Done!

The decks are done. We went back in the water on Saturday, May 7th. Took the boat back to Marina Palmira and started the drudgery of moving out of the rental and getting the boat put back together. We got out of the rental by the 12th, but the putting back together process is still underway to some extent - not only had just about every single thing aboard been moved to the middle of the boat so that the guys could access the underside of the decks, but all the stuff that had migrated over to the casita had to be reabsorbed. I'd say we're at about 90% at this point.

We've decided to stay in La Paz for the summer - the more we talked to people about Mazatlan, the hotter and steamier it sounded. We'll go to the mainland after hurricane season. Art's going to fly up to San Francisco and retrieve our car this weekend - Marina Palmira is definitely nicer than Marina de La Paz, but it's a way out of town, so the car, while not absolutely necessary, will be very nice to have. Hopefully, when Art gets back, we'll have a chance to get up into the islands before the really hot weather gets here. Redoing the decks sort of ate our cruising season this year, but the project was well worth it.

Decks:






We are extremely happy with how they came out.

Decks, Cont'd

The decks are coming along.



They're only able to glue down two planks at a time on each side, so it's rather slow going, but they're looking really nice, don't you think?

Once everything gets glued down, the job should speed up again - caulk, sand and reinstall fittings (we're hoping to do that last one in the water, rather than on the hard - cooler, and no ladders involved, which would mean I could help).

Meanwhile, I'm in LA for the week, taking care of some states based business, including our taxes. Leave it to me to manage to schedule a trip north during a cold snap - it's supposed to be in the 40's tonight. Brrrr. I have definitely become acclimatized to Mexico.

Off with the old

We're about two and a half weeks into the project, and the old teak is all off the deck. It was quite an involved process. Art's been helping with the work, both to see how it's done and to keep the cost down. He's also been taking some pictures. Apologies in advance for the scarcity (and size) of said pictures - when we're on an internet connection where we're not paying by the mb, I'll post more.

First, all the hardware had to come off. There is a lot of stuff on the deck of a Mason 44. Chainplate covers, stanchions, deck fills, hose bibs, blocks, track, etc. All this is through bolted, so the first step was to empty out the lockers and take down all of the headliners under the deck down below. Then everything has to be removed, numbered, bagged and stored. The result is a boat that looks like this:



While that was happening, Reggie and his helper were going over the deck, removing the thousands of screws that attached it to the fiberglass substrate. Some people don't remove the screws, but instead just cut them off. This is a bad idea - it leaves thousands of tiny holes in your deck, and, if you're doing paint or fiberglass rather than teak, the screws can print through the new surface over time. We've seen boats where this has happened, and it's not pretty. Some people will just pry the screws up when they remove the teak. Also a bad idea - you can actually delaminate the upper layer of fiberglass decking from the balsa core, and that's a very expensive and difficult thing to fix.

Then the teak has to be pulled chipped chiseled off the deck. Masons are very well built boats. Correspondingly, even after 22 years, the teak was extremely firmly attached to the deck. Art said the average size of the pieces they were able to remove was ~2" long. It was pretty tough going. Eventually, they got all of the teak up, and were left with a bare fiberglass deck with bits of mastic adhering to it. That all had to be scraped/ground off. Messy.



Interestingly, we did not have fiberglass non skid under the teak. I'd heard that a lot of these boats did, as the non skid pattern was in the molds used to build the boat. On our boat, Ta Shing apparently ground it down before installing the teak. That's probably part of why the teak was so well stuck.

Once they got all of the mastic scraped/ground off of the fiberglass, it was time for one last grinding to smooth everything down, and they were ready to lay the new teak.

Oh, but what's that? This isn't teak caulk! It's teak cleaner. Crap! The distributor sent the wrong stuff down from San Diego. Luckily, Reggie was able to sell the cleaner to a marine business here in town, and the distributor got the (we hope) correct stuff on a truck that should get here tomorrow or Friday. So, for now, they're just dry fitting the planks. Once we have actual caulk, they'll move on to the next step, which is gluing them down. Stay tuned!

To the Yard

There are two types of boaters, it's sometimes said: those who have run aground and those who will run aground. Monday, we became the former.

Our trip to the yard where we'll have Arione's teak decks replaced started off fine. We got off to a fairly early start from the little casita we're renting, get down to the boat, schlep the laundry and a last few things for the house up to the rental car, top off the water tanks and untie. There's no marked channel from Marina de La Paz south to the Singlar yard, but we have, we think, a pretty good handle on the route we need to take. The tide's going out, though, so we need to be careful. At first, everything's fine – 12, 15, 17 feet showing on the depth sounder, amazingly, actually matching what we're seeing on the chart. Then, things start getting skinny. We showing 8 feet, then 6, then 5 then... uh, oh. We're in the mud. Art backs off and tries another direction. Crap. In the mud again. The bottom's soft, so there's not a lot of worry about breaking the boat, but this is waaay too skinny for our tastes. We try yet another direction, and with a sickening sort of slurping feeling, we're hard aground. On a dropping tide. This is not good. If we have to wait to float off, we're going to be here until late afternoon, and still we'll have no idea what direction to go. We try gunning the engine in reverse. Nope. Heeling the boat over with the boom. Nope. Putting up the jib and seeing if the wind might take us off. Not a chance.

