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.