Away we go!

The big day is finally here. Our crew members have arrived safely. The boat is ready to go. And the weather looks fine for now. We are planning to set sail at high tide at 10:30 this morning. Spot Beacon postings will follow our course. Wish us well!

Boat projects

A week from right now, we should be most of the way to St. Augustine, Florida, our first planned stop after having set sail from Savannah on Saturday, May 11. In the meantime, Nan and I have been chipping away at our endless list of boat projects and making numerous trips to West Marine, Home Depot and Walmart.

Nan is back in Wisconsin for a long weekend celebrating her mother's ninetieth birthday and seeing her family one last time before our departure. She is due back tomorrow evening for the final project push before our crew members start arriving on Wednesday, when Mike and Jim fly in, and then Friday, when Jack joins us.

My progress on exterior projects has been hampered by lousy weather. It has been raining off and on since Thursday, and the winds have been gusting to thirty knots. There are whitecaps on Delegal Creek, and breaking waves are visible out toward Ossabaw Sound. The high tides have been record breaking, flooding huge expanses of the Romerly Marsh. Whispering Jesse has been rolling in her slip and straining at her dock lines, making balance in the cabin a challenge. We are hoping for much calmer conditions after the current low-pressure system moves out. We can handle light winds, but rough seas to start would be no fun at all.

Before the weather turned ugly, we employed the services of Sailor's Nautical Services, as recommended by Joel, who slips his cat ketch at the adjacent pier. Walt Suter spliced our anchor rode to its chain after we cut out a badly rusted shackle, and then he returned to tune our mast with some precise adjustments to the shroud turnbuckles. If only everyone in the marine services business were as reliable and professional as Walt!

Chart plotter

We did make it to Savannah last Friday night, but it was a twelve-hour day of driving. My folks waited up and were happy to see us arrive safely. With Dad's help the next morning, we unloaded the U-Haul trailer containing the piles of boat stuff we had brought along for Whispering Jesse into the garage. How we'll pack it all aboard, I'm still not sure.

Nan and I have spent the last week working on our long list of boat projects, everything from removing an old saltwater wash-down pump to cleaning the bilge. On Wednesday, Ben from Marine Wire Works installed our new Garmin 740s chart plotter, a carbon monoxide detector, and three cigarette lighter-type DC power receptacles. While he was working his wiring magic, Elfin (his real name) the diesel mechanic stopped by to see about removing our Webasto diesel heating system, which takes up significant space in the starboard lazarette and which we will not need in the tropics. He also checked on our refrigerator, which is lately capable of achieving temperatures only in the high forties. When he returns, he will tutor us in the basic maintenance of our diesel engine, for a self-sufficient, less worrisome future.

The chart plotter is a huge improvement for the boat, so much better than basic GPS and paper charts. It is mounted on an articulated arm next to the companionway, where the antiquated Furuno GPS was. I went with that location instead of mounting it on the binnacle because the installation instructions advised against a location too near the boat's compass. Ben poo-pooed this, but he agreed that having it in the companionway meant that we didn't need to worry as much about theft. Even in its somewhat sheltered location, the chart plotter's built-in antenna is good enough to pull in strong satellite signals, so there was no need to install the external antenna I had bought. I will be returning it to West Marine, along with the expensive stern rail mount I ordered for it.

Today, I am varnishing all the new wooden parts I have made or bought: an outboard motor storage mount for the stern rail, a beverage holder for the binnacle, a teak leg for the binnacle table, and the cut-out frames I made last fall. The boat has many wooden components, like the cap rail and the cabin-top "eyebrow," and these new wooden parts will add some useful, good-looking accents. Time to go brush on another coat...

On the road

Nan and I are holed up in a Holiday Inn Express in Forrest City, Arkansas, about fifty miles west of Memphis. We decided to get off the highway late this afternoon when the rain was falling hard enough to completely obscure the amorphous blobs passing us without their lights on. We had hoped to make it as far as Birmingham, Alabama, but the weather did not cooperate. We may arrive in Savannah a day late, but it would beat ending up in a ditch like the unlucky hydroplaners we passed earlier today.

