Month: July 2010

Posted on

All stern tied-up

Sailboat with stern tie in Prideaux Haven, Desolation Sound, BC
The ideal stern tie

So I mentioned previously that one of the koans my cruising Zen master, Sturt Bay, gave me was about stern-ties. Also called shore-ties, this common Pacific Northwest practice involves dropping one’s anchor in the desired water depth off-shore, then backing down on it toward the shoreline and running a second line to a convenient anchoring point on shore. Like the venerable Med-moor, this allows more boats to fit into limited space than would otherwise be possible. It is used to allow anchorage in tight spots otherwise unsuitable due to limited swinging space, such as notches, or along steep depth gradients where only a narrow shelf of anchoring depth is available very close to the shoreline. It is also, as I mentioned, simply the polite thing to do in popular anchorages. Many a tree along the Pacific Northwest shore has a groove in the bark from shore-tie lines (dead trees preferred; otherwise, you’ll inadvertently start contributing to the clear-cutting endemic to the region) and some particularly popular anchorages feature rings set along the walls for this purpose.

After my stern-tie fiasco in Sturt Bay, it became clear that we needed to work out some other method for setting things up in contrary winds. We’ve been running shore-ties for several years now but for whatever reason all our previous experiences had been in relatively benign conditions. So, faced with the new challenge, I put some thought into it and was ready when we got to Prideaux Haven in a nasty cross-wind. I would send Mandy ashore with the line while I jockeyed the helm and got the anchor set; I could back against it and keep enough slack in the line for her to loop around a tree and bring back.

In the event, this did not prove to be much easier, and required about forty-five minutes and several trips between ship and shore to accomplish. Prideaux Haven is a popular, usually crowded anchorage, but it wasn’t busy on this day and by the end of it I felt vaguely stupid for having gone through such exertions (although having no doubt served the admirable purpose of having entertained the rest of the anchorage for an extended period) to save space when there was swinging room available all over the cove.

So when we picked up and moved to Walsh Cove, another Provincial Marine Park slightly north of Prideaux Haven, I breathed a sigh of relief that it seemed relatively empty. I could pick a nice, empty patch near the middle, slop out a kingly 4:1 scope, and dangle in the winds to my heart’s content, inhibiting no one and saving vast amount of exertion and frustration.

That was around noon. By late afternoon, the place started to fill up. I thought anxiously about good citizenship and stern-ties, but I had set fairly deep, and the closest likely candidate was a small islet with nothing substantial growing on it to tie to. At that, it was further away than I could reach; our designated shore-tie line is about a quarter the recommended length (most people say 600′ is good). Still, that very position put us pretty well clear of where others might drop the hook… I thought.

It didn’t take long before someone came in and got a little too close. After fending off one another, they decided to set a stern-tie ashore, and I thought nothing more about it.

A couple hours later, the currents and wind got a little odd, and I heard an accented “Excuse me!” through our companionway, and it sounded like whoever said it was standing in the cockpit. I got up, and there were our neighbors again, with our stern swinging dangerously close to their anchor rode.

The rule may be that he who anchors first has the right of way, but I was already feeling like the stupid American, so when they offered to lend a hand getting the line ashore and finding a way to secure it, I jumped on the offer. I paid out enough rode to get our stern closer and the intrepid yachtsman from S/V Effervescence rowed the line in and found a piece of scrub sturdy enough to hold it. We were still too far out to loop it back again (which would allow us to take off without rowing ashore again to untie it) but although thoroughly embarrassed by my continued bad manners, I felt better with it out there.

“Everyone will sleep better this way,” one of the men from Effervescence called across in a strong Quebecois accent.

But, in fact, I had an unsettling dream that a small tugboat worked in behind me and cut the line during the night, sending us spinning around through the anchorage. So much for a good sleep! I was forced to stay an extra day, laying around napping, to recover from the ordeal. Such is the life of a sailor.

Posted on

Desolation Sound: Not so desolate

Desolate adj.
1. Devoid of inhabitants or visitors; deserted
2. Joyless, disconsolate, and sorrowful, through or as if through separation from a loved one
3. a. Showing the effects of abandonment or neglect b. Barren, lifeless c. Devoid of warmth, comfort, or hope

Mandy and I come to Desolation Sound to find, as previous generations have found, that it’s not desolate at all. As we rounded Sarah Point this afternoon in light winds and with the golden sun lighting up the waters beneath the distant green and white peaks, we were accompanied by motor and sail boats large and small. Astern of us, the Pacific Grace chugged along, looking out of place in a way she didn’t the last time we saw her. Dotting the expanse of the Sound itself and Homfray Channel beyond were numerous white triangles, darting back and forth in the rising afternoon winds. Devoid of visitors? I don’t think so.

It’s almost impossible to talk about Desolation Sound without noting the irony of the name and marveling at the stellar bad mood Vancouver must have been in when he so named it. “…not a single prospect that was pleasing to the eye”? Look closer, George! I’m not sure the appellation was such a terrible mistake as it is now seen, however. I watched the Grace cruising in under power and thought hard about the shifty winds we had experienced through the day, and the challenge of sailing our tiny, maneuverable sloop in them against tide and current and with unseen rocks all around, and I imagine the place was less idyllic for Vancouver in any number of ways than it is for the average cruiser today.

Representative of the difficulties is the lamentable tale of Dionosio Galiano and Cayetano Valdes, early Spanish explorers making their way through the area at the same time as Vancouver. Attempting to exit the very channel we were sailing into, poor combinations of wind, tides, and currents held them up for four days in a stretch that we took only hours to pass. If you want an idea what put Vancouver off his soup around here, just kill your engine for a while and see how you do in the narrow passages with, as the Spaniards put it, “…no regularity in the tides in these channels.” Paradise starts to look a little less keen when you tack for three hours only to find you are back where you started.

The last time we were here was early in the season and there were only a handful of other visitors. The weather, fortunately, was just as phenomenal as it is right now. Even now, there are more than enough anchorages, even sheltered, beautiful ones, to go around. I sit at the head of Refuge Cove as I write this, in a cozy, perfect anchorage (admittedly, one surrounded by docks and houses… that’s not a problem further into the Sound) around the corner from one of the busiest resupply stops in the area. We are the only boat anchored here; it’s quiet and serene.

Desolate, indeed.

Posted on

Sturt Bay Zen

I am starting to look on Sturt Bay, a smallish indentation toward the top end of Texada Island near the little mining town of Van Anda, as a sort of Zen master of boating. Every time I visit there, I think I am learning something, but the next time, it turns out the lesson wasn’t what I thought it was.

The first time I came to Sturt Bay, it was toward the end of a blustery day that had culminated in a tacking duel of sorts between ourselves and another sailboat bound for, as it turned out, the same tiny destination. That shouldn’t have been any surprise, because there are few places to duck out of the north end of Malaspina Strait for the night. Sturt Bay represents about seventy-five percent of those places.

The race wasn’t formal, and from the other boat’s perspective, probably didn’t even exist, but it’s a natural thing to start to measure your progress against others on the same path and I shouted gleefully when I saw them ‘give’ by turning into the wind and furling their sails well short of the destination. Our rails buried in foaming green water, we actually gained on them after they started motoring. My first Sturt Bay Zen lesson: sailboats are meant to sail. When it gets rough, you’re probably not gaining anything by dropping sail and relying on your engine. They had a rougher, slower ride on what already had to have been a difficult day.

When we actually ducked into the bay, I was doubly glad we had beat them there. Deep at the mouth, the available anchorage area for small craft toward the head is woefully tight, hemmed in by drying shoals on both sides, with relatively small shelves of solid mud holding ground around the periphery. On a windy day, when one is looking to put a lot of scope out, there may only be swinging room for a couple of boats. We were number one; the anchor was down and set by the time the other sailboat nosed in, and he shuffled around forlornly a bit before going in and tying up at the Texada Boat Club docks (also a fine choice; but not free).

I congratulated myself on ‘winning’ the race and picking up the prime anchoring spot, immensely self-satisfied. Only later did I realize what a jerk I had been. By setting a stern tie to shore, there would have been plenty of room for both of us and more boats besides, should they come in. I had rushed in, slopped out a lot of scope, and monopolized a precious anchorage in a storm. I imagine mariners have been hung for less.

Second Sturt Bay Zen lesson: don’t be a jerk, help other boats fit in.

