And there you have it.

The day after Thanksgiving festivities in St. Louis, I made my way back to Kintala to begin the long month of small repairs, cleaning, and packing to prep her for sale and our move to an apartment. A two day drive turned into three after stopping for a short visit with the crew of Blowin' In the Wind where they were docked in St. Simons. Pulling through the gate at Westland Marina in Titusville, FL the third day and after 1200 miles, it was hard to deny that it was going to be a very long month.

I can't say enough good about the staff at Westland Marina. Dave was unbelievably pleasant and helpful on the phone before we even got there. Once we arrived, he did everything possible to make our transition to the hard a painless one. Patricia, the office manager, is the definition of efficiency and got us checked in post haste. And Angie? She's my new hero. She and Dave run the best DIY yard I've ever been in. It's clean, well organized, and well maintained. The bathroom, laundry, and lounge facilities are top-notch and always clean. Trash is emptied frequently, and all of the machinery is clearly well-maintained. The month would have been much more difficult had it not been for this group of helpful people and their dedication to running a first class facility.

The odd thing about time is that it can simultaneously drag and fly by. The 14-hour work days allowed a lot of time for reflection since polishing stainless and cleaning and oiling interior teak don't take a lot of concentration. The individual days seemed endlessly long, but the days left on the calendar were dwindling rapidly. I had the truck reserved for December 16th and after spending 24/7 with Tim for over five years I was missing him terribly and was highly motivated to get back to St. Louis to see him before Christmas.

The hardest thing about making a move off a boat is the actual logistics. In order to clean properly, I needed to empty lockers and cabinets. In order to do that, I needed to pack, but where to put the boxes while still leaving room to work? Even with our bulkhead table and resulting open floor plan, there's not a lot of room for boxes. It was a bit like a 3D puzzle. A short discussion with Dave and Angie and my job became much easier. They have a system there at Westland where they put a pallet on the forklift, raise it up to the deck gate, and hold it still while you load your boxes. I packed up enough boxes for one pallet and offloaded it the following day. I wrapped the pallet with mover's shrink wrap and Angie hauled it to the boat rack building where they put it in one of the racks up high.

A few days later, pallet two joined it, leaving only tools, cleaning supplies, and my last minute galley things and clothes.  I couldn't pack up the tools till I was done with the small repairs, something that couldn't be completed yet since I was waiting on a part to arrive. I needed to figure out some way to get the tools off the boat but to still have access to them without breaking the bank. I thought of renting a car to store them in or getting the truck earlier, but both were cost prohibitive. I briefly considered just loading them on a pallet under the boat, but the weather was supposed to fall on its face so that idea was discarded rather quickly.

Photo courtesy of westlandmarina.com

I finally decided on getting some really large plastic storage tubs and putting them under the boat. Fortunately, Lowes was kind enough to put their largest storage tubs on sale that week, presumably for people to store all of their holiday decorations in. The clerk that checked me out said that she moves a lot because her husband is in the military and she went out and bought 22 of them so she just packs them instead of using boxes. They stack easily for storing so I could see the benefit.

Once the tools were off the boat, I was able to start at the bow and work aft doing that deep cleaning that you can only do when cupboards and lockers are completely empty. It was so nice to finish the V-berth and be able to look at as I finished the rest of the boat. I needed the motivation to keep going!

One by one the lockers were cleaned and freshly painted, ports polished, the deepest depths of the fridge were cleaned, the teak cleaned and oiled. Kintala was sparkling and I was ready to go home. Exactly three weeks to the day from my arrival, Angie was kind enough to give me a hand on Sunday, loading the pallets directly onto the U-Haul with the forklift so I didn't have to load the individual boxes. The whole of our five years cruising fit on three pallets, 4 x 4 x 3, including a lifetime of aviation tools. Not too bad for a couple sailors aspiring to minimalism.

The very last thing to leave the boat was the grandkids' mascot, Bean the Bear. He had the honored place of shotgun on the trip back. I'm waiting to see if he can endure city life or if he's going to sneak back with the kids when they visit to head back to sea...

As I worked along over the three weeks, some disconnected observations about the experience floated through my head. I offer them to you here as they appeared, in no order.

