We normally try to splash early and haul late to make our already-too-short New England sailing season as long as possible. With good intentions, we splashed in early April and proceeded to commission the boat. On our maiden shake-down sail we discovered a problem that would potentially cost the entire season.
Happy to say that I’m writing from an anchorage in Potter Cove (near Newport Bridge) at the start of a planned month aboard.
It all started when we returned to the dock after that first sail. Linda was piloting, she put the transmission in reverse as part of our maneuver to back down our fairway and… nothing. A few more tries and it finally engaged. Short story is that the reverse gear was mostly non functional and upon inspection, there was seawater ingress into the gearbox.
I want this to be a happy sailing post so here’s the short version…
We were hoping the gear/clutch assembly could be rebuilt and we could get a short haul to replace whatever seal had failed. Nope… Volvo recommends replacing the whole gearbox… But Nope… you can’t order just the gearbox (unless you want to wait a long time for a special order) so you need to order the whole saildrive. There were three in the US and we got one. Safe Harbor Wickford was able to haul us right away and get started. The good news about replacing the entire saildrive is that the whole diagnostic step about figuring out which seal failed is now moot.
Safe Harbor started the work and progressed very quickly. But then…. they noticed that the exhaust elbow had failed and was allowing seawater to leak into the exhaust. Ok, replace that. But then… when the elbow fails, it often wrecks the exhaust manifold too. This is another pretty expensive part and there was only one in the US but we got it. But then… to replace the exhaust manifold, the engine has to be pulled out of the boat.
Fast Forward, and we got splashed on July 2. We put the boat back together and our “season” is starting pretty late. Enjoy some photos of the work…
Rent the House. Go Sailing…
The house is rented again this summer so we are forced to live on the yacht. First-world problems. We’re off for a one month-ish cruise.
The trip started with some last minute issues. Our brand new Harken backstay adjuster decided to fail a couple days before departing. Kevin at Northeast Rigging was able to connect with the Harken Rep in Newport and they overnighted a new part. The night before we left, I thought it would be wise to update all the firmware on all the networked Raymarine devices on the boat. The update went fine but… it erased all of our settings. That was a bit annoying to set up all the displays again. But on top of that, it totally reset the autopilot config which Linda found out the hard way as we were motoring out of Wickford harbor. Why did she need the auto pilot? Because AIS proximity alarms were going off and she was trying to silence them. Those alarms were going off because of… all the settings which were lost. Oh and the wind was blowing 20 at the time… off to a good start.
First stop was just a quick hop to Potter Cove near the Newport Bridge. It was a brisk sail with winds in the high teens to low twenties. Once we rounded the north end of Conanicut Island it was all upwind. The fancy new Dyneema Backstay and new adjuster pump got a good test. We had Mexican night for dinner which is always a good thing. After dinner, I went though the autopilot setup wizard and I think we’ve got a working autopilot again. We will find out very soon.
It was also around dinner time that we noticed another self-inflicted issue. Despite being plugged in for the last week, we were very low on power! That’s because while re-connecting the solar panels, I “temporarily” put the charger on standby so I could verify that all panels were contributing. Apparently, I never turned it back on and the boat’s been sitting there for a week with only solar to charge. The fridge has been cranked up (because you know… we’re plugged in) and the starlink has been switched on. So annoyingly, we had to run the engine for an hour last night and again this morning. It’s sunny and I have the boom tied over. At the moment, about 100w is coming in from solar which is about break-even with everything running.
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We woke up to a beautiful misty sunrise and we’re not in any rush to leave. The plan was to sail to block island. We got up at 0500 ready to depart. We knew it was going to be a hard upwind sail, but after seeing that the seas were 3-5 on top of that, we decided we were not interested in that this morning.
Linda enjoyed visiting with her swimming friends in the morning.
Potter Cove is a popular day anchorage for Newporters but very few people stay the night here. There is some road noise from the bridge, but other than that, it’s a beautiful anchorage. I hope it continues to not catch on for overnights. We had just two neighbors last night.
Onward…