We returned to the boat on Monday. There were still a few pieces to attach to the engine, and then there would be testing. We speculated that we might be able to leave the marina by Wednesday. Ha!
When it came time to attach the starter, the mechanic discovered that the starter sent with the engine would not fit on the engine. When Larry and the mechanic examined it closely, they discovered a major difference. It was not the right starter for this engine. That problem has been dealt with, but it isn’t the end. There seem to be daily revelations of “just one more thing.”
Yesterday morning we expected the mechanic to finish his work. We thought we could put the boat back in order in the afternoon, run errands today and depart tomorrow. Not to be. A few minutes before 5PM the mechanic left to look for yet another part. When he had not returned at 6PM we called and learned that he would not be back until today. The saga continues.
I told someone that it was like daytime TV, maybe “Days of Our Lives.” We have certainly lost a lot of days to this project. A lot of dollars, too. The slip rental alone will be staggering when the final bill is presented. Shipping costs have been shocking. The boatyard, like the government, charges fees for everything. The service company that provided the diesel mechanic, the crane and etcetera will undoubtedly charge for every little thing. We will be glad when it is over.
The good news is that the engine works. You push the button, it starts. This engine starts in the blink of an eye, something the old engine never did. It always had to huff and puff a bit before it got going. So that’s nice. It also runs much more quietly. I told Larry it almost makes me think of a lawn mower, and that is rather disconcerting. I think it should sound powerful. Maybe I don’t really know how it should sound.
The final bit of excitement is the delayed arrival of the replacement starter. The starter that was originally rebuilt for our old engine is back in service now, but we paid for a new starter, and we were expecting one. The latest update on its status is that it may be here by next Wednesday. Is this not fun!?!?!
The engine runs, and so shall we. We have paid our bill to the marina based on a departure on Sunday. We will hang around in Lake Worth until the starter gets here. We might get internet there by using our wifi antenna. We will work with what we have. Our phone works, so they can call us when the part arrives. Then, at last, we can finally go north.
If I were in the business of telling tall tales, I could hardly make up a story with as many hitches and glitches as this one. Still, we are almost on our way. Whew!
The good news first.
The new engine is in the boat. The crane arrived Friday morning and gently placed all 1100 pounds of new Perkins engine in the boat. The new engine is the same model as the old one, a truly new engine, part of the factory inventory of Perkins engine at the time it went out of business. One would expect that this engine is a mirror image of the old one, but as any boat owner knows, it doesn’t pay to have expectations.
The boat is in the water. We splashed in mid-afternoon on Friday and the towboat folks delivered us back to the dock nearby. There are still parts and pieces to be attached to the engine and a few issues to resolve before anyone tries to turn it on. Still, we remain hopeful that everything will be done sometime Tuesday.
Now, the bad news.
The last task to be done before the boat was put back in the water was the attachment of the zinc at the propeller. Larry keeps a supply of them aboard, and he took one out of his stock for this purpose. He has never had any problem with the fit in the past, but this time the zinc did not fit. The discrepancy in the dimensions is so small that it certainly looks as if it should work, but it doesn’t.
The diesel mechanic thought he knew where one could be bought that would fit, so Larry dutifully went there and bought one. However, when the mechanic tried to use it, this one did not fit either.
In other words, this is a very normal boat project. The tiniest thing, the thing you would assume could not possibly be a problem, is a problem.
In order to get the boat in the water, the mechanic had the zinc machined to a slightly smaller dimension. He was able to fit the zinc, and we were able to put the boat back in the water.
It seems almost as if all is well, but there is this nagging concern – if neither of the zincs purchased, supposedly to the same dimensions that have worked on this boat for 25 years, will work, what happens in the future? The big question is: What changed?
Tomorrow the diesel mechanic will be back, and he and Larry will work together. I hope that when the day is over, we know the answers to all our questions. I could use some more good news!
This post is part 8 of 8. If you have missed previous posts, you might want to scroll down and read them first.
Our reason for making this passage was our need for a good diesel mechanic to help us get our engine going again. We were very fortunate that the marina where the towboat captain left us had such a person. He worked with Larry for several days, and they finally concluded that the best course of action was to replace the engine.
Replacement was not a simple choice. New engine. Rebuilt engine. Rebuild our engine. Same model. Different model. What to do?
Perkins made the engine that could not be repaired, and Perkins went out of business several years ago. We could not hope, therefore, to contact Perkins and obtain a new engine. A new model built by some other company would have a different footprint, and might require a lot of other new parts. It would almost certainly weigh less than our engine, which was built 25 years ago. Development of diesel engines has included a conscious effort to reduce the weight, but we were concerned that the difference might change the way our boat moved.
To rebuild our engine or to buy a rebuilt Perkins of the same model was one option. We quickly concluded that we did not want to spend the time that might be required to rebuild ours. We mulled the issues associated with buying one already rebuilt.
Then Larry discovered some good news. He found a company that had bought all the engines Perkins had in inventory at the time they went out of business. This company had in stock a brand new engine exactly like the one we have. Its footprint would be identical to ours. It would be new instead of rebuilt. And the price was right.
It seemed simple enough to order this engine, and it was. That was the simple part. Then the fun began.
