Sanding the bridgedeck continues, though today I did none myself.  The family was in town and I spent the morning at the beach with the big kids, where we got sanded ourselves.  The surf was up.  We had a serious talk about safety beforehand, and everyone did real well.  There were some scrapes and bruises, but it was great fun.  Alas, my phone has gone missing after several years of faithful service.  I think it swims with the fishes.

In the afternoon, Eli and I went to the boat and he helped me change the backstay chainplate bolts.  He had the inside job, which required crawling way back under the transom steps to tighten the nuts.  Kids are great for that kind of work.  Several of the old bolts had corroded and the heads broke off when I tried to remove them.  I’m sure the new ones are stronger, but I’m paranoid now that they might leak.

Holes from the removed thru-hulls and sonar transducer have been plugged.  Bad wood has been cut out around the cockpit drains.  Bootstripe has been cleaned in preparation for fairing the hulls.  That's going to be the next big job.

Sanding overhead is a hard, messy job.  It is a painfully awkward position, and the machine has to be held – no, pressed – up to the work.  Depending on the machine being used, dust mask and eyewear is somewhere between a good idea for safety’s sake and necessary for survival.  My sander of choice is a Festool RO 150 FEQ, which puts me solidly in the survival category.  The thing is a beast and tears off paint at an incredible rate… if you can hold it up.  For every one minute I can hold it, I probably have to rest for two.

Now for the Surprise of the Day:  At some point in the last couple years, I noticed some hull damage on the inside of the port transom aft of the rudder.  The wood was broken, thrust upward like tectonic plates.  It was dry, so I assumed that whatever had happened, it had been repaired from the outside.  It wasn’t a high stress area, so I wasn’t too worried about it.  I repaired the inside to the best of my ability at that time, and promptly forgot about it.

But then during this haulout I noticed the spot looked a little funny on the outside, remembered my inside repair, and we decided to dig into it.  It turns out it wasn’t repaired from the outside at all.  I now think that a boatyard worker, probably at our last haulout, over-tensioned a jackstand and didn’t tell anyone.  The planks of the hull were broken, but the fiberglass skin held its shape, and the water out, for many hard miles.

Another spot repaired at the same yard, where our keels were damaged while hauling out on their rail, we found was not done correctly and will have to be redone.

That was at a “full-service” yard, where I was supposed to turn over my baby and wait until they’re finished billing me.  They tolerated my daily visits, but I wasn’t allowed to do any work.  I had to rely on their personnel for everything.  It was not an experience I’m in a hurry to repeat.  

This time we’re at a yard that allows Do-It-Yourself work, and the difference is huge.  Nothing happens unless I do it or arrange to have it done.  I’ve hired a crew that I trust, and we work on the boat as a team.  Mistakes can always happen, but at least this time they’ll be my mistakes.

I love a good change of pace. I’ve been a borderline burnout for a while now, but moving the boat this summer temporarily cured me. And now I have this wonderful opportunity to get out of the house (can’t go home even if I want to), so of course that’s where I want to be. The grass is always greener, right? The five kids and I have been gone about a week now, spending two or three nights in each place. We’ve visited grandparents, old friends, uncles, aunts and cousins, and now we’re staying in a beach condo for the weekend with Jay.

The kids don’t mind relaxing the routine a bit, especially if it means putting home school on the back burner, but Rachel really likes her schedule. To try to keep nap and bed times consistent, I have a porta-crib. So everywhere we go, I set it up, put her familiar objects inside and show it to her, saying, “Look, Rachel! It’s your bed!” She isn’t buying it. She knows that this is not home, and wakes up a few times each night calling my name just to make sure I’m still there, but she does go to sleep and it is providing some stability. Luckily, she has also been able to sleep in the car, so I plan drive times so that they overlap a nap. So far, so good.

The coolest thing about home schooling is this flexibility to come and go as we please. In fact, all the people with whom we are staying happen to be home schooling, too, so they can make time and space for our visit. This is very accommodating of them, since I know we are quite a distraction. My brother has six kids (with another on the way) so my sister-in-law has to plan meals for 14—and boy can she cook! An army of children is no match for her. I try to help out with dishes, cleaning, and meal prep, but she outshines me any day.

