Many of you may already know of the genius cartoons expressed by XKCD. If this is your first time hearing about it…. you’re welcome…. enjoy… www.xkcd.com

I wrote about our 4 day passage from Culebra, Puerto Rico to Great Inagua, Bahamas, briefly glazing over the wonders of the Puerto Rico Trench. My writing failed to serve it justice. Months later of this dormant guilt I found something incredible! I found an old xkcd comic giving the Puerto Rico Trench its’ well-deserved prominence in the below sketch including amazing detail and facts of the ocean. With resurfaced fortitude…. I give you… The Puerto Rico Trench on our blogsite via Kirsten’s account with visual aid from xkcd…

Prior to leaving, I was unaware of the trench. In fact, as I was sailing along a beautiful sunny beam reach with light surf, Mike down below sound asleep, I looked at our charts and saw depths of 16,000 feet I followed the contour lines further……19,000…. 23,000…27,000 feet! I thought to myself ‘Wow…. that sounds deep.’ And as I thought about it some more…. I recalled, we didn’t even see depths like that in our Bermuda crossing, in fact, it was a half of that. I scrolled in and out of the charts looking for details and I found it, starring me right in the face The Puerto Rico Trench. ‘Why hello there’ (I hope I don’t fall in).

The Puerto Rico trench is 28,378 ft (8,648 meters) deep or 5.37 miles deep. It is the second deepest trench in the world. They named the deepest part of the trench Milwaukee Deep, after the subpar beer of course……. NO, not of course. It’s named after the vessel that sounded the deepest part of the trench on the 14th of February in 1939. Now for the true genius….

*****Below is the great cartoon with seemingly accurate information – aside from the depiction of David Bowie at 6,000 m… Even if Freddie Mercury is under pressure, I don’t think he’d go that deep, I think he’s in the outer reaches of our galaxy.

http://xkcd.com/1040/large/

The first thing you notice about Bermuda is possibly that gorgeous clear turquoise water but for me it was the people. Everyone we met was approachable, helpful, fun, and really made life a good time while we were there. Unfortunately, my photography skills still need some improvement because I completely and utterly failed to snap just ONE photo of someone who made our trip that much better. The first guy we met off the docks was admittedly odd but gave us all a good laugh; he was just sitting by the piers drinking a beer with a friend & he told us about the restaurant he was a chef in and how smooth his chin was after a good shave. There was also the bartender who opened the famous bar ‘The White Horse Pub’ early so I could sit in a dry place and watch the Newcastle game. Or Christina and Chris who we bumped into at the Hamilton Yacht Club and ended up having dinner with at an UH-MAZ-ING restaurant (the same place they held their wedding reception- I found it very sweet they shared this place with us). I wish I had just one photo of these people to share. The below pictures will just have to do.

Reenactment of a village flogging. Woman was caught gossiping and nagging her husband. This is just for viewing as a spectator…. I spoke up in defense of the woman yelling out a Stoffel-ism we learned  from our visit in Mamaroneck, ‘Happy Wife, Happy Life’. The town judge threatened to try me next after that stunt.

 

The cut into St. George clearing into the customs house. Even in grey skies it’s beautiful.

 

One thing I’ve always known about Gaia – she’s no race boat.  She always has sailed pretty well on a beam reach (meaning when the wind is perpendicular to the direction we’re pointed), but thats about it.  Any other angle of sail and we’d better have plenty of wind (at least 12-15kts) to go anywhere at all.

A day where the wind is blowing 12-15 is just about perfect, but they’re also way outnumbered by the days where it’s only blowing 5-10.  On those more numerous light-air days, I always looked jealously on the boats with their sails actually up and not motoring along.  We on Gaia, would always be motoring on those days.

Until recently that is!  As part of gear-ing up for this voyage, right before we left we decided to shell out some big $$ for a “feathering” propeller.  This means that when we’re sailing, the propeller automatically turns it’s blades parallel to the flow of water which dramatically reduces drag.

Meet the MaxProp, it’s fancy:

 

 

 

 

The MaxProp automatically switches between these two positions with an ingenious system of gears that pivot the blades into motoring mode when the shaft turns and then into feathering/parallel mode with the force of the water when the shaft isn’t turning.

I’d heard really good things about these sort of propellers – that they can increase your sailing speed by up to 1kt (thats about 20%).  But I was a hopeful skeptic – I considered it a pretty big gamble – but as soon as we sailed with the new propeller I became a convert.  This thing makes Gaia a whole new sailboat!  I’ve read estimates that sailing with our old propeller (which always looked like the image on the right) is like dragging a 5 gallon bucket through the water.  With so much less drag, we can now get away with sailing on those light air (8-10kt) days.

Sounds wonderful, right?  Well it is now – FINALLY… see it’s been a battle to get this &#$@*(&#! propeller working right!  Unfortunately, it was a battle entirely of my own making.

