Our first order of business was to set up some stairs so we could climb aboard and hack a human-sized hole in the shrink wrap and examine the mayhem within. As it was forecast to rain for a couple of days, we left it at that for the moment.
Everything had held up much better than we had feared. The interior was in disarray, as we had removed everything from its home before we left so that all of our cupboards could be left open to the airflow for the winter. There seemed to be no hint of mustiness, although the interior had the sickly smell of the small amount of antifreeze that we had left in the bilges, just in case. We had bought five big buckets of Damp Rid in the hopes of keeping the humidity down. We were pleased to find even the most saturated had still only soaked up about half of what it could have. Once we popped the batteries back into our weather station, it reported the indoor humidity at 45%, compared to 77% outside.
We had originally planned about a week of moderate work to get the boat ready to go back in the water. Then Dave, the Travelift operator, told us he was going on vacation for seven days. Our choices became go in on the morning of the third day or wait until the afternoon of the eleventh. Looks like we'd better get cracking.
Our hopes of having a perfectly seaworthy boat to go into the water had to be recalibrated to just making sure she would float and could get to the other end of the marina under her own power. We could worry about the rest after that.
My first order of business was to get our engines back to working order. I had removed the belts and impellers for the winter and had to reinstall them along with a general inspection to make sure neither the oil in the engines nor the saildrives had gone walkabout. Then it was a matter of going through each system to make sure everything still worked like it was supposed to. While I did this, Maryanne started un-bagging everything and putting each item in it's general home location.
Our three year old batteries were still in good shape, having been kept full all winter by our two davit solar panels. Maryanne was keen to get the bimini reinstalled, not only to replace the rain protection we were currently getting from the shrink wrap, but she really wanted to make sure there was no issue with our three bimini solar panels or their controllers. Lacing the bimini up is a frustrating, time-consuming job that I had been hoping to delay until after Begonia got into the water, but her second point about wiring up the solar panels convinced me that I should move the job up my list.
Once we were done with the immediate (pre-launch) items we needed to get Begonia to the dock, we kept working to get as far through our post-launch list as we could. By the end of Day Two back in Erieau, we were pretty sure we were ready for the next morning's launch.
The next day, we left the house well before our scheduled splash and beat Dave (the owner and Travelift operator) to Begonia by over an hour. Since we knew he was keen to begin his vacation, we assumed he might show up a little early to get things moving.
Our only two outstanding items were to paint the small portions of the keels upon which Begonia had been resting all winter, and to install the rudders. We needed Dave's help for both, since both jobs required Begonia to be lifted high in the Travelift slings.
Getting Begonia in the Travelift was no easy feat. There is maybe one centimeter total, about the width of a thumb, to divide between both sides. Dave operated the lift and kept his eye on his (starboard) side from his cab near the stern. I tried to position myself far forward of the port hull within Dave's view, where I could communicate with him with hand signals. Fortunately, Dave is a pilot, so we both knew a common set of unambiguous signals to use.
The operation still wasn't straightforward. Between the blocked sight lines, the roar of the Travelift engine and the wind, which was trying to swing Begonia ever so slightly, it was hard to get the Travelift lined up straight. Because Begonia's decks are curved slightly from front to back, Dave was trying to come in parallel to the front, thinking that once he got past the fat part, he had nothing but space to maneuver. From my perspective, he was coming in at an angle on a collision course. When I signaled to turn away, it looked to him like I was asking for the exact wrong thing. Perhaps I got my signals backwards. Then he would turn more sharply into the boat until I was waving frantically at him to STOP! He had to do this gently, because there was no spare room to start Begonia swinging. Dave was very patient, though, and kept trying over and over with no complaint. We did this maybe ten times before the lift finally touched, leaving the thinnest crayon line of Travelift Blue on our white wax job. At this point, Dave shut down the lift to come over to my side to have a look and I went to his. Now we each immediately understood what the other had been seeing. Two more very gentle tries and Begonia was finally lifted from the big blocks of wood that had supported her weight all winter and she was driven to a clear spot in front of the hangar.
