Adventure Time!

Drew and Miya, pirates at large
pirates at large!

Lately it’s been difficult to find time to post here on the blog, as things have been moving forward at a fantastic (or even alarming) rate. It has come to my attention that I haven’t even posted about the moving-forward Plan, and a deadline is approaching fast!

One major change: Miya and I have gotten back together.  Though at times we’re at odds with one another our bond is fierce and beautiful, and we’ll face the upcoming years shoulder-to-shoulder. She will soon be again living full-time on the boat.

So! Without further ado, the Plan:

  • Stop being a directionless cubicle drone
  • Purchase and move onto a sailboat
  • Live aboard in Vancouver
  • Make the boat offshore-ready – almost complete
  • Sail south until the water gets warm
  • Continue sailing with no destination or schedule until it stops being fun.

Obviously with a plan this grand in scale, there has been constant hustle on both of our parts, sorting out the remaining ties to the land, legal considerations, health and dental priorities, and of course continuing to repair and upgrade the s/v TIE Fighter to a point where she’ll be stable and strong on a long offshore voyage. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the boat will never be “finished”, but we’re almost to the point of “good enough”.

There have been many jobs on my list for the past few months, and slowly but surely they’re being finished. All of the major jobs fall under one or more of three major categories, which are, in order of priority:

  1. Ensure the boat is safe,
  2. Ensure the boat is sustainable, and
  3. Ensure the boat is comfortable.
electrical system ongoing
electrical system, now with solar

One job which I have nearly completed is the addition of two massive solar panels to the roof of the aft cabin – well, I have nearly completed it, anyhow.  The wiring is all in place, the solar charge controller is mounted and configured and the system is tested and active… but the panels aren’t yet mounted on the boat itself. I still have to figure out how to properly attach them, and the hardware available just isn’t up to the kind of abuse the ocean tends to throw at things! Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to sort that out, and with around 20a of current flowing into the batteries on sunny days we shouldn’t have to run the generator anywhere near as often anymore.  This both removes a point of failure (the generator could die, leaving us without power) and adds to the boat’s sustainability.

Another job which has yet to begin is the installation of a watermaker. While not critical, in the strictest sense, the watermaker will remove our need for constant connections to the shore for fresh water. Here in Canada that just means motoring up to a nearby marina for 300l of fresh water from the city supply, but elsewhere that might mean getting tainted water, or more likely having to purchase water in disposable plastic jugs – either way leaves a bad taste in our mouths.

Miya, apart from all of the stresses of packing up a life on land to pursue a life on the ocean, has been working to make the boat a more beautiful place to live.  She’s converted the spartan master and crew berth situation into what she calls the “master nest” and the “guest nest”, lined with blankets and pillows and hung with silks like some Afghani tent. She’s crafted curtains for the windows and a privacy curtain for the head, and begun sprouting miscellaneous seeds in the kitchen. Together we built a box across the back of the aft cabin, housing eight large plastic bins, in which we will eventually plant a garden full of green leafy vegetables.

a Searunner (not TIE Fighter) close-hauled near Hawaii
a Searunner (not TIE Fighter) close-hauled near Hawaii

There are projects that won’t be finished before we leave; the boat still has bare exposed ceilings, for instance, and rough uncarpeted floors. Some of the paint from last years’ intense labour in the Shelter Island boatyards has chosen not to stick to the primer, and there are ugly scuffs and scrapes and chips around that make us wince to see them.  The anchor line is still tied to a cleat at the bow, retrieved hand-over-hand instead of a proper windlass and bow roller, and the edges of the bow have been worn through the fiberglass down to the bare wood underneath in several large patches.

Still, most of the remaining projects are cosmetic, and the vast majority of the critical tasks are already complete. The resounding chorus of cruising sailors remains “just go“. There are plenty of sailors who spend their lives getting ready for a great adventure only to discover that they’ve waited too long and now they’re made fast to the shore by family or work obligations. There are no projects left on the TIE Fighter than cannot be completed at some marina in Mexico, probably for significantly less than they’d be up here.

Our planned leave date is September 12th, 2011.

Electrical System Complete!

After a couple of solid months of work, I think I can finally call TIE Fighter’s electrical system complete. Well… arguably finished – I’d still like to add a bunch of solar and possibly a wind turbine, to remove myself even further from the grid, but at least now I know that there’s a very solid base to build upon.

wiring, inverter and charger
the new wiring, inverter and charger

When I took possession of the TIE Fighter the electrical system was working, but it was a mishmash of new and old components, new and ancient wiring and… well, frankly it was obvious that several different people had had their hands on the systems over the years.  Some of the work was efficient and solid, other areas were sloppy and a few were downright puzzling.  When I traced out the existing wiring, at least half of the leads didn’t actually go anywhere, ending in unexplained ring terminals or even just exposed wiring, posing a fire hazard.  With several false starts, I finally decided that the only way forward would be to tear everything out and start fresh.

And so starting fresh is exactly what I did.  I began with the charging system, as the old twenty-amp charger and charge manager were barely functional, charging the batteries at a trickle of about five amps, which meant that a full charge cycle for the existing ninety-amp-hour house battery bank would take approximately fifteen hours of running the generator.  Fifteen hours pretty much every single day – that adds up to a lot of gasoline!  I was going through about a hundred litres of gasoline per month just keeping the lights on and the laptop charged up.

the galley panel up close
the galley panel up close

The new charger was a ProMariner ProNautic 1250 C3, which worked perfectly for approximately two weeks, then died.  The charger would power up but showed an “Under Voltage” fault light – according to Google this is a pretty common failure of this particular charger, possibly caused by using it with a generator instead of shore power, and they’ll replace the faulty circuit within four to six weeks of mailing them the charger.  Several forum posts reported that the replacement chargers died the same death however, and so rather than spend months on this problem I decided to jump ship and go with the much cheaper Iota DLS-55 charger instead.  The Iota charger has far less bells and whistles – pretty much none, to be exact – but comes with glowing reviews of reliability by happy owners.  So far it’s performing exactly as advertised, charging my batteries at a very acceptable 50a.  Once the ProMariner charger is repaired, I’ll be selling it on Craigslist.

