Offshore to Palm Beach, FL
currently in: Lake Worth, Palm Beach, FL

Actually, we've been here for a few days, as you know if you've been checking our position reports.  You might notice that's some 300 miles from our previous location; although we really should have updated our position every day, we don't generally use the single-sideband radio - how we do the ham email and position reporting - while we're underway.  Which is where we were from Tuesday morning through about two in the afternoon on Thursday: sailing down the coast about ten miles offshore.

Well, we tried to sail, but for about the first 24 hours we had to listen to the drone of the engine as there just wasn't enough wind.  A few times we hopefully hoisted sail and turned off the motor...only to see our speed drop, from six knots to five, to four, to three, to two...which is where we start to lose steerage and are basically just drifting with the current.  (I can walk faster than two knots.  I can walk backwards faster than two knots.  Admittedly, not on the ocean.)  At which point we gave up, and turned on the motor again.

We did manage to sail for a couple of hours that first night, though, which incidentally provided a good opportunity for our new AIS system to make itself useful.  Our course led us across the approaches to many busy ports, and at first it was just an interesting novelty to see the little blue triangles sprout across our electronic charts, each with the name, speed, course, and other information of the ship it represented.  Shortly before we put up the sails again for what turned out to be a good two-hour run before the wind died down, I noticed the lights of a ship behind us, between us and the coast; I could see its red port light, which meant it was heading in our direction.  The AIS display told us its name - the Herm Kiepe - its speed - 18 knots, about three times as fast as we were moving - and its course - right towards us.  Well, more or less; its estimated closest point of approach (CPA) was half a mile, plenty of room.  But then we put up our sails, and our speed dropped from about 6.5 to 4.5 knots.  That was fine by us, and would still put us in Palm Beach in daylight the next day if we maintained that speed...but when we checked the chart display, the CPA for the Herm Kiepe had dropped to almost zero: a collision course!

Nervously we watched it.  According to the AIS, the time of CPA would be twenty minutes, so we gave it a little time; because the ship was overtaking us, by the rules of the road it, not us, was supposed to alter course if necessary, and we were supposed to "stand on" - although of course the ultimate rule of the road is to not be stupid, and get out of the way if you have to!  But it kept coming, and it occurred to me that the crew of the ship were probably checking their instruments only every 10 or 15 minutes, which is basically what we do as well.  Whoever was on watch had probably seen the stern light of our boat (and our blip on the radar), set a course to pass half a mile behind us, and then gone off to do something else.  And then we go and mess everything up by slowing down.

So with ten minutes to go, I called the Herm Kiepe on the VHF radio.  An accented male voice answered right away.  "This is the sailboat off your port bow," I said.  "Our instruments show you on a collision course."

"I see you.  We'll change course immediately," he said, and sure enough, the pattern of lights behind us shifted, and when I went below I could see the ship had angled more steeply, and would pass a mile away.  What a relief! 

Of course, the AIS was only part of the toolbox that showed us we were in danger, and helped get us out of it.  But the information it presents is a lot clearer than trying to discern whether a radar blip is on a constant bearing line, I got it well before I could see both port and starboard lights on the ship (a clear indication of imminent collision), and it's nice to be able to hail a ship by name instead of just giving your latitude and longitude and hoping the guy on the other end bothers to match them up with his.

It wasn't until about noon Wednesday that the wind finally filled in to more than 7 knots (or so we are guessing; our wind instrument is flaky and it looks like we won't be able to fix it this trip) and we were able to sail for nearly the rest of the passage.  How much nicer it is to be able to turn off the engine; sailing isn't silent, but it's a lot quieter than motoring, and the motion is easier, and there's no lingering tang of diesel in the air.  (Early in the trip, I was feeling slightly seasick, which is an embarrassing admission considering how light the conditions were.  The swell from the east - long, rolling waves - was considerable, though, and I think the smell of our exhaust, occasionally wafting back into the cockpit, was part of it.  I felt a lot better each time we cut the engine and put up the sails, and after the first day I was fine.)

