Countdown: Three Days

We did finally get a pickup date from the trucker - it's officially Monday the 9th. This leaves us a mere three days to get everything else done before he comes. While thinking about the transport, it occurred to us that we would have to take the hatch covers off and we still hadn't rebed the one over the V-berth yet so it would have leaked like a sieve had it rained. We spent the better part of the day scraping old sealant out and putting pretty new sealant in so hopefully it will hold this time.

Tomorrow we finish the wind vane control line installation and begin to pack up the lazarette and

reassemble the cockpit. Without a doubt, the wind vane project has been one of the more complicated projects we've undertaken on this boat, right up there with the table and the dodger, and the cockpit has been a disaster through the whole installation. It's going pretty well though and I'm getting eager to give it a try. The whole theory of wind vanes still has me a little mystified I admit. The idea that wind can not only power your movement, but direct it as well is an amazing thing.

Not a breath of wind this morning

On a sadder note, a sailing friend of ours found out today that he has a malignant tumor behind his right eye. It's a difficult piece of news, and it emphasizes for me, once again, the fragile nature of life. We have so little time to experience all this world has to offer, and I hope that maybe through our cruising some one of you might be encouraged to follow your dream as well, whatever form your dream might take.

Moving day ...

... has come ... and mostly gone. There is no sign of a truck, trailer, or driver. Not unexpected really, since we got a hint last week that the schedule would slip when there was a question about getting a road permit that extended over the holiday. Text messages went back and forth and by yesterday evening Sept 9th had become the new "moving day". I'm not exactly sure how it is that we couldn't get a truck here on a specific day even with months of lead time; something that in any other industry is as routine as breathing. But this is a "marine transport company". As soon as the adjective "marine" is attached to anything pretty much any semblance of normal operation can be dismissed.

Other than the total lack of professionalism (which no longer surprises me) I am trying to shrug off this additional delay as just another part of being a cruiser. Wait on weather, wait on tides, wait on currents ... wait on a truck. Waiting too many more days will start to be a problem; after all we really have no desire to winter in the Chesapeake Bay. So far we don't need to be gone as much as we would like to be gone. And in the meantime there is always work to do. For the last couple of days I have taken up residence in the lazarette, gaining access to the underside of the cockpit to try and figure out the control line runs for the Cape Horn wind vane.

By the way, as good as the reviews the Cape Horn system garners, the installation has had its bumps. What one gets in the kit is less than half of the pieces actually needed to make this thing work. Sure the missing bits are small; turning blocks, fair leads, clutches, the actual control line itself. Spot sourcing them once the project is started makes sense since the amount needed of each of these things is dependent on the actual installation; and you get to make that up as you go. But somehow I didn't quite get that when reviewing the order list against the installation manual; and we have added several hundreds of dollars to the price by getting the rest of the needed items. Something to keep in mind if you need to put one of these things in your cruising budget. Not Cape Horn's fault at all, just sharing what happened to us. But trust me on this, doing a hot section on a turbo prop engine is a far sight easier than putting this thing in a 30 year old boat. If you can't do it yourself expect the labor bill to add 50% to 100% to the installed cost.

None of which is easing my transition into the cruising life any. I can't get a truck here on time. The bottom took 3 weeks instead of 4 days, the wind vane isn't wind-ing or vane-ing anything yet, the list of work still to do is daunting and I'm sure I don't know what all needs done yet.

I guess if this was easy everyone would be doing it.

Distant Shores

I just read an interview with the popular couple from the TV show Distant Shores, Paul and Sheryl Shard, and I wanted to pass it along. They're having a giveaway of two seasons of their DVDs so if you want to participate, just follow the instructions at the bottom of the post. Of course, we're hoping to win so it won't hurt my feelings if you don't participate!

