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Larry's LogThe next few days were for me, mostly a blur. I worked on the boat every day. One or two days I took a couple of hours to see the town, and saw a dunking demonstration which was very nice except for the girl who got dunked (that water was cold!). I replaced or fixed the mainsheet blocks (deteriorated over 16 years and finally broken by the accidental jibes), traveller blocks, rebedded the inner forstay chainplate and a myriad of smaller tasks. I worked on the watermaker, but didn't try running it since I felt if it wasn't going to work the first time (which I didn't think would happen) I would have to "pickle" it again. I didn't want to do that and I KNEW that it was going to take some concentrated effort to get it working, so I left most of it for St. Martin, where I had been told yacht parts and services were available. The biggest repair for me to do was the stanchions, which I had picked up from Charley on Tuesday. I had also checked the running lights, and naturally, the forward red/green nav light was out. After I took it apart, I could see why. The outside of the socket and the wire connections were completely salt encrusted. It was impossible to fix the socket - I would need a new one. Hopefully I could find just the socket, rather than the whole fixture. Surprisingly, Bermuda doesn't have a chandlery (marine parts) store in St. Georges, and since I had no way to get to Hamilton (the capital and about 45 minute dribve away, I decided to wait until St. Martin to fix it. I figured that since I use the nav lights at the top of the mast (tricolor) while at sea anyway, I wouldn't need to use the deck level nav lights anytime soon. Replacing the stanchions was a real experience in frustration. The stanchions are made of stainless steel and the bases are aluminum. For those who don't know, when these metals are in contact, they tend to corrode and "weld" together. Out of the 3 bases (one gate and one straight stanchion) only one came out easily. The stanchions were bent badly and so for the two that didn't come out easily, I cut off the bent part and tried several methods of removing them. First a soak in penetrating oil overnight, then twisting with a large pipe wrench, then pounding with a hammer, then ********. Nothing worked. I finally said I'll need to call a professional, so I contacted Charley again and he came over. He said we'd never get them apart without breaking the bases unless we could cut them out from the inside. I tended to agree since I had tried everything else he mentioned when he first saw the problem. I also wanted to avoid cracking the deck gelcoat, which had started to happen when I was using brute force on the things. To remove the bases from the deck meant getting underneath the deck and holding the nuts while someone above loosened the bolts. Access to these "invisible" fittings on a boat is always problematic. The straight stanchion base and one of the gate bases was fairly accessible through the starboard cockpit locker, but the forward gate base was located in the aft head compartment in a locker outboard from the sink. There was no access from the locker to the deck. We did the "easy ones" first. I emptied the starboard locker, climbed down into it and held a socket on the nuts holding the bases. Not easy for a guy 6'5", climbing into a space about 4 feet high, but I had done it before and so we proceeded. Those bases came out OK. To remove the last one, Charley went to get a right angle drill with a 3 inch hole saw. Oh god, we're going to drill a 3 inch hole into the aft head locker ceiling, knowing that there are wires and other things up there! After Charley came back with the saw, we carefully determined where the base would be by measuring the distance on deck and then the lengths in the head locker. I told him that there were wire conduits and other wire up there, which I knew from past work. He said he would carefully cut just the guide hole first and probe to see what was there. OK, go for it. Well, he didn't feel anything through the first hole, so he carefully drilled with the hole saw so that the plywood (oh, my nice teak plywood) was so thin you could just break through it with your hand. Well, turns out that the wires were a little further outboard from where we drilled and the bottom of the deck was a good 2 inches away from the plywood. So we were OK. Now we had to see if our measuring was good enough to enable us to reach the nuts holding the last stanchion base. And, it was, but just barely. It took about an hour to grab and remove the 2 nuts holding the bolts to the last base. After that, Charley took the bases with the imbedded stanchions back to his shop. I sat there, exhausted. He came back about 2 hours later with bases sans broken stanchions. He had to cut vertically through the old stanchions and collapse them on themselves before they would come out. We started reinstalling the bases. I had cleaned up the deck where the bases had been, to get it ready for the new caulking, so we started in. Naturally, the first 2 went easily and the last, in the aft head locker, took about 1 1/2 hours to get the washers, lock washers and nuts on the 2 bolts. With the bases in place, I was ready to actually install the new stanchions. This I did the next day, Saturday. But before that I measured for the top rail to hold the solar panel. I had 2 spare lengths which I hoped would be long enough. Naturally, one wasn't. I knew one would be OK, but I wasn't sure about the other and so I needed to get another piece of stainless steel tubing, 1 inch in diameter. Luckily, I had seen some old pieces of bimini top which were the right diameter in Charley's yard, and I thought the right length. I sent Diane back to Triangle Rigging to get the tubing - it had to be at least 60" long. Meanwhile, I continued work. She came back in about an hour, in a car driven by Charley's wife, with the piece I had seen and a much longer one that had a long gentle bend in it. The shorter piece was just about 60" and she wasn't sure if it would be OK so she brought that one and the longer one back. Charley's wife was kind enough to drive her since they were a heavy. Sure enough, the shorter piece was too short by about 1 1/2 inches. Damn. So we bought the longer piece, but now I had to straighten it. After some "figuring", we used a large wood flower pot to brace the piece while Diane held down one side and I gently "unbent" the curve. It worked pretty well and after I cut of the length I needed, you could only tell it wasn't perfectly straight by sighting down it. OK! I started installing the rails the next day, Saturday, and I had just finished at around 11am. Our first crewmember, Harleigh, arrived at 11:30. Kirk arrived about an hour later. After lunch, I had them haul me up the mast to check the rig and retape the spreader tips and some exposed cotter pins. We had started listening to Herb again, and sent him an email to say we were planning a passage to St. Martin, hopefully leaving sometime early in the week. I spoke to him that afternoon on his SSB net and he indicated that he felt the weather would be good starting Monday but that later in the week a low from the US East Coast would probably come in and make conditions very unfavorable, meaning a gale was coming. He thought we would have sufficient time to get far enough south to miss these conditions if we left Monday. Well, our crew was here, the boat was just about ready but Diane and I hadn't seen anything of Bermuda. We decided to make all our preparations and decide definitely on Sunday. Our crew agreed. That night we all went to Tom and Tanya's condo for a wonderful dinner; wahoo and some delicious potatoes and veggies. Thanks again for making us feel so welcome. On Sunday, we got fuel (filling both the tank and 4 gerry jugs), and some more provisions. After talking to Herb again that afternoon, we made the decision to leave tomorrow. The weather window was just too good and Herb still predicted conditions to get nasty later in the week. Since our crew had plane tickets back from St. Martin to the States on the 26th, and it would take 7-10 days to make the passage, we knew we should take advantage of the opportunity. So we stowed everything (solar panels below this time), rigged the jacklines and generally made ready for sea. The following morning, we saw Paul just before I went to the Customs office. We waved and said we'd see him on our way back when we visited again. He wished us fair winds and said he hoped to see us again. I took our passports to Customs and cleared out. I retrieved our flare gun which was in bond and walked back to the boat. We cast off the dock lines and stopped briefly at the Dinghy Club to get water. We finally left Bermuda at 12:15, January 15 under clear skies and a very light easterly breeze. We cleared Town Cut a short time later and watched as Bermuda slowly moved away on our starboard side as we headed south-southeast. |