This was a little sooner than we had imagined but forces seemed to align. We didn’t have a boat, of course, but we had a strong suspicion that we might find a better one to buy if we had some idea about how to rig them, so it seemed an ideal time to attend. And, we were house-sitting for some friends at Kala Point that particular weekend, which made the trip up to Brion’s shop at Point Hudson convenient.

We’d first met Brion and his wife Christian during the chaotic 24 hours of Lotus’ grounding, a fast-paced incident during which I could do little more than marvel at the dazzling demonstrations of nautical acumen on display. Even during the most pressing moments, however, Brion’s inclination toward teaching came through clearly: in the dead of night, by headlamp and flashlight, as he rigged the bridle critical to distributing the forces that would be involved in dragging the 102 ton vessel off the beach at 0500 the next morning, he nevertheless attracted a small crowd as he took the time to explain in detail what he was doing and why. Rapt young Boat School students wedged awkwardly wherever they could fit along the stern rail of the canted vessel to hear the impromptu lecture.

Thankfully, the back room at the loft is on a mercifully even keel, well-lit, and warm even on the most wintery spring day. Consequently, I picked up a lot more during the weekend class than I had on the chilly, rocking, dark deck of the Lotus… despite the best efforts of Ben, the friendly loft cat (as opposed to Audrey, the stand-offish loft cat), whose insistence that our actual purpose in attending the class was primarily to pet him was at times quite convincing. Fortunately, Ben took a time out for a nap atop some spare shackles and strops in the middle of our table and I managed to re-focus on what was happening in class.

As I suspected, much of what Brion does is actually magic, or at least math, which to me is pretty much the same thing. The theories, however, are accessible even to a layman (even if that layman requires his wife to deal with any actual calculating of numbers). To anyone with even a modicum of a sailing background, at some point about mid-way through the first day, the penny will drop and you will find yourself repeatedly saying, “So that’s why my boat is like that!” Because the underlying theme of the class is the inevitability of interacting forces as they impact the design of any craft bent on harnessing the wind to move through water… it is the foot-bone connected to the leg-bone connected to the thigh-bone, only played out in keels and hulls and shrouds the whole way from sea to sky.

While this makes the whole thing sound theoretical or perhaps meta-physical, the theory is interspersed with a considerable amount of hands-on practice that many neophyte sailors will not have previously had the opportunity to undertake, or at least not undertake properly. Among the hardest things, for me, was simply tying knots. It turns out it’s a lot more difficult to un-learn a knot you first learned to tie thirty or more years ago and re-learn it the Brion Toss way than it is to just learn it the Brion Toss way in the first place. On the other hand, the smooth and intuitive loops accompanied by explanations of not just what a knot is appropriate for but why it is, teaches you more about the basic craft of the sailor’s most important tool than you would learn in a hundred years of following rabbits in and out of holes.

If the hardware involved in rigging has seemed mysterious, Brion helps dispel it by forcing you to get right into the teeth of it with your own two hands. Assembling a Hanes or Sta-Lok terminal yourself is all it takes to demonstrate that it is not, in fact, black magic that is keeping your stick in the air, but an array of predictable forces and understandable mechanical connections that can be inspected, adjusted, and managed even without decades of nautical experience. If you’ve been too intimidated to punch a hole in your mast for wiring or hardware mounts, Brion shows you exactly how to do it and explains why it is not necessarily going to lead to the imminent collapse of that spar.

While all the information and practical interaction with real hardware was valuable, everyone’s favorite part of the class was the dock walk… a drizzly, on-site inspection of random sailboats stacked up along the floats at Point Hudson. Straggling along behind Brion, we squinted overhead and leaned down to minutely inspect fittings for cracks, deformation, or the harbinger of such defects, unfair leads. Gradually, with Brion’s gentle guidance, we became adept (or at least less utterly inept) at spotting rigging problems from the dock using nothing more than the Mark I eyeball and a strict application of that first rule of rigging: fair leads. Today, I find myself frightened to walk down any random dock after glancing around and quickly convincing myself every mast I see is a breath away from coming down on my head.

