Boat Week

Although we've been back aboard full time for almost a month now, we've been so busy working and catching up with friends in town that we've done little more than basic cleaning and tidying with the boat. That is all changing this week, which I will call "Boat Week."

Boat Week kicked off yesterday as I cleaned the decks (somewhat pointlessly, in view of the fact they are going into a grimy, messy boatyard in two days) and Mandy cleaned and de-stained most of the hull. I also checked over the engine, which looks a little rough but fired right up and ran well, and we motored over to the fuel dock to pump out our holding tank and fuel up. As usual, I was surprised by how little fuel we had used since the last fill up--about ten gallons. I was even more surprised at the price; almost sixty bucks. We've been watching gas prices on land drop these past few weeks, but apparently the marina kept a Memorial Day premium price or something. Marine diesel should be cheaper yet as you don't pay the "road tax" on it, but next time it looks like it's going to be cheaper to take our fuel jugs up to Safeway and lug them back.

Apart from that, the who evolution went well, and we are all ready to head north to Port Townsend Tuesday afternoon for our haul-out. The weather is just about the worst possible combination; Tuesday should have southerlies, but they are supposed to be "light" which for all practical purposes means no sailing, since you quickly outsail the wind when going the same direction in that situation. Wednesday and Thursday, days when we hope to be painting, promise to kick it up a notch, with southerlies to twenty-five knots... great for sailing, terrible for painting. Particularly because the yard in Port Townsend is moderately well protected to the north, but wide open to the south... those winds will whip across the bay and tear right into us. I have some tarps I can rig as a sort of wind/rain screen (oh, did I forget to mention it's supposed to pour rain as well? yeah) but I don't know if that will be sufficient.

Actually, as I check it this morning, the forecast has moderated somewhat, leaving Thursday not quite so terrible, but the fact remains that it's not going to suddenly break out in sunshine and chirping birds... one way or another it's going to be pretty grim outside.

We've got some barnacle scraping to do. We've never had that problem before, being primarily in fresh water in the past, so it will be interesting to see how easily, or not, they come off the bottom of this thing. Our paint sands off quite easily but I don't know how deeply they dig in.

I also am beginning to think that we have another leak toward the stern, in addition to the rudder post (which I already knew needed to be re-packed); I'm thinking we have some holes in the muffler. It's impossible to say for sure, because the muffler is wedged in beneath the fuel tank and I can only see one end of it. There is certainly water dripping out from beneath it at a fair flow while the engine is on (perhaps a drip a second) but you can't tell if it's coming from the muffler itself or somewhere further aft. If we have time, I'll want to yank it out and see if it can be patched up or welded. It doesn't absolutely have to be done while we're out of the water, though; it's below the waterline but there is no water in it unless the engine is running.

Ditto with cleaning and painting the engine. I would like to do it while I have extra hands around, most of who are more patient and methodical than myself, but it could happen another time if need be.

The keel is going to be the great unknown. I can't see a thing from above the water so I have no idea how dinged up it may be. The cool temperatures are not going to help with any work that needs to be done on it; epoxy and paint both dry slower when it's cold, and it's going to be pretty cold. My hope is that, one, it's repairable, and two, it's repairable inside our time frame... if we miss our splash time scheduled with the lift, we could get stuck. The yard is busy this time of year. Last time we were there, we were next to a guy who had missed his splash date and wound up having to sit there, paying yard fees, for an extra two weeks before they could schedule him back into the water. Of course, if the repair is that complicated, yard fees will probably be the least expensive part of it.

Anyway, rain and all I am excited to get out for the trip up and back. It's been rough, even with the terrible weather, just sitting here watching all the other Memorial Day boat traffic going in and out. We'll still have the terrible weather, but should have the Sound pretty much to ourselves for the trip.

A notepad to the head

Scott works at his computer at the nav table/engine cover. I work at my computer at a settee. With my new noise-cancelling headphones, I am oblivious to his very existence. That means that I am unaware of his calling my name to get my attention, and may be subject to a small pad of paper flying my way when he needs to speak to me.

The hazards of quiet.

:)
Mandy

perfectly simple

Today I had no reason to play with my new headphones, I had the boat to myself. Scott has been downtown, and the boat had only the sounds I added to it, along with the songbirds who manage to throw their tweets all the way across the water to the boat. This afternoon the soft rain began, and since we've had a break from it for a while, the sound of it hitting the deck above my head is welcome again.

It has been a perfectly simple day, and the epitome of what I think people think living on a boat is like. This morning I got work done between cups of tea. After lunch I read some. At one point this afternoon I decided to take care of another menial boat task--cleaning the rust out of the contraption the air filter goes in. Such tasks go best when the mind can follow a story of some sort. I checked through our movie selection and found nothing that held my interest. I thought back to the early days of boat life, when I had even fewer DVDs to choose from. My entertainment back then was the Morning Stories podcast, which I awaited every week and diligently listened to on Saturday mornings while choosing a daily project. I have long since stopped listening to Morning Stories. It is one of those things that just seems to have slipped out of my life, probably when when Dad got sick and everything changed so quickly. The day I learned of his illness began of the end of my first stint on the boat. Old routines were quickly uprooted, and many have never been found again.

During lunch today I listened to the latest Travel with Rick Steves podcast, leaving me without the storylike background I was looking for during a metal-scrubbing undertaking. Then I remembered that I had an audiobook on my computer that I've never listened to! Oh, what a lucky day! The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is set in northern Wisconsin. The descriptions of the landscape take me right back, and the story is quite good as well. Who can be disappointed with writing that likens an otter floating down the river as, "a self-contained canoe of an animal"?

After scrubbing the air filter holder, there was no better afternoon break than to sit down with a hot cup of tea and listen to a story for a while. For some reason, breaks like that seem easier to take on a boat, especially when it is raining, and a perfectly adequate amount of work has already been finished for the day.

Go ahead. Be noisy.

Sure, I need to hike up a rather long dock, even if it's raining, to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. And I haul our drinking and cooking water to the boat in gallon jugs. And I have no choice but to play footsie with my husband in my sleep because our bed converges into a six-inch wide space at the foot-end. And my showers cost me $0.25 per two minutes, and also involve a walk up the dock and a wet-headed walk back again. It isn't a life of opulence or convenience. But today I absolutely splurged on something to make boat-life a huge chunk easier--Bose noise-reducing headphones. I've been ogling them for months, if not years. I'd held off a long time on this extravagant purchase, and I now feel like the most spoiled girl on the dock.

Everyone knows the boat is a tiny space, and Scott and I have managed our workspaces in such a way that we can both work without being in each other's physical way. But, either we must have silence, or headphones on, in order to not disrupt the concentration patterns of the other. Sometimes it just isn't practical. Scott is near silent in the hours between when he wakes up at some (unnecessarily) crazy hour while I am still asleep. But once my heads pops out of the v-berth, it really is only fair that the silence is ended for a while.

Today the audio level boat compromises seemed like they were just adding too much to all the other compromises of married boat life. Scott should be able have CNN on his laptop sometimes while working at the other computer, and I should also be able to have quiet while I am working. I don't think either of us wants too much. He doesn't ALWAYS have CNN or music or a radio on, just some of the time. And I don't ALWAYS want silence when I work, just when I need to do certain kinds of tasks. Yet the two seem to conflict often enough. So I headed downtown to the Bose store.

It took less than 15 seconds to sell me. The salesman told me to try out the headphones. I put them on and he hit a button that made music and talking come out of them. The audio was telling me about the superior sound quality of these headphones, which I don't really care all that much about. I just DIDN'T want to hear other stuff. So I was going to take them off and ask the guy about the sound they eliminate. What I hadn't realized was that when he made sound come out through the headphones, he also turned on the sound of an engine and a train in the store. I was actually confused as to where those sounds came from. I put the headphones back on and the sound disappeared again. Okay. Good. He went on to tell me I could return them for a full refund for 30 days, and they have a full warranty for a year. I asked if that meant that they malfunctioned for ANY reason I'd get new ones or fixed ones, even if I drove over them or something? Yes. Good. I should know within a year whether these suckers will hold up to the salt air. I happily made my purchase, and headed to a coffee shop to try them out.

Wow. Really. Wow! I had to put my computer on it's lowest volume setting, then reduce the iTunes volume even more to have my background work music low enough while it still drowned out regular coffee shop sound. What was more amazing was that, when I took them off again, the coffee shop sounded horribly, horribly loud. Once my headphones were off, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. And I can usually easily work in coffee shops with regular coffee shop sound. I just turn my earbud volume up high enough to drown everything else out. Not good for my ears. Not good at all. This is much better.

A funny thing to be excited about when buying something is the size of desiccant that comes in the packaging. These headphones had a huge packet with them, three times bigger than you get with a new pair of shoes or something. I think the size of the desiccant says something about the quality of the product. I plan to keep my packet of drying agent right in the lovely case that my headphones came with. I also think it's probably good that the little things like desiccant excite me, even when I just got very cool new headphones. I am, after all, a very simple girl.

Yep, all is good. And quiet.

:)
M

Magic

About a week in to taking up life aboard once again, Scott and I are getting nicely settled and readjusted. Yesterday I tackled two projects that had been mildly irritating me for a while now: the cabin overhead and some (unrelated) melted wax.

Between using the diesel/kerosene stove and lighting candles aboard, the fiberglass overhead continually gradates from a shiny beige-ish off-white to a dull grey. Cleaning it again is no easy task. Soot isn't like regular dirt. It is greasy, grimy, and embeds deeply into any tiny nook and divet the fiberglass might have. Plus, the overhead is, not surprisingly, physically over your head. Cleaning it means looking directly upward, with your arms above your head, and gravity assisting the dirty water in trickling back down your arm and into your shirt sleeves. The best way to clean our fiberglass overhead is with a super-scrubby sponge (the yellow sponges with the very coarse green scrubby side, not the blue ones with the no-scratch scrubby side), plenty of Dawn soap, a washcloth, and a sink close by to continually rinse with. Scrub (hard) with the sponge, then immediately rinse with the washcloth. It sounds simple enough, and it is, it just takes a really long time. Cleaning the overhead is also a high-satisfaction project, if it manages to get completely finished, which it did. This morning I got to wake up, stick my head out of the v-berth, and see a shiny, clean ceiling. Lovely.

The other project that had been awaiting some attention was a rather significant amount of wax that found itself melted into our navy-blue cushions during the February trip to the Olympics. I'd scraped at it before, but had found little luck. Yesterday I thought maybe going after it with a needle might allow me to pick the wax out. Nope. White wax remained embedded in blue cushion. A quick Internet search led me to the solution. When I first read that the wax could be melted into a paper bag, I envisioned only a bigger mess, more deeply embedded than the original mess. But it seemed the Internet had formed a consensus that this was the way to go, even on fabrics much more delicate than boat-seat cushions.

So I found a paper bag and dug out the iron. I set the iron to a low-medium setting, and I began ironing on the bag over the spilled wax. Immediately, every spot of wax (of which there were many) began to seep through the bag. I moved the bag to some fresh paper, and repeated, and repeated, and repeated. It worked like true magic. Places had been waxy and white were returned to their original blue. The cushion even became soft again. I couldn't believe it. A while after it cooled, the places that the bulk of the wax landed had turned a little lighter again, but, if I hadn't known the original problem existed, I probably never would have noticed it. Magic, I tell you. Magic.

I call that a successful Sunday on a boat!

Cheers,
Mandy

A fine day for a regatta

...if you don't mind rowing.

Today (or this weekend, rather; starting today) is the National Offshore One-Design (NOOD) regatta here in Seattle, and it's shaping up to be beautiful out there... blue sky, warm air... and not a lick of wind. Oops.

The marina is packed with competitors but it's going to be slow going on the course this morning. We had been planning on watching, but it's likely to be a bit of a snoozer, at least until (unless!) the afternoon northwesterly kicks in. Think we'll go to the U-district street fair instead.

Thievery most foul

So as I got up and made my morning trek to the restrooms this morning, a guy in an SUV pulled up and came over to peer through the locked gate at the head of the dock. It's going to be a nice day, but still, 0530 is a little early to come down and get the ol' scow shined up so I figured maybe he was just one of those poor deluded people who still aspire to boat ownership and was down gazing wistfully toward his dream before trudging off to another soul-crushing day at the office hoping to pay for it all.

Turned out he was already at his office. He was the regional circulation manager for the Seattle Times. One of the guys down at the end of our dock takes the daily paper; it's usually sitting there when I go up in the morning, and this morning was no exception. Yesterday, apparently, he didn't get it, and the manager was down to check on the situation.

My first thought was, wow, that's service! A fifty cent paper gets a mid-level manager in a mileage-reimbursed SUV out to check on it the next day. I don't know what a subscription costs these days, but I can't imagine that service pays for itself... and as the Times man and I discussed, the print newspaper business isn't exactly rolling in dough these days.

He figured somebody had stolen it, and the paper(boy?man?woman? I've never seen who delivers it but somehow I doubt it's a scrappy teenager on a Schwinn these days) routinely shoves it far enough past the locked gate that if so, it had to have been someone on either P or Q docks. Actually, it could have been anyone with a marina key fob I think... I believe they work on all gates. Still, definitely someone who owns a boat here.

