Fall updates

There hasn't been a lot going on with the boat since we finished up our sailing season with the charity sail, but I thought I should give a status update since some of our plans have changed in the last couple of months.

Insegrevious is now moored comfortably in a permanent slip at Shilshole Marina here in Seattle.  We had planned to haul her out and store her on the hard over the winter, expecting that our slip assignment from the Shilshole waiting list would not come up until late winter at the earliest.  We also figured that would give us an opportunity to figure out and fix some of the persistent leaks we have experienced since Shearwater.  That fell through, however, when I phoned the boatyard in Port Townsend and found out that they have a year-long waiting list for dry boat storage.  That surprised me a bit, since there seems to be plenty of room available whenever I drive by there, but it meant we had to come up with alternate plans because the mooring at my parent's place in Port Hadlock is too exposed to the winter storms to be a comfortable place to leave the boat until spring.

When Mandy called Shilshole to check our place on the list, though, it turned out that the long wait was pretty much only for the 34' slips that we had put in for... for a little bit more, there were plenty of 36' slips open.  So we took one of those instead, and got not only a protected slip for the winter, but hopefully a permanent home.  We went up and grabbed the boat in mid-September and sailed her down without incident.  The haul-out will have to wait.

Interestingly, however, the leak rates seem to have diminished since we have had her down here.  I go down and check on her every couple of weeks, and there has been considerably less water in the bilge than over the same period of time late last summer.  I have no idea why, but expect it's probably some combination of slime growing on the hull and encroaching on whatever gaps there may be, or the fiberglass expanding somehow.  I had thought that was something that only happened with wooden boats, but someone said that fiberglass can also soak up water to some extent and expand.  Can't say if that is true for sure or not but if so it would explain things pretty well... she was out of the water and well dried-out in Shearwater, so if the glass contracted it would explain why there were leaks suddenly when she went back in where there were no leaks before; and it would explain why now, after a few months back in, the leaks are disappearing again.

There are a number of things we need to take care of before next spring.  Most important, the bow pulpit needs to be repaired.  During a storm just before Labor Day, she came loose from her mooring somehow and in the process the bow pulpit got bent up and the forward stanchions broken off.  One of the screws holding the bow plate in also sheared off.  I'm going to have to drill that out (something I just love doing), but we'll need a welder to put the stanchions back together.  They actually separated from the plates mounted on the deck, which concerns me a bit--does that mean all the stanchions are weak there?  The rest are designed somewhat differently, but I'm a little worried about them now.  Anyway, we're getting the pulpit welded back together this week.  I'll be able to remount it when I finally get the damn screw out.

The interior woodwork is in terribly rough shape and Mandy will need to put some serious time into refinishing it.  A lot of our tools, spares, and gear are corroded or damaged and it all needs to be sorted out, and what can be salvaged will have to be cleaned, and what can't will have to be replaced.  The exhaust mixing elbow on the engine looks to be developing a leaking rust spot and will need to be replaced.  It's been dripping on one of the engine mounts, so that will have to be checked and possible replaced.  The transmission, as always, needs to be rebuilt, but I'm still not sure that's going to be in the cards, financially speaking, anytime soon.  I've noticed the water pump failing intermittently, so that will need to be torn apart and fixed or replaced.  And all this is just the short list that I can come up with off the top of my head; I'm sure there is a lot more that will reveal itself once I start seriously investigating things.

But for now we're happy to tarp her up and take a few months off from boat stuff.  With the economy the way it is, it's time to focus on business.  We're happy to have a spot at Shilshole finally, though, which should make it all much more worthwhile.  We put a lot of time into the boat the last few years, but it was always difficult to get out on the Sound and do much sailing, and impossible on the spur of the moment, dealing with the Locks and bridge opening restrictions.  It will be much easier now to take advantage of those random nice sailing days that pop up all summer long.  And we'll avoid a lot of the strain on the engine and transmission that narrow channels and obstacles have engendered.

Considering the economy, and our impending nuptials, it's difficult to imagine any significant trips next summer (unless some combination of the two seemingly unrelated events militates a no-frills do-it-yourself honeymoon).  That being the case, we may not haul-out at all next year, saving it for some time when it would be necessary anyway prior to a prolonged trip.

I imagine the San Juans or Gulf Islands will be as far north as we get next summer, although Mandy has made some noise about the Washington coast.  Really, though, it all seems too far away right now to think much about, so we aren't.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Sometimes your problems pale by comparison

This is the airline we flew back from Bella Bella to Vancouver on, passing through Port Hardy on the way.

From the sound of things the plane that went down was smaller, probably on a charter run, but having seen the terrain up there, and the air strips, it certainly makes you realize how much for granted one can take flight safety on mainland commercial flights.

I'm amazed the survivors could get a cell signal. I was pretty much out of service as soon as we got out of Port Hardy's harbor.

Charity Day Sail

Each year, as part of a fundraising effort for disadvantaged Federal Way public school students which was started by Mandy's team when she was with Americorps in that district, we auction off a day sail on the boat. This year, we were just leaving on our trip north when they had the auction so we didn't actually attend, but still offered up the trip, planning to take whoever won out sometime after we got back.

Needless to say, our ability to honor our end of the bargain was called into question a few times during the travails of the trip, but once we got the boat back to Port Townsend intact and convinced ourselves it wouldn't sink out from under the hapless auction winners, we contacted them and scheduled the day sail for this weekend. Although only a six hour event for the winners, it was going to be a full-on three day weekend for Mandy and me, since we had to go up to Port Townsend, get the boat and sail it down to Seattle, take the lubbers out, and then sail it back up to Port Townsend where it will eventually be hauled out for the winter. After everything else we've been through, this all seemed more of a nuisance than anything, and I was looking forward to getting it over with.

We drove up to Port Townsend on Friday morning and found that the boat was still in good shape and ready to go. She caught a little bit when I cranked up her Yanmar 2QM20 diesel engine, but I put it down to low charge on the starting battery (which isn't attached to the solar charging circuit, both to safeguard it from any trouble with that system and to shepherd the solar power for the house batteries) which had been sitting unused for a few weeks. At any rate, we didn't use the engine much, only motoring for about fifteen minutes to get through the Port Townsend canal between Indian Island and the mainland. After that, we raised sail and beat south in moderate winds toward Seattle.

Our troubles started when we went to start the engine again for the final stretch into town. After clicking a couple of times and barely turning over, the engine wouldn't start. I left Mandy sailing south in a breeze which was shifting to northerly and went below to troubleshoot.

My first thought was again the batteries, but the multi-meter showed a pretty good charge on all of them and I tried every combination of the two banks with no result. The starter solenoid would click, but other than the occasional fitful jerk, it wouldn't turn over the engine. I tried jumping across the contacts to hotwire it with the same result. After consulting Nigel and my Yanmar manual, and having run through their various steps to isolate starting problems, I concluded that the starter itself was busted. That was about the extent of my capabilities, however--I didn't feel capable of taking it apart and trying to diagnose or repair it. So, I unearthed our recently re-discovered manual crank and tried that on.

There was nothing doing with that beast, however--I couldn't get it to crank through a single cylinder compression, even putting all my weight and effort on it, and although the engine has a decompression lever which allows the flywheel to be spun up freely before engaging, there simply was not enough room in the engine compartment to spin the crank through a full revolution. Without that, there was no way to get it spinning regularly and no way to get the engine to turn over.

Although the wind had shifted and died off a bit, there was just enough to keep us going on the flood current as far as Shilshole Marina, who we called up and got a slip assignment from for the night. There was a cloud of other boats heading in for the evening as we got there at just about nightfall, but fortunately they all maneuvered around us, not without a few dirty looks, as we ghosted tentatively in behind the breakwater on a fickle breeze. We managed to get into the slip (a shoreside one, no less) without too much trouble and went to bed.

The next morning was pretty miserable. We called to cancel the sail, but the people, who it turned out Mandy had known in her previous job, wanted to come down and see the boat and visit anyway, and since that was the least we could do, we said okay. I also called my friend Don, and we concocted some scheme to construct a fitting out of a hole saw and use his high-torque drill to try and manually crank the engine. It being a Saturday, I had little hope of finding a replacement starter, particularly since Yanmar guards their parts distribution network like Fort Knox and there are few dealers in Seattle in the first place. The ones I knew of were all closed on weekends. Both Mandy and I had to be back in town by Monday morning for business reasons. So, our only hope was to either leave soon and sail the whole way up (leaving soon because the winds may or may not cooperate--the more time you give yourself in such a situation, the better your chances of catching a fair breeze) or get the thing started manually. Since the forecast didn't hold much hope for wind, I pegged my hopes on a manual start.

Don's hole saw blade was about the right size to fit over the manual crank head, but the round file he had brought to notch it to match the fitting was hardly adequate to the task of cutting the hard steel of the blade. Fortunately, another friend, Tory, had just moved to Ballard (the neighborhood Shilshole is in) and was both awake and in possession of an angle grinder which he was happy to lend us. The grinder had the blade notched out in no time.

Unfortunately, "high-torque" wasn't high enough to compress the engine. We did manage to get it spinning pretty good with the compression release set, but as soon as it engaged and tried to actually crank a cylinder, it went nowhere. It took both Don and I to hang on to the drill, but nonetheless the drill didn't have enough smack to turn the engine over.

The other alternative, letting the boat sit at Shilshole for a week, didn't appeal to my pocketbook; and there was no guarantee that come Monday, any of the Yanmar dealers would actually have the part in stock. Delivery could take the whole week or more.

Another friend of ours, Stan, did some Internet detective work for us and came up with a Hitachi part number for an equivalent starter (later, I discovered our original is a Hitachi OEM which Yanmar buys) and I figured there might be some hope of finding one of those in a mass-market auto parts shop, or one of the local chandleries. I called a few auto parts places with no luck, and then tried Fisheries Supply, but no one there could be bothered to look up the part number for me to see if they stocked it.

