Tag Archives: Preparing to cruise

Second Time Around

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I’m sitting in my mostly empty house running down the seemingly never-ending list of ‘to do’ items in the coming days.  You will never know how many little projects your home needs until you move out of it. In fact, I think all homeowners should have the opportunity to move OUT of their homes every ten or so years just to keep things fresh. In my life I’ve remodeled two houses and bought an old boat and refitted that. I thought I knew what hard work felt like. But I’ve never worked as hard as I have in the past three months, and that’s saying something. We need a vacation. How about a trip to Mexico?

Playa El Burro. You can barely see  S/V Galapagos.

Slowly but surely we are getting the hard work done to prepare this house for new renters; renters who are not our children. It was great renting the house to our kid and his friends. The bar was super low in terms of what they expected of the house. Since Andrew grew up here, he was used to the fact that the three way switches in the kitchen and office were wired incorrectly. He didn’t expect there to be a doorbell; people just knocked. The old  dated pale yellow wallpaper felt warm and comfortable to him. The grout in the family room and kitchen, well, hasn’t it always been black? The chipped paint on his bedroom door wasn’t an issue, much less the fact that there were two different kinds of doorknobs on the doors off the hallway. The nicked and scratched paint on the cabinets in the kitchen? Part of the patina; evidence of a room well used. All the scratches on the solid fir doors left by various dogs over the years? Ahhhh, we love the memories of those pooches. And are all those growing green things in the landscape actually weeds that set a million seeds? Who knew? These things have flown beneath the family radar for 18 years. We just didn’t care about them. (Except the weeds. I totally cared about and took care of those. All the time.) But now that we are trying to make the home attractive for other people, we do care about those things. As well as thousands of others. 

Yes, having Andrew and Friends move into the house worked great while it lasted. The mortgage got paid, the kids had a much nicer place to live than they could have afforded individually, and Mom and Dad got to move onto their spiffy old boat and pretend that they would never have to come back and face the music that is moving out of the home you’ve owned for many years.  We downsized our possessions quite a lot, and then we just kind of … left. On some level we knew it was too good to last. And we were right. Kids get married and go off and do the things they are meant to do in life.

When we left last time, all of our furnishings stayed right where they were. This time as we clear the house we are faced with choosing which things to keep and which to let go of. It’s probably not a surprise that I don’t let go of furniture easily. Once it’s gone, I’m fine, but the parting is hard if it’s a piece I like. And I do like furniture. Some of the most ‘historical’ (a word which here means I’ve probably had it for decades) pieces are being given to family and friends, which makes the parting a sweet sorrow tinged with a good bit of happiness. The velvet living room chairs and antique mirror going to a cherished ‘adopted’ daughter, our own daughter’s best friend; the piano of my childhood going to our very close friends who live just across the street; our green four poster bed borrowed by some of Andrew and Jill’s best friends, the ones with the new baby; Andrew and Jill choosing our sofa and a couple of stuffed chairs for their future home.  Even my own sister and mom are taking a couple of things. We infuse meaning into these giftings of furnishings with the history of the Boyte-White family woven into their very presence.

And so here we are; sitting in a house with little furniture surrounded by a yard with almost no weeds as summer disappears into the darkness of fall, slowly but surely moving stuff out of all the rooms. It’s a little like gradually disappearing.  In the end we are going to wind up exactly how we started in this house: living in one room, sleeping on a mattress on the floor surrounded by the few things we need to live day to day while we finish cleaning and remodeling the rest of the house. We are still on target to ‘leave the dock’ for the second time sometime in October. 

Astute readers will be asking the obvious: But where are Andrew and Friends going? The friends had a baby and moved on. But Andrew and his wife, Jill, are preparing for their own traveling adventure. They’ve been planning to do some extensive traveling and their plans are coming to fruition. They are outfitting their Honda Element for camping and about the time we leave for Mexico they will be heading off on a cross country trip and then to Europe. They fly from New York to Paris in December (BRRR) and plan to sell their Honda when they get to North Carolina. After a stint in Europe they hope to get to Ecuador to visit our Claire and her Dan, and then we are crossing all our fingers and toes they will come do some crewing for us aboard Galapagos, wherever we are at that point. You can follow along on their travels if you like, since they’ve started their own blog The Wander Blobs. Why that name? It’s a story, and I’ll let you go to their blog page where they define for you: What is a Blob? We are enormously proud of them both for having a dream that became a plan that is now a happening reality. 

