Weekend in the Life of a Pre-Cruiser and a Celebrity Encounter

April 13, 2015 by Jesse K on s/v Smitty 2 Comments

Friday Night

Get back from our captain’s class around 9:45PM.  Look at the fridge again.  Yup, not working right.  Definately needs to be defrosted before the small amount of food (mostly condiments) goes bad.  Fall asleep trying to read a Captain Fatty article in Cruising World.

Saturday

Get up early for a weekend, 6AM.  Go down to Hingham to hit storage to get our coolers so we can defrost the fridge and see if anything else is wrong besides ice build up.  Go to five stores while I am at it to get stuff for other projects.  Plus take the dog for a quick walk around the park.  Of course I forgot something at the Lowe’s in Hingham so I have to stop at the worst Home Depot in South Bay Boston.  Spend 20 minutes looking for two parts because the store is unorganized.  Finally get back to the boat around 2PM.

My Bride takes the coolers and empties the fridge.  Meanwhile I work on finishing up a couple of projects that were partially done: finished main hatch hinge rebedding (short post coming soon); switched from winter water to summer water setup; organized parts and supplies we just bought.

I was ready to get back into the solar panel project when my Bride called me from the galley.  The pump that drains the refer and the shower sump wasn’t working.  Spent about an hour trying to diagnose the problem.  Decided I was going to have to pull the pump and take it apart as the problem seems to be with the double diaphragm pump and not any of the hoses or connections.  At this point its 4PM.  I don’t want to work on this because I have to take apart our fresh water filters to get the pump out.  So we decide to just manually remove the water from the fridge tonight and deal with this tomorrow.

Cleaned that up, organized a little more.  Another walk with the dog.  Now its 6PM or so and motivation starts to wane.  Plus it’s sundowner hour.  Next thing you know I am sitting in the cockpit, sipping on a Downeast Cider, puffing on a cigar and no more work will happen this day.

Dinner, a little Netflix and again I fall asleep trying to read the same Captain Fatty article.

Sunday

Acoustic Sunrise 🙂

Whenever possible we like to start every Sunday with a pot of coffee, some bacon and listen to Acoustic Sunrise while we eat, do a little light reading and cleanup after breakfast.  This Sunday we slept in until the cannon from the USS Constitution woke us at 8AM.  We went through our typical Sunday morning routine.  Finally got to finish the Captain Fatty article.

By 10AM it was time to get back to work.  Except it’s a beautiful day on the dock.  The first really nice day of the spring and everyone is out on the dock working to get their shrink wrap down and other spring commissioning projects.  Our dockmate Greg introduces us to Richard Trethewey of This Old House.  He’s a very nice guy who invites us for a tour of his beautiful ketch.  We spent some time discussing our upcoming cruise and he gave us some great advice on the Bahamas.

Back to work for real this time. We move everything currently stored on deck or in the cockpit to the dock.  Setup the hose and the got my Bride setup to give Smitty her first good bath of the year.  While she is working on that I am disassembling our freshwater system to access the misbehaving pump.  Once I get the pump out, I go sit in the cockpit and start pulling the pump apart. Once I get the pump apart and clean I can’t find any reasons for the malfunction.  I clean all of the parts, diaphragms and valves and put the pump back together.  I go back down below and reassemble everything and it still doesn’t work.

I look up the rebuild kit on Defender. The service kit is $120 and a new pump is $170.  Ugh, why is it always so close in cost for the rebuild kit?

While I was trying to make a decision about what to do, Greg and Richard came by and asked for a hand moving Richard’s boat out to an outer dock.  So we jumped on for a little ride and helped get the boat tied up out near the USS Constitution.  It was so nice and none of us were too interested in getting back to work.  We stood around chatting for a while.

Finally we headed back to our boat.  Worked to finish cleaning the boat and filled the water tank.  At this point it was 5PM, 70 and sunny.  It was just too nice to think about starting another project.  Instead we invited Greg over for some Dark N’ Stormies and talked about his cruise through the Caribbean in his Bristol 35.5.  Around 7PM the sun went down and with it the temperature.  We made some dinner and got ready for the next work week.

So we feel like we spent most of the weekend working but in the end only crossed a couple of minor projects off the list and added another.