As with almost all things on Gaia, I decided to install the propeller myself while we were hauled out in Salem just before heading south.  What could possibly go wrong?

The MaxProp on the inside has a lot of complicated gears that let it rotate the blades
from parallel (feathered) to motoring.  These gears also allow you to change the angle or steepness of the blades in motoring version, this is called the pitch of the propeller.  Normal propellers have a pitch as well, but it’s fixed – the blades are cast at a certain angle, so you need to match the right propeller with the strength of your engine and weight of your boat.  The easiest way to understand this is like the gears on a bike (or car) – having a propeller that is too steeply pitched is like riding on a slight uphill in a gear thats too low, your legs suffer to push the pedals down, and the engine struggles to turn the propeller.  A propeller pitch that is too shallow is like riding your bike on a slight downhill in too high of a gear, your legs have to spin really fast to speed up the bike – same goes for the engine it has to spin way to fast.

When you install a MaxProp it involves assembling a bunch of parts around your propeller shaft, and as you assemble it you set two different gear positions to determine the resulting pitch of the blades when they’re in motoring mode.  The combination of these two internal settings determines the resulting pitch of the blades.  The manufacturer recommends a setting based upon your engine and boat, and then if need be you can change it.  Once you get it right you shouldn’t ever have to change it again.

Of course, when first installing this thing, yours truly manages to somehow mess up these two settings and get an invalid combination that results in an extremely steep pitch.  And worse, I didn’t spot the fact that the blades were at WAY to steep of an angle.  Kirsten & I happily put the boat back in the water in Salem and were ready to get on our merry way – until we put the boat in gear… KERTHUNK KERTHUNK KERTHUNK KERTHUNK, the whole boat vibrated and shook like crazy as we rapidly pulled the transmission back to neutral.  Uh oh.

So we hauled back out and tried some stuff (not the right stuff), and then put the boat back in the water … same thing.  At this point it was friday late afternoon and the marina was done with us… we could hang out (and pay) at a slip for the weekend and try again monday.  So I quickly got on the phone with the manufacturer and talking it through with them figured out the error of my ways… DOH.

Thankfully, it’s possibly (though very tricky) to disassemble the propeller in the water and change the pitch.  Thankfully I had newly bought scuba gear on board and was eager to justify it’s purchase.. so into the water I go the next day and manage to re-pitch the prop to a much more correct angle, woo!

 

This let us leave Salem and get underway, we quickly raised sail and found delightful new sailing performance due to the reduced drag… score!  Unfortunately, the pitch was still wrong – like riding the bike in too high a gear up a slight hill.  So I’d have to dive again, and also it the whole boat was vibrating some while in forward…

A week or so later I went diving again and re-pitched the prop this time too far in the other direction, now it was really easy for the engine to turn the prop – too easy.  Worse, the vibration was still there.

At this point it was time to leave Boston on the way south, so in consultation with the guys I bought the prop from and others, we decided to make due with it as it was until we hauled out in Oriental, NC to inspect the rudder (a whole other story).  This was a bad idea, we should have tried to solve the vibration at once.

So we motored our whole way south up to this point with a wobbly prop – not wanting to go too fast as a wobbly propeller is likely to wear out the cutlass bearing, which is the thing that holds the prop shaft in place.  The whole time the cause of the vibration was a mystery.

 

 

 

Fast forward to our recent haul-out in Oriental, NC…

First thing we did was to take off the MaxProp and at the distributors recommendation package it up and send it back to Washington State to have them take a look and try rebalancing it.  Waste of time… a week later when we got it back, they said it looked fine and they didn’t change a thing.  Sigh.

Once we got it back, as I was reinstalling it I realized the cutlass bearing was indeed pretty worn and would need to be replaced.  Sigh again.  So I got to it, I’d done this once before but it’s a process that involves removing the entire propeller shaft and hack-sawing out the metal sleeve from inside the strut.. no fun.

 

Once that was done, I went to finally reassemble the whole thing and we were going to splash into the water the next day.  Putting the prop shaft back in I realized.. oh jeez, the shaft alignment is WAAY off.   Prop Shaft/Engine alignment on any boat is very important, essentially the propeller shaft has to bolt directly on to the transmission and it has to line up PERFECTLY.  If it doesn’t line up, the whole engine needs to be moved to match the position of the propeller shaft.  Now in our case this was a little different as we have a V-Drive, which is a gearbox that sits in-between the engine and propeller.  So in our case it is the V-Drive that needs to get moved.

