Home At Last

Here's a couple pictures of the newly minted Mistral. After a week on the hard, we splashed the boat and did a whirl of work to get her safely down the ship canal to The Center for Wooden Boats.
Highlights:
-- The bilge quickly filled with water and the pump didn't work. I had to prime the pump a few times by putting it in a bucket of water up high. How do you spell relief? G-u-r-g-l-e, as in the gurgle of a pumping bilge pump.
-- The propeller shaft got hot after only 100 yards and a paste came out of the stuffing box. Erik Nielsen and I tied to a pier and I started getting ready to overhaul it on the fly but then realized it was dripping water, a sign that it just needed to get a little wet to stay cool.
-- The Center had hardly any dock space so we risked losing new, soft paint to a couple chafing fenders. Greg Reed, dockmeister and soon-to-be Mistral haberdasher, cleared the way for the lovely and paint-protecting arrangement above.
Thanks to Erik Nielsen for piping up to help this morning and putting up with the nervous and recalcitrant skipper. Thanks too to the Seaview East Boat Yard. Ditto to Dave Erskine, Mistral mechanic extraordinaire, who tweaked the idle when we got back and hopefully solved our fouling plugs problem.
It's clear sailing, with some semi-gloss polyurethane thrown in for looks, from here on in. Duck Dodge Tuesday night