 Windtraveler.net interview and giveaway 

Distant Shores

That one thing

Tim and I have been talking about the recent surge of cruisers who are giving up the cruising life for something else on land. Some of them are success stories, people who set out to cruise for a predetermined time, cruised for that time, and are now heading into another venture on land - families, new jobs, business ventures. Some of them are people who set out to cruise and along the way met with a dream they didn't know they had and changed courses. Some of them are tragedies for sure, illnesses, accidents, and the like, but it's the very few out-and-out failures that we have been examining, turning them over in our discussion to see if there is anything we might learn. After a few days of this off and on between boat work, I think we've decided that in most cruising dream failures, the failure is the result of That.One.Thing.

Anyone who has lived on a boat knows what That One Thing is. It's the one thing that drives you crazy nearly every single day. It's a different thing for every cruiser. For some it's the fact that you have to dig to the bottom of the top-loading fridge every time you need to find something. For some it's the three minute showers due to the water rationing, for some it's an uncomfortable bed, for some it's the lack of communication with friends, for some it's the extended togetherness...the list goes on and is as varied as the individuals who are cruising.

We decided that success in cruising is certainly dependent on a variety of factors: personality, expectations, money, mechanical abilities, etc., but in the end it's That One Thing, the straw that breaks the camel's back that pushes someone over the edge and sends them back to land. It's important to remember that we all experience things like this on land as well, but everything on a boat is intensified because of the constraints of small spaces and the sometimes harsh environment. What to do? We decided that as much as is possible we need to isolate those things and find a way to make them better. While the fridge is not my personal thing, for some it's a big issue and so it would be a great idea to find a way to organize the fridge in a way that it makes it easier to access. Ours happens to be filled with those extra-large blue Ziploc bags with the handles. We have one for cheese, butter and yogurt, one for meat, one for veggies etc.They're exactly the height of our fridge, are easy to lift out and easy to see through to find what you're looking for. If the shower is your thing, determine that you're going to stop at a marina with showers at least once a month so you can luxuriate for a lengthy time. Budget for it, and stick to your guns. If it's an uncomfortable bed, spend some money to customize it. We had a custom mattress made for our V-berth and it was the best money we ever spent. It's actually more comfortable than the bed we had in the condo. We had it done at Verlo Mattress and it wasn't very expensive. A cheap 4" memory foam topper from Wally World finished it out for us.

The hardest thing about all of this is identifying what it is for you, and then communicating it to your cruising partner(s). We have this inherent resistance to being honest with ourselves and an even greater inability of communicating those things to those who love us, but if you can stop the buildup of frustration, then the straw is not likely to break the camel's back.

Do you know what your one thing is?

A hunk of metal

The propeller on Kintala is a chunk of solid metal; no moving parts. "How hard can it be to get another
one", you ask? Ah Grasshopper, grab a coldie to wash this one down.

So the propeller guru called the shop guru who called us. The propeller guru had our order for a new propeller and was pretty sure we had messed up somewhere. In a display of customer service kind of astounding given my experience in the marine industry, he was reluctant to spend our money for us until the shop guru checked it out. So the shop guru called us and started asking questions. As it turns out we had absolutely messed up ... by ordering the propeller listed in the Tartan spec sheet! What was I thinking?

In an effort to sort out the confusion the shop guru asked that we send him some pictures of the failing hunk of metal that had been our old prop. We were deep into a discussion about Walter V-drives and Hurth Transmissions, blowed up drive trains and shaft alignments, when the conversation took a strange turn. Did we want an "elephant ear" prop or a "sailor" prop? I, being the neophyte boat propeller buyer / installer that I am, had absolutely no clue what we were talking about. Would that be an African elephant ear as opposed to an Asian one? And, given that it is a propeller for a sailboat, what else would it be but a "sailor" prop? Is there a non-sailor propeller intended for use on sailboats out there somewhere? While this bit of strangeness buzzed over our cellphone connection the pictures showed up in his email.

"What kind of propeller is that? I've never seen one that looked like that before, is it a European prop?"

