I don’t know, maybe it was hubris. You expect to catch the traditional airline cold when you’re crammed into a marrow metal tube with hundreds of other people for sixteen hours at a stretch, so I had half-figured I would get sick right after I got here.
Then, if that didn’t happen, you imagine that any local bugs you don’t have any immunity against will come after you right away, while your defenses are down. But that didn’t happen either.
So maybe I was feeling a little invincible, and didn’t worry about it as much as I should have when I accidentally forgot my bottle of hand sanitizer at the famous Chinese restaurant last week.
But it was probably only a matter of time. Riding the BTS every day packed in cheek by jowl, constantly immersed in teeming crowds, using gym equipment and swimming pools with other people… it now seems inevitable that I would pick up the flu here.
I felt it coming on yesterday after I worked out and went for a swim and tried to convince myself for a few hours that I had just gotten too much sun. But the sore throat started to hit over dinner, and I knew I was done.
It’s difficult to tell here if you have a fever or if it’s just the regular Bangkok heat, but I am pretty sure it’s a flu, not a cold, both from the sudden onset, the aches and pains, and what I imagine is a fairly high temperature.
Everyone’s mind leaps to some exotic foreign disease when they start feeling unwell in a foreign country, but just like at home, the most common maladies are relatively benign. I got my shots before coming over but apparently the flu vaccine that had been worked up for this year’s flu season didn’t match the strain actually in circulation, so I skipped it.
So now I’m left with old-fashioned treatments, namely laying around moaning and drinking a lot of fluids.
I brought some medication with me but nothing for nighttime, which can make all the difference–being able to sleep soundly is a huge secret weapon. The travel nurse has assured me I’d be able to find over the counter medications here easily enough, but after hitting three different pharmacies and countless 7/11s that proved to not be the case. There’s nothing like Nyquil to be had, apparently.
Fortunately, I’m not averse to rolling my own, so I got some paracetamol (acetaminophen, in the states) and a decongestant/antihistamine and dosed myself up before bed last night.
But it turns out that medication dosages here, just like restaurant serving sizes, as scaled to a smaller frame than mine–I had a pretty rough night, never really getting completely to sleep and still feeling enormously crappy. I probably should have double the dose, which I will try tonight.
The timing could be worse, but it could be better, too. It would have been no fun at all if this had come on next week, when I am due to head north to Chiang Mai, or the week after, when heading for the beaches–traveling with a flu is no fun.
But I was supposed to go tour the Grand Palace this weekend and then head up to Kanchanaburi for a couple of days, and those excursions aren’t going to be nearly as enjoyable as they would otherwise have been.
The Northwest Maritime Center’s Race to Alaska (or “R2AK” for the cool kids) has gone from crazy upstart idea (“First place is $10,000. Second place is a set of steak knives”) in 2015 to classic Port Townsend event in 2016. But for me, almost all the excitement of race day happened off the course.
I happened to be in town for the start of the inaugural race last year. I had actually planned to follow the race from further north that first year, hoping to sail ahead and catch the contestants midway, when the field had shaken out and the most grueling aspects of the race were setting in, but that fell through. The start was fun to watch, though—in many ways, it reminded me of that other classic Port Townsend event, the Kinetic Skulpture Race. Although I am currently marooned in town waiting for my rigging to be assembled, I had planned to stay for the race start this year anyway.
The anchorage has been full of competitors getting ready for the race
I went ashore for the Pre-Race Ruckus the night before, chatted with teams and spectators, marveled at the ingenious and foolhardy entries. Checking the forecast, I imagined that it would be an exciting start. While 2015 had launched into a screaming westerly that scattered and battered the fleet after they got out into the teeth of the Strait, this year a brisk southerly and rain showers were on deck, promising a fast downwind start… and some excitement at the line, since the Port Townsend waterfront kicks up a bit with a south wind playing on it.
I got a jump on the scheduled 6 a.m. start time when the wind shift happened at 3 a.m. It was sudden, and caught my rode against the keel, putting me broad on to the wind. I was up unsnarling that and decided to just stay up… I’d ducked in the night before and knew that Velocity Coffee would be opening up at 4 a.m. for the race.
I dinghied in to the dock and spent a long time trying to figure out a way to tie up that wouldn’t result in my dink getting bashed to pieces. I never came up with a solution to that—the wave action was rocking the whole dock around, so I did my best and shrugged and hoofed over to the Maritime Center. If I had bothered to look up from messing with my dinghy, I might never have made it there.
The race start was even wilder than I had imagined. I had breakfast with some friends at their rigging shop and watched the fleet cross the strait on the race tracker website. A small helicopter had buzzed the start line, knocking down a couple of boats—my friend Christian, among other people, had called the police about it, and an officer dropped by to get more information. He’d seen it, too, it turned out, but I had taken a video of some of the low passes and showed it to him. He asked me to email it to him for evidence, as he planned to file reckless endangerment charges against the pilot. The Coast Guard and FAA had already been notified, he said.
And they’re off!
With the wind starting to build again, I trekked back to salvage what was left of my dinghy and go hunker down on my boat before the rain started.
As I got down to the dock, though, I saw what I should have seen earlier that morning: a 32-foot sailboat that had been anchored inshore of me hadn’t weathered the wind shift well, and had dragged anchor and washed up onto the beach just below Better Living Through Coffee. I put my bag in my dink and went over to commiserate with the unfortunate owner.
An acquaintance of mine from a marina where we both used to live was already down there when I arrived. Arnie, too, had a new boat and had decamped to Port Townsend to work on it, and I’d seen him around a few times. He was busy expanding on the finer points of anchoring technique and configuration to a stoic older fellow in a watch cap and damp boots, who I took to be the owner. “Sanderlin” was the name across the back of the boat. I didn’t know what it meant but it didn’t seem like a good time to ask so I just introduced myself to the owner, who didn’t look like he was absorbing many of Arnie’s anchoring lessons, anyway.
Paul was his name, and he was headed for Port Angeles, held up in Port Townsend for a bit by a broken halyard… and, now, a stuck boat.
There was nothing much to do, the tide still falling, but Arnie and I compared notes and agreed that with a higher high that evening and a forecast wind shift back to the northwest, there would be no trouble getting Sanderlin off again around 6 p.m.
That done, I put on some warm clothes and foul weather gear and rowed back in to the beach. The tide was still way out but Paul was sitting there on the beach, a couple of very damp bags beside him and an inflatable dinghy hauled up above the sailboat. He’d been very lucky, I saw, to have ended up on sand and gravel. Rocks studded the beach and seawalls made of boulders supported buildings to either side.
