Binnacle

This is a picture of Sinbad's binnacle on the day we signed the papers to purchase. Plain and simple.
(You decide which of us is plain and which is simple!)

After adding the chart plotter with the radar, gps and all the other goodies, it looked like this. We just didn't have a good idea on how to run the wires and make everything look nice. The Blue Water Bridge over the St. Clair River that connects the US and Canada is in the background.

So yesterday we did this! A new mahogany drink holder and a stainess steel cover which accommodates the wires for the electronics. If you look closely at the pictures you can see we still have the shrink wrap on Sinbad. Tomorrow it comes off, but for now it keeps the rain out.
Happy Sails......rr

Now what?

Suddenly all the comments under recent comments on the right side of this blog have disappeared, the same with the list of followers. I went to the "help" section and it looks like a whole bunch of blogs have this same problem. As of right now there is no answer, so no help. It should all return......I hope.

Here are two pictures of me at the helm of Sinbad. I would like to use one of them has the Mad Capt. of this Blog. What do you think?
Happy Sails........rr

Lighthouses

This is going to be continuing collection of photos of lighthouses that we have been to. When it comes to lighthouses, if Diane and I can get a chance to climb them, we will!

This is the South Manitou Island Lighthouse on Lake Michigan, part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Only the rangers live on the island, with seasonal campers, and at night there is only firelight, starlight, and anchor lights.  You can hear coyotes yipping in the darkness. It's a beautiful and unspoiled place.

The picture of Di is looking northwest toward North Manitou Island.

Behind Randy is South Manitou Harbor, and over his right shoulder you can barely see Rachael Too, our S2 8.0 sailboat, at anchor. The last shot is looking south from the lighthouse.  Lovely.

Here are shots of the old light at Presque Isle, in norhtern Lake Huron, built in 1840.

This lighthouse is almost  hidden by the surrounding forest, so a new, taller one was built nearby around 1871. The old lighthouse is said to be haunted.  Next are photos of the new lighthouse...



The shot of Randy is looking West, the one of Di is facing southeast, on the New Presque Isle light. In the old days, the lights were built  about a day's sail apart from one another, to mark harbors of refuge on Lake Huron, which can be fierce during storms.

Where do you think the next lighthouse is?

If you guessed Gibbs Hill Lighthouse in Bermuda you were right!
Signing off for now .......more lighthouses to be added later!

Seacocks

"Seacocks" ... For the non-sailors reading this, a seacock is a shut-off valve screwed into a hole in the bottom of your boat below the waterline. They are necessary because you need to take in water to cool your engine, flush your heads and drain your sinks,etc. I read somewhere that failed seacocks (or hoses attached to them) are the #1 reason boats sink. Sinbad has 11 seacocks! That's a lot of holes in the bottom of a boat, especially when it's YOUR boat! Sinbad has lived her whole life in fresh water, which is great for us, since there is no salt-water corrosion. Every seacock that we could reach worked, and they worked well after I greased them. The key words here are "that we could reach". The early Whitby 42's were built with two seacocks hidden and completely inaccessible under the aft cabin floor. Not good. Whitby realized their mistake about a year after Sinbad was built and started putting in an access hatch so the seacocks could be serviced.
Now we're getting to the reason for this post. In previous post I was cutting up the starboard settee for the batteries, cutting up the old frig/freezer for the new one. So while I was in the cutting mood I cut an access hatch in the floor of the aft cabin. That's when Diane got worried and asked me not to cut anything else up until I finished these three projects. The bad thing was she was too late. I had already torn up the main salon deck hatch and cut all the wires to the old 12V electric panel! I was feeling like Toolman Tim Taylor on Home Improvement! Life was good! Life got better when Diane said she would fix the hole in the floor of the aft cabin. Cool!
Here are some photos of the job:

What you're looking at here is the hole I cut and the two seacocks. The removable wooden floor board to the left is access to the bilge pump and drive shaft. The two blocks of wood on the side of the hole secure the steps in place. The next step was to seal the cut with West System epoxy.

The white "border" in the hole is 1 x 3 boards that have been painted and glued in place with 5200. Diane then took the piece that was cut out, smoothed it down with her handy Dremmel tool, and faired the cut edges with epoxy.

When we get to a part of the world where teak is cheap, maybe we will replace the cut-out with something pretty!  Happy Sails.......rr

A few pictures of Sinbad

This will be just a few pictures of our home on the water "Sinbad" a 1979 Whitby 42!
On this day we splash Sinbad for the first time.

Sinbad at the dock in East Tawas on Lake Huron. The sails are 30 years old. We wanted to make them last the summer but no luck with that plan. We blew out the 150 Genoa on Lake Michigan and finished the summer with the 100 working Jib. We now have all new sails that we bought at Bacon Sails in Annapolis. They give a good discount for Whitby owners.

That is us sailing out of the harbor on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. We blew the 150 genoa out on the way to Mackinaw City.

Mackinaw City with the 100 jib on.

Frig / Freezer

Well, it was time to get rid of our perfectly good 110 volt frig / freezer on Sinbad and install a 12 volt frig / freezer. The 110 system just wasn't going to cut it for crossing oceans, the extension cord would be just to damn long!
So last Oct. Diane and I are at the Annapolis Boat Show and I'm talking to the owner of the company that makes the CoolBlue Refrigeration System (I talked with him the year before at the Chicago Boat Show and knew I want one) and Diane walks up. So I said "Honey let me have your credit card"........and  she gave it to me! Cool! ...So $2400. later we have a big box coming to my door. That "Honey let me have your credit card" probably wont work again but man-o-man I hope it does.
I removed everything associated with the 110 system from the boat, 2 holding plates, tubing, wiring, controls, pump and so forth. I was making Diane a little nervous. The reason she was getting jumpy is I was doing this at the same time I was riping things up for our new battery's, plus I just cut a 10" x 15" hole in the aft cabin floor(another story).
Back to the new frig / freezer. Sinbad's old chest type frig / freezer was so big that I could not touch the bottom  of the frig or the freezer with out leaving my feet. Not good. So I put 9" of foam insulation sheeting on the bottom of both boxes and some FRP on top of that. Cut a 2 1/2"  hole at the bottom for flow thru and a plate to control the flow (coated the hole with epoxy).

Next I mounted the holding plate and thermostat, mounted the compressor where the old one use to be. Connected the tubing and wired it all up.

 I flipped the breaker on and went home for the day. Came back the next day and life was good. the freezer was down to 12 deg. You can see it was only 53 deg inside the boat!

Now it might be time to do something about that hole in the aft cabin floor.......

Batteries

This was our battery bank on Sinbad. There is a lot here that is not right. Batteries don't like heat so having them in the engine room shortens there life. If you look at the picture you can see that one battery is touching the engine, that straps wont hold anything if there is a knock down, they are not fused and the far battery doesn't even go through the " 1..2...all"switch. I cleaned this up  for last summer's sailing but it was a temporary fix. This week the New Lasting Fix was completed.

Under our starboard settee was a couple of drawers that was nice but not a lot of storage space. So this old retired fat pipefitter tore things apart. The goal was a place for our batteries and more storage.

The easy part is riping things up!

                                                                   



Time to put in some batteries

6 new AGM batteries !! 588 amp hours life is good!

All done .........it still looks like it did befor I started!