Preparations for a Northern Adventure

We haven't left for Canada yet?! What?! I'm sure you all wondering the same thing as us.... "when are going to leave for the big Canadian adventure?"....
Well, in the last 10 days we continued to have issues with our windlass anchor system. We have encountered one issue after another with it. I won't bore you with the details, but everything from receiving a bad replacement part, to seized up parts on the windlass, and even having to return parts we ordered because the chain size changed.... Just a small glimpse into the world of boat work frustration. What should take a few days in your mind will actually take weeks and weeks.

We kept at it, making small steps of progress, and after a whole lot of persistence we now have a working anchor setup! And it's frickin' badass! We invested in 220' of 5/16" BBB chain, an oversized anchor swivel, new anchor bridle system, and an upgraded rope splice to connect to our existing 200' of rope. This is total overkill for our boat in this area, but it's very important to us to have an anchor system we can trust..... so we can sleep well at night. Plus, with this strong setup, we can anchor in spots that many people wouldn't be able to (on the account most people don't carry that much anchor chain/rope on their boats).

Paying out the chain in order to measure and paint distance marks

Marking distances on our chain

Happy with results! Disco waiting for someone to throw the damn ball already!

Removing the rope from our old chain- had to use an angle grinder because it was so corroded.

We used free end of the existing rope to splice to a new thimble, which will attach to our new chain. Great job Jenny on this splice! 

New Rope to Chain Splice on a Thimble. Old one we replaced below

The old rope to chain splice

Our new chain going through our new gypsy! We replaced several parts on the windlass. Gypsies are sized for specific types of chain. Our old chain was not properly sized for the gypsy so it wore it down to the point it did not work anymore.

Old chain and old gypsy piece for comparison

Our first anchor spot- Fidalgo Bay 

We tested out anchor system just outside our marina and the results were great! We dropped anchor, didn't drag, and pulled up our anchor setup with no issues. That was the last big hurdle for us before we felt confident in all of our boat's systems. On wards to Canada!

While the anchor setup took a lot of time to get sorted, we have a bunch of other jobs keeping us busy. A couple of those jobs included:
-changing fuel filters (and learning how to do that- scary!)
-Rope splicing a thimble onto our existing anchor rope
-New step in the companion way
-General maintenance around the boat (cleaning up teak, polishing stainless steel, etc) - there's a lot of those jobs.
-Washing the boat (how does the boat get so dirty so fast?!)
-Leaky portlight
-Paperwork (lots of paperwork getting all of our documents ready to make the jump into Canada- Border Patrol docs, dog docs, people docs, etc)
-Provisioning/sourcing parts
-Crabbing (we've been crabbing everyday- eating like kings!)

Jenny getting into the tight spaces- we had to rehang the anchor locker door 

This is what the boat looks like during a "project day". Unreal how fast we can make a mess when we have projects going.

New step! You have no idea how happy we are to have an additional step there!

While we have been putting a ton of work into the boat, we have also been able to sneak out into the islands a bit and even get some fantastic sailing in! We made our longest journey yet this summer out to Matia and Sucia Islands.

A lot of these state park islands have one dock on them and we were lucky enough to score a dock spot on Matia! The docks are interesting because you are docked there with other boats, so you are all camped there together. We got very lucky because our neighbor was Dave.... and Dave knew things about boats. We don't know things about boats. He was a wealth of knowledge and was happy to share it with us. We learned how to properly tie a boat onto a dock that is exposed to swell, knots, and a bunch of other general info. He even gave us some homegrown rosemary- thanks, Dave!
While at Matia we also busted out our wetsuits and did some snorkeling.

That's about it for now. We are in the final days of our preparations before we leave for Canada. I thought it would be prudent to say that while we are behind our original schedule we had set for ourselves to leave for Canada, we have absolutely loved Anacortes. This little island town has been great to us- perfect weather, nice downtown, good people, and just a generally nice place to be. We have gotten into a rhythm of running on Anacortes' trails, shopping and eating downtown, and listening to free concerts right outside the marina. Lovely little town that we would recommend to any and all! Ok, SV Maya over and out!

Sucia and Matia Islands

Early morning departure from Anacortes on our way to Matia Island

We have arrived at Matia and we scored a dock!

Sunset from Matia

Storm conditions at our mooring ball on Sucia

Disco about to take flight from all this wind

This is our mooring line after one gusty night. Don't worry- we had a backup in place! We brought the mooring lines through chocks on the side of the boat- allowing the boat's movement to chaff through the line. We should have brought both sides of the line through our bow roller- thus eliminating the chaffing action. Lesson learned!

Moving this big fast under sail! Headed back to Anacortes

On our way home from Sucia- Sporty day!

