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

Wood Stove

    After a month or two or measuring, searching the internet, and worrying about burning the boat down, we finally went and got a wood stove. We decided on a Morso 1440 "Squirrel,"  which is essentially a 14"x14"x27" box made of cast iron and fitted with a small window and frilly little legs. Morsos are made in Denmark, and have a whole bunch of complicated little combustion chambers that allow them to meet European emissions standards (and allow us to burn wood without our neighbors finding out). It also has heat shielding on the back, so we were able to put it only 6" away from the wooden cabin wall. Unfortunately, all this fanciness comes with a bit of a downside- weight. The little bugger weighs somewhere around 200 pounds, and it was a bit of a struggle to get it onto the boat and down the narrow side deck to the cabin.

    Once we got the stove onto the boat, I cut a rectangle out of the carpet, and my mom laid down some tiles. My dad then cut a nice big hole in the ceiling on a miraculously non-rainy day, and everyone spent a few hours grappling with the chimney. Eventually, everything was aligned and properly assembled, and after waiting a few days for all the caulk and sealant to dry; we fired it up. Unfortunately, we didn't know that new wood stoves are typically rubbed down with oil, and that your supposed to start them outside to let it all burn off. Instead, all that oil burned off inside Misogi, and the entire boat filled up with a foul-smelling blue haze. We had to open all of the doors and windows on a 40 degree day, and the boat smelled vaguely like burning oil for about a week afterwards.

   Now that all the oil has burned off, the little Morso is looking like the perfect stove for Misogi. It's pretty efficient with wood once it gets warmed up, it keeps the wall behind it fairly cool, and it gets the salon up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature outside is around freezing. We now only use the diesel furnace in the mornings, which is very nice considering that it managed to burn through 30 gallons of fuel last month. The only disadvantage to wood heat so far has been that only the salon and pilothouse are properly heated; the staterooms and heads stay down around 58 degrees. I now end up staying awake as long as possible to avoid getting into a refrigerated bed.

Tile

Temporary Skylight

Everything Put Together

The Chimney

My Dad with His Chimney

It Lives!

General Update

     We've been living aboard for a couple weeks now (or maybe a few; I can't remember and am too lazy to do the mental math), and have gotten mostly moved in. The cardboard boxes of stuff are finally out of the salon, and their contents squirreled away in the proper drawers and cupboards. Our diesel furnace, which went kaput 2 days after we moved, has been replaced with a newer and safer model, so we finally have heat. Most importantly, however, I have moved my favorite potted plants aboard. I had been storing them on Cornwall's front porch, but some sub-humanly vile jerk smashed the pots on the sidewalk, resulting in an emergency run to Fred Meyers for more pots and soil. Luckily, I got the plants in their new pots soon enough, and they all survived. The plants are now scattered around the pilothouse. I stuck them down with museum putty, so hopefully we won't be assaulted by flying cacti next time the boat starts rocking.

    Speaking of rocking, we had our first proper storm on Misogi this week. 60 MPH winds combined with a very high tide resulted in waves smashing over the breakwater and two foot swells within the harbor. The docks, which are fairly rigid concrete structures, were bucking and undulating; and Misogi was rocking enough to make dishes slide around. I thought it was pretty fun.

    The less fun part of the storm was the resulting mess. Although nothing got damaged, the spray coming over the breakwater coated everything (including the cars way up in the parking lot) with a crusty layer of salt. I ended up spending an hour this weekend cleaning the salt off of all of Misogi's windows. Our boat, by the way, has 36 windows. 36 windows is a lot of windows, and most of them are either weirdly shaped and angled, or in hard-to-reach places. It takes great skill and perseverance to clean them all. I did get them all cleaned though, so now I just have to clean the non-window parts of Misogi at some point. That might be even more work.

    The only major problem with parts of the boat that we have restored is black spots on the deck. They're tiny little pitch black speckles that started appearing as soon as we moved Misogi outside, and have been  multiplying rapidly ever since. They don't come off when scrubbed with soap and water, and seems to ooze black pigment when they get wet. We're really hoping that the black spots are just soot from other boat's exhaust, and not a paint defect, because it would really suck to re-kiwigrip all of the decks next summer.

Misogi at Night

Home is Where the Cactus is.

More Cactus

Panorama of Pilothouse Windows (there's too many of them!)

