NASA's Rust Bucket or My Ferret is Fat
July 19, 2005
Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - Buddy Fred's Dock, Oriental, NC
By Tom
Hello and welcome back. Unlike NASA and that 4 billion dollar rust bucket shuttle of theirs, all of our systems
are go for launch. We are currently t minus 3 days and counting. How nervous must you be if your one of those
astronaut guys waiting to get flung into space and you are delayed because the gas gauge isn't working? Can they
even get out and push? Weak dude, weak.
Anyway, Let me take a minute and catch you up to date. Since we have arrived here at the buddy fred's house back in
May, we have :
Stripped and poly-eurathaned the cabin floors
Waged germ warfare with the ever present pin mold and won !
Re-sewn the sacrificial on our #1 genny
Patched a small hole in our interior fiberglass counter
Installed a new masthead VHF antenna
Fabricated and installed a dinghy engine crane
Patched and cleaned said dinghy
Installed aero foils on the dinghy engine
Rebuilt both fish whackers
Sewn a new grill cover
Serviced all three engines
Removed and thrown away about 40 lbs of stuff we didn't use last year
Cleaned out all interior and cockpit cabinets
Fabricated and installed a man over board strobe holder
Made 4 new 60' dock lines out of old running rigging
Made 12 new spears for our hawaian slings
Fabricated and welded in new rear cockpit bars that tie both pushpits together
Balanced the blades of death and installed a third stay to cut down on vibration
Finished installing no-seeum screens in all our windows
Made a new screen door for the cockpit
Installed controls at the helm for our MP3 player
Fixed the furling mechanism on the head sail - no more jams !
Assembled and installed the new ferret megaplex condo
Augmented our dive gear with gloves and weights
Scrubbed, licked (ferrets only), or polished every corner of the boat
Re-sealed 2 deck hatches that were leaking
Replaced the deck lights and the mast head anchor light
Wow, when you put it that way I feel like I've been kind of busy. No wonder we are still here. During the past
three months we also found time to visit with our families and stuff. We made several trips to the great white
north (Maryland) to visit my parental units. Oddly enough, these trips coincided exactly with when I needed access
to my brother in laws machine shop in order to build something for the boat. Go figure.
In other news someone has secretly replaced Milo our ferret with Foldgers Instant Crystals. (I loved those
commercials) Actually Milo has begun to resemble a large, bulbous groundhog. As supporting evidence at right will
show, Milo is in fact a bonafide fat ass. I called Jenny Craig, but she said she was busy with Oprah until
next month, so we are pretty much on our own.
We stopped at a Sam's Club type store last week and bought the usual assortment of 128 rolls of toilet paper,
64 things of paper towels and 50 lbs of rice. I think we did a much better job of provisioning this time around
being that we had last years notes. We also only spent 1/4 as much ! Sweeeet!
We are both anxious to get back underway. The stop here has been fun, but it's time to move on. The rest of
the crew promised to start making frequent log entries as soon as we are back under way andas a result I will
resume updating the site every week.
Stay in touch and stay tuned for Bahamas Year 2.
| 
Logs
