Sovereign Nations

The day was absolutely perfect.

I rowed in to get ice, take out the trash, and arrange for a short-term slip.  We have some work to do on the dinghy, and it’s hard to take something apart when you use it a dozen times a day.

This is an entrance to the marina – bathrooms to the left.

First we had to clean the bottom.  Rather than break out the brushes, we went for a sail.

James dropped the pennants that attached us to the mooring.  I pulled the jib out as we blew down on the wind.  In very few moments, we were sailing out of the mooring field.

Down the river we sailed.  The wind was fresh, the sun was shining, and it was warm.

We ran downwind under jib alone until we got past the bent number 5 green.

Somebody must have smacked this thing awfully hard, because they’re made out of solid stainless steel beams and tough stuff that normally you would want to avoid while underway in a little plastic boat.

James raised the main and tied two reefs in right away.

We were promised 10-20 all day, and that’s what we got.

James decked himself out for all weather before we got started.

I was acting like it was summer.

We had a goal for the day – to circumnavigate Fisher’s Island.  That involves leaving the river, transiting the infamous passage between Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound, known as “The Race” for its swift currents, and rounding back up through Fisher’s Island Sound.

Race Rock is well marked.

We sped through the Race at 6-7 knots, picking up a nearly 3 knot boost by hitting the Race at the strongest ebb.  Then it was broad-reaching down the Fisher’s Island shoreline with the Monitor doing all the work.

That’s James, on watch.

At this point, we’d had the wind mostly behind us, meaning our speed was subtracted from the speed of the wind.  Now it was time to round the tip of the island, bringing us into the teeth of the wind.

Rather than aim a little farther out to Lord’s Passage, we cut through Wicopesset Passage.  This seemed like a fine idea while we were going with the wind and current and clipping along.  It was almost like we hit a brick wall.  The Nor-Wester was on our bow, kicked up to about 15, and the current was now our enemy.  We nearly stopped in a dangerously rocky passage.

We headed for the green, which we thought should be on our port side, but that put us in shallow waters, too close for comfort to the Wicopesset rock pile.  With no power from wind and being swept toward the rocks by the current, we made a very modern decision.

Kick up the diesel!

Whew.  Through the passage and into Fisher’s Island Sound.  In here, the wind was right where we wanted to go.  We tacked back and forth, back and forth.  We turned away from the island – Stonington, then it was Mystic, then it was Noank, then we were done.

With 4 hours of beating between us and Burr’s Marina at 3:30pm, we made our second modern decision of the day.  Motorsailing.

We discussed what we’d do if that wasn’t an option.  Well – we would have taken the wider passage.  Or we would have tossed the anchor out and waited for a favorable current.  When we were getting our asses beaten in the Sound, making very little ground toward our destination, we could have easily anchored on one side or the other.

The diesel’s aboard, and we’re going to continue putting it to use when we feel like it’s an important piece of equipment for keeping us on the water, safe, and enjoying ourselves as much as possible.  We want to be purists.  We want not to rely on the evil, destructive fossil fuel industry.  To our credit, we did spend about $25 on fuel last year.  And in our opinion, that’s still too much.  But it got us back to the dock in less than 2 hours and, yesterday, it was worth it.

Quartering the waves under power, we rose and fell, rose and fell.  The cat looked funny, but he was not happy.  The paying customers on the Schooner Argia weren’t moving much on deck either.

Back at Burr’s, we pulled into a slip with contrary (and strong) wind and current.  Sigh.  We got’er done, and that’s what matters.

And a few hours later, at high tide, we pulled the dinghy onto the dock.  The bottom was much, much cleaner than it started, but this morning, it still looked like it had been slathered with hair gel.

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.

After all the intensity of sailing across the Sound on Saturday, we had significant wind for a night, a day, and a night on the hook.  Sunday drifted by while we were huddling down below dodging the heavy winds and reading.  You know, living the dream…while also prodded by our truest natures (nature? nurture?) to make something, do something, which something became our last blog post.

The photo above does a glorious job explaining how it felt to wake up on Monday morning in Threemile Harbor, East Hampton, New York, in the peace and quiet of a still dawn.

