Milestone #3 has been met, finally! We drop lines and depart Portland for our first day underway on our trip! This day came after many preceding days of highs and lows as we wrestled with boat preparation tasks. We departed with a few tasks still to do, but revel in what has been accomplished in a little over a week at the marina. Among other things, we finished putting all of the deck hardware on, including cabintop winches, dorade vents and guards, stanchions, lifelines, bow and stern pulpits, and the bimini. We were blessed with mostly clear and warm weather for this work. A few surprises arised, including the discovery that the new windows that I had installed were leaking after the first rain. Karen and I had spent a lot of sweaty hours under the boat canopy at home caulking and mounting all 367 bolts to secure these windows, so to find drips of water coming down around a dozen of the bolts put me in a very raw mood. We spent several days removing the old windows, scraping away old caulking and recaulking (and applying much more caulk then before!) as well as using epoxy to seal the bolt heads to the top of the windows. Needless to say, we left this window re-work to the end of the week so that we could head out as soon as the agony was over.
Continue reading “Milestone #3 is achieved — We Leave the Dock! Ep. 3”
