I gotta crow!

View from the starboard bow

I haven't found many ways in my life to create beauty - something that I can work on, stand back when I'm finished and see something that isn't just nice - it is beautiful.

Doing the brightwork on Ayala is one of those experiences. I'm a long way from being done - probably a little over 1/3 of the way. The starboard side of the boat is looking pretty good with 4 coats of varnish on everything you see and 5 on a few others.




This is how she looked the day
I closed the deal to buy her

Understand - I thought she was beautiful just as she was when I bought her. I love a lot of wood on a boat. At the same time, I could imagine what she would look like with some TLC. The brightwork is the place where it shows most dramatically. So that's where I started.




Here she is today











Some of the individual pieces...



Skylight frame



Forward hatch
The butterfly hatch for the skylight is in the background

Forward hatch - close up



I am heading back to Sacramento for a few days, then I start on the port side. It is mostly sanded and ready for varnish. It will take a full day just to finish sanding and to tape before I can start.

 

So far, I have about two weeks of working for 4 -6 hours/day and it is worth every bit of it. I'm eager to get back to it!



 



The future is getting brighter

The varnished wood is called "brightwork."

After what seems like (and actually is) months and months of indecision and depression, I am back at work on Ayala. Of all the options open to me at this point, the one in common to all of them is that I want to have Ayala looking in top shape.

 

Which brings me to the subject of brightwork. Ayala doesn't have as much of it as I would like. For the non-nautical reader, let me explain brightwork. Simply put, it is varnished wood. In the picture to the right, the gray wood is not varnished. The white areas are painted. The parts that look like wood are varnished and are known as brightwork. Usually brightwork refers to the woodwork on deck rather than in the cabin.

Chatelaine - an all wood boat built in Denmark in the early 60's

Before I continue, I should digress and explain that I started sailing in the late 60's when there were still lots of wooden boats around. I have always loved the look and feel and smell of a wooden boat. My first boat, Chatelaine, was an elegant wooden boat built in Denmark. Living aboard Chatelaine was like living in a home built of Danish furniture - simple, elegant, some parts were painted, much of it was varnished. My next boat, Laelia, was a more typical modern design - lots of white fiberglass with only minimal wood trim. It never had the comfortable feeling for me that I had living aboard Chatelaine.

Nowadays, it is hardly practical to own and operate a wooden boat unless one has a lot of money or has lots of experience maintaining a wooden boat and has the time to do the work. For me, Ayala is the best compromise between old and new. She is a fiberglass boat with a lot of wood both on deck and below. She has much of the feel of a wooden boat without some of the major headaches of an all wood boat.

Lots of gray, weathered teak in this picture

She also has more upkeep than an all fiberglass boat but for me, it is well worth the effort. It is the difference between living in an elegant home and living in a plastic bottle.

The most commonly used wood above decks in a modern sailboat is teak. Teak is a relatively soft wood but it has a high oil content and it is gritty. This means that it stands up well to the weather and it is an excellent non-skid surface in the areas where I walk on it. Much of the deck on Ayala has a teak overlay. It is left unfinished – not coated with varnish – to retain its non-skid properties. As the teak ages, it turns gray. There are two schools of thought about the gray. I think it is beautiful. Others think it looks shabby. Perhaps part of the beauty in my eye is the knowledge that the gray teak is traditional for decks. That's the way it looked on the old sailing ships and it is the way it is kept on many high quality (expensive) yachts.

However, most of us would agree that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Contrasting trim enhances the beauty of the gray teak. Teak that is kept varnished does not turn gray. It has a rich, dark brown appearance that is equally as beautiful.

At different times, the previous owners of Ayala have gone both the low-maintenance route with all

of the teak left bare and the higher maintenance route of varnishing the trim. At the point where I bought her, most of the trim was left bare and had turned gray. The immediate previous owner had started to have the trim varnished but only got as far as finishing the trim in the cockpit area. The first picture shows the extent of the brightwork when I bought Ayala. It is a start, but there is much more to be done.

I started with weathered teak looking like this.

So, at long last, I started on the job of sanding and varnishing trim. It promises to be a lot of work but I quickly found that the combination of sun and the fact of actually accomplishing something were quite energizing. I started by sanding off as little of the teak as possible to get past the weathered gray layer. As another boat owner observed, “Teak doesn't grow on boats.” Every time a bit of teak is turned to sanding dust, it is lost and it is very expensive to replace. Teak has been such a popular tropical hardwood for long enough that it is becoming a species threatened with extinction. When one can find teak, it is often not good quality or is not properly aged and dried to be suitable for boat use. I have to accept that the result of my labors will contain some amount of weathered wood fibers unless I am willing to spend lots of money to replace some of the teak – not to mention being willing to accept the environmental impact.