And speaking of keeping dreams alive, we had the good fortune to meet up with the crew of S/V Totem up in Seattle. Jamie and Behan Gifford were the special speakers at the recent meeting of the Puget Sound Cruising Club. We last visited in person with them down in the Sea of Cortez where we made darn sure we got a chance to get them on board so we could pick their brains about our pitiful rig and our need for a new sail. They gave a great presentation on some very special places they’ve been and totally lit the fire for us again. Thanks, we needed that! Having our noses to the grindstone as we do, our cruising life feels so very far away, almost like it existed in a different lifetime. It was great to see them, and also to see so many of the cruising club folks we’ve met over the years. Kevin and Cressie on S/V Blue were there, as well as a few other ‘boats’ from the sea of Cortez. It was a little like old home week and makes one realize just how tight and small the cruising community is. It seems like a small world when you see people you knew down in Mexico back here in Seattle. 

In the same vein of keeping the dream alive, you’ll notice the photos I’ve posted are not from the house. Why would you want to see photos of me cleaning grout or painting molding? After listening to the Gifford’s talk I began thinking about all the many beautiful places we’ve seen so far that I haven’t written about. This place in these photos stands out.

These photos are of the the rock art you can find close to Playa El Burro, in Bahia Concepcion. Finding this rock art was one of more entertaining hikes we did as the weather began to warm up last May.   We anchored at Playa El Burro for this specific reason.  What I want other cruisers to know about finding this delicious rock art is that the guide book everyone relies on is wrong. The most popular guide book tells you that the trail head can be seen from the anchorage and this is not correct. There is no trail to the rocks. You can absolutely see a well defined trail going up the mountain, and there is a trailhead close to a small roadside restaurant. But if you take that obvious trail up the hill you will never find the petroglyphs and you will be very disappointed. I’ve taken photos to show you exactly where to go to find these spectacular pieces of ancient art. Go in the morning and you’ll have shade for your hike.  And the guidebook is totally right about the bell rocks! You’ll find huge boulders that ring like a bell when struck due to the iron content. I’ll go a long way to see rock art. But this place is really easy to get to.[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_llpgJgl9fU[/embedyt]

Back to my previously scheduled program of hard labor. S/V Galapagos, out.

This is sign by the roadway. You want to find this sign and then walk inland from the road toward the clump of trees. Once you’ve located your first petroglyphs among the trees, just keep going uphill from there, following the tumbled boulders. There are hundreds of pieces of art. It’s fantastic.

Here’s the view from the position of the sign.Turn around and walk inland to find the rocks.

 

 

 

The Measure of the Day

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This morning I’m sitting in my window seat at home, my land-life equivalent to the cockpit on Galapagos, nursing my one and only ‘latte’ of the day. I call it a latte, but it’s really my addictive Taster’s Choice House Blend (yeah, thanks, Scotland) and nicely frothed milk. Delicious. It’s my morning ritual. I sit here, observe the early falling leaves, and check my email.

P1100428

I open the email from Bookbub, a website I subscribe to that showcases really cheap books for my Kindle. Most of the time I glance through the list and am not impressed. I hit ‘delete’ and move on. Today I find three books that grab my attention and I end up buying all three. And that’s when it hits me: this is the measure of the day ahead. Getting three Kindle books for a total of 5$.  I guess if you are going to measure the success of a day in advance, this is as good a way as any. I wonder what other wonders this day will reveal?

This Kindle-stock-piling is one of the many small things I do to prepare for all those long hours of web-less forced inactivity that I’m sure must be awaiting me when we cut the dock lines late next spring.   I just know I will have hours and hours to lie around when the weather is too hot to do anything else; protecting my delicate skin from the sun’s bitter rays, Kindle in hand and absorbed in stories. It’s a good dream, and I’m holding fast to it and as I buy-with-one-click. Amazon, you make it so easy.  At this point, I can’t even find all the books I’ve bought because I haven’t yet discovered the secret to keeping them organized. It’s the story of my life.

More fall bloomers. Japanese Wind Flowers

I feel like a squirrel, gathering nuts and storing them away in hidden places, preparing for the lean times. I’ve canned gallons of figs and huckleberries from the yard, hoarding them away under the settee. We’ll never buy jam again. I look at the crab apple tree and begin planning another round of canning. Maybe it’s my mother’s and grandmother’s depression era heritage that keeps me from wanting to see good fruit go to waste.

I’m hunting and gathering dvds we’d like to watch, saving them for that rainy day at an anchorage somewhere. End of the season deals on hot weather clothing find their way into my shopping cart and then into the pillow cover storage on the boat. During the cold and wet winter, I’ll find myself fingering the cloth like prayer beads, counting the days to the warmth and sun.

Even as fall has not actually begun, our late spring departure bears down on us, gathering speed.  It’s hard to believe there is less than a year to go in this plan.  There are countless things to accomplish before then. The big ones are scheduled in our heads for a haul out next year. That leak under the mizzen mast. That old mainsail. All the deck systems. The rigging inspection. All that and more. It will stretch us to prioritize these things into what actually needs to be done before we go, and what can wait until another day, another place.

