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Winter Of Our Discontent
March 21, 2010
"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried."
William Shakespeare
Richard The Third
Act1, Scene 1
For the crew of Makara it has indeed been a Winter of discontent. Not only has Old Man Winter been staying way too far south for our tastes, but there will be at least two more years living on the dirt before the work phase of our lives can be wrapped up. Given this is two more years that we had originally planned it made for a somewhat dark view of things!
\We were not alone in cursing the winter this year, as countless cruisers who had or were headed south, got blindsided by extremely cold weather which extended as far south as Miami and the Keys. From the scuttlebutt we have heard in Brunswick it was a very lousy season this year for a lot of people and we can sympathize. We were hoping to do some work on Makara this winter but it was just too chilly most of the time as temperatures frequently dipped below freezing and the roads between Atlanta and the coast frequently iced up.
Although it is regrettable, dear reader, that svmakara.com has been silent, this is only because we have been thinking about the art of the possible. Due to changing time tables and economic factors we went down a rabbit hole asking ourselves the following: "We have some time on our hands, can we take what we have learned so far and build an even better boat?". This led us to focusing on a critical decision: whether we should sell Makara and build a Makara II or keep and upgrade Makara I. For those who have followed our journey for the past several years as we specified, designed, built, commissioned and then sea trialed Makara in the force 9 remnants of Hurricane Ida, this surely seems as if we have become crazed like Richard the evil hunchback who speaks the famous quote above.
The genesis for the thought to replace Makara with another vessel had its roots in the experiences we had in bringing Makara down the coast which we documented in “Lessons From The Outside”.
Perigail our beloved predecessor to Makara, was upgraded with a protected cupola which allowed the crew person on watch to stay completely protected while the boat plowed through wind, rain and heavy seas. Although not shown in this photo, the open back of the cupola had a zippered cover that would completely enclose the crew member on watch while Perigail's windvane steered.
During the awful few days we spent rounding the three great east-coast capes we dearly missed this protection as the person on watch sat in the cockpit and was battered by wind and wave. The dodger on Makara does not provide nearly as much protection as we would like. We have come to favor a solid dog house arrangement and retrofitting that on Makara would be problematic. There are several other hard to fix issues that also came up in our post mortem of the trip, especially the lack of a secondary set of winches in the cockpit, which as you can see from the picture above, even "tiny" Perigail had. Our knowledge of marine systems, both mechanical and electrical, has also increased greatly over time, which we could put into practice to simplify and increase the robustness of a new design. We also have a number of projects that would entail significant work and resource to do on Makara so we logically asked what could we do instead of that. Hence consideration of a Makara II.
To make a long story short we did considerable work on several possible options for Makara II. In the end we could not justify, at this time, significant outlay for the increase in benefit over Makara, hence we are sticking with the “old girl” for now and will focus on gaining more sea time and see how it goes, while still keeping our options open.
So now that winter is starting to go bye-bye, at least here down south, the old project machine is back in action. The work we did do looking at new designs is being applied to Makara. For example we had some NMEA 2000 gear on board, but now plan to extend it to a full bus stem to stern and switching key instrumentation to NMEA 2000 such as tank sensors (replacing a very flaky system), depth and speed sensors. We are also adding an engine interface and a much superior (to our current) flux-gyro compass to the system. In the next entry Nancy will discuss this in a technical article targeted at other cruisers. Last, and important from the standpoint of crew comfort, we are going to finally upgrade the battery bank to the full size needed to run the microwave at sea without killing the electrical system.
Other projects include getting our grill hooked up to the propane system, getting the Spectra water maker plumbed to the water tanks (last step we did not complete before coming south) and doing some upgrades on the fuel handling system of the boat. The later is a fairly major job and will correct a key issue we found with the diesel fuel filters while coming down the coast. There will be a haul out this spring for bottom work and we will have some yard projects as well to make incremental improvements.
The only thing we are still contemplating is the cockpit comfort angle at sea. Our current dodger will do just fine for the Bahamas, a trip which is definitely on for the fall with our adult "kids", Matt & Christan (yeah!), but our thinking caps are still on and running at full speed to sort that out in the long run.
Until next month, fair winds.