Sovereign Nations

Of course, that’s a bit simplistic…some of these boats don’t look like racers, but they’re all pushing some limits…or this wouldn’t happen:

I really like this: Atom Voyages: Solar Tracker.

On S.V. Sapien, James and I had a small solar panel on a cup-and-ball mount and another on a swivel.  We adjusted the position of the panels throughout the day in order to get the most power from them.  With very little official wattage in panels, we made a great deal more electricity than I would have expected possible.  I’m talking a week’s worth of power before having to run the engine, and that includes watching movies on the laptop pretty much every night.

On S.V. Nomad, all three panels were fixed-mounted to dodger/bimini.  The two smaller ones are still mounted on the dodger, under the boom.  We get power from them – no doubt.  But not anywhere near their full capacity for the full day.  The third one came off with the bimini (a ridiculous installation – completely occluded the view when heeling) and it’s on the side deck with clip-type disconnects on the electrical cable.  It’s a silly amount of resistance, but we’re working on better solutions.

The mount linked to above is a better solution, for sure.  Whether or not we use this model, I think we should seriously consider putting in goal posts at the back of the boat.  With the Rutland 913 wind charger on one post and a fully adjustable solar panel on the other, we’ll be in a very flexible position for making power.

That plus these absolutely gorgeous new batteries we’re adding to the system: Mastervolt Slimline 12v AGM Batteries should give us much comfort in the power department.

Itinerant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An itinerant is a person who travels from place to place with no fixed home.[1] The term comes from late 16th century: from late Latin itinerant (travelling), from the verb itinerari, from Latin iter, itiner (journey, road).[2]

Types of itinerants

* Drifters (rogues, rovers, vagabonds, vagrants)
* Perpetual travelers, including illegal aliens (migrants)
* Nomads, including hunter-gatherers and gypsies
* Hobos, including tramps, bums, derelicts
* Refugees and displaced persons
* Street people (street children, paupers, squatters, waifs, schnorrers)
* World citizens

Itinerants throughout history and today

* Freight Train Riders of America (freighthoppers in United States)
* Romani people
* Various indigenous peoples (indigenous peoples, including uncontacted peoples)

* Afar people in Horn of Africa
* Bajau of Philippines
* Banjara of India
* Bedouin (nomadic Arab people of the desert)
* Beja people in North Africa
* Bushmen of Southern Africa
* Dom people in North Africa and Southwest Asia
* Eurasian nomads of Eurasian Steppe
* Ghilzai in South-Central Asia
* Indigenous Australians
* Indigenous Norwegian Travellers
* Indigenous peoples of the Americas
* Irish Travellers
* Kuchi people of Afghanistan
* Nomads of India
* Pygmy peoples in Equatorial Africa and parts of Southeast Asia
* Quinqui in northeren half of Spain)
* Scottish Travellers
* Yeniche people in Europe
* Carnies (travelling show-people)
* Hippies, including New Age travellers and Rainbow Travellers
* Jossers (circus artists)
* Kobzari (musicians of Ukraine)
* Lightermen (bargees in England)
* Peredvizhniki (realist artists of Russia)
* Swagmen (homelessness transients in Australia and New Zealand)
* Circuit riders and Gyrovagues (Christian ministers and monks)
* Bhikkhus (Buddhist monks)
* Mendicants (beggars of Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism and Buddhism)
* Pilgrims (religious travellers)
* Sadhus (Jain monks)
*Global Circumnavigaters

* Christopher McCandless
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau
* Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
* Paul Erdős
* Gautama Buddha
* Historical Jesus

See also

* Anarcho-primitivism
* Human migration
* Illegal immigration
* Multiculturalism
* Simple living
* Travel
References

1. ^ Itinerant Synonyms, Itinerant Antonyms at Thesaurus.com
2. ^ Definition of itinerant from Oxford Dictionaries Online

Further reading

* George Orwell (1933). Down and Out in Paris and London. London: Victor Gollancz. ISBN 0-15-626224-X.
* Jack Kerouac (1957). On the Road. Viking Press. ISBN 0-14-118267-9.
* Rolf Potts (2002). Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Villard Books. ISBN 0-81-299218-0.
* Sean A. Mulvihill, Larry Kurnarsky (2007). “Living Luminaries – The Serious Business of Happiness” (documentary). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0447431/. “Life is a journey.”

