A breath of air

Saturday, May 12th. Oh good, the forecast calls for rain. But that's ok, it was only supposed to rain for the morning, and then a relatively calm rest of the day, and Sunday was only looking like cloudy with light winds. I'll take that. I packed up the latest parts that arrived, and headed up. This included new LED fixtures for the bow navigation lights, a Raymarine 4DVS fish finder (for the depth meter), a length of dyneema, couple new stanchions, and another length of VHF cable. As expected, the weather was a little dreary for the drive up, but not really rainy. More mist than anything. I've gotten in the habit of watching the webcam that the marina has streaming, to get an idea of what the weather up there is like. Well that, and to make sure the boat is still afloat. If you're of the curious mind, that link is here. The weather up there matched what I drove through, and by the time I arrived, what little rain had fallen was done and over, and it was just a cool overcast day on the water. The first step I decided, was to mount the 24" LCD TV on the starboard bulkhead. That took a matter of minutes, and didn't really give me as much of a sense of accomplishment as I had hoped it would.

Next, I decided to unveil the new electronic gadget and give it a whirl. Pretty boring there as well. All I had to do was screw it to the barely there wooden piece that was on the cabin bulkhead, conveniently screwing into the wood where it was over a previous open cutout for a gauge of some sort. This was to eliminate any more holes than needed to be there, even though the plan is to glass that over again later this summer anyway. But for now, it mounted there, I ran the wire for it alongside the old gauge that's still there, and - you know, now that I think of it, I should've run power to that gauge to see if it worked. Wouldn't that be something? The transducer was the only uncertain aspect of this deal, but as with most, I decided that if I used a nice big seal of toilet-bowl wax between it and the solid glass hull, it should act as a shoot-through-the-hull fixture. My biggest issue then became where to put it. Eventually I decided upon underneath the starboard seating area, as close to the centerline as I could, and as far forward as it would let me, which should put it just about at the leading edge of the keel. By some rudimentary math, it should stay below the waterline unless I'm on a starboard tack with about 30 degrees heel, which I likely won't be doing when I'm that close to shore where depth is an issue. You can see it in this picture from the next day.

The problem with going up early on a day you know you won't be sailing, is that you rapidly run out of things to do! Ok, lifeline next? Since I'm still one stanchion short, and since I don't have gate hooks or anything yet, I simply lashed the existing eye thimble to one side of the stern rail, ran it up through three stanchions on the starboard side, across the bow fittings, back through two on the port, and tied it off. Better than nothing (barely, if I'm honest). But until I get the final stanchion ordered, and the proper hardware, there's no point in splicing into it. Well since I'm on deck, let's replace the navigation fixtures. Three tiny screws each side, and then the wires pull right out of the old bases, and feed the new wire in, screw back down, and done. Quite literally a ten minute job for both sides, and other than the port fixture using flat headed screws and the starboard using Phillips, there were no issues there.

At this point, I was getting a little bored of things going so easily, so I decided to challenge myself with wiring my inverter to the starboard side 110v outlets. The boat originally had shore power set up, and that would feed four household outlets - one on the starboard main bulkhead in the cabin, one starboard in the V-berth, one in the bathroom, and one on port side by the galley sink. I've since removed all the shore power connections, and disconnected the wire where it had branched off, but the wiring for the outlets is still intact for the most part. My plan was easy - wire a new plug on the end of the starboard outlet run, and plug it into my inverter. When I want them to work, I switch the inverter on. This too, went off with only one minor hiccup, in that I originally installed the plug on a pair of wires without paying attention, and that was just a pair of 18/2 marine wire that ran to the hanging locker but with nothing attached. Once I realized my mistake, I changed it around, and bingo, done. Granted, it turns out the Display Port to HDMI adapter I have in my laptop bag doesn't seem to carry audio like my last adapter did, but otherwise, it worked fine. It also meant I could plug my laptop into the outlet on the wall instead of running a cord back to the inverter and risking tripping over it. So at least that worked. I tried hooking up the USB GPS puck I bought, but got nowhere at all with that, and didn't feel like messing with that too much.

