I Sail Away

One fine day, I started the engine of the sailboat and saw the temperature continue to rise–rather than holding at its normal low temperature.  Upon further inspection, there was about a gallon of lovely, green anti-freeze sloshing around in the bilge–and, the culprit was the heat exchanger.

Cooling on a sailboat (or powerboat) is a bit different than your car, but the principle is the same.  Sea water is too rough and has too many particulates to circulate through the machined parts of your motor (plus salt water electrolysis can eat away internal parts of the motor), so a closed system with freshwater is used.  This is exactly like your car.  The systems on sailboats even use anti-freeze to raise the freshwater boiling point to a higher temperature because–well, boiling water (steam) isn’t going to keep your engine cool.

The main difference between the two systems is that instead of a car radiator with its hundreds of internal cooling fins that uses fresh air from the car fan to decrease the temperature, a sailboat has a heat exchanger.  This little device has a series of tubes, and it runs sea water through some of them and fresh water through the others and heat from the fresh water is transferred to the sea water–which is then mixed with the exhaust and jettisoned out the back through the exhaust.

So, here’s the problem: at some point, the idle was set to a lower number on the motor–down to 600 RPM.  It probably happened at the boat yard during the last tune-up.  This is a normal idle for motors, but on the Universal M-25XPB.  The three-cylinder diesel shakes violently at 600 RPM.  Universal Diesel even recommends that the idle be set higher to 1100 RPM (I have since set it back to the correct settings of 1100 RPM).  All of that rattling around and vibration basically shook the fittings right off the heat exchanger–putting a pin-hole into the outer body in the process.

While it looks pretty simple and sounds pretty simple, and, in concept should BE pretty simple, there is a caveat.  A heat exchanger has a copper body, stainless steel bolts, brass water connectors, the pieces are soldered together, and even includes a pencil zinc.  It is the perfect example of what can happen when dissimilar metals are placed together (although the zinc is supposed to eradicate the electrolysis part of the equation).  I was concerned about finding someone who could do the work properly . . . .

Fortunately, one of my friends knew a metal craftsman.  We drove to his metal shop and as we were pulling in, a brand new, stainless steel swim platform/live-well combination was pulling out of the yard.  It was beautiful work and I felt better already.

The guy looked at the heat exchanger and all the pieces and said, “no problem.”  He said he would weld the brackets back together, clean everything, fix the pin-hole, solder everything back together, clean and pressure test everything–and, that it would be ready tomorrow afternoon–around 3pm.  At the time, my spanish was not good enough to negotiate the price, so my friend did it for me.  After a couple of rounds of friendly bartering, they agreed on $100. (I guess he wasn’t following the: Good work, Cheap, Fast: Pick Two” rule.)

And, here is the finished result.  So beautiful, I could photograph it on the settee–even painted the exact same color as the motor–classy.  It installed in about 45 minutes, and after the usual hose tightening and air-bubble bleeding, hasn’t leaked a bit and the motor has stayed nice and cool.  And, lastly, I hand-siphoned the spilled anti-freeze from the bilge and the local boat yard recycled it for a modest fee.

Here is a brilliant discussion of biological infections in diesel fuel and the use of biocide and tank cleaning methods to cure your system.  It includes all of the science and safe practices to accomplish the cleaning of your tank.

http://sail-delmarva.blogspot.com/p/diesel-biocides.html

Today, around noon, two 4-foot tsunami waves from the earthquake in Chile hit Cabo San Lucas. I had early warning, pulled my anchor, and headed out for sea and deeper water (where the waves wouldn’t break), and didn’t really notice them come through.

The Port Captain closed Cabo San Lucas Harbor to all commercial activities, and the reports were that the observed wave height was 2 – 4 feet high as it passed the Galapagos Islands.

There was some damage to some of the boats in the marina (from the absence 4-foot drop after the waves came through–hitting their keels/motors on the ground), but nothing happened to either the boat or myself. In fact, I made the best of it, and had a wonderful sail in 12 – 15 knots of wind, and saw about 5 pods of humpback whales over the course of the day.

I’ll give a full report soon, but for right now: I am safe, back on the anchor in the bay of Cabo San Lucas, the boat is put away, and everything is fine.

This was a big weekend for sports. There was, of course, the mother of all football games–the Superbowl. For sailing fans, however, the mother of all sailboat match racing, the America’s Cup, was at **GASP** 1am this morning.

Here is the shortened version of what has happened since the last event:

The Swiss team, Alinghi and owner, Ernesto Barterelli, beat New Zealand, and won the last America’s Cup. It was tight racing the whole series, and a real nail-biter with New Zealand beating the US team, BMW-Oracle (owner Larry Ellison), and then Alinghi beating NZ.

Of course, I was rooting for BMW-Oracle. They are based out of the Golden Gate Yacht Club in San Francisco–a venue that has hosted many races in San Francisco and has a great, non-stuffy sailor bar . . . so, I’m a fan.

Immediately after Alinghi won (seriously, within minutes), a fake yacht club owned by Ernesto Barterelli, filed a formal challenge–beating BMW-Oracle to become the challenger of record. The rules for the America’s Cup state that the Defending Team and the Challenger of Record must agree on the rules. The owner of Alinghi, Ernesto Barterelli, owned both teams, all the officials, and the rules went crazy in favor of him winning and keeping the Cup. (Stuff like, EB can change the rules at any time. EB can dismiss any team from the competition for no reason at all at any time. Anyone who used to be on the Alinghi team is not allowed to sail for any other team in the competition–meaning Russel Coutts.)

There has been something like 11 lawsuits, and 3.5 years, and all sorts of politics around the AC. At the end of it, Golden Gate Yacht Club was able to wrestle the Challenger of Record title away from Ernesto Barterelli, but what they got was a two-team match–not the 18 team match-racing that we all wanted.

The two teams agreed upon a unique set of rules for the boats. They are racing 90 foot by 90 foot multi-hull boats. That’s right–90’x90′. Alighi is fielding a giant Catamaran with traditional sails . . . and, BMW-Oracle produced a trimaran with a 185-foot standing vertical wing. Yes–a WING. The speed tests for the BMW-Oracle had it clocked doing 25 knots in 7 knots of wind. Uhmmm . . . . Yeah.

The rules are still pretty skewed. Supposedly, the Alinghi boat performs better in light wind, and the BMW-Oracle boat will be a killer in heavy wind, but doesn’t do so well in the light stuff. But, those are supposeds–no one really knows.

And, getting a race off is going to be tough. The sailing instructions say no sailing in winds above 15 knots, the Race Committee can call the race if the wind shifts more than 30 degrees, no racing is the swell is more than a meter high, and there is obviously no racing if there is not enough wind. This is a tough set of conditions to meet in Valencia, where the winds are shifty.

Personally, I want to see the boats race and hold together or blow-up, be a close race, or a blow out, or whatever they are going to do. The suspense is KILLING me.

The races today were cancelled. Not enough wind. So, they will try again on Wednesday at **GASP** 1am, again . . . .

This is my kind of fun . . . .

Tourism is the blood supply of Cabo San Lucas. It brings money, people, mega yachts, fishermen, and a huge supply of Nationals from all over Mexico to work. Without it, Cabo San Lucas would be the simple fishing town it was 30 years ago. There are two sources of tourism: the time shares and resorts, and cruise ships. On my previous two trips to Cabo San Lucas, I stayed once in a Beach resort, and the second trip, we stayed in a private condo. So, I had already been familiar with the former, and apparently, the largest producer of tourists. Now that I am anchored out in the bay, I have become intimately connected with the latter–the cruise-ships.

If you haven’t seen them before, these vessels are enormous. They are entire floating cities, complete with off-shore Casinos, medical facilities, shopping malls, exercise gymnasiums, your choice of restaurants, bars, discos, and vast neighborhoods of rooms. They hold some in the range of 5000 – 6000 people, and provide services for all of them. They arrive in the bay between 5:45am and 10am, and typically depart between 5pm and no later than 9pm. They never stay–Cabo’s fluky winds would spin them around their anchor dangerously considering that each one is hundreds of feet long. When they arrive at pre-dawn hours, they remind me of the first time the Death Star came into full view in the Star Wars movies–ominous, a giant object filled with people and things.

Once they arrive, the Port Captain sends out a representative to collect the necessary fees and complete paperwork and inspections, and then these huge cities start off-loading their precious tourist cargo. Entire portions of the Cabo San Lucas come alive in anticipation of the wandering groups of week-old friends who have arrived and seek a place to eat, a good margarita, and to purchase some silver or a cuban cigar–all the while engaging in the small-talk of new, but tightly-bound friendships.

