Holly and Swing Set Both Get Some Attention

  Boating season is under way on the Alton Pool of the Mississippi. The water is on at the docks at the Duck Club Yacht Club where Swing Set is berthed, so boat owners were out over the weekend and the winter dirt and spring pollen was being spritzed off of a lot of boats on Saturday.
  Swing Set got a bath on Wednesday of last week, so Rosie and I were able to address some other chores on Saturday that we'd been putting off until the weather broke. But first, I need to back up to Friday. I picked up Rosie from work on Friday evening and we got to the boat around 6 P.M. after a pit stop at the IGA. Holly sat on Rosie's lap and barked at customers while I did a drive by shopping stint for enough food to get us through the weekend.
  After bringing another carload of stuff aboard, I asked Rosie how she liked the job I did installing some hanging shelves in the main cedar locker in the master stateroom. "I don't like it." was the short response I received. I re-evaluated the installation and realized that Rosie was right. I had hung the shelves in the widest side of the locker which left no room to hang stuff on the other side. I got my screw gun out, and while dinner was warming up, I made the switch and we were all happy. I admitted that I didn't know what I was thinking at the time, except my mind has been on bigger fish.
  After a dinner of beef stew over egg noodles, we did a few more chores and then we watched our first movie on the boat using our Roku box, streaming movies via the WiFi at the Duck Club. Nifty. We'll be able to view free movies wherever we find a WiFi hotspot, and we'll change our Netflix account from DVD rental to the instant movie program for about $8 per month.
  We got to bed early and slept like logs until the late hour of 8 A.M. That's late for us without the help of our friend Bud Light. Rosie got the coffee going and thus started a filling breakfast while I tended to the job of giving Holly some early morning attention. Before I get too carried away, I have to show you this picture of Holly in her "stateroom". Our friends on facebook have seen this picture already, but some of my blog readers haven't.

  Being part terrier, Holly has discovered the joys of burrowing and gets thus engaged at any opportunity. Those two pinpoints of light are her eyeballs peering out from under her bed.
I took this picture a week ago and was showing it to everyone and was charged with being obsessed with the dog. Yep, guilty.
  Once my scrambled eggs, hashbrowns, bacon, bagel, and two cups of coffee were stowed away safely in my innards, I set to work on my mission for the day which was to install our water maker. The components of our Katadyn water maker have been setting patiently on the floor of the salon since December and it was time to get them put where they belonged.
  Earlier in the week, I had been going over my installation plans mentally and I had a clear vision of how I wanted things to progress and I only encountered one misstep. My setback was minor once I became aware of the beauty of drilling proper pilot holes and it was smoooooth sailing all the way after that.

The Mini-Celebrity

  Holly and I went up to the boat yesterday as planned, but the work I had intended to do didn't happen. Working on a boat is like chess, sometimes you don't make a move for hours.

  Once I got there and got her settled in her "stateroom", I went below to contemplate my strategy to rearrange some equipment in the engine room. I keep an old milk crate down there, as there isn't much headroom to stand, but plenty of head room to sit, and sitting on the milk crate to wonder what to do next is the easiest thing to do in the engine room.

  Considering that Swing Set is getting hauled out for bottom paint soon, I decided that to start taking things apart right at this point would not be in our best interest, especially since I didn't want to be working on the boat while it was at the boatyard and we were going to have a survey done before relaunching. Plus the work I needed to do involved taking the exhaust apart on the starboard engine. I didn't want to take it apart and then have to reassemble it for the drive to Polestar Harbor before the work was done.

  I did get it straight in my mind as to how I was going to approach the relocation of our water pumps and accumulator tank once I began the work. "Gettin' my mind right" is a big part of the process any time work like this is involved, and it's time consuming. Nowadays it takes a stint on the couch with Holly in my lap as I ponder any given problem.

  Once I finished tackling the issue of my equipment relocation, I realized all that thinking about work made me hungry. I put Holly back in her room and tackled a bologna sandwich. Feeling a little bit guilty about not having accomplished much for my morning, I got industrious and scooped Holly up for a game of fetch in the cockpit. Our game of fetch involved some lessons in negotiating the stairs to the flybridge for Holly. Those stairs are steep and the first one is the hardest but Holly just hopped up onto it right away. Her next attempt was not as successful and for her part, the lessons were done for the day. Any further fetching was to be done on the level areas of the boat.

