Sovereign Nations

So we’re on a mooring.

As much as we dissed it last summer, having a 400 pound anchor with battleship chain makes for a restful night under all conditions.

(You got me tied down with battleship chains, 50 foot long with a 2-ton anchor…)

We were at anchor here for a while – you may remember our account of the storm.  Then we went into the dock for a little while. During that time, I started some projects.  The cockpit coamings were due for a new coat of paint.  But the big’un was the jib sheet winches.  Whew.  We hadn’t done a cleaning and regreasing yet – 4 years in with pretty constant use, and it was time.

After struggling with the retaining nut at the top for three days – soaking the bronze/stainless mating surface with Liquid Wrench and hammering at it (in the process, smashing my thumb and losing our mallet overboard…grrr, argh) – I separated the pieces and went to town on cleaning them up.

A lot of grease where it belongs and none on the pawls and springs (machine oil for those), and they went back together easily.  Now the motion is smooth and the pawls click into their teeth, making a nice crisp snapping sound.  Just like new.  Goes to show the quality of Barient winches.

And now we’re at home for the summer.

The up-sides:

The sunrises have been breathtaking and they are unencumbered by the structures of shore.  Since James leaves the boat at 6:15, I (Dena) get in the little boat with him and blink sleepily at all the beauty.  He gets up a little earlier in order to have coffee, and he gets the real glory.

Then I row back to the boat and have my own coffee before starting my day.  This rowing back and forth is only the beginning.  Our little commuter vessel is getting quite the workout.  There’s ferrying James twice a day, plus my trips to the grocery store and/or gym.

As soon as we got on the mooring and Dena took off to Montana, in classic New England fashion, it got cold and rained for a week.  Me (James) and the cat were struggling to keep each other warm and dry.  More testament to our fine equipment buying skills – the Cozy Cabin heater worked wonderfully.

Though the rain has passed over for now, we are getting daily doses of heavy fog – once again, in best New England fashion.

Just in case you’re wondering, this is all up-sides.

The star of these photos is the wooden schooner that showed up this week.  It’s from Port Townsend, owned by Anacortes natives, and being suckers for schooners, you’re bound to see lots of shots of it throughout the summer.  It’s also our nearest neighbor and does lovely things for the view.

Leaving you now, we present a Reflections shot of our new neighbor.

Holy shit, we’re out of money!

…Just like that after two months of, pretty much, constant spending, getting the boat ready for living off the grid on the hook, we found ourselves (once again) in the familiar predicament of being out of funds so it was time to “beat the street”.

It’s always been one of our great orders of pride that the two of us are employable, meaning, it doesn’t matter where we go, we can work at making our lives comfortable and, being as though we don’t require a whole hell-of-a-lot to do that, we in turn don’t require a bunch of money for that purpose. Not only that but we’re both smart, well educated, good looking, well spoken and with a wide variety of workable skills, in other words, infinitely employable…

…That is, if there’s employment to be had.

As for me, (James) the things I’ve done to support my (not so) lavish life style while we’ve been underway these last 14 years have taught me a great deal about what it means to be employable. I mean, looking the part is important and all but convincing a potential employer that it’s amazing that they ever got along without you takes a certain level of skill that takes years and 100′s of interviews to refine. Really, it’s all about your motivation and running out of PB&J is a powerful motivating factor to say the least.

After we scraped the last of the peanut butter on to our (slightly stale) .99 cent wheat loaf this past Monday and then didn’t get the call back from the lame-assed local temp agency, my need for employment skills kicked into high gear!

First off I had to look like I wanted to work, so with a little help from Dena with our trusty buzz-clippers I went from…

The salty sailor with the 50 yard stare to…

Employable Guy!

… Able to enter any business on the planet and convince them that they need his invaluable skills.

…And then I walked.

I walked two miles to the library where I made 20 copies of my highly desirable, lofty, yet one page resume’ and worked my way back to the boat passing out that impressive yet non-presumptuous  document to every business that tickled my fancy.

I went to four coffee houses introducing myself as the greatest (Seattle trained) barista in the world, three nightclubs as the best FOH sound and lighting tech that they’ve ever worked with, three marine hardware distributors boasting of my skills as a top level sales expert, two yacht brokers exhorting the same, and one summer production company gasconading my talents as a manager of all stages.

Then I drug my sweaty ass back to the boat, opened up my computer, and went to craigslist where the very first ad that came up in the employment section read something like this…

DOCK MASTER NEEDED!

Immediate opening for a full time, year around marina manager.
Must have experience with the boating industry and be able to work
with computers…

Holy crap, that’s me!

I sent an email with my resume’ attached and within ten minutes I got a reply with a scheduled interview for the next morning.

Well, I have been the dock master of the Three Belles Marina in Niantic, Connecticut, for a week now and the job is awesome.  It’s fun, the money’s good, the people I work with seem to like their jobs, you have to admit, I’m kind of perfect for it, and one of the best parts is the fact that I get to ride my bike 14 miles, round trip to and from the marina everyday from New London. Not only do I get to work in my industry of choice but I’m going to look and feel great doing it!

Being infinitely employable has its advantages.

What a lovely vacation!

After quitting our grindingly tense jobs and keeping our noses to the boat-work-grindstone, we took some time to enjoy ourselves.

Threemile was lovely and peaceful until the night before we set off for New London. At about 3:00 am we got hit by a screaming squall with winds in excess of 40 knots broadsiding us and rocking our little home in the Hamptons for about an hour before dying back down before sunrise. After the sun came up we sailed away from Long Island heading back to Connecticut to find our summer fortunes.

As we hit the deeps of Gardiners Bay, our winds died and some of the local colors began to pop.

We motorsailed all the way across the Sound but as we made our way into the Thames (rhymes with, me, James) River our spring winds kicked back up to bring us into the downtown free moorage.

Our plan was to shag some free showers at the public moorage using the key-code that we got from them last summer. The key-code worked but the city of New London hadn’t turned on the water in the showers yet. Damn!

So we (Dena) did a little research and found out that we could transfer our gym membership from Groton to Waterford (which is about a mile from our new marina) online so she made that happen and we motored back down the river to our new digs.

On the way down river to Burr’s Marina, we got a good look at the Coast Guard training vessel S/V Eagle. I recommend you google that ship if you don’t already know about her. She’s got an incredible history!

We buried the CQR in 8 feet of water, launched the dink, and struck off on our bikes (we’d dropped the bikes off at the marina last week) for hot showers at our new work out facility.

When we got back from the gym we ran into Bill, one of the guys that works at the marina, and he told us that we could bring the boat into the marina to wait out the threatening storm if we wanted. We thanked him but declined, telling him that we felt pretty good about our anchorage.

On Friday the winds were from the north-east ranging from 25 to 30 knots all day long with gusts kicking our little butts in the 40′s. The pounding seas were ranging from 5 to 6 feet and, let me tell you, at anchor that shit is a big deal! It was a painfully long day but we lived through it and only (ONLY!!!) dragged our anchor about 60 feet toward the scary lee shore. At about noon I went out on deck to put some chafing gear on the anchor bridle, which meant I had to bring in the anchor chain about 10 feet. When I payed the chain back out the anchor came unstuck for just a few seconds, long enough to drag us to lee and freak us (the fuck) out! Although the anchor re-stuck and we didn’t move for the rest of the day we were shaken up quite a bit from the experience.

On Saturday we pulled up anchor and went into the marina to fill the water tanks and deal with some issues that were bothering us about the water tanks. We ran into Bill again and he told us that we could stay in the marina until our mooring was put in the water. We thanked him but told him that we love being at anchor so we’d head back out as soon as we could.

Of course, we thought of some errands to run while we were so accessible.  For the first time, we’re very, very close to a propane filling station – only about a half mile!  Once the marina really gets up and running (we’re at least a month early compared to their usual season), we’ll have laundry and showers on the dock, propane just up the road, and a gym and grocery store not much farther.  For us, with the bikes and trailer, this is pretty great.

The next phase of this spring is earning some money.  Since I (Dena) am keeping myself free to work on the Mystic Whaler and James wants cash in hand asap, we’re going the temp agency route.  That’s the short term answer, but James also plans to do the feet-beating job hunt.

It feels a bit like we’re at the end of a nice long vacation, though we worked so hard through so much of it.  We’ve been on our own time, working on our own projects, and it sure has felt good.  This is a cycle I can live with – sail, get a job, save money, work on boat, sail.  Hopefully the sailing portions will eventually be longer than the others, but hey – it’s still living the dream.