Once more, with feeling

As I begin typing we are still on the hard at Lauderdale Marine Center (map), waiting for the Travelift to come pick us up for our afternoon splash. It's been a productive few days and Vector is once again ready for sea.

Scratch that. The above paragraph was the one and only thing I managed to type Monday before I was interrupted for the remainder of the day, dashing my hopes of getting the blog posted before we left. We're now in the Atlantic Ocean, east of the Florida Reef and about even with Key Largo. I am on watch and Louise is asleep below.


Sunset over Fowey Rocks Light.

We wrapped up the holiday weekend in Hollywood Lake, tendering ashore for a final meal on the waterfront before decking the tender in preparation for our return to Fort Lauderdale. Tuesday we weighed anchor uneventfully a little after 10am to give us a slack-water arrival at the New River, and we had an easy run upriver to the yard, despite rather high winds the entire day.

As we made our way upriver we heard a familiar voice and a familiar boat name on the radio. Our friends Steve and Barb aboard Maerin had come south down the ICW and made the turn upriver just ahead of us. They had just finished tying up at the downtown docks as we passed, and we waved and exchanged shouted greetings as we passed. The marine radio is far too busy on the New River for either of us to even have said hello.

We were tied alongside by 1pm and put the scooters back on the ground. Mindful that the thief who stole my scooter is still there and still has a key to Louise's scooter, we were diligent in locking them up every minute were were in the yard, I collected our waiting mail from the office, and we ran some errands before going to one of our old standbys for dinner.

Wednesday morning first thing, again in high winds, we moved into the liftways where Joe, the unflappable lift operator guided us in before deftly lifting Vector from the water. I think we were both holding our breath as she rose in the lift, not knowing whether we would find some horrible mangling of metal on her underbelly.


Our stumpy Nemo fin looking forlorn. But no damage to the hull nearby.

I could hardly believe my eyes as the keel came level with the ground. The fin had stripped off cleanly and there was not even a scratch on the hull. Something sharp dragged along the keel about two inches from the bottom, leaving a horizontal scratch in the paint that was perfectly level and ran half the length of the boat. Whatever it was also scraped against the skeg, but there was no evidence of a strike on the propeller or the rudder. The port fin also had a small amount of damage on its leading edge at the very bottom.


This long scratch 2" above the bottom of the keel was the extent of the other damage. Hard to make out unless you click to enlarge the photo.

Stabilized Marine arrived shortly after we were blocked and on the stands. They inspected both actuators and shafts and determined that they had not been displaced and needed no adjustments. They popped the remains of the starboard fin (the "shoe") off, replaced the shaft seals as a precaution, and headed off to Naiad to pick up the new fin. I had to call the insurance company's surveyor since this work was proceeding before he could arrive.


A close-up of the aft end of the scratch and the scrape on the skeg.

The guys had the new fin on before lunch and declared everything good to go. In the meantime, the bottom crew from the yard inspected the paint damage so they could give us a quote on sanding, primer, repainting, and the fiberglass touch-up on the port fin. The insurance surveyor arrived after lunch and spent barely fifteen minutes looking at the damage before declaring it a covered loss and the repair quotes to be reasonable.


New fin before installation. The old shoe is on the white cloth to the right.

Somewhere in all of this, I had to again jury-rig the gray waste sump to empty into the black tank, and the condensate from the mini-split to empty into a coffee can. That was all much quicker the second time around, since I had installed a fitting for the purpose on the black tank, and the hole was already drilled for the condensate hose. Of course, this time I first had to empty 200 beers from the bilge before I could run the waste hose.


I had to move all this beer to access the gray sump. The new fitting and valve for temporary connection to the black tank can be seen at upper left.

I had girded myself for having the stabilizer guys there until past dinner time, as had been the case when they serviced the system in January. Since they wrapped up before lunch, we called Steve and Barb and arranged to meet them downtown. We enjoyed cocktails in their saloon before walking to a nice dinner at the Royal Pig across the river. It was great catching up with them after some two years.

Thursday the yard sanded the scratches down to bare steel and applied the primer, and by the end of Friday the paint was done. As long as we had to buy an entire 5-gallon can of anti-fouling, they also touched up the areas where the lift belts had bit into the paint. They barely used a full gallon and I have most of the can aboard now for future touch-up.


Scratch sanded out to bare steel. New fin is visible to the right.

Shortly after the boat show and the resulting purchase of new navigation software for the helm, we had signed up for a two-hour class on how to use it, and Thursday afternoon we we left the yard to its own devices while we participated.  I think we were the only owners in a class of ten or so; the other participants were megayacht crews, including some from Never Enough and Usher, two yachts we've crossed paths with a time or two. As these things go, we got about fifteen minutes of useful information in those two hours, but that fifteen minutes has saved me hours of frustration in coming up to speed on the new software. Plus, they had cookies.

We spent the weekend dealing with paperwork and running errands while the paint cured. The cat, who is continuing her amazing recovery, needed more prescription food, and I had a couple of scripts of my own to fill. I also made a three-hour round trip scooter ride to Miami Beach, where we had cleverly forwarded our mail when we were quite certain we'd be anchored there after the boat show.

That mail included the warranty replacement through-hull valve that we replaced a couple of weeks ago; I took it back to West Marine with the receipt from the one I had to buy there on short notice. It also included the title to the new scooter, which we are happy to have before heading offshore.


Shiny new fin shortly after installation.  It had to be sanded before priming.

As long as we again had a good address, we had a 35-pound Manson Supreme anchor delivered for use as a stern anchor, kedge, or emergency lunch hook. And I rode back over to the chart store, where we had taken the class, with a thumb drive in my pocket, to buy the Bahamas and Caribbean chart package that had been the incentive to install new software in the first place.

Speaking of the Caribbean, we finally got a quote for insurance, and it is literally double our current annual premium just so we can spend less than three months cruising the closest group of islands. We've asked for more quotes. Irma and Maria have made Caribbean insurance an expensive proposition.


Dylan works on the seals.

Monday, as we were wrapping up and getting ready for our afternoon splash, I got a call from good friends Curtis and Gill who were driving back up from the Keys after attending the Looper gathering there. They had a last-minute reprieve on their busy schedule and were able to stop by for lunch; they brought sandwiches, which we ate on he aft deck as we did not want to leave the yard so close to splash time. It was great catching up with them.

We splashed with no issues and tied up for the night at the face dock closest to the river, right next to where we had been blocked, for a speedy escape. Our departure options Tuesday were to shove off at 6:30am to beat the bridge closures before high slack, or else right at the noon checkout time, just ahead of low slack. With a projected 26-hour trip to Key West, we opted for the latter, which had no risk of us getting stuck between bridges at the morning rush hour.


All better. Fresh paint center-frame is touch-up of the area where the lift straps rub.

First thing in the morning the yard hauled another boat and dropped it where we had been. It was a 42' Cigarette with five 350hp outboards; wicked fast. This million dollar boat (literally) was merely the tender to a much larger yacht, Checkmate. It had run aground somewhere in the Bahamas, puncturing the outer fiberglass of the hull. Apparently they left it there in the water for two weeks, leaving plenty of time for the balsa wood core of the hull to saturate thoroughly, probably a six-figure repair bill. Perspective.


This P&O cruise ship was in port as we departed. We sailed on her Princess sister ship.

We dropped lines right at noon and made our way downriver and out to sea at Port Everglades. Maerin had departed the river ahead of us, and they hailed us on the radio from their anchorage at University Cove as we passed Haulover Inlet. We're glad we squeezed in a second outing with them over the weekend, and hope to cross paths again in the Bahamas.

Update: I did not manage to get this post finished last night before the change of watch at 0300. We're now abreast of the abandoned American Shoal light, with just 20 miles to go to Key West. We should be in quarters by 2pm or so. Given that the weather for passage gets lousy in a couple of days, we've booked a week at the marina. That will give me time to fix the two things that broke on our way here.


American Shoal light.

The first of those was our davit crane. Fortunately we had already decked both scooters before the "up" function stopped working, as I was getting ready to stow it after using it to get the 50-lb can of paint aboard. It's a bad solenoid and I have spares on board, but we needed to get under way so I just lashed it down.

The other failure is more serious. Here in the clear blue waters just off the Gulf Stream we gave the watermaker a workout after servicing both pumps in Fort Lauderdale. Production dropped rapidly from rated capacity down to zero in short order and now it will not work at all. In Key West I need to take the pump motor apart and see if it has some kind of problem. We're not going to the Bahamas without a working watermaker, so this problem is tops on my list.

