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.

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.

Everything is better in Nanaimo

I don't know if it's just because of the location, as the sort of northern terminus of the protected waters of the Gulf Islands, or if there is something about the place itself, but it seems like Nanaimo always serves as our happy place when we are cruising in the Strait of Georgia.

If there were ever a time we needed a happy place to go to, it was certainly this week. Ending a whirlwind, on again/off again visit to Vancouver the day after returning from a trip back to the States (for work and play; Mandy worked, I played), we had an arduous crossing of the Strait with no realistic options for bailing out or stopping early. Mandy came down with a terrible cold and was laid up in the v-berth most of the day; the wind was on the nose, and was only moderate at that, which made for a lot of slow beating across a lot of slop left over from heavier breezes the night before; we were low on fuel, necessitating a two hour detour and arguing against motoring; and we hadn't had a chance to go shopping to restock our barren pantry before we left. Also, another storm was brewing on the horizon, ominously, all day long.

So it was under those conditions that we chugged across the Strait for eleven hours, ending up at nightfall in an anchorage that was chock full of Labor Day sailors. In the rain. All I could do after such a numbing day was shovel down some hot ramen (which, together with instant oatmeal and granola bars, comprised the entirety of our larder for the trip) and crawl into my berth and hope that the anchor was set well enough to endure the wind shift coming with the storm.

We woke to a rainy, miserable day, in a damp, dark, chilled cabin. Mandy was still sick, I was still tired. But it was Labor Day, and we didn't really have anywhere to go: docks and anchorages were full, and anyway most of the stores we might have gone to were probably closed. So we just hung around and watched the rain coming down on the portlights.

Today was a new day. The rain stopped, the anchored boats evaporated, the stores opened, and the docks cleared. We hauled the anchor in and motored over to go shopping. It was still overcast, but fresh food brightened our spirits considerably. Returning to Mark Bay, the well-protected, solid anchorage off Newcastle Island Marine park, we had our choice of spots to drop the hook. I got well in close to the dinghy docks, and in the most protected nook in the bay. We managed to get our fiddly diesel heater going, and between it and the glimpses of sunshine that shot through the clouds by mid-afternoon, we got the cabin heated up and the relative humidity down from just over 90% to around 75%. Not exactly dry, but a lot drier, and warmer, than it had been.

We didn't have either oatmeal or ramen or a single granola bar all day today.

Tomorrow and Thursday are supposed to be the best days before another storm system rolls in late in the week, so we hope to spend some time exploring the park further. When it starts raining again, we can either hole up here with the heat on and the wet all locked outside, or we can take a little harbour ferry from the island in to town and amuse ourselves there. It feels good to be all stocked up, with no pressing deadlines, easy access to provisions, power and Internet readily available, and no need to venture out for anything.

We'll probably sit here for a week or so, then duck into a marina to do laundry and take on water, then start poking our way south through the Islands again. Even if September this year doesn't extend our summer measurably, fall isn't so oppressive if you can stay warm and dry and pick your ports as you choose, rather than being forced into them by circumstances.

Forth and Back

Traveling is stressful for most people, but I have decided that traveling while you are already traveling is the most stressful thing of all.

Traveling while traveling? What gibberish is this, you ask? What I mean are the side trips we keep taking away from the main trip that we are on, a swing up through British Columbia. Various things have pulled us back twice in the last month from that trip to Washington state again, and the logistics of those small trips have been difficult and costly.

I'm also not sure stressful is the right word. I have enjoyed both of these trips back, despite the cost and complications. But I end up dreading each leg of them, and what is at the other end. I didn't want to leave Vancouver to come down here in Seattle; now that I am here in Seattle, I don't want to go back to Vancouver. It's not new or exciting; it just seems like work at this point, a lot of work on a voyage that we're not well prepared for. Leaving the boat in a marina while we have been gone has provided a certain peace of mind (particularly during the small windstorm Vancouver experienced today) but the combination of that and our stretch at anchor in between means that we are all used up on time in Vancouver. As soon as we get back, we have to head out, crossing the Strait of Georgia in iffy conditions without provisioning or preparing. That's not really a great idea as we verge into the fall storms, but all my energy and budget have gone into these other trips, so I have a feeling of dread about the whole thing now.

I had been looking forward to this last month of our trip, after many of the crowds have evaporated from the popular cruising spots, and with a little bit of cool, breezy weather mixed in with the relentless hot and clear summer we have otherwise had, but now it just seems pointless and undesirable to go back and go through with it all. We'll still stick with our plan, of course, working down through the Gulf Islands and into the San Juans slowly as we make our way to Seattle again to tie up at Shilshole for the winter... there's neither any point in rushing back. But if there were some way to hit the fast forward button and be done with it all this afternoon, I think I would.

Eeriness

This morning Scott dropped me off at the last sailboat accessible dock nearest the Amtrak station that sits near the head of False Creek in Vancouver. It was only around 8:00 am, and my bus to Seattle didn't leave until 11:30. I was armed with a map of Vancouver that Starbucks had been handing out during the Olympics. Along with street names and such, it also handily shows EVERY Starbucks near every Olympic venue as well as downtown.

I followed False Creek to its head, past the Olympic Village, which had been off limits to non-athletes during the events. This was my first chance to see it. A very nice trail had been constructed (or updated) along the waterfront, and walkers with and without dogs, joggers, bikers, roller-bladers, and moms pushing strollers all made heavy use of this lovely public green space.

To my right, it was easy to see where temporary staging areas must have been within the Village during the Games, since large swaths of land are now just empty lots alongside very nice looking brand new condos. In the center of one lot was a giant inukshuk, the symbol of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.