So, this year, when I once again found myself entering Sturt Bay at the end of the day (thankfully in much more benign conditions) I was both gratified to find it almost empty again, and determined to do my part to keep it open for any later arrivals. And just as we were setting the hook toward the head of the cove, a powerboat came in behind us, the owner standing on the foredeck and looking around speculatively.

“I’ve never been in here before,” he yelled across.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m going to set a shore tie, you’ll have plenty of room to drop right there!”

Once the anchor was set I hauled out my stern tie line and put the raft over the side. I made the line fast to a stern cleat and started rowing for shore. I rowed. And rowed. And rowed. It wasn’t that far… but the wind, if not threatening, was still brisk enough to swing the stern of the boat out toward the center of the bay, and not in the direction I was hauling the line. Turning a big boat with a lot of windage broad on to the wind with oar power alone, I found, wasn’t all that easy. Maddeningly, I could pull it around and get within ten feet or so of shore just before the next gust came up to turn the boat back around, and force me to start rowing like mad again just to hold in place.

The power boater made a few runs at setting his own anchor and eventually gave up and headed for the Boat Club docks. I hope he was just unhappy with how he set and wasn’t fed up with waiting around for me. I gave up, eventually, and rowed myself and my spaghetti coil of line back to Insegrevious.

Third Sturt Bay Zen lesson: good intentions are meaningless without some abilities to back them up.

I have thought up a half-dozen ways I might have accomplished what I was planning on, if only I had thought about it and talked it through first with my wife. It’s hard to come up with and implement that stuff on the spur of the moment, though, particularly if you are not very experienced cruisers. If there’s anything else that Sturt Bay has taught me, it’s that we’re an awfully long way from that sort of Zen focus I can only admire in others.

We’re passing by there a couple more times on this trip, though. Who knows what I might learn?

Posted on

Pender Harbour, same as ever

Seals sunning themselves
Seals sunning themselves at the entrance to Pender Harbour

We haven’t been through Pender Harbour in a couple of years, but it is pretty much the same as we remember it… beautiful homes lining the snaking bays and inlets, lovely little parks and patches of otherwise inaccessible terrain rendered unbuildable to prevent the place from feeling overcrowded and urbanized. The same seals sunning themselves at the entrance light, the SloCat harbour ferry still putters (slowly; as advertised) through a diverse forest of anchored cruising boats, and the same little derelict red runabout twists gingerly about its mooring off the Seattle Yacht Club outstation docks.

Last time was the early season and we had thought then that Garden Bay, the favoured anchorage, was the most crowded place we had ever seen. We hadn’t seen anything, yet. Now, at the height of the season, there are ten times as many boats in here, resting amicably in a tranquil pond on 2:1 or 3:1 scopes.

We also inadvertently contrived to arrive on a Friday, just like all the boats out of Vancouver or Nanaimo heading to Desolation for a long weekend, so that even after we anchored in the early afternoon, more and more arrived, eventually spilling out of Garden Bay into the rest of the Harbour area. Nonetheless, it has been a quiet anchorage. No generators have fired up for the morning shave, and even those heading out for an early start have raised anchor softly and with reverence, so that you hardly notice they’ve left until the small wake slaps at the hull.

It turns out that my hesitancy to depart Nanaimo was mostly rooted in laying at the dock. We decided to make our last day ashore an easy one, sleeping as late as we wanted, taking care of a last few errands at our own pace, fueling and pumping out after the early rush. To catch a favorable current north, we would anchor another night in Mark Bay and head out early the next day.

Once we were at anchor, I was raring to go. The forecast hadn’t changed, nor our itinerary. Free of the easy access to amenities, shorepower, and unlimited water, I suddenly found myself back in a cruising mindset and was eager to move on.

So it didn’t take much to get me out of bed at five in the morning and motoring north through the wind-swept Newcastle Channel. We dodged a departing BC ferry in Departure Bay, spun up into the lee of Jesse Island to raise the mainsail, and pushed out into the heaving swells of the Strait of Georgia (in accordance with the ubiquitous forecasts of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Continuous Marine Broadcast, I always find myself thinking of it as “Strait of Georgia – North of Nanaimo”).

We went out behind a forty-something foot ketch and ahead of a powerboat of similar length; both turned back within a mile. The waves, three footers, were short and sharp, and we were taking water over the bow immediately. The wind blasted down out of the northwest and put us on our ear. For a rough twenty minutes, I thought hard about turning back as well, but decided to trust the forecast and the latest reports from mid-channel, which seemed to indicate the wind would abate and the waves flatten if we could just get that far. I eased the traveler to leeward, reefed in the jib, and got used to the spray in my face. And the wind did abate, and the waves did flatten, and as we pushed south of Texada Island into Malaspina Strait, it turned into a nice day for sailling.

Off the Thormanby Islands, it got a little too nice. We lost our current, the wind dropped to a whisper, and we decided to motor up to Pender Harbour instead of putting in at picturesque, but tiny, Secret Cove nearby.

So here we sit, enjoying our coffee and the sunshine and tranquility of another day on the Sunshine Coast. Here we will probably sit for another day, both to enjoy the scenery, to take ourselves out of the pack of boats heading north for the weekend, and to make some hopefully minor engine repairs (while we are still within a day’s sailing of the yards in Nanaimo and Vancouver). It’s just Pender Harbour, same as ever, as if we had never left.

Posted on

The end of the road is the beginning

The last bastion of civilization can be any number of places depending on where you are heading and what your standards for civilization are. At various times in the past, I’ve felt like my last touch with civilized society before a departure to wander in the wilderness has been at Campbell River, at Port McNeill, at Port Hardy. This year, Nanaimo feels like the end of the well-trod path to me, the last place with tall buildings and well-stocked groceries before we head further north.

The feeling is always a little overly dramatic… “further north” for us this year isn’t very far at all, and it’s likely to be jammed with other sailors and the various seasonal purveyors of goods to those same sailors. Still, I can’t help but to get a tight feeling in the pit of my stomach as I contemplate departure, wondering if I have bought everything here at the last place it may be bought, if I’ve taken care of all those things that can only be taken care of here.

Theatrical as those thoughts may be, Nanaimo itself is doing nothing at the moment to dissuade them. It’s sunny, warm, charming, and the northwesterly, as it has ever done when we have been here, is blowing like stink and raising hairy four foot chop out on the Strait. No set of circumstances could be imagined which could signal more strongly to the hesitant traveller “Stay there! Don’t go out! Spend another day!”

We’re tied up at the outer float of the Nanaimo Yacht Club, a location which has not served to encourage any thoughts of departure. The club staff and members are friendly, the rates are good, and the location ideal. This is the first time we’ve moored here; it seems to be a popular destination and with good reason. The crowded and claustrophobic Port of Nanaimo floats give me hives when the wind is up, which it always seems to be. NYC is less busy and easier to navigate, even considering the constant stream of traffic through the adjacent Newcastle Channel.

So we’re standing on the edge of a precipice of a sort, with a comfortable couch, good food, and great entertainment right behind us, and it’s difficult to take the leap. Countering that, I am quite looking forward to getting up into Desolation Sound at the north end of the Strait of Georgia. I spoke with a lady today just coming back from there and she couldn’t have painted a more attractive picture… beautiful weather, warm water, grand sights. I’m just not looking forward to what it is going to take to get there, though. It’s only about two days, but both of them are out on the aforementioned, exposed, lumpy Strait of Georgia.

That’s strange, because normally I don’t have much hesitation at setting out into exposed waters (or if I do, I guess I must not remember it). You have to respect the Straits, pick your moment, but apart from that, it’s actually sort of fun to get out onto all that open water. The winds are steady and the course clear, just what every sailor dreams of.

But Nanaimo, the end of one road and the beginning of the next, is holding me back. Looking out across at Mark Bay off the lovely and relaxing park of Newcastle Island, I can imagine drifting over, dropping the hook, and spending my whole summer there. I could even spring for the little Honda outboard advertised up at the head of the dock, ease my commute back and forth for ice and sundries. It’s hard, at this moment, to imagine anything half so desirable or convenient up in Desolation Sound. So we’ll have to see if my wife can force me to actually budge when it’s time to pull out of here tomorrow morning.

Posted on

A sad night in Ganges

Sadness permeates the boat here at anchor in Ganges, even as the rollicking background noise of a hundred happy fellow vacationers drifts in the open hatches. Four people are dead, though not here. Only one we knew, and we knew his passing might be soon, but the other three have added to the already oppressive weight, and even an afternoon ashore and our first ice cream in a week hasn’t been enough to lift it.

