While working on the replacement of the sewage system Jason and I have been finding other things that need to be fixed and ordering a bunch of stuff that we know we need!
One of the biggest things is the little outboard motor for our dinghy! It’s bling bling white and should let us haul ass around the islands, catch fish, and go swimming.
Jason also got his shiny new induction cooktop. We removed the propane system from the boat due to the fire hazard and the fact that the system needed complete replacement and repairs. This induction cooktop won’t heat the interior of the boat up as much as any other type of cooktop will, looks super bling, and has a nice silicone cover for the top!
I posted pictures the other day of the galley completely torn apart. Well, since we have it all apart anyway, we’re considering upgrading the old formica countertops to something nicer like Corian. And as all good snowballs do… we are now thinking about redoing all of the upper cabinets to optimize them for what we need. No real progress on this yet because we’ve been so busy with other boat projects, but I started drawing it out so I could play with it.
The last major system that we haven’t bought yet is the electrical system. Everything from the shore power to the batteries, charging, etc. Jason has been designing this, but wanted to get professional opinions on it so he asked me to draw it out for him and make it look nice. I used a ruler and everything… it was hard. Also the picture is a converted PDF, so the quality isn’t quite as nice as it is on paper. Alas, this *may* be the schematic for our new electrical system.
That’s it for all the new stuff for today! On to the old… While we were digging around in the bilge trying to get sewage hoses off of the valves and thru-hull fitting, we quickly realized that there was pretty much NO room to move the valve handles. Most of the space was taken up by the seawater strainer and behind the strainer was this plumbing daisy-chain of fittings. It served the main engine cooling (super important), flush to the aft toilet (removed anyway), and the seawater faucet at the galley sink (super not important). Out of principle I hate having that many fittings in a row and I really don’t like having anything else attached to the thing that’s keeping my main engine from overheating. We went ahead and removed the strainer to get it out of the way but the hoses were stuck on so badly we had to cut it out. Now we get to replace the hose to the thru-hull and to the engine. Awesome. But it’ll be a lot cleaner of a setup!
We keep finding new things on the boat to fix, but honestly it’s going about how I expected so it’s hard to be too upset about it. I really want to fix everything I find correctly and I would rather replace the seawater hose when the boat is safely out of the water than when she’s in the water and we need everything working. The bilge pumps are also going to need a lot of work to get running properly, but that’s a project for another day. (or, you know, next week while waiting for more parts…)