Key West to Marquesa

Finally, we are off.  We had the wind on our aft quarter, so we could get some sails up. YAY!  Lovely sail to Marquesa Key averaging around 6 - 6.5 knots.  A bit crazy taking the sails in because my line handler once again thought it would be fun to take a fully loaded sheet off the winch.

Once again a learning moment, instead of trying to go downwind like he asked,  I should have tacked to make the other sheet the working sheet. (I had it prepped on a the winch.)

We learn by dumbass maneuvers.

Our second dumbass maneuver was that we anchored, well, pretty much in the Caribbean from what I can surmise.  Holy crap. We've been here before and had great anchorage. But our Raymarine chart was really goofy.  We could have got in closer. And we were hailed by some boats saying that we could, but we didn't.  And we paid the price in rocking and rolling all night long.  (and not in a fun way.)

Can't really see, but my boy sails in socks.  It was a bit chilly on the water.

I am a bit chillier than sock sailor.

Yeah, we anchored that. far. away.

Requisite sunset pic.

Prepping for our trip

After a couple of delays due to dead dinghy and trouble shooting a few things, we were ready to finally do a trip to the Dry Tortugas.  Seven years in the making using a boat we owned ourselves.

As Tim worked on testing our systems and trying to break the boat, I had the task of provisioning for our 4 days (plus, for safety).  The first time I had to worry about that, and also pay attention the fact that we'd be 'pack on/pack off' at the Tortugas, so no trash disposal.

I did a pretty reasonable job with supplies.  We have a great set up on our boat with a deep fridge and a freezer (alcohol fridge) in the floorboards.  Now that they both have be recharged and have nice working thermostats on them, we have all sorts of configurations for cold storage.

I also went through and repackaged what I could to limit the amount of trash we would have to deal with.  I made a mental note to myself to get one of the battery powered handheld vacuum sealers for food for when we have longer trips to make.

All in all, I had more food than we needed, and still plenty of storage left.  Big thanks for by Bday present of mobile wine bag that also helped save a lot of space.

Holds two bottles of wine.

Fridge.  Pre-cut up veggies and lunch items in bins down below. (Can't see, but easy to access.)

Rednecks dream: Beer and meat.

Scop me, baby.

Scopalamine, that is.

The magical little patches that make you not throw up all over the place.  Ask your doctor if Scopalamine is right for you.

All my life I have suffered from motion sickness.  Trains, planes, automobiles, boats, IMAX, 3D, you name it.  Trains and planes I have adjusted to. Automobiles are still iffy if I am riding for long periods int the back of the car. IMAX, forget it.

Boats--yes, and no.  Sometimes, just my pressure wristbands and a bonine and I'm fine.  Other times, it doesn't matter.  And sometimes, just self induced because of imbibing the night before.  For reference see Mal de Mar or Sailing with Dummies.

Because of this, I just had been skeptical of scopalamine, what makes it so special.

So, Tim convinced me that we both need to give it a try.

I'm here to tell you, as somebody that gets violently seasick at times, it works.  But as one of my instructors I worked with used to say: "There's no free lunches."

You place the patch on at least 4 hours before it's needed. I did it the night before.

It was very, very, very odd for me to not have at least one odd symptom of seasickness on the way out the the Tortugas.  And I also think it had this serious mellowing out effect-not a bad thing.  I still didn't have an urge to eat, but I didn't have the acid reflux, nausea or vertigo feeling I can get.

Being on a downwind run did help also.

Here's the big side effect thing.  You get dry mouth, SERIOUSLY DRY MOUTH.  You actually wish there was a dental tech with her little water pick standing beside you at all time.  Because of this, I know I have to make sure there's more water than usual on board for drinking.  But, drinking water. NOT A BAD THING.  I had bought some Lifesavers also, and that helped.

Second side effect kicked in about 48 hours later. Double vision.  I could get my calmed down with my reading glasses. Tim actually put my reading glasses on over his regular glasses.  Not really an issue except when we did our brief night sailing adventure. But for me, any close reading was completely freaked out.

Those side effects are worth the fact that I can move about the boat and hold watch without having a bucket close at hand and also feeling like complete crap.  I now know how it affects me, so I'll prepare accordingly.

LED lights

We finally, got the lights replaced this trip. No small feat considering there's over 40+ lights on the boat.

However, in replacing them we found an oh so important reason to get non-halogen lights on the boat. If you haven't replace them yet, make sure you at least replace the one in your engine compartment.

Another thing we learned is the rheostat (#fancywordforlightdimmer) cannot make LEDs go completely out, so Tim installed an on/off switch for the salon.

He also supplied my galley and my vanity light with a bit brighter LEDs. What a guy.

My job: Sort and unwrap.

The old halogens with our melted cover from engine room.

Close up of how plastic had melted--oh, did I mention? ENGINE ROOM.

List from hell

Here's the list after we took our first blue water sail.  Holy crap.  However, some of this list started before we ever left the dock.  I will address some of this in posts to follow.  See below for what we hammered out.

Generator:  Tim tested it in the dock and it ran for 5 minutes, sputtered and crapped out.  Then we got what every boat owner wants to see:  Water leak alarm on the generator panel.  So, we gots Mr. Generator put to bed.  Just found out today that there was a crap ass silicone 'patch' on the generator that failed and there's a lot of corrosion and dry hose.  So, if we had ran it, we most likely would have set the boat on fire. F*($k. We didn't, but now we have some big B.O.A.T. units to shell out to fix this problem.

OC tender:  To take a line from the musical Hamilton.  "You married a Icarus, and he's flown to close to the sun."  My boy dreamed big, but he dreamed bigger than what the little tender could handle.  So Zeus is dead.  (Pulp Fiction: Zed's dead, baby)  The the combination of the attachment points to the davits and the weight in the dinghy-and possibly the Key West summer heat-Zeus suffered some serious structural distortion.  If we had tried to keep her on the davits, even without the weight of the Torqeedo batteries, she would have shredded on our way to the Dry Tortugas.  Thankfully we didn't get rid of Tiny Dancer or the other Torqeedo yet, so we got them rigged up.

Senders:  Waste tank sender already fixed, it got stuck.  Water sender has bad threading and we can't get it fitted to our tank, so we will get it grinded to right threading or they will send new one.

Stern light: We replaced our nav lights with LEDs just to find out that now, they are always lit.  Long story short-because I am not the electrical guru on the boat.  The diode that leads from the main power switch of the electrical panel to the nav lights went bad, so there was a constant short that provided enough ampage to power an LED light.  Got that? No? Yeah. Email Tim if you want more info.  However, it got fixed after we got back, and Sparky is so proud of himself of that.  I got to sit at the back of the boat like a jackass going, IT'S ON, IT'S OFF, IT'S ON, IT'S OFF.

All things anchor: More details in a bit, but remote is bad, snubber needs upgraded, and where the chain meets nylon rode is not good. As in, jams up the windlass not good.

Propane/stove:  Tim installed new sensors for propane in the galley.  It's either placement or sensitivity, but the damn thing would go off as soon as I tried to cook.  So, I get something started in the oven, start the stove. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP and it does its job by killing the gas, but then I have to restart everything.  By now, the stove has had a bit of a build up of propane, so I'd open it and it would set off the sensor again.  Newly invented cuss words during cooking on the hook this time.  Generator shot, so no microwave.

I think the one thing is Front spot light, and more on that later.