The Adventures of Bill

You may be wondering why we didn't have an update yesterday. We decided to have some beer instead. And that is all that needs to be said.

I love halloween, it is a great time of year, and I get to wear costumes! Halloween in the middle of the ocean is a little different. I don't have any costumes, and it is pretty quiet. But I am having a great time, it is one hell of a ride. Plus I am really excited about the what lies at the end of this little sailboat ride.

Have fun, with all the costumes, I will enjoy a midnight watch, just without a lot of extra craziness and costumes...

After 9 days of repairs on the boat in St. Thomas, we finally got going! Although, the day before we left, the chartplotter died!!! B&G said they would replace it for free and would ship it to the local dealer here in Redhook. That meant we had to come back here at the end of the trip instead of continuing to St. Martin. I reserved a slip in St. Thomas for the month of December for the holidays.
We spent 2 weeks cruising the BVIs spending mostly only a day at each location. It made it a busy trip. The winds for the first half of the trip were the "Christmas Winds" and were 20-25kts. Towards the end of the trip, the winds settled down quite a bit.

Our first destination was to clear into Great Harbor, Jost Van Dyke (JVD). We checked out the "town" went to Foxys, then Corsairs for dinner. The following day we went around the island to Little Harbor and visited the Bubbly pool and Foxys Taboo (another restaurant). I really liked JVD mainly because it was beautiful and the traffic was minimal and made for good walking. It was not over crowded like a few of the other islands. I did not go jogging, but it would have been good - minus the big hills! :)

Sopers Hole/Tortola was next on the list. We grabbed a ball and went to Pussers for Painkillers, then onto an Italian restaurant. Great food! We picked up some friends (Matt & Julie) we made on JVD and they sailed with us for a few days.

Norman Island - The Bight - was pretty cool. Snorkeled and Swam treasure caves and the Indians. Willy T's was a little over the top.

Cooper - got there late after spending time at the Indians and could not get a ball. Anchored in Haulover bay and had 20kt+ winds all night which caused an awful motion in the boat. This caused me to get a little seasick. Also due to the winds, I wanted to watch the boat because it was anchored out. I skipped my Rhone dive to make sure the boat did not blow away. It ended up holding like a champ and the catamaran next to us drug about 50' or so overnight.

From here we went to Trellis bay on Beef island as it was a good stopping point with our limited time before dark to go to the north side Virgin Gorda. There were some nice local art galleries here.

Prickly Pear island Virgin Gorda was beautiful. Had Thanksgiving dinner at Saba Rock. I really liked Virgin Gorda a lot. We heard about lobster fest on Anagada and that became the next destination.

Anagada - Lobster fest was great! We spent two nights here and I had my fill of Wahoo for lunches and dinners! (I avoid shellfish)

After leaving Anagada, we stopped for a couple hours at The Dogs and The Baths. For the night we could not make it to Peter before dark so we diverted to Trellis bay on Tortola for the night. Surprisingly, they had the best grocery prices we have seen for quite some time! Although a box of cereal was $9.

From Trelllis, we hopped to Road Town to Clear out of the BVIs and then to Maho bay on St. John for the evening. Grabbed a Taxi to Cruz Bay and cleared customs back in to the USA.

The following morning we visited Trunk bay for a couple hours, then went to Christmas Cove for a few more hours. For the evening we made it back to Redhook for the reserved slip.

This was a great trip. Geoff was schooling me on single handing and I now am comfortable grabbing and leaving balls. General sailing - tacking/reefing etc. He has a few recommendations for changing the reefing etc. to make things much simpler and I will be working on those this month.

It's been a while since I have posted. It has been pretty hectic. Here's the recap - its a little long.

While at sea, got an email from mom and dad that said: meet you in Red Hook Bay, St. Thomas. This was pretty easy to do as it was just past our intended destination of JVD. We really did not need to change much.
So, at about 10mi out from JVD, we attempted to start the engine. (Key word, attempted!) It would not start... sheesh... more water in the oil. ARGH! I immediately changed the oil and it still would not start. Very frustrating! We had two passes to sail through and we were hoping the wind held up. On going thru the pass between JVD and another island, the wind significantly slowed down, but did not stop. Made it through! The second pass was potentially a little bigger. Geoff took over for the second pass and sailed us through. The same thing happened. Winds slowed but did not stop.
I called dad on the Cell phone (It was 1am) and they put the dinghy in the water and drove out to tug us in. They took us to an empty mooring ball an we tied up. It was private, so technically we were trespassing. We hoped we could get off it in the morning to avoid any difficulties.
In the morning we did the same maneuver by hooking the dingy up to the boat and was towed to the marina so we could get a mechanic in and do repairs easily. Geoff was driving the boat and just masterfully got the boat docked. I was in the other dingy - I think Geoff wanted me out of his hair as I was a little anxious about hitting something!! :)
Whew!!! Finally made it. Time was 14days and a few hours at at sea to make it here!

It's been about 8-9 days here now and I have only taken one day off to go diving. This is starting to feel like a job!!! Am I having fun? Not so sure yet. Love the weather though. This past week was repairing everything that broke or needed some sort of servicing.

The plan is to now go to thee BVIs for a couple weeks an come back to St. Thomas on the 2nd. We initially were going to continue down the Caribbean islands but since the chart plotter died, I have to come back here to pick it up. Geoff was able to get a fantastic flight here so, things are coming together. I reserved a slip from Dec 2 until Jan 2 here. Expensive, but from what I understand, it is a nightmare to try to anchor or find a ball anywhere down here during the holidays. So, I will get my advanced scuba cert here and hopefully my brother will come down for a week to go diving!


Here's a quick recap on what all broke - in no specific order. This may or may not look like much, but it literally took an entire week of work to troubleshoot and fix.
1. Engine - at the dock, changed the oil 3-4 times to get all the water out of the oil. Finally got the low pressure alarm to stop blaring. Added an vented-loop (anti-syphon) just after the heat exchanger in order to prevent any water from getting sucked in there. The mechanic inspected the exhaust mixer elbow to see if by chance it had rusted out and that was how water was getting in. It had some rust as was expected, but was in good shape overall. He also tightened up a nut that was pretty loose and had some exhaust leakage, but was not the cause of water. This means the water was most likely coming in through the exhaust/muffler. Had to order a one way check valve to install into the exhaust and i just got that installed this morning. I also had to order a bunch of new oil filters because I had used all of mine. $$$!
2. Bilge pump stopped working properly at sea. It turns out it somehow became unseated and that was the issue. I reseated it and it is working just fine now.
3. Had water pump issues and I ended up replacing it. It turns out the pump is probably ok (have another spare now!) and it was the plumbing that was the issue. I do not have hot water installed on the boat, but the sink in the head was hooked up to it. When the Hot water is turned on, it mixes with the cold. So, it caused the pump to run non-stop and may have been the reason our water disappeared way quicker than expected!!! Good thing we had spare water in jugs. I just had to cap the ends of the hoses and this is not an issue anymore.
4. Just today, the engine battery died... It was the only battery that was not replaced. It is now replaced.
5. The boat got pretty dirty and really needed cleaned!!! The last half of the trip was stormy, so it was not real practical to clean everything. It is now back to a semi-normal state.
6. The toilet seat kept popping off while at sea. Very annoying. This was a new seat I put on but had different attachment mechanisms. I replaced it with the original and hope it will not happen anymore.
7. The roller furling unit go tangled twice. It looked like the block (pulley) the lines go through was too low. I raised it up a few inches. We'll see how that works out.
8. The outboard started to stall when at idle. We weren't sure what was going on. I put some Murphy Mystery Oil in it and it seemed to solve the problem.
9. In N.C. before we left, we discovered the windvane was installed slightly crooked. About 30min before we left, dad brought me a socked set with a 17mm socked to use. We centered it and tightened it up. The manual said "Don't over tighten!". What does that mean?!?!?!? Anyway, we tightened it up a bit and then set off. It ran like a champ for 6 days and started to act up by twisting a bit. I went to straighten it up an the socket fell overboard before I could tighten it!!!! ARGH! We tied it into a neutral position and it stayed just fine for a few days. Of course during a sizeable storm it started acting up again. This time the entire steering assembly started twisting. We were in 30k winds with 12-15' seas trying to figure out what to do. It was making keeping control of the boat difficult. We devised a way to get the rudder off at that point. It ended up sticking on after removing all the pins etc. We were starting to think of drastic decisions to remove the entire system, but... I was not looking forward to loosing a $6000 piece of equipment to the deep. We "Hove to" (stalling the boat under sail) and it just fell off! We had a line attached and just pulled it back onboard. The pressure of water while moving was keeping it on there enough that a mallet would not pound it off.
While here in St. Thomas, I purchased 3 17mmm box wrenches and another 17mm socked. This will NOT happen again!! At this point the windvane is centered at dock and we need to take the boat out to really make sure it is centered properly.
10. The weather cloths in the cockpit came undone. I left them Zip Tied on with the idea that the will break if a big wave hits them and not damage the lifelines. Well, they certainly did break! :) I replaced all the upper zip ties with cord and did the bottom 4 corners with cord too. If a wave come in, it can exit via the lower side instead of being trapped in the cockpit.
11. Chart plotter died... While sailing, the chart plotter which is one device (primary, but we have 3 backups) we used for navigation and the most expensive too, decided to hang multiple times throughout the trip. There are some bugs in this unit or maybe their software. It took an hour or two each time to figure out how to get the unit back and working again. Sometimes it was a network reset, other times it was restoring the system defaults and another was selecting a different chart. Now, just so you understand I had about 10 or less seconds when the system was rebooting to go through the screens and select options. It was very frustrating! At the dock here, I called the manufacturer to get the manual reset method using the buttons to stop any of this in the future. He ran me through a couple tests and the entire unit just froze and hung. It hangs in the middle of booting up now... So they recommended returning it to them under warranty for a new one. It will take a couple weeks to get here. I asked the local yard to make me a template to screw over the hole it was removed from to keep water out of the other electronics.
12. I know there is more stuff, but I just can't think of it at this time. :)

