Monthly Archives: August 2012

First we were waiting for our rebuilt autopilot ram to reach us, then we had to wait for some bad weather to pass. Finally this morning we decided that although the conditions aren’t perfect it’s time to raise our well-planted anchor and blow this pop stand.

As usual, it became a comedy of errors. We decided at the last minute that we should get some water and diesel before leaving. Back into the dinghy went the diesel cans and the water carriers. Down went the dinghy. And did it start? Hell, no! It’s obviously not getting fuel, and as Jack keeps reminding me, he’s not a mechanic so we couldn’t really get to the bottom of it on our own. But we needed the water and diesel so he rowed away toward the inlet and I think I could see the steam coming out his ears.

Meanwhile I set about getting Escape Velocity shipshape, doing the dishes, stowing any loose items and generally getting ready for a couple of days at sea. I put our inflatable life vests and tethers in a bin by the door; Jack had rigged the jacklines yesterday. The whole time I listened to the weather radio to confirm it was safe out there and that we’d get to our destination. We would, but we’d have to motor much of the way. Ugh. It was either that or wait upwards of another week. No way.

Jack made it back in one piece and we stowed the diesel cans and poured the water into the tank. Don’t ask me why we didn’t pour the diesel in because later when we realized we really would have to motor for two days, we knew we’d need more fuel.

Jack decided at the last minute to clean the speedo under the boat. I learned this when I heard water gushing into the starboard head.

“It never did that before!” he said. Apparently there’s a spring-loaded door that’s supposed to snap shut when he pulls the speedo but it didn’t happen this time and we had a geyser in the floor. He got that back in and I cleaned up the flood. It made me appreciate the design of this boat all the more, with the perfectly placed bulkheads keeping the water contained in the head where it can’t do any damage. Whew! Ok, now I’m awake.

The anchor came up with a lot of effort and covered in black gooey mud, and there were mussels on the anchor bridle. It took a long time to clean up the mess on the foredeck.

As always, as we were heading out the inlet and through the breakers Izzy started to cry. I brushed her for a while, which always calms her down, and once we were on course things leveled out and she parked herself in the cockpit well and went to sleep.

The good news is that our autopilot is working beautifully. What a difference it makes not to have to steer all the time! We really wish we were sailing, but the winds are flukey and 5 knots or less so motoring it is.

We’re trying our Swedish watch system, where the day is divided into two 6-hour watches and the night is three 4-hour watches. Less time on night watch and a long sleep period during the day when it’s easier for the watch keeper to see what’s going on.

I’m about to go off watch. Jack’s having a sandwich and we’re keeping an eye on a cargo ship to our right.

This idyllic view of Lake Wesley, as I approach Escape Velocity in the dinghy, was not to be had today. Oh no dear reader, we had no outings in the dink. Wouldn’t start. It’s always been a bit cranky with a dodgy starter button and emergency stop switch, but once started it tends to keep running. This was different. Just couldn’t keep the thing running. The possibilities are not endless but many, some of them serious.
That’s when I discovered that the two sizes of plug wrench that I have are not enough. No Mr. Honda do we really need an 18 mm plug wrench? Standard wrenches couldn’t get into the tiny space allowed by Mr. Honda for such things. How was I to know? Without seeing the plugs I was flying blind. Come to think of it, I’m always flying blind with these things. Marce kept up a constant patter of “it’s not getting fuel.” I leaned towards the more sophisticated, nuanced school of thought of the fouled plugs verity. Without a dinghy we’re in a certain amount of bother. We can’t get to shore in most anchorages.
After an emergency repair of the dodger window Marce researched on the Internet machine which seemed to point toward air on the suck side. That’s not fuel starvation is it? It started right up!
We’ve had one squall line after another come through here today and this evening is no exception. We barely got the dink hoisted back up before the rains came.

That’s life on the water.

I was polishing the plastic windows on our cockpit enclosure when the window gave way with a rrrrrrrrrip. Damn! The enclosure is essential to safety and crew comfort. It protects us from wind and rain and makes the cockpit an additional living space which we appreciate in a 40-foot boat. But our enclosure is original to the boat, meaning it’s 14 years old and definitely in need of replacing. It’s a big ticket item and we were hoping to wait as long as possible to order a new one because we’re prioritizing the mechanical and electronic repairs.

