Sunny day in Cow Bay

OK …………. it’s not completely blue sky and sunshine but it’s about as close as it gets out here.  You can see some blue in the sky and you can tell where the sun is.  For the left coast that qualifies as a sunny day.

It’s nice enough that I’m getting serious about getting the flybridge ready so we can operate from “up top”.  Over the weekend we opened up the bimini for the first time ever.  We had peeked inside the canvas cover, satisfied ourselves that the bimini was in there and agreed that it was likely unusable before we made an offer on the boat.  Since that time we had completely ignored its existence but on Saturday I opened it up and wonder of wonders it is actually usable.  I took it off and ran it through a wash cycle with a lot of bleach.  That reduced the size of most of the mildew spots.  Then I reinstalled it wet because we were afraid it would never stretch to fit if I dried it first.  Now that it has sat in the (rare) sunshine for a couple of days the mildew spots are fading further to the point where it looks generally white. 

There’s still a couple of issues with operating from the flybridge – one major and the rest more in the category of irritants.  I doubt that anyone has actually operated the boat from up there since Chuck sold her 13 years ago.  The dashboard that holds the instruments is a piece of 1/4’ used-to-be-plywood.  It will have to be replaced and I’m not looking forward to that project – many holes to saw and a lot of wires to unhook and re-hook.  The show stopper right now is the lack of a depth sounder.  There’s one up there but it doesn’t work and I can’t make it work despite my efforts in that regard.  Yesterday I phoned Waypoint Marine in Sidney and ordered a cheapo depth-only sounder.  Today I’ll drive over there to pick it up and then I’ll have to go through the contortions to run the cable from the engine room to the flybridge in order to hook it up.  Then we’ll probably use the flybridge until the instrument panel becomes such an annoyance that I finally get around to fixing it as well.

This week Marilyn has her first open water dive on Saturday, assuming she passes the test Wednesday night.  The dive is in Maple Bay and we are also booked to attend a dinner theatre cruise to Chemainus Saturday night.  I’ll probably take the boat to pick her up in Maple Bay and then we’ll carry on to Chemainus.  The dinner theatre is a yacht club event and they are also planning to anchor out in Montague Harbor on Friday night.  We’ll join them there  so we’ve got a busy weekend coming up.  The rest of the group will convoy from Montague to Chemainus but we’ll have to take a slight detour.