First days

Today feels like our first real day living aboard Cupcake. We moved out of the house, handed the keys over to the tenants, walked down the steps to the beach, and sailed away from the mooring on Monday. Anchored about two miles from the house in thin fog. When we awoke on Tuesday we were in thick fog but still needed to get back to shore to take Moss to an appointment at the orthodontist. 

We had forgotten we needed a vehicle. We had forgotten we needed the child’s headgear. We had forgotten about the boat/shore logistics involved. Ellen didn’t want to bother launching the dinghy and motor from on deck, so Moss and I got Cupcake as close to shore as the low tide would allow, and Ellen jumped in and swam to the house towing a dry bag with her wallet, towel, and change of clothes (Turns out the 20 year old dry bag leaked. Not so dry after all.)

Ellen got the truck and drove to the boatyard (Brewer South Freeport Marine) where Moss and I met her to load the final big bunch of gear aboard. Turned out there were no moorings available for rent but a buddy of Simon’s is letting us use his family mooring for the time being. Thank you Christian!

While the girls were doing shore projects, I stayed aboard and tried to solve the Rubiks Cube puzzle of where to stow everything. (My father’s expression is “trying to stuff 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound sack.”) Then the thunderstorms moved in with their rain and wind. The awesome staff at Brewer was willing to deliver Moss and Ellen back to the boat in the afternoon, despite the rough weather.

For lunch, we learned how to roll sushi. Delicious. Had it again today.

Because of the storm, we decided it was prudent to abort dinner plans with our friends Jim and Sherry. Nevertheless, Simon came to visit us in the evening and the four of us had tacos together. 

So Tuesday didn’t feel normal. It felt hectic. And damp. We did watch The Incredibles on the laptop in the evening. Yay Pixar!

But now it is Wednesday. I had a dentist appointment this morning, we ran a few errands, and then we spent the afternoon aboard together getting used to life on a boat again. Ran the watermaker, discovered the source of the unpleasant odor in the aft lazarette, made more sushi. The solar panels were generating. And boy was the wind blowing.

In the evening we went to the local old car show at the Mainely Custard. Saw some lovely cars including a super cool Sunbeam Tiger. The interior was great and I particularly liked the sweet two spoke, banjo steering wheel and the 13” Panasport wheels. Nice.

After some hamburgers and ice cream, Moss and I met up with Simon and had a second dinner with him at Little Tokyo in Brunswick. Simon has been connecting with us pretty regularly and it’s nice to spend these little bits of time together with our favorite boy.

That’s the update. I’ll be uploading this at Brewer, probably with pictures, when we go ashore Thursday morning. The plan is to go for a run in the morning, wash some cars and get them ready for their 12-month hibernation, and maybe spend a little time in the woodshop finishing some projects.

Anchor news

After too much discussion, Ellen and I decided that a bigger, higher tech, heavier anchor was a good idea for us. Of course the 35 pound Delta we’ve been using for the past six years has never let us down. And lots of people think the 150’ of chain we shackle to the anchor is overkill, even without a 45 pound Mantus. In any event, we will give this thing a try on Monday night after we move aboard. It’s been a busy few weeks. 

Smile for the camera?

Moss and Simon are sitting on the boom. Simon is mustering up about as much of a smile as he can. He is sad because we are leaving home and he will miss us. He does not express this sentiment in words, he expresses it in non-verbal ways. Just ask Moss. (But don't ask her this week because she is off at summer camp getting her fill of fresh-water fun in the Adirondacks.)

Seriously though, what is seldom seen on cruising blogs like this is how difficult it is to cut ties with loved ones ashore. Ellen and I have made a point, over the past several months, of going to every wedding, family gathering, awards ceremony, dog and pony show that we can so we are able to spend time with our friends and family. We will miss them all and hope they will miss us at least a little.

Our departure date is coming up much faster than we would like. (How's that for ironic? Spend all winter dreaming about sailing away, when summer hits, there's no reason to sail away.)

We need to be out of the house by July 16. In-between now and then we must clean the house and put our clothing and valuables in storage so the tenants can move in. Then we have two weeks on the boat in Freeport while I wrap up some last minute work obligations. We set sail as soon as the weather cooperates after July 26.

