Month: January 2012

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Things they never told you (winter edition)

Every boater knows that there is a list, a long list, of things they never told you before you bought your boat. It’s like a secret handshake in the nautical world, the unrevealed mysteries of holding tank plumbing, the 0300 anchor checks, the bumps in the night when someone else fails to make their 0300 anchor check… sure, you’ve read articles like this, maybe you even laughed a little bit, but you never really thought it was going to happen to you on your boat, or if it did, it wasn’t going to be as bad as it sounded.

Well, most of those things are pretty universal experiences, and you can have them anywhere from Port Hardy to the Yucatan, and if you mention them in the company of sailors you will get a chorus of nods and a healthy raft of “That’s nothing! One time, I…” replies. But it turns out there is a whole other subset of things they never told us that are exclusively cold-weather related! That’s boating in a nutshell, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve seen it all….

New on our list for winter:

– Winter storm forecasts made with the benefit of the expensive new coastal radar are no better than the summer ones made without it

Snow piled up and shoved aside by the sliding companionway hatch on a sailboat
Sliding Hatch

– Snow piled up on deck in front of your sliding hatch will make it difficult to open. Snow, topped by a glaze of frozen rain, will weld you inside your boat like you’ve been sealed up in a space ship about to be shot off on a six month voyage to Mars

– The drip-lip inside your deck-accessible anchor locker that tends to accumulate water in the summer will freeze that hatch shut in a solid block of ice when it snows. If your water tank fill happens to be located in the anchor locker, you will run out of water at just this time

– That doesn’t matter, because the faucet at your slip will be frozen anyway and you’ll have to hike up to the restrooms to fill up your spare water jugs

– Hatches with ice and snow layered atop them shed condensation at approximately 300 times their normal winter rate

A fender with ice encrusted on it and snow atop it alongside a sailboat
Frozen Fender

– Frozen, ice-encrusted fenders banging against the hull in a windstorm are every bit as annoying as squeaky fenders are in the summer

– Marina access streets are not high on the city’s “to be plowed/sanded” list

– Dock carts do not come in an “all wheel drive” version

– Ice in the rigging really does increase the roll period of the boat so that a 20 knot breeze at your slip feels like crossing the Strait on a bad day

– All that long expanse of dock you appreciated in the summer because it kept you away from the hustle and bustle near the ramp has become an impassable wasteland of treacherous ice, snow drifts, and frozen heron crap

– Despite all this, when you finally reach the head of the dock, you will feel like Roald Amundsen and your sense of triumph will outweigh all the hardships

Icecicles on a power box while looking past it down a long, snow-covered dock
I think I can see the Pole down there
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Treading Water

The 50-knot wake-up howl in the rigging this morning was an apt reminder that this is always a hard time of year to be a boater. Coming on the heels of all the snow and freezing rain of the past week and the promise of only rain and wind (and possibly more snow) to come in the forecast, it’s a stark reminder that the distractions of the holidays have passed and it’s still a long, long stretch until cruising season kicks off. Sure, some of the best sailing I’ve ever experienced was in February, but there are definite caveats to winter cruising in the Pacific Northwest. In any event, with the boat on the market this year, our priority is to keep it clean and available to prospective buyers. While I was fully prepared for the dismal reality that this implied for the winter, ruling out any real cruising for the time being, I was slower to realize that the more depressing side effect is that it also removes all the hopes and dreams for next summer that normally sustain the Pacific Northwest sailor through the off-season. Being in the sailboat market right now involves a curious sort of limbo. We’re eager to get going, but we’re treading water until all the pieces to fall into place.

The Seattle Boat Show is coming up soon and that normally serves to reinvigorate dormant nautical fantasies. This year, I’m scared to go… what if all the neat toys and all the terrific stories about all the wonderful destinations simply serve to rub salt in the wound? Instead of inspiring dreams, is it just going to frustrate fantasies with the cold reality of the unknown?

It’s so bad that I keep trying to convince myself that we really could, somehow, make this boat work out, if only… but there’s no “if only” that we haven’t already explored that magically creates desk space and storage and all the other things we have found, after three years, that we really sort of need before heading out further and for longer. Still, every time we look at other boats, we come back to those if onlys all over again… what we have is so much closer to our ideal than anything else we’ve looked at that it’s painful to imagine spending more to get something less (except for space).

Knowing that this boat will be sold, but not having another candidate to imagine myself on, makes it hard to imagine any of the things that I used to dream of to get through the winters. I have all my memories of Desolation and the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and the empty green and grey wilderness north of there, and the brightly lit harbours of the Sunshine Coast, but I can’t picture myself there again. I have every hope of sailing to those places at some point in the future, but there is something stuck in my imagination that requires the reality of a boat to sail there on to fully visualize it. That, more than the weather or the waiting or the uncertainty, has been the heaviest weight to bear this winter.