It’s certainly been a busy first half of summer beginning with major projects, working down to our lists of smaller projects, dental fun, along with visiting family, friends, Benj driving down for a long weekend, driving up to visit with him in Vermont along with a driving trip to upstate New York to visit some of Lori’s relatives.

This is pretty much how all of our boats have looked like once arriving in Connecticut as we begin our projects.

The view out our stern can be beautiful …

or quite stormy!

Replacing our anchor chain used-to-be a once/5-year task, but the poor galvanization now used makes it rust up after only 2 years. One example of “saving the planet” actually making it worse as more to buy & discard. Many boaters would have their chain re-galvanized 2 – 3 times (making it last 10+ years), however the process is now deemed to be too polluting… The galvanization on our new chain is so thin that much of it is already scratched off so beginning to rust already 😦

Even though the previously owner had recently installed new foam in the salon cushions, it was too soft so we installed the densest foam we could find which is now perfect.

These are pieces of our stainless-steel engine mufflers which had corroded thru in places. It’s difficult to find a good welder for stainless steel work who can fit in small jobs. Fortunately our nephew Matt knows a guy who knows a guy – he did a fantastic job!

With our push to eat healthier, we have become addicted to the “Yuka” app which scores most foods with an overall health score. It is eye opening to see how food companies go out of their way to make food enticing, rather than healthy. These “Honey Roasted Walnut Pieces” should be very healthy, but with all of the crap they do to them their score is only 1 out of 100! A similar bag next to these scored at 84. Not only does the app “score” the nutrition label, it also subtracts out for high calories & harmful additives. While the software may not be perfect, it does give you a very good idea, at a glance, of  healthiness … or not.  We highly recommend the “Yuka” app! Your item gets a bad score? No worries, “Yuka” makes recommendations. 🙂

We weren’t sure if we’d ever see us in this boating magazine, as it’s been 2 years since the editor of SAIL magazine called us one day wanting to interview us for a special multihull issue (which has apparently morphed into “Multihull Power & Sail” magazine). We had just a day to clean-up our messy project boat for a quick photo shoot. All went well, then our article got bumped into a future issue we never learned of, so we pretty much forgot all about it. (and hey, it’s not our first magazine appearance!)

Last month I got wondering but found out the publishing company had been bought, with prior issues likely thrown out as they moved offices across the country. Fortunately, the current Managing Editor was nice enough to make us a PDF of our article. If you’d like to view the entire article, here’s the link: Click here for full magazine article  Our thanks to Lydia Mullan of Firecrown Media Group who kindly provided this PDF & of course to Mike Smith who wrote the article.

With our projects now mostly complete, we’re looking forward to some local cruising to Long Island, Mystic & Cuttyhunk. People at our marina (those who don’t know us) likely wonder why our boat seems to just sit at our slip most of the summer – unknowing this is our break & project time after cruising over 3,000 miles the rest of the year.

It will be fun to explore our old cruising grounds, while testing the work (engines, heading sensor, genset, anchor chain) we’ve performed. As Captain Ron (Kurt Russell) says in the Captain Ron movie, “The best way to find out is to get her out on the ocean. If anything’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen out there.” (it’s much funnier when Captain Ron says it in the movie) 🙂