In town, everyone knows about the cruise-ships. Everyone knows how many will be in-port today: two, four, just one . . . This is their business–to sell goods and services to tourists. The tourists staying at the resorts will still be sleeping. They invariably took advantage of the nightlife–something the cruise-ship guests miss because of the early departure times. So, the wandering hoards are coming from one source. Others aboard the cruise-ships go directly to the activities they have planned: snorkeling, jet ski rentals, a hi-speed water tour, para-sailing, sailing, and right now, whale watching.

My relationship with the cruise-ships is different, and I think, much more intimate than most. I can literally feel them arrive. Marishanna is a race-boat with no insulation, and so I often hear smaller boats motoring past, but the cavitation of the huge propellors of the cruise ships is unmistakable. Something I can hear from a few miles away. Once they are in port, the clanking of the giant chain links of their anchor is amplified and echoes through the water and into the metal parts of my boat.

It is both eerie and unmistakable . . . and a daily component of my morning routine since I arrived. 6am, clank, clank, clank, clank, clank, clank, clank, start the coffee, go above decks, survey the boat, check the anchor, and, well, you get the idea.

You may not be able to tell, but Marishanna has a clean bottom.  I have been keeping fairly current with it–scrubbing the waterline, and softly sponging the underwater paint, but the other day, I noticed that there was only one zinc left on the prop shaft, and that it was nearly gone.  So, I hired a diver to come out and professionally clean the bottom of Marishanna, replace the zincs, and even coughed up a bit extra to have him scrub the bottom of the dinghy.

Zincs are metal attached to the boat that is lower on the chart of elements that all the other metals on-board.  If you have an electrical system, you have magnetic fields, and when you mix a magnetic field with sea water, it needs some place to go.  On boats, you put zincs and give this process something “to eat”–so, that the process will leave your brass, stainless steel, and other metals alone.  It is sort of a boat owner’s offering, if you will.

Once they are gone, your boat vitals are eroding (like the thru-hulls can be made of metal).  So, it is important to keep them replaced and current.  And, Marishanna’s zincs have been renewed–a fresh offering to the god of electrolysis.

Note: They really call them “Sacrificial Anodes“

I am a few posts behind . . . so, first of all, Happy New Years to all of you!!! 2009 seemed to be a big year for just about everyone I knew (myself included). I hope that when you look backwards, the good memories outweigh the bad ones, and if the converse is true, you learned a lot from the experiences.

I also hope that your 2010 is filled with hopes and goals, health, happiness and family. Form your idea, put it out into the universe, work like hell, and then be ready for it to happen. 2010 is going to be a good year for you–I can tell, already. 😉

Currently, I am still in Cabo San Lucas. When we arrived, the rest of the crew stayed for roughly a week, and then returned to their families, their jobs, and the United States–leaving me responsible for all aspects of the boat until we sail it back–at a date later to be determined.

After a week of being in the marina, tied to a dock, I was ready for a little quiet away from the 24-hour activity of the city. There is a dinghy aboard, and a dinghy dock at the marina, so I can go into town whenever I please, but a little privacy and separation would be great. Also, the prices at the IGY Cabo San Luis marina are exorbitant. The facilities are nice, but clearly MegaYachts pay the bills (and, yes, there was even one here with its own helicopter) and us little boats are an afterthought.

There was also a bit of excitement, on my part, for moving out into the harbor because I am excited to get a bigger taste of the cruising life. This is something I have tinkered with doing partially every year, and full-time when I retire . . . so, I might as well learn as much as I can while I am here.

The harbor itself is beautiful–especially at night. The lights of the resorts twinkle and reflect off the water. You can hear the music from the bars and resort clubs wafting through the night air. The first night at anchor, I made my dinner and marched up to the foredeck and took a seat. The air temperature was in the 80s, I was eating dinner and sipping a beer while watching the lights and listening to the free concerts. It was quite idyllic . . . .

The town of Cabo San Lucas is quite small, packed with American, Canadian and Australian ex-patriots, and very friendly. Although things are more expensive here than in some of the other, more rural Mexican towns (American prices for most things in tourist areas), the streets are clean, potable water can be found everywhere, comfort food, if desired, is easily obtained (although I never did find the slice of apple pie that I was craving around Christmas time), and every service imaginable is readily available.

From a boating perspective, two of the three chandleries that I have visited have been quite limited in their selection, and quite American in their prices. I am going to visit the third one this week . . . hopefully to be disproved with my generalizations.

Overall, Cabo San Lucas is an extremely safe, overly friendly, and quite fun town–with warm air temperatures, and warm water temperatures.

Bahia Santa Maria is pristine–like a postcard, actually. It is less than a 100 miles from the larger Mexican port, Magdelena Bay, but rather than deal with all of the bustle and crowds, Bahia Santa Maria is quiet–idyllic almost.

