Two hours, and ten degrees

I was at the boat at half past seven. It was 80 degrees. I left at half past nine, by which time it was 90 and climbing.

That is the working day in August, and I have stopped treating it as a compromise. Two hours at the right end of the morning gets more done than five hours of misery later on, and the list is long enough that pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The housing is up

The shore-power cord has been meeting the dock extension in the open air since the day the power came on. That connection is the weak point in the whole arrangement — the same corrosion, resistance and heat that cooked the original inlet, just at the other end — and the plan for a weather-resistant housing has been drawn for weeks.

It is now built and in service.

I drilled three drain holes, a quarter of an inch each, along what is now the bottom edge, so that anything driven in by rain runs straight out instead of standing in it. Bushings went on both cut ends, which removes any chance of the pipe chafing the cord. Then clips onto the side of the dock, the tube into the clips, and the cord threaded through so that it pulls out one side to disconnect.

The part I am most pleased with is the bit I did not really design. P-clips further back stop that end of the cord moving, so when you push it back into the tube it has nowhere to go but into a loop. The drip loop makes itself. That is better than a drip loop you have to remember, because nobody remembers.

I also started clipping the long shore-side run properly along the dock, discovered that what it wants is five-eighths-inch P-clips, and found I had five of them. More are ordered. Even half done it looks enormously tidier than a cord lying on the walkway.

The connector, at last

The other job was the nav pod, which has been waiting since the anti-tamper Torx bits arrived in July. The autopilot needs to join the existing instrument network, and joining it requires an adapter that comes in two versions. Which one depends entirely on whether the plug at the end of the network has pins or holes. I bought one on a guess and have been sitting on the returns window ever since.

Pins in the hand, holes on the boat. The adapter I already own is the right one.

While the pod was open I found something less welcome. There is supposed to be a gasket between the pod and its base and there is not one; somebody has used flexible sealant instead. I suspect the reason is that the front of the pod is not original — it does not quite line up — and a gasket only seals if the two faces meet. There was enough old sealant left to close it up for now. It will be done properly when the pod comes apart again for the autopilot head, which it has to anyway.

Why I stopped

The last board went in first thing: a piece of marine plywood cut to fit and bonded into the battery compartment, which finishes the mounting surfaces for the fuses, the bus bars and the battery-monitoring electronics. The batteries themselves sit on none of it — one keeps its own box and the other goes on a tray, which is a separate job for another morning. The next step here is to seal that board and its neighbour with penetrating epoxy, and I did not do it.

Epoxy at a hundred degrees is a bad idea. The working time collapses and a mix that would normally give you a comfortable quarter of an hour can go off while you are still brushing it. There was no version of that job today that ended well.

So it waits for a cool morning, which is a different sort of item on a list: not blocked on a part, or on money, or on knowing how. Blocked on weather.

At half past nine I put the tools away and went home, which felt like the sensible half of a good morning rather than the end of a short one.