A little bit broken down ………….

…….. not too badly broken but a little bit nonetheless.

We’ve had a really long run where nothing went wrong so we were overdue.  Yesterday morning at Prevost Harbor Marilyn tried to start the genset and nothing happened.  Being the “man” I assumed she was doing something wrong so I tried it and got the same results.  We normally remote start it from the cabin so I went down below and tried starting it directly from the control panel on the generator.  From there I could hear a solenoid click in when I hit the starter but the engine wasn’t turning over even a little bit.  That meant one of two things – bad batteries/connections or bad starter/solenoid. 

So I broke out the VOM and hooked it up to watch the voltage when I hit the starter.  The genset starts from its own battery which lives in a really ignorant location underneath the generator.  By standing on my head and shining a flashlight through a tiny hole I was able to determine that there was no untoward level of corrosion on the cables or connections.  When I tried the starter with the VOM connected there was hardly any fluctuation in the voltage at the starter so that pretty well ruled out cables, connections and batteries, leaving just the starter & solenoid.  That was pretty well what I had expected but I thought I should go through the troubleshooting before I got greasy taking the starter off.  I wasn’t even a little bit worried because we carry a spare, brand new, Mitsubishi gear reduction starter sporting a genuine Onan parts decal.

Of course to do any serious work on the Onan I have to pretty well completely disassemble the sound shield.  Once I got that out of the way the starter came off relatively easily and I got out the new Mitsubishi.  It fit easily into the hole and the nose cone looked right for the ring gear but it simply wouldn’t turn the last 2 or 3 degrees to line up the mounting bolts.  In a nutshell, its not the right starter for the block we have.  I spent a few minutes figuring out that I couldn’t reclock the nosecone on the Mitsubishi and a few more minutes taking apart the solenoid on the starter I had removed.  Once I got inside the solenoid there was no doubt why it wasn’t working.  The only real surprise was that it had been able to work at all.  I briefly toyed with the idea of boogeying up something with the old solenoid to get the genset running.  Probably if I had turned the contacts 180 degrees and shined up the plate that connects them I could have made it work a while longer but that seemed like a lot of work for very little gain.  The drive gear on the starter was badly worn and I have no idea how old the starter is but it was no virgin when we bought the boat close to 4 years ago now.  It is a Presolite starter and I don’t think the Prestolite brand even exists anymore.

So we opted to untie and head across to Sidney.  We had lots of battery to make breakfast and once we had the Lehmans running we had lots of power to make dinner.  By the time we landed at the Customs dock in Van Isle the batteries were back up to 100% and the water heater was hot.  We need the generator but we are by no means incapacitated without it.  By this time of the year the sun is getting high enough to deliver some serious charge off the solar panels.  We have been having uncharacteristically sunny weather lately which means we are getting some serious benefit from the solar panels. 

When we landed at Sidney the first order of business was to call Customs.  As has been our experience, they couldn’t be bothered to come down to the dock.  The guy yesterday must have been on commission though because he nitpicked over all our purchases in the US and actually charged us tax on the groceries that we declared.  When he asked if we had bought those groceries in the US I pointed out that we left with a full freezer and returned with one but that information seemed lost on him. 

After I got done paying tax on imported Corn Flakes I immediately got on the phone to find a replacement starter.  I haven’t seen the starter yet but I think I hit a home run on the first call.  Delta Marine is located in Westport which is the next bay over from our yacht club.  The parts guy at Philbrooks told me to call Delta and Rob who answered the phone sounded like he knew what he was talking about.  He had a rebuilder who he claimed could have a starter ready for me today but he wanted to see my old one first.  Given my experience with the Mitsubishi, which was sold to me as a replacement and turned out to not fit, I was pretty enthused about matching the housings too.  So we hustled over to the yacht club reciprocal dock and got tied up.  Then I unloaded the dinghy and headed over to Delta with the dead starter.  That was the first time we have had the dinghy in the water since getting back out here so of course it was extremely reluctant to idle.  I need to run some injector cleaner through it but by the time I got back from Delta it was running better although it still died shortly after I dropped to an idle. 

