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?