Connection & Celebration

Boats, like airplanes, seem to take on lives of their own, with unique histories and distinct personalities, at least in the minds of their owners. Boat ownership, for most, has a certain emotional component, with the accompanying highs and lows, bouts of love and hate, joy and sorrow. But you try to keep emotion out of it when you buy a boat (or, for that matter, when you sell it). You make lists of boats, crunch figures, ascribe pros and cons, enlist the help of impartial brokers and surveyors. But the reality is that very few will pull the trigger on such a big purchase unless they like the boat, if not love it. Windbird wasn't the cheapest boat we looked at (most certainly not after refit) nor the best equipped, or even the most ideal for the type of cruising we'll be doing - but we liked her. And worse (from an "impartial buyer" standpoint), we really liked her owners.

I'll be honest, Windbird wasn't love at first sight. My first thought when I saw her was that she looked used. The broker had been frank in my initial discussions with him and so this didn't come as a surprise, and I tried to look past it knowing that cosmetics are a rather small component of selecting a boat - but I came away from that initial look without a great deal of enthusiasm. And then I started reading Judy Handley's blog, and the more I read the more I was impressed with what they did with Windbird, and I started to see the real value of many of her features. When I went back to see the boat with Dawn, it was after having read about half of Judy's circumnavigation logs, and I seemed to see Windbird with different eyes. I was aware that reading the logs were giving me an emotional attachment to the boat - and to Mark & Judy - but I kept reading anyway and pretended that emotion didn't influence the final decision. It undoubtedly did. Now I look at Windbird, and while I still see the "used" bits (really, the bits that are awaiting our attention), she looks beautiful to me. I imagine her rocking at anchor in exotic landfalls during her circumnavigation, and surfing down greybeards in the December Atlantic with Mark at the helm. I dream of our future life aboard her. Every time I walk away, I turn around to admire her. My "like" is turning into "love."

As Dawn and I formed this connection with Windbird, we've also formed a connection with Mark and Judy that I think is stronger than most owner-buyer relationships. During the negotiation & sales process they struck me as very fair and reasonable people, and I tried to act in kind. I read the rest of Judy's logs and we started corresponding regularly via email, while Mark and I mostly talked on the phone. I often read new emails and logs to Dawn. Mark and Judy showered us with books, tools, equipment, and advice. We were really looking forward to meeting them and having them down to the boat - the request was actually included with the purchase agreement - but the sale dragged on and we waited longer than we should've to put it together, and then Mark's health took such a downturn that we scuttled the boat plans and decided to travel to Cape Cod instead - but alas, we were too late. Mark's death hit Dawn and I a lot harder than you'd expect considering that we'd never met the man in person. Nevertheless I felt a real connection there, and knowing he was gone left a really hollow feeling inside - almost like an early preview of losing a parent.

Dawn and I were really honored when Judy invited us to attend the Celebration of Life hosted by New Hampshire Public Radio in Concord, NH, and even moreso when she asked me to read one of Mark's favorite passages at the event. The timing worked out really well and we flew up from Charleston to Manchester via LGA yesterday morning. We checked in at the Concord Days Inn, which is where Judy met us yesterday afternoon (with another two tubs of tools, books and equipment to bring back!). It was oddly like running into an old friend. She has a personality that immediately sets you at ease - something I later also noticed about her daughter and son-in-law, and several old friends we got to know over dinner. I love that.

The Celebration of Life took place at the Capitol Center for the Arts in downtown Concord and featured a number of speakers who had worked with Mark during his years at NHPR and NPR, both in management and on-air roles (Mark was President & CEO of NHPR for 15 years and also Chairman of the NPR Board of Directors for several years). Most had been sailing with Mark on Windbird or other boats, as he clearly loved sharing his passion for sailing with others and treated his work colleagues like family. As they spoke, I realized that I couldn't really go up there and read the piece without somehow explaining my connection to Mark as something other than just the guy who bought his boat. So I scribbled out a few sentences about how I'd come to know and admire Mark in the last months of his life and how I continue to discover more about him as I become more intimately familiar with his boat, the physical embodiment of an ambitious lifelong dream that he and Judy actually made come true. Shortly after I was done writing, Heather (Mark & Judy's daughter) gave a really wonderful, remarkably composed eulogy, and then it was my turn. My speech wasn't polished and the delivery wasn't practiced so I basically read it, but I think the audience understood what I was driving at. And then I read this selection, which was James Kavanaugh's introduction to his 1970 book of poetry "There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves."