There is a West Marine store up the block from the marina; it's the smaller of the two in Seattle, and although West Marine doesn't carry many engine parts, I had plenty of time to wander up there on a blind chance and figured they could call the larger store to see if they had anything. Don and I walked up there while Mandy entertained our recently arrived guests. We had brought plenty of food, so the least we could do was try to shove as much of it at them as possible while they were around.

West Marine didn't carry anything of the sort, as expected. However, there is a small marine consignment store next door, and since we were already there, we decided it couldn't hurt to take a look. I had never seen many engine parts there, either, but I thought maybe the guy who managed it might know of some marine diesel shop open on a Saturday. At that point, I was very much prepared to walk back, suffer through some interminable agonizing while smiling and visiting with our disappointed guests, and then try to warp the boat out to the end of the dock and catch enough breeze to hopefully clear the breakwater and then sail/drift north for the next couple of days, or until we absolutely had to call Vessel Assist. A tow would have been unthinkably expensive, but I was absolutely out of cheap options.

So my mood was dark walking into the consignment shop, and when I walked into the dim corner where their few engine parts are it didn't improve--absolutely everything they had was on a rather barren looking set of metal shelves tucked into a corner, and there wasn't much there at all. Most of it was alternators, but on the bottom shelf there were two starters. And one of them was an obnoxious looking black monstrosity clearly marked "Yanmar" and "Hitachi" which was an almost exact match for the one bolted on the side of our engine.

I couldn't believe my good fortune, and carting it back to the boat I had just about convinced myself that it wasn't the match that it looked like, or that it would be broken somehow as well, or that I would break something else getting the old one out of the cramped quarters it was installed in.

But getting the old one off was a matter of unhooking a few wires and taking out two bolts, none of which stuck or fell in the bilge, and the old one slid right in, a perfect fit. The only difference whatsoever was in one of the electrical connectors; as luck would have it, I didn't have any spares for that gauge of wire, so we had to run back up to West Marine for one, but as soon as the thing was hooked up, it turned right over and the engine fired right up.

Since the people were still there, we got to take them out for a somewhat shortened sail after all, which made us feel tremendously better... and it turned out to be a lovely summer day, light breezes, the Blue Angels arcing about over Lake Washington nearby, and light boat traffic.

We dropped them back off late in the afternoon and decided to head all the way back to Port Townsend that night. Apart from some quirky behavior out of the autopilot around Point No Point, it was a smooth trip back, and we got back on the buoy at my folk's place around 2300 and spent the night on the boat.

We had an easy time securing it again in the morning and getting packed up, and after a hearty blueberry pancake breakfast ashore, we drove back to Seattle with a huge weight off our chest.

Back in time

Wednesday Night
Although in many ways it seems like just another terrible thing on top of a summer that has already had more than its share of difficult moments, I'm trying to see it as a blessing that we have arrived back in Seattle just as my grandfather, in Spokane, has come down with what is probably a terminal bout of pneumonia. So, we're leaving again almost immediately. But I think I am lucky that I even can; had it been a month ago, I would probably not have known until it was done, and wouldn't have had the chance to go see him.

That was in the back of my mind when we left. Since suffering a nearly fatal heart attack a couple of years ago (I rushed over then thinking the same things that I am thinking now) he has never really recovered and instead has been on a long downhill slide during which any week could bring the bad news.

I don't know that this will actually be the end; Grandpa is pretty tough, and he lived through some things we never thought he would make it through before, so I won't count him out now until he stops fogging the mirror. It forces me to reflect, though, on what a shame it is that he will almost certainly never get to hear about our trip. Even if he pulls through this, his degradation is such that he has difficulty recognizing family members, and he hasn't shown much interest in anything the last few times I have visited him.

But it's a shame, because Grandpa was always a great traveller, and he would have loved to hear about the trip and see the pictures. He had travelled to all fifty states with the exception of New Jersey... he just "never found an excuse to go through there" in all his journeys, he said. By the time I was a teenager, he had taken me to places he had found and enjoyed seeing in twenty-five different states, and being on the road with him was one of the most formative experiences in my childhood... among the few memories I still have of those years, in fact. Burnt toast, his favorite breakfast repast, will forever remind me of waking up in the camper in some place I had never been before; and not infrequently someplace different from where I had gone to bed the previous evening, as his years of working the graveyard shift for Burlington Northern often found him awake in the early hours of the day even on vacation, which he would take advantage of by putting on more miles while I still slept. I think I felt a bit like he must have as I conned the boat along the quiet waters of the Inside Passage in the mornings as Mandy still slept below.

At any rate, we are going to go pick up my mother at the ferry terminal downtown shortly and drive to Spokane tonight to see him and stay for a bit.

- - -
Thursday Morning
Grandpa passed away about 10:30 last night, just a few hours after we arrived in town and stopped to see him. He was comatose and didn't appear to be in much pain, although his breathing was very laboured. They had him on oxygen and morphine. We chatted with each other and told him a bit about the trip, and I hope that at some level it made it through to him, even if it was just the subconscious reassurance of friendly voices in the room. The nurses and staff at the Spokane Veterans Home were wonderful to him and although it would have been better if he could have been at home, it was a physical and financial impossibility this last year. I'm just glad that we did get back in time to see him.

He didn't want a funeral so there is really nothing much to be done here. We collected his few belongings this morning and are going to dinner tonight with my grandmother, mother, aunts and uncle, and that will be about it until we scatter his ashes later this summer. He wanted it done up along the St Joe River, a beautiful place.

I feel a little flat today.

We'll probably head home tomorrow some time.

Is this the end?

We're in Port Townsend now, and I am having trouble deciding if this signifies the end of our trip, or when we actually get home. We didn't sleep on the boat last night, and probably won't again, so maybe that means we're done with it... although there is still much left to do even before we can leave it sitting out on the buoy for a month or two.

We had a pretty rough crossing of the Strait of Juan De Fuca yesterday. We pulled out of Garrison Bay around 0600 to catch a favorable tide, and we more or less drifted down Haro Strait after we killed the engine at the south end of Mosquito Pass. The winds were almost too light for steerageway at first, but then as we drifted clear of the island, they picked up quite a bit, first from the southeast, then veering to southwest and west, increasing in speed all the while. Haro Strait was a bit lumpy, two and three foot swells, close together, but when we got south into Juan De Fuca we started getting the big stuff in from the ocean, six and seven footers, and winds gusting to forty knots. Fortunately we were able to take most of the waves on the stern quarter; we nearly got pooped once but the wave broke just before it would have come over the transom. The cockpit drain got a workout nonetheless, as we took a lot of water over the sides and bow, much of which quickly came aft.

Mandy turned a little green but didn't throw up, and I felt fine the whole way. The wind was strongest around Hein Bank, and I had trouble controlling the boat but Mandy thought that trying to reef down was more dangerous than it was worth. In the event, she was probably correct; I was able to trim what I had and get on a reasonably steady course, but it reinforces the idea that one should always reef early. In these waters, that can be difficult to judge. They always say to reef as soon as you think about it, which means that if you are getting a sense that the wind is getting too stiff, you shouldn't wait around to confirm it but to go with your gut; but around these islands and headlands, you go from nothing to forty knots in the space of a mile or so, hardly enough to even start getting a sense of things.

Unfortunately, the winds die down just as fast... we were bobbing around in the swells with the sails slatting within a couple of hours as we approached Port Townsend. There was enough current and just barely enough breeze, though, to sweep us around the Point Wilson light and into the bay, where the wind promptly picked right up again.

I blew my approach to the buoy under sail by botching a gybe. I then found myself without enough sail up to beat back into the wind to give it another shot, and since Mandy was already ready to kill me for a sail plan change earlier in the day which forced us to wrestle the unruly new mainsail around on the boom, I gave up and started the engine to come in for mooring.

Still to be done are cleaning things up, offloading our various personal effects, stowing things for our absence so they won't mildew or come crashing down, and installing a float switch (which we already have; never bothered to put it in since we had such a dry bilge before) to operate the bilge pump automatically when the water level rises to a certain extent.

In US waters

Back in the US police state as of this afternoon.  What exactly is it that has convinced this government, and apparently so many of our citizens, that it is either going to make us friends or intimidate enemies to be treated like scum by incompetent civil servants at the borders?  It certainly doesn't feel good to be home... I feel a little tainted, actually.  I can only imagine what non-citizens might think.  And to those who think that a tough stance at the borders shows that we're powerful and not to be messed with, consider that the grim-faced, swaggering border guards are utterly incompetent.  If you come across someone who acts tough, but is a complete imbecile who can't even see through your little lies about bringing back a few vegetables, you don't find them intimidating, you find them laugable.

I don't say any of this because we had trouble clearing customs or even because they were particularly tough on us.  I think the agent even tried to crack a little bit of a smile, near the end.  But she was so grim, forbidding, and suspicious that I felt like turning back around and going to friendly, welcoming Canada again.

So; that's off my chest, anyway.

We anchored last night at Spencer Spit near Sydney, which is also apparently headquarters for BC Party Central.  It was a rocking Saturday night in the bay off the park, complete with party barges, whining runabouts, rollicking wakes, and possibly—just possibly—an incident of toplessness about four boats over.  I dare not say more.  Anyway, despite the regular presence of an RCMP patrol boat, it was quite the scene.  Mandy didn't appreciate it at all, being very tired after a hard day of shifting winds and strong currents, but it reminded me quite a bit of fun summers on the lakes in Eastern Washington and North Idaho when I was younger.

We sailed almost all the way from Butchart Cove to the Spit, motoring only for a stretch that was particularly windless up the Saanich Inlet.  The winds curve around the headlands and so you are almost always either heading directly into or away from the wind, neither of which are the most optimal points of sail.  In this instance, it was even worse for us, because of a particularly weak ebb tide which made it either flood or nearly flood against us all day long.

Since we don't have much of a time limit right now, I don't mind that sort of sailing so much, but it drove Mandy nuts.

