fetchinketch

In the traditional sailor’s flag code a plain yellow flag represents the letter “Q” and is flow by a ship entering harbor to show that they are “healthy” and wish to be cleared in to enter the country. We fly ours every time we enter a new country until we have been cleared in by customs.

Interesting how a few weeks change perspective. It wasn’t that long ago we were sitting right here fussing and fretting over how long we had been stuck in port. We wanted to go SOMEWHERE. Now… we are really happy we stayed put!

We have a number of sailing friends who are in various stages of being stuck somewhere. The worst difficulties are faced by people who left one port, heading for another; then at the end of the trip, are told they can’t enter the country–go away.

Right now, we are comfortable and reasonably isolated here in Fort Lauderdale. We have been keeping busy by working on other boats, some recently sold, others being prepped for market. Ironically, this situation has turned into a minor financial surplus for us, while a disaster for most others.

We have a boat full of food, and in a place we can comfortably stay for the foreseeable future. We are good.

As bad as this first wave might be, I worry that the damage to the economy around the world, like the second wave of an ocean tsunami, will prove a bigger, and more dangerous problem in the long run. But time will tell…

Another one of our major projects is complete: New rigging for our Harmonie. In the original plan this project was going to be next year when the parts all had their 15th birthday, but needing to shift to a new insurance company, we had to pull this forward. The local firm Nance and Underwood has a lot of experience with Amels and they are set up to make some of the bespoke parts that need to be replaced. All of the rig was replaced, Wires, turnbuckles, pins, everything between the chainplates and the mast.

The crew did a great job, getting everything installed, tuned, and ready to go in a bit less than 3 days of work on the boat.

The stainless steel wires that support our mast don’t change much in appearance as they age, but that doesn’t mean they don’t change. Small areas of corrosion build up, and repeated cycles of loading cause the metal to work-harden and lose strength. They have a finite life, and get risky as they get older.

Now all of our rig is new and ready to go for at least another decade of ocean sailing. We also had some minor sail repairs completed.

We did complete our insurance paper chase, and we’ll post an update on that soon. We did find a policy we were happy with, although it is expensive.

I guess this comes under the category of “First World Problems,” but yesterday our laundry machine came to a clanking halt. Checking carefully, we found the drum would turn a few times, then jam. This machine is 25 years old, and although it has been well cared for by people who knew how these things worked, everything dies eventually. We started looking for a replacement.

There were two problems. Our main electrical system on the boat is 220 Volts, so being currently in the USA we are at a disadvantage, but there are some suppliers of 220 Volt appliances. The second problem was bigger: The size. It is tiny. And the space available requires a very small unit. We were not able to find anything that could fit. The good people on the Amel Forum steered us to a modern unit that would fit, but wasn’t available in the USA, and cost about US$1000–before shipping from Europe. Ouch. So… it might be time to try to breathe life into the old girl one more time.

The good news is that this model is a good, old fashioned, electro-mechanical machine. No software. No silicon chips. No mother boards. Just relays, switches, timers, cams, gears, and pushrods. Once you get it apart, the way everything works is right there to see and understand. So we hauled her up into the cockpit, and attacked with screwdriver and wrench.

When you first open one of these up, it is a bit intimidating. Wires running all over. Mysterious widgets. But with a bit of study, you start to see the logic. A pulls on B, and X turns, and before long it makes sense.

After a full disassembly and cleaning all the parts went back together–and it WORKS.

We know that this machine, made 25 years ago in Austria, has a finite amount of life left. Parts are no longer available–as far as I can find. But, we have postponed the day of reckoning out into the future once again, and nothing looks ready to break. We can avoid doing laundry in a bucket for at least a bit longer!

In another piece of good news, in taking everything apart, we found that the water hose feeding the washer had chafed, almost all the way through! We could have had a great flood dumping all our fresh water into the bilge. Another example of why taking things apart on a boat is a good thing.

It was entertaining to open the machine up and find notes inside in the pervious owner’s handwriting about how to reconnect the wires. Yes, Don, I do know your handwriting!

I had alluded to the possibility of us needing to move the boat away from this marina due to infrastructure work that was coming up. For a lot of reasons, that would have been a pain in the butt. Well, we dodged that bullet.

