Finishing the Keel Repair and a Coat of Bottom Paint

Day 36:  Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Today was the wrap up day for the keel installation.  They mixed a big batch of epoxy and piled it onto the end of the keel and then lowered the board onto the Torpedo.  They then tightened the nuts down, cleaned and faired the epoxy.  The final step was to put plastic caps in the counter sink holes and seal them with a caulking compound.  The epoxy dried in a couple of hours.

New Torpedo and fresh coat of bottom paint

They lifted the boat off of the trailer to facilitate the installation of the Torpedo so while the boat was up in the air, they sanded the bottom and put on a coat of copper based antifouling paint.  That will have to dry overnight so by noon, the project was basically finished.

I did some work on the mast while they were painting.  The boat has a steaming light in the middle of the mast that also has a small spot light that shines down on the deck.  The deck light has never worked since I got the boat so I replaced the whole structure.  We also spent quite a bit of time working on my wind speed and direction indicator transducer located at the top of the mast.  It seems to have demons living inside of it.  Sometimes, when I install the mast, the system works like a dream, and sometimes it works for a while and then quits and finally sometimes it doesn’t work at all.  I have checked all of the wiring and connections several times but have never been able to find a problem.  The folks here at Hake have a test system set up to check the whole system so we hooked up their tester and it appeared that my anemometer at the top of the mast was not working.  To be sure, we got a brand new one off of another boat and it also would not work.  We tested the wire for continuity and they all tested fine.  We got a new wire and connector fitting for the anemometer and it wouldn’t work either.  We began to wonder if the test equipment was not functioning.  We unplugged the tester from the battery and the new boat tester and anemometer and wire worked.  We put my anemometer on the new wire and it worked. And

A new 32 foot Seaward 32RK

finally, we put the tester back on my old wire and my anemometer worked as though nothing was wrong.  There are demons!

Back at the room, we both read for a while before we went into the downtown area of Stuart for our evening meal.  We came upon a really neat waterfront restaurant called the Boat House.  We had another wonderfulcake sea food meal.  I don’t remember the exactly but it was something like a Maine crab roll which turned out to be a pile of crab meat on a slice of bread.  Janine had crab.  I washed my crab down with a Guinness.

After dinner, we walked along the waterfront for a while before stopping at a great ice cream place for a scoop of New Orleans praline ice cream and four  dark chocolate turtles with pecans.  We are going to miss the great food we have enjoyed down here.

Back to the room, we read some more before we crawled into bed at 9:00.  It is also going to be hard to get back onto a non-cruising sleep schedule.