Kinetic Weekend

I've already did a post about this on Three Sheets, but I've been meaning to put up links to a bunch of the photos that didn't make it in the article. Also, for your viewing pleasure, the race start:

And here is a link to the album. Note Governor Gregoire in the crowd.

99 versus 1

We have passed a little bit of water under the keel since I last posted, and by all rights I should catch up on events that have taken place in order since I last left off. And I probably will, eventually; at the moment, I just wanted to make a brief, topical note on some musings that came to mind this weekend at a yacht club event we are attending.

This is going on during the Occupy Wall Street protests, of course, and our club event is just down the street from one, so to speak, at Bell Harbor Marina on the Seattle waterfront. Occupy Seattle is about six blocks up, in Westlake Park. Mandy and I wandered by there this morning. It has been looking emptier and emptier each time I have seen it recently. The last time, there were more cops than protesters. This morning, a handful of protesters, looking cold and miserable, and one officer idling in a patrol car. Apparently, the threat has dissipated.

It got me thinking, though, about how it must seem on the face of it that anyone belonging to a yacht club, and owning a boat, is certainly in or approaching that top one percent, wealthy folks with cash to burn. But that's not our club; the dues, obviously, are reasonable enough for us to afford, and we're not winning any prizes in the economic rat race. Just about everyone else in the club is blue-collar or retired blue-collar. Our 33 footer is in about the upper middle of the pack in this crowd. No mega-yachts or billionaires here.

Yet we're at a marina this weekend that clearly caters to such folks. Bell Harbor is charging $1.35 a foot at a time of year when most places are closer to $.50. The marina is run by the Port of Seattle, which is who runs Shilshole, our home port, but the differences couldn't be more stark. At Shilshole, the restrooms are old, dingy, and in need of re-grouting. The toilet paper is the thin tissue paper stuff that comes in massive rolls that they probably bring in by the fork-lift load. The showers are equally dingy, the water takes forever to warm up, it dribbles out, and you pay a quarter for every two minutes for the privilege.

Here at Bell Harbor, they have real toilet paper, the showers are free, separate, hot, and sparkling. For the first time in my entire life, I took a shower in a place with a gauge that shows the water temperature. There's a video screen with tourist information at the head of the dock. Obviously this isn't to cater to the average joe; and indeed, our tiny little boats are dwarfed by some of the mega-yachts in here right now.

But what I was thinking was, if they introduced such amenities at Shilshole, they would quickly be abused or defiled. The toilet paper would cost them an arm and a leg to keep up. Free unlimited showers would mean someone forgetting to turn off the spigot and similarly costing them a lot of money. Some kid would break the video screen. And it would take an army to keep it all clean and shiny.

That's not because us 99 percenters up at Shilshole are willfully abusive; it's just what happens when a lot of people are using pretty nice things. They just don't get kept up as much as is needed. If you wanted to have such nice stuff, it would become cost-prohibitive... it couldn't be done, even with all the wealth of the one percent. There are just too many of us, and not enough stuff to go around.

There is definitely a problem with the distribution of wealth in this country, but I don't think that spreading it around more evenly is necessarily going to raise our standards of living all that much. What the solution is, I don't know. I am not sure OWS does, either.

Seasons

When we sailed up to Port Townsend last Friday, it was summer... the typical cyclical northerly bombing down the Sound, bright sunshine, blue skies. Today when we came back, it was fall... almost no breeze, fog, grey overcast. We motored the whole way back.

We went up to visit friends and family and to go to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. The Festival enjoyed perhaps the best weather it has seen in the last decade, sunshine and eighty degrees every day. It was packed and there were a lot of boats to see. There were also a lot of seminars to go to but we didn't go to any of them. Wooden boat maintenance is, thankfully, among those few things we don't feel any need to know anything about. We'd like to keep it that way.

Looking at the boats themselves was another story. There is no denying that they are gorgeous, some of them, outright works of art. They are also floating pieces of history. We were aboard boats that had belonged to John Wayne and Howard Hughes. The owner of Norwester, Wayne's yacht, read out passages from old logs describing nights the Duke spent aboard and other celebrities he entertained. Also in the mix, as always, was the tug Elmore, owned by a friend of the family and a centerpiece of the show. Mandy and I had watched last year just before Thanksgiving as the bow of the hundred and twenty-one year old was stove in during a storm. Going through her and seeing all the painstaking repair work was interesting; seeing the upgrades being made was terrific, as a forepeak that had been a glorified junk locker last year goes through the process of being turned into a finely crafted berth.