Afterward Dawn and I hung around a while talking to Jed and Heather and various friends - including quite a few names that rang a bell from Judy's blog - and then her friends David and Susan invited us to dinner with them, Judy, and three others at a nice bar and grill a mile or so away. It was a quite enjoyable time with some very smart, friendly people. Our discussion veered strongly into politics for most of the time - which these days is mostly a really cringe-worthy topic for me - but this stayed quite civil if for no other reason than that all of us (Republicans / newly-ex-Republicans included) were sane enough to recognize that Donald Trump is a stark raving lunatic. But we didn't get to talk to Judy a ton, other than an entertaining discourse on how to best lug a full supply of beer around the world! The evening wrapped up fairly early and we retired to the Days Inn.

We went to breakfast with Judy this morning and had more time for discussion, mostly boat-and-weather-centric (yes, Matthew is still bearing down on us) plus a little more politics. We made plans to have Judy down to the boat once Windbird is back in the water, exchanged hugs, and took a group picture (send a copy, Judy!). It was really special meeting Judy and spending time with her and her family and friends, and Dawn and I were both very happy that we were able to come up to NH for the Celebration. Our flights back down to Charleston went fairly smoothish (ok, if you don't count the stop in Raleigh-Durham for a medical emergency), but on the drive back to the boatyard we were surprised to see the streets are already almost completely abandoned. A lot of people have already evacuated, and every inland hotel in the state is reportedly full. We'll do a little more storm prep tomorrow, and then head out of town to visit friends up in Maryland, do the Annapolis Sailboat Show, and attend "Cruiser's University" next week.

Hauled and Hurricane-Ready

The big news around here is Hurricane Matthew; though it's presently only at the southwestern corner of Hispanola there's an excellent likelihood that Charleston is going to be affected this weekend, and an increasing chance that we take a Category 3 walloping. Accordingly Charleston City Boatyard is in full storm prep mode, with the Travellift staying busy hauling boats from early in the morning until late at night.

Yesterday Windbird was the first boat out of the water notwithstanding the substantial current that seemed to have us pinned in our berth. There was actually enough room to spin Windbird around on her bow and steam out of our alley against the current. My side-current docking at the slipway wasn't terribly pretty but there were plenty of line-handlers to catch us. The rest of the haulout, pressure-washing and jack-standing process went very smoothly. We elected to pay extra to have several anchors driven and Windbird strapped down to them, given the escalating risk from Matthew. Of course the adjacent boats aren't strapped down and if they topple our caution is all for naught. The boat just to our south also has a bunch of loose junk on deck. I may go lash it down on Thursday if it looks like we're going to take a good hit.

 

 

 

The rest of our day was largely taken up with storm prep plus a few other boat projects to finish preparing for the refit. We took off both the boom and spinnaker pole and lashed them to the toerails along the foredeck; I removed the broken gooseneck fitting and collected the new one that RigRite had shipped to CCBY for us. We took the dinghy down from its davits, wrestled it around to the side of the boat, laboriously cranked it up using the spinnaker halyard, and lashed it between the mast and staysail. That would have been so much easier when we were in the water with the dinghy-hoist system still rigged! Oh well. 

 

 

We are planning to come back before the storm but just in case we don't make it back for some reason we decided to completely storm-prep by removing all the lines, fenders and gear from the rear arch, lashing the Bimini & dodger framework in place, and taking the blades off the wind generator. We also rearranged the v-berth to facilitate post-refit re-rigging, removed the remaining internal chainplate covers, ordered our new mast track from Tides Marine, and I installed a stainless folding step for the v-berth. We took an hour long nap during the hot afternoon, and still got done in time to enjoy sundowners in the suddenly-bare cockpit while listening to Jimmy Buffett. Then we headed to a nearby sports bar to watch our Minnesota Vikings beat the NY Giants on Monday Night Football.

We're just about to board a 6am flight to LGA, connecting to Manchester NH as tonight we are attending a Celebration of Life in honor of Mark Handley. It will be our first time meeting Judy, which we're really looking forward to. Tomorrow we'll fly back, do boat work Thursday, and then head up to Annapolis on Friday - weather dependent, of course, as is everything in sailing....

