Skelton Crew: Ready to Splash!

New haling port

We spent most of the holiday weekend finishing up all the odds and end jobs that had to get done before launching. Like buffing/waxing the other half of the boat. Then, just to give her a little more shine, we went around and waxed her again. Boy does she look classy now!

In addition to that major upper body workout Ron got up close and personal with the engine and:

Changed the oil
Switched out the water/fuel separator
Put in a new water pump impeller
Tried to find a replacement fuel filter for a filter with a part number only found in Europe.

The fuel filter may be ancient but at least it's still clean and will work until we can either find a conversion kit to be able to use more widely available filters or order another filter. The fuel/water separator was another story, it was packed full of gunk and sludge and a large blob of gelatiness muck splashed out when Ron emptied it. How that thing didn't fail on us last year I have no idea.

Ron also practiced his splicing skills and re-spliced the mooring pendant to make the eye splices larger so they'd be easier to get over our comically large cleats. This also gave him the chance to point out the need for a splicing kit so he can splice braided line, exactly like the new genoa halyard that we just ordered.

I cleaned the inside of the boat, which still had crap all over from every project we've done this spring. I couldn't believe all the sand paper and tack cloth laying around everywhere, or all the dust that collected on every horizontal surface. I pretty much had to wipe down the whole interior, but now the inside shines just as much as the outside!

Repainted near the waterline and a couple other areas that needed a touch-up,
hopefully we won't see as much growth as we did last year!

The quart didn't do the whole bottom (duh) but it did do a lot more than I thought it would

We're waiting for the new genoa halyard to come before we put the genoa on the furler but we did manage to get the main sail on...which means we FINALLY got to check out our new mainsail cover!