The one we knew, an uncle, my stepfather’s twin brother, had been long in coming… a good man, superficially cheerful, good at his job, fond of pets, he’d been drinking himself into the grave for years, and the end, when it came, was mercifully short. It came the day after our departure, but it was left for the police to find him later, alone in his home, the way he must have wanted it. We didn’t find out until I opened an e-mail today, our first touch with the outside world since we left.

The others happened the same day, and we had an inkling of those at least, but again did not know for sure until just now, a story we saw right here on Three Sheets.

We’ve listened in our more than our fair share of aircraft crashes over the radio, but this is the first that resulted in any fatalities, and it was something of a fluke we heard it at all. The crash happened off the Washington coast, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. As fate would have it, however, it happened near a place called James Island, and we were very near James Island in the San Juans at the time, and someone, possibly a Coast Guard watch officer or a boater with a freak skip reception on the VHF, confused the two and sent boaters from around the region toward a position “north of James Island” in search of a downed chopper, with two persons in the water and unaccounted for.

Over the course of the next hour, according to my log, the confusion was straightened out, and eventually Sector Seattle reported that all persons had been recovered. We knew, however, that “recovered” was an intentionally indistinct term… no one wants to say “corpse” over the radio. So we were at least prepared to find out that the story hadn’t had a happy ending. The third fatality, and the sole survivor, were surprises, but the balance of all the news we had today was bad.

That’s a risk you run when you are out doing this sort of thing. When you touch base with civilization only occasionally, you tend to find out a lot of things at once, and it’s not always pleasant. Two years ago, we returned from a trip up the Inside Passage to find my grandfather gravely ill. He passed away the day after we got back to Seattle. For whatever reason, fate, luck, what have you, I left town for Spokane, where he lay in a nursing home, almost as soon as I found out. I got to see him only hours before he passed away. It brought home the nature of being out of touch in a society that has a broad and unsurprising expectation of easy communication. A hundred years ago, no one would bat an eye at a relative passing away in a town a hundred miles distant and not learning about it for weeks or months. I imagine when people took leave of one another, it was a more portentous event than it is today… there were pretty fair odds you might never see someone again if they were in even moderately poor health.

When we pull out on the boat, we don’t think of it as being tremendously different than when we head off to another town in a car. It’s just another temporary goodbye from friends and family, a “see ya’ around” rather than an emotional leave-taking. But it really is considerably more significant than we have ever treated it. I can’t recall the last time I talked to my uncle. And as the downed helicopter sadly illustrates, accidents on or over the water are unforgiving.

There’s little to be done about any of this. We don’t believe in trading the certainty of a cell phone signal for seeing and doing the things that we enjoy while out sailing. And anyway, much of that certainty is illusory. But no matter, it’s still a sad and quiet boat here tonight in Ganges.

Clark Graebel
Lt. Sean Krueger
AMT 1C Adam Hoke
AMT 2C Brett Banks

Rest In Peace

Posted on

Opening night jitters

As I was standing around on the torn-apart back deck of his antique wooden tugboat chatting with the man who put my cat to sleep, as one does, he mentioned casually that his daughter was flying back soon from Paris. With vacations on the mind, as we were just beginning our own, I expressed admiration and approbation for her trip, but no, he said, it had been a business trip; she, an opera singer, had been performing with Leslie Caron (in A Little Night Music, I presume), but the gig was over and it was time to fly home. She’d been invited back, he said proudly, to do another show next year. It developed that she flies all over the world to perform, providing a convenient excuse for her parents to follow and see her, and the exotic locales, themselves. As if cruising around the Pacific coast on an old wooden tug weren’t enough.

As far as she travels and as often as she performs, I imagine she still gets opening night jitters, and that’s something I can relate to in an otherwise unrelatable experience. I’ve had opening night jitters for the last three days as we have beat our way northward through the San Juans and Gulf Islands.

The sailing has been fine, excellent even; just as last year, sunshine seems to be triggered by our departure from the Puget Sound region, and it’s provided the perfect counter-balance to the chilly but moderate northerly breezes we’ve had, enough to account for short-sleeves at the helm all day long. Beating past the Adventuress as she makes sail, drifting softly up San Juan Channel as vics of geese pass overhead… these are the memories that Pacific Northwest sailing are built on.

