http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPV1XVqsIoM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSDpBUNzlIM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1vzqdaBMx4

“Sailing is Victory. Victory over the wind, which can kill you. Victory over the sea, which can kill you a lot quicker. Over the boat, over the sails, over your own limitations. Sailing joins elemental forces in opposition, and lets you ride them. The illusion is created that you’ve harnessed the elements. You’ve thrown reins on a lion and leaped on its back. Of course the lion is ultimately untameable, and if you’re careless it will turn around in a flash and eat you. Which is also the appeal.” ~Jerry Dennis

Ben just completed reading this book and recommends it.  It was a very interesting read that explained a lot about the Great Lakes.  Most people think of the Great Lakes as just lakes, but having crossed Lake Michigan (~70 miles across, where you can’t see shore to shore) and having read this book, it gives a new appreciation to The Living Great Lakes.

So… We followed by hauling/painting Monomoy, then Conrad and Roxanne of s/v The Great Escape, Heather and Derek with s/v Parallax, and most recently Jim hauled/painted s/v Another Chance.

Another Chance being hauled.

Jim pressure washing the hull.

In this picture Another Chance is nearly done, but is hanging in the sling overnight in order to get a good coat of paint under her keel. Jim used Interlux Micron Extra in Shark White for ablative bottom paint.

While Another Chance was out of the water with painting drying on her bottom, Jim polished and waxed her hull. Check out the mirror finish!

Another Chance heading to splash.

A final picture showing Another Chance being lowered back into the water.

Great job on the bottom Jim! You now hold the Palm Harbor fictitious award for freshest bottom!

You may recall past posts including ‘The Great Escape’ where pictures show a blue hull and red bottom like these pics.

They really worked hard on the paint.

They transformed The Great Escape by painting the hull above the waterline an arctic white and the bottom in blue. All of their effort really paid off; the Great Escape looks like a new boat.

Conrad and Roxanne are prepping their boat for their Great Escape as they plan to sail South in November with intentions of island hopping as long as they feel like with no requirements to be anywhere at any particular time. They plan to produce a website of their adventure so we can all keep up and live vicariously through them; we’ll post that link when it becomes available.

Congrats on the hard work Conrad and Roxanne!

Blake has a boat wheel given to him by our friend Joe.

He made his own sail and set it up on his bed and had a make believe pirate ship.

Ben contacted Standard Horizon via email to let them know about the mishap with photos of the remaining clip and an explanation of what happened; the point of the email was to simply let them know of a potential defect that can be solved with a little thread lock (a single screw holds the clip together and that screw had apparently backed out).

A Standard Horizon’s customer service rep replied to Ben’s email in less than 24 hours with an apology and an offer to replace the radio at no charge. The offer was accepted, because the mishap was no fault of ours and meant we were going to have to fork out another $150 for a new radio, since we really like having the handheld while walking about the cockpit and foredeck (we have a built-in VHF at the nav station below).

Standard Horizon not only replaced the radio at no charge, they provided an upgrade which floats, so that in the unlikely event we ever drop it overboard, we will theoretically be able to retrieve it. The customer service rep even made a joke that perhaps the former handheld alerted the fish to nearby charters till the battery expired (the former handheld was submersible, just didn’t float).

I am very pleased with the way Standard Horizon handled the situation. We truly didn’t expect a replacement radio, nor did we request a replacement.

A big THANK YOU to Standard Horizon! We will continue to support their company and will clearly recommend their product if ever asked our opinion. Our previous radio worked flawless over the past year, so we expect the new one will perform just as well.

When our Ship’s Boatswain, Blake, was 4 years old, he had a favorite book for us to read to him called “Ghost Ship”, which was just released that year. This book was bestselling storyteller Mary Higgins Clark’s first children book and was illustrated by award-winning artist Wendell Minor.

“During his summer visits to his grandmother’s house on Cape Cod, Thomas spends hours walking along the
beach, wondering about the sailing ships of the past and imagining their stories. One afternoon, Thomas digs in
the beach sand and finds an old belt buckle. When he picks it up, something magical happens—a boy his own
age appears: Silas Rich, a cabin boy on a sailboat called the Monomoy that sailed almost three hundred years ago.
Suddenly the world of sailing ships is very near as Silas tells Thomas his tale.”

Blake continues to enjoy the book today, though he tends to read it to himself now.

With the book being Blake’s favorite at the time we sold our sailing vessel Knotical and purchased our next sailboat, Blake was old enough to provide his input on a name; his first choice was Monomoy, and thus it was agreed and subsequently made reputable for our little sailing family.

So there you have the story behind the name of our sailing vessel Monomoy.

The Peacemaker, originally named Avany, was built on a riverbank in southern Brazil using traditional methods and tropical hardwoods, and was launched in 1989. The original owner and his family motored in the southern Atlantic Ocean before bringing the ship up through the Caribbean to Savannah, Georgia, where they intended to rig it as a three-masted staysail Marconi rigged motor sailer. The work was never done, however, and in the summer of 2000, it was purchased by the Twelve Tribes, a religious group with 50 or so communities in North and South America, Europe, and Australia. They spent the next seven years replacing all of the ship’s mechanical and electrical systems and rigging it as a barquentine. The refit vessel set sail for the first time in the spring of 2007, under the name Peacemaker.

The Peacemaker will be used to travel between the communities of the Twelve Tribes while providing an apprenticeship program for their youth in sailing, seamanship, navigation, and boat maintenance.

Here are some photos from our tour:

The good news is the wind should be coming from the East on Friday, so hopefully that will allow us to have a little more water in the bayou to actually get out of the slip and get in a little sailing before mooring at the temp location.

Hopefully this will be the last weekend we are stuck in the slip due to water level and can finally sea trial the new autopilot!

Update: The water level never rose high enough to allow us to leave the slip, so we had to sit tight while the dredge did their work behind us. The dredge showed up on Tuesday and did remove some sand/silt from behind our slip. I believe it will make a difference, however, they bumped a log at about 7 feet down just 10 feet or so to our stern. I suspect the log is the cause of the sand buildup. The dredging will make a difference right at MLLW tide, but not if it is below that, so we still plan to change slips come March/April. Now we just need some pretty weather back, so we can sail!