Boat Search 2012: Becalmed
by Scott Wilson on 15/05/12 at 7:36 am
I’m having trouble judging the passage of time accurately these days, but I think it’s been a little over two months since we stepped off Insegrevious for the last time and entered into our state of lubberly exile. In that time, I think we have seen just about everything in our size and price range [...]
Full StoryThings they never told you (winter edition)
Every boater knows that there is a list, a long list, of things they never told you before you bought your boat. It’s like a secret handshake in the nautical world, the unrevealed mysteries of holding tank plumbing, the 0300 anchor checks, the bumps in the night when someone else fails to make their 0300 anchor check… sure, you’ve read articles like this, maybe you even laughed a little bit, but you never really thought it was going to happen to you on your boat, or if it did, it wasn’t going to be as bad as it sounded.
Well, most of those things are pretty universal experiences, and you can have them anywhere from Port Hardy to the Yucatan, and if you mention them in the company of sailors you will get a chorus of nods and a healthy raft of “That’s nothing! One time, I…” replies. But it turns out there is a whole other subset of things they never told us that are exclusively cold-weather related! That’s boating in a nutshell, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve seen it all….
New on our list for winter:
- Winter storm forecasts made with the benefit of the expensive new coastal radar are no better than the summer ones made without it
Sliding Hatch
- Snow piled up on deck in front of your sliding hatch will make it difficult to open. Snow, topped by a glaze of frozen rain, will weld you inside your boat like you’ve been sealed up in a space ship about to be shot off on a six month voyage to Mars
- The drip-lip inside your deck-accessible anchor locker that tends to accumulate water in the summer will freeze that hatch shut in a solid block of ice when it snows. If your water tank fill happens to be located in the anchor locker, you will run out of water at just this time
- That doesn’t matter, because the faucet at your slip will be frozen anyway and you’ll have to hike up to the restrooms to fill up your spare water jugs
- Hatches with ice and snow layered atop them shed condensation at approximately 300 times their normal winter rate
Frozen Fender
- Frozen, ice-encrusted fenders banging against the hull in a windstorm are every bit as annoying as squeaky fenders are in the summer
- Marina access streets are not high on the city’s “to be plowed/sanded” list
- Dock carts do not come in an “all wheel drive” version
- Ice in the rigging really does increase the roll period of the boat so that a 20 knot breeze at your slip feels like crossing the Strait on a bad day
- All that long expanse of dock you appreciated in the summer because it kept you away from the hustle and bustle near the ramp has become an impassable wasteland of treacherous ice, snow drifts, and frozen heron crap
- Despite all this, when you finally reach the head of the dock, you will feel like Roald Amundsen and your sense of triumph will outweigh all the hardships
I think I can see the Pole down there
Treading Water
The 50-knot wake-up howl in the rigging this morning was an apt reminder that this is always a hard time of year to be a boater. Coming on the heels of all the snow and freezing rain of the past week and the promise of only rain and wind (and possibly more snow) to come in the forecast, it’s a stark reminder that the distractions of the holidays have passed and it’s still a long, long stretch until cruising season kicks off. Sure, some of the best sailing I’ve ever experienced was in February, but there are definite caveats to winter cruising in the Pacific Northwest. In any event, with the boat on the market this year, our priority is to keep it clean and available to prospective buyers. While I was fully prepared for the dismal reality that this implied for the winter, ruling out any real cruising for the time being, I was slower to realize that the more depressing side effect is that it also removes all the hopes and dreams for next summer that normally sustain the Pacific Northwest sailor through the off-season. Being in the sailboat market right now involves a curious sort of limbo. We’re eager to get going, but we’re treading water until all the pieces to fall into place.
The Seattle Boat Show is coming up soon and that normally serves to reinvigorate dormant nautical fantasies. This year, I’m scared to go… what if all the neat toys and all the terrific stories about all the wonderful destinations simply serve to rub salt in the wound? Instead of inspiring dreams, is it just going to frustrate fantasies with the cold reality of the unknown?
It’s so bad that I keep trying to convince myself that we really could, somehow, make this boat work out, if only… but there’s no “if only” that we haven’t already explored that magically creates desk space and storage and all the other things we have found, after three years, that we really sort of need before heading out further and for longer. Still, every time we look at other boats, we come back to those if onlys all over again… what we have is so much closer to our ideal than anything else we’ve looked at that it’s painful to imagine spending more to get something less (except for space).