TIE Fighter also came with a variety of professional-looking circuit breaker panels from Blue Sea Systems, which as it turns out are well made, well designed, and startlingly expensive… the eight-switch panel comes in around three hundred dollars, and TIE Fighter came with three of that panel.  The puzzling part was that though the components were expensive, the installation was awful, using wood screws and rough-cut wood paneling, with the wiring wrapped in electrical tape and dangling over the navigation table.  I ripped all three panels out and rewired them, ordering in labels directly from Blue Sea.  One of the panels was installed into the galley, and as shown in the photo the panel is now active and happy.  There’s even a label for the watermaker, which doesn’t currently exist, and a spare switch for something else down the line… a refrigerator perhaps?

four trojan t-105's and wiring
four trojan t-105's and wiring

The biggest and most expensive upgrade to the electrical system – after the ProMariner charger, of course, but since it’ll be getting repaired and sold I don’t intend to count it in the bottom line – was a brand-new set of Trojan T-105 golf cart batteries.  These are six-volt batteries, which means that you have to run two batteries in series (ie connecting positive on one battery to the negative terminal on the other) in order to get 12v out of them.  Trojan batteries in particular have a very strong reputation in the liveaboard world as being very resilient and reliable – the lead plates in golf cart batteries are much thicker than the plates in a standard car battery, which means that they can be charged and discharged thousands of times.  I purchased the batteries from Norm and Dave, aka Century Batteries, and they were prompt and helpful and delivered the batteries right to the dock.

In order to install the new batteries I had to completely rebuild the battery compartment, removing the old battery box and constructing a new one out of 3/8″ marine-grade plywood, epoxying the corners for strength.  The fit is tight but secure; I measured very carefully and there’s less than 1/4″ of extra space on any side!  Four batteries, connected in two sets of two, cost me approximately $600 and should last for at least five years if maintained properly.  There was easily another hundred dollars or so in custom-built cables and terminal fittings, but as I said, I now have a stable, reliable, modern electrical platform on which to build.  The new batteries give me a grand total of 450 amp-hours of capacity. which so far has proven to be about four days of regular use between charges.  Suffice to say, the boat is a much more peaceful, relaxing place without a generator running on the deck every day!

Next up on the project list: more engine work!

Photoblog: What’s Up?

Wow, what a busy couple of months!

I’ve been neglecting the blog, which is something I need to remedy.  In my defence, I’ve been very very busy.  So, in lieu of posting the ten or fifteen posts that I should have been posting all along, I’ll have to just get the queue out in a very condensed fashion.

Returning to the format of the ‘What I Did On My Summer Vacation‘ series of posts, here’s a rapid-fire “clips show” of the last two months.

staring down the barrel of a yanmar diesel
staring down the barrel of a yanmar diesel

I started and finished a two-week class in ‘Advanced Diesel Engine Maintenance’, in which we tore the above Yanmar 2QM marine diesel engine completely apart and put it all back together.  I’ll probably never take the camshaft out of my Yanmar 3HM, but at least now I’m pretty sure I could if I absolutely had to.

 

notice to move from the Kitsilano anchorage
notice to move from the Kitsilano anchorage - click for higher-res

This one warrants a blog post of its own – but then again a lot of these pics do.  This is a formal ‘Notice To Move’ from the Vancouver Port Authority, as delivered by the VPD while I was sitting safely and soundly at anchor just off Kitsilano Beach.  The officer explained that everyone was getting these notices as an advance move, so that if the Port Authority decided at any point to tow boats out of the harbour and impound them, they could do so without warning.  He also explained that the notices were the result of meetings between the City of Vancouver Parks Board and the Port Authority, over just who’s responsibility it was to pay for the cleanup of Kitsilano Beach after anchored sailboats were blown ashore and wrecked in windstorms.

What really bugs me is that since then, talking with other liveaboards here in False Creek, it would seem that this notice was only delivered to abandoned or unattended/derelict vessels left out at the anchorage, and that I was the only liveaboard sailor to receive a notice.  Strange, especially since I feel like I’ve proven myself to be a responsible and conscientious mariner, and I have never been blown ashore.

The notice says that I am anchored without having seeked permission to anchor, but as of now the Harbour Master has still not replied to my email requesting permission to anchor.  I really do hope that this notice is the first and last interaction I’ll have with the Port Authority, but I can’t help feel a bit of foreboding.

 

goodbye, creamcycle.  you were a good bike.
goodbye, creamcycle. you were a good bike.

In my ongoing quest to simplify and minimize my life, I finally realized that my beloved bicycle just doesn’t fit “indoors”, and storing the Creamcycle outdoors all winter was slowly killing her.  There’s room for a bike in the starboard ama if I arrange things very carefully but that’s a lot of valuable storage space taken up, especially with the prospect of Miya also having a bike aboard.  After much research, I decided that the path forward would be to purchase a Montague Boston folding bike, and migrate all of my pro-grade components from the Creamcycle over onto the Boston frame, and vice versa, and then sell the result on Craigslist.  More on this soon.

 

snow drifted up against the generator
snow drifted up against the generator

February 26th 2011 brought the first and last big snowstorm of the season.  This pic is a little difficult to make out, but if you look closely you can see the snow drifted up nearly over the cabin window, with a melted/windshaped cutout around the Honda EU2000i generator, wrapped here (as always) in a white tarp to keep the weather out.

 

March 4th was my 35th birthday, and we celebrated by sailing the TIE Fighter across the Georgia Straight and over to Pender Island for a weekend-long multi-birthday party with twenty or so friends in a mansion on the highest point on the island.  Seriously swank – a hot tub on the roof, and 360º view of the Gulf Islands!

Miya took this video at a particularly stressful moment during the journey across the Straight – we’d had lovely 10-15kn winds coming out of English Bay, but as we rounded UBC the winds jumped to 20-25kn and we struggled to reef the mainsail, which wasn’t rigged properly for reefing.  Shortly after we succeeded, we suddenly lost steering…

The rest of the trip got steadily worse, and by the time we arrived at the west side of the Straight the wind was blowing a steady 30kn with pouring rain and 3m waves occasionally breaking over the decks.  We arrived shortly after dark on Friday night, exhausted and happy to be somewhere warm and dry – I don’t think my boots dried until Sunday.

 

DR spraying the sails down with fresh water
DR spraying the sails down with fresh water

We moored the boat at Otter Bay for the weekend while we relaxed at the mansion.  This pic shows Dan Ross spraying down the sails with fresh water, after being soaked with seawater.  You really shouldn’t allow sails to sit with salt on them – the salt attracts moisture from the air so the sails will never really dry out completely, which is really bad for the lifespan of the sails, not to mention the probable cause of the large rust stains visible on the headsail.

 

new battery charger installed!
new battery charger installed!

I picked up a brand new modern battery charger for a little under half price on Craigslist and installed it, finally taking control over the charging of my batteries!  Prior to this I had been charging the batteries directly from a 20a DC-DC converter, which is effective but inefficient, and very very hard on batteries.  With the new ProNautic C3 50a charger, my time to fully charge the batteries dropped from seven hours to just under three hours.  Take note of the mess of wires in the background – this was taken after I had already pulled two full laundry baskets of unused wiring out of the boat.  Apparently at least one of the former owners of the TIE Fighter had rewired the boat, but hadn’t bother removing any of the old wiring!

 

winch maintenance begins
winch maintenance begins

One thing I noticed during the Pender “sea trials” trip was that the winches on the mast had begun slipping.  I’ve owned the boat for over three years now and have never serviced the winches, so maintenance was definitely overdue.  I had dropped Miya and DR off at Swartz Bay, and TIE Fighter was now anchored in Sidney, BC, so I had my evenings free to work hard on boat projects.  Servicing winches is messy work but quite introspective and satisfying, much like I imagine cleaning a rifle must be.  This pic shows three of the mast winches disassembled and my first experiments with using ‘Simple Green’ to clean the components.  Result: ‘Simple Green’ does not effectively clean winch components.

 

the daily ritual
the daily ritual

Being anchored in a new place makes me quickly slip into a comfortable routine.  I finally got around to repairing the broken Bodum hand-crank coffee grinder that I purchased last fall, and this pic shows my morning ritual in progress – a pot of steel-cut oatmeal and quinoa on the galley stove, with a Bialetti ‘moka pot’ of coffee percolating beside it, lit by a sunbeam.

 

new day tank, visible (barely) way in the back
new day tank, visible (barely) way in the back

Yet another project that I’d been putting off; the aft cabin furnace needed a day tank.  The hard part about diesel furnaces is that they need to be supplied with diesel fuel at about 3psi – this can be achieved with either a small electric fuel pump, or with a gravity feed from a tank stored at least four feet above the fuel intake.  The problem is that as far as I can tell, very few companies make a diesel tank with an outlet port at the bottom of the tank!  After researching the costs of having one manufactured (about $300), I found this water tank, rated for chemical storage, at the wonderful Sidney Boaters Exchange for a whopping $8.00.  Another $6.00 in parts, fittings and tie-downs and I was in business!

 

more splicing - the headsail sheets are now 340% better.
more splicing - the headsail sheets are now 340% better.

Evenings over the next two weeks were slow and quiet, so I got a few chances to move away from the “needs” projects a little and onto the “wants” projects.  Here’s a pic of the snap shackles on the headsail sheets spliced into the sheets instead of tied in with bowline knots, and the bitter ends of the sheets backspliced.  This is not only faaaaaar more attractive, but also much smoother for tacking as there is less to catch on the inner forestay while the headsail slips across.

 

winches, cleaned
winches, cleaned

More detail on the winch servicing project; the acetone in the back proved to be a failure as well.  At some point a previous owner had serviced the winches by putting grease on the pawls.  Apparently – and this was news to me – putting grease on pawls is a no-no, as the grease tends to thicken and build up, eventually causing the pawls to jam.  For reference, you should only ever put oil on winch pawls; grease is fine (and recommended) for the gears, but the pawls only ever get oil.

The thick, gummy grease is difficult to get off of the components, but the ultimate solution turned out to be very simple: diesel fuel dissolves the grease and an old toothbrush cleans off the remainder. The glass and tupperware in the pic above are both full of diesel, stained an ugly greenish-black by the dissolved grease after soaking the components overnight.

 

winch 'spares'
winch 'spares'

While I had the winches apart, I took the opportunity to purchase a ‘rebuild kit’ from the local marine store, and replaced all of the pawl springs in each winch.  In this pic, the silver chicklet-looking chunky steel bits are the pawls, which are held against the gear sprockets by the little flat circular pawl springs, which causes the characteristic clatter of the winch in use.  Pawl springs wear out over time, but after cleaning the winches and replacing all the springs, my mast winches now work just like new.

 

mast winch mounts
mast winch mounts

The winch mounts during reassembly, after cleaning with diesel, brushes and paper towel. During this procedure it was so bitterly cold outside that I had to go back into the cabin after cleaning each mount to rub my hands together to regain feeling in my fingertips!

 

aft furnace installed and operational!
aft furnace installed and operational!

