At Long Last: Sailing Home Aboard the Heart of Gold

If you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, you may remember that I dropped my boat, the Heart of Gold, off at Svendsen's Boat Works back in June so that they could replace the mainmast damaged in a disagreement with a drawbridge.  While she was there, I went ahead and had them haul her out of the water for new bottom paint and some much needed maintenance.  Five an a half months later, having missed a gorgeous sailing season on San Francisco Bay, I finally got a chance to go sailing again. 

The day started off great on the bay.  The night ended with me and my father freezing cold in a thick fog with barely any working navigational electronics before running the boat aground in my own slip in the marina where I keep her.  If you're up for a somewhat painful story about a good trip turned bad, read on...


We got underway around noon from Alameda.  As we were leaving the berth at the boatyard, we passed another Islander Pacific 41' like mine only not as pretty:

On our way out of the Oakland Estuary, we were keeping pace with this snazzy little motoryacht:


As we were heading out, I noticed that the depth sounder wasn't working.  This will become relevant later.

Clear of the channel, we hoisted the sails and did a bit of tacking back and forth south of Yerba Buena Island just to make sure the rigging was all in good order.  The wind was going exactly the wrong direction for the transit North, so we cheated a bit and motored under the eastern side of the Bay Bridge:


I know there's plenty of room for my little boat to fit under this bridge, but I still find myself getting nervous when I pass under bridges now.  It doesn't help that the perspective always tricks you into thinking the mast is going to touch:


Once we were clear of the bridge and past the lee side of Treasure Island, I killed the engine so we could finally enjoy a bit of proper sailing.  It was only a couple of hours worth of beating into the wind, but I can't tell you how happy I was to finally have my boat back.

As we made our way north, the wind slacked off and the current picked up.  Eventually it was all we could do to hold our position against the current.  Before too long I had to admit defeat, point straight into the wind, furl the sails, and proceed under power.  Here's a quick shot of the Golden Gate fading into the mist behind us:


Passing Red Rock:


Dad spent most of the day bundled up in the cockpit and hanging out:


Meanwhile, I got another chance to exorcise my bridge clearance paranoia under the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge:


As we passed marker six, I snapped a pic showing the wake from the current rushing past the buoy:


It was slow going across San Pablo Bay on the way to the Petaluma River Entrance Channel.  We reached the first daymarker just after the sun had set:



The channel transit was pretty uneventful.  It wasn't until we passed under the Highway 37 causeway bridge at Black Point that things started getting interesting.  Suddenly the fog started to close in and visibility dropped to about 100 yards.  Unable to see the river ahead, I had to steer by gauging the distance to the bank on either side as we headed up the river.

Earlier in the year, a sailboat sank about halfway up the river in the middle of the channel by the tiny community of Lakeville.  As luck would have it, visibility opened up and the tide was so low that we had no time spotting the mostly submerged wreck and avoiding it.  To make it even easier, someone in a parking lot ashore had left their headlights on and they were pointed right at the mast of the sunken boat.  Thank you, whoever you were.

After clearing Lakeville, things got much worse.  The trickiest part of the upper Petaluma River transit is a turn called Cloudy Bend.  At high tide the river looks to be almost 200 feet wide at this point, but there's only about 80 feet of that width that's deep enough to transit.  The rest is only about knee deep at high tide.  At low tide, it's a huge peninsula of soft mud.  If there was any place we'd get stuck, that was it.

As we were coming up on the turn, I slowed to about 1.5 knots and started to favor the left bank of the river to give the shallow part as wide of a berth as possible.  As we were making the turn, the fog thickened.  There are two buoys that mark the edge of the shallow at Cloudy Bend.  We only saw one of them even though we had to have passed within about fifteen feet of the second one. 

Once I was confident that we were clear of the shallows, I picked up speed again.  Just as I was remarking about how we'd gotten through the worst of it, the boat ran aground.  I never even saw the bank where we touched bottom even though you could reach out and touch it from the deck.  As I backed off, the rudder got stuck in the mud astern.  In the darkness and fog, there was no frame of reference to tell when I finally started creeping forward again, so just when I noticed that I'd gotten headway again, I managed to slide right back into the mud ahead.  The tide was so low that the boat barely fit in the river sideways.  I ended up going back and forth this way three or four times before finally getting the boat turned enough to clear the banks on both sides.

