Harvey Repairs are DONE!!!
Breaking Pelagic News…Harvey Repairs are DONE!!!
I have finally gotten all my real estate repaired from the Hurricane Harvey (8/24/17) damage. Its time to give my full attention to my beloved vessel, M/V Pelagic. She was scheduled for her routine yearly haulout and bottom job first week in September, 2017, but Harvey turned my world upside down. So, she has been patiently waiting in her long time slip for me to get her to Hooking Bull Boat Yard at Cove Harbor, Rockport, TX. And in the meantime, she has been growing a fine crop of barnacles, oysters (they like the keel cooler) and waterline moss. After diving on her prop to remove enough growth that she could actually propel herself, I moved her to Cove Harbor and hauled out at Hooking Bull the first week of November.
Harvey did not do any structural damage to her, as Pelagic is STOUT! Neither was there any systems damage or damage to propulsion or steerage. In fact, Pelagic would have survived the storm unscathed had it not been for a large sailboat in the slip to port. First, that sailboat was not adequately prepared for a storm, leaving sails on and deck unsecured. Secondly, she was not tied with large enough lines, nor were there enough of them to put the boat in the center of a “spider web”. What happened was this: Her foresail roller furling broke loose at the deck, and swung around like a wrecking ball on a chain, beating the crap out of everything in its circle of reach. Initially this was the 150 mph winds of the counter rotating storm from port to starboard. And guess what was to starboard…Pelagic! Then the eye of the storm passed and the wind reversed direction (yes, the eye passed over us). The bottom end of the rampant furler was flailing around and the control lines attached the roller furler to the top of my mast and my starboard paravane stabilizer pole. The sailboat, now having broken most of its dock lines proceeded to move downwind pulling Pelagic by the lever arm of her mast onto her side and into a piling. I feel bad that she tore up that12” piling like she did. Soooo… That’s what happened.
At haulout, I started in on the routine maintenance items, working from the bottom up. Pressure wash,sand, paint bottom. Bring the prop down to bare metal, 4 coats Interprotect 2000, two coats bottom paint. Change out26 lbs. of zincs. Clean and exercise all thru-hulls. I decided that now was a good time to do some upgrades and a prolonged haulout. I added a bronze strainer over the forward A/C intake to prevent cabbage heads from getting sucked onto the thru-hull (the others are enough lower in the water that jellyfish are not an issue). I replace both steering cylinders with shiny new ones. The existing steel cable rigging that was galvanized was changed to 316L stainless. A couple of 3/8” StaSet lines that were chafed by the wrecking ball were replaced. A radio VHF antenna and the AIS VHF antenna were also replaced. I added an Uninterruptable Power Supply to the boat computer, which also serves at one of the navigation systems. I added a new Simrad GO9 SXE Chart Plotter for nav system redundancy. I installed a state of the art 4G Digital Broadband Radar with 36 mile range and extreme close subject resolution. I removed and repainted both transom name boards.
While there is still a bit of work to do, Pelagic is smiling again. And she looks great. I can do my starboard stabilizer repair after relaunch. If you would like to see a great sea-boat out of the water, now is a wonderful opportunity to come out to Cove Harbor and check her out. She’s a head-turner!
