This is Gennie. She’s one of the most valuable crew members on the good ship Eagle Too.
From running our espresso maker to heating water for a warm shower, she’s always there when we need her to add a little comfort to our lives.
This is where Gennie usually lives.
She has a pretty blue Sunbrella sweater, and hides out of the weather under the helm seat. Because the cockpit is covered by our Bimini, it keeps her mostly warm and dry.
Sometimes though, her feet do get a little wet. While I can only remember one time when we had following seas high enough to wash a little seawater into the cockpit, I do know she gets a bit wet from rain runoff or boat washing.
This is Gennie naked.
Why is Gennie naked? Because after five years of living in our cockpit, I noticed that her feet were beginning to get a bit rusty and corroded.
I thought they should be replaced. And I really didn’t know if I could get to the mounting hardware for these metal and rubber feet without taking off her clothes.
Turns out I could have done the job without stripping her. But since I was poking around her insides, I decided to see if there was anything else that might need some attention. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that after a quick wipe down with an oily rag, her innards looks darn near new.
Since we’re poking around Gennie’s insides, here’s a picture of her runtime meter. This isn’t a standard Honda feature. This was an accessory we added to better keep track of how old Gennie was getting.
Two hundred and twelve hours in a little less than five years doesn’t sound too bad to me.
Because our local Honda parts dealer hardly ever answers their phone, I found the new set of shoes for Gennie on Amazon at a really good price.
Replacement only took a socket wrench and about 15 minutes. An oil change and a new spark plug, and it looks like she’s ready to go back to the Bahamas!
It will be interesting to see what impact a lurid post headline has on our site traffic… 🙂
Oil analysis. You get such a comprehensive amount of information from such a simple test that I don’t know why we haven’t done it before. We’re well into our preparations for taking Eagle Too back to the Bahamas for a spring cruise, and one of my concerns is that she’s spent most of the last 18 months gently resting in her slip. Before heading out across the Gulf again, I wanted to make sure that we can totally rely on her propulsion system. So I decided to do an oil analysis on her engine.
Wearing rings, a leaking head gasket, tired bearings: all these problems and more can be identified by analyzing the trace elements in the engine’s oil. Just as routine bloodwork can help you understand what’s happening inside your body, a chemical analysis of your engine’s oil can indicate imminent problems lurking below the surface, waiting to blow up in your face at the most inopportune time.
The process consists of nothing more than running the engine to warm it up, and then drawing out a couple of ounces of oil to send to a lab for analysis. After doing some research online, I decided to use Blackstone Labs. Their standard analysis included all the tests I wanted to have run, their reviews were pretty good, and their price of $28 seemed very fair.
One of the things I liked about Blackstone is that they provide a free sample return kit. Just hit their site and fill in your info, and a few days later a package shows up with everything you need to ship back your oil for analysis. When I opened the package, I found a small white poly bottle for the sample, a plastic bag to put the filled bottle in along with a provided absorbent pad, and then a mailable black plastic bottle to contain it all, with a pre-paid postage label already applied.
The package that arrived from Blackstone Labs
Inside the package. White sample bottle, plastic bag and absorbent pad, black shipping bottle with pre-paid mailing label, instructions.
I know that the Post Office can have an issue with mailing liquids, and Blackstone’s ‘bottle inside a bag with an absorbent pad inside another sealed bottle’ is supposed to mollify their concerns. They even provide a form you can download and take to the Post Office with you that explains the law regarding mailing engine oil, just in case the Postmaster still doesn’t want to accept the shipment. But after reading that it could still sometimes take several weeks for the samples to make it back to Blackstone due to the Post Office treating them as hazardous material, I decided to go a little rogue in order to beat the system. After taking samples of both our engine oil and transmission fluid and bottling them in the provided containers, I then packed them in a well-padded Priority Mail box with tracking for return shipment. This meant that unfortunately I couldn’t take advantage of the pre-paid return shipment labels Blackstone had provided, but it also meant that by conveniently forgetting what was inside the box and saying “no” when asked if I was shipping anything liquid or hazardous, they would quickly make their way to their destination.