That's when I looked down at the compass and realized that I'd somehow gotten us turned around and headed back downriver.  If it was happening to someone else, I'd've been laughing at them.

After a bit more grounding and turning and grounding and turning around, I got us pointed back in the right direction.  Proceeding blindly upriver, I'd slowed to a crawl to avoid doing any damage in case we grounded again.

We did.  I don't remember how many times I managed to touch bottom, but the saving grace is that the bottom of the river is soft mud almost everywhere.  Since Dad and I both know the river pretty well, I was confident that we could make the rest of the transit while avoiding the few places where there were rocks or structures along the banks.  Still, the last half mile or so worth of the passage took nearly two hours as we crept along.

As we headed upriver, we kept looking out for any of the lights that should've been visible ahead.  Even a hint of a glow would've been useful.  We could hear the traffic on Highway 101 to the west, but never saw any of the lights ashore until we were at the entrance to the Petaluma Marina.

That should've been the point where I was home free, but the City of Petaluma has neglected the Marina for a number of years and the silt has made it much shallower than it's advertised depth of ten feet.  As we were passing C Dock in the middle of the marina, right in the middle of the fairway, I ran aground again.  Cranking up the throttle, I was able to force my way through the mud to my berth.

Once we were close enough to reach the dock, dad put a bow line around a cleat and I tried to spring the stern in.  Even with the engine running full speed ahead there was no moving.  I was aground in my own home berth where the boat has been moored most days and nights for the past four years.

Having arrived alive, we counted our blessings, passed the rest of the mooring lines over to the dock, and headed home.  That was just after 2330.

At about 0130 I came back.  The tide had risen slightly so I could pull the stern in and tie the boat securely alongside the dock.

Taken for all in all, I'd call it a successful shakedown cruise.  Now I just need to troubleshoot the depth sounder and replace the radar so we can avoid these problems in the future.  I'm done with navigation by the Braille method.

Heart of Gold Repair Update

The last time I wrote about the ongoing drama surrounding the rigging repairs on board my boat following my disagreement with a drawbridge, I stated that "with any luck I'll have the boat back sometime this month."


That was early October.  I have no luck.  Clearly.


Over the following six weeks or so, I've had two separate occasions to go down to Alameda and look over the work in progress.  I found lots of work and very little progress.  Mostly the boat was just sitting idle like so:


Bear in mind that in 2009 it took me about a month to replace all of the standing rigging on both of my masts by myself using a pair of pliers and a bosun's chair.  Most of that time was spent waiting for the rigging shop to cut and swage new wires for me.


For some reason it's taken Svendsen's Boat Works over twice as long to re-rig only one of my two masts even though the rigging shop is on the premises, they've got a crew and a crane to help them, and they had three months to get ready for the job.  I'm not really thrilled about this.


Still, after five and a half months of waiting for the insurance claim, the mast manufacturer, the riggers, and a massive pile of mismanagement and delays, the whole thing is done.  I found out it was finished when I was writing a plaintive email asking how things were progressing.  The reply: "The riggers say it's ready anytime you want it. We just need to wash it." 


Almost a week later I finally had a chance to head down to Alameda and do some last-minute fine-tuning.  At first glance, I was thinking that the boatyard really needs to fire whoever they've got washing boats down there.  Upon further inspection, it was pretty clear they just didn't bother.  Instead, the deck was littered with clevis pins and other detritus from the rigging work.  Five months of dust had been cemented to the deck and hull from the recent rain.  The Heart of Gold looked almost as bad as she did after I spent fourteen months away at sea and off to war in 2008/2009.


After a quick turn around the deck picking things up, I decided to hoist the sails and make sure the new running rigging was in good order.  The main sail and mizzen went up easily enough, but when I tried to unfurl the jib, the brand new roller furler bound up.  Only halfway unfurled, the sail was stuck in place.  When I went forward to see what was the matter, I found the furling line wrapped up outside the housing and spent a few minutes wrestling it back into place so I could re-furl the sail.


