GroupWBench

It seems like no matter how earnestly I vow to keep this up to date, I fall behind. 

The good news is that we have joined the boat club (I just can't bring myself say that I belong to yacht club…way too Thurston Howell III for me) on the other end of the lake. Their docks are much nicer than those at the public marina where we have been. A slip there is also half the cost of where we are. A lot of our friends moved there over the last year, too. The bad news is that there are no open slips for us. We sit on a long waiting list. I have considered going there with  a snorkel and drill and moving some of the boats to the bottom to speed our way up the list.

We've attended a couple of get together social things they held at the new place and I didn't spot any stuffed shirts sporting the blue blazer and captains hat there fortunately. People seemed nice enough. They do take their racing seriously, though. I'm glad they enjoy it, but for me…well, I find paint drying almost as interesting as sailboat racing and can't imagine taking it seriously. To me, it is the opposite of sailing. They add stress to an intrinsically de-stressing activity. I enjoy kicking back with a foot on the tiller letting the boat go where the wind takes us without getting wrapped up over details like fine tuning the trim or getting to some specific point. I also prefer to keep lots of distance between our boat and anyone else out there. Those racers look almost like bumper cars, sometimes. The good thing is that when they are racing around their circles, they aren't out and in the way on the rest of the lake.

Ivy and I went to Kemah a couple of weeks ago and took a diesel maintenance course. The course covered all the basics of the care and feeding of a marine diesel. The morning was in a class room with slides and color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.* The afternoon was spent doing boat yoga on a Catalina 32. The instructor knew his stuff and presented it well. There were some hiccups with the materials for the afternoon that resulted in delays. They could have been better organized. We did get the experience of spend lots of time bleeding air out of fuel lines, though. The class affirmed a lot of theoretical knowledge I had and made me a little less uncomfortable diving in to our little one cylinder engine. That same weekend we went to the open house at the boat broker's there. We got to get on about a dozen boats. I think that the experience pretty much confirmed the two models of boat we are most interested in for a get-away boat. We'll be keeping our eye on the boat porn at Yachtworld for a deal. 

Speaking of fearful, I have still not addressed the stuffing box. I really, really, really don't want to open that up in the water. I've decided to see if a racer guy we know with a boat lift in his slip will let me use his lift to pop our boat up long enough to do the job. In theory, it should only take a few minutes. I do have to really bend myself into a pretzel to get to it, though, and want a safety net in case something goes wrong. 

Having moved to New Braunfels, we are only twenty-five minutes from the lake. With the new job and working from home, we should be able to get out in the afternoons a lot more now that it light a bit later. Hopefully, the fun to suck ratio will be better for that. Speaking of suck, our spreaders are wood. Wood needs protection from the elements. The paint on our spreaders has departed thanks to those Texas summer UV rays. Ivy went up the mast last week and sanded off the last remnants of the old paint. When we next get some time without threat of rain, she goes back up to paint them That won't be too fun. Fortunately, she has enough climbing experience to be pretty comfortable up there.

 

In other news. The new job is going well. It gives us the flexibility to live almost anywhere. I hit the road for a few days once or twice a month and work from home the rest of the time.  I'm finally starting to be back in good enough shape to get back to judo some. We are going to visit Ivy's folks in Spartanburg next month and also sneak up to Charlotte and spend some time on the mat at the big training camp they have there. I used to work out with those guys and it will really be nice to see them again. Ivy hasn't seen her folks in a while, so the whole trip will be good. Selene and Leo have moved to San Antonio. It is nice that they are close now. They are in temporary housing while they wait for the place they are buying in the King William district deep in downtown. They did it backwards by leaving the Texas hill country for a place in town, but are happy with it. 

 * Go read the lyrics to Alice's Restaurant if you missed the reference