Yes, time goes by while I am waiting for the next shipment. The scheduled arrival is next Monday. Hopefully the poles will be straight.
I have been killing time with doing whatever comes up in my mind. Tuesday I spent all day on board Sundowner, Peter (a Serbian) has a sowing machine. In the morning I helped him sowing on his dodger / bimini roof connection. Then in the afternoon he patched up my dodger. I had started a patch myself (by hand, that took hours on Sunday morning), we tried to build on top of that work, but it turned out pretty ugly. All the other patches were came out way better.
Yesterday I went to install the dodger, but the problem is that it is too small for the frame (it always was, and patching made it worse). I had to think about that, but decided that there is of course no way of making the canvas bigger. So, I went for making the frame a little smaller. Cut off about 10-15mm from every tube, and now it fits snug and nicely.
To finish it off, I needed to put in some holding screws, to replace the ones that were frozen up, and I had drilled out in Jacksonville. For that I had to drill in the stainless steel, so I started the engine and tried running the drill on the inverter. That was a complete pain in the butt. The inverter is 350W and is overload protected (it shuts itself off). When you just start to drill the current is normally the highest, so I had to start it carefully, and maybe one out of two times it would work. Now, let me tell you, that stainless steel is hard, hardhard. I broke three drill bits, but finally I did get through.
Last night the outboard gave up on me. It was dark, and only a short distance to the boat, so I just rowed back.
Than it started raining overnight, and it was rainy all morning. Not much I could do outside the boat, so I did some reading (have read a good number of books over the last weeks) and was bored enough to give the heater a good polishing.
After lunch it started to clear up a little, so I went to fix the outboard. Took the carburator apart, but could not find anything wrong. Then took the spark plug out, that looked black. Cleaned it, but would not work yet, so replaced the spark plug, and it started running. Probably need to give the spark plugs some attention weekly. But, I am still very happy with the dinghy and outboard. Did not spend much money on them, and they work just find. Now, I can’t get it to plane, so my economic speed is about 4 knots. But it gets me there.
I have been scouting the cockpit and stern to see where the wind generator is going to be mounted. Not quite sure yet, there is not much room for that kind of gear on a double ender (spitsgatter).
Had a little hobby time interfacing my Garmin with the computer. Found a Linux program gpstransand that talks the right protocol. Was able to download my track from Port Canaveral to Fort Pierce, it took forever, turns out I had been logging my position every 10 seconds, instead of every 10 minutes. But, with the program I can upload and download waypoints, routes, and tracks. Once I have a little more juice in the batteries, I will start playing with converting those to usable other formats (like Google Earth).