All posts by Barry

Rebuilding Boats

Can you hear me now?

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The optimist says the cup is half full; the pessimist says the cup is half empty, and the engineer says the cup has twice the required capacity. I’m not sure which way I feel about our first couple weeks in the boatyard.

We started moving aboard, but there are still about a dozen boxes in the van. (Yes, the storage locker is full, but maybe we can stack it a little higher) We’ve done a few projects, but they nearly all require re-doing, un-doing, or just doing more. So far, we’ve uninstalled far more than we’ve installed.

It started with the head, holding tank, hoses, and macerator pump. All that is gone, leaving just two through-hull fittings and a deck fitting. Now we need to find somebody who wants to take it all away. We installed a Nature’s Head composting toilet, which is working well enough (on the hard!), but we still have to make a permanent installation for ventilation. The big job is that the head floor needs to go down something like six inches, which means cutting a hole and fabricating a new fiberglass platform. That part will probably wait until we want to make a big mess … again. (Grinding out the fiberglass supports for the holding tank made the boat uninhabitable and sent us running to Sears for a shop-vac.)

Installing the “new” stove went really well, once we managed to lower the old one down and haul the new one up. If only the brackets didn’t need to be moved so it could gimbal! Ah well, we won’t be heeling the boat until we launch, so that one can wait. Along with the head floor project.

The next job we wanted to do was remove the bow pulpit because we could see that it needed to be re-bedded (badly!) Unfortunately, my shoulders didn’t fit into the anchor locker. Meps’ shoulders fit, but her upper torso (aka boobs) did not. (For the confused, a reminder: We have a cat ketch rig, with the mainmast located about two feet aft of the bow, and a bulkhead about three inches behind the mast.)

So in comes the crane, and out go the masts. OK, that makes it sound easy, but it wasn’t quite that easy — the spartight compound where the masts go through the deck wasn’t willing to let go of either the mast or the deck. The mizzen mast bound up, then made a mighty jump of about a foot before binding up again. When we did the mainmast, we spent an extra hour trying to break it free with hammers, wedges, and other implements of destruction, while the crane operator waited patiently in his cab, at $150 per hour, alternating between smoking a cigarette and chewing on a toothpick.

Today’s job was cutting, drilling, fitting, painting, glopping, and bolting down plywood “lids” to cover the mast holes in the deck. We wisely used the bolts that held the mast collar in, so we can’t lose them between now and when we need to put the masts back in, which may be months.

Waiting for the paint to dry, I scraped barnacle remnants off one side of the rudder. Now there’s some real, visible progress.

And of course, plumbing projects continue–I constructed a filter to (we hope) make the local water drinkable. Then I had an argument with the convoluted set of hoses and pipes between the sink drain and the through-hull fitting. I lost the first part of the argument: “There has to be a way to do this without so many !@#!@ junctions which could leak.” Now I understand why they are all needed, and I just want to make a version that doesn’t leak. I dunno when I’ll have a better plan or how many more two-dollar plumbing parts that will take.

And then there is the bit where the cup is definitely half-empty: Communications out here in the boonies.

This boatyard is remote enough that broadband internet is unavailable, and most cellphones do not work. (Ours gets signal here so rarely that we both jump up with excitement when it suddenly announces a voicemail — then loses signal to actually retrieve said voicemail.) I just ordered a powerful wifi bridge and antenna that I hoped would be able to get signal from someplace nearby and distribute it to our computer(s). After cabling it up and firing up the computer, no luck.

So I asked Meps to pick up family-sized can of soup at the grocery store. With that, and some electronic parts on order, I’m going to make a directional wi-fi “can-tenna.” And if that finally works, then the cup, or the can, will be half-full!

Living in a Boatyard, Living in Beaufort, NC, Living on a Boat

The true badge of a liveaboard boater

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Years before we counted many liveaboards as friends, I was very reluctant to buy a boat large enough to live aboard. Thus we chose the 25 foot Northern Crow, which was obviously too small for two people to live on. This was my insurance against being begged, nagged or pushed into moving aboard before I was ready.

