Congratulations to us!

We just closed a deal on a Seafarer 38. It is cutter rigged and needs some interior work, Ok, needs a lot of interior work. I am 6'3" and there is atleast another 3inches in the galley area. Don't have great pics yet. The Perkins 4-107 works, looks rough but works. We are pumped.

10 days

It has been 10 days since we last sailed.

Outboard motor issues.

The last day we went sailing, I tilted the engine up and unknowingly pinched two (2) wires off. effected repairs while bobing about to no avail. You would think I could connect the wires without any problems, right? Well you would be wrong.

The starter would not fully engage. Thought maybe the starter battery was low the wife suggested we hook it up to the house battery. Same result, an anemic spinning of the starter.

We sailed in to the fuel dock with several power boaters just watching, not one offer of assistance which I find mostly typical of the powered brethren.

Next day, with the help, (OK, he was the nautical driving force), of a friend we sailed the boat into our slip, though it took two attempts. Whe we pulled in, there was unasked help from, you guessed it, a real sailor. he recognized that a boat with its sails up approaching a dock might be in distress.

Sooo, now a day or three has passed during a massive heat wave and I'm thinking like a demon. The starter itself is now shot, I know, I know, the odds are long that two things could go wrong but remember, I am a genius....lol

I remove the flywheel with a puller, but boy oh boy was its nut ever on tight! The starter was a snap to remove but guess what? On the bench it worked like a charm! Some effing genius I am:(

So its back to the book and the wiring diagram. Somehow I must have screwed up big time as now the ignition smoked a bit. Just a bit. So, any day now I am going to haul that sumbitch motor out of its well and really look over the wring.

Any designer that designs a wellfor an outboard should be stuffed down said well head first. BTW, there was an awefull lot of cuss word at the marina this past week.

Oldsail repair kit.

I was visiting my wifes family in rural Nova Scotia, Canada this week and my Mother-In-Law gave me her fathers old navy sail repair kit. Some of the stuff is beyond my ken. Some I know, but I have no skills to use these puppies.

The first tribute to my navy trade!

This is the first tribute to my naval trade, Marine Engineer, (Stoker), that I have ever came across. We stokers worked in ridiculous heat, I seen with my own two eyes, a medic with a machine that measures environmental stress on the human body scramble out of the engine room when he took a gander at his readings. We stokers just muddled on. If you saw a stoker come off watch and his shirt was not plastered to his body, you knew he was skiving off somewhere.

When we not on watch, we had to respond to fires and dress up in fire fighting gear, and sweat your bag off once more. If there was a flood, we stood waist deep then chest deep in the water shouting measurements to our mates who were cutting wooden braces to stop the flooding. There was nothing delicate about my trade so it was very nice and surprising to hear about this monument.

http://watch.ctv.ca/news/top-picks/new-monument/#clip692455

A plethora of sailing days!

Four days of sailing in a row! Granted, two of those days were short sails, we sailed just to our favourite anchoring point and swim, but we sailed none the less. Imagine swimming in Lake Ontario in May! Unheard of. That is proof in the pudding that global warming is a fact. That and that I put $600 worth of snow tires on in November and we had maybe three snowfalls that might have warranted the purchase. In Canada. Wow.

So far that is a total of 13 days of sailing and the boat has been in the water for around 39 days. Not too bad.

It takes the wife and I less than three minutes to unhook the shore power and dock lines and be on our way.

Long weekeng of sailing and a rigging failure.

In the past 5 days we have been sailing on 4 of them! Only 2 minor glitches that marred an otherwise perfect stretch of days. On 2 of those days we sailed to anchoring points that we liked and basically picnicked on our boat all day, reading, drinking, eating and napping. It can be an easy life style to fall into.

The first glitch was that the starboard block for our jib sheet exploded! We have a multitude of spare blocks on board so it was an easy fix.

The second glitch needs a bit of background here. Here in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, most of us sailors stay in the Hamilton Bay as to get out to Lake Ontario proper you have to pass under a lift bridge that open at the top of the hour and the bottom of the hour.

Earlier this year a cable snapped on the bridge, trapping a couple of lakers (Large commercial freighters) in the bay until temporary repair could be made. Repairs were made and things seemed good.

Well, one day we decided to go on the lake so we approached the lift bridge at the bottom of the hour. It didn't lift. We putted around for another half an hour, again, no lift. We tried raising them on channels 12 and 16, no response. We know our radio works, we can hear and speak on it. So, here we are in a restricted waterway, limited maneuvering room and a snotty bridge operator to boot.

On the other side of the bridge an RCMP, (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, our national police force), marine unit approaches as we miss yet another bridge raising deadline. The cops hail the bridge and the bridge answers! The bridge tells the cops what time the bridge will lift, no explanation why it is so. The cops leave.

Eventually the bridge lifts, we do our thing and repeat the process coming back many hours later. After some investigating and phone calls we find out the cable wire repair was temporary and they will only lift 1 hour after the lift bridge was lowered so as to not overheat the repair job.

The thing is, when we, or anyone else tries to contact them, we identify ourselves as SV this, or MV that. The bridge only responds to commercial vessels. Assholes, and no, there is not a multitude of vessels trying to make radio contact. They are just assholes.

The road trip

Here is the boat, bow on. There is a lot of work to be done on her, which works out in our favour if and when it comes down to offer time.

I am 6' 3" and there is at least 3 more inches headroom in the galley/dinnette area. A plus considering my present boat has 5'6".

Boom roller furling, though I suspect it isn't used as it is also equiped with lazy jacks. The thing with this particular system is that the main wraps around the boom itself, which requires the removal of the boom vang. Good news is that it does spin freely.

Minimal, and I mean minimal electrical system on board. My Coronado 25 has better. Another plus in our favour.