European prop? There are European elephants I never heard about? This boat has never been out of American waters, where would it find a European prop? It also seems that European props go on metric shafts, which would be a huge puzzle. I may be a sailboat propeller neophyte but I do know how to read a micrometer. When I replaced the shaft coupler to the V-drive the shaft measured 1 inch, the size of the coupler I ordered and installed. Unless Kintala has a shaft sized US on one end and metric on another ... (so paranoid am I of this boat that I actually put a mic to the the prop end, it was an inch). If it is a European prop it is tapered for a metric shaft. There should be no way to jam a metric taper on a US shaft except ... might that explain why it took a 7 ton puller to get that thing off? Probably not since the old prop has 16 X 12 X 1 clearly stamped into it. More to the point, if the East Coast sailboat repair guru hasn't a clue as to what has been hanging on the end of my prop shaft, what chance is there I have have a clue?

What I do know is that no one seems to know exactly what is going on with the working end of our drive train. Instead of a nice shiny new propeller, when Kintala gets east she will be met by various puzzled gurus. Instead of going in the water she will hang in the hoist until the gurus are puzzled no longer. Then they will help us spend our money and order the correct thing ... or things ... or multiple things (insert you favorite mechanic's nightmare here) needed to make our Tartan safe for blue water.

All I needed was a new prop. How hard could that be?

The True Cost of Cruising

Two Daughters and five grand kids . . . today was the day we said the rest of the hard good-byes. I was doing okay right through the day, playing, reading books, explaining to the two oldest girls why we were staying at a marina they had never visited and then explaining about travel lifts and trucks. But at the end of the day, just when it looked like I might hold it together the youngest, with no clue what he was about to do to my heart, crawled to my feet, held his arms up to be lifted, then tucked his face into my shoulder . . . 

There is no explanation for the wanderer's soul. There is no cure for wanderlust. I have been unhappy being in one place since (so I am told anyway) my first day of first grade. Less than an hour of being penned in one room and I had had enough. The twelve years that followed, all in the same school district, were pure misery. It showed in my grades, in my list of detentions, in the fights and the brushes with police. I was that kid none of the other kids were allowed to hang out with. Quite literally, they let me out after my Senior year because no one wanted to see me there again.

The two years of technical school were a slight improvement; partly because I was the kid right out of high school in a class mostly made up of people recently out of the jungles of 'Nam. They were a tough lot, several more than a little crazy, many of whom took a liking to the combative kid who (I now suspect) reminded them of themselves before someone started shooting at them. It also helped that only half our day was spent in a classroom; the other half we spent out in the shop. Still penned in, but better than a desk. To this day, no one knows how often I dreamed of just walking away from that place and how close I came to doing it . . . the future I hoped to share with Deb being the only thing that kept me going back.

They let us "graduate" a few weeks early to fill jobs rebuilding B-52s. Deb and I headed west and never looked back. We spent 4 years in one place, 14 in another, 2 in a third, then landed in St. Louis. But we wandered constantly: me as a pilot, both of us as bikers. And no place ever felt like a "home," just a town with a job.

Now, finally, we are on the verge of heading off again; this time for a wanderer's dream come true. No place is home, but anywhere can be our front yard. The challenge of new skills to learn, the lure of new places to see, experiencing life in a way unsuspected just six years ago, and no one can tell us we have to "stay here and do this." But the dream has a price just shy of being too high . . . a price no one but a wanderer would even think about paying.

We like to say that there is no choice, that the wanderer wouldn't be the person he or she is if they could stop. Perhaps that is true. We are going, after all. But I like to think that the price will be a fair one. That in the end the people we love who don't wander with us love us anyway; that they share our adventures and find a larger view of the world. That, in the end, the stories of our lives will be full, even if the main characters in our hearts are not written into every page.

For that is the true cost of cruising.

Cross one more off

As the keeper of the maintenance list now that Tim refuses to look at it, I'm doing a pretty dismal job. After
closing out the house I really found it hard to get too interested in more honey-do stuff. But after a pretty easy morning of finishing up the fitting of the wind vane tower, we were feeling rather guilty about not doing anything so we decided to tackle the holding tank monitoring system install.

