Lifestyle – Page 6 – disengage.ca

Live and Learn

If nothing else, living aboard is a constant source of new practical information. For instance, did you know that while landing a motored zodiac on a beach in two foot breaking waves is simple and straightforward, disembarking from that same beach can be deceptively difficult?

The strong northwesterly winds that started early this morning had us bobbing around quite a lot, and while Miya put up a brave face for a few hours eventually it became clear that she’d be a lot more comfortable (and get more work done) on the shore. We dressed in full foul-weather gear, bailed out the dinghy from the night before, and aside from the tricky part – getting down from the tall side-decks of Tie Fighter into a dinghy that’s rising and falling almost a meter with every wave – the trip to shore went smoothly. We gunned the throttle on the down slope of a cresting wave about three meters from shore and surfed gently onto the beach, tilting up the outboard motor on its hinge just before the blades hit the sand.

I bid Miya farewell and started to drag the zodiac into the water but the first waves met crested up and over her bow, dropping a few inches of seawater into the little boat. I laughed it off and pushed through anyway, dipping a paddle into the water to taker her out to sea the required three or four meters so that I could start the outboard motor without the propellor hitting the sand. To my surprise and alarm, the blade of the little collapsable paddle snapped cleanly off with my first stroke, and I watched as the plastic blade sank quickly to the bottom. Another set of larger waves took the zodiac sideways and shorewards, and then a larger-still wave broke over the side, filling the little boat almost to the gunwales and pushing her heavily onto the sand. I jumped out, and with Miya’s help dragged her up a few feet up the beach.

They say that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results. For the next ten minutes or so I must have appeared certifiable to the slowly-gathering onlookers, though I couldn’t figure out any other way to get back to Tie Fighter! Without a paddle to help take the boat out past the breakers, the timing would have to be perfect – I’d have to wait for a calm(er) set of waves, push the dinghy out just past the breaking waves, jump in, and try to get the motor started while the dinghy was still in deep enough water. By the fourth try, I was having good luck getting out far enough, but for one reason or another the pull-start of the outboard just wasn’t starting! A dozen or so rapid pulls and the motor finally sputtered to life… just in time for the waves to push me ashore and flood the boat again.

After a fifth attempt, Miya pointed out that I’d torn the crotch completely out of my cheap yellow rain pants. I swapped pants with Miya and gave it another shot – I pushed the little boat out as far as I could, then tried to jump in… my timing this time was poor, and a wave chose that exact moment to crest just past the dinghy, causing the undertow to drag the dinghy out from under me as I jumped. I was now hanging on to the side of the dinghy with my legs in the ocean up to my upper thighs. My rain gear protected me somewhat, but all I could think of was how much harder it would be to stay above if my tall rubber sailing boots were to fill with water. I scrambled aboard as fast as I could, with the water only soaking me to my knees, dropped the propellor into the water, and pulled the starter… and it started!

I motored off the beach slowly, standing in 20cm or so of cold ocean water, soaked and feeling somewhat ridiculous. I made my way back to the safety of Tie Fighter, and Miya watched from the beach until I climbed aboard, on the off chance the Gods of the Sea weren’t done with me for the day and something else terrible happened. It is painfully clear that whoever coined the phrase “up a creek without a paddle” – although clearly ‘river folk’ – was on to something, probably as a result of a bad experience.

You know what they say about experience: it’s the best way to avoid mistakes… and the only way to get experience is to make mistakes. I’m going to chalk today’s events up to “gaining experience”.