We spent the early morning cleaning up and stowing the boat.  The temperature was slated to reach 60 – leaving behind the highs of 40 and 45 for, we hope, the loosing action of a stronger sun.  We had to go out and explore our home in the Hamptons.

To actually buy a house in that part of the world you pretty much have to be a millionaire/billionaire from Manhattan (a few exceptions being made for those servants the rich cannot do without, for where would happiness be without a clerk to sell a shirt or a nail tech to buff and fill?  But, of course, those sorts are housed in special zones clearly labeled to keep out the well-behaved children of the rich while being irresistibly alluring to the older kids who know that “Mobile Home Park” is another way of spelling “Acid Score”).

Unless, of course, you’re us.

We launched the dink and gave’er a good eyeballing.  The sailing had shaved her beard and revealed a patina that reassured us.  Yes, there is real copper in the bottom paint we pay over $100 per gallon for.  We rowed the mile into a secondary channel.  Really – this place is strange.  A channel, not more than 50′ wide, brought us from Gardiner’s Bay (just off the Long Island Sound) into Threemile Harbor.  A few marinas line that channel, but more cluster at the south end, through another channel that is even narrower.  The expectation is that ever smaller boats would traverse ever narrower channels and burst out in the Atlantic Ocean.

We put the dink on a dinghy dock next to a Boatel launch that was actually launching a boat. We both thought that it a bit strange that they would be launching plastic-destroyers this early in the year.

We set off on foot for the town of East Hampton, 2.7 miles south.We had this big plan of going to see Jackson Pollack’s studio, the East Hampton windmill, and what we had read was one of the coolest little downtown Villages on the East Coast.

Well, after spending the last four days on the boat never walking more than 30 feet at a time, the 2.7 miles to East Hampton actually felt like a big deal to me (James). The little village wasn’t that great, all the grey ponytails driving around in expensive sports cars can only be laughable a few times at most before they just get old, everything was way over-priced, and – check this out – the Pollack house was not only the opposite way from where we had walked, it was closed. So we walked back.

That was no big deal really. We like walking together, even on a long one,  and just being together makes us happy.

So we headed back to our very own home in the Hamptons.  This time, I (Dena) rowed.  I felt strong and serene handling the oars.  It reminded me how much I loved living at anchor in Maine.

This is us, doing what makes us happy.  I brought us up near the Monitor.

What a good-looking stern!

We had planned to sail north to New London today and get business underway.  Our dirty clothes bag is bulging, our stores are thinning, and we’re skeptical about how much water we have left.  But rain threatened, and another day off beckoned, and today, again, we’re living the dream.

Yes!!!

After months and months of working in these tight quarters with freezing hands, sore backs, bruises, bumps, knots and filth, we did it.  We just left!

But you know, it’s kind of weird, I (James) used to tell people at West Marine that if I got caught in a big blow, so be it, but I’d never go out in one! Well that’s a lie… I should have prefaced that statement with, “that depends on my motivation!”

When we left Spicers Marina at 12:00pm on Thursday, let me tell you, we were motivated and we had to be. The winds were honking at a steady 25 knots with gusts up to 30 with seas from 4 to 6 feet on the bow inside Fishers Island Sound.  It was intense but we just had to put those months of work  to the test. So, the big seas and the howling winds almost felt good… Almost! It was also really cold but motivation can be  powerful protection from the elements at least temporarily.

Once we got the main up, the reefs in, and the Monitor set, it eased up a bit but we were beating hard, heading for Three Mile Harbor inside the South Fork of Long Island.

We met this sailor at Spicer’s, Doc, and we asked him, just like we ask all local sailors we meet, “What’s your favorite local anchorage?” and he told us it was “Beyond a doubt, Three Mile!”

…So Three Mile it was. But once we got out in the Long Island Sound and were getting our little butts spanked by Mother Nature, we started looking for other options. We could head up the Thames (rhymes with James) and shag a free mooring in New London and wait out the wind or we could go somewhere we’d never been before, like up the Niantic River, and put the hook down in a sheltered cove. Well, new is always a better choice so as we made North Dumpling Island we tacked and headed for Niantic.

Six hours after leaving Spicer’s, just before sunset, we were hook down on the Niantic River with the anchor buried in mud and the chain payed out to 10 to 1 just in case the winds got heavy.  (10 feet of chain for every 1 foot of water depth.)

