Second Star

On to Lake Charles 12/12/08 - 12/15/08

2009-08-19T04:26:00.005-05:00

After being tied to a bridge abutment for 3 days waiting for our propeller we were anxious to get going. The diver wrapped things up about an hour before dusk to we decided to head off early the next morning. So the next morning we got up a few hours before dawn, brewed our coffee, dressed in our warm clothes, walked the dog, looked for a break in the traffic and headed on down the road.

It was a little strange motoring down the ICW/GIWW in the early morning dark but we had lost so much time and were in danger of not getting to Corpus Christi by Christmas which was not acceptable as we had already bought a ticket for Julie’s daughter, Ashley, to fly in to spend Christmas at Julie’s sisters house in the hill country west of San Antonio.

We chose a spot about between 2 tugs that were about 1/3 mile or 15 football fields or 20 seconds at 60 miles per hour apart but we were all going about 6 miles per hour so there was 200 seconds or a little more than 3 minutes between the 2 tugs, so we tucked in between them and headed west.

We brought the propane heater up into the cockpit and placed it behind the pedestal (the thingy that the wheel is attached to) to warm our feet. We also used it to toast cinnamon bread for breakfast.

Heading off before dawn with a full moon

We motored throughout the day gazing at washed out riverbanks with tree roots dangling in the air holding on to the remnants of the earth that once fully embraced them.

There were more shipyards, home after home along the canal, resorts, casinos. There was even a floating hotel that was built on a few barges that apparently traveled from event to event along the waterways to wherever they could charge for their rooms.

We charged along at a snails pace for the rest of the day. But we were moving again and this was a good thing.

Ho, Ho, Ho

Mid afternoon we were looking for a place to spend the night but there were no anchorages to be found. We did find a diesel dock earlier in the day and they had said that we could stay somewhere on their property,

We felt obliged to buy fuel from them since we were taking advantage of their offer of putting us on a dock for the night so when we arrived we pulled up to their fuel dock.

It was after 5:00 pm and the front door of the facility was locked so I walked around to the back side of the building and found an open door. I talked to the kid about buying some fuel and spending the night. He told me they would have to recalibrate the pumps but they could top off our tanks (about 25 gallons) but we would have to pull up and around to their fuel barge to get fuel.

As always the wind was starting to howl, after all it was time to dock for the night. I walked up with a couple of 5 gallon jugs and asked if I could just get them filled and transfer them to the boat and come back for 2nd’s. They seemed a little confused but agreed to do it.

When we were done fueling up I asked him about tying up for the night. Unfortunately the dock we were tied up to was the main dock that was used by supply boats that brought goods out to oil rigs and freighters throughout the night. These boats came in late at night, switched crews, loaded up with food and other supplies and then headed out to any number of offshore oil platforms or ships.

So we were offered 2 spots. The first was up the canal a half mile on the left where there was a small canal with a barge sunk next to the bank as a makeshift dock. Unfortunately there wasn’t much draft ( it wasn’t very deep ) and there was no place for us to turn around.

Another worker suggested that we tie up next to the tug across the small bay since they were laying down for a few days for repairs. We chose this option.

We asked the kid to help us shove off of the dock as there was a 29 mile per hour wind pushing us against the dock. He didn’t believe that we needed help at first but I convinced him that, unlike tugs which have two 1,200 horsepower engines, we only had one 100 hp engine and the boat steered like crap at low speeds.

So with a big heave ho, the kid and I shoved the boat away from the dock and Julie, at the helm, hit the throttle, turned the wheel for a right turn and started to pull away from the dock. A little detail that I may not have mentioned earlier was that the pier jutted out about 6 feet a mere 25 feet in front of us and not hitting it would require a bit of luck under normal circumstances.

As I mentioned before, these were not normal circumstance, we were being pushed against the wall and towards the wall in front of us. About 5 seconds into this maneuver Julie was afraid we wouldn’t clear the wall in front of us and started to throttle back. I yelled to her, “full throttle baby” and she responded immediately. I hopped onto the boat and ran forward in case I needed to push off the wall but we cleared it with 3 or 4 inches to spare.

We kept going right and 150 feet later we were right next to the tug boat, facing directly into the wind. Julie had gotten the boat into the wind and throttled back so that I was able to jump onto the tug and tie us off.

The tug was tied off with its flat bow tied to a pair of pilings onshore so we were able to step off of our boat onto the tug and walk forward and step up onto shore. This may seem like a simple thing to most of you but after the grief we had been thru with swamps and other stuff this was like showing up at the Ritz Carlton in the back of a stretch limo.

Off of the bow of the tug was a big field and Ziggy went crazy running around in circles with a great joy to be on terra firma again.

Our "big boat" tied to a relatively small tug.

Sometime in the middle of this night I woke up feeling strange and it suddenly occurred to me that I was sick and going to throw up. I had caught the flu that Julie had two days ago.

Ziggy was sleeping in front of the door to our head so I decided to go to the forward head. I didn’t make it and settled on the sink in the galley. I hadn’t been this sick since I was a kid and several minutes later when Julie came out I had started cleaning out the sink.

I said don’t worry, I’ll clean up, she muttered something about no problem unless I wanted to clean up after her too. I woke up later in the night but made it to the head this time.

The next morning I felt a lot better so we walked Ziggy and hit the road again.

We motored all day up the channel heading west. Around 3:30 we started looking for a place to spend the night, I was still running a fever and I was fading fast.

We looked at the maps and once again there was no place deep enough for us to stay that wasn’t in the channel until Lake Charles and because this was a busy commercial port the prospect of anchoring was a little iffy.

We used Google Earth to scope out the area and there weren’t any real marinas in the area but after zooming in as close as we could we found out that there was a park on a jetty where a river met the main channel with a dock on it, so we decided to check it out.

The city park had a pavilion on one end where people were fishing, right beside that there was a boat ramp with a set of docks next to it. Just beyond the dock was a 200 foot research vessel tied to a dock with it’s bow toward us and it’s bow line tied to a mooring ball a mere 40 feet away from the dock we were eyeing. I figured the ship had a draft of over 15 feet so we should be OK at the dock right in front of it.

Julie was concerned about staying here since there was a large sign that said “No Overnight Docking” . She didn’t want to stay here but I told her I couldn’t go any further and I would lie to the best of my ability if a park ranger came by to chase us off.

We docked easily and tied up, ever since Julie started docking the tension level went down dramatically and the confidence level went up exponentially.

By parking where we did we completely covered the “No Overnight Docking” sign with our boat. Problem solved!

City Pier - Lake Charles, LA

Lefitte to Houma

2009-03-26T09:34:00.000-05:00

December 9, 2008

We woke up this morning on our little bend in the river and headed west again down the ICW which changed names to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway or GIWW somewhere along the way. We had been motoring thru marshy swamps for over a day but the scenery changed fairly quickly into what I thought was a typical Louisiana bayou. The banks of the canal were lined with cypress trees wearing a beard of Spanish moss. The roots of these trees branched out several feet above the soggy ground like tentacles longing for water. The roots were thick and strong, each one almost as thick as the tree they supported , driving down into the soupy mud to anchor the tree above.
We noticed eagles flying above and took a few pictures of them thinking that we would see more of them now that we were in the bayou. We were wrong, the landscape soon changed and there were no more eagles. As a matter of fact, the landscape went from National Geographic to Industrial Canal in a few miles. Had I known that this was the last of the open Bayou we would see I would have parked the boat and gone ashore on the dinghy and poked around to see what there was to see.

A little bit later we were coming into West Larose LA and once again we were confused as to the name of the bridge that we needed opened. Julie hailed the Hwy 1 bridge several times (the name that the 500 page Coast Guard guide used) and the only reply we got was from some Cajun who sounded like he had a mouth full of Gumbo. We could not understand him at all with our diesel running at 2,000 RPM‘s,. We idled back, called again and the same Cajun replied so we requested a bridge opening. He replied that he was not the bridge tender but was driving the tug that had pulled into the canal about 300 yards ahead of us. He told us that we were hailing the wrong bridge and that we wanted to hail the West Larose bridge. Our Cajun friend had just signed off when the West Larose bridge tender came on the radio and introduced himself. Julie requested a bridge opening using her silky smooth, maple syrup with confectioners syrup heaped on top of it voice, and he replied that he would as soon as he got some workers off of the bridge as they were working on it. Julie thanked him and he replied, “We’ll take care of you baby”, which in most parts of this country would sound incredibly sexist but seemed perfectly natural and polite here.

We motored another few hours and arrived in Amelia Louisiana which is one of a cluster of 3 cities that include Berwick, Morgan City bunched together on the GIWW (ICW) that begging their pardon should have been one city based on their size and the fact that we hadn’t seen one real city in 2 days. It turns out that all 3 of these cities are primarily in the commercial boating business as they sit at an intersection of the GIWW and an inlet from the Gulf of Mexico that passes thru the Atchafalaya Bay where ocean going vessels can pass.

All that aside, we were looking to get 40 or so gallons of diesel to top off our tanks because we had read that fuel on this stretch of the waterway was virtually impossible to come by. We went online with Google maps and the only thing we could find was a couple of gas stations that were anywhere from 2 blocks to 1 mile from the water. There was one gas station that was next to a creek that looked big enough to take the dinghy up so we formulated a plan. I would take the dinghy up the creek with the 2 five gallon gas cans we had bought. Then I would run up and fill the cans drag them back to the boat and repeat as often as necessary until we were full. I called the gas station up only to find out that they did not have diesel. I asked where the nearest station was with diesel and found out that it I would have to walk over a half mile to fuel up and at 40 pounds per 5 gallon jug this no longer seemed like a good strategy. We looked at the Garmin and it showed a facility just a little way up a river/channel that had diesel so we called them on the phone. They told us that they we should go under 2 highway bridges that had 75 foot clearance and past the railroad lift bridge and they were immediately on the right.

We went up the channel past huge boat building and repair facilities, one was building a riverboat casino. We passed under the 2 highway bridges, approached the railroad bridge and called for an opening. After several calls and almost 10 minutes we got a reply that they would open soon. Fifteen minutes later the turnstile bridge opened and we went on thru looking for the fuel dock that was supposed to be immediately on the right. We were told that the facility had big red tanks and we should tie up right in front of them to fuel up. We kept looking for them and went down almost a ¼ mile and turned back still not seeing any sign of the red tanks. There was a facility with orange and white tanks but there was no sign of any kind of fuel pumps so we called them up again. I asked if they were past the 2 highway bridges and the railroad turnstile bridge. They said the railroad bridge was a draw bridge not a turnstile bridge and that I was about 8 miles away from where they were.

We looked at the map and realized they were up a river that we were not going on so we decided to continue on and take our chances. After another irritatingly looonng wait for the return trip through the railroad turnstile we were on our way. A few miles up the ICW I spotted what looked like a fuel facility and had Julie look them up online and call to ask if they would let us fuel up. A few minutes later we pulled up at Martin Midstream Fuel Services with a 25 mph wind on our nose. They were great people and set us up with fuel for the boat and gave us two 5 gallon sealed buckets to put additional fuel in. The guy pumping our fuel said the 2nd shift operator wouldn’t have let us fuel up, the facility was primarily for tugs that take on ~ 10,000 gallons which lasts them a week. Julie went in the office to pay for the diesel and came out with a dozen or so oranges that one of the employees had brought in to give away from trees in his yard. He offered a second bag, but how many oranges could 2 people eat. What a mistake not taking them was, they were the best oranges that I have ever eaten. After we shoved off I found out that we were charged the standard rate for the diesel which was $1.57 per gallon. This was about 1/3rd the price of what we had paid earlier in our trip at some marinas so we felt pretty good.

We continued west on the GIWW past huge shipyards and docking facilities. We tried to figure out what was in the barges that were being pushed to and fro. While many of them were not labeled of the ones that were a large number of them had all sorts of warnings about flammability, carcinogen, etc.. and the word BENZENE in large letters.

Benzene is a petrochemical product and had early uses such as making the original decaffeinated coffee Sanka, but today is mainly used as an intermediate to make other chemicals. Its most widely-produced derivatives include styrene, which is used to make polymers and plastics, phenol for resins and adhesives and nylon,. Smaller amounts of benzene are used to make some types of rubbers, lubricants, dyes, detergents, drugs, explosives, napalm and pesticides. See Wikipedia for more information which is where I stole this from.

Near the end of the day we passed a tug that we had been following for a few hours thru a twisty part of the GIWW. The name of the tug was R.L. Guidry and the captain was having a lot of problems with the wind. He was pushing 6 empty barges and we had heard “This is the R.L. Guidry pushing 6 empties” can you hold up for me around this corner or see me on the “2’s” I’m having a hard time keeping my bow up in this wind, along with other requests for “leeway” throughout the afternoon. This request was given in a slow southern Louisiana drawl that was a lot John Wayne with a very deep voice. The rest of the tug captains were courteous but there was a hint of something in their voices that made me think that the captain of the R.L. Guidry was being a little overcautious.

We chose to request to pass on a stretch of the channel that was remarkably straight and he came back that he would see us on our 1 whistle. Being neophytes on the canal we asked if we should pass him on his port (left) side he came back sounding a little harried that we should pass him on his starboard (right) side to our port side. Talking to Julie about his demeanor she mentioned that she had overheard him talking to another skipper that he had been pushing 6 empties since 6:00 am and he had had a long day. We started the snail race to pass him and twelve minutes later we were done. We were now doing almost 7 knots instead of the 5 ½ we had been doing and were eagerly looking for a place to anchor for the night.

About 45 minutes later we found a nice small bay on the Garmin that appeared to be reasonably deep where we anchor for the night. It was in a zig or maybe a zag where the channel shifted it’s course for about 100 yards and had some taller trees that blocked the wind to some extent.
We motored past and then back upstream near the mouth of this small bay that was about 300 feet long on the channel and about 100 feet deep. We looked at the depth and figured out that we could make it in to anchor and not get too stuck. We pushed up into the east end of the anchorage and dropped our big anchor and backed up about 100 feet and set the anchor. We were getting ready to drop the dinghy and take the small anchor off of the stern about 100 feet to keep the boat in line when the R.L. Guidry came around the corner.

The captain contacted us on the radio and told us that he didn’t want to tell us what to do but he wouldn’t anchor where we had just anchored. Julie got on the radio and asked him for more information and he told us that barges coming around the corner in this wind could “wipe up” into the corner and hit us, especially in this wind. He told us that there was a boat dock about a mile up the canal and if we followed him he would point it out for us. We pulled the anchor quickly and within a few minutes we were right behind him again. As he said, about a mile further, he pointed out a boat dock to the right, just this side of a highway bridge. The boat dock was more of a launch ramp for runabouts and we ran aground pretty hard with our tail sticking out 30 feet into the canal.

With a little effort we backed out and went on a hunt for another anchorage. Julie had been driving for the last half hour, something she hadn’t done for most of the day because she had woken up with the flu was running a fever. Earlier in the day she had wanted to stop but I told her that I would drive and told her to go below and sleep. Julie didn’t want to leave me alone so she brought a sleeping bag and a couple of blankets up in the cockpit and slept on and off.
We headed up the channel slowly looking for places to spend the night. The first place that presented itself was a barge dock for the chemical plant that was just past the bridge. We had berthed next to tugs in the past and thought that this might be an option until we saw the ominous don’t park here signs that were posted all over the place. A little further up the canal there was a small cove, about 120 feet across and 50 feet deep that was incredibly sheltered but surrounded by huge Cypress trees and rock, it looked a little difficult to berth in. This would not be an anchorage but a tie off between 2 trees from the bow and stern. We decided to move on.

We pored over the Garmin looking for a place to stay and there were a couple of possible choice up the canal on the left side so we motored to see what there was to see. The first place we looked at was in someone’s back yard and it didn’t look too comfortable, strains of Dueling Banjo’s from Deliverance came to mind. The rifle fire that could be heard from beyond the trees confirmed this. The second potential anchorage was nothing but a dimple on the side of the road so we decided to turn back to the wooded, rocky cove that was just past the bridge.
Since we weren’t anchoring but tying up between trees instead I went forward to untie the anchor lines from the anchors. The plan was to nose the boat slowly into the cove, then I would hop into the dinghy and run lines from the bow and the stern to string us between the two shores out of the way of barge traffic.

We were about 100 yards from the anchorage about 45 feet from the shore motoring along when suddenly the boat turned towards the shore. Within a second or two we were pointed towards the shore at a 45 degree angle and the engine died. I was forward and not fully aware of what was going on but when I came back to the cockpit I asked Julie why the engine wasn’t running. She told me that the engine had suddenly died I told her to start it again and that she said that she had restarted it twice but it died every time she put it in gear.

I wasn’t aware of what was going on and was unable to process what Julie was saying (again) so I started the engine myself and put it in forward gear and it died instantly. I started the engine again and put it in reverse, it did not die but the engine lugged down and would not throttle up.
I realized that we could not move under our own power and was immediately concerned about drifting out into barge traffic.

The GIWW was probable 250 feet wide here and barges could be tied up 2 wide at 70 feet wide and with 2 passing each other going opposite directions with a little space in between them could take up most of the canal especially with the windy conditions. My immediate concern was that we would drift back out into the channel so we dropped the dinghy into the water and I rowed it to shore with the anchor line that I had just untied, the bitter end still tethered in the chain locker.

Not that the line was angry or at the end of it’s rope (that was supposed to be funny) but the bitter end is defined as “The part of a rope that is tied off”. The Bitter End is also an amazing resort on the Island of Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands.

I took the free end of the anchor line and rowed up to one of the cypress trees that lined the bank and attempted to tie the line around it. There were a couple of problems with this: the first being the girth of the tree, the second being the depth of the water.

The cypress trees along the shore were about 80 feet tall and the trunks started to fatten up just above the water and quickly turned into horizontal roots that lay out just below the water where I was paddling.
I had to use my paddle to push down on a mass of roots to shove the dinghy over a root coming off of the tree I wanted to tie up to. This in itself took a couple of minutes, which seemed like an eternity as I was afraid of the boat drifting back out into the canal in the middle of barge traffic. I finally got the nose of the dinghy about a foot from the tree and grabbed about 5 feet of the anchor line and tried to whip it around the tree so that the end would come around enough so that I could grab it. On the 3rd try I was able to lean forward off of the front of the boat and only get a little wet as I retrieved the end of the line. I tied the bow of the boat off on the cypress tree and ran another line off of the stern to another tree and a 3rd line from the middle of the boat to even another tree. We spent the next 10 minutes or so trying to get the boat closer to shore, taking the lines that we had tied to the trees on shore to the winches in an attempt to get the boat closer to shore, but it wouldn’t move.

