Winter 2014 has finally ended, but certainly not without a fight. Freezing temperatures didn't go away until the end of March. Now that everything is getting back to "normal" operation, I think I can safely say that we survived our first cold weather boat season! My friends up north still don't have their boats back in the water and we have already spent two weekends out on the hook. Even before that we locked down to go do a Saturday night in downtown Chattanooga - more about that later.
So spring means that all the heaters have been moved off the boat and taken home. All the jugs of oil, transmission fluid and coolant have been poured into their respective engine location. Isinglass has been cleaned and polished. The boat has been pulled to check the bottom paint, zincs and props. Hull sides polished and waxed. Water line repainted. Pollen washed off and replaced with new pollen everyday we're here!! This has to stop already!!
All through last football season we recognized that having just regular "air" broadcast TV was going to be an issue. So when March Madness came along the problem continued. So on one of those "near the final 4" weekends, we took that trip downtown to watch games. Now locking thru to go downtown is no huge deal after as many times as we have done it, but on this particular day we had 25 mph winds out of the south. That means wind straight on the bow in the lock which makes the boat really hard to hold on the floating bollard. That 30 minute fight felt like two hours. Once out of the lock, the river was white capping all the way downtown. We had to call for help from the marina to get tied up on the dock downtown. This trauma resulted in me ordering a stellite system for the boat the next week. Now we have the same DirecTV channels on board as we have at home. Problem solved!!
Another interesting thing I've been working on is changing out the halogen light bulbs with LED's. A bunch of people have told me what a good thing to do that would be. The LED bulbs use a fraction of the amperage that halogen do. All those people also told me how expensive those LED light fixtures were as well. What made no sense to me was why they didn't just change the bulb in the existing fixture. There began my challenge. Some bulbs turned out to be easy - others not so much. Did you know that LED bulbs have a positive/negative and will not work if not connected accordingly? I sure didn't but they certainly do. That can mean just reversing the bulb in the fixture or it can mean changing the fixture wiring. The bulbs can also be bigger than the old kind and you have to hunt for similar sized ones. Got most of them figured out but still got a couple more to go.
Last week was when the boat was out of the water. I was in Chattanooga anyway for our company retreat so I came up early on Wednesday morning to see what that looked like. Quite different is probably the best description. All the work was finished by Friday afternoon so I got to see it go back in the water. You got to watch that video! The service guys did a great job and zipped that thing in like it was a 16 foot ski boat, just crazy.
Erwin Marine was having a little dock party last Friday night and everyone was telling us how they saw the boat out on the "hard" and wanted to how what was going on. Now it was interesting how suddenly everyone at the whole marina knew it was our boat and were suddenly our new best friends and just had to have the details. Seemed really strange to me. Later Regina told me that our friend Barry had explained it to her. So it seems that most of these folks don't ever get their boats out of the water unless something is really wrong and what they were actually wanting to know was what we had hit and how bad we had screwed it up! Sorry to let you down - just making sure it's all still good.
This weekend has been like early summer. Saturday and Sunday have both been above 80. Now the water is not warm enough to even think about jumping in for a southern boy. Maybe by the end of May or hopefully sooner. Let's just get to the end of pollen season and let the adventures begin!
