Rot Repair

One of my last sails of the summer, I was returning from Holmes Harbor after a weekend with my son and a friend Walt.  The wind was pretty calm at the south end where we anchored, but hit about 20 knots at the north end going around the little island.  I was under full canvas and decided to ride it out as it was pretty clear that once I rounded the point, the wind would likely die down and I’d be on a quartering wind anyway. For some time, it has felt like Sojourn just won’t point on a port tack and the lee shrouds have been getting more and more slack.

I didn’t actually spot it until the next time I tried to take it out - the chain plate didn’t come all the way out, but perhaps nearly an inch. It could have been ugly.   Also the mast step failed (dissolved really), causing the compression post to penetrate the deck and actually go up inside the mast.  It’s about 80% repaired now, with new bulk heads and surgery complete on the cabin top.  I still have to fab a new mast step and do some maintenance on the mast while it is down.

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Moldy Old Boat with a Hint of Sour Bilge

You may have read my previous post where I had tried Formby’s lemon oil and had less than fantastic results. Some months ago, I ran across the blog of a Gulf pilothouse owner who was touting the wonders of another brand, who’s name I forget.  So during the summer, I had occasion to need to entertain the girls while I did some other work.  I gave them each a rag and some of the new magic potion and they enthusiastically went to work dousing every surface in the cabin, wood or not, in lemon oil. The boat was literally dripping in lemon oil, but I figured it couldn’t hurt anything.  A few weeks later, I checked on it and was greeted with a fairly pleasant, in the context of musty old boats, odor. It had performed quite a bit better than the Formby’s.  

Fast forward a few months.  We had 12 inches of rain at the boat in the course of a week according to the bucket in the cockpit.  I entered the cockpit and was greeted with the very strong odor of moldy old boat with a hint of sour bilge!  Several leaks had gotten worse, so the humidity inside was very high.  The little Peltier junction dehumidifier just couldn’t keep up.  Upon closer inspection, every unvarnished wooden surface, which is almost every wooden surface, was fuzzy and green! 

Interestingly, the varnished surfaces were not moldy and didn’t harbor any odor. I’m now about 30% complete with an interior varnish job.

San Juan’s Part 1–Everett to Friday Harbor

After repairing the dingy oarlock, installing the grill, a life sling and the rest of about $500 worth of expenses at West Marine on Saturday, I went back home and collected the second load of trip gear and the family.  It was blowing just less than stink – no idea where that term came from, but I hear it a lot – so I was concerned about getting Sojourn and her tender out of the slip with the prop shaft and dinghy painter in tact.  This was my first experience a loading a 120 pound dinghy on the foredeck, but with he aid of the main halyard I managed without too many scratches. 
We loaded up, backed out of the slip and headed for Langley.  Our goal was to keep each passage to four or five hours. Langley is two and La Conner is about 6 from Everett.  Langley was lovely as always, though it was chilly.  It was very low tide the next morning and I always have to marvel when I see beached sailboats.  There is a wonderful and in some ways very authentic French restaurant called the Prima Bistro, which caters to some of our dietary needs and culinary desires with gluten free calamari among other things. The wonder has worn off for our kids, so in the future I think we will save the modest expense for just Carrie and I who fully enjoy it.  Jack still claims that the have the best fries in all of the seven seas.
On day two we motored directly into a 12-15 knot head wind most of the way to La Conner and were rewarded with very pleasant sunshine and a light breeze.  After watching a 38 foot sailboat with what looked like a newly minted skipper at the helm attempt to dock and nearly destroy his vessel going with the current last year, I was more the wiser and managed a very soft landing at about 1800 RPM going into the current. Here we had the first opportunity to use the dink.
Per our usual we hit the road, or water as it were, at around 11.  We’ve since concluded that my getting up much earlier and motoring or sailing for a few hours while visions of sugar plums or transformers  still dance in little heads would be much smarter.  This was also a short trip so we arrived in Anacortes in the early afternoon.  Apparently a severe leak had sprung in the heavens.  Sojourn isn’t exactly what you would call water tight on the decks, and I pumped about 2 gallons of water from the bilge the next morning. I had gone to the trouble to install a PSS shaft seal this spring and eagerly looked forward to a dry bilge this summer.  It seems my wait isn’t over.   We very much liked Anacortes with its modern wide docks, easy shopping, and spacious parks.  While Carrie shopped and took a break from parenting, I lead a march to the lookout, a mile or two around the harbor.  We actually made it about half way up the hill which was about 90 percent of the journey before the girls gave up. Maggie will declare “I’m tired” and plop herself wherever she happens to be standing.”
The leak had either nearly been mended or the heavens were running out of water, with patches of blue sky in the direction of our destination, so we cast off.  After about 15 minutes, the leak started pouring anew.  I had removed Sojourn’s tattered dodger believing that I would not need it in the summer time – a regretful decision. Just before committing to crossing Rosario Straight, I was carefully watching other boats and the chop through binoculars. Visibility wasn’t great and not having experienced the straight before, and not wanting to risk terrifying the passengers, I headed to the “Ship Harbor” as noted on the chart on the northwest corner of Fidalgo Island.  After about an hour at anchor, the heavens dried up again and we continued our journey.  The winds were fresh and crisp, filling in behind the low pressure system that had just moved through, but being on the bow, I would have been beating into 3-4 foot waves for a couple of hours, so we motored.  As the day proceeded the clouds receded and the sun shined brilliantly through pristine blue skies. I got about 15 minutes of sailing as we headed north around Lopez, but the wind has an uncanny ability to blow right up the passages between the islands so no matter the heading, it is always into the wind.  Tacking in a narrow channel with the family in cruising mode is a challenge so I just motored.
As we arrived in Friday Harbor, 100 foot steel square rigger named the Hawaiian Chieftain was docking.  At any distance it couldn’t look more like a classic pirate ship.  Annie declared it was Captain Jones!  We had previously been regaled with stories of the famous Captain Jones by a father of grown children who sailed through the San Juan’s finding treasure left by Jones and his first mate Scully. We managed to get a tour the next day.  The crew were friendly and the captain very enthusiastic.  She is quite peculiar having been designed and built as a beachable, steel hulled square rigger with hybrid polymer and hemp shrouds, wooden dead blocks and convincing cannons lashed to the deck.
The water is clear enough to see nearly 20 feet down to a completely alien ecology.  Everything is covered in large leafy kelp with a plethora of critters and creatures swimming about.  Translucent shrimp were abundant and a favorite local attraction among the junior sailors, my three being no exception. At night, you can shine a flashlight on them and pluck them out of the water by their antenna.  On the second night we got a slip at H-49, which is very near the north west corner of the marina and one of the best seats in the house for the fireworks show.  Just before the show, we were treated to a giant full moon rising over the mountains to the east.  Annie declared it the ‘super moon.’