That none of them have so far is the ultimate lesson from the workshop. There is little in rigging that, once done, cannot be un-done again and one of Brion’s subtler points is that it is always possible to run the numbers and determine the ideal solution for your situation, even if that happens to differ from what you have already. Rigs are not immutable and neither are they necessarily perfect in their original factory configuration. If something is wonky or unpalatable, it’s not too late to take another look. And, if you’re in the same position we are in and haven’t bought a boat yet, knowing that there are options for failing rigs and having some idea how to price out the necessary repairs or upgrades very much strengthens your hand during the shopping process. We’ve already ruled out one boat on the basis of the necessary repair cost; some other sucker who hasn’t been through Brion’s workshop is going to pay twenty grand more for that boat than he thinks he is paying.

So we’ve managed to segue from an interesting educational interlude back into our more normal panicky boat shopping mode. Better equipped, better informed, and more inclined to dive in and fix potential problems with whatever boat we find… stay tuned!

Two Weeks of False Creek Crud

This summer we had a lot of fun, covered a lot of ground, but we spent a lot of time just hanging around on the hook, too. But there was never a chance to get bored… there’s always something to keep you busy on board.

From pulling out and patching a leaking muffler to doing the same with the head (guess which was worse) to scrubbing two weeks of accumulated False Creek muck off the waterline to simply hanging out on a sunny day and polishing the stanchions, we always had something to work on. More importantly, we always seemed to have the things along we needed to work on it with. After two or three years of bumbling around wishing we had tools or parts to fix the inevitable problems that come up, we seem to have finally accumulated the right variety of gear to take care of most of what happens on the average trip. It felt pretty good to not constantly be pining for a port with a decent chandlery any time something came up.

A half hour of scrubbing later...

Weather also played a big part. It’s a lot more enjoyable to haul everything out of the cockpit locker and go crawling around fixing pumps if all that gear is not getting soaked in a perpetual rain shower while it is out; it’s a lot less objectionable to pull yourself around the waterline in the dinghy scrubbing away if it’s almost ninety degrees out.

Whether it was a matter of weather, or better preparedness, or just a better attitude in general, this year I actually felt like I was ahead on maintenance and projects over the course of the summer. Years past, in remote waters, it seemed more a matter of running the boat hard, patching things up temporarily as they inevitably failed, and putting off all the big refit and repair work into a long and arduous process in the future. Choosing between the two after having experienced both, I will take keeping ahead any day.

Insegrevious used to be a dry boat, despite our rather amateurish (in retrospect) efforts to keep her that way. The bilge stayed bone dry, leaks seemed rare, and it never took more than a decent afternoon with the hatches open to air her out. Rust was rare, mildew nonexistent. It was a rather deceptive introduction to life aboard, in other words.

For the last three years, that airy state of grace has been suspended as we have fought condensation and a variety of minor, but hidden leaks above and below the waterline. I have good reason to believe, however, that we’re well on our way to drying Insegrevious out completely again as our leaky muffler has finally been dragged out and patched this week.

One of the obstacles to drying out most boats is simply that it can be wicked difficult to see where the water is coming from in the first place. This is particularly the case when there are multiple sources involved, because anything you do to identify or narrow them down quickly runs afoul of one of the other problems… or worse, one that may be easily found may be masking others that are less so.

In our case, we knew we had a leak at the rudder shaft, and re-packing it seemed the best solution. The jury is still out on the efficacy of that job, but I also noticed that we seemed to be taking on more water when under power than when under sail. I could see it running forward near the prop shaft (itself which, since I could see it, and see no water coming in there, was a likely suspect early eliminated). It’s true that the hull squats more in the water, increasing the pressure and therefore the leak rate, the faster we go, but the amount of squat for 5 knots under power is the same as 5 knots under sail, more or less, so that left something to do with the engine itself. The least visible part of the cooling system was the muffler, which is located right about where the water was coming from, so that was my prime suspect.

Ghetto Welding job

Pulling it was easier than I expected (disturbingly so… almost nothing is holding it in place): my friend Maxx and I undid the hose clamps fastening it to the exhaust mixing elbow on the engine and hauled it out by the exhaust hose leading to the transom. Sure enough, there was a hole. Unfortunately, it was in the seam between the body and the end. Knowing that neither a new muffler nor an expensive repair job were in the budget for this summer, I had prepared to limp along using some muffler repair tape, but it wasn’t going to work on an edge.

Fortunately, Maxx has a wire-feed welder, and even more fortunately, it was right up the road at our friend Torrey’s garage. A quick trip, four or five tries, and the muffler was holding water again. A fresh coat of engine paint to help keep the corrosion at bay, and hopefully we’ll be good for the summer at least.

The muffler, freshly painted and in its proper home

Tucking it back in place was only slightly more difficult than pulling it out. A full test of the weld and our re-clamping is waiting on the compartment drying out, so we can tell if any additional water is being introduced. With the weather as it’s been, nothing is drying out too fast. But it will eventually, and then it’s on to the next leak, on our eternal quest for a dry boat.

Most of you have some idea what I am talking about even if you have never put names to them. Every sailor I know, for instance, has some selected multiplier he or she uses when estimating the time and cost a given boat project will take over and above what you think it will take. Mine is four; on land I usually just double it, but a boat project I think will take about an hour and cost fifty bucks, I mentally re-adjust to a hundred dollars and four hours spread out over two days (the extra day is because the hardware store will be closed when you realize you need that extra part).

So project time is one rule. Project scheduling involves another. It’s the natural inclination to consider the boat projects one has on hand (quadrupling the time/cost estimates as above, of course), the amount of time and money one has available, and planning to complete the projects accordingly. But you would be failing to take into account the Law of Unexpected Projects, and will quickly find yourself committed to more projects than you have time available to complete.

We ran into something like that this week after drawing up a lengthy lists of the projects we would like to get done this month. We had just enough time to squeeze in the most important ones… and then the galley sink faucet started dripping. And the head sprung a leak. Suddenly, we are two projects over our limit, and they’re not minor little things that you really want to put off, either.

So my new rule will be, schedule only half the available time to the projects you know about. The second half will get filled up soon enough with all the extras you weren’t expecting.

There are also some complex interpersonal rules to do with boat projects. One is the rule of inadvertent assistance. Often, Mandy and I will have our own separate projects to work on, either due to space requirements (there are a lot of places where it isn’t really practical for two people to be working on things at the same time) or particular aptitudes (she gets all the stuff that requires intricate maneuvers in tight spaces; I end up with all the brute force stuff). We’ll then schedule these according to our own convenience, while the other may have work or something else to do.

But the rule of inadvertent assistance says that regardless of what the plan was, eventually both of us will end up having to work on most projects, even when it’s inconvenient to do so. The galley sink faucet was a case in point. Mandy generally does plumbing, and I had other work to do, so I arranged to be out of the way while she worked on it. But little by little, things kept coming up that required my assistance or intervention. Eventually, I found myself soaked, swearing, and contorted beneath the sink, fully engaged in something I’d never planned to get involved with.

That conclusion is similar to one mandated by another rule, the rule of unintentional assistance. That’s where you’re watching someone else work on a project that you have nothing to do with, but find yourself offering “helpful” hints and suggestions, eventually picking up a tool or holding a flashlight, and toward the end, taking over the job completely to see it through to the bitter end. You just can’t help yourself.

When I was a kid, a particularly heavy snow fall brought out all the children in the neighborhood for that great communal ritual of building a massive snowman. The inevitable snowball fight broke out, and someone thought to construct rudimentary snow fortifications for protection. The adults of the neighborhood were of course watching all this, and as we got into the construction phase they started offering tips… make blocks, stack them offset, make the base wider, and so on. Then they started to lend a hand to show us what they meant, and pretty soon out come the snow shovels and while the kids were all back to the snowmen, a full-fledged igloo took shape. That’s unintentional assistance.

I keep wishing one of those guys would wander past my boat when I’m tearing my head apart and would unintentionally take over for me.

I had planned to put together more updates, chronicle things as they happened, but all those grand ambitions went away the first day. So, yet again, this is a true late entry, framed in the rosy afterglow of a relatively successful event, unable to strictly convey the tension and anxiety I was wracked with during our three days on the hard.

The tension all started the morning of the day before our scheduled lift time, when we planned to sail up to Port Townsend and spend the night in order to be sure of being on time. Reviewing the tide tables one last time, I realized that I had misread them when planning the trip, and had scheduled our afternoon departure exactly opposite the most desirable currents. We hastily prepared the cabin and threw off the docklines to get out on the ebb, and had a pretty decent northward sail ahead of southerly winds the whole way up.

