Sailing Vessel Karma

As the winter has progressed

we have been focusing on the big stuff, the solar arch, the autopilots and the like. This is all great, but there are also tons of small, incremental changes/updates/additions which have been coming together to make Karma feel like she’s really shaping up to be ready for an early May departure which is fast approaching.

It is hard to keep track and also not necessarily worth it to write whole articles on some of the small changes so this is more of a “some of the small stuff which we have done”. Not comprehensive, but at least you’ll get a feel for some of the small stuff and also we can reference back and say ‘oh ya, we did do that I guess?’.

Over the winter we have stopped using all the lights on the mast. At the dock there is no need for an anchor light up top, we aren’t doing any night sailing requiring the steaming nor the tricolor up top, and we aren’t romping around on deck at night because its bloody cold and essentially always wet outside… lovely. We recently had 4 more friends come and we did a bit of a Spring shakedown and low and behold, every single light on the mast didn’t work.

We didn’t mess with it on our 4 day trip as we were the only boat at the famed PNW anchorages but I dove into it since to have it resolved. It turned out to be a classic case of the last thing you didn’t check because ‘it couldn’t be but turns out it was’. All of the lights on the mast come down and terminate where the mast comes through the deck, they each have a + and – wire, from there each + goes to a switch and all the negatives terminate at the mast into one ground wire which runs back to where the switches are at the nav-station. “Okay,” I was thinking, “if all of them stopped working at once, it must be the ground” so I start isolating each ground from the mast and attaching them individually to the one ground wire. After fiddling around with a multimeter for an hour and then running a random wire through the cabin as a temporary replacement for the wire in the ceiling I deduce that the ground wire itself has an issue somewhere. I set about running a new one.

Everyone on a yacht will talk about this, running wires is up there with loosing an arm. Its always cramped, confusing, frustrating and painful but it is technically possible. After removing ceiling panels and squeezing wires and myself into spots previously not known to be possible I have a new ground run and all the lights work! I also discover the reason they weren’t working is the old ground wire, which I took out, was tied into a light we took out, hence why it wasn’t working. Oh well, you live you learn, and now the mast lights have their own ground. So its a win!

Another small but necessary project was the addition of a proper main sail and a rig tune! Last year we were cruising with a Baba 30 mainsail, which is about the same size as a 4th reef in a properly sized main. Karma has a pretty high aspect rig, with a 45 foot luff and a foot of just 10.5 feet. Being on the budget that we are we were looking out for a sail loft that had nice condition used sail which some actively racing sailboat replaced. After a while of looking we eventually found one from baconsails.com which was reasonably priced and well packed and shipped! Its 8oz dacron, so quite heavy and sturdy, with 2 reefs the second being pretty deep. We also have all new reefing lines and vang and preventer lines. This works for us as the sail is already quite tall and skinny so the second reef is tiny tiny. Less lines around makes it simple and the first reef is probably good up to some huge conditions at which point the main will most likely go away anyway. Speaking of going away, we also made lazyjacks! And wow are these amazing. Easy to make, lots of patterns to choose from, and holy cow do they make such a massive difference you should do this to your yacht now even if its a 10 foot El Toro Dinghy.

We made ours out of 4mm Dyneema because it was available and is easy to splice. It is recommended to make them out of non stretchy line which now having used them makes sense. The first time the sail flew into them it pulled out the construction stretch of the splices and the sail flew everywhere. Now however, they work wonders. One more thing we are to change is to have the aft most line land a bit further forward on the boom where the sail has maybe 3 or 4 folds. Currently it’s at the end of the boom and it misses a lot of potential for helping flake the first few feet of the sail where it’s the largest.

