Dismasted!

All right, that's not our boat - just wanted to see if you were paying attention!

Our boat, Valkyrie was involved in a little altercation with a railroad bridge. The bridge won.

So, what’s the damage you say? Unknown as yet. Rick thinks it’s probably not too bad, but it really can’t be assessed without taking down the mast. The top is pretty far up there (49 feet – the lowered bridge was 47 feet) and you can use binoculars, but you can’t totally see everything. Rick thinks that the mast itself is ok – if it turns out to be bent, then we’re talking about a whole different ball game. You can’t just bend it back. No, we’d have to have a whole new mast made, and that can’t be done overnight. We would definitely lose the whole summer for sailing, not to mention paying a real fortune.

The guys at the boatyard will take out the mast, but you have to make an appointment to have that done and they are booked for the next four days. Rick spends three days preparing the boat for mast removal, and three sleepless nights worrying about what we will find when the mast comes down. He has to remove all of the sails and halyards from the mast, disconnecting all the complicated wiring (lights, wind indicator, radar, etc.), plus he has to remove everything that holds the mast in place at its base. That includes roping up the cabin table that is normally bolted to the mast.

Meanwhile, the boat has no slip – we gave it up for the summer with the idea that it didn’t make sense to pay for an empty slip while the boat was in Maine. Rick has Valkyrie anchored in Canton, and when he wants to work on her he has no dock for easy access to equipment, and no electricity for power tools. Rick feels like he has to babysit the boat too, since it’s not on a secure mooring or tied up to a dock. What if the anchor should give way in a sudden storm and he’s not there? I've become a boat widow.

The day finally arrives and Rick motors the boat over to Tidewater Marina in locust Point. The guys hook up an enormous crane to the mast and carefully pull it out. They maneuver the mast over to the side of the dock and put it on big, wheeled sawhorses. Then they wheel it over to a spot in the yard where it can be worked on.

The moment of truth has arrived. Rick and the rigger inspect the mast and determine that the mast has made it through relatively unscathed. Various things will have to be replaced – for instance, the spinnaker attachment was mangled - but the mast itself just got some paint scrapes. The rigger tells Rick that this kind of thing (running into bridges) happens all the time. Somehow, I don’t think Rick finds this very comforting…

Mangled Spinnaker Crane

We’re still not sure when we might be able to leave for Maine. Rick wants to take advantage of the mast being down by making some improvements. There are things that he has wanted to do but thought it wasn’t worth taking the mast down for. You know, like your car mechanic will tell you, “As long as you’re in that part of the engine you should have your timing belt replaced, and this and that replaced, etc., etc.” Now he has a golden opportunity to do more work and spend more money! A number of parts need to be ordered, some specially made, and even though Rick can do most of the work himself, he still has to coordinate his efforts with the jobs that need to be farmed out.

The man at work

Meanwhile, Valkyrie has been moved back to Canton. She looks kind of pretty out there, even without her mast, don't cha think? 

Bridges to Nowhere

Chesapeake City

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Becky and Rick are going off on another sailing trip, leading exciting lives, making everyone else feel badly that they have to stay home and work. Chumps all, soldiering on with mundane existences.

Well, let me just tell you how it REALLY is…

We had a terrific plan this year. Rick was going to leave by himself in early June, getting up to Portland by the end of the month. I was to join him up there on July first, when my orchestra’s winter season is over. Then we could spend the summer sailing north, exploring the coast of Maine – a famous sailing ground that we have been unable to enjoy together due to lack of time.

Rick had spent a good couple of weeks slaving on the boat to get ready for the sailing season - re-doing bottom paint, re-fitting the head, and other not-so-enjoyable tasks. Thinking that the boat was now ship-shape, we had our traditional shake-down cruise the last week of May. The plan was to take three days and toot around the Chesapeake, so we headed out from the Baltimore harbor toward the Key Bridge.

I don’t know what it is about that bridge, but it is clearly cursed for us. It seems like every time we try to leave Baltimore we have some horrendous problem, and we’re always right under that thing when it happens. This time it’s the engine. Having just settled onto the foredeck for the cocktail hour, we look back and there’s smoke billowing out of the cabin hatch!

Rick races back to the cockpit and cuts the engine. A fire in the cabin would obviously be disastrous, but so far the smoke seems to be confined to the engine compartment. After some tinkering around down there, Rick determines that the problem is actually with the refrigeration unit – the thing that cools the icebox – and that the actual engine appears to be fine. We end up going out for our little shake-down trip anyway, but Rick admits to me the next day that after reading the manual for the unit (never bothered to read it before!) he now knows that he should have been monitoring the fluid levels. They were down to nothing, and he’s pretty sure he has blown out the compressor. Kinda like blowing a head gasket in your car. The icebox won’t work now, and if you try to use it like a cooler by just adding your own ice, you end up with a big tub of water after just one day. It’s not that well insulated and has no drainage holes.

A working cooler/fridge is something you wouldn’t want to be without on a two or three month voyage. It takes a load of money and another two weeks to get the thing fixed, but Rick is certain that he can still get up to Portland in time to stick with our original plan. He’ll just have to do it a lot quicker and give up on the idea of a leisurely, relaxed trip.

We load him up with provisions and have a tearful goodbye. When we made our original plan, I was looking forward to having almost a month of alone time in our house. Now, that period has been reduced to two and a half weeks, but I feel quite differently about it. My father passed away mid-May, and even though it was not completely unexpected, I’m still grieving and not particularly happy about spending time alone in an empty house. Plus, I worry about Rick going up there by himself. Kind of silly really – he’s done this trip six times by himself, and even when I’m on board it’s not like I’m any big help or anything. But I’m worried anyway.

A few mornings later, I get a casual message on my voicemail. “Hi sweetie, call me when you get up.” When I do get around to calling him back, Rick tells me he’s headed back to Baltimore and is only about an hour away. “What happened?” “Well, I hit a bridge.”

Uh…..what?!!!

Railroad bridge in Mass. - (not the one Rick hit, but similar)

Well this can’t be good. Having just left Chesapeake City, Rick was about to go through the canal that connects the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. You have to time your traverse through the canal with the tides so that you aren’t working against the current, and Rick was out there in the dark, having had very little sleep, at about 4:00am. There are many bridges that cross that canal, and one of them is a railroad bridge that lowers when a train is going through, but otherwise is raised up high. Rick has gone through there many times, and this was the first time he had ever seen it down, but he wasn’t at all worried because it still looked pretty high. Literally, just at the last minute, he realized he was going to hit and he turned the boat hard to port – not enough to save her, but enough to make it a glancing blow instead of a full on smash. The top two feet or so of the mast scraped against the bottom of the bridge, and all kinds of equipment, lines and debris came down onto the deck of the boat. The bow rail had been completely bent out of shape.

So, at least the engine still worked (and of course, the newly repaired refrigeration unit)… Rick motored back to Baltimore. I would be feeling sick about the damage, but Rick is a pretty positive guy and he says he mostly just feels embarrassed. It probably didn’t help that there was another boat waiting on the other side of that railroad bridge whose captain must have seen the whole thing. Good thing Rick doesn’t know them.

We don’t know the full extent of the damage yet, but it's doubtful that it'll be a cheap and easy fix. It’s unknown whether any of our original plan can be salvaged - we may be spending our entire summer on dry land after all (and in the Poor House). Who are the chumps now?

By the way, the bridge was undamaged by the accident.

This video pretty much sums it up:
http://www.prochan.com/embed?f=e53_1351184775