Well, still busy with our “real work” with our business during August. However, last Wednesday a load of Douglas Fir arrived (finally!) for the deck beams. We stacked it in Mahdee’s container and then we took off for a 3 day weekend of sailing on the 30′ Rawson, Stargazer!
Sitting at anchor one night, looking at the moonscape and enjoying the “peace” we’re so glad that we decided to take a couple days for just sailing.
On the way back from that great trip, everything sort of went kaput’s though: The galley sink clogged and as David cleared it, he discovered that the drain hose was simply glued to the bottom of the sink! Da! The previous owner must of been crazy. We had spare parts on board, though, so David fixed it nicely–from one Rube to another Goldberg…Then, I guess he was on a roll so…Dave was replacing a broken bolt on the alternator bracket, dropped it in the bilge and noticed that lots of “yuck” is down there–never did find the nut though–and of course re-distributed the gross “bilge yuck” to more accessible parts of the boat so Brenda could get it on her favorite shirt…Then, the holding tank totally filled up on our final morning, so Brenda was literally “holding it” and dancing around a bit at the helm while getting us back to Fiddler’s Cove quickly! Some wacko decided to park their boat permanently at the pump out dock and while we were waiting for them to leave (sails doused and under power only), Stargazer decided to be difficult by zeroing out her oil pressure on the gauge. So, after killing the engine, we thew up the jib and sailed back to the mooring to diagnose the problem.
More grubbing around the engine for poor David. Change the oil and filter, note the frags of metal in the filter screen…uh, oh…well, restart the engine, 30 psi oil while at idle, zip when giving it higher throttle. Seems like maybe the pump is not keeping up and we’ll have to come back later in the week to (1) clean out the engine compartment bilge so work can be done there and (2) take apart the oil pump and fix it if possible.
While jumping around and thinking about making it to the Marina bathroom quickly, I packed up all our stuff. David kept saying “you know, its getting windy out here”. I noticed the rocking and rolling going on, but, didn’t think much of it. Until I popped out of the cabin with all the bags…
Oh, yes, now the wind is really blowing and the mooring field has white caps and I really have to go pee!
We’ve never seen that much wind here in this little anchorage–it looked like Saganagaw on a really, really, bad day! We had hoped to unload all our stuff over at the dock when we did the pumpout…well, the boat in the way and zero oil pressure nixed that plan. We didn’t feel like sailing over there again just to find that the we’d be stuck rafting up to the boat on the dock (under sail with high winds it could be ugly) and then sailing back out to the mooring again. As we started to lean over Stargazer’s rail to load the cooler, Duluth pack and duffel into the middle of the canoe, literally, the canoe was almost flying off the top of the waves. We decided to “kick back” and be windbound for a few hours on the mooring rather than lose the laptop, cel phone, etc to a big wave as we canoed back across to the marina. Normally I love the speed and ease with which we can canoe from Stargazer to the marina and how light the canoe is so David can portage it to the car top so easily…but on Sunday I was wondering “Oh, why oh why do we use a canoe as a dingy???” With that little bit of extra challenge to get in and out of, this wind is just a bit too much.
Finally, the wind died down a bit (to Sag on a sort of bad day…) and we loaded up the canoe and paddled back to the marina. Finally, access to the marina bathroom!
So, great weekend, but now with a laundry list of things to do on Stargazer, we worked at “work” Monday, ran errands today: picking up porthole gasket materials, lexan, special lexan sealant, bilge pump parts for Stargazer’s manual pump that seems to be on its last leg. Tomorrow, we’ll be out on Stargazer for the “bilge cleaning project”, oil pump project, and to disassemble the old lexan fixed ports so they can be replaced and to replace the working port gaskets.
No work on Mahdee, just “catchup” with Stargazer. Well, that’s what we’ve been doing….
