There are many traditions and ceremonies of sailors and the sea. Some pertain to crossing the equator other navigation based feats, there are also major ceremonies associated with the renaming of a boat which we chose to ignore. While writing this and thinking of our choice to ignore the renaming ceremony, I am reminded of a line in one of the Indiana Jones movies where they were looking for the Holy Grail. They were in a cave with a ghost warrior that guarded the grail, he allowed each member of the group the opportunity to select the holy grail from the dozen or so chalices on display. Another explorer (the bad guy) picked a chalice made of gold and encrusted with jewels. He lifted it up, filled it with holy water, drank from it and died a miserable death, and turned to dust. The ghost guardian calmly said, “He chose poorly.”, I suspect we did too. By now our friend John had left and another good friend Rick Moeller joined us for a week to help with our final preparations and sail with us from Southport to Jacksonville Florida. On Thursday October 16th the 3 of us (plus our trusted boat dog Ziggy) left the dock in Southport for the overnight sail to Charleston SC. We would rather have started with a shorter daytime cruise but there were no harbors deep enough for us to go into between these 2 ports. We left mid day so we could sail the 120 miles and arrive in the morning after dawn. What we didn’t take into account was the very rough conditions at the Cape Fear inlet caused by the winds and waves out of the south and the tidal current out the north. After 20 minutes or so of bouncing up and down thru the inlet the waves settled down enough to go below and asses the damage. There was gear, clothing and other debris strewn all over the cabin sole (floor for you land lubbers) but no serious damage. I decided to check some of the major things one checks while on a boat such as the bilge to make sure we were not sinking we weren’t. Unfortunately the battery voltage was down to 10 volts when it should have been at about 13 ½ volts since we were motoring and the alternator should have us at full charge. I thought of this as a minor issue that could be remedied by installing the 4 nuts that I had just purchased for the water pump on the diesel generator that the boat has. With the generator going we could charge off of it’s alternator as well as off of the charger on board with the 120 Volts AC provided by the generator. The water pump was leaking so I pulled it off to replace a shaft seal and would have been installed already except the original nuts had been lost in a clean up. I measured the bolt size and bought the replacement 5/16” nuts I thought would work but they only went on about 1 turn. I looked at the thread of the nut and the bolt and realized the bolt had a finer thread. I ran out the morning we left to a hardware store and managed to find some fine pitch 5/16” nuts. I hunted down the bag of nuts put the first one on which went 2 turns before seizing. I tried another one just in case and had the same results. Obviously these were not the right nuts. I next broke down and did what no male should ever do, I read the manual. The generator is made by a company called Westerbeke located in Avon, Massachusetts and I must say they have a wonderful manual. As I paged thru the parts list I noticed all of the hardware was standard ¼” or 5/16” but when I located the hardware for the water pump it said 8M, which is a metric designation. Realizing that we had no way to power up our batteries I went up top to tell Julie and Rick that we should head back in but I was too late. They had been up top facing the stiff south wind and waves that was directly ahead of us and came to the same conclusion without me. We turned around and headed back thru the inlet which was sort of like the agitation cycle on a washing machine one more time. We debated going to another marina as we had said our farewells to the regulars on the dock and didn’t want to look foolish running back with our tail tucked between our legs. We decided to go back to the same marina because of it’s convenience, that and the other marinas were too shallow for us. The next day, Friday we got the generator running and tried to locate a new alternator for the main engine but had no luck. The weather was crappy on Saturday so we hung out and did some more cleanup and work on the boat. We left Sunday October 20th, mid day for Charleston in light wind under motor. The sail was uneventful and we took turns on watch thru the night with 2 people on deck at all times, life vests are always mandatory after dark. We used the generator to charge the batteries which worked just fine but after a couple of charges we realized that we were having to charge them way too often. Late that night the bilge pump died, we had a replacement but I spent ½ hour lying face down in the bilge wiring it in. Aside from that it was an uneventful evening and we motored into Charleston harbor passing Fort Sumter with the sun rising behind us.

Rick Moeller at the Helm

A Freighter coming into Charleston Harbor with us

Our plan had been to spend the night and take off for our next overniter to St. Mary’s GA which is on the border with Florida. We decided to take an extra day to replace the batteries and try to hunt down and alternator.
The main batteries on the boat are deep cycle type which are designed to drain slowly over a long period of time, unlike car batteries which are designed to drain quickly over a few seconds to start your car. It is relatively easy to make a deep cycle battery, you just add more lead. We had 2 of these batteries which are about 3 times larger that a car battery weighing in at 180 lbs each.
Doing some research on line I found that golf cart batteries are a great substitute for marine batteries, maybe even better at less than half the price. I found a golf cart shop about 2 miles from the marina that had batteries in stock, called a cab and picked them up. To remove the old batteries we used a halyard (usually used to raise sails) and a winch to hoist them out of the bilge and swung them on dock using the boom.
I called around to marine dealers to find a replacement alternator but all of them had to order one and it would take about a week. I Googled the part number and only had 10 or so hits but found a place on line that had them in stock. I decide to call to see if they can have it shipped to one of the ports we would be visiting in the next few days. To my surprise the area code was for Charleston and when I mapped the address I realized they were only 8 miles from the harbor. 3 hours later I had a brand new alternator pulled off of a motor going into a Coast Guard boat that was upgraded to 24 Volts for a mere $299 vs. the typical $750 from a dealer.
Did I mention it was raining? Not your typical, I need an umbrella rain, more like rain of biblical proportions. OK so it didn’t rain 40 days and 40 nights but Charleston got hammered with 8 inches in less than 24 hours, streets were flooded and the boat was leaking everywhere.
We had spent quite a bit of time fixing leaks and thought we had most of them but this torrential rain pointed out numerous new ones. We decided to stay another day in Charleston to dry out and see some of the sites with plans to leave the next morning Thursday 10/23.
By now we were pretty sure that we had made our amends to Poseidon for ignoring our renaming ceremony.
More later......