Well, my Spouse was asked to stay longer aboard the M/V Manoa so, as I believe we all knew was inevitable, it fell to me to winterize the inboard engine of the Golden Girl. It being my first time I had to be guided through it by telephone. But what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, right.............?

On my way to the Big Top yesterday I took the truck instead of the Prius and threw in the large ladder needed to climb up to Golden Girl where it sits on its cradle. The winterization consisted of running the engine to make it suck antifreeze out of a bucket, pushing out all the water currently in the engine for coolant. 

There were a lot of firsts for me here. For example it was my first time to climb into the surprisingly deep crevice inside a boat engine compartment to retrieve a hose way too far away to reach by hand. It was also my first time personally observing the phenomenon of the sun heating up a clear hose and making it suck up fluid without any motor doing the work. Apparently this leads to boats being sunk upon occasion. By far the most memorable part of this process was afterward when I was asked to stick my finger in the boat's... well, I can only describe it as the boat's nostril, to see if the um... discharge... was green. If it hadn't been, I'd have to repeat the exercise adding more anti freeze to push more water out.

I'm here to say it was indeed green. Note to self... bring hanky for wiping finger next time.

Also someone had left a discarded lamp near the dumpster, which I kept in revenge as a present for my Spouse:



It's about a 6" diameter chrome spotlight head with what appears to be a good working lamp inside. The head itself appears to have been dented at one time, and the dent successfully pounded out. There is still a small crack where the dent was pounded out.



The other end resembles a chrome eyestalk with a fitting allowing it to be mounted on a deck or some such. The inside/underside half of the mounting has a handle, presumably for rotating the head, and also a toggle switch for on/off. I would judge this thing needs to be rewired. That will be a good project for someone who missed out on all the fun of the winterizing.

Today I attacked the old wooden transom on my rowboat. It is too thick for my small outboard to clamp onto, and it was also very rotted and had various odd handles and what not screwed onto it.




Here's the boat with the transom removed. I was somewhat disappointed that there was no manufacturer's plate underneath, because I'd read that if this boat had one, I'd find it on the transom somewhere. The plates were apparently not required until 1972 though, and this is probably years or even decades older than that.



Rotted wood splinters (if anything that soft could be called a splinter) littering the boat floor after transom removal. As can be seen in all of these photos, the paint job on the boat needs help. I am not planning on painting the outside of the hull, only washing it. However my past experiences with canoes make me want to repaint the inside since it's not much fun to be blinded by a reflective boat bottom for hours while on the water.



Here are the chunks of rotted wood transom that got removed. It was so squishy with rot and water that when I inserted a Wonder Bar to pry it off, it compressed and water ran out of it in all directions, like a sponge. Yecch! The larger piece standing up is the inside piece, which I'll use as measurement for the replacement boards.



I didn't start it today but there is also a piece of broken plywood that needs replacing at the boat's bow.



Since the boat is now resting rightside up on the trailer, and since it has been raining, I got a chance to find out how my patch job is working. Note the tiny white patch under the bow, against the blue tarp.



Here's a water droplet that formed. Since the plywood underneath the droplet has only a small moist spot, I take it not very much water is getting out. I'll still try to stop that though. As my Spouse pointed out, there will be a lot more pressure on it once it is actually underwater.



Here's the water that had collected. Based on the paint wear (and the state of the transom wood) I gather this is not the first time water has been in the boat. I am going to use one of the silver tarps to cover it in the long term. For now, the bleach bottle bailer I made cleared it out handily.

The weather was great today! I was highly tempted to go fishing, boat or no, but the local bait shop had fresh fish in so we got some whitefish caught by somebody else for grilling tonight.

Yesterday the weather was gorgeous -- nearly 70 degrees, sunny and breezy. The sort of weather that makes snowbirds come back from Florida and Arizona each year! My Spouse and I both worked on my Fine Yacht. We got the rest of the bondo sanded off (using the angle head grinder and a cup brush) to bare aluminum and oddly enough there was no holeage underneath, only some dents.



My Spouse recommended fairing the hull near the dents and caulking the seams near where the bondo had been, in case the leak had been there instead. Here's the other side:



There was also a noticeable pit or air bubble in the old resin at the seam between the 2 stiffeners. I tried various times to get good pictures of that but it was in shadow, until I got this crazy shot:



Holy digital macro zoom Batman! That is way too much detail, yuck.

