We Are Not Sinking

So reads the title of the email I just got from Tom, with instructions to post it on our blog. Here is his direct account of the past 24 hours:

The log entry for today at 7N 147W shall show that we continue on, where the trade winds are supposed to be, in beam winds of 20 knots and angry seas of 10 feet from 2 different directions.  Beam winds…  Sounds nice eh?  Sheets eased to allow for a gentle flowing air motion across your non-stressed sails as you adjust your heading to whatever course you desire as you sail a rhumb line to the nearest palm-frond island of your choosing… 

Bullshit!

“Fair winds and FOLLOWING SEAS” is the traditional sailor’s parting phrase that one bestows on a voyaging friend.  “Fair winds and beam seas” is what you might passively-aggressively say with a smile, to your ex-inlaws or the tax man.  It’s not as nice as it sounds. In our beam winds & seas we have as much canvas up as we can stand, causing the boat to heel at unnatural angles.  We do this in order to avoid the “death roll” of being side on to the waves without a massive press of canvas to slow the roll.  We are learning to live on the wall.  Ocean blue is the new black. The port wall is the new floor. 

My crew Roberto and Jake are sick in the head.  They’ve both sailed enough ocean miles to think that this is normal. 35 degrees of heel in the bigger waves does not bother them. Occasional “sneaker waves” crash over the top of the pilothouse roof.  I think they suffer from some kind of Stockholm syndrome.  Have I been too kind as their captor?  Are they learning to love this motion and not desire escape?  Our Himalayan Snow cat “Demon” on the other hand, sharpens her grudge daily.  She doesn’t like living on the wall in the hot and humid tropics.  She is currently refining her “dead cat impression”, seeming to lay lifeless on the low side of the boat with an expression that says, “adopt me into your land-bound home now, save me from this life afloat, do it before it’s too late!” She remains lifeless only until a can of chicken is opened, then she is instantly reanimated like some kind of furry zombie, demanding her portion under penalty of being clawed or meowed to death.

Jake is heroically making dinner in the galley in this awful sea state.  Imagine cooking chicken Alfredo on your favorite roller coaster ride. I sit  conversing with Roberto on the upper dinette when I notice a new orange light illuminated on the electrical panel.  The forward bilge pump is on.  No need for alarm.  I’m a recovering wooden boat owner.  Bilge pumps are my friend, and having them running all the time used to be considered normal.  Wooden boat hulls aren’t waterproof you see, and “take up” sea water from time to time.  Sometimes they “take up” sea water through their hulls at a rate that would alarm any sane human.  We’re a fiberglass boat though, (which shouldn’t leak) but we’ve had 8″ of rain in the past couple of days and I know the mast-to-deck seal leaks.   It must just be rainwater which has found it’s way to the shallow portside forward bilge under the mast.   The bilge pump light persists though…

I open up the floor and am greeted with water in the bilge and sloshing contents.  A familiar sight to any wooden boat owner.  I am also greeted with an unopened bottle of wine!  Hooray!  No alcohol sales have been allowed at our last port of call due to the Covid virus regulations and we’ve been dry for quite a while.  Mana from heaven! Mana floating in a flooded bilge on a boat 600 miles from the nearest land, 1,000 miles from the nearest boatyard, in 10 foot confused seas, with no other boat sighted for days.  It’s Chilean Malbec of recent vintage BTW.  I know you were wondering.

I offer the crew “good news and bad”. Red bilge wine being the good, sinking far from help being the bad.  I offer my assessment that it is rainwater and Roberto and Jake begin pumping it out while I focus on more important tasks, like finding the corkscrew.  “The water level isn’t going down.” says Roberto.  I stop corkscrewing.  Really?  It’s just rain water and it’s not raining.  It can’t be seawater can it?  There is a time-tested way to tell if it is seawater or rainwater… I take a cup of the nasty brown bilge water and sip and spit (as one would do with a fine wine) the contents.  If it’s rainwater it will be fresh-tasting, perhaps with faint notes of engine oil or diesel.  Nasty, but fresh.  If we’re sinking, It’ll be salty.

It is salty.

I tell the crew that the water is salty and am greeted with the exact expression that mirrors the cold damp feeling I suddenly feel in my chest.  Shit.  Salt water means it’s likely coming in through the hull somewhere.  “Sinking” would be the term used by someone who has never owned a wooden boat. I have bilge pumps.  Lots of them! 6 installed ones to be exact and 3 more large or improvised ones that can be put into service quickly if needed.  I am a recovering wooden boat owner who would never consider his boat to be “sinking” until the pumps can’t keep up, and yet I have that feeling too.  Our 1985 fiberglass Nauticat was lovingly built in Finland with a 3/4″ thick fiberglass hull. Overbuilt some would say. It’s like having a house with 2 foot thick walls. The fiberglass hull itself definitely isn’t leaking as is fashionable in the wooden boat world.  I know how sturdy the hull is because I recently helped install 2 new through-hull fittings right where the water is coming in…  Oops.  New hull work that penetrates the hull right where the water is coming in… A candidate for water ingress.  Not something easily fixable in our sea state or location either.  Also in the same area of the bilge are 4 other through hulls.  We may be pulling up all the floorboards soon looking for our leak.

The small section of bilge is the only flooded portion, which is very reassuring, and it is pumped dry in a few more minutes.   Water isn’t flooding in, so we decide to wait and see what the ingress rate is.  I continue to try and think of where it could be coming in.  Yes it could be the new through hulls, but I’d really prefer to brainstorm something more easily fixable and less catastrophic, so I continue thinking. 

Wham!  A sneaker wave, a combination of the new East and older Northwest swells tries to knock me off my feet.  Merrowww!!  Our furry quadraped is not impressed either, despite her having twice the ability to stay upright.  We heel with the port rail in the water again.  Hey… rail in the water…  The outflow through hull for the forward bilge pump is on that side, just below the rail, and is normally “only” 3 feet above the water.  At these ungodly angles of heel and roll it might be underwater at times, as could be it’s anti-siphon loop which is supposed to keep water from coming in back.  I go outside  and see that indeed, the through hull that should never be underwater, is frequently underwater in these seas and at this angle of heel.   

I go below and close the valve to this through hull.  We wait and watch to see if more water comes in.  The cat continues to send vibes of hate in our direction.  We eat and wait, the cat’s mood is improved with a portion of canned chicken.  No new water comes in during dinner. The wine made a lovely pairing with the canned chicken and pasta BTW.  Ask for it at your next dinner outing.

It’s now been 12 hours and the sea state has continued to afford us the opportunity to have the rail in the water and re-test my theory of water ingress.  So far so good.  No new water coming in. We’re not sinking! Even with the pumps off we’re not sinking!  Now I can relax and again focus on  living on the wall of the boat, sailing to our destination with a happily demented crew, and with a cat who is hopefully still too lazy to go through with her plans to kill me in my sleep.