The vendor for the engine did not want to accept a credit card for the purchase of the engine, even though our credit card had plenty of credit to cover the cost. The vendor insisted on either a wire transfer or a cashier’s check in payment. Larry put the cash to cover the purchase in his bank account.
From that point forward it was a square dance with a lot of do-si-do. Our bank refused to do a wire transfer unless Larry appeared in person at a branch, but they have no branches in Florida. A bank just a block from the marina was perfectly willing to make a wire transfer if Larry opened an account with them, and they would accept a debit card to withdraw that money from his faraway bank to fund the new local account, but Larry had no debit card. I had a debit card, but I didn’t have the money. When we got past those hurdles, we found that the local bank would take any amount of money withdrawn on my debit card, but the faraway bank would not permit all the money to be withdrawn on a single day. It was a wild ride, a lot like crossing the Gulf Stream, but in the end, the wire transfer reached the vendor and the vendor promised to ship the engine.
We arrived in Florida the morning of Friday, April 30. Today is Tuesday, May 18. We are well into our third week since arriving with the purpose of solving our diesel engine problem. Last Friday, the new engine was delivered to the marine service company that will remove our old engine and install the new one. We know it is here, because we stopped by to see it for ourselves yesterday. Yesterday our boat was hauled out of the water and set up on jacks in the boatyard where there is room for a crane to come alongside to do the heavy lifting. Today the diesel mechanic is due to start working with us. By this time next week, we should have a new engine and be ready for some new adventures. Whew!
So – our passage home began with the question: what could possibly go wrong? In fact, just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Still, by the grace of God, we are home safe in the USA and our old engine will soon be replaced with a brand new engine that ought to be good for another 25 years. So—even though everything went wrong, everything is now going right.
Anybody want to go sailing with us?
This post is part 6 of 8. If you have missed previous posts, you might want to scroll down and read them first.
On this trip, with regard to our winds, it seemed always to be feast or famine. Wednesday, April 28, was famine. The winds were almost nothing. After the two back-to-back cold fronts with their tempestuous wind and wave, it was nice to have some peace, but only for a little while. We were glad the fronts were gone, but we wanted to get to Florida. We could not go there with winds less than 5 knots.
In fact, we could hardly go anywhere. We had decided to simply putter around in the channel, trying to avoid big ships and trying not to go too far east, so we would be ready to cross if the wind ever became strong enough. We were okay with holding our own. We had no idea how difficult that would become.
One of the big lessons of cruising the Bahamas is the tidal currents. We learned to write down the Nassau tides every day, and we learned to pay attention to the relationship of the local tides to the Nassau tides. We learned to care if the difference between high and low tide was small or large. All this stuff matters. In the Chesapeake, the only reason to care much about the tides was if you had a deep draft boat and you wanted to eat lunch at Rock Hall. Otherwise, we hardly cared if they were up or down. In the Bahamas, you care a lot.
For example, when we went to snorkel at the Thunderball Grotto, we planned to arrive at slack tide. However, we were a little slow getting ready that morning, and flood had already begun by the time we arrived. The flood current was strong enough that I never did get inside the grotto. We thought we might go back later, but things happened, or didn’t happen.
On another occasion, during a high high ebbing to a low low, we tried to go against the ebb in the cut between Fowl Cay and Big Majors. The current completely turned our dinghy around and sent us back where we came from.
I learned that the power of the current results from the vast amounts of water that must move between the banks and the deep water through small cuts. However, I failed to understand that even when there is not a cut, the currents are still powerful. They are spread out more, but still strong.
On this day of light airs, as we tacked back and forth across the channel, we were moving in a location approximately between Great Isaac at the edge of the banks and Freeport at the end of the Grand Bahama island. We had grown inattentive, because almost nothing was happening, until we found ourselves in a position about 5 miles from Great Isaac and prepared to tack. That is when we discovered that we might be steering north, but we were going south, and south led onto the banks.
This was a big problem. Ordinarily a sailboat in this fix would hoist the iron jib, but our iron jib was unresponsive. What to do?
We were still sailing with reefed main and the staysail, because we really didn’t want to go anywhere in a hurry, but as we watched ourselves move inexorably toward Great Isaac, we surely wanted to go somewhere else at any speed. It was uncanny. Then we remembered the tides. We were within five miles of the banks, and it was flood current. The wind was so light that it was not filling the sails. We deployed the big genoa, but it simply flapped. We steered away from the banks, but the boat continued to drift. We had no power. The water was still too deep for us to drop an anchor, but if we reached a place where the anchor would bite, how would we ever get away?
If we ever had needed wisdom it was then. We prayed together for the wisdom to see some solution. Then we returned to our analysis. We peered intently at the charts as we continued to chart our position using the handheld GPS. We were headed for Great Isaac, and no two ways about it. The sails were dead. In desperation, we tried to tack anyway, but the headsails would not begin to cross.
Then a tiny gust of wind hit the genoa, and it flapped against the forestay. Larry said, “I wonder if I can walk that thing across. And if I do, I wonder if it will make any difference.” He went forward and led the genoa past the inner stay. Another little gust caught it and it filled momentarily. We let go the port sheet for the staysail and it filled on the starboard side. Larry released the traveler for the main and moved it to starboard. The wind speed indicator reported 7 knots. Suddenly we could hear the water against the hull. On this tack somehow we were moving.