It was a great weekend to spend with friends, so it was bound to be a bit of let-down coming back to Seattle today. The grey skies didn't help. As we eased into our slip at Shilshole and I shut down the engine, it occurred to me that it might be the last time we ever sail aboard Insegrevious. Our plans, always subject to change, at the moment reflect an intent to list her for sale at the end of October. It's very unlikely she'll sell immediately, and if not we tentatively plan to take her up to Victoria sometime in December on a holiday cruise, and there are a couple of yacht club events we might catch before the end of the year. But should a buyer happen along immediately, we could be in an apartment before Thanksgiving, and our next trip by boat would be aboard a different boat.

That's a positive thing, of course, but it was a little depressing to consider it all the same. Insegrevious is our home, after all, and despite many challenges and travails, she has made a pretty fair job of it. I am comfortable with most of her systems and there is not an awful lot wrong with her anymore; or perhaps I've just grown accustomed to most of the deficiencies. Looking at other boats has certainly served to illustrate all of the things we like about this one and made those features stand out. There's no doubt we need something larger. It's going to be hard to find it without sacrificing some of what we already have, though.

Those are melancholy thoughts entirely in keeping with the weather today. I started out in and fine and optimistic mood about where we are at in the world and how events are finally progressing in accordance with a long-term plan (sketchy though that plan may be); now I am feeling as grey as the skies overhead.

Is Mandy memorable?

I think she must be. I mean, I can't forget her, but she's around all the time so that may not be a real test. But apparently other people remember her, too.

Yesterday, she was up doing laundry here at the marina, and a woman walked in and gave her a funny look. Finally, the woman said, "Did you go to the Olympics last year?"

We get into a lot of funny conversations around here, but that might have been stranger than usual. In fact, we did go to the Olympics last year in Vancouver, BC. Of course, so did several million other people. It's not a question like, "Did you have dinner at Matador last night?" And it's not as if Mandy were wearing a Vancouver 2010 Olympic stocking cap, or clutching an Olympic mascot Miga doll or anything; she was as plain as possibly could be at the tail end of a laundry cycle.

But it turned out the woman was Jean, of S/V Perfect Fit, a Bavaria 37 that had moored next to us at the False Creek Harbour Authority docks for a couple of days during the Games in February 2010. We had chatted with her and her husband Mark a couple times as we ran into them, either coming or going during that busy week, but if you had asked me to pick either of them out of a lineup a year and a half later, no way.

At that time, they were living in Arizona and keeping their boat up near Victoria. Now it turns out they have moved themselves and the vessel, respectively, to Portland, and to N dock here at Shilshole. And, apparently, they remember Mandy. No word on whether or not I might have been similarly memorable. But anyway, we'll probably be running into them more frequently now, so that test is yet to come.

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.

New leaks, old leaks

Today was a boatkeeping day. It hasn't rained nor is the wind blowing but still I could not talk Mandy into going up the mast (and in truth, we had such a huge breakfast today that I wasn't looking forward to having to hoist her up there!) so I focused on internal matters.

I checked and topped off the house bank of batteries, both of which seem to be doing all right. After some corrosion problems last year, I was happy to find them nearly spotless now, and I hit them with some more protectant to keep them that way. Since we'll be aboard all winter it probably won't be an issue anyway, since they will be used regularly and we'll have the whole boat warm and dry.

I checked the bilge and found more water in there than I had expected. Since it hadn't been getting much water in it while it was unoccupied earlier in the summer, I tend to want to blame a leaking plug from the icebox drain. Still, it had something that looked a bit like oil in it. I dripped some detergent in it and it didn't cause the usual bomb-burst in the sheen, so it could also just be regular black slime of some sort. But that got me to checking the engine compartment as well.

The last couple times I have checked the transmission fluid, it has been low, despite my having topped it up the previous time. So I wondered if I had a leak there somewhere. It was impossible to rule out completely, but I felt around the housing as best I could, and stuck a paper towel in the spots I couldn't reach, and could not find any fluid. The engine drip pan is beneath most of the housing anyway, so drips should end up there and not in the bilge, but the housing does slope to the stern so it's conceivable that a slow drip could ooze back along the prop shaft and drain into the bilge. Certainly the area under the shaft was slimy and greasy. But the shaft itself didn't have any signs of drips under it. I also wonder if maybe when I have topped the fluid off if I have just been hasty taking my measurements... the manual says to wait five minutes for the fluid to settle, but I haven't always. Maybe it is just settling after I measured. So today, I made sure to wait before satisfying myself that it was topped off. We'll wait a week and see if it stays that way.

