Stuff-and-Such

When I was growing up, my grandmother (who was quite a character) used to talk about "Stuff-and-Such," meaning all the mounds of accumulated things that end up surrounding us. She was, after all, an expert in the matter. All the reading about living aboard a sailboat and the simplified life aboard caused a great amount of philosophical rumination on the subject recently, which culminated in a long weekend of dealing with said "Stuff-and-Such." I faced the garage storage compartment with a great deal of courage, large trash bags, empty Goodwill boxes, and a space designated on the floor with each child's name. Things I learned in the process:

1. If your garage burned down and you never had a chance to look in these boxes you'd never miss what was inside of them. The matches mocked me every time I passed them throughout the day.

2. Personal shredders should have been invented a long time ago.

3. If your child asks you if she can store something at your house, tell her that if it's not important enough for her to have in her house, it's not important enough for you to have in your garage.

4. Spiders already have enough homes to live in without you providing a box of Christmas ornaments that you never intend to use.

5. I could buy a lot of stuff for a boat with the money I would have saved not renting storage centers over the years.

6. If I haven't opened a box in 3 moves I should throw it away immediately.

7. Never ever should I let things or the acquiring of them become more important than people.

Don't get me wrong. Not all "things" collected are bad. Objects have a tremendous power to connect us to memories of good times past and to people we love. I tore open one box of things I'd saved for the kids' kids only to find mixed in with the stuffed animals an old, ratty red hooded sweatshirt that belonged to my mother. She wore it in a picture that I have of her raking leaves on a beautiful fall day. It was one of the last healthy, happy days of her life before she had her stroke. I cried for half an hour. The key is in determining what things are worth saving and what things are not, and the reality of it is that, in the end, we can take nothing with us at all. So as I begin the long, long (did I say long?) process of reduction, I'm trying on the liveaboard life a little at a time, anticipating the tremendously liberating feeling of living life as it should be - hard work with your hands, a close tie to nature, and time with loved ones. It just doesn't get much better than that.

Not just pictures but real boats!

So I had a corporate flight that ended up in Ft. Lauderdale over Friday morning. (That afternoon we flew to Key West, spent the night, and now I sit in Freeport, Bahama. Sometimes this job doesn’t suck too bad!) And as luck would have it the Ft. Lauderdale boat show was going on. It is mostly a powerboat show, but there was one marina where they filled a couple of docks with sailing catamarans; the main displays being Leopard, Lagoon, and Fountaine Pajot. It was the first time I’ve actually had a chance to step onto one of these things and poke around.

Mind you these were all brand new display boats and mostly bigger than anything Deb and I can hope to afford; but it was still a good chance to learn about them. My first impression was that this is just way cool; beautiful pieces of equipment with all kinds of fun stuff to play with. Second, they really aren’t very big. Well, pretty big for a boat but not too big for a house. I guess the way to put it is that this is about as big a change in lifestyle as we could imagine. We would (will) be going from a house / garage full of stuff, toys, things, tools, knick-knacks to a floating, open-floor-plan cabin that floats and moves. Everything you need for daily living is there – but there is no room for all of the stuff we tend to drag along with us through our lives. A good many of the people I talked with at the show, salespeople mostly, were live aboards for at least several months a year. And they all seemed to love it. (I know, they would love to sell me a boat.) Anyway, it was a good time and did nothing to discourage me from hoping to make this happen some day.

A new kind of kitchen for Deb

A new kind of cockpit for me

ASA 103

ASA 103 is now under our belts, with our instructor's signature freshly in our logbooks. We did have more wind this time for most of one day which was refreshing after our "jello" water last class (not a ripple anywhere). ASA 103 was much of the same material as ASA 101 (in fact it's the second half of the book) but all in much more detail. We learned about charts and the MULTITUDES of symbols one finds on them, soundings and how one must remember one's gradeschool math so one is not embarrassed in front of a whole lake of sailboats, bouys and the multiple shapes and colors and names of them and a most useful skill of assembling a head door handle so that the piece with the opening post falls inside the head when it breaks instead of the outside. A few tense moments of claustrophia while examining the broken lock to see how to get it open with only half a handle. Note to self: Always tell someone you're going to the head so if you don't return promptly they can check on you! We had a great time this weekend and learned a great bit, the nicest of which is that you always seem to meet the most interesting people around boats. Here's some pictures for you:

My favorite Skipper:

Jerry:

 Tim, Bob & Chris:

George, Larissa and me:

Waiting for the wind:

Our ever-patient instructor:

A great crew!

