I suppose I have to put the disclaimer up "Not intended for navigational use" first, right? Although I did run into a gentleman once halfway up Johnstone Strait who was navigating his way from Seattle to the Aleutians using a second-hand National Geographic "Maps of the World" CD ROM. He was doing all right.
Google Earth, the program that lets you zip and zoom around the globe with a flick of your mouse, now has data covering the depths of the world's oceans. Navigate with it at your peril! As the article says "The addition of the oceans posed many technical hurdles, not the least being aligning disparate data sets so water meets land in the right places, Google engineers said." That information, of course, is sort of the bare minimum I look for in charting solutions, but at any rate this isn't being proposed as such and I don't know why I mention it.
No, I do know why I mention it, actually; I was trying to skimp and save some money last year by avoiding the purchase of small-scale route-finding maps (also not intended for navigation, though Lord knows they cost as much as charts which are) of the Inside Passage by using Google Maps. I was defeated, however, because I found that the location and distinction of the many small landmasses which make up the Inside Passage were so muddled, and the satellite imagery so blurry and indistinct, that there were no clear representations of well-known channels, let alone navigable passages. I broke down and borrowed the route maps, instead.
I hadn't tried the downloadable Google Earth at the time as I assumed it worked from the same data. Operating under the same assumption in reverse, then, I went back today to check out Google Maps north of, say, Port Hardy, and found that there is a world of difference--although some of the sat imagery is still less than pristine (I don't doubt it's hard to find clear days in that neck of the woods; clouds cover some significant patches of the area even on images further south) it is available in considerably more detail--I can actually zoom down in and check out some of our anchorages, including the infamous Boat Inlet. That lighter green patch toward the bottom of the channel, right before it opens up again, are the shoals on which we ran aground. Zoom out a little bit and you'll see how constricted the channel was--once the transmission lever broke, we were committed to going forward until we reached the larger pool at the interior. Unfortunately, we didn't quite make it.
Keep zooming out and you can see where we were in relation to Bella Bella. The Canadian Coast Guard station is where "Old Bella Bella" is marked on Denny Island.
Had everything gone as planned, we would have ducked out into Queen Charlotte Sound the next day and continued north. Funny, it all looks a lot easier on Google Maps....
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Boat Show ends
The boat show ends this weekend, under appropriately sunny skies. Our last day was Thursday, however, which wasn't quite so sunny, but was considerably less crowded and slower-paced than our first two days.
We went to the South Lake Union section first to take another longer look at the sailboats there with more opportunity to poke around in the nooks and crannies and more time to talk with the salespeople. We spent quite a bit of time chatting with one helpful gentleman from Discovery Yachts brokerage aboard a Regina of Vindo--Mandy loved the (uber-expensive) pilot-house boat but I thought our conversation with the broker was more useful... more information and better informed speculation than one might get in a year of surfing various Internet message boards. Goes to show you that you can't live life successfully entirely online, I suppose.
The Regina was not to my taste, although obviously well-built and well-appointed. It was only a 35, of course, which seems pretty small next to most of the boats there, but it seemed a little cramped even compared to our 33... probably due to more storage and tankage and a different, off-shore-oriented design philosophy.
Two 38 foot Bavarias there had caught our eye on Monday and I went aboard both for another look. I had done a little digging in the interim and found that they are pretty poorly regarded boats, seen as more expensive but in the same category as many of their American coastal cruiser counterparts. I had noticed some problems--puddles at the bottom of lockers, a segmented bilge without drainholes through stringers, and some other design defects. And like the American boats (Bavarias are built in Germany; you're more likely to see them in Europe than the west coast of the US) they weren't designed for heavy ocean-going work, without the host of small features you want to see in a boat that is going to take a beating from time to time. Apart from that, though, I couldn't find the construction and finishing defects that everyone online seemed to complain about. And they do seem better suited for off-shore work in some respects, with more tankage and some of the fittings one would expect on a beefier boat. It's an odd combination, I suppose, and I'm still ultimately not sure what to think. I was initially impressed by their CE Class A (Offshore) rating until I chatted with someone who had gone through the rating process and insisted it was a bureacratic joke. Still, for the money they seem to have better offshore features than their American counterparts in the same size range, and I imagine that even if it is mostly lipservice to the CE rating, that is why.