List of Things To Do Gets Longer

  I thought that the closer we get to our planned departure the list of things that need to be done would get shorter but this doesn't seem to be the case.
  One of our boat neighbors strung together enough water hose over the weekend to run from the freeze proof faucet at the entrance to our dock all the way to the end where are boats are, so when I made a trip to the boat yesterday I had no excuse to not wash the boat for the first time this year. A "quickie" boat wash still takes close to two hours but drying was not a high priority with close to 30 M.P.H. wind gusts helping out with the blow drying.
  I began the de-winterizing process too by filling up the water tank and opening all the water outlets to chase the RV anti-freeze out of the lines. The proper way to "pickle" the water lines is to bypass the water tank altogether, but that method involves some equipment that I no longer own, so I used my older, less efficient technique which makes rinsing out the water tank more of a chore. During my rinse of the water lines I discovered that my #2 fresh water pump wouldn't run without tripping the breaker, and my primary pump would only run for a short time before it too would trip the breaker. That's the way I left things yesterday before I left the river to pick up Rosie from work, so I was able to tax my brainpan all last night as to the cause of my problem.
  Knowing that during the winterizing process last fall required running the water tank down to empty, my suspicion is that some debris in the bottom of the water tank has probably clogged up the strainers on the inlets of both pumps.
  Easy fix, right? Just clean out the strainers and I'm good to go. Well, yes and no. A few years ago my accumulator tank sprung a leak and needed to be replaced. The accumulator tank is an inline pressure tank that prevents the fresh water pumps from starting and stopping with every twist of the faucet handle. Think of it as a surge tank with a small volume. A quick hand rinse, or one toilet flush, usually won't make the pumps activate. The accumulator tank on our Sea Ray was installed at the factory on the starboard hull side, on the outboard side of the water heater, fuel filters, both water pumps and one battery. Think of this as a "remote location".
  A coincidental service appointment at the time prompted me to request that the tank be replaced since some nearby work on our trim tab pump had to be addressed. We got the boat back and I wasn't too thrilled to find that the accumulator tank had been relocated. The relocation resulted in a more accessible tank but put it in the way of some other equipment. I lived with this arrangement for a couple of years, but last year I relocated the tank again, but not to its original spot where a trained monkey would be needed to get to it, but still a better one.
  Now, this better spot put the tank in the way of a quick check of the inlets to the strainers on our fresh water pumps, something I knew when I did it, but I figured I could move the tank out of the way as needed. Yesterday I found first hand how one little mistake can snowball for you. I decided that a total revamp of this one area of the engine room was in order.
  I plan on installing our water maker next month when we move onto the boat and I can have all day to do the installation without interrupting my work to go home, or go drink beer. The watermaker installation will require some rerouting of water lines anyway, so I've decided to switch the accumulator tank and the water pump locations as the accumulator tank doesn't need the attention that the water pumps do. I'll have a report about this job as I go.
  Yesterday was not a complete bust though. I did get the boat washed as I said, and I completed the hookup of our Roku box. A Roku box is like an X-box, or other device that allows you to stream movies or T.V. shows from the Internet to your T.V. I hooked up the box last weekend, but was dead in the water when I went to try it out. I couldn't find the remote for it, and the remote is the only way to turn this device on and otherwise control it. I thought I had packed the remote with the rest of the Roku accessories when I unhooked it to take to the boat. I was ready to order another remote last night when I checked our video cabinet at home one more time to find it hiding way back in the corner of the cabinet, planning on an escape at a later time I guess.
  Once I got everything turned on and I entered the code to the local WiFi, I was able to access the Roku channels. Not only does Roku offer some free movies, we can watch Netflix instant movies too with a subscription. The key here is to be on a local WiFi network and not use the data transfer minutes on our MiFi device installed on Swing Set as two movies or so would eat up the 5 gigs of data transfer we get per month. AT&T brags about thousands of free WiFi hotspots all around the nation. We will see.
  Karl Kotraba came by and took inventory of some things I wanted him to replace when we get Swing Set back in the water from a new bottom painting we are getting done at Bloch Marine next week. We're getting a survey done for insurance purposes too, so we don't want the boat tore up for that.
  I also mounted a bracket to hold our new iPad on the bridge to use as a redundant chartplotter when we are in a 3G area, or WiFi for that matter. The bracket is made by RAM and is a solid mount with the ability to tilt and turn just about any way you'd want it too.
  Rosie had purchased some "hanging shelves" that I was able to stick into one of the lockers in the master stateroom. I'll find out next weekend if she likes my work.
  For now, I'm finishing up this blog post, gathering up Holly, dropping Rosie off at work, and heading to the boat to contemplate my next move to solve my water pump issues. We have to make ourselves scarce this afternoon so a real estate agent can show our condo again.
  It's getting to be crunch time.
  One last note, I don't know if one of our boating friends was being funny or trying to ruin my day last weekend when he reported diesel fuel at over $8 per gallon when he was down there recently, but I checked and price was still below $5. Our theory remains, the higher fuel gets, the more we sit at anchor between trips, hopefully at an AT&T hotspot.

