Leaky Boat in Seattle Winter

The high winds and the lung butter along with the need to make money after a great summer of sailing have kept me off the boat so far this fall. A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend while Lo Lo was away resealing the windows on the boat. They had been leaking even wit

h a light overnight drizzle. That would not do with the coming winter with wind and driving rain expected.

It was a perfect September weekend in Seattle. After a couple of false starts, I managed to scrape and reseal the 4 windows over the course of the weekend. It took about 10 hours total - way more than I thought it would take, but I got some sun, had a couple beers, and entertained the local gulls.

The first window I took on was tough. The sealant was pretty new and it took a while to get the window frame pried up and another hour or two of scraping to get it clean. I was able to get the rest of the window frames off with my fingernails (probably why they were not keeping any water out).

I'm not a great caulker but I'm a perfectionist so I'm ultimately not completely happy with the result. We could probably use new window frames altogether and could probably stand to re-bed the screws, but after a couple of rains, I didn't notice any major leaks, so I'll call it a success.

For my next trick... I'm currently looking for a trailer to borrow for our boat so that we can haul it out and do some work in our driveway dock like bottom paint and fixing a couple of hull scratches and gouges.

Beautiful Evening Sail

The wind went nearly dead as I was waiting for Todd and Ben to show up last night, but as we got going around 7pm, it picked up and we had a magnificent, chill sail. Pretty short, but we got to fly the spinnaker and drink a couple beers (rum and coke for the liveaboard). Then I slept on the boat and woke up to rain and seagulls. Not bad.

More photos

Sum-sum-summertime

It seems it's really hard to keep up with a blog in the summer. We've been very busy since moving our boat to Shilshole in the beginning of June. We moved our primary residence in July to Ballard, getting closer to the boat. But that meant packing, unpacking, settling, doing all 8 things that everyone has planned for every weekend day of the summer, plus a little R&R with each other.

It's great having the boat at Shishole. Our slip is in a perfect spot to start conversations. Everyone loves the unique look of the boat and are blown away by the amount of space inside as well as the layout of the cabin. It's nearly impossible to sit on the boat working on little projects without most people walking by to say hi and ask about the boat.

We've gone out a few times, including through the locks into Lake Union once. First time through on my own boat. Luckily we got to go through the small locks so we didn't have to tie up to 250 research or fishing vessels. (That's Emily, the mayor of Duck Dodge, helping me through the locks)

Once in Lake Union, I got a chance to swim around the boat and find that we have enormous mussels growing on the bottom of the boat, ON THE ANTI-FOULING PAINT. Going to need to get her out of the water for a couple of days and scrape and repaint for sure before the weather turns sour.

Also trying to get an overnight going on the boat somewhere before the summer is over (see note about our popularity above).

New home

Well, we made it to Shilshole Marina after a long trip heading into the wind the entire time. The wind let up from its constant 10-15 knots so that we could eat our lunch, but other than that we found ourselves beating the entire day.



We left at noon from Des Moines with the sun high overhead and the wind steady from the N. We not so quickly realized that we weren't able to beat as well as we would have liked and by 4:30, just a few miles past Three Tree Point, we decided to motor for a while. It was a good test of what our little 32 year old motor was capable of. It ran for 2 hours straight with no problems. Seems the issue is when you pull back the throttle after running at high speed for a while. It just dies. Will have to figure that one out as it's kind of important when you need to not hit stuff.

We ended up motoring until about 6:30, at which point we were somewhere in the middle of Elliott Bay. Once we were happy about not being in the way of ferries, we cut the motor and raised the sails to see how much further we could get before sunset. A little before 8 and not really much closer to West Point and the sun setting, we decided to motor the last bit to get into our new slip before it was completely dark. We pulled in around 8:30, tired and happy to be home at O-4.

We fired up the grill and invited some friends over for beer and gardenburgers. We eventually got her cleaned up and on our way out to grab some more beers in Ballard, we ran into our friend Chris who we found out has his boat at N dock (right next door). So now we've got Ben at L-dock and Chris and Tracy at N-dock. This is shaping up to be a great summer.

Off to Sail!

The weather has cooperated (so far) and we'll be setting sail to Shilshole marina later this morning! Follow our progress on twitter or facebook.

Barnacle Scraping

What happens when it's blowing out there and you can't seem to tack because you don't have a lot of experience sailing and you have accidentally left the motor down to create drag and the shore is within pug throwing distance and your depth meter says 7.7 and you don't really know if that's from the bottom of the keel or the water line but it doesn't matter anyway because you're fucked at that point? Well I don't know about you, but for me that meant I almost got a free
barnacle scrubbing against the shore.

I say almost because by some miracle we were able to jibe and drift away from the shore. I never got a look at how low the depth finder actually got, but I was prayin' for sure.

Many thanks to my crew for not freaking out and for actually saying they would still go out with me again. I'll see if they actually follow through with it in the future.

In the meantime, I'll work on my close-quarter tacking around logs out in the sound, not so close to shore.

We're Moving!

When we got on the waitlist at Shilshole last month, they told us that the projected wait was about 6 months. Yesterday, I got word that a slip was available for our boat, so we're moving to Shilshole to join the ranks of the Shilsholed: Ben, Fisher, Jason and Christy (not for much longer), Bob, and others we're sure to meet soon. We'll be on O-dock, not far from all these hooligans.

It's a great spot, right at the cross float, with lots of room to maneuver and only a boat in the front of us to hit. And close to the road to entertain hecklers and onlookers.

Look for us on June 1!