We have done a few larger projects as well which deserve blog posts in their own right, but I’ll just share here as it all adds to Karma becoming the ultimate in utilitarian cruising. One of the main things we did was redo the entire V-berth. Originally setup for racing, Karma had a pipe berth and then just traditional line and sail storage forward which the previous owner did a semi conversion into a bunk by adding plywood on top of the pipe berth. This worked well but made the bed quite high and hard to get in and out of. We did a simple but effective lowering of this to make it a permanent owners’ cabin. Essentially we put two braces along the hull and then used the same plywood base but moved each piece aft as the new lower bunk is slightly skinnier so they fit the width further back. Now you can sit all the way up on the entirety of the bed with half a foot of headroom making it significantly more comfortable and easy to use!

Another huge life improvement thing we did was make the ceiling panels! When we moved aboard in April of 2022 we trashed the entirety of the headliner as it was old, saggy, gross, and had gotten damp over the winter we left Karma on the hard in Anacortes. We have been rocking the bare fiberglass and hanging electrical ever since. After much deliberation on the material and the pattern for the template we finally pulled the trigger on something and got it up! There is still some to do but this really was a boat to yacht transformation as down below now it feels way less like a project boat with a wood grain ceiling.

Karma is equipped with a propane 2 burner stove and oven. This has worked pretty well for us, the oven not so much but not too important and is to be discussed at some point in another article, with a traditional ‘propane locker’ far aft with its own low down drain and then an electronic solenoid which is activated down below to allow propane to flow into the interior. We, out of precaution, essentially turned off the propane at the solenoid as well as the tank each time we used the galley. Occasionally we would leave the tank on but close the solenoid and noticed that sometimes this could leave a slight waft of propane in the locker if opened. This also significantly decreases how long our propane lasts….. uh a leak?

So we just rolled with this as the leak seemed to be super faint and was in the self draining locker out back so whatever, but to extend our range and to make it way more convenient to cook, we replaced the hose, regulator, and gauge which lead up to the solenoid in the locker. After half a can of PB Blaster and a lot of wrestling and swearing I had the old hose out and could very clearly see the hole in the crusty, probably from the 80s, hose. Perfect! So we replaced everything from between the tank and the solenoid, where the hose looks way newer on the exit, and have yet to get a wiff of propane anywhere since. Hoping our range extends a bit too!

Another major thing which has happened and definitely is getting its own article was the attempted suicide by our engine and our intervention, coaxing, loving, and rebuilding of the exhaust which saved it from the depths of the rust. After a day of panicking but learning lots and making a good friend along the way we were able to rectify the situation and now feel better about our engine than before! It was an interesting experience but we are glad it happened in Friday Harbor where we were able to get help from amazing people and ended up befriending Mitch from Peace Marine (his engine room above). Essentially the jist of the story is at 10am we had enough sea water in our old Yanmar to shoot a 1 inch stream out of our oil dipstick to playing a Catan like board game with Mitch and family and friends 48 hours later. Definitely one for the books, and weirdly enough, we are glad it happened. Though I’m not sure if I’d recommend a salt water rinse for your marine diesel without the consultation of at least one other knowledgeable individual.

Along with these items, we have also:

• Replaced head/foot pumps/plumbing and cleaned fresh water tank
• New dock lines and snubber
• New Pelagic autopilot (install blog coming soon)
• Solar stern arch (blog on this also, its taking forever)
• Added shore power charging for house bank
• Added SSB/HF radio in a non standard way
• Added GMRS radio base station and handhelds for adventuring
• Retuned the rig and finally did something about the inner forestay
• New v-berth reading light with charging
• Changed stuffing box packing
• Added Samsung tablet for navigation
• New Aquapro RIB from Kyle and Ashley from Anacortes
• Probably more lol

We recently did a mini shakedown after a lot of these changes and updates have been made and it was a far smoother experience than expected. As the season approaches Karma is getting more and more ready to go and the whole boat now has the feeling that it’s looking forward to the adventure instead of the bouncing from spot to spot to work on this feeling of last year. We will see how that pans out, it is a cruising yacht after all which means the whole trip is just working on unexpected breakages in far flung places, but that’s what we signed up for and it looks like we will be able to get pretty far flung before something significant breaks to make that experience all the more worth it.