Penultimate week in Hilton Head

The time is flying by here, mostly owing to the unending projects that have been keeping me busy night and day.  In and among those projects, however, we got visitors, from out of the blue -- our first rendezvous with other cruisers.

Rod and Pauline have a Nova Scotia 47, and have been reading the blog, at least since I posted an introduction a couple of weeks ago over on the Trawlers and Trawlering mailing list, an on-line email list to which I have subscribed for some seven years or so now. They, too, moved onto their boat from full-timing in a motor coach, and they wanted to meet us and compare notes.  As they were passing right by on the ICW, they asked if we might be up for a visit.

Apparently, the marina here has a "three nights for the price of two" promotion here in the off season, and so they opted to spend three nights, arriving Saturday and leaving with the tide this morning.  We had two nice visits in the intervening two afternoons, with tours of our respective vessels.  Ironically, another Nova Scotia 47, out of only perhaps four ever built, was one of the boats we very nearly looked at in Jacksonville, just before we made a dash to Savannah to see the boat we now own.

It was great making some new friends, and we copied down quite a few hints and tips from their four years of cruising.  They are Australian, so they face even more obstacles than we do in regard to the bureaucratic paperwork and minutiae of keeping a boat.  I am sure we will run into them again someplace.

After my last post here, nearly a week ago, I more or less gave up on finding a suitable TV before we left Hilton Head.  After spending far too many hours on the project, I needed to move on to other, more pressing issues.  The TV I had to return to Best Buy just arrived back there today, so at least I've now got my money back, and Louise thinks she's found a model, by Haier, that will work, which we might have sent ahead to Charleston, our next stop.

When we arrived back at the dock after our last training session and got everything secure, I did my routine check of the engine room bilges, and I noticed a trickle of water I had never seen before.  Water running into the bilge is never good, and so I started pulling up floor plates until I found it -- a drip from the fresh water pump.  The pump was not running at the time.

After scratching our heads for a few moments, we realized that we had completely filled the fresh water tank after returning to the dock, and so the level of water in the tank was likely slightly above the pump.  It looked like there had been some leakage there for a very long time, and we later confirmed the drip slowed down to nearly nothing when the tank was below about 3/4 full or so, unless the pump was running, something it only ever does for a few seconds at a time.  So we had not noticed it earlier, but it was not a new problem.

Nevertheless, having excavated to the pump itself and started the troubleshooting, I wanted to get the leak stopped, and to that end I bought a rebuild kit online for $40 and sprung the $30 for overnight shipping, so I had it in hand by Friday.  That, of course, was before I knew we'd have visitors.  Once the flow rate dropped to nearly undetectable, though, I was no longer so worried about it.  I should note, here, that with everything, pump included, being ten years old and full of rust, my initial thought was to just replace the pump; that was before I found out they cost $3,000 (yes, really -- a water pump).

By Sunday I was ready to tear into the pump, but realized I had better wait to Monday when I would have access to the local hardware store till 6pm.  That proved prescient, as I had to send Louise out mid-project for hoses and fittings to replace the ones I had to cut off with a utility knife.  Also, I ended up calling the manufacturer, Groco, halfway through for advice, and a live tech support person answered the phone and was very helpful.  The pump is now rebuilt and does not leak, although there is enough scoring on the shaft that I do not expect to get another full decade from it.

Of course, rebuilding the fresh water pump was not even on my original project list, so there's another day gone from the schedule.  With no backup system for water pressure, this was also a project that, once started, had to be completed in one session.  By contrast, Odyssey had two separate water pressure pumps (each only $300, not ten times that much), and also a fitting where city water pressure could be attached.  Adding a city water fitting in the engine room, for the next time the pump needs to be serviced, is now on my to-do list.  I'll do that when I replace all the galvanized fresh water plumbing with PEX sometime over the next few months.

As long as I was working on plumbing, which I detest, I also tore into the tiny air compressor in the flybridge coaming that runs the massive four-trumpet air horns.  There's a small tank on it, perhaps a gallon or so, and a little DC compressor, which I judged adequate to inflate fenders and scooter tires, and so I put a Tee on it and a quick-connect fitting for that task.  I've been missing my compressor since we left the bus, and getting a larger compressor, principally to be used for a "hookah" dive rig, is much further in the future.

That project was complete in time to inflate the new fender that arrived from one of my numerous online orders.  There were three nice large black "barrel" style fenders on the boat when we got it, and we felt we could use one more.  That will let us pre-set two on each side whenever we come into an unknown marina, with our four large ball-style fenders available to move around as needed.  Once secure we can have all four of the nice barrels on the dock side, and stow the balls, which are faded orange and bear the battle scars of a decade.

I did finally manage to get the heading data working on the radar display, and my order of terminal strips arrived in the last couple of days so I can finally finish cleaning up the NMEA-0183 junctions under the helm.  Once we get back under way we shall see whether that will cure the stabilizers of their penchant for centering at random times.  I also ripped out a bunch of abandoned wiring under there, and managed to label a dozen or so wires that formerly were mysterious.  It's all starting to make sense, but I can see several dozen hours ahead of me in cleaning up and rewiring things under there.