• When we get the next boat, I told Tim we are going to put it on the hard for two weeks every year and empty every cupboard, locker, and cubby so I can discard junk, clean and paint the interiors, and restock in some orderly fashion. Really. I'm serious.
• Cleaning brass really doesn't take much time or energy and the results are so immediately and completely satisfying.
• Right after you finish oiling the teak, a huge cold front storm will find another leak so you have to do it again after fixing the leak.
• Moving off a boat after five years was way more difficult than moving out of a house after twenty years.
• Why do we wait to fix that small annoying thing until we're selling something? I had intended to modify the mainsail cover slots for the lazy jacks for the last year. I have absolutely no idea why I waited.
• It's fun to see how long something lasts in the boatyard free pile after you put it out. The record goes to some fiberglass repair components - they got snatched up before I even finished getting them out of the dock cart.
• First Place in cleaning supplies: Miracle Cloth. Someone mentioned these on one of my Facebook forums. I'm a skeptic by nature so anything called Miracle Cloth in my mind probably isn't. I was so very very wrong. This is the most amazing product to come along for boaters in a long time. It's a heavy duty rag saturated with some sort of cleaner combination that includes coconut oil. It smells great, but boy oh boy wait till you wrap your hand in it and rub that rusty stanchion. The rust just wipes off. One cloth did over half the boat and probably would have lasted longer but it was totally black. I'll be doing a detailed review in a separate post, but in the meantime here's the link on Amazon.
• Runner up in the cleaning supplies: Mother's Mag and Aluminum polish. I ran out of Prism and couldn't get any delivered in time to use so I found this stuff at the local auto store. It's a completely acceptable metal polish. Miraculous on our aluminum backsplash and did a good job on brass. Prism is my go-to polish for metal, plastic, fiberglass, pretty much anything but, honestly, it's been going up in price so bad that I've been looking for alternatives.
• It's amazing how many meals (although odd) that you can squeeze out of what's left in the pantry when that means you don't have to pack the food, carry it, or move it into the new place.
• If you absolutely need something to fix or clean something on the boat it will absolutely be in the box you just taped up.
• When the people at Enterprise start calling you by name and asking you how the boat is coming along, it's long past time to be gone.
• A piece of dark chocolate is good any time but it's especially good when it's the last piece you have and you just found it in the fridge.
• The love of bacon is relative. When you just finished spending several hours cleaning the stove, it's easy to ignore the package in the fridge.
• There is simply no greater pleasure than a long hot shower after a long dirty day of work.
• No matter how long the project list is, there's always time to stand and chat to your neighbor about where they've sailed.
• The easiest thing to leave: the 12-foot ladder.
• The hardest thing to leave: Tim's custom bulkhead table.
• As I sat resting one afternoon, I looked around and realized that there is simply not a single component, system, or piece of Kintala that we haven't laid hands on to do something to: maintaining, customizing, cleaning, polishing. As I looked at it all, my only goal was to leave the boat in the condition that I would want to find it as a prospective buyer. Whoever you might be, I've accomplished that goal. And there you have it.

Rescued from the Apocalypse

I needed some things for the apartment. You know, stuff like sheets that fit the now queen-sized bed rather than the king-sized V-berth, and some dress pants and shoes for Tim since his zip-off pants and boat shoes were a little inappropriate for the new job. I went to Target early the day after Christmas, right after dropping Tim off at work. Pushing my cart through the kids' department after realizing we had a grandson's birthday to think about, I stopped mid-track, stunned. It looked like a tornado had ripped through the department. There were new clothes strewn around on the floor with dirty cart tracks pressed right over them. There were piles of clothes laying on top of hanging racks. There were labels ripped off laying everywhere. There were products from other departments laying everywhere, many of them opened. A pair of someone's badly worn tennis shoes was shoved under some clothes, obviously a product of a shoe theft. Shelves were wiped clean, and remnants of the clothing they held were laying in a pile on the floor at their ends. I literally couldn't even process the destruction.

There was a sales associate walking around picking things up and, bewildered, I asked her, "Is this from the Christmas rush?" She looked at me with a look that mixed exhaustion, frustration, disgust, and a touch of depression before answering, "This was just from Christmas Eve. We did double the business we did last Christmas Eve  - way over our projected total. People were pawing through things, shoving other shoppers aside...it was mayhem." Realizing I probably looked pretty stupid standing there with my mouth agape, I explained. "We've been living on a boat the last five years. I guess I've been a little isolated from this..."

