Moving aboard

The boat is back in the water with fresh bottom paint looking good.  Now it is time to start the painful process of moving aboard.  I say painful not because I'm not looking forward to living on the boat, but because moving is always a pain, and when you try an shoehorn all the trappings of life ashore into a space roughly the size of your closet you need to make some tough choices about what you need and don't need.  i'm finding that I am continually asking myself, "how did I end up with all this shit?".  Fortunately I have a storage unit to handle some of the overflow, but that has a bunch of crap in it already.  I think the plan is, since I have to be out of the apartment by the end of the day tomorrow,  to put everything from the apartment into my Chevy trailblazer and gradually move what I need onto the boat over the weekend.  This should work since most of the furniture and large items came with the apartment and I've already done several rounds of tossing out/giving away stuff I really don't need.  After a few weeks on the boat, I should have a good idea of what I want to keep, and what takes up more space than its worth.

In reality, the Westsail has a tremendous amount of storage space for a 32 foot boat, and the previous owner lived aboard with his wife and 2 kids.  I cant imagine where they kept everything, but I guess you learn to live with less stuff,  a skill I will be trying to acquire over the next few months.........

Boatyard time

Friday morning around Dawn, I brought the boat over to the boat yard for Haul out with my friend Pauly. We had a nice ride over watching the sunrise and tied up at the work dock at Independent Boatyard at about quarter to eight (we had to be there by 8:30).  After signing in, the yard hauled Valkyrie first thing which was nice because sometimes you have to wait for hours if there are other boats.  Really I had planned on the whole process taking longer so I ended up taking it easy for the rest of the day and getting everything together for Saturday morning.

I started sanding early Saturday morning and and as I thought, the bottom was in good shape and it only took about 3 hours to sand the entire boat.  After lunch, I put the first coat on and the boat started looking really nice.  Sunday I put a second coat on and then inspected all the seacocks which were in good condition.  in climbing around in the engine room, I discovered the nuts on the battery terminals for the starting battery were very loose which is probably what caused the difficulty starting on Friday morning.  we'll see when we get back in the water.

Well, Friday is the day.  The boat is finally coming out of the water for paint.  I haven't gotten a lot done the last week because I was busy with work, and sailing on the weekends, but the time has come.  Friday morning I have to bring the boat around to Independent Boatyard, about an hour trip, and hopefully they'll haul the boat first thing.  Today I let the engine run for a while and checked to see how much fuel was in the tanks, about half full.  The one somewhat disturbing thing is that the engine doesn't seem to want to start with the starting battery alone, in fact it doesn't even begin to turn over..  When I parallel it with the house bank, it starts right up without any trouble.  I have a strong suspicion that the starting battery is nearing the end of its useful life.