My watch got damaged on the last passage so I am completely lost in time lately. I think it has been about a week since I last wrote a blog. Weirdly time seems to go very blurry out here in the blazing hot tropical Caribbean islands without a watch to orient me. Was it yesterday…?   3 days ago…? last week….?    meh… who can tell….?

For the last week I have been suffering dearly for my boat. My hands are so cut up I have to first aid them everyday to prevent infections. The reality of living on a yacht in the nasty horrible salty ocean is that everything breaks and falls apart so fast. I had a new (less than a year old) mouse for my computer… Kaput last week. Sometimes it feels like as fast as I can clear things off the to-do list more things get added. It is frustrating.

As the Captain…  all alone wild girl responsible for EVERYTHING about this boat, who depends on this boat for her life and safety, when WildChild is broken I feel it deeply, like a giant ball of anxiety and stress that will only go away once I heal my girl. I am a very tough conqueror who sometimes gets focused like a laser beam. Important repairs consume me to the exclusion of all else. This stubborn “grit” as Clint Eastwood would say, is sometimes to my own personal detriment.

Come along and share my last week with me…

 

Checking in

I did mention that I am lost in time, so please forgive me if I am having trouble holding the chronology together for you. So like a week ago…?  maybe 10 days ago or so… I made my arrival to Grenada with no fan fare. The first horrible knot of anxiety WildChild gave me was the engine failed upon arrival, I think I mentioned that in the last blog. The second knot was that I was anchored in a rocky area and feared my anchor was not set properly. I was now living alone again on WildChild with only my teddy bear for company. I was locked in under a Q-flag until cleared by the local health officials, which didn’t take too long.

 

 

The check-in process was smooth enough for me but the little glitch upset Candy a fair amount. The Covid results that usually come in by 3pm did not come in until around 8:30pm that night. So Rather than clearing in Friday I went to shore to clear in Saturday morning.

The check-in process is something that always causes me anxiety, as a wild child I just LOVE freedom and strongly dislike “being under tight control” which governments show the most at airports and border areas. What is kinda cute though, is that down here in Grenada, the “tight” government border control was a cute little shack with a picnic table outside it.

 

 

You are not even allowed to step inside the shack they make you do your paperwork outside on the picnic table. I know this lesson, smile at all costs and suspend all logic and reason for the afternoon, open your purse… and be unlimitedly patient. The Grenada customs and immigration people down here have a history of being rude and unfriendly but it seems that problem has been overcome. The agents were kind and polite. They did their mumbo jumbo paperwork while I sat outside in the heat. All my papers were in order and in a short time I was dating and signing about half a dozen pieces of paper to please them.

What I like, is that they only take for you $50ec per month to be here unlike Antigua which gets you for $100ec + per month. Grenada is cheaper than Antigua… so yay…!     🙂

Paper work in order I was free to wander around now. The pressing priority was my damaged engine. I dinghied over to the Grenada yacht club, made friends with the security guard, a cool dude nicknamed “Ninja” for his martial arts background. He helped me understand the land area I was near and where I could / should go to try and find parts.

The Island marine store has its own dinghy dock at the head of the bay. I dinghied over and was immediately approached by local….   hmmm…  vendors…  hustlers….  not sure what to say. A white girl alone down here attracts a lot of attention…. sigh… the story of my life I guess. I am getting better at handling them. I secured my dinghy and made it to the store 23 minutes after it closed…!   grrrr….

Repairs would have to wait until Monday when the store reopens.

I returned home alone and Teddy and I celebrated sunset together in the rolly anchorage.

 

 

The next day my focus and concern became the status of my anchors. I was going to be stuck here for a while and I wanted to inspect my holding. I dove down with the go-pro camera to have a look and was not terribly pleased with what I found.

I have told y’all many times before that I use a sentinal anchoring system but I think I have not explained it to y’all for a while now. So here is another quick description for any sailors out there. The idea is, you set your main anchor as per normal, then climb about 20-30 feet of chain back in. Then you attach your sentinal anchor, a BRUCE anchor with about 10 feet of very heavy chain, with a shackle to a link in the main chain. Then play out the 20-30 feet of chain and drop it all. It serves to guard your main anchor by holding the chain down and securing a perfect scope on the main anchor. It also gives you double the holding power and will reset itself no matter which way the wind comes.

Well, one thing you do not want to see when you dive your two anchors is this….

 

 

It was a 23 foot deep free dive down, dangerous for me with my heart condition, but I found em both. This is NOT what you want to see. I have shown pictures before of what well set anchors look like and this is not it. The bottom was all rocks and small coral formations. There was nothing for the anchors to dig into.

I WAS NOT SET INTO THE BOTTOM… THIS IS NOT SAFE…!

This did not give me a good feeling inside. I am alone with a disabled engine in a rolly exposed anchorage, anchors barely holding on.

At the moment, my engine runs, it will turn on and go, it only has a cooling problem. It will over heat quickly, but as is… I could use it for about 3-5 minutes in an emergency. Once I start taking it apart I will lose this emergency use. I did not want to have my engine completely disabled any longer than necessary. I delayed the repair until Monday morning when the parts store would be open again.

 

Engine Repair #1

 

Monday morning I began the suffering.

I am not a mechanic. I do not like working on engines. I am afraid of engines, lots of power and fire / explosion risk that scares me. Lots of things I do not understand that can go wrong. I am fortunate enough to have the original engine manual onboard. I had spent the previous day studying it, consulting with friends, and trying to take pictures to find the leak. The best I could figure it was in or near the fresh water pump output hose going up to the head.

It almost sounds like I know what I’m talking about huh…   🙁

 

 

The biggest problem was, of course, limited to no access to the area in question. This port side of the engine butts up against the galley fridge wall and is an unmovable object. I cannot see this area directly and had to use cameras and mirrors to even try to inspect this area. I added water to the system and tried to locate the leak. I could not resolve it.

I had to turn the engine on and begin circulating the water after the pump to find the leak, but I am alone. I cannot be at the engine control console AND looking at the engine at the same time. If I do this and something goes wrong, I will not be near the off switch. I am so scared, such a chicken really, but I took a deep breath, summoned my courage and just did it.

The super exciting news is…. the leak was readily apparent. There was a tiny split in the hose I am pointing to in the diagram above.

A hose…. this can’t be so hard…  I can do this…   how hard can it be to change a hose…?   Okay… I am flooded with relief, I can do this.

Now for the hard part…. I have little to no access to the area in question. I have to hug the front of the engine, reach only my right hand (i am left handed) in behind a buncha dirty engine stuff, and without any visibility, working by feel alone, try to remove the old hose.

It is insanely hot down here everyday. I am working in my “work bikini” and dripping in sweat all day. I keep getting cramps in my legs from spending hours crouched in uncomfortable positions. I have to feel my way behind a buncha stuff I don’t understand to figure out something I cannot see. IT IS HORRIBLE WORK…!

I do eventually get the hose removed before noon. I dinghy it to shore and bring it with me to the chandlery, my big plan to say “here… I need exactly this”.  It seemed like a good assumption… at the time.

I bring home exactly the same hose size and begin to try and install it.

my assumption bit me in the ass….

Well…. it seems… unbeknownst to me…  this old hose was not an original part that had failed. Some previous monkey had installed an improper 1 1/4 hose where there should have been a 1 inch hose. I  got my new hose on easily enough but noticed it did not seem to want to clamp down properly. Hours suffering to figure this out the hard way. I am so frustrated I begin to cry.

FUCK IT….  the store is still open… I remove my “new” wrong sized hose and go back and find and buy the “correct” sized hose. I have been working like a machine all day.

I return to the engine that is definitely not my friend right now. I have not eaten all day and have not stopped for any breaks… I need to conquer this problem A.S.A.P.   and I am losing daylight.

I can say I understand why the previous monkey did not install the correct size hose… it was fuckin hard as shit to do. It just would not cooperate. I spent hours trying to get it on. I could get one end or the other on but not both at the same time. The thick hose did not want to flex and bend in the tight limited space. I could only work with one hand and blind.

 

 

I admit… I can get very stubborn and very determined when I need to. I had a friend recently call it “true grit”, a compliment in man language. I worked myself like a machine until my machine broke down. I overcame ignorance and fear and anxiety and stress and physical barriers working non-stop, focused like a laser beam, until I declared victory.

CAPTAIN WILL NOT FAIL…!

As the day wore on my body began to physically fail me. Without eating or resting all day… my heart condition began to punish me for neglecting my body. While French kissing the dirty engine in a tight embrace and cursing her designers for making my life miserable I began passing out, my blood pressure suddenly letting go. I would pass out in uncomfortable positions and come to disoriented and in pain. My hands and arms all cut up from working in the tight difficult space. My body crumpled in an awkward position.

I would come to… in tears…  with sweat burning my eyes… struggling to breathe in the oppressive heat….  fight to reorient myself…  shake out the legs cramps… and get back to it. In the last hour I was passing out about every 2 minutes and struggling to come back and finish the repair before dark.

Good news….   I did eventually win…!!!!

Bad news….   it was really really hard to do

I really pushed my body too far…

Bad Lexi… bad girl….   :O

When will my robot body be ready… I need something as strong as my iron will that can keep up with me…! I don’t like how frail this human body is. Why does it keep breaking down on me?

 

Changing Anchorages

The anchorage outside of St. Georges is way too rolly for me to be able to play my VR games on deck in the evenings. The holding is terrible. It is a bad anchorage. The next morning, with my newly repaired engine (fingers crossed) I decided to lift anchor in the early morning during the thermal calm and move WildChild to a better anchorage.

Solo sailing is not new for me. I am very smart and tough and a GREAT sailor… I know how to walk my steps and go thru the process alone. I had to plan my departure preparing for an engine failure at any second, my engine had not yet earned my trust. The terrible news is… when I raised my anchors, it was clear, they were just laying on the bottom, no resistance to lifting them out at all.

YIKES….!

 

 

I was relieved when my engine seemed to be working great again. I raised a double reefed main alone and killed the engine once I had fallen off the wind. The sail was a short one, only took about 3 hours from anchor up to anchor down. I had to go south down out of the lee protection of the island and around the corner against the exposed trade winds. Straight upwind again but WildChild does this so well.

The passage was not actually that bad, waves mostly 1 to 1.5 meters for most of it. It did make their dominant wave period a bit uncomfortable, smashy. It was coming out around Glover island when the waves got up over 2 meters and began washing me in the cockpit. The last few miles were a bit rough and I made sure I was always tethered in. Solo sailing is very hard on WildChild, I have to move between the helm and center cockpit to work the lines. Bashing to windward the yacht is on her side and heaving 2 meters up and down with salty spray everywhere.

I know my girl and I am very good at this sailing thing though. I eventually sailed into the mouth of the bay and got her to windward to drop the sails alone. Engine on, I began motoring into the bay looking for my adopted boat parents. They knew I was coming and had motored out in their dinghy to meet me. Mom climbed onboard and dad lead the way in his dinghy to a clear spot in the anchorage behind their moored yacht.

I have been looking forward to seeing them again for over a year now. Bryan and Regina are an older American couple sailing out their retirement down here in the Caribbean. I met them almost two years ago in this very bay and they pretty much adopted me right away. They have a penchant for adopting lost stray animals and this soggy sea rat was quickly embraced by their kindness. I have no parents and Bryan and Regina pretty much adopted me from the first day they met me.

So now and forever more referred to as my boat mom and dad.

As I was working on getting WildChild properly anchored in this tight mooring field behind mom and dad I noticed my engine temperature was beginning to climb slowly, oil pressure going low. I got the anchor set and killed the engine.

Later I went down below and opened up the engine compartment and my heart sank. Instead of the engine pan being filled with coolant…. it was filled with thick black engine oil this time…!

