Wind and Windlasses

It's been breezy here in Port McNeill and I'm glad we're tied up securely at the town harbour and not out at anchor like the poor folks who showed up after we did on Saturday. Turns out it's a big weekend here, or maybe just typical of the high season... we got the second to last available spot on the dock when we pulled in around 3pm. I hadn't even been in a particular hurry; I had heard they'd expanded the docks here, and a competing private marina has gone in next door, so I figured there would be plenty of space.

We're glad to have it. We're way out on the end of the new floats, so our Internet connection is pretty marginal, but the water is good, we have power, and the showers are clean and don't charge by the minute. High living, indeed.

I spent most of my day today catching up on business and bills while Mandy trekked in to the laundromat. I found a few spare minutes to dig into the busted windlass a little more and research it online: enough to realize there's probably not much benefit in taking it further apart.

From what I can tell, it sounds most like the gears have stripped out entirely in the gearbox. Fortuitously, another blogger at Three Sheets just posted of a similar experience (with a different windlass, but of a similar type). What happened to him mirrors closely what happened to us. The pictures of the gears are most illuminating.

I then found some posts by other folks who do have the same model windlass as we do, describing the difficulty of getting the gearbox and drive shaft separated. It took a hydraulic press in a machine shop in their case. It sounds like I could get the box off the motor easily enough, and could then take it somewhere, but I think having the shaft out of the windlass would negate it's ability to work in manual. And then we'd be entirely out of luck.

So, it sounds like we're going to get a good workout for the rest of the trip, cranking the anchor assembly in by hand. Hopefully we won't run into winds like this when we do so, because the process isn't fast, and doesn't allow one of us at the helm while we're doing it (sometimes helpful to keep the boat on station--or off the rocks--while the anchor is down, but not secure). When we pulled out of Carriden Bay the other day, I did it all myself, but that was dead calm and I only had to bring it up 18 feet.

There will be a time when it is blowing twenty knots and I have to haul it up fifty feet or more, and that I am not looking forward to.