Well, late for me anyway!
The marina has a policy of everyone being in the water by Memorial Day. This is good because it keeps the travel lift schedule full and discourages those who procrastinate launch for real or imagined reasons.
But, for those of use who have 10 gallons of projects and a 5 gallon completion bucket, it doesn’t work out very well!
This year, I had elected to replace part of my standing rigging (just the forestay) and also decided to replace all of my running rigging as well. Plus, I was adding a new anchor light, combination steaming and foredeck light, new VHF/AIS antenna and, of course, everything had to be snaked, routed and pulled up the length of Amalia’s 30 foot mast.
Oh, did I neglect to mention that I had a worn-out cutless bearing that had to be replaced before the splash?
I don’t recall that the spring was particularly late as far as the snow leaving and temperatures making it tolerable to spend afternoons on projects on the hard, but it definitely seemed that my pre-splash project bucket had grown to about 50 gallons and most of this work hadn’t even been started by Mid-May.
I began to get some of these things done but didn’t realize that the events around the (apparently) simple task of replacing the cutless bearing would take quite that long!