Specks on the Kiwigrip

Living Aboard

We're finally living aboard. It's been about a week since we moved, but a combination of internet problems and school work has kept me from updating the blog. The move went surprisingly smooth; my parents hired 4 college students, and we put all of the contents of our house into the basement of I Street, a vacant apartment in Cornwall, and the boat in only four hours. In fact, it went so quickly and efficiently that I doubt we'll be able to remember where we put anything. Amazingly, all of our clothes, utensils, cooking hardware, tools, and a few bits of art managed to fit on Misogi. She has an amazing amount of weird-shaped storage tucked into every possible nook and cranny. There is a hand-sized door in the galley that leads to a cavernous cupboard about the size of a small dog, a drawer under my bed that is a 7-sided polygon, and closets with small doors that turn out to be big enough to stand up in. 

We hired a professional cleaning person to try to salvage the carpet and counter tops, and somehow they succeeded. The boat is cleaner than it's been in 9 months and smells like food and diesel instead of wet dog. My bed is very comfortable, although because of the list of the boat (we're still trying to figure out howto fix that) I keep falling out. All the sinks have hot and cold running water, and the toilets are... acceptable. All in all, Misogi is pretty comfortable, and mostly dry inside.

Unfortunately, not everything has gone so well. The refrigerator barely keeps food cold, the oven and range didn't work until yesterday, and the diesel furnace is too sketchy and dangerous to use. So, we have no heat. A leak has developed under the hatch to the flybridge, which is really quite vexing because it was a part of the boat that we rebuilt. I have a plan for fixing the leak (caulk everywhere!), and the heating issue will hopefully be solved by a new furnace and wood stove before temperatures drop below freezing.

For those of you curious about what Misogi looks like inside, I tried to take some pictures. There's not very many, because I discovered that most of the rooms are too small and awkwardly shaped to photograph, but here they are:

Salon and Galley (with messy counters), looking forward. 

Salon, looking aft.

Pilothouse

Pilothouse

Scary stairs leading to staterooms.

My parents' room (well, half of it).

Spare stateroom

My room

Moved (the boat).

Today we finally moved the boat back into our slip! It was a beautiful, sunny day with light winds and not much current, so the maneuvering was pretty easy. I got to do all the driving, and it went pretty well except for almost scraping a piling on the docking bit. Misogi responds to the controls really quickly with her huge (4 foot diameter!) props, and maneuvering her is actually easier than Mariah was. I had to back Misogi out of the boathouse, which was pretty tight, then pivot 90 degrees and back her all the way down the side channel. I swung her around in the main channel, and drove forward straight over to our slip. Embarrassingly, my first docking attempt was a bit cock-eyed, so I had to back out and try a second time. Thankfully, the second attempt went swimmingly  (or floatingly?), and Misogi is now tied up at good ol' gate 5. 

All of the decks now have kiwi-grip and are theoretically watertight, and there's only a few railings and gutters to install before the exterior is finished. Misogi's interior is extremely dirty, but the electrical system is adequately functional for living aboard, as are the water and sewage systems. Unfortunately, the heating system doesn't work, and we will probably have to replace all the fluid and bleed the air out before it will work again. Misogi's rear end is impressively ugly with the temporary roof and stained canvas, so hopefully we will get motivated to finish replacing the back deck before too long. Everything else is fairly pretty though, which is good because we're moving aboard in 5 days!

Misogi and her temporarily ugly butt getting backed out of the boathouse.

Driving Misogi Backwards Down the Channel

Coming in for the Landing

Scraping the Dock a Little Bit... 

Kiwigrip

 Unfortunately, school has started. I now have a lot less time to work on the boat, but it is 99.99% watertight now. Most of the remaining work is in painting and working on the electrical system. We have sold our house, and have to move out of it by October 15th, so we have a proper deadline to work with now. I finished up the corner on the port side deck by installing some "water funnel things" between frames. They will drain water towards the scuppers and prevent it from pooling and rotting out the bases of the frames. My dad did some sketchy temporary plywood and epoxy patches on the flybridge; hopefully they won't rot out too soon. David has finished up most of the redneck-ish temporary roof for the back deck. It looks really, really, REALLY ugly. I'll post some pictures of it when it's done.

My mom and aunt have managed to finish varnishing and paint nearly half the boat over the last couple of weeks. Today they put Kiwigrip (a very tough and waterproof rubberized deck paint) on the foredeck. Hopefully we'll have Kiwigrip on all of the decks before we're out of the boathouse.

Water Funnel Thing

 

New Plywood

New Name

Foredeck Before Kiwigrip

Foredeck After Kiwigrip

Mom, Dad, and Aunt Painting

Kiwigrip Seen From Flybridge