The best of a 30-shot photo-freak-out.

… And enjoying the lightshow.

I’m down below decks listening to the rain and early fall wind howl through our wind generator, I’m shaking my head, tisking my tongue and thinking about out last adventure… You’ll love this one, it’s got a happy ending!

The job was over… I had put all of my wage-slaving resources into that (broken application of an oblivious ideal) job and come out of my two month haze with a powerful sense of independence and caring.

The lines were tossed off, we were underway and it was 0630 hours.

The night before our escape we loaded up our little pick-up with all of our non-sailing gear and building supplies and parked it at the Liberty Marina about a quarter of a mile away from Oak Grove, where our boat was. I didn’t sleep worth a shit but by the time we got underway I was as freaked out and as ready for an adventure as I’ve ever been.

We set sail to the Sou-Easterly breeze freshening off our beam just East of the South River Bridge and I started up my computer so I could send off my resignation; it read…

Dear Carefree Boat club,

I quit.

My final day of work was Friday September 24th 2010.
Please attempt no further correspondence.

James

…And just like that, I was not working for the Carefree Boat club or rather, free of carefree.

I guess I have to give some kind of reason behind my abrupt retreat from my former employer or a passing reader might think I was little more than a disgruntled slacking dock hand… Oh, believe me it was so much more than that.

Here’s my take on the aforementioned ‘oblivious ideal’.

Let’s say you (not really you but some other you, whatever…) got “the hook” and you want to go boating but don’t want, or you think you can’t afford, a boat. Like most Humans and Americans in particular, that are used to getting pretty much anything they want, you look for an alternative to owning and actually working on a boat, and again, like most spoiled (fucking, top-of-the-food chain) Homosapiens you go to the internet and you find what you are looking for… A pretty website that tells you exactly what you want to hear.

What a “Carefree” customer wants to hear, and is told, not only by the pretty website but by a non-stop-barrage of e-mails, phone calls and slick office meetings with very motivated salesmen (with 6 or more children to feed), is that you can have a beautiful watercraft, anytime you want, it will run perfectly and you don’t have to care at all, that’s why it’s called Carefree…

Of course, in there lies, my problem.

I am a man who has spent the last decade living on and caring for my boat and I honestly believe that it is imperative that I, at the very least, give a shit. If I didn’t care, if I was care-free, I couldn’t do it and as a matter of fact, I don’t think anyone can. If you don’t care about the vessel and how it works and moves through the water than how can you care about the effects that vessel has on the environment and the other people that share that water with you. I believe that you have to immerse yourself, not only in the boat but the environment and the industry that surrounds boating if you’re going to be safe and respectful on the water, and I also believe, that is the only way to do it right. I’ve always told people that ask how Dena and I can live like we do; to do it safely and comfortably you have to change every single part of your life to those ends, or rather, you have to care, deeply and profoundly.

At first I was as idealistic as I usually am about a new opportunity, I told myself that there was no better person to teach the club’s novice boaters how to ignore the creed of the club they were giving all their money too and care about what they were getting into. Of course I didn’t tell the club owners that the above was my (nefarious) plan but that is the actual job that I set out to do.

What my carefree job turned out to be in reality was launching 15 carefree boats, twice a day with a compliment average of 3 to 5 carefree boaters per launch and then capturing the vessels and drunken carefree’ers upon their arrival, cleaning up their soggy carefree messes, pumping out their carefree urine and puke filled toilets and cabins and saving their carefree lives when they broke their carefree boats.
After getting overwhelmed immediately after starting the job by all the above Carefree-ness  I very quickly realized that there was no one in the company that shared even a hint of my on-the-water philosophy and finding the people that would respond to my expertise within the club its self was going to take a very long time if I didn’t have the right staff for the the project. The project of changing a bunch of dangerous carefree fools on the water into careful boaters.

Right out of the gate, the decision to hire me deeply hurt the feelings of the two guys that were working there for most of the summer. They both could clearly see, that after all the shit they had to deal with concerning the members of the club, that a company that would go off and hire an “outsider” to take over a job that they both wanted, wasn’t worth a shit and the only way they could see to get back at the company was of course, to monkey-wrench the manager. Both guys hated each others guts for various reasons so it wasn’t a unified concerted effort to bring me down but along with the other responsibilities of the job it did have a remarkable effect on me. Those guys believed, incorrectly, that they could do the job I was hired to do so both of them showed me nothing but contempt. And why not, they didn’t know me, I was just another manager, all they knew was that the company they worked so hard for didn’t care enough to pay them enough to live, didn’t offer them any kind of perks or benefits and didn’t believe they could do a job that they thought they were already doing. They believed, correctly, that the company they were working for was, in fact, Carefree.

But…
….I am also a man for whom life has endless possibilities and all that Carefree’ing got old enough to set our ship to sail on the MOST Perfect Sailing Day of THIS YEAR!!!

Of course you have to know that Dena’s responce to my initial grumblings of not wanting to take it for long was always a resounding, “Fuck it, let’s go!”
… So we sailed off into to the sunrise, away from the non-caring, from the careless, from the (fucking) carefree once and for all with my bridges thoroughly a-flame. I walked out without notice on a Saturday, dude, I was not going back to that job.
…And it was beautiful and inspiring and it reminded us of what it was we were doing, and how we were doing it, and how right it was for us, and that we were happy just to be doing it, just to be sailing off into the sunrise together. The sailing effected us deeply, in ways that are so absolutely profound that we couldn’t help but care.

…It looked like this.

The wind was on our starboard beams aft quarter for the first two hours under-sail but as we rounded up into the Chesapeake Bay-proper the wind, as foretold by our technology, changed its direct to our port-side broad beam. The gybe was invigorating!

North, north east for 8 solid hours when the wind changed again to give us an hour of wing on wing down hill running back up that old River to our familiar moorings in green water… Home, again, and as always, ready for the next adventure.

The End

Now all we need is a fight!

It all started out as a regular, run-of-the-beautiful-mill sailing trip.

No really.

James has been doing the commute between Essex and Edgewater for a few weeks now, but the idea was always that we’d move down to the dock on which he works.  Rain stalled us on the two occasions we’d planned to make the 10-hour sail down. Yesterday was fine, though, and we got out of bed knowing we would be sailing all day.

We stowed gear, stored foodstuffs, and worked our mooring lines off the pilings they’d been wrapped around since we moved to Cutter Marine on April 20, 2010.  Setting off, we had no wind and resigned ourselves to motoring out to open bay.

The Chesapeake greeted us with vivid patches of blue sky behind the shifting drifts of dense cumulonimbus.  We motored; we sailed; we motorsailed.  The rhythm of wind-building and wind-dying was followed closely by our jib, which roller-unfurled and roller-furled in a flirty dance.  The main sail did a stately version, staying high but pulling in while motoring and drifting far out when sailing – we were broad-reaching all day long.

Have you ever been sailing?  It’s a lovely combination of doing nothing and being busy the whole time.  Watching for crab pot buoys, keeping on course, watching other boats approach or glide away, adjusting sail – none of it is stressful.  On a light-wind day like yesterday, we didn’t even observe our usual watch schedule.  We passed the helm off whenever it felt right and the person not touching the tiller was responsible for spotting buoys.  It was relaxing and happy and we loved on each other at every opportunity.

Slicing kalamatas to spark up our colby-jack sandwiches – that was the dangerous high-point of the sail until we got well into the South River.

I was at the helm and sailing obliquely toward the land just down-river from the Quiet Waters Park.  I scoped out the dark-bricked, castle-like dwelling on the cliff up-river from the park and just beyond the entrance to Harness Creek.  When James asked me how close we could get to the shore, I glanced again at the chart, confirming what I’d seen before.

“Pretty close,” was my laconic answer.

The depth sounder was showing a steady 14 feet.  That means about 16 feet of water depth – plenty for our boat.  Much of the Chesapeake and its estuarine systems run shallower than that.  I’ve been in channels with 7 and 8 feet of water.  To a Puget Sound girl, that sounds like nothing.  But I’ve been getting used to it.  And I was about to pay for my overconfidence.