As we approached the Lake Worth inlet late Thursday morning, the wind got lighter and shifted a bit, so the motor went back on.  (Eventually, anyway.  I was on watch while Britt slept, so I messed with the sails, gave up, put the motor on and took the jib down, then felt that I had been too hasty and put the jib back up and turned the motor off, messed around again, then gave up for good.)  We motorsailed for a couple of hours, then our last leg angled us toward the coast, and Britt said, "We could sail again."  I looked at the chart.  "It's only half an hour to the inlet," I said.  "I'm too tired and frustrated from messing with the sails earlier, but if you want to, go ahead."

And then the engine weighed in by abruptly stopping.

This wasn't a cause for panic.  We have two big fuel tanks, and right now they're filled with two-year-old diesel, so they foul the filters frequently.  Usually when this happens, the engine "faints" rather than cuts out entirely - it loses RPM for a few seconds, then returns to full - and that cues us in to switch tanks.  That is, assuming that we hadn't already been keeping an eye on the pressure gauge Britt installed with the filtration system - when the needle is past vertical, deep in the red zone, it's time to swap tanks and replace the filter.  Which we had just done the previous morning, while motoring, so it surprised us that the filter was already fouled.  But we swapped to the second tank, and I turned the key...and the engine wouldn't start.

Okay, cause for concern, anyway, if not panic.  We still had the mainsail up - we usually keep it up when we're motoring in open water, just to steady the boat - and the wind was blowing us toward shore, so the first order of business was to hoist the jib and then tack, so I could sail back north, toward open water, while Britt diagnosed the problem.  He thought it might be the primary fuel filter, the fine filter on the engine that picks up the gunk the tank filters miss, so he changed that filter while worked through the angles in my head and decided that it would be easy enough to enter the inlet under sail, and we could anchor in the little anchorage just south of there while we figured out what to do next. 

Then Britt popped his head out of the engine and announced, "I think we just ran out of diesel in tank #1!"  There was plenty of diesel in tank #2, but the fuel line had gone dry, so the engine wasn't catching.  I gave over steering to Bob (our autopilot) and helped Britt pre-bleed the lines for the second tank, and then we restarted the engine with no problem at all. 

Normally, we keep track of our engine hours as a proxy for fuel usage - we burn about one gallon per hour - but we hadn't done a very good job this time.  Part of it was that we used our heater a lot for our first couple of weeks, and because the furnace cycles on and off depending on the thermostat, it's hard to track how much diesel it burns.  But now that we're in warmer climes, we're not running the heater, so we ought to be able to stay on top of things from here on out.

Lake Worth is a large anchorage, a good place to hang out while waiting for weather to go in whatever direction.  Lots of boats here, and every day a few more filter in and a few slip away.  As we both have job-work to do as well as the various boat projects we need to finish, we'll be here at least until Tuesday, and perhaps longer.

(passage stats: 53 hours, ~20 sailing 33 motoring or motorsailing, 300 miles, avg speed 5.6 kts)

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/31/2007 [link]  4 comments Post a Comment   

 
Life on the Intercoastal Waterway
current location:  "Wally's Leg" near Brunswick, GA

For the past week we've been meandering our way down the ICW.  None of it's new to us, as our first year we took the waterway all the way to Fort Lauderdale, and several sections we have seen many times from both directions.  But we've been off the boat for two years, so I feel as though we've been taking a refresher course in the ICW, refamiliarizing ourselves with the rhythms of the waterway.

It's a whole different way of looking at the world, traveling along rivers and dredged canals at about 7 mph.  Certainly it's analogous to the highway system, with routes you can find on a map, and signs with shapes and colors that indicate their meaning, and even rules of the road - but of course they're all a little different from the highway versions.

The range of cars, SUVs and pickup trucks are represented by a variety of pleasure craft, sail and power.  Instead of semis hauling trailers, we have tugs pushing barges.  We even have our equivalent of the straight-pipe Harley: the cigarette boat, which is long and skinny and really really LOUD.  And every once in a while we see a few bicyclists - that is, kayakers.

The analogy isn't perfect.  I don't know what the equivalent of going aground would be in a car (and maybe I don't WANT to know!) And hee, I was about to write that we haven't gone aground yet, but as I was typing this paragraph, Britt slowed way down, so I put the computer down - I'm sitting below, typing, while he takes a shift at the helm - and went up to see what was going on.  "Six feet and dropping," he said, so I checked the chart and told him we were too far to the right.  Immediately he turned left, but before we got to deeper water we saw depths under five feet. Normally that would put us aground, but as we are motorsailing - motor's on and the main's half out to help push us along - we are heeled a bit, so I guess that kept us off the bottom.  (Or maybe it was just very soft mud!)  It's dead high tide, nearly six feet above datum, so at low we would have been on dry land - good thing we didn't ground!