The light tan wood is sanded teak. This is pretty close to the
color of the original teak.

Still, even the lightly sanded teak is an attractive contrast to the weathered teak (see left). Once it is varnished, it turns still darker as you can see in the picture below.

Teak after the first coat of varnish.

But this, my friends, is only the beginning. The first coat of varnish is 50% varnish and 50% thinner. This makes the vanish thin enough that it soaks into the wood. The vanish manufacturer recommends a second coat of 50% solution, a third coat of 75% varnish, a fourth coat of 90% varnish followed by a minimum of four coats of 90 – 100% varnish. An additional two coats are recommended for wood exposed to tropical sun conditions. As best I can figure, there is about two month's worth of work to get to that level – weather conditions permitting.

Weather conditions? Oh yeah, I neglected to mention that the varnishing has to be done under certain conditions. It has to be sunny. It has to be warm – 65 degrees or better. It has to stay sunny and warm long enough for the varnish to harden – about four hours. At this time of year in Alameda, CA, that means that I can't start applying varnish until close to 11 AM and it has to be finished by 1 PM. If the air turns cool and damp before the varnish is hardened, it turns milky and has to be sanded down to the previous coat before continuing.

As of today, I have applied the first coat to the starboard cap rail. I have sanded the port cap rail and the rub rails on both sides. The cap rail is the rail that caps the edge of the deck. The rub rail runs along most of the side about half way between the cap rail and the water line. The name describes the function that it servers when a ham-handed skipper bumps into the side of the slip while docking.

An additional complication is the presence of detail work in the trailboards. There are trailboards port and starboard at the bow and at the stern for a total of four. The dark parts of the picture to the right are a raised design. In this picture, the background teak is sanded but not varnished. In the picture below it, you can see that the painted design does not stand out well against the darker, varnished teak. (The blue stripe is masking tape - not a permanent feature.)

 

As best I can figure, the way to deal with this situation is to apply most of the coats of varnish – perhaps all but the last two – then paint the raised portion with a contrasting color. The most likely candidate is gold paint. It contrasts well with the darker teak, it is traditional and it looks quite elegant when done properly. This will be a challenge given that I am artistically handicapped.

Producing good brightwork is both a satisfying art and an act of masochism. I am counting on the satisfaction in producing beautiful brightwork to outweigh the pain. Stay tuned for the results. More pictures and commentary will follow.

First Single Handed Sail

 

Ayala's bowsprit - the pole sticking out the front

Finally! Things are in sufficiently good condition to go sailing again. "All" that was left was to clean up all the loose items on the boat that would shift about or fall overboard if the boat were to heel under way. All told, that took about three hours and a lot of stuff got stuffed (if you know what I mean.) I have a couple of containers of items that are related only in that they happened to be lying around when I wanted to go sailing. They will get more appropriately sorted - someday.

I backed out of my slip a little after 2 PM. My plan for departing just didn't quite come together as expected. When Ayala backs up, her stern "walks" to port (left). That means that her bow swings to starboard (right). I have this long appendage known as a bowsprit on the front of the boat (see picture.) It seemed intent on dragging itself along the side of my neighbor's cabin. Prompt intervention with a boat hook prevented any damage but Ayala seemed to have a mind of her own about which way to turn once clear of the slip. I spent about five minutes going backward and forward in short burst doing my best to get Ayala headed the right direction. It finally all came together and we escaped the marina without damage.

Sail plan for a cutter rig

Once out on the water, the conditions were nearly ideal for a first trip out as a single hander. The wind was about five knots (six mph) with minor excursions above and below that velocity. Ayala is stable enough that keeping her on course and getting the sails up was a piece of cake.

Ayala is a cutter rigged sailboat. As you can see in the diagram to the left, there are two sails in front of the mast. The one farthest to the right is the jib. The next one back is the staysail (pronounced stays'l). Getting the two sails deployed is especially easy on Ayala since the jib and staysail are roller furling sails, i.e. they wind up around their respective stays rather like a window blind turned on its end.

