Boat work and work work continue

Work on the O'day is still going on at a slow pace, what with the weather and the Thanksgiving Holiday. I have been able to install a new 360 degree light on the masthead, the old one had quit working and was so badly crazed it crumbled when I touched it. Since working on the mast is so much easier when it is laying down I also replaced the jib halyard. This was a difficult job as I had to remove the entire top of the mast and push a long hard wire through the mast and then pull the new halyard through. I used an electricians fish tape (used for pulling wire through conduit) to do this and now can fly a Spinnaker or use a head sail other than the one on the roller furling. In a moment of brilliance I had pulled the bitter end of the old halyard into the mast and for the last year or so had been without this halyard.Of course being self employed work still goes on, this is a 30 ton Carrier Packaged Heating and cooling unit with a variable frequency drive, the unit is larger than my truck and was not running.

Let me see, what could it be, man there are a lot of wires and controls in here. This is an ever changing business and old school doesn't work any more.

Over Thanksgiving we had about 20 family members over for lunch and took all the kids to the park on a cold windy day. This picture is of my dad Clyde Thomas Starkey and one of his Great Grandsons Colton Thomas Stone. It was nice to have everyone over, it will also be nice to do this at my brothers house on Christmas.

The bicycle rides have been plagued by bad weather making it hard to get in any miles over the last few weeks. This year our cycling club (GDBCLUB.com) is putting on a weekly spin class and has helped keep up the conditioning, these spin classes are as hard as you want to make them and having other people working with you helps the motivation.

This weekend I decided to go ahead and ride outside and got rained on Saturday in the cold and had 30 mile an hour winds on Sunday afternoon, I still got in 70 miles and just acted like the wind was a long hill climb.

Doing better than I deserve

Dennis Starkey