Monthly Archives: August 2020

Skidding Into the Dock

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You know, Facebook is a great archive of memories. Regardless of how irritated I get with that application, I do like being able to pull up memories to see what I was doing on this day in year’s past. Pulling up today’s memories I discovered that this is the 3 year anniversary of doing our final provisioning for the passage to San Francisco. We were in Friday Harbor, where we took delivery of our headsail. Three years. It hardly seems believable.

These have been three years of hard wear on Galapagos. Using a boat the way it’s intended to be used makes it work hard and things start giving up the ghost. Lately it feels almost comical. Today I noticed that one of my collapsible silicone bowls has developed a crack. My yogurt emerges through the crack and threatens to drip onto the table. This is the second bowl of a set of three that has done its duty well but is just worn out. Probably it’s not real silicone. Probably it’s just plastic. Who knows? We have used these bowls every single day for over 3 years (because we lived aboard before we left the dock). I guess they have earned their keep.

I am reminded most fondly of the trip we had bringing this boat from Astoria up to Tacoma. Because we were still learning about the boat systems, especially the exhaust riser for our then-new engine, Hiram, we literally skidded into the dock in Tacoma just as the riser broke for the second time in that trip. It absolutely broke in half just as we came to a stop.  I don’t think this landing will be quite that dramatic. So far the riser on that engine exhaust is the one thing that is holding up well after three years.[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ4V_-GY3PM[/embedyt]

We joke that now we have a boat that we could advertise for sale as ‘kept her owners safe for a three year cruise and is ready to go again!’. Laugh. Out. Loud. Not only are we not selling her, but if you are in the market for a boat and it’s advertised in that vein, bring your calculator to add up replacement costs for every single thing on board. Be sure to check their silicone bowls because they will surely be worn completely out.

You might be wondering what else is giving out on this fine vessel we call home. Here’s a short list:
1. Our battery charger – no longer charges at the dock. Must run engine or use solar panels. Will be replaced by the charger of Mike’s dreams; a Victron Multi-Plus. That’s a charger/inverter combo that would also make my wildest dreams come true. We’d be able to just plug things into the regular plugs on board. Whaatt? What magic is this? After living aboard for this long, my bar for thrills is super low.

2. Our Force10 stove – The burners only work on high now, and even then the big one is barely hot enough to keep my pressure cooker going. The oven is a joke and must be babysat continuously to be sure the temperature is not either too cold to bake anything or a blazing 500F. I am not making that up. I still manage, just, to bake bread and other assorted goods, but believe me when I say I have to sit by the oven door and keep checking that temperature gauge. Ridiculous. Either fix or replace. We are not sure yet.

3. Our toilets – they are the Wilcox Crittendon big old fashioned bullet proof types that eventually wear out because everything does even though Michael rebuilt them both before we left. They will be replaced. We’re just done with them. Electric fresh water flush is coming to Galapagos. Be still my heart!

4. The entire rig – that’s an entire post by itself, or three. We are a sailing boat again but our trust in any part of the rig has been destroyed and pulling the mast and replacing all the rigging and hardware is one of the main reasons we are here. This includes all halyards and lines, sheets, everything. All of it. That’s right, we are made of money.

5. Our hand held cheese grater, the kind that grates parmesan cheese. Broken beyond repair. Sad. Already replaced while we shopped in Port Townsend. This was a big deal.

6. Every stitch of clothing. Michael will just be throwing his pants away. Between his lack of haircut in months and his clown pants, well, I don’t want to talk about it. He still shaves and I am grateful for that. I have already disposed of many articles of clothing but cannot seem to part with some of my sun-faded tshirts because they still remind me of warm water and sea turtles. I’d like to say they smell like sunshine but that’s a bridge too far. My heart bleeds.

Because this is more interesting than a photo of my shirt.

7. Every cushion in the salon. They are disgusting. To be fair, they were not meant to last this long anyhow. We just ran out of money to spend on things like cushions and decided we could either go with what we had or work longer and never leave the dock. We chose wisely.

8. Mike’s favorite volt meter. We have multiples. You cannot have too many volt meters. But it’s sad when your favorite tool wears out. And speaking of tools, I’ll just include right here the hand held vacuum that goes with our Ryobi rechargeable tools. It’s going to give up any second now. Hard use. Very hard.

9. The switches on the electric windlass. When we landed on Vancouver Island to drop anchor in a safe harbor, the windlass switch failed. It was straight up a corrosion issue. Mike has fashioned repairs but both switches need replacing. One does not want to raise an 85 pound anchor and big chain by hand.

Fixing the windlass switch. Could have been watching sea otters, but no.

10. I’m leaving this blank so there is room for whatever decides to break tomorrow. Will it be the shower fixture that already leaks? Will it be yet another door that stops closing correctly? Will the chartplotter give up? Will the spigot for fresh water on the aft deck finally break off? Will the light in the aft bathroom finally stop working altogether? So many juicy possibilities.

We are slowly but surely making way to the south sound, trying to make the most out of the last drops of summer. We’ve been living in summertime for the last three years. I know you feel sorry for us as we shiver in our fleece. We spent a lot of time in Port Townsend, remembering why we love that town. Next stop was Port Gamble, where we had two very lovely days and wondered why we had never visited by boat before. We’ll definitely go back there at some point.  Last night we were in Blakely Harbor with a 180 degree view of Seattle’s lights. I tried hard to enjoy them as they were very pretty from a distance, but the truth is I never missed Seattle even a little bit. Today we will carry on down Colvos Passage to Gig Harbor where we started this trip over three years ago. We said a tearful goodbye to our kids right there at the guest dock.

After Gig Harbor we’ll hang out on the guest dock in Tacoma for a day or two. If you are in the neighborhood, come down and say hello. I wish we could invite you onto the boat like we would have before. But even so, we’d be glad to see you from a respectable distance. Alas. What a world we are living in. Re-entry is hard, folks. It’s just hard.

Spinner dolphins in the sun. We sure miss these guys.

The nights are getting colder out here. We were socked in with dense fog at Port Gamble. Yesterday afternoon I was wearing shorts. Today it’s sweatpants and polar fleece all the way. Fall is on the way and we keep our fingers crossed for a slip on the guest dock at Swantown in Olympia. They don’t open that dock until after Labor Day. We’ve been on the waiting list for a slip since December, but with the Covid-19 thing, the waitlist is not moving much. Clap your hands real hard for us, spit and spin, pray, and do all the things to send us good joojoo about finding a temporary slip for us to skid into for the winter. We’ve got a lot of projects to get started on.

When the October issue of 48 North hits your inbox, look for an article about our landing in Canada after our rig failure. You’ll get all the scoop about it there.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16.

Random Thoughts With My Morning Coffee

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Ah, good morning, Pacific Northwest flat water. What is this thing about an anchorage so quiet that the boat feels like dry land? What’s the point in that? May as well be in a house. You’d think I’d sleep better, but I don’t. It’s too still and I don’t know where I am. It’s confusing.

Unexpected yet delightful Canadian welcoming committee.

I realize that we have been in cell service for about 8 days now and I’m already hooked. That’s a bad sign. I know this because we took refuge from some rainy winds coming to Port Townsend by toodling over to the bay between Indian Island and Marrowstone Island. It’s protected here all right. We prefer anchoring away from the huge cluster of boats in Mystery Bay so we are over by the DO NOT LAND BOATS HERE signs that the Navy puts up along the shoreline of Indian Island. There is no cell service here for some bizarre reason. I was dead irritated by that. I wanted to spend the evening scrolling through Craigslist looking at camping vans, along with, apparently, every other human who lives in the United States. They are very popular right now. Maybe we should wait until winter.

Hey, here’s a bit of information about our last passage. Reading between the lines of our posts you may be wondering why we suddenly turned the engine on (Blast! I hated to do that.) and why we landed in Canada for a couple of days (See photo of welcoming committee above.). That would be because we lost our backstay on Day 21 of our beautiful passage from Hawaii, 500 miles from Cape Flattery. Yes, we sure did. The word ‘lost’ here means kaput. Toast. A goner. Yikes!

Yikes stripes. It broke in half. While this looks like metal fatigue, in fact it is not. The metal you are seeing is the end piece that is inserted into the insulator. There is another like it on the bottom half. The composite material was probably UV damaged, at least that is our operating hypothesis. 

For the non-sailors in the reader group, the backstay is one of the pieces of wire that holds up the mast. The mast is the big pokey stick that holds the big sail that makes the boat go. In short, when one of the pieces of wire breaks, your mast can fall down. The backstay is the piece of wire that supports the mast from the back of the boat, keeping it from falling forward. To lose a backstay is very, very NO BUENO.

I’m writing that story up for possible publication (because, why not?) so I cannot tell the story the way I want to right now. If the story is accepted for publishing, you will read it there. If it isn’t, then I’ll publish it on the blog.  Anyway, the important things are thus: we did great, we kept our rig intact, it failed at the SSB insulator up at the top of the mast, no one was hurt, no other boat damage was had, it happened in the morning when the sun was up, and we are a pretty terrific team when the chips are down.

After we had everything secured and under control, I was feeling pretty low.  Then a huge pod of mixed Pacific White Sided and Northern Right Whale dolphins came to the boat and stayed for well over half an hour, leaping and tail slapping, and it made me feel loads better. There were hundreds of them. This was the only dolphin visitation we had for the whole passage. Coincidence? I will never believe it. Once I get my computer to play video again (Thanks, Apple.) I will post videos for you. Until then, imagine hundreds of dolphins leaping and slapping by the boat. Oh, and also the sun came out. Consider my spirits uplifted.

Northern Right Whale Dolphin. So adorable and different!

We now have a new backstay, which Mike installed two days ago. Thank you to Port Townsend Rigging for fitting us in as an ‘emergency rigging need’ and getting it built for us in less than 2 days. They rock. A complete new rig was already on the list for after these passages. We just started earlier than expected.

And why didn’t we talk about it as soon as it happened? That would be because we didn’t want people like our kids and mothers to be worried about us when there was no reason to be and there was nothing they could do. Also that would have been an additional distraction for us and we needed to focus on getting the boat home safely.  We were safe, we were fine, just bitterly disappointed and sad. I have to mention, however, that right after it happened our kids’ spidey senses must have been tingling because we received sat phone text messages from BOTH of them within an hour of each other asking how things were going out there on the sea. I can only say that, travelers that they are, they surely understand the lies of ommission people tell when they don’t want to worry others needlessly.

Pretty Velella on a calm day at sea.

Hey, remember S/V Flying Gull? The gorgeous Sparkman and Stevens sailboat we almost bought years ago due to completely overlooking how much money we would need to update her? Recall she fell on hard times and was involved in a police shooting in the waters of Bainbridge Island. Then she was sold to someone who wanted to bring her back to her glory. Well she is sitting in the Port Townsend boat yard and might be up for sale again soon. She needs a lot of work but if a person has deep pockets and a love of classic boats, well, need I say more? We still think she is one of the loveliest boats we have ever seen. Plus she has a porcelain urinal. That would provide a lot of amusement. Seeing her up on the hard in Port Townsend made our hearts sore.

Flying Gull. Still a beauty.

In other news, these are the thoughts that run through the mind over coffee.

– You really can never have too much extra line on a boat.

– Ditto on shackles and other random sailing hardware.

– What is the useful life of a shackle, anyway?

– There are WAY too many boats up here. It’s suffocating.

– The thing they say about being out on the ocean getting under your
skin is absolutely true. Let’s go.

– Having any kind of rig failure at sea crushes your soul just a little bit and leaves a hard
kernal of guilt that needs to be resolved.

– Tuna blood dries hard and slick and is difficult to remove from the
side of the boat.

– It’s impossible that the San Juan Islands are as close as the chart
says they are. WTF?

– Our website needs a redesign and I have no idea where to even
start with that.

– Will we ever use our paddle boards in these waters? I see other
people on theirs. Maybe they don’t fall in like I do.

– Cruising friends on the ground when you are on passage are
invaluable.

– Shout out to the Coast Guard for existing and being on top of
their original mission.

– Our boat looks shabby and rode hard after 5000+ miles.

– Why can’t someone create a product that completely protects
marine stainless steel from rust? Forever.

– Ditto on teak. I am so over doing wood finishing.

– Tell me, grey seal, how does it feel to be so wise? To see with eyes
that only see what’s real. Tell me, grey seal.*

– Every day I read the news and it’s always the same. Why bother?

– We cannot wait for new salon cushions. The need is real.

– Putting up the sail for the first time after repairs is a fine feeling.

Greetings, friend! Where are your companions?

Sitting here watching for Tufted Puffins at Protection Island. I love anchoring a nice roadstead anchorage. Maybe we will roll around a little bit and I’ll sleep better. Tomorrow we go up to the San Juans. It’s less than 20 miles away. Still beside myself with disbelief over that. It used to feel like going to another world altogether.

*Thanks for the ear worm, Elton John.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16. Currently at Protection Island. Watching Puffins.

 

 

 

 

Breaking the Seal

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Yesterday Michael and I got off the boat for the first time since July 2.  You would think that after that long, with our legs atrophied to those not unlike stick figures, we’d be chomping at the bit.  You’d think we be practically swimming for shore, defying the death that would surely be ours should our bodies submerge for even a moment into this frigid, sepulchral water. And you would be wrong.

Flat calm. Cold.

For reasons even we have yet to define, we have not been anxious to get off the boat. Sure, we know we have to. Eventually. Both of us eye the land with something akin to, while not exactly loathing, a feeling of mixed hostility and fear overlaid with resignation. We have lived in our little bubble aboard Galapagos for too long, I think. Even in Hawaii, we stayed aboard most of the time, and the virus was only one of the reasons why. In fact, it was mostly this other, unnamed feeling of resistance to being on land that kept us hunkered down in our small, contained world. Mentally, I wondered what was to become of us when thrown into the cold world of literally everything except our boat and other cruisers.

Yachtie.

One of the books I read in preparation for cruising was Windy Hinman’s Tightwads On the Loose, her story about their 7 year Pacific cruise.  Of course I enjoyed the entire book, but the chapter that I remember made the biggest impression on me is her chapter on how hard it was to come back. Maybe it was more than one chapter.  I haven’t revisited the book, since I gave my copy to another hopeful cruiser long ago, but I remember her saying she was struck with how depressed she felt, how hard the re-entry to average American life was for her. For some reason, that chapter has stuck with me for these years and now I keep coming back to it in my mind and wish I had her book in front of me to reference. I think I’ll get the Kindle version and re-read it.

So today we will up anchor when the tide current slows coming into this protected Sequim Bay, with its hurry of boats coming and going,  and go to Port Townsend. Our Andrew and Jill are coming to say hey tomorrow, and my mom will come on Tuesday, so we will be in Port Townsend for a few days.  Maybe seeing our family in the flesh will balance the scales a little bit for us.

I know that as we transition into a new kind of life here, probably a mixture of boat and land life, we will get accustomed to being here again. Maybe that’s something we worry about, this ‘getting accustomed’ thingy. We have both been joking about how this coastal cruising we are now doing where anchorages are plenty and the water if flat,  is bound to make us ‘soft’.  We will pull up to a dock and get fuel pumped directly into our tank, no filtering required, rather than walk to the Pemex station with a cart full of garrafones to hurk back to the dinghy, then the boat, then laboriously filter into our tank. We will fill up with water from the tap when we get fuel, because we know that so far, the water is good here, so we really won’t need the water maker as much. We will eventually have our car back. Even the anchorages are easy. We haven’t had a rolly anchorage since Hawaii. This kind of living can over time erode the self-sufficient toughness we have grown to live with and that has made life interesting. Groceries will probably always be within reach.  Our biggest challenge will be staying warm and keeping our fingers and toes out of the water. We still forget that we can’t just jump in and swim to the shore.

Hurry up and take the photo, I can’t hold this fish much longer! One of several lovely Albacore tunas we caught. Wow we will miss that.

We have so much to say about our passages and putting all of that down in a coherent and organized way is a challenge. I’m thinking a good way is to simply choose some entries from my passage journal, which I kept religiously, almost compulsively. Here is my note from July 6, 2020.

“Day 4 of passage home. 120 miles made good yesterday. Position 27 46N 158 55W

Having been given the choice by Rick Shema, The Weather Guy, we have opted to keep a course a bit to the west in order to sail up and around the Pacific High. This will add 24 hours or 100 miles to the trip but will avoid motoring for 2 days.  Seems like a fair trade. I would like to be able to sail the entire trip. We feel the weather transitioning with the number of squalls we are seeing. Mostly they disturb the wind for a bit, dump a little rain, and then we pick up where we left off.  Last night I awoke to sails flapping over a glassy swell, something new on this trip.  It didn’t last long, but these episodes do decrease our miles traveled for the day.  The clouds are big and fluffy and sometimes dark.

Yesterday we fished all day but no luck with the tuna plug.  Today Mike says he will drag the squid lure.  Mixed feelings about fishing as the boat motion is challenging.

Everything feels so damp below from salt. I just want to throw the settee cushions away and start over.  They never feel dry.  My bunk feels dry, thank goodness.  But there is salt everywhere. It will take a week to clean this boat.

Today I had 2 naps, in spite of getting rest last night.  The wind is steady and more cloud cover. Air is cooler at night, especially.  We could use a day of softer winds but we appreciate making the miles for now. ”

 

S/V Galapagos out, somewhere in the Puget Sound area.