Catching Up in New Zealand

First, my profuse apologies for not updating this more.  I’ve been writing, but writing fiction, not blogging. That’s been taking a lot of my time. The good news is I’ve written something like 130,000 words since last July. But very few of those words ended up in this blog. Whether fiction writing is a viable thing for me is a question for another time, but it is the primary reason I’ve devoted so little energy to writing here. This isn’t really the space to talk about my writing, though everything I’ve read says I need to build a social media “platform” to help promote my work some day if it ever gets published. So that means another blog to not update often enough…if you’re curious though, there is a “Contact” page here.

The second reason is we haven’t been doing all that much that is blog-worthy and interesting. Life in New Zealand has been…routine…and we’ve not done the same quantity of touring and exploration this year as we did last. Some has to do with a few things that happened, like our car getting stolen and the headaches from that. Some friends have been gracious enough to loan is their car while they were in the states, but we haven’t been making the great ranging road trips we did last time around.  We’ve spent a lot of time writing, doing school, and handling a few boat projects.

As of this posting we’ve technically overstayed out visit here, and had to apply for a visa extension to get past six months. The weather has been tough for leaving, with low pressure systems coming through every third day or so for the last few weeks. We, along with a handful of other cruisers, are perched waiting for a good window to go. Since we were planning to meet Will in New Caledonia next week and won’t be there, we also have other considerations.  We changed his flight to meet us in Auckland, though we will miss a good departure window in the next couple of days to do so. But June 3rd is looking good.

Marley’s Ghost

You can see the flakes of metal coming off here.

Two major projects faced us this season in New Zealand. First, we needed to get our bottom painted. We had it done last year, but the paint was rather disappointing after the fantastic experience we had with Blue Water’s Copper Pro SCX 67. That stuff was amazing; we painted in the spring of 2012 before leaving Rhode Island, and it was still providing some protection by the time we got to New Zealand in late 2014 some 15,000 miles later.  Don’t look for it, it’s been discontinued. But our bottom looked better when we arrived in NZ in 2014 with that paint than it did when we arrived here last year after six months in Fiji with the new paint we had to use.

The second project was also from another disappointing product, our anchor chain. That was also replaced in 2012 right before we left. Three hundred feet of Acco’s best HT 7/16th inch chain. Within a year it was rusting, within two it was staining the boat with rust and looking nasty. After three and a half years chunks of it were coming off on the deck every time we ran the windlass.

300′ of chain in a pile. Note the intense rust in the middle of the chain.

We were deeply concerned that the chain no longer had the strength or integrity to hold us securely. The pictures show that there is clear and serious degradation of the metal in the chain. Disappointing, as this was the top quality chain we could buy in the U.S. before we left, and we expected to get a decade or more out of this chain.

Fast forward three and a half years, and we’re in New Zealand.  Where everything is metric. And 7/16″ chain is nearly impossible to come by, and I had to jump through the hoops I talked about in the last entry to get the right one here.

After our bad experience with the Acco chain, we wanted something different. Which worked out pretty well since Acco isn’t a very strong presence here anyway. We settled on 12mm Maggi Aqua 7, a higher grade Italian chain with excellent rust resistance and the strength we needed. It’s easy to come by here in NZ, and it ended up costing us less than the last lot of chain we bought in the U.S. for 100 meters.

726 Lbs of shiny new chain. Thanks to Sea Power for moving it for us!

Three hundred feet of 7/16″ HT anchor chain weighs 645 pounds.  One hundred meters of Aqua 7 12mm chain weighs 726 pounds. So this isn’t something you’re going to put in a dock cart and wheel down to the boat. It isn’t even something that a couple of grown men can comfortably move without some heavy-duty hardware help, your average shop dolly isn’t going to get it done. Once the chain is loose it’s like wrestling a big, dirty snake.

In our case we had it drop shipped to Cater Marine who’d ordered it for us, but we weren’t ready to install the chain when it arrived. We had to wait until we were pulled from the water for the bottom painting, then we could drop our 645 lbs of old chain (less all the rusted bits that fell off…) on the ground and haul the new chain up with the windless. When we finally got the boat on the hard I met with the folks at Cater, and we stood around the drum of chain, prodding it with our shoes and trying to figure out how to move it. Finally we reached out to Cater Marine’s neighbors at Sea Power, who installed our generator for us last year. They had a little truck with a crane on it, and were able to bring the new chain over for us and drop it under the bow, where after some work on the windlass to replace the gypsy we got it loaded on the boat.

Of Gypsies and Bearing Mush

In 2012 when I swapped out the old 12mm gypsy for the 7/16″ model it was pretty easy.  Undo a big nut on the windlass, pull off a little hardware and off it came. Slide the now one back on and put it all back together. It took me less than an hour.

This time, I wasn’t so lucky. The first thing I had to do was get the 12mm gypsy. Which I really didn’t want to do, because I am cheap and a new gypsy is not. But as I said in my last post, the folks at Marine Consignment came through!

Getting the gypsy off was not so easy. It should just slide off, but it wouldn’t move. Close inspection shows that the gypsy and the clutch surface seemed to have seized up together. No amount of heating and banging would move it. Our friends at Sea Power once again came through, with a specialized puller tool that popped it right apart for us.

If you like gruesome detail, it was the bits I circled in red.

Then I discovered what a mess the windlass was. Without boring you with gruesome details on the inside of the windlass, we discovered that the top seal on the drum had leaked. So all the of the bearings and retainer clips inside the windlass above the deck level had corroded to mush. Literally, brown rusty mush with a few rough round pellets in it that must have been ball bearings at one point.

Keep in mind, before I tell you our idiot solution, that this windlass has worked just fine for years with this bearing in a mushy state. This windlass is discontinued, and getting actual parts from the manufacturer in Italy proved impossible. Our friends at Cater Marine did track down appropriately sized seals and bearings for us eventually.

But in the meantime, we were on the hard for a week getting the boat painted while living on board. Living on board on the hard…is a subject for another post. Suffice to say, the key information is you want to do as little of it as possible, even if you weren’t paying fifty bucks a day to stay in the yard.

Close inspection after removing all the mush showed that this would be a labor intensive process to replace all the bearings, involving disassembling the windlass down to and below the deck level. This creates an opportunity to make new leaks, and would extend our time on the hard considerably since we had to put the windlass back together to load the chain.

So, with the flawless logic that it had worked fine with the bearing chamber packed full of rusty mush, it should all work find if I cleaned out the mush and packed it full of grease, I put the windlass back together and finished the project.

I have the bearings, clips and seals I need to finish the job. Now I just need a few days in a marina to rip it all apart. I don’t want to do it at anchor, since I won’t be able to use the windlass until I’ve finished. That would be a bad thing if some weather moved through. So maybe Australia in a few months.