We are in the water!

Yeah us!

Ok thought we were going in the water sometime ago, just needed a touch of bottom paint. Wrong. Had to get the old paint soda blasted off as the PO never really did any of that sort of stuff, so a decade or so of old nasty bottom paint on the boat. Had the boatyard get a guy in to soda blast the bottom. Peachy! Nope, not quite so fast there new boat owner.

This is close up of what was left after the soda blast was finished.  Many hours of rust removal from the keel, many hours of sanding, four coats of barrier coat, THEN a coat of ablative anti-foul.  Now can we go in the water PLEASE?

Crane trip into the well. So yes we made it into the water. And didn't need to be pulled immediately out of the water either. Motor started immediately and off we went. Had a friend I met at sailing classes, actually one of the instructors, help me drive it out to the slip.  

Had no idea that mooring was so stressful. First off going in reverse to back down is a no go.  Stopping, yes, going anywhere but in a circle? Not happening yet. Tomorrow is hanging the sails day. Then maybe we can get some sailing pictures up.

Later all!

Almost to the water!

While I was in the Navy we had a saying, "Sailors belong on boats and boats belong at sea.". "Haze gray and underway." Lots of those fun little things. Anyway, last few trips to the boat have been quite epic and have got a huge number of things resolved. As noted in my previous post, the engine runs. We were quite thrilled with that. But I was having serious issues with the electrical systems. The engine ran, the charging circuit worked, that all seemed pretty straight forward. But only two of the lights worked below decks. No power to anything else. Loads of testing, reading schematics, trying to track down the issue without ripping the entire interior out of the boat. I had been using the PO's manual, which was driving me nuts as it was just a tiny bit different from what I was looking at in person. So I compared the paper manual he had, and the PDF version I had, had an awesome AH HA! moment when I finally noticed a small entry indicating the paper manual was for a sister boat, Sun Fizz, not a Gin Fizz. I my defense the paper manual is missing it's cover. Spent some quality time with my voltmeter and some faint PDF based wiring diagrams and noticed a tiny difference in the schematic to the reality of the wiring in front of me. A touch of back story, the boat is OLD, when it was built they were using four six volt batteries to make up the 12 VDC system for the boat. Split into separate 12 VDC circuits, one for starting, one for the house bank. The house circuit could be switched from 12 VDC to 6 VDC so the lighting had two levels, dim and dimmer. Somewhere in the boats past this was changed to be a straight 12 volt system. The electrical panel has a switch that shows 6 VDC and 12 VDC, logically I always left that switch in the 12 volt position, because those are the batteries I put in after all. Opps. Really the 12 volt side of the selector has no wire on it at all, yeah you got it, I just moved the switch to 6 volts and amazingly enough the boat now has lights and power to all it's lights and outlets. Sigh, weeks of hair tearing and concern for a freaking switch. I'll have to rewire that once I figure out what else has been changed incorrectly.

Other news, cleaned the bilges out. Betty was able to come down for the weekend which we spent scrubbing the nasty out of the bilge. I was a bit dismayed to find that the bilge pump is in an area that doesn't actually accumulate any water that happens to get in the bilge until it overflows the flooring. So that has to be resolved. The shower/head area deck turned out to be completely rotted out. Four buckets of old rotted plywood that was still wet and gunky.

So that is going to be fun to repair. The little black button in the middle there is some sort of drain that is connected to the main waste line that runs the grey water from both the shower and sink back to the well where the only bilge pump is sitting and is then pumped over the side. Yeah that whole arrangement needs to be resolved. I am thinking I can fill the area with two part expanding foam and then lay a chunk of ply over that with a cut out for the water to drain into a plastic bowl with a self actuated bilge pump. Or something like that. But the main bilge pump still works, as long as you bail the water into the box it is sitting in, so I got that going for me. 

Betty scrubbed the galley floor, more nasty. She ended up peeling the covering off the ply that was laid, so we are looking into something seriously cheap to put down over that. I pulled the wood slats off the bottom of the cockpit and scrubbed that mess out. 

The bottom is to be painted next week and she should go in the water the following week. Here is a picture of where we expect to be our new home to be parked for the next series of repairs. Pretty fancy don't you think?

