Tow Boat U.S. to the rescue (that got your attention, didn't it)



The mother of all horseshoe crab shells.

We did receive help from Tow Boat U.S as we approached the entrance to the harbor at St. Augustine, but not in the way you might think.

Our friends on Shambala gave us the idea to call Tow Boat U.S. to give us some local knowledge on the placement of the entrance markers, which are uncharted because they change so much. The representative from Tow Boat U.S. was very helpful and I was mildly surprised because if you think about it, they're cutting into their own business. But they're earning karma and as Matt said, especially in todays weather, it would become a case of salvage work instead of a tow if we had run aground.
 
There was a small-craft advisory today, which was the cue for our heavy boat to depart St. Marys. We pulled up anchor in the dark and had a fast if lumpy sail to St. Augustine. The most challenging parts of the day involved leaving St. Marys and entering St. Augustine. The inlet to St. Marys was extra bouncy due to the mix of strong wind and current. A few kitchen implements went flying and we almost lost a 5-gallon bucket filled with rainwater that we left up on the side deck. However, and more importantly, we saved the remainder of Mark's birthday cake from destruction.
 
We thought the worst was over and then we got to the entrance of St. Augustine. It made our exit from St. Marys seem mild. For a brief period, our boat spun so far from side to side that it felt like a ride at the amusement park. Catamarans don't generally heel but they do sometimes corkscrew around like an unstable top--especially on the ten foot waves that had built up over the day. Matt's big red Craftsman tool chest fell over, which Conrad kindly screamed to let us know, but it was too chaotic for us to do anything about it. Since the entrance is uncharted, in addition to steering the boat in the washing machine waves, we had to look for the markers. They are there, but you can't see the next set until you are almost to the current set, at least when they are obscured by large waves and you're looking directly into the setting Fall sun. It's a tense way to navigate because you're not actually sure that you will see the next markers in time. If you've ever driven on a curvy, narrow mountain road in the fog when a car could be coming around the corner at you with seconds to react, you have an idea of the feeling.
 
But all in all, it was a good day.  We arrived in St. Augustine safely. Nothing is broken, no one is hurt and it's getting warmer. And as a bonus to the ever-present dolphins, we had a huge leatherback turtle swam right past our boat.  We'll wait here for a couple of days and hope for some NW winds to develop to push us down to Stuart.

Thanksgiving in St. Marys, Georgia

 

We generally love living aboard, but being away from family and friends can be hard. Holidays have a way of bringing those feelings front and center. This Thanksgiving, even though we're apart from family, we are fortunate to be spending time with cruisers from all over.

Every year, the small town of St. Marys, with the proprietors of the Riverview Hotel as the driving force, opens its arms to cruisers who are Thanksgiving orphans. Volunteer townsfolk cook turkey and ham and cruisers bring the side dishes. In addition to the big feast, there are activities every day leading up to Thanksgiving. Locals give rides to the grocery store, propane shop and the laundry. The food is great and the company is even better. Man, can some of these cruisers cook.

The Oyster Roast. We have never had oysters this way

and they were fresh and amazingly delicious.

 

Although cruisers come in all shapes and sizes, there is definitely a common bond among most of us. Another great aspect of a gathering of cruisers is that you're bound to see some familiar boats and people. We got to reconnect and spend time with Shambala, a boat with two kids similar in age to ours that we first met in the Bahamas in the Spring. It is still a rare enough occurrence for us to meet other kid boats (let alone kids of the same age) for it to be a reason for celebration. We had a great time with them. That alone was worth the price of admission (I mean that metaphorically; there's no actual admission fee other than a side dish), even if it means  braving sub-freezing temperatures overnight with no heat (yes, there was ice on the decks again this morning). I know, join the club.

 

 

The winds are favorable tomorrow for the 10-hour sail to St. Augustine. With so little daylight now, we'll be pulling up anchor at zero dark thirty to get a jump on the distance. We'll probably stop there for a couple days before continuing on south in search of warmth (at this point, we'll settle for the absence of ice).

Cumberland Island, Georgia

 

Cumberland Island is an otherworldly place that is accessible only by boat (there are ferries that service this National Seashore). The forest is green with enormous ground palms and hanging mosses.  Matt and I kept expecting dinosaurs or Sleestaks to appear around the next bend. Park Ranger Rene Noe gave one of the best tours we have ever had, punctuating her talk with tidbits gained from her many years of living on the island as a ranger. She included a memorable dramatic re-enactment of the meeting between James Oglethorpe and Chief Tomochichi, enlisting half of our tour group. We learned that most of Cumberland Island was owned privately by the Carnegies for a long time and a few of the Carnegie descendants still own property on the island.

