More Provisioning: Four batteries and a raw water pump

We are now richer by four large wet cell batteries and a new raw water pump, acquisitions that were not on our list. Indeed Aurora's house power system and engine have functioned flawlessly from the get go.

We've always used all the batteries at once, recharging them with solar and with the engine. Recently we realized that each of two banks (of a pair of batteries) also functions independently. And when you're on a long cruise, it's nice to know that if one bank dies, the second is ready to back it up. But there seemed to be problem with the switch to switch between banks so when we got to Coal Harbor we asked the marina shipwright to have a look.

The batteries have been my job. After I crawl into the engine room, Jack hands me a mirror and flashlight so I can check the water levels and add more if necessary. Unfortunately, I knew nothing else about batteries until yesterday when Bob McKnight took the "last legs" meter reading, showed us how they were bulging and explained the counterproductive electro-physics of mismatched brands (which just might be explained by Aurora's 14 year circumnavigation of the globe). Within minutes he'd measured battery racks and made a couple of phone calls to order four new batteries.

Then exiting the engine room Bob took a quick look around at the raw water pump and groaned. This pump circulates sea water to cool the engine and contains the impeller, which every novice mariner knows you need to change when a jellyfish gets caught in it. Well our pump was wiggly, misaligned and had a loose belt. So we closed the throughhull so Bob could get the pump out out as he phoned up a marine machinist on the other side of town, who promised to have it rebuilt by the next afternoon.

And it was and immanent crises were averted. Vancouver was the place to be. Bob and his colleague Rick Robinson did this caper with such elegance, speed, wit, and charm that we dedicate this posting to them.

Provisioning

Are we ready to sail yet? No matter, we're on our way. But our provisioning was so fast, complicated and incomplete that we've been at it ever since!

A week ago we started the major feat of packing our Honda Civic for the drive to the Aurora. Not only did we have groceries - some swept off our own shelves - and gear - "dinghy dogs", a deck hammock, scads of charts, chart holders, scooter, bicycle - but also stuff we had removed from the boat for previous expeditions - life jackets, foulweather gear, pots and pans, folding chairs, binoculars and sleeping bags. Yes, this month we've already sailed the Columbia and gone over the Bar into the vast Pacific, did four days of Waterfront Blues Festival and pitched our tent for a family reunion in the California Redwoods.

No sooner did we roll up to the boat with our first cartfull of stuff when we ran straight into a lovingly caught crab feast. Yep, just like last year when we left with Kinza on board: Nikki and Al interceptd us even before we went aboard and fed us.
Day one of our cruise would be last Thursday when we motored through thick fog to the Port Townsend work dock. There Bob from Goldstar Marine linked our cheap fix AIS (see previous post) to the main electrical panel. Lisa and Dan of Port Townsend Rigging sent Josh up the mast to install a new mainsail track, lazy jacks with clever snaplocks and a cunnungham. Then Carole Hasse of Port Townsend Sails showed up with a spectacular state of the art mainsail.
No sooner had everyone left than Vicki Phillips of the Coast Guard Auxillary showed up. We'd taken her up on her offer of a free safety inspection and her checklist hit all the pre departure essentials, from documentation to the active status of chemicals in our lift jackets, flares, and fire extinguishers. We did quite well but lo and behold could not get the all important anchor light to work until after Vicki left and we figured out the magic combination of switches on the electrical panel.

When Vicki left, we finished cooking a copious bottom-of-the-Flanders-fridge beef stew and Felicia and Steve showed up to spend the night along with Rich and a friend. Then Roland, Rose and Fleur, also en route from a couple of coolish nights camping on the Olympic Peninsula, called but opted for the Aladdin, a bargain motel right on PT's working waterfront. In the morning Felicia met me at the Safeway to transport a supply of canned and bottled goods, which Rick and Lucas carried below deck to add to the mounds of chaos already there. It was a bit before noon when I threw my bike on the deck, a farewell delegation of Roland, Rose and Fleur untied us and Jack and I were off across the Strait of Juan de Fuca..

Jack the Skipper boards La Niña

Jack emailed this after visiting the faithful reproduction of the famous ship while it was tied up on the Willamette.


This was the best boat show I've ever been to. As an avid armchair sailor, I had enough reasons already to visit what is called the best reproduction ever of one of the three boats in Columbus' first fleet. But I am also reading at this very moment the new book by Tony Horwitz about Columbus and all the other early visitors to the Americas.

Anyway, La Niña is moored on the Eastbank Esplanade just north of the Hawthorne Bridge. Several times I almost turned back before arriving because I couldn't see it and was sure they had got the dates wrong in the paper. You
can't see it at any distance at all because it is incredibly small - just 66 feet long on deck, with 17 feet at the beam (think a mere 1 1/2 times Aurora). Its color is dark and dull, and I doubt its masts go as high above the water as ours does.

Keeping our beloved Valiant 40 in mind again, "primitive" does not even begin to describe La Niña. Of course no head, propane galley, diesel heat, VHF, GPS, roller furling, winches, cabins, or berths. This very heavy tub (200,000 lbs, almost 10x our displacement) can not even dream of sailing to windward. With its square-rigged sail plan, it can only run with the wind. In fact, lacking a serious keel with any bite to it, La niña can't even take advantage of winds smack on the beam, because the boat gets pushed faster to leeward than it can move forward. I also noted that the boat, for all its weight, still rocked around a lot on the quiet Willamette mooring. "Oh yes," said one of the crew members. "She bobs like a cork."

So, my respect for all the early explorers is only greater seeing what they had to work with. And I also now appreciate that, even setting aside diesel engines, GPS, and the like, modern sail boat design extracts so much more performance out of the wind than was the case in the old days.