We call Reggie, who's doing the work on the decks. He says he'll try and get someone from the yard to come out and help, but they don't get in until 9:00, so it would likely be 10:00, with even less water, by the time they get to us. We hail the marina. At first, they say they can't get to us until 10:00 either, but Art points out the situation with the tide, and they say they'll get someone right out. A few minutes later, two pangas with guys in blue marina uniforms are headed our way. We get lines attached, and they start pulling. And pulling. And pulling. The boat heels over and I hear things crashing off the counters below, so I run down and put stuff away before it breaks. I am, at this point, starting to get a little freaked out. As Art pointed out, this wasn't exactly helping, but that's just where my brain seems to want to go. I have visions of us stuck here for days, waiting for the tides to come up. But what if this was a really high tide? What were the tides doing over the last few days? How could I not have checked. Hell, what were we even thinking, setting off into an uncharted bay on a falling tide. We are, clearly, idiots. Also, we have no idea what this is going to cost. What if it winds up being a salvage job? (a salvage job is a very expensive, complicated maritime law thing related to whether or not the boat's actually in danger.) Do these guys even know where the deep water is? My brain is doing me no favors here, going off on the worst possible tangents. After about 40 minutes, the pangas get us free. Those three guys just refused to give up (which is what I told the office at the marina when I stopped in today to leave a tip for them). We are both incredibly relieved.

We call Reggie again, and tell him we'll mill around in the marked channel until he can get a boat out to guide us in. He does one better than that, and gets a boat and an extra guy who has been in and out of Singlar a whole bunch of times on his own boat, which draws even more than we do. This guy comes aboard and sends us way up to the top of the bay to cross over to the channel which runs pretty much nowhere near where we thought it was along the Mogote (peninsula on the west side of Bahia de La Paz). It takes a long time, as we're sort of feeling our way along, dead slow, but we do eventually get to the head of the dredged, marked channel into Singlar. In addition to being incredibly reassuring, our helper (Bob? Bill? Why am I so bad at names?) Rob is good company. He left for San Diego later that afternoon, but we know which boat is his and are so buying him a drink (or several) when he gets back.

Of course, by the time we get to Singlar, the water is too low for them to get us out – the slings on the lift can't be lowered enough to get them under Arione. Reggie runs me back to Marina de La Paz so that I can take our rental car back to avoid being charged for an extra day. I get us checked out of the marina. Oh, and the towing bill? Just over $100 U.S. What a relief.

Decks

Arione is not a new boat. She's well past old enough to vote and could get a drink if she had the ability to order one. She has teak decks. Teak decks that were, regrettably, but standard for the time she was built, fastened with approximately five million screws through the balsa cored fiberglass nonskid decks that were molded into the boat for people who didn't want teak. Of whom there were very few, judging from the messages I've read on the Mason mailing list over the past 10 years. Most people with these boats have either dealt with their decks or are wondering how they will deal with them. We've known since we bought her that at some point, the decks were going to be an issue.

We figured at some point we'd have to replace the teak decks with painted nonskid. Which would have been functional, but a little sad. This is a boat that wants pretty decks, and paint is not particularly pretty. What we didn't know was that we were going to be in La Paz, where there is a guy who specializes in redoing teak decks. He took us around and showed us a lot of his work on other boats. It's beautiful. Bonus - he glues the teak down. There will be screws and bungs in the edge pieces, but that is something like 95% fewer screws into the deck than we have now.

Replacing a teak deck is never going to be a bargain proposition, but he's doing it for us at a price we can afford. Art's going to help with the labor, and I'll inventory the hardware as it comes off, so that reduces the labor a bit. Through a local mailing list, we've found a short term rental that's not too dear.

The work starts Monday. We'll rent a car this weekend and move all of the stuff that needs to be off the boat into the rental. I'm psyched.

Fixing one's boat in (not so) exotic places

We are out of the boatyard and back in Alameda, at least for a while. We got our radar adjusted and our autopilot configured and our echo charger replaced, so that was all good. Then, as if they'd just been waiting for us to address everything we thought was a must do, our wind instruments completely shut down. Dead, deceased, not of this earth, no longer living. The yard guys came out in their little fast boat (God, I love KKMI), but once it was apparent it was not just some easily solved wiring problem, we turned around and headed back to Richmond. Ron was able to get the instruments going by resetting the controller (one of those special "only if you're a marine electrician because it's not in the manual" menu items, I guess), but now we're worried.

