JollyDogs Pacific Puddle Jump Summary Part 1

8º 55.021s 140º 06.206w

Fri May 10 2019

JollyDogs passage summary part 1

JollyDogs is a Seawind 1160 built in Australia and delivered to her first owner in the USA in 2008. She joined the family of Mark and Isabel Hardesty in April 2013 on the day the Boston Marathon has the bombing incident. We moved aboard full time in June 2014, averaging about 9 months per year on board since 2015. We hauled out back last October 31st in Puerto Penasco, Mexico at the Northern end of the Sea of Cortez, and executed a fairly comprehensive refit, including removal of the mast and boom for modification and refurbishment. Here’s a list of the bigger chunks that were replaced at vast expense. . .

· All standing rigging including turnbuckles (with the exception of the pelican striker cable)
· All running rigging (a couple lines replaced over the previous 3 years)
· Jib sail, new from Neil Tasker at Barracouta, the original sail maker for our girl
· Main sail, new from Jamie Gifford of Zoom sails
· Trampolines, with much more open weave than original
· Deck organizers, all four with upgraded Spinlock devices
· Mast base turning blocks (10) and main sheet blocks (4)
· Stainless steel safety lines (replaced with dyneema, fabricated by us)
· Rudders and rudder bushings, (both rudder stocks had severe crevice corrosion)
· Exhaust mixing elbows
· Sail drives got new seals and O-rings in the output shafts and new oil.
· Gori 3-blade folding props got new vibration dampers and a thorough cleaning
· Zincs all around
· 2000 watt pure sine inverter
· International power input 60 amp battery charger
· CALB 180 a/h LiFeP04 battery cells (16), 4S-4P configuration for 720 amp hours storage
· Sunpower solar panels with support structure mods, 1440 watts total among 4 panels
· 4 Victron solar controllers, Victron voltage monitor and battery monitoring system
· Viking Rescue You Pro 4-man life raft
· Chain plates for the Jordan drogue system
· Complete re-work of the SSB installation
· Iridium Go installation
· VHF radio w/ loud hailer
· B&G mast top wind instrument w/ Triton II display and speed/temp/depth water sensor
· B&G Zeus3 12” chart plotter
· Dinghy davit/solar arch support upgrade

That’s most of the big chunks. We also modified the steering system by installing a redundant bearing device, as the older design is known to have at least one failure at sea. Recommendations from Jamie Gifford led to modifications to the main boom to eliminate the original main sheet block attachment tangs. We cut them off, smoothed the aluminum, and fabricated dyneema strops and retainers to created block attachments. Turns out that’s what Seawind ended up doing as the original method was inferior. Altogether a pretty easy modification. Jamie also made various recommendations regarding chafe protection which we followed.

It was an extremely expensive and difficult four months, and we did almost all the work ourselves. Our efforts were interrupted by sickness and death among friends and family members, but Puerto Penasco is a great DIY yard and close to the US; it’s easy to bring parts across the border and only a 4-hour drive from Phoenix, Arizona. At the end of it all, we knew more about JollyDogs and her systems than we perhaps ever hoped to know.

We finally splashed in early April and made a mad dash for Mazatlan. Upon arrival we hired Marine Services Mazatlan to thoroughly clean, buff, wax and polish the entire exterior, which was trashed by four months of desert sand storms and boat yard filth. It’s not uncommon for an insurance company to require a comprehensive vessel survey at ten years of age, especially before launching on a multi-year journey away from home. To satisfy that requirement we engaged with Rick Cummings, an approved surveyor and owner of Marine Services Mazatlan. Rick found various problem areas that we had missed, which led to more work, including:

· Shimming the goose neck attachment to eliminate play in that critical load path
· Replacing the bilge pumps and switches
· Replacing virtually all sections of raw water hose in the engine compartments
· Adding support to various electrical harnesses in the engine compartments to preclude corrosion should a raw water leak develop

We bolted from Mazatlan after five days of hard work and with a short stop in Chacala to visit the fun folks on Sea Pond before arriving in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. Almost four weeks in that marina gave us time to complete most remaining big projects, provision with fresh fruit and veg for the passage, collect our crew, and take a day sail with Jamie and Behan Gifford to examine the rig tuning with an eye towards optimization for the new main sail. We found and corrected a problem with the single point reefing, an error made in a hasty installation. We determined that our rig was in good tune, rather surprising as we’d had to do it ourselves due to the lack of a qualified rigger in the yard.

(more in part 2)