May 10, 2016 International Zip Tie Tuesday

Since we are in the Bahamas, today in going to be known as International Zip Tie Tuesday according to Dave.  After working on rearranging our electronics, he had to go back and zip tie the wires.  If you don’t, they will vibrate and rub and break, or the insulation will come off.  Bare wires can start a fire or burn something out.  Plus, as you store things in the area of the wiring, you won’t accidentally pull a wire loose.  

Dave decided not to wire the 12 volt outlet at this time.  He would have to take everything out of the aft cabin and pull up all the boards up that support the bed mattresses.  We don’t need it right now, so he will run the wiring when he is working in that area in the future.

I heard him from the aft cabin say “If there were Olympic competitions for boat repair, one of them should be tying a zip tie one handed where you can’t see it.”  Must have been a tough spot to get to. 

It is funny how you come up with the littlest things that can simply life on the boat.  For instance, I have been making fresh bread, so I have been using our bread knife on a regular basis.  We keep all of our knives in a drawer with covers.  You can’t leave them in a knife block because if the boat is healing or rocking in a storm, they can go flying through the air.  Well, our bread knife was too long to fit in our ONE drawer, so we had been tucking it up behind some spices so it wouldn’t go anywhere.  Today, I checked it out again and realized that the knife isn’t too long, just the cover.  So I had Dave cut the cover to fit the knife.  Ta Da?  Now it fits in the drawer.  Maybe we should have figured that out a couple years ago, but we weren’t using it very often. 

Dave spent some time in the starboard aft lazarette.  It is deep enough that he can actually stand in it.  He had to reroute cables for the instruments which meant he also had to zip tie the cables and wires.  While he was in there, he pulled out all of our paper products that were stored in there so I could verify my count.  I was pretty close.  I may have mentioned this before, but toilet paper and paper towels are very expensive here.  So we bought the two brands that we like, put them in 2 gallon zip lock bags, then bagged them in a kitchen garbage bag and then a heavy construction bag.  Don’t want them getting wet.  We really like Viva paper towels for cleaning.  But we decided we could go with a cheaper brand to use as a dinner napkin in the future.  We don’t have separate dinner napkins or Kleenex tissues.  2 less things to store when the paper towels and toilet paper will do the trick.  

pulling paper products out of starboard stern lazarette

It took Dave a couple calls to R&B boat yard to catch Robert.  Dave wanted to discuss the quote for painting the boat.   When we found out that they wouldn’t be able to paint our boat until mid June, we decided it wasn’t going to happen.  We need to be heading back to the US by then.  We may go to Spanish Wells to buy the paint and check out the boat yard for future plans.   But now we can take our time.

We decided to get the boat ready to leave tomorrow.  We are going to cross over to northern Exumas first, then take Fleeming Channel to Current Settlement, and then on to Spanish Wells.  No plan for how many days.  The weather will probably decide for us. 

I made bread today using the recipe we like.  But today, I put the dough in the freezer after the first rise.  We want to experiment with thawing it and baking it.  Some days just aren’t conducive to making the bread.  You can’t leave a bowl on the counter to rise if the boat is rocking and rolling.

Dave had emptied a couple fuel cans into our tank and wanted to go into town to refill them.  I decided to go along.  It’s nice to take advantage of a walk on shore (and have an ice cream treat-it won’t freeze in our freeze).t

mailboat- arrives at the island one day a week bringing groceries and whatever