Dramatic revelations

First and foremost I read my outboard motor's manual today. I had been considering ordering a flush kit so we could change the oil ourselves.  You can put the lower unit in a bucket of water and run it to warm it up, but I have always been skittish of doing it because it is scary to have the prop in the bucket.  We have done it this way in the past in a rain barrel, and when we bought it they demonstrated it in a large trash can full of water.  When reading the manual I learned that it is suggested that you REMOVE THE PROPELLER if you are going to run it in a bucket of water.  Phew. Dang.  Sometimes you really do benefit from reading the directions.

Now, onto the Dalloway.  This weekend we sanded the high filling primer some more.  A lot more.  A lot lot more.  I installed the boom hardware for the lazy jacks, and the jiffy reef system.  I found so many cheek blocks in the tool box that I think we must have bought them before Derecho and it just took this long to get around to installing the system.  I hauled the monster sewing machine to the club, took the final measurements, and finished the last little bit of sewing on the sail cover.

Then we took a little break to join the opening day parade.  Clothing was optional.  JK. Thank god. 

There was even a gentleman playing the bagpipes. He was quite impressive.  

The boats were blessed, the cannon fired, and the flag was raised. 

Afterwards I finally installed the stack pack.  This thing is really phenomenal. I can't say I necessarily recommend buying the sail rite kit but I absolutely recommend making one of these things.  Just watch the video on youtube, it really wasn't that hard. Having three sets of instructions made it so much more confusing than it had to be.

Then I assisted with the taping and the painting.  Here's a nice before and after photo. 

Coat one is complete, but we have to wait 16 hrs between coats and sand every time so our schedule just expanded quite a bit.  We will have to sand and paint saturday then sand and paint sunday. I don't think it very likely that we will be able to tape on the new paint until the following weekend so the boot stripe and the speed stripe will both have to wait. I am not entirely sure we won't lose patience with the whole thing and just launch.  (That's what happened with the filling primer.  We only did one coat. Hand sanding the whole boat to that extent was torture.)