This is a rare month, inasmuch as there are five full weekends this month, and so even though we've been through four weekends already, counting the one when we arrived, we still have one left.  We're hoping our friends in Savannah, who once lived here in Hilton Head, will come up for a visit now that we are done with training.  We'll also try to take advantage of the next few days to get out to some of the local establishments that we've missed up to this point, including the other side of the Palmetto Dunes resort, now that the seasonal shuttle has just started running.

Sunday we took the boat out on our own for the very first time.  We only went as far as the fuel dock, because we needed the pumpout station, but still it felt like a big milestone.  We got that done just in the nick of time, too, because if we had put it off another day, we'd not have been able to get over to the fuel dock in the ~40-knot winds yesterday. The winds let up a little overnight, but were back to storm force again by mid-morning today.  I am hoping for much calmer conditions when it comes time to leave.

Best Buy -- not

It really should not be this hard, but my second try at buying a new TV from Best Buy has ended once again in failure.  Unlike the first time, where I canceled the order before it even shipped once I learned, by downloading the owner's manual, that the advertised headphone jack did not exist, this time the TV was delivered and I had it in my hands, out of the box, before I discovered the problem.

Once again, the actual product and the advertised specs did not match up.  As I wrote in my last post, after a suggestion from a reader, I ended up ordering an Insignia model, which is Best Buy's house brand (the first mistake was a Westinghouse model, so I can let Best Buy slide on the incorrect specs, which were equally incorrect on the Westinghouse site).  The specs for this set state quite clearly that it is just 2" thick without its stand.  And at first blush when opening the box, it looked quite slim indeed.

Once I had it out, though, and held it up to the wall, it stuck out much further than I expected.  It turns out that, nothwithstanding the slim-looking edges, the unit is actually 3.3" thick, an error of over 60%.  I raced back to the web site to double-check, make sure I ordered the right one, etc..  Then I noticed the box even has a graphic showing the total thickness as 2.0" -- it's just plain wrong.  Wrong on the box, wrong on the Best Buy site, wrong on the Insignia site, and wrong in the database at Customer Service.



To their credit, Best Buy customer service was very apologetic, and they are sending me a $50 gift card for my troubles, in addition to the return UPS tag to send it back.  Frankly, my trouble is worth more than that -- this most likely means I will live without a TV now until sometime in May.  The bill for my unusable DirecTV in the interim will be more than that.  I'm guessing it's also costing them another $50 shipping mislabeled product in both directions, so you'd think they'd have some incentive to get the specs correct on their web site.

Moving on to something more pleasant (more schadenfreude coming, though, I promise), we are now cleared to operate the boat on our own, the restriction to have a licensed captain aboard having been lifted this morning.  Captain Gary had actually already written our sign-off letter by Monday night, but we wanted more practice and spent another day with him yesterday, and he brought the letter with him.  I emailed a scan of the original to the insurance folks last night.

I wanted a try at coming in to an unfamiliar marina on our own, so yesterday's session was a lunch excursion to Harbour Town, with its circular yacht basin and make-believe lighthouse.  The entrance is narrow and marked with private aids, and we radioed ahead for courtesy dockage to eat at one of the restaurants.  We were assigned a slip and given directions, and told that dockhands would meet us.  So no more putting around and picking our own practice grounds -- I had to either make this slip or admit defeat and radio back for something less challenging.

As it turned out, we slid in easily on the first try, tied up, and had a nice lunch at the Crazy Crab.  Gary knows every harbormaster on the island, and after lunch we went to the office to get permission to do some more practice in their harbor.  We did two more practice dockings at different slips around the harbor, including backing in, before we decided that pretty much any slip there would be a slam-dunk, and we left.

Gary had one final curve-ball for me when we landed at our own dock back at Shelter Cove.  This time it was not my bow thruster that went out, but the upper control station. So far, all the docking and departures have been conducted from there, as I have much better visibility all the way around the boat.  In the cold and windy conditions we've had most days, I've then moved down to the warmth and comfort of the pilothouse helm only after clearing the harbor outer markers.  Docking from the lower helm was less of a challenge than, for example, docking without the thruster.  But I still prefer the visibility from the flybridge and I will generally man the maneuvering watch from there.

I spent a good part of the day Monday underneath the helm console.  While that may sound uncomfortable, once I am through the cabinet door, there is room for me to sit cross-legged in there mostly upright, move around, and even lie down fully.  I am starting to call it my man-cave.  I've been learning a great deal about our antiquated electronics suite, and I wanted to see why the radar gets no heading information, the stabilizers keep forgetting how fast we are going, and the radio on the flybridge doesn't know where we are.

The heading mystery was easily solved -- there is nothing at all connected to either the heading output of the autopilot, or the heading input of the radar display.  The Furuno radar takes some proprietary heading input format, but the Simrad autopilot supposedly speaks the Furuno dialect, so I ordered a cable to get the two talking.  Once that's done, we should be able to see the radar information overlaid onto the chart, which would be useful.

The root of the other electronics issues became apparent as I started following cables into a Gordian Knot that was more or less lying on the floor and bound together with zip-ties.  I must have clipped 30-odd zip ties in just a three-foot stretch of cable bundle to excavate to the heart of the matter.