Even with the light breezes, Ayala moved along quite nicely - a pleasant surprise since she is almost 5000 lbs. heavier than Laelia. I started tacking my way out the Alameda Estuary toward San Francisco Bay. There was another boat about the same size, crewed by a man and woman, headed the same direction. Naturally, I was doing my best to stay ahead of her. We seemed to be on opposite tacks most of the time. After the second occasion of crossing paths with less than 20 feet between us, the woman shouted across "What a beautiful boat!" Always nice to hear!

Finally, it was time to turn around and head back. I was not wanting to stay out into the sunset - it gets chilly very quickly as the sun gets down to the horizon.

Lazing along downwind

Down wind, Ayala continued to move along very nicely on very little wind and against the last of an outgoing tide. Sailing downwind, it feels almost like there is no wind. This being a bright, sunny day, it was comfortably warm in the cockpit leaving me enough time to take a picture of the rat's nest of lines (ropes) lying around. I have to do something to get all those lines organized! It is too easy to get them tangled or to trip on them.

I turned on the autopilot to steer Ayala while I started dropping the main. The autopilot very obligingly steered the boat for most of the time until the main was nearly down. Then it quit. There appears to be a loose connection somewhere and it wasn't getting data from the compass to tell it if it was on the right course. Another project!

Getting back into the slip turned out to be fairly easy although not quite as graceful as I would wish. No damage. No scars. I call that a successful outing!

After getting the sail cover back on, I pulled all of the stashed items out of their temporary living quarters. Even after they were all recovered, the interior looked the neatest it has looked since I moved aboard. I hereby resolve to keep it this way. No more scattering things about willy-nilly! Neat is nice.

I am going to try to come up with a schedule that has me doing one inside project (something below decks) and one outside project and then I go sailing. It lifts my spirits immensely!

Cash is simple?

One might expect that cash transactions are quick and easy. Not always!

Earlier this week, I received the final payment for the boat I just sold - in cash. 186 brand new looking 100 dollar bills. It being MLK day, the bank was closed so I took them all back to the boat and hid them away in what I hoped was an inconspicuous spot.

A couple of days later, I rode my trusty bike to the bank hoping that I wouldn't get robbed or get hit by a car or fall down and have cash flying all over the street. I made it - no problem.

I walked into my bank and laid the cash on the counter. The teller's eyes got big. "How much is there?"

I told her. She looked flustered and excused herself to speak to her supervisor. When she came back, she explained that this was going to take a while. There is special paperwork to be done for transactions over $10,000.

But, before we even got to the paperwork, she had to count it - very carefully. Then she had to go back through it and mark each bill with a special pen. The ink shows up brown on a genuine bill, black on regular paper.

All was in order at that point, so she started in on the paperwork. I had to present identification, SSN, and sign a receipt. Then I had to wait another 5 - 10 minutes while they did something online and got a response back.

All in all, the transaction took almost half an hour. A check would have been way simpler.

Then I got to thinking...

What if some of the bills had been counterfeit? Maybe the boat buyer would make it good - maybe not.

What if someone came in to rob the bank just as I laid the money on the counter. Would the bank make good? I doubt it.

Cash is simple? I don't think so. I will think at least twice before I do any more large cash transactions.

Getting properly shafted

Diagram of stuffing box and stern tube

Inquiring minds will want to know how the engine inside the boat can turn a propeller outside the boat when the propeller is under water and we don't want the water to come into the boat. In the tidy little diagram at the right you will see the answer.

Stuff to cut up to make stuffing rings

In this diagram, the engine is to the right. The propeller shaft is hooked to the engine and passes through the stuffing box and the stern tube to the propeller at the left. It is basically a shaft passing through a tube stuck the hull of the boat. Now for the tricky part - making the arrangement leak proof. It is rather difficult to make the stern tube bearing snug enough to keep water out without having it so tight that it causes excess friction which causes heat which causes the whole thing to weld itself into a lump that will no longer make the propeller turn. The solution is to make the stern tube bearing loose enough to let some water get past it and help cool it.

The pieces labelled "Packing Gland" and "Packing Rings" are the secret to keeping water out of the boat. The rings are simply thick string - about 1/4" in diameter - often flax, heavily impregnated with a slippery lubricant. A ring is a length of string cut to just the right length to go around the propeller shaft. Stuff several layers of these into the shaft and then compress them using the stuffing gland and voila! we have an arrangement that doesn't leak - much. Normally, when the propeller shaft is turning, about one drop of water per minute will work its way past all the packing and drip into the boat. This helps keep the packing rings cool. One drip per minute is easily handled by any competent bilge pump. As time goes on, the packing rings get compressed and the boat maintenance guy has to adjust the packing gland to keep the proper amount of pressure on them to stem the flow of water.

