Category: What We’ve Learned Along the Way

Every sailor has a story from which they can tell that they’ve learned from.

Happiness Is a Clean, Unobstructed Set of Solar Panels

A fellow veteran cruiser, Elizabeth Randall, told Sherine that she washes and cleans her panels everyday. Of course, I’ve always been curious about how much it really impacts the panels themselves looking at my panels on top of my two prior homes in San Jose, CA. They get filthy! But of course, in no way am I going up on the room to clean them…but I suspect folks do.

So, I decided to find out. I woke up and checked solar production. While this far from a comprehensive test, I thought I’d report it anyways. If I were to do this right, I’d track solar production over a week or so doing nothing and then track it cleaning the panels. In any case, I think it’s good information.

While One has 4 410W Sunpower Panels run into two MPPT controllers. One for Port and one for Starboard. At ~0900, While One is facing pretty much north due to the strong 20kt winds. I calculated the panels were producing about 298W. I cleaned all the panels and production seemed to increase to about 355W or possibly more. Moving the boom to Port so that it didn’t put a shadow across the panels, production increased to over 500W.

So essentially, cleaning the panels, which were really dirty by the way, produced about 20% more power.

Despite having 1600W of Solar, I can tell you that it hasn’t been enough to completely compensate for our power needs. Granted, we’re not trying to conserve. Yeah, we turn stuff off when we can but the inverter is running 24-7 and we’re powering several computers, Starlink, two freezers and two refrigerators. We generally run the generator when we make water. In any case, despite still running the generator about 6 hours this week, we went from nearly 70% state of charge (SOC) to about 32% SOC between Monday and Saturday morning.

I think my next improvement will be to install a higher current charger from the generator. At present, we only have about 80A capacity to charge our 1320Ah Li Ion battery bank. This would take about 18 hours (likely more) to charge to full. I estimate about 0.5 gallons/hour to run the generator at light loads (which is bad for the engine) so we’re talking 9 gallons or about $45 with $5.00/gallon diesel. Yikes!

Anyways, we can clearly do more to save water and power but “Happy Wife is a Happy Life”.

It’s official…we suck at this cruising thing!

Ugggh!

Well, it’s been three weeks since we left our boat in Beaufort, NC. At that time, it wasn’t looking like we’d get a weather window to get down to Fort Lauderdale by November 28 and, given this, we’d also have to reschedule the delivery of our Pod…so, we decided to rent a car and drive to Sarasota and to hire a boat captain to deliver the boat down, once the weather window opened. This was an expense I’d rather would have not had to incur.

While One as been at Just Catamarans for a little over a week now. Solar should be done on Wednesday, we’ve been told…but honestly, given our lack of success in schedules lately, I’m not holding my breath.

Sam and Brentley are flying into Florida so we can spend Christmas up at Lecanto. We’ve moved Sam’s flight up so that possibly he could accompany us to Bimini. However, the weather is not looking great for a crossing this Sunday. Yeah, we’re a bit far our so lots of things can happen. The front can speed up or it can slow down. Who knows. But, when you have flights already scheduled from Bimini to FLL and Brentley and her girlfriend flying into TPA on the 22nd, we have constraints!

Yeah, we’re frustrated we couldn’t be at Bimini by now…but as we sit and ponder, we’ve come to realize that the bulk of our frustration is really self-inflicted. The goal for cruising is to wait the weather out and avoid, insomuch as you can predict, any nasty weather and waves. However, when you schedule Pods to be delivered, solar to be installed, flights for Sam and Brentley, flights to get back from Bimini to FLL, etc….it’s REALLY difficult to just go with the flow – Or as they say, as the wind blows.

We did this to ourselves. We’re so used to having things when we want, as we planned them. Had it not been for all of these things, we’d simply wait out the weather in Beaufort, Key Biscayne, Charleston or wherever we happened to be at the time on our boat and exploring new places…but instead, we find ourselves in a limbo of constantly changing plans.

Yes, it’s official…we suck at this cruising thing. Lesson learned. In the future, we’ll do much better.

A Bird in the Hand…

While we weren’t planning on starting to sell our house until much later, the sale of a couple properties near our home piqued our interest. The home across the street sold for significantly more than we had believed our our was worth at the time and we had spent significant money upgrading our bathrooms, installing solar and putting a pool in, among many other upgrades.

I’m sure most folks in the World have probably heard how notoriously expensive Bay Area Real Estate is and how competitive it is to buy a house. We’ve been very fortunate. When we purchased our first home in 2005, we paid way more money than I ever thought we’d pay for a home…and it was a VERY modest home. Suffice it to say, that even with the Pandemic and the 2008 housing crisis, that home (which we still own) is significantly higher than what we paid.

Homes pretty much sell themselves here….at least they used to. As such, we teased the idea of selling our home by ourselves and avoiding the sum 4.5%-6% Real Estate commissions. But, we ultimately decided not to.

In March, the market was hot. We listed the home as “COMING SOON” but as a started to prepare for my trip from St. Augustine to Norfolk, VA, I began to get worried. We had the continued lockdowns in China, the Ukraine crisis and now crazy high inflation. We needed to get it on the market FAST!

After some 48 days or so, we finally got an offer on August 2! However, it was way below what we were hoping for and it was with contingencies, something relatively unheard of in the Bay Area.

After a couple of counters, the Buyers put their final offer in and Sherine and I needed to make a decision. Selling a home can often be an emotional experience. When the market is in decline, comparing our home value to others that were sold weeks and months earlier is a challenge, to say the least. Trying to convince Sherine that while she may be right in thinking our home is worth more than what was being offered, that doesn’t mean there’s buyers ready, or able, to spend the money we think it’s worth.

We can’t complain although sometimes we all do. God willing, the house sale will go through but we have a little less than 3 weeks to go to see if the Buyer’s house will close. Assuming it does, we’ll walk away and would have done alright. It’s good to not make home buying/selling personal, in my opinion and in times of a market decline, A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Exciting times await!

Flexofold Props On Their Way

After finally figuring out which size of props I needed, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a pair of Flexofold 18x13x3L. I want to thank my contact at Nautitech, Paul Colin, who has been an absolute Godsend. He’s exceptionally responsive and goes out of his way to answer all of my questions. Thank you Paul!

Of course, I forgot Europe shuts down for holiday in the summer for a month. For Flexofold, this was from July 8 until August 1st.

Finally on Wednesday, Marlene at Flexofold told me the props are packed and ready to be shipped!

Fast forward to today, Friday, August 5, I received a call this morning from someone who allegedly worked for UPS. Apparently, the declared value of the props of $5352 is some $2500 or more above the limit of importation without duty…or something like that. I didn’t research it and I could barely understand the woman who called me. Frustrating.

Anyways, she went on to say that she needed a Tax ID number from me. I told her this was not a business and she suggested my SSN would suffice but, of course, if I wasn’t comfortable giving it to her over the phone I could call Customer Service. I thanked her and, of course, told her I was uncomfortable giving her that information. That started to be what turned out to be a very frustrating 40 minutes of my Friday morning.

Calling UPS’s Customer Service was futile. There was simply no phrase which could get me to speak with an actual person nor was there any means for me to clear this problem up. I tried at least three times before finally giving up. Finding the Contact Us page, I saw there was an International Shipping Customer Service number. However, I met the same fate as with the other Customer Service number.

Then I proceeded to setup a MyUPS account…or whatever it’s called. I was successful. I could see my shipment but there was absolutely no way to pay duty or put my TIN into the system. In fact, the Website seemed to suggest that the packages were en-route and nothing was wrong.

Then I noticed one more number on the Contact Us page for Technical Service. Might I be able to worm my way through Technical Service and finally get this thing cleared up? Success! After speaking with 4 people, repeating the story 4 different times and repeating the tracking numbers at least 8 times, I was finally able to give a credit card number to pay the $39 needed for Duty. No TIN was needed.

Now, I recognize the volume of packages UPS ships. I realize that customer service must be very expensive but, I could not have imagined a worse customer service experience. Here’s a vendor that is likely making several hundreds of dollars to ship a package from Denmark to the United States and this is how poor you treat your customer?

UPS is not alone with this approach to Customer Service. Many companies nowadays have resorted to voice recognition systems at least for the initial customer service contact. They’re all horrible and I think it sends an absolute terrible message to your customers. by adding insult to injury.

I don’t know what the solution is. I suppose that ultimately natural language comprehension will become almost as good as a human…I guess that’s the holy grail. But, until that happens, we’re all going to have to suffer or protest with our pocketbooks and pray for change.

Grounded!

About 10 years ago when I owned Terrapin, a Ranger 33, my family did a cruise-in to Petaluma.

From Alameda, the trip is decent. We took an extra long weekend off to make this trip, leaving on a Friday night and anchoring off of China Camp (a great anchorage). The Saturday morning we were up at the crack of dawn motoring up to the entrance of the Petaluma River.

San Pablo Bay, despite it’s vastness, is actually very shallow in spots. I did a good deal of research before making this trip and read the importance of adhering to the channel markers. It is also important to make the trip at high tide, which we did.

There is one draw bridge prior to Petaluma.

We stayed a night or two, I can’t remember. We planned on sailing from Petaluma to Alameda in one day.

We left early ( I believe on a Monday) and were nearing the mouth of the river. I had gone down to use the head and Sherine had taken the helm.

Upon returning, I came up to the cockpit and looked around…and almost immediately said: “You need to be over there!!!!”. Within, what seemed like seconds, we screeched to a halt.

We were towing our dinghy with some line which floated. However, while trying to reverse out of our situation, we essentially sucked the line into the prop….the motor stopped.

I believe it was Labor Day weekend or later at during the trip. The Bay’s never warm but it was especially cold this time. I proceeded jump in and and cut the rode off the prop.

It was much later when we hauled the boat out for bottom paint that we realize the strut had been bent in this ordeal.

Ten or fifteen minutes after the grounding while deciding what to do, a power boat came speeding by looking at us…seconds later it was spitting out spouts of mud as it tried to strong-arm itself out of it’s grounding.

We tried for a half of an hour to get out but were unsuccessful. We call an emergency vessel service. $800 to have us pulled out. Holy Cow! They did give us a good idea of dropping out the anchor into the middle of the channel and wait for the tide to some in. Late evening, the tide turned and we proceeded to winch ourselves out.

I ended up taking an extra day off of work and rather than make way to Alameda under darkness, we got a slip at a nearby marina for the night.

Properly Store your Dock Lines

A handful of years ago, a few of us were heading out on the Bay. Sailing is a lot of work, for those that are thinking about getting into it. Stretching, contorting, nonstop moving around and grinding are all part of this sport. I’ve always been taught to do things such as to minimize the amount of work later. I’m not necessarily talking about unsafe shortcuts, what I’m talking about is little things like: Instead of taking the lock off my boat and putting it downstairs in some random place in the galley, drop it in one of the holders inside of the cockpit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve locked up only to find I needed to open her back up to go find the lock.

Anyways, we don’t remove our dock lines generally (unless racing) and generally just coil them up, put them around a lifeline, and then place one end of the coil inside the other. It works great. Of course, I haven’t invented this, I’ve seen so many do the same.

However, if you done make the diameter of the coil of the rope long enough, there can be only a small portion of the coil end inside the other and, as we found out, it’s not safe!

It was a windy day and we were heading out past the Golden Gate. It must have been a flood and the wind waves were decent. It was a rough go. Unbeknownst to us, either a wave or the excessive bobbing of the boat cause the coil of rope to come off the lifeline and fall into the water. As we tacked out the Gate, everything was great until just about 100 yards to the other side Sherine noticed we only had steerage to Starboard and steerage to Port was very limited.

I don’t know what caused me to notice, but we eventually found the dock line in the water with no end visible!

Honestly, I can’t recall how we managed to tack (or gybe) and eventually turn back under the gate. Oh yeah, I forgot one more point. The dock line has fouled the prop we found so we’d be unable to drop the sails and motor somewhere safely to fix the steerage.