Finding Nemo: one step forward, two steps back

We are anchored again in South Lake, Hollywood Florida (map). Observant readers will note that this is north, not south, of where we were when last I posted here. And, yes, at the risk of continuing to recite a litany of setbacks, there is a story here.



Wednesday morning we tendered back ashore to the Intracoastal Mall for (we thought) the last time, got our rental car from the parking lot, and headed out to run a few last errands before returning the car to Enterprise. That included returning what had turned out to be completely unusable snorkeling sets to Walmart, hunting for replacements, and picking up 14 gallons of gasoline in four Jerry jugs while we refueled the rental car.

We ultimately found usable snorkel sets at the Winn-Dixie right next to the dock, and we dropped the gasoline back at the tender before heading to the rental agency. Louise also bought an Instant Pot while we were in Walmart, but with no good way to secure it in the tender we just carried it with us. Once again we had to get a Lyft back to the dock from Enterprise.

After returning to Vector we loaded everything aboard and decked the tender. I spent a few minutes adding fuel stabilizer to the Jerry cans; this gasoline should last three or four months depending on how far we need to tender to shore at each stop. We had filled the tender from our last jug just before heading ashore, so in total we have over 20 gallons.

We checked the schedule for the next bridge south that we'd need opened, at Broad Avenue, and weighed anchor a little before 2:30 pm. Or, I should say, we tried to weigh anchor. In what would prove to be a bad omen for the day, we brought up a two-foot long metal spike impaled on the anchor chain. It was wedged in there pretty tight, and my efforts to free it by hand and by using a four-pound engineer hammer were unsuccessful.


This picture does not do justice. That's a 2+' long wedge-shaped piece of steel impaled through a link in the anchor chain.

We actually put in a call to TowBoatUS for some help with the problem, reasoning that working on it on the deck of a towboat was going to be easier than by having my arms wedged through the hawsepipes. After getting a confirmation they'd be sending someone, we continued working on it ourselves, ultimately getting free by tying the debris off to a cleat using our emergency chain hook, and unweighting the chain using our regular hook. A great deal of shaking and tugging was involved but the spike eventually fell free.

We called TowBoat back to cancel the call and finished weighing anchor. As a side note here I will relate that towboats in SE Florida are cutthroat. We tried hailing the Miami TowBoatUS but were answered by Fort Lauderdale, and I wasted fifteen minutes with them before agreeing Miami had a closer boat and that's who we needed. In this part of Florida you need to be clear about whom you are speaking with and whether or not they are the closest or even covered by your towing insurance.

We motored out of the lake, turned south on the ICW, and cleared under the Sunny Isles Bridge without an opening. The ICW was busy on a pleasant day leading up to the boat show, and we stayed well toward "our side" of the channel (there's really no such thing, but common practice is to pass oncoming traffic port-to-port or "one whistle" on the ICW). It was an astronomical low tide but the ICW is deep here and we were cruising in 12' of water.

So imagine our surprise when we heard the most awful crashing and scraping sounds from the starboard side, characteristic of a hard-object strike, with the sounder still reading 12'. I immediately took the boat out of gear, but we had plenty of momentum, even at the low cruise we were maintaining in order not to be too early for the bridge. I used the bow thruster alone to try to move us to port, and Louise ran out on deck to see what we might have hit, just in time to see what was left of our starboard stabilizer fin pop up behind the boat.

At first we wondered if we had hit some submerged debris, perhaps leftover from Irma. We seemed visually in the channel, lined up for the next set of markers, and our chart said we were navigating in a minimum of ten feet of water. I update the charts regularly; this was the latest NOAA chart, updated in December and not scheduled to expire until November. But it sure sounded and felt like rock, and the shoreline here is rip-rap.


The chart showing our track. Leftmost dark line was our path when we hit; rightmost dark line was the return trip, with the waypoint set as we passed the fin. Lighter lines in between are a track from our previous pass through this area, two years ago. The light blue area is charted as 10'.

Once I was convinced it was safe to re-engage the propeller, I maneuvered slowly while Louise went below to check for leaks around the stabilizer actuator and elsewhere in the bilges. Fortunately, all was bone dry. With the closest safe anchorage being the one we had just left in Maule Lake, we turned the boat around and headed back whence we came. I marked a waypoint on the chart as we passed our forlorn stabilizer fin, bobbing close to the mangroves on the western shore.

Not knowing what other damage may have been done, we proceeded back slowly, with frequent engine room checks. We dropped the hook back in Maule Lake a short distance from where we had been (map), mindful that we did not want to foul on the same spike. As soon as we had the hook set, I picked up the phone and called our insurance company.

Normally with something like this, we debate considerably whether or not to file a claim. Our deductible being what it is, damage has to be significant before it even makes sense, and even then, having an allision or grounding in the file can cost more in the long run. But in this case, we had no choice, because of the fin. With no way to retrieve it ourselves, and being responsible for any damage it might cause, we needed our insurance to accept responsibility for it and take care of it.

I also placed calls to Naiad Marine, the manufacturer of the stabilizers, and Stabilized Marine, the company in Fort Lauderdale who has been servicing them for us, to find out if there was any reason we would need any part of what fell off the boat. Those calls were returned much later, confirming that the debris was not useful. I never heard what the insurance company did about the debris, but we gave them GPS coordinates and a full description. I'm only sorry we did not think to take a photo of it in the post-incident chaos.

What we did photograph, or attempted to, was the part of the fin that remained with the boat. In an unexpected christening I set up my as-yet unused underwater camera to take video, attached it to the mount I bought for it at deep discount at West Marine, attached that to our 12' boat pole, and went on something of a fishing expedition. The water here is too murky to see much, even in bright sunlight, and the camera does not view a wide-enough angle, but what came back at least showed the metal innards of the fin and its shaft still intact and probably not bent.


The metal backbone of the fiberglass stabilizer. White areas are probably bits of fiberglass still adhered. What remains is a fraction of the size of the original, sort of like Nemo's lucky fin.

The insurance company informed us that it was up to us where to go for repairs and to arrange the parts and labor. When we heard back from Stabilized Marine, though, we got some bad news: There were no fins in stock at Naiad, and a fin would have to be fabricated in Connecticut and shipped down. The fab lead time was two weeks and ground freight would make it a third. It looked like we were going to be here in southeast Florida for another month.

Our romantic Valentine's dinner ended up being leftovers, with rice cooked in the new Instant Pot. And we self-medicated with plenty of wine. But we were afloat, with all systems operational, if a bit impaired in the stabilization department, and we counted our blessings. It was not the Valentine's Day Massacre, and we had to remember that just that morning, less than an hour away, 17 people were in fact massacred, just a mile from where friends of ours live. Our problems are insignificant in comparison.

You may recall that our plan for Wednesday had been to head south to Virginia Key in Biscayne Bay so I could go to opening day at the Miami Boat Show. Ironically, one of the things I was hoping to get there was software which can display more kinds of charts, and it's possible that having access to those charts might have helped us avoid this grounding. Now that we were safely anchored and not going anywhere until I could get more information from the insurance company, I decided to continue with my plan to attend the show.

Thursday morning I tendered ashore at the docks next to the Blue Marlin Fish House in the Oleta River State Park. It turns out the restaurant is closed for renovations, along with that entrance to the park, neither of which is apparent when arriving at the dock. I ended up having to walk around the end of the vehicle gate to get out of the park; a North Miami Beach police cruiser was parked there but took no notice of me marching out of a closed park.

From the dock it's a ten-minute walk to the bus stop, and a single express bus brought me to American Airlines Arena in Miami. I bought my show ticket online while on the bus, thus was able to immediately board the "water taxi" to Virginia Key for the show. The water taxi is a series of boats chartered by the show to shuttle attendees back and forth, and the one I ended up on was a Skipperliner dinner boat of the sort that often passes us with a wedding reception in progress aboard. Complete with bar, which was doing a brisk business at 10:15am. The one right after mine was an open pontoon boat, and I was happy to be more comfortable for the half hour ride.

I spent the whole day at the show, and I won't bore you with the details of all the booths I visited and engineers with whom I spoke (Thursday is the day the vendors send tech personnel alongside the sales and marketing folks.) Suffice it so say I came away with a couple of free parts for broken things on the boat, the information I needed about chart software, discounts for the software, charts, and other items, and a key piece of information that was worth the price of admission and the three-hour round trip to the show.

