Shivering our timbers over here

It's cold out, and getting colder! Checking the forecast last week, I saw temperatures predicted down just below the floor of normal, which bumbles along in the forties and fifties this time of year. That was enough to make me a little nervous; our hull paint, the big project we had planned this week, requires twelve hours over forty degrees to dry. With the predicted winds also making rudimentary tarp-tents impractical to keep the area around the boat at least somewhat warm and protected, I was getting a little nervous about going through with the scheduled haul-out at all, even though I had already obtained all the supplies I needed and though Don had already scheduled a flight over here to help out with the tasks.

My concerns only deepened over the weekend as the forecast got colder and colder. Now they are predicting temperatures below freezing all week, with lows in the twenties. I'm not brave enough to look outside right now and see what it is here in Hadlock, but I do know without a doubt it's going to be too cold to paint. So, as soon as the yard opens, I'm on the phone to cancel with them. The haul will have to wait for next spring.

There are other problems, though, with sustained temperatures so low... frozen boat plumbing! Normally, the waters of Puget Sound, frigid though they are, act as an excellent insulator for the boat systems. As long as the water isn't freezing, then generally nothing inside the boat will be freezing, either. But last winter, skeins of ice started to form in the marina slipways when it was cold and snowing, and I have little doubt the same will be happening this week.

Fortunately, haul-out or not, since Don is already on his way over, I'll be at the boat anyway and can keep the heat on and keep it above freezing inside, at least. That brings up another question, though, which is, exactly how much above freezing can I keep it? I have the built-in diesel heater and two small electric space heaters. None have massive BTU outputs, but in a small space, that generally hasn't mattered. But it's a small space without any insulation to speak of... if I can't pump more heat in than it is losing through the fiberglass skin in a given amount of time, it's liable to still be pretty damn cold aboard. We haven't before had to deal with living aboard when it's this cold out. Well, maybe Mandy has, but I haven't asked her about it. Either way, it is not without trepidation that I head aboard today... at least the boat will be preserved for future use and protected from expensive repairs by our presence, but how much we will enjoy the experience, I can't really say.

Keep on truckin'

This got a little stream-of-consciousness and has almost nothing to do with anything nautical... you can choose to keep reading along, or not, I'm not promising it will ever improve in quality or arrive at a particular point.

So, I haven't wanted to say anything until the ink is dry, but there is something like a 99% likelihood that we have finally got our house rented out. Mandy is going to collect the first check tomorrow; when it clears, I'll consider it official.

But the upshot of that, other than that we can stop bleeding dollars on a mortgage payment for a place we aren't living in, is that we have to get it completely cleaned out finally before the 12/01 move-in date. We'd left some furniture there that we had been trying to sell (it's easier to find buyers for that sort of thing in town than out here in the sticks), but it hasn't sold, and the new renters have plenty of their own stuff they'd like to move in instead. So, a trip to town with the truck was called for; we took it in for Thanksgiving, before we even had a clue it was going to rent, and had already grabbed part of the stuff, but there was another load left and I picked today to pick it up.

I wanted to get going early, figuring traffic might get bad at the end of the holiday weekend. Driving around through Tacoma is, economically, pretty much a wash most of the time... gas costs about as much as a ferry ticket, and unless you time the ferry perfectly it's about the same length of time to get there. But with a load of stuff, mileage costs more than the ferry, so "early" meant an early ferry. There is a 0520 and a 0700 from Bainbridge on Sunday; it's about an hour to the ferry from here, so I would have to leave at either 0415 or 0600. I have been fighting off Mandy's cold, so I set the alarm for 0530 and figured I would catch the seven o'clock and it wouldn't be too busy.

As it happened, though, I couldn't sleep much last night, and I happened to roll over and look at the clock just after four. So I got up and headed out.

After about a mile, I realized I hadn't turned the alarm off and it was going to wake Mandy up early (bad, because of that cold and all). Irrationally, my first thought was to call her so she could turn it off, but eventually I realized there wasn't anything to do about it and just kept going.

I got to Winslow with about five minutes to spare, but to my surprise, traffic was stacked up past the light and only trickling in. I started to get nervous, imagining sitting around in the cold, dim parking lot for an hour and a half, but when I finally inched up to the booth the ferry was still there. The toll-taker, frazzled, was talking on the radio saying, "I'm going to let a few more through and that's it, they're still stacked up out there." Turned out it was the day of the Seattle Marathon; all the runners from the peninsula were heading over to make the start time. WSF had neglected to staff for it; I was one of the last aboard, and the ferry pulled out 80% empty with cars still stacked up way up the hill in Winslow, because there was only one toll-collecter on duty.

A private business, you'd have to think, hey, once it's clear you're not going to get everyone through the line, just wave the rest through and load as many as you can before the departure time (which has to be held firm, lest the schedule be off for the rest of the day). You are just ticking people off at that point, an empty ferry, empty parking lot, a lot of folks waiting. But it's the state, of course they're not going to do the smart thing. Actually, now that I think about it, from a certain perspective the state should be more willing to let people through... most of us pay taxes, so in essence we've paid at least part of our way on the subsidized service.

But of course no government worker is going to default on the side of service over adherence to regulation, so the boat left mostly empty.

Anyway, I got to the house ridiculously early and had to load a bedroom set, a weight bench, and other miscellaneous junk as quietly as possible so as not to wake the neighbors. I got most of the stuff; the weights I had to leave (boarded up out of reach of the four-year old and dog who will be occupying the place... geez, I was worried that Mandy forgot to ask for an additional deposit on account of the dog, but the toddler will probably do more damage anyway) since the only spot I had left for them was concentrated in the back corner of the bed and unbalanced the load too badly. Try loading and unloading 200 pounds of cast iron weights in the dark without making a racket! I think I managed it, though, no lights came on.

After that it was a pretty easy trip back; I had good ferry luck on the return trip, too, didn't wait more than ten minutes. A bungie snapped somewhere along the way and a back corner of my tarp shredded unnoticed in the wind stream, but nothing got wet or damaged.

I missed the Seahawks game, which was unfortunate, since it was a rare win. When I finally turned the TV on, the choices were San Francisco versus somebody or the Vikings and the Bears. Although it would have made more sense to watch SF since they're in our conference I pretty much have to tune in to Favre TV when Mandy is around.

I've been pretty well hard-wired to root against the Vikings from all the years Mandy was a fan of Brett in Green Bay so I almost reflexively find myself cheering when their opponents do well and groaning when Favre connects... which happened a lot today. He's having a monster season, and it sort of forces you to re-assess his career. Everyone knows the interceptions thing, but with an extremely solid front line (anchored by former Seahawk Steve Hutchinson, whose absence from the 'Hawks does much to explain their own lackluster performance these past few years), an extraordinarily capable receiving corps, and All-Pro running back Adrian Peterson in the backfield, he's got all cylinders firing and is at a career low in the season for interceptions, and near highs for everything else. It makes you wonder what he could have done with more talent around him earlier in his career, and to what extent it was his talent alone that dragged Green Bay along for all those years. Or perhaps he simply didn't have the maturity until this point in his career to make use of everything that was at his disposal. It's hard to say but interesting to consider.

The afternoon was diminished by news of the four Lakewood police officers who were gunned down at a coffee shop preparing for their shifts. It's especially chilling coming so close on the heels of the assassination of Seattle officer Tim Brenton last month. In fact, it almost makes you angry at them... what could they have been thinking? It's too early for any details of what happened exactly, but how, a bare month after a cold-blooded killing of another officer who was just sitting there, could they put themselves in that position? Were they in a booth? Was no one watching the door and did the killer not raise any hackles? It's not impossible for one armed man to kill four in a close-in gun battle, but you have to imagine it involves either incredible luck or the cooperation of the victims. And how could they have been unaware, bottled up, or otherwise unready in any way in the wake of Brenton's murder? Did they avoid firing back to avoid endangering others in the shop? If so, should they have, according to the cold logic of the active shooter response protocols adopted by many departments after the fiasco at Columbine?

Cops almost always are reacting rather than acting in these situations, as it must be; they are the good guys, they can't start pulling their guns every time they get a hinky feeling about someone. The crazies who do this sort of thing can conceal their intent and almost always get the first shot. Nonetheless, officers tend to prevail in these situations (to put it coldly, they have a 6 to 1 kill/death ratio versus criminals). Superior training and discipline has them making better use of cover, shooting straighter, and thinking more clearly than the opposition. American cops, by and large, are pretty ninja. Policing an armed and violent society has inherent risks that has upped the overall skill level of men and women in that dangerous job. Which is why it is so unbelievable that a single nut, in one fight, managed to kill four of them and escape. I can't off-hand think of anything like it; four officers have been killed by the same assailants twice in California in recent history, but in neither case were all the fatalities caused in the same incident... multiple encounters allowed the murderers to focus their efforts.

