Watching it now I can see that it's really hard to tell the height of the waves in a 2D video - next time I guess maybe I should get lower to show some perspective.  Suffice to say that at the peak of the storm the occasional wave was breaking up onto my deck, which is unnerving at the best of times, but twice as scary at 3am when everything is cold and black.

Because Tie Fighter is a trimaran she is not vulnerable to the severe rolling, or 'heeling', that a regular sailboat would see in a storm like this. Instead she jumps to the top of each wave, but due to the anchor line pulling her into the wind she often cannot ride gently down the other side as she'd like. In a strong wind, her bows point anywhere from 90º off of the wind, and when she's pointed directly into the wind she'll sometimes ride to the top of a wave and SMASH her bows down into the trough of the next, pressing me bodily into my foam mattress.

Due to their width, multihulls are much more vulnerable to "corkscrewing" in a wave system; this means that one bow will head up the incline of a wave, followed by the stern, followed by the other stern, followed by the other bow, while the first bow and stern are already on their way down the other side of the wave. Think of a bowl of soup, and imagine dipping the edge of the bowl in a circle, causing the soup to slosh in a circular wave. Now imagine that you are the soup. Corkscrewing is hell for people with motion sickness! Nights like last night make me realize just how phenomenally lucky I am that I don't get seasick.

Engine repairs have jumped up on the priority list, yet again. I think it's time to just have the engine pulled out and overhauled; it's something that I really need to be stable, and currently it just isn't. I'm now hunting for a boatyard that will do this for me, ideally one that will let me hang around and watch.

So, uh... where have I been?

I'm anchored about 300m west of Kitsilano Beach, where I've been since February 1st.  There are no regular police patrols to worry about, the marine traffic is low, the people are friendly and the neighborhood is pleasant, if a bit homogenized for my tastes, and perhaps a bit remote from most of my regular haunts. The scenery is good, and I peacefully weathered the collective insanity that was the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games without incident. I've technically been "legal" to return to False Creek for just over two months now, but in all honesty I've been quite enjoying the change of scenery; all things considered, living on Kits Beach is quite lovely and I haven't felt any strong drive to return to False Creek. I will very likely return to "my spot" near the Cambie Bridge soon, but I am not in any particular rush.

I was told that anchoring out here would get very unpleasant if the weather turned foul, but in reality the only time it's bad is when the wind comes from the west - there's reasonable shelter from the north, east and south, but the open ocean is to the west, so even a light breeze can build up a wave system.  Rowing back home to Tie Fighter can be somewhat exciting when the wind is blowing hard and the waves are 50cm or more and breaking onto the beach!  The first time I tried to row home during a westerly blow, as soon as I pushed off the shore the rowboat was pushed sideways by a wave, where another breaking wave caught her and nearly dumped me completely over, right back onto the beach.  Two or three more waves broke into the dinghy in that row home, and by the time I reached Tie Fighter there was 15cm or so of water around my feet.  Since then I've been making a point of using a massive yellow drybag backpack that my friend JP gave me - whenever the weather report looks dubious I replace my usual Chrome cycling bag with the drybag.  I'm certain this practice has saved my laptop from getting wet at least twice.

completely unrelated: random stuff on my table. whatever, blogs are better with pictures.

Gathering potable water was a big question for a while - during the Olympics, my usual water fill-up spot, just under the Granville Bridge, was blocked by a barge holding a three-story restaurant.  I never did figure out exactly what the point of it was, but the last time I sailed past there were people seated at a table in the window, being served lunch by a waitress; all three waved at me as I went by.  I have been living out of a set of five 4l water jugs for... oh, it must be about three months now.  I fill them up once a week or so; I used to use the faucet on the side of the government building near the Cambie Bridge, but now I've been using one on the side of the Watermark Restaurant on Kits Beach.  The restaurant has "security" faucets, which require a special tool to open an access panel and the same tool to turn the water on and off; neither the panel nor the faucet are any match for my trusty Leatherman tool. Before I figured out the security panels, I had been skulking around in the alleys of Kitsilano looking for an unprotected faucet and feeling somewhat scandalous.

Honestly though, the two biggest problems about living on Kits Beach are both related to the beach itself.  For one, there's really no place to lock my dinghy, so every time I go ashore I have to drag the dinghy bodily up over the tideline.  At low tide, the tideline is a 150m slog uphill in wet sand, dragging a 90kg rowboat, a backpack and a bicycle - some days I have to do this three or four times, and almost every time it's just a warmup for a long, fast bikeride.  I figure this makes up for not renewing my gym membership.

kits beach in the summertime - not my pic

If I leave the dinghy overnight on the beach overnight in good weather, I have to worry about drunken idiots trying to steal it for a joyride.  They usually abandon their mission after they realize the oars are padlocked together and to the boat, but twice now the dinghy has been dragged below the tideline before being abandoned.  If I had been another few hours before returning, the dinghy would most likely have washed away, leaving me with a choice of calling in a couch-favour from a friend, a cold, wet sleep on the beach, or a very cold swim home. This won't be as big a problem in the summer - in fact I'm considering the idea of swimming to and from the boat just for fun.

