It's been quite a while since our last post...but there are reasons!
We finished the 2017 season, and pulled out. We launched again for the 2018 season. Then after a few sails, Greg and Sandi spent a month traveling around Europe. Germany, Italy, Greece, Italy again, and back through another part of Germany.
After we got back, we went out to go for a sail. As we were getting ready, Greg grabbed the lifeline to pull the boat into the dock, and instead of coming in, the boat tipped. WTF? And then we figured out what happened: the keel cable had snapped during the most recent wind storm. You know, that thing we kept saying we needed to replace. Fortunately, we were docked above sand and the 550 pound keel rather than continuing unabated, smashed down into the sand. We were incredibly lucky, because if the water were any deeper, the keel likely would have continued and probably sunk the boat as it smashed into all kinds of fiberglass. The lake water level was lower at that point, too, which saved us.
So we had a friend with scuba gear come out and thread the new keel cable that we'd had sitting on our shelf up through the volcano and back onto the winch and attach it to the keel. Back in operation! Well, no. Because, it turns out that 550 pounds of cast iron in free fall has a tremendous amount of force, and it bent the keel locking pin (part 15 in the drawing). This means that we ran into problems with raising and lowering the keel. We did manage to get the keel up, but with difficulty and could not lock it with the pin. We pulled the boat out shortly thereafter for the season. 2019 came and went with no repairs and no sailing due to a large home renovation project.
2020 came, and with it came the pandemic. We scheduled to get the boat down to CSR Marine to get the repairs done, but the trailer lights didn't work. It took us a while to debug that our ground wire had snapped. We finally got that fixed and the boat to CSR, but by the time they finished, the 2020 season was done. It was kind of too bad, because sailing is one of the few things you can do during a pandemic, and there were many days where we said, "it really would be nice to go sailing."
CSR Marine is expensive, but we felt that they did good work. They actually came in under their initial bid. They took off the keel. They cut out the old locking pin (15) and fiberglassed in a new locking strap (16). Since they had the keel off, we got a lot of other keel maintenance done. We replaced all the keel raising hardware, a new keel winch (1), tube around the volcano (5), the brass turning ball (7), the pivot the keel goes through (13), the pivot pin (14), installed the centering kit so the keel no longer thunks. The pin put a big gouge in the side of the keel, so the keel was ground down to the metal and refinished with a better profile. New bottom paint. Added a zinc to the keel, which it never had before. And had them wax the hull. All this work cost more than what we initially paid for the boat, but we kind of feel we got a new boat out of it. The only parts in the picture above that didn't get replaced were 8 (the volcano itself), 9 (the keel eye bolt which looked fine), 11 (the keel, which got refinished), and 12 (the keel shoe casting, which looked fine).
Also, around this time, our hosts providing our dock on Lake Washington sold their house and moved to Arizona. (Thank you for those years there, John and Barbara!) So we got on the waiting list to get a slip at the Port of Edmonds Marina 25 minutes from our house. In March 2021, we got a call from the marina that they had a slip for us. We signed the paperwork and as of April 1st, we had a slip. We weren't quite ready to get a boat into it but the slip was waiting for us.
What we learned: Don't put off replacing the keel cable. It is possibly the
weakest link in the entire Catalina 22 design.
