Regrowing our sea legs

We are back on the boat! While our time on land was good, we are happy to be continuing on with our journey, and not just because we are heading to hotter weather. It was great catching up with family and friends (and for me patients too)! We had several nice dinners with family and walks with friends. I didn’t realize just how much I missed everyone. However, being away from the family for most of the time while I worked was really hard. They managed to do a lot of schoolwork and swimming while they were at Kevin’s parents house. I think that helped pass the time and I saw them on weekends. I enjoyed being in a place where I didn’t have to think about how much water I was using, and if the toilets would work. I also liked that I didn’t have to do dishes 3 times a day for a whole month (thank you Mom!). Now, that I have had a break from dishes and Kevin has had a break from boat jobs, we are ready to get back into boat life again.

Kevin and the kids traveled back to the boat 4 days before myself. The plan was for them to get there and get some jobs done while they waited for me. That way, we could leave just a few days later for warmer weather. They managed to do some jobs like installing new hatch handles on the rest of the boards covering the bilges, defrosting the freezer, cleaning the vent hood screen and removing some supervilous cushins occuping space in the bow lockers. However, one of their bigger jobs was rebuilding our windlass. The windlass is the motor and gear machine that helps us lower and raise our anchor. It is a beast of a thing, and has been leaking oil since near the start of our trip. Since, we got a bigger anchor, Kevin also got the windlass a bigger motor and wanted to install this. Unfortunately, it ended up taking them 3 days to take it all apart. It was probably never serviced before and parts of it were almost totally corroded away and other parts wouldn’t come apart. They had to buy separate tools to help pull them apart. They also had to re-build the mounting holes because of the corrosion. Kevin filled the spaces with Marine-Tex, an epoxy putty, and then drilled out the holes for the bolts again. The day after I arrived back, he finally got the last piece off and started the rebuild process. However, turns out the box of rebuild parts, had a mislabeled oil seal for the worm gear, so he had to use the old worm gear. Then, after putting the new motor on, he discovered that the cover for the windlass wouldn’t fit, and he had to put the old motor back on. So, it was 4 days of work with minimal new parts. It was frustrating, to say the least, but the good thing is, it was cleaned, oiled and put back together so it still runs more smoothly and doesn’t leak!

The weather that greeted me when I arrived in Charleston wasn’t that dissimilar to what we get at home. In fact, it was the same temperature, and the day after I arrived there was a rain storm. It poured rain all day and kept us mostly on the boat. Howver, we did go out to buy the tool for pulling apart barings. There was so much rain, that when combined with their unusualy high tides, it caused flooding. Luckily the marina our boat was at had two piers to walk back to land from, because the main one ended in a flooded parking lot. We had rented a truck and were able to drive out of the parking lot and over the flooded roads to the tool store. Apparently, much of the downtown area was also flooded. While I was away, the kids spotted some pretty interesting wildlife along the road to the marina. Our marina is located in a more industrial and infrequently used area of town, and so they rarely saw other cars on the road to the marina. They did see some foxes, some large white birds that seemed to nest on the reeds next to the river that ran along side it, and an american alligator! We truely enjoy seeing all the different animals on the east coast that are not often seen on the west coast.

Monday morning brought bright sunshine, an end to the rain, but not necessarily the wind. Because we were still struggling with putting together the windlass, we decided we had to spend one more day at the marina. We originally were going to leave on Monday and go to anchor by the aircraft carrier again before heading out to Florida. Instead, we spent the morning installing the clean, leak free windlass. Then, because we finished up in the early afternoon, we headed downtown to walk along the seawall and check out the old french quarter and surrounding areas. It is full of many well preserved old houses, both smaller and much larger. As well, there are old churches and buildings. We stopped at the taco shop, Ruru’s, for dinner, because my family said I couldn’t miss out on this yummy food they discovered while I was away. Also in the old town, there are many very old cobblestone streets and reminants of the old city wall that used to surround Charleston. The wall is now mostly buried underground, but you can see parts of it in some of the streets. Chareleston is really quite a lovely city to visit and we were glad to spend this last evening here, not knowing when or if we will be back. To top off all the picturesque houses, there were Christmas decorations adding extra colour to the streets.

The next morning we managed to get ourselves off the dock just before noon, after picking up a few more bins to store stuff in. Now that our bowlockers have more space, we are going to move some of the stuff that is in the crew cabin/storage area into bins in the bowlockers. This way, when we have guests they will not be buried under all our stuff! The bins had to be big enough to hold stuff but small enough to fit through the round hatches that are the entrances to the bowlockers. There is only about 36cm of clearance. We found some, although most are colored red and green.

