Days on the water, days in the boatyard, and the occasional day spent upside down in a locker with a torch in my teeth.
The first real piece of the new mains cabinet, cut in quarter-inch MDF so that mistakes cost almost nothing. A slow day in a warm garage, most of it spent finding tools and learning to use a router, and it ends with a hole that the panel gear passes through.
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One piece of plastic cut square, using a technique I had to work out first, and which is going no further than the kitchen table. A week when the heat and something I cannot shake kept me at home — which turned out to be the cheapest possible place to find out that the panel is the wrong thickness, and that the two sheets I already own are each about half right.
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Two small jobs on Friday morning, done the sensible get-it-working way, and the feeling afterwards that I had spent it rearranging a mess rather than clearing one. What followed was an audit of everything I have already built, a decision to undo a good deal of it, and a Sunday spent on the floor.
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The port lazarette has power in it and the house charger is mounted and charging. Then an hour with a multimeter, chasing a light that would not light, over a connection to a brand-new busbar that I had never actually made.
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An hour before work. Swallow is on the internet and can be watched from home, once I found the reason she would not talk to it — and the new electrical panel is in far enough to have shore power running through it.
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The panel I had nothing to cut last time got cut, and Eve is properly rigged at last. Then the main electrical panel swap stopped over a part I did not have, which turned out to be the right place to stop. The lithium house battery went in instead.
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A day off, spent finding out that the plan for ducting the portable air conditioner through the port lights does not work. The forward hatch does. Also, after a long search, somebody to build the canvas.
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The air conditioning is beyond saving, and its replacement is deferred to October. The portable unit meant to make this weekend bearable did not arrive. The day went instead on painting backing boards that nobody will ever see.
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An early start and a hard stop. The shore-power housing went up, a question about a connector was finally answered, and the day ended not because I was tired but because of what the epoxy would tolerate.
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A visit with no tools and one job — photograph everything. It was 103 degrees, the phone shut itself down twice, and two questions we had been carrying for weeks turned out to have been sitting in front of us all along.
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Shore power lets me test the systems that depend on it. The answers condemn two old panels, expose an air conditioner that is not conditioning anything, and begin the search for an engine fault.
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New inlet, new cable, a galvanic isolator, and 120 volts arriving on the boat properly for the first time. Also a lesson about seacocks.
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The passage was only a few hundred yards. It was also my first time maneuvering Swallow in close quarters, with an uncertain engine and a permanent slip waiting at the other end.
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The permanent electrical system was becoming a major refit. A cheap battery and a deliberately temporary arrangement gave us something more valuable: time.
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Two dead batteries should have meant buying two new ones. Instead, they led to a new charging system, a safer way to divide the boat's power and the beginning of a much larger electrical refit.
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The survey told me what was wrong. Three Catalina 270 owners helped me understand what a 270 should look like, and a voice from the dock started the clock on moving Swallow.
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She came to us with a bare transom. Her name came from the first boat I ever loved and the books that first made me want to sail.
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A short search for something that would get me out of the office ended with a Sunday sea trial, one key and a boat of our own.
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