Under full stream

The prudent sailor takes information where she can get it. This port-to-port distance chart helped in our passage planning, although I had to squint.

Day 31 to Day 39: Quebec City, QC to Tadoussac, QC (days 18 to 19 of sailing)

We came and went through the city of Montreal without, save for a bike trip to a chart shop by Mrs. Alchemy across the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, with little touristic activity. Partially, this was due to our habit of sticking to the Seaway/big ship channel rather than diverting to "downtown" yacht clubs, and partially this was because we wanted to avoid crowds and, we hoped, COVID. We were determined not to pick up the bug not only due to the potential health risks, but because two weeks stuck on a boat ill was a worse alternative than two weeks stuck on a boat in self-isolation once we reached the "Atlantic Bubble" and a reasonable prospect of making our appointment with our winter shipyard destination.

Thanks to the magic of cross-referencing charts, I was able (in French, yet) to obtain the correct model to restock our spares.

So while the Montreal south-side suburb of Longueuil had the ability to meet our needs, we didn't actually see much of Montreal itself. Quebec City was different: it's more compact and while the opportunities for tourism per se were considerably muted this year, and rightly so, we did get to see a fair bit of it.

The housing on parts of Boulevard Champlain beneath the Cliffs of Insanity below the Plains of Abraham struck me as dangerously hopeful in terms of not getting a boulder through the attic.

We have found our decison to bring bicycles aboard vindicated, even though special care had to be taken to turn handlebars sideways, to watch for lines snagging and to secure them to the rails. Grocery getting involved backpacks and bungee cords and sweat: Quebec City is plateaus and hills and cliffs for the most part and the narrowness of the shoreline on the river, so critical to its defense when run by the French, means almost any provisioning is going to involve a steep climb uphill and the smell of wearing brake pads on the return leg. While the actual sea air downriver from Quebec City certainly began to affect the bicycles in terms of corrosion, the benefits of not having to take public transit (where available) or taxis (ditto for the smaller places) have been significant, as has the chance to see from the saddle the more ordinary parts of town. And our legs and lungs are fitter than when we moved aboard.

"Leave out the back way" is not an option.

The Yacht Club de Québec, once we found it, its seawall rocks composed of boulders the same colour as the surrounding cliffs, was a very nice place and we finally got to have a socially distanced brunch instead of whatever we could grill up in the galley. Also access to decent showers, a laundry not closed by COVID and a proper chandlery nearby were all huge pluses.

Lucas and his beloved poutine in an otherwise empty cafe in old Québec

We had a "medical incident" when we were asked to change docks after a much-needed refuelling. Backing down, I came a little too close to the stern rail of a docked boat, and she attemptied to fend off, cutting her thumb in the process. She freely admitted that it was unwise to put her hand between a moving (if ever so slowly) 16-tonne vessel such as ours and another boat and wrapped it up until we were back at dock. But when your animal rehabber wife tells you she required stitches, it was likely the case.

Why a thumb makes a poor fender.

A nice man from a nearby boat named Georges drove us to the closest hospital, which happened to be part of the University of Laval, and we waited about five hours to be seen. The actual stitching took about five minutes and Becky reports a "99%" recovery. The Québec health care system (despite the wait, there were more serious cases in front of us) seemd pretty efficient and cost us, as in our home province, nothing, but we were glad to get back to the boat that night.

Drive directly onto le chariot du bateau

One of the interesting sights at any yacht club is how they handle the practicalities of boat handling. In a strongly tidal place like Québec City, they favour the ramp and tractor over the Travelift approach. This consists of driving a wheeled frame at an appropriate state of tide and wind down a long ramp, driving the boat into said frame, lashing the boat to the frame and hauling it to wherever it needs to go in the yard. How they get the boat off the frame and onto jackstands or blocks wasn't clear, but it was mesmerizing to watch it done.

Regardez ce premier virage à gauche, et bonne chance!