Today we’re in a holding pattern at the SNSYC reciprocal dock waiting for the rebuilt starter.  There’s a work party to do some spring cleaning at the yacht club tomorrow so we’ll wait for that too and then go back to Cow Bay tomorrow afternoon. 

Back in Anacortes ………………

…….. in the high rent neighbourhood.  This is what is parked directly in front of us. 

I don’t particularly like the looks of it and I’m damn glad I don’t have to pay his moorage, let alone his fuel bill.  I wouldn’t even want to guess what it might sell for – it looks pretty shiny.  We’re on a reciprocal dock so our moorage is zero dollars per night, paid for by our SNSYC membership.  There’s a great flurry of activity in the marina today – the sun is halfway out, its not raining and it is pretty warm so everyone’s thoughts are turning to getting their boats ready for spring.

This morning we got untied relatively early – I couldn’t sleep so I was up really early and Marilyn didn’t sleep in as late as she said she would.  We were entertaining guests onboard last night.  That happens pretty regularly on cruising boats.  You meet someone on the dock, invite them for drinks and end up visiting for several hours.  Last night it was a couple from Seattle in an Ocean Alexander and a young guy in a sailboat.  As we pulled up to the dock in La Conner, they materialized out of nowhere to take our lines.  I think we very rudely spurned their offer of assistance but they let on they didn’t notice.  We’re just so used to doing it alone and its really no big deal. 

La Conner has a bad reputation because there is always a current flowing through town but our slip was parallel to the water flow.  Current running lengthwise down the boat doesn’t really present much of a problem.  If its running crosswise to the pier you are trying to tie up to it can be more of a challenge.  Anyway, having blown off their help we felt compelled to go apologize and that morphed into appetizers. 

First we had to go shopping for a few staples.  Marilyn was out of flour which meant she was also out of bread.  She’s turned into a pretty damn good bread builder.  She uses a machine but sometimes she makes dough and sometimes she uses the machine to make a loaf.  Anyone who has ever run a bread machine knows they aren’t dead simple to operate.  Most people get frustrated with them and quit using them.  That’s how she got this one – someone didn’t use it so they gave it to the Thrift Store where she bought it. 

After she bought flour she was able to make cinnamon buns for our guests.  I made some garlic roasted mushrooms.  Evidently they both were a hit because we didn’t have much for leftovers.  Our guests arrived armed with a creamy spinach dip and some crackers so by the time we got wrapped around all the appetizers we didn’t bother with supper. 

We had to stop at the pooper pumper this morning.  Puget Sound is a no-discharge zone for sewage but they make it pretty easy by providing lots of pumpouts.  The whole subject of marine poop is extremely political with people holding strong views on both sides.  I have a bit of a philosophical problem with pumping our sewage into shoreside pumpouts which dump into municipal sewers which in turn dump directly into the ocean.  But we’re guests in the state so we do as they do, whether we think the practice makes sense or not.  On the Canadian side there’s lots of enviro-quacks who think we should pump our sewage but no pumpouts to pump it into so the decision is pretty well made for us there too.  In the big scheme of things I think there are a lot more serious environmental concerns than the shit that a couple of prairie dogs create in their 5 or 6 months of annual cruising.

By the time we got done pumping poop our guests from last night were untied and heading north up the Swinomish Channel so we just followed them to Anacortes.  The channel is a little shallower north of La Conner than it was south of town which is the exact opposite of what it was the last time we went through.  They need to dredge this channel about once every four or five years.  I think they had just dredged the channel north of town the last time we were through; at that time the south channel was really shallow.  They did the south channel in the winter of 2012-13.  It looks to me like the one north of town is going to need to be done pretty soon.  There was some big fight leading up to the dredging in 2012-13 because the Corps of Engineers refused to fund the dredging, as they had done in the past.  Their decision had something to do with the amount of commercial traffic that goes through the channel and it seems to me that the local communities ended up raising some or all of the money for the project.  The alternative to the channel is to take Admiralty Inlet on the outside of Whidbey Island and eventually follow Juan de Fuca, Rosario or Haro straits, depending on where you want to go.