The plan was to watch the depth carefully.  According to the chart, the bottom should come up to about 9 feet and stay there a little ways before jumping up to 2 feet.

It didn’t.

The depth sounder read 14 and then I felt a slow jolt, our momentum died, and the sounder changed its mind and told me – about 2 seconds too late – that I had 2.4 feet of water around me.

My boat is deeper than that.

James and I looked at each other, looked up at the full sails, and started talking.  Once we decided it would be useful to take turns with the talking thing, James began the conversation on the right foot.

“We are so fucked.”

I turned away from this statement of fact and started sculling.  That just means wiggling the rudder back and forth by pushing and pulling the tiller.  The point?  I was trying to power off of the soft bottom.  Didn’t work.

James backwinded the main each direction, one after another, while I sculled.  I thought I was breaking free because the rudder started moving more easily, but nope.  I realized that I was just using the rudder to scrape the mud away from that portion of the river and stopped pumping the tiller back and forth.

A weather eye showed that we weren’t going to sail out of this one directly – the wind was pushing us hard and harder onto the mud.  We pulled the jib in but decided to leave the main – it would be useful in heeling the boat over (which reduces the depth since the bottom of our boat has a wineglass shape).  Once we started to break free, that would be helpful.  We hoped.

Here’s where I’m proud of us.  We each have our own, idiosyncratic responses to urgent and/or dangerous situations.  James jumps into action; if he can’t, he gets upset and starts to freak out.  I slow down and start to work through solutions methodically; if I am rushed, I stiffen up in fear that I’ll make things worse.

We did all four of those things in this case.  James freaked and then calmed himself; I froze and then jumped in.

What we also did was this: we launched our dinghy in a new manner that we fashioned in the moment and instantly.  After rigging it out with oars and oarlocks, James jumped down into it, we filled it with an anchor and a bunch of chain, and he rowed out as far as the chain would reach.  He unceremoniously dumped the anchor over the transom of the dinghy and began rowing back.

I knew we had a problem before he made it back to the boat.

Turns out, our lovely anchor with its 150 feet of lovely chain?  Well, the chain is actually two shorter pieces of chain.  In two different sizes.  Neither of which fits properly into our windlass.

And here’s why that’s a problem.  The windlass has teeth in it that are spaced precisely to fit into the links of a specific size of chain.  The chain winds around the windlass and is guided off by a piece of metal called a stripper.  In this case, the chain got bound up in the teeth and the stripper couldn’t always break it off.

The upshot is that I spent a really, really long time turning a winch handle against both the entire weight of the boat and against the chain itself.  The whole point was to haul the boat off the mud, which is hard enough in the best of circumstances.  With old rusty chain that was never meant to be wrapped around a windlass?  Well, it was a long slog.

Why wasn’t James taking turns, you ask?  Well.  James started out taking turns.  At one point, the chain got so badly stuck that he leaned outboard, over the bow pulpit, in order to pull some slack for me.  Did the wind blow us a little harder?  Did James just pull too damn hard?

I don’t know.  But he pulled himself against the 1 inch stainless steel tubing that makes up the bow pulpit.  His ribs pushed into that tubing so hard that one of those ribs popped out of its accustomed home.  From one moment to the next, his groan of hard work turned into a moan of pain.

Of course, I stopped working to find out how badly he was hurt.  He’s done this before and it’s a long healing process – 4 to 5 weeks before he’s really better.  I got grim and he got upset.

“We could call someone.”

That was my suggestion, and I wasn’t talking about calling my mom to say hi.  (Hi mom!)  I sent James into the cabin to find our insurance information and the phone number for Tow Boat US.

Then I kept turning that winch handle on the windlass.  Right about the time James had everything in hand, I looked up from my Sisyphean task and realized we weren’t pointing the same direction we started in.

“James!  We’ve moved!”

And minutes later, I broke the anchor out of the mud and hauled it into its cradle on the bow.  James and I looked at one another.  “We can’t do that again.”