Christmas Winds

We’ve been anchored out in the Kitsilano Anchorage for two weeks or so now, and we’re slowly getting used to the isolation again. Ever since we switched to a Zodiac inflatable dinghy with a 4hp Mariner outboard, I’ve grown somewhat lazy about rowing to shore, and since there’s nowhere to securely dock the Zodiac at Kits Beach, I’ve been finding reasons to avoid leaving the boat during the day. Honestly it’s not so bad, but the combination of rowing, dragging the rowboat up 150m of steep, wet sandy beach and cycling everywhere has me not particularly worried about that little extra layer of Christmas padding around my middle.

gps log for anchoring in False Creek — gps log from False Creek, December

Just before getting the boot from False Creek by the VPD, we had a really interesting night of weather, resulting in a dragged anchor and a surprised crew. The night started off like any other cold, rainy December night, with strong winds from the east – Tie Fighter swung back and forth on her anchor line but held fast as expected. We anchored just off the tip of Charleston Park and settled into the forward cabin for a cozy night with a laptop full of movies and the diesel furnace blazing, but after about an hour of steady rainfall and increasing winds I thought it would be best to set an anchor-drag alarm on the GPS. Not twenty minutes later, the winds had continued to rise and the alarm went off, but we only dragged about ten meters to the west before setting firmly in place, ostensibly for the rest of the night.

About an hour later, things started to get weird. The rain pattering on the cabin roof became noticibly noisier, but then abruptly… stopped? Suddenly – in the span of maybe ten seconds – the wind died down to nothing, completely switched directions 180º, and started back up even stronger than before!

With the new westerly winds pushing her sideways, Tie Fighter swung around on her anchor rode and wandered to the east, uprooting her primary anchor again and resetting it pretty much immediately. I can only assume the new anchor setting wasn’t as strong as the prior, because within an hour the anchor-drag alarm was shrieking again and we were drifting east. To the credit of the CQR-and-Fortress anchor combo, we only drifted a few feet before coming to a stop.

gps log for anchoring in the Kitsilano Anchorage, December — gps log for anchoring in Kitsilano

Anyhow, since that night we’ve been sitting at anchor out in Kitsilano again, and we’ve endured a few nights of seriously heavy winds – though nearly all of those winds have been from the northeast through the southeast, we haven’t logged any winds at all from the west! That is all about to change of course; late tonight the forecast has us seeing 15-25kn of northwesterly winds.

The water out here in Kits is a lot more active, with winds throwing up small wave systems and the passing Granville water taxis sending regular wakes our way to the tune of about two foot waves. We bounce around a lot more – never enough to actually cause a cup of coffee to spill or anything like that, but enough that the flashlight hanging from the hook by the bed is slowly leaving a crescent-shaped black mark on the wall. It’s not much motion, but it’s constant. I quite like it, though I could certainly see how it could be a source of frustration for anyone not prepared for it.

Miya has held up admirably – we had worried that she’d have a hard time acclimatizing to the realities of living aboard a poorly-insulated sailboat in the winter, especially when she can be somewhat prone to motion sickness, but she has adapted extremely well. Barely two months aboard, and the other day at breakfast I had to point out to her that it was cold enough in the aft cabin that we could both see our breaths – neither of us had noticed the cold at all!

Environment Canada marine weather report for Christmas — marine weather for December 22nd - 26th

Moving forward, we have a few interesting project on the go, with a new diesel furnace for the aft cabin right up in the foreground. With any luck, all we need to do is acquire a bunch of diesel hoses and a small tank and the dampness problems we’ve been seeing in the aft cabin will be a thing of the past. The shift from the large diesel cookstove in the aft cabin was a great boon to our ability to cook – the convenience and familiarity of instant-on burners and the sheer unbridled decadence of freshly-baked bread have made living aboard in December a much, much more pleasant experience – but the reality of burning propane has begun to set in.

The problem with propane is that for every liter of propane burned, a liter of water is released into the air. Well, technically the gasses released by the combustion – one of which is apparently hydrogen – combine with the oxygen already present and create H20, which means a damp cabin. In essence, running the propane stove every day has meant that the moisture level in the aft cabin is far higher than in the forward cabin, and that is manifesting as foggy windows, slippery soap and chocolate, and worst of all the beginnings of mold and mildew. This really has to stop, but the only real answers are ventilation and dry heat!

Anyhow. Things progress. More soon.

Winter Weather

I know that the weather in Vancouver last winter was considered ‘mild’ by most, but between the steep learning curve of diesel furnaces and a general lack of knowledge regarding boat life in colder climates I can’t really say that the experience was particularly pleasant. That being said, nothing last winter prepared me for multiple days of sub-zero temperatures!

Miya and I returned from Oklahoma (she competed in the Route 66 Marathon, finishing in 5:05:24, an excellent time for a first marathon!) on Monday night, but with a -17º windchill we decided that it would probably be best to spend the night at my sister’s house. When we returned in the morning, we discovered the cold had actually frozen much of the plumbing solid, destroying the new galley faucet. Fortunately the new hoses held up to the ice and the new flexible water tanks didn’t freeze, so we didn’t have two hundred liters of water in the bilge to contend with but it was still a nail-biting couple of days waiting for the pipes to thaw. Just to make things interesting, the follow-up to days of bitter cold was a massive (by Vancouver standards anyway) snowfall – Thursday afternoon found me digging out the snow shovel from the depths of the starboard ama and shoveling a solid six inches of snow off the decks. Shortly after I finished, of course, the snowfall turned to sleet and subsequently to rain, cleaning off the remaining snow and leaving me with a pair of dinghies full of icy water to bail out.

Tie Fighter's halls decked — Tie Fighter's halls, decked

The rains haven’t really stopped since, but that hasn’t stopped us from continuing with boat projects, albeit indoor ones. I’ve managed (under duress) to get the diesel furnace in the forward cabin working again, a problem that required the routing of diesel fuel lines under the floorboards and rigging an electric transfer pump. Now the forward cabin is toasty and warm, though the new propane stove in the aft cabin is turning out to be not the heat source that the former diesel cookstove was. We’ve had to run the Honda generator for several hours each day, just to keep a pair of small electric heaters going – it’s a disgustingly inefficient way to keep warm, but at least it works. I’m in the market for a second small diesel furnace.

The cold hasn’t stopped Miya from continuing to turn Tie Fighter into a home, and now the aft cabin salon has received some Christmas treatment. We even have a small Christmas tree fashioned from a live rosemary plant! The salon doesn’t smell like a traditional Christmas, but between the rosemary and Miya’s constant baking it definitely smells delicious, a welcome change from the pervasive smell of diesel and the salty sea air.

News From The Front

We finally managed to escape from Shelter Island!

A particularly poignant lesson I’ve learned in the past two weeks – well, technically I had already learned it once twice this summer, but apparently I’m either a sucker for punishment or a sucker for a “deal”. The lesson is that – to borrow from Robert Asprin’s ‘Myth Adventures‘ series – when you think you’re getting a deal from a dock rat, you had better count your fingers, then your limbs, then your relatives.

“Dock rats” are people who live in the boatyard or on the dock, picking up cash contracts wherever they can. Dock rats who charge cheap rates for carpentry or painting or engine work often do because they’ve got addiction problems, socialization problems, or are just straight-up incompetent, preventing them from working for reputable companies or starting their own. In some cases it’s a combination of all three!

Anyhow. I was bitten three times at Shelter Island, hiring dock rats for labour – there were at least another three times that the work I hired them for was of excellent quality, but one carpentry job was botched utterly, one painting job went sour, and now finally my engine repair work has gone south. The technical version? When the guy reassembled my engine after replacing the head gasket, he didn’t tighten down a particular lock-nut properly, and within a couple of hours of use the engine vibrated the nut loose and eventually fired a push rod up and straight out the top of my valve cover!

On a good note, despite the fact that the engine is currently not running while I await delivery of the parts from Toronto (parts cost: $15. “overnight” shipping: $85. ouch, but it beats waiting two weeks…), I feel very, very good about the engine! When we removed the head to change out the head gasket, we found that whoever it was that last changed the head gasket actually installed the wrong gasket for the engine!

I’m sure 95% of you have no idea what it means to have the wrong head gasket installed – I didn’t know until very recently. The short version? The gasket was completely blocking the passages for the engine coolant, which finally explains my overheating symptoms. Ah HAH! Finally, a big, glaring reason for the problem that’s been plaguing me for a solid year!

