Well, we’re away. We left on Monday September 12th 2011 as planned, leaving Vancouver about ten hours later than expected but making good time across the Georgia Straight, spent the night at the mouth of Porlier Pass and motor-sailed the next day down to Cadboro Bay just east of Victoria. We crossed the Juan de Fuca on Wednesday, cleared customs and spent two days in Port Angeles, then motored on up the Juan de Fuca arriving in Neah Bay on Friday night. The weekend was spent carefully watching for a “weather window”, in which we could set out with six to ten days of reasonably good weather to look forward to… but then I made an expensive mistake.
We’ve entered another one of these infuriating “hurry up and wait” scenarios, as a result of my carelessness while working on the steering system. I was removing a sprocket when it got away from me and clattered down the centerboard trunk and into the ocean. Given that we’re anchored in soft mud in about 10m of water the chances of finding a heavy 10cm chunk of dark bronze were pretty slim, but we had a diver go down twice to look anyway. The replacement part is on rush delivery from Ontario and will hopefully arrive in the next few days.
The big question now is whether or not we’ve missed our weather window to head out into the open ocean, or whether the big storm winds of October and November are upon us. Traditionally, the end of October is the absolute cutoff time for heading out on an offshore passage south from the Pacific Northwest, but what with the changing weather patterns of the past couple of years it’s anyone’s guess.
Too much has happened lately to give a full rundown, so I will return once more to a pictorial style of blogging; here are a few snapshots of life over the past few weeks..:
Chad Taylor and Dan Ross jamming on the bows
During the last weeks leading up to the final departure, we spent as much time as possible hanging out with friends, enjoying what little summer Vancouver had to offer up this year. With so many projects to complete, perfect moments like this were rare but treasured.
installing spreader lights, repairing the steaming light
Most of the boat projects were one-man jobs, but Miya had to winch me up the mast several times for minor repairs. The next time we haul out I will likely run a few more wires up to the masthead; it’d be a much better place to mount the Ubiquity Bullet router and high-gain wireless antenna than the current location on the aft cabin roof, for instance, and someday I’d like to mount a webcam up there as well.
Jared and Thu departing on S/V Resolution
Our friend Jared has been working on his boat ‘Resolution‘ for the past year or so, and left about ten days before we did for San Francisco. He’s taken a few different routes than we have; going with a smaller monohull for instance, installing davits and monster solar panels and choosing a SatPhone instead of radio communications. It’s been very interesting to watch another geek take on the challenges of living aboard on his own terms.
electrical room overhaul completed!
I’ve finally gotten the electrical room into a state that I can consider “finished”. New features since the last photos – a smart alternator regulator on the far left, and a homebrew fuel polishing system on the bottom left, comprised of a pair of Racor diesel fuel filters and a Reverso fuel pump. The polishing system should help keep our engine Maude healthy even in the third world, where fuel quality can be questionable at best. Incidentally, since the last cooling system overhaul she’s been running like a top!
On the extreme left you can see a little piece of the yet-to-be-installed Spectra Ventura 150 watermaker; the next compartment over houses our water system, and that project will be a fun challenge I’m sure… it will require a haulout to finish as the watermaker will need two new through-hull fittings, one for seawater intake and one for brine discharge.
first aid kit, populated
If you’re planning to head offshore, you’d best be prepared for whatever may come to pass – and the first-aid kit on TIE Fighter was not exactly anything to write home about. Taking careful notes at both a Red Cross First Aid course and a pair of Bluewater Cruising Offshore First-Aid seminar, I assembled our new kit into a bomb-proof Pelican 1550EMS case which should survive anything that we throw at it. The kit contains everything from happy-face bandaids to hardcore prescription antibiotics and injectable painkillers.
An awesome first-aid kit is only half the battle though; Miya and I have enrolled in a Wilderness First Responder first aid course in San Francisco in October, which is an intensive 80-hour course covering emergency first aid in remote scenarios where professional help might not be coming right away.
the middle of the Georgia Straight at sunset
Once we finally got away, the stress of getting ready to leave didn’t fall away as easily as planned. We were off, for sure, but tensions ran a little high while we adjusted to the new state of being. The first night we pulled into an anchorage in the dark, and currents and tides and deadheads made the situation questionable, but once the full moon rose everything came into focus. Waking up the next morning everything was much clearer.
freezing on watch
Neither of us were prepared for the realities of sailing in September; I think we were both spoiled by the 29º temperatures in Vancouver the days leading up to the grand departure. All of our winter clothes were packed away in tupperware containers in the amas, but those were quickly pulled out as it became apparent that gloves, hats and scarves would be necessary. We are very glad to have high-quality foul weather gear, and look forward to soon sailing in warm waters.
raising the courtesy flag
Before clearing customs into a new country, a vessel should fly a yellow flag – the symbol for the letter ‘Q’, or ‘quarantine’ – to indicate to the port that the vessel has not yet cleared customs but intends to. After clearing customs, the yellow flag is replaced by a flag of the country being visited, known as a ‘courtesy flag’. Raising the courtesy flag of the US is something I had been looking forward to for a very long time, as it marks a huge milestone in this adventure!
