Summer has arrived with a vengeance on the Bay. It seems like all the
other liveaboards here have air conditioning. Alas, we're sweating
buckets as we work, despite the four fans we've installed. We plan to
leave Petrini's marina and start living "on the hook" tomorrow. Not
just because of the cost; it's breezier and therefore cooler out at
anchor, and we need all the cool we can get.
We stay a little cooler now because of our awnings. Forward of the mast we have a "kite", a diamond-shaped piece of canvas suspended by ropes and bungie cords. Aft of the mast we have a nifty cover made by a company called Shadetree. It is supported by collapsable poles which thread through sleeves in the fabric, just like a tent. It's easy to put up and take down, but we look a bit like a Conestoga wagon. (They were also called "prairie schooners" -- I guess this brings that term full circle!)
When
we stop living in a marina, we'll be depending on our ground tackle
-- anchors, chain, and line -- to keep us wherever we choose to spend
the night or the week. Windom's original primary anchor, a 45 lb.
CQR, is exactly what we would have bought on our own anyway. It was
attached to about 50 feet of extremely heavy chain plus about 180
feet of line. We replaced this rode with 300 feet of 5/16"
high-tensile chain plus 100 feet of new line. Overkill for the
Chesapeake, but if we ever get into the Caribbean or South Pacific,
where anchorages can be 60 feet deep or more, it will be needed.
The new chain is lighter per foot than the old chain, but chain is chain, and anything suitable for anchor use is heavy no matter the grade or gauge. At a bit more than a pound per foot, the first challenge was getting 300 feet of chain from our van to our boat. Petrini's has two beat-up dock carts; after temporarily reinforcing the bottom of the more rickety of the pair, we fed about half the chain into one and half into the other, along with the 100 feet of line that had been already spliced to the end of the chain. The docks here are so old and decrepit that we were half afraid the weight of the carts would just break through a rotten board, but we made it to the boat.
Then it was easy. Britt climbed on deck, and I handed him the bitter end; he fed it into the windlass, pushed the "up" button, and the windlass sucked all 400 feet of rode into the chain locker. We then ran it out on the dock again, bit by bit, so we could mark every 10 feet (we attached cable ties in different colors; paint wears off quickly), then pulled it back in and shackled the CQR to the end.
The secondary anchor is a Danforth 20H which is probably a little light for this boat. It was originally on a very short length of chain plus 120 feet of line; we put it on a 50-foot section of new 5/16" chain, plus the original line that was on the other anchor. We'd like to get a new "Spade" anchor, which came out really well in boat magazine tests, but it's made in Tunisia and doesn't seem to be available around here yet. Maybe we'll try to order one from the manufacturer -- although I hate to think of the shipping costs.
But good ground tackle is worth the money. We recently saw an example of what can happen with an inadequate system. A sailboat was anchored out in Spa Creek near our marina, just past marker #3 which marks very shallow water toward the shore. In the evening there was a good rain and a few big gusts of wind. The next day near low tide, sitting in our cockpit, I noticed the anchored boat looked a little odd. About eighteen inches of waterline stuck out above the water -- that puppy was aground! They must have dragged anchor in the squall and been blown aground; the tide then went out, leaving them even higher and drier.
When we started out, our battery charger was dead, so we had to recharge our batteries from the engine alternator. Since we installed the inverter/charger, we've been able to charge from shore power again, but once we're away from marinas we will need to charge from the engine again. Although the stock alternator capacity of 80 amps is relatively high, we needed more efficient charging for our huge battery bank, so we bought a Balmar large-frame alternator which can crank out up to 210 amps.
Nothing is ever easy, though. The new alternator has a dual-belt pulley, but the old one only used a single belt, so the new one couldn't just be bolted on in place of the old. But we didn't have room to put the new alternator anywhere else without major work. Suggestions from people we talked to ranged from "cut a hole in the side of your engine room for the new alternator" to "it just can't be done".
Well, we did it anyway, and without cutting up the engine room. Britt bought an idler pulley from an auto-parts store and installed it in a small space on the opposite side of the engine from the alternator, then routed the water pump belt around it. A bracket kit provided enough parts to mount the new alternator where the old one had been. We then commissioned a local machinist to make a double pulley to Britt's specifications, which would bolt onto the crankshaft pulley and drive the alternator. It took several trips to auto-parts stores to find belts of the right size, but finally we had a working engine with a brand-new alternator. [Photo sequence, left to right: original engine configuration, idler pulley installed and alternator removed, final configuration with new alternator in upper right.]
We're still waiting for our refrigeration system parts, and we haven't installed some of the goodies we bought, but we're ready to take a break and do some sailing! It's getting too hot to work, anyway, at least here at the marina, so we're going to slip the lines. We're not going too far at first, though. We're going to try to get a mooring in Annapolis Harbor -- if we can't, we'll just anchor -- so we can spend the Independence Day weekend in town and see the fireworks. We'll schedule an overnight haul-out for one day next week so we can install our Max-Prop and cut a new through-hull for the refrigeration system. That won't be here for at least another week, though, so we'll putter around the area until it arrives. We still need our van for a while -- hopefully we'll figure out a place we can leave it for a few days at a time, where we can dinghy in and get it, until the time comes to park it for good. (We're a bit nervous about this because someone broke into it two nights ago and stole the stereo.)
We'll be slowly finishing the "initial outfitting" phase, and easing into the "cruising phase", so even though we've still got work to do, we should be writing more about sailing and less about equipment. At least, that's the plan!