After picking up my bus ticket, I consulted my map for the nearest Starbucks, which was only about 2 blocks away. I stepped inside it, but it looked like a commuter Starbucks and had only a few barstools for seating. I was looking for something more substantial to wait out the hours at. The next-nearest Starbucks was back the direction I had come from. So I headed back, but decided pass along the opposite side of the Village and see what was there. There was nothing much: old, nondescript buildings, workshops or former workshops of differing sorts, many of them with faded "for lease" signs out front. I walked along a street busy with cars, but not many pedestrians. The map was true, however, and there, in the bottom of a new condo/office building on the far edge of the Village was the promised Starbucks.

After killing a few hours there catching up on this and that, I walked back to the bus station. This time I decided to walk through the middle of the former Village and see what that was like.
It was weird. Eerie-weird, and not at all what I expected from passing by within blocks of it in each direction. Two blocks toward the water, and the trail was busy with human traffic, two blocks the other direction, the the street was busy with car traffic. In the middle of the former Village there was nothing: no cars, no people, no dogs, no kids. The street and sidewalks were equally empty.

I'd heard that the condos that were built for the Village were not selling well, and many had been converted to rentals, which also were not filling very fast. Most of the condos had the shades drawn, either to make the vacancies less obvious, or to keep down the air conditioning costs on hot days like today. A few occupied units had plants out on balconies, softly announcing, "Someone lives here." The scene was mostly like an empty movie set. Since it's Sunday, people aren't at work and kids aren't at school. But they aren't here either. As I came to a park within the Village I noticed the first sign of life. There was a single family with a child. A little later, as I got to the end of the last street, two adults on bikes rode in and a car left a parking garage. There was a sign for a London Drug, but where it was, I don't know.

It was like a ghost town, except that everything was brand new and perfectly landscaped. The thing is, this place must have been the hub of the palpable energy of nervous, overwhelmed, elated, disappointed, or just relieved athletes and their coaches and families. The streets and sidewalks must have been packed with teams in their matching gear showing their country of origin. I highly doubt cars were even allowed inside, on account of the thousands of people. I can't imagine a place with more emotion than the Olympic Village would have. And now, everyone's gone; they took their liveliness with them, and the new residents have not yet arrived.


If we hadn't made the trip up to Vancouver to experience some of the Olympics, I doubt any of this would have occurred to me. I wouldn't have known the history of where I was, nor would I have experienced the spirit of the host city at its greatest hour. Now, here I was again, and there was nearly nothing that actually claimed that these few city blocks had even been the Village, nor marked its border or touted its past. Not a single set of Olympic rings were anywhere. Some "Vancouver 2010" flags remained, and a street was named "Athlete Ave," but that was about it. Except for the soft rustling of the leaves of newly-planted boulevard trees, there was only eerie silence, and the laughs of one child in a park.

Marina-stop Balance Challenge

It has taken us a while to find a good coffee shop in Nanaimo. I often think it is overstated that Seattle is addicted to its coffee shops, and that there are too many of them around, often multiple per street corner. I love the Seattle coffee shops; I love the "sameness" of them, and I love the sheer quantity. I am the biggest Seattle cliche. You can get pretty much the same things at all the Seattle coffee shops, which means that no matter which one you find yourself at, you can still get your favorite beverage (I never get coffee, but that is a different topic all together).

This morning, while walking back to the boat after visiting "Serious Coffee" (a place I'd go back to), Scott said he felt like we'd wasted our stay in Nanaimo by not going further from the marina and exploring more. I somewhat agree.

Marina stops have contradictory objectives. On one hand, they are a place to rest the body and mind since there are so many fewer worries, such as how well the anchor is set or if we are too close to another boat, or rock; and the tides (and subsequent anchor rodes) really don't matter when tied to a dock. On the other hand, marinas are an opportunity to get a lot of work done since we have Internet and unlimited power for computer activities. And then there are the necessary things to do as well: get groceries and ice, fill up the water and fuel tanks, do laundry, clean the salt off the dodger with freshwater (so we can see through it again), and pump out our waste holding tanks. The challenge is getting the necessary stuff all done while finding time to rest as well. When the activity of sailing itself takes so much energy, it is difficult to expend an equal amount of energy on onshore activities, too. While the lists say, "Get this done!" the body and brain say, "No." It doesn't seem like it would be so hard, yet I certainly haven't found the balance it seems to require.

In the end, even a stay of three or four days flies past. Onshore activities just aren't as urgent or demanding and at some point rest is needed. I'm trying, instead of fighting the urge to sleep and relax, to just let it be, and not rush through it, even if that means not exploring so much of the city around us. But then, instead of fighting the urge to sleep more, I find myself battling the nagging feeling of "missing something."

I'm going to need more practice at this.

~M

The faucet that kicked my a**

In the past few years, I've thought of myself as not a bad plumber. Maybe not a good plumber, but not a bad one. Give me some barbed fittings, plastic flexible hose, and a few clamps and I could hold my own. In the five years we've had the boat I've replaced much of the existing hose, the head sink, and added a hot water heater. So, when the galley faucet started dripping last week, I offered to take on the project, and Scott happily agreed that it was a good idea.

I was actually glad the galley faucet finally created a reason to be replaced. It had a high spout, which is nice, but it also only barely reached over the sink. That's an odd flaw, since the one of the main jobs of a faucet is to direct water eventually down a drain. Every time (yes EVERY time) something was washed in that sink, as much water went behind the sink as in the sink.

I started in the same place I started when the head faucet needed replacing, the aisles of Home Depot. However, the great HD did not offer a suitable replacement. I went as far as to buy a regular bathroom faucet and bring it to the boat (since normal kitchen sink faucets don't use the 4"oc water supply posts). The new faucet looked odd and was quickly returned to Home Depot. I was thrilled to find an equally priced bar faucet from Overstock.com, and it arrived a short three days later. I opened the box, pleased.

As soon as I began the project, I remembered all the irritation of replacing the head faucet about four years ago. Nothing on this boat is accessible, especially the backs of sinks. I finally resorted to cutting the head faucet off with a hacksaw.

