Month: July 2012

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Lists

With the return of an actual, floating, functioning vessel to my life, I have also once again subjected myself to the tyranny of the dreaded lists. You know the ones of which I speak. Not the cutesy, idle “honey-do” lists that landlubbers tack up on their refrigerators next to elementary school art exhibits and snipped Garfield cartoons; no, these are serious lists, lists with heft and import, lists that have big dollar figures attached and real consequences wrapped up in them. These are boat lists.

The first one started during the survey and amounted to about a page of items I wanted to check particularly myself while we had her apart or out of the water, or which I wanted to be sure to ask the surveyor about, or made sure that he checked, or that he mentioned in passing but which I wanted to follow up on later. That’s the most crumpled and stained of the bunch but even now, two months later, I find myself consulting it regularly, largely in terms of its contribution to longer, much grander lists which have since followed with greater focus and more intimidating price tags attached.

The grand-daddy of those I have come to think of simply as “the Boat list.” It’s about two pages, double-columned, single-spaced, right now. There are a disturbing number of items on it with no check mark next to them, mostly because they are annotated “buy” which attaches an outlay of some major or minor amount in connection with their completion. But there are plenty of free things on the list to do as well, which remain undone through sloth or circumstance, little things like “Check head heat vent hose connection with heater on (because it looks cracked and I don’t want to set the toilet paper in the locker on fire)” which is waiting for it to get cold enough for me to fire the forced-air diesel heater up for the first time.

The most frightening thing about the Boat list is that, apart from some easy single-serving items such as the heat vent, it actually represents more of a meta-list, a list of lists, many of which have yet to be created but nonetheless menace me by implication from the innocuous lines on the page that say things like “Size, buy, and install solar panels.” That’s a whopper in six words, an item that is probably going to require two or three full-page lists on its own, not to mention a thousand bucks and two months of Sundays to complete. I haven’t even started making those lists yet, but they are out there, circling, biding their time.

I tend to breeze past lines like that when I look at the boat list these days in favor of relatively easier items like Run out anchor rode, check and mark if necessary and Disassemble, clean, and lube winches I’m not saying that’s going to be a breeze, but it looks appealing compared to the solar panel project or the dread Size, buy, and install new holding tank and manual pump. I’m thinking of creating a new list, one with my wife’s name at the top, and moving that one over there. She can have Purchase dinghy and Sew telltales on jib and mainsail too.

But the boat list isn’t exactly a master list representing all other lists, either. It’s just projects or stock items. There are also the checklists, that special sub-set of lists that my feeble brain relies on to avoid sinking or blowing up or simply spectacularly damaging this expensive boat we have barely moved aboard. The scary thing about the checklists is that I haven’t actually gotten around to writing them all down yet, so I am forced to refer to an incomplete and inchoate mental representation that goes something like:

  • Check transmission disengage
  • Check battery switch on #2 (start)
  • Advance throttle to 1/4
  • Key on, press start button
  • Check exhaust for water
  • My god, open the coolant seacock you fool, the engine is running already!

I won’t even trouble you with the propane fueling checklist that I haven’t written yet. But you probably want to be at another dock on the first run-through.

But the great thing about lists is that they make you feel like you are getting somewhere, even when you aren’t. If ever I need a little boost to morale, I can just think about something I haven’t done yet, and write it down, and it makes it seem like I have actually done something, even though nothing at all practical has been accomplished.

That’s not to say that the lists aren’t useful. Sometimes, they help you realize or remember things that otherwise would never come to mind. One morning a couple weeks ago, while we were on shore up in Port Hadlock, I was having some coffee and admiring our shiny new boat as she lay to her mooring in the soft morning light. As I watched, the local clan of otters swam by on their daily constitutional across the bay.

Now, otters are a bit like aquatic cats, only a lot more smelly, and if there is mischief to be had, they will be into it. I had previously neglected to consider this factor in my thoughts on anchorages, because Insegrevious had a relatively high freeboard and a swim ladder that we religiously stowed on leaving the boat for any period of time. We continued this habit reflexively with Rosie but neglected to consider the easy access to the ladder offered by the swim steps at the transom.

The otters weren’t so dim, and sensing potential capers available in their home waters, they quickly mounted the swim steps and started sniffing around. I got a sinking feeling as I began to envision buckets of otter poop clogging up our voluminous cockpit, and set down my coffee to start searching for my lifejacket so I could go launch the row-boat and chase the little beggars off.

