Sailing Up a River

When you think about sailing, you probably picture a yacht under full sail slicing through the blue sea! The only thing around the yacht is more waves as it chugs along through the water towards an endless destination. This thought might seem romantic, but at some point, the yacht will arrive on a shore and make its way up into a port. Old ports tend to be located up a river, offering them ease of access to the open waters but yet still protected from the fury of the waves during a severe storm.

For those with a powerful diesel motor onboard, these journeys up the river to the port city are no challenge at all. All you need to do in these cases is turn on the motor and power your way up the river until you reach your destination in a timely manner. For those of us who have opted to forgo this luxury, traveling up the river may be a bit more intimidating. 

Rivers have a few standard qualities, and understanding these features will make navigating them all the easier. A river will always flow from the land to the sea. There may be a slight flood as the tide rises, but it will be much weaker than the current as the tide retreats back into the ocean. This preferred direction of rivers is due to the fact that rivers drain runoff from the land into the sea.  

This means that the force of the current is directly correlated to the amount of rainfall that has occurred in that area . If they have been having heavy rains, expect a stronger current pushing against you. If it has been dry lately, expect an easier to at sailing up the river. 

The other challenging thing with rivers is their width. Rivers can be wide, but they can also get very narrow at times. The area of deep water will also be narrower than the width of the river as well, meaning that you will be forced to sail in a relatively narrow space. This can make it difficult to work your way up a river, especially if your are working into the wind. Short tacking against the wind and against the current is equivalent to Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the mountainside forever.  

It may sound like rivers are the worst thing you can encounter on a sailboat, and you may be inclined to think that you need a motor to get to the port town located miles up the river. This thought may seem well founded, knowing all the natural forces are stacked against you, but remember that these old towns were established long before diesel motors existed. All trade that occurred in these old towns was done by sail, and if the town is old enough, by square rigger! 

While it may sound like it is next to impossible to sail up into a river and reach a port town, the truth is it is very doable; you just need patience.  

When sailing up a river, you want to plan on traveling with an incoming tide, after a period of dry days, when the wind is blowing you up the river. This will give you the easiest go at it, as the river will not be flowing too hard, the tide will give you a bit of a push, and the wind will carry you all the way up. 

Winds are another problem with rivers. You might start out with the wind on your stern, but as the river bends and twists, the wind may begin to blow from the wrong direction. Trees that line the river will also make winds light and variable, further adding difficulty to the entire process. Traveling up a river can be tricky at times, and if you find that you are loosing ground, the most prudent action would be to drop anchor and wait for conditions to improve in your favor. 

Arriving at a small port town by sail can be fun and exciting, especially if you had to time it with natural events and work for a few days to finally get there!  

On a side note, an important thing to carry while sailing up a river is cheese. If you get stuck somewhere and have to wait for conditions to improve, cheese may be your best tool to free yourself from your predicament. Sitting in the cockpit waiting for the winds to change or the tide to come back into your favor will drive you crazy! These events take hours to change, and the changes occur very subtly, especially that far up a river. Cheese will work to take your mind off of the situation, help you relax, feed your belly, and keep you happy. As you sit back and relax with cheese in your stomach, you will stop worrying about time and simply enjoy the sights of the river bank as you await better conditions. Once conditions do return to your favor, you can raise anchor and continue on!

Working With Pets

Pets are a big part of your life, even when you are cruising. They are with you while you relax, while you eat, and even while you work! No matter the circumstance, your pet will want to be right by you or on you while you toil away on your latest project.

While covered head to toe in a tyvek suit, Sammy, my parrot insisted on being with me. She was not happy in her cage alone in the boat, and she was not happy in her cage near me. Sammy insisted on being right on my shoulder while I worked, no matter the circumstance. Since they don't make tyvek suits for birds, I had to be extra careful not to get any bottom paint on her feathers! 

It might be hot, it might be uncomfortable, but your pets will be right there with you. 

Cruising Mindset

Cruising is not just the act of taking long trips on your yacht, it is an entire mindset that becomes you as you cruise. 

Maddie and I have cut the dock lines to society and set off as full time cruisers. We have no schedule, no itinerary, no nothing! We simply pick a place and start heading there. We get there when we get there is a good way to sum it all up. 

