Sailing Again 2012-2013

Ariel had some preparations for this years trip starting in August. We thought we would be taking off on a two week cruise in Southern Chesapeake after a brief trip on dry dock for bottom painting but the issues kept coming up.

One thing Charles did was to re-design the "stuffing box" arrangement for the rudder post. I had often noticed our taking on water on the starboard side when extremely heeled over.  It turned out that some of the water was from the stuffing box / rudder post arrangement and some came from a split in the exhaust hose for the engine.  Above the shiny stainless steel is a design Charles made to hold the rudder post in place and to prevent water from coming it there are three precision cut spacers for "o" rings that are about 2 inches in diameter.  The yard had to build up the fiberglass.

 Then Charles put the adhesive ( 4200 I think) then it was screwed down in place and he put in his special "o" rings. The area developed a crack which we did not know existed between holes made in the old fiberglass and the places where the new fiberglass covered. So after a second fiberglass application she was good. 

It leaked under power!  That was when we discovered the exhaust pipe leak.  It caused the port lazarette to fill with a certain amount of moisture-- like most of our lines were drenched even though the boat was in dry dock for a month.. The leak drizzled down the new rudder post arrangement so it was hard to tell if that project was complete.   She is dry now.

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Taking the boat in and out of the sling he noticed places on the keel that were in need of repair.
 These were dug out and replace with a special filler hardened, filled some more, hardened and finally painted.

All this comsumed August and into September. We were not able to go on a club cruise as we had hoped since she was not sea worthy. It was disappointing as Sheila and Steve did a lot of planning for a great cruise.


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We decided to replace our 13 inch TV with a 20 inch TV which came with a DVD player and ran on 12 volt power.  We already had a TV antenna but we needed to make sure power was getting to the antenna so we could get on air tv stations.  We have enjoyed TV in most places, but not always FOX news.

 

 

 

TV in place.  We added an HDMI cord to watch movies or things from the PC.

 

 

Behind the TV is a storage area for bowls and rice as well as my bread mixes.  I decided to bring the bread machine along this year and we have made bread on shore power in Charleston.

 

 

Another project was a new bow pulpit which Charles installed himself. It has the new LED lights which are more compact and take less power to run.