Even if all is not well in the world, at least there’s progress on my boat.
Cerberus, a 1979 Cape Dory sloop, has spent more than a year ashore, waiting for a new engine — first to arrive, then to be installed. In the interim, I lost all of the 2024 sailing season.
I am doing the work myself now, having given up on paying someone to do it where the boat sits, in Connecticut, at least not at an hourly rate I would like. I am not complaining; I enjoy the work. I just wish I had a few more days in the week to do it.
A few weeks ago, I noticed — praise Poseidon — that the guy hired to get the engine mounted had accidentally drilled a hole in the bottom of the boat and not noticed or perhaps forgotten to plug it up. It was like something in an imaginary “Looney Tunes” cartoon: Road Runner pecks a hole in Wile E. Coyote’s canoe. I got it patched with a bit of epoxy and two layers of fiberglass cloth.
One of the boatyard managers stopped by in his golf cart Sunday while I was working belowdecks. I told him about the hole. He did not seem surprised. “Mike,” as I’ll call the guy who drilled through Cerberus’s hull, had also falsified paperwork on boats he was supposed to get ready for winter, leaving them vulnerable to freezing.
The boatyard manager took a drag on his ever-present cigarette and said that this left the yard with five cracked engines to deal with. I figured I got off easy and was lucky to have noticed light streaming through the hull before Cerberus went in the water. Tim, a fellow Cape Dory owner who I met there, said it would have sunk.
There is plenty still to do to get ready. Rainwater collected in the bilge over the past year and has taken on an oily sheen; the smell smacks me in the face when I first open the hatch after a week away. That will have to go. The minimal brightwork wood on the outside needs revarnishing. A masthead light might need replacing. But the engine remains the biggest hill to climb.
Slowly it will get done. A new propeller is due here soon. A friend has offered to machine parts to fit. If all goes to plan, I should be sailing by the Fourth of July.