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.

 

 

 

Another Farewell

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“A Ship in Harbor Is Safe, But that Is Not What Ships Are Built For” -John Shedd

Late Wednesday evening I tidied up my desk, put my access card in my supervisor’s desk drawer and walked out of the Washington State Patrol headquarters for the last time. After two and half years, another chapter in my working life comes to an end.

I am still a little incredulous at how I ended up working on databases for the State Patrol. The very moment I stepped off Galapagos at her new home in Olympia, the phone rang asking me to come in for an interview. That was in September of 2020; the depths of COVID times and everyone was scrambling to sort out a new normal. Fortunately, adaptability is a super power one acquires living aboard a sailboat in Mexico.

Remember the Good Old Days?  All masked up (except for Asha!) during a software release.

For the first year and half, I was one of a handful of people that came into the office daily; Everyone was teleworking and only a few managers would show up from time to time. Because I lived so close by, it was more convenient to work in the office. Plus the building is beautiful and my office was very comfortable. So I would work all day, Zooming with my co-workers in an office with no one in it.

The Helen Sommers building where I worked. A beautiful space makes coming into the office a lot easier.

Lucky for me that I got to work with a team of great people that were so patient and helpful as I came up to speed on the various projects. It was a good match; my experience developing databases merged with the State Patrol’s multi-year effort to modernize their records systems. It was fulfilling work in a way I had not expected. I re-wrote their Missing and Unidentified Persons database and developed tools to export the data to other agencies. But it was also hard to see the stories of people’s lives gone terribly wrong. Human tragedy reduced to a record in a table.

Rest easy, citizens. We have our TOP people working to protect you.

I am so grateful to my managers and co-workers that made my time at the State Patrol so enjoyable.  Even during COVID, the energy and comradery in our group made work a pleasure.  Thank you all.

Many, but not all of the crew that keeps the data flowing for the State Patrol.

Now my full time job is working to put the finishing touches on Galapagos so that we can begin cruising the Salish Sea this summer and head to Vancouver Island and beyond. We will move back aboard sometime this month and yet another transition will begin. I have to remind myself that farewells, hard and scary as they sometimes are, always imply a new beginning; a chance to set dreams in motion and bring them to reality.

Great Refit 2023: Woodworking 101 and Other Projects

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We are truly checking things off the list aboard S/V Galapagos. It’s almost like we plan to go cruising again or something. I remember this part of preparing to go last time. It did not feel real then, and somehow, it doesn’t feel real now. There are always so many things that can delay leaving the dock, and the attachments we form to life on land are many and deep. It’s just not easy to let go of the dock.  And that’s on every level: physical, emotional, psychological, financial.

Preparing to move back aboard and leave my garden. Again. Transitions between lives: not my forte’.

But we’re doing it anyhow because the good years we have left to live and will be physically able to do things like cross oceans are passing. Fast. Here’s a short list of what we’ve done in the last couple of weeks:

1 Dropped sails off at Ballard Sails in Seattle to be looked over, and have a new ATN Spinnaker Sleeve installed so we can reduce the number of shit shows on the foredeck when we deploy that sail.
2. Dropped the Viking life raft off for servicing at the Viking facility in Auburn.

Get a load of all those life rafts!

3. Made a running start on installing the new radar pole on the aft deck. This pole is complete with a davit for lifting our new-to-us dinghy engine. Photos another day on this.  This involved leaving the slip, docking the boat in a tight space with only a few feet to spare front and back, and getting back into our slip…all with zero drama. Zero. Drama. My favorite kind of drama.
4. After much perseveration, Michael has ordered new blocks for the mainsheet, choosing to go with the Garhauer 50 series, which is a step up from what we had. We’re excited to play with the angles of the sheet in relation to our hard dodger once we have the deck block in hand.
5. We’ve brought home all the lines and washed them so we can examine them closely to see which ones we’ll want to replace.
6. Continued reorganizing stowage, getting rid of excess stuff we don’t need, creating a manual spreadsheet (otherwise known as a notebook) noting where everything is stored. Note: old line, stored in a plastic bag, makes a dandy filler for oddly shaped bilge areas, creating a flat platform that allows things to be stowed in those areas safely. Why didn’t I know that before?

