Ñandú

It seems that overnight segments are not friends with us. We departed from Sandy Hook, NJ one morning with the intention of making it by the next day to Lewes, DE, some 130 nautical miles away.

After clearing most of the heavy traffic to and from New York City we pointed south and got ready to raise the main sail. A loose rope out of nowhere fell to my feet. Uh-oh. It was a section of the lazy jack that untied itself. Not a biggie, but it was a sign that the gods were not with us that day, and it meant I had to climb up two thirds of the mast with the boat rolling to the waves to put it back where it belonged. My breakfast did remain in its place, thank you very much.

One hour before dusk I decided to turn on the port engine, since we where not making good progress against the wind, and even less so with the winds getting lighter. Beeeeeep!!! Alarms galore in the engine panel, with a familiar pattern. Oh, no, not again! I shut the engine and went down to the engine room: yes, again. The alternator was loose.

Since the alternators are seemingly becoming the villain of these adventures, please allow me some technical explanations to clear their honor. We have wonderful engines that run fine, and high-quality alternators that run fine. The only problem is that the engines are Yanmar and the alternators are Mastervolt (a better match to our Mastervolt lithium batteries than the original Yanmar alternators)… and they don’t seem to want to stay together. The second attempt was a specially manufactured bracket that just broke in two pieces.

An  alternator is not a critical part of an engine: it just recharges the batteries. However, the belt that drives the alternator in these engines also drives the coolant pump: a loose alternator means a loose belt, which means no coolant circulation, which leads to overheating, which destroys the engine. So the port engine was out of commission.

And given that the starboard engine had an identical bracket holding the alternator, it was at risk too, thus we decided not to use it and reserve it for our landfall. However, at the pace we were sailing we would have needed an extra full day to get to our scheduled destination. We changed course to Atlantic City, NJ, where we arrived the following afternoon, me overheating with flu symptoms.

We’re now in this otherworldly marina surrounded by golden casinos that saw better times, waiting for new, stronger brackets to fix the alternators (as in fix them so that they don’t move), while also waiting for my fever to subside. Multitasking at its best.

Oh, and Leslie decided to skip the wait and the viruses, and, understandably, abandoned ship. It was a pleasure and a relief to have the extra hands and experience of an adult making sure two kids with more sailing dreams than practice would not sink a brand-new boat. Now we’re on our own. We’ll follow Captain Ralph’s advice: go slow and aim for the cheapest boat.

After that exciting night the next few legs have been rather uneventful. That’s good news for us, but bad news for you, since you are now reading a duller post.

From Provincetown we sailed across Cape Cod Bay, took the man-made Cape Cod Canal and then navigated the shallow, narrow, convoluted, nerve-wracking, no-mistakes-forgiven channel to Pocasset.

There we got the jib repaired, bought rope for a new jib sheet, and replaced the double block that caused the debacle with two single ones.

The sailmaker who repaired the sail had a piece of wisdom for us, upon hearing how the jib got damaged: “You have to be aware that on a sailboat everything is broken. You just don’t know yet.” So true.

Then we hopped to beautiful Block Island, RI where we enjoyed a warm stopover day only to wake up with frost on the roof a couple of days later in Milford, CT. Our passage through Long Island Sound also included a solitary stay anchored in Joshua Cove, CT, to wait out a big blow, and docking in funky City Island, NY, our last stop before the scary East River and its Hell Gate by Manhattan.

The East River is not really a river but a tidal strait, and has a reputation as a tricky passage because it is narrow, has a lot of commercial and recreational traffic, and currents can reach five turbulent knots when the river takes a sharp bend at the aptly named Hell Gate.

We approached the entrance motoring cautiously and nervously, and cowardly decided to follow the only other sailboat around, which was also running on their engine but was smaller and less powerful than ours. We even slowed down in order to remain behind them, which provided us an entirely unjustified sense of safety. Hell Gate came and its rips did look scary, but the boat didn’t even notice. At least our boat didn’t notice. The boat ahead of us started to drift broadside with the current, getting dangerously close to the concrete walls on the Manhattan side. When we got closer, our unknowingly appointed fearless leaders hailed us asking for assistance! They had gotten a line entangled in their propeller. So, in a way, it was a good idea to go behind them, because they cleaned up the way for us. As I maneuvered to get alongside them, a smaller and more nimble powerboat came and gave them a tow, so we continued our way to a marina in the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.

Now, of course, soon after I started a draft for this post and used the word “uneventful”, we had an eventful leg. Stay tuned.

While the yard guys were still working on the boat, we flew to California to help our daughters get settled in their colleges and pick up Oliver, the cat (the only member of the family who hadn’t moved so far, since we left him under the care of the new owners of our house). The alternator issue was still waiting for parts when we came back to the boat.

A week later the parts arrived and we had a functional although still not entirely finished boat, so we recruited an experienced friend, Leslie, to help us move the boat South and nervously got underway. It’s not going to be the pleasant, laid-back and slow harbor-hopping that we intended, because we lost the summer to all that waiting and it’s starting to get cold up here.

After a short leg to Booth Bay with almost no incident (just some alarms going off, lobster traps being dragged by unconventional means, and the watermaker refusing to pay the debt it has accumulated with us) we pointed the bows to Cape Cod.

At dusk it started to drizzle, wind and waves started to pick up, and things got a bit rough, but other than a lot of noise and some rolling and pitching, we were safely making good progress under sail.  Oliver, however, was in full freak out mode, and Kathy was concerned about him to the point that she helped him keep balance on his way to the litter box.

[Warning for non-sailors: sailing jargon ahead. The jib is a head sail, head means toilet, but the jib is not a toilet sail, even though it has a head.]

