Nip, Tuck, and Varnish

I've mentioned before that Sabine's getting refitted this winter. She's been in the shed at our winter marina getting sanded, varnished and painted.

Here is the taff rail that goes round back of the boat, and gives her that "Pirate ship" look.

This is looking toward the bow of the boat. See all that shiny wood? That's all been freshly varnished. Puuurrrrrr.....

This is the hatch right over our bed. When it rains it leaks because the wood trim wasn't sealed. When the rain started, we had to scramble onto the cabin top with trash bags and bungee cords to waterproof the hatch so we could sleep. As much fun as that was, I am glad it's sealed now.

This is the trim along the edge of the cockpit.

The edge of the cockpit. You can see how the wood trim goes all the way around.

This is the bow. That motor-y thing in the middle is our decrepit anchor windlass. It's broken. For the last few seasons our windlass was Todd. He doesn't particularly care for hauling anchors out of mud. This season we will replace this crappy windlass with one that actually works.

This is a skylight that is over our dining table. It leaked. A lot. We were never able to take advantage of the light that came through it because it leaked so badly. A few seasons ago we gave it the trash bag bungee cord treatment. Not anymore. The guys from the marina adhered a rubber gasket to the skylight so it will be water tight.

Mmmm.... skylight. Light below deck is important, because our windows are quite small in the main cabin of the boat. I can't wait to not have trash bags on this anymore.

Summer can't come fast enough.

Splash!

Ladies and gentlemen! Behold! Sabine is in the water. She went in today, and she is not leaking. She happily sits at the dock, and it's likely that tomorrow we'll take her to her summer home, a mooring in Greenwich Cove, RI.

This is Sabine in the slings on the travel lift. This bit of machinery is the dream of every man, as it is controlled by a remote control. They lower the boat, which is held in place by the slings, into the water. Then when the boat is all the way in the water they pull the slings out and the boat is left floating. In the last 10 years I've seen the boats we've owned launched with a travel lift at least 10 times, and it never ceases to amaze me.


This little propeller moves the whole boat, that is when the sails aren't doing it.

This is the fix that the fabulous men of Brewer's Marina in Cowesett did. You can see the stern tube toward the top of the picture, in the center. Then they poured fiberglass resin over the tube to seal it in there. In a boat you have to be creative with your space. All this stuff, the stern tube, the black exhaust tube at the bottom of the picture and whatever else is in there that I cannot identify with words other than "thingy" all sits under the bed that Todd and I sleep on. Between the stern tube and the bed is a compartment that holds six batteries as well--these batteries are what makes cold beer in the fridge, lights at night, and running water when we want to brush our teeth.

The shiny substance in this picture is ocean. Ocean beneath the boat. Not in the boat, beneath the boat--this distinction didn't exist last summer.

Sabine at her temporary slip.

All we need to do now is finish cleaning the interior, flush the antifreeze out of the water system, change the oil in the engine, and move to our mooring.

Can I get a hell yeah?

Cracked

I had mentioned before about how Sabine is sinking, how we’ve been steadily taking on water and how it’s been getting worse and worse over the years. Over the years we’ve been trying to isolate the problem, and still had the bilge fill with water over and over, and we pumped hundreds, maybe thousands, of gallons of water out of the boat in the 6 years that we’ve had this boat.

At a party last month, our friend Cap’n Paul told us to fill the bilge with water from the hose and see where it leaks out, with the logic that if it’s getting in it’s got to get out. Before committing the counter-intuitive act of filling out boat with water there was one spot we hadn’t checked—the propeller shaft.

The prop shaft connects the inboard engine to the propeller—to do that it resides in a tube that penetrates the hull called the stern tube. The stern tube’s point of penetration through the hull is higher than where we would have filled the boat with water, so it is entirely likely that we would not have seen the leak if we filled the boat with water as water only runs downhill. On a lark we asked the mechanics at the boat yard to pull out the prop and shaft and check it out. When they did that last week they saw that the stern tube is literally crumbled into pieces.

