Preparing for the ICW (18 - 24 April)

Well, tomorrow, we are securing our lines and heading back out to sea … actually we are heading out to  the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, called variously the ICW, the Ditch, and the “Inside” by our fellow cruisers. In general, our plan will be to cover about 60 miles per day, anchoring out along the way, then, once in a while, when we get to someplace we really want to see, stop at a marina and smell the roses. Our plan is to stop at St. Augustine, FL, Charleston, SC, near Cherry Point, NC and maybe Virginia Beach before heading up to the Chesapeake. We think that will take us about six weeks, but it may be a little bit longer. We shall see.  So the next several Blog entries will be about our travels. However, before we can start that journey, we had to get some things fixed, so this entry is more for those of you who are gear heads, geeks and mechanics than it is for those of you who are reading this Blog for the destinations rather than the journeys.

But before I begin, I have to announce a stunning realization. Over the past month or so, in dealing with the electrical systems on the boat I have had to use the equations E=I*R and P = I*E and a few others.  The fact that I had to use these equations would not be particularly surprising to most engineers or even some repairmen. But what is absolutely stunning is that I learned them about thirty eight years ago when I was taking EE 301 – or what cadets called “Juice.” Now Juice wasn’t my best subject and I am not sure how well I knew and could use these equations back then, but I am amazed that I can remember them all these years later without having used them much in between. And to think, we cadets used to complain about all the trivia we were learning. How was Juice going to help me be a better Army officer? How was it going to help me lead men into battle? Little did I know that while it may not be essential for an infantry officer, it is absolutely crucial for a retiree setting out on a cruising adventure.

Ok, now back to the mundane. Most of this entry is going to be about maintenance and repairs. I may have mentioned in our last entry that we had three major items that we needed to get fixed: the heads, the steering and the winch in the dinghy davit.  Each of them has a story (of course, or I wouldn’t be writing about them).

First, the heads. I wish I could tell an entire, start-to-finish story about our heads. Sadly, all I can do is to recount the current chapter in the continuing saga. Before Tim, Carrie and crew arrived our heads began to act up. We knew what to do as a stopgap (put salt in the water with each flush) and we executed that plan very well. But after we came back from our house-closing trip, the heads began showing yellow and red lights again – and anything other than green is bad. However, this time the problem was with not one of them, not two of them, but all three of them. Well, we managed to last a few days with minimal functioning in the heads, but as soon as we arrived in West Palm Beach we called a marine plumber. The owner of the company was very responsive. He showed up the same day, looked at our heads and promptly told us that while he might be able to fix two of them, we really should buy three new ones. He proudly told us they were only $1300 each, plus the labor to put them in, of course, and he would be happy to order them for us that very day. Now what I should have told him was that he was wrong. What we really needed to do is to buy a brand new ten million dollar yacht with working heads, but we weren’t going to do that for the same reason we weren’t going to buy three new heads; because it costs too much money.

This is one of the dreaded Lectra San units.

Anyway, once he understood that he wasn’t making a big sale, he sent one of his technicians out to take a closer look. The technician, Bob, decided he needed to take our heads back to the shop for testing, repairs and an overnight muriatic acid bath. We pointed out that if he took both of them that we would be headless (so to speak), so he agreed to take one, give it an overnight bath, then return to re-install that one while he picked up the other one. Well, about 3PM in the afternoon on Friday we hadn’t received our head back and hadn’t heard anything from Bob. He had said he wanted to give them an overnight acid bath, not a weekend bath. So we called to ask what was going on. The phone person said she would check with Bob and have him call back. To make a long story short, after a few more phone calls to them, someone knowledgeable did eventually call back and said that Bob still had to do this that and the other and that we could probably have our head back on Monday. I was not a happy camper and let them know that wasn’t the proper answer. The lady-who-answered-the-phone must have detected an unhappy customer and had some influence within the company because I got a call shortly afterwards that saying that both heads would be disassembled, bathed in acid and returned on Saturday. And you know what? They were.

We know we are going to have another issue with the heads when we get to the Chesapeake. The Chesapeake has brackish water; it doesn’t have enough salt in it to make the Lectra Sans work. So, our plan is to have one Pura-San put in (the new, sparkling, updated really cool Lectra San-type head that doesn’t require salt) and to add an ounce of salt to the other heads until we head south again. Then maybe next year we will have to buy yet another head and so on. So that was one boat unit. (Boaters don’t like to talk about the cost of things because we all know that boating is an expensive hobby/lifestyle. So, we talk in euphemisms. One Boat Unit is … well, let me put it this way. Do you know what the B.O.A.T. stands for? Bring On Another Thousand. I think you get the picture.)

Ain't she a beauty?
And look, she is no longer leaking hydraulic fluid!

