After the disastrous day of trying to find water filters, we decided that we would work on things that we knew we could accomplish. We decided to rebed the running back stay chain plate bolts. We hadn't worked on this since Deltaville way back in October! After about an hour of searching, we finally located the bolts and I headed outside with them to start work while Mike cleaned up from our search.
Once outside, I started removing the first of three sets of bolts. Surprisingly, these bolts were in good shape so I reused them and rebeded the bolts. The second set of bolts were extremely corroded and significantly shorted than the bolts that we had purchased. By this time, thankfully, Mike had completed the work he was doing inside and received the lucky task of cutting the new bolts short enough for us to use to resecure the chain plate fittings. While he started on this, I started removing the bolts from the third set. When we originally bought the bolts to replace the current ones, we had three sets of bolts to choose from. At the time, we did not know this. All I can say is that I am thankful that we picked the longest bolt to base our purchase on! Though it would have been much easier had we purchased the right sized bolts for all the holes. Anyway, we developed into a routine, Mike would complete a bolt just as I completed removing one bolt and rebedding the one that he had given me a few moments previously. In this way, we made short order of rebedding all of the bolts. Out of eight bolts, there were only two that had to be cut a second time, pretty good cutting on Mikes part, especially since there wasn't a single one that was cut to short.
As a reward for completing one of the major lingering tasks that we had successfully been putting off, we decided to head to the Charleston Yacht Club for drinks after dinner. When we arrived there, there were, perhaps, six people at the bar. We chatted with a few people there who gave us some background on the City Marina and how the waterscape (is that a word?) has changed over the past several years. We also heard about the proposed commercial shipping terminal that developers are hoping to build in Charleston that will almost double the size of the shipping port. After a fun evening, we braved the veritable Arctic chill, OK it was only about 50 degrees out, to return to the boat and sack out for the evening.
Voyages