Boat diving today.....

I dove under the boat with just a mask and fins yesterday to check the propshaft and rudder zincs and found that 4 of the propshaft zincs were eaten away enough to need replacement.


Today I bought new zincs, got out my scuba gear, went under the boat and replaced them. It took about an hour, even thouogh it's an easy job. Zincs are baseball sized solid zinc castings that will succumb to electrolysis before any of the underwater bronze or stainless steel parts are corroded or eaten away by electrolytic action in salt water. There are also zincs where salt water runs through the engines, the raw water pump and the generator cooling water system. These zincs were OK, so next I'll check to see if I can improve the electrical bonding for the propshafts, which is like grounding the underwater metal to electrical grounds in the boat. If not, I'll have to check monthly and replace zincs when they need it. It's also possible that one of the marinas we were at had improper stray current in the ground wire of their shore power, which could cause zincs to get eaten up when we plugged in to that electric power.

Key West Sunset.......

We did the usual tourist thing this evening and went to Mallory Square to watch the sunset, with a thousand other tourists.

It is a nice place to see sunsets and I got the classic sunset picture, even with the seagull and sailboat, just like you see on those paintings on velvet sold at roadside stands.

We're moving to a mooring ball in the Key West Bight tomorrow afternoon. It's like anchoring out without an anchor. We'll dinghy in to the Key west City Dock, which is on the northwest side of the island....too far to walk down to tourist town here. Daisy will miss walking here where there are dozens of cats and chickens around. Chickens are protected in Key West because it is thought that they eat the local bugs and scorpions. I must admit that we have seen no bugs or scorpions the whole time we have been here. The cats don't bother the chickens either, maybe because the roosters are big and have big dewclaws on their legs for fighting off cats.