So ok, my schedule for the day just got rejiggered and I set about sewing the window back on again. Luckily the holes didn’t rip, just the thread, but pushing a needle though about seven layers of heavy vinyl took all my strength and about 3-1/2 hours.

Later Jack decided to make a dinghy run to unload trash, fill up our diesel jerry cans and our water jugs. We lowered the dinghy, loaded it up, Jack started the motor and it immediately died. He tried again. And again. And thus began an hour and a half of raising the dinghy, troubleshooting the motor, lowering the dinghy, trying it again, raising, lowering, raising, lowering. All the while Jack kept muttering “I’m not a mechanic. I’m not a mechanic.”

“You have to become one,” I said, which didn’t go over well, as you can imagine. Eventually he inspected the fuel line end to end and found a loose clamp. With that tightened up the motor started right up but by that time the rain was moving in and we unloaded the dinghy again, pulled it up and stowed the jerry cans.

The trash we left in the dinghy.

NOAA weather radio is our friend and our enemy. We listen to it daily while at anchor, anytime we plan to leave the boat, and especially if we see dark clouds forming on the horizon. We listen to it when we’re planning to move on so we can pick the right day and time of day for the best conditions.

A few years ago NOAA changed from live humans reading the forecasts to computer-generated voices using text-to-speech software. There are several voices, and each has its own character and, dare I say, accent. They even have names, Paul, Tom and Donna.

As we move up the coast we have to learn the new and constantly changing placenames referred to in the forecasts, the rivers, inlets, points, sounds and other delineations they talk about when they announce a thunderstorm warning from, for example, Hornpipe Inlet to Turgid Sound. Is that us? North of us? It gets more complicated by the pronunciation of the NOAA computer forecasters. I find Donna to be particularly difficult to understand for some reason. When we first got to the Hampton Roads area we listened for a long time to familiarize ourselves with the new place names and referenced a chart to orient ourselves.

If you’ve spent any time listening to weather radio you know that after a cycle or two the voices just become white noise until something catches your attention, a warning, a change in pattern. The first day here my ears perked up when I heard “Wall of Silence.” Wow! We were anchored in an area with many military installations. We saw cruisers and aircraft carriers. There were helicopters overhead. Naturally, when they announce a wall of silence you pay attention. I figured it was something like the bus signs “If you see something, say something.” Would we get instructions over the radio? Would we need gas masks?

Days went by and we heard the Wall of Silence every day. I was never paying close attention to hear the beginning and only perked up when I heard it. No instructions. No gas masks.

And then I lucked out and heard the whole sequence from the beginning. It was Donna announcing the weather observations for Richmond, Norfolk, Chesapeake City, Wallops Island. Wallops Island! Wall of Silence!

I mentioned this to our friend Alan in the anchorage and he thought he heard Wall of Silence, too. And the funny thing is, even after we figured it out, whenever the weather radio is on I still think I hear Wall of Silence when Donna gives the weather observations.

We’re about to move north again. After a day or two Wallops Island won’t be in our forecast area, but I’ll miss the Wall of Silence.

Jack made a second attempt at getting the vent hose off the fitting at the top of the holding tank and using a selection of screw drivers as levers, he did it! Then, with me cowering in the cockpit, he cleaned the fitting and buttoned it up again. While he was there, he discovered that the clamps on the other hose at the top of the tank weren’t quite as tight as they should have been. He took care of that and we replaced the sofa cushions.

Eighteen hours later and so far no odor. Our friend Jim gave us some tips and recommendations on tank treatment that we plan to follow as soon as we’re in a place where we can pump out and thoroughly flush the tanks. Thanks, Jim! In the meantime, we’re happy with the results of three days of nasty work.