At the moment the guys at the yard are ripping out the old stern tube and replacing it with a new one. If all goes well the work will be done by the end of the week and she’ll be in the water again for the weekend. Hopefully this weekend I’ll be aboard cleaning in preparation for the 4th of July, and putting all of our cushions aboard while Todd is in the engine compartment changing the oil and our sailing season will be salvaged after all.

3-2-1 Contact!

Sorry, I’ve been very neglectful of my blog. But as always I can explain. See, I am starting the new job on Monday and it was my goal to finish writing my book before I start the job and I did it! I finished the book yesterday afternoon.

I haven’t talked about the book here because I don’t want to turn into one of those bloggers who shamelessly promotes the living hell out of my book should it ever get published. I think it’s inevitable that some promotion happen, I mean I would want people to buy it, but I don’t want to be annoying about it. So anyway, I’ve written a fictional book, and now I need to print it all out, settle down and read it and make a few more edits, and then I’ll be ready to start querying literary agents and see if I can net one that can sell the book. So, this last week it’s been all-book-all-the-time in our house. As a result I’ve largely given up on the endless “settling in” process that happens when you move house, and it also looks like a bomb went off in our house as it’s now filthy where I live.

:::

Today we spent the day at the boat, getting it ready for launch. I have mentioned in past posts about Sabine’s leak and how we’ve been attempting to isolate the source of the leak, and in the process jacked up our electrical system. Well, the electrical was a quick and cheap fix today, and then tomorrow we’ll lay down some fiberglass inside the bilge so we can seal up any holes in there. During the week we’ll replace the depth sounder, which has a crack in it. Hopefully this will do the trick and Sabine will be floating at her mooring by the end of next week. Conveniently said mooring is a only a few blocks away from my new job, so I will have a very short commute on the nights when we stay aboard.

:::

We left the dogs home while we were at the boat, because the temperature has been in the 90’s today. Normally we’d take them along, but leaving them in the truck would have been way too uncomfortable (and deadly) for them, and because the boat is in dry dock right now, it would be impossible to carry a 70 lb Labrador up a ladder. Since we’ve lived here we’ve been leaving them in our vacant master bedroom (which we’ll start renovating in the fall, so we didn’t bother to move our bedroom furniture in there) because there’s nothing for our mischievous dogs to get into in that room while we’re out. Today we decided to let the dogs have the run of the house.

In our old house we couldn’t let the boys have run of the house while we were out because Griffen learned how to open the fridge and help himself to the contents. In the new house we have a side by side fridge and freezer. The handles are higher, so we figured that Griff wouldn’t be able to open it.

Boy, were we wrong.

While we were out Griffen grew a thumb and opened the freezer. He helped himself to a pound of frozen ground turkey, whatever was left of the peas and a package of brats. Of course the styrofoam and cellophane packaging was strewn all over the house, licked clean.

Looks like they’ll be banned to the bedroom for the rest of their lives.

“Just Fill it With Water--if Water’s Coming in, it Will Also Go Out…”

This was our friend Captain Paul’s advice when we told him about Sabine’s leak at a party on Saturday night. Monday we headed over to the marina to take Paul’s advice. Over the winter we had the full soda blasted so that the paint, the gel coat and all the stuff that makes fiberglass watertight was stripped away, so we hoped that the entry point of the leak would be more obvious.

The thing about boats like ours is that there are several points at which plumbing and other accessories penetrate the hull below the waterline—which means that at each point where these fittings go through the hull is also a point where there is potential for leak. We have through hull fittings to accommodate the fresh water intakes for the inboard diesel engine and the diesel generator. There are also through hulls for the sink drains, shower drain, and the keel mounted cooling plate for the refrigerator. Also, the depth sounder, and speedometer are mounted through the hull, below the waterline as well.

Over the course of trying to diagnose this leak, we never noticed any wetness near the through-hull fittings. We also never noticed any abnormal leaks near where the propeller shaft enters the boat on its way from the propeller to the engine. (Seeing a few drops there is normal.) We have long suspected that the water is entering the boat through the keel, which is the big heavy part under the boat that keeps the boat upright and helps the boat move forward even if the wind is coming from the side. We have never been able to be completely sure that the water is entering through some unseen crack or hole in the very bottom of the bilge. (The only way either of us has been able to actually touch the bottom of the bilge is if we do a handstand in it. And honestly, it’s such a stinky place who the hell would want to do a handstand in there, let alone put a face down there?)

