Short jaunts

We're back now from a quick weekend trip up to Port Hadlock. I always like the boat after we are just back from going somewhere. Everything is stowed, and after some work, it's all clean, and it looks much more spacious and less cluttered than it gets after even a few days of sloth at the dock.

We had a great sail up on Friday, even with the winds mostly on the nose. We didn't even have to get up at an unreasonable hour. The morning started out fairly calm, but once we rounded Point No Point it built to eighteen to twenty knots and we really took off even in the persistent chop. It was warm and sunny all day long. I like a little bit of water over the bow to let me know I'm really sailing, but not enough to make it back to the cockpit and soak me, and that's exactly what we got... just enough to wet down the foredeck. Perfect.

We paid for that coming home, though. I got up at 0430 to a drizzly, pre-dawn murk. Fog patches dotted the bays and shoreline. There was not a lick of wind, nor would there be all day long. We motored all the way home... for a few hours with the main up as I held out some vain hope that the predicted southerlies would perk up after dawn. They never materialized. In partial compensation, once we turned the corner at Point No Point, the sun finally came out and stayed out, burning off all the fog in short order. There was quite a bit of small craft traffic but almost no tugs or ships, so we cut recklessly across the shipping lanes in a beeline for home and made it in about six hours, all told.

We had not been on the mooring ball up at my folks house in some time, and the pendant was quite predictably caked in barnacles, mussels, and other un-identifiable sea-life. Our usual routine is that I take the helm and steer us in, and Mandy grabs the mooring at the bow. Indeed, we put the pendant out there, and on a float, to make it easier for her, since her arms and upper body strength aren't sufficient to hold on and loop a line down from the bow. But there was so much crap on the line she could barely lift it. I would have like to have gotten pictures but it took both of us, with all four hands, to hold the boat in place and haul the line aboard. It took her five minutes of chipping to get enough crap off to put it on the cleat.

I had thought several times last winter about rowing out and taking the pendant off until summer, but when I thought about it, conditions were usually raging, and when they weren't, I hadn't thought about it. I think we'll be putting it to more use this fall and winter, though, so it probably will stay much cleaner.

While we were both up scrambling around on the bow, the engine was chugging along in neutral at low RPMs, and at some point I heard a shrill alarm trilling over its slow thumping. Neither of us could do anything about it immediately, but when we were finally tied off I ran back to the cockpit and killed the engine. The alarm was coming from the C80 chartplotter. "GPS FIX LOST" it said. Well, I knew where we were, so I silenced the alarm and poked around a little bit. The chartplotter was getting no signal from the Raystar 125 GPS antenna, and the antenna LED indicator was dark.

My theory is that the chugging engine caused vibration that worked a connector loose somewhere. I'm still not sure where, but it is working again. As I was poking around, tracing the SeaTalk signal between the SmartPilot module and the antenna, it started working again. I didn't keep clear track of what I poked, though, so I will have to wait until it happens again to fix it more permanently.

All in all, everything performed well going both directions. The engine pushed, the GPS fixed, the auto-pilot piloted... although it got a little drunk near the end of the second day, and started to steer opposite the direction it said it was steering. I'm going to write that one off as a glitch, although I will check the rudder position sensor before we go out again.

That may be as soon as a couple weeks from now. We are hoping to get up to the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend the second weekend in September. I haven't been to it in quite a while, and I don't think Mandy ever has. We're not actually shopping for wooden boats, but we like looking at boats in general, and while wooden boats are a maintenance nightmare, they sure are pretty.