Knowing that this boat will be sold, but not having another candidate to imagine myself on, makes it hard to imagine any of the things that I used to dream of to get through the winters. I have all my memories of Desolation and the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and the empty green and grey wilderness north of there, and the brightly lit harbours of the Sunshine Coast, but I can’t picture myself there again. I have every hope of sailing to those places at some point in the future, but there is something stuck in my imagination that requires the reality of a boat to sail there on to fully visualize it. That, more than the weather or the waiting or the uncertainty, has been the heaviest weight to bear this winter.
Tsunami Dreaming
As winter advances, and other folks dream of sugar-plum fairies and Yuletide cheer, my thoughts once again turn to earthquakes and tsunamis. I’m not quite superstitious enough to subscribe to the “disasters come in threes” rule, but I am sailor enough to feel a little uncomfortable that each March for the past two years has seen a great earthquake along the Pacific Rim with an equally devastating tsunami accompanying it. In the wake of last year’s Tohoku event in Japan I sketched out some of my thoughts on dealing with a potentially similar event generated off the Washington coast by the Cascadia subduction zone. Those thoughts have never entirely faded, and, disappointed with the data and predictions I could find on local effects of a similar tsunami, I’ve kept an eye open for better information on what we can expect in the waters and along the shoreline of the Salish Sea.
So I was intrigued when I came across the website of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup. CREW is a non-profit organization of representatives from the public and private sectors working together to envision and reduce the effects of earthquakes and related hazards. They have put together a number of good resources for understanding the effects and preparing for them; most interesting are the scenario papers discussing the most likely local quake effects from a big-picture perspective. They factor in not just the first-order effects but also many of the likely secondary effects, such as major passes being blocked by landslides, ferry service disruption from terminal damages, and state-wide economic effects from port disruptions.
Unfortunately, like every other source, they either haven’t calculated or haven’t published any detail about Puget Sound tsunami effects or timing. It shows how far our region has to go that even the basic data isn’t available; without it, planning is going to be haphazard at best. So I’m left with my original speculation, which is that there just isn’t much time to react if you live on the water and significant event occurs. The warning time could be so short, and the shaking last so long, that it could prove impossible to get up the dock before it hits. Should we make it that far, there’s no guarantee that the ramp up to the parking lot would still be attached shoreside; the recent remodel here at Shilshole beefed up our docks quite a lot, but they don’t look to me like they were designed for lateral sheer. If the ramp is out, the seawall would be insurmountable in the time available. But, if even after all that we made the parking lot, high ground still requires a 100 meter sprint across train tracks, through brambles, brush, and weed, and finally onto a hillside that might well be coming down to meet us at the same time we headed up it… local landslides are predicted to be extreme.
I’m beginning to think that our best option may be simply to stay with the ship, as it were. While it’s true that a lot of boats are demolished in tsunamis (particularly those in marinas with lots of stuff to bash into; concrete floats, pilings, other boats), it’s equally true that a lot of them stay afloat for quite a while after the waves. Most sailors are familiar with the axiom that one should always step up into a liferaft; maybe it’s also best to step up ashore in the wake of a tsunami. Certainly our hull would fare better beating against other boats and debris than our frail carcasses would. Getting rattled around during the ride would be unquestionably dangerous, but it’s not entirely unlike getting bashed around in heavy weather, which is something we’re reasonably equipped to cope with.
This seems a little unorthodox and runs contrary to every published bit of advice I can find. On the other hand, none of the published advice seems to contemplate the situation faced by boaters here in Puget Sound.
Staying aboard has other virtues as well: you retain all the resources of home. Emergency management people suggest a gallon of water per person per day for three days, but as long as we have the boat, we have about thirty, along with fuel, limited electricity and generation capacity, communications gear, regular and emergency food stuffs, and tough, warm clothing and footwear. In fact, we will have pretty much everything we have now, with the caveat that it may be damaged. But damaged is not missing entirely, as it would be if we abandoned it for high ground. A run for the hills precludes much more than a backpack, if that.
Even if the hull is breached, a dinghy or liferaft to get ashore with plus the ditch bag still probably provides most boaters with a more complete emergency kit than most lubbers will have in their homes. If you’re equipped to deal with sinking off-shore and surviving in a life-raft or on a desert island, you are certainly equipped for sinking right in the marina and living in a parking lot until help can arrive.
What I have realized is that I was looking in the wrong places for answers about preparing for disasters as a liveaboard or cruiser. For one thing, there just aren’t enough of us to make it worth the while of any official or agency to look specifically into the matters that most affect us. But more importantly, this is a lifestyle that requires self-reliance. There is a great community of boaters, most of who will go to great lengths to help one another, but at the end of the day you have to be able to count on yourself, your boat, and your crew in tight spots. If you don’t have the resources or cannot make the decisions yourself when disaster strikes, there is little chance that anyone else can do so for you. That is a lot of responsibility, but it goes hand in hand with the freedom that comes with the lifestyle.
When it comes to earthquakes and tsunamis, then, I need wake up and check my own lifelines, just like the rest of the time. Hunkering down or running for high ground isn’t a decision I can expect anyone else to make for me; I can debate it with others, look for every bit of relevant information I can find, and put some consideration into the options and consequences, but if the moment comes, it’s just as surely my sole decision to make as if I were facing a storm at sea. Unorthodox or not, I’ll have to come to terms with rolling my own dice and taking my own chances if this winter brings the third in the set of Pacific Rim mega-quakes.
Both sides of the table
My wife and I idly look at boats for sale all the time, playing the same “what if?” game that most sailors confined to a single sailboat play, wondering how much bluer the sea might look from the cockpit of a brand new Hallberg-Rassy. Since we have pulled the trigger and listed our current boat for sale, our searches have become more earnest and our appreciation of the business of yacht sales has become much broader and more nuanced. Both looking and listing, we now have seats on both sides of the table, and both perspectives are enlightening.
I expected slow going on the sales side, based on the conventional wisdom that fall and winter are no time to sell a boat, and on recent numbers from the industry. So I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of interest that surfaced over our ad. However, I have also come to appreciate the tolerance that brokers must exhibit fielding hundreds of requests from folks who have neither the resources nor intent of actually buying a boat. It’s impossible to sort these out; we probably look like some of them ourselves, in our grubby street shoes. But if as many people were actually shopping as appear to be shopping, boats would be as precious a commodity as gold right now.
It’s hard to critique this impulse to browse considering the market; in fact, we ourselves are shaping up to be some of the pickiest buyers we have seen! You have to look at a lot of boats before you find anything approaching acceptable, and there are a lot of boats out there right now. The word among brokers is that the good stuff still goes fast, but we’ve developed a more nuanced perspective on “good” as well: good is what matches your needs and price point, and there are immaculately maintained and outfitted vessels out there that do neither, while there are some skeletal tubs that come pretty close.
I’ve given up predicting what will move and what won’t. It seems to be based on what the buyer is looking for, which isn’t always what the sailor identifies as important. After all, someone out there at some point bought all those over-priced hulks with rot, blisters, and saggy stays that the keener-eyed viewed and rejected. As we’ve isolated the features that are most important to us, we’ve learned not to judge what others look at. Different folks have different views on life and sailing and what it’s worth to them.
Still, it’s a shock when someone comes aboard to look at our boat and doesn’t check the chain plates or look at the engine or check the bilge or ask about locker space. But it might explain why brokers seem surprised when we do so, or prove unable to answer basic technical questions about what they are selling and unwilling to get back to us with the answers later.
Of course, it’s easier to know all the details when you have lived so intimately with them for so long. I’m fairly itching for someone to ask me about the the chronic mast step rot problems on these models so I can explain in loving detail how ours has been removed and replaced with solid glass, but so far, alas, no one seems to care.
What they do care about is something that seems less surprising, but surprisingly disregarded by brokers: looks and cleanliness. We have an old boat, but it looks a lot newer than many newer boats we have seen, because we have kept up with some of the simpler maintenance and basic cleaning. In contrast, many of the boats we have viewed as buyers lately haven’t been vacuumed, or look like they have a pre-installed sprinkler system after a rainy day, or have keel bolts encased in rust. These are all things that are easier to keep up with if you are living aboard, granted, but they aren’t so difficult to address that a day of detailing couldn’t deal with them. As sellers, we have been fielding a lot of compliments about how our boat looks, and considering the competition, it’s easy to see why.