I screamed, “Look at the GPS? Where are we?” Larry looked and behold, we were moving north. We charted every 5 minutes, and we were moving ever so slowly north. At last, we were on a tack with enough energy to take us away from Great Isaac. Whew!
The rest of the day and through the night we had one objective: stay clear of Great Isaac. The moon was still big, although waning. We saw a few big ships, but none in our path. The night passed quietly, and the morning dawned. The wind was from the east at barely more than 5 knots. That was certainly not enough wind to take us across the Gulf Stream, but we did not want to waste an opportunity to go forward. We tip-toed northwest and then gibed southwest. We simply had to keep moving.
If you missed Part 1 of our return home, you might want to scroll down and read it first. This post is part 2 of 8 that describe our long sail home
Part 2 – Plan and Prepare
As we started planning to sail back to Florida, our first order of business was to identify a weather window for the trip. We needed wind, but not a gale, and we needed southerly winds for the Gulf Stream crossing. We needed a window of about 4 days. That duration was unlikely, given our experience with the passage of cold fronts during our trip, so we allowed mentally for the possibility that we would need to wait out a front somewhere, even though we continually hoped to avoid that possibility. After all, with no engine, our options for entering and leaving anchorages were severely constrained. Many, many entrances to anchorages in the Bahamas are much too tricky to maneuver under sail alone.
We needed the weather window pretty soon. It was already late April. Our insurance wants us north of Florida by June 1 each year, the beginning of hurricane season. Even after we got back to Florida, we knew that it would take some time for a mechanic to determine the problem with the engine and then do the repairs. After the repairs were done, we still needed time to get north of Florida before June 1. We really could not dawdle.
We had to choose a route that gave us the least challenges to our limited maneuverability yet took us as directly as possible to our goal. We worked out a route with a decision point in the middle. We could depart Big Majors Spot, traverse the Decca Channel, and cruise up the Tongue of the Ocean. When we reached New Providence, we had to choose either the Northwest Channel or Northwest Providence Channel.
If we chose the Northwest Channel, we had to arrive at slack or flood, because we dared not risk it if the wind were east or southeast into an ebb tide. We had to navigate a fairly narrow path to the Northwest Shoal, then to Mackie Shoal and Great Isaac Light. As we viewed our weather windows, we inevitably found ourselves crossing that bank in the dark. Or anchoring out there through the night. The tidal currents on and off the banks can be very powerful, and we worried about our options passing the Hen and Chickens and Great Isaac at any time.
Our other choice was to take the Northwest Providence Channel (Route B) around the Berry Islands and completely avoid the banks and Great Isaac. It added distance but greatly reduced our risks on the banks. As will become clear later, this choice added its own risks. You can never avoid risk altogether when you embark on a sailing adventure. The trick is to be able to manage the risks you accept.
Both routes converged between Great Isaac and Freeport. From there, we had to cross the Gulf Stream without power, navigating appropriately to arrive at our destination, the Lake Worth Inlet.
We identified 4 tricky challenges along our path.
As for the weather window, our first choice failed us when the predictions were revised unfavorably for us. The next window looked like four good days if we started on Thursday, so we got ready to go, but there was never enough wind. We need 10-12 knots to move this boat. On Thursday, April 22, the wind never exceeded 7 knots. One day lost.
On Friday, April 23, the winds were predicted to be at or near 10 knots all day. In fact, they were much lower until late in the afternoon. Since our plan was to sail round the clock, it would not have been unthinkable to depart in the afternoon, but it was completely unthinkable to navigate the Decca Channel in the dark. A second day was lost.
As we waited, we continued to discuss our plans. They were complicated by the fact that not only was the diesel engine completely unavailable; the generator that we used to charge our batteries was behaving strangely. We had been running it 2-3 hours each morning and another hour or so in the evening to keep our batteries well charged. However, at the same time our diesel engine problems emerged, the generator began to behave strangely as well. Not being an electrical engineer, I can only report that Larry said it was putting out too much voltage to the inverter/charger. If it had an AC load, such as the electric coffeepot or the water heater, it could be induced to run normally for almost an hour, but eventually, even those loads were not enough to keep the voltage down and the generator had to be shut off. We could charge the batteries to some extent, but there would never be sufficient charge to run e-charts or the auto-pilot.
As we planned our watches, we expected that twice a day, Larry would be able to run the generator for about an hour, but during that time, he needed to give it his undivided attention. We would be able to have refrigeration, lights, hot water, and most of the comforts of home as long as we were careful.
Sailing without the auto-pilot was a daunting prospect, but we gritted our teeth. What choice did we have? If we stayed where we were, we would never solve our problems. We decided that we would take turns at the helm, 2 hours on, 2 hours off. Our actual schedule was a bit more flexible, but not by much. Without the auto-pilot, somebody had to be steering at all times.
Sailing without electronic charts was less daunting, but still undesirable. We sailed without them for several years, but never on such a passage as this one. Of course, we had already learned that e-charts cannot be the only resource for piloting in a place like the Bahamas. During our whole trip, we were constantly checking the e-charts, the paper charts and the guide books for all the information we could get. We had two sources for GPS information: a handheld GPS with a display about the size of a cell phone screen, and a GPS mounted on the nav station. We had the Explorer Charts for the Bahamas, which we had come to rely on heavily, perhaps even more heavily than our e-charts. (When we went to Hatchet Bay, the e-chart showed us sailing through solid rock, so we took the e-chart locations with a grain of salt in the Bahamas.) Our handheld GPS had a chart display of sorts, but you can imagine that what you could see on that little screen would be more entertaining than informative. It did, however, provide information such as speed over ground and distance traveled, etcetera, which proved very valuable to us.
