Month: December 2009

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Christmas travel as sailing analog

So I’ve been missing sailing in between being busy and not having the weather for it, and with Christmas now intruding on our time (yes, yes, I’m a veritable Scrooge, I know) I didn’t figure we’d be getting in any sea time for a couple of months.  But it turns out that the Christmas travel season may well prove to be a good stand-in for a good, brisk winter sail.

Our destination this year was Phoenix, where the family had agreed during balmier days earlier in the year to gather at my sister’s place to celebrate the holidays.  It seemed like a good idea at the time; after a few months of drizzly, miserable Pacific Northwest fall and winter, the perpetual sunshine of central Arizona seemed a soothing balm, even if palm trees aren’t exactly a substitute for a nice, plump Douglas Fir in the living room.  It turns out, however, that Phoenix is gripped in a wet, frigid winter of its own, and the lows here have been lower than those in Seattle, even though Seattle itself is unseasonably cold.  It turns out the combination of cold and the deprivations of holiday travel are a lot like off-season sailing.

It started with the flight down.  The unpredictability of arrival times is a staple of the sailing life, dependent as we are on wind and tide.  Airplanes generally do better, but this time out, we found ourselves spending an extra hour in the air, courtesy of a nasty thunderstorm parked over Sky Harbor just around the time we were supposed to be landing.  Even better, we spent the time orbiting the periphery of the storm, with lightning flashing out the windows, rain spattering the windows, and Mandy slowly turning green beside me as the plane bounced around in the unsettled air.  I started getting flashbacks… it was just like crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca!

She managed to keep her lunch down, but the misery was eerily similar to certain sailing experiences we have had.  Maybe the whole sailing experience need not actually involve sailing!  This was an exciting thought, though I admit I had difficulty concentrating while trying to pry her fingernails out of my arm after touchdown.  After all, the better parts of sailing are frequently when the actual sailing bit is finished.  Basking about the anchorage in the sunshine, drinking wine at sunset in the cockpit… or even just drifting once the wind dies in the vast, scenic spaces.  These are usually the foundations of our fondest memories, and the idea that one might build upon them without the actual strain and penury of boat ownership was a novel concept to contemplate.

The possibilities were further impressed upon me when I went to shave the first morning after our arrival.  As is often the case aboard, where shaving is a less-than-frequent occurrence, it developed that I had forgotten to pack any shaving cream.  And so, just as if I were aboard Insegrevious, I was forced to improvise a lather out of what soap happened to be available.  In this particular case, it was my grandmother’s “Berry Breeze” hand soap, which filled the role admirably, although I smelled faintly of strawberries for the rest of the day.

Navigation, too, has been a replicable challenge.  Though the signage is somewhat better, the vast, open desert proves as constant as the waves on the ocean, undulating slopes of cactus receding into the distance in every direction, with no particular clues as to which way is north.  And if you do figure out what direction you need to head in order to reach your destination, you are thwarted instantly by the oppressive Phoenix traffic, just as the Sunday exodus of cruise liners and cargo ships parading up Puget Sound can force one into undesirable tacks for extended periods.

Have I found the perfect replacement for cold, expensive, off-season sailing?  Well, probably not.  For one thing, the sun came out today and it almost hit sixty degrees.  That’s just too warm… I nearly broke a sweat.  For another, it’s not nearly expensive enough.  Airline tickets just can’t compete with shredded sails and shorted-out marine electronics.  Still, it may be something I have to experiment with for a few years to rule out entirely.  You can’t just form a solid opinion in one trip.  Maybe Arizona in the winter isn’t a bad replacement for Puget Sound cruising!

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Ships of Lights

I am constantly amazed at the energy and industry exhibited by fellow boaters at our marina.  The forest of lighted masts and stays that have sprung up around the docks are a testament to boaters braving the frigid temperatures (ice in the slips!  that’s two years in a row, bring on the global warming already!) in the last couple of weeks to string them up.  And as if that weren’t enough, scads of them have been out on the water with their colorful decks, spreading Christmas cheer around the city and sound with lights and music.

The Argosy Christmas Ship was hovering around out off the Ballard Blinker last night as I was heading down into the marina, which distantly reminded me that last night was the night the informal parade was happening off Golden Gardens and going through the Ballard Locks.  I had halfway planned to hustle out, weather be damned, to try to recover some of my flagging Christmas spirit, but back in the warm, dry cabin, I quickly passed out on a settee.  I woke up blearily at some point to the strains of some jingly sort of holiday music, but by then I was just dead tired and quickly went back to sleep.

My own yacht club even got in on the act, taking a group of developmentally disabled folks out as part of the Seafair Special People’s Holiday Cruise a couple weeks ago.  The Ohana, incidentally, the boat used for the cruise, is a beauty, even if you’re not typically into motor yachts.  Even more amazing, the owners on occasion manage to get their three very active golden retrievers all aboard and out cruising all at the same time without anyone going overboard.

All this industry seems all the more amazing compared to my own treadmill-like existence at the moment.  The holidays are always hard, but this year seems colder, wetter, and more difficult than ever, and it’s been hard enough just to keep up, let alone make forward progress.  Boat projects seems even harder in the winter; harder yet when your tools are scattered between the boat and a place two hours and a ferry ride away.  Of course, nothing is to hand when it’s needed, and everything on my list, from the large (painting the hull) to the small (changing the oil) has been thwarted in some respect over the past few weeks.  With Christmas travel plans coming up, none of it is likely to get done until January, and it’s all just hanging out there and hovering over me until then.

So the cheery lights as I come in to the marina are a welcome sight, and those folks who have taken the time and trouble to get them up deserve a hearty Merry Christmas from me.

Merry Christmas!

Photo courtesy Shutterbug Photos under Creative Commons 2.0 license
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No Room at the Inn

I think I might have mentioned here before that Mandy and I have, through what luck I do not know, tickets to the Vancouver Winter Olympics coming up here in only a couple of months.  Specifically, we’re going to the luge, an event to which neither of us have any particular connection, and which doesn’t present itself as an ideal spectator sport, considering that the sleds and their riders pass through a very limited field of view on the track at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour.  But I’ve always like watching the luge events and the bids were correspondingly low for the tickets, so that’s what we got, and the point isn’t really so much the event itself as, hey, we’re going to the Olympics!

As anyone else with tickets, or ticket aspirations, already knows, getting the tickets is the smaller part of the battle to attend the games.  The larger part is accomodations.  Vancouver will be filled to the point of bursting with athletes, officials, spectators, and their families.

If you didn’t already know you were going, if you are among those who only got your tickets in the most recent lottery and have been beaten to the punch by everyone who got lucky a little bit earlier, you have a real challenge working out some place to stay at this point (disclaimer: I am not one of those people; we found out that we got our tickets months ago and I have only my own procrastination to blame and deserve no sympathy in this matter).  This is the case even before you might try to take minor details such as budgets and travel dates into account… places to stay are just hard to find up there this February.

I knew that this would be the case, of course, as it has been at nearly every modern Olympic games, but I also figured we had an ace up our sleeve: accomodations that float.  Vancouver has vast amounts of waterfront loaded with marinas and at least one pretty decent anchorage right in the middle of town.  And how many other ticket-holders also happen to have boats?

Not that many, it seems, but enough to make things troublesome, perhaps.

Finding a reasonable slip at a marina is our first choice.  We only plan to be in town about four or five days, making it a pretty affordable option if we can find an opening, even with inflated rates.  We’ve had some oddly schizophrenic responses to our inquiries of availability, however.  Some marinas we call cluck mildly, as if they are bored by silly, slow Americans calling so late in the day and tell us they have been booked up for months… don’t we know the Olympics are on, eh?  Others don’t seem to realize the games are happening at all… it’s business as usual, the off-season, and regulars are probably going to be in their slips, there’s probably no room but leave your number and they’ll get back to you.  We have a couple of vague, “Yeah, we think we have something open, let me call you back” answers hanging out there, but no one has actually called back.  I can’t figure out if they are in the second group and don’t care about the money to be made, or if they are in the first, and don’t want to waste time on anyone not booking up for the full two weeks.

Because there is that second group, I still have some hopes of getting a slip, but I’m focusing more now on Plan B, anchoring out.  Here, however, there is also some uncertainty.  False Creek, the primary anchorage in downtown Vancouver, nicely protected and at the center of the city, also happens to be hosting on its shores the Olympic Village, where the athletes will stay.  Needless to say, in the wake of Munich and Atlanta, this creates a security concern, and the latest word is that the Creek will be blocked off at the Cambie Street Bridge to all vessel traffic.  That still leaves quite a lot of usable anchorage, but not the copious amounts I had recalled from prior visits.  Also, the security situation there leaves the question of whether all traffic or anchorage may be prohibited as of some later date up in the air.

All this uncertainty has left me scheming and coming up with alternatives to such extent that I am now fully capable of getting down as far as “Plan F” without scratching uncomfortably for risky or unlikely alternatives.  Still, I’m holding out some hope for Plans A (a slip in False Creek), B (anchoring in False Creek), or D (a slip in North Vancouver).  Don’t ask what happened to Plan C.

While this degree of confusion over the final plans would normally leave me something of a nervous wreck, I am actually having a little fun this time around.  It has forced me to look harder and see that there really are a lot of options.  Having to work through them and consider how we can still get to our event and have a berth to sleep in the same night is giving me additional confidence that the whole trip is going to be exciting and memorable.

Of course, it could get a little too exciting; we have two notoriously rough straits to cross at a dodgy time of year.  But I trust too that I have built enough time into our plans to make the crossings during what weather windows may be available.  Even if not, if we somehow get stuck in the Gulf Islands somewhere, if it’s cold and blowing crazy, at least we’ll have tried it… and anyway, I can probably scalp the tickets for twice what I paid for them!