We decided on a SCAD single tank monitoring system because it has an external sensor that can go on our plastic holding tank without having to drill any holes or fit any fittings. It's a clean, simple system and we like clean and simple. Unfortunately, Tartan doesn't always agree and continually tries to make access as difficult as possible for things like wires. It took us 4 hours and a completely torn apart interior, but we got it done and we're pretty happy with it. I did hold my nose and open the access panel on the top of the tank so I could see if the Empty on the panel agreed with my eyes. This holding tank was actually a water tank at one point that someone converted to a holding tank, so the pumpout fitting is about 2" short of the bottom and there is always some sludge there. It means that for us our 24 gallon tank actually only holds about 18 gallons so we will have to watch it pretty carefully in the early days of cruising till we see how it goes. At least now we'll have a monitor instead of having to disassemble the V-berth to get  at the access panel to take a look-see.

Nothing like having your mattress on your dining table...

Mantus Muscle

Tim says it's big and ugly, but if it lets me sleep in peace while the wind blows and the tides rise, then I'm a happy camper.  Now if I can just talk him into 250 feet of chain...

Are you sure???

J.B. the Magic Man

That would be the words that came out of Tim's mouth as he was given the total from the welder. You see, he came to fix the crack in the port side spreader bracket and to repair the repair that Crowley's in Chicago made such a cluster out of. Now, keep in mind that this guy made a special trip to the boat from New Baden, IL, with a truck and portable Tig welder, to weld on our mast where it currently resides on stands at Tradewinds Marina. He looked at the job, rubbed his bearded chin for a moment, and then got to work. It was a thing of beauty to watch. He was quick, efficient, polite, and professional. Crowley's, on the other hand, had a guy right there, had the best (or rather supposedly the best) facilities in Chicago, and they still couldn't get it done. Crowley's charged us $858 to weld that bracket. Just want to be sure you got that. $858.00 green crinkly ones. So, it was with great trepidation that I sat on the deck with my feet on the first rungs of the ladder we use to climb to the boat these days, checkbook in one hand, pen in the other, waiting for the invoice total. I heard him mumble "six forty" while he was scribbling and I thought, "Ahhh that I can deal with. At least not another $858". I get ready to write the check when he turns to Tim and says "One eighty."  Tim's mouth hangs open, his eyes go blank, and for a moment he is speechless. For those of you who know him, this doesn't happen very often. "One eighty?  Are you sure?? Because this is the last chance you have to up it brother and then I'm going to take it." Never occurred to me for one minute that the six forty he was mumbling was the time he finished.

$180.00.  One hundred and eighty US dollars to fix a new crack, and repair someone else's screwup, all delivered right to our front door, or rather our companionway I should say. And we now have a professional weld on our mast instead of the freakishly embarrassing mess that was there before.

Look, Ma! No more Swiss Cheese!

I have one happy aircraft mechanic camper.

So if you need a difficult weld done, be sure to call

Marvin Spaeth Welding Service
321 W Missouri St.
New Baden, IL 62265
(618) 588-3596

And be sure to ask for J.B. 

Random thoughts on a half day

Deb and I finished up the bottom paint around 12:30. Instead of taking on another project in the heat of the day we decided to give ourselves a bit of a break, grab some lunch, head into a nearby town for some ice cream, maybe even take in a movie. I haven't been off-site in more than a week. For an ex-airplane driver used to wandering around the country that is like being house bound. On my half day of leisure some thoughts come to mind ...

Hydrocoat "RED" isn't really red, it is more like a sandstone pink. And "BLACK" isn't really black, it's more like a dark chocolate brown. It looks okay, but not quite like I expected. The nearly three weeks of constant effort to get the bottom done seems like a lot. If pressed I might admit that Kintala is slightly more seaworthy than she was; after all the concrete void is now sealed. Supposedly the Chesapeake Bay water critters will find a poor purchase on the not-so-shiny new paint as well. Add that to the fact that the boat does look a far sight more "nautical" than she did - maybe the three weeks of effort were worth it after all. One thing is for sure; her good looking bottom makes the various dock scuffs on her flanks look much worse than they are. My operator's head tells me don't worry about it, there are surely more scuffs in our near future. My mechanic's heart says its time to break out the polish.

