Let's Stop Here

The Tolomato River, N 30 03.079 W 81 21.938

This morning, just before noon, we were cruising down the Tolomato River towards St. Augustine. The temperature was 77 degrees, and the sky was clear. There were some rain clouds far to the west. We would be in St. Augustine in less than two hours. We passed a little bight where I saw a sailboat anchored. It looked like a very pretty spot. I said to Libby, "Let's stop and anchor here for the day." She said, "OK." So here we are.

We are surrounded by sawgrass marshes. They extend about a mile to the east and a mile to the west. Beyond that are trees. We can't see any buildings or roads. The river here is full of dolphins. I'll say it again. The Florida visible to boaters is very very nice.

Out and In

Blount Island, St. Johns River,FL N 30 23.830 W 81 30.392

Tuesday, November 28, 2006
We got a lot of business done on Monday. We tried (and failed) to make a reservation for a mooring in Marathon for January. We tried (and succeeded) to reserve some time with a diesel mechanic in mid December. I contacted Dave Hackett near Melbourne. Dave told me that the next space shuttle launch is scheduled for December 7. That might work out just perfect for us to see it. Oh boy! I went to the post office and got some presents in the mail, and mailed my broken Acer computer back to Acer for repair. I also picked up the stanchion that Bud Taplin made for us. We ordered that last August. That's how long it takes for snail mail to catch up to us.

But our big project for the day was to go over to Tiger Point Boatyard and have Tarwathie hauled out for one hour and a fee of $140. You remember Tiger Point. In June 2005 that was the place where I painted the bottom. In December 2005 that was the place where we had the cabin heater installed. It is also the home marina for our conflict resolution specialist friend Baird.

While she was out I replaced the propeller zinc (remember when I tried before and dropped it?), and the propeller shaft zinc. I also greased the Maxprop with a grease gun. That prop is supposed to feather when we are under sail, but lately it hasn't feathered and the propeller shaft turned all the time when sailing. That costs us 0.25-0.50 knots. It might have been possible to hire a diver for $50 to do the zincs, but the grease job could never have been accomplished under water.

Today we got fooled by the weather report. We were supposed to have NE 10-15 knots so we set out to sail to St. Augustine, 55 miles away. After getting out past the jetty, we raised the sails, but it was a no go. There was only enough wind to make one knot. Worse, there were close-spaced swells coming from the east that made us roll violently. The sails and the boom just thrashed back and forth, so I had to take the sails back down and motor. Then the choice was to reverse course back in to Fernandina, and then down the ICW, or to stay outside and motor 18 miles to the St. Johns river.

I've never been suspicious, but almost exactly a year ago in almost exactly the same spot, we were faced with a decision of whether to continue or to turn back. A year ago, the problem was that the control line for the monitor self-steering broke and I couldn't repair it in the rough seas. Last year we chose to go back, this year we chose to go forward.

A very uncomfortable 5 hours later we entered the St. Johns river. We're anchoring here for the night rather than pressing south on the ICW. This is the fifth time we anchored in this spot behind Blount Island. It was never our goal any of those 5 times, but rather a matter of convenience. Should we be superstitious?

I have a new criterion for sailing at sea. Suppose we are rolling in the swells plus/minus 30 degrees with a period of 12 seconds. Then the midpoint of the sails about 30 feet over the water, is swinging about 50 feet in 6 seconds, or about 9 feet per second, which is an average speed of about 5.3 knots. Therefore it will take a wind of 10 knots or more to prevent the sails from being backwinded on each roll of the boat. Therefore, my new rule of thumb is that if winds are less than 10 knots in a rolling sea, we should not raise the sails.

The Dodo and the Genius

Point Cove Marina, Pablo Creek FL

This morning began as Florida mornings should. It was 70 degrees at 6 AM. We got up, raised the anchor, and set out for Saint Augustine. The wind was against us so we planned to motor the 35 miles down the ICW.

