For no particularly good reason, I mostly go out and see the sights on weekends rather than during the week.
This past weekend seemed like a good time to visit Chinatown because it was the kick-off to the Chinese New Year celebration (it’s now the Year of the Rooster, in case you were curious. Specifically, a fire rooster, which sounds like a mid-level Dungeons and Dragons encounter).
The festivities are muted this year in deference to the period of mourning for the country’s late king (who will feature a cameo later in this story), but the city is heavily Chinese, both ethnically and to some extent culturally, so it figured to still be somewhat raucous.
Another excuse was to visit an exhibition by photographer Landry Dunand (this is the exhibit, though the location had moved to a Chinatown gallery), who uses old photographic techniques to capture modern subjects… in this case, Thailand, although he is better known for his work in Afghanistan.
Before heading to Chinatown, though, we ducked in to check out Timemaker, a different exhibition that was on the way.
Finding galleries, or anything else, is an interesting exercise in Bangkok. Even when you have the street address and the full powers of GPS and Google Maps at your disposal, the entries are often around back, in a dark alley, and utterly unmarked. You could well be stepping into someone’s home or the back of a store.
Gallery guide
In this case, a street vendor pointed the way, and we went up some rickety stairs to a plywood door and stepped into a rather modern looking gallery and cafe space. A tiny calico cat ran up immediately to greet us loudly.
She was our guide to the exhibition; she circled the room, looking back to make sure we were taking in all the pictures, then she shot up the stairs, meowing all the way, to the next part of the exhibition. When we moved too slowly, the meowing became even louder and more insistent, echoing down the stairs.
She followed us out to say goodbye, then became more interested in chasing a rat. There are plenty of rats to chase.
Along the way to the next gallery (here insert some random amusing miscommunications having to do with the lack of distinction between the liquid l and r phonemes in Thai resulting in a dead-end conversation about who exactly “Gary” was and why we would want to go see him), we hit a wave of incense smoke as thick as a forest fire.
It was drifting out onto the street from the temple of Wat Traimit, the home of the fabled Golden Buddha.
The story behind it is an interesting one but you can get it from Wikipedia. The temple where it lives is now home to a museum also, and overrun with tourists. But with the holiday, many locals were there as well, lighting candles and delivering offerings to the monks.
There is a protocol to entering, which finally drove home the differences in culture to me here.
The fabled Golden Buddha. Yes, most of them are gold, but this one is fabled.
It’s not just the removal of shoes, which is common enough. Or the requirement that you step over a threshold rather than onto one.
The strange part was what was allowed in these holy places versus what was not.
With a trio of monks standing at a table in front of the statue, observant Thais approached and reverently handed them packages of clothes, food, and other gifts, bowing and paying respect. Yet at the same time, the room was crowded with tourists, taking selfies with the statue and wandering through the middle of what seemed like a moderately significant religious ceremony.
No one thought this was strange. Heck, some of the locals were taking selfies, too. But on the other hand, my date, who had worn shorts, was careful to rent a wrap at the booth (and the degree to which this is engrained is evidenced by the fact that there is a booth out front where you can rent wraps) for that purpose out front and cover her legs, and she was constantly mindful of where the monks were in the room–even if one of them approached her and their clothes accidentally touched, she said, she would feel very bad about it, since such contact was forbidden.
The museum was closed but I found the compound and the protocols interesting enough.
Afterward, we ate at what I was told was a famous restaurant up the street a ways. I couldn’t tell you the name of it–the sign was in Chinese. But there was a very long line so I imagine it was well-known in some circles. The food was good, anyway.
Dressed up for Chinese New Year at the local grocery store.
There were street vendors out in front and lining all the roads, selling all kinds of apparently identical foods, but the lines were a little blurred… the restaurant is open to the street and tables spill out onto the sidewalk and beyond. We were seated at the outside edge, which made for excellent people-watching.
There were both locals and tourists crowding the sidewalks and spilling over into the streets. I am not entirely sure what everyone was doing, unless we were all just there looking at each other. There were a lot of women in traditional Chinese dress, both tourists and locals. It just seemed like everyone was out walking, though, spilling out into the road with the cars and taking in the sights.
So Chinatown was busy, but it seemed to be busy just for the sake of busyness. We’d passed a bar with some decent live music on the way there, but when we went back it was packed.
So we ended up in another part of town, at another club… Saxophone. This is also apparently well-known and well-respected as a local jazz club, but they weren’t playing jazz that night. Instead, when we arrived there was a Thai band offering up some pretty decent covers of 60s/70s blues-rock.
Although the place wasn’t completely packed, it was still very busy, and the only seats we could find were right in the band’s lap. It would have been hard to talk even if we both were completely fluent in the same language, which isn’t the case anyway, so for conversation we resorted to typing on our phones and trading notes.
The band started playing a tune that I didn’t recognize and my date typed “I think this song is by the king.”
Funny, I thought. It doesn’t sound like an Elvis tune.
Then it clicked. For some reason, I had been reading up on the late king, Rama IX. He was universally loved and respected here and the mourning period is taken very seriously. Commemorative photos of him are everywhere you turn, and black and white bunting adorns both government and private buildings… even the American embassy.
As I was reading his Wikipedia page, it became clear why. Not only the longest serving Thai king, he was also a man of diverse interests and talents. (Of particular interest to me, he was an accomplished sailor and boat designer. He won a gold medal in the Southeast Asia Peninsular Games in 1967 in sailing.)
Among those was music. In 1950, he started his own jazz band in Bangkok and played live on Friday nights for many years. He even performed with Benny Goodman.
This, I thought, explained much about the people’s affection for the man and continuing sadness at his passing. I tried to imagine Queen Elizabeth, or even Prince Charles, jamming with Benny Goodman. My brain couldn’t process it.
Some of his compositions, then, remain popular on the Bangkok jazz circuits, it seems. The one the band played that night wasn’t half bad.
So, in answer to the question of why, in a major, hazard-prone city the size of Bangkok, one hears almost no sirens as one does in a major Western city, I have discovered this: emergency responders rarely turn them on.
Why do they rarely turn them on? Because why bother, that’s why.
I’d heard that Thai drivers were no respecters of the global “pull over and let the ambulance by” rule that Westerners outside of the city of New York live by, but it’s really a whole different scale of shits not given.
As I was leaving the condo to go out tonight, I noticed a column of grey-black smoke rising over the city to the east. To penetrate the smog, smoke has to be pretty beefy stuff, so it was easy to read as a major structure fire, or so I thought.
I learned later that there are apparently massive, tightly-packed slums here (I haven’t seen this yet) where almost no vehicles fit. Now, during Chinese New Year, with candles and incense burning constantly, fires are more common (there’s a warning posted in the condo building about this). But I’m told the residents there are mostly on their own, since none of the engines can get in. They respond and wait near the edges to keep the flames from spreading while the slum-dwellers do their best to extinguish the conflagrations.
Not pictured: even more apparatus scattered around the lot looking broken down. But it’s an actual working fire station.
There happens to be a fire station between the condo and the closest BTS station. It took me a while to identify it as such. The courtyard is packed to the gills with apparatus in various color schemes, types, and states of disrepair. I had taken it for a boneyard at first, and perhaps it is that also, but it turns out that somewhere in there are a functioning engine or two, since one came blaring around the corner, lights flashing and siren screaming, as I walked down the street.
It was rush hour, however, and the road was well packed. The engine crawled along at the pace of traffic, no one even attempting to pull over to let it by (in fairness, there are few places on the average Bangkok street where it would be conceivable to pull over to let someone by, not that drivers are averse to mounting the sidewalk in other circumstances).
The firefighters in the cab looked stoic about it as I passed them at a walking pace. Just another evening commute.
The police truck that followed about a minute later didn’t bother with the siren at all, understandably. At least the cop isn’t going to ruin his hearing for no good reason.
Absent the equipment requirements of the fire department, the police seem to respond more often on motorcycles, riding two-up and cruising between lanes and along sidewalks like all the other motorbikes. (The occupancy record that I have witnessed so far, incidentally, has been five on a bike–two adult women on a single scooter with three children variously wedged between them or hanging off the ends.)
But traffic jams are actually probably preferable to open road here, as I found out during my first hair-raising ride in a Bangkok taxi.
I was out late, after the BTS lines stopped running (I’d been at Saxophone, a jazz pub where there wasn’t any jazz… one creditable Thai band covering 70’s rock and blues tunes, though) and too far to walk home.
Fortunately, I was with someone who could speak Thai, and happens to live in the same condo development, otherwise I would never have figured out how to describe how to get there to the driver. In some cities, cabbies just seem to know how to get everywhere, but this involved a lengthy conversation that I could never have managed on my own.
Two smallish rigs responding very, very slowly in traffic below a BTS station. Probably took 5 minutes for them to move 200 meters.
Once that was out of the way, though, the rocket ride commenced.
There were no seatbelts, which didn’t seem to concern either the cabbie or my companion, but I was petrified as we blasted down narrow streets, through red lights, ignoring lane markings and other traffic as if they were ghosts. Motorcycles cut in and out of the stream randomly. I didn’t have a view of the speedometer, but we must have been hitting 50 on some open stretches of city street.
There was a police checkpoint on the way, and the cabbie blew right through it, appearing (to me) to only narrowly miss running over several cops, but no one seemed perturbed. Tied together by some organizing principle indiscernible to the casual western passenger, heavy use of braking and judicious wheel spinning got us through a dozen near-misses that would have set horns sounding in the States and probably resulted in a road rage incident.
If NASCAR ever started recruiting Thai taxi drivers, all the good ol’ boys who currently dominate the list of NASCAR cup winners would all be looking for work at O’Reilly’s. These guys are fearless and trained almost from birth in a traffic gladiator pit in which only the quick survive.
But somehow we survived all the way home, and all for the low, low price of around $6. For thrills like that, a ride at an American amusement park would cost $30 or $50!
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.
What is it about living on land that makes us fat?
I’ve written before about how easy it is to get flabby when out cruising, but that was at least partly tongue-in-cheek. In reality, I tend to drop pounds when we’re on the boat, although I’m not really sure why. Conversely, I am not really sure why it is that I pack on the pounds when living ashore for any length of time.
Mandy and I are wrapping up a month of house-sitting, taking care of two wayward pugs for some friends who have jetted off to Southeast Asia for a while, and I sit here bloated and burping now watching Wheel of Fortune on their big-screen TV, reflecting on the possible causes for the sudden expansion of my midriff.
I always imagine that being on land is going to improve my general conditioning; there are more places to go, more area to move around in, space to exercise. Throw in the dogs, who like to have a walk now and again, and the fact that this particular house is at the base of a hill a hundred stair steps away from the street, and you would think that I’d be shedding pounds like crazy.
But the opposite has happened and I am left wondering: is it the TV? We don’t have one on board and what we watch we stream over the Internet, rarely. It’s been a treat to have a big screen high-def set during the Winter Olympics and Oscars this year (and I have developed an addiction now to “True Detective,” as has Mandy to “Downton Abbey”) but perhaps the lethargy that comes from sitting and staring at the screen has depressed my metabolism to hibernation levels.
Or maybe it’s the full kitchen. Mandy has gone a little crazy with the cooking now that she has an electric oven, all kinds of counter space, appliances, and a five-burner stove at her disposal. And she’s gotten pretty good at it. Cheese, eggs, heavy cream, pasta… I suppose those can add up. We had pretty much abolished pasta from the boat menu this winter to keep the humidity down, so maybe we went a little overboard here.
Speaking of kitchen appliances, maybe it was the microwave. We don’t have one on board, and it is still a bit of a mysterious luxury to put a bit of food into a metal box, push a few buttons, and have it emerge hot and delectable in mere seconds.
Then there is the opposite of the microwave, the freezer. Our icebox on board keeps cold enough, but freeze things, it does not… which makes ice cream a rare and fleeting treat. Here, it’s pretty much on-demand, and oh, boy, is there demand. With chocolate sauce and whipped cream, frequently.
And if you combine the freezer and the full-size oven, what you get is pizza… whenever you want it, and loaded with toppings.
There’s also a toaster, which practically begs to be loaded up with my childhood sweetheart, Pop Tarts, not to mention my more mature and worldly mistress, Toaster Strudel.
Of course, Americans are famously fat, and there don’t seem to be any particular trends dividing the seagoing from the landlubbers. In fact, I saw recently that Montana is the slimmest state… and also among the most land-locked. And I have passed a few folks out on the floats wide enough to make you grab for a piling so’s not to be forced off the edge of the dock. So it’s not shoreside living in general, apparently, it’s just me.
I suppose it could just be a general lack of willpower. Notwithstanding the frequency with which people who claim to know me tell me I’m stubborn, it’s possible that I just don’t have the degree of discipline necessary to regulate myself in the relative freedom and prosperity of a house. Perhaps I’ve fallen to excess without the confines of the tiny floating world to restrain me.
On board a boat, restrictions come with the territory–a certain order to everything, necessary limits to resources which force one to consider the details of the life one lives at an intimate level unnecessary in the first-world home.
Whatever it is, I’m ready to be done with it, and squeeze back aboard my tiny 36’ sailboat. Fortunately, fat floats.
Hang on—I think my Pop Tarts just popped up out of the toaster. I’ve got to go.
I was slaking my thirst for things nautical during the dark winter months here recently by perusing some of the larger online cruising forums when I came across a thread titled “Shy cruising; or, don’t invite me to the potluck” which begged to be read.
The original poster commented that she had been reading a different thread recently (such is the nature of cruising life in the winter; we don’t talk about different anchorages we’ve seen recently, we talk about various threads we have been to and explored) in which the social aspects of cruising were rated most highly in the experience of many of the posters.
This person found that moderately confusing, because, she said, her and her husband cruise to get away from people, not to hang out with more of them.
This apparently struck a chord and a chorus of “me too!” posts joined the thread, each echoing the same sense of relief that you might find at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where you have finally found a forum of like-minded folks to whom you can confess your embarrassing condition in safety and with acceptance.
I number myself among those folks who most enjoy cruising precisely because it gets me away from other people. It doesn’t take me more than a week in the city before I’m dreaming again of empty anchorages, with only trees, seals, and sky for company. Oh, and my wife. But she’s pretty tolerable these days.
As the forum experience shows, this isn’t actually a completely rare proposition. Nor should it be terribly surprising.
Some of our most celebrated cruising progenitors were folks who intentionally set off cruising in order to avoid the crowds: Joshua Slocum, Bernard Moitessier, and here locally, Capi Blanchet and her brood (one could argue she had all the society she needed in one familial bunch already).
You might think that a lot of people still go cruising for the same reason, and if that was your assumption, you’d be shocked to find out how social the whole scene actually is. It’s hard to imagine a more convivial bunch of adventurous non-conformists. As the original thread that sparked the anti-potluck thread demonstrated, many of the folks out there find their interactions with other cruisers to be among the high points of their voyages.
Of course, with sociability comes sociopathy; get a large enough group together of any sort of folks, anywhere, and you will start finding petty slights and disagreements adding up, social norms developing and corresponding shunning and shaming occurring when those norms are violated. Cruisers, for all their kindness and generosity, are no different.
So there are still some of us who would just as soon avoid the crowds, spend our time in the unspoiled anchorages where we can be apart, and hunker down and read a good book while we’re recharging and tanking up at the marina instead of kicking back in the yacht club bar with a crowd.
Still, we are all social creatures by evolution, and however much we think we want to isolate ourselves, we’re just not equipped to survive individually. Cruisers are a tribe, and the rituals of community are not without value, even if you don’t find them particularly enjoyable. Those rituals provide some of the binding that strengthens the altruism, increase communal knowledge transfer, and lay the groundwork for the rapid, strong interpersonal relationships that even us loners enjoy with other sailors on a one-to-one basis.
For my part, and I think this is true of most cruisers to greater or lesser degrees, I appreciate both aspects of the lifestyle. I actually even enjoy a potluck now and again. And the benefit to cruising is that you can have it both ways. Many people do; there are many empty, isolated anchorages in the Broughtons, for example, where solitary boats can be, well, solitary, for days at a time with no neighbors or visitors. Those anchorages are less than a day’s sail away from, say, Pierre’s at Echo Bay, where every night is a feast and there is always a crowd.
Hopping back and forth between the two states is one of the great advantages of the cruising lifestyle. So, don’t invite me to the potluck … but when I feel like it, I’ll probably just show up anyway.
Having spent quite a lot of my time around sailors lately, I’ve found myself exposed to a greater proportion of sea stories than the ordinary man-on-the-street experiences in the average year.
I’m undergoing treatment and the doctors think I’ll pull through it all right, but it’s left me thinking about the sea story genre in general, and the construction and delivery of sea stories in particular. There are good and bad sea stories, and good and bad deliveries thereof, and as with any genre, the bad ones seem to be in the majority (thus the cause of my condition, no doubt).
In the interests of furthering the cause of good sea stories, I am going to share my thoughts on the matter and hope that two or three people listen earnestly and adopt some of my proposed standards before they try to tell me one more time about that once when the dog couldn’t make it ashore and peed in the dinghy instead.
That’s not a sea story, in my book. That’s just cruising; hardship is commonplace. You were in a storm, and there were big waves? Big deal; fear and water go hand-in-hand, too. I don’t mind if you tell me, but I’ve been scared and wet a lot of times too and it doesn’t interest me all that much anymore.
You hit a whale? Now we’re on the right track. But if you just hit a whale, and went below, and everything was fine, and the whale waved at you and swam off okay, that’s not much of a sea story to me, either. It’s novel, sure, and I’m sure it was exciting if you were there, but it’s nothing that’s going to keep anyone on the edge of their seat.
Sea stories have to either be tense or funny. But the best of them are both.
What makes a good sea story for me is the humorous or casual portrayal of a deadly situation. Death isn’t funny to a lot of folks, I understand that. But in two of the most amazing hurricane stories I have ever heard told, the hurricane was just a bit player in the incident, barely worthy of a walk-on mention, quickly lost in the background of an even more exciting incident.
But this resonates with other sailors because being able to laugh at such danger is what helps us to face it.
This is good news for a lot of potential sea storytellers, because it means that folks who don’t have the presence or timbre to keep a crowd hanging on the edge of a cliff in casual conversation can at least shoot for funny as a qualifying factor. Not everyone can pull off spooky or tense, but I have confidence that most people can learn to be some sort of funny. Self-deprecating often works in the absence of anything else.
The other necessary qualification, of course, is to have some sea stories to tell. It’s not adequate to have only a handful; you’ll become repetitive and be that guy who is always trying to find a way to work his one decent story awkwardly into the current topic of conversation. I have approximately one good sea story and I’ve learned, no matter what, it’s generally best to just keep my mouth shut, even when I think that it might be pertinent to the theme at hand.
What you need is a vast catalog of stories, which will seem like a bottomless well to your listeners, which you can segue smoothly into regardless of what the subject of current discussion might be. Tendrils from any single one of your stories might themselves have enough depth and detail to spend an evening sharing them. If you can shift from a story about shopping for shoes in Venezuela to surviving a tsunami off the coast of New Zealand to your initiation into a tribe of cannibals in Indonesia in the course of a ten minute conversation, then you have exactly the catalog of which I speak. If you just have that one time when you were in the Philippines when the volcano exploded, that could be exciting or funny, sure, but you’re going to get to the end of it, and then what? Real sea story tellers always have more, or at least give you a sense they have more, just over the horizon.
The best sea stories open modestly as a small anecdote when, for example, someone happens to mention a minor issue they have addressed recently with their head and you recall something similar that happened to you once in Brazil, and your solution was like theirs, only involved uncontacted native tribes, drug smugglers, and a hurricane of some sort. You open and close with the head itself, of course; the other involved parties, as fascinating as they might seem to the layman, will be mentioned only in passing, as between seaman, who understand that a really nasty head glitch is ten times the trouble of even the most vicious drug smuggler.
