Getting on with things

We're still seeing good interest in the boat, but it's hard to gauge how serious people are so we're prepared for the long haul when it comes to selling. In the meantime, I've got my eye out for possible interim apartments, and we're continuing to look at possible replacement vessels regularly.

Last weekend, we went up to Everett to check out an Ericson 38-200. I have been wanting to get a look at one for quite a while now; on paper, they have much of what I think I am looking for in a boat. It's not a huge size, which keeps costs and control manageable; the build and sailing qualities are reputed to be good, and the longevity of the basic design seems to attest to it... two different companies have been building them for over thirty years. That also means they are generally available on the market, and a relatively new model can be had very nearly within our price range. Finally, the dash 200 version has a separate aft cabin (very popular with the peanut gallery) and the head roughly amidships, an unusual characteristic on American-made vessels of that era, but one that we find extremely attractive.

The particular boat we looked at was in sad shape and in no way worth the asking price, nor probably even half the asking price. But that was okay, there are others around the country available. In general, it was what we hoped it would be: sensible layout, decent tankage, and scads of storage. Way more storage than I had imagined, actually. We have been surprised how rare that is on putative cruising boats we have looked at, and it's a strong plus on the Ericson. Lots of hanging lockers make Mandy happy.

The layout is a little constrained compared to what we are used to on Insegrevious. The table drops down to form a berth, which is common, but it doesn't fold away, and the U-shaped layout of settees in the main cabin prevents you from using that space for anything else. Worse, the nav desk is pathetically small, and there is no where else aboard where a strapping fellow such as myself could easily lay out an office space. Since office space is one of the major factors driving our boat search, that may be a fatal flaw.

Mandy and Maxx have been trying to convince me that such space could be manufactured without too much difficulty but I suspect their judgement is clouded, respectively, by hanging lockers and the existence of a separate "Maxx Cabin."

In any event, I find that I wish we could simply get on with things; sell what we have, buy what we can, make it as close as possible to what we want, and go sailing and living. Instead, it seems we're stuck in a holding pattern for as long as the market requires, both on the selling and buying side of things.

Intellectually I am not only aware that this might take a while, but indeed have been planning on it taking a while... I have told myself to be happy if we sell Insegrevious by next summer, and that it could be six to nine months after that before we find a replacement we both like, can afford, and which is in suitable condition. And after that, it could be another six months or more of refitting even on a good candidate before we could actually go anywhere.

While my brain is on board with all this, my heart is not. Maybe it's a mid-life crisis sort of thing, but I want to get on with things, and am having trouble reconciling the idea that things are not likely to be gotten on with at anywhere near the clip with which I would like to get on with them. There's really nothing I can do to speed it up, but the waiting is interminable.

Boat for sale!

So, I've listed the boat finally... she's on Craigslist for $18,500 currently. I've gotten a gratifying amount of interest so far, averaging out to one call or e-mail about her a day, but I'm trying not to let that make me overly optimistic. There is a lot of tire-kicking that goes on in the used boat market, and I won't be at all surprised if we don't get a serious offer until next spring (the height of the boat selling season; sailing is a harder sell around here with pouring rain and raging winds in the fall and winter). Still, I hadn't really expected anything for a few weeks, so it's good that there is a level of interest.

It's had me thinking much more about what exactly will happen if we do manage to sell her in the near-term. We're already planning out Mandy's conference schedule for next year, and we're both focusing on expanding business this winter. The ideal situation might be to sell Insegrevious, throw our stuff into storage, and go hopping around the West Coast looking for a replacement, but that might be difficult to pull off. So I have been looking at small, cheap apartments here in town to serve as a sort of homebase during the looking/buying process.

There are a fair number in a reasonable price range (although I haven't actually gone to look at them; maybe they are disgusting) but the big problem is that almost all of them want a one-year term. I certainly don't want to still be stuck up here in a lease next fall... if we are actively searching with cash in hand, I would expect to buy something next summer and have time to get it up here (if it's not already in the area) or to move to wherever it is, before bad weather sets in.

It's very hard to pre-determine what the right solution will be, because different things make sense in different time frames. If in fact we don't manage to sell until next spring or summer, a one-year lease might not be a bad thing... we could keep working through next winter here and be all ready to go out and get the replacement the following spring, coinciding with the lease expiring. But for a shorter-term solution, I am still at a loss, and I dislike being without a plan of some sort.

Kinetic Weekend

I've already did a post about this on Three Sheets, but I've been meaning to put up links to a bunch of the photos that didn't make it in the article. Also, for your viewing pleasure, the race start:

And here is a link to the album. Note Governor Gregoire in the crowd.

99 versus 1

We have passed a little bit of water under the keel since I last posted, and by all rights I should catch up on events that have taken place in order since I last left off. And I probably will, eventually; at the moment, I just wanted to make a brief, topical note on some musings that came to mind this weekend at a yacht club event we are attending.

This is going on during the Occupy Wall Street protests, of course, and our club event is just down the street from one, so to speak, at Bell Harbor Marina on the Seattle waterfront. Occupy Seattle is about six blocks up, in Westlake Park. Mandy and I wandered by there this morning. It has been looking emptier and emptier each time I have seen it recently. The last time, there were more cops than protesters. This morning, a handful of protesters, looking cold and miserable, and one officer idling in a patrol car. Apparently, the threat has dissipated.

It got me thinking, though, about how it must seem on the face of it that anyone belonging to a yacht club, and owning a boat, is certainly in or approaching that top one percent, wealthy folks with cash to burn. But that's not our club; the dues, obviously, are reasonable enough for us to afford, and we're not winning any prizes in the economic rat race. Just about everyone else in the club is blue-collar or retired blue-collar. Our 33 footer is in about the upper middle of the pack in this crowd. No mega-yachts or billionaires here.

Yet we're at a marina this weekend that clearly caters to such folks. Bell Harbor is charging $1.35 a foot at a time of year when most places are closer to $.50. The marina is run by the Port of Seattle, which is who runs Shilshole, our home port, but the differences couldn't be more stark. At Shilshole, the restrooms are old, dingy, and in need of re-grouting. The toilet paper is the thin tissue paper stuff that comes in massive rolls that they probably bring in by the fork-lift load. The showers are equally dingy, the water takes forever to warm up, it dribbles out, and you pay a quarter for every two minutes for the privilege.

Here at Bell Harbor, they have real toilet paper, the showers are free, separate, hot, and sparkling. For the first time in my entire life, I took a shower in a place with a gauge that shows the water temperature. There's a video screen with tourist information at the head of the dock. Obviously this isn't to cater to the average joe; and indeed, our tiny little boats are dwarfed by some of the mega-yachts in here right now.

But what I was thinking was, if they introduced such amenities at Shilshole, they would quickly be abused or defiled. The toilet paper would cost them an arm and a leg to keep up. Free unlimited showers would mean someone forgetting to turn off the spigot and similarly costing them a lot of money. Some kid would break the video screen. And it would take an army to keep it all clean and shiny.

That's not because us 99 percenters up at Shilshole are willfully abusive; it's just what happens when a lot of people are using pretty nice things. They just don't get kept up as much as is needed. If you wanted to have such nice stuff, it would become cost-prohibitive... it couldn't be done, even with all the wealth of the one percent. There are just too many of us, and not enough stuff to go around.

There is definitely a problem with the distribution of wealth in this country, but I don't think that spreading it around more evenly is necessarily going to raise our standards of living all that much. What the solution is, I don't know. I am not sure OWS does, either.

Seasons

When we sailed up to Port Townsend last Friday, it was summer... the typical cyclical northerly bombing down the Sound, bright sunshine, blue skies. Today when we came back, it was fall... almost no breeze, fog, grey overcast. We motored the whole way back.

We went up to visit friends and family and to go to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. The Festival enjoyed perhaps the best weather it has seen in the last decade, sunshine and eighty degrees every day. It was packed and there were a lot of boats to see. There were also a lot of seminars to go to but we didn't go to any of them. Wooden boat maintenance is, thankfully, among those few things we don't feel any need to know anything about. We'd like to keep it that way.