My very first stop at the show was Naiad Marine, where I found the VP of Service, Vic, manning the booth, which was devoid of customers. We've dealt with Vic on a number of occasions, once even having him aboard to make an adjustment to our system. I laid out what had happened, hoping to get some reassurance that we'd only need a replacement fin and not much else, and lamented the fact that we'd have to wait two weeks for a fin to be made.

Vic, who seemingly knows everything there is to know about stabilizers, allowed that he was almost certain there were two fins in stock in south Florida. He picked up the phone, made a few calls, and by the time I left the booth there was a fin with our name on it and I was to expect a call back from Stabilized Marine. They called me shortly thereafter, and we agreed to have them pick up the fin and do the work, to include a prophylactic changing of the seals and inspection of the bearings, even though we literally just did that last month.

I left the show shortly after 4pm on, by happenstance, exactly the same boat. With the brutal Miami afternoon traffic, it was 6:15 by the time I was pulling back up to Vector. I offloaded my cache of brochures, parts, and miscellaneous items and we tendered back to the mall for dinner.

As much as I like that anchorage, by this time we were quite done with Maule Lake and the rather tedious 15+ minute dinghy ride to get ashore. But with no real repair schedule in place and lots of phone calls to be made on the Friday before the holiday weekend, we opted just to stay another day so I could line things up.

The insurance adjuster had called me during my water taxi ride Thursday to say they had assigned a surveyor and I would be hearing from them shortly. When that had not happened by late Friday morning, I made a few calls trying to track him down. It turns out that he had turned down the assignment, and we spent the rest of Friday, to no avail, trying to get a new surveyor. We were hoping to learn whether they would send a diver to inspect before haulout, or if they could just meet us at the boatyard. With no answer, we had to proceed with plans without that information.

After a day on the phone we now have scheduled a haul-out for first thing Wednesday morning right back at Laudedale Marine Center, where we'd already spent three weeks. They had availability, a decent rate for haul-block-and-launch, and their bottom crew would be the best choice to touch up whatever damage we did to the bottom paint they applied in January. We also arranged for Stabilized Marine to do the repair starting Wednesday or Thursday, depending on the surveyor.

With all thus arranged, we headed ashore one last time, to put some eBay sales in the mail, have a beer at Duffy's, and a nice dinner at the very upscale Sea Grill, where we counted ourselves lucky to get a table on a Friday evening. We decked the tender as soon as we got home.

Yesterday morning we weighed anchor before the weekend shenanigans got into full swing on the ICW. We made the hour-long trek back here to Hollywood, where it's easier to get ashore and there is a wider variety of options. We'll likely stay right here until we head up to Lauderdale Marine on Tuesday, where we hope to spend the night in the water before our early-morning haul-out.

This is by no means a slam-dunk. We have yet to inspect the hull and propeller to determine what, if any, other damage may have been done. If we're very lucky, we'll need only the fin and some paint touch-up. But there is a chance that the hull plating has been dented, or that the propeller struck either the same rock(s) or the debris from the fin itself (although we noted no unusual vibration en route here at any rpm). And there is still a possibility that the actuator shaft is bent or otherwise damaged. Our remaining good fin was more than adequate on the ride up.

Once we're back in Fort Lauderdale we'll put a scooter on the ground and I will have to make the trek down to Miami Beach, which is where we had our mail sent for pickup right after the show. And we've signed up for training Thursday afternoon on the new chart software, delivered by the same person I talked to at the show.


Angel looking much more alert in the comfort of her cube.

In other news, Angel is still with us, although she is not really drinking on her own, and the only thing she'll eat is the kind of store-bought cat food we like to call "crack." We're giving her subcutaneous fluids daily and she is gaining strength a little at a time. She's also acting more like herself, albeit a little unsteady, than she did while she was crashing. We remain hopeful that she will resume drinking on her own and start to eat the prescription kidney diet that she needs.

When all this is behind us we will make haste to Biscayne Bay and possibly further south to the keys so we can make our crossing to the Bahamas. The season is slipping away and it's not clear how much farther, if at all, we will get this year.

Crewmember down

We are anchored in a familiar and comfortable spot, on Maule Lake, about halfway to Miami (map). I wrote extensively about this hidden gem anchorage the last time we stayed here, so I won't repeat myself. A couple of the places in the nearby Intracoastal Mall have changed hands, but otherwise it is as we remembered it.

We've been here since Thursday evening, even though I had hoped to be south of Miami by now, and therein lies a tale. We're one crewmember short, with Second Mate and Chief of Security Angel in the hospital, where she has been since Saturday. When we dropped her off, we feared she was at the end, but yesterday's report from the vet has given us some hope, and we are awaiting this morning's call.


Angel in her "most interesting cat in the world" pose, in better times.

She's 17, the last pet standing of the three stalwarts that departed San Jose with us 14 years ago. She's been showing her age, reluctant to go up and down the stairs and a little unsteady on her pins. And lately, she's been eating a little less and showing less interest in the pureed pumpkin we put out for her each morning to help her digestion (hey, she's in her 80s in people years).

We had a lot of drama on the boat Thursday. We weighed anchor around 8:15 to retrace our steps back to Dania Beach, and cleared past the series of three drawbridges. We had just cleared the Dania Beach Boulevard Bridge and were not yet at the cutoff canal when the yard called to say we should come right in to the lift slip; we were in the slings and out of the water by 9:30.

Paul the surveyor was already at the yard waiting for us, and so as soon as we could get a ladder alongside, there were a gaggle of us back aboard, including both of us, Paul, and three yard guys who came to replace the valve. We pointed out the cat to each who came aboard, and, honestly, she seemed to be fine and her usual self at the time, keeping mostly out of everyone's way.

I immediately became too busy to notice what she was doing after that. I divided my time between trailing the surveyor and answering his questions, and keeping an eye on the crusty old yard guy who was honchoing the valve replacement. As it stood, I barely caught him before he would have used the wrong bedding compound to install the valve, a non-removable type prohibited by the manufacturer. "Why would you ever need to remove this?" Hmm, well, let's see -- maybe because it broke JUST LIKE THE ONE YOU JUST TOOK OUT. Also, his decades of experience make him more qualified than the engineers at the manufacturer. SMH.


Failed seacock, disassembled for analysis. Piece at lower left broke off the piece just above it. No obvious reason noted.

The valve replacement was done in less than an hour, and the yard needed us out so we booted the surveyor off the boat, splashed, and drove around the corner to a dock at the community center (map), where he met us to finish the survey. After we tied up I remember paying a bit more attention to Angel, making sure she did not go out on deck during the remainder of the survey. Again we noticed nothing unusual.

The surveyor finished by lunch time, and we had our lunch there at the dock before shoving off. I am very happy to report that we had an excellent survey, with no major items noted and a valuation set considerably higher than what it's been since the day we purchased the boat, reflective of the enormous amount of work we've done to upgrade it. After a quick bite I spent a half hour in the bilge reconnecting the plumbing, and we were back under way before 1pm.

I had figured to end up right back at the Hollywood Lakes on Thursday, but with such an early start, and wanting to feel like we were finally making more progress south, we opted to come here instead, just another five miles (and three drawbridges) along the ICW. We figured to spend maybe two nights, taking Friday to relax, before joining the fray hunting for anchorage in Miami the week before the big boat show.


Sunset reflected off Sunny Isles Beach skyscrapers, from our anchorage in Maule Lake.

I don't really remember whether Angel was showing any signs of stress that afternoon. I went about my business, which included drilling a three inch hole in the floor of the guest stateroom right above the new valve, so we can get an arm in there to exercise it regularly. Previously, a ton of quilting stuff had to come out so we could move the mattress, and then I needed to don work clothes to enter the graphite-dust-covered bilge just to reach the valve handle.

Somewhere during the afternoon we noticed that she had become a little lethargic, and that she had not really been eating or drinking. We were pretty beat from a full day of work on the heels of a couple of stressful days, so notwithstanding our proximity to a number of good restaurants here, we opted to just grill a steak aboard that evening. And that's when we really noticed she was in trouble. We often offer her a single nibble of fat or meat when we have it, and she refused to even touch it, which is very out of character for her.

Thursday night she began a rapid decline. Having been through it before, we recognized it as the sign of renal failure. Angel has but one good kidney, and she's been through a renal crisis in the past. It seemed to us like her system had finally had enough after 17 good years. We tried to keep her comfortable all night and do whatever we could to get fluids into her, which is not much without IV bags and sets. And we ruminated about what we were willing to do beyond end-of-life palliative care.