I am working on a few small but important things such as the medical kit. I’ve made great progress ordering things from Amazon, such as these Quik Clot sponges for stopping bleeding, and this Israeli Bandage Battle Dressing compression bandage, and even this skin staple kit. It’s amazing how much you can spend on things you hope never to actually use. I purchased first aid for the mind in an entire season of Big Bang Theory, waiting for a nice binge watch session in the Rumpus Room on board.P1100422

With the aft cabin creative endeavor complete and Mike having almost completed the install of the new hydraulic steering lines, our next big interior project is going to be the galley and the water system on board. My little grey cells are working overtime experimenting with materials, doing research, coming up with a cunning plan to increase accessible storage, get rid of the old countertops, and replace the tired sink before the drain snaps off and falls into the cabinet below. Of course this is all while saving money and coming up with new Cheap Boat Tricks. I have ideas, plans forming in my brain. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, here are the three books you may want to consider for your own Kindle. Hurry before the prices go back up:

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories by Ben Fountain $1.99

Coop by Michael Perry $1.99

Escape on the Pearl: Passage to Freedom From Washington, D.C.  by Mary Kay Ricks $.99

 

 

Consider This

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Mike and I have never ‘lived aboard’. The times we have spent night after night on the boat, times where we’ve been able to get into any kind of routine, we’ve been at anchor somewhere on vacation. That’s a way different animal in many ways than living aboard at the marina. This week we turned the house over to Jill and Andrew and decided to stay at the marina. We get 8 days/month to stay aboard without being considered ‘liveaboards’, so we figured we’d take them while the weather is decent.

When you live at the marina, you get to see things like this.

When you live at the marina, you get to see things like this.

How are we doing with living at the dock? Pretty good. As a rule we’ve always enjoyed being at the marina, and, of course, we love our Galapagos. But here are some differences between dock living and land house living that readers who don’t have boats may not have considered. These are among the many things you must be able to take in stride if you are going to live aboard a boat happily. So if you are considering living aboard, consider these points.

ONE: It’s loud. I mean really loud. We are next to the freeway and the train tracks. We are next to other people on other boats; people who talk to each other when we are trying to sleep, people who have dogs that bark at us. Flushing the head is loud and long. Everytime someone runs the water the water pump comes on. Walking across the floor would put an old house’s creaks to shame.
Our solution? These particular earplugs. Even though I am very hard of hearing, earplugs are necessary for me to get any sleep here. Fortunately, these really do work! I just ordered a lifetime supply. You might want to hurry and order. They’re on sale. Don’t let the price deter you. You can use them over and over and over.

The neighborhood.

The neighborhood.

TWO: Privacy is different. We love the marina community here and everyone appears to be entirely respectful of each other’s private space. But it is very different because you actually see people all the time. They are out and about, walking up and down the docks, sitting in their cockpits waving as people walk by. It’s like living in the middle of a small city. We hardly ever see anyone at home, and if we don’t make an effort, we can go weeks without visiting our neighbors. We really enjoy being in a community of people at the marina, and the amount of privacy we had at our house is unlikely to be missed too much. But I can imagine some marinas where this would not be at all true. I think it has to do with the people where you are and we got lucky at Foss Harbor. In spite of that I will not be sitting in the cockpit in next to nothing drinking my morning coffee in the marina like I do at home, and at anchor. I do have my limits.

THREE: Tasks take longer and require advanced planning. Consider my aforementioned morning coffee routine. Boil water, unplug kettle, plug in frother and froth milk. You can’t do it at the same time, and in the winter I will have to turn off the heater before doing either of these things. That’s because there isn’t enough power on the boat, even plugged into the dock, to run two heating devices at once. (Not to mention the fact that there are way fewer areas to plug things in.) I learned that the hard way last winter when I tried to make coffee while the heat was on. Whoops. Want to dry your hair? Turn everything else off first. Need to change a lightbulb? Well, it’s unlikely you will be able to get to the extra bulbs unless you take a bunch of other things out of the cabinet first. It’s not like at home where you walk into the utility room, reach up on the shelf, grab a bulb and go for it. Probably it’s going to take you at least 15 minutes to do that simple task. Multiply that by the number of tasks performed daily.
Just ugh.

Just ugh.

 FOUR: Grit City. This is how Tacoma is referred to and we have figured out why by having our boat docked in downtown Tacoma for several years. This black grit is everywhere and on everything. Therefore it’s kind of hard for the boat to ever feel really clean to me. Today I rinsed off the hatch lenses and lo and behold, there really is sky out there and I can see it again! Wiping the surfaces inside the boat will reveal everything getting covered in gritty black dust. If you like to clean, you’ll love living on a boat in a marina in the city. I like our marina, but I look forward to getting away from this dirt.