We motored out of the marina and under the bridge to the main harbour where we were able to put up our mainsail before heading out to sea. We had good wind forcasted for the sail down to St.Augustine Florida, and we actually got it this time! We either motor sailed or just sailed all the way down. The downside of course, was that there were lots of waves to go with the wind. It was a rock ride and we were happy when we arrived in St. Augustine the next afternoon. When we left Charleston it seemed like we were the only cruisers left behind, but in St. Augustine we found main anchorage full and had to ‘park’ our boat a little farther out. Luckily it was still an easy dinghy ride away. I have always said I actually like dinghy-life, but admittedly, in cooler weather it isn’t quite as fun. We had dinner on the boat and turned in early because the waves during our passage didn’t afford us much sleep. The other thing that happened on passage was that our helm seat broke! Simon, Halyna and I were sitting together on it listening to Christmas carols, and Simon was boucing us back and forth with his feet on the helm station. We heard a loud crack and the bottom screws came right through the fiberglass. The seat was pretty unstable for the rest of the night and needed to be fixed right away.

We woke in St. Augustine with slightly warmer weather (only needing a sweater now during the day) and started working on the helm seat repair right away. We took the seat off, ground down the holes that were there and removed the sticky residue that was left behind by the foam that padded the seats. While Owen and I were doing this, Kevin and Halyna were fixing the starboard aft bilge pump that stopped working. Turns out it was just a loose breaker. Thankful for easy jobs! We got back to the seat when we returned from our afternoon and evening on shore. Our next step in fixing the helm seat was to re-build up the fiberglass that the seat attached to, including filling in the holes. We used 4 layers of fibreglass and a slow drying epoxy (it was all we had). The work was tricky because the stand that the helm seat attaches to is very small and access to the inside of it is through two 10 cm holes. We had our wrench on a leash so that if we dropped it, it didn’t fall down into a crevass in the boat that we couldn’t get to. After applying the fiberglass we had to wait just about 24 hours for it to cure before we could drill out the new holes and re-attach the seat. Which meant that we had to start our next passage without a helm seat!

We did manage to go to shore to enjoy St. Augustine. We were told it was a great place to visit and it stood up to it’s reputation. There are so many old buildings and impressive old hotels in the old town. It is very touristy, but still enjoyable to check out. There was also a fort, but we decided we would skip this fort and just get some walking in. We also stopped at a Pirate Museum. All of us thoroughly enjoyed learning about the pirates that used to pilage the area and there was even the worlds only remaining pirate treasure chest to check out, and fake canons to blast. We got Kevin a new mug, because he has the worse luck with mugs and his one from Charleston is already broken. We also had ‘America’s second best’ pizza by the slice and a tasty dinner before heading back to the boat to work on the seat. St. Augustine was particularly beautiful this time of year, because it was completely lit up with Christmas lights. I don’t think there was a single tree or building in old town that wasn’t lit up, and the whole city glowed across the water to our boat. The stop in St. Augustine was also a nice one because of how easy they make it for cruisers/boaters to visit. You can get access to the dinghy dock, along with laundry facilities and washrooms, for $12 a day at the City Municipal Dock, which is right downtown.

That evening we read the forecast for the following day. We were hoping to go from St. Augustine to West Palm Beach on another overnight sail. Unfortuantely, although the skys were clear, the winds were supposed to be subdued and there were supposed to be large waves. Looking ahead though, things were just going to get worse and we had some Christmas gifts to pick up in Fort Lauderdale. We decided we would go and see what it was like. We had a back up plan to stop in Ponce de Leon Inlet if needed. Fortunately, the waves, although choppy, were tolerable and there was enough wind to put up the sails (although one motor was still on to keep up our speed). The waters got quite a bit more rough in the early night, but then smoothed again while we went around Cape Canaveral. Right before it got really rough, we put the helm seat back in place. We were happy to have a place to sit down for the long sail. Even better, we were treated to a close up viewing of a rocket launch as we rounded the cape at midnight. It was spectactular to see the rocket take off less than 10nm off our starboard beam and race through the sky over our boat. A bucket list item for Kevin and Owen.

Now were are nearing the end of our passage and West Palm Beach as I write this post. We look forward to being here for several days, especially for Christmas, before heading to the Bahamas. We had wanted to be in the Bahamas for Christmas, but it would require heavy sailing and probably a passage over Christmas eve, which we didn’t want to do. Santa can’t miss our boat!

Merry Christmas to all my readers! I hope the holidays are good for you and you have lots of time with family and friends, and breaks from work and your busy lives.