It's just a little shark

15º 49.553s 145º 07.072w

Sat Jun 08 2019

Snorkeling and beach combing with Isabel . .  .

Today was another day in paradise. It’s a hard life, trying to decide what to eat for breakfast, then which boat project to work on, then plan on which atoll to visit next, then go on an adventure, then return and eat, maybe split a really bad local beer, have a hammock nap, then work on another project, then download weather, then examine the tidal flow in the pass (departing here and arriving there), then it’s time for a shower and dinner, then think about a book or movie.

Honestly, I don’t know how we find the time for it all.

We always have at least one task to work on, as JollyDogs is a very demanding girl, and salt water is the evil incarnate. It’s a good idea to dive on the anchor every day, as there are bommies all round and even though the anchor itself is in a nice sandy patch, the chain can get wrapped on a bommie if we experience lots of wind shifts.

The temperature and humidity are lovely, but sleeping at anchor isn’t always a restful experience as the wind frequently howls on and off, and it seems there’s been a shower late every night. I’m generally up once or twice a night and look around the anchorage and the chart plotter to ensure we’re not dragging our anchor. Maybe spend a few minutes looking at the stars and hoping to see a meteorite.

We go to bed around 2100, awaken around 0530, then generally look for a short nap opportunity in the afternoon. That keeps us pretty well rested, and the snorkeling and long walks on the beach keep our appetites up. If the anchorage isn’t too rough we can paddle for an hour or so on our SUPs or do a good yoga work out on the front deck or cockpit. Altogether it seems we’re staying pretty fit, between finally getting enough rest, after what I reckon was 28 years of sleep deprivation at the helicopter company, and the exercise we get just being in this environment. Bodies heal themselves while one is sleeping, so that’s kind of important, and Isabel is always focused on our nutritional intake. A good maintenance program, clean fuel, and regular operation keep the helicopter running well.

Today our snorkeling adventure yielded lots of interesting colorful fish, some amazing clams, very beautiful, and a couple of white tip reef sharks, one of which was a good two meters long. They stayed well clear of us, and we did our best to not disturb them. Afterwards we dinghied a couple of miles over to the inside edge of the atoll at a spot where the Google Earth image hinted at a path across to the outside of the reef. We found a nice two track and soon were on the beach at the high tide line, wandering along looking for interesting bits.

There was a lot of plastic debris, washed up on the beach from who knows where – could have traveled thousands of miles, so we’re really getting down on plastic, especially bags and bottles. There’s just no way to pick it all up, so after a while we just try not to notice it and concentrate on the sea creatures in tidal pools and hunt for shells. Isabel has an eagle eye for pretty shells, and when we completed our expedition today her pockets were full of various shiny cowries. She’s got a basket for shells, and as she finds better or more interesting ones, something has to go. I’m betting she buys another basket soon.

We’ve been bobbing around this atoll for a week now, and it’s time for new scenery. Looks like we’ll blast off around 0600 to make the pass during slack tide, then have a nice gentle sail over to Fakarava, a much larger atoll to the West. There’s lots of ecotourism there, a few resorts and restaurants, and decent bandwidth internet. It’s about time we took care of some business online, so off we go. You can bet we’ll try real hard not to look at the news – it’s just a bunch of noise anyway, and we’re feeling pretty mellow right now.

Oh, and it’s about time for the captain to treat the crew to a nice dinner out.

Anchoring, teamwork and trust

15º 57.554s 145º 04.780w

Wed Jun 05 2019

Living on a boat presents elements of danger almost on a daily basis. Just moving about a boat in rough conditions can be risky, and the general rule is “one hand for you, one for the barky”. Raising and setting big main sails is much easier with two crew, our Parasailor simply isn’t an option unless both of us are going to be available to manage setting and stowing that bugger, plus being quickly at hand in the event things get suddenly out of hand. Suddenly increasing winds due to squalls or other atmospheric phenomenon often require close cooperation to drop and stow a light air sail. Heavy weather sailing is stressful and apprehension can build; it’s important to know your sailing partner is there to support you.