What I found there is that our "NMEA junction box," where information from the GPS attached to the chartplotter is fed to other devices such as the stabilizers and radios, was actually just a bundle of wires zip-tied together, with the signal wires crimped, poorly, in a single crimp connector for each polarity.  I counted seven wires in each crimp.

Without boring you all with the intricate details of NMEA-0183 signals, let me just say that there is only one device that "talks" and multiple devices that "listen" on any given signal bus.  So for example, a GPS unit could be the talker, spitting out position, speed, and course information at regular intervals, while a radio might be listening to learn the ships position (in case someone pushes the "distress" button, which instantly transmits the position to the Coast Guard), and the stabilizers might be listening to learn the speed (so that they can automatically return to a centered position when the ship is moving too slowly for them to be effective).

A rule of thumb in such matters is that one talker can support at most three listeners, lest the signal power degrade to the point where it is unusable, or at least unreliable.  Sort of like how your water pressure starts to drop if you have too many faucets open at once. You might get away with four or even five connections, especially if all the wires are short, but seven listeners on one talker is beyond the pale, especially considering two of them are up on the flybridge, at the end of some 25' of cable with two splices in it.  So it was really no wonder that the two devices on the flybridge are getting no signal, and the stabilizers occasionally think we're stopped when we're doing six knots, causing them to slam to center with a mighty clunk that feels an awful lot like running aground.

To add insult to injury, there was really no reason for this.  The Furuno chartplotter, which is doing the talking, has not one but three different NMEA outputs, so it could conceivably talk to nine different devices at once without testing the limits of any signal receivers.  So by merely ordering a second cable, about $40 at the time, this all could have been done properly from the get-go.  Throw in a few $5 terminal strips and it could even look professional and be easy to understand and maintain, too.

Fortunately, the cable I ordered to get the heading information into the radar/chartplotter can do double-duty as the second talker to split these out.  And I will be moving one of the two radios from the Furuno output to the other chartplotter, which has its own dedicated GPS, so that we will still have a distress-capable radio working even if one of the two GPS chartplotters quits.  Today I updated the Furuno unit from software version 7, current when the boat was built, to version 20, the last release for this model.  That project required, you guessed it, yet another cable, which arrived yesterday.

Vector at the boat ramp.  One of the many docks where Gary had us practice.

Now that we are, essentially, done training, I will spend the next two weeks here getting many of these projects knocked out.  If I get lucky I might even find a replacement TV in time to install it before we get under way, but that is looking doubtful.  And stay tuned for the leaky water pump story. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I will retire to my man cave.

Éirinn go Brách

 

Happy St. Patty's day, everyone, and especially my good friend Jack, who routinely writes my name "Seán." I'd love to tell you we spent the day drinking Murphy's, or Killian's, or maybe even Yuengling with green dye in it, and watching the parade at the south end of the island, but the reality was even more mundane.  Although we did finally get massages today, and they were wonderfully relaxing, even if the massage place had to warn us about potential traffic snarls due to the aforementioned parade.

We had a good week for training.  Gary had us do more practice in the current, and my bow thruster went out once again, this time courtesy of Gary turning it off at the circuit breaker without telling me.  At one point Gary asked us what else we wanted to practice, and Louise suggested we had never picked up a mooring ball.  So we motored over to a small mooring field just downstream of Palmetto Bay.

This was not a public mooring, but more of an anchorage, with balls dropped by lord-only-knows who.  We found an unused ball, but it had no line attached, and I suggested that we could call it a success if Louise could hook the eye with the boat hook.  We got it on the first shot, approaching from down current, with Louise giving me directions from the bow once the ball left my line of sight.

Gary then decided that had not been enough of a challenge, and said he'd really like to see us get a line onto the ball, something that might come up in the real world once in a blue moon (most public moorings will have something attached to the ball that can be hooked). With no way to pull a heavy ball with a mooring chain up to the bow pulpit nearly ten feet above the water, we had a quick pow-wow and decided I would try to get Louise over to the ball while perched on the swim step, where she could actually reach out and run a line through the eye.

That was, indeed, more of a challenge, as I can't see the swim step from the helm, and it's just at the end of shouting distance.  Somehow, on the third pass, I was able to get her close enough to bring the ball in with the boat hook, and she got a line onto it and then walked the bitter end forward to the bow cleats.  We did not want to chance actually putting any strain on the ball, with unknown ground tackle, and the potential for cinching our own line up tight enough that I'd have to get the swim platform over again to undo it (had this been "for real," once moored we could drop the tender and re-arrange the mooring tackle as needed).  So once Gary pronounced us "moored" we pulled our line back off the ball and backed away.

While we were doing all this a group of folks in a tour boat came by to ask if it was our ball.  Apparently the tour guides have seen that ball there for years with nary a boat on it, and no one knows whose it is.  We had to explain that we were just practicing, and they seemed disappointed.

By the end of Friday's session we had the sense that we were ready to do this on our own, and Gary has agreed.  I am waiting now for the insurance company to tell us exactly what they need Gary to send them, and then I think we will be official and able to move the boat on our own.  Nevertheless, we've asked Gary for one more session, just to get a bit more supervised practice in.  I'm hoping to get all this squared away by mid-week, which will give us another two weeks here at Hilton Head with no commitments, so we can wrap up some projects on the boat and the bus before we get under way.

