Docking Karma and Mysterious Fluids

It's interesting to watch the etymological gestation of a neologism. Twice now, Sky has referred to the folks who mysteriously appear at just the right time to catch lines as dock angels, and thrice I have performed the service for others... feeling a tonnage-proportional measure of the same gratitude I know well from my own uncertain performances. "It's just docking karma," I say in humble response to effusive words of thanks; "Scotty caught us the other day when we first arrived here. We love dock angels." They smile knowingly, and immediately adopt the term.


We haven't had any more truly horrific docking experiences since Everett... but that's not enough to induce complacency. A backing test a few days ago indeed revealed highly squirrely behavior, though the Canadian buyer of my trimaran made the brilliant suggestion that I try to isolate the problem by gunning it in reverse, dropping to neutral, and seeing how she backs inertially with only underbody influences as opposed to the swirl of propwash interacting with the keel.

This is but one of many learning curves that are yet in their early stages. I had a diesel mechanic come by the other day to diagnose low-RPM smoke on the main and a rapidly dripping raw-water pump on the genset; I'm taking her in next week for injector pattern-testing and a pump rebuild. The day after his visit, the Yanmar wouldn't start... and following the advice of Calder I avoided pointless cranking and thought it through with the aid of friends, books, and forums. It turned out that the stop solenoid, which shuts off fuel at the injector pump, was sticking in the closed position. A fingertip released it and she fired right up.

A few dozen more events like this and maybe I'll know enough about diesels to at least nod knowingly when someone describes a symptom.

Weirdly, most of my problems these days have to do with fluids. Diesel fuel measurement, leaking hydraulics in the pedestal steering pump, the yet-incomplete plumbing system, even a leak in the shower cabinet that alarmed me with water in the bilge... seems that I'm always trying to contain, exclude, consume, or eliminate liquids. Maybe that's normal on a boat.

In the domain of electrons, which should be my forté, there are also a few puzzles... mostly related to Xantrex products. Even the little Link meter, a passive device that acts as a sort of fuel gauge for the batteries, continually forgets the capacity of the bank and displays misleading info. The built-in Prosine 2.0 inverter spews RFI and strangely cycles connected laptop chargers. And the little toy 400-watt inverter gives up at a quarter its rated power output and starts mewling pathetically. I'm about to pull it all out and replace it with Outback gear (including the MX60 for solar charge control, with recycled Microship panels hanging off the radar arch).

This shakedown (now 118.5 miles along) is proving to be highly worthwhile... mostly in the sense of helping separate the important projects from the fanciful ones. It's even saving dollars (whatever those are these days); I've streamlined the nav system and eliminated a lot of redundancy in the original specification. We're still not sure how all this will shake out logistically, but the next phase of ship projects will be very tightly focused compared to the vague activities of last winter that accomplished too little.

I am slowly getting to know the new gizmology, and although the Maretron tank-level adapter is still not making much sense, I did manage to get their sexy rate gyro compass calibrated in the very sloppy magnetic environment of my steel boat. This was accomplished by firing up the network display and following instructions, which basically had me execute a series of steady circles in calm water at a couple degrees per second. Since there was a little current running in Drayton Passage, it made for an entertaining track:


(I was actually a little concerned that residents of shoreside houses might find the behavior aberrant enough to justify calling the authorities, but fortunately we went unnoticed and didn't have to explain our ferrous wheels.)

Zooming way out, here's the big picture of our last two on-water days, before falling into the vortex of Boston Harbor and the social swirl of Sky's ex-life...


The social part is at least half the fun of this, you know. There is a tangible sense of community among sailors, for just being on a boat implies passage through a series of filters including the irrational desire to be out there fixing fluid leaks in exotic places while battling gales and currents. We dined with a delightful couple who covered 25,000 miles around the world on a 50-foot ketch named Skybird and wrote a book about it... I helped them set up a new blog.

Duly inspired, Sky started a blog of her own, and I think it will be fun to watch. She has a lot to say, I tellya what.

But you know, aside from all the complexity, bulging design notebooks, ridiculous expenses in a flailing economy, occasional junk hardware, surprise leaks, and the white-knuckled terror of drifting sideways between rows of boats without being able to bring the bow around... there is still magic afoot. It is all too easy to cling to a vision of something you want to do someday, yet watch life pass as dreams are slowly replaced by acceptance.

There is no better time than now.

-Steve

First Steps

It is unbelievable and almost surreal to be sitting in the salon of Nomadness, the view outside at last presenting something other than the endlessly reversing Swinomish channel and the rather unexciting marina.