Looking at the boats themselves was another story. There is no denying that they are gorgeous, some of them, outright works of art. They are also floating pieces of history. We were aboard boats that had belonged to John Wayne and Howard Hughes. The owner of Norwester, Wayne's yacht, read out passages from old logs describing nights the Duke spent aboard and other celebrities he entertained. Also in the mix, as always, was the tug Elmore, owned by a friend of the family and a centerpiece of the show. Mandy and I had watched last year just before Thanksgiving as the bow of the hundred and twenty-one year old was stove in during a storm. Going through her and seeing all the painstaking repair work was interesting; seeing the upgrades being made was terrific, as a forepeak that had been a glorified junk locker last year goes through the process of being turned into a finely crafted berth.

It was a great weekend to spend with friends, so it was bound to be a bit of let-down coming back to Seattle today. The grey skies didn't help. As we eased into our slip at Shilshole and I shut down the engine, it occurred to me that it might be the last time we ever sail aboard Insegrevious. Our plans, always subject to change, at the moment reflect an intent to list her for sale at the end of October. It's very unlikely she'll sell immediately, and if not we tentatively plan to take her up to Victoria sometime in December on a holiday cruise, and there are a couple of yacht club events we might catch before the end of the year. But should a buyer happen along immediately, we could be in an apartment before Thanksgiving, and our next trip by boat would be aboard a different boat.

That's a positive thing, of course, but it was a little depressing to consider it all the same. Insegrevious is our home, after all, and despite many challenges and travails, she has made a pretty fair job of it. I am comfortable with most of her systems and there is not an awful lot wrong with her anymore; or perhaps I've just grown accustomed to most of the deficiencies. Looking at other boats has certainly served to illustrate all of the things we like about this one and made those features stand out. There's no doubt we need something larger. It's going to be hard to find it without sacrificing some of what we already have, though.

Those are melancholy thoughts entirely in keeping with the weather today. I started out in and fine and optimistic mood about where we are at in the world and how events are finally progressing in accordance with a long-term plan (sketchy though that plan may be); now I am feeling as grey as the skies overhead.

Is Mandy memorable?

I think she must be. I mean, I can't forget her, but she's around all the time so that may not be a real test. But apparently other people remember her, too.

Yesterday, she was up doing laundry here at the marina, and a woman walked in and gave her a funny look. Finally, the woman said, "Did you go to the Olympics last year?"

We get into a lot of funny conversations around here, but that might have been stranger than usual. In fact, we did go to the Olympics last year in Vancouver, BC. Of course, so did several million other people. It's not a question like, "Did you have dinner at Matador last night?" And it's not as if Mandy were wearing a Vancouver 2010 Olympic stocking cap, or clutching an Olympic mascot Miga doll or anything; she was as plain as possibly could be at the tail end of a laundry cycle.

But it turned out the woman was Jean, of S/V Perfect Fit, a Bavaria 37 that had moored next to us at the False Creek Harbour Authority docks for a couple of days during the Games in February 2010. We had chatted with her and her husband Mark a couple times as we ran into them, either coming or going during that busy week, but if you had asked me to pick either of them out of a lineup a year and a half later, no way.

At that time, they were living in Arizona and keeping their boat up near Victoria. Now it turns out they have moved themselves and the vessel, respectively, to Portland, and to N dock here at Shilshole. And, apparently, they remember Mandy. No word on whether or not I might have been similarly memorable. But anyway, we'll probably be running into them more frequently now, so that test is yet to come.

Short jaunts

We're back now from a quick weekend trip up to Port Hadlock. I always like the boat after we are just back from going somewhere. Everything is stowed, and after some work, it's all clean, and it looks much more spacious and less cluttered than it gets after even a few days of sloth at the dock.

We had a great sail up on Friday, even with the winds mostly on the nose. We didn't even have to get up at an unreasonable hour. The morning started out fairly calm, but once we rounded Point No Point it built to eighteen to twenty knots and we really took off even in the persistent chop. It was warm and sunny all day long. I like a little bit of water over the bow to let me know I'm really sailing, but not enough to make it back to the cockpit and soak me, and that's exactly what we got... just enough to wet down the foredeck. Perfect.

We paid for that coming home, though. I got up at 0430 to a drizzly, pre-dawn murk. Fog patches dotted the bays and shoreline. There was not a lick of wind, nor would there be all day long. We motored all the way home... for a few hours with the main up as I held out some vain hope that the predicted southerlies would perk up after dawn. They never materialized. In partial compensation, once we turned the corner at Point No Point, the sun finally came out and stayed out, burning off all the fog in short order. There was quite a bit of small craft traffic but almost no tugs or ships, so we cut recklessly across the shipping lanes in a beeline for home and made it in about six hours, all told.

We had not been on the mooring ball up at my folks house in some time, and the pendant was quite predictably caked in barnacles, mussels, and other un-identifiable sea-life. Our usual routine is that I take the helm and steer us in, and Mandy grabs the mooring at the bow. Indeed, we put the pendant out there, and on a float, to make it easier for her, since her arms and upper body strength aren't sufficient to hold on and loop a line down from the bow. But there was so much crap on the line she could barely lift it. I would have like to have gotten pictures but it took both of us, with all four hands, to hold the boat in place and haul the line aboard. It took her five minutes of chipping to get enough crap off to put it on the cleat.

I had thought several times last winter about rowing out and taking the pendant off until summer, but when I thought about it, conditions were usually raging, and when they weren't, I hadn't thought about it. I think we'll be putting it to more use this fall and winter, though, so it probably will stay much cleaner.

While we were both up scrambling around on the bow, the engine was chugging along in neutral at low RPMs, and at some point I heard a shrill alarm trilling over its slow thumping. Neither of us could do anything about it immediately, but when we were finally tied off I ran back to the cockpit and killed the engine. The alarm was coming from the C80 chartplotter. "GPS FIX LOST" it said. Well, I knew where we were, so I silenced the alarm and poked around a little bit. The chartplotter was getting no signal from the Raystar 125 GPS antenna, and the antenna LED indicator was dark.

My theory is that the chugging engine caused vibration that worked a connector loose somewhere. I'm still not sure where, but it is working again. As I was poking around, tracing the SeaTalk signal between the SmartPilot module and the antenna, it started working again. I didn't keep clear track of what I poked, though, so I will have to wait until it happens again to fix it more permanently.

All in all, everything performed well going both directions. The engine pushed, the GPS fixed, the auto-pilot piloted... although it got a little drunk near the end of the second day, and started to steer opposite the direction it said it was steering. I'm going to write that one off as a glitch, although I will check the rudder position sensor before we go out again.

That may be as soon as a couple weeks from now. We are hoping to get up to the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend the second weekend in September. I haven't been to it in quite a while, and I don't think Mandy ever has. We're not actually shopping for wooden boats, but we like looking at boats in general, and while wooden boats are a maintenance nightmare, they sure are pretty.

New leaks, old leaks

Today was a boatkeeping day. It hasn't rained nor is the wind blowing but still I could not talk Mandy into going up the mast (and in truth, we had such a huge breakfast today that I wasn't looking forward to having to hoist her up there!) so I focused on internal matters.

I checked and topped off the house bank of batteries, both of which seem to be doing all right. After some corrosion problems last year, I was happy to find them nearly spotless now, and I hit them with some more protectant to keep them that way. Since we'll be aboard all winter it probably won't be an issue anyway, since they will be used regularly and we'll have the whole boat warm and dry.

I checked the bilge and found more water in there than I had expected. Since it hadn't been getting much water in it while it was unoccupied earlier in the summer, I tend to want to blame a leaking plug from the icebox drain. Still, it had something that looked a bit like oil in it. I dripped some detergent in it and it didn't cause the usual bomb-burst in the sheen, so it could also just be regular black slime of some sort. But that got me to checking the engine compartment as well.

The last couple times I have checked the transmission fluid, it has been low, despite my having topped it up the previous time. So I wondered if I had a leak there somewhere. It was impossible to rule out completely, but I felt around the housing as best I could, and stuck a paper towel in the spots I couldn't reach, and could not find any fluid. The engine drip pan is beneath most of the housing anyway, so drips should end up there and not in the bilge, but the housing does slope to the stern so it's conceivable that a slow drip could ooze back along the prop shaft and drain into the bilge. Certainly the area under the shaft was slimy and greasy. But the shaft itself didn't have any signs of drips under it. I also wonder if maybe when I have topped the fluid off if I have just been hasty taking my measurements... the manual says to wait five minutes for the fluid to settle, but I haven't always. Maybe it is just settling after I measured. So today, I made sure to wait before satisfying myself that it was topped off. We'll wait a week and see if it stays that way.