Every department was more of the same. There was some odd post-apocalyptic vibe in the whole place; the elevator music was silent, leaving only the sound of pallet jacks, stacking boxes, and the little bleeps of their stocking computers trying desperately to determine the original location of something left on the floor. Sales associates and stockers shuffled silently through the layers. No one smiled.

Since returning to landed life, I have seen the very worst of my fellow humankind. We've been dumped unceremoniously into the whirlwind that is consumerist life in the States today. Impatience, greed, and abject rudeness abound everywhere. If it weren't for the blessing of having our family close by, I might have been tempted to join the workers in their despair, but the years of travel have changed me in a very fundamental way. 

For more than five years we've been blessed to be part of the cruising community. It was, in fact, the single most important part of our cruising experience, and one that surprised us. We expected to love the sea, the sunsets, the long walks on beaches, the movement of the boat through the water, the playful antics of the dolphins, but we never expected that we would form the deepest friendships we've ever had in over sixty years. We never expected to experience the selfless giving, the complete trust, the genuine caring that we have from those we traveled with. We never expected to see the very best of humanity or the ways in which that would change us.

Our friends of Life On The Hook recently decided to buy a house and to commuter-cruise some months out of each year. He commented that he wasn't sure they would still be considered cruisers once they had a permanent address on land. I replied that I disagreed, that I think cruising changes who you are, and grants you a place there permanently. Cruising is a state of mind, that of caring, kindness, helpfulness, generosity, wonder, respect. Those are qualities that develop as a result of being part of this traveling community, qualities that remain even when a member of the community is landed, regardless of how long.

As I navigate the apocalypse that is landed life, I will carry with me closely the memories of the last five years: the unexpected gift of food from a tiny galley, the offered ride to buy groceries, the support during a family death, the countless smiles and waves from cockpits passed in the dinghy, the offer of a free dock for a night's stay, the innumerable bouts of laughter over appetizers in the cockpit. And if all that is good about the cruising community can bleed over just a bit to the people around us here in the city then I'll consider the time well spent.

Closing a circle...

The end of my first week of being un-retired for the third time, and this time it is serious. It has been about 13 years since I last went through indoctrination at a new company. No one actually calls it “indoctrination” anymore. Instead it is “indoc,” which sounds a little less 1984 Big Brother-like. In fact it has been rather interesting, going around to various departments to get the low-down on what part they play in the business of helping professional aviators be even more profession still, and how what they do intertwines with what I am going to be doing. As in many things “aviation” there is a whole army of people behind the scenes making possible what pilots or (in this case) instructors, do. We (pilots and pilot instructors) get to launch and strut our stuff for all to see and admire but, without that support staff, we would be talking to empty caves while scratching lessons on the wall with a rock.

Not exactly Kintala's cockpit...

Things have changed a bit since the last time I joined a big company. “INDOC” now includes a long list of subjects addressed by computer-based training. The longest and most detailed instructions explore the areas of workplace harassment, cyber security, document security v privacy, protecting trade and military information and, as one can imagine in this post 9/11 world, preventing bad guys from using advanced simulator training to learn how to crash airliners into buildings. A lot of people clearly put a lot of effort into preventing such a ghastly affront from happening again. Instructors are the last line of defense, but its hard to imagine anyone getting anywhere even close to the classroom, let alone a sim, with such evil intent. Everyone on the planet, except the bad guys, should feel pretty good about that.

The sections on harassment and protecting private information could pretty easily be summed up the words of Confucius. “Surely the maxim of charity is such: Do not unto others what you would not they should do unto you.” I know the Christians claim this one for their own, and that’s fine. But it seems pretty likely that they borrowed it from the Stoics, who likely borrowed it from Confucius…who likely borrowed it from someone now lost into history.) In today’s world the training on work place harassment and protecting private electronic files took up most of a morning. It seems a pretty sad state of affairs when so much emphasis is needed for something we should have all learned in kindergarten, “Don’t be a putz.”

All in all I am finding the transition back into a world I once knew so well, but have been away from for a while, smoother going that I had feared. Some regulations have changed, some procedures are different then they were. I am getting used to driving once again, and now expect at least one person to try and wreck into me on each commute. Keep an eye out, dodge as necessary, and all is well. Seconds later all is forgotten, just another day on a St. Louis road.

