All posts by Barry

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

Don’t tell the C.S.P.C.A.*

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Today we were driving in the Gaspé Peninsula, and went by one more of the dozens of little roadside rest areas. Since this is way past the tourist season around here, they are all closed, but this one was better than most–there wasn’t a gate to lock, even if they did screw plywood over the doors to the washrooms. Considering this an invitation, we drove in and parked. We carried our picnic to the playground, enjoying the view of the Atlantic ocean on a brisk autumn afternoon. We let Prussia out of the van (on her leash), and Margaret was taken for a walk by the cat. Prussia lead her around the washroom building, walking along the railroad tie edge of the landscaping. A guy driving by on an ATV almost fell off when he saw what was going on.

Meanwhile, I was still in the playground, and I saw the slide. It was one of those enclosed plastic tube slides, and it made me think of the time that Prussia spent about twenty minutes absolutely fascinated by a small dry culvert. I walked up to where Margaret was walking the cat and said “I’ve go the urge to do something evil.” as I looked over at the slide. She started laughing. I went down the slide to make sure that it worked.

With much patience and a little coaxing, Margaret got Prussia near the top of the slide.

She was far more interested in trying to go under the platform and smell things, but our patience was limited. Finally Margaret picked her up and put her inside the slide. She started walking down, not too impressed with the momentous occasion. Margaret tells me she kept walking, then started to skid a little. She braced her paws as it got steeper, but she only slid faster, and Margaret let go of the leash. The next thing I knew, she slid by in a hurry and I just barely got this picture.

I took care of the important task that followed (picking up the end of the leash) and then got to record the next part of this adventure.

* I’m not sure–Is there even a Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals? I don’t know whether I should hope that they do exist or don’t exist.

Usually, when Prussia is unnerved, she’s pretty eager to get back to the safety of the Squid Wagon. But as I handed Margaret the leash, Prussia was just in a mood to continue her walk. Then again, she didn’t say, “Let’s do it again, Mom,” and head right back to top of the slide!

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

Back in Lunenburg

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We’ve just finished a wonderful, fun, hectic, and over-stuffed visit to Newfoundland mostly with Meps’ dad.

Whew!

Now we are catching our breath and thinking about how to get back to Seattle and build that boat. And working on putting up some pictures and stories from Newfoundland.

And, while we are relaxing, we will be able to check our email a couple times a day and even have ready access to a payphone, so drop us a line, and we’ll reply or call back!

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

Ladders to Nowhere

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When we were driving through New Brunswick in the Squid Wagon, we saw these ladders several times, and we don’t know exactly what they are for. You can’t see it clearly in this picture, but there are some ropes which would allow the height or angle of them to be adjusted somewhat.

This picture was taken on Deer Island, in the Bay of Fundy in a little cove. I think that there is still some commercial fishing going on there, so these might be for fishing. They definitely are in the part of the Bay that has pretty big tides, probably 25 or 30 feet.

If you know what these are, leave a comment…heck, even if you have a decent guess, leave a comment!

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

The best part is acting after making a decision…

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At least that’s what the Indigo Girls said in one of their songs. But then again, they were talking about real action where you really do something, not just plop down some money and sign some papers. Well, anyhow, we did make a real decision finally, and I really hope (and think!) that the best part is yet to come. The part about making the decision sure was a lot of work, and wasn’t much fun.

While looking for a conversion van, we stumbled onto an oddball: A Ford E150/Econoline Club Wagon. It is a full-sized van, and this particular model had an aftermarket awning like a small RV, mini-blinds and screens on most of its windows, and was two-tone red and white and looked pretty cool. (well in a funky sort of way….) It was very old (1989), but very low mileage (50k). The A/C even worked, front AND back. The best part was that the third row of seating was a bench seat which folded down in three parts, and was long enough to sleep on. We thought this vehicle was wonderful! Then we took it for a test drive. The cruise control broke while Meps was testing it on the road. Then she drove it in a tight circle, and the steering or front suspension jerked and jumped. She was scared, and this vehicle was written off. Then we talked to the guy who ran the used car lot, and found him to be at least as bad as the worst sleazy car salesman stereotype. We pointed out that the inside rear-view mirror wasn’t there, and he told us how dangerous it was to use those instead of the outside mirrors on a big van. In fact, anything we mentioned that was a problem, he explained why it was wonderful and implied that we were ignorant or stupid.

