Sqoop: a square-rigged sloop

 This is something I probably should have addressed sooner; namely, the electrical system.  It’s kind of a mess which I guess is inevitable in a 35+ year old boat.  The original bare-bones system has been added to and modified over the years so that now it’s a tangle of chaotic wiring with a schematic that makes little sense and some workmanship best described as ‘questionable’. Yes, those are wire nuts you see buried in that rat’s nest (wire nuts should NEVER be used on a boat) but that is not the scariest thing I discovered. When I did the pre-purchase survey, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the boat came with a functioning 1500W inverter; having access to AC power when away from the dock is always a nice option to have.  When I started my investigation of this particular circuit, I noted that the inverter was hot-wired to the battery and happy to see a fairly short wire run of beefy one gauge cable connecting the two, meaning both the ampacity and the voltage drop of the circ

 I’ve been delaying the last major piece of brightwork refinishing because the boat will cease to be a functioning sailboat; I’m referring to the teak baseplate underneath each winch. To pull each piece off means the winches and cam cleats have to be removed: Once I disassembled the winch (taking care with the spring clip!) and removed the five mounting bolts (with a little help from a friend), I had to remove the fasteners holding the baseplate to the fiberglass, which were buried under bung plugs, so of course those had to be drilled out first.  When I finally got the baseplate removed, it was not surprising to see all the dirt and crud underneath.  Also not totally surprising: finding additional holes in the fiberglass leftover from some previous piece of deck hardware; I believe I have found the source of the quarter berth water leak!  Here is a picture after the area was cleaned up and the extra holes filled with epoxy: I cleaned, sanded, stained and epoxied the baseplate.  On the