We spent the night on a mooring at my parent’s house in Port Hadlock, and the southerly built up to a brisk 25-30 knots by the time we had to leave for the boat yard in the morning. My friend Maxx, there along with my parents to help with all the work, and I unfurled a postage-stamp worth of genoa and took off northward like a rocket. Making things even more interesting, an ammunition ship was coming in to moor at Naval Magazine Indian Island, right between us and the Boat Haven in Port Townsend, at the same time. Quite apart from the strictures placed upon small craft such as ours by Rule 18(b) of the COLREGs, one simply finds oneself inclined to give ammunition ships a wide berth.

The wind also gave rise to speculation that the hoist might not happen as planned; as we pulled into the work pier the gentleman tied up ahead of us took our lines and informed us that he had been delayed almost two hours already. The thought of several tons of boat being blown around in the slings was not comforting. But when I checked in at the yard office after lunch, they were ready to go… I found myself motoring into the U-shaped slip almost an hour earlier than scheduled.

That's not so bad!

I never get any good pictures of our haul-outs because I am always the one stuck on deck when we come out of the water. This year the position was particularly nerve-wracking. Not only had it been three years in salt water on a single coat of paint, but in February, we had dinged a rock in Montague Harbour with what felt like a pretty solid whack, and my visions of what the soft lead keel might look like after that affair had grown increasingly horrific with each repetition of the event in my mind. I went so far as to schedule an extra buffer day in the yard in case significant repair work was necessary. While the boat was in the water, there was no way to tell what the bottom edge of the fin looked like. As it was being hoisted out, then, my only clues from on deck came from watching the faces of friends and bystanders on the ground below. They looked pretty sober, I thought… not a good sign.

I hopped off when the bow stopped jerking around, and turned around to get a good look… and saw nothing more than a few dings and some cracked epoxy. The keel was hardly damaged at all. Even more remarkably, the hull was surprisingly clean but for a conga line of barnacles along the bottom of the rudder and around the prop shaft. Most everything came off at the business end of the pressure washer, but the paint stayed put… particularly gratifying since I had ordered another gallon of the stuff for this year’s coat (Pettit Unepoxy Plus, inexpensive and apparently quite effective the waters of the Salish Sea).

Everything else went similarly according to plan. The painting was fast and easy, there was plenty of time to wax and buff the rest of the hull, the rudder stuffing got re-packed, the engine painted, and the various gouges in the keel epoxied and faired, all in the first two days. The last day, with our afternoon splash time, was mostly a lot of waiting around for paint to dry.

Say, he isn't loosening that nut, is he?

The disappointments were mostly secondary; at some point during the past three years, the prop shaft zinc was apparently thrown off, and the shaft, strut, and prop all had some degree of corrosion which had to be taken off. We sprayed the works with a zinc-based paint this time around, which our boatyard neighbor assured us was good stuff and had the added effect of making the whole assembly look solid and new. I also took some of the spare time we had to go up the mast and take a look at our malfunctioning radome, but even after tightening every connector in sight and blasting them with contact cleaner, it remained malfunctioning.

Maybe the paint will hold it all together

The rudder shaft re-packing also didn’t turn out entirely well. When we went back in the water, it was perfectly dry and looked good, but once underway with the stern squatting down, it started dripping again. At least it should be dry while we’re at dock or anchor now. I’ll have to weight the bow down and give it another try with the boat in the water, though.

On the whole, though, I came out of it all pretty pleased. It was more difficult than the last time around simply because it was hard to look at our home all torn apart in mid-project and propped up on stilts (fortunately, we could stay at my parent’s place, and didn’t have to try to cope with living aboard while out of the water… I’m not sure either we or it would have survived that experience). It’s hard to explain, but it’s extraordinarily important for everything aboard to be secured and organized. That has, for me, taken on an even more important mental component while living aboard… it’s hard to move around or get anything done if that’s not the case, and so I find myself a little out of sorts when it starts getting messy and disorganized, as inevitably happens during projects of this sort. It was a tremendous relief to have time on the last day to get aboard and clean and stow everything, and I had great satisfaction sailing back to Seattle (motoring, actually; we weren’t so lucky with the wind on our return trip, and chugged along over glassy seas nearly the whole way back… with an extra half knot or so of speed with our clean bottom and prop!) in a boat that both looked and felt like a boat should.

Though satisfied, I’m also pretty tired… I feel all hauled out myself right now. But every time I look at our newly shiny hull and clean bottom, ready for a summer of sailing, it’s worth it all over again.