It's a nonstop show now. Full moon and fast clouds soaring back and forth as we swing at anchor from the black mud of Oak Harbor. Dock strollers in Everett ambling by against a backdrop of confused choppy water sparkling in the sun, as a 22-knot wind stretches our new docklines and the VHF crackles with Coast Guard traffic (three people in the water near a capsized boat were rescued by Amazing Grace). Forested islands passing slowly, sometimes at heel angles while under sail, sometimes as a slow pan with a purring diesel soundtrack. The colorful Eagle Harbor, with rowing teams and kayakers darting among derelict houseboats and gleaming yachts as Seattle reflects setting sun across the Sound.

It doesn't suck, really. Not at all.

Getting off the Dock

The past few days have been a massive succession of learning curves and changes-of-state, all of which were welcome and long-overdue. The first hurdle was the hardest: getting enough slack in the To-Do list to consider actually leaving, rather than just chronically planning to do so. That can easily become a lifestyle in itself, you know, the years passing while reality trails behind the mission creep of new capabilities and evolving needs. People spend careers doing exactly this, and I look back with a painful wince at 16 years since I retired the BEHEMOTH bicycle and started looking to water. At every level of magnification, it is hard to take the first step when there is so much preparation to do.

Sky is a good influence. I over-engineer relentlessly, chasing gizmological visions of terrible beauty. She likes it simple, austere, and now. While my Inner Geek would never allow full adoption of her modus operandi, the influence has the effect of rendering mine more lean... and lists get pruned to reflect what is essential while she gets me off my too-sedentary butt to get things done. My own favored way of removing something from the task list is to conclude that it's not necessary after all, so as the weather grew more alluring, we found ourselves working with an oddly synchronous urgency... even notifying the marina of our departure date.

But first, we had to deal with some epic biology... mussels, barnacles, kelp, grasses, and slimes various that had matted the entire hull, disabled the speed log, and turned the MaxProp into a big vague blob thriving in the primordial ooze of La Conner. Troy of North Sound Diving polished 'er up:


Slipping the dock lines sounds easy, but this boat has one very strange quirk: she doesn't back well. The Max-Prop has lots of oomph with 77 horses behind it, of course... but the underwater profile is rather bizarre with a huge gap between the keel-mounted running gear and the skeg-hung rudder. Backing is so clumsy that for a time I even convinced myself there was a hydraulic problem allowing slippage, but now that I can actually watch a rudder-angle display it is clear that we are looking at a design issue. Since that's not going to change anytime soon, it means three things: lots of practice in places that won't involve insurance companies if I screw up, avoidance of parking spots that involve difficult retreats, and very likely a bow thruster.

Our Baccara friends were there to cast off lines and keep her aimed right, however, so this particular launch wasn't too bad... and we were off to the fuel dock where I slurped 88 gallons into the aft tank, carefully calibrating the N2K sensor at every 10 gallons. (Days later, however, it still tells me I am at 100%, so either the ship is infinitely efficient or something is amiss.)

Onward!


We tiptoed out of Swinomish Channel with a strong sense of escaping, and turned south for Camano Island while listening to NOAA weather radio talk of 20+ knot winds later in the evening, and lacking anything but calm-weather anchorage at our "home port" decided to skip across to Whidbey and duck into Oak Harbor. Again I acutely felt the lack of a chartplotter, tiptoeing in at low tide while identifying charted marks with binoculars and unable to use a hand-bearing compass on the steel boat... but we made it through a phalanx of racers heading out, found the dock full, and were presented with the opportunity to learn how to anchor. "I've never done this before," I called to the skipper of a Beneteau as we glided past. "Just what you want to hear from the guy upwind of you, eh?" His friendly gesture seemed to suggest as much forward movement as possible.

We survived the night, though not without a bit of nervousness and plenty of checking reference points on shore. My 300 feet of chain, 65-pound Bruce anchor, and Lighthouse electric windlass make for a robust bit of ground tackle, so with one more initial learning curve checked off we headed out to get to know the sails. Yarrh! Now we're talking...


She has a stately motion under sail, and there is enough momentum with 18 tons of displacement to complete a tack at a relaxed pace. Not too tender... the heel angle is mild even when she has a bone in her teeth. Running downwind is not as smooth; the mainsail touches the shrouds at a moderate sheeting angle and there is no preventer to reduce accidental jibe potential, but I'll deal with that later. For now, it was most reassuring to be able to make decent upwind progress:


(OK, that little bit at the bottom end is messy... it took a while to figure out how to refurl the main!)

