Clark Island

I finally finished up Yggdrasil and took her out for her first (and probably last, because it's fall now) real trip of the season. My friend Grady and I went out to Clark island for two days, and somehow managed to get slightly lost on the fairly tiny 55 acre island. Clark island was stunningly beautiful, with clear water and small pocket beaches that looked almost tropical. Unfortunately, it was peak wasp season and the island was buzzing with the nasty little buggers. Yellow jackets were bad enough, but the bald faced hornets were extremely aggressive. We had to retreat to the boat halfway through the afternoon and didn't return until the cool air of evening had driven the buzzing demons back to their nests.

Leaving the Bay

Clark Island

Me

Grady

Madrone

One of the really neat things about Clark island was the lack of names carved into most madrones. The island is rarely visited compared to most other public islands in the San Juans, so the usual hordes of pocket knife wielding teenagers haven't marred the soft bark of the hundreds of madrones on the island. There was only one tree on the end of a point that was at all name-ified.

Sunset

The trip back to Bellingham was rather exciting. The outboard broke down about a half mile away from the island, so we had to sail the 10 or so miles back home. Thankfully, we had about 20 knts of wind most of the way, and made very good time even with reefed sails. Even sailing back into the harbor went fairly well; the only thing I crashed into was my own dock box.

New Flybridge

Misogi got a new flybridge cover for the winter, as well as a new canvas enclosure for the aft deck.

Fogginess

Valley

Large Mountain Beetle

 I also took a bit of a non boat-related adventure with my parents. We went up to artists point for a hike in the mountains, and found a huge White-Spotted Sawyers Beetle along with some nice views of mountains and valleys. There were also a lot of bicycles, which made driving on the Mt Baker highway slow and dangerous. Bicycles are worse than jet skis.

Sucia

After a week of finishing up some final projects, like mounting the cradles for my rowboat, making a cactus holder so my plants don't go flying, and filling up with fuel; we headed out on our first trip. We decided to go to Sucia because it's the first place we went with all of our previous boats. We left for Sucia on a beautiful sunny day with very little wind, and got there in about 3 hours after fighting a bit of current through hale passage. We towed Thumper behind us, and our hastily assembled towing bridle worked perfectly. The only problem we ran into heading to Sucia was that Misogi failed in her most basic purpose: she didn't keep the water on the outside. A bunch of seams above the waterline on the bow had dried out over the summer, and whenever we hit a wave or went faster than half throttle sea water poured in. This wouldn't have been a huge problem, but our forward bilge pump had blown out it's diaphragm, so we had no way of getting the water out again. By the time we got to Sucia we had a good 6 inches of water in the bilge. Sucia was as beautiful as always, with fantastic sandstone formations everywhere. The only problem was a huge mosquito population; walking around on the island was made fairly unpleasant by the little bloodsuckers, and by evening they had migrated out into the harbor and we had to shut all the doors and windows. We felt sorry for the people camping ashore.

Misogi Getting Fuel

Cactus Holder

Anchored at Sucia

Cave

A Very Small Beach

Our first night at Sucia was rather  entertaining. After a perfectly calm evening (during which we anchored with only 3:1 scope) a respectable 35-40 mph wind came up at about 1 am. Because Echo Bay is pretty exposed, we got rocked around a lot by large swells and Thumper kept getting caught under the rub rail. Nobody got much sleep. As it turns out, that was a good thing, because the combination of high tide and a particularly strong set of waves popped out the anchor at about 6 in the morning, and we went sailing across the anchorage. My dad was awake, so he got my mom and I up to start the engines and raise the anchor. My dad didn't want to re-set the anchor, so we tied up to the linear moorage and stayed there for the next day. We also found out that our anchor light and masthead light fixtures were both broken.

Broken Anchor Light

Windy (gold needle shows max. wind speed,
gauge reads about 5mph slow.)

 The next day, we took a hike out to Johnson point in the morning. There were some pretty amazing old growth madrone groves with trees several feet in diameter, and some great views. Surprisingly, despite there being around 30 boats in echo bay alone, we only ran into one other group hiking. We had the point to ourselves. By afternoon, the straits had calmed down enough to try a run to Patos in Thumper. It was a bouncy ride over, but we were able to drive right up on the beach and tie off to a fallen tree. Small boats are kind of convenient that way. Patos was a beautiful island with a very dense forest, a very cool rocky shoreline with a long shelf that collects intertidal critters, and a vast grass-covered point where the lighthouse is. Although only the lighthouse remains of what used to be a large compound with shops, cisterns, barns and a marine railway, there are ruins and crumbling foundations all over the north end of the island, which make for very good exploring. There is also a barn swallow colony living in the eves of the lighthouse, and they make their presence very well know if they are surprised. Barn swallows can be surprisingly intimidating if 20 of them are swooping within feet of ones face. Patos also has a straight concrete path built in the 1940's that is constructed just like a city sidewalk. It is surreal to walk around a mostly deserted island on a surface that feels like it should be in downtown Bellingham.

