so today i decided to tackle the lower rudder bearing first. primarily because everything else was overwhelming. if you recall i had to fix this in kupang underwater, that was fun! at that pint i learned that the brass part had been replaced with a stainless part. some months later this part finally made it out to me and i have been caring it around for a year or two. aimee finally got the right bolts as well yesterday so finally we where ready to swap it out.
the job was not too bad the hardest part was making sure i did not freeze up the stainless bolts so i used plenty of grease when i put them in. the second hardest was “trimming” the bolts. i did some after they where installed, not sure i recomend this but it worked.
somewhere along the way during this process the yard guy came by with the estimate. the basic bottom job was 7$ per foot for paint and sand, aprox $310 totally reasonable so i was hoping for something along this line. the actual estimate was on top of his 310 and was 1. bottom barnacle bit removal (pre sand) 4 hrs x 40 = 160 2. keel fill dings 4hrs x 40 = 160 3. rais water line 600 including material 4. blisters did not even talk about this so basically an extra 1k we did not have so i told him we would just do every thing except the basic bottom job
everything was pretty overwhelming but we got aimee a new scraper and she got going on scraping the barnacle bits off. sietse came by and we ground out a few blisters. i sent some photo’s off to gerry for his thoughts. we only have 3 more days before the whole country shuts down for 4 days so there is no way we will be going back in the water soon!
we went out for dinner around sunset as it was too hot to be on the boat. we will prob have to do this every night as we cant really run the sinks etc and the stove makes the boat unbearable. i do have the holding tank selected and freshwater flush enabled so at least we can use the heads conservatively at night.
Roger