The part that worried me most as we planned was sailing at night. We had cruised round the clock on several occasions, but always with the engine, the auto-pilot, and the e-charts. The person on watch at 2AM mostly needed to be sure not to collide with another ship or go off course into some other hazard. We had never sailed at night precisely because we had not felt ready to manage sails at night. However, in this case, we really had no choice. Even if there were some place to stop each night, stopping meant that it would take us a very long time to get back. Even if there were some place to go, there was no guarantee we could get in and out under sail. We had to sail round the clock. Again, we gritted our teeth and accepted that challenge.
We had a plan. On the morning of Saturday, April 24, we listened to the weather, observed that the wind was running about 12-14 knots from the east, and everything looked right. The generator hit some kind of a glitch after half an hour, but we assumed we could make that time up later.
It was time for the Go/No Go decision.
We chose GO.
This post is Part 1 of 8 that tell the story of our return from the Bahamas. It was quite an odyssey. I will be posting the segments daily for a while, so come back for the next installment.
There is a saying that the cruising life is an opportunity to work on your boat in exotic places. We have learned the truth of this statement, but sometimes, an exotic location is not the right place to initiate repairs. We found ourselves in exactly that situation, and this blog is the story of how we dealt with it.
If a friend who owned a sailboat with all the bells and whistles said to you, “I think I will turn off everything and sail 400 miles without ever using my engine or anything else that needs electricity,” what would you think? No engine. No electronics. No auto-pilot. No refrigeration. Nothing that used electricity except bilge pump, sump pump and navigation lights. Radio off unless needed for an outbound call. What would you think? You might think this person is crazy.
We recently completed just such a trip, and it was not about mental illness. It was about necessity. Our engine would not work. Our generator would not work. We were in a foreign country and our efforts to get repair parts shipped in had hit a brick wall. Furthermore, we had no way to assure ourselves that the parts we thought we needed would actually fix our problems. For all we knew, the new parts would only allow us to see a deeper problem. It was desperation time. Larry said to me, “Do you think we could sail this boat back to Florida without an engine?” and I said, “Well, it is a sailboat after all.”
We had owned our home sweet sailboat since July of 2000, almost ten years. We had had some lovely adventures, but we had never before undertaken to sail longer than 8 hours at a stretch, and we had never before sailed after dark. We had always been able to fall back on the engine and the auto-pilot and e-charts. The trek that lay before us would have none of those things. Here is how it came to pass.
We checked in to the Bahamas on January 18 with high anticipation of the adventure of discovery. Maybe it is true that thousands of people have made the crossing and spent the winter in the islands, and maybe it had become a ho-hum trip for some, but not for us. We might have been the first people ever to conceive of such an idea. For us every new sight was like a new discovery that nobody had ever done before. We visited the Berries, Eleuthera and the northern Exumas, going as far south as Staniel Cay. We anchored at Big Majors Spot across from Staniel Cay on the 16th day of March, and we remained there for five weeks.
Along our journey to Staniel Cay, the engine occasionally failed to start on the first try, but that behavior appeared to be mostly related to the fact that it is a relatively long run from the fuel tank to the engine. Time after time, Larry was able to trick the engine demons and get us going. After we reached Staniel Cay, we remained there happily for two or three weeks. Then we thought we would like to visit nearby Black Point Settlement. We planned to do laundry and shop for groceries and see some new sights. We called the fuel dock at the yacht club to confirm that we could get to the dock and that there was actually fuel available. We buttoned down for travel, and then Larry went up to the cockpit to start the engine. Nothing. Nothing but a feeble splat.
Been there. Done that. He began to muddle about in the engine room, but unlike previous efforts, there was no response. We settled down to give him time to trouble-shoot the problem.
He tried all the usual tricks. I waited in the cockpit for the command to push the button. Every so often Larry called out, “Push the button!” Each time the engine wheezed or groaned, but it never did start. Things looked very gloomy.
The next day he worked through all the diagnostics one more time. He concluded that the starter he had hoped would finish this year’s voyage had bowed out, exit, stage left. It was finished, over, kaput.
Internet searches at Staniel Cay require an account with Exuma Wifi at the cost of $10 for 24 hours or 200 mb, whichever comes first. Accounts for longer terms are cheaper per hour or mb, but still very costly by our standards. We bought an account for a week, knowing that there would be some back and forth conversation when he ordered parts and arranged for shipping to Staniel Cay. Rather than give you that story blow by blow, I will simply say that Larry came to despair of getting the part shipped to our location. There were too many hurdles to success in that endeavor.
The biggest hurdle was his fear that even if he somehow managed to get the parts and install them, they might not solve the problem. Even with a new starter, it was possible that the engine would not start. The problem might lie deeper than that.
Thinking along that line, we quickly rejected any notion of trying to locate a diesel engine mechanic in the Bahamas. We had already received numerous warnings not to look for such services in the Bahamas. It would be a miracle if we connected with someone who was actually qualified to help.
