Upgrades for the head

Dock Days 24-26 San Diego, CA 10/26 - 10/28/2016
While we have been away from our house in Redding we have been using our internet data through a little jetpack from Verizon. Several of our devices just decided to download some updates automatically and chewed up a number of gigs. That was very perturbing for sure! What that means is that we seek out free internet and Starbucks is our site of choice. We have spent quite a bit of time there in the past 3 days doing our blog and equipment research for the devices we need to make choices about.

It seems we are shopping every day now for something we are working on! Remember I don’t like shopping? Those who love retail therapy would be in heaven around our world right now! We have been going after some of the big things like faucets and a shower. Tim thinks the faucets are the originals or maybe second generation and they are copper hard plumbed right up to the fixtures! There are no flexible hoses from the copper to the faucet. Tim hates this kind of work and suffered greatly as he worked corroded nuts loose without crushing or crimping the copper. He was a master contortionist in the head as he snaked his body over the head and pump to get his hands, but mostly just one hand, into the small cabinet space. All our faucets are separate hot/cold knobs. Our new ones will be one lever, except the shower.

The shower is a new hose and head that uses a special design to accelerate the water so it comes out with more force with less water. It has a button to stop the water flow so we can take those famous sea showers by first getting soaked and then stop the flow. Next comes shampooing and soaping up, then press the button and the water flow starts again for the rinse. The hose is longer and removable from the wall where the previous one would not have reached over Tim’s head and it didn’t lower down far enough to wash just legs and feet. Our new one was a brilliant find! Oxigenics with Power Pause, they have many other products that look really good too. 

The now new faucet in the head is beautiful! It’s just one lever and the faucet is higher so we can wash our hands under it and I can actually get a wash cloth wet under it. It’s a high efficiency faucet and I’m very pleased. I know in time Tim will be glad he took the massive trouble to change out the old one. This one was practice for the galley faucet which we had to special order today and will wait about a week for it to arrive. It is surprisingly difficult to find fixtures around here! Maybe because there are so many options for people to choose from that stores don’t what to hold much of an inventory?

It seems that we are continually refining our lists! We updated our Amazon wish list with the items we still need and will need to purchase before leaving. Living in this boat world makes things more clear as to needs the more time we spend in it. I’m working on creating a rain catcher, there’s more shopping for that to come. Tim is cleaning off weather stripping and replacing the seals on our top hatches. One out of three is done.

Our Peel Away 7 arrived this week and today I finally had a chance to set up two test areas. I will check them in the morning to see what the dew time is on them. One spot is testing the Cetol that is all over all our beautiful teak. Tim also calls it evil. Its manufactured by Sikkens, and it really is a sick product that turns orange and cracks off. The second spot is for the paint that is on our teak window trim. What is Peel Away you ask? You might want to just google it yourself. I used it in the early 2000's in our Victorian house to strip away 12 layers of old paint off the beautiful fir mouldings in quick and clean fashion. It is painted on nice and thick, then a vapor barrier paper is applied to cover it while it goes to work. After 24 hours I came back and using a plastic scraper to lift off the paper and paint all together and voila! I’m truly hoping this works much the same for us here! That means no sanding or scraping, a novel thought right? You can be sure there will be pictures as we do this. We have a lot of wood on and in our boat. This product is a green biodegradable product.

For me, while Tim was working on the new faucet in the head, I was the labeling queen. Tim asked for me to label where things are so when we pull back a cushion, Tim and I will know which compartment to open to find the item. I placed the labels in the respective area of the cover that corresponds to the location of the item in the compartment. I also identified a number of things that I am not going to keep on the boat and they have been removed to the car. Several bags and two pairs of sandals that will not hold up to use in this environment. Now I only have 11 pairs of footwear on the boat! I know you are thinking that is a lot! Here’s my list: slippers, shower shoes, Toms, deck shoes, Keen water/deck shoes, tennis shoes, mary janes, ankle boots, hiking shoes, sandals and my weather boots. Tim has slippers, sandals, deck shoes, water shoes, hiking boots, dress shoes, comfy shoes, and weather boots. That’s 8 pairs for Tim. Sometimes I get irritated that women have so many additional clothing items to work with or have need of. If I had my way, I’d just dress like a guy, but some of the places we will be going to expect that women will wear a dress and not pants. I need pants for the boat living as a dress everyday is not practical.

I have a chore that I am irritated that I have not completed yet: waterproofing the dodger. It has to be dry and we’ve been experiencing heavy dew at night and I have to do it when the wind is not blowing. Maybe tomorrow? I’d like to get this off my list! 

Tim crewed on another boat in the middle of these days. While he was doing that I wrote on the blog and took a long walk between the loads of laundry. I also cleaned up the cabin down below.  The To Do List is shrinking! Yay!