Back under way

We are anchored just inside Lake Worth Inlet, near Palm Beach, Florida (map).  Aboard with us are our friends Steph and Martin, taking a brief break from the commissioning of their new boat to join us at Trawler Fest, which starts tomorrow in nearby Lake Park.

We shoved off yesterday morning at 7am from our slip at Apex Marine, from which we had not budged in six weeks.  Other than when we were on the hard at the boatyard, that's the longest we've stayed in any one spot without moving, and it feels good to finally have a change of scenery.  Also, we got a good chance to test out many of the changes we made to the boat while we were in Stuart.

We had fantastic weather for the outside run, and once we were well past the jetties at St. Lucie Inlet we had calm seas with gentle ~2' rollers.  With little breeze it actually got a bit warm in the pilothouse even with the doors open, with the massive expanse of glass facing south, and so we spent the middle portion of the day on the flybridge -- a perfect day on the Atlantic.  We might easily have come the whole way less than a mile off shore, but we angled out to the three mile limit and back in order to empty our tanks.

It has been over two weeks since my last post here, and once again I have a great deal to update.  I do also still plan to write up the whole electrical system upgrade as a separate post, but I literally just finished the project three days ago, and I need a few hours to gather it all together.  At least I can report that all worked well during yesterday's test run, and last night was our first at anchor on the new batteries and inverter and we finally can make it through a whole day without running the generator.

When last I posted here, we were just about to leave for the Miami boat shows.  Parking in Miami Beach turned out to be quite the challenge, and we missed an hour or so of show by the time we got parked and into the convention center.  We stayed all the way to closing time at 6pm, and I just barely made it to all the vendors on my list.  I think we made it up and down 85% or so of the aisles as well, and we picked up a handful of items for the boat.  I also ordered a new VHF radio for the pilothouse, thus adding to my already lengthy project list.

One of the reasons to attend on (and spring the upcharge for) "premier" day at the show is that the manufacturers send their technical reps for that day.  We got great information from Lugger, the manufacturer of our engine and generator, Wema, who made our tank monitors, Nautical Structures, who made our crane, Naiad, who made our stabilizers, and ACR, who made our searchlight and EPIRB.  I also spent a good deal of time with the head guy at Standard Horizon, which cleared up enough of my questions to enable me to order their newest radio.  All in all a great investment, and we'll probably come back to this show again some day for just that reason.

Even though we did not make it to absolutely every booth on Thursday, we decided it was not worth paying another full day's admission Friday, and we opted instead to go to the Boat and Brokerage show a little further north, which is free.  We went through the handful of booth vendors there, and walked through a few boats as well, before finishing up at "Cruiser Port," which is a miniature version of Trawler Fest that pops up within other major boat shows.  That left us just enough time to get back to Stuart and our lonely cats Friday evening, and the car back to Budget on Saturday morning.

Last week's great project was, of course, the installation of the granite in the galley.  I had to defer completion of the electrical project and other engine work until the granite was done, so that I could have my parts of the project done in time for the granite installers to do their thing.  That meant, for the most part, my least favorite activity: plumbing.  As long as we were getting new sinks which would require re-plumbing of the waste lines, I took the opportunity to remove the hokey ABS unvented traps and wastes all the way down to the metal stubs at the base of the cabinets, and start over.


Granite being shimmed during installation.  This is the cooktop cutout.

I also took the opportunity presented by all this to install an under-counter filtration system at the wet bar.  We've been using a faucet-mounted Brita filter at that sink to get our drinking water, and we wanted to get rid of the unsightly and somewhat less convenient faucet-mount, with its expensive proprietary cartridges, in favor of an industry-standard filter holder and a dedicated spigot on the countertop.  This would also allow us to plumb the ice-maker into a filtered source, whereas before it was connected directly to the supply from the tank.


New PEX water lines (left), filter (center) and waste plumbing (right).

Redoing the fresh water plumbing meant removing the supply valves and a handful of fittings upstream, and I decided that now was as good a time as any to replace all the crappy galvanized steel pipe in this part of the system.  That added more than a full day to the project, involving ripping out some 40' or so of 1/2" galvanized pipe in the engine room and replacing it with PEX.  This has been a long time coming, and we now finally have at least one place in the boat where we can get fresh water that has not been flowing through decade-old galvanized pipe.  I still need to do this for the rest of the boat, but at least there is no galvanized potable plumbing left aft of the engine room bulkhead.


Countertops removed.  The duct at left carries HVAC from the unit below the counter to the grille in the upper cabinets and is normally covered by trim.

In order to get the wet bar countertop out (and the new one in), I also needed to disassemble the lowest level of the built-in wet bar bottle rack.  I had to pick up a brad nailer to put it all back in -- fortunately, there is a Harbor Freight in town and I was able to grab one on sale for $22, as I really didn't want to spend $80 or more on a "lifetime" tool to shoot perhaps four dozen brads for this and some other trim projects around the boat.


New wet bar counter and sink with new faucet at left and drinking water tap to its right.  You can tell what's important on our boat -- the wine is wearing its own life vest...

Even though we paid the granite company for "demolition," a modest $75 fee that included hauling away the old counters and sinks, I removed the wet bar counter myself, and also removed all the fasteners from the galley counters and broke them loose.  That left only cutting them in two and carting them off the boat for the granite guys.  The new counters also came in two pieces, with a small seam in the center of the sink cutout.  They did need to take two of the counters back off the boat to make a few additional cuts with a diamond saw -- the stove cutout was too small, and the wet bar counter needed an adjustment.


Fixing dinner on the new counter.  The nice large sink is a bonus, and the seam between sections is barely visible.  We added soap dispensers for hand and dish soap on either side of the single-handle faucet.

The new counters are gorgeous, and really make a huge difference to the look and feel of the galley area.  In addition to the new drinking water tap in the wet bar, we also had to get a new single-handle faucet as well, as the two-handle one that was in there did not leave enough room for both.  The new spigot makes it easier to fill the coffee pot and our water pitchers, too.  Most of all, I'm glad to finally be rid of the hokey plywood square that's been filling in for the counter where I removed the electric range back in June.



The old solid-surface countertop, before removal.  What a difference.

After the granite was in it took me another full day to get all the plumbing back in.  As long as I was adding fully new drains, I brought the stacks all the way up to just below the counters and installed mechanical vents on each, which has reduced considerably the amount of "blurping" that we hear when the washing machine drains, as well as allowing the new sinks to drain a bit better.


New replacement O-ring on left, old, leaky one on right.  Definitely not the correct part.

By the time all this was done we had just a few days left before shoving off for Trawler Fest, and it was a mad scramble to get everything done.  With the old alternator off the engine I needed to yank the raw water pump to address a long-time oil leak.  I had already purchased a replacement O-ring, and I was certain that I would find the old one pinched, cracked, or dried out.  Instead I found an O-ring that was several sizes too small in thickness for the application.  Considering the reversed cover plate and the took marks I found on the raw water side of the pump I can only conclude that some technician somewhere pulled the whole pump off the engine to get a cantankerous impeller out, then used the O-ring intended for the cover plate to reinstall the flange to the engine.


"Inside" the water pump cover.  Stamped writing indicates this was originally the outside and it was flipped when the inside became worn.

The new alternator, being exactly the same frame as the old one, fit on without any trouble, and I was able to use my Gorilla Bar to tension the new pair of V-belts.  A quick stationary test of the new unit under load showed more than the rated 110 amps.  We detected a faint burning smell, which we are attributing to break-in as the belts seat and the manufacturing oils burn out from the new parts.

