Shaken not stirred

Shaken, not stirred or Lemonade, I’m not sure which is the better title for this post.

The first cruise you take after refitting a boat is called the shake down cruise. Its purpose is to find out what works and what does not and what needs to be tweaked a bit more. As you all know by now we have spent a lot of time and effort refitting the boat in preparation for our trip. Our plan was to immediately start making our way to Alaska.

Now, I have a friend and ex work colleague, Ron who will hurt himself laughing so hard when he reads that I had a plan because when I made one at work it rarely went as it was supposed to but hey, you must start somewhere.

Over the last few days we were making our way north, up the coast, in the general direction of Alaska, only to run into some issues with our new main sail that require us to divert back to Sidney on Vancouver Island to work with the sailmaker and rigging company to come up with a solution. For those not familiar with the British Columbia coast. Sidney is almost exactly the opposite direction we want to be headed.

We are doing the shake down thing very well. The boom vang blew a seal and dumped hydraulic oil on the deck. It was, of course, the only piece of rigging we did not change when we did all the rigging work as it looked fine. No one has one in stock, so we will need to order that, and it could take 2 weeks to arrive.

We also discovered that the washer/dryer only works when we are plugged into shore power at a marina and not on the inverter as we had wanted. This should be a simple case of swapping the wires from the shore power busbar to the inverter busbar.  An easy fix in boat terms. Oh, and the new water maker pump drive gear came off the shaft. Turns out it was missing a set screw from the factory. An easy fix once I find a metric sized set screw, not be found in Ganges. Hopefully Sidney.

Repairing all of this is going to take some time. Now this has thrown all our scheduling out the window, so we will need to rethink our stops, but I think we can still make Alaska this season.

Remember the old saying ” when life gives you lemons make lemonade.” Well here’s the lemonade. We are supposed to have two weeks of beautiful weather, and we are on a boat in one of our favourite cruising areas, the Gulf Islands. We are currently anchored in Ganges Harbour, Salt Spring Island and just came back from walking the town and like always checked out the coolest of hardware stores, Mouat’s Home Hardware. Mouats has been in business on Salt Spring since 1907. It has the most interesting and eclectic stock. Electrical panels to espresso machines, dog toys to decor items, barbecues to boat parts.

We had pizza at the Oyster Catcher and are now just relaxing and taking in the sunset.

Just doing what we can with some lemons.