Systems – Late Entry

July 9, 2016

Life’s Little Southerlies

Rescued vessel count this week: 1

It was only a dinghy, but I hauled this one off by myself, so I believe I should get full credit. No pictures, on account of I was rowing with both hands to get the beast off the beach in the teeth of the southerly wind and swell pounding in from across the bay.

It has been a southerly kind of week, both literally and figuratively. The winds out of the south here in Port Townsend are unkind in a variety of respects–with them comes clouds, rain, cold and unseasonable weather. The long fetch of Port Townsend Bay lets the waves build up for five miles before they land, heaving and breaking, on my bow and sweep past onto the beach. It’s a rough ride in the anchorage during such breezes, even when the wind speed rarely exceeds ten knots.

The rest of life seems to be taking a cue from the weather, and indeed may be related, as my time in the anchorage up here becomes generally intolerable, and yet apparently interminable.

A rare sunbreak at the Port Townsend Fourth of July celebration

The Fourth of July was a cold, windy one here. I went up to the local celebration and fireworks show at Fort Worden but froze half to death and made no new friends and found no old ones in the sparse crowd. It was a lonely, miserable 4th, the worse since I was supposed to be down in Oregon visiting family for the holiday instead. But the rigging work still has me pinned down here, as stuck in purgatory as I have ever been, watching the summer slide away and other, more favored folks sail on to better and further adventures.

The winds have made the anchorage even less tolerable. It’s rolly and wet. Getting into the dinghy and getting ashore is a chore, yet being on shore is preferable to being stuck out at anchor. All the same, it won’t do to get too far from the boat; the reduced windage and swift currents has her swinging strangely and unpredictably, to the surprise of other nearby boats. I spent the greater part of one day down in Seattle, and came back to find the rode wrapped around the keel, trapping Zia beam-on the the waves and swell. Once again, late evening engine maneuvering was required to get her unhung.

I’ve since hung a sort of modified kellet off the rode, designed to keep the bights out of the upper portion so it can’t get hung up on the keel; we’ll see how that works.

In the meantime, there are the other denizens to worry about. One gentleman, for some inexplicable reason, hauled up his anchor from a reasonably distant position and dropped himself right into my swinging radius for some reason. We had words around 10pm, which, in my view, was better than 2am, and he picked up and moved again, thankfully. And then, the next day, came back again (though at a reasonable distance). With so much open space out here, I find such decisions utterly inexplicable. Yet it happens repeatedly.

The dinghy I pulled off apparently fell victim to the same winds and swell. The towing ring was ripped out and no mooring line was on it, so I imagine it broke loose from somewhere. Where I found it, it could equally have come from the dinghy dock (though I saw no loose lines when I towed it back there), a boat in the anchorage, or a cruiser passing by. I asked around and someone thought it was from a big ferrocement cruiser, Jasman, in the anchorage, but no one was aboard when I went and banged on the hull… and how could they have gotten ashore, with no dinghy? The mystery remains, and the dinghy sits there, unclaimed, taking a pounding from the swell.

Mine sits nearby, also being beaten up. There’s no position on the dock not vulnerable to the southerlies, and a beach landing is even dicier in these conditions.

Beaten up is a good description all around. Zia is getting rolled and worn, I’m getting rolled and worn, and progress frequently appears glacial on projects both personal and professional.

Yesterday, at last, the fabricator finished up my new chainplates. The cost was less than expected and the construction beefier than originally specced. I’ll get them installed on Monday and then, hopefully, be on to the next steps in getting my mast back soon.

Despite the occasional misery, there have been flashes of sunshine. I popped into the cockpit to a flurry of yelling and flutter of sails the other day to find myself in the middle of a race.

And I got a text from my friend Lauren with a long-awaited bit of news: she’s nearly finished up with a far, far more ambitious and consuming project than my own, a near-total rebuild on her Buchan 37, Skybird, after a disastrous sinking in a storm last fall. One of the final touches of this project required (well, didn’t required, but was expedited by) turning the whole boat nearly on its side to glass over a massive hole that had been torn into the port side by the Boat Haven breakwater.

