Category Archives: Downshifting

Making Space

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Warning: Disturbing photos included in this post. Beware. Neatniks everywhere, please choose a soothing beverage and do some deep breathing before you being to read this.

Enjoy this kind of photo while you can.

Here’s a little metaphor I use with my clients who ‘do too much’, those people who come to me because they suddenly find they cannot manage all the requirements they believe their lives impose upon them. This visual image is born of my worst nightmare: being on a cruise ship, faced with all the food they reputedly offer up at each and every meal, and probably between meals, too. So many choices!! It makes me want to run screaming. The visual image goes something like this:

Imagine life is like eating on a cruise ship, except that the buffet line stretches off into infinity. You cannot see the end of the line, all the foods are set out before you. There are salads, meats, vegetables, breads, puddings, cakes and pastries, sauces and creams. There are smoked oysters and cracked crabs. Everyone gets one plate and everyone has to keep moving down the line. No stopping for long. You must eat as you go. You begin putting foods on the plate, and because you are a conscientious soul, you make sure to put steamed vegetables and other tasteless fare on the plate along with your devil’s food cake because you know what’s ‘good’ for you, right?

The ubiquitous cruise ship.

At first, you can eat fast enough to keep up with the line, and your plate never really gets over crowded. You can keep the broccoli from touching the roast beef.  But as the line progresses you begin to feel full and your plate is looking a bit crowded. You would like to stop now and digest, perhaps take a nap,  except that the rules of the cruise ship are that you must keep choosing foods. You don’t get to stop. Your choices slow down, but eventually, somewhere around mid-line (or maybe earlier if you have a lot of kids and a high pressure job), you notice that you cannot keep up and the mashed potatoes are hanging dangerously, tenuously, over the side of your plate. If you add that helping of bread pudding, it’s going to push lots of things over the edge, no matter how good it tastes. Or it’s going to get all nasty with broccoli juice on it, destroying the essence of pudding that it is. You look ahead and realize you still cannot see the end of the line.

At this point, poised with burgeoning plate, you begin to panic. How can you do this thing? You end up making an appointment with me. And I totally understand your nightmare. I completely capiche your almost-adolescent angst. Oh yes. I get it. Oh client of my nightmare, you are me.

Letting go of my koi was very hard for me. I still miss them. Here they are in their new home, though, happy as…well.. koi.

You’ve got to make space on the plate in order to move forward in the line, in order for happiness to be restored so you can enjoy the cruise. You really do want to at least taste the strawberry cheesecake but there is simply too much steamed cauliflower without butter or salt on your plate. Everything you have already put on your plate is taking up all the room. What to do, what to do, what to do? The rule is you have to keep going. You have to continue to eat what is on your plate. There is only one thing to do. Break the rule. And you can do this in one of two ways.

You can keep overloading the plate until everything just sort of falls apart onto the floor; rule-breaking by ommission.  It’s a valid choice, but you won’t be in control of the triage attempt. Or you can do rule-breaking by commission. You can do it with malice and forethought. You can practice a little of what I like to call ‘Nancy Reagan’ therapy on your rules. You can ‘Just Say NO!’ to stupid rules.  I like to choose the latter. I like to actively break rules that suck.

Oh large pile of dead tree branches, Oh wasted dinghy and little falling-down hut that Andrew built many years back. You are the boiled cauliflower of our lives.

All that stuff on your plate? It’s keeping you stuck in the line. You can’t move forward, and you can’t move back.  It’s taking up space that is mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual.  How can you invite yourself to partake of the cheesecake, or even the nicely aged cheese, if you don’t get rid of some of that other stuff on the plate? You must find a way to surreptitiously dump your plate without actually eating the food. You simply have to make room on the plate another way, a way that your internal rule-maker has not thought of before or won’t notice. Or maybe could actually get used to!

Looking around, you notice no one looking your way. The time is now. You let your plate droop like a woman with southern charm. You let the food slide quietly down under the table, concealed by the table cloth. You keep moving. No one gives a crap that you did this, and this is a revelation to you. You just broke the rule and the ship didn’t sink? What the what???

See this work area? Well we aren’t working on anything back there anymore. The ‘rule’ was that work scraps go back in the work area. But what if those projects are a thing of the past?

Your plate now almost completely clean, you begin again; moving more slowly, thinking carefully about the choices you make. Taking only small portions where before you would have overloaded. You are mindful of the process and the plate stays in balance. You have perfect proportions of protein, carbohydrates, vegetables, and desserts and because you eat and move through the line thoughtfully and slowly, things work better. And you remember the plate-dumping and how easy it turned out to be.

The energy of life is not infinite. We have X amount of energy; mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, that we can expend on living our lives. And anything that takes up too much room on one part of our life plate is impinging on all the other things, no matter how  small the ‘thing’ is. People many times do not understand this concept. Just because something seems like a ‘small thing’ doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take up energetic space. And that means it’s harder for something new and terrific to come into our lives.

See all this stuff in the v berth? It’s about to get a new home. We’re making more space in the workshop aboard Galapagos, too.

So all of this is to say that ever since we moved the date up for our Little Cunning Departure, we’ve been in overdrive trying to relinquish some of our food onto the floor of our cruise ship so we can have more space for chocolate cake. You know? We are running into our own internal rules all the time and having to challenge them. For instance, until now Mike’s ‘rule’ was, “I will work until I am 57.”  He dumped that rule on the floor. People cheered the decision. He felt free of a rule.

The hardest rules for me revolve around our family home. These are extraordinarily difficult rules for me to challenge. For instance, I have a ‘rule’ about wanting to maintain a land-based home in case we want or need it, or in case our kids need it. That’s one big, heavy rule and it’s really based on fear, like most internal rules. Fear that we will never be in a position to own this nice a home again. Fear that once the family home is disposed of, the diaspora of the children will be complete and finite. They will never be home again because the home will be gone. Fear that I will miss my home more than I can bear. So many fears. I have to work through them one at a time. At the end of the day, the tie to the home represents a huge investment of time, money, energy, and emotional space that I could be using for being excited about our big transformation into world travelers.

Yes, I will miss this space for maybe a long time. Maybe not. I hope NOT.

Yes, I will miss this space for maybe a long time. Maybe not. I hope NOT.

Some of our internal rules are just too solidly attached to the plate to budge. For instance this week we came smack up against the reality that is getting our home ready for either sale or rent. There is a long list of projects that need to be finished at home and these projects are taking up space for us that could be used other ways. We need to get them done. So we got out the paper calender and began making goals about accomplishing those tasks in a timely way, metering it out over the course of a few months.

One of our rules as a couple has been ‘we can do it ourselves. Why pay someone else?’.  We have learned with Galapagos that sometimes it is just a relief to pay others to do work that, while you could do it yourself, is not your best use of time. Thinking we would make faster progress if we paid someone to help us, we had someone come out and give us a bid for getting the mess in those photos above cleared away. There is a small structure to tear down and dispose of, left over from Andrew’s ‘building things in the yard’ days. There is a pile of old wood to go, and a huge pile of tree branches; victims of recent stormy weather. We have two areas of the yard that are holding space that needs to be freed up. We were dead excited to be getting some help with this stuff.

But oy!  Now we remember why we’ve always been ‘do it yourself’ types. The bid was 1200$, plus, of course, the dumping fee. Um. Hmmm. Damn. For some people that’s not a lot of money. For us, right now, it is. That’s a new sail for the boat, or a radar system, or half a fridge. Our rule solidified. The fee, when measured against the work of three men for a day, seems reasonable. But we cannot pay it with a glad heart. So we will have to do it ourselves. Of course, this attitude has made us into people who will consider living off the grid on a boat almost exclusively when the time comes. So there’s that benefit.

It’s going to be terrific!

On the Galapagos front, we are creating lots of space in Mike’s workshop. Our friend Larry Simmons is a talented and experienced wood worker. Mike has engaged Larry to refurbish his workshop area on Galapagos so that it will more efficiently hold the hardware store we have on board, currently taking up the v-berth.  The money we spend on this kind of thing feels good. We cannot do that work ourselves as it requires skills we will not have in this lifetime and Galapagos is worth it.

This letting go, this challenging of the internal rules we live by, is not a thing to take lightly or for granted. These are the rules that have allowed us feel in some semblance of control over our lives. Many times they are so dyed in our wool, feel so much like ‘laws’ instead of ‘rules’, that we forget that we chose them. We made them up. We can unchoose them and make space for other things.  Letting them go is challenging and fearful work. But, you know, I really really like cheesecake. So … onward!

A January bloom.

A January bloom.

If you are cruising or living on your boat and you remember some rules you let go of in order to get from that life to this one, please stop by the comments section and tell us about it.

 

 

 

Creeping Towards Victory

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While Melissa was evacuating from her old office and attending the sailing conference, I spent another weekend in Astoria inching ever closer to that happy day when Andromeda is back in the water. We make progress, but slowly.

Since the weather was pretty mild on Saturday, I got to work right away sealing the cockpit sole and screwing it back down. The sole has been sitting loose since John, the previous owner removed the old engine sometime in September. That means that water has had an easy time flowing into the engine room and we had to keep the steering pedestal and other steering hardware down below. Now that the new engine is in, I really wanted to start buttoning up the cockpit. We have enough trouble keeping the boat dry without having the engine room practically open to a rainy Astoria Winter.

My Bear Trap.  This allowed me to apply the butyl tape and then lower the floor down with a minimum of lateral movement.

Melissa bought some grey Butyl Tape from This Guy after reading about its superior quality from Tate and Dani of Sundowner Sails Again. This was my first experience using this tape and I am so far very impressed with its ease of use and tenacity. I did have a bit of a learning curve when it came to applying it though.

Lesson one with butyl tape. Do Not Remove the paper backing until the tape is applied to at least one surface. This stuff is tacky!

I applied slightly overlapping runs of the tape to the cleaned and freshly wiped lip of the the sole.

Two runs of tape, slightly overlapping

For reference, check out our earlier post on getting the cockpit sole cleaned.

Once I had run the tape around the perimeter and gently lowered the sole back down, it was time to screw down the sole and seal the 32 holes that had been originally used. That’s a lot of 1/4 inch screw holes. Assuming 100 Kips of tension as the low end of the range for a quarter inch 304 or 316 stainless screw, clearly we are more concerned with the amount of attachment area between the screw and the fiberglass sole. I opted to screw down on both sides of each corner and once on each side, which comes to twelve attachment points for the sole. The remaining twenty unused holes were filled with epoxy.

Corners and sides are screwed and filled with Life Caulk. The unused holes are filled with epoxy.

I hope I don’t regret using the Life Caulk for the screws. After using the butyl tape, I think it may make a superior seal. It is certainly easier to work with.

We will refinish the sole at a later time. This may be an opportunity to use the Kiwi Grip paint. We will need something that provides a good grip but that won’t trap a lot of dirt. Suggestions anyone?

With the sole finally secured, I was really excited to put the steering pedestal and wheel back in the cockpit. I have knocked the pedestal over three times and am amazed that I haven’t broken the thing as we work around it down below. I had to repaint some of the brackets holding the steering pump and hooking up the rudder hydraulics is still a little ways off, but man it feels good to have an actual wheel back in the cockpit.

Sole and Steering pedestal re-installed

Sole and Steering pedestal re-installed

Since this post is running a bit long, I’ll save the engine alignment for Friday. But I do want to leave you with a final photo of one of Melissa’s projects. We brought home hundreds of pounds of hardware which Melissa meticulously went through and organized. We still have some weird stuff that I need to look at, but the screws, bulbs, O-rings, and a thousand other bits and pieces are now on Andromeda and labeled! Anyone who has ever just thrown up their hands and gone to the Chandlery for yet another bit of stainless steel will appreciate how great it is to have the ability to lay your hand on just the right sized screw for a particular application.

The metal bar with a dog leg is for the engine control cable. Finding the correct screw for the job was easy.

We have several containers like this which are divided by type, (Machine, Wood, Brass etc) The organization is still a work in progress but so far, I have saved hours looking for parts or going to the store to buy something we already have but can’t find. Thanks Baby!

 

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

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Mike got the good news this week that our prop shaft and new propeller will be in tomorrow. This was news we were pretty excited to hear, especially when Shawn the Mechanic said he could go down to Andromeda sometime this week to start the installation process and, equally important, the repair to that nasty hole in the fiberglass. This news means things are progressing, and that lit a fire under our hind ends to hightail it down to Astoria this weekend and finish up some projects. And start others.

These weekends are now so seamless that it’s actually hard to remember all the things we get done. One job just seems to flow into another and pretty soon the day is shot and we’re crawling into bed too pooped to keep our eyes open for long. The drive home on Sunday seems much longer than the drive down on Saturday morning. We drink coffee late into the day.

This weekend I had a new ‘toy’ I got at the boat show: a cleaner for all kinds of materials called Flitz.  The display showed how it rejuvenated the plastic headlight cover on an old headlight. I was intrigued because we have a couple of hatch lenses and ports that are cloudy looking and this might help. When the sales lady cleaned up my ring and it looked like new, I was sold. We bought a tube and I tried it on the cloudy port lens in the aft head. Take a look:

The ‘Before’ shot, taken after using plain water to take off surface dirt.

After cleaning both sides with Flitz. Nice!

This stuff is not cheap at $24.00 a tube, but it will save me from having to replace the lexan skylight in the cockpit, so it’s basically already paid for itself twice over.

We changed out some drains that were leaking. There are very few things about this boat that I would put in the ‘dislike’ category. The deck drainage is one of them. I noticed this when we looked at the boat, but we loved the boat too much to care about these drains. The drains go through the deck and out through a thru-hull, which means more opportunity for water to get into the boat. This makes little sense to me, except from a purely aesthetic point of view. Also, the drains are not particularly beefy. Unlike most other things on this boat, these give us pause. They are held in place with what amounts to a piece of plastic and whatever bedding material is used to keep the thing in place.

Plastic? Really?

See that white piece of plastic? That’s all the stands between a drain that leaks and a drain that doesn’t. If you look closely you can see a small crack in the center of that white piece. This little crack appears to have compromised the integrity of this drain. We removed another drain, known to leak, and found the same thing. These are not big leaks, but they are irritating leaks and they cause damage over time. I will be replacing the shelving in the cabinet in the aft head due to the leak from this drain.

So I repaired two drains using epoxy, but this is a temporary fix at best. Eventually, when we’re in some place where boat work is less expensive,  we’ll probably want to take these out altogether and find a way to get the water to drain directly over the side. Not in the boat. Meanwhile we’re searching for a decent fix. Mike found a cheap drain that almost fits, and an expensive drain that didn’t fit at all. We need something that is about the same size as the countersunk area where the drain is installed so that the drain will sit flush to the hull. Two of our drains were replaced in the past, probably due to this bad original design, and they replaced them with drains that sit too high against the hull, so basically they are just a waste of space because the water just goes around them. File this in the “what were they thinking?” category.

Mike finished installing the Sound Down insulation and it looks great! He mounted the raw water strainer and the fuel pump.  Things are starting to come together in that engine room. With the white walls, there is plenty of light, and we’re discussing ways we can modify the floor of the cockpit (ceiling of the engine room) so that it will clamp down securely without the use of billions of bolts (all with little holes that can let water into that boat!) .

A little more progress in here. Mike is in his usual position, crouched low over some kind of tubing.

Mike had tasked me with pulling out one of the thru-hulls in the forward part of the boat. We figure doing one or two of these at a time will eventually find them all done. Unfortunately, locating this one was a bit of a challenge as it required major contortions, not to mention arms like a monkey, and working with the sense of touch alone as there was no way to get both an eyeball and an arm into that space. Situated up under the sole of the forward head, a location that man has not seen in 35 years, this thru-hull was long overdue for new grease. When I finally got one of the nuts loosened the cone shaped part literally fell out into my hand. It was then I realized that the nuts were actually on the bolts in the wrong place and not even holding the pieces together.  So you KNOW that thing was leaking. Mike had to come install it because his arms are longer and his eyeballs are smaller.

In the on-going saga of Andromeda’s storage compartments, let’s just say the the archaeological expedition continues. I can’t say for sure what led me to lift up the cushions to the dinette and look inside the cubbies there, but lift them up I did and I discovered that all of them were filled with, get this: More Canvas! Dear Lord! How much canvas can one boat carry? And why? Recall that we already brought home what appears to be an entire cockpit enclosure in really good shape, along with what we believe to be an entire canvas boat cover (which we’ll probably never use). All of that was stored in the forward berth and under the starboard settee. I thought I had looked in all of the cabinets. Apparently I had not. We are still discovering things.

A screen enclosure. This would be very nice in the tropics.

I experienced a rather extensive mixture of emotions as I pulled out yards and yards of canvas with little sandbags attached. Then rolled canvas with snaps and steel supports in special pockets. Then miles of plastic screen that turned out to be another cockpit enclosure, complete with a huge piece that apparently goes around the front of the hard dodger. Amazement, confusion, concern, excitement, alarm… they all sort of swam in and out of my conscious awareness as I pulled on item after another out of the bottomless cabinet. Mary Poppins, come on out! I know you’re hiding in there somewhere!  Sorting these things and matching them up was actually fun, like doing a puzzle without a picture to go by. Because, of course, almost none of it was labeled in any way.

But what will we do with all this stuff? Do we need it? It’s not that I’m not glad to have these things, I think. It’s that if we have to carry all this canvas on board until we get to an anchorage somewhere, we’ll have no place to stow other things. Like food and supplies. We are talking a LOT of canvas here. Our garage is now full of it as it takes its place alongside all the other things we have out there that are not being used but are ‘too good to get rid of’. Oy.

Andromeda wearing her party dress. I have to admit these look really cool. But they take up a LOT of room. Still, shades of Flying Gull! (Yes, I do still dream about that boat, but don’t tell Andromeda. She’s a much better boat for us.)

One absolute prize I found was a set of these hatch covers that double as wind scoops. The mystery of the metal supports was solved:

We are very glad to have these wind scoop/hatch covers.

So more canvas came home to be cleaned, sorted, and stored. So many of the storage spaces on Andromeda are filled with supplies that were on the boat when we bought it. After we added all of our supplies for the current projects, the boat was looking very messy inside and not at all like the peaceful place we intended. Sure, we’re working on a lot of projects but this is a big boat. There should be room for projects and also for relaxing and unwinding. We decided we better get this stuff organized: sorted, labeled, and stored so that we’ll know what we have. There are engine parts, nuts, bolts, screws of all kinds and sizes, every kind of fastener you could imagine, along with spare parts for every system on the boat. Some are spare parts for systems that were replaced long ago. We brought it all home as a task for those long winter evenings.

The photo doesn’t actually capture the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ we brought home to deal with.

I’m excited because I love organizing things. Please do not believe for one minute that I am an organized person. I just like getting a lot of little things to fit together like a puzzle. And also shopping. I will get to shop for an organizing system after we determine what we need. Yay! Something I’m good at! No monkey arms required!  Mike is excited because he gets to use his label maker. Guess which one is his, and which one we found on the boat:

Hint: our labels will be black and white.

If I do a really good job on this task, maybe Mike will let me help organize his workbench. We haven’t even touched all that stuff yet.