Getting everything cleaned up and secured after all the projects was itself a big undertaking, and I also had to finish wiring the new chartplotter system to the autopilot before getting under way.  We just barely got it all done, but almost everything worked perfectly on the way here.  The two separate GPS inputs to the new chart system appear to be causing some "jumping" of the position signal, and I need to learn the routing commands, but the oil leak is gone and we had plenty of juice from the new alternator under way.

The new hydrostatic release for the EPIRB arrived just before we left, and, along with having just recertified the unit with a brand new battery, updated that part of our safety regime before our ocean excursion, leaving only updating the life raft on our major safety-related list.  Good thing we are not signed up for any seminars at Trawler Fest, just cocktails -- as an arriving cruise ship suggested to me this morning, I need a vacation.

Milestones, millstones, and Miami

Once again I must apologize for the lengthy delay in updating the blog.  We have been incredibly busy here aboard Vector, and every time I am in the frame of mind to post, something more immediate preempts it.  I had intended to post an update at the end of January, and here it is nearly half past February and I am just now getting to it.  I will touch upon many of the distractions here in this post.

The last part of January saw some important milestones.  Observant long-time readers will realize that we celebrated our first anniversary of boat ownership shortly after I last posted here.  About a week later, I celebrated another successful voyage around the sun.  Both occasions passed with little fanfare, although it was nice to have our friends and fellow cruisers Martin and Steph here to help us celebrate.

Speaking of Martin and Steph, their own long-range trawler arrived here in Stuart at the Nordhavn docks just south of us a couple of weeks ago, and we drove out with them to the inlet to watch her come in.  We had also driven down to Fort Lauderdale with them the preceding day to see her at the docks at Bahia Mar, where she overnighted after off-loading.  Bahia Mar is very familiar to us from three Trawler Fest events there, and we all had a nice lunch next door at Coconuts.

We've been spending lots of time with them since they arrived, having dinner together perhaps two nights out of three.  Part of that has been catching up, part of it has been boat talk, and part has been helping them through the passing of their cat, who made it all the way here only to be diagnosed with inoperable cancer.

When we are not with them, of course, I am working on the boat, and that has been essentially non-stop since my last post here.  I always have a long list of projects, and we even had a somewhat shorter list of "things to get done while we are in Stuart."  The lists are so long that it is hard to decide where to start.  No problem, though, because more often than not, the decision gets made for us.

Usually that happens because something I have on my list, that I know is a failure waiting to happen, actually fails, and then I can put it off no longer.  This happens often enough that we have an expression around here: "the boat chooses."  But the big one on this visit actually got scheduled as a direct result of my last post.

In that post I mentioned that I would be renting a truck and running down to Miami to pick up new batteries.  I'm not sure what market dynamic is at work here, but the Miami/Fort Lauderdale distributor consistently has lower prices than anyone else on the east coast.  My buddy Steve in Fort Lauderdale read that little tidbit, and contacted me just a day later to say he would be coming up this way to check on his boat on the Okeechobee waterway, and would I like him to just bring the batteries with him when he came up.

After a few messages back and forth we learned he could get a better price than could I from his usual distributor, and he did enough business with them that they would give him until the return trip to bring back the cores.  And so it was that, even though I was nowhere near ready to start the Great Battery Replacement Project, I was now committed to swapping the batteries themselves less than five days hence.

The batteries, at 165-170 lbs apiece, weigh 15% more than I do, and I spent a full day getting them out of the racks and dragging them over to the ladder leading to the aft deck, after first spending another full day rewiring the engine starting circuits and then jury-rigging the whole boat to run off what is now the lone engine/generator starting battery while the house batteries were out of commission.

Poor Martin, who is also outweighed by these batteries, got pressed into service to help me haul them up the ladderway with a block-and-tackle I borrowed from the boat next door. We then used the crane to haul them off the boat one at a time and load them into a dock cart for the trip to shore.


A pair of new batteries on the deck.

Steve arrived just in time for lunch along with his wife Harriet and friends Lou and Renea.  Steve and Lou both have ex-Pegasus Neoplan Spaceliner buses, and so having the three couples together at lunch was a sort of mini-gathering of the heretofore non-existent Neoplan Spaceliner Owners' Group.  They also both have large cruising boats and so we have a lot of common ground.


Hoisting a battery down the hatch.  Note the jury-rigged board to suspend the block and tackle over the hatchway.

Steve, Martin, and I unloaded the new batteries from Steve's truck after lunch, and Martin helped me get them down the dock and next to Vector after Steve and the gang left.  Louise and I were able to get them onto the boat and back down the ladderway into the engine room two days later, and then I was able to finally start on the big project, which long-time readers may recall involves switching the boat's electrical system from 12 volts to 24 volts.


Chaos in the engine room, with all six batteries on the floor.

That will be the subject of a post in itself.  For one thing, it's a long tale and this post is already heading for the far side of "too long."  For another, I expect some people who don't normally follow along here will be interested in that project and I want to have a stand-alone post to which I can link later on.


I need to remediate this rust before I can rack them.

The combined project of changing the batteries, rewiring the core electrical system, and replacing the inverter have consumed the lion's share of my time over these past two weeks, with some 50 hours or so in it so far.  We're now running on the new batteries and inverter, but I'm not done yet, as I still need to replace the engine alternator.  I'll write up the whole project, with photos, when it is fully completed.

Lest it sound like it has been nothing but work since we arrived, I will also say that we've had a good amount of pleasant weather and have enjoyed many beautiful sunsets from the deck.  I also watched the launch of Nasa's TDRS-L satellite from our upper deck, which was spectacular as it arced across the night sky even though we are a fair ways from Canaveral here.  And we made the time to walk across to Loggerhead Marina for Kadey-Krogen's open house, where we toured perhaps six of their top-of-the-line Krogen 58 models (including the aforementioned neighbor from whom I borrowed the block and tackle) along with a couple of smaller boats more akin to Vector.

I also do not want to leave the false impression that, aside from the surprise acceleration to the schedule, I have been working seamlessly on the electrical system when not socializing.  It is inevitable that in the midst of such a long project, the boat will intervene with some demands of her own.

For example, I mentioned that we used the crane to hoist the batteries off the boat, onto the dock, and into a dock cart.  To avoid damaging the boat, I kept the wire rope, "headache ball," and sky hook above the level of the boat deck, opting to connect the lifting sling to those harder bits with a nylon line.  When we were done for the day, I tied the line off to the rail to keep it all from swinging around, knowing we would need the same setup to get the new batteries back onto the boat.

It was a rainy evening -- my brand new batteries were sitting on the dock getting drenched -- and while we were sipping our final postprandial glass of wine we heard the horrible sound of an electric motor whirring, then straining, then stopping.  At first we thought it might be coming from the engine room, but then we realized it was the crane.  I turned off the breaker and the lights in the boat visibly brightened, and when I checked the line it was bar-tight.  The crane is rated at 800 pounds and can probably exert 2-3 times that amount of force, so I backed away without disturbing anything further.

It turned out that water had worked its way into the hand controller, shorting the switch and commanding the winch to retract.  I was able to dry it out enough to command it to extend, and we disconnected the controller and left the winch power off.  Lesson learned -- never leave the davit breaker energized except when actually engaged in hoisting operations, and don't leave the supposedly weatherproof hand controller out in the rain.

We made it all the way through the hoist-in operation the next day with only one uncommanded retraction, and the controller is now on my workbench to see if I can improve the weather resistance somewhat when I am done with the bigger projects.

A day or so later, after my morning shower and while I was shaving, I realized I was not hearing the gray water sump running periodically, as it should be while using the sink.  I opened the bilge to find most of my shower water in the bottom, having overflowed the sump.  The batteries sat unconnected another day while I wrestled with the sump, finding the pump clogged.  I ended up removing the pump altogether to try to resuscitate it on the bench, but there is no way to open one of these up and no amount of cleaning and lubrication would get it to spin more than a single revolution.  I ended up going to West Marine on a Sunday morning to buy a new pump, which took me the rest of the day to install due to cramped working quarters and the fact that the replacement was a different brand, with a different bracket, than the original.

The unscheduled sump project spanned two days, and as the sump is in the guest stateroom bilge, we simply closed off that room before we headed to dinner Saturday evening with our friends.  Forgetting there was a giant hole in that room where part of the floor used to be, Louise stepped into the darkened room after coming back from dinner and fell straight into the bilge.  She has bruises all over and lots of sore muscles, but we were very, very lucky -- she did not break any bones.  (It's been over a week now, and she is on the mend albeit still a little black-and-blue.) Another lesson learned -- either put the floor back, or leave a light on when taking a break from working in the bilge.

The electrical project is also massive enough that I am interrupting it periodically to wrap up other projects as I am able.  For example, the updated board for the AIS came back from Furuno, and the connectors, cables, and adapters I needed to connect it to the permanent antennas on the mast arrived, so I spent some time getting all of that working again, to include cramming the two antenna cables through our already overstuffed vertical chases in the pilothouse.  Also the repaired microphone came back from Icom just a couple of days after I had sent it out.


New cable to connect the AIS on the console to the antenna lead-in in the overhead.  I had to connectorize this after pulling it into the chase -- no way to pull the whole connector through.

Among the many projects on our "do in Stuart" list was replacing the carpet in the master stateroom with woven vinyl Bolon sheet goods that Louise bought when we were still in Deltaville.  She also bought tile squares of a similar material at the same time, which I installed in the salon while we were in Charleston.  We could not really use the squares in the stateroom, because there are hatches throughout the room which may need to be accessed periodically, and so we needed something that could be lifted as needed and then laid back down, and the squares really need to be adhered to the subfloor more or less permanently.


Using the old carpet as a template for the new flooring.

Unlike the squares, I needed to cut the sheet goods to shape off the boat, and here that meant in the parking lot.  That necessitated doing the bulk of the cutting on a weekend, and, reluctant as I was to interrupt the electrical project yet again, with another big project to boot, we were running out of weekends.  So Sunday we hauled the Bolon out to the parking lot along with the old carpet as a rough pattern, and by the end of the day I had the forward half of the stateroom finished.


The finished product.  Shadows in this photo make it look blotchy -- it's not.

It's not possible to do the whole room in one section, as the carpet had been.  Instead we had two different-sized remnant sections of the same material, and I have a small seam on each side of the berth.  This also lets us get to most of the hatches without having to lift the much larger forward section of flooring.  Double-sided carpet tape holds down the edges and keeps the seams even, and when it loses its grip from too many removals we will just replace the tape.

Another project on the "Stuart" list was to replace the galley counters with granite.  Anyone following along since Deltaville may remember that I replaced a three-burner electric range with a dishwasher and two-burner induction cooktop, and we've been living with a square of plywood filling in the missing section of countertop ever since.  We finally got a quote we could live with from a local countertop outfit, and they came this morning to make templates, for installation next week.  It should look nice when it is done, but of course I have more work ahead of me undoing the plumbing and the old counters.


A sample of the new granite, atop the Corian it will replace.  Hard to capture the true colors in a photo like this.

To punish me for taking so long to get around to posting here, Neptune had two more surprises for us in the past week.  One of the boarding gate latches popped off as Louise was boarding with an armful of groceries, trying desperately not to let the gate hit her in the bruised hip.  Of course, that latch went straight to the bottom of the marina, and, as luck would have it, they are no longer made.

Finally, two days ago, just before dawn, we were awakened by the unmistakable sound of the water pump running.  The vinyl hose supplying hot water to the sink in the guest head had popped off its barb, where it had been barely seated and poorly clamped during construction.  Hot water quickly filled the locker below, cascading out onto the teak-and-holly floor and raining down into the bilge that we had just finished cleaning and drying from the previous week's sump episode.  Fortunately, we got the water shut off after only perhaps a dozen gallons or so -- had this happened while we were away, all 500 gallons of our fresh tank could have done untold damage to woodwork and soft goods.  We don't have a dock water connection, but this is a key reason why we would never use one even if we had it -- you can't sink the boat by pumping from an on-board tank.

Tomorrow we pick up a rental car so that we can zip down to the Miami Boat Show on Thursday.  We're not going there to look at boats, but I have a long list of vendors and products to check out in the convention center.  The alternator and the plumbing will have to wait another couple of days.  With any luck, I should have it all done and the whole boat back together before we shove off for Trawler Fest at the end of the month.

Settled in

We are tied up at Apex Marine, on the north fork of the St. Lucie River in Stuart, Florida (map).  Apex is a boatyard and also manages the docks for Allied Marine, a brokerage here.  A majority of the boats here are for sale, listed by Allied, nearby Kadey Krogen, or other brokers including our very own Curtis Stokes.

We actually arrived here a full week ago, on Wednesday.  Upon checking the forecast after my last post, we learned that conditions would deteriorate rapidly starting late Wednesday, making docking here Thursday dicey at best, if even possible.  So Wednesday morning we got an early start and headed straight here, calling on the way to see if they could take us a day earlier than we had planned.

No problem, but by the time we arrived winds had already started to pick up considerably, and backing into the slip from a narrow fairway was challenging.  The boat "walks" to starboard in reverse, and the wind was also sending us that way, while as luck would have it the dock was to port.  It did not help to have a brand new $1.5M+ Krogen 58 on my starboard side, but with some help with the lines from the yard staff we got tied up without incident.

There are a lot of large, expensive boats here, and Vector looks almost diminutive in the lineup, a sharp contrast from some of our recent stays, where she was the largest boat in the marina.  Just driving down the fairway with all the expensive gelcoat on either side of us was a bit intimidating.  Fortunately, we're in for the long haul now -- no need to move even to pump out.  Martin County has a free pump-out boat that makes the rounds, and we had them stop by yesterday.  County ordinance requires us to have a pump-out receipt every ten days.

The trip down from Fort Pierce was otherwise uneventful, although it gets a bit exciting at "the crossroads," the intersection of the dredged channels that constitute the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, which follows the Indian River, and the Okeechobee Waterway, which follows the St. Lucie River.  The ebb in the St. Lucie can be fierce, and I had to hand steer with vigor to keep within the channel as we approached the intersection.

To add to the excitement, the new AIS squawked twice just as we were in the thick of it with "messages."  Sheesh, we just installed this thing -- who can be trying to send us a message?  As it turns out, they were test messages from NAIS, I think in advance of MLK (at least, those initials were in the message), possibly some sort of DHS preparation.  The sending station turned out to be an enormous land-based mast antenna southeast of Orlando.

Speaking of the AIS, it's now "down for maintenance," as I've had to send the main board to Washington for a firmware update.  When it comes back we should be getting proper reporting of all in-range targets, including the Class-B ones that came into being after this unit was first released.  I've also returned the microphone from our pilothouse VHF radio to Icom, who promised to replace the cord, with its crumbling insulation, at no charge.  With any luck we will have both items back aboard and in service before we shove off for Trawler Fest at the end of February.

