All posts by Barry

Living in Vero Beach, FL, Living on a Boat

Re-orientation

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On our mooring in Vero Beach, Flutterby usually hangs bow to the wind, gently hunting back and forth from one “tack” to the other.  When there is no wind she faces a random direction, only moving when we walk about inside.  But most days there is a breeze, and Flutterby spins back and forth, and sunbeams come through portlights and hatches to walk back and forth across the opposite wall, or our berth.

Yesterday, a little barge was working its way through the mooring field.  Eventually it came up next to Flutterby to inspect our mooring.  I’m one of those guys who likes work, and as they say, I can watch it all day.  In that spirit, I had a conversation with the guys on the barge while one of them dove down to inspect our mooring anchor. I found out that we were on an old-style mooring with a ten foot long concrete piling — buried completely under the mud and shell bottom, with a chain going from it up through the float at the surface. Flutterby’s bow is tied to a ring on the end of the chain, free to spin around and hang whichever way the wind or current sends her.

Since the wind was always coming from the bow, on any breezy day I could open the companionway and the forward-facing hatch in the V-berth, and fresh air would blast straight in through the cabin.  This is great if somebody just started to scorch things on the stove and you want to clear the air before the smoke alarm goes off.  (Don’t ask me how I know!)

But today, all this changed. I motored for less than an hour to Flutterby‘s new home on a dock.  It sure is convenient to not have a 5-10 minute dinghy ride (with its high risk of a wet butt) in order to go anywhere or do anything. In fact, I took a bike ride in my new neighborhood just for the fun of it, something I never got around to doing when the bike was a dinghy ride away.

Living in a place that is tied down at 4 corners, unable to move, is just weird!  Now the sunbeams only make one very slow transit per day. And the wind: It blows whatever direction it wants to, possibly from the starboard side of the boat all day. It is just plain weird, and that is all I can say about it!

Designing and Building a Junk Rig, Rebuilding Boats

Time for some new junk

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Flutterby junk rig drawing

I first had a dream of building a junk rigged sailboat almost twenty years ago.  For the last four years I’ve been planning to build a junk rig for Flutterby–even before we had looked at her as a possible boat to buy.

Since we arrived in Vero Beach at Christmas, my job has been to design some sails to put on her.  OK, there have been many other things to do, including designing and installing a solar power system  Now I’ve pretty much run out of rig design questions to chase my own tail around, and I’ve got a design good enough to show off to other junk rig designers. I don’t know how many of our readers are junk rig designers, but you can still see what we plan to put up on Flutterby.

For those who are interested, there are some additional files you can look at:  (more detailed specs and drawing for 8-panel version shown) (specs and drawing for 7-panel variation) (Flutterby’s original cat ketch rig)  If you do have any ideas about how this might work, talk to me soon, as I hope to be ordering parts and starting construction by the end of the month!

2010 Flutterby Goes the Right Way (Second Maiden Voyage, Southbound)

Welcome to Sunny Florida

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Flutterby is still happily hurrying down South for the winter.  Today we made it out of Georgia, and I only touched bottom once.  I even managed to keep plowing the bottom until I was back on course, no damage done.

Now that the narrow twisting waters of the Georgia ICW are passed, we are ready to feel at home in warm sunny Florida.  But it took a hint from us wanting to feel at home.  Err.  Oops.  We ARE from the Pacific Northwest.  So this is how sunny Florida welcomed us!

What we saw when we got to Florida

2010 Flutterby Goes the Right Way (Second Maiden Voyage, Southbound)

Crossing our track

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When people sail around the world, one of the biggest milestones is when the path they trace leaving their home port is crossed again on the way back. I don’t know if we are going to sail all the way around the world or not, but we are ready to be sailing on now. I’ve know people to circumnavigate in anywhere from three years to seventeen years.

Tonight we just crossed the track of our three-year boatyard circumnavigation.

Here are some entries in Flutterby’s log:

Dec 6, 2007 1220 Anchored at Wrightsville Beach, NC
Dec 7, 2007 0630 Departed anchorage at Wrightsville Beach, NC
Dec 7, 2010 1630 Anchored at Wrightsville Beach, NC

So exactly three years ago we were heading North from here only two days away from Beaufort and an approaching haulout. Today we were coming back this direction after departing two days ago. Sometime today we were exactly to the minute in the same part of the ICW we had been three years ago.

Living in Beaufort, NC, Rebuilding Boats

One last job

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Well, we  have checked just about everything off our list of things to do to get the boat ready to head South.  OK, there are still a few small projects, but they are nothing compared to what we have already done.  Except for one last job.

Where's Waldo? Barry does one last job on Flutterby
Where's Waldo? Barry does one last job on Flutterby

We need to pack the boat for travel.

