Author Archives: Schooner Mahdee

The Sun is Shining and Buttercup Lives

Posted on by under car repairs, Musings

The sun came out this morning. Rainbows and sparkles. Ah, Much better now. Late last night I sat up reading and websurfing for several hours as the winds piped up to the “howling” stage and the boat shuddered and rocked with the power of it all against the hull and rig. In the early morning light, the wind died down and I slept until 10 am!

As I dragged David out of bed (his excuse for sleeping in was that I blocked the exit from the bed, asleep myself) and shooed him out the companionway door saying “fix Buttercup” he mumbled and grumbled but went outside. A few minutes later he returned, grabbing my bathroom hand-held mirror and a few wire leads and headed back out to Buttercup. Thirty minutes passed and I could stand the suspense no more. I put on my jacket and went looking for him–thinking he might need help. However, as soon as I walked up the gangway I heard David’s distinctive laughter and saw him standing talking with fellows who have boats at this military marina. As I reached him, I asked if he fixed the car. “Yep. It was no problem.” he said with a big grin. Relief. Whatever it was, it was no big deal.

After a few days of steady rain and then last night’s total deluge, several boats at the marina were in danger of sinking. The marina manager, dockmaster and crew spent the day pumping out dingies, making sure bilge pumps were working on the boats that belong to active duty military people deployed and bringing a couple boats in from the mooring field–boats that looked “low” in the water and in need of bilge pumping. I’m thankful that the marina manager has such a good attitude about keeping everyone’s boat afloat and making sure deployed military don’t have reason to worry about their vessels.

Later, as we were going out to run our various errands, David told me a wire had come undone from the starter motor–one that was hidden behind the header and not easy to see (thus the mirror) but all was well now. Buttercup, what a bad girl you’re been! Disconnecting wires! That’s a low shot. I’m so happy that David saw through your ruse!

We finished the day by stopping by our storage unit to retrieve a cable and video card for the Shuttle computer, stopping at the grocery, stopping at our favorite marine bookstore to chat with the owner, Ann, stopping by Downwind Marine and picking up many important packages delivered there for us–my car registration (expires this month!) and a wonderful gift from my brother, Brad, and sister-in-law, Alina. They studied all the pictures of Mahdee that we have on the blog and then Alina drew a lovely profile of the boat that she had an embroidery shop put onto two soft and warm merino wool sweater-jackets for David and I. I’m wearing mine now and we’ll have to take pictures shortly to post here.

All-in-all, a very good day for us. Tonight David is futzing around with the Shuttle computer and I’m catching up on reading; shortly we’ll watch a DVD about John Adams. Yes, all-in-all a very good day.

Rain, rain, rain

Posted on by under Musings, Projects, We need...

It’s raining amazingly long and consistently for San Diego. I hope the folks inland are doing fine. Our Saab friend and parts supplier, Paul, had his road wash out day-before-yesterday. He’s stuck at his remote home (with parts we need) and we’re stuck on the boat with too much rain to troubleshoot Buttercup. I hope Paul is having as good and mellow of a time as we are. Hot coffee this morning and moving into the hot tea for the day realm. Patter, patter goes all that rain.

We usually turn the inflatable Tinker Traveller upside down on the deck but, silly us, we left it right side up when we got here the other day. It has about 8″ of water in it. I need to go bail it out but I’m waiting for a lull. At least that’s my story.

Since we’re at the Fiddler’s Cover courtesy dock, we had the luxury of shore power all night long. Ah…that means we left on the computer that needs the OS upgrade and proceeded to download about 4-1/2 Gigabytes of files. This morning at 6 am it was done! I’m impressed that the tethered Sprint cel phone did so well with it. Now David is doing the install. So nice. He’s moving his OS over to my little small form factor (SFF) Shuttle computer which will then be his little SFF computer. He’ll also move the HDTV card and a few other things over as well. We’d originally built up the Shuttle as a clone/copy of a system that we put together for a customer doing some medical image processing. Before bringing it to the boat, we removed the important business guts–mainly the NI Labview card–from it and really have not been using it at all for over a year. So, it is nice that it will have a purpose on the boat. We’ll “retire” David’s larger computer for now. We have plenty of room for David to keep a full size computer aboard, but it is really nice to not use one all the time since the power drain is pretty big. My notebook is nothing in comparison to either the SFF or the fullsize computers.

