{"id":9882,"date":"2019-06-17T10:48:38","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T15:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sailpandora.com\/?p=9882"},"modified":"2019-06-17T10:48:38","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T15:48:38","slug":"when-spring-commissioning-becomes-a-refit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sailpandora.com\/?p=9882","title":{"rendered":"When spring commissioning becomes a refit…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, It’s getting close to launch time for Pandora and what a long road and winding road to the water it has been.\u00a0 Perhaps she’ll go in tomorrow or Wednesday.\u00a0 \u00a0Fingers crossed.\u00a0 \u00a0I sure hope so, as I want to bring her to my event at the Essex Yacht Club this weekend, the Open Blue Water Boat Weekend.\u00a0 \u00a0 It’s going to be a great event with a capacity crowd of 100, our biggest event yet in seven years.<\/p>\n

Here’s her cover coming off last week. \"\"There have been so many projects and new “stuff” since she was last in the water.\u00a0 The mast and new standing rigging (last fall) is all set up and ready to step when she splashes.\u00a0 As the owner of the mast to the right from a J30 said to me, “that’s a mast and a half, you’ve got there.”\u00a0 \u00a0I agree.\"\"Her cushions and area rugs are clean and ready.\u00a0 I was grossed out to see the nasty dirt that was sucked out of them and equally amazed with how bright and new they look. \"\"It took a surprising amount of time to do this seemingly simple job.\u00a0 That’s a lot of parts.\u00a0 \"\"The unbelievably frustrating and painful mast step fix is done and back in place.\u00a0 That’s if a lowly step can be beautiful, this one is.\u00a0 Well, it’s beautiful to me given the months of sweat that went into the effort of summoning the nerve to do it, removing the screws, cleaning up and refinishing and putting it back in place. \"\"Look simple?\u00a0 Lest you forget, dear reader, this is what I started with.\u00a0 \"\"All the old halogen and fluorescent fixtures are gone, panels recovered with new vinyl and fixtures replaced with LED lights and lovely LED white\/red dome lighting.\u00a0 I expect that these lights will be somewhat brighter.\u00a0 That little detail should be a big hit with Brenda who has long suffered with poor lighting while attempting to do delicate hand work in the evenings. Below, two of the nearly 20 new lights.\"\"We will be warm and toasty while we are under power, on those evening passages in the fall and while we are in Maine this summer, compliments of our new engine driven heater.\u00a0 \"\"Brenda will love her potty again with her shiny new evacuation pump, one of the three pumps that it takes to run her potty.\u00a0 Who would have guessed that a potty needs three motors?\"\"Dining aboard will be just a bit more civilized with our newly varnished dining table. \"\"And there should be fewer, I hope none, drips below as I have pulled and re-bedded just about everything that went “drip in the night” and a few that didn’t, just to be sure.\u00a0\"\"And, speaking of drips, the newly installed drip-less prop shaft seal, all blue and shiny and newly “restored” CV joint, to the right.\u00a0 That CV joint was a big job, let me tell you.\u00a0 And that’s saying something as my contribution in getting it done was limited to writing a check, ditto for the seal. \"\"I really tried to address every little detail to make Pandora ready to be her best, down to polishing the plexi hatch panels.\u00a0 If it’s possible to see beauty in a flat piece of plastic, these are worthy now.
\n\"\"And even the tiny details of putting plastic shims under the ends of the solar panels to be sure that they are perfectly level did not escape my attention.\u00a0 No more aft drooping solar panels for Pandora.\u00a0 Yes, I know, her stainless needs polishing.\u00a0 I’ll get to it soon, I promise.\"\"And, of course, who could forget newly renewed caulk on the dodger windows.\u00a0 And that took several years for me to even build up the nerve to tackle.\u00a0 It wasn’t easy but less daunting than I had feared.\u00a0\"\"And, I even found a way to re-use the old dimmer switch holders, the only way I was able to fit a “round peg (dimmer) into a square hole”, in the bulkhead.\u00a0 Pretty nifty, if you ask me.\u00a0 They took a lot longer to do than their humble looks, would suggest.\u00a0 \u00a0And, they even have a lovely colored ring around the button, green, blue or orange, depending on which state the lights are in, on, off or dimmed.\u00a0 \u00a0So, exciting?\u00a0 To me they are.\"\"New chaps, engine cover and seat, in matching grey, of course. \"\"And, speaking of matching, who can forget Pandora’s new “clothes”, a lovely grey paint job.\u00a0 If you follow this blog, you will recall that I really beat the “color thing” to death, with renderings of her in multiple colors<\/a>.\u00a0 Just to be sure. \u00a0I even had small panels painted “just to be sure”.\u00a0 I even have new fender covers on order, monogrammed of course, and in grey to compliment and protect that expensive paint.<\/p>\n

\"\"Oh, so many things to obsess about, my specialty.<\/p>\n

And, under the category of “how did I break that?”, I was working on my binnacle compass the other day and dropped it.\u00a0 Broken you say?\u00a0 Not a problem as I was able to purchase repair parts.\u00a0 However, when I looked for the compass to fit the new parts to, I was UNABLE TO FIND IT, in spite of tearing every conceivable area on board and at home apart, no compass.<\/p>\n

I ultimately had to purchase a new shiny compass.\u00a0 Here it is in place.\u00a0 Looks grand.\u00a0 However, if you look closely, you’ll see that the sun cover doesn’t fully retract as it hits the instrument cluster above it.\u00a0 No problem, all I have to do is to move that cluster up 1\/2″.\u00a0 \u00a0Isn’t it ALWAYS SOMETHING?\u00a0 \u00a0Today’s project.\u00a0 Well, solving that problem is just one of today’s projects.\"\"Alas, all is not lost as Pandora looks great.\u00a0 Isn’t she shiny?\u00a0 You can even see my little truck reflected in her so shiny paint.\"\"Ok,\u00a0 I’ve admitted it, I have done plenty of obsessing about getting Pandora just right” and with nearly a year to think about what needed to be done, there was\u00a0 ample time to obsess about every little thing.\u00a0 While “obsessing” perhaps overstates the point, I have also found myself wondering, for the past few months, no make that the past year, as Pandora’s “to do” list continued to grow, is when does spring commissioning becomes a refit.<\/p>\n

The company that painted Pandora last summer promoted themselves as a “refit company” prepared to do whatever repairs or upgrades would be needed.\u00a0 \u00a0 This term, “refit” is often used to describe what happens when a superyacht is put into a yard for months of upgrades.\u00a0 Somehow, that just sounds more impressive than “ashore to fix broken stuff”.<\/p>\n

So, the question is that as Pandora about to be commissioned, and it had better be in the next two days, after being out of the water for the better part of a year, is it spring commissioning our was it a refit?<\/p>\n

Now that I look back on all that I accomplished over the winter, on our home, Pandora and for Brenda, especially those projects for Brenda as that gains me “Time aboard Pandora points”,\u00a0 I realize that I was able to catch up on a great deal of “deferred maintenance” both at home and aboard Pandora, perhaps the term “spring commissioning” really doesn’t apply.<\/p>\n

So, what about all that happened with Pandora while she’s been “on the hard”, was it a refit or commissioning?\u00a0 In including the mix of items I detailed above, here’s a mostly complete list of what was done to Pandora, in the last year and especially since last spring when I returned from Antigua.<\/p>\n

The list, in no particular order…<\/p>\n

The stuff I hired out.<\/p>\n