Yesterday, we went to Port Townsend to get Swoose ready to sail south to Olympia. I wanted to become more familiar with the boat’s systems before I ventured out alone on the Salish Sea. Weather can change quickly this time of year so knowing how to start and stop the engine and understanding how the sail reefing system works seemed like the smart way to be safer.

The dinghy was stored on the foredeck but we found that it blocked forward vision while sailing the boat. Faced with single-handing the boat southward, I opted to remove the dinghy and take it home for inflation testing and to get cleaned up. Getting the half-inflated dinghy off the foredeck was an awkward bit of business but we persevered and got it down to the finger dock. We had no trouble deflating it.

The real challenge was trying to figure out how it went in the special boat carry bag. The neat package shown on the Saturn website is not at all what we ended up with; our package looked more like a really big pig-in-a-blanket!

Once we got the dinghy off the foredeck, Swoose looked like a proper sailboat…well, as proper as a catboat-style sailboat can look in a sea of sloops, ketches, yawls, and schooners! I think she is lovely.

I did have trouble getting the engine started. Jan suggested that I read the manual — again! — and I finally followed her wise counsel. Onboard Swoose was the original 40-year-old operating manual for the Westerbeke W-13 engine and it did contain a piece of critical information. I didn’t find that critical item in the section about starting and running the engine. I found it in the part about stopping the engine. It turns out that the throttle lever was pulled all the way back to the stop position. Once I moved it forward so that the engine could get fuel, the engine fired right up.

I left the engine running for 15 minutes to watch for overheating but it reached 140 degrees on the gauge and stayed there. Cooling water was being discharged throughout this test.

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I also discovered that the foot pump for the galley sink was not pumping. We ran out of time to dig into this issue so it goes on the list as a non-critical item for the future!