May 9, 2016 Electronics, laundry and baking

We started out the day with a couple loads of laundry.  You have to start early to go through both the wash and rinse buckets with soaking.  And then it takes most of the day for everything to dry.  We hang some on a line that Dave runs and some on the life lines.  I always wipe off the life lines first.  They get a crust of salt on them after a passage.  Today I thought about my mom always wiping off the clothes line before hanging clothes to dry.  She probably didn’t get a dryer until I was about 10 years old.  Even then, it was a used one, and she still hung lots of the clothes.  In the winter, she would hang them in the basement with fans blowing on them.  Dave took over doing most of the laundry.  My hands get really tired wringing out the clothes.  We looked into getting a wringer, but something that won’t rust is really expensive.   I help wring the lighter things and hang them up, move the clothes pins halfway through to dry the pinned spots, and take things down.  We have never lost an article of clothing, only the pins.  But we decided not to wash sheets on really windy days anymore.  Anyway, laundry ends up being an all day affair.

nice breeze-watch those clothes pins that are $1 each

Since I had free time today between laundry chores, I decided to try our bread recipe again.  I have some of the previous bread in the freezer.  But by the time we are out of bread, I won’t have the free time to devote to bread making.  I used the same recipe as last time, from the bread flour package.  I tweaked a couple things and it turned out great!  This is what I have been looking for!  I think we have the recipe and technique we have been looking for.  The plan is to stop buying bread (unless it is from a local bakery/often someone’s home). 

best bread yet

yippee

tasted as good as it looked

Dave called the R&B boatyard again today.  He asked for an estimate for boat work a week ago.  He received an e-mail with in a couple hours.  Dave has just a couple questions for them.  And then we have decide IF we want the work done here and WHEN it can be done.  We have a couple boatyards in mind in the states.  I guess it would have been smart to be getting estimates from them, too. 

Dave got back into his electronics (when he wasn’t wringing clothes-such a multi task-er).  First he hooked a new wire to the 12 volt outlet.  That wire will have to be run back to the circuit breaker that is for all of our 12 volt outlets.  That is located in the nav station in the main part of the cabin.  To get there, this wire has to go from the port lazarette on the side of the boat to aft port lazarette on the stern, then down to the aft cabin where it runs diagonally under all the boards under the mattress for the bed,  then under the hanging closet, then thru the aft head under the sink and behind the holding tank, then to the circuit breaker in the nav station.  Dave will run that wire tomorrow.  AND it has to be zip tied all along the way. 

a sample of getting everything out of the port lazarette

Next he moved the autopilot control head to the binnacle and the depth gauge to the port engine start panel.  The depth gauge gave him the most trouble.  There are 2 wires hooked to this meter, one is for speed and temperature and the other is depth.  There is a long story about how he thought he could run one, but had to go back and run both that I am not going to go into.  Those wires start in the v berth under the floor where the sounder is located and run the length of the boat to the binnacle.  The speed log is beside the depth sounder.  He was worried that there would not be enough wire to make this move, and their wasn’t.  So he had to trace where they ran.  He climbed into the port aft lazarette and found where the wires were installed in a zig zag pattern for no reason.  He was able to move the wires to get more length and secured them in place.  But he will zip tie it tomorrow. 

Now he needed to move the autopilot wiring from the port engine start panel to the binnacle in the center of boat.  That wiring comes down the port side into the aft cabin.   From there, Dave had to remove a ceiling panel to get to a tube that all the wires run through then up to the binnacle.  Once in the binnacle he had to keep these wires away from the steering cable and throttle cable.  This needs to be zip tied tomorrow, too.

mess of wires to zip tie

After Dave had the  autopilot wired, he noticed that the GPS wasn’t working.  He figured out that he had the GPS hooked into the autopilot.  So now he had to get the GPS wire out of port side.  That meant going back into the aft cabin, removing a different ceiling panel to get access to the GPS and then move across the ceiling in the wiring tube to reach the binnacle.  And that will have to be zip tied tomorrow.

working in the binnacle

Dave nonchalantly said to me “I don’t know if you know it, but tomorrow is ZIP TIE TUESDAY.   And since we’re in the Bahamas it will be International Zip Tie Tuesday.”
Everything was back into running smoothly before sunset.  Whew!  So many people ask “what do you do all day?”   This just shows you how complicated some projects can be. 

The home made bread was yummy with our left over pork.