In the daytime the dinghy faces a completely different problem; several times now I've returned to the beach on warm, sunny afternoons to find children playing in my dinghy. This doesn't bother me in the slightest in principle, but for the fact that the universal game to play with a boat found on a beach appears to be "See How Much Sand We Can Pile Into The Rowboat", followed closely by "Appropriate The Bailing Bucket As A Beach Toy, And Lose/Bury/Keep It". I don't remember these games from when I was a kid, but just for your own reference my dinghy is *very* difficult to effectively clean sand out of, and making a bailing bucket out of an old laundry detergent container has the important prerequisite of first owning laundry detergent.  If you are the sort of person who owns laundry detergent, I would be much obliged if you would save the jug for me.

The second problem is the sand itself - it gets in everything!  Regardless of how much is in the dinghy, walking across the wet beach my shoes are completely coated in the stuff.  I track sand into Tie Fighter on my shoes, then from the salon into the bedroom on my socks, then into my bed on my feet.  I have sand in my bed.  Do you know what it's like to have sand in your bed?  In March?

boiling water serving two purposes - making tea and testing Yanmar engine thermostats

The engine situation hasn't changed even a little bit.  There are three bottles of C-L-R sitting on my navigation table, and one of these afternoons (perhaps tomorrow, actually) I should take the time to run it through the engine block just to see how it fares. I will likely need to use several plastic buckets and re-route one or more of the engine water pumps to get the C-L-R into the appropriate engine chambers. It could get messy.

I did take some time to try to diagnose the problem a little further, and I'm starting to think that at least part of the problem was just that the thermostats had corroded into a partly-open state.  I've got a new set of thermostats in there now, but given that they're still in raw water I suspect that I'll have to replace them yet again before I can call the engine "maintained".  I still have to convert Maude back to antifreeze cooling and get the electronics all hooked up properly, so that I can have alarms and warning buzzers and gauges on the engine again. Soon, Maude, soon.

Anyhow. Hiatus off. More regular updates to come. I promise.

completely unrelated: Friday morning I was woken up by yet *another* hovercraft. how awesome is this photo!?

I think I actually know what's going on now.  At some point, X minutes after pushing the engine hard, the cooling water ceases to flow into the exhaust and the superheated exhaust burns a hole in the tubes.  There are a pair of thermostats that redirect the water flow from the exhaust manifold and into the main engine block once they heat up, though the water should then flow into the exhaust manifold and out the exhaust.  I now suspect that the engine block has become fouled with calcium scale, and now water no longer flows through it.  Fixing this will likely require a heavy-duty descaling solution, or perhaps straight-up muriatic acid.  It's a touchy procedure, but there is hope - I may have finally sorted out a way to barter myself some time with a proper diesel mechanic!

More soon.  I simply have too much work to do to write proper, long blog posts right now.

UPDATE: Swapped in an edited version of the hovercraft shot, with levels and curves tweaked by Jason Sims.  Nice one!

A quick highlight reel - in the past three days, I:

• bicycled over forty kilometers and rowed over eight kilometers in total,
• borrowed a truck and drove to Bellingham and back for engine parts,
• had my oil filter spring a leak, leaving me with a couple of liters of used engine oil in my bilge,
• spent over $700 on a new exhaust system, and assembled and installed it,
• ate six cans of sardines and probably over a pound of sliced ham,
• drank most of a bottle of Sailor Jerry, and
• went out dancing.  Twice.

Tomorrow morning I try once more to escape the Creek.  My first destination will be Kitsilano.

The problem with being towed out is that I cannot safely anchor out in English Bay in February weather without an engine - if I drag anchor, I could end up on the rocks, or worse.  They can't - or at least, they shouldn't - put me into a potentially dangerous situation.  That leaves one option: they could choose to tow me to the VPD docks and impound my boat.  That would *really* put a damper on my adventures!

Anyhow.  I found the part I need.  Actually that was easy, as I had already sourced and purchased the part a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately, getting another replacement wasn't so easy, as there apparently isn't a single water trap in Canada at this time.  With some calling around and favours called in I managed to track down a water trap at a marine supply house in Seattle, though due to license agreements they cannot sell it to me in Canada.  They did however suggest a shop in Bellingham that they could sell to, who could subsequently sell it to me, and so by way of Sweden to Seattle to Bellingham to FedEx to Vancouver - at significant expense - the part should arrive on Monday.

all the bits I need to replace

The real faulty part, the one that I am 95% sure caused all these problems in the first place, is available in Vancouver.  According to the internet, the raw water injector elbow apparently only lasts about five years before rusting out and clogging up - honestly, I should have predicted this, it would have saved me a lot of time and money.  The injector elbow is attached to the engine block with a... I don't know what it's called, an attacher elbow thing. That thing was seriously rusted, though when I last removed it to check it it seemed fine on the inside, and the guys at the marine store said that they last an awfully long time, so I wasn't worried.  Still, when I went to pull the injector elbow off today, the bit connecting the two snapped off in my hands.  Not exactly the kind of behavior you expect from an ostensibly solid steel fitting!