Another difference is that when you're driving down the road, you don't have to radio the bridge ahead to ask it to let you through.  Of course, when you're in a car, most of the time you get to cross the bridges right away, but sometimes they make you wait for a stupid sailboat.  :-)

Sometimes bridges are a welcome distraction in a dull day, sometimes they are annoyances.  Leaving Charleston, we hustled to make the 9 am opening of the Wappoo Creek bridge, which only opens every half hour, and not at all during rush hours; with a favorable current, we arrived at the bridge right on time, and when we radioed the bridgetender, she said, "Two minutes." 

That sounded good, because the current that had helped us make the opening was now trying to push us into the bridge.  It's a lot easier to stall into the current than with the current, but I figured, two minutes, I'd just wiggle around and wait.  So we wiggled and waited.  And waited.  There was a big break in traffic, and we expected the gates to come down...but they didn't, and more traffic crossed.  Another break.  And then more cars.  Meanwhile we were being swept uncomfortably close to the bridge, so I turned the wheel and hit the throttle, turning away from the bridge in a big circle - and of course, when we were pointed upstream and away from the bridge, the bridgetender decided to FINALLY open the damn bridge.  Ten minutes after her promised "two minutes."  Grr.

On the other hand, the tender at the Ladies Island Bridge at Beaufort called us before we called him, telling us that we should just come on up and he'd open right away because he had a boat waiting on the other side, and they were lined up on the east channel so we should take the west channel.  And "have a nice day."  And he smiled and waved from the control booth.

It seems to me that the bridgetending world seems to consist mostly of young black women who favor the vehicles, and old white men who favor the boats.  I guess my preference will change when I'm in a car rather than in my boat, of course.

Away from the inlets and the cities, there really isn't much traffic, because it's still early for most of the snowbirds.  Still, we do see a small but steady stream of yachts going north; we're pretty much the only southbound vessel out there.  (Other than Wings, who apparently passed us while we were doing chores in Charleston and are about a day ahead of us.)

The scenery has slowly changed from the cypress swamps of South Carolina to the grassy swamps of Georgia.  That is, in the unpopulated places.  In the populated parts - well, if you were a visitor to the US seeing this country for the first time from a boat on the ICW, you'd think everyone was fabulously wealthy.  The houses on the waterway are huge and fancy mansions, with long docks ending in gazebos and floating docks, sometimes boat lifts.  We stare at how the other half lives as we go by...and then the waterway bends, and we're back in the swamp.

Which is where we are now, anchored in a tidal creek called "Wally's Leg."  (And don't forget that http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/winlink.cgi?KG4EYP will get you our most recent location, whether or not we've updated this log.  And actually, I'm updating this log using the cellphone modem before doing the location update on the radio email, so wait a few minutes before trying it!)  It looks like the middle of nowhere, but the strong signal on the cellphone reminds us that although civilization might not be evident from here, it's not very far away.

Anyway, we've had enough of poking down the ICW.  The weather's looking good for a jump outside, so the plan is to exit the waterway at St. Simon's Sound near Brunswick and head for somewhere in Florida. It's two days to West Palm Beach, a good way to make some miles in a hurry. See you then.
- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/26/2007 [link]  0 comments Post a Comment   

 
See, it really does float
I figured I'd throw this one out for those of you who have only seen the boatyard pictures, to prove that our boat really does float. We are at Thunderbolt Marina in Georgia, near Savannah.
- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/24/2007 [link]  1 comments Post a Comment   

 
Low tide near Charleston

We came through the ICW by Isle of Palms near Charleston during an unusually low tide - at dead low. All the floating docks to either side of us were "floating" on the mud!

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/23/2007 [link]  2 comments Post a Comment   

 
Morning mist on the Waccamaw River

I took this picture shortly after dawn a few days ago. The cold air and relatively warm water combine to make the whole place look eerie.

