Taking Care of our Boat

24 June 2019 – Taking care of our Boat

Another week of the rainy season has gone by, and we’ve still managed to stay slightly busy. About six months ago, while in Thailand, we noticed that our 20 year old Lazy Boy Love Seat recliner was getting worn – very worn. In time, we came to notice there were actually holes in the “leather”, mostly on my side Diane said, and action was needed. 

The question was – should we repair or replace? By the time we got to India, we had decided that we wanted to repair, to reupholster this sofa. It was still very functional and did fit perfectly into the space. After all, I did build the cabinetry around it. The challenge then was to find out where to take it. Upon a recommendation from our friend Varghese, we took the sofa to Peter at C.C. Creations, where his team did a complete reupholster in about 10 days time. They used a heavy grade of green dyed leather and we are very, very pleased with the outcome. The cost, by the way, was a little less than $500 CDN, probably a quarter the price of a new model (if we could have found one). After bringing it back to the boat, I sprayed some Corrosion X on the working mechanism and springs and then we bolted it back to the cabin sole. 

I’ve also been working on a modification to my home-grown hookah system, something that I developed when we were in Malaysia last year. Peter on SV Kokomo was throwing out a steel air pressure reservoir. I gratefully accepted this gift, had a welder put on a few fittings, bought a few more air pressure fittings – and had Nazar paint it up for me. The result is a small air reservoir to complement my hookah, and give me more air to breath when I’m a little deeper, at the bottom of the keel. I haven’t tried it in the water yet, but it does hold air – a lot of air. 

We took a step to make our drinking water even better. We have two aluminum water tanks, one for water-maker water and one for “other” water; which means de-chlorinated water from the dock, slightly filtered rainwater and/or recently distilled water from our new air conditioner. Our drinking water NEVER tastes like aluminum because our expensive SeaGull filter (.4 micron) does a very good job of cleaning it. We realized that our rainwater might have been a source of algae, so we had our water tested and both the tank water and the water from our SeaGull water filter turned out to be perfectly fine. None the less, we decided to chlorinate the tank overnight (the first time we did this), clean the tank and add new water. The reason we thought this was necessary was mostly because our expensive ($200 per filter) SeaGull filter only lasted 6 weeks instead of 12 months! In addition, we installed a new 5 micron filter for the rainwater, replacing the curtain shear material we had been using for more than 10 years. Lastly, we added a new filter housing and a new 5 micron filter specifically to protect that SeaGull water filter. I had read online that somebody did this, to prevent the SeaGull from getting gummed up too soon. 

When we went to the market on Friday, I saw something that struck me as unusual – a man carrying an umbrella hooked into the collar of his shirt. When I saw him, I realized that I had already seen many men carrying their umbrella this way, so I had to get a photo. There are different styles here in India!