banaari 27 Posted April 26, 2012 Share Posted April 26, 2012 Inspired by some most excellent write-ups (Megwyn!), thought I'd contribute one myself. Do not judge too harshly, I was young and ignorant. Cast your minds back, dear readers, to (Auckland) Anniversary Weekend. The weekend before, I had bought EMJAY*, a Beachcomber 6.5 parked at Milford Marina. The intention was to sail her home to Kerikeri, and so I had taken the Thursday and Friday off work to provide a 5-day window for prep and sailing. Wednesday afternoon and Thursday were spent buying and installing various bits of kit thought necessary to the exercise: Dinghy, charts, compass, depth sounder, hand-held VHF, hand-held GPS + North Island charts, first-aid kit... Smart Marine and Sailor's Corner *love* me. Friday morning the weather was absolutely atrocious, and so the revised plan was to try to get to Tutukaka over 3 days, and complete the trip on a subsequent weekend. Now, Milford Marina is tidal - there's a sodding great weir in the way, and even drawing only 0.6, one is limited to +/- 3 hours. This gave us a departure window opening from memory at something like 9am. 8am, still running down the checklist and get to "Check and fill porta potty". When said potty was extracted onto the jetty, daylight was visible through cracks in the plastic. Fortunately there's a branch of the Warehouse very close to the marina. Less fortunately, I was still required to walk the afluent streets of Milford carrying a large boxed camping toilet. Come about 10am and all set. Trundled to rear of the boat and started the outboard, and then set about working out which lines to drop first. While this discussion was still occuring, the outboard quietly puttered to a stop, and could not be restarted. The article in question was a 1981 vintage Evinrude 15. We were hard up against our complete lack of understanding of outboards, and a corresponding lack of tools to do anything anyway. We put the sail cover back on, removed our lifejackets and contemplated our options. A series of increasingly desperate calls were made to the various mobile outboard repair technicians. One of these gentlemen happily agreed to come out and get us running. Shameless plug here and many thanks to Jason from Rangitoto Marine who diagnosed and fixed a bad case of plug fouling, due to the massively over-oily mixture the previous owners had been using. Jason departed, leaving us with a serviceable outboard and enough tide (just) to get the hell out of there. Lines were cast off and I proceeded to back us out of the berth. At this point a more knowlegable individual would have recognised something badly amiss from the excessive throttle setting required, and the relative lack of movement of hull through water. Not being that individual, I persisted. We backed out into the channel, aimed the nose downstream and transited the weir without incident, albeit very slowly. As we approached the bend in the channel, the crew L. (who is blameless in these matters and hence shall remain anonymous) pointed out the incoming launch. I proceeded to give this threat a wide berth, and promptly ran the starboard keel into the mud. As we slewed around helplessly I dived for the throttle and gear lever intending to back us out. The outboard decided to shut down completely, and the slewing continued until we came free of the mud and commenced drifting downstream sideways without power. Frantic re-start attempts (L. on throttle and myself on pull cord) were abandoned when the throttle control left the boat. The outboard was a short-shaft model and to avoid fouling the transom, a previous owner had elected to remove the manufacturer's tiller/throttle control and replace it with a length of plastic tubing hose-clamped to the stub. The hose clamp, stressed beyond endurance by several hours' fiddling, gave up. Clamp and hose are now littering the bottom of the Wairau Creek. I resorted to frantic tiller-waggling techniques last employed on the Laser, and at least managed to keep us pointing the way we were drifting. I'd like to flatter myself that made all the difference in keeping us off the rocks, but rather suspect luck had a lot to do with it. At about the time the outer marker at the end of the reef hove into view, drifting slowly towards us from the port bow it dawned on us very slowly this was a *sailing* vessel. L. set about getting the sail cover OFF again - I have never seen a body move so fast. This was when another latent quirk manifested itself - the mainsail track was sufficiently dirty to prevent us raising the sail properly. Although I'd got it up without too much trouble in the berth with no wind, it just was not cooperating in real world conditions. L. got a quick verbal introduction to the concept of a "reef" and why I wanted one installing, desperately. We somehow managed to squeak past