The optimist says the cup is half full; the pessimist says the cup is half empty, and the engineer says the cup has twice the required capacity. I’m not sure which way I feel about our first couple weeks in the boatyard.

We started moving aboard, but there are still about a dozen boxes in the van. (Yes, the storage locker is full, but maybe we can stack it a little higher) We’ve done a few projects, but they nearly all require re-doing, un-doing, or just doing more. So far, we’ve uninstalled far more than we’ve installed.

It started with the head, holding tank, hoses, and macerator pump. All that is gone, leaving just two through-hull fittings and a deck fitting. Now we need to find somebody who wants to take it all away. We installed a Nature’s Head composting toilet, which is working well enough (on the hard!), but we still have to make a permanent installation for ventilation. The big job is that the head floor needs to go down something like six inches, which means cutting a hole and fabricating a new fiberglass platform. That part will probably wait until we want to make a big mess … again. (Grinding out the fiberglass supports for the holding tank made the boat uninhabitable and sent us running to Sears for a shop-vac.)

Installing the “new” stove went really well, once we managed to lower the old one down and haul the new one up. If only the brackets didn’t need to be moved so it could gimbal! Ah well, we won’t be heeling the boat until we launch, so that one can wait. Along with the head floor project.

The next job we wanted to do was remove the bow pulpit because we could see that it needed to be re-bedded (badly!) Unfortunately, my shoulders didn’t fit into the anchor locker. Meps’ shoulders fit, but her upper torso (aka boobs) did not. (For the confused, a reminder: We have a cat ketch rig, with the mainmast located about two feet aft of the bow, and a bulkhead about three inches behind the mast.)

So in comes the crane, and out go the masts. OK, that makes it sound easy, but it wasn’t quite that easy — the spartight compound where the masts go through the deck wasn’t willing to let go of either the mast or the deck. The mizzen mast bound up, then made a mighty jump of about a foot before binding up again. When we did the mainmast, we spent an extra hour trying to break it free with hammers, wedges, and other implements of destruction, while the crane operator waited patiently in his cab, at $150 per hour, alternating between smoking a cigarette and chewing on a toothpick.

Today’s job was cutting, drilling, fitting, painting, glopping, and bolting down plywood “lids” to cover the mast holes in the deck. We wisely used the bolts that held the mast collar in, so we can’t lose them between now and when we need to put the masts back in, which may be months.

Waiting for the paint to dry, I scraped barnacle remnants off one side of the rudder. Now there’s some real, visible progress.

And of course, plumbing projects continue–I constructed a filter to (we hope) make the local water drinkable. Then I had an argument with the convoluted set of hoses and pipes between the sink drain and the through-hull fitting. I lost the first part of the argument: “There has to be a way to do this without so many !@#!@ junctions which could leak.” Now I understand why they are all needed, and I just want to make a version that doesn’t leak. I dunno when I’ll have a better plan or how many more two-dollar plumbing parts that will take.

And then there is the bit where the cup is definitely half-empty: Communications out here in the boonies.

This boatyard is remote enough that broadband internet is unavailable, and most cellphones do not work. (Ours gets signal here so rarely that we both jump up with excitement when it suddenly announces a voicemail — then loses signal to actually retrieve said voicemail.) I just ordered a powerful wifi bridge and antenna that I hoped would be able to get signal from someplace nearby and distribute it to our computer(s). After cabling it up and firing up the computer, no luck.

So I asked Meps to pick up family-sized can of soup at the grocery store. With that, and some electronic parts on order, I’m going to make a directional wi-fi “can-tenna.” And if that finally works, then the cup, or the can, will be half-full!