After catching up on our sleep, we awoke to a beautiful, peaceful bay. I popped my head out of the hatch (before even having a cup coffee) and went up on deck. The water was like a mirror. A dorado (Mahi-mahi) was chasing a school of smaller fish, and he/she (couldn’t tell) came swimming by as if it were a dolphin: breaking the surface of the water, down into the water, out of the water again, and back down again. The dorado in its rhythms did this between our boat and another one for a couple hundred yards. It was beautiful.

Apparently the town was hit really hard by hurricane this summer. The recent rains associated with the storm are what caused the hills to turn green. The local fisherman, to my understanding, fish here during the week and stay in some improvised housing, and on the weekends, drive back to wherever their homes and families. Of course, there are some who live her permanently, but not many. The only sign of humans from the harbor, in fact, were these dozen or so improvised buildings and a slightly larger structure that I believe was the “town bar.”

We were excited about 2 full days of rest and relaxation (while the rest of the fleet catches up). There were a few chores (our dinghy needed a bit of repair), and, a couple of social events. But, for now, we were excited to take in the scenery and relax.

Somewhere during our first leg of the trip, we had forgotten that this was a race. We had started joking that “we are cruisers now,” and as we would collectively make decisions, we would posit, “Are we thinking like racers or cruisers?”

The two groups are not mutually exclusive, nor are they in confrontation with one another. For example, there was a green-hulled boat only a few feet longer than ours who smoked by us, and it looked like a pretty comfy ride. Turns out that it was a custom-designed Farr 44 purpose-built to cruise comfortable AND go really, really fast while doing it. The point is that on the first leg of the trip, all of our little-racers-within were lulled into a sweet nap while we “enjoyed ourselves” in the cruising mode.

On the second leg–something snapped. Or popped. Or awoke. In all of us. Maybe it was the adrenaline from the start. Or, more likely, it was pulling into the Bahia de Tortugas with 60 boats from the fleet already waiting for us. I, for one, thought a we pulled into the last anchorage, “Wait a minute. We are down here on a RACE boat–with no insulation, exactly ZERO exquisite staterooms, with a two-burner stove and a one-holer toilet seat for which we fabricated a CURTAIN to give us the illusion of privacy, and weighing roughly less than the diesel, water and provisions you are carrying on-board . . . and, YOU beat us?”

Regardless of what the motivation was, each of our little-racers-within awoke from their nap, and they were hungry. No motor. Spinnaker through the night. No set the spinnaker to a conservative setting and forget it. This was war–or, better, this was a RACE! There isn’t really a trophy, per se, but we wanted an illusionary one. We wanted “bragging rights” which has its own HUGE currency in the superstitious, over-indulgent, beer-swilling, story-telling world of sailors. And, race we did.

The winds picked up and were blowing around 25 knots during the end of the first day, and Nathan hand-drove for hours–keeping the boat on the edge to drain every ounce of speed out of her . . . because Marishanna shines in these conditions: downwind, big seas, and 25 knots of breeze. If it wasn’t for the warmer water, she might have thought she was at home in San Francisco.

With the spinnaker up and sailing downwind, a racing sailboat can do magical things. If the driver knows what he/she is doing, they feel the wave approaching (there is also a rhythm to it), and they turn the transom of the boat to sit firmly on the wave, and for a few brief moments, the hull partially pulls out of the water and basically “surfs” down the waves. By definition, sailboats should only be able to go a certain speed calculated by the length of the hull. In these brief moments, however, a light, fast, raceboat with a large spinnaker sail up, properly-designed stern, a powerful wave, and a good driver, and you can reach speeds above your hull-speed (Marishanna’s hull-speed is in the mid-to-high 7 knots).

With Nathan driving and the conditions right, we peeled off consistent 10’s–for awhile, doing it with almost every wave. We hit some pretty regular 11’s and saw numbers as high as 15 knots. And, that is how you win races.

Sailing to Bahia Santa Maria was about 280 nautical miles. We ripped off the first 180 miles in about 20 hours, and as the wind died from 25 knots to 15 knots and down to 10knots, we continued to drain every ounce of speed we could get from the boat.

Somewhere in the early hours of the morning (around 4am), a bit more than 2 days after we started, we crossed the finish line. We weren’t the first to arrive, but at least we were respectable (in the top 20) and, had our pick of the anchorages.

And, yes, the green boat was already there . . . .