The Big Winter Update Part 2

We are back with the second part of our big winter update. In the last post, we had just finished two big projects: Rebuilding all of our portlights and refurbishing our water system.

Picking up where we left off, winter continued and we took full advantage of the dark, rainy (and sometimes snowy!) days- focusing our efforts on inside activities, while we waited for sunny, spring days.

The aftermath of Winter Storm Maya (yep, the storm was actually named Maya!)

My poor bike- conditions were sometimes difficult 

Hiking on the Olympic Peninsula 

If you recall we had issues with our batteries back in Simoom Sound on our trip last year. Not only that, they were installed in a chaotic manner, and it never really felt right. We had three 12V deep cycle batteries for our house electrical loads. Those batteries did a fairly good job of meeting our supply needs, but we never knew exactly how much charge was left in them. That's critical information for a cruising boat that anchors out a lot.

The old batteries

So the decision was made to replace and reorganize our batteries. We only have a small amount of space available for batteries, but we managed to squeeze four 6V lead acid golf cart batteries into the battery compartment. This increased the amount of power we can use, with the added bonus of all the batteries being collocated in the same spot. The only catch was having to move a diesel transfer pump and reroute a rat's nest of wires. Small price to pay for an increase in battery power.

New Batteries!

Rerouting and sorting out the rats nest of wires.

New batteries in with bracing straps- now that is sexy!

Here is our new battery monitoring system- love it!

After removing the diesel pump we had just enough space for all 4 batteries. Using special hydraulic crimping tools borrowed from school, we were able to make custom, professional level battery cables. And as part of the project, we added a new digital battery monitor system. With this device we know exactly how much energy we have left and can manage our boat accordingly.
At this point, I think the battery and associated monitoring system will be our most valuable useful project to date. That remains to be seen, but we are elated about the new system, and the amount of confidence gained by upgrading that system.

After doing a technical, boat system project, we moved our attention to cockpit seating. While we love our boat, it did not come equipped to serve a proper happy hour. With the help of the school's woodwork shop, we tackled the problem head first, making a bench seat in the far aft of the boat, an intermediate removable bench seat, and a folding table.


This project was sooooo fun and it encompassed lots of problem solving and artistic decisions. After speaking with some knowledgeable people we decided to use tzalami, which is a Caribbean hardwood. After lots of trips between the boat and school we were able to finish all the various pieces. At this point Jenny's schedule allowed for her to be in Anacortes more. And because of this we were able to work on this together.

Jenny working on shaping our new bench seat

After a bunch of layers of varnish we installed our new projects and have loved them ever since. It really opens the boat up and makes it more comfortable.
A special shout out to our friend Evan, who built the top of our cockpit table- he even used old growth fir, which is a beautiful and rare type of wood. Thanks so much, Evan! You rock!

Varnishing the various pieces

New projects installed on Maya and looking great- we love it

Those were two of our bigger projects, but we also had a bunch of smaller projects which included cleaning out our diesel tanks, fixing our windlass, and general upgrades in organization in preparation for our big trip. These projects ensured we didn't get bored and boosted our confidence before our big summer trip.

Cleaning our dirty diesel tanks

Diesel tanks cleaned!

New anti siphon loop installed on our engine- this is a simple yet crucial installation for our diesel engine. It ensures that a siphon does not occur which would cause saltwater to flood the engine... ruining the engine.

At this point the days were getting longer so we managed to get a bunch of mini trips in the islands. We were lucky enough to be able to bring out family on several trips, which was so fun. These trips also served as practice for our big trip coming in the summer- testing out new batteries among other systems.

Fun wedding in Leavenworth- Congrats Tim and Alex!

Cool tree on Matia Island

We went fishing with our friend, John, and Jenny caught a Lingcod!

Hiking on Cypress Island

Family outing to Sucia! Thanks for coming, Chris and Bridger!

Happy hour aboard Maya (note the table is being put to use!)

Highlights from our Winter Backcountry XC Skiing Trip 

The Big Winter Update (Part 1)

Ding Ding Ding! Did you hear that? That's the official start of blog season!

We are back with lots of updates on what the heck we have been doing since the end of our first cruise back in October. Spoiler alert: WE HAVE BEEN BUSY!

Highlights from our adventures with portlights and hatches

Video from of our water tank projects

Stepping back in time to last October, we had just finished our first big cruise with Maya through the Inside Passage of British Columbia. We had an amazing trip and came home with a massive to-do list for the boat. With winter approaching, we quickly got to work.

Happy Halloween!

Maverick and Disco

The first major task we needed to tackle was our portlights and deck hatches.... literally all of them leaked. We have 7 portlights and 2 hatches in total, all of which are original to our 40 year old boat. After discovering that our portlights are $800 EACH, we decided that purchasing new ones was not an option, we decided to rebuild them.

One portlight- you can see water was leaking through the gasket material

After pulling the faceplate off you can see how much water intrusion there was

Sizing up the project, we thought the portlights and hatches could be done in a week.... well I'll tell you we are a little wiser now because that job took TWO MONTHS! Two months of scraping, taping, sealing, and all the other crap that went into them..... nine times over.

The job was painstaking and slow, but served as a great learning opportunity. We can proudly say that our boat does not leak at all anymore! Which is a good thing because the PNW winter proved to be a cold wet one!

Cleaning up the surface for new butyl tape (a sealant)

A closer view

Jenny scraping an old portlight- each one needed to be spotless for new sealant

So much prep went into each and every portlight

Portlight glass ready to be rebedded- this was the scariest part of each portlight.... no mistakes allowed!

So by the time the hatches and portlights were rebuilt Jenny found a contract Pharmacist job down south of Seattle. Unfortunately, the location of the job was too far to commute to from the boat so Jenny's sister was kind enough to let her live at her house in Seattle during the week, making the commute bearable. The job came at the right time as the winter here in the PNW is dark and wet... Jenny worked hard getting our cruising kitty fund back in order, not to mention all of the boat parts that Maya needed.

So while Jenny was working, I was up at the boat lounging around and sipping Pina Colodas.... actually not quite. Instead of lounging around, I enrolled in a Marine Technician program at a local community college where I became a full time student learning about diesel engines, boat electrical systems, marine drive train systems, among other things! School provided an amazing opportunity to get hands on experience with engines - deep diving inside them and learning an incredible amount.

As if the school program wasn't cool enough, on campus, there's a huge workshop with a bunch of very knowledgeable people to draw from.  If I had any questions about something on Maya, I could bounce ideas off experts and use the vast array of tools the workshop had to offer.

School! What an amazing place!

Those tools and experts came in very handy when we discovered our water tank was going bad! As part of getting the boat ready for our next trip, I opened up the water tank to inspect and clean it. Much to my chagrin, I found it corroded and in bad shape. What was going to be a simple inspection and cleaning turned into a much bigger project. The first step was to get the tank out of the boat. Removing that tank proved to be a challenge, but after a struggle it was free and we could see what was causing the issue.... corrosion. 

Our main water tank during the initial inspection

Horrified at what we found! 

You can see severe corrosion on the inside... the outside was even worse

The gaping hole left after removing the water tank. That greenish white on the bottom is a copper sheet 

The tank is aluminum and was installed directly above a copper sheet used by another system. Unfortunately, when copper and aluminum are in contact (or even close to one another) corrosion occurs. Because of that corrosive interaction our main water tank was severely damaged at the base. I brought the tank into school and had the experts look at it where we came up with a plan to save it:  chop off the bottom and reweld a new piece of aluminum to it. This removed the worst of the corrosion, while sparing us the cost of a new tank.
It turns out that a fellow student is a pro welder, so I gave him $100 and some beer and a few days later he returned our new spiffy tank... ready to be put back into use! To put into perspective, having a new tank made would probably have run us over $1500... I love school! 

New spiff-a-fied tank!

