Foggy Mornings
I love sailing. I love the feel of the wind on your face, the silent moving through the water, being outdoors. In fact, there’s little that I don’t love about the whole experience.
I love the fact that I have an electric engine. It’s not completely silent. But it’s quiet enough that you can hear the music on the stereo, or keep up a conversation with the folks on the boat, or just enjoy the feeling of being on the water.
On foggy mornings, I don’t imagine sailing. I imagine heading out, with the electric motor going. The area so quiet it feels like you’re the only one around. Not being able to see the shore, but knowing there are others out there in the mist, on the water, looking out, wondering if there’s someone unseen on the water. Faintly hearing the motor, because sound seems to travel so much better in the fog.
Today was a day like that. I heard the weather report this morning: heavy fog until noon. I dropped by the marina, to put ice in the icebox so that the drinks would be cold this evening when we headed out for the race. The fog was out there, on the river, and I yearned to go out and meet it.
Sigh! I had to go to work, to afford my boat habit, and leave it behind for now.
Waiting
Five weeks ago, I asked the marina to pull the boat out for spring prep. It was early enough that I hoped to beat the rush of boats also wanting to get ready for a spring launch. I had purchased the boat 6 years ago and, according to what I’d read, the bottom should be stripped. So I asked the marina to do that. They told me that the bottom didn’t need to be stripped. Good news!
So I asked the marina to smooth the bottom and check for blisters. I have little upper body strength and I don’t like spending my time with a 30-lb vacuum sander over my head. I also figured, with the schedule I’ve had lately at work, it would be much faster to have the marina do the work.
That was 5 weeks ago.
We’ve had weather delays. The wife of the guy who was working on it had a baby.
And we had communication errors.
See, when I told them to smooth the bottom, I meant that I thought there were blisters to be taken care of, and the paint was pretty wavy because I’d just been slapping it on. But the head worker thought I meant that I wanted the paint sanded off, so he started to do that.
Now, I don’t know why he did that, especially after he told me that it didn’t need to be stripped. But that’s what he was doing. And that was taking so long, because the paint was on there hard, so they called in someone with – not a sandblaster – but a bead blaster? Anyway, same idea. They stripped the paint.
Well, that did open up any blisters. But it also meant that there would need to be a barrier coat put on. At first I told them I’d take care of that. But as the time went on, I again figured that it would be faster to have them take care of it. But I don’t know. They haven’t even gotten that far.
I stopped by tonight. They have about 2/3rds of the bottom prepped. Meaning that it’s had the filler put on and it’s been sanded smooth. They still have half the keel and all of the rudder to do.
The good news is, I won’t have to have this done for about 10 more years.
Will I have the boat for next week’s race? A week after racing season has started? I hope so!
Stripped boat bottom
Line Back
After last time’s unsuccessful attempt by a Sea Scout to get the jib halyard back on the mast, their Scoutmaster, Mike, offered to do it for me. So, the following weekend, we met and he donned the climbing harness that Liza had used the week before.
I had been concerned about being able to get Mike, or any full-grown adult up the mast, since I don’t have alot of upper body strength and I figured that alot of the physical part of overcoming gravity would need to be done by me and the winch trying to raise Mike on the main halyard. Mike assured me, however, that he could shimmy up the mast to help in the effort.
Well, it didn’t quite work that way. Apparently, my mast was too slick for him to climb. So, like with Liza, he climbed onto the boom so I could get enough slack to get the line through the catch block we had set up and onto the winch to turn it to lift him up.
Mike atop the mast
The job turned out to be much simpler than I thought it would be. Gotta love Newtonian physics in action! There was enough mechanical help from our setup that I had no trouble turning the winch and lifting him up. Mind you, it took alot of turns to get him up – it was a slow job. But it was fairly painless from my perspective.
Not so Mike. He got as far as the shrouds and asked me to stop. I assumed he was tired and needed a break. Luckily, the line was through a clutch, and on my self-tailing winch, so I didn’t have to hold it while he rested. It also made it easier on the climb up because I didn’t have to worry about losing ground.
Once Mike reached the top, it was a quick job to get the line in place. He had pulled the core out of the line and woven the ends back to make a loop that was narrower than the line itself. He then attached a string, and attached the straightened coat hanger to the string. The whole thing went in and he was ready to be lowered in no time.
Lowering Mike down, with that setup, was no problem either. I wrapped the line around a nearby cleat, to give me some leverage, lifted the clutch, pulled the line out of the self-tailer, and started lowering him. Again, it proved to be much easier than I expected.
When Mike got down, he said he’d gotten dizzy when he was up there, which surprised him. That had never happened before. He did take some time to lower his head and get back his equilibrium before pronouncing that this was the last mast he was likely to climb; he was going to leave it to the Sea Scouts from now on.
