Ballard Living in Style

Ballard living is a whole different experience when you’re not parked out near the dead-end of Seaview Avenue Northwest.

Some friends who have a slip at Ballard Mill Marina are hauled out at CSR for a month getting some work done. They kindly offered me their spot while it’s empty. It’s a much easier place to get boat work done than out on the hook—water, electricity, stability, and hardware stores inside walking distance.

It’s also nice to have grocery stores and showers to hand, since I don’t have either refrigeration or pressure water installed yet. And work-work, the kind that brings money in the door, is easier with regular high-speed Internet service… although I have been pleasantly surprised at the speed and capacity of my T-mobile plan when I have needed it. Five gigabytes of high-speed data, with tethering allowed, on their lowest tiered pricing… not bad at all. Considering all the hoops I had to jump through to get a tethered connection for sipping 3G speeds a couple years ago, I am finding the LTE world pretty impressive. And it is so easy. I worry about getting a signal in more distant anchorages, though; coverage is T-mobile’s Achilles heel.

It’s refreshing to get up in the morning and wander a couple of blocks to decent coffee shops, along broad, bricked streets that are empty of pedestrians and commerce save the few industrial concerns gearing up for long days at the beginning of boating season.

Old Ballard is mostly too pricey for me, but it’s nice to look at. And the library is nearby, and good grocery stores, and any sort of marine hardware or expertise you could possibly need.

I need a lot.

Zia, the boat, is a 1978 C&C 38, and she’s feeling all her long years. Decks and canvas were a Northwest winter green when I got her, rope rotting in her rig, her paint faded and chipping away with the relentless onslaught of the seasons.

As is often the case with old boats on the market, her owner got to an age where he simply couldn’t keep her up anymore. A retired Boeing engineer, he’d clearly maintained her with love and expertise for as long as he was able. But the past few years hadn’t been kind. And the updates, the sort of common and ordinary improvements that cruisers tend to make over time, seemed to have stopped sometime in the late eighties. A litany of ancient electrical systems, antique instruments, and dated cordage fill my list of to-dos.

First up has to be the rigging. Like most C&Cs, she came with rod-rigging and has it still… all original, 40 years on, slack and in dire need of inspection. And, most likely, replacement—not even rod lasts forever. Water intrusion around the starboard chainplates makes some crevice corrosion more likely than not, and corrosion around the mast at the step all point to a desperate need to get the stick pulled before putting a load on it.

Of course, the running rigging would almost certainly fail first, bare and shredded in those rare places the lines are even visible beneath their coating of slime.

Then there is the bottom; blisters need repaired, keel bolts tightened and the hull/keel join filled and faired. A wobbly prop needs pulled and rebuilt or replaced. And…

And, and, and. Any time I pull the lid off, It’s all too easy to diverge into long lists of deficiencies and projects, years worth, tens of thousands of dollars worth. It’s overwhelming.

So mostly I try to focus on priorities and take one project at a time. Cleaning is the easy default. There’s always more to clean. And in a quest for easier living, a bump in the electrical system and addition of a solar panel are necessary precursors to the installation of refrigeration and a pressure water system. I’ve been muddling through such things, in between Ballard outings, waiting for my date with the Travellift in Port Townsend.