Spot Tracker

Hello all, I have purchases a Spot Tracker ,which is a GPS navigational safety aid.  You will also be able to follow out trip and know where we are at any given moment.  Just click on the Spot Tracker web page located in our Links.  I have also added two weather sites that I use to track the weather, have a look.
The weather is looking good for our trip back to Whitby Ontario.  The plan is to leave Midland on Saturday in the early PM and anchor out at Christina island overnight.  This will let us leave early Sunday morning, around 4 am, and give us a straight rum line to Tobormoy.  I figure we will be under power most of the way across G/B but once we get around Tobormory it will be a slay ride down to Sarina.  We hope to be in Port Stanley for the long weekend to visit with old friends and crack open a few bottles of wine .  Next stop will be the Erie beach Hotel in Port Dover.  If you ever get to Port Dover you have to have the fish dinner at this Hotel.  After that its on to the Welland Canal and then a short sail to Whitby.
The hardest part of any sailing trip is letting the dock lines go.
Doug

All our bags are packed, we're ready to go......

Well, we are just about ready to go on Friday, whew, what a whirlwind of activity there has been in our house during these last few weeks!  I am just so thankful that we have been gradually downsizing over the years.
We have checked the Wind Guru site, and the weather looks favorable for us for a few days anyway.  We might even have to use the iron genny....shhhh....


Keep track of us everybody, we'll keep in touch, ciao!

Doug & Vicki

Moving Our Belongings Aboard

This past weekend, we moved our loot onto the boat.  Everything has it's place, we just have to remember where that is!  You certainly learn very quickly what you really need on board & what you can do without, having said that, there really  wasn't much brought back to the land yacht.

Doug got the GPS all hooked up & the antenna as well, took longer than he anticipated, but a job well done in the end.
We got all the wood seats restored, but could not apply the teak oil, as it kept pouring rain in Midland.  However, it did stay nice & warm & we are thankful to have a dodger & bimini, which we didn't have on Zephyr.

We have one more weekend before we sail on towards Lake Ontario to our home Port of Whitby. We are taking 2 weeks to sail her home, and we are very much looking forward to our adventure.

We had a visitor on Saturday night while we were bbqing & enjoying a glass of wine, a beaver came swimming toward our boat!  He was big!  I said to him "keep on swimming, we are not a wooden boat" LOL!

/)       We will report soon on our way home...until than...smooth sailing!
~~

Ready to Splash

We finally put on the new name "Zingara" Port Whitby last Friday, what a beautiful sunny day it was, blue sky.....
So we removed the ladder brackets, Doug on the inside of the stern, I on the outside, then we measured and applied the 65" wide name.  Than we had to re-install the ladder brackets...well, we used 5200 on the screws & got that all screwed back together, went to attach the ladder & oh oh, it wouldn't attach on one side....ugh...we had the brackets on the opposite sides...so we had to remove the brackets & re-install....trying not to get 5200 on the new decal...it went on Doug's chin hairs instead, but blended in nicely as his goatee already has quite a few white hairs!
 
We got her all done (luckily they were running behind at the Marina), now she was ready to launch, which was tricky as she was in a tight area.  All went well, and she is safely afloat at her temporary dock at Beacon Bay.

Saturday we scrubbed her topsides & attached the bimini & dodger with her new windows, wow!  She sparkles!
Saturday night, we had our first guests aboard, our friends Christine & Terry, and there was absolutely no wine spillage on Zingara!  On Sunday, we took her out for a test sail, she just glides!

Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again

This is one of those jobs that just gets worse the further you get into it.  After finding that the strut and stern tube were out of line there was only one decision left to be made, remove the Strut.  Now that I had the complete drive line removed, it was time to come up with a plan to re-install and re-align the components. I machined two locating bushings, one in the aft end of the Strut bore and one in the forward end of the Stern Tube.  These bushings held the drive shaft central to the two bores.  I also machined two slip bushings that would locate inside the front bore of the Strut and the aft end of the Stern tube.  When everything was in alignment these two bushings would slip into the two bores.  The Strut was bedded back in place with 3m-5200, I think I ended up with more on me then the strut!  Once this was done all that was left to do was line the engine to the drive shaft.  The Dripless Seal was also installed as well.

Enough of this technical stuff.....let's go sailing!

Strut to Stern Tube Misalignment

As Vicki indicated there is a misalignment between the Cutlass bearing the Stern Tube.  The first indication of this was the wear marks on the Cutlass bearing itself.  At the front end of the Cutlass there was excessive wear on the top half of the bearing and at the back side of the Cutlass the wear was on the bottom.  I made up two nylon plugs with a .020” hole drilled in the center of each.  One plug was placed inside the aft bore of the Strut and the second was placed in the front bore of the stern tube.  I then ran a string through each hole and pulled it taught. Now I took measurements at the front of the Strut bore and the aft bore of the Stern tube.  I didn’t really have to take measurements as I could see by eye (yes even with my tri-focals on and my fifty year plus eyes) I could see that the Cutlass bore of the strut was running up.  Remember back in Grade ten when you were doing trigonometry and you said to yourself when am I ever going to use this.  Well I can say I still remember SOH-CAH-TOA!!!!!!!  I pulled out the calculator (couldn’t find the slide rule, god am I getting old) and found that the Strut bore was off half a degree to the Stern Tube.  Over sixty inches this would mean that the drive shaft was 7/16” high to the center line of the stern tube, not good!  What to do??????????

I looked at a few different options but all would only bastardize the drive line (a trade term we use when one doesn’t do the jog the right way).  The strut is now off the boat!  I will give you a post later, on how I re-aligned the strut to Stern Tube.

Launch Date is April 23/10 and Zingara has no drive shaft or impeller.

Here is a picture that makes all this nonsense worth while. It was taken on the island of Anegada BVI.

From Winter Coats to Shorts!

Wow!  What an absolutely gorgeous sunny weekend we had to work on our boat!
Doug finished with the engine, while I started washing the port side of Zingara, she was a dirty girl!
The boat is so high off the ground, I was getting a sore neck stretching with the pole and brush, Doug took over for me and got her looking clean.  We purchased a buffer which brought up the shine beautifully. I took a photo of the port side where it says Legend to show you how shiny Doug got the boat, beautiful!  We have the starboard side left to do next weekend, and we have decided to put one coat of paint on her bottom.....only 3 weeks till launch! Yikes!

The boat yard went from being cold and silent to warm and busy,  with the buzz of buffers going, covers coming off and the laughter and stories from fellow boaters who had come out of hibernation.
It's great to see boating season has begun.....love it!

We enjoyed a great dinner with wine of course, and had an early night of well deserved rest.  The winds were very strong all night, but we were safe all snuggled in. 



Now it's back to the grind....work that is....until next weekend.....I just love working on my boat!