April 21, 2015 Highbourne Cay, Exumas

Since we are comfortable with this anchorage and we have wifi here, we decided to stay one more day.  Today I cleaned the heads and the saloon area.  It seemed as though there was sand everywhere.  So it was a long day of hard, sweaty labor.  I guess we have to pay the price for being in such a beautiful area. 

Dave put out a “rocker-stopper” stabilizer system today from Magma.  It is a piece of stainless steel metal about 3 feet long that is hinged in the middle.  Dave also added zincs to it to stop the corrosion.  As the boat rocks, the metal folds and sinks.  But as the boat rocks back the other way, the metal  pieces open and resist coming back towards the surface, thus slowing the motion of the rocking.  This hangs off the end of our boom.  We could use the whisker pole that we use for the jenny which would get it further away from the boat.  We may try that next time because it work even better.  But we did notice a difference, less rocking motion.

Dave also reorganized the aft lazarettes.  He wanted to group all of his dock lines together.  Everything he had in the lazarettes were in black garbage bags.  So it took time to check out everything.  Along with his dock lines, he located all of his snubbers and chafe gear.  Now it is all stored together.  These are important for strong winds.  He did find 30 rolls of toilet paper that I was sure was there, but he didn’t see them the last time he was in there.  So now I am ready to take more of his “crap”. 

There was a leak in the port light above our berth.  So Dave poured a bucket of water over the closed hatch while I was below watching for the leak.  It was coming from the hinge.  The hinge had 2 screws with a backing plate and a rubber gasket.  The gasket was bad.  So he removed it and placed butyl rubber, his answer to everything, and it sealed great.  We have 2 other port lights with that same mechanism, so he plans to replace those gaskets with butyl rubber, too.

We have cushions in our cock pit with the female part of the snaps on the under sides.  And the male part of the snaps  are in the fiberglass of the seats.  But they have never matched each other.  We noticed the bottom of some of our nicer seat cushions were torn from the male snap heads.  So Dave removed all of them today and placed blue tape over each one.  At some point, he will fill them all in with gelcoat.  There are other areas of the boat that need gelcoat.  So he will make a day of doing that all at once.  This is one of those jobs that was put off until we could look at pretty blue water while we were working on things.

We also did a load of laundry.  What wasn’t dry was brought into the cockpit overnight, since it threatened to rain.  Just a busy boat day.