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Many safe sailings to one and all.

-S & K (and the cats)

It came right down to the wire, but the engines started up without any problems Monday morning, and in a very, VERY strange coincidence the surveyor that the buyer found ended up being the same person who surveyed the boat for us two years ago back in Raymond! It turns out he's an associate of the surveyor just up the street from the marina.

At about 10:45 am we pulled out of the marina (and had a few harrowing moments with the boat hooks making sure we didn't bump anyone too hard) and made our way up to Lake Union Ship Yard near Gasworks Park. I got to drive the boat for a few minutes after we were in open water, and it's remarkable how sluggish a vessel seems to respond to turning the wheel, compared to a car. Of course we were also only going about 7 mph so that might make a difference as well.

The haul-out went uneventfully (see picture above) with a layer of algae and general sea scum washed off the hull. There are a few small blisters that have turned up since the last time she was out, but nothing serious.

All-in-all things were about as I expected, with the condition of the boat similar to what it was when we had it surveyed in 2005. We did improve many things although there are always things to do on a boat, so the new owner will have her hands full if she decides to take on any of the projects. She at least inherits a good mechanic and a marina full of knowledge and advice. I'm sure she has lots of plans and vision for the boat, just like we had back in April 2005. She was already unloading lots of paint from her car as I was leaving the marina!

Here is one of the starboard exhaust risers:

Note the rust and general state of distress.

Both manifolds and risers on the starboard side required replacement, and the heads needed some machine work to clean them back up. While all of this was going on, we discovered a broken valve stem which also needed replacement. Additionally (note a theme here?) some moron in the past had used silicone on top of the head gaskets, which made a giant mess of things and needed to be cleaned off of all the surfaces before a new gasket could be put down. On top of all of that, the alternator bearings needed replacement, and the impeller on the water pump seized up and needed to be replaced as well. This doesn't even get into crummy hoses that will probably need replacement in the future, or myriad other small issues like mismatched spark plugs.

Once we (and by "we" I mean Kory, the mechanic) got everything reassembled, a gasket on the oil filter popped and we had a nasty little oil slick in the bilge. That was some nice icing on the cake with that engine, but it got repaired.

Thankfully the port side was much easier. The starter had shorted out on that side, and after a trip to the motor shop in Ballard it's as good as new. The only other major issue on that side was again a bad impeller on the water pump, and a missing spring in the distributor cap. It's got the same hose woes as the starboard side (and probably a leaky gasket on the coolant reservoir?) but it started right up after the starter was repaired and things look good on that side.

Haul-out and survey are on Monday, and barring disaster there the boat will hopefully be in new hands shortly thereafter!

Oh, right.

So we're thiiiiiiiis close (holds fingers mere millimeters apart) to selling the boat, but before the transaction is complete the buyer wants to have the boat hauled out, pressure-washed, and surveyed. All fair and good requests (and things we had done back when we were in her shoes) but there turned out to be one minor hang-up with getting this dealt with - our engines. They haven't been run in a very long time (hands up if you can guess when the last time was), which I will point out is a very stupid thing to do.

On to the port engine! I flipped the instrument panel on for that side and the first thing I noticed was the voltage readout gauge: 10.7 volts. Strange, especially since both engines are fed by both batteries so the voltage readout should match (and both batteries are constantly trickle-charged when the boat is plugged into shore power, so they're both at capacity.) I tried turning the engine over anyway, since some of those old gauges are kinda lousy. The starter groaned a little, but it acted exactly as if the battery was dead. At that point I turned everything off and decided it was time to bring in the experts.

After a bit of poking around Kristin got a referral from a friend at work who also lives aboard. Even better, his mechanic was available to come down the very next day and poke around. Corey (the mechanic) met me at the boat the next morning (Wednesday) and had a look around, starting with all the same simple tests I had tried before concluding something was bad inside the starboard engine. He pulled the spark plugs and found water in the fuel mixture in a few of them, suggesting that the head gasket might have gone bad. Luckily boat engines are much easier to take apart and work around than car engines, so although it required a fair bit of disassembly the entire thing can be done on-site. At the same time we discovered that the bearings in that engine's alternator were also about to fail, so since the port starter needed to go in for service that was sent along with it. There were a few other basic problems (crappy automotive hose, a defective coolant gasket, mis-matched spark plugs...) but nothing particularly scary-looking... mostly just shoddy past maintenance.