My friends Kristen and Howard also are home schooling their three girls (brilliant little cuties they are, too), and they made space for six more for a couple of days. They are unused to the rambunctiousness of my three boys, but are very gracious. Kristen, if I may boast for a moment, started home schooling at least in part because of contact with our family, but she has far surpassed me in her ambitions as a home school mom. Her website, www.teachingstars.com chronicles her homeschool journey and provides helpful information on all sorts of home school topics and curricula. She is inspiring another generation of moms to give their children a great education at home.  

Next week, we’re headed to the keys to visit our favorite place, Curry Hammock State Park (www.floridastateparks.org/curryhammock), and our home school friends, Park Ranger, Ken, his wife, Amy, and their three fabulous kids. Hopefully, we’ll do a little snorkeling, fishing, and playing in the sand, and maybe some reading, writing and arithmetic on the side.

The main event for me today was the survey.  This is where a guy comes and inspects the boat to see that it is not likely to sink or burn, and is valued correctly.  Basically making sure it is a good risk from an insurance perspective.  From my perspective, it’s a trial.  This guy is coming to judge what I’ve done over the last four plus years.

It went pretty well.  I was concerned how he would react seeing the obvious moisture in the bridgedeck, but he was cool about it.  He spent about an hour tapping the boat with his phenolic hammer and pronounced it all sound.  His meter did not detect any undue moisture in the hulls, but the rudders pegged it.  He didn’t bother with the bridgedeck.  We were so distracted by the bridgedeck, we never tested the rudders.  Apparently, they’re full of water.  Which isn’t ideal, but it isn’t terrible either.  He said most rudders are.

He said that moisture itself is not a problem.  It’s only an indicator of a future problem.  As long as the hammer says the boat is solid, there’s no current problem.  Even the bridgedeck passed the hammer test.  Obviously, we’re concerned about future problems and are going to great lengths to fix the bridgedeck.  What will we do about the rudders?  Probably nothing.

The difference is that the rudders are full of salt water, which does not rot wood the same way fresh water does.  They’re also not dripping, which means whatever water is in there got in from the top.  Fixing it would require undoing the whole steering system and dropping the rudders.  Been there, done that.  No thank you.  There is a risk that the welds holding the rudder’s internal webbing to the post will break, but that risk wouldn’t go away even if we did rebuild them.

The surveyor was full of helpful anecdotes.  He said a catamaran came into that very boatyard about a year ago for a survey, and when they hauled the boat out of the water it only had one rudder.  The skipper was completely oblivious.

So after poring over the boat for four hours, the surveyor found two things I’d done wrong.  First, our propane stove does not have thermocouples to shut off the gas if the flame blows out.  I had no idea such things existed, and I’m still not sure if I can retrofit them.  Second, the galley outlets by the sink are not GFCI.  Yes, I suppose I should have known better there.  Interestingly, he had a tester for the GFCI outlets we do have, and we discovered they don’t work on our inverters.  Shore power, yes.  Generator, yes.  Inverters, no.

He found a burned-out navigation light and a smoke alarm with a dead battery.  I fixed both in his presence and he was satisfied.  He was not happy that my batteries are not strapped down.  Granted, this would be a legitimate concern on a monomaran that rolls all over the place.   But our boat would have to be completely upside down to budge them an inch.  I invited him to try.  They weigh 175 pounds apiece.

All-in-all, I consider the survey a huge success.

On the bridgedeck front, we have identified at least three separate sources for the moisture.  One is the cockpit drains, the bottoms of which are flush with the bottom of the bridgedeck.  The water has a tendency to spread out along the bottom of the bridgedeck rather than pour straight down.  Extending the drain pipes a fraction of an inch will help immensely.  We’ve already proven this during an afternoon thunderstorm.  Second are the fasteners (screws) which secure the bottom of the bridgedeck to the grid (in addition to copious amounts of epoxy).  However, the fasteners themselves were not epoxied.  They were screwed into raw wood, a filler was put over the hole, and then paint.  Not good enough.  Moisture permeated the paint and the filler to attack the wood through the screw hole.  The good news is that the moisture only appears to be in the surface layer of the plywood.  With the paint removed, it is drying before our eyes.