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/23/2007 [link]  1 comments Post a Comment   

 
Location, location, location
currently in: Charleston, SC

A quick update while we still have WiFi. First of all, I've set blog comments to forward to the radio email, so we'll get them now no matter what. (That is, comments on the windom.netrack.net site; if you're reading this via an aggregator or the LiveJournal syndicated feed, I can't get those comments.)

Second, I'm going to try to be conscientious about position reporting when I check in on the radio email. This means that you can go to http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/winlink.cgi?KG4EYP and retrieve a nifty little map with our (more-or-less) current position.

And speaking of position: the big project we did while here in Charleston was installation of a new VHF antenna for our new AIS receiver. AIS - Automatic Identification System - is a VHF broadcast that all big commercial ships are required to make, giving their name, destination, location, course, speed, and other information. Our new navigation software plots this information, so we bought a box - basically, a special-purpose VHF radio that receives on the AIS frequencies and converts the data into NMEA - and today we hooked it up. (That makes it sound easy. Actually, it took all day to pull the cable for the antenna, install the cable ends which were actually designed for a different gauge cable, reposition our existing equipment to make room for the new box, and so on... And it took all day yesterday to navigate the bus system to get out to the mall to find a Radio Shack to buy the various cables and ends and bits, of course, so the total time expended is entirely out of proportion to the result!)

But finally we got everything installed and turned on the software, and hee, if navigation was like a video game before, now it's even more so. Here's a screenshot of the view from Charleston Harbor, with various ships coming and going; we can click on any of them and get full data: speed, length and breadth and draft, even cargo.

It's a fun little toy, but also, we figure it's a safety feature. We use radar when we're out in the shipping lanes, to help us stay out of the paths of big ships, but sometimes the motion of our boat makes it hard to tell whether we're on a collision course with a ship. Any more information to help us stay out of their way is useful. Plus, the radar (and our eyeballs) can't see around corners, but AIS does - the screenshot, for example, shows lots of ships on the other side of the peninsula of Charleston.

Not that we're going to be using it much for the next few days. We've finished our chores here and are ready to leave, but the wind is going to be light and from the southwest - right where we're going. So there's no point in going outside; we'll stay in the ICW for a while, where the only big ships we'll have to dodge are tugs with barges. (Hmm, if they are broadcasting on AIS, it might be kind of nice to see them before they come around bends!)


- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/22/2007 [link]  0 comments Post a Comment   

 
Communication
currently in: Charleston, SC

As you probably noticed, the formatting was a bit wonky on the last post; this is because I sent it by email using the Winlink ham radio system, which strips off all the html and imposes its own weird formatting.  Ah, well.  As that's going to be our primary method of posting the blog, expect more weird formatting in the future - sorry about that!  

Right now we're anchored in Charleston, a stone's throw away from the city marina.  The anchorage isn't exactly the best - the first time we were here we had various exciting adventures which neither of us want to repeat, and it took us several tries to get anchored such that we would neither go aground nor hit anything when the current swung us around, but with the WiFi bridge that Britt put together sitting up on deck, we can connect to the marina wireless!

This is a good thing, because the cell phone modem doesn't seem to be working, grr.  That is, it doesn't connect to the dialup ISP that I set up while in Durango.  It worked there; dunno why it doesn't work here, but it doesn't, and that's aggravating.  Unless we can find wireless frequently, we're not going to be able to retrieve our email as often as we though we'd be able to.  But I will be doing the ham radio email regularly from here on out, so if you want to reach us, use my Winlink address: KG4EYP [at-sign] winlink.org.  It's a really low-bandwidth link, so please send only plain text. I'm going to try to set up the blog comments to forward, but I'm not sure I'll be able to, so if you want a quick reply, use the ham email.

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/20/2007 [link]  4 comments Post a Comment   

 
Southbound!
(Converted from HTML)
currently in: Awendaw Creek, 33°02.1 N 79°32.4 (near Charleston, SC)

Well, southwest-bound on the Intercoastal Waterway (ICW), anyway.  We'd planned to leave around midday yesterday - it was too cold to get excited about an early departure - in company with Greg and Maria-Luisa on Wings, the other boat that was splashed on Monday.  But Wings was having engine overheating problems, so Britt went over to see what he could do to help, and they ended up working on the engine together much of the afternoon.  (This is the way cruising is: you help others, and others help
you.  Besides, they had driven down from Maryland, where they live, and so had a car, and Maria-Luisa took me shopping twice.  So it was only fair that we help them out.)

