Well, before we pulled the ship out of the shed I was “moving the needle forward” on some random details . . .yes, my life is long string of random details.

Loading the 200# liferaft by myself . . . 

. . . off CIII roof to dock to boat down channel to beach to truck to ferry to drop-off . . . every two years.

The galley refrigerator was under performing (running too often, clogging up with frost) so I sourced a new one and needed to repurpose the old door that matches the galley wood working.

and we were running low on 9″ lunch plates and I ordered in a new set . . .  of course the old ones were 8 7/8″ in diameter and the new plates would not fit the galley rack . . .  more on that next blog.

and a new 18 person silverware set . . .

new upgraded main engine coolant flow alarm . . .

But finally she came out of the shed . . . 

and was gently lifted by the professional crews at Ocean Pacific Marine . . . 

and all the usual washing, scrapping and painting commenced with Skipper Jonas Fineman and Lead Guide Sarah Hauser attending . . .

And Mike of Ocean Pacific pours a new zinc propeller zinc. 

selfie . . . duh.

An addition . . .  I had installed a forward looking sounder about 15 years ago but it had never performed to my expectations and I am vulnerable to the glossy electronics displays at my local marine supplier. And I like to have something new to play with in the wheelhouse. So this year we installed a Garmin forward looking sounder. But of course there was a “wrinkle”. Modern marine equipment is designed for fiberglass hulls which are usually less than an inch thick. But the COLUMBIA III’s planking is 21/8″ thick and the transducer is not long enough to make it through the planking, especially when it goes through the hull vertically ( ie diagonally though the wood). So I dreamed up a scheme to create a “box” to to house the new transducer. From previous measurements, I made a mock-up of the keel and the garboard plank in my shop prior to going to the ship yard . . . 

and then a 1/4″ plywood prototype , , , 

. . . which Luke used as a pattern to transcribe the final measurements onto when we were on the hard . . .

. . .  and then he raced home by skiff, welded up the housing in stainless steel and brought it back to the ship yard the next evening and I installed it . . .

and painted with anti-fouling , , ,

And of course the new sonar required connection to the existing NMEA 2000 backbone . . .

Here’s the screen in the wheel house. It has the added benefit of containing its own built-in GPS receiver and a full set of coastal charts. This adds a nice redundancy to our navigation system. We’ll be trying this out this summer as we poke about in the remote, less charted waters of the BC coast.

More little skipper projects . . .  I installed 3 propane shut-off solenoids on the ship for extra super duper safety but i have never been happy with the solenoids themselves. They require power to hold them open (fail off or “normally closed” but that’s a constant 3 amp draw, but the part I really didn’t like was that when operating, they were too hot to touch, like really! and that’s on a propane line! It never seemed right . . .  i even replaced them thinking they were defective. So this winter i sourced a valve company that makes valves for many, many! applications: corrosive, medical, gas, petrol-chemical, small and really big . . . and I settled on these. Stainless steel body, designed for gas, normally closed, but once open the current draw drops to near zero . . .

and whilst in the ship yard I installed three new solenoids . . . 

and created a new terminal strip inside the salon for ease of replacement if required . . . and leak checked the whole arrangement once completed.

I’m a bit of a slow learner . . .  I had never really had a cocktail in the first portion of my life, so over the last 3 years I have been experimenting . . . . The stress of the annual haul out deserves a fancy alcoholic concoction whilst taking Jonas out to dinner to get away from the boat yard for a break . . .

more “experimenting”. Jonas stuck to beer.

The boot-top gets redone  . . .   

Sarah renews the dark oak Cetol on the waterline gumwood.

Jonas hand cuts the copper paint on waterline . . . carefully.

and after a 24 hour delay for strong winds we were lifted . . . .

Another successful spring haul-out.

Home again. Phew. Boats are a metaphor for life; many leavings , many returns, and many adventures along the way.

It’s not what life gives you, its how you deal with it . . . Hopefully with grace.

I think most of us remember the feeling . . . a university term paper that is assigned months in advance  . . . that hangs, unstarted, in the air all winter, clouding otherwise pleasant moments of respite . . .  and as such, the Canadian Coast Guard Radio inspector asked me to create an “Antenna Map” for the COLUMBIA III and he gave me a year to comply . .