The aft furnace was critical during this period – prior to having the furnace working I was mostly confined to the forward cabin for pretty much everything except cooking, working my day job from either my bed or the “guest nest”, which is what Miya has named the port-side single berth.

Upon first lighting of the new furnace, I nearly burned the boat down! It started up just like normal and worked great, but shortly after this photo the furnace began making a “chuffing” noise and the walls of the burn chamber started glowing red hot – I quickly shut it down, but it kept burning for a good five minutes afterwards. Apparently the diesel metering valve had been set for a much more viscous fuel, and when I measured and tuned the meter it was delivering more than three times the normal amount of fuel to the burner. Since the tuning the furnace has worked 100% as expected, keeping the aft cabin warm for days on end.

 

the 'boudoir' cubby, painted and shelved
the 'boudoir' cubby, painted and shelved

Speaking of the “guest nest”, here is a pic of the newly-painted and newly-shelved cubby below the port side berth, which Miya has named ‘the boudoir’, and we’ve decided is her personal storage area while she’s living aboard with me.  My personal storage space is the opposite cubby, which I have dubbed ‘the study’.

 

the headsail, spread out at the sail loft
the yankee headsail, spread out at the sail loft

In the sail across from Vancouver, we tore the mainsail in no less than five places, mostly due to poor reefing skills but probably the fact that the sail is fifteen years old might have something to do with it.  I brought the sails in to Sidney’s Leitch and Mcbride sailmakers to have it repaired and to get a quote on a replacement sail.  I was impressed with their workmanship and attention to detail, and by the personal service I received – they even picked me and the sails up from the boat, and dropped me off again afterwards.

 

cutting the hole for the new switch panel
cutting the hole for the new switch panel

The biggest project of all, while living at anchor in Sidney, was to gut and replace the entire electrical system of the boat.  This meant making final decisions on the organization and placement of the switch panels, and cutting into the walls of the cabin to install them.  Here I’ve discovered that the panel above the stove is only 1/4″ plywood, and that I’m able to cut through it quite easily with my pocket knife.

 

LED lighting in the engine compartment
LED lighting in the engine compartment

As a part of the electrical system upgrade, I installed LED lighting into all of the under-cockpit cubbies, with the engine compartment getting extra attention as it’s probably the one where having good lighting is the most critical.  Amazing how much cleaner Maude looks with good lighting!

 

cubbies in the forward cabin, lit up with LED strips
cubbies in the forward cabin, lit up with LED strips

The forward cabin cubbies – the ‘study’ and ‘boudoir’ – shown lit up brightly with the new LED cubby lighting system.  What a phenomenal difference it makes, having these formerly dark and dirty spaces now clean, white and bright.

 

a new outlet beside the bed
a new outlet beside the bed

I only have a 400w inverter on the boat currently, but that’s more than enough to run things like laptops and cellphone chargers – I really don’t have much else to plug in anymore!  Still, it’s nice to have the convenience of being able to plug things in wherever you are, so I’ve installed GFCI outlets all over the boat.  This one is only temporary – I’ve replaced it already with a more modern outlet that has a green LED, so that you can tell at a glance whether or not the inverter is turned on.

 

the finished electrical panel in the galley
the finished electrical panel in the galley

The galley electrical panel installed and active! I’ve since also added a backlighting kit to this panel, so the panel labels glow a soft green at night. It’s the little touches that really make the work feel professional, and give me great pride in having done it all myself.

 

the completed electrical system wiring
the completed electrical system wiring

I’m very proud of my wiring job – apparently fifteen years of being a network tech has some boat benefits after all!  All wires to the switch panels are cut to length and terminate in double-crimped flanged spade connectors on terminator bars, all grounds are bussed together with appropriately-sized wiring, and every subsystem on the boat has an individual circuitbreaker. TIE Fighter now has a modern, well-installed electrical system, onto which I can build with confidence. Next steps: a much larger battery bank, then a powerful solar array and possibly a wind generator. The “grid” just keeps getting further and further behind me.

 

propane canister packed up for bicycle transport
propane canister packed up for bicycle transport

On yet another trip to the Sidney Boater’s Exchange I found a pair of nearly-new horizontally-mounted propane tanks for $100 each.  This was a great deal, as used horizontal tanks are very hard to find, and new ones are over $400 each – my propane locker can fit two twenty-pound propane tanks, but they have to be horizontal tanks, standard vertical tanks (like on a barbeque) are too tall for the locker.  Packing a propane tank home on my bicycle garnered some strange looks from the locals.

 

Xantrex LinkLITE installed and operational
Xantrex LinkLITE installed and operational

I also picked up a Xantrex LinkLITE battery monitor, which conveniently fit into the hole from the ancient (and dead) Heart Interface battery monitor that was installed on TIE Fighter when I purchased her.  Yet another step towards complete mastery of my electrical system – a former boss of mine was fond of saying “that which gets measured, gets managed”.  This is absolutely true with regards to battery life; I can now measure how much electricity the boat is using at any given moment, and know at a glance how much battery life I have left before I have to run the generator to charge back up again.

 

sitting on a stoop on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico
sitting on a stoop on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico

After three solid weeks of heads-down work on the boat, a vacation was in order.  Miya’s close friend and cousin Stacee was getting married in Puerto Rico, and Miya was the maid of honour so I was invited along as her date.  We flew to Vieques, a small rustic island about an hour east of San Juan.  Vieques is known for beautiful beaches, quiet towns and a large population of unfenced horses running free over the whole island.  At times I really felt like I was back living in Costa Rica again, and within the week my spanish came rushing back to me.

 

Miya, post-serenade
Miya, post-serenade

At some point, walking from our budget hotel towards the posh resort the wedding was being held in, we were flagged down by pensioners in a small bar by the side of the road, invited in for a drink and to listen to the locals playing music and gabbing.  Here Miya has just been serenaded with very decent spanish folk music by the man on the left, and the one-armed man on the right had just finished telling her the story of his being stabbed in the abdomen two nights earlier, on the street a block from our hotel.