The winds through the Golden Gate in the summer can easily exceed 25 kts. I decided to sail into Treasure Island’s Clipper Cove. For the most part this was relatively uneventful once you figured out how to plan for significantly limited steerage.

Clipper Cove is generally not protected from the winds unless you get up close to the south-west portion of the cove. The entrance is also shallow at low-tide and groundings are possible depending on your draft. The southern portion of the cove is very shallow, stay north.

We eventually were able to drop the the main and the jib and drop anchor.

For the next hour, I spend cutting the dock lines off the rudder and from around the prop in sub 60º water. This is the second time I’ve had to do this in my sailing career on the Bay and yes, there’s a story and a lesson’s learned in that one too! I’ll write about it later.

Bareboat Charter Captains, Know Where the Tools Are

Since buying my first sailboat in 2007, I have had a number of events on the Water from which I have learned from. Every sailor and boater is bound to have a few. It doesn’t matter whether you sail a 40 year old venerable plastic classic or a brand new boat. Stuff breaks.

I always love to read other sailors’ accounts on incidents they’ve had and what they learned. I find it makes me a better sailor. Despite all of this, I can almost guarantee another incident is around the corner to apply what I’ve learned and to learn new skills from.

Sherine and a good friend of mine were chartering a new (1 year old?) Leopard 40 out of Tortolla in the BVI in following Thanksgiving in the BVI. We were several days in our trip and having a blast. This was my second trip to the BVI (I’ll cover my first trip in the Points of Interest section of my site eventually). We sailed from Virgin Gorda near where the Bitter End Yacht Club were to Anegada for the night where we had an excellent freshly caught lobster. I didn’t make it to Anegada my first trip to the BVI, but I was glad we made it a priority this time.

Anyway, the next morning we woke and decided make way for Jost Van Dyke, a must-do for anybody sailing the BVI. The channel into Anegada is shallow and you must pay close attention to the markers. Once we were out of the shallows. The winds were about 10-15 knots, I seem to remember. We were making good time.

I believe I was at the helm and my friend was helping with the sheets up near the helm, where they were all run. All of the sudden, we noticed that the boom disconnected from from the mast. My friend went to investigate where he found a pint which the tack of the main attached and which ran down through the gooseneck had come out. Yikes!

Being a good captain requires you to me calm under any circumstances which may arise. I can tell you that I’m certainly a work in progress after 13+ years of sailing on the San Francisco Bay…what can I tell you! Things got exciting quick, as they often do, when you encounter a situation from which you have no experience.

I can’t exactly recall the durations and all of the steps we took. Sherine took the helm and we tried to fix remedy the situation. Of course, we could have just dropped sails, anchored and called for assistance…but if you’re a sailor, this is what sailing is all about IMHO. WE CAN DO THIS!

But I believe the first idea we had, prior to finding the pin and the parts, was to put a screwdriver in place of the pin to stop the boom from flailing around. We went to the cabin to find tools.

Now, I know the Captain that checked us out told us were the tools were but given it’s not our boat, we forgot. Next time, I’ll pay more attention and even inspect the tool box to know what it had and did not have!

We got a screwdriver but I can’t remember if whether we were successful or not. I believe upon further inspection we figured out that the pin were still attached to the tack and we found the washers and the nut on the deck which, fortunately did not fall overboard.

After trying to align the boom to the gooseneck while under sail and insert a pin which was under load of the main (I was sure we were not going to do), we decided to let the main down.

Long story short, we were able to re-attach the boom to the gooseneck and continue on sailing to Jost Van Dyke.

The rest of the charter we joked about the situation and the fact that folks with far less experience could have fared much worse. When the charter ended, we told the Captain about our situation…neither was he apologetic or interested!

Things I learned:

  • This is not new, but further reinforces the fact that Stuff Happens on the water and this is why it’s important to be sober (which we were)!
  • Pay attention when checking out the boat…they do it for a reason!
  • Fire up the engines (for safety) and drop the main.
  • Stay Calm!!