Ready for Sea

Mintaka is tied up to the guest dock in Port Angeles, Washington, awaiting our return from a brief family visit, as well as the arrival of our two crew.  She's ready for sea, and so are we.  Except for a few more chores, of course:  remounting the radar, pickling the new water-maker membrane, filling the fuel and water, and reorganizing stowage to make room for the crew.

I installed a new radar and chart-plotter from Garmin last year, and have been very impressed with them both.  Last week, though, the radar stopped working.  Bad timing!  After a telephone consultation, we sent it off second-day air to Garmin's repair facility in Kansas; they repaired it in two days, and sent it back next-day air.  Thank you, Garmin.  I still have to haul it up the mizzen mast, though.

The chart-plotter quickly seduced me to the Dark Side.  I still prefer paper charts for planning and visualizing the bigger picture, but the plotter really lowers the work load for minute-by-minute navigation.  It also makes some things possible that I would never have done before, like leaving harbor through a dog-leg channel before dawn in fog (caveat here -- been through that channel many times, and had a back-up plan).

Over the past month, we've sailed around a little, but mostly anchored in various places to do chores and to rendezvous with friends we'd met in far-off places:  Ric &Kitty, American friends living in New Zealand but cruising on their boat in British Columbia; Jim and Deb on Roriki, who we met on a street corner in Tahiti; Willy & Cindy on Pazzo, who we met in Samoa; and Will & Joan on Chaika, who we met in Mexico.   Surprising how many cruisers fetch up in the Northwest.  The meeting with Chaika was completely unexpected; they just sailed into our anchorage one afternoon.  It is amazing sometimes how boat-paths cross.

So, we cleaned and greased all the winches, installed a new manual bilge pump in the cockpit, replaced part of the engine exhaust system, varnished the mizzen mast and boom, re-rigged the spinnaker pole and moved the genoa tracks forward on both bulwarks to work with the new sail-plan, swung the compass, etc, etc.

Swinging the compass is an interesting exercise.  It involves taking relative bearings to a landmark some miles away, and at the same moment recording the compass reading.  Do that at numerous points in all directions on a calm day, graph the results, and you know the accuracy of your compass in any direction.

The mizzen mast being wood, it needs to be varnished a couple of times each year.  I use a halyard to rig a non-stretching rope to ascend, go up once to sand lightly on the way back down, then go up again to varnish on the way down.  Takes a few hours.  Unfortunately, I picked an anchorage with more boat traffic than I had bargained for -- wound up swinging around a bit up there.  Good thing I don't get queasy easily.

The new sail-plan necessitated a different lead for the jib sheets, so we had to move the bulwark tracks forward a few feet.  Nothing ever being simple, several of the screws proved intractable and had to be drilled out.  Then, in moving the cars along the tracks to new positions, the knob that retracts a spring-loaded pin broke off on one,  meaning that car could not be moved. These things are heavily made of cast stainless steel, and was the devil itself to cut off.  Even the almighty Dremel tool failed to do the job.  I finally resorted to muscle and hacksaw.

Lest you think that all is fun working on a boat, consider the consequences of a plumbing failure with the head.  On land, one just calls a plumber, and mops the floor.  Not so simple on a boat.  A month or so ago, a guest pumped the head with a valve miss-set, and blew a hose off.  If we didn't know shit before, we sure do now.  It was truly an unholy mess, in some very difficult spaces.  Took almost three days to clean.

All that is behind us now, the open sea and far-off shores ahead.  Weather permitting, we'll cast off next Saturday morning, next stop San Francisco.