That's it for now. I hope to actually have some time to relax a bit and not be repairing stuff all the time.

Take care all!
bill

We are 203mi from the BVIs!! There is finally light at the end of the tunnel. The winds have been against us these past few days and have turned variable for today and tomorrow. We really need to get east so we can sail SW to the BVIs. If we do not get far enough East, we could end up in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. Both great places, but not where we are looking to go. Our current strategy is to try to make a point 25mi east of us. That will give us a good angle to get to Jost Van Dyke in the BVIs. Monday the trade winds supposedly are returning to normal and I hope that means all these storms will be gone too! :)

Last night we really didn't make as much progress as planned due to the strong winds and waves. Trying to motor only gave us 2-3kts!!! We ended up sailing a bit North East to try and get some easting in and then we tacked to the South West. That ended up being a mistake as it took some of our easting away. OOPS!!! It's easy to make a bad decision at 3am.

Through out the trip, the goal was to make 100mi per day. That worked out fine until recently... We really hope we can get there in 2-3 days as we both really need a break and a full nights rest. Sleep depravation can only last for so long. We work in 3hr shifts - 6pm-9pm, 9pm-12am, 12am-3pm, 3am-6am. outside of those hours it is a pretty loose schedule.

One thing that I did really learn on this trip so far is that I will not be single handing back to Seattle. I will need to come up with alternate methods. One alternative plan is to sail through the Caribbean, spend hurricane season in panama, then work north up to Texas or Florida. Once there, put the boat on a truck to Seattle.

Talk to you all soon! bill

Hello All! Geoff says Hi too!

It's been a couple days since our last update. It has been a pretty hectic time. We have been having quite a bit of bad weather and has been pretty exhausting. Of course at the same time there are boat issues we had to dig into and figure out. Who would have thought that waves over the stern would drain through the vents into the bilge?!?!?! Sheesh! we thought we had a leak in the boat somewhere. It was pretty stressful going through everything to track that down. We covered the vents with plastic bags and everything is fine now.

The wind just died and we are re-doing our fuel calculations. We have approximately 22 gallons of fuel left, which gives us 44 hours of motoring. If the waves are not against us we can do about 4-5kts. If we can use the wind, we can get 6kts and we have 290mi left. So, we definitely have some sailing to do yet.

Our plan is to motor or motor sail when there is wind and the closer we get, the winds *should* shift to our favor for a bit. I am crossing my fingers!

Till the next time!

bill

Wow, what a fun night. Geoff has been going out and catching some wind ponies! We've had some strong winds (20-25kts Gusts 30kts) and sizeable seas last night with more through tonight. That should be the end of the strong stuff. The boat is handling well and we are really anxious to finally get to Tortola! All the fresh food is now gone. Bread is gone. All that remains (and is quite a bit) are 3 months of dry goods and canned goods. Hopefully we can keep it appetizing!

Boat wise, I think we have tracked down a leak causing the bilge pump to run quite a bit and use up our battery. I replaced a bolt on the muffler and did not have a gasket to put on. It is *hopefully* the root cause of our issue. I liberally applied silicone all over the bolt threads and then after screwing it on, smothered the outside too. The bilge appears to be holding steady now.

If we can continue doing 100+mi days, we should be there in 5ish days!

Talk to you all soon, bill