Today we started out with some of that; although we were tucked in tight between some shoals and two other boats, and despite the wind being shifty and weak close in to shore, I managed to haul anchor and sail out of the anchorage.  It took almost an hour to round the spit and get into clear winds, though, a lot of tacking and maneuvering in light winds.

Once we cleared the reefs, though, it was a straight fast shot across Haro Strait to Roche Harbor.  And it was there in the Strait, rather than far north in some exotic locale, that we saw our first orca whales of the trip.  It was brief and we would have missed them entirely, as they were astern of us, but another boat nearby radioed to warn someone from heading into them.  There may have been two and they were on the surface only briefly, before disappearing.  We and the whale watching boats hung around for twenty minutes or so looking, but eventually all gave up and headed in.

Then we did the customs thing in Roche Harbor, topped off our tank (four gallons since French Harbour) and took on ice.  We had decided to stay in Garrison Bay, just south of Roche Harbor, for the night, since it has easy access to Haro Strait and we can get moving early tomorrow for our crossing of the Strait of Juan De Fuca.

Motoring down Mosquito Pass toward the bay, though, we heard a sudden snapping sound, and all our electrical instruments went dead.  Mandy went below immediately and saw smoke wafting from the engine compartment, but she checked quickly and there was no fire.  Some rudimentary troubleshooting elicited no results, and since Mosquito Pass has some tight spots and non-obvious hazards in the channel, we both turned our attention to navigating by paper charts through to Garrison Bay (both the chart plotter, with its exact GPS fix, and the depth sounder, our two primary tools for negotiating difficult passages, being offline).  We reached it without incident and I pulled out the multimeter to track down the problem.

After tracing the current from the batteries (all of which were good and with a full charge) through the system I found the culprit: the wire from the regulator to the positive bus bar on the switch panel had snapped, or rather the metal connector had snapped.  Additionally, the wire was melted in places.

I fortunately still had sufficient spares available to replace the wire and connectors, but it will probably have to be done again, since the spare parts are from my stock of electrical spares that got soaked when we sunk.  They will probably work for getting us home but I wouldn't want to trust them as permanent parts of the system.

It's still very nice, weather-wise, and we would love to go ashore and visit the English Camp park, but we're both pretty beat after all that and we are getting a pretty early start tomorrow to beat high winds in the Strait and to take advantage of favorable currents.  Maybe after a nap...

Anyway, barring bad weather or horrific accident, we should be back in Port Townsend by tomorrow.  I have a few things to do on the boat yet before letting it just sit, so that may take a couple days, but Mandy may be back in Seattle sooner so she can get back to work.

Butchart Gardens

We had a swell time at Butchart Gardens today. We've only ever been
here before in the winter, and it's a whole different show this time
of year. Plants are in bloom, for one thing. Much warmer and less
rainy for another.

We didn't break any records getting the anchor up and getting out of
Ganges this morning... it was pleasant and we lingered until 0900 or
so. We had favorable tides, but even so planned to motor the three
hours or so down just because the winds are so shifty around here,
and because I figured that mid-morning/early-afternoon might be the
best time to snag one of the four mooring buoys that the Gardens
maintain in Butchart Cove just off their dinghy dock. Failing that,
we would have to anchor around the corner in Todd Inlet and row
around... not nearly so pleasant.

As luck would have it, we caught the last open buoy and so we're
hanging maybe sixty feet from the dinghy dock, a quick row away. We
went back and forth a couple of times, just for the heck of it.

No sooner had we tied the boat up and got our stern tie rigged than
two other boats swung into the cove, looking for accommodations. We
just beat them, something of a miracle considering our leisurely 5
knot cruising speed.

I have no doubt Mandy will have much more to say on the subject of
the Gardens. I just enjoyed them moderately, but she spent a few
more hours wandering around in them than I did. I soaked up sunshine
and read instead.

This is a great little spot but I don't want to hog the buoy, so
we'll get out at a reasonable hour in the morning and see how far the
wind takes us. We're in no real hurry, but we're definitely heading
for home at this point... it becomes more attractive the closer we
get, and although we're having some good times now near the end of
the trip, it just seems like it's about time to wrap it up and get
back to the more mundane parts of our lives. So, we'll probably be
back inside of a week. What we'll do with the boat is as yet
undecided. The leak rate varies greatly and not always predictably
(although we believe we have isolated the forward one to the
knotmeter thru-hull, at least). It seems to increase with heavy seas
or speed, but it's hard to observe scientifically when we're out
bouncing around a lot. Anyway, it should be fine on the water for
the remainder of the season, but I don't know if we'll leave it in
that long or haul-out early. Probably we'll wait and talk about it
after we get home and get some perspective on things.

Variable winds

I mean really variable--between 40 knots and nothing, within the space of about an hour. That was what characterized our sail down from Nanaimo to Ganges yesterday.

It was really whipping in Nanaimo; no one else was leaving the harbour and I questioned my own judgment as to the wisdom of departing around eleven. The other people on our float thought we were crazy but helped us get out of the tight spot on the leeward side we were stuck in anyway. I think their concerns were probably justified by the difficulties we had just getting out of the dock--I couldn't get the $#(*$#$% transmission in gear again, although the lever seems to be more stable now, and we drifted down onto a old steel ferry that is used as a waiting area for the current Protection Island ferry. Eventually things got sorted out, without damage to either party, and we motored out of the boat basin.

It was really tearing outside the breakwater, so we motored around into the lee of Protection Island to raise sail. We only put up the main, and with one reef tucked in it at that, and then spun around and took off like a banshee running downwind for Dodd Narrows. We had a bit of an ebb with us, but we were making 6 knots plus of boat speed for most of the way even before accounting for that. Three to four foot seas were rolling us around from astern but Mandy did a great job of keeping on course in some pretty tight spots. We shot Dodd Narrows under sail (normally I wouldn't have considered this; but there was only one other boat going through and we let him get clear before we did it), hitting nine knots over ground going through the passage.

Shortly after that, on a rather rough gybe, the aft-most reefing point on the main tore partly out. We came up into the wind and dropped the main smartly, then raised our jib and kept going at nearly the same speeds.

That only lasted until about the north tip of Saltspring Island, however. The blasting northwest wind faded away to absolutely dead calm in less than an hour as we headed south. Fortunately, we still had some current, and after a couple of hours of eking out little random breezes, we finally came into some decent wind again near the entrance to Active Pass and were able to sail around the corner and up into Ganges Harbour.

This is a great anchorage, at least in the sense of being able to put down one's anchor and have plenty of swinging room--the whole of the harbour seems to have good mud bottom and depths around 30 feet: prime conditions for a small boat such as hours. It's a little exposed to southeast winds, but the winds are so weird around here it's hard to say if that's a danger (as it would typically be along the northwest coast). At any rate, there isn't any wind to speak of at the moment, or in the forecast, so we will probably be motoring from here.

We're heading to Butchart Gardens next; they have a water-side entrance and a dinghy dock, and we're only about twelve miles from there now. I think we'll head down there today, spend today and possibly tomorrow there, then work our way back out into the southern Gulf Islands.

An Unexpected Swim

We're tied up at the Port of Nanaimo's small boat basin now;
strangely, our Internet connectivity is worse in here, so less
frequent updates will be posted.

It blew pretty good today but it's still very warm and sunny out. We
moved into the marina not because of the wind, however, but because
we had some chores that are easier to do dockside and errands more
convenient to accomplish on land.

The wind did provide Mandy with her one major amusement of the
morning, however. Before we were ready to haul anchor and head to
the marina, the dinghy had to be hauled in and stowed on the foredeck
(they charge by the foot!). Leaving her below doing something, I
went up to take care of the task myself. As has been previously
mentioned, our dinghy is a smallish inflatable raft, and doesn't
weigh any great amount... easy for one man to handle, or so I thought.

I led the raft by its painter up alongside the bow and hoisted it up
over the lifelines without issue. Once I got it on deck, though, I
needed to have it lay flat so I could lash it down through the rails
on either side of the cabin top. Because of the wind, this proved
difficult, and the raft kept popping up on me before I could get the
line fed through and secured. I relied on holding it with one hand
and paying the line through with the other, a tedious process.

Suddenly, a ripping gust came up, and caught under the lip of the
raft. It stood the raft upright, slammed it against me, and sent the
both of us cascading rather unexpectedly over the port side lifelines.

I found myself holding on with one hand to the boat, the other to the
raft painter, with my left foot tangled up in the lifelines. I
thought for about half a second about trying to haul myself back up
over the side, but I was pretty far gone and didn't want to let go of
the raft. Also, I knew that the swim ladder was down, so I figured
that was the more dignified option. So, I untangled my foot, let go,
and made a small splash.

I quickly realized, though, that holding onto the raft could be a bad
idea... the wind would catch it and turn it into a sail, and tow me
off down the channel like a windsurfer. So, I tossed the painter
back up deck and hoped it would tangle in something long enough for
me to get back aboard and grab it. Unfortunately, by this time Mandy
had heard the whole commotion and she was waiting for me at the swim
ladder as I swam around. I had been planning on avoiding mentioning
the whole thing, but as it developed this would have been
impracticable simply due to the fact that I was soaking wet.

Mandy retrieved the raft and I changed and then we hauled anchor
(against the wind; an arduous task) and came in to the marina.

Here, we have been thwarted in at least two of the three tasks we had
set out for ourselves, making it a rather pointless expenditure; we
haven't been able to find the hardware we need for our sail at the
chandlery in town, nor a replacement for the electrical outlet that
is out. So, Mandy has been cleaning the boat most of the day, and I
have been laying around, waylaid by a headache that doesn't have
anything to do with falling overboard, I am sure. We have run other
small errands and will do laundry before we leave, which will
probably happen tomorrow around noon.

Excitement in the anchorage

If that last entry seemed to end a little abruptly, this is why.