Now that we are settled in for a month, we've started dealing with a number of routine medical checkups as well as some administrative minutia that is all best handled while stationary for a while.  One of the administrative issues had to do with "registration" for the boat, an issue necessitated by Florida law, which allows visiting yachts a 90-day stay so long as they have registration in their home state.

We had no such registration, of course.  We chose Delaware as a home port, in part because they do not require any registration of federally documented boats, have no tax on boats, and have reasonably easy procedures for registering the tender and other administrative matters.  We knew, too, that they would be happy to issue us a registration sticker for Vector, with an administrative fee, should such a sticker be required by another state.

We were assuming that we'd have Delaware send us the sticker here once we got settled in, which would give us the 90-day grace, taking us to the end of March, at which time we'd have to have Vector out of the state.  We could then come back for up to another 90 days, up to 180 in a year.  When we shared this with local friends and professional skippers Chris and Alyse, they suggested we could just register the boat in Florida instead, which would eliminate the need to be counting days.

After doing a bit of research on our own, it appears that we can register the boat here without becoming Floridians ourselves, and since we've had the boat longer than six month and it has been out of Florida that whole time (closer to a year, actually), no Florida tax will be due.  Registering the boat here is just shy of $200 -- only a bit more than it would cost for a Delaware sticker, and that's a bargain compared to what it would cost us to move it out of the state for a few days at the end of 90 days.



So Florida gets some more of our money, we get to stay as long as we like, and everyone is happy.  We now have a shiny new Florida sticker on our window, which will deter the marine patrols from pestering us to prove we've not overstayed the grace period or to show them proof of registration in another state.  We did spend nearly an hour, though, showing receipts to prove the boat was out of Florida for the first six months we owned it.

In between doctor appointments and DMV visits I've been trying to whittle away at the project list; today I installed new blinds in the guest stateroom to match the ones we already installed in the rest of the boat.  My port multiplexer is here and other parts will arrive over the next few days to finish up the chartplotter project, and I will start on the battery rewiring in the next few days so I can run down to Miami for new batteries in the next couple of weeks.

Today our friends Martin and Steph arrive from California and will settle in to their temporary apartment here in town; their new boat should be arriving sometime around the end of the week.  If they are not too bushed after a full day of travel -- with a cat, no less -- we will meet them tonight for dinner.

As I have said here before, my goal, although not always met, is to blog once from each stop, in other words, every time we move the boat.  Now that we're stationary for a bit, I will not be posting as frequently, but I will try to put something up every now and then with an update on the projects.  Our next voyage will not be until the end of February, when we head south to Lake Park for Trawler Fest.

Shorts!

We are anchored south of Causeway Island, in the Indian River near the city of Fort Pierce, Florida (map).  We arrived here yesterday afternoon, after a relatively short cruise from Vero Beach, where we had tied up Sunday afternoon at the city marina (map).

Sunday we had a nice cruise south from Eau Gallie.  En route I called the Vero Beach City Marina to arrange for a mooring ball, which would have been $15 for the night and afforded us all the amenities of the marina via use of the dinghy dock.  When I called, though, all the moorings in water deep enough for us were full, and they also had no slips.  They did offer to let us "raft up" to another boat already on a mooring.

We opted to continue on to a spot along the ICW where we could anchor for lunch, and take stock of our other options.  There's really no place for us to anchor in Vero, and even if we could, the same $15 fee applies to just using the dinghy dock.  Continuing on to Fort Pierce, the next anchorage, would be another two hours under way.

After dropping a lunch hook and getting ourselves fed, we looked at all the other options including nearby marinas, and I called the Vero Beach city marina back to see if things had changed.  There were still no balls available, but a slip had opened up, so long as we could fit into an 18' wide space.  With our other options limited, we agreed to the slip at $1.60 per foot.

Squeezing our 16'-wide boat between two piles just 18' apart was a bit of a challenge but we made it in without banging the pilings, and home free, or so I thought.  I did not discover it until the following day but there turned out to be some exposed nail heads on the dock rub strip, and we managed to get a good scratch in the paint bringing it alongside.  Municipal marinas are seldom in the best of repair.

Fortunately I was blissfully unaware of that whilst we enjoyed a wonderful evening with our friends Chris and Alyse, who picked us up at the marina and entertained us at their home.  We always enjoy spending time with them, and it is a bonus to get to see their dog, Bert.  We will see them again at the end of February, if not before, when we will all be at Trawler Fest together.

Yesterday morning we lingered all the way to checkout time, noon, getting as many power-intensive tasks done as we could manage before shoving off.  With our dockage in Stuart nominally unavailable until the weekend, we figured on a series of very short days and stopped here, less than two hours south, knowing it was a good anchorage, with access to amenities ashore should we need them.

Since setting the hook, I have been working on projects, including a quick repair to an anchor roller problem that had us both scrambling around on deck before we could drop the hook.  Among those projects has been emailing or calling to make arrangements in Stuart for various things.  One of the calls I made this morning was to the marina, to make sure they had the dockage agreement and to provide a credit card.  Now that the Stuart Boat Show is over, I thought I'd ask if they could get us in any earlier than the weekend.

To my surprise they said they could get us in tomorrow, and I was so unprepared to hear that answer that I declined, and agreed on Thursday instead.  I did not want to commit us to a 30+ mile run tomorrow without consulting weather and charts.  In hindsight it would have been fine, but I am happy to have the extra day to make it into the marina.  The early arrival meant I could make some early doctor appointments before our friends Martin and Stephanie arrive next week.

The other big project here has been the ongoing work on the new plotter and AIS system.  I now have everything properly bolted down, so we are ready for sea, and I got the AIS talking to the plotter, although finalizing that connection will have to wait until my new four-port serial adapter arrives in Stuart.  I have learned a great deal, though, in the process.

For one thing, on the cruise down to Fort Pierce from Vero Beach I realized that the SeaCAS AIS receiver we've been using all along receives Class-B signals just fine, and we've been able to see all the boats around us transmitting a signal.  I ended up calling a sailboat on the VHF just to confirm that they were using a Class-B transponder.  So our inability to see Class-B transponders heretofore has been a limitation of the old Northstar chartplotter rather than the AIS receiver itself.  That's a little surprising, given the structure of NMEA sentences (and the fact that this AIS receiver pre-dates the rollout of Class-B).

The other thing I discovered, which is much less surprising and I more or less expected it, is that the "new" Furuno FA-100 unit does not properly register Class-B targets.  I called my technical contact at Furuno today and he confirmed that the software was out of date, which is unsurprising considering Washington State Ferries decommissioned these perhaps three years ago.  Rather than send the whole transponder to them, 15 pounds worth,  I'm going to open it up and pull out the relevant circuit board and just send them that.  With any luck I will have it back with the software all up-to-date before we leave Stuart.

It has been incredibly pleasant since we arrived, other than the inevitable occasional Florida thunderstorm.  We've mostly had all the windows open and have spent lots of time on deck, where today we saw our first manatee of the trip (and perhaps the 200th dolphin).  I am finally wearing shorts again, for the first time since Baltimore.  It's supposed to be a bit cooler tomorrow, but will again be pleasant thereafter.  We should have fine weather for getting around the Stuart and Jensen Beach area by scooter.

