Northbound at sea

We are in the Atlantic Ocean a few miles east of Isle of Palms, South Carolina.  We had a perfect weather window for the overnight run to Cape Fear, and so we decided last night that we would weigh anchor this afternoon and "get, while the getting is good."  I would have loved to spend a few evenings in Charleston, but we've done that before, and we really did not want to spring for a marina stay.  The city marina would let us land the dinghy for $5, but then we'd need to take a taxi to get anyplace useful.  It would be worth it to have dinner at the Harbour Club across town, but they don't serve dinner until Wednesday evening, and we did not want to miss our window by staying an extra two nights.

We had a mostly relaxing day yesterday, just what we needed between the long run from Hilton Head and tonight's overnight run.  That said, I did get a couple of projects done, including cleaning out and improving my redneck sump box under the shaft stuffing box.  This sump is intended to catch all the dripping from the shaft (if it does not drip seawater all the time, the shaft will overheat) and pump it back overboard, but crud that has accumulated in the box has been interfering with the float switch, a fact we learned after the engine room bilge filled with enough water to set off the alarm.  We've had to vacuum the water out of that bilge several times over the last few days after the switch started acting up.  We did it again today, hopefully for the last time in a while.

Today's project was a bit more critical, literally needing to be done before we could weigh the anchor.  To wit: repair the anchor roller.  Louise posted a photo of our repairs under way in Port Royal Sound, but those were temporary; from the foredeck I can't really reach the bolts on the roller to tighten them properly.  We had hoped simply to get it working enough to drop the anchor in Charleston, where I could hang over the bow and make a proper fix.  As it turned out, even just swinging at anchor, the bolt on the other side of the roller also worked its way loose, and I noticed it at 3am when I did my final snubber check on the way to bed.  I was able to unweight the chain enough to get the bolt back in a couple of threads' worth at that late hour, and called it a night.

The line taking the weight of the chain off the roller, that I rigged last night.  You can see my fingers working on the other side.

This morning I went over the side in my "sit harness," just as I did in Biscayne Bay, to effect a proper repair.  In this case, that involved removing both bolts and taking the inner roller off entirely, sanding the axle smooth (and filing off a particularly bad "tulip" at one end), and slathering the whole thing with marine grease before putting it back through the roller.  I think the friction between the roller and axle was causing the chain movement to literally unscrew the axle right off the bolts.  One bolt would loosen on retrieval, and the other on deployment.

Hanging over the bow in a harness.  I'm wearing my swim trunks, just in case, and keeping the chain between my legs to hold position.

Once I had the axle, the roller ends, and the two washers that stand it off from the carriage all greased, we very carefully put the roller back and I got a thread or two of each bolt engaged.  Then I applied thread locking compound to each bolt before tightening it all back up.  With any luck, this repair should have us good to go for some time to come.

While I was hanging down there, I could tell that the lower roller was also not turning freely.  It did not have the same bolt issue, because it uses a different axle arrangement, but nevertheless I thought we should free it up a bit.  So Louise held the grease container where I could get a finger in it, and I was able to cram a bunch of grease up between the roller ends and the carriage with the help of a thin piece of cardboard.  It all turns much more smoothly now.

Black line to the left has second chain hook to unweight the chain.  The white line with an eye in it is what I step into to haul myself back up to where I can step on the roller assembly and climb back aboard.

In order to work on the lower roller, we had to take the weight off the chain further down, which we did with an extra chain hook and another line.  (This section of chain is hanging loose at anchor -- the force of the boat at the end of the anchor rode is being taken by the snubber, attached to a bow eye at the waterline.)  The whole time I was working, Louise was snapping photos, and she got a shot of the resulting macrame on deck, with the two ends of the line holding the chain off the aft roller, the end of the line with the hook holding the chain off the forward roller, and, of course, the end of the line holding the dope-on-a-rope, yours truly.

All's well that ends well, and we seem to have a working anchor system again, and the anchor and chain came back aboard smoothly when it was time to depart, around 3pm.  The late departure is so that we will arrive at tomorrow's marina destination more or less at high slack tide, the best time to come in the skinny channel and get the boat docked.  I even allotted an extra hour or so, which means we are basically lugging along here in the ocean.  We had a nice 2-knot push out the inlet today, and we'll have a push in at the other end, too.  The 3pm departure also let us rest a bit more, and take advantage of Charleston's free WiFi.

