Failures

What’s Stopping You?

What’s Stopping You?

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Over a year ago we sold everything; our house, our cars, toys, books and furniture to follow a dream of living on a boat and travelling the world. That was a monumentally big thing to do. We completely uprooted our lives and that added a lot of pressure to succeed. In a year and a half of owning the boat and a year of living on board we have barely moved it. Why?
It’s weird because I have been onboard with the idea of living on a boat from the beginning. In fact I was the one who pointed out we don’t have to wait for retirement to make it a reality.
Jason loves to sail. I have never sailed before but I love to travel. There really isn’t anywhere I wouldn’t like to visit. I want to go back to Ireland, visit uninhabited islands, experience the cultures of the South Pacific, see the cherry blossoms in Kyoto and the tulips blooming in the Netherlands, I want to see the Parthenon and the Great Pyramids and so many other places. We have been interested in the sailing and traveling life from the start. So what is stopping us?
Well we had some problems with the engine leaking water into the oil. The standing rigging that holds up the mast was 18 years old and in bad shape. One of our through-hulls started letting water seep into the boat from the river. Those were all critical things to fix… but…
I’ve never needed to be handy with fixing things in my life. Because repairs aren’t something I know how to do well, I tend to shy away from trying them. This is a mental roadblock for me. One that I have had to start facing because boats are a lot of work! Often too much for just one person.
I have needed to help more and more with projects. I helped re-bed hardware, remove, refit and replace through-hulls, epoxy and paint repairs, hoist sails, and climb the mast among other things.
I’m still not very handy but I am learning. As I learn and help I am realizing our boat starts to feel more real. Not just a place where we happen to live but something that is truly ours.
Some days it feels overwhelming and like maybe living on a boat was a bad choice and it would be so much easier to live in a house.
Then again… is an easy life what we really want? Or do we want to follow our dreams? Our brains build roadblocks in our path to success. They do this to mitigate the pain of failure. Our brains help us give up on our goals before even trying.
The truth is we have only been half committed to our dream. We have been letting the work that needs to be done become our roadblocks against really living our dream. One of those roadblocks for me has been driving the boat. It is 42 feet long and it is our home. The idea of making a mistake can be paralyzing if I let it.
I recently commented about not feeling comfortable docking the boat. One person replied to add a bunch of extra bumpers on and give it a try. This really resonated with me because what she was essentially saying is ‘face your roadblocks.’ I haven’t docked the boat yet but I did decide to take the helm and back it out of our slip to take it out for our first time actually sailing! This was big for me. It helped me realize that the fears we build up in our heads are usually worse than reality.
The more I do on the boat, and roadblocks I confront, the more excited I become to actually get sailing. It feels real in a different kind of way then just wanting to travel and even selling everything and living on our boat.
It feels a little bit more mine.
What are your dreams? What roadblocks are getting in your way? What can you do to face your roadblocks?
Those little holes in the bottom of our boat

Those little holes in the bottom of our boat

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The excitement and stress involved in doing a large project on a boat is always high. The anticipation of being complete is a great feeling. Knowing that all you have to do is that one last thing and you are finally done…except…we are learning that it is never really done.
Just as we were wrapping up the large undertaking of pulling down our mast and replacing all of the standing rigging holding it up, we decided to do another ritual check of things around the boat.
This check is fairly simple and often quick. The first thing we look at is the bottom center of our bilge. Since this is the absolute lowest point in the boat, and under all of the floor boards, it is where all water flows if there is any kind of leak. Checking this area for water will give us some insight into how well we are doing at not sinking.
After checking the bilge at the lowest point, we go through each of our thru-hulls. These are the holes in our boat that are meant to be there. Some are above the water line outside and some are below. Some are used to discharge water out, like the sink drains, and some are for bringing water in, like the air conditioner cooling water.
Each thru-hull is first a hole cut into the boat. A bronze or plastic device is placed into the hole and sealed in place. Attached to this bronze or plastic device is a valve often referred to as a sea-cock. The sea-cock typically has a barbed nipple attached to connect a hose. The intention behind all of this is to control how the water comes in or goes out and to avoid leaking.
As with all things boat related, just as we thought we were getting done with big projects like the rigging, our inspection of thru-hulls revealed that one of them was leaking. That meant our boat was sinking! Of course, our boat was sinking very, very slowly but still.
Unfortunately, the only right way to fix a leaking thru-hull is to pick the whole boat up out of the water, remove, and re-bed it. As always, we started researching the best ways to do this project and came to MarineHowTo.com. This site has a wealth of experience based tutorials on boat related work. It is well worth a look if you are learning.
They describe a method of using fiberglass backing plates instead of the wooden ones that Hunter thought was a great *read cheap* idea. These are to be glassed into the boat so they are permanent and fixed. It also suggests that using something like the Groco flange adapter will help to improve the strength of the whole system. We decided this was the way to go and we were going to do the oldest 5 thru-hulls below the waterline. We have 11 total below the waterline but the other 6 had been re-bedded a few years ago by a previous owner.
We needed to flatten the inside of the boat so that our new backing plates fit properly and then could be well glassed into the bottom of our boat. When you need to grind the inside of your fiberglass boat and you don’t really want to get fiberglass dust everywhere what do you do? I say make a sanding tent!
After a ton of research, even more elbow grease, and a little bit of guess work, we were able to get them all replaced. Of course just we we thought we had the hard job completed we realized that the hull had some bumps on it…These bumps are known as osmotic blisters.
These are bubbles that form between the fiberglass of the hull and the gelcoat that is used as a barrier. It turns out that gelcoat isn’t really that great for boats despite being on just about every fiberglass boat I have ever been on.
The blisters fill with fluid which slowly converts to a corrosive substance. It then eats away at the fiberglass which rots it. The only solution is to grind all of the bad glass out of the hull. It was a little scary to start grinding on the outside of our hull but once we got started we just kept going until we got all of the water out.
After grinding it all out the next step was to fill the holes with thickened epoxy. We used West Systems 105 Resin, 205 Fast Hardener, and enough 406 Colloidal Silica to make it like a thick peanut butter. This mixture had to be pushed into the holes then smoothed out to make a nice finish. Once we had the finish shape we wanted we were able to paint over the patches to make a finished look.
That big hole in the top of our boat…

That big hole in the top of our boat…

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I didn’t realize just how many holes there are in a large boat. Despite not wanting to have holes, since they seem to be how water gets in, there are several. One of the larger ones on the topside of the boat is for the mast.
Some boats have a deck stepped mast and some have a keel stepped mast. A keel stepped mast is one where the mast goes through the top deck of the boat and then rests on top of the keel at the bottom of the boat. A deck stepped sits on a foot on the deck. Under the foot on the inside of the boat is a compression post that goes down to the bottom of the boat.
On Rána we have a deck stepped mast with a solid stainless steel compression post. This has the advantage of having a much smaller hole in our deck than if we had a keel stepped but that doesnt mean we have no hole.
When we took the mast off the boat it seemed like the right time to take apart the mast step and work on rebedding it. This is where we completely disassemble it, remove it from the boat, clean it, then remount it with new bedding compound in the hopes that it will not leak on our heads.
Upon taking apart our mast step we found that ours had a mast foot, which is the dark grey plate, a stainless steel plate with wings to hold the turning blocks, and another stainless steel plate which was welded to the compression post.
Someone got the wild idea that we could try rebedding just the mast foot and leave the rest in place since it looked as if the whole compression post would have to be removed to rebed all of it. As I am sure you can imagine that did not go well.
A few days after we bedded the mast foot we were sitting at our table as it started to rain outside. It didn’t take long before it was raining inside as well. I suppose it was better than having it leak after the mast went back up! So we went to work taking it all apart again and cleaning it up. This time we took the whole compression post out and cleaned everything.
Once we got it all back in place it looked pretty good. We waited a few days for the bedding compound to cure then we did some wet tests to make sure it wasn’t going to leak. The only thing left to do now was to take apart and rebed all of the chain plates…
All dressed up with nowhere to go…

All dressed up with nowhere to go…

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You work hard and you plan everything but in the end, are you ever really ready?

We haven’t been great about taking the boat out since we moved aboard. As you can imagine, we have mostly focused on the transition to living in a small space. Just getting everything on the boat and out of our truck took weeks. We had to find every awkward storage space the boat had including the hidden ones.

Still, we thought it was time to get her out into the river for a joy ride. We planned everything out…we thought.

We went through the dubious process of stowing everything we had lying about the cabin.

We took the cover off our dodger.

We checked the engine out and made sure all of the fluids were ready to go.

We got the life jackets out and the kids excited to put them on and go for a ride.

 

Then we tried to start the engine to get out of our slip. It turned over for a split second then was dead. I realized quickly that the starter battery was dead. It seemed like it had just enough to maybe start so we tried it once with hope. Still nothing.

Luckily, we just happened to have a standard 12V car battery charger from when we had been at a previous marina. They had disconnected our power cables while we were away from the boat and when they put them back on they didn’t do it correctly so we came back to our entire house battery bank without a charge but that’s a whole different story.

I quickly setup the charger and hooked it up to the starter battery. I was determined to save our day trip since we had already put so much work into getting out.

Finally, after about an hour I had just enough charge to get the engine running. Everyone got so excited. We were ready to get out of our slip.

I was just about to disconnect us from shore power when I realized I should probably turn on the instruments. I figured since I was turning them on I should quickly check our depth. I knew we were near high tide but it’s always best to double check.

Our boat draft is 5.4’ from the water line. That means that we sit that low in the water so the ground has to be at least that far from us. Our slip has about 5.3’ of water at low tide. Most likely our keel has grooved out an area so it doesn’t actually sit on the bottom but it is very close. At high tide, we only see around 6.3’. The river we are located in is only around 5-8’ at the deepest points.

I looked quickly across each of the instruments. Wind was slow, maybe 5 knots from the West. Hull speed was zero as expected. Then depth…it showed 23.5’. I had to double take before it clicked that something wasn’t right.

I thought maybe it was just a glitch and I could reboot it so I tried. When it came back up all I got was “—“. After a quick google search and some frustration, I discovered that it was likely a failure of the display unit.

Now, if the wind sensor or even the speed sensor had gone out we could have still enjoyed our day but no. It had to be the depth. This is the one instrument on our boat that is critical for us to even get out of our marina.

At that point, the day was lost and the kids were let down. We decided to let the engine run for a while since it needed it anyway and it would charge the battery. I spent the rest of the day trying to solve the depth problem. The kids and Carolyn went into the cabin and found other things to play.

Sometimes you can plan for everything. It isn’t until you are ready to embark that you realize you missed something so simple. At least we weren’t leaving for a month-long voyage at sea…