Cruisin' Plans

I think I mentioned I was having a little trouble with the heat exchanger on the engine.  I'd been cleaning up the cooling system, replacing the hoses and the impeller, and decided to remove the exchanger core so it could be soaked in a caustic solution to remove any deposits that might have built up.  The core is a bundle of copper tubes suspended inside a water-filled cast iron housing and functions just like the radiator in your car except that it uses water for cooling instead of air.  The fresh water engine coolant flows through the tube bundle and transfers heat to the brackish Bay water that is flowing through the housing.  The core sticks out both ends of the housing and is held in place with "O" rings and end-plates.

The end-plate at the back of the heat exchanger is the one I'm having trouble with.  When we first looked at the boat before we bought it I noticed a lot of corrosion where this plate bolts up.  I mentioned it to the broker and the next time we looked at the boat it had been cleaned up.  I was told they had "fixed" it.  What they did was clean away the obvious corrosion and putty up the end-plate with about 28 ounces of gasket sealer.  When I took it apart a year later I found the back of the housing had been eaten away by the corrosion, destroying the gasket surface.  I was unable to find the "O" ring back there and suspect this might be the original problem, that someone had forgotten to put in the "O" ring when they reassembled it, causing a water leak.  It's in a spot that's hard to see so it probably went unnoticed for quite a while, thus the extensive corrosion and damage.

I've been soaking this area with penetrating oil for five days now and still can't get the core out of the housing.  It's like it's welded in there.  Even if I could get it out I'd still hafta deal with the ruined gasket surface.  I talked to Brian at Conlyn Marine, the local Yanmar engine pro, and asked him about replacing the housing, which in my mind is the only real way to deal with this.  He didn't want to tell me what it would cost to replace the housing because I wasn't sitting down with a drink in my hand.  Uhm, that can't be good.  So I went home and decided to just goop up the end-plate as best I could and let it go for a few more years until it was time to rebuild the engine, something we'll need to do before we head out on our cruise.

The next day I called Brian and asked him again what it would cost, just being curious.  When he told me it came out to be less than the cost of the wind generator we were going to get.  I decided on the spot that getting the engine repaired correctly was a higher priority than the wind generator.  I just can't stand the idea of doing Mickey Mouse repairs.  The parts will be delivered tomorrow and hopefully we'll be back in business by the end of the weekend.  This works out really well.  We'll still have time to get the wind generator installed before we go on our trip in June.  That'll give us the whole month of May to make sure the engine is behaving nicely.

On May 13th (FRIDAY the 13th!!!) Cheri's nephew and his wife, Brian and Katie, and their 3 year old daughter, Kaitlyn, will be joining us for a sail up to Rock Hall.  We'll be staying at the Osprey Point marina and there's a really nice B+B and restaurant there.  Brian's Mom and Dad have made reservations at the B+B for Brian and Katie and Cheri and I will take care of Kaitlyn for the night.  It's a full day sail from Herring Bay to Rock Hall, 6 or 7 hours.  We have reservations for dinner at 1930 so we'll hafta get an early start.  Brian is an avid fisherman and is hoping to get some time out on the Bay.  Maybe trolling at 8 knots.

We're putting plans together for our vacation in June.  We're taking two weeks off, May 27th to June 12th.  We're planning to sail down to the Patuxent River (map) and stay in Cuckold Creek ( just past Solomans Island) the first night.  From there we'll sail up the Potomac River to St. Marys City for a night and maybe up to Breton Bay (map).  Our next destination is Mill Creek off The Great Wicomico River (map).  This is supposed to be a really beautiful spot and we may spend several days here.  Further up the river is Horn Harbor and we've heard that it's also a good spot, well protected, quiet.  From there we'll head south.  There are several good creeks but I think we'll go to Antipoisen Creek (map).  This is where Captain John Smith almost died from a sting ray barb wound.  History is interesting but doesn't need to repeat itself so we'll avoid the sting rays here.  We haven't decided if we'll explore the Rappahannock River to the south or head across the Bay and check out Tangier Island (map).  Once on the eastern side of the Bay we'll look into the Nanticoke and Honga Rivers (map).  I suspect we'll run out of time somewhere around here, especially if we find some good spots to explore with the dinghy.  We want to spend as much time at anchor as we can but will look for a marina every 5 or 6 days as a break.  I think the main attractions will be Mill Creek and the Nanticoke River.  These are both reported to be mostly undeveloped and much the same as they were 400 years ago when first seen by Europeans.

A few years ago my sister and brother-in-law, Ellen and Ed, gave us several books about Captain John Smith and the two voyages of discovery he made around the Chesapeake Bay (check this out).  Almost all of the places we're planning to go to on this vacation were on Smith's 1st voyage. I've been wanting to do this ever since we got those books.  I want to sit at anchor in Mill Creek and read about what they did there and try to imagine what it was like.  Of course most of the areas they went to are way different now with farmland and developments at the river's edge but there are still places that look very much the same.  I think this is gonna be cool.

Memory Loss

Today is April 20th, 4-20.  This is significant because our boat is a 420.  This day is also recognized by dopers around the planet as a special time to celebrate their smoke-hazed lives seen through bloodshot eyes.  Everybody fires up a fatty on 4-20 at 4:20.  This goes back a while, at least to the 1990's, to high school doper days and 4:20pm was supposed to be "the time" to meet up after school to get stoned.  I know this because I had teenagers in the 1990's.  Nuff said.  Now, the radio station I listen to, WRNR out of Annapolis, is celebrating today by having the Doobie Brothers do a concert and giving away prizes to callers when they hear songs played that have anything to do with "doobies".  I just find this interesting because back in my high school days this kind of thing was all kept hush-hush and underground in a secret society kinda way.  That in itself made it special.  I think that's all gone now, become pretty much an everyday, out-in-the-open kinda thing.  Society has certainly gone downhill.

But the hubbub about 420 got me thinking about our boat, the Island Packet 420, and now I'm wondering if there was some subconscious thing going on when we bought the boat, that attraction to "420".  I'm thinking the Island Packet people intentionally named it 420 for this very reason.  They knew the people buying it came from a generation pretty much founded (foundered?) on marijuana.  The boat itself is actually 44' 7" in length, not 42' as the name implies.  Of course, who in their stoned-out mind would pick up on that?  I think there's something subliminal going on here and we got sucked right into it.  I mean, why did we buy this boat?  I had no previous knowledge of it.  We simply had a list of ideas, things we were looking for in a boat.  I suspect the subliminal image of a Main Salon filled with pillows and thick shag carpet with a 4 hose hookah and a box of Stoned Wheat Thins on the table would make this boat stand out above the rest for some people.  All those other boats are really intended for the straight-laced Yuppies and lawyer types.  Pretty sneaky of those Island Packet folks.

Of course, this is all just subconscious gobbledygook.  We don't even have a hookah.  We sold pretty much everything we owned when we moved onto the boat.  And our carpet is more of a sculpted Berber.  We do have a buncha pillows though.

We actually chose this boat because it fit our list of needs better than anything else out there.  The Island Packet is designed and built with the notion that it will be sailed across oceans, perform well in all kinds of conditions with a limited crew and, above all else, keep that crew safe and secure.  It's recognized as being one of the best designs out there for serious extended cruising.

We're moving forward with our plans to get the boat ready for our own extended cruising in 2014.  We got a nice tax return this year and will be putting that back into the boat.  There's three items we want to get this month that will make anchoring out more enjoyable.

1.)  Hatch screens - Since we don't have a diesel generator yet we won't be able to run the air conditioner when we're away from the dock.  Summers on the Chesapeake Bay can get pretty toasty (and buggy) so we're gonna need to have airflow through the boat while we're at anchor.  We already have a screen enclosure for the cockpit and screens for all the ports but that's only part of it.  This boat has seven hatches that can be opened up and really get the air flowing through.  There's a company, Glebe Creek (click here) that makes nice teak framed screens that hang on hinges from the inside of the hatch.  We just placed the order for these and should have them by next week.  That'll be nice!

2.)  Companionway doors - Cheri spends more time aboard than I do because she works from home two days each week.  For a better sense of security she wants to have locking doors on the companionway.  Zarcor (click here) makes really nice doors out of Starboard which is low maintenance compared to teak.  They also have removable panels so you can put in screens or clear Lexan if you want.

3.)  Wind generator - Our two 85 watt solar panels provide some charge for the batteries but not much, and only when the sun is up (duh).  We plan to take two weeks in June and cruise around the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay, spending the majority of our time at anchor.  To be able to pull this off we're gonna need a better way to charge the batteries so we can have our coffee in the morning and play on the computer all day and watch movies at night.  Oh yeah, and have hot water for showers and an icy cold freezer so our ice cream doesn't melt.  I've been eye-balling several different makes of generators and I'm kinda leaning towards the Sunforce 600, which is a 600 watt model (makes sense, huh?).  It's available through West Marine and they stand behind their stuff pretty well.  Plus their store is like 200 yards from our boat.

So, I'm getting this stuff ordered and installed.  We also need to have the boat pulled to inspect the bottom, see how the paint is holding up and replace the anodes.  I'm thinking about raising the waterline since we've added about 5000 pounds of stuff to the boat in the last 6 months and she's sitting a little lower in the water.  While the boat is out of the water I plan to polish and wax the hull which should be a real fun job since all I have is a 3' stepladder.

Last weekend we worked on cleaning up the topsides.  Cheri polished out the windows in the dodger and the lenses in the hatches.  I polished and waxed the cabin, which turned into an all day job and there's still a lot to do there.

We finally got the water turned back on at the dock.  Woohoooo!  All winter long we've had a 250' length of hose stretched out along the dock to get water to the boat.  Whenever we had to fill the tank it required walking back and forth to the end of the dock to turn it on and off.  Pain in the you know what.  When the tank was filled we had to make sure the hose was emptied out, otherwise it would freeze and then we'd have no water.  This was all about a 45 minute process, all done in sub-freezing weather.  Glad to see that over with for a while.

I started replacing the hoses on the engine.  This was part of a bigger project, removing the heat exchanger.  "They" say all you have to do is remove the hoses, pull off the front and back covers and pop it out.  Uh huh.  The back cover was really, really corroded.  I scraped the corrosion away and found that the engine block was eaten away and the gasket surface is gone.  Not just pitted but completely gone.  Yikes!  How am I gonna get this thing to seal up again?  The rear cover had so much silicone sealer on it they must have used an entire tube.  Quality work there.  I think I'll try this stuff called J-B Weld and try to build the surface back up so the gasket has something to seal to.  Another Mickey Mouse job.  Not mine, theirs.  I honestly don't know why people do things half-assed like this.  It only creates problems down the road for people like me.  In the end I was unable to get the heat exchanger out and had to ask the local Yanmar dude to come out and give it a try.  More on that later.

So this is a pretty busy time of year for us, as it is for most boat owners.  We have lotsa stuff to do on the boat just to get her ready for the sailing season plus we have a vacation coming up and we have stuff to get ready for that too.  Guess I had better get on it.

On a more personal note, Cheri's Dad passed away on March 30, 2011.  He was quite an individual.  Cheri's younger brother, Scott, wrote a beautiful obituary which tells more about the man than I could ever hope to.  I've included it here in remembrance of a special human being.

JACK B. HEBNER

25 September 1923 - 30 March 2011

At high noon, 30 March - Jack Hebner, a USN Retired Master Chief Petty Officer, went to join Heaven's Chief Petty Officer Mess.  We lost an honored patriot, an upstanding citizen, and a cherished husband and father.  Our loss is Heaven's gain.

Jack joined the Navy during WW II.  Over the next 30 years - from the shores of Africa and Bermuda, the decks of Aircraft Carriers like USS FORRESTAL, USS SHANGRI LA, USS SARATOGA and USS ENTERPRISE, and countless bases in the United States - he served with distinction.  He served with Honor, Courage and Commitment.  As an Air Crewman and Flight Engineer - he gallantly contributed to combat in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters during WWII.  He also participated in the famous Berlin airlift.  As a squadron maintenance Chief - he made numerous extended deployments to Vietnam from 1963-1965.  Jack was a Sailor's Sailor.  After retiring from active service in 1975, Jack and his family spent the next 10 years living and cruising the Caribbean on a 45ft sailboat named POR FIN.  After that, he spent 20 years traveling the country in his Air Streamer trailer - catching up with a lifetime of Navy and family friends.  

Jack loved life and lived it to the fullest.  He said what he meant and did what he said - accomplishing every life goal he set for himself and his family.  A man of many interests and talents - he was a scratch golfer, rebuilt car engines, operated HAM radios, painted, played the harmonica, and perfected such delicacies as Beer-Can Chicken, and Trash-Can Turkey.   Keen wit, an infectious personality, and a beaming smile made Jack a truly adored and likable soul.  He was the brightest of stars all the days of his life.

More than anything, Jack loved his family.  He loved with all his being.  He is survived by his wife of 65 years, Audrey Kline Hebner, his two daughters Cheri Ward and Holly Olsen, his two sons Jack Hebner, Jr and Scott Hebner, his sister Jane Hebner Kiger, six grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.  We'll miss you Jack - God Speed and Open Water to you always.