We are very busy down here at Palacios, Texas. Lots of work to be done on the boat. I've been varnishing the wood and disassembling/cleaning the winches and greasing them. Pam's making new awnings, bimini, seat cushions, and covers for things. We got a new outboard motor for the dingy the other day. I had bought a really cheap used dingy from a guy and finally tried it out a couple of days ago with the new motor (it was just a "starter" dingy). When I p...

Hi everyone! Sorry it's been sooooo long since we have updated our blog. I really don't have a good excuse, but could probably come up with one if I had to! The weather has been extremely humid and hot with temperatures in the low 90's and the humidity in the 70's. We put an air conditioner on our boat in the companion way (which is where you walk down the ladder into the boat) to help keep it cool. The only trick now is learning how to straddle the unit as you...

We're settling into our routine of sailing and working on things on the boat. All of the sailing has been going well. We had a nice easy sail yesterday. Really light wind, so we put up all our three main sails. We have a cutter, which means it has a jib sail and a staysail up front and the mainsail aft. We also have a spinnaker sail that would fly way out in front, but we haven't tried it yet. We got to practice our man overboard drill yesterday. When we w...

We've been busily practicing sailing and motorboat/docking. Everything has been going smoothly, no crashes into the dock or groundings. We're comfortable docking the boat with just Pam and me now. Before we would have a bunch of people standing on the dock, ready to "catch" the boat. I've been doing a little more engine maintenance. I had a fuel line "banjo" fitting that would always just slowly weep a little fuel. It had been missing a coppe...

The engine needed a lot of maintenance. I replaced all the fuel lines and the three fuel filters. I cleaned out the fuel tank. Primed the fuel system. I replaced all the water coolant lines and flushed the engine and water tanks. Cleaned the air filter. Replaced the raw water (sea water) pump's impeller. Cleaned up the battery terminals. Cleaned the bilge. Still need to change the oil and filters for the transmission and engine. I can put that off for a ...