This unfortunate discovery starts causing lightbulbs to go off in my head – the alignment being off probably caused the vibration in the first place, but how did the alignment get off?  The alignment was perfect with the old propeller… Duh!  Of course!  The alignment got off due to my original mistake of wrongly pitching the new propeller ridiculously steeply making the whole boat go KERTHUNK KERTHUNK…  All that torque caused by the prop probably shifted the V-Drive a little bit and threw off the alignment – so the propeller was fine all along, and we could have solved the problem all along without hauling the boat…  So the final solution was get the boat back in the water (you can’t accurately align the shaft on the hard because of slight hull deformation) and realign the shaft to V-Drive, which really just amounts to slightly moving the V-Drive.

Once I did that, we put the boat in gear at the dock and eureka!  Finally we have a non-wobbly, correctly-pitched MaxProp… for the first time ever, Gaia sails fast AND motors fast!

If you got this far in my diatribe/essay, you’re a brave soul (or a parent) and let me assure you that none of this was anyone’s fault but my own, and I strongly endorse MaxProp… so much so that I’ll say anyone with a heavy cruising boat with a 3 blade fixed propeller should absolutely start saving up now for some sort of a feathering or folding propeller…. or you can just continue sailing around towing that giant bucket of drag under the boat.. your choice!

 

 

 

We stayed in Ocracoke Island for a few days and enjoyed the small island life; where most people get around by foot or golf cart. It held a very laid back ‘Block Island feel’. The entire weekend was dedicated to pirates and learning the history of Ocracoke/Blackbeard from story telling and sea shanties to pirates dueling! Everyone walked around with a pirates garb on or at the very least a beer in hand.

At Ocracoke Blackbeard was awaiting King Georges pardon from his pirating ways. Lieutenant Maynard had other plans. Ltnt. Maynard and crew successfully attacked and apprehended Blackbeards crew and beheaded the feared pirate at Springers Point.

After our second overnight passage we pulled into Willoughby Bay just inside the mouth of Norfolk Harbor as dawn was breaking.  We were exhausted so we passed out and slept for the morning and cleaned the boat / relaxed that evening.

The next day, the 20th, warm weather was finally back to stay for a while and we motored into past battleship/aircraft carrier row at midday under sunny skies.  Norfolk Naval Base is home to the Atlantic fleet and from the water, if you’re lucky, you can see the biggest and baddest examples, up close.

I’ve always been a bit of a naval nerd, and aircraft carriers were a fascination since I was a little kid, so I didn’t mind getting to see the USS Harry S. Truman and the USS Eisenhower from about a quarter mile off the bow & stern, respectively.  I read a bit about them online as we went past and it turns out the Ike had just pulled into port after a short deployment in costal waters to help test the new F-35 fighter jet, which is probably the biggest military boondoggle ever.  It’s costing us $400 billion to build, and it can’t out-fly the 30 year old jet it’s supposed to replace, the F-16.

While we were pulling past the two fleet carriers and a whole host of destroyers and missile cruisers, we were overflown a number of times by the naval base’s airborne defenders, E-2 Hawkeye radar planes, and P-4D Pelican dive bombers.

We motored into Norfolk’s inner harbor on the Elizabeth River and anchored right
across from the USS Wisconsin, a WWII battleship turned museum.  The next day we got to watch a Coast Guard training / demo – a helicopter lowered a sailor onto a tug, then pulled a “victim” back up to the helo in a basket – pretty cool to see up-close.

At this point, I’d been putting off engine maintenance on Gaia for quite some time and given that we had a whole bunch of motoring upcoming – Norfolk was the place to catch up.  So I spent a full day and a half going through the full set of frequent & infrequent engine maintenance items – a few of which I’d never done before.  The full list was:

• Clean entire engine and engine bay
• Clean v-drive and v-drive bay.
• Checked salt-water pump impeller, found we need a special tool to remove.
• Checked secondary fuel filter for fuel contamination (found none).
• Replaced air filter.
• Replaced transmission oil.
• Drained the anti-freeze coolant from the engine and removed/cleaned the heat exchanger.  Refilled with new coolant.
• Replaced sacrificial zinc.
• Changed oil & filter.
• Changed v-drive oil & cleaned salt-water chamber
• Tighten engine stuffing box (this the spot where the propeller shaft leaves the boat) and rudder stuffing box (the spot where the rudder shaft leaves the boat)

All in all I found no problems with the engine, but, while inspecting the newly replaced steering cables (done right before leaving) I caught what could have become a big problem – one of the pulleys in the steering system that I had replaced was coming loose and almost popped out, which would have meant the steering wheel would have suddenly stopped working!  It was an easy fix, but sure better to find in a safe harbor then when steering in a big ocean.

Taking a break from engine maintenance, we explored Portsmouth, which is right across the river from Norfolk, the town is rich in maritime history with old churches, gaslights and oddly enough a german beer garden – which of course we couldn’t pass up!

Up next, into the intra-coastal waterway we go!