The Spring That Wasn't

  My thoughts turned to Spring this morning as I was walking back from City Hall in downtown St. Louis in yet another effort to get all of our documents in order. The weather here, like in other parts of the country, is unseasonably warm, straight from winter to summer.
  This means that activity at our harbor is increasing, something I need to keep in mind. Swing Set is not de-winterized yet. We have been staying aboard most Saturday nights all winter and this means using "the bucket" for most toilet activities, however, like any self-respecting dock rat would do, the males generally utilize the areas between the docked boats for nature calls when they find themselves outside. I was on my way up to the car last week when I decided at the last minute to take care of business before jumping into the car for the 40 minute ride home.
  Now, before I go on, don't tell me that there is not a male boater out there who has never done this. I am calling you a liar and a fraud, in front of whatever supreme being you want to name, if you say you have never used this method for relief, at least once.
  Sneaking in between two boats is usually fairly discrete, unless of course someone is aboard a boat you are standing between. Even worse if you are facing in their direction when involved in this activity. This is usually not an issue at night; for one, if someone is aboard, they may have lights on. In this instance, you avoid this area. For another thing, at night it's dark out, at least around here, so you can't be detected.
  But during the day, it's like those pimped up cars you see on the streets with the dark sunscreen on all the windows; installed for the purpose of "you can see out, but can't nobody see in." Someone looking out aboard a boat you are facing gets a technicolor view of all your hardware and you don't know if someone is in there or not, unless you hear either screaming or loud laughter.
  Such was my experience last weekend. As I finished up and walked up to the parking lot, expecting to see only our car waiting for me, I noticed another vehicle on the lot. Yes, it was the vehicle belonging to the owners of the boat I had used to shield myself from any prying eyes in the vicinity. Turns out I would have been less offensive had I stood on the bow of Swing Set, and hummed a tune during the process. However, having heard no screams or laughter, there is a chance that they were in a part of the boat where they couldn't see me. I figure I'll hear about it later if they weren't.
  So Spring, right?  Today, thinking about Spring got me to think about trees. We haven't owned a tree, much less a blade of grass, for over 12 years. I don't miss owning either. The grass is just so needy when it comes to mowing and otherwise manicuring, and trees are just killers.

Staying Connected

  We made some more progress over the weekend in our goal of staying connected to friends and family while living aboard Swing Set.
  The first thing we did was get an iPad. A new version of the iPad is coming out, but for our use, we bought the current version and saved some money. The improvements weren't enough to warrant the difference in price for us. Although we intend to install our desktop in our new "office" aboard the boat, we wanted the iPad mainly to use as a backup chartplotter. So in addition to the chartplotter capability, we'll be able to access email and facebook from the bridge. We can access those things with our iPhone too, but we wanted the bigger screen.
  One concern we had was the fact that our iPhone is grandfathered in for the time being with an unlimited data plan, and the iPad was exempt from that plan. Knowing that we would be primarily using the iPad for the chartplotter application, the question was one of how much data transfer was involved in using the chartplotter. A call to Navionics solved the riddle. We were told that once the charts are downloaded, then there is no data transfer involved in the actual use of the Navionics program. I also accessed the data usage report on our iPhone and discovered that in 10 months of use, I only used a combined 19 Gigs of data, both sent and received, so with a 3Gig per month plan with AT&T, we shouldn't exceed that many minutes.

