Sovereign Nations

The Norva: a big-enough, not-too-big, dark wooden floor.  Scarred and heavily coated.  Brick walls.  Big pillars that block the stage from the sides.  Two bars, one off the main floor and one up on the balcony.  Sure do like a balcony.  And old stained-glass windows on the third floor, hiding the offices.
So there I am, nodding in appreciation for a good room, a good venue.  James and I got drinks and before long I needed to pee.  You know, it happens, even though you wish it wouldn’t.  Because that means being intimate with a grungy bar/show bathroom.

And the weirdest thing.  I push open the swinging door to the women’s room and the mellow light inside bathes a sight that assaults my eyes with the unexpected.  Cleanliness.  Sponged on multi-colored paint without a single message from a previous user scrawled across the long expanse.  Neat tile, moldless grout.  Ten gleaming sinks in two rows facing one another, staring in each other’s shining mirrors.  And beyond, fourteen toilet stalls, each with a white toilet and more impecable, silent walls dividing them.

No, this won’t be a whole post about the Norva bathroom.  I have to say, though, it was a shock to the system.  The rest of the place had the lovely darkness that refuses to divert attention from the stage, even the bars being low-light affairs.

Well, I was curious enough I had to look it up.  The building is about 80 years old and was renovated in 1998.  I cannot believe that bathroom is 11 years old…they must have done more since.  Everything I read about it focuses on the 7 person jacuzzi, sauna, and indoor basketball court for the performers.  Like I care, since I don’t get to enjoy it myself!  (Sour grapes?  Perhaps.)

Anyway, we sat up in the balcony and watched the opening band on a couple of monitors that showed us what was happening on the stage we couldn’t see from our table.  The picture wasn’t great, but shooting in a live music situation from permanently installed cameras…well, it’s not guaranteed to give you the best view.  And really, they were right there – if we cared about seeing well, we’d've stood.

The opening band was seriously percussion-deficient.  As in, there was almost none, and not just in the mix.  There was no dedicated percussionist, though a couple of band members sat at a little drum station and hit things for a few measures in a few songs.  Really, there wasn’t a single song with percussion all the way through.  With that and the high, clear voice of the singer and the pretty nicely played fiddle, it was an airy sound that made little impact on me.  A few of the melodies were lovely, with nice holds, sharp, close harmonies, and unexpected resolutions that I enjoyed, but overall, I was not wowed.

Oh, and they took themselves very seriously.  Want proof?  Band name: The Hollow Flame.

Okay, then there was a long, long silence.  Except it wasn’t silent.  The extraordinarily long break between bands was filled with the sound of Pink Floyd and, yes, it was surreal.

And the show.  The Decemberists played two sets.  The first set was a long, rollicking musical mosaic from what must be their latest album…the one I don’t have.  The Hazards of Love.  It seems that the album is one long story, like rock opera, but more coherent.  I don’t even know if I heard the whole thing, but what I heard was fabulous.  There wasn’t much of the sea shanty to this one, and they even go heavy metal for certain parts, but the lyrics, language and imagery alike, are lovely as ever, and the music is creative and played beautifully by the whole ensemble.  It included two singers who aren’t part of the usual group and have projects of their own.
Yep, I’ll need to get that album.

After another long, long break, I got the part I recognized.  Billy Liar, The Sporting Life, We Both Go Down Together, among other sing-along favorites of mine.  The Bachelor and the Bride was as strange and hurtful and beautiful as I’ve experienced on road trips and sitting quietly on the boat.  Really, if you haven’t heard the album Her Majesty, the Decemberists…go now and obtain a copy.  Spend some time listening to it, don’t listen while reading or writing or blogging…

What I didn’t hear and missed: Red Right Ankle; I Was Meant for the Stage; Los Angeles, I’m Yours.  Goodness, I would have listened to them play their entire oeuvre, had they wanted to do any such thing.

They did one cover – Heart’s Crazy on You.  It was a moment featuring the two guest singers who take two of the roles in the Hazards of Love set. Giving them a front-and-center song to share was nice, and they did a great job on it.  It’s a loud, wailing piece, and the alto/soprano split they’d maintained up until then gave way to the sharing of melody that Ann and Nancy were so good at.

Sound was impeccable – the sound system is gorgeous to those who enjoy such technical matters.  James was impressed, and that doesn’t happen easily.  The mix was more-or-less good, though the singers change from lead to backup enough that the sound level didn’t always rise and fall exactly at the beginnings and endings of solo bits.