Here's a shot of how it was set up:


To avoid binding up, the line is supposed to run through the opening on the right where the cage is designed to lead it onto the drum instead of allowing the line to get caught up under the rotating disk at the top.  It's a bit tough to spot in this picture, but cast into the cage above the opening is an arrow with the word "LINE" imprinted on it.  This makes it perfectly obvious to the most casual observer that this was put together wrong.

Other problems were less of an issue.  The new turnbuckles are stainless steel instead of bronze.  They're pretty, but they don't look quite right next to the few old ones that are still on board:


My main complaint with Svendsen's is that everything took such a long damned time.  I expected some major delays on account of waiting for the insurance company to pay out and for LeFiell to take a break from making missile bodies and jet engines so they could manufacture my new mast (which is gorgeous by the way).  But once the mast arrived at the yard I really expected the whole project to come together in a week or two. 

Instead it took over two and a half months.  When I'd ask about the delays, I was given every excuse you can think of including a backlog of small racing boats that apparently took precedence over taking care of me after all the waiting. 

What really irks me is that they didn't even bother to call and let me know it was done.  I don't know what kind of profit margin they've got going there, but it seems to me that there should be some sense of urgency when someone's waiting for you to finish tens of thousands of dollars worth of work.  Just saying.

On the plus side, the bowsprit is a bit shinier:


Now that the boatyard was finally done with the rigging, it was up to me to get the boat home.  The last time I did any work on board, I was concentrating on getting the engine up and running after it's brief submergence back in June.  I hate working in the engine room because it's a bit cramped:


Still, with some help from my friend Matt, I was able to fire it up and test it running both ahead and astern.  Everything worked reasonably well, but the raw water pump wasn't pumping any water.  Looking closer, I noticed that the belt was loose and the pump wasn't turning at all.  The fix was a simple matter of replacing one of the two fan belts in the filthy, rusty hole:


After that, the wet exhaust started puking out more seawater than I'd ever seen. 

With the cooling system up and running, it was a simple matter of scrubbing things down and making ready to get underway the next morning.  I'd been without my boat for far too long to keep waiting.

Stay tuned for bloggage on that little adventure.  It started off as a pleasant day of sailing and slowly turned into a tale of darkness and gloom with impending disaster around every turn.  In case you're worried, I did survive.

Heart of Gold Repair Update

A few years back, my onboard electrical generator started overheating.  It never worked all that well to begin with, so I wasn't thrilled to have to fix it again.  The problem turned out to be a failed raw water pump (it pumps cold seawater into the heat exchanger to cool the engine) and when I learned how much a replacement pump would cost, I figured it made more sense to buy a new generator altogether.


That was some time in 2008.


Since then I've had a few monetary setbacks and a luxury like having an onboard generator hasn't been very high on the priority list.  Essentially, the dead machine is just filling up space and serving as ballast on board to keep everything sitting on an even keel.


More recently, I had a survey done aboard the HofG and the surveyor recommended that I should remove the dead generator.  By his reasoning, it was just an extra liability and it was making it much harder to access vital systems and shutoff valves elsewhere in the engine room. 


He was right.  Now all I had to do was pull a massive, heavy chunk of steel (and wire, and oil, and rust) out of a room with no floor to stand on (and a ceiling too low to allow a person to stand upright) through a door only about half the width needed in order for it to fit through.

With no better way to occupy their time than to listen to me swear at my tools, Matt and Trevor came along to help.

Here's the offending piece of machinery before we got started:


In order to make it fit through the door, we removed as many of its parts as we could.  The air filter, heat exchanger, control box, fuel filters, and countless other bits and bobs all had to go.

Matt pulled off the exhaust hose and went to work on the mounting bolts while reaching in through the aft end of the engine room.  Meanwhile, I worked at the rest of it while sitting on top of the engine down in the bilge.

Here's what we looked like while fighting off claustrophobia and trying not to crush anyone in the process:


We managed to get much of the electrical end apart, but we needed a much bigger hammer if we were going to tear it down any further.  Instead, we had to wrestle the now-much-skinnier generator out through the aft door into the master cabin.