It’s been the kind of week that should definitively answer the question,” what do you do on a boat if it rains.” Nothing scary, just lots and lots of rain.
Early this morning I could see the clouds building up over the Atlantic and I knew we’d have rain in 20 minutes. We were low on water so I thought this might be the last chance to make a water run and still stay dry. Rudee Inlet is a no wake area so it takes a while to putt over to the marina to fill up the water jugs. We dropped the dinghy and I headed over to the marina. Just as I finished filling the last jug the rain opened up. It was a very wet ride back to Escape Velocity, now resting peacefully in the rain, with two other catamarans.

Locals have told us how strange it is that in a small but deep anchorage it’s usually catamarans that anchor in Lake Wesley. You’d think that the generous depth would attract monohulls with deep keels.

I changed my clothes and hung the sopping wet stuff up to dry.
It’s not likely to dry on a day like this.
We decide to make a break for shore when an unexpected stoppage of the rain allowed us to drop the dinghy and catch a bus for the mall, with nothing worse than a wet butt. We are not mall people, and once again the experience failed to satisfy. On the way back to the beach it began to rain. So much for a nice stroll on the boardwalk and pizza dinner. Another wet ride back to EV and more sopping clothes hanging to dry.
Marce took up sewing another pillow and I heard the behemoth motor yacht that is berthed right in front of us stir into life. Just as I started to plan a way to let him pass safely I saw the massive thrusters boiling under the yacht and it just levitated sideways and passed us with a nonchalant wave from the helm.

We had our pizza but Marce had to make it. A cozy late dinner with the pitter patter of rain on the cockpit roof.

We’ve heard that the autopilot ram is on the way to us! Goods news for a rainy evening. I still don’t know what you’re supposed to do on a boat when it rains.

We opened up the access to the top of our offending holding tank. I spent a half hour taping everything up with plastic just in case there might be some leakage. Then jack unclamped the hose and tried to pull it off the barb. And tried. And tried. Then I tried. And tried. We could twist It and turn it but we couldn’t get it off even one ridge of the fitting. After about an hour we gave up, reclamped it and went back below to snake the hose from the other end. Yep, it’s still clogged. Ugh.

We have a steadily increasing odor from one of our holding tanks, even though they are both being treated the same, and we try to use the heads equally. After a lot of research, we came to the conclusion that the tank vent is plugged. As the skipper previously wrote, heads, head repairs and the attendant accoutrements are his responsibility, not least because Jack’s sense of smell is marginal at best and I can pick off a piece of fruit one day beyond its sell-by date at fifty paces.

He began by disconnecting the vent hose from under the sink and probing it with a plumber’s snake. Yep. Clogged. There shouldn’t be anything but air in a vent hose, so having waste in it explains the odor, not to mention restricted air flow for the enzymes we use to treat the tanks to be effective.

I read on a blog that sending a stream of water from the outside of the vent can clear the clog with the added benefit that it sends the offending material into the tank and not into my nice clean bilge or anywhere else where I might smell it in perpetuity. The only problem is that our vent is under the boat, a space that’s too low for the dinghy to fit. Five Below to the rescue, where we bought a blow-up pool raft for $2. After hours of trying to blow it up, Jack announced that it wasn’t worth the two bucks.

Finally, with the raft somewhat inflated, we discussed how this would work. Since there’s nothing to hold onto under the boat and there’s always a bit of a current running here in the lake, Jack wanted to first rig a line bow to stern so he could pull himself back and forth and hold himself steady while squirting the vent. I tied a line to the bow, Jack plunged into the water and paddled underneath, I handed him the line and he paddled back to the stern, where I took the line and tied it off.

That done, I handed Jack the hose and he pulled himself back to the vent and tried to clear the clog.

Unfortunately, the vent is so plugged that when Jack took the hose away from the vent all the water he just squirted came right back on him. So mission not accomplished.

What this tells us is that the clog is right at the fitting on top of the holding tank, and that means disconnecting the hose from there, a process that will surely end up in a smelly mess inside the boat.

Not looking forward to that.

In Norfolk we were treated to a constant parade of ships, fun to watch, and generally so quiet that if you weren’t watching you could easily miss them. Here in Virginia Beach we find ourselves adjacent to the Naval Air Station Oceana and near constant training flights of F-18s. When they’re flying we can’t converse, talk on the phone, listen to the radio or even think. These things are extremely loud and incredibly close.