Speaking of the bus, when we checked in on it last weekend, we started the generator and it died after two minutes, out of fuel.  Between leaving Thunderbolt and arriving in Hilton Head the level in the tank had dropped below the dip tube for the generator.  We ran the main engine for a few minutes to top up the batteries, and then left.  Today, after our massages, we returned to the bus, prepped it for travel, and rolled out to the highway to get fuel.  After re-priming the generator I ran it for ten minutes and we breezed out all the systems.  There is a lot of work to do on the bus, but we are deferring most of it now until we have the boat in the yard; since we'll be living on the bus for that month or so, we'll have some time to take care of bus projects.

Work also proceeds apace on boat projects.  We've now got the new pedestal system for the saloon table in place, raising the table up to a more appropriate dining height as well as allowing it to be slid about a half foot back and out of the main aisle.  I have all the parts for the pilothouse table now except the top, which should be here this week.  And I attached a pair of stainless lifting eyes to my scooter, so we can stop lifting it from its plastic grab bars in the back.

This weekend was the first really warm weather we've had since arriving.  It was nice enough yesterday to sip beer on the aft deck, and we finally turned all the heaters off. That meant we wanted to open all the windows on the boat, which itself turned into a project.  All but one of the operable windows on the main level have been stuck shut since we got the boat, and so yesterday we spent a couple of hours freeing them.  Mostly that involved me hammering at them with a deadblow and some blocking, and then, once they were open, cleaning off the crud and corrosion that had stuck them shut in the first place.  We were very pleased once we had them all open -- we get nice cross-ventilation from the six operable windows.

We also opened all the portlights below for the first time.  They are dogged with T-handle ball nuts that are supposed to swing out of the way once the handle is backed off a few turns, allowing the glass to open.  However, the original builder boxed the windows in so tight with cherry trim that the ball nuts have to be removed completely to open the windows.  I'm still noodling on how to fix that without having to redo a lot of expensive joinery.  Again, once opened, we got a good bit of air moving through the space.

I am starting to work on planning our departure from here early next month.  We are paid up through April 2nd, which, if all goes well, is also the drop-dead date for the last of the shipments we are waiting on.  Right now my plan is to cast off that morning and head to the ICW, about an hour from here.  We will then have a three-day cruise to Charleston, where we have tentatively planned to connect with our friend Stephanie and her mom, who are traveling down from her mom's place in Myrtle Beach for a little R&R.  The resort they booked has its own marina, so that should work out nicely if all goes well.

Among the packages we are awaiting, incidentally, is the new TV.  My last post generated many suggestions, including one to look at Best Buy's house brand, Insignia.  It turned out that Insignia offers a 39" model, with a headphone jack, that is just 2" thick, and a nice fit for the space in the other dimensions as well.  No ratings for these models on Consumer Reports, but the constraints had ruled that out.  I am hoping it will all just work out.  Tomorrow I need to work on selling the 27" Sharp, with integral DVD player, that's in the saloon now.

Once we wrap up in Charleston we will amble north along the ICW all the way to Virginia.  That's a journey of around 500 miles, which can be done by a seasoned skipper in about ten days (50 miles a day means roughly 8-hour days in a boat that does 8mph, allowing for bridge openings and idle-speed zones).  We are hoping to do it in about a month, or averaging just 16 or so miles per day.  With any luck we will be at the boat yard by about the second week in May.

Over the next two weeks we will be provisioning the boat, wrapping up some of the more critical projects, and squaring Odyssey away for a month or so of storage in our absence. Once we are in Virginia I need to find a way to get back here so I can bring the bus to the yard, where it will once again be our home for the duration of the work.

Crowdsourcing a TV

The sheer number of projects on the boat is sometimes overwhelming, and project work is punctuated by training, which is even more exhausting.  That said, we are getting a lot done on both fronts.  I have come to a point, though, where I need to appeal to our readers for help, with one of the more minor projects.  To wit:  we need a television.

Louise watches almost no television, and I don't watch much myself, but sometimes I like to turn it on at the end of a long day, when my brain is so numb that even surfing the internet is more work than I want to do.  But I can't watch television on the boat, because the TV that came with it has no headphone jack.  In fact, there does not seem to be any way to get the audio out of the TV, even if I had an external amplifier, without the speakers blaring.  If I want to watch TV but Louise does not (which is the norm), she, understandably, does not want to have to listen to it, whether she's here in the saloon with me, or below, trying to sleep.

There are other issues with the TV, too, such as it is blocking part of one of our view out the windows, and it's much smaller (27") than the one we had on Odyssey (32").  We knew that part early on, and it was a "distant future" project to replace the set.  Now that we've discovered the lack of headphone capability, it's moved up the list rapidly.  Among other things, we are paying monthly for a DirecTV subscription that is all but useless at the moment.

We've identified a spot for a larger screen, above the forward end of the saloon settee, and I thought it would be a slam-dunk to just order a decent 37" model, a size that would fit nicely there.  When we were in California, I helped install a 37" set for my mother-in-law which was just 2" thick, a perfect fit for us, and I nearly ordered the same model for myself.  At the last yawning instant I learned that it had no headphone jack, even though the manufacturer's web site says it does (just before the "specifications subject to change" disclaimer).