Cypress Swamp

With the tying up all done, Julie broke down and was almost hysterical about breaking the boat.
As I mentioned before, she was running a fever all day and had talked about stopping early in the afternoon, she had slept in the cockpit (anyone else ever wonder where that name came form) most of the day but was still very sick and tired. I tried to console her, telling her that this was a freak accident. After all, who would have expected to hit a completely submerged tree while motoring 45 feet from the shore? Eventually she calmed down. A little later when I was able to sneak off, I went below and proceed with a silent four letter word tirade about our present predicament. With that out of my system I felt much better about addressing the current situation. I had seen these symptoms before, we had a piece of line wrapped around the propeller shaft that was knotted so tight that it was killing the engine whenever we put it in gear. The cure was simple, jump into the 48 degree water, cut the rope away and goes on our merry way. I put on my leaky dry suit and climbed down the ladder into the incredibly dark murky water and swam to the back of the boat. Julie was waiting there for me as was one of the dock lines that was cleated off, hanging in the water that I would use as a tether.

The propeller is about 3 ½ feet below the water, so I not so bravely grabbed the rudder and pulled myself down and grabbed the prop. I found the shaft and as I suspected it was wrapped with some sort of line. It felt like polypropylene (ski line) and I started pulling it away. Because of the cold I couldn’t stay down very long and I quickly came back up and got a knife from Julie.
I dropped back down under the water and started hacking at the rope around the shaft but something didn’t seem quite right. I had cut rope off of prop shafts many, many years ago and there was a different feel to it. I came back up, gave the knife back to Julie and dove back to investigate. I grabbed the rope around the shaft and started tearing at it with my fingers. It started coming off in ribbons and felt nothing like rope. I came back up to the surface, looked in my hands and realized that I had strands of tree bark in my hands. I looked up to tell Julie what I had found and she was not there. I was terrified. I was so cold and weak at this point that not seeing her when my head came out of the water completely freaked me out. I called out for her and within seconds her beautiful face was looking down at me. I implored her to always be there when I came up, the water was so cold and incredibly dark I was not comfortable at all, as a matter of fact I was frightened.

While I was talking to her my right foot hit something in the water a couple of feet behind the rudder and about 4 feet down. I moved my feet around found what felt like a pole sticking straight back about 4 feet below the water. I dove down and using my hands in the inky black water realized that the pole was in fact a tree trunk about 6 or 7 inches in diameter, that would help to explain the bark wrapped around the shaft. I came back up to the surface and suddenly had a strong suspicion about why the engine died each time we put it in gear.

I dove back down, found the propeller and used my hands to trace the outline of the 4 blades of the prop. I made it thru 3 of the blades and finally to the 4th when I encountered the same tree trunk that I had just been standing on. The blade of the propeller was buried almost 2 inches into the tree trunk and appeared to be slightly bent. I surfaced and went to the boat, found the tree with my feet, put my hands under the bottom of the boat, stuck my head under water again to get better leverage and tried to break the tree away from the prop. I have always had strong legs, I wrestled 119 pounds my senior year in high school and could leg press 375 pounds. If that same strength to weight ratio held up I should be able to leg press close to 600 pounds. Of course we do tend to fade over time but I was still trying like hell.

A few minutes later I was in the boat, soaked to the bone and shaking uncontrollably and we were still stuck solidly to the tree. Julie helped dry me off and get me dressed in sweats and laid against me for a few minutes to get me to stop shaking………….. I really hate being this cold.
A little while later all was well except for the fact that we were sitting there with our propeller stuck into a submerged cypress tree on the ICW with barge traffic going past us. So we did what anyone else would do, we turned on all of our lights, hung lanterns on the back of the boat and got on the radio to alert tugs of our situation.

Actually we did not get on the radio, Julie got on the radio. She was feeling a little better now and as we mentioned before, these guys would much rather listen to a woman than a man especially when it was something like this. She would occasionally hail a passing tug to explain our situation and ask if they new of any locals that could pull us off. She also asked for the tug captains to pass the word up and down the river that we were stuck here and to keep an eye open for us. None of the captains knew of anyone that could pull us off and they all wished us luck and said that they would pass the word about us stuck and sticking out into the channel, all except for one. Some old fart came back on the radio, after Julie explained that we were stuck on a tree, and repeatedly told us that we had picked a really bad place to park. Julie tried again to explain the situation but the opinionated old fart didn’t want to hear anything but his opinion. As I write this I wonder if I am becoming an opinionated old fart,. Obviously the answer is no, and obviously I don’t care what you think.

We spent the night on the side of the “highway” with the radio on sleeping a little at a time, talking to tugs occasionally about our plight. Most of the tugs apparently had heard that we were stuck there and slowed down when they came closer. I thought of how much fuel we were wasting with these tugs slowing down and speeding up for us and felt guilty. With this thought in mind I decided that we need to be a little more considerate the next time we get stuck. The barge traffic died down a little after 4:00 am, I turned the radio off, and we actually slept for 2 hours.

About 6:30 we got up and were trying to evaluate the situation with fresh yet sleepy eyes to see if there was some way we could get unstuck. I wasn’t getting in the water again; if I had a scuba tank and a real dry suit I could have dove down and used a saw to extract the propeller from the tree, but I had neither.

We were standing on deck, Julie still sick, trying to figure out what to do when an all aluminum power boat with twin outboards came by doing about 15 miles per hour. I tried to hail them on the radio by description, “Eastbound workboat passing the sailboat on the side of the cannel come in please.”, with no response. I then started waiving my hands at them but they kept going. They were about 200 feet past us when they throttled back to an idle and turned back towards us. When they got close to us a young guy ran to the bow of the boat and asked , “How you doing?” , I replied, not so good. He then asked, “do you all need help?” I said, “you bet”. Another guy in his mid 40’s that looked like a guy that I am sure I saw on a Louisiana Cooking show (Y’all remember Justin Wilson saying “add a little onion”, which sounded like onyon, “I guarantee.”

We talked about our situation and they said that they would pull us off. We scurried about and started removing the lines from the Cypress trees on shore and the kid on the work boat jumped into the John boat or as he called it “Joeboat” that they had on their fore deck (that would be the little flat front part of the deck of the boat in front of the little house part in the middle). He took off the bow line while we removed the stern and mid-ship line.
We took the bow line of our boat that had just been looped around a Cypress tree and handed it to the kid. He started to wrap the line around the cleat at the back of their boat when the older guy walked out of the boats cabin and said, “Don’t be tying any of your coonass knots now.”.

In case you don’t know what a coonass is, the following is from Wikipedia.
Coonass, or Coon-ass, is an epithet used in reference to a person of Cajun ethnicity. Although many Cajuns use the word in regard to themselves, other Cajuns view the term as an ethnic slur against the Cajun people, especially when used by non-Cajuns. Socioeconomic factors appear to influence how Cajuns are likely to view the term: working-class Cajuns tend to regard the word "coonass" as a badge of ethnic pride; whereas middle- and upper-class Cajuns are more likely to regard the term as insulting or degrading, even when used by fellow Cajuns in reference to themselves.

The working class kid laughed and cleated the line off to their boat and said that we should get away from the front of the boat just in case the line snapped when they were pulling it. He waved at us and they both stepped back into the cabin of the work boat. They pulled the boat straight out from the shore slowly until it the line got tight and they stopped. They then started to throttle up until both 250 horsepower outboard engines were roaring and the boat was almost dancing on the water. After a minute of pulling their boat had drifted down river so they backed up the river and pulled again, this time aiming a little more upstream so the current wouldn’t affect them so much. The second time around ended up just like the first go around, only it took a little longer. On the 3rd try they headed even further upstream and started to throttle up when the fine yacht Second Star pulled away from the shore effortlessly. Both of the guys on the work boat came out of the cabin with confused looks on their faces, which probably mirrored the look on my face. Julie was the only one that wasn’t amazed and she said, “That explains the loud cracking noise I heard at the end of the last try.” Apparently the propeller had broken away from the tree it was stuck in when they had finished pulling the last time and we were already free when they tried the 3rd time.

They said that they would pull us back up to the boat ramp up stream and we told them that we had tried it the night before and ran aground. I told them that I wanted to try to motor on our own so they idled backwards as I collected our anchor line. When they threw the tail to me Julie throttled up a little bit and we started to move ever so slowly back up the river. She immediately slowed the boat down but even at 1,000 RPM ,which was almost idle speed, the rear end of the boat was moving around like a washing machine on spin cycle with a bunch of towels clumped up on one side. We looked up and the top of the mast was also tracing 3 foot diameter circles in the sky. Something was definitely amok and we were pretty sure it was the propeller.

The boat was unwieldy but we slowly headed up the canal. The guys on the work boat stuck around and asked what we planned to do. I told them that I thought that the cut out next to the bridge across from the boat launch looked kind of promising but I wasn’t sure how deep it was.
They said that they would find out and shot over there and ran aground near the opening with their 1 foot draft. They then took it upon themselves to find us a place that was deep enough.
After a few minutes they came back and told us that the canal was pretty deep against the bridge abutment on the downstream side from the boat launch. We went up river, spun around and slowly motored over towards the abutment which was at a 45 degree angle to the main channel. We were surprised to find that it was so deep there that when we finally tied up the back of the boat only stuck out into the channel few inches. The weird part was that if you jumped off of the front of the boat you would most likely break your ankles on the large flat rocks that were there.

Our buddies on the work boat had helped us get docked and said that they would check with us later in the day when they got done with their rounds. We found out later that they worked for ConocoPhillips Oil and did a daily checkup of a handful of oil rigs that were out on some of the shallow lakes and bays in the area. These rigs were fully automated but they would check on them regularly to do some of the checkups and maintenance that still required human beings.
We looked on the internet and called around looking for divers with no luck. We then tried dive shops but they didn’t get into the commercial part of the business. We next tried a propeller repair shop and they suggested a guy and gave us his phone number. We called him and he said he would pull our prop and come back to reinstall it for $1,000 but he didn’t take checks or credit cards, cash only. Now this was an issue, we usually had a couple hundred bucks stashed away on the boat for minor emergencies but were down to about $80 after our last fuel stop and a dinner. Our debit card would only allot $300 per day which meant that it would take 4 days to come up with the cash our “buddy” wanted.

Later that day our work boat buddies showed up again after making their rounds on the local oil rigs and asked how we were doing. We told them about our problems with the diver we found and they said that they would look into it for us. The next morning thy stopped by with a phone number of another diver that might be a little less expensive and a little more flexible with respect to payment terms. We thanked them and called the diver they recommended. This diver was only going to charge us $875.00, unless it was real easy, and would take a check. So we set up a time to have them come by and pull the propeller. One of his divers was a young guy that was going to school to be a helicopter pilot and would be passing by in the morning to go to school and coming back in the afternoon. He was to pull our prop in the morning, we would get it fixed during the day and he would reinstall it that afternoon.

We called our good buddies at Enterprise car rental and told them that we needed to be picked up and that we were under the Bayou Salee bridge. They came back and asked if we were near to the bridge and we said no, we were under the bridge, next to the boat ramp and they said that they would send someone out to pick us up. An hour later I was standing under the bridge when a new Ford F150 pickup pulled up and I hopped in. The driver was a young black guy who drove me back to Franklin LA and the car rental office. On the way there, I asked him what the strange stalk-like crops where growing in the fields that we passed, he replied that they where sugar cane. (It worked out that Julie returned the car a couple of days later and the same young guy dropped her off at the boat. He asked her where I was from because I didn’t even know what sugar cane looked like.)

Did I mention that it was cold again? It was mid December in southern Louisiana and despite what it should be, it was cold. Seems while we were tied to a bridge abutment on the side of the ICW/GIWW they had snow for the first time in 20 years. All the tugs and people we came in contact with were all excited about it. Of course they had heaters and furnaces and stuff like that that kept you warm. All we could do was add layers of clothing and huddle around our little 6” heater to try to keep warm, then we ran out of propane and it got really cold.
After I picked up the car I went to a grocery store to pick up dinner and then to Wal-Mart and bought up their entire stock of 1 pound canisters of propane gas for our heater, a grand total of 12 cans.

Everybody gets extra layers!

The next morning came and went and no one showed up to take off our prop. After a handful of calls we finally got in touch with the owner of the company and found out that our guy wasn’t going to show up until that afternoon. I kept kicking myself (figuratively speaking) because I could remove the prop myself if I had a dry suit, tank and associated gear and of course a divers certificate and it would cost only a little more than I was going to pay to have them remove the prop. But I didn’t so I was stuck, literally.

The diver showed up late in the afternoon and walked over to survey the situation. I explained what was what and he went back to his pickup to change into his dive gear. We both walked down the embankment next to the bridge and I got into the dinghy while he walked into the water near the bow of the boat and swam back to the stern to evaluate the situation.
I sat in the dinghy watching his bubbles and occasionally talking to him and handed him wrenches and other tools to free the propeller. 15 minutes later we were heading back to shore and I had the prop in the dinghy with me. It was late in the day and the local repair propeller place that Julie had talked to the day before was closed so we settled in for another frigid night in Southern Louisiana. The next morning Julie called the prop shop. YOU TELL THE STORY HERE BABE.

I spoke with a very nice guy names Joel and explained that we had hit a tree and our prop was bent so I felt that we would need a new one. He said that would be expensive and that they could us a rosebud torch and hammers to repair ours. He wanted to confirm the size of our wheel. Now I was a little confused. What did it matter how big the wheel was, it was our prop that was bent. After a little Laurel and Hardyesque exchange Joel slowly explained, so that any five year old could understand, that there are 3 types of propulsion systems for vessels “A little boat like ours has a propeller, a bigger boat like a tug boat has a wheel, and a really big boat has screws”. They would be happy to fix our propeller. I asked him what it would cost and would he take a check or credit, after the divers I was feeling a little vulnerable to being taken. He said “don’t your worry miss Julie we’ll fix you up and there won’t be any charge”. I jumped into the rental car and drove the 30 miles to the prop shop. It was amazing to see the guys with torches heating huge 4 foot diameter wheels and using two sledge hammers against each other top and bottom on the metal to pound them back into shape. By comparison they used a Bic lighter and tack hammer to fix ours. 2 hours and a gift of a large box of donuts later they were done.

Houston I think we have a proplem.

I have to say that despite the awful circumstance of this particular week the hospitality and genuine concern shown by the guys from Conoco and Joel at the prop shop made this bearable. Our friends that pulled us off of the tree checked on us twice a day. It was 28 degrees and they new that we had very little heat and wanted to make sure we were ok. They brought a huge container of the best home made gumbo I have ever eaten and picked us up on the 3rd night and took us back to the house that they live in all week so that we could shower. It turns out that southern hospitality isn’t dead it’s just well hidden. BACK TO YOU

The next day we found out that our young diver buddy was off in the Gulf looking for a helicopter that had crashed with 3 men on board, which seemed a little ironic since he was going to school to be a helicopter pilot. We wondered how he felt about diving for members of the profession that he hoping to join but then realized that helicopter pilots probably had better survival rate than divers and made more money.

Later that day the owner of the company came by and installed the prop despite the fact that our fearless mutt, Ziggy tried to scale the bridge abutment to attack him when he showed up without warning and yelled down to us. Ziggy had jumped off of the boat on to the timber wall and I had to pull him off of the wall before he fell back into the canal. As bad as this was, he really freaked out when our diver showed up again wearing his dry suit, tank and hood looking like the creature from the black lagoon. When the diver dropped into the water I got on the radio and told the closest tug who and where we were and that we had a diver in the water replacing our wheel. He came back and said that he would alert all other vessels in the area. The installation took 15 minutes and 2 tugs passed by at the slowest speed I had seen on the canal. When he was out I told the nearest tug and it was business as usual.

We were ready to go but it was late afternoon and it was a long day to the next possible anchorage so we decided to spend another night tied to the Bayou Salee bridge, we would leave before dawn the next morning.

