Cruising with Osprey

28 July 2011
27 July 2011
26 July 2011
25 July 2011
23 July 2011
17 July 2011
17 July 2011
16 July 2011
15 July 2011
14 July 2011
13 July 2011
08 July 2011

Doom and Gloom

21 June 2009
As it turns out I really did jinx us with my last post. Not only are we nowhere near where we left off last fall but have actually gone backwards in our quest to get Osprey ready for cruising. First of all I have to have a rant about the weather which has gone from bad to worse. Little did we know when we had side curtains made for the cockpit (see picture), that we would be deploying these to keep constant rain out. We got them made to shade us from the sun!! - something we have not seen for what seems like weeks. Today we have had a full on gale which is forecast to blow until Tuesday. Tom, has been rescuing boats blown off their moorings for most of the afternoon. Thankfully, our dock is fairly protected and our bow is pointed into the wind so we are quite snug and secure. I am very glad we are not out on an exposed mooring.

We had a bad week in terms of accomplishing anything on poor Osprey - in fact more things broke than got fixed. I think we are now paying for the relatively trouble free year of cruising that we had. So now we have to spend the time and effort to fix the things that could have gone wrong last year but waited until now. First of all, we did rebed all the chainplates but have discovered that half of them are now leaking. This is perhaps the good thing about all the rain we have had - we are finding the leaks now. So at this point we know which ones are leaking but really cannot figure out why, because we thought we had done a good job. Our plan is to redo the leaky ones again - but need it to stop raining long enough. The next disaster is that the ice box developed a leak. Again, it is a bit of a mystery how this happened. We thought we had pinpointed the problem to a small blemish at the bottom of the box. I layered on some fiberglass and resin, tested it for leaks and it seemed good to go. Tonight I fear it is leaking again **#@!!!! Other disasters include: my beloved electric kettle - wonderful for making my lifegiving cups of tea - gave up the ghost on us, something we cannot fix alas. So it's back to the little whistler on the burner. Tom lost the screen on his Freiling (very expensive, double insulated, stainless steel) French Coffee Press, blasted off by the dock hose when he was cleaning it - much swearing! We attempted to put a water meter into our fresh water system to monitor our usage. We had tried this two years ago but could not get the fittings for the meter to stop leaking - for some reason I thought that maybe this time around it wouldn't leak - well of course it did, so we had to take it out again - that wasted a whole day. At this point we are afraid to touch anything for fear of breaking it. This is not a good thing on a sailboat as all this stuff has to be maintained or it will bust at the most inopportune moment. The final sad note is that there has been no progress with the engine. We are not sure what the problem is - we assume that the new mounts have not arrived but they shouldn't have taken this long......

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Vessel Name: Osprey
Vessel Make/Model: Shannon38 #33
Hailing Port: East Greenwich, RI
Crew: Tom & Vicky Worosz
About: We have cruised to the Bahamas and back twice ad are now back on land for a while. This Summer (2012) we have outfitted ourseleves with motorcycles and are heading off for a month long "land cruise'

Who: Tom & Vicky Worosz
Port: East Greenwich, RI