No, I still don't have my boat back. Yes, it's been over three months since I brought her to the yard.
The good news is that the new mast has arrived. The bad news is that this was an apparent surprise for the rigging shop and they're neck-deep in work for an upcoming racing series or some such noise.
While I'm waiting, I asked the folks at the boatyard to go ahead and pull the boat out of the water to repaint the bottom and get a periodic survey. So on Friday when I stopped by, I was thrilled to find her looking like so:
The bottom has been stripped of its layer of slime and the occasional barnacle, and the sacrificial zincs are all new:
Even the propeller is all polished and new looking:
The view from on deck is a bit more disconcerting though:
While I was there, I asked to see the new mast. I found it in the rigging loft with a shiny new coat of paint:
It turns out that the patina on my mizzen mast makes the color nearly impossible to match, so they did the best they could. This mostly just tells me that I ought to look into replacing the mizzen sometime soon too.
Here's a shot of the shiny new masthead:
With all the shiny newness aloft, it only stands to reason that the engine room is getting even uglier. When the surveyor was poking around, he found a number of through-hull valves that were inoperable. I added those to my work list with the boatyard and set to work replacing the alternator and starter after their most recent submergence. You can see why I needed a new alternator:
Later today I'll be going down to the yard to dismantle the dead generator and remove it piece by piece from the boat. That'll give me an excuse to go ahead and remove the hundreds of pounds of lead bricks in various lockers that were loaded in to offset the weight of the generator.
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