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?