Been dived

I decided I should get Terry-the-diver over before I leave for the prairies.  I didn’t think I had any problems but that’s part of the reason why you hire a diver – because you just don’t know for sure.

So yesterday Terry showed up after he closed the dive shop for the day.  As I expected he didn’t find much of note.  He said the bottom was pretty well clean, including the props.  That’s good news because I want to get at least 2 years on the last haulout and it would be great to go three years.  He changed the bow thruster zinc but it was less than 1/2 consumed which means it would have easily gone 6 months.  That’s my new goal for it.  For some reason it still gets consumed faster than I would like to see but I can live with 6 months.  We still had 3 shaft zincs on each shaft.  I normally like to have two per shaft – one that is well eroded and one that is “new”.  We must have thought that the eroded ones were nearly gone last October and added a new one to each shaft but evidently the eroded ones had more life left than we thought.

I think we’ve got a pretty hot boat next to us.  Not “hot” in any positive sense either.  Hot in the sense that it is fairly electrically active and under-zinced.  Whenever it is plugged into shore power our zinc consumption goes way up but lately it hasn’t been plugged in.  That’s a good thing but there’s no telling when that boat’s haphazard management will decide to plug it in again. 

My two recent trips to Vancouver likely helped keep the bottom and the props clean.  That and the colder winter waters.  The worst conditions for bottom growth are warm water and an idle boat.  Since ours typically sits idle during the warmest months that is a negative for us but we’ll try to use it again before summer. 

The other big project for yesterday was bottling a couple of batches of wine and a batch of port.  We split the carboy of port 3 ways and made some “regular” port plus some raspberry and some blackberry flavoured.  Its pretty damn good if I do say so myself.  We conveniently couldn’t get it all to fit evenly into the bottles so I had to force myself to drink the leftovers last night.  The leftovers were raspberry flavoured so I fear I may have to open one of the other flavours tonight in the interest of ensuring that it is also drinkable.  It would be a terrible shame to store it and then open it for company only to discover that it isn’t very good.  I think I should make the sacrifice to ensure that doesn’t happen.  No sacrifice is too great etc etc