Yesterday he got the remainder of the upper engine block disassembled and discovered that the gasket wasn't at fault; instead the primary fault lies in a check-valve that is supposed to keep sea water out of the main system. This valve had failed after many years of service, and allowed water to seep into some of the cylinders. There's some rust and crud in them, but thankfully the lake is freshwater so the damage isn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Additionally, one of the shafts is bent to nearly a right-angle, which means the engine has probably been operating on five cylinders for quite a while since that appeared to be old damage.

Thus far that is where things stand. With everything disassembled and a lot of dirty water and coolant in the bilge things certainly look like a mess, but he remains optimistic we're going to have the engines running again quite soon. Right now most of the delay is with third parties who are doing some machine work, testing the starter, cleaning the rusted up cylinder, etc. I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow when I go down to replace a jammed-up deck fill (think of it as the equivalent of the gas cap on your car, but for fuel, water or waste on a boat.)

This could be the proverbial snowflake that broke the camel's back, as we assess the future of full-time living aboard after an all-time record rainy month capped by a bitter cold snap that's likely to remain in place for at least two more days.

There's a lot still to be done with the boat (both in terms of repairs and enjoyment), but everything comes at a price, and this month that's been a damp chill, fifteen inches of rain, and now a layer of ice.

If we get another inch of rain at the airport (where they keep such records), we'll surpass the third wettest month on record there, which was January of this year... the last time the poor webcam needed a toweling off. Four more inches and we set the all-time wettest month record, as measured downtown.

Good thing we don't have to worry about flooding, and instead just deal with a few drips and drops while the elevation goes up!

The garden was quite prolific this summer, and I'll have a report on that once it's done producing. We recently sold our kitchen nook and table and are in the process of making the front living area into a much more comfortable 'living room' oriented room, rather than the big hard-seated kitchen it was. There will be some pictures of that as soon as we've made one or two more trips to Ikea.

There are a few big construction/repair projects afoot in the near term, too. One involves finally installing a range hood to help vent all that steamy air when we cook. That's about half done and nearly ready to install - I just need to find my hacksaw and cut a few pieces of sheet metal for the venting!

The bigger project is going to involve repairing/replacing all the rotted bulkheads beneath the floor. We knew when we got the boat that they were in bad shape (for some reason the Cruise-A-Homes were built with cheap normal plywood instead of marine-grade, and the ends of the wood weren't sealed with epoxy, so nearly all the boats have had similar problems.) This has finally reached the point where most of the dividers are flaking, cracking and generally breaking apart. The repairs appears to be straightforward, though noisy and probably a bit messy.

The added advantage will be that we could also remove the original aluminum gas tanks and holding tank and replace them with fiberglass tanks that are easier to maintain and clean, or leave one fuel tank out for additional storage space.

A view from our new kayak: Gasworks Park and the University Bridge.

Two weeks ago we had a thoroughly entertaining neighborhood get-together to race dinghys, be neighborly, and generally get wet. It was a raucous affair, filled with lots of splashing, rain, and prizes. There are lots of pictures at a special photo gallery. Of course, it's often difficult to take pictures of yourself when you're actively doing things. Luckily several other people took pictures as well. Van's pictures are in our gallery, and you should also check out our neighbor Lee's great pictures (and beautiful photo album design), since we're in a bunch of them, doing wild and crazy things.

For what it's worth, we won the "one oar down, no oars back" mixed doubles event. Kristin was the powerhouse in that event, I basically kept the boat straight while she zoomed us along.

During the heat-wave last weekend, I removed the cover on our front room ceiling hatch. As a historical note about the boat, this hatch was apparently installed in order to put in a retractable ladder to the upper deck (for reasons lost to the mists of time...) but was since covered over with a lid. I discovered the lid was still mobile, so we pulled it off to help vent the hot air. This worked well for about three days, but then Jasper discovered that he could make the jump from the kitchen table out the hatch, so the cover is back on until I investigate some proper sunroof options.

We've had an impressive amount of wildlife on the docks, considering how disturbed the natural layout of the lake is. As mentioned previously there's now a bald eagle in the neighborhood, who is apparently hunting the coho salmon which are running right now. There was a two-foot salmon dead in the marina yesterday, and where there's one we're sure to smell more in the next few days. There are also lots of small samon fry in the marina, swimming around in small schools between the boats.

There have also been a clutch of eight baby mallards that have frequented the marina for the past month, growing rapidly and making quite the ruckus whenever they get separated. They're almost as large as their mother now, and likely to be off fledgling in the next few weeks.

The garden has attracted the usual suspects - bees, aphids (argh!), ladybugs, and ants, but it has also drawn some big, beautiful painted-wing dragonflies and their smaller plain-winged cousins (as pictured above.) They're tough to get a good picture of because they're almost always flitting to-and-fro, resting on plants for just a moment before continuing onward.