But before I could get that far, one of the otters found the ladder, and naturally decided to climb it. As he put his weight on it, though, the folded-up lower section slowly and majestically unfolded out away from the hull, slowly at first and then with sudden acceleration. I could see the look of surprise on his face as it went over past the tipping point with him still clinging hopefully to the rungs. The splash as he went back into the water scared the rest of them off, even though the ladder was now down, but I had two new items for the boat list: otter-proof swim steps and secure boarding ladder in upright position.

Those put me onto page three of the Boat list.

The thing that keeps me from being driven into utter despondency by three pages of stuff that will probably never get done is knowing that, despite all that, we actually have very little to do on Rosie. We bought a boat that, in boat terms, needed next to nothing done with it to live and sail on. When I think about some of the boats we might have bought, and the lists that would have accompanied them, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling looking at my paltry three pages and change. There are folks out there facing a lot worse!

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A Wild First Ride

It stands to reason that after more than two weeks of gorgeous Pacific Northwest summer weather, the first weekend we decide to take off sailing on our new boat would be heralded by a nearly unprecedented stretch of thunderstorms.

We weren’t fixated on the weather in the first place because it was mostly a working trip; we still have a bunch of stuff stored in Port Hadlock, and our move-in was not going to be complete until we collected it and found places to cram it aboard Rosie. We had already had to delay for a week, so we were pretty committed to going, rain or shine.

But the forecast had mostly shine in it, and we certainly weren’t going to be averse to enjoying a leisurely trip north under blue skies and sunshine. There was little wind in the forecast but, other than hitting the Cut sometime before 1800 to catch slack or a nice ebb, we didn’t have a particularly stringent timetable.

As the week progressed, the outlook got progressively worse. But when I checked just before we pulled out on Friday, the outlook for Puget Sound still had clouds and southerlies giving way to eighties and north winds ten to fifteen knots in the afternoon… not the best of all possible days, but nothing for two people who had been without a boat for four months to sneeze at.

We pulled out of Shilshole under gray skies and ten knots from the Southwest. My greatest trials and tribulations with Insegrevious had come from having to back out of our slip into southerlies; the harder it blew, the more power was required to back out, the stronger the prop walk tried to pull our stern in exactly the wrong direction. So I faced a certain moment of truth right at the very beginning of the trip: would this larger boat with even more windage prove as troublesome?

Happily, the answer was no. I put all 27 horses briefly to work to get some momentum up, swung the wheel to starboard and silently beseeched Neptune for the wherewithal to avoid looking like an ass the first time I pulled out of the slip, and was rewarded with a smooth, controlled pivot in the fairway with room to spare.

We had the Sound pretty much to ourselves as we passed the breakwater, which was fortunate because getting the sail up on our own for the first time took a little fiddling and guesswork. We’ve never had lazy jacks or stack packs before and sorting through the profusion of lines took some time. But in the end it really just boiled down to unzipping the pack and then cranking… and cranking… and cranking. A cat sloop with a 55′ stick has a lot of mainsail to hoist. After that, popping up the fractional blade jib is a light dessert.

Once the engine was off and we were enveloped in quiet, Mandy went back to bed. I bore directly for Point No Point and settled in for the ride. Sun breaks appeared suddenly and fleeting in the clouds overhead. A couple of motor yachts emerged from the Ship Canal and overtook us on a similar line. Our knotmeter crawled up to 5 and sat there.

Running with the wind is always quieter than reaching or beating, but it struck me immediately just how quiet the Freedom is… with no rigging to groan and squeak, few lines to slap or vibrate, and no big metal tube to echo, it gives a very peaceful ride. Wave action was light and we seemed to just levitate across the water.

At first, I thought the booming I heard was freight cars mating up along Burlington Northern’s waterfront tracks. But the rumbling didn’t stop and it kept coming back and I slowly realized that Saturday’s thunderstorms had come to the party a little bit early. Two brilliant and crackling neon lightning strikes into the water just south of Whidbey Island drove the point home.

