I
didn't do much with the boat over the winter. It was too cold in the garage to
repaint the drive, and in general too cold to do much of anything comfortably.Winter-Spring
I
didn't do much with the boat over the winter. It was too cold in the garage to
repaint the drive, and in general too cold to do much of anything comfortably.
The wet weather continued through the winter and spring. In February, we had some of the worst flooding anyone in our area had ever seen. Normally the dam at Winfield keeps the river level regulated within a few inches at my house. At the left is a photo of my dock under water on February 23.
I drove down to the dam to see what it looked like there and
found that the water level was the same on both the upstream and downstream
sides. The water went down the next day, but the heavy rains continued. Each
time the river began to start looking like it might clear up, another storm
would come along and muddy it up again. The water never got up to the February
level again, but the bad weather continued well into spring. Memorial day came
and went with no opportunities to go boating. An amazing quantity of logs,
trees, trash, tires, furniture, and appliances floated by, leaving us wondering
where it all would go.
As the weather warmed, I started on the outstanding maintenance items. I sanded the drive down and repainted it, this time without disassembling anything, other than removing the propeller. I swapped out the zinc anodes with the ones that I had sanded down to shiny metal and lubed the gimbal bearings with the recommended Mercruiser grease.
I found some corrosion on the ends of the battery cable and replaced it in hopes of an easy fix for last year's starting troubles.
I bought an inexpensive Blaupunkt automotive AM/FM radio and CD player and
installed it in the same general area as the original, in the side panel next to
the left seat. I got a mounting gadget from my friendly neighborhood boat supply store,
WV Marine, that recesses the stereo into the panel and has a door over the
front. I mounted new speakers high up under the console, out of the weather.
There was an unused switch on my instrument panel, so I used it as the power
switch for my stereo. (Being an auto unit, it's designed to be turned on with
the car's ignition switch: I wanted to be able to use mine with the boat's
ignition switch off.)
There were some gouges in the bottom center section, so I bought some
fiberglass filler from the WV Marine to patch those up. After sanding off some of
the grime, roughness and old paint from previous repairs, they turned out to be fairly shallow
scratches and I filled them in without too much trouble. While I was
fiberglassing, I filled in the holes where the trolling motor had been mounted,
along with a few additional holes where other accessories had come and gone.
I purchased a liability insurance policy from BoatUS. My state doesn't
require boaters to carry any type of insurance and I hadn't gotten around to
looking into insuring my boat previously, partly because I had got it going so
late in the season and partly because I wasn't certain how long it would stay
going. Now that it was looking like my boat was going to be useable for the
foreseeable future, I figured insuring it would be prudent.
There's no protection from the weather at my dock and because of my boat's barge-like shape, the bow seating area acts like a giant funnel to bring rain water into the boat. The cover that came with the boat had been altered to fit over the trolling motor, and I had un-altered it after removing the trolling motor. It leaks profusely and to complicate matters, it's made of vinyl and not only lets a lot of water in, it prevents it from evaporating out once the rain stops. The top and rear cover is vinyl also, but is relatively water tight. I decided to try and fabricate a new front cover and this became one of those projects that starts out as a simple idea and blossoms into a huge undertaking.