On one of my Tour de France assaults grocery gets, not only did I take note of the beautiful neighbourhoods of the plateau's Sillery and Bergerville areas, but I also found a few interesting bits of signage. I believe, for instance, this is how my last name sounds in French, although it is an Anglicization of an Irish tribal name, I got to hear it read back to me all through la belle province.

If you are reading this on a phone, it says "Avenue Désy"

Around the corner was a little bit of horrible history and again, from a car, you'd miss these sort of things.

Seemed fishy to me.

Regardless, provisioned, rebolted, recovering and provided a pre-dawn tidal window (this was now a constant consideration in when we would leave a place, tempered by how far we thought we could get), we departed the city and headed ever eastward with an increasing compontent of north. Even a disconnected vent line on the shaft seal that put an alarming, but easily pumped out, amount of nearly Atlantic Ocean into the bilges was discovered and dealt with.

Sure, for you, this is a light jog. For Alchemy, it was a new record

We spent the first two to three  hours of our journey to Cap-a-d'Aigle, some 77 NM downriver, hammering into contrary tide with a side of wind that kept our speed down to about 4 knots. We did this to catch the turn of the tide partway around the south side of Ile d'Orleans, the large island in the St. Lawrence NE of Quebec City and to reach the "choke point" of L'isle-aux-Coudres. We had been counselled back at the club to go past this island at slack time, or at least with the last of it at our backs as it was very difficult to challenge the current at this spot.

This was with the current. Given my RPM at this point, I should have been doing maybe 6.2 knots.

That prospect was perhaps undersold. We had a ridiculous if rocky run and kept breaking speed records as we peeled around the end of d'Orleans.

Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

We got around the purported area of concern at about 8 knots, still fast, but manageable.  Cap-a-l'Aigle's marina was one of those that is hard to see  until you are practically on it, but it was in a beautiful, if increasingly rugged, setting.

Behold, the dawn cloud dragon.

The next day dawned very calmly, which allowed for an easy departure to Tadoussac. The river opens out considerably at this point and is some 10 miles across, so we could choose which "chenal" to take as there were far fewer concerns about depth and the buoyage remained excellently maintained, another reason we tended to stick to the shipping lanes.

Perfect for spotting whales. And seals. And gannets.

The run to Tadoussac was less than half of the previous day's tidal-current-boosted passage, but in reviewing the charts, I was a little concerned about the confluence of the Saguenay and St.  Lawrence Rivers in terms of the way the tide and current came out of the former fjord-like river at differing and sometimes contrary rates to that of the St. Lawrence. So, as has been so often the case, I had one eye on the clock and another on the river.

Seriously, an unusually calm day to drive a boat

Which is how I first glimpsed, even from the semi-restricted view from inside the pilothouse, my first whale dorsal fin since I was delivery crew on Bruce and June Clark's Bristol 45.5, Ainia, way back in 2009.

Lucas and Becky had spotted them, too, and this was about the first time I noticed the lack of a telephoto lens aboard. We lost count around 20 or so, and we also spotted a seal mum with a head the size of a garbage bin, and her cuter offspring, who was wearing a sort of kelp beret, as one does...alas, no footage as we were among other boats and had to focus on not hitting animals or vessels. As a side note, all those eyeballs forward caused me to notice what looked like a telephone pole vertically floating in the water, about 30 cm. above it. So I reported it to the Coast Guard, because that could seriously dent a sailboat.

Tadoussac is a busy place for sailing as well as whale-watching, and is very beautiful in spots.

We arrived at Tadoussac in the early afternoon, and after a bit of an issue finding our assigned dock, we settled in for some R&R. This was the place to do it, a village of 700 or so that swelled to service the tourism industry to about 3000. There's even a microbrewery. More in our next post.

Yes, the tide and the marina happily co-exist with that steep a slope in the channel.

The widening gyre

Oh, how could we not pick up a few tins of this? It was actually very tasty.