A bit of a hike to the showers, but we need the exercise anyway. We certainly aren't going to be showering on the boat for a while. Other small things found while scrubbing. All the screws that hold the ledges that the flooring sits on have rusted away and all the little ledges are just slimy nasty, so those all need to be replaced. The dog house the engine sits under has been modified by PO and now needs to be modified back. Basically the dog house is also the stairs up to the cockpit. It fits tight to the galley cabinets on the starboard side, so is cut away on that side. On the port side however it runs straight back to the bulkhead next to the engine compartment and behind the nav. station. The dog house was built so that a smaller panel could be removed on the port side so you could tilt the entire stair assembly on end and move it into the salon area. Otherwise it is too wide to get it there and causes even more chaos in an already tiny space. 

I swear Betty and I are going to have some quite amazing adaptations to make. We are really rather messy folks. Not dirty mind you, but we do have serious issues with clutter. That clutter usually ends up getting piled into nice neat piles, then the piles get piles. Then they get placed somewhere to be gone through and filed. Where they languish for an indeterminate period of time. There just isn't room in this baby for that level of clutter tolerance. 

Did some shopping for stuffs though, have some gauges, a barometer, clock, tide clock, thermometer coming, a new fan, some more LED lights, and a few sundresses for the lady of the boat. 

And that is about it for this episode of this oldy boat, on a budget!

LA!

News from the right coast.

Headed out to the boat as the mechanic guys say they can look at the engine today. Pretty nice day, got an early start with one minor complication, water was out. So down to Starbucks we head, which nicely enough has an Autozone next door. Had to pick up another battery. Dropped Betty off at the house and sat in traffic all the way up 95 to 495. Finally lightened up about 30 miles from the boat.

Anyway complaints aside I emptied out the lazarette and looked at the tangle of wires and decided to replace the only remaining original battery. Used one of my winches to get the battery on board, stupid things weigh 12 tons. So +1 there the winch worked. Got the battery hooked up and amazingly enough the mechanic showed up, and I'll be damned if the engine didn't just turn over and kind of chug a bit on the stored fuel and water in the system. Diddled the plumbing from the engine to the through hull so that instead of the sea cooling the heat exchanger the water in the bucket did it instead. We are after all some 1/4 mile from the water. I learned that you don't ever just connect a hose directly to one of these engines, if you have an issue getting it started you can hydro-lock it. Then you are totally screwed. Rather than having a radiator like on car there is a cooling loop in the engine that takes seawater from outside the hull and runs it up to a heat exchanger that sits on the engine, after it takes the heat from the coolant, standard antifreeze, it is routed to the a box that the exhaust manifold is connected to which cools and "cleans" the exhaust. Then both the water and the cooled exhaust is ejected over the side from an above water through hull. It's all pretty simple, but the hoses are quite long. The pressure from the exhaust cycle forces the water out the hoses, but if there is no pressure the exhaust box will get filled with water which will back fill into the engine, and as water can't be compressed you now have a major repair on your hands Anyway to make this long story short, the engine cranked for a couple minutes then fired right up. I was so excited! Remember when we bought this boat I expected the engine to be a seized lump of useless cast iron. We ran it for 20-30 minutes to get it up to operating temp, engaged the transmission and spun the prop a little bit. Then looked for leaks, none, no extra water, no extra fuel, no oil pumping from unfindable cracks. Simply amazeballs. I am over the moon. Just saved a good 8 boat bucks there.

I'll have to figure out how to add video so you to can enjoy my unbelievably exciting engine sounds and watch the belts spinning, until then just make loud raspberry noises.

Other things we have done, Betty got a backrest completed.

I scared myself by starting to work on the electrical system:

I think we are going to spend the weekend there either this weekend or next, not sure. Betty has been working killer hours and needs a break.

Made my first trip to West Marine, yeah it's worse than Toys-R-Us for adults. 

That's it for this weeks scintillating installment of "This Oldy Boat". 

LA!

