We're looking for the trash fence...

Woo hoo!!! This makes it feel very real!

Today's test is to see if the iPhone posting with location is still working

The blog has purposefully been very quiet about our exact plans because we had yet to quit our jobs. Dawn quit her job the first week of July. This week I let my work know and can openly say this will be my last week at work!

The obvious next question is what are you going to be doing? We’re going sailing, more correctly cruising! The basic plan is to leave Puget Sound from Neah Bay in mid-August and go to San Francisco. The next planned stop after that is to be in San Diego in mid October to join up a couple of hundred other boats to sail from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas as part of the Baja Ha-Ha Rally put on by Latitude 38 magazine.

After that who knows… Yes, we’re comfortable with ambiguity.

WOO HOO WE’RE GOING CRUISING !!!

A few days ago I got the Postie plugin for Wordpress working and tonight I'm testing that the WP to Twitter plugin is working as well. Normally I use Windows Live Writer to author my blog posts and when I publish to the blog, there is a Live Writer plugin which also sends a tweet. With these two plugins I can email over HAM or SSB radio and still post and send a tweet and it will work like magic!

I've been working on this for months, and moved hosting companies to one which had the right base images and policies to let me run Wordpress as I wanted with the plugins I wanted. Happy to be on http://www.bluehost.com/ thus far things look pretty good.

One thing you might want to notice is that to date you have seen the author as Patrick or Dawn when we post from the web or using Windows Live Writer. When I post from the HAM radio the posts will be from "sv Deep Playa". Minor thing really but I think it's fun to keep the posts separate.

One more geeky toy is working. :-)

When we purchased the boat we had a non-working knot meter and a single function transducer with a display located only on an internal bulkhead in the aft cabin. The new gorgeously installed Maretron DST100 instrument will measure Depth, Speed and Temperature.

I just have to get a cable to hook it up to the NMEA 2000 network and we’re done!

Steve, a fellow burner and shipwright at Seaview, made that fairing block. It looks great and I’m sure will give us +.001 kts in boat speed.

“They” say you should ensure your bilge pumps are secured so they can’t flip over, stop working, etc. Deep Playa has two electric and a manual bilge pump non of which were secured. I added an automatic switch to one of the electric pumps and secured the float switch and the two electric pumps.

I used 1/4”-20 threaded posts which were fixed to bases the size of a fender washer. We cleaned the bilge real good and used 5200 to secure these posts to the floor of the bilge. It was a pretty easy project and gives a little more faith in our bilge pump setup.

Pulling the headliner was one of the first things we did after we bought the boat and this weekend we completed installing the new one!!

The process was pretty simple, trace the old 1/8” plywood and vinyl covered panels onto new 3mm (or 4mm when 3mm can’t be found) marine grade plywood. Cut them out, sand, apply 3-4 coats of white satin finish paint. They undoubtedly will be off a bit, so you cut them down a bit more or sand them so they will fit properly and install the trim which we also painted white. Our salon ceiling is now white from drip rail to drip rail which makes the salon feel more open and light. Brining the white down the cabin top is an interior designer trick we heard about from friends and I think it worked out swimmingly!

The only thing left to do is to paint the pieces of 1/4 round and touch up all the spots I messed up as we were installing everything.

We’ve been on the hard the past couple of days to do some projects that are safer done ashore than in the water. Mostly we were removing the old transducer and installing a new NMEA 2000 one, but in a new location as well. There are some other above the waterline projects we’re doing as well.

The one thing that is a bit of an issue right now is the anti-fouling paint put on the hull in November 2009 (but not launched until Feb 2010) doesn’t seem to be holding very well. The Pettit Ultima SR60 is flaking off in spots. The yard is talking to Pettit about it and I’ve contacted the P.O. to see if he recalls the kinds of bottom paint which have been used. Everyone is stumped at this point and depending on the actual issue fixing it might be a huge pain (and or expensive). We’re considering just touching it up and dealing with it later as well.

If you’ve had any similar experiences I’d love to hear stories or suggestions.

That issue aside, being in the yard isn’t so bad as we’re rocking out the work!