Well, we’re now a day into our 6th experience aboard Mahdee of a serious gale or storm (as recognized by NOAA National Weather Service that is) since last fall; This one sounds terrible from below deck, but is actually quite nice. Sunny and bright with sparkling and streaming whitecaps on the (small) waves in the harbor.

David is outside in the cockpit, shielded from the worst of the wind and enjoying working on making a wooden storage box for the cockpit. He’s grinning because the sawdust is flying away in the winds and he’ll not have to sweep up the mess of the project.

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???

You know, sometimes I do things in totally the wrong order. And then, at other times, I do things in the wrong order but it doesn’t matter because I used the wrong materials and it all has to be done over again anyway. Well, that’s the story of glazing the butterfly hatch windows.

We have three hatches, each with two butterfly “wings” that open up to give us fresh air and they also wonderfully light the interior. The glass in these six windows is about 12″ x 24″. I say “About” because each one is slightly different from the next. When we got Mahdee, the glazing was frosted (sun damaged) plastic. We decided to install tempered safety glass as it is 10x stronger than just regular glass. We’d been advised to install 8 mil hurricane film on the inside of the glazing as that stuff is the same as the laminate used on laminated glass and would increase the strength even more and make it such that the tempered glass if it broke would all stay together rather than fly everywhere.

Well…where should I start with the “oops” moments? Let’s just say that David was pushing me to install the glass because he was tired of plastic over those hatches during rain storms… and I hadn’t yet found a supplier (in California) of the hurricane film. So, since I knew we wanted a very flexible glazing material, I decided to use the silicon-modified polyurethane made by Tremco that we’d used to bed many things on deck. I’d forgotten that this material should be painted to prevent UV degradation.

While we were still in the boatyard, I installed the glass assuming I could glue on the film (inside) later and I used the Tremco which ended up being the wrong glazing material. Last fall we noticed that the glass wasn’t stuck to the Tremco anymore. I called the supplier who explained to me that the product I used was great for lots of things, but glass in sunlight was its enemy since the layer of Tremco closest to the glass would have plenty of UV light to breakdown the glazing material. Alas, I’d have to reglaze. Simultaneous to learning about my use of the wrong glazing material, I located a supplier of the hurricane film (Concord) and learned that it should be installed on the glass all the way to the edge of the glass…else it would require a hefty 1/4″x1/4″ bead of high strength silicon between the film and the window framing–ugh.

So, I had two reasons to re-glaze the butterfly hatches–first because they actually leak a little after the sunshine got to the glazing for a year and second because I didn’t feel like putting on additional interior glazing for the film.

Now that I’ve explained myself, guess what? I started removing the Tremco from the butterfly hatches Tuesday. Tough stuff. While it peeled away from the glass without much effort, it is definitely stuck to the teak frames. After a few hours of misery with the razors and chisels, I did two of the six windows and really improved my removal techniques. Today, I’m planning on doing the other four.

This glazing thing clearly isn’t soaring with my strengths. I actually had to call the Concord (window film) company to have them explain to me how to find the protective film on the glue side of the 8 ml thick hurricane film. The fellow laughed and said it was a common problem and I should just “do what the professionals do: bite the edge and move it with your teeth” I was sure there was no protective film or glue side as I had literally started pulling apart the two layers of the hurricane film! But, I did what he said and a miracle occurred–I found the film.

After “unglazing” is done today, I’ll be installing the film and then be re-glazing with a straight silicon material (that cannot be painted). It doesn’t look like it will rain or we’ll have fog for the next 48 hours, so, keeping my hopes up…I’m off for my day’s adventure of re-setting window glass.