One of them was used, but it presented a currently unavailable center cockpit version, which I quite liked. Mandy wasn't impressed by either one, though, which I suppose is just as well. Something common to those and the other European boats was the inclusion of the head amidships or slightly aft, which I really like. Our Hunter has a similar arrangement and I can't imagine considering anything else for use in bouncy waters. It's a task to stand up forward of the mast when we're in heavy seas; trying to use the head would be a disaster. The easier motion toward the stern makes the necessary functions much easier. I am not sure why it has been left to the European designers (with a few notable exceptions) to come up with more practical modern accomodations, but that seems to be the trend.
Mandy was quite impressed by the Catalina 44DS, which practically has a basement in the bilge... but then, she's the one who doesn't want a boat bigger than 38 feet in the first place. The space is nice, but a floating condo isn't really what we're after.
At the end of the day, there wasn't really a lot down on the lake that impressed us. We did get some ideas on various features we like, though, which will probably be a help when it comes time to shop around for an upgrade.
After we were done at Lake Union, we took advantage of the free SLUT (South Lake Union Trolley for you non-locals... they changed the official name pretty quick when they realized the acronym it formed, but you can still buy "Ride the SLUT" T-shirts in a variety of venues in the South Lake Union area) tickets and grabbed the streetcar downtown for lunch. Then we hoofed it over to Qwest Field to catch the Man Overboard presention by Chuck Gould, editor of Nor'westing magazine.
This turned out to be a presentation we both liked. It was suitably generic to type and size of boat, even though Gould is primarily a power-boater, and suitably specific to the region and our climate. There were no flashy insights or silver bullets, but then none were expected. Gould gave a good talk and presented an effective framework for thinking about crew safety in terms of MOB accidents.
After all that, I feel like I should be out in the sunshine today working on Insegrevious. Since it's SuperBowl weekend, though, I'm at home instead, doing the work that I might instead have done tomorrow, had I not been going to a SuperBowl party instead. But it feels like spring is getting ready to burst out soon, and with it we'll have to find some time for sailing again.
We went to the South Lake Union section first to take another longer look at the sailboats there with more opportunity to poke around in the nooks and crannies and more time to talk with the salespeople. We spent quite a bit of time chatting with one helpful gentleman from Discovery Yachts brokerage aboard a Regina of Vindo--Mandy loved the (uber-expensive) pilot-house boat but I thought our conversation with the broker was more useful... more information and better informed speculation than one might get in a year of surfing various Internet message boards. Goes to show you that you can't live life successfully entirely online, I suppose.
The Regina was not to my taste, although obviously well-built and well-appointed. It was only a 35, of course, which seems pretty small next to most of the boats there, but it seemed a little cramped even compared to our 33... probably due to more storage and tankage and a different, off-shore-oriented design philosophy.
Two 38 foot Bavarias there had caught our eye on Monday and I went aboard both for another look. I had done a little digging in the interim and found that they are pretty poorly regarded boats, seen as more expensive but in the same category as many of their American coastal cruiser counterparts. I had noticed some problems--puddles at the bottom of lockers, a segmented bilge without drainholes through stringers, and some other design defects. And like the American boats (Bavarias are built in Germany; you're more likely to see them in Europe than the west coast of the US) they weren't designed for heavy ocean-going work, without the host of small features you want to see in a boat that is going to take a beating from time to time. Apart from that, though, I couldn't find the construction and finishing defects that everyone online seemed to complain about. And they do seem better suited for off-shore work in some respects, with more tankage and some of the fittings one would expect on a beefier boat. It's an odd combination, I suppose, and I'm still ultimately not sure what to think. I was initially impressed by their CE Class A (Offshore) rating until I chatted with someone who had gone through the rating process and insisted it was a bureacratic joke. Still, for the money they seem to have better offshore features than their American counterparts in the same size range, and I imagine that even if it is mostly lipservice to the CE rating, that is why.
One of them was used, but it presented a currently unavailable center cockpit version, which I quite liked. Mandy wasn't impressed by either one, though, which I suppose is just as well. Something common to those and the other European boats was the inclusion of the head amidships or slightly aft, which I really like. Our Hunter has a similar arrangement and I can't imagine considering anything else for use in bouncy waters. It's a task to stand up forward of the mast when we're in heavy seas; trying to use the head would be a disaster. The easier motion toward the stern makes the necessary functions much easier. I am not sure why it has been left to the European designers (with a few notable exceptions) to come up with more practical modern accomodations, but that seems to be the trend.