Day 23 to Day 30: Sorel, QC to Quebec City, QC (days 14 to 17 of sailing)

With the rudder pin repair holding, we ventured east of Montreal to Sorel, QC. Travelling down the St. Lawrence Seaway for us has generally involved daylight-only travel with a large component of motoring. This is because the Seaway is full of a mix of commercial shipping and weekend warriors on jet skis and power boats shedding large wakes. It is also depth-constrained in many places beyond the buoyed channel. This makes for relatively easy, if 'busy' navigation, and the need to phone ahead to ensure marinas and yacht clubs are a) open at all in the time of COVID; and b) open to us on any given night; and c) have enough depth at low tide (which becomes a factor around Trois-Rivières, about midway between Montreal and Quebec City.

Mrs. Alchemy's affection for her fresh herbs made for some improved dinners aboard.

We were on the St. Lawrence long enough to see some of the same ships coming and going. For a summer with a pandemic and a Montreal dockworkers' strike, we saw no dearth of shipping.

An 'easy' day at this point was under 50 NM (about 100 km. or seven to eight hours of cruising with the river current's aid). A more ambitious day would add 10 to 20 NM to that total and would often necessitate leaving at dawn and arriving at dusk.

A daily sight on the St. Lawrence River and we were sure to maintain a respectable distance.

Ships going either way on the river were invariably cautious with us and we returned the favour by either holding our course as far over in our "lane' as possible, or, where depths permitted, going out of the channel briefly to allow two ships going in opposition directions to pass each other without us in the mix.

I do not understand the rationale of anchoring ships in a river on standby, but we passed a lot of them that clearly hadn't moved in some time.

Sorel-Tracy at sundown

Civilian pleasure craft, on the other hand, are numerous in this part of Quebec and exhibit varying degrees of seamanship. PWC (jetskis) were more annoying than dangerous to us, but 40 foot planing power boats would often pass too close and rock us with their excessive wakes. In some places, particularly on weekend days, whole flotillas of these sort of speedboats would pass us as if we weren't there. We saw very few sailboats of our size in transit on the river, just small daysailers in places where the river allowed a little room to cruise.

In the picture to the right, we can just be made out by our mast with its Furuno radome and our green mainsail cover. This is at the Parc Nautique Sorel-Tracy, which had a wicked-looking rock just at its entrance, and at which we first noticed that it was getting harder to find bilingual Francophones, meaning we had to revive our own morbid French in order to ask questions about depth at dock (profondeur) and the type of fuel sold.

The next day, August 8, was just as beautiful as the previous one, so we proceeded to Trois-Rivières, a place we found both beautiful and good for stocking up, so we stayed at the pleasant Marina de Trois-Rivières, where we met a variety of interesting sailors (the river was getting wider and more sailboat-friendly) and got in some needed exercise biking around town. We also did our laundry in a nearby cafe (the marina laundry was, as was often the case, by COVID measures and we showered on a converted houseboat instead of in the marina building itself). That pair of espressos while we were waiting was the first 'restaurant' experience we had had while in Quebec, and was a test of our French, which didn't evidently shine when heard through Sunbrella face masks.

Approaching Trois-Riviers: I hope those containers aren't carrying perishable goods because this Don wasn't moving..

I was interested in Trois-Rivières not only as the best provisioning stop before Quebec City, itself the last city prior to Halifax in Nova Scotia, but for a minor if real connection to the place. My grandfather, Ted Davies, was an Irish immigrant to Canada in the mid-1920s. His education at Trinity College, Dublin, had given him a reasonable command of French, and some officer cadet training as a teenager gave him a clue about things military. So, despite being, at age 36 and with two children, positively elderly in 1939, he was readily accepted as a volunteer to the Canadian army. He went from private to company sergeant-major rapidly and, as he was a very good shot, spent the war as a weapons instructor to an English-speaking regiment in the morning and a French-speaking one in the afternoon. My mother spent ages 5 to 11 as an 'Army brat', and one of the places my grandfather served was Trois-Rivières. Evidently, she picked up French quickly, as children do, and promptly lost it when her father was stationed back in Ontario. Such are the fortunes of war, apparently. My own French is better today than when I spent a month in Lyon in 1981 'immersed', but still means I sound like a rather unpromising five-year-old in most exchanges, more is the pity.

