Moku Pe'a Bora Bora Passage Video

On October 24, 2014, I flew from San Francisco to Bora Bora to help Hawaii friend, Bill Leary, sail his Beneteau 351 MOKU PE'A from Bora Bora to Kaneohe. It was a wonderful 2,500 mile passage and a great break from the projects at a time when Northern California turned cold and rainy.

I made a video that captures the essence of the trip. If the box below doesn't have the video, you can link to it directly at YouTube here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjfYNkYfKP0

You can also read Bill's entertaining and very well written journal entries from his 7-month cruise from Hawaii to Tonga to French Polynesia, including an 11-day passage eastbound from Nuku'alofa to Raivavae, and eventually back to Hawaii here:  http://mokupea.blogspot.com/2014_03_01_archive.html

Long Cruise Break

After completing the installation of the 12 opening ports in mid-October, I took a 7-week break, flew to Bora Bora, and helped a friend from Hawaii youth days, Bill Leary, bring his Beneteau Oceanis 351 from there back to Kaneohe, Hawaii. It was a fabulous passage and a video of it is about two-thirds complete. It should show up here in a few days.

The ports have had a good test. Marin has already gotten 20 inches of rain from October through mid-December. Last year, we had 12.5 inches from October through June. There was one very small drip that was cured by tightening the port's cam latches a little. Otherwise, things look perfect. It was a long haul, repairing the cabin side, painting, and installing the ports, but I'm very happy with the results.

Before:

















During:

After:

Refit Video - Episode 1

Quicksand

I don't know why I so much dread the sanding. It only takes a minute.

Brush Streaks

Kuewa's exterior cabin side got its 8th coat of paint today. Four epoxy primer coats and now 4 Awlgrip polyester urethane finish coats. Mike Cheong helped apply finish coat #3 on Saturday using his professional tipping technique following my rolling efforts.

Yes, really - professional. When Mike got fed up with the defense electronics engineering contracting world several years ago, he took a break and worked on boats in Sausalito for a living. That makes him a professional. One of the tasks was applying the varnish to wooden hulls on classic boats. The boat owners were very finicky and the owner of the business was so particular that the workers were not allowed to know the formula for the varnish/solvent they used. The manager would bring the blend out of a back room and hand it to the workers.

The plan worked. Mike cleared his head, and the fortunate defense electronics engineering world now has Mike back. Although Mike's painting skills are exemplary, the security of our country benefits greatly from Mike's intelligence. (Discussions with Mike about work are always brief - he is never able to tell us anything about what he's working on). I'm just happy Kuewa benefits as well!

Mike's Saturday tipping looked really nice, but he wouldn't let me call it quits after that coat. He was dissatisfied with a couple of areas with a slight sag.

This is how it looks after I applied finish coat #4 today. It passes the 4-foot test, but probably not the 3-foot. Meaning you see lots of brush streaks at 3 feet. I'll sand this again tomorrow and Thursday (about 9 hours with the sanders) and Mike and I will apply the final coat Saturday. I bought Mike (well, I guess Kuewa) a $35 paint brush for that final tipping.

We will probably not eliminate brush streaks altogether. If it's possible, I certainly don't have the skills. Mike probably would given enough time at it (this paint behaves differently than his varnish). Kuewa is a sailing boat, not a boat show boat, so with 9 layers of UV protection, I'm happy with the look we've got here. Besides, pretty soon the birds crap all over it anyway.

Jazz Cup

We had great fun in the Jazz Cup on Saturday and won our division! The Jazz Cup is a 28 mile race from Treasure Island at the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge to Benicia, a few miles up the Sacramento River. It's a spinnaker run just about the whole way with a boisterous gathering at the Benicia Yacht Club. There were 110 boats that finished.

We were racing Tom Faraola's new-to-him Santa Cruz 27 Rio. There were 5 of us aboard: Tom and his girlfriend Kristi, Nick and his wife Patty, and me. Tom and Kristi and I had sailed the boat once and flew one of the spinnakers for a while a couple weeks ago. No one had even seen the sails we had up during the race (they were beautiful sails).

We made a couple of mistakes early in the race but recovered very well, catching up and passing many boats, including the one other Santa Cruz 27, after both mistakes. We worked well as a team and had excellent boat speed. If you must know, the first mistake was being about a minute late for our start because of a last-minute headsail change to better handle the building wind. We were pretty quick and got the change done in time but the commotion distracted the skipper and we got too far away from the starting line.

The second mistake was even worse. There is a buoy off the Chevron dock in Richmond to keep racers from getting too close to the potential tanker operations there. We didn't know where it was and followed a group of boats that over-shot the lay line to the mark with the building flood current. The result is that, as we got closer and closer to the mark, we were forced to head higher and higher as the current set us down faster and faster until we finally backwinded the spinnaker just before the mark and had to fall off before rounding. The other boats ahead of us were able to just squeak around the mark. We couldn't believe the blunder! It took 5 minutes to quickly get the spinnaker down, hoist the jib, tack back up against the current, round the mark, reset the spinnaker, and drop the jib. There was some consolation in that one full-race big boats right behind us did the same thing.

The rest of the race was full concentration on the spinnaker, working the spinnaker sheet and gybing the spinnaker, several times dropping the spinnaker and raising the jib when the wind came too far forward and then dropping jib and raising spinnaker again, working the main, watching what the competition was doing, and trying not to spin out in the stronger puffs. We did a great job with the spinnaker take-down at a leeward mark off Benicia and then tacking 3 miles or so back up to the finish at the club. It was fun to catch up and pass our competition again, and some of the bigger boats as well. Our division was not all that competitive overall, though. We finished 78th in fleet.

But it was great fun! There is no time for photos when racing a small boat with 5 people aboard so I have nothing pictorial to post. We had a beautiful sail back yesterday, all close-hauled. We laid in about twenty tacks to get home in 5 1/2 hours.

Crack Negotiator

In my last post, I mentioned a small kitchen cabinet project. Those of you who know me well know that my projects can drag on a bit. Those of you not aware of this but reading this journal are certainly starting to suspect.

Our small kitchen has very humble 1973 cabinets. Some day, they will likely all be replaced. In the mean time, I have been trying to supplement storage space. Shortly after moving in, I got a combination microwave/range hood to get that piece of equipment off the counter.

To use the space between that and the refrigerator, I built a small cabinet that kinda sorta matched the color and wood grain. The door frame molding is a near-perfect match. Unless you really look, you don't notice it's not original.









Over where the pantry is, there was a lot of wasted space up top, so I knocked out the paneling, built a cupboard bottom, and we put stuff there.

It looked like this for almost a year. The plan was always to make doors like the other one, but this time I could not find the right frame molding anywhere. Months passed. Last March, I gave up and took another door in to a cabinet shop and told the nice fellow to make two new ones like this with these dimensions. He quoted $120.

Weeks passed. I kept stopping in but there was always a reason why he had not gotten to it yet. More weeks passed. One time I said, "Hey, how 'bout $150 to get it done?"
"OK, couple days." More weeks passed. Finally he called and said they were done.

Ta-da! Five months and $30 higher cost. If you've got a construction project or are about to buy a new car and want a crack negotiator to help, I'm here for you. I knew this MBA would come in handy!










Yesterday I finally put the last coat of paint on Kuewa's interior cabin side and the cabin trunk exterior now has 3 coats of primer. Onward and upward.