The galley faucet was equally unwilling release the adapter that connects a house faucet to boat flexible hose as the head faucet had been. We have better tools now, so this faucet got cut free with a Dremel. This would have been faster than the hacksaw, except the Dremel needs to be recharged frequently and does not have the oomph to cut through the upper sides of two supply lines (the only side we could reach) in a single charging. Still it was easier, as well as apparent that the evening project was now going to be a 2-day project.

Once the old faucet was off, the actual tightness of the undersides of the galley faucet became known. There is about a 2" space between the sink and the backside of the cabinet beneath the supply line posts coming down from the faucet. The adapters need to be screwed onto the posts, but there is no way to get a tool in there for assistance. So, by lack of any other option, it was merely hand tightened (by my weak hands). Not to mention that I thought I'd be smart and have the hose already attached to the adapter so I wouldn't need to mess with trying to tighten the hose clamps in the tiny space... except that the space is too tiny for the hose to spin around with the hose clamps already in place. So the clamps had to be loosened and pulled out of the way.

After hand tightening the adapter to the faucet-side supply lines as much as possible, the hose clamps were slid back up and tightened as much as possible with assistance from multiple different sized screwdrivers. Diverse curses and groans of varying pitches and amplification and a few cuts and band aids later, I re-pressurized the system, not actually confident that it would not leak. And leak it did. Cranking my head around, flashlight in sore hands, I could see the water coming from above the adapter.

Again, the adapter couldn't be tightened while the hose clamps were in place. So, off with the clamps, and while I was at it, off with the hose as well. No sense having that in my way. I mustered all the strength I could to get the cold water adapter off and replaced the Teflon tape, and screwed it back on again. The hot water I couldn't get back off, my arms and hands apparently having lost strength since connecting it hours earlier.

The next steps: Put the hoses back on, get the clamps back in place, turn the water back on, and try to identify where the drips are still coming from. Happily, it seemed the new drips came from above the hose, but not above the adapter. My additional cranking on it did some good, somehow. I hoped that tightening the two sets of clamps, screws opposite each other, may fix the drips. Except it didn't. Both hot and cold still let out a drip every few seconds. I've heard that over-tightening hose clamps can also cause a drip, since it can open up a gap near the flat screw area. But, given how difficult it was to get a screwdriver into the space, too tight seemed unlikely.

About 6 hours after starting that morning, I cried uncle. My arms hurt. My hands had been jammed by the screwdriver more times that I know. I called Scott back to the boat, saying I'd done my best, but the faucet had kicked my ass.

Being diplomatic, he tried to convince me that not all of my time that day had been a waste. I still can't see how that can be true, since the first thing he did was completely remove the entire thing and start anew. The best I can think I did was supply him with an actual example of how it would all look when it was put together again.

It was time for me to teach, and he had the project to himself. By the time I was finished, so was he, looking nearly as beaten back as I felt. But he'd gotten closer to the goal of a new faucet that does not drip below the sink. Closer to a non-dripping faucet connection isn't an acceptable final outcome, and it seems drips slowly continued to fall. With everything quite wet by this time though, it was hard to tell what was new water and what was old.

We put everything back under the sink, since there is no place to put that stuff while we wait for everything to dry. I made dinner, and afterward laughed at the habits I saw had been in place for containing the water in the sink during the process. At least the new faucet does what it is intended to do. It turns on; it turns off; it releases water over the cavity of the sink and not along the perimeter of it. That's something!

Tonight, or maybe tomorrow, we'll take everything out again for a close inspection of possible drips.

Scott has taken a more philosophical reflection of the day in his Late Entry post, The Rules. After reading it, I thought back to the day I replaced the head faucet. No, it wasn't a day. It was three, possibly four days. I'd cursed, I'd probably cried, I'd asked for help, and it was eventually in place. And for all the years since I've just used it, happy that it existed, forgetting the trouble that got it there.

Hopefully this new chrome will bring me as much worry-free use. And all shiny and new, it sure is pretty!

~Mandy

The First Day of Summer

Today is the first day of summer we have had here in the Puget Sound region. I know it's not really even officially summer yet, but there is often a point some time in the spring where you have a day that is basically a summer day, and from that point forward I think of summer as having begun. If subsequent days return to more spring-like weather, I just think of it as a crappy summer, rather than a normal spring.

We were having a normal spring up through yesterday, which means rain and sun breaks, but mostly rain, and that was a shame because I had to have our cat Rosie put to sleep yesterday, and she very much would have enjoyed a few hours laying around in a warm puddle of sun before she had to go.

Rosie has been living at my parent's place in Port Hadlock since we moved aboard our boat last summer. Diagnosed with a chronic condition just as we were getting ready to move, we didn't feel right just giving her to someone else. But she had perked up quite a bit after we moved her there and didn't show any signs of moving on from her ninth and final life anytime soon.

We spent the winter with her while my folks were out traveling. She seemed to be normal, happy, and healthy, but toward the end of our stay she was sometimes forgetting to go outside to go to the bathroom, and she was sleeping a lot more than usual... pretty typical old cat behaviors.

After we left, though, she was eating less, forgetting to go outside more, and sleeping even more often. When we went back up last week for our haul-out in nearby Port Townsend, we were shocked at how skinny she had become. As long as someone remembered to put her outside in the morning and evening she would go to the bathroom out there; otherwise, she was hitting the living room carpet more often than not.

So it wasn't like there weren't signs that she was deteriorating, but she was so small that it doesn't take long for things to go downhill seriously if she hits a tipping point of some sort. After we sailed back to Seattle, she pretty much stopped eating and drinking entirely. She stopped sleeping in her favorite spots and instead camped out in a corner of the living room behind a potted plant. So, after a phone call from my mother not a week later, I drove back up on Friday to see her for myself and take care of the necessary arrangements.

