Oriental, NC

Dreary day today on the creek....calm and warm!

The headless man!  Duane's very busy with the new battery system.   I'm just doing boat chores, not much else happening!

Oriental, NC

Saw a couple of Canada geese walking along the shoreline.  Kindof odd, I've never seen them here before.

And we heard a huge splash - went for a walk to see the source.  Ended up being 2 large dolphins meandering between the docks, hitting their tails on the water as they surfaced.  Didn't manage a photo since they are just above water for a split second, but got a good view of What If and Sojourn!

Stay cool today, record heat in store!

Oriental, NC

Duane's been very busy designing our new lithium battery system.  Lots and lots of parts, wires and controllers.  Still waiting on some major parts, but in the next month or so, these heavy old batteries will be history!

Oriental, NC

The sunshade is finally finished after what seemed like hundreds of assembly dry runs.





For those of you who are interested in the construction, we opted to sew on webbing straps instead of using bungie cords like a lot of folks.  I just hated the though of figuring out which-bungie-goes-where each time it's deployed.

The front is secured with a short piece of webbing and a DOT Common Sense fastener looped around the jib halyard.

And the two sides are joined at the mast using the DOT fasteners and webbing passed thru under the sail/sailbag.

And the spreader cable was handled with a pocket using sunbrella binding.

Pretty pleased with it! Hope to get lots of shade in the future! A shady view from inside the cockpit.

Oriental, NC

Forgot to mention yesterday - our neighbor has a raised bed garden.  She brought me these lovely veggies.  So sweet.

And these little birdies visited our boat during one of the many rainstorms.   Odd to see them just sitting there, waiting out the rain.....

Oriental, NC

There is a few days of solid rain in the forecast, so we decided we'd better zip over to the other lot and do some mowing.  It was a little grown-over since it's been more than a month since we mowed it last.

A few hours later.  One of these days we'll have to cut up the old dead tree and pile it up....

I had brought our gas-powered weed-eater this time from home.  My little electric one my mom gave me years ago is great for the lot where the boat is - but this required some heavy duty action.

All cleaned up.  (These stump piles are left-over from Hurricane Florence damage.)

And the rest of the day was like this, back at the boat!

Oriental, NC

Pretty and calm on the creek this morning.

We raised the mainsail to install these "tell tales".  

4 on each side (the starboard side are green, of course).  These help tell us that the sail is trimmed properly in the wind.

I had a hankering for cheesecake.   I think I'll add a small springform pan to my galley.  The cake was good but hard to remove from this crockery dish.

Oriental, NC

Continuing with the sunshade saga, we spent a good part of the day designing and sewing the attachments.


First I had to make an opening for each of the support cables at the mast.  I just used some leftover sunbrella binding to finish this area.

And we made quite a few straps with DOT Common Sense twist fasteners to hold the two sides together thru the boom.

This is what the opening looks like with the cable running thru.  You can see one of the twist fasteners in action too.

And this is as far as we got.  We did not have enough strapping, so we had to quit for a couple of days until Amazon brings the next batch of webbing and fasteners.  It will be Wednesday before we can do more.

Oriental, NC

We spent July 4th busy, busy! 

I had ordered fabric to make a sunshade like the one on What If.

It's basically a rectangle held in place by bungie cords.  Cathy made hers in two runs - the tan was the first attempt and the green was added on later because she wanted it to be larger.  This covers the entire salon area, vastly reducing the head load from the sun.   (Only used while at the dock or at anchor).

I rolled out the 10 yards of heavy fabric on the dock.

Measured and cut it into 4 equal pieces.

I won't bore you with details, but then we spent the next several hours hemming and finishing the edges, making two equal large rectangles.  Enough for one day, tomorrow we'll do some fitting and adding reinforcements for all the grommets.  I was tired from handling the huge pieces of material for hours.  And I used 10 bobbins of thread!!   (I decided the white 92 UV bond thread from Sailrite would be OK in this situation since the shades won't be exposed 365 days a year since I like the look better than the more durable black thread).

It was time for our July 4th picnic.  The fire was fun to have but was very warm!!!  Luckily later in the evening a wonderful breeze came up and made it very pleasant even at 90 degrees.

Ended the day with our isolation buddies Ed and Cathy - and a great watermelon.  Nice and sweet.

Yeah, it was windy!  Hope you had a wonderful 4th!

Oriental, NC

We spent most of the day working with our "sailbag".   So the way the sailbag is designed, the "jacklines" pass thru two grommets and the lines are just tied at the bottom of the mast.  When the sail is raised, the sailbag just sortof collapses.  We don't like this - because when you drop the sail, it's just a big pile on top of the sailbag that you have to sort out.  Seems like a silly design.

So, we had to remove the sailbag to redesign it.  Plus we needed to do some other repairs anyway.  And did I say it's sunny and 90 degrees?  Not complaining.   Well, maybe a bit.

I didn't detail the process, but we basically made a loop out of heavy strapping material and sewed it on the inside of the sailbag.

So now the jackline passes thru the first grommet and is tied directly to the loop.  (The outline of the strap is the black rectangle you see.   This keeps the sailbag taut and the sail will drop into the now-more-open pocket.

Plus we repaired some other areas including replacing some strapping and re-stitching a lot of repairs we made last year.....the thread I used was not as UV resistant as I'd hoped - borrowed some really good  thread from Cathy - hopefully these repairs will last several years in the constant sun.  And I'm really loving the new Monster Wheel on my sewing machine.  Easily sewed thru many layers of sunbrella and webbing.

And after a yummy dinner on What If, it was time to drive to Oriental for fireworks!!! 

We parked at Pecan Grove and had front row seats all to ourselves for the firework show. 

I'll just include a few shots for your enjoyment.  Hope you have a happy July 4th!

Oriental, NC

Beautiful days down on the creek - a bit warm though!  Luckily there has been a breeze parts of most days.

Dinner was on Sojourn - just salad and mushroom tortellini in vodka sauce, so I needed breadsticks of course.  So easy and wonderful!

Our standard 2 games of "isolation Hearts" with Ed and Cathy and an early night!

Oriental, NC

The boat looks odd without the jib.....I've got all the sunshields out to try to minimize the heat in the boat.  (Just want to help the a/c units not work so hard!)

Our sunshields are small in comparison to What If's - they have lots of shade!   I've got fabric ordered to fashion a similar tarp for Sojourn.  Hopefully will be a quick project.  Fabric to arrive on Monday.

Oriental, NC

The teak looks nice now.

And since it's oil, not varnish, all I should have to do is wipe on more oil occasionally to keep it looking nice.