That exposes boaters to a lot worse weather than the relatively sheltered trip up the east side of Whidbey Island and then out to Rasario through the Swinomish Channel to Anacortes.  When I think about it though, we really don’t see much commercial traffic on that whole inside route so if they’re who is paying the freight, there won’t be much commercial support for dredging.

Edit: Google came through on the tug: Evidently she is the Nautilus Swell.  According to this guy she was 100 years old in 2012.  Platypus is the yard that we hauled Gray Hawk at 2 years ago – this boat may have been there while we were there but if she was I certainly don’t remember her.

Leaving Seattle

We got an early start from Puget Sound Yacht Club Friday morning because we had a big day ahead of us.  As it turned out one of the biggest challenges of the whole day was winding our way through the flock of rowing sculls between Freemont and Ballard bridges.  Talk about taking your life in your hands.  There’s some serious boats go through that canal – boats that make Gray Hawk look like a dinghy.  And then here comes a bunch of clowns out there rowing.  Kayaking is bad enough but at least they look where they’re going.  Rowers sit ass backwards in their boats, can’t see shit for where they’re going and these clowns didn’t seem overly concerned.   Out of the whole works of them – maybe a dozen boats in total, some with 4 idiots rowing, I saw exactly one of them with one of those head mounted rearview mirrors that bicyclists sometimes use.  I had one clown that appeared determined to ram me until I blew the horn at him and most of the time we were in and out of gear and spinning the wheel from side to side to get through them.  I’m sure the commercial guys are a lot less concerned for their welfare.

Covich Williams, the Chevron dealer just inside the locks was our first stop.  We took on just a few gallons less than an even 500.  I think maybe we could have squeezed in the 500 if it had mattered but their volume break started at 400 gallons. Its really bad form to overflow your tanks – the EPA has no sense of humour about oil spills so we stopped just short of 500 gallons.

The total came to close to $1,600 US – I expect it will kick hell out of $2,000 by the time it clears our account in Nipawin.  When I did the miles per gallon calculation it came out to 1.47 nautical miles per US gallon.  I could make that sound better by converting it to statute miles (shorter miles) and using a real gallon instead of that wimpy ass thing the Americans use but no matter how you cut it, we don’t get great mileage.  And after well over three years, that’s what it is.  In the winter we burn extra diesel running the Webasto to keep warm and in the summer we burn extra diesel through the old Onan to keep the lights and stove working.  We probably get something better than 2 nautical miles to the US gallon when we’re underway but this whole adventure wouldn’t be much fun if we were freezing our asses off and hungry all the time.

Armed with full fuel tanks we tackled the locks again and this time they were a piece of cake.  We went through the small lock again – and all alone again.  There was some monster plastic boat sitting outside the locks when we pulled out of Covich Williams – I thought he must be waiting for the locks but after a while he just cut across the channel in front of us, turned around and buggered off.

Then we had an uneventful cruise north to Everett.  Uneventful is always our goal.  The occasional whale event would be pleasant but, in general, boring cruising is the best kind.

As we approached the entrance to Everett Marina we could easily see the warship in the foreground of this photo.  As we got closer though it became apparent that what initially appeared to be the background waterfront is actually an aircraft carrier.  Those things are immense – its hard to imagine just how big they really are until you are looking up at one from the water. 

Everett Marina is at the mouth of the Snohomish River so there’s a pretty fierce current flows through it at all times.  It took me by surprise as we approached the marina because I had throttled back to idle, as I always do, and couldn’t figure out why we were barely moving.  Getting through the entrance required some additional throttle followed by quick action to make the turn up toward our reciprocal slip.  Unlike Seattle, in Everett we had lots of room to tie up.  The evening turned out to be really pleasant – not quite warm enough for a glass of wine on the aft deck but we tried that for a few minutes anyway.

