Sooo…. I realize I don’t post very often… internet is a rare thing… but that’s not an excuse I can use right now.
WildChild has been safely docked at a yacht club in Cape Canaveral Florida since December 23rd. We found this place thru our friend Tom and the great news is it only costs $460 for a month. That is awesome because when you start cruising you quickly discover that marinas really want to rob for more than a hundred bucks a night! Yep… since you own a boat you must be rich and they are entitled to take as much of your money as possible… American Capitalism… whata ya gonna do…?
We really needed a break. Four months of hard and continuous sailing in miserable conditions wore us down. In our first week here at the yacht club we did not do very much… just rested… socialized… and walked around. It seems to be important to deliberately make time to talk with other people when you are cruising. Being cooped up 24/7 with your partner is hard. You will get sick of each other no matter how much you love each other. So socializing has become more important than I ever realized it could be.
The second week here we began taking care of the boat. That list of boat projects that grows as the ocean breaks your boat. I must admit that I am amazed at how fast the ocean and the salt corrode your boat. Of course there is also the enormous forces exerted on your boat by the wind and the waves too.
I have seen electrical things corrode at amazing rates. I had to install a new windlass switch when we were in Portland Maine because the old one (2 months old) corroded to defective. To understand the details the windlass switch is on the underside of the anchor locker door. The switch itself is sealed in a grey outdoor water tight junction box.
The second switch corroded to dust within 2 weeks! Yep 2 weeks and the freakin thing fell apart. So in St. Agustine we found a used marine supply depot and I bought like a dozen possible replacement switches.
The Blue Sea systems momentary contact switches I wired to activate the water tank sending units to read them literally corroded and fell apart when I touched them last week. And the are inside the boat under the V-berth! They were new 5 months ago.
So for the last week we have been suffering to fix and improve the boat. We installed the mast camera we bought from B&G before we left and had to run the wires from the helm station thru the engine room and the salon and then up inside the mast. This was the hard part. The camera is mounted on the first speaders now and IT WORKS.
I was figuring that when we get to the Bahamas in about 10 days it might be nice to see the waters ahead before we hit the coral heads. It was a lot of work to install but hopefully it keeps the big keel safe.
We replaced the secondary anchor light at the top of the mast. Energy efficiency is extremely important to a boat designed to survive off the grid. So we installed the best super duper LED anchor light money can buy about a year ago. It still works… and uses so little energy it can’t be detected by the power analyzers on the line… but…. it is pretty dim.
So 5 months ago I made a 3 clump white LED ring (in a transparent sealed tube) and mounted it at the top of the mast just below the dim one. It was a good idea but it didn’t survive the ocean pounding. I made a new one and improved upon the idea.
See… we found while sailing at night that our night time navigation lights…
A/ use too much power
B/ blind us and take away our night vision thus takes away our ability to see out into the dark.
Soo… we tend to sail dark… kind of… we always sail with the anchor light on. We figure it can be seen from above the waves and does not blind us.
Soo… the new and improved secondary anchor light I have built and installed at the mast head has much more white light… and… I installed a red and green section into the band at the right points. So now it can be used as an energy efficient navigation light in open ocean sailing and it only uses about 5 milliamps.
Of course we still have the main navigation lights for when we are in harbors or in vessel traffic areas of have any boats within a mile of us.
The project list goes on and on like this… another thing we are excited about is I had some custom blocks made by Garhauer that arrived yesterday. Today we installed them. They are hopefully a brilliant idea and will prove to be an awesome improvement on the boat.
We can now control the running backstays from the new blocks and cam cleats we installed. The exciting part is that it now frees up the secondary winches for the storm sail or furling the genny or running the spinnakers without losing the extra support of the running backstays.
On an update note…
We are leaving on a 4 day Caribbean cruise ship tomorrow. I have going on a cruise ship on my bucket list and we figured this is the closest we will ever come. We don’t need to book flights or hotels to get here (its right across the harbor from us now) and we could pick up last minute tickets and save money there too. So for $260 each we figured lets enjoy the ocean.
I kind of joke that we are doing reconnaissance mission of the Bahamas so when we take WildChild across we will know where we are going… ha ha.
When we return here we will begin looking for our weather window to continue jumping south. Next stop probably lake worth inlet at the isle of palms. Then from there we jump across to the Bahamas.
Cheers…