I was sitting up in the cockpit, typing merrily away and enjoying the quiet morning in the harbour, when suddenly a Coast Guard Zodiac came screaming up the channel nearby (we're anchored near one of the entrance markers). Since it's nominally a 5 knot limit in the channel, I figured something was up, so I flipped on the radio and turned to one of the common working channels the Coasties use up here. Then the Zodiac turned into the harbour, and I started looking around for trouble nearby... and saw that some time in the night, the powerboat anchored two or three slots down had capsized.

There wasn't really much to be done at that point so we just spectated. In between the Coasties, other cruisers out in their dinghies offering to help, and random kayakers in the vicinity, it was quite a circus for a while. I caught some of the conversation on the radio between the Coast Guard and the sailor who had first noticed it and called it in; he said he'd tapped on the hull and heard no reply, and dove on the bow enough to tell that the forward hatch was open. You would think if someone had been inside and made it out, though, that they would have called in themselves, or most likely would have ended up first at another nearby boat looking for help and/or refuge.

The Coasties seemed a little befuddled, and so would I have been... there isn't really much of an emergency, nor a significant hazard, and what are four guys in a Zodiac going to do about an upside down boat? They tapped on the hull themselves, walked around on it a bit, then headed over to a nearby public dock for some unknown reason before heading back to their station. We were surprised; in the US, at least, it seems likely they would have had a dive team out to check for bodies or survivors as long as there was any question at all. And although the boat may have been left for commercial salvage rather than wasting government employee time babysitting it, I'm pretty sure that a spill boom or something would have been put up around it to contain any fuel leaks and prevent other unwary boaters from running into it.

It's possible that there were some communications that resolved the matter that didn't come across on the channel we were monitoring. That could have explained the stop over at the marina, if perhaps the owners were ashore already and had been located. We're hoping that they were off the boat at least when it happened, although we don't envy them the weeks ahead (which we're already painfully familiar with ourselves).

So, apart from that things are pretty nice here. We spent most of the day today on Newcastle Island Park, which island is the closest landmass to us (about 30 yards, although it seems further when rowing). It's a very interesting place, home to a sandstone quarry, First Nations (Indian, that is) villages, a coal mine, an old amusement park, and vast fish salteries at various points in history. Remnants of each of these are scattered about the place, all connected with some very fine walking trails which are only marginally impeded by snakes.

There are also supposedly a large colony of albino raccoons, but we only saw the regular kind. And a deer. And many, many geese.

We're enjoying it so much here that we are probably going to stay for an extra day (total of three; we'd already planned on one to see the sights, one to fix the boat... the usual ratio, it seems). After that, we'll probably head south to Victoria and Butchart Gardens.

Nanaimo

Pulled into Nanaimo last night around 2130 and dropped anchor in Mark Bay off of Newcastle Island Park. It's a lovely large anchorage, though fairly well packed with boats of every shape and size. We grabbed a spot with some open swinging room near the outside of the pack, but the depths throughout are shallow and the weather is calm so we don't have much to worry about. It does, of course, place us further from the dinghy docks at the park, but closer to those in town (if we could figure out where those are) and we're actually quite close to a nice little beach to land at on the island.

I imagine I will get some pictures of the place up at some point in the next few days.

We plan to stay here for a couple of days. We're not really tired; the trip down from Campbell River has been characterized by light winds and calm seas (except for a patch of pitching around yesterday morning departing Blubber Bay on Texada Island, where I got fairly well soaked up on the bow securing the anchor as we punched through three foot seas) and the weather has been terrific so we're doing okay in those respects. We have a horde of miscellaneous little tasks to take care of in town, though, laundry probably being the largest.

We also need some quality time in a good marine chandlery and then with the boat itself. The transmission lever, that same foul beast that indirectly led to all our worst troubles on this trip, is still giving us grief. We bored out the sheared off screw and replaced it with a bolt... which in turn sheared off within a half hour. Since then, we've been making down with a series of cotter pins, a steel nail, and anything else we can think of to secure the handle to the bar. But they all bend or break outright after a day or so of use. The thing is a demon. It has always been stiff to shift, but now it bends nails? It's almost unreal.

We also need to get some slugs for our new mainsail. We finally took some time in Campbell River to try to get the thing up. It's cut perfectly and fits the frame of the mast and boom without any problem, but the slugs at the luff are too large to fit into the track on the mast, which is what holds the sail and the mast together. We shaved one of them down (they are plastic) but it turns out that not only is the body of the slug too big, but so too is the very loop with which it is attached to the sail. With the Dremel aboard, we could probably grind it all down in an hour or so and make do; since it was soaked and so far unreplaced, it's probably easiest to just buy new slugs that fit the mast and attach them to the sail.

Campbell River is very nice for the location, but it is not a sailing center in any respect. Here, we are hoping to find a chandlery which has honest to goodness sailboat hardware.

So, that's the plan, and we'll try to enjoy what looks to be some lovely weather for the next

Sailing may be exciting again

I don't know why, but for some reason being here in the marina at Campbell River is raising my enthusiasm for sailing again. The boat is still a mess (both cosmetically and operationally) and our inability to isolate the leaks and dry it all out is frustrating, but for whatever reason, sitting here in the dock as the wind whips through the rigging really makes me want to be out in it, rather than just sitting.

Maybe it's just the safety net of having a real town and marine supply center nearby, or the relative security of the Strait of Georgia, or the fact that we've been through here before and have had positive experiences, or that there are visibly larger numbers of people here who are clearly more incompetent than even we are, but I just want to get out on the water again.

Of course, that makes it even more bitter that we have lost so much of our painstakingly carved out two months of free time to be doing just that, and more fraught to consider our future opportunities for doing it again.

But I had worried that this whole episode would sour us on the activity and that the boat itself would prove to be unsalvageable at the costs we were able to bear. Mandy is making headway on a lot of the cosmetic stuff, though, and I'm getting my head around the mechanical, and we may just be all right after all.

Anyway, I can't wait to get out of here in the morning and go sailing. Even if our wind is mostly gone by then.

Quite a lovely little town

I (Mandy) love Campbell River. I didn't think I was missing civilization, but I do feel better here than I have since we returned to BC last weekend (and it took the whole weekend of: Bus to ferry, ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, the Graebels coming and picking us up and taking us to Port Hadlock, then them kindly taking us the next day to Port Hardy via another ferry ride between Port Townsend and Victoria, BC, and a long drive, then we hitched an overnight ferry ride to Shearwater, arriving already tired, but wanting to get underway immediately).

Anyway, here, in this sizable town, I can buy things like face wash and q-tips and other normalities that were lost to saltwater filling the head. And here, for the first time since last time we were here about a month ago, we can fill up on potable water that is both potable (none of that in Shearwater) and clear, like water should be. So, for once, I'm using up extra water to get the tanks emptied so I can refill with this non-scary stuff.

So, today I first begged Scott for a stop at Starbucks this morning (a sure sign of a civilized town, I think), then I went to the store and stocked up on lots of goodies. I hope Scott will now stop eating cookies for breakfast, since breakfast bars are just as convenient. Then I went to the boat store and talked to someone knowledgeable about the damage done to the boat from the Coast Guard's pumps beating the crap out of our cockpit while they kept us afloat. (I do prefer the boat get beat up than us sinking.) The nice fella sold me something called "Interlux Heavy Duty Stain Remover" to get out the rust stains. I don't know what caused the stains, but they weren't there before the pumps were on board. I'd been scrubbing them with everything we had on board before, and nothing would help. I applied this stuff and watched pure magic happen. I felt like I was in a TV infomercial. I put it on and watched the stains just disappear, mo rubbing, no scrubbing, nothing. Wow. I was having fun! I went around the boat and tried it on other areas that had been vexing me over the years. Pure magic at every turn. As far as fiberglass stains are concerned, the boat now looks better than ever.

The nice fella also sold me some gelcoat and hardener for the gouges also left from the pumps bouncing themselves from Boat Inlet to Shearwater. I dug out some sandpaper from a locker and prepped the gouges for repair, but unfortunately gave up fighting the wind before trying my first repair. This isn't really the weather for that sort of thing. Happy to sell me something else, the fella also sold me some boat cleaner and wax, (he said my now-clean fiberglass wouldn't stay clean long without waxing it) and I'm excited to get it applied as soon as possible. Seeing the poor shape of the boat had been part of what was been keeping my spirits low. Seeing it nice and clean cheers me right up.

I also finally found a birthday present for Mom. I'd been waiting to get something, hoping to find something cool in Alaska, but the last 3 weeks of June were taken up by the unforeseen, and now I'm a bit late. Then I got to explore even more of Campbell River looking for the Thrifty Foods to ship it from, which I did eventually find. Then I had another stop at the liqueur store to replenish my Irish Creme (SO yummy in hot chocolate) and a bottle of wine for our rendezvous with the neighbor tonight.

While I've been out running around town and futzing with the boat, Scott has been forcibly resting. We've been going, going, going non-stop since leaving Shearwater, and yesterday he was stuck navigating through lots of rapids while dodging logs down Johnstone Straight while I tended to the bilge, diligently emptying it with a syringe at regular intervals to measure how much water was coming in at different conditions, and to be certain it was coming generally from where we thought it was. Anyway, the boy was visibly exhausted. I'm really glad we decided to stay an extra day here. Of course, now that he is rested, he wishes we were out sailing in this stuff. I don't agree. I'm quite glad to be tied to the dock, getting things done, and just generally feeling caught up on stuff and unrushed.

As far as I'm concerned, it is looking up, mysterious leaks or not. Tomorrow we should have favorable northwest winds to push is right to the next stop.

If stuck, it's best to be stuck someplace decent

Campbell River, for instance.

I had been hoping that the storm would die down by now and we could get on our merry way south today, but it's still blowing ~30 knots, and that's here in the shelter of the marina. Still, Mandy had to make the decision, ultimately... I was too tired to decide. So we paid for another night and will sit it out instead of beating south toward Comox or Texada. We had to move to a different dock, however, and had a heck of a time doing so in this wind.

