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!

Sorry for such infrequent updates, but we’ve been busy getting all of our friend married -- wedding number 3 in as many weeks is Saturday -- as well working on boat projects.

Wedding number 1, over the 4th of July weekend, was in Cle Elum. Lars and Jenny we’re absolutely beautiful and to be able to have all of our Burner friends together for a solid three days was an absolute gift. The weddding was meant to be a “Goofball Wedding” so I had to bust out my green PeaBear costume for the ceremony! (Have to find a pic of that still)

Wedding number 2 was in Roche Harbor and we took the boat up. The weather didn’t cooperate too much with sailing, but we did get a few hours in, used the Hydrovane and even had to put a reef in the main, I was glad I finished finished installing the reefing hardware on the main boom the day before!

Julia’s and Jason’s wedding was held at anchor on the biggest spinningest raftup I have ever been on. The AnderGuards (as we call them anyway) are an awesome couple and know how to throw a party. Some of us water people went ashore to partake of the Roche Harbor Bar as well. The lamb burger isn’t all that, skip it. The rum runner is delicious, have 3 instead!

On the way back we went to Blind Bay on Shaw Island. We went for a long walk on the island around the bay and enjoined some very good ice cream from the Shaw General store which first opened in 1899!! That night we took a dinghy of wood to Blind Island for a night of fire and marshmallows.

The night after was spent in La Conner, WA after handling the tricky navigation of the Swinomish Channel. The depths in Swinomish are supposed to be 6’8” at low tides, but can be a bit all over the place (usually deeper, but sometimes not) given that they don’t’ dredge it as much as they used to. La Conner is very cute town and if the Swinomish channel has been scaring you off, don’t’ let it. Just plan to go in with at least +X feet of tied where X = (7’ + Your Draft + 2 feet) and you should be fine. Also, don’t’ leave La Conner until you have similar depths. Aside from that I think it’s very doable but WAY easier for those shallow draft Bayliner wake machines.

Since we got back I changed the oil, installed new oil cooling lines which were leaking, changed the raw water impeller and the zinc in the heat exchanger.

Dawn has been working on organizing our medical kit and working on the sail covers. Because it was too windy to sew on the dock, we spent about 4 hours in the conference room at Windworks sewing all the main stitching for the covers. Dawn ran the machine and I manhandled the cloth to allow her to sew more easily. We can’t thank Greg and the staff at Windworks enough for loaning us the conference room. That was absolutely awesome!!

Wedding number 3 is tomorrow, I’ll save that for the next post, and we’ll do some more technical posts on the sail covers as well.

whew… I’m going to need a vacation after this 3 week vacation!