New Orleans and West

2008-12-28T08:26:00.000-06:00

December 7, 2008

After our 2 night stay in the Rigolets we headed up into Lake Pontchartrain and under the I-10 bridge which was a 75’ tall interstate that we could easily pass under with our 64‘ mast. This was the second bridge we had passed under since Marathon Key and even though we had a chance to measure the height of the mast when it was pulled from the boat to confirm the height, it still looked like we would hit it when we went under it.
About 100 yards after the bridge we made a right and headed towards shore to Oak Harbor marina following the markers for the channel. We had talked to the harbormaster and asked about the depth going into the harbor. He said with our 7’ draft it normally wouldn’t be a problem but we were at low tide and it was the lowest tide he had seen in 2 years. He also told us that he bottom was soft mud and that we should be able to power thru it.
About 500 feet from the marina the depth sounder said we should be aground and the boat started to slow down. During the worst of this we showed a depth of -1.2 feet and we were moving at 1.2 knots with the throttle wide open. We finally made it to the harbor where the depth was over 10 feet.
There where 2 docks in a harbor that could easily hold 10 docks, we later found out that there were 10 docks before hurricane Katrina but they were all destroyed. We found our slip, docked the boat and went to check in. It was nice to be safely tied to a dock with shore power.
Later that night while waiting for a pizza to be delivered, the gate guard showed me pictures of the destruction with 40 foot power boats lodged between the condo buildings that surrounded the marina. The guard told me that he had taped an illegal parking ticket onto the hull of a boat and when the owner arrived to survey the damage he thanked him for making him laugh instead of crying.
Additional pictures taken by a resident during the hurricane showed that the water had raised up 6 feet out of the harbor and another 8 feet to the balconies on the second floor. There were pictures of the road that led to the condo/marina complex. It was lined with dozens of boats that had floated past the condos and were stopped by the row of trees next to the road.
It’s one thing to see these images on TV but it is completely different to see them in the place where it happened. This perspective greatly increases the impact of the images.
The next morning we motored a short distance to get fuel and were surprised to see diesel at $4.65 per gallon, not that it mattered, they were closed during the week in the off season. We had some fuel, not sure how much, and 20 miles to go across Lake Pontchartrain to get to New Orleans where we could hopefully get some fuel.
There was a decent breeze so we sailed most of the way across the Lake and after some research on the internet we found that there was a gas dock open just around the corner from the city marina where we had reserved a slip for the night.
We filled up and were pleased to find that their diesel was only $2.58 per gallon, a full two dollars cheaper than the place that was closed.
We entered the marina and went down between the wrong docks and had to turn around. The boat is 47 feet long but with the dinghy hanging off of the davits in back we were about 52 foot long and the distance between the 2 docks was about 60 feet. Julie offered to spin the boat around and I gladly let her. After a successful 6 point turn we went around to the correct slip.
Going ashore to check in we found the main building empty but spotted a worksite trailer a little further down on the seawall. We walked down and checked in. It had been had ripped thru over three years before they were still working out of a temporary facility and would be for few more months until repairs were complete.
Inland from the marina was a 10 foot tall concrete wall with huge steel doors opened to provide access to the marina. Later we found out that we were in the 9th ward where some of the levees had been breached during Katrina.
While walking to a local grocery store we passed an empty store front in an otherwise occupied and busy strip mall with water marks on it that were 8 feet up. A block away there was a townhouse complex with about 150 upscale units that was completely unoccupied. There were signs of work being done on some of them but many of them sat there with windows and garage doors torn off, it was odd to say the least.
We were still beat so we rented a car and decided to do some errands and some sightseeing.
When we had to get towed in the Rigolets the Sea Tow captain asked if we were going to the French Quarter and suggested that we go to Pat O’Brien’s. We said we would go there and he told us to call him when we arrived, it seems that his best friend from college was the general manager and he wanted us to get the royal treatment after all of our problems.
Upon arriving at Pat O’Brien’s we gave captain Christian from Sea Tow a call and he said he would give us a call right back. We were standing in the courtyard when we saw a guy walk down the stairs talking on his cell phone and looking around. I asked if he was talking to Christian and he said yes to me, goodbye to Christian and introduced himself.
For the next hour we got free drinks, a tour and a detailed history of the original French Quarter drinking establishment which had it’s roots in the speakeasy days and created the infamous rum drink called a Hurricane.
We ate a tasty dinner at the Gumbo Shop and strolled around for an hour taking in the sights of the French Quarter, which is actually a National Park. The only park that liquor is not only allowed but appears to be encouraged. This would be evident by the fact that after dark the streets in the Quarter are barricaded off and you can roam the streets sipping your favorite libations.
At the far end of one of the streets we strolled down we came into an area that was filled with topless bars. There was even one that claimed on it’s marquee that they had the most gorgeous transvestites anywhere. We turned around and headed back when we were confronted by a hawker trying to sell the bare wares that were inside the doors of the establishment. We said no thanks to which he replied “ It’s OK, couples are welcome, it’s family night”. We burst out laughing and kept walking.
The next day was Sunday and we left the city marina and sailed 5 or so miles to the mouth of the industrial canal to another marina where we would spend the night and venture off at first light. The next day we had the task of getting thru the canal and all of the barges and ships that traverse it. Like all vessels we had to use the industrial locks that keep Lake Pontchartrain out of New Orleans then venture down a few miles of the Mississippi then as far down the ICW as we could get.
Sunday morning we left the marina and motored a mile to the first draw bridge in the industrial canal and requested an opening. The bridge tender replied that the traffic gate (just like a gate at a train crossing) was malfunctioning and it would take a little time to stop traffic. After 15 minutes we called back and asked humbly, as we always did, what was going on and how long it was going to be, He came back that the electrician would be there in ½ hour to fix the gate. We replied that we were going to find somewhere to park and asked that he gave us a call on the radio when the gate was fixed, he agreed to do that.
We went back to the marina where we had spent the night and finally at 9:00 we got the call from the bridge tender that we could come thru and we did.
As we motored down the Industrial Canal we first passed by a facility that built huge 100 foot plus luxury yachts and then hundreds of fishing boats and ships that had been destroyed and washed up on the shore by Katina. The scenery ran from one extreme to the other.
Our next huge obstacle was the Industrial Locks that according to some of the guides are almost impossible to get thru and pleasure craft were not welcome. Julie was concerned about going thru the locks so she had called the day before to speak with the lock master to ask about procedures.
As we approached the locks we radioed ahead to request an opening to which they replied that they would open momentarily and that we should drive in and they would throw us lines to hang on to when the gate on the other side opened.
To those who are not familiar with locks, they are a means to bring boats from one body of water to another that is at a different height. The basic theory behind them is that a boat pulls into a lock and watertight doors close behind them. There are doors on the other end of the lock that then open allowing water to enter or exit the locks until the water is the same level as the water outside of it. The level of the water can change in a lock anywhere from a few inches to 40 feet depending.
You may ask why anyone would want to do this and there are numerous reasons. The Panama canal joins the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans shortening the trip from Japan to New York by thousands and thousands of miles. The canal does not go straight across the Isthmus of Panama but goes up over a mountain range that runs through the center of the country. Boats are raised up going thru locks up to the crest of this ridge and lowered down thru the other side using additional locks.
Where we were the locks separated Lake Pontchartrain from the Mississippi river and the change was only a raise of a foot though during the spring flood season the difference was 14 feet or so.
Anyway we entered the locks and immediately the guys on the lock yelled down that we were under arrest. I didn’t get it at first but Julie was laughing and I realized that she had quoted the one guide book that talked about getting crushed or getting arrested. Seems she had mentioned that we were coming through in the morning aboard a 47’ sailboat that didn’t want to get squished and apparently we were the only vessel that matched that description this morning.
We talked to the lockmaster and got as much “local knowledge” that he could spare regarding the next leg of the days travels. The entire process took 15 minutes and we were not crushed by a barge or arrested.
While in the lock we had tried to contact the bridge tender in the draw bridge that was 100 feet beyond the exit of the locks to no avail. The lockmaster suggested that they were probably in the bathroom and called them on the phone. We now had an appointment for a bridge opening as soon as the locks open.
We bid the folks at the lock farewell, passed under the drawbridge and headed down toward the Mississippi.

Industrial Locks with drawbridge beyond

Our next goal was to head south 5 miles down the Mississippi, turn left into the Algiers canal and locks. As we motored out into the Mississippi we passed ships that were washed up on the shore from Katrina and many more that were anchored in the river in designated anchorages. There were ships ranging from 400 to 800 feet long from ports all around the world sitting at anchor waiting for something.
We quickly found ourselves nearing the Algiers locks so we contacted the lockmaster and asked to be allowed to pass thru. He told us that there 4 barges heading eastward, opposite from our westward course, that would be coming thru in a little bit and told us to wait outside the locks off to the side to wait for them.

Ships at anchor on the Mississippi

Boats on the shore after Katrina

It was pretty windy and we were having a hard time staying in one place so we turned around and head the ¼ mile back to the Mississippi river where we could go in slow circles and have some control. As soon as we headed out the lockmaster came on the radio and scolded us for leaving the staging area. Julie explained that we did not steer well at low speed so we need to retreat to where we had more room to maneuver. The lockmaster quickly came back and told us to stay in the area we were to the south of the opening to the Algiers canal until the first barge came though then we were to come into the locks and pass through.
What he hadn’t said was we were to come thru and get the hell out of the way but that unspoken direction seemed pretty obvious to us. Even though we have equal rights to the waterways with commercial traffic and equal responsibilities we were learning that the professionals would just as soon let us go thru early and have us out of their way.
We successfully passed thru the Algiers locks and continued on towards the city of Lafitte where we would make a slight detour of a couple of miles to a marina where we were told they had 7’ depths and we could spend the night. Along the ICW from New Orleans until you get to Galveston there are very few marinas designed for larger boats, especially a sailboat, since the water outside of the ICW tends to run on the shallow side in the bayous and swamps. Not to mention the hurricane damage.
We motored 3 miles down to the marina in Lafitte (which was named after the 19th century pirate Jean Lafitte) and proceeded to get stuck before we could even enter the small harbor. We decided to try to tie up along the outside break wall, along the main channel, but ran aground about 5 feet from the shore. Apparently the woman that told us that our 7 foot draft was no problem didn’t know what she was talking about ,so we motored back to where we had turned off of the ICW and found a place to anchor for the night.
The next morning we continued west down the ICW with no particular destination since there were no marinas for several hundred miles beyond this. We had left civilization for a while and enjoyed the scenery.
That evening we anchored on the side of the ICW in a small bay ,surround by swamps and a handful of small trees, that was not full of oil harvesting equipment.
I took Ziggy to shore and both of us almost fell victim to the quicksand like mud. I put him on shore with his lifejacket on and he tried to walk inland. Within 5 feet he sank in ¾ of the way up his legs, struggled to get out and made it to a tuft of grass in this muddy bog. For the first time ever he went potty, “Good boy go potty”, while wearing his lifejacket.
I coaxed him back into the dinghy and tried to row back out where it was deep enough to motor back to the boat. Somehow we had gotten stuck in the mud so I tried to use the oar to push away from land, I soon discovered that we were definitely stuck.
I jumped off of the front of the dinghy onto a piece of wood and used the oar to shove the dinghy further away then laid a branch in the mud to step on to get back in the dinghy. After a minute more of pushing we were back in deeper water. Ziggy was going to have to wait until we found real land the next day before he had the chance to get back to shore.
Back on the boat we set up a lantern in the cockpit, put together some snacks and poured a glass of wine so we could relax, reflect on the day and enjoy this unique landscape. Then the mosquitoes came. I wanted to get a picture of our repast in the setting sun and Julie agreed to pose even though the swarm was arriving. I took a few shots when she proclaimed that we were done and we both grabbed our snacks and stuff and dashed below and closed up the cabin. Thank goodness it was late fall otherwise the bugs would have been really bad .

The Rigolets

2008-12-27T09:45:00.000-06:00

November 29, 2008

We left the anchorage at Horn Island and continued on our passage westward thru the Mississippi Sound on our way toward Lake Pontchartrain that would take us into the New Orleans area and on to the ICW. We had made the decision to come inland to utilize the protection of the ICW. The other option was going around the Mississippi river delta which was a 200+ mile trip thru the gulf and the weather forecast was not great. The inland trip follows the twists and curves of the ICW as it connects the dots of existing rivers and lakes. It’s about 150 miles further and 3 days longer but much safer.
The weather had been decent but the forecast was for high winds and scattered thunderstorms. As the skies around us started to darken we turned on the weather function on our Garmin which was fed by our XM Radio. With this service we could overlay wind speed and direction on the map along with full blown weather radar. The weather radar showed storm cells all around us. The storm cell show as symbols that can be highlighted with a cursor that shows the speed and direction of these cells.
It looked like we were going to get lucky, most of the cells were directly west of us and heading northeast meaning they should miss us. The forecast proved true, so we missed the 60 mph winds that were associated with these cells, but we still motored thru 30+ mph winds and plenty of rain which lasted for a couple of hours.

Birds around a fishing boat

At the end of the day we anchored just a ¼ mile from the Mississippi sound off of Catfish Point in a group of islands called the Rigolet’s (Rigolees to those in the know). We found a small channel off of the ICW that was deep enough to anchor and settled in. I took Ziggy ashore and found the bank was not solid but mostly swamp. It was almost dusk and I kept hearing strange sounds that sounded a lot like people talking in the distance but I knew that the only signs of civilization for miles around was a train track and an old decrepit oil platform. Julie heard the same sounds and called me back to the boat.
She went online and we listened to the sounds of alligator territory calls which sounded like people talking in the distance, a little scary. We decided to find some real land before we took Ziggy ashore in the morning.
As we sat in the cockpit in the setting sun the old oil platform took on a very eerie look. The platform was a metal building probably 75’ by 150’ sitting on a steel frame about 40 feet off of the water. The legs on the platform were twisted on one side and the whole thing leaned. The building itself was rusted and parts of the roof and some of the walls were missing, it had the look of some battle robot from some sci-fi movie.