I wound down with a couple sandwiches, and some Netflix, and called it an early night.

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!

I woke up and it was pretty breezy, and still a little cool, but in short order, the sun came out and other than wind being a little more than I was hoping for, it was a nice day. My biggest issue was just that I was out by myself. Sure, now I can turn the outboard left and right, but I was still solo. The wind was from the South, which in my slip was blowing me off my pier. This would mean as soon as I left the dock lines go, I was going to blow across the slip pretty quick without anyone else to help maintain control. So instead, I emptied out the anchor locker, and swapped things around a little. I eliminated the old dried out lines in the chain locker, and straightened out the roll of 100' 3/8" Walmart special. I shackled my new 25' of chain to the end, and wired that with some safety wire. Then I put removed the tiny two anchors in the locker, and tried to hook the larger Danforth onto the chain, only to then realize it won't physically fit in the locker. With the absence of anchor hangers on the bow, I removed it and put it back in the cockpit locker. I have 200' of 1/2" line to replace that smaller stuff with anyway.

One nice feature of the Victron SmartSolar MPPT controller, is that it has built in Bluetooth which you can connect your phone to, and get information about your system at a glance. So around noon, with a decent sunny day, I took a peek. Simple button presses, and you get a nice shiny screen. Plenty more screens too, but the first one is the one most people will look at:

I also decided to get a better handle on the head and holding tank situation. Goodness, what a mess. Not just because of what it contains, but how it did so. I took a quick video to explain how it was set up, which you can check out here if you want, but the short version is: There's normally a thru-hull somewhere, that the head draws water from. In this case, I can find none. Anywhere. The hose that feeds INTO the head for water, is just capped off under the V-berth. From there, the discharge goes into a fitting on the top of the holding tank. The outlet of the tank has a Tee in the line, one goes through a manual pump and to a discharge thru-hull, which I can't use being on an inland lake. The other side snakes a long way around to a fitting (mislabeled) on the starboard deck. There are two vent lines from the top, one that goes alongside the pumpout hose, and the other into the chain locker. This normally wouldn't be as bad as it might sound, if it wasn't for that the fill for the freshwater tank, is IN the chain locker. I don't know who designed it, but it was unsmart. It's also something I intend to change soon. But soon is not now.

While I do want to replace and re-plumb everything brand new, that's a few hundred dollars worth of expense, and then the time, that I'd rather not have to outlay right now. Instead, the plan is to remove everything on board, and replace the fixed head with a Port Potti. In this case, I'm planning on going with something like this SaniPottie 975MSD from Defender:

This will allow me to have almost the same capacity to hold as the original 6 gallon holding tank was, at a lower initial cost, and I can still plump it (with new hose) to a pumpout fitting. This allows me to not need to haul it out of the boat if I don't wish, and it also more importantly, satisfies Canada's requirement for waste. A regular removable porta potti is not acceptable in the province of Ontario, so mounting this "permanently" with the kit, and hooking to a pumpout, solves that. One option was to just re-plumb the intake for the head into the sink drain thru-hull and use that sort of setup, but that would hinge on the rest of the system being ready to go and frankly I'm not sure it is. If you're curious to see how it's set up in shaky video form:

After I sorted that out, I decided that it was time to stop being a wimp, and get my hands wet. The wind had died down and shifted so there was no excuse to not get this boat out for her first sail with me at the helm. The outboard fired up fine, still surprises me every time, and I let it warm up. I backed out with a lot more control than I expected to have, and headed out to open water. The main is already tied on the boom, so once I got out into the lake with a little more wave action, I was able to hoist that relatively easily. The headsail, I had to actually get in place. I decided to feed it up through the hatch instead of hauling it up the deck the whole way, and it worked fine. It took little effort to raise, and other than having a bad sheet angle, I was soon able to move along at 4-5 knots, according to Navionics.

