So as Sandy has finally passed us and we’ve managed to weather it relatively fine in comparison to other locations I finally have a few minutes to write an update as to what happened to us during the storm.

First I’ll tell you what our plan basically was for the storm.

1. Batten down the hatches
2. Weather the worst of it
3. Go for a stroll once it passes and check out what happened to the rest of the Toronto Islands

Hurricane Sandy however had other plans.

We have been very hard aground for quite a while at the marina. Lake levels have been incredibly low this year. Not so shallow that we can’t get ourselves out but it is at a concerning level (Side note: We’re right now at the low point of the lake cycle so with any luck next year will be more regular). This is nothing to totally worry about on a normal year with normal weather.

The Hurricane brought with it extreme pressure changes and waves even in our protected marina (the waves had white caps in some of the basins because of the wind for instance). The Lakes aren’t affected by tides but what we do get is that big storms push large amounts of water around the lakes giving us something similar. Typically this is a gentle process but not under these circumstances. As a result we went from hard aground to floating (something we hadn’t been doing for near a month at this point) in very short time spans. Combine that with the waves and we started pounding on the bottom.

The Toronto Islands are mostly made up of landfill and sand. So buried below the soft sandy soil could be anything including concrete, steel, heck anything that is hard and ungiving basically. The pounding on the bottom essentially punched a hole in the bottom and a leak formed.

J and I were mostly in the galley keeping an eye on how things progressed outside and trying to keep our cats calm. Cosmo (our black cat) frankly didn’t give a crap what was going on and was lounging upstairs with us. Martini (our tabby cat) started acting odd. Normally he’s a rather skittish cat that doesn’t particularly like being held too closely. But he was running up to us and jumping in our laps. Stay for a bit. Jump off. Then run to the stairs. He did this over and over until J decided to follow him to the top of the stairs in the cargo hold. I was on the phone with my parents when she suddenly yelled for me to come on downstairs and that there was a problem.

What we found was that there was nearly a foot of water above the tile flooring in the cargo hold and rising. We do have bilge pumps available but they are 110volt pumps and we don’t have them plugged in, we also didn’t have any high water alarms installed either. This I know is a grievous error and not a good idea in any boat and I can only blame myself for not having such systems in place earlier (the 12volt pumps that were already in there from before have never worked).

J and I quickly jumped into action and threw in all out pumps that we had into the bilge of the cargo hold to try to make headway on the water before we try to totally identify where the leak was coming from. 1 pump was starting to slowly make headway but I threw in a second anyways just to make it go down faster. Once we started making headway I was able to take some photos.

This trip I wanted to basically man the wheel the entire way over but the fates conspired against me. I ended up getting the stomach flu only a few days before this move and even on this day I was still hurling over the rail. Fortunately my friend Mitch (who’s got loads and loads of experience with ships) was on hand to do that while I just ran around with my parents and some friends on board to man the lines (while I also manned the rail). The trip went smoothly and this year and our dock was there waiting for us.

View April 20th 2012 in a larger map

This year is we’re going to have a lot of changes on board structurally as we’re doing a lot of finishing work inside via either contractors or our own muscle. More on that to come throughout the year.

I hope to take Pathfinder out more often this year after some crucial work done on the ship itself (running lights, rudder indicator, radio etc). We’re also planning a trip State side to fuel up as well as it’ll cost us maybe $200 in fuel to get there and back but we’ll save at least $1000 in fuel. Plus it’ll be a fun trip!

Hey all. So a number of things have gone on.

1. We moved the boat! We’re back at Pier 4 for winter again.
2. I piloted the ship out of TIM (thanks to Mitch giving me guidance on how to handle the ship) so now I’m no longer called “Swabby” by Dad.
3. The best news is that on Halloween I asked Jeannie to marry me and she said yes.

Here is a map of our path. I took it out at TIM and headed straight across to Pier 4. Right where there’s the circle is where Mitch took over since the wind was starting to play tricks with us and so I got on the ropes to help creep us along the walls with the ropes (special thanks to Shane as well for helping with the lines despite his hangover from the night before. )

View Saturday October 29 2011 in a larger map

The sun sets on Pathfinder once again after a spectacular series of long overdue nice days. True they’ve been hot, but it hasn’t rained, no drops in temperature and overall the evenings have proven to be quite pleasant. In any case I find myself relaxing after driving back from my parents house this weekend on the front deck looking at the full, yet quiet, B Basin of Toronto Island Marina with the CN Tower to my left lit up by the setting sun. Life couldn’t get much better than this really.