On the water again

Well, fear not, my friends. I’m not going to talk about that tedious old crap. I’m going to talk about another kind of crap altogether, fresh, exciting crap that you will be happy to learn about: our stuff.

It’s no accident that the phrases “I have a bunch of crap” and “I have a bunch of stuff” are more or less synonymous in English, I have decided. Most stuff is crap, and can safely be disposed of despite our more noble attachments to it. This is a simple fact you learn once you move from a 1400 square foot house to a 33′ sailboat, and it’s almost universally described among those who take the plunge as a sort of liberating experience. My wife certainly sees it that way and I suppose, intellectually at least, I can understand that. The modern tendency of people being owned by their stuff rather than vice versa has been broadly commented on; moving onto a boat is a sure way to short-circuit that unhappy state of affairs, because you just don’t have the room for it (the fact that you will soon end up being owned by your boat is another topic entirely).

The thing is, I’ve never felt owned by my stuff. I have always been pretty happy with an accumulation of goods that could more or less fit comfortably in the back of my pickup truck. Apart from a few random and relatively small items I have spent considerable money on and find routinely useful, I just don’t feel much need for stuff. While living in a house, it’s true that I accumulated a great deal more items than that, but I had little emotional attachment to them and didn’t have much trouble ditching them when the time came to do so.

After a long winter of house-sitting, splitting our time between the house and the boat, we’re finally consolidating almost all our various crap back in one place: aboard. And despite the fact that it mostly all came from here in the first place, we’re having a heck of a time getting all back in comfortably. Unlike when we moved aboard in the first place, however, our space issues now are not really caused by any unhealthy and unwarranted attachment to a surfeit of unnecessary crap. This time, rather, we are confronting a simple irreducible minimum of stuff.

It’s certainly true that necessity is the mother of compromise and most of us can get by with a lot less than what we think of as “necessary” but I don’t think I am going out on a limb when I find it necessary to keep around enough clothes for a week, food, office supplies and tools, and the other various items that we are now finding it a challenge to stow neatly and securely. It was easy, the first time around, to look at some object or other and say, “Pitch it; I haven’t used it in years.” Now, I look at what is left, and as I consider each separate thing, I am either looking at something I use almost every day, or which prudence and common standards of seamanship demand remain aboard.

I think this is the point at which most people decide they simply need another three feet of boat. One wag suggested we just put the stuff in the basement, and I won’t pretend I haven’t considered building some sort of floating filing cabinet that could be towed along behind if necessary. Driven to such desperation, those 36 footers start looking pretty good.

I’m determined to weather the crisis, however, if for no other reason than we simply can’t afford anything larger right now. I have every confidence that, given a few weeks of patient, persistent re-arranging and Tetris-like maneuvering, pretty much everything will fit. Then, I won’t even want a bigger boat… I’d just have to start the organizing all over again from scratch.

Strange, and perhaps unromantic, you may protest. True, but who among us can govern our hearts when what they really yearn for is the feel of a good solid wrench to wrap the palm around, the silky bristles of a scrub brush, or the luxurious softness of a chamois cloth infused with polish? I see here today that I am not alone in feeling the call, the dock being alive with other boaters on a similar mission, queues at the water spigots, scrub brushes held at port arms.

Scrubbing the deck and cleaning the bright work is the most straightforward and perhaps least risky part of the urge, however. In maintenance, as with romance, there is ample opportunity for broken hearts, and they are most likely to crack when the engine cover is removed after a winter’s disuse or the bilge revealed in all its putridity for the first time.

In my case, it’s the engine. The hatch has been off most of the winter but it’s tucked away back next to the quarter berth, which, in another of the immutable laws of the sea, has filled up with the detritus that might more properly have been consigned to a cockpit locker except that it was always raining when we wanted to put it there. So the engine has been out of sight and largely out of mind, until today, when I find it looking sickly and rusty, despite a considerable amount of exercise in February.

The problem, as is so often the case when it comes to maintenance, is that it wasn’t maintained early enough. Normally the engine compartment stays quite dry over the winter, but this year, a leaking rudder shaft has ensured a steady trickle of water down below the engine pan on its way to the bilge. The shaft packing won’t get changed out until we haul out (sometime next month, if I ever get it scheduled), so there is nothing for it but to let it trickle. Last summer I noticed that the engine needed a fresh coat of paint, but I was either busy or out having fun or not feeling like living in a cloud of paint fumes, so I put it off, reasoning that it wasn’t likely to see much use until spring anyway.

