Have you heard the saying “everything on your boat is broken, you just don’t know it yet”? I have said here before, you have to love working on a boat to own one – otherwise you will drown in all the maintenance. This weekend we took on our “small jobs” list and managed to get quite a few completed. The boat had 12v in the forepeak, but it was an unusual plug and we couldn’t find adapters to fit; so Magnus decided to switch to standard USB connectors instead. That meant of course some wiring, a little drilling, and even making small changes to prior installations. We talked about the quality of the job he would do, and agreed that “This is Lulu” – meaning it has to be high quality to match the existing high quality. Thus it took about 7 hours to complete just the USB ports. But now we have USB connections on both sides of the bed (“his and hers”) which means that life is just that much more comfortable onboard.
This doesn’t mean that Lulu hasn’t been well maintained – to the contrary she is in absolutely fabulous shape and we are thankful every day that we got to be her new owners. But a boat needs continuous maintenance. And that is just the small job list – there is a list of bigger jobs (like install our new watermaker – but we won’t do that until next spring) which is connected to big ticket items. And some jobs lead to more jobs – either because the problem didn’t get solved, some new problem was discovered or because something went wrong. We are still trying to figure out if we can make it easier to haul out the mainsail – we have greased the wheels on the little car that runs in the boom and took Lulu out for a test sail yesterday working on hauling in and out the mainsail with slight changes in variables to see if it made any difference. No change, we might just ask Seldén for help.