We made an appointment to have someone come out and do it at home on Saturday, since she has always hated car rides and I wanted her to be in comfortable surroundings and not stressed out at the end, but once I saw her it seemed clear that wasn't going to be a factor. She was just listless and generally unaware of her surroundings, although she did purr a bit in the morning when I got there and petted her.

But she wasn't getting around well, even when she tried. When she showed some signs of interest in the water bowl, I put it right under her snout but after sniffing at it, she just lay down right there with her head on top of it. She wasn't feeling good, and I didn't want her to feel like that for another day.

Mandy kept urging me to take her outside and let her lay in the sun or play or just feel free, but it was really pretty crappy outside. It cleared up in the afternoon. In fact, it was miserable when we went into the vet, and sunny and clear when we came back out, which just seemed cruel.

She barely objected at the car ride. It was like she seemed to know that she shouldn't want to be in the car, but it turned out not to bother her once she was there. I just held her in her blanket on my lap. She meowed half-heartedly for a few seconds and then just lay there. The vet is only about two minutes away, so it wasn't much of a ride.

I was very pleased that the vet who was there happened to be a friend of my parent's, who had been at their house and knew Rosie, and she him. I think, though she was zoned out from pain meds that we gave her before we even left the house, that it helped that everyone in the room at the end were friendly people that she knew. She was a very sweet, sociable cat.

One of the assistants at the vet said that typically, calicos are the redheads of the feline world, very temperamental (I knew exactly what she meant!) but Rosie had, in the time that we had her, become very much a people cat. She liked people and they liked her. When we first brought her home from Spokane, we didn't see her for a week. She spent all her time under our bed or dresser. But gradually, she warmed up to us, and when our other cat, Hobbes (previously deceased), wasn't hogging all the attention, she would sit on us or with us wherever we happened to be.

She was also the better mouser of the pair, that being the ostensible purpose for introducing the cats to our house in the first place, quickly clearing it out. Later, she would get bored and from time to time catch a mouse or bird outside and bring it IN, which wasn't exactly what we had in mind. But she was well-behaved and good with adults and kids alike.

She loved finding a patch of sunshine and zoning out for her mid-day naps there. Which is why it is so hard, now, that this is the first day of summer. There are puddles of sunshine all over the place, but no Rosie. She was a good cat, and she deserved her sunshine. I wish I could have given her one last day of it. I don't know how her day would have been today, or her night last night, and there is some part of me woke up this morning relieved that she was not still out in her corner too weak to hold her head up. I'm glad to have spared her more of that. But I can't keep from looking around and thinking it would have been a little bit better for her if I could have found her some sun before having her put to sleep.

It would be poetic to say that I had buried her in a place with a nice patch of sunshine, but instead I picked a spot on the bluff near my parent's house (adjacent to, but not within, the previously established chicken graveyard) with a view out over the water, and some nice weeds to hide and play in. She loved to stalk. And for the past year, one of her favorite spots has been up on the back of a chair where she can look out over the bay. But there was not sunshine there, either. So I figured she would appreciate the view more. I hope so.

She was our friend.

Planning life

We can't seem to plan for the average week, so life seems a little bit out of reach. The haul-out we have been trying to get to for the last five months is a case in point. December was our goal; finally, this week, I have managed to get it scheduled for early June. What's a delay of seven months or so? Well, the obvious answer is, half a year of our lives.

Not that it matters, because we haven't been able to schedule the rest of our lives with any greater success. We had hoped to take a month or two and head north to Desolation Sound this summer, an area we have passed through but never yet really explored. An early season trip, ahead of the hordes of July and August, seemed to be the best bet. But the haul-out delay, other business bookings, and nothing else getting done this winter as we had expected, have put that idea on the rocks as well. I suppose we're neither the first or last people to notice how life keeps getting in its own way.

Watching what has happened to other people during this recession has only reinforced the point. We don't want to buckle down, work for the next twenty years, and hope we're in good enough shape still to enjoy retirement. We could just as well end up trying to do it in the next recession, or after a bout of serious medical problems, or who knows what? Everything we see screams out at us that every day is important, that you can't count on reaping the rewards at the end of a career. The time to enjoy is now, in whatever capacity one can manage.

So we hate having our lives just slide randomly along this way and we thought we were taking steps to keep all that from happening. We're not so foolish as to imagine we can control all the little ups and downs, but we thought we might structure our lives and livelihoods such that those things need not get in the way of what we really want to do. More than two years ago, I started cutting back on the support side of my business in favor of projects and report-based consulting, to reduce the on-call nature of the job; at the same time, we started building up the web presence for Mandy's business to reduce her dependence on having face time with students. The latter effort has been fairly successful; the former has been a victim of the recession or my own ineptitude, it's hard to say at this point. Last year, we moved out of our house, got it rented out, and moved aboard our boat, dramatically cutting back both expenses and possessions.

As I look back at it all, we mostly did what we set out to do in terms of cutting back. But it hasn't served to cut us loose at all. I'm not sure what went wrong. It's a bunch of small things, I guess. A cold snap, a miscommunication, a sense of professional responsibility, lack of resources, the price of gas, personal matters, money matters. The thing is, it's always the small things. There are always going to be small things. If we can't figure out how to live the way we want to despite the small stuff, how does it ever happen?

I've always thought the answer was basically "don't sweat the small stuff." That's a great thought. But it turns out that a lot of the small stuff matters; in a sense, I suppose, it's actually big stuff. I'm not sure this is as counter-intuitive as it sounds. After all, everyone knows that it's the details that count, whether they are in customer service or boat maintenance. So you shrug all that off at your own peril.