For us, anchoring is the ultimate team effort. Isabel has anchored in a wide variety of bottom, wind, and current conditions around the world. She also has a sense of etiquette and believes it’s just plain bad manners to crowd other boats in an anchorage. We approach an area slowly, tour around a bit do map bottom depths and examine how other boats are lying to the wind and current, then do our best to drop and end up about 80 meters from all other boats once the chain is out, the bridle installed, and we’ve pulled down with a good bit of power to verify a proper set.

If you’ve ever chartered a boat somewhere such as the BVI or Belize, the charter company will generally state that the boat must be anchored or secured to a mooring ball by 1700 or some other time well before dusk. We used to get to the objective location by around 1600 and get set, have a swim, and then have a cocktail in hand by 1645. It was great sport observing the boats arriving “just in time”, racing to the last remaining mooring balls or spaces where anchoring was still practical. There was almost always a lot of screaming and shouting between whoever was on the bow and the person on the helm, generally a couple but often a big crowd on a larger charter boat. Occasionally there was a loud grinding sound as the keel contacted a reef that was obviously on the chart if only the crew had looked. Did you know you can get a reward from some charter companies for tattling on the idiots that scrape up keels?

So anchoring is where cooperation and trust among couples is easily observed from afar. We’ve certainly had our rough moments and occasionally we still disagree about proximity to subsurface obstacles or shallow water, but the more we do it, the more we gel into a team that trusts one another’s instincts. These days we motor slowly into an anchorage, discuss how each of us perceive the available options, then Isabel goes forward to operate the windlass while I position the boat where we want to end up, drop a waypoint there, then having considered the scope we’ll set and the lay of other boats to the wind and current, I position the bow where we want the anchor to touch the bottom and signal Isabel to drop. I call the depth, and she calls the chain length as she deploys it. Deploying the chain is a pretty serious technique; if the boat is stationary and she drops much more than the depth of the water, the chain can actually pile up on and foul the anchor. So once she knows the anchor has touched bottom it’s my job to gently move the boat away from the drop point, advising her of our speed over ground so she can judge what rate to deploy additional chain.

We generally agree ahead of time what scope we want to set, i.e. how much total chain to put in the water given the depth of the anchorage. When possible we’ll set 7:1, so when the water is 5 meters deep compared to the waterline of the boat, we’ll deploy 35 meters of chain before installing the bridle. We’ve got a Mantus chain hook on our bridle, and while we love how well it secures to the chain it is a bit of a pain to install or remove, so I always leave the helm and go forward for that task. Often we’ll swap places at that point and Isabel will assume the helm and back us down, head to wind, with increasing thrust until we’re satisfied the anchor isn’t dragging. I’ll join her at the helm and use the radar to examine our position relative to all the boats near us. I’m looking for a 90 meter radius of clear water around us. Once we declare victory we look at how we’re lying with the engines off, and hopefully we still have about the same amount of clearance around us. As boats respond differently to wind and current that clearance may be different by a fair bit, but we’ll generally have at least 80 meters spacing or so, and that feels safe, polite and respectful of other’s privacy.

It’s taken us a long time to build that level of cooperation and trust. We’ve lived on JollyDogs now for 5 years. We’ve been married for 21 years. We’ve known each other for almost 23 years. A couple of days ago we crossed the threshold of ultimate trust. Does that seem confusing to you, knowing we’ve trusted each other with our lives in this risky environment for 5 years? Just ask yourself, what’s about the most important thing to a woman, something she agonizes over, seeking just the right person to trust with the task??? Isabel asked me to cut her hair!

Well, as my US Army Yuma Proving Ground test director Ricky Douglas once said to me, “the only difference between a bad haircut and a good one is 2 weeks”.

JollyDogs spares and redundancy part 1

15º 57.532s 145º 04.778w

Sun Jun 02 2019

Isabel says that everything on the boat has to have at least two purposes, and if we haven’t used it in at least a year, it’s off the boat. That apparently applies to me as well.

Part of safety is redundancy. Things are going to wear and break. Long passages especially lead to chafe problems that would never become apparent in day sailing or short overnight adventures. Stuff that somehow can find a way to rub together for 20 or 30 days leads to frayed canvas or lines, worn steel parts, etc. It’s important to look around the boat and figure out how one can improvise a fix if something important fails deep at sea and we simply have to find a way to carry on. Parts of our main sail stack pack canvass took a beating on our passage from PV to FP, and I’m still trying to decide how to repair it.

