Time to Sortie Again

It’s been nearly a month since we returned from our last trip, consequently marina fever has once again set in….it’s time to go somewhere.  Since we enjoyed the St. Pete journey so much the last time out, and fellow Nordy owners Martin & Stephanie are hanging out there aboard Blossom, it just sounded like a good idea to head back up there, but this time spending a few more days to enjoy the local area.  

On the Hook @ Useppa (Again)

So we’re off….first to Useppa for a relaxing night hanging on the hook, where we are right now, and it was a gorgeous day here in south Florida.  As we exited the Caloosahatchee River today we also came across a VERY playful pod of dolphins, who rode our bow wave for quite a while.  Michelle got some pics and some video, hopefully we'll find a way to post those, it was great entertainment.

Tomorrow we pull the hook in the morning and head north to Venice (Crow’s Nest), and then make the longer leg to St. Petersburg’s Muni Marina on Saturday.  Once again we’ll make the run on the “outside”….while the inside path up the ICW is almost always a smoother ride, its bridges, narrows and shallows are just a royal pain in the ass.  We’ll take lumpy water over that, and the forecast actually looks pretty tranquil.

We also have some operational testing to do on this sortie, more on that later.

More Mucking Around with Nav/Comm

Michelle & I spent the past week or so battling cold & flu bugs, so we didn't get a whole lot done on our Ghost Rider punch list.  But I did make some progress on a couple of nav/comm mysteries.

Mysterious AP Nav Error

The first was investigating why, on our last sortie (up to St. Pete), our autopilot Nav (route-following) function had suddenly stopped working.  After tracing potential physical wiring issues, as well as pursuing software configurations, it finally occurred to me that none of that likely would have changed -- the only difference on that last trip was that the various routes we were following had been imported from my laptop's backup copy of Nobeltec Odyssey. Or so I thought.

(Edited here 2-25-16.) After testing several more times, it appears the issue is one of sequencing -- e.g., if the ship's computer was turned on prior to everything else (Furuno Navnets, Simrad AP, etc.) then apparently the various inputs (COM ports) were not being recognized or initialized.

An RD-30 "4-Up" Display

The second was trying to understand what data was available to the (admittedly ancient) Furuno's RD-30 digital display & how to configure / display that properly.  Reading Furuno (old NavNet 2 era) manuals is like practicing bleeding -- it's fairly painful & they are definitely not the drop-dead simple stuff you get with Garmin equipment.  That said, these old Furuno units are nearly bullet-proof commercial grade devices, and once you figure them out, they just work.

Another RD-30 Example

Anyway, after painful reads of the RD-30 and Airmar manuals and decoding NMEA sentences -- oddly aided by a couple of cold fronts that generated consistent 20-30K winds from the NW that you couldn't misinterpret -- we were able to dial in seemingly correct wind & temperature readings from the Airmar antenna, along with a handful of other nav metrics from the Furuno Navnets & the ships's Nobeltec computer.  (And yes, that depth display -- under the keel -- is accurate.)

Sometimes even these minor victories feel majorly good.

Final Piece of the Connectivity Puzzle

Office Space with Ethernet Powerline Adaptor

A while back we had installed a MikroTik GigE wireless router & a MikroTik Groove high gain antenna to bring the boat's wireless Internet up to snuff.  But the lower deck office equipment (scanner, printer, NAS) remained on a separate (wireless) network due to the difficulty of running more cable down there.  I considered creating a wireless bridge to join the two networks, but that configuration exercise can be exasperating, so I decided to revisit the "Ethernet over Powerline" technology to see if that might be an easier solution.  As it turns out, it definitely was.

Ethernet Powerline in PH

While I'm not a huge fan of Netgear's consumer-grade equipment, their new "Powerline 1200" adaptors were getting very positive reviews and are actually quite good -- you won't get anywhere near the advertised 1.2 Gbps speed, but they do reliably clock in at 400 Mbps, which is plenty good for the boat, and faster than anything else out there in the Powerline networking genre.