The day came that Larry said to me, “Do you think we could just sail this boat back to Florida without an engine?” and I said, “Well, it is a sailboat, isn’t it?”
We began serious planning to take the boat back to Florida where we could work with a credentialed diesel engine mechanic in a location where parts could be shipped readily.
Come back tomorrow for Part 2.
Friday, January 22
When we left Port Lucaya, we warned all our readers that it would be a while before we had internet again. We were right. However, I did not think it would be as long as it has actually been. This is a learning experience for all of us. My expectations for the interval were probably shorter than yours. We had a plan that didn’t turn out, and that is likely to be a pattern with us now. We are into a cruising experience that does not lend itself to schedules or multi-tasking or productivity planning.
The most important variable every day is the weather. We are very faithful to listen at 6:30AM every day to Chris Parker, the resident meteorologist for the Bahamas and the Caribbean. We try to hear some other broadcasts as well, but we make it a point not to miss his. The weather forecast guides our preparations. If we are at anchor, we evaluate our setting for its value as shelter for the winds predicted that day. If we are planning to cruise, we study the forecast for a good opportunity to reach our destination without bad weather, big winds or ugly seas.
I describe this process, because it is important to help you understand our past few days.
We left Port Lucaya early on the morning of Wednesday, January 20. Our destination was Great Harbor, a large anchorage just south of Great Stirrup Cay. If you look on Google maps for the Berry Islands in the Bahamas, the Stirrup Cays are on the northeast tip of that group of islands. We spent a couple of days there enjoying the clear water and watching cruise ship passengers play in the water.
On Friday, January 22, we headed south planning to go to Frazers Hog Cay. However, as happens sometimes, along the way we spied a little cove that looked interesting and decided to stop there first. We thought that if we didn’t like it, we could continue the next day to our original destination. This little cove is bounded by White Cay, Devils Cay. and Saddleback Cay. Here is where the devil comes in.
We studied the chart and the guide books. The entrance is narrow and bounded by rocks. One must pay close attention going in, and it is important to make a turn to starboard at the right point to get to the marked anchorage off the lovely white sand beach of White Cay. However, sometimes little islands like these do not look the same in reality as they looked in our minds when studying the chart.
We turned into the entrance, and that part worked well, Unfortunately, as we passed the rocky shoal that guards the entrance, we became disoriented and continued too far past the spot where we should have turned. Before we realized the error, we ran aground on a rocky reef. The tide was coming in, and the tidal current no doubt moved us toward the reef faster than we recognized. We attempted to use the engine to back off and then to turn around, but in the middle of our efforts the engine stopped. It refused to restart. We were in a mess.
Experienced Bahamian cruisers say, just as ICW cruisers say, that there are two kinds of cruisers: those who have gone aground, and those who lie. Experienced Bahamian cruisers are fairly nonchalant about this sort of a predicament. We were not and are not yet experienced Bahamian cruisers. We are still learning how to do it.
In the US, a situation like this is very annoying, but no big deal. You call a towboat, you pay the bill, and you move on. In the Bahamas, there are no official towboats. The Bahamian volunteer rescue service focuses on life-and-death emergencies, which our problem was not. However, we made a radio call attempting to connect with someone who could help, and thanks to the kindness and experience of Bill and Barb on S/V Duet, a catamaran anchored nearby behind Devils Cay, we received the help we needed.
Bill and Barb have been cruising the Bahamas for 34 years. They are quite humble about their experience, saying that they have already made all the mistakes, so they know how to help other people. The fact is that they give of themselves without any accounting. They are generous and kind and they go above and beyond any sort of obligation to help one’s neighbor. We think they are angels.
When Bill and Barb arrived, we had just deployed our dinghy. Larry was in the dinghy with the anchor, and I was hauling anchor chain out, loading it in the dinghy. Our plan was to set the anchor in deeper water and use it to pull ourselves off the reef. We had the theory of the process right, but we might never have succeeded without Bill and Barb.
Before they arrived, we had set all our sails, hoping to catch the wind that was blowing in the direction we wanted to go toward deep water, but every time the wind pushed us toward deep water, the current pushed us back to shallow water. We were making no progress toward deep water, and the sails were doing what sails usually do, pulling us forward. By the time they got there we had moved dangerously close to Saddleback Cay, but we were so busy trying to deploy the anchor that we had lost our focus on the effect of the sails. Bill and Barb boiled out of their dinghy and doused the sails. That stopped our crawl toward Saddleback and allowed everyone to focus on the goal of getting the boat back into deep water.
The whole situation was made much more difficult by the wind and current that buffeted us and tried to take us all where nobody wanted to go. However, we were quite fortunate that we ran aground on a rising tide. Even though the current of the rising tide was against us, when it finally turned, it worked with us. The wind was blowing in the a helpful direction, but until the tide turned, it could not give us any headway against the tidal current. After the tide turned, the wind, the current, and all our efforts were pulling the boat toward deep water.
Larry and Bill worked together to set first one anchor, then the other. Barb and I were on deck pulling the anchor rode in. That is how we caused the boat to move.
It was a time for celebration when we finally had the boat floating. We used both of our anchors to pull us into a better position, and finally we were in a location where even the swing of the boat on our primary anchor was unlikely to run on the reef again. Because we were in the path of the tidal current, however, we deployed the second anchor to assure that we were not pushed to a less desirable position. Whew!