The skies were clear behind us and I considered turning back, but reasoned that the south winds would push the storm cells ahead of us long before we reached them, so we continued on. But as we got closer, the thunder grew and the lightning came more frequently, showing no signs of pushing off. We shortened sail and ducked in near the bluffs just north of Apple Cove Point, thinking the height of the land might provide some shelter and that surely the lightning couldn’t last much longer… this is the Pacific Northwest, after all. I’d never seen a thunderstorm that didn’t blow itself out after a couple hours.

Across the Sound, we could see other recreational boats and working craft also slowing up or stopping. A tug towing a floating crane looked to be a particularly inviting target and we wondered if it would be smart to hug in tight to something so much taller than us, or dumb to hang around in the vicinity of such a likely strike zone.

Pretty soon everyone started heading north again, despite continued rumblings from that direction. I understood why when I saw flashes behind us… a cell had snuck in near Edmonds and we were boxed in. We let the sail out again and started running north, hugging the bluff all the way to Point No Point and around into Oak Bay.

Looking into the air at a sailboat mast passing beneath a low bridge
Squeaking through below the Port Townsend Canal bridge

There, we slowed again. There were strikes hitting near the north end of Marrowstone Island, and we wanted to give them plenty of time to move on. And, as high tide arrived, we began to contemplate the uncertainty that comes with a new boat over the exact height of the mast and its subsequent adornments. The bridge to Indian Island rises 58′ over Mean High Tide… the listed height of a Freedom 36 is a smidge over 55′. The tide was at its Mean High as we arrived… how big was the wind instrument on our mast top? The VHF antenna? Were we floating higher than most Freedoms? We couldn’t sneak through nearly as slowly as we would have liked on that first big test with the ebb sweeping us along, but we cleared with what looked from on deck like inches to spare.

As we reached the north end of the Cut, a lance of lightning forked down over Indian Island and shook the boat with thunder, a not-so-subtle reminder that we weren’t out of the woods yet. A special forecast alert came up on our cell phones, containing this precious snippet of advice:

THUNDERSTORMS WILL CONTAIN DANGEROUS CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING. IF YOU HEAR THUNDER…HEAD INDOORS.

Did they mean just down into the cabin, next to all the electronics and that big conductive stick jutting almost sixty feet up? Or were we supposed to find a shed to stuff the entire boat in?

We made our mooring with surprising ease; again, the boat handled more easily than I would have expected given the extra length and beam. We sold our old dinghy with our old boat but this boat did not come with another one and we haven’t found a new one yet, so my parents left theirs tied to the buoy and we hopped in and headed ashore before the lightning could get another shot at us.

The thunderstorms were still hanging around the next morning, but we shuttled back and forth to the boat during the occasional clearings.

As I had been warned, she tended to sail back and forth on the mooring. Unfortunately, this had the effect of drawing the pendant across the blade of the bow-mounted Bruce anchor like a saw blade. I applied some poor man’s chafing gear (duct tape) and resolved to rig a bridle that would hopefully swing clear of the anchor.

Unfortunately, pawing through the paltry box of spare deck gear aboard, I could find no shackle of a suitable size to join our hefty 1″ mooring line to the bridle lines. I borrowed a truck and headed up to Hadlock Building Supply, the go-to gear store in thriving downtown Port Hadlock.

As I came up the hill to the four-way intersection that marks the center of the Greater Port Hadlock Business District, I noticed that it seemed a little more thriving than usual. White tents were pitched in parking lots in front of the local strip mall, bands were playing, and a sheriff’s cruiser blocked the intersection. Every man jack of the reported 3,476 inhabitants listed in the Port Hadlock-Irondale census-designated area appeared to be lining the streets. I had stumbled directly into the midst of Hadlock Days.

Looking along a parade route with a bus and fire truck
The Hadlock Days Parade

The parade route ran right past Hadlock Building Supply and it was blocked off, so I parked at the Post Office and hoofed it over. Sirens blared and children laughed as the local fire departments tossed candy out along the parade route. But when I got to the Building Supply, all I found were a handful of other bemused looking men and a sign that said “Closed Until 2pm for the Parade.”

I turned around to look at the parade again. Passing by just then, in all its glory, was the Hadlock Building Supply float, accompanied by the entire staff of the store.

