Jib Notes

There were five of us on our first trip with the Tillicum.  Tina and Tim joined Jamie, myself, and our cat, Quixote.  Tina graduated with Jamie from the University of St. Augustine.  Tim was a captain we hired on the recommendation of our broker, and whom we were all very grateful was along for this trip.  He proved himself fully during the day, and we plan to hire him again to help us learn as much as we can during these first few weeks while preparing for our upcoming trip.

The day started slowly, with Jamie and I dragging after only a handful of hours of sleep.  Tina showed up on schedule with an amazing spread of food, gourmet vegetarian cooking of quantities enough to feed us all for a week.  We left her car at Marina Jack, our intended final destination for the day, and carpooled up to St. Petersburg where the boat had spent its last eight years.  We met Tim there, as well as Brooks, the original owner.

Brooks gave Tim and I a quick run through of the whole boat, and it slowly started sinking in that he didn't own it anymore, we do!  This resulted in a mixture of emotions, including elation, shock, relief that it had finally all come together, and a vague feeling of being somewhat over our heads.  Shortly before heading out, the 66 HP diesel Yanmar died, stealing away a little of our confidence.  We replaced the primary fuel filter and it started again fine, so we chalked it up to old fuel and headed on our way.

Ten minutes later as we were navigating the narrow channel outside, the engine died again.  Tim calmly gave directions, and in seconds we were flying our jib and fully under wind power.  We had a following wind of 15 knots, and the tiny jib was enough to push us along at five knots, safely getting us outside where we also put up the main.  It was a beam reach all the way down with steady winds coming out of the north east and never more than two foots swells.  Blue skies and sunny, it was also quite chilly (in the 50s).

Looking at the engine, I finally figured out that the issue wasn't clogged filters as originally assumed, but instead was that fuel wasn't flowing.  The Tillicum has two tanks, a large forward fuel tank and a smaller tank under the cockpit.  Being diesel, each tank has an inflow and and outflow.  To control which tank fuel is coming from, you have to open both valves on one tank, and close both valves on the other tank.  The valves were both closed on the forward tank, but only one valve was open on tank under the cockpit, a simple fix.

After a full day of enjoyable sailing, we arrived at the pass into Sarasota in time for a beautiful sunset.  We dropped our sails and motored up to the #1 and #2 outer buoys which were only somewhat like what was shown on the chart.  At this point the depth sounder couldn't decide if we were in 20 feet of water or 2 feet of water, and for the rest of the evening it repeatedly lied to us.  We motored in slowly, and even though it was high tide and we were in the middle of the channel, we felt the sandy bottom a few times.  Tillicum draws just under 6 feet, and evidently that's all Big Sarasota Pass offers.

It was completely dark by the time we found our slip at Marina Jack, after navigating the less than well marked channel.  We pulled bow in so that our cockpit has a little privacy, tied the lines, and celebrated a good day and the beginning of our new life by opening up a bottle of champagne that Brooks had kindly left aboard for us.  It was a tremendous day!

We've now got a lot of work ahead of us, learning the boat and getting ready for a trip to the Bahamas.  Bill Spivey will be joining us for a little over a month at the end of February, a visit we're looking forward to.  Our goal is to be fully ready to go by the time he gets here, a slightly daunting task as I'm also going to be working full time.  There's a lot to do, but also a lot to look forward to.