We anchored off a friend's beach for a while, then, while lounging in bed, discovered that fooling around with the fuel-level sender had damaged the old gasket. A diesel stink was rising through the new latex mattress, and sure enough, down in the hold was a puddle of pink fuel. That, coupled with more wind predicted and uncertain holding through a wide tidal range on the fully exposed beach, prompted us to motor on to Everett for a painful lesson in parallel parking between power boats in 20 knots of wind off the dock and a 3-knot current astern.

I ended up having to do a 360 in the channel to take another run at it, and a couple of "dock angels" helped with lines. Two days later, trying to back into combined river and tidal current, I had problems again - getting sideways in the channel, unable to bring the bow upcurrent until another pair of angels caught a stern line and flipped us around. This is not good. I need a bow thruster. The Sideshift looks intriguing, kind of like the "redneck bow thruster" I was going to cobble together with a couple of left-over trolling motors but doubtless much more robust... and a friend in Finland recently pointed me to the products from Willdo that look even more alluring. The alternative is the classic tunnel thruster, but those are insanely expensive to install ($10-15K) and are fraught with problems including turbulence, fouling, and difficult maintenance.

Fixing Your Boat in Exotic Ports

That's the definition of cruising, according to one wag, and I see it happening already. We're in Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island now, and my list is daunting: generator raw-water leak, main engine light smoke at idle even when hot, the epic plumbing job, chartplotter installation at outside helm, Mac Mini installation below, SSB and other radios, change the Racor I used for fuel transfer once the new vacuum gauges arrive, replace the awful Prosine inverter charger, calibrate the rate gyro compass, do the on-water commissioning for the autopilot, install a Floscan N2K interface for fuel-consumption monitoring, build solar array, deal with the maneuverability issue before I break something, fix tank sender, and more. Gak. But at least we're off the dock and getting to know her quirks while adapting to life at sea. It's the first step, always the hardest of all.



We're continuing south on this shakedown cruise, then will take some time to deal with the major issues before heading into Canada. An upcoming post is going to cover a few tools that I have come to truly love (while dissing a few that evoke the opposite response), and no doubt there will be a few more adventures to continue adding spice to a life that has been much too devoted to planning. Boogie!

Fair winds,
Steve

Fixing and Fixturing Frenzy

"Just a minute," I told Captain Jerry, when he popped by the boat to announce that the pile of Dungeness Crab was ready over on Baccara. "Sky is sewing chafing gear and I'm chasing cables."

"Those are forever jobs," he replied with a twinkle. "The crab is ready now!"

Yah, it's high season... and our friends had just hoisted a hefty trapful in a brief sailing foray out of this weird quasi-brackish backwater. It's time: I have a yet-untested crab ring, a shellfish license, a boat, I-68 for re-entry from Canada, and even a winsome and willing first mate:


But jeez, these last few days before departure are insane. We're sleeping on the boat now, and the homestead is in the capable hands of a new friend who emerged from the vapours of the net after a long correspondence with Sky. Cooking aboard is less mysterious, the tools are getting stowed, and it is now much less startling for me to find all the parts needed for a project right here in the nomadic lab. But still... the frenetic sense of a million little jobs is seeming increasingly incongruous whilst bobbing gently in the wakes of passing stinkpotters.

Some is fun, of course, like watching things flicker to life (and getting a clean bill of CANbus health from the borrowed Maretron N2K Meter). Nothing like a cluster of LCDs at sunset to gladden the heart of an old geek...


I've also been severing umbilici, both real and symbolic. One of the real ones was the anachronistic wall-wart running the Top Global 6800 EVDO router (though I would now much rather have the Cradlepoint CTR500). Being tied to AC to run a device whose entire purpose is to route local WiFi to a wireless Internet connection is a little weird. So I fixed it:


But that was easy. The reverse engineering jobs are more challenging... like slurping diesel tank levels onto the N2K bus. This shouldn't be hard, in theory; the input side is an ancient technology that basically incorporates the resistance of a "sending unit" into a voltage divider and displays the result on a meter; the output side is a magic little black box with analog on one end and NMEA 2000 on the other. But like many things on this boat, the reality is arcane and confusing. The resistances of the three tanks look more or less reasonable, and once I fixed a wiring error in the gauge that precluded simultaneous backlight and fuel-level sensing, it even showed a more or less plausible reading which, although reassuring, didn't correlate with the actual level observed by removing the inspection plate on the starboard tank:


(I am not at all happy with the color of the fuel, the severe gunk revealed in some of the photos, or the discovery that the tank isn't as full as I thought... increasing the probability that over the winter I have been inhaling air through the vent and condensing it into an invisible zone of water with a corresponding biocline that is home to filter-clogging bugs. Also, the prospect of a 150-gallon fillup at bend-over prices is not at all appealing.)