I've spent several hours already, time that might have been more productively used, looking for a TV that will meet our needs.  Alas, headphone jacks seem to be going the way of the vinyl record.  So if any of our readers can point me at a set that will meet our needs, I am all ears.  I'd love to have something that is highly rated with great picture quality, but it's so hard to find anything at all that at this point, I am not picky.  The requirements are straightforward -- the set can be no larger than 37" x 23" x 3", must have a headphone jack with a way to shut off the speakers, and a minimum of 32" (diagonal) screen.  I found exactly one TV on the market that meets these criteria, but it is a "3D" model costing north of a grand, at least twice what I am willing to spend on this project.

The set we have on Odyssey is 4" thick, common for that era, which is just a bit too thick for the intended location (more than about 3" will interfere with the headroom for anyone seated at that end of the settee).  Nevertheless I am considering moving it aboard, and replacing it with the 27" unit from the boat, just so I can have a working TV aboard until we solve this problem.  Then I can stop thinking about it until much later, when I have more bandwidth.

In other news, we spent the day training yesterday, and I am happy to report that we did not hit anything else with the boat, unless you count the mud at the bottom of our marina. This despite the fact that halfway through the session, Captain Gary informed me that, for training purposes, our bow thruster had just gone out and I would have to complete all remaining maneuvers without it.  We were able to get back to our own dock on more or less the first try, but coming to a windward dock across from the marina fuel dock was more of a challenge.  It took me four or five tries to get alongside the first time, and after we tied up, Gary suggested I try again. (Louise adds: Gary only smiled when I said, "Hey, if the bow thruster had really failed, the LAST thing we would do is move from this successfully docked position." Gary is a taskmaster.)

The second pass was even more of a challenge, but we managed to get a breast line onto the dock.  Then I struggled mightily to bring the boat alongside, backing, filling, and trying to use the rudder and prop wash to thrust us onto the dock as Louise tried again and again to throw the lines to the distant cleat.  Nothing I tried was working, and even Gary was perplexed, until we finally realized the port side of the boat was on the bottom.  It was low tide, and in the spring tides yesterday that was negative three-quarters of a foot.  As soon as we realized it, I shut down the engine, as I did not want to suck any more mud through the heat exchangers.  We declared a one-hour hiatus, to allow the tide to come back in and give us a bit more clearance before heading back to our own dock.

We had finally managed to put the lines on while I was motoring the boat against the dock, so we had a good list to port when I shut her down.  Shortly after I snapped the photo at the top of this post, I slacked the lines and we came more or less level, but it was still a good leap from the boat to the dock and vice versa.  Once we had a little water under the boat we called it a day and went back to our own slip, once again with an audience.  They seemed appreciative; I'm thinking of leaving a hat upside-down on the dock so we can collect some tips next time.

I spent part of today listing the recent take-outs (step lights, table pedestal) on eBay, and the rest of the day installing new items that have been delivered over the last couple of days.  We now have a pedestal system for the table in the saloon that can actually raise it to dining height (the previous pedestal topped out a good bit too low for comfortable eating, with barely enough room to squeeze one's legs underneath), as well as allow the table to slide several inches toward the settee, so that it's out of the way of the aisle when not in use.  The last of the parts for the pilothouse table also arrived today, so we'll be able to mock that up on our next day off, probably Thursday.

Tomorrow we have another training session scheduled, and the person who might touch up our paint will be coming by after we return to the dock.  All this week there is a food festival going on at the restaurants around the marina; we attended the kickoff this evening involving tapas from multiple venues, served around the massive statue of Neptune not far from us.  We can still hear the live entertainment as I am typing.

School of hard knocks

It's been five days since I last posted here, and in that time we've only been out training one day.  We had gale force winds here on Wednesday -- I wouldn't choose to leave the dock in those conditions even if I were a seasoned skipper, and so we had to wave off the training session planned for that day.  Friday was the next day that Captain Gary had free, so that's when we went out.  We are scheduled for our next session tomorrow morning.

During our first session, on Monday, we never left the protection of the Shelter Cove marina.  There is no current here to speak of, and the condo buildings on all sides offer some protection from wind as well, so we had easy conditions all day.  Gary challenged us by directing us into successively tighter spots, but as long as I had the boat dead slow, it was relatively easy to put it where we wanted it.

For Friday's session we left the protected harbor and practiced docking at nearby Palmetto Bay, exposed to the current in Broad Creek.  We did several passes at the face docks before Gary had me drive down a narrow fairway from which the only exit was backing out -- between two lines of other boats.  In addition to dealing with the current, this was really our first experience driving backwards.  In reverse, the thrust of the propeller is not deflected by the rudder, and so has no effect on the direction of the boat. The rudder itself helps little, as there is not enough water moving past it to be effective, and it's at the wrong end of the boat.  So steering is mostly from the bow thruster.  My first pass was not pretty, but we made it out without smashing anything. The second time around was much smoother.

We then headed out into Calibogue Sound hoping to practice at Harbour Town.  We approached, however, at low tide, and there was not enough water for us, so we instead headed over to Daufuskie Island, where there are some unused docks along the Cooper River.  It was here that we swapped roles for a while and I worked the deck while Louise drove the boat.