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuckity fuckin shit mother fucker shit fuck….!

I boil with frustration

I just can’t seem to get back to all calm happy and good onboard again. What the hell has gone wrong now I wonder thru the tears of frustration.

 

Engine Repair #2

Wouldn’t it be lovely if my engine would just work and stop asking for so much attention all the time. At first I feared I might have blown the head gasket or cracked the oil pan or something horrible like that. It was not a little oil, it was like almost all of the engine oil in the pan now.

I strip out of my Captains bikini and change into my dirty work bikini. After the engine has cooled down I begin inspecting things. It seems… this is a small issue, a fixable issue, but a frustrating issue.

My engine has asked me for an oil change, which I know how to do, and have the supplies onboard to do. I am in a convenient safe bay and this is a good place to do such a thing. I am grateful to WildChild for at least breaking down in a good place and not a remote place.

I will include the diagram and images below to try and help explain it…

 

 

…it seems the people who designed the engine… stupidly… placed the oil dip stick opening exactly where the fresh water coolant hose needs to go. As two objects cannot occupy the same space, this did not go well when I installed the new hose.

The new hose is in there very tight. It is a thick proper hot water hose and therefore not very flexible. After I finished installing it the day before I put the oil dipstick back into its hole. Now either I did not get it all the way in, because the hose prevented it, or I did get it in but the hose pressed against it until it popped back out. I am unsure which.

So while sailing, port rail in the water, engine tilted 35 degrees on its side with the rest of the boat, the engine oil poured out. Easy enough to rectify… sort of. It is a terrible design to put the two objects in conflict like this. I cannot change the design of the engine.

The old hose had a dent in the side of it to accommodate the dipstick. Now that the new hose was hot, the rubber would be more pliable. I used a bunch of screw drivers to wedge and press against the hose to deform it to create a dent for the oil dipstick to have room to exist in. As the engine and hose cooled I am hoping it will eventually be happy to take the new deformed shape.

I did the oil change, which I admit WildChild needed. The oil was very thick gunky and dark dark black. I added Lucas oil additive for older engines this time and changed the oil filter. Pumping out the oily mess was unfun but I have a dirty oil pump hose for the occasion. Dirty Captain Lexi wins again after a few hot sweaty miserable hours of suffering again for her boat.

I will have to keep an eye on that stupid dipstick from now on.

Fingers crossed WildChild will stop asking for engine attention…  I hate doing engine work.

 

Civilization

My boat mom and dad welcomed me and wrapped their arms of protection and comfort around me. My first hugs in a long time, I could finally begin to relax and feel safe and protected again. Feeling safe and protected is something you land people take for granted. I live a dangerous life alone on the ocean which is a dangerous place. I do not get to feel safe or protected very often. Being a soft sensitive girl I would like to feel safe, secure and protected far more often than I do.

 

 

They welcome me on their yacht anytime I want company or just to feel safe. The last time I had this sanctuary of safety was with my friend Peter back in Feb/ March. Mom and dad have fed me dinner several times already. They know all the inns and outs of this place. They know how to catch the busses and get around. They know where all the good shops are. They know where to go to get parts and supplies. Mom took me shopping on the bus over to the “good” grocery store so I could replenish my supply of milk again.      🙂

 

 

They have a high speed dinghy making water transportation easier. They are happy to give me a lift when I need to access shore. It would be a long slow dinghy ride in my little 4hp dinghy.

One of things about cruising life is food cravings. You give up a lot of convenience to live out here. You would never think of yourself having a craving for McDonalds food… until you spend years on the ocean and now you CANNOT have it. Then you start to dream about it.

I have been dreaming about chicken wings for months now. I have not had good chicken wings since Luperon years ago. Andrew had a chef at the patio that made perfect wings. As soon as mom and dad knew I had been craving chicken wings for months now they knew exactly what to do. There is a restaurant at the marina in front of us that has chicken wing Wednesdays.