Using the lessons he learned when lifting Begonia last autumn, Dave was able to position her further aft on the lift than the first time. This meant Begonia's forestay was farther from the Travelift's beam, enabling her to be lifted higher without making contact. This meant that instead of having to wade knee-deep in ice-cold water while she hangs off the edge of the pad, we could install the rudders from the dry ground of the parking lot. Dave lifted Begonia way up, then told us he was going to go find something to do for an hour so we could sort everything out without feeling like he was breathing down our necks.
It seemed unnecessary. Reinstalling the rudders usually only takes a few minutes and we were happy to do our part in letting Dave start his vacation as soon as he could. He said he had plenty to do anyway, so he would be back in an hour.
It turned out to be a good thing he was. The paint went on quickly enough, but the rudders were being more difficult than usual. Perhaps the cold temperatures tightened all of the tolerances between parts. To make things work, I had to almost completely disassemble the steering system, fit the parts and then tighten it all back up again on each side of the boat. With the job finally done, I emerged grubby and sputtering obscenities under my breath just five minutes before Dave's return.
Thankfully launch day was sunny and calm - that certainly helped
Dave lowered Begonia into the water. After a brief inspection below, I found no leaks, so we decided to proceed with the next step: starting the engines. Port started okay, but starboard was more resistant. Dave offered plenty of advice, but after the tenth try, I knew there must be air in the fuel system and there was no way it was going to start. I had replaced a fuel filter assembly last autumn and thought I had bled the system. Apparently I hadn't bled it enough.
"No problem" Dave said, "Just put the good engine in reverse to get out of the slings and Maryanne and I will walk you back to the dock".
I put the port engine in reverse. A splash of prop wash emerged from the stern and Begonia nudged forward and right, sending Dave and Maryanne scrambling (something in the new throttle controller had been installed backwards, making forward reverse, and visa-versa!). I learned from that one pretty quickly and put the engine in forward. Then she backed out of the slings and turned stern to the right toward the dock. I took the engine out of gear. Dave and Maryanne then pulled Begonia to the dock with the lines. Ugh! It looks like my day is not going to go as planned.
Installing a new type of throttle quadrant was another one of the jobs I had completed last year. My primary concern was that the throw (the distance the cable moves when engaging forward or reverse) was correct, since there is a small tolerance for the correct values. Since doing anything with the throttle or shift mechanism is an extremely frustrating job due to the tight spaces and the fiddliness of the parts, I thought I checked three times that the direction was correct, but I clearly needed at least four. Now I had to disassemble the whole thing and reverse the throw of the shifter cables. Then I had to re-bleed the starboard fuel system and see if I could get that engine to start and then stay running.
After consulting with Maryanne, I decided to get the starboard engine running first. That way, we could proceed to our assigned space by the fuel dock with the backward transmissions. There we would be out of the way and could take our time with the rest.
The straightaways weren't bad, but maneuvering into the dock required me to forget my muscle memory, take a breath, and think each movement through.
As we approached the dock to our left, I started in a coast with both engines in neutral. Okay, normal enough. Next, to slow down the port hull and start the turn, I need to put that throttle forward. Then, to speed up the turn, I pull the starboard lever into reverse, stopping the boat by putting both levers in forward. Then it was a little bit of back and forth to shimmy into our spot and, WHEW! I'm glad it's not a windy day.
As I sat there, staring at the shiny new throttles and shaking my head at my mistake, Maryanne decided now would be a good time for her to take the car to Chatham to run some errands. I hate running errands even more than I hate doing fiddly repairs, so I was happy to have her take that off my plate while she avoided the ranting lunatic that was due to arrive in about ten minutes.
Her plan worked well apart from the fact that, when she finally made it back to the boat, we were both exhausted from independently frustrating days. Neither of us were in the mood to be doing much else, now that we were reunited. Fortunately, my main job of changing the shift cables around had not been as bad as I had feared (the new throttle type was much easier to work with than the old, awful one I removed the previous autumn). I had enough time left over to tidy Begonia before her return so that there was plenty of floor and counter space for whatever she was bringing back with the car. This was when it was nice to have the crappy bach. Instead of then having to muster the energy to put stuff away so we have a place to sit, we could look at each other, declare, "We're done!" and drive away for the night.
The next day was Sunday. We had planned to stay on the boat for the day and not leave Erieau because of the upcoming Pandemonium. Monday was going to be the total solar eclipse and the town was expecting to be mobbed. The roads would be choked to a halt. All of the shelves in all of the stores would be bare. Every unoccupied dwelling was going to be rented out for extortionate rates. Extra cops were coming into town (from where?) and the local authorities, worried that people would fall into the lake by walking off the jetty while wearing their eclipse glasses, dropped off an emergency response triage trailer by the fire station. Our local county, Chatham-Kent, had declared a state of emergency due to the expected traffic, and the trash pick up had been postponed.
Maryanne took a short walk to the main road, noted that it was occupied instead of its usual empty, but certainly not to the point of gridlock (can you even have gridlock with three cars?), and announced that she thought today would be a good day to do the BIG provision, after all, while I went up the mast and did a host of other jobs aboard.
Again, thanks to her having to go to ten different places to get what she needed, I had plenty of time to get Begonia cleaned up and make plenty of space for our new provisions before she returned.
Our spot by the fuel dock is the best in all of Erieau for provisioning. The car can be brought three steps from the boat, with the deck right at the car's trunk level. We squirreled Maryanne's haul away, out of sight. For the briefest of moments after we were done, it felt like the good ol' days of us just hanging out on our boat. Of course, our main problem was that our water system was still pickled with antifreeze and we had ZERO potable water until the marina opened the next day and turned on the tap for us. Time to go back to the bach for the night.
Our next two jobs to get Begonia livable again were to give her exterior a good clean and then flush and fill the tanks. The deck cleaning was straightforward. Flushing the tanks wasn't. The potable antifreeze we used in the water system is non-toxic, but it tastes revolting, even in tiny concentrations. It was important to be very methodical in flushing every part of both systems (one for the electric pump, one for the manual foot pumps), plus the entire hot water circuit along with its tank. It took five times of filling the tanks and then pumping the water overboard to get water that seemed okay coming out of the taps. We finished just in time for the show to start.
Eighty percent of a total solar eclipse doesn't look like much of anything at all. Unless you are actually looking at the sun through your eclipse glasses or its image with your pinhole camera, you would barely notice anything is amiss. Even with most of the sun's disc covered, your pupils merely dilate a bit to compensate and, with the shadows still being sharp-edged, it just feels like it could be an ordinary, slightly hazy day.
Then, about three or four minutes before totality begins, things start to happen fast. Darkness descends quickly, with the light fading by the second. It's like the twilight of a normal sunset has been sped up twenty times.
In the days leading up to the eclipse, there is a lot of hand-wringing about what the cloud cover will be during the event, hoping that it will be zero percent. We didn't get so lucky in Erieau. For most of the morning, there was not a cloud to be seen. About three hours before the thing was to start, a thin layer of cirrocumulus moved in from the west. The high clouds were thin enough to see the blue sky beyond and between scattered lighter patches. The sun shone through them without difficulty. Their presence would turn out to make the eclipse even more amazing.
Because cirrus clouds are high enough to be seen from a couple hundred miles away, in the last few seconds before totality started for us, we could see the clouds on the distant horizon fall under the moon's shadow. The line then raced across the sky towards us. As soon as it touched the sun, it was suddenly middle-of-the-night dark, except for the eerie ring of light surrounded by the stars.
This is where the clouds got us. There was the possibility of a comet being visible during totality through binoculars. I used our best set to search, but the clouds kept me from seeing the dimmest parts of the sky. For the first time ever, (and last!) I pointed them at the sun and was rewarded instead with a view of the beautifully colored streaks and arches of the corona.
There was not nearly enough time to fully enjoy the event. The clouds on the distant western horizon brightened. The back of the moon's shadow raced towards us and as soon as it touched the sun again, it was suddenly daytime. A few minutes later, we were back to what seemed like again like a sunny, if a bit hazy day that brightened until it was keeping us nice and warm in our dark clothing. The whole thing went from light to dark to light again so fast that someone could easily have missed it with a poorly timed trip to the restroom.
