Sailing Vessel Karma

The summer is slowly but not

so surely coming to a close in the PNW and the earlier sunset times are the first indication of this. The days are warm still, clear with but a few scattering of clouds. The winds are still the PNW notorious light variety though there are occasional days of strong winds peeking in. Every 8 days or so there seems to be a slight rain, so that’s also easing its way in. The sunset is still spectacular but it’s at 7pm not 10…

We have officially, at least as far as I can tell, secured an actual dock slip in Friday Harbor where we and Karma will spend the winter side tied. It’ll be interesting as we have been on a dock a total of maybe 7 nights over the course of the spring and summer, and now we are sort of gearing up to return to a dock for an indefinite amount of time. Indefinite meaning until April, but it’s not like we won’t take advantage of clear and cold days throughout the rest of the seasons. We still have to race against S/V Swirl and see S/V Mig at her launch when that date comes.

Returning to a dock means the boat will also inevitably return back to a semi-project state which is a good and a bad thing, mostly good. So far we are hoping to:

• Replace the head and associated plumbing
• Replace drinking water lines
• Clean and properly vent fresh water tank
• Install some sort of heater, plausibly a forced air diesel one
• Convert “icebox” back to refrigerator
• Come up with and install some sort of ceiling lining
• Refinish teak external cabintop handrails
• Sta-Lock a turnbuckle onto and actually secure our inner forestay
• Find a mainsail that is actually properly sized
• General end of season engine maintenance
• Re-paint nonskid and cabintop
• Plausible larger inverter/charger so we can use shore power
• Plausible electric cooking, sorta depends on inverter decision
• Plausible haul-out to do bottom and topside paint
• Redesign and lower the V-berth
• Finish stern arch fabrication

The list goes on, we will probably come back and add things here. Expect articles on each of these projects as they happen as well. In the meantime, though, we are going to keep drifting around in the light winds as we slowly head back to Friday Harbor the weekend of October 2nd. Originally we were planning to stay north until we got too cold but we were informed that to ‘confirm our spot’ we are to be at the port in the first 7 days of October. Why we can’t pay for our slip and show up a month late, I’m not sure, but we are out of money and the jump north to the next island group here is a bit far for this late in the season so maybe it’s for the best.

Time at a dock also means we can finally get through the backlog of articles we are to write about essentially the entire summer as well as the 35 days of refit in the boat yard. Better late than never and better late than too late that we don’t remember what we did. There isn’t much information out there on the Chita built Peterson 37s, so it’ll be good to put up what we have done in the case someone else stumbles upon the same boat at some point. If you’re on a Peterson feel free to reach out as well!

For now though we will continue to hang out in Otter Bay, North Pender BC as the poolside as the season comes to a close. From here we may do one more Gulf Island stop and then pull a classic cruisers’ sneak to Stewart Island, WA in the San Juans before pulling into Friday Harbor on Saturday or Sunday, the 1st or 2nd of October.