Moored. Ball 5. 26°27.3728′N 081°57.0415′W.

Since moving to the mooring ball, we've really ramped down to -- well -- nothing.

Grocery Shopping

The grocery store is behind the Snook Bight Marina. The marina doesn't have a proper dinghy dock, but the Bayside Bistro does have a dinghy dock.

So that means early dinner and grocery shopping. Sounds like fun.

It is, however two miles away. We thought t½″he one mile dinghy ride at Garrison Bight was long. This is a 45-minute dinghy ride out. And another 45-minites back.

Since we had settled weather, it was very nice to potter down the mangroves. If the wind picked up it could become nasty.

The food was amazingly good. We have low expectations for bars next to marinas. They have a kind of lock on the boaters and don't have to be terribly good. The Bayside Bistro was very good.

The Aft Head Faucet

The heads have "single hole" faucets. Underneath, two copper tubes and a mounting stud feed through the hole in the counter-top. There's generally a bracket under the counter-top with cut-outs for the copper tubes.

Our aft head countertop is built on top of two ½″ thick slabs of insulation. The stud is not long enough. And. Further. There's no useful bracket.

I think there might have been a bracket once-upon-a-time.

A few years back, we took the faucet off to replace the original gasket which was falling apart. We assume it was original, and the rubber dated from 1981. At that time, I think the bracket had been reduced to some rusty flakes that dropped into the engine room. I think. I'm pretty sure I turned the nuts on the stud until they caught against the edge of the countertop and kind of wedged the faucet in place.

Since the faucet wasn't held down well, the gasket CA made creeped around and developed a wrinkle and was awkward to clean. So. We tried again to get the thing seated.

CA tried a bunch of things to wedge washers in there. The essential problem is the stud is for countertops no more than ¾″ thick. With insulation, ours is well over 1″.

Here's what we did.

This is some pipe-hanger strap. (And the two copper tubes for hot and cold.) The shadowy mass in the lower-left is the underside of the sink.

The holes in the strap are -- of course -- too small for the threaded stud.

Drilling one hole out to be the diameter of the stud is a nightmare of trying to drill through thin, flexible sheetmetal. Note to self. Next time use the big metal C-clamps with pieces of plywood on top -- holding it in your hand only shows you how deeply the edges can cut.

Using tin snips to cut two little notches around the copper pipes, also challenging, but not has bad as drilling. And doesn't involve so many band-aids.

A couple of screws to hold it firmly against the underside of the countertop and we can tighten the stud down until the faucet is usable again. Yay!