boat news

So we've gotten a lot done in the past few weeks, mostly repairs on the steel bottom, cutting out portions of the bottom steel that were suspect and welding in new plate. The new keel coolers, 3 inch pipes on the outside of the hull that cool the engines radiator water have been installed and all is ready to be sand blasted down to white metal and primed twice and painted. All of this is being done on a fixed price basis which is far less stressful. Joyce and I have been down in the engine room chipping rust off the steel with pneumatic chisels and needle guns, an incredibly nasty job, but we're just about done. We've just about finished fabricating the new doors and windows and they're ready to be sent out to be glazed. Hopefully when we get back from Boston in early Jan we can put the boat back in the water and move it to it's new spot a couple of hundred yards away and I'll be able to work on it by myself. I'm hoping the guy that sold me the engine will come up and put my engine room together and set up the hydraulics and controls. The list of things to do goes on and on. I keep laughing at myself for thinking I was going to retire from work and just hang out on a boat. We may have to move to a part of the world where you can still buy slaves. I hear the average monthly wage in Cuba is 20 dollars.