We Quit Our Jobs!

Life on the Wanderer Ball was pretty exciting!

Right after that last post, we went to a movie (can’t remember which, so now you know how good it was) and stopped by a WM customer’s boat to see his progress. The sky got awfully nervewracking, with a big parenthetical black streak too thick to be joking. (Wait – it was the Avengers. Yawn. No, it was great, really. Yawn.) We jumped on our bikes and beat the storm to the yacht club. We locked up and beat the storm down to the dock. We got in the dink and…didn’t beat the storm to the boat. Instead, we got mothball sized hail along with a deluge so intense that we had to bail at the same time I (James) rowed.

Waddaya gonna do about the weatha?

The best part? It kept raining. Curious why that was best? Well, we hadn’t had showers in, um…a few weeks, at least, and so we pulled the soap out and did a fresh-water shower right there in the cockpit. Naked tits and ass (but no cock) and then a brisk dryout below decks and all was right with the world.

We rowed all over the Back River trying to find the best place to put the dink and discovered that every bit of the New England Coast from Cape Cod to Portland, Maine is very sadly for rent.

This little tricky spot seemed like an option, until we came back to the boat an hour before low tide to find the dink hard…and I mean…hard aground.

Those are rocks and they’re not underwater.

We wandered around Hingham and wasted an hour by shagging a shower, finally tugging the little boat free about two hours after the low.

We humbled ourselves to the Yacht Club members of the South Shore for three gloriously free weeks. We squeezed every bit of niceness the good people of the S.S.Y.C could eek out of their squeaky little, over-taxed stores of grace.

They did it. They didn’t want to, but they did. They let two serious cruising sailors shag on one of their empty mooring balls for three weeks before the season started and you’d think it was going to kill the poor little capitalist bastards.

By THEM, we don’t mean PHreD or the unknown owner of the Wandering Ball. We mean the “officers” of the club, those who were so stressed out by things like staining wood (still not finished, BTW) that we represented the real and present danger of stroke.

So we left Back River with a curious taste in our mouths…

…Maybe that’s not the best choice of words!

We made it back to the South Shore Yacht Club after our 16 mile (round trip) bike ride and our 8 hours of “same-ol” to find that some person, a human person had left a hot steaming pile of shit in our beloved little boat! WHAT MAKES A PERSON THINK THAT’S A GOOD IDEA!?

Really!?

That sucked.

Anyway, the next day we threw off the lines and headed back to Wessagussett.

I (James) could get caught up on the shit-thing so I’d better get back to the story… a-hem.

We motored around the Back River peninsula on a glass water day back to the very mooring we picked up almost a year ago to the date.

Since we leap-frog our boat and our bikes, this meant James walking from the new club to the old one, then riding to work. I (Dena) tried to do the same thing a few hours later and arrived at the bike rack sans keys.

Instead of repeating the same trip, I walked back along the water, including a jumping-skipping part along a broken-down old wall that was supposed to keep the hill from falling down.

Suckas.

Of course, it was built in 1928, so I guess it didn’t owe those houses any money.

Once I succeeded in getting my bike back, I loaded it up with laundry and set off, decked up in my uncertain-weather gear.

At a red light, a car idled next to me until the light changed. I started to make my protected left turn and heard a voice yell, “Get on the sidewalk, weirdo!” Looking over, I was astounded to see a smart phone in the asshole’s hands. He recorded himself hassling a biker…after waiting like a coward for the light to change!

Prick.

Onward.

We had shit to do!

The big project that we’ve had in the works for the last year (at least!) has been the Fan Tail Aft-Rail (above, before).

We’ve both been drawing and talking and measuring this cluttered space on the back of the boat for years actually but it wasn’t until we found an aft-rail on craigslist this past winter that “almost” suited our needs that started us thinking in terms of Must-Get-it-Done.

When we first thought about doing this thing, we were in New Jersey. We figured we would just go to the closest Boxy McBoxerson, pick up a shit-load of galvy-pipe, a few 90’s, a couple of bases, and we’d be all set. But then we started looking at the manufactured sort, the kind “they” (the boat manufacturing industry) built to perfectly fit the mass-produced sailing vessels from a once thriving (but no longer) American boat-building industry.

With the discovery of a boat junkyard (never to be ignored), we also discovered a rail that would work. And then they wanted too much money. And then we saved up some and then they had sold it.

Fuckers.

But we discovered another rail that would work, with a little reciprocal-saw action. We cut that fucker up, put it in a truck (Thanks Bobby!), hauled it back to the boat…

Removed the old stuff…

And started putting it together.

Not always graceful…

Or dignified…

With the old wind generator gone and the new rail in place, it looks so clean and functional. We have to redesign everything about using that space. We’d planned to put the propane tanks, the folding ladder, the Fortress stern anchor, both of the Siemans 75 watt solar panels, the fenders, and spare lines on that rail while also using it to route the Monitor windvane control lines.

Not going to happen.

We’ll pick the best and make it work – propane tanks, Monitor lines, hopefully the solar panels, and not much else.

Next project!

And oh yeah – we quit our jobs!