Anyway, I went back and started the engine up to see if it was maybe spraying oil off under power, or if putting it in gear caused a drip. As she fired up, I happened to look down at the binnacle, and think I spotted the problem: our compass no longer has any liquid in it!

In order for the compass card to spin freely, it usually floats in a sea of mineral oil. As you can see, ours no longer does. So that could well explain the oily sheen in the bilge water (although not really the blackness; but that could still just be regular slime).

I stuck my head in the cockpit locker with a flashlight to see if I could see any drips from below the binnacle housing, but it was just too bright out to spot anything minor like that. I could tell, with much gratification, that the rudder post step is bone dry, so the packing seems to be holding.

We're planning to sail to Port Hadlock next weekend, and between our various GPS units and spare compasses I think we can manage it, but after that I'll have to pull the compass and take it in to see what's up. I'm hoping it's just a leaky seal somewhere rather than a cracked housing.

Having developed a satisfying hypothesis for that mystery, then, we set about fixing the drip still remaining from the head outflow connection. I had to rouse Mandy for that, because my hands aren't small enough to reach. It's hard to imagine how the manufacturer could have positioned this to be any more difficult to reach, since it is at the rear of the toilet at the base... that's an area almost inaccessible by definition. To make matters worse, it is also inside the toilet skirt, which is not removeable. So you have to reach in from the front, and around, to get to the hose clamp. And since it's inside the skirt, there is almost no room for tools.

I ended up holding up the head as much as I could with the hose still connected (as it must be, when one wishes to tighten the hose clamp) while Mandy reached underneath to tighten it. After about three tries, it stopped dripping... or at least it has not dripped in the past hour. I am not prepared to declare total victory, but surely we have struck it a grievous blow. Still, manhandling the whole apparatus back into place and securing it to the base again (which must be done from underneath; don't ask how) is not a gentle process and it is easy to imagine all our careful work undone by a wrong twist or an over-tightened bolt somewhere along the way. Anyway; we charged it back up again and will see how it looks in the morning. Even then, a leak may not be obvious, as once the thing is all secured there is no way at all to see what is happening under the skirt in the rear. Ultimately, we may not know for sure until it has again been used in anger and we detect the telltale aroma of sewage seeping outside the sewage system.

Minor sunshine

So the truck sold easily enough; I got quite a bit of interest in it and was able to sell it for my asking price, which was about half what I might have expected to get out of it here in town if it didn't have any mechanical problems at all. Getting it fixed at the shop up there would have eaten up about the same amount, so basically I came out where I would have anyway, only without having to deal with both the hassle of the repair work and the uncertainty of whether or not the repairs would have worked. That is a ray of sunshine.

My friend Maxx graciously volunteered to go up and repair it himself, which, if it had worked, would have netted a better overall return. A head kit is only a couple hundred bucks, and I could have got away with slipping him a few hundred for his time. But the uncertainty about the outcome would have remained, not to mention the fact that he is supposed to be painting right now for an upcoming show, rather than tearing apart truck engines out of town, so I would have felt pretty bad about that scenario anyway. And pushing the repair attempt back after his show would have just left a clunker sitting around in my folk's driveway for a month or two. People would start thinking there were shed boys living there. So I am just as happy to have it all done with now, and can move on.

The Zipcar experiment has been working out okay so far. We've only used it a couple times, both for Mandy's classes in Renton, and successfully piggybacked our car-required errands on the trips. It's a bit of a hike to get to the car and come back after dropping it off, but the weather has been nice. I imagine we'll adapt as winter sets in. Or we may end up buying another clunker. I would prefer not to. We'll come out ahead financially at this rate. Avoiding gas, insurance, and upkeep expenses will allow quite a bit of Zipcaring around at less expense.

What with all the sunshine lately, we've had ample opportunity to clean up the boat. While I was gone yesterday, Mandy did something to the companionway to spiff it up, and today I gave the deck and cockpit a good scrubbing and they are fairly gleaming now. This may last long enough for us to not be embarrassed when we take her out next weekend. Tomorrow's agenda includes head repair (ongoing!) and basic engine maintenance. If it's not raining or blowing I may hoist Mandy up the mast to re-string a halyard and secure our steaming light, which has been a bit wobbly. I'm looking forward to getting out for a sail, even a short one.

From marking time to floating in limbo

Well, we are back in Seattle and back on the boat, now for the foreseeable future. I am pretty relieved in some respects; although we are located way out in the Seattle sticks (as much out in the sticks as you can get in Seattle, anyway), it still seems relatively close to everything. We went downtown yesterday to see the new Harry Potter movie. It was great; Seafair weekend is in full swing and we went to the noon showing, right when the Blue Angels are up. The theater was deserted and we got the best seats in the house. It was the first 3D movie Mandy has ever been to. I'm not sure she noticed any difference. But it was fun to get out and do city things finally after so long.

Although we are back in the city, in some ways we are feeling even more disconnected. The problem with the truck turned out to be the head gasket, which is a major problem and opens a whole can of worms with respect to other potential engine problems. I had been hoping to limp back to Seattle with it, but it really seemed to be deteriorating quickly when I started out, so I ended up leaving it up there and we took the bus back. So we are without a vehicle right now. We have pretty much decided just to sell it, rather than putting a bunch of time or money into repairs and even then possibly not having it actually fixed.

I have mixed feelings about this. In our grand plan of getting out and sailing around more, the truck was never in the long-term picture anyway. What's the sense in keeping a vehicle if you are never around to use it? It seems silly now to put more money into it or to go buy something else when the ultimate goal is to not have it anyway.

On the other hand, we weren't quite to that stage where we were going to head out yet, either. We don't even have the boat we plan to take! So that's a year or more, perhaps, of having to make things work out here in the sticks at Shilshole without having wheels of our own. Mandy says she feels increasingly like a hobo. I'm torn on what to do: bite the bullet and buy something else, accepting that spending that money on a car takes it away from buying a new boat, or to try to make do without a vehicle, even as Metro is threatening to cut the only bus line we have out to the marina (a bus that is very nearly useless already, as it runs so seldom).

We're going to try going without for a while and see what happens. We signed up for Zipcar yesterday, a car sharing service that won't really cost us anything if we end up not using it, and which should be pretty inexpensive for those times when we absolutely need a car. The down side is that the closest cars they have are in Ballard. That represents a pretty long walk, which reduces the convenience factor considerably. And while it might be tolerable in the summer, it's got the potential to be untenable this winter, particularly for the sorts of business engagements that we might need to drive to. Mandy isn't going to be looking her best heading to Boeing after slogging through two miles of mud puddles to get to the car. Taking the bus to the Zipcar, if the route even still exists by then, would work, but it's hideously expensive for a short hop. Walking to get the car, bringing it back to the marina, then getting ready and going, would also work, but is a very time-consuming process.

So, I have some trepidation about the situation but the only way to resolve it seems to be just to try it. We will still have the option of buying a car if this doesn't work out. My first instinct is that we can do anything for a while, and that the best way forward is to just accelerate our plans to get another boat and get out sailing again, but I don't have any clear plan for making that happen. There are a lot of little steps in between to be figured out, like selling this boat, finding a place to live temporarily while shopping for the next one, figuring out what to do with the slip in between, and figuring out how to sustain our businesses while we are out sailing. We were on a good path to get most of our income from remote, online work, but earlier this year that fell off a cliff for some reason and now most of our income is back to coming from in-person engagements. We're still making as much, maybe even a little more, but it's a setback for a traveling lifestyle. The state of the global economy also looms darkly. Sometimes I wonder if that's just a pipe dream I've been chasing, making one poor decision after another in pursuit of the unachievable. It's hard to look back over the past few years and see how many situations we have been in where life has handed us lemons, and I have made rancid lemon juice out of them instead of lemonade.