Yesterday we moved further north to La Conner, retracing our track from when we first moved Gray Hawk from Seattle to Sidney.  I didn’t have Chuck standing beside me as we entered the Swinomish Channel but I could have used him yesterday.  We had a really stiff breeze blowing out of Skagit Bay to the south of us.  It was blowing hard enough that I had to be crabbed about 30 degrees to the channel as we followed the range in.  That’s pretty hard on the nerves when you’re in a really narrow channel but you have the boat pointed out of it.  As you turn in at the west end of the channel there’s a couple of reefs that were just barely awash yesterday and our strong crab made it look like we were heading straight over top of them.  Fortunately we didn’t hit anything.  We had all the electronics turned on plus 2 pairs of eyeballs watching the world around us.  They’re still the best nav instruments on the boat – eyeballs that is.

Backing up in Seattle

There was a pretty wicked breeze blowing yesterday afternoon.  It got a lot worse overnight but it was howling pretty good by the time we got around to docking at Puget Sound Yacht Club. 

Calling what they have here a reciprocal dock is generous.  We sure appreciate the spot to tie up but its really marginal for our purposes.  REALLY marginal.  There’s probably less than 30 feet of dock available and we’re a minimum of 48 feet overall, likely closer to 50 feet.  If we could properly tie the bow off to somewhere that wouldn’t be insurmountable and I think we’re moderately secure but its by no means ideal.  I guess its “free” moorage (paid for by our annual SNSYC membership) so we’re getting what we pay for. 

The big problem when we arrived yesterday was this guy:

That’s a broken off “dolphin” or piling.  Its pretty ominous looking, despite the attempt to beautify and safen it by the addition of a flower pot and flashing light.  You can tell from the photo how close it is to our port side but what is harder to convey is how tight the space is between it and the boat immediately behind us.

When we first pulled up to look at our mooring I didn’t think I could squeeze between the broken off dolphin and the boat behind us so I attempted to back down on our mooring.  That’s doable on a calm day or even in a mild breeze but yesterday with 20+ knots blowing us directly off the dock there wasn’t a hope in hell of success.  I got close and then the bow fell off, I couldn’t hold it and I ticked the dinghy on a piling at the end of the dock.  I put a tiny bend in a piece of aluminum trim on the dinghy – invisible damage compared to the years of abuse our dinghy has suffered but enough to convince me that plan wasn’t going to work.

So we came around, went deep into the marina, spun the boat in the middle of the fairway and then crept between the monster in the picture above and the boat that is now behind us.  That went just fine, as I knew it would as long as we could get through the gap between boat and dolphin.  The marina host was out and about by that time so she came to get in the way while Marilyn was handling lines.  I continue to be amazed by how little some boaters actually know about line handling despite – as in her case – over 20 years of experience doing it.  Some people get better with experience and some people just get more experience at doing things the awkward or wrong way.  If you review back to the spring line drawing that I posted earlier this week and imagine some fool taking that spring line just barely FORWARD from the midship cleat then you will have a picture of what our host did.  She had grabbed that line away from Marilyn who assumed that meant she knew what to do with it.  I had to tell her three times to take it back and I think in the end she was offended by my tone.  I pretty well had my hands full using throttles and thruster to hold us against the wind so by that time I was more interested in results than tact.

Pineapple express alive and well

This screen capture from Weather Underground says it all:

That big conveyor belt in the sky has been hauling water up from the south Pacific for close to a week now and shows no signs of letting up.

Back in Seattle, virgins no more ….

…… lock virgins that is. 

On Monday we left Bremerton and headed across the Sound back to Seattle.  We thought we were headed to a yacht club on the north side of the canal by Ballard but at the last minute discovered that I had seriously effed up on the location.  It was in fact way down on the south end of Lake Washington.  We were freaked out enough about going through the locks – clearing under multiple bridges to get to some unknown location in Lake Washington was flat out of the question.  So we diverted to what was supposed to be a yacht club dock at Fisherman’s Terminal.  As it turned out when we got there the large woman in charge of moorage had no clue about the yacht club we were referring to.  But that was all ahead of us as we approached Hiram Chittendam locks.

