Category Archives: Preparing to cruise

Did Weasels Rip My Flesh?

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I’ll give Frank Zappa the nod he deserves for this finely chosen combination of words and the visuals they bring up. But, I mean, he got his idea from this cover of Man’s Life magazine from 1956.  This may be a man’s magazine, but I will not be outdone by old masculine tropes. Weasels do not discriminate. More on that later.

This is about as good as it gets.

So, how’s it going out here with this shakedown 2023 cruise? I mean, we are both shaking down and cruising, so I guess all the goals are being met. We have shaken down the outboard lifting system until it works flawlessly, even for old spaghetti arms here. We have given the new Alado furling system a hard shake where by at first we worried we had made a horrible and expensive error in judgement ordering that one (even though we loved it on the Cal34). It’s dialed in now, and much relief on board. For now. My trust level is tentative on this one. We continue to toss around the new stackpack, which is working well but still has a few small issues to be sorted. No big deal. We just like to tweak things incessantly.

Mike is working on replacing the lifelines, going from pink to blue dyneema. They used to be red. That lasted about a week in Mexico before they faded from UV damage. I imagine the nice rich blue color we currently have will be more of a baby blue before it’s over. Oh yes, and we added 200ft of anchor chain to the aft locker to balance the pointy part of the boat better. Now when the engine is on, she squats like a pro, sometimes maybe a bit too much. We’ll continue to shake that down as we go. Hmmmm. Let’s see. I know there is more.

Mike is shaking down his fishing systems. Rockfish:2. LingCod 0, and more’s the pity.

There was almost a galley emergency when I realize my pressure cooker was not pressuring. I don’t want to buy a new one so I was happy when giving the valve a deep clean was all that was needed to set it to rights again.  We are loving the new folding steering wheel and the new wind instruments with a beautiful display in the cockpit that we can rotate to show whatever combination of data serves the purpose at any time. Thanks, Garmin.

One of several screens of combinations of speed, wind speed, apparent wind speed, depth, Course over ground… I mean what does it NOT show? Getting knocked around by very large swells close together here in the Strait of Georgia, under reefed sails. But SAILING!

The Starlink has been working beautifully and is a true treasure on board. (Our only hiccup was in Princess Louisa Sound, where we were surrounded by towering land masses. I believe it can be forgiven for not streaming a zoom meeting to perfection in those conditions.) We refer to this new comms system as The Muskrat, for obvious reasons. While we’re ‘floating like the heavens above’, we do have that Muskrat love.

In other news we are rightly pleased as all get out with our new True Kit dinghy and the 2 stroke engine I got last year for my birthday. It goes almost TOO fast. The new way we have rigged the boom is working nicely. Still happy we took the mizzen off and we’re getting used to how she looks without it. The new latex mattresses in the aft cabin, while, yes, really heavy, were worth every penny and every minute of difficulty and heavy lifting. Expanding the settee in the salon, while making the access to stowage underneath the cushions a little more difficult, was an excellent choice for overall comfort.

Somewhere in Jervis Inlet. It’s not an anchorage. But, you know. So what?

We decided at the last minute to pull the trigger for larger membranes for our Rainman Watermaker, so those are on order from Australia. I mean, what’s a shakedown cruise without at least one international delivery? Thanks to friends in Port Townsend, we’ll take delivery of those there. We have made a number of last minute on-line purchases and at least one of our kids will meet us somewhere in the north Puget Sound to deliver the goods, as well as some Costco loot and all the wine I took off the boat to avoid paying Canadian Customs for the privilege of bringing it across the border.

Our paddle boards are still holding air. And that brings us to the title of this post.

No shakedown of S/V Galapagos would be complete without a foray into the water. You’d think that the water up here in Canada would be way too cold for foraying, and as a rule you’d be dead right. But in Princess Louisa Sound the water was close to 65F degrees. Still cold, but with my handy new 4mil wetsuit, I was game since it was also about 90F outside and it wasn’t like I was actually going to go UNDER the water. Just the thought of putting on a wetsuit and getting into the water made me giddy with anticipation. And that, my friends, is where our cautionary tale begins. That feeling of giddiness that is the harbinger of being possibly less careful than I should be, even though who would have known? Certainly not me.

Being photobombed. Snorkel hair, don’t care.

It takes anywhere between 15 and 60 minutes for me to don a 4mil wetsuit, depending on the amount of moisture on my skin at that particular time.  It’s not easy, graceful, or even, really, acceptable, but there it is. By the time I have tugged, stretched, shimmied, threatened and sworn the wetsuit into place and zipped it up, I have less of a feminine glow and more of a dripping sweat to deal with. It’s bloody hot in there and the cold water is going to feel good.  Into the water I slipped, being very careful not to fall off the swim step and smash my forehead on the propeller of the dinghy engine. I was absolutely sloth-like as I made my way down the swimstep ladder, which is known to be slippery, and sank beneath the surface. Cold water made its way in a trickle down my back and I breathed a sigh of relief and profound pleasure at being back in the water again. Today, I would see great things.

