I delayed all work to prepare for this radio event, of which the 'worst songs' part was simply hysterical. 'XPN's program director Dan Reed deserves much credit, firstly for being an excellent DJ, providing information, context, and witty banter (as well as interviews with artistes and persona guests), and secondly for actually enduring all seven hours of the worst songs ever.
One thing I had to do was to move the speakers out to the cockpit to continue work on the hull. On our Raider 33 Antigone we had cockpit speakers which my brother Steve made for his old Fiat, which had come with none. They were nifty little white-overlay-plywood boxes with aluminum grilles and Sparkomatic 6x9s in them. I came up with the idea (which I don't remember if we actually did) of mounting a Herreshoff-style cleat on the top of each one, to serve as a handle and a place to wrap the cord. We just took these out and stood them on the cockpit seats whenever we wanted them.
For Diana I'm doing the same thing, likely with these nice little speakers which come from a 1980s Sony component portable stereo (which is currently in the boat). I have already run the speaker cables back to the lazarrette but have yet to decide if I want to install connection points in the side of the little Dorade box or just to leave them below. I hate how I screwed this little box to its mounting cleats; I should have used the cleat-on-cleat method that CY's Ziggy uses all the time as it hides the fasteners (provided there is interior access). I will most probably plug these holes and add the cleats inside to do it that way... after the cover goes on and I remove the box for varnishing inside.
The Sea Dog low-profile vents are meant for the Dorade boxes on the cabintop. The ones back here should be the taller traditional kind but as yet I have only ordered the low ones from Defender.
The one shown installed (and not totally pushed-in) is the one that vents through the Dorade box and through a hose to the foot of the quarter berth. It works great. The other one leads directly through a hose to the bilge, where I have yet to fit a bilge blower for the gasoline vapors. It is plugged here because, as Diana is not now swinging to weather on a mooring, I can't keep the cowl trimmed as an exhaust vent.
The patched hole in the cockpit was where I installed the Whale manual bilge pump, one of the first things I did when I got this boat as the cabin windows leaked like a sieve. I decided to relocate it to the inside of the coaming, both because it's easier to operate while steering and because it'll free up access through this cockpit-seat locker.
The 'XPN radio event was really a lot of fun and I helped clog up Twitter with many comments. As a result of the event's effect on listeners, '@885countdown' was the number-4 most-Tweeted event in the US on 24 October, easily number-1 in the Philadelphia region, and the station's own website crashed due to too much traffic. Truly an event for the ages!
BTW: the number-one favorite song, as it had been at the last countdown in 2004, was Springsteen's 'Thunder Road'. The worst one, on this, the first-ever worst-songs countdown, was Starship's 'We Built This City' (I am not making this up!). And here I had thought 'Billy, Don't Be A Hero' was a shoo-in.
- JC2
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