We have lived aboard for several-month periods before, but never on our own boat. The longest period was seven months, with Brian on Cayenne, and shorter times on Vger, Complexity, and Indigo. We even lived on Flutterby briefly while we did insurance company-required repairs and transported it from South Carolina to North Carolina. But we always had our “home” elsewhere, or if not an entire “home,” we had something like 75% of our stuff in storage.

This time, it is different. We don’t have anything but a few boxes of photographs, wedding china, and other irreplaceable memories–we have all the things we need right here with us, either on the boat or packed up inside the Squid Wagon. And this time, moving aboard took us by surprise–we thought we knew what living aboard is all about, but life always smacks you in the face with a lesson pretty quick.

Before we arrived in the boatyard, I had been thinking of all the projects we had to do to make Flutterby ready to cruise, starting with re-finishing the bottom and fixing leaking hardware in the deck, along with any damage it had done. It has now been four full days and the only project we have completed is plumbing the icebox drain so it gets pumped overboard instead of draining into the bilge.

What have we been doing? Trying to carry our stuff up the ladder from Squidley into the boat, and find a place for it inside.

It didn’t take us three days to succumb. In fact, we would have done it in two and a half, if our cellphone had better signal in the boatyard. We are now the proud renters of a storage unit. I hope that when we are ready to sail we can fit everything aboard, but for now, this is the cheapest way to protect our sanity that I can think of.

Living in the Pacific Northwest

Moving forward…almost

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Yikes, it’s been two years since I’ve written anything for the web here! And it’s been about half that since the once-trusty, now-rusty Squid wagon moved.

Ever since we returned from the Carolinas, we have been preparing to move over there. Being the practical [Err, Sweetie, is that pronounced “Procrastinating” instead] one, I insisted that we were busy doing holiday things instead, so we didn’t really try to do anything until a couple weeks ago.

Today, I finally finished some of what I had started many moons ago–I got the engine of the Squid Wagon to turn over. It would have been real “forward” progress if I had gone and drove around the street or something. But I didn’t do that–the “original” problem was that the engine wouldn’t start after sitting for a day or a week…so I’m waiting until it continues to start tomorrow and next week before I re-assemble things completely. Then I’ll drive it somewhere. Yes, Meps did get emergency towing added to our car insurance first.

Of course, the progress of paring our lives down to fit everything inside the van except for a few stored treasures is also glacial, but every bit helps…like believing that the van will be ready for the task before we are!

Living in the Pacific Northwest

Is there such a thing as a soft-shell clam?

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I’ve heard of soft-shell crabs, and I’ve even eaten a few. A few weeks ago, Meps and I were walking on the beach at Moclips, Washington, and we saw some strange critters washed up in large numbers. “What do you suppose those are?” we asked each other. “Soft-shell clams?”

Picture of "Soft-shelled clams"

OK, I’m not at all convinced that they are soft-shell clams, or even that such things exist, but I love the idea. And they do look quite a bit like clams, with a similar shape and clam-like growth rings. On the other hand, they seem to be tri-valve clams since they have a flat bottom and either a flat top with a sail, or perhaps the vertical part is a third section.

I suspect that the blue ones were more freshly deposited on the beach. Others have a translucent or iridescent color and look more like empty shells; maybe they’ve been up on the beach longer, with a chance to dry out.

If you have any idea what these critters really are, give us a hint. If you don’t know what they are, don’t worry–we’ll enjoy your interesting guess more than the correct answer!

2005 Retracing the Yukon Gold Rush

Back to Puget Sound

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Well, our trip to Alaska is finished with a return to one more mode of transportation. We left Indigo in Friday Harbor, and then took the Washington state ferry from the San Juan Islands to Anacortes, and are now back on Camano Island.

We need to sort through our pictures, journals and memories of the trip and find some goodies to share. Eventually our lives will settle down and we may figure out what to call “normal” for a while, but probably not ’till September.

Family Tales, Philosophy

Wonderful Excess

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At its bare minimum, life really doesn’t require much. You breathe, you eat, you drink, you go to the bathroom, you sleep. Being able to walk between the bedroom and the bathroom helps, but is optional. Shopping for food and cooking it, cleaning the bathroom, or even working to earn money is another level up..