I noted that the tachometer didn't work this morning. Darn. It had stopped working just before arrival yesterday. However I wrote it off to temperature problems. Our tachometer has always been balky when it's warm. It starts jumping up and down, then stops working. When the weather and the engine cools off, it starts working again. This morning was an exception. It didn't work. Darn, I thought, add that to my list of things to do.

I was a dodo. Libby came up in the cockpit and said, "The last time this happened the alternator was broken. Look. The engine is running but not charging. The battery voltage is down to 11.5 volts." Holy mackerel! She was absolutely right. I had forgotten about the connection between the alternator and the tachometer and I hadn't noticed the low voltage.

I dashed down below and opened up the engine compartment. The last time, it was the alternator belt that jumped off. This time the belt was OK. I stopped the engine and stuck my head way in. Aha! There was a broken wire. It was the wire that connects the alternator to the intelligent battery charge control. Without it, the charger would set field voltage to zero and the alternator would not generate.

How to fix it. I was tempted to find an anchorage, but once again Libby was more alert than I. She said, "We may not be able to start the engine again if the voltage is too low." Once again she was absolutely right.

So we put in to the first available marina. Point Cove Marina was about 7 miles from where we started. It was the devil getting in here because the marina's channel is shallow and it was low tide. We ran aground three times before getting in to a slip.

The wire broke at the place where there was an in-line fuse holder. It was a poor design because the fuse holder flopped around in the air and was subject to vibration. The lead was too short to be able to tie it down with a wire tie. No wonder it broke.

The marina has a very small and poorly stocked marine supply store. But surprise, one of the few things they did have for sale was in-line fuse holders. It cost me $2.50. Within an hour, I had the broken wire repaired.

By the time that was done, I was all greasy from working on the engine. So as to not waste a big mess, we went ahead and did an oil change. Then I headed off for the marina's shower.

We're not so unlucky as the 40 foot sport fisherman at the next slip. The men on that boat ran on to the jetty coming in to the St. John's river. They ruined both propellers. Remember how I wrote just a few days ago about nervousness and caution approaching the breakwater (jetty) of a sea inlet? Those guys should have been as conservative as I. Now they have a Navy Seal diver hired to replace the propellers using SCUBA gear.

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Turkey Day

Fernandina Beach

Sunday, November 26, 2006
Today we had the turkey dinner feast that we didn't get to have on Thanksgiving. We invited our local friend Baird, and Libby fixed us a proper meal. We had turkey, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, salad, corn bread, plus coffee, apple pie and ice cream for dessert. Yummy. It is amazing what you can do in a small galley on a boat.

You may recall Baird from an earlier blog article from a year ago. Baird is the guy who works at the boatyard. He built himself a home on the water, and near the boatyard, that was just charming. He had a little jungle growing on the property and among the exotic plants and banana trees, it was shaded by overhanging Cyprus trees and Spanish moss. The house was a simple single room. It was built on telephone piles to lift it higher than expected flood level. The bathroom was detached but beautifully finished in colorful Mexican ceramics.

Baird ran afoul of the local authorities. It started when the stuff in his yard interfered with a place in his yard where the local cops used to hide their car in the bushes at the end of a dead end street and sleep. It got much worse when a lineman for the city complained about his electric hook up and Baird told him to F* off. Within the hour, he was besieged by building inspectors, health department, and everything offensive and official. They said that everything he did was not up to code. That was true but Baird offered to fix all deficiencies they pointed out. This continued for months, and Baird put thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of his own labor in fixing everything they cited. But to no avail. No matter what he fixed, they would come up with a new hurdle for him to cross. It was clear to me listening to his story that his efforts were futile -- he made enemies in city hall and they were determined to thwart his every move no matter what. Only a bribe, or kissing ass, or a very intimidating lawyer could have saved him. The finale came when he went to a public hearing to decide about his building permit. At the hearing Baird lost his patience and grabbed the inspector by the collar and dragged him over the table. Wow. He could have gone to jail, but instead he just got evicted.

Now he demolished the house and is selling the property. He said that once the check arrives, he's going to sail away in his boat and head for the Mediterranean.