The bridge over the St. Lawrence at Trois-Rivières

The marina at which we stayed was essentially in a park that was once owned, as so many places have been in Quebec, by the church. It was a short bike ride up a path and over a bridge to reach "the town" and its services. Once again, COVID knocked out most touristic opportunities, but we noticed that the confluence of the rivers and the general look of the place were both pleasant and prosperous.

Because the marina, like most places this year, was underused, there was a slight air of neglect surrounding this sad scene.

Prosperity, however, tends to be unevenly distributed. This wasn't the first place we saw abandoned boats, and this stout little ketch, run aground at high tide at the end of the Marina basin, was no exception.


By the same token, and it may seem a little naive to remark upon this as a person who spends a lot of time in yacht clubs, affluence is also relative. In front of us at Marina de Trois-Rivières was something called a Prestige 630 motor yacht. It was the largest pleasure craft we knowingly saw to date, although there may have been a larger converted tug or something similar I didn't recognize as a private vessel. It's got four foot seven inch draft (tirant d'eau, locally) and over 23 feet "air draft", which means it can't go under a lot of bridges. It weighs twice what our steel sailboat weighs, which is saying something, and gets 10 litres to the mile in fuel burn for a range of 270 NM. We carry about 380 l of diesel and can cruise under motor for about five times that distance. Different world. The first time we saw it move was when it bellied up to the fuel dock here, although we would see the boat later in the trip at Rivière-au-Renard in the Gaspesie. Yours for two million.

The big yacht would helpfully block out the sun in the mornings.

Pax Dei, in beautiful nick

We would see another Westsail 32 a few weeks later. Figures, they are indestructable.

Most people who mess about in boats are, contrary to popular opinion, are of more modest means. Their boats are cottages, or even floating homes in retirement, and the amenities tend toward the spartan. Trois-Rivieres had a few of these, including a beautfully kept Westsail 32, Pax Dei.

Because some marinas and yacht clubs are built in "non-commercial" areas, they can be quite verdant.

After some remediation aboard, includingour 250 hour of engine runtime change of oil, change of air filter, and change of oil filter (which didn't sit properly and sprayed oil about the engine bay), we found a clog of weeds in the Perko seawater strainer circuit. We replaced the impeller and cleaned out everything and eventually restored prime. That and a tightening up of the rudder pin repair made us seaworthy, or at least river-ready, once again and it was time to hie off to Quebec City.

Go with the flow, they said.

But tidal effects were beginning to manifest eastbound, and this had to be taken into account. We spoke with Maurice, an experienced sailor on the dock, who gave us some tips on how to negotiate the Richelieu Rapids, a rather dramatic narrowing of the St. Lawrence River after a long stretch of largely placid progress at the best place to stop the night before Quebec City, Portneuf.

Said placidity. Too calm to sail, even were we so inclined.

Due to a paucity of Canadian Hydrological Service navigation charts (they are being, stupidly in my view, phased out in favour of "on demand printing", which is rare to find), we were using "Trakmaps", printed nautical chartbooks that, while expensive, allowed us to preview routes and make decisions about distances in a way somehow more tactile than playing around with the plotter.

Thanks for such a tiny wake, Mr. Big Ships I Wish to Avoid.

We knew we wished to approach the rapids at slack tide, because the river's current at that point would accelerate us a fair bit (in fact, we hit a new speed-over-ground record of 10.1 knots at that was at a creeping along RPM of 1400!). We also knew that the yacht club at which we wanted to stay was pretty near the end of the rapids and we would be steering obliquely across the current. And we didn't want to go through with ships of the size seen above anywhere near us. So timing was important.

