Elusive Winter Break

One thing about living on a boat is you can’t always choose your down time. After spending two months in the UK and U.S. gathering boat supplies and visiting friends and family. We returned to Norway at the end of January, hoping to spend a quiet winter on our mooring in Hakoya, just outside Tromso, catching up on routine maintenance at a relaxed pace.

Our plans started to shift the moment we walked into the greeting area at the Tromso airport and were told, “Snow Dragon lost her mooring and was on the beach but is now OK”. Luckily Mark, Fred and his wife Fredo were on their boats and realized that Snow Dragon was in trouble. In over 50 knots of wind, they dinghied out with long lines and manually winched Snow Dragon off the beach and secured her to a large boat. They told us that we missed a good workout while we were on the plane.

Snow Dragon showed no ill effects from her beach landing and we were able to turn our focus back to making Snow Dragon habitable after her midwinter hibernation. Her batteries were flat so we ran a cord to the quay and plugged into shore power. With the batteries charging and the heater running, we began unpacking and started on some of our winter tasks.

Then the owner of the boat we were tied to returned and asked us to leave, which meant we had to get the mooring back in place in a hurry. Frances suited up in multiple wetsuits and we rowed out to the mooring to find out how Snow Dragon managed to drag it. Frances dived down to take a look  and saw that only part of the mooring was intact. The water was too cold to work in and we ended up having to hire a professional diver with a dry suit to come and reset the mooring.

In the meantime we discovered that neither our generator nor the engine would start. The problem with generator turned out to be a failed circuit breaker which was easy to fix but the engine remained a mystery.

The diver came out and reset the mooring, he was confident that it was secure but there was no way to test it without our engine. We ran a line and used the powered windlass to winch Snow Dragon back to her mooring. Everything looked good until the tide started to go down and it became evident that we were too close to the beach. At midnight in the snow, we ran a line to the boat we had been tied to and put tension on it to keep us from grounding. This worked well in normal wind conditions but we did not feel it was secure enough to withstand the 30-40 knot winds from different directions that were forecast for the weekend.

After the big boat left, we decided to move to their place, which consisted of four moorings. Repeating the same workout that Mark, Fred and Fredo underwent getting Snow Dragon off the beach. With Snow Dragon secured, we were able to wait out the heavy wind without worrying.

The wind was still blowing Sunday night when our heater stopped working. Luckily our new mooring position was close enough to run our power cord to shore. This enabled us to have enough power to run our small electric space heater and the dryer with the door open for heat, without having to run our generator all night. The heater had just been professionally serviced and it was frustrating that it failed so soon afterwards. We hope to have it running before the temperature drops t0 minus eighteen celsius later this week.

Today the mechanic came out to look at the engine and came to the conclusion that we had been dreading, Snow Dragon needs a new engine. It is not a job that we are looking forward to. Over the next few days we will decide on a replacement but our choices are limited by what will fit. The only thing that is certain, is it will be an expensive and difficult task.