I brought us in last night on the windward side of the float, using the wind to take us in and braking with the engine and it was pretty smooth. Getting off again was another story--I could swing the boat off using prop walk in reverse but the wind kept the bow pressed in against the float. One of the marina staff helped us by pushing off as we swung around, but after I got off I didn't have enough room astern to build steerageway sufficient to swing the bow upwind (which I had to to get out of the dock). So the wind kept blowing us down toward shore as we were stuck athwart the channel between two floats--I couldn't go forward or reverse, since there was only 60 feet of space and we took up 33 of that. I finally decided to just let the wind carry the bow in and managed to get a clear enough shot astern to reverse out. Not pretty, but it worked.

Bringing her in to the new spot, which was even more constrained, was easier... just a repeat of last night, with an extra pair of hands to help. In any event, better all this hassle than having to try to come in from leeward with our little 20 horse engine and gimpy shift lever.

We've taken advantage of the extra time to get some shopping done and I hope to get rested up. Mandy met a neighbor on the float who has invited us over for coffee later, presumably to hear the gruesome details of our accident. I should take the CD of photos along.

Mandy is out at the stores again and I'm just chilling out on the boat, listening to the wind whistle through the rigging. A part of me wishes we were out in it, but I know that's not wise, particularly with our various defects and the vicious reputation of Cape Mudge in a southeasterly. Still, I'm intent on getting out of here tomorrow, even if there is left over slop--we've seen plenty of Campbell River already, as hospitable as it is.

Back in Campbell River

We arrived last night in Campbell River again, some place we had not expected to be again on this trip. We've been moving pretty fast, so not much chance to write or give updates, so I thought I would try to get something out this morning to bring you up to speed.

As Mandy mentioned, we elected to continue down the Inside Passage rather than trying the West Coast as we had previously been inclined. This is partly a function of the limited amount of time we have remaining (it's more necessary to wait for weather windows coming down the exposed West Coast) and partly a distrust of the boat and its systems. We find something new every day it seems that is failing or broken or otherwise compromised. All things considered, until we have everything back in shape, it's best not to be out on the open ocean, and better to stick closer to civilization on the Inside route.

The items of greatest concern are leaks. We are taking on between one and one and a half gallons an hour of saltwater, and we can't figure out why, or from where. As Mandy mentioned, the fiberglass repairs that Shearwater did looked very good, and I talked with the glass guy at length about his process (which he illustrated with pictures at every step) and don't have any qualms about the quality of the work (which I damn well shouldn't, at that cost!) The bottom showed no cracks or compromises at all before we went back in the water.

They also, however, did some work on the hull/keel join, replacing a couple of keel bolt nuts and epoxying the join. You may recall I had slapped a patch into a crack we had found at the leading edge of the join during haul-out this spring--Shearwater ground that all out and fixed it up right, now it's smooth and seamless as if it came out of the factory. However... my shoddy patch job didn't leak. :/

Actually, though, I can't say for sure that theirs does either. We are taking on water from forward and aft of the keel, and from at least one of the keel bolts. It's one that they messed with; but I can't figure out how, if the hull is visibly intact with no cracks, water could be getting in even if they botched the nut job somehow. And even if it were, the forward leak is coming from somewhere above that join (the actual source is hidden beneath the interior liner somewhere; we can't find it and it is very slow at any rate).

The stern leak appears to be the worst but again, there are no hull compromises, and to cursory inspection the rudder and shaft seals appear intact. We have a dripless shaft seal, and no damage was incurred to our knowledge aft of the keel.

I'm nearly at a loss for isolating the source of these things; as long as I can't, I don't feel I can trust the integrity of the boat too much.

I also don't know whether to attribute it to the collision, or to Shearwater. We had no leaks before we went aground, to be sure; afterward, the one big one would have hid everything else. The yard isn't very familiar with sailing vessels, and I am not sure how confident to be of their diagnosis and repair of the keel. I increasingly see the wisdom of the local who said to get a patch job and head to a yard further south. The purely fiberglass work is pristine, but the other stuff has me wondering.

Other minor issues we have come across are: the autopilot clutch tends to pop out of gear now; it seems like we open a compartment or box every day that we discover is still damp; one of our AC electrical circuits is compromised, either with corroded wiring or receptacle; one of our settee cushions absolutely will not dry out; doors and drawers have warped and no long fit properly; the floor veneer is about twenty years older than when we started; and all sorts of miscellaneous ills, mostly to do with personal equipment or clothing.

On the whole, things could be much worse. Our expensive electronic gear is all working flawlessly (aside from the autopilot), the boat is as fast under power and sail as ever and still handles well, and much of the hard-to-access systems such as plumbing and electrical were spared or seem to be fine.

Now we're just hoping this storm system sitting on top of us will blow out so we can keep moving south. I am not sure if I have given up yet or not on treating this as a separate vacation; it seems like it is still too constrained by the implosion of the last segment to really be something new. It seems as if every time we turn a corner where we could do something new or fun, we find something else broken or breaking that keeps us from doing it, or the weather pinning us down as now. The weather is part and parcel of sailing and I could be okay with that. But everything else seems like a guillotine hanging over our heads with an unknown drop date (the transmission lever, the thing that started this whole mess, freshly thru-bolted together with brand new hardware, snapped off in my hand again the instant we pulled out of Shearwater--the bolt sheared through. How is that for an omen?), and our time and resources are limited for dealing with any more failures.

We're hoping for a return to sun and northwest winds by Monday, and that will leave us a week and a half or so to try to enjoy the Gulf Islands and get home.

Southbound

Scott and I took off out of Shearwater as soon as the boat was dropped back into the water around noon on Monday and headed south to Port Hardy. We left there this morning are hurrying to catch a favorable current in Johnstone Straight today. So this is just a quick post to say that we're headed home probably staying closer to the east shore of Vancouver Island, since we saw the west shore of the mainland on the way up.

The fiberglass repair, I dare say, looks better than new. The guy really did a nice job mending the hole through the hull. However, we are still taking on water somewhere, though we don't know exactly where it is all coming from, which make us wish the fiberglass guy had had more sailboat knowledge than he did. There seems to be a dribble coming in around one of the keel bolts, but that doesn't account for how quickly the bilge fills. It seems to be mostly coming from the stern, perhaps around the prop shaft or else the rudder pole. (Forgive my non-nautical terminology.) At any rate, it is enough to make us untrusting of the boat as a whole, but trusting enough to get it home. As long as the bilge pump holds out to emptying the bilge about 2-3 times per day, it will get us home okay, unless something else breaks. It looks like there will still be a lot of work ahead.

The continued leak has us downspirited to the point that we just can't make the sail home be like a whole new trip. That, and the fact that the boat is still grungy inside from the submersion, regardless of any amount of cleaning, makes it hard to keep our spirits high. I'm itching to put on a new coat of varnish on some of the woodwork below to make it shine like it did before, but that will have to wait.

On an up note, the engine seems to be a-okay, and the electrical is more or less okay as well. The new bolt through the transmission lever broke the first time we put it in gear, and now a cotter pin is providing the band-aid. We're babying it, trying to not go into and out of gear much, so our anchors have not been as secure as we'd be comfortable with.

This morning were socked in with fog, having about 400 feet of visibility, and were grateful to the radar for letting us know where other boats were, where they were headed, and how fast they were going. We've been running the engine all morning to catch the current, and motoring just isn't as fun for us as sailing. The good current will run for about 3 hours today and each of the next 2 days, which should get us to the other end of Johnstone Straight, and hopefully back to sailing conditions again.

Looks like Scott is getting the fenders out. We must be nearly to Port McNeill, where I will send this while Scott goes to the store, and we'll be off again as quickly as possible. We're already cutting into our 3-hour window for the current.

Sorry for the delay in getting word out that we're on our way again. We just couldn't stomach giving Shearwater another ten bucks for internet on top of the ten-thousand plus they already have. I'm not sure where we'll stop next. Someplace south, is all I know.

Some rays of sunshine?

At least it has been sunny here in Seattle while we are back; not so on the Central Coast, which seems to have had rain every day and we are not sad at all to miss that, even if we do wish we were on the boat.

Talked to the yard earlier this week and they claim things should be finished up and the boat should be back in the water this coming weekend. I hope so, but it's already been quite a delay and I'm not sure if more time would really matter all that much or not.

Our plan right now is to head out on Friday to Port Townsend, then get a lift from my folks up to Port Hardy on the north end of Vancouver Island. A ferry leaves from Port Hardy Saturday night and puts in at Shearwater on Sunday morning, so we could be on our way again as early as that, or more likely, sometime Monday.

Which way is "our way" is still up in the air. We're constrained a bit by time... I have to be back by the end of July at the latest for business reasons, and Mandy by early August, also for business. That's a month, which sounds like quite a bit, but the complicating factor is that even after the repairs are completed, I am still not sure how far I can trust the boat systems until I have a chance to run with them for a while. All the obvious stuff will be fixed, but salt water is insidious... more could be compromised than we know, and until we do know, we'll have to take it easy and stay in fairly protected waters.

The upshot of that is, if we decide to bring the boat back home, we'll probably have to start south almost immediately, to ensure that we have time to limp it along if other things do turn out to be damaged. That's not the end of the world, there is a lot of neat geography to explore which we zipped past on the way up, but at the same time, having got as far north as we have, it seems a bit of a waste to turn back only to have to cover the ground again the next time we try to get to Alaska.

So our other option is continuing north, and using the remainder of the month to get into the panhandle, then to store the boat there somewhere over the winter and come back to collect it on another trip next year (although we probably can't afford to be away as long next year).

Option Two makes Mandy nervous, but having the boat up on blocks somewhere up there doesn't seem to me to be much different from having it down here somewhere. We weren't going to have time for a lot more sailing this year, anyway.

Internet access being what it is up there, you may not find out where we are headed until we are almost there.