“I’m going to go get a coffee while we wait,” I told him. “You want something?”
He hesitated, mumbled, “Well, I’m not really going to have any money until next week…” which told me much about the condition of his boat and his ability to equip and repair it.
“No, no,” I said quickly. “I’m buying.”
Sanderlin on the beach
We had coffee and hunkered down inside as the rain started to fall. Paul was a semi-retired electrician. He’d been living in Port Angeles for a little while but he’d learned to sail in Florida, when he was younger… his parents had both been licensed masters, had sailed the Caribbean and as far away as Venezuela. He’d only had the Endeavor 32 for a month or so and was still trying to get it out to Port Angeles.
As the tide came up and the coffee shop started closing up, we walked back out to the beach. The fellow who owned the building the shop was in and who lives on the upper floor, was out there. He said he recognized me; he had been keeping an eye on me, anchored out in front of his place, mastless, for a while now, wondering if there was something wrong. I assured him that it was part of the plan and I was just waiting for parts.
Another dinghy hit the beach, bearing a tall, bearded fellow who introduced himself as Gene. He had the Alajuela 38, Brio, that was moored out just a bit past Zia and thought that he, too, would come in and lend a hand.
Paul, whatever his youthful sailing experience, seemed inclined to wing it when it came to getting Sanderlin afloat again. I had been to this rodeo before and had broached the idea of getting a kedge out to haul off with, but Paul thought he’d just let the tide come in, hop on board, and try to motor off. I had my misgivings, but it was his boat; Arnie, at least (where the hell was Arnie now, anyway? I wondered) had got a line from the bow out to a seawall at the mouth of the little bay, so a little pulling could be done from there.
Now, Gene, too, brought up the kedge idea. Paul didn’t seem to want to make a decision about it, so we made it easy. I had hauled in a hundred feet of spare line and some snatch blocks, and Gene had a couple of large spools of line, and we sort of eased Paul into the idea that it would be useful and easy to run his knock-off Danforth out past the eelgrass line and use it to haul himself off with.
It was fairly pouring by now, drizzle running down inside the neck of my fouly jacket, but setting the kedge was fast and easy. I waded out and got the block on and Gene rowed the anchor out and dropped it, and we returned to the beach and stood and were rained on, waiting for the tide.
There was nothing at all dramatic about getting the boat afloat again… it just happened, Paul cranking on a winch and me working at the bow line as the water slowly rose around it. Someone had had the foresight to dig out around the rudder and the waves in the bay had abated, so no damage was done, and Paul fired the engine up and swung around to the city dock, where we’d all agreed he ought to spend the night.
Gene and I recovered our gear and he invited me out to Brio for dinner, which sounded good after a long afternoon of getting soaked. I rowed back out to Zia to get into some dry clothes and found that my phone had been blowing up while I was ashore; the media had apparently got wind of the video and wanted permission to air it, and were pestering the Port Townsend police department about it since they didn’t have my contact information. The police had been trying to get hold of me. In the meantime, the most natural place for most people to get at the video, Three Sheets, had gone down (a unrelated, but unfortunately-timed, problem, it turned out later).
I fired off a few email replies, it being well after business hours, and rowed over to Brio. Gene, his wife Crystal, and their two children, Byron (3) and Rowan (1) sold their house in Denver last year, bought Brio, and moved on board to give the sailing lifestyle a shot. It’s the sort of story about living aboard that you love to hear, and I was absorbed by it over soup and cornbread cooked on an impressive looking old diesel stove in their classic galley.
The Brio story, boat-wise, turned out to be very similar to the Zia story, in terms of previous owners and equipment and circumstances, despite them being quite different boats, so although they are relatively new to the liveaboard lifestyle we had quite a bit in common. The kids were already asleep when I arrived and we spoke softly in the red-lit cabin as they tossed in their berths.
The rain let up only a little by the time I returned to Zia, and it kept throttling up and down all night. My chainplate holes, sealed with duct tape, had not withstood the onslaught, and water had spilled down into the interior there, and from the one leaky port light I know about. That dampness combined with the soaked boots, clothes, and gear that I dragged in made it a damp evening indeed.
The rain petered out by late the next morning and I rowed in to check on Paul and go to the store. He had gotten a good night’s sleep, he said, and was fixing to go get anchored out again. Since he hadn’t had enough rode to get the kedge out the night before, I asked him how much he did have.
“Oh, I got eighty feet,” he said. “I figure I’ll come out and anchor near you. I only put out like seventy before. You’re in about, what, thirty feet of water there?”
“Yes, I’m in thirty feet, but eighty feet of rode isn’t going to be enough to hold you that deep. You are going to want a minimum of ninety, and that’s a bare minimum. Any kind of serious blow and you’ll want even more.”
“Well, but I’m going to put out like ten or twenty feet more than I had before.”
“Yeah, it’s not how much more you put out, it’s whether or not the whole length you put out is enough.”
We went around and around in this vein for a while, and I suggested to him—both for reasons of selfishness and practicality—that he head over to the other side of Boat Haven, where he could get the hook down in about twenty feet over sand and mud. Having seen his anchoring setup up close, I didn’t want it anywhere near me—he didn’t have the scope to hold in thirty feet, and to get in shallower close to town, he’d be in grass and weed, and wouldn’t hold anyway (which is likely what happened the first time around).
He was still unresolved when I headed to the store, but he was getting ready to shove off when I got back. I again tried to dissuade him from returning to our corner of the anchorage, but he seemed determine to give it a shot. I shrugged, steeled myself preemptively against offering any “I told you so’s” when he ended up on the beach again, and returned to Zia.
Pretty soon, Paul motored past and, true to his word, tried to drop anchor near me. Too near me… almost directly on top of my anchor.
“Paul! Paul!” I yelled. “You’re on my anchor! You got to pull up, move further off!”
The wind was picking up now out of the northwest, and since he was almost on top of my anchor he was, necessarily, windward of me. As he started drifting back, still dragging his ersatz Danforth around, I had visions of him hooking my rode and sending both of us reeling out of the anchorage, intertwined. He was debating with me about swinging circles but quickly drifted close enough that even he could see it was going to be a problem, and reluctantly began hauling his anchor up again (by hand).
I armed myself with a boat hook and kicked some fenders over, hoping I could fend him off and let him scrape down one side on his way to becoming someone else’s problem. But it all relied on him getting the anchor up, which he didn’t seem to be in to much of a hurry to do. I started yelling—I could see his anchor, right there below the surface, getting closer and closer to my outstretched rode.
“Paul! Pull up! Pull the damn anchor up, man, you got to get it up now. Right now, Paul!”
