August 2nd 2016
Yorktown Heights, NY
Today proved to be very busy. When I awoke, the plan for the day was to just attach four pad eyes onto the kayak for the Topkayaker.com Knee Straps that will help me stabilize the kayak in bigger water, and if I’m really good, roll it. Then we’d run to the Supermarket and pick up my food for the next thirty days. Get back, pack up and head out tomorrow morning for the re-launch. Well that was the plan anyway.
(9am) What happened was a bit more complicated and used up the whole day. It started with the gentlemen stopping by to see the tent I was selling. I invited him inside and showed him how it set up and broke down. He loved it. It’s going to be used for his two boys when they go camping so Mom and Dad can have their own private tent again. I was thrilled I didn’t have to mail it back to the store. He was thrilled to get a nice tent for a good price. It should work well for the kids.
(10am) Then we got to work on the kayak. After watching some of the Topkayaker.com videos on installing the knee straps, I sat in the kayak and Arlene aligned the hooks marking them where I’d need to mount them. Well that set off a bunch of little projects. Now that I had the rivets and rivet gun, I figured I might as well do a few more modifications. I added a few more pad eyes, switched some of the deck lines around, tightened up others, removed some shock cord I wasn’t using and relocated it to areas I was. Improved the tension cords on the foot pedals and relocated the mounting points and attached the glides for the foot pedals better. I also removed a Ram Ball I had previously installed in a bad location. That required a bit of finesse, as I didn’t install it to be removed. With all this work, I wanted to make sure all these new holes were sealed up well so now I’d need a trip to the hardware store for some salt water friendly Silicone and Epoxy.
(1pm)Before we were to head out, I had another project to tend to. The new tent meant a new footprint for that tent, but this time I wanted to make the foot print rain fly compatible. Unlike the prior tent where the rain fly was permanently attached, this new tent would require the rain fly to be installed after unless I made a special footprint. I had two choices for the footprint. Buy one for $70 (OUCH) or make my own for $20. With this special footprint, I’d be able to erect the tent poles on the footprint, then install the rain fly and finally, erect the tent under the fly out of the rain. This would mean that I was going to need some more parts too so now it was time to head off to the hardware store.
(3pm) We completed the template for the footprint and inventoried my remaining food before heading out to pick up my provisions and parts. I wasn’t expecting this trip to take more than about two hours. That would prove to be very wrong. We hit Shoprite first to pick up the food as I heard they have great prices. It was true, they do have really great pricing and I was able to pick up all my provisions except for one meal. – Dinner! I’ve been using Progresso Stew packs for dinner. It’s a two serving package or in my case, one meal. It’s priced much better than those freeze-dried meal kits at $4 a pack. Sure, its heavy at one pound a pack, but I’d have to carry that in water for the freeze-dried stuff and my boat can handle the weight. So off we went to other stores looking for my dinner plan, but didn’t have any luck.
(4pm) I stopped in at Home Depot and grabbed the stuff I needed, well most of the stuff I needed. I forgot some screws and I could not locate the plastic dip that you use to put a plastic coating on your tool handles. I was looking to use this to replace the rubber tips on my X-Grip for the phone. I’d lost two of them already and felt the plastic dip would work well. Unfortunately, the only stuff I could find was in spray cans.
(6pm) We headed home for dinner with plans to go back out and try some more stores for my dinner plan. By the time Arlene got dinner cooked and I worked on installing the accessories on the kayak permanently, it was after 7pm. Too late for food shopping, but time for a haircut.
(8pm) I’d wanted to get my hair cut before the expedition, but like today, we had run out of time. It’s been a bit warm on the water and though I know that is going to change quickly, I still wanted to get it cut short so I don’t have to deal with it much in the beginning.
As much as I wanted to re-launch tomorrow, it just isn’t going t happen. I needed one more day to finish refitting the kayak and completing the footprint for the tent. We ordered some of the food on-line, but even there, they did not have more than a half month worth so we’ll need to come up with a plan B for my meal plan tomorrow.
Day 32 Done