morning in Neah Bay
Neah Bay, at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula, is the last safe harbour before heading out into the open Pacific Ocean. It is a small Makah indian reservation with a population of about 700 people, but we are still able to steal internet access from several open wireless networks using our high-powered antenna and router. The bay is wild and beautiful, with loons calling in the night and thick fog rolling in regularly.
surface analysis for the eastern pacific ocean
This is a ‘weatherfax’ transmission, retrieved from the internet. This is basically our window into what’s going on weather-wise on the open ocean, and once we have a working HF ham radio rig on the boat we should be able to pull down these images for free from wherever we happen to be on the ocean. Learning to interpret these images is a steep learning curve, but once you get past a few key hurdles the information becomes somewhat fascinating.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about moving onto the ocean is the amount of knowledge about the world around me that I’ve been forced to learn – it boggles the mind that the tides move in and out with such regularity, yet mere meters away from the ocean Vancouver has a half a million people who have no idea what phase the tide is at any given time. Similarly, I feel like I’ve been living with the weather for my entire life, looking up at the sky without having the foggiest (heh) idea what I’ve been looking at. The more I learn about how weather systems function, the more I want to know!
working on the reefing systems
While we wait for the weather to change to a more favourable window there are dozens of small projects that didn’t get finished before we left Vancouver. In this photo I’m working on the reefing system; a series of ropes and pulleys and hooks that helps to get the main sail “reefed”, or shortened by a third – or two thirds – in case of heavy winds. Now complete, the improved reefing system will help us to sail even when the winds blow at gale force or higher.
out in the zodiac with a local diver, gps in hand
When I dropped the sprocket from the steering system into the ocean, I essentially paralyzed us; we can’t steer at all. We’re not only stuck in Neah Bay, we’re stuck right where we’ve anchored until we can replace the part or work around it somehow. Miya walked the local docks looking for a diver, and to our luck the first person she talked to offered to dive for us. Daren Akin, a local diver, went down twice to try to find the part – sadly he was unable to locate it, though the attempt was greatly appreciated!
I cannot believe I did this. I really need to rewire my brain to assign more importance to small bits of hardware when working over a big hole that leads to oblivion. You’d think I would have learned that lesson from my bicycle.
Miya playing Nintendo on a rainy afternoon
So now we’re stuck, with most of the projects out of the way and a boat fully stocked and ready to travel. The delay has been a blessing in some ways, letting us finish up work that we hadn’t had time for and giving us a chance to catch our breaths and adapt to the new realities of life on the road, to sleep in and prepare for the monster ten-day marathon sail down to San Francisco.
Soon the company in Ontario from whom I’ve purchased the replacement part for the steering column will send me the tracking number for the UPS shipment, so that I might have a better idea of when we’ll be out of here – but until then, we remain at anchor.
With less than two weeks until our scheduled departure, every single day is filled with project work! I’ve been trying to balance boat projects with tying off the last loose ends of life ashore, with good, steady progress. Still, I’m faced with having to carefully choose between which projects can be left for the time being and which projects are critical to the offshore voyage portion of our adventure.
the rock that nearly wrecked the boat
I’m definitely feeling “in touch” with the TIE Fighter and the ocean, however. This morning I was awoken by a wake from a passing boat, one which must have been pretty massive because it lasted for far more than the typical three or four waves. After about the twentieth wave or so I figured something was amiss, so I jumped out of bed and checked – sure enough, TIE Fighter was lying perpendicular to the incoming ocean swell, causing her to rock sideways. Usually the anchor line holds her bows pretty much directly into the swell, so this was out of the ordinary. I pulled out the GPS, and just as I suspected, the anchor was dragging.
The anchor I’ve been using lately is a Fortress FX-37. The benefits of a danforth-style anchor are many, but the real value of the Fortress model is that it’s made out of cast aluminum alloy instead of steel. The FX-37 weighs a mere 21lbs, but the holding strength is reputed to be that of a steel anchor at least double its weight!
The biggest downside of the folding anchor model is that if the anchor should fail to fold, it ceases to work. This morning I was nearly blown onto the rocky shore as a result of a little one-inch rock getting wedged between the anchor flukes and the shaft! Fortress anchors may have the best holding power in their class, but they don’t handle being re-seated due to shifting tides or winds very well. I’ll be spending some time re-thinking the anchoring situation in the near future, let me assure you.
Update: when I went down to Seattle to help Miya move out of her apartment and onto the boat fulltime, disaster struck – I received a phonecall from the Kits Beach lifeguards saying that the TIE Fighter was about 100m off the rocks and headed in fast! Fortunately a friend from another boat rushed out and deployed a second anchor for me, and a phonecall to my good friend Simon had him scrambling to rescue the boat. He was able to pull the anchor and head in to False Creek, albeit with some hassle as the new fuel polishing system apparently siphons fuel from the engine lines if the valves aren’t closed properly! He made it as far as the Burrard Bridge before the engine conked out, and had to enlist the help of the Coast Guard to tow the TIE Fighter in to safer waters.
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:
Ensure the boat is safe,
Ensure the boat is sustainable, and
Ensure the boat is comfortable.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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!
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
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 - 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.
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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.
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
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'
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
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!
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
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 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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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 - 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!
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.
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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.
