Well, I’m not dead yet…

Life as it is today, is a very different thing than it used to be. COVID 19 has up-ended the world and put the boots to most everything in lives we once pretty much took for granted. Our club is located in a public park, and getting access has been a nightmare. Since SD came out of the water in the fall of 2019, I’ve seen her 4 times. Each time was a blitz to get something vital done, and then back into lock down. Our 2020 season was truncated, launching in mid summer and out again a month earlier than normal. We only had about 40% of our fleet in the water. This year, we just finished launching, the majority are in. Masts are laid out and being prepped, they start stepping next weekend.

I am the only one working from the office now, everyone else is working from home. They like being there, I love being alone in a huge building. I finally get to listen to MY music. The job has slowed down, the volume of work is down about 75%. Some days it’s hard to stay awake. My home life hasn’t changed much, didn’t have a social life to speak of even before COVID messed up everything. Aside from work, I go shopping once a week and the rest of the time off duty is spent writing, and playing online games. Lots of time playing games. I had 4 weeks off in April, wanted to get started on SD as the restrictions were lifting. BOOM. Locked down again. So I ended up putting something like 300 hours into one particular survival game, Valheim. (I love it, best one I’ve ever played so far).

Back to the boat. I am staying out this year, and retirement is looming. I was planning on being a free man by last October, but our contract expired, and the company usually gets rid of a bunch of people by offering packages. Still waiting on that, but I expect it will come soon. Once that happens, I want to get my butt down to the boat and get cracking. Whether COVID lets me remains to be seen. Personally, I think we will see an endless stream of variants. Seems like every time we think it’s receding, we read of another one hitting somewhere else. I deal with a lot of help desks in India, the people I talk to are scared silly. So the logical side of me says it is here to stay in one form or another. Time will tell that tale.

Once I actually get back to it, the first concern is finding out why my engine will not run for more than a couple of minutes before she dies of fuel starvation. Time for a thorough systems check. I suspect it’s either a blocked vent or a air leak I haven’t found yet. A possibility of some dirt in the new fuel tank exists but there is no way to clean the tank out as it is a welded aluminum tank with no access panel. I expect to find out soon enough.

The next thing is to get going on the DC electrical system. All I have right now is the starter battery for the engine. The house battery is in place but nothing exists beyond that. I had started on building the housing for the panel, roughed out using the most amazingly crappy plywood I’ve ever seen. As I’d mentioned before, the difference between materials in 1978 and now is staggering. Today you don’t get “wood”, they only sell “crap wood”. Where plywood used to be multiple layers, good on both sides, and glued with water proof glue, now you get splintered crap, knots, 3 plys instead 5 or 7, and glue that disintegrates at the mere sight of water. So I’m using the crap to make templates of everything, and will at some point, put in real mahogany plywood. The electrical system is designed, now it’s time to turn paper dreams into physical systems.

The list of things goes on and on, but as I said, Freedom looms.