He was practically on my bow by then and he didn’t quite get it in time—a fluke snagged my rode, but it was close enough I could reach down with the boat hook and flick it off at the last second before it went taut. Unfortunately, while I was doing that, I wasn’t able to fend him off, and he smashed right into my pulpit, breaking my bow lights off.
“Sorry,” he said weakly. I didn’t reply.
He swung around again and this time went much further inshore, but still upwind of me. I was seething by then—this is the thanks I get?—but there wasn’t much I could do about it. At the same time, I knew he was exhausted and frustrated, and if he was rejecting all the advice he had been given, it was a pattern I also recognize in myself from time to time… a hopelessness and fatalism fueled by the knowledge that I may be doing something stupid, but at least it is a stupid thing I am capable of doing on my own.
Still, I figured on another sleepless night. The tide was still coming in and wind building, so I expected to see him skidding toward me again when the geometry failed, as it inevitably would.
But after a couple hours of careful attention, I lost track of time doing other things. Suddenly, in a flash, it occurred to me that I hadn’t looked out at Paul lately.
I popped up and peered out a port light toward where he had anchored. No Paul. Had he moved? I wondered, hoping against hope. Then a cold feeling swept over me. Maybe I couldn’t see him because he WAS RIGHT ON MY NOSE! Feeling the panic rise, I happened to glance out the other side of the boat. And there he was, not far away, but not right on me—almost directly between Zia and Brio.
Well, we both dodged a bullet there! I thought, reaching for me shoes… for he was obviously dragging, and just as obviously completely oblivious to the fact.
Crystal was already out on deck yelling and sounding an air horn and Gene was climbing into his dinghy. I yelled a couple times as Sanderlin swept past, then threw on a lifejacket and got in my own dinghy to start rowing after him.
Gene got there first and banged on the hull.
“Paul! Paul! You’re dragging, man!”
Paul’s head appeared in the companionway. He looked around. I couldn’t read his expression exactly, but he shrugged.
“I’m just going to let it go,” he said.
“Paul, man,” I said. “You can’t just let it go. You’re going to get out deeper and deeper and it’s going to drag faster and faster!”
We finally managed to convince him to haul up the anchor and give the spot near Boat Haven a try. He wearily started hauling up the anchor again and Gene and I returned to our own boats. I sat in the cockpit and watched as Sanderlin got smaller and smaller, Paul pulling and pulling on the rode. When he finally got it all on deck he was probably a mile off and accelerating. But when I saw him finally start moving upwind again, I took off my lifejacket and went below.
Still… I didn’t actually rest easy until I saw him get past the ferry terminal and out of sight.
Fortunately, it’s the bottom half, so it floats. It floats high, in fact, because with no mast in, Zia is light as a feather. She bobs around at anchor like a frisky fawn. I don’t know what the hell she has to be frisky about, she’s got no rig.
Better without the blisters
Everything I could get to in the yard, I got to, though not always well. The bottom was in such awful shape that another month could have gone into stripping and patching and fairing; instead, I got down to the wire and called it good and slapped a couple coats of paint on. The second coat covers all manner of evils… but I still know what lurks down there, beneath the surface.
I managed to polish and wax the topsides, too, although in retrospect they probably should have been compounded first to take care of some of the worse scratches and blemishes. The stripe and logo and name all need further attention, too. I had imagined they were all painted on but it turned out that they are stickers of some sort–I don’t think vinyl, but along those lines—and they are peeling and chipped. More projects for another day.
But I couldn’t do a damn thing about the rigging.
It was with morbid fascination that Brion took me through the ills that had befallen my chainplates, showing me the crevice corrosion and cracks beneath a microscope after polishing away the surface crud. One of the eyes was actually deformed, a load forced onto it that the scantling couldn’t quite take.
The center plate is deformed, bulging up on top and the eye stretched
As he pointed out, finding all of these gross deformities was actually good news, considering the vintage of the rigging. If they hadn’t been so obvious, I would have been forced into a tail-chasing internal debate about replacing the chainplates, a gray netherworld between “They’re good for another ten years” and “They might fail tomorrow.”
Which is a benefit from the mental health perspective, certainly, but of no consolation to my pocket book. Big chunks of steel polished to a high sheen are not cheap.
I had known this was a possibility the whole time, but hadn’t realized how long it would take to get that done. Although I could have used more time in the yard productively, I couldn’t afford it, so back in the water I went, bereft of mast or travel plans. The fine folks at PT Rigging agreed to stash the stick behind their shop (they’ll be doing some of the work there) and took the rod off my hands for measuring.
The consolation to this delay is that to be marooned in Port Townsend is no terrible hardship. If you don’t already have friends in town, you’ll have some soon. As the maritime crossroads of the Pacific Northwest, there are no shortage of congenial souls meandering around both on shore and in the anchorage.
Pocket yachts beached in front of the Northwest Maritime Center
So I plug away at various small projects that can be done out on the water, enjoy the snowy visage of Mount Baker and her sisters from the cockpit at lunch, take time out to wander the streets and bookstores and other happenings about town.
Last weekend there was a pocket yachts rendezvous and a steampunk festival going on simultaneously, a sort of twining of ingenuity in slightly different directions. It’s not common to see so much cleavage at the average yachting function but I thought it a worthy addition. Although, this being Port Townsend, it’s not unusual to exchange nods with folks in Victorian garb any other day of the week, either, as I did with one young lady perambulating around on her velocipede as I walked back to the beach from the store on Friday.
Although I am effectively pinned down until the rigging is done, there is some small sense of satisfaction in having a daily routine again. I wake up, have coffee in the cockpit if it’s pleasant out, or row in to the coffee shop if it’s not, write, research, wander. In the afternoon it’s cleaning or boat projects. I’ve finished installing and wiring a small solar panel, which keep the batteries topped up out on the hook. With that done, I moved on to installing a refrigerator conversion kit to the icebox, so cold drinks and leftovers are now on my menu once again. I cleared out the rot in the deck around the chainplates (and, where it wasn’t rotted, cut back the core so it wouldn’t get rotten in the future) and filled the space with epoxy in preparation for the plates going back in.
There’s not much I can do about the general filth and clutter on deck until I get the mast in and get a couple days in a marina to clean, so I simply swing around at anchor looking a mess, while passers by laugh and lampoon my mastlessness.
Is it a steampunk festival, or just another day in Port Townsend?
It’s not all sunshine and rhododendrons up here. There’s a lot of work, too.
But first, the rhododendrons. Or, at least, the Rhody Festival, a quintessential small town festival, complete with a run, carnival, and a surprisingly long parade.