Tomorrow we will weigh anchor in the morning and head south.  We'll either anchor along the ICW near Jensen Beach, or continue around into the St. Lucie River and anchor someplace in Stuart, giving us all day Thursday to get situated at our new digs for the next month or so.

Broadcasting our presence

We are anchored in the Indian River lagoon, at the mouth of the Banana River near the community of Eau Gallie  (map), a neighborhood of Melbourne, Florida.  We are just north of the Eau Gallie causeway, and from here I can see the masts of boats in the Banana River, separated from us by a thin strip of land.

We arrived here early Thursday afternoon, after a very short cruise from Cocoa.  With a full week before we can dock in Stuart we are in no hurry, and we spent a leisurely morning at the dock in Cocoa before shoving off around 11am.  It was quite blustery and there was a bit of chop with winds out of the east, so we elected to make it a short day and anchor here in the lee of the islands to the east and the causeway to the south.

After we set the hook and got settled in, we decided we'd spend two nights here, so I could get some projects done.  There is a small shopping center ashore with a Ross, Office Depot, Publix grocery, and a few other stores, and we figured we could dinghy in if we needed anything, although we have not splashed the tender since arriving.

Friday was a gorgeous day, with calm waters and lovely temperatures, and we had all our meals and cocktails on deck.  We had breakfast and dinner on deck yesterday, too, although there was a windy bit in the middle of the day.  Apparently Boston University trains their women's crew here, and we heard the coxswains and coaches shouting through bullhorns as they skulled by the past couple of days.  Yesterday the sailboats were out in full force, along with a handful  of jet-skis, and we've been treated to live music the past two nights emanating from Squid Lips bar and grill across the lagoon. It's all been very relaxing, other than the projects.

I intended to get cracking Friday morning on finishing up the bulk of the work on the new chartplotting system, and then start on the installation of the Furuno AIS transponder.  But I ended up spending all morning Friday filling out the 5-page application for dockage in Stuart.  It would have taken me perhaps twenty minutes to print it out, fill it out, scan it back in, and email it, but I really wanted to do the whole thing electronically, as we've done from the bus for the past nine years.

I had all the software to do this quite seamlessly on my Windows computer, no matter the format of the original.  (That computer is now the new chartplotter, so, again, I could have simply gone over and done it from there, but I am stubborn.)   My current machine is a Linux box, though, and while I lived and breathed Unix when I was at Bell Labs and Stanford a million years ago, I find myself at the bottom of the learning curve with respect to modern graphical tools for this platform.

I forced myself to hammer through it, and next time I need to fill out a form intended to first be printed it will take me just a few minutes, but there went the morning.  (For the curious, I used Gimp and added my text and graphics in separate layers.)  After lunch I emptied out the cabinets under the helm and settled in to my hidey-hole with a pair of dikes and a screwdriver.

After clearing cables back to the far reaches of the under-helm area, I sorted out where the new cables would have to run and then attacked the top surface of the cabinetry with a 2.5" hole saw.  The old Northstar plotter ran on three fairly thin cables which only had connectors on the plotter end -- the other ends were loose and spliced or connected under the console, and the installer had run all three of them through a half-inch hole.  Between the new chart system and the AIS I had a bundle of cables five or six times that size, and many were pre-connectorized.  I have a nice finish grommet and cap for the new cutout, so it looks cleanly finished.

While the installation of the new plotter did not strictly require it, as long as I had to do all this work under the helm with power, signals, and cable routing, it made sense to tackle the heavy lifting on the AIS project at the same time.  That necessitated a bunch of re-wiring of existing NMEA data paths, and there was a bit of trial-and-error, as the IMO-compliant Class-A transponder is very picky about input information.  I spent hours trying to get the autopilot to supply heading information to the AIS unit, with no success.

Our autopilot takes its heading information from a magnetic compass, heavily compensated for the steel boat.  Even though it is being supplied fix information from a GPS, and thus could calculate true heading based on deviation, it simply will not broadcast true heading if that's not what it is receiving as input.  The AIS will not listen to magnetic heading sentences, only true heading.

After having run a full set of wires from the autopilot to the AIS for the heading information, in addition to the full set of wires from the Furuno radar/charplotter to the AIS to supply position, course, and speed information, what finally fixed the lack of heading at the AIS was to tell the Furuno plotter to send the true heading information.  I think I would have tried that first were it not for the AIS documentation, which appeared to mandate that heading come in on a separate port dedicated to that purpose.

All's well that ends well, and even though I ran wires I didn't need and rewired the autopilot unnecessarily, I eventually got the AIS to stop screaming about missing inputs, and yesterday morning we came up on the air -- as the Washington State Ferry Walla Walla.  I quickly powered down and rebooted into initial settup mode, and we now have the correct vessel particulars for Vector programmed in.

The AIS uses a lot of power, and it requires both the radar display and the autopilot to also be powered up so that it has a source of position, speed, and heading information.  So now that testing is finished it is all powered back down, and will likely remain that way any time we are at anchor or moored.  While there is arguably some safety benefit to showing up on other ships' AIS displays at anchor, particularly in areas with towboat traffic (a large ship can't really hit us because we anchor in water too shallow for them -- not so with tugs and barges), we're also a pretty visible radar target, and we really can't spare the juice.

The additional work on the chartplotter system involved moving the notebook computer to a cabinet under the helm and running cables from there to the monitor, the mouse, the power supply, etc. -- basically cleaning up and dressing the installation.  Eventually the new AIS will also be connected to this computer, but I need some additional hardware, and I had to noodle through getting a new source of GPS information as well.

For the time being, the new plotter is still getting both GPS and AIS data from the old SeaCAS AIS unit mounted in the eyebrow above the pilothouse.  This was handy for testing, because it means we can see ourselves -- the SeaCAS unit sees the transmission from the new Furuno unit as a target. and I had to filter it out on the alarm screen.  It does mean that I had to rob the VHF antenna from the pilothouse radio to get the AIS working; once I remove the SeaCAS I can re purpose its VHF antenna for the Furuno. Getting the cable up to the eyebrow through our already over-stuffed cable chases will be a challenge, though.

I had been concerned about where the position information would come from for the new chartplotter once I remove the SeaCAS, which has its own GPS and broadcasts both AIS and GPS data on the same port.  A little digging today revealed that the GPS "antenna" for the now-defunct Northstar plotter is actually a full, stand-alone SirfStar GPS NMEA "talker."  It's already on the mast and the wires come in to a junction block under the helm.   All I need to do is connect power to it and make a serial cable to connect it to the computer and I should get GPS position, speed, and course data.

The extra bit of hardware I need is a USB adapter that will give me more serial ports.  The single-port unit I have now works fine with the SeaCAS, which sends GPS and AIS on the same cable.  With the new setup, I need separate ports for each, and if I had an extra couple of ports I also can bring in heading from the autopilot and depth from the depthsounder.  I'm sure the Office Depot here would have that item, but I ran out of day.

This morning we will weigh anchor, bound for Vero Beach.  We have friends there, and they will pick us up at the city marina for dinner.

Redundancy

We are docked at the Cocoa Village Marina in Cocoa, Florida (map), not to be confused with Cocoa Beach which is a half dozen miles due east and across two rivers from here.  We have friends in Cocoa Beach who have generously provided us with RV parking on many occasions, but no practical way to visit them on this pass.

Today's temperatures soared back up into the 60s and we did not really need another marina tonight, but we had a certificate for a night's stay, and so our visit here is costing us just $12, for electricity.  It's one of the nicest marinas we've seen, with a nice lounge, laundry, and rest rooms.  We'd never have ventured in here without the incentive, as the channel is a mere seven feet deep, and we saw sounder readings as low as 6.3' on the way in, but we're glad we came.

