Kaimusailing

The hot weather of the summer is definitely over. While we were gone on the delivery it got
down to 47 degrees one night in the boatyard. Now it is hovering in the 60‘s, excellent working weather, but we are preparing to leave again for another delivery.
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I had bought an Irwin aluminum toe rail from the guy who cuts up abandoned boats. I needed 16 feet of it to make two 8 foot perforated rails on the inboard edge of each bow deck. These will serve as trampoline attachments. I cut the toe rail to length, returned the excess as agreed, then cut two pieces of the old roller furler foil 1 foot 7 inches in length. These I will use as extensions for my cheap Harbor Freight socket wrench ratchet. They fit the handle perfectly and 1 foot 7 inches is the inside length of the toolbox.
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I wanted to get some work done and continued on grinding the bottom paint on the port bow, inboard side. I had stopped on a hot day quite a while ago and now it was cool so I completed that job.
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I spent the evening with warmed up leftover pasta with meat sauce. It was cool and I slept well. I was awakened by the skipper on the phone saying we have to leave in a couple of hours, he was moving the delivery up. I was totally unprepared for this change, I had a million things to do before I could leave.
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I had groceries to give away for others to use before they spoil, I was set up for more grinding on the hull bottom, those tools had to be put away and rain was forecast, so tarpaulins had to be spread out and clamped down. I needed to shower and pick up a prescription at the local pharmacy. I had to get my nautical equipment sorted out, new batteries, find my inflatable harness, repack the computer soft case that held the GPS, SPOT, camera, batteries, and all the cables for connecting and charging them.
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I got to work and had everything sorted out except picking up my prescription, which would run out while we were at sea. Skipper said yes we could stop and pick it up, why don’t I call it in beforehand. I hadn’t thought of that, called and ordered, ready by 1:15, but they close between 1:30 and 2 for lunch.
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I was ready, now waiting for the skipper. Our ride was ready pacing about. Then finally skipper appears, let’s go. First we have to go to the post office to mail something, OK, then to the pharmacy. We get there at 1:37 and have to wait till 2. Not on me. We grabbed lunch.
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We went to the Jacksonville airport and picked up a Chevy and headed down I-95 to Ft. Lauderdale with only a few delays on the way. We arrive late and get to work the next day.
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The owner of the Lagoon 410 catamaran spends the day replacing his impeller in the port engine. This is a terrible job requiring a lot of disassembly, but he goes at it and at the end of the day we are testing the engine, good to go. We installed a second chart plotter that will also display AIS, ship identification, while the original chart plotter will display radar. The two brands, Garmin and Raymarine, are competitors and apparently don’t speak the same language. We actually have more electronics than we really need.
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The forecast is for 15-20 and later 15-25, so we will have plenty of wind. We go ashore and have the customary pizza the night before departure. Our discussion turns to what a day it has been with a lot of snags and are we unlucky? Sailor’s superstition, the boat has been renamed without the ceremonies that must be performed to rename a boat and not incur bad luck. You need a big Kahuna from Hawaii and seven virgins, plus chants of ancient rites. We have done none of that.
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We get underway after the owner gets rid of his rental car and we top up the fuel tanks before going North up the ICW channel to the Port Everglades inlet. Out to the sea buoy and go South to follow our route, but it is rough and we cheat, heading South about a quarter mile past the first green channel buoy. We set a course for the next waypoint down the coast, but it is too rough. The seas are confused. We conclude the Gulf Stream is abnormally close to shore, we hug the coast at about the 100 foot depth contour, then come even closer.
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We don’t have far to go, the entrance to the channel inside the Florida Keys reef is just past Miami. We find calmer water closer to shore and decide to shake out the reefs we had put into the mainsail. The forecast was for 15 - 20 - 25 getting stronger later in the day and further South, so as we went down our route we could expect stronger winds.
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The main sail was incredibly hard to hoist. Perhaps the reefing lines were holding it back. I gave up near the end and let skipper put his back to it. I pointed out to the owner that his round battens would be prone to chaffing of the batten pockets, as Kaimu’s had been and showed him where the pockets were starting to tear already.
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The boat sailed way better with full sail up, the jib had been rolled fully out. We were making 7 and 8 knots on a beam reach and could have gone faster if we had more sail. We sailed this way to the beginning of the buoys that mark the channel inside the reef. We tested the radar to see if it would pick up buoys, helpful after dark with unlit buoys.
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I made some food, something different, diced seeded tomatoes and onion, with a can of salmon added and a big dollop of balsam vinaigrette, that was mixed up, breaking up the onion and salmon pieces, a little hot salsa was then added, and then spooned onto a bed of spring salad greens. They ate it.
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We follow our charts and chartplotters into a shallow region, just a short distance to the East it plunges into depths and there is the Gulf Stream and rough water. On the back waters of the reef it is rough but smaller rough and we are sailing along perfectly.
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We decide to use the 3 man 3 hour watch routine starting at 5 PM. The owner will start off with mostly daylight and I will be able to assist him pick the way through the back waters of the reef. Then I will come on watch at 8 to 11 and skipper will relieve me until 2 AM, then we start our rotation all over again.
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We had hoped to be in this area of unlit daymarkers during daylight, but we are just a little late. It grows dark and there is an opportunity to get sunset pictures. We have radar, but it turns out to be useless. The overlay with the chartplotter won’t work and stand alone radar display doesn’t give us confidence in what it is showing.
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The other chartplotter will show AIS contacts. This is very useful except that this boat has an old AIS transmitter somewhere that is being picked up by the new unit, who thinks it is an emergency, thus alarms. There are alarms going off all the time from both chart plotters. Meanwhile this computer, the Getac, finally gets to do its thing. We are using it to plan and follow a route through the back waters.