Ever since she told me this part was coming, I’ve been anxiously waiting to see the boat on its side (absurdly; I’ve seen boats on their side plenty of times, just not quite so intentionally or quite so far out of the water) and pestering her to text me the moment she tipped it. I got the text late last night and hustled over in the morning so as not to miss it. And indeed, the sight didn’t disappoint.

She’s scheduled to splash next week, finally. A sign, perhaps, that even the worst weather blows over eventually.

June 20, 2016

Boat Yard Blues

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.

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.

May 23, 2016

A Happy Boatyard

There are happy yards and sad yards and the Port of Port Townsend’s Boatyard is one of the happy ones.

Oh, I don’t mean everyone is thrilled to be here. There are wrecks and disasters, people recovering from sinking and other myriad catastrophes, mired in insurance claims and backbreaking bills. But that may simply be a constant in the boating community in general.

No, I mean it’s the sort of place where folks nod to one another as they pass, strike up conversations when tools go down at lunch time, lend a hand when hands are too few to get that rudder lifted in place and hold it while it is secured.

The yard staff are quick with jokes and invariably helpful despite the blistering pace of work during the spring season… 16 to 18 boats in and out of the Travelift each day, on average, two 75-ton lifts shuttling back and forth between yard and water almost continuously, while the big, ponderous 300-ton monster trundles out from time to time for the really big hauls. You often hear “Shave and a Haircut” blipped out on the Travelift horns. These guys enjoy their jobs.

They remember the boats from season to season and their rigging is careful and conscientious despite their light-hearted manner. I’ve been here before but my boat hasn’t; the lift operator remarked that he didn’t think he’d seen her before but that she had lovely lines and he’d remember her the next time.

We chatted about strap placement and agreed on adjustments for the future… poorly-located transducers make Zia difficult to lift properly. CSR crushed the knotmeter paddlewheel at the survey haul-out. The Port Townsend guys noted with glee that they had just missed it.

“You guys are the best,” I tell them. “That’s what I always say.”

Blisters have all been opened to cook dry

And it is what I always say.

Despite being busy, they gave me my choice of spots in the yard. I told them to surprise me, and they tucked me away into a nice, protected corner, convenient to hardware stores and bars, a rather empty precinct that nonetheless feels quite comfortable.

Port Townsend is a popular do-it-yourself hard so although people are busy, they’re not on the clock. Everyone is happy to put down their tools for a while to chat. It’s a great place to learn about boats and boat maintenance.

I feel judged when they come through and stare silently at my blotchy hull

It’s good blister-drying weather. Sunshine and a brisk northwesterly, every afternoon, day after day… not Port Townsend in spring, surely. But here it is. Deer wander quietly through the forest of vessels as the morning sun casts long shadows off the masts.

Blisters are just one of many, many, many projects on my agenda. The mast comes out early on—the rigging needs replaced. All of it. And probably re-engineered, although it quickly becomes obvious that despite having more than a month out of the water, I won’t have nearly time enough to get to everything that needs to happen. Rigging can happen in the water… much of it probably will.

In the meantime, I get up, work, take a shower, go to bed.

In the shower, which takes only quarters, someone has left a penny on the floor, perhaps for luck.

I can use the luck, but also wouldn’t mind tidier facilities. The Boat Haven restrooms and showers, ostensibly coded, are in practice open almost all the time and serve as a sort of hygiene station for the many in Port Townsend who have living situations other than homes. This creates a rather funky air and despite the best efforts of the Port’s valiant cleaning staff, it’s more common than not to find the place in moderately foul condition. If possible, wheedling a code to the Point Hudson facilities and trekking to the other end of town to use those immaculate, spacious, classically tiled accommodations can provide a luxurious alternative every few days or so.

It’s also an excuse to stop work for a bit and enjoy Port Townsend itself. You run into friends on the street and they always offer to give you a lift, though the town is tiny and eminently walkable. Or they might show up at sunset to bang on your hull and ask for your help shifting a dinghy in exchange for a coconut-rootbeer float.

It’s a good deal and I took it.

The weather can’t last but, hopefully, neither can the blisters.

November 29, 2013

Weather the winter aboard

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?

November 4, 2013

Does your house float?

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!

June 24, 2013

Unfathomable Aggravation

A friend of mine recently asked why exactly it is that all crappy things seem to happen at once. An optimistic read might be that it helps get them all out of the way. If that’s the case, then we are in for some damn smooth sailing this summer, after the last two weeks trying to escape the gravitational confines of Puget Sound.

I had envisioned a lovely, relaxing sail up to Port Hadlock, where we would have an easy time finishing up a long list of boat projects with the expansive shop facilities and expertise available to us there. Instead, Mandy and I bickered all the way up from Seattle, and faced minor and major setbacks at almost every turn. When we finally grabbed the ball out in front of my parent’s place, it was hardly clear where even to start.

Our holding tank challenges were only the tip of the iceberg. While wrestling with those complications, I also found that I had ordered several parts of the wrong size for our solar panel installation. The Mercury outboard that had come with our new dinghy (admittedly, thrown in for free) resisted all efforts to restart the water pump. No clear path could be located for a discharge hose for the new bilge pump I had bought. We discovered a fracture in one of our rope clutches.

Meanwhile, every single trip either out or back from the boat seemed to result in some item that was supposed to be aboard ending up ashore, or some extraneous crap from ashore ending up on board. Inevitably, that item would prove to be vital for whatever the next step might be in whatever project we were trying to inch ahead with.

Between rowing back and forth to the boat a bajillion times a day, dealing with increasingly inconvenient tides, and trying to sort out the various self-inflicted equipment problems from legitimate vendor- or manufacturer-created difficulties, we were getting pretty tired out. It was a relief when we turned Rosie over to the boatyard in Port Townsend to work on the hopelessly snarled holding tank project, so we could have a bit of a break. But, when my wife went into the local clinic with a small rash below one eye and came out with nose cancer, it was probably inevitable that the only available specialist appointment for the next three months was going to be back in Seattle, at 0745 the next day.

Fortunately, we had some other errands to run in town; I picked up a loaner outboard from a friend in case we couldn’t get the Merc going, and we took care of some other necessary business. The doctor took a chunk out of Mandy’s nose and promised to call back when they figured out what was going on. We got back to Port Hadlock fairly late, but I woke up early the next morning to fret about equipment orders and small engine repair. I spent most of the day in the shop trying to put the Merc back together again, ultimately chopping off some small chunk of the drive shaft to get the lower unit back in place. It still didn’t pump water.

That evening, we were laying around digesting far too much dinner and finishing up the second half of “Gone With The Wind” (a title descriptive of the state we desperately were hoping to achieve ourselves) when we heard a loud thump from the other side of the half-wall between living and dining room. Then I heard something no one wants to hear, least of all a son of his mother, a series of weak, pained “Ow, ow, ow, ow” coming from the floor.

Mom had fainted while reaching up into a cupboard and fallen backward into the half-wall, doing this to the metal-reinforced corner with the back of her head:

An indentation in the corner of a wall — This is what a thick enough skull at a high enough velocity will do to a drywall corner bead

That earned her a trip to the emergency room, ten staples in her noggin, and an overnight stay for observation. It turned out, after a CT scan, that they were more worried about her heart than her head… they weren’t sure why she fainted in the first place but found some suspicious traces on an ECG. They wanted to keep her for the weekend for additional tests but finally agreed to let her come home with a portable monitor on.

I took a quick trip over to the local mailbox place from the hospital and collected a variety of large boxes which I assumed were the parts for the solar panel. Instead, they turned out to be a variety of large cushions… not ours at all. The actual solar panel parts were still sitting on the floor of the mailbox place, which, of course, closed before we figured out what had happened.

So we spent much of that week in and out of and hanging around various medical facilities, while not much of anything was getting done on the boat. We collected her from the outfit doing the holding tank work and trekked back down to Hadlock, failing to notice that much of the other gear we needed to finish up the installation had ended up in their shop and not on board.

When we were moored up once again, I volunteered to drive to Walmart to pick up the prescriptions for Mom, hoping to die in a fiery head-on crash somewhere en-route, but was favored with no such fortuitous change in circumstances.

The weekend was mostly spent waiting, since just about every piece of hardware we needed was either locked up in someone else’s shop or sitting around waiting for the mail to start moving again on Monday. The additional delays only ratcheted up the tension. Fortunately, since Mom had the blood pressure monitor out already to check how her new meds were working, I was able to entertain myself by watching my own pressure ratchet higher and starting a betting pool on when the first aneurysm would occur.