We've been to Cocoa before -- there is an Elks lodge just a few blocks from here where we've stayed in Odyssey more than once.  It has a functional, if not vibrant, downtown with a handful of restaurants and a famous hardware store, and we wandered over to Ryan's for dinner.  It was a nice break in an evening filled by an unscheduled project.

That project would involve the complete failure of our primary chartplotter mid-cruise today.  Fortunately, I was steering with the autopilot on heading mode, with no route entered on the plotter, and the backup plotter was fully functional, if a bit slow.  We were tied up here by 2:30 in the afternoon, having shoved off around 11 this morning, so I had plenty of time to work on it.

This plotter, a Northstar M121, was added to the boat in 2007 by the last owner, along with an AIS receiver.  It was state of the art in its day, and has been a pretty good plotter for us, but it's had it issues.  For example, several times the GPS position has "jumped" back and forth between our actual position and some random position half a mile or so away -- once, it even had us jumping over to the Med and back.  Fortunately this has never happened under way, but rather only while we were docked or anchored.

A couple of weeks ago, some sort of GPS error cause our total mileage to jump from under 2,000 nautical miles to over 5,000.  We'd been using this information for our log entries; fortunately, the backup plotter also has a mileage total and we were able to simply switch over to it -- the figures differed by a mile or so and we noted that in the log book.

In addition to the actual errors, the unit had some limitations that has had me working toward replacing it anyway.  Chief among these is a lack of overzoom -- on some charts, you just can't zoom in far enough to see what you're doing.  The user interface is clunky, and certain alarms that ought to be configurable aren't, such as constant complaining that there are no AIS targets in range.

Today's failure was the CCFL backlight, which quit entirely.  At first I though the plotter had lost power or otherwise been switched off, but a reboot revealed that the screen was still there, just unreadable.  Unfortunately, this sort of LCD can not be read at all without backlight, and so the unit is basically defunct.  If I leave it on, at least the GPS position data will continue to flow to the VHF radio, but that's about it.

Ironically, the backup chartplotter, which is original to the boat and thus twice as old as the Northstar, is still running like a champ.  Being much older technology, it is much slower to update the screen, and lacks the ability to display AIS target data, but it is serviceable and is also passing information to the other VHF radio, the depth display, and a plotter screen on the flybridge.  It also runs the radar and can overlay that on the chart.

I can still get parts and service for this much older system, a Furuno unit.  Northstar, on the other hand, ceased to exist years ago, being subsumed into Simrad before, they, too, were swallowed up by Navico.  A call to Navico this afternoon revealed that they stopped servicing these units over a year ago and parts are no longer available.

With nothing to lose, I opened up the case, and I think I can get a generic replacement CCFL online and get this working again.  If so, it will end up on the flybridge, where I can use a second daylight-readable display, which had been my plan for this unit when I replaced it anyway.

Replacing the CCFL and getting this back together and functional is more of a long-term project -- it will take at least a week to get the tube once I have the old one out to measure it, a project which will likely take me another couple of hours at least.  That's too long to go without a working display in the pilothouse that updates faster than the old Furuno and can display AIS, and so I ended up tackling the critical two thirds of the PC-chartplotter project, which I had planned to get to later in a more leisurely manner, this afternoon.

Some time ago I had already spliced in a serial cable to the AIS receiver NMEA output for exactly this purpose, and so today I did not have to monkey around under the helm.  Also, I already had two critical components on hand and standing by -- the display, which is a $99 LCD TV we bought at HH Gregg back in March, and the PC, which is the Acer notebook that I recently replaced with an Asus Linux notebook for my daily use.

I ultimately need to mount the Acer under the helm someplace and run all the cables properly, but I was able to get all the pieces working together and the display properly positioned today.  The AIS unit happens to include a GPS receiver and so the single NMEA cable carries both position and AIS information to the PC where it is processed by either Polar View or OpenCPN chart software.  It's all working fine here at the dock, and tomorrow we'll find out if all is working properly under way as well.

Accelerating this project means I will have to work some more magic later to get our new AIS transponder working.  The idea had been to replace the current AIS receiver with the new transceiver, but that will now mean finding a new source of position information for the PC.  As it stands now, both the PC and the older Furuno plotter are fully separate and thus redundant systems -- they do not share any inputs.  The new AIS unit will be taking position from the Furuno.

Eventually I will find a way to make it all work.  We have no fewer than ten working GPS receivers on the boat, not counting embedded ones whose data we can't read directly (such as the ones in the EPIRB or the Spot tracker).  Half of those are connected in some way to functional chart plotting systems, so we always have a way to plot our position.

Space coast

We are docked at the municipal marina in the city of Titusville, Florida (map).  Notwithstanding my last post, wherein I speculated that we would be here just one night, we are pinned down by weather and tonight will mark our second here.  Fortunately, it is relatively inexpensive at $1.44/foot for BoatUS members, plus $9 for power.

Sunday night found us anchored in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, just east of the yacht club (map).  The weather was so beautiful Sunday that we made it an extra-long day, going well past our targets of Daytona Beach or Ponce Inlet.  At one point it got so warm in the pilothouse that we went upstairs to the flybridge and ran the boat from there, taking in the stately homes lining the Intracoastal Waterway surrounding Daytona.

We have a reciprocal yacht club in Daytona that charges just $0.75 per foot, and had we been ready to stop that would have been a great option.  But the town itself holds no calling for us, and with such perfect weather it made more sense to press on and anchor for the night.  Nevertheless we enjoyed passing through this area on the water, and the waterway was quite busy on a pleasant weekend afternoon.

The anchorage in New Smyrna Beach had less than eight feet of water at low tide, and we waited until after 9am to weigh anchor yesterday so that we'd have at least 8.5' of water and a rising tide, which also gave us a little push up the Mosquito Lagoon for the first couple of hours.  The lagoon itself is quite tedious, with a very narrow and shallow channel in the middle of lots of un-navigable water.

Still, we had a nice run yesterday until we reached the Haulover Canal north of the space center.  The skies turned threatening just as we made the turn, and after we cleared the canal into the Indian River lagoon, the heavens opened and the winds picked up to 20+ knots.  I had been running at 1500 rpm all day for fuel economy, and I had to increase to 1600, 1700, and at times 1800 to maintain good steerage and stabilizer performance in the blow.  Even then, we were listing perhaps five degrees port with the fins at full lock.

We managed to make it all the way to Titusville and through the Nasa railroad bridge without getting pushed out of the channel, and the final leg into the marina, due west through a small entrance channel, I had to crank it back up to 1800 again.  We docked in crosswinds of 15 knots or so, in a narrow slip off a fairway not much wider than the boat is long, but we made it in without incident and, according to Louise, we again impressed the dockhands.  Weird, because I gave myself only middling marks for it, having to skid along one of the pilings with the rub rail.

Conditions deteriorated throughout the remainder of the afternoon, and by nightfall we were quite happy to be well secured alongside and have 50 amp power to run every heater on the boat.  From a high in the 60s mid-afternoon temperatures had dropped into the 40s late in the evening, and it was just this side of freezing at 33 when we awoke this morning.

The layout of the docks here precluded launching a scooter, so we walked over to Crackerjacks on the pier last night for a casual dinner.  I also hoofed it into town mid-afternoon to reprovision critical items at the lone mediocre grocery within walking distance, supplemented by a few items at CVS.  We could have skipped that process had we known we'd extend by a day.