…And boy did they ever!

The wind didn’t let up for the next 24 hours so we spent a wonderful day, Friday, all by ourselves in that quiet little anchorage drinking rum, playing Yahtzee and cleaning up after our sea-sick kitty (he’s okay now, it was just that first few hours in the big seas that did it to him).

The best thing about sailing in the early spring is the fact that no matter where you go you will most likely be alone.

On Saturday the winds eased up just after noon so we hauled anchor and set off.

The Niantic River entrance is crossed by two bascule bridges.  One is a railroad bridge – only 11 feet off the water – and the other is Highway 156.  The highway is 32 feet off the water and all bridge heights are measured at higher high tide, so we would be brushing the bridge at low tide.  No way were we going to chance that.  Besides, there is nothing like the feeling of stopping traffic on a Saturday to go under a bridge! I called the bridge operator on Ch. 13 on the VHF and that’s all there is to it, they just stop the traffic and open the bridge for you, just like that!

One of the main reasons we went up the Niantic River, besides the newness of the whole thing, was the fact that it would set us up for a very nice down hill run most of the way to Three Mile the next day and that it did.

We left the reefs in the main (just ’cause) and were under sail less than ten minutes after coming out of the river.

All the systems that we rebuilt or newly installed were put to the test. The wind generator works, I mean it charges, but we’re really not that satisfied with it. For some reason it’s a lot louder than it ever has been before and I believe that can be attributed to the fact that we painted the propellers. Another thing about the wind generator, it doesn’t seem to be generating as much power as it used to and we can’t really figure that one out. We’re getting most of our power from our 165 watts of solar panels and even living off the grid hasn’t put much strain on our power generating capabilities.

But the Monitor Windvane Self Steering system works incredibly!

It’s such an elegant system to watch and it does the job it’s supposed to perfectly.

We sailed a down wind straight line across the Long Island Sound between the North and South Forks of Long Island through Gardeners Bay before we tacked up wind for the beat into the Three Mile Chanel.

Yeah, it was cold and the winds were a bit fresh at times but here we are again all by ourselves in a beautiful anchorage in East Hampton, N.Y. doing what we do best, being free.

There are few mooring buoys out at this time of year and no other boats in the whole of Three Mile Harbor.  The wind has picked up again and we’re sitting tight today.  Maybe tomorrow we’ll row ashore and check out some Long Island, East Hampton style.

And maybe not.  The best thing about our lives right now – we don’t owe anybody an explanation.  We don’t have to ask anybody’s permission.  We can just do – or not do – whatever we want.

This is where we started.

So, just to let you know, this is going to be mostly pictures of the work we’ve been doing.  As soon as the weather warmed up enough that we could hope the epoxy would dry, we turned our combined attention to the aft deck, or fantail, if you prefer.

We’ve been fiending to get the Monitor wind vane (pictured above, with me) on this boat since we first saw it at the Marine Consignment of Wickford, months ago.  It works like this: a vane is pointed thin side to the wind.  The boat changes course and the wind angle changes, so the wind pushes the vane over to the side.  This turns a servo-rudder in the water and the water pressure pushes the rudder to one side.  That pulls a line through a bunch of blocks and attached to the tiller, steering the boat so that the wind vane is again straight up and down, thin side into the wind.  Strangely, wonderfully, it takes less than a moment for this to happen.  This is what steered us for 20 days between San Francisco and Hawaii.

First, we needed to prep the fantail, including the taftrail.

A big part of painting is prep.

Which includes filling the holes for all the random hardware we removed, filling and fairing, and sanding.  That’s where we are above.  Below, we’ve coated that new surface with neat epoxy.

And more sanding.

We wanted to install the Monitor and the Rutland 913 wind generator we already had, but they both needed bases.  We got these on before painting so that the 610 – thickened epoxy that, unlike regular epoxy, doesn’t overheat when used thickly – would bond chemically as well as mechanically to the fresh epoxy on the deck.  It was just a little too cold for it to cure in one day, so this phase stuck around longer than we wanted.

Finally, though, we primed.