Back at the end of 2015, Casey at Pacific Offshore Rigging suggested replacing our topping lift with a much larger line. It was looking a bit tired, but his point was that in the event the main halyard parted, we would be able to quickly switch the topping lift over to the main halyard attachment point and get sailing again. A great idea, and worthy of a little extra cost.

We have replaced every piece of running rigging, and at 11 years old it was absolutely time to do so. Sun and salt are evil. As we’re not made of money, rather that buy two sets of everything we kept the still serviceable lines as spares and found homes for them. Not easy on our little boat as both the weight and storage volume are problem, but necessary to have the spares so we have the old spinnaker and jib halyards tucked safely away. The main halyard was absolutely shot, but we’ve got that topping lift trick . . .

We’ve got all the materials for a full change of oil and multiple oil filters (those might be hard to source), and enough extra to deal with a sudden leak. We’ve got lots of spare fuel filters in case we get a sudden case of fuel contamination. We’ve got heaps of 20 and 5 micron filters for the water maker, rebuild parts for the boost pump and high pressure pump, and plumbing parts to exclude one of the two pressure vessels in case one membrane goes South. We always have a couple jerry jugs of diesel and gasoline and when those are gone we’re even more keenly aware of our fuel state. We’ve got a spare house water pump, and parts to rebuild those including microswitches and a full up pump head. As a backup we’ve got a manual pump and we’re already setup to bypass the electric pump and extract drinking water. Imagine having a few hundred liters of water on board and no way to get at it. Perhaps most importantly, there are two toilets on the boat. Imagine blocking the only head!

Not only have we got two engines (oh the joy of catamarans) but two full up alternators with individual regulators, and spares of each. The fuel tanks do not interconnect, so if one fuel tank becomes contaminated it won’t foul the other one. I recently replaced most of the salt water and some of the fresh water hoses and kept enough of the old ones for emergency repairs. Thad brought us a heap of stainless steel hose clamps; those do break on occasion, so we’ve also got that going for us.

A set of oars live in the dinghy, and we’ve got 2 spare props for the outboard. As well we’ve got a spare fuel line for the dinghy fuel tank; apparently those can be very difficult to source in some parts of the world as they’re manufacturer specific.

We’ve got 4 solar panels, each with its own controller. If a controller died we could combine multiple panel inputs to a single controller, and they’re large enough they’ve got head room for additional input. We don’t have a spare inverter (wish we did), but if it packs up we’ve got a little Honda generator we can use to run the watermaker and any other AC appliance.

Our LiFeP04 batteries are in a 4S4P configuration for a total of 720 amp hours, so if a single or multiple cells go South we can reconfigure to any multiple of 180 amp hours and keep going. We’ve got 2 refrigerators to keep fresh food and veg, but we’ve only got 1 freezer. If that packs up we’ll have no ice cubes! However, the designer/builder of that unit, Mal Betts of ICEER in Australia, was our guest at a rally years ago, and he left us with a spare controller, the most common part to fail. What a guy!

We have a spare autopilot, as the original owner had installed one we considered inadequate for a boat of this weight. We test it occasionally to ensure it’s still available for emergency duty. The Seawind 1160 has dual rudders with a solid interconnect link, then individual cable steering to both a port and starboard helm station. If one hand steering station cable fails, we can use the other. If both fail, steer with the hydraulic autopilot which connects directly to the interconnect link. Backup upon backup. Try losing steering at sea – it does happen and becomes a major emergency fast. Our pals on Shamal, another Seawind 1160 somehow lost an entire rudder – the must have hit something at sea, and found that the boat could be steered to safety using only one rudder. Not great, but redundancy.

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We’ve got 2 propane cylinders, multiple cans of wasabi, and lots of fishing line and lures. Not going hungry out here! There’s a lot more to mention, but you get the point, and only you know your boat and all its systems, and if you don’t you better get up to speed.

BS sessions with other cruisers often include topics such as “how are you prepared cope with this or that system failure or outright emergency, and what tricks have you learned so far?” There’s a lot of clever folks out there, and it’s useful to share ideas. At the end of the day, perhaps our most important spare is the cruising community itself, whose members are ready to come to the aid of others, either with tools and parts in hand, or over the radio from afar. It’s a great bunch of folks!