Category Archives: Preparing to cruise

Who Is In Charge Here?

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This week is downright excruciating in its painful slowness to pass. I’m feeling a little resentful and extra useless. This is a week I should be seeing all my clients. Instead, I scheduled hardly anyone because I had been called to jury duty. When I got the notice in the mail I thought to myself, ‘Welp, I should just suck it up and do my civic duty because it’s not actually much of a hardship for me to do it and, after all, I can just walk to the courthouse from the boat.”. This, my friends, is known as “challenging the gods”. This happens when you have a concrete plan that has dates and numbers attached to it, where you turn your free will over to someone else; a plan written, as it were, in stone. As I chanted those words of agreement to serve, the gods rumbled in their slumber. I didn’t even know! Nothing wakes a sleeping god like the sound of a gauntlet hitting the earth.

Taking a break for a long walk at the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. It’s worth the trip.

My next poke at their soft, ego driven underbellies happened last week. I had been watching one of my favorite Netflix shows: Grace and Frankie. This is a show about two older women and their older ex-spouses, but that hardly describes the hilarity. Starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, it’s worth binge watching and that’s what I was doing. One of the episodes in season 3 sees Frankie and Grace on the floor, both having done something simple and painful to their respective backs. I thought, ‘Thank God I’m not quite there yet.’.  Do not ever, readers, say those kinds of things, even in your head. I’m telling you. Let my experience be your guide to dealing with things like fickle, egotistic gods who want you to know who is boss. Hint: it’s not you.

They chose their timing well. They chose to hatch their plan during a day of fun and laughter with my mom and sister. We went shopping for wedding clothes. Claire, our oldest, is getting married in May in Scotland. This gives me permission to buy a dress and shoes, even though I have no place to store said items. I’m the mother of the bride, for the love of all things! I’m not going to show up sporting ‘cruiser’s casual’ attire. So I’m in the shoe section.  I stand and lift my foot to try on a shoe, the same way I lift my same foot every single blessed day to put my shoes on, and that’s when they struck their blow. I turned slightly to the left. My lower back muscles made some kind of sickening inner scream, reminding me in no uncertain terms that I am, indeed, in my late ’50s with very little estrogen to spare. My final thought before the pain registered was, ‘Damn. I think I just hurt myself.Trying on shoes? Really? WTF is happening?’.  And indeed, it came to pass.

The pain began to build slowly. By the time we got back to Mom’s house, I was seriously uncomfortable. The next morning getting out of bed was amusing to someone, if not to me. The weekend was wasted as far as I’m concerned. I couldn’t do anything but protect myself from further injury and wish I had an on-board chiropractor, although I probably wouldn’t have let him touch me. Ice and aspirin became my two best buddies. They do say that pride goeth before a fall and I have always prided myself on having a strong back. It’s never let me down; until now.

We’ll be passing this area aboard Galapagos in just a few weeks. Low tide creates lots of interesting and dynamic patterns.

By Sunday I was praying that I would not have to go to the courthouse and sit in a chair all day for the whole week. Fortunately, my doc had already fixed me up with some muscle relaxers in case muscle injury were to occur on the boat. She’s pretty smart that way, but no one warned me that trying on shoes would be my downfall. I reported to jury duty, but in the end, they discharged me because I was medicated. Apparently one will not think clearly if one is falling asleep due to the effects of medication. I felt both guilty and relieved. OK, mostly relieved, but I SHOULD have felt more guilty. So I guess I felt guilty about not being more guilty? I pondered this over a delicious coconut macchiato and the entire New York Times all to myself at the local Starbucks. Hey! I had to take it slow going home. And I needed the caffeine to counteract the drug-induced lethargy I was feeling; sustenance for the slow walk home.

Is this a cautionary tale about being in your late 50’s and living on a sailboat? Hardly. This is a cautionary tale about challenging the gods who love to thwart people’s idea that they are, in any way, in charge of their lives. Just get over that already because anything can happen at any time. This is a cautionary tale about setting dates in stone and not having wiggle room, something I’m always really loathe to do because it makes my anxiety go a little nuts. You know all those people in your life who are commitment avoidant? You might think they are rude, but maybe they just know how the gods play better than you do. The more concrete thinkers among you might say this is a caution against trying on shoes when you live in a small space and have no place to put them, but you would seriously be missing the entire point.

And, if any gods are paying attention to this post: WE ALREADY KNOW YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF OUR FATE! NO NEED FOR FURTHER LESSONS! WE ARE PAYING ATTENTION AND IF YOU WILL ONLY LET US KNOW WHICH TRIBUTE WILL SUFFICE, WE’LL SEE WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU. OKAY? PAY NO ATTENTION TO US SMALL, MERE MORTALS.

Anyhow, my back is healing fine so no need for concern. I’m being extra careful and this will not impact our plans in any way. My chiropractor says I’ll be right by this Friday. And I’m going to believe him! Today I will have my usual walk at my usual pace! Hurrah!

So… we have a ‘reservation’ for hauling out the boat at Swantown in Olympia for June 5. We’ve got help lined up to get the mizzen mast pulled and the rigging on that mast replaced. And we could change that if we wanted to! We really could! We are leaving the marina on June 3 for a leisurely trip down to Olympia over that weekend. But we could actually leave on June 2 if we wanted to. Wait. No, that’s a Friday. Sailing lore forbids leaving on a Friday. But still! We could if we wanted to! We have to create a moving target. Carry on…keep moving…nothing to see here, folks. Nothing to see.

Nothing is real until it actually happens. And even then, there are people who will have ‘alternative facts’.

Speaking of Scotland and gods, I am gearing up for a more cooperative trip to Scotland this time. Three years ago I met Claire in Scotland and we had quite the rumble with the gods of that country, used, as they are, to battle. I was on the losing end of the game with my plans last time, even though I had a wonderful time. They can take my plans, but they can’t take my happiness!  I wonder if I can appease them this time.

Other news not worthy of an entire post:

  1. Mike finished rebuilding the second toilet. It no longer graces our salon. Too bad. It was a good conversation starter.
  2. We bought a Viking 4 man life raft. We bought it used, but still under certification, from another sailor. That saves us over 1000$. We gave up on getting the Portland Pudgy raft kit because they are having technical difficulties and I need a guarantee that we will leave with a raft aboard Galapagos.
  3. Mike hooked up the fresh water shower on the aft deck. Now we can rinse salt water off of ourselves before coming into the cockpit or salon area. I’ll probably be kind of a stickler for that.
  4. Our solar panels are kicking power-making butt.
  5. We are shopping for boat insurance for the trip down south to Mexico way. I hate insurance shopping.

The New Math

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I’m so glad I took math in school back in the olden days. How fondly I remember using those simple flash cards to learn my math facts: 1+1=2, 2×2=4, 5X10=50. You remember. This was straight math. The kind that had rules that allowed you to understand how things worked. Like if you want to multiply a number by 10, just add a zero to the end! Like magic, it worked! All numbers divisible by 5 end in either a 5 or a 0. My god I loved it! I could get the right answer! Even quadratic equations were soothing; like a puzzle easily solved once you found the right combination of numbers. And geometry? Be still my heart! It was positively intuitive! Yes, I did pretty good at math back in the day.

So easy. So fun.

But then came the ‘new’ math. This modern and ‘improved’ version sucks big time. Nothing is straight forward, it’s all convoluted, and one begins to wonder if the rules of the universe are not, in fact, rules at all but just some crazy pronouncements thrown down by random gods just to see who can drive mere mortals crazy in the shortest amount of time.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? You, boat owner, know exactly what I’m referring to in this ‘new math’ paradigm. That’s right. It’s lists and boat jobs. I believe strongly that whoever came up with this new math crap owned a big old sailboat and was frustrated with getting boat jobs done, so they threw the new math out at students everywhere as punishment for their own suffering.

I’ve been thinking about the new math of boat jobs and trying to discern a rule that would make things more predictable and understandable. I mean, I’ve spent my life learning about the archetypes of human existence, which is basically a fancy education way of saying ‘recognizing the patterns of human experience’, which is another fancy way of saying ‘what people do and say all the time’. So why not turn that need for predictability to the simple boat job? I am, thus far, a failure in this area but I have a working formula in progress.

For the uninitiated, all boat jobs follow the Attention Deficit Disorder mindset, which is to say I should be used to it by now. You know the drill: one task inevitably leads to another which leads to a different room and by now you’ve forgotten what the first task was. The ADD mind is less a straight line and more like a cob type spider web. It makes random connections, but in the end it holds together. Somehow order is made from chaos, but the technique looks different each time. Truthfully, I like to be the one to allow my mind to meander hither and yon. I don’t like it imposed upon me by nameless boat gods.

This kind of web. Not the orb kind of web, which is orderly and predictable.

It’s like this. Say you are at home in HOUSE. Say you want to do a simple task, such as hang a curtain rod. You get your rod, you get your level. You get your tiny tools. You get one side attached to your wall, take your ladder to the other side, using your level you mark the spot to put the other end, secure it, and voila. Rod hung. It takes maybe 15 minutes after you gather all your tools. This is the old math, and if you think that boat jobs work like this, then you would fail the test.

In boat jobs there is always, 100% of the time, the concern that what appears to be a simple equation is, in fact, new math cleverly hidden. Your one job is not, actually, only one job. It’s actually two jobs, or even three or four jobs, depending on 1) how much you care about your boat 2) how willing you are to put things off until another day 3) your level of anxiety balanced with your rational thinking mind 4) how soon you want to cut the dock lines and get the hell out of this slip 5) how many other jobs are on your list, a number made more difficult by its variable nature. (We will rule out boat jobs that, should you fail to do them, would cause your boat to sink.)

Although this post is running a bit long, lets give an example here. God, I wish I had a chalkboard. I feel a teaching moment upon me.

Let’s take the simple task of trying out the emergency tiller, a long, heavy steel thing that weighs a ton and is meant to help steer the boat should our steering cable break. (Never mind that we will also have another way to steer the boat in that expensive Hydrovane that still hasn’t yet been installed due to the new math equations making installation unnecessarily complex.)  (Also never mind that the REASON we are trying the emergency tiller in place NOW is that Mike is already down in the lazarette running the wires to the new solar panels and so the cover plate to the hole for the tiller is there in front of him, giving him this additional job ‘while he’s at it’. )

The offending hole, tiller installed.

I go up to the storage unit and retrieve the unwieldy tiller. When I come back I go below and remove the cover plate down in the aft cabin. Mike has removed the cover plate up top. The tiller goes through this hole and sits on a post under the bed in the aft cabin. So far so good. But now is the tricky part. Watch out! We are about to enter ‘NEW MATH ZONE’. We have missed the cover plate as something that needs to be rebedded, which means water has intruded under the plate, which has led to some rotting of the wood core around the plate. Will we fix this now? Or will we fix this later? Let the rabbit hole of the new math begin.

Here is how our equation stands:

(A + B (C+1/2D) / E)+F = Whether you get to that rot now, or later.

A = amount of rot, a number between 1 and 10, where 10 is an area the size of Texas
B=number representing how much you care about your boat, 1-10, where 10 means your life could depend on her stoutness.
C=your willingness to be blind to the rot for awhile, 1-10 where 10 is complete denial.
D= your level of anxiety on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is jumping overboard with panic. We multiply this number by 1/2 because: rational thinking and to stay within the law of new math being ridiculously complex.
E=how many days you have left before you leave
F=how many other things are on the list, a variable and imaginary number because in the new math, 1+1 does not equal two, ever, and everyone knows that this is a list that is never completely checked off.

How it looks in the aft cabin.

Given the rules above:

(2+10(3+5/2)/52) + infinity = 1.26 + infinity = infinity

You can see that because the results will always equal ‘infinity’ you can just ignore that ‘infinity’ part as a given, and focus on the 1.26, a completely meaningless number which proves that this new math is a complete waste of time. And now we’ve procrastinated long enough, following this imaginary logic to its extreme. We’ve come to the end of our little game. Bottom line: will we fix this rot?

In our case it was sure serendipitous that I had just Saturday gone through, organized, and prepared for stowage all of our epoxy supplies. Mike took to removing the rot, but quickly gave it over to me as he realized he needed to complete his first task: wiring the solar.

In the end, that +infinity at the end of the equation means I’m dealing with the rot now because I actually have the time while we’re waiting for Mike to be finished working at Boeing. In spite of knowing that this problem has been there for a long time and it’s not going to sink our boat, I care too much about our boat to be able to let that sit. You see, there is nothing straight forward about the new math when it comes to boat jobs. I sure hope your school funding doesn’t count on your passing this kind of test.

Shhh. Please do not call attention to the screws holding that dorade cover in place. (That’s the white thing with a red hole in the middle) You might not see the screws in this photo, but I know you sailboaters know they are there. We already know, too. Oh yes. We do… and also the latches to the lazarette. We know ALLL the things that need checking. So. Many. Things.

I began digging out the rot, an oddly satisfying task. We put a heater under the hole, and today I’ll rig a tarp to keep the rain out. We’re going to dry it out as well as we can, and then I will get to work with all those epoxy supplies I so carefully packed away for the haul out. It’s not really a big job. It’s just added to all the other ‘not very big’ jobs that must be done at some point.

Our list of tasks is like a living organism, just like our list of things to purchase. Like a cranky and difficult to please god, we giveth to the list, and we taketh away from the list as time and funds require. It gives us some relief from concern that after the haulout, we will have a good few weeks to just sit around somewhere and casually do boat jobs however we want. There’s nothing more that I want to do in the whole wide world than sit at anchor somewhere and look for more small areas of water intrusion into our deck. Doesn’t that sound terrific? We actually think so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These Last Days

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Mike walked up to pay the moorage for April and told the folks at Foss Harbor that we’re leaving. He gave them notice. This is the last monthly moorage we will pay for Galapagos in Tacoma for a long time.  That feels kind of…stunning. It’s actually more stunning than the day Mike gave notice at work. It’s more stunning than when we moved out of our house.

At work,  Mike’s in the midst of helping to find his replacement; not an easy task, apparently. If you want to know how many airplanes Russia might need in the coming decades, he’s your guy for 4 more weeks. His last day ‘working for the man’ is May 4. We’ve spent the better part of the last week getting his retirement paperwork in order, going over and over our choices about how the pension comes to us. These decisions feel so big, so fraught with opportunity to make a life-altering mistake. Boeing is really good about giving you a human being to walk you through this process. We are grateful for that.

This goes in the mail tomorrow.

I’m seriously winding down my practice now. My last day of work is April 30. Unlike Mike, I’m not relieved to stop working. I’ve been really enjoying my work. Ever since I cancelled all my contracts with insurance, I’ve felt a new sense of freedom in the work I do, like a big weight was taken off my shoulders. Imagine that! Just being connected with the insurance system weighs me down. Think about that at your next doctor’s appointment.   I make less money refusing to bill insurance, but I’m happier with what I do. Seems like a good trade to me.

I don’t have any paperwork to sign or turn in on my last day of work. It will be a day like any other except that I will have my very last appointment with my very last client. No fanfare or hurrah. Just…done. Damn, I still remember the first client I ever had. So strange. You do something for 28 years and then one day, you don’t do it anymore.  I’m lucky to have done something I loved. I will miss my work and am thinking about how I might keep my hand in a little bit while we’re out. That’s probably not seriously workable because of scheduling and having internet/phone access, but it makes me feel better about leaving the practice behind. And I’m open to it.

The spoils of a fun day of painting rocks for our travels.

By the time we leave the marina and go to Olympia for the haul out, we’ll be quite ready to get this show on the road. We’ve already started talking about how little we might be able to get away with doing before we go because we’re kind of chomping at the bit to get out there. We are starting to get excited about the idea that we get to go cruising this year. It feels like forever since we’ve been anyplace cool on Galapagos. And that’s because it HAS been a long time. I can’t wait to get out on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, actually. It’s a big body of water, and it smells like vacation and summer. Plus, whales! We always see humpbacks in the strait. Mike better start practicing his whale calling song, because we’re coming for them!

We will hang around the south sound until the end of June, when we get our last immunization from the nice Elizabeth at Costco, and then we will start our journey north to explore the inside and the Strait of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland. We are still considering a circumnavigation of Vancouver Island by way of shake down, but as every sailor knows, those kinds of plans will blow around with the wind and weather. Gosh, it’s really nice to not have to be in too much of a hurry! I’m already enjoying that part and we aren’t even gone yet! 

You know, in all the blogs I’ve read about people doing this thing called cruising, I don’t remember reading about how strange it feels to be at this part of the planning process; this part where you are almost completely ready to cast off the lines, with one foot in your land life, and the other on the boat. All the final land-based contracts and obligations are poised for disconnect or have been put on hold. House is rented, jobs are quit, boat is paid for.  All systems are ready, you just have pick up your foot and go.

We’ve been eating, breathing, sleeping this plan for 5 years. It’s been the all-consuming focus of our existence, for better or for worse. Between this plan, work,  and family stuff, we have had no time or energy to invest much in anything else. The amount of psychological energy and focus this kind of life change takes is enormous; much more than we would have ever known. It’s hard to explain that to others.

All that’s left at this point is to have those ‘last’ days, haul her out and get to work on her, and then to say goodbye for awhile to our people. The hardest part is saved for last.  I remind myself that it’s ‘farewell for now’, not ‘goodbye’. I remind myself I can come home if I want to, for a visit. I remind myself that my people can come to Mexico and beyond and be on the boat with us. I remind myself. A lot. And I wish they could all come on this trip, too.

Benson Island, one of my favorite places. I wonder if we’ll be there again this year.

By the way, since we’ll be in Scotland most of May, we are trying to get the storage shed at the marina emptied out this month. We have a couple of things boat related up for sale. Right now we have a #45 CQR anchor and a nice dehumidifier. If you are interested in either of those, give us a shout.