28 February 2010

It's still winter in Nova Scotia but its become LATE winter...we get more rain than snow, the ice chunks floating in the Minas Basin and piled on the mud flats at low tide have almost vanished, and the days are notably longer.

It's also the time of year when what we refer to as "boat bits" begin to arrive at the house and I start making more frequent visits to Northern Symphony. This year, we are doing a massive refit in preparation for the Grander Scheme and so the number of boat bits is much greater than usual. And, since we had Northern Symphony put into a (unheated) shed last fall, I can now start doing boat projects! It's still barely above freezing in the shed, but there's no snow or ice and there's no wind. Plus, with the plastic roof, its a bit of greenhouse if it ever gets sunny (not likely in Nova Scotia in springtime!). So I've been visiting the boat and making measurements, figuring things out, and even starting to do some first steps of projects.

Today, Leslie and I took the first concrete steps towards replacing our engine: We disconnected everything except the prop shaft from the engine! Having made almost all those connections myself during upgrades over the years, it was a bit of a wrench to cut wires, cap-off fuel lines, etc. but the engine is now ready to be lifted out by our engine installer...He's going to do all the things that require actual skill or knowledge and we're doing all the rest...which looks to be most of the hours. It seems somewhat mad to contemplate starting a major cruise with a brand-new engine but I'm pretty that our old engine wasn't going to survive the cruise: Basically, we'd have had to replace the engine within the next two years anyway...so this way we get to do it at a time and place of OUR choosing.

The projects have begun!

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26 December 2009, Nova Scotia

One part of our refit, and the part that is most comfortably done when it's below zero, is the re-development of our instrumentation systems. This is turning out out to be a rather massive re-design of Northern Symphony's electronics as we try to simultaneously address several needs: (1) Our radar needs to be replaced as the old scanner has failed beyond repair, (2) we'd like to fix several of our instruments that developed quirky, intermittent behaviour during the Grand Scheme, (3) there are many things we'd like to have instrumented that were not included in our Grand Scheme system (tank levels, rudder position, engine monitoring, more weather data), (4) we want to move the instruments on the cockpit bulkhead to someplace over the companionway so that they aren't hidden by people sitting in the cockpit, (5) we'd like a comfortable all-weather watch-keeping station, (6) we'd take advantage of the capabilities of new-generation marine electronics and , (7) do all of this while re-using as much of our already-installed and correctly-functioning electronics as possible to minimize waste and cost.

The system that has been developing depends on constructing a new pod of instruments that will mount over the companionway. The instruments that are currently on the cockpit bulkhead will be moved to this pod and a new Furuno radar/chartplotter will be placed there along with a second autopilot controller. I'll detail the electronic wizardry in a later post but for now let's just say it's not for the technologically faint-hearted! The burning question, the one that had to be answered before anything concrete could be planned, was whether Anne (who is now the shortest member of our family) could see over the new instrument pod when she stands at the helm.

To answer this, I built a full-size mock-up of the new pod (complete with fake instruments scaled to actual size by Photoshop after copying pictures from the Raymarine site). Today we took the mock-up to the boat and put it in position. The Verdict: From the helm, Anne could see our bow roller! So, our fears about sight lines allayed, the design of the new instrumentation system can continue.

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21 December 2009, Nova Scotia

Okay...I've been a crummy blogger.

But this blog is about cruising and, for the past few years we haven't been doing a lot of that! Yes, we've gotten out sailing a fair bit, even lived aboard for much of the past summer, but all in our local bay...nothing that really inspired me to document it here.

BUT...The dream is festering and, once again, we have decided to act as though we are going cruising next year and do the things we need to do to make that happen. The last time we tried it, we actually went cruising! So this time, I'm going to blog the preparatory parts. And what a prep its going to be! The kids have school until the end of June, which gives us six months to do the refit prior to undertaking The Grander Scheme. Yes, its a few days before Christmas and there's snow on the ground and ice in the water, but the refit is underway!

Or, more accurately, the preparation for the refit is underway. The first step was last fall when, rather than storing Northern Symphony outside under her winter cover, we had the yard pull the mast and slide her into an unheated shed: We'll be able to work on her without exposure to the wind and precipitation. We also realized that we need a place to work on the portable parts of the project: A shop. Unfortunately, our garage looks like this:


Actually, that's only half of our garage, but the other half is where our car lives. So, the first step is to get all that non-shop stuff out of the shop, which led to one of the stranger boat re-fit projects: Building a shed. Well, it took me pretty much all of the fall season, thanks in part to a busy travel schedule, but I did get it done...Now I can move the stuff in garage and begin converting it into a shop. That's my holiday project...

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Colin
4 August 2008, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

Wow...Two years. Our lives are incredibly different in many ways. We expected them to be different, but we couldn't have predicted how very different they would be!

A few things have not changed: We are still sailing, still doing boat projects, and still schemeing! In fact, we have now conceived "The Grander Scheme" In two years, Evelyn will graduate from high school and Leslie will be the same age that Evelyn was when we embarked on the Grand Scheme....What if, two years from now, we did it again?

We're thinking of a variation of the Great Loop, going back to Tadoussac from here and thus cruising the area between Nova Scotia and the Gaspe which we didn't do last time, and then going up the Saint Laurence, through the Trent-Severn waterway to lakes Huron and Michigan (Thus sailing the only great lake we haven't cruised before). From there, we'd head south through Chicago and its canals to the Mississippi and then the Tenn-Tom waterway to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. Then south to get to the keys (another place we didn't get to last time) and then over to the Bahamas before reprising our previous cruise up the east coast and back home to Nova Scotia.

Yes, it's two years off and only a crazy idea...but look what happened the last time I had a crazy idea!

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