When we had taken "extended vacations" before that we called cruising, we had a set amount of time available to us. We had a destination in mind and a return date already set. Everyday that we weren't heading towards our destination was a day lost, because we did have to turn around at some point to return to work. 

While the trips were relaxing, they were still speckled with stress. If the winds were not right, or we didn't get far enough on a day, we felt like we might not actually get to our destination and we would be forced to turn around by our jobs. 

Now, we don't worry about these sorts of things. We wake up when we wake up, raise anchor when we feel like it, and sail until we decide to stop for the day! 

We were anchored in Harness Creek in South River when we decided to visit a little town called Easton. This town is located far up a river and was rather far for us by sail. We didn't care and we set off towards this new destination.  

After three days of sailing, we were nearing this town on the river and were only 0.3 nautical miles from the place we want to anchor for a while when we ran aground. 

Running aground is never a fun time, but the truth is it isn't that bad for us.  Wisdom, our sailboat, has a full keel. Running aground simply means that we are sitting on the bottom of the river with no worry about damage to our undersides. 

We checked the tide table and found that it was nearly low tide, and the tide was going out. We tried to heel over with the sails, kedge off, even be pulled off by the assistance of a passing powerboat. Alas, the tide had gone out too fast and our waterline was about 6 inches higher than normal. Our keel was stuck in the mud and our only hope was to wait for high tide to lift us off. 

The tide would take a few hours to come back up, and instead of stressing our situation, we simply got out some cheese and a game to eat and play in the cockpit while we waited. 

That is the true sense of cruising. Time no longer matters, as you simply take each day as it comes and each moment as it presents itself. There is no worry about deadlines nor schedules, as we are merely sailing along as best we can in the direction of our next destination. 

Blister Repair

Osmotic blisters may be the bane of a fiberglass hull, but it is a small problem that has been blown way out of proportion. The truth is, all hulls suffer form some form of degradation: wood hulls rot and get worms, fiberglass hulls get blisters, steel hulls rust, and aluminum hulls disappear by galvanic corrosion. You simply need to choose a hull material that you feel comfortable repairing yourself.

Blisters are caused by the osmotic pressure of water that passes through the layers of fiberglass and exposes areas of delamination. When the hull is lifted from the water, these areas will bulge out like lumps. When you crack them open, water will pour out with intense pressure. 

Fixing blisters can be a very costly endevour if you pay to have someone else do it, but they are actually very easy to fix yourself. You only need a grinder and an sander. 

Using a grinder, you can rip through the blister, tearing out all the delaminates fiberglass that is overtop. Then you can begin to tear out laterally, as you follow the damage from the blister. As you work, the affected area will be wet and have a slight brown color to it. You simply want to grind away until you no longer see any brown or wet, and you can't even see where the different layers are of the hull. 

At this point you will have a gaping hole in the side of your boat. This may seem like a major problem, but it is easy to fix. 

If the blister is not too deep, the repair is very straight forward. If the blister is rather deep, then you simply need to take a few extra steps to fix it. Neither of these two methods are difficult, and both can be done in a few minutes. 

If the blister is shallow, and not passing through many layers of the hull, you can simply fill the hole with thickened epoxy. How deep is too deep for just epoxy is dependent on the hull itself. If you have a 1/4 inch deep hole on a 1/2 inch thick hull, you have just compromised 50% of the hull in a blister! Yet, if the hull is inches thick, this is a small surface scratch that is inconsequential to the total structural integrity of the hull. 

In my case, the hull in this area is 1.5 inches thick, and the blister was 1.4 inch deep. This comes out to be 1/6th the hull thickness, so I simply repaired it with thickened epoxy. 

Regular West System Epoxy can be mixed well, then 406 thickening agent can be added until the entire mixture looks like thick peanut butter. This thick mass can then be stuffed into the hole and wiped over with a plastic spatula. The spatula will contour the blisters surface to be flush with the hull, taking all the work out of fairing the repair job! It is just that easy, simply smear it in and smooth it off! 