Geek-Friendly

Facebook and plugins, oh my

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I should actually write something exciting for our blog, but that will wait for another day.  No problem though–Meps wrote something good and decided to publish it today!

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how to get our blogs put up onto Facebook, since we got sucked into that a while back. I’ve found a plugin called Wordbooker and I’m hoping it will work well.

We’ll see what happens on my facebook profile soon enough. There is supposed to be some sort of magic where comments transfer back and forth between Facebook and the blog.  Watch out, here I come moving right into the social media of the ‘aughts, marginally still within the decade!

Rebuilding Boats

An easy job

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Meps had just flown out for a couple weeks, and I am alone with Flutterby and her huge todo list.  I decided that I would pick up a quick and easy job so I could just get something accomplished and feel good about it, then move on to whatever I should be next.

Flutterby's blue binnacle

So I decided to re-assemble the binnacle–The painting was done, all the new parts from Edson have been here for ages, I had already re-built a LED compass light where the old incandescent one used to be.  It should be quick and easy, right?  Well, that was what I thought when I started the first day of working on it…

First I decided I needed to clean up the shaft that the wheel goes on before I re-assembled it.  Then I noticed there was a little bit of pitting in a couple places, so got out the dremel and some grinding and then polishing tips.  Nothing was very deep, it all cleaned up OK, and it took less than an hour.

Of course, I decided I needed to remove one split ring to inspect and clean under one bearing race, so I had to find somebody in the yard who had the pliers for that job.  I ended up having a nice chat with Ward and Audrey, but the quick part of my job was rapidly receding.

Then I tried to install the new parts of the wheel brake.  Only a minute to file the paint out of the hole it needs to go through.  Then I found that the brake knob spindle wouldn’t fit through the new bushing.  Oops.  Looks like it was once or twice tightened down enough to flare out the metal.  After dinner I probably spent another hour with a file and sandpaper fixing that.

OK, brake installed, shaft went in easily enough, and I didn’t make too big a mess when I got the grease gun out.  There were 4 threaded holes I had painted over; I was able to clean 4 of them out with a tap, and then had to borrow another tap to clean out the others.  That went well too.

Geez, those old 1/2” washers and lock washers look pretty corroded.  I should get new ones.  No problem, Bock has them in stock.  Now let me put the riser and the new idler plate on the base.  Odd, something must be a little warped; oh well, when I tighten the bolts down it should smunch together.  Oops.  The new plate (a massive bronze casting) is a lot thicker than the old (mild steel, rusted through) one was.  Now my bolts aren’t long enough anymore.   I wonder if Bock has any stainless steel (or bronze) 2 1/2″ long 1/2” Flat head machine bolts.  Nope, but they have more of the 2” long ones I can’t use!

OK, now off to the McMaster-Carr website to order the bolts I need.  Then I can put it together.  I go the order in early enough to be shipped out today; it might be here tomorrow, but Monday is more likely.

Uh-Oh.  That hole where the bolt for fastening the engine control cables is supposed to be on the back side of the pedestal, not the front, isn’t it.  Back when I patched the holes where the old autopilot used to be mounted, I left the wrong one.  Ah well, as Philip says, “another imperfection.”  And I suppose I’ll have to find the old hole and drill it out again.  Or maybe I can mount the cable bracket on the other side.  I guess I’ll try that…as soon as I get the new engine control cables.

Maybe I would have done better starting with a hard job?

Rebuilding Boats

Journeyman

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I like the term journeyman.  Part of it is because I like to travel, but that is really just an irrelevant bonus.  Perhaps it is because I’ve never done a formal apprenticeship program, and don’t have to worry about any unpleasant aspects of it.  But I’ve been thinking about it just the same lately.

You see, I (with Meps by my side, keeping up with me) have spent a lot of the last year doing fiberglass repairs and construction.  I didn’t have a formal master, although there are several people here in the yard who have that level of skill, and they have been generous with their advice.  As I understand it, there is a journeyman piece which is completed.  It represents a test of skill and knowledge, and marks the end of the apprenticeship period.  In fiberglass, I consider the re-finishing of two 42-foot long carbon fiber masts to be a journeyman piece.  Perhaps I am exaggerating, but only a little.

We finished that job a couple months ago before we left for Seattle, and I am finally getting back to some of that work.  And I’m realizing that this journeyman level of skill is something I have in some areas, but not in others.  For example, I’m still quite a few steps away from claiming that level of skill when painting, especially with two-part polyurethane paints.  And I doubt I can claim that level of skill as a writer either.  And as an editor, I don’t even want to get there very badly.

I think I realized this when I tried to write about two weeks of working full-out on re-finishing our masts.  It had some good information in there, and a few funny bits too.  But it went on and on (the job did too, so that was accurate).  I am sure that it would be possible to edit it into a nice (short) funny story for this website.  It would also be possible to write a big detailed piece that would be very useful for anybody about to re-finish a carbon fiber mast, and interesting to a few people, but pretty boring to the rest of you.  But I just don’t feel like slogging through the editing work, so it will stay as it is….much closer to the big long description.  The story does include a bunch of pictures, but if technical details of fiberglass work make your eyes glaze over you have been warned.  (Download my telling of our mast refinishing project (PDF format) in all its glory if you wish.)

Strangely enough, I don’t find anything negative or bad in this.  I like to know what I’m good at.  And also what I want to get better at.  And while I don’t particularly like to suck at anything, there is room for that in my world too.  There are a few thousand things I can happily leave for people who love or need those skills more than I ever will.

Journeys by Land

It takes three

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Many people have expressed concern or fear about the idea of sailing a boat out on the open water when I mention our dreams and plans to launch Flutterby and sail, mentioning places like the Mediterranean as a possible destination.

I have a stock explanation that I offer up as some form of reassurance to them:  Before there is a real disaster where lives or our floating home are at stake, it takes three bad things working together against us.  They could be bad luck, or they could be just poor judgement and preparation on our part.  This theory came from thinking about all the disaster sea stories I’ve heard, and I was always able to identify at least three things that went obviously wrong.  Almost always, one of them is just bad luck, but usually at least two of them are simply poor judgement.  Like taking inexperienced crew across the Tasman Sea, and then accidentally letting a halyard go during a storm.  Actually that was just two, and it only resulted in a great story and two crew members who will probably never sail across an ocean again–no real harm happened that time.

The reassuring part is that you have the ability to not do many stupid things.  I expect to be able to keep my stupidity list down to one at a time while sailing, requiring double bad luck to get me in real trouble.  (We’ll see how this works)

On the other hand, when driving the Squid Wagon cross country, I feel like the stakes are lower–it would probably take more to make a really dangerous situation….but let me start counting:

Squidley is an old vehicle, and some things have degraded a bit, but I just put up with them.  Like two out of four door locks that can be made to work, but don’t always work when you want them to, and in the way you want them to.  Or door seals that let some rain in once in a while.

Stupid idea #1: The fuel gauge reads correctly when the rear tank is in use, but not when the front tank is in use.  This happened a couple months ago and I figured it was easier to work around it than to fix it.

Stupid idea #2:  The batteries died once or twice overnight for no reason I could understand.  Rather than spend time and/or money chasing an (apparently) intermittent fault, we just disconnect the batteries when not using the vehicle overnight.  With battery switches it is particularly easy.  [I still don’t know if this plays into the story or not]

Bad luck #3:  Something went wrong in the alternator or voltage regulator–and the alternator was putting out enough juice to really cook one of the batteries.  Err…was this all just luck?  I drove from La Fayette, Georgia to Spartanburg, South Carolina before I had really decided I had a problem and actually tried to deal with it.

Bad luck #3, part two:  Found an auto electrical/alternator shop in Spartanburg (un-named to protect the guilty), which was at least pretty incompetent, and possibly did nothing at all.  At I’m only out $80 or so.  OK, they said they fixed the field wire shorted to ground, but the problem didn’t change.  Then they said the put in a voltage regulator, and perhaps they did.  Or maybe they just opened the field wire, so that the alternator wouldn’t overcharge my batteries.  (I’ll figure out more when I really get this fixed)

I didn’t really figure out that the fix was bad until I made it from Spartanburg to Columbia and had a fantastic lunch with a friend.  By then I was sure that the alternator wasn’t charging anything, and my batteries were slowly going down.  But I figured I could keep driving quite a while like this.

Bad judgement #4:  I’m ready to be back on the boat. I’ll try and push it and get back before I have to use my headlights (which would drain the (already low) batteries faster), and then address the problem in the boatyard with access to tools, guys to stare under my hood with me, auto parts stores, a loaner car and auto part stores.

Remember that fuel gauge that didn’t read what was in the front tank?  I looked in the manual and figured that it was a 16 gallon tank.  I figured I could probably get at least 15 out of it.  So I tried driving 173 miles on that tank.  It took 11 gallons at the next fill up.  I used the non-reading tank first so whenever I got nervous I could switch to the one that told me when it was getting low.  The next time I went 200 miles on it.  11.6 gallons.  Then 235 miles. 14.3 gallons.  By now I was getting pretty confident.

Bad judgement #5:  (Meps, I know that if you were here, you would have told me so!)  I decided to drive 250 miles on that tank.  I dunno…maybe I was getting worse mileage because I was on a high speed limit interstate and driving fast to get home before dark (See #4).  Well, now I know that the tank can get 15.9 gallons put back into it when it is completely empty.

So Squidley started slowing down, and I decided (too late) to switch tanks.  I even tried to turn the engine over while rolling forward in neutral on the shoulder.  (Yes, Meps, I really know you would have told me so now!)

For those of you lucky enough to have never run one fuel tank empty on Squidley, the process is now to crank the starting motor for a long time, to re-prime the diesel engine.  Running the starter for over 30 seconds could overheat it, so stop at that point.  I’ve found I usually have to crank the engine for 30 seconds about three times to get it started.  After switching to the non-empty tank.

See Bad luck #3, #3 part two, and Bad judgement #4.  The batteries barely had enough juice to turn the engine over once.

At this time, I hadn’t done a count, but I was reflecting on the fact that the margin for error on a road trip is greater than when crossing a large ocean in a small boat.  I was pretty sure I had hit three by then. But this was driving, not sailing, and the result is a good story, not a disaster.

At this point, I changed into dirty jeans, got out my jumper cables and hung them on the mirror (Good judgement #1), and then started looking under the hood to identify my alternator, and wondering if the shop in Spartanburg had really put anything on there.

A truck driver heading home in his personal vehicle stopped and pulled around to me, and offered assistance after a little bit.  (Good luck #2)  It took quite a while but he finally managed to get enough juice into my batteries and starter to do the required cranking.  Once I got started, we disconnected the jumper cables and I thanked him very much and headed off down the road.  He later told me that he stopped and turned around because he saw the jumper cables hanging from my mirror.

Finally I decided to stop at a truck stop in Greensboro, and fill up that empty tank.  The sun was just down, but there was still plenty of golden light.  It would be another 40 miles to Kinston, the next likely truck stop.

I’m going to stay the night here, and leave in the morning.  I may or may not need another jump start then, but if I do, it will only take 2 minutes instead of half an hour, since the fuel tanks are full and the fuel line is primed.  Sitting here and writing this rather than pushing on makes good judgement #3.  And I think the balance will make for a safe departure in the morning.

Burning Man

You can’t step in the same river twice

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I was on the road to Alchemy, the Georgia regional Burning Man festival. Several people I had never met before told me I should go on Saturday night. I thought about it on Sunday. Monday morning I had decided to go. By Tuesday afternoon, the Squid Wagon and I were underway across North Carolina.

After a long drive on mostly two-lane roads, I ended up on I-95 heading South. Traffic wasn’t very bad and I was talking on my cell phone. (Gee, I used to hate those people…so much for moral superiority!) I had seen a couple billboards but didn’t really pay attention to them. Then I saw the giant sombrero tower. I interrupted the conversation with “Oh my god, I have to stop now.” and then made my way toward the exit. I said goodbye and then found a place to park.

About five years ago, Meps and I went to South of the Border, and found some much-needed levity. A bit over a year ago, we stopped in and got a few interesting things for Burning Man. By this time, I knew I was at the mother load of kitsch, and must stop and look for inspiration.

Some things don’t change. They still had inflatable space aliens. They still had tasteless stuff. There were still feral cats running around the property. The employees still seem jaded at all the silly kitsch surrounding them. Or maybe they never had a sense of humor anyhow? There still weren’t many other customers there.

Other things are different. The inflatable space aliens are only in three colors now; no pink ones anymore. I didn’t have anybody to point out the best goofy stuff to, and nobody was pointing it out to me. In fact, nobody was smiling or laughing there. Now I’m wondering if I was smiling enough when I was there.

I bought a couple things, then got some food, and went back on the road.

The next day I made it to Columbia. I proceeded to spend most of the day trying to find thrift stores on almost every side of the city, looking to find more costume clothing. Plus the party store. And a really cool costume shop called Hip-Wa-Zee.

But I’d been there before too. Meps and I and her father and a friend in Columbia had all spent a day driving around most of these places, looking for costume bits and other Burning Man stuff. This time when I scored, there was nobody to share it with. And this time I was getting half-lost driving around a strange town, rather than having a native take us from place to place.

So even if it was going up the same river, it was a different place this time. And, of course, the thrift shops had completely different merchandise than last time! I got some great stuff, although I still think the dragon print shirt I got last time is the best costume I’ve purchased in the entire state!

But as I continued upstream, I entered a different part of the river system, and things really started to change. This time, I wasn’t going to Nevada, I was going to Georgia. On the road to Burning Man, it started to feel like we were salmon returning from the sea, and all going upstream to the same destination at the same time. The closer you get, the more frequently you see people obviously heading in with you.

On my way in, I got lost going into and then through the last town, and finally made it to the gate of the event. And realized that I had not once seen another vehicle that I could clearly identify as going to Alchemy with me. If I had been driving to Burning Man, I wouldn’t have had any trouble guessing the last four turns because so much traffic was obviously going to the same place, and it would have been easy to follow.

Then I was in the event, and looking to the present, not the past–being part of the stream that others were walking through, and wading in myself as well.