Tag Archives: catana

Pushing to the Finish

One more sleep to till daybreak.. Uh? Loosing your mind??.. Of course daybreak happens after a sleep. Lets try this again, One more sleep till we arrive, there will be plenty of naps between here and there.

Sun is out, wind is cooperating and giving us a boost to arrive in on Thursday morning well ahead of the changing weather. Not taking any chances tho, burning some diesel to make sure. Temperature is brisk, so tolerable with 3 layers on. I’m sure 19C/65F degrees is warm for some.. but it’s darned cold at night. And the cold front hasn’t even arrived yet.

Finally saw sails on the horizon to further the proof that we are going some where. And even more interesting is that we all have ESP and we can read each others mind even if we are miles apart. Imagine the possibilities.

In almost synchronized swimming precision, we all decided to raise the canvas at the same time. Well could have been daybreak and the ‘slow wind’ from over night was starting to fill in enough to use it as propulsion instead of just making noise flapping back and forth.

Ready set raise!

Doing pretty good on finishing the pork products, a couple of chops will be donated to the incinerator as we can’t eat everything. And there is no way Christine will let the pulled pork go to anywhere else, so that’s for lunch and to be followed with Gumbo for dinner since its getting cold..

All in all, nothing but making the miles today, and checking on boats that also on this hear fun passage. And fresh baked cookies, now time for another one of those naps. And restraint, save some cookies for the officials. Must save cookies… Must save cookies.

All good all day, Last night out. 90 miles to go, nice winds, decent seas, scattered clouds

Cheers to tomorrow’s sunrise and learning to speak Kiwi again. Sweet As.

Penultimate sailing day is spectacular

Still one reef in the main, couple wraps on the foresail but still managed to squeak out 196miles toward destination in a 24 hour period. Not too shabby. The sun is out, the waves are not being (&(@#&$ (obnoxious) so it’s pretty spectacular.

Gorgeous day

Well the Jib fairlead decided it wasn’t happy with the strain of its job, so it parted ways. After all they have been through these past few years, couldn’t they keep it together a few more days? He hadn’t even been expressing his discontent. He had come onboard only a couple of years ago as replacement when his predecessor did the same thing. Seems that stainless pivot point isn’t really up to keeping them together, but no worries, nothing a little bit of creative macrame bondage can’t solve temporarily. Call it therapy. When we tack, I’ll clean that up a when it’s not under load.

Knots that bind us together

Burning though the meats that are illegal, marinated some pork loin to create some Vietnamese Bahn Mi sammiches, Mexican style. Roll’em up in tortilla with the last of the fresh veggies. Might have made too much, we still have to have dinner.

Wind will die later tonight and on will come the drone of the engines to keep us going toward the goal.

250 miles to go.
All well on board, except its getting colder, layers are being added now 19c, or 66F inside the cabin.

Wash down pump replacement

Servicing our Girl: Sugar Shack

What do you do on a beautiful day in paradise?  Get dirty?  We had a few boat projects that needed to be completed in calm weather (no wind and no swell).  So, we set out to do some maintenance and servicing of both Sugar Shack and Sweetie (our dinghy). 

Anchored in calm waters with very little breeze made it much easier to accomplish these specific projects.  We dropped the hook at North Totegegie where we had beautiful views. 

Servicing the Boat in Paradise

Servicing the Boat in Paradise

Windlass Service

What is a windlass?  It is an electric wench that raises and lowers our anchor and anchor chain. It is a very important part of our boat as it would make anchoring nearly impossible without it.  In a pinch, we can manually raise and lower our anchor using the hand crank method.  However, we have 100 meters of 10mm stainless steel chain attached to a Spade x140 anchor that weighs in at over 65lbs.  Imagine cranking all that chain and anchor up by hand – no thank you!

Our Lewmar Ocean 3 windlass (2000 watt) was running a little slow when raising the chain.  Once it got going it was fine, but the startup was less than optimal.  Not a problem, just needed a little love.  We are at anchor with our anchor chain connected to the windlass.  Can’t rightly service the windlass without removing the anchor chain, right?  First things first, Matt ties a line to the last link of chain (just at the rode) and then secures it to the anchor roller so he could remove the pressure off the windlass.  Then he jumped in the hole (locker) and cleaned the brushes and removed the corrosion.

Servicing the Windlass

Servicing the Windlass

Not yet at 100%…it might require a more comprehensive servicing in a month or two.  For now, it is better than it was and that is good for us (maybe at 95%).  A few days later, Matt took the windlass apart and cleaned all the connections.  He found a loose wire that was the culprit and now the windlass is running perfectly!

Tail Tails

Do you know what a tail tail is?  It doesn’t have anything to do with your posterior or an animal.  A tail tail on a boat is an indicator of how your sails are trimmed while underway.  They are small, light pieces of fabric attached to the sail.  When the sail is trimmed correctly, the tail tails on the windward (inside) and leeward (outside) of the sail will stream backwards.  That’s when life is good.  If the sail needs trimming the tail tail will either fly up or down indicating the need to tighten or loosen the jib sheet (working line) to give you optimal performance.

Our tail tails were very sad and in need of servicing.  Easy enough job when there is no wind.  Matt had to drop the sail onto the deck in order reach all the tail tails.  You don’t want to do this in windy conditions as your jib will be flopping all over the place.  We bought a kit which made replacing them super easy.

Washdown Pump

Our Jabsco washdown pump is located in a locker near the mast.  This pump provides pressure to our hose to enable us to wash down the boat, the anchor chain and pretty much anything we need.  It is great because we can use it with salt water or fresh water depending on how the valve is turned.  We usually hose things off first with salt water, then do a final rinse with fresh water.  Why is that?  Because we have an abundance of salt water and a very limited amount of fresh water.  Our pump was very corroded as it is in and around salt water and salty air.  It worked, but it was limping along.  Instead of ‘servicing’ we decided to replace her.

The pump is only attached with a few screws and clamps.  Matt had it replaced in under an hour.

Wash down pump replacement

Wash down pump replacement

Servicing Sweetie – Our Dinghy

I had intended on putting the work done to service Sweetie on this blog, but it was so extensive that I ended up giving it her own blog post.  Stay tuned for “Dinghy Spa for Sweetie.”

Events from this blog post occurred during the month of January 2021.  Our blog posts run 8 weeks behind our adventures.