The second issue was the steering. I don’t remember whether I wrote about it before, but both the upper and lower helms were leaking hydraulic fluid and the steering on the flybridge was – in technical terms – “squishy.” Now I could live with it in the Bahamas, but in some places the ICW seems less than 100 feet wide. If you get two boats coming at one another, and throw in an idiot or two who insists on passing while all this is happening, then you want to make sure you can pilot the boat through the eye of a needle. Ok, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. I don’t want my steering to fail when we are close to other boats. So, Ray from Florida Rigging and Hydraulics came on board and fixed the steering and told us a lot about our steering mechanism that I didn’t know. In short, I learned a lot at the same time I got the steering fixed and spent another boat unit.

 Now we had people working on the heads and the steering, but we were having trouble finding someone to work on the davit’s winch. We weren’t sure whether the problem was mechanical or electrical, so who do we call? The problem was that you could raise the dinghy with the remote, but when you took your finger off the “up” button the dinghy started going down. It seemed to me that it was a mechanical issue – maybe the brake wasn’t engaging or the clutch was slipping, but I wasn’t sure. We finally got hold of Scott at Ramsey Marine. He told us he thought it was electrical, but he wouldn’t have time to work on it until the middle of the following week. So, he thought we should try to fix it ourselves. He said he thought it was one of three things. It might be dirty electrical connections on he davit, so we should clean those up. Alternatively, it might be a bad remote switch. If cleaning the connections did not work, he said, he could test the remote for us because his workshop was only a few blocks away. Or it might be a bad motor. If that was the problem, we would probably be here a while until the motor arrived. He then left and asked us to call him if we had any questions.

What I really appreciated about Scott was that he didn’t try to “up-sell” us. Like certain marine plumbers did. He gave us some expert advice and suggested we use that advice – free of charge—and save some money. Well, we cleaned the connections and in the process discovered that one of the connectors had broken. As is usually the case, however, knowing what is wrong is not the same as being able to fix it. I tried to solder the broken prong into place, but my fingers, my soldering iron and the solder would not all fit in the same tight space.  I tried a couple of other things and decided that I was making things worse rather than better. So, I called the cavalry (Scott). Scott always returns phone calls, but he still didn’t have the time to come out and help us. Eventually, though, Scott got in touch with another electrician, Arie, who came out on Monday morning, asked for the manual and got right to work. After that, he pulled some things, unscrewed some other things and told me what had broken was not just the prong on some plastic block, but the rectifier for the unit. Okay, I may have remembered E=IR, but rectifier was beyond me – that must have been for the “hives” in the class. (An inside joke that only a few will understand. Sorry.) Apparently, because of a loose connection, the unit was getting only a fraction of the electricity it needed. It wasn't a 700 pound capacity winch anymore, it was behaving like a 350 pound capacity winch. But Arie knew that you could replace a rectifier by connecting four diodes. In short, after two hours, Arie fixed the problem. This one cost only 1/6 of a boat unit!

Two of our big black 17,000 lb breaking strength lines.

One of the issues we discovered in the Bahamas is that we did not have enough lines (ropes). We had enough to tie the boat up, of course and a couple of specialized lines to use as snubbers for anchoring, but when the wind really starts blowing we really wanted a couple of extra lines. So, we went to Boat Owners Warehouse (much cheaper than West Marine) and bought some. We have a set of five blue lines, so we decided to get another complete set or black ones. Now these aren’t the lines that your granddad used to lasso stray dogies on the ranch, these are double-braided, ¾ inch line whose breaking strength is 17,000 pounds. We bought five of them with lengths from 35 feet to fifty feet. We intend to use them both to dock so we can give our regular blue lines a break, but in a hurricane, we would have ten ¾ inch lines, one 1¼ inch line and sundry smaller ones.  I am hoping that would be good enough. The cost for the new lines? They ain’t cheap – just under ½ a boat unit.

And finally, we cleaned the boat. I mention that for one reason. We had some terrible rust spots on the boat that had resisted our best efforts for months. We had tried just about everything. When we were walking back to the boat one day, Ann struck up a conversation with a guy who was strolling the marina docks with his son. It turns out that he details boats for a living. We asked him about our little stains and he suggested FSR – Fiberglass Stain Remover – so we bought some. My goodness it is wonderful! It takes all sorts of stains off of the deck without hurting the paint or the gelcoat. It is amazing stuff. And that turned out to be only 16/1000 of a Boat Unit.

ANN'S NOTES: It has been an interesting and expensive couple of days. We did get a lot done thanks to some very good repair men...yes..some did try to upsell but once they knew we were not going to buy they did their job well.

Ann's all important phone --
her connection to he kids and everybody else.

I  became a real happy boater once I came into cell phone range once we saw the coast of Florida!! I am now back on face book and in the land of grocery stores. I even bought some fresh flowers for the boat...the Bahamas has many flowers out in nature but none you can place in a vase to enjoy.

We also rented a car for a few days so we could do some errans and go shopping. We went to Target and to Bed,Bath and Beyond. We bought a sign in BBB that reads "Paradise Ain't Cheap"...that is so true with this stay in Lake Worth.

I am so excited about heading back to VA/MD. I think the trip up the ICW will be fun and intersting. We are well provisioned,the boat is in good shape and the Captain and First Mate are ready to GO!!!

Traveling Soul...OUT