But after they'd solved the overheating problem and started the engine up again, something else started giving them trouble, and they decided they'd better stay at the marina another day and figure things out, so we headed out alone at about a quarter to four in the afternoon.  Britt set up the lines for a quick exit, Maria-Luisa gave us a hand from the dock, and I smoothly backed out and then pulled out into the waterway.

Where I, um, promptly hit a tree.

Okay, you can stop laughing now.

What happened was: Britt had handed the autopilot control up to the cockpit through the small port behind the nav station.  I left the wheel to step forward to grab it, and honest, I figured it would be just for a few seconds, no problem, except that we were already close to the right bank of the waterway, and the wheel and rudder turned freely...right toward the bank, which in this part of the ICW is not actually a dirt bank but a cypress swamp.  I looked up to see a tree approaching at six knots,
which, okay, that's not quite seven mph, I can run faster than that, but still, when a tree is ten feet from the bow of your boat, six knots seems pretty darn fast!  I eeped and ran for the wheel just as Britt came up the companionway in order to pick the autopilot control up from the floor and hand it to me. A hard reverse to kill the speed and a yank on the wheel kept us from actually ramming anything, but I might have left a little bottom paint on an underwater root, and a couple of branches got
caught in the rigging and rained twigs all over the deck. Smirking, Britt cleaned them up, and he didn't stop making fun of me until I promised to write it up for the website, so everybody knows that I drove our boat into a tree.

We anchored relatively early in a quiet, dark creek.  This morning was clear and the sun made it feel deceptively warm, so we got moving shortly after nine.  The coastal forecast is for winds from the wrong direction for sailing, so our plan is to stay in the ICW until Charleston, at least - that's another 40 miles down the ICW from where we anchored after a long, chilly day.  After that, there are lots of inlets where we may head out to test the sails and make some miles toward warmer weather. 
I'm looking forward to taking off my down jacket and ski hat!
- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/19/2007 [link]  4 comments Post a Comment   

 
Like riding a bicycle

currently in: Myrtle Beach, SC, but hopefully not for long

Has it really been a week since the last update here? Fortunately, our silence is due not to disaster or lack of news, but to simply being too darn busy to sit down at the computer and compose a post. We've been re-installing our gear, fixing the little things that have broken in our absence, and buying the things we need to get ready for our cruise.

When we arrived at the boatyard on Monday morning, the lift was already in place around our boat. There was some hemming and hawing and critical looks at the strap arrangement before everyone was satisfied, but finally we were hoisted in the air and driven down the road, where I touched up the bottom paint on the keel...and then Windom was gently lowered into the water.

  

This was the moment of truth. Not, would we float? (we were confident on that point) or even, would the engine start? (since we had tested it while on the hard), but: would I be able to steer us into our assigned slip without hitting anything? After all, it had been nearly two years since the last time I'd been behind the wheel. Steering a boat at low speed is almost completely unlike driving a car: there's no brake, only forward and reverse, the pivot is in the rear rather than in the front, wind affects different parts of the boat differently (and much stronger than it does vehicles!) - it's a matter of calculating and controlling your momentum, rather than pointing and shooting. No matter how much boat-driving I do, I always get nervous in close-quarters maneuvering.

When I asked George, the marina owner, where we'd be berthed - confessing that I wanted to scope it out ahead of time so I'd feel more confident coming in - he commented that it seemed like it was always the sailboats with the most cruising equipment that were the worst at coming into a dock. Which is, of course, perfectly true: We cruisers are out there sailing, not docking! But the pressure was on, so when we got in the water, my heart was pounding.

But I shouldn't have worried; It's funny how quickly it all comes back. For both of us: I slid Windom right into the slip, and Britt figured out exactly what lines we needed and where we needed them, tying us up quickly and securely. Just like riding a bicycle, I guess - your body remembers, even if your brain forgets.