Recognizing that doesn't really provide a tool to help deal with it, though. If anyone else came to me and told me about all this stuff that is making them crazy, the way it is making us crazy, I would tell them to just drop it. Walk away, recognize that what you are accomplishing in dealing with these small things is never going to add up to the big thing you want your life to be. It calls for a fundamental restructuring, I would say, a life lived by taking only the road that leads toward your goals. There are sure to be enough speed bumps on that route already... don't force yourself to deal with the potholes on all the side roads as well. Stay on the highway.

We thought that we had done that, though, and yet here we still are, rambling down the dusty little roads that seem to take us further away from the mountain of our goals, not closer at all. We're not really sure what turn to take, so we keep going, easing off on the accelerator a bit as we watch the mountain recede in the rear-view mirror, but never finding a spot to make a U-turn.

We both know that this is how you give up on dreams, slowly and with small, rational steps. Neither of us want that to happen. But the way we thought we knew to stop it, just didn't work. Now we're sort of at mile one again.

Apparently the couth and class of participants at the annual Fisheries boater's swap meet (which we were unable to attend this year) has not improved since this depressing episode I experienced a couple years ago.

Marty over at Three Sheets Northwest seems to have had a similarly poor experience this year. Are people just broke and desperate now? Or do events like that just draw out the few jerks in the community?

Keller Ferry

For a long time, whenever anyone said "ferry" I pictured not that hulking green and white apartment building-sized ships that cruise powerfully back and forth across Puget Sound with a backdrop of fog, green pine forests, and towering snow-capped peaks, but instead a little cabin-less thing shaped more or less like a dinner-plate with a few up-ended cubes of butter stuck around the periphery. This vessel, surrounded not by the verdant mountains of Western Washington but by the sage and sand hills of Eastern Washington, was the only thing I knew in my childhood that was ever called a ferry, and everyone always just called it "Keller Ferry."

We called it that because that's how you got to Keller, obviously, or the popular Sanpoil campground almost as far away. It's only today via a blog post by Captain Richard Rodriguez over at Bitter End that I find out that Keller Ferry has a real name: the Martha S. Even more incredibly, she's been on that run in more or less continuous service for more than sixty years, having begun in 1948.

I had always assumed, as a child, that this was the ferry, an assumption reinforced by the fact that the county it connected to the north was Ferry county (named, I also find this afternoon, not after Keller Ferry, but instead Washington's first governor, Elisha P. Ferry). I grew up not far from it and spent many a summer swimming and playing in Lake Roosevelt at a Park Service campground just downstream from the landing. If you waited until it got close the the landing and then dove under water and were still, you could hear the throbbing of the engines, a much different sound than the high-pitched whine of propellers from every other craft on the river.

I think about that now as I hear the throb of the Evergreen State through the hull as I sit moored near the periphery of the docks at Friday Harbor.

New normals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, we're sorry

So, we've been working on thank you cards for our wedding gifts during the trip (see, this is how much we appreciate you all; we could be out enjoying the bountiful wonders of British Columbia and instead we are huddled in our dank little cave by candle-light scratching out thank-you cards instead) and mailing batches off as they are done along the way.

In a lot of these places the post office consists of a shack with a slot in it somewhere, or a small corner of the general store with the proprietor wearing a second hat as part time postmaster. As you might expect, this does not absorb the fullest measure of their attention, but by and large they do yeoman's work in a thankless task for the small communities and transient boaters they serve. Nonetheless, we checked in Victoria on the rates to use for mailing cards and such to the States. It was complicated a bit by the fact that we (ahem... Mandy) picked two different sizes, which took different rates. But we thought we had it all straight... until Tofino.

There, the good folks at Canada Post informed us that the stamps we had been putting on one of the card sizes was insufficient... by almost a dollar! They said the cards would probably still be delivered, but that the recipient would have to pay the difference on the postage! This was terrible news; here we are thanking people for their immense generosity, and instead, they are having to pay even more just to read the thank you!

So; if you are among those so affected, we apologize deeply and will think very carefully on sending out additional, follow-up thank you cards, weighing the benefit of thanking you properly with the very real possibility that we will screw it up yet again and force you to pay a third time for being so nice to us at our wedding.

The Endless Immensity of the Sea

Thoughts of Mandy's:

Antoine de Saint-Exuperie is quoted as having said, “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Things along this trip do seem endless and immense, and it isn't hard to see how the early explorers and settlers thought it all could never end. Surely, when the streams seem to keep coming from the hills and mountains, one after the next when looking one direction off the boat, and the never-ending sea is all that exists when looking in the other, those people must have thought it would be inexhaustible. How could an ocean so immense ever run out of fish? How could endless hilltops of timber have all been felled? When imagining every islet run over with sea otters, how could the trappers have ever thought the playful little animals could be trapped to near extinction?

Yet every little settlement we pass has notes in our guidebooks about how it was once a bustling fish offloading dock up until the fisheries collapsed, or some similar story. Now most of these places have gone one of two directions. Either they are near ghost towns, or have learned how to harness tourism, mostly sport fishermen. Tahsis, where we are now, has a large, waterfront paved yard slowing being grown over by the evergreens. That yard was the sawmill that made this town. Now it is empty, quiet, fenced in, and derelict. Still, when we look off into the mountains surrounding the inlet into here, clearcut after clearcut is visible. Some seem to have been cut a few decades ago, and are filling in again. But some seem to have been cut in the last few years, the fresh brown scars of the landslides obvious to even an unseasoned looker. I wonder if the logs are just being processed elsewhere, or if there are too few left to keep so many places open, or if demand has just dropped and so fewer are being cut. I'm quite curious on the matter.

And I wonder if the local fishermen were angry when the sea otters were re-introduced a few decades ago. What do they think of the added competition searching for the dwindling fish population. And I wonder if the fish population had an unnatural surge a hundred years ago, when they sea otters were first harvested so fully. Without the otters preying on the salmon, did the salmon population boom, making the new commercial fisherman think there were always so many fish in this sea?