Friday she was still up and about and generally being herself, other than a bit weak and still not eating or drinking. But she seemed OK for us to leave the boat, which we needed to do. Thursday afternoon I got word from Lauderdale Propeller that the custom plate for our PropSmith tool had arrived and was available for pickup. Just in time, too, since I'm not sure what we would have done, other than ask them to hold it, had it arrived after we left the US.


New PropSmith plate, right, replaces the one on the left with incorrect threads.

Getting that tool was just going to become more and more difficult the further we got from Fort Lauderdale, and so I booked a cheap rental car for noon on Friday so we could go get it. The car was less than it would cost to ship the tool to another stop, and there is an Enterprise right across the ICW.  We left the tender at the dock at the mall, where they picked us up. They were having a problem that day getting any cars, and so my booking for an econobox landed us a full-size, four-door F150 pickup truck, and they even gave us a quarter tank grace on fuel when I mentioned the fuel mileage difference.

We headed directly to Fort Lauderdale to get the tool. As long as we had the truck, we ran some other errands as well, stopping at West Marine to return the extra parts I did not use for the valve project, the auto parts store for dinghy spark plugs, and Home Depot to return a few items there as well. We also dropped by Progressive to trade the title to the stolen scooter for a check for the balance of the claim.

In the course of the day we learned that semi-local friends and fellow Neoplan bus owners Steve and Harriet had just arrived in town, and we agreed to meet them for an early dinner along with Ken and Pam, their in-laws. They were kind enough to meet us down in Hollywood so we could get back to the cat a bit sooner in the evening. We had a nice dinner at Sal's and it was great catching up with old friends.

We left the rental car at the mall overnight, which is a very busy place on Friday night; every restaurant and lounge is doing a booming business there when the weather is nice, and a good deal of the parking lot is given over to valet use. We parked in an out of the way corner and made our way back to Vector, crashing over the wakes of a dozen luxury yachts on the ICW Friday evening rush hour. "No wake zone" has a different meaning to some of those skippers.

We arrived before 8pm to a very lethargic cat. She'd stopped eating altogether and, worse, was not drinking either. We tried to get some water in her with a syringe, but that's like trying to put out a fire with a soda straw. If we had an IV set and a bag of Ringers we would give her subcutaneous fluids, something we did on a regular basis towards the end of George's life as her kidney disease progressed.

Friday was a rough night. As lethargic as she was, she still managed to make it down the stairs to come up and sleep between us on the bed, which is very unusual behavior for this cat unless it is very cold. It's been in the 80s here. When we awoke Saturday morning we thought we might lose her.

The morning discussion was what you can imagine surrounding the end-of-life issues with an elderly pet. Our chief concerns were her quality of life and unnecessary suffering. As it was becoming clear she was not going to just slip away without a protracted period of discomfort -- she was by this time wandering around the house crying -- we made the decision to take her to the vet.

We still had the car available until 1:30 or so, and I scratched my plans to do some final shopping in the morning and, instead, we stuffed her paperwork in a backpack, assembled the carrier, and took the whole kit and caboodle of us back to the mall in the dinghy. The cat is very blase about the big boat, but she was not happy about the tender ride.

We picked a pet hospital that was fairly close to the lake, where we could get back on the town shuttle later if they needed to keep her for treatment. She complained mightily in the car, which actually gave us a great deal of hope: it seemed like she still had some fight left in her, and perhaps the discomfort was something more acute than end-of-life renal failure.

The hospital in Aventura looked at her and determined, unsurprisingly, that blood tests were required, but then they informed us that they could not keep her overnight for treatment. So we ended up declining the blood work, loading her back in the car, and going north to Hollywood, where the veterinary hospital is 24-hour. They got us right in and ran some blood tests.


She loves bags. Looking at me as if to say "were you planning on going somewhere without me?"

Her numbers were horrible. But between ourselves, the vet in Aventura, and the vet in Hollywood, we determined that it was worthwhile to try IV hydration before making a determination, and they presented us a treatment plan for 3-5 days of hospitalization and fluids. The estimate was well north of what it cost to replace my scooter; there is nothing quite so expensive as a free pet.

After leaving Angel in Hollywood we raced back to Sunny Isles Beach to return the car, which was overdue. The office was swamped, with a lone employee, and she graciously waived the fee for being a half hour late, and also credited us for a Lyft home since they had no one to drive us.

It's been lonely here the last couple of days without her. All we can keep thinking is that we hope she makes it back home. The last two calls from the vet have suggested a great deal of improvement, so perhaps it was something acute. She's been through this once before, when we surmised she got into something toxic outside the bus.

She loves to go out on deck and drink the rainwater that has pooled in various places on deck, and with all the yard work we can't rule out some chemical residue on one of the decks, in spite of vigorous washing. And the vet suggested that something on the x-ray might be a small kidney stone; when George had one of these a decade ago she went completely into crisis.

We've been here in Maule Lake now for five nights, and we'll be here at least one and maybe two more. Things were incredibly busy and stressful up until we returned from dropping the car off, and in the last two days of "down" time, I've been catching up on another project that must be complete before we head offshore, switching my Google Voice number away from Sprint and moving my cell service to T-Mobile.

T-Mobile works much better than Sprint internationally, with service in many countries including the Bahamas and much of the Caribbean included in the plan. It also works better domestically, and now that I qualify for the 55-and-over unlimited plan it's also a better deal than my grandfathered unlimited Sprint plan.

My Google Voice and Sprint phone numbers are one and the same. When we last went to the Bahamas, even though Sprint does not work there, I missed no calls or text messages because I got them through Google Voice. I can't do the same trick with my T-Mobile number so instead I am "porting" my number, which Sprint actually owns, to Google Voice, and my calls will be forwarded to T-Mobile.

Of course, you can't just move a phone between carriers, either, and so while in Fort Lauderdale I bought a spiffy new pre-owned T-Mobile phone and signed it up for service at a T-Mobile office. I've spent the past couple of days rooting it, loading apps, configuring them, and transferring data. A tedious process to be sure. It's all ready to go and last night I divorced Google Voice from Sprint and fired off an order to port the number. That should happen sometime in the next day or two. If you have my number, nothing should change, I'll just be making and receiving all my calls and texts through Google Voice.

Update: Angel is back home!

I was still typing here this morning when we made the decision to head ashore, even before the vet called, to get a bagel and be ready to pick up the rental car I had booked for this morning in a fit of optimism. We enjoyed our bagels and did some shopping while we waited for the vet to call. Our 10am car reservation came and went.

Finally around 11:30 we heard the good news that Angel was eating and drinking on her own and that it was our option to pick her up today or have them hold her one more night. We chose the former, and called a Lyft over to Enterprise where the same clerk was again alone, swamped, and without a driver for pickups. She took the Lyft fee off our rental price.

It was something of a slog back up to Hollywood. After dropping her off there, we had seriously considered moving the boat back up to the Hollywood Lakes anchorage, but it turns out that getting ashore and renting a car there is not really any easier, and we'd make a ten-mile round trip in the boat, a three-hour process, to save ourselves twenty minutes in a rental car.

We had a long wait at the vet's, but eventually we got Angel out of her personal hell. We left the office with a box full of supplies, including five liters of lactated Ringers, injectable anti-nausea meds with a dozen hypodermics, and appetite stimulants to be administered orally. She looked a bit shaky, still, but much better than when we dropped her off.

On the way home we stopped at Walmart, the stop I had to forego with the last rental car, to pick up some needed items including a pair of mask-and-snorkel sets to replace the ancient ones that are disintegrating, and some additional items for the scooter to replace the ones that were stolen. We arrived back at the tender at an extremely low tide, and it was quite the challenge loading everything for the ride home.

Angel spent the first half hour sniffing everything in the saloon to make sure she was really home, then spent an hour or so next to Louise absorbing love through osmosis (she has never been a lap cat) before finally retiring to her "cube" where she is currently cashed out. It's exhausting being in the hospital.

Tonight we have to give her her first bolus of sub-cu fluids, and we're hoping that in a week or so she will be back to drinking well on her own. She is by no means out of the woods yet, and recovery is not a slam-dunk, but we are hopeful and holding positive thoughts.