At any rate, as with any news of that sort, the whole thing made the rest of the already grey day seem particularly grim and unsettled. Mandy had to go back to town today to teach tomorrow, and I am, as always, irrationally worried about her being there alone after such a vivid demonstration of how unbalanced some parts of our society are. I know, of course, that in fact violence is increasingly rare, particularly involving strangers; still, as I write above how saddened I am that the four deceased were caught off-guard, it seems obvious that no matter how rare, it is a thing that it would be both hypocritical and folly not to prepare for. I guess if you want to find the connection to nautical matters in this post, that would be it: risk is the intersection of the severity of a possibility with the likelihood of it occurring. If a thing is both rare and inconsequential, then putting much effort into preparing for it is probably a waste. If it is uncommon, but serious, however, it's probably worth preparing for in some respect. I guess I would put "getting assaulted by a complete stranger" in that category, just like "hitting a rock and sinking your boat." Someone probably keeps odds on both those... be interesting to see how similar/dissimilar they are.

I see now they are looking for a guy pardoned by Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas in connection with the shootings. If it turns out that is in fact the killer, I imagine this will put paid to any further presidential aspirations Huckabee may have had.

Bering Sea crab boats

After digesting a day's worth of "Deadliest Catch" episodes, I am even more impressed with the crab boat captains and crews that work the Bering Sea waters. It's not so much the bravery (whether it is bravery, avarice, or stupidity actually seems to be a point much debated, and I'm not sure I have a position on the matter) that pushes them to work in those waters, but the subtle expertise they demonstrate in the difficult situations in which they find themselves. They may come off in many episodes as regular, working-class joes doing a tough job of an industrial variety, but in fact they are generally a bunch of savvy, intelligent, supremely capable individuals who happen to be doing traditionally blue collar work. It's a bit like astronauts out building new modules onto the International Space Station; they're turning wrenches, sure, but that doesn't imply they are simple grease monkeys.

As one of the captain's observed in an episode I saw today, "These guys up here are all the real deal." You don't stay employed, or alive, in that environment if you can't think as well as act.

Nothing reinforces this more for me than some other reality programs that have come out over the past couple of years in the hopes of duplicating the success "Dangerous Catch" has found. Discovery has one called "Lobstermen" that basically is the same show only covering fishing boats working the North Atlantic, and someone else had one about loggers working here in the Pacific Northwest.

Watching those just reaffirmed all the low opinions that us elitist snobs often have about folks in those professions; they tend to be the dregs, who can't get work doing much else, certainly not for any more money. They posture and then whine, make dumb mistakes and then walk off, and seem utterly incapable of addressing obstacles with the least bit of ingenuity or cleverness. I have trouble sitting through those shows. The drama is usually in the challenges that the crews face, but the challenges presented in those imitation shows either seem contrived or pathetic... obstacles that wouldn't slow, say, the Hillstrand boys down for more than five minutes, instead absorbing an entire episode as a gaggle of loggers stand around flummoxed.

In contrast, watching the crab boat crews reveals a bunch of guys who can navigate, weld, fix hydraulic systems, perform medical diagnosis and field surgery, rescue men overboard in twenty foot seas, SCUBA dive in icy waters, splice cable, clamber ashore from a wrecked boat using an improvised ladder of crab pots and safety rope of shot line, and perform a whole host of other mechanical and intellectual tasks that would strain the capabilities of professionals from any number of fields... in short, they exhibit the modern equivalence to the traditional abilities to "hand, reef, and steer" required of the able seaman in the age of sail.

I guess that's something that appeals to me about boating in general, though, the idea that if you keep putting yourself in that environment, you can pick up many of those diverse and useful skills. Of course, every summer here we see plenty of evidence that isn't universally the case, but at least the potential is there. And I'm constantly amazed, even here in the tame waters of Puget Sound, how many truly excellent skippers there are out there. They may be your dentist, a mechanic at Boeing, your local postal worker, or a software engineer in "real" life... but on the water, they have all the skills and poise of those iron men of yore sailing wooden ships. Watching from shore, few lubbers have any idea the depth of knowledge and expertise that can be involved in making those fluffy white things scud about on the placid waters, but the more I learn, the more impressed I am with the local sailing community. It's not the Bering Sea, but it's challenging enough!

Deadliest Catch Marathon

On Discovery Channel, all day today. Booyah! Thanksgiving Weekend marathon-watching at it's finest. Tomorrow is "Dirty Jobs" and I expect to remain fully occupied by that as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!

What we are lacking in two-legged friends and family this year we are making up for with the feathered and four-legged variety. I guess we miss the rest of you and all, but frankly it's a relief that none of the menagerie up here will be asking us at any point through the weekend "So, what is it that you are most thankful about this year?"

We're actually heading into town to have Thanksgiving Dinner at a vegeterian restaurant with some other friends who are absent family this year, but if not, I believe we would have opened the house up, brought the chickens in (it's raining wicked hard out there right now) and had a Thanksgiving Feast with them, the pugs, and the cat. No bets on who would have attempted to feast on whom.

Hope everyone is having a grand holiday this year!

Crock-pot cooking

I've never used a crock-pot before, but I was listening to NPR last week and they had a panel of people on talking about favorite fall recipes, and apple-butter cropped up. They spent about five minutes enthusing about slow-cooked apple butter and debating their favorite recipes, and I was sold. I have always liked apple butter, but I've never had both apples and the means of producing butter from them at the same time. Up here in Hadlock, however, there is a crock-pot sitting on the pantry shelf and four or five trees full of apples going to waste up the hill, and I didn't have anything else planned for the weekend beyond sitting on my duff watching football, so I decided to make my own.

First, and the hardest part of the whole endeavor, I had to convince Mandy to go pick me the apples and then help me peel and slice them. After a lot of moaning and complaining this was accomplished, and we found a combination corer/slicer that made the work a lot easier. The apples were mostly pretty small, which meant we had to cut up a lot more of them for five quarts than if we'd been using off-the-shelf apples from the grocery store.

That done, the rest was pretty easy: pitch 'em into the crock pot with a mess of sugar, cinammon, and cloves, and let the whole thing bubble away on low overnight. The recipes I came across were fairly consistent in recommending eight to eleven hours of cooking time, but either my apples were too crispy or I didn't chop them up finely enough, because I had them on for almost thirteen before the consistency was good. The taste, if I do say so myself, is excellent... better than the off-the-shelf variety by far, although mine still isn't as smooth (I could have blended the mush and cooked it down a little more for better consistency, but it doesn't matter that much to me). We ended up with a lot less than I expected, though... five quarts of apples doesn't yield the veritable flood of apple butter that I had imagined. So, we'll probably have to whip up another batch here before all the apples go bad. I should ask Mandy how many are left up there....

Television: not all I had imagined it to be

I was pretty excited about this weekend, my first in quite some time with a working television and satellite access that I would have all to myself. I've been craving football, and other than a few glimpses in sports bars and the kind indulgence of friends, I haven't had a chance to catch a complete, non-streaming game all year. Streaming has been all right, but it's just not the same as the glory of a full-size set, a full-on stereo, and the stability of a dedicated satellite TV connection.

Although we've been house-sitting for a couple of weeks now, circumstances have previously dictated that I be back in town on weekends since we have been here, so it's just as if I hadn't been here at all. I'm looking at the same situation for the foreseeable future, so I had a lot riding on games happening this weekend, at least mentally.

Unfortunately, it was a bye week for the Huskies, and the dragging Seahawks were up against the newly reinvigorated, Favre-led Vikings. Of course, my worst fears were realized; the Vikings gave the Hawks a merciless beatdown, one that wasn't even particularly exciting to watch. So the whole TV thing, at least whatever I had built it up to be in my mind, has been kind of a dud.

Don was wondering why I seem to be so uncharacteristically absorbed with football lately, and I didn't have a ready answer. I think I finally figured it out, and maybe figured out why it is that a lot of people are so absorbed by sports in general. Football intrigues me because of the intellectual aspects; once you get past the hitting, it's actually a pretty complex game, and when executed properly, it's a sort of elegantly violent ballet, a beautiful exercise of physical prowess and mental agility. But that's not really why I've been so interested lately. Rather, it's because it represents an escape. Because it's something you can be absorbed in, can lose yourself in the permutations of and the technicalities. It takes you away from some of the frankly unappealing elements of day to day living, elements that have been more prominent in life lately than I might otherwise prefer.

So I'm watching the game today and a Chevy commercial comes on, one of those melancholy John Cougar Mellencamp versions showing the stolid, suffering but persevering blue-collar culture that represents the company's target market, and I realize that a lot of people are, and always have been, in that same boat. I'm probably just projecting, but if I was an assembly-line worker recently laid-off, or a farmer whose fields had turned to dust, I'd probably be pretty eager to lose myself every Sunday in the travails of the team of my choice, too. So maybe that's why I am so eager to do so now, and so displeased that the teams of my choice either aren't on, or aren't performing well enough to allow me to participate in a vicarious victory right now, when I could badly use one.

The Salish What?

You may or may not be familiar with the controversy (which may or may not be much of a controversy, when you get to the bottom of it) over the now official naming of the body of water encompassing the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound as the Salish Sea. The idea, brainchild of retired WWU marine biologist Bert Webber, has been kicking around for thirty years but saw a burst of interest within the past five years or so, leading to its official adoption by the State of Washington and US Boards on Geographic Names.

I was suspicious at first and have resisted applying the monicker in my own references. I dislike stuff that seems to just be made up for the sake of political correctness or some mythical sense of ecological purity, and this smacked of that on the surface... an ahistorical Indian name applied for the purpose of tying together a geographic region as an ecosystem. "Salish Sea, the meaning would be so positive in the sense of all of us working together," said one supporter of the bid. Bah! Positivity, what did that ever get me? I don't want a body of water to be touchy-feely, I just want it to flood and ebb twice a day with moderate predictability.

The reasons opponents have given for their stand against it have been no better, though. "It's just another one of the American efforts to erase the border," says one, an example of "cultural imperialism" stressing words over deeds, though this argument fails to explains exactly how all the things that make a border a border (ie, different taxes, laws, and a bunch of guys in uniform standing along it) are going to be erased by the new name, or how Canadian citizen Webber, the originator of the monicker, fits in to these nefarious plans. Frankly, I got tired of listening to people whining back and forth on the subject these past few years and have just as soon be rid of the whole subject.

But despite all this I kind of like the name itself; it's catchy. And whatever the motives of the people proposing it, I find that it actually does fill something of an important niche in geographic reference to the region. I have in the past found myself casting about for a name for the region roughly covered by the Salish Sea, cobbling together "lower Inside Passage" as a bastardized approximation. It turns out there is a logic to the layout of the sea; there are natural borders at the edges of it, and only notional ones inside it. It comprises the general area of the puddle where we primarily sail, a place that has never really been confined by national boundaries, and now those waters are tied together with a single name instead of a bunch of hyphenated approximations. "It's a silly idea. We have beautiful names," says the same Canadian resister of cultural imperialism as was quoted above. Maybe (although, frankly, I don't think "Strait of Georgia" is anything to write home about), but what you don't have is one name to refer to all of those places together... until now.

Better Late

So, I may have mentioned to some of you in the distant past that I was talking with a local nautical website about writing a blog for them. Finally, this has come to fruition, and you can find my humble efforts on their site at http://threesheetsnw.com/lateentry/

Of course, this comes about just as the cruising season is fading away, so you might not see the post volume spike there until closer to spring. I'll continue to maintain this blog, too, as a channel for topics of more direct interest to friends and family, but my most pithy observations and generalized nautical subjects will probably end up posted there rather than here. On the plus side, they'll be more likely to be spell-checked first.

Happy Halloween!

I'm up early. Gale force winds have been blowing most of the night, pushing us into the dock and causing the fenders to squeal and the boat to rock back and forth, which Mandy observed a couple hours ago was "scary." And also that "the wind is trying to blow us to Canada." These are the sorts of things I get out of her when she's still asleep.

Anyway, I had to get up and go to the bathroom anyway, and when I did, I realized she's right: it is scary. The wind is shrieking through the rigging of a hundred boats, a full moon hovers in the bright mists above a dark and forbidding cloud bank off over the Sound, and it's Halloween! It's supposed to be scary!

I could have wandered over and knocked on our nearest neighbor's hull and yelled "Trick or Treat" but that might not have gone over well. Frankly, I hope that there is not a strong trick-or-treating tradition down here, because we have no candy to speak of. They'd have to get granola bars, which would surely lead to a trick... TP in the stays, or some such. There aren't many kids that live here, but it's the sort of place where it would be pretty safe to go trick-or-treating even in the city, for those who have gate keys.

Project Gemini: Success

And, as predicted, Boeing will be opening up the new 787 assembly line in South Carolina rather than Everett, according to the Times.

Everett doesn't stand a chance

I don't want to get too far afield from nautical matters, but Everett has a port, right? Anyway, if you live in the area you are no doubt already familiar with the great debate over whether or not Boeing will site its second 787 assembly line at the existing assembly facility in Everett, or if it will instead build a new assembly plant near another Boeing facility in South Carolina that already builds some parts for the plane. With 787 sales already doing quite well, even in the downturn, and despite some notable problems getting the plane off the ground, the decision is of no small consequence to the economy here, and the primary sticking point for putting the second line in Everett is the historic bad blood between the company and the machinist's union. Much has already been made over the union's apparently ill-timed decision to strike over pay increases last year even as the economy was plummeting and order cancellations piling up. Though the strike ended with a victory for the union, it may prove to have been a Pyrrhic one, having convinced the company to seriously consider a permanent relocation of facilities to non-union territories.

Charleston is one of those places, located in a right-to-work state, with a labor force that has already demonstrated a willingness to discard union representation. Though any such large-scale move threatens to disrupt an already shaky 787 program, something I ran across in the paper this morning pretty well convinces me that the game is over for the Everett machinists.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, the state Department of Commerce is preparing its confidential proposal to Boeing under the code name Project Gemini.

"Confidential proposal?" "Project Gemini?" Whoa! Is that the Department of Commerce, or the CIA? I'd say that indicates a degree of motivation that just isn't going to be matched here in Washington, where Boeing has long been taken for granted. Add the fact that the Charleston labor force, wracked by unemployment, is hungry for even moderately well-paying jobs while the IAM workers in Washington seem to loathe their employer with a seething wrath typically reserved for direct-to-video martial-arts revenge fantasy movies, and it's hard to see what incentive Boeing might have to stay. Reporters keep pointing out that it's a lot of effort to get one of these things up and running in a new place, and that Boeing has already invested a lot here in Washington. As someone who has recently moved, I can certainly understand that moving is a pain in the ass, and I suppose it's even harder if it's not just your house, but a massive and complex aircraft final assembly facility, but if you've got no prospects for future improvement in one place, it doesn't matter much what your sunk costs are, it's time to make a change and go somewhere else. You're just throwing good money after bad at that point if you stick around.

If the IAM doesn't come up with a secret proposal and a cool project name of their own soon, I'd say they are in a world of hurt!

Paging the white sailboat on R dock

Your lights are on... and have been for more than a week now.
I'm only just now starting to realize that it's not Venus or a particularly low airliner approaching when I catch sight of this out the companionway hatch early in the morning or late at night.

Is it just me, or is it raining a lot?

When I woke up this morning to the now familiar deluge splattering the hatch over my head, I began to think that perhaps my perception that it has been dumping a godawful amount of rain on us lately was simply a matter of proximity... when it rains a lot and I'm in a house, I don't notice so much, since the roof is a long way away and the sounds muted even out the windows (since instead of splashing into more water it's falling softly into grass and leaves and such). Also, I didn't used to get showered on between my bedroom and the shower before. That's sure to draw your attention. Maybe it's not so bad, I thought, I'm just more exposed than before. It's probably no worse than usual, I am just not used to hearing it like this.

That was before I got up to drive to a client's office this morning. The massive lakes forming in the roads all over town were not typical. Having to run the wipers at full bore to maintain a minimal vision of the road is not par for the course. This is the third time this month already I have noticed such heavy downpour and when I checked the weather service totals just now it turns out that I'm not just imagining things; we received half the typical monthly average of rainfall for October this morning. We're already double the typical monthly average, and there is the rest of the week yet to come. Then we get into the rainiest month of the year, November. Fun.

Ballard makes good (sort of)

Ballard has had a hard time impressing me with much of anything recently. After the novelty of the Locks wears off and the quaintness of Old Ballard starts to just look a little shabby, the traffic and parking (Almost Live was dead-on with the old Ballard Driving Academy sketch... 7 is as fast as anyone goes here in Ballard. Actually, taken as a whole, their compendium Ballard sketches comprise a pretty fair tourist guide to the neighborhood. Here's a bonus one with Bill Nye before he was the Science Guy.) and unfortunate location really start to grate on ones nerves.

But I had a half-hour or so to kick around at the Ballard Farmer's market today, and if there is anything to recommend the neighborhood, that would probably be it. In addition to being a real farmer's market, with actual farmers and actual fresh farm products available in quantities exceeding those of the half-baked craft goods that most farmer's markets try to pass off as authentic country goodness, the two or so blocks of Old Ballard that are blocked off and decked out for the event every Sunday ooze character. Looking for a crusty old guy walking around with a parrot on his shoulder? Got that. Pink Floyd covered by a two man accordion band? Got that. A hastily penned folk song chronicling the recent adventures of Balloon Boy? You better believe they've got that. And if the prices at some of the booths haven't managed to avoid gentrifying along with the rest of the neighborhood (fresh food at Yuppie, rather than country, rates) at least the quality of the goods are solid and the selection broad. Produce, meat, eggs and cheese, all available from multiple suppliers, right there in the same block.

There are deals to be had, however. Like most markets, you can dicker, if that's your thing. And there are just some genuinely good prices on some things. I managed to snag a half dozen mini donuts at the bargain rate of $1.75. And there is the constant possibility there, as at any non-systematized, casual marketplace, of teller error... error which may well be in favor of the consumer. I, for instance, received seven donuts in my half-dozen batch, a small counting error worth nearly 30 cents and one extra ration of yumminess in my belly when all was said and done. I shall commend the mini-donut both very favorably to friends and family in the future, so in the long run they will no doubt find it was a mistake well worth making.