We spent another few days looking at conversion vans, and then realized: Aha! The Club Wagon was the vehicle for us. We can just drive off in it, rather than have to spend a week removing and replacing expensive upholstery in a conversion van. Which would probably reduce its resale value as well. This is perfect. Oops. There aren’t any more of them within 100 miles of us, and are only two or three possibilities worth driving 200 miles to see. So we spent a day driving across the state, and found a good old one (overpriced) and a newer worse one (bad feeling brake pedal, poor shifting…) which was more expensive, but would have been well-priced had it been in good shape. And kept on looking. And re-considered conversion vans. And figured that we were just being stupid and couldn’t make up our minds.

Then another week went by with thinking, fretting, phone calls, negotiations, and internet searches, and looking at one more interesting semi-destroyed vehicle. This one was our second “Half-Back” which is a conversion van with front bucket seats, a back bench seat that folds down to a bed which isn’t comfortable my six-foot frame. But behind that is a opening plexiglass window like a truck cap has, and a big unfinished area in the back for cargo. This seemed like a really interesting idea for a vehicle. Too bad both of them we looked at had problems like a shot suspension, worn out seats, brakes that pulsed when you used them, and a check engine light that was on.

Friday was another long day, but we came home with a new (to us!) 1990 Van. The process of having it checked by a mechanic went flawlessly…except that on the way, the gas pedal fell to the floor, and wouldn’t stop revving as high as it would go. The poor woman who I was about to buy it from was really shaken up, but she did stop the van and turn it off. Eventually her husband returned, and all four of us were standing around trying to figure out what was happening, and wondering if anybody was really going to buy or sell a van today. But it turned out that the air filter housing had pivoted out of position and then caught the throttle lever on the engine and held it nearly to the floor. Once the filter was back in position, the throttle was back where it belonged, the van was back to its usual behavior, and then it made it all the way to the mechanic who said “You’ve got a good truck,” and advised some minor stuff like front-end alignment, tire balancing, and new transmission seals and fluid, before we drove it across the country or towed something really big. So we went to the DMV, gave them money, signed stuff, called our respective insurance agents, and then it was done.

We had lunch, then prepared for the three hour drive back to Vero Beach. I was in the same Toyota Camry that had been “Buddy Boating” with us back when we were on Cayenne, following Meps in the new van. Everything was fine until we stopped at a traffic light on the outskirts of Vero Beach. Since the van is quite tall, I didn’t realize that the light had turned green a while ago, and since I had the stereo on and windows closed I couldn’t hear the starter turning to no effect. But eventually I noticed that she had put the hazard lights on and realized that something was wrong, and went see what was going on. She had run one tank dry, and the engine wouldn’t start on the other tank. We spent a couple minutes looking through the manual and trying to find the “emergency fuel shutoff valve reset button,” and tried a few more times, but then it started up again. We decided to just drive the rest of the way home and hope for the best. We got safely home, and all is well now….or at least I think so. Prussia was giving the van the strangest looks through the window!

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

Decisions Unmade

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The last mention of this decision we put on this website was something about trying to pick an RV for ourselves to travel around in, and then plop down someplace to build a boat in a few months…or possibly longer. We were ruminating on that and having trouble making the choice. One day driving back from yet another trip looking at the RVs which wasn’t particularly productive, I said something like “If we didn’t have to accommodate our cat on this journey, how would we do it”? We started talking, and decided that we weren’t really RV people and would probably just camp with a car and a tent, like we did on our first Interlude. Or maybe we would get a big old van and camp in it, rather than the tent. For this sort of travels, we did fine in Peepcar for ourselves ten years ago, but we would need a big truck or cargo van later for boat-building, so why not get a big vehicle now?

But the RVs just seemed too big to drive around. We were arguing about whether it would be worse to have a truck w/ a trailer (overall length of 35-40 feet, impossible to park anyplace but a campground or truck stop), or just to have a 22 foot self-propelled RV that would almost fit into a parking space, but would mean not having transportation unless we were willing to move our house…at 7-9mpg. Regardless, it just didn’t make sense to spend $8000 for an old RV just for the cat. We decided that we would somehow find a way to make a smaller vehicle work, and our travels might have to be planned around the cat, but at least they wouldn’t be planned around the vehicle.

In trying to figure out the RV stuff, we had read Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, and Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon (ok, we had to return it to the library before finishing it, but we will get back to it someday).. Both these guys traveled in modest vehicles, but both of them were single guys. One was a small camper made on a pickup chassis, and the other was a Ford cargo van with a bunk built into the back. So we started thinking about cargo vans.

After looking at cargo vans, we figured out two things: One, they never seem to have cruise control, which Meps dearly wanted in our next vehicle, and, Two, they are just plain raw inside, and would need a lot of work to make them look anything like civilized enough to spend a couple months driving to Seattle the long way in.

So next we started looking at old Conversion Vans. These are the opposite extreme, with lots of fancy upholstery, real wood trim, and a TV and VCR installed. As most of you know, we detest TV on general principles, so that wasn’t a big plus, but these vans were pretty cheap, and were generally pretty low mileage, so we looked at quite a few of them. Plus a lot of them have a high ceiling, so when we built a bunk in, there would be more headroom or underneath storage available. And they came with windows that open, and already have screens and curtains. But most of them were a bit tired, and several of them behaved quite badly on test drives….so we lost our enchantment with them.

Geek-Friendly

Virtually Moving In

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Right now Meps and I are in the middle of the process of moving our virtual home. While we were living with Brian, we had put quite a few bits of ourselves up on Brian’s webpage. But we are no longer living there, and upon moving out, decided it was time for our own website too.

After several days of searching for available urls, we ended up here, and we think this will be a good place. Moving is, of course, always a combination of disruption, excitement, hard work, and opportunities, and some things may be in different categories depending upon who and when you ask. Here’s some of the stuff that’s been keeping me busy these days:

  • The last site was mostly done in Movable Type, but by the time we started this one, there was a new version (3.0) with a new license that was generating near universal bile and hatred from the blogging community. The licensing scheme has improved a bit, but it still seems that a simple site like this one which has two authors (barry and meps), no longer qualifies for the free copy, while previously anything non-commerical qualified for the free version. I couldn’t even find the older version (with a license we could use legitimately) on their website. While on one hand I hate to stop using good software just because I’m a cheapskate, on the other hand, I am not sure how much I want to trust my stuff to folks who keep changing the rules and costs of playing with them. Amid all the outcry about the new license, I found suggestions of alternative blogging software.
  • I went looking and found WordPress as a possible alternative, and started looking at installing it. Right now, it seems a little simpler and cleaner, although I do miss the wonderfully written documentation of Movable Type.
  • This gave me the opportunity to learn about PHP and MySQL, and I always love learning about new computer tools, so this was fun. Since the Vero Beach Public Library doesn’t have a good selection, I read my first “dummies” book, and found that it had some good stuff even though I hate to consider myself to be in the target audience!
  • We never did get that photoblog or photoalbum that we had been planning to do someday, so I’m back looking at stuff I can use to make that job easier.
  • Meps and I get to play around with designing a new site design, including using some of these new toys.

Anyhow, it is now time to stop web-surfing and playing with new computer goodies and put something up, so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m sure it will take a bit longer to finish the move-in process, but in the meantime, we’re going to get a couple things up on the site. Like a physical move, there will be a few things that stay in the cardboard boxes waiting until we get around to finding the right home for them, so be patient, we’ll get around to it eventually. There were also a couple bits we wrote earlier but couldn’t put up here since we didn’t have a blog to put them on, so they are going in, back-dated, along with our old “Travels with Meps ‘n’ Barry” stuff.

2004 April Fools Cruise #1 (Offshore and ICW with Brian on Cayenne)

Ships Passing in the Day

After I wrote about buddy boating, one reader said that she was disappointed not to have heard about other neat boating folks we had met. Not to worry, she still liked the story, so I’ll keep writing for the website! After that I did start thinking about our contacts with other boaters. The great majority of them have been distant or fleeting. I am guessing that this has something to do with where we are and how we have been traveling.

Every place Cayenne has stopped so far has been close to the ICW. In other words, we haven’t gone very far from the freeway, sometimes just off on the shoulder where we still get wakes from boats going through. Sure, we were a day or two out at the Dry Tortugas and Key West, but after that we headed back inward. Whenever it was reasonable, we went out offshore for our passages, but once we came in to an anchorage or a dock, it was back by the ditch.

This is like an all-day interstate drive, done in slow motion: The oncoming traffic rushes by, and some boats zoom past you, while you slowly pass a few others, but you may stay with a boat all day, perhaps pulling a little bit ahead for a while, then waiting for the same bridge opening with them, but staying within sight all day. Perhaps you hear them on the radio all day, opening bridges or talking to their next marina, even though you can’t see them. Also like a freeway, sometimes you play “leapfrog” where you pass the same boat multiple times, perhaps over a few days.

Sometimes you spend a lot of time with a boat without really making contact. Persistence is a sloop with a light blue hull. One day, we motored in sight of them for about six hours, waiting for bridges, then getting ahead, and repeating the process. Another day they were one of the boats in an anchorage with us. We haven’t even talked to them over the radio, but if we do meet them in the next few weeks, we’ll remember those days.

We spoke briefly with the crew of a big 55 foot ketch, a father and son pair. They had been up and down this coast many times, and had some useful tips about places we were planning to go. (I hope we remember some of them…) The ICW makes cruising linear, in that everybody is going either up or down, so usually everybody has just been in the same places and is going to soon be at the same places. The seasons being what they are, we are almost all going the same direction too–another kind of snowbirds all migrating North for the summer.

Since we are in a pack of sorts, you might first notice a boat when somebody else asks about it. When we pulled into Southport, another boater asked, “Have you seen Pilgrim today?” Pilgrim is a smaller classic looking ketch owned by William and Nancy. They are a younger couple (i.e., not yet retired, unlike many if not most cruisers going up the ICW). When we passed them, we noticed that the boat hailed from Lady’s Island South Carolina, right around where Meps’ parents had had vacation property and then retired to. Nancy told us that her father had also been a professor and that he had moved the boat down from Urbanna to Lady’s Island when he retired.

William and Nancy bought the boat and spent the winter driving down and fixing up Pilgrim for the voyage back up to Urbanna on the Rappahannock river in Virginia. We are pretty new to full-time cruising ourselves, so I felt some connection to these nice folks who were just starting out with their first boat. I know it isn’t true, but it sometimes felt like everybody else already knew each other and had been up and down the ditch a dozen times, so meeting somebody who clearly wasn’t in that category was a memorable change.

We first met Southern Cross in Venice, Florida; we were in the middle of a bad evening and night that involved not having room to anchor, re-anchoring at every wind shift, then noticing Southern Cross anchored, and going by to ask them if they knew whether if there was any deep water nearby, perhaps better than our charts showed. As we went by, they cheerfully admitted they didn’t know, but would watch and learn from our mistakes…We next noticed them at the Dry Tortugas (They are the ketch with green sailcovers to the right of us in the photo currently on our homepage). Weeks later, we heard Southern Cross on the VHF, but figured that they were just another boat with that name. A week ago, we realized that they were the same boat, and had a long three-way conversation over VHF with them and Daisy Dee about where to anchor around the Alligator River. They both decided to anchor in Alligator Creek, while we went off in search of Lassie. Three days later, we were at a dock in Hampton, and Southern Cross came in a little later. This time we had a leisurely conversation at the dock, and (among other things) found out that they too keep a website going: www.svsoutherncross.com.

Sometimes you meet really wonderful people. I don’t expect we will be meeting better folks, I only hope we have more time to get to know them now that we are in the Chesapeake and “off the freeway” for a while.

2004 April Fools Cruise #1 (Offshore and ICW with Brian on Cayenne)

“Buddy Boating”

Buddy boating is a concept I had read about, but never done. It normally consists of finding a friend who has another boat and leaving one anchorage together to move on to the next one where you meet up again. I suppose you could also sail together, but usually one boat is faster so you end up separating, especially if your passages are several days long. It is sort of like going on a cruise to a destination together but a bit less organized. Interesting idea perhaps, but probably not what I would end up doing, or at least not anytime soon….all those books that I read were probably doing it in the South Pacific, and we won’t be there for months or perhaps years.

Little did I know! We tried to start out in Key West, except that we didn’t plan our stay well enough for Hank Schulte (Margaret’ dad) to meet up with us, so we missed the first leg. We arrived in Vero Beach and hung out with him for over a week; The crew (Margaret, Barry AND Prussia) even moved onto land in his new condo. Margaret’s brother Steve was also visiting her dad, so it was a mini-reunion. It was a wonderful time, and after visiting, doing a few boat projects, and celebrating a big birthday we headed back out to sea. Three or so days later we arrived near Harbor Island, South Carolina.

A few hours later, our buddy boat arrived: Hank’s Toyota Camry! And despite a minor snafu about which rest area to meet at before heading in, Steve’s Toyota Camry arrived as well. We connected up the next morning, and then we stayed around for a few days. Margaret’ family has been going to Harbor Island for twenty years with first a vacation condo, and then a beach house at retirement. It was always a wonderful, almost magical place, especially when Margaret and I got married there. Hank had sold his places on the Island a few years ago, and we hadn’t been back since. We had a wonderful visit, with more time visiting with Hank and Steve, plus checking out how the Island had changed (mostly more development) and how it had stayed the same (the beautiful beaches and marshes, and the remoteness). This visit also included a boat project: Borrow Hank’s “boat” and drive our sail in need of repair to Charleston.

Then we departed. This time we shanghaied Hank and took him with us in the boat, leaving his Camry behind. Steve drove his Camry back to Spartanburg, shrinking the flotilla by one. We had two nice days (with a bit of intense navigation) going up the ICW to Charleston. Once we arrived we met a friend of Hank’s and after a very brief visit said goodbye. Hank got a ride back to Harbor Island that afternoon, and the next morning we headed North.

It may never be like this again, but I think buddy boating is fun!

2004 April Fools Cruise #1 (Offshore and ICW with Brian on Cayenne)

Pieces of a Fast Passage

I’ve been told by sailors that there are three kinds of wind: Too much wind, too little wind, and just the right amount of wind in exactly the wrong direction.

We’ve spent nearly a week dealing with too much wind, staying inside the ICW, sometimes in marginal anchorages, and not being able to sail out toward the Dry Tortugas. Last night the winds abated and shifted around toward the North, which is as they should be for going on our way. We got the Sanibel Causeway bridge to open for us at Eleven and headed out into the Gulf.

Now we have another kind of wind: So little that we can barely make progress. In fact, we were drifting down on a crab pot and Brian had to run the engine to get steerage back. It has dropped down to below anything our wind instrument can measure, probably zero to three knots. There is a long gentle swell, only one or two feet, but I was finding that if it went by the boat in the wrong direction, it was enough to keep the sails from behaving well. At this rate, we should have 15 knots on the nose after a week of this.

I finished typing, shut the computer down, then decided to take a bit of a nap. The boat was now moving through the water a little over two knots, which was probably twice as fast, but I hadn’t paid any real attention. After napping for at most an hour and a half, I woke to remember another old saying: If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour. The boat is heeling a bit, and I’m hearing the sound of it plunging through the waves just outside my bunk in the forward cabin, and as I glance up sleepily I see the poor cat trying to walk along the boat, and every few steps we lurch and heel a little more, and she slides sideways along the floor, then stops and starts walking again. I am reminded that the cabin sole is varnished and fairly slippery, especially if you have fuzzy wiffles between your toes. Maybe we’ll have to sand some of that varnish off when we feel like working on the boat again.

The sea is still an amazing shade of light green and the sky is still blue. Now the boat is moving at five or six knots, the wind blowing about ten. We are still heading out from San Carlos Pass and Sanibel Island, after about four hours the depths are getting close to fifty feet, which means we shouldn’t be seeing any more crab pots. Sailing sure isn’t that certain or predictable, but it feels pretty good right now.

We watched the sunset out in the cockpit, and slowly the stars came out as the daylight faded. I very seldom take the time to be out watching something like this, but today I was just steering the boat and didn’t have anyplace else to be or “important” things to distract me. The process was much slower than I was somehow expecting. The sky stayed orange and eventually almost brown. First a bright planet and a few stars started to appear. Eventually the sunset was gone and stars started growing brighter. After that the border between sea and sky became harder to distinguish; I could find it clearly in some directions, but it was nearly invisible in others. And the stars started coming out. Orion was out very clear, not very high off to the west. I wished I could identify something other than the dippers and Orion on that night. One of the planets (I would guess it was Venus) was up in the West, and it was bright enough that it had a really clear trail of reflections below it in the water.

As it got later, I just had to steer and watch for the occasional traffic, mostly shrimpers. I was getting sleepy, and decided I would wake up Brian for his watch when Orion set. As I kept steering, Orion was going down, but I was losing alertness faster. I never looked at the time during the entire watch, so it was sort of timeless, but couldn’t have been that long–When I gave up and woke Brian, it was only 11pm.

It has now been a day and a half since we arrived, and my memories from the night watches are getting more vague and fuzzy as time goes on. As I was writing this, I had to ask Meps when it was that I got up and when I went down to nap, and when she was steering the boat. I took another shift hand steering later in the morning–I had missed the moonrise, but the sliver of moon was still low in the East. I also remember not quite winning another contest with myself to stay alert and on duty; this time until we were one mile from our first waypoint going into the Dry Tortugas. I remember trying to steer downwind and keep our course pretty accurate, and make sure that the sails didn’t bang and crash as we rolled with a swell passing under us. As got sleepy again, my world contracted; I was focused on the steering compass, or looking in front of the boat and keeping that unidentified constellation that was just to the right of the masts where it should be, occasionally risking a glance at the wind instrument.

While the steering was not physically difficult, it took all the concentration I could muster to keep the boat on course as we rolled and yawed with each swell. If there was a light or a boat on the horizon and I tried to figure out what it was, I found myself off course, and had to correct. When I looked at the mizzen sail because it seemed to be fluttering too much, I went off course. When I thought I saw the lighthouse tower in the Dry Tortugas, perhaps both of them, I didn’t take time to look and try to figure it out because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the boat on course. I did have just enough extra mental energy to decide that when we got to the waypoint we would have to turn the boat onto a new course and even adjust the sails. I decided that there was no way I would trust myself to make those decisions, I was just too groggy. Despite this, I think I was still doing a reasonable job of steering Cayenne on her course as long as I didn’t try and think about anything else.

Finally I decided it was as close to that waypoint as I was going to get (I think it was two miles) I woke Brian again, told him what was going on, and went down below for another nap. A bit later Brian and Meps woke me in time to take the sails down and we motored around behind Garden Key to anchor in the Dry Tortugas.