 

One of the island's main features is the population of (now) wild horses, including descendants of the ones that Mrs. Carnegie had released from their stables upon her death. A couple of the horses wandered over while we were on the tour. These horses, who were curious about an oblivious Mark as he sat poking at an ant hill, are walking away in the shot above. At the ranger's request, we yelled at Mark, "Don't move!" He did a good job of staying still until the horses wandered off and when they were a safe distance away, the ranger clapped her hands to startle them off. She mentioned afterwards that the one horse had bit a foal recently (which died as a result). Okay, Mark, stay over here with us please.

Hmm, what's that thing?

Remains of the Carnegie Dungeness Mansion, destroyed by fire.

After spending a couple of weeks on the hard and then some sunny but cool days in Charleston, with some choppy overnight sails thrown in the mix, the last couple of warm days here has been a welcome respite. Cruisers are starting to gather in the area for the Cruisers Thanksgiving at St. Marys, which we plan to attend. As a result, we have had the chance to talk to a lot of nice people, like this well-traveled sailing couple that we initially met in Charleston.  The next few days are forecasted to be very windy, followed by a couple of days of rain.  As a result we may not be able to get off the boat much.  Let the cabin fever begin.

 

Charleston, the Fall Installment

Back in Charleston.  Back in the fountain.  In November.  Silly boys.

Matt mentioned several times that our trip from Beaufort, North Carolina, to Charleston should be windless, smooth and flat. So of course it was like a washing machine (Matt's reading over my shoulder and saying it wasn't that bad, but he's wrong), and we all felt sick for the first half of Day 1. He has a knack for saying, "If this wind holds, we'll be in __________ by _______" and then having the wind promptly die. But the seas calmed down and the rest of our motor-sail (mostly motor) was pleasant.

We saw a lot of dolphin and since we didn't try to take any pictures (they usually vanish when we get the camera), they stayed around for a long time. They were probably hunting all the little tunny running about. We caught five good-sized ones in less than an hour and then gave up fishing. We weren't sure whether or not the little tunny were good to eat but we kept one because it had gotten a hook through the eye and was done for anyway. We learned later that most people won't eat them but some people say that if you soak them in milk for a gazillion hours, and you don't eat anything else while they are soaking, you'll probably be hungry enough where they might be palatable. I was the only one to eat the one that Matt teriyaki-d, but it didn't go to waste.  The fishy smell from cooking it hung around for the next 2 days to further reinforce our decision not to keep them anymore.

Overnight, the moon was bright enough to read by and we enjoyed the balmy weather. I never look forward to the overnight passages but then end up really enjoying the peace. Matt and I both watched Pitch Perfect again, which has become our passage movie. Just try watching that movie and not getting one of the songs stuck in your head, even if the music is not your cup of tea.

It's fun seeing Charleston in a different season. School's back in session so there were a lot more college students walking around and fewer tourists. The boys had the fountain all to themselves and got a bath, of sorts, to boot. Now we're off to Cumberland Island in Florida.

Hope floats, but we don't (at least for a few more days)

Huddled around a space heater lent to
us by another boat in the yard

A year after buying our boat, we have come full circle as we sit out of the water in a boatyard. When we purchased Perry, she was hauled out in the Bahamas.  As we approach the end of week 2 of our estimated 1-week haul-out, we can reflect on the past year of boat ownership: we have been to the Bahamas and back twice (4 times for Matt), sailed the eastern seaboard to Cape Cod and done approximately 14,703 repairs.

The boatyard, despite being full of friendly people, is a dust bowl in the middle of nowhere. We have to walk a quarter mile to use the bathroom and every other day reveals more reasons to open our wallet. There is ice on the boat and last night our whole boat was shaking from the wind.

So are we ready to throw in the towel and crawl back to Chicago with our tails between our legs? As happy as it would make our parents, no way. First of all, Chicago is 20 degrees and snowy today. Second, we have had a great year and feel that the best is yet to come. Don't get me wrong, we're not happy about the time and money we're spending here but we see it as another step in our journey.