Mandy was quite impressed by the Catalina 44DS, which practically has a basement in the bilge... but then, she's the one who doesn't want a boat bigger than 38 feet in the first place. The space is nice, but a floating condo isn't really what we're after.
At the end of the day, there wasn't really a lot down on the lake that impressed us. We did get some ideas on various features we like, though, which will probably be a help when it comes time to shop around for an upgrade.
After we were done at Lake Union, we took advantage of the free SLUT (South Lake Union Trolley for you non-locals... they changed the official name pretty quick when they realized the acronym it formed, but you can still buy "Ride the SLUT" T-shirts in a variety of venues in the South Lake Union area) tickets and grabbed the streetcar downtown for lunch. Then we hoofed it over to Qwest Field to catch the Man Overboard presention by Chuck Gould, editor of Nor'westing magazine.
This turned out to be a presentation we both liked. It was suitably generic to type and size of boat, even though Gould is primarily a power-boater, and suitably specific to the region and our climate. There were no flashy insights or silver bullets, but then none were expected. Gould gave a good talk and presented an effective framework for thinking about crew safety in terms of MOB accidents.
After all that, I feel like I should be out in the sunshine today working on Insegrevious. Since it's SuperBowl weekend, though, I'm at home instead, doing the work that I might instead have done tomorrow, had I not been going to a SuperBowl party instead. But it feels like spring is getting ready to burst out soon, and with it we'll have to find some time for sailing again.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Seattle Boat Show
It's that time of year again... freezing, windy, with a dash of snow thrown in for spice. The warm breezes and gentle swells of summer on Puget Sound are but a distant memory, which only the most stout-hearted are able to chisel out and contemplate without tears of sorrow sweeping their cheeks.
It must be time for the Seattle Boat Show again!
We got three day passes again and have gone for two of those days. My first impressions are that the show is both smaller and more sparsely attended than last year, but the deals are much better and more easily had. Pity we're not shopping for much this year... most of our outfitting was either done or won't be done again until the next time we are getting ready for along trip. Most of the boat budget this year will probably go into engine repairs, if that.
We are taking the opportunity to catch some of the seminars that we missed last year in our haste, and to check out potential future upgrade boats should we suddenly have a fit of profitability in one of our businesses. We're only catching the free seminars, not the presumably more comprehensive "Boat Show University" presentations, which cost extra, and they've been a mixed bag. Mandy liked the Marine Weather skills presentation by Lee Chesneau, which I felt was scattered and confusing (to be fair, Mr. Chesneau looked as if he were having a horrible day, with some sort of fever and an uncooperative electronic equipment, and I am sure that hurt his presentation), whereas I liked Clyde Ford's Situational Awareness presentation and Mandy felt it didn't address the topic that was promised. We're going to go to Chuck Gould's Man Overboard presentation tomorrow; hopefully that will score a hit for both of us, as it's a significant concern of ours.
As usual, the show has us all fired up about getting out on the water again. With the economy in the dumper, why not spend all this time not working by sailing, instead? I'm not sure I know the answer to that rhetorical question yet, but with the economy the way it is and our impending nuptials this summer, there might be "Perfect Storm" conditions for taking another sizeable trip considerably before we had ever thought we would. Sailing as a honeymoon has the virtue of putting the dollars that might otherwise be blown on airfare and accomodations into something that we will get more long-term use out of (ie, the boat). And diesel prices are lower and the exchange rate better this time around, to boot.
It must be time for the Seattle Boat Show again!
We got three day passes again and have gone for two of those days. My first impressions are that the show is both smaller and more sparsely attended than last year, but the deals are much better and more easily had. Pity we're not shopping for much this year... most of our outfitting was either done or won't be done again until the next time we are getting ready for along trip. Most of the boat budget this year will probably go into engine repairs, if that.
