The fun part of life in the boat yard is meeting other boaters, discussing plans, sharing meals and helping each other with car rides and technical problems. The downside is that boat yards are dirty, not all the people are your friends and that you are not out cruising yet. We met several couples whom we would spend time with on the water as we moved south. We had discussions about who would launch first, Ed thinking that of the four boats with similar time-frames we would be last by several days.
Working and living on a boat simultaneously is challenging especially when one person is attempting to organize and clean while the other needs access to boat spaces, tools are out constantly and some amount of debris is being made. Also, a boat needs a lot of cleaning to remove mildew after a hot-humid Georgia summer. Practically speaking, this means that the cleaning and organizing has to wait.
The most unexpected job this year was replacing the sewage lines for the toilets. Ed started to install a macerator (a macerator grinds and pumps out sewage from a holding tank out at sea) and found that the toilet lines were nearly plugged with calcium build-up. This added about three days of work and resulted in sore shoulders and bruises as Ed worked to remove the old and install the new.
Ann painted the bottom of the boat this year on December 15th and we launched on December 20th. No more night trips down the ladder to the bathroom and back! Of the four boats, Duet, Pea Soup, Wild Iris and us we ended up being the first because they mostly ended up with more unexpected jobs than us. Ed sold 10 feet of unused septic hose ($8 per foot) to Wild Iris because they had a problem. It is great to go in the water and leave the boat yard behind, at least physically.
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