 

first scuba dive!
first scuba dive!

We took advantage of the tourist industry on Vieques and signed up for a one-day ‘Explore SCUBA’ course, which took us out to the end of an unused (but heavily secured) military pier for a pair of dives.  The waters under the pier were teeming with life, and I discovered to my great relief that the sinus and inner-ear problems that plagued me as a youth have not in fact followed me into adulthood – I am able to dive after all.

 

click for a high-res version
click for a high-res version

I’ve included this pic because I think it makes an excellent desktop wallpaper; subtle and not too busy.  Click the pic – or for that matter, any of these photos – for a higher-resolution version. We saw many sea turtles, as well as several types of ray and many, many different tropical fish.

 

ripping around on a little Yamaha scooter
ripping around on a little Yamaha scooter

Vieques is fairly small at only about seven miles long, but we soon felt the pangs of not having our bicycles. Renting bikes was an option, but at $25/day per bike renting a motor scooter for $50/day seemed like a much better option. In the three days we had the scooter the island was opened up to us in a way that was impossible on foot, and we explored the tiny back roads of the island.

 

probably my favourite pic of the whole trip
probably my favourite pic of the whole trip

There’s something about the sunshine that makes everything a little easier to take… after a few days on the beach it was difficult to remember why we’d been so stressed out about all the little things back home.  This pic was taken at the “red beach”, on our way back from the “green beach”, where we’d discovered that tiny, vicious gnats come out in swarms as the sundown approaches.  Miya was strangely unaffected, but bites covered my arms in itchy red welts that lasted for several days.

 

yet another splice - this time it's rope-to-chain
yet another splice - this time it's rope-to-chain

A month or two ago I visited Miya in Seattle and picked up a 150′ length of gorgeous barely-used eight-plait nylon anchor rode at Second Wave, yet another marine consignment store.  I think I might be getting addicted to used sailing equipment – this 3/4″ nylon rode was a great deal though, at $50 for 150′, compared with $1.60/foot locally!  I spliced the rope to a 40′ length of 5/16″ heavy steel chain, and this splice is currently holding me at anchor quite handily.

 

motoring away from Tsehum Harbour
motoring away from Tsehum Harbour

On April the 6th, I left Tsehum Harbour and headed back towards Vancouver.  I missed my tide window for Active Pass that day – with a sailboat you can only traverse the pass at slack tide, and slack tide was at 1pm.  I ended up sailing slowly up the Trincomali Channel and spending the night in Montague Harbour, which is a lovely anchorage but in a complete cellular reception black hole, ruling out any extended stay.  In the morning I packed up and headed out through Porlier Pass to begin my solo crossing of the Georgia Straight.

 

racing the rainstorm
racing the rainstorm

The weather for the first days sail was a mix of sun and rain, with long periods of spring-like warmth followed by cold rains and wind.  This rainstorm followed me up the channel for several hours, but when it finally caught up with me late in the afternoon it turned out to be an unexpected hailstorm!

 

self-portrait, about 4km into the Georgia Straight crossing
sailing ninja self-portrait, about 4km into the Georgia Straight crossing

The only real downside to sailing in cold weather is the long periods of inactivity, requiring you to basically sit outside in the cold wind for hours on end with nothing to do.  Even with proper foul-weather gear, two layers of wool sweaters and wool hats and gloves, it’s still freezing.  Pair that with the inexplicable lack of a fly on my overall-style foul-weather pants, and the only real movement you have for the vast majority of the journey is the occasional trip indoors to pretty much completely disrobe to pee.  Still, apart from the puzzling lack of zipper, I am completely pleased with my Helly Hansen foul weather gear.

 

 

Here’s a video, taken once everything had calmed down and I was moving steadily forward. After I came through Porlier Pass I was expecting some heavy winds and probably some waves, but the addition of the tidal surges from the pass made for some very, very stressful moments!  I got my second reef into the main, but not before stuffing all three bows into the waves several times, strewing tools from one end of the cabin to the other, and spilling the contents of my cupboards all over the floor, breaking a bunch of dishes and making an awful mess.  The rest of the trip across was spent with the double-reefed main and staysail, which I finally shook out near UBC.  I made an average of about 6kn across the Straight, but once I got the headsail up in more protected waters I reached 9.2kn coming into English Bay.

 

creamcycle, built up and listed for sale
creamcycle, built up and listed for sale

This is the “new” Creamcycle, built up as a fixie with all the brand-new components from the Montague bike and listed for sale on Craigslist.  Do you know anyone looking for a rad (if well-used) bike for the summer? 🙂

 

off to class, with a 20kg outboard in my backpack
off to class, with a 20kg outboard in my backpack

Yet another class with the Bluewater Cruising Association; this time an outboard motor repair and maintenance class.  Here it is Saturday morning at 8am, leaving on my bicycle with the heavy outboard in my backpack.

The outboard, we like to say, “worked really great until it didn’t”.  In Sidney, during a trip to shore, the outboard very suddenly quit with no warning, in the sort of way that makes you think something is very, very wrong.  Reading up a bit on the internet, I found out that you’re supposed to change the gearbox oil regularly, which I hadn’t – though apparently when you go to drain the gearbox oil it’s supposed to be oil, not dirty water and metal filings.

 

outboard repair class, saturday morning, 10am
outboard repair class, saturday morning, 10am

Sitting in class, we learned all about the workings of outboards, stripping out sparkplugs and taking apart carburetors, and I slowly dug down into the problem that had caused the outboard to stop so suddenly.  Clearly the problem was in the gearbox, but could it be repaired?