If you wish to see a little short clip under way, for whatever reason, here you go:

I only stayed out a little while, before I had to head back home. Docking was my biggest concern, with the displacement, and that I was solo. I secretly hoped for a dockhand, but since the A dock on the marina has yet to fill out, that was only a dream. I did manage to slow down enough, that aside from bumping the port side a little more onto the finger than I hoped, the boat actually didn't do too horrible coming in. In hindsight, I should've burst it into reverse a little more right as I entered which would've pulled the stern in more. Lessons learned for next time. Tied off, cleaned up, and away I went. The season has just begun.

Weekend in the water

Blue Skye was launched and made her way to the Fair Point slip on Wednesday, May 2nd of this year. As with any thing that you're excited about, you find ways once again to get back to it, so by the weekend, I was heading up once more. The third trip within a week. Kind of funny how the drive seems to not matter once the boat is in the water.

The main reason for going up was to just do some more boat projects. I was fairly certain I wouldn't take the boat out just yet, but there were things I wanted to look at, and address before that day would come. The first of which, and probably the most important, was to tackle the outboard situation. I can't remember if I mentioned in my splash thread, but the short version is this: The original A4 has long since been removed, and a kicker bracket mounted center of the transom. I have a Mercury 9.9 XL Shaft on that bracket. But the issues I had were a) the motor wouldn't steer, at all. Locked center, and try as I might, there's no simple "do this" step in the service manual. Just talks about how to hook up steering cables. And b) Even at the lowest setting, the bottom of this EXTRA LONG FREAKING SHAFT was barely in the water. How it managed to get me through those waves, God knows. Reverse was a nightmare, as the motor tried to kick upwards just enough that the prop, I swear, was skimming the surface, and all it seemed to do was just give me prop walk to port, but no real momentum.

So step 1, I found the barely noticeable set-screw that was locking the steering tube. Success, I can now steer the motor! This should certainly help with the reversing issue! I haven't tested that theory yet, but I can't imagine it would be a bad thing.

I also relocated that kicker bracket about 4 inches lower. Now, on full drop, the plate on the outboard sits properly where it should. Full raise, and I'm ALMOST out of the water (I still can't figure out how to tilt this f'n thing!) But at least with more bite under the water, I should also have a little more control and thrust, and then when I get around to swapping to a high-thrust prop after this season, that should take care of a bunch of things.

The other thing I did, was to mount my 100 watt solar panel on the stern rail. It's an HQST Monocrystalline panel, the slim model. I ran 10 gauge cabling down into a deck gland on the cockpit wall, and into my Victron MPPT controller. I need to get my adjustable support pole still, but even just tightened down on the clamps on the rail, it doesn't go anywhere without force being applied - even so, I used a couple lines to tie it off to keep it from dropping down.

I then finally dug out all the sails, and started hoisting and checking what the inventory really looked like. The first and most striking issue is that the main sail is from a Newport 27S, which is a different cut and about 20 square feet smaller. I also noticed that there are no jib tracks or cars present, which means that sail trim is going to be no easy feat in the interim. But the halyards and sheaves work just fine, and it was a productive weekend.

Launch Day - The Ride

The funny thing about the Great Lakes, of which Lake Ontario is the smallest, is how rapidly the weather can change. Wednesday's forecast, was mid 60's, and light breeze. And that's exactly what it was until about 3:30 PM. If you read the first part, you'll probably have put the math together that we left after 3:30 PM. After we managed to finally get turned around off the dock, we motored towards the mouth of the river channel, and that's when I realized that the waves might be a little higher than expected. So let me back up a spot, and add some filler.

Until I buy a new gas tank for this outboard, it's only got about a 3 gallon capacity. I judged it to be about half full, and so bought another 3 gallons on our way playing musical cars. Even with an untested outboard, my brain was saying that a 13 mile journey, at say, 5 knots, should only take,2, MAYBE 3 hours? And ok, if we were to assume a gallon per hour consumption, that still leaves me an additional 50% capacity in which to call a buffer. My brain was also factoring in light breeze and calm seas. And not an outboard that had the prop mere inches beneath the surface. Now I should also mention that it was a pure guess, since a motor of that size, pushing a boat of this size, and I truly don't know how much it actually sips or guzzles. I was spitballing. To be fair, some of my best work is done that way.

