Monthly Archives: April 2018

How We Broke The Boat

In a head-to-head battle between a boom vang and a topping lift, apparently the boom vang wins. Now I have to admit that there is a certain logic in this. You see, in the ongoing adventure that is a life afloat, Murphy’s Law reigns supreme. Breaking the boom vang is something that could be safely addressed from deck level. But the topping lift? Repairing that means that someone has to be hauled to the top of the mast, six stories above the water. So obviously, the one that requires the greatest physical danger to repair is the one that will cry Uncle.

Some background: a boom vang is used to pull downward on the boom to control mainsail twist. A topping lift is a line that pulls upward on the boom to keep it from falling downward when the sail is lowered. In our case, we use our topping lift to keep the boom elevated to the optimal angle for unfurling and furling our mainsail, which rolls up into the mast like a window shade. If the boom angle is off, the sail won’t roll in and out smoothly, which can be kind of a PITA.

Here’s a picture I found online of a vang in case you’re not familiar. Pulling the line on the vang shortens it, pulling the boom downward.

So there we were in 10,000 feet of water, crossing from the Great Bahamas Banks to New Providence, and the wind was dying. We’d started off moving along well, cruising at 6 knots in an 8 knot (apparent) SW wind. But as the wind lightened, our speed started dropping into the mid-5’s, and at times our knotmeter would read 4.9. We were trying to delay starting the engine for as long as possible, because damn it, we’re a sailboat, and we should be able to do more sailing! But we wanted to make it to New Providence by dinnertime, and we still had over 30 miles to go.

Since we’re cruisers, we don’t normally obsess over sail shape like racers do. As long as the boat is moving along at 5 knots or more and we’re not heeling excessively, it’s a happy day. But since we had places to be, I started fine tuning the mainsail to get everything I could out of what wind was left. I noticed that the top of the mainsail was twisting off to leeward (downwind) enough to spill air from the top third of the sail, costing us speed, and I wanted to fix it. So I tightened the vang, pulling down on the boom, and reducing the twist in the top of the sail.

But I forgot to loosen the topping lift. Because it’s set to a particular boom angle, I hardly ever touch it. And because we don’t race and aren’t constantly looking for ways to wring out another tenth of a knot, I usually don’t mess with the vang much. So I just didn’t make the connection when I noticed I had to winch really hard on the vang to pull the boom down. I didn’t think about the fact that I was stretching the topping lift. Not making excuses really, just a mea culpa.

A few minutes later, a cascade of line rained down onto the port side deck. “What the hell was that?” Rhonda and I asked each other, until I looked up and saw we didn’t have a topping lift any longer.

“Crap.” That’s about all I could think to say.

We were in the middle of a pretty good weather window, one that was supposed to last for several days, and our plans were to stop for the night in New Providence, and continue south the next day to the Exumas. But now we had a change of plans. It looked like we’d be heading to a marina in the hopes of finding a rigger who could fix our broken boat.

We learned an interesting thing about Nassau in the next few days. While it seems that there are sailboats all over the place, it turns out that there aren’t actually any people here who work on them. No matter where we called, looked or searched, we couldn’t find a single business that did rigging repair (note: I see a possible business opportunity for someone who wants to semi-retire to the Bahamas). I even texted our rigger back in Pensacola to see if he had any connections here. He suggested a person in Miami, who referred us to a contact on the island, who passed us on to the same local sailmakers loft that I had already called and who told me they didn’t do rigging. It took two days of phoning around just to find someplace that sold the line we needed, and then they only had it in red. (Red’s fine, red will work, we’ll take the red thank you very much. How much? $190? Sigh.)

We finally felt that we were making some progress when we approached the operators of NavTours, the local sailing charter base here at the Marina. “Sure, we have some people that can help, but you’ll have to talk to them and arrange something, and they’ll have to do it on their own time after they get off work,” we were told.

The next three days were spent talking to a succession of NavTours employees who all claimed they’d be happy to help, but then always failed to come through for one reason or another. Finally, we met Yasmin, the wiry French-Canadian, who said that if we’d move the boat at 7AM to a slip on the other side of the marina that faced into the wind and then take down our mainsail so he could use the halyard to ascend the mast, he’d do it for us. We shook hands and a plan was finally in motion.

We settled on the 0700 appointment for two reasons. Yasmin had to start work at NavTours at 10, which would give him three hours to help us. Also, the winds have been lighter in the morning, picking up significantly in the early afternoon. Dropping and then reinstalling our huge mainsail would be impossible in any kind of significant wind. So underway at 0700 it was. But that meant the alarm had to be set for 0530. Being retired for several years now, neither of us had been up that early in longer than we could remember. But we rose to the challenge (and the alarm), and at five minutes after 7, we were sliding into the designated slip that faced into the wind, and I started taking down the main.

