Over the last month or two, we've gotten completely settled in and started working on fixing some of the nonessential things that were bugging us. We had a fairly useless electric kitchen stove that would blow breakers whenever it was used, and even when it managed to stay on, it took 20 minutes to half cook half an egg. Our solution was to get this beautiful new-ish propane stove:
We put the old electric one up for sale on craigslist, and managed to find a guy who lives aboard down in Seattle and wanted to replace his never-used gas stove with an electric. As luck would have it, our stoves were made by the same company and were exactly the same size and configuration, so we were able to just drop the new stove straight into the hole left by the old one. We did hire a marine heat person to install the propane piping and solenoid, because a system filled with pressurized and highly explosive gas seemed like something worth having a professional set up.
I finally managed to get the teak trim installed around the wood stove's tile, so our carpet has stopped fraying and some unsightly gaps and cracks have been covered up.
Unfortunately all I had to cut the trim was a handsaw and a cheap compass, so the joints ended up a little bit imperfect. It still looks really good from about 10 feet away.
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| Teak Around the Wood Stove |
Another craigslist score is Honey Badger, my new (but actually about half a century old) rowboat. I had been meaning to get get a rowboat for exercise for a few months, but had just about given up finding anything before summer when this Ranger 12 popped up for sale. It was cheap and came with a trailer, so I bought it, launched it, and tied it up to the swimstep. Honey Badger used to be a sailing dingy, so she's a lot more stable and better in nasty weather than most rowing boats, but she still rows pretty easily and tracks beautifully. I've now added a row around the harbor to my daily routine.
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| Honey Badger |
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| Glamour Shot |
A couple weeks back, Bellingham was hit by extremely strong (60 knts or thereabouts) winds from the south. Apart from having her canvas flybridge cover ripped off for the umpteenth time, Misogi was perfectly fine. Other people were not so lucky. Most of the shrink-wrapped boats got holes ripped in their plastic, and a liveaboard sailboat on our dock had their staysail come partly off the roller-furler and ripped to shreds. The POB's boathouse had one of it's walls ripped right off the floats, and is now slowly sinking and twisting itself apart. I decided to take a walk on the boardwalk, and saw that the South end of the bay was getting hit much harder by the storm. One of the three remaining boats off Fairhaven dragged anchor and wrecked on the ferry dock, and the other two got pummeled pretty thoroughly by the waves.
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| Sinking Boathouse |
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| The Osprey in the Storm |
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| Boat Wrecked by Ferry Dock |