Ready to Haul

We've had a productive three days here at the Charleston City Boatyard, and Windbird is ready to haul tomorrow morning at high tide (10:58am). I'm a little nervous about getting her out of our current docking spot...we've got a 107-foot motor yacht named Shana parked behind us and the only way to get out of here is to reverse, which is a maneuver in which Windbird doesn't excel. I'm thinking wait for absolute slack water and then kick the stern out about 40 degrees with a bow spring line and a big fender in forward gear (left hand prop, remember) then use reverse propwalk to straighten out as I sneak around that very expensive yacht's 26' beam. We'll see how that goes.

In the last few days we've stripped Windbird of her sails, her stack pack, lazy jacks, all her lines and halyards, her dodger, bimini and enclosure, her dinghy hoist, her chainplate covers, her mast-bottom electrical connections...all that's left to take off - after she's hauled - is the spinnaker pole and boom. We've also done a fair amount of cleaning, which is probably pointless as she'll get filthy again in the yard. I replaced her lightning-fried stereo yesterday and we were happy to have tunes again. I have a replacement part for her gooseneck to install on the boom tomorrow and will try to get the current one welded as a spare, and will be ordering new Tides Track tomorrow as well...I went up the mast to measure it today. I definitively diagnosed the fuel problem (he said oh-so-cautiously) but none of the few marine stores open on the weekend had the necessary parts so it's a fix I'll be making on the hard and testing once she's splashed again. Thank you Al for the suggestions in the comments to my last post, thankfully it didn't get that involved. There were two blockages that I identified - which screwed with my initial diagnosis - but with both of them bypassed the engine is getting plenty of fuel and is running well.

Our days have been productive but we've found time to have some fun at night as well. Friday night we went out in Charleston, and last night we saw the movie "Sully" at a local ciniplex. It was pretty good considering that I'm pretty intimately familiar with the subject material. Their depiction of the NTSB investigation was pretty bogus but there was a lot else they got right, including quite a few things that nobody but an airline pilot would notice. I'm actually friends with Jeff Skiles, the FO on USAirways 1549, and Aaron Eckhart did a rather good job of adapting his personality and sense of humor. As an aside, I was in lower Manhattan when they ditched in the Hudson. I had landed at Newark earlier in the day and, as was my custom, took my crew across to NYC to do the tourist-and-pub-crawl thing. We were waiting in line for the Staten Island Ferry (free, and affords a nice view of the Statue of Liberty) when a bunch of news helicopters started orbiting over the harbor and several police boats tore out of the East River and up the Hudson. We got on the ferry and soon overheard someone saying that a USAirways Airbus had crashed. I felt absolutely sick. Then we all started reloading cnn.com on our phones and soon discovered everyone had survived and was floating serenely down the river towards us. What a great feeling, then and in the days afterward. I will note that day was wicked cold, and cloudier and breezier than depicted in the movie. We stood on the back deck of the ferry trying to see the commotion upriver and were soon chased inside by the icy wind.

Dawn and I met a nice older gentleman on the docks today named David; he has a gorgeous 1999 Tayana 65 named Pintail that he's been working on here for "1 year 7 months." He said this boatyard has been extremely slow for him. I certainly hope that's not the case for us, all the google and activecaptain reviews I read online were fairly complimentary. We'd really like to be done in a month so we and Piper can move aboard.

Tonight we found a local sports bar called Tailgators & we'll be returning there tomorrow to watch our Vikings take on the Giants during Monday Night Football. Very early Tuesday we'll be flying out to LaGuardia and then Manchester, NH to attend Mark Handley's Celebration of Life in Concord, NH.

Back to the Boat

We made our way slowly, painfully back down to the boat today for what's planned to be a 3-week stint away from Minnesota, for me at least.  Dawn will be flying back after the Annapolis Sailboat Show and Cruiser's University on Oct 13th, while I'll be flying a 5-day trip to Lagos, Nigeria starting Oct 15th and won't return home until the 19th. Dawn's brother-in-law and his family are watching Piper (they own Piper's mom), thank God...we'll see if that poor dog even recognizes me in three weeks.

We had a 3am wakeup to make a 5:20am flight to Atlanta. Rather than sleeping on the flight, I played with openCPN on my newly refound Asus tablet (yes, it was in the little-used back pocket of my overnight bag along with the notebook containing my conversations with Mark). The flight to Myrtle Beach filled up so only I made it by sitting on the jumpseat, while Dawn had to wait for the next flight. Beth Schwab was kind enough to pick me up from MYR since Dawn's Jetta was still at our marina - thanks, Beth! - and then I drove back down to the airport to pick Dawn up. The Jetta was misfiring badly last time we were in town, and reseating the spark plug wires didn't help it this time. I figured it was a bad coilpack, which are notorious for failing on VWs in rainy weather (and it was a very stormy day, much like our last visit). So after I picked up Dawn we took the car to a nearby garage and waited for about 3 hours. They ended up replacing the spark plugs and wires as well as the coil pack just to be sure. Maybe not what I would have done right off the bat but my tools were down at the boat. Three hours and five hundred bucks later we have a perfectly-running Jetta. Oof. We probably should have just sold it in MN and rented cars every time we come out here.

Our two-hour drive to Charleston was interrupted by having dinner at a waterfront bar in Georgetown that we had visited the night we anchored there. We got here after dark, and thankfully found a way into the locked boatyard and down to the dock to Windbird. This time everything seems to be in order - we turned off all the circuit breakers except the battery charger and refrig when we left the boat. I spent some time tonight working on the Asus plotter tablet and finally got OpenCPN talking with our external GPS dongle. I also wrote a plan for tomorrow. We'll get up early to unbend the sails while it's still out, reshuffle the Vberth to get some things we need and stow some other things we don't, go on a West Marine shopping run, then in the afternoon I'm going to try to track down this fuel problem once and for all. The way I see it, there are two possibilities: running on a somewhat low tank that had sat for six months resulted in ingesting some sort of gunk that fouled lines or components upstream of the Racor filter, or else we're getting air into the system in some insidious way I hadn't considered (as Al commented in my last post). Frankly the recurring nature of this problem seems to point to #2. I think I have a good thorough troubleshooting methodology sketched out that should allow me to eliminate potential sources of either problem one at a time.

The rest of this weekend we'll do various other decommissioning tasks, on Monday morning Windbird will be hauled out and the refit will begin in earnest, on Tuesday we are flying to Concord NH for a celebration of Mark Handley's life hosted by New Hampshire Public Radio (Judy's asked me to do a reading, which I think is a pretty big honor - I've also liked the selection since I first came across it a few years ago), on Wednesday we're flying back down here to do some work on the mast and boom, and on Friday we drive up to Annapolis. Whew! In between I'll be coordinating lightning repair work with Leigh Jones as we'll likely want to do some of it while Windbird is out of the water and the mast is off. This is all (hopefully!) leading up to us moving aboard full-time around November 1st, so I just gotta keep my eye on the prize as we put in the long days of hard work necessary for that to happen.

Neither Here Nor There

Dawn and I had our first multi-day cruise together on Windbird last week; it was eventful but ultimately successful as it did quite a bit to increase our confidence in venturing further afield and being able to handle problems as they arise. Because some fairly major problems did arise. In a somewhat related note, the boat is not back in Little River; it's already at the boatyard in Charleston, where we were originally planning on bringing it this week. But I digress.

After our rainy boatwork day last Monday we were up early to a nearly as dreary Tuesday. We got off the dock by 8:30am and were soon steaming southward (really, more westward) on the ICW. We had one swing bridge right off the bat in Little River, followed by swing bridges at Barefoot Landing and Socastee. Everything else was theoretically 65' clearance or better...there was one bridge that was known to not have its published clearance during flood waters and the recent rain made me worry a bit, but we took it slow and Windbird visibly cleared it by a good bit (61' air draft). Going under bridges is always a bit of an exercise in nerves, because from 56' below it always looks like you're going to hit. We did a good job of timing the tides and had a positive or neutral current all the way to the Waccamaw River, where we had about a knot and a half positive current all the way to Thoroughfare Creek. We got there by 4pm but it took us a few passes to get anchored right where we wanted next to the sanddune considering the ripping tidal current (switches 4x a day), northerly winds blowing through, and the proximity of the bushy shore. Seriously, it was close to 2 knots current on the outgoing tide and 1 knot incoming. I ended up standing a quasi-anchor watch that night (using anchor alarm + waking up every hour or two) but needn't have, our 66 lb Spade stayed thoroughly planted in the thick creekbed mud. We launched the dinghy soon after arrival to explore the nearby canals that were dug for a long-defunct resort project and were shocked to find a nearly-new Beneteau 45 docked alongside one of them. This guy apparently regularly takes that boat through the narrow cut from Thoroughfare Creek - it seemed skinny even from the dinghy! As soon as we got back rain started falling, then stopped long enough for me to lube our windlass and resecure the hawse pipe to the anchor locker. Then started falling again as soon as I put dinner on the grill. Sigh.

 

 

 

 

We were up early the next morning only to take advantage of the outgoing tide because we had a quick 3-hour motor to Georgetown. The weather was gray but dry, and we were anchored in Georgetown's inner harbor on the Sampit River by 10:30am. I called up Sharp's Canvas right away and Chris Sharp came out to measure our enclosure for a replacement estimate. I'd originally told him we'd take a dock at Harbourwalk Marina but we decided at the last minute to stay on the hook instead, and he was gracious enough to still come out and brave a dinghy ride to and from the boat. After that we had lunch, went in to explore the town, came back and took naps, went up the mast to try to take pics of the lightning damage (there wasn't much), did a few other boat projects, reanchored to move further away from a shallow area in case forecast northerly winds overnight swung us south (they did), and went to dinner at the River Room. I had shrimp & grits on someone's recommendation and while I'm normally not a grits guy, it was delicious.

 

 

 

 

 

I slept much better that night, sure that our anchor would hold securely. It was pouring rain when we awoke Thursday morning and hadn't let up much by the time we pulled up the anchor in the predawn darkness. We had our anchoring routine down pretty well by now: I work the windlass and Dawn drives according to my hand signals. She stayed at the helm out of the anchorage and well into Winyah Bay. At a wide point in the bay she headed upwind and I raised the mainsail just in case we should lose the engine on our way out the inlet. The forecast was for light easterlies with small seas and we decided to go offshore even though returning the way we came, via the ICW, was a lot shorter and more practical. Dawn hadn't been offshore in Windbird yet and I figured it was a good day for it.

 

 

Well no sooner did we get out on the ocean and headed NNE than I found the wind directly on our nose at 15 knots or so, with steep short waves from the same direction that slowed Windbird down to 3 knots as we pounded into them. I thought maybe they were being kicked out by a nearby thunderstorm but they persisted as we slogged miserably northward. After an hour we were still in sight of the Winyah Bay sea buoy. At that point we talked through our options. If we persisted we would get to Little River inlet way after sundown. The inlet itself is lit but the winding course back to Little River is not, and I'd never done it after dark. Otherwise we could turn around, fight the current 18nm to Georgetown, and then start in on the 52nm ditch cruise back to Little River - again, contra-current. We'd have to find somewhere to tuck in for the night along the way. The final option was to turn southwestward and head to Charleston a week early. The wind was favorable, and it normally isn't this time of year. The distance to Charleston harbor inlet was the same as Little River inlet. We decided this was the best option, turned around, put out our yankee to go with the main, and motorsailed on a broad reach at over six knots.

All was well until about halfway there, 22nm from Charleston inlet, when the engine began rapidly losing power. A visual inspection turned up no problems, and it soon died completely. The racor gauge showed high vacuum pressure, and my first thought was a problem with the Racor filter. Before I started troubleshooting I got the sails all trimmed up for what had become a very light-air downwind sail, and once we had Dawn on a good heading to keep the yankee drawing - about 20 degrees left of the rhumb line - I headed downstairs to start working through the options. The racor was fine; there was just no fuel going into it. Eventually I narrowed it down the blockage to the small inline fuel pump used for bleeding the system, or so I thought. My troubleshooting was interrupted several times by passing squalls that necessitating running upstairs to reef, and then again 15 minutes later to shake the reefs out. My reasoning was that if we couldn't get the engine running reliably, I wanted to sail to near the inlet and then call TowBoatUS to tow us inside, and that meant keeping our speed up as close to the rhumb line as we could manage. The shifting winds meant that one minute Dawn was ghosting downwind at 1.5 knots in light zephyrs, the next minute beating upwind at 6 knots in a light squall. She did a magnificent job standing watch at the helm for several hours with no autopilot.