Our location was exposed to the cove entrance, but it was a good jumping-off place for us to sail out whenever the wind was right. Since we did not have a working engine, it seemed possible that we might have to do that. We thanked Bill and Barb profusely, and they went back to their day, planning to do some diving in the time remaining.
Several times throughout the days to come, Barb and Bill checked on our well-being. It wasn’t enough that they had put their lives aside for us at the time of crisis. They continued to be concerned for us. When another boat ran aground in a different nearby location, Bill and Barb again made time to help them and followed up with them, too. Both we and the crew of the S/V Mary Rose agree that the S/V Duet has a crew of angels.
Larry and I sat quietly in the cockpit trying to collect ourselves. We were both exhausted. We could not imagine how Bill and Barb would be in the mood to go diving after wearing themselves out helping us. Larry made a few stabs at starting the engine, but it simply refused. We were in a safe place, we could take our time working on the next step, so we simply let go of the problem. It is hard to describe, but we both felt that God was very much watching over us, and we could be at peace about this situation. We had a nice dinner, we took showers, we got a good night’s sleep. A fresh new day would dawn in the morning.
Tomorrow, Day 2 will post.
Aboard No Boundaries
January 4, 2010
Before we ever set out to visit the Bahamas, friends with experience gave us a somber warning. “Be sure you get across before Christmas. The Christmas winds can keep you waiting for days and days.” I wondered what that meant, because I could not find that term anywhere – Christmas winds. I know now what that is all about.
One of our guide books tells the story in more scientific, therefore more cryptic, language. It talks about the fronts that line up to the west of Florida (I deduced that they must form first in the Great Plains) and roll across that state into the Atlantic and across the Bahamas. These fronts come in from the west, but they usually have a northerly component, a dead stop for any plan to cross the Gulf Stream. The description accorded nicely with the comments of other friends about the parade of fronts across the Bahamas in the winter. I filed all this information in my mental folder for the Bahamas and there it sat, waiting for a time when it would be needed.
Well, here we are, still in Florida on January 4. And now we are learning firsthand what the “Christmas winds” are all about.
We never intended to be here in January. When we cruised into St. Marys, GA, on November 30, we thought we needed a few days to do some work on the generator. We might even need to deliver it to the Panda shop in Ft. Lauderdale. We thought a week or ten days ought to do it. However, the math on the rates for Langs Marina showed that if we paid for a month, then, after ten days, the rest of the month was essentially free. We said to ourselves, “What if it takes eleven days, or even twelve?” We never thought for a minute that it would take a whole month.
In fact, when Larry called the Panda folks to tell them that he had done all the tests they recommended at first report of our problem, he expected them to tell him right then that he should put the generator in the shop. Instead, they gave him more tests to run. He did what they advised, and he talked back and forth. It seemed as if all this conversation went on forever. Finally, on Friday, December 18, we delivered the generator to the shop. All the dithering over what to do about this generator had taken almost three weeks, and we seemed to be no nearer a solution than when we started.
We were concerned about all the time it took, but we were more concerned about the likely cost. Even though the generator was still in warranty, we worried that somehow, the work we needed might be ruled out of warranty. You just never know. So here we were, one week before Christmas, and no generator.
The day we delivered it, Larry wanted to arrange to pick it up as soon as possible. He delivered it to Panda at 8AM on Friday morning, and he expected to pick it upon the following Monday afternoon. The service manager quickly disabused him of that expectation. He told Larry to call on Monday afternoon, and then he could give him a better idea when to pick it up.
Larry persisted in his faith that we could pick up the generator at least by Tuesday morning, but we deferred making hotel reservations for the trip until after that call. It was a very good idea. We learned on Monday afternoon that the service team still had no idea when they could give the generator back to us. They seemed not quite sure what it would take to get it working, and they were quite professional in their determination not to guess or string us along with promises or hints of promises that they could not keep. Needless to say, Larry and I speculated endlessly, constantly concerned that we would get a huge bill along with the repaired generator.
Despite all our worries, Panda made the generator good and completed the work under warranty. We are deeply thankful that they saw it that way. We would have loved to get the generator back a lot sooner, but when we pulled into the marina at 5PM on Christmas Eve with the generator in the back of our rented jeep, we felt good about its condition. Unfortunately, the long delay occasioned by the repair did not get us across the Gulf Stream before Christmas.
We enjoyed Christmas Eve with friends. Mike and Suzanne Pillola hosted the evening at their home in St. Marys. We sang and feasted and played games with Roger and Bonnie Ford and our hosts before attending Christmas Eve worship at Christ Episcopal Church. We relaxed on Christmas Day, enjoying a nice dinner and lovely Christmas music all day. (I think we have every Christmas album Mannheim has ever released, plus lots of other great stuff.)
Then it was time to get the generator back into the boat and working again. Larry put it through its paces to confirm that the repairs had, indeed, put it back in working order. All this work was not complete until New Years Eve. We were not ready to leave the marina until New Years Day. We were in for a big shock.
We had no idea the freeze of the century was about to drop in on us, not to mention the Christmas winds.