Eventually, the store opened, I got a beefy 3/4″ bow shackle, and headed back to the boat. Through the rest of the afternoon we ferried our junk out to the boat and turned my mother loose aboard to find places to put all of it. I left her and Mandy out there in a salon piled with stuff and went ashore to collect some other friends who were coming out to check out the boat. When I got back out again, it was as if we had brought nothing new aboard… the salon was empty.

We had a pleasant afternoon after the storms faded, and spent the night aboard to be ready to catch the 0800 slack through the Cut heading south.

The day dawned foggy but breezy… south winds this time, scattered light rain showers, and a generally dismal Northwestern fall day. I let Mandy sleep in while I cast loose and motored through the Cut without incident. On the other side, I fell into the same trap I always fall into in Oak Bay: feeling the nice breeze coming down through the slot next to Scow Bay, I raised sail and killed the engine, only to be quickly blown into the doldrums off Mats-Mats with light, shifting zephyrs gently blowing us in circles while the real wind ruffled the sea temptingly only a half-mile or so further along. After a half-hour swearing I would sail my way out of it, as I always swear, I fired up the engine and motored for fifteen minutes, as I always do.

The rest of the day gave us a nice preview of working to windward in moderate wind and chop. The Freedom rode more smoothly, and didn’t appear to have particularly more problems pointing, than our old Hunter had. After clearing the usual confusing rips north of Point No Point, we had a series of long, easy tacks down to a point just south of Edmonds, where the wind finally failed and we motored the last forty-five minutes home.

Although the weather wasn’t terrific for it, I felt like it was a good trip to have under our belts. The boat posed no unpleasant surprises (other than a blown fitting in the freshwater system after we got back to the dock; probably pounded loose in the chop) and we felt like we got a good sense of how she will handle in various conditions on most points of sail. Apart from the lightning, it was an good learning experience.

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Closing Time

There’s never anything smooth or easy when it comes to boats, and our closing process on Paros has been no exception: at the last minute, our financing fell apart, and we had to scramble to come up with alternatives on a short deadline. A glitch in dealing with one of the conditions of our post-survey counter-offer took longer than expected to resolve. We received an unexpected offer to purchase a sister-ship at a considerably lower price (which we ultimately declined, obviously). The process stumbled along fitfully and stressfully, extending what already seemed like a perpetual state of displacement.

So I was prepared to feel some sense of triumph and celebration when everything was finally all signed and completed and we took possession of our fantastic new boat. Getting the deal done, getting moved in, getting her moored, taking care of all the necessary and innumerable details of boat ownership, had become the uttermost focus of my life over the past weeks and I was looking forward to some triumphant release of all that accumulated tension when the deal was finally done.

But the last weekend before our scheduled closing date, as I was fretting over financing and insurance and bottom paint and whether or not the small locks were going to be open, life happened. Saturday night, we got a call that my aunt had been admitted to the hospital with a dangerous blood clot in her leg. Already faced with some serious health problems, she inevitably experienced complications during treatment. We went to bed uncertain about the prognosis.

That same night, though I didn’t learn of it until early the next morning, a close friend from high school, just off a plane from Minneapolis and waiting for a cab, turned to his wife and said, “I’m feeling dizzy.” Then he collapsed and died.

Nothing to do with the boat seems all that important now.

So the last week of negotiating the final arrangements for the purchase were interspersed with funeral arrangements; a call to the broker was followed by a call to some distant friend or another to break or share news; a visit to the boatyard was trailed by a visit to the crematorium… one last view of the boat before it went back in the water, one last glimpse of Dave before his cremation. I made the final arrangements on the road while driving back from the funeral in Spokane. We took possession the day after we got back to Seattle.

I know I should be excited, but mostly what I feel right now is sad.

My aunt, at least, is doing better, and fortunately we were able to visit her while we were in Spokane for Dave’s funeral.

We’ve been aboard for a few days now and it has been wonderful. We’re almost entirely moved in, and we’re swimming in extra space and luxuriating in unheard-of amenities like refrigeration and an oven and forced-air heat (not that we need it, with the sudden advent of summer). There are supplies to be sorted out, new systems to learn, cables to be traced, electronics to be understood. And the sun is coming out now and the marina is coming alive, and normally I’d be eager to dive into it all to start figuring it out. But I just don’t find myself all that interested in any of it at the moment.