Things actually went pretty well from that point on. Yasmin fixed up his bosun’s seat to go up the mast, and I cranked him up while Rhonda tended the spinnaker halyard, which he used as a safety line. Of course, it was 10x harder than it sounds. About 50 turns on the winch to lift Yasmin was all my poor heart could handle before I’d have to stop, gasping for breath, and then take a break. It took at least seven or eight episodes of winch, gasp, pause to rest, then resume before he was finally at the top of the mast.

Going Up

Almost There!

Finally At The Top

Rhonda manning (womaning?) the safety line.

It was then that we discovered that I hadn’t just snapped the line. It looked like I had overloaded the topping lift masthead sheave (small pulley) so severely that I’d bent the axle, rendering it unusable.

That shaft is supposed to be straight!

The topping lift normally runs from the end of the boom to the top of the mast, over the sheave, down through the mast to deck level, and then back to the cockpit so it can be adjusted underway. But with the sheave destroyed, there was no good way to run a replacement. So it was on to Plan B. I passed a length of 3/8ths line up to Yasmin, and he tied it to the top of the mast. I could then tie this to the end of the boom, effectively acting as a replacement topping lift. Only it wouldn’t be adjustable. It would have to be set to a specific length and tied off. But that’s OK. We can work with that. It will allow us to keep sailing the boat, until we can make it back to Pensacola, land of readily available parts, overnight delivery, and easily obtainable rigging services, and have a proper repair done.

Yasmine came back down, the mainsail went back up, and a little after 9AM we were slowly sliding back into our original slip, all before the winds started picking up. A $100 bill changed hands, I tied off the new temporary line at what looked like a good height, and we were back in business.

Of course, it took five days to work out a solution, it caused us to miss what had been an excellent weather window, and it now looks like it will be about three more days before the winds again turn favorable for us to continue south.

And that’s the story of how we broke the boat. A simple little cautionary tale about how a brief lapse of judgement led to a week’s delay and over a thousand dollars in unanticipated expenses counting parts, labor and marina fees.

Just another day in the Bahamas, mon!

Time For A Recap

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We broke the boat while crossing from the Great Banks to New Providence in the Bahamas. We’ll have a bit more to say about that soon, but for now, things could be worse. We’re hanging out here at Palm Cay Marina:

Since hanging out in places like this is exactly why we do what we do, well, you won’t be hearing any complaints from us. In the meantime, the downtime while we work on fixing Eagle Too actually gives us a chance to do a little catching up.

First let me say that if you want to see more of the day-to-day details of our travels, along with lots of pictures of sunsets and beaches, you really should follow our Facebook page. Its much easier to quickly post a “here we are” message there than to write a blog post, especially in this land of intermittent WiFi. Eventually we see the blog focusing more on general information for cruisers, especially if we move forward with our tentative plan to put all our lessons learned into a book.

OK, so let’s get caught up. As we’ve mentioned before, when leaving Florida for the Bahamas, we like to move up to the area of Angelfish Creek and the Ocean Reef Club in north Key Largo. Doing so cuts our transit of the Gulf Stream down to just a little over 50 miles, which we can easily do in daylight. After waiting a few days for southerly winds, we raised anchor at 0800 and headed out into the North Atlantic.

This is what’s known as a BAB, or a Big Assed Boat. It shared our anchorage off Ocean Reef Club in Florida.

The charts said it was 54 miles at 063° to our destination, Bimini Sands Marina. Calculating a 15° offset for the effects of the Gulf Stream, once clear of the outer reefs we set the autopilot to 078°, hoisted the sails, and settled in for the ride. Motorsailing in a light SE wind and with the help of the powerful current, Eagle Too was flying, averaging 8 knots speed-over-ground. Here’s Rhonda hard at work piloting the boat.

We saw quite a few sails on the way across, as apparently a lot of traffic had stacked up on the Florida side waiting for good weather to cross the Gulf Stream. As you may be aware, in a mild south wind the Gulf Stream can be as tame as a kitten, but in a strong north wind it can be worse than a bull ride on a rollercoaster.

We passed this vessel about halfway across, and just had to take a picture. You don’t see very many Chinese junk-rigged sailboats around these parts.

The 15° course offset turned out to be absolutely perfect, as in less than seven hours our autopilot had driven us directly to the entrance to Bimini Sands Marina.

An hour after arriving, we had taken the shuttle to the airport, cleared in with Customs and Immigration, and took down our yellow “Q” flag and hoisted our Bahamas courtesy flag. We’d finally made it back to the Bahamas!

While waiting for good weather to cross the Great Banks, we spent the next few days doing some typical Bahamian things, like stopping at Joe’s Conch Shack for some fresh conch salad.

Check out the conch shell pile behind the shack. There were some beautiful shells there, but we honestly don’t know what we’d do with more conch shells!

