A friend gave em to us to sell at the nautical trader flea market. It’s early!

I have the alignment almost there. It might be as good as it’s going to get until we replace the mounts. We have a booth at a nautical flea market tomorrow. After that I’ll tighten everything up one more time, plumb the engine, and hopefully have it running properly by tomorrow evening. Then it’s just a bit of stowing and we’ll be off.
It looks like an east wind is setting in for the week. That’s good for sailing to boca but bad because it’ll push the water out of Charlotte Harbor. It’s already pretty hairy getting out of here so that might make things a bit more challenging. A couple who we’re friends with hit a rock in the middle of the channel on the way out and split their rudder. Scary. Be careful around marker 5 if you ever come in here.
We’re thinking of New Orleans this weekend. Wishing we were there for French Quarter Fest.

I had to filter the fuel in the dinghy tank a few times and I sealed the fuel pump up where I think it was sucking some air. Seems to be running much better but it still needs to have some gaskets replaced. That can wait until we’re in boca though.

If anything looks funky it should get better soon.

They don’t require you to have current registration if your boat is in a yard. They used to pro-rate your registration if you were in storage for part of the year. When they increased the registration fees they also quit pro-rating. So, we just had to pay for 8 months of registration that we aren’t required to pay for under Florida law because the tag office changed their policy. Or something like that. Anyway, it was $125 for 5 months of registration. Now we’re poor again, but getting close to shoving off. I think I have all of the parts I need for the prop shaft coupling. We have a few hours of web site work to do before we head back for more boat preparation.

Last spots of paint are going on. Running gear is assembled. Launching shortly.

Thru hulls installed. Rudder bolts locked. Line preventer for rudder installed. Lots of small stuff done. A few small things for tomorrow. Should be launching around 10.

Got about half of our list done. Rained out. Hoping the epoxy and paint cure tonight. Still a few hours of work for tomorrow before we launch. Filthy and too exhausted to care.