Chapter 59: Is It Done? No. Are We Leaving? Yes!

Yep, we’re outta here! The last week has been a flurry of preparation as we get ready to leave Brunswick and head south. There is a saying that if you wait until everything is done to leave, you never leave. So everything is NOT done. But a lot of it is. And the rest of it will get done along the way. Over the last week, we have gotten several things done. First, we finished up the engine repairs. We had an oil leak from the rear seal on our engine. Repairing that meant removing the transmission and bell housing, replacing the main seal, and putting it all back together. It turns out this seal failure was a ghost from the sinking (sorry, I mean “water intrusion event”) in 2020. Water got into the bell housing and caused corrosion and failure of the rear seal. Obviously, it wasn’t dealt with at the time, so, you know, the usual. But now we have an engine without an oil leak, which is great!

We also figured out dinghy storage on our foredeck. We tried a variety of ways to secure it, none of which were really great. Fortunately, our project manager came to the rescue (again) and had a support fabricated which works great. Check!

We managed to solve our rigging problem, which stemmed from an anchor problem. Our new anchor could not be retracted all the way onto the bow roller-it jammed against the furler for our headsail. The fix for that was to add a small extension onto the forestay under the drum. Problem solved! Except then our forestay was longer, which meant it was too loose. Generally, one tightens the forestay by tightening the backstay-that pulls the top of the mast aft. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough travel in the backstay turnbuckle to do this. So… Surgery! We took an angle grinder to the backstay, shortened it by about 6 inches, and voila! Now we have an anchor that fits, and forestay that’s tight, and (bonus!) some rake to our mast, which should improve performance under sail.

We are left with two issues. The first is our traveler. The traveler is a track with pulleys that controls the boom. When I went to service it a couple of weeks ago, it came apart in my hands-surprise! Broken bolts, bent bolts, ball bearings flying everywhere-it wasn’t pretty. So it as to be replaced. We have installed a new track but the main car for the system hasn’t arrived. We’ll have to jury rig something and have the part meet us somewhere-I’m still thinking on it.

The other issue is our power management. We left until too late figuring out how that all works: the battery system, the inverter, the battery charger, the solar controllers, etc, etc. So we have some configuration issues to work on. The biggest challenge is that the system is displaying how much charge we have in our batteries. That gives us the equivalent of EV “range anxiety”. We’ll figure it out. There’s always YouTube.

I’m sitting here in the marina clubhouse doing a final load of laundry before we go and reflecting back on the last 5 months. Yep, it’s been 5 months since we arrived in Brunswick. It’s been a LOT of work. A LOT. Kim and I have put in a lot of hours, learned a lot, been frustrated a lot, laughed, cried, bled, and commiserated over Meraviglia. And now, ready or not, it’s time to go. I crunched some numbers. Kim and I have each put in roughly 1250 hours on boat work in the last 5 months. For perspective, a full time worker generally puts in 2000 hours per year for a 40 hour work week. At the going rate for marine tradespeople, had we paid someone to do that work, it would have cost about $400,000. Even with that savings, we’ve spent almost $300,000 getting Meraviglia back into shape. We know that we are VERY blessed to be in a position to be able to do that. And we still have spent less than it would have cost to purchase a new boat. But it’s been…a lot. There are really only a few people who know what it’s been like: Kim, myself, Drew, and Daniel. Drew and Daniel are the team at Mariner Marine Services. They have been with us on this project from the beginning and we could NOT have done this without them. They have become friends as we have worked through the many problems this refit has uncovered. When we bought Meraviglia, we didn’t know where to take her to have work done. We basically picked Brunswick at random. We could not have chosen better. Drew and Daniel will forever have our gratitude. They have helped us keep this dream alive. Drew’s wife, Ana, is a metal artist and she fabricated an art piece for Meraviglia, which Drew then painted (he’s truly a renaissance man). It’s amazing!

And now we discover whether this is what we want. Because we still don’t know. But now we find out… We leave today. We hope.