 

what came out of the gearbox of the outboard
what came out of the gearbox of the outboard - photo by Jennifer Craig

When I finally got the gearbox opened up and stripped, a few pieces fell out – and some of those pieces were ball bearings.  Well – I use the word “ball” somewhat loosely there; the parts that fell out were anything but spherical.  D’oh!

End result?  The engine is apparently a write-off.  I can probably get a few bucks on Craigslist for it, for parts – but the cost of the replacement bits to get her running again are approximately four  times what I paid for the engine originally, and given that it was quite underpowered for the dinghy it was on anyway, I guess I’m now in the market for a good used 8hp motor.

 

freshwater system complete!
freshwater system complete!

Lastly, I finally added in and plumbed the third 100-liter water tank to the freshwater system. This has been on the bench for a while, but now the freshwater system is pretty much 100% complete – there’s still a slow, weeping leak on the galley sink that I need to tend to, causing the water pressure pump to kick in about once an hour to keep the pressure up. As far as I can tell the only fix for that is to replace the whole faucet assembly it hasn’t really been high up on my list of priorities.

 

 

Phew! And that brings us pretty much up to current!  So many updates, with so little time. I’ve got to remember to try to spew this stuff out in smaller portions, but when things are moving fast it’s really tough to keep up.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation – August Edition

Given that we’re a few hours away from 2011, I guess I should probably clear this posting out of my ‘drafts’ folder!  This is the third and last installment of the ‘Summer Vacation’ blog series; the series of photos showing the brutal amount of work done to Tie Fighter over the summer months.

If by some chance you missed the June and July editions, I recommend you read those first.  Without further ado:

up on the hard, repairs proceeding
up on the hard, repairs proceeding

With the sanding finally finished, it was time to re-tape the hull and apply the primer paint. A darker shade of gray paint was chosen, because while white paint reflects the visible spectrum of light and doesn’t absorb heat, it still allows ultraviolet light to pass through which will eventually destroy the fiberglass.  The pigment in the gray primer absorbs the UV light, protecting the fiberglass underneath.

In this photo you can also see the patched hole in the hull near the main bow, where I removed and replaced the oddball old, seized 2″ ball valve for the head output with a proper 1.5″ stainless valve.  While I had her out of the water I replaced all of the old ball valves with new stainless valves, and removed and sealed up two that weren’t used anymore… the handle on one of those ball valves had rusted completely off and the outlet had been capped off with a copper pipe cap.  I have no idea what that through-hull was for originally but it obviously hadn’t been used in years and was a liability.

hulls primed!
hulls primed!

This is what Tie Fighter looked like primed with the military gray paint.  I loved the way she looked, and if it were possible I would have left her this way – the problem is that as a wooden boat, she has to be painted white.  Anything darker absorbs heat, and causes the wood hull to expand and contract, which will eventually cause the fiberglass to separate from the hull.  If that happens, moisture (via condensation) will form between the fiberglass and the wood, and eventually the whole boat will rot from the inside out.  So yeah.  White.

Pity though!  I wished I could have just painted a big white number on the side and left her this way – she’d look like a Canadian warship!

head and forward locker painted
head and forward locker painted

While she was up on the hard I might as well use some of the extra epoxy paint to update the insides… here’s the head, prior to ripping out the toilet, pedestal, floor and… well, everything really.  The head is much nicer now, as you’ll see in later photos…

topsides primed
topsides primed

After the first coat of primer went on, the whole boat had to be sanded again and wiped down with solvents before the second coat..  Those sanders went through hell and back, and the solvent fumes made us dizzy and melted several pairs of rubber gloves.

In the background you can see that it’s garbage day in the boatyard; all the dumpsters are being lined up right across from Tie Fighter, so that the garbage trucks could spend an hour making a huge racket at 5am.  By August we didn’t even hear them anymore – after long hard days in the sun, sleep was deep.

James rolling and tipping in the dark
James rolling and tipping in the dark

Once the second coat of primer was on and sanded, it was time to put on the first coat of the finish paint, Interlux ‘Brightside’ white.  The paint is a single-part polyurethane – which we now know isn’t a good thing to put over top of a two-part primer (ie, paint that comes in two cans, a base and an ‘activator’, which need to be mixed together before application).  Brightside gives a very professional-looking finish when “rolled and tipped”; first the paint is applied with a roller, and then you lightly brush over it with a foam brush to knock out all the tiny bubbles, leaving a sexy, glossy finish.  When we finally figured out how to do it properly we worked long into the night painting the hulls, fighting off the swarms of mosquitoes from the nearby swamps that showed up every night as soon as the sun went down.

Tie Fighter, white!
Tie Fighter, white!

Within a couple of days, the whole boat was shiny and white.  At this point, however, catastrophe struck – the paint on the bottom and hull was drying properly, but the topsides didn’t seem to be drying at all!

I don’t have clear memories of the next few days – I do remember being brought closer to tears of frustration than I have been in many years.  Dark times indeed.

At least the paint on the hull sides and bottom seemed to be drying properly… the primer used there had been a two-part epoxy primer by Interlux, but the topside primer was a two-part epoxy from a different company, and as far as we could tell it didn’t dry the same as the paint on the bottom, and the off-gassing of the primer drying caused “solvent entrapment”, causing the Brightside to still be tacky three days after application.

topsides, sanded down again
topsides, sanded down again

We had no choice but to sand all the new white paint off and start over from the primer again.  Two more solid days of sanding nonstop, and we were back to square one.  Sanding gummy, partly-dried paint is way more work than sanding old, dried paint, and we went through hundreds of sanding discs.

forward bilges, epoxy paint drying
forward bilges, epoxy paint drying

Since there were three of us sanding, but only two sanders, we took the time to gut the bilges in the forward cabin and apply a couple of coats of thick, tough Interlux ‘BilgeCote’ epoxy paint.  Wow – the bilges went from a dark, dirty, scary gutter to a reasonably nice place for extra storage!

hatches drying in the sun
hatch covers drying in the sun

I had nearly forgotten about the hatch covers – all of them needed minor repairs, a good sanding and several coats of paint.  A few days of work and they were shiny and new again.