The summer has so far been a rather busy time for me with work and the boat but mostly work taking up a large amount of time. Again I find that refitting a vessel while living on it while still working is, if anything, a test of patience and extremely flexible on board project deadlines. Many of you know that I’m still wrestling with the plumbing for the boat with special focus on getting our head (toilet) done. Everyone seems to marvel at how long we’ve lasted without one on board but honestly after having essentially lived a life style more akin to camping than in a (floating) condo Jeannie and I have (miraculously) gotten used to it. Every day I work on Pathfinder gets us closer and closer to being a fully fitted out live aboard vessel, but with every step forward one tends to run into “surprises” along the way forcing one to either rethink, redo, or rip out something on board. This isn’t due to a lack of planning mind you as I’ve found one of the best ways to shorten project times is to literally think about how to do stuff on board for days and even weeks before actually starting on it. I know this sounds like me being incredibly lazy but I’ll guarantee you that this sort of project requires careful planning above and beyond what normal house renovations require. Here’s an example:

Behind where our toilet will go I have to build a rectangular box to house the sewage hose, water pipe, and electronic system for the toilet. One would assume this would be a straight forward series of 12 pieces of wood (roughly) that is split into 3 different sizes to make a proper box (4 for width, 4 for height, 4 for depth). Well no. Since this is a) a boat and b) an old boat things have warped and shifted into odd angles and what not. One cannot even use something as basic as a level since the boat rocks with the waves and also tends to list (lean) to one side. As a result every piece is a different size yet it is now perfectly square to the floor and to every other piece. Weird eh?

Regardless of all these hang ups we now have both side of the galley completely done cabinet wise (counter top, water, electricity, lighting are still in the works), we have a window AC unit installed (inside the pilot house it can easily hit 30 degrees without the blinds closed and the AC off like we had for the past 2 days while we were gone), ventilation for the cargo hold retro fitted into the cargo hold hatch done, and part of the starboard side repainted with black paint to cover the rust and scuffs from it’s 5 years of neglect in the ocean (Thanks Jeannie!).

So as one can see things are progressing, but life throws things in the way which one needs to take care of.

In the Marina itself our little community expands and contracts depending on the sort of events going on on or around the island and the weather (psch… These fair weather boaters I tell ya). The tour boats still fly on by putting us on display and mentioning Pathfinder prominently, however incorrectly, in their tour speeches. The wild life knows which ships to harass for bread, and we still end up giving tours almost weekly to people who have dreams of working and living on a boat such as ours. But for now I shall sign off calling it a night on my little 65′ slice of cottage life heaven in down town TO before starting the work week anew.

34 degrees Celsius? Honestly? For Pete’s sake this weather is not being kind.

Fortunately we have 1 weapon available for the time being… The lake. It’s still cold water in there so the cargohold stays at a much cooler temp than the pilot house etc which does get very hot. Next week I’ll be dragging the in window AC unit down to put into one of our windows in said pilot house. Cool air should fall from there into the lower areas eventually much more easily than the issue we had in winter where hot air apparently decided to not rise from the cargo holds fire place.

We also install the other 1/2 of the cabinets in the galley and I have a few pictures of that. Just haven’t had a moment to upload them given how busy work has been. sigh

As cheesy as this sounds it really felt like a home coming when we got back to TIM this past Friday. Before we get to far into it here’s the path we took:

View Pier 4 to TIM April 2011 in a larger map

Originally we had planned to make this trip a lot bigger by going out the Western gap then coming in through the Eastern gap and coming into TIM. We didn’t do this for a number of reasons.

1. During winter we used quite a bit of fuel for heating with the Webasto. Near the end we had sorted out the system a bit more thus we got it to use less but still that ate through a quite a lot of fuel.
2. We couldn’t get a fuel truck in to give us more fuel. This was rather ridiculous overall. We wanted 1500L of undyed diesel delivered to us for heating and general fuel (The Webasto is a fuel oil system and fuel oil is just dyed diesel. Legally we can’t run dyed diesel in the boat since we can use it for moving the ship around and undyed diesel is taxed in a particular way for non-commercial transportation…. It’s a bit confusing but whatever)
3. Timing. Basically since the fuel issue was around we could do the trip in a short while and get ourselves safely across, have a drink or 2, and call it a day for Easter weekend. If we had stayed around longer the day would get a bit longer for the entire crew and we’d all get home late.

Overall the entire trip went fairly well with only the typical issues associated with manually dragging a large ship with the wind blowing it into the marina through a narrow channel. Lots of rope and some elbow grease and we were able to pull Pathfinder through the bridge and passed one of the docks that was pointing into the channel a bit. The engine then started up alright and we headed on off across the harbour to the Islands (A trip of 2km roughly). Things were going well until we were just shy of the 1/2 way point when the engine started to conk out the way an engine does when it has no fuel. A number of questions raced through my head really quickly.

Had my last fuel sounding been off drastically?

Did we really not have 600L’s in fuel left?

Were we going to be in serious trouble and get blown into the airport before we got rescued?!

Turns out none of those. Apparently right before winter we shutoff the fuel lines to the engine just to stop any fuel leaks we might have. So ya. Whoops! This just reinforces that I need to get a sensor array working in the engine rooms so we have a ships status screen of some sorts.

The other issue that we had was the weather. It was gorgeous no doubt but when I had woken up that day it was perfectly calm with NO wind at all. By the time we were ready to set off (around 11:45) the wind had picked up and was starting to blow the ship sideways (Ships such as Pathfinder have no sails and don’t use wind as a mode of transportation BUT since we have a super structure [The house like section above the hull part of the boat] we have a lot of something called “freeboard” which is the amount of surface area of the ship above the water. THIS acts like a sail and since Pathfinder has a LOT of weight it takes a lot of pulling to stop it from drifting away since the wind was blowing us west into the middle of the marina.). By the time we got to the Deep Pike Cut, where we have to keep an eye out for a hidden sand bar that depending on the water depth, we couldn’t see through the waves since it was a bit choppy. Regardless we made it through with no issues and managed to get to our dock with no incident… minus our dock have 2 ships on it temporarily which got out of our way REALLY quickly.

Once tied up it was like a really nice home coming. Saw a lot of faces I recognized and they recognized our crew back which was nice. So now everything is as it should be. Back at the island where it’s nice and quiet, the cottage country in the middle of down town Toronto.

Big thanks to Niel, Sandy and John Cameron along with Marjorie. Also thanks to Shane from Pier 4 for helping with the ropes. Naturally a HUGE thanks to my Dad for piloting us across (something I hope to learn how to do properly this year)!

Jeannie and I have just completed on the Pathfinder at Pier 4 (more or less). Things have been going rather well even if the ship isn’t 100% complete. We now have most of the equipment ready to be installed but we’re still working on wood work. Today I hope to get the galley paneled and with Dad’s help get some electrical run. Although that sounds like a rather large amount of work Dad and I have decided that if we don’t get to it, then we don’t get to it. This week is our week of recovery since the mad rush we did the end of last week (where we did the majority of the wood work, finished 90% of the insulation and vapor barrier installation, and brought Pathfinder across to Pier 4.

Wow. You can really tell this is an early morning post. I’m just meandering all over the place with topics. Whew. Ok. I need coffee…

Back to how it was on board Pathfinder. Most of the time the temperature right now hovers around 20 degrees Celsius in the pilot house which has become our temporary master bedroom until the wood work in the cargo hold is done (right now it’s acting as wood storage and my workshop). The bathroom right now is by far the most insulated place in the entire boat… considering it’s holding onto all the last batons of insulation ready for installation when we have the rest of the framing up for the cargo hold. The galley right now has a picnic table in it along with some of the rest of our miscellaneous gear and kitchen utensils. We hope to have this mostly sorted out say end of next week but we probably won’t drop the mattress down to the cargo hold until the week after some time since next weekend we’re getting our HUGE Wabasto heater for the boat. This new heater will be total overkill for our purposes and is a bit pricey… But at this point a bit of overkill on heat for the coming winter is a good thing

Aside from the mess and general disorganized nature we’re living in, Jeannie and I are happy. We have our own space!

So Pathfinder made its final journey for the year from Toronto Island Marina to Pier 4 this year. Naturally since this is one of my stories things didn’t exactly go as planned as you can see by the map below of approximately where we went.

View From TIM to Pier 4 in a larger map

First was the break out from TIM that was a bit fun but not overly scary. As some of you know we were hard aground. Thinking back on it we may have been as much as 18 inches into the mud at times so a good portion of our propeller was buried… Mind you with a 40 inch prop that really amounted to a hill of beans really.