The repairs from here will be pretty easy. I’ve had the main part done already; finding a guy to weld a patch into the cast-aluminum valve cover. This wasn’t a problem in a blue-collar fishing town – asking around at the marine stores resulted in a list of seven local guys who could do the job, sorted by price and quality of work. I chose a guy near the center of the list, and when Miya and I found him, he barely said three sentences to us from the time we explained the problem until the repaired piece was back in my hands. I asked how much he wanted for his time, and he charged me a whopping two dollars.

The rest of the repairs I think I can handle myself, there’s not much to it. I’ve picked up a set of feeler gauges; basically a set of strips of metal, each one a specific thickness. I’ll use those to carefully adjust the rockers on the top of the engine to their specific gaps, and with any luck the engine will fire up and run smoothly. I will still eventually have to convert the engine back to fresh water cooling, but I’m pretty confident that I can do that myself some weekend.

*sigh*. Well, engine repairs aside, I am overjoyed to finally be back at anchor! Miya and I limped into Steveston Harbour on Saturday night and we’ve spent the past few days anchored across from Steveston Landing, which is a lovely, quaint little “seaside boardwalk town”. There are probably two hundred fishing boats at the public docks, then a fisherman’s wharf market flanked by retirement condos on all sides. The first time I visited this neighborhood was a few months ago with Ernst, dropping off my diesel stove at Mariner’s Exchange, a consignment marine store – he mentioned that Steveston Landing was a really nice place to spend a day with the significant other, wandering around the docks, taking in the sights and having a nice meal.

tiefighter_steveston_20101104 — Tie Fighter at anchor in Steveston Harbour

One milestone that might not seem like much to the casual observer but that really meant a lot to me – last night was the first night spent under the newly-installed LED anchor light – a legally-required white light at the top of the mast. No big deal, right? In the time I’ve been living aboard I’ve noticed that very few of the anchored boats have their anchor lights on at night. As a result a lit anchor light at night has come to mean to me the difference between a well-appointed, properly-maintained sailboat under the command of a skipper with a good attention to detail and a… oh, I don’t know. An unoccupied boat? A derelict vessel? A scofflaw? I have always wanted to be one of the boats with their anchor light lit up at night, but between electrical problems and battery issues and just plain not having the light at the top of the mast… I haven’t ever been. If I can help it, I will never spend another night at anchor without my light aglow.

The plan from here? When the parts arrive, I will finish the engine repairs and Miya and I will head back to False Creek for a few weeks. We’re hoping to sail on Saturday; we’re approximately 20nm from home, and if we make decent speed we can be back in Vancouver in about four hours.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation – June Edition

It’s been six months since I’ve updated my blog, and much has changed. So much, in fact, that the sheer amount of things I have to write about has been preventing me from writing at all! I’ve resigned myself to the fact that many of this summer’s great adventure stories will have to remain untold, and that I will just have to tell the biggest story – and in the spirit of ‘worth a thousand words’, I think the story is best told as a series of photographs, with a descriptive paragraph for each. There are eighty-six photographs in total, and that’s after having culled and cut and edited out well over half of them. Most of these photos are lower quality, all that remains from my iPhone’s ‘Facebook’ application.

The short version: I planned to haul Tie Fighter out of the water for a two-week intensive repair and paintjob session, and those two weeks turned into a grueling sixty-five day slog, working ten or more hours per day in the hot sun with a total of five days off over more than two months. Fortunately the weather cooperated, if you count blisteringly hot sun as cooperation…

Without further ado, I present to you “What I Did On My Summer Vacation”, the June edition. If you’re reading this on Facebook, I strongly suggest you visit my main blog site (http://www.disengage.ca) for the original formatting.

Given the ongoing problems with my engine overheating, I figured it was probably prudent to enlist some help with the travel from Kitsilano up to the boatyard that I’d be working in, Shelter Island Marina in Richmond, BC. They were chosen because they are the only boatyard in the lower mainland with a travelift capable of hauling out a boat the width of Tie Fighter!

towing Tie Fighter behind the Foulkeswagen

My friend John Foulkes offered to give me a tow up the Fraser River with his powerboat, and so Ernst and I sailed Tie Fighter out around UBC and to the river mouth, then attached a line to John’s boat (the Foulkeswagen) and headed up the river. Aside from a near miss of the banks during a daring coffee-relay mission between the two vessels, the trip was peaceful and uneventful.