So far, I don't seem to be learning from that experience, which has left me a little confused. You're supposed to take lessons from life and use those to improve your decision-making moving forward, but I look back at all this and even though I see all the poor decisions, the lessons always seem ambiguous or contradictory. I never seem to be able to apply any of them to the next decisions I have to make. I feel a little cheated; where is all the life wisdom supposed to come from?

Marking time

We have had a pretty dull, non-nautical, non-summery summer up here so far, with no real progress on any front: business, boat-buying, boat-selling, general leisure, or anything, really. I had a much different picture of how the summer was going to go. It hasn't necessarily been bad, although we have had some setbacks, but I feel like we've just been marking time, sitting around and going through the motions without any real plans or real progress on plans we though we had.

When we agreed to house sit for a couple months this summer, I had envisaged an opportunity to continue what had been a pretty productive winter, work-wise. As I have probably mentioned too many times, the boat is a little too cramped for me to really get good work done, so being in a house with a real desk, stable Internet, and un-encumbered electricity is a big opportunity for me. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of luck capitalizing on that this summer. The place we are staying is very nice, but there actually isn't a really good desk setup, the Internet has been a little flakey, and there have just been too many little distractions and disruptions for me to really get cranking on things.

My sense is that Mandy has done better, but it's been harder for her too, because a lot of the opportunities that have popped up for her this summer have required physically being in Seattle, so that adds the commuting element to the equation. Complicating that factor has been automotive problems, which I have been unable to fix.

And all the while we aren't really getting anywhere on our short-term goals to get Insegrevious ready for a potential sale, and finding a replacement for her at a suitable price, in a reasonable location, and in the right time frame.

This actually produces something of a negative feedback loop. Our inability to get sustainable, online business going also affects our ability to go places and look at boats, or to travel anywhere once we buy a bigger one. So it seems like we have taken a couple steps back this summer rather than taking a couple forward as I had hoped for.

I don't have any good answers for the boat situation going forward, but at least business seems to be picking up. We'll see how the dragging economy starts to impact that going into the second half of the year, I guess, but for now both Mandy and I are looking at more business lined up for the fall. It's all on-site stuff, unfortunately, but it does represent additional income, so that is something.

After this week we will at least be back on the boat, which may not be the best thing for business, but may give me more opportunity and motivation to work on the larger lifestyle arrangements again. And although the rest of the summer is no less crowded with commitments than the earlier part, we might at least actually get a chance to go out sailing a bit, even if only for a couple days at a time.

First sail of the season

A short one, and no pictures, on account of Mandy wasn't here and I was at the helm pretty much the whole time. I took out the lucky winners of the Federal Way AmeriCorps team's "Sweets for Success" charity auction, which promises a thrilling four hour sailboat ride among the many biddable items. We provide the sailboat, and the thrills. Also light snacks.

Snacks and thrills were in short supply this year. Pretty much any given day before July is a crap shoot when it comes to weather and yesterday was better than some and worse than others. It was sunny and moderately breezy when we pulled out mid-morning, but the wind died off as we got down into Elliot Bay and the clouds started to come in as we slatted our way north again in light air off West Point. Actually, I was a little relieved that it was so calm, since it can be a drag to effectively sail single-handed with four obstacles in the cockpit. As it was, I barely had to touch a line all day long, no one got sick, and no one got sunburnt.

Fortunately, no one had to pee, either; I charged up our recently re-assembled head (a re-circulating model) before heading out, and it still leaks. If there is a plus to this, it looks like it may be leaking now from the discharge hose and not from the main gasket. It's nearly impossible to tell for sure since it only happens when it is in place, and there is no access at all to see completely around the base or the gasket. But the drips I could see were much closer to where the discharge connects than to the gasket. That would be relatively good news, since we can always tighten the hose clamp up and see what happens.

But that will have to wait for Mandy and her tiny little hands to get back, since I can't get mine in there.

It was good to get out on the water, anyway, and just gave me a taste for more, which is bad because I'm heading to Arizona soon, where water and sailing are both in short supply. Sunshine, on the other hand, appears abundant, so I will have to hope that is an adequate substitute. Oh, and there is some baby or other down there I am supposed to see.

Back aboard

It is always a more difficult process to transition back into living aboard full time after a stretch of time in a larger space. We came down yesterday with our truck load of stuff and the inevitable compression back down into 33' is always stressful. When we go elsewhere to house-sit, it's the opposite: our relative paucity of stuff is released into a huge environment where it all flows out and is hardly noticeable. Here, it piles up quickly and all the habits of getting things packed and keeping them stowed have not yet kicked in so it is constantly cramped and untidy.

This year, just about the time we re-learn all those habits and things start to get ship-shape again, we're going to be off house-sitting again... the bad habits that come with living in huge spaces will only be reinforced.

At least yesterday was a pleasant spring day and we got to go for a walk and enjoy the benefits of being back in the marina. We have a fairly easy month ahead. We decided we did not ultimately have time to take any trips up to Canada in between now and our next house-sitting engagement, so we are just going to stick around Puget Sound. We might take some short trips to the South Sound, or to a weekend yacht club event or two, but otherwise we'll hang out at Shilshole until we go back up to Port Townsend in mid-June. We'll be back again in mid-August and have no idea at all what we'll do after that. August itself is pretty well booked up with events in Seattle or Idaho, so we won't be going anywhere then. After that, we're really up in the air. Gas prices being what they are, it's an open question whether or not my parents will need anyone to look after their place next winter. The RV is a thirsty beast! We almost certainly won't find a new boat by then, and there are some business opportunities that may be coming up for Mandy in the Seattle area anyway, so I guess the odds are that we will stick around here for fall and winter, at least. We may take some short trips but fall is not the time to be heading north.

I managed, eventually, to get the starter problem fixed with the truck. It turned out not to be the contacts at all, but the gear assembly, so I did end up replacing the whole thing. The new one was a little quirky at first but it seems to be functioning smoothly now. Next up: a vacuum leak (I suspect) that is messing with my idle speeds.

As far as the boat itself goes, it's in pretty good shape except for the head seal leak that needs fixing. The head is all cleared out and ready for me to get started, but I have not been eager to dive into it and it may be mandatory to wait for a day that is nice enough that I can have all the portholes and vents open before I start cracking it apart. Looking at the forecast, I am hard pressed to find anything of that sort coming up.

Getting ready for summer

We had to go into town last week to see our accountant, and it was our first opportunity to catch up with friends and family there after a month of dog-sitting had pinned us down in Hadlock, so we turned it into a three day mini-trip. It also conveniently overlapped with a monthly yacht club meeting, which we have missed the last few of, so we were also able attend that.

It was the first time we had a chance to spend any significant amount of time on the boat for a few months, and I was a little worried about what I might find. I already knew there were a couple projects to be done. The leaky head has been on my radar since last fall, but before tackling that we needed to pump her out (as clean as possible, thank you!) so that was on the agenda this trip, and also some AC wiring needed to be replaced/reterminated after a melt-down earlier in the winter. What else might have happened in our absence was what I was most apprehensive over, however; boats left sitting on their own do not fare well during the winter months and I attribute our relative lack of troubles this past couple of years to a continuing presence aboard even during the off-season months.

Our trip to town did not start off well; we had a ten AM meeting with the accountant so we planned to catch the eight o'clock Kingston-Edmonds ferry, but when I got in the truck and turned the key, all I got was: click! My first impression was that the battery was out, but that didn't really make a lot of sense since it had only been a week since I had been anywhere with it, and it had started without any hesitation then. Sure enough, when I hooked the charger up to it, the only change was: click!click!click!click!click!click!click!click!click!click!

So, most likely the starter, not something I could do much about right then. Fortunately, my parents left their car here over the winter so we grabbed the keys for that and made the next ferry and got to our appointment on time. Just before we went in, I got a call from someone and had to make some notes; the pen I grabbed exploded while I was making them, and got all over my hands and notebook. So I looked really poorly prepared when we went in to go over our tax return. At least that part went well.

Afterward, traffic was terrible, the weather was miserable, and Mandy was hungry, a very bad combination. We had to get gas before going to a restaurant, and since the Costco gas station is right next to Home Depot, I had to buy my project supplies there too. Instead of just being able to pick the wiring you want off the shelves now, they have some big fancy motorized rack that only store employees can use to access the wire spools, so I was further delayed explaining what I needed and waiting for the Home Depot guy to figure out how to get it.