I took the small fuel pump out of the system, put it together, and fired up the engine. It ran fine for about an hour as the sun set over the inlet, still about 7nm away. Then it died again. Obviously I had not fixed the problem after all. This time I realized that the way I previously plumbed the system, it wasn't necessarily the fuel pump, it could also be the fuel selector. So back down the engine room I went as Dawn sailed upwind in suddenly fresh 20 knot westerlies. This time I bypassed the fuel selector by plumbing the system directly to the starboard fuel tank, though still without the electric pump. Bleeding the system using the small hand level on the lift pump took forever, but once I was done the engine ran fine. I was still very suspicious of it so we kept the sails up the whole way to the anchorage, motorsailing in case we suddenly found ourselves engineless. But it stayed running all of that night and the next morning without a hiccup. I need to troubleshoot the entire fuel system much more thoroughly when we go back to the boat this weekend.

 

 

 

It was nearly 9pm and pitch dark by the time we reached the inlet, which is at least very well charted and marked with lighted buoys. Several ships preceded us but there were none overtaking, so at least we didn't have that to deal with. It was 11pm by the time we finally dropped anchor just off of The Battery on Charleston City's southern end. We had gone some 70nm over 16.5 hours during the day motoring, motorsailing, and pure sailing, we'd reefed several times, and I'd spent several hours in the engine room while Dawn sailed. Exhausting, but we made it.

We slept in slightly the next morning, picked up our anchor, and headed around the bend to get fuel at Charleston City Boatyard. We weren't out of fuel in any of the three tanks but all three were a bit low and I thought that perhaps that was why something had apparently fouled the fuel selector. $260 later we had our full 170 gallons of diesel aboard. It was another two hours up the Cooper and Wando rivers to Charleston City Boatyard, which given its location we quipped should be called Charleston Country Boatyard. I misunderstood the docking instructions and we had to switch our lines and fenders from port to starboard at the last second, then I completely misjudged the ripping upriver current and botched the approach. It's actually the first time I've approached a dock with a big current on my stern, and if I had messed it up any worse we would have smashed gelcoat. Fortunately there was a strapping young lad on the dock to catch our stern line and he was able to hold on to our 30,000 lb behemoth until I could jump off the bow and run back to help him haul in the stern. Embarrassing. My docking technique had been pretty good until then.

 

So now Windbird is safely tied up at Charleston City Boatyard. We'll be flying to Myrtle Beach tomorrow to retrieve our car - still sitting at Lightkeeper's Marina - and then will be on the boat over the weekend doing decommissioning work to prepare for our haulout on Monday morning. I finally got ahold of our insurance company and got the ok to commence repairs on the lightning damage, which is a very good development since we can replace the radar and masthead wind transducer while the mast is still off of the boat. Having now taken the boat a few places with no autopilot, most sailing instruments inoperative, no chartplotter, no radar, and worst of all no stereo, I'm very excited to get everything up and running again, with new chainplates and standing rigging to boot. There's a lot of work to do before this boat is ready to head south - almost too much to think about, at this point. But we'll get there, slowly but surely.

Rainy Boatwork Day

Our flight out of Charlotte last night was delayed a bit and we didn't get to the boat until 1am. I was alarmed to find that both our Asus nav tablet as well as my "boat notebook" containing all my notes from the calls with Mark were not where I expected them to be. When Lance and I left the boat 10 days ago I thought I stuck both in my overnight bag, but when I got to Atlanta a few hours later they weren't there so I assumed I had left them on the boat. Nope. I've looked everywhere. I called Myrtle Beach Airport as well as Delta and neither have them in lost & found. The one other possibility is that I put them in the rarely-used rear pocket of my overnight bag - I'll check that when we get back to MSP. I sure hope that's where they are, otherwise they're likely gone for good. I really don't know where they could have gone between the boat and the ATL baggage claim.