We are taking the opportunity to catch some of the seminars that we missed last year in our haste, and to check out potential future upgrade boats should we suddenly have a fit of profitability in one of our businesses. We're only catching the free seminars, not the presumably more comprehensive "Boat Show University" presentations, which cost extra, and they've been a mixed bag. Mandy liked the Marine Weather skills presentation by Lee Chesneau, which I felt was scattered and confusing (to be fair, Mr. Chesneau looked as if he were having a horrible day, with some sort of fever and an uncooperative electronic equipment, and I am sure that hurt his presentation), whereas I liked Clyde Ford's Situational Awareness presentation and Mandy felt it didn't address the topic that was promised. We're going to go to Chuck Gould's Man Overboard presentation tomorrow; hopefully that will score a hit for both of us, as it's a significant concern of ours.
As usual, the show has us all fired up about getting out on the water again. With the economy in the dumper, why not spend all this time not working by sailing, instead? I'm not sure I know the answer to that rhetorical question yet, but with the economy the way it is and our impending nuptials this summer, there might be "Perfect Storm" conditions for taking another sizeable trip considerably before we had ever thought we would. Sailing as a honeymoon has the virtue of putting the dollars that might otherwise be blown on airfare and accomodations into something that we will get more long-term use out of (ie, the boat). And diesel prices are lower and the exchange rate better this time around, to boot.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Mid-winter musings
Still not a lot going on sailing-wise in our world, but I have been using some of the enforced indoor time from our recent cold and stormy weather in the Pacific Northwest to catch up on some of my blog-following, and came across this account by some Seattle sailors braver than we are, who ventured out last month weather notwithstanding. It sounds like about as much fun as we had assumed...
I can't remember the exact date, so I can't be sure it was the S/V Hello World that I saw, but sometime around this timeframe I was driving out to Shilshole to check up on Insegrevious and happened to catch a glimpse of a sloop just heading out the south breakwater, bucking and slamming into the surf, and thought to myself "Those poor gutsy bastards, it's gonna be a long day for them wherever they are headed."
Of course, the best way to learn is to put yourself in a position where you have to, so I don't think it's inherently crazy to go out this time of year. And from the laundry list offered at the end of the post, it's clear they did learn from it... which is better than I can claim from my experiences in similar situations.
I thought I would comment on a couple of their "lessons learned" though, after several passages through similarly rough Puget Sound/Strait of Juan de Fuca waters which have lead me to slightly different conclusions.
I'm sure we'll get better, and goodness knows the crew of Hello World are probably better sailors than we are, but I have come to the firm opinion that not going overboard in the first place is the number one goal. A PFD is a nice touch for the Coast Guard when they come to recover the body afterward.
So; in addition to putting one of those on before leaving the dock in such conditions, I'd make sure I had a jackline rigged (we kept it rigged more often than not last summer, though we used it only twice that I recall) and harnesses on the crew (because trying to get a harness on while you are bouncing around is a one-way ticket to Vomitville if you are prone to that sort of thing anyway).
They also mentioned in the post that instead of raising more sail, they fired the engine up to beat north. That seems to be a very common response in such conditions (we've seen people do it frequently both around here and further north) but in my experience it's exactly the wrong thing to do. Sailboats sail... they make for lousy motor boats, or at least those of our vintage seem to. We are almost always more comfortable in "marginal" conditions under sail rather than under power. It's counter-intuitive, and I am not enough of a mariner to explain why, but the boat rides more easily (a relative improvement only, to be sure) and handles better with some sail up... not just some, but enough to give it some power through the water. We smoked a newer, larger boat heading into an anchorage on Texada Island after they dropped sail in very similar conditions and fired the motor up, and we spotted them a handicap of fifteen minutes starting off.
I also have concerns about running the engine in those conditions... crud churned up in the fuel tank, the chance of backflooding the exhaust, spinning the prop out of the water, and the like, all seem like unnecessary risks that could diminish our capability of navigating safely in-shore wherever we did happen to end up. And if you are prone to getting sick (or even if not) the last place you want to be in such conditions is below with your head in the engine compartment trying to figure out why it conked out on you.
I feel bad about the cat, but I think at the end of the day everyone would probably have been happier (and closer to Kingston) with more, rather than less, sail out, no matter how crazy it seems when the wind is howling through the rigging and the waves are slapping you around like an extra in a Clint Eastwood movie. I don't know how well a Caliber 40 points, but Insegrevious goes like gangbusters in those conditions... that would probably have been the fastest trip to Kingston we ever would have had!