Locking through was pretty much a non-event.  We hung out at the waiting point on the west side, just past the bascule bridge for probably 10 minutes.  They have multi-level bollards built into the wall so we just threw a spring line over one of the bollards and tied it off short to a mid-ships cleat. There’s a pretty stiff current runs past there – they are releasing a lot of water from the lakes and all that water had to flow past us as we waited.

I could tell the lock was getting ready to let us in because I saw the gates opening before they turned on the green light for us.  Once we got the green we just pulled into the small lock and tied off to the floating bollards.  Its pretty simple in the small lock because the bollards rise and fall with the level of the lock.  On the big side you have to send long lines up the sides and then tend the lines as you rise or fall in the lock.  Because we were in the small side we just tied off, waited for the boat to rise and the gates to open and then untied and moved out.  QED as father would have said.

This morning we untied at Fisherman’s Wharf and came under Ballard Bridge, then Fremont Bridge and finally Aurora Bridge which brought us into the top end of Lake Union.  We scouted out the location of Puget Sound Yacht club whose reciprocal dock will be our home for the next two nights and then did a very leisurely tour around Lake Union. 

Bremerton

On Friday afternoon we arrived in Bremerton to use our free moorage pass from the Seattle Boat Show.  Evidently someone in town realizes that tourists are important – that’s why they staffed a booth at the Boat Show and handed out coupons to induce us to come for a visit.  And it worked to get us here but I don’t think we’ll come back.  As so often happens in business, the promotion got us in the door but the follow through will keep us from coming back.

Now don’t get me wrong, Bremerton Marina is a lovely place.  Its one of the nicest marinas we’ve ever tied up in.  It is very reasonably priced – in addition to our free two day pass we paid for a day so we know what their rates are.  And they even had a “Bader – Reserved” sign stapled to our slip when we arrived – we’ve never had that kind of treatment.  The woman in the marina office was friendly enough but when we started asking about local facilities the train started to come off the rails.  She had no clue about where to buy groceries.  She was unaware of some other local businesses too but come on – groceries???  In a marina that is trying to attract transient boaters??? 

Since we’ve been here we’ve noticed that the marina is largely empty.  I’m sure the fact that their internet is constantly down isn’t the reason nobody is here but its annoying nonetheless.  We’ve been having a real run of boogy internet access this trip.  Yesterday Marilyn had a big file to upload so she went to the library where they advertise internet access.  “Oh no, its not working today and we don’t know when IT will get it fixed.”  So she went to a little coffee shop where random untalented singers entertained her while she uploaded. 

The most important reason we won’t likely come back though is that its a pretty boring downtown – what’s left of it.  In places like Anacortes, Roche Harbor, La Conner, Vancouver or Victoria there’s a vibrant downtown community with stores and/or entertainment in close proximity to the marina.  Here not so much.  A couple of coffee shops and several hotels is about it, as far as we can see anyway.

Right next door to Bremerton marina is the Puget Sound Shipyard and Maritime Maintenance …………….. I dunno the rest of it – the name is like a paragraph long.  Whatever the name, it appears to be the sole local employer.  Judging by the dolts we’ve seen wandering in and out its a heavily unionized environment.  And judging by the boarded up retail space in the downtown the shipbuilding activity has been severely curtailed in the last few years. 

The new Garmin system worked flawlessly on the way over.  I’m moderately puzzled by that – perhaps someone who reads this knows something about Cat 5 networking.  If so please help me understand what is happening.  We waited at Elliott Bay until the mailman arrived because he was delivering a couple of super dooper genuine Garmin Cat 5 modular network connectors.  I didn’t install them but I did read the directions.  I had actually given up on them arriving before we left so I used RTV to goober up the connections sufficiently to keep out rainwater.  Garmin has these really neat cable boots that include a locking ring complete with an o-ring to keep them watertight. In addition to the fancy weatherproof boot, they came with instructions for field installation which clearly indicated that the cables are to be wired as crossover cables.  That matches some of the anecdotes I read online – Garmin’s website is silent on the matter, at least as far as I can tell. 