Today the temperature barely rose above 40 (I know -- cry me a river, but, hey, this is *Florida*) and the winds were so high we did not even want to try backing out of the slip, and so we stumbled to the office at the 11am checkout time and extended a day.  That allowed us to take the marina's free shuttle over to Walmart this afternoon, where we fully loaded a shopping cart with staples.

Adding to the decision to stay an extra night was the nagging concern that, with our six foot draft, we might have trouble getting into our next planned stop, at Cocoa Village Marina.  The person I spoke to there yesterday expressed concerns about it with these winds (there is no tide here, but wind can raise or lower the water level by several inches).  The water is skinny enough there that we would normally not consider it, but we have a certificate for a free night that we won at the MTOA Rendezvous.  In any event, we did not want to find out at the end of a difficult, cold day today that we could not enter the marina and would need to press on and then anchor out in freezing cold weather.

I got back from my grocery excursion yesterday just in time to head up to the flybridge to watch the launch of the SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket from Launch Complex 40.  SpaceX has a launch envelope that extends to ground winds of 30 knots, and they were just under that.  We could not see the pad, as it was on the other side of a tall bridge from us, but we could see the rocket ascend into the clouds and then emerge above them before disappearing downrange.  Not anything nearly as impressive as a shuttle launch, but exciting nonetheless.  This is now the second launch we've been able to catch from the boat.

This evening we had a nice dinner downtown at Chops, which was closed last night.  Tomorrow conditions are forecast to be much calmer, and we will shove off at checkout time and head to Cocoa.  The person I spoke to there today allowed that our draft should be no trouble at all, and the last boat that had a problem drew more than seven feet.  It should be a short day, with only about three hours or so under way.

Cannon in front of them volley'd and thunder'd

We are anchored in the lower reaches of the Matanzas River (map), just downstream of the Intracoastal Waterway and perhaps a mile and a half from the river's mouth at the non-navigable Matanzas Inlet.  The historic Fort Matanzas, which guarded this "back door" to St. Augustine for the Spaniards, is less than a thousand feet from us on the ebb (photo above, from our aft deck).

When we arrived this morning, we were alone, but there are now four sailboats anchored downriver of us, closer to the fort.  I'm happy to be further away -- what we did not know, before arriving, is that the National Park Service periodically fires one of the four cannon emplaced there (we assume with a charge but no projectile), once per ferry trip.  The cats, who intensely dislike such sounds, are a bit shell-shocked, but seem to be acclimating.  It was better on the flood, when we were another 300' further away.

We are just 16 nautical miles from where I last posted, near Vilano Beach.  In fact, we went nowhere at all yesterday, even though we had been prepared to weigh anchor before 8am.  After a very rough night, we awoke to heavy seas and fierce winds right there in the river, and we opted to stay put rather than wrestle the boat around in challenging conditions.  We had plenty of food, water, and fuel, and a fast Internet connection, so why rush?

It's probably best that we had planned on the early start, because it meant we loaded the tender back on deck when we returned from an excellent dinner Thursday evening at 180 Vilano Grill.  The storm that blew through in the middle of the night would surely have tossed it about and likely sent it crashing into Vector more than once.  We were awakened several times by new motions and noises, including a clunking sound that we ultimately attributed to the stabilizer fins moving up and down and hitting their stops in all the commotion.

Neither of us is particularly sensitive to this kind of motion and we both generally slept pretty well -- I learned to sleep on moving trains at a young age.  But when the boat is moving so much, every time you wake up for any reason, such as to use the bathroom, is cause to trundle upstairs to check the chartplotter and look out the window.

Through all of this the anchor never budged, and the unusual sounds were mostly due to 20 knots of wind in opposition to four knots of current.  The current pushes the boat all the way to the downstream end of the chain, and the wind turns it sideways to the current.  The constant horsing makes the now-taught snubber rub the shackles, and the waves slap at the hull, all of which transmits through the whole boat.

When we finally did come upstairs for coffee, I had to pour it by holding both cup and pot in the air, another trick I learned riding the rails.  We spent the morning glued in our chairs, and were relieved when the current finally reversed and came more or less in line with the wind, which was so strong that we even brought the cushions down from the flybridge overnight.

All's well that ends well, and by dinner time things had calmed down considerably.  In fact, we could easily have left the anchorage any time after noon or so, but by then we had missed the window for a favorable tide both here and at the two skinny spots north of here.  This morning we had good conditions and we weighed anchor at 8am as planned, for the 8:30 opening of the Bridge of Lions.

Aside from the one spot where the depth sounder read just over nine feet, we had a very pleasant, if short, cruise.  (That nine foot spot would have grounded us at low tide, when it would have been just five feet.)  I enjoyed passing through the city on the water, and the Matanzas River has some lovely sections.

Other than the report of the cannon (and no disrespect meant to Lord Tennyson or those who perished at Balaclava), this has been a great spot.  I've enjoyed looking at the ~275-year-old structure from the boat, and if the weather was better we'd drop the tender and visit the park.  There is also a well-reviewed restaurant next to the A1A bridge over the inlet, but we'd have either a wet beach landing or a scramble up some rip-rap to access it.

As cold as it has been here lately (and, yes, I know much of the rest of the country is a good deal colder and likely does not want to hear me whine), we've been able to get away with just a few hours of generator run time each day.  However, it will drop well below freezing Monday and Tuesday nights, and will not be much above it during the day, and so today we spent some time looking at the route ahead with an eye to landing in a marina for those two nights.  That will also give us a chance to do laundry and reprovision.

So at this writing the plan is to weigh anchor early tomorrow and press on down the ICW to Daytona Beach or maybe Ponce Inlet, where we will again anchor, and then to the Municipal Marina in Titusville for Monday night.  If the schedule and weather holds, we might have front-row seats for the SpaceX Falcon-9 launch now scheduled from the cape for Monday evening.

Rather than pay for two nights there, we plan to run another 20 miles south on Tuesday to Cocoa, where we have a certificate for one free night at the marina, which we had won at the MTOA Rendezvous back in Baltimore.  Between the night in Titusville and the night in Cocoa, that should get us through the worst of the cold snap and also provide access to plenty of shoreside services.

The oldest city

We are anchored in the Tolomato River, just east of Camatchie Island in Saint Augustine, Florida (map), the oldest city in the US.  We are just north of the Vilano Beach bridge, which crosses to the community of that name at the south end of the barrier island.

We anchored here because there is virtually no place closer to town where one can legally anchor.  The city of St. Augustine has "paved over" the nearby anchorages with city-owned mooring balls, and enforces an ordinance prohibiting anchoring within 100' of mooring fields, 50' of marine infrastructure, and a few other places, as part of a Florida state pilot program for mooring fields.  The legality of the anchoring restrictions is currently being challenged in federal court.  While essentially forcing cruisers to take their mooring balls, the city at the same time disclaims any liability for them, so if your mooring breaks free, you're on your own.

Vilano Beach happens to have a free dock, attached to the city pier, that is just a couple of blocks from a Publix supermarket and a couple of nice restaurants.  We could even tie Vector up at the free dock, but there is a four-hour limit there, so we decided to just splash the tender today and make two trips, one for groceries and one for dinner.  It's been raining all morning, so we are holding off for a break in the weather.

