Sorry folks, looks like the batteries were dead in the Spot for awhile, but we’re back up and tracking on the “Where are we” page. Thanks to Bill for txting me to make sure all was alright. Saw a beautiful sunset south of the Bay Bridge. Nermal is doing well, he’s fast asleep under some luggage. I’ll try to figure out how to post pictures from my phone soon.

In a nutshell, things are finally “good to go.”  Today we leave as soon as the tide is high enough to let us exit the Bohemia (sometime mid to late morning.) My dad has been in town for the last week, tirelessly helping us to provision and pack the boat. We lost a day or two to shear exhaustion and the fact that the days are about 7 hours long, but in our minds we’re finally ready. While we’re six weeks late departing for our 18 month cruise, we’re okay with that!  To put it into perspective, if you’re leaving for a long weekend, and you’re a couple hours late getting on the road, that’s basically what happened.

So follow along on the Spot, I’ll have it turned on tracking our every movement, you can view our progress here.

While we’re underway we’ll try to get a few posts together describing the difficulties we’ve encountered over the last month. Needless to say, everything didn’t go exactly as planned.

Stay tuned, palm trees and tropical fish are in the near future!  Don’t worry, we made sure the sunscreen and scuba tanks are packed away safely.

And don’t forget to follow along at http://svjointventure.com/where-are-we/

A quick update on where we stand, today my task is to rewire the boat, finally connecting all our new electronics:

No Problem!

Few things go together as well as backbreaking physical labor and loud Metallica.

When our boat was first hauled out, I thought the bottom paint looked pretty good considering we were in the water for 18 months. Upon further review I noticed some things… flaking ablative paint… blisters on the rudder… a confusing blister pattern on the propeller strut support… bare cast iron on the keel… dissimilar paint wear… and an overall condition that seemed to say, “Hello Mr. Barnacle, please attach yourself to me and cause Brad’s life to consist of scraping and cleaning this bottom for the next 18 months.”

After some serious soul searching, (and trying multiple alternatives,) the marina’s industrial 6″ orbital sander came out and the sanding began.  The keel, rudder and prop strut needed to be fully stripped so I could repair the underlying blisters and barrier coat those items. The rest of the hull was sanded smooth so our new bottom paint will adhere properly. Furthermore the base of the keel was ground to bare cast iron so that I could cover it with a protective coating of thickened epoxy. Years of cruising the upper bay with our keel dragging through oyster shells, rocks, mud, and crabs had left multiple deep gouges and holes in the original gelcoat covering.

I’m happy to say that yesterday we finished up the sanding and grinding.  It was painful labor but the mp3 player helped immensely. Today it’s raining, so tomorrow I’ll start the tedious process of filling the blisters, applying 5 coats of barrier coat and 2 coats of bottom paint.

We should be back in the water in time for the trick-or-treaters to stop on by.  I already have my Halloween costume picked out, I’ll be going as a coal miner:

You load 16 tons....

Haul Out

Rudder and Strut

Keel

Today marks the start of the 42nd Annapolis Sailboat Show, the oldest and largest in-water sailboat show in the world.  We’re very spoiled to live only a little over an hour away from the show. By dumb luck we attended our first boat show when I interviewed for my job in Maryland in 2004 and we haven’t missed a year since.

Not only do you get to see all the fancy new boats, but anybody who is anybody in the boating world is in attendance. In addition to seeing all the latest boats, it’s a great place to try out new products, comparison shop for necessary items, and buy whatever you need at a great price.  Sabrina and I have a few last minute items that we’ve been holding out on buying until the boat show. We want to look around at life rafts, see if we can get a deal on a EPIRB, and generally double check our list to see if we’re forgetting anything. (For you cruisers out there, Dozier’s Waterway Guide will debut their 2012 Waterway Guides at the show, first place to buy the latest editions.)

Not only does the show have great products but they hold the show on the historic Annapolis waterfront across from the Naval Academy. It’s cruiser friendly with many people timing their trips south so they can stop and either work at the show, or pick-up some last minute items.  In addition to all this, they sell Pusser’s Painkillers inside the show!  With the warm, sunny weather we’re currently experiencing I assume the boat show will be packed with people on Saturday and Sunday.

Unfortunately, my cold has moved from my sinuses to my chest and Sabrina is about 2 days behind me with her cold.  Each day we feel a little better, hopefully we’ll feel well enough to fight the crowds at the show. The last couple work days on the boat have been brought to you by “Fishermen’s Friend” menthol cough lozenges.  They’re all natural, extra strong, and just look at how happy that fisherman looks on the tin:

For this post to make any sense at all, you must know the following things:

1. LeBron James plays basketball in the NBA.  (For our international spammers readers, LeBron James grew up in Akron, Ohio, he was drafted number one overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 NBA Draft, he  took the Cavaliers to the playoffs from 2006-2010, he won the MVP in 2009 and 2010, and finally gave the city of Cleveland hope that it would win it’s first professional sports championship since the Browns in 1964.)
2. I moved to Maryland from Cleveland during the height of the Cavaliers run and for a brief time, LeBron made me care about professional basketball.
3. On July 8, 2010 LeBron James televised “The Decision” and stabbed Cleveland in the back. He abandoned the city that literally raised him and left to play for the Miami Heat.
4. In response to the people that called him out on his actions, he created a ridiculous commercial trying to generate sympathy for his actions.

And that brings us to the inspiration of this post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtejCR413c

Currently I’m working on several major projects, wiring new electronics, repairing soft spots in the deck, stripping down and rebuilding the engine, mounting solar panels, preparing our dinghy for cruising, cleaning our water and fuel tanks, waxing the hull, painting the bottom, etc.  Any other time, my constant perfectionism would require one or two of these tasks to take a month.  I have less than a month to complete all of them (and many other tasks not listed.)

So I simply ask…

What should I do?

Should I just slap the engine back together?  But I’ve worked so hard, I need to make sure our propulsion is in great working order.  If I put it back together improperly it will put all my hard work to waste.

Should I just wire the electronics together without making sure that the breakers operate the way I intended?  But the reason I started rewiring the boat was because I didn’t know what switches worked what devices.

Should I skip waxing the boat? I don’t know if I could deal with a dirty boat.

Should I install the solar panels next summer? We’ll need that power when we’re sailing in the Bahamas away from marinas.

Should I not install my custom scuba tank storage system? What’s the point of cruising without scuba diving?

Should I stop cutting holes in the deck to fix the soft spot?  At this point I’m too far to abandon this process.

Can I save time by not sleeping or eating?  Probably not for long.

Should I save time by not showering?  Right now Sabrina is looking forward to our cruise, I don’t want to endanger that.

Should I not have the boat hauled out to paint the bottom?  Barnacles.

Should I abandon my minor projects?  Minor projects have a way of becoming major problems.

Should I stop this blog post and get back to work?

Maybe it was all the rain we’ve had recently, or my current state of exhaustion, or the changing seasons and the colder temperatures, but whatever caused it – I’ve been afflicted with a head cold for the last couple of days.

This is very unfortunate, because I’ve had to call in sick to my job these last couple of days.  (My current job is working every waking hour to get the boat ready to cruise in less than a month – and I love it!)  I’m trying to do things that don’t require me to be outside in the cold, rain and wind, so the engine has been getting my attention recently.  Hopefully I’ll be reassembling it shortly, we’re getting hauled out next Monday or Tuesday and I want to run it before we’re out of the water.

On the bright side, drier weather is moving into the area.  This is great news and should allow me to get some fiberglass work done on the deck.

We’re in the home stretch, all we need is some dry weather, some parts to arrive, and plenty of time to reassemble things.  Perhaps the wonders of modern medicine and over-the-counter drugs can help us meet our departure date?

I can’t wait till we sail south into remote, uninhabited areas… maybe then our internet will work!

In a nutshell, our internet has been out at the marina for four weeks. I call the phone number for support and leave messages, they promise to call me back, nothing happens, and the cycle repeats itself. Finally a couple of days ago I talked to someone who knew what was going on, and he said that they’d have it fixed, in November. I was not pleased, but he said he would try to put a band-aid on the problem until then, the band-aid must be working because I am actually able to write this post this morning.

In other news, the only thing happening on the boat is work.  I finished cleaning out my office on the 16th, and since then here’s a quick run-down of the projects underway:

• Installation of high quality sound-proofing in the engine compartment
  We did this for thermal insulation also, the engine tends to make the boat warm and the fridge hot. 
• Replaced the stern shower supply tubing
  They had a leak, so we replaced them and now we have a stern shower again.
•  Replacing every hose on the engine
  Most of them were worn and looked ready to break, easy to do them all at once.
• Engine disassembled, cleaned, repaired, tuned and reinstalled
  Much more on this later…. 
• New AGM batteries
• Wiring new electronics
• Developing our solar panel installation
• Purchased a used 9.8hp Tohatsu outboard off of craigslist
  Now no scuba diving site is safe from us!
• And much, much more!

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, sorry for the lack of posts.

To quickly update you, Hurricane Irene was a non-event at Bohemia Bay.  The sheltered marina handled the winds just fine and since the storm went to the east of us, the water was sucked out of our area and we didn’t get flooded.  The boat made it through the storm with no problems, and many thanks to our marina neighbors that kept an eye on her.

Unfortunately, since Irene has left, it seems like it hasn’t stopped raining for more than a day. The remnants of Tropical Storm Lee have been dropping record setting rainfall amounts on the entire northeast, including the Susquehanna River watershed that extends through Pennsylvania into New York.  Along with many other places, this flooding is now impacting Havre de Grace at the top of the Chesapeake Bay.

We spend our winters at Tidewater Marina and they have posted a lot of photographs of the flooding on their blog.  This photo shows one boat owner using a dinghy to get to his boat…while it’s in the slip!

Just like being on a mooring!

We have a lot of friends who live in Havre de Grace and/or keep their boats at Tidewater, I hope they stay safe and the damage is minimal.

Luckily for Bohemia Bay, we’re on the other side side of the Elk Neck peninsula from the Susquehanna River.  While we’re definitely seeing higher water levels, the majority of the water is heading down the Bay.  For the last few days the water levels have fluctuated with the tide, and haven’t gone below what would be considered “normal” high tide level.

Here’s the graph of the water levels from the weather buoy at Chesapeake City:

Chesapeake City Weather Buoy

In other news, today is my last official day at work.  I had to say goodbye to the boat, head into the office, and hope that the marina doesn’t flood while I’m away.  Here’s what it looked like around 8:00 this morning, high tide is at 8:40.

Higher High Tide

More to follow when we get a chance to write, I’ve been working hard on the boat and to finish up my professional duties at the office.

For right now, just remember We’re Still Here!