Hurray for our side, hurray at last!!!!
It's officially all ours. Woopee! and what an adventure we had getting it. We set out on Wednesday morning, July 6 to sail to Roche Harbour in the San Juan Islands in Washington State so we could officially take possession of the boat. The morning had started out being quite windy, so I figured the boat would be able to get out there and show us what it could do, the wind gradually dropped as we scurried around stowing everything that would move and tying the dynghy to the deck. By the time we left with the hired captain aboard the wind had dropped considerably. We sailed about half way across to the San Juan's and the wind died and we started motoring and the adventure began.
We had the motor revving at about 2000, 2200 RPM's and we were going great guns. We were chatting and talking and enjoying the sunshine as Cat's-Paw IV made her way merrily across the strait, then
HOLY SMACK, smoke started pouring out of the engine exhaust and the engine up and quits!!
It was like a frigging sauna down below, the hired dude heads down the stairs and we start opening every hatch and porthole that is on the boat. UGGH it was so hot and steamy down there it was unbelievable. We had to madly unfurl the genoa and try and maintain steerage in a fast flowing tide and very little wind.
We waited about 15 minutes for the engine to cool down and then Barry and I poured about 5 liters of water into the radiator, then we tried the engine again. Barry was sent below to watch to see if there were leaks and sure enough a hose was leaking like a sieve. SOOOOO, we turned the boat around, still not having landed in the U.S. and sailed very slowly back towards Canadian waters as Barry and the hired dude tried to fix the engine. Well, the sailing gods were with us, and as luck would have it the hired dude (whose name is Gerry, by the way) was a steam engineer in the navy, in another life, and we had put all the spare parts from the previous owner aboard and low and behold the owner had a quite rare, but entirely necessary ELBOW hose, that would do as a replacement.
We very tentatively started the engine again and chugged slowly towards Roche Harbour, very careful monitoring of the engine was taking place the whole time. We managed to dock at the Customs Hut and Barry went ashore and did all the paper work. Then we moved the boat to another dock and we all went ashore and and had lunch. Mission accomplished, now we just had to get back to Canada.
Well the ride home was very uneventful, except for the popping of a cork once we hit Canadian waters. We toasted everyone and everything, and the bow got sprinkled with champagne and there were smiles all around. We safely landed back in Canada and Gerry informed us that, that was the longest delivery he had ever made. We thanked him profusely, gave him a large tip and proceede to have our first real meal aboard. Man, will we ever be able to do anything the easy way.
