On the Hard.

It has been too long since Madrigal has been bottom painted. In fact, I've never seen her bottom until today....Justin has from under the water.

Anyhow, now we're on the hard for a few days!

Slightly scary.

You'd think we had black paint on the bottom. It's actually bright blue.

gubbus.

a quick update

All kinds of fun stuff has happened. My parents brought their motorhome out from Michigan for about 10 days. We camped at Wompatuck Park (the same place Jenny and I stayed over 4 years ago when we came to look at Boston as a possible place to live) for a few days, then took Madrigal out for an overnighter at the harbor islands. The first day was mostly a no-wind motor, but the second day we had a great southwesterly all morning which we used to spinnaker our way out to sea and up the coast.

My mom is, well, not really scared of sailing, but more... petrified might be the right word. So a nice gentle spinnaker run was doing her some good and she was fairly relaxed. Well we didn't go very far because I knew we had to turn around and beat back into the wind to get home, so after a short while we struck the spin and tacked around to come home. Just then the wind picked up about another 10 knots and blew a consistent 20 dead on our nose. We didn't quite have the rails in the water, but I think my poor mother may never sail again. She was pale and tired by the time we skipped back into the harbor at a nice 7 knots. We struck the sails and motored our way through the myriad 100's (literally) of boats that were out enjoying what everyone around here considers perfect sailing weather. I must admit that Jenny and I were put a bit on edge by all the wind with so much boat traffic around, but mostly it was just fun. We so rarely get out in blustery weather like that. We are still getting accustomed to it ourselves.

After the sailing adventures were over we all piled into the RV for a trip up to New Hampshire's White Mountains and then over to Portland Maine for a stop and go trip down the coast back to Boston.

We ate lots of seafood and stopped at nice beaches. It was a ton of fun, but I'm out of time here and the internet is not being good about uploading pictures. Perhaps I'll get some more up later.

In the meantime we've scheduled our haulout. In 2 days time Madrigal will be sitting high and dry in Quincy Mass for a few days as we paint the bottom, change zincs, add lightning grounding plate and a transducer for a depth sounder. Should be fun despite the hard work. It will be the first time we've ever actually seen Madrigal out of the water!

-Justin

Up the Mast Again

A funny thing about taking the mast down is that the crane operator wanted the Windex to be taken off the top. I guess they can get caught pretty easily and get ripped off. So...up the mast I went!

We had to get a bosun's chair (finally), because we had no one else's to borrow this time. That was fine though - we've really needed one a bunch of times now and it's such a good thing to have.

The hardest part for me was the first spreader. I must've spent a solid five minutes at this point before making it the rest of the way up.

We've Been Busy....

Not much time to write now, but just wanted to post a few pics while I got the chance. We got the mast taken off and Justin did a ton of work, so we now have anchor lights, an antenna, a radar reflector and various other fixes to the mast. It was pulled on Tuesday and put back on today.

There's something nerve wracking about watching your mast dangle above your boat. I wasn't too keen on that.

Anyway, that's all for now.

Thunder, Lightning and Lots of Changes

Wow, lots of thunder and lightning here lately! Tornado warnings, even. Feels a lot like Michigan this spring/summer. I'm liking it a lot. Ok, I'm slightly nervous about the whole bit too, but even still it's been a nice change of pace from the normal Boston weather.


We've been improving Madrigal in lots of small ways lately - almost too quickly to blog about, but I'm trying to keep up.

Did we tell you that we installed the composting head (err, toilet) in Madrigal? We had bought it for the Fitzcarraldo but the new owners didn't want it and kept it for us. We've been using it since we moved to Thayer's Landing and it's working out well, thanks to the solar vent that Justin installed in the cabin top. Hooray solar power. That thing is a power horse.


The other bit we've been trying to put more focus on is safety. We're hoping to use the boat more this year and if we're going to be sailing more, the boat should be as safe as we can make her. Seamar sells affordable netting for the lifelines. We got the netting a good long while ago but couldn't put it up due to the big topsides paint job that was taking place. Well, Justin added the grip paint over the weekend (well, *our* weekend, which was Thursday or Friday) and so he then added the netting too. The grip paint is another vast improvement for Madrigal for safety, as we're not slipping around on deck when they're the slightest bit damp. It made a world of difference.

Anyhow, it's hard to keep spending money for these upgrades, but we're doing it as wisely as we know how. Maybe one of these days we'll go a good long stretch without buying something new for the boat. Until then, this boat just keeps getting fancier and fancier.

Big Catch at Thayer's Landing

Justin and I noticed yesterday morning that a few boats were "missing" from Thayer's Landing. Actually, it's finally boating season around here! So a few people had gone out for the day.

Here are a couple of pictures of what may come to be a fairly normal thing for us to see on the weekends...