Knot Practice:

And a short video of what it looks like inside the cabin while you're sailing pretty quickly:

Really sailing a boat, some...

I sacrificed my “Honda Racing” hat to baby Neptune today. It blew off when I looked up check the trim on the genoa. Up to then I hadn’t actually seen a lot of wind on a sailboat, so I slow in making a grab for it. We did try to use it as the victim for an impromptu “man overboard” drill, but by the time we got the boat turned around the hat had drowned and apparently sunk to the bottom. As it turns out maybe baby Neptune likes hats (Baby Neptune is the youngest child of a distant cousin to King Neptune, the god of ocean fame.) because, for the next hour or so anyway, the wind blew at better then 10 kts. We got the Catalina 309 (the same boat we were on before) heeled over enough to get the leeward ports buried in the water for short moments. We even reefed the genoa a little. Now that was some fun.

But sadly enough it was an old hat and baby Neptune must have gotten tired of it. By mid-afternoon the wind had faded. Though we tried to sail home for a while “wing-on-wing” with the light puffs of wind behind us, eventually we admitted the obvious; that we weren’t actually going much of anywhere and all of us would be late for work the next morning if we didn’t fire up the “iron spinnaker.” (Otherwise known as the motor.)
We gained the dock among a small squadron of sailboats all put-putting home with sails stowed. But for a short time we were really sailing.

So now we have about 32 hours of time on the boat with another 8 or so hours of classroom time; for a total of about 40 hours. The same amount of time it takes to get a private pilot’s rating. Just like flying, I think I’ve learned enough about sailing to go out now and teach myself how to do it. And I hope I do a better job then some of the other classes who have used this boat have done. We got to the boat yesterday to find one of the stanchions broken off and a long, wide, unsightly scrape down the port side of the boat. It looks to me like someone dragged it along the dock and hooked the stanchion on something, though the story is someone broke it off trying to keep the boat off the dock.

There are two cables that run around the perimeter of the boat called “lifelines.” These lines are held up by little fence-post looking things called stanchions. The lifelines are actually no such a thing. They are more like a “remind you that you are about to fall off the boat” lines. I think their real purpose is to make sure that you hit the water headfirst if you actually do fall overboard, since they are set right about knee high. They look cool though, and if you get heeled over far enough you drag to bottoms of the stanchions in the water. But apparently you can’t push a boat around with a stanchion without breaking it off.

In addition to a broken stanchion, (one that held a pulley block for the rolling the jib by the way) the handle on the head door fell off during our day. This could have been a minor annoyance to anyone who pulled the door to latch behind them. The good news is that the head has an opening hatch, and we could have handed the handle into sailor trapped in the head. Anyway, the boat only lists for $100,000 or so, so what’s a broken stanchion here or a latch falling off there? If I had a ton of money I’d still buy the thing just to learn on. I would hope to get a little off the list price though.

Machine lust

It has been a while since I have been smitten so badly by a machine. Well, a year anyway, since I was smitten by the GSXR. Deb never has to worry about another woman, but let a racy looking motorcycle scream by, or get me near a boat with some good looking rigging; my brain goes into lock and I start reaching for my credit card. I’m sure some doctor somewhere has a name for my affliction. Anyway, I read about sailboats, study sailboats; I even have a little spreadsheet made up to compare things like length / beam ratios and displacements between different makes and models of catamarans. It’s all kind of fun actually.