Bottled up, ready for return
Less than a week after dropping the samples in the mail, I received an email with our completed oil analysis results. I was delighted with the findings. Everything looked perfectly normal. No coolant in the oil, no excessive metal wear products. Just the readings you’d expect from a healthy, happy little diesel engine. And so for a little bit of effort and a minor expense, we’ve received a great deal of reassurance that our trusty little Yanmar has a long life ahead of it.
In a couple of previous posts titled “It’s Stupid Cheaper,” and “No Longer The Generous Neighbor,” I talked about how sick and tired we were of having to provide zinc anode protection to our entire marina, requiring us to replace our shaft zincs about every six weeks. (They’re both pretty good posts from back in the day before we actually headed out on the deep blue, so you might want to give them both a quick read.)
Well, installing that galvanic isolation Klingon cloaking device (which won’t make much sense if you didn’t read those posts like I suggested…) has definitely turned out to be a great investment. We spent most of last week out on local waters, and one of the chores I tackled was replacement of our shaft zincs.
Now I’ll admit that the old zincs that I removed were looking pretty darned crusty. But believe it or not, these babies had been installed over a YEAR ago!
You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen. These two shaft zincs had been installed over a year previously. A year in which Eagle Too was pretty much continuously plugged into shore power, since we decided to buy a house last winter rather than head south.
So by making our boat electrically invisible to marina electrical systems, we’d stretched the life of our zincs from about six weeks to over a year. Pretty amazing.
Here’s a picture of old and new together. The old ones were definitely tired and worn, but they still had life left in them, and had obviously continued doing the job they were being paid to do.
So the verdict is in. Our ProSafe SF60 (i.e. Klingon cloaking device) is definitely performing for us. And for that, it goes on the exclusive list of Life On The Hook approved gear and gets our official LOTH Seal of Approval!
Rhonda and I recently celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. As one of those major anniversaries that end with a zero, we decided to do something special and take a cruise to Mexico. Now you may be thinking two things. First, why on earth would people who just spent four years living on a boat want to get on another boat (ship) for a vacation? And second, how can a couple that look so young and active have been married for 40 years? 🙂
So the first question is pretty easy to answer. Before we became Cruisers with a capital C, we for many years had been cruisers of the cruise ship variety. It was always one of our favorite getaways. A week of fine dining, shows every evening, interesting places to visit, and someone to make your bed and clean your bathroom—what’s not to love? As for question two, well, all I can say is I guess we’re pretty fortunate.
Rhonda has always been passionate about sea turtles. So when I mentioned that there was an excursion we could sign up for where we could help local conservationists rescue baby turtles, she was all in. After arriving in Cozumel, we boarded a van for a trip to the undeveloped eastern shore of the island. Notice the black sticks in the sand in the picture below? Each one marks the location of a sea turtle nest. It was amazing to see, because it went on this way for miles. Back home in Pensacola, we get all excited if 10 or 12 turtles lumber up onto our miles of beach to deposit some eggs. Here in Cozumel, I could reach out and touch a dozen nests without even moving.
So here’s how this worked. The conservationists (I can’t really call them biologists, because I’m pretty sure this wasn’t their day job, but rather something they did out of passion) monitor the nests constantly to see when they hatch out. It usually happens at night. A typical nest might contain about 120 eggs, and when a nest hatches, there are usually a few turtles that for whatever reason just don’t manage to dig their way out. So the next day, this small group of volunteers dig up the nest by hand to rescue the slackers. They formerly dug every nest up themselves, sometimes more than 20 a day. But then someone realized that there are people on cruise ships who would happily pay for the opportunity to do the manual labor, while they just watched and took notes.
So that’s how we found ourselves on a beach in Cozumel one August morning, along with our friends Lance and Shelly, who were also celebrating an anniversary and who also liked the idea of rescuing baby turtles.
After some brief instruction, we were turned loose to excavate.
You had to go pretty deep. After a certain point, I had to take over because the hole was deeper than the girls could reach.
It was amazing when we started finding tiny little turtles buried in the sand.
The four of us eventually found seven turtles alive and kicking and apparently happy to be out in the fresh air and sunshine.
The conservationists had previously collected a batch of hatchlings that decided to dig their way out in daylight, which is a pretty bad idea if you’re a turtle. The area was swarming with Magnificent Frigate birds (that’s their name, look it up!) that love tasty little turtle snacks. The men rounded up the turtles to protect them from the hungry birds. We then added the ones we’d collected,
After traveling a mile or two further down the beach to a spot free of birds, we then let all the little guys go. One look at the water, and instinct kicked in and they were off and running.
Here’s a brief video to give you a feel for how marvelous it all was.
We’d hoped for a fun and memorable experience. It greatly exceeded our wildest expectations. We can’t recommend this activity enough if you ever have the opportunity to take part. You’ll remember it forever. We sure will!
And from now on, whenever we spot a sea turtle while out sailing, we’ll ask ourselves, “Is it one of ours?”
It’s the peak of hurricane season, but November is only six weeks away. That means it’s time for us to start waking Eagle Too up from her lazy summer slumber and start exercising systems and gear to make sure we’re ready for our next cruising season.
In the Navy, a ship and crew preparing for deployment go through a series of increasingly complex exercises called workups. The purpose is to get the crew out of their casual in-port mindset and once again thinking and acting like sailors, as well as testing the ship’s systems to verify that it’s ready for an extended voyage. This past weekend, we got underway for the first time since mid-July to begin our own workup. The plan was to spend four nights at anchor in Little Sabine Bay at Pensacola Beach in order to attend the annual Taste of the Beach culinary event. The plan didn’t include soul crushing, energy sapping heat. But that’s what we got anyway. Four days of temperatures in the mid-90’s with humidity that pushed the heat index above 110 degrees.
It was not a fun four days. The crew of Eagle Too was sweaty, tired and cranky. But we stuck it out in order to give everything onboard a thorough checkout.
The verdict is that we’re not quite ready for sea. While most everything onboard did fine, it looks like our 42 month old house battery bank is on its last legs. Bus voltage was just too low for the number of amp hours expended. And our usually trusty outboard gave us fits. Even though I’ve run it regularly to keep the carburetor clean, it apparently suffered heat stroke and quit running, causing us to have to resort to rowing at one point. Ah, outboards. They truly are moody beasts. I mean, they’re really no more complex than your garden variety lawnmower. But they seem to be 10 times more temperamental.
Back in our slip, plugged into shore power with the air conditioning blasting away, we started working though the issues we discovered. We may have solved our outboard problem. It seems like it was a stuck float valve that eventually worked itself free. But we’ll have to test the house battery bank again at anchor for a few days to see if the equalizer charge we performed upon returning from the beach has jolted them back to life. I’m only mildly optimistic. Personally, it makes more sense to suck it up and replace the batteries while we’re here in the US where it’s easy and fairly cheap. If we try to make them last one more season and they end up expiring while we’re somewhere south of somewhere, we’ve learned it can be a long, long way to someplace that sells batteries, and they’ll be priced like they’re made of gold with diamond and emerald accents.
Eagle Too anchored in Little Sabine Bay, Pensacola Beach, Florida taken by Annie Dike from www.HaveWindWillTravel.com
I was going to call this post “Bitchin’ Ditching,” but with four active tropical systems in the Atlantic right now, I just couldn’t make light of what really is a serious subject.
Like many (hopefully all) cruisers, we carry a ditch bag with some essential stuff in it that we think we might need if we ever have to abandon ship. And like many (hopefully NOT all) cruisers, we’ve probably overlooked a bunch of things that we’d need in an actual emergency. We’re working on that, trying to add some things to make the bag more useful. But one thing I know we didn’t have right was its location. Our ditch bag lived on the back corner of a shelf in our aft cabin—a spot that would have required one of us to crawl back on our hands and knees and move other things to reach it in an emergency.
And then I saw a picture of someone else’s ditch bag. It was under their companionway ladder. It was a palm-smack-in-the-middle-of-the-forehead moment. So guess where the new home for our ditch bag is.
To be fair, we’d already been living on the boat for a year before we bought our bag, and this area had already become home to some other items. Since our ditch bag was something we hoped we’d never need, it seemed OK to stick it in an out of the way spot. But now that we’ve been cruising for three seasons and have several OMG weather experiences under our belts (or under our inflatable life jackets, I should say), the need to be able to grab-n-go in a crisis has moved up the priority list considerably.
Another thing I like about this spot is that if we ever end up being boarded by the Coast Guard for a safety inspection, our emergency strobe and distress day signal are easy to reach.
If you’ve been along for the ride long enough, you may remember we wrote in the post Overcoming Tyranny about how we hate being held hostage to arbitrary expiration dates and thus don’t depend on flares to meet our USCG emergency signaling requirements.
Space blankets, a sharp knife, some sturdy shears, a day’s worth of bottled water, some energy bars, copies of our USCG documentation, insurance and passports, a bright flashlight—just a few of the items in our bag or on the list to be added before we head out again this fall. So what’s in your ditch bag? And more importantly, where do you keep it?
“I expected you to come in on crutches,” my therapist said at my first physical therapy appointment.
I hadn’t. I was wearing the leg brace my surgeon had prescribed, but rather than locking it rigidly as directed, I’d released it to swing 30° so that I could move my injured leg enough to limp along without crutches.
While lying in bed recovering from the surgery necessary to put my left knee back together, I’d had plenty of time to surf the web, researching the procedure my orthopedic surgeon had performed. I was particularly interested in the discussions on recovery time. The listed recovery range for a partial kneecap removal and patellar tendon reattachment ran from six weeks to one year, with the average being five to six months. I thought six weeks sounded pretty good. I wanted to be that guy. So I started pushing myself pretty aggressively.
It started while I was still in the hotel room we stayed in post-surgery while waiting to regain enough strength to be able to get back onboard Eagle Too. First I’d use my crutches to get back and forth to the bathroom. Then I started leaving one next to the bed, using the other as a cane. Within a couple of days, I was able to hobble back and forth without them.
Once back onboard, I started taking a daily walk. At first I could barely make it to the nearby street corner and back, stopping to pat the corner lamppost in triumph before returning to the boat, holding on to Rhonda the entire time to steady myself. After a few days, I was slowly adding distance to my route.
Two weeks after surgery, at my first follow-up with my surgeon, he told me I could begin weight bearing on the leg. “Way ahead of you, doc,” I said. “I’m already walking around the block every day.”
Two weeks later I started physical therapy. That’s when I surprised them by walking in rather than hobbling in on crutches. They were even more surprised when after two weeks of therapy I showed up without my leg brace. I just felt it was doing more harm than good. I understood the need to protect my knee from being flexed excessively and tearing the tendon repair. But walking with a cage on my leg was throwing my gait off so much that my hips would hurt like hell after a 20 minute walk. I could see where if I followed the prescribed regimen and wore the brace for 12 weeks, I’d need to learn how to walk all over again once it was off. So I jumped on Amazon and ordered a Velcro knee support to wear instead.
“You need to put that leg brace back on,” my therapist sternly lectured me.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much not going to happen, it’s killing my hips when I walk,” I replied.
“Well you really shouldn’t be walking so much,” he said unapprovingly. “I want you back in that brace.”
Another week, another therapy appointment. I again showed up with just my Velcro support.
“Have you been wearing your brace?” my therapist asked.
“Not one time,” I replied. We just stood and stared at each other for a moment, and then he shook his head and started warming up my knee with an ultrasound probe.
Rhonda and I resumed our Tuesday walks to the local AMC theater for $5 bargain movie days. Then we started going a few more blocks to Starbucks. Another week, and I was once again accompanying her on the mile walk to Publix for groceries. I started walking back wearing 20 lbs of groceries in a backpack.
At my six week post-surgery follow-up with my surgeon’s nurse, she was as dismayed as my therapists. But when I showed her that I could stand, walk, and move my leg freely, she shrugged, checked with the doctor and then wrote me a new physical therapy prescription authorizing strength training exercises.
Now it felt like I was getting somewhere. Rather than just standing and waving my leg around at therapy, I could start using the leg press machine and ride the stationary bike. Another week went by and then I decided to test myself. I’d been using Uber and Lyft to get back and forth to my therapy appointments. I now decided to get a ride to my appointment, and then walk the 1.5 miles back to the marina afterwards. It went OK, and that became my new routine. Last week, I started walking both ways. You should have seen my therapist’s face when I said I didn’t need to do any warmups since I’d walked a mile and a half to get there and I was pretty sure the knee was warmed up already.
And now it’s been over eight weeks since my surgery. My knee is a long way from being all better, but it’s strong enough that Rhonda and I can head into town for a festival and go to dinner, covering three or four miles in the process. More importantly, I can move around on deck, climbing up and over the dinghy to get to the anchor locker, or down the ladder on the stern to access the swim platform lockers. A few weeks ago I just didn’t have the strength in my left knee to climb around like that. I figure in a few more weeks, it won’t even be that difficult.
My next follow-up with my surgeon is in another week. I intend to tell him that he did such a wonderful job that he won’t be seeing me again. We love St. Petersburg, but we’ve been here way too long. It’s less than three months till hurricane season starts again, and we want to try and do some cruising. So unless it voids my warranty or he sees some major reason why I shouldn’t, we’ll probably push on south and head for the Bahamas for a couple of months. It sounds like a great way to recuperate!
This is a post for those of you that geek out on the technical side of boating and marine design. I was having a conversation recently with a fellow boater who told me that he was shopping for a cruising sailboat, but was advised to ignore production boats (e.g. models by Beneteau, Catalina, Hunter, Jeanneau) as they weren’t suitable boats for cruising. Next to the relative merits of different anchor types, few topics will generate a more heated discussion among a group of sailors than the suitability of modern production boats for cruising. On one side you have the Old Salts, who think only limited production, heavier displacement, craft-built boats like a Hinkley, Westsail or Bristol can safely transport you to faraway islands. On the other side, you’ll find a large number of sailors who own and actively cruise their late model production boats and who know from experience that no matter where you go in the world, you’ll find the harbor full of boats that Old Salts will swear were never capable of making the trip. It’s clear which side we fall in with. We’ve traveled close to 5,000 nautical miles so far on our 1997 Hunter 376, and think she’s a terrific boat for island hopping. There’s a list of features that we think make her a great cruiser, but the one I’d like to talk about today is how the use of an interior fiberglass floor pan stiffens and reinforces the hull.
At one time, builders hand-fitted wooden frames into their hulls, and then fiberglassed them in place. Unfortunately wood rots, particularly if water finds a way inside the fiberglass. And all the labor needed to do this fitting and layup costs a lot. So as fiberglass technology progressed through the 1970’s and 80’s, builders began devising ways to cut production costs by molding a solid fiberglass floor grid consisting of a series of box beams, and then gluing this into the hull interior. The Old Salts will say that this makes access to the interior of the hull impossible in the event that you get holed (you hit something at sea that punches a hole in the bottom of your boat). But the modern naval architect will point out that as an engineered, wood free structure, this grid is incredibly strong, light and will never rot. Personally, while both may have a point, I’ll take light, strong, cheap and durable, which benefits us every single day, over the extremely unlikely possibility of being holed while underway, requiring an emergency repair at sea.