If You Think a Dirty Bottom Slows You Down

Just imagine what it does for your boat.  Someone who posts on Sailnet has that quote in their signature.  I can’t find it at the moment to give proper credit.

Sojourn had been getting slower and slower.  I smartly or stupidly, ignorantly, or well, ignorantly, bought Sojourn without hauling her to look at the bottom.  It had recently been painted, but that is all I really knew. Almost two years have gone by. Last summer, using GPS averaging, I clocked Sojourn at ludicrous speed - 6.4 knots at 3600 RPM.  At this blistering speed, the ordinarily high and dry exhaust port on the transom is completely submerged.

This year, I could only get about 5.5 knots, could not make 3600 RPM, and the exhaust port wouldn’t get anywhere near the water line.  So I decided that it was time to haul her.  I could have saved some money by waiting for Winter specials, but not knowing what the bottom looked like and knowing it wasn’t going very fast was bugging me. 

On the big day, I motored the quarter mile to the lift, and watched as Sojourn briefly left her familiar depths and traveled skyward as the travellift hoisted Sojourn onto the hard. My first impression was that the hull was much cleaner than I expected.  The only obvious growth at a distance was the volleyball of muscles attached to the bottom of the keel. The prop didn’t have a single barnacle.  As it moved to the pressure wash station and I got closer, my heart sank.  While mostly free of growth, her hull looked like surface of a Martian dry lake with lots of blisters.  Water was seeping out of the cracks between the drying tiles of paint.  The guy I had hired to do the job was making noise about a “peel” and how the boat might not be worth that much.

I sent this and several other photos to Ben who was very reassuring. He said his Mason looked the same way when he bought it.  He advised me to scrape it, fix the worst of the blisters, do a few more next year and go sail it.  So that is what I did.  It turned out that most of the blisters were in between the layers of paint and not in the gel coat, although the gel coat had is fair share.  I hired Lakota Marine Services in Everett to do the scraping and painting, not expecting to have time to do it myself.  They fixed 20 or 30 blisters, I fixed 20 or 30 more and I left 70 or 80 for future haulouts.  They re-painted it with two coats of BlueWater Copper Shield.

