Anatomy of a 31/2″ x 6″ idea.

Or, as I like to remind anyone willing to listen . . . I do not travel the world in the off-season, nor loll on chaise-lounges in some sunny clime . . . . No, I ruminate for years in a tedious and momentum building kind of way; whilst at the wheel steering the COLUMBIA III up long remote channels or over coffee in the winter months alone and gazing perspicaciously out my window upon a misty coastal morning . .. . Ie: I had an idea that scurried about the edges of my mind for years and this winter i catapulted into action . . (read “trudged”).

The COLUMBIA III is divided into 5 water-tight compartments: forward (or the collision bulkhead), chapel area, main engine room, aft accommodation area and the lazarette in the stern. The three central high volume zones have 2 separate bilge pumps and a high water alarm that rings (very loudly) the general ship’s alarm if water levels get unusually high. (I won’t tempt Murphy but generally a rare occurrence . . . ) But, astute reader that you are, you’ll be wondering why the other two zones have no pumps and no alarms. Me too!

In addition to the lack of pumps or alarms in all the compartments, there was no annunciator panel in the wheel house that would notify the Master if one of the pumps was operating. Generally, its nice to know if a pump is running as it might alert the Skipper to a problem before it gets out of hand. An example of this was when my desalinator burst a water line and was spraying salt water in the engine room . . . the bilge pump took the excess water away but I only realized the problem when I noticed the discharge water getting pumped over board. An indication of pump operation in the wheel house would have alerted me sooner.

So after years of abject procrastination, (an affliction I am all too familiar with!) I decided to rectify this problem and I planned a remedy.

Here’s the “concept diagram” from the Mothership Adventures Research and Development Department . . ..

And a rough schematic to make sure I knew what I was doing . . .

Then a pictorial view so I could wrap my brain around the physical layout of the number of terminals I’d need in the little display unit . . .

Then a rough prototype in cheap plywood to determine how small I can make the unit and still fit everything into one place . . .

Then I transfered that idea into a varnished mahogany frame with strobing alarm and circuit breaker for system protection . . .

And a small brass plate to hold the circuit breaker in place . . .

and a custom designed face-plate created in town at an engraving establishment . . .

and 9 red and green LED indicator lights wired up at my kitchen table . . .

and then I forgot to take any pictures but I had to thread 200 feet of data wire from one end of the ship to the other to connect the pumps and high level bilge alarm float switches to the wheel house. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this (I installed 17 connected smoke detectors throughout the ship a few years back) but it’s a lot of work to inveigle rolls of wire through water tight bulkheads, under floors, under bunks, over ceilings, behind steering gears and wheel house wire bundles . . . .

and a small metal plate so I could fasten the whole unit against the wall . . . and 24 wires connected to the terminals . . .

And the final installation mounted in the wheel house.

So now I wander through the wheel house and glance at my little “achievement” and ponder, “I wonder what it’s like to be a normal human. Perhaps I should take up watching televised sports instead.”

“To bed”

At the end of every season we put the COLUMBIA III “to bed” for the winter. As we live on a remote island and produce our own limited power through solar, micro-hydro and back-up generators, we do not produce enough power to plug in heaters in the ship over the winter. The modest salon fireplace running on stove-oil provides the only steady source of heat. It flickers away 365 days of the year. As a consequence of this limited heating, we remove as many items made of fabric or paper from the ship to avoid attracting moisture and mildew.

Therefore, every book, cardboard box, mattress, towel, sheet, face cloth, quilt, pillow, life-jacket, spray skirt, . . . (I expect you get the idea) is removed from the ship . . . .

and lugged up the dock . . .

in many, many loads . . .

up to my small cabin and stored here for the winter!

Funny how my small place gets even smaller with the extra “supplies” on hand . . . I certainly rock the concept of an emergency preparedness kit . . .