How could 10 months slip by so quickly . . . .

But I do like a challenge, especially if it taxes my paltry drafting skills . . .  Despite the fact that every antenna has installed by me over the years it took quite a bit of reverse engineering to trace each antenna back to its source. As I like a tidy wheel house and my wire bundles are nicely routed and secured, I had to cut most of the cable bundles free of their zap-straps to allow me to connect each electronic unit to its antenna. I figured it out, but now my wheel house looks like someone threw a grenade in the door . . .. .

But I do take pleasure in the results . . .

One has to remain calm and placid when life throws us vexing curve-balls . . . and I for one, after my decades of maritime experience am pretty good at salty equanimity . . . sometimes . . . and other times i just pull a jacket over my head and silently scream . . .  really?!?!      REALLY!???

This story is actually too involved and traumatic for me to recount in blow-by-blow detail but here is a scintillating overview:

The anchor winch on the COLUMBIA III is over 70 years old. Late last season it broke. It broke in an awkward way and at an awkward time and cost a lot of awkward money and was awkward for Mothership’s reputation and awkward for some of our guests and awkward for my self-esteem and really made my sleep patterns awkward . . .

Was that vague enough?

Being awkward-adverse I fixed the precious little contraption to the best of my abilities (which proved to be not up to the task) and despite functioning wonderfully in the preseason sea-trials my wonderful winch took on a new, cantankerous personality soon after leaving the dock at the start of the season. Perhaps my lovely winch was feeling separation anxiety when it got too far from me because, in an endearing attempt to keep in contact with me, the winch decided any attention, even bad attention, was better than feeling abandoned.

So, soon after heading north for the start of the season, the 70-years-without-a-hiccup winch (my lovely) started to make grinding and squeaking noises and shaking and shuddering motions. (not positive symptoms for a machine if you are unfamiliar with the signs) . . . and then it promptly stopped doing its primary function . . . winding in the chain and anchor. Really, I’m not requesting a lot of complex tasks . . . just turn the drum when asked . .

Thus began a blissful summer of “exchanges” between me, my lovely winch and my skippers, Jonas and Steve. I drove to Port McNeill twice and we had the winch apart so many times I lost count. We had wonderful support from a local machinist willing to make boat calls  at odd hours to keep our tours running. The winch chewed-up internal gears and found novel ways to fail and we created novel fixes attempting to outmaneuver our petulant “lovely”. One set of worm gears lasted 70 years and we went through 2 more sets in 3 months. My normally pristine fore-deck was defiled with absorbent pads and hydraulic spills and greasy tools . . . and the super cool part was the guests never knew the skippers and I where exhausted with the unwanted “negative affections” of the stupid winch.

Here is what the new happy gears looked like: . . .

Here is what we found ONE of the times the winch stopped performing its turny-turny function . . . .. The bronze gear had moved laterally and the drive gear had chewed up the teeth. That 5/8″ space to the right of the gear shouldn’t be there.

I received this photo as part of the dialogue between the ship and me at home . As the gear had slipped laterally, I concocted the idea of a plastic “shim” to hold the gear in the right place .  . . so I ran down to the workshop and made a set of ‘Ultra-High-Molecular-Denisty plastic (UMHD) “washers”. Note here I am NOT a machinist so these are crafted with a drill press, hole saw, router and sand paper!

and I raced to Port McNeill to meet the ship. I ripped the winch gear-case apart at the engine room workbench . . .

It was a long night as I had never had the gear case apart before, but the new plastic shim looked pretty convincing once installed . . .

That fix bought us a few weeks but the audio expression of disapproval returned and flourished . . . the squeaking returned and got worst . . . So I went back to Port McNeill to meet the ship on the turn-around between tours and this time I found an angelic local machinist that took the gear box to his real machine shop and he made a real steel shim and trimmed the drive gear to improve its alignment and hopefully reduce the distressing squeaks.

At some point, Skipper Jonas replaced Skipper Steve but the fun just kept coming even as the ship mover further north to the Great Bear Rainforest area. As Jonas had not been on the ship for the earlier midsummer sparring with the winch I briefed him on the phone and sketched a procedure for dissembling the winch if necessary and sent it to the ship with more spare gears and hydraulic motors hoping to limp through the last of the fall season.