Damage Pictures

You'll find more of these in our Flickr stream (click on the rotating picture panel at left) but I thought I'd put up some of the shots we managed to get while we were hung up in Boat Inlet and during the tow and recovery afterward.

This is from about the point we figured out we weren't going to recover on that tide:
I am exhausted after two attempts to winch us off; the white line stretching from the stern toward the camera is the spare anchor line we were using to pull ourselves off with, first with our spare anchor, and then tied to a tree ashore. Looking at the angle of the boat, it's pretty obvious we were too hung up to keep trying any such heroic measures.

By low tide at 3AM we were high and dry. I hopped off and splashed around to look for damage. All I found was some primarily cosmetic damage at the base and leading edge of the keel:

Everything else was obscured by the large rock we were resting against to starboard. I got a picture of that, too, but it is too dark to make out much.

I went to catch some sleep, only to wake up to this:

Well, it wasn't quite that deep when I first discovered it, but it got even deeper, despite our best efforts pumping and bailing.

The Coast Guard made it back out in their Zodiac about forty to forty-five minutes after I hailed them. We probably spent an hour after that getting both gas-powered pumps going and dewatering the boat. None of us could figure out where the water was coming in from, so we just concentrated on getting her afloat enough to get off the shoals. Once we were more or less upright, they dragged us off stern first... then Mandy spotted the hole in the starboard side. The helmsman, Randy, actually intentionally grounded us again at that point since we had disconnected one of the pumps (which was aboard their boat) and weren't sure if the remaining one could keep us afloat. With some patching, we decided it could, and he backed us out into more open water so we could rig a tow harness from the anchor bitt forward:

Then we started the long tow:
The portable pump ran out of gas once, which I think freaked everyone out but me; I had been expecting it but we were in rough water and it took a bit of time to refill the tank and get it restarted (with probably half the gas going overboard rather than into the pump). I kept the edge off the flooding with our internal bilge pumps, which didn't do too bad keeping up for a little while (we have a 1500GPH Rule in the main bilge and a little 800GPH Rule in the shower sump).

And this is the hole, interior and exterior views:



I thought I uploaded a shot of them tipping the boat sideways on the travel lift to dump all the water out, but I must not have... Mandy found it very amusing, so I suppose we'll post it pretty soon.

Anyway, that's about it. Spent more time bailing than taking pictures, and anyway it was pissing down rain the whole time so there wasn't a lot to see.

tidal emotions

It feels good to be back in Seattle. Of course, I am in my Happy Place, my neighborhood Starbucks, and Scott is in his Happy Place, his basement office. Emotions for Scott and I have been a constant up and down for almost a full week now. The bummer of it is that hitting the rock should have been nothing more than a glitch in the trip. We should have floated off the next day. But the central coast of BC isn't considered "rugged" for nothing. Lately it seems like the positive emotions have had more reasons to ebb than flow. Sorry, all of sailing seems to make for easy and obvious metaphors. If this were aligned with a lunar cycle, I'd say we hit a Spring Tide yesterday. Everything, for me at least, seemed to be at extra high-highs and extra low-lows, with strong currents flowing between them. Well, maybe the highs haven't been as high as the lows were low. Today feels much mellower.

But at least home is comfortable. At least cell phones work and an internet connection is already paid for along with the other household bills, and it always works. And my Starbucks chai is only a few blocks away.

Yet, inside my head and heart, there are still the glimmers of hope. Hope that we will get back on the boat next week, and still manage to eek out a little more of a northerly heading before turning back. Not all options have been explored yet. There may still be time to salvage a good chunk of the trip, if things manage to start looking up. If they actually start the repairs. If they finish when they say they will.

While we are home I can do some marketing and Scott can work on the website, getting it ready for the next stage of hopefully allowing us the boating lifestyle we want. There is never a lack of things to do, that's for sure.

I still think I've learned far too much from all of this to not keep sailing. It would seem such a waste to have a new understanding of so much, then little chance to use it. My appetite has been whet, and I don't expect the desire to be back on the boat to pass swiftly away in any current.

Home for a while

So, we are back in Seattle, probably for about a week. We're very disappointed to have to be here, and a little concerned about what is going on with the boat in our absence, but financially this was our only realistic option for waiting out the repairs.

We had become a little suspicious of the boatyard at Shearwater... although we clearly dropped the ball on hassling the insurer and making sure that all connections were made there, it just seemed to us that things were moving a little more slowly and being made a little more complicated than they needed to be. Some of this we wrote off to culture... we had read that things were a little more laid-back up there and you had to be patient (although their pricing certainly doesn't give them any disadvantage to taking a few extra coffee breaks a day!). And some of it we wrote off to the remoteness of the place and the fact that things have to be shipped in, and so on, and so forth. But there was just kind of a lot of "Ah, it's late, we'll talk about it tomorrow. Or Monday" going on that may be cultural or otherwise innocent, but at the same time doesn't fail to pad their yard fees.

We heard from a fellow cruiser who had put in there and who had built his own fiberglass boat that the bulk of the repair on ours could be accomplished in about a day; three or four was what we heard from friends in the States. So when the yard said, "It's not going to be ready to start painting for a week" it sort of solidified the suspicions. Then, from a local, we heard that the yard has something of a reputation for that sort of thing and that insurers who have dealt with them before tend to have them do a quick patch and then ferry the boat elsewhere for the final repair work.

Of course, they can certainly charge what they like and take as long as they want, they are the only option inside 300 miles, and they have us over a barrel. We couldn't communicate with our adjuster sufficiently from there to talk about other options, and as they had already approved the repair work there, we decided to just let them go on it. It's disappointing to be losing so many unnecessary days from a vacation that was very difficult to arrange in the first place, but when you get down to it, the whole thing was our own damn fault, and this is a risk you run sailing in remote places.

I suppose what is hardest for us is that this part of the process is turning out to be more difficult and painful than the actual wreck was, and the more so because it really shouldn't be. But things only got harder after we got the boat in the yard and it's extremely frustrating to have no options and watch both time and money being eaten up to no end other than lining pockets.

So we'll try to take advantage of however long we are back in town to catch up on business matters and try to make a little money, and we'll worry about how long is left in our vacation window when we finally get word that the hull is done. We're not even positive that will conclude things; I checked the engine and electronics over as best I could, but it's still possible that something else is significantly broken, and we won't know for sure until it's back in the water. We'll just have to figure out what to do then.

And then the adventures taper off

This is just a quick update; we have to hustle and catch the water taxi over to Bella Bella in a few minutes.

After having a lot of missed connections with the insurance people last week, and some miscommunications with the boat yard, we're only just now discovering that the boat won't, even optimistically, be ready until sometime late next week. Had we known that before the weekend, and also that the insurance would not cover our lodging expenses while we can't be aboard the boat, we would have cut and run sooner. But as it is, we're just coming to all these realizations this morning, and we're getting the hell out of Shearwater. None too soon; everyone is nice, but we've seen them all far too often and frankly so much cheeriness is starting to get on our nerves while we're stuck here.

So I got us on a flight this afternoon to Vancouver, and we'll try to get to Seattle by tonight. I hope. I need a shower.

It's severely disappointing for both of us, since we had a limited amount of time in the first place, and other things were cutting into it already, and now we find that we may not have enough to keep going, to say nothing of getting the boat home. So; no decisions yet, we're just in very glum moods. Watching the Princess Cruise Line ads on the big screen here in the bar isn't helping much.

Well, more later, I imagine, unless the plane crashes, which doesn't seem all that unlikely at this point.

adventures abound

Shearwater, the place we were towed to and can keep us (hostage) for as long as they choose, is an odd little place. It isn't exactly a town, but kind of a marina village. I think I've seen most of the locals at least twice already, and many of them even more. Everyone else seems to be sailors or power-boat yachters. It is sort of like Northern Exposure, but with fewer moose and more Bald Eagles, and transient boaters.

The B&B we are at is run by a British woman, and the place has certain British flare, and an odd culture mix eclecticism.

Slowly, things are looking up. Just to feel better about something this afternoon, I cleaned off the pilot berth (the highest point the water had come) and laid all the wet things out around the boat, and cleaned scrubbed the berth. It is the only clean part of the boat right now. Everything is covered in silt and dirt and salt, or still sitting in salt water. The frustrating thing is that we can't run our freshwater while we are on the blocks, so nothing can be cleaned with fresh water until we are back in the water. And, water here is not potable, so we can't refill after we do use what we've got. I don't even know where the nearest potable water is at. (Our B&B runs off a rainwater system and set a jug of drinking water out the door today while I was napping.)

We can't even empty our full bilge in the yard, so the water on the boat has to stay there until we get put back in the drink. The floorboards are swollen and grossly dirty, but nothing can be done for them at this time but listen to the squishing water under them when they are walked on.

All of our clothes are wet, except the single set we had in a dry-bag, but it seems of little use to wash and dry the rest yet when the locker they were stowed in will be cut apart when the fiberglass work begins, and there is no other dry place to put them yet. Our lodging is too far away to take them to in the meantime. We stuffed them all into plastic bags so the rest of the boat can dry out around them. If they mildew, their next stop is the laundromat anyway. Today was spent trying to empty filled storage containers of water to prohibit further rust on tools, and other small feel-good tasks.

We seemed to have lost our Dewalt drill, possibly overboard, since it was out on deck before we even grounded, trying to drill the pin out for the transmission level so we could cotter-pin a new one in place. It was out on deck, and since it was dark, it may have just been lost in the heeling-over during the night. Oh well. Other electronics are shot, as well, like the Dremel and multi-meter. Most of the stuff will dry and be fine, however. Everything else is going on the list for the insurance adjuster. I have no idea what will be covered at this time, however.