Madrone

Lion's Manes

Patos

We worked out a temporary bilge pump for the return trip by taking out the floor in my bathroom and running a hose up into my sink. It turned out to be a good idea, because the water was still coming in pretty fast, and it kept too much of it from running back under the water tanks. Besides the leaks, it was a fairly uneventful trip light chop that bounced Thumper around a bit but had no discernible effect on Misogi. Getting into Bellingham bay was a bit exciting, because the entrance between Portage and Eliza was almost completely filled with crab pots. They were so close together that we had to pass less than 20ft away from a few floats, but thankfully they all used sinking line so we didn't wrap anything around our props or rudders.

Temporary Bilge Pump

Bilge Water Going Down the Drain

The Straits

Serpentine Wake from Dodging Crab Pots

May

So, I kind of forgot about the blog for the last month or so. A lot of stuff has happened, so I'll try to cover it all. The haul-out went really well, with no major surprises. We painted the bottom, replaced a through-hull (actually, we had the yard do that because it was for sewage discharge and absolutely disgusting), re-bedded some underwater hardware, replaced the zincs, and sanded/painted the props. By the way, the propellers are immense. That little plastic bag in the first picture is actually about the size of a piece of standard printer paper. The only slight bit of unpleasantness was some pitting on the props, probably caused by electrolysis. Propellers this big are ridiculously expensive, so we just kind of ignored the pitting and put on a really good coat of prop-paint.

Propeller

Pitting

Freshly Painted Bottom and Prop

While the boat was hauled out, I took the opportunity to cut out the cracked and leaky seam compound on the planks near the waterline and replace it with new stuff. This went fairly quickly, and should prevent plank form rotting out too fast. After the compound got of dry, I put a fresh coat of paint on below the rub-rail. We promptly put a big scratch in it when we docked the boat after the launch.

New Seam Compound

We got our new back deck roof-deck-thing installed, replacing the redneck 2x4 and chipboard addition that had been grafted after some adventures with a broken crane some last-minute sawzall surgery, the new deck was installed. Thanks to our neighbors and owners of Kingfisher Craftsman for the pretty new boat piece! The new deck extends further back to protect the transom, and is raised a few inches to protect my dad's head.

Misogi With a Naked Boat

Chris Helping to Lower the New Deck Into Place  

New Deck painted and Pretty.

We also got some proper boating in with a trip to Vendovi Island on Thumper. Vendovi is a beautiful little island just south of Lummi. It just recently came under the ownership of the San Juan Preservation trust after being private for a good century or two, and is open to day use only. This means that it is seldom visited and remarkably un-trampled. Vendovi still has all the old homesteading equipment leftover from the previous owners, as well as beautiful views, neat plants, and very clean water. Plus, it's only 45 minutes away with Thumper.  

Vendovi

More Vendovi

Thumper, by the way, confirmed that her name was the right choice on when the wind picked the return trip. Right after the picture below was taken, a decent chop came up, and Thumper's light, flat-ish bottomed slammed across the waves like a soda can blown over gravel by a hurricane. It was not particularly comfortable, but the boat and our kidneys made it back to the harbor without too much damage.

Heading Home

I've also been making steady progress with m sailboat; stripping out and painting the interior and replacing some of the rigging. I got a new turquoise sail cover as well, which does a great job of making the boat look a bit less derelict.

New Paint in My Sailboat

New Sailcover

I've also become a professional shipwright! Well, not really, but our neighbor paid me to patch a big rot spot in his bulwarks, and I think my patch came out very well. You can't even see the where the old stuff ends and the stuff I put in begins. I need money to support fixing and cruising the sailboat this summer, so if anyone needs some work done on their boat don't hesitate to give me call (360-714-0060). I can't quite do real professional-quality work yet, but I also don;t charge real professional prices...

Dutchman

Fairing Compound

Good as New!

Enlarging the Fleet and Hauling Out

I haven't blogged in a couple months because nothing interesting that related to living on a boat was happening. This last week though, lots of stuff has happened. Our boat fleet expanded by two; we finally got our tow-behind tender after months of off-and-on research, and I picked up a really cheap sailboat at the Port's abandoned boat auction. Our cats came and stayed on the boat for a couple weeks, and we just hauled Misogi out today to get her ready to actually be used.