In the background is James’ tent, which he lived out of for several weeks.

topsides white
topsides white

FINALLY, the topsides were painted again – it took far longer than expected, and I got my first sunburn of the summer, working 14-hour days trying to get this goddamned project finished and back in the water!

In this photo you can see the repairs to the front window evident, now that it’s all one color; I thought I had spent enough time sanding the area, but I guess it could have used one more pass with thickened epoxy and another hour or two of sanding.

applying the BC vessel registration numbers
applying the BC vessel registration numbers

The registration numbers going on, for the first time.  The VPD would be pleased about this, since they’d fined me $100 earlier in the summer for not having them displayed.  That was my first police fine since a speeding ticket fifteen years prior!

I love how shiny the hull is in this photo!

masking tape removed
masking tape removed

When the tape finally came off, she was looking amazing!  I had many boatyard folks come over to congratulate me on the work, saying how impressed they were.  Dan, James and I had been working on her nearly every single day since the start of the summer, and it was finally starting to show.  Of course, there was still a tonne of work to be done before she could go back into the water – but at least the outside was (mostly) finished…

Tie Fighter, shiny in the sun
Tie Fighter, shiny in the sun

Ernst came out to visit and take a few pics with his fancy camera-on-a-stick rig – a long, extendable monopod with a remote trigger.  He got this shot and the next one on a beautiful sunny afternoon.

Tie Fighter, ready for intergalactic battle
Tie Fighter, ready for intergalactic battle

This is probably my favourite shot of the entire summer – she just looks so fast and smooth!  The decks are so shiny – of course, we’d still have to apply two more coats of paint yet, a couple of coats of anti-skid paint so that walking across the wet deck wouldn’t result in a swim.

Kym painting the bootstripe
Kym painting the bootstripe

Kym came out and spent a few days in the boatyard to help with the work – she had some time off, and as someone who enjoys working on boats she was happy to help.  I put her to work taping off the bootstripe, a just-for-looks stripe around the base of each hull.  This was a much larger job than either of us anticipated, and taping alone took almost seven hours!

Tie Fighter, bootstriped
Tie Fighter, bootstriped

With the masking tape removed, the bootstripe looked fantastic, well worth the effort.  The Searunner Construction Manual says that a bootstripe can make the difference between a boat and a yacht.

aft cabin, workshop mode
aft cabin, workshop mode

With all the work on the outside, we had pretty much completely neglected the interior of the boat which was still completely gutted.  If I had any intention of moving back into the boat as my home there would be a lot of work to be done yet!

tearing apart the head
tearing apart the head

I found a new marine toilet – a Groco ‘Model K’ – on Craigslist for $200 delivered.  Given that the Model K retails for over $1000, I thought this was a great chance to upgrade my bathroom facilities, and jumped on the deal.  The new toilet was a good 10cm taller than the old one, however, and so the pedestal would have to be lowered – it was as good a time as any to rip everything out and start from scratch.

remasted!
remasted!

Once the chainplates were reinstalled and the two coats of antiskid paint were applied, it was as good a time as any to get the mast back up.  Michael Flynn took the day to come and help re-rig Tie Fighter – his help was welcomed, especially since he’s a professional rigger with a tonne of sailboat experience!

up the mast!
up the mast!

Of course, re-masting the boat left a chunk of rope at the top of the mast.  Someone had to go up to retrieve it, so I tied my climbing harness into the mainsail halyard and Michael cranked me up with the main winch while Kym tailed the line.  This was the first time I’d ever been up the mast.

good riddance, work pants.
good riddance, work pants.

During that day, at some point I was pulling some line and managed to tear the entire crotch out of my work shorts.  Last year, I wrecked probably half of my wardrobe when working on the boat – this year, I decided early to designate a single pair of pants as my work pants, and I spent most of the summer in these shorts.  By the end, the legs were so thick with paint and epoxy and sweat that they were stiff, and the pants could almost stand up on their own!

fantastic pic from Ernst
a beautiful art shot from Ernst

Ernst came out again to take a few more shots of Tie Fighter – I finagled him into helping me reinstall the centerboard at this point, which was a brutal job – the centerboard trunk is approximately three meters long by two meters deep, and there’s a 3cm hole in the centerboard itself which needs to match up to a pair of 3cm holes found deep in the bilge.  The process of reinstalling the centerboard is much like threading a needle, only with the needle being 100kg and needing a winch to move it.  After several hours trying, Ernst came up with the final solution which was to draw arrow lines radiating out from the centerboard’s hole, and to look into the trunk with a flashlight to see the lines.  Once the lines were drawn, we had the centerboard lined up and the holding pin installed within minutes!

Scott laying the traveler
Scott laying the traveler

My brother-in-law Scott came out to help with a few of the final rigging tasks, between working and school.  Here he’s lining up the bolt-holes on the traveler.

rigged and ready
rigged and ready

FINALLY, she was ready to go back into the water.  I was filled with pride – this was by far the largest and most difficult project I’d ever been a part of, much less in charge of.  I took this final photo – you can see my bicycle aboard, ready to go back to living   on the water.

lifting her up...
lifting her up...

The dinghy was lifted back up onto the deck by a friendly forklift operator, and the lifting straps were put into place…

carried across the yard...
carried across the yard...

Across the yard we went!

...and dropped back into the water!
...and dropped back into the water!

On August 24th, bright and early in the morning, Tie Fighter finally went back into the water.  Fortunately, she floated and all of the hull repairs proved to be watertight.  Unfortunately, we hadn’t had a chance to do any engine work yet, and so I couldn’t really do much besides motor down a few hundred meters and dock at C-dock, where I would spend the next two months continuing to repair and upgrade the inside of the boat.

the finished head!
the finished head!