Mike, after his rest
Climbing the Mast
I discovered last year, when replacing the jib, that the jib halyard was starting to look worn. But the line itself was much longer than I needed, and the rest of it, beyond that top foot, was in really great shape. So this year I asked a friend of mine if he could reweave the eye back in for me. He agreed.
So I attached an extra line to the halyard I wanted to pull down and pulled the new line into place as I pulled the old one down. That way, when the old one was repaired, I only needed to reverse the process to get the old one back into place.
Well, my friend fixed the old one over a weekend, and the next weekend, Erik and I went down to run the halyard back up. It was quite breezy that day, so we decided to wait. We wouldn’t be able to reattach the furler jib, so it seemed a waste of time to mess with the halyard, so I tied the line back up, re-stuffed the jib into the cabin (we’d taken it home and I’d cleaned it off while it was down), and headed home.
So, I must not have tied the line off well. Because the following weekend, when we came by to try again, the line I’d used as a placeholder was neatly coiled on my deck.
So back to my friend I go. He happens to be the scoutmaster for a Sea Scout troop, so I asked if he thought one of his scouts might be willing to climb the mast and replace the halyard. He said he thought so.
So today, I met Liza (the Sea Scout) at the boat with Mike (the scoutmaster). Liza donned a climbing harness that Mike had brought along, rather than the bos’n’s chair I had borrowed. We moved the jib pulley back so it was next to the jib winch and hooked Liza up to the main halyard. We pulled the halyard through the pulley and into the winch and pulled her up the mast.
Liza up the mast
We had sent Liza up with a straightened coat hanger to use as a guide, the halyard, and some painter’s tape, to attach the halyard to the coat hanger.
Liza first had trouble trying to get the coat hanger through. It was apparently not a straight shot. She was doing this from the rear of the mast and finally came around to the front and figured out how it needed to go. She tried again and got it through, after a few more attempts.
Next problem was the tape. The painter’s tape wasn’t strong enough to hold the halyard on to the coat hanger. So we passed her up some duct tape to use instead. This worked, but now she was having trouble pulling the coat hanger back through. The coat hanger had been straightened out. But one of the spirals in it was hanging inside the pulley.
At this point, Liza had been up the mast for an hour, so Mike asked her to come backd own and we’d try again another time.
So now my conundrum. Do I ask Liza or another of the troop to try this again? Do I get one of my experienced buddies, whose more heavy, but would know what they were doing to do it? Do I attempt to do it myself? Or doI pay to have someone at the marina do it?
We’ll see. No hurry. I don’t need to have it done until April when racing season starts.
[Top]Lighted Boat Parade
Lighted boat parades are an adventure. I keep reminding my friend of this. They will be guaranteed to have a story. The first year we did it, I had a terrible time judging the distance between me and the other boats. In fact, at one point, I got call on the VHF radio from the guy in charge asking if we were still part of the parade. The second year, I went to rent a generator for running the lights and they only had large (I thought) ones. I went to the boat, discussed it with a few folks, and we decided we could run the lights with an inverter connected to the house batteries (no, not going to run them on the engine batteries!). We tested it and it seemed to do ok. But the parade came, and we had no lights. There wasn’t enough power so we were sailing dark. We did have glow sticks, and the lights at the very front worked. In addition, I decided to head up Sarah’s Creek. I didn’t see the marker and ran right into it. Stopped the boat cold. One of my passengers somehow fell against a heater I had in the vberth and hurt his back.
Then there was this past year, our third.
I didn’t want to have the generator problem again. I had bought a generator during the summer as a backup when we headed down for Cock Island. Erik and I checked it and couldn’t start it. I had purchased the protection plan. So we went to Harbor Freight and exchanged it. Generator? Check!
This year’s issue? The cheap bottom paint I bought last year.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I had barnacle problems this year. On top of that, I used cheap bottom paint for the first time. That was a big mistake! What I didn’t talk about in the barnacle article was the fact that the boat was so covered with slime that I had to have it power washed, which I wasn’t planning on. Then, in September (4 months later), it was covered with slime again.
Well, I guess I should have pulled it out and power washed the bottom and cleaned the prop again, because the boat barely moved. We couldn’t be in the parade because we couldn’t reach the parade. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the boat going fast enough to catch up to the parade. <sigh!>
So we played on the water, trying to head to Yorktown Beach. But, after singing our carols and enjoying some hot buttered rum, we headed back.
We still enjoyed each other’s company. But next year’s checklist:
- Generator? Check!
- Bottom cleaned? Check!
- Prop cleaned? Check!
Oh, and there was one other issue. I ran lights up the mast, but didn’t do it too smartly. I ended up with the ‘wrong’ ends down below and couldn’t light the lights. Paul, my resident electrician, had to restring some of the lights so we could get them all going.
After all, we had a generator. We should at least have the lights! 🙂
2013 Lighted Boat Parade