Late Summer, a year ago, we decided to pull off and replace Mahdee’s deck.  We figured that we could get the new deck built before the rainy season hit.  In typical weather fashion, heavy rains came in the Fall while the deck was in pieces, and by the time the rainy season arrived the deck was in place and not a drop of rain fell.  The weather is not just unpredictable, but is usually capricious–if you need dry weather and/or the forecast is for dry weather, rain will fall with uncanny predictability.  But as soon as you change your actions to compensate, the weather will change too.  We had planned to be in the water by this year’s rainy season.  We aren’t there yet, but this time the weather hasn’t been the problem it was last year.  The heavy rains are helping us to identify the small remaining leaks–mostly in the old charthouse which we chose to keep rather than rebuild.  One-by-one, we are finding the elusive crevices and filling them.  Further, during the rains, we are finding things to do inside Mahdee where it is dry (and warmer).  The result is that some things are getting done that we had thought wouldn’t be done until we were launched–that’s about right now if we were on schedule.

The big news is that, working inside Mahdee, we have both (Cummins 5.9L main propulsion and Onan 8Kw genset) diesel engines running!  Clearly these are needed before launch, so the engine work is behind schedule.  As Brenda noted in an earlier post about a friend that said 80 percent can be obtained with 20 percent of the work, that friend didn’t have a boat.  The engine has conformed the more typical ratio–at least 400 percent of the expected level of work is needed before the result will be seaworthy.  In a related observation, we have noted that, despite the fantastic selection of stuff at marine stores, virtually none of it will work as designed on Mahdee.  I think that is a combination of Mahdee’s size and age.  We spent a long time trying to design a semi-typical exhaust system that would conform to ABYC standards.  The result is a very custom design that took forever to build and contract-for the building of all the various custom parts.  Of course, there are a few details to take care of on the engine systems before it is fully seaworthy–clearly I haven’t hit 400 percent yet.