Though living on a catamaran someday is the goal, I find myself reading up on little (less than 30 feet, more than 20 feet) mono-hulls with the idea that a “starter boat” in the lake around here might be a good idea. I’ve always heard that a boat is a hole in the water into which people throw large sums of money. But hell, I used to own two airplanes so how bad can a boat actually be? (Besides, I don’t have large sums of money. Once having had two airplanes might have something to do with that state of affairs.) It would be good practice. Not only might I actually get a chance to sail a boat when the wind is blowing, (next weekend is not looking too promising in the wind blowing department) but I can learn things like what it takes to keep a boat floating with all of its systems working. Another reason for a slightly large beginner’s rig, it has to have some of the systems on it that a cruiser boat would have. If it’s not on the boat it can’t break. But if it doesn’t break I don’t get a chance to learn how to fix it. And of course that is just what I need, more practice fixing things. (The little Zuki is running, the Beemer clutch / oil leak is the next project.)

Why?

I sat outside to eat my lunch yesterday and the sky was crystal clear blue, the humidity is finally gone here in St. Louis and the smell of dried leaves was wafting by me and I'm wondering why in the world I'm not finding a sailboat today instead of being locked up in my cubicle for 9 hours a day. Human beings are meant to experience nature and I'm pretty sure that an 8X8 box doesn't qualify...

The Next Step

Well we signed up for our next course, Basic Coastal Cruising. Here is the link to the standard for the class so you can read about everything we will learn in 3 days:

http://www.american-sailing.com/asa_standards/standard_basic_coastal_cruising.html

The class will be October 12-14 and we're hoping that this time we have a little more wind than the last time! We will have the same teacher (which I'm really excited about because she was great) and the same boat. It should be an amazing day with the leaves turning.

I also added a link to a site for one of the boats that we're looking at. It's a lot of fun to drool over. It would have to be used though - definitely can't afford a new one!

A Good Book

I cruised through amazon.com a week ago and bought a couple books (Their new book browsing tool is wonderful). I've read enough "how to" books for the time being and I wanted some real-life stories written by people who have done what we want to do. I bought "A Year In Paradise: How We Lived Our Dream" by Stephen Wright Watterson (ISBN 0-9706167-0-8), a story of a retired couple in their early 60's that sail their 30ft sailboat from Sandusky, OH to the Keys and back in a year's time. The author is an excellent writer with a dry sense of humor very similar to mine and descriptive skills that transported me right to the cockpit of their boat, where the aroma of baking cookies was wafting up from the galley below. I wanted to leave tomorrow.

Now I'm reading "At the Mercy of the Sea" by John Kretschmer (ISBN 978-0-07-149887-6), the antithesis of the previous yarn, which has me riding out terrifying nightmares of hurricanes at sea.

I've chosen both books in an attempt to be realistic about my expectations, aware that while everyone seeks the romance of the sail, there are both inconvenient and dangerous aspects to cruising on a sailboat. I decided this is a price I'm willing to pay to squeeze every last drop of living out of whatever days the Lord may grace me with.

Thoughts over a cup of coffee...

A few minutes before I head off to the hangar and I am running the weekend’s adventure through my mind. Not so much the actual learn-to-sail part, but the first brush with a life style of living-on-a-boat part. The only real reference I have is the 31-foot boat we used this weekend; not big enough to live on but certainly big enough to use for something like a two-week cruise.

In the cabin was everything you usually use in a day, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, a place to sit at a table and even a desktop where one could work at a computer. There were lights and though this one had no heat or air-conditioning a larger boat would. We were out in the toolies so there was no Internet access, but that was a function of where the boat was parked, not the boat itself. There was even a bulkhead, (if one were so inclined) to hang a nice, flat-screen TV to play movies, and power to run it. It was all just really close together.

So I look around this house, which is the nicest house we have ever had and I really love it. We have this perfect, huge bedroom with a lot of floor space I rarely walk on. It has a walk in closet full of clothes I never wear. We have 2 ½ bathrooms, an empty bedroom, and a bedroom with 3 desks, two bookshelves, and two computers. We have a living room with two couches, tables, and a fireplace. (I love the fireplace.) And we have the coolest back yard in the Central West end, to say nothing of my garage. Why even think of not living here?

And yet… The backyard of the boat is the ocean, or the shore, or the lake, or whatever part of this huge planet you happen to have sailed to. I have the coolest back yard in the C.W.E. but the cockpit of a boat is the coolest front yard I have ever seen. A slightly bigger boat, (say a 38 foot Cat) would have plenty of room for things like books and tools, even bicycles and snorkeling gear. (I think my SCUBA diving days are over just because I’m not sure I want to go through the hassle of getting another certification.) And though I would miss my garage, I would be living on this huge machine with two engines, electrical systems, and all kinds of stuff I would get to tinker with all the time.

Living compact, light if you would, mobile, mostly self-contained, with the wind and the waves rather than isolated from them; I have to admit the idea is growing ever more alluring.

Then again, maybe I am just nearly as nutty as some people have always thought? Anyway, off to work…

At least I know what I'm trying to do.

Day two of trying to make a boat go where I want using wind and sail, helm and help. The help comes in the form of the rest of the crew. It was kind of amazing how quickly Tony, Mike, Joe, Jerry, Deb and I formed a semblance to a working boat crew with the patient instruction of Larissa. (It might have helped that four of the group, Deb, Jerry, Mike and I, were all pilots. Jerry is a corporate pilot flying Hawkers out of St. Louis.) After each maneuver we would all swap places so we could learn how to work the sails as well as getting time and practice driving the boat. People shifted posts from helm to mainsheet and jib sheet “grinders” almost like we had a plan.

The name “grinders” comes from sticking a big crank handle in the top of a mechanical winch (the boat had 4 of them) and working it to tighten up various ropes (called “sheets” for reasons completely unknown to me). These “sheets’ are used to put tension on the sails which is called “trimming.” A person using the handle - to turn the winch - to tighten the sheet - which pulls on the sail - to set the trim; looks like a person working a giant, old-fashioned coffee grinder, and it sounds sort of like one as well. Trimming changes the shape of the sail and allows them to use the wind more efficiently. Use the wind more efficiently and you go fast.

“Fast” is of course a relative term. On water it turns out there is a maximum speed any sailboat can go no matter how hard you push it, a speed which is equal to 1.34 * the square root of the length of the low water line in feet. The boat we were on today had a top speed of about 6.83 knots, a blazing 5.9 mph! Who would have thought that 5.9 mph was nearly as fun as 120 mph on a GSXR 1000? (I’m sure someone is thinking, “And a damn sight safer to boot.” Hi Mom.) And really, because of the light winds today, the best speed we made was right around 2 ½ mph. Neither Deb’s nor my motorcycle will actually do just 2 ½ mph unless you ride the brakes and badly abuse the clutch. In a sailboat in light winds it is a respectable speed and we were all quite pleased with ourselves for getting the boat to go at such an amazing pace using nothing but a gentle breeze. (We did get a good laugh when a butterfly PASSED us on an upwind tack.)

The day started with a review and a written test. Deb (of course) aced the test and scored the first 100% that our instructor had ever handed out. I (of course) didn’t score 100. In my defense let me say I have taken dozens of written tests over my carrier as a pilot and long ago gave up caring what the actual score was, as long as it says “passed” at the top of the page. And well, as most of you figured out a long time ago, Deb is smarter than I am.

So after two days of being on a boat I am smitten once again with a bad case of machine lust. (To complement my apparently permanent case of wanderlust.) Airplanes. Motorcycles. And now its boats. Not just any kind of boats either, but big, beautiful sailing type boats that cost more than a house. I don’t know if we can ever make it happen, but it looks like we are going to give it a try. I guess the worst that can befall us is we go broke and get wet.

Been broke. Been wet too. So I guess we’ll see.

Miscellaneous pictures

Sailing "Wing on Wing", when you sail downwind and have the mainsail on one side and the jib on the other. This allows the wind to push the boat downwind more efficiently.

Tim at the entrance of the cabin so you can guage the size.

The inside of the boat facing aft.

The tack explained

For the non-sailors: I was told that I was not clear about a video I posted. The video of Tim's first tack is a video of a sailing maneuver in which you start at one edge of the no-sail zone and steer through it to the other side. This involves the sails moving from one side to the other side of the boat as the wind direction changes. The no-sail zone is an area from about 10:30 on a clock to about 1:30 on a clock in which you cannot sail. If you attempt to, the sails simply stall and you will be stuck in what they call, "the irons". This term came from a battle tactic in which ships would try to force an opponent to sail in the no-sail zone, rendering them powerless, after which they would board them and put them in irons.

(Now you can go back and look at the video again)