Kaimusailing

Work continues with early rising to avoid the afternoon heat. 101 today in the shade at noon.
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I began the installation of through hull fittings in the starboard furthest aft compartment. It is large enough to have a manual head in there, to be used at sea only. The problem is that we can not empty our holding tank to the sea without going through an awful lot of trouble to get to the 3 way valve that controls where the waste water goes. So it always goes into the holding tank. Many places in the Caribbean do not have pump out facilities. Also while out at sea there is no need to use a holding tank.
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I had to figure out where to put the through hulls, so I climbed down into the compartment, which is small, confining, and seems to be ultra-hot, as if it were a solarium, or sauna. And this was in the morning. Just wait. There is no ladder down into this compartment, you have to kind of use the stringers that line the sides of the hull, inside, as footholds, and climb down, one leg to the left, one to the right, don’t slip. Sweat is pouring off and every place I touch, with my knee, hand, butt, has a sweat puddle. When I work in one place for a while the pool of sweat grows. My clothes are completely soaked.
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The job is to mark two spots where the two through hull fittings go, drill a pilot hole on each one, then go down on the boatyard level and drill from the outside of the hull with a hole-saw. One hole is for a 1 1/2 inch through hull fitting, the other for 3/4 inch. This takes more time than you’d think. The hole-saw bits were saved in an old paint mixing container, but there was a little note pad sitting on top of it, so I went around the whole pile of stuff a few times before I found them.
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After I drilled the holes I tested them to see if I had to hollow them out more, but the through hull fittings fit perfectly. This is a very narrow part of the hull, we are near the keel, there wasn’t enough room to drill from inside the hull, and now I see it might be difficult to install the seacocks without them interfering with each other.
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One solution to the interference problem would be to put the larger sea-cock on a 90 degree elbow so that the sea-cock was running fore and aft. The other one would have plenty of room. the 90 degree elbow is about $150, outside the budget in my opinion. Maybe I can get a used one from Doc the boat chopper. His business card reads “Doc’s Chop Shop”. He cuts up old boats so that you don’t have to.
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It doesn’t bother me too much to have a problem like this, a through hull with no seacock. If the boat is launched without this opening closed somehow, it will go down like a rock. I won’t launch of course until we have that fitting, and we will get one before launch.
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Here is the link to the tracking page for the Race 2 Alaska, R2AK:
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http://tracker.r2ak.com/
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This an insane expedition style race in which the only rule is no engine power, i.e., not motor propulsion on board.
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There are a lot of these kayak and small sailboat races throughout the year and we run into them on Duckworks, Chesapeake Light Craft, Sailing Anarchy, Latitude 38, and other online sites and magazines.
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This one has it’s own peculiar dimension: first prize is $10,000, second a set of steak knives. I bet those steak knives will start to get very precious in future years. This is a race with boats that can only get into the ports or maneuver when there is no wind using some sort of human powered mechanical propulsion, oars, paddles, Hobie cycle powered gear, and many other contraptions. The race course is the inside passage from Victoria, BC, to Ketchican, AK. This is Scandinavian fjord-like country. Winds are either in your face or coming up behind. Tidal currents are notorious, whirlpools, unpredictable patterns, and even local waterman can get fooled. The scenery is spectacular. British Columbia, where the Smeetons ended their days, I would hate to go there because it might be the final resting place. I hate rain.
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It is a wet maritime climate there and the wind can come from any direction, but tends to be funneled by the high hills along the narrow channels, so if it comes along and aids you, it will be a good wind, if it comes along and heads you, you will have a tough time. It will be a NW or SE wind. The tidal currents are tricky and in some places very strong, in others very strange. I looked at a tide chart that showed a 7 hour ebb tide, a 1 1/2 hour flood tide, then two days of ebb. On the other end of the channel it was opposite.