Tomorrow we will return the car we had to rent for today's excursion, then deck the tender and head back out of the lake for Miami. I'm hoping to catch the "tech day" at the Miami Boat Show on Thursday, if we can get anywhere near the place, to talk to PC chartplotting software vendors. Our current system simply can not get good charts for most of the Caribbean or even, really, the Bahamas, and it's time to switch to something with more chart options.


Our final sunset over Maule Lake, from the aft deck.

Reluctant to leave her alone for a while, tonight we're eating aboard. We had a nice sunset on the aft deck, accompanied by the clamor of a drum fish. The drum fish have been serenading us off and on since we arrived, and it took us a few minutes to rule out something mechanical going haywire on the boat when we first started hearing it. We've heard them before, but it's been a while, and everything making noise underwater gets amplified on a steel boat.

With any luck we'll be in Miami or Miami Beach when next you hear from me.

We didn't get far ...

We are at a familiar and comfortable spot, anchored in South Lake, Hollywood, Florida (map). We've been here since shortly after leaving the boatyard Monday afternoon. Our plan was to anchor here for a night or two while we recuperated from the yard work, and maybe make some progress on the communication and insurance fronts. Alas, that was not to be.



Monday morning was a whirlwind of activity. I ran around the yard settling up bills, collecting the last of our mail, and signing out of the marina. Louise rode over to the vet to get the cat's paperwork signed, and then picked up some last minute groceries. We loaded the scoots, offloaded the last of our trash, and cast off our lines right at the noon checkout time.

The trip back down the New River, fortuitously at slack, was mostly uneventful, although we did have to pull over and wait for three giant yachts, each with a pair of towboats, making their way upriver. We made it back to the ICW and turned south, through Port Everglades and three drawbridges, to this spot, the first usable anchorage southbound from the New River.


We passed an old friend along the ICW, Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas. We had a lovely holiday cruise with her when we still lived aboard Odyssey.

We like this anchorage because it's protected and quiet, yet quite easy to get ashore right at the beach boardwalk, with a couple dozen restaurants, a small market, and access to public transportation. It has become a favorite stop of ours, and more so now that anchoring in Fort Lauderdale proper is difficult.

Soon after setting the hook, I tackled the first of two projects on the plate for this anchorage, which was opening the seacock for the washdown pump on the foredeck, necessary before using the anchor washdown, which we'd need to do as we weigh anchor to leave. This was the last seacock on the boat still unopened after the sandblasting, which required us to close them all.

All the other seacocks are in the engine room or tiller flat. They are not exactly easy to access, as most are under sole plates which first must be lifted out of the way, and they tend to be hard to reach and difficult to turn. I have to use my pry bar to move some of them (and, BTW, my good Gorilla pry bar was also stolen at Lauderdale Marine, right off our aft deck, so I had to buy a replacement). Almost all the other seacocks are also stainless steel, with the exception of two in the tiller flat that are above the resting waterline.

I had opened all of those seacocks before we splashed, with the exception of the macerator discharge, which had to wait until we were in the water. Among other things, the engine can't be started without three of the seacocks open, and as long as I had the soles up I opened them all.

The seacock for the washdown pump, however, is in the forward stateroom, AKA the quilt studio, underneath the berth, near the bow thruster. Access requires moving most of the quilting supplies, sewing machine, table, and several other items out of the room, lifting the mattress off the bed, then climbing four feet down into the thruster bay, which is perennially filthy from graphite "brush dust." We did this to close it in the first place, but then put everything back, and we opted not to move it again until we needed to.

Big mistake, and, in hindsight, I should have opened that valve while we were still on the hard. The valve had been stuck open to begin with, which often happens due to marine growth, and I had to clean it out with a screwdriver and squirt some lube into it from the outside to get it to close.

I'm not sure why it then stuck in the closed position, but when I went to open it Monday afternoon, the valve handle snapped off in my hand. Fortunately, the valve was still closed and nothing started leaking, so I was not jumping overboard with a dive mask and a wooden plug. But here we are, with a seacock stuck closed and no way to use the anchor washdown.


Oops.

This is not, of course, a crisis. Nothing is leaking and all the critical systems on the boat are working. But we did not want to face the prospect of six months of anchoring in the Caribbean with no washdown, and so I immediately set to work on how to get the valve replaced.

Seacocks can often be changed while still in the water. You push a plug into the through-hull from outside the boat, unscrew the valve from inside, screw a new one on, and then pull the plug and hope it does not leak. And if this seacock was metal that's what I would do. But we added this through-hull to the boat in the yard in 2013, and we could not weld easily in this section of the hull. Neither could we use the traditional bronze through-hull and seacock because it would cause galvanic corrosion of the steel hull. So we opted to use one made of a fiber-reinforced plastic material called Marelon.

If the valve was installed correctly, this should not be a problem. Marelon is exceedingly strong. But if the installer slipped up and got any super-adhesive sealant (3M 5200) on the threads when he installed it, there is a good chance it won't come off without breaking something. And if that happens with the boat in the water, we have a big problem. Reluctantly, we decided to bite the bullet and haul out for the replacement.

I spent all day Tuesday calling yards from here to Miami to see if anyone could do a "short haul" -- a haulout for an hour or two while the valve is replaced without leaving the lift slings. With the Miami show right around the corner, many yards were too booked to fit us in. Three yards told us they would not haul steel boats -- a new one on us. And two yards said they do not permit work of any kind while in the slings.

Lauderdale Marine Center would do it, but we really did not want to go all the way back up the New River. Plus our nasty thief is still there, and we'd likely have to take a night of dockage on one side or the other (or both) of the haulout. Ultimately, we found a yard just a few miles away, on the Dania Cutoff Canal, that could haul us out for a couple of hours this morning, so long as we supplied the part but paid their mechanic to do the work. Fine.

Our story, however, does not end there. You may recall one of the items of unfinished business is to secure insurance coverage in the Caribbean. We started this process in early January, before our Geico policy renewal was due. Our agent took all the details and promised to follow-up with Geico underwriting about extending our limits of navigation.

The policy renewal date came and went (we are on auto-renewal) with no answer. Finally, after three full weeks, our agent told us Geico would not cover us. We use an agency that sells multiple lines and prides itself on covering yachts worldwide, so we simply asked them to source a policy from a different underwriter. They agreed and again we waited.

So Tuesday, after I was done making seemingly 400 phone calls about the busted seacock and I was comfortable we had that problem well in hand, I poked the agent again about getting insurance. And only then does she inform me that, sorry, we can't talk to any other underwriters because you don't have a current survey.

I just about lost it, for the second time in as many weeks. A full survey requires the boat to be out of the water so the surveyor can inspect the hull. The time to tell me we needed this was two weeks ago, when we were still on the hard. It would have been a cake walk then. We could even have had a surveyor out while the bottom was bare steel. Suffice it to say, we will not be giving this agency any further business.

Switching our business to another agency will also require a full survey. Since a survey will be necessary no matter what we do unless we want to go no further than the Bahamas, we again will bite the bullet and get it done, post haste.

Reluctantly I called the yard back to postpone the haulout. Mind you, I had already given them the song and dance about wanting to keep moving, leaving Fort Lauderdale, etc. in order to line it up for this morning in the first place, and now I was waving it off. I explained the insurance issue and they were very understanding.

With what little was left of yesterday, and most of today, I made another 400 phone calls to try to find a surveyor on short notice. This involved lots of back and forth with the yard and the mechanic, because in order to do it all in a single short haul, everyone needs to be available in the same two-hour window.

The end result is that we have both a surveyor and a mechanic lined up tomorrow morning, and the lift operator will try to work us in sometime around 10ish. If all goes well, we'll be done with both by the end of the day, and we'll come right back here and stay through the weekend. We still need that break.

The second project on my plate here went off without a hitch, to wit, testing the watermaker after the recent repairs. I did not want to test it while still at the marina, because there are often hydrocarbons in the water from spilled fuel, solvents, and whatnot, and hydrocarbons are deadly to osmotic membranes. The water here in the lake is clean enough for testing purposes, and I am happy to report the unit is now producing more water than we've ever seen from it before. That's likely a combination of our pump having been marginal for some time, and the fact that the replacement pump is actually rated at a slightly higher capacity. We're very happy with the result.

Monday evening we consoled ourselves with comfort food at Sapore de Mare, an Italian joint we like right on the boardwalk. And last night we opted to dine at one of the nice places on the ICW, GiGi's, which has its own dock. Tonight's activity was a round trip on Lyft to the West Marine back in Fort Lauderdale, the closest place to get a replacement valve. We ate on the boardwalk when we returned, at Sugar Reef, which proved to be weird but tasty.

