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The most difficult month

May 31st, 2011
by Sara.
11 comments

We have exactly one month to go before we untie the docklines and head north from Olympia. Sleep has gotten more difficult, the lists of things to do and buy and fix are checked multiple times daily. We grow more and more nervous about how our lives will look 30 short days from now. We are still excited but these last few weeks are beyond stressful. Wine helps.

It feels like I have a million things to do, buy, organize. I press “Two-Day 1 Click” multiple times each day on Amazon.com as I stock up on coffee filters, homeschool books, rechargeable batteries. It will be infinitely more difficult to get, well, stuff, when our car is sold three weeks from now. Mail order will pretty much cease at the end of this month as we won’t be staying in any one place more than a few days in our quest to travel around Vancouver Island by the end of August. Check, check, add another item, check….

In reality though we are ready to go. Only three things keep us at the dock other than Leah’s last day of preschool in mid-June:

  1. Moving our things from our larger storage unit to the cheaper, smaller out-of-town unit
  2. Hauling Wondertime in mid-June to paint her terribly overgrown bottom.

Make that two things. I feel better already.

Our departure date is hurtling towards us. At this point we’ll get what we can get done but whatever doesn’t will happen underway. We know this, we’ve done this crazy race to the end twice before. We know we’ll leave no matter what and it’s never mattered before what was still on the list when we threw the lines on board. Some nights through, we collapse, exhausted, at trying to chink away at our lists and take care of our two busy girls (the youngest of which is going through her 2 ½ year disequilibrium with full force. Which can be pretty cute. But still…).

That is when we grab a guidebook off the shelf and start reading, again, about the places we’ll be traveling to. In 30 days. We talk about route plans, anchorages we don’t want to miss, friends to stop and see along the way. We forget about the lists for an hour or two and remember why we are doing all this in the first place.

An addition to the fleet

May 16th, 2011
by Sara.
1 comment

Almost the entire summer last year we scoured Craigslist in search of a sailing dinghy. At the time, we didn’t have any intention of taking one cruising with us (where on earth would we put it?)  but we yearned for a little sailing boat to take out after work or on the weekend, one we could rig up quickly and be off sailing in minutes, unlike the hours it takes to get the big boat ready. Besides, sailing little boats is such a sweet lovely pastime: the big boat takes us places but a little 8′ or 10′ boat would just take us around in quiet joyful circles. Our search for a small, affordable boat was fruitless and before we knew it fall had arrived and it was soon much too chilly to mess around on the water much.

With so many projects underway and tasks to check off we haven’t even had time to think about starting up the search for a small sailing boat this spring. But what has happened so many times to us happened again: what we stopped searching for found us. This past weekend our dock neighbors and friends, also a liveaboard family of four, found a great deal on a larger fiberglass sailing dinghy. They’d toted a Walker Bay 10 with them all around the Puget Sound, sailing around countless anchorages with all four family members plus their dog aboard. We were honored when they asked if we’d like to have their beloved dinghy.

Of course we gratefully accepted, rigged the little boat up, bundled up the girls and Michael was off with them on their first dinghy sail. She scooted along our bay in about 5 knots of wind. “We’re gliding!” Leah beamed as they silently circled the bay. It was not the type of dinghy we had been searching for, but with the incredibly easy sailing rig, stable and indestructible hull our new little Walker Bay seems to be just right for now. Besides, with four people on board we are bound to need more tenders.

Michael is on the aft deck as I type this, taking measurements to see if we can fit some davits to accommodate our growing fleet. Looks like we may be cruising with a sailing dinghy after all.

A light, a friendship, and a job done

May 2nd, 2011
by Sara.
2 comments

Eric and Angela, s/v Rouser (Tenacatita)

When we were getting ready to set off cruising in 2002, we received an innocent email from a couple also gearing up to head south that year. The crew of s/v Rouser, Eric and Angela, lived south of us in Olympia (we were still in Seattle at the time), had just found our blog, and were excited to find another couple getting ready to set sail that was also well south of retirement age (27). Since we had never sailed to the south Puget Sound before, we took a week in late July that year to meander down that way and get a personal tour of the town of Olympia from our new friends. We hit it off right from the start and made plans to meet up again in San Francisco in a few weeks. Which we did: right after Michael and I passed under the Golden Gate, Eric and Angela zoomed out in their dinghy off Sausalito to greet us, having arrived the week before.