Anyway, this is one of those things that starts as a simple to-do list item and burgeons into multiple notebook pages, research into tank cleaning, exploration of sensor alternatives, and whimpering as Nigel Calder warns about the perils of exactly what I see here. But hell, maybe I can get away with quickly burning off the ancient stuff, doing a fill-up while calibrating the existing sensors, and relegating this to the ever-more-burdened back burner. Yah, right. Nothing is ever that easy on a boat.

A very familiar phenomenon in projects of this scale is yak shaving - "any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on" (credited to the MIT AI lab and widely Googlable for examples). Usually this translates into rising frustration as you range further and further from the original task, chasing parts to build a fixture for the temporary tool needed to test the bifurcated widgetframus that you will use to increase the refrangible densiosity of the thing you are actually trying to DO, damn it. But sometimes you get lucky, and the yak shaving accidentally knocks other items off the list... like yesterday, when I was trying to uncover a fuel tank and ended up extracting the ancient dinosaur of a watermaker that has been very much in the way on a lot of levels. The boat's roll angle changed by at least a degree when I wrestled the pumpset onto the dock, and I now have room for the svelte Katadyn 40E that has been patiently outliving its pickling since I bought it last year.

Feline non-sequitur

Throughout all this, my faithful cat, Java, has been watching grumpily as more and more familiar items (including me) disappear from her home of 10 years... and even though she covered about 25,000 miles around the US as a catlet way back in the heyday of the speaking biz, she's been growing moss between her furry toes in the woods of Camano. The other day I decided to shake her up a bit, so I hauled her off to the boat without warning...


She had never really seen this much water, and seems as enchanted as I am with the play of light... though I suspect she may have self-preservation in mind more than adventure. She also has a fondness for Dungeness crab.

Well, a frenetic time makes for a scattered posting, but the myriad snippets fade into a homogenous blur if not immortalized in snapshots of pixels and words. Tuesday a diver will attempt to conquer the thicket of biology that threatens to take root and render Nomadness anything but, and trips to the lab are now starting to feel more like "visits" than "going home." By this time next week, we'll be properly afloat.

Boogie,
Steve

Autopilots, Salinity, and Gizmology

There is something refreshing about a deadline that looms with implacable insistence. Instead of the casual plasticity of self-imposed schedules, there arises an urgency tied to the plane tickets of house sitters and the contractual inflexibility of marina move-out dates.

Given all that, we have recently noticed a increase in the completion percentage of the lists (clearly defined tasks, purchases, project management documents, general to-do, and so on). It is difficult to detect whether this is attributable to an actual increase in productivity or is just a growing reluctance to add new tasks, but really... who cares? The important thing now is more evenings like the one the other night with friends on Baccara and My Decade, as well as maximizing Time On Water even if the adventures are thinly disguised as autopilot commissioning, salinity-vs-power tests on the Sanitation Device from Hell, or a succession of pragmatic missions (Brion blessing the Hood in-mast furler, Andrew installing the Little Cod woodstove, prostrating ourselves before marine plumbers in the vain hope we might petition for a moment of their time, or even, dare I say it, learning the boat and just plain sailing).

What this translates into, from a bloggish perspective, is a backlog of news.

Tina the Autopilot

(Tina Turner, of course)

One of the big jobs that I've known about since before buying the boat is autopilot replacement... the clunky old Robertson not only suffers from a mysterious internal confusion regarding compass heading but was also associated with an industrial-scale continuous-running hydraulic pumpset that would drive us mad while killing the batteries. "Replace autopilot" was thus one of the first items on the to-do list, a classic illustration of the inverse relationship between the number of words required to express a task and the number of hours required to complete it (the Roberts Law of Creeping To-Do List Complexity).


Given the monstrous 30 cubic inch Wagner N50-300 hydraulic cylinder that drives the rudder and the desire to have the new contraption play nice with N2K lingua franca, it didn't take long to winnow down the available choices. I selected the Simrad AP24 (some on eBay over here).

There are a lot of pieces to an autopilot system. A computer is at the heart, of course, with a separate display head providing a user interface. It needs to know the ship's compass heading, rudder position feedback, and course data if proceeding to a waypoint rather than just maintaining a fixed direction. A remote control is essential, making it possible to drive the boat without being tied to the helm, and the "business end" is a motorized unit that powers the rudder back and forth without fighting other steering inputs (in my case, the wheel). And, given a navigation network that makes every data source available, a clever autopilot can also incorporate wind data to replicate classic wind-vane steering (great for the trades) or depth countour tracking along bathymetric features. It will even auto-tack and fine-tune itself to the apparent wind, adjust its servo gain to sea state, and so on.