In fact, now that we've been living aboard again for not quite a week, we've noticed how easy it's been to pick up where we left off two years ago. When we started putting the boat back together, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia as I recognized all the things we'd left here (the plates! The books! The Scrabble board!); we instinctively reached for the grab rail when we went down the companionway, and ducked our heads so as to not smack against the low ceiling when we sat at the nav station. But actually living aboard takes things one step further, as we go through the remembered motions of daily life.

If you add together all the time we've lived on Windom - our first three and a half year cruise, plus the winter of 2004-05 - it's longer than we've lived in our current house in Durango. So maybe it's not strange that it seems so comfortable and natural to move cushions out of the way to get to the cookies or to flush the toilet by pumping a handle. We have fallen naturally into the shared language we developed to describe the storage areas (the coconut locker, the safety locker, the coffin), and Britt can get out of bed without waking me up (a serious accomplishment, because he has to crawl over me to do so).

My parents came down to visit for a couple of days, and together we took a shakedown cruiselet down the ICW to a quiet little anchorage in a National Wildlife Refuge. Although we'd taken them for a daysail on the Chesapeake once, this was the first time they'd ever spent the night aboard. As we apologetically asked them to move aside so we could get something out from under the settee, or explained how to operate the head, they shook their heads and commented that living on a boat seemed so complicated. Well, of course it is - if you're not used to it. But for us, Windom is the house we used to live in, and dealing with the vagaries of boat life is like automatically stepping over the first stair on the staircase because it squeaks, or turning the knob on the downstairs faucet the "wrong" way because that's how it was installed by the idiot who lived there before. We don't need to think about its quirks - they're already in our bones.

And when we returned to Hague Marina after our little overnight, I maneuvered us into the slip just as neatly as you please - and I think my parents actually thought I knew what I was doing!

I'm starting to get antsy about slipping the docklines for good, now. There are still tasks to be done, and this is a convenient place to do them - we have a loaner car at the marina, and occasional internet access, and we know where the West Marine and supermarkets are. On the other hand, if we stay here until every last problem is solved and task is completed, we'll never go anywhere!

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/17/2007 [link]  0 comments Post a Comment   

 
Some boatyard photos

Here are a few pictures from the boatyard. Each photo links to its Flickr page, which has caption information and a bigger image (and a link to an even bigger one). Cross your fingers for us that we get in the water tomorrow, and that everything goes well!

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/11/2007 [link]  0 comments Post a Comment   

 
Attitude
currently in: Myrtle Beach, SC

Today we made our first (but no doubt not our last) trips to West Marine and Home Depot.  As I swiped my credit card through the reader, I joked to Britt that now I finally felt like we were out cruising! 

We're making progress, slowly but steadily.  The deck and hull have been washed, the teak's been oiled, filters have been changed and the interior is getting very close to being livable.  The gouges in the keel from our close encounters with reefs have been filled in and await bottom paint.  The instruments have been reconnected and correctly tell us that our speed is zero.

Today we started the engine: Britt crawled into the lazarette and directed a stream of water from the end of the assembly of hoses that we have connected to the boatyard's sole water tap some 300 feet away into the seawater strainer, while I stood in the cockpit, arms outstretched, the fingertips of my left hand barely able to turn the ignition key, the fingertips of my right hand barely able to nudge the throttle.  We had to clean some corrosion off the starter wires before we even got it to crank, and I had to restart the engine over and over as it fitfully coughed over the air bubbles and dirty diesel in the lines, but Houston, we have liftoff - or at least we have an engine.

Another couple has come into the boatyard to prepare their boat for cruising.  I walked by their boat on my way to turn on the water, and the woman jokingly asked whether she could borrow a Valium.  It seems they had asked the yard to paint the bottom, and had hired someone local to do some interior work, and neither had been done; in addition, the boat was dirty and things were a mess, and the prospect of the work that lay ahead depressed them both.

Listening to them made me feel very odd!  Because certainly, Windom isn't in any different condition than their boat, and in fact their boat has only sat for a year while ours has sat for two.  But by contrast, we're excited and happy, and it seems to us like there's not that much to be done before we can get underway.  They're thinking, oh no, two whole weeks of work, and we're thinking, oh boy, only two weeks of work!  I guess in absolute terms, maybe we don't have it so good - but all we have to do is remember the labor that we endured in 2004, and this seems trivial!