Not only did we save a ton of money, we can cruise more safely and comfortably with the knowledge we have a clean water tank. While it felt great to have that tank back in, there was no time to rest, because we needed to  focus on our other water tank (which we had never inspected either). When the time came, I nervously opened the tank and, thankfully, didn't find the corrosion that the other water tank had. What I did find was a somewhat dirty tank, which was in need of a thorough cleaning. Additionally, we decided to install a water tank gauge in order to see how much water the tank had.

Our front water tank sits under those boards- our mattress sits above that.... not easy to get access to!

What a mess.... working on cleaning this tank and installing a tank level gauge

Knowing how much water you have aboard is critical to safe cruising, as potable water is often not available for miles, as is the case in the Inside Passage. The problem with our front water tank is that it sits in the Vberth, under our blankets, mattress, and boards, which can't be easily taken off. The solution was to install an electrical tank gauge that we can monitor with a simple flick of a switch. This project proved to be super fun and satisfying as I got to use my knowledge and skills from school to use, taking care to run wires in an organized fashion with proper terminations and labeling. With the gauge in, we can simply flick a switch to know how much water we have, without tearing apart our bedroom.

New water tank gauge!

What the electrical connections look like. Done right the first time!

After hundred of hours of work, we are a leak-free boat, and clean water tanks that we can trust. We are much closer to confidently heading out on our next cruise.

As stated earlier, this is the start of blog season so we will be publishing blog posts more often.

Check back soon as I continue to detail the rest of our boat improvements and the start of the 2019 cruising season!

Thank for reading and we hope to see you soon!

Completing our Journey: Making it home and taking a look back

Hello and welcome back!
So sorry for the long delay since the last post. Things are very busy at the boat so finding time to edit these videos has been a challenge.

Video highlights from Victoria to Anacortes and a financial breakdown of our trip

A look back at our trip- Part 1 

Anywho, we left you with us enjoying Victoria with friends and family. After a couple of really fun days we made our way back to The States. That portion of the trip was pretty uneventful: Customs was a breeze, weather was calm, and after two days we rolled back into our old slip in Anacortes.

We learned so much on this trip that I could not possibly begin to explain everything. The biggest thing we learned is that we like cruising, and that WE CAN DO IT! We were total rookies at the start, never having dropped an anchor before, and 840 miles later we successfully made it back to our homeport. Now, we aren't experts or anything, but we gained so many skills and confidence in our abilities. We honestly didn't sail much (probably under 10% of the time), so we have a lot to learn there, but that's ok though because by motoring most of the way, that afforded us time to focus on other things such as the boat systems and navigation.

So yea.... Mission accomplished!

We landed back in Anacortes and got to organizing the boat and readjusting to life back at the dock. We learned a lot about the boat during our trip North. We got to know Maya a lot better and that allowed us to make a priority list of things that need to change on the boat. I'll briefly list out some of the main things we are going to work on over the winter:

1. Leaky Portlights and Hatches (they basically all leak so those are going to need work)
2. Plumbing issues. We discovered we were only using one tank of water (we have two) so a deeper dive is needed to look at why that is going on. Also, we have had issues with the vent line plugging.... lots of issues with the plumbing that we are going to look at.
3. Some electrical things- sprucing some things up and making some small changes.
4. Engine work- our engine is in great shape, but we are looking to add an anti-siphon loop which could potentially save the engine should we find ourselves in a following sea condition (I'll explain more in a upcoming blog post).
5. Like a million other little things.

So those are the upcoming maintenance items we are going to look at (among others) during winter.

OK, so that about does it for this blog post. My apologies that this one is a little short and lacking in pics, but in place of those is a Part 1 of our trip recap video montage. Enjoy!

Thanks for stopping by and we hope to see you soon! Cheers!

Naniamo to Victoria- The Home Stretch of our of 2 month Journey!

Hello and welcome back to our journey through British Columbia! Previously, we had stopped in Naniamo after successfully crossing the Strait of Georgia- an 18 mile open water crossing. We pick up our story just after leaving Naniamo.