Part of the mystery for me was that the winch worked perfectly for 70 years, then one bronze gear failed and was replaced. After that one replaced part the winch became a grumbling, hissy-fitting, pain-in-the-you-know-what!!!

And then Jonas called me again . . .really this was getting us both tramatized . .

Jonas was near the end of the second last tour of the year and the winch quit working again . . .like HOLY SH*T MAN!!!!!. I know I cried. The new symptom he told me was that hydraulic oil was spilling out of the winch case and the winch wouldn’t turn . .. . Oh my lovely you are out doing yourself . . .  and the only way hydraulic oil could get into the winch housing itself is if the seal on the new hydraulic motor had failed. We had to change the hydraulic motor immediately.

Jonas and crew managed to retrieve the anchor manually each of the last few days of that tour using the emergency handle we had created after last summer’s “circumstances”. It’s a good thing Jonas is strong . .  .

All summer I asked myself over and over, what had changed . . . . and finally, embarrassingly, that tossing turning vexing night, mid-September, mid-winch-ongoing-crisis, I had a thought, a really good thought, (though a bit slow, Ross). I realized that yes, I had changed the bronze drive gear but trying to be Mr. Proactive I had also changed the hydraulic motor that the gear was mounted on!!! . . . I HAD changed 2 things . . . So, armed with this epiphany, I raced to the nearest airport and put the 70 year old hydraulic motor on the earliest plane to Bella Bella. It was SO easy, all I had to do was purchase a complete $625 seat on the plane for a 20 pound shoe-box. It was the only way the airlines would guarantee delivery . . . Jonas installed the old pump following my instructions  on the day before the last tour of the year . .. .

and all the grumbling, squeaking, grinding, squirming, shaking and shuddering signs of excessive winchy attention-seeking ended. 

and Jonas completed the season without mishap and brought the ship south with a few crew and their partners to celebrate.

We concluded that the new-off-the-shelf hydraulic motor I had installed last spring was defective, perhaps its own drive shaft was bent. Regardless of why, the problem left when the old motor was reinstalled.

When the ship finally made it back to our home port of Campbell River in early October EVERYONE was relieved and completely done with pandering to our petulant anchor winch. We hadn’t lost a day of touring and the guests were unaware of the tussles we had to keep the season moving forward, but enough was enough. I was NOT going to do that again. So I payed a crane truck to come to the shipyard and literally pluck the winch off the front deck and took it to a machinist in Campbell River. North Island Machine Works had done work for me in the past including custom building our main drive-shaft when we replaced it a few years ago. So, Ryan was the fellow I turned to. I stopped in shortly after and he had the winch dissembled . . . like an exploded-view in a parts diagram!

And here he showed me  the bronze gear (number 3) that was right on the edge of also failing . . . every gear tooth was about to break off! We believe the defective hydraulic motor was so mis-aligned that it was slowly folding the gear teeth over to the point of failure.

Once the old winch was dissembled the machinist and I had a “little chat”. He felt he could repair the winch for about $5000 and he could remake the winch into a newer more robust winch for about $10,000. And I said, “Ryan, I want this winch completely rebuilt and running like a Swiss watch and I don’t want to lose anymore sleep nor tax the patience nor skill-set of my skippers with sub-standard equipment. Their job is to run the ship well. My job is to provide them with good equipment.” I gave Ryan a $20,000 budget.

And the reconstruction began . . .  here is the old winch housing with the tie-up bollards removed . . .

note 70 years of rusty deterioration . . 

and the new, new, new winch case with finely machined surfaces, modern upgraded hydraulic motor (I bought 2 for a spare) and the entirely new, re-engineered gear box . . . 

The old gear case was welded together, the new gear case is welded and then machined on critical surfaces to make everything line up PERFECTLY !!! 

and the old worm gear upgraded to a new heavier-duty set of gears . .   

I have had Mr. Murphy eavesdrop on my conversations often enough to know i can’t guarantee the winch will work flawlessly this summer, but I can absolutely proclaim with confidence that I have TRIED to ensure it will.

End of part 1!

I will add part 2 when the rebuilt winch is completed.

thanks for your patience with this “quick synopsis”. Ross