I think I'll keep my eyes open for some books about the natural resources of this land, and the changes that have occurred in the last few hundred years. I wonder, too, where it is headed.

There is time to think about these things when slowly passing through the beautiful narrow inlets of Vancouver Island. But when we're sailing in the open sea, there is time to think of none of that. Never have I had more fun sailing than when running downwind along the coastline of the Pacific Ocean, being pushed by the swells from behind. Every now and then a swell will break, just as it crosses under the stern of the boat, leaving the soft sizzling of millions of tiny air bubbles surfacing around us as the boat sinks back down into the trough of the swell. After a few more moments, the boat is at the peak of the next swell, being pushed along again. For my light little self, it take all of my body to keep the boat pointed where I intend it to go. At the end of my three-hour shift, all of my body is tired and wanting food, food, food. After food, then sleep. But it sure was fun!

Fun as it is, the trip under motor to this little village was a relief for my tired body. Moreso, even becuase a tiny hornet got the best of my right hand a few days ago. Apparently I have a mild allergic reacition to hornet stings, because my right hand, all the way through my elbow and up to my shoulder is sore from it.

...Exuperie was right about the motivation that the longing for the endless immensity of the sea can create. I can't imagine a crossing a boat this size, but the wanting to do it, possibly someday in a bigger boat, does keep me working while on this trip, always hoping we can make enough money to squeeze a lifestyle out of this. My work has nothing to do with sailing, but sailing has everything to do with motivating me to do the work!

Well that's it, then

Well, we've done it... the knot has been tied, the die has been cast, the leap has been leapt: we're married.

The wedding was wonderful and we want to thank everyone again for making it so. We were thrilled that so many people were able to make it out and be with us for the occasion. On top of the challenging trip to our wedding site in scenic but out-of-the-way Port Hadlock, friends and family alike chipped in and helped out with the hundreds of details, major and minor, that go along with a mostly do-it-yourself wedding. Woven in with our memories of the day and each other, we will always have the recollection of the spirit and generosity that came from all of you before, during, and after the event.

We've been working our way through our cards, and have been absolutely blown away by the generosity of both those who attended and those who were unable to make it. We had not requested gifts, since traditional wedding gifts would only be a hindrance aboard the boat, but what people have given us is amazing and is certainly making our honeymoon a wonderful and memorable experience! Nothing but fine dining and the best hotels from now on!

We're in Victoria now, finally having had a chance to catch up on a good night's sleep in a nice hotel overlooking the Inner Harbour. We had about an eight hour crossing from Hadlock, despite a slow start in light winds. There was still patchy fog on the Strait once we turned the corner at Point Wilson, so we ended up motor-sailing much of the way, because the balky radar seems to have a slightly higher proclivity toward working normally when it is powered off the starting battery bank... and we have a rule that if the starting bank is in use, the engine must be on to keep it charged. Either way, it was a fairly quick trip and the Strait was largely well-behaved (relatively speaking--Mandy still got queasy), but we hadn't gotten much sleep the day before and were both pretty beat.

Today feels like a new world after eight solid hours in a real bed, and multiple showers apiece. The weather is as gorgeous up here as it was in Hadlock for the wedding, and tourists abound. We're happy to take our place among them; we had a coupon for the boat show for a deal with three nights moorage with the Harbour Authority here and so we will spend the next few days here relaxing and seeing the sights we have missed on previous trips. It will also give my computer power adapter a chance to catch up with us; I forgot it when we left so the Graebel's are having to ship it up to us. I'm writing this on my little Eee PC, which is okay but a little challenging in the typing department. It also is missing some of my programs and passwords for work stuff, so I am a little crippled without the PowerBook. I suppose that will force me to take a break for a couple days, though.

In addition to sightseeing and restaurant grazing, we'll take the opportunity here to take a more in-depth look at the radar. I want to replace some of the battery cabling on the house bank, which has some corrosion... the tendency of the radar to work more often on the starting bank has me looking at power again. But since it still cuts out on the start bank, that can't be the only problem, so Mandy is still going to have to go up the mast and check the wiring.

We'll also probably do some laundry, and I will have to find a Canada Post office and master the intricacies of international mail... I also forgot to leave my truck key for the Graebels and am blocking in their lawnmower! I imagine they need a break from yard work right now anyway, though. We'll be working our way through thank-you cards as well. Don't be offended if gift checks aren't cashed for a month or more... we can't take care of some of the name and bank related changes we need to make from foreign soil.

Figuring out those and other things are good practice for living aboard, however, and although we haven't completely moved out of the house yet, this is really the beginning of that stage of life. It's interesting and a little exciting and not so frightening as I had imagined. Living aboard provides its own element of "island time" where the cares and concerns of real life are not wholly absent, but are frequently subsumed or replaced by the exigencies of the moment. Dodging tanker traffic in the fog in the Strait of Juan de Fuca is no time to be thinking about work or mortgages or banking. And if I have to think about those things at some point, it's fun and challenging to do so in such a beautiful place as this.

The stop is less hectic than most of our port stops so perhaps I am getting a somewhat jaded view of life aboard. But I think I can put up with the bad parts if the good parts continue to be this good.

Kitty moving

We are just back now from ferrying our small cat, Rosie, up to the Graebel's place, which is to be her new home. The house is an empty and more lifeless place without her here, but she has grand new places to explore and sleep, and people who will pet her and spoil her extravagantly and we are trying to take heart in that.

We had known several months ago, as we started to talk about plans for the coming years, that we would have to find a new home for her. Our plans right now involve extending our honeymoon trip on the boat more or less indefinitely; we'll be renting out our house and living aboard, sticking around Puget Sound perhaps, but not ashore. Rosie is no spring chicken and we didn't want to disrupt her by trying to get her to adapt to life aboard, nor did we want to risk her in what can be a risky environment for a cat.

Things became more complicated two months ago, however, when she was diagnosed with feline leukemia. It's a terminal condition, and the vet gave her six to eight months. She had an episode at the time that made it look like it could be a lot less than that, but, always resilient, she bounced back and with medication has been doing quite well more recently. Still, we didn't want to dump her off on anyone new, both for her sake and theirs... it seemed dramatically unfair to take her out of her comfort zone in her last months, and equally so to ask new owners to become attached to and care for a cat with a fast-approaching expiration date. Were circumstances otherwise, we probably would have simply delayed everything (well, not the wedding, but the honeymoon) and stayed with her in our home until the end. Finances and her returning robustness would not allow that sort of unforeseeable delay, however.

Fortunately, my parents offered to take her in. They already know her, and she them, so it's not a dramatic shock to either party. They're located near enough that we will still be able to see her frequently, and should they take off RVing this winter, we can house-sit with her (and the chickens, who frequently have trouble finding good caretakers). There is a vet right up the road from them, and what with the proximity, there is a good chance that if she starts to go south we will be able to be there to take care of her at the end and not have to force the unpleasant task on anyone else.

Stress isn't good for her with the depressed immune system so we were most worried about the car ride up to Port Hadlock. Rosie has never traveled well; when we got her from my friend Steve, who lived in Spokane at the time, she meowed through the entirety of the four hour trip back from there, and made at least one spirited escape attempt from the confines of her cardboard box. We have a cat carrier now, but the anxiety level was approximately the same.

True to form, when we loaded her up in the carrier, she started meowing like the world was about to end. Mandy drove while I was tasked with calming the cat, but the best option while she is in the box is simply put towels over it and hope she forgets we are there. This did not work. Still, we had a plan, which worked out quite successfully in the end.

We kept her in the box until we were through the ferry tollbooth downtown and could roll the windows up. Then, while we were parked and waiting in the lot, we let her out of the carrier. She snooped around the car, frightened and hiding at first, then simply curious, then intensely curious with all the other cars pulling in and people walking back and forth. It gave her time to get used to the interior of the car without anything particularly scary happening, though. Then, when the ferry arrived, we got to expose her to the noise of the engine and rolling around slowly as we loaded, all while she was loose in the vehicle. It was such a short interval that she didn't have time to get loopy, but enough to see what it was all about.

Then, after a break while the ferry went across the Sound, she was pretty well okay with the car moving. There was a little meowing, a lot of shedding, and some episodes of hiding under the passenger seat, but on the whole she did very well. Other than some mysterious urge to crawl down between Mandy's feet and the pedals, she stayed put with me on the passenger side without much complaint. By the time we actually got to Hadlock, the sun was out, and she crawled up on my lap instead of hunkering down in the footwell, and though she wasn't purring she at least deigned to be petted.

We spent the night up there with her so she would know it was safe. The Graebels had things all set up for her already. Rosie is an indoor/outdoor model, having grown up in a barn, and doesn't stay inside for extended periods very well (although she will use a litterbox in extremis). A traditional wandering-around outdoor cat won't last long that far north on the Peninsula, however, on account of eagles, coyotes, raccoons, etc. So, Linda built a rather sizeable cat run along one side of the house. Completely fenced in, containing plants, resting places, and intriguing features, Rosie can pop out through an open window anytime and either enjoy the wilderness or answer the call of nature in complete safety. I have no doubt she'll still meow at doors for a while, but I think she'll be sated by her run.

The new house is already being taken over. At our place, it was never work of more than thirty seconds to establish her whereabouts when she was inside. Up there, she can disappear sufficiently that four people searching for five minutes have trouble finding her. She will no doubt appreciate that sort of insularity. She found no shortage of quiet places to curl up and sleep after exploring the place thoroughly.

It's very quiet around here now, clumps of cat hair blowing like tumbleweeds through the living room, but in the end, it is better than leaving her here with a stranger or having to move her later, when she is sicker. We feel better thinking of her half-buried in pillows up there or lounging in the sun room like she used to do on the deck here.

Back in time

Wednesday Night
Although in many ways it seems like just another terrible thing on top of a summer that has already had more than its share of difficult moments, I'm trying to see it as a blessing that we have arrived back in Seattle just as my grandfather, in Spokane, has come down with what is probably a terminal bout of pneumonia. So, we're leaving again almost immediately. But I think I am lucky that I even can; had it been a month ago, I would probably not have known until it was done, and wouldn't have had the chance to go see him.

That was in the back of my mind when we left. Since suffering a nearly fatal heart attack a couple of years ago (I rushed over then thinking the same things that I am thinking now) he has never really recovered and instead has been on a long downhill slide during which any week could bring the bad news.

I don't know that this will actually be the end; Grandpa is pretty tough, and he lived through some things we never thought he would make it through before, so I won't count him out now until he stops fogging the mirror. It forces me to reflect, though, on what a shame it is that he will almost certainly never get to hear about our trip. Even if he pulls through this, his degradation is such that he has difficulty recognizing family members, and he hasn't shown much interest in anything the last few times I have visited him.

But it's a shame, because Grandpa was always a great traveller, and he would have loved to hear about the trip and see the pictures. He had travelled to all fifty states with the exception of New Jersey... he just "never found an excuse to go through there" in all his journeys, he said. By the time I was a teenager, he had taken me to places he had found and enjoyed seeing in twenty-five different states, and being on the road with him was one of the most formative experiences in my childhood... among the few memories I still have of those years, in fact. Burnt toast, his favorite breakfast repast, will forever remind me of waking up in the camper in some place I had never been before; and not infrequently someplace different from where I had gone to bed the previous evening, as his years of working the graveyard shift for Burlington Northern often found him awake in the early hours of the day even on vacation, which he would take advantage of by putting on more miles while I still slept. I think I felt a bit like he must have as I conned the boat along the quiet waters of the Inside Passage in the mornings as Mandy still slept below.

