So it looks like tomorrow is going to be the big day! Bella goes in the water at last. We have had her for almost a month now, so it has been hard not going sailing. But at last we will be on the water, perhaps only in the marina, but on the water nonetheless. The weather predictions have been for on and off rain for Saturday, now it appears to be off, however the wind is supposed to be gusting as high as 33 mph, so we will have to wait to see how brave we are feeling after we get her set up.
We are planning on picking up Bella, our new to us Precision 23, at Hooper’s Yachts Saturday. They are putting on a new coat of bottom paint, VC 17m, to keep the nasty little zebra mussels off our beloved. While we were visiting the marina we noticed a couple of stink pots that had no bottom paint applied the previous year. What a mess! The bottoms were covered with zebra mussels.
image from www.fnal.gov
This shopping cart is a good example of what the bottoms of those two boats looked like. Yikes! I do not want our sailboat to look like that!
We also had Hooper’s replace the centerboard pennant line, as long as they had Bella up on the lift. I was previously planning on doing that myself while she was in the water. I thought perhaps I could dive under the boat, untie the pennant from the centerboard and pull the new line down and attach it to the centerboard, and poof, a new centerboard pennant. I always wanted to be a navy diver anyways and this would have given me my chance to live out that fantasy. Oh well, I’m sure there will be plenty more chances for that.
Precision 23 on Lake Pepin
So perhaps now, I will be able to start regaling everyone with actual tales of sailing adventures instead of pictures of Bella and I sitting in the driveway and me droning on about how we are wishing we were on the water. Here is an image I found of someone having a great time on a P-23 on Lake Pepin, soon this will be us!