The results of running the engine without exhaust cooling are evident in the photo; a big hole burned in the water trap, the plastic elbows melted, and the bit of flexible exhaust hosing is now somewhat suspect.  I'll likely replace the exhaust hose at the same time, probably picking up a few new stainless-steel hose clamps as well.  The funny thing about hose clamps is that about 80% of the time they say 'stainless steel' on them but the little screw holding them together isn't actually stainless, so after about a year you come back to find the band is still nice and shiny while the screw is a featureless lump of rust.

Anyhow.  This isn't even close to what I'm supposed to be working on right now.  I have a big webserver rollout with a due-date of Monday, which means I'll likely be working through the weekend.  Back to the grind...

This morning I awoke to a gorgeous, sunny day, an obvious sign that my move out of False Creek would go smoothly.  Of course, I neglected to check on the phase of the moon or something and it all went horribly pear shaped - I am currently still at anchor in False Creek, about 500m west of my previous anchorage.  I've been sitting around doing dayjob work and waiting for the VPD to show up so I can tell them my sob story and pray they don't issue me a fine or tow me.

This morning I cooked a big breakfast, checked in on work stuff, and prepared Tie Fighter for the grand exit.  I fired up the engines - she started (almost) right away!  I pulled the anchor; no small task, with months of False Creek grime and growth along the full length of the rode, and noticeably heavier due to the addition of a thick steel cable that I dragged up from the bottom also.  The ocean floor of False Creek has a legacy of a hundred years of industrial garbage.

I motored away from my anchorage, a bit nervous, and made it about 200m west before I heard a strange 'clunk' and the engine started making a new and different noise - nothing huge, but a perceivable shift, and that's never a good thing.  I went down and checked out the engine compartment, and I could hear a bit of a noise but couldn't see anything out of place.  I later discovered that the secondary water pump - which wasn't hooked up, but which I had bolted loosely to the engine "just to get it out of the way" - had shaken loose of its mounts and was resting against the beltwheel of the primary water pump, grinding into the bronze housing of the pump.

I went back up to the cockpit and throttled up, and things went smoothly for about five minutes - I could almost see the Granville Bridge, and I figured I could dock there and sort any further problems out before making my way out into English Bay.  No such luck; within another minute I felt the engine power drop suddenly, and I saw smoke begin to pour into the cockpit via the engine compartment vent.  I immediately throttled down, dove below and opened the engine compartment hatch, only to be met by a cloud of black smoke.  I killed the engine and waved the smoke away looking for signs of fire, ready to jump for the fire extinguisher at the first sign of flickering yellow and orange.  Fortunately there were no flames, just thick, black smoke pouring out of the dark engine compartment.  I thought at first that perhaps I had over- or under-tightened a belt, but as I looked closer I realized that there was a gaping hole melted into the side of the brand-new water trap I had just installed, and the plastic elbows in the exhaust line had both melted beyond recognition.  $@&%!  The smoke was a combination of diesel exhaust and scorched plastic.

With no engine, floating free in the shipping lanes of False Creek, I was in a bit of a bind.  I threw out my anchor and got on my VHF radio.

"Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, this is Tie Fighter, Tie Fighter, over."

"Station calling Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, go ahead, over..."

I outlined the situation - normally the Coast Guard would recommend me contact a towing company, but given that I was about 500m from their station I thought it might be worth a try giving them a call.  About ten minutes later they showed up and offered me a tow, which I gladly accepted.  They tied the massive Coast Guard zodiac - the 'Kitsilano 1' - to the port side of Tie Fighter and towed me the 150m or so to the nearby anchorage, where I dropped my anchor.  I thanked them and sat down to give them all the information needed for their incident report.  They left me a copy of the report, so that I can present it to the VPD when they come knocking next.

Anyhow - the long and the short of it is that my exhaust system has been malfunctioning for a while, and now I am 95% certain the problem is in something called a "raw water injection elbow".  The elbow is where seawater that has been used to cool the engine is injected into the exhaust system, cooling down the exhaust and ejecting the warm seawater from the boat.  These elbows apparently only last about five years, and lacking a decent record of maintenance on my engine, I have absolutely no idea when the last time mine was replaced.

