Maintaining and Sustaining

We had a good sail from Hope Town to Green Turtle on April 27th, including that notorious passage around Whale Cay, exposed to the swells of the Atlantic piling steeply as the sea floor shoals from thousands of feet to nil. It proved lumpy, but was no problem and tested a bit our sea legs, idle from sailing the Sea of Abaco. We were going to stay a few days, but a cold front was predicted and we wanted to be sure we could get south of the Whale again to Marsh Harbor to meet Steffi and Charlie next week, so on Monday we motored into stronger than expected southerlies to Hope Town and noticed the engine was running over 200 degrees. We stopped it, it cooled a bit and we reached our mooring in Hope Town Harbor.

The next day, an inspection of the raw water (sea water) pump impeller revealed that several of its rubber blades had broken off. One was lodged in the outflow of the pump. An impeller is a mandatory spare part, we had one and installed it, removing the fragments of impeller blades that we could find. Pump blades had disintegrated once before, and the boat yard in Maine had insisted that they flush out the heat exchanger to remove any other blade fragments that might block the flow of seawater.

The heat exchanger is a four or five inch diameter tube that runs side to side at the back of the engine. It is constructed so that engine coolant – a mix of fresh water and antifreeze – can run through it and be cooled by sea water circulating in smaller tubes that run end to end through the larger tube. Sea water and fresh-water coolant never mix, they just get close. I talked to Darrin the mechanic at Man-O-War who reinforced that each of those tubes needed to cleared. Instead of a hose, unavailable when on a mooring, I could run a wire through the small tubes to push out any impeller blade fragments that might be stuck, impeding the flow of cooling sea water. There are about 30 tubes, each about a quarter of an inch. More intimacy with our special needs diesel.

Removed the round plates and gaskets at each end of the exchanger and used a mirror to see in the ends which on one side are about three inches from the bulkhead and on the other about six. Then by sort of lying over it I could thread the wire through each tube and feel its tip come through the other end. Failed to make it through only one tube, found no other fragments and declared victory as more water gushes out the exhaust pipe and the engine runs its usual hot, but not super-hot temperature.

Then the propane cook stove stopped working and discovered that the 20 pound tank was empty. Journey has for a reserve, 10 pound propane tank that we switched over to, but the stove would only light with a match, not by pushing the button that springs a small static electricity generator that creates a tiny spark by the burner sufficient to light it. Took it apart and a wire the size of a door bell wire had come loose from the spark generator. Reattached, it works fine.

New friend Jay on board Airborne, a Mason 44 moored here in Hope Town, a tall, slender mustached retired lawyer who most recently spent a year in Kosovo helping to solve problems in its justice system, said over coffee that the great thing about sailing is the challenges of problem solving. “Things don’t work and you have to fix them, it’s all consuming, all occupying, I love it.” Ed, our friend on Troubadour, spends hours with manuals and a wonderful series of how-to books that comprehensively cover maintenance and repair of the boat systems that make you go, tell you where you are, allow you to meet bodily needs and, most fundamentally, ensure survival. If your roof leaks at home, you don’t sink!

It’s about as pioneering as you can get these days. Like Conestoga wagons, our home and way of getting places is one and the same, and our wagon train is the cruiser’s net that makes a community of boats through its daily, VHF volunteer broadcast of weather, messages and information. Each morning on the segment called open mike, there are usually several requests by people asking for help related to such things as refrigeration, single side band radios, batteries, software, or if someone knows where they can get a spare part or tool, and nearly each time there’s a response by someone offering to help.

We’re learning a new way of relating to our goods. They’re scarce and fragile. You have to grease the axels or the wheels will fall off. It’s a shift from a user and consumer to being a sustainer and maintainer. It’s a shift driven by necessity, but made possible by time to think, go slow, to work methodically and to get the help of others. You have a week, not a Saturday afternoon, to sort a problem out, and you have a community of people in the same straights as you to help you do it.

While we’re maintaining and sustaining, we’re increasingly maintained and sustained by the people we meet in Hope Town, built around this eclectic group gathered as the Hope Town Writer’s Circle, people on boats and those who pass in and out of the Hope Town Coffee Shop. M. noted that when we’re in the settlement - the houses, groceries, restaurants and shops that surround the harbor - it takes time to walk around because you stop so often to chat with someone you have met before. People always say hello when you pass by on the streets or in dinghies.

Boat relationships begin by approaching in the dinghy and asking what kind of boat it is. Nearly always people want to chat. We stand in dinghies, holding onto the approach boats gunwale, discover home ports, mutual friends, and destinations, but usually decline an invitation to come aboard, but if there’s chemistry, which most often there is, you ask or get asked to come by later for a drink of some kind.

Jay’s wife Luisa on Airborne is an accomplished artist. Linda on Epilogue makes beautiful jewelry. We got to know both independently, introduced them at the coffee shop and M. spent an afternoon with the two on Airborne the other day and returned with a beautiful small oil painting of the Hope Town lighthouse, an icon for us of this journey, and a necklace. In later conversations with all of them, it was clear they enjoyed time only with ladies for a change.
That’s enough for now. We’re headed out for coffee and might see again Allen, Dave, Dave, Jr., Mary, Nancy, Nan, Larry, Audrey, Herb, Sally, Marguerite, Linda, Don, Frank, and of course Heather and Andrew who own and run the coffee shop.

Post script: Getting the propane bottle refilled proved to be surprisingly easy. We had noted that weekly, another old US army LST, a small one, arrives laden with large and small containers of propane. Often small bottles, with the names of cottages and boats are sitting on the dock waiting for it. Turns out the day of our need, an inquiry at the grocery store on the harbor front revealed that the barge would be arriving on Wednesday, pick-up bottles and return by Thursday new. Journey's bottle joined a cluster of others, disappeared, and returned full for the price you'd pay in Boston.