I took advantage of the time and buffed and waxed the top sides which made a remarkable difference. I used 3M rubbing compound and wax, each costing about $50, but worth it as my previous attempts made little improvement.  One other piece of advice that I followed and pass on is don’t even attempt this without a Makita variable speed rotary buffer or similar. The cheap orbital you get at the parts store might be ok for the final wax, but for buffing, you’d be better of doing it by hand.  It took me about 12 hours over two days to do the complete job including wax. In the process, I was continually struck by the notion of how small Sojourn is in the water and how big she is out of the water! Scaffolding would have been helpful.

At least as important as the buffing was cleaning that the buffer wouldn’t touch.  My hull was anything but white and I had tried several cleaning products that didn’t touch it. Davis FSR is almost magical.  Take a look at the before and after photos. The guy who did most of the work on my boat kept telling me to buy some and try it. I finally did.   I used about a pint of FSR, keeping it wet with my boat brush for about 30 minutes and then wiped it off.  Amazing!

On day 5, I slimed the prop with Lanocote as I did last year, splashed her and set off for Poulsbo.

Frankensail

While I think the whole family agrees that overall, we wouldn’t trade  our cruises for anything (except perhaps Port Ludlow in near freezing March) the first few hours are always an adjustment period. There is apparently a mandatory transition from land to sea that involves lots of squealing and taunting and complaining about this that and the other thing with threats from me of making them separate or, heaven forbid, come up in the cabin with me.  After a couple of hours, it calms down and they start playing nicely until precisely an hour before arrival when the “are we there yet”’s start.  Arrival represents the end of the transition and the beginning of the adventure.

On our way to Langley, I was single handing with the kids down below and mom was to meet us by car the next morning.  We were in the thick of the transition.  While the Around Whidbey racers were giving up due to lack of wind on the West side, we were in 20 knot winds according to a couple of anemometer equipped sailors we met in Langley.  Annie was squealing because of Maggie.  Jack was telling on Annie and Maggie was squealing just because she could. I was struggling to get the sails up in the stiff breeze and the tiller wasn’t having the easiest of times keeping us into the wind.  I had set the tiller pilot, raised the main, and went to raise the jib, but couldn’t find the halyard. After a couple of seconds of a ‘this does not compute’ moment, I looked up to find it streaming from the masthead, apparently tangled in the top of the mainsail track. I managed to furl the main, retrieve the halyard, and re-tie the missing stop knot.  (I’m fairly fastidious about stop knots, and there was clear evidence of a previous one in the stiff old line, so me-thinks that helpful little fingers were at work.)  I hoisted the main, and then the jib.  The wind was heavy, so I used the winch handle.  I killed the motor and set for a close haul. 

Immediately , something wasn’t right with the main. I looked up and found the wire jib halyard wrapped taught around leech, caught on a baton.  There was about a 10 inch tear.  While I paused for a few seconds to think about the best course of action the tear started to grow.  By the time I got the halyard free of the winch, the tear was half way to the luff. I don’t recall the sequence of the next 10 minutes, just the loosely attached highlights.  I had fully furled the jib and we probably lost steerage, causing the boat to fall off, which healed the boat and put a lot of pressure on the main. The tear went all the way to the luff under the pressure. 

I had many thoughts. – despair at the prospect of having to buy a new main.  - should I cancel the trip?  - joy at the prospect of a new main.  I decided to continue the trip.  Our destination was directly up wind and without the mainsail, I wasn’t able to point very well.  Our VMG was only about two knots and we had eight to go, so I furled the jib for the third time and motored.  I took the sail pieces to a newly minted sail maker in the club named Tony.  The good news was that he could fix it. The bad news was that he could fix it.    A week later, h returned ‘Frankensail’ and cruised to Poulsbo.  Can you spot Frankensail’s stitches?

Sojourn’s Ten Dollar Tiller

We cruised to Port Ludlow with Milltown a couple of weeks ago and came home in need of a new tiller. Making our way south, we motored into 20 knot winds and six foot waves for a couple of hours before turning west at Possession Point. We turned right, hoisted the sails, and after the bumpy ride it was a surprisingly nice sail to Hood Canal. Initially, I sailed by a reefed main alone, but it felt like she could handle some more, so I raised the 130. A little later, took the reef out of the main and  sailed under full canvas at 6 knots.  We timed the current well, so we were making 8.5 over ground.  

Arriving at Hood Canal about an hour before dusk in diminishing wind, I decided to drop the sails.  After doing so, I headed back to the cockpit and managed to trip on something, perhaps the line I had securing the dodger. As I look back, I’m amazed that the only mark on me or Sojourn was her broken tiller.