The first indication of rethinking the voyage was when we made the turn west out past the marker and directly into oncoming swell. It felt like every third wave, the prop was out of the water, the momentum would drop, and we'd have to build it back up. It felt like it took forever just to get going, and we probably hadn't even gone a mile before I was seriously questioning how much fuel I brought versus should have brought. Oh, and let me fill you in on the other fun part of this boat that I discovered not long before. There are anchors on this boat. Four of them, in fact. There are two in the bow which seem to be the kind you find at Walmart. Which frankly, I wouldn't even use as a lunch anchor on glass water. They're seriously that undersized. There is exactly zero chain. There's a few lengths of heavy rode, but maybe forty or fifty feet, max. There's also the remnants of what appeared to be a spool of 3/8" rode from again, Walmart is what comes to mind - only it was just as if someone had slid this pinecone shaped rode off the spool and kicked it in the locker. Not attached to anything, but had at least some length. Another anchor is a small collapsible 4 bladed thing in a bag with maybe another hundred feet of rode. I call this a dinghy delight. And then, I finally found an appropriate sized danforth in the cockpit locker. Just chilling around, not hooked to anything, just.. there. The reason I bring this up, is because my mind was already trying to make an escape plan if the worst should happen. Even a mile out, I had never run this particular motor under load, much less any length of time. Who knows what might happen there. Perhaps the conditions would suck so much fuel up, we'd run out. The rig wasn't fully tuned at the dock (because it wasn't supposed to be bad weather, and even in the channel wasn't THAT bad so when I had decided to motor the journey, we decided the rig could wait. Bad call. We probably could've gotten away with it on the fly, adjusting as we bounced but I prefer not to. The main was on and lashed, but with 15 knot winds here and there, it would be a last resort.

We pressed on, doing what we could to zig and zag between swells, until we finally could make enough of a turn more southerly where the waves weren't breaking straight on. This allowed the outboard to keep from coming up and out, and progress started being a possibility. I focused instead, on a point up ahead on the lake, West Ninemile Point. I estimated it to be the halfway point of the journey. I had already put a little more gas in the outboard tank, leaving what looked to be about 2 gallons in reserve. I decided that as long as we at least made it there, then we should have enough fuel to last. Spoiler alert, we did. Though maybe I shouldn't have sounded so sure of myself when my dad asked if we had enough to make it. Pft, of course we do. We ended with probably a half gallon, maybe three quarters, left. Totally reasonable. But, we did start to make progress. It was slow, but it was there. A running joke was "At least we haven't sunk yet!" in reference to the leak from earlier. At one point, I climbed to the bow - did I mention I have no lifelines at all, and missing stanchions? Because safety. Seems to sit a little higher than my last one, but it was quite a fun ride, while I tightened down the forestay a little more. This poor boat was getting bounced and loaded around pretty good, even under motor.

Finally we near the home stretch. A few miles to go, I've emptied the rest of the fuel into the tank (Dad asks "did you save any?" - Nope. Not that it would've mattered, since if it ran out of the main tank, I'd use the rest anyway. If it has room, use it. If we were going to run out completely, it wasn't going to matter what tank the last drop came from). And that's when we see the rain moving across the lake to our starboard. It gets darker over Oswego behind us. Down to the last two miles. Rain drops. Well that's fun. Waves that had started subsiding at least a little, built back up to where they were. And then the lightning starts flashing around us, the thunder. Well, I guess this trip is a little for everyone, eh?

Through the rain, we could still make out the navigational lights at the end of the channel into Little Sodus Bay. Plenty of gas left to my untrained estimate by shaking the tank. Ok, no nerves there. Time to just get in there. Fortunately we didn't have to worry about the fenders being on the wrong side, since I was docking to port anyway. Sun was fading closer to the horizon, so it was going to start getting darker quickly as we turn into the channel. Once we made the turn, the waves that had been coming across our starboard bow, now were being redirected and pushing us along into the channel, and into the bay where the waves had all but vanished. Getting behind the breakwall into Fair Point, nice and peaceful. At this point, I knew the motor would be given another test - dropping back to idle in gear, or neutral. Remember, this thing has tiller controls but because of it, there's no revving up in neutral if it starts to sputter. But it held just fine, we pulled into the slip as nicely as could be at about Eight O'clock PM, and tied her off. Grabbed my bag of clothes and my keys, and we were done. Four hours of fun, really. But at that point, the boat had survived, we had survived, and what better way to spend a Wednesday evening!