After doing some research I had picked Boatlife caulk for the patch job -- such as it is. I ordered that online and then as it turns out we already had Boatlife solvent lying about so I had that too.



Here's the caulking job as it currently stands. The seams are done but I think the fairing part could use a second layer. I am still trying to figure out if a second layer is allowed with Boatlife Caulk or if I need to just wait 10 days, sand it and hope for the best.



If it looks a bit messy it's because the boat was rocking back and forth on its precarious perch on the trailer while I was at work. This was due to my Spouse going after the trailer taillights with a sawsall. They needed replacing (as well as the whole trailer needing rewiring) and the bolts were so rusty they were never going to come off any other way. They were replaced by nearly identical el cheapo taillights available from Wal Mart.

The next step for this boat will be to take it to a body of water and put it in, and see if it leaks or what. I have an underwater writing wax marker for notating leak points, and a liquid version of the Boatlife caulk that will be good for stopping fine cracks and loose rivets type leaks. There is also a little of the thick type caulk left as well. So after going back and forth on that for a while the metal repair part of the boat should be done for this year. Cross fingers ;-)

In other news, the Johnson HD-25 outboard my Spouse bought me is now totally rebuilt. It too has reached the point where nothing else can be done at home. What remains is to test it in an actual lake and see if it pumps water well enough to keep itself cool. It doesn't work in the barrel of water my Spouse set up for running the motor in, but that is apparently not necessarily a realistic test fixture for the pump as the water pressure is nothing like what it'd be in real life.



I also have some fabulous pictures of what they looked like new. Or at least refurbished. Check this out:



This is from Peter McDowell's North York Marine website. He sells the paint and decals if we were ever obsessive enough to paint this motor. Of course, then it would be way too nice for the boat ;-) Also check out this link for a beautifully scanned 1949 folding brochure from Johnson displayed on a German website.

I can't wait to take it out on the water!

When I bought this Fine Yacht (a used 12' aluminum Sea King) the fellow said he thought there was one minor leak and from what I could see this cracked bondo patch appeared the likeliest culprit:



There was also this matching patch located on the other side exactly opposite that one:




It looks like the boat got jammed end-to-end somehow, and started to crumple at this point until the two stiffeners at top of that photo bumped up against one another preventing any further movement. Heh, I guess that proves stiffeners are needed. I wonder if later versions of this boat had one continuous one instead of 2 separate ones, since it might have been a weak point in the design.

Well, yesterday my Boat Life caulk arrived, so I no longer had any excuse to delay attacking the possible leaks. Boat Life makes various different products that can be used for boat repairs. The caulk is thick and good for filling gaps and will stay flexible forever once dry -- rather than cracking like this bondo did. I also got a tube of the liquid version which I hope will be good for sealing any rivets that turn out to leak.




My first task was to knock off all the loose bondo which I did with a hammer and chisel. In the picture above you can see how dirt and water were getting in there through the cracks.



Here's what it looked like with all the loose bondo removed. Underneath some of it was good bondo that had not become brittle or cracked. My Spouse says it tends to get mixed unevenly and this is probably properly mixed, while the brittle part probably had too much hardener.



Here it is with all loose bondo and partially sanded clean with a manual brass wirebrush. My options at this point are to either finish cleaning it up with the brass brush, or to use an angle grinder with a cup brush. Trouble is we don't have a stainless steel cup brush, only a regular steel one and those are not recommended for use on aluminum. My spouse suggests I use it anyway for expediency, then follow up with the brass brush to get rid of any bits of steel (molecules I assume) that might still be present. In any case, it is freezing rain today so I have time to ponder before continuing!



Zinger and Daisy watched from the house, probably wondering if I had lost my mind. My Spouse was cleaning my outboard off to the left out of frame, so their heads were swivelling back and forth as if they were watching a tennis match.



Our back lot line near the boat still needs to be cleared. A lot of trash wood grew up there last summer that needs to be taken out before it greens up again this year.



Here's the other half which I have finished! I have been working on this a bit each day. My rule is to cut down 25 sticks per evening. LOL



It now appears that all tulip types are at least partially represented, so we'll see now how well they flower. The tiniest ones are already flowering, making them the first things to bloom on our property this year!



I definitely feel more inspired to keep adding more tulips each fall now that I know some make it. It shouldn't take too many years to have a huge swath growing under the trees!