My manual ‘spreadsheet’. Sometimes I just need to be old school. And these lists, divided by cabin, have already come in handy.

7. Replaced the leaky, albeit brand new, Lewmar hatch in the salon. They sent us a new lid. It does not leak. Finally.
8. Removed the clear polycarbonate window inside the cockpit, looking down into the galley. Bought replacement. Refinished teak under that, filled old screw holes with epoxy, sanded, then painted that part of the cockpit with Total Boat paint. It works great and has held up in other areas, including the sole of the cockpit. Replaced window with new, clear version. We are pleased with it.
9. Painted the ceilings and around all the ports. I’m using Dutchboy Cabinet and Trim latex gloss paint in Nantucket Grey. I painted some of our fiberglass with this stuff years ago and it has held up really well under hard use. Impressed. Working on replacing the dated and worn-out curtains. It’s time for a fresh look.
10. Michael climbed the mast and installed the vane for the anemometer. Now we are a yacht. Both wind speed AND direction? Wow. It’s so fancy.
11. Begun bringing stuff back to the boat from the storage unit. Only the important things first. Like books. And Patrick the starfish. But where is our stack pack for the mainsail? We truly are flummoxed. It’s not like this is a small item that can be stuffed in a corner somewhere. Did we get rid of it, because we were never really happy with it? Unlikely. We are generally loathe to get rid of canvas. But searching the basement, the garage, and the storage unit has revealed nothing so far. The search continues.

We know what’s important. Patrick and our snorkel gear.

The big task checked off the list: put the woodwork back around the chainplates. We are dead pleased with how this came together, and with how we’ve showcased our new boat bling. When you pay this much for stainless steel, you kind of want to show it off. So here’s the end result.

The wood we chose was due to a combination of expediency, availability, and cost. A quick stop at our local hardwood shop for woodworkers brought into sharp focus what we’d be up against if we decided to go with something like Brazilian mahogany or, gods forbid, teak. Not only would our costs absolutely be knocked out of the park, but we’d also be faced with needing to have the wood milled, adding time and costs to an already tight budget and timeline. We decided to go the expedient route and get milled poplar, available in a number of different sizes from the local big box store. Although it’s a soft wood, not my preference for this project, the areas where it’s used are protected and these new chainplates are unlikely to leak. I’ve sealed the wood against swelling due to moisture. However,  if this wood, for any reason, doesn’t hold up over time, it will be very easy to replace it.

I apologized to the gods of Teak as I chose all the sizes I needed to do the job, and then stopped by the paint counter to look at wood stains. We wanted something that would contrast well with the blond wood already there, and also be different from the teak trim we have. To try to match that would have been difficult, if not ridiculous. So instead I went with making it look different by design. In the end, I had stain mixed to my own specifications, having the paint counter worker add brown colorant drop by drop until I got the warm shade of almost-redwood I was after.

Re-purposing some extra teak trim at the bottom to give a nod to the rest of the wood trim in the boat.

Back at the boat, the project came together much more quickly than I anticipated and soon our chainplates were the star of the salon, surrounded by painted fiberglass that matches the paint I used years ago to cover the dated almond colored fiberglass used throughout the boat. That paint job has held up really well. I managed to recycle some teak trim we had from other remodeling projects to accent the new frames above and below, tying the new wood to the old. I call this interior look “Nautical Industrial Chic” (TM).

This weekend we are dog sitting with Emmett, who is definitely an adolescent Aussie. We are forced to sit around and do nothing for a couple of days, which is not our style but I guess we need the break. I imagine we will move back aboard sometime in May.

He’s thinks he’s so grown up.

But, wait! There’s more! As though we didn’t have enough going on, turns out we will be losing the tenant in our little apartment early in May.  I look forward to a fast and furious, but seriously long overdue,  re-do of that space before we say goodbye to the dock.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16.