Summer boat chores (to prep for a crazy winter!)

Now that we have been back at the boat we have been busy knocking out routine maintenance and also getting ready to put the boat on the hard for the year. It's weird for a lot of reasons, but one of the most striking is that since moving aboard in 2009 we have NEVER had to winterize the boat and now we will have to!

We kicked things off with a solid flushing/de-jellyfishing of the air conditioning system. It's a constant battle here in the lower Chesapeake Bay, but a/c is soooo nice!

A VERY clean strainer; the "to-do" post-its; picking up packages and parts with my partner.

Some of the other boaty things we've done:
- changed engine oil filter, fuel filters, Racor filters, v-belt, impeller, cleaned intake strainer
- changed transmission oil
- flushed and replaced coolant
- conducted outboard maintenance and lay-up
- topped off batteries
- lubed shaft seal
- washed and waxed the deck and cockpit

- applied a coat of Semco seal to the teak
- polished stainless steel
- cleaned the dinghy

Teamwork makes the dream work! The kid crew has been SUPER helpful in our endeavors!

A cleaned/waxed/sealed cockpit!

This next week will be spent purging as much as we possibly can, emptying the galley of all food, and prepping to move the boat down to Deltaville, VA at the end of the month. I am SUPER excited about our next adventure, but my heart breaks a little as I think about leaving our girl on the hard.

Love our home!

~Jo, 1st Mate (for at least another week!)

Hurry up and wait...and get home!

As military veterans, "hurry up and wait" is something we have known all too well over the years! It transfers well to boat life as we are always at the mercy of Mother Nature and boy does she make us hurry up and wait sometimes!

We hurried out of Charleston after one night with the intent to do an overnight passage to Beaufort, NC. In the middle of the night, thunderstorms offshore and lumpy, short-period seas drove us to head for Wrightsville Beach, NC instead. We arrived just after sunrise and grabbed a prime spot to wait out the clocking winds over the next few days. Shore access is super easy here so we went right in for a big Mexican lunch and some errands!

Passing by the T/S State of Maine at anchor in Charleston; a little bird hopped a ride with us; and we finally had a meal and margaritas ashore!

Winds were pretty strong out of the north for days. We kept looking for a chance to creep along close to shore to Beaufort but seas were still forecast to be uncomfortable (and this is supposed to be fun!). The ICW was an option, but we aren’t huge fans of this section so we waited. We booked some travel (woo hoo!), relaxed, and eventually…I got stir-crazy. We have sooooo much to do this summer and once I was rested, I became restless! So I pitched a plan…a 24-hour run to Florida and back. See, we have some things in storage that we need for travel and school next year, and some things that would be better to have on the boat this summer. With a 1-day rental I could make it there, get stuff out of storage, get our mail, sleep a bit, and get back! I left at 1730 one day and was back 24 hours later with our stuff and a bag of Bojangles biscuits for the boys. Success!

The life of a road warrior. Outside of the boat and our car, this little bit of stuff in storage is all we own.

By the time I got back Frank had also decided that we might as well take the ICW. With just a few long days in the ditch, we could be back to our marina in Maryland. After six nights in Wrightsville Beach we set off on a long, cold, windy transit to Morehead City. It honestly went fine and we had a pretty good rest despite thunderstorms in the area.

I was NOT ready for this wardrobe!

Wind, fog, and thunderstorms would continue to factor into our travels as we went from Morehead City to just south of Dowry Creek Marina. Our transit of the Alligator-Pungo Canal and Albemarle Sound the next day was one of the calmest we’ve ever had, and we had a very peaceful night on the hook in the North River, just south of Coinjock. We were up at sunrise Sunday to make the run to Norfolk, but opted to continue on until sunset and settle into a nice creek up the Poquoson River near York Point, VA to wait out some severe storms the following day.

Scenes along the NC/VA Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

We were up at sunrise again today and now here we are, heading north in Chesapeake Bay, just north of the Potomac River. Tonight we will tie up to a dock for the night for the first time since mid-December. 

I really do love sunrise on the water!

This will be our home base for the summer. In two weeks we will begin some travel that will end with our daughter returning to the U.S. after 10 months in France. We won’t spend much time on the water this summer and will instead spend our time visiting friends and family and preparing for the next chapter as this one closes. Lots of changes coming, but it’s good to be home.