We inspected the hull before we laid out the hoses to fill the water. We noticed that there are thousands of pin holes in the fiberglass which may or may not have contributed to the leak. We also noticed that there is a crack in the wooden mount for the depth sounder which also could have contributed to the leak. While these are certainly interesting observations the only way we’d know for sure is if we can get water to run out of the boat.

The next thing we did, before actually committing the counter intuitive act of filling the bilge in our boat with water, was to test the bilge pump to ensure that we could get the water out of the boat after we complete our experiment. We plugged an extension cord into the shore power inlet, and Todd fiddled about with the electric panel and discovered that we couldn’t get the bilge pump to run off of shore power, and we didn’t have enough battery power remaining to power the pump.

Before it ever got started, our experiment ended with an electrical issue that is now another item on the to-do list. And this, my friends, is the story of our lives with a boat restoration—you start one project just to unwrap the need to complete some other task that is peripherally related to the first project.

And now, on to repair the electrical mystery.

Detouring to this Blog’s Intended Use

Back in 2004 Todd opened this blog so that we could talk about boat restoration. The followsabine.com site was originally intended to be all about our sailboat, Sabine. Then I got bit with the blogging bug, and I went and girled up the joint. I still talk about sailing adventures, because it’s such a big part of our lives, but I haven’t really gotten into talking about the finer points of the boat projects that we’ve done over the last 4 years that I’ve been doodling on this blog.

It’s Memorial Day weekend here in the US, which is the unofficial start of summer and the start of boating season. In the past we have scrambled in the weeks leading up to Memorial Day weekend trying to get Sabine ready for a weekend long trip to Newport, Jamestown or even Block Island.

This year we didn’t bother trying to get the boat into the water for Memorial Day weekend, and debated as to whether we’d even put her in at all this season. As you know, we’ve moved house and there are numerous projects around the house we’d like to complete that will get it closer from being an awesome house to our dream house. Over the years we’ve also had a mysterious leak on Sabine, which has only gotten steadily worse over the years until last year when the bilge would constantly fill with water to the point where we were sure it would sink unless we pumped the bilge almost every single day.

We have hunted high and low for the source of this leak, and haven’t found a reasonable explanation other than gnomes boarding the boat and peeing excessively into the bilge. (But the quantity of beer in the fridge hasn’t inexplicably decreased, so we promptly ruled this explanation out. Still, it’s an interesting theory.) We hauled the boat out of the water over the winter, with the intent of investigating the matter further.

Over the entire winter we were saddled with a dilemma. The worst case scenario for the source of the mystery leak is a cracked stern tube—this is the tube that penetrates the boat so that the propeller shaft can extend from the inboard engine, through the hull to the propeller. Replacing a cracked stern tube is way out of our collective boat restoration skill set, and to hire the boat yard to do it would cost roughly the equivalent of a brand new exotic sports car from Italy. (Maybe. Depending on the kind of car we’re talking. Are we talking about a Fiat or a Ferrari? I am thinking more Fiat than Ferrari.) The best case scenario is that the leak is coming in through a fitting that needs to be sealed better, or that it is coming in through the actual fiberglass of the hull, which will mean sealing the hull with epoxy.

So the dilemma is do we get the stern tube replaced and forego the house projects, or do we not launch the boat and do the house projects? To further complicate the dilemma, I was unemployed all winter, and our household has less discretionary income to spend on such an expensive boat repair, or home renovation for that matter.

Not only is the expense adding to the dilemma, it’s the actual time it would take to do these repairs. Will we be spreading ourselves too thin over all the things we enjoy doing in the summer because chasing down this leak will consume us if we do not find it? But then, I cannot imagine a summer without sailing. It’s what we do, and it’s what we love.

At some point over the long holiday weekend we will thoroughly inspect Sabine’s hull, and go over all the entry points that penetrate the hull to see if we can find a source of a leak. If we can find something that we suspect caused this leak, we will determine what it will take to patch it and launch the boat. If we cannot find it, we won’t launch.

