We’ve been spending time in Minneapolis the past couple of months — Anne was working, and it was nice catch up with family and friends.
We arrived back to our home marina in Oriental, NC, in mid-June. While we were away, the team there completed our battery upgrade that we are very excited about. We’ve switched to lithium batteries that will enable us to take full advantage of the energy our solar panels put out and give us more flexibility at anchor, away from marinas.
We’ve been completing many projects ourselves over the past few weeks and are really excited to be getting underway! The bigger projects often take more than a day and include unexpected delays/complications. The projects have included the following:
- Replacing our broken anchor windlass. This is the mechanism that raises our 85 lb anchor and its chain. It broke in April on our last anchor raise at Cape Lookout. As with most/all boat projects, it involved “boat yoga” — squeezing into small places to access various steps in the work.
- Reconfiguring our chain locker. We opened up the place the chain is fed into as we raise it. This change avoids “castling” of the chain, which means the chain would bunch up into a pile and require whoever was raising anchor to stop, spread out the chain and then continue. Not a huge amount of work, but just one more thing to keep an eye on and to create a delay in the event we need to raise anchor quickly.
- Replacing our chain. Salt and sea air are hard on it, and it was beginning to corrode. We didn’t want to find ourselves adrift when the chain failed, leaving the anchor on the bottom of the ocean. While it sounds simple, imagine 255 feet of chain needing to be marked every 30 feet so we know how much we are letting out and that chain, weighing 380 pounds, being loaded onto the boat after getting the old chain off.
- Replacing our propane stove top. The old one had reached the end of its natural life, and only one of the three burners worked. It’s lovely to now have a 4 burner stove!
- Organizing storage, removing unused items off the boat, reorganizing existing supplies in storage. As we’ve described before, Antares are built for live aboards, so think lots of storage and the danger of accruing stuff, just like at home. Unlike home though, all the extra weight can make a difference in how our boat moves through the water.
- Hoisting our new low wind sail into its sock and then tucking it away into a storage locker on deck, ready to try on our passage. It is made of nylon, similar to our spinnaker, but it has a vent to spill wind and is thus safer to fly.
Of course, we’ve also taken time to catch up with our friends at the marina, to make new friends, and even to drive into the big town, New Bern, 45 minutes away, to go to the movies. We also made sure to have local ribs and brisket.
Now, finally, it’s time to get underway. Our friend and trusted crewmate, arrived July 2nd, and on the 3rd, he and Jim set out on the intracoastal waterway for Norfolk, VA. Anne unexpectedly had to spend time with family and will meet back up with Jim and Brian in Norfolk in a few days. If all goes to plan (hah, it’s a sailboat!), we will head from there to Cape Breton, NS.