The grim reality of the stuffing box environment

So much for the theory part of this post. The reality is pictured at the right. When you compare this picture to the diagram, please note that in the picture the engine is to the left and the propeller to the right.

When I bought Ayala, her stuffing box was dripping about once per second. A quick look at the stuffing gland told me that the gland was adjusted as far in as it could go. Either there were no packing rings or they had been compressed so much that they were no longer effective.

Now, it seemed to me that pulling the packing gland out of the stuffing box while the boat was in the water might be a dicey kind of proposition. Once the rings are pulled out, what is to keep the ocean from coming in? I consulted with my friendly local boatyard and was told that the water would not come in fast enough to sink my boat as long as I had my work well organized.

Before pulling the stuffing gland out of the stuffing box, I made several new stuffing rings and laid them where I could get to them easily. I elected not to dig around and remove what was left of the old rings. This being the first time doing this job, I didn't want to take the risk that I might do something wrong and end up with an embarrassing amount of water in the boat. I will repack the stuffing box next time I have the boat out of the water to have the bottom cleaned - in about a year.

Of course, since this whole assembly resides in a low part of the boat, it is somewhat greasy and dirty with some minor corrosion in evidence. In fact, it is so low, that it is below the floor boards in the compartment under the cockpit. Working on the stuffing box means crawling into a fairly small compartment, kneeling and putting my forehead on a big black tube for support and reaching down into the depths of the bilge with both hands.

Getting the nuts off the studs sticking out of the stuffing gland was a slow process. I could only turn the nuts about 1/6 of a turn before I had to reposition the wrench. Once the nuts were off, the packing gland refused to cooperate by sliding out of the stuffing box. Half an hour of applying PB Blaster (penetrating lubricant that also dissolves rust), tapping on the gland with a hammer and using a cold chisel as a wedge between the stuffing gland and the stuffing box persuaded the stuffing gland to let go and slide up the propeller shaft toward the engine.

I was gratified to see that the water was coming in at no more than a steady trickle. It was enough to cause the bilge pump to come on for a few seconds about every thirty seconds. Pushing the new stuffing rings into place was relatively easy. I slid the stuffing gland back into place and seated it with a few taps of a hammer before tightening down the nuts that held it in place.

Now the book says to start the engine and put it in gear so the propeller is turning. Observe the stuffing gland and see how fast the water is coming in. If it is more than one or two drips per minute, tighten the nuts so the packing gland compresses the stuffing rings a bit more. Then let the engine run for about five minutes and feel around the stuffing box. If it is hot, the stuffing is too tightly compressed.

At the end of the five minute test, all was well. Only two drops of water were observed and the stuffing box was only slightly warm to the touch. All that was left was to clean up.



Rat's nest of wiring dangling perilously close to the steering cables

Did I say "all that was left?" The observant reader will have noted from the second picture and the one to the right that this space, located under the cockpit, is pretty grubby looking. Also, the picture at the right shows a rat's nest of wiring with some of the wiring dangling close to the steering cables at the upper right. It is conceivable that when Ayala starts rolling and pitching in a rough sea, these wires could end up getting tangled in the steering mechanism. Not a pleasant thought.

It was another hour's work to scrub down the enclosure then reroute wires and use wire ties to secure them where they won't cause mischief.

With all that done, I have completed the last major task I need to do before I go out day sailing on the San Francisco Bay. Hopefully, the next post will contain a description of such an event!

Progress

This is the starting point

I have found that when I have a job to do on a boat, it usually includes a string of "... before I can start this, I have to do that ..." connections. After going through one of these exercises, I was down to the top two things that I needed to do to be able to move on. Today's winner was to remove the air conditioning unit from the boat. The other job was to put new stuffing in the propeller shaft stuffing block but, today being Saturday, there were a string of interesting radio programs on KQED and I figured I would miss the smallest segments by doing the air conditioning job.

Why would I want to remove the air conditioning? The biggest is that I will probably never use it. To use it, I would have to be in a slip with shore power available. I hope that my future life aboard will include very little of that once I am clear of SF Bay. The other is that it is heavy and it sits well to starboard in the boat. Ayala has a more or less permanent two degree list (tilt) to starboard that I would like to eliminate. Most of it is due to the 60 gallon fuel tank that lives under the starboard settee. That's a little over 400 lbs. of off-center weight that is not balanced by anything on the other side of the boat. Someday I will remove that tank.


