Surprise surprise, more work for Jackie O.

To save some money, Kate and I decided that we would anchor Jackie O out of the Marsh Harbour Bay Marina.  Anchoring out is very tricky.  First, you are required to stay a certain distance from other boats for obvious reasons, next you have to make sure you don't trip another boat's anchor - which is easy to do, and finally you are forced to guess whether or not your anchor has dug into the sea bed.  There have been instances where boats will drift into one another in the middle of the night causing serious damage and stress.  But we were willing to give it a try.  Little did we know, anchoring out on that particular evening would be the cause of a very large problem I'm currently trying to deal with.    

After a beautiful sunset we relaxed on the boat and then decided to go to bed.  That's when the wind decided to pick up.  Unbeknownst to us, this would be one of the strongest winds of the month.  The wind caused the boat to 'swim' back and forth constantly.  We were definitely rocking.  At around 3:00 a.m, an unfamiliar thunking noise coming from the stern woke me up.  Something was rattling around where it shouldn't have been.  But not really knowing what sort of sounds were 'normal' while anchoring out in torrential winds, I left it to look at the next day.  The following morning, Kate and I weighed anchor and cruised the boat around into the harbour.  We got all of the dock lines set up and head in to the marina with the wind pushing us rather quickly.  Once we recovered from slightly crashing into the dock, we looked at each other with a sigh of relief - at least we had survived.

I decided to take a look at the thunking noise from the previous night, so I got on my wetsuit, jumped in the murky waters and dived under the boat to see what I could see.  I found that there was something wrong with my partial skeg rudder.  Turns out that the bottom joint is loose.  Great.  This means, I may have to get the boat hauled out of the water to get the work done.  I've got my fingers crossed that I can identify the problem and fix it while tied up at the dock.  I tried to replace part of my steering cable (which is a broken greaser unit) and while removing the cable from the conduit, it jammed up.  This caused an entire renovation of the steering helm which caused an entire removal of the cable and housing systems.  I decide that I'm going to try to find the parts that I'm missing, but after riding my bike around numerous boat yards, I learn that nobody on the island knows what I'm talking about.  I come back to the boat annoyed and tired.  I realize that I have to order in the parts from the U.S.  This means air freight, Fed Ex and the sound of ka-ching going off in my head.  

Currently, Kate and I are stuck in Marsh waiting for the parts to show up.  While that's happening, I have to get back into the water and fix the original problem - the loose rudder.  At this point, I'm ready to trade the boat in for some money or a fast moter yacht that will take me where I want to go, when I want to go.  Something that I didn't realize about Sailing is that there is an awful lot of sitting around and waiting.  Waiting for reasonable weather, waiting for safe winds, waiting for replacement parts to show up or waiting for the boat batteries to charge.  I'm patient in some ways, but in other ways not at all.  This whole boating experience has in some regards made me more cautious about what I jump head-first into.   There is one thing that is for sure; I know a hell of a lot more about boats now than I ever wanted to.  Hopefully this helps me in the future.