Accessible snacks are really important. There's an easy way to do this. All that's required is to eat some Classico® spaghetti sauce that comes in those high quality Atlas Mason jars. The hard part is keeping the jars handy. Unless, of course, you have a nice shelf under which you can screw the lids.

CA did this major galley improvement. She screwed lids along the underside of the aft shelf in the galley.

The jars don't rattle. The snacks are kept fresh. Glass is easy to keep clean. And the row of jars just looks cool.

While she did that, I made a hole.

Technically, I didn't create the hole. What I really did was remove the air conditioner that was sitting on top of the hole, revealing what was already there.

Remove an air conditioner? While living in Virginia? Am I crazy? Maybe. Maybe not.

The Cascade

Essentially, our fuel filter system has failed. To replace it, we need to free up some space in the engine room.

The best available space had a big-old box o' electronics parked there. So, to upgrade our fuel filters, we need to move the electronics.

Turns out that the box of electronics was a Cruisair SA10 pump relay. This allows two Air Conditioners to share a common raw-water pump.

Doesn't Work

Here's the rub. We tried the aft A/C back in July. It made cold air. However, since it was mounted on the cabin sole, the cold air didn't circulate well. Basically, all it did was cool the bilge.

We asked the previous owners about that. His line was this "We never used the aft A/C unit; we found that the forward unit and a fan made the boat plenty cool enough."

The Cruisair installation guide suggests that A/C units be at least 3' above the cabin sole. This was on the cabin sole. Maybe with an extra fan, it might have cooled something other than the bilge.

Okay. It was not installed properly. And it's not terribly valuable even if it was up higher or helped by an extra fan.

Reduce, Recycle, Remove

Rather than move the SA10 pump relay, we can chuck it. It's only there to allow two A/C's to share a common pump. If we cut back to one A/C, then we don't need a relay; we just wire the compressor directly to the pump.

I removed three wiring runs: power to aft A/C, aft A/C to pump relay and pump relay to pump. I also removed two long plumbing runs to send water to the A/C compressor, and drain water overboard.

We took the (still working) unit over to NautiNell's for sale to someone who wants a 16,000 BTU Cruisair N-series unit. What's I kept are a bunch of hose clamps. And a souvenir "AC 2" label I peeled off the electrical panel.

Bonus: we get to remove a through-hull. We can have a skilled fiberglass craftsperson pull the fitting, plug the hole and fiberglass over it, removing a potential point of failure completely from the boat.

But, Now...

But for now, there are these lovely new jars in the galley and this hideous hole in the cabin sole.

I need to figure a way to put some framing under the cabin sole. Then I can cut a piece of teak that's about the right shape and drop it into the hole. The issue is that the hole is hideous and irregular, and cutting something equally irregular will be difficult, at best.

A nice compromise might be a pleasant squared-off top plate that sticks up above the level of the floor a little bit.

A more clever thing to do would be to take a router and create a nice, rectangular frame around the irregular hole so that a nice piece of teak could be dropped into the hole and hang over the edge a bit. If I had a router. And if I could use a router successfully.

First things first: new fuel filters go into the space freed up by removing the old relay.