All Hauled Out

Hauling out, that annual or biannual, or in our case triannual, ritual, is a taxing business, and I’m feeling pretty overtaxed even though we’re done with it finally. Turns out that while it can be a pretty demanding event for anyone, when it’s your home going up on blocks, it’s even more stressful.

I had planned to put together more updates, chronicle things as they happened, but all those grand ambitions went away the first day. So, yet again, this is a true late entry, framed in the rosy afterglow of a relatively successful event, unable to strictly convey the tension and anxiety I was wracked with during our three days on the hard.

The tension all started the morning of the day before our scheduled lift time, when we planned to sail up to Port Townsend and spend the night in order to be sure of being on time. Reviewing the tide tables one last time, I realized that I had misread them when planning the trip, and had scheduled our afternoon departure exactly opposite the most desirable currents. We hastily prepared the cabin and threw off the docklines to get out on the ebb, and had a pretty decent northward sail ahead of southerly winds the whole way up.

We spent the night on a mooring at my parent’s house in Port Hadlock, and the southerly built up to a brisk 25-30 knots by the time we had to leave for the boat yard in the morning. My friend Maxx, there along with my parents to help with all the work, and I unfurled a postage-stamp worth of genoa and took off northward like a rocket. Making things even more interesting, an ammunition ship was coming in to moor at Naval Magazine Indian Island, right between us and the Boat Haven in Port Townsend, at the same time. Quite apart from the strictures placed upon small craft such as ours by Rule 18(b) of the COLREGs, one simply finds oneself inclined to give ammunition ships a wide berth.

The wind also gave rise to speculation that the hoist might not happen as planned; as we pulled into the work pier the gentleman tied up ahead of us took our lines and informed us that he had been delayed almost two hours already. The thought of several tons of boat being blown around in the slings was not comforting. But when I checked in at the yard office after lunch, they were ready to go… I found myself motoring into the U-shaped slip almost an hour earlier than scheduled.

I never get any good pictures of our haul-outs because I am always the one stuck on deck when we come out of the water. This year the position was particularly nerve-wracking. Not only had it been three years in salt water on a single coat of paint, but in February, we had dinged a rock in Montague Harbour with what felt like a pretty solid whack, and my visions of what the soft lead keel might look like after that affair had grown increasingly horrific with each repetition of the event in my mind. I went so far as to schedule an extra buffer day in the yard in case significant repair work was necessary. While the boat was in the water, there was no way to tell what the bottom edge of the fin looked like. As it was being hoisted out, then, my only clues from on deck came from watching the faces of friends and bystanders on the ground below. They looked pretty sober, I thought… not a good sign.

I hopped off when the bow stopped jerking around, and turned around to get a good look… and saw nothing more than a few dings and some cracked epoxy. The keel was hardly damaged at all. Even more remarkably, the hull was surprisingly clean but for a conga line of barnacles along the bottom of the rudder and around the prop shaft. Most everything came off at the business end of the pressure washer, but the paint stayed put… particularly gratifying since I had ordered another gallon of the stuff for this year’s coat (Pettit Unepoxy Plus, inexpensive and apparently quite effective the waters of the Salish Sea).

Everything else went similarly according to plan. The painting was fast and easy, there was plenty of time to wax and buff the rest of the hull, the rudder stuffing got re-packed, the engine painted, and the various gouges in the keel epoxied and faired, all in the first two days. The last day, with our afternoon splash time, was mostly a lot of waiting around for paint to dry.

The disappointments were mostly secondary; at some point during the past three years, the prop shaft zinc was apparently thrown off, and the shaft, strut, and prop all had some degree of corrosion which had to be taken off. We sprayed the works with a zinc-based paint this time around, which our boatyard neighbor assured us was good stuff and had the added effect of making the whole assembly look solid and new. I also took some of the spare time we had to go up the mast and take a look at our malfunctioning radome, but even after tightening every connector in sight and blasting them with contact cleaner, it remained malfunctioning.

The rudder shaft re-packing also didn’t turn out entirely well. When we went back in the water, it was perfectly dry and looked good, but once underway with the stern squatting down, it started dripping again. At least it should be dry while we’re at dock or anchor now. I’ll have to weight the bow down and give it another try with the boat in the water, though.

On the whole, though, I came out of it all pretty pleased. It was more difficult than the last time around simply because it was hard to look at our home all torn apart in mid-project and propped up on stilts (fortunately, we could stay at my parent’s place, and didn’t have to try to cope with living aboard while out of the water… I’m not sure either we or it would have survived that experience). It’s hard to explain, but it’s extraordinarily important for everything aboard to be secured and organized. That has, for me, taken on an even more important mental component while living aboard… it’s hard to move around or get anything done if that’s not the case, and so I find myself a little out of sorts when it starts getting messy and disorganized, as inevitably happens during projects of this sort. It was a tremendous relief to have time on the last day to get aboard and clean and stow everything, and I had great satisfaction sailing back to Seattle (motoring, actually; we weren’t so lucky with the wind on our return trip, and chugged along over glassy seas nearly the whole way back… with an extra half knot or so of speed with our clean bottom and prop!) in a boat that both looked and felt like a boat should.

Though satisfied, I’m also pretty tired… I feel all hauled out myself right now. But every time I look at our newly shiny hull and clean bottom, ready for a summer of sailing, it’s worth it all over again.