Where is my boat?

Man this is annoying. Betty and I have gone out to the boat a few times, I think I mentioned it is currently sitting on the hard about 80 miles from our lovely mid 70's home we remodeled. I am at a place where I need to start parting with some $$ to move forward. Immediate needs, batteries, and not the usual $90.00 wonders we buy every year or two that start our cars. I need a few serious deep cycle monsters, AGM Group 31 type, $250.00 to $400.00 per, so I can power the interior lighting and instrumentation, as well as crank the engine. I also need some bilge cleaners and Bilge Coat, $30.00 a gallon. I am also going to have to start taking things apart as we have surfaced a fuel leak that fills the bilge with diesel fuel. We hand bailed about 12 gallons of bilge crud out so far. I can hear "Get started, you aren't working after all!" I would love to! Ok not really, but it's all part of the joy of boat ownership, which so far from all my reading has translated to "Buy a boat! Do your unscheduled maintenance in exotic places, with language issues and difficulty sourcing parts!" The issue is that a month after being told we "own" the boat we still do not have a bill of sale. The frigging paperwork is still in limbo. I am absolutely not spending any serious cash on this project till everything is in order legally. I was annoyed that we had to purchase three new buckets from Lowes to accomplish the first round of bilge cleansing.

I feel Betty and I are stuck in a version of our personal "Glory Days". Which appears to the unaided eye to be the mid 70's. House built in 1974, boat from 1977, etc. Just the weird thoughts that run through my mind in the middle of the night when regular folks are sleeping.

Have been checking on the costs of some items that will need to be replaced or added on the boat. These items are on the list, in no particular order:

• Lighting
• Ventilation
• Engine
• Paint, interior and hull
• Cushions
• Refrigeration
• Instrumentation, Radar, Navigation, AIS, Chart Plotter
• Required safety equipment, Life Raft (OMG! $$$$), Flares, Noise maker, EPRIB, fire extinguishers.
• Sole

Sails appear to be ok, hull, ok, standing rigging, ok. So once again, just like our house, the bones are viable, the skin and guts could use some work. Some of these items are on the future list, like the instrumentation, that one item is going to cost a very pretty penny indeed. While I would love to be a Checkbook Captain, my budget is certainly not going to accommodate that. So things are a touch more complicated in that I will have to do this sort of thing in stages. But the items I put in now need to support the things I will put in years from now. As the boat currently sits I feel fairly certain I could put it in the water and sail away. But not in a level of comfort consistent with doing it more than a few times or going any long distance. And heaven, actually Coast Guard, help me if anything would go south during that excursion. 

Anyway to that end I have been doing a ton of research, mainly centered around everything in the world marine. Yeah a bit scattershot. And as always it's a battle between the haters and the opposite haters. Yeah the opposite of hate is love right? Not on the internets. Go try to research anything and mostly you find a mash of conflicting opinion. What's the best battery? "Dude! Wally World has the best!". "You moron, you shop at Wally World? They oppress third world peoples and prey on the local poverty stricken." Then a three page invective riven discussion of Wally Worlds business model. All while never actually discussing which battery Wally World has that is "The Best". Somehow or another President Obama gets drawn into the discussion then it really goes off the rails. Then you look at the posting dates and see it was posted 5 years ago. So I have settled for simply looking for recommendations, not from the manufacturer. Figuring out what actually comes from a manufacturer is harder than it sounds.

After exhaustive research I am simply exhausted from researching. I zeroed in on a thing I am fairly competent in, electronics. I will need to replace all the lighting on the boat to lower power level of lighting. This particular boat will run exclusively off a 12 volt DC system for the foreseeable future. There is no lighting in any of the berthing areas, like I am never going to actually open a paper based book whist reclining in my rack. Or want to be able to find my pants on a dark night. So that will need to be added. Whether I convert the boat to a diesel electric system or not we will need to scrimp on every amp hour in the batteries. So obviously LED lighting is in my future. OMG! What is WRONG with you people! Those prices are frigging insane! $25.00 for a single round red/white puck. Screw this I can build my own. This I can do on my own. Yay! This is actual straight forward research, instantly found two reliable sources for plans, and four sources for parts. So I'll be creating my own. Ventilation is also an issue, we need fans in the berthing and living spaces. Nice quiet 12 VDC fans that aren't energy greedy. Back to qualitative research.

Betty is in charge of the sewing projects, simply cuz she can run her machine. We brought some of the pieces of the salon cushions back to the house a few weeks ago. She is thinking about what we have that can be repurposed and reused from the piles of things we keep moving from state to state.

Now if I could just get the boat paperwork we could do some "boat stuffs".

Amadeus September 19, 2014

LA!