It’s a Shakedown

I don’t have a lot of pictures to capture the moment, but the events were some of the most memorable in the past couple of months. This write-up may be uninteresting if you are looking for a great story or pictures on the water. Fair warning!

After taking possession of such a major asset, you begin to appreciate the rich history that it has had. I discovered additional information which I did not know while searching through the aft cabin storage lockers:

• 1997-2002: Called “Nike”, and purchased new from Hallberg-Rassy by a guy in the U.K.
• 2002-2006: Owned by a guy in Ireland, and I believe was sailed throughout Northern Ireland. The boat made it’s way to New Zealand.
• 2006-2017: I believe a broker sailed the boat to the Seattle area where a guy from Colorado picked it up sailed the upper Northwest of US and Canada and did a number of upgrades. Renamed to be “Litha“, because the purchase was on the Solistice. The boat sat on the hard in the yard at Herrington Harbour North from 2011-2017.
• 2017-2021: Owned by a really nice guy from the D.C. area

We arrived late on Friday (5/14) to get ready for a shakedown cruise. Both of us were exhausted from a long work week and life in general on land. We had Aaron along for the ride, doesn’t he look amused?

We took a lot of wagon loads to the boat with tools and other items from our previous boat like Garmin devices, handheld VHFs, life jackets, etc. We still have no idea what all is aboard this boat and what has been left behind by the previous owners.

We explored the insides and did just the opposite; we took off wagon loads of items that are not needed at this time including 4 different head sails, including a spinnaker. If you are curious, here is an interesting sail guide. Check out these pics from my backyard in New Jersey (our grass is finally coming back alive).

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Look at the state of this backstay adjuster that we had to rebuild (which we did):

This is the only device used to pull aft on the top of the mast. If this hydraulic unit fails, we have very little force to prevent the mast from falling forward. We knew that we needed to protect the mast in case of catastrophic failure, so we set to rig the running backstays made from Dyneema. How ironic that I used to work for the company that makes Dyneema, and I was walking inside the plant that made this fiber in 2014. No pictures, sorry. If you want to learn more about running backstays watch this video:

We wanted to take the boat out for a short shakedown cruise. No sails, just motor. But that meant that we had to back this beast out of the dock…and then re-dock it when we returned. We’re thinking “no way” and “How in the world did Ken do this single handedly?” My mouth started to dry up from the nervous jitters. Some friendly guys a couple a boats away appear to be getting their sailboat ready for a race that afternoon. Of course, I’m thinking “what do they know?” and then I thought “hey…what DO they know?”. Sensing we were a bit apprehensive about leaving the dock, they offered to help us. With all of the lines removed, we slowly eased the boat backwards out without a hitch. All of the suddent the fears leave, and we are back on the water again.

We got out into the Chesapeake and started looking for a place to drop anchor. We found it, but dropping anchor and grabbing the hook are apparently two distinctly different things on the Chesapeake. We actually dropped anchor and also a couple hundred feet of chain. Worked like magic!

We lifted the dinghy off the boat which was no small task considering the 1-2 foot waves and occasional big boat wake that would hit us. Success! Now it was time to pull it back up and set it on deck. We weren’t the smoothest of boat operators on the water, but for first timers, we were giving it all we had.

We made it back to the dock, safe and sound. Looking at that backstay adjuster, I just couldn’t leave it. The options to have the work done on the boat were very limited in the timeframe that I would like. Annapolis Rigging came highly recommended, but I later heard that timing for turnaround is running 10 weeks if I take it down and drop it off to them. That wouldn’t work for me either. So, I took it off, rigged up a system to hold the backstay temporarily. Once I had the unit at home on my workbench, I contemplated re-building it myself, but I thought this would be a job left for professionals. Out of desperation for a fast turnaround, I took it VIP Hydraulics in New Jersey to rebuild, and they did a great job.

This is a Navtec ia7-22. This has a 3/4″ shaft. I heard that Navtec went out of business in 2017, but a lot of places sell seal kits. I bought the NAV-A370-SK-022 from Offshore Spars.

My first mate helped me go back a week later and install this back on the boat. We couldn’t go past the Krispy Kreme enroute another time without stopping. So, guess what we did?

I had to figure out how to pull down with enough force on the backstay so that she could help me pin it at the base. We did it in the dark at the dock with headlights on. The neighbors probably thought we were crazy on a Friday night working on the boat. It works like a charm! Then we took a fun dad & daughter walk through the Herrington Harbour South resort and beach.

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I spend the rest of the night digging through our aft cabin lockers and seeing more of what has been left behind. Then I realize that I never checked the batteries. We were told in the survey that the batteries seemed to be off-gassing. It had me curious, so I bought some old-school pH paper to test the standing water on the top of our lead acid batteries.

I can’t pass up this story. Way back when, my dad “gave” me a book about sailing and boating. It was an encyclopedia and a nice thick hard cover. I kept that book forever in all of our moves from across the country. Since we recently started to sail, I have looked high and low for this book. Every other month, I’d get the gumption to go looking again in all of our boxes and book shelves. No luck. I came to the conclusion that we thinned out our book collection during one of the moves and that I’d never see it again. What was the name, you ask? I couldn’t for the life of me remember, but I knew it was navy blue and had gold foil lettering on it. In my late night exploration of the boat, look at what I found:

Next day we realize that it is time to move the boat up to Herrington Harbour North to haul it out to make repairs to a leaking thru hull. Ken told me he wanted to fix these before re-launching this year. He was keen to what was needed for this boat, that is for sure!

Really appreciate Ray coming down to help me (and my first mate) move the boat along with my first mate up to HHN. We hit the entrance to the marina channel about 2 hours after low tide and we bumped into soft shoal; not a problem for our 110 hp Volvo to power through. I got really good at backing up.

We landed at dock B-34 and left Litha there in good hands.

Later than night after a 4 hour drive home to New Jersey, I realized that I forgot to cover the helm with the beautiful teak table. So I emailed Glen on Cloudy Bay, and he went over and covered it for us. The sailboating community is really strong.

When the boat got hauled out on Tuesday, Ray was right there with big wrenches in-hand to take apart the thru hull. And yes, Ken and Ray were both right, we have some definite work to do on our thru hulls.

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The plan is to leave Litha on the hard for the month of June for work to be done from the survey and to ensure it is water tight. It is unfortunate as this is a great part of the sailing season. But we do have 4 kids, jobs, a house and cars…etc…life on land still to tend to.

At the end of the day, this is why we call it a shakedown. We have to make sure, absolutely sure, that the boat is ready for the sea. Thank you to all of our friends that have helped us make good decisions and get to this point. Another update will be just down the road.

Here is our last memory of Litha at the dock: