Zoe gets her shots

Took Zoe to the vet today. She's all up to date now and has 14 months of heart worm and flea medication, so we should be in good shape for a while. They were very nice at the vet clinic and said that I could come down and get her health certificate whenever I'm ready to leave and it wouldn't cost anything extra.

Hopefully it won't be that much longer, but I've been really tired for the last few days and haven't been making as much progress as I would have liked. My cold is almost gone and the weather has warmed up, but I still feel worn out and sore all over -- guess I'm still not used to manual labor.

I got almost everything taken off in the cockpit today, but still have a few more bolts to remove to get the traveler off. I got the nuts off yesterday, but I still have to unscrew the bolts all the way to get them out. All the bolts used to mount deck hardware are stainless steal, and these are about three inches long. What makes it difficult and necessary to unscrew them the entire way is that all of this stuff was put on with a lot of sticky caulk so it wouldn't leak. So basically, you have to unscrew it out of the bed of caulk. I'm not taking off the traveler because it was leaking, though it's still a good idea to remount everything from time to time, but because it would be next to impossible to fix the hole in the deck next to it where the stern pole was mounted if I didn't take it off. If it hadn't been for that hole, I wouldn't have touched it. However, now that I have, I noticed that the caulk had given way at each end, so it was probably time to remount it anyway.

I did run into one problem today. The cover for the engine control panel was in bad shape, so I pulled it off. It looks like I'll have to replace it, but I'm not really sure how I'll do it. It's in the cockpit and will be under water if the cockpit gets filled, e.g., if a wave washes over the deck. The old one was just a sliding plexiglass cover that didn't actually seal, so it would have filled up with water. Not sure if getting wet would hurt it, but it also had a drain hole in the bottom that drained directly into the bilge. So if the cockpit did fill, I'd end up with a lot of water in the bilge, and that's a really bad idea. I'd like to seal it completely, but also make it usable, even in wet conditions. I'll have to talk to Gill about it tomorrow and see what he thinks. A lot of newer boats have all weather control panels that don't need a cover and don't leak. Perhaps I can seal mine in such a way that it won't matter if it gets wet and then just use a simple sliding cover like the one it had before.

Forecast calls for rain tomorrow, so I'll try to finish up the traveler and do all the sanding and grinding I need to do so I'll be ready to start glassing once it clears up later in the week. I'm really pretty close, but since it'll take several days to complete the glass work, I'll try to get the big holes ready right away. They'll take the longest and will require multiple applications. There are a couple of places where the cork core has been damaged and needs to be fixed. Those will take a little extra time as well.