Like I do every day, today I resolve to update this page more often.

Having the new kiddo doesn’t leave a lot of time for that, although I am making progress on the new boat. The old Muffin sold, too – to a guy from Italy, who will be picking her up next summer. He intends to sail her back across the Atlantic, I think – which makes me happy. I had hoped that she’d end up crossing oceans, as she’s meant to.

“Urs

The new boat has a name now – “Norman” – after our dear old friend Felis P. Normous. Neil and Stacey’s boat is named after their cat, Zora – so if we get to cruise the South Pacific together, it’ll be “Norman and Zora’s South Seas Adventure”. Since they can’t be with us, at least they can in spirit.

Urs went sailing for the first time the other week, and she was a champ. Slept like… well like a baby. The fresh air and motion of the boat put her right out, which hopefully bodes well for her as a sailor.

So… it ended up costing us another $13,000.00 to get the boat up from Florida. I can’t even get my brain around STARTING to add up what this misadventure cost us. Remind me NEVER to take advice from anyone ever again. We got some advice from a friend of Fran’s brother’s – Nate – and it ended up costing us somewhere in the range of $15,000.00. We could have just paid off the guy in Florida. Instead, we spent an extra fifteen grand, AND Nate never checked on our boat, so it sat for a month in Florida with the main hatch wide open. I WILL NEVER TAKE ADVICE FROM ANYONE EVER AGAIN.

But, she’s here, and we can get to work on her. That’s the consolation, I guess.

So I spent Saturday grinding rust off her bottom, and last night I gave everything a nice coating of OSPHO. Interesting stuff , that – kind of nasty, but it sure seems to do the job on rust. I’m going to hit it with 4 coats of Rust Bullet epoxy now – Fran’s dad, Terry, is going to help, which is awesome. It’s nice to know that we’ve got some backup, and it means a lot to us that he’s on the team.

The thing I am pondering most now about the boat is the engine. 5000 hours on it. Wonder if it’s going to last? We might end up having to repower, huh? The Deutz/MWM diesel in her now is just a 35 HP engine, which should really be enough – the prop has got a lot of pitch to it. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find a rebuilt diesel of the same make/model – although there is a rebuilder in Belgium that seems to sell them. It’d be nice if it was just a straight swap, and not some hellishly complicated process.