The first two months as Sailboat owners
It’s the typical Hot Florida summer weather and we are spending as much time as we can on the ocean. We have been spending a couple days a week at the boat. Between all the projects and improvements we do get time to play. We love the Marina we are in, lots of amenities making our time at the boat that much more enjoyable. Here is sunrise on our dock at the marina.
Sunrise at our dock
We chose Fort Pierce for several reasons. It is on the same coast as we purchased the boat and we are not ready to take her around the tip of Florida or through the Okeechobee waterway just yet, although those adventures are on our list. It is as far south as we are willing to drive regularly. Brian has this very strong itch to go to the Bahamas and we are a day’s sail away. And lastly the marina we chose and Fort Pierce for that matter is a stone’s throw away from the inlet to get out on the Atlantic, a lot of areas along the east coast of Florida are a ways from an inlet making half of your sail time just getting to the ocean.
Leaving the marina we always get this picturesque view of the pelicans sitting on the wooden pilings, and it always makes me smile.
Leaving the marina
We have yet to go north or south on the intercostal waterway, every time we go out we head right out the inlet to the Atlantic. We love sailing along with the dolphins and have very much enjoyed the auto pilot. We just set it and both get to relax, sometimes even napping. But in between the tacks of course.
I occasionally get to pretend to be captain.
I get to drive and act like captain
Brian is a natural. I love this picture of him.
Brian is taking care of the jib
The first few weeks/months going to the boat has been a blast, exploring and getting to know the boat. We cleaned her extensively and added our own decorating touches. One of the most exhausting cleaning projects we tackled was the walls behind all the teak wood strips. We are thinking that the previous owners used teak oil on all of the wood strips while they were hanging on the wall and the teak oil got all over the walls in between and behind. We took down each strip and scrubbed the walls. This is just showing the strips in the v berth, but the teak strips of wood are also in the salon on each side wall and on the wall by the chart table, it was quit the arm workout to say the least.
We changed out all the interior lighting to LED, installed a smoke detector and carbon monoxide alarm and cleaned out the sea strainers. We purchased and installed a new main halyard line since the existing one was a little too worn for Brian’s liking. One of the stereo speakers was cracked in the cockpit so we replaced both speakers with new ones. The new speakers are not weathered and are actually white, I am sure they won’t be white for long.
The previous owner had just purchased a new stereo and had it installed and the stereo is equipped with bluetooth, so we have been enjoying playing our own music that we have stored in our phones through the stereo system throughout the boat. To make sleeping onboard more cozy I got a memory foam topper for the V berth, and we are very pleased with it. Sleeping on board is pretty comfy and it only took a few nights for me not to be claustrophobic. We had to install a galvanic isolator because there was not one and the insurance company required that we have one onboard. We got a quote for the company at the marina to install it for us but after research decided that it was something that Brian could do and glad we did. We saved over a thousand dollars doing it ourselves. This is also when Brian absolutely fell in love with working in the lazarettes, can you hear my sarcasm?
The battery charger quit working soon after we got Nepenthe so we also replaced it and added a digital read out panel inside that shows battery status.
Next we installed a new shower sump box with clear top and replaced the smokey plexi glass piece by the chart table with a teak piece that matches the salon area.
The biggest project I tackled was I re-upholstering all of the interior cushions. The cushions you sit on were brown vinyl that were taped and safety pinned around the foam and the back cushions were the original 35 year old fabric.
Old upholstery, the v berth and the back of all the other cushions are original to the boat
I know how to sew, I have made a few quilts in the past but have never tackled anything like this, but we are very pleased with how they turned out and again doing it ourselves we saved A LOT of money. I used all the same foam but refreshed it by covering it in batting. For about a month I took a section at a time home to work on and complete.
I was very grateful that Brian’s mom was nice enough to fly from Ohio to help me for about a week.
Mom during her visit to help with the cushions
The most difficult cushion to sew was the one that covers the table when it is lowered to turn that area into a bed. The cushion has a cutout in it to go around the pole. It is not perfect but I am perfectly happy with it.
I have not yet completed the V berth cushions, I am putting them off till after our wedding.
Brian went on a hose replacing mission, he replaced many hoses, the sink drain hose, fuel hoses, and exhaust hose. If you would ask Brian the biggest project he embarked on he would say engine work. He would call himself a computer geek and the furthest thing from a grease monkey or mechanic. After several weeks of trying to get a diesel engine mechanic out to the boat to do routine maintenance on our Volvo Penta engine unsuccessfully, Brian tackled the work himself. Again do I need to say we saved loads of money. He changed the engine oil, the transmission oil, and the oil filter, the impeller and replaced the oil water separator filter. Brian has no complaints that all the engine work is done from inside and not from the lazarettes.
The one thing we did not do ourselves was we had the sunshade that was coming unstitched fixed on our foresail/jib. We took it down off the boat, laid it in the grass at the marina to fold it up and took it into a shop in Melbourne, it only cost us about $200.00
One of the scariest projects for me was when Brian removed one of the leaking port light windows to reseal it. For me, I never want to see a big hole like that in the boat, holes in boats are not good, right? This is when we found out that the port light windows are brass, so while the window was out we took advantage and polished it as well. That was not an easy task, they have not been polished in so long that it took so much elbow grease to accomplish the slightest change, again another arm workout. We did a little research online for tips to polish brass, we tried ketchup-did not really work for us, we tried vinegar-which worked the best, and we tried Brasso-it worked ok. So now we have one port light polished.
Like I said earlier, it has not been all work, there has been a lot of play. We took the boat out, it’s August and the ocean is so calm it looks like glass.
Always a beautiful sight heading back to the marina.
