Sailing Vessel "Never Monday"

  Morgan Out Island 41 Pedestal Upgrade When we first bought our Morgan Out Island in 2015,  the Previous owner had started on a rudimentary console to hold sailing instruments that surrounded the existing binnacle compass.  As it was far from complete we discarded it and built a ply wood “pod” with the intention of housing the existing Raymarine ST60  trio of Speed, Depth and wind instruments.  Added to that I purchased a Garmin Echomap 7 inch plotter to give me some navigational data The original pod was functional but far too large and completely interfered with cockpit liveability.  If someone was sitting on the front cockpit seat (facing aft)  the pod was right in their face.  From the helm station, shorter users had difficulty seeing over it (originally designed for my viewing height).  The challenge was to keep the same analogue instruments, add switching and migrate to a larger 9 inch  MFD.  Some people now favour a single p...

Oh, glorious, glorious sanding.... (thanks Mads!!) We're back at it.  Working on the propane locker that is.  I try to limit my exposure to grinding fibreglass as i had a bad reaction to heavy fibreglass grinding when I was a teenager (allergic reaction,  my face swelled up like a chipmunk)     One of the problems with building anything with corners using a male plug mold is you tend to get a build up of fibreglass at the corners and a smooth finish on the inside and rough finish on the outside.  Most of the rough finish can be dealt with using a nice 7inch disc sander ( HF has a nice cheap one that has lasted me 5 years so far!!)  After demolding and initial grinding. I realised that there was substantial flare out the the bottom corner where sides wrapped around to the form the bottom and the bottom layers had wrapped up to the sides (rookie mistake I should have known this would happen).  Also because I used 1708 knitted fabric,  the ...

When  we first installed our propane system on Never Monday we lashed our propane tanks to the stern pulpit.  While this worked for keeping the tanks "vented"  and i'd done the same on a previous boat (also with 10lb tanks).  the result was a bit ugly and in incident where the stern of the boat got hung up on some piles made us plainly aware of how vulnerable this also left the tanks  Original tank hanging from rail.  We decided that the tanks needed more protection, both from the elements and to move them inside the the life lines to give them some additional protection.  We looked at commerical options but at close to $1000 for a locker that would only hold one tank,we knew that there had to be a better option.  After all they are just a fiberglass box!  In looking around at my options I found this blog post: Pheonix's custom fiberglass propane locker So I set out to build my own.... Step 1  was to decide on the dimensions.  We ca...

Last spring it all started with a little drip... Fig. 1  In the spring of 2019 I was checking on the boat and found this little surprise waiting for me.  It was wet,  but not water wet,  It was hydraulic fluid wet!  and on a Morgan Out Island Hydraulic fluid can only come from one place, the steering system!  When we got the boat in 2015  the steering system had not had any fluid in it for a number of years.  We filled the system in 2016 to get her home and the system held fluid (and seemed to work well). After our initial fixes to get the boat up and running to bring her home  to Whitby Ontario we discovered over the winter  that the helm pump needed new seals, so that was rebuilt. Over the years We suspect that the original fabrication of the stern tube left a little to be desired in terms of quality and completeness.  On the inside of the keel there was a section of "deadwood"  that was made up of a small...

Building a dodger.... We decided over the winter that we needed some shelter and protection in the cockpit.  At the Toronto International Boat Show in January we spoke to as many vendors as we could in one place which was  a good idea at the time.  What we didn't realize was either way it was going to take longer than we expected.  A traditional Sunbrella dodger came with the advantage that we didn't have to do anything other than contract it out,  the big disadvantage for us was they aren't particularly sturdy and as we have a center cockpit,  the boom and accompanying sail handling is more of a challenge with a soft dodger. We decided to build a "hybrid" hard top dodger with soft Sunbrella sides.  We liked this as we can still roll up the front panel for ventilation when needed but still have protected cockpit space when needed.  Off to the build we go! The Build... First  thing we had to do was decide how large the "hard top" port...