I don’t run but I love to watch a good parade, and since it was spitting rain on the Saturday of, I didn’t feel guilty about trekking down to the far end of the waterfront and watching from the warm, dry upper story of a sail loft overlooking the route. It was the usual variety of small-town bands, floats, random vehicles from local businesses, and politicians out glad-handing.
Since it’s also Port Townsend, the whole thing was polished off with free cake.
But the next day was back to the yard.
I spend a lot of time complimenting boaters around me on the fine, smooth, unblemished finish of their bottoms when they’ve finished up painting. In return, I get a lot of comments about mine along the lines of, “Well, at least that’s the part no one can really see.”
I sure hope not. But so far, the topsides aren’t looking any better. Worse and worse, actually, as the accumulation of yard crud builds up with no way to wash it off. The mast is out and sails and various bits and pieces of the rig are scattered around haphazardly, contributing to the general state of disrepair.
Let the torquing begin!
I work hard to keep some portion of the interior clean and livable. Really, my desk and the v-berth are the only places I spend any time. The head is worthless and not much cooking happens with no way to do dishes. The salon is in pieces since the table is supposed to be mounted to the absent mast, and the bilge is opened up to dry out and provide access to the keel bolts.
That access is terrible, even with everything opened up. For the forward-most bolt, I actually have to drill out a plug—there is no access panel. The sole is an aftermarket addition, beautiful and in good shape, but I curse the previous owner for not taking the opportunity to make the bilge more accessible. That probably explains the lack of maintenance, though—out of sight, out of mind.
It’s also going to make installing a shower drain challenging. The original pan remains below the sole in the head, but it was never plumbed to a sump. In fact—and I think I can blame C&C for this one—the forward bilge section it leads to doesn’t even drain after into the main bilge. Water simply pools up there forward of the mast step, a terrible design decision.
Most of my time is taken up with bottom projects. Lubing through hulls, fixing the knotmeter, sanding, grinding, chipping. It isn’t until I get the top layers of paint off that I can see what truly awful shape the bottom is in. Several generations of paint have left a splotchy, uneven base. Some of it comes off down to the gelcoat with a couple quick passes of 80-grit on the orbital sander. Other places, I can go at it all day with 50-grit and nothing happens.
Rather than just leaving a plug or hatch, the previous owner just drew a circle of where to drill to get at the forwardmost keelbolt
There are fewer blisters than I had feared, although so many on the rudder that I realize I should have just stripped the whole thing down and done it from scratch instead of grinding them all out. The keel, too, has an odd pox, although it can’t be blistering since lead doesn’t blister. I read that sand impurities left over from the mold can cause a flaky surface but I marvel that something so terrible could have been left that way for so long without being addressed.
So, chipping, grinding, sanding. The only way to have done it right would have been to have had the entire hull professionally stripped, but it’s too late and too expensive for that now. So I seethe at doing a ton of work that will STILL only have to be discarded and redone again at some point in the future.
I trudge off to the showers exhausted each evening and go to bed early and disheartened.
It’s an existential question, the most fundamental sort: can you even be said to be a sailor without a ship? Is it not a ship that makes you a sailor? Why call yourself a sailor, if you don’t sail? Perhaps I am also a millionaire, without a million dollars, but… you know. That’s where my heart is. That’s who I really am.
I am without a ship, a wife, a life… pretty much everything I knew is far away, another world. So am I a sailor still?
And if I am a sailor still, am I then, as Conrad has it, “…of not much more account in this world than an aimless log adrift upon the sea”?
I have seen plenty of aimless logs adrift. I never thought to count myself among their number. But feeling of no account… that’s as accurate a phrase as I have found to describe myself of late. All aimless logs are good for is sinking.
It’s hard to write about boating when you don’t have a boat, and hard to write about the Sound and the Sea when you are landlocked, fifty miles and a mountain range away from the nearest saltwater. Hard to write about anything, really, when your head is torn apart by thoughts of loss and betrayal, and though those may be the only thoughts in your head, your lawyer tells you that you can’t discuss even that.
Saint Exupery exhorts us to long for the endless immensity of the sea, and that’s no problem: I’ve got longing in spades. The only pleasant things I think of have to do with being out on the water.
But I have nothing from which to build a boat; nowhere to put it, no money to outfit it, just a long, nightmarish limbo to live through for the next year while lawyers and leeches make all my assets evaporate. The cruising kitty is gone, and, at 42, I’m starting over at the bottom again, without the energy or optimism or skills I had when I was starting out. Everything I had saved and worked for is gone, and the reasons I had for saving and working gone with it.
There is nothing but discouragement left where my dreams once lived.
But there’s something redemptive and encouraging about the ocean. Empty horizons speak of limitless possibility. When I think of the people I have met while out sailing, in smaller boats, with fewer resources, with objectively more difficult situations, I can’t recall any misery or dejection: they were seeing the same amazing places that I was, puffing along with the same breeze, sailors all the same.
Even though I know that about the sea, I can’t say I’m optimistic. What I am, if I am anything, is shattered. And it’s hard to say if I’ll ever be back together again. I’m surely no longer the person I was, and that may be what is most painful, because I thought that guy was okay. I can’t say if anyone will ever see him again. Trauma changes each of us, and not always in the best of ways.
But if I can’t see over that horizon out there, at least I can see that it is there, and there is another side to it. I don’t know if it will hold reefs or storms, or golden sunsets. But I cling to the idea that it’s something different than what is here now.
My wife and I stopped on the dock to chat with a neighbor the other day, and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does this time of year, to how we were all respectively holding up aboard as the weather turns inexorably for the worse.
This is our neighbor’s first winter aboard and we found ourselves nodding sympathetically as she described the travails of condensation, chills, leaks, mold, and limited electricity. Oddly, however, I didn’t feel that natural tightening in my chest, the shortness of breath, the cold sweats, and other coronary-like symptoms that such discussions usually give rise to.
Then I realized: it was because this year, things haven’t been bad aboard Rosie. And last year wasn’t as bad as the winter before… and so on. It turns out we’ve actually been learning lessons every year, and those little tricks and techniques have been adding up, and instead of a soggy, moldy, dark pit of despair, this winter we’re living in a slightly cozier version of our summer-time sailing palace.
Make no mistake: winter aboard in the high latitudes is the acid test. It’s not crossing the Straits, it’s not getting to Alaska, it’s not venturing out to the coast… it’s juggling your limited resources and getting through those 8 daylight hour days with your sanity intact and your wardrobe uncorrupted by mold and diesel fumes. Those are the Pacific Northwest sailors we look up to, not the Vic-Maui winners who drive home to hot baths and in-floor heat systems in their palatial suburban mansions.