Of course, it’s the dis-use that kills boats generally, not the use, and now I have a lot of detailed scrubbing to do before I can paint it.

Fortunately, it’s a slight enough obstacle that it hasn’t cooled my recent maintenance ardor, but I’m thinking now that it might be best today if I don’t also look in the bilge. Spring fancies can soon enough turn to summer doldrums. I don’t want to kill a good thing while it’s going.

So since Tim Flanagan at Navagear and Captain Richard Rodriguez at Bitter End have both posted recently on their choices for wearable emergency strobes for their PFDs I thought I would throw my own selections into the ring. I come to the conversation to find Rodriguez swearing by the AquaSpec AQ98 and Flanagan currently using an old ACR Firefly 2 but wavering between the AQ98 and the ACR Hemilight 2 for an upgrade.

I think both are in the minority among local sailors in wearing a strobe at all, at least from my extremely unofficial observations around the Sound, but it’s a minority that Mandy and I are also happy to be a part of. We both have ACR Firefly Plus lights velcroed to our lifevests at the shoulder, together with a plastic rescue whistle tucked in and tied off to the lanyard. Mandy, not coming from that peculiarly male tradition of pocket-knife ownership, and facing the same problem as female sailors everywhere, a lack of pockets, also has a small Gerber Paraframe tethered to hers… although I will probably replace it soon, having discovered that Gerbers are a bit crap when it comes to nautical knives.

We’re in another minority in wearing plain old fashioned life vests instead of inflatable PFDs (you were probably having some trouble visualizing how we strapped a bulky ol’ Firefly Plus to the shoulder of an inflatable harness, weren’t you?) but we’re happy to belong to that as well. They’re bulky, they’re ugly, they’re uncool, but there is absolutely zero chance that they will go in the water and fail to float.

That simplicity and reliability was also a factor in selecting the Firefly Plus. They’re not SOLAS or even USCG rated, so I don’t mean to imply the construction is superior. But they aren’t just a strobe light; the other end of the unit is a plain old flashlight. Hands-free lighting on deck is important for sailors and like most, we have headlamps on board for that purpose, but we find that it’s easier to use our shoulder-mounted Fireflies. They are already with us, won’t get knocked off, and are easily switched on and off (too easy, sometimes; if they have a failing it is the potential to be turned on accidentally). I don’t think we have pulled our headlamps out of the locker in years.

Because we use them so regularly, we never have to wonder if the battery has gone dead or if the light has broken. They take standard AA batteries you can find anywhere in the world and we always know they are ready to go in an emergency.

I’m not blind to the appeal or advantage of inflatable vests or micro-strobes. The freedom of movement and light weight can be safety features in and of themselves, allowing safer and easier movement on pitching decks or in restricted cabins. Some people are also more likely to wear the devices in the first place if they are less obtrusive, and none of this stuff does you any good if you don’t wear it.

In our particular circumstances, I like the trade-offs, though. Neither of us mind wearing the gear, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing for certain that it will all work when we need it is worth whatever small inconvenience it may introduce.

So that is my reasoning and our personal safety gear. What’s on your PFD?

(Edit 3/25/10 – Grammatical corrections)

So now we’re set to head north in less than a month, and it’s time to go through what is effectively our spring commissioning.

I’ve been a little scared to crack open the engine compartment, and if you have ever tried to pump cold oil out of a sump you would be too.  Of course it’s my intention to warm the engine up before I take a crack at it, but the engine has been a warm-weather creature to this point, and I’m also a little worried it’s not exactly going to fire right up when I hit the starter.  Better here than just off the Customs dock in Bedwell Harbour, of course, but I’ve got plenty to do already without having to nurse along a sick diesel.

Our radar has been claiming it doesn’t exist for some time now and  I’ve been trying to find a method with which to get up the mast and get the hood off it without freezing to death.  My technique so far can be described as “wait for spring” but time has run out on that one.  The nice days we have been having, I have not been at the boat, and the days I have been at the boat have been uniformly rainy and miserable, which aren’t the best for poking around at delicate electronics, anyway.