Yesterday after posting here I noticed the tugs that had been out where we detoured near Folly Beach, towing in the barge and several hundred feet of pipeline, the very stuff around which we detoured.  Today on our way out the channel we passed the same tugs, this time bringing in the pump or whatever it was that reminded me of an AT-AT.  It looked far less impressive with its spuds up -- most of its mass was awash as it was being towed.  When we passed it in the ocean, the spuds were all the way down and the belly of the beast was well above the sea surface.  It appears that if we had just come in a day later, we would not have needed to detour.

Our 3pm departure had us out the channel just ahead of a giant Ro-Ro, as well as the Carnival Fantasy, which makes its home port in Charleston.  In a few minutes we will be out of Internet coverage, and likely cell service as well, for most of the remainder of tonight's trip.  This will be the furthest offshore we have been.  By 1pm tomorrow we should be approaching Bald Head Island, and we'll have service perhaps a couple of miles sooner.

Burning out a fan up here alone

As I type this, we are in the Atlantic Ocean about five miles east of Fernandina Beach, Florida (map). We are steaming south at 7.3 knots, and it looks like we will make the turn to the St. Johns River entrance channel around 2:30ish, two and a quarter hours from now.  The flood current will give us a boost into the river and we should be tied up around 3:30 if all goes well.

We're not really in Florida yet, as we are far enough offshore to be out of the state, but for all intents and purposes we left Georgia behind when we crossed the St. Marys entrance channel about 15 minutes ago. We are close enough to shore, though, that I got a good view of Jekyll and Cumberland islands as we passed by, and I could see Fort Clinch and the state park campground on Amelia Island where we stayed in Odyssey on our very first pass down the coast.

We passed one giant RoRo in the Brunswick channel on our way out, and we've passed a half dozen or so shrimpers plying their trade, but have seen nary another cruising boat since we left the harbor. Conditions today are perfect -- the 3:40am forecast was revised back down to 2'-4' seas, and, frankly, we haven't really seen much over 3'.

It would have been a perfect day to visit Cumberland Island, but Louise, while on the mend, is still too far under the weather for a shore excursion.  Besides that, with such perfect conditions, we wanted to make progress while the going was good.

Our plan had been to weigh anchor at 8am, to have a good boost from the ebb on the way out of St. Simons, yet still plenty of daylight for the whole trip.  That had us bringing the anchor in with well over a knot of current, making for a bit of a challenge.  We actually got a late start, as the chain was fouled on the bottom somehow and getting it all back aboard was slow going.

Near the beginning of the retrieval I went on deck, as I always do, to retrieve the chain hook.  Louise otherwise handles all the deck work while I drive the boat, but her arm is just not long enough to reach the hook at the end of the anchor fairlead through the little hawsehole we installed for the purpose.  As I stepped out of the pilothouse I detected the smell of burning electrics, and my first thought was the windlass motor was burning up.

Finding no obvious problem with the windlass, and detecting no smell there, we continued getting the snubber off the chain and went back to work.  As I stepped back toward the pilothouse door, I smelled it again.  Louise brought her more sensitive sniffer over toward the pilothouse, and found the smell to be coming from the hood for the forward bathroom exhaust fan.  I had turned that fan on a few minutes earlier.

Relieved that it was not the windlass, I raced downstairs and, fortunately, found no fire or other badness, but the fan was now inoperative and it looks as if we've burned it out.  This is the second one -- we replaced the identical fan in the master head a few months ago, both probably victims of our Modified Sine Wave (MSW) inverter.  It probably says something about me that the first thing that popped into my head is the (somewhat altered) Elton John lyric that titles this post.

As a side note, that line from Rocket Man has generated more different mondegreens than perhaps any other song in history, so much so that Volkswagen made a commercial out of them, touting their audio system's clarity.  They understandably omitted our favorite, though, "burning out a pair of underwear."

Repairing a fan a foot above my head is more than I want to tackle out here in the ocean, so a full diagnosis will have to wait until we are tied up or anchored tonight.  The sorts of induction motors in fans really don't like MSW power, which is one of the many reasons our new inverter (yet to be installed) is a true sine model.  The fans were also ten years old, which is probably the lifetime of the insulation in a damp, let alone marine, environment.

Tonight we will either be anchored just a few miles up the St. Johns, or else tied up to the free docks at Pine Island.  There are no services there, but it's not far from the entrance.  Tomorrow we might continue upriver to Jacksonville.  Our affiliate club there is having a New Years Eve party, and there are plenty of other venues just a short walk from any of the three free docks in town.