Got all the big pieces out. Lots of room!

But I digress. The final reason for removing the air conditioning unit is that it takes up over half of the space in a large storage locker. Storage space is too dear on a sailboat to give it away to something as useless as an air conditioner that I won't use.

With all that in mind, I plunged into the fray. As you can see from the top photo, the beast is tightly crammed into its enclosure. It was a matter of starting at the edges and working toward the center. First the control panel, then some of the connections inside the cabinet. Finally, I had it down to no more than the compressor and the big squirrel cage blower. With everything bolted together, the unit was to wide to make it out the door. I finally figured out that the hole you can see just below the blue/gray hose that is hanging off the left side of the cabinet was the way to access the blower motor and get it loose from the rest of the unit. Still, it took another hour and a half of wrestling with everything to get the unit out of the cabinet.



Compressor and blower sitting on deck

As you can see, there is still a lot of clean up to do - dirt and mold abound in the area that used be buried by the machinery.

I now have the biggest parts sitting out on deck. I have advertised on Craig's list for someone to come pick it up for free. It might even be operational.

So - after some clean up tomorrow, on to the next project. Stuffing the stuffing gland. More later...


Update

For those who are waiting breathlessly for an update on the fresh water system problem:

Water tank in the bilge. Aft is to the left.

According to the boat specs, the original tank was 100 gallons. This appears to be a replacement tank - fiberglass over plywood - and probably doesn't hold quite as much. I finally figured out that the fresh water tank is divided into two tanks. In the picture to the right, you can see the large tube with a tee in it going to each tank. There is a smaller tube in each tank that is in the line with the red handled valves. Those are the intakes for the fresh water pump. For some reason, when they are both turned on, the system seems to suck a lot of air. I tried turning off the valve to the aft portion (to the left in the picture) of the tank and things went well for several days. Yesterday evening, the problem reappeared - the pump would not shut off after use. I turned off the valve to the forward half of the tank and opened the one to the aft portion. So far, all is well.

I hit a slump - got mildly depressed and had a hard time staying focused on getting work done. Some variety surfaced in the form of a dinner with the Wednesday Night Dinner guys at Macaroni Grill in Milpitas. It is always interesting to catch up with these friends I first met in 1977 when I arrived in Silicon Valley.

I rented a car to get to the dinner and kept the car for another day so I could drive down to Santa Clara to meet with one of my former co-workers from Agilent, visit the much updated marina at Westpoint Harbor where I used to live aboard on Laelia and had dinner at the Sequoia Yacht Club. Dinner at the club was quite interesting. I was accidentally included in a group of people who had been out doing a lot of sailing in the South Pacific and backpacking in Ecuador.

All this reminded me that I need to arrange things to have a little more variety in my life. In the months before I moved aboard Ayala, I discovered that regular exercise did a lot to improve my mood and give me energy. I was going to the gym three times a week for a workout and an extended swim. I got to where I could swim for 30 minutes without stopping and I felt great afterward. Yesterday, I finally made it to the gym for the first time in a month. I had to stop swimming at the 20 minute mark but I feel so much better today! Gotta keep up the workouts! It is a bit tricky because the gym is about a 15 minute bike ride and I don't want to be out pedaling around in the dark. That means taking a 3 hour chunk out of the middle of the day - but it is important so I will be working on doing that.


Starboard settee with way too much stuff

Ayala has lots of things that need fixing up but she is certainly in good enough condition to do some SF Bay sailing. I just need to clean up some of the clutter and make sure that things won't bang around too much. My focus for the next few days will be to get things in shape to go sailing.


Port settee and dinette. Better but needs work.

I got started on my fixup agenda by doing a good deck washdown today. Alameda is not the cleanest place to keep a boat to begin with and the SF Bay area has been experiencing a string of "Spare the Air" days - too much pollution in the air. There was an unsightly amount of green fungus starting to appear in areas on deck so the washdown resulted in a significant appearance upgrade.

Now - start sorting through the cabin clutter. What to I need to keep here to be able to work on the boat? What can I put in storage or get rid of? Hopefully, by the next time Judy comes to the boat, we will be able to go sailing instead of working on cleaning and fixing the boat.