The manager couldn't believe that people who owned such big, expensive boats would need to stoop so low as to steal another man's paper. There's a machine just down the block! It's fifty cents! They can afford a $200,000 sailboat but not fifty cents for a paper?

While I can only dream that our boat held as much value as he imagined it must, the point was taken. We like to think of the marina as being pretty safe; a lot of people lock up neither boats nor dock boxes, and routinely leave rather expensive sailing gear out on deck or on docks without giving it a second thought. I know the marina is always warning people about this, but I don't know of anyone who has had anything stolen.

And yet, clearly, there is a paper thief among our ranks!

I felt bad for the guy from the Times. He says this isn't an infrequent occurrence, and I believe him. In fact, I doubt most people think of it as theft. For the same reason that fifty cents isn't a lot to pay for a paper, it also puts an inherently low value on the news, value that has been pushed ever lower with the advent of television and the Internet. To a lot of people, it isn't even worth fifty cents. Whoever took it probably didn't think of doing so as being much more foul than picking up any piece of scrap paper off the ground (although how one reconciles depriving a fellow boater of his ritual morning reading is another matter).

I felt even worse when he offered me a free paper after our talk and I turned him down. I read the Times online. Even there, though, I have to admit I don't value it much. Google News, to be honest, hits most of the top stories I might care about even regionally. And what I find more valuable are the hyper-local sites, the MyBallards, West Seattle Blogs, and even more finely tuned Three Sheets Northwests, that tell you the really interesting stuff that traditional papers have never managed to cover and can't manage even now that the technology is available to them. It's a sad fact that the market just doesn't bear the costs of printing and distributing a daily paper anymore, and that the value of traditional journalism in general has dropped as more and more people find the power of becoming information sources themselves, rather than relying on their hard-boiled daily reporters to come up with it.

It has to be tough to make that adjustment, and the man from the Times seemed a little melancholy as he drove away even on this fine spring morning.

Stuff: Part III

This is my third time moving onto the boat. The first time, in April 2005, was the easiest. It was just me and my stuff. My lack of knowing anything at all about what happens to stuff in boats under way, heeled over 20%, or stuff living in dampness for much of the year, made putting my stuff in a spot somewhere rather easy. Plus, since it was just me, there was nobody else's opinion about the appropriate home for such stuff. And most important, it was just my stuff. One person's stuff is, well, approximately half of two people's combined stuff. (I know, that's some fancy math!)

A couple of years after I moved off the boat, Scott and I moved aboard together. Since we'd traveled for months together on the boat already, we had gone through the major adjustments of having two people aboard and physically close to one another. But when we'd been traveling before, we did not need to bring our businesses, or our entire lives, with us. Most people's individual home offices have more space than our total boat, and we're fitting two home offices AND everything else in this single, small space. Last fall the boat began feeling quite small. But we adjusted. We worked, we sailed, we crammed stuff into lockers.

This winter I planned how this move back aboard would be easier. We'd bring less stuff. We'd organize better. I think, in my mind, the boat grew at least 50% from it's actual size. The first load of stuff back to the boat arrived with me on Sunday. By Tuesday morning I was quite happy with myself. I'd not only gotten everything put away, I'd also gotten rid of some things that just invited clutter and unsightliness. Tuesday however, Scott, and everything else arrived. The picture in my head of lockers not crammed with stuff, and shelves not having stuff piled on top of stuff, quickly disappeared along with my lovely "we're-back-aboard!!" mood.

We got most of the stuff crammed into places yesterday, and when I woke up this morning, I was almost surprised at how little stuff was still out just laying someplace waiting for a new home.

Scott says more stuff moved on the boat this year than has been here before. I'm not sure how that has happened. He says all those loads of stuff to Goodwill were things that had never lived on the boat to begin with and were just in storage. When I look around, however, I don't see anything that I never saw before. I recognize all this stuff. Plus, I KNOW I've taken things from the boat.

It seems there are few options. We can't just go out and buy a newer, bigger boat. Not for a while at least. And we can't magically make this boat bigger. Option three is to adjust once again. We can continue to weed stuff out. And we can continue to reorganize the stuff that is here to make it fit a little better, bit by bit. My goal today is to do that. Getting rid of even ten small things is a good start.