If the weather was nicer, we'd stay another couple of days and spend some time in St. Augustine proper ($10 fee to land the dinghy at the city dock, or we could drop the scooters at the dock in Vilano Beach).  But the weather will not be all that pleasant, and we've already spent quite a bit of time exploring St. Augustine on the scooters on various visits in Odyssey.  It's a nice town, but they've made it so difficult to visit by boat, that it's not worth it.  By contrast, Vilano Beach has gone out of their way to welcome our business, and we are happy to do our grocery shopping and have dinner there.

We had a nice cruise yesterday down the ICW, with a fair tide the whole way.  We had to leave Jacksonville Beach at 8am to have such conditions, and folks who know what a notorious cheapskate I am will know that it was difficult for me to unplug the cord from the power outlet that was, in theory, paid up till 3pm.  The 8am launch also had us both in bed before midnight, so we rang in the New Year on "boater's time" -- three time zones ahead, as "boater's midnight" is generally 9pm.

That put us here mid-ebb, and the current is wicked.  It is again mid-ebb as I am typing, and a good three knots is trying to rip the tender away from Vector -- we put an extra line on it just in case.  When we stopped the boat yesterday, the propeller continued to windmill in the current for another two hours. Once it stopped, near slack, static friction took over, and it has, thankfully, remained unspinning since.

Last night the Nordhavn First Forty, hull #1 of the popular Nordhavn 40 series, anchored just a few hundred feet upriver from us, so we were in good company here.  We're also just a few hundred yards from the entrance jetties to the Camachee Cove marina, and we just watched a 40 or 45' trawler make three attempts to get into their channel at mid-current before giving up and heading back upriver to wait for slack.

This is a great spot from which to head offshore via the St. Augustine inlet, and it would be a nice day's run down to the Ponce de Leone inlet near New Smyrna Beach.  But the inlet here requires calm conditions for us, and the forecast is not favorable for the foreseeable future.  Instead we will continue south along the ICW, which will also be more interesting, as we have not done this section.

In order to have favorable tides for this next leg, we will weigh anchor no later than 8am tomorrow, which should put us at the Bridge of Lions in downtown St. Augustine for the 8:30 opening.  The bridge does not have an 8am opening on weekdays, and the 7:30 opening would have us leaving mid-ebb in very heavy current.

The next anchorage south is near the Matanzas inlet across from Fort Matanzas, in uncharted depths.  That's just 20 miles or so from here, and if we have any trouble getting in there on a falling tide we will continue on to Palm Coast, where we'd have a choice of marinas.

Happy New Year!

We are tied up at Beach Marine, along the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) in Jacksonville Beach, Florida (map).  We had a very short but challenging run here this morning from last night's digs, at the free docks on Pine Island off Sisters Creek, also along the ICW just north of the St. Johns River (map).

Yesterday's cruise in the Atlantic from St. Simons Sound to the St. Johns was picture-perfect.  Notwithstanding the 4' sea forecast, conditions were so calm that Angel made it through the whole day without tossing her cookies, a first for an all-day ocean passage.  As we approached the St. Johns entrance we also had a bit of live entertainment.

The first was an oil tanker anchored several miles offshore, who called the Coast Guard to inform them of lifeboat drills.  This tanker had the sort of lifeboat that is launched off the back from a ramp some ten meters above the sea, sort of the ultimate free-fall thrill ride.  While we did not actually see the boat slide off the ramp, we did see the before-and-after, which was impressive enough.

While this was going on we heard a Skymaster aircraft on whale-protection duty call a couple of fishing vessels to inform them of a Northern Right Whale in the immediate vicinity.  We could see the plane orbiting, and I would estimate from our radar range to the involved fishing vessels that the whale was just about a mile from us.  I am sorry we did not actually get to see it (but we did see more dolphins than usual -- maybe four or five dozen).

We had a favorable current up the ship channel, but that same current made docking at the unstaffed free docks very challenging.  Captain Gary trained us well, though, and even in a good 1.5 knots of cross-current I was able to get the boat close enough to the dock for Louise to get the lines on.  No thanks to the dozen or so folks fishing from the docks, clearly posted "No Fishing From Docks."  They seemed annoyed that a recreational boat might actually be using the recreational boat dock for docking.

We were secured alongside before 4pm, and set about figuring our plans for today.  Initially I had thought those would involve heading another 15 miles upriver to Jacksonville proper, where there are three free city docks and where we though we could have a nice New Years dinner and perhaps spend three nights (the limit on the free docks).

By coincidence, our friends Rod and Pauline on Two by Two happen to already be at one of the aforementioned docks, the lone one with electric power (a $9 per day charge, collected automatically by a meter).  We knew this dock was reserved (and not free) for "special events" and they let us know that tomorrow is such an occasion, with a football game in the adjacent stadium.  It was unlikely there would even be room for us, and if there was, we'd have to cough up $50 for the day, along with the electric charge.

The dockmaster there also manages the other two docks, and he allowed that all docks were likely to be full up for the holiday, and Rod had already observed that the one closest to the restaurants was already full.  In such circumstances, boats are required to "raft up" per city rules, to make room for everyone.

We didn't want to spend an extra $50 to be on a dock with a bunch of water-borne tailgaters, nor did we want to "raft up" with strangers and have folks traipsing across our boat in post-party drunken revelry tonight, and so we decided that New Years is perhaps not the right time for us to visit Jacksonville in our boat.  We'll save the visit for a return trip when we can have three quiet and pleasant days at the nice dock with power, and also explore further up the St. Johns river without any time pressure to be moving south. We're sorry to miss another opportunity to visit with Two By Two, but know we will see them again.

Today would have been another perfect day for an outside run, but the next inlet down the coast, at Saint Augustine, is tricky, and impassable for boats such as ours in all but the best of conditions. Forecasts are imprecise, and we could not risk running several hours to St. Augustine only to find the inlet impassable -- the next entrance would be an overnight run.

That left the ICW south as our alternative, and we opted to shove off at 8am this morning to have favorable tide and current.  The current under the Atlantic Boulevard bridge, north of here, is notorious, and with today's spring tides, it ripped through at 5 knots on the flood and 6 knots on the ebb.  Slack is a very short interval, with current going from +2 to -2 knots in the span of just over an hour.  We made it through with two knots against us this morning and were happy to have it.

In order to get out in time, we had to leave the dock with a knot or so of cross current again, this time in the other direction and pinning us to the dock.  It took several tries before I could get the boat far enough from the pilings to avoid ripping the lifeboat off the side, and then I had to power out into the channel at full throttle, but we made it without scraping anything.

Between getting off the dock and making it under the Atlantic bridge, today was some of the most challenging helmsmanship I've faced.  By contrast, docking here at Beach Marine was a cakewalk, and according to Louise I impressed the dockhands.  I was a little miffed, however, as they had told me on the phone they had plenty of water for our boat, but when low tide came around, at -0.8', we were on the bottom and about 2" or so dry below the waterline.  The place across the ICW had been honest and told me they only had 6' MLW in the channel and at the docks.

We ended up walking over there this evening, as they had the nicest restaurant in walking distance, appropriately named Marker 32.  It would have been a much shorter walk had we stayed there -- from here, it was a mile and a quarter over the bridge (and 65' up and down).  There are a pair of restaurants here, too, but they are basically burger and deep-fryer joints, and we wanted something a bit nicer for our last meal of 2013.

Tomorrow we will again shove off at 8am, before the place even opens, to have the best water going south.  It's 30 miles to the next stop, Saint Augustine.  That city has become decidedly cruiser-unfriendly of late, so we shall see where we end up berthing for the night.

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.