~Jo, 1st Mate

Our Florida Painter--how to lock a dinghy

Ok, before anyone gets all upset over this, WE ARE FLORIDA RESIDENTS. The simple truth is that as we've cruised between Maine and the Bahamas, Florida is the only place we have ever been advised to lock our dinghy. Hence why we call this our "Florida Painter." Once we hit some spots in the Caribbean this setup will see more use, but for now, that's what we call it! It's not at every dock (and it's not just docks in Florida!), but reviews of various dinghy docks will let you know which ones are susceptible to theft.

Dinghy locks can get a little controversial in the cruising community for one simple reason--do it wrong and you screw over other boaters! Yep, it's all about courtesy. Crazy, right?

In general, just tying up a dinghy should be simple. You tie off with a cleat hitch with a sufficiently long painter so that other boaters can maneuver your dinghy tie up at a crowded dock. You don't need 12 wraps on the cleat to be secure--just a simple hitch does the job and allows another boat to cleat off on top of you if needed. And with the long painter (one boat length after you're tied off) other boats can scoot around you and land their crew. When you get back, you nudge theirs out of the way on their long painter and pull your dinghy in to load up. Easy! Or at least easy as long as everyone does it. It's generally poor form to tie up your dinghy fore-and-aft as it takes up two cleats and makes it so that no one can maneuver to the dock for the entire length of your dinghy. Please, just don't do it.

But some places are prone to theft and locks are recommended. Even if everyone is only tied up with one line, locks can piss people off if they are super short (or worse, strung through the dinghy handles and locked fore-and-aft). A 3' cable lock means your dinghy can only move a little over a foot from the cleat--it's not maneuverable at all and makes it hard for others to land on a crowded dock. I've seen the super short cables locked to a dock and the long painter floating in the water next to it. The long painter doesn't do any good there--it literally does nothing! 

So what do we do? We use an obnoxiously long steel cable and a U-lock. We have a 30' long, 10mm (I think...maybe 12mm) steel cable. It is looped around our dinghy engine lock, routed over the deck, and led out to the dock. With that kind of length and our 10' dinghy, we can lock up so that our "painter" is 10-20' long! On some cleats we feed the cable through the cleat and back into the dinghy. On others we just slip the U-lock through the center hole of the cleat and lock the cable on. Either way, the cleat is still totally available for someone else to tie off a painter and with all of that cable we can adjust the length of our "painter" to fit the crowding at the dock. Our cable and lock are so beefy that we don't even bother with the rope painter. 

The cable is looped around our outboard lock and run along the deck to the bow under the fuel tank.

The cable is fed through a sturdy cleat and the lock is kept in the dinghy, leaving it 10'+ away from the dock.

This beefy bike lock was left over from our land days and works well!

We've seen skinnier cables, stainless steel chain, and shorter (but not super short) cables just run from the bow--all are options. Just be considerate other boaters and you're good to go!

Once final note...raising your dinghy engine at a crowded dinghy dock is also not a good move. This puts your prop in danger of slicing open someone else's tubes. At really shallow docks where there is plenty of room and everyone can be on about the same length of painter without turning all around and bumping, it can work. But in general, just try to avoid it at docks. Engine up on the beach, engine down at the dock!

Back to work at the Annapolis Boat Shows

After spending the summer at a dock and having all sorts of fun visiting family and friends, we are finally on the move! And the Skipper and 1st Mate are heading back to work for the first time in two years! We are now just south of Annapolis and ready for our job for the next two weeks at the Annapolis Boat Shows. We are working with local retailer Fawcett Boat Supplies in their Boats & Motors booth and are super excited to share great gear with fellow boaters! I mean we get paid to talk about boats, boating, and boat gear, we get to go to the shows every day, and we get a discount on some gear we need for our continued cruising. Winning!

His and hers work uniforms...can't wait to share great gear!

We have settled into a nice slip at Skipper's Pier in Galesville that isn't breaking the bank while we work and as it was a 42nm run from our slip at Pax River the boys were able to move the boat while I took care of some errands and moved the car. It's also close enough to friends from our old home marina in Herring Bay that we can see friends when we aren't working. Hope to head south shortly after the show!

All snugged up at Pirate's Cove!