It also turns out that one of the instructors working in the same program I am about to join was, once upon a time, a student of mine when I worked at a University. I gave him his initial introduction to high altitude and turbine operations. Now he is a five year veteran at FlightSafety and fully qualified Sim instructor on the Legacy 500. In fact he may end up training / checking me out in that airplane. Which I think ranks pretty high up there on the, "How cool is that" chart.

Talk about closing a circle.

Going forward

Our first few nights in the new apartment, it will take a while to get acclimated to living this deep in a city. We were pleased to see that there is a clear line of sight from the balcony to the setting sun. I’m tempted to keep the Conch horn close by to mark the day’s end. There is so much noise in the city, one clear note of celebration ringing its way around the buildings couldn’t be a bad thing, could it? I am also curious as to why people ever complain about how a boat smells. The city’s assault on the nose is at least as bad though, like a boat, I suspect that in a few days it will become unnoticeable.

It is likely it will take several weeks to adapt to this new living space. It is only a few square feet larger than was Kintala’s interior, but it still feels much too big. The ceiling is far away for one thing, though that leaves a lot of additional storage space in closets that go all the way up. Of course the apartment it is a completely different shape than was the boat, a box fit only for sitting rather than a form fit for moving. Also, here, all we can do is decide where to stick what, adapting to the space rather than, unlike Kintala, adapting the space to us. What this room really needs is a fold up table mounted on one of the walls, with storage behind it for dishes and such. The best we are going to do is getting Kintala’s original table back, with its two folding sides and center line storage area, where rum and gin are likely to take up permanent residence for an occasional taste. The shifting schedule that will be my new life will keep such tastes to a minimum. “Flying” a sim falls under all of the rules of flying for real, including a 12 hour minimum lapse between imbibing and reporting.

The space could also use a tool storage / work shop area. Tools are now stashed in a half-dozen different tool bags, most of which are tucked away in what looks to be some kind of shoe storage area. I can't imagine actually having that many shoes but, then again, it is likely such a person with that many shoes can't imagine anyone having so many tools. 

It is hard to believe not quite two months have passed since the decision was made to do this thing. Even though I have been putting in some long hours of study to get up to speed with the new responsibilities, it has all had a kind of surreal feeling. Settling in to this new space quickly put an end to that. Going forward is now the only path to getting back to where we want to be.

Stumbling my way through…

People who live on land have made this getting back to land thing far more difficult than it needs to be. Out on the water people tend to take your word for things. People “buddy boat” for weeks or months starting out with just a simple agreement between two crews who, likely, hardly know each other. They start to respect each other pretty quickly when making joint decisions on weather and routing. Should one boat run into some kind of trouble, the other will step up and help in every way possible. Often, in our experience, “buddies” will go far above and beyond what would be expected to get their new friends out of whatever jam they have found themselves in. Such is born without so much as a handshake, just people meeting, talking, finding they have a common goal, and then agreeing to help each other along for while. Which is sort of what it should be like to have a job.

No one thinks that the other crew might be lying about their level of experience, no one doubts that the stories told are basically true. It must be admitted that sailors are at least as good as those who fish at telling stories, but somehow that gets taken into account and all is well. No one thinks that the story will be exaggerated to the point where claims of knowledge and ability are being exaggerated. In fact it is often the other way around. People who have had thousands upon thousands of miles slip under their keels, with more stamps in their passports than most people have bills, are almost shy about their adventures. Telling tales is one thing, baseless and exaggerated boasting quite another. Rarely have I seen the latter among the cruising community.

One of our first buddy boats

That level of trust is seen in other ways. During our years on the water, we often helped out another crew with some mechanical problem. It was never necessary to offer proof that I knew enough to help. It was just assumed that I would help as much as I could, or at least not make matters worse.

Ah, but moving to land…

We bought a car. Part of that buying process involves getting it registered. Part of that registration process means listing an address. We don’t yet have an official address in Missouri, even though this is where I am currently living and where the job is located. We listed the address of the apartment we have a tentative agreement to lease. But we can’t sign that lease until I can prove I have a job. So, when the official job offer came in my email I forwarded it to the leasing office. The email, rightly so, didn’t actually have a benefits package or pay scale listed and so wasn’t good enough for the leasing office. Now I have to take a paper copy of the benefits package to the leasing office. I can tell them how much I will be making over the phone, but that isn’t good enough either. They need to see a piece of paper. In the meantime the car registrations ended up going to a place where we don’t actually live yet, and have since disappeared into the unknown. Surely ours are not the first registrations ever lost and we will be able to get duplicates. And just as surely it will be a pain in the ass, having to prove to some agent somewhere that I am who I say I am and I actually own the car they already know I own.

Then there is the background check. My resume goes back roughly 45 years. The contract company doing the background check sent me an email. They couldn’t verify that I actually attended the tech school I attended right out of High School in order to start my career, and insisted I send some kind of document. Oddly enough, my graduation certificate was actually near at hand. I took a picture of it and posted it in an email, a picture anyone halfway competent with photo shop could likely fabricate in less than 5 minutes. But it made them happy. Now though, they can’t verify that I actually worked at one company for eight years. They can verify the first five years, after that? Nada. They want me to contact the IRS, come up with some documents, and email them along. I will do it of course, but I thought the whole idea of a background check was to independently verify the claimed background. If you are going believe in the documents I send that can easily be fabricated, why not just believe my resume in the first place? The really weird thing, those last 3 years were spent flying with the person who brought me to this job, a person who as been a FS instructor for more than 5 years. If they want to verify I worked there, all they have to do is ask him. Hell, we went to Flight Safety together at least twice in those last three years for recurrent training.

Land living apparently makes one skeptical of everything and everybody. Nothing is taken at face value, no one’s word is good, everyone is assumed to be running some kind of scam. I guess that is understandable, just look around. The land lets people get away with things, things big water would use to administer a major smackdown.

All who live out on big water face the same challenges, deal with the same kinds of problems, have to have mastered the same basic skills. There is no where to hide when things go awry, and when they do everyone caught tends to work together; first to survive, then to recover. When cruisers meet it is something they know that they share. Somehow big water has infused much of the cruising community with a basic honesty.

Something I never thought about much until heading back to land, and something I really, really miss at the moment.

Balance

It has been several weeks since I put Kintala in the rear view mirror, heading back to St. Louis to work for Flight Safety International as a ground / sim instructor. The job is secure now, with the official start date less than two weeks away. There will be a ton of training / preparation work before I actually stand in front of a class room full of pilots or saddle up in a sim. First there is the required pile of paperwork to complete. There is an old saying in aviation that goes along the lines of - an airplane can’t fly until the weight of the design, test, and certification paperwork is at least equal to the maximum take-off weight of the aircraft. Digital files and computers have reduced that stack somewhat, but it looks like pre-employment paperwork for flight instructors has to equal about half the applicant’s body weight before they can be turned loose.

Once the paperwork is complete and indoc finished, the real training begins. There is computer-aided training on subjects yet to be disclosed. Then there is a new type rating for the aircraft they want me to teach, the Embraer Legacy 500. This will be my fourth type rating, the third I have earned at Flight Safety. A type rating is a month-long training exercise whose intensity is hard to describe. Modern day full-motion simulators are marvels of engineering. It is quite easy to forget that one is attached to Mother Earth, and so no matter how badly a maneuver might get botched, the ground will not rise up and smite thee. The risk might be simulated, but the tension on the flight deck can get very real indeed. There are emergency procedures; engine failures at the most critical moments of a departure roll, wind shear encounters, explosive decompression, flight control anomalies, fire…that must be utterly mastered. Perfect execution, in these cases, is just barely good enough. 

Along with the simulator training are forays deep into the aircraft systems: normal operations, failure modes, redundancies, limits, reversion modes…hydraulics, electrical, flight controls, pressurization, air conditioning, de-ice systems, auto-brakes…  Yes, there will be a test and no, it will not be graded on a curve. Every professional pilot in every airliner cockpit has been through similar training. That is a good part of the reason for it being safer riding along in an airliner that has lost an engine and half of its flight instruments on a dark and stormy Saturday night, than it is driving down the road on that same dark and stormy Saturday night after the bars have closed. On a sunny Sunday morning with all the systems up and running normally, it is safer to be sitting in an airliner than to be sitting in church.

For flight instructors there is another whole area of training required, that of learning how to use the training aids, those being the simulator, graphical flight simulator (GFS - otherwise known as a cockpit procedures trainer to us old pilots) and the myriad training aids used in the classroom. There will also be a week’s worth of instructing on being an instructor, something I am quite curious about and looking forward to doing. It all sounds rather daunting even if I have been through it several times before, and have spent hundreds of hours standing in front of a class room full of students. 

Will the upcoming years be interesting, challenging, and worth while? Yes. Will they be as good as those same years spent on Kintala, wandering hither and yon, being part of the cruising family? I honestly don’t know. My thoughts easily drift back to quiet anchorages, clear waters, and overnight passages; both easy and not so easy. Most of my dreams are of being on the boat, the first waking moments bring a touch of regret as the dreams give way to being back on land. My feeling is this is going to be both better than I had hoped, and harder than I had imagined. Its a bit like that first crossing to the Islands, half way there in the middle of the night, lightning on the horizon, lumpy waves occasionally splashing into the cockpit. One part of the brain says, "Relax, it will be fine. You know what you are doing." But some other part of the brain says, "Are you crazy? What are you doing here?"

For the curious, the link shows the exact place that will be my working "home," and the very sim I am about to learn. 

www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/november/pilot/turbine-school-is-in-session

We own a car...

We own a car. I know “American Normal” is to own at least one car, usually more. In fact, at this moment, we actually own two, though that will soon be rectified and is part of another story. But the fact is we have been rather happy with not owning a car for these past five years. When needed, we would rent a car for a day, weekend, or for a trip to see Daughters and families. We used one when we needed one, paid for it, and didn’t pay for having one around when it wasn’t being used. If we had owned a car it would have been hard to come up with a way to move the car as we wandered around. Even a small one wouldn’t fit on the deck, and trying to tow one behind Kintala would likely not work out very well. So we made do without. But now we need a car nearly every day as there is no public transportation that works with my new schedule.

I have a schedule. I know it is “American Normal” to have one’s life ruled by schedules. There are schedules for work, kids' soccer, church or other social obligations; people have self imposed schedules to catch sports games on TV or particular TV shows. Cruising “schedules” are a whole ‘nuther thing, spanning hurricane seasons and month long tide schedules. They shift and change; the schedule that worked northbound in the spring would bring nothing but trouble if tried southbound in the fall. On the boat, most of the time, if something caught my interest that kept me up most of the night, no problem. There was no alarm set for the morning and I could sleep as long as needed. But soon there will be a “schedule to keep,” though it is still likely to be different from most “land schedules.” 

Oddly enough, though airline passengers think of nothing but the schedule, and get rather irritated when a carrier doesn’t hold to the schedule, for people who actually work in the flying end of aviation “schedule” is a misnomer. Flying work comes at all hours of the day and night, everyday of the year. Some trips last a day, others two or three and, depending on the particular segment of aviation one is in, can run on for a week or more. In the training world that I am about to enter, the full motion sims (each of which cost in the millions of dollars range) normally work 20 hours a day, pretty much every day of the week. Since “flight time,” even in a sim, has daily limits set by regulation, it takes roughly two and a half instructors to ride herd on the crews training each day. Someone gets to head for work around 0300 in the A type M in order to crank up the sim at 0400. Someone else gets to shut the thing down at Midnight. The time slots shift so constantly that one of the questions during my official interview was if having a not-really-a-schedule schedule would be difficult for me. 

So my soon-to-be schedule-less schedule requires a car. And it turns out I’m not much of a city driver any more. In fact I’m not much of any kind of driver. I have turned in to that “old guy” who sets the cruise control at 5 over the speed limit and then goes about my business. Oh, I try to stay out of the “fast lane” so long as my exit doesn’t get off from that side. But if it does I’m not likely to speed up for the last mile or two just because the guy behind me is pounding on his steering wheel and shaking his fist at me. If I notice at all I’ll just wave back. Truth to tell though, I would rather try and get Kintala on a dock in a 3 knot cross current or cross the Gulf Stream on a dark and bumpy night, than tangle with Rt 40 through St. Louis at rush hour. I think doing the latter is far more hazardous. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but some of these land dweller types are in an awful hurry for people who can’t drive very well.