A ghastly day

It's an absolutely ghastly day out today, rain whipping sideways and the wind shrieking through the rigging overhead. Halyards can't even beat out a decent rhythm in this stuff... it's bong bong bong ding ding shreeeeek and then on to something else. West Point says that it's only 25 gusting to 28 but the variance seems greater here in the marina. It's good to be inside, even if it's inside of something that is bobbing around quite a bit even in dock.

I expect I am noticing it more because I just got back from a job this morning. When I left, before the sun was entirely up, it was just raining. There is less rain now but the wind took me by surprise. I stopped at the dumpster to pitch some garbage on my way down from the truck, and the wind caught the lid and whipped it right up and over the top. I couldn't get enough leverage to get it closed again. Fortunately it's pretty much empty so trash isn't getting vacuumed out and blasted around the neighborhood.

I'm super glad I got the dinghy deflated and stowed yesterday, though. I wanted to give it some time to dry out first, a couple of good sunny days, and I never got them, so I settled for a couple not quite as wet as usual days and decided yesterday it was as dry as it was going to get. Good thing... if I'd left it out last night I would be starting all over again as of today. And the forecast is not promising with respect to aridity.


Fortunately, now that I am back for the day, I have something to mess with inside the boat: a new Mac Mini.

Since moving aboard, I have been needing something with enough horsepower to handle the development environment I run to build Mandy's website stuff for her; I develop in Windows because it's Playskool easy but I run it in a virtualized environment to handle the different machines necessary and to ensure that it's portable. Previously, for example, I ran it all on a home-built Linux machine.

My antique PowerBook had a processor to old to run it all, though, and I'm not in a position to replace it right now. A dedicated Windows machine would have been an option, but a very limited one, and probably would have needed to be custom built to get the form factor small enough, making it as expensive as a Mac anyway. I decided on the Mini as a compromise; it could handle all the development stuff and serve other purposes as well, such as video and sound editing, and function as a boat-sized server when at dock. It's small enough to fit easily into our computer dry box, and portable enough for us to easily take house-sitting. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor are the bulkiest items.

I figured all this out a month or so ago, but rumor had it the Minis were due for a mid-life upgrade sometime soon, and I didn't want to buy one when a better one could be had for the same price in a matter of weeks. So I had been sitting on my thumbs, stewing and not getting much done, until last Tuesday, when Apple finally announced the new version. I was so excited I got up and drove to the Apple Store at University Village, only to find that they hadn't gotten any in yet. I went home and ordered online; it showed up yesterday (free shipping!) and today it's all assembled and running back at the nav station.

I'm having trouble concentrating on code, though, so mostly I am fiddling around getting it set up to serve movies to all the other devices here and getting the virtual machines updated to take advantage of the increased processing power. What with all the racket outside, I doubt I will actually accomplish much on it today. But tonight, when it gets quite, or very early in the morning, when I can't sleep, it will be sitting back there ready and I'll sink into the lethargic fugu of programmers everywhere and hopefully crank out stuff to start catching up with what we want the website to be able to do right now.

Scary noises

Mandy was all freaking out last night because of "scary noises." These amounted to our fenders squeaking and lines shifting in some heavy winds, accompanying the usual rocking and bobbing boat motion that happens in such situations. I made fun of her; after all, we've heard all those noises a hundred times, and frankly I find them somewhat reassuring... it means everything is where it should be, doing what it is supposed to do.

It's calm and quiet this morning, and I got up to go up to the bathroom. For a change of pace (exciting life I lead here) I walked down to the bathrooms at the head of the R/S docks. Along the way, I heard a seal barking out near the breakwater. The sounds echoed off the high bluff to shoreward in the morning gloom. It was spooky. Halloween is almost here.

Sailing home in the rain

If we thought it was a bit damp getting up to Kingston, that was nothing compared to the drenching we got on the way home from there! Yesterday was wet and chilly out on the water; yet despite that, we had a nice, fun sail down to Shilshole, where we are now tucked away again, safe and warm.

Mandy actually sailed most of the way. We pulled out around 1100 with the rain and winds both relatively light in Appletree Cove, so we motored out into clear air beyond the southern point (query: the point forming the southern tip of Appletree Cove isn't named on my chart... does it have a name? or does the cove extend technically all the way out to President's Point further south?) and picked up a nice 10 knot breeze from the southeast to raise sail in.

After that it was just a matter of beating south, which was not terribly onerous as the wind remained moderate and from a favorable direction. We took some pains to stay out of the shipping lanes as the intermittent showers hampered visibility somewhat, but there weren't many other vessels out on the water. Not a great day for it according to conventional thinking; but it was kind of a fun little trip for us. The wind kicked up as we got closer to Shilshole and we made the trip in about three hours.

We also took some advantage of the rain to go pump out our holding tank. For those unfamiliar with the process, consider again something I have mentioned here before: there is nowhere "down" in a boat for anything to fall or trickle out of. Everything that comes into the hull stays there unless removed, settling to the lowest point physically possible and cluttering or messing the place up in the meantime. This, of course, includes sewage.

We have a small chemical toilet installed by a previous owner, rather than a more conventional marine head, but we improved the installation a couple years ago with the addition of a holding tank that we can empty the toilet into while we are out and about. This extends our cruising range in the no-dumping environment of Washington State (BC, with fewer pump-out stations and laxer environmental regulations, is simply a very large and diluted open sewer) considerably. But eventually, one must pay the piper, and when we do so by visiting the conveniently located pump out station provided at the marina fuel dock, we prefer to do so in the rain... Nature's hose, constantly directed over our shoulder to flush away any gruesome bits of evil stew that somehow escape the massive vacuum system that sucks the tank empty.

Because of our unusual setup, flushing the system is more complicated than it is on other vessels. We have a two-stage process, where sewage is pumped from toilet to tank, and then sucked out of the tank. To flush everything out, we go through that process a couple of times, which involves a lot of getting on and off the boat, turning the vacuum on and off, turning the flushing hose on and off, and crawling into the cockpit to work the pump. Mandy hates everything to do with the head. Still, I am not sure she wouldn't hate a conventional marine head even worse, with its greater complexity and propensity for breakage. I am pretty happy with what we have. A different setup would necessitate a much larger holding tank to serve for the same period, which would eat into already limited storage space.

But the tank is emptied and we're here where we can use the marina facilities now. We're hunkered down with the heater on full blast, drying out foulies, waiting out what looks like a week or so of pretty miserable weather coming on. Our timing isn't usually all that great, but I have to say we timed this trip just about right. We probably enjoyed about the last week of continuous decent weather this year, and finished up just as things are getting worse. I'm not sure how often or where else we might go this winter, but trips will probably be considerably less frequent. We will probably be kitty-sitting for much of the winter, as my folks take their RV and head south for sunshine. There is probably at least one sailing trip up to Port Townsend in the cards sometime in November or December for a haul-out; the hull needs re-painted and our rudder stuffing box needs repacked. Apart from that, I think I may be content to sit in a marina and wait for spring!

Go Bucs!

There's quite a nice little park/commons area adjacent to the marina and below the KCYC clubhouse (available for rent!) here in Kingston, and when we went out for our daily constitutional this morning we saw folks out setting up tents and hay bales and propane heaters, which piqued our curiosity. From the colors of the decor and other banners we saw up all over town, we quickly deduced the function for which the preparations were intended: Kingston High School Homecoming Week!

So about 1800 we hear the parade processional arriving, accompanied by the high school marching band. I was just getting out of the shower (free showers at Port of Kingston! Up to this point, I have been referring to good showers as "Buck fifty showers" since that's about what it might cost to have one at Shilshole, but from here on out I will simply call them "Kingston showers") and Mandy was in the middle of fixing dinner, but I was thrown into a paroxysm of excitement at the prospects of free entertainment, so I dried off and forced her to finish quickly so we could shovel it down and get up to the party.

The park was full of screaming teenagers chasing one another around with cream pies; the big attraction of the event, other than the hot dogs, was apparently the opportunity to splatter other people with cream pies, sometimes in an organized and carefully measured manner, sometimes simply opportunistically. I got caught in a drive-by and caught some over-splatter on my back but it was merely a flesh wound. I threatened to put Mandy's name on the list for those being drug off to the target booth, but probably no one would have been very excited about throwing pies at her. She seemed confused by the whole thing... her high school apparently had pretty sedate homecoming events. I don't even remember what they were like at my high school, but the whole thing reminded me quite a bit of the hubbub surrounding homecoming at the high school in the small town where I lived when I was younger, Lake Roosevelt High School. The similarity was no doubt enhanced by the similarity of the mascots; the Kingston Buccaneers and the Lake Roosevelt Raiders (who are a fairly typical 0-5 so far this season, I see; they might have a shot against Brewster in a couple of weeks, the winner avoiding the ignominy of coming in dead last in the Caribou Trail league). I don't have any really distinct memories but the whole thing seemed vaguely nostalgic for that reason.

Anyway, we didn't stick around long but I'm still enjoying the band playing from down here on the boat.

Go Bucs!

The wet way to Kingston

It didn't really get super-wet until we got here, actually... our timing was nearly impeccable in that respect. But it's sure pouring out now! We're thrilled to be tucked up in one of the two reciprocal mooring slips kept by the Kingston Cove Yacht Club at the Port of Kingston, with the electric heater blasting and the hatches dogged down tight. I am doubly glad I finished caulking the toe-rail at the bow a few weeks ago, too; persistent, nagging leaks in the v-berth have all but stopped, even in the heaviest weather.