Last night, as Baird was driving home in his decrepit old Toyota pickup, he was stopped by the cops at a check point. He had no licence plates, no insurance, no ID with him, no papers of any kind, and he had not registered his truck for more than 5 years. Once again he could have gone to jail, but he escaped with just the cost of a tow truck to get him home.

Baird said that a man owning a boat on the same dock was a S.O.B. and they didn't get along. One day, according to Baird, the man bolted a big white fiberglass storage trunk from West Marine to the dock, "one inch away from my boat." That infuriated Baird, so his remedy was to get his sawzall, and to cut the trunk away from its mountings and to dump its contents into the water and to throw the trunk in after. Baird is a sweet guy. Really. But it's easy to see that he is destined to always live in trouble with the authorities.

Our son Dave suggested that Baird should live in Fairbanks. He would hardly stand out at all from the typical Alaskan up there. No doubt David is right, but Baird loves tropical weather so Alaska is not the right place for him. The upper Amazon basin may be more to his liking.

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T-Shirt Weather

Fernandina Beach, Florida

Oh it felt good to strip down to a t-shirt today and to enjoy the sunshine. We spend the day shopping and doing errands. This is the first time since Solomons Maryland that we had the chance to really stock our grocery supply.

I forgot to mention two things about the trip down. Thursday night we were treated to a spectacular meteor shower. Perhaps is was the Perseus Shower, I'm not sure. The sky was crystal clear, except the perpetual clouds over the Gulf Stream 30 miles to our east. The moon set soon after the sun so it was a very dark night. Perfect viewing conditions for a meteor shower. In those conditions I also like standing my watch sitting on the upper deck beside the dinghy. That gives me a great view of half of the sky.

The trip was uneventful, except for the final part. Arriving at the St Mary's River inlet we had to navigate to the end of the breakwater, about 2.5 miles from shore. Although the winds were light, when we dropped our sails and headed in the swell started violently rolling us. It was extremely hard to stand up enough to hold the tiller and see where we were going, even when braced. We arrived after dark, and the lights on the navigation aids were seen against the backdrop of city lights. I could see a light briefly, then the boat would roll and I wouldn't get a chance to see it again for 20 seconds. That made it extremely difficult to tell which light was what. To top it off, my mind was filled with memories of the story our friend Baird told us of counting the buoys wrong and running his boat aground on the rocks of the breakwater. We made it OK, but I depended extra heavily on our GPS.

The value of a chartplotting GPS is hard to overstate. We can't use it for navigation directly. It isn't necessarily accurate enough for navigation. One sill has to see the buoys or other aids visually. Also, the GPS database can have errors. Also, things change. In this case, when we encountered the first red bouy at our intercept with the entrance channel, I asked Libby to check the number with the spotlight. "It should be number ten," I said. She picked it out with the light and called back, "sixteen." Sixteen! I re-checked the GPS, and both sets of chart books we have on board. All three sources said it should be "ten." "Oh well," I thought, "they must be renumbered." It was the GPS that allowed me to be so calm. It is plenty accurate enough to tell me that this is the last bouy before the breakwater, no matter what the number. If we didn't have the GPS, I would have been panicked by the discrepancy. I would have reacted by sailing three miles more out to sea to meet the first bouy and then three miles back in following them all. It would have taken two hours more time. With the GPS, I was confident enough to know we were right despite the discrepancy.

A second major advantage of GPS is that it can be read even at night and even when one's hands are busy steering the boat. At night, and in bad weather, paper charts have to be left below. To consult them means abandoning steering long enough to go below decks. If one is making a near approach to a hazard like a breakwater, that is too risky. Without a GPS, and on a dark night in bad weather, we probably would have had to stand hove to off shore until the following morning before attempting a hazardous entry.

The bottom line: our GPS allows us to be much less conservative in our navigation without increased risk. The same is true with very many other technical applications of computers. Software allows operators of everything from airplanes to nuclear power plants safely with reduced safety margins. The more ignorant you are of the state of your machine, the more margin you must allow for uncertainty.

Oh, by the way, we were indeed at the correct bouy, and it had been renumbered.

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