We cast off the lines… no movement.
Dad started the engine at low… no movement.
We throttled up higher… no movement.
We maxed it out… It slowly pulled itself backwards into the deeper waters of the middle of the marina. Marginally deeper that is. We were still dragging bottom but only a bit. We had a piling post put in for us for next years dockage which was in our way for turning out (our ship has a huge turning radius) so some of the TIM dock hands help push us around so we could get out easier and then we were off to brave the Deep Channel pass.

“Why ‘brave’ Josh? It’s a deep channel! No problems there right?”

Yaaaa. About that. It’s deep in places but that channel has had freak sand bars pop up with the crazy weather systems pushing the water around. Regardless though we did get out without hitting bottom and kept a decent amount of space beneath us most of the way. Part of the issue is that we don’t have a working depth sounder so we never really know how much water is beneath us at any given point so it’s all done by eye balling the depth (correction: we HAVE a depth sounder… it just doesn’t work well if it works at all). Once we got to the buoys outside of the channel we were in the deep water of the Toronto Harbour area.

There I called up Pier 4 to ask if we had permission to slide right on in since I knew that there was 1 guy that “needed” to get in before us. A bit of back story on that and why we didn’t go into the slip on Friday like we had originally planned because the other vessel needed the space around us to get into his slip for winter (the channel into the marina is just shy of 30 feet across and Pathfinder is a whole 18 feet wide so it makes it a bit tight for anyone to maneuver). That timing worked out well for us anyways so we had no issues. We decided to try maybe for Saturday then… The guy had to reschedule his entry date again due to engine problems. So we said we’d be in early Monday morning… Annnnnnnnnnd so did he. But that he’d be at latest noon… Mind you we got a lot of work done Saturday and Sunday so having a Monday departure was ok. Just the time was getting late especially with me having to work on Monday as well. We call up Pier 4 and the other vessel still isn’t there because he’s getting a pump out across at RCYC. So we end up taking a toddle around the harbour area completing 1 loop.

During this Pier 4 calls again and informs me that they’re STILL not there and that it may be a bit later. So we decided to do yet another loop of the harbour as you can see. At one point we thought we saw the other vessel and did a bit of zig zagging to let him get in front of us so we could just follow him right on in. But when he got closer to Pier 4 he veered to the west and headed for the western gap. Just then Pier 4 called again and said he wasn’t there yet so I called to Dad at helm that we couldn’t come in yet, but Pier 4 interrupted and said to just come in now since it was after noon anyways and the other boat would just have to shuffle in around us. So with some maneuvering we slid right on into our new home at Pier 4 on the western wall just passed the white draw bridge.

Thanks to all that helped out with the journey!
Mom, Dad, my number one gal (you know who you are), Skipper Cheryl, and Mitch!

Yesterday we decided that we would try to leave later at night with the tide just to make the passage that much quicker. The speed part worked out well as we were able to hit 10 knots while in the area outside of Eastport with the islands, the down side was that with minimal lighting and basically no light from the moon that night we couldn’t see the buoys at all. To solve this Neil and myself went out onto the bow with flash lights to light up the buoys as we could find them. Let me tell you that breeze from the ocean is cooooooooooooooooold. So it took us a bit more time to get out of that area and into the actual ocean than we had anticipated and the entire journey part went off with no more of a hitch than going down the wrong side of an island part way requiring us to double back on our path. No biggie really.

Now that I we were out in the ocean we could start our shifts which was 2 people awake for 6hrs, then another 2 people awake for 6hrs. Since it was my turn off I could rest and relax… HAHA Just kidding. The “calm” weather that we were told about was technically “calm” for that stretch of the ocean. By calm they mean 10 to 12 foot waves constantly tossing us. Fortunately our course aimed us straight into the waves so we pounded through them fine enough. UNFORTUNATELY I discovered that I get violently sea sick in those conditions and spent the next day (yes ALL night and all day pretty much) hurling onto the back deck.

Pro tip to those that get motion sickness and plan to take on a trip such as this. Do NOT have rum and cokes, fish and chips, and red wine right before heading on out. Tangy was the flavour and disgusting was the experience.

So anyways my shift began which I pretty much just tried to soldier through as much as possible between bouts of “christening the back deck”. Things were going fine until near the end of my shift when disaster struck. The steering became increasingly difficult to operate at all to the point where steering was near impossible to keep a steady course (of which we had had a hard time due to the waves and the inaccurate steering system anyways but this enhanced it 10 fold). Little did we know that at this point the start of a long series of problems was just beginning. My Dad woke up from his night early and Jon and I informed him of the issue with the steering system. We decided we’d go down and see the issue first hand.

