True North is already a very pretty girl and doesn’t need a lot of work on the outside. (no teak to varnish or anything!!) However she’s been sitting for a while and needs some cleanup. Jason and I spent days buffing the paint on Peregrine and this boat is twice as big… so we’re just paying someone to do it for us!
you can really see the difference in the before and after in this shot!This is the path we take to the boat every single time! lol
Jason bought us a big ole anchor to mount on the back of the boat in case we need to anchor with a stern anchor. We finally got the bracket installed the other day so the anchor has a home on the side of the arch instead of just sitting on the deck in the way.
I had some rubber ‘monkey fist’ mounting brackets leftover and used one to hang up our fishing gaff on the arch! Barely even notice it’s there.
It’s on the front leg.
An anchor doesn’t have any value unless there’s rope attached to it. Jason bought us enough rope and chain to get the job done, but we don’t have a good spot for it. I had planned on making this fancy custom bag but… I don’t really want to… and that’s the kind of thing that’s freely available so I just ordered one! It will attach on the back side of the rear arch next to the anchor.
It’s going here
The bag finally came in the other day. I sewed on some webbing loops and zip tied it in place!
Mission accomplished!
Another big bulky thing we have to store is two fullsize kayaks. The only place for those to go conveniently is on the rails of the boat. I tried just tying mine to the stanchions with foam blocks but it didn’t work at all and I finally caved and spent money on the nice padded, stainless kayak holders from West Marine.
Looks pretty good there!
Once we get the boat in the water I’ll likely move the racks outside so the kayaks are more out of the way, but at least now they’re up off the deck and nicely padded!
They do fold up nicely when the kayak isn’t here.
We finally got around to bringing the other kayak to the boat.
So many toys!
Our dinghy engine is 20hp so it’s super powerful and really scoots along with Jason and I, but with 4 people in the boat it suffers slightly. Now that we’re going to have 4 people on the boat full time, we really need to fix this. One of the solutions is to install hydrofoil fins to add a little lift to the boat. These just bolt onto the back of the engine. Pretty easy!
And they look cool too!
When we bought the boat she had some white sun shades over the main windows for the saloon. Nice to have for sure, but they were literally disintegrating into threads. After spending so much effort trying to get some shade on Peregrine I decided to pay the guy at the local canvas shop to remake them for me! Now we’re good to go!
Looks pretty nice!
Now that we’re at the dock we can plug in shore power. We had one cable plugged in and grabbed our second one to try and run the air conditioning to test it, but it looks like it caught fire at one point.
not good
Luckily these are fixable so it just took a few minutes and a new end and we had it done!
Like having a new cable!
I’ve been slowly working my way around the boat getting all the chalky gel coat buffed and shiny again a but it’s takes days! One thing that’s required to use the boat is to have the name on the boat, so jason lowered the dinghy so I could do that!
Here’s the whole back of the boat now!
In addition to the kayaks, Jason also has a foil board it’s “only” 6’ long but we still didn’t know where to put it. We decided that the easiest place would be to tie it to the ceiling outside.
A prettier solution will be coming later I think.
Boats notoriously always need more freezer and fridge space. On Peregrine we had a little electric cooler that we used for drinks and leftovers. We kept it when we sold the boat and there’s a perfect little spot on True North with a 12v socket already installed! Perfect!
Fridge nook!
For now we’re done with a lot of the little stuff on the outside as we’re finally preparing to get going on the boat! Bahamas here we come!
