Category: Systems

No, not the Rules of the Road… I’m talking about the real rules that govern the day to day lives of sailors.

Most of you have some idea what I am talking about even if you have never put names to them. Every sailor I know, for instance, has some selected multiplier he or she uses when estimating the time and cost a given boat project will take over and above what you think it will take. Mine is four; on land I usually just double it, but a boat project I think will take about an hour and cost fifty bucks, I mentally re-adjust to a hundred dollars and four hours spread out over two days (the extra day is because the hardware store will be closed when you realize you need that extra part).

So project time is one rule. Project scheduling involves another. It’s the natural inclination to consider the boat projects one has on hand (quadrupling the time/cost estimates as above, of course), the amount of time and money one has available, and planning to complete the projects accordingly. But you would be failing to take into account the Law of Unexpected Projects, and will quickly find yourself committed to more projects than you have time available to complete.

We ran into something like that this week after drawing up a lengthy lists of the projects we would like to get done this month. We had just enough time to squeeze in the most important ones… and then the galley sink faucet started dripping. And the head sprung a leak. Suddenly, we are two projects over our limit, and they’re not minor little things that you really want to put off, either.

So my new rule will be, schedule only half the available time to the projects you know about. The second half will get filled up soon enough with all the extras you weren’t expecting.

There are also some complex interpersonal rules to do with boat projects. One is the rule of inadvertent assistance. Often, Mandy and I will have our own separate projects to work on, either due to space requirements (there are a lot of places where it isn’t really practical for two people to be working on things at the same time) or particular aptitudes (she gets all the stuff that requires intricate maneuvers in tight spaces; I end up with all the brute force stuff). We’ll then schedule these according to our own convenience, while the other may have work or something else to do.

But the rule of inadvertent assistance says that regardless of what the plan was, eventually both of us will end up having to work on most projects, even when it’s inconvenient to do so. The galley sink faucet was a case in point. Mandy generally does plumbing, and I had other work to do, so I arranged to be out of the way while she worked on it. But little by little, things kept coming up that required my assistance or intervention. Eventually, I found myself soaked, swearing, and contorted beneath the sink, fully engaged in something I’d never planned to get involved with.

That conclusion is similar to one mandated by another rule, the rule of unintentional assistance. That’s where you’re watching someone else work on a project that you have nothing to do with, but find yourself offering “helpful” hints and suggestions, eventually picking up a tool or holding a flashlight, and toward the end, taking over the job completely to see it through to the bitter end. You just can’t help yourself.

When I was a kid, a particularly heavy snow fall brought out all the children in the neighborhood for that great communal ritual of building a massive snowman. The inevitable snowball fight broke out, and someone thought to construct rudimentary snow fortifications for protection. The adults of the neighborhood were of course watching all this, and as we got into the construction phase they started offering tips… make blocks, stack them offset, make the base wider, and so on. Then they started to lend a hand to show us what they meant, and pretty soon out come the snow shovels and while the kids were all back to the snowmen, a full-fledged igloo took shape. That’s unintentional assistance.

I keep wishing one of those guys would wander past my boat when I’m tearing my head apart and would unintentionally take over for me.

Hauling out, that annual or biannual, or in our case triannual, ritual, is a taxing business, and I’m feeling pretty overtaxed even though we’re done with it finally. Turns out that while it can be a pretty demanding event for anyone, when it’s your home going up on blocks, it’s even more stressful.

I had planned to put together more updates, chronicle things as they happened, but all those grand ambitions went away the first day. So, yet again, this is a true late entry, framed in the rosy afterglow of a relatively successful event, unable to strictly convey the tension and anxiety I was wracked with during our three days on the hard.

The tension all started the morning of the day before our scheduled lift time, when we planned to sail up to Port Townsend and spend the night in order to be sure of being on time. Reviewing the tide tables one last time, I realized that I had misread them when planning the trip, and had scheduled our afternoon departure exactly opposite the most desirable currents. We hastily prepared the cabin and threw off the docklines to get out on the ebb, and had a pretty decent northward sail ahead of southerly winds the whole way up.

We spent the night on a mooring at my parent’s house in Port Hadlock, and the southerly built up to a brisk 25-30 knots by the time we had to leave for the boat yard in the morning. My friend Maxx, there along with my parents to help with all the work, and I unfurled a postage-stamp worth of genoa and took off northward like a rocket. Making things even more interesting, an ammunition ship was coming in to moor at Naval Magazine Indian Island, right between us and the Boat Haven in Port Townsend, at the same time. Quite apart from the strictures placed upon small craft such as ours by Rule 18(b) of the COLREGs, one simply finds oneself inclined to give ammunition ships a wide berth.