The boring parts

So from here on out this will get even more boring than simply blank pages. As it is starting to get warmer it was time to head for the boat and get started on my lists. First thing, finish removing the old dingy overhead. Last year we got about 1/3 of it off. Nice. Yesterday I finished that job in the salon, yuck. There were enough cockroach cadavers and empty fossilized egg cases to make a giant cockroach, or something. lots of vacuuming after that nasty experience. I'm obviously saving the trim pieces but the rest had to go. As most monohullers can attest the inside of a boat is more like a cave, dark, close, and occasionally intensely humid. I do hope to alleviate at least a little of this by replacing the old mahogany overhead panels with some bubble insulation and a white fabric type headliner. While I was there I also spoke to the yard ladies, they are so nice, got to pet the office dog as well, sweet. There was some disagreement between the PO's lawyer and myself about the date the boat became mine, which only matters when it comes to storage costs. So I ponied up another batch of green to pay for the "past due" bills. I need to get some help from one of the diesel mechanics to get the beast running, or determine that the beast is really just an expensive anchor. First appointment I could make was two weeks out. I also got the keys to the boat, so can finally lock it up properly. Which is hilarious when I think about it, having it locked up "properly" certainly didn't stop the many brokers from gaining access previously. Will have to look at that a little closer once we start heading out to other places. I have heard that people really don't steal sailboats, but man do they steal stuff OFF sailboats. Which makes sense, sailing is a fairly specialized skill. The boatyard I am in has a large number of boats pulled out, some folks getting their boats ready for what looks like a fun sailing season. Ours depends on if the engine works or not. So now that I have the headliner down I can start some work in troubleshooting the installed electrical system. One light in the entire boat works, well did work, I dismounted it yesterday. Nothing else gets power, got to be some corroded connections somewhere. Also noticed that one of the connections to the ground plane for the VHF has fallen apart. One nice thing is that it, the boat,  doesn't appear to be catching anymore water. Now if I could just figure out what all these ropes laying all over the place were used for...

I did spend some time sitting in the cockpit just soaking it up. However today was forecast to be warm but rainy, I stayed home, will go brave the weather later this week.

LA!

Winter almost over

So it's getting all spring like around here, which really only means that it's gray and drippy rather more than blue and shiny.  Still plenty cold, not yet time to dewinterize Amadeus. I have two tasks to complete for April, get the motor running and paint the bottom. Until we have overnight temps above freezing no engine work, and no painting till same temps are in the 50s. Then she needs to go in the water, which is already paid for thankfully. I have 1/2 the overhead torn out already, and will strip the rest out on next visit. The electrical work will take a couple weeks as I track down corroded wires and replace the interior lighting with LEDs. Already have a stock of lamps to go in place, but with no power to any but the single fluorescent in the salon, need to figure out the wiring first. Also want to run a few extra wires to accommodate some fans in all the areas. Amadeus has two overhead hatches and two opening ports located on the aft bulkhead of the salon. So fans are going to be a nessecity. No dorade type ports either, which I find annoying.

I did tear apart the aft cabin and OMG!! I found a life raft tucked in there. Thank you P.O. I thought you had sold it. My current conundrum is how to mount the forward Bimini, and raise the sails, and the anchor, and tie it up to a dock, or mooring ball, or start the engine, so loads of fun stuff in my immediate future.

I worked for a couple months this winter, it was exhausting and frustrating to the extreme. But brought in enough to fix the transmission in the car and still have a few boat bucks left over. While I love my Jetta, it can be a very expensive thing to fix. Thankfully it hasn't required very much of that.

Sailing school should start pretty soon, so I'll be doing that as well.

I should be updating thing here a little more frequently as I actually start doing more stuff. Expect more pictures as I dig around and find more junk as well as fix some other junk.

LA!

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!

Amadeus Closing

So very cool. So the terror is mostly declining, steely determination is trending, I'm all for that. Took Betty to the boat the other day, she was not completely displeased. We are compromising a bit on the berthing areas. It has a center cockpit, yay, but has a walk over interior. So the "Owners Stateroom" is completely separate from the salon part and has no attached head. Well I can live with that. It has a number of other berths including two sea berths, nice and snug, as they need to be. The head is all rather odd as it is split port and starboard. The "shower" and sink is to port and across a small passageway is the head to starboard. Old manual head at that. Might be looking at replacing that in the future with a composting air head. Has an interesting puzzle of interlocking doors to allow a touch of privacy for those personal moments. Two doors manage to cover three openings. The sole is junk. The Gin Fizz originally came from the factory with a glassed over plywood sole, which they then carpeted. This one just has some creaky plywood down painted and mostly not attached to the boat really. The vaunted hanging lockers are miniscule, but seeing as we don't have to sell the house to afford the boat we are not planning on living on it while the refit is happening. Still haven't determined if the engine is a rotating thing or rusted into scrap metal. We bid the boat expecting the engine to be junk, so if it isn't, gravy! Moves the plans up several years and lowers the refit cost significantly. Or at least leaves the outlay further in the future. The engine says it only has 1563 hours on it, which is insanely low hours for a boat this old. Still need to find the stupid battery bank, it's a small boat so there are only a few places left to look, but I need tools.