We’re by no means experts at this dance. Many folks have been doing it a lot longer, some of them in even more limited circumstances, and even more exposed locations. But this winter, our fourth spent living on board, we’re finally not dreading those long, dark days ahead before spring.
Here’s our formula so far:
KEEP IT DRY
Damp and miserable are words that will be forever closely associated in the liveaboard lexicon. The dryer you keep your boat inside, the less miserable you will be.
The first big rain of the season should tell you where your exterior leaks are, and you should fix them. Don’t put it off; you won’t get the opportunity after November. The earlier you start, the more likely you are to do it properly, too, not to simply slap thick, ugly beads of sealant down in desperation as the clouds gather (as we have done all too often!).
Mop your bilge out dry and clean it. Keeping it dry may not be possible all winter, but if you are starting with a pond of mold and scum down there in the first place, you’re going to be fighting an up-hill battle the rest of the season.
Once you’ve taken care of the water you don’t want inside, you have to deal with the water you have to have inside: mostly, what you bring in yourself.
Start by minimizing this. Shake off as much of the rain as you can out in the cockpit; kick off your shoes in the companionway.
What you can’t keep out, confine. If you have a wet locker, use it. If not, the head is often a ready-made place for putting wet things. Usually there is a separate vent; you can open it and close off the head from the rest of the interior and allow it to air out without contaminating the rest of the boat.
We avoid any other steam-generating activities through the winter, too. No spaghetti, no showers aboard, no simmering stews. If we absolutely have to boil something, we use an electric kettle to pre-boil the water, which keeps most of the vapor confined. As an added bonus, burning less propane in the course of cooking introduces less water vapor. We used to use an electric hot-plate as an alternative to the propane stove.
We have a small de-humidifier that goes in whichever compartment seems the most moist at any given time. In a couple compartments which otherwise have poor circulation, we installed small, cheap 12 volt computer fans to pull out moist air. In places where that wasn’t feasible, we use a variety of desiccants–we’ve trained friends and relatives to retain and pass along the little packets they all get in mail-order packages. Those work well for drawers and small lockers.
This year, I have decided to try some trays of silicone cat litter in larger spaces that aren’t fan-equipped but are too large for small desiccant containers. It’s not as efficient as dedicated desiccants but it’s cheap! We’ll see how that goes. Maybe it will just attract marina cats.
Condensation on interior hatches and portholes is a boon; the water has condensed out of the atmosphere in a place that is easy mop up and remove from the interior. We use some nice absorbent linen rags to soak it up, then toss them under the dodger, where they will dry with the least bit of sun for provocation.
Also on those rare sunny days, or even some cloudy ones without rain, we are aggressive about opening the boat up and venting even at the expense of some of our hard-earned warmth. Getting a mass of water vapor out on one clear day earns you some buffer when you are dealing with weeks following with one rainy day after another and no chance to dry anything out.
We try to keep fabric and cushions away from the hull. Mandy designed, and my mother sewed for us, a sort of bivvy sack of sheets that exactly fits our v-berth mattress, secured with elastic hooks rather than fitting over the edges. Combined with the Hypervent-like material that the mattress is made from, it keeps the bedding and compartment dry and warm.
In our aft cabin, where the cushion is just the traditional fabric-cased foam rubber, we put our cockpit cushions (which are waterproof, obviously) underneath the mattress, to provide an air gap for circulation and to keep the fabric out of any puddles that might form.
KEEP IT WARM Rosie isn’t well-insulated, but she’s insulated… a cored hull, some interior foam insulation, curtains, and interior wood paneling all help keep the warmth inside to some degree. The insulation also helps in keeping it dry; without getting into the dewy weeds of water cycle physics, it’s reasonably safe to say that keeping the boundary layer temperatures of your interior members warm when it is cold out will help prevent water condensing on them.
We have a forced-air diesel furnace aboard but while we’re on the dock, shore power is actually a cheaper heat source. We can keep the whole boat in the mid-sixties with a 1500 watt fan-equipped space heater when exterior temperatures are in the forties; by closing off some compartments, we can keep the necessary living spaces warm enough for us when it’s as cold out as it usually gets in Seattle (in the thirties or so). If it’s much colder than that, we can use both electric and diesel heat.
Space heaters are a controversial and potentially dangerous way to heat a boat. We use the moderately safer ceramic type, and position it so as to keep clear of potential ignition hazards. We tend not to run it when we’re not aboard. The diesel furnace absolutely doesn’t run when we’re not aboard, or when we’re asleep.
At night, we tend to rely mostly on an electric blanket for warmth; no sense heating the whole boat when we’re scrunched up in the v-berth.
When it’s particularly cold, you’ll be trading off ventilation for warmth. Our diesel furnace helps this equation; it has a cold-air return plumbed in, and so recirculates air from the boat, but also adds in relatively dry exterior air from its intake.
Wardrobe figures into your comfort level, also. We’ve gradually, slowly, and painfully learned to excise pretty much anything cotton from our wardrobes, particularly in the winter. If there’s water around, your socks and t-shirts are going to find it, soak it up, and hold it, cold and chilly, against your skin. Synthetics and wool are pretty much what we stick with now.
KEEP YOUR SANITY
I was going to say, “Keep it bright” but that’s just one aspect. If you’ve followed the advice to keep warm and dry, you’re probably living in something that now resembles a cave.
We use a lot of cheap, small tea-light candles when we’re aboard to make things a little more cheerful, as well as adding heat to the boat (you’d be amazed how easy it can be to heat a small boat using only candles; that was basically our back-up heat source on our last boat, and worked remarkably well).
This year, Mandy talked me into stringing up Christmas lights through the interior. The LED string draws almost nothing and it keeps her happy.
But there isn’t really any substitute for just making yourself get off the boat and go places from time to time. Usually, one or the other of us will take off for a few hours every other day or so and work from a coffee shop or co-working space or at a local library. It’s good to see the outside world; even if it’s wet and miserable and cold, it’s a change of pace. And if it’s wet and miserable and cold enough, it makes the boat look that much better.
If you can manage it, getting away for even longer is a good idea, too. This winter, we’ve picked up a couple different house-sitting gigs that will take us off the boat for a couple weeks or a month at a time. Houses aren’t necessarily all they are cracked up to be, either, but going from a couple hundred square feet to a couple thousand opens your horizons considerably.
An unavoidable side-effect of heating, ventilating, and lighting is increasing electric bills, and higher demands on your limited electrical systems.
From the safety perspective, it’s a good idea to go over your AC system before fall and ensure all your connections are clean and solid, and your shore power cord and plug are in good shape. If you’re not getting good connections, you’re going to be turning that valuable electricity into heat in the wrong places, and sometimes dangerous places.
We have to manage our electrical consumption closely to keep it affordable and to avoid over-drawing our circuit. It becomes a ritual; running the space heater in the morning to warm the boat, turning it off to run the hot water heater, juggling the demands of the de-humidifier against the electric blanket, the lighting against the ventilation fans. And you have to balance how much of your nice warm interior air you are willing to vent and replace with drier, but colder exterior air that you’ll have to pay to heat all over again.
In time, though, this all becomes a sort of second nature, like any sailing process.
Our way isn’t the only way, and probably not even the best way, but we’re pretty comfortable in these dark, cool, wet days. Still, we enjoy conversations with other liveaboards on the subject; everyone has a cool tip or trick that they use that we would never have thought of independently (the 12 volt computer fans, for instance, came from a chat with another couple this summer who had learned of it from another friend).
So what are your tricks for weathering the winter aboard?
My wife and I often house-sit for short stints during the winter months when we’re tied up in town. It’s a good opportunity to get off the boat for a bit, get away from the psychological struggles of living in a damp, closed-off cave and into a place with all the amenities of modern living that we have otherwise chosen to forgo. It’s like a little mini-vacation, really, a chance to remind ourselves how the rest of the first-world lives, and why.
But often, we come away from those gigs with a new appreciation for our own lifestyle, simple and self-contained as it is.
Last Saturday’s windstorm provided one of those experiences.
We have been watching two pugs for some friends of ours who were out of town for a couple of weeks. The first few days were a luxury of big-screen TV with several million cable channels, uninterrupted high-speed Internet, microwaves, full-size oven, on-site washing machines, huge refrigerators, and a bathtub. Even the pugs seemed to provide novel entertainment in the form of long walks in fall leaves.
Then came the storm.
We were both away from the house for most of the day; my wife returned first, mid-afternoon, only to find her way blocked. A tree had come down across a power line next to the only road in or out of the neighborhood, dropping the line right into the middle of the road and taking out power all along the hillside.
Exhibiting laudable compassion but scant sense of self-preservation, Mandy, worried about the pugs left alone in the dark, cooling house, drove under the wire and went down to the garage. The house itself sits on the waterfront, a hundred stairs down from the road, usually accessible via an electric tramway running up and down the hill. The tram, of course, was unusable; the stairs (on which she had, last year, badly sprained one ankle) were cluttered with downed branches and leaves.
Steeling herself for a descent through the flurry of debris in heels, Mandy made her way down the hill to retrieve the pugs. When she got there, she found that it was high tide. Fifty knot winds were rolling huge breakers onto the seawall, crashing up and over the deck, and cascading down into the basement. Normally, a sump pump automatically drains any water that finds its way down that far, but with no electricity, there was no pump.
People are forever saying to us, “Oh, I’d be worried about having a house that might sink!” but of course they’ve got it completely backwards… their houses absolutely would sink, whereas we like to think of ourselves as having a house that probably floats.
The house we were watching certainly would not float. Mandy grabbed the pugs and went back up the hill.
We met up in town and had dinner while debating our course of action. I decided that our obligatory house-sitting duties might include going down with the house, should it come to that, so we decided to go back in the hopes that the power had either been restored or we could find some alternate method of powering the pump. We normally have a generator on board our own boat which we could have retrieved and taken with us, but had loaned it out to a friend for a few weeks.
Things looked good as we drove back to the house; lights were swaying, but on. But as we drove down the last stretch of road, we passed a City Light truck–a small one, not the sort that fixes anything–poking around near where the tree had come down.
The power line was still down, although deactivated and marked off with cones. Beyond, all was darkness.
Something else that comes of living aboard is a habitual readiness for finding one’s way back along dark docks or being able to open a combination lock at night. So we had flashlights on us and used them to pick our way down the hill (pausing to laugh inappropriately at pugs high-centered in leaf-piles) and into the house.
It was dark and without heat. Another question we constantly hear about living aboard is, “How do you stay warm?”
Well, it’s not always easy, but we have a diesel furnace that is powered off our 12 volt system (as are most of our lights), a system backed up by a hefty battery bank, solar panels, and usually a separate generator. It works whether we’re attached to shore power or not, and if the city electrical grid goes down, it bothers it not a whit.
I thought often of that tiny little Wallas furnace as we shivered through the long, dark night at the house.
And it was dark; we scoured the cabinets and pantry and found only a handful of birthday candles. On the boat, we use candles a lot, not just for ambiance, but also because they can actually heat up such a small space pretty well on their own. Huddled over a tiny birthday candle (stuck in a used Keurig k-cup for a hold–we didn’t have any cake to put them in), the light and warmth were swallowed up by the vast space of the house.
Power, water, and sewage are the three great things that most people use (or, ahem, produce, as the case may be) from the city unthinkingly day in and day out. Deprived of only one of the three for less than twenty-four hours, we found ourselves pretty miserable.
Those are also the things that people most often worry about when it comes to living aboard, and they are frequently cited as the most significant obstacles when people tell us they couldn’t do what we do. But it seems to me that they aren’t always aware of the trade-offs they are making when they forgo the self-contained nautical solutions to those issues. Our head and heat and water and power aren’t as voluminous and powerful as city-connected systems. But they’re simple and easy to fix or bypass when problems arise.
Public utilities are tremendously reliable, of course. And it’s not that houses can’t be equipped to deal with outages. But on board a boat, you almost can’t help it. You’ve got stocks of food that lasts forever and is easy to prepare because that’s what you eat on passage. You’ve got spares because you can’t count on a hardware store when break out on the water. When power or water have gone out in our lakefront neighborhood in the past, we often haven’t even noticed.
The power came back up in the morning, the pump came on in the basement, our heat and unlimited power and lighting were restored. Salt caked the deck, windows, and siding on the waterfront exterior. Puddles emerged beneath the refrigerators; they’d self-defrosted and leaked overnight. There was no bilge for the water to drain into.
But we left with a renewed appreciation for how little our boat is like a house!
That’s the only adequate word I can come up with to describe Mario Vittone’s presentation at the Museum of History and Industry on the 2012 sinking of the HMS Bounty replica off the coast of North Carolina. The title of the presentation was “The Illusion of Experience” and it is that illusion, for any thinking sailor, that is so sobering: ultimately, Vittone is talking less about the Bounty than about us, and the difficulty of seeing through the veil of what we call experience into the reality of the dangers that any day on the water may entail.
