That time of year comes early

Spring has sprung, very early here in Minnesota. Ice out on Minnetonka was the second earliest on record, March 17^th 12:17am. I had taken the cover off of Seeker back in late February as the snow was pretty much done. My project list for spring before launching was as follows;

• ·         New motor mount for the outboard. I had swapped out the massive all electric bells and whistles 9.9HP Yamaha with a nice simple 6hp Yamaha. Got a bunch of credit as well. This mount also raises the motor out of the water a bit so, less drag when sailing.
• ·         New rudder bushings. The lower ones were shot and the rudder slid back and forth.
• ·         Modifications to the jib car controls. Make them no longer pin stop and easily adjustable. Got the hardware for Christmas for that.
• ·         New Traveller. 2:1 traveller being replaced by all new Harken hardware and making it a 4:1.
• ·         Anything else that comes up.

 

Not bad for February.

A fine late February Saturday was hitting the mid 50’s for temps, yeah like I said, very early spring. So I started early in the day and got a bunch of things done. Motor mount, rudder bushings, took a look at the traveller and went, yep gotta go. 

Out with the old.

Comparing new to completely shot.

Installed

Yep, that's a motor mount.

I also saw that a nice little chunk had been taken out of the trailing edge of my rudder. Well, seeing as I needed to fill the holes for the electrical wires for the old beast motor, I was going to be mixing up epoxy anyway. So I backed it with the multi-tool known as duct tape and had at it. Wasn’t a big deal and it is on the trailing edge above the water line, so should be pretty harmless. 

Ouch!

All better.

Got the other holes filled including the ones for the bimini brackets that were just screwed in to the deck. Why anyone would think I bimini works on a 235 is beyond me. Was a very successful day, especially for being February in Minnesota. Ya gotta take advantage of warm temps as much as possible. At this point I had the traveller upgrade and the jib car mod left to do. Time to spend a few $$ and order the traveller hardware. As this was a pretty extensive mod, that will be covered in an upcoming post. 

I know, you all can hardly wait…..