See, the wind instruments aren't essential (though they're certainly nice), but the same controller thing that Ron reset also runs our knotmeter and our depth sounder. Now, the knot meter I could almost really not care less about, as it's largely been supplanted by the more useful speed over the ground (as opposed to speed through the water, which is often, especially in the San Juans, quite a different number) from the GPS, but about the depth sounder, we both care a great deal. Because a boat is supposed to, y'know float, which it can only do in sufficient water. How do you know how much water you're in? Ding, ding, ding: the depth sounder. So that's a fairly critical thing to have working, and, well, that controller is old enough to drink and it's apparently getting flaky.

We installed a new wind sensor (of course, compatible only with B&G gear) when we were in the yard in Bellingham. But replacing all of our current gear with new B&G stuff would run probably twice what replacing it with Furuno instruments (everything else on the boat is Furuno now, save the VHF radio), although the labor would be more for the Furuno approach, because we'd need to haul the boat to put new transducers in the hull and go up the mast (OK, we would not personally be going up the mast, but someone would) to replace the windstrument. We could also sell the very expensive and almost brand new wind sensor if we got new gear it wasn't compatible with - apparently likely for quite close to what we paid for it. Assuming Ron can get us onto his schedule, I think we're going back in the yard. Again. What we'd be installing, we're not quite sure, but the wind/speed/depth instruments are fairly surely on their way out.

It's like they know, the instruments do, somehow. I hate them.

Other than that, it's been a nice few days. We've seen lots of family and old friends, and are, in fact, going wine tasting in Sonoma with one of those friends tomorrow. We've had several really nice sails - we haven't seen wind like this since we moved to Washington, and while the Bay is definitely deficient in cruising destinations, it is one hell of a nice place to just sail. It's been lovely, really. Just more expensive than we'd hoped. But, as I keep reminding myself, we'll have a far better boat for all this work stuff we're putting into it.

I am so ready to do something that doesn't involve moving the boat around tomorrow.

And we're having fun, dammit.

At KKMI

We are in the yard for the day, getting a few things put right that weren't quite. The echo charger (probable blown fuse), the radar/chart alignment on the plotter, a once-over on the engine. Today is mostly about figuring out what we need, they'll order everything up and we'll come back when it all comes in to do the actual work.

Had an absolutely wonderful sail up here from South Beach yesterday - up the city front and across the gate to Raccoon Straits, then a downwind run to the yard in Richmond. Aaaah.

Backward Compatibility Fail

When we were coming up with the list of upgrades we wanted to do for this trip, AIS was near the top. This is a system that "sees" other boats (the ones with AIS, anyway) and displays them on the plotter at the helm. It also broadcasts our information to other boats in the area with AIS receivers. It gives you not only the name and size of the boats it sees (so you know what you're looking for), but also speed and course (so you can tell if you're likely to run into eachother). With the right type of radio interfaced to it, it also allows you to direct dial the helm of any boat you can see on the screen. It is, in short, extremely useful, especially as we head down the coast.

The installation was straightforward, but getting it to talk to the plotter was not going well. In fact, it was not going at all. A little research that we should have done in the first place turned up the fascinating fact that our five year old plotter can't display AIS targets. Ugh - we need to buy a new plotter. Since the plotter is also our interface for the radar, we needed to make sure our existng radome (radar antenna) was compatible with the new plotter. I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that it was not. We wanted to go to a 10.4" plotter - one of the only things we've been sorry about from our previous big refit five years ago is that we cheaped out and went with a smaller screen on the plotter - but our existing radome would only work with the seven inch display.

We basically had two choices - one was a Frankenstein's monster approach of a mixed NavNet 1/NavNet 2 setup that had us installing the new plotter at the helm, the old one somewhere down below and having them share data. Oh, but they couldn't share charts over the network, just data - to have charts at the helm (sort of important, since that's where we drive the boat from), we'd need to buy new charts, which eliminated one of the potential cost savings of the monster approach. Did I mention that the new plotter uses SD chart cards, while the old one uses something else? I didn't think so. That's why we couldn't just go without charts in the plotter down below (making it a dedicated radar only unit) and move the chart cards we already own to the plotter in the cockpit. It would have saved us the cost of a new radome, but just looked like, well, something we could get working, but what if it died? Something told us this kludgey solution was going to be a ring-tailed bitch to troubleshoot down the line. Also - JFC, everyone who has dual helm stations has been buying two sets of chart cards? I had no idea.

So we gritted our teeth and went with option two: ripping everything out and installing a new system from end to end. That way we'd at least have the old complete system to sell, and we'd have a standard installation that anyone with access to the manuals could troubleshoot. Problem solved.

