Working on the boat

Slowly getting Guiding Light back together and ready to go

By November 22, 2018 No Comments
Guiding Light

This week I have been telling you why I left the Guiding Light in Granada Marine and how they installed brand new engines. I was lucky and got the boat back in the water two days after my dad and I arrived. This helped a bit with the heat, but it really helped once we got away from the dock and to a bay with better breeze.

Since then, we have been working hard getting Guiding Light ready to go. Dad has been doing a great job of cleaning the interior while I tackle some other projects (still not the big project I accomplished this summer, but that will come out in the next week or so). These projects ranged from the regular like getting the sailed bent back on (I had to recruit help for this one and it was so hot we recovered in the shade with drinks for over an hour) and putting all the gear in place to installing and mounting the water maker bracket I told you about on Tuesday.

One of the days I had a list of 3-4 things I wanted to do and got to it. I started by replacing the cracked sink drain in my head (amazing how hard it is to find these!), did some cleaning, and attached the toilet vent hoses. While I was doing this dad said one of the cabin fans was blowing the wrong way and when I looked at it he was right. Turns out when I installed it I switched the wires and the fan blew towards the wall instead of out to the beds. It was easily fixed by switching the two wires, but I am surprised no one said anything over the last year. Haha.

This was the day I tackled the water maker bracket that took two hours of upside down work to complete (I wrote all about it two days ago) and by the end of the day I was wiped out. This is when dad informed me the shower would not drain. I went down and fiddled with it for a while and finally gave up saying he found the first item on tomorrow’s list of projects. We finally sat down to dinner and a movie before heading off to bed. It was in bed and half asleep that it hit me……I had forgotten to open the seacock for the shower. A seacock is a ball valve used when a hose goes out a boat. Sure enough the water pumped straight out and I announced “the shower drain is fixed!”

Now we are getting ready to sail from Grenada to Puerto Rico. It is around 420 miles and should take 2.5 (at 7 knots) to 3.5 (at 5 knots) days and the wind should be on a beam reach or further back to a broad reach. Stay tuned and I will write about how that went and I might even get a video on Facebook that I take during it to show you how we are doing. Make sure to check them out.

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