July 16, 2011.

The last 7 days have been a roller coaster of a week.

Bess and Bill stopped in for an evening of dominoes and some fine coconut rum sippin’.

It’s been several months since we’ve dusted off the dominoes, so it was a lot of fun, >>>>KoKoMo, Christy kicked ass. Then on Sunday we finally met Greg & Lynn of S/V Paperbird. They’ve just become the owners of a sister ship to our Veranda. They bought the boat in Texas and had it shipped to their home waters here in Annapolis. We arranged to get together so they could see what changes we’ve made to make the Veranda more livable.

After 2 hours on our boat they took us out for lunch and then we headed over and spent a couple of hours exploring their “new to them” Pearson 422. They’ve got 2 years to chip away at their list of repairs and upgrades as they prepare to cast off and head south. It was great to meet them and we look forward to seeing them on the water.

The Savages are back from Maine so we got to spend some time hanging around with them. So the roller coaster definitely had some highs……and then there was the Achilles.

The Achilles is a big SeaRay type powerboat. It turns out that even if you’re going really, really fast you still need enough water for the boat to float. The math works out that if you draw 3 feet of water then you need to be in MORE than 3 feet of water to properly operate the vessel. So the rule of thumb is that the water depth has to be greater than the vessels draft. Surprisingly enough this presents a challenge to more boaters than you’d expect.

When a sailboat bumps the bottom they find the bottom with their keel. Generally, its no harm no foul, they sit there until they “unbump” themselves and continue on their merry way. Power vessels generally find the bottom with their delicate moving bits like the propeller or rudder. This usually results in job security for people in the marine repair industry.

I was tasked with removing both of “Achilles” propeller shafts as they were pretty twisted after an unfortunate combination of a lack of math skills and a short attention span by the helmsman. The cramped conditions made removal a nightmare and Oh Look! they're v-drives. It literally took me 2 full minutes to step down from the deck and worm my way into position behind either engine. It took me about 15 hours of ass busting work to finally get both shafts out. The majority of that time was on the starboard shaft which I ended up having to cut out.

When I got home from work last Thursday Christy told me that since the Savages had gone sailing for a long weekend and she had the use of their minivan and that she wanted to drive up to Ithaca, NY to see Ashlee, the youngest girlchild. I didn’t realize that Ithaca was in my plans for the weekend and it turned out that it wasn’t. Since Christy had Friday off she wanted to leave early on Friday. Since I was working on Friday, that left me with a different kind of formula to cipher. Bill’s working until Friday evening + Christy being on the road early Friday = Bill’s not invited….Fine. Chick thing.

So Tucker and I puttered around the boat on Saturday. At least I got to watch the US Womens National Team play Japan in the Woman’s World Cup final on Sunday……Crap. Talk about your rollercoaster.