There was theater as well.  The lead singer, Colin, had a fine time controlling a large room full of fans, having us sing, splitting us into three parts and bringing the dynamic of each up and down separately until we all did an enormous crescendo together.  My watching-brain was amused by the placement of us all under his will so well and thoroughly, but I sang with the rest.
Finally, a thoroughly hysterical reinactment of the making of the film Fitzcarraldo.  Now, this was strange enough in its screen version.  With a crowd of people forming the mountain out of their raised arms and a band member playing the part of the ship being hauled up the mountain, dropped, and hauled up again before breaking up in the rapids…well, you will have to make your own picture of it.

The only thing that could have made the show better is something I wouldn’t want.  If their live sound was leaps better than their recorded sound, as with so many other bands, it would have felt even better to experience the live show, for which we paid dearly out of our food budget.  But it’s hard to begrudge well-recorded albums that will continue to please me long after they have left Norfolk behind.

So, on 09/09/1999 Dena and James signed the papers for the sailing vessel Sovereign Nation and effectively sailed off into the sunset…

Wow!

…Now here we sit at the top of the food chain, at the top of the second decade of the 21st century exactly ten years after we set sail on our first boat together 10,000 nautical miles later and still loving each other, our lives and the decisions we’ve made together. I know, I know not exactly a world record but a record non-the-less for the two of us that’s for sure!

Whenever we (as humans) reach these land marks in time we tend to get all sentimental and shit and recap those adventures in our heads and for us the word “adventures” really does fit the bill. So for all of you out there that have just recently joined our program let me just give you the “Sports Center” style recap of…

!!!The Amazing Adventures Of Dena and James- A Decade at Sea!!!

(the sound-bite version)

9/9/99- bought our first boat together a wooden fifty foot, William Garden Sea Wolf ketch rigged sailboat that we named S/V Sovereign Nation and upon boarding her for the first time Dena slipped and broke her left arm…

10/25/99- Our first big adventure aboard SVSN… We’d planned to go to Doe-Bay on Orcas Island (were we’d been married the year before) but got stuck in Oak Harbor, WA after getting hit by a terrible storm in the Saratoga Passage between Whidbey Island and Camano Island. The storm lasted for four days and was the worst storm in 25 years with winds reaching 65 knots with fallowing seas from 10 to 13 feet. We had a wet boat, a ton of bruises and a dreadfully sick cat. BUT, as we rounded the last channel marker a local T.V. crew caught us on camera and interviewed us after we made landfall. After describing our adventure to the interviewer She asked me if I’d ever do anything like that again, my reply; “Are you kidding me, we live for this shit!”

11/15/1999 to 12/31/1999- Our first haul-out of SVSN. After replacing the deck with a drunken fuck-up as our “ship-wrong” we splashed our Sovereign Nation and headed for Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island, WA.

01/01/2000-07/01/2000 We lived aboard SVSN as “sneak-aboards” for the next six months… (high lights include; rowing across Eagle Harbor every morning to the Ferry terminal and taking the ferry into Seattle every day and sailing our ship in Elliot Bay with friends and family.)

07/01/2000-09/09/2000- Gunkholing in the San Jaun Islands! A beautiful sailing adventure all throughout the Islands of the Northern Washington coast that ended with the two of us at anchor on an island looking at a bright spot on the horizon saying to each other “That is our next home!”

09/10/2000-07/15/2001- Blaine, WA. This was our first official Port-of Call… After making land-fall we quickly got jobs with the local newspaper, me as the photographer and Dena as one of the features writers. I also got a job at the Inn at Semiahmoo as the woodworker for the Inn. We made some great friends, shot some great pictures and started building our first website… “sovereignnation.com”

07/15/2001-09/16/2001- We sailed from Blaine, WA. to Eureka, CA. Our first off shore adventure together!!! Highlights include; Sunfish, dolphins, Orca’s and two airplanes smashing into two buildings in New York City…

09/16/2001-04/20/2002- Wet, tired and broke we made land-fall in Eureka, CA. and got work at the only place in that crappy little town that we could find… Dena sold glasses at the mall and worked the graveyard shift at a local breakfast joint and I worked at SEARS as a stock-boy… (After we’d had enough of that horrible little bum-fuck town Dena got a job in Oakland, CA. working for Toys in Babeland and we left SVSN in Eureka and moved our bodies to downtown San Fransisco…)

06/17/2002-09/17/2006- San Fransisco, Emeryville, Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland, CA… On the 17th of May in 2002 I got a phone call from the Eureka public marina saying that SVSN had been hit by a plastic-destroyer at the dock and the taft-rail, mizen boom-gallows and mizzen boom had been torn off the boat!!! Dena and I took the weekend off and went down to Eureka to sail SVSN down to the San Fransisco Bay… We Jerry-rigged the boat and sailed her down to SF.

On the 21st of May in the year 2002 we sailed our broken boat out of the Humbolt Bay into the Pacific Ocean once again… As we rounded Cape Mendocino we had 40 foot seas for ten hours!!! “WAVES the SIZE of WALMARTS” We watched our beautiful 6ft wooden lapstrake dory get destroyed by one of the biggest of those aforementioned monster-waves and made land-fall in Emeryville, CA. at 0201h on the 23rd of May 2002, just 55 hours after setting sail in Eureka… 55 hours that are as real to me today as if I had just lived through them yesterday!!! 55 hours that we will NEVER FORGET!

…We lived in the San Fransisco Bay for four years on two boats. After repairing SVSN we sold our Sovereign Nation to three sailors from the Czech Republic and they sailed her to the Mediterranean Sea from Richmond, CA. in the spring of 2004. We bought our next boat, S/V Sapien, a 1989 Gulf-32 pilothouse sloop, from Dena’s dad and put over 5000 nautical miles under her full keel over the next two years as we made her ready for our next big adventure, (highlights include, a two week sailing adventure up the California Delta and an incredible off shore sail down the coast of California to Monterray, CA.),  San Fransisco to Hawaii!!!

9/17/2006- 10/06/2006- San Fransisco, CA to Hilo, Hawaii!!! Yes we sailed a 32 foot sailboat 2040 nautical miles from the San Fransisco Bay to the Big Island of Hawaii, it took us 20 days and once again confirmed that, not only were we invincible but sailing around the world was the way we wanted to spend the rest of our lives!

10/06/2006-10/18/2007- After living on the hook in Hilo for four months and NOT finding work there we circumnavigated the Big Island of Hawaii to Kona where we lived for another four months before sailing to Honolulu, Hawaii on the Island of Oahu. We were able to find pretty good jobs there and a permanent slip for S/V Sapien but found that living under the shadow of debt-culture and across from an airport in “paradise” wasn’t the life that we had planned so we sold that boat, paid off all of our debts and briefly moved back to mainland just long enough to fall in and out of love with a fucked-up alcoholic hairdresser… Anyway, that is another story all together!

…Then we moved to Moses Lake, WA. saved up enough money to move to India (see India blog entries)…

12/25/2008-Present- So there we were in Trivandrum, Kerala, India looking at boats on E-Bay when I stumbled upon a beautiful 1961 Phillip Rhodes Chesapeake sloop rigged 32 foot sail boat. Dena and I had spent the last 6 months exploring the Indian subcontinent and writing our separate works of fiction and we both knew, at that moment, it was time to go back to sea. It took us a little over a month to sell off all of our furniture and our Bullet (our Royal Enfield, Bullet motorcycle) but we did and thus moved back to the USA to Norfolk, Virginia to take possession of our new boat.

…Well, yesterday was the 9th of September 2009, our tenth anniversary of living our dreams and once again we made two profound decisions that will forever change our lives…

1) I will spend the next 6 months finishing and preparing my manuscript “!RADIO! Vol-1″ for publication and…

2) We will name our new boat, S/V Sovereign Nation as well…

…So from this point on, we will start preparing ourselves for our next big adventure, Norfolk, VA. across another pond to circumnavigate The Mediterranean Sea in our new SOVEREIGN NATION!!!

The century was almost old enough to discard and our Sovereign Nation was in ship shape and Bristol fashion.
The event was the celebration of our first anniversary and the destination was our place of the declaration of our joining, Doe Bay on Orcas Island (Lat: 48 35′ 56. 84″ N. Lon: 122 52′ 09. 57″ W.)
We’d worked for over a year to see this dream come into fruition and as I stood on the bow of our mighty ship I knew that our adventure had just begun.
So. we tossed off the moorings at 0700h and shortly there after we set sail leaving Port Washington in Bremerton, Wa. for the last time.
The weather was perfect for sailing our 50ft William Garden Sea Wolf ketch rigged wooden sailboat with 15 knots of wind on our Port-side beams as we rounded the southern most point of Bainbridge Island. All day long we tacked from shore to shore making our way North. At the end of the first day we called the Kingston Marina home. We jumped aboard the Kingston/Edmonds ferry and discovered the best Indian food restaurant in Washington just on the other side of the ferry terminus.
Rested and ready for the continuation of our adventure the S/V Sovereign Nation with her crew of two (and one pissed off cat) set sail once again on the beautiful Puget Sound.
As we rounded Point No Point the winds kicked up to 18 knots and the first reef went in the main. It was a spectacular sail.
Because of the favorable winds we made the decision to head into the Saratoga Passage between Whidbey Island and Camano Island to drop the hook for the night at the Langley Anchorage… A beautiful night on the hook followed by a meal of white-trash-hash (Mac-n-Cheese with a can of tuna added for flavor) and baked beans, living the dream!!!
The next morning we set sail again at 0700h and ten minutes into the sail my friend Ray called us up to tell us that the weather forecast was pretty bad and that we should baton down the hatches for the night as soon as we could. Well, the sailing was beautiful with winds fair so we decided to head into Oak Harbor Marina to wait out the storm. At 1200h we were hit by the first of the big gusts a 30 knot blow that inspired me to reef down on both reefs in the main and strike the mizzen for the rest of that day. By 1300h we were in 10 foot following seas with the winds at a steady 25 knots tacking from lee shore to lee shore between the two islands. It was incredible!!!
By that time our cat Fritz, was freaking out and hiding under my feet while I was at the helm and driving me crazy so I had to man-handle him to get the poor little guy down below.
Dena was on the charts down below as well with the binoculars in hand peeking out of the companion way giving me constant directions when I heard a very strange sound. Off our starboard aft quarter, literally out of nowhere, came a Sea Ray ’27 cabin cruiser with a very scared young man at the helm getting his ass brutalized by the heavy seas. He pulled up dangerously close to our stern on the starboard side and yelled, “How do you get out of the Saratoga Passage!!!?”
Now, you have to imagine that this was a very surreal moment. Us in a 25 ton wooden sailing vessel fighting for our lives and this kid in a plastic destroyer asking us for directions! Dena plotted him out a course and over the screaming wind we managed to convince the poor guy to take his boat into Oak Harbor with us. He pretended to understand our directions and took off at about 15 knots ahead of us… we never saw him again.
After four hours of some of the hardest work of my life we spotted the entrance to the Oak Harbor marina resort. By that time the winds had kicked up to 65 knots and the following seas were a non-stop 12-13 feet breaking over our transom drenching me with ice water every 5 seconds or so. Dena took the helm just long enough for me to go forward and strike the jib and main sails a truly amazing adventure in itself! I got the sails secure and came back to the cock-pit just in time to make our approach to the entrance bar. Because you have to round up into the wind when you start the engine and strike the sails the boat had fallen off course during the maneuver so we were in a kind of cross wind by that point with the seas breaking over our beam at midships with the boat being pounded on all sides by the washing machine seas…It started to rain…
Describing the sound of a wooden boat being hammered by a terrible storm is impossible in itself but when you ad a howling terrified cat to the mix you get something right out of a nightmare, poor little guy, he was so scared and all he wanted to do was get under my feet for protection… OUT OF THE QUESTION!!!
Much to my surprise, we made the turn at the entrance bar and headed into the marina when suddenly the main sail blew out of my dressing and went in the water. Dena took the helm again and I ran foreword to re-secure the mainsail, another terrifying event that is impossible to relate.
The Oak Harbor Marina is a pretty nice place and normally very protected but on this particular occasion the seas inside the marina were an angry mess of white-caps and million dollar boats. We called the marina on channel 16 and told them our situation and they gave us a slip number along with directions on how to get in then wished us luck. The slip was well inside the marina so we powered through the storm and finally made our moorings with a slam at 1723h on the 24th of October 1999.
The two of us sat there in the cabin of S/V Sovereign Nation for an inordinate amount of time just holding each other and cuddling our poor terrified kitty.
We made the decision to do something that seemed somewhat normal to calm us down so we gathered up all of our wet cloths and went up to the top of the dock to do laundry.
When we got to the marina laundry mat there was a local T.V. News crew waiting for us. They told us that we had just lived through the worst storm in 65 years and wanted to know if we would give them an interview. We agreed so the four of us, Dena, myself, the interviewer and the camera man all went back down to the boat They took some pictures of our shredded flag blowing off the mizzen topping lift and they asked us a few questions about sailing in a storm then at the end of the interview the woman asked me if we’d do anything like that ever again…
“Are you kidding me,” I said, “We live for this shit!”