Still it seems a little surreal. I can't believe we sunk our boat. It seemed inevitable that a trip this size would have adventure of some kind, yet I was continually surprised that things could continue to escalate in the way they did. I always thought that if you sunk a boat, you must have hit something and sunk it, not hit something, waited 4 hours or so, then punctured the boat as it tipped onto a rock, then waited another few hours before you knew you punctured it, then sunk it by the water rising above you with the tide and not you "sinking" down into it. I hadn't realized how good it is to sink a boat by having the water rise above it until we were being towed over water hundreds of fathoms deep back to Shearwater and realized that if the borrowed pump quit during the trip, the boat would be unrecoverably sunk. At one point, from Grant's boat, I thought Insegrevious was getting lower and lower into the water. Grant, however, assured me it was because the Coasties were towing faster then the boat's hull speed and that was the reason it was lowering. We pulled up alongside it and I could see that it wasn't so bad after all. In fact, the Coasties said it would be a 4-hour tow, but once we hit open water they picked up speed (and worry) and kicked it up, so I'm sure we arrive in less than 3 hours.

Yet, there is much to be thankful for. Scott and I both kept our heads throughout, and stayed calm, and, with help, got things taken care of. He may say he didn't learn anything, but I learned lots and lots, and I think he probably did, too. And I don't feel too bad about it, either. Stuff like this happens. You don't know if it will happen in your first big trip out, or after 40 of trips, but it does happen. This time is was to us.

I was surprised today when he told David that we'd still make it to Alaska. His optimism sneaks up on me sometimes. At this point, I'd thought it would be a trip to central British Columbia. But if we can still make it to Alaska, well, then that's a good thing!

Oh, and I haven't mentioned yet that I've seen 5 Orca Whales. The first one scared the crap out of me. I was at the helm, under motor and auto-pilot, crossing Queen Charlotte Sound. I'd been watching for ever-present dead-heads, when suddenly there was one directly in front of me, about 50-60 feet directly in from of the bow. I ran to disengage the auto-pilot. We were in heavy swells, so everything was in sight, then out of sight again, but I couldn't spot the huge log I'd just seen until it resurfaced, and blew water straight up through her blow-hole, now about 30 yards so starboard. Scott was resting in the companionway when I shook him violently and scream-whispered, "A whale! A whale! A whale! To starboard!" He wasn't thrilled with the awakening I'd just given him. But I had fun watching the whale for another hour or so. We saw one more that day, then two the next day, then another the following day.

Very cool.

Random updates and backstory

The bed and breakfast we have moved to is quite nice, and has an excellent view north out over the bay. It is about ten minutes walk up the hill from the marina and shipyard. As Mandy says, there are pluses and minuses to being further away.

We spent an hour or so on her this morning, laying things out to dry, emptying water out of various places not previously discovered, and salvaging what we could. One benefit to the B&B is that it has a kitchen, so we were able to get some food off and save our perishables. On the whole, however, there isn't much we can do until the shipyard staff does their thing—they'll need in and out and while they are helping us dry out with a heater and wet/dry vacs, we won't be able to get everything sorted out and tested until we're back in the water. Right now, we're still waiting for some information from the insurance company.

Everyone is extraordinarily sympathetic here; “Oh, we've run up on the rocks before too,” said our B&B host, and the Coasties gave me a brief tour of the shipyard pointing out the other vessels they have hauled in this year, mostly commercial fish boats.

Mandy is feeling more grim today and I am about the same as before. I am confident the hull can be made good as new, or better, but it's an open question what damage might have been done to the engine. I'm not clear on what the insurance will or won't cover, either.

It's finally stopped raining and the sun is out, which certainly helps from the drying-out perspective. But there are a lot of things we want to rinse with freshwater and re-dry as well, so another day of rain might not have been altogether bad. On the plus side, they can do the glasswork out in the yard if it's dry... otherwise, they want to remove the mast and take her into the shop, an old airplane hangar left over from when this was a WWII seaplane patrol base. I'm not keen on taking the mast down; it's one thing, at least, I know is undamaged after all the excitement and I would like to keep it that way.

Speaking of excitement; the day before we went on the rocks, we had an energetic afternoon out on Queen's Sound, splashing about in the leftover swells and wind from a low which had just passed through, with the idea that we would cut outside the channels and get a good straight day or two of clear sailing up toward Prince Rupert. The result was everything you expect open ocean sailing to be: blue skies, big waves, spray, breakers, fun stuff. Only I didn't get to enjoy it much because I spent most of the time heaving over the side like a lubber.

The incident confirmed something I have suspected for a while, which is that I don't get seasick very easily, but when I do, it is quite severe. I find myself almost incapacitated with weakness, which simply is unacceptable on a two person boat. Mandy gets sick easily (although, above deck and at the helm the whole time, she did not on that day) but then she pukes and can function again. I keep heaving the whole time, getting weaker and weaker even after my stomach is empty.

The worst part is that I had done everything I could think of to head off the very possibility this time: I had a good filling meal, took anti-nausea medication, didn't move around much or suddenly after we got into the swells. But I did have to go below to don some gear, and that's when it started, and after that it was all downhill.

This is tremendously disappointing to our aspirations to sail more and farther; it's just too risky for one of us to be that far gone. Mandy probably wouldn't have lasted another hour or two in those seas, and what if she went overboard or something (although I made her clip in with a safety line as soon as she took the helm)? Although I enjoy all of this quite a lot (apart from vomiting and wrecking the boat) I'm beginning to wonder if I am cut out for it.

At any rate, we ended up cutting back into Kildidt Sound, a beautiful little place we would not otherwise have seen on the coast of Hunter Island, and then back into Fitzhugh Sound via Nalau Passage. We kept north up Fitzhugh as we had the days before and then cut up Lama Passage and through Seaforth Channel to where we eventually got in trouble in Boat Inlet.

We stopped, coincidentally, for lunch here in Shearwater on the way and ran into a solution to a mystery while we were here. The S/V Spirit, belonging to David and Jo out of Helena, MT, was also at the dock, and we stopped and chatted with them for a while. Turns out they have two other friends who are heading north with them who they had somehow lost a week ago, but who also are named Scott and Mandy. Sometime after we finished talking with them and left, we heard a hail on the radio: “Amanda Grace, Amanda Grace, Amanda Grace, this is Spirit calling.” It's a very familiar hail; we've been hearing it randomly for a week, but it took hearing it again to out two and two together: Spirit has been David and Jo, and they are looking for their friends Scott and Mandy, no doubt aboard the Amanda Grace.

We ran into David again this morning at the laundromat and gave him most of our sordid tale; we'll get together over drinks later probably. They had seen the yacht being towed in and heard the story (the whole town knew about the entire thing, in shocking detail, before we were even out of the slings of the travel lift. I had forgotten that about small towns) but hadn't realized it was us.

I had not realized until this afternoon that it was Friday, and they don't work weekends here. I had heard that the pace is a bit slower than city folk are used to, and it is, and I'm trying to adjust... although I notice that they don't charge any less for the time than those faster folks back in the city do. Hopefully the insurance will cover everything, or that's what I am clinging to in order to stay happy and confident. So, we have another three days at least up on the hard... an enforced vacation from our vacation, I suppose. But there is plenty that we can do aboard, checking the engine, drying things out, cleaning up, and that should keep us occupied for a while. Not to mention washing and drying every single item of clothing to our names here.

Internet connection is really terrible and quite expensive, so we probably won't get a lot more updates out until we leave.

Something Broke

So, before I get started, I want to reassure everyone that Mandy and I are fine and indeed are the very picture of health, and the boat is still more or less in one piece and somewhat floatable. We're in Shearwater, on the north BC coast, probably for a few days, but have very limited communications capability, so please don't try calling, and e-mail may be a while in being answered.

We lead into this unfortunate turn of events with the classic failure cascade: a number of small, inconsequential, seemingly unrelated things going wrong in sequence which compound one another into outright catastrophe.

In this case, it started with the transmission lever.

I had just dropped sails shortly after sunset, as we rode the dying winds into a narrow, protected inlet a few hours north of Bella Bella on the Central BC coast. As is our practice, I had started the engine prior to pulling the sails down, just to make sure that it DID start and to give it a little time to warm up before using it for anything. It ran fine, as it has been the whole trip.

However, when I pushed the gear shift lever into "forward" the whole thing broke right off in my hand; the screw connecting the lever to the bar going into the binnacle had sheered off even with the bar, leaving no purchase whatsoever to shift with. It had, however, gone into forward gear prior to breaking, so I had some headway; this, at least, was different from the scenario which sprang immediately into my mind, which is a cold nightmare based on the last time this happened, which didn't involve the lever breaking, but rather the cable snapping inside the binnacle, and didn't shift into gear at all, and didn't take place in a remote Canadian wilderness with clear navigable waters ahead, but rather mid-way beneath the open leaves of the Fremont Bridge. But that's another story.

At any rate, with steerageway from the prop and nothing in front of our mast, I wasn't too worried; I call for Mandy on deck and had her fiddle with the bar for a while, but neither she nor I could get purchase with any of our tools to lever it back into neutral, or to reverse, which we needed to properly set our anchor for the evening. My thinking at that point was that we would simply continue to motor into the anchorage, slowly, and pitch the anchor over at first without setting it; that would glue us in place at least for a while to work on a fix, and the cove we were in was extremely protected and safe enough to sit on an unset anchor for a while.

So; my next concern was that it was night, and the entrance was very narrow, and several rocks were noted prominently on the chart. I had already threaded my way past several, but I put Mandy on the bow to watch for any uncharted or misplaced boulders. The two prominently marked with asterisks on the chart were both at the starboard side of the channel, so I hugged the port side... failing to notice the less prominent color gradation (particularly with the dim lighting) to port which marked shoal waters.

Nonetheless, I had one eye on the depthsounder, and it didn't look suspicious; it was holding at around 7 feet, which isn't a lot of clearance for a boat which draws 5'5", but which was the controlling depth marked on the chart, and thus expected. So I was a little surprised when Mandy hollered back from the bow, "What depth are we at?"

The answer, provided seconds later as we ground up onto the rocks at one and a half knots, was "Not enough."

