the to do list.  We went to bed Saturday night feeling great about all we had accomplished and looking forward to finishing up the fly screens and the forward head installation on Sunday.  I woke up at 3:30 in the morning to a strong smell of diesel in the boat, but went back to sleep.  When we both woke up Sunday morning around 8 we started investigating the source of the odor and found diesel in the bilge and a track of diesel from the amidships, forward corner of the starboard diesel tank.  We quickly put a damage containment plan in place.  Matt borrowed a friend's oil extractor and took some diesel out of the tank, in case part of the issue was it was overfull.  Then we had to get the diesel out of the bilge.

Luckily we knew Scott and Kim had empty diesel jugs that we were sure they'd let us borrow.  They were out of town so we called their house and talked to Kim's mom, who was watching their kids.  She said we could come on over.  As we hopped in the car we sent Kim a text to let her know what we were up to.  She called right away and told us they had just moved all the boat stuff to a storage unit.  Thankfully the unit was accessible through combination locks and a key lock door that was easily jimmied open.  We are so grateful to Scott and Kim for being so generous in letting us take the jugs. 

When we got back the boat we quickly began clean up.  Matt took the jugs to the boat to start getting the diesel out of the bilge and I was trailing him down to the boat.  I ran into our friends Ralph and Lisa and they were talking about borrowing Ross's "little thingy" to pump some tranny fluid out of their boat.  I told them they couldn't use his little thingy because Matt was using it on our boat.  Ralph then said he used to have a little thingy but he didn't know where it was.  I knew where it was and told him, then we made a few cracks about Ross's little thingy being bigger than Ralph's and too bad Ross wasn't around to hear people arguing over using his little thingy.  Which was the oil extractor Matt was using to extract the diesel!

Here is Matt pumping diesel and water out of the bilge.  All told there was maybe a quart in there and the tank did not seem to be actively leaking.  Hopefully.

Here is a closed fly screen on one side.

 And an open fly screen on the other.

Here is the forward head, installed on its mounting board, ready to be installed.  We have it all done, just didn't get any photos.

By the time we wrapped up Sunday it was around 4 and we still had to clean up and pack up, and we had some friends coming by to say hi.  We remembered we had some chicken breasts and some mustard sauce on the boat so we decided to stay the night and barbecue chicken.  Joe and Carrie decided to stay as well so we all hung out for a bit. They barbecued their dinner on our boat since our barbecue is easier to use than theirs (we keep ours mounted on the sundeck, ready to use, while they have to get theirs out and set it up every time.  Blow boaters.).  Once they were done barbecuing, after 9 pm, Matt and I soon called it a night and went to bed after a long, busy, stressful day.

Monday morning I thought the boat smelled fine other than the forward head which seemed to have a diesel smell.  Matt was convinced the whole boat reeked of diesel.  I generally notice odors more than he does so I think it is ok.  I hope.

We head to the boat again on Thursday this week, though we are both off work and plan to head to the Encinal Yacht Club in Alameda Friday morning for our yacht club's annual "Encinal Assault" cruise out.