Winter Work -- Time's a Running Out

In September 2016 we committed to installing a new BetaMarine 35 HP four cylinder engine.  The reps were kind enough to comp us tickets to the Annapolis boat show, so we attended and put our deposit down on the engine.  Final payment was rendered in January, and now our engine has been built and is awaiting us in North Carolina.  Once we give the word, they will ship it up to Herrington Harbor North, where Dependable Marine will do our installation for us.  The trick is, as you might have noticed, that before we can go down there we have to get the cabin top repairs completed, get the boat back in the water, and get her down to Herrington Harbor just south of Annapolis.  Unfortunately you can't work with epoxy resin if it's too cold out so the winter was a waiting game mostly.  

I did clean behind the slide away oven cover with Bartender's Friend. You can see the grease line where I stopped to take a before and after photo:

She shines in the sun.  

We had some warm weather and bit the bullet.  Here's what was under the mast.  

Nice mulch.  

The outer fiberglass skin is thick enough that all this other crap is really not that necessary, but it's good to get the rot out and reinforce.  The new coring right under the mast base will be aluminum plate.  No messing around. 

Looks like cake batter with all the layers laid up. 

Meanwhile we could do a bit of work on the mast. There was some weird stuff wired in.  I had a "strobe" switch that was part of a reverse polarity circuit -- god knows how we ever got anything on the mast to light up but we usually did.  These will all be re-wired and replaced with LED fixtures to save on juice.  

This looks like a later addition, but maybe it was original and it's just an object lesson in stainless vs. aluminum. 

Lots of our blocks at the top of the mast were just attached with shackles.  And Matt went up using these things to hold his weight. 

Mast head casting removed, clodhopper for scale.  

This barge is right across the water from the mast.  For some reason it fills me with existential dread.

Meanwhile, we had a good solid day of pouring rain, and I arrived at the club the following day.  Ran the bilge pump for 20 minutes, which puts us at about 100 gallons in the bilge from one rain event.  Red alert, we have a massive leak somewhere.  I looked everywhere and couldn't find the source so I did the last thing I could think of and I pulled the companionway hatch slider out.  

Oh and look at that.  They ended the fiberglass before the hatch opening, filled in with thickened epoxy and thirty seven years later we have a mush festival.  I reached in and pulled pieces right out.  

Cookies anyone?

This teak beam was bedded in 5200.  Thank god for those new oscillating cutting tools because without it I would have had to knock this off with a hammer.  It took a full day of excruciating cutting around the sea cover and the teak beam but I got everything off.

And we got out all the mud dauber nests and the rot and the cracked epoxy.  

Suddenly the whole ceiling is translucent.  

While I did all that Matt continued on the mast base.  I also got a crazy good deal on a pair of Nicro solar vents -- 99.99 from West Marine -- unheard of.  So we had to take off the old dorade boxes and my pretty pretty cowl vents (never got a breath of breeze through them).  The project just keeps getting bigger! 

Time for a break.  

Mast Removal, Haul Out, Gel Coat Patching, Shenanigans

We haven't yet actually inspected the top of the mast, and there was  a bit of cabin top compression under the mast base so the only thing to do was to have it taken down.  We took down the mast ourselves on a Grampian 26, which has a hinged mast base and is relatively light. That was bad enough so we went over to Bay Boatworks and they were quite professional.  They were able to lift it straight up and off the boat quite seamlessly, and it's now in storage over there.

Haul out went pretty smoothly as well, which was a nice surprise. The only trick was using the wash down area for the power washing, which added a lot of sling time to the process and I didn't enjoy that in the least.  But she's out, mast less, and comfortably sitting on her jack stands now.  I'm working furiously on the brightwork, trying to get the old gross cetol sanded off and re-coated.  Where I've finished it does look mighty fine.  I re-caulked where needed, but the more I look around the more I see that what i really should have been doing was re-caulking the teak decks. Just thinking about taping that off makes me nauseous.

She looks so small without the rig up.  

Riding the slings 

Phew, on the stands.  

Teak with Cetol vs. the old cetol with a lot of flaking and exposed gray wood. 

Just a close up of some of the impressive joinery.  

I got some two part paint on gelocoat -- there are a hundred or so little chips that go down to the fiberglass. I probably didn't have to do this but it made me feel better to fill them in.  

Jib Block Woes

Last weekend we blew out one of our jib blocks. 

The sail track is original to the boat. We were hoping to order new blocks and put them on the track cars. That was a failure so now we are trying to replace the cars too. On paper it looks like the ones we have ordered should fit, but we won't know until next week when we are leaving on a ten day trip. I have all my fingers crossed....

