December 8, 2011

Last weekend Carol picked me up in Ventura and I spent the night at her place in LA.  The next day we shopped the gourmet groceries of Los Angeles searching out some Coppa ham (capicola)and other goodies to thank Scott for caring for my dog Yeager.  By late afternoon I was at the airport waiting for a flight to Sacramento.  My friend Jim picked me up in Sacramento, and I took him and his wife Cathy out to dinner at a local Thai restaurant that was a favorite of theirs.  I spent the night at their house, and the next morning Jim drove me all the way to Hidden Harbor to pick up Yeager and my old Nissan truck.  It sure is nice to have good friends!   After saying the difficult goodbyes, Yeager and I started the long drive down to Ventura.  We almost didn’t make it.  At a gas stop in the middle of nowhere, the truck wouldn’t start.  The starter solenoid vibrated and the dashlights flashed on and off, but the engine didn’t turn over.  Hoping it was just a sudden battery failure, I tried pushing the truck down the gentle slope of the gas station lot to push start it (Thank God it was as stick shift!).  On the third try popping the clutch, just as I was running out of driveway, it started.  Whew!  All I had to do then was drive another 400 miles without shutting off the engine.  I did it, but it made for some interesting “comfort” stops.

Once back in Ventura, I spent most of the week working on settling in, running errands and catching up with paying bills and depositing checks.  First chore, though, was replacing the truck battery.  I lugged a spare battery from the boat up to the truck to get it started, then it was off to Walmart for a new battery. 

It was fascinating to see how much the area had grown in the 10 years I’ve been gone.  Much has changed, but much remains the same.  Things seemed further apart than I remembered them, but that might be because I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where they were.  One remembered treasure that was still around was Oxnard Surplus Equipment.  It has all kinds of surplus metal, equipment, parts, hardware, motors, etc, etc, etc.  You never know what you'll find, but it's fun and it's a cheap source of parts and materials if you can find what you want or something that will work.

With the stresses of moving and living aboard, it’s showing more and more that Yeager is old and seems to be getting more feeble each month.  Even with my helping him up and down the boarding ramp, he still has trouble.  After he fell a few times it was clear I needed to do something, so I built him a bed with a guardrail on one of the cockpit seats and added guard rails to his boarding ramp.  Both helped, but it’s still hard for both of us. 

My only other little project was to remove the windlass motor to ship it back to the maker for repairs.  As you may recall, I purchased a costly new Lighthouse windlass in February 2010, and was impressed by it's apparent quality.  Unfortunately, it soon began to manifest some problems.  When first starting it, it would crank very slowly and feebly, but then would gradually build up to normal speed.  It also started oozing a blue-green liquid.  I called the maker, and their rep said it sounded like faulty brushes were causing the slow running.  They require precise tolerances, and the motor maker doesn't always get it right.  He also said the lubricant used is blue-green, and that if too much is used, it can leak out.  Sounds like simple fixes, but such quality control issues don't exactly inspire confidence.  We'll see if they repair it at no cost even though I'm 10 months out of warranty, since it seems to me these are clearly manufacturing defects.  Hopefully I'll have the same type of positive experience I had with WH Autopilots.  Once the autopilot's defects were repaired (quickly and at no cost), the autopilot performed beautifully the entire trip.

Now that I'm more moved in, I’m looking forward to seeing old friends soon, settling into the boat projects, and enjoying life in this wonderful spot.