The offseason work begins.

Just because Pegu Club is out of the water doesn’t mean that we won’t see her again until the spring.  On the contrary – we have plenty of off-season projects planned, and not a lot of time to get cracking until the winter really sets in.

Although the weather has been conspiring against us, we’ve managed to get down to the boat a few times since Pegu Club was hauled out.  The first order of business was to take everything out of the boat so it could be stored in our basement.  And I mean virtually everything: cushions, dishes, pots and pans, lines, sails, winches, the battery, flares, lifejackets, solar panel, etc.  You get the idea.  It did go more quickly this year, however, because we didn’t have to take a bunch of pictures so that we could remember in the spring how everything had been set up.  Not that we won’t still need the pictures.  We’ll just be able to use the old ones again.

Once that was done we gave her a well-deserved bath, scraped the barnacles off of the keel and the propeller, cleaned up the waterline, and polished all of the stainless.  Then it was time to really get started: the first off-season project.

Our first priority is to replace the sink drain seacock.  We discovered at the beginning of our first season that this seacock was weeping.  After some initial hyperventilating, obsessing, and quizzing every boater we knew as to whether we should haul the boat out of the water, we relaxed, closed the seacock, and put a bucket in the sink to do the dishes in.  During the off-season we lapped the seacock, crossed our fingers, and promptly discovered at the beginning of the second season that it was still weeping.  A bit less hyperventilating this time.  The bucket remained in the sink, and replacing the seacock moved to the top of the off-season list.

We did our research, including posting on the Bristol Yahoo group and reading the appropriate section of “This Old Boat” by Don Casey, and went to work.  Jeff did yeoman’s work trying to remove the seacock from the inside, but dynamite wasn’t going to get that thing to budge.  We were going to have to go through the thru hull.  The UPS man delivered a Dremel to the house via Amazon, and we went back the following weekend for a second try.

Jeff busted out the Dremel, took a deep breath, and started cutting.

It went much more quickly than we anticipated, and before we knew it the thru hull popped out, the seacock was off, and we had a hole in the boat.

It was a gorgeous day and frankly, if we had known it was going to go that quickly we would have been better prepared to keep working.  Unfortunately, this was all we had planned for the day and it was in the lower 60’s.  We are going to regret this missed opportunity when we’re working outside with temperatures in the 30’s and 40’s.

Back at home, we’ve been researching what seacock we want (Groco), what kind of backing block we want to use (Groco rather than wood), whether to drill the screws through the hull (no), and how to attach the backing plate (still undecided).  We’ve been reminding ourselves that once we’ve finished this, future seacock replacement will go much more quickly!