Meanwhile the pump for the shower sump is either slightly blocked or just barely working.  We probably should have shop access it out before we put any water Into it. 

We did a mid season oil change since the oil was looking quite black and nasty. 

I'm ready to do some sailing. The winds have been too light for the past two or three weekends so we have mostly been motoring and swimming. 

Sippy Cup Fail

We signed up for an overnight regatta to Annapolis.  We did it last year, maybe a week after purchasing Hobo.  Last year we white knuckled it down the bay and finished 11th out of 11. Huzzah!

This year, we had a bad start.  We got down the general vicinity of the starting line and anchored out to make dinner prior the 7:00 PM start.  Ten minutes before the start (yeah, we cut it that close) we found the anchor too deeply set to get it up easily so went to start the diesel.  Although the electrical inside was working, there was some failed connection to the starter because turning the key and even pushing the starter button on the engine block didn't elicit any response of any kind.  After a few minutes of panic for no apparent reason the engine did start. We got the anchor up eventually, got the main up and were motoring around near the start line dithering about whether even to start the race, when we realized we were on a collision course with a pretty shiny new Pearson.  Before we realized that they most definitely had the right of way, they saw us, swore up a blue streak, and tacked.  We continued to kick ourselves for this failure for most of the night.

Anyway, we got across the start line only 3 minutes late, which was pretty good I think.  The wind was blowing nice but right up the bay so everyone was tacking back and forth trying to get away from the scrum at the starting line when an announcement was made over the radio that there had been a collision at the starting line and one of the boats was dismasted.  The race organizers went to help recover the mast and get that party on their way back home.  Meanwhile the guy who wins the race every darn year was basically gone over the horizon already.

We continued on, narrowly missing colliding with a partly submerged tree near the channel up to Havre De Grace.  It's been there for many years and we have hit it in the past with no harm but it is a nasty little obstacle.

The sun was beginning to set as we approached Turkey Point.  There we found approximately 1,000% more crab pot floats than I have ever seen there before.  We immediately fouled one  on our rudder.  We couldn't shake it so we had to drop the anchor and the sails and go overboard to let it off.  We got loose, got under way again, and the boat immediately behind us instantly picked up the same float and had to the same drill.  Two tacks later we were back south of Turkey point and all of a sudden came to a dead stop and lost steerage. Baffled, as we weren't near any floats this time and  usually Hobo can drag a crab pot with no problems, we dropped the anchor and the sails AGAIN and AGAIN went overboard. This time there seemed to be nothing -- but when we hauled up the anchor we found a line wrapped around it that connected two floats and was hanging out just a foot or so under the surface.  We should have cut it as that is really an unacceptable hazard, but we were too relieved to be free and continued on our way.

The wind turned a bit and we had a really nice run all the way to Poole Island. I recieved several hails from yacht club members asking for status and tempting us to quit the race to come anchor with them.  We breezily declined and continued on our way.

At four AM we still hadn't made it past the point of Poole Island (this would be maybe a 1/3 or 1/4 mark to the finish line . . . ).  The wind and tide were both against us, developing some sloppy swells and chop, and the tacking was torturous and unproductive. We had a brief fight about whether to turn back and sail with the wind to Worton, which is an anchorage with which we are both comfortable and familiar, or to continue west under sail (too afraid to start the engine in the profusion of crab pots) and anchor in the dark and unfamiliar lee of Hart Miller Island.

Hart Miller won out, and we made our way towards the Middle River under sail, basically relying on my chartplotter app to keep us from running into Hart Miller, which is dark and nearly invisible at night.  Eventually we were able to drop the hook and pass out.

We woke up basically right in the middle of the river, but hey, nobody hit us and we got to sleep!

We motored lazily into Annapolis, and didn't even join the post race party. What we didn't know was that only 4 of the 11 boats that started the race finished at all.  Had a great day in Annapolis, and then we made our way to Rock Hall and had a great day there.  The bay really does have a lot to offer.

The Perseids made an appearance and we have been enjoying seeing some fireballs and meteors with visible tails and smoke trails!

Fourth of July Weekend Mini Trip

Friday night, July 1, we installed the stack pack for good this time.  Here's a shot I took from the dingy:

It looks giant but it makes the boat easy to find, that's for sure.  We hung up a hammock for fireworks viewing and enjoyed that greatly when we were not under sail.  

Our karma came back to get us though.  The annual Sippy Cup regatta is going to be on the night of the new moon this year.  We scoffed at a captain who isn't going to participate for fear of snagging crab pots in the dark.  We are crab pot proof, we said. We aren't worried, we said.  

