The boat is covered!

Rode Trip is now all bundled up for the winter!  I think she looks good, but I could be biased

Bottom Work

After reading up on the procedure in Bud Taplin's Westsail manual, I've decided that the "hole" in the bottom of RodeTrip is actually just a void where the polyester putty has hardened, cracked and fallen out leaving a hole in the gel coat.  This picture is of the longest hole.  It was not very deep, almost 1/2" at the deepest point, and thankfully did not extend far from the opening visible.  So a quick trip to Home Depot makes me the proud new owner of one $5 halogen worklight, which can easily double as a spotlight for any upcoming home theater presentations.  Made it all the way to boat plugged in the fancy new light and then realized I had no where to plug in the grinder!  I called it a night and returned the next day with a splitter for the end of the extension cord.  Now I have light and can run the power tools!


















 The first step I took was to grind out all the loose material including mussels that the pressure washer didn't remove.  After scraping and grinding the hole was ready for the epoxy putty.  I chose to use everfix epoxy, and it turned out to be very easy to work with.  After applying the epoxy and determining that there wasn't a fatal flaw in the plan.  I moved on to grinding out the other problem areas on the keel.  It was at this point my new halogen lamp decided that it wasn't interested in working any longer and with a loud pop the glass front turned into a spiderweb.  Another trip to Home Depot and I left with a replacement for the work light with faulty glass.  Hopefully this one will last a little longer.  

Here I am!  Stephanie caught a photo of me putting the finishing touches on the keel grinding project.  The bottom is now prepped, and I just have to wait for a warm spell ( 60F for 24 hours) to finish with the epoxy.  The way the weather has been this week, that could be a while!

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has now come and gone, and we have realized once again everything that we have to be thankful for.  The whole Grandjean clan descended on Amesbury for Thanksgiving this year and we had a blast.  Good food, great weather and wonderful company.  RodeTrip was included in the celebrations since Grandma made the trip up from Pennsylvania and she had't seen the boat yet.  She was excited to see the boat and we are always proud to show RodeTrip off to anyone who is interested and most people who aren't!

Organization and Refinishing

Stephanie has been hard at work and removed almost everything that isn't firmly attached to the boat.  It now resides mostly in our garage, and a little in the basement.  Now we have no excuse to not start documenting what we actually have.   If you are actually curious as to what came with the boat the full list is here.  This is still a work in progress as I haven't made it through too much of the pile yet.   Most of the drawers from the boat as well as many cabinet doors have been removed, so they can be stripped and refinished.

Here is one pile that is currently in our garage 

Our current sail inventory consists of......

All the sails appear to be in good to very good condition.  So far we have only used a couple of them, and we've been happy with their performance.  

Stephanie was busy starting on the woodwork while I was documenting and measuring sails.  Here she is removing the old varnish from some of the cabinet doors.  

Winterization Complete

The engine is now completely winterized!  As it turns out I was priming the engine exactly correctly, and the problems with getting the engine restarted after the fuel filter change were related to the new rubber o-rings that were installed.  It would have helped if I knew that I was priming the engine correctly.  I had never primed the diesel myself, and spent a long time convinced that the filter change had been successful and that I couldn't prime the engine.   Now it is finally taken care of though, so we can move on to some more productive projects! 

The next project is to fix the voids in the hull seam on the bottom of the keel.  I ordered some epoxy putty, and epoxy resin and it arrived last week, so with a little bit of warm weather this week we should at least get the voids ground out and cleaned, as well as start taking gear off the boat to inventory what we currently have.  

Winterization in Progress

Stephanie and I have been fighting to have enough daylight after work to finish up the winterization of the engine.  We got a good start on Sunday and managed to do a good amount of the winterizing tasks. 

Here is what we accomplished!

1. Changed the oil 
2. Changed the oil filter 
3. Drained the old engine coolant, flushed with water and filled with new coolant 
4. Changed the fuel filters 
5. Filled plumbing for the head with antifreeze 

Here's what didn't get done

1. Emptying of the water tank 
2. Filling the raw water intake for the engine with antifreeze.  This really is a problem, and is currently taking up a lot of time.   The engine would not start after I changed the fuel filter.  After searching the internet tonight, and a more careful read of the shop manual, I think I was missing a step in the process of priming the engine with fuel. 

