Category: General

I am constantly amazed at the energy and industry exhibited by fellow boaters at our marina.  The forest of lighted masts and stays that have sprung up around the docks are a testament to boaters braving the frigid temperatures (ice in the slips!  that’s two years in a row, bring on the global warming already!) in the last couple of weeks to string them up.  And as if that weren’t enough, scads of them have been out on the water with their colorful decks, spreading Christmas cheer around the city and sound with lights and music.

The Argosy Christmas Ship was hovering around out off the Ballard Blinker last night as I was heading down into the marina, which distantly reminded me that last night was the night the informal parade was happening off Golden Gardens and going through the Ballard Locks.  I had halfway planned to hustle out, weather be damned, to try to recover some of my flagging Christmas spirit, but back in the warm, dry cabin, I quickly passed out on a settee.  I woke up blearily at some point to the strains of some jingly sort of holiday music, but by then I was just dead tired and quickly went back to sleep.

My own yacht club even got in on the act, taking a group of developmentally disabled folks out as part of the Seafair Special People’s Holiday Cruise a couple weeks ago.  The Ohana, incidentally, the boat used for the cruise, is a beauty, even if you’re not typically into motor yachts.  Even more amazing, the owners on occasion manage to get their three very active golden retrievers all aboard and out cruising all at the same time without anyone going overboard.

All this industry seems all the more amazing compared to my own treadmill-like existence at the moment.  The holidays are always hard, but this year seems colder, wetter, and more difficult than ever, and it’s been hard enough just to keep up, let alone make forward progress.  Boat projects seems even harder in the winter; harder yet when your tools are scattered between the boat and a place two hours and a ferry ride away.  Of course, nothing is to hand when it’s needed, and everything on my list, from the large (painting the hull) to the small (changing the oil) has been thwarted in some respect over the past few weeks.  With Christmas travel plans coming up, none of it is likely to get done until January, and it’s all just hanging out there and hovering over me until then.

So the cheery lights as I come in to the marina are a welcome sight, and those folks who have taken the time and trouble to get them up deserve a hearty Merry Christmas from me.

Merry Christmas!

Photo courtesy Shutterbug Photos under Creative Commons 2.0 license

Last week, the US Board on Geographic Names followed the Washington State Board on Geographic Names and the Geographical Names Board of Canada (who knew there were so many agencies dedicated to geographic names?) in approving the label “Salish Sea” to the body of water formed from the collection of the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the US and Canada. The decision represents a victory for proponents of the monicker, who have been pushing for the adoption with varying degrees of intensity since the 1980s.

The idea originated with former Western Washington University professor Bert Webber, who coined the name with a reference to the dominant language family in use by the Coastal tribes who populated the waters when Europeans began to show up, for the purpose of raising awareness of the fact that all the waters involved shared a contiguous ecosystem despite their diverse names. It seems, in retrospect, at once a masterful coinage to attract support of liberals and the ecologically-minded and an inevitable lightning rod for the fire of conservatives and nationalists.

And so it proved, particularly during the past few years when the name’s stock had been rising and its likelihood of adoption becoming more real. Canadians portrayed it as a US effort to erase the border (though Webber is, by birth, Canadian himself); surprisingly, some ecologists objected that it would dilute their efforts to achieve better awareness of Puget Sound as an ecosystem… a selfish statement that I would think would cause even more concerns for the Canadians than worries about what is already a pretty nominal border, but I suppose that just proves that conflict makes for strange bedfellows.

At any rate, now that it is more or less decided (the province of British Columbia still has a say, but since the border hasn’t actually been erased yet, I don’t see how they can tell us what we can or can’t call it from down here), I am not sure it really makes any difference for opponents. They can keep referring to the various constituent bodies of water by their original names as long as they please.

For myself, it allays a certain degree of guilt I have found in using the name during its years in the wilderness. Now that it’s official, I don’t have to feel like a wimpy liberal treehugger when I use the term. The truth is, I have kind of always liked the sound of it, really, ahistorical though it may be. And whatever your other objections, it’s hard to argue that the name isn’t useful. I’ve struggled for years to come up with some easy way to refer to the overall body of water we typically find ourselves sailing in here. It’s certainly not restricted by existing geographic boundaries, and it’s hellish inconvenient to say “Puget Sound, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Strait of Georgia” whenever referring to it. I had come up with “lower Inside Passage” but that has considerable ambiguity even among local sailors, and doesn’t mean much of anything to anyone else.