Getting Our Ducks In A Row

  My blog posts have been far and few between because there isn't much to tell right now. Please hang in there, we will be ramping up activity on Swing Set in the next couple of weeks. We are still shooting for an early May departure down the Mississippi and then posts should be daily depending on our progress.
  Rosie has given notice to her employers, no easy task in this economy, but it's a load off of her mind.
  We're getting our finances in order and still are trying to sell our home. If we don't sell by a certain date, we'll start efforts to lease it out until the market turns around.
  We're headed for Swing Set today with another load of things from our home. I hope we don't sink it before we take off.

Holly's Adjustment to Swing Set Continues

  I had mentioned previously about how devastating the loss of our last pet was over thirteen years ago. Not only was the heartache over that loss a factor in our not getting another pet, we also had our choice of homes playing a large part in deciding to not get another dog.

  We had moved from our last home on the Meramec River to a condo in the city. The first condo we had in the city was on the second floor of the complex, and facing the street was a "solarium" with all glass walls which gave us a great view of the activities outside. An event I witnessed one morning while relaxing in the solarium cemented our resolve to avoid getting a pet again. If you are squeamish, skip the next paragraph.

  It was shortly after we had moved into our condo in the Central West End, just west of downtown St. Louis. The area has lots of shops and restaurants; in fact, we had over 13 restaurants and bars within a block each way of our condo. All of this activity made for great people watching most of the time. One chilly fall morning, an attractive woman came walking down the sidewalk, dressed in a very sharp and stylish pantsuit, being partially drug along by probably the largest Great Dane I had ever seen. The obvious goal for the reason of the walk was soon accomplished as the canine moose "assumed the position" and dropped a pile of excrement approximating the size of a football. While steam was still rising from this monstrous production, the woman dutifully whipped out a plastic grocery bag to perform her lawful responsibility as indicated by signs placed along the sidewalks about every 25 feet. The sight of that well dressed woman bent down grasping that steaming pile of dog doo doo with only a thin film of polymer separating it from her well manicured hand is one I'll never get from my mind. What amazed me about it was her ability to get it all with one scoop without it some extra squishing out onto her wrist.

  I told you to skip to this paragraph. I decided that we were never going to be that person. Not only was the actual act of picking up after a pet in the manner described a revolting one in the first place, being a place of high activity, the CWE was also a target for muggers and purse snatchers due to a large amount of potential victims present. Venturing out in odd hours of day and night for "dog doo duty" was a little more risk than we wanted to take in exchange for an occasional tail wag.

  It was partially due to this window upon humanity that we had that prompted us to move less than three years later. I once witnessed a purse snatching and I ran out in an attempt to apprehend the culprit, to no avail. One night I followed a suspected home invader while placing a call to the police after seeing the suspect emerge from the dark between two of the buildings where only someone up to no good would be at that time of night. I was right in my assumption that the person didn't belong there when I later learned that a man walked right into a first floor condo, but was luckily scared away by the resident. Being witness to other smaller, but equally annoying affronts to humanity, such as illegal parking or failure to pick up after a pet, helped persuade us to move to a high rise where the view was good, but human activities were too far below us to be of any concern.

  While others in our building have pets, or had pets, the twice daily trips down the elevator for the trek across a street to the only strip of grass for blocks around certainly didn't appeal to us at all. So it remained until our move to the boat became eminent and the prospect of having a small pet trained to do business in a litter box of some sort renewed our interest in a dog.

  If you've been reading this blog at all, you've already become acquainted with Holly, here sporting her new life vest and perched on the stairs to the flybridge on Swing Set last weekend. Holly was chosen specifically due to her small size as a companion for our life on Swing Set, and with good reason.

  What inspired me to write this blog was some recent posts on the forum of the America's Great Looper Cruisers Association regarding choosing the perfect dog for doing the Loop. I've mentioned before about how some people cannot make a decision on their own and feel a need to ask others for advice on the most basic of subjects. On one hand, a boat dog is a boat dog, but some people think that "doing the Great Loop" requires a pet that is somehow unique to that experience. So on the other hand, I suppose spending a weekend on a boat with a pet and its specific requirements would be different than spending a few months straight onboard with the same pet.