October 25, 2011.

I was up at the shop by 0700 and told them that I needed to take care of my prop and would punch in later, they were cool with that so I got started.

I removed the non spinning spinner and headed up to the shop. I degreased everything and carefully inspected the bearing surfaces for scratches, burrs and any other anomaly that I could find. I did find a tiny dent and polished it out. Then it was back down to the boat to reassemble the unit. Once again it bound up tight, as I seated the last 2 bolts.

I painted the inside surfaces with Dychem Blue. I reassembled everything and once I pulled it all back apart I could see from transference of the blue dye exactly where the parts were binding. Then it was trial and error as I repeatedly polished away the dye and a bit o' metal in an effort to alleviate the binding.

Removing too much metal would make the whole refurbishing all for naught, so it was polish, assemble, attempt to spin, rinse, lather, repeat. After the first few attempts I could start to see a difference. It was still way too tight but there was definite progress.

After close to 4 hours I was satisfied that things were as they should be. I put the blades on and everything moved pretty smoothly. Cool. About time.

Then I sanded the shaft and put on a shaft zinc. Next up was the zinc that PYI supplied for the prop. When I flipped it over I thought I had picked up an old zinc. It was horribly corroded.

I've seen zincs come out of the water in better condition than this one. One side looked fairly clean and new while the back face was shitty. I mean, seriously, where do they store their zincs, at the bottom of the ocean? So it was another trip back up to the shop to clean up the face of the zinc.

Once both zincs were installed I applied a couple of coats of anti-fouling paint to the prop and shaft. The travel lift picked us up and while we were hanging in the slings I painted the jack stand pad spots.

While that dried, I compounded and waxed the bow sections that had been hanging out over the water while we were on the hard.

The boat was finally ready and after moving a few boats to make room we were once again back in the water. The wind genny is up, the backstay is tight, Christy washed the decks and as of Thursday evening the Veranda will be officially southbound.

And it only took all freaking day....