I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that the various boards on names didn’t simply auction the naming rights away as has been discussed with the state ferry system. Paul Allen might have picked them up and then who knows what we would have ended up with? Although “The Vulcan Sea” has a certain appeal to the sci-fi fan in me.

Surely among the list of reasons anyone might care to provide as to why they sail, and certainly as to why they might live aboard a sailboat, would be the view.  Certainly it is the scenery that is among our most treasured memories of experiences on the boat, and if I may say so, this part of the world is particularly endowed with sublime vistas, from raw, dark, stony headlands standing implacably before vast ocean swells, to tall, jewel-like cascading waterfalls plunging down the green-shrouded flanks of snow-capped peaks.  We’ve seen them all from the cockpit of Insegrevious, and they account for much of our motivation to continue cruising the often chilly and fog-obscured waters of the Pacific Northwest.

But it has occured to me repeatedly since taking up our cat-sitting duties on the shore in Port Hadlock that in fact we sailors do ourselves a dis-service when voyaging amongst such splended scenery.  As the broad panorama of the world goes by outside our hull, we are frequently half-submerged in a poorly lit dungeon from which the view is no better than that of the average suburban basement.

This hits home for me now because I see and enjoy more of what is going on out on the water here from on the shore at Port Hadlock than I do out on the boat in the same location.  And even that is vastly more than what one sees in the marina, wedged in between other boats with a narrow view across the dock and, if one is lucky, the imposing stone blocks of the seawall out toward the Sound.

Out the windows here, I don’t just see three boats (one to port, one to starboard, one astern, as is the case in our slip at the marina) but a score of them, moored, riding at anchor, or sailing serenely by on their way north or south from the Port Townsend Canal.  Trees cover the shoreline all along Port Townsend and at night, the town lights twinkle cheerily across the water.  I see more water, and more boat traffic, in a day than I otherwise would in a week at the marina.

I don’t say this as an argument against living aboard, but rather in favor of cruising.  When you are out sailing, you have to be up the cockpit.  And thinking back, when we are happiest on the boat is when we are going somewhere.  As accomodations, it serves as rather pedestrian fare.  For sightseeing, it is an incomporable tour boat, leisurely, comfortable, quiet.  Though no one would envy us the pace, one of our most beautiful moments was in the early season in Desolation Sound, ghosting along at barely a knot, twenty feet from shore, watching the sealife and shoreline carry on in utter silence, as if we were suspended in mid-air, invisible.

Once anchored, though, unless the weather is favorable, the same problem arises.  Newer boats with their salons raised higher from the waterline are beginning to deal with this deficiency, but for those of us with older models, I am afraid the installation of a periscope may be the only option.  That, or going cruising, of course.

You’ve probably heard of the famous paradox of Schrodinger’s Cat, wherein physicist Erwin Schrodinger illustrates the strange nature of quantum physics with a thought experiment involving a cat, a box, and a flask of poison.  If you’re guessing that the story doesn’t end well, that’s the paradox: according to quantum physics, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead.  Schrodinger, for his part, thought this was bunk, which was why he framed it in that way, and lately I am beginning to think so too, as Mandy and I are experiencing our own issues with undead felines.

The cat in question is the one pictured here, a good-natured calico named Rosie who has graciously allowed us to feed and shelter her for five years or so now.  We inherited her from a friend who was moving.  When we ourselves decided to move aboard after the wedding and go sailing for a month, we figured we would simply pass her along again, certainly to someone we knew so we could visit the furry little freeloader frequently.  Despite our attachment, we never seriously considered bringing her on the boat with us (we’re not quite as adventurous as some people).  She’s nearly twenty, though she doesn’t act it, and doesn’t adjust well to new circumstances.  And, I couldn’t bear the thought of somehow losing her overboard… the waters are cold here and a small cat isn’t easy to spot in a big ocean.

So we were all ready to place her with a loving family of our acquaintance when something happened.  I woke up one morning last spring and found her disoriented, walking in circles, getting stuck in corners, and trying to hide from us.  When I did catch up with her, she acted as if her neck were causing her pain.  So, off to the vet we went.

She worsened during the exam, and the vet had nothing definitive to tell us.  He sent us off with some drugs to wait for the result of lab tests he would have run.  Over the course of a couple of days, she improved gradually, and we hoped that it was simply a neck injury of some sort that was healing on its own over time.

The labs came back with a different diagnosis, though: feline leukemia, a terminal condition.  The problems exhibited were probably due to an infection secondary to the leukemia.  We should keep her on the drugs, the vet explained, and she might make a temporary recovery, but within six to eight months we should expect her to deteriorate to the point where she would have to be euthanized.

In addition to our natural sadness at such a dire turn, this complicated matters enormously.  You can’t go and pawn a dying cat off on just anyone, and particularly not on your friends.  No, you have to pawn them off on your family.  So we arranged, and my parents graciously agreed, to take her in at their home in Port Hadlock during her last few months.  We hoped we would be back from our trip in time to spare them the unfortunate task of taking care of her right at the end.

Well, that time has come and gone.  Rosie has not only recovered, but grown fat and happy in the seven months since her six month death sentence was handed down.  We figure that once she entered the realm of my stepfather, a notorious spoiler of animals, she decided she was on to something good and decided to stick around to take advantage of it.  So now she gets table scraps, has her refrigerated wet food carefully microwaved up to a palatable room temperature just before being served twice a day, and she shows no signs of any terminal condition.

Nonetheless, she does not travel well and we do not figure her for a boat cat, certainly not as a new career at her advanced age.  Not to mention which, it seems unlikely that we would be able to support her in the style to which she has become accustomed.  So at my parents’ place she will stay, but there is a catch: they traditionally pack up in their RV with the coming of the Northwestern winter rains, and head south for warmer climes.  So, what becomes of the cat?  Well, it’s back to us… such that I am up in Hadlock right now typing this with her perched on my lap, drooling pleasurably on my arm.  We’re cat-sitting for the winter (with some chicken-sitting thrown in for good measure) while my folks are away.

In truth, this isn’t a bad way for cruisers to go when exploring the more extreme latitudes.  We ran into a couple last year heading north along the Inside Passage, David and Jo on S/V Spirit, who have sailed all over, from the Gulf of Mexico up to our neck of the woods, and they’ve made this their MO in northerly waters; find a secure place to stash the boat, and line up a housesitting gig through the winter months.  Last I heard they were putting the boat in Sitka for the winter and coming back down to Washington until warmer weather returned to the Panhandle.

It’s a great strategy for cruising Alaska, such that I seriously considered it two years ago instead of heading up and back in one season.  You’re left with a lot more time to explore, and there is much to explore up there.

Here, the arguments aren’t quite as strong, but there is the cat, of course, and the constant appeal of a warm fireplace to curl up in front of while the storms rage outside.  In actuality, it should work out very well for us.  Of the trips we have planned this winter, both involve us heading north.  In December, we hope to haul out here in Port Townsend, and having a home base nearby will allow a considerably easier experience working on her.  Then, in February, we have tickets for the Vancouver Olympics, and plan to use the boat as a base of sorts up there to enjoy the event.  Jumping off from Port Townsend saves a day, at least, on that trip.  And depending on weather, we may sail back and forth between here and there just in the normal course of commuting for business.  Either way, we’ll be splitting our time between the boat in Seattle and the house here as a matter of convenience throughout the winter.

A lot of people might tell you that planning in one summer to get married, rent out your house, move aboard a 33 foot sailboat with your bride for an indeterminate period of time, and immediately circumnavigate Vancouver Island as a honeymoon trip would just be asking for trouble, but I say big leaps in the wake of the wedding are traditional.  Charles Barkley met 17 year old Frances Trevor in September of 1786, married her in October, and set off from Belgium for the West Coast of North America in November. Edith Iglauer moved at the drop of a hat to Vancouver BC, from New York, to marry and fish with John Daly in those same waters, and that was as recently as the seventies.  It wasn’t that long ago that the custom was to make all your dramatic lifestyle changes right after getting married.  Go slowly?  Dip your toes in first?  Bah, I say.  Take the plunge!

But anyway, a lot of people have, usually quite politely, told us they thought it was asking for trouble when we planned to step aboard our 33 foot sloop, Insegrevious, last July on the night of our wedding to live aboard indefinitely and circumnavigate Vancouver Island.  They may still be right, but at least we have some tradition to cling to.

The Barkleys spent 46 years together, much of it sailing in this very region, so I don’t think the precedents are terrible.  Maybe we’ll get something named after us.  Or perhaps Mandy will outlive me and write a new Northwest classic.  Possibilities abound.

We’re not as tough as any of those past sailing couples, of course; the perseverance and stoic work ethic that came from a life aboard a wooden vessel in a wilderness a year away from civilization, or from weathering a great depression and a world war, are virtually unknown, and perhaps unimaginable, to our generation.  But we have been in some difficult places, and can at least imagine ourselves capable of getting through more of them, and if we lack grit forged in childhood from poverty and deprivation, perhaps our current deprivation will impart some.

At least we have withstood the first part of the test, sailing around Vancouver Island, and since we returned more excited than when we left, I think that bodes well for our chances.  I started writing this after a week back on dry land, a week that seemed twice as long and three times more stressful than the month we were gone; all we could think about was getting back aboard.

I should say more about the vessel we will be aboard; a sailor’s boat may be as much or more a part of his or her character and outlooks as all other formative experiences combined.  Sometimes I think that the boat informs the experience of sailing more than those sailing her.  Insegrevious is a 33 foot Hunter sloop, a ’77 model, an old, solid John Cherubini design with nice lines (no humpback for us!) and a good turn of speed for her age.  She isn’t as spacious as newer models and much of her gear and many of her systems are old, but she has been pretty well maintained and retrofitted enough to make me comfortable taking her into out-of-the-way anchorages like those on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  After two years of pretty hard cruising, it’s clear the time is coming due for a haul-out and re-fit but we try to take the breakdowns in stride.  After all, what else can you do?  The sea is unpredictable and boats are built by human hands.  Any cruise is fraught, regardless of what you sail in.

This blog will be about cruising, the fraught parts together with the fun.  We are moving aboard because it seems like a good time to do so, with business depressed (we are both self-employed) and likely to remain so, and with cruising a long-held goal.  We’ve heard that cruising is just like real life but more damp (even in Seattle) and that’s all we expect; we’re under no illusions that we’re getting away from it all, we’re just trying to take it at a slightly different angle.

At the same time, we don’t want to simply be floating apartment dwellers, one of those boats with a DirecTV antenna clamped to the rail and mooring lines that have stiffened enough to be used as clothes lines… we want to be out, sailing, living that life at the same time as we work and play in our current lives.  We’re not south-bound along the traditional escape route of Pacific Northwest cruisers, but we’re not just going out on the weekends anymore, either.  Call it local long-distance cruising.  There will be changes, some of them major, sacrifices, often unpleasant, and trials, frequently unexpected.  But still, it’s just Mandy and me, moving forward, only now primarily under sail power.  We hope you will find it interesting.

– A note about the name of the blog

Not many cruisers are as rigorous about log keeping as I am (more on that in a subsequent post), and those that are often have their own methods and shorthand for doing so.  My own introduction to logs and logging came at the impressionable age of 18, when I went to work with a bunch of ex-military, ex-police officers for whom there was a Right Way and a Wrong Way of recording watch information for subsequent readers.  In that indoctrination, I was taught that it was always best to record information as it happened, but if that were not possible, one was not to simply fudge it and write things down in a subsequently timed entry; instead, the time of the observation should be noted at recording, and annotated with the initials “LE” for “Late Entry” to indicate that the information itself was actually being recorded after the fact (and therefore, the recollection might not be as fresh, might be informed by additional knowledge, etc, etc).

Cruising and blogging are activities which are almost inherently dis-contiguous in the time-space continuum, in that when one is sailing one is almost certainly without either the time or the means to blog, and conversely one who is blogging probably is not sailing (or at least not sailing very hard).  Thus, pretty much all my blog entries are going to be “Late Entries” in the nomenclature; you are hereby notified that they may therefore have been considered, re-considered, half-forgotten, polished, and embellished before you ever get sight of them.