I'll admit that I'm not at all thrilled about the idea of this thing sitting in my bedroom for any length of time.  Still, once it's hoisted up and out I'll be able to get back to cleaning things up once and for all:


I had the boatyard blank off the raw water intake and I'm still planning on capping the exhaust fittings, but at least this beast isn't in my way anymore.

While the boat was out of the water, I also had the yard go ahead and free up a couple of the through-hull shut-off valves that had siezed. 

There's still a few scheduling setbacks that have the rigging work stalled.  But the mast is ready to step and the rigging wire is all made up.  With any luck I'll have the boat back sometime this month.

Stay tuned...

Heart of Gold Repair Update

No, I still don't have my boat back.  Yes, it's been over three months since I brought her to the yard.

The good news is that the new mast has arrived.  The bad news is that this was an apparent surprise for the rigging shop and they're neck-deep in work for an upcoming racing series or some such noise.

While I'm waiting, I asked the folks at the boatyard to go ahead and pull the boat out of the water to repaint the bottom and get a periodic survey.  So on Friday when I stopped by, I was thrilled to find her looking like so:

The bottom has been stripped of its layer of slime and the occasional barnacle, and the sacrificial zincs are all new:

Even the propeller is all polished and new looking:

The view from on deck is a bit more disconcerting though:

While I was there, I asked to see the new mast.  I found it in the rigging loft with a shiny new coat of paint:

It turns out that the patina on my mizzen mast makes the color nearly impossible to match, so they did the best they could.  This mostly just tells me that I ought to look into replacing the mizzen sometime soon too.

Here's a shot of the shiny new masthead:

With all the shiny newness aloft, it only stands to reason that the engine room is getting even uglier.  When the surveyor was poking around, he found a number of through-hull valves that were inoperable.  I added those to my work list with the boatyard and set to work replacing the alternator and starter after their most recent submergence.  You can see why I needed a new alternator:

Later today I'll be going down to the yard to dismantle the dead generator and remove it piece by piece from the boat.  That'll give me an excuse to go ahead and remove the hundreds of pounds of lead bricks in various lockers that were loaded in to offset the weight of the generator.

Stay tuned.  With any luck I'll have the boat back sometime this year...

Heart of Gold Repair Update

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I took my boat down to Svendsen's Boat Works in Alameda for some mast and rigging repairs after a disagreement with a drawbridge operator about exactly how open the bridge actually was.

So a little while ago I went down to check on the boat and found her like so:

For a moment I couldn't think of what exactly was amiss. Then I realized that the mainmast had in fact been removed. A little walking around the yard and I found it lying on some sawhorses. This is the first time I'd gotten a close look at the broken end where the masthead used to be welded on:

About a foot below that you can see where the bridge girder hit and scarred the aluminum a bit:

Looking down along the length of the mast, it also looks (to my untrained eye) as though there's a bend in the mast right where the lower spreaders are attached:

Other than that, some of the screws that held the spreaders in place look to have been pulled loose:

I'm still waiting to hear from the insurance company and Svendsen's rigging shop as to whether they can save the mast and make it serviceable again or if it needs to be replaced altogether. We'll see.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in another post, the boat tried to sink last week. It seems that my trip motoring all along the length of the bay was enough to wear down the flax packing in the shaft log (the seal where the propeller shaft passes through the hull of the boat) and it was leaking by significantly. This shouldn't have been a problem but, for reasons unknown, the bilge pump decided to take a vacation at about the same time. So after a couple of weeks of sitting at the dock without incident, the engine room filled with enough water that it completely submerged the engine. Blast!

After they'd pumped the water out, the good folks at the boatyard sent me a bunch of terrifying pictures of the oily funk that now covered everything in the engine room.

That afternoon I ran down to Alameda and tightened down the packing gland to prevent it happening again.

Last night I shanghaied my friend Matt and we went down to troubleshoot the bilge pump. The problem with troubleshooting the bilge pump on my boat is that it's situated at the deepest darkest part of the bilge, below the prop shaft. The only way to reach it is through this hole:

More precisely, the only way to reach it is to lay face down on the deck, slide into the hole head first, thread your body past the two stainless steel steering cables, lean against the raw fiberglass of the hull, and stretch as far as you can in order to just barely catch the top of the bilge pump housing with your fingernails, then hold onto it as if for dear life while you shimmy and shake and swear and suffer and slowly back your way out of the hole. All the while, the steering cables digging into your left armpit.