The charts indicated all sorts of places we could tear out our bottom. Not calming.

So were nerves...this is the inside view of the S-shaped breakwater walls, based on a design by the noted architect Sauron, and it was tricksy coming and going. Those walls, by the way, suggest the ever-increasing tidal range by this point.

Delvic, a really nice metal boat with an unusual choice in her wooden rig at Portneuf

Yacht Club de Québec, an excellent base from which to explore, pardon the inadvertent camera setting

But the club itself was nice and allowed us a decent sleep before the drive (more traffic, more bridges and more current) into the beautiful city of Québec, more of which will be related in our next post.

Buoyage of the damned

Day 19: Longueuil, QC

Somewhere in the St. Lawrence Seaway, a hairy lad keeps watch

It's been a busy time since the placid events of Kingston. We left for Brockville (anchored behind an island) and Cornwall (marina) in the St. Lawrence and anchored out for the first time on this journey. We got used to avoiding huge ships. They were numerous, but actually courteous compared to the wake-producing legions of powerboaters and jet skiers. Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec are stuffed with them.

When a ship goes by the anchorage at 0500h and you have the old camera set to "manual".

We entered the lock system at Iroquois, but just prior to that, we stopped at Iroquois Marina, a very isolated place down one of the previous iterations of canal, as is common on the Seaway, where ghostly pieces of former infrastructure abound. Making the turn into Iroquois Marina, we ran lightly aground. Alas, it was a taste of things to come.

Becky says there is a heron of some sort in this photo. I could hear a banjo.

We were pulled off by the staff easily enough, and one of those fine fellows, Matt, mentioned he had gone down to Nova Scotia to retrieve some sort of boat yard equipment. Turns out it was from Hubbards and the East River Ship Yard, o/o Bradison Boutellier. The fact that I should drop in to a marina that resembled something from "Deliverance" only  to meet a guy who knows a guy I know is one of the mysteries of sailing. Or, as is the case in a confined channel, mostly motoring.

Having reprovisioned in Iroquois, which, like so many small Ontario towns, seems to be devoid of people under 50, we transited our first lock. It was, as a lock, a doddle...there's only one foot difference at either end and I guess they only bothered to erase some minor rapids there naturally. However, the tone to come was set in which "hurry up and wait" became the standard. The process is straightforward: download an app to one's phone, call a number at 8 AM and book the next lock or two you think you can arrive at either in the morning or the evening. Then pay the $25.00/lock fee. You are then emailed a receipt for your reservation. You must make said reservation, and slots go quickly in this time of COVID. Boats cannot raft up and only 11 are allowed through either upstream (southwest to the Great Lakes) or downstrean (northeast to the sea). We watched the website like hawks, even as we soon discovered that the "A.M." and "P.M." pleasure craft lock-throughs were a touch fanciful, in that they were entirely subject to commercial traffic, of which there was a great deal, and could in fact happen at, say, 1630h and 1830h, meaning one could arrive at 1000h and basically piss up a rope either tied to a dock one was not permitted to leave, or circle endlessly in the approaches with 10 other vessels waiting for the lights to change.

Said traffic. While we were wary of ships, they were very steady and predictable and we had no issues with them.

Good thing I got the solar panels hooked up.

Another one on Lake Francis. Even at 12 knots, they didn't throw the wake a powerboat did.

Past the first lock, we stayed in a "canal marina" and managed to clip a sunken crib (a stone remnant of the previous canal). We did no damage to the rudder (it was a pretty minor tap), but we mnst have turned or otherwise unseated the nut securing the pin to the plate and the hydraulic ram arm. This became obvious later.

We went down an American canal to the two American locks. The weather was fine, but very gusty, at about 25-30 knots from aft. The "pleasure craft waiting area, as seen below, advertised six feet of depth.

And to think I used to like Eisenhower.