Eventually we got the girl some food, which was helpful, and then I dropped her off at a Starbucks to get some work done and stay out of my hair while I was working on the electrical system. It was, I think I have mentioned, cold and miserable, but while I was working on the AC system the whole thing had to be off, which meant no heat. So, I fumbled around with numb fingers stripping wire and crimping and re-attaching various connections. In some ways I got lucky: the main trunk from the shorepower connector had been melted right at the switch terminals, but it still had enough slack I could cut that away and re-terminate it with clean wire. The length of wire to the aft AC circuit was completely trashed, so I replaced it with some outdoor wiring, hopefully better suited to the harsh engine compartment environment it runs through. That was a pretty short run so I didn't have to do much to replace it. I was worried that it had damaged some of the other circuit cables, but fortunately it had not.

I pulled everything off the AC bus and cleaned and shined up the switch terminals. I suspect poor contact there led to a lot of the excess heat in the first place. In a perfect world, that panel would get replaced, but here I settled for cleaning and sanding them up. The subject might get revisited next winter if we need to run heaters frequently again.

That work took me all afternoon, curled up like a contortionist over the engine, and I was cold and sore and in a spectacularly negative mood by the time I was done.

The next day, though, things were a little better. The wiring all worked, and despite running the hot water heater, battery charger, and a space heater all night long, it wasn't warm at all. Then I fired the engine up for the first time in six months and despite having forgotten to switch the battery over to the start bank, it turned over and caught on the first attempt. No water in the fuel, and I only had to top up the transmission fluid slightly. The transmission itself was no worse than ever. The much-patched muffler spat out a load of rusty water, but didn't leak at all. It's getting replaced this summer anyway, but it was still gratifying that all the patches held over the winter. Perhaps the rust has reinforced them.

So we went over and pumped out the holding tank in the rain, and flushed it through as many times as I could convince Mandy to do so. We pulled the access plate on the toilet and it was as clean inside as I have ever seen it. I'm going to let it set for a while to dry out, then pull it apart to hopefully find and fix the leaky seal.

There were no other leaks anywhere; the forward part of the bilge was bone dry. There was a little water in the after part but no more than was there last time I looked at it, months ago.

While I was mucking around with all those systems, Mandy cleaned up the galley and icebox and took off the rails that hold the ice box lid up, which were beginning to fracture and need to be repaired. We'll have to do something similar with the larger and more fragile rails that support the nav desk at some point, so fixing these up will be a good trial run.

So things are fairly good on the boat front, even as we continue to look for a replacement. As far as the truck goes, I found a rebuild kit online for about ten bucks, so that is on the way and I should have time to pull the starter and make sure that's the problem before the kit shows up. And as for the rest of our summer, we have a slightly better picture of what it's going to look like than we did a month ago. Some friends of my parent's are planning to go to Las Vegas for July and August, and they asked if we could watch their cats while they are away. Since we didn't really have anything else planned, we said sure. So we are going to be house-sitting for most of the summer, too. If there is time in between, we might duck up to Princess Louisa Inlet, which we still have not seen after passing by it five or six times. Otherwise, we finally got official liveaboard status at the marina, so we can hang around at the dock as long as we want or take short trips around the Sound without respect to watching our dock-time to stay under the allowed limit.

It's probably not going to be much of a sailing summer, but that's okay; we'll be able to get more work done, and hopefully afford a better boat when we find one!

USCGC Bertholf

We noticed something odd about the superstructure of a Coast Guard cutter nearby here for the past couple days, but she arrived in the rain and we didn't get a good look before most of her hull was obscured. We're pretty used to our two resident High Endurance Cutters, the Midgett and Mellon, both Hamilton-class vessels based in Seattle, and this didn't look like them.

Today she is pulling out and it turns out there is certainly something different: she's the USCGC Bertholf, the first of the new Legend class "National Security Cutters." According to the Wikipedia article, she's homeported in Almeida, so I don't know if they are moving her up here or if it's just an extended cruise. I haven't decided yet if I like the looks or not. Kinda boxy superstructure, but the hull itself is more classic. As implied by the name, these are more oriented toward drug-runner interception and terrorist intimidation than search and rescue, so there is less to like on that front. But, if we ever have a dust-up with the Canadians, I trust now we'll come off fairly well with the new weapons systems.

Know the market

Just now watching CNBC, I realized why MREs are so expensive right now... they had a story on about how disaster supply and survivalist stores are booming right now, in part because of the recent example of the Sendai quake, but more so because of the Mayan mythology about the world ending next year. There couldn't be a worse time to be shopping for that stuff.

I think I will just stock the kit with ramen and macaroni for now, then, and pick up my MREs in January 2013 when they are suddenly dirt cheap.

900,000 clams and 800 bags of oyster spat

This past week I volunteered to help Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife seed baby Manilla Clams and Pacific Oysters in two local parks. If there is one thing I've learned after spending hours of time on the beach every week all winter long, it is that I don't know a damn thing about our local beach ecosystems or the ocean as a whole. Since hands-on experiences seemed the best type of education for me, I signed up.

On Monday, I, along with about 12 other volunteers and two folks from the Dept. seeded 900,000 baby Manilla Clams at a beach on the south end of Indian Island. On Wednesday, about 50 people showed up to spread 800 bags of "spat" on a 5-acre site near Shine Tidelands State Park.

Indeed I did learn quite a bit, but learning always come easy at the beginning of any new subject. It will take about 2 years for both of these species to become harvestable, and this re-seeding is an annual event.

The clams especially seemed to have had a long journey to arrive at this site in large coolers. If I remember correctly, they were born on the west coast of California, then spent about 4 months quickly growing in size in Hawaii, then spend another few months back on the west coast, possibly of Washington. These little guys were about 9 months old.

And so my confusion with the whole process began. If these little buggers grow here naturally (though neither species we were seeding are actually native), why are the harvests large enough to warrant the need for reseeding allowed every year? Why aren't fewer just harvested, allowing a natural re-population?


I have a feeling this is highly political. If I understood correctly, it is the fees and possibly the taxes that the commercial fisherman pay that directly pay for this reseeding effort. Perhaps there is a trade-off there? "If you will allow me to take x million dollars more of catch, I'll toss a few million your way for reseeding." That is my more cynical thinking. On the other hand, people hold what they can see, feel, and eat at a higher value. So, since the areas we were seeding are for sport shellfish diggers and not commercial, perhaps it is part of a bigger plan for getting the public involved in caring about the ecosystem. And then there is the revenue of individual shellfish licenses, which must add up to a pretty penny every year also. Shortening the season or reducing the allowable number of clams and oysters to be harvested would probably cut into the number of people forking out money for the privilege.

Environmentally, it is possibly a net gain. These baby clams (at least the 25% estimated to survive to a harvest-able size) will go on to have more than a year of time that they will be cleaning and filtering their foster-home waters before they are harvest-able. Now that sounds nice, especially since Puget Sound is not known for being a pristine waterway, but remember, these clams have already been shipped across the ocean twice. And believe me, they are HEAVY. That doesn't sound so great for the level of carbon in our atmosphere. It would probably take a fair amount of scientific calculation to see if the Earth as a whole comes out ahead.

And still I am left wondering why we are not seeding native species instead of non-native (though seemingly benign and non-invasive) species. One Dept. guy did have an answer for the oysters: the native and highly endangered Olympia Oysters are not legal to harvest, though there is one commercial fishery that can legally take them. The purposes of these oysters is mainly for recreation. I would imagine the other reason is economic. With more than a million (yes MILLION) dollars shelled out for this combined crop of shellfish, I imagine they are looking for the cheapest species to use.

One thing that I imagine is a net gain are the clams that decide to migrate out of the park they are planted in, and the oysters whose larvae end up farther down the beach. On the whole, I would imagine it works out to a net gain of overall shellfish in the region. I think I will need to have a much greater understanding of all of it, from biological to political, for it to become coherent in my own head. In the meantime, I'll plan to keep learning!