As mentioned in a previous post, the boat bailing bucket I made out of a bleach bottle in that post couldn't be field-tested because the requisite unwanted accumulated water was still frozen solid. However, that opportunity has now arisen and the bucket came through with flying colors! Er, literally. Mostly browns and oranges.



This leaf-and-apple filled water has been accumulating all winter in the top of a tarp wrapping an unfinished dog house. It really smells rank too.



Modeled by my lovely Spouse, the bailer is doing a great job. It appears the water is orange in color. Trust me, it looks way better than it smelled.



Left unsaid, but implicit in my not having asked for permission to use my Spouse's beautiful leakproof silver tarp for this purpose, is the assumption that I will be the one to have to scrub and wipe all the gack off of it and restore it to its previous pristine cleanliness.



The bailing actually went very fast and I was frantically snapping pictures trying to get good ones. Total time to empty the tarp to about a tablespoon left: about 30 seconds. I am told "a scared man with a bucket" can move a lot of water indeed.

Score: Bleach Bottle Bailer for the win!

I am not sure this indicates a great confidence in my new boat (nor my abilities to master operating it) but I was advised to make a bailer and that using a bleach bottle is the easiest way. Here's how I did it:



The idea is to cut the end off the bleach bottle so that you can hold it by the handle and use the open end to scoop up water. So, first I needed to figure out where to cut the bottle. I reasoned that if it is to hold water, the easiest way to create a straight line to cut on would be to put it in water and let the waterline determine that. First I filled it partway with water itself (to weigh it down) and then I placed it in a partly-filled sink. I set one end down in the drain (to keep it from sliding around) and propped the other end up on something so that the water came to the bottom edge of the bottle. The deeper the water, the more of an angle the cut will be at.



While the bottle was still in the water I used a Sharpie to mark the waterline. If you have the newer, non toxic Sharpies they are not waterproof so every time I accidentally touched the water I had to dry the tip off to continue. On the plus side, this kind of Sharpie comes off real easy with Goo Gone if you want to clean up the bottle after you're finished.



I stabbed the line once with a kitchen knife to get it started, then used my trusty Fiskars to cut along the dotted line. I'd put a link to buy these Fiskars if I could but I wasn't able to find one. I got these at Jensen Tools in 1996 and they say made in Finland -- not made in China like the ones I see for sale at Wal Mart. I hope they never break! As a note, if you have the chance to use an older bleach bottle I would. The new ones are awful thin-walled.



Here's what it looks like finished. I put a rope and clip on it but I don't really know where it'll be stored in the boat yet so I may have to change that part later.  The fuzzy gray thing in the lower right is Daisy, one of our cats. She was crawling all over me bumping my wrists with her head while I was trying to focus. This new camera has no setting for "cat helping" that I have found yet.



My intention was to field test the new bailer by emptying out this water accumulated in the base of the doghouse project. Unfortunately we were having a cold snap today and it's frozen solid all the way through. What beautiful clear ice! So that will have to wait for now.

I play DragonRealms, an online text-base RPG (that means you type everything and there are no pictures; you just imagine it all in your head). At one point my character went to a festival with a lot of booths selling things and one of them had tiny pets such as crickets and katydids. The pets would ride on your shoulder and do cute things like chirp, walk in small circles and look up at you curiously. What really stuck with me was the name of the tent though: "Small Friends". So when I got a refurbished replacement for my first (dead) PDA, a Palm Tungsten T3, I named the unit "Small Friend".



The first one only lasted a few months so I didn't have a lot of hope but lo and behold this Small Friend has provided years of service and has stood up well to my usual treatment of dropping it on the floor a lot. In fact it has lasted so long the original rechargeable battery has now gone south. This month I found someone selling cheap replacement batteries for only $5! I figured if they are that cheap now they will soon no longer be available, so I went ahead and bought 2. In the unlikely event my Small Friend lasts another 5 years, at least I'll be set for batteries. There is a great website with photos and instructions on how to swap out a T3 battery. I followed these and my only comments are to add that you may need to use a small flathead to pop a small tab holding the bottom on (on the ass end of it between the "tabs" they tell you to pull out) in step #3. Also, in step #8, on my unit it was a little hard to tell if they meant you to include the black piece with the top or pry them apart, because mine were fairly firmly attached together. It turned out you definitely want to leave the black part behind attached to the front. It helps a lot to go around and pop the rest of the sides first, despite them saying you should start with the top :-p