Matt didn't get a picture of me halfway in the hole, but he did get this shot of me in between a couple of forays down below:

Once I'd pulled the pump out (losing a hose clamp and a basket strainer into the bilge that I'd have to go back for in the process) I pulled it apart to see what was the matter. For all my poking around, it looked to be in good order. Holding it to the battery terminals, the pump functioned perfectly. Clearly the flaw was elsewhere.

Working my way back up the system, I found the problem. There, just under the deckplates in easy reach and ready view, were a pair of crimp connections that were badly corroded. Once I'd replaced the crimp fittings, everything ran perfectly. So in essence I'd spent two hours risking cuts and scrapes and the structural integrity of my spinal column in the deepest darkest dirtiest part of the boat when all I had to do what cut a couple pairs of wires and reattach them. Shit.

The coolest part though is the pair of bruises I got that match the steering cables I was laying on:

Awesome!

Stay tuned for more...

Haulout and Rigging Repairs for the Heart of Gold

For those of you who don't know, back in March I took the Heart of Gold to downtown Petaluma to go out drinking with some friends.  I like to bring the boat downtown because it puts me within walking distance of all of the shops, restaurants, and bars (or stumbling/crawling distance as the case may be).  Unfortunately, as I made my approach to the D Street drawbridge, the bridge tender didn't tell me that due to some sort of controls problem, the bridge hadn't opened all the way. 


Even though I've taken my boat through this same bridge many times (often at higher tides) This time I didn't have quite enough clearance to pass under the bridge.  Instead, I caught the forestay on the bridge.  Since I was trying to avoid holding up traffic on D Street, I was moving pretty quick when it hit and the impact was enough to tweak the roller furler, mangle the bowsprit, and snap the welds that held the mastead to the top of the mast.  The mast itself may have been bent beyond repair as well.


Luckily nobody was hurt.


Having a potentially broken mast and a bunch of wrecked rigging means no sailing.  No sailing means my sailboat is basically not a sailboat.  This will not do.


The plan was to take the boat down to the yard for repairs as quickly as possible.  The only problem is that not long after the whole fiasco, I was shipped off to Japan for Operation Tomodachi.  Then I came back to the crazy schedule I needed to run in order to be ready for Maker Faire.


Finally on Monday I set out from the Petaluma Marina with my father aboard, bound for Svendsen's Boat Works in Alameda.  I picked Svendsen's because back when I was a 14-year old sea scout, they gave us a good deal on the haulout when we were working on the old wooden 45-foot picket boat that became the Sea Scout Ship Compass Rose.  I liked the facility and the location and felt like it was a good idea to go back there.


The transit down to Alameda was pretty unremarkable.  Dad and I left the marina at about 1030.  Three hours later we were finally clear of the Petaluma River channel and in fairly open water.  When the waves started picking up, things got a bit interesting for a moment.


Back when the masthead broke off, it was held in place by one of the old wire halyards that had hooked itself across the top of the mast.  In the calm water of the Petaluma River, it's stayed in place for the past three months.  Once we were in a bit of a rolling sea, the broken masthead finally started to work its way down the wire halyard. 


The main problem with this is that it might eventually decide to come down altogether.  In the process, the roller furler for the jib would kink or bend and possibly tear up the jib itself.  Turning for a favorable wind, I managed to get one of the rope halyards wrapped around the upper spreaders and pull it tight enough to hold the damaged rigging in place.  If the rigging didn't look messed up before, it definitely looked bad now:


While I was monkeying around with all of that, Dad was at the wheel:


Early in the afternoon we passed Red Rock:


As we entered the open Bay, I was glad to see that the weather was fairly calm:


In case anyone's wondering how I could've hit a bridge, I'd like to point out that it's very difficult to guage how much clearance your mast will have while standing in the cockpit.  So when the bridge is opened up, you have to trust that the operator has indeed opened it as far as he needs to in order for you to pass under it.  To illustrate this point, here's a shot of my mast as I was about to pass under eastern span of the Bay Bridge.  In this case I had about a hundred feet of clearance:

It still looks like it's about to hit.