But that minimum isn’t what life is really about. Life is about having the exuberance to go out and run and dance or play, or the passion to make a difference in the world, or the drive to have a successful and interesting career, or just a wild and crazy dream to follow wherever it takes you.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’m watching how much energy and life is left inside Prussia. When she was younger, she was the picture of that delightful excess, and would run around and play, and jump and try to catch birds or attack any other cats she saw. In the last few years she became an old cat: She wasn’t really into playing and very seldom ran anywhere. We had trained her not to get on kitchen counters, eventually she couldn’t jump there from the floor even if she wanted to. She slept a lot, but cats always do that. Just the same, I thought she was sleeping more. She still wandered all over the house, still hated other cats and let them know it. Recently, we start placing “steps” for her, so she could climb up to places she used to be able to jump easily.

Prussia has been hanging in there at the bare minimum level for about three weeks now. We can clearly see that there is hardly any flesh between the bones and the fluff. But the harder thing is to watch is how little life is left in her. She manages the bare minimum pretty well. She breathes. (And we check to make sure that she continues) She sleeps. (Probably twenty-two hours a day of sleeping, napping, and resting.) She still drinks, but not much, and is pretty dehydrated. She eats, now mostly a little gravy around the catfood. She goes to the bathroom. (with difficulty, and I won’t gross anybody out with details!) She can walk, but she isn’t very steady and doesn’t try very often. Sometimes it looks like she didn’t find the energy to put her tail where it belongs but just sat on it in a un-cat-like way. Her world is getting smaller.

Whenever we see a sign of energy above that bare minimum, we celebrate. Even if it is just her tail twitching in annoyance at us, her mother hens. This morning we woke with her at our feet and heard her purring. And when we offered her food, she ate it. Two or three times in the last week, she found the energy to climb the stairs and check out the upstairs of the house. Once she even walked out the front door and wandered through the yard.(Margaret had to convince her not to crawl under the fence into the neighbor’s yard for fear that she would get in a cat fight that would finish her.) Other times she is just very alert and bright-eyed, looking around at us. I wonder if she remembers jumping to the top of the fridge or the fireplace mantel.

Some people I know aren’t able to live life with all this wonderful excess; they are just able to manage the basics of survival, plus (perhaps) a job of some sort. I know some people are sick, or depressed, or very old and infirm, or just somehow lost, but it saddens me to see life a reduced when it doesn’t need to be. I hope to live with as much of this wonderful excess as I can for as long as I can — maybe even equivalent to Prussia’s ninety-and-counting cat years.

Family Tales

Eleven Cents in the Bank

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Yesterday, we took Prussia to the vet. We’d called ahead, letting him know that we wanted to set up a hospice plan for her.

He was kind, gentle, and nice, and Margaret was coping well at the time; I was almost able to keep my voice modulated normally, and my eyes were just a little moist. He explained that cats are very good at conserving their last energies, and that Prussia had used up most of her reserves by now. “It’s like you’re used to living on a dollar a day, but then you have no income, so you figure out how to live on a penny a day. Now you only have eleven cents in the bank, so you figure out how to live on a quarter of a cent a day.”

On the way home, we stopped at our friend Margaret’s house. We’d lived there for a year with Prussia, and she and Margaret’s cat, Clingon, were mortal enemies. When the van door was opened, Prussia started walking toward it like she was ready for a walk. So I put her harness and leash on. She walked me up the front steps, around the house to the back door. She knew the house, and wanted to be let in. When she saw her nemesis through the glass door, suddenly she showed her old aggressive streak, growling and hissing and almost lunging at him. I said to Prussia “Those eleven cents are yours to spend — do whatever you want with them!” We kept them separated, because this time, he might win the fight.

I don’t like the price I’m paying for all this, but I am amazed at how I have a much better understanding of what really is important. I remember saying a few years ago that I would be really sad someday because Prussia would eventually die, and I’ve been failing to groom her well enough to keep her coat clean and free of mats. (She did the job very well when she was much younger.) I was afraid she would die with her fur all a mess. It would have been easier if Prussia liked being groomed, but she doesn’t. Now I regret that just a week ago, I groomed her until she got mad at me.

Margaret has often told me the story of how this little tiny ball of fluff with a huge voice and every parasite known to feline-kind appeared outside her apartment. Since she had no cat food, Margaret gave her tuna, which figured prominently in her own menu at the time. Prussia has loved it ever since; she always got the water drained off, while Margaret got the fish (sometimes, Prussia got a little of the fish too). Menus have changed, and I never really liked canned tuna, so it’s become a rare treat for her. It took us five days after Prussia stopped eating cat food to realize that it was time to feed her anything she would eat. At first, we tried ice cream, milk, and cheese. People recommended Fancy Feast and baby food. But you should have seen her perk up when we brought a can of tuna to the bedroom and opened it in front of her. She slurped down the water and started eating again. She came into our world with canned tuna. She’s probably going to leave our world on canned tuna, too.

Cats, Family Tales

Speaking the Unspeakable

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Today, I said it. “Prussia may be dying.” Margaret said, “I was OK until you said it.” An hour or so later, I said, “I was OK until I said it too.”

We have been watching our cat slowly grow older and weaker for three or four years. She can barely jump anymore, she sleeps a lot, she’s getting bad mats in her fur; She has become a finicky eater and is losing weight. Margaret admits she has been preparing herself for a while now, even though she doesn’t exactly say for what. For the last year or two, Margaret gets upset when the cat “sleeps” or “naps” without quite closing her eyes. It would freak Margaret out, so she has taken to watching for Prussia’s side raising and lowering as she breathes.

We have often talked about how inconvenient it is to have such a long-lived cat — we have been planning to sail around the world, and we hear that kitty passports can be a real pain. It also means we can’t go away for long without either taking her with us or finding someone to take care of her. She is eighteen now, and would be nineteen sometime in July; We never really expected her to live this long anyhow. I guess we really expected her to live forever, like you always do.

But five days ago she pretty much stopped eating. I never worry at first when she does that, because she would often go a day or two hardly eating, and then get hungry the next day, and eat a lot of food. Today I said the unspeakable. However hard you try to prepare yourself, there is no preparation, and today I know that.

I am again remembering two things: First, nothing is permanent in this world; in other words, death is a unavoidable part of life. I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life learning this in the true and visceral way, not just intellectually. Second, nothing in life is certain. I have always expected to outlive Prussia, but I have no way of being sure that will happen.

Of course I’m still hoping she will recover her spark and fight her way back to heath…for a few months or years. But I can’t stop my brain from racing around through the other possibility and its consequences for us.

Living in the Pacific Northwest

Meps and Barry, Home Phone

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Well, we did it again. Back in the summer of 2002, we started shopping for a cell phone to use once we moved out of our house on Lynn Street. I did most of the searching, comparing prices, trying to puzzle out plans, asking people if they liked their phones and/or had good coverage, etc. Eventually we decided it was too expensive and that we weren’t going to bother. We just moved our land-line to the next home, and then went phone-less when we moved out.

Fast forward to November of 2004. Now we need a phone again, and we went shopping AGAIN. It was still a pain in the butt. The short version of the story is that if you want to use your phone to browse the web with the computer, you now need a separate data plan which will give you limited use of almost dialup speeds at a well over broadband prices. So we make the same decision as last time.

As of next Tuesday, the 7th, we’ll again have a phone. The number will be (206) 322-1664. And until then we’re staying in our house at 1112 E. Lynn Street, in Seattle, so you can just drop in if you are in the neighborhood. We’re pretty sure we’ll be here a month or two.

I guess we’re just incredible cheapskates or Luddites or something after all. But somehow paying around $170/month seems just too much. When we move onto a boat we’ll have to re-consider again since a land line will be impossible then. For now, we just can’t stomach the expense.

2004 Half a North American Circumnavigation (and 3/4 of a Newfoundland One)

New Photos and Stuff!

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Hello everybody,

We’ve been lucky enough to find a spot on the street in Ottawa with a Wi-Fi connection, so we’ve been putting new stuff up on the website. Here’s what’s new.

We’ve been trying hard to keep up with our adventures. So far, we’ve got nearly all of our stories from Newfoundland up, three weeks after we left, and a few bits from other parts of Canada.

We’ve also been working on the photos: Now our Maine and New Brunswick photos are up and captioned. (Some day we’ll get a few of our Newfoundland pictures up too!)

And lastly, and probably most important, Margaret is doing a wonderful job of keeping the limericks up to date, having even put up one from Quebec!

Enjoy!
Barry