Maybe our last day in P.A.

It doesn’t feel like we accomplished much today.  We should be back in the water but the Travelift was tied up all day with a boat that launched yesterday and came back this morning.  It’s owner ran it hard into a rock, so hard that it bounced back according to the report we got.  Then he took it offshore to fish for a while with a busted bulbous bow and damaged keel coolers.  So when they got here the refit was pretty major.  And when you do that much work there’s bound to be one or two things slip through.  They left it in the slings this morning because it was clearly just going to be a quick trip but at 5:00 it was still hanging there.  They did finally get it in the water and I took some video of the launch. 

There’s no way I can take video footage of our own launch so if you want to see what happens, this is as good as I can do. 

Marilyn spent the morning finishing up polishing the shafts – they look really shiny now.  I changed a couple of zincs but I talked myself out of doing them all.  We have so much zinc hanging on this boat that each individual anode doesn’t erode very quickly.  I changed one of the three big plate zincs just because it seemed like I should put a new one on but I think the one I took off weighed more than half of what the new one did.  The old plate zincs were on the boat when we bought it so they were likely good for a year or maybe two more. 

I had a little discussion with our project manager about our invoice when it showed up.  He had no way of knowing that I trained in the farmer school of “grind the bill until the owner drips blood.”  In fairness to me though I wasn’t grinding them for recreation the way a few of my customers used to enjoy doing it to me.  In our case we had an estimate for the work and there were a couple of items on the invoice that were so far from the estimate as to be unrecognizable.  In the end we arrived at a fair, mutually agreeable solution which is more than I can say for the outcomes of some of the invoice reductions I have endured from the other side of the counter.

The Travelift is empty tonight but I don’t expect to be the first launch in the morning.  I really have no idea when we may get in the water.  We’ve agreed that unless we launch before noon we will stay one more night in the marina.  We’ve got a couple of medium long days to get from here to Seattle so we don’t want to set out late in the day.