“Nobody on the crew is terribly unlike you or me,” Vittone said. The failures aboard Bounty, in his view, were failures inherent to human nature, not to intentional neglect or outright indifference. To Vittone, the mechanisms of the actual sinking had become beside the point (although he clearly had explored them in as much detail as anyone who cannot visit Bounty’s cold grave at 2400 fathoms ever can); instead, the tragedy encompassed every other problem, every other tragedy at sea that he had heard or read about in his 22 years of experience as a highly decorated Coast Guard rescue swimmer.
It’s Vittone’s assertion that all tragedies at sea (with the exception of some medical evacuations) begin with decisions made on the dock, before a line is ever let go. On the Bounty, it was the cumulative impact of a host of decisions, some made years previously, that culminated in what might have been the one last fatal one of slipping the hawsers and heading out at all with a Category 2 hurricane on the horizon.
His talk explored the roots of those decisions more than the consequences. In both his presentation and his series of articles on gcaptain covering the joint NTSB/Coast Guard hearings on the incident, he focused on the thinking behind those decisions and explored the rationalizations that the decision-makers used at each stage to convince themselves that what to all objective appearances was a dangerously rash voyage was, in fact, business as usual.
Vittone originally used the phrase “illusion of experience” as a reference to someone who knew a very little bit about hull maintenance teaching someone who knew absolutely nothing; in relative terms, that little bit of knowledge must have looked like a lot of experience to someone completely new to the business. But he has taken the concept further, suggesting that even someone who had a great depth of experience (such as Captain Robin Walbridge) but who came by it only narrowly (e.g., aboard a small handful of vessels; or primarily one, such as was the case with Walbridge) might undergo the same illusion.
This scenario should ring a loud bell for many small-craft sailors.
Vittone’s insights mesh with those of other authors who have explored this mystery in detail, including Laurence Gonzales (“Deep Survival”) and Atul Gawande (“The Checklist Manifesto”). Gawande’s characterizations of the condition that Vittone describes might be to call those in its grip “inept.” In Gawande’s world, ineptitude is a failure to apply existing knowledge to prevent catastrophe. Captain Walbridge had all the knowledge at hand to make a decision to stay in port or seek other shelter; he simply failed to apply it to the conditions he was facing.
But Vittone’s take is more insidious; he might argue that Walbridge did apply his knowledge to the situation; and, unfortunately, among those things which he thought he knew was that he had been in difficult, marginal conditions with Bounty previously and successfully sailed her through them. That knowledge may have helped inform his decision to put out in conditions, and in a vessel, that objectively were an extraordinary risk.
In this, Vittone seems to join Gonzales in suggesting that, in fact, experience can be one of the most hazardous contributors to tragedy… something that Gonzales calls “The Sandpile Effect,” in which positive experiences in marginal conditions sublimate the risks so that they appear, subjectively, acceptable, even normal. After each such experience, the margins become stretched further and further.
In fact, Vittone said, what scared him the most about the Bounty incident was that they had almost made it… if the pumps had been working, there was a good chance the ship might have made port. And, having succeeded once more at one further extension of his storm experience, Walbridge might have stretched his luck even further the next time, and more people might have died.
If this has a familiar feeling to it, it’s because it’s just an extension of what most of us are pleased to call simply “experience.” We learn we can do things successfully by having done them; we expand the horizon of the possible by measuring what we have succeeded at and extending our ambitions out a bit further. This “crawl, walk, run” model is the basis for training programs of every sort, from day-sailing instruction to master’s endorsements. The thought that it can, itself, become a dangerously subversive pattern of thought is profoundly disturbing. “Experience is being fooled by someone who’s gotten away with the same mistake longer than you have,” said Vittone.
Vittone makes it clear that none of these revelations are new, and indeed, that they are nearly universal. He spent some time explicitly relating the phenomena that Walbridge underwent with that of NASA administrators responsible for the decisions to launch Challenger and, later, Columbia in the face of objective data that suggested caution. (Anyone interested in the Challenger disaster and in the sort of rationalization and normalization of risk that Vittone is highlighting here owes it to themselves to read Richard Feynman’s appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the accident.)
If this is in fact simply human nature at work, then none of us are, by definition, immune to it. In fact, those who believe that they are (“that could never happen to me; I would never make such bad decisions”) may be the most susceptible. If it can happen to genuine rocket scientists, what hope do the rest of us have for avoiding it?
Vittone’s suggestion is that we all stay a little bit afraid… to provide “a fair estimation of the account of peril” in our decision-making process. And he says that one of the best ways of achieving that is to entertain doubts; your own, and those of your crew. Or, as Gonzales advises more succinctly, “Be humble.”
At the end of the day, you’ll have to make a decision, and it may be right or wrong. But it is likely to be better if it is informed by not just experience, but a diversity of experience.
And this is where Gawande’s prescriptions can be useful; they provide a systematized method for objectively assessing decisions even in the face of extreme emotion or pressure… a method that can be designed and evaluated at leisure in the safety and with the resources of the experience of others easily at hand.
Again, these recommendations are not new. But they are not broadly encouraged in the sailing community today either. Our experiences have been that they are unnecessary to our successful return. But that experience may be just another illusion.
They sometimes call this month “Fogust” out here on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and it’s been living up to the reputation so far this year. Our radar has gotten a good workout from the moment we crawled out of Bull Harbour all the way back down into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We’ve had wind and fog, rain and fog, lightning and fog… even, sometimes, sun and fog, as the upper layer peels back and bathes the boat in a stream of brilliance from the heavens even as the surrounding water is obscured by thick, pearly walls.
Fog can be picturesque. There’s something supernatural about being completely cut off from the visual world when you’re inside a thick fog bank. If it’s not so thick, it can perform strange and wondrous tricks with views of already spectacular scenery… decorating a wooded slope with streaming tendrils, torn apart by the trees, gracing an otherwise pedestrian-looking rock with a crown of fluff, or merely rendering an entire vista in soft relief, as if through a vaseline-smeared lens. And it has it’s own sort of terrain features: fog lines, fog banks, fog mountains, fog rivers, fog canyons. Once, in bright sunshine, we even saw a fog-bow.
A Fog-Bow
But mostly it’s become an annoyance to us at this point. We’re out here, at least in part, for the scenery. And we can’t see it. We’ve had good sailing days and bad sailing days, but in the fog, good sailing becomes mediocre, and bad sailing, which otherwise would be tempered by the amazing spectacle of water, mountains, whales, and eagles, becomes miserable. It’s like being stuck in a sensory deprivation chamber–nothing but blank, undifferentiated whiteness at an unmeasurable distance. Without the steady visual cue of the horizon, my wife becomes even more susceptible to sea-sickness.