The third source is more elusive.  A pattern of wetness is emerging that roughly coincides with where we have conduit running through the bridgedeck.  Conduit carrying fresh water hoses.  “Aha!” you think, “A leak!”  Not so fast.  One of our intrepid technicians inadvertently tasted the water when he drilled into a flooded cell and received a deluge in the face.  He declared it salty, and quite foul, many times actually, and loudly.  Hmm, we must ponder.  Meanwhile, the sanding continues.

It only took two days before “the plan” went into the wastebasket.  

The bridgedeck is the span between our hulls.  It is a sandwich construction, with heavy beams running between the hulls and smaller pieces fore-and-aft to make a grid, and layers of plywood on the top and bottom.  We walk on it above, and the waves hammer it below.  Structurally, aside from the walking part, its job is to make sure the boat remains square, and that one hull doesn’t outrun the other one.

The paint on the underside of it has always been a problem, and with the repairs we had to do, I had half a mind to take it all down and repaint it.  Half a mind.  Notice I didn’t even mention this in the Day One post.

But on closer inspection, we found unsettling signs of moisture.  Moisture in boats is generally a bad thing, but especially wood boats prone to rot.  Like ours.  We put a moisture meter on it and found high concentrations of moisture in several different areas.  The paint was going to have to come off.

While stripping the hulls finished ahead of schedule, Eco Strip couldn’t do the bridgedeck.  There’s no fiberglass there, just wood and paint, and they were afraid of tearing up the wood.  So we’d have to do it the hard way.

Yes, that’s a girl.  And yes, I’m slightly uncomfortable with that.  But she works like a horse.

It’s too early to tell what this means for our overall timeline.  After we’re finished sanding, we have to find the cause of the moisture, fix that, then repair the wood, then seal it all up and paint it.  

I’m taking suggestions for color.  I’m bored with the red and I’m thinking of something a little more fun.  I always joke that nobody but a helicopter pilot will ever see it anyway.  Maybe chartreuse?

So it’s a little bit of a bummer, but we expect the unexpected.  On the plus side, we’re going to fix the shit out of this.  Cuz that’s how we roll.  

The first order of business once the boat was down on blocks, was to get the paint stripped off.  For this we contracted Eco Strip, a company that specializes in removing bottom paint.  They use what is essentially a warm pumice mud to blast the paint off the hull.

We budgeted four days for this process, but they brought two machines and got it done in a day and a half.  This is hands-down the fastest, most economical and environmentally-friendly way to get bottom paint off a boat.

What we’re left with is a little bit baffling.  It’s kind of like stucco.  We can clearly see it was put on with a trowel.  The stripping process removed whatever soft fairing was used, so we’ll have to re-fair it before we can barrier coat and paint.

It was over three years ago that we last hauled Take Two out of the water for maintenance.  At that time, our bottom paint was relatively fresh and we had other priorities.  This time, our paint was four and half years old and our primary motivation for pulling out.  

Hauling out is never easy for us.  I only know of five yards in all of Florida that can handle our 26’ beam.  They’re in Bradenton, St James City, Key Largo, Ft Lauderdale, and Ft Pierce.  So that’s why we’re in Ft Pierce.

Hauling out is further complicated because the boat is our home.  Last time we still had a house.  This time we’d need alternate housing for up to two weeks while the boat was getting worked on, which meant a total disruption of our lives.

It took us two months to make it all happen, but finally Take Two got to take a ride on the TraveLift.

We’re expecting her to be out for two weeks while we work through our project list:

• Strip off 20 years of accumulated paint buildup below the waterline.  We’re having adhesion problems and can’t just keep adding more layers.
• Remove three thru-hulls from back when we had toilets flushing with salt water.  I don’t see us ever going back that direction.  Each is a risk, and they’re in the way.  That will bring our total number of removed thru-hulls to 11.
• Remove the forward-looking sonar transducer.  Maybe the technology will be better someday, but for now I don’t think it’s worth having.
• Replace our unused speed log transducer with a combination depth, speed, and temp unit.  With keels 20 feet apart, seeing depth on both sides of the boat will be really helpful.  It will take some time to get the second depth integrated into the instrument displays, but we won’t have to haul out to do it.
• Have a surveyor look over the boat.  Our insurance company requires this every five years.  That anniversary is only six months away and with the bottom paint off, this will be the best opportunity for the surveyor to see the condition of the boat.
• Change the bolts on our backstay chainplates.   Some of the bolts are submerged, so we need to do this with the boat out of the water.
• Change the cutless bearings and zincs on the running gear, and grease the propellers.  That’s just regular maintenance.
• We also need to decide whether we want to keep the propellers counter-rotating, or change them to rotate the same direction, and whether we want to change the blade pitch.  These changes would be in anticipation of replacing the engines later on.
• Repair the bridgedeck strakes that were damaged when we broke our catwalk.
• Repaint the hulls with antifouling paint.  We’re going with Trinidad SR, a hard paint.  We haven’t been having much luck with ablative paints, and wanted to try something different.  We can always switch back later.

