Repower is Finished - On with Cruising!

To nobody's surprise at all, the repower took a couple weeks longer than expected. This was mainly due to our decision to replace the old two-piece drive/prop shaft with a single piece, only to discover that it could not be machined in St. Thomas but was instead manufactured and shipped from Ft. Lauderdale. This was happening right around the holidays, which I think interfered a bit, and then shipping (via USPS) was a mess - it actually got returned to Florida, then mailed again to St. Thomas. The result was that we didn't actually get the shaft until just after the New Year. Meanwhile we sat on the dock at $67 a night, which was frustrating. We launched the dinghy and used it to run Piper around the corner to Vessup Beach, which was a nice cruising-like break from the dock. I picked up a 9-day double Rio trip over Christmas (gotta pay for all this shiny new machinery!) while Dawn flew north to be with family. Back on the boat, we worked on miscellaneous projects like servicing our winches and recaulking our teak deck, and then celebrated a nice, fairly low-key New Years Eve in Redhook, staying up until nearly 3am.

The shaft, new engine and transmission went into the boat on Friday, Jan 4th, about as easy as the old one came out although Kevin did have to take a few more things off of the new engine. We were told fairly late that our second alternator's brackets wouldn't work with the new engine, and not wanting to spend more time in St. Thomas to have a new bracket machined, I chose to install a battery switch to allow the 120A alternator that came with the engine charge either the engine or house batteries (and also allow either bank to start the engine). We do want to keep the redundancy of a second alternator, but this setup buys us some time to get the new installation right. Solar and wind are doing a pretty good job of keeping up with our usage, but it would be pretty disconcerting to head out cruising with no other means of charging your house bank.

After the engine was physically in the boat on Jan 4th, I had to head to the airport to fly to Atlanta, where I had my 9-month recurrent training on Saturday and Sunday. Kevin did more of the installation on Saturday but not everything was done, so he finished up Monday morning, at which point I was back. By Monday afternoon we'd started the engine for the first time - a very exciting moment - but it was too late for sea trials, so we did those Tuesday morning. The engine ran very well, but it was obvious we're pretty underpropped with the new engine. I think we were with the old one too, but now it's especially bad. Other Tayana 42 owners with 53-57 hp engines get about 6-6.5 knotsin flat water at 2400 rpm; our old engine gave us 5.5 on a good day; with this one we're getting 4.8. It's only an 18-inch 2-bladed prop with (I'm guessing, there's no stamp) around a 12-14 inch pitch, which is quite small. Kevin advised us we should repitch or get a large prop as soon as possible, and we decided to do so in St. Martin, where the marine facilities and services are considerably more abundant than St. Thomas.

We left the dock at American Yacht Harbor for good at 11am Tuesday with a terribly embarrassing incident, our first ever docking disaster. With a narrow fairway to maneuver in and a brisk crosswind piping up, a miscommunication between Dawn and I plus a misjudgement on my part led me to try to turn out before I had room to clear our rather large neighbor, M/V Tabula Rasa, whose bow was sticking well out into the fairway. We ended up getting blown into her huge anchor, which neatly inserted itself between our forward lower starboard shroud and upper starboard shrouds. The owner and a bystander came running to help, along with two cruisers on small dinghies, and between all of us we were able to extricate the rig from the anchor's clutch and push Windbird clear. We circled back to the T-head to apologize and make sure there wasn't any damage; thankfully both boats escaped without harm (well, we slightly bent one of our stanchions). It was a couple of really tense minutes and could have been a lot worse, and it left us feeling a bit shaken all day, definitely taking away from some of the glorious triumph of escaping Red Hook with a brand new engine.

We motored to Maho Bay, our favorite anchorage on St. John, where we swam with turtles and I gave Windbird's bottom a good scrub with my snuba rig (it was surprisingly clean for 2 months in marinas, so unfortunately the scrub didn't improve our speed much). Piper got in some good beach play time once the beachgoers went home, although the sunset patrol of vicious noseeums cut short his fun. It was a lovely evening with brilliant stars, and it felt so great to be out cruising again.