We have been taking items off the boat, trying to get it emptied out so that we can identify what we are going to do to help make the boat more comfortable.  

Overland

We had an appointment with Overland Marine at 11am.  Which suddenly turned into 10:30am with a phone call on the morning of September 23rd.  So we made a quick stop at the Andyman for bagels and coffee and headed down to Newburyport.  We hopped in the dinghy, still tied up where we left it, paddled out to RodeTrip and headed upriver.  Dad called the Gillis bridge and requested an opening.  The bridgemaster happily obliged. 

 

This is what I usually think of as a classic "drawbridge"  the chart lists it as a Bascule bridge.  Here is the Rt. 1 Bridge opening just for us!  First time I've ever requested this and it went very smoothly.  We even got a compliment from the bridgemaster.  He called us on the radio after we went through just to find out what kind of boat we had, because he thought she was good looking!  That's our boat!  

We made it to the ramp at Cashman park right on time, and began straightening up a bit.  We hadn't finished completely when the crew arrived.   Three guys from Overland came to the dock and took charge right away.  I have all good things to say about the entire experience.  I was a little nervous having never pulled RodeTrip out of the water before, and we were about to do it with a trailer instead of a travelift.  It went off without a hitch, although it took several people get the boat off the dock where it was pinned by the current!

 The hydraulic controls lifted RodeTrip right up, and it looked like he was driving a remote control the whole time!

 

 We had to pull quite a bit of wiring out of its neat zip-tied runs along the top of the cabin in order to allow the radar cord to come out and be coiled with the mast.  Apparently you cannot cut the cable and splice it back together later, or it is really difficult.  After the mast came off, they dropped us off at our vehicle and told us to meet them at the yacht yard in a half hour.  We went and got a quick cup of coffee at the plum island roasters, and then headed up to see RodeTrip. 

She looks a little naked without her mast!  We started on the pressure wash before the bottom dried, and it took a little while!

Here is Brian doing a little bit of work for the camera, and here is Bruce actually doing the pressure washing!

And here she is halfway to being clean.

We were just about finished with the scrubbing ( pressure washing)  and were busy cleaning the bottom of the keel when we got a little bit of a nasty surprise, it appears that we have one of those Westsails where the joint between the two hull halves needs to be filled.....or at least that is what we are hoping right now.  This pictures is of the very bottom of the deepest part of the boat. 

It looks like at the very least we are looking at taking a grinder to the bottom of the keel and filling the void here with epoxy, fiberglassing over it and then repainting.  That sounds like a lot of work, and that is probably what will be happening later this winter.    For now RodeTrip is sitting pretty at Overland Marine and will wait patiently for us while Stephanie and I go on our delayed honeymoon to Kauai!  Thank you Aunt Margaret and Uncle Barry!  We'll be staying in Princeville for a week and we are very excited. 

Coming out for the winter.....

So Bruce, Brian and Mark were scheduled to sail RodeTrip from Portsmouth, NH to Newburyport, MA in order to get her hauled onto the hard for the winter on September 22nd.  Mark went and did something terribly inconvenient and got a job.  So he headed off to Rhode Island to start work on the 23rd, and Bruce headed up to Amesbury to start the process.  We had a good weather forecast....except for the wind direction, so we ended up beating upwind towards Newburyport.  Not a big deal because we weren't in a hurry.  We took a very long first tack all the way out to the Isles of Shoals.  Dad's first trip out to the Isles. 

I haven't figured out how to upload a GPS track to the computer yet.  Hopefully I will eventually insert the track for this trip here......don't hold your breath for this one to appear though. 

The trip down had great wind, and a few highlights including my first ever sighting of an Ocean Sunfish!  These fish look so weird, but really neat. 

We were sailing along when I spotted a fin out of the water.  It didn't look like a shark fin, and was moving quite slowly, so we tacked around to a look and see how close we could get.  We got as close as we wanted, in fact we circled this fish 3 times and got him within a couple of feet of the boat.  He seemed to completely ignore us.  The fish was probably 4-5 feet long, and looked like he was probably that wide as well. 

