1/11/01 | Ready to leave Vero Beach

corrosion happens

The weather finally warmed up enough for us to pull out our bicycles and take a ride. Normally our bikes live in the aft cabin, but we'd put them on deck (inside the sail bags they live in) while installing the heater under the aft berth back in November, and they've been there ever since. Britt's was in good shape, but the opening of my bike's bag had obviously been exposed to the elements, because my poor bike had a thin layer of salt all over it. Not too much rust, fortunately (it helps having aluminum frames!) but it needs a good bath and a dose of lubricating oil.

We've been fighting corrosion on all fronts lately. When Brittt got under the port settee to do some work on the watermaker -- new cooling fans so it won't overheat, and new plumbing so we can direct the water into either water tank -- he was distracted by a mass of corrosion on the refrigerator condenser. Seawater runs through the condenser to cool the refrigerant; some of it apparently squeezed through the rubber end cap and leaked out. After cleaning it up, he saw that the only real casualty was the pretty blue paint on the condenser's surface. He used an anti-corrosion paste to seal the cap to the metal condenser body when he reassembled the condenser, and we hope that will stop (or at least slow down) the process.

Sea water and salt air are inescapable on a boat, though, and the inevitable result is, well, inevitable. I took advantage of the warmer weather to catch up on some long-overdue maintenance on the stainless steel arch and rails. (One of the first lessons of boat life is that stainless isn't. It just takes a little longer to rust than regular steel.) I justify polishing the stainless as an important job, since pitted, corroded steel might fail and break, but my real reason is that shiny stainless steel rails are so much prettier than rusty ones. A sailboat with brown-spotted rails, dull and neglected, looks sad and somewhat derelict, like a car with "Wash Me" written by a finger in the dust on its hood. Our rails were embarrassingly rusty, so I figured I'd better get cracking before we got run out of town.

I had been using a 3M metal polisher, along with a lot of elbow grease, to clean off the rust. After de-rustifying a section of rail, I'd apply wax, rubbing it on and buffing it off. I learned the hard way that without the wax, the stainless would re-stain in a matter of weeks. The two-pronged treatment keeps the stainless looking good for a couple of months, but it's a hassle. At the little marine store in town, I bought some Collinite Metal Wax, which promises to both clean and protect. It did the first part very nicely; we'll see how well it lives up to the second part.

I actually don't mind doing the stainless as long as I can do it a little at a time. It's a mindless job, and I can daydream and listen to the radio while I rub, rub, rub. The problem is that we have an awful lot of stainless steel:  lifeline stanchions, bow pulpit, stern rail, dorade vent guards, bimini hardware, and of course our big equipment arch. Still, it's better than teak, which is a much greater pain in the posterior, maintenance-wise. We have only a small amount of exterior teak -- a deliberate choice -- but a correspondingly large amount of stainless. There's no denying that teak is pretty, but keeping a varnished finish looking nice is practically a full-time job, and even "low maintenance" Cetol and Armada finishes need touching up every few months. On the suggestion of friends who oil their teak, I bought some teak oil and tried it on our once-varnished cockpit table. Now I have a weirdly spotted cockpit table, and gooey hands. Maybe we need a stainless steel cockpit table.

I polished the arch to a silvery glow as the radio deejay announced that the Lotto jackpot in Florida is up to $20,000,000. Twenty million dollars! I could buy a ticket. If we won, we could buy a brand-new boat, huge and gleaming, with acres of teak and shiny stainless rails. And we could hire someone else to keep it looking beautiful!

sunshine on my panels makes me power

After a lot of research, we decided on 3 55-watt solar panels from Siemens. The important thing was their geometry:  they are long and narrow, so three can fit crosswise on the arch. Although two big panels (or one really humungous panel) would make more juice in ideal conditions, our arch is far from ideal because we have the wind generator mounted on one side and the radar on the other, both of which cast significant shadows. Shading a little of a panel decreases the power a lot. We figured that with three individual panels, even if one was shaded, the others might not be and would produce their full quota of power.

We did most of the wiring in advance, so it took us only a day and a half after the panels arrived to figure out a mounting system, go buy the parts, and then install the panels. As usual, Britt did most of the figuring out, and all of the hard icky stuff like drilling and tapping the arch and poking tiny wires into tinier holes without dropping the screw that holds them down. As part of the wiring project, we re-wired the wind generator in a more efficient manner, running the wires directly to the power distribution bus with a relay to the panel switch (rather than running them all the way to the panel and then back again to the power bus, which is what we had before). Visions of ampere-hours are dancing in our heads. We'll have so much excess power we'll be able to sell it to California!

planning ahead

Between friends with cars, our bikes, and the great bus system here, we've filled Windom to the rim with stuff. Based on our experiences last year, we went light on canned meat and vegetables, dried beans, white flour, and white rice, but loaded up on crackers, candy, cookies, chips, rolled oats, fruit juice concentrate, and miscellaneous gourmet goodies. The local grocery store carries Britt's favorite brand of baked beans, which has been difficult to find on the east coast, so I stocked up -- 14 cans ought to hold him a while! We've got thirty bottles of wine carefully packed away. It only needs to last us until we get to the Caribbean, as wine's cheap there, especially on the French islands such as Martinique. Last year we searched fruitlessly all over the Palm Beach area for what we consider the only tolerable brand of beer in cans, Tecate; much to our surprise and joy, we easily found it here in Vero. Five cases of Tecate quickly disappeared into the cavernous space under the forward berth which we call "the coffin", and there's still plenty of room. Boat spares, too, are being stowed away: extra alternator belts, fuel filters, oil filters, water filters, zincs, and anything else we can think of that we might need. Waterline?  What waterline?

We've been loading up our electronic charts of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, to scout out where we might go and what we might need. It looks like the charts we traded for last year will be sufficient, as long as we get the appropriate guidebooks. There sure are a lot of guidebooks out there, and we went on a buying frenzy. In addition to cruising guides to the Turks and Caicos, the Spanish, American, and British Virgin Islands, the Windwards, the Leewards, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela, we splurged on a few basic travel guidebooks to the Caribbean and Venezuela. One critical book, Passages South by Van Sant, is totally unavailable pending a new edition; we've got our order in, and hope to get it before we leave the Bahamas, if not before we leave the US. It's the bible for cruisers who, like us, plan to take the "thorny path" east and upwind from the Bahamas to the Caribbean.

But before we can dream too much about exotic ports like Luperon and Soufriere, we have to make our way to the exotic port of Miami. Tomorrow we'll motor down to Fort Pierce, fill up with diesel and fill our jerricans with dinghy gas, then scoot out the channel for the overnight run down the coast. In Miami we'll visit friends and relatives and do some final provisioning, then head for Bimini when the weather allows. After checking in to the Bahamas, and checking out the reputedly fine diving there, we plan to continue to Andros, another island we missed on our almost-pan-Bahamas tour last year. After a stop in Nassau (and maybe some exploration of the rest of the island of New Providence) we will head over to the very northern Exumas, then south toward George Town.

That's the plan, anyway. But as is typical of cruising plans, it's only written in jello.