We decked the tender when we got home, and we're all set to weigh anchor in the morning for the 8am bridge opening. And I really hope the next time you hear from me, I'll be reporting on what a relaxing stay we're having someplace.

First World Yacht Problems

We are at Lauderdale Marine Center, on the New River in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (map). Tomorrow will mark four weeks since we arrived here, and it's been longer than that since I last posted to the blog. It's been an eventful few weeks, and I am going to try to catch all the way up in this post, so grab an adult beverage and settle in.


Vector on the hard at Lauderdale Marine Center, having her bottom done.

Today's title is an expression we use often aboard Vector. It seems at times like we are forever solving problems, or spending money on infrastructure and minutiae rather than the enjoyable things in life. And I know some of you are here just for the schadenfreude. So we say this to remind ourselves that we are retired and live on a boat, a life circumstance that perhaps 98% of the world population would trade for their own in a heartbeat.

Another expression we use around here is "it's only stuff." Life is made of experiences, not stuff. and when stuff breaks, or falls overboard. or even goes down with the ship, we try to remind ourselves of what is truly important, which is not "stuff." That reminder can be exceedingly difficult at times.

Last week was such a time. A little over a week ago, my scooter was stolen. Again. The one I just bought in Charleston in October to replace the one stolen there, after a decade of service. The new scoot did not even make it three months. To add insult to injury, I literally installed the personalized license plate ("VECTOR 3"), which finally arrived while we were here, the day before the theft. When we discovered it missing, I lost it completely. I flew into a rage, screaming obscenities and banging things around. Had the thief been in front of me, I think I would have killed him with my bare hands.


"Midnight" in happier times. Yes, the bear and of course the windscreen are gone, too.

Making matters much, much worse was the fact that the thief not only had my scooter, but also the keys to Louise's scooter, the door to the boat, and the cable locks we use to lock the bikes. We spent the rest of last Saturday dealing with the fallout, including a trip to the locksmith with the cylinder from the boat door to have it re-keyed.

By way of explanation, we had rented a car last Friday in order to take the cat to the vet. She needed an international chip (the chip she has is not valid outside the US), an update of her vaccines, and a USDA health certificate in order to travel to the islands. As long as we needed a car for the cat, we planned to make a large provisioning run to Costco, Walmart, and Publix to lay in the rest of the provisions for up to six months offshore.

While Enterprise normally picks us up when we rent a car, launching the boat that morning interfered with the timing of the pickup, and we opted to ride over to Enterprise, just ten minutes away, two-up on my scooter. Louise had parked her scooter in an out-of-the-way spot due to moving the boat, and she walked over to it to get her helmet before climbing aboard with me for the ride over.

When we pulled up to Enterprise I took my keys out of the ignition as usual, so I could stow my helmet in the trunk, and Louise went to take out her keys for the ride back. Except she did not have them. Knowing she had just used them to get her helmet, she took my keys and immediately rode back to the yard to look for her keys, which she figured fell out of her backpack-style purse either in the yard or en route. They were not near her scooter, and we both traversed the route we had taken twice apiece looking for them. We even asked a worker in the yard, who had been near her scooter the entire time, if he had seen her drop her keys, and I checked with the office and both security gates to see if they had been turned in.


Not long after we splashed, we got a greeting committee consisting of this manatee cow and her calf. A welcome site, after having seen a dead manatee (from a propeller strike) floating upriver shortly after we were hauled.

What we know now, but did not know at the time, is that someone who works here, possibly the same person with whom we spoke, saw her either drop her keys or maybe even leave them in her trunk lock. And that person picked them up and pocketed them with the intention of returning in the wee hours to steal her scooter. When they came back, after first getting on her scooter (her helmet, which had been on the bike overnight, was moved to the ground), they realized they also had the key to my much newer, nicer, and more expensive scooter, and they took that one instead. We were asleep in our berth not even 30' away.

We spent the day talking to the police, the security department at the yard, the skipper of every yacht that might have camera footage, and anyone we could think of who might have seen something. All for naught, just as it had been in Charleston. And we extended the rental car while we dealt with everything.

It took me a week to work up the courage to report it to the insurance company. Twice in three months is a bit over the top and I will not be surprised if they drop us next year. Sadly, I got all of about $300 for the last one, which is not even one year's premium on the insurance, and I don't expect to get much more than that for this one, even though we spent around $2,500 to purchase it and replace everything else that was stolen along with it.

This time around I didn't have to shop much for all that replacement gear; I just called up my Amazon orders from November and kept clicking "Buy Again." This time I also needed to replace my helmet (which escaped last time), and the fancy BlueTooth headset that lets me get directions from my phone and also serves as an intercom. I dropped over $500 in one day just on replacement gear, and that does not include the stuff I had put in the bike that I either had lying around or I bought at Walmart. I still don't have all the replacement gear.

I also did not have to do too much shopping for a replacement scoot. That model turned out to be perfectly fine for my use, and I just hunted around for another one just like it. I got lucky and found one just a few minutes away in Pompano Beach, sold by a private party with less than 200 miles on the ticker. It even has ten months left on the warranty. It's matte black, which is growing on me, though I preferred the midnight blue of its predecessor. I had even named the bike "Midnight," although I am now questioning the wisdom of bonding with a vehicle enough to name it.


My new new scoot, as yet unnamed. The bear has also been replaced, but I won't be buying a windscreen.

Having now spent a dozen paragraphs venting at you about grieving my stolen ride, it's time to move along to happier topics.  When last I posted here, we were just about to leave Palm Beach, and in fact we weighed anchor, thankfully without any fouling issues, the next morning for the day-long cruise down the ICW to Fort Lauderdale.


This festive gingerbread house and holiday theme stood out along the ICW.

Fortunately HRH The Grand Vizier was not in residence and we cruised past Mar-a-Lago without having to do any two-stepping with the Coasties. We also lucked out on drawbridge timing, and while we were prepared to anchor in one of the very few anchorages along the ICW, by mid-day we figured to make Fort Lauderdale in plenty of daylight. With our old favorite anchorage here now off-limits, and needing to do laundry and pump out our tanks, we opted to dock for the night at the municipal Las Olas Marina, another old standby.


On Fort Lauderdale Beach, the snowman is tanned, and wearing a life jacket, hat, and sunglasses while SUPing.

We had an excellent dinner at long-time favorite Coconuts, and breakfast at one of the numerous beachfront joints before finishing up our errands in the morning. Ruminating about where we'd spend the night before our 7:30 am Monday haulout, I called Cooley's Landing, another municipal marina well upriver, to see if they'd make an exception for us to the 50' length limit. Much to my surprise they did, and we dropped lines at slack tide for the trip upriver.

The New River is always an exciting trip, and the first couple of times we did it you could even say "butt clenching." But I'm comfortable with it now, especially at slack, and I expected no issues. Still, we had a dicey do-si-do with a megayacht who apparently ignored my sécurité call at the Girls School, and then yelled at me about it in that sort of entitled-skipper manner we sometimes encounter. Before we even made it to the river, a sailing cat trying hard to make a scheduled bridge opening decided to pass us in the ICW, and very nearly ran over a bunch of Optis from a sailing school. I had to go full astern to avoid a collision or, worse, any possible contribution to her hitting a bunch of kids.


Under the bridge near Cooley's Landing. No crabs, no gas nozzles. We don't know what the other prohibition had been.

Squeezing into the slip at Cooley's Landing (map) was also a bit of a challenge but we made it without incident, although I would not even try it at anything other than slack current. As it was we were compressed against the pilings on either side at max ebb and max flood, and we nearly wore through the "new" fender we acquired back at Marina Jack's. Backing out of the slip in the morning mid-ebb was not for the faint of heart, but on a schedule I had no choice.


A duck and her ducklings at Cooley's Landing. At one point we saw them all swim across the river.

When we arrived at the landing, the weekly jazz fest was under way at the park next door, in front of the Performing Arts center. The jazz ended just as I got off the boat, but I enjoyed walking around the festival. The city has free day docks here, and they were jam-packed for the event on this picture-perfect day. In the evening we enjoyed walking to the Hamarshee district for dinner. Cooley's Landing is well-situated for walking downtown, and has more amenities than the other city marinas, but the tight squeeze and the battering from the current mean we'll likely not stop there again.


Vector, making ready to depart Cooley's Landing.

