We Heart Charts

A while back my blogging friend Ellen over at The Cynical Sailor and His Salty Sidekick mentioned that she scored a bunch of paper charts on the ‘free’ table at her marina in Florida. I might have been just a wee bit envious of her score because we really need paper charts on board Galapagos. We can buy charts at about $25.00 a pop, but we need a lot of them, so that begins to very quickly add up to a ton of money, especially as they will not be our primary means of navigation. And especially as we have many other things we need to get. (Hey, I’ve spent some time updating our project list and creating a list of things we still need to buy.  Check them out.) I began to double down on focusing on getting charts to appear somehow. Somewhere. charts2

So why do we even want to carry paper charts? Isn’t that going a bit too far? Well, considering that the paper charts will be back ups to our back up to our back up, I can see why people who do not travel by boat might wonder that. But our GPS, great as it is, just cannot take the place of a big paper chart. With big charts there is no scrolling around on an electronic device, no zooming in and out on a relatively small screen, and generally no driving old eyes insane. You can see at a glance and a magnifying glass what the coastline looks like, what kinds of depths you will find, where might be a good place to tuck in for the night. You get the ‘big picture’ fairly quickly. They are also dead best for route planning. No one sits around the table dreaming and planning about their voyage over a hot GPS screen. Charts are required for that. So I want them. We heart charts.

Enter a man named Gary. Gary works on ferry boats and lives on a sailboat at our marina. He also used to work on tug boats where he was in charge of keeping the charts updated. Gary has a garage at the marina; we have a garage at the marina. Gary was cleaning out his garage, I was getting rid of stuff from ours, putting it in the ‘free’ area. I noticed these HUGE rolls of charts sticking out of his garbage box.

“You throwing those away?” I asked, breath held ever so gently, eyes casual.
He says yep, he is.
“We are looking for charts for our trip down the coast. Would you mind if I took them off your hands?”
He didn’t mind if I took what was trash for him, but could be treasure sure as the world for me.

I scurried away, charts bundled tightly under both arms lest he change his mind. Two days later, Mike would deliver a couple of 6 packs of good beer to his boat by way of ‘thanky very much, fellow sailor!’. Can we use his old charts? Why yes. Yes we can. charts3

What a gold mine! There are charts that show the entire west coast of the United States, including up to Alaska. There are charts for the Columbia River and Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, even Hawaii! Mike and I had too much fun looking over each one and sorting them in piles. Want, Don’t Want, Wish we wanted but we probably don’t. We were kind of a little bit in heaven. Both of us love paper charts. There is something, I don’t know, so ‘tactile’ about them.

These charts are several years old, of course. So they need updating, and you wouldn’t want to use them as your primary means of navigation without updating them. Fortunately for us, NOAA has the updates on line and has made it simple, if time consuming. You simply enter a chart number, and a list of the updates will be given.

Here's a screenshot of the kinds of updates you will find.

Here’s a screenshot of the kinds of updates you will find.

Most of the changes are minor, such as moving a buoy a bit. But there could be changes in depth in areas, and there are additions and deletions to aids to navigation. I took to the interweb site to update this chart of the coast of Washington State. charts4

Yeah, I could use some actual tools for plotting on charts, but for now this sheet rock square helped. By way of example, I had to move a buoy just a little further from the rocks on this chart. I plotted the new location for the buoy, which, frankly wasn’t very different from the first location and I thought , ‘man if we couldn’t find that buoy without a location that was precise to the minute, we probably have more problems than an out of date chart’. Still, we’re talking crunchy rocks here that this buoy alerts us to, so it’s not like it’s unimportant.

The black dot is the new location. Not too far from the old, but still, it's either correct or it isn't. Now it is.

The black dot is the new location. Not too far from the old, but still, it’s either correct or it isn’t. Now it is.

Again, these are back ups to our backups. They are great for getting an overall picture, and for planning, plotting,  and dreaming. So if the shit hits the fan and every single one of our other navigation tools somehow fails us, we can take that trusty little sextant out of the cupboard and carry on! (Yeah, we’ll blog about that another day.)

We’ll choose the ones that are most useful to us and then update them. But we’ll also buy a couple of new charts that are the most important ones, just to be sure. This has saved us a lot of money and we’re very grateful! Next, we’d really like to find some charts of the Pacific Coast south of our border, and the Sea of Cortez, Central America, the Galapagos Islands, the south Pacific Islands, you name it.  We’ll buy them off you if you’ve done your trip and don’t need them anymore. Pass the word to your friends! We heart charts.

 

Finally Landlords

This week will usher in a flurry of activity around the old homestead as we prepare for our first, and probably only, experience having strangers living in our house. We had pretty much given up on that idea of how to make a little extra sweet mullah. We had a number of inquiries over the last few months, but at the end of the day, no one had come through with an actual deposit of money to hold the place. C’est la vie. No harm, no foul, and not much lost in the preparation in terms of money. After all, we’re content to live in our house and have no one to care for Skippy yet.

Skippy with one of his many hedgehogs.

Skippy with one of his many hedgehogs.

Now we have a fish on the line and so this week will see us scurrying doing a final empty of drawers and closets, getting rid of more stuff because that just makes good sense, and cleaning the bejesus out of everything. I actually have a list and a schedule in order to make this deadline. Who knew I was so capable of being organized?

The long term plan still remains for our son Andrew and his girlfriend Jill to find jobs here in the Tacoma area and join another young couple (best friends forever) in renting this house.  Andrew just finished that GIS certification to add to his Bachelor’s Degree in Archeology/Geology. He’s looking for his first GIS gig. He’s a hard worker and plays well with others. Keep your eyes open, okay?

Five years of full time school. He is so ready to be done. With dualing computer screens, he is seriously a chip off the old block.

Jill graduates from Western Washington University today. Go Jill! We are so proud of her. She’s a fine artist and her degree is in alternative Arts Education from Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies. She went to high school at the Tacoma School of the Arts. I think she must have known her general destiny for years. We are looking forward to seeing how her career evolves.

How can this have been an entire year ago? Dan and Claire are back in Guatemala, Jill is wearing the mortarboard this year.

How can this have been an entire year ago? Dan and Claire are back in Guatemala, Jill is wearing the mortarboard this year.

It’s kind of amusing to me that this idea of the younger generation living in the family home is turning out to be the actual plan because years ago, before any of them had finished school, much less had jobs, they all fantasized about living here together when we went gallivanting over the sea. We scoffed. We couldn’t see how they would pull that off.  Now, that’s actually the plan. Why would we scoff at the machinations of youth? Stupid middle aged people. Have we forgotten youth’s magic? Sheesh, I hope not.

So we will get a week of living aboard at the end of the month while our house makes us a little money to earmark for something required on the boat.  We are allowed to spend up to 8 nights/month on board without being considered ‘live aboards’, so that’s perfect. We are looking forward to it. 

 

 

Life’s Little Challenges: A Personal Tale

We’ve been writing this blog now for over 4 years and it’s been a lot of fun for me to record this life transition. Looking back at our earlier posts I am sometimes stunned at all the progress we’ve made in these years and at how much the blog has helped keep us on track.  What started out on October 8, 2011 as a way for me to keep a kind of on-line diary turns out to be something I actually like doing. Except, at times,  for the coming up with ideas part.

Love this photo of Galapagos out on Commencement Bay last April. Photo taken by the good people of S/V Elsa.

Love this photo of Galapagos out on Commencement Bay last April. Photo taken by the good people of S/V Elsa.

Especially when there is nothing cool going on down at Galapagos, I can hit considerable dry spells where life just doesn’t seem interesting enough to write about. If you write, you know what I mean. Real life is just filled with all kinds of what I call ‘beige’; things that are really the neutral backbone of living and bring everything together, and yet they don’t actually get noticed. Most of life is lived in the ‘beige’, and yet we write mostly about the ‘red’ moments, the moments that make everything else go ‘pop!’. (Photos from our cruise last year because how else would I illustrated this post? These are photos of the ‘beige’ parts of cruising.No drama. Just living.)

How we dry our socks aboard Galapagos. Yes, we are careful.

To keep the writing mojo going you kind of have to get ‘creative’ and you need to have a serious supply of ‘butt glue’, a term first revealed to us by a successful published author, years ago. She said this was her secret. You have to glue your butt in the chair, put your fingers on the keys, and compel them to move.  I remember that term every time I sit down in front of the computer and wait for inspiration to hit. It’s a little bit of what I’ve termed ‘Nike Therapy’. You “Just Do It”.

Lately I’ve made space in my life by cutting certain things out of it. I’ve written extensively about all the junk we’ve given away to other junk collectors and to charities. I’ve released my contracts with insurance companies and commercial office spaces in my work and chosen to work as a Life Coach rather than a Psychotherapist, freeing up much needed psychological space and energizing my practice. But nature abhors a vacuum and now I have internal space to fill. It’s like clearing out a room in your home. What will you do with it now that it’s empty? The possibilities are endless.  I’ve decided I need a little more of a challenge for myself in terms of writing. I need to up the ante a bit, and have a little more pressure to bring the blog up a notch. Well, actually, it’s more about bringing my own development up a notch, but if the blog benefits, that’s all to the good.

Getting creative in the forward berth. This will be the ‘rumpus’ room and the guest room.

I religiously read The Cynical Sailor & His Salty Sidekick and also SVCambria.com.  Both these bloggers do what’s called Blog Challenges. The idea is that some alpha-blogger out there in cyberblogland gets a God complex, or maybe they just are gluttons for punishment. Said blogger then sets up some kind of rules about what you blog about, then they hit ‘go’ and a bunch of bloggers sign up to follow their rules and begin writing their little hearts out. Must be a powerful feeling! I mean, you should see the list of blogs from people who want to get on board with being challenged by rules! There are more blogs on that list than there were people in any of my graduating classes. (Note: Little Cunning Plan is number 970 on the list.)  But I have been intrigued. Am I a blogger? Can I be challenged? Do I want to do this? Am I commitment phobic? The answer to all of these questions is yes. I am, I can, I do, but I am.

Ah, commitment. That last one is the biggest hurdle for me.  When Ellen, over at Cynical Sailor, announced she was doing yet another blog challenge, the A to Z Challenge, that little voice that compels me to obey started yammering in my head. “You must do this. This would be great for you. You have plenty of time to devote to this. Just look at all the empty space in your psyche! This is the time. Just do it. Stop procrastinating you lazy female. I don’t want to hear excuses.”  Really, this voice is like every gym teacher I ever had in any school anywhere.  Apparently I needed to get my butt glue out and just do it. Yes, it would mean committing out loud to something that would take time. Yes, Mike and I are traveling to Washington D.C. in early April, the very month of the challenge. Hmmm.

Breakfast. I made these crustless spinach quiches and froze them. No muss. No fuss. Plenty of protein.

Of course, I didn’t go down without a fight. I’m much too willful to simply obey without questioning. I mean, I have never even played a team sport!  And there are many good reasons for that. We should all be grateful I passed those up. I argued and used logic. I put my hands firmly on my hips. I stomped around a lot. I threw that voice more insults than a Republican at a ‘debate-ish’ type of event. But it was like my own arguments didn’t even register on the voice’s little radar. It’s like this voice thought I had nothing better to do. Sure, I actually don’t have anything better to do right now.  But still, I was a whiner and didn’t give in. Until Ellen said Stephanie over at SV Cambria was going to do it, too. Well, crap then. The gauntlet was thrown down. Okay, fine. I’ll do it.

And now I’m excited to get started. Sometimes commitment to is like that. You resist for no good reason except sheer laziness and the feeling of power of getting in your own way, then once the promise is made, it’s all good and that yammering voice simmers down for awhile. So get ready for daily (except Sundays, a day of rest as the good Lord intended) blog posts in the month of April. I’m already writing them in my head and guess what else? There is a theme! The theme will be revealed on March 21, because I’m trying to follow the damn rules, okay?  Should be a fun month.

Enjoying the aft deck after we removed the huge bulk that was the old life raft. Clearing space is good.