We had regretted for several days that we had never been able to visit Cumberland Island due to the constant confusion surrounding the generator repairs. We left the marina on New Years Day in a light rain. We said to ourselves that we would not like to walk around the island in the rain. We would visit it the next day. From that day to this it has not been a fit day to go strolling about in the outdoors.
We started following the weather the week intensely the week before New Years Day, and I was unhappy to see that the winds were almost constantly from the northwest. As I watched day after day, this state of affairs continued. When we left the marina, I remember saying hopefully that maybe the winds would change on Wednesday, the day after the last day in the forecast cycle. From that day to this, I keep hoping the same thing – that in five or six days the winds will change. The fronts keep rolling through, and the wind keeps coming at us from the northwest.
I don’t know when this state of affairs will improve. Not only are all the winds from the wrong direction, but we are also in the grip of arctic cold, something we certainly did not expect at the border of Florida. As we check cities down the coast, we can see that the situation is not dramatically better in any location we could reach in two or three days, even if we were willing to go out into the ocean at these temperatures. Wind from the northwest is not itself a problem when we go south along the coast, but a northwest wind at 20 knots and a temperature of even 40 degrees feels quite cold. The forecasts do not indicate that the deep freeze will relent soon.
So here we are still, trapped by the Christmas Winds. We will get to the Bahamas sometime. We take it a day at a time. Nothing enforces flexible decision-making like cruising in a sailboat,.
November 22, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
I have been telling you how early we get up each day. Even on the ICW, with the exception of our first day, we are getting up at 5:30AM in order to cover a lot of territory before dark. Anchoring in the dark is no fun. We want to be ready to stop around 4PM in order to be set and comfortable before the sun goes down.
Sometimes this strategy actually works.
When we were cruising this summer, we managed to adhere to this strategy with one exception: Provincetown. An assortment of issues conspired to delay our departure from Boston until noon, resulting in an arrival time in Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod, around 8PM. We could see our destination as the sun began to set around 6PM that night, but it is a long trip around the little curl at the end of Cape Cod before you actually get into Provincetown Harbor. It was fully dark before we rounded the end of that curl. We crept into the harbor, almost running into the breakwater in the dark. We thought it would be an actual wall, but it appeared to be just a pile of rocks that stuck up a foot or two above the water. Provincetown is a very small town. There is very little light at 8PM down on the waterfront and no signs of life. The moon wasn’t much help as we anchored in deep darkness using flashlights, e-chart and grit. We didn’t do it because we love to prove ourselves; we did it because it was necessary.
We had to do the same thing in the Sassafrass River on our way back to Baltimore. We had run up Delaware Bay with the intention of transiting the C&D Canal before we stopped, because finding shelter along that monster bay is no simple task. We also were quite ready to get back home, and this was a good way to get there sooner. The result, of course, was that we entered the Sassafrass just after 2AM. Again, there was little moonlight, and again we felt our way to a successful anchorage.
We had planned to avoid such issues when in the ICW. In the first place, the ICW anchorages are almost all quite confined. There isn’t a lot of room for error, due to the constant challenge of shoals and stumps and snags. It would be easy to get in a mess if you try to anchor when you can’t see. Yet on Saturday (11/21) we found ourselves doing it again.
We had left Buck Island Harbor about 6:45AM. We got up early as always and were ready to leave as it got light. The run down the North River was uneventful. Crossing Albemarle Sound reminded me of cruising on the Chesapeake. We passed through the Alligator River Bridge and headed for the Alligator-Pungo River Canal.
It was about 1:30PM when we saw a couple of sailboats ahead of us pull out of the channel into a tiny little spot near shore where they appeared to be anchoring. We were near the entrance to the Alligator-Pungo Canal, and I asked Larry why they would be anchoring there. It isn’t a designated anchorage, and it was not long past noon. “Maybe they don’t think they can get to the end of the canal before dark,” he said.
That was a sobering thought that I had not considered. The canal is 25 miles long. It was 1:30PM. At best we were making about 6 knots. Sunset would be 4:55PM. Whoa! Maybe we would not get to the end of this canal before dark either, and there is NO place to stop in the canal.
The longer we were in this canal, the less I liked it. The scenery is quite picturesque, even a little spooky. I love swamp landscapes, and this one was lovely. However, twenty-five miles of it was almost more than I needed. The ambience was not improved when our 8-foot depth alarm went off in the middle of the channel, supposedly in 15 feet of water. There was a thump and a scraping sound, and then nothing. The depth went back to 15 feet and we went on. It was probably a log that washed into the channel during recent heavy rains.
At the end of the canal is a fixed bridge charted at 65 feet of clearance. I didn’t look, and we didn’t thud, and we soon exited that canal. Off to the right in the upper reaches of the Pungo River is a designated anchorage where we had considered stopping. However, we had also looked for a slightly better spot a couple of miles downriver, and that is a good thing. There were already eight boats in the designated anchorage. We could certainly have found a place there, but we don’t like crowded anchorages. Every time we see a crowd of boats anchored together, it calls up images of the anchorage at Newport, RI. We don’t like that kind of close communion.
We continued downriver to a spot where we could anchor in 8 feet of water in a more sheltered location. We were just about to finish our work when another sailboat came cruising in to be our neighbor. It isn’t that we don’t like friends and neighbors, but with all that water to choose from, why did this boat want to be right next to us? Oh well. We used our flashlight and our e-chart and our grit and we got the anchor set just the way we wanted it.