We draw five foot 10 inches on our full keel.  Becky spotted the vcry small, very literal buoyed area a little late, and I made a sharp turn...right onto shallow ground. This was problematic.

This is Edward's boat. It didn't end well for him, either.

This is Edward's blurry powerboat. He attempted to haul us off, for which I salute him, but he couldn't get much accomplished, and managed to foul his own props with our tow line. He also drifted into even shallower shallows. What a day it was turning out to be.

After several hours of blackening the oil in an attempt to reverse off with no result save some spinning, and a few more hours of bumping as the howling wind lifted us slightly and then dropped us three inches, I had to admit defeat. I called a U.S. Sea Tow outlet. Their first question was "do you have tow insurance?"

No, we did not.

It's hard to express how depressing this was. I stared more at this evil little nav aid for hours.

They put a towboat (a Stanley with a 150 HP outboard on it) from 70 miles away and drove to where we were. By this point, it was dark. After Herculean efforts, including a fresh regrounding, we were able to dock for the night. We also had Edward taken off. His props were unwrapped and it was discovered that only one of two was slightly damaged. Huzzah! Cost: $3,240 U.S. The U.S. dollar Visa card howled.

Note the evil buoy. I would say we are inside its six-foot demarcation. It begged to differ. That ship was requested by the lock staff to veer slightly port in order to give us enough "wash" to bump us free.

The next morning, full of hope and relief, we turned tightly off the dock and ran aground. Again. We nearly lost our tiny minds. More phone calls, more waiting. More pumping out the water tanks to lighten our load and (futilely, as it turned out) attempt to self-refloat. And while the integrity of the hull appeared to be intact, a nasty squeaking from the rudder's nether regions confirmed the pin was loose in its socket, meaning I had to break out the tiller and hand-steer.

Alas, the wash was a wash-out, although we did do a dramatic lurch of promise

Eventually, two different Sea Tow guys showed up and hauled us off stern first. Our bowsprit smacked the rubber fenders at the end of the pier, looking like the boat had had lost, not won, a fight. Cost: Another $3,240 U.S.

For a place with Homeland Security, they didn't even want to see our passports

The passage through the U.S. locks was as leisurely as any other, but made complex by the need to lasso floating bollard things, which proved difficult for Becky and Lucas and myself, trying to maneuver under tiller and not prang the wall. But we got through.

The slot in which the bollard thingie rises and falle.

The St. Lawrence widened into some pretty lake-like stretches after this, but, hand-steering as I was in some pretty impressive currents (8.8 knots with the diesel at just 1500 RPM), I did not stray far. The weather on the way to Cornwall deteriorated a bit and I was, frankly, a little paranoid. We stayed in the marina for a couple of days while I sought to find the right nuts to repair the job. A very nice contractor named Ben, who wishes not to be identified further, loaned me a massive 3/4" socket wrench and gave me a beefy 7/8" coarse threaded nut as are found, evidently, on hydro towers. This did the trick...but wait, there's more.

More ships!

More scenery!

More locks!

More random maintenance!

The Canadian locks were simpler to handle: two 1/2" poly lines were dropped from the top and simply eased around a bollard as we descended sedately. But the waits to get our slots were even longer: I estimate 24-28 hours of waiting over the five Canadian locks, mainly because of "more ships".

Looking a little rough there, Prime Mininster

Off, I believe, to Hamilon.

AIS has been, in actual practise, a positive boon in running down the river. We get constant updates as to speeds, closing times, distances of closest approach and other nerve-settling data. Because even the steel Alchemy is but a pop can next to these beasts, some of which bear evidence of mild collisions we didn't even want to dwell upon.

We were invariably the first to the "pleasure craft dock" and therefore had the longest wait times.

Slowly, we made our way to Montreal, but King Neptune, who operates on a franchise basis in these waters, had one more trick to play on us.