Having passed safely under the bridge, we made our way down the Oakland Estuary toward Alameda.  Along the way, we passed Coast Guard Island:


After a bit of looking, we finally found our way to the dock at Svendsen's Boat Works and moored.  Here's another shot of my jacked-up rigging:


As we left the yard, a lone raven stood watch in the yard:


The next day I got the first call from the yard with their initial range of possible damage estimates.  I'd rather not post numbers, but suffice it to say that their worst-case estimate was about half of my total earnings from last year.  Thank goodness I have insurance.

Stay tuned...

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I Hate it When My Head Gets Clogged

The word of the day: feculent.


The other day I woke up on my boat and, as often happens first thing in the morning, I felt the sudden urge to go to the head* to sit down and catch up on my reading.  I ended up taking a number four** and when I got up and stepped on the flush pedal I was mortified when there was no flushing.  No flushing at all. 


On the boat I have a vacuum flush system.  This means that there's a ball valve at the base of the bowl and a vacuum pump and tank downstream in the plumbing.  It's a pretty foolproof system.  When working properly, stepping on the flush pedal opens such a powerful vacuum source that there's an audible rending of the air around the bowl itself.  Your ears pop and, if your mouth happens to be open when you flush, you may actually have the breath sucked from your lungs.  It's all very satisfying.


So you can imagine my dismay when I stepped on the pedal and nothing happened.  Not only did I miss the satisfaction of having my daily intestinal sculpture evacuated into some far away place where it would no longer offend anyone, I was also filled with dread at the thought of the repairs that I would get to peform on the system itself.


What follows is a tale of filth and flatulence, the slightest word of which could harrow up your soul.  There's also pictures.  In order to spare those folks who might have just eaten a meal, the rest is after the jump. Click "read more" if you dare...

More Pics from the Heart of Gold's First Photoshoot

As promised in a previous entry, here are a few more pictures from my shop assistant Mallory's photoshoot aboard the Heart of Gold.  Here's one of my favorites:

More pictures after the jump.  Enjoy.

The Heart of Gold's First Photoshoot

The other day Mallory, my intermittent workshop assistant, asked if I could make my boat available for her to do a photoshoot for her portfolio.  Not having any other plans for the boat just then, I agreed.

I also stuck around to help out.  The whole thing started just after dark and I'm eager to see the images the actual photographer and his assistant managed to get.  I took a handful of snapshots in the meantime, so here's the best one I got:


She cleans up pretty nice. 

Mallory, that is.*  Especially considering the way she usually looks when she's hanging out with me:


I'm counting on getting a few of the bigger, better images from the pro with the big camera when he's done sorting and processing them.  Stay tuned and I'll post them when I get them.

*The boat too, really.


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Fire Fire Fire...

...Almost anyway.

A few nights ago I went down to the boat, sat down to watch a movie on my laptop, and noticed that it seemed to think it wasn't plugged in. 

Upon further investigation, I found that it was plugged in.  The circuit breaker for the outlet was turned on too.  Looking further, it turned out that none of my 110V systems were working.  Going to the dock, I found the shorepower connection was plugged in and the breaker was turned on.

Back on deck, I unplugged the shorepower cable and found this ugly mess:


Now when I discovered the problem, that loose bit of metal was still firmly embedded in the female end of the cord.  Not thinking (since I'd just checked that the power was on) I grabbed it to pull it out. 

All things considered, I suppose it was just enough of a jolt to remind me that sometimes I'm an idiot.

Apparently, one of the leads had started to corrode.  As they corrode, the connections get worse, the terminals heat up, and start to become more flexible.  As they flex, the terminals lose their grip and the connections get worse still.  This downward spiral continues until something fails enough to the point where there is no longer a flow of electrons.

Fortunately, the connection was broken before anything burst into flame.  It wou've been unpleasant to go down to the boat and find it'd burned down and sank.

Here's what the receptacle looked like on the boat end:


And here's the insides of it once I'd started to dismantle it:

Like I said, I'm lucky the boat didn't burn down to the waterline.

Anyhow, a hundred dollars and an hour later I replaced the end of the cord, the receptacle, and swept up the debris:

Now it's just a matter of waiting for the next minor problem.

Stay tuned...