FIVE: Everything is tiny. This seems obvious, but think about the implications. Doorways are tiny. Passages are narrow. Sinks are elfish. In the shower, you can practice your squats to pick that soap up off the floor because there is no room to bend over. Small, narrow spaces mean you have to pay attention to where your body is in physical space. Bruises are ubiquitious to boat living because there is always something to bump into. And that’s just while at the dock! (Actually, there are fewer bruises when underway in these small spaces because they give you a place to brace yourself. But this post is about being at the dock.) These small spaces also mean that the few pounds I put on over the summer have to go. I really feel the difference on the boat. And remember, we have a really big boat by most people’s standards.

Turn sideways, please. And watch your step and you walk through our shower.

Turn sideways, please. And watch your step as you walk through our shower.

 

SIX: Cooking is tantamount to building the Parthenon, as we say around here. That means it is unnecessarily complex. The workspace is on top of the fridge, which is bloody inconvenient almost all of the time. Lots of people love cooking on a boat and maybe you would be one of them. But even at home, I’m not crazy about cooking. In a perfect world I come down to find breakfast waiting in a variety of heated dishes on the sideboard and served by a man named Jeeves. Since that’s unlikely in this lifetime the simpler the better in terms of meals.

From unloading the fridge to accessing various pots and pans at the bottom of a deep storage space, most boat cooking is a bit of a challenge. I haven’t found my groove with refrigeration organization yet.

SEVEN: You must have constant vigilance regarding moisture. And I’m not talking about the obvious thing like boat leaks, although there’s that, too. I’m talking about how you can’t store anything below the water line without putting it in plastic to avoid mildew. And that’s only the beginning. For instance, today I bought air tight containers to store medications and first aid supplies because the air on a boat is always moist to some degree and that moisture ruins things. In a house, you bring home your medications and even things like spices, and you put them in the cabinet. On a boat, you do that at your peril. Storage containers must be airtight if you want these kinds of things to last. Think for a moment, if you will, about storing everything you have in your house in plastic ziplock bags or air tight plastic storage containers. Everything.

Jeeves. Fridge to the left, cabinet where pots are stored to the right.

Jeeves. Fridge to the left, cabinet where pots are stored to the right.

EIGHT: Boatatosis. We all have our super powers and mine is the sense of smell. I could always tell when it was time to clean the floors at my house by how the house smelled when I walked in. This was due to our having a dog in the house. On board Galapagos, we battle smells from our engine room. Hiram’s room (our little red Beta engine) can have a smell reminiscent of teenage boys’ filthy socks. Maybe we should have named that engine Audrey because everyone knows girls smell better.
The worst part is that when a boat has a smell, people, including us, assume it must be the head (the bathroom). That’s not always the case. For us, it’s the bilge. We’ve tracked down the smell to the spillage of hydraulic fluid which, when mixed with bilge and heat, creates a stinky stew that is really offensive. At home, I could just wash my floors and get that clean house smell. On the boat it’s much more complicated and involves cleaning out a deep, dark reservoir of rank. Oh yes, and we can’t actually see into this bilge because Hiram is sitting on top of it. (Yes, Mike is just finishing up replacing the original hydraulic fluid lines, which apparently had a leak somewhere. Hopefully this will lessen our problem.)

NINE: Expanding on number 5, even the trashcan is smaller. When cruising trash is a really big deal to handle and our boat is large enough that we have to have a written plan for handling it.  But even at the dock, dealing with the inevitable trash of modern life is constant. We have one trashcan. One. And it is smaller than the size of a plastic grocery bag. We endeavor to keep as much trash as possible off the boat but even so, especially when doing projects, we have to make at trash run each day. We almost always have an overflow trash bag in the cockpit, which drives me a little crazy.

Trashcan for tiny trash.

Trashcan for tiny trash.

TEN: Rule of the boat. Boat dwellers already are familiar with this. This is the law of nature that says that wherever you need to go on a boat, someone is going to be in your way. Need to get through the passage into the aft cabin? Mike will be in the engine room with the doors open blocking the way. In order to get through you will either have to go around, or he will have to disturb his task to let you through. Need to get something in the galley? Not if someone else is there first you don’t.

Am I complaining? Not even a little bit. But it is what it is and people need to know all the things that are true, not just the sunshine and sandy beaches things. Which, by the way, we did not even get this year. There will be times when I will become seriously annoyed at one thing or another on this list. But on the whole, it’s going to be completely worth it. In fact, last night as I nestled down in my comfortable berth after a long day of boat projects, I noticed this little niggle of a feeling bubbling up from somewhere close to my solar plexus. I think it was something like contentment.

Do you live on a boat? What annoys you the most?