A job well done

I’ve been working against the incessant rain to get the anchor remounted.  We’re going to Anacortes next weekend for Trawlerfest and I’m vain enough to want the boat looking as good as possible.  I love the look of our new Sarca but the mount left something to be desired until this morning.

Initially I planned a search of the various second hand stores in the vicinity and on the mainland because bow rollers heavy enough to mount the new anchor are not cheap.  Then I added up what the search was likely to cost – its over 100 bucks round trip to go to the mainland where the best stores are – and I quickly raised my budget for a new bow roller.  I made a trip to Nanaimo, stumbled onto an incredible chandler on the waterfront and ended up coming home with a stainless steel bow roller with a nylon roller.  I think the roller is maybe a little light for our purposes but if/when it fails I’ll replace it with something more substantial.  The bracket itself is pretty well exactly what I wanted and it was all lying on the shelf in Nanaimo for a mere 1/4 of a boat unit.

Today the epoxy that I applied yesterday was cured enough to drill again.  I like using the West System slow hardener because the ultimate strength of the epoxy is higher if it cures slowly but in this miserable weather its awful tempting to use the fast hardener because the weather pretty well guarantees a slow cure either way.  Eventually I’d like to coat the teak in the bow pulpit with West System using clear hardener but there’s no way I’m going to even try that until the weather smartens up.

The biggest challenge of the installation was to conjure up a tie down mechanism that looked good and was secure.  I’m not 100% happy with the appearance of the tie down for the CQR but it will do until I come up with something better.  The biggest consideration for the CQR mount (aside from appearances and security) was to keep it out of the way when we deploy the new anchor.  Now that the windlass is working the way Chuck said it would the chain runs out pretty fast.  Its actually kind of cool to watch and hear it go out but its going fast enough that I don’t want it to get hung up on the old anchor when its really flying out.

The new bracket came with a storage pin which required drilling the new anchor to accept the pin.  That only cost me one drill bit so it could have been worse.  All in all I’m pretty satisfied with the appearance and it won’t shame us when we open the boat to trawler-crawl in Anacortes. 

I did some hard drive housecleaning and discovered the following two pictures of prawns.  I continue to be amazed by how easy the little devils are to catch.  A sink full of prawns pretty well sums up how we have been catching them.

   

The one on the right is the finished product after I pulled all their little heads off.  Actually their heads aren’t so little so the pile is quite a bit smaller but still pretty impressive.

The prawn fishery is supposed to be in very good shape.  I hope so because the commercial guys are out there now trying to harvest all the little buggers.