End result?  I'm still in False Creek, albeit closer to the Granville Bridge.  A new water trap is about $330 (I know this well, having just bought one last week, argh), a new injector elbow is $390, the connecting bit which may need to be replaced is about $120 and the replacement exhaust elbows are about $35 each.  Instead of moving on with my great adventure, I'm now out about a thousand bucks and have a bunch of engine work ahead of me.

Someday.  SOMEDAY this engine will be stable and reliable!

<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.

Ok seriously, it's fracking cold out here.  The past few days the temperature has dropped further and further, and as I write this it is 6pm, pitch dark outside and -6°C.  I know some of you are reading this from the Prairies or the Maritimes, where the ambient temperature has been hovering around -20°C, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that you also have furnaces and insulation and such.  Tie Fighter is made of 3/8" marine-grade plywood over cedar stringers, with an R-value of... god, I have no idea.  Not enough, anyway.  It's COLD.

click to view larger - can you spot the outline of the (heated) cabin vs. the outline of the (unheated) closet?

I've had some questions posed about insulating the boat, and the short answer is:  I'm still researching.  One school of thought says that the only way to insulate a wooden boat is to use foam rubber, and bond the foam directly to the wood, being careful not to leave any air gaps between the wood and the foam.  The reasoning is that if you leave air gaps, you're inviting condensation, which to wood means mildew or eventually rot.

The other school says that you should never bond anything to the wood, because that makes it much more difficult to notice problems, and a helluva mess to work with.  They say to rather allow it to breathe and stack insulation over top that can have air forced in behind it via fans or blowers, so that the condensation can dry up on its own.

What am I going to do?  I have no idea.  I'm still soliciting opinions from various liveaboard forums and fellow False Creek denizens.  For now, I'm toughing it out and burning several different forms of fossil fuels at the same time trying to stay warm.  When I woke up this morning I had to break up the ice in the sink dishes before I could make breakfast.

Cold aside, I HAVE A WORKING ENGINE AGAIN!  The diesel engine theory class paid off in spades, and I was able to diagnose the problem, correct the situation, and get Maude started.  This was a huge boost to my confidence and self-esteem, especially given the nature of the problem and my previous (complete lack of) experience with engines.

To recap; Maude had started to lose power at some point during my last run up to fill my water tanks.  The change was gradual but immediately noticible; the engine dropped in power without my touching the throttle, which is up there with "sounds different" or "emitting smoke" or "smells funny" on the diesel engine scale of uh-ohs.  Not quite 'explosion', but definitely not good.

The most immediate difference between my response to this problem after having completed the diesel theory class vs. my response before the diesel class is that I now have any response at all other than ignoring the problem and hoping that it will resolve itself.  Carrie once said to me "I don't deal with little problems anymore.  Little problems either go away on their own, or they become big problems.  I deal with big problems.".  I took this somewhat to heart, but I have come to realize that that philosophy can only apply to some aspects of life; in other situations - diesel engines being a noteworthy example - it's best to deal with little problems immediately and with extreme prejudice.  Don't just solve problems, smash them out of existence with the largest hammer you can find.

the fuel lift pump, source of my woes

Maude had started to lose power, and I ignored it.  The next time I tried to go for water,  Maude died about four minutes into the voyage.  Fortunately the incoming tide pushed me directly back over my anchoring spot, or I would have had to radio the Coast Guard for assistance.  Attempting to restart her seemed to work intermittently, she'd start but die as soon as I applied any throttle, which is exactly the behavior one would expect from water in the fuel lines.  The answer there would be to drain the water from the fuel lines, bleed the lines of any newly-introduced air, and then restart the engine - bearing in mind that the "bleed the lines" portion of that answer is an eleven-step procedure requiring three different sizes of wrench.

Needless to say, I was unsuccessful with the bleeding of the lines.  For the life of me, I could not seem to get the air out of the lines; I must have pushed that little fuel lift pump lever tens of thousands of times, blistering and scraping my hands in the process.  Nothing seemed to work!

Fortunately I had signed up weeks before for the Cooper Boating 'Advanced Diesel Theory' class, and so I went to class and paid close attention, asking so many questions that I'm sure the teacher is glad to be rid of me.  Each week I returned from class with fresh resolve and a new set of hints, and spent a few hours poking at the engine trying to figure out what part of the bleeding process I was doing wrong.  Each week I was unsuccessful.

After five straight weeks trying to perform the relatively simple process of bleeding the lines, I decided that I was doing it right and that there must be something actually wrong with the process.  I decided to take each part in turn and track out the problem, just like I'd do with a computer issue.  Eventually this led me to a conclusion:  the fuel lift pump just wasn't lifting fuel.

source of the problems, click for closeup

Long story short, I pulled the fuel lift pump off the engine and disassembled it on my kitchen table.  I found that the input valve assembly was clogged in the 'open' position with a motley assortment of plastic scraps, gelled diesel and hair(?!), which I removed.  This was clearly a result of the stock fuel filter having been removed by a previous mechanic and a third-party fuel filter installed instead, after the fuel lift pump instead of before it.  I cleaned up the pump, tested and reinstalled it, changing the location of the fuel filter along the way - but still I had no fuel flow!

