Archive | ShipShape – boat work & boat life

Yesterday, we were hanging and waiting the shipment of our two new boat bikes. It gave Randall a chance to take the outboard apart and try to fix the reluctant pull cord. It took much longer than expected because the coil spring came flying out once the thing was apart. But two hours later, it […]

The oil pan on our diesel engine was badly rusted and had a couple of small holes on the side after the previous owner had a salt water cooling pump leak that ran down the side of the engine.  I knew it needed replaced, but kept putting it off, thinking it might heal itself or […]

“Can I go fishing?” We hear this request daily. Lily would like to catch something, sure, but a fish-less stretch is not an entire loss. She likes casting and casting for 30 minutes is, by itself, sport enough. Occasionally she gets the plastic worm to sail where she wants it and a minute of success […]

Tristan Jones is a well known among sailors for his fascinating sea stories. He claimed to have logged more than 450,000 nautical miles on various boats. Biographers and readers have argued a bit over this number but I think it’s more controversial that we don’t have an accurate count of how many bowls of burgoo […]

  Once you decide to live on a boat, tons of thought goes into What BOAT? We’ve had three sailboats and so we’ve made this difficult decision three times. It probably shouldn’t be so difficult. In the end, it is how you live and not what you live on that makes for a happy/unhappy voyage. […]

“Did you do any thru-hull work,” the travel lift operator called, sitting patiently at the controls of the travel lift. “Uh, yeah. A lot,” was Randall’s answer as we scrambled below. “I’ll give you a few minutes,” he said to our backs. Thank goodness. I hate to ask Randall to commandeer the travel lift. Lift […]

>Czech N Mate sets sail tomorrow for Isla Mujeres, Mexico. She’s come a long way since the picture below. A couple of years ago, Randall and I were walking the dock to our boat and passed a boat with a hailing port of Drumright, OK. Her owners, Jerry and Debby Brichacek, were trying to get […]

> “Don’t you worry about pirates when you go sailing?” Well, it’s not like we are unarmed. Flaming arrows are terrifying on the high seas. We make Jake practice at night so the locals won’t get alarmed. Hopefully, Randall will have the catapult finished before we leave. Ok, just kidding. Jake would not share pics […]

> Randall’s been sawing on the boat again with a little miter saw. It’s never fun to cut wood you know you’ll have to replace with $40/foot teak but he didn’t like the way the caprail was pulling up at the bow. To get to the wood, we had to remove the bow pulpit and […]