Taking Off

By Chris Edmonson


Adventure has many forms. This is about the adventure of getting sailing vessel Faith ready to go cruising for her first season with her current owner. What she lacked in equipment she makes up for in volume and comfort. As a 41 foot Morgan of 1987 vintage she had the updated keel to be able to turn better than her predecessors and spacious aft cabin to keep the skipper happy. The center cockpit means that she is a dry boat and it doesn’t seem as if there is a football field in front of you as you steer the boat. The galley is of the “one butt” sort, like most boats, but it has a huge refrigerator/freezer unit for food storage. In fact, the galley storage is the most adequate storage aboard. Storage was on the list of items to be added to during the build up to leaving Portland where she has been berthed for two years. Other storage around the boat is decent but without significant lazarettes she had little space for the typical equipment needed for longer term cruising. Morgans were built for chartering in easy climates and the short stays by most chartering crews would mean that storage for other than food and spirits was not a big design consideration.

So, what is needed to bring Faith up to speed? The list is not overwhelming in any way other than that there is not much time to bring everything aboard and hook it up. Needed are solar panels, fresh batteries, HF radio, new standing rigging, new roller furler, re-plumbing the head hoses, and a variety of spruce up projects. One of the problems is the amount of focus necessary to do all this at once within a five week period to be able to leave the dock on the desired schedule. No, wait, now it’s four weeks to go and no project is completed!!!

Even the navigation station is a clutter of things piling up that will eventually go there in an organized way to be of use. The radar and GPS have not been tested or used because while the boat had been sailed during the last few years it was the sort of sailing that gets you out for a few hours at a time but coming back to the dock each night. Looking around the cabin yields a variety of thoughts about what the order of attack to put things right should be. The big jobs that require time and multiple people to complete are likely better to start earlier in the process than the quick and easy jobs. Perhaps a few of the easy jobs should be slated for early dispatch though so that it seems like we are making good progress all along the way. In any case, the tools have been sorted through to see what needs to be added to work through the list so at least we are ready to take the first run at the list. The count down means that it is essential to keep on track and free of any big distractions… can we say, “Hold the partying”?

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The closest boat in the next slip over is also getting ready to go; their departure date has already been pushed back from this year to next because of the number of unfinished projects. The reason there are so many things to do stems, in part, from a less than thorough survey when it was purchased last year. Like dominoes the jobs mounted up until the new owners caved in to the list and had to make the hard decision to stay another winter in Portland to accomplish everything. For us this is not an option worth contemplating. Everything is geared toward leaving on August 20th and any significant delay would lead to bouts of depression and fits of outrage! The optimist would find an ally in this time issue by forcing themselves to work harder as the time line shortened… less than optimism would yield one to never leaving.

When you think about how you work at working you might not have the concept of working on a boat with a deadline in the same perspective. There are so many ways to accomplish any single job you face and the free advice from the perfect sailors (refer here to the song, “The Perfect Sailor” by Eileen Quinn) on the dock can “help” you lose your focus. For instance, it turns out that there is an alternative to the white hose you buy at West Marine (recently referred to as Tiffany By the Sea) for $3.50/foot to plumb heads. There are a bunch of house boats here and they use a green version of the same stuff… yes, we are talking about the same specs – es mismo – for a hose that costs $1.50/foot. I mean, who knew??? It was an accident that we found this stuff and could incorporate it in the job at hand. It’s usual that you find out about a thing like this two years after you did the job.

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So, here’s the picture, you have four weeks to go and the largest job (time-wise) is the re-plumb of the heads (yes, there are two aboard). You start in disassembling the existing tubes (oohhh… quite stinky) and diagram everything so that you know what the original intent of the designer was. Then it strikes you that you NEED a macerator in this system to deal with its eventual calling and demands as a cruising boat. Hmmm, let’s see, where to put the macerator?

As a momentary tangential thread, there is also the thought process occurring that whispers to you that this is actually a safety issue. You see the exit of all this from the boat requires a loop with an air intake above the waterline that doesn’t exist yet. Well, wait, there is a loop but it needs to be there between the head and holding tank, but we are talking about a new loop somewhere between the tank and the sea cock that takes all that stuff out to the open ocean. Come on now, this can’t be that hard, after all it’s just plumbing! The real problem is that it is a boat so there isn’t any more room allowed for this beyond what the manufacturer thought was minimally required when the yacht was built. Ah, then you find a small space that looks like it will work just fine to mount the pump but you have to route some wiring there too to power the whole mess… hmmm, AGAIN!!! You don’t want to sink the boat.

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So, to this point you have used up a couple of weeks and there are only three weeks to go. Time crunch does not even begin to describe the problems faced. Gads!!! There is still a missing control cable for the short wave radio that may be hard to obtain and the ground for the antenna is not installed or purchased. The battery set up is not finalized on the re-design. The standing rigging is half done with the rigger shipping one of the shrouds tomorrow from Seattle and while the new roller furling unit has arrived it cannot be installed until the rest of the standing rigging is installed. The number of other projects has grown rather than become smaller. At the end of the day you are noticing that you aren’t as sprightly as you were a few years ago. The work doesn’t stop until late each day because the sky is light at this latitude until much later than you are used to. The real problem with this is that you also tend to get up a little later each day than you are used to!!

SO many jobs in this process are single person jobs for 90% of their duration. It is the 10% when multiple hands are needed that throw the timing off. While one person is running for parts the other is stuck waiting to finish some segment. Then there are other people volunteering for additional times to finish certain projects but it is hard to coordinate when any part of a job will reach a stage that makes sense for them to join in. Parts for re-designed segments are a stumbling block too because you don’t know the area and there are always conflicting opinions on the dock about where to find some of the more exotic things needed. Hmmmm; seems like a time for the perfect sailor to show up and wave a magic boathook or something!!

We originally thought we were going to update and change out the batteries on the boat but on the way back from picking up the new batteries we made a quirky decision to ADD the new ones as an additional bank. There was just the spot for this addition and we built the platform and hefted the new double bank of four Rolls 6 volts into place. Each one weighs in at around 75 pounds so I feel fortunate that they are separate batteries (unlike the 8D’s I had in Visigoda at nearly 170 pounds apiece). It is at this point that I have to say that if you ever have a chance to look into the cavernous engine room of a Morgan 41 you should do so. It is a sight to be enjoyed, savored and longed for.

As it happens one of the items needed to finish the plumbing of the macerators is some sort of box to put a small electrical momentary switch into and probably another similar box to add a connection juncture so that later modification will be easier. In the meantime, even though we are in a marina, we are using the heads some of the time so when it comes time add the last hose connection to each head you end up dealing with getting waste out of the way first (i.e.: call Royal Flush to come over to pump out).

As the LAST past schedule week hits you the standing rigging is still not complete and the local rigger promises a fast response time so you give him the pin-to-pin dimensions for the last part of that, the backstay with insulators for the shortwave radio, at 55’ 3.5”. When he delivers it a couple of days after your previously anticipated departure date you find out he is dyslexic and gave you a 53’ 5.5” backstay and doesn’t immediately have the fittings to build another one without “someone” taking a trip to Seattle to pick up fresh parts. At this point you have assembled the roller furling unit and have it semi-mounted on the forestay but can’t finish this and tune the rigging without another trip up the mast to install the backstay!

The Bon Voyage party was scheduled for the original departure date so we are week past that when all the truly essential stuff needed to start the trip has been done. Every day we field a bevy of calls asking the same, “Did you leave yet?” question. As things go on it seems every bit of the packing away takes forever but finally we are ready to leave the dock with several jobs left to do along the way. The shortwave radio is about half installed but at least there is now a proper backstay to attach the antenna lead wire to!! The nets for the engine room, certainly not a big job, are yet to be done… simple stuff really.

In the midst of all this one morning you are awakened by a neighbor knocking on the hull telling you your dinghy is deflating and sinking with the motor on board!! As it turns out the answer to why this happened is that it had sand in the valve and while easy to correct it means you need to rebuild the motor a bit to flush all that nasty water out. Hmmm… did we have time for this diversion?

Certain projects just aren’t started because there is no time for them. We had intended to put lazy jacks together but this was something we never found a time slot to have happen. Also, we were going to put the reefing system to a quick test to be sure that it worked as intended. Again, no time to even start this project, big surprise there. The roller furler finally goes together and the back stay is on so we tune the rigging and get the foresail on (a brand new 135 genoa). It also is becoming more evident by the day that the boat has not been washed in a very long time. There are just not enough hours in a day to make this happen. ¡¡Que lastima!! Ultimately we have to make the decision to leave the dock with some projects and the smaller issues unresolved. They will have to be done down the track a ways. So, here we are “ready” to leave… cast off and head over to the pump out then to the fuel dock and then, whoa, we are going west out the Columbia. It is sun shiny and about 11:30 in the morning. We call the I-5 bridge and get the clearance dimension of 69 feet (we need 64) so looking up as we go under is a rush that will not soon be forgotten. Then we call the Vancouver railroad bridge for a swing to open our way west. The bridge opens and, glory to the amazing river, we slide into the channel and mix it up with barges and freighters from every direction, going somewhere now. The list fades for awhile and the river banks display sights of all sorts. An osprey screams down close in front of the boat at one point and snatches a large fish, so large that the bird has trouble gaining altitude. The shore shows all manner of commercial enterprise while the hustle of life continues. If you have ever played SimCity you have a sense that these things are possibly timeless, though they are not. It is this leaving that may presage the new phase, the new view of what your life holds. Some cry at leaving but some rejoice.