I plugged one unit into a Pilot House outlet and connected its Ethernet cable to the MikroTik router; and then plugged the 2nd unit into an electrical outlet in the office and hooked its Ethernet cable into the office router.  Voila!  Instant network connectivity over standard 120V AC circuits.  Now we can access the printer, scanner and our network-attached-storage device from the ship's single wireless network.

http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-PL1200-100PAS-Powerline-1200/dp/B00S6DBGJM

Stern Thruster: Resolved

We lost use of the boat's stern thruster back on the morning of 19-Jan as we were trying to maneuver Ghost Rider away from the Gasparilla pump-out dock (at a very low tide.)  We had kicked up all sorts of mud, and the back end wasn't responding well to the thruster....pretty sure we were dragging the keel on the muddy bottom, but we finally broke loose & were able to motor out of there using only throttle & rudder....and the stern thruster at that point was non-responsive.

While we don't class the stern thruster as a "safety of flight" issue, it is damned convenient to have in cross-wind / cross-current docking maneuvers on a single screw boat.  Our two dock-ups & departures since then sans thruster have been uneventful, but given what we paid for that thing, we wanted it back.

Debris Removed from Thruster Tunnel

I finally got one of the local SidePower techs to come out to the boat today, and after verifying that the 15HP motor was still in good shape, we decided it was either a shelled gearbox (that would be bad, requiring a haul-out), or something was jammed up inside the thruster tunnel.

I managed to intercept a diver working on a Kadey-Krogen two slips down from us; one dive & 20 minutes later he had extracted about 10 pieces of black poly rope - totaling about 7 feet, with lead weights and parts of a plastic handle - from the thruster tunnel & props.  Best $40 I've ever spent.  After I plopped in a new 500A fuse, the thruster was back to life & sounding healthy.  Yay!

I need to replace that 500A fuse with the prescribed 400A, and then do some stress-testing on the thruster, but it's looking very, very promising.

New Interview Posted

James Ellingford, owner & operator of N62 Pendana, has long been publishing interviews with other Nordhavn owners as well as related industry experts.  We’re not exactly sure why they wanted to interview us, but they did, and James published it here today:

Click Here: Interview with Rick & Michelle on Ghost Rider

Cruisair & Tranny Maintenance

While I’m still trying (unsuccessfully thus far) to get a tech out to the boat to diagnose the dead stern thruster, we finally did get some much-needed repairs & maintenance done on the Cruisair tempered water A/C system this week.  We engaged Captain Ed’s Marine Service here in the FMY area (does good work – Cruisair certified, deliberate & reliable).  

Old Nasty A/C Sea Strainer

First & foremost was replacing a bad board in the guest stateroom’s air handler, finally bringing that back to life.  We also replaced the original (cheap & leaking) A/C sea strainer (see pic) with a new Groco unit, plus performed a much-needed flush of the sea water circuit with a barnacle-buster cleaner.

While we were at it we fixed a couple of sticking air handler valves and re-clamped some leaky chiller hoses.  The remaining to-do is to bring up the propylene glycol levels in the fresh water circuit – not so much for the anti-freeze properties, but more for the desired lubricating effects.

 Finally, I also got the oil & filter changed for the main engine’s ZF transmission at its scheduled 1,000 hour / 1 year interval.  The most difficult part of that process was getting the damned oil-filler nut removed, which required (1) a special ¾” hex socket tool, and (2) an inordinate amount of torque (with a breaker / extension bar), even after pre-soaking with Kroil & a heat gun.  The startling noise it made when it did break loose sounded like a small bomb going off in the engine room.  But the only injury was a bruise on my butt from a hard landing on the engine room floor.

Lowering the Salon Table

One of the minor challenges we encountered on Ghost Rider was figuring out how to lower the salon table down to the level of the surrounding seats.  Why you ask?  Well, there were levers on the post that indicated it was supposed to....and there was this vague idea that it could be turned into a sleeping area for the grandkids.

It took several days of soaking the pedestal in "Kroil" lubricant, followed by all kinds of bouncing on top of the table, but we finally got it to move to its lowered position.  On the latest boat trip with the kids aboard we developed a new technique, pictured here.