The problem I have is that, when I bought the cable, it was a straight through cable which I intended to cut the end off of in order to pull it through some tight spaces.  I didn’t bother looking for a crossover cable because I reasoned that I could simply attach the new end that I was going to put on anyway as a crossover.  However, once I got the cable back to the boat, I figured I might as well hook everything up to try it out and when I did that, with the intact straight through cable, the system worked just fine.  My reaction at that point was “Oh well, the internet anecdotes are therefore wrong – no surprises there.” and I went ahead and hooked the radar up with a straight through cable.

So now I’m thoroughly puzzled.  Based on internet anecdotes and Garmin’s own assembly instructions, my installation is wrong.  But it appears to be working.  In the short term I’m going to leave it the hell alone but it will no doubt bother me until I get to the bottom of it.  Some of what I’ve read suggests that I need a crossover cable if the MFD connects directly to the radar and a straight cable if I have a router in between the two devices.  But we don’t have a router in that network so that theory doesn’t help me.

Our voyage to Bremerton started out along the same path that we took on our very first trip in Gray Hawk.  We recognized the marker buoy that held the basking sea lions three years ago and sure enough, there was a sea lion on it again.  It was the same route but it felt very different.  This time we docked in a seriously stiff breeze that had been bossing me around as we worked our way through the marina.  I was worried about holding the boat against the dock while Marilyn got off but everything went well with no incidents.  Three years ago my approach was point and pray – this time I actually had some clue what I was doing.  As I recall we had a dead calm day three years ago – the wind we had on Friday would have seen us bouncing off boats all the way down the fairway.  Having a clue doesn’t guarantee success but I think it helps.

We use a long midships spring line for virtually all our docking situations.  Its such a simple system and we rarely see anyone use it.  Occasionally we will run into someone who claims to use a spring line but often they are clueless about how to best use one so I’m going to post instructions here.  Not that we’ve such great boating experts but this system simply works so its worth putting it out there.

Three things to note:

• The rudders are hard over AWAY from the dock
• The spring line leads from a midships cleat and attaches to the dock well aft.  I’ve shown it attaching behind the boat but that’s not necessary.  What I often see though is people leading a “spring line” directly from the boat to the closest cleat on the dock.  That doesn’t work.
• the drawing doesn’t show it but at least one engine is engaged.  Depending on wind I will try to use the engine away from the dock to avoid the chance of a dropped line getting picked up in the prop closest to the dock.  If the wind is strong though that won’t be possible because the outside engine will tend to counteract the rudder action. 

When we approach the dock Marilyn has the spring line attached to the midships cleat and coiled beside her.  She is sitting at the exit on whichever side we are docking, ready to step off immediately when the boat is stopped next to the dock.  Even with a stiff breeze blowing us off the dock, if I approach at about a 30 degree angle to the dock, the turning momentum of the boat will easily put us solidly against the dock at least momentarily.  The trick then is for me to stop the boat completely once it touches the dock and for Marilyn to promptly step off the stationary boat, before it drifts away from the dock.  If the wind is strong, we will almost immediately start to drift away from the dock.  I can counter that somewhat with power against the rudders hard away from the dock (that holds the stern to the dock) and countering the turn away from the dock with bow thrust toward the dock.  As I found out in Nanaimo a month ago though, under the wrong conditions I simply can’t hold us for long.  In that situation we had backed into the slip so I didn’t have any forward momentum to initially pin us to the dock.

If all goes well Marilyn steps off and promptly ties off the spring line well aft.  At that point it simply doesn’t matter how long or hard the wind blows.  Once that spring line is attached I can simply tighten up against it and we aren’t going anywhere, at least until we run out of fuel.  The rudders and props hold the stern pinned to the dock and the spring line keeps the bow from swinging out.  I generally stay at the helm but if need be I can leave a prop turning and go forward to handle lines.

It is important to note that all of the above can be accomplished at a dead idle.  I view it as a failure if I use throttle anywhere in the above manoeuvring except for a brief burst of power to quickly stop us against the dock.