There will probably be a few other things that pop up along the way, but hopefully no big surprises.

In the meantime, Tanya has taken the kids on a little road trip to see friends and family.  I stayed behind to supervise the work and have rented a place nearby.  We figured the best thing for Spideycat was to stay aboard.  Since the boat’s air conditioners can’t run without cooling water, I bought a little window unit and ducted it down a hatch to keep her cool.

It turned out that the radar wasn’t broken.  It wouldn’t turn on because the moron who rewired the DC panel forgot to connect the negative side of that circuit.  Guilty.  My stupidity was compounded by the time and trials it took to figure that out.

Then when it did turn on, the display reported a “bearing pulse error” and the scanner wouldn’t turn.  I thought that was the nail in the coffin, and began researching new radar systems in earnest.

Without going into a lengthy technical explanation of the differences between traditional pulse radar and the newer frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) “broadband” radar, my research led me to decide I wanted the latter.  I’m far more interested in what’s inside 1 mile than outside 10 miles.  Usually when I want radar, I want it NOW and don’t want to wait 1-2 minutes for a magnetron to warm up.  And then I want the radar image on my existing Navico-based chartplotter instead of a separate display.  All these pointed to Navico’s 4G radar.

But part of the research process involved poring over the manual for the old system.  It was then that I noticed our scanner has a safety switch on the back of it.  This switch is to prevent someone working on the scanner from getting zapped.  Normally, a switch on the back of a radar scanner 15 feet above the deck of a sailboat would have a hard time getting flipped accidentally.  But this sailboat has a monkey problem, and a flipped switch was a very real possibility.  Sure enough, I sent a monkey aloft to flip it back, and presto! we had radar again.

The night off Key Biscayne when our radar wouldn’t turn on, we narrowly missed running down a marker that wasn’t on our charts.  We may never have seen it at all except for the luminous eyes of the bird sitting on it — staring at us with silent reproach as we passed within a dozen yards.  Radar does seem a good bit more important now than it has in the past, but not quite to the point where we’re ready to replace a working system… yet.

We had the first kid fall between the boat and the dock this weekend.  

One of the things we’ve had to adjust to recently is having Take Two on a fixed dock instead of a floating one.  With a floating dock, the boat is always in the same position relative to the dock, so it’s easy to create a safe and comfortable way to get on and off.  

But a fixed dock never moves, and the boat, subject to tide, current, and wind, moves all over the place.  At times you can simply step from deck level, over the lifelines, and onto the dock.  But at other times the deck might be below and several feet away.  It can be very difficult if you have short legs, are carrying a baby, or wearing Italian shoes.  Which covers the whole crew at one time or another.

The preferred way to get aboard at low tide is the Tarzan method.  We have a halyard clipped to the toerail and a light painter from the halyard to the dock.  You pull the halyard to yourself by the painter and then swing aboard with your best yodel.  This works great for the kids, and even the adults after a few cocktails.  But it’s not so good at high tide, or for getting back off the boat.

The next effort was a ramp from the toerail to the dock.  I made it out of a 2×10 and put some 1×2 furring strips on it for tread.  It worked great, but it kept falling in the water between the boat and the dock.  We never saw it happen, so I could never discern exactly what the problem was, but eventually accepted that the ramp idea was flawed.

