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.