AND there was light; and the Lord said “EW! This place is FILTHY!” And it was so.

Installed the new LED bulbs for select interior lights today. Select lights only because the bulbs are about 20 bucks a pop. They are brighter than the old-school incandescents we had in place and draw only 0.1 amps each. This is a big deal when you are running on batteries.

The bulbs are excellent, and come highly recommended by my man in the industry (shout out to John!) — the company is MarineBeam.

SINCE we got our spars and sails in their rightful place, one of my primary occupations has been figuring out how to get the Picaroon trimmed properly, by which I mean balanced both fore and aft and side to side.

When we first launched, she sat 6 inches high at the bow, but we knew that would be corrected by the masts. Of course, we lost maybe 250lbs off the main rigging gang when we switched to Dynex Dux, so even with the masts stepped (500lbs for the main, 200lbs for the mizzen, or so), she still sat high forward.

Gradually, over the last few weeks, we’ve been putting weight back on her, most of it up in the bow: two anchors put a combined 90lbs right out on the end of the bowsprit; the mainsail and genoa, probably 50lbs each; halyards, sheets, sail covers, the dinghy, all gradually moved the centre of balance forward.

At the same time, she was listing to port. It started as a 3° tilt. No surprise: half the house batteries (210lbs), starter battery (150lbs), inverter, charger and various electrical black boxes are all over to port. So, gradually, we started to move anything that could be restowed over to the starboards side, including all the tools, dinghy anchors, dinghy chain, food cans, papers, the 1.5TB hard drive.

Once as much that could be restowed was, we still had a couple of inches of bottom paint showing at the bow, and a distinctly flabby, wallowing arse-end.

Finally, I bit the bullet (again–it’s amazing I have such pretty teeth), and hauled out the beautiful stainless steel davit (25lbs) that hangs off the starboard taffrail, and the stern anchor (25lbs) that hangs off the port, along with 50 feet of chain (55lbs). That fixed it.

The stern anchor and chain will stow in the bilge–depending on how much we find we need it, I might put it back on the rail with a reduced chain section. The davit, although a marvelous thing, can be made redundant by a tackle clipped to the mizzen boom, which I’ve already tested and works fine.

Now I’ve got to see about laying off those cookies . . .