Finally, after putting together a bit of critical information from the instructor along with a tidbit from the guys at Stem to Stern, I realized that the copper washers in the banjo bolts connecting the fuel lift pump to the fuel lines must be letting air into the lines.  I replaced the copper washers, tightened up the banjo bolts, and suddenly fuel began to flow.  I performed the rest of the air-bleed procedure, cranked the engine, and low and behold Maude shuddered to life.

Anyhow.  I have an engine again, though I haven't yet installed the secondary fuel filter I purchased, nor replaced the belts, nor replaced the exhaust tank.  I have yet to change the oil, either in the engine block or in the transmission.  I haven't even begun to reroute the cooling system, changing it over from raw seawater to antifreeze - but all of these projects will come.  I have a working engine, and with a little luck I can keep it that way.  I am no longer afraid of Maude.  The engine is no longer a black box.

Just to add to the stress of the bitter cold, the police have just motored past in their 'R.G. McBeath' policeboat, which is the one they use to enforce the anchoring bylaws - they didn't stop by to chat, but they're weaving in around the anchored boats, making their presence known.  I don't have any idea what is going to happen to those of us squatting here in False Creek.  I suspect we'll all be kicked out prior to the Olympics, but I don't have any good ideas on where to go after that - there really aren't any other good, sheltered anchorages around Vancouver.  The hard winter might shortly become much, much harder.

I'm not sure what the real reason is.  I've been maddeningly busy, the kind of busy where it seems like every spare minute is taken up but nothing seems to be getting accomplished.  Still, that's not to say that life halts, and as such I've got a whole pile of micro-updates that I probably should have been posting all along.  Nothing important or earth-shattering, no crazy adventures, just the usual day-to-day crap.  Each of these stories should be its own update though, I just have to stop procrastinating and letting them pile up.

False Creek at night in the rain. admittedly gorgeous. I love my neighborhood.

To start off with, if you're reading this from somewhere other than Vancouver, British Columbia, you might not realize that it's been raining for something like fifteen goddamned days in a friggin' row. I know that complaining about the rain is one of Vancouver's favourite pastimes, and I knew getting into this that the rain would be something I'd have to face up to sooner or later. It's not actually all that bad, once you realize that "being stylish" and "being comfortable" are mutually exclusive. I've gotten used to living in my tall, bright yellow rubber boots, and leaving the boat without wearing rainpants seems pretty silly these days.  Wet clothes hung up to dry can take days to dry on a boat - my sweaters are still damp from laundry day, which was a week ago tomorrow.

The thing about rainpants and raincoats is that they look pretty dorky, but they really work.  I have yet to find any that are waterproof, breathable, and look acceptable in public - it seems like you get your choice of any two of those features.  I'm willing to pay extra for the good stuff, especially seeing as I use them pretty much every day!  I have one set of Helly Hansen raingear that was quite pricy, but it has already paid for itself many times over just through regular use.  The other day I caught the pantleg in the chainring of my track bike, pulling it almost the entire way around - but when I unwound myself and pulled it free, the most damage was a bit of chain grease; the rubbery material itself didn't tear at all.

see the four or five inches of water in there? that's probably a hundred liters overall.

Every day that I go ashore - which isn't every day, mind you - I have to climb down into my rowboat and bail out the rainwater.  I use a plastic bucket made from a cut-off 1.89l bottle of blueberry cocktail, which I assume to be roughly 1l in size, and to stave off the bitter cold and monotony of bailing, I count the buckets as I empty them over the side.  My record to date is 120l of water in the rowboat from one night of rain.  Seriously!  I need to track down and cut up a bleach jug or something similar, bailing at 1l per stroke isn't the most efficient solution.

One nice thing about my rowboat is that there are large chunks of foam rubber bolted to the inside of the gunwales, which I'm guessing are supposed to keep the boat afloat and upright even if it fills completely with water.  This is reassuring - there are a bunch of other boats in False Creek, many of which aren't liveaboards and the owners don't come down very often to check on them.  Those folks have dinghies locked to the nearby dock, but the rain tends to fill the dinghies up and sink them ever few weeks.   Last week, one such boat belonging to my friend Eric had sunk in this manner.  When I returned home from a night on the town, I heard strange splintering, cracking noises from the dock as I came down the ramp - it turned out to be Eric's dinghy, sunken and trapped lengthwise between the heavy wooden dock and the rocky bottom.  The tide was almost all the way out, but it still had a foot or so to go...  and the noise was Eric's little fiberglass rowboat, cracking and folding under the massive weight of the dock.  Sad, but there was nothing I could do to help.

mmmm, hot cast iron

It has also been cold lately, and as you've probably guessed from my last post, I've been fighting with my furnaces again. The warmth from a diesel stove is delightful... when it works. I heard someone on another forum describe diesel stoves as "more of a hobby than an appliance", and that pretty much sums it up.  Twitchy things, these machines, and at times it almost feels more like I'm learning to play a new musical instrument than trying to heat a boat.  They constantly remind me that they must be treated with respect - as I type this I have yet another slowly-blistering burn on my forearm from touching the wrong part of the oven door while toasting a bagel in the stove an hour or so ago.

