It’s raining amazingly long and consistently for San Diego. I hope the folks inland are doing fine. Our Saab friend and parts supplier, Paul, had his road wash out day-before-yesterday. He’s stuck at his remote home (with parts we need) and we’re stuck on the boat with too much rain to troubleshoot Buttercup. I hope Paul is having as good and mellow of a time as we are. Hot coffee this morning and moving into the hot tea for the day realm. Patter, patter goes all that rain.

We usually turn the inflatable Tinker Traveller upside down on the deck but, silly us, we left it right side up when we got here the other day. It has about 8″ of water in it. I need to go bail it out but I’m waiting for a lull. At least that’s my story.

Since we’re at the Fiddler’s Cover courtesy dock, we had the luxury of shore power all night long. Ah…that means we left on the computer that needs the OS upgrade and proceeded to download about 4-1/2 Gigabytes of files. This morning at 6 am it was done! I’m impressed that the tethered Sprint cel phone did so well with it. Now David is doing the install. So nice. He’s moving his OS over to my little small form factor (SFF) Shuttle computer which will then be his little SFF computer. He’ll also move the HDTV card and a few other things over as well. We’d originally built up the Shuttle as a clone/copy of a system that we put together for a customer doing some medical image processing. Before bringing it to the boat, we removed the important business guts–mainly the NI Labview card–from it and really have not been using it at all for over a year. So, it is nice that it will have a purpose on the boat. We’ll “retire” David’s larger computer for now. We have plenty of room for David to keep a full size computer aboard, but it is really nice to not use one all the time since the power drain is pretty big. My notebook is nothing in comparison to either the SFF or the fullsize computers.

Drip, drip, drip…that’s the other thing about all this rain. It drips off the main boom onto the charthouse roof. Each time I hear a drip I think something is leaking INSIDE the boat. It’s only the drip on the roof, though. We do have two leaks of import–one adjacent the toilet that is managed with a little pail on the sole to catch the drips. I know where it’s coming from but can’t really fix the problem for a while–so the pail does it’s thing. The other leak of significance is directly over our bed! The leak is along the port aft corner post of the charthouse and doesn’t have an easy fix either. The water is captured by a funny little hammock I built for this express purpose of catching water. The net hammock is lined with plastic and contains a high absorbency synthetic terry towel. Typically, dew and rain leave a few little drips in the towel. On the other hand, this rain has poured drip, drip, drip in for a couple days. I “emptied” the hammock last evening as it was actually full of water! I measured about 1/2 gallon. It took a couple days to get there. This morning, I emptied it again! It really rained hard last night!

When we did the rebuild of Mahdee, we re-roofed the charthouse but we did not rebuild its walls. There were just too many other things to do with the boat. This is one of the only areas that we “put off” for the future knowing that it was easier to access than other projects would be. So, it is no surprise that the scuttle and deck hatches do not leak, the charhouse roof is sound, but the charthouse walls have their issues. By design, the butted joints of wood to corner post create an opportunity for leaking. Before launch, I did put some cotton caulking and sealant there, but clearly it needs more! Further, the mitered joints around the charthouse windows provide opportunity for water seeping in. That is a much bigger project to take on. Someday we’ll remove the mitered window frames that a previous owner installed and we’ll put in traditional frames like Mahdee originally had. Someday. But, that day won’t be soon.

Rain, rain, rain.

Update–added at 2:00 pm–due to heavy rain and flooding, the nearby base, NAS North Island just sent everyone home keeping “essential employees” only. So, we wouldn’t be working on the car there anyway as they’ve just closed shop. Rain, rain, rain.