Putting paint on with a roller is a really cheesy way to do it. It doesn't seem too bad if one thinks of a boat as a house which, in a way, it is. But if one tends to think of a boat as a machine, like a car or an airplane or a motorcycle, then rolling on the paint definitely falls into a category of maintenance usually associated with trailer parks. There is probably no cost effective alternative. But I can't help but think that doing a better job of prepping and painting boat bottoms, using just some of the technology available with process and product, would eliminate all of the heartburn over "osmotic blistering". It isn't the fiberglass in the hulls, it isn't the water filled environment, it is just the low rent way we paint them causing the problems.

Kintala probably lost 0.1% of the speed she might have gained to the kamikaze bug corpses now embedded in her new paint. Some of them dove right into the leading edge of the roller which, I thought, was kind of rude. Most of them were corps bugs though, and so smashed into minute little specks that all but disappeared. (The spiders were another story.)

There is still a lot of stuff to do; prop, anchor locker, new anchor, wind vane, pull down the canvas, rig the boat - inside and out - for road travel, get the mast welded, sheaves, LEDs, SSB, VHF antenna, rigging repair and inspection. Then, someday, the boat will go back in the water and a bunch of this stuff has to get done the other way around.

I'm sure glad to be done for today though ... necesita el descanso.

Early mornings, late nights, and lots of progress

A short picture collection from today.

We moved the stand pads and finished the red coat.

After the red coat cured for a few hours we did the black coat. After it sits all night we'll move the stand pads and paint under them as well. The coverage of the black over the red was phenomenal. It continues to impress us.

I think she's looking pretty good, don't you?

Late nights...

Our dinner view from the clubhouse.

I loves me some Hydrocoat

I think I've mentioned this in a previous post, but I ran a Sherwin Williams aircraft paint distributorship

for 5 years back in the early 2000s. We sold a water-based paint, or rather we tried to sell a water-based paint because aircraft painters are a stuck-in-the-mud lot and are petrified to try anything new for fear it will upset the paint fairies and leave them with blushes or blisters and a corporate jet repaint bill of $250K. In addition, after painting with 2-part polyurethanes for decades, they found it impossible to believe that any water-based paint could stick as well as their urethanes or look as pretty. It became necessary for me to send out samples to painters just so they could try it.  I began to get phone calls with the words, "Damn! Don't get this stuff anywhere you don't want it, because it sticks so good you can't get it off!".  So when I found out that Pettit made a water-based paint, one I could used without fear of getting a tumor or turning into a deranged blithering idiot from exposure, I was immediately on board. Today we put on the first coat and I became an instant believer.

The instructions are detailed and clearly written and stress the fact that all bottom paint performance is dependent on the substrate prep, so pay attention to yours if you choose to use it. That being said, it's one of the few paints that can go directly over VC-17, which some previous owner had chosen to put between two layers of other paint of questionable compatibility, a fact that I'm fairly sure contributed to the large amount of paint blisters we had. Hydrocoat can be applied by sprayer, roller or brush and we chose the roller method, not having the facilities to spray and not having the time to brush. The paint rolled on smoothly and dried quickly on our warm day (84° and 68% humidity), but not the irritatingly fast dry of VC-17 which means that two people can share a tray and work at the same time without having to do the antics of VC-17 application to prevent it drying
before you get it on the bottom in the typical Midwest summer heat. There is very little odor, and what there is has a pleasant, clean smell. Need to scratch your nose? No problem. Just rinse your hands under the hose and the paint washes off.  Our blue tape line on the waterline pulled clean and sharp, although we didn't leave it on very long per some forum suggestion I had picked up along the way of researching the product.



We only have the first coat on and we'll update you once we get the black final coat on, but everything I see so far has me smiling big.

Yes, we were working around Tim's fiberglass repair which was still curing