Anyway the $5 battery worked great, and the only headache was it wouldn't resynch to my PC right away and kept crashing whenever it got to the Versamail part. Since I don't use Versamail anyway I finally just deleted it off my Small Friend and everything synched up properly. A few years ago we both trained ourselves to stop keeping tiny pieces of paper with notes on them, drifting up into big mounds of clutter. This thing syncs with my Outlook and my SplashID so all my tasks, notes, calendar, contact information, and passwords are portable with me and shared back and forth. I don't know what I'd do without my Small Friend! <3

Also in small buddy news I now have a new Camera! My Spouse bought it for me as a belated birthday present. Excellent! It is a Canon PowerShot SD900 Digital ELPH. They can be gotten on eBay for about $60, or at least that is what this one was.



It fits in this great pouch to which a small tripod gleefully (and conveniently) hugs:



The main advantage of this camera over my other one, a Canon PowerShot A40, is that it will focus a lot closer. A LOT closer. It also has much bigger pictures pixel wise. I was playing with it today and here's a picture I took of our cat Zinger while he was sitting on my lap:



Using PhotoShop I kept cropping it farther and farther to see how much detail was available... amazing! And this is nowhere near as close as it can focus either.







Fun stuff!

Also courtesy of my industrious Spouse I now have a fabulous new Outboard for my 12' aluminum fishing boat. It's a 2.5 horsepower gasoline trolling motor. It is a Johnson HD-25 produced from 1946 to 1950. I can't really show you a picture now because it's already clamped onto my lumber rack and taken apart into about 1,000,000 pieces, but here's what they look like when complete:



The 2nd one from the left is a Johnson HD-25. Apparently they are a fetish item for fishing because they will fire at one stroke per second, making for incredibly slow trolling. Putt... putt... putt.... I hope my Spouse can get it working! I am given to understand I may be helping out by manufacturing some leather washers in the not so distant future.

I also did buy replacement oars for my boat. They are new, blonde varnished pine oars. I also had the old ones in the living room while waiting for the new ones to arrive. There have been a lot of jokes about me "bringing 'ores home" especially the twin blonde "'ores". LOL

Alas, my Prius (whose Bluetooth name is, by the way, "New Friend"... my desktop is "Big Friend" and my iPod Shuffle is "itty bitty friend") got hit by a deer on the way back from the trip to pick up theoutboard. It looks like a lot of damage cost-wise but luckily my Spouse was not hurt.  I'll take it in tomorrow for an estimate.

I am pleased, nay, ecstatic to announce that I am now the proud owner of a Fine Yacht of my very own (see above).

I have to admit I've been fantasizing about boat ownership since I was a teenager, so in other words for a rather long time. Mostly wooden boats or ships, but since I started listening to Bass Edge podcasts I've been able to see the positive side of motorboats as well. Now, I never quite envisioned myself owning THIS particular type of boat, but hey... fishing has given me an excuse to actually buy one and the price was right, that being $150 on Craigslist.

It is a rowboat and came with oars (which need replacing) and its own trailer (which needs electrical work and a paint job). It also needs a small amount of leak patching so I will soon be learning all about that!



Here's the "topside" which I failed to photograph before we turned the boat over to keep snow out, so it is currently the underside. There are 3 homemade wooden bench seats, a homemade wooden transom and a piece up front also.



Here's another angle showing the trailer a bit more. It's a pretty minimalistic trailer. I find the boat and trailer completely unintimidating as it's quite possible to simply pick it up by hand and place it on the ball hitch of the truck. Quite a far cry from the horse trailer we had back in Colorado! But they are so light that I will have to watch out not to bounce it right off the back of the truck when hauling it over bumps.



There are 3 areas that will need patching. This one was already patched once but since it's cracked I will need to redo it. There is old green paint left on the patch. The outside hull has traces of not only green paint, but also white and blue from different times. I will probably be leaving it silver on the outside. I could see repainting the (burnt sienna painted) topside simply so it doesn't blind me in the summer sun though.



This one doesn't appear to have ever been patched yet.



Nor this one. I will get to learn all about patching aluminum boats. Whee!

Alas I have it on good authority a boat of this stature is not usually named, so I guess it will just have to be a generic Fine Yacht for now.

I plan to take it out on the local inland lakes, ponds and streams to practice my fishing this summer. That will be fun! :)