Anyway, I salute them for getting out on the water and using it as a learning opportunity. I wish we had more time, both to get the boat ready and to actually get out there, but it'll probably be spring before that happens. Even worse, the boat show is coming up at the end of this month, and that'll probably spark our imaginations up and make us even more anxious to get out on the water!
I can't remember the exact date, so I can't be sure it was the S/V Hello World that I saw, but sometime around this timeframe I was driving out to Shilshole to check up on Insegrevious and happened to catch a glimpse of a sloop just heading out the south breakwater, bucking and slamming into the surf, and thought to myself "Those poor gutsy bastards, it's gonna be a long day for them wherever they are headed."
Of course, the best way to learn is to put yourself in a position where you have to, so I don't think it's inherently crazy to go out this time of year. And from the laundry list offered at the end of the post, it's clear they did learn from it... which is better than I can claim from my experiences in similar situations.
I thought I would comment on a couple of their "lessons learned" though, after several passages through similarly rough Puget Sound/Strait of Juan de Fuca waters which have lead me to slightly different conclusions.
- A time machine is the only accurate weather forecasting tool. Don't rely on the forecast being accurate!
- Get your PFD on before you leave the dock because there's too much business to attend to once the boat is in motion.
- Being on the foredeck in four to six foot seas sans PFD isn't a great idea.
I'm sure we'll get better, and goodness knows the crew of Hello World are probably better sailors than we are, but I have come to the firm opinion that not going overboard in the first place is the number one goal. A PFD is a nice touch for the Coast Guard when they come to recover the body afterward.
So; in addition to putting one of those on before leaving the dock in such conditions, I'd make sure I had a jackline rigged (we kept it rigged more often than not last summer, though we used it only twice that I recall) and harnesses on the crew (because trying to get a harness on while you are bouncing around is a one-way ticket to Vomitville if you are prone to that sort of thing anyway).
- 25 knots is not enough wind to go under reefed main and staysail on our boat.
They also mentioned in the post that instead of raising more sail, they fired the engine up to beat north. That seems to be a very common response in such conditions (we've seen people do it frequently both around here and further north) but in my experience it's exactly the wrong thing to do. Sailboats sail... they make for lousy motor boats, or at least those of our vintage seem to. We are almost always more comfortable in "marginal" conditions under sail rather than under power. It's counter-intuitive, and I am not enough of a mariner to explain why, but the boat rides more easily (a relative improvement only, to be sure) and handles better with some sail up... not just some, but enough to give it some power through the water. We smoked a newer, larger boat heading into an anchorage on Texada Island after they dropped sail in very similar conditions and fired the motor up, and we spotted them a handicap of fifteen minutes starting off.
I also have concerns about running the engine in those conditions... crud churned up in the fuel tank, the chance of backflooding the exhaust, spinning the prop out of the water, and the like, all seem like unnecessary risks that could diminish our capability of navigating safely in-shore wherever we did happen to end up. And if you are prone to getting sick (or even if not) the last place you want to be in such conditions is below with your head in the engine compartment trying to figure out why it conked out on you.
I feel bad about the cat, but I think at the end of the day everyone would probably have been happier (and closer to Kingston) with more, rather than less, sail out, no matter how crazy it seems when the wind is howling through the rigging and the waves are slapping you around like an extra in a Clint Eastwood movie. I don't know how well a Caliber 40 points, but Insegrevious goes like gangbusters in those conditions... that would probably have been the fastest trip to Kingston we ever would have had!
- Why didn't we try to heave to in those conditions? [slaps forehead]
- If you're prone to sea sickness, don't play with your iPhone.
- Christy and I have a veto rule. If one of us is ever uncomfortable in a situation, that person has the right to veto our way out of that situation. Period. We both played the veto card during this trip in different situations and it worked great.
- After the boat is safely in port and everything calms down, we like to talk about what happened. This goes for trips that go smashingly well and trips that don't. This also worked great and is always a good learning tool for us.
Anyway, I salute them for getting out on the water and using it as a learning opportunity. I wish we had more time, both to get the boat ready and to actually get out there, but it'll probably be spring before that happens. Even worse, the boat show is coming up at the end of this month, and that'll probably spark our imaginations up and make us even more anxious to get out on the water!
Monday, November 24, 2008
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!
Monday, August 4, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
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.
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.
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