Day: October 1, 2020

As mentioned before, last Friday the boat rail pulley on the lower end failed.
On Tuesday morning, Arthur and I got up super early (4:30 AM) to catch the low tide and install a new eye bolt for a pulley to anchor the lower end of the boat trolley cable.
I didn’t take any picture, but this is what an eye bolt looks like.

After I went to work, Tuesday, Arthur tried to pull the boat out of the water on his own at the mid-day high tide.
The new eye bolt failed. So it looked like this.

It left us questioning our choices. Not to mention, it looked like a question mark, right?
Yesterday morning (Wednesday), we got up early again, and tried to re-engineer an anchor for our pulley. We drilled a second hole, and installed a U-bolt.
It looked like this.

Then I went to work, and though the boat was out of the water, Arthur decided to lower the boat back into the water because the boat was crooked on its cradle.
As Arthur attempted this, there was a catastrophic failure of our U-bolt. I found this piece of our rail, and the loose pulley, near the tide line when I got home.

And this was the base of the rail in the morning.


So now there was no chance of getting the boat back into the water to “re-float” it and straighten it out. You can see the crooked boat, here.

Instead, we decided to use a come-along and chains to pull the boat around on its cradle. I didn’t take a picture of this process, because I was working hard. But this is a come-along and a chain, which we used (somewhat blurry).

We got the boat straightened out and up into the barn using the come-along and the trolley winch (but only “uphill” would work, because of the broken pulley at the bottom, so each time we needed to “reverse” we had to set up the come-along).
We paused during the uphill trip because Arthur wanted to wash off the boat. I said it would be a multi-day job, but he plowed into the effort.

After about two hours, he said he agreed it would be a multi-day job, and decided on second-thought he’d just like to get the boat put away in the boat house. So we did that.
Yay.