Syzygy Sailing

“Shut it off!!! Shut it off!!” I screeched, sounding much like an excited 16 year old girl. I was half excited and half  terror-stricken, because something dramatic had just gone wrong with the engine. This was 6 months ago, when I was hellbent on becoming Syzygy’s primo engine mechanic.

The engine is a mystery to me.  I love working on it,  learning about it, figuring things out, but in the end, most things that would be good to know about an engine, like how tightly to crank down on a bleed screw, are a mystery to me.

Continue reading “Summertime Flashback: “Jon, you’re scaring the guests””

I’m on roll, I don’t have any work until feb 16 and I’m working on the boat, and I’m on a roll, because there’s stuff, so much stuff, to do. I dropped karen off at the train station for work every day before sunrise this week, and arrived at the boat before dawn, very cold, and worked all day, short or even no lunch, many espressos. Sleeping well. There is a lot to do.

We need to save money for our trip, so being out of work feels discouraging, so I feel the need to be extremely productive on the boat, because there’s stuff that needs to get done on the boat no matter what, and if I’m using my time to fix up the boat then it’s okay that I don’t have any work. Right?

It has been cold and rainy all week, and leaking depressingly into the boat. I worked like a dog and slept like a baby every night. I don’t know that I have that much work to show for my efforts. I have no standard by which to judge, and no one to look over my shoulder and pat me on the back. Most jobs spawned unforeseen baby jobs. I hate those baby jobs.

I know that I am making progress, I know that I have been enjoying the work.

Though I have been enjoying myself, tomorrow I may rest.

A few heavy metal pieces of the Monitor windvane needed some welding (for strengthening and repair), so the holidays came just in time–I packed them up in my checked luggage and flew home with them. 

My dad isn’t a professional welder, but as a farmer he welds frequently.  Stainless steel is finicky so it usually requires a TIG welder; my dad has a MIG setup on the farm and the stainless wire he picked up was too thick besides, so it was a challenge.  The welds didn’t turn out very pretty, but it works, it’s strong, and the price was right.  Thanks to dad for helping us out, and props to him for making it work even with difficult conditions.

Below is a few seconds of footage of me grinding back the welds in the shop.  I wish I had some footage of the welding, but I forgot to grab the video camera.

In the course of the last few months, Matt and I have regularly taken pride in removing janky parts from the boat. You could say that’s how we’ve prioritized our refitting projects: by endeavoring to eliminate jankiness. Whenever we discovered a severely corroded wire or a screw that had rusted into a pile of dust, we’d throw the offending part onto the cabin floor, and yell, "Jank removed!" We took immense pride in casting off such crap from our boat. But really, like many people, we were using the term generically, and incorrectly.

Another example: Over the holidays, I heard a friend ask for a janky beer. I asked her to clarify. "You know, like Bud Light, or PBR," she said. What she meant by janky was: thin or weak. This, too, is an incorrect usage of the term janky.

Matt and Jon and I mistakenly used the term janky to describe corroded or rusty parts — but corrosion and rust are just wear and tear, the type of decay that you expect on any boat. Truly janky stuff is a step above (or below, depending how you look at it) — parts or repairs that were improperly concieved and poorly installed — and our boat was (and still is) laden with such things.

Some recent highlights:

Continue reading “On jankiness”

I grew up on a farm, and all my life my father has been bashing gasoline engines and lauding diesels. He wouldn’t buy any vehicle that wasn’t a diesel, and we had two 1,500 gallon diesel tanks around by the barns–one for on-road vehicles and one for the tractors. As a result, I grew up plugging the diesel suburban into an extension cord in the winter, and waiting to start the car until the glowplugs–whatever the hell they were–warmed up the engine. Meanwhile, in their gasoline vehicles, my friends could fill up at any gas station and accelerate from 0-60 in something significantly less than the 30 seconds it took in the suburban. I wrote off my father’s opinion as old-fashioned, ultra-conservative, non-progressive, and wrote off our diesel vehicles as too loud, too much work, and too slow.

I’m home now, back around my dad, and back into the diesel debate.

Never in a million years would I have guessed that one day I would know how to sail (?), that I would own a sailboat (!?) and that the sailboat happens to CONTAIN A DIESEL ENGINE (!?!). And never ever ever would I have guessed that one day I would agree with my father about the benefits of diesel engines. Don’t be mistaken: I have done my own research and come to my very own, independent conclusions. They just happen to be the same conclusions as my dad’s.

Continue reading “Home for Christmas (or: diesel vs gas)”

It’s amazing how little time must pass before you can look back in hindsight and reflect on the way things used to be. Why, just 10 days ago Syzygy was in great shape, clean and spiffy, and getting spiffier every time we took on a project. Over Thanksgiving, Matt and Jon had fixed the engine coolant leak (the cause of our overheating problems), started rebuilding the Monitor wind vane, installed a fuel gauge on our electrical panel, and finished painting the wooden rub rails (which had begun to rot in places). Before that, I’d re-bedded old chimney flu, and finished installing a stainless steel dinghy cradle.

And just like that, a small repair job turned evolved into damage control and then evolved into crisis management, and now there’s a giant yellow patch on the port side of the deck, and no tracks with which to fly the jib…

Remember when I admitted that opening up 62 holes in the deck was a can of worms if there ever was one? Wasn’t that the truth. It was a friggin’ barrel of worms.

Continue reading “A can — no, a barrel — of worms”

How many people does it take to unscrew 62 bolts?

It’s a trick question, of course, requiring a bit of a story…

For the last couple of months I’ve been on a mechanical crusade to make sure everything screwed through the deck of our boat is screwed through the deck properly. By properly, I mean in a very particular way, which I’ll get to. But first: the deck is sandwich-like, in that it’s made of two pieces of fiberglass with a layer of balsa wood in between. It’s like a sandwhich made of matzoh and cream cheese. This design has its ups and downs. One down is that if you apply a lot of force, it’s not too hard to squish the sandwich, which weakens it. Another down is that if you drill through the sandwich and don’t seal the hole just right, water that leaks in ends up rotting the balsa wood (further reducing its strength) before it leaks all the way into the boat. It’s strange, but if you have a leak, you want it to actually leak.

So the proper way to drill a hole through our deck is to drill a much bigger hole than you need, and then to scoop out a bunch of the balsa wood around the hole. Then you put a piece of tape on the bottom of the hole, and pour in a big glob of thickened epoxy, which is about as thick as peanut butter and about as strong as, well, modern plastics. Then, once the epoxy hardens, you drill a hole through the middle of it. This accomplishes two things: it provides some support (like the little plastic thingy that keeps the pizza box from collapsing all over the top of the pizza), and it protects the soft, wooden core of the deck from rotting if it ends up leaking. As you probably guessed, there are lots of things screwed through the deck: a dozen stanchions (aka fence-posts around the edge); a 6" disc covering a 5" hole for a chimney flu; hardware for flying the spinnaker; the liferaft cradle; the dingy cradle; the fairleads (pulleys) that keep our lines in order; our new rope clutches; 9 chainplates that keep the rigging tight; and two 10-foot tracks that the jib cars slide along. Most of the items on the list are held in place by a few screws, presenting minor challenges — and so far we’ve fixed everything but the stanchions and… the jib car tracks.

Continue reading “How many people does it take to unscrew 62 bolts?”