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The first leg of the race is a test to see if you can continue on up to Alaska, it is a leg from Port Townsend, USA to Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. It was won by Russ Brown of PT Watercraft, the same fellow who wrote the epoxy ebook and the rolling perfection ebook on painting techniques.
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The race has continued up to Alaska and will probably finish in the next couple of days. Russ is singlehanding and has been overtaken by other boats with full crews. The winds have been light, so boats tend to get clumped together in little groups depending on who gets a fair wind or fair tide.
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I am also following the Volvo Ocean Race and the Whitbread Legends race, both on a leg from Gothenberg, SE to The Hague, NL. Of course I will root for Copernicus, the Polish boat, a Whitbread legend, but they are stuck up in Denmark, not in last place, Rothmans, the largest Whitbread Legend boat has that honor, returning to port and dropping out of the race.
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Back at the aft compartment through hulls and seacocks, I bought a bronze 1 1/2“ elbow from Doc and had to order a “short nipple”, a bronze piece of pipe with NPT threads on both ends. The elbow cost $20, the piece of threaded pipe cost $20, plus $10 shipping. These are the effluent path from the future manual head out to sea.
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The work continued forward of the pilothouse in the dinette. The space was emptied of stuff that had been stowed there in the past and then Awesome cleaner and a sponge cloth cleaned up the area, in two stages, first the inboard dinette seat, then the outboard. Under the seats is the starboard battery bank, 4 size 27 AGM batteries, the solar charge controller, and the solar charge controller monitor, which is a neat device that shows battery charge and solar panel amperage to the batteries. I didn’t want the monitor in the galley or dinette, so I moved it to the pilothouse.
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When I tried to understand what the monitor was telling me, I began to think it was not operating properly. It was showing about 13 volts on the battery voltage setting and about the same in amperage on the solar panel amperage setting. This didn’t seem right. I had been running the small refrigerator on shore power, then switched to the onboard inverter, so maybe we are drawing 13 amps to power the refrigerator, but when I put the refrigerator back on shore power, the numbers stayed the same. Hmm. I didn’t have a good digital multimeter after zapping the last one while testing the windlass. I couldn’t verify the voltage or amperage.
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It turned out a replacement monitor was only about $20, so I bough 2. I have to be careful buying things and shipping them to the boatyard because we will not be here for too long. I also bought a couple of digital multimeters. Why not, they were something like $4.71 and $7 and would get here before July. In fact, one came in just a couple days, so I tried it out on the solar panel/battery issue. The solar monitor said battery voltage was 12.0, the meter said 11.98. Maybe the replacement solar monitors are not needed.
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Next I have to thank Jock, captain of Sophie, who ordered that his small Nova Kool freezer be removed from his boat. I ended up with it, to test, and although it is old, it still works. It’s running on the port hull solar batteries, which have almost no other loads. I guess because it works I will have to give it back.
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Meanwhile we have the small fridge in the pilothouse which I hoped would freeze some freeze pops in this heat. It must be too much to ask because there was a click and the fridge stopped. I reached around back and burnt my hand on the little compressor. Yes it is hot here. Too hot to cool down and freeze the captain’s freeze pops.
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The heat index today was down to 116, and work inside with a fan was doable. When Bill the steamfitter, who had me work on his computer for several hours, asked if I would like to go down to the gas station restaurant for a couple of cold beers, I immediately went along. They decided to sit outside because it would be too painful to sit in the air conditioning and then return to a hot boat in the boatyard. Yardbirds.
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Bill had recently sailed back from the Bahamas with Matt, who owns the pretty boat Chamar, an Allied sloop. I grew up not far from the Allied boatyard in Catskill, NY, and one of my classmates worked there for a while. There are other Allied boats in the yard and up at the docks in Maryland, Capn Kris and Cornelia Marie each have an Allied Princess yawl, neither wants to give up “their” boat. There is one right in front of Kaimu in our boatyard. An Allied Princess.
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The image is of Chamar, what a pretty boat.