Logs - 2024 | A sailboat adventure site

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The Logs of SV Unladen Swallow - 2024

Boat projects are mostly in the acquisition mode – that is acquiring all the parts/ pieces/ knowledge to do them.

Planned projects include:

Pressure switches for the fresh water and salt water wash pumps – need a trip to Home Depot at some point!
Propane to Electric Conversion for the galley – this is a more long term project but we really want to do it!
Lower Rudder Bearing – we understand this a bit better and will be ordering the parts in the coming months
Keel cooler for the freezer – yup gotta order that part…
RO Membranes for the water maker need to be replaced…

Feb/ Mar/ Apr 2024

We worked to build up our haul-out kitty and have now moved into almost full-time logistics planning and work. Haul-out is now 3 Jun on the island of Carriacou at Tyrell Bay.

It’s been a good season with Lee surpassing last season’s Scuba student count to include some Open Water, Adv Open water and some specialty students. And LOTS of Basic Diver intro courses. Lee also worked with a second Scuba Shop Aqua Marine.

Along the way Lee got dive #800 logged.

As we write this at the end of April we have purchased most of what we plan to need for haulout and are navigating getting it shipped and transported onto our boat so we can take everything with us.

The diving has been slow in April so we’ve started the boat projects early – especially as we have acquired needed parts. So our get a jump on things list includes:

Fresh water pressure switch install – our fresh water pump is automatic once again!
Removal of the Starboard Berth door and frame in preparation for the galley carpentry work
Removal (and sale) of the Force 10 propane range. The new combo oven is on St Thomas and waiting to be released from Customs

Lee also traveled up to FL to bring back a bunch of items that could not be easily shipped and to finalize ordering many of the parts/ pieces that we will be using during haulout.

May 2024

May 2024 a.k.a time to head south for haul-out and Hurricane Season.

Relations with Aqua Action have now reached the point where Lee is no longer working for them. With supplies for the next phase of refit already on the boat, we decided to get to work and use the time to our advantage. We also started preparing the boat for an extended passage. We left St Thomas the 3rd week of May to give us plenty of time to make our Haul-out date of the 3rd of Jun. First stop was St Croix. The plan was to stop here and introduce ourselves to a dive shop there that was interested in having Lee work for them next winter. As soon as we got underway, it became apparent the boat was not happy with having sat still for so long. The motor although running “fine” was not developing much thrust. Fortunately we were sailing to St Croix and the motor was just needed to get the sails up and get us safely anchored. We’ll try to sort that out once we are on St Croix.

The rudder was quite stiff – we had the replacement rudder bearing onboard – so we had to hand steer.

There were other little things, but we made it safely. The anchorage on the west end of St Croix has good and bad areas for holding and we apparently chose poorly. We had plenty of scope so just dump more out.

The meeting with the dive shop went well and I turned my attention to the boat. Jumped in the water and cleaned the prop – it had some growth on it, but no enough to account for the loss of power. The bottom wasn’t super clean, but not bad. Well the next phase of the passage was to motor for a day against the wind and get over to Saba. Well this took far longer and used way more fuel than expected as things were still not right. Eventually we discovered that the entrance to one of the fresh air vent hoses was blocked – the fixture had broken and the engine was not getting enough fresh air. We later discovered that the 2nd hose was also blocked. We went through3 times the fuel we should have and took twice as long to get to Saba and when we discovered there was no fuel on Saba pressed on to St Eustacia. We anchored there to clean the bottom, catch our breath and try to figure out what was going on. The remainder of the trip was mostly sailing as we had made our way far enough East to be able to sail. After cleaning the hull, we left the following morning for a mostly uneventful close reached sail down the Windward islands. We did encounter some squalls but where sufficiently prepared that they were just nuisances. We saw dolphins and even whales, but no pictures to prove it.

Our timing was a bit off and we discovered that we would not be able to make the harbor on the island of Carriacou before sunset, so we stopped at Union Island just north of our destination for the night. We made it easily the next morning to Carriacou.

Jun 2024

Pulling the anchor at Union Island I apparently over-stressed the Solenoid of the windless and had to add it to my list of things to replace and consigned myself to pulling the anchor by hand until then.

We checked in to the country of Grenada and to Tyrell Bay Marina only to discover that they didn’t complete our reservation process. We did not have a haul out date. The scrambled and got us in a couple of days later than planned.

The detailed plan and outcome for this haul-out period is found over in the Refit - 2024 area of our refit logs. However the highlights are that we quickly fell behind as the yard couldn’t get the rudder out of the boat and the stripping of the bottom was done too aggressively, requiring significant rework.

These items caused our schedule to slip and ultimately led to us still being on the hard for Hurricane Beryl on the 1st of Jul. The yard was ill-prepared and had no experience dealing with a storm of this magnitude and once it had past, over 95% of the boats in the yard where not longer sitting on the blocking that they had started on. Our boat was knocked to the ground catastrophically and eventually was declared a Constructive Total Loss by our insurance company.

We are going to cover Hurricane Beryl on it’s own page as there is far more to the story than what I want to cover in our 2024 log. The bottom line is that we remained on the island for 2 and half weeks after the storm having assisted with the initial relief efforts. We evacuated back to FL for most of a month before coming back to the island to salvage our belongings and get them shipped back to FL.

Aug-Oct 2024

We spent the rest of 2024 living with my sister in FL dealing with the insurance and restarting our lives. We bought a car so we could get around. Lee spent several weeks cleaning and dealing with everything we shipped back from the boat.

We took the opportunity while boat shopping to attend the 2024 Annopolis Sailboat Show. Along the way we got to reconnect with the crew of Delos.

Lee was able to make some significant furnishing upgrades to his sister’s quilting studio and Brownie chipped in as one of the “sweat shop” workers trying to get all the orders out the door that where due by Christmas.

We have started looking for new boats, but our circumstances are proving to be complicated and our options are not as broad as we were hoping.

Nov - Dec 2024

In late November, the insurance company finally presented us with a settlement offer that we accepted and we hope to see usable funds by the end of December.