Don't get me wrong, I do love this boat, and I adore the boating lifestyle, but it is quite an adjustment, even after doing it twice before, to be on the boat full-time, not as a retired couple off sailing the ocean blue, or as a couple off for a weekend sail, but as a working couple, living full-time, on a boat perfectly suited for one.

Now, I've got a few projects that are patiently waiting for my attention today. I'll pick a bin, or pick a locker, and start paring it down once again. The upshot to it being a 30-year-old boat is that, when everything is put away, it is magically beautiful. It has all the old-boat charm that made me fall in love with it when I first saw it. It isn't hard to love this boat; it is just hard to fit all of life into it!

Cheers,
Mandy

A day for random events

The weather station in Port Townsend, across the bay shows gusts to 27 knots, but the wind is out of the north and they are somewhat sheltered by the lay of the peninsula there. The Smith Island station is showing gusts near storm force, 42 knots, and if we're not getting that here in Hadlock, it's gotta be pretty close. Tree limbs and detritus have been smacking the windows all day, and limbs are coming down in the driveway. Apparently they are coming down elsewhere, as well, because a couple hours ago the power went out, and stayed out until just now.

The wind is causing havoc out on the water. I've had the scanner on most of the morning, and now again that I have power for it, and Channel 16 is busy with warnings and calls for assistance. A vessel off Camano Island had the mast come down. As I listen, they have not been able to cut it free, and it's damaging the hull as they creep along toward shore.

Also, just coming across now, another vessel has activated its EPIRB somewhere nearby. No contact has been made; it may have just gone overboard from a boat at anchor. But maybe not.

The Coast Guard has been busy reporting vessels adrift, and the Port Townsend ferry has sat firmly at the dock in town, checking in with passing vessels for conditions in mid-channel from time to time. They haven't heard any reports yet they have been happy with, because there they still sit.

Out front, a vessel that has anchored out all winter here in the bay, a big forty-something footer called the Fram, is dragging down toward the beach. Another, smaller boat is dragging in right along with her, but it started further out and isn't as close in yet. I tried calling the marina nearby, where I think the owner keeps his dinghy, but there was no answer... I suspect the power outage may have done in their phone system. I looked up the boat in the national vessel registry, which has several Frams, but the most likely candidate didn't show a name for the current owner. Finally, I gave in and called Port Angeles, where I got a very harried duty officer who took down what information I had on the vessel but didn't seem too optimistic that they could locate the owner. If she comes ashore, it'll be a much bigger mess than the little 27 footer that washed up in the last storm.

There may be hope, though. The tide is out, and as she comes in shallower, the effective scope on the anchor rode increases, providing more holding power. She has been catching off and on as she drifts, and it may dig in here close enough that the scope provides an effective grip for the wind and wave strength. If that happened at high water, she might still go aground when the tide receded, but if she catches, and if the wind lets up before high tide, then she may just be okay. A lot of ifs... but it's a pretty nasty blow.

Since the power was out when I was doing all this research and calling, I had to tromp up to the shop and get our generator down to charge my phone and get some Internet service back. Back in the woods, if one can put out of one's mind the possibility of being squashed by a falling tree limb for a moment, it's actually quite a pleasant day. The wind is all overhead, the sun is shining brightly, and it's pretty warm out. I didn't linger to sunbathe, however.

My folks will be back soon and so I spent yesterday making sure their bathroom, little used in the back part of the house while they are away, was spic and span. Today I went back there and found some splotches of what look suspiciously like bird poo, blood, and a scattering of very tiny little feathers on the tile. I can't, however, find the culprit, which leads me to believe that somehow, the cat, who is confined to the house and to a very small netted run outside it, somehow contrived to lure in, catch, and eat a bird in the house. That she managed to accomplish this never-before-attempted feat the very day after I clean the part of the house she chose as a dining area is not, I think, coincidence.

The chickens seem to be coping well with the weather, but then, they are chickens; I'm not certain they understand anything that is going on outside the coop. Branches keep clattering down on the roof but they take no notice. They seemed very displeased I didn't have any of their favorite corn feed for them when I stopped in to collect eggs on the way back from the shop.

This morning, the UPS guy stopped by the place for the first time ever. It wasn't for me, but the package was of interest for other reasons, none of which are worth going into here.

And, I found out the my buddy Loyd passed the Washington State bar. He'll be sworn in by next week.

Got a text from another friend I hadn't heard from for almost a year.

So that's it. So far just a bunch of random stuff happening with no real narrative line. Some days are like that.