And painted.  Then we took several deep breaths each and drilled a bunch of new holes in the deck we just fixed.

James says, “Whew.”

And then it was on with the deck hardware.

Now, that picture shows the wind generator pole in the upper left corner.  Now, we’re going back in time just a tiny bit.

Putting the wind generator back together was a task that covered everything from electrical wiring, pvc pipe fittings to piece together the different pole sizes, through manhandling the heavy thing into place and all the way to bolting it down with serious butyl tape.

Starting with…

Then moving to wiring…

A closeup of the rectifiers.

The whole thing went together pretty well after that.

Another step closer…

Once again – I’m not the only person who works on these things.  James, as the photographer, gets a visual bad rap, but is right there with me when not photographing me.

Then we were ready to put the thing on the pole and mount it.

And then up we went!

And guess what?  We started making power with it.

YES!

And on to the next project.   Cause we’ve been working feverishly like that.

Monitor – here we come!

We took the old mounting tubes and hardware off, drilled holes in the new tubes (feels strange to make such a short story of such an epic, cuss-word laden event), and bolted them into place.

Once again, this is the second time we’ve done this job.  More often than not, that’s not the case.  So this one did go straightforwardly into place.

You have to know, through out this entire fantail project Dena spent most of the time in the aft lazarette which, as you can see, has a vertical opening hatch that is just big enough for Dena…

There are a total of 16 through-bolts with 1/4 inch backing plates holding this machine on our boat, it’s not going anywhere that we don’t!

A thing of beauty!

…And this is how it drives the boat.

It really is that simple and it’s so much fun to watch.

We finished just in time for a really nice weather window so we’re going to go out into the world and test this rig, starting tomorrow.

Yes, we did it!

…With kitty!

So, just like that, the galley is done!

Ok, that’s a lie…

After months of working on this project one and two days at a time we did more work in the last two weeks than was possible in the five months prior.

…But first, we took her out for a spin!

We were pretty good about running the engine periodically throughout the winter and the last time we filled the tank with fuel was in Provincetown, Mass, on the trip down to Connecticut this past fall. So it was time to fuel her up, shake off the bottom and get out of the dock for a little reminder of why we do this shit.

It had snowed the night before and it was brutally cold but that never stopped us before.

The trip started out calm, crisp, and beautiful but as we rounded up to head into the Mystic River a big squall bore down on us.  By the time we made it to the Brewers Marina fuel dock, yep, it was snowing again.

After joking with the staff about loving the weather around here and this being the perfect day for a sail, we headed back to Noank and tore into the job once again.

By the end of that day we had the new green trim installed around the new cabinetry and the balustrade painted.

Then we rented a car and ran off to New Haven, Conn, to celebrate my 49th circumnavigation around the sun. It was awesome, we went to the Yale campus to get a look at the Natural History Museum and did a bunch of shopping for the new galley. We tried to get a sneak-peak at Shakespeare’s Hamlet staring Paul Giamatti but of course it had been sold out for months so we headed back to the boat and resumed our labors the next day.

One of the really cool things we picked up the day before was a bunch of new LED lights for the new galley so the first thing we did after making coffee was install our new lights. I can honestly tell you that it has never been that bright in our galley and the best part about it, they only draw .03 amps!

Next, WE MOVED ALL OUR SHIT!!!

To install the balustrade we had to (got to) pull the sink, the stove and remove everything from the shelving, but hey, we love to move our shit so what the heck!

The balustrade install went well once we found the magic cuss words so we moved on to the new cutting board that fits on top of the stove.

While we had everything pulled apart, we (ahem) replaced the bungs we’d removed last summer and did a fresh coat of varnish on the bulkhead.  Requiring a full sanding…

Before the Epifane could be applied.

We went to Ikea in New Haven to get the plastic see-through food containers that we built the new galley around and while we were there we found a cutting board that would go on the stove top pretty well. It was always part of the plan to build a cutting board to fit on top of the stove and stow it behind the stove on its own little rack while we were cooking. It was the way we had it set up on our last boat, S/V Sapien, and it was one of those very smart things about the design of that boat that we wanted to emulate on S/V Itinerant. So we did.

Dena cut and routed the pieces, then I sanded them, then she epoxied them in place and this is what it looked like.

Please don’t get me wrong, Dena made this beautiful table pretty much all by herself.  The only thing I did was sand the pieces before and after she put them in place… Isn’t it incredible?  (Dena’s aside: Except that it was also his idea to do the mahogany pieces around the perimeter and that’s what really makes the whole thing pop like crazy.)

The last piece of this cabinet was the shelving for canned goods.  Eventually there will be cushions so that there’s a seat in front of it, but in the meantime…

And this is how it all came together.

They invented the way we Americans perceive our seasons here in the Atlantic North East. By they I mean, most likely, Ben Franklin, didn’t he invent “all things American”?

…Anyway when it went from February 27th to March 1st it was like flipping a switch from winter to spring and as we all know, springtime, especially March, means wind and rain. The weather reports were telling us that there would be an intense bout with wind and rain this week but only for Tuesday with the rest of the week shaping up to be perfect for our working projects.

So on Monday we loaded up the bikes with everything we’d need for a good long ride and took off early.  We knew that it was going to be a big day, so we planned to eat breakfast along the way.

Ahem.

This story really starts on Friday.  In the rental car, we did as much running around as we could in our efforts to get the doomed refrigerator and the propane stove working.  Our last jaunt of the day was to Airgas in Waterford.  I had called them and the person on the phone said that, yes, they stocked all kinds of hoses already made up and, yes, 25 foot lengths were standard.

When we got there (meaning when a mall sprung up in the middle of nowhere), we discovered that the person on the phone was a bad listener.  Though I had said I needed a 25 foot low pressure propane hose with female 3/8 inch flare fittings on each end, she must have heard 25 foot blah blah hose blah blah blah.  Cause all their hoses were for welding and air tools, not for propane.

At the counter, the guy told us that they might be able to make up the hose we need, but that Ranzie was the guy for that stuff and he was gone.  Wouldn’t be back until Monday.  That being, of course, not a day we planned to have a rental car.

When Monday rolled around and the weather was bearing down on us and we were still eating nothing but PBnJ, we did the only thing we could do to make life easier.  I (Dena) called Airgas – Ranzie’s direct line, no less – and left a message.  Right before we left, I tried again.  And then we rode to the community.  That was our first 5 miles.

Once there, I called again.  This time, I called the main number and was handed to Ranzie.  He was evasive about giving exact answers, but said he had the hose and could figure something out for fittings.  As much as I would have preferred a strong, definitive, and excited yes, that would have to do.

This was the point where we started really counting.  The trip to Airgas was going to be 10 miles, each way, from the community.  There’s a place called DJ’s Campus Kitchen, just on the other side of the Gold Star Bridge.  This is the same bridge we walked across this summer when we went to the Nautilus museum and we ate at DJ’s that morning and just loved the giant, plate-sized pancakes.  So 5 more miles and we’d get some breakfast.  Can do.

No go.  DJ’s is open 6 days a week, Monday not being one of them.  So we decided to hold out in hopes that there would be a decent breakfast place somewhere along the remaining 5 mile route (10 miles having already been covered).

Though we rode through a dizzying array of varied neighborhoods, not a one of them had a breakfast place on the main drag.  This is definitely not Maine.

So we made it to Airgas, feeling good and strong, but hungry.  The conversation with Ranzie was short and effective.  We’d come back in about an hour.

The hunger, though, that got us all tied up.  The only food within a mile was a piece of shit McDonalds in a Wal-Mart.  What could be worse than that?  But with 15 miles of bike riding under our belts with nothing to eat and another 15 to come, we were strongly motivated.  The idea of riding a couple miles to the Ruby Tuesdays brought a fleeting grimace to my face and we rolled on down to Mickey’s.  I’ve never like their fish sandwich.  If in a bind, I choose the King any day, but alas – we got two of our least favorite environments at the same time and James got enough onion from the tartar sauce to send him unhappily to the bathroom.

Shaking off the sense that I’d been manipulated and punished for not driving a car, we went to Lowe’s.

This part of the trip was largely exploratory.  We’ve been debating, for quite some time, on how we were going to build an aft rail for our boat without resorting to the expense of 316 stainless steel and the expertise we would have to hire in order to have it made up and installed.  We’d discussed whether or not we could do it ourselves, without welding, but still – the tube alone is extremely expensive.

Then James brought up an idea he’d been thinking about, and we had one of those moments where it felt like – of course!

Galvanized pipe can be primed and painted.  It can be wrapped with line that can be painted.  It can be protected all kinds of ways, basically, and is more resilient – less brittle – than stainless.  It comes with threaded ends and an array of fittings to apply to those ends.  Best of all, a 10′ length of galvanized pipe is 10-15% the cost of stainless.  Basically, we can do the whole thing for what we’d pay for labor on stainless.  Or another way, we can do galvanized now, whereas stainless would be off in the murky, no-sure-income-having future.

At the store, we priced it out.  We can do the whole project, including extra tube in case we mess up a bend, for $200.  That means getting work a little sooner, but it also means that we can do our entire aft deck project in the next couple weeks.  We’re going to clear the aft deck, fill all the holes, grind/fill/sand/prime/paint/etc, and reinstall all the things we really want, without all the random shit we don’t.  If we didn’t do the rail at the same time, we would have several problems.  Where to lead the propane hoses, since we’re relocating the tanks.  Whether or not to keep the stanchions that are already there and fix those holes later.  Etc.

Better.

Then we went and picked up our perfect propane hose.  Even better.

After 10 miles back to the community, we sat with the cats for a while, trying to make up for leaving them so much.  We each took showers and relaxed a bit.  Then we did miles 25-30.

By the way, for those of you who are bicycling badasses, remember that James did all of that hauling a load in the trailer.  He is the true bad ass.

Ah – finally.

We had wonderful coffee today, percolated on our completely functional gimballed stove.  Love it.

Tuesday, it rained.  We knew it was coming and batted around the idea of a day off, reading and such.  I (Dena) was pretty into that idea, but James was gently persistent.  He kept looking at the Blue Sky MPPT Solar Controller that had just arrived in the mail.  I broke our last one getting it into the dumb box they sent.  This one didn’t come with a box, but we were planning to build our own.

So, why not?  We built it.

First, we drew out the plan.  Second, we cut the holes for the ammeters.

The rest of the cuts went smoothly.

We cut the hole for the controller.

Putting it all together got us:

And then wired it up.

The rest of the box went on the aft bulkhead and this face went on the front.

By which time there was no sunlight left, so we couldn’t even tell if it was working correctly!

And this morning, we discovered that it wasn’t.

The ammeters require shunts.  Which we don’t have.  So James rewired the damn thing to bypass the ammeters, but it definitely works.  It was trickling power into our mostly full battery when we left.

Here at the community, we were meeting a navy wife with two kids who wanted to take our kitty.  We’re looking into finding them new homes because we’re not nearly done with the big projects on the boat.  The noxious chemicals they’ll be exposed to on the boat could be terrible for them, and they can’t leave when it’s bad like we can.  So yeah, the family showed up.

The younger kid jumped right on Tackle, as though he’d misunderstood the name.  He was rough with the cat and we were skeptical enough that we’re waiting to see if there’s another home for him.  Really, he’s just too good a cat.  He didn’t get up and run away when the kid roughed him up.  Weird, right?

Well, there’s no denying he’s a good cat.

We got back to the community- shit, a million years ago- to discover that we were going to have a big (all) managers pow-wow in one of the unfinished 2nd floor apartments. We went up to the apartment, made ourselves comfortable and moments later were joined by the other two sets of managers. The lead managers showed up first, then the shit-heads and we got right down to it. The two leads told us when their last day of work would be and started talking about how there have been tensions and how “we” would “all” have to work together and respect each other and…

I (James) jumped right in and asked the only question that I thought really mattered.

“When are you two leaving?” I was speaking to the two shit-heads that have been lying about us and trying to make our lives miserable over the last five months.  They were supposed to go to their new community at the end of February or beginning of March.

The response was a simple, “At least two more months.”

The math made it’s way through my head… They weren’t leaving and our regional manager had already made them an offer to be the lead managers of the community and there was no fucking way I was going to work for those lying, cheating do-nothings so my response was simple.

“There is no way I’m going to work with these two fucking clowns for even one more second.”

Dena said, “Yeah, this won’t work.  We quit.  This is our last day.  Our last hour.  Our last 15 minutes.”

Okay.  That’s done.

Back to the boat.  Literally.  We jumped on our bikes and rode to the boat to finish the last day-off project – inserts to make the sinks usable as countertop space.

Then we rode back again.  The focus had shifted.

Now we have to make the boat livable, get all our shit on board (moving all our shit…again!), and create an environment for the cats.  The very next day, we put an ad up on Craigslist for a moving sale.  Two days after quitting, we sold everything we’d purchased in order to make that dumb apartment work for us.  Lighter and a tiny bit richer, we turned all our attention to the boat.

Livable means working stove and plumbing.  It means stowing our clothes and tools again.  It means installing the refrigerator.  It means devising a plan for our two roommates – the cats.

The stove has been a nightmare of parts problems.  We moved the stove farther from the tank, so we got a longer hose.  The fittings are the wrong size, so we hunted in vain for reducers don’t exist.  While we hunted, the weather worsened.  We’re still without a way of heating food, so this is our diet:

This fits not only our cooking options, but also our financial situation.  We’re doing it low-budget from here on, as we didn’t make enough money from the corporate hell in order to fund serious boat work.  We’re talking reusing materials and buying on the cheap at every turn.  And since we like PBnJ well enough and making the boat suffer is not an option…we’ll eat basic.

Installing the sink was another project of major importance.  Again, fittings were lacking.  We have managed to find them at this point, and both the pressure and foot pump are hooked up and working but not without that level of difficulty that you only get on a boat.

Before we could test the water coming in, we had to hook up the drain so it would have some way of getting out.

A process which proceeded with the usual number of skinned knuckles from tightening hose clamps.  We also had to replace our stiff sanitation hose with the flexible bilge hose you see in the next photo – it’s the stuff with the dark coil.

And then we ran some water.

James filled a mug and sipped.  Then spat.

It seems that, when our bilge pump broke earlier this year, salt water sat on top of the water tank access hatches long enough to seep into the main water tanks thus fouling the remainder of the water we had in there.  Bad, bad, bad.  Now we’ll have to empty the tank, refill it, re-empty it, and probably shock it with vodka or bleach.  We’d more or less expected to have to clean the tank, but we didn’t foresee the salt.

Last on the list of things that did not go well – and this is a big one – is the refrigerator.  First, building it into the old hanging locker was a string-of-curses kind of experience.  It’s so strong and firm now, that it’s hard to remember what was difficult about it.  Building the compartment is overshadowed by our next discovery.

The fucking refrigerator doesn’t work.

It comes on and runs for a while, but then it starts to short-cycle.  On for about 3 seconds, off for about 5 seconds.  Also, it’s not cooling.

So we rented a car.

By the way, there was this storm.  Gale force winds blowing snow around.

But we kept working inside the boat – luckily we didn’t have to ride to it!

Living aboard is better.

Anyway, a stormy day seemed like a good time for the car rental.  We took the refrigerator to the nearest authorized service center just to discover they don’t even make the parts for it anymore.  I’m (Dena is) grateful to the service person who suggested we check with the parts department before giving them $75 to diagnose the problem.  If we’d paid $75 to find out that problem couldn’t be fixed, I would have been infuriated.  As it is, we donated $230 to a local marine chandlery (the same one we patronized for the hinges we didn’t use) and drove all the way to Rhode Island for no real reason.

Except – we hit a Lowe’s while we were there and got the trim we needed in order to move forward in the galley.

We cut the trim to the right length, putting 45 degree angles on the places where two pieces met.

Yay miter box!

Put some primer on them…

James put the first coat of paint on today.

Meanwhile, we also finished the drawer by cutting and routing out the handle.

We also cut and routed the finger holes, then repainted the hatch covers.

Finally, today, they were ready to install.

The galley cabinet is well on its way toward done.

Hey – what’s that whiskey doing there?  Gimme that!

And yeah.  We’re getting things done at 10x the rate we were before and spending almost all our time on board.  It’s amazing how fast this stuff goes when we’re working on it every day, even when it feels like one step forward and two steps back.  Remember our favorite saying?

The only work worth doing.