Blinds:
We had been planning to add wooden blinds to the cabin ports – a bit more updating rather than the curtains in the main salon. Nat had gotten them ordered – cut to width but we had to adjust the length. No problem – how hard can that be……..
The blinds we finally picked are actually not wood – they are some type of plastic. I know that sounds a bit tacky but there are 2 reasons to go this way.
First – they were a great colour match to the stain I have used in the cabin
Second – they will not fade with the sun like real wood will.
So – that’s what we have.
Installation day – a day when I am at the boat alone so I can make all the mess I want. First job is to adjust the length. Well, they are 48” long and needed to be 9” and 12” so there was a lot of adjusting of various bits of string. So I worked on the salon floor with screw drivers and scissors and went at it. Once the length was adjusted I could hold them in place and work out how to attach them. Then came the actual install. In my mind it was a 20 min job. In reality it took close to 3 hours. The biggest challenge was the brackets that hold the blinds up – they are designed to attach and then slide the blind in place. Easy as long as you have the room (hard to image that being an issue with a house) but in our galley / main salon we didn’t. So it was a lot of improvising to get them installed. However, I believe the effort was worth it. I also added the valance trim that came with the blinds to the valance over the galley porthole. It really finishes things off and adds a warm touch.
Next I will tackle blinds in our master cabin – that should be interesting.
Cable TV
We enjoy having the TV at the boat – some days it is just nice to relax down below and catch a show we watch. Last year we just plugged in and away we went. This year the local cable supplier had changed from analog to digital signal – necessitating a converter box (at least that was what was explained to us by the marina). So I trotted over to the office to see what was needed. I was handed 2 large boxes of electronic items – one for each TV. Great……..more wires and complexity. I just knew this was not going to be easy.
I had visions of them being the thumping great box like we have at home for Rogers. Mercifully it was about ¼ that size – nice and compact. OK, so pretty much everyone has hooked one of these up – the cable in from the main feed and the cable out back to the TV – piece of cake. Ah – not so fast Kimosabe, this is a boat remember. So let’s deal with one TV at a time.
The master cabin. Simple – the TV is just sitting on a shelf with plenty of room to place the converter box next to it (remember, this is the old TV/VHS combo unit). However, theTV is positioned so that the back is basically touching the forward locker wall so disconnecting the cable from it to plug into the box is impossible. The TV has to be moved. It is screwed to a piece of wood that is screwed down to the shelf – from the underside. So, to access that I had to empty the locker of clothes, the central vacuum attachments etc. Then remove the little access door that lets me get under the TV shelf and then contort myself to get a light and screwdriver in there and working upside down remove the screws holding the TV down. All this just to unscrew one cable lead. Got it all hooked up and low and behold no signal………A quick call to the marina office confirmed that Cogico had picked today to do work at the marina and the cable was off - great.
So on to the main salon where the new flat panel TV is mounded on a bracket over the fridge – part of the work I did early in 2010. There is really nowhere to practically mount the box here. Luckily they also supply an IR remote dome that allowed me to hide the box and still have the remote work. So, detach the TV from the mount bracket, unplug the leads, remove the close out panel and now I have access to the area behind the TV – and the boat is looking really torn apart. Anyway, I installed the box in behind the TV and ran the out cable and the IR remote dome out through the close out panel, re-installed the panel, hooked up the cable and power to the TV and re-attached it to the bracket. And……still nothing. Another call to the office and yes, they are still working on the cable – call back. I do several times. Finally at about 4:00PM the marina’s “Larry the Cable Guy” comes down and tests my cable on the dock. The office staff must have been convinced I was having TV withdrawal since I had called so many times about the status of the cable. I just wanted to know if my installs were OK before putting everything back together. We finally have a signal again. The main salon TV comes to life – the master cabin one does not. Hooking up a tester shows the box is faulty. Back in the dingy and over to the office to exchange the box and we have 100+ channels in our cabin now. The main salon TV is only getting about half of them. I am suspecting the box is faulty but it is an ordeal to get at it so I have not been able to verify that yet.
Marina heads:
We have been boating as a family for 19 years now in various boats and never clogged the head – until our trip to Mac Ray. Now, to try to put this delicately, it was the results of too much paper, and not enough water in the bowl and how shall I put this – a non pee flush. Anyway, the vacuum pump did not like that and I think the mass lodged in one of the valves – called a duck-bill. I did some research on the computed and it seemed to be a straight forward – albeit messy fix to replace the 4 duck-bills. I jiggled teh hoses around hoping to mov ethings along but no luck. Sea Ray girl suggested we go for a pump out to see if that would work to dis-lodge things. So we went around to the Mac Ray fuel dock for our free pump out. We did the normal pump out and then turned on the vacu-flush system and flushed the loo……low and behold it sucked the blockage out and the system is working great again – way to go Nat – I means Sea Ray girl. We got fuel at the same time – they were offering a 20 cent per gallon discount to transients so why not. I mean, may as well kick the visa a bit more. Lesson learned with the head - plenty of water and minimize the paper.
