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!