This brings to mind the saying that some friends reminded us of back in 2001 when our cruising life underwent a series of unfortunate events:  "Attitude is the difference between ordeal and adventure."  I wonder how much of my current feeling of ebullience and excitement stems from simple anticipation, from knowing that we're heading out again, having missed it, and being focused on the positive - and from having expected worse.  Because it is a lot of work, no question, and I'm not exactly crazy about hard work, as everyone who knows me is well aware!

Well, it's a good thing we've got this positive attitude.  Because the bad news is that one of the yard guys is on vacation, and another one is injured, and although we were hoping to get splashed tomorrow, it's looking like we won't be able to get put in the water until Monday.  Our hotel room isn't bad, but it's not that cheap, and we have to give the rental car back on Saturday - so I think we're going to be living on the boat on the hard for the weekend.  No fridge, no running water, and I'll have to climb down the ladder and walk to the marina restroom (or more probably the bushes!) if I need a toilet. Hopefully my attitude will come through the weekend intact.

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/07/2007 [link]  0 comments Post a Comment   

 
Ready to get this show on the road

currently in: Myrtle Beach, SC

Well, we're here. Unsurprisingly, yesterday was utterly insane: we got up at 5:15 a.m. and finished shutting the house down, our friend Andy drove us the fifty miles to the tiny Cortez airport, Britt nearly had his toothpaste confiscated at security for being one ounce over the TSA limit...and that was just the beginning. Four airplanes later, we disembarked at Wilmington, North Carolina, discovered our luggage had not made it along with us, drove to the Motel 6 where we had a reservation only to find nobody at the desk and no answer to our repeated hits on the "call night clerk" buzzer. We found another motel, turned the fan on high to mask the noise from the partiers down the hall, and shortly before midnight we finally fell asleep.

But today has been, for the most part, much better. After good coffee and a shared muffin at a coffee shop in Wilmington and a quick look at the lovely old homes in the historic downtown, we drove west along a quiet parkway listening to the rental car's satellite radio and making fun of the names of seaside developments advertised on the billboards we passed. (Southeastern North Carolina appears to have two major industries: churches and real estate.) In Myrtle Beach we found a relatively inexpensive kitchenette hotel room. And then, with great trepidation, we went to the boatyard. After a pleasant chat with George, the owner of the marina, who assured us that he could probably find whatever we needed to get Windom going again, we headed out to look at our boat.

Yep, Windom was right where we left it. Some of the tarps we'd used to cover the deck had ripped in places, and only a few shreds remained of the white plastic garbage bags that had covered the solar panels, but for the most part, Windom's exterior looks pretty damn good. The teak trim needs a little sanding and re-oiling and there's dust and dirt across much of the deck, but it's a far cry from the thick green slime that greeted us the last time we came back to the boat.

We got a little nervous when we opened the companionway and saw a few dead wasps on the floor, but it doesn't look as though there are any nests in the boat. There's very little mold or mildew, and since we didn't leave any nasty formaldehyde preservative in the boat, like we did last time, it doesn't smell horrible, either. Best of all, when we turned on the main breaker, we found that the batteries are fully charged - we even turned on the inverter and used boat power to run the vacuum cleaner!

When we'd gotten back to the boat in 2004, after it had been on the hard in Florida for two years, I was depressed for days at the mess that faced us. This time, it was entirely different, as we bustled around the cabin discovering all the things we had forgotten we'd left aboard. Look - our nice, heavy insulated coffee mugs! Look - the water filter! The clothes we'd left in the cedar-lined closet weren't musty, and the tools we'd left under the settee weren't rusty, and even though we'd stored the wheel in the shower and the dinghy motor in the middle of the salon, it didn't take a lot of imagination to look around and remember all the wonderful cruising experiences we'd had - or to anticipate the ones to come.

There's still a lot to be done, of course, and we haven't even tested the major systems that will have to be operational for us to get underway. Some things we can check while we're out of the water; others, like the refrigeration and the watermaker, will have to wait until we get splashed. But right now we are pleased and excited, and ready to get this show on the road and this boat heading to the Bahamas.

And hopefully, our luggage will arrive before we depart!

Labels: boatyard

- posted by S/V Windom @ 3/04/2007 [link]  2 comments Post a Comment