Another priority was to pick up some fresh baked Bahamian Bread from a little place we know on North Bimini.

One plain and one cinnamon raisin, please! If you’ve never had fresh Bahamian bread, you’re really missing something special. The closest I think I can describe what the regular loaf tastes like is to imagine that a vanilla cake and a King’s Hawaiian dinner roll had a secret love child.

And the cinnamon raisin? It’s like a whole loaf of Cinnabon without the frosting!

While on North Bimini, we took the time to tour the Dolphin House, which we’d missed the last time we were here. This house deserves a dedicated post (we spent over an hour there and took over 50 pictures), but for now, here are just a few highlights.The Dolphin House is this amazing piece of functional art that is a hand built labor of love. The gentleman you see in the picture is Ashley Saunders, and he has spent his entire life constructing this architectural wonder. It’s made entirely of cement block and hand-mixed concrete, and virtually every single inch is adorned with shells, salvaged tiles, and found objects that Ashley selected and placed by hand.

What’s truly amazing is when you lean in to take a closer look. Then you see that much of the decoration on a wall like this…

is exquisitely detailed. How many hours of hand labor do you think it took to cut each one of those spirals from individual conch shells and then apply each shell petal to this flower?

We finally made it to the third floor, which is still under construction. “Do you think you’ll ever finish it?” I asked Mr. Saunders. “No,” he replied, “my son will have to finish it for me,” he said poignantly.

But just imagine what it will be when it’s finally done. And look at the location!

Before we left, Mr. Saunders asked if we had a boat card we’d like to add to his collection. He has devoted one corner of a room to displaying the cards of visitors that had toured the Dolphin House. We were happy to add ours to his collection.

Do you see anybody we know?

Our card joins the collection.

We were amazed when we awoke the next day to see that sometime in the early hours of the morning, a Bahamian mailboat (the generic name for the small inter-island freighters that travel the islands) had managed to squeeze into our marina to make a delivery. Disappointed that we had missed watching it pull in, we made sure to hang around in order to see how it would manage exiting through the small channel entrance.

And then it was time to leave. The prediction called for a brisk south wind, and while the seas were expected to be a bit higher than we liked, it looked like we could make a quick transit of the banks. Having never seen 20 knots of wind on the banks, we really didn’t know what to expect, but since the whole area is so shallow, averaging only 12 to 15 feet deep for the entire 75 miles of the crossing, I thought it was more likely that we’d just see a short chop rather than the 3 to 5 foot seas I’d expect on the Gulf from winds that high.

See that narrow channel behind us? That’s the one the mailboat came through!

Eagle Too was once again flying, averaging over seven knots under wind power alone as we enjoyed what for us has been a truly rare event—making way towards our destination without having to run our engine! We made such good time that rather than anchoring about 2/3rds of the way across the banks as we’ve had to in the past, we made it basically all the way to the eastern exit point, the NW Channel, in a single day.

We spent a night at anchor on the banks, which is always a little weird because their’s no land in sight except for straight down, where you can clearly see seabed 15 feet below you. It looks like you’re anchoring in the middle of the ocean, but it feels like you’re sitting in a lake. Because of the rapid progress we made, we were able to start early the next day and make it all the way to New Providence (Nassau), where we stopped for the evening in a lovely little spot filled with white sandy beaches called Old Fort Bay.

It was on this passage where we broke the boat. Well, a little part of it, anyway. We were motorsailing along (the wind had died and we were once again having to run the engine) when all of a sudden a pile of line (lubbers would say rope) came cascading down onto the deck. “What the hell?” we both said, before figuring out that our topping lift had just expired and fallen to the deck. It’s a line that’s used to set the angle of the boom, and losing it would make sailing a bit more difficult. Our plan had been to keep moving south towards the Exumas. We have a deadline, after all. We’re trying to get to Georgetown by April 24th, when the Family Island Regatta, the national sailing championships, kicks off. But now we decided we needed to find a place where we could repair our broken topping lift. So the next day, we pointed the boat toward a place we’d been to before, the place where we are right now, called Palm Cay Marina. We sailed along the north coast of New Providence, past the docked cruise ships and resorts, to round the eastern end of the island and pull into a slip at Palm Cay.

Our AIS identified this as the Carnival Glory, which we’ve sailed on several times.

Sailing past the Atlantis resort.

And that basically brings us to now. We’re here at Palm Cay Marina, trying to find a way to fix our broken topping lift. It’s turning into quite a little story of its own. But that’s a tale for another day…

We Don’t Do Force Five

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Eagle Too and the boats around her dance at their moorings as the winds blow steadily from 25 to 30 knots. Whitecaps dot the harbor. We listen as gusts howl through the rigging, our bow lines creaking as they strain to hold us in place.

