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.
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
Moonlight Race
Each year, I try to stretch my sailing experiences a bit beyond what I did the year before. Last year, I decided to take on the Moonlight Race.
When I first started racing my boat, I tended to come in dead last. Part of it was inexperience, part of it was trying to avoid the other boats, afraid I’d get my damaged if I was too close. But that also meant that we were getting back to the docks after dark. So we learned to sail in the dark early on.
Besides, it’s never completely dark on the river. If there’s no stars or moon, there’s always the homes that line it, the Coleman bridge, and the power plant. Each, if not iluminating the area, does it make it possible to at least get our bearings. The only real obstacle to worry about are the shallows on both sides of river and the shallow areas at the mouth of the river. So, as long as my depth meter is working and visible, it should be no problem.
First Steps
The first step was to find the route and figure it out in the daytime. The route required us to start at R-22 on the York River, round York Spit Light, then back to R-22.
I’ve sailed near that area numerous times, when heading down to Hampton. But I couldn’t remember ever seeing that structure before. So I wanted to sail by it, both to get an idea of what the time would be, and to be able to identify it when I saw it.
Wendy and I headed out one morning, in search of the structure. I had 3 different sets of coordinates for it, so we only had a general idea of where it was. We headed out of the river, having the usual difficulty doing so.
The prevalent winds are such that the boat wants to go across the river, not up or down it. This we knew. That meant that one the hardest parts of the race would be getting out of the river itself. So this was one of the things that Wendy and I had to work on.
It was taking forever, as usual, to get out of the river. So we motored a bit to get out of the river, rather than waste our whole time in the river, rather than looking for the structure.
Once we got out of the river, we had mixed weather: no wind to too much. Well, not really too much. It wasn’t dangerous. But we did move quite quickly.
When we got close to where the light should be, we started looking for it. The spot was near the intersection of two different routes in the area. And, there was a third route nearby. Between them, there were a number of different markers with the same numbers on them. This threw us off. In addition, there were a number of different structures in the area, none of which looked like the picture we’d seen. Our time was growing short, so we headed back, having not found the structure.
First Moonlight Run
Our next practice session was a nighttime one. Dew, one of the more experienced sailors I know, and his girlfriend, Kelli, joined me, along with Wendy. We headed out about 1/2 an hour before sunset.
It was cold enough to be brisk, but not uncomfortable. And the wind was great.
With Dew’s help, we made it out of the river without motoring. In fact, the only problem we had heading out was getting too close to Tule Marsh, another shallow spot on the river.
I did learn, too, that iPads are not the best of navigation tools at night. Their light is too bright and leaves you partially blinded when you look away. Add to the fact that they are difficult to see in the middle of the day, too, and I don’t think that my iPad will become a navigation tool that I’ll rely on too much on my boat until I have one with a bimini to shade me.
We made it out to the York Spit light and I understood why Wendy and I had such a hard time finding it the first time. It had been destroyed in one of our storms and never rebuilt. So it was essentially just a platform with some sticks on it, not anything like the picture above.
On the way back, we had another problem: the house lights went out. I hadn’t charged the house batteries, and we had been running both lights and music the whole way. I didn’t worry about it, since I have two ‘house’ batteries. I use one at a time, so I assumed that the other was still charged. Nope. We switched over to it and it was dead as well.
Later, when I had charged them both, I found that one discharged as the other did. I still haven’t figured out whether the circuitry is bad or one of my batteries is dead. Another chore for this winter.
So, anyway, back to the story…
As I said, we had plenty of light surrounding us. We had picked a night near the full moon. Unfortunately, I hadn’t checked on the time of moonrise: the moon wasn’t rising until early, early morning, so we were sailing without the moon to guide us. But we had the GPS, we had the landmarks I mentioned, and we had a depth gauge that worked to keep us from bottoming out.
The only slight issue we had was the tug that couldn’t see us and didn’t answer our call on the radio (unlike Robert Redford in All is Lost, I do have a spare VHF radio in cases of emergency. Luckily we did stay out of his way and didn’t get run over.
We did make it home safely, quite late. And that was something else we were checking out – how long would it actually take us to make the run.
The Race Itself
Well, the race got cancelled. We got out there and there was only us, one other racer, and the committee boat. The rules require that there be at least 3 boats racing to make it official, so the race was cancelled.
Crew that night were Dew and Kelli. And the three of us decided that we wanted to do the race anyway.
The wind was strong. The waves we 4′-5′. It made for a rough ride heading out. And it ended up hurting Kelli’s back. She spent time in recovery afterwards. Luckily, the temperature was great and the company wonderful. Luckily, too, Dew was with us. I wouldn’t have made the run without him.