The view inside one of the locks, possibly Ste. Catherine

We had booked a morning lock transit for Ste. Lambert lock, the last one in the otherwise well-charted and buoyed Canal du Sud, a sort of bypass for those disinterested in the charms of the five-lock Lachine "pleasure craft" canal on the north side of Montreal Island. There was a yacht club in which we intended to stay, and while the area called "the lagoon" in which it was located was mysteriously unsurveyed, ourmarina guide claimed "two to three metres throughout".

The evil buoyage at St. Lambert. Not even once.

You can guess the next sentence. Go on, try.

We ran aground on a mud shoal. We were hauled off by a Zodiac with a 150 HP outboard driven by auxiliaries from Quebec's Garde côtière canadienne, and very effective they were. Our keel, once stuck on, only wants to back off. It took more time to fill out the form than to get off the mud. Cost: $0. I love my country.

We anchored in a very nice spot with very deep silt. That's the new Champlain bridge lit up.

We reversed back under the bridge (Champlain, old and new) and anchored out of the channel in about seven metres. The Spade anchor sets almost too well: we had to deal with a phenomenal amount of clay and silt the next morning and I had to use the old "rolling hitch on the chain run to the rope side of the gypsy" to get it in, as the chain side was slipping and complaining. But get it in we did.

Lucas is a big help, but he'll never truly enjoy upping anchor in seven metres of muck.

Bye, bye, mes ecluses!

Two guys we met in the six-hour wait for St. Lambert lock, Denis and Marc, were going to Port de plaisance Real-Bouvier and offered to prompt us on the VHF over the depths at the entrance, which looked dodgy and featured a slewing two-knot current, as is typical in the river. We got in with only mild tachycardia, and have reprovisioned in the suburb of Longueuil...

Took much of one afternoon to rearrange the anchors and clean off the filthy foredeck

...to rerun the anchors for less friction...

Inclinometre Velcro'd in place. Bought at Valleyfield for $10!

...made some minor improvements...

Boring, I know.

...and started on the more important job: a more permanent fix to the "pin" connecting the hydraulic steering ram to the rudder. As recounted above, we lost the nut to this last week in a graze with an old stone crib, and have replaced the nuts in the water twice with some difficulty as the rudder plate the pin (think something 7/8" thick) is about two inches below the water, which is fine for hand tools, but not electric drills. Add to this the aspect that to actually examine the pin means removing the entire rudder...I've only seen this part once, when Matt Phillips and I installed the Variprop and a new shaft and other goodies circa 2014 (see www.alchemy2009.blogspot.com for details if you like that sort of thing).

Cotter pin dryfitting.

So I've drilled a 7/8" nut (obtained at the perfectly stocked Demers Quincallerie Industrielle....think Atlas combined with Pacific Fasteners in Toronto) where my French was sufficient to get the nuts, the washers, and the two obscure sockets needed (1 5/16" and 1 7/16"!) and a 3/4"-1/2" reducer so these massive sockets can go on my biggest rachet wrenches/rbreaker bars.

We've assembled one of the tenders, crank on one of the nuts and a flat washer, hang a Dremel from the aft cabin portlight and use my Dremel's 36 inch extension with a 1/8" drill bit to drill into the existing holes in the nut, through the pin and then to insert and secure a SS cotter pin, which won't bear much force, but *will* prvent the nut from backing off.

One of these already fell off into the drink...because it's not yet pinned.

Fingers crossed, this will preserve the non-tiller steering (and the autopilot, which is very welcome in weather like this) until Halifax, in which the shipyard to do list now includes a replacement of this pin at the very least, and perhaps a rethink of how the rudder and the hydraulic arm are connected overall. Oh, and the wisdom of having a workshop on board is ever more clear.

We managed yesterday to get a good start, but the Dremel's too fast, so I'm going to hang my 500 RPM Makita drill lashed to the boat and use a Miles Orbiter to drill, slowly, through the SS pin. With luck, it will get through to the other side, I can pin it securely and we can be on our way.

Sunset over the Cardassian Embassy.