The Westlake Pirates

Once again the nice weather seems to have us doing things other than updating the website. It's not that we haven't been busy, but a lot of it has been dull and uneventful.

The garden was quite prolific this summer, and I'll have a report on that once it's done producing. We recently sold our kitchen nook and table and are in the process of making the front living area into a much more comfortable 'living room' oriented room, rather than the big hard-seated kitchen it was. There will be some pictures of that as soon as we've made one or two more trips to Ikea.

There are a few big construction/repair projects afoot in the near term, too. One involves finally installing a range hood to help vent all that steamy air when we cook. That's about half done and nearly ready to install - I just need to find my hacksaw and cut a few pieces of sheet metal for the venting!

The bigger project is going to involve repairing/replacing all the rotted bulkheads beneath the floor. We knew when we got the boat that they were in bad shape (for some reason the Cruise-A-Homes were built with cheap normal plywood instead of marine-grade, and the ends of the wood weren't sealed with epoxy, so nearly all the boats have had similar problems.) This has finally reached the point where most of the dividers are flaking, cracking and generally breaking apart. The repairs appears to be straightforward, though noisy and probably a bit messy.

The added advantage will be that we could also remove the original aluminum gas tanks and holding tank and replace them with fiberglass tanks that are easier to maintain and clean, or leave one fuel tank out for additional storage space.