Anyway I am off to handle the closing tomorrow. Many more pictures and ruminations to follow. Got to make a run to Home Depot for a chain and lock for my ladder, and wasp killer as I have a hive living under the lid to the starboard lazarette in the cockpit. Forgot about them and whipped open the lid the last time I was there and promptly got stung, but only once thankfully. Any of you that know me know I have a weird sensitivity to bug bites.

LA!

OMG!! We bought a boat!!!!

So we got the dreaded email from the broker today.

I quote: "Congratulations you bought a boat. I will. Call you tomarrow to give you details .thanks Arne" yeah tomorrow is spelled incorrectly, but really I don't care!!!!

This is both the coolest thing ever and fricking terrifying. My initial reaction is jumping up and down screaming, which is rather amusing seeing as I am who I am, Mr. Doom and Gloom himself. You could call me Eyore. There is so much to do! And the firstest thing is getting Betty on the boat. She wasn't able to come with me to check it out, so I did a FaceTime walk through with her after I determined it wasn't a total pile of crap. We have been looking for so long that the culmination of this phase is very hard to believe! I have spent the last couple of days doing research and making lists. 

Really that is all for now, I'm going to get stupid drunk and eat pizza. More when the news soaks in and the terror slides into steely determination. 

Amadeus

Hello faithful followers. So it has been quite a few months since we last reviewed Craig's obsession with getting a new boat. I saw a listing for another derelict hull for 8K somewhere around here and called the broker. Excited! : ) Boat was withdrawn from market due to a deck issue. Bummer! : ( However he then reached into his magic internet thingie and produced a number of other equally derelict hulls sitting here and there. Going through those listings was pretty simple, nope to small, small, to much and to small, then magic! Amadeus.

Kind of a catchy name for a boat. Amadeus is a 1977 Jeanneau Gin Fizz ketch, 37.5 feet, 17,400 pounds displacement. If you look quickly before it is pulled from Yacht World @ http://www.yachtworld.com/boats/1977/Jeanneau-Gin-Fizz-Ketch-2749683/Solomons/MD/United-States#.U-_FZ_ldV8F you can see the original listing. She is in pretty darn good shape for an older lady. Appears to have a full compliment of sails, books, almost everything. Bad thing about these boats, they cooled the engine with water directly from the ocean, usually they are fresh water cooled with a heat exchanger. So hot salt water + metal = RUST! I am willing to bet the engine is a frozen lump of cast iron back there. So I'm looking at another re-power situation. But this hull is smaller and lighter than the other beastie we offered on, so fewer batteries, smaller motor, less cost, yes!

So why this boat in particular? It is inexpensive so we can buy it outright, it's a strong hull form and is quite respected. Respected enough to let a 15 to 16 year old single hand it around the world. That would be Laura Dekker in 2010. How cool is that?

This boat is not too much of a compromise, we are getting the ketch I wanted, but are lacking a hull, so monohull it will have to be. Maybe I will stumble on a winning lottery ticket and I can go get the catamaran I want in a future purchase. Until then I will be happy with the rehab on this baby. It is listed at a steep discount as it is an estate sale and they just want it gone. I am happy with that. It is located about an hour and a half from home in Solomons, MD. So anyway we tossed out a bid, will see where that goes.

So very excited! As the saying goes, the two happiest boat days in your life, the day when you buy your boat, then the eventual day when you sell your boat.

Hey did anyone see "All is Lost"? We watched it not to long ago and all I got to say is "Dude, you might be Robert Redford but you can't plan for shiite!" At least he had a sextant, note to self, maybe look into getting one, then learning how to use the damn thing. But have a back up laptop or two, a back up GPS unit or THREE, and toss in a VHF handheld as well, and for gods sake don't store them all in the same place! Beyond that though I thought they did a most excellent job in filming the movie, the sound track was awesome! I think there are maybe ten lines of dialog in the entire thing. He fought his boat and didn't abandon it till it was actually sinking out from under him. Because life rafts can keep you alive, but man they suck. Keep your harness clipped to the boat, he went over the side a couple of times.