The next morning we sailed downwind back to Cruz Bay, where the local insurance adjuster, Marty Carlson, had asked to see the boat again. The one thing he hadn't been able to figure out, and something that had bothered me too, was just how the top end of the engine got so full of water when the bilge flooding had only reached the bottom of the rear main seal. A remark from the mechanic who worked on the boat in Puerto Rico gave Marty an idea, which was quickly borne out once he inspected our cooling/exhaust system. Our raw water, after it exits the heat exchanger, goes through a vented loop above the water line before returning to the exhaust elbow. The vented loop drains into the scupper hose. Because I apparently neglected to open the scupper seacocks before we left the boat for the summer, once they filled up with water it backflowed to the vented loop, filled the water muffler (that I had drained), then came up through the exhaust and flooded the top end through one or more open exhaust valves. The boatsitters were still negligent for not bringing the cockpit flooding or bilge flooding to my attention, but my inexplicable failure to ensure the scupper seacocks were open after I exercised them (it was on my checklist, and had been crossed off) was the original disastrous mistake. It remains to be seen how our insurance is going to handle this.

After Marty inspected the boat, we motorsailed around the south side of St. John to Lameshur Bay, our 2nd-most favorite anchorage in St. John. I enjoyed some spectacular snorkeling around the point there, and it was another beautiful night with only one other boat around. The next day, Thursday Feb 10th, we were off the mooring at 11am and headed ESE to St. Martin, 95 miles away. We had a great weather window for motorsailing across the notoriously rough Anegada Passage (which wags call the "Anegada Pukeage"). It was a little slow and choppy at first, but soon the wind went almost directly south and quite light, and the seas settled down and our speed crept up. We crossed in quite a lot of company, for many cruisers had been holed up in the Virgins waiting for the Christmas Winds to break. While we were about 15 miles out, our friends John and Belinda on S/V Be As You Are radioed back that there were several lobster pots in 100 feet of water just after crossing the dropoff while approaching St. Martin. Since I had my usual 4am-7am watch and didn't want to wake Dawn up early, I slowed down and altered course to the south to cross the shelf once there was enough light to see any lobster pots. We got into Marigot Bay at 7:20am Friday and found a nice spot to anchor in 11 feet of crystal clear water over a perfect sand bottom. And that's where we are now.

I'll write more about St. Martin later, but my first impression is that they got really, really hard hit by Irma and they've been a lot slower to recover than Puerto Rico, the USVI, and even the BVI. Marigot is a shell of its former charming self. Quite a few completely wrecked buildings have been left where they lay, the bush quickly overgrowing them. There are still dozens of sunken and half-sunk boats in the lagoons. It's still beautiful here and there's a lot of boat activity, and the marine industries seem to be back up to full speed (largely fueled by all the salvage and repair work, I'd guess). But I'd guess it's going to be several years yet before St. Martin fully recovers from Irma.

We ran into our old pals Howard and Doris from S/V Safara here; they actually hailed us as we were pulling into Marigot. Last year we weathered the blow of the season in Mayaguana with them (and our friends on Sea Otter), and made the short crossing to Provo in their company. They quickly scooted across to the DR and it was several weeks before we saw them once again, in Luperon. After that they scooted down the chain to Grenada, and this season have been working their way back up to St. Martin where they're doing some work on the boat. Yesterday I got on the cruiser's net to inquire about a 3-bladed propeller, and Howard came back to offer a 19" x 13" specimen from his bilge, for free! I'm cleaning it up today and we'll hire a diver to put it on tomorrow, and hopefully it'll be a good match for the engine. If not, we'll have to choose between buying a new fixed-blade prop or springing for a nice MaxProp or VariProp feathering propeller. They're a lot of money and require extra maintenance but have much better power in reverse, have field adjustable pitch, and have far less drag while sailing than a traditional 3-blade prop.

Our other project here is getting a new bracket fabricated for the second alternator. A machinist should be coming to the boat tomorrow, and can hopefully draw up some plans. Then it looks like we'll have good weather to head to Saba and Statia for a week before coming back to St Martin. We'll finish exploring the island, get our practical stuff wrapped up, and I'll fly out for a 4-day trip; then my parents will be flying in and we'll head out with them to St. Barth, (possibly) Montserrat, and Antigua. It's good to be out cruising again!