Old oil rig

The next morning it was sunny but very windy. We pulled anchor and motored over to the railroad bridge that was about a mile away and tried to call them on the radio to have them open up. We ended up talking to several bridge tenders until we were able to determine which bridge we were looking at.
You would think that if they heard someone on the radio saying “Railroad bridge tender, this is the sail vessel Second Star, come in please” and they looked out the window of the tender building and saw a sailboat sitting in front of the bridge they might reply. Apparently that’s not how it goes, we have found that unless you know the correct name of the bridge they don’t often reply even if they are the only bridge within radio range.
The 500 page federal guide we downloaded doesn’t help much either, they often have the wrong name and inevitably the phone number they provide ended up dumping us into to the voicemail of some young woman. We had better luck using Google earth to identify the river or island names that were closest to the bridge we were trying to contact.
Something else we learned fairly quickly was that we were far more successful if Julie made the call. Most of the bridge tenders dealt with tugboats, fisherman and ships and enjoyed talking to women. Julie started using her maple syrup with powdered sugar voice which worked even better. I wonder why she doesn’t talk to me like that anymore.
After passing by the bridge we head up Pearl River and it was just a few miles to go before we got to Lake Pontchartrain. We were only ½ mile past the bridge when the engine sputtered, running at only an idle. I knew immediately what was wrong.
We have 3 fuel tanks on the boat and I always kept 2 open until they were almost empty when I would open the 3rd tank. I then knew it was time to refuel and we had 33 gallons and about another 100 miles worth of fuel.
I had noticed the previous day that the 2 tanks were getting low but I had never opened the 3rd tank. I ran below and opened the 3rd tank but the engine was still barely running. I went below to kill the engine so I could quickly bleed the air out of the system that was sucked in when the other tanks went empty.
I was down below pumping the purge as quick as I could but there was still a ton of air burbling out of the drain tube into the jar I was draining it into.
Julie yelled down below that we were getting close to shore. We had been in the middle of the channel which was about ½ mile wide so I figured that she was just panicking. I told her to hold on, and that we would be running again.
She yelled a minute later that we were getting close and I asked how deep the water was she replied that it was 15’. I told her that I would be done soon. 15 seconds later she yelled again and I asked again how deep it was and she said 10 feet.
I ran up top and to the bow to drop the anchor which I did… just as we ran aground.
The boat was parallel to the shore being pushed towards it by the wind, we spent the next 1 ½ hours trying to get the boat out of the mud bank. The first thing I did was finish bleeding the air out of the system which took another 15 minutes. We tried to power out of the mud but being parallel to the shore we only seemed to get stuck even worse.
Using the dinghy I took the second, smaller anchor about 150 feet out into river and set it as best as I could with the dinghy. We tied the anchor line to the spinnaker halyard and cranked it in with a winch. This technique, called kedging, did 2 things, first it pulled the boat away from the shore, second it tipped the boat over since we were pulling from the top of the mast which effectively raised the keel up. Unfortunately the tide was going out and after 30 minutes of grinding the winch as hard as we could we realized that this wasn’t going to work.
We got online and called SeaTow which is a nationwide company that rescues stuck and stranded boaters. We had signed up for SeaTow at a cost of $140 per year early on in the trip as we had read about the cost of a typical tow running over $1,000. Looks like our insurance was going to pay off.
An hour later the SeaTow boat arrived and fed us a line. He tightened up the line and gave his twin 200 horsepower engine full throttle. The bow of the boat pivoted out and we started moving across the channel. About 300 feet out we were doing 6 knots when the boat suddenly pirouetted around and came to a stop. Apparently we had come to the end of the line on our 55 pound anchor. I had untied the second anchor and put a lifejacket on the line as it was shorter than the primary anchor. I never thought we would be pulled out as far as we were.
It was about 2:00 in the afternoon and the wind was getting stronger so we decided to motor the 5 miles or so to the marina and come back in the morning to get our 2 anchors. We motored up the river which took us to Lake Pontchartrain where the north west winds were whipping up some good size waves.
We were motoring about 200 yards from the rocky north shore when the engine started to stammer again. This was not good at all, the wind was driving us towards the shore and we had no anchors to stop us if the engine died.
We decided to set the sail and turn back towards the relative shelter of the river and the engine stopped sputtering. Our plan now was to go back where we had lost our anchors so I could grab the line for the second anchor we had dropped with life vest tied to it. This should be easy enough to do in the dinghy and when I had it Julie would drive the boat up to me and so I would pass it up to her and we could anchor. It was set far enough from the shore that we should have no problem getting stuck again.
As we got down to the area where the anchors were I dropped the sail and got into the dinghy. I had the life vest and the anchor line in the dinghy when I waved to Julie at the far side of the channel. She waved back at me frantically and I realized that something was wrong.
I dropped the line, sped across the channel and found out that the engine was barely running.
I got aboard and we discussed the situation. We were about ½ mile from the railroad bridge with the wind blowing us towards the portion of it that did not open. The engine was barely running. We still had no anchor. It was almost dusk. We decided to use what little power we had and the wind behind our backs to run the boat on to the shore which we did.
We called SeaTow again and talked to them about our situation. They were reluctant to come out because they had to cross Lake Pontchartrain and it was getting really rough. In the end they agreed to come out and set an anchor for us so we wouldn’t drift into the bridge if we broke free from the mud when the tide came in and the engine didn’t run.
They showed up just after dusk and dropped an anchor about 150’ upwind in the channel from where we were stuck. He let out some line, cleated off the anchor line on the bow of their boat and backed up under full power to set the anchor.
They tried to get close to us to hand us the line when I noticed that the end of the anchor line was wrapped around their outboard. The assistant on the boat almost fell in while we doing this but managed to hang on. It took them about 10 minutes but they finally got untangled and handed us the anchor line. They agreed to get us in the morning if we couldn’t get off in the night when the tide broke us free.
Shortly after they left I found that the fuel line going to the engine had kinked shutting off the fuel. I cut the wire tie that was used to hold the fuel line in place where it went around a 2” diameter support, which allowed the line to straighten out. We tried the engine and it ran flawlessly.
I went to sleep while Julie sat up on watch. She woke me up about midnight with the sensation of the boat moving freely in the waves, we were not completely free but we were not hard aground.
We backed out of the mud and started drifting downstream waiting for the anchor to stop us. We had gone much farther than I expected so I went forward and started pulling in the anchor line. It didn’t take long to realize that there was no anchor at the end of the line.
We now had another dilemma. We had anchor line in the water so we couldn’t motor forward and we were drifting towards a fishing boat that had anchored in the channel with it’s nets out, trying to catch fish as they came by in the tidal current. By the time we had all of the anchor line on board we were 100 feet from the fishing boat. Apparently we scared the captain of that boat as he was waving his flashlight madly at us. We motored away trying to decide what to do next.
We decided to break the law and tie up to one of the ICW markers. There was one across the channel in the lee of land which would give us shelter from the waves so we headed over.
I was on the bow of the boat as Julie guided the boat towards the marker, which is basically a telephone pole set in the riverbed with a red triangle and a flashing red light on it telling all that saw it where the channel was. We were about 50 feet away when we ran aground.
I jumped into the dinghy, Julie fed the anchor line into it and I started heading towards the marker. I was about 15 feet away when I heard Julie yelling. I turned around and realized that the boat was no longer stuck and she was drifting away.
I climbed back into the boat and we drove into the mud again only this time we were going 3 knots not ½ knot like we were the first time. It held this time and I was able to get the boat tied to the marker. Since it was high tide the water would only get shallower, so we decided to back the boat out of the mud. Julie powered up in reverse and soon we were out. With the boat safely tied to the marker we went to bed and slept soundly.
The next day it was windier than it had been and it was very cold so we decided to spend the next 24 hours there.
The fuel gauge for the 3rd tank showed that we had less than ¼ tank which was a little disconcerting since the we were not sure how soon we could get fuel. Many of the marinas in the New Orleans area were destroyed by Katrina and we couldn’t find out on the internet if any were open or if fuel was available.
With this uncertainty about our fuel situation we didn’t want to run the gen-set to run our sanders or even the space heater. We cleaned the boat thoroughly but spent most of the day reading and talking. It was odd to just sit around like this since we have always been hardworking and not the type to just sit around all day. We finally got comfortable with the fact that we were stuck and actually had a mini vacation.
The next day the wind died and the temperature was supposed to climb into the 60’s, so it was time to go anchor hunting. We motored down to where we had been stuck and I did as we had planned and easily retrieved the smaller anchor which we tied the boat to.
With the boat firmly anchored it was time to retrieve the other anchor which was a 2 month old Delta anchor along with a 1 month old 75 foot length of 3/8” chain and 175’ feet of ¾” anchor line that in total cost about $1,000.
I had paid attention to several landmarks around where we had dropped the anchor so I changed into my dry suit. The dry suit was not a diving type of dry suit but a sailing type for small boats that I had bought years before when racing Lasers (a 1 man racing boat that tips easily) on Lake Michigan in the fall.
We hopped into the dinghy headed towards shore where I hopped out of the dinghy and walked around the area I thought the anchor should be.
It was hard to walk around since the bottom was all mud. There was a semi-hard mantle or crust on top that you could walk on most of the time but occasionally the crust would break and I would sink into the incredibly soft mud below. One time I sucked in so deep I almost panicked, OK, maybe I panicked a little. After that I held on to the dinghy while I walked around.
After a half hour or so we decided to try a different tack and went back to the boat, changed back into dry clothes and McGyver’ed a treble hook using 2 gaff hooks, a boat hook and a 5lb lead weight. We tied a line to treble hook and tied it to dinghy and motored slowly back and forth for about ½ hour hoping to snag the chain or line. We were just about ready to throw the towel in but on the last pass we caught the chain. We pulled the chain up enough to tie a line with a life vest to it and went back to the boat where I changed back into my dry suit.
We went out to where we had snagged the chain and pulled it up to the dinghy again and pulled ourselves hand over hand along on the chain towards where the anchor was. When we got to where we could not pull the chain up anymore I jumped in the water which was about 50 degrees and used my feet to follow the chain.
About 6 feet further it disappeared into the soft mud where the water was about 5 feet deep. When I had dropped the anchor originally I had managed to drop it in about 3 feet of water just as we ran aground. The anchor had also been about 20 feet closer to the shore and barely hooked into the mud.
I cleared as much of the mud away from the chain as I could with my feet and then dove down and started clearing as much as I could with my hands. The mud was soft and cleared away easily but after a dozen or so dives my hands were 2 feet down into the mud, about 6 feet underwater, and I still hadn’t touched the top of the anchor.
We determined that when the tow boat had pulled us out to the middle of the channel and we came to the end of the anchor line the 40,000lbs of boat moving at 6 knots had pulled the anchor to some incredible depth in the mud.
The only way to pull the anchor out was either tie a line to the head of the anchor or to use the boat to pull it out backwards. I couldn’t reach the head of the anchor and the only way to pull it backwards would be with a bulldozer or crane on the beach. We realized that we could not salvage our new anchor so we decided to try to salvage the chain and line.
We went back to the boat and I changed out of my leaky dry suit and into my clothes and we went back out to pull the line out so we could retrieve it. We took the line that was around the chain and using a sawing motion slowly worked down the chain towards where we thought the end of the line would be. We only went about 30 feet along the chain before we were on the anchor line meaning that 40 feet of chain was buried in the mud. We later heard a story of a boat having it’s anchor 20’ deep in the mud under similar circumstances, this was a commercial boat and they had a nearby barge and crane that they used to pull it up.
We went as far as we could out on the line but it was apparently snagged or caught on something so tightly we could not lift it up into the dinghy. We decided that the best way to salvage the line and chain was to cut the chain off where it disappeared into the mud, drag it back to the boat and use the diesel to pull the line free.
So it was back to the boat and into my swimsuit this time, the dry suit leaked so badly and was so cold it just didn’t seem worth it.
I brought along the bolt cutters and went back to the float that we had left tied to the chain and jumped into the water. The chain was in water about 4 ½ feet deep so I had to dive down to get the bolt cutters on the chain in the muddy water. After a few tries I was ready to go, held my depth, dove down and pulled the handles of the 30” bolt cutters together and nothing happened. After a few more tries I realized that the 3/8” high test chain was much stronger than I and my bolt cutters.
2 hours later which included three 15 minute forays in the 56 degree water, each followed by bouts of shivering and shaking, we loaded up and took off for the marina that we had been trying to get to 3 days earlier.
Reflecting on this fiasco it all started because I was soooo very smart. Had I actually paid attention to Julie when she was telling me we were going to run aground this never would have happened. But I knew I could get the engine started long before this happened and that she was just overreacting. Maybe I’ll listen to her next time………………….. I hope I listen to her next time instead of being such a know it all.

Port St. Joe to Mississippi

2008-12-25T08:03:00.000-06:00

11/24/2008

We had arrived in Port St Joe yesterday around 5:00 after our big 33 hour jump from Tampa and motored up to the dock in light winds. We checked in with the harbor master, took showers and went up to the restaurant to have dinner.
The restaurant had a fairly extensive seafood menu as many do along the coast, but one item on their menu appealed to us more than the others, “Cook your Catch”. In other words, they would cook the tuna we caught the day before and we wouldn’t have to clean it. We ordered and the waitress said most people cleaned their own fish, but one of the guys in the kitchen would do it for a couple of bucks.
The guy came out and we walked back to the fish cleaning tables by the dock. A nice gentleman at another table informed us that we were Americans and wouldn’t like this fish. It turns out that we hadn’t caught a tuna but a bonito which is not really considered an edible fish. We ordered dinner and quickly went to sleep.
The next morning we fueled up and walked to a nearby grocery store and filled our fridge. We also stopped at boating/fishing store and got some more fishing gear, as I was determined to catch dinner some day. (fyi, if you are 3 miles offshore, you are in international waters and do not need a fishing license. )
Our destination today was Panama City which was a mere 45 miles or so west along the Florida panhandle. The day was pretty uneventful and we ended up motoring the last bit across the bay to the Panama City‘s city Marina. As we motored across we saw flocks and flocks of pelicans, seagulls and a slew of other types of diving birds feasting on the fish in the bay. They would all swarm to one area and then to another as a group, taking off, diving and landing in waves. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

A Flock of Pelicans

A Flock Of Seagulls

We pulled into the marina at 5:15 only to find out that we were finally back in the Central time zone and it was 4:15. Not that we have much use for clocks or calendars, we actually have more use for docks and colanders (yes, we cook real food on board). If the weather is good and the sun is up we sail, we don’t often know what day it is or have a clue as to the date.

We walked to the downtown district and enjoyed window shopping for a bit. It was nice to stretch our legs and see some of the Christmas decorations. Going back to the discussion about time, it’s almost feels as if time has stopped for us, but it keeps on marching in the world around us.
The next day our goal was to make it to Destin Florida so we headed out into the Gulf of Mexico. It was cool with a so-so breeze, not much in the way of waves, so we motor-sailed. The day was pretty uneventful until we got to Destin.
As we approached the harbor mouth we talked to a couple of marinas about staying the night. They said that the last hurricane had pushed a sand bar across the mouth of the channel where they were all located and the depth was 6 foot max. They suggested that we come into the harbor and anchor at the west end near the highway bridge.
We were a little worried about entering the harbor itself since the guide book we were using claimed that the sand bars at the harbor mouth shift on a regular basis and that the buoys aren’t moved all the time. Sounds just like our mast misadventure back near Tampa but this time there were only 1-2 foot waves instead of the 3-4 foot waves that we had back then.
We motored slowly into the harbor mouth without incident and found our anchorage. We were about 150’ from a bridge with 30 foot clearance and just around the corner from the ocean. We dropped 2 anchors each facing a different direction since the tides and currents going in and out ran as high as 3 knots in either direction. We didn‘t want to wake up with the boat at sea or against a bridge.
We also set the anchor drag alarm on the chart plotter for 75’. If the GPS in the Garmin detects that we have moved more that 75’ it will set off an alarm.
I went to Radio Shack to pick up a replacement TV antenna since our previous one fell apart. It picks up both standard TV and the new HD signals. HD is awesome, it can be further off target than the regular channels with amazing clarity.
We took Ziggy to the beach so he could do his thing and he went absolutely nuts. Destin has the whitest beaches that I have ever seen. The sand was incredibly fine and flew around him as he ran and cut in tight circles. He was acting the same way he did when he used to play in the snow back in Illinois.
The next morning we took off heading further west along the Florida panhandle the date was November 25th, it was 2 days until Thanksgiving. It had dawned on us a couple of day before that we had first sailed into Florida on October 28th, we had been in Florida for a month and wanted out.
We joked about calling the consulate so they could help us get out or confessing to a crime in another state so we could get extradited. But this wasn’t funny anymore.
We had originally planned on getting to Corpus Christi on December 1st and yes that is in 2008. We thought this was very do-able since sailing straight thru at 6 knots would take 2 weeks. But with less than a week left on our original deadline we had about 800 miles left to go……. It wasn’t going to happen.
Our goal for today was to get out of Florida and into Alabama, nothing personal all you Floridians, but we wanted to get done.
We started motoring and a couple of hours later we were joined by a family of dolphins who stayed with us for a good half hour. The water here was clearer than anywhere else we had seen, and maybe even clearer than in the Caribbean, so we could see the dolphins when they would dive down to 20 feet or so.

Clear water and a Pod of Dolphins

There was mom and dad and 2 smaller ones that seemed to swim as fast as and jump as high as their parents, it was incredibly entertaining.
We motored westward and entered the ICW at Santa Rosa Island and continued on about 15 miles to a small lake and up to what had been a marina complex but after a hurricane a few years back was only a restaurant and bar. There was no current in this stretch so we anchored at the end of where the docks had been feeling comfortable about where we were parked for the night.
The restaurant was called Pirates Cove and was a cool looking building with metal siding and roof. It had a large screened in seating area on one side and had the look of a great summertime party place. The sign on the front door said that they were closed for the Thanksgiving weekend but we had read on their website that they were having a community potluck Thanksgiving dinner that evening.
Some hippy looking guy in his mid 20’s was sitting on an old ugly sailboat on which he appeared to be living. We talked to him and asked about the restaurant, he said that it was closed for the holiday. I asked him about his boat and he said that it was only about 15 years old and that it was a custom built boat off the lines of a wooden boat. Looking closely at the boat you could see the weave of the heavy fiberglass that it was made of, it was some of the worst fiberglass work I had ever seen.
Looking into the boat, it was full of clothes and other junk with a small area cleared on one of the bunks to sleep on, it was kind of like a nest or something. Hard to believe that someone was living like this but it takes all kinds.
It was about 4:30 so we went back to the boat and hung out waiting to see if anyone showed up. About 6:00 we noticed a handful of cars parked by the restaurant so I went up to see what was up. Walking into the bar there was about 20 people chatting, I walked up and asked who was in charge. I was informed that the owner was in the kitchen and they pointed past the bar where I saw the kitchen.
There were 2 men there, one heavyset younger guy and a trim old guy with longer white hair and a full white beard. I walked in, introduced myself and told them that Julie and I had been on the road for 6 weeks and would like to join them for Thanksgiving dinner.
I must’ve sounded pretty pathetic because the skinny guy with the Santa Claus hairdo stepped forward, gave me a big hug and said that they would be glad to have us join them. I thanked them and told them we would be back in a little bit with mashed potatoes, since that was the only thing we had enough of for the potluck.
We showed up 20 minutes later with our pot of mashed potatoes made of 4 packets of seasoned instant mashed potatoes and were welcomed by quite a few people in the group.
The party was underway so we got in the end of the buffet line and filled our plates with turkey, ham, sausage, vegetables with melted cheese, all sorts of potatoes with melted cheese and more dishes with cheese. You gotta love the south, they’ve yet to embrace healthy eating at the cost of flavor.
With our plates full we wandered out to the screened in porch and sat at a table that happened to be next to “Santa Claus”.
We talked as we ate and found out that Santa and Mrs. Claus had lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean, much of the time on a boat without an engine, living off of the fruits of the sea and land. They lived this nomadic lifestyle for almost 20 years, but ended up in Alabama 10 years ago and started building small wooden boats for a living.
The next morning we awoke feeling a little more content and headed down the ICW for Mobile Bay. Mobile Bay is pretty good sized, 10 miles or so across and 30 miles long, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico up to Mobile. There is some ship traffic running north and south in channels that run thru the bay which aside from the channels is only about 5 feet deep. The bay has dozens of oil and natural gas rigs dotting the horizon.
After motoring east thru Mobile Bay we entered Mississippi sound which is a body of water defined by the coast of Alabama and Mississippi to the north and a string of islands to the south. Beyond these islands was the Gulf of Mexico. We left Alabama and entered Mississippi, this was the shortest time we had spent in any state. We were very happy to have another state under our keel.
There were no marinas on this stretch of our journey and we hadn’t picked an anchorage for the night since we were not sure how far we would get due to the weather. Now we were looking for a safe place to anchor for the night. The winds were out of the south so our thought was to anchor on the north side of one of the barrier islands that defined Mississippi sound. Looking at the chart plotter, Google Earth and internet searches we decided to tuck in behind the end of Horn Island. It was the tallest island around and long enough to give us some shelter from the winds and waves coming in off of the Gulf.
We dropped anchor and both of us jumped in the dinghy with Ziggy to go ashore for a bit. The island was about ½ mile wide and about 10 miles long, with the highest point, a dune, about 40 feet tall.

Notice Ziggy, our 70lb mutt to the left in the picture.

We landed near a huge channel marker that was sitting on the beach about 70 feet from the water. It was about 30’ tall overall and the lower portion was about 15’ across and it had to weigh several tons. It must have broken loose and washed ashore during a hurricane to get something that big that far ashore.

We goofed off for a while and headed back to the boat before sunset, we ate well and slept well that night.