~ Jo, 1st Mate

Getting the Arch Back on Solid Footing

One of the boat projects this summer was to fix our arch, or rather figure out what was wrong with it. Last year an audible squeak developed near the starboard side deck mount. We tightened the bolts, but it kept returning. The arch also had more play in it as it came under load (some is normal, but this seemed to move more than it had in the past) and I kept thinking I could see the deck flex a little. Uh oh. 

Let me back up. We first put the arch on the boat in late 2011. It's a Beneteau factory arch, but for a 423 model. It mounts with two feet on the top deck and two on the transom, and uses four bolts on each foot. It was shimmed to fit the angle on our 393 model transom and made our boating life so much easier. We had to take it off/remount it in 2017 as part of a cross-country move. And it was probably fine until we started cruising full time, loading more crap into the dinghy while it was on the davits, and sailing in rougher conditions. We keep the dinghy with the engine on it on the davits for our little offshore hops, tying off the dinghy so it doesn't swing in seas. The issue started in the spring of 2020. 

By the end of this winter cruising season we knew we had to really look at it. Being at a dock this summer afforded us the opportunity to do the work ourselves (saving money and accepting a hard job!). First step was to remove the arch and see if we could identify an issue. This involved removing the solar panels so they wouldn't get damaged in the process and disconnecting a bunch of wires. With the arch off and dangling off the back of the boat, Frank was able to get in and see what was up. 

The 1st Mate helps out with lazarette boat yoga as much as she can while taking the arch off. Solar panels were stored on the foredeck throughout the project and we suspended the arch with the topping lift.

We did get some good news! Seeing a deck flex brings fears of a rotted core and a big, involved repair to get the mushy wood out, but the section of deck we are dealing with is actually solid fiberglass! Yay! And it wasn't cracked that we could see. Now we always knew where the bolts came through the deck was a little weird, with some bolts just going through the layer of deck and 3 of 8 total deck bolts going through a wood backer/other component of the deck structure. Removing the whole arch also revealed that where the bolts went through the deck the fiberglass was only 3/8" thick whereas where it was mounted on the stern the fiberglass was almost 1" thick. And we found that one of the 16 bolts that mounted the arch was bent. Sooooo....our issue was likely a combination of the thinner top deck, the heavy load in the dinghy, and maybe taking some big lateral loads in waves at some point. 

Since the deck was solid fiberglass we decided to reinforce and level the mounting surface for the deck feet. Frank started by building up fiberglass blocks that would be used to level out the deck mounting areas. This took a lot of layers of fiberglass, then cutting to shape, then more fiberglass to get them the right thickness.

Arts and Crafts time on Lehe Paine with! Building and shaping the blocks was a multi-day process, but it was worth it. 

And that was the easy part! Then he had to wedge himself into the lazarettes multiple times to place the fiberglass blocks and then coat the entire mounting area with layers of fiberglass to ensure it was one complete, solid structure. This whole process stretched over a few weeks with curing times, weather delays, and other fun. 

More boat yoga! We had some really hot days that made this task miserable; fitting the blocks.

When the deck was reinforced he went a step further and epoxied 1/4" G-10 fiberglass board as a backing plate at each of the four mounting locations for the arch. And because Frank doesn't underbuild anything he also went with beefier, longer bolts.

Trent drills through the new layers; the bolt upgrade; G-10 backer boards in place.

With the deck beefed up the guys drilled through the new layers of glass, we slapped some 3M 4200 sealant/adhesive all over the place and remounted the arch! Ok, it wasn't actually that easy...4200 got everywhere, I was terrified we would drop the shim in the water, the rubber mallet was used extensively to push bolts in, and a few of the bolts were actually too long to clear the arch legs as they were going in and had to be cut. But it is back on and better than ever! The deck mount actually looks way better and more flush than when the rigger put it on in 2017. Add in the many gelcoat cracks that Frank fixed as part of the project and it really looks fabulous! (FYI, spider cracks in gelcoat are common, especially on a boat that's as old as ours.   It's usually just a cosmetic issue.)

The "car" is back in the "garage" and the deck was SOLID!

We feel pretty confident that this should solve the issues we were having (or will rip the entire stern to pieces)...guess it's about time to head out and test it out on the ocean!