So that is all from this end, stay tuned to see if this has legs!

The hulk is still floating

So news of the hulk. It still floats, amazingly enough. It's been doing that for 21 years now, but we had to be sure. So we drove down to see the thing yesterday, 278 miles, 28 bucks in gas. It was predictably a mess. we poked and prodded, lifted the access hatches, unscrewed ports and fills, grabbed wires and got a splinter of SS in my left thumb. Annoying to say the least, particularly as I can't seem to localize it and get the darn thing out. Anyway yesterday was a rainy winter day, very warm for the season, low 60's. The boat is of course in the Carrotoman river, western branch, so is living in a high humidity environment, like everywhere else in Virginia. And the rain didn't help any. This is a boat that will need particular attention to ventilation, all the ventilation you could possibly get in a boat. So to make a long story slightly shorter, it was raining in the boat. Well sort of, kind of a slow condensation drip from here and there. Like I said we moved everything and opened all the interior hatches, all dry in there, I was amazed. Just the main salon was having issues, well all the open living areas, but I didn't find any water under stuff. So to Google I fled, yes condensation is a serious issue in all sailboats and there are ways to resolve it, the main being to keep it flooded with DRY WARM MOVING air. Who would have thunk that? New problem located, helm won't turn, because it's out of fluid and locked up? It is a hydraulic system BTW. Locked with some pin I can't find? Cause the rudder is mashed into the ground? The rudder post is friction welded to the sleeve? Who knows. Anyway the current owners are having major issues, in that they either don't want to sell the boat, or they just want to have it magically go away. I am leaning on the side of magically wanting it to go away. So to assist with that I called my insurance company, Liberty Mutual, and extended my liability insurance to cover the thing, after we sign the magic papers, called what might be the boats new home, checked prices of this and that and tendered a new offer. 3K for the boat and all they have to do is sign the stupid papers. Then I can be the proud owner of a new derelict hull. Liberty Mutual is an awesome company BTW, I always enjoy working with them. You may have already seen the issue with this rash proposal. Yes I might be saddled with a useless chunk of steel sitting in a boat yard some hundred and five odd miles from my home. A useless chunk of steel that I own outright.

Crawled into the engine room, loads of room in there to get stuff done. But I am thinking that in order to get the engine out of the hull I may need to cut the floor of the cockpit out, winch the engine out, then re-weld the floor back in place. There is room in there to hold a decent set of batteries, water maker, generator as well as the hot water heater. I should even have room to put the control head for the auto pilot in there. I was concerned about that as it is a rather noisy little guy. Auto pilots constantly make small movements to the rudder, and the rudder actuator is a rather large hydraulic piston directly under our heads in the master stateroom. Having a small hydraulic pump whizzing away under your head 24x7 is not what I call sweet sailing.  But I am pretty confident that I can put it in the engine room, seeing as that is where all the lines originate from anyway.

The boat is fairly majestic looking sitting welded to the dock. I'm pretty sure it is due to the bowsprit sticking 12 feet off the bow. The boat over all is 60' give or take a smidgen. The hull is 47.5, so it looks quite a bit larger than it is in actuality. Both masts are keel stepped, and both masts penetrate the living spaces in the heads.

>>>>>>-----Breaking News-----<<<<<<

Just heard from the broker, the owners counter offered, $8500.00, same deal, as is, where is. Nope not going to happen. To much risk for to much money. If the hull had a higher intrinsic value I would have assumed other people would have snapped it up. It is not like we stumbled into a secret hidden boat selling place. It has been advertised all up and down the East Coast since September of 2013. We were slow to move on this thing. So to me the only value the hull has is the value I am willing to put into it, wow, a free market thought. So now we wait while the broker, who really seems like a nice guy, tries to get the owners to understand that this is probably the best offer they are going to get. Seeing as they aren't willing to do even the minimum to sell the thing. Really it took two hours on the phone to get the insurance figured out, less with the marina guy, who also knows the boat and lived with the previous owner. So if the current owners aren't willing to do even that little amount of work to get the thing sold, they are indeed naive.

Anyway, playoffs are on, and I am not going to bore you with the rest of my thoughts on what might be a non-starter. But we did pick out a new name, "Steel Breeze".

Go Broncos!

----------- Further Updates -----------

The hulk eventually sold, not to us and the Bronco's lost the Super Bowl. Bummer on both counts.