We pulled out of Eagle Harbor this morning just after the showers stopped there and right as the sun started to put in an appearance. The clouds and rain were still low and swirling off to our east, folding Seattle in an amorphous blanket of glowing gloom. Sunlight reflected through the swirls off the top of Qwest Field and some of the taller office towers poked out through, but with the sun coming from behind the cloud banks, the city was mostly erased from view. We raised sail just inside the #2 buoy and headed north in about 8 knots of wind out of the southeast.

The sun stayed with us most of the way and the winds were fairly light and of course on a rainy Wednesday there was no traffic to speak of outside the ferry and shipping lanes. It stayed that way until I went off-watch three hours later; as soon as Mandy got on deck the sun disappeared, the rain started, and the wind kicked up. We were just off Jefferson Point by then, though, and the additional burst of speed put us into Appletree Cove in no time. We got the sail down and tucked in to the marina with no trouble, happy to see that a reciprocal slip was open. KCYC maintains two here, and although there probably was never much likelihood of finding anyone in them this time of year in the middle of the week, my fear was that we would, and would then either have to pay for a regular slip or have to look elsewhere. We've been itching to use our WSYC membership to stay cheap or free at a another club, and with a series of storms coming in, this seemed like a perfect opportunity. There isn't really a particularly safe anchorage here, so the marina is the only good option.

So now we're drying out and catching up on work. We'll stay for a couple of days, and most likely head back to Shilshole after that. Our ambitions to visit the south Sound may be quashed until spring. But we'll have an opportunity to explore Kingston, previously a place that has simply been another quaint town to pass by on the way to a ferry terminal.

I can't get away from Bainbridge Island

Actually, it was my vote to stay in the first place... we had planned to head out today, but I thought Mandy would like to hang around and see lovely downtown Winslow. That was before it started to rain. Anyway, we're tucked away warm and dry at the local library for the moment. And we got to walk around a bit before it started raining, so hopefully she got her fill of quaint cottages and parks. We'll grab lunch somewhere in town on the way back to the waterfront.

Tomorrow I am not sure where we will go. The original plan had been to check out the south sound on this trip. That was the same plan as last time, of course, but this time we simply missed our window... Mandy wanted to stay close to town for Monday, and now the wind has shifted so it's out of the south, and since we're doing this for fun and not simply to say we did it, a six or seven hour tacking marathon to get down to Gig Harbor just isn't in the cards. But we don't really want to hit our old haunts up north, either. There are fewer options in the mid-sound region, at least if you discount Poulsbo/Bainbridge and the Port Orchard area, which is where we have spent the past week already. I'm inclined toward Kingston or Everett at the moment, but we'll see what the weather is like in the morning. The West Point weather station showed wind out of the northwest this morning, which put me in for a bit of confusion... another instance of too much information being a bad thing. I thought for a bit we might get to Gig Harbor after all, but the reading seemed anomalous and at odds with the forecast so I dithered, and here we sat instead.

But it's not a bad place to sit and Mandy is picking out places for lunch right now, which beats a peanut butter sandwich on the boat, and might even make up for the damp seats in the dinghy we'll have to deal with on the way back out.

I can't get away from herons

Herbert, Herman, whatever he is called these days, has apparently followed us across the sound and taken up a perch astern of us on the linear mooring system here in Eagle Harbor. I really hope it wasn't he who pooed upon the starboard cockpit bench last night. I shall be severely disappointed.

Mandy is over in the City (as they call it here) working today and I have had to wander about Winslow on Bainbridge Island all by my lonesome. Actually I quite like the place, despite a paucity of coffee shops in the immediate harbor area.

Mandy was saying the other day that it doesn't feel like fall yet, but it sure did to me this morning as I walked around in the cool mist, with the trees starting to turn and Halloween decorations everywhere. I was just looking for a Starbucks (there isn't one) but I quite liked my little tour of downtown Winslow. Unlike so many well-to-do towns that have sprung up in the middle of quaint villages, the architecture here pretty much all seems to match. Modern condos, cottages, and townhomes all blend in well with the older houses and cottages, and a fine patina of vegetation tends to mask what differences there are. I didn't see many mega-mansions, although certainly those abound along the waterfront all around the island; in Winslow, the homes are small and tidy, making excellent use of space.

The commercial areas are tidy and well-considered also. The buildings are mostly newer, but again the new fits well with the old. I've never seen so many doctors, spas, yoga studios, and gyms... the islanders must be some of the fittest and healthiest people on earth. But then, since it seems most of them walk or ride their bikes down to the ferry every day and then to whatever points their business takes them in Seattle, they probably get plenty of exercise anyway.

They are dying the slow death of frogs in a pot of water being brought slowly to a boil, though, as a series of "citizen" initiatives has led to decreased transportation funding and increasing ferry fares these past few years. Indeed, another just took effect; traditionally, to cope with the summer tourist season, Washington State Ferries levies an additional charge during the summer months, removing it to the relief of locals in the fall. This year, they are taking away the summer surcharge, but simultaneously adding in a rate hike so most people will actually pay more than they did this summer.

It's hard to say what effect this will ultimately have; certainly it will press hard against the less well-to-do commuters, who may find the economics of the situation dictates a move back to the mainland. Will Bainbridge become an even more exclusive enclave? A sleepy retirement community? Or will the wealthy depart too when the low funding levels result in almost inevitable service cuts, such as those that have already done away with passenger-only ferry service?

One of the benefits of having our own floating transportation is that the outcome won't really affect us either way. But it would be sad to see this lovely little place dwindle.

Water ballet

I'm waiting for the ferry at the Seattle-Bainbridge terminal right now and watching an intricate ballet unfold off the Seattle waterfront. An OSCO container ship is coming in to the east waterway, with tugs in attendance, as the Kaleetan sits at Coleman dock offloading and Wenatchee manuevers around to the north to come in to the dock to unload as well. In the background, the Adventuress beats southward nearer Bainbridge Island and a Coast Guard cutter heads north. The winds are out of the south at ten to fifteen knots. I shudder to think what sort of windage the ferries and cargo ships present; on the other hand, their vast bulk must also have an intrinsically damping effect on any such motion.

You don't have to be on the water regularly, or at all, to appreciate these things; but I find I notice them more now.

I see there is another ferry in the dry dock over at Todd Shipyards on Harbor Island. Looks like one of the super-Jumbos, but I hadn't heard that any of them were being taken out of service. I wonder too if the cutter is heading out for a reason; on the way over earlier today, I saw a smaller fast-response boat with its lights on heading the same direction. A single large incident happening? Or completely unrelated? Nautical matters are under-reported, or if they are not, I at least haven't found a good real-time or near-real-time source of them yet. I have come to realize that I've been spoiled by the past few years in West Seattle with the West Seattle Blog to refer to as the the information source of first resort in almost every instance. With more of our time spent in Ballard now, we've taken to checking out MyBallard.com, which is often mentioned in the same breath with WSB, Fremont Universe, and CHS as frontrunners of the new hyper-local news scene. But MyBallard is a pale, feeble imitation of WSB... updates are old, infrequent, and incomplete. Mandy read something the other day which was comparing the post volume of the various local hyper-local (did I coin that?) websites, and WSB was far and away the most prolific.

It certainly shows in the quality and utility of the site. Do you hear sirens in West Seattle? Check WSB... they already know what's going on. Traffic backed up? Check WSB, they know why, and what your best alternate routes are. Looking for something to do this weekend? WSB has all the events, no matter how small, happening in the neighborhood, and hey, if you missed one, they usually have reports afterward of what happened and how it was. One day, Mandy heard a strange beeping noise outside in our neighborhood. It was irregular but kept coming back. Finally, we checked WSB. Turns out someone had gone out of town and their house alarm had malfunctioned several blocks north of us. WSB had the story, had followed up with the police, and checked with the alarm company to see what the timeline might be for getting the thing fixed, all before we even thought to check the site.

This sort of in-depth, up-to-the-minute information beats anything that traditional news sources can provide, even those with websites, and the success that WSB has had in delivering such information feeds on itself. At least half of the secret to their success is that almost everyone in West Seattle, should anything even remotely newsworthy occur in their presence, will quickly tip them via e-mail, cell-phone, or Twitter. They've effectively tapped into the local population, because those people all know that what they contribute will be reported and be useful to their neighbors. And because everyone checks the site when things are actually in progress, you get a wider variety of information sources than if a whole army of reporters had been sent to cover the event. The comments are often as useful as the story, and the editors frequently make use of information gathered there as well.

The other half of the secret seems to be that they are dedicated, old-school reporters... up half the night listening to the scanner, in the car in an instant to check out a scoop, cell phone always on. Fast footwork and good sources make for great reporting. And of course none if it would work if Tracy and Patrick weren't extremely professional in tone and conduct. They have journalism backgrounds, and it shows; but unlike their more staid compatriots in the "real" newsrooms, they also have figured out how to leverage modern technology to get useful information to people in a short timeframe.