The waves were with us coming back, so we surfed home. And, as I said, the temperature was great. This time, I did made sure the house battery was charged so we were able to enjoy our music out and back.
Coming into the York River, we had the moon, we had the lights from the bridge and from the power plant. And the winds were calmer in the river. It made for one of those moments you want to savor forever.
Will we do it again? Heck, yes!
[Top]Motorsailing into the Docks
Today was a lovely day for a sail. It was completely overcast and breezy, which kept the temperature down. And the waves were low, which made me happy. I don’t mind wind; I hate fighting waves. When you have to go through waves, much of the energy that should be going into forward motion instead goes into getting through the waves. Lots of physics to that. Will have to look it up sometime.
So no waves.
The wind was coming from the west, so I decided to head out towards the bay. That way, I’d be going downwind heading out and upwind coming back, making it cooler in the hotter part of the day.
I left the docks about 8 am. The plan was to head out about 2-1/2 hours, then take about 1-1/2 hours to come back. That would have been great for upwind out and downwind back. But it doesn’t work too well for the reverse.
The problem in York River is that the prevailing winds tend to go move in such a way that, if you’re tacking to close haul, you’ll spend your entire time going from one side of the river to the other, making very little progress. I hadn’t thought of that when I was making my plan for the day.
Still, it should have been okay. I could just motor enough to get me in a good spot to tack into the channel leading to the marina.
Step back a moment here for the next part.
As those who have read my blog fairly regularly know, I have an electric engine. I have 4 100-amp 12-volt batteries that run it. Those batteries are sufficient for most of my needs, which is getting out so I can sail, motoring back in when I get the sails down, and handling the occasional time when the wind completely dies. I have used that power to sail all the way from Yorktown to downtown Hampton, running out of juice just about 1/2 mile before we reached our slip.
I put the batteries on the recharger every time I leave the boat. The batteries, when quite low, will take about 17 hours to charge. I normally check the charge levels before I leave the slip. If all the lights are green, we’re good to go. If something is blinking, the batteries were probably really low and it’s taken longer than usual to charge. The blinking means the charger thinks there may be a problem, since it has taken too long. So I’ll unplug it, then restart it so that the recharger is reset. Next time, we’ll be good to go.
I had one occasion when the charger didn’t seem to charge the battery right. We had all sorts of problems then. Apparently, when one battery is low, it drains power from the others. So we actually had to be towed in by another boat to get to our slip that night. And, the next day, we couldn’t even start the engine. I discovered that time that one of the charge wires had come loose. Once I fixed that, everything charged and we were good to go.
So, this morning, I didn’t check the colors on the recharger before I took off. I did notice that the display for the engine only showed 85% charge, which was strange, since I hadn’t been sailing in a week. But I figured I’d check it out later.
Now, back to our lovely day of sailing.
I’m heading back. I’m in the river, I’m doing the usual back and forth and not wanting to be. So I go directly upwind, which I need to do to get to the marina channel, and I turn on the engine. The wind is pretty strong, so I’m not making alot of progress. But I am making some progress. And the display shows that I should have 4-1/2 hours left in the batteries. No problem. I’m definitely less than that away from where I want to be. So I run the engine long enough to get around the refinery piers, then turn the engine off and sail a bit more.
Strange. The indicator is now showing I only have about 30% left on the batteries. That doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t have gone down that quickly. When I turn it back on, it still shows that I can do another 2-1/2 hours, so I figure I’m ok.
I turn the engine off, tack over and back. I’m still not as close to the channel as I want to be. But then again, when I get frustrated, I tend to hurry the process. Rather than going long on a tack, to allow me to position myself better when I tack back, I tend to turn too early, requiring a few more back and forths.
I turn the engine back on. This time, I don’t seem to have alot of power, although I am moving forward. This was a symptom we saw when we ran out of juice heading to Hampton: the engine was turning the prop. But it was turning it slowly, and it didn’t matter how much we turned up the throttle; no more juice was going to get out.
I’m in the channel at this point. And I let out the jib, just about 25%. Luckily I was at a good angle to use it. Lucky, too, I didn’t hit bottom. I don’t think I ever would have gotten out if I had.
I back into my slip. It’s easier to run the power if I do. But I barely had enough juice to move the boat backwards. In fact, we touched the pier across from the slip before I could back it up.
When I plugged in the power, I hadn’t yet turned off the indicator. Now, instead of 28% battery, it showed 56%.
Hopefully, the cause is just an in-line fuse blown on the recharger line. Hopefully, it’s not that one of the batteries has gone bad!
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