Launch Day - Getting Wet

After scheduling my launch for Wednesday morning, May 2nd, at 11 AM, I decided that I would head up late Tuesday night. On my drive up, my dad gave me a call and offered to come up and help, and that would also solve my problem of how to get my car back. So I said sure, that'd be great, just heading up now and that would give me time to get up earlier, already be on site, and get the new Sheave Divider figured out. When I put the new ones in on Monday, I noticed that the new ones fit about perfect, but the old ones on the aft side had a slight gap in between them, and it left just enough doubt in my mind about the halyards jumping and getting jammed. Since it's the kind of thing that only happens in the worst time, I thought I should fix that. The other thing I needed to do was to source some more clevis pins for the rigging, as almost all the existing ones were either missing, or in the case of a couple shrouds, were galvanized carriage bolts that were already being worn through. Luckily most of the stores in Oswego open up at 7 AM during the weekdays. Stop one was Walmart for a drink, and more importantly, a plastic-y-composite-ish clipboard that happened to be about 1/8" thick. Ran over to Lowe's and bought them out of 3/8 clevis pins, Harbor Freight for some more, and back to the boat. With an eye on the clock, I went to work cutting the board into a small spacer section that would cover the aft half of the masthead, slid between those sheaves. Worked perfectly. I then went through and plopped pins in all the rigging.

After that, I thought hey, I have some of this JB WaterWeld, I'll stuff some around the old prop shaft. I mean, what's the worst that it could do, just not.. do anything? So I did that. Then I touched up the paint on the port side of the hull that got scraped away before I purchased it. So at this point, it was waiting for my dad to arrive. 11 was near approaching, and he later told me traffic had slowed him down. I stumbled upon the discovery that the ropes I had been kicking around under the cabin table were actually two pre-made halyards with shackles, so we quickly threaded them through in replacement of the old ones. And now, we were ready to go! Or pray. One of the two.

Bernie at Oswego Marina was great to work with. The launch and mast step were pre-paid by the previous owner from the winter storage, so it was just a matter of doing it. He backed the hydraulic trailer expertly, and loaded the boat. I'm used to a travel lift, so this was a new, and slightly nerve wracking experience. But after moving it over to the slings, suddenly she was in the air, and dangling over the water.

Once she settled into the water, Bernie gave us time to jump below and see how she looked. My dad, ever observant, looked down in the cockpit hatch because the stern tube would've been a place I would think I might see leaks. Remember, there's no motor, hasn't been in forever, so who knows what kind of shape that equipment was in. Even with WaterWeld over it, there's no knowing. First thing he saw was what looked like questionable fiberglass, but from everything I could tell it was the old rusted corner of the gas tank that had just made a mess of things. Still dry back there, other than a little water pooled behind the tank, but it wasn't anything coming in, it was just there.

Then we went into the cabin and wouldn't you know it, the next phrase was something like "Well there's water here." Well I hadn't looked there recently, but I was pretty sure I didn't remember any under there last time I looked! He was looking under the port settee and sure enough, about two inches of water pooled underneath. Very clear water, not like it had been dirty from sitting or dripping down the hull. Well then... There are a few thru-hulls on that side of the boat. There's a sink drain, the intake for the head, and two older thru hulls that were likely depth sounders or the like. Underneath the boat, they look like they'd been painted over - inside the hull, one was missing and appeared to have a plug in it's place, and the other had it's wire cut off. After careful wiping with countless towels and such, we realized the plugged one was where it was seeping in. It wouldn't have sunk the boat, but it would've been something to really try to keep up with, and that's just not acceptable.