Sarasota to Fort Myers

The layover at Marina Jack's (floating docks) in Sarasota turned out to be a good idea as severe weather moved in overnight & clobbered nearby Siesta Key overnight with strong winds and at least one twister.  Staying an extra day there seems equally wise in retrospect -- had we tried to make it to Venice & dock at Crow's Nest, between the stiff wind and strong current we probably would have ended up in the restaurant's parking lot before coming to a stop there.

Making the Most of the Guest Stateroom

The trip down the ICW from Marina Jack's (Sarasota) to Gasparilla on Monday (1/18) was uneventful, and certainly calm compared to the offshore seas of 6-10'.  And since it was a holiday, the bridges were generally operating on demand, so the journey was quicker than planned. The only real drama was whether we had enough depth in Gasparilla for Ghost Rider's draft.  On arrival day the answer was 'yes'.  Upon departure the next morning (1/19) -- with a brisk north wind pushing water out at low tide -- the answer was 'not so much'.  We definitely stirred mud and bumped the bottom on our morning departure, and it seems we may have tortured the stern thruster a bit much in the process of getting off the dock...will know for sure when the repair bill comes in.

In the interim, however, we had a great time with our son Nick, his wife Danielle, and their 3 beautiful children aboard.  Sleeping quarters were a bit tight, but youth proved adaptive, at least for a few days.  We had an absolute blast spending such quality time with our family and stirring up our grandkids.

We arrived back in Fort Myers late Tuesday afternoon (1/19), sans stern thruster, but docked up uneventfully and got the grandkids some much needed dirt dweller time to run off some energy.  And today we put them on the plane back home. Missing them already.

St. Pete to Sarasota

Kids & grandkids joined us yesterday in St. Pete, and after we call crammed into Ghost Rider, we departed St. Petersburg Municipal Marina around 10.30 and headed down the inside to Sarasota.  Our original plan to go on the outside got ditched with the next cold front passing through....gale force winds brought seas of 6-10 feet, so the inside path became a no-brainer.  We overnighted at Marina Jack's, and with persistent winds currently clocking at 30 mph, and a much better forecast for tomorrow, we've decided to spend a second night here.

Sheltered from the storm @ Marina Jack's

That will make for a long day tomorrow.  We'll skip Venice to make up our time and try for the Boca Grande or Useppa anchorage, but with 10 bridges to negotiate along the way the ETE is something of a crapshoot.  So we'll have some alternate landing plans along the way just in case.

Will work on some pics for the next post, it's so cool to have family on board with us.

To Venice & St. Pete

Our AIS Track (which is missing some points)

On Wednesday (1/13) we departed our Useppa anchorage around 1000, timed so that we'd arrive at the Crow's Nest Marina in Venice at slack current. We departed the calm ICW on the "inside", exiting to the gulf at Boca Grande Pass and headed north to Venice in a short chop of 3 foot seas, with an occasional 5-footer here & there. No big deal in Ghost Rider, except for the fact that Rick neglected to manually latch the door to the fridge, and one wave rebound proved that Chelle's wine bottles don't bounce, they break when they hit the galley floor.  Apart from that oops, and some (fairly standard) minor system issues, it was an uneventful passage and Chelle took the helm to dock us up at the Crow's Nest with ease.

Later that evening our friends Dan & Juli Eisenberg drove up from Englewood and joined us for a great dinner in downtown Venice. (Luna's....highly recommended for excellent Italian fare, but either split the entree 3-4 ways or enjoy plenty of leftovers....and it's cash or check only, no plastic.)

Today we departed Venice @ 0830 and headed north on the outside again to St. Petersburg; it was a very nice ride today, with only a short period of sloppy conditions at the entrance to Tampa Bay.  St. Pete Municipal Marina seems to be a wonderful place, although so far all we've done is give the boat a much needed bath & put her to bed...we plan to explore the area a little more after the nasty weather passes through tonight & tomorrow.