Blog

We had a flurry of activity on Seabird for the last few days. One guy finishing the cabinet repair on the Portuguese Bridge that has been leaking for years and another guy was installing flow sensors in my keel cooler that supplies the Naiad stabilizer coolant. That has been a nagging problem for years. When the coolant is interrupted for any reason (pump failure, clogged lines) you have no warning until the high temperature alarm goes off, when you really need to shut down the stabilizers.

We also decided at the last minute to install Plexiglas storm plates. They are 29” x 37” and are ½ inch thick. The other two boats have them and we would feel kind of silly if we were in a storm crossing to Russia and the already thick ½ inch thick salon windows for some reason failed due to a large wave (s). We had them installed on the port side salon windows only because they are the most susceptible to damage (they are set out to the edge of the boat on that side. Storing these plates is a big issue because of their size. We ended up sliding them under different mattresses in the boat (I hope our guests don’t mind!)

We decided that we had no contingency plan should our navigation computer fail. We do have a second identical computer so we had it programmed to slip into place of the failed one should that happen. In theory, it should work fine and the tech from Yachtmasters and I tried swapping them several times and it seemed to work seamlessly. They are one of the few companies that have been able to make a Vista computer interface with Nobeltec and all of the peripherals (auto pilot, AIS and GPS).

We had a last minute crisis with our new Heating/Cooling system. A circuit board failed and we also had some of the piping starting to leak. Thanks to Sure Marine for a quick response on the new board and thanks to Emerald Harbor Marine for jumping right on the leak problem. All are now solved.

Carol has been cooking up a storm! It looks to me like we have 6 months of food cooked, vacuum bagged and frozen, but I could be wrong. We surely will not starve.

If you had asked me two days ago if we were actually going to leave on Thursday of this week, both of us would have said “no way!!”. We had so much to do and arrange for prior to leaving and the list kept growing. I can say now that we will be leaving at 6am tomorrow morning. My sister Diane and brother in law Mike arrive today and will accompany us to Ketchikan, Alaska.

Our friends on Grey Pearl and Sans Souci are long gone toward Alaska. The plan is to catch up with Grey Pearl somewhere midpoint in BC and hopefully Sans Souci before we get to Alaska.

Next update will be from BC.