Sun, Ocean, Sand, Beach, Palm Trees!

We are in Florida. Fort Lauderdale, to be exact. Harmonie is docked up the New River in a canal behind a private house. We have been hustling to get a bunch of projects done, this time pretty much all “lifestyle” projects instead of functional ones.

A new mattress for our stateroom. The old one was… old. Having our old bones bounce down against the hard plywood underneath was no longer acceptable. We were replacing a ~10 year old polyurethane foam mattress, but ran into a problem. The thinest innerspring mattress we could find was too thick to allow use of the leeboards (that keep us in bed in rough sailing). To the rescue, a custom latex mattress about 5 inches thick. Hopefully many years of very comfortable resting!

New windows for the dodger. The hard plastic windows on the Amel dodger are a vast improvement over the soft vinyl windows use on a lot of boats, but even these have a finite life. I have a couple words of advice. The first time it even crosses you mind that the view thru the windows is looking a little “fuzzy” schedule to change them. Really. The improvement in clarity is breathtaking. Use acrylic (“Plexiglass”) not polycarbonate (“Lexan”), and choose clear, not tinted. The tinted windows are nice in the hot sun, but the reduction in visibility at night cancels all other benefits. There is a reason that cars are not allowed to have their entire windshields tinted! At the same time, we have a new lens to replace the one in the aft cabin hatch. 

Our refrigerator in the galley has been struggling for some time. We have managed to drag it along, but the cost of diagnosis and repair outstrip a new unit by a significant margin, so a swap out has been arranged.

The BIG project is refinishing the cabin sole. Unlike a lot of Super Maramus, our cabin floor is wood. It had been refinished once before in its life, but the finish was thin, and had started to fail, and was looking pretty tired. We hired a local woman who had done some finish work for us in the past to do this project. As I write this we are a few days from completion, but the floors are looking SPECTACULAR.

In about a week, we will be back underway again, headed to the Bahamas where there is warm weather, beautiful, empty, beaches to enjoy, and fish to catch.