Monday I picked up the newly re-plumbed holding tank and the solar panel parts. Of course, I didn’t notice the missing plumbing parts until after we got the tank back to the boat and tried to put it in… foolishly, we had assumed that once we got it back, we’d actually be able to start making progress. Instead, I ended up having to make another trip back to town to get the rest of the parts from the yard the next day (because, of course, they were already closed again by the time we figured out what had happened), but that was okay, because I found that I had ordered the wrong size of one of the panel parts and had to overnight in the correct sizes, so I could pick them up at the same time from the mailbox place. That little Pyrrhic bit of efficiency was the high point of the week.

We went to take off the cracked rope clutch only to find that the builder had glassed over the backing plates, nuts and all, when they had tabbed in the bulkhead for the aft cabin (aggravating as this was, it’s actually the first manufacturing defect of any significance that I have found on the Freedom to this point). That had to be cut away, and a new triple clutch found; a friend’s shop in town had none in stock, and I was still naively hoping to be gone before a special order could be got. We took the clutch ashore to patch it up as best we could for the time being.

Other than mounting the control panel, I abandoned the new bilge pump project altogether. If all boat projects were wiring projects, I realized, I could be a very happy person.

Three men lift and install a solar panel above a radome on a sailboat arch — Bolting the new solar panel into place on the arch

Most of the rest of the days blurred together. At some point, my stepfather and I ran down to pick up a replacement outboard we found on Craigslist in Gig Harbor. Mandy managed to get the holding tank plumbed up correctly. We heard back from the specialist; her nose cancer could wait until we returned, and there was some chance in fact that the biopsy procedure had actually removed most of it. Mom’s head stopped ringing and her heart seemed to continue pumping in a sturdy and workmanlike manner. My friend Maxx arrived from town to help out with other sundry projects and we finished up the solar panel installation and wiring. My stepfather, putting some of his Boat School woodworking skills to good use, finished up and mounted a gorgeous chart holder in our aft cabin.

Gradually, stuff started to more or less work. I tried not to think about the long-term damage to our bank account or relationship, or to the vast debts of donated labor, assistance, and gratitude I was accruing with friends and family (toward the end, I am fairly certain that much of this assistance was delivered tinged with desperation to finally be rid of us both and our boatload of problems).

A wood chart holder for rolled-up charts installed in a sailboat cabin — Chart holder installed

Finally, one day, we let go the mooring pendant and motored up to Port Townsend yet again. We plugged in for the night and used unlimited electricity and free-running water to scrub away the detritus of two weeks of project mishaps. Time was taken to stow and organize. Provisions disappeared into larders, tools disappeared for hopefully the last time in a long time. And, with a freshening breeze and a fair tide the next afternoon, we floated past Point Wilson, bound for points north.

June 19, 2013

The Tank

The situation with our holding tank came to a head late last summer, during our first semi-extended cruise aboard Rosie. It happened somewhere off Des Moines:

Mandy: “Why won’t the head flush?”
Head: *gurgle, gurgle, slosh*
Me: “Um, don’t try to flush it anymore.”

We’d never had head problems before, at least not of the traditional sort; the head aboard Insegrevious was a simple re-circulating RV toilet, which would sit there silently and smell for as long as we could take it or until we pumped it or dumped it. There was no real penalty for over-filling it, and we installed a small additional holding tank for some more breathing room. Between the two, we could get about two weeks of more or less un-fetid cruising time, with the ability to extend a little longer for a small price in stenchiness.

Because the re-circulating toilet didn’t have any inputs other than what came out of us, we were unprepared for the rapidity with which a flushing marine head would fill up the holding tank. And because of the way Rosie was plumbed, we didn’t have the safety outlet of a manual overboard pump, either (not, ahem, that we would ever use such a thing in US in-shore waters); once that tiny little twelve-gallon tank filled up, that was it but for the bucket until we could get to a pump-out station.