 

 

Mom and dad took me to shore with them a few days ago and treated me to a chicken wing orgy of heavenly yumminess. Ohhh goodness that made me so happy. I am still having happy dreams about how wonderful those wings were. All credit to the chefs at that restaurant…. they did chicken wings like professionals… just perfect.   Maybe next Wednesday I might try it again. Just go hog wild and treat myself like a princess.  Little things make me so happy.   🙂

 

 

Plumbing Repair

Two days ago I had just finished making water and wanted to clean out the galley sinks. They develop a smell. The salt water combined with food particles go down your sink drains and develop into a zoogeal mass that stinks to high heaven. It is something you need to know about and tend to when you live on a yacht in the ocean. Usually about once a month, when I notice the smell getting worse, I just flush a bucket of seawater down the sinks, then close the seacock valve and pour down a bottle of white vinegar. Let the vinegar sit for a few hours then flush it out. It usually helps descale the hoses and kill off much of the organic bacteria in there.

This time though… when I flushed it, I heard water dripping onto my floor.

 

 

Grrr…  this made me so frustrated. It seems like everything has been breaking down on WildChild in the last few weeks. Repair after repair…. repairs I don’t feel like doing… fixing things I don’t want to have to fix. Again what I want has little bearing on my reality.

I spent an entire day… morning to night…  suffering again, to repair this. My already cut up and sore hands now getting covered in bacteria and organic goo begging to infect me. Working in the tight space with the sharp objects creating more cuts on my hands.

Of course this system was never done properly either. The sink drains are 1 1/2 inch fittings… the hose they used is 1 1/4 inch hose. The output hose installed thru the hull is a 1 inch seacock. Of course the world of plumbing does not want to make adapters available because it is not the “proper” thing to do. But proper and reality often differ on a yacht.

It is sooooo HOT here all the time… we are now nearing the peak of summer. The temperature inside the yacht is hotter than body temperature most days now. WildChild keeps a good supply of spare parts and I began digging thru my plumbing supplies to create some kind of MacGyver creative solution to the new problem.

This repair became high priority. I now had a 1 1/4″ inch hose exposed to the ocean able to sink my boat. Sure the break in the hose is above the ambient waterline… but how far above I am not sure. I closed the seacock and disabled my galley sinks until the repair was done.

It was a very difficult repair. I did not have the necessary parts onboard. Dad took me to the hardware store to buy supplies and try to mickey mouse some type of solution to this difficult problem. My first few attempts failed. I had none of the “proper” parts to make the repair. I changed out both sink tailpieces for new plastic ones. This started out as 1 1/2″ inch hoses.

Then I built a giant Frankenstein freaky huge Y to connect them. Huge tough and functional but it took a long time to find parts and build. Then, with no adapter to get down from 1 1/2″  to  1″ hose I created one using random parts and hoses and clamps I had around. I actually used a piece of black rubber engine coolant hose in the converter.

Again I became laser focused like a machine and stubbornly determined to conquer. Again I worked all day in the brutal heat to fix this before sunset. Again I did not eat rest or take any breaks all day. Again my body began to fail me. By sunset mom and dad came by the check on me and invite me with them to go to the chocolate festival. When I came up on deck to greet them I nearly passed out. I began shaking and tremoring and getting white spots in my vision.

I had to decline their offer because my girl was still injured. With fresh blood dripping down my hands I burst into tears. Mom ordered me to take a break and drink a gatoraide. I was running my frail body down below its breaking point again. BUT…  I have to suffer for my girl… she needs me… there is nobody else to take care of her. WildChild has been making me suffer for her all week. Repair after repair I keep grinding away at the to-do list that never ends. I work and suffer and overcome anything I have to so that I can take care of her. I suffer until my body breaks down and I begin to cry again as I wake up from another feinting spell.

 

This week I have been suffering for my boat a lot.

 

I dream about someday making naked snow angels in the beautiful cold Canadian snow where I belong.

I can’t stand this brutal tropical heat….

I’m dyin down here, suffering all day everyday…

 

 

 

cheers sailors

 

Captain Lexi

 

…. naked and sweaty and hot and frustrated ….