Maya at our first anchor spot! 

Concert at the park from our dinghy. Went out to fetch crab pots after the show- nice evening!

Biggest crab of the season so far

One step forward, two steps back (but still having fun!)

Hello! At the end of the last blog post we had just spent a couple of nights out in the islands. It was so nice to get some island time in, but after that trip we had one goal: anchoring in Maya. Every night we have spent away from a marina has been tied up to a mooring ball.
While tying up a mooring ball is great and easy, you can only do that if there's a mooring ball where you want to spend the night- anchoring will allow us to spend the night wherever the heck we are (conditions permitting of course).
At this point, we had inspected our anchor chain and it looked ok, with the exception of the rope to chain connection. The next step was to show some love to our windless. A windless is the device that brings up the rope and chain from the sea floor. It's a big electric motor that has a special cog that the chain fits right in. This eliminates the need to manually haul up all that heavy metal that makes up the chain and anchor. Our windless made a whining sound when we were using it to inspect our chain so we took it apart, cleaned it, and greased it. Ready to anchor out now, right? Wrong.
As we pulled up the anchor the chain kept slipping out of the special cog (called a gypsy). Puzzling.... why is it this doing that?! We spent several hours exercising The Scientific Method trying to get to the bottom of just what the heck is going on. After several frustrating hours spent scratching our heads we determined that our chain was the wrong size for our gypsy and had been wearing it down over the years. Oh boy.

This is our anchor chain and gypsy that brings up the whole anchor rode. The links don't fit properly which causes the whole chain to slip.

So now we had a decision to make.... do we get a new gypsy and hope it works with whatever kind of chain we have or do we replace both the chain and the gypsy?
Ultimately we have decided to replace both. Hard to spend the money, but having confidence in our chain and anchor setup AND knowing we can bring up the anchor when we need to outweighs the financial costs. To give you an idea of costs, our new windlass parts cost approx $500, and our new chain is probably going to cost about $750.

It's funny how we expected to be anchoring out a few weeks ago, only to encounter this issue which has postponed the anchoring experiment several weeks. Apparently that's how boat stuff works- everything takes longer than expected. That's ok though because even though it was frustrating to find this problem, we learned a ton in the process. Chain types, advantages of chain, all sorts of stuff. Good thing we are both scientists because this stuff takes some brain power and reasoning to figure out! OK done talking about chain and anchoring.

In other news, our dinghy is mobile now! We purchased a little 2.3HP Honda outboard! It's so awesome having the ability to motor somewhere, as opposed to rowing. Don't get me wrong, rowing is fine for short trips, but there's no way we are going to be rowing miles at a time. While the motor is about the smallest 4 stroke gas engine you can buy, it's still BIG and BULKY. You know what doesn't work well on sailboats? Big and bulky items. Time to put our thinking caps on figure out where to store this motor. We have a solid railing in the back of the boat which will take the weight of the dinghy motor and keep it there. Of course there's a slight bend and angle to our railing, which eliminates the possibility of buying a pre-made mount from the store. Doh. After much discussion and thinking we put our plans into action! We fabricated our own motor mount out of 1/2" marine grade plywood- laminating layers together. Oh how I miss the workshop at the Cashmere house! We are totally limited on space and tools, but 3 days later (yes, 3 days!) we had a functional motor mount! Not bad for total boat noobs. We ended up spending way less than a pre-made one (we spent about $50 on ours).

We were very motivated to find a place to store our motor because crabbing season is about to start here in the PNW! And wow there's a buzz about town. Everyone is talking about it, crabs pots are out on every boat in the marina, and presumably there's a millions of crabs just outside the marina. While we are here at the marina, we will be using our dinghy (and motor!) to set and retrieve crab pots. We only have to motor out about 1 or 2 miles from the marina, which our dinghy can do in about 15-20 minutes. So yea, we are all set to start crabbing now!

Liking what we see!

Drilling holes for bolts

The dinghy motor in its spot

Lastly we enjoyed the opening day of crabbing season! Cory and Sara came up to go crabbing on opening day and we had a great time figuring out all this crabbing business. Basically it involves motoring out about 15 minutes from the marina, dropping pots with chicken as bait, then returning to the marina to relax for a few hours before going back out and harvesting.
Beginners luck may have had something to with our catch because we caught a bunch! Dinner was amazing and we were able to send Cory and Sara home with some extra meals of crab.

Headed out to set crab pots- cool boat tied up at the marina

A crab!

Lots of crabs! The brownish ones are Dungeness and the red ones are Red Rock crabs.

Our neighbor lent us his pot and rocket stove to cook up the crabs

It was absolutely delicious

Our crabbing vehicle

Jenny and Sara headed out to check pots

The first pot we pulled

YUM!

That's all for now- basically we are just getting the boat dialed in so we can leave here feeling confident in Maya's ability to safely get us from point A to B. While we aren't sailing, fishing, and drinking fancy drinks every day, we are still having a ton of fun learning about boats and their systems. Stay tuned for the next update! Hopefully we'll have a new anchor setup by then.

Thanks so much for reading!

Boat work and finding our sea legs

Hello! We have had quite the week living and traveling on Maya. This was basically our first week living aboard as well. We have learned a ton in such a short amount of time- mostly that EVERYTHING takes way longer on a boat. Need that one tool that buried in a back compartment? You're gonna need to take everything out and completely blow up the boat to get it. I swear the boat can be clean and organized one second and then the next it's a complete mess! And we made some HUGE messes aboard..... however we did make a ton of progress on boat work and even snuck in a few trips to the islands.

Our first order of business is getting the boat set up so we can cruise, which means inspecting and taking stock of our anchor and chain setup. We have never dropped anchor in this boat so we thought it prudent that we inspect every foot of it. Glad we did because the connection from chain to rope is in bad shape!

Our chain to rope connection looks bad so we will be upgrading

Inspecting our anchor rode on the dock

We also found out that we need a bridle system that connects the boat's chain to the boat- so the weight of the boat isn't pulling on our anchor windlass (which is the big motor that brings up the anchor). We ordered that part and moved onto the next project. We will test our anchor system soon- there's sure to be a blog post about it.

This past winter we made a bunch of purchases at the Seattle Boat Show (with boat show discount, I might add!). One of those purchases was an Automatic Identification System (AIS) which is basically smart radar for our boat. When we are out at sea, we can see all the other boat's name, heading, speed, size, etc all from our chartplotter and our phones. Super cool and a huge leap in terms of safety and navigation aboard. As mentioned earlier, the job took waaaaay longer than we expected because everything takes longer on a boat! It was a fun project though- getting to run wires throughout the boat and getting to know the boat's electrical system was good too. The system is installed and functional. Major win!

Our AIS system is the blue thing on the right. Other boxes are our smart battery charging system (white box), and our NEMA (the boat's marine instrument network) boxes (black)

We had to make a custom bracket to mount our AIS GPS antenna on Maya's railing

Maya's electrical hub. That engineering degree is being put to use!

It wasn't all work and no play this past week though- we managed to spend 3 nights out in the islands (we used mooring balls- still no functional anchor system yet). We had guests coming to stay with us over the weekend so we wanted to do a recon mission out to the islands. We are so glad we did because we discovered an issue with our engine's exhaust system! Oh no! Our boat has a "water lift muffler" that was leaking and cracked. The muffler takes the hot water and exhaust gases from the engine and helps lift that mixture up and out of the boat. Our engine sits below waterline so it needs this muffler to help overcome gravity. Anywho, the whole top was cracked and we could see it spewing gas and water out of it. Worse, the inlet hose was leaking bad, which was filling our boat with salt water! Ahhh! It wasn't gushing, but still! Salt water coming into the boat is bad, and the boat would have been dead in the water if that muffler blew apart. We kept a close eye on the muffler as we cruised back to the marina. The next few days were spent sourcing the part and getting that new muffler installed. It was a dirty, cramped job, but we were able to fix it the day before our guests arrived!

UV protected!

Rowing to shore at James Island

The big black cylinder is the water lift muffler

Here's a small glimpse of what the old muffler was doing- it had to go!

Beginning to remove the muffler...


The view from another angle

Here's the old muffler- you can see cracks on the surface- water and engine exhaust were spewing from there! Ah!

Luke and Rachel came up for the weekend to spend a night aboard Maya out in the islands. The weather forecast for the weekend called for rain and cold. Undeterred by the forecast we headed out into the islands and were subsequently drenched with rain. After initially having trouble finding a mooring ball for the night, we pulled into an anchorage just as the rain stopped... happy hour commenced and it didn't rain the rest of the trip!
Great trip out into the islands.

Photogenic Pup

Maya and Mt Baker

Maya with Mt Baker in the background- taken at James Island State Park

Towing Rita on our way to Cypress

Rita and Maya at Pelican Beach on Cypress Island

This gives you an idea of the currents that run through the islands- it's like a big river!

Cup of coffee at Cypress

Freezing on our way home from our recon mission

Soggy on our way out to Cypress Island- thankfully the weather improved dramatically after we tied up to the mooring ball!

Jenny, Rachel, and Disco coming back from a mission to shore

Happy hour crew at Cypress Island

And the view from the Pelican Beach on Cypress Island