We sailed together for the most part of the next six months, exploring southern California and the Channel Islands, sailing across the US/Mexican border together, Baja California, crossing over to mainland Mexico to Puerto Vallarta, then down to our most southern anchorage of Tenacatita, where we stayed for a month in January-February 2003. I remember countless evenings spent with what soon felt like old friends: laughter and food and drinks, hikes, exploring small dusty Mexican towns, our New Years road trip inland to Guanajuato, bonfires and music on the beach, sailing side by side to a new destination.

And then, as it always does with while cruising, it came time to say farewell. Rouser was preparing to puddle jump to the Marquesas that spring and had decided to sail farther south to Zihuatanejo to depart from. We were heading north to spend spring in the Sea of Cortez. The day had come when we had to part ways.

It was a teary afternoon; we said our goodbyes quickly. We said we would keep in touch via email (which we did) and visit together in the future (which we have). Angela is from Minnesota so we gave them a copy of Lake Wobegon Days to read on their way across the much bigger lake. They gifted us with a nice tri-color/anchor light that they had as a spare, inscribed. I think Michael had always lamented that Pelican did not have a tri-color at the top of her mast, which would be much more visible at night than our deck-level navigation lights when sailing. We were touched that our friends wanted us to be visible too.

Eric and Angela made it all the way to New Zealand, and we made it all the way back to Seattle. Our gift never made it to the top of Pelican’s mast for reasons I can’t recall now. But we’ve toted that bubble-wrapped light around with us for eight years, through another boat and two houses. Now on Wondertime we were hardly surprised to find out that she didn’t feature a nice tri-color light, but a burned-out rusty single anchor light at the top of her mast.

Now she does. Our beloved gifted tri-color light is sporting new high-efficiency LED bulbs up at the top of Wondertime’s mast. We now shine brightly in the night sky. Friendship made visible.

Floating somewhere between elation and panic

Mar 15th, 2011
by Sara.
10 comments

Joy ride

In a few days, that counter you see on the right-hand side of our site, the one counting down the days until our cast-off from Olympia will be in the double digits. Which means only three months until we are outta here. Oh my.

This sends chills down my spine for two completely separate, distinct reasons. One, I am so freaking excited. I mean, New Years was practically yesterday and that was nearly three months ago. I have a sneaking suspicion that the next three crazy busy months will fly by even faster. Spring officially starts next week and will whiz by until Summer comes sneaking in and then we are off, off and away for two years of bliss and terror. We will at last be off cruising with our children, a dream that truly hatched the last time we were cruising in Mexico when we saw the joy older cruisers were having with their delightfully bright sailing kids. We are so so close and barring any major catastrophes (and it’s got to be a big one) we will be officially cruising in 106 days. Chills.

On the other hand:  that leaves a mere 106 days left to get ready. Oh [insert favorite expletive here]. There’s quite a lot to do and my head swims with all that I must get done in the next months: passports, homeschooling materials, HAM radio license renewal, mailing address change, rigging splicing, another storage unit cleanout and move, first aid kit stocking, clearing out winter clothes and storing summer duds, sunscreen hoarding, car selling, on and on.

Michael has been steadily ticking away on the boat’s List, working on at least one thing daily. Our #1 must-dos are getting checked off one by one and we are truly at the point where we could leave now and get the rest of the items done underway (which is how I suspect a few will be completed anyhow). At this point, we have finally whittled down the big stuff: new lifelines=yes, new refrigerator=later, watermaker=much later. The dinghy we purchased for $400 on clearance at Costco (yes, Costco!) two years ago seems to be hanging in there just fine so it’s the one we are leaving with. We’ll keep the money to replace these items in our cruising kitty for now and replace them when a great deal appears in the future, or as needed.

Most days, I am so entrenched in the regular details of our life (laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, chauffeuring Leah to preschool) that I feel like it’s impossible that I’ll even make a dent in my list and I feel our departure date looming, instead of looking forward to it. But bit by bit it’s getting done. Each week I part with even more stuff that’s been hiding in our storage locker (we are whittling it down to fit in a 5×5 unit), getting things cleared out via ebay and Craigslist. I tuck away books for our endlessly curious students of the sea. I whip the end of a fraying sheet, hoping my fraying nerves will stay in check too. I try not to panic. I know the list will never be all done anyway. It never is, no matter what you’re doing in life.

Besides, I only have 106 more days to worry about “getting ready” anyway. After that, we’ll be cruising. Chills.

Spring Rigging

Feb 10th, 2011
by Sara.
2 comments

Two new headstay wires...check!

Truth be told, spring is still a long ways off (it was 25°F outside last night after all) but the sun did show her lovely face this past weekend for a few hours. Plus, our calendar promises that winter’s end is in sight. One of the top items on our List is to begin replacing our standing rigging. We figure that it is the original wire and fittings that the ship’s notes indicate were installed 20 years ago. Not only is the wire past it’s recommended lifespan, it is also 304 stainless wire which corrodes much faster than 316SS in the tropical environment we’ll be spending the next few years in. In other words, it’s time to replace it all.

Michael drew up a spreadsheet that listed all of the wires that we’d need to replace. It was soon clear we had found one of the disadvantages of maintaining a cutter rigged ketch with a bowsprit: with twice the number of masts of your typical sloop, there really is twice as much wire and rope involved. We have a total of 24 separate stainless steel wires, each with a Norseman swageless fitting at each end for a total of 48 Norsemans (soon to be 54 when we add three insulators to our split backstay for our HAM radio antenna). Thankfully, we had replaced most of Pelican’s (8 wires) standing rigging and all of Rivendell’s (13 wires) ourselves so we’ve had a bit of practice with swageless fittings. But clearly with this much rigging to be updated it was time to get started.

On Thursday, with clear weather forecast for the weekend, we put in an order at Fisheries for the items we’d need to replace our headstay and our staysail stay. We were able to meet the Fisco truck in Tacoma with our new 3/8″ and 1/4″ lengths of 1×19 316SS wire rope and the Norseman cones we’d need to replace when we reassembled the fittings that came with the boat.

On Saturday afternoon, with the smallest child napping and the eldest watching a DVD and munching on a snack, I hoisted Michael up the main mast to release the staysail stay. (We had taken our headsails down a few weeks ago to have the Sunbrella UV covers restitched.) Michael tied a halyard to the top of the stay and took the pin out of the eye to release it. I then lowered him back to the deck and we (along with the excellently timed help of a couple of passing neighbors) lowered the stay and furling unit carefully to the dock. Michael then cut the old wire next to each Norseman fitting, taped the new piece of wire to the old one and pushed it carefully through the furling foils. After lining up the old and new wires and fittings, he cut the new wire to length and unscrewed the Norseman fittings to clean out the old wire and prepare them to be reassembled.

It was here that we first became suspicious of our old rigging. With a variety of wrenches, oils and heatgun at the ready to unlock the sealed Norseman fittings, he was, in fact, simply able to part them by hand. Uh oh. We found that there was no evidence of Loctite being used on the threads as is required. What’s worse, the fittings had not been sealed with any polysulfide to keep the water out but what appeared to be winch grease that had mostly washed away.

With serious concerns about the state of our existing fitting assemblies, we were hardly surprised with what we found the following day. With our staysail stay reassembled (complete with plenty of Loctite and polysulfide goo in them) we hoisted the unit back up, then hoisted Michael up to reattach it. I then cranked him all the way to the top of the mast to release the headstay fitting and we lowered it in the same manner as the smaller stay. When he disassembled the Norseman that had been holding our headstay on, we found again little evidence of sealants used but not only that, the cone was barely hanging onto the wire. It is supposed to be 1.5x the wire diameter down the inside of the wire but this cone was at the very end and the outside wires were splayed out instead of being tucked in, formed around the cone nice and neat.

Bad Norseman

Good Norseman

So, where before we had “replace standing rigging” on our to-do list, now we have REPLACE STANDING RIGGING. Once again, we are reminded that if we have not thoroughly inspected something on our own, we have no idea if it’s ready for sea or not. 4 Norsemans down, 50 to go.

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