The bilge pump wiring could probably wait but it’s one of those few things I can do as easily in bad weather as good so it is probably the only thing that will actually get fixed to my satisfaction before we leave.  That, at least, will provide some comfort if the shower sump floods back into the cabin; in fine weather there is no problem, but when we are out getting tossed around (as seems likely to happen on a February sail) the fact that the head floor drain was built in without a one-way valve results in evil-looking slime creeping back out of the sump and making a bid for freedom.  I’d let it go its way, but unfortunately I am often between it and the companionway.  Only one of us may prevail.

Despite the daunting laundry list of things that need to happen between now and February 10th, I’ve found that having a good hard deadline does wonders to fix the mind on what is most necessary and to actually make progress on projects that have seemed insurmountable.  I wouldn’t give odds, then, that I won’t get up the mast by then (although whether or not I am capable of debugging the radome is another matter), and I’ll get the oil changed even if I have to use a blowtorch to heat the pan to do it.

Come to think of it, our insurance settlement for a burnt boat might just cover the cost of hotel rooms in Vancouver.

There are still sailors, of course, who hold to a philosophy of austerity, spurning fancy electronics, power-draining appliances, and complex gadgets like watermakers and satellite TV systems.  Mandy and I ascribe more to the Einstein theory of systems complexity: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”.  The catch, of course, is what you consider to be the lower limit of “no simpler.”

In our case, Internet makes the list.  Both of us run businesses that are heavily dependent on Internet communications.  We can get away (and indeed enjoy doing so) from it for a few weeks at a time, by planning ahead and making some allowances, but for living aboard, intermittent or low-speed connections to the web just weren’t going to work for us.

At Shilshole, we have the option of getting Comcast cable internet, but cable is expensive no matter where you are and is an even worse deal for boaters: you only get it when you are tied up in the marina.  Satellite internet was both outside our energy budget and price range.  We don’t have, and don’t otherwise need, a High Frequency radio aboard, so HF modems aren’t in the picture, and are too low-bandwidth for our needs besides.

But we’re not going particularly far afield except in small doses, so easier solutions present themselves.  In this case, in our region, wireless Internet is the clearest choice.  Almost all marinas are equipped with WiFi hotspots, and here in the Pacific Northwest, most of those are controlled by a single wireless provider.  That means a single subscription has us covered up and down the coast in both Canada and the United States.

Equipping ourselves to use that service was considerably more straightforward than most of the other alternatives.  Although the provider does sell hardware packages for boats which they claim are necessary for the “marine environment” it’s not hard to roll your own solution at much less expense.  For most circumstances, we’ve been well served by a fifty dollar USB-powered signal booster and an old 8 dbi antenna I happened to have laying around.  As long as we are within a mile of one of the marinas, we have good luck connecting at high speeds with that rig.

We had another challenge that was a bit stickier, though.  Our “winter quarters” where we are house-sitting are right next to a marina… but not one served by this particular company.  The closest marina with that provider is five miles away across the length of the bay.  Our cheap booster and omni-directional antenna were not going to cut it.

But five miles, across open water, is still within the realm of the possible when it comes to wireless connections, and using some handy web-based calculators, and some educated guesses about the equipment the provider was using, I was able to run the numbers.  I could still use our existing booster, and with a vertical height of at least 21 feet and an antenna gain of 20Dbi, a connection should be possible.

Beam me across the bay, Scotty!

I went with a 24Dbi parabolic grid just to be safe, mounted it on an 8 foot galvanized pipe atop an embankment to get to the minimum height necessary, and lined it up with a combination of binoculars and a basic wifi signal strength meter on my laptop.  When it was all connected up, presto: Internet access across the bay.

Fine, you say, but what does this have to do with you and being aboard your sailboat?  How does that help?

Ah, but that’s the best part.  Even during the summer months, we spend quite a bit of time moored out in front of this very same place.  With the cooperation of the rightful tenants, I can leave my arrangement up year around.  Plugging it into another common wireless access point or to a computer with wifi and Internet Sharing capabilities (which describes most Macs and newer PCs these days) I can create a secondary wireless signal at the house… which we will then be able to link to with our standard equipment aboard the boat when we are dangling off the mooring ball out front.

Okay, this isn’t a solution available to everyone, but if you happen to find yourself in a similar situation, it might be an option.  Get to know the neighbors in places you moor or anchor frequently!  The antenna is relatively small (and for most connections, you could use one much smaller) and the power consumption is minimal.  And if you share (subject to the provider’s terms of service, of course), they might even let you do it for free!