My first feeling, was.. words I would rather not repeat. I didn't vocalize anything much, but inside I was quite disheartened. When I had my last boat, I replaced thru-hulls all new, and glassed over ones I wouldn't need. These looked visually fine inside and out so I never gave them too much thought. So as thoughts of what to do raced through my heads, my dad suggested maybe we could tighten it? So I grabbed my channel lock pliers and cranked down on the nut holding the plug in. No change. Then he pointed out that he meant on the actual backing nut for the thru-hull. Oh. Duh. Right. I managed to get a lock on it. All in all, it might have had about 1/8 of a turn in it, but it did seem to stop the leak. Or at least slowed it that we couldn't see it actually seeping any more. Phew. We ran to the others and inspected, and all showed dry. So, on that note, it was time to get the boat to the other side of the slips to get the mast raised.

How many of you know about prop walk, and the like? Ok, plenty of hands. The outboard I have on this boat, is a Mercury 9.9 Extra Long Shaft model. Thankfully (even though it's not ideal for many folks) it has tiller controls for gear selection. While this requires that the engine be kept more delicately in tune because there's no revving in neutral, it does give the option to control the progress with one hand on the boat tiller and one on the motor without having to reach for the gear selector. Mind you, this motor had only been run for ten minutes or so at home prior to this. Thankfully it fired right up and settled into a decent idle. So as you can see from the above pictures, we're backwards in the slings. Not knowing how this boat was going to handle - it's twice as heavy as my last boat - I thought it would be best to swing the bow out, and then allow me to drive forward out, up past the regular slips, spin around in the nice wide channel of the Oswego river, and come back into the dockside for raising the mast. And good ol Bernie walks the boat back, and kicks the stern off, assuming I'm going to back it the entire way down (which I had mentioned a few times that I was planning otherwise..).

Let's revisit sailboat steering for a moment. When you get into the upper 20s in feet, or anything without an outboard, the boat is steered with the water disrupted by the angle of the rudder, either moved by tiller or wheel. The water moving over the change in the angle pushes the stern of the boat, causing the turn. Let me emphasize that. Water MOVING over the rudder. You have to be moving, to turn. On smaller boats with an outboard that can be steered, you can turn the outboard to thrust it one way or another whilst starting to move. On a boat with a fixed motor, or in my case an outboard that couldn't be turned, you have to get some water speed up before the boat will react. A 9.9 horsepower motor with a standard prop, I admit, is underpowered for the boat. It will work fine, yes. But it's really a little weak, at least in standard prop form. Once it gets moving, sure it'll keep the boat moving, but the initial thrust is weak. It's weaker when the outboard isn't sitting properly down in the water where it should. And it's even worse in reverse when the natural tendency of an outboard is to rise up due to the thrust, especially so shallow already.

We ended up doing a K-turn in a boat. Basically reverse was going nowhere, so I tried getting movement forward to try to turn the boat. And it became rapidly clear that I was not going to make enough speed to make the turn very quickly, before driving straight onto the rocks that you see in the left side of the photos above. Desperate to avoid running aground, I twisted into reverse. Instead of instantly stopping the boat, it instead just more or less churned the top of the water in frustration, but had the added unintended effect of giving me a sharp prop-walk reaction to port. Happily, this was exactly where I wanted to go. So in doing that, it gave me enough room to forward, and eventually get going the proper direction. And sure enough, once we got out and I could speed up, the extra speed made it easy to just spin right back around and come in to the dockside, to tie up for the mast.

The mast raising went without incident, if you discount that I almost forgot to tighten the masthead bolts back in from my sheave divider install. We got the mast up, and Bernie gave us the ok to leave the boat tied up while we ran one of the cars to Fair Point Marina where we would end up, so that we would have way to come back and get the other car. We got to Fair Point easily, and stopped for some Friendly's on the way back. Arriving back to the boat a little before four, we had one more thing to sort out. One of the halyards was through a spreader so I tied a wrench to a thin line I had, and after about two dozen attempts, got the throw right and straightened it out. Now, we were faced with once again being pointed in the wrong direction. More than that, the wind had started picking up a bit and the clouds were coming in which cooled the day down a little. But, on the plus side, the wind was coming from the Southwest, so I had the genius idea of just releasing the stern, letting the wind and waves carry the stern out and around, and use the bow as a pivot until we were turned around. Which worked great in my head, but in practice, my dad cast off the bow a little early and.. we needed another 97 point turn to get out. Well, not really, but we did have to thrust reverse to curve a little, and then trying to get enough speed, we needed every inch of the working space to get that sucker to turn 180 degrees. But, after all that, we were finally pointed in the right direction. And if only that had been the hardest part.

