Blue Turtle Cruising

Belated boat projects

Since we’re going with the “belated” theme, we can file this one under “better late than never”.  This weekend was one of those wonderful weekends where we have nothing planned. After our hectic schedule with family in town and Randy’s father’s wedding, it was nice to relax a bit this weekend and check off one of our long-standing “to-do” items on our never ending boat project list.

We had a great Saturday morning where we met my father at Guitar Center in Fort Myers where we bought Corey an acoustic guitar for his upcoming birthday. Corey and I have been learning to play ukulele, well, Corey is a bit more advanced than me, and we decided it was time for him to move on up to learn guitar. Naturally, we enlisted the help of my father, who has played guitar for over 50 years now. We thoroughly enjoyed meandering through the store for about 2 hours talking and playing various instruments. We ended up getting Corey a Taylor GS Mini and are super stoked to hear him learn new songs and play.

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A boy dreaming of electric….
Grandpa Steve and his mini me trying out some guitars
Grandpa Steve and his mini me trying out some guitars

Saturday afternoon, Randy and I tackled a job that we had been putting off for quite a while: cleaning up the bridge seating storage and brow storage areas. When we purchased the boat almost 3 years ago, we noticed all sorts of miscellaneous tools, and parts stored under the bench seating on the bridge. The previous owners left us with tubs and casings full of old screws, plumbing and electrical pieces, fuses, bulbs and other miscellaneous stuff. Randy and I vowed that one day we would go through it all and chuck what we didn’t need and organize what we kept. Since then, it’s been a huge mess where we would just toss various parts and supplies under the bench on the bridge. We FINALLY, went through it all and organized items by their purpose: plumbing, electrical, gaskets and seals, pumps (bilge and water), stainless screws, etc. We also managed to throw out so much useless stuff that we gained a tone of extra storage space. We joke now that, had we done this in the first year, we wouldn’t have been able to identify what half of this stuff was. It was so great to finally cross this task off of our list. Now if we could only tackle the other projects we still need to do: varnish our teak rails and finish painting our boat.

Bridge mess: piles of stuff to organize
Bridge mess: piles of stuff to organize
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Big pile’o hose clamps
Bucket of bilge pumps
Bucket of bilge pumps
Cleaning out the bench storage
Cleaning out the bench storage
After: organization zen
After: organization zen

We finished going through and organizing our bridge Sunday morning and rewarded ourselves with a dinghy trip to New Pass to soak up some sun and return back to the marina for a pool party and wonderful Paella made my Mary Kay.

Randy and Sophie at New Pass
Randy and Sophie at New Pass
Not a bad view!
Not a bad view!

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