Well, no, problem not solved (this is a boat, it can't be that easy). To accommodate the new plotter and the helm VHF that we'd previously installed, we needed a wider instrument pod. Unfortunately, the wider pod was also taller. So tall, in fact, that it would have been sitting directly on the dome of our compass. It was also deeper, so it obstructed the view of the compass needle. Now we needed a smaller compass.

I think we've got something that will work, but honestly, I'm not going to believe anything until it's all hooked up and back together. Sometime later this week, we should have a new radar, plotter, instument installation at the helm and compass. Oh, and we'll have AIS. Hopefully.

Anyone want to buy a Furuno 1733C/NT radar/plotter with charts from the top of Vancouver Island to Acapulco? We've got a spare. It doesn't speak AIS, though.

It's been a really crappy couple of days for the cats...

... and not so great for us, either, although we are very, very glad to finally have our boat back. Friday morning, we arrived in Bellingham, supposedly needing only to get briefed on the operation of the watermaker and new fridge, to find the boat swarming with boatyard workers. Thus, the cats spent Friday shut in the forepeak to keep them from "helping" (or escaping). This was not good. We'd been assured that all the work would be complete by Tuesday, and that the yard would take the boat out for a sea trial sometime between then and Friday. Obviously, that hadn't happened.

The jib was still sitting in its bag on the foredeck, where we'd left it last Sunday. The hydraulic system was still not hooked up, so the rig wasn't tuned. Nothing (lights, radar, new wind instruments) on the mast worked. Basically, the boat was exactly as we'd left it the prior weekend. Pissed doesn't really adequately describe our reaction to this state of affairs. By late that afternoon, the hydraulics were hooked up, the rig was tuned, and the jib was back on. After the yard told us all was good with the mast, Art tried the radar. It still didn't work. A call to Furuno tech support suggested that the problem was the video cable. An attempt was made to solder it. It worked until the housing was put back on, then stopped. A second attempt was successful - hopefully the fix will last - I'm a little nervous about it, honestly. The watermaker apparently works, sort of, but its electronics aren't talking to each other as they should, so that's going to have to be addressed by the branch of the yard down here in Seattle and/or the manufacturer in Eugene, OR. After everyone had left for the day, it started to rain, which was when we discovered that the Spartite around the mast partners isn't. Grrrr. Testing is apparently not Seaview's strong point.

We let the very annoyed cats out of the forepeak, ate dinner and went to bed. We needed to get up early the next morning to catch the ebb out of Bellingham to carry us to Port Townsend, where we planned to stop for the night.

We cast off from the yard at about 7:30 Saturday morning. So far so good. About 20 minutes out, Art suggested that it would probably be a good idea to check the packing gland. That, along with our entire stern tube/cutlass bearing assembly had been completely rebuilt. You can see where this is going, can't you? I went down to look at the gland, and there are two nuts spinning merrily away on the end of one of the bolts that hold the entire assembly together. If you don't have a boat, you probably don't know that had this particular item come apart, we'd have had a large hole in our boat about 2' below the waterline. This is, most assuredly, not a good thing. In fact, it is a very bad, potentially boat sinking thing. Art was able to get the thing properly assembled while I sailed around in circles with the engine in neutral. Did I mention that it was raining?

Things really couldn't get any worse from there, and they did, in fact improve quite a bit.

The ebb was really picking up by the time we got going again, and we went bombing down Bellingham Channel and Rosario Strait at about 10 knots over the ground. The wind was straight on the nose, so we were motoring. The cats, who hate the engine, disappeared into whatever dark and small parts of the boat they cram themselves into whenever we turn on the noisy thing. We were at or above 10 knots for a couple of hours, and covered a lot more ground than we had expected, finding ourselves at the head of Admiralty Inlet at noon. This is more than 40 miles from Bellingham, and if we were going to stop as planned in Port Townsend, this is where we would turn west and head in. However, knocking off at noon when we were only 45 miles from our destination seemed, well, stupid, especially as it had gotten sunny and on the edge of almost warm as the day went on. We figured we might as well just keep going to Seattle. This really annoyed the cats - the last couple of hours of the trip, Maggie would yell at us any time either of us went below, and would stand on the top step of the companionway yelling through the drop boards when we weren't. She was ticked, and had things to tell us. For an 8 pound cat, she's pretty damn loud.

We pulled into our new slip in Elliot Bay Marina at 6:30, completely beat, but really glad to be home. We averaged over 8 knots for the whole trip, which is really amazing - our usual speed is just north of 6. No one had any energy to make dinner, so we foraged. Even I didn't manage to stay up past 10:30.

This morning, we were both moving very slowly. Tomorrow, we'll take the train back to Bellingham to retrieve our car. I suspect we'll also be giving the yard an earful.