A friend of mine recently asked why exactly it is that all crappy things seem to happen at once. An optimistic read might be that it helps get them all out of the way. If that’s the case, then we are in for some damn smooth sailing this summer, after the last two weeks trying to escape the gravitational confines of Puget Sound.
I had envisioned a lovely, relaxing sail up to Port Hadlock, where we would have an easy time finishing up a long list of boat projects with the expansive shop facilities and expertise available to us there. Instead, Mandy and I bickered all the way up from Seattle, and faced minor and major setbacks at almost every turn. When we finally grabbed the ball out in front of my parent’s place, it was hardly clear where even to start.
Our holding tank challenges were only the tip of the iceberg. While wrestling with those complications, I also found that I had ordered several parts of the wrong size for our solar panel installation. The Mercury outboard that had come with our new dinghy (admittedly, thrown in for free) resisted all efforts to restart the water pump. No clear path could be located for a discharge hose for the new bilge pump I had bought. We discovered a fracture in one of our rope clutches.
Meanwhile, every single trip either out or back from the boat seemed to result in some item that was supposed to be aboard ending up ashore, or some extraneous crap from ashore ending up on board. Inevitably, that item would prove to be vital for whatever the next step might be in whatever project we were trying to inch ahead with.
Between rowing back and forth to the boat a bajillion times a day, dealing with increasingly inconvenient tides, and trying to sort out the various self-inflicted equipment problems from legitimate vendor- or manufacturer-created difficulties, we were getting pretty tired out. It was a relief when we turned Rosie over to the boatyard in Port Townsend to work on the hopelessly snarled holding tank project, so we could have a bit of a break. But, when my wife went into the local clinic with a small rash below one eye and came out with nose cancer, it was probably inevitable that the only available specialist appointment for the next three months was going to be back in Seattle, at 0745 the next day.
Fortunately, we had some other errands to run in town; I picked up a loaner outboard from a friend in case we couldn’t get the Merc going, and we took care of some other necessary business. The doctor took a chunk out of Mandy’s nose and promised to call back when they figured out what was going on. We got back to Port Hadlock fairly late, but I woke up early the next morning to fret about equipment orders and small engine repair. I spent most of the day in the shop trying to put the Merc back together again, ultimately chopping off some small chunk of the drive shaft to get the lower unit back in place. It still didn’t pump water.
That evening, we were laying around digesting far too much dinner and finishing up the second half of “Gone With The Wind” (a title descriptive of the state we desperately were hoping to achieve ourselves) when we heard a loud thump from the other side of the half-wall between living and dining room. Then I heard something no one wants to hear, least of all a son of his mother, a series of weak, pained “Ow, ow, ow, ow” coming from the floor.
Mom had fainted while reaching up into a cupboard and fallen backward into the half-wall, doing this to the metal-reinforced corner with the back of her head:
That earned her a trip to the emergency room, ten staples in her noggin, and an overnight stay for observation. It turned out, after a CT scan, that they were more worried about her heart than her head… they weren’t sure why she fainted in the first place but found some suspicious traces on an ECG. They wanted to keep her for the weekend for additional tests but finally agreed to let her come home with a portable monitor on.
I took a quick trip over to the local mailbox place from the hospital and collected a variety of large boxes which I assumed were the parts for the solar panel. Instead, they turned out to be a variety of large cushions… not ours at all. The actual solar panel parts were still sitting on the floor of the mailbox place, which, of course, closed before we figured out what had happened.
So we spent much of that week in and out of and hanging around various medical facilities, while not much of anything was getting done on the boat. We collected her from the outfit doing the holding tank work and trekked back down to Hadlock, failing to notice that much of the other gear we needed to finish up the installation had ended up in their shop and not on board.
When we were moored up once again, I volunteered to drive to Walmart to pick up the prescriptions for Mom, hoping to die in a fiery head-on crash somewhere en-route, but was favored with no such fortuitous change in circumstances.
The weekend was mostly spent waiting, since just about every piece of hardware we needed was either locked up in someone else’s shop or sitting around waiting for the mail to start moving again on Monday. The additional delays only ratcheted up the tension. Fortunately, since Mom had the blood pressure monitor out already to check how her new meds were working, I was able to entertain myself by watching my own pressure ratchet higher and starting a betting pool on when the first aneurysm would occur.
Monday I picked up the newly re-plumbed holding tank and the solar panel parts. Of course, I didn’t notice the missing plumbing parts until after we got the tank back to the boat and tried to put it in… foolishly, we had assumed that once we got it back, we’d actually be able to start making progress. Instead, I ended up having to make another trip back to town to get the rest of the parts from the yard the next day (because, of course, they were already closed again by the time we figured out what had happened), but that was okay, because I found that I had ordered the wrong size of one of the panel parts and had to overnight in the correct sizes, so I could pick them up at the same time from the mailbox place. That little Pyrrhic bit of efficiency was the high point of the week.
We went to take off the cracked rope clutch only to find that the builder had glassed over the backing plates, nuts and all, when they had tabbed in the bulkhead for the aft cabin (aggravating as this was, it’s actually the first manufacturing defect of any significance that I have found on the Freedom to this point). That had to be cut away, and a new triple clutch found; a friend’s shop in town had none in stock, and I was still naively hoping to be gone before a special order could be got. We took the clutch ashore to patch it up as best we could for the time being.
Other than mounting the control panel, I abandoned the new bilge pump project altogether. If all boat projects were wiring projects, I realized, I could be a very happy person.
Most of the rest of the days blurred together. At some point, my stepfather and I ran down to pick up a replacement outboard we found on Craigslist in Gig Harbor. Mandy managed to get the holding tank plumbed up correctly. We heard back from the specialist; her nose cancer could wait until we returned, and there was some chance in fact that the biopsy procedure had actually removed most of it. Mom’s head stopped ringing and her heart seemed to continue pumping in a sturdy and workmanlike manner. My friend Maxx arrived from town to help out with other sundry projects and we finished up the solar panel installation and wiring. My stepfather, putting some of his Boat School woodworking skills to good use, finished up and mounted a gorgeous chart holder in our aft cabin.
Gradually, stuff started to more or less work. I tried not to think about the long-term damage to our bank account or relationship, or to the vast debts of donated labor, assistance, and gratitude I was accruing with friends and family (toward the end, I am fairly certain that much of this assistance was delivered tinged with desperation to finally be rid of us both and our boatload of problems).
Finally, one day, we let go the mooring pendant and motored up to Port Townsend yet again. We plugged in for the night and used unlimited electricity and free-running water to scrub away the detritus of two weeks of project mishaps. Time was taken to stow and organize. Provisions disappeared into larders, tools disappeared for hopefully the last time in a long time. And, with a freshening breeze and a fair tide the next afternoon, we floated past Point Wilson, bound for points north.
