Sailing on borrowed time

The world unfolds in uncharted and unpredictable ways, making for good luck, bad luck, and (for those born under a bad sign) no luck at all. Unpredictable as luck may be, it also seems to be a bit malleable. Confucius, some 2000 years ago, said, “The more you know the more luck you will have.” Various golfers apparently took up that theme with variations of, “The more I practice the luckier I get”. One of my most used quips is, “It's better to be lucky than good” but, in all honesty, I don't really believe in luck at all. Nor am I a big fan of fate though, like most of the pilots I know, I regard “Fate is the Hunter” as a pretty good description of a professional pilot's life. Not being of the religious frame of mind the idea of “everything happening for a reason” seems a bit unfair to refugees and people dying of cancer. Such people also make Henley's “I am the captain of my fate: I am the master of my soul” little more than a poetic expression of pure hubris.

Still, the world unfolds in uncharted and unpredictable ways, sometimes holding us up, sometimes landing on our heads, and most times doing a little bit of both at the same time. The only thing we get to “captain” and “master” is how we fit what happens into our tiny corner of the world, how we let events shape the kind of people we become.

The reason the stuffing box was leaking and the
Three Bolts to Go that started this whole process.

Work on Kintala continues. Much to my surprise, I have done mostly support tasks; pulling the broken parts off, grinding the outside of the hull, bolting a few of the new parts back in. Much of the hard work has been picked up by the Yard Gurus. The Engine Guru was particularly aghast at his findings, having to crank the WesterBeast over nearly and inch and a half to get the new drive shaft centered in the middle of the stern tube. The old one was basically riding hard against the edge, with the dripless seal running way out of center. (Which actually says a lot about the seal since it didn't leak a drop in all the miles we have covered.) It seems pretty obvious: whoever did the last repair remounted the strut “close” then lined the engine up as best they could. Why the boat wasn't shaking itself apart is anyone's guess.

The Glass Guru wasn't impressed with his findings either. He discovered that strut was being supported by about 1/4 of an inch of glass, and that, not fully wetted out when it was laid down. I'm not exactly sure how Tartan mounted the strut in the first place, but I am sure they should have talked to our Glass Guru before they built the boat.

The boat has also seen a small parade of the experts who work here drop by to take a look, including a boss or two. The consensus is unanimous; one good line snag wrapped hard around our drive shaft would likely have pulled the strut clean out of the hull. Kintala would have sunk within minutes.

Clearly we have been sailing on borrowed time, three years worth in fact. Parts of those years were spent sailing around the crab pots of the ICW, the Chesapeake Bay, and the western coast of Florida. More than once we brushed past a pot not seen until the last moment and, last year, made the night motor up the Chesapeake strewn with pots and drift nets. A mistake on deck could have put a line in the water while in the middle of the Gulf Stream or in the Atlantic between the Abaco Islands and Egg Key. It isn't hard to image how disastrous it could have been.

Were we lucky? Was that not our fate? Or did we just make the best decisions we could along the way, based on what we knew at the time, and working with the resources we had available? Things unfolded the way they did, uncharted and unpredictable. We ended up here, surrounded by people who have the knowledge and resources to get us up and going again, safer and better than we were. Things don't always work out that way, and then we make different decisions and use different resources. All of which turns us into the people that we are.

Which, in our case, is grateful members of the cruising tribe, hoping to be back “out there” soon.

1/3 of the flax seal was missing, turned to mush in the grease. It had also not been placed in the trough correctly so it had
merely squished between the plates and wasn't against the rudder post.

Three bolts to go

For the first time in months, the WesterBeast rumbled to life with a purpose, dock lines were tossed, and Kintala eased her way back out of the slip where she has rested for all these long months. It was kind of exciting even if we were only headed to the haulout pit. We weren't really planning on being lifted out, but the rudder stuffing box had started leaking on the way up the west coast of FL, and it lies well below the water line. Lifting the boat just high enough to pull the three bolts that hold the stuff in the stuffing box, without having water flood into the boat, was among the very last things needing to be done in this summer of work.

It has been a while since I drove a boat in the tight confines of a marina, but there was zero wind, shift and throttle worked silky smooth, and we ghosted into the lift straps like we knew what we were doing. Half an hour, hour at most, and we would be back in the slip with the boat closer to 100% than she has ever been.

A few hours later Kintala was sitting on the hard.

I have always been a bit shy about the parts of our drive train that didn't get attention back when the v-drive exploded. I should have been even more concerned after learning of the water spout hit that had done so much damage to the boat including (apparently) shoving it backwards into some shallows that damaged the rudder. With the boat nearly out of the water we could see the shaft and prop, and decided to take a closer look. After careful consideration, a new prop shaft, dripless seal and cutlass bearing will be installed (long overdue and recommended last summer by the folks at Oak Harbor)

Another issue is the shaft support strut mounting itself. Once we really started to look at the shaft / strut /  bearing combo that hangs under the bottom of the boat, I grew convinced that the strut support had, at some time in the past, been repaired; a repair that left much to be desired in such a critical area of the hull. Where the shaft exits the hull also appears to be more than just a bit of a hack job. I just couldn't convince myself that it was going to be okay to keep going with things as they were.

It would be easy to get discouraged. We thought we were so close to being on our way once again, with a fat and happy cruising kitty and a solid boat. There were plans to visit family and have family visit us, travels that are due to start in less than two weeks. The Islands were calling for the winter. All such plans seemed to be at risk with the cruising kitty cringing in fear of the costs heading its way.

But it may not be as bad as we thought for those first hours of Saturday morning. The Snead Island crew is a crew of experts and we are (junior) members of the family. If there is anyplace in the world to get critical glass work done in a high stress area of the hull well below the water line, this is the place. What seems like a Major Big Deal of a boat repair is often, to them, a minor glitch handled as a matter of routine. Chop out, glass, re-align, and remount the shaft support? Sure, no problem. (We just did that exact same thing for the two big engines just installed in the project boat I've been working on all summer.) Source custom bits and parts? The number is in the shop's speed dial list. A new shaft, coupling, seal and bearing will be on the way before the week is out.

Since I like to imagine myself as one of the experts around here, much of the work will fall to me. But our glass slinger has been slinging structure glass for decades. The engine guy has aligned as many marine engines as I have done hot sections on aircraft turbines, or flown instrument approaches right down to minimums. I will not mind having them looking over my shoulders and offering suggestions.

So I am going to put off being discouraged until we see how it goes. A broken boat, even if it is pretty much all one owns in the world, is still just a broken boat. And it may well be that we (once again) uncovered a potential major problem the easy way, in the perfect place to address it with a minimum of fuss and risk. However bad (or not) this hit turns out to be, when done, Kintala will be a better, safer boat, than she was yesterday morning when we eased out of the slip...

...and thought there was only three bolts to go.