The advantage to Cooley's Landing was that we had but a single bridge to transit before arriving here at the yard, Davie Boulevard. The bridges are restricted for the morning rush hour, although we had to be through before then anyway due to the early haulout. But there was comfort in not having to transit the downtown bridges as well as the sometimes-troublesome railroad bridges under time pressure.


Another view. Because, ducklings.

The yard had neglected to tell us which of the several basins and lifts would be used for our haulout, and we went right past the correct basin, which was formerly part of a different yard and literally just reopened a week or so before our arrival. No one answered either the radio or the phone, and so we hung out near the 485-ton lift, blocking its access, until one of the yard workers noticed and gave us some direction. When we finally made it to the lift, they had not prepared for our weight, and we had to station-keep for a half hour while they added two additional belts.


"The Beast" 485-ton marine lift. They haul some big boats here.

Still, they had us out of the water and blocked on the hard (map) before 9am, just in time for the crew from Stabilized Marine to arrive to service our Naiad stabilizers. The lead tech was the same one who serviced our system two years ago, across the state in Bradenton.

I did not write about it here because it seemed really minor to us, but when we crossed over to the west coast in December on the Okeechobee Waterway, we ran over a sand/gravel bar that had built up near a drainage creek. One second we were in 18' of water and the next we heard scraping on the hull. By the time I could even react, we were across it and back in 18'. I knew we took some paint off, and as a matter of course we checked the starboard actuator to make sure it was not leaking or binding.

As we discovered when the boat first rose out of the water, we did, in fact, strike the starboard fin, scraping off some paint, but also pushing it up into the hull. We'd been through this before, on the port side, and it cost us a $500 positioning potentiometer and a bunch of work (by an inexperienced yard) to stop the fin from interfering with the hull. After that incident I repaired the potentiometer for a spare; even though Naiad claims it as the smallest replaceable subassembly, what actually breaks is a $20 articulated coupling that can be ordered from industrial suppliers on-line.


Vector in the slings. No matter how many times you watch this, the nervous feeling never goes away.

The Stabilized crew swapped my spare in for the damaged one and re-adjusted the fin, on top of the rest of the service. That included the routine biennial replacement of the outside seals, replacement of the hydraulic fluid now ten years old, and cleaning of the heat exchanger connectors. While the hydraulic oil was out, we also replaced the return hose with a spare I bought five years ago when we discovered the original had chafed in a section (we installed chafe guard at the time). To their credit, the guys finished it all in one day, but they were here until 8pm.

The stabilizer work was the nominal reason for the haulout in the first place, although we also knew we would need to have the bottom paint touched up, even though it is only eight months old. We spent part of the day talking with the yard about the bottom paint, and I also called several on-site contractors about touching up our topside paint, adjusting our anchor roller, and a number of other issues. We were pre-scheduled to re-splash just three days later, on Thursday, which would have been plenty of time to do the stabilizers as well as touch up the bottom.

Almost nothing is ever that easy in a boatyard, and this time was no exception. In addition to the damage we did running over the gravel, there were numerous spots were our nearly brand new bottom paint was already flaking off. After scraping at it with various tools in several places, we all concluded there were over seven different paint jobs on the bottom, and speculated that it was unlikely the bottom had ever been taken back down to bare steel since the boat was new back in 2003.

Sanding, priming, touchup, and a single re-coat was going to cost as much as our last bottom job, thanks in part to the fact that all such work needs to be tented here in Fort Lauderdale. And the consensus was that we'd get another year on it, but w delaying the inevitable need to take it all the way down. After quotes for two different coating systems on top of sandblasting, we ultimately decided to blast all the way down to bare steel and start fresh, at about twice the cost of the touchup and re-coat job.


Vector wearing her skirt for sandblasting.

That immediately stretched our time on the hard from three days to two weeks. The yard wasted no time; we made the decision Tuesday and by Wednesday morning we were already tented for blasting. Sandblasting all the old paint off took a full two days, and we sealed the boat up tight to avoid getting dust everywhere.


Bare steel. The discolored area behind the bow thruster is the outline of our (full) water tank, which caused a "sweat" area on the hull.

Settling in for a couple of weeks on the hard brought its own challenges. A requirement of this yard, as well as a requirement of the sandblasting operation, is to close off all the through-hulls. No discharge of any kind, including gray water and bilge water, is permitted. So shortly after being hauled out Monday morning, we turned off the water to all the upstairs sinks and dishwasher, which drain directly overboard, and I jury-rigged a hose from the gray water sump belowdecks into our black tank system.


International 262 epoxy primer. We had three coats -- white, gray, white.

This allowed us to at least be able to wash up in the downstairs sinks, brush our teeth, and wash a few items from the galley as needed. In order to avoid filling up the (now combined) tank system too quickly, we showered ashore in the marina facilities, and we tried to use their rest rooms as much as possible as well. We soon tired of washing our coffee mugs in the bathroom sink, and bought some disposable coffee cups to get us through our time on the hard. We also made the decision to go out for dinner every night to minimize the dirty dishes.


First coat of bottom paint is "red" as often seen on ships. Second coat is black. We're using the same paint the ships use, International 640.

With no ability to use the seawater-cooled air conditioners, we made good use of Meriwether, our mini-split in the pilothouse, but even this required modification. The condensate from the evaporator is normally plumbed overboard through the same condensate drain for the main air conditioners, and I needed to jury-rig a collection system using a plastic coffee can while the through-hulls were closed. At one point the can was filling every two hours, a testament to how humid it is in south Florida. We had to carry it off the boat to empty it.


Temporary condensate catchment. I had to drill through the cabinet above to run the hose out.

Unlike other yards we've patronized, Lauderdale Marine Center (LMC) is more of a landlord than a boatyard. They operate the lifts and set the stands, and they have a bottom painting department, but they don't offer any other repairs. Instead you are free to do them yourself, bring in outside contractors from an approved list, or hire one (or more) of the many on-site contractors who lease shop space from LMC.

LMC charges for "lay days" -- days your boat is in the yard on stands -- by the foot. There is an additional fee for utilities, and the yard is happy to rent you any number of other things you may need, including golf carts, fork lifts, scaffolding, and the like; even a ladder. I looked up the rental schedule ahead of time, and realized we'd have to pay the yard $150 a week just to have a ladder to get on and off the boat. Before the lift hauled us out, we got off the boat with our own collapsible ladder instead.

The golf cart rental may seem silly until you realize that it's nearly a mile from one end of the yard to the other. We're in the newest section of the yard, with fresh new rest rooms, but no showers, which are literally a half mile away. We put the scooters on the ground just as soon as we were blocked on the stands -- I deliberately installed enough cable in the davit to reach the ground when the boat is on stands.

We used the scooters constantly -- even using the bathroom was a haul, as was checking the mail or visiting the offices or shops of the many contractors. And there are no restaurants in walking distance, so we took them to dinner nightly. Most days I was also out to the hardware store, West Marine, or the dollar store down the street for one thing or another.


LMC bottom crew working on the primer coat.

As long as we were committed to be in the yard for two weeks, we sought quotes on three other projects from some of the vendors here. In large part, this yard caters to megayachts in the 120'-200' range, where money is no object, and the quotes we were getting were not in keeping with our budget.

By a coincidence of timing, our good friend Steve was in town that first week to attend the Refit show at the convention center, and we managed to get together for lunch. Steve is well connected in the industry, and he suggested we talk to a friend of his who owns a running gear business at the yard to get some other referrals. Within ten minutes of introducing myself, Chris had me in a golf cart driving around to a couple of other vendors, and we were able to get much more reasonable quotes.

I'm sad to say that one of those vendors was a painter, to touch up perhaps two dozen of the worst areas of rust that have already appeared on our topside paint job that was only eight months old. That touch-up cost us another ten percent of what the paint job cost in the first place, and we only elected to deal with the worst of it. The yard in New Orleans that did the original work has stopped returning my phone calls, despite promises to "make it right." But all of that could be the subject of a tome in itself.

The second project was to take some metal off the new anchor roller assembly so the anchor can self-deploy. When we had the assembly fabricated in New Orleans by an independent welder, doubling the thickness of the plating, we did not realize the opening would be just a hair too small for the connecting hardware, and the anchor jams in the guide on its way out. Louise has to skew it using a boat pole to get it to drop. I took the assembly off shortly after the sandblasters were finished (we did not want the anchor and chain to be in their way) and Engineered Yacht Solutions cut it open, machined it down, and welded it back together, which cost nearly as much as we paid the guy in NOLA to make it in the first place. The anchor drops smoothly now on its own.