Tampa Bay to Port St. Joe, FL

2008-12-15T09:21:00.000-06:00

November 22 - 23, 2008

The most amazing thing happened today, we woke up before dawn and went back to sleep for another hour. The next thing we did was start the engine, which actually cranked over just fine relieving me greatly as I had dreamed that I had tried to start the engine and the engine battery was dead as a doornail, not that I actually know anything about the specifics of doornails and their afterlife.
This wouldn’t be so bad except that when we woke up before dawn the space heater we had been running when we went to bed was off. The reason it was off was not because someone had turned it off but because the house batteries had dropped to a low enough voltage that the inverter shut itself down.
Seems like the only time we really sleep well is when we are moored to a dock with our power cords plugged in along with cable TV and of course the ever popular wireless connection for the laptops.
When in doubt we always start the big engine first (the Yanmar) as it always starts immediately. With it running we crank up the Westerbeke which runs the big generator and then turn off the Yanmar.
The Westerbeke provides 8000 watts of power which is more than enough for the coffee pot and the microwave plus whatever. It also charges the batteries thru the inverter at 125 amps plus another 50 or so amps with it’s own alternator, which is enough to get them topped off in about ½ hour.
With this done I took Ziggy to shore to do his thing while Julie made coffee and stowed everything. Back on board we weighed anchor and motored out to leave the Tampa Bay area for the 4th or was it the 40th time. On the way thru the bay we rigged the staysail and our makeshift plastic tarp bimini top which in conjunction with the original plastic windows, that were not destroyed in a storm a month ago, provide decent enough protection from the winds and occasional waves.
Leaving the harbor we had to follow a channel west for about 6 miles to clear the shoals that lie to the north and west of the harbor mouth. The winds where on our beam (side of the boat) so we set the staysail and main to help us along. A little while later we set the new genoa and started to move along at over 8 knots, we cut the engine and settled in at 6 ½ knots which is a little over our target of 6 knots.
When we reached the last marker and hardened up ( sailed closer to the direction that the wind was coming from) we were on course. The winds were about 12 knots and we were close reaching at 7 to 7 ½ knots; fair sailing indeed.
The forecasted high for the day on shore was 70 degrees, offshore where we were the high was going to be in the low 60’s and with the wind it seemed much cooler. So we were bundled up in fleeces and foul weather jackets with hats and gloves.
We wanted to keep warm as this was going to be our longest leg by far on the trip. Our destination was up near the panhandle of Florida, a city called Port St. Joe which was 200 miles away. At our target speed of 6 knots we would be wailing, I mean sailing, for 33 hours and should get into the harbor before sunset tomorrow.
We had intended to stay near shore (no more than 20 miles out) but this was going to add several hours to the trip. But with more faith in the boat than our ability to dock at night we decided to cut straight across. This, as the crow flies, route would take us 70 miles off shore but we felt good about the boat and our abilities plus the forecast was for reaching (wind from the side) blowing 10-15 knots with 2-4 foot waves, perfect conditions for this boat. If all went to hell we have our emergency satellite transponder that sends our location out if activated. We also have our dinghy plus a 6 man inflatable life raft made by a company named Winslow which is supposed to be the very best. Buying the life raft and satellite transponder is kind of like buying insurance, you hate to spend the money but you wouldn’t be without it.
As we sailed north we were greeted by 5 dolphins that stayed with us for over ½ hour, which was by far the longest we have had a group stay with us. They would swim next to the boat alone and in groups then they all migrated towards the bow (front). They would swerve and weave from side to side moving at what appeared to be twice our speed of 7 knots.
Quite often one of them would swim about a foot below the water directly in front of the bow with it’s tail almost touching it as it moved up and down thru the waves. After a minute or so the dolphin would move off to the side to catch a breath with a telltale snort as they sucked air in thru their blowhole.
The curious thing is that one would move away from the bow to catch a breath, another would move right in to take it’s place, this must be the cool spot to hang out.
After the dolphins took off we decided to try to catch some fish for dinner. We had tried fishing in the past but at the speeds we travel all the lure seems to do is dance along the surface where no respectable fish would hang out. Julie suggested using the 5 lb lead weight that came with the boat as a sinker but I was afraid it would break the fishing line.
Just for grins I took about 30 feet of 1/8” nylon line and tied it to the weight along with another lure on a short fishing line. This rig sunk about 2 feet in the water but was so close to the boat I figured we had a better chance of clubbing a fish than catching it.
But this little trial provided the inspiration for something that ultimately would work. We took the lure off of the weight and the 1/8 line and tied a simple overhand knot around the fishing line near the weight. We lowered the 5 lb weight into the water which dragged the fishing line down with it. Looking back, the lure had disappeared and by our best guess was running about 5 feet deep. This had potential as our sonar/fish finder showed fish at about this depth.
About 2 hours later while I was typing this I heard the sound of the fishing reel run so I jumped up, set the drag and 5 minutes later landed what we thought was an 8 lb tuna
Sure wish I had watched a fish cleaning video on You-Tube, it’s been over 30 years since I’ve cleaned a fish and I didn’t do that many.

The good news is we have a book on cruising cooking and the author highly recommends cooking Tuna as a steak cut, I can do that. We figured it would be better to clean the fish in port. Sharp knives and big waves don’t make for fun times.

We had Dinty Moore stew for dinner (a favorite of our sailing buddy Lee) cooked in the microwave, add some crackers and it is a feast fit for a king. That and it warmed us up and filled our stomachs for the long night ahead which is important ‘cause there aren’t any White Castle’s or Denny’s where we can stop in to grab a bite.
The sun set around 6:00 with only a cloud or 2 to be seen which was a good sign. Around 6:30 we saw a boat in the distance ahead of us so we turned on the radar to see where it was heading. The radar has a function where you can draw a line on the map towards a target and you can watch which direction it is moving relative to your movement. After about 10 minutes we were able to figure out that it was moving to the left about 3 miles ahead of us and that it was probably as close as it would get.
The radar is great for night sailing especially if the visibility is poor. There is another function that allows you to create arcs or circles around the boat at distance that you can define. If anything shows up on the radar in these areas an alarm goes off notifying you that a boat or land is in this area.
Tonight the visibility is to the horizon so we will only turn the radar on every ½ hour or so since it draws so much power. Just did the Radar check and nothing to be seen out to 16 miles.
It is also important to do a visible check every 20 minutes or so to see if something is sneaking up on you like a freighter, which can travel 2 miles in about 10 minutes. it’s also a great opportunity to peak out from under the “bimini” and see the stars.
There are 2 brilliant stars or most likely planets setting to the west. The first one is about 10 degrees above the horizon, the second one is about 5 degrees above the horizon and a little to the right. On the horizon directly in line with these to planets is the freighter we saw earlier.
It is a strange thing to be sailing out here like this. I have sailed the Mackinac race 12 times and Julie has 2 under her belt. Lake Michigan at it’s widest point is about 100 miles wide so you can be 50 miles from shore in this race. At night with a little haze or fog it may seem like you are the only boat out there, all alone with your crew of 8 or so.
When the dawn breaks and the haze burns off you can always see a half dozen or so of your competitors and maybe even the Coast Guard cutter that herds it’s flock of sailboats up the lake.
As I am writing this we are 61 miles from the nearest land, about 80 miles from the nearest Coast Guard base which is in Tampa and probably 20 miles away from the freighter that passed in front of us 2 hours ago.
Not that we need any help but it is a little odd and maybe unnerving to be out this far so alone. I suspect as we grow more experienced and confident in the boat this uneasiness will subside but I don’t know if it will ever go away.
Fear is not always a bad thing. If we didn’t fear harm we would be far more likely to walk into traffic. If I didn’t have an underlying fear of what could go wrong I wouldn’t check the things that need to be checked on a regular basis. It is this checking that keeps us safe on our way by preventing the things we fear.
It is 8:48 pm, Julie is sleeping, the sky is full of stars and my favorite constellation Orion just showed up to the east. The wind is blowing about 13 knots directly off of our beam, the waves are 2-3 feet and we are close reaching with the Main, Full Genoa and Staysail at over 7 knots. This is has to be some of the best sailing I’ve done since we started this journey which according to the trip odometer on the Garmin has taken us 1228 nautical miles. I almost wrote knotical miles which would have been wrong which reminded me of the following true story.
While rebuilding the house in Las Cruces that we currently have for sale we built some cabinets and “built ins” out of a wood called Knotty Alder. Knotty Alder has a warmth similar to Hickory along with some knots that give it character so it is a popular wood these days, it is also cheap. The local lumber yard sells this by the board foot so there is no SKU or bar code for it. You just tell them what kind of wood it is and how many board feet you have and they look it up and charge you accordingly.
I went in to purchase a few boards to finish up a piece we were working on and brought them up to the check out where a new “girl” was working. She was in her mid 20’s and had only been there a week so I didn’t think she would identify the wood so I said I had 15 board foot of Knotty Alder. She looked at me with this confused look and said “Naughty Elder, is that an account name?” I managed to not say anything crude or laugh as I explained about the Knotty Alder and went on my way.
Back to the boat, it is just eating it’s way thru the waves with power rhythm and authority. It kind of reminded me of riding a thoroughbred at a gallop. We had the good fortune of strong steady winds all night with average speeds of over 7 knots. Late into the night the waves did pick up and the wind favored us with about two hours of speeds between 8 ½ -9 ½ knots. A little disconcerting when you can’t see a thing. We are taking turns sleeping. With only two of us, we both have to be on deck, in case something goes wrong. It is cold but thankfully our friend Rick left his sleeping bag.
Sometime about 3 in the morning I noticed some strange waves next to the boat and spotted a large flash of silver just below the water. At first I thought it was the Loch Ness monster then I remembered I wasn’t in Scotland.
As I watched I realized it was a group of dolphins and my initial reaction was that they were a bunch of teenage hoodlum dolphins that were trying to steal our hubcaps. I wasn’t worried because unbeknownst to these young punks the wheels had come off this baby a long time ago.
The sun came up and we had already put over 120 miles behind us but still had another 80 miles to go. The wind slowed and came in from the south warming things up so we showered and relaxed in the cockpit in shorts and T-shirts while the autopilot dutifully guided us along.
The day has been fun but it really started to cool down around 1:00 as the wind filled in from the north, the good news is there are no waves and we have a full suit of sails up along with a little engine assist doing ~ 8 knots to get to the dock in Port St Joseph, FL before sunset.
After 33 hours on the water with only a few hours of sleep we’re getting a little goofy, singing along with the XM - Summer Love from the musical Grease and dancing with the dog.
Sorry if this went on so long but this is the first real-time blog that I’ve had a chance to write. All the rest have been recollections, some as old as 2 weeks but this was pretty much written while it happened.
By the way I want everyone to know that I write this but Julie embellishes, edits, corrects and punctuates.

And as I (Julie) am currently embellishing, I have to say that his Johnson isn’t as big and impressive as it looks. The camera does add ten pounds you know. And occasionally, no matter how many times you pull it, it just won’t start!

Tampa Boatyard

2008-12-15T09:04:00.001-06:00

Tampa Bay boatyard
We didn’t go to a boatyard in Tampa or even in the bay but we ended up about 5 miles down the ICW from Tampa Bay at a place called Snead Island Boat Works. We decided to go there because they actually had a crane. We needed a crane because after our last sail with the mast “shrinking” again we decided that there was a problem not with the hull or mast step but with the mast itself and it needed to come out.
We had talked to several boat yards and Snead Island was the only one that had their own crane, they were also highly recommended on several websites. I talked to the yard manager on the phone before we arrived and told him that we needed to have the mast pulled and that I wanted to do some of the work myself. After a bit of chit chat and telling him that I had worked in a boat yard for 5 years he said this would be OK. Quite a few boat yards won’t let you do any major repairs on your own boats, I think the main reason for this is because of liability issues.
We arrived late in the afternoon and softly ran aground trying to dock on the wall outside off the marina. One of the yard managers came out and told us that we needed to come into the basin and dock on the wall that was just thru the entrance and 10 feet to the left where it was deeper. We spun back into the open bay and slowly approached the narrow entrance to their marina and put the boat into reverse, which we had recently discovered pushed the stern to starboard and the bow to port. (which means the back of the boat went right and the front went left).
Julie was standing at the middle of the boat with a line that she threw to the man waiting on shore who wrapped it around a cleat and stopped us.
The yard manger, Steve, came over and talked to us about everything we needed to do to get ready to pull the mast in the morning. Julie and I spent the next 2 hours loosening shrouds, removing the boom and other hardware plus disconnecting wires for the instruments and lights that are on the mast.
8:30 the next morning we heard the crane pull up and we grabbed Ziggy and got off of the boat. Being a person that is not capable of staying away from “the action” I ended up back on the boat to help the yard manager, Steve, attach the cable from the crane to a piece of webbing which was wrapped around the mast. Next we tied a rope thru the webbing and the crane operator reeled in the cable which slid the webbing up the mast to a point a little more than half way up the mast. We then tied the rope onto the winches on the mast which kept the webbing from sliding any further up the mast.
I volunteered to go below to help guide the mast thru the cabin to keep it from banging in to things. Next there was discussion between Steve and the crane operator such as “boom up”, swing left” to get the crane lined up with the mast and then “cable up” which is the command to start the process of lifting the mast out of the boat.
The mast stuck a little as the crane started to lift it. You could tell because the boat lifted just a little maybe an inch and then when the mast “popped”. In a previous life working in a boat yard I helped pull to a hundred masts but had never had this happen. As the mast came out from the darkness of the bilge I could see that the base of it was jagged, looking kind of like piece of torn paper. This would explain everything, the shortening of the mast causing the loose rigging without the base of the mast moving down. When the mast was pulled up thru the deck I asked Steve if he had ever seen this before. He told me that he had a handful of times and that it was not that uncommon on older boats. The crane swung the mast over to the side and it was laid down on saw horses.

Mast out of the boat

With the mast laying down we were able to look into it and saw that the aluminum on the inside of the mast had never been painted or treated in any manor from the factory. This lack of any protective coating allowed saltwater to attack and finally corrode enough of it away so that it was weaker than the loads generated when we ran aground causing it to crumble. The mast was pitted and pretty heavily corroded up to about 4” inside the mast.
A little later I found a piece of the original mast about 1 ½” tall and 1/3 of the original diameter on the ground next to where the mast was set down. It must have been wedged inside when the mast crumbled and fell out as it was being lowered. It was very corroded and by my estimation weighed less than half of what it should have.
Looking inside of the mast step I found a mixture of sludge and crumbled aluminum about 3 inches deep. I scooped it out, cleaned the step which is an oval shaped stainless steel plate with vertical collar welded to it in the shape of the mast. There were six ½” bolts sticking up out of the bottom of the bilge that were used to hold the mast step in place.
Steve said the way to fix it was to cut off the bad part of the mast and build the mast step up the amount that we cut off of the mast. Cutting off everything that was bad would leave a strong mast, building up the area under the mast step would leave the mast the same height. This made sense and I agreed to the idea, he said he would stop by later with a Skilsaw to chop the mast base down and take a look to see what could be done to build the mast step up.

Mast chunk on left - Chopped off piece on right

I had worked thru a couple of ideas and called my very good friend and long time sailing and boat modifying buddy Jack to bounce a couple of ideas off of him. I asked him what he thought the load on the mast was and he guessed 30,000 lbs after I gave him the size and weight of the boat.
With that guess under our belt Jack asked for the dimensions of the mast cross section and the thickness of the mast (for those of you that don‘t know, aluminum masts on boats are not solid, they are hollow) our mast is 9” from front to back, 7” wide and 3/16” thick.
Jack calculated the total number of square inches and multiplied it by the strength of aluminum and divided by 3 for the safety margin designers put in “just in case” all in his head and came up with a number that was close to his original guess.
This information was important so I could use a material strong enough so that it wouldn’t compress under the loads of the mast. 30,000 pounds is quite a force but the base of the stainless steel mast step is oval measuring 11” by 13”. Roughly, the base of the step has an area of 140 square inches. Dividing 30,000 lbs by 140 square inches gives 214 lbs per square inch. To put this number in perspective, if a 120lb woman wearing high heels puts all of her weight on one heel that is ½” by ½” she is asserting 480lbs per square inch on the floor (½ X ½ = ¼ Square inch with 120 lbs of force on it, multiply this 120 by 4 to get the force generated on 1 square inch and you get 480 lbs per square inch). This was not an insurmountable task.
Steve showed up on his lunch hour and cut the mast base off which took a few minutes, he then came below and looked at the mast step. He suggested using pieces of mahogany marine plywood with waterproof glue stacked up with layers of fiberglass matte (which is kind of like felt) between each layer.
I agreed and he had his ship’s carpenter cut me enough pieces to account for the 5 ½ “ of mast that was gone.
I cleaned out the bilge and ground away the surface of the fiberglass where the plywood was going to be stacked to give a good clean bond area and since it was now 6:00 we called it a day.
When we first arrived at the yard we told them we were going to have the mast pulled and go anchor in the harbor to work on the boat. They suggest we just stay on their seawall and use their facilities, we took them up on this without a second thought.
We had dinner and went off to their shower facilities which were quite nice. We have a shower on the boat that works just fine. The water is heated via a 20 gallon or so water heater in the bilge which is heated thru the “radiator” on the engine or by regular old 120V AC. But showering on most boats is kind of like showering in a closet that also has the head ( toilet) and sink, so showering on shore is always a treat.
The next morning I laid down 3 layers of fiberglass cloth on the bottom of the bilge where the new plywood base was going to go plus an additional 4 inches around the area to tie the new mast step into the hull, these 3 layers were about 3/16” total. I bolted down the first layer of plywood and plenty of epoxy oozed out ensuring a good solid bas and bond. Each additional piece of plywood was coated on all sides with epoxy to keep water out and another layer of fiberglass matte was place between each layer to ensure the strongest buildup possible. I secured each layer to the one below with matte and epoxy with 20 drywall screws.
With 8 layers of the Okum marine plywood installed I had regained the 5 ½ “ that had been cut off of the mast. I added 4 layers of fiberglass ( 8 oz biaxial with matte if you really must know) to make a solid bed for the stainless steel mast step and called it a day.
We were low on provisions so I grabbed my back pack and hiked 2.8 miles to the meat market and another ¼ mile to the produce stand and returned to the boat almost 2 hours later with 20 pounds of great stuff and demanded a back rub. Yes I can be quite the whiner.
Around 10:00 the next morning they re-stepped the mast and we spent most of the rest of the day reattaching shroud, electronics and the rest of the stuff that goes in and around the mast. We finished up around 3 in the afternoon and decided to stay until the morning, just so we could relax a little bit and use their showers again.
We had installed a 4 cubic foot fridge/freezer which is about 3 times the size of a dorm fridge while we were here. We used about 15lbs of ice per day at about $4.00 per day so spending $178.00 at Lowes for this fridge had a fairly quick payback. The fridge was about 1” too wide to get down below so we gut off some of the main hatch trim and glued it back on after we got the fridge down. There is a seat in the hallway heading back towards the aft cabin that was a waste of space and fortunately the fridge fit in the space with about ¼” to spare.
The next morning I remembered that our stuffing box was still leaking, I talked to Steve about borrowing a couple of 3” open end wrenches ( aka huge mongo wrenches) to adjust the stuffing box. He chuckled and said “you don’t do it that way, I’ll send someone over to show you”. 30 minutes later one of the mechanics stopped by with a pair of Channel Locks ( great big pliers ) and a hammer.
This guy whacked the lock nut a few times with the hammer and it broke free from the cap nut, he then spun the cap nut down until it stopped leaking. It took him 3 minutes with $30.00 worth of tools to do what I had not been able to accomplish over 3 hours with $50.00 worth of tools I had purchased for the job. So much for what I know.
With the mast and stuffing box done we were excited to get going, our problems were behind us and the forecast was great. Julie turned the key to start the engine and nothing happened.
I asked if she had turned the key and she gave me that look. I asked her to turn it again and when nothing happened again I almost snapped or maybe I did.
We had just spent 3 days repairing the collapsed mast base. Just before that we had rebuilt the starter on the gen-set. Before that we had replaced the headsail that tore itself up in Charleston. Before that we had replaced the alternator on the Yanmar diesel. Before that we had replaced the batteries. Before that we had repainted the boat. Before that we had rebuilt the rudder.
We were going thru money like a drunk sailor. Coincidence????? I think not.
Going back to being a kid working on cars with my dad, I decided to start with some of the basics: a starter is nothing but an electric motor that turns the engine fast enough to get the pistons to start firing, at which time the engine is running and you step on the gas and go.
I went to the engine room and had Julie turn the key again. I heard the distinct click of the solenoid, or Bendix, pulling in, which should provide the required power to make the starter run. The next step was to check the power cables coming in to the starter to see if they were loose. Great news, the first wire I wiggled, the main wire to the starter was incredibly loose.
I found the right wrench, tightened it up and confidently asked Julie to start the engine. Nothing happened.
This time I really lost it, going on about pieces of poop and not catching a break. Julie was wondering about my sanity (even more than usual) and asked what was going on.
I explained that if tightening the wire hadn’t worked the problem was most likely that the starter itself was burned out, probably because of the loose connection and it would take 2-5 days and several hundred dollars at least to have it rebuilt or replaced.
After my “little” tirade I asked her to try to start it a couple more times. I heard the sound of an electrical arc that was away from the starter at the back of the engine. It turned out that the main engine ground cable was corroded where it attached to the engine block. After the 5 minutes it took to clean and reassemble everything the engine started flawlessly and we where on our merry way.
We chose to cross Tampa Bay and exit there instead of exiting thru the channel where we had run aground 4 days earlier. It was a little further but the Tampa Bay channel was deep enough for ocean going ships and there was no chance for us to run aground here.
We felt bad about the time and money it took to repair the mast after grounding but on the other hand felt pretty good as similar loads could be generated on the mast while sailing in high winds and pounding seas. If we were sailing with 40 knots of wind and 20 foot waves and the mast base collapsed, loosening the shrouds the way it did, the mast would have certainly fallen. Now imagine if this happened in the middle of a stormy night, 80 miles from land.
Our little mishap was probably a blessing in disguise.