The wind also gave rise to speculation that the hoist might not happen as planned; as we pulled into the work pier the gentleman tied up ahead of us took our lines and informed us that he had been delayed almost two hours already. The thought of several tons of boat being blown around in the slings was not comforting. But when I checked in at the yard office after lunch, they were ready to go… I found myself motoring into the U-shaped slip almost an hour earlier than scheduled.

I never get any good pictures of our haul-outs because I am always the one stuck on deck when we come out of the water. This year the position was particularly nerve-wracking. Not only had it been three years in salt water on a single coat of paint, but in February, we had dinged a rock in Montague Harbour with what felt like a pretty solid whack, and my visions of what the soft lead keel might look like after that affair had grown increasingly horrific with each repetition of the event in my mind. I went so far as to schedule an extra buffer day in the yard in case significant repair work was necessary. While the boat was in the water, there was no way to tell what the bottom edge of the fin looked like. As it was being hoisted out, then, my only clues from on deck came from watching the faces of friends and bystanders on the ground below. They looked pretty sober, I thought… not a good sign.

I hopped off when the bow stopped jerking around, and turned around to get a good look… and saw nothing more than a few dings and some cracked epoxy. The keel was hardly damaged at all. Even more remarkably, the hull was surprisingly clean but for a conga line of barnacles along the bottom of the rudder and around the prop shaft. Most everything came off at the business end of the pressure washer, but the paint stayed put… particularly gratifying since I had ordered another gallon of the stuff for this year’s coat (Pettit Unepoxy Plus, inexpensive and apparently quite effective the waters of the Salish Sea).

Everything else went similarly according to plan. The painting was fast and easy, there was plenty of time to wax and buff the rest of the hull, the rudder stuffing got re-packed, the engine painted, and the various gouges in the keel epoxied and faired, all in the first two days. The last day, with our afternoon splash time, was mostly a lot of waiting around for paint to dry.

The disappointments were mostly secondary; at some point during the past three years, the prop shaft zinc was apparently thrown off, and the shaft, strut, and prop all had some degree of corrosion which had to be taken off. We sprayed the works with a zinc-based paint this time around, which our boatyard neighbor assured us was good stuff and had the added effect of making the whole assembly look solid and new. I also took some of the spare time we had to go up the mast and take a look at our malfunctioning radome, but even after tightening every connector in sight and blasting them with contact cleaner, it remained malfunctioning.

The rudder shaft re-packing also didn’t turn out entirely well. When we went back in the water, it was perfectly dry and looked good, but once underway with the stern squatting down, it started dripping again. At least it should be dry while we’re at dock or anchor now. I’ll have to weight the bow down and give it another try with the boat in the water, though.

On the whole, though, I came out of it all pretty pleased. It was more difficult than the last time around simply because it was hard to look at our home all torn apart in mid-project and propped up on stilts (fortunately, we could stay at my parent’s place, and didn’t have to try to cope with living aboard while out of the water… I’m not sure either we or it would have survived that experience). It’s hard to explain, but it’s extraordinarily important for everything aboard to be secured and organized. That has, for me, taken on an even more important mental component while living aboard… it’s hard to move around or get anything done if that’s not the case, and so I find myself a little out of sorts when it starts getting messy and disorganized, as inevitably happens during projects of this sort. It was a tremendous relief to have time on the last day to get aboard and clean and stow everything, and I had great satisfaction sailing back to Seattle (motoring, actually; we weren’t so lucky with the wind on our return trip, and chugged along over glassy seas nearly the whole way back… with an extra half knot or so of speed with our clean bottom and prop!) in a boat that both looked and felt like a boat should.

Though satisfied, I’m also pretty tired… I feel all hauled out myself right now. But every time I look at our newly shiny hull and clean bottom, ready for a summer of sailing, it’s worth it all over again.

“Oh, great,” you say. “Here he goes again about risk and checklists and aviation or something. BOOORRRIIING!”

Well, fear not, my friends. I’m not going to talk about that tedious old crap. I’m going to talk about another kind of crap altogether, fresh, exciting crap that you will be happy to learn about: our stuff.

It’s no accident that the phrases “I have a bunch of crap” and “I have a bunch of stuff” are more or less synonymous in English, I have decided. Most stuff is crap, and can safely be disposed of despite our more noble attachments to it. This is a simple fact you learn once you move from a 1400 square foot house to a 33′ sailboat, and it’s almost universally described among those who take the plunge as a sort of liberating experience. My wife certainly sees it that way and I suppose, intellectually at least, I can understand that. The modern tendency of people being owned by their stuff rather than vice versa has been broadly commented on; moving onto a boat is a sure way to short-circuit that unhappy state of affairs, because you just don’t have the room for it (the fact that you will soon end up being owned by your boat is another topic entirely).

The thing is, I’ve never felt owned by my stuff. I have always been pretty happy with an accumulation of goods that could more or less fit comfortably in the back of my pickup truck. Apart from a few random and relatively small items I have spent considerable money on and find routinely useful, I just don’t feel much need for stuff. While living in a house, it’s true that I accumulated a great deal more items than that, but I had little emotional attachment to them and didn’t have much trouble ditching them when the time came to do so.

After a long winter of house-sitting, splitting our time between the house and the boat, we’re finally consolidating almost all our various crap back in one place: aboard. And despite the fact that it mostly all came from here in the first place, we’re having a heck of a time getting all back in comfortably. Unlike when we moved aboard in the first place, however, our space issues now are not really caused by any unhealthy and unwarranted attachment to a surfeit of unnecessary crap. This time, rather, we are confronting a simple irreducible minimum of stuff.

It’s certainly true that necessity is the mother of compromise and most of us can get by with a lot less than what we think of as “necessary” but I don’t think I am going out on a limb when I find it necessary to keep around enough clothes for a week, food, office supplies and tools, and the other various items that we are now finding it a challenge to stow neatly and securely. It was easy, the first time around, to look at some object or other and say, “Pitch it; I haven’t used it in years.” Now, I look at what is left, and as I consider each separate thing, I am either looking at something I use almost every day, or which prudence and common standards of seamanship demand remain aboard.

I think this is the point at which most people decide they simply need another three feet of boat. One wag suggested we just put the stuff in the basement, and I won’t pretend I haven’t considered building some sort of floating filing cabinet that could be towed along behind if necessary. Driven to such desperation, those 36 footers start looking pretty good.

I’m determined to weather the crisis, however, if for no other reason than we simply can’t afford anything larger right now. I have every confidence that, given a few weeks of patient, persistent re-arranging and Tetris-like maneuvering, pretty much everything will fit. Then, I won’t even want a bigger boat… I’d just have to start the organizing all over again from scratch.

It’s spring, and the light green sprouts on the hillside above the marina make it look as if Bob Ross has taken his great celestial brush and begun the annual creation of his legions of happy little trees. The sun is out, warmth begins to seep into the cabin from outside rather than leaking out of the inside, and all manner of birds and harbor creatures are re-appearing. It’s spring, and in times like these, a young man’s fancy turns to… boat maintenance.

Strange, and perhaps unromantic, you may protest. True, but who among us can govern our hearts when what they really yearn for is the feel of a good solid wrench to wrap the palm around, the silky bristles of a scrub brush, or the luxurious softness of a chamois cloth infused with polish? I see here today that I am not alone in feeling the call, the dock being alive with other boaters on a similar mission, queues at the water spigots, scrub brushes held at port arms.

Scrubbing the deck and cleaning the bright work is the most straightforward and perhaps least risky part of the urge, however. In maintenance, as with romance, there is ample opportunity for broken hearts, and they are most likely to crack when the engine cover is removed after a winter’s disuse or the bilge revealed in all its putridity for the first time.

In my case, it’s the engine. The hatch has been off most of the winter but it’s tucked away back next to the quarter berth, which, in another of the immutable laws of the sea, has filled up with the detritus that might more properly have been consigned to a cockpit locker except that it was always raining when we wanted to put it there. So the engine has been out of sight and largely out of mind, until today, when I find it looking sickly and rusty, despite a considerable amount of exercise in February.

The problem, as is so often the case when it comes to maintenance, is that it wasn’t maintained early enough. Normally the engine compartment stays quite dry over the winter, but this year, a leaking rudder shaft has ensured a steady trickle of water down below the engine pan on its way to the bilge. The shaft packing won’t get changed out until we haul out (sometime next month, if I ever get it scheduled), so there is nothing for it but to let it trickle. Last summer I noticed that the engine needed a fresh coat of paint, but I was either busy or out having fun or not feeling like living in a cloud of paint fumes, so I put it off, reasoning that it wasn’t likely to see much use until spring anyway.

Of course, it’s the dis-use that kills boats generally, not the use, and now I have a lot of detailed scrubbing to do before I can paint it.

Fortunately, it’s a slight enough obstacle that it hasn’t cooled my recent maintenance ardor, but I’m thinking now that it might be best today if I don’t also look in the bilge. Spring fancies can soon enough turn to summer doldrums. I don’t want to kill a good thing while it’s going.