In the summer, Captain Richard Rodriguez's Bitter End fills much of this gap for the San Juan Islands, although that isn't his goal and consequently there are many gaps in the coverage. Puget Sound Maritime fills a position as an aggregator of nautical news published elsewhere, but it's neither timely nor complete. Three Sheets Northwest has excellent, well-researched and well-written feature articles, but it's geared almost entirely in that direction and lacks immediacy and completeness as a nautical news source. The Coast Guard's District 13 public information site is an excellent resource for Coast Guard activities, but generally well after the fact (and rightly so; they have more pressing business).

In short, I am probably asking for too much... spoiled, as I said. I suppose there is too little sense of community on the water; few people live here, after all, it's a weekend getaway for most. For those who work on the Sound daily, I imagine the grapevine fills much of the need for news. There are times I turn on the VHF just to listen in much the same way I used to habitually click over to CNN when I didn't have anything better to watch (although their ridiculous antics of late pretty much cured me of that even before I got rid of the television).

Well, I hadn't planned on writing about all this when I started out, but there you go. If anyone knows of a better source of local maritime news, let me know!

The Wrong Side of Poulsbo

That's where we're anchored, a consequence of my failure to do more in-depth research prior to departing the home dock. Depth, indeed, was my undoing, as was time, working together to cause me, when we arrived just after dark Thursday night, to pull in short of the vast, gleaming Port of Poulsbo marina, taking up with the tawdry ranks of powerboats in the mooring field between the marina and the yacht club. Oh, there is depth all right, and we put the anchor down perhaps fifteen minutes earlier than we might have, and goodness knows it's well-protected, well-provided with Internet service, and as possessed of lovely, teasing views of Mount Rainier, the Olympics, and the charming Scandinavian homes surrounding Liberty Bay as a person might wish... but it is, alas, on the far side of the marina from the dinghy dock.

And I neglected to purchase the 2.5 horse Tohatsu we saw at Second Wave on Thursday that was going for a song. A song, I tell you!

It's just as well things aren't too convenient here, as otherwise it might be hard to come up with sufficient reasons to leave. That's easy to say, I suppose, with the sun shining, the boat warm, and our electricity as yet unsapped. Sometime in the coming weeks when the lights began to dim and the rain to fall unyielding from the heavens, I suppose I wouldn't need much more pursuading to weigh anchor. But at the moment, I'm quite content to sit out here and bobble gently at the end of the rode, watching everyone else go by.

We're trying to work out a plan for early next week, which will require Mandy's first extended adventure in getting back to town from somewhere (possibly here) in the Puget Sound region for the students she has on Monday. It would all be quite simple but for her insistence on leaving on Sunday to get there, and returning on Tuesday... two days amongst the least convenient for transit from the hinterlands here. Or Sunday is, anyway, Tuesday is no worse than any other day. But it does mean I have to sit someplace an extra day or so, and that brings me back to being here, on the wrong side of Poulsbo from the dinghy dock. Kill an extra day at the Kitsap Regional Library? Perhaps after finding a wayward maple bar with my name on it at the excellent bakery near the waterfront? No problem. But row an extra half mile each way to get there? That, I am not so excited about.

Will keep you posted on the alternatives. Right now I'm looking at (blech) Bremerton instead.

Two-wheeling it

We finally got our bike rack up last week. It's actually a dinghy rack, but a lot of people use them for bikes as well, since bike storage is otherwise somewhat problematic here at Shilshole. There are plenty of bike racks, but they are all labeled "Day Use Only" (this somewhat incomprehensible dictate has led a fellow tenant to start locking his or her bike to the railing at the entrance to our dock instead of the perfectly good, and empty, bike rack six feet away, where it would be much less in everyone's way), and there are some small bike sheds which seemed expensive and awkward and quite possibly all taken, and then there is some sort of bike graveyard behind a chain link fence, where the bikes of absent cruisers go to die.

Since we are cheapskates and actually want to use our bikes regularly, we did what a lot of people do (and which the marina allows and apparently approves) which is to pay the extra $5 a month for the two vertically mounted steel tubes that go with fittings behind our dock box and buy a six foot pressure treated 4x4 to lash up between them and hang our bikes from.

The only real challenge was finding bike hooks for our purposes; we have two to hang, and need to have some separation so they are easy enough for Mandy to get down without tangling them together. We found a couple of fold-down tool racks at Lowe's that were just about perfect. I only noticed after we got them back that they have mount points that are closer to six inches apart than four... not enough room to put a screw in both holes when putting them up on a 4x4. The screws were sturdy enough that one would hold a bike pretty easily, though. I'll go back and screw a chunk of 2x4 in to the bottom of the 4x4 sometime later and secure them both top and bottom.

After getting the hooks mounted, it was just a matter of holding the 4x4 in place and trying to talk Mandy through some half-remembered Boy Scout campsite lashing techniques. In the end we got it secured pretty well, I think. At least, neither the bikes nor the rack have come crashing down yet (although out of paranoia I continue to attach the bikes directly to the crossbeam with their locks... if they do get dislodged they should wedge and hang there instead of turning into seafloor features beneath the slip). And Ballard, which is just a bit too far to walk easily or enjoyable, is now begrudgingly accessible.

Kinetic Kaos

We took off last Thursday to see where the wind would take us, and since it was blowing from the south when we left, we decided to go north. We'd never been to Port Ludlow, at least from the water, and so decided to anchor there for a few days and see what we had been missing.

Ludlow is a somewhat unusual community and equally unusual as an anchorage. Ashore, the community is composed largely of retirees (although you will find the locals as you get higher up into the hills off the water) and doesn't look anything like a conventional small town. It's built around a resort and golf course; there are a few nice restaurants, mostly associated with the resort, but the closest thing to a grocery store is the local mini-mart, and as far as other services go, if the resort doesn't do it, it pretty much isn't available. In recent years, the place has garnered a reputation as a quiet destination for the rich and famous, and it's certainly well-designed to cater to the affluent recluse... houses are tucked into the trees, the resort is quietly classy, and the views are classicly beautiful. I can't comment on the golf course since I'm not a golfer, but isn't 27 more holes than usual? The excesses of the wealthy!

The bay is well-sheltered, particularly the further in you go, where the high hillsides draw close and block the winds (although a pair of underwater cables can make anchoring problematic). If that's not enough for you, though, the inner bay, accessed through a shallow channel near the base of the main waterway, is almost entirely enclosed. Although anchoring depths in the inner port are acceptable for a boat our size, two to three fathoms, I didn't feel like braving the entrance, with a least depth that is pretty close to our nearly one fathom draft. It would be fine at high tide, but then you are limited in when you can leave. I didn't have any premonition that I would have some pressing need to leave, but still... I decided to drop the hook in the outer bay.

We had a day of rain and I came down with a wicked cold, but our diesel cabin heater decided to work more often than not so we had a couple of pretty nice, quiet days working and reading. Unlike many anchorages, Ludlow doesn't see a lot of traffic. We had only a single companion at anchor (and I didn't see anyone on deck the whole time we were there) and I can't recall rolling at the hands of an errant wake even once.

Ludlow is only about six miles from Port Hadlock, where my parents' mooring buoy is at, and we thought that while we were so close we might swing past and pick up a generator that I had stored up there... Mandy was jonesing for more power and sunlight is bound to be in short supply in the coming months here. When I e-mailed Mom to see if they would be around for us to come get the thing, she mentioned something I had completely forgotten: it was the first weekend in October, time for the Kinetic Skulpture Race in Port Townsend!

We seem to end up going to the race by happenstance more often than by design, which happily fits in well with the event's general theme of merry unpredictability. Since we were so close, it seemed like fate was once again calling us to the race.

As it happened, we had to be back in Seattle by Sunday afternoon, and wouldn't be able to watch the main event on that day, but we hauled anchor Saturday morning and beat the tide through the cut (the Port Townsend Canal, between the mainland and Indian Island) and got to town in time to watch the always exciting outcomes of the mandatory pre-race Brake and Float Test. The skulptures are created with varying degrees of inspiration and workmanship and there are inevitably some contestants who fail one or the other.

The wind had shifted to the north and was whipping down at Hadlock in the south end of the bay but it was pretty nice in town next to Hudson's Point where the Float Test happens. We were late and didn't have a great view but various degrees of dampness witnessed among those coming back up the ramp attested to a number of flotation-related issues among the contestants.

As is typical, I forgot my camera, which is a pity this year particularly as some of the costumes were particularly good. There was a Alice in Wonderland theme and frozen in my mind's eye is the sight of the White Rabbit throwing a few back on the other side of the window at the iconic Town Tavern (which is unfortunately no longer the Town Tavern... but to fans of "An Officer and a Gentleman" it will live on in its former glory!) after the Float Test.

We had a great dinner with my folks and their friends Pete and Nancy and Brent and Janet. Brent (the same gentleman who did the delicious ribs we served at our wedding) and Janet cooked and it was as excellent a meal as we have come to expect from them. I got a good night's sleep and a hot shower and then it was time to head back south.