Sunset from the boatyard.

Sarasota to Tampa Inlet and Back Again

2008-12-08T06:37:00.001-06:00

We got up just about dawn and started our morning ritual, take Ziggy ashore, make coffee, check the engine for oil, clean up, store everything, weigh anchor and motor away. Our destination that evening was Clearwater, FL which was about a 40 mile trip. This was going to be our jumping off point for the 180 mile trip up to the panhandle of Florida.
The channels in and out of Sarasota harbor were too shallow for us to pass thru so we started up the ICW towards Longboat pass which showed plenty of depth for us to exit. The trip up was about 10 miles so we enjoyed the scenery and warm weather.
About ½ way on our little journey we ran aground in the center of the ICW and had to spin the boat and motor back towards a side to get going again. This was not the first time we had gotten stuck and by far not the worst.
Coming out of Dismal key we got stuck so badly we ended up using the dinghy tied to a halyard (one of the lines that pulls sails up to the top of the mast) to lean the boat over far enough to get the keel out of the sand so we could go. I had the 9.9 horsepower outboard at full throttle and the boat leaned about 25 degrees lifting the keel up by a foot or so. After it started to move I still kept pulling until we had a foot or two of water beneath the keel.
The ICW is supposed to be a minimum of 10 feet deep along this stretch but there is always drifting of sand and mud along the way. Federal funding to keep the ICW has been cut in the past few decades and they do the best they can to keep it safe, having us get stuck occasionally is lower on their priority list.
We got down to Longboat pass, hailed the bridge tender over our marine radio and he told us he would have it opened up right when we got there, which he did.

Bridge at Longboat Pass

We passed thru and we motored down the channel at about 7 knots to fight the 3 foot waves coming at us, following the buoys out about 3 miles to where we could turn north and head for Clearwater.
Julie turned north a few hundred yards past the last buoy in 20 feet of water and I went below. About 15 seconds later the boat slammed so hard I was thrown to my knees, we had run aground. I got up and ran back up top where Julie was throttling up the diesel to full power and trying to turn back to where we had come from.
At first we stayed put rising up and slamming on the hard sand bottom with each wave. At one point we were over so far that a large wave broke over our port aft (back left) quarter and splashed up into the raised cockpit.
I was getting pretty frightened at this point. Boats sink occasionally but I suspect more are swamped while being dragged sideways up on a beach or rocks. The 40 some foot boat that we saw on it’s side at Marco Island was swamped after it swung on it’s anchor into shallow water at high tide. When the tide went out, a difference of about 4 feet, it laid over so far that water came in the hatches and filled it up. It was totaled in virtually no wind or waves.
We were out in 3 foot waves and about 15 knots of wind, being pushed towards the beach. Fortunately we had not put our sails up yet which would have driven us on shore. Thankfully the 100 horsepower, inter-cooled, turbocharged Yanmar diesel screaming at full speed was able to push us towards deeper water. At first we only moved a foot or two at a time as we raised up on a wave, only to crash back down on the sand, but after about 30 seconds we were back in deeper water.
We both looked at the map and buoys and everything said we should have been in 25 feet of water but apparently a recent hurricane had move the shoal further out. Hurricanes and currents change the contour of sandy bottoms, especially near inlets, on a regular basis. Quite often maps and guide books warn of this. Usually, however, the Coast Guard, NOAA or maybe it’s the buoy police move them to prevent mariners from hitting obstructions.
We regrouped, pointed the boat north, still motoring and Julie insisted that something was wrong with the “feel” of the boat. I assured her all was well and told her that she was just a little shaken up from our grounding. It was then that both of us noticed that the shrouds that hold the mast up were all loose and that the mast was flopping around like crazy. This was not good at all.
I grabbed a couple of heavy dock lines and laced them around the shrouds from side to side to tighten them up. When I got done it looked like a spider had made a giant blue web at the base of the mast, but it was no longer flopping around.
We turned back around and headed for the drawbridge and the ICW where we could find an anchorage and assess the damage. We found a spot to anchor near a marina and restaurant about 3 miles from the draw bridge.

Drying Laundry While Waiting

I could only think of 3 reasons why the mast would have “shrunk” like it did. 1) The mast step collapsed. 2) The chain plates or tangs that the shrouds attach to at the deck pulled up. 3) The hull was damaged and the keel and mast step that sits on top of it had moved down. Julie thought that the mast might have been collapsing in on itself, I didn’t think that this was possible.
I spent 5 minutes with my head in the bilge (crawlspace) studying the mast step (cup that the base of the mast sits in) and the surrounding fiberglass to see if the mast step had collapsed, but could not see a sign of damage. Option 1, the mast step collapsing had been ruled out.
Next I looked at where the chain plates attached to the fiberglass bulkheads (supporting walls) inside the boat and found no sign of movement or damage. Had the chain plates pulled up there would have been dents where the washers on the back had been for the last 30 years, but as far as I could tell they hadn’t move 1/16th of an inch let alone the 1 inch or so the shrouds had loosened. Option 2, the chain plates pulling up had also been ruled out.
After we ran aground, one of the first things I did immediately after the mast was tied in place was go below and look in the bilge to see if we were taking on water. The fact that there was no water leaking into the boat indicated that the hull was intact. Once we were at anchor, I donned my snorkel gear and dove in. Visibility was not very good here so I ran my hands over the bottom of the keel and over the entire area where the keel met the hull top to bottom several feet “looking” for a crack or some sign of damage, there was nothing. This ruled out Option 3, meaning there was nothing wrong.
OK, something was definitely wrong. but I had not figured it out. I looked around for other clues and saw the stainless steel cable that runs from the mast step to the mast collar, which is bolted to the bottom of the deck. I put my hand on it and it seemed to be just as tight as it was previously, I asked Julie to feel it and she agreed with my observation.
I realized that if the mast step had moved down causing the rigging to slacken this cable would be incredibly tight, trying to pull the cabin top down 1 inch. This meant the mast step had not moved at all, which was a very good thing.
But something had moved and the only thing that I could think of was that the last time the mast was stepped something was in between the mast and the bottom of the step keeping it up until we hit bottom so hard. I really couldn’t think of what could have held it up, a piece of wood, some misplaced bolt, I didn’t know. What I did know was that the previous owners had done a lot of goofy things and this was probably just one more.
We tightened the rig up, did some other maintenance on the boat, had dinner and went to bed.
We awoke the next morning and the weather forecast had changed to crappy, so we decided to rest up do some shopping and do some more work on the boat.
We were anchored off of Anna Maria Island which turns out has a free trolley, so we hopped on board and went about 3 miles up where there was a grocery store, a hardware store and the ever popular West Marine. We got everything we needed and headed back to the boat via the trolley.
Since we were anchored we did not have shore power to charge the batteries so about 2:00 I tried to start the Westerbeke generator to charge everything up. When I flipped the start switch all I heard was a click, not the sound of the starter motor. I tried a few more times and still no starter, only a click.
As a kid I used to help my dad work on the family cars and back in the 60’s and 70’s starters were not near as reliable as they are nowadays, so I got to learn a fair amount about starters.
The fact that there was a click meant that the solenoid that pushes the starter gear in and closes the contacts to provide the starter motor with the 70 or so amps of current that it needs was working. The next thing to do was to check the power wire coming into the solenoid, it was fine, the wire going out to the motor wiggled easily and I realized that the wire was completely gone, only the insulation was left.
It was easy enough to fix this problem, it only took an hour to get to the hardware store to get a soldering iron and some heavy wire and another hour to completely disassemble the starter and solder the new wire in place.
The next morning we decided to take the ICW up another 9 miles or so into Tampa Bay and exit thru a shipping channel so there was no chance of running aground again. We motored across the bay and raised the new headsail and the mainsail when we got far enough out into the channel . With about 10 knots of wind and 2 foot seas we reached along at about 6 knots admiring our pretty new sail.
About 10 minutes later I raised the staysail and got my camera to take a couple of pictures of our baby with her full suit of sails slicing thru the water.
When I was done I put the camera below and came up to find Julie asking “Why are the shrouds loose again?”. I told her to spin into the wind and start the engine but only go fast enough to keep the boat pointed into the wind. While she did this I dropped the staysail and rolled up the main and genoa (headsail) reduce the strain on the mast and rigging. We turned around and headed back towards the protected waters of Tampa Bay.

Our Beautiful New Sails

Ponce de Leon to Sarasota

2008-11-27T12:23:00.000-06:00

11-11-2008

Diesels are wonderful engines; they develop more power per gallon of fuel than gas engines and they have no spark plugs and the associated electronics required to operate them. Another good thing about diesel is that it does not burn, quite unlike gasoline so it is much safer.
So if the engine was sputtering occasionally the only real problem it could be was the fuel. I had already changed the fuel filter and there was no improvement which meant it was either a faulty fuel pump or air in the line. So I did something that no man should ever do, I read the directions.
Turns out there is a bleed pump for air on the engine with a drain hose so I grabbed a jar and bled the system, quite a bit of air came out.
We pulled the anchor and motored out of Ponce de Leon bay and the motor ran flawlessly.
Our next destination was about 40 miles up the coast, a spot where we could anchor for the night called Dismal Key. A name like that conjures up visions of deep dark mangrove swamps and even more NoSeeums (the nasty little biting mites that drive you crazy). When we arrived we were pleasantly surprised. The keys here were covered with a low jungle canopy with beautiful sandy beaches.
We anchored behind a key that would give us the most protection, donned our swim suits and hopped in the dinghy to go over to a beautiful beach on the next island. About 100 feet from the shore we ran aground so everyone got out, except for Ziggy and pulled the dinghy up to the beach.
We spent the better part of an hour (If most of an hour is called the “better part”, what is the worst part?) walking in the water along the beach which was knee deep 150 feet out. We were looking for shells, fish and watching Ziggy go crazy running in the shallows. He would run in water 6” deep and while trying to drink water that he splashed up, which is not a good thing since he tends to get sick when he drinks anything but tap water or wine.
The next morning I took Ziggy ashore just after dawn and started hearing strange noises in the “jungle” not terribly far away. It was kind of strange and made me think of the TV series “Lost”. A minute later about 100 small egret or heron looking birds flew out of the tree tops about 100 feet away and swooped out to the water directly over my head.
We weighed anchor and headed up towards Marco Island which was only a few ours north. We motored into the bay thru a twisty channel which appeared to go over land in a coupe of places. As we got near the marina we were going to stay we saw a large sailboat laid on it’s side, half submerged in the shallows, it was an eerie sight.

Half sunk boat Marco Island

We docked and John ran off to get a rental car so we could do some shopping, he was going to drive to Miami the next day to catch a flight back home.
Early the next morning John took off, it had been great having him with us again. His help on the boat and steering had been invaluable. After hugs and farewells he walked down the dock and Julie and I were alone.
The forecast was for strong winds and waves so we decided to wait a day for better weather and work on the boat some more. One of the 2nd tier projects that had been on the list had moved it’s way all the way to the top with John’s departure – fix the autopilot.
I had looked at the autopilot previously and all of the components were in place and connected to the controller but it would not power up. I traced the power wires and found that the positive wire had been connected to the engine battery but the crimp connector was broken.
This was one of those bad news good news things. The bad news was that the connector was broken the good news was that if it wasn’t I never would have found out that it was connected to the engine battery. Autopilots use a DC motor to steer the boat and in heavy weather can draw quite a bit of power.
On a boat with 2 sets of batteries the starter battery is supposed to be isolated from everything but the engine starter. This way you can run lights, stereos and anything else on the “house” batteries until it is stone dead and with the flip of a switch you can still start the engine to recharge the house battery.
By having the autopilot hooked to the engine battery we had a very real opportunity of being out on the ocean without lights or the ability to start the engine.
I found a spare breaker on the house power system, flipped the switch, adjusted the course on the autopilot and watched the rudder turn, success!
The next day we headed out of the bay and turned north to Sarasota.
We talked to someone at the marina we wanted to stay at and they suggested that we get into the ICW (Intracoastal Waterway) at Venice Inlet since none of the entrances to Sarasota Bay were deep enough.
We got in the ICW and had to wait for 2 draw bridges and a swing bridge.

Swing bridge on ICW

We motored thru Sarasota harbor and arrived at the marina around 3:00 in the afternoon.
I ran some errands and when I got back Julie took the dinghy from the boat and met me at the Marina Jack bar. We waited about 45 minutes and Scott from Atlantic Sail Traders arrived with our new used headsail.
As our original sail was trashed in Charleston we had purchased a 3 year old sail and had it modified with a new bolt rope and roller furling cover all for under $1,000 where a new sail would cost at least $4,000. The sail had draft stripes and 2 telltale windows which are racing features and many serious racers replace their sales every few seasons. After a few seasons the material may have stretched a little and may not have the perfect shape. For cruising, a sail like this will last another 5 years.
We had dinner on the boat and went to bed, our plan for tomorrow was to head up the ICW and sneak out into the Gulf at the first opportunity.

A man's home is his castle really..........

Hitchhikers on the way

Key Largo to Ponce De Leon Bay

2008-11-27T09:47:00.000-06:00

11-8-2008

We left Key Largo headed for Marathon Florida which is on Vaca Key about a 30 mile jaunt. Our original plans were to go to Marathon for provisions etc.., spend the night and head down to Key West where we intended to see the sights and relax for a couple of days. Unfortunately these plans changed because of a hurricane brewing near Cuba.
Paloma was a tropical storm that briefly became a hurricane and then regressed into a tropical storm after crossing Cuba on it’s way north east. It was supposed to miss Key West by over a hundred miles and it did but there was a chance of it veering north and hitting the keys in a few days so we decided to cross over to the Gulf Coast at Marathon and run north as fast as we could like scared, or as I like to say cautious little children.
We stayed at a funky little marina in Marathon, we couldn’t get into the city mooring area because of the overhead power lines. As it was, the marina worked out well. They had showers, a small store, fuel, a restaurant and a bar; we utilized all of them.
We only set foot on 2 of the many Keys but there was a consistent theme on these two, laid back. There was kind of a hippy, Bohemian culture that ran from the old to the young. Dreadlocks and beards were common on both men and women, more so the beards on men but still….
The boat next to us was being painted by some old grey haired bearded guy who was more than happy to give us advice on products and techniques for applying non-skid to our decks. He told us where to get the glass beads used in pavement striping saying we should use it instead of silica sand because it sparkled when the paint wore off whereas silica sand made the deck look dirty. He also said the glass beads were much cheaper than any typical marine store non-skid additives.
For those of you that don’t know what non-skid is, it is a form of texture used on a boat deck where you would typically walk. This is not so important when you’re sitting at a dock but as soon as the deck gets wet and you are healing (tipping) any smooth surface becomes like ice.
That afternoon we took the dinghy up to West Marine (kind of an Ace Hardware for boaters and priced accordingly) to pick up some pieces and parts and line we needed. On the way we realized that we were almost out of gas for the Johnson so we went as slow as possible to conserve. When we got back to the boat we had the gas tank tilted so the fuel pickup was at the very bottom and we had about a tablespoon of gas left.
Later I took a cab to Lowe’s to get some hardware, paint stuff and a 2nd huge pipe wrench to use to tighten the stuffing box. Some of you might ask why I would need a pipe wrench for the stuffing box and most of you will ask, “What is a stuffing box?”. A stuffing box is fitting where the propeller shaft exit’s the boat that keeps water from coming into the boat. It consists of a threaded flange with a cup shaped nut that has a hole in it to let the shaft go thru and a lock nut that tightens against the cup shaped shaft to keep it from spinning loose. There is some waxed thread that goes around the shaft and is compressed onto the threaded flange by the cup shaped nut that when tightened properly acts as a seal to prevent the water from rushing in. Ideally it should leak approximately 3 drops of water per minute (or 180 drops per hour) thru the shaft to keep this waxed rope lubricated enough so that it does not overheat while motoring.
Our stuffing box was never going to overheat, we were leaking at about 3 gallons per hour and the sound of dripping which was clearly audible while lying in bed combined with the bilge pump turning on repeatedly was getting on our nerves.
With 2 big pipe wrenches John and I struggled to get the wrenches on the two 3” nuts thru the 8” wide opening which was ½ under our dresser and rotate them opposite directions to break the lock nut free. 20 minutes later we quit. We had done nothing but bang our knuckles while contorting around each other looking like we were playing twister and the lock nut wouldn’t budge. We were pushing so hard that the flange was flexing in the hull and were genuinely concerned that we might break it resulting in a trip to the boat yard to have the boat pulled out so we could pull the prop shaft and replace the flange.
This wouldn’t be all bad though, the replacement stuffing box would have a new lock nut.
We ate dinner at the restaurant, had a couple of beers listening to the live music and relaxed.
The next morning we got up, showered, filled up our diesel tanks and filled the gas tank for the outboard.
With this done we shoved off and headed out of the harbor towards the bridge that runs the length of the Keys to Key West. We had to go under the bridge and then straight north about 40 miles. The bridge was reported to have a clearance of 65 feet while our mast is 64 feet tall. Add antennas and wind instruments to the top of the mast and we should be at about 66 feet from the water.
To get some additional clearance we tied a loop on the end of the boom that John stood on and swung the boom straight out, Julie stood on the side of the boat holding the shrouds and leaning out to tip the boat as much as we could. We motored under the bridge as slowly as possible and cleared it by a foot or so.