Video highlights from our travels from Naniamo to Victoria

Travel stats covered in this blogpost:
Distance: 69.8 Nautical Miles
Time spent traveling: Approx 15.5 hours
Duration: 6 days

The red line indicates our travel covered in this blog post

Google Map Locations (click to view on google maps):

Naniamo

New Castle Island

Montegue Harbor

Sidney Spit

Oak Harbor Marina

Victoria

We left Naniamo after spending two really great nights there. The anchorage and docks were basically deserted compared to when we were there about a month and a half earlier. We had anchored out the first night, but when wicked winds starting blowing in the morning, we opted to move to the deserted docks. Docks are THE BEST THING when you have a dog, because you get to skip all the rigmarole of getting Disco, you, and the dinghy ready to go to shore. So yea, we were psyched about the $15 dock spot. 

I know we have mentioned it before, but New Castle Island is AWESOME! It's huge, well kept, has showers, and no one is there! Perfect place for an off leash dog run around the island.... which is about 6 miles. Enough gushing... back to boating.

So we left Naniamo and headed towards Dodd Narrows, which is where changing tides squeeze water through a narrow opening, causing heavy current. We showed up on the North side of Dodd Narrows about 30 minutes prior to slack tide (no current) arriving. After waiting for the boats from the South catch the last of the dying tide going north, we caught the very beginning of the tide going south and safely transited Dodd Narrows!

We motored the rest of the way to Montegue Harbor, which seemed like a ghost town compared to when we were there about 7 weeks prior. Montegue Harbor is a huge, well protected bay, that's about 30' in depth everywhere- in other words it's a great anchorage.

Sunset at Montegue Harbor

Maya at anchor in Montegue Harbor

The colors were spectacular, but much different than a regular sunset 

We were heading south to Victoria to meet up with family for the weekend, so after one night in Montegue Harbor we continued south to Sidney Spit which has a great little beach and nice anchorage. Again, it was basically deserted, but I'm sure in mid summer it's jam packed due to its proximity to Sidney and Victoria. 

Sunset from Sidney Spit

Disco on the sandy beaches of Sidney Spit

Maya at anchor in Sidney Spit

The next morning we woke up to deteriorating weather, but decided to continue south regardless. South of Sidney Spit, two large bodies of water meet: Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We were riding the tide south with wind blowing off of Juan de Fuca, which caused waves to stack up, making for an uncomfortable ride. Couple that with cold temps, hard rain, and a healthy bit of wind and needless to say it was kinda rough. Not in the sense that we were in danger... more like "I'm so ready to not be out here right now".

We managed to scoot past a point and tuck into Oak Bay, where we decided to drop the anchor. Unfortunately, ocean swell from that biting wind was coming straight into the bay causing us to pitch and roll.... screw that! We pulled up the anchor and made a final dash to Oak Bay where we picked up a slip for the evening.... hot showers cure all!

The next morning we made the final leg to Victoria under great weather conditions. We found our way to the Causeway Marina, which is in the heart of downtown Victoria. It's really awesome being able to park your house right in the middle of a major metropolitan town (for like $35 a night).

Pulling into Victoria... very busy waterway!

Our dock spot at the Causeway Marina

Empress Hotel in the background

The super famous Empress Hotel!

We met up with family and whipped up the town- touring local breweries and we even had a drink at the super fancy Empress Hotel. To make things even more fun we met up with French Canadian boaters, L'excursion, who we had met in Sidney Bay almost 2 months prior. It was so nice to see familiar faces in Victoria! 

Drinks at the Empress

Group shot!

Group selfie!

Craft Brewery Flight

Our friends, L'excursion, on the left. This is at an Irish bar in downtown Victoria

Disco dog not caring about being in front of a famous hotel

After a couple of whirlwind days in Victoria it was time for us to head back to the United States. The next blog will cover our last few days of our big trip along with what we had going on immediately after our arrival back to Anacortes.

As always, thank you so much for stopping by and reading. Please feel free to leave a comment/question and I will get back to you!

Thanks again and see you next time!

-Mac, Jenny, & Disco

Disco trying to stay warm in a pile of blankets.