The third project was something of a last-minute addition and thus became the long pole in the tent. We've been wanting for some time to re-do the shower in the master bath. It was a poor design from the outset, with a flat aluminum pan for a base, covered with a teak grate, and Formica walls with myriad seams covered by cherry trim. With the drain dead center, the aluminum pan never completely drained no matter which way the boat was tilted, and the wood-covered seams eventually leaked and we had water rotting away the wood behind the Formica.


New fiberglass shower pan, sloped to a corner drain. Corian threshold and baseboard replace some rotted wood pieces.

The constant standing water, the rot, and the resulting mold was getting unbearable, and various stopgaps were no longer effective. We replaced the whole thing with a custom fiberglass pan, sloped in two directions to a drain in the corner, and one-piece fiberglass walls all the way around. A useless sloped "step" at the port side, which covered the chine of the hull but was usable for nothing, was replaced with a built-in fiberglass "bench" for use in heavy seas, and which also serves as a place to set the shampoo and soap. Lack of such a bench, a common feature in long-range cruisers, meant we were using a stand-alone "assist" stool in heavy seas, sold principally to the elderly and disabled for use in their home shower.


Bench seat, 18" tall. Impossible to shower in 5' seas without it.

I ripped the pan out myself, along with the old shower fixtures and drain, and did all the plumbing. OP Yacht Services did the rest of the work, including cutting out all the rotted wood with a Fein saw and replacing it with fresh. It came out very nice, and it's much cleaner and brighter in there now. They fitted a tempered glass door as well, which replaces the shower curtain we've been using for five years. The curtain replaced a bi-fold wooden door that was difficult to use and not at all water-resistant.


Looking in through the glass door. I replaced the fixtures and ran PEX for all the in-wall plumbing.

Being in the yard for at least two weeks, and in the boating capital of the US with every conceivable marine service nearby, I also tore into a number of projects myself, starting with the watermaker. Our water production has dropped to less than half nominal, in spite of replacing the membrane the last time we were in town. We suspected the high pressure pump, so I removed it and brought it down to the local Spectra dealer for inspection.

The high pressure pump turned out to be fine, although a slight leak in the pump body prompted a replacement of the check valve O-rings. So next I removed the low-pressure pump, and that turned out to be the culprit. The motor was fine, so we just replaced the pump head, and I put the whole system back together. I'm waiting to get in some cleaner water than this marina to test it all out.

A slew of other projects included replacing the check valve on the stuffing box sump, touching up the black paint on the lower rub rails, installing a new snubber that I had made up at the local rigger, replacing the gas lift struts on the davit, and replacing the TV/monitor on the chart plotter. I took our PropSmith tool over to Lauderdale Propeller to finally have a proper threaded plate made up, three years after the guy in Deltaville failed the assignment. I also added the two stainless eye bolts, found at the nearby well-stocked hardware store, to my scooter for lifting it with the crane, a task I will now need to repeat.


New hand-priming pump on the main engine.

The hand priming pump on the main engine recently started leaking diesel into the bilge, and I replaced that with a newer model from Bosch that supposedly will not leak, and is more compact and effective to boot. And as long as the anchor was on the ground, I spooled out some more chain and re-painted the red 50' mark.

Freshly painted chain marking. The anchor connector got a coat of zinc spray, too.

The new monitor for the chart plotter was necessitated by a dead spot in the lower left corner of the screen, caused by an accidental spill. It was mostly still usable, but it made it hard to see a couple of icons in the Windows task bar when I needed to. The plotter app itself was fine. But with a rental car and easy access to a Best Buy we dropped all of $70 on a new 19" LED TV for the purpose. The old TV, which had cost me a C-note at HH Gregg, was still fine for TV watching, and I mounted it down in the guest stateroom, over the door, in case any future guests might want to watch TV in there. When it's not being the quilt studio, of course.

The theft of the scooter threw a monkey wrench into the works just as things were starting to come together. I spent the better part of a full week dealing with the fallout. In addition to finding a replacement scooter, I had to deal with replacing all the other things lost, and a mountain of paperwork. With the thief still out there with keys, we've also had to be extra diligent about chaining up Louise's bike. Since he also has the lone key to her cable lock, we had to repurpose the lock and cable from the dinghy for the duration.


One of my numerous projects was giving the prop and cutters three coats of zinc spray after the bottom was done but before we splashed.

In a twist of fate, right after the theft of my scooter, the rear tire on the other scooter stopped holding air, and I spent a full day last weekend getting the wheel off and replacing the tire. Somewhere in that project I lost my 10mm socket, probably at the bottom of the marina, and I needed to hunt one down this week.

We ended up extending the rental car, mostly one day at a time, for a full week, Fortunately I was able to get it on a $19 daily rate. That let us make several additional provisioning trips, and there are now 418 cans of beer stored in the bilge, and we have 40 pounds of rice on board, in addition to two full freezers.

Having the car meant that I was also able to seize a deal at West Marine when I stumbled upon a clearance table while trying to source aluminum anodes for our line cutter. The local flagship store has been clearing out their backlog of orphaned special orders, and I scored a bow rail for our dinghy at 90% off, along with a handful of smaller items, also at 90% off. I've been wanting a bow rail ever since we got this dinghy, but not at the ~$500 list price.


My new prize on the floor at West Marine, while I frantically tried to suss out whether it was the right one for our model dinghy (it was).

The bow rail is now installed, along with an LED nav light and a nice cleat from Amazon to finish off the installation. One of the benefits of the bow rail, in addition to safer and easier boarding, is a permanently mounted nav light in lieu of a removable pole mount unit that really needs to come off when not in use. The cheap LED model I bought had poor side visibility and I ended up spending an hour or two modifying it to correct the issue.

The tender also needed its motor shroud latch replaced, and I found the parts at the local Merc dealer, so that's ticked off the list. I also replaced the old and beat-up propeller that I've been nursing along since it first struck underwater debris from Sandy back in Atlantic City a few years ago.

Speaking of propellers, we also need a new one for Vector. The one we have now is manganese bronze, and has been slowly dezincifying. After sandblasting, the damage was quite apparent. We had one of the shops here fit a sorely needed anode to our prop shaft (they had to machine one down to fit) since our shaft brush is clearly not keeping up, but it's too late to save this prop. The new one, whenever we order it, will be NiBrAl and should have fewer galvanic issues. There is a six week lead time so we could not order it here unless we wanted to stick around.


Anode squeezed in between prop hub and line cutter.

I've been more or less working ten hour days, seven days a week since we arrived in the yard, and I am just now coming up for air. But we did make time to get in a few visits with friends who happened to be in the area.

Nina and Paul from Wheeling It stopped by on their way to the Keys; they are preparing to sell their rig and move to Europe to resume their mobile lifestyle there. Chris and Cherie of Technomadia also stopped by, in between securing their boat for a while and resuming their travels in their vintage GMC bus conversion. And mostly-local friends Chad and Amanda met us for dinner one evening in Plantation. We were hoping to intersect with formerly local friends Steve and Harriet as they returned to close out some business here, but we missed by a hair.


Another gratuitous gingerbread shot.

A couple of days ago I took our scuba tanks in for an inspection and refill, and I'm part way through the process of moving my phone to T-Mobile's unlimited international plan and pointing my Google Voice number at it before we head offshore. All we need now is a new Iridium plan and proper insurance, which seems to be taking our agent longer than it should. Yesterday we pressure-washed the tender inside and out, and did our best to wash the boat.

We're done in the yard now, and honestly we could have left here Friday, except I was too exhausted to move the boat, and we still had projects spread all over the boat. If I can get my act together we should be able to shove off tomorrow and head south to Hollywood, where we can anchor. That will give us a chance to regroup, and test the watermaker while we are still in striking distance of the Spectra guy.

The general plan is to head south at least to Miami and maybe all the way to the Keys before crossing the gulf stream to the Bahamas. We still have to provision the fresh food, something best done at the last possible instant, and we need to have the insurance and phones squared away before leaving the country. We also need to get back to the vet (without the cat) to have him sign our pre-departure paperwork.

Now that I am not working every waking minute, I hope to be more timely with blog posts. I still have a lot to do, but things tend to be a bit more relaxed at anchor. With every day in the yard costing money, there is a lot of pressure to finish and get out. When next you hear from me, we should be on our way to Miami.