Just north of Poole's Island my husband was on the helm.  I saw an orange float dead ahead and called it out, but we ran it right over anyway.  I ran to the stern and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited and it did not pop up.  We continued sailing with no steerage problems so I assumed we had dodged the bullet somehow, but every few minutes there was a quite little tappity tap on the hull.  We sailed to the midway point of Poole's Island and still the tappiy tapping continued.  I looked through all the stowages for something that would explain it and found nothing.  Since we were moving pretty slowly my husband went overboard and checked the prop aperture, but there was nothing stuck there.  We kept sailing and the tappity tapping kept going.  Finally, since we knew we would want to motor into the wind to get to our anchorage for the night, we decided drastic measures were required.  We dropped the sails, dropped anchor, and my husband went under the boat again.  He checked the prop, he checked the rudder, he checked behind the boat, he checked all along the keel and found nothing.  He was just swimming back to the stern, and was saying "I have checked everywhere, there is NOTHING stuck on this . . ."

And that was when he found it. His foot brushed a piece of taut line extending 90 degrees from the centerline of the boat and out.  We hauled it in and found this guy:

The other end, the float end, was jammed into the 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch gap at the bottom of the hinge for the rudder, with the float pressed up against the hull.  There's still a teeny tiny piece of line stuck in there.  I tied the lines back together and left the pot where it was, some three miles from where it started.  (sorry crabber guy, I hope you find it)

Karma.  

So now we know. It's possible.  

Meanwhile, it has been the worst year on record for carrion and fish guts on the boat. We have found fresh sushi, fresh intestines, millions of bones and scales, half a rabbit, and a duck egg so far this year.  We hung up an owl and that seemed to help with the ducks but the ospreys/eagles are still enjoying themselves.  I have a nice bloodstain in the middle of the mainsail now.  

We keep trying different configurations of holographic reflective tape. Hopefully this weekend we won't find as much as we have been.

Up the Mast with a Mast Mate

I don't have any pictures from the spreaders this time.  Things did not go all that smoothly.  Saturday we installed the new water pump, a small Flojet.  It worked perfectly from the first moment.  Of course there are no more leaks since what is left of the water system is fortified against extreme pressure now.  The Flojet is super quiet and very low draw.  The lights don't even flicker when it comes on.  LOVE IT. It took us probably four trips to Lowe's to accomplish everything we needed to do, so the day was largely spent driving around town and getting back only to realize we didn't have everything and had to go back out.  Then by the time we had everything we needed the powerboat traffic was in full swing.  We ran the Mastmate up anyway.  We had a couple of false starts as we had not used one in a year and had to try to remember how everything is supposed to come together.  We didn't have any sail cars for it so we ran it up loose and then winched it down at the bottom so that there would be tension on it.  Unfortunately it was still a wild ride up, with Matt swinging from one side of the mast to the other, vertically or horizontally and everything in between.  By the time he got to the spreaders it was clear this was not going to be an easy sojourn up there.  The mission was to repair a loose spreader boot (my top priority) and install blocks just under the spreaders for the lazyjacks (his priority).  He got his drill out, drilled the first hole. Then he got out his tap and tried to tap the hole.  He got a little way done before the swinging of the boat caused him to break the tap off in the hole.  I sent up some vise grips to get it out, but we had no way of finishing the project without it.

We went back to Lowes and then went to West Marine and found, luckily, 8 sail cars that would fit our track.  I put them on the Mastmate, and lubricated them in anticipation of getting up super early and trying again at sunrise while the power boaters are still sleeping.

The next morning everything went pretty smoothly! Matt got the lazyjacks installed (I think they might be pretty crooked but it doesn't matter one little bit).  He couldn't manage to get the waxed thread in to position to do the spreader boot with riggers thread, so we  . . . we put duct tape on it. I don't even care. It's perfect. I love it.

Anyway, I cut the legs for the lazyjacks, ran up the stack pack, ran up the sail, took the boat out for a sail to make sure everything would hang right, and then realized the whole front end of the stack pack was off from the angle between the mast and the boom by about 10 degrees.  No big.  I can fix this.  So we had to take the whole thing down and back home for a little adjustment but honestly, that's about as little adjustment as I might have hoped for.

I had to undo a lot in order to pull the front back, and now there's a weird fold in it that I'm not happy about but I didn't have enough room to but it down and then reinstall the common sense fastener grommets further in so this was my only choice without adding a strip of fabric and thereby two more seams.

The other thing I learned from putting it up is that the bigger the stack pack the harder it is to work the zipper.  It definitely needs an external loop of line to run the zipper pull so I added some cheek blocks to make a triangle loop and i am really crossing my fingers that this will actually work.  Mack Pack does this for larger boats but I'm not sure how they get the line from the top of the stack pack down to the side without just having it drag across the ends of the material too much.  If it works I will post pictures to clarify this post.

