Our first holiday season

I can't believe I haven't written since October!  Since I really enjoy writing that says something about how busy we have kept ourselves.  I always took it with a proverbial grain of salt when I read books and blogs from other live aboards about how busy the boat keeps you with ongoing maintenance projects.  It is very very true.  We are finally feeling caught up with projects for a while.

Some updates:

•  Our Christmas Tree 2014
• the Hurricane furnace has gained a new gremlin and after 6 months and a fair amount of money we are planning to take a serious look at a replacement unit at the Seattle Boat Show next week.  It starts quickly but will not maintain a flame.  My suspicion is that there may be an internal water leak when the system is pressurized. I took the boiler out of the system last weekend, and believe it should now have all air bled.  If we pressurize the system without the boiler (using heat from the main engine) and the water level doesn't go down then I will be pretty sure I am right.
• Bob Senter (AKA "Lugger Bob") is the factory service trainer for Lugger/Northern Lights company in Seattle.  (Our main engine is a Lugger (Lugger Company marinized a John Deere tractor engine) and our generator is a Norther Lights brand.)  He is reputed far and wide among the trawler community to teach excellent classes at many of the boat shows.  His classes are fairly expensive and fill up fast but are considered to be worth the cost.  We learned through the grapevine that if he is in town he will come to your boat for a reasonable cost and do a customized class for you.  Clarice and I took him up on this and consider it money well spent.  He was able to go over common maintenance issues, provide us with some valuable history lessons about the equipment we have and, being very familiar with our boat model, point out some common problem areas that we need to fix while they are small.
• We purchased a ultrasonic device that is reputed to dramatically decrease the marine growth on the outside of the hull.  It is either the smartest $2300 we've ever spent or the dumbest.  Only time will tell but we could not find much information on the devices.  In any case we did the final installation steps this week and will see how it goes.  
• We had up to 8 people staying on the boat over the holidays. See the sidebar story for further details.
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• We are looking forward to next weekend when we will make our annual pilgrimage to the Seattle Boat Show.  We have a number of things we want to check out and will be holding down the Port of Everett booth with our Yacht Club for a few hours.
• Speaking of "our yacht club".  We joined the Mukilteo Yacht club.  Serendipitously for us they recently lost access to their old facility in Mukilteo and moved their meetings into the local sailing club building here in the Everett Marina.  The cost is very low.  The people are laid back (no polyester in this group) and friendly.  The cool thing is that we tend to go out on the boat in the slow winter season when there is little competition for reciprocal moorage so we are getting lots of free dockage during a time of year when anchoring out and using the dingy looses some of its charm. (For the non-boaters: guest moorage in Puget Sound runs from $.75 to $1.50 / ft / night.  With a 46 ft boat, it adds us quickly if we aren't careful.)