~M

Disaster Planning

Like a lot of people, the recent series of disasters in Japan has prompted Mandy and I to take a hard look at our own disaster preparedness and adjust our plans and expectations. One of the greatest lessons from the terrible tragedy is that disasters rarely come alone; after a hurricane, you will probably get flooding; after a quake, in our area at least, you may expect a tsunami. After any widespread disaster, you can expect fire, disease, and the ordinary depredations of seasonal weather that many of us subconsciously tune out in our electrically-powered, environmentally-controlled bubbles of habitation. It takes a particular degree of unlucky to have a nuclear plant melt-down thrown into the mix, but utilities and industry in general may experience any number of secondary catastrophes that could impact surrounding areas. So on top of suffering damage, you may find it necessary to evacuate further, without any significant degree of assistance. As we saw with Katrina and as we are seeing on the Sanriku Coast (I only know it's called that because I am watching Japanese TV right now... the coverage throughout the disaster has been excellent and they are running an instant retrospective at the moment), that assistance can take significantly longer to arrive than the government claims.

The Tohoku Quake is in many ways a good model for some of the likely disasters we face here in the Pacific Northwest. The most likely major seismic event we face is also from an off-shore fault at a similar distance and depth; we have water and large population centers in close proximity. So the quake/tsunami combo is something we want to be ready for, and there are some hard lessons learned in Japan that we are working to assimilate.

The biggest one of those is the size of the wave. Our plan, while house-sitting up here in Hadlock, had involved climbing the nearest hill. Turns out it's only about forty feet above sea level; predictions for the wave that might be generated by the Cascadia fault range up to a hundred feet. That's at the coast; even if it's only half that here, though, we're still ten feet under water. So we've had to re-think our evacuation route. Complicating matters are a lack of models for that sort of information. We haven't been able to find any information from NOAA or the USGS about how big waves here might be, or just as importantly, how long they might take to get here. To get to any hill higher than that forty footer, we have to go down first; the only thing worse waiting on a hill too small would be getting caught in a valley too soon.

There's not much we can do about that and there are no certainties in most disasters anyway, so we're working with what we can control.

We have long maintained two medium-sized bins with emergency supplies. I've always felt that the three days/three ways mantra preached by local government is a little lightweight (they do say, in the fine print, that government assistance "may not be available for several weeks or more" which is more realistic) so we have packed up enough gear and supplies to be able to rebuild civilization brick by brick should that become necessary. While here in Hadlock (we don't take the bins to the boat; in a way, the boat is an oversized bin full of emergency supplies already) we have been keeping them up on shelves at the shop, on the theory that keeping them further inland might keep them safe should something happen to the house, or if in fact what was most damaged was the shop itself, then at least we might still have everything that is already in the house itself. The Tohoku incident showed the folly in this. The shop probably isn't going to be any safer from a wave than the house. Worse, the shelves would likely collapse from the quake or at least disgorge all their contents into a jumble on the floor, which we then would have to spend precious time digging through to get the disaster bins out. So, we have moved them (and our portable generator) down here to the garage, where they can be chucked into the back of the truck and we can be out of here in two or three minutes.

Of course, that's assuming we can get out of the garage. I figure the power will go out first thing, so the automatic door openers aren't going to work. There's a manual override, but what are the odds the tracks are going to be bent out of alignment if there was a severe earthquake?

Even if all that goes well, there may be trees down across the driveway or other roads out of the area. So we're looking at being on foot. The smart folks have backpacks to carry along with them rather than bins, but I like the durability of the bins and the capacity, so I have come up with a plan B for taking them along on foot as well... wheelbarrow! I actually tested this for the first time while bringing the two of them down from the shop to the house. It was surprisingly easy to push both of them along in the wheelbarrow, one atop the other, even down the bumpy gravel driveway. Although, come to think of it, that's all downhill; I should re-do my test going the other direction sometime.

The thing that seems to have got most people nervous right now is the nuclear incident and at first glance, that doesn't seem like a major concern here. The only working nuclear power station in the state is in Richland, well away and downwind from here. Upwind, there's just ocean. So we haven't been tripping over ourselves to get in on the rush for potassium iodine tablets. Still, when the furor dies down, I think we will get some; right out the front windows on any given day we often see submarines or aircraft carriers tied up over at the naval station on Indian Island. That's right: portable nuclear power plants, right on our front porch! And they are all right upwind of us, too. The US Navy has perhaps the safest nuclear program in the world, a program that produced our greatest president: Jimmy Carter. But accidents still happen. A quick review of Wikipedia's list of military nuclear accidents reveals quite a sordid history of mishaps, from which the Pacific Northwest has not been immune: there are at least two warheads laying around loose somewhere below waters we sail in fairly frequently. And these are just the ones we know about.

Incidentally, I think that all makes a pretty good argument for the comparative safety overall of nuclear energy; for all the incidents and the many, many accidental releases of radiation, there have been damn few documented long-term environmental hazards... far less than, say, the Exxon Valdez spill or the recent Deepwater Horizon incident. For that matter, they have generated fewer human fatalities. It may be years before we find out the full story of everything that has happened in Japan this month, but I wouldn't find it surprising at all if there were more deaths, short and long term, attributable to the refinery fires that broke out than from the nuclear accident.

Still, we're getting the pills.

You might ask why we're not more concerned about being right next to a major ammunition depot in the first place, either while we are staying here in Hadlock or when we anchor out near here. The answer should be obvious: if something goes wrong over there, it will be quick and there will be little we can do about it. Actually, I think we're pretty safe. Other than on vessels in transit, it's unlikely that there are any nuclear weapons over there, and although a conventional explosion may be significant, I think we're situated to avoid the worst of the blast. And once it's done, it's done... no waves to worry about, no significant destruction of local infrastructure.

Apart from the pills I am fairly happy with how we are stocked up with the bins. We don't have as much water as recommended, but a filter, and in the Pacific Northwest there is never a source very far off. While we have plenty of food, much of it is dehydrated, which could still put a strain on the water supply, particularly if for whatever reason we are on the move. So I've also been looking into picking up some MREs, which are fully hydrated but still relatively lightweight and well-preserved. That would also help me avoid the onerous task of sorting and replacing expired food products in the bins every couple of years... in this environment, an MRE could stay good (for a certain value of "good") for thirty years or more. So I have been looking into buying some of those.

Turns out MREs are really popular with certain folks. There is a whole website dedicated to them. You can pretty much only get them by the case, though, and the whole thing would come to around a hundred bucks with shipping, which gets me more than I want for more than I want to spend. I'm thinking of going in with some other folks on it, though.

Of course our most fervent hopes are that none of this is ever needed and that this is mostly just an exercise in planning, but I feel somewhat better for the fact that in the wake of the Tohoku event, we at least know what questions to be asking even if we don't have all the answers yet.

Laid Up

That pretty much describes the both of us for the month of March: laid up. We brought home colds from the conference we went to in Spokane (or the party we attended on our way home, who can say?) and have been taking turns laying on the couch moaning about them. Then, we started our month-long dog-sitting stint with Daffy, a tubby and ancient dachshund belonging to some friends of the family. I was not previously aware that dachshunds were nocturnal creatures, but she seems to come alive only at night, snuffling and snorting about the bedroom, or whimpering softly in the dark. From time to time, she appears to have a seizure during which it sounds like she is trying to cough up a hair ball, leaving us both wide awake and wondering what horrors we might see if we turned on the light. We usually leave it off now. Her owners said she's been doing that for a while and hasn't keeled over yet.

So anyway, it's been hard to sleep around here and I finally gave up this morning when Mandy accidentally head-butted me a little before five. My brain is too fuzzy to work so I have mostly been looking at boats. It turns out there is another 38 footer up in Anacortes that I might want to take a look at, an '84 Catalina 38. I should have checked the listing sites more closely before we went up there to look at the Hunter. Fortunately, Anacortes is pretty close to Port Townsend; short hop on the ferry over to Whidbey Island and then a nice drive up across Deception Pass. Daffy doesn't always react well to being left unattended, however; she will pretty much just cut loose and perform her elimination functions anywhere she happens to be. We have a time-tested method for dealing with this while we are here: any time she shows signs of life and drags herself up off of the bed where she spends most of her hours, we take her outside and keep her there until her duty is done. If we're not here, though, we can't count on her to hold it for more than a couple hours. She will also whine loudly and incessantly until we return, which obviously doesn't effect us during our absence, but makes me feel bad when we get back. She is a poster child for the Wikipedia article on dachshunds:

If left alone, many dachshunds will whine until they have companionship. Like many dogs if left alone too frequently, some dachshunds are prone to separation anxiety and may chew objects in the house to relieve stress.