the marker with about 10 feet to spare. Things were not looking wonderful. Even if we'd had a functioning outboard, the tide would not let us back in to the marina. With a brisk southerly blowing we elected to head for the northern side of Rangitoto and sort ourselves out while tied up somewhere. I had visions of bodging together a replacement throttle. Serious misgivings began to torment me - plenty of wind and we barely making two knots. I hunted around below, found a pair of vice-grips, and got the outboard restarted, which gave us maybe 2.5 knots all up. Eventually we limped into Boulder Bay and dropped anchor in something like 11 metres, due rank inexperience. [ Depth provided by dangling the transducer over the side... had only half-finished the installation. ] Extensive use of the iPad and various smartphones on board (L's day job) wised me up to the general desirability of either more warp, or less depth. Elected to go for less depth, but were foiled when the outboard refused to start at all. Started worrying about something called "tide" and something else called "scope". Eventually spliced every spare bit of line into the warp to give us 50 metres, for a depth at high tide of 14 metres. (During this process I managed to step on and fracture the ventilator in forward hatch.) Decided at this point to complete the installation of the depth sounder so we could set depth alarms. Epoxy mixed and transducer permanently emplaced. L. drew my attention to the rather interesting issue of getting home again. We had an intransigent outboard; a tidal marina and a boat seemingly incapable of exceeding 2.5 knots. Time to call for help. Given the non-urgency of the situation we set about trying to find a *discrete* phone number for the Coastguard. Half an hour of trawling the 'net produced the exact same number we hadn't noticed, displayed prominently on a big red sticker on the forward bulkhead. The Coastguard seemed extraordinarily impressed that we weren't actually in imminent trouble and were quite happy to remain where we were until convenient. A tentative collection time was set for the following morning, subject to whatever other Anniversary Day madness might be going on. It was not a comfortable night. Sleep was in short bursts, punctuated by powering up the GPS to check we hadn't dragged. Every so often a wave train would come past at exactly the right frequency to set up a violent rolling motion. Things would go quiet again only to be repeated ten minutes later. At about 3am, the depth alarm sounded. I was out of the hatch like a scalded cat while L (untroubled by the appalling burden of command) slept on. Indication was still 11 metres under the hull and we seemed to be in the same place. Concluded a particularly large stingray or shark had swum under the transducer. 10am and a black speck appeared on the horizon surrounded by an enormous rooster tail of spray. As anybody on the receiving end of the emergency services will know - they're bloody good. The most impressive bit of the tow back was the 3-point turn executed while rafted up that got us aimed back into our berth before the final nudge. Fortunately the cameraman for CoastWatch was not on board and so hopefully we won't be appearing on TV anytime soon. Aftermath: A mat of mussels 4 inches deep covering the entire wetted surface and both keels has been removed, doubling the observed Vmax. The outboard was replaced with a brand new Yamaha 8. (You pull the cord; it starts. Stop and repeat as many times as you like...). A liberal application of SailKote sorted out the track, at least temporarily. The anchor and line has been upgraded to a 20 pound plough, 10 metres of chain and 100 metres of warp. An appalling run of weather and work committments means the love object is still in Auckland, now parked round at Westhaven. *There will be new name, quite possibly "Visa". Working reference for the moment is "the love object". Link to post Share on other sites
col j 0 Posted April 26, 2012 Share Posted April 26, 2012 entertaining. reminds me of when i borrowed a mates boat with some non boatie mates. motor shat itself. sailed back essentially single handed into the marina. was annaversary day a few years back and our photo was in the herald, thats when the owner found out i used his boat. no biggie cos the next day id swapped the mariner for my yammaha Link to post Share on other sites
Bimini Babe 0 Posted April 26, 2012 Share Posted April 26, 2012 Funniest story I've read here in a while. Good effort banaari. Now you can handle anything! PS. You won't ever regret the Yamaha. Link to post Share on other sites
banaari 27 Posted April 26, 2012 Author Share Posted April 26, 2012 PS. You won't ever regret the Yamaha. Agreed: When we came back to the boat a couple of weeks after installing new beastie, and still emotionally scarred by the experience with its predecessor, it started on the first pull. Quote from the crew (a man of few words unless related to motorsport) "I'm in love" Link to post Share on other sites
