Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has now come and gone, and we have realized once again everything that we have to be thankful for.  The whole Grandjean clan descended on Amesbury for Thanksgiving this year and we had a blast.  Good food, great weather and wonderful company.  RodeTrip was included in the celebrations since Grandma made the trip up from Pennsylvania and she had't seen the boat yet.  She was excited to see the boat and we are always proud to show RodeTrip off to anyone who is interested and most people who aren't!

Organization and Refinishing

Stephanie has been hard at work and removed almost everything that isn't firmly attached to the boat.  It now resides mostly in our garage, and a little in the basement.  Now we have no excuse to not start documenting what we actually have.   If you are actually curious as to what came with the boat the full list is here.  This is still a work in progress as I haven't made it through too much of the pile yet.   Most of the drawers from the boat as well as many cabinet doors have been removed, so they can be stripped and refinished.

Here is one pile that is currently in our garage 

Our current sail inventory consists of......

All the sails appear to be in good to very good condition.  So far we have only used a couple of them, and we've been happy with their performance.  

Stephanie was busy starting on the woodwork while I was documenting and measuring sails.  Here she is removing the old varnish from some of the cabinet doors.  

Winterization Complete

The engine is now completely winterized!  As it turns out I was priming the engine exactly correctly, and the problems with getting the engine restarted after the fuel filter change were related to the new rubber o-rings that were installed.  It would have helped if I knew that I was priming the engine correctly.  I had never primed the diesel myself, and spent a long time convinced that the filter change had been successful and that I couldn't prime the engine.   Now it is finally taken care of though, so we can move on to some more productive projects! 

The next project is to fix the voids in the hull seam on the bottom of the keel.  I ordered some epoxy putty, and epoxy resin and it arrived last week, so with a little bit of warm weather this week we should at least get the voids ground out and cleaned, as well as start taking gear off the boat to inventory what we currently have.