We have been able to spend more time together as a family than ever before. Although sometimes having the kids 24x7 can feel like a burden, it is the main luxury of our current path (along with sleeping in as long as the sun and kids allow us). Even though we have only been to the Bahamas and along the Eastern seaboard of the U.S., neither of which sounds particularly exotic or exciting, we have had memorable experiences that we will never forget. We have met many wonderful people and made fast friendships that we hope will last. The friends that we met in Beaufort last July helped make this trip more tolerable by welcoming us for Halloween, having dinner with us, and lending us a truck. Also, we have been lucky to have had visits from family so we haven't felt as homesick.

If all goes well, we should be out of here this week and we can plan our escape down south. I really hate to write those words because if the past is any indication, "if all goes well" seems to be a rare event in the world of boat repair. Fortunately, we are working with a competent and helpful team at Jarrett Bay.

For those of you that are interested in the minutia of boat repairs, here is the saga (so far) of our recent haul-out. I myself have almost nodded off just writing about it.

1. The purpose of the haul out was to fix the chunk that we took out of the keel in the Bahamas. That turned out to be the simplest task. Matt's temporary repair seems to have held just fine and the thick layer of barnacles that covered it also helped seal the spot up nicely.
2. The shift cable on the port engine that snapped while we were trying to dock was replaced. The other day, Matt brushed the starboard engine shift cable ever so slightly while working on something else, causing it to snap. That has now been fixed too. Much better that it break now than when we are in the middle of maneuvering the boat in a tight place.  Since the shift cables were snapping like twigs, we also decided to have the throttle cables replaced as well.
3. The starboard engine had been shimmying at high (for us) speed. The cutlass bearings needed to be replaced and we decided to replace the ones on the port side too. The parts had to be ordered from the U.K. because of our European boat's neediness for metric.
4. Although the bottom was painted just a year ago, enough of the paint had flaked off (and/or blasted off by the power wash we got when we were hauled) to make it worth re-doing while we were out of the water anyway.
5. While the bearings were being examined, the mechanic noticed that the propeller shaft was slightly off kilter so we removed that (which required the boat being lifted and the rudder being removed). A few days later, we were notified that there was a crack in the shaft so a new one needed to be obtained and machined (fortunately we didn't have to get it from Europe).
6. The propellers were a bit dinged so we had them reconditioned and balanced (since again the main expense of doing it would be the haul-out).
7. Our starboard rudder was weeping water and so we drilled holes to drain it and are having the problem areas repaired with new fiberglass.
8. We have noticed that there has been grease under the roller furling over the last six weeks or so. According to ProFurl, when that happens, your bearings' days are numbered. We didn't want to have to replace the bearings while in the Caribbean so we tackled that job here. It took Matt and two mechanics a lot of effort to try to remove the roller furling unit and Matt finally ended up having to drill out a screw, which it turns out did not need to be drilled out (duh!). Suffice it to say that it was incredibly difficult to remove it and we started to wonder whether it was a good idea to start the project after all. The ProFurl America rep was very helpful and got us the new bearing kit quickly and we were able to get the new bearings in and the roller furling reinstalled, which was also very difficult.
9. Matt rewired all the charging systems and removed the old diode based battery isolator with new (and reportedly more efficient) ACRs.
10. Our batteries have been showing a voltage drop recently. After much internet research and discussions with various experts, Matt discovered that the charger for our battery bank was not set up correctly and so our batteries have not been fully charging, pretty much ever. Batteries don't like not being fully charged and they have started to go bad. Matt worked with an electrician here to determine which batteries were good and we are replacing two that are bad. Hopefully with the new settings on the charger, the battery bank will be happier. On a side note, even after the batteries were switched off, our system continues to get power back fed from some unknown source. It is unclear whether this is a serious issue and reportedly it can be very difficult to isolate the source of this kind of thing.
11. An example of how relatively simple things can take an inordinate amount of time is one of our diesel fuel fills on the port side. When we last got diesel, Matt could not get the cap off that fill. While here, Matt spent several hours on various days trying to remove the cap, including applying cold, heat, leverage, and percussive maintenance (hitting it really hard). He bent several tools. The cap would not budge (the fill itself did come loose). If it had been anywhere else on the boat, we could have easily removed the hose clamp and replaced the whole fill. However, the hose for this fill is behind our refrigerator, which weighs 300 pounds and required Matt and another big guy to finagle it into place. Matt finally decided to cut a hole above the fridge and put in a "vent" (cause now its a vent, and not just a big hole in the wall, see?). Now that he had access to the deck fill, he was able to see that it was not all hose going to the fuel tank, but sections of schedule 80 PVC in certain sections to accommodate some tight bends.  The PVC was fine, but the glue had deteriorated over the years so several sections of pipe had to be re-glued together (all while trying to access everything through a small 4"x6" hole).  Hours and a fine layer of fiberglass dust later, everything was back together.  As it turns out, the hole - I mean "vent"- is probably a good idea anyway, since moisture tends to build up in there. Plus it's got a nice cover on it and looks good.