We recently pulled up a portion of our cabin sole in order to refinish it, in the process exposing some of our boat’s interior floor pan.
As I looked at the box beam grid, I realized that I had seen this method of reinforcing used before. Here’s a shot of a Metro subway station in Washington, DC, which Rhonda and I have ridden many times in years past:
The box beam construction they used when building this tunnel makes for a light yet strong structure that resists the weight of the city above. And if you took the top of that subway tunnel and flipped it over, you’d have something pretty similar to how a modern production boat hull is designed.
To give you an idea of how long engineers have known that a box beam grid makes for a strong, light structure, here’s a picture of the Roman Pantheon, constructed almost 2,000 years ago and still standing despite being built in a seismically active area.
This is pure engineering excellence. So as far as I’m concerned, if an Old Salt tells you that production boats aren’t strong enough to take cruising, ask them how they can doubt a technology that’s been in use and performing well for over two millennia.
Several years ago, while on vacation in Hawaii, I picked up a T shirt sporting a picture of the Hawaiian state fish. I liked the shirt because it showed the fish’s name in Hawaiian, which is Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. It’s a real mouthful to say, but after some practice it soon flows easily off the tongue, and even tickles a bit in the process.
A year or so later, I was driving home from work (this was back in our pre retired-to-go-cruising days) and I found myself following a trailered boat by the same name. There plastered across the entire transom was Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. It just barely fit on a boat that was easily nine feet wide. I laughed out loud. Because the name just tickles my funny bone.
But now it’s several years later, and Rhonda and I have a few thousand miles of cruising under our belts, and the thought of boat names has been on my mind. Particularly because I’ve seen a few lately that make me go, “Hmm, I wonder if they really thought that through.”
You see, one thing we’ve learned in our travels is that sometimes a boat name works, and sometimes it doesn’t. And while it may seem as though an inappropriately named boat might be merely inconvenient, in our experience it can sometimes become a bit of a problem. So I find myself pondering the issue of how to choose an effective name for a cruising boat, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the subject.
Now none of this really matters a great deal if your plans don’t involve cruising. But if you do intend to head out over the horizon someday, then here’s what it all boils down to. While cruising, you are going to find yourself interacting with foreign officials. They may not speak English very well (or at all), but they’re going to have to hear and understand your boat’s name. Second, you’re going to have to fill out forms and declarations that will require you to list your vessel’s name, and sometimes the space to write it isn’t very large. But most importantly, you’re going to find yourself having to use your boat’s name on the radio quite often. From speaking to bridge tenders to negotiating crossings with other vessels, responding to the Coast Guard or checking in and out with harbormasters, you’ll be on the radio a lot more than when you were weekend sailing around your local waters. And long, complex names just don’t work well on the VHF.
The first tip I’d suggest when choosing a good name is to not use something that suggests nefarious intent. This would seem so evident that it hardly needs mentioning. Yet there we were in Marina Gaviota Varadero, Cuba, watching some very un-amused Cuban police detain the crew of an American flagged vessel that had just arrived. Their boat was named “Guns and Drugs,” and sported a large graphic of an assault rifle. Now this might have really cracked up the boys back in Miami, but it didn’t go over so well in Varadero. Our check-in only took two hours. We didn’t see the crew of Guns and Drugs for three days. So if you think “Human Trafficker” is a hilarious name for a boat, don’t be surprised if the Customs and Immigration officers fail to share in your mirth.
I’d also recommend avoiding foreign phrases. If you think “Occupandi Temporis” or “Mi Velero Impresionante” is just so c’est chic, then have at it. But please know that you’re going to be phonetically spelling it slowly and often on the radio, usually to someone who is dealing with background noise from boat or helicopter engines and can barely hear you. Most importantly, try to keep it short. When it comes to VHF radio communications, the shorter the better. One or two syllable words work best. “Ultimate Retirement Strategy” might expertly define your life situation, but it’s a mouthful to have to keep repeating to the Coast Guard every 30 seconds while reporting a vessel in distress. “Cool Sea Breeze” sounds lovely and is pretty easy to understand. But “Sea Breeze” is better, and the best option would be to just keep it to “Breeze.” Trust me, you’ll thank yourself in an emergency.
A boat’s name can often be a highly personal reflection of the hopes, dreams or desires of its owners, but choosing an appropriate one can involve compromise. The point of all this isn’t to dissuade you from putting what you truly feel is the best expression of yourself on the back of your boat. We just wanted to give you a few things to consider when making your decision. Because I can only imagine the issues the crew of the good ship Humuhumunukunukuapua’a would face if they ever tried to take their boat cruising.
There’s a lot of time to think about things when you’re spending 32 hours motorsailing across the Gulf. One of the many thoughts that crossed my mind during our recent jump from Clearwater, Florida to Port St Joe was the issue of picking a suitable weather window for offshore travel. The criteria for planning a comfortable and thus enjoyable ocean passage is a topic I wish we had known more about before setting off on our Life On The Hook™. But there’s no teacher like experience, and after over a dozen offshore passages of a hundred miles or more, many involving the crossing of a major ocean current, we’ve come up with a list of criteria that we apply when determining whether or not to make a jump. This list reflects our priorities and ours alone. You may have or learn to develop your own list of what’s important to you. But since it’s always good to share knowledge and experience, I thought we’d pass along what we feel makes for the most comfortable passages.
Leaving Clearwater Florida Bound For Apalachicola
Number one on our list by a wide margin is sea state. When we first started cruising, I’d have considered the wind forecast to be the top concern, but something we’ve learned is that the winds don’t matter if the sea state doesn’t work. When making a go/no go decision, we’re looking for forecast seas of one to two feet. If everything else is perfect or we absolutely have to get moving (which seldom happens because as cruisers we don’t travel on a schedule), then we’ll consider two to three foot seas. But if we see that the forecast calls for three to five feet or more, then forget it, we’re staying put, even if the winds and weather are favorable. High seas make for a miserable passage, which often means missing out on an otherwise nominal weather window because the seas are still too high from a previous weather system.
Now we’ve met some cruisers that will laugh at that. “Three to five foot seas? That’s nothing!” they’ll say. But here’s what we’ve learned. The forecast wave height is for the average sea state. If the forecast is for 1 to 2, you’re going to experience quite a few 3 footers. If they’re calling for 4 to 5, well, you’ll have more than a few 7 footers hitting you. And for us on our boat, this would be dangerous. Not because the boat can’t take it, but because the chance of one of us getting hurt increases exponentially with sea state. In 1 to 2 footers, it’s not too hard to move around, as long as we’re careful and always keep one hand on the boat. It’s possible to put a pot on the stove to make coffee or heat up a meal. Above 3 feet, the boat will start pitching and rolling enough that going below and moving around can be dangerous. The stove gimbal is hitting its stops, which means pots won’t stay put, so it’s strictly sandwiches and water rather than hot food and coffee. Spending hours holding on to the stern pulpit to keep yourself upright is tiring, and fatigue leads to loss of focus. Then you try to go below, miss one of the ladder steps, and fall into the cabin and get hurt while 50 miles offshore. Following 5 foot swells cause the boat to roll 25 to 30 degrees or more, and beating into them causes the bow to bash into the waves. It can be tolerated for a few hours. But a day or more? No thank you.
Rhonda Caught A 24 Inch Little Tunny. Related To Tuna, The Gulf Was Full Of Them.