The glut of big, beautiful blooms is nearly at its end, but the tomatoes, sunflowers, and wildflowers will continue to draw some wildlife as summer progresses. If any eagles catch fish which caught dragonflies which ate aphids in the marina, we'll be sure to let you know.

Right, that's a mature bald eagle, cruising directly over our little marina in the middle of a huge city. It made a few lazy turns around the parking lot out front, then continued gliding toward downtown, doing more loops over the south portion of Lake Union before turning back north, passing directly overhead yet again (by this time I had the binoculars out to get a good view), then cruised north and out of sight toward Fremont.

It turns out this isn't the bird's first trip through the marina, either. Our neighbor saw it last weekend being chased by crows while carrying a very large fish, which it proceeded to drop back into the water, not more than fifty feet from our boats.

I'll try to get a picture if it comes by again, but I suspect it's going to turn out like one of those "polar bear in a white-out" images.

The afternoon was beautiful, with the sun out and almost every boat on the lake occupied by crowds ready for a party. Shortly before the fireworks a second thunderstorm rolled through with about fifteen minutes of rain and lots of impressive bolts of lightning, which is plenty unusual for Seattle. Things cleared up again in time for the fireworks, which I'm sure Kristin has lots more to say (and post pictures) about.

Little did we know the real adventure of the evening was to follow about two hours later. Kristin returned from retrieving Delia (who was safely housed elsewhere due to the evening's noise) and commented about something apparently burning across the lake. I went out on the pier to discover this:

That's a massive four-alarm dock fire directly across the lake. Lots more pictures and background below the fold.

For reference, the building at upper right is St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral on Capitol Hill. Interstate 5 runs across the middle of the image from left to right (you can see the lights in the right half of the image... the left side is entirely shrouded in thick black smoke.) The fire is on the docks, and the blue lights around it are some Police Harbor Patrol boats.

Here's a slightly longer exposure. The fire was reported at 1:30 am, and started on a NOAA research dock next to a 200 foot steel-hulled research vessel, which is visible in sillouette in some of the pictures. It flared up for a while as the police and fire boats raced to the scene (and sent some HUGE wake into the marina - to the point that almost everyone woke up, plates and glasses broke in various boats, and many lines needed to be re-secured.) WIth dock fires, the fire department has a tough time battling the fire effectively due to limited access by land. These docks have the added problem of being soaked in creosote, which is basically coal oil tar, so the wood was like a giant wick and water was nearly useless in suppressing the flames. Instead the main focus was preventing the flames from spreading further.

As you can see, their efforts were unsuccessful at first, and the fire rapidly engulfed a second and third pier. Detonations could be heard as (gas cans? transformers?) exploded, although there weren't any visible fireballs among the already thirty-foot high flames. These piers are all part of a NOAA research facility, with some small buildings and lots of hydrological materials on them. The boats are steel hulled (and diesel powered), so other than heating up quite a bit and getting in the way, they were holding up fairly well, all things considered. The captains of a few other boats in the area managed to get their vessels powered up and out of harm's way, so the lake had scattered running lights most of the night.

The city's freshwater fire boat, Alki, eventually arrived after the crew was mustered and the engines warmed up, and once it got there it started pumping many thousand gallons of lake water onto the conflagration as well. Most of the time it was so shrouded in smoke and debris that I couldn't locate it. The main city fire boat, Chief Sealth, which is moored on Elliott Bay downtown, also arrived much later as it had to go around Magnolia and through the locks.

Probably the most impressive part of the battle was a tugboat the city requisitioned and brought in shortly after the arrival of Alki. It did a lot of tight manuvering in and out of the burning piers and around the massive NOAA research vessel, with a firefighter on top manning a massive water cannon in the face of huge quantities of billowing smoke. They were by far the most visible part of the battle, although from land several ladder trucks could be seen dousing the nearest portions of the docks, and police boat crews used their sirens and bullhorns to roust the nearby floating home residents, evacuating about forty residences (some by boat!) in case the fire spread further, or sparks rained down.

Here was another brief flare-up as a piling ignited like a giant candle. By about 4 am the major flames had died down and the docks were down to smoldering ruins, glowing orange under a constant stream of water. At this point the smoke cleared somewhat, with the heavy black smoke replaced by a lot of steam.

After spending about four hours watching the events unfold, I finally called it a night because the wind hadn't shifted toward our marina, and the blaze was contained, even if not close to being extinguished. As the skies started to show signs of dawn, it was time for a few hours of sleep. The yacht repair guys were going to start arriving in about a half-hour anyway, and they could keep an eye on things if needed.