When diesel stoves and heaters are working perfectly they're lovely, but when they start to work badly it's a slippery slope... give them a bit too much or a bit too little fuel and they're inefficient, dirty, smelly and can even be dangerous.  I'd been feeding the main stove a bit too much fuel, and it responded by filling up with soot.  The last time I had an overabundance of soot, I used my little wet/dry shop-vac to clean it out.  I was absolutely pleased as punch with the results - until I noticed that every bit of soot that I'd removed from the stove had been blown straight out the back of the shop-vac and all over the cabin, creating a nightmare of a mess to try to clean up.  It was literally weeks before I got the last of it - and actually, from where I sit in the aft cabin right now I can see at least two spots where there is still soot from that fiasco.

This time I did not intend to make the same mistake - I researched shop-vacs and soot on the internet, and came to the realization that the root of my problem was simply a lack of a filter device on the shop-vac.  Since I could not find any information about my 'Stinger' shop-vac on the internet, I made a plan to purchase a newer, more appropriate shop-vac - but when I went to the Home Depot to pick one out, I found that my 'Stinger' had merely been renamed to 'Husky', and the colours changed.  This certainly wasn't obvious from their website!  Fortunately, the Husky model had filters available, and for a whopping $6.99 I left the Home Depot with a filter and a vision of a clean stove.

And it worked!  Well, mostly anyway - the stove is now clean and there wasn't a major mess to clean up afterwards.  It still wasn't a simple or tidy job, and all of my cuticles are still as black as night, but the stove is once again safe and clean-burning.  The only real downside is that the filter didn't seem to get *all* of the soot - I didn't notice any in the air, but when I blew my nose later on I was startled by a pair of jet-black spots on the tissue.  *sigh*.

In other news, I've been spending my quieter evenings watching movies I've purchased from The Sailing Channel - and actually, I'm really torn here.  The Sailing Channel has made their DVD movies available for $29.99 USD plus shipping, or you can download them for $12.99.  Wow!  That is some seriously forward thinking for a niche video company, and I'm very happy to help support them; I have purchased four downloaded movies so far and will likely purchase more.  The part that tears me a little is that for such a forward-thinking company, their website is hideous.  Seriously.

One of the movies, Lin and Larry Pardey's "Get Ready to Cruise", had a bunch of tips that I'd already figured out on my own, but there were two in particular that were each alone worth the price of the video download.  One of the tips involved seat cushions in the salon, which I won't bother to explain here (yet, perhaps I'll blog it when I implement it) - but the other was a simple and effective way to build a shower on a sailboat!

9.5 liters of pure, unadulterated cleanliness

I've been working a bit on that tip, and while I've still got a little ways to go I'm nearing completion.  The premise is simple: use a basic pesticide sprayer, and refit it with a longer hose and a showerhead attachment with a simple valve assembly.  I've expanded on the idea a bit, and replaced the 1/8" feed tube in the sprayer with a 1/4" stainless steel version, which should give me significantly more water flow, making it even more like a real shower.  I also chose a black plastic canister, which should mean that in summertime I can just fill the canister with water and leave it outside in the sun and in a few hours I'll have a hot shower.  In the meantime, I'll have to boil a pot of water on the stove, but given that there's usually a pot of water on the stove for tea anyway, I don't feel like this is a particular hardship.

After you've got the mechanics sorted, all you need is a spot in your boat configured to handle a bit of water splashing around and you've got a shower!  My boat has just such a place - the bathroom, or 'head', right at the front of the boat has waterproofed walls, raised bulkheads and a simple floor to catch the water.

The remaining parts, before I can finally have a shower on the boat, are pretty easy - I need a piece of hose, I need to replace the carpeting in the head with some kind of raised plastic draining tile, I need to fit the bathroom with shower curtains and I need to install a small bilge pump in the bilge to pump out the used shower water.  I hope to get those tasks done before the end of the weekend, but we'll see how it goes.

On the engine front, I think the best money I've spent in ages was the $399 for the Cooper Boating 'Diesel Theory - Advanced 5 Session Program' course down on Granville Island.  The instructor really knows his stuff, and even though the classes come out to about $25/hour, as Trent pointed out a visit from a diesel mechanic is about $120/hour.  I've learned so much about engines in the past few weeks, and it has given me a great deal of confidence in my ability to tackle any problem that should arise on my boat.

rocket surgery!