I spent the night on the Shelter Island docks, then in the morning I motored up to the lifting dock…

travelift lifting Tie Fighter out of the water

…where I was lifted up…

carrying Tie Fighter across the boatyard

…carried across the boatyard…

…powerwashed, and…

: Tie Fighter blocked and ready for work

…finally set down gently on metal stands, ready to be worked on.

At this point I honestly did think that I’d only be out for a total of two weeks, but everyone who asked about it laughed when I told them my schedule and predictions of how long it would take. One guy, a fellow geek, actually recommended I take all my predictions regarding time and money to be spent, add a worst-case scenario, and then multiply it all by ‘pi’. Strangely his predictions were the most accurate of anyone.

The first task was to remove the centerboard, though of course it didn’t want to come out. At some point, some previous owner hit some rocks and damaged the fiberglass bottom edge of the board – the wooden centerboard absorbed seawater and swelled up, causing it to stick in the centerboard trunk. Two days, a lot of rocking, some serious leverage provided by halyards and block-and-tackle, and a bottle of extra virgin olive oil later… she came out.

the centerboard, out on the ground — the centerboard finally out

Six hundred pounds of centerboard doesn’t move around too easily! Ugh, three different layers of anti-fouling paint, old fiberglass, wood fibers and several years of marine growth – this piece of wood was foul. We drilled a bunch of drainage holes in the board and propped it up on wood blocks “for a few days”. Little did we know, it would be there for almost two months.

One of the first major projects was to repair a “tiny, little 6-inch spot of rot” in one of the port ama bulkheads. Of course, we quickly learned that as soon as you can spot any rot, there’s a lot more that you can’t see… and the project turned into a bulkhead, support beams, an inside panel and several feet of decking!

20100624_1_DR_bulkhead — DR tracing out a new bulkhead

My close friend Dan Ross spent a large portion of the summer out in the boatyard with me, helping to repair the boat. His work ethic and good humour kept me both motivated and sane through the long, hot days on the asphalt.

: DR fitting the replacement bulkhead

In the photo above you can also see the line locker, the open hatch on the right. Originally this had been a locker for a life raft, accessable from below the wing should the boat ever capsize… but of course, the hatch wasn’t installed well, and subsequently it rotted. We removed the hatch and built up the locker as a proper watertight line locker, by replacing about fifteen square feet of the underside of the wing, then building a new floor into the locker over top of that.

: port ama hatch rebuilt, awaiting fiberglass

: Miya on the starboard bow

During this time I also had other friends visiting and helping quite often – here’s a pic of my lovely girlfriend Miya working on the starboard bow. At first we tried to remove the old anti-skid paint with sandpaper and then with an angle grinder, but the sheer amount of work to do so was staggering. In the end, we found that methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) was the answer – the anti-skid paint dissolved under the solvent!

: Miya, Teak and DR pulling up the mast

We also removed the mast and rigging, both so that I could inspect and upgrade the mast head equipment and so that we could get access to the centerboard trunk, the largest and most complicated rot problem of all…

: the mast on the ground

: lots of rot in the mast step!

Above you see the mast step, which essentially collapsed as soon as I applied a little pressure to it. I’m very fortunate that it never collapsed on me while I was at sail, though I’m pretty sure that I would have had problems if I’d left this project for another year.

: the rain cover built and installed

As the Canada Day weekend approached, bringing June to a close, the weather forecast showed a prediction of rain. With a quick run to Home Depot for lumber and a tarp, we built a rain cover over the worksite – which had the side effect of giving us some much-needed shade on what would prove to be the hottest days of the summer.

And so ended the month of June. I’ll try to add the subsequent posts, with the photos from July and August in a timely fashion, but my world seems to be accelerating currently, so no promises.