It’s our fourth time stopping in Marathon, Florida, but it’s the first time we’ve picked up a mooring from the Marathon Municipal Marina in Boot Key Harbor. Even though there are over 200 mooring balls in the harbor, the location is so popular with cruisers and liveaboards that there is typically a 30 to 50 boat waiting list for a mooring at this time of year. Things don’t usually start to open up until after April, when cruisers from places north, their winter season over, start their seasonal homeward migration.

Approaching the mooring field, Boot Key Harbor, Marathon

Usually on our trek south we end up anchoring outside the harbor while waiting for good weather so that we can move on. This year is different though. There are actually moorings available. As we look around, we can see several empty ones near us. The reason is Hurricane Irma. When the storm hit the Florida Keys last September, there were over 250 boats moored or at anchor in Boot Key Harbor. After the storm passed, only about 50 remained. Most of the permanent residents were wiped out, and many seasonal cruisers who would have normally filled the vacant space in the harbor decided to skip this season in light of how hard the local area was hit. The result is that when we hailed the marina, they were able to immediately assign us a mooring ball.

Hurricane damage in Boot Key Harbor. This was an abandoned marina, but the last time we saw it the building was intact.

Once the strong north winds in Ft Myers Beach blew themselves out, we experienced a near perfect three days of mild and sunny weather to continue our trip south to the Keys. This is the third time we’ve made this trip in the last two years, and we have a well-established route. From Ft Myers Beach, we head down the Gulf coast to Marco Island, and anchor in Factory Bay.

Thick smoke in Factory Bay, Marco Island, Florida from nearby brush fires.

Smoke so thick it was difficult to breath.

Next, we continue south past Cape Romano and then turn east towards the Everglades, to our next overnight anchorage at a spot called Little Shark River. It’s a great place to park for the evening because if the wind is from the typical easterly direction, you can anchor a mile offshore in 10 feet of water, protected from any wind-driven swell and far enough out to be left alone by the mosquitoes and no-see-ums. But if winds turn westerly, you can head up the river to anchor (in depths of 12 to 14 feet once you clear the entrance bar) and have a peaceful evening. Just be sure you have good screens!

From Little Shark River, it’s an easy seven hours across Florida Bay to the Seven Mile Bridge and the Florida Keys. Well, it’s easy except for the millions of lobster pots that dot the Bay in the winter. Making this crossing at this time of year is actually a lot like running a slalom course, with constant course changes to avoid running over one of the lobster pot floats and potentially wrapping its line around the prop and shaft.

Once in Marathon, a look at the weather forecast convinced us to head to one of the available moorings in the harbor rather than anchor out. We’d originally been hoping to just stop for a day, maybe two, and then be on our way for the Bahamas. But a building high pressure system to our north was predicted to bring us several days of strong east winds, in the 20 to 30 knot range. On the Beaufort scale, that’s what’s known as a Force 5 to Force 7 wind. If you’ve followed us in the past, you know we have a philosophy here on Eagle Too that features something we call the suck-to-fun ratio. We like cruising in calm seas in warm sunny weather in 8 to 12 knots of breeze, because it’s fun. We don’t like bashing into six foot swells in 25 knots of wind, because it sucks. It’s strictly Force 4 winds or below for us. We travel with purpose, and that purpose is to enjoy ourselves. The weather forecast we were looking at did not have a lot of potential fun in it. So we elected to pick up a mooring and wait it out.

Life On The Hook isn’t all glamour and sunsets. Filling a water jug at the dinghy dock to transport back to Eagle Too.

The wind blew for three days, but things finally died down and we were once again on our way. We slipped our mooring and moved to the anchorage outside the harbor to stage for an early departure the following day, stopping at the fuel dock on the way out to top off the tank and fill our reserve jerry jugs.

Sunset over the Seven Mile Bridge

In one of those “it’s a small world” funny coincidences, we learned on the way out of the harbor that we had been moored for four days right next to Penguin, another boat from Pensacola, who was also heading for Bimini. They actually keep their boat right around the corner from us in Pensacola. We spent the next two days leapfrogging past each other as we headed up the Keys, and are now anchored 100 yards apart near the SW shore of Rodriquez Key, just off Key Largo.

It’s Easter Sunday, the first of April, and we’re having a relaxing day doing some writing and weather research. We’re not liking the east winds that are currently blowing for a Gulf Stream crossing, as we’d be heading right into them, but they’re supposed to veer to the southeast in a couple of days. Tomorrow we’ll probably make our last coastal jump north to Angelfish Creek and an anchorage we know off Old Rhodes Key, and then make our crossing to Bimini when the winds turn southerly on Wednesday. Again, if you’d like to see where we are, you can locate Eagle Too by checking our mapshare page at share.garmin.com/EagleToo.

Hopefully we’re just a few days away from a couple of cold Kaliks and some warm Bahamian bread!