Success!

We now have installed our new VHF radio.

Using the new radio, accessible from inside and out in the cockpit

 The installation was not quite plug 'n' play, but took only a couple of days once we set our minds to it.  We installed it right where the old VHF was located, which gives us access to the radio from inside the cabin and outside into the cockpit.  It has many features, including an internal GPS locator, and displays our speed, course, location, and other useful information.  Best of all, and the big reason we wanted it, is a feature called AIS - Automated Identification System.  All commercial ships are now required to transmit information about their vessel, including name, destination, and last port of call.  The new radio calculates the closest point for our two vessels, and has an alarm if a collision could happen.  Then we can take action - calling the ship to make sure they see us, and changing our own course or speed.  We're pretty happy to have it.

Installation - sorting out the rat's maze of electrical wires

Standard Horizon GX-2200

I have a new nickname, "Radio Gal", and I get up early to listen to the weather report and check in with our radio nets on our SSB radio.  It will be our lifeline when we are out to sea.  I also managed to get my laptop computer hooked up to the radio, through a small box called "Pactor", that enables us to send and receive short emails while at sea.

Talking away - to others hundreds of miles away!

SSB and Ham Radio

ICOM IC-M710 Marine SSB and Ham Radio with Pactor to the side

It's been a long haul, but we are getting close to setting sail!

New Engine Insulation

While we waited for a coolant system hose to be shipped to the island for our engine, we decided to tackle a job that we have put off for over five years:  replacing the sound insulation on our engine box.

Engine box after grinding down to the wood and glue

The engine box had foam insulation with lead backing and a nice shiny aluminum front at one time.  As it started to deteriorate, we tried taping it on and then just had to start ripping it out.  Finally we scraped the insides and just left it that way.  The sound of the engine was considerably louder when we were under power, and there is a greater risk of fire spreading more quickly through a wooden box.  We used the drill and a couple of different grinding wheels to get the rest of the crumbling insulation out.

A messy job

Once it was down to the wood, we took the box over to the boatyard's carpenter, Pedro.  He installed new insulation.

Pedro in his workshop, working on our new insulation

Pedro is the friendliest worker amongst a congenial crew here at the boatyard.  Being the only carpenter, he is busy all the time.  Schooled as an artist in New York, he came into carpentry by working at furniture-making to put himself through college.  He brings an artist's eye to some of the loveliest works of wood I have ever seen.  We are very happy to have Pedro to finish this project - and our voyage home will be quieter if we need to motor for some time to make our goal.

Meanwhile, back at the boat, we made use of a borrowed vacuum cleaner to scrape off the rest of the engine insulation on the stern wall.  This crumbling mess had deposited black, diesel-sodden bits over the top of the engine, which all had to be cleaned off.  Then I went after the engine's rusty bits with light sandpaper, Q-tips and Corrosion Block.  While we had the vacuum, we went over some of the far reaches of the boat, down into the bilge, behind the stove, all places that have not been fully cleaned for years.

Perhaps the best news is that our engine coolant hose came in.  We installed it, along with new hose clamps all over the cooling system, with a minimum of fuss and bother.  Best yet, no leaks or drips!  We have propulsion again!

The People We Meet on Their Boats

Living on a boat has its challenges but also its serendipitous moments.  We meet some interesting people in the course of their travels.  People sail into the boatyard to haul their boats, work on them, and then store their boats or sail away.  It's a very different kind of community, one whose makeup changes every week.  Recently many boats have sailed away, their projects completed.

In the slip next to us was a boat that had just been purchased by an engaging Dutch couple.  It was their first boat, and they flew to the neighboring island of Aruba to see what life aboard a boat in the Caribbean would be like.

Wietze and Ria

Wiri, a Dutch boat next door

They sailed the boat from Aruba to Curacao, and were busy every day with projects, like everyone else around us.  They are appealing and friendly, quick with a smile and conversation.  Their boat is an aluminum cutter rigged sloop.  We don't see many aluminum boats; most sailboats here are made out of fiberglass, like ours.  We enjoyed their company for several weeks, and now they have flown back to Holland until next October.

Ferro-cement sailboat

On the other side of us is an industrious Austrian couple with a very unusual boat, made out of cement.  It is a tidy rig, with two masts, a ketch with many hand-made add-ons, and they are busy all day with new projects.  They are also friendly, but will be sailing away to other parts of the Caribbean next week.  They carry full-size bicycles on their boat to get around on the islands when they come into port.  It's still hard to believe that cement can make up a floating hull.