The latest invention is a step, made from some spare 2×10 into an inverted L-shape with triangular supports, and screwed into a piling.  The kids know that when I break out the power tools something interesting is about to happen, so the older ones were loitering around on the dock and casually watching me work.  Sam was last to join.  He saw kids on the dock, he saw a new step between the boat and the dock, and he deduced that the others must have used the step to get to the dock.  Unfortunately he was not correct.  The step was only tacked in place while I was busy cutting the triangles to support it.  

Nobody saw what happened next, but we all heard the big splash and Sam’s shrieks of fear.

Poor Sam.  All the kids had been coached: if you fall in the water, just swim to the transom steps and climb out.  It used to be that they could haul themselves right out onto the dock.  But the swimming part was new, and Sam hasn’t been the best listener lately.  With the surprise of falling six feet and finding himself in the water, he forgot to swim and instead bear hugged the barnacle-crusted piling.

Sam is okay.  A calm reminder was all he needed to detach from his piling and swim to where we could lift him out and hose him off.  He needed some patching up, and calming down, but once that was done it was like it had never happened.

The lesson here is that when you panic, rational thought often goes right out the window, and the results are often not good.  Unfortunately, panic is hard to predict or control.  Sam has jumped off the boat and swum to the transom hundreds of times for fun.  But the difference between jumping and falling triggered a completely different response.

Sometimes we just have to learn things the hard way.  To this day, I have a row of 3-inch scars on the inside of my left knee.  I got them when I was a little older than Sam.  It was the last time I ever tried to climb up a piling.  I’m betting this will be Sam’s last time, too.

Toward the end of our recent trip, we remarked to ourselves that the boat had done really well.  We had the sense that nothing had broken, but a review of the log tells a different story.

At the end of the trip, the “broken” list was:

• The washing machine doesn’t work on inverter power.  It comes on, but then freaks out and generally just doesn’t function.  The inverters are supposed to put out a pure sine wave, but I assume the washer is sensitive to some noise or anomaly in the signal.  To get the washer to work correctly, we have to run the big diesel generator for the whole 90 minute cycle (per load).
• The generator stopped inexplicably on two consecutive runs early in the trip.  I waved some tools in its general direction and it seems to have taken the hint.  No more trouble.
• The inner forestay tang broke.  I have no idea how this happened and I’m a little disconcerted by it.  I would not have guessed that this shroud was ever under enough load to break, but maybe three days of wave action generated by TS Debby was enough to fatigue it.  We replaced the staysail halyard with a low-stretch line, cranked it down, and carried on.

• Our anchor loads during the storm were enough that we could watch the bridle legs stretch.  Despite adjusting the wear point several times, the lines chafed enough that I think they warrant replacement.  And spares.
• We leaked in places that we’ve never leaked before.  If those are the conditions it takes to make those places leak, then they aren’t even worth fixing.  The rain was tremendous and the wind didn’t allow the water to drain properly, so the boat was effectively submerged.
• A newish cordless drill was dropped overboard by one of my little helpers.  It’s expected that tools will go overboard from time-to-time, and I took this in stride.  I did dive to look for it, but it was nowhere to be found.
• Our free kayak developed a new crack after we let the kids use it.

• Our radar refused to turn on.  It might be a simple fix, or it might be time for a new 4G broadband unit.
• The starboard alternator belt began squealing when the alternator load came on.  It was funny because we’d be motoring along just fine, then Tanya would use her Vita-Mix for something and the belt would start squealing as the alternator tried to compensate.  I’d had the belt off recently and probably didn’t put it back with enough tension.  Time to replace it anyway.
• The port engine got reluctant to start.  It normally starts easily enough, but runs rough until it warms up.  Not wanting to start at all is new.  Probably the injectors need to be rebuilt.  I should carry spares.
• When docking at our destination marina, I had the brilliant idea of using a dock line to check the boat’s momentum instead of using the engines.  What I didn’t account for is the upward force on the cleat from the fixed dock.  The result was a broken deck cleat, but it didn’t just fall off like the picture implies.  I found that broken piece 90 feet away.  I’m probably lucky it didn’t give me a haircut along the way.

• The dinghy motor’s electric tilt and trim stopped working again.  I think I’ve replaced that switch three times already.
• Last, but not even close to least, Tanya’s Vita-Mix stopped working temporarily.  Apparently, it was just over-heated, but for an hour it looked like we were all going to starve.  We’re adding a refurbished machine to our complement of spare parts.