wheels 543 Posted April 26, 2012 Share Posted April 26, 2012 That's the kind of post we all expect for a 1000th, not the 82nd. Great story. Real nice of you to go to all that trouble to give us such a great read. Link to post Share on other sites
203 0 Posted April 26, 2012 Share Posted April 26, 2012 Ahhhh, Great read! Reminds me of our experience we had on christmas day... We own a 25ft trailer sailer (trojan) which we got really cheap as a go up project..We brought it two years ago, and have rarely used it... We decided to go with it because it was a much better bargain than most other yachts around this size that we were looking at at the time, So we brought it, anyway, We got up nice and early on christmas morning, and went down to weiti boating club to rig her up and launch, all was going well, motored on out of the river, and down to little arkles bay, where I would pick up the mother, and other brother, I continued to motor on around while the father went in and picked them up... This is when the trouble started, I was sitting 200 odd meters off shore, in the middle of the bay, and the bloody motor conked out! I soon restarted it, And we motored of again heading towards tiri.... I was a light 2-5kts, so up went the larger than usual no.1 genoa, and slowly sailed over towards tiri, we got into a wind hole and decided to motor the rest of the way, but, we had flippen motor problems! We had just replaced the old fuel tank... so didn't think anything off it. Happily motoring along, it would conk out every few minutes, we were puzzled to as what the problem was.. we had a feeling that it wasn't getting enough fuel, but really, air was getting into the line, so it would keep conking out again and again and again... we finally got to tiri.. Had a nice little lunch and then stayed around for a swim, it was empty there for once! A hour or so later, we decided to head home... It was a downiwnd run the whole way, so up went the handkerchief kite Got to arkles before we decided to drop the brother of to go be a b$tch boy at mc donalds Motoring down weiti river again and it shut off once again, and again, just as we pulled up to the wharf, it did it again! We had had enough! When we got home, we tested the little 8 horse with another tote tank from the fizz nasty And it ran fine for a good 20 minutes... So that brand new fuel tank, was stuffed! The father took the hose connection off and discovered that where the filter was, was a big little crack (8cm) We phoned up the company we brought it from later in the week, and they told us to bring it in... They accepted that they were the ones who broke it in the first place, And happily exchanged the part with a new one of the shelf, At no cost! It was great! this was actually a great day, we had to pay no extra money, and that comes rare these days! Anyway, thats pretty much it.. Just thought id share considering we had problems to do with a iron headsail! Link to post Share on other sites
Variant 2 Posted April 26, 2012 Share Posted April 26, 2012 Cool story I know Milford creek pretty well. And had a very similar story with a boat I bought there. On my very first attempt at going for a sail on it the motor failed big time (old Honda sail drive RIP) we were almost out but the easterly wind pushed the bow around into the wall. Luckily I had already hanked the jib on, so just pulled it up and was able to sail back to the berth. And like you, then proceded to buy a brand new Yamaha Link to post Share on other sites
Megwyn 2 Posted April 26, 2012 Share Posted April 26, 2012 Awesome Banaari - thanks for sharing. I love your humour. Link to post Share on other sites
cam 0 Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 Excellent read banaari! Very entertaining voyage, thanks! It was mostly entertaining because I recognised myself in the same situations in the past. Amazing how quickly things go pear shaped eh? All so different from how we see it happening in our mind:) The lessons are never-ending in this particular journey. Link to post Share on other sites
Megwyn 2 Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 The lessons are never-ending in this particular journey. Part of the allure. Link to post Share on other sites
wheels 543 Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 And as I was told many many years ago, by an old Sailor. "There are to types of Sailors. Those that have...and those that will" Link to post Share on other sites
banaari 27 Posted April 27, 2012 Author Share Posted April 27, 2012 And as I was told many many years ago, by an old Sailor. "There are to types of Sailors. Those that have...and those that will" I'm still mostly in the "will" department Boat's in Auckland, I'm in Kerikeri and the outlook for the next month or two is purely a four-letter word rhyming with "lurk". Most of which was supposed to happen in Auckland but currently isn't. Anybody near H-pier, stroke her nose for me? Link to post Share on other sites
ab1974 1 Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 I walk past her every few days, sitting there lonely with her new mooring lines and anchor warp ready for her next adventure. I'll keep an eye on her for you and make sure she doesn't get bored and go for a sail by herself. Link to post Share on other sites
OYSTR 1 Posted May 4, 2012 Share Posted May 4, 2012 At least there's always someone worse off (PBO next month) Link to post Share on other sites
Megwyn 2 Posted May 4, 2012 Share Posted May 4, 2012 What a disaster! Link to post Share on other sites
ab1974 1 Posted May 4, 2012 Share Posted May 4, 2012 Murphy had a good laugh there. Makes your day look like a relaxing picnic Banaari Link to post Share on other sites
banaari 27 Posted May 5, 2012 Author Share Posted May 5, 2012 Murphy had a good laugh there. Makes your day look like a relaxing picnic Banaari Too true, poor bugger. Discovered the hard way there are NO "reasonable" assumptions you can make about the condition of the boat you've just bought / are buying. Link to post Share on other sites
banaari 27 Posted May 5, 2012 Author Share Posted May 5, 2012 I walk past her every few days, sitting there lonely with her new mooring lines and anchor warp ready for her next adventure. I'll keep an eye on her for you and make sure she doesn't get bored and go for a sail by herself. It's likely to be a while longer Am directed to man the exhibition booth with the boss at one of our industry (GIS) conventions, at the Marina Vilamoura, Portugal. Seven days' travel all up to achieve two days on the ground, transiting through Heathrow and Gatwick twice, and the complete loss of two consecutive weekends. Followed by a week in Perth; nicely staged to kill another two weekends.... GRRRRRGH Link to post Share on other sites
banaari 27 Posted January 14, 2013 Author Share Posted January 14, 2013 Well... it has been a year of plans scuttled by work, over and over again. The intention this weekend was to get the love object hauled out, scrubbed and antifouled. As usual, work intervened and I couldn't get the number of days required to do it properly. Back-up plan was to come down and install a tiller pilot and then go play. Spatial issues (height of tiller above horizontal plane of ram) mandate the acquisition or fabrication of a bracket. On hold. Did I mention that the weekend was stinking hot, there are roadworks on Westhaven Drive, and trying to get anything done an uphill battle? So thinking back to the fun and games last time, instead spent Saturday morning configuring pick-up lines around the berth and acquiring a telescopic boat hook. Crew arrived early afternoon and after more faffing about organising outboard fuel, for the first time in about 9 months we extracted the boat (dirty bottom and all) from her berth and committed navigation. Trundled with no fixed intent up the harbour, beating happily into the late afternoon sun. Fetched up eventually at Soldier's Bay and decided to exercise the privilege conferred by twin keels. We snuck gently in to about 1.3 metres and conducted a full water baptism of the new anchor. Having learnt to be paranoid I jumped over the side with mask and snorkel and verified the bottom clear of nasties. Watched the sun go down and the Auckland lights come up while quietly waiting for the expected bump or two from below... which never came. First we knew she'd settled was an absence of rocking. Eventually crawled into the sack and woke up pointing downhill -seems Beachcombers make a three-point landing- and then watched the tide come in. The nose came up and this time there was the expected gentle bumping and scraping, for all of about a minute, as the keels lifted. Sunday morning was devoid of wind and so we proceeded back to Westhaven under power. While I like the reliability of the new outboard, the incessant sound of a moped coming from the tail ISN'T why a body goes sailing. Got her back into the berth first time exactly as planned; pick-up lines and long boathook working as intended, no dramas - serious cause for celebration. Looking at the evidential video after the fact, seems I omitted to disconnect the topping lift and both sails could have used considerably more welly on the halyards. Next time Link to post Share on other sites
Atom Ant 0 Posted January 14, 2013 Share Posted January 14, 2013 Excellent story. I've enjoyed reading your frank and brutal honesty. I really hope you get to use your boat a bit more than you did last year. Link to post Share on other sites
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