Shaken down and stirred

[Dual log - we kept saying "oh, don't forget to add..."]

I (Hilde) promised myself I wouldn’t write one more post until we had actually left the dock and gone somewhere. Yesterday we returned from our first short shakedown cruise, to Offatt’s Bayou, behind Moody Gardens in Galveston. The weather forecast promised high 80s and 10-15 winds, which we got the first day out. After that it was 90-95 degrees in the afternoon and not a wisp of wind. We enjoyed the mornings and the evenings and gasped miserably in the heat in the afternoon.

Shakedown cruises are basically time away from the dock to see what works, what doesn’t work, what breaks, and what needs to be tossed overboard at the first opportunity. We discovered that we didn’t remember all the myriad steps it takes to secure the boat, all the steps it takes to get her ready to sail, and all the steps it takes to keep a happy ship. We remembered most of them, but the devil is in the details.

What a mess! All this stuff had to be stowed - it's a safety hazard of the first order.

Amazingly, it got stowed. This is more like it.

We did manage to clear the decks. I did manage to make some food in advance. We did find the fiddle rails and secure them before we left. We did find all the bits and pieces we needed to leave, such as the polypropylene line to secure the dinghy. We figured out how to use our new life vests. We took on fuel the day before we left so there was no hurry as we left. I secured most of the stuff below. We remembered to put the lanyards on our glasses.

The chaos of the grocery store trip when you are stocking up for a few days.

Sweet potato salad, the one thing that did get made ahead of time.

I didn’t think to secure the gallon water bottles that live under the companionway steps – on the first tack they slid out from under the steps and on the second they rolled to a stop right in front of the steps, making it quite difficult to negotiate my way off the ladder.

I forgot how stuff shifts in a cabinet, and got clonked on the head by flying canned goods when I opened the door in search of snacks (the tack we were on heeled us 10 degrees or so, pushing all the cans against the cabinet door).

We found that the dangling mesh bags are a no-go: they wave wildly back and forth, slamming the onions into the table and wall.

I forgot to put all the loose objects in the head into the sink while we were underway, and my favorite water glass flew to the floor and broke, even though it was made of heavy plastic.

I thought flat-bottomed things on the sole of the cabin would be fine, but they slid everywhere, turned over where possible, and scattered this and that all over the place.

I forgot the hot water heater only works when we are plugged in, and it was so hot I couldn’t bear to heat water on the stove for washing up. Eew.

I forgot how long it takes to prepare food for a trip when you don’t want to cook and ran short because I ran out of time before we left and couldn’t bear to cook in 95 degrees.

Did I mention we trusted the weather forecast and left before our new cabin fans arrived? Never trust the forecast for more than a couple of days. It was supposed to be cool.

I decided to dump my heavy plastic “wine” glasses that I have bumped my head on for a decade and never used. Decision made when I bumped my head for the 439^th time in 95 degrees and 80% humidity. I have no sense of humor when I feel like a boiled turnip.

We had some exci tement trying to furl the jib with its halyard very loose. My bad...I am supposed to check these things before we push off, but, again, I forgot.

David wrestled with the windlass, which acted up because one of the electrical wires running to it was loose (here we have our first genuine shakedown fix!) and the resulting short blacked out our instruments. Fortunately, we were pulling up the anchor in an empty, and completely flat, anchorage with no other boats and no breeze.

The second shakedown fix became obvious when we noticed that the bilge pump ran about every fifteen minutes instead of once a day. This was bad because it added unnecessarily to battery load - and water was coming in where it shouldn't. The run down the Houston Ship Channel in lumpy seas had loosened the stuffing around the rudder post. It is designed to be adjusted, so it was an easy fix, once David loosened the bronze nuts. Once again, he enjoyed the new locking access panel in the cockpit floor. There was room enough for him to sit down under the cockpit floor with the rudder post to fix it, instead of crawling into dark spaces through too-small lazarettes.

I had a miserable time reading the charts on our new B&G chart plotter. The color scheme, etc. is different and the controls are different as well.

I discovered that I absolutely have to have some project to work on when we are at anchor because after one day of reading nonstop I had nothing else to do but clean the boat and sweat and swear under my breath.

Shakedowns are not all bad news. The new high-pressure pump that feeds the washdown hose on the foredeck easily cleaned the gooey black ooze that passes for "mud" here in Texas from the anchor chain and anchor. Clean chain in the anchor locker lasts longer and doesn't stink up the vee berth.

Also, the new solar panels kept our house batteries topped up without our having to run the engine while at anchor. What blissful silence that was! More practically, it saves wear on the engine and saves fuel - as well as minimizing pollution.

In other words, it was a highly successful trip!

We did have many lovely things to enjoy:

We were able to sail a bit on the way down, and enjoyed the motoring trip back up from Galveston because we finally had a (motor-generated) breeze. The wind to and from Galveston is always on the nose; there is no explanation for this phenomenon, but you can count on it. We had lots of fun motoring back up the channel admiring all the working boats – barges, tankers, container ships, ferries, a science boat from Texas A&M, pilot boats, a tug boat, etc., as well as a few other pleasure craft. It was a busy day on the channel. We used AIS several times to identify and call barges by name, just so we all knew who was going where. The wind was such that we had a lovely breeze the whole way, which makes all the difference. Also a bag of chips, which helps morale a whole lot. Cold leftovers, chips, yogurt, and cold seltzer water kept the wolf at bay.

For the videos below, left click on the text and then on the link location that appears below it. When the box with the video appears, click the arrow in the upper right hand corner to play the entire thing. None is longer than 90 seconds.

Trail ride along Pelican Cut behind a couple of barges. On the left, "The Colonel" is coming toward us. It's a faux paddle wheeler that is usually docked at Offatt's Bayou.


Barge "race"; they aren't really racing, just trying to pass one another safely, as they are going different speeds.

Our first night on the hook, when the moon loomed over the horizon. David's photo, at the beginning of the blog, does it better justice. It looks really small in this video, but it was enormous.

The mornings were glorious! It was cool and the anchorage is so big we felt spacious and free.

We saw three flamingos fly by! Either that or three great egrets that had been washed with a red shirt. I have no idea where they came from or where they were going.

The harvest moon was full and glorious our first night at anchor and shone brightly the whole time we were gone.

I managed to get most of the green tape goo off the deck using acetone (Wear neoprene gloves! That stuff is nasty.) although a few stains remain. It looks so much better!

We had a lovely breeze come down the forward hatch, which made sleeping possible and even comfortable, despite the high humidity which left the sheets pretty soggy.

When we came back in, we got set up with A/C in record time, now that I know how to clean the filter. It’s a good thing, too, because below decks after six hours of motoring it was 98 degrees and 80% humidity and I thought I would die before we plugged in. Autumn, my foot.