Heavy with the weight of my guilt over such a bleak month of accomplishments, I took myself over to the boat early this morning and managed to get at least a little something accomplished. The weather was fabulous today. I rode my bicycle over to Hayden Bay Marina and locked it to a light post on the nearby pier.

It’s been almost one whole month since I’ve been able to get over here so I started by manually pumping out the very minimal lower bilge water that had accumulated as a result of all rains we’ve had. The temporary pump worked perfectly for this. I still need to shop for a proper pump to replace the piece of crap I was sold some time ago.

Inside the boat I started by turning everything on, and since radio offered little beyond the boring personal stories and car salesman’s ads, I played my blues cds while I worked.

I had last left the work by locating all the original teak slats for the forward cabin ceiling, fitting them in so that I could determine the placement of the end cleats where I’d made changes to the cabin configuration.

This morning I began by sanding the three cleats to rid them of any residual paint, then sanding the hull at the marked locations where I’d be attaching them. With that done, I cleaned everything off by first vacuuming the sanding dust away and then washing the surfaces to be glued with acetone. I mixed some West Systems epoxy and wetted the surfaces of the cleats that would be glued to the hull. Then I thickened some more epoxy and applied it generously to the cleats, one at a time.

That is, I worked on each cleat separately, laying it fully laden with thickened epoxy in its location against the hull, then attaching the teak slats to both it and the other cleats in order to secure the exact location for each of them. I had three cleats to install, the two at the forepeak where the new chainlocker bulkhead had been installed, and one on the aft port side where the new bulkhead for the head compartment had been installed.

And that sums up February for me. My next task will be to remove the slats, sand and clean off all the ceiling areas of the forward cabin, strip the remaining paint from the overhead, and paint it all a wonderful, bilge paint white. It will gleam with good karma.

I then took myself off for a bicycle ride to explore the island access a little more. There is nothing better in the world than boats and water and nature (oh, and sunny weather).

It’s pretty obvious I haven’t done a thing this month. I feel negligent, but I have a good excuse. I’m working on that most-precious of things, an income-producing project, which started the first of this month and that is taking up all my time. I hope to get back to work on my forward cabin project soon, and when the sun returns after the Spring rains, to be able to return to the varnishing work I never finished last year.

I finally located an as-yet unused manual pump that I had purchased long ago but had never deployed because it was the wrong type of pump for mounting vertically inside the cockpit well wall. It’s been stored away all this time and, having located it, I took it to the boat to see if I could determine once and for all whether the problem of not being able to pump out the lower bilge lie with the pump itself or with the hoses. It took only minutes to swap out the pump and give it a try, and I found that the problem is definitely the pump. In fact, the test pump responded so effectively and immediately that I realized that the existing pump has never worked properly. I’m bummed about this. This failed pump has seen so little use, and I’ve often read that they are practically indestructible. It’s a Guzzler 500 that had been bought for $65 and installed by the yard back in the summer of 2003. It’s the pump mounted on the bulkhead in this photo.

So, I have to buy a new pump.

I spent the rest of my time at the boat today trying to fit the forward cabin ceiling slats in place in order to determine the position of those troublesome support cleats located at the chainlocker bulkhead end, and at the port side head compartment bulkhead end. I will need to epoxy them in place and I don’t want to have to change any of the original fastener holes in the slats. I had retrieved what I believed were all the remaining slats from storage, but quickly found that I had overlooked some of them. I did a few other things, simple things, like installing a cleat in front of the water tank, and filling the holes that had been drilled in the overhead under-deck long ago to determine whether there was rot in the core.

The malfunctioning manual bilge pump continues to baffle me. I reinstalled the pump after having disassembled it to check for problems, of which I found none. I awoke from a dream that suggested a clogged hose. I took something with me today to poke through the hose from the pump to the seacock but found nothing. I fear this pump has just quit on me. Unsettling, really. These manual pumps are supposed to be indestructible. Evidently, not so. I may do something different for the lower bilge, in fact. More thoughts on that later.

I managed to finally apply a coat of primer on the new chainlocker bulkhead today. It seems like so little, but really it takes a lot of sanding to get to the point where a coat of paint can be applied. That said, I sanded and sanded and decided I’d gotten as smooth a surface as I would get, after which I applied a coat of primer paint, all the while listening to NPR discussing how we really got bamboozled into an irreversible dilemma when we let Bush convince everyone to attach Iraq. How on earth do we ondo the wrongs of others when we never voted for them or their projects? One single man alone can’t do it. Shame on us all!

Ok ok, I’ll get off the subject and move on. Here’s a picture. Or two pictures, different exposures.

What’s also going on in these pictures is the positioning of the ceiling slats, that is, I am attempting to position the original supports for the slats at each modified end so that I can epoxy them in place before I’ve finished painting the hull interior. This is a tricky business. The original positions have been altered somewhat by the work I’ve completed with the new bulkheads. I don’t want to have to drill new holes into the support cleats. I think this will work. I will have to retrieve more of the slats from my garage before I can proceed. The angles are critical.

On the port side, where I’ve installed the new bulkhead to isolate the head compartment, I will have to cut down all the original slats to fit the new, shortened forward cabin space. I’ll have to be a little more flexible with fastening the slats here.

I finished tabbing the forward-facing surrounding edges of the new chainlocker bulkhead today. What a chore! Imagine fitting arm, head and epoxy brush through a 12″ x 12″ opening and fabricating something you can be proud of! I will need aspirin to sleep tonight for sure. I didn’t get any tabbing applied to the overhead section because frankly, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t reach in there enough to properly lay in the tabbing. The areas I did tab, all along the sides, are good to go though.

I had taken the manual bilge pump home with me yesterday to see if I could find something within the unit that is keeping it from properly pumping water through. I took it all apart and it looks like new everywhere. So, I’ve put it back together and tightened every single bolt, and will return this to the boat and give it another go.