If you look closely you can see the fin coming out of the water in this video clip. 
This is an interesting website, and I reported our sighting here http://oceansunfish.org/#

The trip to Newburport continued on afterwards.   We arrived at the mouth of the river at precisely the wrong time.  The tide was running out HARD.  We decided that we'd rather continue sailing, and headed down along plum island.  It was gorgeous and when we turned around we had some very high ( for our boat) speeds running downwind back to the river.  Once we got there it was interesting dodging the dredgers that were operating in the mouth of the river.  I was pretty nervous, and it was hard to tell where they were heading all the time.  In addition the current was still running very hard and we really had to work the engine to make headway.  This picture was taken after all the danger was passed......funny we didn't think to grab the camera when the barge and tug were headed nearly at us in the channel.  During the whole event, we were trying to stay in the channel as much as possible.  The fishing boat in front of us decided to skip a channel marker and ran aground.....looked like a pretty sudden stop, followed by a slow backing up all the way to the channel.  

We tried to let go of the stress and have a nice trip up the rest of the Merrimack river to Newburyport.  The Merrimac is not like the Piscataqua in just about anything but the currents involved.  The Merrimac is much shallower, so seeing depths like 8-10 feet on the depth sounder is a little unnerving when I'm used to seeing numbers like 60-70 while in the channel.  We didn't bump ground on our way in, so I guess that means we didn't wander too far outside the channel. 

We arrived in Newburyport, pulled up to the dock and went to visit the harbormaster.  Fall hours are apparently by appointment only.  We called his cell, and get checked in for an overnight on one of the three moorings.  We took the sails off the boat, disconnected the boom and stowed it below.  It was a little bit sad taking the boat apart for the season.  We finished up about the time it was getting dark, and stopped at a nearby boat to let the owner borrow our flashlight so that he could see the combination on his lock to let himself into his boat.  The flashlight only helped a little bit.....he indicated that he had a "hard day of sailing".  We headed back to the car and got cleaned up and went to dinner before driving up to Portsmouth to get my car back.  

Steve, Christy, Roommate Mark, and the Camera go for a sail

Quite possibly the most authentic sail yet, we put the whole crew to work replacing the mooring ball before leaving for our sail.  This was absolutely necessary as if we had just cast off......the chain would have sunk quickly to the bottom of the river and sat uselessly on top of the 5000lb granite block we bought to hold the boat in place.  Here the whole crew is hauling!  Haul harder!

After the mooring ball was replaced with the new one, we hoisted the dinghy aboard and preparing to go. 
 A little background on the dinghy placement, we're not really sure yet how we are going to take the dinghy with us when we go on long trips.  For now we have been playing around with stowing the dinghy on the foredeck ( shown here in the picture)  and towing the dinghy behind us, like we did on the trip with a large group of friends.  Both seem to work well, but when we aren't using the foredeck for anything I like not having the dinghy trail behind us.    I also learned that when towing the dinghy tie it up on the starboard side!  The engine exhaust is on the port side of the boat, and I blew a lot of water and grime into the dinghy Yuck.

Mark helping Stephanie get the super yankee ready to fly. 

 This is the view of Star Island from the mooring that we picked up in Gosport Harbor.  It was a great place to stay and eat a delicious Peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  We borrowed a mooring ball from the Portsmouth yacht club, and we're pretty sure they didn't mind because no one else was out near the islands.  From the harbor it looked like it was raining in Portsmouth for quite a while.  We were lucky that it didn't rain on us at all! 


After a delicious lunch and a smooth run back to the river we had a little excitement on the way back upstream.  

 This vessel poked its nose around the corner and we hugged as close to the shore as we were comfortable with to stay out of the way.   The crew seen in the second picture were busy taking pictures of us and waving like tourists!  I hope they had a good stay in Portsmouth. 

Christy, Steve, Mark ( the new roommate) and the new Camera

Warning this post includes nothing about sailing and is quite off-topic but does include lots of pictures from Christy's awesome camera.  The next post will be about Sailing with Christy and Steve.