As is my habit, I pull my floating swim platform, the paddle board, over and begin to decant snorkel gear onto it from the handy swim platform at the back of the boat. Case with special mask, anti-fog spray, earplugs to keep the cold water away from my brain. (I hate the scuba hood I have and have ordered something else, but meanwhile, it’s the earplugs for me.).  Water bottle with electrolytes. Case for eyeglasses. Fins and snorkel. Quick-dry baseball cap. Excellent. Now to mount the board and paddle out to the area where I want to snorkel.

Let me pause here and give you a visual about how I generally accomplish this feat of unadulterated  athleticism.  From my position in the water, I rest my forearms across the board. Then I give a mighty dolphin kick, truly Mark Spitz-esque,  and launch myself bodily from the water and onto the board, landing gracefully draped across it. This move makes me feel 25 again! I am so elegant and natural looking as I perform this with the ease of a true sea mammal!  From there I can pivot and sit up. Securing all of my belongings under the handy bungie straps, off I go. So easy. Except…

Except that I haven’t done this in over three years. Except that I was not wearing my swim fins, which I generally am. Except I am, as of today, not 25 years old. And, of course, I didn’t warm up any muscles before I got in the water because who actually does that? Not me.

As I landed smartly sort of on my right short rib, I literally felt the weasel claws rip my flesh on the inside. “NOOO!”, I yelled to the absolutely no one who was listening. “Weasels ripped my inside flesh and wow, this is going to hurt tomorrow!”. The seal, he did not care. He silently slipped beneath the waves.

But what to do? Am I going to let flesh-ripping, if not eating, weasels ruin a perfectly good opportunity to test out my new snorkel and possibly see a curious harbor seal under water for the very first time ever? What am I going to do? Get out and try to struggle out of a cold wetsuit and apply ice? The water is already cold enough for a compress. The wetsuit offers structural support. It doesn’t actually hurt yet, although I know it’s inevitable that it will.

I just carried on. It probably didn’t make any difference to the amount of pain I’ve been in for, let’s see, 5 days. I figure I pulled some kind of core muscle somewhere near that short rib but whatever. It’s hard to say exactly where since the whole upper right quadrant of my abdomen hurt dreadfully by the next day, to the point where movement was difficult.  I was forcefully reminded that 1) I use those muscles regularly 2) I live on a sailboat that is never still 3) I am 40 years older than I think I am. Nothing is broken and no one can do anything about this kind of injury. It’s already turned the corner on getting better as of today, which is a great relief because sailing down the coast would have been extremely painful and probably not a good idea. So overall, I feel like I made the right call by carrying on with what I was doing. As we are currently sailing across a pretty challenging Strait of Georgia and dealing with big swells and a short interval, I’m using those core muscles a lot just to stay upright. So, thankfully, I’m good.

Lest you think it’s just me who gets up to no good out here, get a load of the varmit climbing into what is definitely an old, rusty Ford filled with lockjaw. Looks like his mother didn’t teach him how to stay out of trouble, either.

And if that isn’t a smug face, I’ve never seen one.

We enjoyed a couple of days being mostly lazy before leaving Princess Louisa Sound and moving down the inlet towards Pender Harbour. There was a 2 1/2 hour hike that sounded like it went almost straight up to 1500 feet or so. We passed. I know my limits.

Ha! Caught you!

Not to be outdone by an actual injury to my flesh, weasel or no, the area of Pender Harbour at the mouth of Jervis Inlet still celebrates the manly man of the 1960’s and his glorious physique. And why wouldn’t they? They have a grand tradition, according to their history,  of celebrating this trope of masculinity and the well developed muscles it boasts, hanging out for everyone to see and, potentially, to admire. The evidence of this is clear from the latest edition of Pender Harbour Magazine, a publication that celebrates the harbour lifestyle. Why just look at this photo from the 1950’s of the shenanigans harbourites got up to during some kind of regatta. I’m not sure what these guys are doing, but it doesn’t involves sailing.  I envision the local weasels, salivating and showing their sharp little teeth.

Photo credit to Sue Kammerle, as shown in the 2023 edition of Pender Harbour Magazine

We had anchored in the harbour for a couple of days so I could work via Starlink and maybe rest the savaged flesh inside my abdomen. Needing a walk on actual land,  we took Sea Pony, our fast dinghy,  over to the dock where, mindful of the need to mitigate pain,  it took me 5 minutes to disembark, strategizing every movement before executing same. Once on my feet I was fine, so we set off down the road. Honestly, during this time of removing myself from the dinghy onto the filthy and splintery dock, I wished I had a sweatshirt that read, “Not Old. Just Injured. Carry On With Your Business.”

Coming around a bend in the road I see this little shack labeled ‘Nut Hut’. Considering that their storage facility here at the harbour is called “Squirrel Storage”, I imagine there are a lot of squirrels and nuts around here. Hungry, I checked out the offerings. Sadly, no nuts were to be had. Instead there was a darling little display of a school desk and chalkboard, plus a way to measure your height on the corner of the wall. I think it’s a school bus stop. But wait! There’s more!

A trove of manly treasure!

On the wall was a magazine rack holding a number of fine copies of old comic books. Like from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when men were real and women were… almost exactly the same as they are now.  And these were not the Archie comics of my own youth, regardless of Betty’s curvaceous nature. What we had here were real comics for real budding men; manly comics, especially of the Wild West variety. Everyone knows that only a true man understands the wildness that is west.

Michael and I took a walk down memory lane as we took our time leafing through the pages, revisiting such beloved and thoughtfully indoctrinating characters as the skinny many who always had sand kicked in his face by muscle bound beach bullies, and the young woman who needed extra bust development. How could that smile be real with breasts that small? How she must suffer.

I don’t know about you, but this move never worked for me. Not that I needed it.

Who could ever forget the days where you could learn hypnosis by mail for the low, low price of 1$? I should have taken advantage of that way back then. I think the cost has really gone up.

It’s hard to fathom all the great deals I missed out on because, probably, my parents said no.

Wow, almost 10$? That was a lot of money back then. That must have been high quality stuff, as is evidenced by the Mr. Universe poses and the women who seem to just want to touch him for no good reason at all.

I don’t even remember being offered the chance to earn prizes by selling seed packets door to door. Man. I really missed out. And being paid for ideas? A girl can only dream! According to the advertisement, big companies need thousands of ideas per month! (See above) Just send the people at “IDCO” (get it?) all your ideas and they’ll let you know if any are good! Imagine! People would have PAID ME FOR MY OWN IDEAS AND WOULD IMMEDIATELY LET ME KNOW IF I HAD A GOOD ONE! And to think of all the money I spent getting college degrees. What a waste.

Scams as old as time. I remember that somehow I knew these were scams, even as I sat in the tree with the neighbor kids reading the latest issue of Betty and Veronica. How did I know? Well, probably my parents told me. I mean, I didn’t have a checkbook or even a debit card back then so I would have had to go through them to get the hypnosis coin. And I can just about imagine them saying no. I mean, as a rule, my parents didn’t approve of stuff like hypnosis. They already had enough trouble with me. Who knows what I would have got away with had I been given more power over others,

This one really hurts. I bet I could have sold a ton of seeds and maybe even joined all the other white kids in winning a plastic magnifying glass.

My favorite comic among the ones left at the Nut Hut was the Bat Lash comic, which I think may have been from 1968. I kind of wish I’d taken that but I didn’t. I’m not going to say I was not SORELY TEMPTED! It was incredibly cool and I can’t even believe that my finer nature won out on this internal battle. I wanted that comic for some reason only my own, dark inner self knew.  I had never heard of Bat Lash before and, doing a quick search later, found out there were only 7 editions of that comic published. Good thing we had been motoring at 5 knots for about 3 hours before I remembered to google it. Otherwise I’m not convinced that my moral compass would have passed muster. Bat Lash was, according to Wikipedia,  “A self-professed pacifist, ladies’ man, and gambler”, probably not necessarily in that order. Had I known all of that while standing in the Nut Hut, that particular comic would have found its way into my backpack. I didn’t even read the entire comic, so I will never know if he actually saved the Wild West or ruined it. Alas.

Will you just get a load of this? I don’t know. I might have to find one of these just because it’s seriously unbelievable and yet I am drawn to it. The woman saves the day by keeping her man out of trouble since, naturally he is unable to think for himself, being a man of pure instinct and reptile brain. Is that his mom or his girlfriend or what controlling that steed with her thighs? I’ll never know since I didn’t take the damn thing. And even as I analyze the not-so-subtle teachings from the fine literature of my youth, I am vastly entertained.  I read that the flower on his hat symbolizes his conscience and that when he is getting ready to do something dirty and rotten and scoundrel-ish, he removes his hat. I’ve always been attracted to a man who knows his own mind.

Looks like Ma Cob’s Mr. Man is going to be mighty unhappy finding ole’ Bat Lash at the family table.

We are headed back to the states, kind of slowly. Currently under sail for awhile, which is a new twist on this trip. We’ll make our way through the islands again, spending some time at old favorites before we cross the strait to meet up with one or two kids; probably one. We are extraordinarily grateful to Kerry and Donn Christianson in Port Townsend for letting us use their porch for an international delivery of high volume water maker membranes. It’s good to have friends, even if you don’t see them often. We look forward to a little time in Port Townsend, a favorite place. After that, we’ll make our way out to Neah Bay to await a weather window for going south.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16.

Shakedown 2023

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Welp, we left the dock at close-enough to slack tide on August 1, as planned. Not one for tempting the gods of docking or undocking (?)  on the first day of the trip, I was fairly insistent that we wait until the currents were not gnarly before we pulled out. Michael is, if not amenable, at least resigned at this point, so we were in agreement. It was a good move anyway as it gave us time to take the car up to the house, do one last pass through the old place to see if we had missed anything and give our daughter one last squeeze goodbye. These are the cuts that are the deepest, these leavings of loved ones.

Walking to the marina we gave a wave to Left Bank; the French pastry place on our corner. I imagine they’ll still be there when we come back, judging by the lines of customers that are always out the door and sometimes around the corner. Down the hill to the marina, stopping at the marina office to turn in our keys and parking pass. They will mail us a check for our deposit. That was a little bit of a surprise, considering we had automatic payments. I guess they want to keep that money as long as possible.

On the dock, Richard from S/V Firefly and the other Richard from S/V Soirse were on the dock waiting to cast us off and wave us bon voyage. We’ve come to love this dock community and all the sharing of tools and information, even gossip, if you will,  that goes back and forth in such places. We have a special place in our hearts for young couples like Richard and Ashley on Firefly who are living aboard, working, and making their bigger plans. Firefly Richard got certified as a marine electrician and recently started his own business. He is already really busy. We are thrilled for him. Hit us up if you are down Olympia way and need the contact info of a good, local marine electrician.

Headsets on, Michael gave the boat a little push to get the stern going in the right direction, I gave the engine a tiny bump of reverse, and we floated out of the slip one last time. I always breathe a big sigh of relief when the stern is in the right direction and the current is low enough to manage. We still had enough current to need to finesse the leaving; floating back, cranking the wheel, moving forward, cranking the wheel, floating back again with more cranking. Then Mike said the bow was clear of Richard’s Hunter 50 and we were off, steering clear of the marina and into the fairway with the lowest water under the keel that we have ever had in Olympia. At times the depth meter read 3 feet under the keel. Yikes.

Farewell, for now, Olympia.

All the way through the channel, we commented on how low the water was and how easy it would be to run aground. In my own mind I harkened back to the days when I would have literally been panicking about this. How far I have come in managing that dreaded anxiety. Now, in a muddy area like Olympia, I am just thinking; ‘Welp, if we hit mud we will just get more coffee and wait it out’.  To be clear, rocks are another issue altogether.

As I write this, I am connected to Wifi via our nifty new Starlink system. This has been working great so far and has been a real treat to have aboard. Except for the power draw. Although it’s not really that much, it’s enough that we unplug it at night, and if we don’t have sunshine to keep the batteries topped off, we can’t really afford to use it without charging the batteries with the engine. This was not an issue until I brought out my brand new crockpot to make some carnitas.

You scoff.  Surely she doesn’t use an electric device to cook on a boat? Yes, she surely does and has done forever since we have had this boat. I love my little crockpot and bought a brand new small one with a locking lid so that we would not have a repeat of the famous sweet-potatoe-stew-on-the-floor fiasco that occurred at the beginning of the passage to Hawaii. You haven’t lived until you have been on your hands and knees in large swells and decent wind cleaning up tomato-based inedible stew.

Anyhoo, we were going to entertain Andrew and Jill and my sister, Amy, in the cockpit with some of my world class and probably famous carnitas tacos and my plan had been expertly thwarted by Michael who said we didn’t have enough battery power for that. We had been sitting in Gig Harbor at anchor for a day and a half and the batteries were not keeping up due to the insidious trickle of juice being used by the Starlink. Out came the pressure cooker, but this was surely information that is now recorded as part of this shake down part of the cruise. Can we manage this draw on our precious electrical power? Sure. Do I want to manage that? I do not. We need to put on more solar, something we talked about before we left. Where to put another panel is the issue, but we may have a plan for that. We’ll see, but it’s possible we need to add “bring solar panels currently residing in the basement” to our list of items the kids will bring us at some point before we head south.

Two of my favorite people in the cockpit eating yummy carnitas tacos.

The other thing we’ve discovered, although the only proof I needed for this was the way water pools in the forward port corner of the cockpit settees, is that we need more weight in the starboard stern. Our boat has always been a bit bow heavy, mostly because we carry 300 feet of 3/8” chain and a big anchor. When we put a new engine aboard all those years ago, we lost weight toward the back of the boat because we put in a smaller Beta Marine engine to replace the really big Ford Lehman that was in there. At one point this boat also had a genset in the engine room and I imagine that also weighed something significant. Once we took the mizzen mast and all of its bits off and stored them at home, we lost more weight aft. Adding the radar pole helped some, but not nearly enough. So I have observed our boot stripe with, as they say, a gimlet eye.

We had no idea how much weight we needed to add. So we did a small experiment while at anchor in calm Gig Harbor. We let out all of our chain and watched the bow. Yep. The bow was significantly higher without all that chain. This gave us a rough calculation that adding 300 pounds would be enough to balance her out so that her nose is high enough to not plow into the waves. When we add the 80 pounds worth of Liferaft that is currently living in the forepeak and will live on the aft deck during ocean transits, we figure we will be fine. We are currently at anchor in Bellingham and while here we are going to work on solving this problem. We hope to end up buying additional chain and storing it in the aft lazarette. The sailboat wrecking yard also sells buckets of lead shot from recycled boat keels that we could get in a pinch. But extra anchor chain would not come amiss. Yesterday, crossing the Strait of Juan de Fu*^ You, we experienced proof of concept that our bow is, indeed, too low to be plowing into rough seas. Enough about that. It was not fun for anyone. Fortunately, the north end of Whidby Island sported smoother water.

Galapagos, with her boom to one side to take advantage of all the sun power hitting the solar panels (making the boom appear short). With no chain left in the chain locker, she looks almost right. Not quite, but almost.

As shakedown cruises go, this one is definitely working to reveal potential issues. We had the hydraulic steering rebuilt this year and while that is working fine, if a little stiff, we have had a couple of hiccups with the autopilot. To be brief, twice during the trip up here it has briefly stopped working, giving us an error message that said the motor for the unit had stalled. It’s a Raymarine Smart Pilot, which has a heavy duty motor and has worked for these years without even a hitch in its giddyup. So we are a little flumoxed about what might be happening now. Raymarine has an article on their site that Michael is referencing in terms of what might be going on and we’ll go through those possibilities to see if Michael can get it sorted. We do not know if it is related to the rebuild of the steering. Perhaps not. But whatever it is, we would like that sorted before going to ocean sailing again. Although we use our Hydrovane almost exclusively on passages, we use the autopilot on inland waters anytime we have to motor and would rather fix that while in the US than try to fix it in Mexico.

Yesterday we noticed yet another little issue that, while irritating, we know how to address. We got in about 30 full seconds of sailing via headsail today before two things happened: the wind died, and the bolt rope on the headsail started coming out of the track on the furler. Honestly we didn’t even have time to tweak the sail shape. This was dead irritating because that bolt rope has always been just small enough to do this and cause irritation. Of course, we sailed for years with it like that and Michael had worked a fix at the foot of the sail to keep it close enough to the furler that it wouldn’t pull away. It was just one more thing to keep track of and watch carefully. But we just had that sail up at Ballard Sails in Seattle to be looked over and that would have been the perfect time to have that bolt rope replaced with something just a little larger where this would not be an issue. Had we recalled this was a problem. Which we did not. We were reminded today when as soon as the sail was unfurled it started coming loose at the bottom. Curses. Many curses.

Michael and I are getting in the groove out here. We are already playing our favorite games of cruising: Log Dodge (whereby you steer clear of anything that might be a log in the water), What’s That Noise? (whereby you get irritated by a repetitive noise and try to locate the source), Wind/NoWind (whereby Mike gets excited because we still haven’t sailed yet and he believes he has felt wind and gets the headsail ready to deploy only to be thwarted because it was only someone exhaling somewhere), Kill the Fly (self explanatory) and Hot, Then Cold. This last one is the game that comes up after you’ve put away your cold weather clothing because you inconveniently forgot that you are actually moving north first, not south, and a cold front is coming in. Also, Pacific Northwest. Meh.

Our new radar pole and engine lifting system. Works great! This added some weight in the back, but not enough.

We will be here in Bellingham for another few days while I work from the boat and Michael locates more anchor chain. Bellingham is a really fun place to visit by boat. Great dinghy dock and the anchorage is close to all the fun things Fairhaven has to offer.

Where we anchored off the south end of Marrowstone Island. It was a peaceful night. No, this is not in the guidebooks. Remember, you saw it here first. The bottom is smallish rocks and sand with the occasional kelp. We dug in and held fast in about 20 feet under the keel.

 

S/V Galapagos, standing by on Channel 16a.

 

Off We Go

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Recently, two people in my life have said to me, “Melissa, it seems like you always have a lot going on.”  They are not wrong.

We have a date to leave the dock. But is this a solid date? So far we have had three dates for leaving the dock and they have come and gone for various reasons. We just were not ready. This time, we think, we just might pull it off. I mean, there is a gathering at our place in Olympia so we can say goodbye to some folks, so I guess we better make this one work. Cross fingers, spin and spit three times, say all the prayers and magical incantations.

The plan is to leave the dock August 1. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update and there is a reason for the delay.  That reason is not laziness. We were cruising forward, the end of the refit in sight and planning an exit around Mike’s June birthday when the inevitable happened. Life threw in a considerable change of plans and we had to adjust.  May as well get used to this kind of thing because cruising full time is filled with opportunities to learn how to be flexible.  This time it had nothing to do with the boat. It was the guy renting our apartment.

He had finally decided to move out. At the beginning of April. We had planned to leave in April. His timing was not impeccable.

This little apartment was carved out of the main house decades ago.

Now, understand, we bought our house with this tenant in place. He had a solid history of on-time payments and was quiet; two good things that go great together when you are basically sharing your property with a stranger. We are not displeased, however, that he had decided to move. The apartment needed a serious renovation, which we really wanted to get done before we left again.  But we could not do that with someone living there and we were not going to ask him to leave just so we could renovate. Olympia is extremely short on housing of any kind and we just would not do that.

The problem was the timing. I wanted to scream, “Could you not have decided this two months ago?”.  That apartment he lived in had not been updated since Job was tested by a divine being. I’m not going to go into detail here because you might be eating or have a weak stomach,  but let it be said that once he abandoned the apartment, we could not, in good conscience, rent it to someone else without renovations. Complete. Renovations. And deep cleaning. Deeply deep cleaning.  It was filthy.  Almost every single surface had to be redone. The stove was so dirty that I was afraid we’d need to replace it. Mike was still working on the boat and had a full time job at that point. That left the bulk of the work to me. Fortunately, I have wild renovation skills and in a pinch, I can be very focused, if not driven.It’s an understatement to say that this was an intense and all encompassing job. Hideous texture had been sprayed on all the walls, probably multiple times over decades. This included the original picture railings. All of this had to be scrapped off. The picture railings had to be stripped and painted because to buy new ones, and yes, we wanted that period detail to remain, would have been hundreds of dollars we did not want to spend. The paint on the walls was a grey gloss from the mismatch department of Home Depot. Gloss paint. On the walls.  My eyes felt like they were bleeding just looking at it. Countertops in the kitchen were original to the 1960’s and while that sounds retro at this point, in reality it was just nasty and would never be a clean surface again.

Why would anyone do this to beautiful, old growth fir molding?

It took two months. I literally worked on that apartment every moment of every day that I was not seeing clients. I always enjoy my job, but I have to say that during those two months seeing clients was the physical break I needed from the overload of daily manual labor. My body. It is not as young as it was.

The living room got deeply cleaned, the walls scraped of the old texture and paint and repaired where an ancient roof leak had left water damage; the paint literally peeled off the wall in that area, big sheets of rubbery latex peeled back like a price tag. There was the discovery of lovely pink wall paper, probably from the 1940’s. I kept a piece of that on the wall and put a frame around it.  Fresh paint on walls and all woodwork. Italian plaster on one wall, because I love that kind of finish and the apartment deserved it after years of neglect and outright abuse. Molding refinished and rehung. New air conditioner. New smart TV. New light fixtures. You’d think we were going to be living there ourselves, such was the attention to detail, but I don’t know how to do things by halves.

The new space. We love hanging out here.

I left a 5×7″ piece of this in place and put a frame around it as a nod to the history of the house.

Next the bedroom walls were scraped, during which the discovery of more cool old wallpaper from 1938 with Popeye and Olive Oyl (that link is to the Cooper Hewitt museum website where this wallpaper is listed). That room was part of the main house back when this room was, apparently, a child’s bedroom. Of course I wanted to uncover all of the wallpaper but then was not the time. I covered the walls with my favorite white paint: Dover White. Classic,  and it goes with both warm and cool colors somehow. Interesting serendipity: we have paintings of Popeye and Olive Oyl on the boat; done by our ex-son-in-law during happier times with him. The Universe provided a lovely framed print of Puget Sound in shades of blue at no charge to our pocket book. I decided to make the bedroom a tribute to our sailing days and hung that print and our watercolor of S/V Moonrise (done by Seattle’s Alex Kimball) and a hand embroidered whale done by our friend Lesley.

We got the print for free when a friend received it by accident and was told to keep it. Nice.

In the bathroom, more scraping of the gloss navy blue walls (Really? Gloss navy blue?), and trimming out a terribly badly done shelving unit at the back of the bathtub. New caulking everywhere. New fixtures and light. New mirror. The grey plank tile floor, while not my style, was serviceable and at least easy to clean. That stayed. Towel warmer on the wall for those humid Pacific Northwest winters.

More wallpaper was discovered in the bathroom. This time it was from the 1980’s. How do I know? Because it’s the same wallpaper we used in our kitchen in our first house, that long ago. Claire even remembered it from her childhood.

Can you see the little flowers? They were all the rage in 1985.

If there is anything I feel good about in this bathroom, it’s that shelf. That thing was just a mess that had been covered by a curtain.

Bad phone photo of a badly done shelf. What you cannot see in the photo are the raw 2×4’s and peeling contact paper. I just could not see my way clear to leaving it like this.

In the kitchen, the cabinet doors all got a refinish, which was much more work than I counted on,  and I painted the hinges and metal pulls in order to save a little $$ and time.  I did a concrete overlay on the heavy plywood that was underneath that old formica. That formica peeled right off, the glue was so compromised. New backsplash using beautiful aluminum stick on tiles. Those things are great. I tiled the floor using the same tile we used in the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen in the big part of the house. New sink with a smaller footprint to allow a bit more counter space, and new faucet. Mike installed a light above the sink, and new microwave/hood above the stove. He put in new electrical plugs, and grounded ones at that!  We installed a fold-down counter and I found bar stools at a Goodwill. The kitchen was the most work but it’s gorgeous and, more importantly, a good workspace now. And clean. It’s very clean.

A workable small space with room to sit and visit. Or fold clothes. Whatever you prefer.

The furnishings we got from our daughter, who had those in her last house. When she moved into our house they went into our basement. They are perfect for the apartment and saved a ton of money. Plus, our basement is a lot more roomy now. It’s practically light and airy.

We got this extensive project finished and spent maybe a week resting on our laurels and not letting anyone touch anything in there while we just enjoyed the restful fresh and clean feeling of the new space. Honestly, we just loved hanging out in there. In a wild coincidence, our friends Lynn and Curt Brownlow, who we first met in the Aquatic Park anchorage in San Fransisco on the way down to Mexico, were passing through Olympia and came to visit. What a great thing to be able to see them and have them take the apartment for a spin! It felt a bit like the apartment had been blessed by the the gods of cruising, somehow.

Finally, we listed on Furnished Finder and within a few hours after the listing went live,  it was rented to a traveling nurse. Our daughter, Claire, lives in our house and will manage the apartment while we are gone. It had been part of our overall plan to use this apartment as part of an income stream for cruising, but also be able to have it available when we needed it. Check that off the list. Whew.

The gardens have gone crazy this year.

And now that the apartment is out of the way and my body is on the road to recovery from that, on to boat news.

As I was working full time on the apartment and still seeing clients, Mike had finally left his job at the State Patrol and continued preparing Galapagos for our trip, going back and forth between helping finish the renovations and working on the boat. We discovered that we could not find our stack pack for the mainsail. Hmmm. It was just – nowhere- to be found and although we generally do not get rid of canvas until we have perseverated for years, we really were not happy with that stack pack and I can imagine saying something like “get rid of this thing because it’s not going back on the boat”. Maybe we tossed it, maybe we didn’t. But we could not find it anywhere. We’d have to get another. This problem was solved directly as Mike’s friend Bruce had decided to set up shop doing canvas work and he took us on as his first clients in order to learn. Got to love the timing of that. It’s good to have friends with skills.

He and Mike designed a pack that is a hybrid of the Sailrite pack and the Mack Pack, tweaking and fitting it until it was just right. We are really pleased with it.  We finally got the mainsail on this boat, with the pack in place, and today Mike will attach the edges of the pack to the mast and that project will be finished. Galapagos is looking like a sailboat again.

We are pleased as heck with this one.

Another addition to the boat this time is internet access with Starlink. Even as I type, the Starlink dish is mounted on the stern rail and is fired up and working. We have been using Starlink as our internet on board for over a week now, testing it out, and have been pleased so far.  What a game changer this will be. We have an idea of how we will manage  to keep the internet from being front and center of our lives while we are cruising, but being able to keep working for awhile (me) to boost the sailing kitty even more and being able to be more connected to family will go a long way towards keeping my own mental health good. I really struggled with missing our kids and family while we were gone last time and while I am finally feeling maybe a little frisson of excitement to get going, there is the pull of my connections to my loved ones that makes me feel emotional. I have assuaged my sadness by buying three new wetsuits in a variety of thicknesses. I’m ready to get in the water!

No trip is without its flies in the proverbial ointment and, as it turns out, our latest fly is  the amount of alcohol we have aboard. I have prepared for two years of enjoying the occasional bottle of wine by stockpiling that and stowing it all over the boat. This is mostly because although Mike is more easily pleased with any number of red wines,  there are only certain types of wine that I actually enjoy and they are not readily available in Mexico. Tequila? Yes. Wine? Not as much compared to the embarrassment of choices we have here.  I just felt like this little luxury would be nice to have, so I have been buying the extra bottle here and there and stashing them.

What I did not consider is that we are going into Canada first to get that circumnavigation of Vancouver Island that we missed the last time we left for long term cruising. The rules for bringing alcohol into Canada are extremely strict and while it’s possible, if not probable  that it would not be a problem, if it turned out that someone decided to charge us duty or if we accidentally did not claim every bottle (because honestly I have no idea how many are on board) we could potentially lose our Nexus privileges. No bueno. Although people regularly bring a lot of alcohol across that border into Canada, claiming that it’s “ships stores for personal use aboard”, I have read more than one account of customs officers that did not find that claim to be either amusing or valid on a personal vessel.  It’s not worth the risk to us.

So I am looking at this as an opportunity to see our kids one more time before we head south. We will offload the alcohol to their safe keeping and then they will drive out to some location on the Olympic Peninsula and deliver it to us when we are back in the US. I imagine by the time we have gone around Vancouver Island we will have a list of other things they can bring as well.

At least these bottles are easy to find.

This will extend our time in the Pacific Northwest a bit because we had planned to just head south from Vancouver Island. But plans change and this is the latest iteration. I have spent some money on that wine and I intend it to be on the boat when we head south.

Our final (maybe?) tweak to the salon was to install our table top on the sturdy pedestal that came with the boat. We had replaced the big, heavy teak table with a smaller, lighter weight oval shape that pleased us more and we had installed that on a Lagun aluminum support that worked brilliantly while living aboard in a marina. We loved the many adjustments we could easily make to the position of the Lagun setup. But I was truly concerned it was not solid enough for offshore use or for even being in a rocky anchorage. So we changed that out for the solid pedestal that attaches to the sole of the boat. It is much more sturdy and I won’t be worried about grabbing the table if a wave rocks the boat hard.  We moved the aluminum support to the other side of the salon and installed that with a little tray that makes a dandy extra table on the other side. We can remove that when we are underway and stow it in the forward berth. The starboard side actually has a nice table that is built into the settee and stored upside down under the middle cushion, but its use divides the settee into two seats and we never seem to use that, preferring to leave that settee free for napping.

We use the spool of dyneema as a footstool for now. New lifelines, coming to Galapagos while at a quiet anchorage somewhere. Soonish. Yes, we snugged the pedestal up to the settee because it works for us that way.

 

We really like this Lagun table support. It’s just not solid enough for offshore.

Of course, we have other projects underway because project work is never done. But we did add a sewing machine to our inventory this time around. I had always wanted a Singer Featherweight machine and when I pointed that type of machine out to Mike, within days one appeared, as though by magic, on Facebook Marketplace. It was in Olympia about 5 miles from the marina. These little machines are very popular and a nice one will sell quickly so we bought it the day it was listed. It is literally like new. It has been stored in a garage for a very long time, having been built in 1961 and then used maybe a handful of times by a Scottish woman who decided sewing was not her jam. After giving it a drink of good machine oil and motor grease, it sews like a dream. Lightweight and small, it’s the perfect machine for me to take aboard for minor sewing projects that I would ordinarily do by hand. Mike loves it, too and I envision the day when I’ll need to move over and let him have a go. This will sew through canvas and made short work of finishing off the shade cloth curtains for the cockpit. I have a growing list of little sewing projects that will put this machine to good use.

Note the cat slipcover. I covered all of our “bottom sider” style cushions with colorful beach towels. This is our new pet. He doesn’t need food or a litter box, making him the perfect cockpit companion.

I made these by hand but the addition of additional machine stitching, and heavy webbing, has made them sturdier. We use them all the time.

I’ve got a couple of clients today and a final Costco run on my calendar for later. Mike is blowing up the SUP boards to be sure they are still good. Keep your fingers crossed on that one. We don’t really want to purchase new ones at this point. The cockpit is put together, inflatable fenders are stowed within the easy reach of the lazarette on the aft deck. The boat is washed. We are that much closer to backing out of this slip.

S/V Galapagos, standing by.