But while the sailing has all come naturally and without any great effort, the anchoring has been something else entirely. I suppose it’s only to be expected; I’ve been sailing pretty regularly this year, since February, and in sometimes challenging conditions that keep the skills familiar. Until last night, though, I hadn’t let go the anchor in nearly a year, and it’s taking some effort to get through the jitters.

Mind you, the conditions have been pretty close to ideal… we’ve been in well-charted anchorages with firm and proven holding, the waters are sheltered, the winds have been calm. Other than what can only be called a normal level of summer-time congestion with other tenants, it just doesn’t get any better for putting down the hook.

But in my mind, I can’t seem to place it where I want it, and when I do, I’m not satisfied with the set, and when I am, the scope is wrong, and we’re too close to another boat, or a rock, or shore, or some other unspecified obstruction. I can only peer around nervously, certain that everyone else is staring at my ineptitude, worried that someone nearby is going to yell out those dreaded words, “Hey! You’re way too close here!” And I’ll have to pull it up by hand, since we don’t have a winch, and go through the whole routine again, probably with just as unfavorable results.

None of this, of course, has actually happened, and objectively I doubt that anyone bats an eye at my antics… only half the other craft that come in even bother to back down on their ground tackle, and while my scope might seem embarrassingly generous by Pacific Northwest standards, the swinging room left between boats has been just about average for these anchorages. It’s mostly in my own jittery, over-cautious mind that these factors all measure up to varying levels of deficiency. And in a few days, with a few more anchorages behind me and no particular traumas to point to from them, I’ll probably be dropping and picking up the hook with as little conscious thought as I ever have. Anchoring is more art than science, every boat is a bit different, and every situation has a number of factors that are assessed as much on a subconscious as conscious level. So it can be expected that it might take a while to get in the flow of it all again.

Still, I doubt I will sleep well tonight, and if the wind picks up I’ll have my head out the hatch every ten minutes, anxiously comparing positions. Another part of my conversation with the tugboat owner will no doubt come back to me in that moment; as we stood there on the deck with the cladding planks torn up, he pointed down next to a worn oval, nearly an inch deep, in the original planking of the turn-of-the-century tug. “That’s where the controls for the winch were,” he said, and I thought with awe on the generations of workers that must have stood there to wear that groove in the solid decking, working the controls as they eased some great vessel in or out of its berth, or took up barges in haul. When I think about in now, though, what I think is, “Boy, I wish I had a winch.”

Image courtesy Tim Zim, licensed under Creative Commons.

Posted on

The anxiety of joy

There seems to be a tipping point before any significant or lengthy sailing trip we make, a point before which I go to bed eager each night for the next day to pass, happy to be that much closer to the date of departure and looking forward to leaving everything behind in favor of brisk winds and full sails. After that undefinable but certain point passes, though, I wake each morning with trepidation, wondering if it is really one day closer to that dreadful hour we must leave, and whether or not it might be possible to indefinitely delay our departure instead so that I might have time to deal with all the lists of tasks I have compiled during those earlier, happier periods.

That point has arrived.

When Marty posted prior to a recent trip regarding his anxiety at the beginning of voyages, it immediately resonated with me (in fact, you can read the comments on his post for my own early-trip horror story) because I often find myself nervous before heading out on major trips as well. It’s a little odd, because there’s really no more likelihood of something going wrong than if you were just heading out for a day sail. I suppose the impact may be greater, but it still seems a little silly. And it’s not like life stops just because you leave port. All that stuff that needs to be done will probably still get done. With some minor handicaps, I can work through most of the next three months just as if I were here in the slip at “home.” The boat, after all, has all the same stuff aboard no matter where we are, and it’s not as if Canada or the North Sound is an isolated backwater without chain stores and high-speed Internet access.

I know, intellectually, that whether things go wrong or not after we leave, I will still have a feeling of freedom and exhilaration once we are actually gone. It may take a couple of days for the residual tension to leak out, but I get over the anticipation of difficulties and start enjoying myself, at some level, eventually.

Just not today.

The usual pre-trip anxieties have been exacerbated by a series of difficulties in executing a sublet agreement for our slip while we are away. We like to lease the slip out while we are gone not just to cover the moorage fees, but also because it serves as a sort of burning the boats incentive to both leave on time and stay gone as long as planned. With the slip just sitting here, we might be tempted to cut things short and duck back if the weather gets nasty or work piles up or something else calls us home. Or, with all those lists of things to do, we might just sit there, working madly, never getting around to going out and enjoying ourselves. With another boat sitting in our slip, the temptation, and possibility, is squashed.

