If you are going to travel the ICW or sail anywhere in the world, anchoring knowledge is a big deal. And by the time I was ready to make my first trip I did know a lot about anchoring before heading for St Augustine. Let me explain. A few months earlier, I made an attempt to renew my boating bond with my crew promising a very tranquil afternoon on a remote St, Johns Island beach – no authoritative command shouting, no raising the sails, simply motoring through a local knowledge cut and anchoring just off the beach and a short dinghy ride to where we could have a picnic lunch and enjoy serenity and privacy. Pretty clever way of selling the sailing life and re-bonding with my crew, huh? What could go wrong? Thankfully an anchor and rode was a part of the sail-away package.
The day did start out pretty well – we found the “local knowledge cut” in the Charleston Harbor jetty just like the locals said and a couple miles later, I dropped the anchor, and Captain and crew went happily ashore. For a while it was bliss until suddenly my littlest daughter innocently asked “where is the boat daddy”. Well the boat was in sight but about a half mile from where it should be – obviously a case of anchor dragging. But what to do about the problem was a bit of a quandary.
As I ran down the beach I thought about the Annapolis Book of Seamanship laying next to the couch in my house and vowed, once the present crises was resolved, I would diligently re-read each of the […]
Before I can share my first trip, I must explain how I became the gained the basic knowledge I think necessary to make a first trip of a couple thousand miles.
As a boy growing up in the cornfields of Indiana, visions of oceans and seas and rivers were ingrained in my mind by my grandfather – a Danish immigrant and a North Sea eel fisherman. Although I would have wait for college spring break in Ft Lauderdale to get my first glimpse of emerald and blue salt water, his stories of the sea and the transatlantic passage from Denmark on a wooden schooner gave me a leg up on all other wannabe sailors of the world. So in 1978 I found myself at the yacht brokerage dock in Charleston, South Carolina, writing a check for a brand new Hunter 30 – the FIRST and most primary of the many watery lessons I have learned – A FOOL AND HIS MONEY SOON PART.
Now mind you, I had never sailed before – no prior Sunfish experience, no prior Hobie Cat experience, no romantic, captained, chartered, sunset dinner cruise on a tranquil bay, not even one hour’s practice sailing a remote controlled boat on a little pond. But armed with my grandfather’s legacy, many evenings of arm chair sailing with the Hiscocks and Joshua Slocum, and the broker’s “personal assurance” that thirty footers are much, much easier and forgiving to sail than little sailboats like Hobie Cats and Snarks, I found it easy to part with the windfall bonus I had received from my company the day before.
After all the broker did promise that he would […]
This project was submitted by Bob Salnick of DE45 Eolian This project is from the winter of 2004/2005
During the last months I had noticed that the amount of water being delivered out the exhaust pipe had been decreasing. (Water? Out the exhaust pipe? Read on.)
First, a brief lesson on marine engines… ours is ‘fresh water cooled’. That means that it is exactly like a car engine. Except that instead of an air-cooled radiator, we have a heat exchanger which is cooled with sea water. The engine coolant and the sea water do not mix, any more than the air and the engine coolant in a car mix – they are separated by the internal walls of the water-air heat exchanger (radiator) or water-water heat exchanger (marine engine). Once the sea water has picked up the waste heat from the engine, it is put to one final use: It is dumped into the exhaust gases to cool them so that high temperature plumbing is not required for the exhaust system. It exits with them. The injection point is at an elbow on the very end of the (water cooled) exhaust manifold.
I had cleaned the exhaust elbow once before by poking around inside it with a piece of wire – I am sure that I didn’t do a very good job, but I did get the water flowing again OK that time. This time, I decided to remove the elbow and acid pickle it to clean it completely.
It looked easy.
Tho the working space is very cramped, the elbow itself is not large, and it is held onto the exhaust manifold (painted blue in the picture) with only 4 nuts. Well, when I tried to […]
As I’ve been spending the last 2 months repairing things that broke and improving things that bugged me while crossing the Pacific, I thought that I might reflect a bit on some modifications I made that really worked well. Here’s an incomplete list in no particular order:
Pin rails – The pin rails give Bodhran a salty appearance, but have also turned out to be incredibly handy. I originally built them to store the halyards while at the dock so that I wouldn’t have to bungee them away from the mast at night. The pinrails perform this task admirably, but also keep the mast free of clutter while sailing as well. When I installed my removable lazy jacks, I didn’t install cleats on the mast, instead they just get the second forward on each side. My running backstays when not in use attach to the aftermost pin. My foreguy for whisker pole attaches to the foreward most pin both when in use and while stowed. You get the idea.
The pinrails were fairly easy to build. First I got the bronze belaying pins from the Wooden Boat Foundation Chandlery. Then I took two mahogany 1x3s (teak would have been better) about 6 inches longer than the width of the lower shrouds where I wanted to attach them. I bolted them together and then drilled them out to accept the belaying pins. The I used a table saw to cut a 7/32” grove at an angle to match the shroud in one of the planks. Then just route the edges, slap some varnish on them and bolt them to the lower shrouds. The half without the groove compresses the wire into the grooved side to hold time in place. Chest high lifelines – Here’s an […]
April 8th we finally left Puerto Vallarta. Next stop the Marquesas Islands. We were treated to quite a send off with a dolphin show that “Sea World” could not have produced.
Factor in that immediatly after the show, the fishing reel started to whine and Phoebe called it, fish on! We had snaged a 65 pound marlin. Phoebe had been requesting one our entire time in Mexico and here it is. Normally we would not keep a marlin but we had a minor mishap with our freezer. We defrosted the freezer prior to reloading it with weeks of prepared and frozen food. The problem was that we forgot to turn the thermostat back up. Thus Emma and her Mom’s week of provisioning, preparation and pre-hard freezing went to waste. Thus the marlin was pure luck and we enjoyed every bite.A couple days later near the Socoro Islands, we were visited by the Mexican Navy. The Captain requested to send a boarding party over to examine our “papers” upon my respose that our papers are ready for his inspection, he kindly declined and wished us a pleasent voyage.
On our crossing we only saw two other ships. One was a Chinese tanker coming from New Orleans via the Panama Canal on to Korea. The other was a Chinese container ship coming from Austraila bound for Mexico. There were also a couple of Japanese long liner ships out for tuna, but the fear factor of a war ship or huge tanker/container ship vs. a fishing vessel is astronomical.
After the dolphin show and the Mexican Navy the Pacific Ocean did a strange thing. It turned into a placid lake. We were becalmed for nearly 6 days. The picture on the right […]
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