99 percent

What an interesting weekend. I'm going to save people the trouble, and give the abridged version so they don't have to read through all the long bits if they don't want. And, go!

So it's finally splash time. I figured I'd take the weekend, spend it on the boat, and tie up all the loose ends that needed tying, and then Monday would be launch day. Turns out Mother Nature had other plans - Cold and wet on Saturday when I went up, which negated doing much. It was SNOWING on Sunday morning when I woke up. And today, Monday, was more cold all morning, then the sun came out, but the wind never subsided. Hence, no launch today.

What I did get done though, was:

* Installed the Steaming/Deck combo light on the mast.
* Ran all new wire for the mast, including the VHF cable
* Ran new wire from the electrical panel to the mast step in the cabin
* Wired the bilge switch
* Sorted out the cabin wiring
* Installed the new Masthead Sheaves and re-ran the halyards
* Mounted the VHF antenna, and Anchor Light
* Other bits and things.

So it was three days on the boat, all of them cold, and windy, and I got little things done. So if you don't want to hear the long drawn-out version, feel free to head off to wherever you're off to next. For those who like self-imposed torture, you be warned.

Saturday:

I got up early, at least for me, and decided that before doing anything, I would replace the vacuum line to the brake booster on my car. The old one had split really bad, and though taping it up heavily with electrical tape sealed a good portion of the leak that was tripping codes on the reader, it still left me with manual brakes only. This had gone on way too long, so that was job one. I have slightly better brakes now! And must still have just enough of a leak where codes are staring to manifest again. Fix one thing, five break. One more year car.. one more.

Loading up for the lake was an adventure in and of itself. I drive a 2003 Jaguar XJR - right before Ford started bloating them up in '04, and is one of the last years they had that truly classic XJ-series look to them. Unfortunately, it also means a pretty small trunk when it really comes down to it. And in this wonderful (tempermental) car, I had to figure out how to fit an outboard, a ladder, the gas tank, an extra gas can, clothes, my laptop and camera, tool box, box full of epoxy, another box full of parts and pieces, and countless other things. Which, thank you very much, I succeeded in doing. So onward to the lake! I stopped in Cortland for some Wendy's, because by this point, it was near 1:30 or so. I left there a dry person, and quickly was glad to be in the car - a pretty hefty rainstorm passed through as I made my way up towards Syracuse, which slowed traffic on the highway a good bit. Soldiering on though, I arrived just after 3 PM. Matt had left the Sapphire Blue paint on the blocks by the keep, for the touch up that will eventually be done.

I unloaded the car, plugged my extension cord into the power at the building and ran it to the boat. Inside, I fired up my trusty little Walmart heater, and the Halogen work light - combined, they do a fair amount of heating in the cabin. It was certainly going to be better than the night it was fifteen degrees, but still would be appreciated. The problem I had, was that the majority of what I wanted to do was outside work. Mast work on the wiring, the sheaves, working on the deck fitting for the electrical, and so on. I wasn't exactly wearing survival gear, but it still was drizzling on and off long enough that it was miserable to try to do much for long outside. The object was to not become fully soaked to a degree that would make drying out a long process. I passed the time by running to the store for a few things, like a new clevis pin that would work with the new sheaves in the masthead. Apparently stores only stock 2" long pins in a 3/8 diameter. I should've measured... but I took a gamble, and it turned out to be just right. Too wet to mess with that, I did about the only other things I could - I got the old steaming light off the mast, which was basically just glued on. I also went to the masthead, and cut off the connectors up there which weren't even doing anything. A few more rain drops, then I went out again and pulled the existing wiring with some new taped to it, for the new combo light. That didn't go as planned - all it succeeded in doing was pulling a bird's nest from up inside the mast out and showering over my head, and the tape came undone anyway. I saved the egg and set it aside. Not my fault, don't build a house in another man's mast.