Drip, drip, drip…that’s the other thing about all this rain. It drips off the main boom onto the charthouse roof. Each time I hear a drip I think something is leaking INSIDE the boat. It’s only the drip on the roof, though. We do have two leaks of import–one adjacent the toilet that is managed with a little pail on the sole to catch the drips. I know where it’s coming from but can’t really fix the problem for a while–so the pail does it’s thing. The other leak of significance is directly over our bed! The leak is along the port aft corner post of the charthouse and doesn’t have an easy fix either. The water is captured by a funny little hammock I built for this express purpose of catching water. The net hammock is lined with plastic and contains a high absorbency synthetic terry towel. Typically, dew and rain leave a few little drips in the towel. On the other hand, this rain has poured drip, drip, drip in for a couple days. I “emptied” the hammock last evening as it was actually full of water! I measured about 1/2 gallon. It took a couple days to get there. This morning, I emptied it again! It really rained hard last night!

When we did the rebuild of Mahdee, we re-roofed the charthouse but we did not rebuild its walls. There were just too many other things to do with the boat. This is one of the only areas that we “put off” for the future knowing that it was easier to access than other projects would be. So, it is no surprise that the scuttle and deck hatches do not leak, the charhouse roof is sound, but the charthouse walls have their issues. By design, the butted joints of wood to corner post create an opportunity for leaking. Before launch, I did put some cotton caulking and sealant there, but clearly it needs more! Further, the mitered joints around the charthouse windows provide opportunity for water seeping in. That is a much bigger project to take on. Someday we’ll remove the mitered window frames that a previous owner installed and we’ll put in traditional frames like Mahdee originally had. Someday. But, that day won’t be soon.

Rain, rain, rain.

Update–added at 2:00 pm–due to heavy rain and flooding, the nearby base, NAS North Island just sent everyone home keeping “essential employees” only. So, we wouldn’t be working on the car there anyway as they’ve just closed shop. Rain, rain, rain.

Buttercup is Jealous

Posted on by under car repairs

Yes, it’s true. Our vehicles have always been jealous of the time we spend with “the other vehicle.” We can tell. Wesley, the newer car, has been getting all our maintenance attention for the past few days as we pull together parts and get to work on his transmission. There couldn’t be a worse time for Buttercup to hiccup than now. So, of course, who isn’t starting? Who has always been amazingly reliable but now has decided to flip-out and not start? Yes, that would be our dear old girl, Buttercup. David got in the car this morning to go to the North Island hobby shop to do a couple things for Wesley even though it is cold, wet, and miserable. And, Buttercup started, went 30 feet, and then said “I’m done for the day.”

David and a passing boat owner pushed Buttercup back into a parking spot. And, here we sit, warm and dry inside Mahdee looking out at the wet and cold surroundings and wondering when David will be able to get some test leads onto Buttercup to trace her problem. Somehow it doesn’t seem right in the pouring rain. She’s not a finicky car that gives us problems in wet weather. However, she KNEW we were dependent upon her and she has taken advantage of the situation. All the engine tools are sitting in Wesley. All toolboxes, everything. It’s all a couple miles away at the hobby shop. So, we hope there’s not much wrong since it will have to be fixed with our woodworking tools, a screw driver and a dental pick.

It is the perfect excuse, says David, for sitting inside and doing…nothing. This, I totally agree with him on. We have shore power. So we’re downloading Debian updates for one of the computers, doing laundry, and eating various munchies while we watch the winds whip the furled jibs of neighboring boats and the dockmaster scramble to deal with it.

I wonder what tomorrow will hold.

Google Analytics Alternative