Our other surprise on arrival was that the freshwater pump wasn't working. There was still pressure in the accumulator and the water tanks were still full, but that was all the troubleshooting I did last night. I drifted off to sleep thinking of boatwork, and decided not to take off for Georgetown this morning as originally planned but instead fix the pump, do some other projects, take our time provisioning, and then take advantage of the later tide on Tuesday to make good time down the ICW. That decision was borne out when we woke to booming thunderstorms and pouring rain that lasted until nearly noon. It's been raining off and on ever since. The next few days are supposed to be a little better, though still not great.

I didn't really get a lot done this morning but was more productive after we came back from provisioning, lunch, and the obligatory visit to West Marine. I used my multimeter to troubleshoot the pump and quickly ascertained that there was power to the pump, the ground was good, and the pressure switch was working. Strange that the pump burned out in our absence without actually running, but that's apparently what happened. I remembered seeing a spare water pump somewhere so Dawn searched our boat inventory spreadsheet, which quickly located it in a hideyhole under a drawer in the aft cabin. This made me smile, as Judy told me that on the night Mark passed away he was mumbling something about a boat part in a drawer. Got it, Mark! I tore out the old pump and just hooked the "new" one to the wires without connecting the plumbing; it didn't work. But when I bypassed the pressure switch, it did. So I had one bad pump with a good pressure switch, and one good pump with a bad pressure switch. With a little parts-swapping and wire splicing, I had myself one good freshwater Frankenpump assembly! So we have pressure water again. I may see if anyone around here can rebuild the old pump & sell me a pressure switch, otherwise I'll have to buy a spare from West Marine ($175).

 

My other rainy day projects consisted of opening a messload of boxes from Amazon, mostly new additions to the ever-growing tool collection; reorganizing said tool collection; playing with my new Dremel; fixing my electric razor; making another futile call to our insurance company; measuring the boom, ascertaining the model (Isomat NB-40), and finding some parts for it; installing another all-USB DC outlet (the 3rd I've replaced, Tayanas came with weird Type-A plug DC outlets that are useless except for running some of the DC fans in the boat); and replacing the water pump circuit breaker, which was stuck on. I took apart the old circuit breaker, an ancient German Stotz-Kontakt 20A. A broken metal tang was jamming it open, there was no fixing it and they're very hard to find, so thank goodness Mark had a couple extras lying around to send to me.

 

We had a nice dinner of grilled steak & asparagus (the grillmaster got a bit soggy) and then walked up to John Schwab's to visit for a bit. I'm planning to get off the dock around 8:30am tomorrow, weather permitting, as the incoming tide will give us a nice boost down the ICW to the Waccamaw River. I have a nice anchorage picked out at Thoroughfare Creek, which will give us a short Wednesday to Georgetown. It'll be a long haul back on Thursday - whether via the ICW or offshore will depend on the weather.

Planning the Haulout

We're getting a lot closer to the big, expensive part of the refit: hauling out Windbird at Charleston City Boatyard, securing her on land for a month, yanking the mast, replacing her chainplates, stem iron, and standing rigging, fitting the mast with a new Tides track, replacing a cracked gooseneck fitting, fixing a small area of water intrusion in the skeg, replacing a seacock, refreshing the bottom paint...and oh yeah, replacing the radar and masthead wind transducer if I can ever get the insurance company to call me back. Dealing with them has been pretty frustrating. It's been a full month since the lightning strike and I still don't know when they'll send out an adjustor. I'd hate to move the boat to Charleston before then.

Regardless, we've set everything up with CCBY. We'll be arriving on Sept 30th, decommissioning over that weekend, and hauling out Monday Oct 3rd. We'll be headed to Annapolis the following weekend which will give me a week to work on the mast and boom. When we get back, before splashing the boat we'll paint the bottom. Apparently I'm going to work a few days in there, too. It's my first month based in Atlanta and I bid efficient trips to several places I haven't been before: Lagos, Nigeria and Bogota, Colombia. 

Dawn and I spent all day today trying to nonrev out to Myrtle Beach; we eventually gave up on getting out of MSP on Delta and took American through Charlotte, which worked much better. We'll be cruising the ICW and Waccamaw River to Georgetown SC the next few days, getting some boat projects done along the way. Really looking forward to moving aboard at the end of October so we can spend less time traveling back & forth & more time getting the boat ready...and so I can see Piper more than a couple days a month. I definitely miss my pup.