Sparkman and Stephens 1963 sailboat

Down the dock is one of the more compelling characters we have met recently, Pablo.  He is a US Coast Guard certified captain, and has been tasked with getting this boat ready to sail and delivering it to Maine.  It is one of the few wooden boats here, and was made in 1963.  Pablo is from New Mexico, and he relocated to New England some years ago to become a lobster fisherman.  He spent six years engaged in commercial fishing on the Grand Banks, like the Perfect Storm boats.  His tales of fishing in all types of weather off the coast leave us spellbound.  He was even swept overboard once, and lived to tell about it!  Whenever our projects leave us despondent we go talk to Pablo.  What he is working on with this much older boat dwarf anything we are doing, and leave us feeling like our projects are all very achievable.  When I first met him, his boat was sinking at the dock in late December - a wooden boat can ship water between its planks, and that's what was happening.  Thankfully it did not go under, due to the timely use of several emergency pumps.  Ibis is almost twice the size of our boat, and all of its systems are more complicated.

The Great Dane

Up "on the hard", as we say, still on land, is my favorite name for a boat.  Great Dane is a steel ketch from Nova Scotia, and has been in the yard for a long time.  We haven't met her owners, but perhaps they are of Danish ancestry.

Highland Breeze

At the end of our dock is the largest boat here, 112 feet long.  It has a crew of four or five, including a captain, cook, engineer, and deckhand.  Everything is automated on this boat - sails go up with the push of a button, the anchor comes up and goes down with hydraulics, along with many more systems that must be continuously maintained.  It is a wondrous machine to behold, but I wouldn't want its maintenance!  The boat has crewed charters, where people fly in to Curacao and spend a few days or weeks aboard, sailing the Caribbean.

Just a few of the more interesting boats and people we have gotten to know here in Curacao.

How Hard Can It Be To Change the Oil on a Diesel Engine?!

This week's agenda included addressing the diesel engine on our sailboat.  A dirty secret among sailors is how often we turn the key and fire up the "iron jenny" (jenny is slang for the headsail, or Genoa jib).  We sailors are almost never happy with the wind - there's too much of it, too little, or it's from the wrong direction to get where we want to go.  So - we start up the trusty engine and use fuel to get going, or to assist the sails.  We needed to change the oil and inspect the engine, which is now 30 years old, like the rest of the boat.

Our Yanmar diesel engine - access by taking off the stairs and box surrounding it

Changing the oil is one of the messiest jobs on the boat, and we tend to avoid it as long as we possibly can.  In fact, neither of us really likes maintaining the engine, and it drops down to the bottom of any to-do list we make.  Nonetheless, we had to take the bull by the horns and get to it.  The whole process is like parking your car in the living room and taking it apart, while trying not to spray black oil around our living and kitchen quarters.

We use a hand pump to get the oil out.  Long ago, I changed the oil on all of my cars.  That was an easy process compared to this - cars have a handy nut at the bottom of the oil pan, you are working on it in a garage with a cement floor, and a minimum of fuss and bother gets the whole job done quickly.  Not so here - the hand pump and its lengths of hose tend to get away from us and dribble on the rugs, the cushions, the walls, the floor - everywhere but on the plastic sheeting and newspapers we have put down.  More than two hands are always needed to keep the pump's hoses more or less where they should be.  Then the oil filter has to come off - and it drips oil all over as well.

With the engine and transmission in full view, we then decided to check the transmission fluid.  It has its own handy dipstick just behind the engine.  We knew something was amiss when Larry said, "Does this thing screw out?  It's just pulling up and out...."  And half of the dipstick came up in his hand.  The other half, a plastic screw assembly, remained firmly stuck in the transmission.  I often tell Larry that all this problem-solving on the fly we do on the boat is really good mental exercise, and he won't get such made-to-order mind joggling in a nursing home later.  He tried screwdrivers of various shapes, needle-nose pliers, and finally - in a burst of a mental ah-HA moment, a wire crimpers that fit perfectly in the hole left by the remaining end of the dipstick.

Transmission Dipstick - broken in two

So, I left the boat to go up to the mechanics' shop in the boatyard.  How convenient we are finding these problems here - just get on the dock and walk to the shop!  Jack, the guy in charge, sees more problems on boats of all types every day.  He had just the part to fit and I left with a new dipstick.  In Venezuela, for instance, this would be an insolvable problem, and we would be left trying to Super-Glue the old part back together.  Spare parts are impossible to find there.  But here in Curacao they abound.  What they don't have can be shipped in.

Now, with everything put back together on the engine, the moment had come.  Turn the key and see if the engine starts, and observe it carefully for problems.  OH NO - water dripping from the raw water pump!  We have had problems with this in the past - and replaced the pump five years ago.  Here's where some of the corrosion that has suspiciously been invading the left side of the engine.

Larry trying to combat the rust overtaking the engine

The pesky water pump

So, today has been another day with Mr. Engine.  We've had the pump off before, but we both had conveniently forgotten how it was done, and need to figure it out again.  The manual for the engine we have has many helpful diagrams, but the text tends to say "Remove the raw water pump."  Not how, or which screws to take off first, or the fact that the lower fan belt assembly needs to come off with it.  My trigonometry text in high school was written in much the same fashion - "The proof is left as an exercise for the student."  I used to hate that phrase, and this manual has many such omissions.  After several fits and starts, we have the pump.  It looks fine to us, but what do we know?  We'll have to take it up to the machine shop and have the experts tell us.

Safety At Sea

As we dig into every locker on the boat, dragging out long-stored items and pitching many of them, we are thinking about safety gear on the boat.  We will be making some upgrades to ensure safety underway.

One of the most-overlooked safety items is a spot light.  We have two - one is hard-wired and needs to be plugged into a 12-volt plug in our cockpit.  The other has a rechargeable battery.  These spot lights have made a difference in two hairy situations offshore in our past.

One of our spot lights

In 2006, we were about 60 miles offshore from Norfolk, with the best weather forecast to sail straight down to the Virgin Islands.  We had just had our engine serviced by a mechanic and were fully provisioned and excited about sailing to the Caribbean.  That night (everything happens in the middle of the night), I spotted a commercial ship and started tracking it.  We are always concerned about ship traffic - something that big could mow us down, sinking our boat, and never even know it.  I had already tried calling the ship on our marine radio, with no answer.  I woke Larry up, and we started the engine... or tried to.  It sputtered and died.  Suddenly, with the sharp clarity that impending danger engenders, we were in peril.  The wind was almost non-existent and we had no power from our diesel engine.  We tried to hail the ship again, with no answer.  So, out comes our trusty two-million-candlepower spot light.  We first shone the light on our sail, and then pointed it at the bridge on the ship that was growing larger by the minute.  Aha!  That got their attention, and they answered our next call on the radio.  They did indeed see us and would take evasive action.

On another voyage, we were about 40 miles offshore in the Atlantic.  In a big ocean, you'd be surprised at how like a broad highway the Gulf Stream is, with shipping traffic up and down the Atlantic coast.  Up the coast, the ships take advantage of the Gulf Stream to sweep them north.  Going down the coast, ships stay more inshore to avoid the stream, which is where we were, just off  North Carolina.  Again, at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, we were on a collision course with a ship.  It seemed to be tracking us; as we changed course, so did they.  Our spot light came to the rescue again.

So it's important to charge the batteries and check our spot lights.  We may buy another to have in reserve.

We are also looking at a new horse-shoe buoy, with a bright light, for crew overboard emergencies.  We both wear inflatable life preservers with built-in harnesses at all times when in the cockpit, even in the most benign weather.  We tether ourselves to strong U-bolts on the boat as well.  Even so, we need to guard against falling overboard, which is how many deaths at sea occur.  We have a plan, including marking our GPS coordinates, immediately doing a U-turn to go back, starting the engine, and throwing all throwable safety cushions.

New Plastimo throwable buoy - replacing a badly deteriorated 30-year old one

We also carry an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicator Radio Beacon) whose sole purpose, when activated, is to send an emergency alarm to Search and Rescue operations with our beacon's information, boat information, and GPS coordinates, in case of sinking or other catastrophic emergency.  It's one piece of gear we hope to never need.

Our ACR EPIRB - it goes into the life raft with us

On our minds has been our lack of ability to identify ships at sea.  So, we just purchased a new VHF marine radio, with a built-in feature called AIS (Automated Identification System).  This radio has a nifty display that shows all commercial ship traffic within a 5 or 10 mile range, with an alarm when the ship enters our range.  It shows the ship's name, departure point, next intended port, speed, and direction, among other information.  Best of all, it shows the Closest Point of Approach distance, meaning that if both the ship and our boat keep on the same course and speed, how close they will be to us.  No more guessing in the middle of the night!

Here's the new radio we are waiting to arrive

Here's our old radio - a 30-year old ICOM

We are waiting for this radio to come in so we can install it before we go.