For those of you attentive Readers, I know you will be concerned. Yes, the little stove-oil fireplace runs 24/7/365 even when the ship is only checked once a day during the quieter winter months. And I am the kind of Skipper that would worry dark and troubling thoughts in the wee hours of a winter’s night . . . so many years ago I designed and installed an automatic thermal fuel-shut-off system for the fireplace. If the fireplace even “thinks about overheating” a thermal switch shuts off the fuel supply with a fire-proof rated solenoid if the air temperature ever rises above 85ºF/30Cº. Worry-wart Skippers (me) need to be able sleep in the winter too . . .

Oops, I got side tracked . . .

For me, the ship is not truly “stood down” until she is emptied and every cupboard and compartment is left open and special ventilation fans (with their own dedicated power receptacles) are installed and running that I consider the current season is over.

The lazarette (nautical talk for storage area in the back of the ship) houses a wwwwide range of items during the summer; from spare wine glasses to extra engine oil, from beer to bilge cleaner, from wine to wire, from dish soap to dinner plates, from gumboots to garbage bags, from hose to hand sanitizers, from v-belts to sea-chests . . . uhh, a lot of spares . . .

So we empty the “laz” to ensure the area is well ventilated and to weed out the “necessary” from the “accumulation of the extraneous”. Here Steve is spelunking the “laz”.

We also have a system (of course we have a system!) of ropes and pulleys installed in the rafters of the boat shed to hoist each kayak up out of the way for the winter. This makes winter and spring maintenance a lot less cluttered.

Steve is on the roof connecting and lifting . . .

and I am on the dock pulling like mad and tying off one kayak at a time.

I often get the sensation that I am swimming under-water watching the fleet of mothership kayaks passing by. A seal’s eye view if you will.

The ship’s non-perishable food stores are pulled out of their nooks and crannies and organized and inventoried. We will compare preseason shopping lists against post-season inventories and adjust the master shopping lists for next year.

Phew! It is always a busy final push when everyone’s energies are waning; the pull of home projects, family and friends beckon after the long busy season.

Once the crews finally left after the day’s toils, I sat by myself on the sofa in the salon, glazing about me with relief that another touring season has come and gone. I am not religious per say, nor especially superstitious, but I am still completely comfortable with pausing by myself and thinking. “Thanks.” Thanks to the ship, her crews, her guests and the good fortune of this BC coast. My personal motto for my little business has always been: Safe, Fun, Viable.

Safe: I want everyone; crew, guests and bystanders to be safe.

Fun: Life isn’t worth living if it can’t be fun (and admittedly I am willing to work for this!).

Viable: I want my business to flourish enough to treat my crews well, provide my guests with an exemplary experience, maintain this heritage ship as best I can . . .

And have some left over for me too.

Thanks. 2022 was a good season.

Ross, Owner/Skipper/Chief washer

Spring ’22. Sand and paint . . .

Oh My!! I am getting behind on my blogging. April 1st snuck up on me and Pounced with a Vengeance! All of a sudden crews arrived and “stuff started happenin!”

So I decided that just this one time we would do a quick n’ dirty, once-over-lightly, git-her-done refit. You know, after all my Covid losses it was ok to cut as many corners as possible . . . .

No, no, no. Really! You are hurting my feelings if you believed that last paragraph . . . have you learned Nothing from the last decade of boring maintenance minutiae?? No, I had 7 crew, logging over 600 hours on payroll, just to make sure my very, very, very fastidious guests (both returning and new) would find our humble ship worthy of their journey . . .

And a quick drum-roll/ gallop through some photos…

On the first morning I usually walk around the ship with the crew and we look at different aspects of the ship and what we think needs regular attention and what needs the “next level” treatment. Generally, some part of the ship’s wood-work needs to be stripped to bare wood and refinished starting from scratch. If certain parts of the exterior of the ship are getting chipped or tired, we put that area to the top of the list. This year we choose to strip the salon windows and the aft 1/2 of the ship’s high profile handrails to bare wood, and also sand the aft deck coating off.. See next . . . And we usually sand and paint the main deck house/wheel house every two years and this was the year…

We had an unusual misadventure with the finish on the aft deck last season. I am not quite sure how I managed to trick a dark brown deck finish to go white when it got wet or cold (honestly!) but it needed to be stripped off with aggressive sanding . . . I’m so good with Aggggressive!