65 foot tall bridge

What are you laughing at???

The wind was directly on our nose and sailing was not an option. The engine was stuttering again.
After a worrisome day of motoring, we motored into Ponce de Leone Bay dodging shallows with the Garmin chart plotter and sonar (depth sounder/fish finder). Approaching land we’re peering forward to see where we were (anyone notice that I used were, where and we’re properly in the same sentence???) going to penetrate the dark mass of mangroves and underbrush to find the channel that was shown at 8’ depth.
While still out in the Gulf we followed the Garmin/Game Boy thru a series of channels that reminded me of the paper mazes you find on the back of Denny’s placemats that kids try to conquer while their parents try to have a civil discussion, and it never failed us. It showed .2 feet ( ~ 3 inches ) below the keel so I decided to check the depth with a stainless steel rod that we had. And figured that the water was about 9 feet deep. The keel is 7 feet deep and the depth sounder is supposed to be calibrated to show 0 feet when the water is 8 feet deep or 1 foot below the keel, fortunately there is 1 foot error on the safe side.
Ponce de Leone Bay is located in the Everglades National Park which based on memory starts near Miami and covers a half a billion square miles of Florida extending to the west 2 miles into the Gulf of Mexico. inland
We chased dozens and dozens of white Egrets and a handful of Herons down the channel as we motored. We have seen these species before and they never run before, apparently these birds don’t often see people or boats.
After some investigation we decided to anchor off to the side of the main channel where 5 rivers joined in to flow to and from the sea. The charts showed 6-7 feet depth but we we’re sitting in 9 foot plus water with our big anchor and it’s recently added 3/8” chain holding us in place.
John and I dropped the dinghy off the davits and got Ziggy loaded up for his landfall that he so looks forward to after each of these trips. We looked around the mangroves for a suitable place to pull ashore and saw a small area that was not completely overgrown with the knee like roots of the mangrove trees.
Pulling ashore we realized the bank was a soft clay with crawfish holes every 8 inches. Ziggy jumped ashore and tried to walk into the “woods” which had a floor of broken branches and roots about 1 foot above the ground with weeds and other small plants and shoots everywhere. Ziggy had a very hard time walking around but finally found a place where he was stable enough to do his thing.
By the time this was all done we were being swarmed by no-see-ums which are tiny flying mites found near beaches and marshes throughout the south. These little creatures are almost invisible but bite like they have piranha teeth. We sped back to the boat and got below as soon as possible.
A little later the wind picked up and scared some of them away but it was still tough to stay outside for more than a few minutes to see the sunset and take some pictures.
Being in the middle of a National Park was a bit odd as we had no cell service or internet on any of our wireless cards but we still had XM which was part of our Garmin plotter weather service.
We snacked on smoked gouda, apple slices and crackers and later had some awesome homemade chili for dinner. We sat around talking, played cards with real cards instead of with a computer. I played a game of solitaire and wondered if I was violating some copyright law that Microsoft had. Good night don‘t let the bed bugs bite :) .

Birds in the Mangroves Ponce de Leon Bay

Sunset in the mangrove swamp Everglades National Forest

Ft Lauderdale to Key Largo

2008-11-23T07:45:00.000-06:00

We left our mooring in Fort Lauderdale at 7:15 in the morning motoring down the river towards the large draw bridge that once passed would allow us to make a quick left and head out to the ocean. The drawbridge, like many in busier areas opens twice an hour, on the hour and the half hour. We timed our arrival so we would be there a couple of minutes before the hour.
The 8:00 hour came and went and at 5 minutes after I called the bridge tender. I told him that I had read in the NOAA (National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration) Guide that the bridge should have opened at 8:00 and asked if there was a problem. The bridge tender replied quoting the book that the bridge would open on the hour and ½ hour if requested. I told him that I was new to the whole bridge thing and requested an opening at 8:30.
So a half hour later than we planned, we motored out of Ft Lauderdale and turned south towards Miami. The water was deep enough along here that we were able to stay fairly close to shore and see the sights. The shore was lined with numerous beautiful homes and mansions a couple of which were massive to the point of amazing.
As we got closer to Miami the homes were replaced by high rise condo buildings which lined up side by side down the coast for miles. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but I suspect that ½ of the population in the area must live in these oceanfront buildings based on the number of them.
The older buildings were more traditional but the newer ones where all different in their style and colors, I have never seen such a variety of buildings in my entire life. There were quite a few new ones in the process of being built which surprised us considering the state of the real estate market. Maybe it is still strong here or it just made sense to keep building them once they had started.
We turned west to head into Biscayne Bay, went past the large commercial docks, then headed south into the bay itself. Moving under motor only we followed the Garmin and the navigation signs thru the channel that was deep enough for our 7 foot draft.

The bay averages several miles wide and is about 10 miles long but the deepest it gets is about 12 feet in a couple of spots. Much of the water is only 2 – 5 feet deep and from the surface it all looks the same. In open waters with waves it is easier to see where the shallows are by the waves. As the water get shallower the waves break and form white caps, this is a sure sign of a place to stay away from. The color of the water is also a good indication of depths but this only works if it is sunny and not to wavy.
We picked a spot in a harbor on the west side of Key Biscayne to anchor for the night near the Key Biscayne Yacht Club. The spot was sheltered and the yacht club would have docks that we could bring our dingy and dog ashore.
After anchoring and getting settled in John, Ziggy and I took the dinghy ashore. I took off to the store to get some groceries while John walked Ziggy. As I exited the property I noticed the guard who indicated that he was not going to let me back in thru the property when I returned. I hiked the 1 ½ miles to the grocery store thru quiet neighborhoods past neat old homes and newer large homes which were obviously replacements for the older homes that were torn down to make room for them.
Walking past a park with families gathering for a Little League game I thought of how strange my life had become. While living in Geneva, IL we were up the street from the park and often heard the noise from these types of gatherings. These days we were more likely to hear the sounds of freighter horns, gulls and crashing waves.
I did my shopping and bought 2 canvas (not paper or plastic) shopping bags and filled them with our groceries as I had forgotten a backpack. After a few blocks I took off my canvas belt and looped thru the handles of the bags so I could sling it over my shoulder. Switching shoulders every few blocks made the trip back relatively comfortable.
After leaving the yacht club earlier John had noticed that the house next door had all of it’s windows covered with hurricane shutters, a sign that no one was home. When I called to get brought back to the boat we rendezvoused there and all was well.
Dinner was tasty as always; we relaxed for a while afterwards and went to sleep.
The next morning we weighed anchor and with no wind at all we started motoring to Key Largo. We were on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) following the natural and sometimes dredged channel from marker to marker.
A few miles into our trip we saw what looked like boxes or sheds on stilts off in the distance. As we got closer we realized these were houses on stilts with docks at water level and stairs going up 10 feet or so to the main level. Most of them seemed deserted but a handful of them had boats tied to their docks. As we motored by one of them we read a sign warning unauthorized people away. There was also mention of use with a special permit that was available with information at the website www.stiltsville.org. We visited the site which has quite a bit of info about this unique area which in it’s heyday semi-lawless and communal.

Near the bottom of Biscayne Bay we exited to the east into Hawks Channel which runs on the eastern side of the Keys all the way to Key West with a long reef several miles to the west. The reef on the east side breaks down the waves coming off of the Atlantic making it smooth sailing in all but the worst conditions.
We motored along uneventfully with John and I sanding the cabin and deck with orbital sanders until a US Customs and Border Patrol boat came up next to us. Seems it was a slow day and we were the only people in the area to harass. They requested permission to come aboard which they were granted and 2 younger agents came aboard leaving 4 agents on their boat that all tried really hard to look intimidating.
After introductions the lead agent asked our names, our business and for the boat registration. We told him that we did not have the boat registered as we bought it in North Carolina and were going to register it in Texas where we were going to be living. Texas, like many other states requires a physical inspection of a boat to register it so we were not registered but did have a bill of sale and the surrendered title from the previous owner. We were asked to give our ID’s to the agents on the other boats so they check us out.
I went below to find the paperwork and after a few minutes one of the agents came below and asked if we had anything down here that we should know about such as guns or drugs, I said no but was kind of weirded out by the way he had asked.
I still couldn’t find the paperwork so I called up to Julie to help me find it. The agent up top insisted that I had to come up while Julie went down for the safety of the other agent so I obliged.
Up top I started talking to the 2nd agent and found out he grew up in Wheaton, IL which is the town where I went to high school and lived for a while. After finding out that he was a DuPage County Sheriff, John mentioned the name of another sheriff that he went to school with that the officer knew and the ice was starting to melt.
Down below the 1st agent was nosing around in lockers and drawers while Julie was growing upset while trying to locate the paperwork. I remembered that we had a copy of the bill of sale and title e-mailed to us which we had saved to the laptop that we could show them. The 1st agent said that would help so Julie tried to retrieve the copies but the laptop crashed.
Just then they were told by the guys back on the patrol boat that our licenses had come back clean sot hey told us we were free to go.
I asked the 1st agent why they had stopped us and what they were looking for. He said that because we had no registration numbers the boat might be stolen. I laughed and said “If I wanted to steal a boat it wouldn’t be this one.”, he laughed too.
We traveled a few mile further and found a place to anchor for the night.

Ponce de Leon inlet to Fort Lauderdale

2008-11-16T02:36:00.000-06:00

Megayacht Helios in Ft Lauderdale

Dolphins along the way

11/1/08 - 11/3/08
Having arrived late at the marina at Ponce de Leon inlet we docked in one of the few spots left that happened to be a little shallow so we stopped about 2 feet away from the dock in the mud. No big deal, we just spun the bow in so we could step on and off and planned on tightening things up when the tide came in. We had dinner at the marina restaurant and went to bed.
The next morning we were still stuck but the tide was rising and after a half hour we were able to shove off and motor around to fuel up. So with a full belly of fuel we motored out the channel and turned south towards Cape Canaveral.
I have been trying to calculate the fuel usage on the boat but it is a little hard to do. Speed under motor seems to vary considerably depending on wave and wind direction and also whether we are motor sailing. According to the manual, at about 2,000 RPM’s we should be going about 6 knots and burning about 3 gallons per hour which equates to about 2 miles per gallon. Based on my rough calculations we are getting closer to 3 miles per gallon in the worst conditions.
When we started this journey a couple weeks ago the winds were out of the south bringing warm air with them. Since then the winds have been mostly out of the north or northeast bringing cold Canadian air with them (damn Canadians). The winds are still out of the northeast but we are getting far enough south that the local warm air is diluting the northern air. So with the wind to our back we were able to wear jeans and T-shirts during the day for the first time in a while.
The motor sailing was pleasant enough for the full day trip so we settled in and enjoyed the sights, what there was of it 10 miles offshore. There is a very large reef extending out into the ocean to the north of the harbor mouth that we had to go around, combined with the curve of the shoreline that kept us this far out. We were able to see the launch platforms for the shuttle at Cape Canaveral but the launch was still over a week away when we passed by.
We motored into the channel at Port Canaveral just before dusk and found our slip at the marina just as the dockmaster had described it over the phone.
We try to plan whether we are going to stay at a marina or anchorage the night before or early in the day so we can call around to get the best deals etc… We have several tools with which to do this. The Garmin chart plotter has information icons on the maps for different marine facilities. If you move the cursor over the icon and hit ENTER a page opens up with details including phone number and address. Google Earth on our laptop using the Verizon card has the same kind of capabilities using the “find business” field but does not have the depth information that we need to get into some of the marinas. Google Earth does have the added benefit of helping us locate hardware and grocery stores that are within walking distance of some of these marinas.
Back at our dock we see a large Carnival Cruise ship about 150 yards away on the other side of a man made peninsula. There is a second dock for a cruise ship that is about ¼ mile away. Later that evening there was a loud horn blast so we went up on deck and watched the Carnival ship pull away, it was like watching a small city sail off.
After a meal of delivered pizza (they used sliced sausage links instead of chunks) we went to bed. The next morning there was another Carnival ship at dock where the other had been, a Norwegian cruise lines ship and a Disney "Big Red Boat", which by the way is blue with red stacks, at other docks. We shoved off and headed for Fort Lauderdale.
There were no obstructions to force us off shore so we were able to sail down the coast about ½ mile from the shoreline. The waters were much deeper than we had encountered anywhere else along our way so it was comfortable sailing.
By mid-morning the wind was such that we were able to fly our spinnaker (the big colorful sail that balloons out in front of the boat). We set the sail, turned off the engine and where able to move along at about 6 knots which was our typical target speed. On some days when we have greater distances to cover we try to make 7 knots but today was a 45 mile trip and at 6 knots we were looking at an 8 hour day on the water. One nice feature on the chart plotter is that after you plot your course it gives you an ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival).
We had the spinnaker up for about 3 hours as the winds slowly increased we were able hit almost 8 knots if we caught a wave just right and surfed. I joked that we had gone as fast as 9 knots surfing with the staysail and main but I didn’t want to see that kind of speed with this sail especially with only 3 people on board, one of whom had never been on a boat with a spinnaker up.
Julie was down below talking to the sail maker that was working on our replacement jib and the wind was steadily building. We were moving along at a steady 7 to 8 knots surfing to 9.2 when she finally came up. She took over the wheel while John and I put up the staysail and lowered the spinnaker.
I have seen and been part of numerous disasters while lowering spinnakers. I have seen brand new, up for the first time spinnakers end up tangled in the mast and torn to shreds. I have seen spinnakers end up in the water causing the boat to come to a dead stop from 18 knots and spin completely around. We got that one in but it was torn up but repairable, but “it was not a problem, it was an opportunity“.
Our spinnaker dousing came off perfectly and when it was safely stored in it’s bag I came back on deck where Julie told me that we were doing 10 knots after we set the staysail in preparation for the spinnaker douse. Not bad for a 40,000 lb pig dog cruiser.
A couple of hours later as we drew close to the harbor we were escorted by a pod of Dolphins. We had seen a few at a time in the past but with this group we saw as many as 8 out of the water at the same time with silouhettes of more in the water. They stayed with us for 15 minutes or so and amused us by riding our bow wake and jumping out of the water in groups.
We were arriving at Ft. Lauderdale the day after the big in water boat show and saw all types of power and sail boats heading north to their homes.
We pulled into the main channel behind a cruise ship and in front of a small container ship along with about 10 other pleasure craft going in and out of the main harbor. Things were pretty tight especially when the cruise ship stopped to back into it’s dock in front of this parade. After a 10 minute wait for the cruise ship we made the turn and had to wait a few minutes for the bridge to raise so we could pass under it.
We motored up the river to a mooring field where we could tie up to a city owned “anchorage” for the night. As we motored we passed the docks where the show had been and saw more mega yachts than we had seen on the entire trip. In Charleston we saw five 100 foot or so powerboats, here there where about 40 of them along with a half dozen sailboats of the same size or bigger including the 140' sailboat Helios that was across fromour mooring. For anyone who is interested we are starting a collection to rent Helios for a week. We have thrown $100 in, just looking for the remaining $174,900.
After we moored John took me via dinghy back towards the harbor mouth so I could pick up anchor chain for the big 55lb anchor. Along the way he got pulled over by a Ft. Lauderdale police boat and was given a warning ticket for going to fast. The manufacturer of our anchor recommended a 35 or 44 pound anchor for a in the 40 to 50 foot range. Since we were at the top end of the range and heavy for our size we chose to go heavier.
Anchors do a great job of keeping you in one place but they do a better job if you have a chain fastened to the anchor before the rope. Rope floats, chain sinks and helps keep the tips of the anchor down and engaged in the bottom. Chain also acts like a shock absorber in wind and waves, the boat has to lift the heavy chain off of the bottom before it becomes taught. Rope on the other hand is already tight in a straight line between the anchor and the boat and jerks on the boat with every wave.
I went to a place we had found online and paid $3.25 per foot instead of $12.00 per foot for the 70 foot of 3/8” chain that weighed 120lbs. The cab driver had sailed some and was amused and thankfully not upset when he had to back up to the side door and we loaded the chain.
Later that night it was more food and more sleep.
As a side note: marine toilets a.k.a. heads are similar to real toilets in appearance but that’s about it. The water used to flush comes from the ocean thru a fitting in the hull and is pumped into the toilet with a hand pump with the lever set to “wet“. Once you have enough water in the bowl you flip the lever to “dry” and continue pumping until the bowl is dry. Whatever was in the toilet is pumped out continually no matter which direction the lever is set. You must always flip the lever to the dry pump position when you are done as most heads are below the waterline and water will seep in and fill the bowl and overflow.
Last night I got up to go to the bathroom and instead of turning on the light and bothering others I sat down and instantly jumped up as someone had left the lever on “wet” and I had just dunked my dangly bits in chilly water.

