S/Y RAPTOR: January 2018 | MONTH IN REVIEW

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Here's a quick summary on what we were up to this month.

Happy New Year! Wishing you and your loved ones a blessed and wonderful 2018! 🎉 {in reality this post is a couple of months late}

It's been a busy month for us. While I have been busy juggling between my new job and sorting out some personal stuff; Alex has been busy working on the long list of boat projects and has made a lot more progress than he did last month! {yay}

He finally replaced the cracked mixing elbow on the engine. Unfortunately, the one we got from US was not the right one, even though we checked with the salesperson prior to purchasing it. Nothing new, as a result, we purchased a couple of new hoses because the inlet on the mixing elbow did not align to the outlet on the heat exchange. Things we do to make it work.

Several months ago, after we re-bedded the shroud chain plates & re-attached the shrouds, we noticed, as we were tightening the shrouds, that the middle port shroud would not tension whatsoever above the spreader. For some reason, it seemed to have slipped up through the spreader clamp on the end of the spreader when we loosened the shrouds, but then got jammed & refused to slip back into place. Check out our 'Spreader Maintenance' post to see more photos!

Last September, Alex started the Fuel Tank Project. The one where we had to remove an entire wall in the main port cabin to gain access to it and added an inspection port to clean the sludge out. The project was put on hold for a while as he needed parts for his fuel polishing system which he finally picked up in the US last December. Take a look at some of the connectors below. Apparently it's not as easy as it looks!

He also sanded the bow, where we made two access holes to get access to the forestay chain plate area we had to repair & reinforce in Richard's Bay, South Africa 5 years ago. The access holes were sealed up of course, but left visible... just in case we had to open them up & revisit the repair done on the wood supporting the chain plate. Many years later, the repair still looks very strong 🙏, so he finally decided it was time to seal the whole area permanently. More updates on this later.

It's good to see the progress on Raptor. Although still far from being ready to launch.

As for me, getting back into the the rat race after two years is rather challenging. I am trying my very best to keep my head above the water and doing my best to stay positive. If you see me frown, turn me upside down! 😆

Oh, and on 23rd January, after almost 3 years on the hard in PowerBoats, we had all the stands for the boat replaced (in 2 hours). The blocks of wood we were on had too much moisture (beginning to rot a little) and had lots of ants. So we got them replaced to be safe! Scroll down below to see our new stands.

Check out our posts this month: