New Tiller

On the voyage to Fort Myers, we got stuck in the mud heading into a little marina on the side of the Inter-coastal Waterway (ICW) and got the tiller broke off at the rudder post due to a misplaced tow rope and a too small tow boat. I fixed the tiller by sawing off the broken end and drilling a new hole, but the resulting tiller was too short--not enough leverage and poor steering position--and irremediably broken-- delaminated core. So, back in Apalachicola, I searched the net and found Tillercraft, which seems to be the only custom tiller house left in the US.
Richard, there, after a bit of negotiating the correct shape and size, fixed me up with a beauty. Because of the shape, tillers are hard to photograph, but here are a couple of shots:

So, now the tiller is prettier than the boat! I look forward to my next sail. BTW, I am keeping the old one. I can double as a spare tiller and a spare cudgel, should I need either.

Too pay for the tiller, I had to sell my marine SSB radio. The truth is that I never liked that radio. It was based on channels, i.e. pushing a button got a specific frequency and mode. The trouble was that there were only two channels out of sixty million that I ever used and could remember. To surf the ham spectrum was possible, but required pushing about sixty buttons. I like dials! So, it was more radio than I ever needed. It had one advantage which was its Digital Service feature--a red button that when pushed sent a distress signal all over the world. However, I already have a similar device that works with satellites, much more of a sure thing. So, it was not too hard to see it go to Louisiana.

The radio had a special antenna tuner that I included because it only worked with the ICOM M802 and my next radio will surely be an old Yaesu or Kenwood--solid Japanese ham radios--and their corresponding antenna tuners. [Boat antennas need tuners because they are essentially long wires, not cut to a specific frequency's length]. At any rate, in order to retrieve the tuner, I had almost insurmountable problems. The guy who installed was very small and he drank a lot. So, when he read the instructions to install the tuner as close to the antenna as possible, he did not discriminate between electrical length--the length of the coaxial cable connecting antenna and tuner-- and physical length. So, he mounted it as far back in the stern as he could get, leaving about six feet of extra coax neatly coiled.
I barely even reach the tuner, let alone unscrew it. I managed to unscrew one screw of three, and my friend Marsha, a small person, crawled back in there and unscrewed another. The final screw was stripped, so I tried to lever it out and could not budge. Marsha's husband, Mike, a very, very strong guy, got his crow bar literally ripped it out of the hull (I epoxied all the holes).

The point of the antenna tuner story is that whenever I crawled back there on the quarter berth, I always came out covered with white flecks, paint or gelcoat coming loose. Plus, the new tiller inspires me to get this old boat spiffed up. Here is the quarterberth now:

 The purpose of the quarterberth is to allow an additional sleeping space underneath the starboard lazarette, but it was probably never used thusly. In fact, it is mostly a handy place to stow life jackets, fishing equipment, and other gear. But it is also useful for me to crawl aft and check the transmission oil, tighten the stuffing box, etc.

It should be very clear that my next job to spiff up the boat will be to do a little painting! I am experienced now that over a week I helped my daughter Lisa and son-in-law Andrew repaint their Tallahassee house, so I purchased a quart of very expensive boat cabin paint and UPS delivered it today.