 Oh, I'm back in my boat today, and there's a bit of sun, so I'm getting some motor. Good, we're actually moving! Haha, this is great! Got the barnacles off the boat. Ah, yeah! Haha, love this! Man, I love this boat. I'm not even pedaling right now. And the pedals, if they're at that angle, they don't... They don't hit the water. Let me, uh... Let me go visit my friend, and just yell at him for a minute. Man, the steering on this boat is amazing! Holy cow! Oh, it's so good! Yeah, between that rudder and that motor, they both steer, so... Oh, this is really, really good. I've got a pretty good stiff wind coming from that way right now. And it is not pushing me around at all. Even with my motor at kind of, uh... I don't know, it's maybe half speed right now. Yeah, this thing handles great. I just hope I don't get a cloud. Because I need to operate on my pedals, make them a little better, before I really rely on them. I want to, the pedals only go, they're only like this wide, so they can go, they can be a lot wider, and still fit. Alright, let me just turn this off for a second, and try to have a conversation with my friend. Alright, I think my friend is not there right now. He did say he was doing some stuff today. And when I turned the motor off, and I was just coasting, I could still steer really well with the rudder. Great. Okay, let me get up a bit of speed, and then I can kill the motor. And yeah, it's totally, totally turned just on the rudder. That is great. Maybe I should, maybe I should do some pedaling too. The thing is the pedals are still too small, I need to modify them. But, uh... Oh, everything's great on this boat. I love this boat. Look at how awesome a boat this is, it's really, really good. Yeah, I'm not going super fast or anything, but I'm getting some pretty decent speed, even with the motor at pretty low power here. It's hard to tell how fast I'm going. You can't see the water going by down there. Oh, I just hit a cloud. That means I'm slowing down. I also really love having this, I love having the pedals, because I can see the water. Alright, I guess this is a good time to test just pedals, since I'm in pretty heavy clouds right now anyway. And I think I can roughly triple the surface area of the pedals without modifying anything else, because if there's lots of space here, the pedals don't even come up to the top here, there's some more space. I'm doing a little bit of stuff. I'll be able to make the pedals bigger. Just on what I've got. I just need like, alright, I'm moving now. Oh, come on, come on, keep going, keep going, keep going. There are any more sections that I can be in. Oh man, now I don't want to stop, but I don't know what the sun is going to do. You have to get a cover for that. Okay, so the steering is amazing on this boat. Yeah, I can turn real tight corners and everything. It's actually much better than that boat, which I've been driving a lot. Like this boat, I have to make pretty wide turns. And it's mostly just because of the way the steering is set up. So here, the pivot point for the rudder is there, and then the rudder sticks out way behind it. So when the boat's moving, there's a lot of water pressure pushing the rudder to straight. So when I'm steering, it takes some force to force the rudder to the side to steer. So I kind of had to gear it down. So the push rod here, or the pull rod, or whatever you call it, is connected pretty close in to the handle, which limits the amount that I can move that, but it makes it easier to move. Now this one, I almost made actually the same kind of rudder on this boat. And then I was like, wait, wait, wait, no. If I pivot it here and then hang it out back, it's just going to have too much force to fight against because this is just a much bigger boat than the other one. So I switched it to this kind of rudder, which has the pivot through the middle almost. I left it hanging out a little bit behind so that there's a little bit of water force straightening it out. But for the most part, you can turn it freely. So it's just a lot easier to turn the rudder. It's not trying to force itself straight all the time, so it can turn a lot further. And yeah, pretty much from the bottom of this metal thing down is in the water, maybe even a little bit higher than that. And it turns really well. And then plus the motor here that also steers. So the motor actually puts propulsion in the direction that'll turn the boat. So even if I'm sitting still, I can go from a standing stop and start steering right away, which is really nice. Okay, what else? Well, I guess for the steering, yeah, everything's functioning great on it. I just need to finish up the little things. So the steering wheel here pulls on this string, which turns the top, whatever you call this, turny shaft, which runs the whole length, which means I can steer from the front of the boat, which is also really nice. But to finish this off, like a collar here. So this can't slide. And then, you know, collar up in the front, or I could even just put two collars here just to keep it lined up, right? So that this pulley thing here is lined up with that. So this doesn't end up having the strings come off or get bunched up here, whatever. But that looks like the only thing I have to do with the steering. Oh, well, there's one other thing I have to do with the steering, which is... Yeah, cut off this. There's donglers sticking out the front. So I just want to cut it off there. And here's a collar that was on the previous version of the boat. So I could just take out this metal pin, which is all rusty anyway. Put the collar where it's supposed to go. Put it back in. Cut this. And then the steering is good. You know, and a collar on the back. The switch is amazing. It's in a really good spot. You know, it's easy to reach from sitting here. The steering is easy to reach from sitting here. And I'm going to have chairs that go here, which is great. I have two chairs coming. Thank you, Paul. I'm pretty sure it was Paul. Let's see. What else is going on? So for the power system, like for the motor, right now I have four solar panels, four out of the six solar panels connected through the switch. The last two solar panels, I'm just not going to connect until I get the batteries, because that's what they're going to ultimately connect to. And if I connect into the switch right now, I'd just be setting up a temporary thing. I'd have to do it anyway. And I'm not going to use the boat much before I get the batteries. So I'll just leave the last two solar panels disconnected until I get the batteries. Now the pedal system, I definitely need bigger, bigger paddles. And I did leave space, because the things are only like this wide, so I can make them significantly wider and they'll still fit. And there's even some space at the front here, but I'm going to have to trim like this, this edge, but just under there. So, because right now the paddle thing goes like pretty close to the edge, but I can trim that and make it a little bigger. So I should be able to at least double to probably triple the paddle area that's in the water. Yeah, and I have paint for the boat. I'm not going to paint it until I kind of get everything else wrapped up. I also need to wait until there's a sunny forecast to paint, obviously. I don't want it to get rained on in the middle of painting. Overall, I'd say that's a pretty awesome test of the boat. Yeah, everything's going great. Just the paddle wheel need bigger paddles. Everything else is spectacular. And I am super glad that motor still works because I haven't tested it in a while, but it looks like it totally functions. I did get some oil to put in the gears in the bottom of the motor, you know, the part where the propeller comes out and there's gears and 90 degree thing. So I'll do that at some point. It does have oil in there. It's just old and dirty at this point. I'll put new oil in soon. Other than that, I guess I should see about those pedals, the paddle wheel pedal thing. Because I definitely want those to be functioning well enough that if for some reason I have a problem with the motor, I can still pedal and get somewhere. Like, you know, I want it to be I want it to be usable when I'm driving with the motor. You know, to give me a bit of exercise and get a little bit more speed. But the most important purpose is just as a backup. So if the motor for some reason has a problem and it doesn't function, I can still pedal and, you know, get to wherever I need to go or get home at least. So I definitely want to make sure the pedals work well.