Yesterday afternoon, we made it to Bentonville, Arkansas as planned. Nan's sister Monica and Monica's partner Vicky made us welcome in their beautiful home. Scout made himself at home with their two dogs and ten cats, which is good because he will be spending the next seven or so weeks with them. Nan and I decided early on in the planning for our sailing trip to Isla Mujeres that Scout should not sail with us. He has almost no experience with being on a boat, and if he got sick or injured, we would never forgive ourselves. Instead, Nan will fly back to get him in early June, after we are safely settled at El Milagro Marina.

The photo from this morning shows Nan, Monica, Bella and Scout just before Nan and I said good-bye to Scout and were escorted by Monica and the dogs out to the interstate. We can't thank you enough, Monica and Vicky!

To the moon

As my 1995 Honda Passport's odometer approached 200,000 miles, I joked that I wanted to take it "to the moon." The average distance to the moon from earth is 238,857 miles, and I figured if I had made it this far, the additional 40,000 or so miles would be a cinch. Alas, it was not to be. I sold my Honda this past Friday to the gentleman in the photo, Perry. He was pretty happy. I was pretty melancholy. Eighteen years is a long time to hang onto a vehicle, and it was not an easy transition. But it's a part of the plan, which makes it worth it. Tomorrow, we will begin our drive east to Savannah, where Whispering Jesse is waiting for us to sail her to Mexico. The adventure begins.

Island transportation

For Christmas this past year, Nan and I gave our little family the gift of transportation for our upcoming adventure living on our boat in Isla Mujeres: folding bikes for us and a dog trailer for Scout. Since then, the weather has been so lousy that we haven't been able to try them out, but we were able to take advantage of a beautiful Saturday afternoon last weekend.

The bikes and trailer unfolded smoothly, and I had them set up and ready for a test ride in no time. Nan escorted Scout on his leash to the zipped-open back of the trailer, but he was having none of it. It didn't help that when I lifted his front paws into the trailer, the weight shift caused the attached bike to crash over on its side, which spooked Scout pretty badly. Then Nan came up with a brilliant idea: put him in through the front of the trailer instead. I unzipped the main front flap, lifted Scout and placed him inside the trailer. The angled front is what makes this possible. I held him in place while I attached his collar loop to the trailer's inside harness, then I pushed his head through the smaller opening, zipped shut the larger opening, and he was ready to go. Nan and I walked the bike and trailer for a few yards, and the motion didn't freak Scout out, so I got on the bike and started riding. It was a little awkward pulling the heavy load, but it worked just fine until I tried to go up a hill. The bikes are single-speed, and I stood to put pressure on the pedals, causing the trailer to jerk with each downward pedal. Scout freaked out, spinning around in the trailer. I got off the bike and walked it the rest of the way, and Scout calmed down.

With a little practice and some positive experiences, I think we can get Scout to ride comfortably in the trailer, which will make transportation on Isla Mujeres faster and give us a wider range than walking would. Who knows, maybe he'll even learn to enjoy it.

Air conditioning

For the nearly three years we have owned Whispering Jesse, our 1980 Valiant 40, I have planned to replace the installed Webasto diesel heating system with a Webasto central air conditioning system. My thinking has been that I could just reuse the existing vents and ducts, and replace the one unit with the other. The only problem I could see was the expense. The air conditioning unit, seawater intake kit and basic duct work would add up to almost $2400, plus installation, which could easily run another $2000.

I was talking on the phone with my father about boat projects a few weeks ago, and he asked me why I wasn't considering a portable air conditioner like the ones he had seen at Best Buy. I told him we had personal experience with one in Isla Mujeres when our rented apartment's main air conditioner stopped working. It wasn't very effective. But my father's idea got me thinking about the air conditioners I have seen on sailboat cabin tops blowing cool air in through open hatches. After I got off the phone, I checked West Marine's website and found that they carried their own model that did exactly that, but it was over $1700 after you added in the cloth hood and rubber air deflector. Searching the Web, I discovered that the original model was produced by Cruisair. I went to eBay on a whim to see if there were any used ones for sale and was surprised to find three of them. I put in a bid on the one that appeared to be in the best condition, the seller offered a counter-bid, and I accepted it. It was a good deal at less than a third the price of the West Marine one, even with the expensive shipping--it weighs almost eighty pounds! I had it shipped to my folks' house in Savannah so I could try it out on the boat while I was out there.

I'm happy to report that the new (to us) Cruisair air conditioner works well. After lugging the unit into place at the most central hatch, located just forward of the mast, I covered the open hatch and unit with the included hood, plugged in the power cord and turned the unit on from inside the cabin, where the controls are located. Cool air poured out immediately, and the fan noise was not too bad, like light white noise. When I went up on the deck to check the unit from that angle, I noticed that there was water around it on the deck, which would be expected from condensation, but it was minor and would be drained off by the scuppers.

I could see only two issues I would need to resolve. The first was that the hood did not fit snugly around the base of the hatch, but I think I can fix that with some bungee cords. The second was that the unit was not level due to its position at the lip of the hatch, though it probably needed to be if the bubble level on the top of the case was any indication. I found a block of wood in the marina dumpster left over from a recent construction project and put it under the forward edge of the unit. The bubble leveled right out.

When it's not living on the deck, the air conditioner will need to be manhandled down into the cabin and stored in the V-berth, which will end up being more of a large closet than a possible guest room once we get where we are going. My hope is that the air conditioner, in combination with sun shades rigged above the decks, will keep us tolerably cool in tropical marinas, especially at night when we're trying to sleep. We will see.

Another trip to Savannah

Hello from Savannah. I arrived here Saturday morning on the red-eye from points west. The weather has been mostly cool and windy, which has kept me off the golf courses and focused on boat projects. On Sunday, I was able to get the Aries wind vane removed from Whispering Jesse's stern, as the photo I took yesterday shows. It required turning the boat diagonally in its slip for pier access to the stern and then squeezing down inside the starboard lazarette with a wrench to keep the nuts from spinning while Billy and Garrett from the marina ratcheted off the bolts from the outside. We managed to remove the entire apparatus without dropping it or any tools into the water, which was more difficult than it sounds.

It was critical to remove the wind vane as my first project because Ray, the boat's previous owner, was driving down from Pennsylvania on Monday to pick it up. A gentleman from Atlanta had expressed an interest based on my previous blog post but later changed his mind. I thought I would end up advertising it for sale on Craigslist, but then Ray contacted me out of the blue. He has a new "project" sailboat and wanted wind vane self-steering for it, something he is very familiar with from his twenty years of experience with the Aries on his previous boat, which is now my boat. We reached a favorable deal and he mailed me a check.

It was good to see Ray. We had met only briefly in May 2010, when we took the boat, then named Little Walk, for a sail in Chesapeake Bay, along with Bob the broker and my friend John Kretschmer, who flew up from Fort Lauderdale to help me evaluate the boat for purchase. Ray had given me a thorough tour then and filled my head with too many details about the boat's many systems. Seeing him again after three years of ownership was an opportunity to get answers to my many questions.

Ray was pleased with the refit work. He stopped on the pier to admire his old boat in the last light of day and then breathed in its smell from the foot of the companionway steps. We dropped off his duffel bag and sleeping bag in the aft berth, where he would be spending the night, and took a brief look around the cabin. He lifted the bilge covers and had me flip the bilge pump switch to manual to clear a small accumulation of water, though we were unsure why it had not cleared with the switch set to automatic. I told him the refrigeration was not working well, and he showed me how to tell if the compressor was kicking in. We adjusted the rheostat in the fridge to the mid-point and checked the thermometer I had hanging in there, with the idea of checking it again when we returned from dinner.

The fridge was a few degrees cooler when we returned but still not cold enough to make ice. We turned on the cabin lights and used a flashlight to check the Webasto diesel heating system. Ray had installed it when he was living on the boat through the winter in Boston Harbor many years ago, but Nan's and my future sailing plans are much more tropical, so I told him I would be taking it out and putting in an air conditioner instead. He told me to take care with the removal of the components because they would have good resale value. If any readers are interested, please contact me by email using the address under "View my complete profile", or it may be time to consider Craigslist again.

Earlier on Monday, I met at the boat with Kevin, a project manager from Thunderbolt Marine, to discuss some boat projects that are beyond my abilities. The first was the removal of the Webasto system, but now it's a couple of days later and I already have two of the five heat exchangers removed. I expect to have the other three removed by the end of the day today. But I will still need some professional help getting the main unit out of the starboard lazarette, replumbing the fuel line, and closing off the exhaust through-hull. Kevin and I also discussed the refrigerator and several installations: the Garmin chartplotter and antenna I purchased during my last trip to Savannah; a marine-grade carbon monoxide detector; two or three cigarette-lighter-type electrical adapters; and a macerator pump for overboard pump-out of the head's holding tank. Kevin's specialty is fiberglass and paint, and he had some good ideas as we walked around the boat looking at various dings and scrapes that need touching up, including the four new scars on the stern where the wind vane used to be.

