Lounging in the cockpit at anchor eating dinner and watching the sun set, I started scanning Pasargada in the fading light, it occurred to me again how much the boat takes care of us. It’s been a rolly anchorage, the swell is wrapping around the protection of the point and tossing the ships around, but the motion on board is not bad at all.
Through the Sea of Cortez, Pasargada has been fully in her element. She’s being used exactly as designed, built, and intended (or as exactly as Rachel and I can manage). Hundreds of years of sailing tradition married with the best of current technology and design, built by the expert boat builders in Sweden. The boat is doing exactly what she was designed to do.
We can easily see it in how the boat feels, looks, and sails. The decks are cleaner from all the saltwater. The batteries are in a rhythm, healthy, working as designed, the watermaker at full efficiency filling our tanks day-in and day-out with the purest water. The anchor system is securing us every night and providing plenty of rest. The sails, the engine, all love being in use.
All this costs us just a few rounds of maintenance every day, checking on the little things, keeping up with cleaning, reconditioning, replacing as needed, keeping everything in balance as we go. Yes, things break, yes we need to haul parts from the around the world, yes we need to do boat yoga in stuffy engine rooms, we need to change oils, and filters, and dive the bottom and hundred other bits, but can we deny the boat when that’s what she needs? Everything we put in we get back ten-fold.
It takes time to find this balance. It takes time to transition the “marina boat” to the cruising boat. We had to spend almost a whole year cruising in Puget Sound (as much as we could) to expose all the weaknesses, and we found many!
For any readers planning to cruise their boats fully-time, congratulations, you will be challenged in ways you can’t imagine and you will love it. Your boat will love it. Do anything you can do to get into full cruiser mode early, so you can keep the enjoyment mode and the maintenance mode from intersecting too often. May all your “boat work in exotic places” be planned, not unplanned.
For the prospective cruisers, I will be putting some of our learnings from the last two years here, over the next few weeks. Here’s my semi-comprehensive list of the anchor systems on our boat.
• Anchor: We love our new-generation anchor. We were not as happy with the old generation anchor. I’ll leave manufacturer names out, but I believe that technology improves over time. I remember when shaped skies became popular, it seemed like a fad, after all, skis hadn’t changed in decades. And yet, soon there was no doubt that the new technology had improved skis (for most people).
Get the best anchor you can and practice a lot. Our new gen anchor sets easily in most bottoms on a given spot. Often we find a patch of sand surrounded by rock, it’s important that when we drop the anchor and chain and back up, that the anchor grab and dig immediately. We use a laser range finder (for hunting or golf) and GPS to confirm our position. Whatever anchor you use it should be able to set quickly. Practice somewhere other than Liberty Bay, that’s almost like cheating. Also, I highly recommend a laser range finder, the anchorages are not getting any less crowded, you and your neighbors will sleep better knowing exactly how far apart you are.
• Chain: For those in Seattle, you have one of the last places on the west coast that regalvinizes chain, Emerald City Galvinizing in Freelard. If you have older chain, that’s great, it’s probably better metal, get it regalvizined! You won’t be able to do this almost anywhere else!
We found that most anchorages, unlike Puget Sound, are pretty shallow (10 to 30 feet). But to increase our range we added another 100 feet of 8-plait to our chain (we wrote a blog post about this). We like having the flexibility of being able to anchor deep if needed (with proper scope).
• Windlass: This is pretty critical (duh). We did our best to recondition our windlass, but we still ended up with some issues. We’ve found that being able to drop chain fast is a key in getting a good set for our anchor, so we removed the capstain that came with the unit and changed to a configuration that lets us loosen the gypsy and drop the chain. In this way when we find our spot, even if it’s blowing 25 knots, we can drop the anchor and chain and back down before we get blown off, no using the “down button” on the windlass for us.
On the windlass, we found the “up” button failed one day. This was really unfortunate and of course happened when we needed to move because of a hazard in Cabo San Lucas. We were also anchored with a lot of scope in deep water. We had to pull up anchor manually twice before we had a minute to switch the wires down bellow. Some boats have a windlass remote, or two stations for running UP/DOWN. Whatever your configuration, making sure your up button works and has redundancy. It’s super frustrating to have a perfectly fine windlass and a bad switch.
Further, is the motor, the gypsy and everything in good shape? We’ve found the new generation anchors set so well that they hard on the windlass. We unstick the last bit of the anchor by hand now. What about the motor? Do you have a workshop manual for it ? A friend of ours had a solder fail in the motor in the middle of the Pacific and were only able to repair it as a result of some really good luck (and persistence). Be sure your windlass situation is bullet proof, rock solid, redundant, etc. This is something you will use day-in and day-out and it’s really awful when it stops working. Being field reparable is better than carrying a whole other windlass, they are big and heavy.
• Snubber: Unlike Puget Sound, we often find ourselves in rolly, surgy, and difficult anchoring conditions. Having a really nice, long, chaffe protected snubber is extremely important. We made a two legged snubber out of 3-strand nylon and using metal eye and built-in chaffe protection. Essentially we based it on the Mantus snubber design, the splices are not that bad, but it’s a bit of mental exercise to figure out how to do it. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s super long, stretchy, easy to deploy and attach to the chain (we use the Mantus chain hook gen v2, instead of rolling hitch) and you know how to use it all. We can adjust the legs of the snubber to help us orient better in swells, and again, the whole thing protects the ever so important windlass that our back muscles and ligaments depend on!
Next time I’ll talk about the watermaker a bit.