OK, we’ve been living aboard since August of 2008 (in the boatyard, remember?) and relaunched the boat in April 2009, continuing to work on it in the water and do local cruising. Here we are A YEAR LATER! and all I can say “can we go more than 12 hours of sailing without breaking SOMETHING?” We’ve only moved up the coast a tiny bit from San Diego (and our storage garage) to Newport just because we’re constantly fixing things. Every sail we do means a long, longer, longer still list of things to fix.
OK, perhaps that sounds a bit melodramatic, but seriously, the record for us–12 hours of sailing time before something necessary broke, shook loose, leaked, chafed through, or something “revealed its evil side” which is my term for design defects, chafe areas, or equipment that is inadequate for the task and must be beefed up, modified, replaced, whatever…
It’s always something. We haven’t experienced these sorts of problems with other sailboats. But, we’ve not pushed other sailboats very hard like we’re pushing this one.
We’re confident sailors. We know what to do and have the wherewith-all to do it…usually. However, today, we’re less confident that we’re ready to go offshore with this boat than we were 6 months ago. Give us another 6 months and we’ll be looking for a comfy little anchorage in the Sea of Cortez that we’ll just stay in forever more.
The sorts of things which we’ve been dealing with is really varied–simple stuff like the white motoring light on the foremast burned out with only 30 hours of use (climb the mast); or more serious stuff like an APC Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) catching fire.
Lots of things have created big “projects” for us to complete before we can get out of Southern California. These aren’t want-to-do things they’re need-to-do things relating to functionality or safety. The clock is ticking for us in that we need to start our trip to the Pacific Northwest…NOW…or at least by the first week of May or so in order for us to not be fighting the winds and currents too much. We’ve more-or-less written off the idea of going to Hawaii simply because we’d have to take crew along since David and I would be constantly fixing things–every 12 hours, right? Many times things that need to be tweaked, fixed, changed, take two people to do safely.
Then there’s the “big” issue of “big” too. We seem to be constantly pushing our bodies, our tools, everything because this stuff on this 29 ton schooner is…big. Last week I modified my Reliable sewing machine with a Sailrite Monster Wheel so I could push it harder as the clutch wasn’t up the the task of more than 3 layers of our 12 oz Dacron sailcloth. And, I need to go through 6 and 8 layers of it. Now the Reliable can do 6 layers but oops, this weekend I messed up the timing by pushing it to try and do…9 layers… So, back to sewing machine fixing for me tomorrow.
A lot of stuff we do bring on ourselves, breaking something or mis-using something. But…most of it is legitimately a big surprise for us when something just breaks down or doesn’t work as it should.
Enough with the whining. Yesterday we re-installed our newly modified main goose neck. We’re sitting here in the middle of a gale (last night through tomorrow) with bouts of rain so I’m at least smiling that my (last week’s) re-setting of the glazing in all the butterfly hatches isn’t leaking
Maybe we can shoot for…13 hours???