These docks are unstaffed and there would have been no one to take lines even if we wanted them to, however, we've been mostly eschewing assistance anyway, in order to practice.  So whoever is working the deck catches the cleats with either an eye in the line, or by looping a "U" of line with both ends on the boat.  We had several nice landings and takeoffs without trouble from theses docks.  And then it happened.

On the last pass, Louise was practicing taking off by motoring against a line, which I was to release once the boat was pointed in the right direction.  It all went well until, while I was releasing the line, the free end of the line managed to get pinched between the two halves of the eye that was fastened to a cleat aboard.  Once the boat was tight against it, nothing I could do would free the line.  As it happened, this was one of our thicker lines, as well -- it would have taken quite some effort to cut through it with a knife, dangerous under that kind of tension.  By this time the current had us, and there was little Louise could do from the helm to slack the line so I could get it out.

Gary came running down to help me on the deck, but before we could extricate ourselves from this situation, the current had pulled us 180° around.  All our fenders were on the port side, where we had been docking, and our starboard side was rapidly approaching the dock.  The single ball-style fender I managed to deploy in time popped out in seconds, and then we were against the dock.  If the entire dock had been wood we would have been fine, but several galvanized bolt heads protruded, and we are now sporting some nasty scratches up front.  On the plus side, there were no other boats nearby (even though, for learning purposes, we had been pretending that there were), and so we did not crush a center-console like a walnut.

Once we were pointed into the current, Louise was able to slack the line and it fell free, but the damage to the boat, and our pride, was already done.  Since no one could see how the pinching happened except me, I ended up demonstrating it to Gary after the fact, who later demonstrated it to Louise.  All agreed that it was not something we could have predicted, nor was there really anything much we could have done about it once it happened.  Our take-aways from this were two-fold: first, that particular cleat and hawse-hole should be avoided for this maneuver, as the placement of the cleat relative to the hole contributed to the snag.  Second, we should use our lighter dock lines in these situations, so that, as a last resort, they could at least be cut free.

The damage is superficial, but as we now have bare steel exposed to the elements, it needs to be fixed.  We have touch-up materials aboard, and Gary knows a local guy who can do the work, so we should have it fixed this week sometime.

Not content with only this much drama, we then returned to Palmetto Bay, where I did some practice in the fairly heavy current mid-flood.  After a couple of successful landings on the face docks,  Gary once again challenged us, this time asking me to back into a slip off a fairway perpendicular to the current.  I overshot the entrance, and the current soon pinned us against the end of the finger pier.  The bow thruster barely kept us from swinging into the next (occupied) slip nose-first, and I had to keep on it full time.  In a few minutes the motor would overheat or the fuse would blow, and I had no choice but to back, side scraping along the finger pier, until the current was pushing us into the slip we wanted instead.  No bolts on this dock, so no damage to the boat, but I am thankful for our heavy steel hull.

Unlike some of our previous trainers, Gary has kept away from the controls through all of this.  Other than one time, on our first approach to our dock when we arrived from Thunderbolt over a week ago, he has not touched a lever.  My adrenaline has shot through the roof more than once, but I have to admit that I am learning a lot.  Presumably he is not going to let us take out another yacht, but he knows every dock (and every harbormaster) on the island and he seems more than content to let us leave as much of our paint on them as needed for the lessons to sink in.

We have come a long way in just a few sessions, and I am now building some confidence that we will have the minimum skills we need to run the boat in the next few weeks. Every time Gary asks if we are up for a challenge, we say yes, and then we go someplace we would not have chosen to go on our own.  We have to constantly push through our own discomfort to make the next breakthrough.  It is grueling, and we arrive back at the dock exhausted.  Fortunately, our own dock is now the easiest thing we've done, and it was a piece of cake when we landed at the end of the day.  Even the inevitable audience seemed appreciative.

Of course, being exhausted from training does not mean the endless boat projects have stopped, so yesterday I spent most of the day installing new courtesy lights in the main companionway.  There had previously been lights on only five of the eleven steps, and Louise felt it was dangerous that way.  Given that one of the five was already broken, I ordered a dozen new LED models to do every step.  Wednesday and Thursday were also major project days, installing boat-hook holders and excavating to the bottom of the lazarette, where a very rusty emergency tiller and propeller wrench had rusted themselves right into a nasty piece of carpet.  As a bonus we found a bunch more lines down there, which Louise ran through the wash.  I also completely rewired the isolation transformer and the main electrical panel, which was what necessitated the laz clean-up in the first place.




We try to get off the boat a little each day; today we walked over to the Disney resort, across a little bridge from us on the other side of the marina.  It was just like walking into one of the mid-scale properties at Disney World in Orlando, complete with topiary, immaculately manicured grounds, and not one, but two life guards at the pool.  Seeing Vector from the other side of the marina also gave us some perspective; it is considerably smaller than the boats on either side of us.  We also rode the scooters over to check on the bus in the afternoon, and do a little shopping.  We seem to get out every two or three nights for a restaurant meal, and we still have yet to eat even at all the places within walking distance.

We shall see what Gary has in store for us tomorrow.  So far the pace has been working out well, with a full day of training followed by one or two days to ourselves to recover and digest.  And, of course, the project list is unending; today I "outed" myself on the trawler mailing list (welcome, T&T listees) to ask for help with the satellite dish.