If th blister is deep, you can wet the area with untickened West System Epoxy, and then add some chop strand mat to the hole. This will provide new fibers that will add in the structural integrity of the entire repair. Over this layer, you can then add more unthickened epoxy to fully wet the strands of fiberglass. When they are all wet, you then proceed with the thickens epoxy just like before. Simply smear it in and scrape it smooth! 

Blisters may be an eyesore, but they are more an annoyance than anything else. Small blisters will not sink your boat, only it's resale value! Keeping your boat out of the water through winter allows the hull to dry out well and reduce the incidence of blisters as well. If you live aboard though, your boat will always be int eh water and blisters will become a fact of life when you haul out. 

You can choose to ignore them until they get big, or you can choose to repair each and every one of them as they occur. Which ever way you choose to go with, just keep in mind that blisters are not a death sentence to a fiberglass hull, simply an annoyance you get in response to your relaxed maintenance schedule of haul outs. 

Lost Wax Technique

In the world of casting, there are two main ways of making a mold. The simplest is to take an object, shove it into something which leaves an impression, then pour the metal into the impression that was left behind.

This method is often called sand casting, since sand is used as the something that the object is shoved into. Sand is a wonderful casting medium because it is reusable! After you finish your casting, you can pack the same sand around something else to create an entirely new object.

The problem with sand casting is your object needs to have "path of draw" which simply means that there can be no undercuts in your object to allow the object to be drawn out of the the sand without disturbing your mold.

Imagine you wanted to cast a cone. If you hold the base and shove the tip into the sand, you will be able to pull the cone out of the sand and leave a perfect impression of the cone in the sand. This impression will hold molten metal perfectly!

If you held the tip and buried the base, you would not be able to pull the cone out without disturbing the sand and destroying your impression.

Ensuring that you always have a path of draw is important, as it allows the object to be reused should the casting fail and need to be repeated. This lets you make one blank that can be used to create an infinite amount of molds over and over again!

The truth about the sand though, the object is not pressed into the sand, but instead the sand is poured and packed around the object. Then the entire sand box is flipped and the object is removed. It is just easier to visualize shoving a cone into sand then to try to describe packing sand around the cone and pulling the cone from the sand.

The other method for making molds is the lost wax technique. Lost wax is very forgiving when it comes to shape. There can be undercuts, as well as intricate passages between the metal, as the entire item is created in wax! Anything wax can do, the mold can also do, and hopefully, so will the metal!

When you see a bronze statue, where the intricate body could not have been pulled from a sandbox to leave behind an impression, this is the technique that they used. The entire statue is first made in wax and then covered in plaster. The plaster will adapt perfectly to the wax and take on the shape down to the last detail. Once the wax is entirely covered with stone, it is ready for the second step: the loss of the wax!

The mold is heated, causing all the wax to melt out and be lost; hence the name of the technique. Now you have a stone cast of the item you wish to make in metal with a void where the wax used to be. The metal is then poured into the hollow space and allowed to fill all the voids.

Unlike the sand casting technique, where the blank is saved and reusable if you mess up the casting, with a lost wax technique, you only get one try. If you fail during the casting phase, you need to start from scratch and do it all again!

Naturally, you want to make sure everything is working perfectly before you risk destroying a masterpiece of a wax form that may never be fully realized in its metal form! Here is where practice and experience come into play.

If the wax is fully covered in stone, how will the wax escape and the metal enter? Experience will help the craftsman place the sprue in the right places to allow the wax to exit, the metal to enter, and the air to exit the mold. If any of these steps are not successful, the entire casting may be ruined!

Sprue placement is important, and intricate pieces will require intricate sprue designs. In general, larger items will need multiple sprues to allow the metal to enter and flow through the mold. Sprues also need to be placed at the top of the mold, that way they don't spill out metal as the mold is filled.

If you have a long flat item to cast, placing two sprues, one at each end will be a good idea. When you pour the molten metal into one sprue, you will know that it has passed to the other side of the mold if you see it exit the other sprue. This will remove doubt about whether or not the metal made it all the way down the passages.

The lost wax technique can be rewarding as well as painful. If everything comes out well, your casting will be as intricate as your wax model. If anything goes wrong, you will be left with nothing more than a disfigured dream of a casting. Your wax is gone, your mold broken, as your heart saddened as you begin the entire process over again.