The next 30 minutes where an adventure as the water is shallow, the marker is at least 200 yards from where my new chart plotter say it is and the current was pushing me toward the rocks and the alleged marker at about two knots.  Someone later told me they installed a new marker recently.

Seeing that I was physically a few hundred yards from the marker, I decided to try to mend it, knowing I would have to drop the hook in a couple of minutes.  I found an old quick clamp, some utility cord and a nylon strap to get me the rest of the way to my destination.  Carrie and the kids had no idea any of this had happened.  Wow. Sojourn is filthy!

In Port Ludlow, I cut the splintered part of the tiller off with my Leatherman and Tony lashed it to the fitting.  Wow, I kind of like the feel of the shorter tiller. I’m not sure why the tiller was 5 feet long in the first place. Twelve inches makes for quite a bit more room in the cockpit.

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to build a tiller rather than buy one.  I don’t know what they cost, but my foggy memory says I saw one at Fisheries for about $150.  I’ve been engaged in some wood working projects anyway, so I bought a piece of ash with a knot in it for $10 at the half price wall at Midway Plywood. It was my first introduction to ash, which I picked on the rumor that boat oars are made of it.  It works and looks much like oak.  Like walnut and a few other woods, its saw dust has a pleasant odor. Given the knot, I couldn’t just glue two pieces together and cut it with a jig saw.  Also, I surmise that laminating adds a little strength as the grain is interrupted and thus any potential large cracks.

I traced the old tiller profile on some MDF, modified the curve a little and cut it with my jig saw to make a form.  I then cut and planed the ash into 1-3/4 x 1/4 strips. I wanted to use alternating light and dark wood like the old tiller, but there wasn’t any to be had on the half price wall and I didn’t want to spend more on materials than I could have spent on a finished tiller. I had some walnut on hand, but didn’t know if it was a good “wet” wood.  Teak is prohibitively expensive.  According to Midway, Sapele (pronounced SA-PEE-LEE) is the species of choice for boat builders these days.

I smeared Titebond III wood glue on a couple of strips and clamped them to form. It may have worked but, I just wasn’t comfortable with the wood glue, so I switched to epoxy.  I ran the cured tiller through the planer and then proceeded to carve the handle, which I botched badly.  My last ditch effort to save it made for a much better finished product as it turned out. I cut the botched handle off and made a jig to get it to spin up in my lathe.  I turned the end down and then essentially gun drilled it with a 3/4” forstner bit.   I turned another piece of ash into a handle with a 3/4” shaft.  I slathered epoxy in the hole, inserted and clamped the handle.  Voila!  I even managed to get the grain to match up pretty well.  The picture shows it with its second coat of Bristol Finish.

Cursing at Dodgers

Fortunately, I have a job and have been too busy to play with sailboats this winter.  I have neighbors who aren’t so lucky.  Unfortunately, however, I have a job and have been to busy to play with sailboats, thus the 4 months since my last post.

I’ve been slowly working on the dodger. I made a form and laminated two pieces of 3mm marine plywood, glassed them and painted it with Interlux Pre-Kote in preparation for
Brightside.  I found that the ends had too tight of a bend radius, so I put 1.5mm deep cuts with my Skilsaw every half inch for 12 inches on each end, which worked well. By happy coincidence, my work bench was almost the ideal size for strapping the plywood to the form with motorcycle straps.  In the process I made two serious mistakes.

First, doing math in my head under the influence of wine, I mis-calculated the ratio for the epoxy.  I filled the pot to the 3 oz mark with part B then to the 12 oz mark with part A.  12:3 is 4:1 right? Would you believe I’m a licensed professional engineer?

It was from Tap Plastics and was a 4:1 ratio, and apparently doesn’t cure well at 3:1.  I’ve since learned that 1:1 or 1:2 ratio epoxy is more forgiving.  After laminating the two sheets, I just kept using the same amounts.  When I finished glassing the top.  It just didn’t feel right – it was hard, but sticky.  When I got to the bottom, it was worse.  I actually used a torch to heat and remove the uncured epoxy and glass and re-glassed it.  The re-glass job was gratifyingly hard and not sticky. 

Second, I misunderstood the use of Pre-Kote and effectively was trying to use it as a fairing compound. It would gum up the sand paper. Perhaps it just needs time to harden, I thought..  Being busy, a month went by and it was still like day old latex paint.  I could scratch it off with my fingernail. 

At this point, I’m of two minds.  One is to use the 7/8 dodger frame I got as dumpster salvage and go traditional canvas and the other is start over.  The little bit of stripping I did suggests that starting over would be the lesser amount of work if I wanted to stick with the hard dodger.