All that is just tourist whining, of course. The more serious problem is that fog makes sailing more dangerous. We lose much of our range of visual scanning for hazards on, and just beneath, the water. Deadheads and other semi-submerged obstacles appear out of nowhere. Reference points for navigation, including most marks, are unavailable.
Radar helps fill the gap with respect to large land masses and most other vessels, but it can prove as terrifying in its own way as the fog itself. Most radar users are familiar with the phenomena of “radar-assisted collisions,” perhaps most famously in the case of the Andrea Doria/Stockholm accident. Sometimes, knowing what’s out there is more dangerous than running blind.
Fog with a more menacing look as it rolls toward us near Cape Sutil
One afternoon as we meandered along at four knots or so through a bright glowing fog bank, I squinted at the radar display trying to make out a wavering blotch it painted intermittently about one mile ahead on my port bow. Before the fog had thickened up, I had spotted a large trawler and a smaller sport fisherman in the vicinity, but this return didn’t look like either of them. The bearing was steady and the distance was decreasing, but I couldn’t hear any engine sounds… another sailboat? The way it was fading in and out, it didn’t seem unlikely. And if, like us, they had white sails and a white hull, they’d be particularly difficult to pick out in the mist.
I watched anxiously as the range continued to decrease. Three-quarters of a mile, a half-mile, a quarter-mile… still no visual contact. As the range dropped, my blood pressure increased. I called Mandy on deck to help scan for it. Eventually, still with no sighting, it dropped away along our port side and I lost it. Mandy went back below and I tried to get my thumping heart rate back to normal.
A few minutes later, I glanced at the radar again. The contact was dead astern of us, at one mile… and closing! I flipped around, though I knew I couldn’t possibly see it, and stared out into the fog so intently that I started imaging things… dark shapes just out of sight, the white flashes of a bow-wave.
Just then, it occured to me that the monotonous groan of the radome spinning over my head was beating out the theme to Jaws.
I never did find out what that particular blip was. But we have had plenty of close calls all along the coast similar to that.
Plain Fog
What I think about most, though, was a tense ten minutes we had several years ago on a bright, sunny day in Mosquito Pass with not a shred of fog in sight. It was our very first passage through that picturesque, windy passage, and with our chart plotter running, depth-sounder sounding away, and all the relevant landmarks and navigational aids in plain sight, we anticipated no problems.
Then there was a loud “pop” from below, over the thrum of the diesel, and an acrid cloud of smoke drifted up out of the companionway. At the same moment, every electrical instrument on board went dead.
While Mandy scrambled below to fight any fires she might find, I was suddenly in an unfamiliar channel, notorious for currents and blind turns, without a depth reference or accurate position. A moment of panic passed quickly as I realized that an accurate chart was close at hand, and I could easily see all the channel markers and points along the passage. We made our way into Garrison Bay without further incident and found that the positive wire from the alternator had snapped off at the connector. Ten minutes with a crimper and spare connector and it was all fixed again.
Multi-layered fog
But the rapidity with which all our modern instrumentation can be put out of commission, in the worst spots at the worst moments, has stayed with me. Fog forces reliance on those instruments. We carry spares and have alternatives, but some of these are simply inadequate for navigation in zero visibility in tight quarters. Fifty years ago, before GPS and radar, people simply didn’t put themselves in those positions. But we do now, and think little of it. Until something goes wrong.
I usually experience some grand catharsis when we finally sail off toward the horizon after a period of difficult outfitting. I sometimes worry that the troubles we have getting ourselves together and out the door, as it were, will eclipse the purpose and design of living this sort of lifestyle, shunting us into some undesirable halfway-world between conventional life and sailing free, a limbo that consists of the worst parts of both and the best of neither. That worry, usually strongest in the middle of the darkest hours when it seems as if we will never actually pull away, has always faded with the wind and water and sunshine that wash the soul during long days under sail along the Sunshine Coast.
But this time, that feeling has persisted, clinging tightly and ominously at the back of my head. I’ve begun to worry that the aggravation is never going to be outweighed by the moments of freedom and fleeting happiness, and that dark consideration colors everything that happens now that we’re out cruising freely and without timetables along the Strait of Georgia.
We’ve had good–great, even–sailing since we finally tacked our way out of Port Townsend in light winds two weeks ago. A week of cool, showery weather brought stiff southeasterlies, and we cruised north quickly driven before them. We skipped through the San Juans in two nights, then made the jump straight up to Vancouver in a long, lumpy day in fog and rain.
As we approached the long-awaited entrance to False Creek, though, we noticed what appeared to be an unusual number of kayaks and paddleboards milling about off the old, defunct Kitsilano Coast Guard station. As we drew closer, the skittering crowd suddenly coalesced, and formed a line across the channel. We dropped into neutral and glided slowly to a halt, the waters thankfully placid and dull after a long day fighting Fraser River chop. What we wanted was nothing more than an easy clearance into the country and a solid set in sticky False Creek muck for a long and deserved rest; what we were facing looked more like a blockade. Had the First Nations decided to close off the Creek? Environmental protesters taking matters into their own hands to protest unregulated discharges? We spun theories out of thin air as we tried to divine the purpose of the line-up.
Then, a loud hailer came echoing thinly across the water. “Five… Four… Three… Two… One… GO!” Paddles flashed into motion, water churned, and we found ourselves right in the middle of a racecourse off Kits.
Fortunately, the wave of small craft fluidly broke around us, passing to either side without taking any notice. We picked out a kayaker in the middle of the pack at random: “Go number 183! Come on, you can do it!” She looked up, distracted, then smiled, and bent back to paddling.
We spent the rest of the week in Vancouver wrestling with various post-departure difficulties and adjusting to life without the usual amenities. As is so often the case, our immediate plans were upset by a variety of factors… failure to finish some projects before leaving, international complications, simple things that turned out to be hard or impossible, loose ends that hadn’t been tied up. The intermittent bursts of rain and sun seemed to echo our moods, shifting from dark to light as we wavered between enjoying Vancouver and feeling sucked back in to the problems we hoped we had left behind.
Our moods might have improved had we simply sat there and waited for the weather to turn and the problems to work themselves out, as they always seem to, but the succession of southeasterlies that came with the rains were too good to pass up and we pulled out after only a few days, heading north, with no real destination in mind.
We still have no real destination in mind; but we are running, downwind, from the problems that are probably still lying back where we left them.