Rail (not ours) in the water

May 11, a short Sunday morning sail into a good stiff wind. The only other boat out was a neighbor's ketch from Port Hadlock which flew past us with its rail in the water most of its length.

This was a much anticipated weekend with Kinza. On Saturday hiked the Dungness Spit, getting distracted on the way by an intriguing logging festival in Sequim, featuring a very long community parade with floats from all the little festivals around Northern Washington and the Olympic Peninsula. The Dungness Spit Light - only 5 miles out in the ocean - is really far you walk on soft sand. The lee side of the spit is an off limits nesting area, and you need to make periodic jaunts to the highest part of this very narrow spit, to see the birds on in the calmer water. We painstakingly identified a duck with a headdress and a gull known to interbreed with another in that area. But I can't remember their names!. Driving home through Sequim we also saw a herd of Roosevelt Elk right in a semi residential area at the foot of the mountains.

Mid-winter cruising north of the 48th parallel

To celebrate my birthday on December 3 we spent the weekend on Aurora. Sunday morning broke clear and beautiful with a fine breeze. We sailed up Port Townsend Bay and into the Strait. Then it turned windy and cold, so we tacked back toward home. Sailing into the wind made it all the colder and then it started to snow. Soon we were in a blizzard, with snowflake clumps an inch and a quarter in diameter coming at us at 35 knots. It was a complete whiteout and we needed to use radar to find our way back to port. We spent the rest of the weekend cozily snowed in, the furnace working like a charm. No photos from this cruise!
Compare this with the most perfect mid-winter cruise imaginable. It wasn't until February that we made it back to the boat again. (A holiday drive to California for Christmas with the family was followed by Jack's Mom's passing and a larger gathering of the family for her memorial. ) In the midst of one of the heaviest winters on record we found ourselves surfing across the water while basking in the sun surrounded by the Cascades on to the north and east and the majestic Olympics to the south west. Point Wilson, home to the spookiest waters around, looked like something on a postcard from the Caribbean.

Baggywrinkles?

Baggywrinkles? What's that all about? Worried I'm losing my self-esteem? Well, not really. Beyond what sailing into the wind is doing to my face, the name has a certain ring for me.

Baggywrinkles is a historic textile term. A lot of sailing is textile art - think of all the sails and all the lines. Baggywrinkles are where the two meet: If a sail chafes against a line, both wear out. Baggywrinkles are protection. They're those funny things that look like a merger of a hairy caterpillar, a feather boa and a lambswool duster. They're easy to make. All you need is some worn out or left over ends of rope.
These baggywrinkles are on the rigging of the Raglan, a fine schooner that towers above us here in Port Townsend. It was built in Denmark to haul lumber from the Northwest. Later it was purchased by Neil Young and fitted out with quite a luxurious interior.
Aurora is spending the week here getting a new traveller. (Basically this is hardware on a track with a bunch of pulleys offering a 1:5 effort:energy ratio that lets us position the mainsail. See Glossary of Nautical Terms.) The folks from Port Townsend Rigging have removed all the old, party frozen blocks, installed a new rail and a car with ball bearings, and lines that lead into the cockpit. This traveller, along with our new roller furling system designed by Liza of Port Townsend Rigging and the brand new genoa designed by the Carol Hasse, will make Aurora an easy boat to sail and save crew energy on those long hauls.

The Columbia River

On these rapidly shortening, often freezing winter days, Aurora is safely moored at a lovely spot at the south end of Port Townsend Bay. Bald eagles soar overhead and at night it's hard to identify constellations because the sky is so crowded with bright stars. But to get here, we start by driving down the Mighty Columbia.
What a river! It starts in the Canadian Rockies and 2000 km later emerges at Astoria, Oregon. Columbia sailors know their stuff. They contend with relentless current, bridges that must open to let them pass, ferocious winds out of the Gorge, commercial shipping, and The Bar. And yet hundreds of Columbia River sailors, including OWSA women, cross The Bar every summer, navigate blue water along the unfriendly coast of Washington State and sail into the Juan de Fuca Strait just to get to where Aurora starts her northerly voyages.
We were reminded of this on the day after Thanksgiving when Selena and Brian joined us for a pilgrimage to Astoria to visit the Columbia River Maritime Museum. We stood awestruck before the huge map of the shipwrecks strewn upon The Bar, deservedly known as the Graveyard of the Pacific We lived through dramatic Coast Guard rescues. We toured the light ship that was moored at the mouth of the river, endlessly tossing its crew. We saw how a small band of bar pilots guide thousand foot ships over The Bar.


Then we came upon a modest display on the USS Constitution, which had visited Astoria following its restoration earlier in the century. The USS Constitution was my first experience with a sailing vessel. It was the 1950s and Mom, Dad, Barbara and I took a road trip through Massachusetts. We got an essential civic education following the dotted yellow line of the Freedom Trail through Boston's old streets, imagining Paul Revere tearing off on his horse, putting the Minutemen on high alert. But the whole while, Mom kept talking about the USS Constitution, and getting us mentally prepared by reading Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous poem "Old Ironsides".

A remarkably impressive ship, indeed, but it was only last week that I understood why it meant so much to Mom. Although it had been saved from destruction in the 1830s by earlier patriots like Oliver Wendell Holmes, it fell into utter disrepair by the turn of the century and the US Navy decided to scrap it. Again the public stepped up. And the restoration of the USS Constitution would not have been possible, I learned standing in front of that display in Astoria, without the contributions of thousands of school children in the early 1920s. Mom would have been part of all that! Of course she was excited to show us "her" ship.

Mom passed away in February, the first weekend we spent on Aurora, where we were with Selena and Brian when we learned of her stroke and death the next morning. Thinking she would have wanted us to, we took a short memorial sail that same day. But now I see it was the right thing to do.