In the past when we’ve done this it’s taken one phone call, a short meeting to complete the paperwork for the port, get a check, and hand over the key fob. This time around, the first candidate only wanted to lease the slip for part of the time available. That would have left us a little short on cash, so I went with the second guy who called, who turned out to be out of state. That resulted in enough hoops to jump through that I found myself wishing I had called it off and gone with guys three, four, five, or six who called instead, and has delayed our departure even further, but at last it’s all over with and we’re free to leave. Friday afternoon of the Fourth of July weekend. In the rain. With everyone else.

So we’re not actually going very far, just down a few docks, where we’ll wait for the weather and crowds to clear, as is predicted for next week. Then, under clearer skies and sunshine, my anxiety should turn to joy and the clean exhilaration of sailing uncrowded seas will replace the clouded apprehension in my mind.

Posted on

The Joys of a Dry Boat

Damp is a constant condition for most boats, or at least a condition that owners constantly must fight with in order to maintain a dry and pleasant aspect aboard their vessel. Everything, understandably, is stacked against a boat being dry (and I don’t mean dry in the alcoholic sense; indeed, the wetter your boat is with water, the wetter you are likely to want it with booze) from being immersed in saltwater to being surrounded by the humid air just above it. Here in Seattle, there’s also the rain, a factor that provides insidious infiltration from areas which might not otherwise be suspect.

Insegrevious used to be a dry boat, despite our rather amateurish (in retrospect) efforts to keep her that way. The bilge stayed bone dry, leaks seemed rare, and it never took more than a decent afternoon with the hatches open to air her out. Rust was rare, mildew nonexistent. It was a rather deceptive introduction to life aboard, in other words.

For the last three years, that airy state of grace has been suspended as we have fought condensation and a variety of minor, but hidden leaks above and below the waterline. I have good reason to believe, however, that we’re well on our way to drying Insegrevious out completely again as our leaky muffler has finally been dragged out and patched this week.

One of the obstacles to drying out most boats is simply that it can be wicked difficult to see where the water is coming from in the first place. This is particularly the case when there are multiple sources involved, because anything you do to identify or narrow them down quickly runs afoul of one of the other problems… or worse, one that may be easily found may be masking others that are less so.

In our case, we knew we had a leak at the rudder shaft, and re-packing it seemed the best solution. The jury is still out on the efficacy of that job, but I also noticed that we seemed to be taking on more water when under power than when under sail. I could see it running forward near the prop shaft (itself which, since I could see it, and see no water coming in there, was a likely suspect early eliminated). It’s true that the hull squats more in the water, increasing the pressure and therefore the leak rate, the faster we go, but the amount of squat for 5 knots under power is the same as 5 knots under sail, more or less, so that left something to do with the engine itself. The least visible part of the cooling system was the muffler, which is located right about where the water was coming from, so that was my prime suspect.

Welded seam on boat muffler
Ghetto Welding job

Pulling it was easier than I expected (disturbingly so… almost nothing is holding it in place): my friend Maxx and I undid the hose clamps fastening it to the exhaust mixing elbow on the engine and hauled it out by the exhaust hose leading to the transom. Sure enough, there was a hole. Unfortunately, it was in the seam between the body and the end. Knowing that neither a new muffler nor an expensive repair job were in the budget for this summer, I had prepared to limp along using some muffler repair tape, but it wasn’t going to work on an edge.

Fortunately, Maxx has a wire-feed welder, and even more fortunately, it was right up the road at our friend Torrey’s garage. A quick trip, four or five tries, and the muffler was holding water again. A fresh coat of engine paint to help keep the corrosion at bay, and hopefully we’ll be good for the summer at least.

Muffler in place beneath fuel tank
The muffler, freshly painted and in its proper home

Tucking it back in place was only slightly more difficult than pulling it out. A full test of the weld and our re-clamping is waiting on the compartment drying out, so we can tell if any additional water is being introduced. With the weather as it’s been, nothing is drying out too fast. But it will eventually, and then it’s on to the next leak, on our eternal quest for a dry boat.