The wind, in addition to switching direction, had also upped its intensity, and was bombing down at twenty to twenty-five knots from the north. We only inflated our little six foot raft, since the dinghy is a pain to assemble for such a short stop, and I paid for it by taking several cold North Pacific waves in my lap on the way back out to the boat. Once aboard, though, we raised sail and took off like a banshee going south. We only put up the main (except to manuever into the cut) but kept hull speed or close to it for most of the trip. We made it in a little over four hours, a thrilling down-hill sleigh ride under blue skies and sunshine.

We weren't the only ones out, either, and not everyone was quite ready for the ride. We overheard pan-pan calls for four different capsize incidents resulting in persons in the water, two engine overheat/fires on board, and what sounded like it might have been a collision between the Vessel Assist Everett boat and someone else. We were busy trying to wrestle our main down and negotiate the flurry of kite-surfers and sailboarders whipping around the north breakwater at Shilshole by then so I'm not sure what exactly happened. But the Seattle Vessel Assist boat was absent from its slip at the base of our dock when we got in and I have no doubt they were having a busy day.

Football afloat

In general, I don't miss TV very much now that we are without one. I canceled our cable even at home a few months ago, and sold the TV itself earlier this month, and hardly noticed it was gone with so much else going on. We never considered replacing it when moving aboard, although many people do have TVs aboard these days. Dedicated marine satellite TV receivers are one option, and if you spend most of your time at the dock, Comcast is available at every slip here at Shilshole. Dish antennas abound, clamped to rails or in makeshift mounts on the floats themselves.

We don't really have the room or the desire for a dedicated TV, and with options like BitTorrent and Hulu we can pretty much keep up with any of those shows that we do deem as "must see" TV.

But fall is upon us, and with it football season, and this is where my plan is failing me, because football is an event best viewed live, and the NFL and NCAA are both extraordinarily protective of their respective properties and considerably behind the times in their adoption of web-based technologies.

I can almost always find Seahawks game audio streamed from the various radio stations that follow them, but I like to watch, too. NFL's GameCenter web tracker isn't terrible for a visual representation, but it doesn't sync with the audio and it's a little dry and statistical. Here, atdhe.net is my friend. The site is an aggregator of sports video streams, originating from individuals who are generous enough to put up streams direct from their own TV receivers by a variety of means. Most NFL games can be found there, although bandwidth can be a problem. I'm not sure if it's primarily at our end (I suspect this is the case; the marina wireless is not overly robust here) or elsewhere, but it's generally a serviceable quality. I'd like to find out more about the whole operation, which is apparently run out of France, but they are understandably reticent to put up much information about how it all works.

Husky games are more difficult. They have a service similar to NFL's GameTracker, run by CBS Sports, but it's much harder to watch as they have sauced it up and made it 3D, which only muddies what is actually going on. Sometimes more popular college match-ups can be found on atdhe but not, for example, yesterday's game against Stanford (although considering the outcome, perhaps it was a blessing I couldn't find it). To make matters worse, however, the NCAA has a web blackout it imposes against streaming radio stations, so I couldn't even listen (we don't have a standard radio receiver aboard for similar reasons as the TV).

I have found a number of somewhat shady looking services online that claim to stream web video of just about any game but until I can dig up more about them, I am hesitant to offer up my credit card number. Anyway, it's an interesting challenge to figure out what I need to do to get these things for free; they are, after all, broadcast openly over the air, so there isn't any inherent reason they shouldn't be equally available online.

Anyway, the 'hawks and Bears are neck and neck right now with six minutes left, so pardon me while I return my attention to that side of my screen.

Herbert the Heron

Mandy has decided that the Q dock heron here at Shilshole is named Herbert. I was thinking Henry, but whatever. He's a wily one, in his own way, so I haven't managed to snag a picture of him yet. At the same time, he's remarkably tame, and seemingly curious about us people and our strange ways. A couple days ago he scared the heck out of me as he blasted off with a godawful squawk from the next finger dock outboard of us when I was clambering out of our hatch early one morning bound for the restrooms. Coming back, he got me again, this time by perching atop a radome on a stern rail mast right next to a wind generator... in the half light, the silhouettes are remarkably similar and my mind just registered two generators there (as unlikely as that may be) until he blasted off.

Even when he isn't trying to scare you, Herbert is a little bit spooky. Last night I was coming back down to the boat after dark, and saw someone walking ahead of me down the float. Lighting along the floats here is from little lamps installed in the utility stations at the head of each slip pair, resulting in little twin puddles of light marching down the float in regular order. It's kind of dim and cool and hits people about waist level, allowing you to see them as a set of sort of disembodied legs either approaching or receding along the float ahead of you. So people look a little strange anyway, and it didn't hit me until I was within 60 feet or so that the guy walking down the float ahead of me was actually Herbert.

I slowed down a little bit, thinking I might get the drop on him and even up the score in the scaring the heck out of people game, but he knew right where I was. When I got within about twenty feet of him, he calmly turned off onto a finger pier and wandered down to where two neighbors were kicking back over beers, probably to try and bum a Coors off of them. He didn't say anything as I went past and I didn't either, and as I was packing my stuff down the companionway I saw him stalk past on the main float continuing his casual inspection out toward the end of the dock, sans beer. He didn't seem too put out, though, probably understanding it was always a longshot and that he would have had trouble carrying it anyway.

Lately he's been surprising me less often, as I am on to most of his hiding spots, but what with him being a bird and all, there's always the vertical option, and he can relocate from mast to mast in near-silence. Still, he hasn't been blasting me with that terrible noise even when he does get the jump on me, and I take it as a sign that we are now known and welcome inhabitants of his dock.

Whoop... he's squawking about something outside right now. Did Timmy fall down the well? I'd better go check.

New normals

When I was a child, if I woke up before the rest of the household (at least during the cooler months of the year) I would wait until our forced air heat came on before making the noisy climb down from my bunk bed to the floor so as not to wake anyone else. If I moved around thereafter, reading or playing quietly, I would similarly wait for one of the heating cycles. Often as not, I would park myself over one of the heat vents, sometimes using a blanket to form a sort of one-man teepee to trap and funnel the warm air.

I find myself reverting to those patterns these days, waiting to get up in the morning until our space heater kicks in so as not to disturb Mandy. Then I turn it up all the way, increasing both heat and white noise in our small cabin area, and turn in toward my nook back at the nav desk to stay toasty while I putter around at my computer.

I've been waking up early remembering odd dreams lately. Last week, I was a character, the narrator, in a Nick Hornby novel. I woke up with vague memories of articulating my strategy for keeping a map of the homes of my favorite rock stars, but using false names for each of them so that if the map should fall into the wrong hands, it couldn't be used as a guide for stalkers or other nefarious agents. It's just exhausting to dream that sort of thing... you wonder if that's where he gets it.

Before that, I had woken early another morning having dreamt of reading a terrific Terry Pratchett novel, remembering the clever plot and several inventively written scenes revolving around a civilization with only one book which was added to piecemeal over the generations, only to realize that he had never written such a novel at all. If he does come out with it I will be torn between suing for infringement or hanging out my shingle as a telephone psychic.

I'm hoping that sleep patterns and other basics will get back to normal now that we have gotten the house ready to rent out, but I am slowly realizing that I am going to need new normals now. The summer has been a whirlwind and maybe that is what was needed to break us out of our old life before settling in to the new one; the boat seems a haven now, rather than a limitation. Although we are still finding places to stow all the last-minute stuff that we discovered we "must" have with us (I expect much of this stuff will disappear soon enough; having grabbed it up in haste and panic like a drowning man clutches at a life ring, we will likely cast it aside just as he might when he finds himself in much shallower water than he imagined) it seems much more manageable than a household full of such stuff. Things have their place here, and everything has to be in its place, or the disarray is obvious. It's a bit like those big tool boards they use in kanban manufacturing systems, where outlines are drawn or cut in precisely the shape of each tool, so that anything out of place is immediately missed and can be located and restored. If you see anything sitting on a settee or table in here, it's not where it is supposed to be, and needs to be put away.

There is tremendous comfort in that, even though the "away" places are not yet all as well organized as they might be. The knowledge that everything we have is there for a reason and goes someplace in particular, and that we can push it all back away from the dock at any time and go wherever we want with it is reassuring... something that can be controlled in otherwise uncontrollable times.

In some ways I know that this is misleading; there will still be externalities to deal with even living aboard. Making a living, managing assets, and so forth will not simply go away. But it's been remarkably easy for Mandy to produce much of her material while we are out and about, and as I move more toward supporting her business and focusing on time-limited, narrowly focused engagements in my own, I have to think it will all work out okay for me, too.

There are lifestyle issues; it can be very damp and every item aboard must be guarded in some way against being wrecked by water inadvertently. It's cramped and confined, especially for me. I have found a suitable work space, wedging myself into the nav desk area, and I don't hit my head on the overhead or companionway hatch much anymore, but I'm simply never going to fit well in the tiny shower/head. We went to the Boats Afloat show last week and I was incredibly envious of all the new, large interiors on display there.

But it's still new enough, or different enough, to be a little bit magical, and it's compensation enough for now to feel the boat rocking gently beneath you as you wake up in the morning, to see the sun reflecting off the water on the late summer afternoons, to hear laughter and see lights in the portholes around the marina as evening falls and to feel very tucked in and secure in your own boat.

