currently in:  Fort Myers, FL

Yikes. Tomorrow it will have been one month since we arrived at the boatyard and laid eyes on Windom for the first time in over two years, and we're still not out cruising yet. If it takes this long every time, part-time cruising becomes a lot less appealing!

On the other hand, a lot of the work we've been doing has been to fix things that happened because the boat was badly stored in Florida, and we don't intend to do that again. (For example: the batteries were completely dead because we couldn't leave a solar panel up to trickle charge them, which would add dangerous windage in a hurricane, and repeated bilge pump operation from the large amount of rain that fell drained the batteries.) We made so many mistakes storing Windom that we could write a book on How Not To Store Your Boat. All the things that were applicable in Maryland for winter storage were wrong for Florida summers; much of the advice we received from other cruisers was wrong, or more exactly it was incomplete. And a lot of things we didn't do because we were lazy and it was midsummer, and we paid for them all this past month.

But we sure did accomplish a lot. We record all the maintenance work in our maintenance log, and here's what's been done since December 6th:

• Cleaned exterior and interior of mildew, mold, major corrosion, tape and tape residue
• Repaired gouges on keel where we'd hit a reef in the Bay Islands of Honduras, sanded the bottom (a nasty task!), taped a new, higher waterline, and applied two coats of bottom paint
• Disassembled and lubricated the anchor windlass, cleaned corrosion off the motor and painted it with rust-inhibiting paint
• Cut out rusty sections of anchor chain and spliced new anchor rodes out of what was left of the good chain plus some spare anchor line, and measured and marked all three anchor rodes (primary, secondary, and stern) every 25'
• Greased the prop and installed new zinc anodes on shaft and prop
• Filtered the old diesel fuel through our offline fuel filter - we filtered it quite a bit before launching, and then filtered more while sitting in the marina. The ick that has grown in the tanks (despite the chemicals we added) is truly amazing!
• Retensioned the standing rigging (the stuff holding the mast up), removed and laundered all the running rigging (the lines controlling the sails), and turned all halyards end-for-end, which required splicing new eyes into the ends
• Inspected and cleaned the mainsail, and installed the jib on the roller furling
• Disassembled the plumbing Y-valves and lubricated them, lubricated the various moving parts of the toilets and got them mostly working (one is not usable right now, the other is)
• Cleaned out the bilge, replaced the bilge pump float switch, and cleaned out the water tanks
• Installed a new anchor pump washdown system
• Got the systems running again:  refrigerator, heater, VHF radios (installed a new handheld charger), SSB radio, stove and oven (which needed minor repairs and some major cleaning, as mud-daubers had made nests behind it), grill (which needed lots of cleaning and major repairs), instruments, lights (needed to clean off corrosion from contacts for the nav lights, and ended up replacing large sections of the wires that had been corroded, as well as the entire anchor light system), and so on
• Replaced batteries. Actually we did this twice, first getting some (relatively) inexpensive temporary batteries to get us out of the yard and down to the marina; then we bought and installed the big, heavy, expensive batteries we plan to actually use. And which hopefully will last through the next storage.
• Re-installed the solar panels, including a new one, and the wind generator and a new regulator.
• Installed new bimini and dodger
• Stripped old finish from all exterior teak, scrubbed with teak cleaner, sanded and oiled
• Cleaned and inflated dinghy, filled transom holes with epoxy (we'd cut them to bolt the engine on), bought a new between-decks plug and drilled out the transom to fit it. Still some repair and maintenance work left to do on the dinghy, though!
• Got the outboard motor going:  cleaned out all the mud-dauber nests inside the motor casing (!), changed the oil and filter and the lower unit oil, checked the spark plugs, pumped grease into the lube points, and so on

Of course each of these list items hides a lot behind a few words; the teak took four days of hard work from both of us, for example, and the anchor washdown pump required a lot of wiring and plumbing, all executed by Britt curled uncomfortably upside-down in the anchor locker (which we had to empty out and clean, first), with me handing him tools and parts. The big batteries we use weigh 165 pounds each, so in order to get them on or off the boat we need to winch them in using a halyard running from the top of the mast, over the end of the boom (which we extend by strapping the whisker pole to it), and just setting this up takes some time. Even relatively straightforward-sounding tasks take on new dimensions when done in the cramped spaces of a boat.

And the list doesn't include a few minor repairs and fixes and changes, not to mention all the minutiae of living, such as grocery shopping (and the big provisioning run), buying parts, doing laundry, doing bills...all of which are rendered a lot more difficult in an unfamiliar city, with an oversized vehicle (which nobody's bought yet - we had a few phone calls and one looker, but that's it). Our shopping expeditions, whether for food or for hardware, are planned like military maneuvers. (Usually the opposing armies of traffic and fatigue beat us.)

There's still a lot to do - but the list of what's left is a lot smaller. Hopefully we'll be out of here early next week. And finally we'll be able to enjoy the fruits of our labors!