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I stayed on Sea Puppy this weekend and early week. I know she will be coming out of the water soon.. Just a matter of days really. I don’t really want to think of it. Everyone one I know has invited me to go sailing with them when I pull Sea Puppy. Sometimes I wonder at how fractious our sailing club is. Times like this makes me see it for the family it tries to be. Though the only blood binding us is that spilled on our boats and taken by the ocean to pay our dues for using her it is still a powerful binding. There is a brotherhood not really spoken of but it is felt. So for any of you that read this…. Thank you brothers and sisters! It has continues to meant much to me.
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Miriam and the kids went out with me today and we motored out to Waities Island and anchored near shore. The kids had been wanting to go putt putt golfing but I didn’t go along with that. I know how much they like it but I really wanted to spend as much time on Sea Puppy as I could before she comes out of the water next week. It ended up being one of those glittering days that all goes well on. William and Emily had a great time playing on the beach at Waities. I played with them some and the rest of the time spent scraping Sea Puppys bottom. Over all she was really clean. Nothing but a handful of barnacles. I ended up snorkling with a the while plastic handle that heavy duty scrubby pads come glued to. I had one I was going to wipe the bottom with but the glue fell apart in the sun while in the cockpit. The plastic scraper I had bought, broke within a few minutes and Miriam had started using the handle. It worked great. Protected the hand and was hard enough to scrape with but malleable enough to not break.
I took sea puppy out sailing today.. not many more days sailing left for her this year. I will be taking her out of the water this coming week. 🙁
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The final results are in. I have had the boat back out several times now and with the 6 pitch prop it performs the same as the old 4hp engine. With the notable exception of one day it not being able to quite run at 5knots over the water.. I am done with with it. There is something wrong with the engine and I am going to send it back. I have put two months of effort into working with tohatsu on it to no result. I bought this engine because it was supposed to be more 50% more powerful than my old one, quieter and more fuel efficient. It is less powerful, it is almost as noisy as my old one, but the fuel consumption is impressive (better than factory claims i think). All in all though it is a failure it simply doesn’t perform to the factorys specs. The dealer that sold me the engine has never tried to contact me again. I am going to contact the credit card company and dispute the charge today. I really hate doing it but it’s just to much money to accept a product that is so important to my boat that does not perform to the manufactures specs or to my boats needs.
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For some reason I thought I had written up the story of me going up the mast and fixing the topping lift and replacing the bulbs in the perko masthead light with LED bulbs. I couldn’t find them by searching on the site so I grabbed what I had written on http://www.beneteau235.com and am posting it back to my site.
Sea Puppy has a perko mast head light unit. It has two bulbs one for steaming and uses two for anchor. I just used two bayonet 12 led bulbs that are a bulb for bulb replacement for the stock bulbs size wise… I was worried that It would not give me enough light compared to the old bulbs but it seems to work.. a friend out with me at night on the ocean this past week when looking or it could see them from 3 or 4 miles away with no problem he said.
Each of the new bulbs draws about 260 millamps so between the two I think about a half amp total compared to the 1 1/2 amps the two old bulbs used.
We went out on La Bon Vie sailing today.
It was nice. I took a lot of pictures … so I guess I should post a couple here. Other than that it was just a nice lazy day on the water.
Miriam hanging out with me on the starboard side of the cabin top.
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Orrin and Zsanic
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Jay on Walkabout
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Another Walkabout Picture
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Next morning we left anchor under sail and due to error on my part got into shallows that the rudder touched. We were moving very slow about 1/2 knot. Not much wind and flat other than a few wakes. I dropped engine quickly and just backed straight up when then next wake ripple came by. again no fuss or muss..
It was all very embarrassing though.. second time in two years that I have touched bottom. 🙁
We did the long motor back to the marina and did breakfast with the gang 🙂
actually we were pretty lazy the rest of the day hanging out with everyone at the docks for most of the rest of the day.
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The night of the 4th this month we went out and anchored out but we left late from the dock.. maybe 9pm… it was very very dark (no moon at all) and all the idiots on the water kept trying out their 10 million candle power spot lights directly on us.
We got about 3/4 of the way to the inlet and were winding through an area just past the calabash crossroads when the water depth started dropping and dropping… I thought I was in the middle of the channel when just to starboard the red dayboard marker slid by. This is the dayboard marker that when your on the other side of it you stay about 100 feet away not to get into to shallow water. I was between it and the bank of the island. It passed about 10 feet away on starboard and we could barely see it. Combination of just plain dark dark and our eyes getting blasted by multi million candle power lights.
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