Rather than put ourselves through that horrible job for a second time, we dug out our secondary anchor, a Fortress, and all of its rode and chain.  In a now-businesslike fashion, we rigged this second anchor to a jib winch and I jumped into the dinghy.  After rowing about 200 feet out, I looked all around and really, truly believed that I was well into deep water.  I dropped the anchor over the transom and rowed back.

James had recovered somewhat from the shock and pain of popping his rib out.  He was scrambling around the deck when I got back and I couldn’t really chide him for it – I was going to need him if we were to get unstuck!

We pulled and pulled and pulled.  Eventually…after a long time…it suddenly got easy.  That meant one of two things – either the anchor had come loose or we were free of the mud.  Within another few seconds, the answer become clear as we sailed gently past the anchor!

James finished hauling the line in and, once we were completely sure we weren’t going to suck mud into the engine’s cooling water intake, we cranked her up and backed off the anchor to get our tail into even-deeper water.  Soon, James had pulled the anchor up (go Fortress!) and I was motoring into the channel!

Success!

We motored at a near-idle until I felt like any mud near the water intake had been washed away.  The rest of the trip was busy – we had a whole lot of cleaning and tidying to do.

We pulled into the Oak Grove Marina almost exactly 10 hours after leaving Cutter Marine.  Even with the running-aground adventure, we made it to our new home with plenty of daylight to spare.  We spent it cleaning.

Now we’re in a new home and we’re settled here until the end of November.  After that?  Who knows.  But I sincerely hope that our next move is, dare I say, boring?

The squall is building overhead and my thoughts are leaning in the direction of, Wow, I’m glad we’re not out there now…”

Ok, I’ll start over…

Dena and I were eating sushi last last night contemplating a Monday morning sail. We’d get up… whenever, ready the boat…at the pace we feel is needed and go sailing. Destination, whatever…

It was incredible, the wind was a fresh 10 knots out of the North leaving the dock, meaning, to our broadsides but we slipped out between the pilings without even getting close and just like that we were out in the upper Middle River. As we rounded in to the confluence of Dark Head and Hopkins Creek we set sail and in less than a minute we were silently clipping away at five knots at a heel of about 15 degrees to starboard. It was perfect! We tacked twice before leaving Frog Mortar Creek aft and with it we payed out the sheets for a beautiful broad reach out towards the open Chesapeake Bay. Once again, Incredible, absolutely perfect sailing!

Before making the mouth of the Bay we rounded up to head back up river so Dena could make it to work on time. We had an out flowing tide on the way down river so we knew with the up wind beat and the ebbing tide we’d be in for a little bit longer trip going back home. On our second tack upwind we luffed up into a gust so as I tightened sail Dena fell off just a touch and at that very moment we got broad-sided by a massive rogue gust from the rivers’ confluence. In the next 8 seconds the boat would be knocked down, the forward lower shroud on the port-side would be ripped out of the deck and the rig would shudder with a terrifying groan. Within that aforementioned span of time I tossed off the sheets and Dena pointed our bow into the wind. In less than ten seconds we were sailing perfectly again and I was hauling in the genny with the roller furling. We were silent with adrenaline for a few long heartbeats afterwards.

I’ve heard it said by so many sailors I’d be hard pressed to find the original quote, that “Sailing is nothing more than a series of contemplative hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”. Today I am indeed inclined to agree with that statement.

When the water flowed over the leeward bulwarks in the knock down it scooped up one of our fenders, tossing it overboard. Without saying much to each other we both thought it a good time to do an under-sail “MOB” drill and go back and save our fender from certain piracy from the local suburban Reevers of Hog Pen Creek, Maryland. It wasn’t until we had tacked twice and gibed 3 times that we both realized we were just a little too shaken-up to do a maneuver like that, but, according to the U.S.C.G that is the absolute best time to do a “Man-Over-Board” maneuver; when you’re freaked-the-fuck-out…

We saved our beloved fender…

…But as we were settling back in to sailing up-river again I noticed that the forward-lower shroud on the port-side was tossing around the foredeck like a drunk’n sailor. I alerted Dena to the issue and went forward to inspect the damage and strike our main sail. The half inch thick chain-plate that supports the lower part of the mast on the port side of the boat had snapped in half when the spreaders went in the water during the knock down.

