David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Monday, June 29, 2009
Location: Lake Huron
Coordinates: 43° 15.366′ N  82° 26.224′ W

We left Harsens Island this morning after a couple weeks on my Mom’s dock. It was a great visit with both family and friends, and it was really fun to be docked at my childhood home. This morning’s goodbyes were bittersweet, but when you’re cruising, there’s always another port-of-call to be made — so we’re off to Mackinac Island in northern Lake Huron.

While on Harsens Island we took advantage of (a.) a garage full of tools, and (b.) ready access to a car to get lots of projects done. Some of these were normal provisioning and preparation for another voyage, but others were one-time projects or upgrades to Three@Sea.  Here are a few of the highlights:

• Permanent Installation of Satellite Phone: We bought our Iridium handset while we were cruising in the Bahamas, but it really needed a fixed external antenna, and I wanted it to be mounted on the dashboard. We had been using a temporary external antenna that required a wire to be hanging out of one of the portholes — not very elegant. We mounted a marine antenna atop the stack fin, and mounted the phone to the dashboard next to one of the plotters. This was a pretty big project, but we’re very happy with how it turned out.
• Reorganize All On-board Storage: When we moved aboard Three@Sea last August we had never lived on a boat before, so we weren’t sure what we needed or how to use all the storage. Kathryn took everything out of every space, evaluated whether we really needed it on the boat, and then reorganized everything back into its appointed space. This was a huge, multi-day project, and Kathryn did a fantastic job making Three@Sea more organized and more lean-and-mean.
• Paint Anchor Chain: This was a small but satisfying project. Our three-hundred feet of anchor chain has painted markings every fifty feet to help us figure out how much rode we have deployed. Because they’re used so often, the markings at 50′, 100′, and 150′ were quite worn, and they were getting difficult to see. We dangled the anchor chain into the river, and re-painted these three markings. I’ll be anxious to see how much it helped when we’re anchoring in The North Channel next week.
• Major Food and Supplies Provisioning: About every three months Kathryn does a major provisioning. We’ve tried to time these so that we have access to a car, and position them where there are stores we like (obviously this is a luxury we won’t have once we begin our circumnavigation). We dropped some serious cash at Trader Joe’s, Costco, Target, Avalon Bakery, and a few other miscellaneous local grocery stores. Our newly-organized ship’s stores are now chock full of good stuff.
• Screens for Pilothouse Doors: Our pilothouse doors are Dutch doors, so the top and bottom can operate separately. It’s very nice in warm weather to have the top half of these doors open to get sufficient ventilation into the pilothouse. Unfortunately, when the bugs come out, the doors had to be closed. This wasn’t such a big deal when were were cruising in cool weather. But now that it’s getting to be summer, it’s really not an option to have the pilothouse closed up in the evening. I decided to build some custom screen frames to fit the door openings, which are curved at the top. They work perfectly: Last night we kept the doors open all night, and it was nice and cool in the pilothouse.
• Mount Kayak on the Boat Deck: We celebrated Kathryn’s 50th birthday on Harsens Island, and she received a kayak as a group gift from family and friends. This unique Ocean Kayak is called the “Peekaboo” because it has a glass-bottom portal for viewing the sea life and bottom — it’s very cool. But now we had to figure out how to carry it aboard Three@Sea. The gods were looking out for us on this one: While I was trying to come up with a temporary mounting solution (because I thought I would have to order some brackets), I ended up with a permanent solution. The kayak fits perfectly strapped to the outside of the port railing on the boat deck. The bottom side sits atop the port handrail, which is very strong, so it can easily support the 60-pound plastic kayak. We bought four mesh straps with adjustable ends, and it snugs right up to the railing. Voila!
• Install New Mattress: Our mattress aboard Three@Sea has always been uncomfortable. We tried to make it better by adding a 3-inch foam “topper”, but it still wasn’t acceptable. At home we slept on a Tempur-Pedic mattress, which is a very nice memory-foam mattress that we really liked. I had this crazy idea that we could buy a queen-size memory-foam mattress for Three@Sea, and cut it to fit the odd size of our stateroom berth. We ordered a new Isoform mattress (one of Tempur-Pedic’s competitors) and had it delivered to my Mom’s house. Then, using a sharp carving knife, we sliced the foam to be the same shape as the old mattress, which worked great. We’ve been sleeping on the new mattress for about three weeks, and we love it! We moved the memory-foam topper to Ayla’s bed, so she got a minor mattress upgrade too. [Note: I originally forgot to include this upgrade in this blog, but when I was making the bed this morning it hit me, so I edited the blog to include this item.]

These continuous refinements and upgrades to Three@Sea are all part of the fun of this adventure. I’m sure we’ll have another long list by the time we reach the next place where we have access to tools, a garage, and a car. In the mean time, we’re going to enjoy these latest upgrades.