Christy and Steve have been planning on coming up for a sail for a while, and they decided that the weekend of September 11-12 was a good weekend.  Little did I know that they were going to be bringing up an AWESOME camera!  To help turn the weekend even more into a party, Mark had an interview up this way, and decided to stick around.

    Saturday consisted of an awesome photoshoot in Portsmouth followed by a road race, where Steve let loose and surprised alot of Seacoast runners with an incredible 9th place finish....Christy had a great race running 38 minutes, and Brian and Stephanie managed to squeak out a 42 minute finish coming in well under the goal finish of 1 hour.  Sunny and Berkely were the inspiration for us to run the race and they hosted a bbq and their place afterwards.  Our garden is at Sunny and Berkely's and it is still doing really well.  ( This pics for you Grandma! ) What a day, here are some snapshots.

Danger Hurricane Earl!!!!!

Oh right, so since I'm writing this after the fact, we were relieved that Hurricane Earl dissolved into a tropical storm well before reaching New Hampshire and in fact if it weren't for all the hype, it would have gone unnoticed.  We went out and checked on the boat before leaving for PA for the weekend, and discovered that the mooring ball had deflated!  Not a big deal, but annoying.  It can wait until we get back up to New Hampshire. 
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2010/graphics/al07/loop_5W.shtml

This link is a composite of all the forecasts that the national hurricane center put out for Earl.  I think that I watched all of them after it started turning up the coast......here they are in fast forward.  It is a little weird to watch.  Enjoy!

Mom and Dad Wasylyk's Saltwater Passage

Steve and Sally drove up from PA for a fantastic visit and a cruise out to the Isles of Shoals.  We got really lucky with the weather, and the tides and had a great trip down the river with the current and nice steady winds all the way out to the Isles.  Here we are waiting for the dinghy to levitate itself over to the water.  We didn't wait too long though, shortly after this pictures was taken we picked it up ourselves and carried to the water.  I keep hoping that the dinghy will learn to do this by itself though.

 

 

Underway pictures, including an artistic use of the dorade vent, Tom Sawyer sailing on the bowsprit, and Brian and Stephanie during easy sailing!

After a great trip out and back, we spent some time brainstorming about what to do with the interior of RodeTrip.  The boat is in good shape, but right now is not very comfortable.  None of the projects will start before we haul the boat out for the winter, but we need to start thinking now.  Mom and Dad Wasylyk were a great help.  Sally just knows what will look good without us having to try it first, and Steve can instantly see a good way to do any project/idea that we came up with.
      Our brainstorming session was cut short by the sound of fighter planes attempting to get stuck in our rigging!  We ran up onto the deck and had a great view of the Blue Angels!  Here they are buzzing the naval air station, while waiting for the rest of the formation to catch up.  I'm not sure how low they fly, but it certainly seemed like they were less than 500 feet off the water.  Amazing show, even from 3 miles from the airstrip. 

Largest Crew Yet! August 14th, 2010

On August 14th we had the largest crew yet out on RodeTrip.  This was the first time we had to take more than one trip in the dinghy.  Justin came up from Boston, and Tony came down from Portland and everyone had a blast.  We sailed out of the Piscataqua and made a big loop down towards Odiorne point, and then back up the river.  It was a bit of  a drifter, but we had enough cold beer (brought by the crew) to keep the crew from getting restless. 

   We were drifting along when Ryan, Tony and Justin decided that a man overboard drill was in order!  They didn't know that we weren't going to turn around for them. Being strong swimmers they grabbed onto the dinghy and went for a surf ride before they pulled themselves back to the boat.

 

 

Our trip home involved fighting the tide more than usual.  This goes under the lessons learned section of sailing.....the MIGHTY Piscataqua is named called mighty for a reason.  The river almost didn't let us back to our mooring.  With Perkins rowing at near full power we were just about stopped in the river going by the coast guard station.  Everyone enjoyed the sunset, while Stephanie and I were in the cockpit debating if we were actually moving upriver at all.

Mark goes for a sail, July 12th!

Mark had an interview in Boston on July 12th, and stayed with us in Amesbury. In the beginning of July the days are quite long, and he got to go for a sail out to the 2KR buoy and back!