The steering system is a custom and overly complicated mess of pipes and pumps. Behind the steering wheel is a sort of mini-pump that when turned pushes steering fluid down to a compressor pump that ups the pressure from the engine turning. That is kept full by a resevoir that is nearby the pump and the fluid is kept cool by a cooling system attached to a pipe on the water intact for the engine. FINALLY we get to the pipes that go to the piston that turn the rudder. What broke or what we SHOULD have noticed that broke before we did what we thought was a good idea was the belt that ran the compressor pump on the engine. We should have noticed this and just soldiered on but we decided to stop the engine to see if there was something we could do. A few things were going on at once at this point that we hadn’t fully thought through. First off the waves were coming from the South South East direction while we were heading more or less South and on top of that the wind was coming from the South East. When we shut the engine off to have a look we lost steerage (like in a car if you’re not moving forward you can’t steering) and were hit by a big wave that turned us sideways to the waves. This rolled us extremely dramatically throwing cargo and people all over the place. My Dad at the wheel at that point hollered down for us to get the engine back running. An operation which I had not done before nor had Jon who was with me. So I was hitting the switches and hollered that I had no idea how to do this. Jon to his credit was a sea of calm during this and just said “Calm down. We’ll be alright.” at which point my brain instantly painted a picture of us capsizing and drowning while locked in the engine room. I managed to get the engine back running regardless and we got steerage back. So we took 5 (oddly enough I wasn’t sea sick during this moment of terror) and then surveyed the damage. The entire saloon/galley area was trashed. The table was overturned, provisions were thrown all over the place but the only casualities were a bottle of beer and a jar of pickles. Once those 2 smells had combined and heated up I naturally took my spot at the stern hurling some more. Yay me.

As a point of interest Neil pretty much slept through all of this. The guy is crazy. He was smiling like a maniac while at the wheel when we were pounding through the waves. I basically took mini cat naps between bouts of hurling. To add to this part of the journey we believe there is something happening with the electrical system as some things seem to be acting a bit weird at times (Radar, and radio most notably). This is not a good sign since we have to dock at Cape Cod in the middle of the night.

(Tune in next week for the rest of the hurling express. I should be adding the next article when I have a few minutes to myself.)

Today was another busy one. We finished fitting on the new Radar to replace the old one with a jury rigged scaffolding we made out of some lumber that was left on board, we also hooked up the auto pilot the best we could to the old steering wheel that is in the pilot house (an original wooden wheel from a Canadian Schooner of all things!). We also hooked up the head to a stable pseudo platform just below and behind the wheel house with straps and screws and a weird slab of wood and twisted metal we found. Should be sturdy enough for the strongest of craps. Although we bought a water tank for the express purpose of feeding the toilet with water we opted to use 2 barrels we bought in Eastport instead to keep things simple, those will be lashed to the starboard rail during the trip.

We got ready to move the ship around near a crane at the end of the pier to pull down the mast (The previous day I had drilled a whole bunch of holes around the base of the mast about 1′ up to act like perforations to make it easier to cut with the Sawsall today). A few things happened that made this a particularly ticklish operation. First the engine wouldn’t start properly so we called over Butch (one of the previous Captains of the ship) to help us start it properly which he did by spray ether directly into the air intake. Then when we pulled out nice and slowly the auto pilot got in the way of proper steering of the ship (it wasn’t until later that we discovered we had left the clutch on the thing on thus locking it in place… didn’t matter anyways turns out the zip ties we used to attach the gear to our wheel were too weak to control the wheel anyways and literal snapped like dry noodles). Next since this was the first time we had taken it out ourselves my Dad was at the helm… We tried to approach the pier twice before we veered out to the bay a bit and make 1 last attempt. This ended up being more exciting than we thought, the boat being as heavy and big as it was, AND unfamiliar at this point essentially got away from my Dad controlling it a bit. The rollers that Hal (another previous owner and the broker for the boat) built are designed so that the “Bruce Anchor” when pulled up would roll up onto it and seat neatly in place. In our case it acted like a powerful wood plane and shaved of 2 inches and several feet of wood from the dock. This literally threw wood and gear all over the place… but the boat stopped in the right location after a bit of man handling from the lines that were hanging from the pier. Soooo ya… That was dangerous.

Anyways we’re leaving tonight with the evening tide… Seriously how many times does one get a chance to say that?