Fortunately, such things are closely spaced here in Puget Sound and it was an easy detour to take care of our problem. But the sobering realization that came of the situation was that, between the two of us, we got about three days out of the thing. Even in the San Juans, we were going to want to hang out for more than three days between high-tailing it to a pump-out. And even further north, where pump-outs are hard to come by, we wanted the ability to hold our waste in anchorages and dump it ourselves once out in open waters.

Clearly, a major plumbing project was in order before we headed out for the summer.

I dithered and put it off, reasoning that it was foolish beyond measure to start cutting up the existing system while we were living aboard, and before the weather was warm enough to allow hatches to be open 24/7. With the sudden switch to warmth and sunshine this spring, I ran out of excuses, and pulled the access panels to get at our existing tank (after popping every hatch and porthole on board open wide).

Remarkably, it was amazingly easy to extract. I had the foresight to get a super-thorough pump-out ahead of time, and flushed it through several times (not difficult with a mere twelve-gallon tank), so it didn’t smell much, either. The hoses all pulled right off… I found myself wishing I knew what pipe dope the installer had used, because it was still supple and easy to slide off, yet had a strong, impervious seal: on the intake, the hose clamps had not even been tightened, but the hose had never budged.

I had to cut off one of the fittings but apart from that the tank slid directly back out of its slot.

After that, I spent some quality time with the Ronstan catalog and a tape measure. Our thinking was that we wanted to continue to make use of the space beneath the head sink where the old tank had been, while extending it back slightly beneath the port settee… perhaps doubling the volume without sacrificing all the lovely storage space beneath the settee. Although I didn’t find a perfect fit for the space, I ordered a likely-looking 20 gallon model that was narrow at the bow and widened coming aft to take advantage of the extra room.

This is where it began to all go wrong.

When the tank arrived, the fittings looked off somehow… not exactly where I had specified. I figured I could work with them, though, until I tried to wedge the tank into place. It didn’t fit. I stepped back and looked it over again. It was almost exactly backward… I had ordered a starboard-side model for a port-side hole. I could imagine the confusion the workers had experienced when trying to comply with my impossible fittings diagram, with the sides labeled wrong.

My heart sank. We were due to head out the next day; there was no time to make any corrections. With some measuring and cajoling, we finally figured out that the tank could still fit into the available space, backward… allowing the slanty bit to match up correctly to the hull form. However, that really put the fittings in the wrong spots. Any vanishing hopes we had about getting the plumbing hooked up before we pulled out evaporated completely.

To make matters worse, Mandy had invited several friends along for a ride with us as we made our first leg off Lake Union and out into the Sound. Tearfully, she called each of them up and explained our lack of facilities and the attendant requirement to either hold it or use a bucket if the urge should arise.

Despite this rather graceless introduction to sailing, not a one of them bowed out! Although, when they arrived the next morning, I did notice that while all had brought copious amounts of snack foods, there was not a drop to be drunk between the four of them. Not a single head-call was made in the four or five hours we spent tracking back and forth across the Sound before stopping to drop them off and fuel up at Shilshole.

Much as we would have preferred to shelve the topic, we still had to get the boat up to Port Hadlock, where we had already planned to sit and finish up projects for a week or so. There was a lovely southerly breeze left riffling the Sound after we dropped off our guests, and the forecast for the next day was for dead calm. So we headed out again, sailing as far as Ludlow for the night. I will spare the reader the indelicacies of our toilet arrangements for the evening, but perhaps it is sufficient to say that the matter of the holding tank was never far from our thoughts.

We skipped up to Port Hadlock the next morning and commenced much arguing, wailing, and gnashing of teeth for the next several days as we tried to figure out how to get everything hooked up and in place. As is frequently the case with boats, the two states of being seemed mutually exclusive: we could hook everything up just fine, or we could put it all in place where it belonged, but we could find no non-quantum-mechanically engineered means to achieve both states simultaneously.

At wit’s end, we finally motored up to Boat Haven in Port Townsend and engaged one of the marine service outfits up there to come up with a solution. They sketched out a very reasonable approach and an acceptable rate and timeline, and we left Rosie in their hands while we went on to wrestle with other projects that didn’t require our being aboard.

Unfortunately, the rest of the week ticked by, and we heard nothing. Finally, on Friday, I gave them a call and got the bad news: they wouldn’t be done until Monday.

Faced with the prospect of another three days of not being able to work on anything else aboard, not to mention two more wasted days paying moorage, we went down to collect her and take her back down to Hadlock. When I got aboard, my heart sank again. Although they had put about half the total estimated hours into her already, I couldn’t see that very much had been done. What had been done was not the important bits, but the easy stuff that we could have done ourselves. Worse, some of it was just wrong; hose cut in the wrong spots, fittings installed where braces were meant to go.

Rather than paying for more hours for them to correct these issues and finish the project up, we arranged to have them finish re-plumbing the tank in their shop and decided to complete the installation ourselves.

However, having the tank re-plumbed seemed to break a logjam for us. The new standpipe fitting was still in the wrong place (although a new, different, and less wrong place than before) and required replacing a brace (which itself required re-cutting a support in the bench) and routing several hoses awkwardly, but it was accessible, and we quickly cut and fitted all the tank inputs and outputs in one afternoon. We ran out of pipe dope or might have got it finished that night.

The next day, Mandy (traditionally the plumber of the family) went out and finished splicing in the hand-pump and connecting the splitter for pump-outs either through the deck fitting or overboard through the waste through-hull. Because we were out of time and money, we didn’t put in the final piece of the puzzle, a Y valve to allow the head to bypass the tank entirely and go directly overboard, but we left stubs in place to splice that in later, when our appetite for dealing in sewage has returned.

With some trepidation, we opened the head seacock and flushed a few gallons of raw seawater through. I listened anxiously as it trickled through the maze of new hose and fittings, and finally, after what seemed like an eternity, dribbled into the tank. I peered suspiciously at all the fresh double-clamped connections between the two. No drips.

Mandy: “Yay, it works!”
Head (ominously): *gurgle, gurgle, slosh*
Me: “…”

May 5, 2012

Learning the ropes (and wires, and rods, and spars)

As an interlude, of sorts, in our hectic schedule of looking at boats, decrying their deficiencies and/or costs, and freaking out about where to live until we find one, Mandy and I had the opportunity to attend one of famed local rigger Brion Toss’ Rig Your Boat weekend workshops. These workshops are something of a rite of passage for local sailors hoping to head off-shore, it seems, and we expected that someday, should our ambitions extend themselves in that direction, we too might take the whirlwind plunge into the mysteries of tangs and forces and leads, leads, leads… always leads, preferably to be made fair!

This was a little sooner than we had imagined but forces seemed to align. We didn’t have a boat, of course, but we had a strong suspicion that we might find a better one to buy if we had some idea about how to rig them, so it seemed an ideal time to attend. And, we were house-sitting for some friends at Kala Point that particular weekend, which made the trip up to Brion’s shop at Point Hudson convenient.

We’d first met Brion and his wife Christian during the chaotic 24 hours of Lotus’ grounding, a fast-paced incident during which I could do little more than marvel at the dazzling demonstrations of nautical acumen on display. Even during the most pressing moments, however, Brion’s inclination toward teaching came through clearly: in the dead of night, by headlamp and flashlight, as he rigged the bridle critical to distributing the forces that would be involved in dragging the 102 ton vessel off the beach at 0500 the next morning, he nevertheless attracted a small crowd as he took the time to explain in detail what he was doing and why. Rapt young Boat School students wedged awkwardly wherever they could fit along the stern rail of the canted vessel to hear the impromptu lecture.

Thankfully, the back room at the loft is on a mercifully even keel, well-lit, and warm even on the most wintery spring day. Consequently, I picked up a lot more during the weekend class than I had on the chilly, rocking, dark deck of the Lotus… despite the best efforts of Ben, the friendly loft cat (as opposed to Audrey, the stand-offish loft cat), whose insistence that our actual purpose in attending the class was primarily to pet him was at times quite convincing. Fortunately, Ben took a time out for a nap atop some spare shackles and strops in the middle of our table and I managed to re-focus on what was happening in class.

As I suspected, much of what Brion does is actually magic, or at least math, which to me is pretty much the same thing. The theories, however, are accessible even to a layman (even if that layman requires his wife to deal with any actual calculating of numbers). To anyone with even a modicum of a sailing background, at some point about mid-way through the first day, the penny will drop and you will find yourself repeatedly saying, “So that’s why my boat is like that!” Because the underlying theme of the class is the inevitability of interacting forces as they impact the design of any craft bent on harnessing the wind to move through water… it is the foot-bone connected to the leg-bone connected to the thigh-bone, only played out in keels and hulls and shrouds the whole way from sea to sky.

While this makes the whole thing sound theoretical or perhaps meta-physical, the theory is interspersed with a considerable amount of hands-on practice that many neophyte sailors will not have previously had the opportunity to undertake, or at least not undertake properly. Among the hardest things, for me, was simply tying knots. It turns out it’s a lot more difficult to un-learn a knot you first learned to tie thirty or more years ago and re-learn it the Brion Toss way than it is to just learn it the Brion Toss way in the first place. On the other hand, the smooth and intuitive loops accompanied by explanations of not just what a knot is appropriate for but why it is, teaches you more about the basic craft of the sailor’s most important tool than you would learn in a hundred years of following rabbits in and out of holes.

If the hardware involved in rigging has seemed mysterious, Brion helps dispel it by forcing you to get right into the teeth of it with your own two hands. Assembling a Hanes or Sta-Lok terminal yourself is all it takes to demonstrate that it is not, in fact, black magic that is keeping your stick in the air, but an array of predictable forces and understandable mechanical connections that can be inspected, adjusted, and managed even without decades of nautical experience. If you’ve been too intimidated to punch a hole in your mast for wiring or hardware mounts, Brion shows you exactly how to do it and explains why it is not necessarily going to lead to the imminent collapse of that spar.

While all the information and practical interaction with real hardware was valuable, everyone’s favorite part of the class was the dock walk… a drizzly, on-site inspection of random sailboats stacked up along the floats at Point Hudson. Straggling along behind Brion, we squinted overhead and leaned down to minutely inspect fittings for cracks, deformation, or the harbinger of such defects, unfair leads. Gradually, with Brion’s gentle guidance, we became adept (or at least less utterly inept) at spotting rigging problems from the dock using nothing more than the Mark I eyeball and a strict application of that first rule of rigging: fair leads. Today, I find myself frightened to walk down any random dock after glancing around and quickly convincing myself every mast I see is a breath away from coming down on my head.

That none of them have so far is the ultimate lesson from the workshop. There is little in rigging that, once done, cannot be un-done again and one of Brion’s subtler points is that it is always possible to run the numbers and determine the ideal solution for your situation, even if that happens to differ from what you have already. Rigs are not immutable and neither are they necessarily perfect in their original factory configuration. If something is wonky or unpalatable, it’s not too late to take another look. And, if you’re in the same position we are in and haven’t bought a boat yet, knowing that there are options for failing rigs and having some idea how to price out the necessary repairs or upgrades very much strengthens your hand during the shopping process. We’ve already ruled out one boat on the basis of the necessary repair cost; some other sucker who hasn’t been through Brion’s workshop is going to pay twenty grand more for that boat than he thinks he is paying.

So we’ve managed to segue from an interesting educational interlude back into our more normal panicky boat shopping mode. Better equipped, better informed, and more inclined to dive in and fix potential problems with whatever boat we find… stay tuned!

January 3, 2011

Keeping busy

It’s amazing how self-contained you can be on a boat. All the running back and forth to various marine hardware stores that happens when one is in port must either serve to stock up on a variety of otherwise superfluous supplies, or simply be unnecessary, because there is never any lack of things to be done, or stuff to do it all with, even when one is out sailing around.

Sailboat waterline coated with green crud from False Creek, Vancouver, BC — Two Weeks of False Creek Crud

This summer we had a lot of fun, covered a lot of ground, but we spent a lot of time just hanging around on the hook, too. But there was never a chance to get bored… there’s always something to keep you busy on board.

From pulling out and patching a leaking muffler to doing the same with the head (guess which was worse) to scrubbing two weeks of accumulated False Creek muck off the waterline to simply hanging out on a sunny day and polishing the stanchions, we always had something to work on. More importantly, we always seemed to have the things along we needed to work on it with. After two or three years of bumbling around wishing we had tools or parts to fix the inevitable problems that come up, we seem to have finally accumulated the right variety of gear to take care of most of what happens on the average trip. It felt pretty good to not constantly be pining for a port with a decent chandlery any time something came up.

A reasonably clean sailboat waterline — A half hour of scrubbing later...

Weather also played a big part. It’s a lot more enjoyable to haul everything out of the cockpit locker and go crawling around fixing pumps if all that gear is not getting soaked in a perpetual rain shower while it is out; it’s a lot less objectionable to pull yourself around the waterline in the dinghy scrubbing away if it’s almost ninety degrees out.

Whether it was a matter of weather, or better preparedness, or just a better attitude in general, this year I actually felt like I was ahead on maintenance and projects over the course of the summer. Years past, in remote waters, it seemed more a matter of running the boat hard, patching things up temporarily as they inevitably failed, and putting off all the big refit and repair work into a long and arduous process in the future. Choosing between the two after having experienced both, I will take keeping ahead any day.

July 1, 2010

The Joys of a Dry Boat

Damp is a constant condition for most boats, or at least a condition that owners constantly must fight with in order to maintain a dry and pleasant aspect aboard their vessel. Everything, understandably, is stacked against a boat being dry (and I don’t mean dry in the alcoholic sense; indeed, the wetter your boat is with water, the wetter you are likely to want it with booze) from being immersed in saltwater to being surrounded by the humid air just above it. Here in Seattle, there’s also the rain, a factor that provides insidious infiltration from areas which might not otherwise be suspect.

Insegrevious used to be a dry boat, despite our rather amateurish (in retrospect) efforts to keep her that way. The bilge stayed bone dry, leaks seemed rare, and it never took more than a decent afternoon with the hatches open to air her out. Rust was rare, mildew nonexistent. It was a rather deceptive introduction to life aboard, in other words.

For the last three years, that airy state of grace has been suspended as we have fought condensation and a variety of minor, but hidden leaks above and below the waterline. I have good reason to believe, however, that we’re well on our way to drying Insegrevious out completely again as our leaky muffler has finally been dragged out and patched this week.

One of the obstacles to drying out most boats is simply that it can be wicked difficult to see where the water is coming from in the first place. This is particularly the case when there are multiple sources involved, because anything you do to identify or narrow them down quickly runs afoul of one of the other problems… or worse, one that may be easily found may be masking others that are less so.

In our case, we knew we had a leak at the rudder shaft, and re-packing it seemed the best solution. The jury is still out on the efficacy of that job, but I also noticed that we seemed to be taking on more water when under power than when under sail. I could see it running forward near the prop shaft (itself which, since I could see it, and see no water coming in there, was a likely suspect early eliminated). It’s true that the hull squats more in the water, increasing the pressure and therefore the leak rate, the faster we go, but the amount of squat for 5 knots under power is the same as 5 knots under sail, more or less, so that left something to do with the engine itself. The least visible part of the cooling system was the muffler, which is located right about where the water was coming from, so that was my prime suspect.

Welded seam on boat muffler — Ghetto Welding job

Pulling it was easier than I expected (disturbingly so… almost nothing is holding it in place): my friend Maxx and I undid the hose clamps fastening it to the exhaust mixing elbow on the engine and hauled it out by the exhaust hose leading to the transom. Sure enough, there was a hole. Unfortunately, it was in the seam between the body and the end. Knowing that neither a new muffler nor an expensive repair job were in the budget for this summer, I had prepared to limp along using some muffler repair tape, but it wasn’t going to work on an edge.

Fortunately, Maxx has a wire-feed welder, and even more fortunately, it was right up the road at our friend Torrey’s garage. A quick trip, four or five tries, and the muffler was holding water again. A fresh coat of engine paint to help keep the corrosion at bay, and hopefully we’ll be good for the summer at least.

Muffler in place beneath fuel tank — The muffler, freshly painted and in its proper home

Tucking it back in place was only slightly more difficult than pulling it out. A full test of the weld and our re-clamping is waiting on the compartment drying out, so we can tell if any additional water is being introduced. With the weather as it’s been, nothing is drying out too fast. But it will eventually, and then it’s on to the next leak, on our eternal quest for a dry boat.