Funemployment Begins

Friends,

Apologies, apologies. I know it's been a while since we've posted, and you'd think we'd be better bloggers while the interweb is still easily accessible, but I assure you the mean time wasn't wasted. We have been hard at work. Part of our hesitation to post is that I can't seem to find my camera's usb chord, so  I haven't got many photos for this post- I'll add more photos soon...

Finally, we're all working on the boat full time. My last day at URS was last Friday, though I had basically passed off all my projects by the end of December, so my last week consisted primarily of cleaning out my desk and drinking beers with co-workers. Needless to say, I am really looking forward to adjusting away from the 40 hour work week and cubicle lifestyle, though I will miss the friends I made at the ol' office...

A few big milestones have been reached since the New Year. We now have both solar panels installed and operational. We're waiting on a few parts that we ordered to complete our system for articulating the panels so that they can be positioned at the optimal angle, but other than that, the set-up is complete.

As you can see, they're fairly gigantic, but they should be able to keep up with our power usage. The concern with mounting them on the side rails like that is that they'll take will without doubt be splashed repeatedly and may take a fairly decent pounding from a wave now and again. They're designed for the marine environment though, so the water should be locked out well (I might take some sealant, or smacky, as Dana calls it, and put another bead around the junction box for overkill...) and we stabilized the rails with another stanchion on each side, so hopefully the whole getup is strong enough. Once we have the parts installed and I can take some more photos, I'll write a post with our energy budget (how we sized the panels) and the process of installing and wiring it all.

Aside from the solar panels, we now have a great shelf system in the far aft compartment. We refer to this area as the 'aft quarter' which is where the captain's cabin might be in a larger vessel- the spot with the beautiful windows on the transom and plenty of headroom in your typical pirate ship. This is really only because we cherish any 'piraty' qualities of any boat (old pirates with swords and cannons, not the 21st century buttholes with AK-47s and RPGs) since you can barely contort a body into this area of little Ardea. Before, it was all dead space. But with some clever maneuvers, we managed to get an awesome shelf installed. We were able to fit six jerry cans in there with room to spare. More on that in a future post from Dana, our resident carpenter.

Once we got those jerry cans secured in the aft quarter, we really started to get big eyes. We did some brainstorming and devised a way to catch rainwater and feed it directly to three of those cans (though we could expand to more cans later). Then, we ran tubing from the bottom of those jerry cans to the galley and installed a bronze y-valve under the galley sink. Now, we can select rainwater or salt water to be pumped through our newly installed manual faucet. For the saltwater, we plumbed the system to the intake at the head using essentially a garden hose splitter. We weren't sure if having the toilet and the faucet pulling from the same seacock would effect the water pressure at either, so we wanted to be able to turn them on or off independently. It worked out quite nicely. This will allow us to avoid using our electric water pump whenever we've got fresh water in our jerry cans and it will allow us to do much of our cooking and cleaning with saltwater. We're all starting to feel pretty good about Ardea's water capacity, now 108 gallons.

Aside from these bigger projects, we've knocked off a lot of little things. We finally built a hinge for the top of the propane housing, replaced the shieves (rollers that allow lines to make a 180 degree turn with little friction) in the booms and masts and installed our EPIRB and MOB strobe in the cockpit. We installed a boom vang on the main mast, got all of the reefing lines situated and run aft, and got the old Perkins checked out by a mechanic (no problems there!).

We're in a bit of a frenzy as our window for ordering parts, etc. is closing rapidly. I think we've got it all figured out though. We're putting in our order for paper charts today. Other than that, we've got to stock spares, wrap up these last few projects, and clean Ardea up for her journey. Though there may be a system coming in middle of next week, we're hoping the weather will be fit for our departure on Sunday the 22nd of January.