We'd scheduled an "overnight hang" at Bert Jabin's Yacht Yard for July 6th: they would scoop Windom out of the water at 4:00 in the afternoon, leave us in the Travelift slings overnight so we could put in a new through-hull for the refrigeration system and install our new propeller, and then put us back in the water the next morning. It's a lot less expensive to do things this way than to get hauled out and put on stands, and anyway we figured that since we had only a few things to do, we could easily do them in the afternoon and early evening. What we hadn't figured on was the heat -- and a mysterious electrical system short.
For a week, the heat and humidity had been setting records. We'd been happy to be out at a mooring where we could catch some breezes. Since our time there was up at noon, and we weren't getting hauled out until the end of the workday, we decided to go sailing and enjoy the slightly cooler weather out on the Bay. We motored away from the mooring and were just about to put the sails up, when suddenly all the instruments went dead. After we hoisted the sails and turned off the engine, Britt went below to investigate: we'd blown our main fuse, and all the 12-volt electrics were out.
Well, we didn't really need any of them to sail, although the loss of the depthfinder made me nervous (I kept a more wary eye than usual on the chart). We opened the lazarette lid to help dissipate the engine heat from the systems room, and when it had cooled a little, Britt crawled in with his electrical meters to try to figure out what had happened.
I had a lovely sail, a nice reach across the Bay in winds from the south. Britt, cooped up in the hot and airless systems room, didn't have nearly as pleasant a time as he systematically disconnected and reconnected all our cables, trying to track down the problem. By the time we were approaching Back Creek again, heading for our haulout appointment, he had discovered that vibration had caused the alternator positive cable to rub through its insulation and short out against the negative bolt, but wasn't convinced that was the only problem.
When we pulled into the Travelift slip at 3:45, the temperature was still somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 degrees. We each took a cool shower, got a cold Coke from the soda machine, and went to work. Although our antifouling bottom paint had done its job on most of the hull, the unpainted propeller and shaft were coated with barnacles. After scraping them off, we removed the old prop and prepared to assemble the new Max-Prop onto the shaft. Things went pretty well, although of course nothing ever goes as smoothly as promised in the brochure, and it was almost unendurably hot. Periodically we'd stop, wipe the sweat off everything, and drink something cool. The local Max-Prop distributor (Garth Hitchens) happened to work at this boatyard, and we got him to take a look; despite the brutal weather and the late hour, he stayed with us for half an hour, helping and giving advice, and even came by the next morning to make sure things worked when we got into the water. Great service, and we hadn't even bought the prop from him.
After we'd gotten the propeller on, Britt drilled a hole in the
bottom of the boat and installed the refrigerator through-hull, while
I biked to West Marine to buy a new fuse to replace the one we'd
blown, and some new zincs. Boats plus seawater try to become
batteries -- since the water has many different metals immersed in it
(stainless steel and bronze on our boat, plus other metals on other
boats) current flows, which leads to galvanic corrosion of the metal
which acts as an anode in this boat-battery. 
To
protect the important metal bits, unimportant metal bits are bolted
onto them. Zinc is a good and cheap anode, so usually hunks of zinc
are used as sacrificial anodes. After only 2.5 months in the water,
our shaft zinc was amazingly
corroded, soft and crumbly, so we replaced it with two zincs for
additional protection.
The last thing to do was touch up the bottom paint. We had to paint the new through-hull, repaint the prop shaft strut, and touch up those few spots which had either flaked off from improper application, or been scraped off when we touched bottom. By now it was finally a reasonable temperature for working; unfortunately, it was also pitch dark, about 11 pm, so we worked by headlamps. Shortly after midnight, we showered off the dust, grime, paint and steel flakes. It was still way too hot to sleep in the boat, which had been soaking up the sun all afternoon, particularly since we still had no electricity and therefore no fans, so we made beds in the cockpit and slept out in the open. First thing in the morning, we were lowered back into the water.
Before we pulled away from the boatyard, Britt rechecked the electrics, rerouted the alternator cable, and replaced the blown main electrical system fuse. I started the engine cautiously, but everything seemed okay, so we motored out to begin our first real cruise.