Bus-n-boat update

 

We are at the Shelter Cove Marina, off Broad Creek on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The harbor area here, part of the Palmetto Dunes resort complex that extends across the highway all the way to the ocean, comprises several condominium buildings, a dozen or so shops and restaurants, and, across the marina from us, Disney Vacation Club's private island, complete with ubiquitous mouse-ear signs.  We've already enjoyed two of the restaurants since our arrival Saturday.

You have probably noticed that the pace of our life has increased dramatically since buying the boat.  I am looking forward to a time, likely some distance in the future, when it will slow back down to a more leisurely pace and we can enjoy languorous sunsets on the aft deck sipping cocktails.  For now, however, there is a lot to do, and the list seems to grow rather than shrink each day.  One of the unfortunate consequences of this is that I have much more to write about, yet much less time to write, and so it all tends to pile up in the back of my mind until it all comes out at once in a mega-post whenever I get a quiet morning, such as today. I do have a big project for this afternoon (more in a moment), but otherwise we are taking a "day off."

To pick up where we left off, we splashed the boat (marine-speak for a mostly splash-less process of putting the boat back in the water) Friday morning, checking the thruster installation for leaks while we were still in the slings.  No water was evident and so we slipped out of the lift, with Kevin once again at the helm, giving the thruster a good workout in the process.  We tied up on the pier with Beija-Flor, some of whose crew rushed out to take our lines.  Karima was just off our bow, and keeping us far enough from the power pedestal that we needed to borrow a cord from the yard.

With everything now working, we confirmed a Saturday departure with Captain Gary and also called Shelter Cove to re-confirm our reservations.  As it was still fairly early in the day, I decided to wrap up the thruster re-wire project so we could put the stateroom back together.  So I spent a good part of the day crouched under the guest berth, or straddling the thruster tunnel cowboy-style, with an old bath mat as my "saddle" (the tunnel, being steel and immersed in ~55° water, was coooold).  The project was fairly involved, and unavoidably grew to include rewiring the anchor windlass as well.

Both the thruster and the windlass are 24-volt items, and they share a 24-volt battery bank located under the forward berth that is separate from our normal house and engine battery banks, located in the engine room.  The bank, a pair of size 8D gel batteries, is constantly being charged by a 25-amp battery charger whose 120-VAC cord is plugged into an outlet powered by our inverter.  In this way, the batteries are charged by shore power or generator when available, or by our main engine alternator while under way.

That's all well and good, and this single pair of batteries is sufficient to run both motors as needed.  However, it turned out that both items were also sharing a fuse.  While the windlass, with its much smaller wiring, also had its own 100-amp circuit breaker, that breaker was downstream of the massive 250-amp fuse that was specified for the thruster alone.  As a side note, there was no spare on board for this highly critical fuse, and one of the eBay items waiting for us when we arrived here was the spare I purchased just as soon as I learned this.  That fuse blew once, on the previous owner's watch.

The problem with this arrangement is that there are times when we use the thruster and windlass simultaneously, and the risk of blowing the fuse during anchor retrieval operations is extremely high, which would leave us in danger should we be trying to weigh anchor, say, to avoid weather or because we were dragging the anchor.  Replacing the fuse requires several minutes, time when one of us would have to leave the deck or the bridge -- not good.  Retrieving the anchor involves one of us at the helm, with the other on the foredeck peering over the bow at the anchor chain while operating the windlass with the foot controls.  The person on the bow directs the helmsman, using hand signals, how to move the boat, with thrusting the bow one way or the other being nearly as common as moving the boat forward with the engine.

Another inconsistency in the wiring for both devices was that the builder chose to install a pair of very expensive, marine-grade, 250-amp contactors (remotely-operated cutoff switches), but oddly chose to put them only into the low-current control circuits for the devices, rather than in-line in the main power supply to each device, clearly within the rating of the contactors.  The result of this was that the main power supply wiring to both units was still energized even when the switches at the helm console for the devices was placed in the "off" position.  Making matters worse, subsequent work on the thruster system had bypassed even this isolation, so the thruster worked at all times regardless of the position of the switch.

It took hours, but by the time I was done we had the windlass on its own circuit separate from the thruster, and each system's power routed through its own contactor operated by switches at the helm.  Now when we turn the thruster and/or windlass "off" we can be assured that neither can be accidentally operated by an inadvertent movement of the control levers, which are exposed at both helm stations, and that the systems can be serviced with the power properly disconnected. We had the stateroom cleaned up and back together by the end of the day.

Any hope I might have had, however, of moving the bus from the marina to Hilton Head before our departure was lost, and that will be today's project.  When I am done posting I will head back down to Thunderbolt on the scooter to pick it up, then I will drop it at a nearby location we have arranged for the month before riding back here on the scooter.

Saturday morning Captain Gary arrived as promised at 9:30 am so we could depart on a favorable tide.  That tide was chosen explicitly so that we could make it through the shallow waters of Fields Cut, north of the Savannah River, at mostly high tide.  Fields Cut was where I grounded the boat on our last training excursion.  Gary's training style is to observe first, and correct only when needed, so after discussing our plan we ended up taking the boat off the dock and into the ICW on our own.  We cleared the Causton Bluff bridge at 28' without an opening (although we did lower our HF antennas) and had an uneventful and pleasant cruise to the Savannah River.