Karen worked her network of friends here, masterfully, and managed to secure us one of the very few spots left for a boat of our size. Yesterday we moved the boat out of the way of the construction, and settled in to our new, temporary home on the other side of the marina.

Project Status

We continue to work hard on projects that are not immediately critical, but might just be lifestyle enhancing (like our air conditioners!), or cosmetic and/or value adding to the boat (like refinishing our saloon table). The big, and important, job left is replacing the standing rigging.

The wires that support Harmonie’s mast are now 14 years old. With one circumnavigation on them, they were on our schedule to retire next year, for their 15th birthday. Unfortunately, the need to find a new insurance company requires us to push that ahead to this year. We have pulled the trigger with the local rigger, the parts have been ordered, and assembly started. By the middle of this coming week, they will be going up and down the mast replacing wires.

In the past couple of days, we got our boat speed transducer up and running again, our space all prepped for our new air conditioner so it can just drop in when we pick it up on Monday, our flexible propane line to the stove replaced, the rudder shaft repacked, and a bunch more things done. Karen has been scrubbing her fingers to the bone getting weeks and weeks of boatyard dirt off the deck. For an older boat, she really sparkles.

Also coming up this week is the big Miami Boat Show. In the last few years this show has shrunk dramatically as a sailboat show, but it is still huge, and all of the major suppliers and manufacturers are there with their latest and greatest toys. We have a couple of things we need to look at there to evaluate for future projects, and a few things we’ll be shopping for–if we have any money left after this busy refit season!

Insurance Update

Insurance evaluation continues to take a lot of time. Over the past several years the marine insurance business has been roiled by higher than normal losses. Many companies have left the business, or greatly restricted the scope of policies they will write, so we are hardly unique in needing to re-shop something we thought we had sorted out.

We now have two policies in the running. They have different pros and cons, and quite different prices. Both touch down on the right side of most or all of our most significant issues. Once we get everything assembled we’ll post our thinking on this.

We are having had soooo much fun with boat insurance. We are learning a lot, and are rapidly weeding out policies based on what we are learning about insurance companies, their policies, and their brokers. Not a lot of what we are learning is pretty.

Most marine insurance policies are treated as “warranty” policies. Some of the warranties are explicit. For example, the person buying the insurance “warrantees” that all the information supplied on the application is true, and remains true for the duration of the policy. Other types of warranty are “implicit” and are not part of your policy or application, but have been found by the Federal Admiralty Courts to apply to marine insurance as a matter of law without being spelled out in words. For example the “Warranty of Seaworthiness” means the boat is maintained in a condition of seaworthiness suitable for the waters she normally sails in. If not, the policy is void for all losses.

Our most recent learning has been about the way your “home port” and your “cruising region” are treated. You would think that if your policy specified a “cruising region” from Georgia to Maine, and listed a home port of Annapolis, Maryland you would be covered anywhere from Maine to Georgia. Well… yes, and no.

The secret catch is that some parts of your policy are priced based on your home port. For example, the risk of hurricane damage. Although it is nowhere stated in the policy, the assumption is that you are covered for a “named storm” ONLY at the home port described in your storm plan. One of the things you implicitly warrantied was that you would be there during a storm. Did you know that? If not…Surprise! If you are in Maine, and the storm plan you filed with your insurance company lists Annapolis as your home port… you might NOT be covered in Maine for storm damage.

If you are in Maine and a storm approaches, you can call and update your storm plan, and have them reprice your policy for your new location. That’s an option. IF they approve your new storm plan and IF they give you a fair price as the storm approaches…

For 99.9% of all boats the concept of the “home port” isn’t a big deal or a serious limitation. Few boats ever travel far enough from their home dock that they risk getting “caught out” by a named storm, so it’s not an issue. For the tiny fraction of boats like us without a “fixed address” who can’t really predict where we will be when, the whole thing is highly problematic.

Not all polices work this way. Our old policy did not, and so far we have found ONE policy that is written in a way that seems to be about right for us. There is more coming. Hopefully we can sort all this out by the end of the month.

Evicted?

We did get a Surprise! of our own yesterday. At 4:59 PM (on Friday!) the office here at LMC sent an email telling us that they were going to be dredging the east basin of the yard (where we are docked) and we had to move by February 14th. Move as in, “Go away, we have no room for you–anywhere.” Karen has appealed, and gotten our case on the agenda for the Monday planning meeting. The primary issue here for us is that our rigging contractor has promised February 14th as our “done” date for that major project. The expectation that this happens 100% on time seems to be unduly optimistic. As much as we want to leave here, we had hoped that it would be on our choice of days…

In any event, we’ll figure it out…

We continue to make project progress, although it does seem that we add two new for every “Done” we cross off the list, but that’s a boat.

You haven’t seen a lot of postings here from us for the past several weeks. We have been BUSY. This has been the most intense (and expensive!) maintenance and project stopover we have yet had on Harmonie. She is getting older (like us) and needs more TLC (like us!) and some things were just unlucky timing with several big projects that needed doing at the same time.

There are almost no maintenance or repair projects we postpone while we are here in Fort Lauderdale. The supply and service infrastructure here is better than anywhere else we go, so it makes sense to fix EVERYTHING that needs fixing, or is showing signs of age. Most of these are things we had on our card before we arrived, but there are always extra things that come up when you start taking a boat apart. Then there are the “Surprise!” events–like needing to find a new insurance company–that just add to the fun.

Here for your reading pleasure(?) is what I am sure is an incomplete list of the projects we have been working on since we arrived here in Florida. Not all of these are finished (yet), but it will give you an idea how we have been spending the last 9 weeks. Projects with a (*) preceding them are ones we farmed out to local contractors. Everything else we have done ourselves. I am sure in the time left, we will add a few more. So… in no special order….

1. Change oil and seals in bow thruster.
2. Change oil and seals in “C-Drive”
3. Disassemble, and re-grease prop.
4. New rudder zincs
5. (*)New bottom paint
6. (*)Buff and wax topsides
7. (*)Rebuild turbocharger on drive engine
8. New exhaust elbow on drive engine
9. New transmission on drive engine
10. New exhaust elbow on generator
11. Fix raw water leak on generator
12. Install back up bilge pump.
13. Replace failing main saloon air conditioner
14. (*)Insurance survey
15. New fixed ports in all cabins, and repair sun damaged interior wood
16. New thermostats for both freezers
17. New level gauge for aft head holding tank
18. Replace packing on rudder shaft.
19. Replace battery in PLB EPRIB
20. New Main Epirb
21. Repair cockpit speaker for VHF radio
22. Change zincs on engine and generator
23. Update radio registrations and licenses
24. Renew HMS permit for offshore fishing
25. Replace thru-hull for aft holding tank vent
26. Rebed lens in forward cabin hatch
27. Realign door on fridge.
28. New hatch, screen and blinds for main saloon
29. New secondary anchor
30. Repair steaming light
31. Refinish forward head hatch frame
32. New main traveler control line
33. (*)Various sail repairs
34. Canvas repairs to dodger
35. New propane hose for stove
36. (*)New standing rigging
37. (*)Major deck repair
38. (*)Liferaft service.
39. Annual review of abandon ship ditch bag
40. New LED screen on autopilot
41. Replace various hoses and belts on engines.
42. Improvements to anchor chain lead to winch.
43. Repair/replace water speed transducer.
44. Repair mount of aft cabin space heater
45. Add CO/smoke alarms to each cabin

It is interesting what is NOT on the list. Almost no electrical repairs or upgrades. No significant repairs or upgrades to deck hardware. Almost nothing that we have upgraded or repaired before. It’s nice to see projects and upgrades we have done in the past are holding up and working as they should.

Pretty much as we expected, the survey in support of the new insurance came back with just a few trival recommendations, so that added nothing to our project backlog. Having that in hand means we can move ahead with the last of the insurance quotes and make a decision on that front.

While being productive and improving our boat is a good and rewarding thing, we are very much itching to get out of here. While we do like the local area, the scenery at the boatyard is NOT what we want to be looking at from the deck of Harmonie. A remote and lonely anchorage in the islands is the much preferred choice. Soon. Very soon!