Anyway, I went back and started the engine up to see if it was maybe spraying oil off under power, or if putting it in gear caused a drip. As she fired up, I happened to look down at the binnacle, and think I spotted the problem: our compass no longer has any liquid in it!

In order for the compass card to spin freely, it usually floats in a sea of mineral oil. As you can see, ours no longer does. So that could well explain the oily sheen in the bilge water (although not really the blackness; but that could still just be regular slime).

I stuck my head in the cockpit locker with a flashlight to see if I could see any drips from below the binnacle housing, but it was just too bright out to spot anything minor like that. I could tell, with much gratification, that the rudder post step is bone dry, so the packing seems to be holding.

We're planning to sail to Port Hadlock next weekend, and between our various GPS units and spare compasses I think we can manage it, but after that I'll have to pull the compass and take it in to see what's up. I'm hoping it's just a leaky seal somewhere rather than a cracked housing.

Having developed a satisfying hypothesis for that mystery, then, we set about fixing the drip still remaining from the head outflow connection. I had to rouse Mandy for that, because my hands aren't small enough to reach. It's hard to imagine how the manufacturer could have positioned this to be any more difficult to reach, since it is at the rear of the toilet at the base... that's an area almost inaccessible by definition. To make matters worse, it is also inside the toilet skirt, which is not removeable. So you have to reach in from the front, and around, to get to the hose clamp. And since it's inside the skirt, there is almost no room for tools.

I ended up holding up the head as much as I could with the hose still connected (as it must be, when one wishes to tighten the hose clamp) while Mandy reached underneath to tighten it. After about three tries, it stopped dripping... or at least it has not dripped in the past hour. I am not prepared to declare total victory, but surely we have struck it a grievous blow. Still, manhandling the whole apparatus back into place and securing it to the base again (which must be done from underneath; don't ask how) is not a gentle process and it is easy to imagine all our careful work undone by a wrong twist or an over-tightened bolt somewhere along the way. Anyway; we charged it back up again and will see how it looks in the morning. Even then, a leak may not be obvious, as once the thing is all secured there is no way at all to see what is happening under the skirt in the rear. Ultimately, we may not know for sure until it has again been used in anger and we detect the telltale aroma of sewage seeping outside the sewage system.

Minor sunshine

So the truck sold easily enough; I got quite a bit of interest in it and was able to sell it for my asking price, which was about half what I might have expected to get out of it here in town if it didn't have any mechanical problems at all. Getting it fixed at the shop up there would have eaten up about the same amount, so basically I came out where I would have anyway, only without having to deal with both the hassle of the repair work and the uncertainty of whether or not the repairs would have worked. That is a ray of sunshine.

My friend Maxx graciously volunteered to go up and repair it himself, which, if it had worked, would have netted a better overall return. A head kit is only a couple hundred bucks, and I could have got away with slipping him a few hundred for his time. But the uncertainty about the outcome would have remained, not to mention the fact that he is supposed to be painting right now for an upcoming show, rather than tearing apart truck engines out of town, so I would have felt pretty bad about that scenario anyway. And pushing the repair attempt back after his show would have just left a clunker sitting around in my folk's driveway for a month or two. People would start thinking there were shed boys living there. So I am just as happy to have it all done with now, and can move on.

The Zipcar experiment has been working out okay so far. We've only used it a couple times, both for Mandy's classes in Renton, and successfully piggybacked our car-required errands on the trips. It's a bit of a hike to get to the car and come back after dropping it off, but the weather has been nice. I imagine we'll adapt as winter sets in. Or we may end up buying another clunker. I would prefer not to. We'll come out ahead financially at this rate. Avoiding gas, insurance, and upkeep expenses will allow quite a bit of Zipcaring around at less expense.

What with all the sunshine lately, we've had ample opportunity to clean up the boat. While I was gone yesterday, Mandy did something to the companionway to spiff it up, and today I gave the deck and cockpit a good scrubbing and they are fairly gleaming now. This may last long enough for us to not be embarrassed when we take her out next weekend. Tomorrow's agenda includes head repair (ongoing!) and basic engine maintenance. If it's not raining or blowing I may hoist Mandy up the mast to re-string a halyard and secure our steaming light, which has been a bit wobbly. I'm looking forward to getting out for a sail, even a short one.