We were exhausted. We had arisen before it was day, and we cruised until it wasn’t day again. We ate a simple supper and went right to bed. Boy, am I glad we are retired and don’t have to work for a living any more, getting up at the crack of dawn and working until we keel over into bed at night. I bet everyone would like to be retired and on permanent vacation like we are!
July 2, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
In the navigable waters in the USA, we spend a lot of our cruising time looking for markers. Usually we watch for red and green buoys. We remember the sailor’s mantra, “Red, Right, Returning,” and we get a little confused sometimes in rivers or canals, trying to remember if upstream or downstream is “Returning.”
Sometimes we argue, not about which marker we need to find, but rather about which marker we have actually found. We seek a red marker “6L” and I shout “I see it.”
“Where?” asks the captain.
“Over there,” I say, pointing.
“Where?” he asks again.
The problem is that I am standing on the port side of the aft deck while he is sitting at the helm. When I point to the silhouette I can barely distinguish as a red marker, from his perspective, my finger appears to be pointing somewhere else altogether. From our different starting points, the light and shadow on the water do not look the same. It may take two or three “sightings” before we agree that we are both looking at the marker we wanted to find.
Differences in point of view color our lives in many ways. I remember when my mother acquired a wonderful sewing machine that made fabulous embroidered designs. What fun she had with all those designs! She put arrowheads on stitched-down pleats. She decorated my clothes and my doll’s clothes with frieze lines and flowers. It was wonderful.
However, she did not want to exclude anyone. To share the joy, she made a set of colorful string ties for my brother. She made them in every color imaginable. She embroidered them with all the designs her machine could make. She stitched. She pressed. She spread them all out on the dining room table for everyone to admire. And each morning as my brother headed out for school, she looked him over and asked, “Did you forget your new string tie?” She dug in his drawer to find just the right tie for that day’s shirt. I think that my mother and my brother saw those ties from two different points of view.
Today as we transited the C&D Canal, we encountered a problem. The railroad bridge with only 45 feet of clearance was down. The top of our mast is 55 feet above the water. In my opinion we need 70 feet to feel safe, and if I were asked about it, that is what I would say. “We need 70 feet.”
The captain, however, tells it like it is. When the bridgemaster asked for our height, Larry said, “55 feet.” But then he added,”We would really like 70.” That made me nervous. The bridgemaster had already told us that men were working on the bridge, so I worried that he might not want to move that bridge one inch more than absolutely necessary.
Then the bridgemaster told us that as soon as he could see us, he would raise the bridge. That really put me in a spin. We could see that bridge right in front of us. When exactly was he going to see us? Would there even be time for the bridge to be raised high enough? I didn’t like this plan one bit. What was he waiting for?
He told us to proceed, so we did. It seemed to me that we were awfully close to that bridge when the bridgemaster came back to say that he could see us and was starting to raise the bridge. “You don’t need to stop and wait,” he said. “Just keep moving. You will have plenty of room.” Easy for him to say! He was sitting on this monster steel bridge that we could not damage if we tried. We were asked to proceed toward it as if it would simply be where it needed to be when it needed to be there. Talk about a faith challenge!
My faith was weak. We moved forward, and I saw the bridge inching up ever so slowly. Of course it was slow. How many gazillion tons does it weigh? I was standing on the back deck looking up. I kept waiting to see that bridge rise higher than the top of the mast, and it wasn’t happening. Finally I screamed. “Larry, stop! Stop! You have to stop!”
Larry slowed the engine, and I saw him try to make a sharp turn away from the bridge. “You have to stop! We’re going to hit it!” I was frantic. I could hear men’s voices shouting, “Keep going! Plenty of room! You have twenty feet.”
I kept looking at the top of the mast. There was no way we would go under that bridge. I expected to hear a horrific “Bonnnggggg!” at any moment. Again I heard the voices. “You have forty feet! Keep going!” Then amazingly, I looked up and saw the underside of the bridge. We were suddenly through it and no disaster. We waved to the men and shouted “Thank you!” They waved and shouted “You’re welcome. Happy sailing!”
I am pretty sure that I am the subject of dinner table conversation in a half dozen homes tonight where the men who were working on the bridge tell about the frenzied screaming woman who nearly created a disaster when there wasn’t one. From where they stood, they could see that we truly did have plenty of clearance. They were standing on a bridge pier almost at the level of the top of the mast. I was standing at the bottom of the mast looking up. From the deck of the boat, looking up, the top of the mast looks much more than 50 feet away. When we came to the next bridge, which is reported to have 150 feet of clearance above the water, I watched as we approached the bridge. Even there, knowing that the bridge was 150 feet above, it still appeared to me that our mast would never go under it until we were finally there.
It is a real metaphor for life. How often have you faced a situation that appeared insoluble from your perspective only to have a friend say something like, “What if you looked at it this way?” As long as I lacked the ability either to get a new perspective on the relationship of our masthead to the bridge or the ability to have some faith in the bridgemaster, I was doomed. We face a lot of situations in real life that are like that. We lock in our perspective on the problem, and we have no faith in anyone else. We stand rooted in our self-centered universe and refuse to trust anyone to help us. The next time I come to a bridge, or to a seemingly insoluble problem, I will try to trust the perspective of the folks who are in a better position to see the truth than I am.