In other news I installed a new mast boot last week. It's a big sheet of rubberized butyl-type tape. Went on clumsily and leaked like a sieve. I don't really know why I switched from the tried and true big hose clamps and strip of truck inner tube that has worked faithfully without leaking for the past several years. I reinstalled the old truck tire yesterday afternoon and will see if it leaked when I get out to the boat tomorrow. Big gear upgrade tomorrow also. Stay tuned.

Brother Jeff and sister-in-law Eileen are visiting us this weekend. Poor Eileen is all banged up from a bike accident so I don't think we will be doing any sailing. 

Upholstery

So did you hear about the guy who fell into an upholstery machine last week?

He's fully recovered.

Ellen did some fine work recovering the cushions in the cockpit so I scrubbed the fiberglass free from several seasons of accumulated grime. Looking sharp.

Weather fax

A few weeks ago I learned about weather fax. We used a little shortwave receiver listen to Chris Parker's Bahamas weather broadcasts for sailors in 2012 when we were in the Bahamas. But it has been a while since I used that radio and I wanted to start practicing and thinking about what our shortwave-needs were likely to be over the coming year. 

After talking with my friend Tom Budka* I decided to try running a wire up the mast to connect to the radio. The radio came with a wire that, six years ago, I used to string up on a flag halyard each evening so I would be ready at 6:30am to hear the Bahamas forecast. Reception was generally somewhere between "staticky as can be" to "actually that's very good," but at all times the system was the essence of jury-rigged.

In an attempt to improve quality of the reception and ease of daily set-up, last week I ran a wire from the second spreader, with enough slack to run down the mast, under the cabin sole, and into the portside cabinet in the v-berth (that's where the radio listening happens in the morning). When the mast was stepped on Monday I pulled the end of the antenna wire through the secret spaces of Cupcake using a cleverly and previously installed messenger string.

Tomorrow I will get aboard to try out the reception.

What I'm particularly interested in trying is receiving weather faxes.  (My instinct is to type "weatherfaxes" as all one word. The autocorrect doesn't seem to think that's the correct way, and I'm not going to spend the next 12 months fighting that grammar battle. Plus, I'm probably wrong anyway.)

So tonight I tested a couple of applications for receiving and displaying weather fax images on the iBook. After a bit of previewing, I ended up purchasing the alluringly-named HFFAX for $8.99. The program (itself as bare-bones as a weather fax) listens through whatever input source I specify (headphone jack in my case) and if I feed it weather fax sounds from the shortwave receiver, it will generate a greyscale image of the raw weather data broadcast by NOAA (transmitted at specific times on specific frequencies for specific areas of the world).

I ran a test using as input some prerecorded weather fax audio I found on youtube. Although not coming from the radio, this input let me test the system and experiment with settings. The results are astounding to me. I know the sound I used was super clean, nothing like the shortwave I anticipate receiving, but the fact that the whistles of a fax machine played over the radio can be turned into an image with crucial weather information when we are not connected to the rest of the world by internet or cell phone or even VHF seems magical.

This is what my iMac drew when it heard the dolphin squeaks from youtube.

This next image is what a shortwave-to-HFFAX looks like on the site that sells the software I bought (blackcatsystems.com). As soon as I get a weather fax image of my own, I will post it. Might be a few weeks though, so please...try to contain yourself/selves.

*Tom and I met in third grade, he holds a PhD in electrical engineering, and he designs tiny antennas for a living. The last time we saw him he gave us a little device that detects radiation leaking from microwave ovens. Sells them for $20 each to the tinfoil-hat types.

Home waters

Cupcake had her mast stepped yesterday. After bending on the sails, I brought her home. I was pleased to see her make 6.5 knots through the water in about 15 knots of breeze. That's with just the genoa flying and the dinghy dragging behind. 

In other news, the dinghy engine hoist I installed (easy-peasy) works great. I was able to get the motor from dinghy to mother ship by myself and then from mother ship back to dinghy by myself (although in a bouncy mooring field it was a challenge I would prefer to have some help with in the future).

For those of you keeping score, the hoist is a Nova Lift II by Forespar. 

One mystery I encountered is that the masthead light shows red, green, and white instead of just white. Don't really understand how three wires, properly connected, can give such a different result from last year. But I'll get to the bottom of it all. It is supposed to show white at anchor and colors underway but I didn't flip the underway switch. Curious.

The boat doesn't leak any saltwater. And after yesterday evening's heavy thunderstorm and rain, I was pleased today to see there were no wet cushions or wet portholes, so the rebedded portlight seems to be doing well. There was some rainwater in the bilge. No big deal.

