When we bought the DeFever, one of the things we weren’t crazy about was the fact that the main salon had built-in bench seating and bolted down table. When looking at different boats, we noticed that built-in seating is quite common in trawlers. We decided that if we found a boat with the built-in furniture, …
Boat Projects
We’ve come a long way baby! One year ago (May 2012), Randy and I bought a 40′ DeFever Passagemaker and brought her home from Longboat Key. It was then that began our experiences in living aboard. We didn’t really know anything about caring for and maintaining a boat this size, but with the help of …
The trawler blog has been quiet the last couple of weeks. We’ve been staying at Cape Coral Yacht Club for the last two weeks so we could have our canvas and isinglass redone. Blue Turtle’s previous canvas/isinglass had to be roughly 10 years old and in desperate need of attention. When we got her, the …
So, after all the fun we had last weekend, it was time to get back to work. For me, this meant diving head-first into my laptop (I had to really work). Randy is still on vacation so he and his dad spent about a day and a half this week refinishing our lower decks. Our …
Since Randy has some time off before starting a new job, we’ve been taking advantage of him being able to dig into some boat projects. One of things he started working on already is the restoration of our exterior wood. Several days ago, Randy patched the holes and cracks with and epoxy and Life Caulk. …
Check out our more recent post, “Why we are loving our marine WiFi booster now“ Most of you folks know that I make my living by using the internet. I’m a graphic designer and web designer and I work out of our trawler. I absolutely have to have good internet access which totally clashes with …
We’ve been planning on repairing the wood rails on the deck and giving them a maintenance coat of varnish this winter, but somehow keep procrastinating. Part of the reason is that Southwest Florida is a paradise this time of year, and living on the beach seems to make us lazy…all we want to do is …
So, with so much socializing and beach-going, there hasn’t been a whole lot of projects on the Blue Turtle (although there are many to do). Randy’s father, John Boy, came out a couple of weeks ago to help him remove one of our water tanks that had a crack in it. We had 2 100 …
We’ve worked on a few miscellaneous projects last week. One of them was to remove the doors and waterproof and repair them. With the summer storms, we quickly realized that the doors weren’t weather-proofed. During a downpour, we would have water coming through a few cracks in the door. Also, some of the wood was …
A few of you may have seen the photos posted here or on Facebook about our recent galley project, where we resurfaced our galley countertops with porcelain tile, replaced our faucet and installed a 2 burner cooktop where an old propane stove used to be. Since we had such a great outcome with the tiled …
When we bought the DeFever, it had an old propane stove in it that we immediately knew we’d want to replace. Besides it not being something we would use, it was rusted inside and rattled making a lot of noise. I decided that I wanted to remove it and instead, add a 2-burner electric ceramic …
So this past week (Tuesday, actually) we put Blue Turtle back in the water. She’d been on the hard for about 11 days at Olsen Marine Services. We had her hauled out to have the bottom painted along with some other repairs: Now that she’s back in the water, Blue Turtle is in good shape …