At any rate, we are going to go pick up my mother at the ferry terminal downtown shortly and drive to Spokane tonight to see him and stay for a bit.

- - -
Thursday Morning
Grandpa passed away about 10:30 last night, just a few hours after we arrived in town and stopped to see him. He was comatose and didn't appear to be in much pain, although his breathing was very laboured. They had him on oxygen and morphine. We chatted with each other and told him a bit about the trip, and I hope that at some level it made it through to him, even if it was just the subconscious reassurance of friendly voices in the room. The nurses and staff at the Spokane Veterans Home were wonderful to him and although it would have been better if he could have been at home, it was a physical and financial impossibility this last year. I'm just glad that we did get back in time to see him.

He didn't want a funeral so there is really nothing much to be done here. We collected his few belongings this morning and are going to dinner tonight with my grandmother, mother, aunts and uncle, and that will be about it until we scatter his ashes later this summer. He wanted it done up along the St Joe River, a beautiful place.

I feel a little flat today.

We'll probably head home tomorrow some time.

adventures abound

Shearwater, the place we were towed to and can keep us (hostage) for as long as they choose, is an odd little place. It isn't exactly a town, but kind of a marina village. I think I've seen most of the locals at least twice already, and many of them even more. Everyone else seems to be sailors or power-boat yachters. It is sort of like Northern Exposure, but with fewer moose and more Bald Eagles, and transient boaters.

The B&B we are at is run by a British woman, and the place has certain British flare, and an odd culture mix eclecticism.

Slowly, things are looking up. Just to feel better about something this afternoon, I cleaned off the pilot berth (the highest point the water had come) and laid all the wet things out around the boat, and cleaned scrubbed the berth. It is the only clean part of the boat right now. Everything is covered in silt and dirt and salt, or still sitting in salt water. The frustrating thing is that we can't run our freshwater while we are on the blocks, so nothing can be cleaned with fresh water until we are back in the water. And, water here is not potable, so we can't refill after we do use what we've got. I don't even know where the nearest potable water is at. (Our B&B runs off a rainwater system and set a jug of drinking water out the door today while I was napping.)

We can't even empty our full bilge in the yard, so the water on the boat has to stay there until we get put back in the drink. The floorboards are swollen and grossly dirty, but nothing can be done for them at this time but listen to the squishing water under them when they are walked on.

All of our clothes are wet, except the single set we had in a dry-bag, but it seems of little use to wash and dry the rest yet when the locker they were stowed in will be cut apart when the fiberglass work begins, and there is no other dry place to put them yet. Our lodging is too far away to take them to in the meantime. We stuffed them all into plastic bags so the rest of the boat can dry out around them. If they mildew, their next stop is the laundromat anyway. Today was spent trying to empty filled storage containers of water to prohibit further rust on tools, and other small feel-good tasks.

We seemed to have lost our Dewalt drill, possibly overboard, since it was out on deck before we even grounded, trying to drill the pin out for the transmission level so we could cotter-pin a new one in place. It was out on deck, and since it was dark, it may have just been lost in the heeling-over during the night. Oh well. Other electronics are shot, as well, like the Dremel and multi-meter. Most of the stuff will dry and be fine, however. Everything else is going on the list for the insurance adjuster. I have no idea what will be covered at this time, however.

Still it seems a little surreal. I can't believe we sunk our boat. It seemed inevitable that a trip this size would have adventure of some kind, yet I was continually surprised that things could continue to escalate in the way they did. I always thought that if you sunk a boat, you must have hit something and sunk it, not hit something, waited 4 hours or so, then punctured the boat as it tipped onto a rock, then waited another few hours before you knew you punctured it, then sunk it by the water rising above you with the tide and not you "sinking" down into it. I hadn't realized how good it is to sink a boat by having the water rise above it until we were being towed over water hundreds of fathoms deep back to Shearwater and realized that if the borrowed pump quit during the trip, the boat would be unrecoverably sunk. At one point, from Grant's boat, I thought Insegrevious was getting lower and lower into the water. Grant, however, assured me it was because the Coasties were towing faster then the boat's hull speed and that was the reason it was lowering. We pulled up alongside it and I could see that it wasn't so bad after all. In fact, the Coasties said it would be a 4-hour tow, but once we hit open water they picked up speed (and worry) and kicked it up, so I'm sure we arrive in less than 3 hours.

Yet, there is much to be thankful for. Scott and I both kept our heads throughout, and stayed calm, and, with help, got things taken care of. He may say he didn't learn anything, but I learned lots and lots, and I think he probably did, too. And I don't feel too bad about it, either. Stuff like this happens. You don't know if it will happen in your first big trip out, or after 40 of trips, but it does happen. This time is was to us.

I was surprised today when he told David that we'd still make it to Alaska. His optimism sneaks up on me sometimes. At this point, I'd thought it would be a trip to central British Columbia. But if we can still make it to Alaska, well, then that's a good thing!

Oh, and I haven't mentioned yet that I've seen 5 Orca Whales. The first one scared the crap out of me. I was at the helm, under motor and auto-pilot, crossing Queen Charlotte Sound. I'd been watching for ever-present dead-heads, when suddenly there was one directly in front of me, about 50-60 feet directly in from of the bow. I ran to disengage the auto-pilot. We were in heavy swells, so everything was in sight, then out of sight again, but I couldn't spot the huge log I'd just seen until it resurfaced, and blew water straight up through her blow-hole, now about 30 yards so starboard. Scott was resting in the companionway when I shook him violently and scream-whispered, "A whale! A whale! A whale! To starboard!" He wasn't thrilled with the awakening I'd just given him. But I had fun watching the whale for another hour or so. We saw one more that day, then two the next day, then another the following day.

Very cool.