Here is where the failures began to compound; distracted by the transmission problem, we hadn't sufficiently heeded our course in the first place. And now aground, our first and best option, reversing immediately, was unavailable.

We grabbed the boat hook and ran forward to try to pole off. That didn't work. Next, we rigged our spare anchor at the stern and Mandy rowed it out a hundred yards astern, in clear water, so we could attempt to kedge off. Winching the anchor in instead simply cleared a vast channel of leafy green seaweed from the bottom, finding no purchase and returning a veritable salad as the anchor came back over the side. Next, Mandy simply rowed the line across the narrow channel and tied it to a sturdy tree instead, but by this time, we were listing badly on the falling tide and were hard, hard aground, and nothing was getting us off.

I had been concerned from the outset that our list was to starboard, as was the remaining open water of the channel, and that the tide was due to fall more than ten feet that night. If our keel stayed on the rock it was on, we risked tipping over entirely into the empty water to starboard. So, as I had Mandy off rowing about, I was freshening up our ditch bags: waterproof bags we had prepacked with some vital items, to which I added more flares, our handheld radio, batteries, food, flashlights, additional clothes... anything I could think of. And I got on the radio and put out a "Pan-Pan" call; a step below a Mayday, pan-pan is a request for non-urgent help, or for assistance which may be required to prevent a situation from becoming urgent.

I got an immediate response from Prince Rupert Coast Guard, who used their powerful transmitter to put out a marine assistance request for any nearby boats to come to our aid, and tasked the Bella Bella rescue crew to respond to our location. They were about forty minutes out and they were all the help I expected; this far north, it's unusual for anyone to be very nearby.

By the time the Coast Guard Zodiac showed up, it was clear that there was in fact a boulder to starboard which would prevent our overturning that night, and we were too hard aground for them to pull us off without significant damage at that point, if in fact they could get us off at all. After some discussion, we all agreed that we were secure for the night and that we would simply have to wait for high tide in the morning to refloat us, at which time we would try to kedge off again. Mandy hauled back all the ditch bags I had sent to shore with her, and tried to get to sleep in the V-berth.

I stayed up until 3AM, low tide, and hopped off to take a look around; my next big concern was that somehow the rudder was also hung up or damaged. It was not, however, and the only apparent damage was largely cosmetic scraping at the base of the keel. The hull/keel join we had patched when we hauled out and painted in April was still solid--no signs of stress whatsoever. I was feeling pretty optimistic after the walk-around; we were supported solidly and although morning high tide might not be enough to lift us off, there was another later in the afternoon which almost certainly would. I didn't have much doubt that we would be able to get ourselves free, and most likely continue directly with our trip. I went back aboard and curled up in the pocket formed by the 45 degree tilt of the starboard settee and tried to catch some sleep before an 0830 wake-up to catch the rising tide.

I instead woke around 6 with the insistent cold lapping of water at my lower back; the boat was flooded up to the level of the settee.

I hopped up and woke Mandy. After my inspection the night before, the water was a particularly rude shock: the hull hadn't appeared to have been breached at all. I had closed all the thru-hulls or plugged those in seemingly risky locations without valves in order to prevent water somehow entering them before we were floating upright again... I wasn't too worried about this, however, as nothing similar had happened at the geometries we had dropped at, and it seemed likely we would rise at the same angles. My immediate conclusion, then, was that the keel was somehow stuck and those seemingly safe thru-hulls were beneath the surface now and downflooding, or that something else had failed, possibly the rudder shaft as we came somewhat upright.

I broke out our manual pump and a bucket, and sent Mandy flying ashore with the drybags yet again. She also plugged the remaining thru-hulls; but the water level continued to increase. Worse luck, the starboard side was also where our electric bilge pumps emptied... they would be useless.

I got on the horn to Prince Rupert Coast Guard again and got an icy feeling in the pit of my stomach as I failed to raise them after three calls. I switched my battery selector to chain both banks to increase my transmit power, but with the mast tilted low and our antenna with it, coverage was bound to be bad. Finally, I managed to get a response, but it was very broken and I could only hope they were copying me better than I was them.

They came back after an interminable amount of pumping and bailing to announce that the Bella Bella boat was on its way back out again. Mandy came back aboard, and there was nothing for it but to bail at that point--the boat was too full of water even when we first noticed to easily find the source of the leak, and all we could do was try to keep upright until the Coast Guard, with their powerful gas-powered pumps, could arrive.

We did, and they did; but to everyone's surprise, the 80-litre per minute pump was able to only barely keep up with the flooding. A lot of water was coming in, and none of us could figure out from where. The Coast Guard crew hailed a Fisheries Patrol boat and had them pick up another pump and run it out... another half hour of agonizing bailing and intense concentration trying to figure out where the water was coming from. We would gain on it for a while, come more upright, then suddenly take on more and sink again. It was baffling.

Finally, with the second pump operating, we managed to get ahead of the flow and, clearly concerned, the Coasties rigged a towing harness and yanked us none to gently off the shoals.

I was feeling pretty good at getting off, with an apparent minimum of damage to the underbody, still thinking that the problem had been some sort of quirky downflooding from some thru-hull which should, now that we were off the rocks and upright, be above the waterline.

Then Mandy spotted the gaping hole in our starboard side.

We got some loose junk stuffed into it; the Coast Guard rescue specialist, a fellow named Paul who had also been out the night before, asked if we had a tarp, which we did, but then it wasn't clear how to rig it to patch the hull. I had some 5-minute, underwater setting epoxy aboard, for just this purpose, and we broke it out and cut a patch from the tarp... but then, stupidly, set it inside against the hull, where the pressure kept the epoxy from setting against the hull. We should have done it on the exterior, difficult as that might have been. But the epoxy was all gone and we were managing to keep the stream down to where one pump could manage it, and the Coasties, now past the point where they were bothering to pretend this was nothing outside their ordinary day or nothing to be overly concerned with, immediately got underway towing us back toward the boatyard at Shearwater; our only real hope, the closest travelift which could pull our hull clear of the water.

Another boat from nearby had appeared as we were being pulled off the rocks; Tesuji, a converted fishing smack owned by a fellow named Grant who was cruising nearby and heard the calls and decided to standby. This was a good call on his part; the Coast Guard had only an open Zodiac, their main station lifeboat having had an engine go down the day before, so he was able to take Mandy aboard and let her warm up as she began to get hypothermic.

It was raining to beat hell and the Coasties were motoring fast and the leaking increased as we left protected waters and started pounding through the ocean swells. I had my hands full trying to keep the hole plugged; and the single gas pump that was left aboard was no longer keeping up, and I was forced to run our own bilge pump to keep the water level down.

I'm not even sure how long the tow was; I just know it was depressing covering all the same ground I had sailed up the day before in reverse. I just shifted between checking the water level, patching the hole, watching the tow line, and checking the hand-held GPS.

The yard had the travel lift ready and in place by the time we got there and we drifted right in and they picked Insegrevious right up and finally, it was over.

What seems clear now is that when the boat settled to starboard in the night, there was some unseen prominence on the rock on which it impaled itself. Because it was hidden atop the rock, I didn't see it on my 3AM survey, and while I checked the locker that the gash (an ugly, unclean, splintered thing perhaps two feet in diameter; although the total opening is not that large) was in when trying to locate the leak, I concentrated on the thru-hull in that location, and missed the hole behind other floating junk. The reason we would get ahead and then suddenly take on more water was likely that the hole was mostly plugged by the rock that made it when we were flooded and heavy, and then came open as we pumped out and bouyancy lifted us off it.

Over, then, except that we have a lot of work ahead of us, and an uncertain future. We're in a cramped hotel room at the Shearwater Marina Resort right now; we had some food, got warmed up, and Mandy called the insurance agent. The people here are wonderful; from Grant, to Paul and Randy, the Coast Guardsmen who responded this morning, to Al the boatyard manager and Rick the "best fiberglass guy on the coast," everyone has been terrific to us. This morning, they're moving us up to a B&B with a hot tub, no less.

But it's quite a blow, nonetheless. I am happy that we are both safe, and that in the end the damage to the boat appears rather minimal--two feet is not a huge patch, and happily not much more than our clothes and tools were soaked... the electronics were largely spared by fate of location, and while the engine was partially immersed, I have reason to believe it was not significantly or permanently damaged. If it ever stops raining, the interior may even dry out someday.

I'm glad we were able to work together successfully and not give up, and to keep afloat long enough for help to arrive. I think Mandy probably though I as giving up any number of times through the night; but I rather thought of it as preparing to not give up on the next phase of the struggle. We never feared for our own safety. I was confident we could get easily ashore if she went down and that we had enough to survive with and to hail rescuers if need be, even if I had to hike over to the main channel to do so. At the same time, it was a roller coaster of being confident in our chances at keeping afloat, and then being certain we were going to have to pull ourselves ashore.

But the blow isn't what went well, it's that it happened at all. Of anyone I know, I am perhaps the most cognizant, and even over-cautious about those failure cascades that lead to these circumstances, and yet when faced with one, I was unable to break myself out of its clutches. If the events of the previous day, which I'll go into later, hadn't already suggested that I am a rank amateur who is clearly not cut out for this business of sailing, this would certainly have called my base competence into question. A lot of people have bad luck; very few of them sink their boats. And this wasn't bad luck, but bad judgement, which is certainly disappointing and perhaps unforgivable. Do we learn from such events? Perhaps, but there is certainly a limit on what one may learn compared to what damage one may comfortably tolerate to one's self, loved ones, and possessions.

I am not sure that I learned much new, at any rate, which is the real disappointment. While unquestionably an adventure, most of what I did wrong, I knew was wrong already. Yet I did it anyway; and risked myself and the girl I love the most, while not even consciously considering those risks.

At any rate, it's been a long couple of days. The boat is safe, we are safe, and tomorrow we'll face the butcher's bill and find out whether or not we may continue in such time as we have left.