Two Weeks

Echo Bay sunset

Transitioning to retirement is not an event... it is a process. And at this stage of the process, we have discovered that our previous usage patterns for the boat have changed.

In our old life, we were off the dock for three or four days at a time (towards the end of my career I was working 3 10-hour days/week, a schedule I highly recommend to anyone approaching retirement as a way to 'ease into' it). Except for vacations, when we were off for longer periods. But that meant that normally, provisioning was not a difficult task - not much different from the normal day-to-day provisioning that goes on while living aboard. Pretty much it was "How are we fixed for coffee and beer?" before we left.

But as I mentioned, our patterns have changed. Now we are typically off the dock for two weeks at a time. This means that the old slapdash provisioning has had to be upgraded. And we need to fill the water tanks before we leave. And... well lots of things. Because our trips now are not just a quick jaunt across the Sound to Port Madison or something, but real cruises instead. The kinds of cruises we used to take once or twice a year and that really do need to be planned for.

We have settled (for now, at least) on two weeks because of a couple of things. First, garbage. Regular readers of this blog may remember that I have mentioned before that our limiting capacity on Eolian is not water, fuel, storage, etc... it is garbage. And in two weeks we reach the "full but still manageable" stage. (After a month we are at the "garbage bags on the stern" stage.)

And second, two weeks seems to us like a nice split in life styles... 50% on shore and 50% living aboard.

What we do while off the dock has changed too. Before, we used to zoom from place to place, rarely leaving the anchor down longer than over night. Why? Perhaps because we subconsciously heard the clock ticking in the background and felt the need to get as much in as we could before we had to be back at the dock. This too has changed. Now we spend days at a time anchored in the same place. Today, for example, is our fifth day at anchor here in Echo Bay on Sucia Island... and we expect to be here for several more days.

So, is this better? It certainly is different than our previous life - I think it is more like the life that world cruisers live.

Retirement is good.

Two Weeks

Surveying

So today I spent a little while in the dinghy with my new depth sounder... Taking measurements. All of the readings in the picture above are ones I made. Since I am crowd sourcing this data, I made sure that it was corrected for the tide before adding it to the chart. 

Three things were learned:

    1.  There is adequate water off that private dock should we need to tie to it in an emergency 

    2.  The shoal area to the north of the dock is marked too shallow on the charts. 

    3.  The "buoy" that marks the wreck directly in front of us (I thought) actually is apparently an  abandoned mooring. But having marked it as a wreck is probably a good thing anyway tho, since when (not if) the float breaks away or rusts thru in a couple more years, no one would want to anchor on top of whatever is down there as an anchor and whatever rode remains. 

More surveying to come...

Surveying

New Toy

Recently when anchored in a familiar bay, we saw a boat anchored in a location that was filled with submerged pilings. Or at least in the past it was... Years before, we had actually surveyed this part of the bay by dinghy at low tide and marked the locations of the pilings we could see using a hand-held GPS.  Did he know something we didn't?  Or was he blithely happy in his ignorance (and lucky)?

I'm sure a similar situation has happened to you - you might be interested in taking the boat between those two small islands as a short cut, but the chart detail in the passage was totally inadequate to take the risk.  Those of you with $15,000 RIBs as tenders probably already have a depth sounder installed and can then use the dinghy to do a quick bathymetry survey.

But we don't have that kind of dinghy.  So what to do?  Not wanting to do a permanent installation on our dinghy, I considered hand-held depth sounders.

There is one that is shaped like a flashlight - to use it, you dip the big end in the water and press the button for a reading.  Great for spot soundings, but awkward for taking more or less continuous readings.

Awkward

And then there are the ones that have a hand-held read-out, connected to the transducer by a cable.  This is better, since the read-out is in your hand, right side up and easily read on a continuous basis.  But there's that cable.

And then I found the answer:  A wireless depth sounder.  There are several varieties - being a cheap frugal mariner, I bought one direct from China instead of one sold by a name-brand manufacturer (also made in China).

It's a cute little hand-held unit - not waterproof, so don't drop it in the drink.  It communicates with the completely separate transducer via radio.  And the transducer is a tiny little thing:

A friend suggested that it should have been molded with a duck's head on the post

The transducer is powered with a single CR2032 coin battery and there is no on/off switch.  Instead, there are two exposed metal contacts on the underside - when it is placed in water, it turns on.  There are a couple of holes molded into a fin on the bottom (you can just see one at the tip of my finger) that you can use to attach a towing line.  Or a fishing line!  Yes, it is small and light enough that (should you be a fisherman) you could cast it over to that deep hole where the lunkers might be hiding.

I am very much looking forward to using it to survey our favorite anchorages to maybe expand the territory available to us!

New Toy

Corners

Have you ever done fiberglass layup? If you have, then you know how difficult it is to get the wetted cloth to follow a sharp outside corner tightly, with "sharp" being a variable depending on how heavy the cloth is.  It tends to spring back, leaving a gap underneath.

Well, boat manufacturers have the same problem you do.  And on Eolian, there was a place where the cloth pulled away from the gelcoat-sprayed mold corner, leaving a gap between the gelcoat and the cloth.  This revealed itself over the years by the gelcoat cracking up in the bottom of what was now an inside corner, because it was unsupported.

 

The problem area was on the aft deck, where the coach house meets the deck.  Sadly, I did not take a "before" picture...  but this one shows the extent of the area to be repaired after I ground out all the loose gelcoat flakes with my trusty Dremel tool (the perfect tool for this job!).

Now, gelcoat is formulated for application by spraying.  That means that it is quite fluid, tho the thixotropic agents included mean that when you stop disturbing it, it stays put (unlike epoxy, which continues to run and drip, seemingly forever).  But that fluidity makes it quite difficult to control the application accurately.  I mixed the gelcoat in a small cup with a tongue depressor and then used that same tongue depressor as an applicator - the radius of the end was close to the radius of the inside corner of the repair area, if I tilted the stick at the right angle.

After the gelcoat had gone off I sanded it using 220 grit wet/dry sandpaper (wet), a small piece wrapped around the end of another tongue depressor, to knock down the areas that needed to be flat.  For the radius in the corner Jane donated an old Chap Stick container, which turned out to be a pretty close fit.  Sanding is tricky.  You want to knock down the high spots and get nearly level with the surrounding area, but you don't want to cut flush until you are working on the final coat.  The original gelcoat, tho much thicker than a paint layer would be, is quite thin and easily sanded thru.  So you only want to sand flush once.

Because of the fluidity of the gelcoat, it took several applications to get the surface brought up (oh, how I wish that there was a gelcoat formulation even as stiff as, say, Greek yogurt!).  In the beginning I applied a lot, but at the end just a dab here and there to fill the hollow spots.

For final finishing I went over the area with 400 grit wet/dry (wet), and then used some polishing compound.  It comes out as shiny as a factory finish.

And done.

Again, major kudos to Fiberlay for such an amazingly perfect color match.  If you can see any color difference at all in the picture, it is because in the area where I was working the oxidized gelcoat got cleaned off, brightening the color.

(And yes, replacing that fixed port is on the list.)

Corners