Baja Haha Crew Party Tonight

We're hoping to pick up a couple of extra crew for the Haha. Max will be making the trip from San Diego to Cabo with us, but we need some extra hands. We've gotten a lot of responses to our Latitude 38 crew listing, and are hoping to meet a few of those folks tonight.

Details at the top of the right sidebar if you're interested.

Got crew. Thanks for your interest.

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.

Done moving

We are DONE. I handed back the keys Tuesday morning. Now we have to make the store/sell decision on the car.

I had forgotten how much work it is to move onto the boat

We made the process worse by having storage units in both Seattle and Anacortes. It's amazing how fast we accumulate stuff - when we moved up here five years ago, our possessions fit in the boat and a single storage unit. Of course then we moved ashore and went to Ikea where we bought an apartment's worth of stuff that we've spent the past five years slowly upgrading. Somewhere in there, we moved from a two bedroom apartment in Bellevue to a one bedroom apartment in Seattle. The result is a bunch of post Ikea stuff (much of it in storage) that we don't want to get rid of.

As of today, we're out of the storage unit in Anacortes. Art spent a couple of days up there earlier organizing, taking the ancient containers of methyl ethyl bad shit (some of which, I'm embarrassed to say, date from our time in Alameda - yes, we moved old cans of paint thinner and lighter fluid with us when we came to Seattle*) to the Skagit County hazmat disposal site, and disassembling the bakers racks (those chromed wire shelves you can get at Costco) of which we've somehow accumulated six. This morning we drove up there and picked up a one-way U-Haul. Thanks to all the work Art did in advance, we had the truck packed up in a little over an hour. I drove the car back, taking the scenic route through La Conner as my Skagit Valley farewell tour. After quick stop at the boat to take some stuff out of the car so that Art would actually have somewhere to sit when we dropped of the truck, we headed down to the place where we're storing all of our stuff while we're in Mexico.

Originally we were going to bring all of that stuff to the apartment and then pay the movers to take it to storage*. At some point last week, a little lightbulb went off and we realized that we could, wonder of wonders, through the amazing technology called the telephone, call the movers and see if we could just drop it off at their storage facility ourselves. Which we did. Cheaper and easier. I like that.

Next week = movers, which, of course, means the remainder of this week = packing.

Seaview is definitely redeeming itself - the watermaker works, and although there's still some sort of leak at the mast, the Spartite is quite possibly not the problem (which, in addition to perhaps not being the yard's fault, might be a bigger problem than we thought, but la la la la la I'm not going to think about that right now...). The owner was positively mortified about the packing gland. The guy they've sent to do most of the work is great, really seems to know his stuff, and funnily, is married to a woman we've met a couple of times who goes to the same Spanish teacher we do.

Our autopilot, unfortunately, appears to have bitten the dust. As a) it's 20 years old and b) we've rarely used it, this isn't terribly surprising. However, neither of us wants to go down the coast without a method of steering the boat that doesn't require actually standing at the wheel. It was also pointed out to us that even if we were to manage to revive it, if it died again, the likelihood of finding parts to repair a circa 1989 B&G Helmstar 740 are somewhere between slim and nil. The good news is that the hydraulic ram (the part that moves the rudder), which would be fairly spendy to replace, appears to be OK - meaning we'll just need to replace the brain. What was I thinking? Of course we needed to replace the ram too - on further inspection, it was unsalvageable.

The status on our SSB is still unknown. We're going to have it bench tested to see if the problems we're having are operator error (quite likely) or there's something wrong with the set (also likely, as this is another circa 1989 piece of equipment).

If you've read this far, you may be wondering if our retirement has turned into a bleak and unending ordeal of uninterrupted toil. Not likely! We went over to Blake Island and hung out for a few days at the end of last week, which was lovely, unseasonably warm, and a great introduction to cruising around Seattle. Also, we signed up (#13) for the Baha Ha-ha, which makes everything feel a little more real and all the schlepping we've been doing totally worth it.

* What can I say? Sometimes we are idiots.