Apart from uncontrollable oohs and aaahs, the crowds did not break into an impromptu Bacchalania. Erieau is not Burning Man (Could you imagine?). Our local "crowds" consisted of about eight parked cars in the marina store lot (about 20% of its capacity), each with about five occupants milling around nearby. There was one guy (our nearest) pacing the fuel dock. He did not fall in. Maryanne and I enjoyed the show comfortably seated at Begonia's cockpit table. Later, we saw drone footage of the beach, where there were maybe a hundred widely scattered people clustered in a few dozen groups. Maryanne and I both remarked to each other that it reminded us of Y2K, where none of the worries leading up to the event materialized at all. The poor fire rescue boat returned to the boat ramp beside Begonia with no victim strapped to their floating back board. We're pretty sure no one had to crack open the triage trailer, either. {Maryanne:I guess it is better to be over prepared, than under prepared?!}
The total eclipse (viewed directly with eclipse glasses, and indirectly with a collander acting as our pin-hole camera) just happend to pass right over us in Erieau
Naturally there were plenty of pictures looking way better than ours - this one by photographer Jose Castillo who was also in Erieau to witness the event
Later in the day, we were visited by Barb and Dom, who had come to collect our shop-vac and a few of the other items we brought for the haul-out for which we don't have long-term storage space. They turned out to be really interesting and friendly. They live in Chatham, but keep a holiday trailer right across the channel from Begonia as a getaway. We all became fast friends and went back and forth several times visiting whenever they were in Erieau during our stay.
With so few 'extra' jobs, we had some time to kill and got to explore a little of the local countryside
Farewell to our wonky but functional AirBnB rental, that had been home for the last week
An approaching storm had us moving deep into the marina basin the next day to a spot with better protection from the weather. We spent our last night in our rental accommodation and managed to pack up and move our stuff aboard the boat between rain showers. It was so nice being back at home, away from that dive, with its weird, slanty floors. The slant of Begonia's floors correlates with the wind noise outside, which we find more comforting.
We slept soundly in an oasis of warmth, under a pile of blankets in our cozy berth, Maryanne had made up a couple of sets of fleece sheets before we departed in the winter, and these were well appreciated. The weather had moved in. When I finally emerged into our chilly cabin to fire up the heater, it was slashing with heavy rain and there was fog so thick that I couldn't even see the fuel dock. It would have been a perfect indoor day except for the fact that we were due to return our rental car in Chatham. The "we" in this case being Maryanne, who offered to do the task solo to keep from "creeping out" Pamela, the person who volunteered to give her a ride back to Erieau afterwards. That didn't save me from the weather, though, as I had to do my own last-minute errand to Blenheim for a new inverter before she left {Our old one seemed to have stopped working over the winter haul out}..
With no car, no house, and no more jobs left to do on the boat, we spent the storm's second day marveling at the awfulness of the weather as we relaxed inside Begonia's cozy, heated cabin.
By the next morning, the clouds and rain had left, but an icy wind still remained. Our sailmaker messaged us to say they were on the way with our new wardrobe of sails. To be honest, I hoped they could have held out until afternoon, after the wind had a chance to die down some more.
That would have turned out to be a bad idea. Bending the sails on, particularly the mainsail, is a complicated kerfuffle. Even though Tac and his assistant, Julian, were experienced guys, it still took the four of us almost four hours to get everything mounted and stowed properly. I had to go up the mast twice during the whole process.
Since all the sails, plus the mainsail bag, were new, we expected there to be issues with the fit or with getting the new hardware to interface with the old, particularly since we changed a few things to make improvements. In the end, it all went really well with hardly any hiccups.
Installing the new sails, and a few days later getting to actually sail with our new spinnaker
I was most impressed with the mainsail cover. Over the years, Maryanne has made numerous complicated repairs, modifications and improvements to the old one. The purpose of some of these are not readily apparent and really only understood by her. The replacement Julian made incorporated all of them, as well as a few ideas of his own. Rather than needing to make adjustments to make it work, it was pretty much ready to go right out of the bag. Once it was zipped up over the mainsail, we stepped back and let out a big sigh at having a fully functioning sailboat again.