What this all translates into on Nomadness is a lot of mounting and connecting, which of course immediately introduces interesting challenges (since nothing, on a boat, is ever quite as simple as it seems). The old pumpset used heavy copper hydraulic tubing instead of the more modern flexible stuff, I was unwilling to start cutting holes in the lower helm for the control head while the availability of Furuno's long-promised NavNet 3D chartplotters is still a matter of considerable public speculation, running long heavy power cables through the innards of a boat is hard, and pieces of the old pilot had to get out of the way.


Since I wasn't quite willing to rip out the Robertson and leave a gaping hole to be filled someday by the back-ordered MFD8, I kluged a couple of felt-covered wood panels above the existing lower helm... and there installed the sexy Maretron DSM250 instrument display, an old GPS, the autopilot head, Kestrel 4000 weather instrument, Icom M72 handheld VHF, Zoom H2 audio recorder, and timer (with the little stuff all on velcro for quick removal). This is how it begins.

Terry from Anacortes Marine Electronics came over and did the hard hydraulic stuff, then once all the cables were run it was time to start testing. Basically, it came up pretty well, though we haven't had a sea trial yet and the rate gyro compass still needs to be swung (calibrated to the boat's considerable magnetic field). The Simrad user interface is a little ungraceful in places and it switches to Spanish if you hit the MENU key during rudder calibration, but still... I think it's going to be very cool. One of the best parts is the WR20 remote, which is a hand-held device (with neck strap) that talks to a networked base unit via Bluetooth and allows full control over ship steering (as well as some clunky ability to view data pages from other systems). I can walk around the marina with this and still steer Nomadness and observe her coordinates... which is kind of a strange thought. I always did love remote-control toys.

Blame the Salinity

As you may know from recent posts, one of the more annoying issues has been the plumbing... we really want to be free to wander around without having to tiptoe when it comes to discharge. The pieces are all in place and appear to be very well done, but the LectraSan - a gadget that seems to inspire love-hate relationships with voyagers - is not cooperating.

The symptom is a green-yellow blinky pattern that is reported to be due to inadequate current through the cabling, low battery, failing plates, or insufficient salinity. Since the plates seemed to be the only plausible cause, I gave it the muriatic acid treatment and was rewarded with a red LED and immediate shutdown, which means blown fuse or intermittent. More fiddling whilst lying in awkward positions, and then it was back to yellow-green. Raritan was not too helpful, reassuring me that "the unit is in the extended cycle and is treating properly" even though their manual says not to use it when this happens since it eats plates, and then, when pressed, advising me to pull out the poop-encrusted contraption and ship it to Florida or New Jersey. While that is quite an interesting toss-up, I am more tempted to use it as an artificial reef.

But a friend at the marina pointed out that the salinity of the mighty Swinomish should not be taken for granted, and that his LectraSan, in fact, is now including the identical failure mode in its repertoire of misbehaviors. A bit of research turned up the fact that the salinity in the open ocean is 35 PSU (Practical Salinity Units), or 35,000 parts per million of salt... while the Swinomish Channel, running back and forth between two shallow bays with much river outflow, ranges from 20-27 PSU at the north end down to 0-15 PSU south of La Conner, depending on phase of the moon and Skagit River discharge. The temporal salinity gradient might thus be keeping LectraSan current flow depressed (about 29 amps last night), triggering the error condition... so now we have yet another reason to flee this place of annoying cross currents and recently booted live-aboards for the timeless allure of open water.

Nobody ever said this was going to be simple!

I was going to wrap this up with a rhapsody on gizmology, one of the driving forces behind my chronic technomadness, but it's time instead to go do some. And besides, the geeky bits sometimes seem to pale in the presence of the more pressing issues... having the magic carpet complete enough to spirit us away on a moment's notice. I just got the ship's FCC licenses (SSB and MMSI, plus Radiotelephone), the hard mattress in the aft stateroom now has a latex layer, and the pile of boxed products is now noticeably reduced as their contents have become integrated into the ship.

Oh, and a quick footnote, speaking of geekery: I've been unable to get automatic RSS working here, since apparently Blogger only does it for Blogspot-hosted sites. I'm unwilling to manually edit XML each time, so I munged the Feedburner files (I think) to just point to the front page. If you know how to fix that so the RSS/Atom/whatever happens automatically, please let me know.

Cheers from the not-so-salty sea,
Steve