One day I closed a thruhole before leaving for a long hiking trip. I had never done this before so Mike explained the safety reasoning & where all the thruholes were on the boat. He explained, if a pipe directly connected to a thruhole were to fail (aka break) & we were gone, it would potentially allow for the boat to sink. I immediately googled thruholes and read this little tidbit of information “A three inch diameter hole twelve inches below waterline can emit 177 gallons of water per hour (gph)…”. I was horrified to realize someone had intentionally put holes in my boat. I understand how silly and ignorant I was but back then this information was revolutionary to my fear of living on a boat. Proof that ignorance is bliss. A week later Mike left for a business trip. This left me on Gaia, on a mooring, by myself, for a week (can you feel the impending drama building???). I tell ya, I surprise even myself at how many things I found to keep me up at night. My Dad would always joke saying ‘leave one foot on the ground when you sleep, just in case…’ . I’m embarrassed to admit I wasn’t that far away from trying it – I mean WHAT IF the bilge pump broke and the VHF radio didn’t turn on, AND the dinghy was stolen…..

Fast forward a boat season or two…..

We hauled Gaia out at Admirals Hill. And while others could slap an undercoat of paint on or polish the hull over the course of a few days, Gaia always seemed to become a semi-permant resident in whichever marina we were being hauled out. This haul-out was no different. This seasons haul-out was dedicated to thruholes or “seacocks”. Mike replaced 5 thruholes, and filled in three we deemed unnecessary, and together we rebeded one stubborn thruhole… (fun story there).

Kirstens brief overview…..

• First step; choosing the thruhole: underwater thruholes shouldn’t be plastic, it’s more expensive but go with the bronz (do I need to remind you how many gallons of water can get through a 3 inch hole?). Plastic, as you may guess, has a much easier breaking point and is more susceptible to extreme changes in cold.
• Second: Once you have your replacement thruholes you’ll need to remove the old ones….. good luck with that. Items required for removing a thruhole are the expected screwdrivers, wrench, and angle grinder and unexpected but most productive was the blow torch.
• Thirdly, clean out the hole, sand lightly around the edge and apply the 42Hundred. 42 hundred is your underwater sealant which retains a bit of flexibility to prevent against cracking.
• To remove and close up a thruhole you’ll need to sand the edge at a slight angle so as to make it a beveled edge. After that it’s all about layering fiberglass carefully to reinforce the hole.

Overall, after hearing it so many times, I admit it…. It’s not as scary as you may think.

Last bit of this story is; Mike replaced and touched up every thruhole EXCEPT ONE (which was a lot). When it was time to put us back in the water the travel lift operator sat Gaia in the water and we eagerly jumped onboard to check for any leaks. “Looks good”, “looks good”, “looks good” rang back and forth between Mike and I as we checked each thruhole with headlamps. I thought we were in the clear and then we heard the bilge pump go off … crud. There was a leak somewhere. Mike shined his headlamp at the ONE thruhole he didn’t touch and sure enough that little bugger was leaking. We had an emergency haul out and we were put back on the stilts. The marina operator gave us one hour to fix it and get back in the water. There was a lot of cursing and blow torch action but we got it done like we always do.

It had never occurred to me people lived on boats until I met Mike McLinn. And like anyone that opens your eyes to a new and exciting possibility that resonates with your interest and desires…… he became a kind of mentor. He also happened to become my climbing buddy, hiking friend, boyfriend, and, in due course, my husband.

We have been living on our 424 Pearson (42ft LOA (length overall) for over two years. Her name is Gaia and make no mistake, a slight against Gaia is slander against a good friend.

Over the last five years in sailing Gaia, I learned a few things from Mike, experience, and comparing her to other sailboats. Gaia is a ketch rig, so, double the fun with masts! It makes her interesting to sail and balance out the mizzen (smallest sail- in back) with the genoa (our largest sail that’s in front on the forestay). Jibbing with a ketch is also a bit more interesting because the mizzen sail can act against you in crossing the wind (if you’re not tactful enough). Ketch rigs tend to be heavier and more seaworthy, ideal for long distant passages in my mind. 424 Pearsons (ketch as opposed to the cutter/sloop design) also have a lower mast (51 feet), intended to fit under bridges “easily”. Another perk is our keel; it’s a modified full keel so our draft is only 5 feet for a 42 foot vessel (not too shabby). And did I mention how much water we can carry….. 170 gallons of water…. Let’s review: low mast, shallow keel, seaworthy vessel, with lots of water storage.

Over time, I realized something…. This boat was not meant to sail circles in Boston harbor.

It was then I began to appreciate the 3 large solar panels mounted on the davets and wind generator for power. I began to love that Gaia never smacked into forceful bounding sea swells the way that faster boats did with a flatter haul design. I enjoyed taking down the main sail just to see how Gaia would sail with just the geny and mizzen. At some point in those five years, I became a salty sailor.