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After negotiating some unlit daymarks in the dark, the jib finally is blanketed by the main and starts flogging. We decide to roll it up. I had put a barberhauler on it to keep it full of air and had to remove it, then started to wind up the roller furler. Something was wrong, the furler line was tight and the sail wasn’t furling. We let it out, tried again, no use. Skipper came on deck with his harness and head light and went forward to the furling drum and began to sort out the snag there. He was able to get it un-snagged and we rolled up the jib. On our last boat we had a similar problem when one of the fairleads broke and got rolled up with the furling line into the drum. This time it was just too much line that fouled itself.
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The amount of line on the furler drum has to be enough to roll the entire sail up as you pull the line out of the drum. Because the jib on this boat is smaller than normal, it is a tradewind sized jib, it doesn’t need as much line on the furling drum, but has plenty, enough to furl a full sized jib or genoa jib. It jammed the same way fishing line can jam on a reel.
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The excitement was over, skipper went below to rest up for his watch, I remained with the owner for his last hour of watch. I commented, baptism of fire, he had had an exciting watch with a big problem and a solution by teamwork in the dark. That was enough for one watch. Now it was my turn.
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There was no excitement on my watch, sailing was serene with just the main, 6 knots of boat speed, flat water, but depths were concerning. It looked like we were sailing in 8-9 feet of water. There was a rock and buoy ahead, so I went around them. Later I concluded the depth sounder was showing water under the keel, not depth from the waterline.
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When my watch was over and skipper came up to take over, a rain squall hit and boat speed went up into the 9‘s. We both got wet in the rain. I went below and slept while he coped with the rain squalls that came one after the other. Apparently later the inverter quit when battery voltage dropped below 11.8. Then a sailing catamaran showed up on a collision course. He hailed them on the VHF radio with no response. He had to change course and hope they didn’t change theirs.
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The owner came on duty with a lot of noise. One engine was started to recharge the batteries, the radio traffic, all contributed the shattering of my peaceful sleep down below. I came up and made a pot of coffee in the ship’s stainless French press. I had never used one before. It made a good cup of coffee.
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Someone had picked up three cheese Danish pastries, so I had mine with the coffee. It was 2:30 AM. Our ETA at Key West was daybreak. I wasn’t sure what the plan was, would we stop there, would we continue straight for Gulfport, or would we head North up the west coast of Florida.
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The owner was glad to get off watch and get some sleep. We had worked together on his watch to manage our route on the computer. He was familiar with the software now and we fine tuned our course to stay in the channel, miss unlit buoys, and cut corners here and there.
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Finally he was off watch and I was on. Skipper had said I could get off watch at 6:30, presumably to make breakfast. I worked some more on our course and got us into 35 feet of water and a surprising 8 knots over the ground, must be some sort of Gulf Stream counter current.
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The technique for fine tuning our course was to use the measure function in OpenCPN. Right click on the chart, select measure from the list, the cursor becomes a pencil shape, left click the pencil anywhere, then click again somewhere else on the chart and it will display the distance and bearing between the two marks. We do this for a new course and note the bearing, then use the same function to measure the true course of our ship’s track which is displayed on the chart in real time. Make the arithmetic calculation of the degrees of course change, then enter that amount into the autopilot, which allows plus and minus tens of degrees as well as plus and minus one degree, so if we wanted to come left 23 degrees we would hit the minus ten twice and the minus one button three times. These course changes do not usually produce the desired effect because external forces like wind in the sails and currents against the hull have a big effect on what course the boat will follow, no matter what the heading is. The result is a constant reentering of course changes to make the course made good follow where we want. Things are simpler in the open sea.
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I was now off watch and down below and asleep in a short time. I had promised to make breakfast and did so after about 3 hours of sleep. I made pancakes from scratch and added sliced bananas and blueberries to the batter. We had some great maple syrup from Canada on board and the pancakes and bacon were a hit. All that carbohydrate had the result of sending us back to bed, but only the skipper was allowed to take a nap after he reserved a slip in Key West for us. We were going to spend the overnight there. We all pretended to be macho and gung ho to keep sailing and it would have been a logical decision to use the beneficial wind that we had while we had it, but we all wanted sleep and knew another night at sea would strain us, we needed all the crew to be alert at night, no dozing, no bad decisions.
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The Lagoon 410 we were sailing was an ex-charter boat, but had an owner after its charter service and he made some modifications to make it more like an owner’s version. The big difference is in the starboard hull where the charter version has two staterooms each with its own head, and the owner’s version has one stateroom with a much larger head and additional storage.
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I seems these charter boats all have similar drawbacks, electronics in the cockpit are sun damaged and not working, or are new replacements that are only hooked up for their basic functions. For instance an autopilot will function as an autopilot but won’t be able to use the chartplotter’s interface to follow a route. Chartplotter electronic charts are a package that includes the Caribbean and that’s all. Radios are set up for international frequencies. Radios do not have a remote handset in the cockpit. Sail rigs are smaller than mainland sail rigs and sails often have sun damage. Charter boats also often have hidden damage, they were severely damaged and repaired to be put back in service. When they finally sell a boat, usually after about a decade of service, it is worn out, it is set up for charter people not an owner and family.
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I like this boat very much, it sailed well, lots of creaks and groans though. The cabin is well laid out with plenty of room for the cook and room for dinner guests. The nav station was a little bit awkward, but that was due to the way the instruments were laid out.
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The main sail was unbelievably difficult to raise and is something we will try to fix on this trip. We are stopping in Key West unexpectedly, probably for just one day, and then heading out again.
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The image is from this computer and is our berth in Key West.