It's time to get back to the boat. More later...

CORRECTION: I discovered this afternoon that the people who installed the new engine took out the heat exchanger that was in the engine room, so there are four now, not five. And I am happy to report that they have all been removed. Ah, storage space!

Weather Fax

One of the capabilities I have wanted for the boat is the ability to receive weather faxes while out at sea. When I first started looking into it, I was under the impression that it required an expensive single side band (SSB) radio, like what licensed amateur radio operators use. But while searching the Internet one day, I found a British website that advertised a weather fax package consisting of a Grundig shortwave/SSB radio and a software application called Mscan Meteo. The idea was to run a simple audio cable between the radio's headphone jack and a computer's microphone jack, tune the radio to a weather fax frequency, and then watch as the software draws a weather map right on your computer screen. What could be easier and less expensive than that?

I didn't want to place an overseas order or deal with the Euro exchange rate, so I started looking to see what was available closer to home. I went to the Mscan website (mscan.com) and downloaded a trial version of the Meteo Pro software to my laptop. There's not much to look at without a radio signal, though, so I shopped for the shortwave/SSB radio mentioned in the British website, the Grundig G3 Globe Traveler. I found it for sale on the Landfall Navigation website (landfallnavigation.com), where I had recently purchased a courtesy flag, but a nice person there informed me that the radio had been discontinued. Thinking there must be a few still unsold somewhere, I found one at Amazon.com for $99.99, well below the $150.00 retail price. When it arrived, I put the whole package together, using an audio cable I already had, and started experimenting.

I tuned to the American frequencies I found in Meteo's help screen and discovered that the weather maps they offer focus on different coastal areas depending on the signal's origin: Boston for the North Atlantic; New Orleans for the Caribbean; and Point Reyes for the Pacific. I focused on the New Orleans signals because the Caribbean is my area of sailing interest. With a little fine tuning of both the radio and the software, I was able to get a weather fax to draw on the screen, but then a banner appeared informing me that I was using an unregistered version of the software. It made the weather fax almost unreadable. I checked to see what it would cost to register the software: $239.00! Back to the Internet, where I found a shareware program called SeaTTY that serves the same basic function for a $35.00 registration fee and does not block its weather faxes with banners to encourage registration.

Tuning in the New Orleans frequencies from western Colorado has not been easy. The signals are not very clean, so the weather faxes are also not very clean. I imagine that if I was closer to the point of origin, I would get a much better result, something closer in quality to the weather fax at the top of this post, which was taken from NOAA's radiofax page (weather.noaa.gov/fax/gulf.shtml). When I head out to Savannah for another round of boat projects at the end of this week, I will take the whole weather fax kit with me to see how it does in a place where it could be really useful. More on that later...

The Man in the Moon

One of my oldest memories is one I revisit frequently, whenever I look up at the night sky and see a full moon. I was reminded of it again this past Monday, as I watched the full moon rise from the window of a jet flying to Cincinnati for a business training.

It must be the summer of 1961. I have just turned three. My little brother Stuart, my baby sister Jane and I are finishing bowls of ice cream at Grandpa and Grandma Lichty's house in Bloomfield, Iowa. My other sister, Susan, is not yet born. We kids are alone at the kitchen table with Grandpa, Jane in a high chair. Grandpa gets up from the table, collects our bowls and spoons, and walks them over to the sink. As he washes them, he looks out the kitchen window and sees the full moon. He calls me over and points. "Do you know what that is, John?" I follow his finger, raise one of my own, smile that I do know, and say, "The moon!" He smiles back. "Can you see the man in the moon?" I look hard at the bright, blue-gray shapes and try in my imagination to make them look like a face. I don't see it. I see a marble, like the ones Grandpa is teaching me to shoot, but I don't say so. He senses my frustration, puts his hand on my shoulder and pats it. "Keep trying. You'll see it."

All these years later, I still look hard at the full moon, willing the shapes to resemble a face, but they never do.