Catching up

What with all the running around we have been doing since we got back from the honeymoon, it hardly seems as if we actually are back... we've just slipped off into some parallel universe where we have no home and no permanence but simply slide from one hectic journey into the next with short pit-stops in half-familiar boats and houses.

I mentioned the yacht club event that we attended the week after we got back; after that, we scrambled around catching up on work for a week and then a friend and I attended PAX here in Seattle the following Friday (exposing ourselves to swine flu in the process, apparently... I feel fine, though. achoo!). The next morning, Mandy and I got up early and drove to Spokane, where we stopped off to check out our recently minted lawyer friend Loyd's new digs and our friend Don's ongoing remodeling project (both looked good), then continued on to a family camp out up on the St. Joe River in northern Idaho. It was a little drizzly, on and off, but we had a good time and got to catch up with a lot of family we have not seen in a couple of years.

Coming back through Spokane on Monday, I got a text message saying another friend had fallen and broken her ankle. Apparently there had been rain on both sides of the mountains, and she had slipped on some slick stairs and smashed it up pretty good. I got to see the films later after helping her get to a doctor's appointment--they were pretty ugly, chunks were off floating around randomly in places where there aren't supposed to be any chunks. She had surgery last night and got a skyscraper's worth of hardware installed but she'll be laid up for a while.

So this week has been a lot of running around in between helping with that situation and Mandy have another presentation in Federal Way today. We're supposed to be getting the house cleaned up and cleared out and ready to rent, but our time has been available here in such limited chunks that we aren't making much progress... or if we are, it doesn't really look like it.

Tomorrow we'll get a truck load of stuff off to storage though, and hopefully that will help. I plan to get everything that we want to hang on to stored, and then go through and just shovel everything that is left into the truck to go to either Goodwill or the dump. Our goal is to get everything clean enough to have potential renters able to start looking at it by the fifteenth. We had better, because the Lake Union Boats Afloat show starts the next day, and I plan on attending. Of course, we're missing out on the annual Wooden Boat festival in Port Townsend this weekend, but that is at least partially because I thought (or had been told, by someone who ought to have known better!) that it was last weekend and not this one.

Anyway, we're staying busy, but we're not making a lot of progress. Hopefully next week will change all that.

Home Sweet Shilshole

It's a day early, but Insegrevious is back in her slip on Q dock again and we're back in Seattle!

We had our slip sublet through today and weren't planning on being back until tomorrow... and only half of us at that, as Mandy was going to have been dropped off in Poulsbo to go up and feed the cat and retrieve our car from Port Hadlock.

I got an e-mail this afternoon from the guy who we had sublet to saying that he had been able to get into his new permanent slip a day early and was all moved in already. Mandy was feeling rather poorly and hankering for a bath anyway (no baths on the boat... not enough water and no where to soak!) so we hauled the anchor and headed up out of Agate Pass and across Puget Sound to home.

It was another beautiful day, after the fog burnt off this morning, and I was a bit sad to leave our idyllic anchorage. But we would have had to go tomorrow pretty early anyway, and possibly in the fog, so this was probably for the best; all we're really missing is another night in the v-berth, and we had forgotten our pillows anyway. Plus, with Mandy not feeling well, it was no sure bet I would be able to send her up to Hadlock anyway, and as she can't really dock the boat on her own, I couldn't go, either.

So tomorrow I'll have to get up early and schlep myself up there the hard way, via ferry and transfers across four different transit systems. I've been wanting to get that figured out anyway, since in the future it seems like it might not be an uncommon commute for us, but I wasn't really planning it on such short notice. It's a busy week, though, and I suppose one more thing isn't so terrible. The boat, at least, is some place close and secure, and we can focus on other things for a short while.

All you can eat

...and more, would be a good description of our first outing with the West Seattle Yacht Club at the annual Steak Fry in Brownsville.  This is a bunch of folks who know how to eat, drink, and be merry.  From the Friday early arrivals potluck to breakfast today, there was chow (and booze) aplenty, and a lot of genuine, jovial people enjoying themselves.

Neither Mandy nor I are by nature joiners, so we were relieved that things went so well this weekend.  We had a good vibe when we had dropped by another outing of the club's earlier in the year, and this confirmed it... it's not one of those snooty, jacket-wearing yacht clubs, but a working man's club with a little history to it, a bunch of people who have a good time on the water and have gotten organized about it.

It was not only our first outing with the club but our first time in Brownsville, and we're kicking ourselves for not having explored our own backyard a little sooner.  The Port of Brownsville is a charming, inexpensive marina in semi-rural East Bremerton (or thereabouts... I'm fuzzy on where the lines are all drawn on land) with friendly staff and tenants, great accommodations, and a lovely view.  Sunrise this morning (which I saw only because I volunteered to help cook breakfast; a sort of warm-up for a big family gathering in Idaho next weekend that we also plan to attend) over Port Orchard and Bainbridge Island, lighting up the patches of fog and a blue sky overhead, was beautiful.  We had a patch of rain on Friday night but otherwise the weather was terrific.

We met a lot of new and interesting folks, with boats and boating preferences as varied as are available in the Pacific Northwest, from sailors to trailer-boaters to people who just like boats but don't have one yet themselves.  We were at first a bit concerned that there are relatively few sailboat owners in the club but it became clear after a few conversations that there were many sailors-at-heart; as is often the case, former sailors "of a certain age" were members who had found it necessary to give up the labors of cranking winches and balancing on the weather rail for the safer and more practical realms of powerboating.

The whole thing really did remind me quite a lot of my own family gatherings and so I felt almost immediately at ease.  Mandy was a little more reserved at first but even she had loosened up by Saturday evening.

We're missing the next outing, coming up this next weekend, but we're looking forward to the annual Halloween Cruise.  I'm not a costume guy but Mandy is already plotting something.

It's another gorgeous day here in Puget Sound today.  The fog has lifted and we pulled out of Brownsville, with some regret, just after noon.  We didn't go far; another place we had never been down here was Manzanita Bay, which is just across the channel on the Bainbridge Island side.  We have our slip at Shilshole sublet through the end of the month, which is tomorrow, so we have a couple days to wander.  Anchoring out with fancy houses and boats all around us isn't a bad way to spend them, we figure.  With solid Internet and enough Pepsi and Pop Tarts to get me through the mornings, it shouldn't be much different than working at home.  Tuesday, I'll drop Mandy off in Poulsbo to go up and feed the cat (the Graebel's are moving half the family these couple of weeks, it seems) and collect the car, and I'll get the boat back over to Shilshole, finally, for a rest.

Minor reflections on US Customs

So, I finally got around to reading the "warning letter" we almost received for our late entry into the country at Port Townsend earlier this month. We had been cautioned by the CBP officer that we had violated the law by showing up after office hours, and that hefty fines could apply, and that we should look over the pertinent regulations to ensure that future behavior was within acceptable margins.

Today, I read the letter quoting the relevant sections of US Code... and I can't find a single one of them that we violated!

I've quoted a couple sections below; though there is additional language in the letter, these are the only sections I can find with relevance to our entrance.

Section 4.2 of the Customs and Border Protection Regulations (Title 19, Code of Federal Regulations, section 4.2) which states that upon arrival in any port or place within the U.S., any vessel from a foreign port or place... master of the vessel shall immediately report the arrival to the nearest Customs and Border Protection facility or other location designated by the port director.

That's the only bit I see that has any wiggle room in it that we might have somehow failed on... the "other location designated by the port director." There isn't a facility in Port Townsend, strictly speaking... on the other hand, it was the closest locale with an office to our point of entry.

Report of arrival of vessels: The arrival report shall be made by the master of the vessel to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer at the nearest port of entry by any means of communication. (italics mine)

Which is exactly what we did. I stress the "any" because they made it sound like our major failing was arriving too late to report in person, and the after-hours phone call was an unacceptable method of making contact. If I were reading their own letter as instructions for properly entering into the US, I would have the impression that we were being instructed to do exactly what we had done.

Now, I am sure that the underlying code can be twisted or interpreted so that we could be guilty in almost any circumstance... that's the beauty of a complex legal system. But I can't see in any way, shape, or form how we violated anything as explained by the violation letter!

More of your tax dollars at work....

Okay; that's my last CBP rant until next year! Return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Miracle on the Elliot

At least, that's the overblown (or perhaps intentionally ironic; always hard to tell with newspaper quotes) description of this event offered by an SPD Harbor Patrol officer.

We overheard the drama on the radio this morning as we came down to Bremerton from Port Hadlock. Due to our distance from things, the only clear transmissions we heard were those of Sector Seattle, but it sounded as if the responding boat owner, as he is identified in the article, was in fact the local Vessel Assist captain. The Seattle Vessel Assist boat is moored at the base of the ramp that goes to our slip on Q dock, so it would have been pretty well situated to respond, much closer than any police or Coast Guard vessel, assuming the skipper was nearby.

Unrelated, but moderately exciting for us avid Captain Rodriguez followers, we also overheard Remedy for the first time, at nearly the same time.