06 November 2008

Messing about in boats

We've been back on board Nahani for 2 weeks, and it's been bliss. Hobart weather is mild, mostly lovely sunny days with just the occasional grey and showery one. We've been doing long overdue boat maintenance, and installing some of our most recently purchased toys.

The new Seiwa radar antenna is now adorning the jungle gym, and after hours of fiddling with the wiring, the engineer has finally got the radar operating properly with our Seiwa Explorer3 chartplotter - we can now overlay the radar picture on the chart, which makes it much easier to interpret the radar plot. The more we use the Seiwa gear, the happier we are with it.

As part of that process, we have taken the jungle gym and back rails down so that the maintenance chief could deal with some minor rust spots where the stainless steel rails are bolted to the mild steel plates in the scuppers. He is using plastic grommets in the holes the bolts fit into to stop the problem recurring.

When not holding up bits of the jungle gym in the dismantling or re-erection process, the mate has been sanding some more of the teak, as we are progressively changing from treating the teak with a oil/stain combination, to using straight oil.

When the weather has been murky, we've spent time emptying lockers, re-organising the contents, removing things which don't get used, and generally cleaning and tidying.

Since our arrival in Hobart we've been actively advertising the Perkins engine and the Aquadrive. The latter is sold, and we've had 3 enquiries about the engine. It appears in the paper version of the Trading Post today, so we may get more enquiries over the weekend.

The only thing that we're not so happy about down here is that our aged Volvo, having served us as a boat car all the way to Queensland and back, and then taken us from Melbourne to Hobart via the Spirit of Tasmania and a leisurely drive, is finally suffering from what we fear is a terminal illness. Peter is planning to get a second opinion from a mechanic today, but unless it turns out to be something simple and cheap, we may have to take her to a final resting place somewhere. In the meantime, we've borrowed the old faithful Maisie Mazda from cousing Claire.

Back on the upside, we watched the US elections with great interest and are much relieved by the result. We celebrated with Rolf Bjelke and Deborah Shapiro on their famous boat Northern Light (see http://www.amazon.ca/Time-Ice-Winter-Voyage-Antarctica/dp/product-description/0071353224), which is currently berthed just across the jetty from us.

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