Hurricane Ian cuts us a break; Last Projects finishing up before Delivery

 Three weeks of dead air on a social media platform is always a risky thing, and I take responsibility for that. I've been mostly incommunicado with road trips back to St. Louis, and Oklahoma, and frankly there's been nothing much to report on since last posting.  Until Ian, that is.

Even that, thankfully, turned out to be a non-event here in Thunderbolt Marine Inc. where Spirit of South Carolina still floats at the face dock.   As Ian approached, Capt Hackett and 3 of his yacht management team converged last week to triple up all her dock lines, roll up the awning and  add an additional four big ball fenders dockside. Hunter remained aboard. That was it.  Luckily, the hurricane passed well east of Savannah area, and Thunderbolt saw little overly dangerous winds or surge.  As of this writing, a few fixes in the engine room remain to be resolved.  Starboard diesel's  alternator  will be replaced this week, and some final engine electronic tune-up's will be completed. 

So,  six months in shipyard.  Other than three weekends when volunteers drove themselves down to clear out and clean berths, and do some mechanical troubleshooting, Spirit of South Carolina has basically sat in the sun and dried out.  Hunter did get a head start scraping off peeling varnish on the aft cabin butterfly hatch.  

Notice the newly wooded cap rail
 and instrument consoles.

This past two weeks,  Capt Hackett's team has been mostly at work on deck with heat guns and scrapers, taking down to wood the entire cap rail, some half-rounds around hatches, instrument consoles at the cockpit, and aft cabin butterfly hatch-the saloon butterfly remains in pretty good shape.  After six months in shipyard, the neglect on that wood took it's toll in  yards of peeling varnish and sun damage.  

The second half of that project, the varnishing will be handed off to us volunteers. Personally, I'm counting blessings. All that scraping/sanding would have taken several volunteer weekends.  In a conversation with Capt Hackett, he also expressed an intent to switch from the Deks-Olje two step preservative and varnish system (D1-D2) to an Epiphanes varnish. That is also expected to be a time-saver. 

Schedule for delivering home still hangs on the issue of Captain and crew.  Everyone's anxious of course to get her off this dock and back home.  I'm starting a new pestering  campaign to get as much advance notice as possible when that will happen.