I feel as though I’m being stupid and selfish in this because death is the great universal experience and everyone has lost someone close at some point. I have, for that matter. I suppose that there is an extra cold heaping of reality that hits anyone when the first close friend among their peer group passes away. Dave was a day past his thirty-ninth birthday when he died. While no one would call that “young” (and certainly the degree to which it represented, in fact, “old,” had become an increasing source of mutual needling between us) it was still about twenty years shy of a date that I had expected to be burying high school buddies, barring accident.

To a large extent my friends from high school remain my friends today. Dave and I lived together on and off after graduation, and in fact moved here to Seattle together. In the years since, until I moved aboard the boat three years ago, we had never lived more than about five blocks apart. You don’t think much about these things as you’re living them. But it’s that proximity, and those experiences, that bind you to people, sometimes in ways, and to such extent, that you don’t fully realize until later.

He only came out sailing with us once but he was excited about the new boat. Dave enjoyed new and adventurous experiences but he liked his creature comforts also, and given a private cabin, a three-burner propane stove with oven to indulge in his hobby of cooking, he and his wife would have had a great time aboard this summer. When you have had all those shared experiences, your brain somehow hardwires itself to anticipate more, and sadness is what you get when your conscious mind overrides those expectations with the reality that they are never going to happen again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dave’s attitude toward life lately. When I spoke at his funeral, I told a story that he liked to tell, about how he once spent three hours trying to talk me into going sledding on the first big snowfall of the year, and how I never went. He thought that story said a lot about me, and I thought it said a lot about him, and we were probably both right. He was never afraid to go out and do what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it. I have always been more cautious.

While we both had our regrets over some decisions we made from those different fundamental natures, I suspect he had fewer. Whether it was just his nature, or something he had learned along the way, he had figured out that you can often get away with having your fun and still coming out ahead. He had a successful career, but he wasn’t a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy. He always did as well, or better, than I did, even if I spent hours fretting and planning and scheming while he was kicking back in an all-night poker game. He was living proof that the consequences of being laid-back were never as dire as I might have imagined.

When Mandy and I decided to move aboard a boat and take up a life less land-bound, I was fighting that cautious nature, and in some ways I was winning. But it’s not a one-time bout; caution can keep creeping up on you, subtly inclining your choices toward safety and rigor, away from novelty and excitement. I had made a conscious decision at some point to spend more time doing things I enjoyed and less time running on the financial hamster wheel, but that’s a decision you have to keep making. It’s all too easy to fixate on the degree to which your income has receded and to discount the freedom and joy that summers spent cruising have offered instead.

It gets easier to put that balance in perspective again when something like this happens. I don’t think Dave had a lot of regrets in life but he sure wasn’t done living it all yet, either. The knowledge, visceral and immediate, that in one way or another we are all as liable as he was to end up with much left undone is a spur to me, once again, to not put off my ambitions overmuch in favor of ephemeral security. The best security, I think, may be to take a page from his book… find something to laugh about in everything, have fun when the opportunity presents itself, go sledding when the snow is falling.

So it’s time to re-name our new boat and get on with sailing. Paros isn’t a terrible name but we don’t love it and it holds no meaning for us the way it must have for the prior owners. Since the documentation has to be re-filed at time of purchase, it’s an easy time to change it. You’re probably cringing at this point because you think that the punchline to all this is that we have decided to name our new boat Dave. That would have been exactly the sort of incongruous prank I might have played on Dave when he was alive, but it would just seem cruel now that he is unable to retaliate in kind.

Instead, my wife suggested Rosie and that’s what we’ll call her. Rosie was our calico cat’s name; she also died in June, two years ago, and she’s buried on a bluff overlooking the mooring buoy we often use in Port Hadlock. We’ll look up from the deck of her namesake and wave and hope she has found a ray of sunshine to rest in.

A way to commemorate Dave is more complicated and harder to settle. He had no children but left behind both parents, a younger brother, and a shocked and loving wife. My thoughts lately have been mostly for her, but, like all mourners, I have come to realize that there is nothing that can be said and there is nothing to be done that can in any way impact the vast depths of that loss. All words ring hollow, all deeds fall flat.

In time, no doubt, I will want to sail again. Similarly, I’m sure, some opportunity will arise to make my memories of Dave something lasting and meaningful. Until then, the best I can do is look around me at this wondrous new vessel we have acquired, and resolve to use it to take us to all the places we most want to go in life.