St. Mary’s, GA to Ponce de Leon Inlet FL

2008-11-13T05:47:00.000-06:00

Ziggy showing off the latest in canine wear

Leaving St Augustine

10/28 We spent an entire day in St. Mary’s resting up from our overnight trip from Charleston. Even though we were across the river from the Florida border it was dropping into the upper 30’s at night, so John and I ventured off to get jackets gloves and food for the next few days. We had been talking to a retired man who was trying to net shrimp for bait and asked him for directions. After 10 minutes of talking he suggested that we hop in his truck and he would give us a ride into shopping district which was a mile or so down the road. He dropped us off at a clothing store about 3 miles away.
We got our clothing needs plus a fleece blanket and walked a few blocks to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. Our intention was to buy a few items but we ended up with about 40 lbs of provisions and decided to catch cab back to the marina.
When we got back we found out that Rick had a change of plans. Instead of accepting a ride to Jacksonville from the 2 guys who were mooring next to us, one of which had a car, he was going to have to rent a car and drive to Raleigh for a business meeting. The closest car rental place was a few miles up river, down a channel running south in the town of Fernandina, FL. He had to leave early, as did we for our trek to St. Augustine, so we motored over mid afternoon.
As seems to becoming our standard, the wind started picking up just as we came in to dock. Fortunately, the wind was pushing us towards the dock so I just came to a stop a couple of feet away from the dock and we drifted in. Unfortunately, the wind was whipping up some decent size waves and really pushing and bouncing us against the dock.
With the help of the dock master we found a local marine store a few blocks away. John and I went to find another fender while Rick and Julie went off to find someplace to have a drink. The store was small and cramped with all sort of odds and ends for boats but they did have 1 large fender. The proprietor of the store appeared to be in his mid 60’s and sported a toupee that had to look just great in the 70’s when he bought it judging by the cut style. We succeeded to get the fender and the obligatory “couple of other things” we just had to have without bursting out laughing and headed back to the boat to mount the fender and catch up with Rick and Julie.
We had a drink at a couple of bars, one was too expensive, the second was too smoky, the 3rd was an Irish place which worked out great as we had couple pints and headed back to the boat for dinner and a private showing of Blazing Saddles. Soon after we all retired for the evening. As we get more acclimated to life aboard the clock becomes less important and the sun and moon rule our schedules.
The only time that time really matters is when we are going into a shallow inlet or harbor and we have to watch the tide. Tides in the Carolinas had varied up to 5 feet from low to high. Along with the change in water height at low and high tide comes the tidal current between these extremes. As the tide is rising the water from the ocean flows thru the narrow inlets to fill the bay, harbor and rivers that are beyond it. Some of these currents run at speeds up to 5 knots which can be extreme with a boat that only goes 7 knots under full throttle.
10/29 The next morning Rick took off after hugs and handshakes, his experience, knowledge and bullheaded determination to figure something out will be missed. As difficult as this first leg had been it would have been a lot worse without his help.
We shoved off and set sail towards St. Augustine Florida which happens to be the oldest city in the US. The sail down was uneventful, winds mostly behind us, some waves and the motor droning as always.
We arrived and set anchor in the harbor after flipping the dinghy off of the deck, lowering the Johnson and mounting it we ran Ziggy ashore for a little relief and play. We cooked dinner aboard, relaxed and talked for awhile about what to do the following day as we had decided to take a day off to sightsee and to celebrate Julie’s 37th birthday.
10/30 We awoke in the morning, took Ziggy in to do his thing, brought him back to the boat and headed out for a day on the town. We saw some sights, went to a hardware store and got more pieces and parts to fix/improve the boat and wandered some more. We were going to another section of town and decided to head down to the waterfront so we could look at the boat and make sure all was well. Ziggy does not like being left alone and back home he had the devious habit of finding a piece of paper, tearing it up and leaving it by the front door. We were not sure what he might do aboard the boat, scuttle it, sail off with it or just pull up the anchor and set the boat adrift J .
It turns out he chose the latter, as the boat had moved a few hundred feet down the channel being pushed by the wind and tidal current towards a handful of anchored boats and the bridge.. John and I ran back to the marina where the dinghy was docked and sped off to grab the boat. We moved to a new spot and decided to drop a second anchor, which we did off of the stern of the boat using the dinghy to carry it far enough away to get some slope to the anchor line to counter the current when it reversed. Instead of going to shore for dinner we cooked on board and decided to reschedule Julie’s birthday for sometime when we were on dock.
We set the drift alarm on the GPS and it went off at about 2:00 am. The front anchor had dragged with the incoming tidal current as we had spun closer to shore and run aground. The bad news was that we were stuck, the good news was that we were at low tide and we would float free. The bad news was that we didn’t know when we would be free so we took turns on deck for the rest of the night. Just before dawn the boat was free, we pulled the second anchor and were under way.
10/31 This day was fairly nondescript as we motor sailed down towards Ponce de Leon, it was a fairly long trip and we arrived right about dusk with the wind picking up again. The only real thing of note was the fact it was Halloween and John was sea sick, he looked like he was in costume as a zombie, looking grey as hell and half dead.

Charleston to St. Mary's GA

2008-11-06T08:28:00.000-06:00

With new batteries and alternator we felt confident leaving for the next overnight trip of 120 miles from Charleston, SC to St. Mary’s GA. The forecast was 15-20 knots (1 Knot = 1.1 mph) of wind out of the North East with 5 - 7 foot waves, this sounded a little rough but doable.. We motored out of the channel about 7 miles to where we were out of the shallows and reefs that surround this and many other harbor/river entrances. As we were motoring the waves started growing higher and where quite steep and irregular. In the deeper ocean the waves were spread way out cresting every 7 seconds or so and 5-7 foot waves are nothing to speak of. In the shallower area that we were in these wave grew taller and closer together with crests coming every 2 seconds. We were wallowing fore and aft and side to side in a very uncomfortable motion. We decided to carry on a little further into deeper water hoping that he wave pattern would improve. About 10 miles out we found no relief and decided to come back into the harbor. Motoring back almost directly into the wind and waves was even more uncomfortable and rough than when we were coming out. About 15 minutes into our return trip a loop of the roller furling headsail flipped open about ½ way up. After a few seconds it tugged enough sail back to flip again it did that 2 more times and now we had about 2 foot of sail pulled out over a length of about 10 feet. This was very odd as the roller furler did not actually unroll, the material simply pulled out enough in the wind to unfurl and it snow balled. I tried to unroll the furler but a line was fouled and before I was able to do anything the headsail tore in several different directions and places. After a while of trying to motor in the wind and waves with this huge flag pulling the boat off course repeatedly we figured out how to wind the sail up enough to get the shreds out of the wind.

Remains of headsail
We got back in the marina and did a decent job of docking quite unlike our first arrival where we tried to back into a narrow channel against the tidal current and ended it up spinning out with people scrambling to help us 2 times. This lovely boat is great for straight line cruising on the open sea but not so good in tight quarters, especially at low speeds.
Going below we found the laptop on the cabin floor along with the microwave which had fallen off of it’s low shelf and was hanging by it’s power cord. We found out that Corel dishes do in fact break and that Ziggy really, really hates this kind of sailing.
We cleaned up fixed up and decided to wait for better weather which finally came 3 days later on October 26th.
Our buddy John showed up about 2:00 pm and we shoved off with a full compliment consisting of Rick Moeller, John Hoshaw, the lovely Julie Lambert, Ziggy and your’s truly, Capt. Mark (Bligh) Lambert. The weather was chilly but pleasant, there wasn’t much wind so we motored most of the way with the main sail up to lend a hand.
We came into St. Mary’s, GA mid afternoon looking for a marina to stay at and finally raised the harbor master on the radio who told us to go to the far docks and cautioned us to look out for the boats on the dock. We motored over to the dock with our fenders (great big rubber baby buggy bumpers for the side of the boat) and lines out ready to dock. We docked fairly well this time and noticed that just 10 feet ahead of us there were ¾” diameter bolts sticking out of the side of the dock up to 2 feet. The dockmaster wasn’t warning us about boats, he was warning us about the bolts but in his southern drawl something was lost in the translation.

2008-11-04T07:53:00.000-06:00

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......

Southport Boatyard

2008-10-29T07:43:00.001-05:00

It’s been non-stop work since the last post and plenty has happened.
This is being written as we are motoring/sailing between Charleston SC and the Jacksonville FL area so there is plenty of time to kill.
We spent 2 weeks at the boat yard working on several projects to get the boat ready for the trip including painting the hull above the waterline, rebuilding the rudder, fixing as many leaks in the deck that we could find and removing all of the vinyl covered linings used on the overhead (aka ceilings in a house) and ceilings (aka walls in a house). Our good buddy John Hoshaw flew down during this time to help us and we all worked our butts off. We were renting a house on Oak Island about 2 miles from the boat yard and 2 blocks from the beach. We actually quit working at 5:00 one day to go down to the beach and goof off.
My sister Sue who lives about 100 miles north came down several times to help and bring down goodies we had shipped to her house. Sue spent 2 nights at the end of our stay in Southport and was a great help getting things wrapped up. She and her husband Dan stopped on one trip down and picked up a 9.9 horsepower Johnson outboard that we found Craig’s list.
The Outboard is 4 years old but in great shape and comes to life on the first pull. When we go off shore we bring the dinghy up on deck and mount it on the stern rail of the boat. Below is a picture of my Johnson; needless to say I am very proud of it.

The paint job included grinding, filling, sanding, filling, sanding, priming, sanding, priming topped off with 2 layers of white paint. Julie rolled out the paint with a foam roller and then lightly brushed it in 2 different directions to completely eliminate the roller pattern. We had to learn quite a bit about thinning the paint and keeping the brush clean with thinner between applications. We later added a deep blue boot stripe and gold paint in the cove stripe, the results were fabulous.
The rudder rebuild consisted of notching and laying cedar boards vertically between the stainless steel tabs sticking back from the rudder post, We then wetted out a layer of fiberglass with epoxy and temporarily screwed more cedar boards down horizontally. When the epoxy was hard we spent an hour or so with a handheld power planer to taper the cedar sandwich into the shape of a rudder. On top of this went almost ¼” of fiberglass cloth, some fairing compound and primer.
The original overhead and ceiling liners were made of a layer of ¼” mahogany plywood covered with 1/8” open cell foam all topped with the same white vinyl with tiny little holes found in 60’s and 70’s cars. On the overhead every foot or so there was a teak batten going from side to side holding the liner up.
On ceilings (the walls inside of the cabin top) someone covered the liner with a layer of rattan grass wallpaper that was popular in the 70’s or 80’s and trimmed the edges with fancy carved trim that turned out to be plastic coated foam. As lovely as this was, the years of small leaks thru the deck and around windows hatches and ports had unfortunately turned much of the liner into a rotting moldy mass of pulp.
Each batten had 8 screws which had been cover by wooden plugs that had to be painstakingly removed to preserve the batten. Next the liner was pulled out some times as a complete panel sometimes in handfuls as the wood tore. About 20 large contractor bags of the liner was pulled from the boat and dumped.
The next step was to wash the fiberglass behind the liners using a garden hose type fertilizer sprayer set at ¼ cup per gallon with Simple Green cleaner which sat for 10 minutes before scrubbing and rinsing. A mold and mildew killer/preventer was then applied with a small garden type pump sprayer to get into all of the places that couldn’t be reached by hand.
Leaks were fixed by removing the bolts that held hardware down (such as winches and cleats), cleaning the old caulk off and putting new caulk around the hardware and bolts and tightening them down. This is typically a 2 person job, one on the deck and one below to loosen and tighten the bolts.
When the davits ( the large brackets in the back of the boat used to hold the dinghy out of the water) were removed to be recaulked several cracks were found in the deck under the bases which is not a good thing. To repair this about 50 holes were drilled thru the top layer of the deck thru the wood core which was trashed after years of being wet but not thru the bottom layer of fiberglass decking. After some time to let the wood dry out, epoxy was squeegeed into the holes and allowed to cure solidifying the soft core area over a 1 ½ foot square area one each side. The next day 3 layers of fiberglass were applied on the top and bottom of this area to really stiffen it up. The original backing plates that were used were 1/8” aluminum that were bent and twisted when removed. The new backing plates are ¾” African Teak which is incredibly strong and dense, if you put this wood in the water it is so heavy it will sink.
There were numerous other tasks, some major, some minor but finally on October 15th we were ready to be launched. Because of the length of the boat and the rigging for the mast the travel lift was not able pick it up with straps in front of and behind the keel. They had to place one strap in front of the keel and the other on the bottom of the keel which looked scarily unbalanced and put most of the weight of the boat on the rear wheels that were not drive wheels.
The simple task of launching became very interesting when the marine travel lift got stuck in the wet sand around the boat, digging holes as the front tires spun. After 15 minutes of filling in holes and placing boards and timbers under the wheels they finally chained a large backhoe to the travel lift and pulled it onto the concrete launch pad.
This whole episode was quite unnerving. Some of the 4”X6” lumber was snapping like toothpicks if not properly backfilled with sand underneath. The boat was swaying and jerking around in the slings which wouldn’t have been so bad if they had been able to pick it up properly. When we finally got the boat over the slip and dropped it in the water, Charley the owner of the yard said “damn that’s a heavy boat”.
Mentioning Charley makes me think of all of the people at the boat yard. The yard manager, Billy Jack from Louisiana, was always talkative and helpful. He had been a commercial fisherman for 25 years and looked like he was 60, turns out he was younger than me.
Any day of the week there would be 2 to 10 mostly older guys hanging around in the main shop talking about anything from politics to boats and occasionally telling tall tales from their glory days. These locals had apparently known each other for decades and were aloof at first and would only mutter an occasional greeting as we walked by. As work progressed on the boat and they saw what we were doing they became more friendly and would stop by to see what we were doing and ask questions and offer advice.
Some of the guys even talked to Julie after she painted the hull and told her that it was the best boat yard job they had ever seen and that she could get a job at any boat yard painting. During the first 1 ½ weeks they treated her like some sort of parasite that had invaded their guys club.
One weekend Charley fed us lunch, pulled pork on Saturday that he had bought from a fund raiser at the local Moose Hall. He had a 1 gallon jug of barbeque sauce that was absolutely delicious, the label on it was some woman’s name and phone number to call if you wanted more. On Sunday we had baked King Mackerel that he had caught in a fishing tournament on Friday, also amazing stuff.
As we left we decided that if were looking for a change from Corpus Christi, Southport would be on our list of places to hang out, but I think the Caribbean may rank a little higher.
More to come soon

On land

2008-10-06T05:54:00.000-05:00

Arriving in Southport, NC Julie was able to see the boat for the first time and amazingly she didn’t get in the car and drive back home. Ziggy surprised us by climbing up and down the steep companionway stairs, we were certain we would have to lift him up and down.
After a couple of days at the marina Julie pushed me off so I could motor the ~ ½ mile to the boat yard where we were going to have the boat pulled so we could work on the boat. As soon as I cleared the slip I realized there was a problem, at full throttle I was barely moving and mostly sideways at that. After a few minutes I realized the fast way to move was idling in reverse where I was able to make about 1 knot. About halfway to the boat yard I was met by their workboat that Julie had sent out to help me back to the slip.
The decision to have the boat pulled was made after I asked a diver to inspect the rudder that was rumored to have been damaged after backing into an iceberg (not sure if it is true or not but it sounds better than hitting the dock). The diver was able to move the fiberglass on the top of the about ½” to the left and right which is a very bad thing.
After a few gyrations the boat was lifted out of the water and moved to shore where we noticed that the fiberglass was all but completely gone from the rudder and the top foot of the core was missing. This was interesting since I had just seen the top of the rudder when we left the marina ½ mile down the ICW. We also noticed that the prop was encrusted with a layer of barnacles about 1” thick making it essentially useless.

Travelling East

2008-09-29T21:43:00.000-05:00

After almost a week's delay, trying to get our house finished and on the market we finally struck out for North Carolina to commence work on Second Star ( which unfortunately for the next week or so until she is repainted still has the moniker "Wet Dream" ).

We completely filled the bed of the Tacoma pick-up with clothes, gear and supplies for the 3 weeks of boat repair and the 6 week trip from the Southport, NC to Corpus Christi, TX.

We stopped in San Antonio to see Laurie, John and Maddie; Julies sister, brother in-law and niece and had a wonderful time as always. We were in a hurry so only spent a total of 16 hours with them, almost half of them sleeping which was a shame. It's times like this, that you wish you could freeze the clock and spend time doing what you really want to do and be with people you enjoy being with.

Second Star

2008-08-20T14:44:00.000-05:00

On August 11th, 2008 We purchased a 1977 47' Litton Perry cruising yacht in Southport, North Carolina. She was designed as a blue water cruiser capable of handling the worst the open ocean can offer up and built by Universal Marine company in Taiwan.

The hull is solid fiberglass with a fair amount of Teak trim on deck. The interior has Mahogany plywood bulkheads and furniture faces with Teak doors and drawer fronts, the cabin sole (floor) is a layup of solid Teak and Holly.

Some of the major features are:
Two Cabins with in-suite head and shower
Two A/C - Heater units
Large Freezer/Refrigerator Unit
3 Burner stove with oven
Large Main cabin settee with table
New Autopilot
Cutter Rig - Mainsail, Jib and Staysail
Rollerfurling Mainsail
Rollerfurling Jib
Selftacking club footed jib
13'6" Beam (width)

We were warned that it needed quite a bit of cosmetic work but that it was structurally sound. On the plus side she had a new 100hp Yanmar diesel installed in 2003 which has been run for 800 hours (this equates to about 25,000 miles on a car engine). The cost of this engine and installation is close to what it cost us to buy the boat. There were also a handful of other recent equipment updates that add to the value of this beauty.

Upon initial inspection, all of the structural parts of the boat are rock solid indicating great design and construction. On the other hand the boat is a bit tired and needs a lot of work to get it into like new shape. As I told Julie over the phone when I first saw it "If you stand way back and squint really hard it looks great". The Hull while is in pretty good shape as far as nicks and scratches but the paint is old and faded. The transom is especially ugly where it boast the existing name "Wet Dream" (that's gotta go quick).

The original teak decking was removed several years ago leaving non-skid and a bunch of epoxy patches where the screw holes where, we plan to sand the entire deck, paint the cabin sides etc.. and roll on new textured gelcoat non-skid decking.

The teak around the gunwales (edge of the boat) is pretty much shot so we plan to replace it with Ipe which is a South American wood that looks similar to Teak. Ipe is used in high end patio decks and has the same waterproof properties as Teak but it is tougher and costs about 1/5th as much. (After seeing a sistership online that replaced the original teak with synthetic decking we were inspired to use Ipe decking.

That's all for now, much more later