Launched and Loaded

Cupcake was launched last week. Right now she is floating at the dock at Brewer's South Freeport Marine waiting to have her mast stepped.

We spent the weekend loading the boat and chipping away at projects. Got the head fully installed, including the exhaust fan. The tricky bit about that exhaust fan is that the little fan (a computer fan, I think) is designed to sit in a manifold right under the dorade. My concern was that any spray or moisture would quickly kill the fan. So I figured out a way to mount the fan well inboard of the thru-hull exhaust port I put into the transom.

I've run a vent line from the transom thru-hull to a bulkhead in the aft-lazarette, and the fan manifold attaches there. Since the hose from thru-hull goes up before it goes down to the fan housing, the theory is that any water will run out and not in. We will see how that works out. In the meantime, I am ordering a replacement fan, just in case.

At this point in the preparations, it is standard practice for cruisers to show a shot of the crowded interior and say something like "I don't know where we are going to put all this stuff." We are actually pretty sure we know where everything will go, and we are pretty sure it will all fit. The last time we went on a multi-month voyage, we had one additional person, lots of unnecessary equipment (eg. four anchors, two of which had no rode or place to be stored other than a hanging locker), and no idea about all the hidden spaces aboard. I've opened up previously inaccessible space aft of the aft cabin, we don't have a holding tank, and we will be storing non-perishables in the bilge.

Nevertheless, here is one obligatory crowded-boat pictures as well as a shot of an un-crowded cabin and a shot of truckload #1 of 4 (and the Angus sticker Simon slapped on the bumper).

Also you can see the new cushions in place. Ellen noticed that only some of the cushions hav the new foam we requested (and paid for). She thinks when the inmates did the work, they used new foam when a supervisor was watching but used old foam when nobody was watching. Ellen now has a dim opinion of convict labor. She is also going to call the prison and demand a discount.

Nitty-gritty

Ok, if you are checking on the site to see pictures of cocktails and sunsets, you're going to have to wait about two months.

If you are looking for down and dirty maintenance and repair details, you have come to the right place. Here are, literally, the nuts and bolts of the hardware installation I just finished.

To install new hardware in the deck (I decided the winch on the starboard side of the cabin needed to move so the new clutches would fit) I drilled out the holes with a bit bigger than the 1/4" bolts used to hold the parts to the boat. Then I filled those holes with epoxy (the cabin top is perhaps the one place on the boat where the fiberglas core is actually still dry). Then I marked the holes and drilled them for the 1/4" stainless steel bolts.

Then I made a template showing where the bolts came through into the cabin so I could cut and drill stainless steel backing plates. Then I put the whole thing together with bedding compound so nothing leaks.

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Home stretch

We are on the first of what is likely to be a whole lot of home stretches. This one is the home stretch before launch...maybe launch happens Tuesday maybe Wednesday. Hard to say. In any event Ellen has been soldiering away at the starboard deadlight where we think the last leak is coming from. (And we know there is no such thing as a last leak on a boat. This one is the last leak for now.) She has been scraping and peeling and scrubbing, and huffing VOCs. The parts are cleaned off so tomorrow we can rebed things in the hopes of sealing this source of unwanted water.

Looks ugly now, but once the caulking and trim piece are back in place, and once the deck has been scrubbed and waxed it's going to look fantastic. And be dry.

In other projects, I got the transom finished today when I installed the name and port of call. Also got the new "PEARSON 36" vinyls installed on the sides. Looking good. (Special thanks to Super Jill for her prowess with the printer. She made the numbers for the rubber dinghy. You will see those in plenty of shots once the rubber dinghy gets launched.)

After putting the name on the boat (stressful stuff keeping everything centered and leveled) Ellen and I got the swim ladder back on. We had it welded since it's been rusty and failing since getting whacked by an errant sailboat in Bimini, Bahamas in 2012.

We went with two colors this time around. It's not so obvious in the photo, but "CUPCAKE" is blue with a black outline. The boat shed is starting to get on my nerves. Today it was evident that some cat used a nearby part of the building as a litterbox. Reminds me why we are not sailing with a cat.

Moon Cracker

Finally got the little sweetie finished. Simon helped me pull her out into the sunlight for the first time in three years so we could make sure the rig works. Probably take her sailing this weekend.