Next we look at forecast precipitation. We live under a 63 foot aluminum pole, and when we’re out on the ocean, we’re the tallest thing by far from us to the horizon. So if they’re predicting thunderstorms, we don’t go. It’s just that simple. Much better to just wait it out in the marina or anchorage, where at least we’re not the only tall aluminum pole around. If the forecast is calling for showers, but not thunderstorms, then it comes down to intensity. A little light rain isn’t that big a deal, we have foul weather gear for that. But if they’re calling for moderate to heavy showers, we’ll probably stay put. It might be different if we had a full enclosure for our cockpit, but we don’t, and there’s only so many hours of standing at the helm in the rain that we can tolerate. If it’s not a day that you’d consider riding a motorcycle, it’s probably not a good day for a passage.
Another Little Tunny. Only 18 Inches, So She Let Him Go.
Now we get to wind. You might think that as a sailboat, this would be higher on the list, but here’s what we’ve learned about wind in our 4,000 miles of travel. It almost never blows from the right direction at the right speed. It’s either too little, too much, or coming from the wrong direction. If we only traveled when the wind was right for sailing, we’d hardly ever go anywhere. So if the prediction is for force 3 or less (up to 10 knots), we’ll go, regardless of the forecast direction. We’ll consider going in a force 4 wind (11 to 16 knots) if it will be behind us, but we won’t go if we’ll be reaching into it, because the apparent wind will be in the 20+ knot range. Greater than force 4, we’re staying put. Even as seasoned a sailor as Bruce Van Sant, author of the cruiser’s bible The Gentlemen’s Guide To Passages South, says that there’s no point in traveling in anything higher that a force 3 wind unless you have no other choice. It’s not relaxing, it’s hard work, people can get hurt and boats can break, and that’s not why we cruise. It’s probably different if you have to be at work on Monday, but cruisers don’t sail to a schedule. We just don’t do it.
So here’s the dirty little secret about sailboats, at least as far as cruising goes. Seventy-five percent of the time, you’re going to be motoring or motorsailing. Only a quarter of the time or less will you actually be able to arrive at your destination under sail alone. So yes, make sure those sails and rigging are in top shape, but also consider adding that three bladed prop, make sure your engine alignment is spot on, and do whatever propulsion system upgrades you may need in order to feel confident about running your engine for days at a time without a break. You’ll probably need a spare alternator or water pump much more than a spare sail.
Good Morning, Apalachicola!
After considering the sea state, rain and wind, we like to take a look at the moon phase. Since you only get one full moon a month, it’s not something you can really factor in to your decision to go if everything else is in alignment. You just take what you get. But let me tell you, spending a night at sea in conditions that require sail adjustments or movement about the deck is infinitely better when there’s actually some light to see by and you’re not totally dependent on a headlamp. And it’s extremely comforting to actually be able to see a horizon at night, especially when crossing a shipping lane full of fast moving freighters or threading through a pack of fishing trawlers. The total darkness of an overcast night with a new moon, where you can hear the waves but can’t see them because the world beyond the lifelines is invisible, can be unsettling. So we like to make long passages during times when the moon is at or near full.
Heading Up The Apalachicola River
Yes, the stars are breathtaking out in the middle of a calm sea on a clear, moonless night while ghosting along under sail in a gentle breeze. But in 14 months of travel, we’ve experienced exactly two nights like that. Every other of the more than a dozen overnight passages we’ve made have been cloudy, dark, rolly, windy, or some combination of the four, while the steady drone of the engine numbed our ears and physically wore us down.
RIver Cruising. We Saw Alligators, Manatees, Turtles And Ospreys.
So those are the criteria that we evaluate when determining when to head out onto open water. If you’re one of those people whose response is “we go regardless of the conditions,” or “we sail through thunderstorms and force 7 winds all the time,” I have one simple question for you. Why? I’d like to hear what motivates you to do such a thing.
Crossing Lake Wimico
Since much of this discussion probably makes ocean passages sound less idyllic than you may have pictured, some of you may be asking the question, “Is it worth it?” My answer is “Yes, it is.” Passages can be a trial, a measure of determination and a test of endurance. But the return on the investment is that we get to spend weeks, even months visiting some pretty amazing places that most people are lucky to experience for just a handful of days. And in the final balance, that’s what cruising is all about.