Around midnight hell broke loose. The jib sheet broke and the jib started flogging furiously and uncontrollably under 25 knots of wind. We settled on a plan to lower the jib and stow it in the port hull, passing it through the head’s hatch. We started the engines to point upwind, Leslie poked out of the hatch like a prairie dog, Kathy got ready to release the jib halyard, and I went to the foredeck keeping my head down to avoid a whip from the sail, and tethered myself to a strong point. I tied a line to the jib’s tack and threw the other end to Leslie, opened the tack shackle and started pulling the furious beast down with all my strength. It didn’t move at all. That was because Kathy was still searching for the cleat that held the halyard. Once she opened the cleat, the jib reluctantly accepted to come down, but it wasn’t easy and I suspected the luff was getting damaged as I forced the sail down. After Leslie tamed the bottom half of the sail through the hatch, I had to cut a safety wire and unscrew a pin to release the head shackle and get the top half through the hatch. I succeeded, but focusing at close range while going up and down wildly with the waves did me. I returned my lunch to the sea. By the end of the ordeal all four of us (cat included) ended up seasick and executing one version or another of the feeding the fish or shouting to submarines act.

The rest of the night was quite gloomy, with everyone cold, wet, seasick and exhausted, and the cockpit a huge mess that nobody wanted to spend energy in tidying up.

The aftermath: the luff tape was in fact damaged, the clew block disappeared (I later found in the trampoline the remnants of the shackle that held it; the whips were strong enough to break it), and the jib had a 3-foot tear, probably caused by the flying block.

The cause: the jib is rigged for self-tacking, but whoever decided to attach a double block instead of two independent single blocks to the jib car made a bad choice. The jib sheet came out of each block at different angles, so it didn’t run smoothly and ended up chafed.

Taking possession was quite anticlimatic. Since we moved into an unfinished boat, our first night was nothing like the romantic and exciting start of a new life that we had envisioned. We had to load a ton of stuff (a minivan and a trailer to the brim), but there was no place to store anything. Not only the storage spaces were not finished, but the shelves and doors that would be part of them were on the beds and floors, interspersed with tools and rags, leaving very little space for anything else. On top of that, there was fiberglass dust everywhere. Not the most welcoming place. But fresh water flowed out of the faucets, propane flowed out of the stove burners, and the mattresses had been delivered earlier that day, so we could live in there.

After a few days floating tied to a mooring buoy, a more positive mood replaced the initial shock. Firstly, they may be slow to finish the boat, but we have full confidence in their workmanship, and the boat does look lovely if you ignore some details such as duct-taped plastic film in lieu of windows.

Secondly, things started to find their place, and now it takes me less than a minute to find my underwear. And, perhaps most importantly, the composting toilets do work as advertised!

We compiled a long list of things to fix and finish, only to learn that one of the key workers, the electrician, was at the hospital with a serious infection. We started to wonder whether we were the carriers of a nautical curse. A couple of years ago we owned a 1948 Folkboat, and we had hired a wooden boat expert to inspect our boat to give us a recommendation on a particular issue. He didn’t show up and then didn’t return our phone calls. When Kathy finally got hold of his assistant, she said that the reason he hadn’t returned our calls was because he died. Less than a year after that, I hired a diver to clean the boat’s bottom. He didn’t show up and didn’t return our phone calls. Appallingly enough, the story repeated itself almost exactly. So, after two unexpected, tragic deaths in our nautical record, the news were downright scary. Luckily, the electrician survived our curse and came back two weeks later. By then the list had grown to include a broken alternator bolt.

We got ourselves busy learning about the boat’s systems. We learnt, for instance, that the watermaker will actually consume your precious fresh water. Yup. Turns out that if you don’t use it for a few days (and we didn’t because the seawater in that little fishing harbor didn’t look clean enough), the watermaker will use 2 or 3 gallons of fresh water to flush the system and keep some obscure (and expensive) “membrane” from getting ruined. Now, of course, when the time for the flush came, there was no water left in the tank the watermaker is connected to. Actually, there was water, but it wouldn’t flow out of the tank because, as we learnt later, of a clogged vent. Clogged with, most ironically, fresh water. So there we were, manually moving water with the kettle from the tank in the other hull, to feed water to this fabulous gadget that was supposed to feed water to us.

Then one day something was suddenly amiss. My beloved dinghy, fruit of years of hard weekend labor, had just vanished! Panic ensued. And quite a bit of frustration given that I had just spent almost two full days installing a gunwale guard… to protect something that now was entirely lost. Without such an indispensable item the situation was disastrous, and, frankly, terribly embarrassing. Desperation turned into hope when we recognized a black, red and grey shape in a rocky beach in the island in front of us. It was there, waiting for us! We quickly donned our wetsuits and jumped into one sailboard each, and swam, paddled and kicked to the island. Gecko, the dinghy, somehow ended up magically cradled in a soft layer of seaweed, without even a scratch. What had happened was that each of us thought the other one was going to tie the dinghy, and neither of us did, nor double checked. To make matters worse, at that moment I did imagine a scenario where the dinghy would drift untethered, and figured I’d grab a sailboard to chase it, but even with that thought in my mind I didn’t bother checking the dinghy was secured. Lesson learned. Maybe.

All and all, there hasn’t been any time to relax yet, except for a little on-wheels cruising that we did with our daughters. To-do lists remain long, with forms to fill, manuals to read, spare parts to buy, things to organize, van and trailer to sell, gear to inspect, diesel engines to understand. We know that for the moment we are just experiencing most of the bad and few of the good things of cruising, but we also know the tide will eventually change. So, when we get overwhelmed we just have to take a deep breath and look outside to enjoy one of those good things: the landscape that surrounds us.