At C-dock, I had time to finish the head.  Here’s a shot of the toilet installed, with the holding tank plumbed and secured to a shelf with ratcheting tiedown straps.  Technically this photo is from mid-September, but I figured it would be best to include an “after” shot, given the two or three “before” pics.

As the summer came to an inevitable close, I spent a lot of time feeling bitter about the fact that I had spent the entire warm-weather months doing something that I thought would be completely finished before the summer even started.  I had really wanted to spend the summer living the Vancouver lifestyle, bouncing from beach party to afterparty, sailing as much as possible, and having a great time.  Instead it was several months of hard labour ,while paying through the nose for the privilege of doing so.  It was my friend Dan Ross who set me straight; I was complaining about the loss of the summer when he said something like

“Actually”, he said, “I have to say, this has been probably the most interesting summer of my life – I’ve learned a tonne of new stuff, and been a part of a large project that we finished.  I can’t say I have a single complaint.”

I was broadsided by that statement but when I thought about it I had to agree.  It was the most interesting summer in memory, and at the end of it all I have my home to to show for it.  She still has a tonne of work to be done, but she’s solid, stable and floating, and eventually she’ll take  me wherever I want to go.  The weakest link in the chain is me, and that’s a lesson – paid for dearly – that I’ll always have.

Countdowns All Around

It’s Thursday, and I’ve got three major, looming deadlines staring me in the face.  I think I’ve got a handle on all of them, but it’s definitely not a relaxing time in my life right now.

<Geek>

On the work front, I’ve migrated two very large web properties into the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud over the past eight months or so.  I’ve been learning the ins and outs of the new technology as I go, and the playing field really has changed.  There have been a tonne of little headaches and bugs and glitches, and I’ve been pulled out of bed at 5am more often than I care to admit.  And now – just when we’re finally stable – a directive has come down from the Evil Masters to port both sites to a common backend using the latest new Drupal code.  On one hand this will open a lot of doors for us, allowing us to scale a lot quicker and use some of the more modern tools, like storing all images on a Content Data Network (CDN) instead of on our current frontend webservers.  Still, the deadline for launch is February 12th and that’s coming up faaaaaaaaast.  I’ve barely got the preliminary test servers in place!

</Geek>

On the boat front the engine work continues, though the work seems to multiply every time I put time into it.  I’m finding a great deal of satisfaction in it, actually – I mentioned to a friend yesterday that it is very much like ‘The Legend of Zelda’, in that the puzzles are difficult, but once solved there is immediate positive feedback (ie the engine works better) and you can move on to the next puzzle, often using knowledge or tools you gained from the previous level.

Yesterday’s miniboss was changing the zincs in the engine.  Sacrificial zincs are bits of… well, zinc.  The theory is that if you bind several types of metals together in a marine environment, the weakest metal will corrode.  Because of some kind of galvanic voodoo, the other metals will not corrode until the weaker metal is completely corroded away.  Zinc is a very weak metal, easy to work with and cheap, and so quite a few different parts of the boat have sacrificial lumps of zinc attached to prevent the more important bits from corroding.

The zincs in the engine should be replaced about once a year, more or less depending on use.  My engine has three zincs – at $7.00 per zinc, it’s a $21.00 job to replace them all, but compared with approximately $10,000 for a new engine, the price is negligible.  The zincs are attached to the end of thick bolts and screwed deep into the heart of the engine.

One of the three zincs is located right on the front of the engine, easily accessed.  The other two zincs are located far down the right side, between the engine block and the wall.  Once I stepped back and surveyed the engine, I found that I could just barely get a socket wrench in a gap, which allowed me to remove zinc #2 with little difficulty – but zinc #3 was a real hassle.  To get at the third zinc I had to remove the fuel lift pump (skills and items gained from previous level!) and the exhaust manifold – and even then the bolt holding the zinc into the engine was seized pretty solidly.  I ended up having to extend the socket handle and actually step on it to get the bolt free; never send a hand to do a boot’s job.  I swear I heard victory music when that bolt finally gave way.

So far in the past month I have rerouted the fuel lines, replaced the fuel filter, installed and plumbed a second fuel filter, replaced the damaged exhaust water trap ($300, ouch), replaced the impeller in the raw water pump, and replaced the zincs.  Remaining, I have to have the alternator tested and serviced, pick up new oil, drain and change the current oil, drain and change the transmission oil, take the heat exchangers to the radiator shop to have them boiled out, pick up antifreeze, install the secondary cooling pump, drain the engine cooling system and replace with antifreeze, reroute the raw water intake through the heat exchangers, rewire the instrument panel, and then get the fuel tank polished.  Whew!  Someday soon, I will have an engine that runs reliably; ideally one that I do not have to climb into the engine compartment with a screwdriver to start.  There’s almost no chance I’ll have all this done by Monday, so I really have to pick and choose what tasks are actually important.

…and then I get to start on the electrical system!  For some reason, since returning from Vegas the house batteries aren’t holding a charge anymore.  I have no idea why; I need to replace the batteries and purchase and install a modern charge manager.  I don’t expect to get that one sorted out for under $1000.

Lastly, I have Sequential Circus coming up on Saturday.  This is a huge show, with six live-pa acts performing 45-minute sets at a local show venue slash warehouse space.  Everything is coming together smoothly, mostly because it’s our sixth time running this show and we’re all getting really good at it.  It’s really starting to look like we’re going to have a solid crowd too, which takes a lot of the financial stress off of my back – if everything works out well, I might just come out of it a hundred bucks richer!

I still haven’t figured out where to go on Monday, and the False Creek / Olympic Village security lockdown continues… more on that soon.