…And that was the moment of sheer terror, the moment we realized we really had just barely escaped death.

The fact of the matter is, if we hadn’t rounded-up into the wind and tossed off the sheets at that very moment we would have been dismasted and the entire sailing rig would have come crashing down into the cockpit where we both were at the time.

Wow…

We made it back to the dock without incident and before I got back from the head at the top of the dock Dena was gearing up for her bicycle ride to work. We bantered back and forth a bit but as she took off we both gave in to that look that we give each other every single time we live through another one of our calamitous adventures, and together we said, I love you!

Hmmm, One of the valuable lessons we’ve learned over the years of being prudent sailors is knowing when to go out and when not to go out…

In early September of 2001 we were in the little town of Newport, Oregon waiting out the weather before heading South for the San Francisco Bay. On NOAA’s weather radio the forecast was for calming seas on the morning of the first so we decided to go into town, check our e-mails  and get one last hot meal before heading off shore once again. As we walked the four miles to the Newport Library for our half hour of free internet access we both were a little more than just quiet, a rare thing for the two of us for sure, we were down right scared that the weather was going to turn on us but neither one of us wanted to deture the other one from the excitement of continuing our adventures around the world! So, we walked on in silence…

…After doing our business at the library we set off for a local all you could eat buffet but before we got there we both came out of our terror closets.

I told Dena that I thought it was a bad idea to be in a big hurry and if we both had bad feelings about leaving than we shouldn’t go, period!

And just like that, we both sighed a big sigh of relief and resigned to NEVER go sailing when either one of us even felt the least amount of reserve. It was like having a giant weight lifted off the conversation, not-to-mention liberating, we were both happy and even a little content by our decision to stay in a sheltered cove for a few extra days if for nothing else, piece of mind!

It’s a good thing we did too, that night Dena got food poisoning from the all-you-can-eat place and she wouldn’t be ready for another off shore adventure for another nine days…(*)

Somewhere in that long lost dinner conversation I’m sure were the seeds of another rule-of-thumb that Dena and I have applied to our general adventure behavior; and that was all the other “No Sailing” days in any given year while sailing in the waters of the United States of America…

…Never, and I mean NEVER! Go sailing on Memorial Day, the 4th of July or Labor day, the three days out of the year that the waters of the US are rife with idiocy! Every single ass-hole who has ever been on the water WILL be on the water on those three days, it’s a guarantee.
…Well, This year Dena and I haven’t seen each other that much over the last few months and of course that means we haven’t been sailing very much either, ok, we haven’t been sailing at all since we made land-fall in Middle River, MD!

WHAT?!

That’s totally unacceptable so, last weekend we decided to go sailing on the only day that we both had off together in at least another two months. At the time it sounded like a great idea, a bottle of wine after a day on the water… As I’ve said before, I work at (evil empire inc.) and Memorial Day is one of their biggest sales days of the year so rest-assured the build-up to such a big deal is in its self a big (fucking) deal and I spent all week worrying about going sailing on one of THOSE days… By Sunday night this past week I had fostered a very BAD feeling about Monday’s sailing adventure and felt compelled to change our plans just a little…

… Sunday night we scrapped the first idea of going out all day in the big boat in trade for a full day of sailing down Middle River in our 9 foot Cat-rigged dory, S/V Tinker. We sailed up-wind and down river with Dena at the helm past five or six ship-wrecks to the “River Watch” restaurant and bar for some rich food and a few strong rum-punches! After that we sailed with the tide and the wind at our backs back up Middle River with me at the helm all the way to the Eastern Rd. bridge then back to our home and global-circumnavigation vector, the S/V S.N. Nomad. We had an absolutely incredible all day adventure that was free, fun and relatively void of the holiday ass-hole factor and best of all neither one of us got food poisoning!
* (September 11th 2001)

…It’s true,

A none-stop parade of broken bodies in dignity carts scoot the white top of neo-rural  Maryland. As the Slanted faces with a post digestive grimace, times 8, brighten my morning return from “The Thing”, I realize that retired-Baltimorians dressed in ancient suburbs just aren’t very pretty.

It looks much better from the water…