Beached Whale

Thumper is our new tender; an 18' Hewescraft. It gets it's name from it's nasty habit of slamming into waves in choppy weather, an effect caused by having a nearly flat bottom at the stern. Adding to the thumping experience is the fact that the boat is built of aluminum, and sounds like a drum when it hits said waves. Although the flat-ish bottom and light aluminum construction don't make for the most comfortable ride, they make the boat very efficient (about 7 mpg) and fast (about 40 mph). We've only used Thumper once so far because my dad is a party-pooper and wants to install a bunch of safety equipment, but hopefully in a couple weeks we'll be taking day trips around the bay and to nearby islands.

Thumper

My auction sailboat's name is Yggdrasil (pronounced eeg-drah-sil). I was going to change it to something more pronounceable, but an elderly Norwegian guy with a weathered captain's hat and admirable facial hair stopped by when I was cleaning out the cabin and gave me a hand-written letter about the history of the name. We talked about boats and history for a while, and I learned that Yggdrasil is a massive tree in Norse legend that supports the nine realms (of which Earth is one) and holds fate together. After an encounter like that, changing the name seems like bad luck, so "Yggdrasil" my boat shall remain. Yggdrasil is pretty rough; she's covered with algae on the outside, has no engine, and was filled with mildewed upholstery and rotten food when I got her. Fortunately, she came with seven sails (including a spinnaker), and is structurally very sound. Her design also has quite a pedigree. Yggdrasil is a Swedish-built Albin Vega, and her sister ships have gone through the northwest passage, circumnavigated the world, and made it around cape horn. After a few months of gutting, re-building, and installing some kind of motor, Yggdrasil should be a fun and bomb-proof little cruiser.

Yggdrasil 

Yggdrasil's Gutted Interior

I forgot to write about it when it happened, but we got our cats back for three weeks! My aunt got a new job and had to go through training in Oregon, so we took the cats to Misogi and looked after them. They took a few days to adjust, and never really got used to storms or the engines, but seemed pretty happy and relaxed most of the time. I'm kinda glad that they didn't end up living on the boat permanently though, because having a litter box in such a small space is rather unpleasant.

Potter

Lily

I'll probably be back in a week or so with another post detailing all the complications we will inevitably have with various hull-out chores. 

General Updates

Over the last month or two, we've gotten completely settled in and started working on fixing some of the nonessential things that were bugging us. We had a fairly useless electric kitchen stove that would blow breakers whenever it was used, and even when it managed to stay on, it took 20 minutes to half cook half an egg. Our solution was to get this beautiful new-ish propane stove:

 

 We put the old electric one up for sale on craigslist, and managed to find a guy who lives aboard down in Seattle and wanted to replace his never-used gas stove with an electric. As luck would have it, our stoves were made by the same company and were exactly the same size and configuration, so we were able to just drop the new stove straight into the hole left by the old one. We did hire a marine heat person to install the propane piping and solenoid, because a system filled with pressurized and highly explosive gas seemed like something worth having a professional set up.

I finally managed to get the teak trim installed around the wood stove's tile, so our carpet has stopped fraying and some unsightly gaps and cracks have been covered up. Unfortunately all I had to cut the trim was a handsaw and a cheap compass, so the joints ended up a little bit imperfect. It still looks really good from about 10 feet away.

Teak Around the Wood Stove

Another craigslist score is Honey Badger, my new (but actually about half a century old) rowboat. I had been meaning to get get a rowboat for exercise for a few months, but had just about given up finding anything before summer when this Ranger 12 popped up for sale. It was cheap and came with a trailer, so I bought it, launched it, and tied it up to the swimstep. Honey Badger used to be a sailing dingy, so she's a lot more stable and better in nasty weather than most rowing boats, but she still rows pretty easily and tracks beautifully. I've now added a row around the harbor to my daily routine.

Honey Badger

Glamour Shot

 A couple weeks back, Bellingham was hit by extremely strong (60 knts or thereabouts) winds from the south. Apart from having her canvas flybridge cover ripped off for the umpteenth time, Misogi was perfectly fine. Other people were not so lucky. Most of the shrink-wrapped boats got holes ripped in their plastic, and a liveaboard sailboat on our dock had their staysail come partly off the roller-furler and ripped to shreds. The POB's boathouse had one of it's walls ripped right off the floats, and is now slowly sinking and twisting itself apart. I decided to take a walk on the boardwalk, and saw that the South end of the bay was getting hit much harder by the storm. One of the three remaining boats off Fairhaven dragged anchor and wrecked on the ferry dock, and the other two got pummeled pretty thoroughly by the waves.  

Sinking Boathouse

The Osprey in the Storm

Boat Wrecked by Ferry Dock