Keep your fingers crossed for us. We'll be baking today to keep warm.

Death by a thousand cuts

After a much too exciting arrival, we have settled into boat fixes and life at the boatyard. It can be depressing to spend time at what is essentially a big boat hospital. However, we are well aware that things could have been much worse.

As we pulled alongside the fuel dock at Jarrett Bay (in Beaufort, NC) to pick up our project manager and mechanic to help diagnose a vibration, we thought we were fighting a current that was pushing us off the dock. Missing the first attempt, Matt brought us in on our second attempt in reverse, and the boat started swinging in a weird circle and was headed for the dock piling. Trying to slow the speed in reverse and pivot the boat, he gunned the port engine forward--only to find it rocketed the boat backwards even quicker.  It took a second before Matt realized that the port engine was stuck in reverse.  With only one engine operating properly and the other trying to swing us in circles, he managed to motor the boat back out into the river in a wide arc and we put the anchor down to regroup. 

With 3 other large boats tied up in the basin, we narrowly missed needing to make an insurance claim. After confirming that the transmission cable was DOA, we decided to skip the employee pick-up and go straight to the scheduled haul-out. Even without any current in the haul out area, it's still difficult to operate a large cat at slow speeds with just one engine.  Too slow and all the boat wants to do is turn. Too fast...well, that's not a great idea in a confined space.  Worse, when you try to reverse to slow the momentum with just one engine, the boat will pivot radically.  Suffice it to say Matt was happy to get tied up with just a bit off a "kiss" to the forward starboard bow.

We hauled out to fix the chunk of keel that we knocked loose in the Bahamas and to check out a shimmy in the port shaft. But now that were are hauled out, the list of tasks (and dollars flying out of our pockets) is growing: fixing that port transmission cable, putting on another coat of bottom paint, replacing the bearings in the furler, and on and on.  The problem is that almost every close examination reveals something that could be bettered or fixed.  As an example, the port side vibration seemed to be due to a bad cutlass bearing. The starboard shaft isn't vibrating yet but the bearings could use replacing too. Just sourcing the bearing, which the boat manufacturer says is "standard" in any marine store, is proving to be troublesome as they cannot be found anywhere except Europe and other equally remote areas.  Before pulling the bearings, the mechanic "dialed" the shaft which revealed a slight bend.  This in turn required that the boat be lifted up to take out the whole rudder (and we had to wait for the 200-ton lift to be repaired because it died right behind our boat while trying to move a fishing trawler the size of a small house). And while we're at it, the propeller looks a little battle weary and could use some gussying up. We may or may not go that far, but you get the picture. We may be here longer than the week we thought it would take. It is soul-sucking but necessary. It's times like these that we wonder if it would have made sense to pay more upfront for a newer boat.

On the plus side, we got to spend Halloween with the friends we met back in July. Conrad and Mark had been very anxious about what we were going to do for Halloween because that is their favorite holiday now. We know because they have said it about 50,000 times. Brian, Cheryl, and Peyton came and got us from the middle of nowhere and saved us from being Halloween orphans. And we had one of the best Halloweens yet. The boys came away with quite a haul and they have big plans for it all involving building a candy model of an electronic game called Battle Dragon. We actually had to talk them into eating some of it--what?

We also discovered the cause of the leaks in our dinghy that appeared when we were in Cape Lookout. We had thought she was just showing her age and that the epic dinghy ride for sushi was the last straw, but while Matt was repairing one of the holes he found a tooth from one of the fish that was having a feeding frenzy around our boat one night (so much so that we kept hearing heavy thuds against the hull and found the bait fish on our transom the next morning). He identified it as an Atlantic Cutlassfish. We used to raise the dinghy every night but have gotten a bit lazy some nights. I guess we'll go back to playing keep-away from the crazy sea life.