We got our SSB on eBay last night:

“SSB”

$587.10! Which I think is a steal – it retails for around $1300-$1400.00; hopefully this one is in good condition. We still need the antenna tuner and the modem – we underbid the modem by about $80.00 – which is a bummer. Someone bid up the antenna tuner to $395.00 – which seems bizarre to me, since you can buy one new for $395.00!

I’m hoping to get down to the boat to do some rustproofing today… but it’s the Thomas the Tank Engine weekend. There are a bazillion little kids running around the yard, which means I don’t think I can drive the toolshed (our ‘86 Volvo) and I don’t know that I can get my whole painting kit onto the scooter. Oh well, we’ll see. I’ll do some computer work in the morning and then make some plans.

I’m a little worried right now about “systems creep” – we were going to go without refrigeration and SSB, now we’ve added both… I feel like we have to start drawing a bright line somewhere, or the boat will never go in the water. Every “authority” you read says “keep it simple, go small, go light, go NOW” but then someone says “how can you live without X” and you rethink and redraw… and your plans never get finalized. It can be very frustrating.

I also worry about obsolescence – I have, for example, a Personal Satellite Communicator, that was state-of-the-art in the 90’s, still pretty cool in 2001, and now is a piece of junk. I worry that if we don’t get going soon, all the gear we buy will be ancient and worthless.

I worry too much.

Neil and I got to look at the forepeak on Saturday. We lugged the windlass over to Hamilton Marine and figured out that it wants to have 5/16″ chain, which is probably pretty hardcore for the Muffin – but what the heck, it’ll hold us in place REALLY well.

“windlass”

We were trying to think of a smarter layout for the foredeck – maybe put the windlass off to the side, maybe try and lead the chain down through a pipe farther into the bilge, maybe mount the windlass in front of the anchor locker, maybe remount the anchor rollers off to one side – but none of it seemed to work. In the end, we went back to our original plan of mounting the windlass on top of the heavy steel hatch on the anchor locker. Three steps forward, two steps back…

I think we’re going to go with around 120 feet of chain, and another 150 of Brait rode – that’ll only add 120 pounds to what we normally carry in the rode locker, which shouldn’t hurt our upwind performance too overly much.