The best way to acquire such a catalog of stories, from my observations, is to be poor, or have been poor at some point while out on your voyages. Rich sailors have weather and docking accidents and fouled anchors just like everyone else, but there just seems to be something about living dirt cheap and close to the locals that provokes a series of rollicking yarns. This is why Tristan Jones managed to produce a veritable library of books about his experiences, and why Fatty Goodlander can pack a conference room full and keep them spellbound for a two-hour stretch.
But the rest, I’m afraid, is just luck. Woe unto the sailor who circumnavigates without serious life-threatening experiences occurring to him or her.
Of course, this subtle method of working your sea story into an appropriate opening in the flow of conversation is not the only way to tell it. There are those few individuals who, through charisma and technique, are able to bound into a room, nod to the largest man, wink at the prettiest woman, and in the ensuing silence bellow, “SO there I was… off the coast of Borneo in a typhoon on a raft made of toothpicks lashed together with second-hand Chinese dental floss….”
But that talent is rare and unless your confidence abounds, you’re better off trying the first technique instead. The same goes for the sea chanty, a likewise venerable tradition of sea storytelling, but one best limited to the rare sailor with some semblance of musicality.
There is some debate over whether or not good sea stories should be true or not. In my view, you have no business telling a sea story if you’re not willing to embellish it a bit. They’re called “sea STORIES”, after all, not “sea documentaries”, or “sea affidavits.” No one really needs to know if you’ve polished it up a bit along the way. Half the fun for your listeners is trying to figure out if you made up the part about the gigantic python, anyway.
Victoria, Victoria… what city harbor in the Pacific Northwest could rival it for beauty and maritime history? Capital of British Columbia, blessed with a wonderful and gorgeous downtown waterfront featuring capital architecture and vibrant activity, the city figures prominently in the nautical history of not just the region, but of the entire North Pacific Ocean.
Equidistant from Seattle and Vancouver, the two great population centers of the region, Victoria beckons sailors looking for a quick weekend away from home. Located squarely in the mask of the same rain shadow that makes Sequim one of the sunniest places in Western Washington, Victoria also enjoys enviable weather for getaways even in the winter months.
But Victoria offers some challenges to the cheap sailor. The best anchorage in the most desirable location–the Inner Harbour–is entirely off-limits to anchoring. Much admiration and approval has been written elsewhere about the picturesque Causeway floats and enormous convenience of the other available public floats in the Inner Harbour, all of it entirely true, but it’s also indisputably the case that they are not cheap: at 1.80 CAD per foot during the high season, they are in-line or a bit higher than most private marinas in the area. While the value this pricing represents is great, it’s not in keeping with the cheap sailor’s intent to pay market rates.
The areas north of the city along the Saanich Peninsula also offer a wide variety of marinas and a number of good anchorages, but those will be outside the scope of consideration for this discussion. It’s certainly possible to reach Victoria easily from Sidney by rental car or public transit, but we wanted to find a closer alternative (particularly considering the poor experiences we had with the Victoria Regional Transit System).
Anchorages
The Fisgard Point Light, at the entrance to Esquimalt Harbour
Pickings are sparse for secure all-weather anchorages in Victoria. Cadboro and Oak Bay both leap out as options from a quick look at the charts.
Unfortunately, both these locations share the same general deficiency, which is that they offer very little protection against any sort of southerly wind. Southwesterlies are common in the summer months as the turbo-charged west wind roars in off the Strait of Juan de Fuca and curls up through Haro Strait. And the winter southeasterlies that howl up from Puget Sound are not to be trifled with in the colder months, either.
Gonzales Bay was brought to our attention as a possibility, but it is both small and shallow for the average cruising sailboat.
However, any of these three could be reasonable options in the correct weather conditions.
Fleming Bay is also mentioned in several guidebooks but it’s tiny and we’ve heard tell the locals strongly discourage anchoring there.
The best all-weather anchorage for Victoria, we feel, is Esquimalt Harbour. Esquimalt offers several options with good holding and fair protection, including Thetis Cove, Cole Island, and Limekiln Cove. A dinghy with a good engine or an oarsman with a strong back will be required to explore the full range of the harbour from any of these anchorages, however. Thetis Cove is the closest to the best landing spot, Portage Park.
Located to the west of the Inner Harbour, off Royal Roads, Esquimalt is, and has been since 1865, the home of the Royal Canadian Navy’s main West Coast base, HMCS Naden. Almost no one actually calls it Naden. Regardless, the Queen’s Harbourmaster controls access to all of Esquimalt harbour and you are required to check in with them on VHF channel 10 when entering or getting underway within the waterway. Try as I might, after listening in on the ops channel for four days straight, I could never quite catch the common call sign for QHM; however, they did answer to “Harbor Control” when I hailed and simply requested a destination both coming in and heading out. There were no hassles involved.
The best guidebook we found for all these areas (and many others besides) is a little-known digital publication from Salish Sea Pilot. The free, downloadable PDF guide for the Gulf Islands (they offer an equally up-to-date and easy-to-use guide for the San Juans) is the clearest, most informative, most comprehensive guide to anchorages and landings available to day, bar none–including the expensive annual publications covering the region.
Although “cheap” is usually synonymous with “anchoring” in this part of the world, we found the best option to be the exercise of our reciprocal mooring privileges with the Canadian Forces Sailing Association (CFSA). Located adjacent to the Esquimalt Graving Dock, the CFSA docks and clubhouse are quaint and lovely and active. The facilities are excellent and the members and staff friendly and accommodating. We can’t recommend a stop there highly enough, should you happen to belong to a club that has an agreement with them.
Landings
In a city with few good available anchorages, it should come as no surprise that there are also very few places convenient for sailors to land their dinghies.
Beach landings are possible at the public beaches in Cadboro and Oak Bay, although the security of your unattended dinghy may be an open question. Both bays host marinas; it’s possible that some wheedling and a fresh crab or two might earn you a dinghy spot at the docks for coming and going during business hours.
An orca shrubbery outside the Empress, the only sign of the marine mammal we saw near Victoria on this trip
Similarly, Portage Regional Park in Esquimalt offers beach access, but uncertain security, particularly after dark. However, there are places where you could reasonably conceal most small dinghies (small dinghies being the most likely sort for a cheap sailor to possess). Whether or not hiding it makes it more or less susceptible to shenanigans is a judgement call left to the reader.
Surrounding Neighborhoods
Esquimalt itself presents as very blue-collar and suburban. The massive graving dock and naval base dominate the Esquimalt Harbour side of the peninsula; gleaming, steel and glass high-rise projects line the Inner Harbour side. The lower peninsula, where you are likely to land and spend some of your time, is actually an amalgam of Esquimalt, the township of View Royal, and the Songhees Indian Reserve.
It’s about a 3 mile walk to downtown Victoria. Alternatively, the number 24 and 25 buses run from Admiral’s Walk to downtown. The bus will cost you $2.50 each way, unless you can find the elusive $5 day pass, which will let you ride as often as you like during a 24 hour period.
We asked a driver about the day pass–they don’t sell them on the bus. We stopped in at three different stores that are listed as pass suppliers, and they all were out of them, and all told us that they were almost always out of them, and that the Transit Authority refused to give out any more.
This intransigence became less puzzling throughout the day as various transit workers did their best to screw us over; we were shorted on time when we asked for transfers, and one driver (of a bus with plenty of empty seats left) just outright drove past us at a stop, despite our flailing hands and shouts. He just looked at us and shrugged as he drove on by.
So, if you can bring a bike, that’s what we would recommend. Otherwise, whether you would prefer to take the bus or not, be prepared to hike… there’s no guarantee they’ll let you on board the bus!
A particularly ambitious and athletic crew could follow the lead of the natives and portage their dinghy across from Portage Park into the Gorge Waterway, but be prepared for some strange looks as you cross the busy Island Highway.
Provisions and Services
There is an ideally situated shopping complex just up the street from Portage Park. Located at Admirals Road and Hallowell in View Royal, the Admiral’s Walk complex includes a Thrifty Foods, a Pharmasave drugstore, a few restaurants, and a laundromat.
A private housing development sits between the park and the shopping center, but the brand new Esquimalt and Nanaimo walking trail going in along the former rail line which skirts the park will allow an easy walk around the development and onto a public street flanking the complex.
You won’t find any Internet service to speak of in Esquimalt Harbour, and the Navy might take it the wrong way if you started monkeying around on deck with your super-powered wifi snooping antenna setup next to their base anyway.
Moka House coffee shop, in the Admiral’s Walk complex, does offer complimentary internet access for paying customers.
Things to See
The Japanese Garden at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific
Here, again, Victoria is less accommodating to the cheap sailor than some other ports we could mention. It’s not that Victoria doesn’t have plenty of excellent things to see; it’s just that the best of them tend to be expensive… Butchart Gardens, the Royal British Columbia Museum, and Craigdarroch Castle are all marvelous, but will take a bite out of your wallet.
But there are a few alternatives–none of which eclipse the fact that you really should just cough up the cash to go see Butchart Gardens and the Royal BC Museum, as well.
We enjoyed just spending some time walking around Beacon Hill Park (which, by the way, has its own bit of nautical heritage to disgorge: the name comes from Mount Beacon, on which a range had been established to help guide early mariners into the harbour). The surrounding neighborhoods are equally charming, a mix of modern apartments, quaint cottages, and vintage Victorian houses on display. For the more astute observer, a wander around the streets of Victoria can be a history lesson in itself.
There are also the British Columbia parliament buildings (the other fascinating architectural exhibit overlooking the Inner Harbour) which may be toured for free.
Inside Bastion Square, near the Marine Museum
As an alternative to Butchart Gardens, consider visiting the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific. Maintained almost entirely by volunteers, the story behind the varied gardens there is interesting enough to warrant a visit in and of itself. But the gardens have a creditable selection of flowers and foliage, for folks who are into such things, as well as an artful Japanese Garden, and a nature trail through a conservancy area filled with birds and other wildlife.
Notwithstanding some recent structural problems, the Maritime Museum of British Columbia is also a must-see stop for visiting sailors. Located downtown in historic Bastion Square right off the Inner Harbour, the very building seems to ooze historical import.
With all this to do, and much more left unlisted, it’s a good thing Victoria is so close for most Northwest sailors… you’ll be back again and again and again and never exhaust the possibilities for entertainment and leisure available in British Columbia’s stately capital city.
It’s not actually fall here yet in Ucluelet. It just feels like it. The chill in the air, even when the sun emerges, dim and distant, from the rolling fog banks, just feels like fall. The smell of the fog in the trees, the sweaters worn by people on the streets, even the sign up at the local bakery: “Pumpkin Pies! Order yours today!” And with the first real frontal system of the year hovering out below the western horizon, advertising its imminent apperance with southeasterlies and the occasional thunderclap, it takes more than one glance at the calendar to convince me it’s not even mid-August here on the West Coast yet.
Which is a shame, because fall brings to mind thoughts of a return to work, of a deluge of pumpkin-flavored espresso drinks in cozy Seattle coffee shops, of unlimited dockside power, and watching Seahawks games in sports bars. In short, it makes us think of home, and between those thoughts and the dreary weather, we’re searching for a window ahead of that oncoming front to shoot back up the Strait on the last of the strong northwesterlies to leave Barkley Sound behind for another year.
A deer licks salt off the rocks on the beach at Ucluelet
We don’t really want to be thinking about these things right now, because Barkley Sound, and in particular the Broken Group Islands in its center, a part of Canada’s Pacific Rim National Park, is a childhood fantasy of barely-awash rocks, forested islands with cunningly shaped bays concealing secret caves, and fascinating sea-creatures just waiting to be explored and conquered in a youthful frenzy. It’s all I can do to keep myself, right at this very instant, from paddling the dinghy ashore and claiming a rugged-looking rock and its four hardy-looking trees for Scott-land (the standard fantasy country which I ruled, firmly but justly, in my youthful imagination) and begin building an impregnable fort thereupon from driftwood and rocks.
It’s fortunate my parents never actually brought me here when I was a boy; they would never have found me again amid all these amazing hideouts.
Even the weather would have provided little deterrent to my younger self. The streamers of fog tangled in the trees and leaving a grey tint to land and sea alike only increases the air of magic and mystery surrounding this place. The occasional beam of sunlight stabbing down through renders solitary islands in golden-green, suddenly three-dimensional, beckoning me on: “Over here! Explore me next!”
Ucluelet, at the northern edge of all this wonder, has been dubbed (in that inimitable Canadian way of managing to give even geographic features nicknames that sound like they should belong to hockey players) “Ukee” by the locals. The village looks like a place that is waiting to happen (motto on the district website: “Life on the Edge”). A large, modern-looking community centre and library sits across the street from the beach; tiny, environmentally-friendly electric-powered Might-E trucks whisk district workers around the peninsula on their errands; vast tracts of platted subdivisions wind through the hills overlooking the ocean (or, rather, overlooking the fog where the ocean would be if you could see it), with fancy street number markers signifying lots which have not yet been cleared or built upon.
We stayed on the Japanese Dock, near the entrance to the small craft harbour. Although we had to forgo the pleasure of electricity or the shelter of the inner harbour, we found that the Japanese Dock isn’t waiting to happen; it’s happening now. Dinghies overturn, paramedics visit, colorful locals are hauled off to jail.
Waiting for the next big thing to happen at the Japanese Dock in Ucluelet
Just as we were getting ready to leave, another sailboat came in to land on the leeward side of the dock. I looked up and saw it pivoting out by the stern in the wind; something was amiss. I hopped off Rosie, ran over and took the stern line from the owner, who, as his boat was barndooring rapidly toward the hefty-looking stern of the wooden trawler behind him, calmly informed me that the bow line had come off and he was going to hop back aboard and “F– off for a bit,” which he proceeded to do in the nick of time. He then made a smooth 360 in the channel and re-fastened the bow line and came in again and executed a flawless landing.
He hopped off again and started to tell me the story of his difficult day, beginning with his anchor dragging overnight and his boat ending up tangled in a commercial crab float, then the bow line slipping off the cleat while his buddy was still holding the other end on the dock. I interupted him mid-sentence.
“Your stern line is about to do the same thing,” I said, pointing at the last little loop about to slide down the end of the cleat.
“F–ing h—!” he exclaimed and jumped back aboard.
Fall coming or no, it’s hard not to want to stay and see what happens next in Ucluelet.
I’m not sure where we’ll be when I post this, but I know where we are right now: Cutter Cove. I’d like to be more specific, but when I asked Mandy what island this little bay was carved out of, she standing at the helm with easy access to the chart plotter, she looked down, punched a few buttons, and shrugged. “It doesn’t feel like saying.”
In a fit of pique, I went below to consult the definitive reference, our Canadian Hydrographic Survey charts. They didn’t have the name of the island, either. And it’s not like this is a small island… it’s quite large, so large, in fact, that it extends off the edge of the particular chart I was consulting. Perhaps, to save ink, they only print the name on the other end of the island, presumably on some other chart.
I could go dig that one out but I don’t care much. We’re only staying here for a single night, there’s nothing else apparently remarkable about the place other than that it is not Blenkinsop Bay.
Blenkinsop Bay is where we spent last night, tucked into a broad bight off of Johnstone Strait. We often seem to spend nights in Blenkinsop Bay just off Johnstone Strait, usually because we have been over-ambitious and have secretly dreamed grandeous dreams of getting all the way up to the bomb-proof anchorage of Port Neville by day’s end. Port Neville is only two miles up the strait from Blenkinsop, and it is everything that Blenkinsop is not… well-sheltered, shallow, vast, picturesque.
But that dream is as unobtainable for us as Tantalus’ grapes, because every single time we punt our way out of Current Passage, it seems like we hit a wall of wind and those big, choppy waves that Johnstone Strait is famous for. Two more miles might as well be half an ocean, and Blenkinsop Bay is right there, staring at us, unsmiling, with the door held open, a surly inn-keeper who knows they have they only room left in town and you’re going to take it whether the beds are lumpy or not.
And, whether we sail or motor, that’s the inevitable destination, and we look longingly up the channel before swinging in, alone, and setting the anchor in the teeth of winds and waves that, were they not being directly compared to the monsters roaring just outside the entrance, would immediately suggest a re-consideration of life choices.
In the nights that inevitably follow, we are pummeled about, heaved around the cabin and rolled sidelong in our berth, screeched at all the while by demons shaking the rigging overhead.
Every morning after we spend an evening in Blenkinsop Bay, we toddle past the entrance to Port Neville bright and early, ploughing north through placid waters and light breezes, and watch a fleet of smarter, better-prepared boats exiting single-file, looking incredibly well-rested and laid-back. We snarl and keep going.
So Cutter Cove seems pretty idyllic right now, even though a bit of a breeze is kicking up.
Boat names fascinate me. I’m always curious about the thinking that goes into naming a boat, all along that spectrum from Breaking Wind up through the well-trod middle ground of Serenity or Wind Dancer and on to rare and poetic examples like Morning Cloud. Of course, that’s an entirely subjective categorization; the guy out there motoring around in Breaking Wind probably finds it contemplative and poetic.
If you’re like my wife and I, you won’t have a lot of opportunities to exercise your boat naming muscles over your boating lifetime. Spending more time thinking about something than doing it can be dangerous, but I’ve distilled down my own preferences slowly over the years. Personally, I only have a few criteria for a boat name: I want it to be short, commonly spelled, easy to understand over the radio, not ubiquitous, and personally meaningful.
The name of our last boat, Insegrevious, was none of these things. We’d inherited the name with the boat and never quite got around to changing it. But she was always a sure-fire conversation starter while hanging around at the marina or rafting up at the locks. In time, I at least came to appreciate the notoriety, if not the befuddled or bemused responses I would get on the radio or when filling out moorage paperwork. We’re mis-spelled permanently on dozens of transient moorage logs up and down the Salish Sea.
Rosie’s grave is on a bluff overlooking our usual mooring in Port Hadlock
When we bought our Freedom 36, she was named Paros, which was neither here nor there for me. It was an unusual name, but it didn’t mean anything to us, and though short and easily spelled, I suspected that it might not do well on the radio. Since she had to be re-documented at time of purchase, changing the name was easy; it was only a question of what to change it to. For all the thought I’d given boat names over the years, I came up empty.
My wife came up with Rosie in a flash. It was a complicated but inspired choice. Rosie was the name of our small, sweet calico cat who had passed away from feline leukemia a couple years before. We’d always been too scared to have Rosie aboard the boat. She was older and sick already by then, and a particular passage of Daniel and David Hays’ excellent “My Old Man and the Sea” haunted me, where they describe the loss of a kitten overboard in the night.
But this presented a way to have Rosie aboard our new boat, if only in spirit, and it was the obvious choice once Mandy mentioned it.
Wow, that masking tape is hard to remove!
After that, it was only a matter of peeling Paros off the transom and replacing it. The sun had already done much of the work for us on the first part, and we peeled the old lettering off in the course of an afternoon last August. Mandy spent another few hours fashioning a temporary name out of masking tape, just in time for our official naming ceremony. (Incidentally, any of you who are considering ordering stick-on vinyl lettering for your boat, let me save you a lot of money on that inferior solution: it was ten times harder getting that masking tape off than it was removing the old vinyl lettering! I expected it to wash off in the first light mist we ran into, but let me tell you, that stuff has got some long-term stick in it.)
It has, ultimately, been just about a year, but we’ve finally got a permanent name painted on. I give you the Sailing Vessel Rosie:
Rosie
The design and painting were conceived and executed by our friend Maxx, an artist. He did an excellent job of creating a very readable font, while simultaneously capturing Rosie’s look and sense of whimsy. We’re happy and proud to take her along with us wherever we go now.