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Better Laid Plans

One of the things I hope that I am increasingly getting used to is the need for the prudent mariner to occasionally make dramatic and substantial deviations from plans in order to accomodate changing conditions or reduce unforeseen risk.  This is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the need to run calculated risks, which also seems to be part and parcel to the seagoing lifestyle.  Some of the recent news coming out with respect to the decisions made by Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama in light of warnings given to avoid the Somali coast by a wider margin just prior to the attack in which he was taken hostage highlight this aspect; crew blame him for avoiding the one and a half day detour, while other captains point out the trade-off between the detour and time and fuel costs.  There is probably some rational, unemotional, economic “right” answer to what should have been done there but it was clearly a calculated risk.

The thing about calculated risks, as that incident aptly illustrates, is that sometimes the risk bites you.  It seems to me that the trick is to keep calculating along the way, and to realize when the equation changes so that the risk you thought was reasonable becomes unreasonable, you can change course.  Sometimes it’s a big course change.  Such is our need with the mass of Arctic air moving into the region here colliding with our scheduled haul-out next week.

With everyone’s favorite northwest weather guru, Cliff Mass, predicting dire cold (particularly along the Strait of Juan de Fuca), we are throwing in the towel on the hull-painting haul-out we had scheduled for this week.  Rain we had planned for, seasonal cold we could deal with, but the cold snap that is coming down is just going to be too much.  The calculated risks have changed.  With the average lows this time of year bumping along at a mild 40 degrees, we figured we could tarp up and keep the hull warm enough for the paint to dry, but with forecasts looking at mid-twenties overnight, and winds that promise to take a basic tarp-tent and shred it, we don’t foresee being able to rig anything that will allow us to paint and get back in the water in the time frame we had planned.

The forecast isn’t entirely out of the blue but I’ve held my course maybe a bit longer than I should have.  When you get amped up and prepared for a big project, when you are feeling prepared and in control, it’s not easy to accept that conditions have changed, and you find that you want to roll the dice… hope for milder temperatures, imagine that you can rig a solution at the last moment.  It’s easier, psychologically, to amend your best laid plans than to throw them all away.

But the risk versus reward doesn’t always pencil out once you lay the psychology aside.  I have all the paint and materials ready, and they aren’t going anywhere… the money in those is invested, so to speak, and assuming I use them wisely it’s not a waste.  But the instant the hoist starts going with the straps beneath the hull, I’ve also accrued the haul and yard costs.  Those are only worthwhile if we can actually get the work done.  If it doesn’t get done, we can still save the paint, but we have to pay for another haul-out again in the spring.  If we actually try to paint and it turns into gelled muck on the hull, then not only do we have to pay for another haul-out, but for more materials.  In short, the costs are high.  Even a moderate chance of failure probably isn’t worth taking.

Of course, this isn’t one of those situations where life and limb are at risk; the dangers, such as they are, are entirely economic.  But for exactly that reason it’s an easier case study than the more emotional situations mariners not infrequently find themselves in where they must weigh risk against reward.  It’s instructive to me that I am feeling the same pressures with this as I sometimes do when deciding to make or abort a passage… an instinct to just get it over with, a feeling that putting it off is shirking, a hope that maybe the weather won’t be so bad after all.  But just as with those passage-making decisions, none of those feelings really count… they’re just feelings.  There is no real need to get it over with, there isn’t any duty being avoided, the weather will do what it wants regardless of our hopes or fears.  Objectively, the numbers look better if we wait.

So wait we probably will.  And I hope what I take away from it is a more dispassionate approach to other sailing decisions, an awareness that sometimes, the best laid plans must change.

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Baby, it’s cold outside

And getting colder yet, just in time for our scheduled haul-out next week.  The good news is the sunshine; it’s going to be dry enough for painting.  The bad news is the cold; the paint we are planning on applying has a minimum ambient application temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit.  The forecast, admittedly long-range at this point, calls for highs around 38 degrees.

There were always risks with scheduling a haul-out at this time of year, and temperature was one of them.  Partly for that reason, I scheduled an extra lay-day this time around, figuring that if it were raining, I would have better odds of a dry window, or if it were cold, I could still get in two coats even with a 12-hour dry time.  But that was always counting on our typical cloud blanket keeping things over the freezing mark for relatively long stretches of time.  Now, I’m scrambling to come up with alternatives if the forecast happens to be correct.  A few tarps, a generator, some bright work lights, maybe a space heater… it could work!

As with all things weather-related in the Pacific Northwest, in the end we’ll just have to wait and see.  It could still pour rain; or, we could plunge well below freezing for days at a time.  One catastrophe I actually find myself getting excited about, though, is the tantalizing and frightening prospect of snow. We’re supposed to have a relatively warm and mild El Nino year here I am told, with little chance for the massive snowstorms we experienced last year.  But as I look at the two week forecast, I see the telltale flakes prominently displayed around the middle of next week.  Maybe it’s a little perverse considering that this is a trip where I am actually trying to get things done, and spending money in that pursuit which may be wasted if the weather turns south, but there are few enough sailors around here who get the experience of sailing in the snow.  I’m sort of hoping to be one of them!

Don’t tell my crew!