And Nadya seemed to be getting aggressive too, so she tried her hand on the decks as well.

While I worked on the aft deck, the crews began sanding . . .

and the hull of course.

The port holes on the hull have bronze “beauty rings” that we remove each year for painting. But the screw holes were getting stripped so I glued dowels into each existing screw hole and then sanded the area flush. Then we started as from scratch to re-attach the rings.

For some unknown and perhaps unknowable reason, the green paint on the forward port bulwarks seemed marred by old blisters while the rest of the bulwarks seemed fine. So we cheated here by stripping just the troubled section hoping the ship’s name would cover the less than perfect transition from new paint to the existing paint.

And of course, my grand daughter, Maeve, had to do her pre-season salon sofa trampoline check . . . the test went pretty well until grandpa called an end to the session!

Here the aft hand rails get stripped to bare wood and sanded to perfection.

Here’s a “project” for you. The salon has 3 large windows on each side of the vessel and I have been struggling for 17 years to have the exterior finish look as good as I want it to be. I have tried several different types of marine varnish and none have stood up to the UV exposure these windows seem to attract. The feature transom on the ship suffered the same fate and I found that Cetol Marine Gloss finish solved the problem . . .So this spring three crew spent a lot of time carefully hand-stripping the old finish off, resanding the bare wood and then refinishing the windows with 3 new coats of Cetol. These are custom ordered, tempered glass, thermal-paned windows and I made it really, really really really, really clear I wanted the old finish removed and NONE OF THE GLASS scratched or broken from the heat guns stress fracturing the glass . .

My line was, “I am paying you to go slow!”

At some point Robin cheerily reassured me that, “Each window is going to cost you about $1000.00 just to strip the old varnish off!”

“Ya, ya, Robin. Just get back to work . . .”

After all the dusty sanding the whole ship is washed, from the masts down to the water line.

And finally the paint starts to go back on.

and the clear finishes on the bright work.

We usually paint in teams of 2 or 3. 1 rolling the larger areas and one “tipping” or smoothing out the roller marks for a gleaming final gloss look.

We go through a lot of paint, paint brushes, foam brushes, rags and yogurt containers saved from last season with the guests. Here ace guide and chef, Robin Humphreys, readies her tools. But perhaps with the exception of the skipper/owner guy, all the Mothership crews are “Ace”.

And the salon windows get their new Cetol finish applied.

and the handrails start to shine.

and the sundry bits that were removed get a refinish.

. . . shower grate renewal.

Somehow or other, Leah and Nadya were able to paint and dance at the same time.

One of the final steps is applying finish to the decks. Hopefully this one doesn’t go white when it gets cold or wet!

As this was a “post Covid” spring . . . meaning I was watching my cash flow and being a bit chintzy . . I didn’t embark on too many new projects, but the ship’s under-water hydrophone, (that allows us to listen to whale vocaliztions!) needed replacement.

And Tavish suggested we create “windows” on the main-engine belt-guard so we could monitor v-belt wear when the engine was running. So Luke removed the guard and added grilled inspection ports.

And what marine blog would be complete without some “potty talk”? I bought 3 new toilets and installed them just to make sure everything worked smoothly in that department.

And you know computers of all makes and sizes save us all time and money . . . Here is 1 of 2 ship-board GPS’s that I upgraded. The old ones worked just fine, except that in case of an emergency, my emergency radios (which derive location from these devices) would proclaim to the world that I was in really desperate difficulty in 1978! It was an irreparable software glitch. Oh well. At least the new GPSs were only $1300 each.

So when the Skipper was starting to lose his composure, Nadya led us in group equanimity exercises.

A finishing touch to the spare anchor hawshole.

The life raft returns after its bi-annual recertification . . . darn this is super heavy and just so much fun to wrestle into and out of a truck and skiff on a beach . . .