I started cutting the material for the hatch covers but I need 96 inches of three inch wide strips for the casing and edges of the cover. I think I got maybe 48 inches done if I am being kind, before I got tired of it and quit for the night.

Expanding the Network and Building a Stack Pack

There's an ad in Texas right now for a Rafiki 35 for 10,000.00.  The ad doesn't really say anything and only has two pictures.  The boat has nice canvas and looks to have been well cared for (from the outside in a small picture, I don't know what the inside is like or anything up close).  I contacted the seller, who put me in touch with the buyer, who is pretty excited! Nice to meet someone else.  I think that makes it five now that I know of. Still looking for the rest of you.

Anyway, I had my copy of the blueprints scanned and was able to share them.  It sounds like maybe it is not as standard as I had thought to have received a copy of the plans with the boat.

Meanwhile, my big evening project has been to build a stack pack.  It's gigantic.  I think we could use it to sail in high winds if we wanted to.  Building one for the second time was definitely a lot easier than the first time.  We are planning to go up the mast this weekend to install the blocks on the mast for the lazyjacks, run the line, and also to reattach a spreader boot that is working its way loose.  The weird flat spreader bars are a challenge, it seems.

I'm planning a four leg lazyjack configuration and I'm using bowlines for the loops for the legs instead of hardware.  The topping lift is very heavy duty so the stack pack won't have to take the weight of the boom usually, and I think everything can be fairly simple. Last time around I went with the 300.00 Harken lazyjacks, which are nice but not very adjustable and leave a steel cable and block banging on your mainsail.

All told, the project has cost less than 300.00, and that includes the line which was quite expensive.

Next thing will be to make hatch covers.  You can really tell that the interior will benefit from the shade. The poor dinette table is really UV damaged.  We can spruce it up a bit when we get around to it, but it would be nice to at least protect it some.

Last weekend we were sailing with just the jib. lazy style, when the steel cable that holds the foot of the jib down to the ruller furler pulled free of its fittings. The jib actually popped up a bit on the track.  That is being replaced this weekend also with dyneema.  We also attempted to sail off the anchor with just the jib, but the maneuver had to be abandoned in order to avoid scaring some anchored power boaters to death.  I don't think they had their brown pants on so it seemed unfair to torture them.

Update re:  the Whale Pump:  They sent us an email stating that the pump was too large and it was our fault for buying the wrong one (it isn't, the specs say it's for a 2-3 outlet system. We have 3 outlets . . . ).  We had to contact Defender to get someone to go to bat for us.  Now Attwood is replacing the pump but honestly what on earth.  This was completely mis handled and I feel sorry for anyone who didn't buy their equipment from someone who could help!

That right there is the Whale Universal Pressure Pump.  I can't say whether it's a good pump or not generally, but the one we got has been a nightmare.  Picked it up at the Defender spring commissioning warehouse sale.  By the time we were ready to install it the return window was over (you only get 30 days and they won't help you at all after that time has passed).  It went in easily enough, but as soon as we powered it up it shot water out of the motor housing.  Since Defender was done with us, we had to contact Attwood, the american distributor for Whale products.  They refused to pay shipping to return it and were completely unapologetic about our instant problem (clearly the product had not been quality checked at all).  A week or so after we shipped it to them we were told that it had been missing a washer and they were returning it to us.

We finally got it back and installed it again.  Again, the install was super easy.  It started pumping away.  Now, this is advertised as low draw and very quiet. It was not quiet. It was not low draw. The lights still flickered with every cycle of the pump.  God only knows what our anchor light looked like while we were doing this . . . Leaks formed EVERYWHERE in our freshwater system.  The entire hot water line let go at every single fixture.  We assumed that it was because the old pump hadn't been really pressurizing well any more and now there leaks appearing all over the place in the old fittings and soldered pipes.  It actually reached the point where pipes were disconnected entirely and water was just pumping out into the bilge.

Fortunately we don't have a hot water heater so we just capped off that line and focused on fixing the leaks in the cold water system.  When they were finally fixed, we tried the pump again and it would never shut off.  It pressurized to the point that turning on a faucet resulted in a geyser that would ricochet from the bottom of the sink to the ceiling (and me).  The tubing in the system was bulging from pressure.  The pump was dancing around all over the place still trying to pump! So clearly Attwood failed to quality check the pump not once but twice.

Not only was customer service unpleasant and unaccommodating, they are completely incompetent at repairing their own products and testing them as well.  Now, thanks to them, we will have to re-plumb our whole hot water system if we ever want a hot water heater.  Gracias, Attwood.  Gracias.

Hobo came with some fun, original advertisements: