Category Archives: Sailing

Boat Show? No Go!

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This weekend we were planning to attend the boat show in Seattle. Seattle has a huge boat show every winter and you can go from booth to booth seeing all the new technology available for boats of all kinds. You can also go on new sailboats and see what the designers have been up to lately. That part is fun as long you you avoid looking at the  prices. The danger of shows like the boat show is that you can walk away feeling as though sailing is a sport for the rich only. What is the solution to that problem?

Go sailing, of course! So that’s what we did. We skipped the boat show entirely this year and instead we spent the weekend on Moonrise. We had an unseasonably ‘warm’ (a word which here means 50 degrees) and sunny weekend so, despite the probability of no wind, we took Moonrise and headed south to Anderson Island. We got lucky and there was enough of a breeze to actually do some sailing. Lest people forget why we do this, here are some photo reminders.

Only one other boat on the water, and it was a sailboat. A sailboat which overtook our boat and passed us smartly, making us feel like novices. Actually, he just stayed in the middle of the channel rounding Pt. Defiance, so he kept the wind.

Drinking hot tea, under a blanket, to stay warm. Thank goodness for the sunshine.

Mt. Rainier, as seen from our quiet anchorage. The water was as still as a lake.

Sailing home under jib alone, into the ubiquitous Pacific Northwest photo of the ferry with the mountain in the background. Sorry it's fuzzy. I had one hand on the wheel.

Final shot of the mountain as we approach the marina.

 

 

The Doldrums of Winter

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When the power is out, there is time to do things like build a Snow Queen.

My usual routine of posting something every few days has been decidedly interrupted by a winter storm that I have determined must be called ‘the doldrums of winter’.  After posting how lovely the place looked with all the snow, I thoughtlessly wished it would stay around for awhile. Never did I realize how my powers of manifestation would be abused!  We entered into a storm cycle that left us literally withOUT power for 4 days, with a large hole in our kitchen window, and a yard that looks like a cyclone thundered through. And the snow did, indeed, linger through all of this.

It is this time without electricity, during the darkness and cold of winter, that I am referring to as the ‘doldrums’. Sailors will recognize that term as referring to the areas of low pressure around the equator that are famous for having little to no wind. Sailboats can sit for days, or even weeks, until the wind, their source of power, returns. I’m imagining some sailors have been driven insane by this waiting.

I’m reading Miles Hordern’s book Sailing the Pacific, his story of sailing from New Zealand to Chile and back by himself. In his book, he describes his experience of the doldrums thus:

” There was nothing to do. Or perhaps, I could do nothing. I turned on the radio, but its talk was of a world I no longer knew. A book was hopeless: I could seldom read a sentence before my concentration dissolved. …Again and again I found myself climbing to the deck….Each time I hoped that finally there might be something there…..But each time there was nothing.”

I believe this aptly describes Mike’s behavior during this brief time of living without electricity and internet service while the storm raged on. The word ‘raged’ here means the sound of exploding limbs, falling trees, and continued snow. Mike was actively involved in ‘waiting’, which everyone knows is a verb of action. He waited at the window, watching. He waited outside, until I got just a little upset at him for wandering around underneath the deadly trees and called to him in a rather loud voice to come inside. He talked on the cell phone to our neighbors to coordinate experiences and wonder out loud when the power would be restored, when another limb might hit the house, whether a tree would fall. Would our little enclave of a few houses warrant the attention of the power company? Did they KNOW we were powerless? How long would we have to wait? Days? Weeks? The stillness that was usually my husband was nowhere to be found. Perhaps men are like this when their homes are threatened.

The remains of the birch tree.

I, on the other hand, was the essence of feminine patience. I sat placidly by the window, doing crafts by lamplight, occasionally getting up to stoke the fire. It was as though I was gestating in some way, although what I would be giving birth to is beyond me at this point. I hope I am creating here a dramatic enough picture. The exploding trees interested me in a sad kind of way, but I felt deeply the fact that I had absolutely no power to do anything about the storm. It would do its devilry to our trees and property, and then we would clean up later. My birch tree was snapped in two pieces. I barely batted an eyelash. My smoke trees were smashed to smithereens by huge branches. I will recover.  We were warm, dry, fed, and together. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs had never been better met. It’s true that should a tree land on our house, we could be injured, but worrying about it would not change that. Why this logic generally escapes me when it comes, say, to my children, is beyond me. Still, I sat smugly enjoying the slowness of life.

A hummingbird on my frozen rhododendron. We kept our feeders full during the storm.

In fact, when the electricity came back on yesterday, I was a bit disconcerted at first. And then I felt a little mournful. It’s not that I don’t like having the convenience because, after all, I am not crazy. But I do love those times when life is pretty simple and small. Having a power outage makes life very small and contained, and only the basic things are important. Now that the power is back, we live large again. In some ways, this is unfortunate.

Somewhere underneath these branches are my beautiful mature smoke trees, sacrificed to the god of winter.

 

A Photo Tribute to Moonrise

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I’m beginning to feel terrified. We have all these plans, and they all hinge on the releasing of attachments to land based things for awhile so we can go and see the world. You see, our children are more well-traveled than we are, and we just cannot let that stand. We want to go to Mexico, and Central America, and down the coast of South America, even to Antarctica. We want to go to the South Pacific, to New Zealand, and to the Great Barrier Reef. We want to sail in Europe and around the British Isles. And being the kind of people we are, we want to go to those places on our own terms and stay away from the touristy crowds. We’ve already established that Moonrise isn’t going to be our world traveling boat.  So now, I’m getting terrified because we’ve put her up for sale. We’re about to be boatless, and we don’t know when, or for how long. Yikes! If you are not a sailor, it’s hard to help you understand just how bad that’s going to feel.

It's hard to get shots like this if you don't have a boat.

You cannot get to this awesome sea cave without a boat.

Being boatless means I won't be able to see things like this, which make life worthwhile. I don't want to go whale watching with 40 strangers in orange jumpsuits for 1 hour. I want to spend the whole day watching them from the deck of my boat.

Part of our preparation for the cunning plan has been purging the house of extraneous stuff and this has forced us to reckon with the idea of ‘sunk costs’. You know: the costs you’ll never recover,  like the fact that we bought something for 1500$ and then sold it for $500. That 1000$ difference is just gone. Poof! When Mike began to tally up all the time and money we’ve spent on Moonrise in the four years we’ve owned her, it became crystal clear that we were going to have to find a way to accept the energy we’ve sunk into her as just par for the course. It would have been great if we had known when we bought her that we would someday want to sail the world and needed a boat designed for blue water. But life has a way of being messier than that, and we wouldn’t have been ready to buy such a boat at that time.  So what do we have to show for those sunk costs?

Plenty. When we bought Moonrise we were still pretty novice sailors. Having Moonrise allowed us to gain skills in ways we would never have done on the Saucy Sue (our Catalina 27). Different boats are made for different things. We sailed in conditions we would have shied away from on the Sue, just because Moonrise made us feel safe and secure. We learned we could sail in 30 knots of wind and 10 foot waves, at night, to cross the Strait of Juan de Fuca. You would have had to hog tie me to the mast to get me to do that on a 27 foot Catalina. Then you would have had to clean up after me. Not pretty.

Mike, fueling up for his turn at the wheel during the night crossing.

Three reefs on the main, just a tiny jib up. Everyone harnessed to the boat, no one allowed on deck. We did three hour watches, two people in the cockpit, one below napping.

Andrew at the wheel during the night crossing, checking the compass heading. Don't ask about the scrub brush behind him.

We learned how to work as a crew together.

Mike and Andrew trim the sail. I'm at the wheel.

And we learned how to use our cruising spinnaker.

On days like this, I think Moonrise is the prettiest boat on the water.

While Saucy Sue was a great racer and day sailer, I would not have traveled extensively on the Sue. She just was not a comfortable boat.  Moonrise is the perfect coastal cruiser. We took extended trips on Moonrise, with her comfortable cabin and sleeping arrangements and complete galley. She encouraged us to venture further each year. We were soon learning to anchor in places the guidebooks didn’t talk about, until we finally braved the Pacific side of Vancouver Island and Barkley Sound.

Nothing but big Pacific ahead.

 

The foggy west coast of Vancouver Island.

One of those anchorages that is not in the guidebooks.

Sailing experience is not all we gained for those ‘sunk costs’. We also gained experience working on boats. Moonrise has a lot more to offer her new owners than she did us. We’ve learned how to ‘remodel’ the boat interior, and how to not be too mortified at the idea of cutting into fiberglass and wood. Mike, especially, has really cut his teeth on Moonrise when it comes to working on boat systems and improving them. We know, now, how to have a boat hauled out and how to sand and paint the bottom ourselves.

Moonrise's lovely bottom.

As hard as it is to look at the tally sheet of expenditures on this boat, how much would it have cost us to have someone teach us these things? How would that even be possible? No, I feel sure that this is money well spent in the end. Sure, we are selling the boat, but we are not selling our experiences, our learning. We get to keep those. And we have the memories of being on this boat together in places we would not have seen otherwise.  And those are priceless.