Last year, she ate the molding in the dining room when we left to go to town for the day to run errands. This year, we at least hope to prevent physical destruction by means of a pug-cage lent me by some other friends. If it can hold two rampaging young pugs, it ought to be able to confine an elderly wiener dog for a few hours.

So if we ever get to feeling better again, we may go up and take a look at that Catalina. I don't have terribly high hopes for it from the design perspective, but it is even less expensive than the Hunter was. It also occupies a similarly exceptional role in the pantheon of production boats: as the Hunter cutter was designed by John Cherubini, the Catalina 38 design is a product of the renowned Sparkman & Stephens naval architecture firm, designers of a long line of historic and undefeated America's Cup defenders (and, legend has it, during WWII the hull of the now-famous DUKW amphibious trucks that can still be found criss-crossing the streets and waterways of Seattle loaded with tourists). Due to the volume of the model that was produced and the association with the less auspicious Catalina name, you can pick up a high-performing boat at a fraction of the price it would sell for if it had the original designer's name attached.

That said, the Catalina 38 has some of the exact same features I disliked in the Hunter 37 cutter, namely the keel-stepped mast and the head forward. The keel is also nearly two feet deeper, which can be a drawback. But it looks like it might have more hanging locker space, which would make Mandy happy, and it's a foot longer and $15,000 cheaper. It's relatively narrower for the length due to its racing lineage, but also has less tankage, so storage space in general might be better. I'm fine with that. Tankage is a perennial concern for cruisers, but I would rather start out with less built in and either add additional tanks to preference or carry additional stores in cans. Single large tanks are more efficient, but less trustworthy and less flexible. We would rather take advantage of the extra space while doing short hops around here for now, while later having the option of taking on more cans of fuel and water to stretch our range if necessary.

The Catalina also has most of the advantages of the Hunter, in that it is a well-known boat with large and dedicated owners groups, for which much information and advice already exists dealing with common issues and upgrades. I've heard that some runs have been prone to osmotic blistering (that could explain the price) but you never know until you take a look.

But since we are laid up, that will have to wait.

The Hunter 37 cutter

So I mentioned in a previous post that in our search for a newer, larger boat, we thought it made sense to minimize the uncertainty inherent in used boat purchase by sticking close to a model and design that we are familiar with: the John Cherubini designed late 70s/early 80s Hunters. I also lamented that few were for sail in the Pacific Northwest market. Well, a couple weeks ago, a 37 foot cutter of that provenance came on the market, and so when Mandy and I were on our way back to Port Hadlock on Monday, we swung up through Anacortes to take a look at it.

I had high hopes. Thirty-seven feet seems just enough larger to accomodate our needs without being too expensive to maintain or too difficult to maneuver. The 37 cutters also occupy a special place in the Cherubini lore, being reputed as some of the finest sailing, most livable boats produced by the Hunter/Cherubini matchup. They are the among the few Hunter models that have been broadly accepted as long-distance, blue-water boats, and the owners almost universally seem to love them.

We didn't love it. I really wanted to; this particular vessel was priced a little higher than what we want to spend, but there are others for sale across the country in our range and assuming the design basics were all right, we might have picked up one of them just as easily. This one was in fine shape, recently re-powered, and no doubt worth the asking price. But too many of the features that we really like about our current Cherubini Hunter were missing or terribly flawed on this model.

One of my biggest personal complaints about our current boat is the size of the head/shower. I literally don't fit well enough to take a shower... can't wash my feet! It is unavoidable on the 33, there just isn't enough room. But the shower compartment on the 37 is even smaller! The head is located forward, too, which I find a fatal drawback in many American built cruisers. There is just too much motion up there in rough seas for a safe and tidy completion of necessary bodily functions.

The mast is keel-stepped, as opposed to our current deck-stepped model. That may make it stronger, but it also makes it more susceptible to leaks, which this one had, even though it was a very well-maintained boat.

The internal stowage was also lacking. We have come to rely on the relatively large spaces under our settees and under and atop the pilot berth on our current boat for storage and when packed correctly, everything we need fits in just right. On the 37, and on other models in that range we've looked at, there is greatly increased tankage, and typically the tanks are located under the settees. On the 37, this isn't even replaced by space under the v-berth (where our water tank is located) because that's where the holding tank is at. Notwithstanding the queasy thought of sleeping on top of the sewage, that just doesn't leave a lot of room. Presumably the cockpit locker and lazarette are much larger (the salesman didn't seem too interested in actually selling the boat; he didn't bother to unlock any of those hatches so we could take a look, and didn't seem to know or care much about the boat itself) but those spaces are inaccessible much of the time and unsuitable for many of the items we currently stow in the cabin. The quarterberth is not much larger than ours, and the space beneath it is taken up by the fuel tank.

The galley layout was not particularly appealing; the chain locker was tiny; the nav desk was small; engine access was poor; there was very little hanging locker space; there were no good candidate areas for creating a work space. These are all areas in which, despite moving up to a physically larger boat, we felt we would actually be taking a step back from what we have now, or at least not gaining in the particular requirements that we feel are not already being met.

This was a real let-down, because there are some other very positive qualities. The size of the fleet and the iconic nature makes the 37 cutters generally quite well documented and easily supported... the community on hunterowners.com is very active and helpful. Problems with the model and their solutions have been thoroughly discussed and explored. The build quality is something we can judge from our own boat, produced in the same shop in the same era. The sailing performance is supposed to be excellent, which is important to us as we prefer to sail, in situations where others are often forced to motor. And the Hunter name, much reviled in sailing circles, tends to push the price down despite the respected designer.

I suppose I was hoping that we could short-circuit the hard job of doing legwork and research to find a replacement boat by leveraging what we already know, in the same way that a lot of folks will stick with a brand as they are up-sizing. In this case, though, it doesn't look like that trick is going to work, and I feel like I am back at square one.

It's a given that all boats represent a compromise of some sort between price, livability, and performance. I don't think the particular combination that I am looking for is out of reach. There are any number of newer designs that have exactly what I want, which are priced in the same range that Hunters traditionally have been. In thirty years, they'll be exactly what I am looking for. But it seems that thirty years ago, no one was putting together those particular combinations of features.

At this point, I really don't know what to look at. There is very little in the Pacific Northwest in our price and size range and we don't have much of a travel budget to be out looking at other options. It looks like we probably will not be putting Insegrevious on the market this year after all, without a clear idea of what we might be looking at for a replacement. It's a bit of a let down, but I guess I am getting used to not having any really solid plans for the future by now, so perhaps not as much of a let down as it might otherwise have been.

Hang-ups

I wouldn't say that our winter has been uneventful, exactly, but it hasn't been very entertaining, either, thus explaining the lack of posts to this blog this season. As snow, hail, and sunshine take over the skies in rotation throughout the day, whipped in by gale force winds from the north, it has felt pretty exciting today so I thought I'd post about a couple of recent hang-ups we have had this weekend in Port Hadlock.

We woke up Saturday to a brisk northerly, the same sort that tore loose and sunk a bunch of boats here last fall. There must have been some fishing opening in the waters south of us, though, because as the sun rose a parade of sports fisherman pounded their way south through the cut against the current, even though the ebb meeting the wind just off Indian Island was creating some roller-coast rapids they had to negotiate. One sailboat upped anchor and headed south as well, a wise move even though he had a rough passage under sail.

We had imagined that most of the boats left in the anchorage here had been pretty well tested over the course of the winter but I happened to glance over at the marina mid-morning to see that one of the victims from the Thanksgiving storm last year had broken loose again and had somehow been swept around the marina onto the mudflats nearby. That might have been lucky; in November, she had been pinned against the marina breakwater, dismasted, and had big chunks ripped out of the hull as she pounded into the concrete. This time, she just drifted in until her keel hung up in the mud. Fortunately, Vessel Assist Port Hadlock was right there... they literally just backed out of their slip and got a line on her. It only took about five minutes but it was a rough five minutes. I got a couple of videos; this one shows the un-grounding and a bit of low comedy as the hand on the sailboat takes a tumble when the line goes taut:



The others are on my YouTube page. That was Saturday; Sunday, I took on a hang-up of a different nature. A tree had come down above the guest house garage driveway and hung up in another, leaning at about a forty-five degree angle. It effectively blocked the driveway, which wasn't a huge deal because the only thing in there is the lawnmower. That won't be needed for a couple months. More worrying was the fact that it was very close to hitting yet another tree, one which is already leaning toward the guest house itself. Although that one seems pretty solid, my concern was that in a southerly, if the hang-up un-hung it could smash into the other one with quite a bit of force and potentially bring it down on the guest house itself.



