Kintala sails away

After nearly a year and a half, with one attempt derailed by an incompetent surveyor, Kintala, our faithful Tartan 42, has become the apple of a brand new owner’s eye. It is said that the two happiest days of a boater’s life are the day the boat is bought, and the day the boat is sold. I am not finding that to be the case.

Kintala was our full-time liveaboard home for nearly 6 years. For two years before that she taught us the trials of getting an older boat ready to go cruising, and the triumphs of mastering her racing-like sailing character. She carried us to the Islands, kept us safe in 60 knot blows while riding to her anchor, and shrugged off 10+ foot seas on more than one occasion. Most importantly she taught us things about ourselves that we could not have learned from any other tutor; she fundamentally changed the way we approached life, and forever altered the way we look at the world.

Before Kintala, I was the quintessential US citizen / consumer. I owned a sports car, a pick-up truck, a collection of motorcycles, and a boat. We lived in a nice condo with a shop in the garage out back, traveled on vacations, and watched movies and sports on a big screen TV mounted to the wall perpendicular to a working fire place. Though not rich by America standards, we lived pretty well compared to the rest of the world’s population. 

To the vast majority of human kind that has walked the earth in the past, we would have been magicians. Our sculptured cave was heated and cooled on a whim and we traveled across the ground at breakneck speeds in or on thundering hunks of metal. I made a living flying… FLYING! Eight miles in the sky, covering hundreds of miles in less than an hour, and doing so night and day with (what would appear) little thought given to the weather. Rain, snow, wind, and clouds? Pfftt. I even flew OVER thunderstorms and looked down on the lightning with utter impunity. 

And, somewhere deep in my American soul, I believed I had earned such an exulted place all on my own. I had what I had, and I deserved it. But then we sold off everything except some clothes, tools, and knick-knacks, moved onto Kintala full time, and took to the sea.

Very quickly we became different people living in a different world. Kintala kept us safe in some ugly weather, but very often we didn’t feel safe. Instead we felt exposed, out on the edge, not sure of what the outcome would be. Afterwards, such moments make for great stories and indelible memories, but…”Pfffttt” was an attitude long forgotten. We no longer lived in a sculptured cave − dry, stable, heated and cooled on a whim. Every wind shift, current change, tide, and passing wake rocked, swung and tilted our world. “Stable” became a relative term. Were we holding on with both hands, finding it hard to walk, or catching things being flung off of shelves? No? Then what movement we did feel was “stable enough.” Some nights, sleep was elusive because of the sweat running down our backs and soaking the sheets. Other nights we huddled under every blanket we could scrounge, loathe to get out of the berth in the morning because we could see our breath floating toward the salon in the frigid air. We often sailed our boat cold and hungry, hot and thirsty, and soaking wet when we couldn’t outrun the rain.

We sailed to the Islands and lived for months with people who could barely fathom our riches. We lived on a YACHT, and didn’t have to work to put food on the table. That everything we owned fit into some 400 square feet was still more opulence than many of our new friends could ever hope to see. Yet they were just like me, working as hard as they could to make ends meet, worried about the people they loved, and doing what they could to make things a little better in their community. It quickly became overwhelmingly clear that I didn’t “deserve” what I had. My exalted place among human kind was a matter of a lucky birth, meeting and falling in love with the right person and - most importantly - having that person love me back. Sure we made some good decisions and worked hard. But pretty much everybody we met while causing made the best decisions they could make and worked just as hard.

As the years went by, the American consumer in me faded away. I became just another wanderer in a world filled with beauty and risk, quiet anchorages and 10 foot seas. I came to suspect that dolphins and whales might be smarter than humans, certainly wiser. I started to wonder if the main reason we can’t communicate with them is that they are so far beyond us in fitting into the cosmos that we humans just don’t have the necessary vocabulary. It may be that they don’t have thumbs and can’t make tools, but has our tool making made us smarter or wiser? Or have we just constructed a civilization that is unsustainable and built the weapons useful only for doing ourselves in?

Out in big water in our little boat, I realized the ocean cared nothing about my opinions about anything. Then I started to realize that most of my opinions didn’t matter anyway, were likely pretty foolish and uninformed, and usually tainted with more than a bit of hubris. The ocean will ferret out any incompetence, but it hasn’t a care about me being competent…or not. The same is true of the sky, of course. But I tangled with the sky in some of the most sophisticated machines human kind has ever invented, backed by a network of weather stations, specialists, airports, and experts. 

Kintala was an old sailboat with a tired motor. The skills necessary to make her go were learned thousands of years ago. Had a sailor from the 1400s magically appeared on our deck, he would not have thought us magicians. He would have known instantly if our sails needed trimmed or reefed, took one look at the night sky and known in what direction we were headed. As for the rest of it? Weather stations don’t pick up rogue waves or 40 knot winds falling out of a clear, calm night sky for reasons no can explain even to this day. The experts and specialists were out of phone and radio range. The next port, if more than 50 miles away was, in all likelihood, more than a day away as well. The hubris of land living is a hard act to maintain out in big water in a little boat. 

Life unfolded as it will, and now we find ourselves back on land. We have added a few possessions. A car is necessary, some bikes as well. We bought some used musical instruments to fill our days with a new skill of making some modest music. But we rent our two room flat, still don’t own a TV and, for the most part, keep to ourselves and family. We are happy and contented minimalists, living as lightly as we can in a burdensome world. 

And Kintala is no longer ours. Something that, at one point in the last few years, I would have thought very unlikely. I was a sailor, and I lived on a boat named Kintala. Now I am not, and I don’t. And I'm not sure what that means or where it leaves me. As to what comes next? I can’t really say. 

For I am just another wanderer in a world full of beauty and risk, quiet anchorages, and 10 foot seas. 

The first day we saw her.

Lowering Kintala into Carlyle Lake, her home for the two years we prepped to go cruising.

Motoring her from the lift pit to her new home on Carlyle Lake

Her first dock. Yes, she was the largest boat on the lake by quite a bit. It took a shoe horn to get her into that slip

One of our first sails on Lake Carlyle, long before the dodger and new bimini.

Sailing on Lake Carlyle, long before the dodger.

One of our excellent sails on Carlyle.

As good as it gets

Learning how to use the whisker pole

First sail with all of the grandkids.

The first dinner on the newly installed table

New cushions installed

Installing the best piece of equipment we ever bought - the Mantus anchor.

Time to head for warmer waters!!!

The Blessing of the Boats at Carlyle right before we left to go cruising

Our cruising sendoff with good friends John, Nancy and David

Our first anchorage cruising

Lots and lots of miles motoring on the Intercoastal Waterway

The first of hundreds of bridges we would pass under and through with Kintala.
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Annapolis

And more bridges...

Some of the ICW was a challenge in fog

Lots and lots of fabulous sunsets

And moon rises...

Our first lock experience

Friends that accompanied us on our first offshore passage from Charleston to Fernandina Beach

And "friends" that met us in Florida...

Our favorite anchorage in No-Name Harbor in Miami

No-Name Harbour

Dinner Key Moorings and the frequent storms there. This was the Mother Ship.

Kintala and the Mantus held fast through this one.

Prepped for her first hurricane, Joaquin

Didn't get us away from the storms, though...

Anchored outside of Hopetown. So glad we got to see it before hurricane Dorian.

Met by a new friend

And more friends

And more friends...

And yet even more friends

Kintala was often a sail loft with the Sailrite machine working hard

One of the many hitchhikers we had during our travels

West End Bahamas before Dorian. One of our favorite places in the Bahamas

And someday we hope to end up back here in whatever boat takes us there.

Walk Away...

We wrote a book about being on the buyer’s side of a boat purchase. It is a modestly popular book, selling much better than either of us had anticipated. One of the core ideas in that book was that any potential boat buyer should be spring-loaded to walk away from any deal for pretty much any reason. An idea that, rumor has it, prevented a few people who read the book from getting stuck with a boat that wasn’t right for them.

For now, we are temporarily on land, replenishing the cruising kitty and spending time with family we didn’t see enough of while out wandering the waterways. We are also looking, when the time comes, at going back to the cruising life as trawler dwellers rather than sail boaters. But even if we ultimately decide that sailing is still the way to go, we have decided that Kintala is not the boat on which to live out the closing chapters of our lives. A nearly all-out racing, big-blue-water boat with a few of the harshest racing edges smoothed out a little…making her come to life and romp across the waves as she was designed to do is a little more work than is comfortable for a short-handed crew on the plus end of middle-aged.

So we are now on the seller’s side of the boat purchase equation. An effort that is proving to be just as frustrating, and with just as many pitfalls, as being a buyer. And while my opinion of boat brokers has gone up during this process (our’s working relentlessly on our behalf), that of the marine industry in general, and surveyors in particular, has plummeted to new lows.

After a year of effort we finally had a buyer make an offer on the boat and put down a deposit. All was looking well for closing by the end of the year…then came the survey. The surveyor is said to be young, enthusiastic, not that experienced, and very thorough (I haven’t met her). She even climbed the mast to check the rigging and there discovered that all of the swaged fittings on the standing rigging are cracked.

Big problem.

Big, big problem.

A problem big enough to set any return to the cruising life back a year or more. Rigging is expensive, and getting the job done remotely? A recipe for nothing but endless heartache and delay. Then we would have to start the boat selling process all over again.

We were a bit stunned to hear the news. Kintala’s rigging is only six year old. We had it installed at Oak Harbor just before setting out, an outfit known for building and installing racing rigging. They let me help build and install the rig. Though I am not a sailboat expert (or at least I wasn’t back then) I had spent nearly 4 decades in aircraft maintenance. Wire rigging is nothing new or special just because it is on a boat rather than a plane. It was a fun (if expensive) project and I am forever grateful to the good folks at Oak Harbor for showing me the ropes.

Kintala’s potential buyers, after thinking about it for a day or so, decided that offering a lower price then facing the repairs was not what they wanted, and backed out of the deal. Yes, they read the book and, yes, I was getting a taste of my own advice. I understood, as I would have done the same. Still, we are on the other end of the equation now and it is a pretty massive blow. But life is what it is. Kintala is an older boat. Though we loved her and spent uncounted hours and dollars getting her in the best shape we could, she is not perfect.

Within minutes of learning that the deal was dead, Deb was on the phone, getting quotes on fixing the rig along with other items the surveyor listed that helped scare off the buyers. One is the typical keel smile present on nearly every boat I have ever worked on with a bolted on keel. Another is a soft spot in the foredeck that will take any half-competent glass worker a couple of days to fix. We were told the survey makes a pretty big deal out of each, though I have no clue why that would be the case. I haven’t actually seen the survey. I was told I might be able to buy a copy of it if I liked, something that is not likely to happen before the sun explodes and swallows up this little planet. You will see why in a moment.

As it turned out, the rigger recommended by the yard was actually working in the yard when Deb called him. He was stepping a mast and allowed as he would take a look at Kintala and get us a quote asap. Barely an hour later he called with the news. There is nothing wrong with the rig. What the surveyor described as “cracks” are, in fact, the normal tooling marks that come with building a rig.

Truth to tell, I suspected all along that was what he was going to say. As mentioned, I helped build and install that rig. It is oversized for the boat and we aren’t racers, never pushing the boat to anywhere near its maximum capacity. The only other explanation for what the surveyor “found” was the fittings themselves being defective: not impossible, but pretty unlikely. But it appears to be too late as far as the buyers are concerned. They are new to this cruising world, paid a lot of money for that survey, and are not likely to be easily convinced that there is nothing much wrong with the boat after all.

(A big shout-out to the rigger here. He knew about the survey, could have easily given us a reasonable "quote" for fixing the rig, spent a week working on other things, and sent us a bill along with a couple of cracked fittings laying around his shop.  Being a thousand miles away he might well have gotten away with it.)

So here we are. The rig is fine but the “survey” is out there, authored by a person who, apparently, doesn't have a clue. How a surveyor cannot know about tooling marks and rigging is simply beyond understanding. It is central to what they should know as experts inspecting a boat. Worse, my experience is that a bad survey is like getting a DUI. Even if it turns out the machine was out of calibration and pinged you for the single beer you had at lunch, the stink will linger.

The rigger has agreed to send us a written report on his findings, and we are working toward getting the “smile” and soft deck spot fixed. They are minor issues that a) are likely part of nearly every older boat currently for sale and b) if we were still on the boat, we could fix in about a week. (Indeed, Kintala’s keel smiled at us the first time we saw her, and I’ve fixed two other soft spots on the deck in the ensuing years.) But they now carry “offical” surveyed stink as well.

I guess the good news, for us anyway, is that - had the buyers offered a price contingent on the rig needing repaired - we would have likely said "fine". They would have then had the happy experience of finding out there was nothing wrong and walked away with a smoking good deal on a pretty nice boat. So, in this case, my advice cut both ways.

So it looks like our sojourn on land will likely be extended a bit. Life is what it is. And if one chooses to take part in the business of boats…well…life is what it is.