Monday Morning (says it all)

As is often the case there was a bit of drama in the sky over Kaneohe Bay just before dawn. The cloud in the photo exploded into existence and was gone in a matter of minutes.

The main task for the day was to (endlich) finish installing the new wiring harness on the engine and connecting it up to the new engine panel. I actually managed to get that done (in fits and starts) before the day was done. The problems were nothing special, just the well known domino effect.

At one point I found a wire that wasn't connected to anything. So, I decided to trace it back. That was going to be impossible without removing it. So,what the heck, I decided to remove it. After spending the next hour or so in many dirty, awkward and uncomfortable positions I finally located the other end of the wire. It was connected to an unlabeled switch which was protected by a fuse that had been removed.

In the course of pursuing this odyssey I uncovered one of the battery banks and discovered that the water level in the batteries was low. So, of course, I interrupted the wire pulling that had interrupted the engine rewiring to fill the batteries. That project, in turn, had to be interrupted to go and buy some distilled water because the onboard supply had slipped away.

Which brings us to the next photo. Here you see the reason that I had to make a trip to the store for distilled water. The bottle of water that I had stored on the boat for just such an event had disintegrated. Simply died of old age. So, be cautious if you have water set aside somewhere for emergencies. When you need to use you might be in for a nasty surprise. At least, on the boat, the leaking water didn't do any damage. It just ran into the bilge and was pumped overboard.

Somewhere along the way all these projects got finished and the boat doctor's attention turned to the bow running lights that were not functioning. It was back to the Sherlock Holmes approach with volt meter in hand but some pretty awkward places to work up in the bow. Without Ric's help I had to go back and forth between the control panel at the nav station and the bow about a dozen times. (Not really suitable activity for someone who ought to be in an old folk's home playing checkers.) Some of the wiring was left over from when the boat was built and it runs inside a tube in the fiberglass that is not accessible. I have a couple spare breakers on an auxiliary power panel by the sink in the forward compartment, so, when I got fed up with fooling around with the meters and old wires, I just rewired the light from scratch. And that takes care of that.

As an aside let me mention that I hit my head pretty seriously on a metal fitting on the overhead in the extreme forward bow compartment. It hurt, but I tried to ignore it because I was busy and had my hands full at the time. Then I forgot about it. It wasn't until much later in the day (after getting someone to help me put up the mast ladder, after talking to a couple other boat owners, after doing some shopping on the way home) that I finally saw myself in the bathroom mirror at home. There was a gash across my forehead and dried blood running down my cheek that I had been unaware of.  I might have been arrested for frightening children (and small animals).