Savannah is a deep water port, and as we entered the river channel, which the ICW crosses at an angle, we had to turn downriver to allow an inbound container ship to pass.  We ended up passing the entrance to Fields Cut by a quarter mile or so.  While the three of us were discussing the maneuver to turn around and approach the cut from downriver, which is actually an easier approach, we instead decided to take the outside route, just because we could.  So we continued downriver, passing yet another giant ship as well as a dredge working the channel.

Other than a very brief encounter during the sea trial, this was our first time with the boat in open water.  Among other things, it gave us the chance to try letting the chartplotter drive the boat through the autopilot along a course that we entered graphically through a series of waypoints.  Just like Mr. Chekov -- course plotted and laid in.  In 2-3' seas with fairly stiff winds, it also gave us a chance to see how well our jury-rigged scooter mounting arrangement would hold up, and gave us a sanity check on how well we had stowed everything aboard.

The boat and systems did quite well, but we learned that we need some windshield washers.  The very blunt bow on this boat tends to send salt spray over the pilothouse when slamming into head seas, and the wipers just mush the salt around on the windshields.  We had to go out and clean off the windows by hand several times; fortunately they are easily reached from the well-protected Portuguese bridge.  Add another project to the list -- pilothouse windshield washers.  We also learned that Angel gets seasick in the ocean.  I heard her yowling down on the master berth while I was at the pilothouse helm, and Louise was able to rush below and get her off the bed and onto the bathroom floor just before she lost her breakfast.  She did this in the early days of her life on the bus, too, and we're hoping she will similarly acclimate to the boat in time.



We arrived here at Shelter Cove in the early afternoon, with those same stiff breezes blowing us away from our assigned dock.  Gary only had to help at the controls once, wherein he learned what I had been saying since we met -- that the boat does not "prop walk" at all -- and we made it to the dock mostly courtesy of the dockmaster and another boater taking our lines and helping to drag us in.  After Gary left we got signed in for the month over at the office, and collected a half dozen packages that had been stacking up awaiting our arrival.  We had a celebratory dinner at the upscale Ela's restaurant above the marina office and store.

Sunday we made no training plans so that we could get the scooters unloaded and possibly retrieve the bus.  This latter endeavor was scrubbed when we realized the office was closed for the day at the location we had arranged, and instead I ended up installing some of the items that had been waiting for us, such as a new bushing for the helm chair and a reading light for the pilothouse settee.  It also took us quite a while to get Louise's scooter started after it sat unused for a couple of weeks.  Without the ability to jump-start it from the bus, I had to kick-start it, requiring too many kicks to count.



Yesterday our training started in earnest, and we spent a full three and a half hours under power, without ever leaving the marina.  We traveled a total, according to the GPS, of just 0.3 nautical miles, bouncing around among four different docks here at the marina, including the fuel dock to avail ourselves of the pump-out.  I mostly drove and Louise mostly tended the deck, and we're pretty comfortable now getting back to our own dock as well as the fuel dock.  Gary had us back in to a traditional slip as well, which was more nerve-wracking but we managed it.  Fortunately, there was no boat in the adjoining slip (there are two slips between each pair of finger piers).

Most of the day we had fairly calm conditions and little current.  By the end of the day, though, winds were again pushing us off the dock and I made five passes to get the boat back to the dock on our last attempt.  Of course, we were deliberately eschewing any help from ashore, since we really need to be able to dock unassisted when needed.  We finally managed it, with the owner of the 72 Hatteras in front of us, fresh from a $2m refit, eyeing us cautiously much of the time.  He's a nice guy, and they will be our  neighbors for the month, so I am sure there will be cocktails in our future.  I should add that we had an audience of one sort or another all day, including the four or five people that took seats on the quay to watch our final multi-pass attempt.  Apparently, this is to be expected at every marina.

We were both exhausted by the end of the day, and opted to take today off to recover.  That gives me the chance to get the bus this afternoon, and Louise to do some grocery shopping.  We are tentatively scheduled to resume training tomorrow, but the forecast does not look good, so we shall see.  That's OK, as I have no shortage of projects to keep me busy, and we're in pleasant surroundings here.

Yesterday we also received the estimate from Deltaville Boat Yard in Virgina for the extensive yard work we need to have done on the boat.  We are still discussing it but on the surface it looks reasonable, and we are leaning towards heading in that direction from here.  That would resolve the whole Florida six-month rule issue with which we've been wrestling, and give some focus to our travel plans.  One of the terms of the estimate, though, is that we would be off the boat for some or perhaps all of the heavy lifting.

This had come up when the yard owner was aboard last week, and I had volunteered that we were happy to move back to the bus for that part of the work if it would lower the estimate.  The yard has offered a parking spot with shore power, so that will work out perfectly.  It's a perfect fit all around, giving the old girl a new purpose in life, at least for a month or so.  We only need to figure out how we will leap-frog it from Hilton Head to Deltaville when the time comes; it probably does not make sense to take it to either of the potential long-term storage options, in Tennessee, between now and then.