I have got to tell you, having spent the better part of the day becoming intimately acquainted with the ice box on Faith, I have come away impressed.
Say what you will about those (often) drunken Portuguese fishermen that I understand were the majority of the workcrew at Pearson when our boats were being assembled, I am impressed (I think that is who I should put it).
I have a buddy who does cabinet work. If he assembled cabinets like these guys built this ice box, it would take approximately 8 years to remodel a single kitchen.
TO back up,
I have a confession. I like my ice box (now past tense). I like my cabinets, the hanging locker, I even like the original Monel water tank up forward. I drank water out of it all summer and there ain't a thing wrong with me......
Well, anyway.
The problem is that I have never used my Ice box as an ice box. I use it as dry storage. I know that I would not use it while cruising, and frankly don't have a great need for lot's of cold storage anyway. (medium cooler suits me fine).
The ice box is very inefficient for dry storage (with all the space taken up by insulation), and I wanted to remove the lid from my favorite lounging spot in the cockpit anyway (as well as remove the potential off-shore liability).
Today was too damp to epoxy the holes left by the removal of the jib tracks. So the ice box was bumped to the top of the list.
Here is what my old friend looked like before I started.
I know, shameful. It was always good for collecting all the junk that piled up as I was working on everything else. The purple magazine rack..... that I will not miss.