We didn't have the weather we needed yet to leave Erieau for good. The next day was a bit blustery and sloppy, so after walking to the beach to confirm that conditions looked survivable out on the lake, we untied and headed out for a sail.
The harbor exit was a bit scary, not because it was anything worse than moderate, but because we would have preferred a nice, flat departure for our first time out for the year.
We unfurled the main and jib and almost immediately needed to reef them back down again in the high winds. We tacked back and forth a couple of times and pretty quickly realized the well-oiled machine we were last year had gone a bit rusty. We did everything correctly, but each task seemed to take half a second longer to remember after the last. I guess it's a good thing there was no traffic. We were literally the only sailboat in Lake Erie.
As we turned back to Erieau, we were a bit disappointed that the wind was still to strong to hoist the new spinnaker. Instead, we decided to come in on jib alone. By the time I had the mainsail down, we were right at the top edge of the speed range for the spinnaker, provided we kept our course pretty deep downwind. We rolled up the jib and brought the spinnaker bag forward for hoisting.
Everything went as planned and the sail filled with a satisfying fooomp! Begonia, with her smooth new bottom paint, lept forward as if she had been waiting all winter to break into a full gallop. We took five or six minutes to enjoy the ride and then brought the spinnaker down, satisfied that the test of our new sails had been a success.
On the way back in, we spotted Barb and Dom waving to us from the breakwater. We were no sooner tied up than they arrived with essentially a whole meal to share with us in celebration {Every time they visisted Barb was extreemly generous with gifts}.
The only real hitch in our outing was that our flux gate compass (the electric one that interfaces with our instruments) was WAY off. This causes all sorts of problems. The little boat icon on the chart plotter thinks it's going sideways everywhere. This makes it think there is a huge cross-current, along with a wind from the wrong direction. This, in turn, makes the autopilot freak out at being told to do anything except steer straight ahead. This needed to be fixed sooner than later.
I decided to try sooner. With Begonia at the fuel dock, I was having a hell of a time getting any of our compasses to even agree with each other, much less on the heading I thought I should be seeing. After pacing around with our hand-bearing compass (our most accurate and reliable one) I had the idea to get off the boat and walk around a bit with it. As I was walking along, the needle was making a rhythmic back and forth, back and forth, almost as if I was carrying a big magnet in one pocket. I wasn't. I made a few more passes and it quickly became apparent that each of the metal pilings at the edge of the fuel dock is magnetic, with the south arrow pointing at each one as I walked by and pointing away in between. Well, that can't be good. That's why south was to the right of us no matter which way we were sailing.
My first thought was that the pilings might be electromagnetic instead of just plain magnetic. If there was that much stray current in the water, our zinc anodes would be gone in days. A quick check with the multimeter ruled that out, thankfully. Still, who builds a dock out of magnetic pilings? It's probably not the best place to lay alongside for a week. The instrument recalibration would have to wait a until we were well away from here for a while.
Our next problem was our water. Despite flushing the entire system through five times, it still had a little bit of an unpleasant taste. We could use it to make bad coffee or bad tea, but drinking it straight was a struggle. I decided to apply a homeopathic remedy and dilute it until not one molecule of the antifreeze remained in the system. Then I'll be able to sell it for a fortune!
Sorry. After very carefully flushing the system again, being careful to get to every little corner of the system, I discovered that the magic number is eight. We filled and replaced every drop of water on the boat eight times and now the water coming out of every outlet tastes exactly like the hose water going in. I welcome the return of good coffee.
[Maryanne]So, we've returned the boat to its home status, fully stocked with provisions and tested all new systems and sails; aside from being a little rusty on our procedures (thank goodness for checklists), we are good to continue the adventure! Special thanks to Erieau Marina for fitting us in at the last minute way back in October, to Barbara and Dom for being so generous with their time and gifts, and to Pamela, another interesting lady, for giving me a lift from the car rental and being so welcoming.
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