So in our last episode, we had hauled out Grace to have some work done.  We have now had her bottom cleaned and painted (is it politically incorrect to say “her bottom looks really good?”).  The props have been swapped, the rudder removed and cleaned up, the end of the keel that supports the rudder rebuilt (it was apparently damaged in a grounding incident).

The stabilizer fins are being removed and serviced.

All is going pretty well, except one big problem… the bow thruster has some teeth missing!  With all the teeth I’ve replaced in my career, you’d think this would not be too big of a problem, but I am not very skilled at replacing teeth in gears.  It looks like somehow a log or something very hard was ingested into the thruster, breaking these very important teeth.  So they will have to be restored by the company that created them, and they live in Western Canada.  And have just apparently changed gear suppliers, so they are having a difficult time getting me the proper teeth to make me smile.  Sigh.  So we are stuck here, on the hard, for at least another week.  Sigh again.

So we decided to move all our stuff on board now, instead of waiting till we are again in the water.  We had almost everything we own shipped to Ft Lauderdale in a POD.  I was hoping we’d be launched by now, and could just take stuff from the POD to the van, and then down a dock and onboard.  Now we would have to carry all 8,342 boxes up the ladder and onto the stern.  (maybe that isn’t the exact number, but it feels like it!)

So here is the van with 82% of all the POD contents loaded… notice how the rear is sagging! (we were too, but I don’t know if that made the van any happier).  So after a myriad of trips up the ladder with heavy boxes, we got two van loads dumped into our nice boat…

And this is what she looks like!  Hopefully, by Monday she will be all ship shaped again… I’ll admit I’m grateful there is a Sabbath rest in between now and then!