By Tuesday we’re hoping that the winter long dilemma will end.

Derailed. Kind of.

We had a few goals for the weekend, and I don’t think we accomplished a single one of them. But that’s OK, we still had fun anyway.

Friday night we went for a sail. I don’t think we set out until 7 or 8 PM, and we came back around 11PM. We love night sailing on Narragansett Bay, because we pretty much own the bay at that hour of night. It’s very peaceful, and a great way to end a work week Or a work day for that matter.

I brought the boat up to the mooring while Todd picked up the mooring lines that we tie to the boat. Usually it’s the other way around, Todd drives and I pick up the lines. But we’ve been trying to cross-train me on the boat lately. I don’t mind getting to try something different, but I am often afraid of making a mistake. Our boat weighs something like 32,000 pounds, it doesn’t turn on a dime, and could do some serious damage if it got away from me at the helm. Luckily we got tied onto the mooring without any trouble, and my knuckles didn’t get too white while I held onto the wheel.

Saturday morning I ran the 5K race. I finished in 31:49, and stopped twice to walk. Overall the course was flat, but the last half of it was on the bike path, and in the hot sun. At that point I had walked. The whole race I watched an elderly man way ahead of me who did not stop once. So, here I am at 33 stopping to walk, and there was that man at a million years old who hauled ass all the way to the finish line. I think I need to get into better shape.

After the race we intended to get some work done on the boat, and we didn’t do any of it for one reason or another. The parts we needed were in a store that had closed for the day before we got there. You know, things like that. Saturday night we took our friends Sean and Heidi out for a sail. We sailed for about 5 hours, and covered about 40 miles. It occurs to me that I can jog faster than my boat can sail. So, forget about the self-esteem hit that happened at the race where I was outrun by an elderly man.

Sunday morning we woke up with the best of intentions to get work done. We got our parts, we went out to the boat. Our friend Garrett the yacht rigger came over to have a beer and distract us. The sun was hot, and we decided our time was better spent swimming. We put on our suits, piled the dogs into the dinghy and cruised by Tonya and David’s boat, and convinced them to go swimming too. Then it started to rain, so we went back aboard to wait out the rain.

The rain stopped, we decided to get some work done, when we realized we’d forgotten the cordless drill. We went ashore to go home and get it when we saw our friend Chocolate Dave launching his boat at the boat ramp. We stopped to help him get his boat to his mooring, then set out to work again when we realized that all the adhesive we’d brought to finish this project had hardened. We decided that getting this project done wasn’t meant to be, and our time would be better spent eating Chinese food. Then we learned that Dave’s boat had a leak, and we helped him get it out of the water.

OK, so to sum up. Outrun by an old guy, went sailing, did no boat work, still live in my house and not on my boat, and now I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

Before and After

Sorry for the delay in writing. Todd and I have been ridiculously busy. I know I also have not posted the newest installment of the CT River trip either. This time around I wanted to post pictures, and haven't been near my home computer for long enough to get the pictures off of it and upload them here.

So, ridiculously busy at what? Well, this time of year we're always running around trying to get the boat in the water. There's always some huge restoration project we're trying to finish up before she goes in. Well, this year we ripped out the floors in the main salon of the boat. Then we discovered that some of the supports underneath were rotted, so we had to slather fiberglass resin here and there to make them strong again.

The floors feel great now. Nice and solid. Though I need to varnish them to protect them. Right now they are still bare wood. I went out and bought a new pair of shoes that I keep in the boat as clean shoes so I won't drag dirt onto my brand new floors too. Someday soon I will get to wear those shoes outside the boat. I am already fantasizing about where I will wear them.

At any rate. Here are the before and afters:

Before. We ripped out the table, which belongs where the two holes are. Then we pulled out the rotted parquet. I thought I had actually liked the parquet. Until I saw the after picture, that is.

After.


The boat's in the water now. So all we have to do is finish the oil change on the engine and generator, varnish the floors, put the booms and sails on, clean, and bring out the cushions and we'll be ready to move aboard again.