That being said, Maude still doesn't start.  I've identified the problem; her fuel lift pump is either clogged or the pumping diaphragm has worn out and come apart.  It isn't rocket surgery; I have to remove the pump, disassemble it and inspect it.  If it is still serviceable I need to clean it out, then purchase and install a primary fuel filter before the pump ($100-$200), then bleed the air out of the fuel lines, and Maude should then start.  If the pump isn't serviceable (apparently the diaphragm used to be a replaceable part, but they haven't made them in years) then I have to purchase a new lift pump, which will cost me about $110.  I spoke on the phone with Lindsay at 'Stem To Stern', the local Yanmar service center, and he was exceptionally friendly and helpful.  He was my first contact with that company, and ensured my business - I'll be heading down to their shop soon to pick up the parts, and I'll probably also stock up on fuel and oil filters, zincs and replacement hoses while I'm there.

So what's the holdup?  Well, the fuel lift pump is in a very difficult place to reach without pulling out the whole engine, which is simply not an option at this point.  None of my sockets are long enough to reach the bolts holding the pump onto the engine, and so yesterday I went to Canadian Tire to purchase a wrench to do exactly that.  I figured a single 10mm wrench would do the trick, however when I saw the Mastercraft ratcheting wrenches on sale for $49 for a set of ten, I went for that instead.  Comparing that to $16.99 for the single 10mm socket wrench, $50 was a great deal!

there's the problem...

Of course, the wrench doesn't fit - I mean, the sizing of the socket to the bolt is correct, but the thickness of the wrench itself means that I can't get it to set on the head of the bolt.  I basically need to go back to Canadian Tire tonight to fetch yet another socket - a longer one this time - and then try my best to manoeuvre my hands in between Maude and the wall, remove the pump and then figure out the next step.

Once that's all done and Maude is starting again, I'm not even close to finishing the other work that she needs.  For one, before I purchased Tie Fighter one of the previous owners had had a pump failure while off on a sailing trip, and had to make some emergency repairs - she's been converted to use raw water (ie straight from the ocean) for cooling.  That's... acceptable, at least according to the manual, but not optimal.  There are a pair of heat exchangers bolted to the engine room wall, and a newly-rebuilt freshwater pump is waiting in the wings to be reinstalled.  I'm not sure just how much work that will be, but I'm sure it'll be at least twice as long as my best estimate, which currently is "a Saturday".

Furthermore, I noticed during one of my extended stays in the engine room that the raw water pump belt is very loose!  This is especially troubling, in that it could mean the engine could overheat and eventually fail completely.  I won't have her started up without first replacing that belt.  I do have a replacement belt, I just have to install it - thought that means removing all the other belts first in order to get it on.

Lastly - and the most blatantly obvious to any outside observer - none of the instruments work.  Nada.  Not one.  They're not even hooked up!  Neither is the key ignition or the starter switch, none of the gauges or emergency lights... nothing.  I basically have to rewire them all individually, which isn't actually all that difficult, but will take some time.  Someone in the past has rewired the panel at least twice, probably due to using the wrong gauge wires originally and having them overheat and melt.  I think it's probably better to just rip it all out and install it fresh, so that I know the work is good from end to end.

Anyhow.  That's what's going on.

Well, today marks one of the more 'down' days; there were a bunch of factors, but it definitely started with my own stupidity.  Technically it "started" yesterday but the turning point was at about 2am last night, at least three beers past the "pint of no return", when I decided that my baby sister's suggestion to return to her house with her and some friends for more beers sounded like an excellent plan.  That plan involved riding my bike five kilometers in the light rain with a guitar on my back, drinking several more beers, singing songs and laughing for an hour or so and then riding five kilometers back home in the pouring rain, finally arriving back home at about 5:30am.  I peeled off my soaking-wet clothes, flexed some blood back into my stiff, frozen fingers, and climbed into an icy bed.

At about 7:00am, I got an SMS message from work - something had broken in the webserver farm, and it needed my attention immediately.  Of course, the laptop was in the other cabin, so I had to get out of my (finally) warm bed, get dressed, walk ten feet through the pouring rain to the other cabin where I had left my laptop, and then sit in the cold dealing with a server issue.  Fortunately it was nothing terribly difficult and I was back in my bed in about an hour... just long enough for the bed to have gotten cold again.  At some point during that hour the rain had stopped and the wind picked immensely, howling in the rigging, blowing the hatches closed and making my halyards slap against the mast with a rhythmic cowbell-like sound.

I had only been asleep for an hour or so more when my phone rang - it was my neighbor Shawn, calling from aboard 'And-E', his 26-foot cruising sailboat.  "Hey," he said, "Heads up, that powerboat has dragged his anchor again and just slammed into us, he's headed your way now...".  I thanked him and got off the phone and started getting dressed, and just as I put on my boots I felt the shuddering *thud* of another boat hitting my hull.

It was *freezing* out!  The strong westerly wind coming up the False Creek channel wicked any semblance of warmth out through the weave of my sweater, but I was still a bit too groggy - and quite possibly still a bit drunk - to remember to put on a windproof jacket.  I put out a few fenders, pushed the boat off my bows and let out some more anchor rode.  Fortunately it seemed that just as he hit me, his anchor found purchase in the ocean floor, and as I moved ten feet or so away, he swung back and forth in front of me but didn't come any closer.

Now, that's a really good thing - if you've been following along the past few weeks, you'll know that my engine currently doesn't start, which means that if I have to move the boat, I'm... well, in the interest of keeping this blog clean-ish, let's just say it rhymes with "out of lucked".  I have faith in my anchor; the 35-pound Delta on 40 feet of heavy chain and 300 feet of strong one-inch polyester rope has held me in place through rougher conditions than this - but that's not to say that there's no stress in wondering if it'll hold this time.  The bottom of the ocean floor can change without warning, and False Creek is notorious for garbage and silt.  Recently I helped another friend re-anchor after he dragged, and when we pulled his anchor up we found a one-foot length of steel I-beam lodged firmly in the blades; no wonder he hadn't gotten a good hold!

I watched the powerboat warily for a few minutes - I'd spoken with it's owner a few days prior about his constant anchor dragging, but he'd apologized and shown me his brand new 50-pound 'Bruce' anchor, which definitely should be more than enough to keep a little boat like his in place, so I was pretty sure that if he'd found purchase he probably wouldn't be going anywhere.  I figured he'd be coming back pretty shortly, and so with the powerboat swinging back and forth ten feet off my bow, I went back to sleep.  At this point I realized that it was going to be "one of those days", so I didn't bother taking my clothes off; I just took off my boots and jacket and pulled a blanket over myself.

Well, I got a good solid 40 minutes or so of sleep before my phone rang again.  This time it was Dale, the owner of the other (and nicer) Searunner trimaran in False Creek.  "Drew," he said, "I just got a call from the police, and they say my boat is up on the rocks - are you on your boat?  Do you have a spare anchor...?".  I looked out my front window, and there was Dale's boat, sitting up on the rocks near Monk's.  I do have a big spare anchor, and so it was back out of bed again and into boots and raingear.  I put the heavy anchor into the rowboat and fought the howling winds rowing the 300 meters or so west, dropped the anchor into the water, rowed back to Dale's boat and climbed aboard.  I wrapped the anchor rode around one of the winches, intending to winch him off the rocks, and went to grab a winch handle... nope.  No winch handles.

Fortunately at this point there was a small wave system building, and I was able to rock the boat off the rocks and pull her to safety with just my arms, lying on the foredeck with my legs braced on the stanchions, using the two anchor cleats to gain a mechanical advantage.  You'd be surprised just how large a boat you can move with just a sustained pull!

Once Dale's boat was safe, I rowed back to Tie Fighter to try to catch some more sleep - but of course, there were a few emails that needed my attention, so it was another half-hour before I could return to my bed, which was now once again cold.  I kept the raingear and boots close and buried my head in the blankets - it took a while to drift off, due to the physical activity, but I was determined.

I had finally nodded off and had been asleep for a good solid forty minutes or so when I was awoken yet again by that now-unmistakable sickening *thud*.  I jumped out of bed and threw on my boots, and headed out to find the powerboat crashed into my bows again - this time with a man aboard, doing his best to get his boat untangled from mine.  He apologized profusely; apparently he'd come to retrieve his boat, and in doing so his engines had stalled just after he pulled up his anchor, and they were now refusing to start.  His problem was cooling fluid, or more accurately a lack thereof.  I had some to spare, so we rafted his boat up against my port side and tied him off, and he tackled the cooling problem.  In a few minutes, he was up and running again, and we untied his boat.  He set off with more apologies, sincere thanks and a promise of a delivery of beer sometime soon.

So that brings me to now, more or less.  It's barely 5pm on a Friday, which usually means the day is really only about to begin.  I'm due at a very exclusive techno dance party tonight, but with five hours of sleep and very little physical endurance left I'm not sure how that will go.  The wind has died down a lot, but it's still quite windy out, and the temperature has dropped a few more degrees - thankfully my diesel furnaces are working very well, and the aft cabin is warm and toasty.

Some days are up, some days are down.  I spoke once before about the amplitude of the good-day/bad-day sinewave, but I'm still maintaining that the good days outweigh the bad.  This blog pretty much only reflects one portion of my life also, and suffice to say my romantic interests lately have been equally tumultuous - actually, way moreso.  *sigh*.

I'm almost afraid to have a nap at this point, lest it anger whatever gods govern Friday the Thirteenth and something else comes up - but I think I'm going to give it one more shot.