I finally gave up for the evening on Saturday and just buckled down inside. Fired up the laptop and watched some more Volvo Ocean race highlights, and tinkered with the bilge pump wiring. Which is to say, I ran the wire up to the ground block, the positive up, and temporarily mounted the bilge pump switch under the main location. I really do need a finished piece to mount everything to soon.

Doesn't look like much, but it's something to start with, and by weekend's end, it was pretty much all wired as far as the panel goes. That was it for Saturday, so I climbed into the port berth, turned off the halogen and slept with the quiet whir of the heater keeping up with the weather.

I woke up Sunday to being snowed on. Well, outside, the boat didn't have the hatch open or anything. I decided that I needed a few things from the store. One of the things I had done during my wiring fiasco was to notice a previous VHF cable hole near the masthead that someone had tried to fill in with what looked to be like JB weld. I tapped it with a screwdriver and it popped out easily, so that solved my dilemma of how to get the VHF cable through. But I needed some grommets for the hole. So a trip to Harbor Freight and that was solved. Except it wasn't - turns out the grommets in their assorted pack are for about 1/16" depths an the mast is easily double that in thickness. But between that and some extra taping and heat shrink, we should be fine. It just got to the point where it was cold and rainy enough, that I couldn't really get much done. I finally got the combo light riveted in place (crooked by 1/4 inch which I hate myself for but it was hard to gauge with the mast laying half crooked in a cradle). I had originally decided on launching on Monday, but the forecast for that day was going to be really windy so I knew I wouldn't be getting much of anywhere. So in between rain drops, I decided to run the rest of the wire up the mast. I have a fish tape, how hard can this be? As it turns out, there are foam inserts about every ten feet in the mast. The fish tape wasn't going to cut it. Another trip to Lowes for 40' of PVC pipe, and bingo. Push them through from one side to the other, run the fish tape down it, tape everything to the other end, and pull everrrrrything back out. This included the VHF cable and one pair of wires from end to and, and another pair of wire to the steaming light. The wire is Red and Yellow in the jacket. So I have Red #1, Yellow #1, Red #2, and Yellow #2. Yellow 1 is going to be a common ground. Red 1 is the anchor light, Red 2 is the steaming light, and red 3 is the Deck light. This is made a little easier by the combo light having a single shared ground lead feeding off it. By the time I got done running that, I was ready to duck back inside for the day. I was just tired of being cold. I watched a few more shows in between running new lengths of wire from the panel back to the feed up to where the mast plug would be. I couldn't really put the new plugs and socket in place, since it was still cold and wet, so I just left it all in place.

Monday came around, and it was quite blustery. I didn't do much when I got up, just moved some stuff inside. For some reason, I found myself really tired still, and laid down for another hour or so. I woke up to sunshine, and slightly better temperatures. By better, I mean over 40. I took the time to finally, FINALLY get the new masthead sheaves in. It was a fairly simple process, other than I tackled it a crazy way. Since the sheaves I needed to put in were on the narrower end of the masthead, I had to remove the old ones on the aft side, and lower the new ones down from that end on some string to hold in place, and get everything lined up. Which also required removing the backstay pins and all that, but went pretty smooth. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized that the plate on the top of the masthead was just bolted on, and I could've just popped that off for full access. Go figure. At least they were in. With the sun coming out finally, I also took the time to mount the deck plug in place after soldering the wire together. I drilled some pilot holes, put down a layer of 5200 over the opening and previous holes, and screwed everything down. These connectors are something else though. I'll do more on those later. The mast wiring went just the same, other than dangling off the ladder with a hot soldering iron to reach it all. I had pre-tinned and filled the backside of the connectors with solder so that I had a head start with the wiring, and it went smooth.

After all that, I went home, for a much needed shower and night's sleep.