Our friends Matt and Lindsay were up for the weekend, and my first thought was to see if we could just pull the hang-up down on the side opposite the guest house. Complicating matters further, the main propane tank lies in that direction... but there was enough room to bring it down safely, at least, if we didn't yank too hard. We rigged a cable loop around the lower third of the trunk through a notch formed by a branch, and hooked it up to Matt's Suburban and gave her the gas.

It turned out that it didn't matter how hard we yanked, it just didn't want to come down in that direction. In fact, it was much more inclined to roll back toward the tree leaning toward the guest house. So, we left it hooked to the Suburban as an anchor and broke out the chainsaw.

I had a mounting sense of dread as I got the saw from the shop. I have always had a hell of a time getting this chainsaw started. It seems like I have to yank on the cord for an hour before the thing will fire up, and during all that pulling, there is never any sign of encouragement; never a cough, choke, or splutter to suggest that we are making some headway towards operating. I never know which time it's going to be that it just doesn't start at all. As I whaled away at it with an audience of my wife, friends, and their two children, I felt myself growing warm from more than just the exertion as it failed to start. Making matters worse, anytime Mr. Graebel breaks out the saw, he seems to get it going in a couple of swift yanks, just like in the movies. My audience eventually grew bored and cold and disappeared.

Eventually, it dawned on me that when I see Mr. Graebel using the saw, it's always when he is here, in the summer when it is warm, and when I am trying to start it, it's always during the winter when it is cold. I took it inside and left it on the warm floor for an hour, and then took it back out again and it fired up in a couple of pulls.

Although I thought I was in business, it was quickly apparent that I was not. I got the first cut in, but it was slow going and when I went to finish the notch I mostly got just scorched wood... the chain was too far gone. I shut it down and cast about the shop for a spare chain, which I was sure Mr. Graebel would have around somewhere. No luck. By then it was dark and the whole saga was heading into day two.

The next day Matt and I went out first thing and got another chain for the saw. The plan was to cut the tree off at the base, notched to fall away from the guest house, and hoping that some combination of pulling with the Suburban and the weight of the trunk dropping free of the stump would shake the top loose. As I started cutting again, I could see a hundred reasons that wasn't going to work out as planned, but I kept cutting anyway. With the pressure at the top keeping it pressed down against the trunk, it didn't want to just drop free, so I had to cut almost all the way through, at which point of course it slipped down and bound up the saw. With a combination of pulling, shaking, and sawing, I got the blade loose and the base of the tree dropped down to the ground. Where it stayed. Nothing came loose, except that it all showed an even greater inclination to come down toward the guest house.

Matt and I decided to try to pull the base around, using the stuck top as a pivot point. The base was pretty well stuck, though, and Matt couldn't get good traction, and we resorted to more and more dramatic steps to yank it loose, until we had bent the gate on a slip hook, and finally the clamps at one end of the cable came loose and sent the thimble flying and the cable running free. This reminded us of a bit of folksy wisdom that the renter in the guest house had passed along the day before, which was something like "Don't saddle a dead horse upside down," by which he meant that the clamps should be installed with the U-bolt toward the shorter, working end and the "saddles" along the standing part of the cable. The one we were using was backward from that. I figured it was Mr. Graebel's cable, he had probably put it together the way he wanted it, so I left it alone, but it turned out old Bill was on to something there.

But that pretty much finished us up for the day, because the tree wasn't budging anyway. I lashed it up to another tree on the uphill side to help keep it from coming down toward the guest house and went inside to look for alternatives. Oh, and found the spare chain when I went to put the chainsaw away, of course... I had knocked it back behind something when I was getting the saw out in the first place, apparently.

Most of what I found was a lot of advice not to mess with hung up trees, suggesting that those more than any other result in injury and fatalities among sawyers. The most practical advice was from wildland firefighters, who sometimes simply have to drop them: they said pull it down or use a bulldozer or some dynamite. There was one technique that looked promising, called a step-cut:



That was basically what I had done with my first cut, except that instead of the tree just dropping free after I made the back cut, it just pinned the blade in between the trunk and the stump. I don't know if it was because of the angle or just the fact that my tree was a lot bigger and heavier. With the little I could find about the technique, the suggestion seemed to be that it was best used only on trees under 10" in diameter, where mine was more than a foot.

While I was looking, I came across another entertaining video of how not to deal with a hang-up:



There were some other suggestions, but they pretty much all revolved around smaller trees: rolling it, twisting it, etc, etc, just weren't realistic options with something this size.

So, anyway, I finally admitted defeat and called up Mr. Graebel for the name of his tree guy. I'll be interesting to see what he ends up doing with it.

Mid-winter update

It's a new year, and it finally feels like I have enough breathing space to post a blog update.

That makes it seem as though life has been more busy than it really has. In fact, it's been a pretty quiet winter around here. Mandy and I have just had our heads down working. Things were pretty hectic right after we got back in port; a variety of issues with our rental (I'll avoid going into any detail, but will say that I had some immediate sympathy for Jason and Christie over at S/V Hello World when they recently mentioned their dealings with "shitweasel tenants"), business, and the basic business of life all conspired to put us behind on whatever arbitrary scale of progress we had chosen to adopt.

So, once we got everything immediate dealt with, we just sort of hunkered down and got to work. It feels like it has all been productive, but it will be hard to say until we are into next year and business cycles start to pick up again (retail may do well during the Christmas season; with us, not so much). If we've done well, we should profit; if not, well, back to the drawing board.

Either way, we have had very little focus on boat-related matters, but we think we have arrived at a couple of useful conclusions:

- Our boat is fine for living aboard, if a little cramped for one of us, but it's definitely too cramped to both live and work aboard simultaneously. If we want to travel, which we still think we do, it's just too small to sustain that lifestyle.

- If we can sell this boat and take the proceeds plus some savings, we can afford a boat that is big enough to both live and work aboard.

So that is roughly what we are planning to do, and in that order... we definitely have to sell Insegrevious before we can contemplate moving on to another boat. For one thing, we certainly can't afford two slips for any extended period. We actually have a larger slip than our length currently at Shilshole, so if we can clear out Insegrevious then we have room to move something else in without hunting around for a new home.

Of course, that's assuming we can find a new vessel in this area, which may just be wishful thinking. Our original plan, long long ago, had been to hold out aboard Insegrevious until we could afford a new boat. There are a variety of arguments about new versus used, but I think I am fairly well settled on the thought that it would be easier and not much more expensive to get what I want, in a more or less pristine state, by buying new. Older boats in a given class are not hugely less expensive if they are at all worth purchasing, and they have a tremendous amount of uncertainty attached, and usually a lot of worthless and potentially problematic modifications in the bargain. So, if I am going to drop a couple hundred thousand either way, on balance I will probably get something new.

But we don't have a couple hundred grand laying around right now, so something older is what is in our cards. If you do have to buy an older boat, then it makes sense to minimize the amount of uncertainty. That means not just getting a good survey done, but also primarily looking at boats you have some familiarity with and which have a known record. For us, that means the older, Cherubini-designed Hunters.

There are 36s and 37s that fit that requirement, and happily also our budget. Unfortunately, not many of them are to be found in the Pacific Northwest.

They also are not really worth trucking around the country, so there are good odds we will be relocating to wherever we find what we might buy. Where we go from there is an open question; we aren't really planning that far ahead.

What we are doing is trying to get our businesses to the point where we don't need to be in Washington, or near Washington, full-time to manage them. I think we have made good progress toward that goal these past few months. The next few will help provide the proof. Then, by spring, hoepfully I will have enough time that I can spend on Insegrevious working to get her sold. What happens next will depend on where, and how quickly, we find a replacement for her.