Compliments aren’t offers, though, and at that end of the day, as sellers that’s all we care about. As buyers, though, we understand exactly why the offers aren’t rolling in… the economy is uncertain, there are boats popping up for sale all the time, and there is a pervasive sense that waiting a little while will see lower prices and a better selection. If a little despair tends to creep in from the sales side of the table, it’s buoyed again by the thought that whatever disadvantages we encounter there are coming into play on our side from the buying side of the table. At times, though, it just seems like a big merry-go-round that it’s impossible to get off of, and you start to understand the old saw about the two happiest days of a sailor’s life being the day he buys the boat, and the day he sells it. By that measure, we have a couple of really happy days coming up sometime soon!
One Big Fish
In the otherwise made-for-TV-moviesque 1980 “The Final Countdown” there is a scene in which an officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz walks over to an enlisted rating who is monitoring radio traffic.
“Neem-itz?” says the officer, repeating an accented phrase heard over the radio. “Who’s that?”
“A Russian trawler,” says the enlisted man, euphemistically referring to the transparent disguise used by the Soviet intelligence-gathering vessels that routinely shadowed US carrier groups during the Cold War.
“What’s he want?” the officer asks.
“One big fish!” the rating jokes, pointing at the deck of the carrier beneath his feet.
The Final Countdown
As much a star of the movie as Kirk Douglas or Martin Sheen was the Nimitz herself. Filmed on board and using planes from the carrier’s air wing, the cheesy “carrier travels through time” plot snuck in a great deal of verisimilitude about the carrier lifestyle… the cramped quarters, flight deck operations, general quarters. For these things, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for “The Final Countdown” and by extension, the USS Nimitz.
So when I found myself tramping up a ramp from the pier onto the same flight deck elevator that Sheen took his leave from at the conclusion of the film, it was, if not a dream come true, at least a modest fantasy realized.
I was climbing aboard the carrier at her current berth at Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, where she is undergoing a twelve month refit project. I was with a tour group of Coast Guard auxiliarists and their families, courtesy of my stepfather. Leading our tour was Commander Brent Johnson, the command chaplain aboard Nimitz. Later, whenever I had need to grapple mentally with the immense scale of the vessel, I had only to tell myself, “Here is a ship that requires not just a reverend, but an entire organized team of clergy to pray for her and all the souls aboard.” That’s how big the Nimitz is.
There are nominally 2500 of those souls, not counting various air wings and other attached commands. During refit, the planes and aircrew have been removed and more or less replaced by great piles of heavy machinery and scores of shipyard construction workers. It’s no minor thing to take a warship apart and put it back together again in the right order, and it’s not done lightly; Nimitz will undergo one more of these between now and her expected end of life in 2025. This one, Commander Johnson said, is primarily to install shipboard wifi. Apparently, the iPad explosion has reached the Navy.
Actually, there are many major and minor systems being maintained or upgraded during the refit work; the Nimitz-class carriers may spend up to twenty percent of their lifespan in the shipyard undergoing repairs and modernization. The Navy expects to get fifty years out of them. When I reflect that Nimitz was christened the year I was born, the reality of that number really hits home. It also compares impressively with the lifespan and expectations we have for our own sailboat, Insegrevious. Although I have to note, modestly, that my own shipboard wifi installation project didn’t take much more than five minutes, with no dead spots.
Other than those that take the planes from the hangar deck to the flight deck, and a few specialized ones for armaments, machinery, or casualties, there aren’t really any elevators on board. You get between decks on ladders, not much different in construction or angle than the one leading down into the cabin from the cockpit Insegrevious. As the youngest person in the tour group by probably two decades, I spent a lot of time waiting around at either end of these ladders as duffers with various joint ailments clambered resolutely up or down. While there, I had plenty of time to marvel at the mirror sheen reflecting my stunning visage from any brass-clad fitting in view. To see such a high degree of upkeep, in the middle of what was basically an active construction project, spoke volumes about the morale and motivation of the crew.
A sealed catapult track along the flight deck cluttered with re-fit equipment
The Navy personnel aboard were, uniformly, polite, attentive, and professional. It was clear in their faces that they had been spending long days performing exhausting manual labor that had little to do with the picture the recruiters must have painted for them, but they were positive and upbeat and quick to crack a joke. One of Commander Johnson’s subordinates who was assisting with the tour had just joined the ship, coming in from Marine Helicopter Squadron One, the unit that is responsible for ferrying the president around by helicopter. He introduced himself as “The Sermonator.”
Although the ship may not have been at her prettiest, going aboard during an overhaul exposed much that might not normally be seen on a tour. Access panels were off, exposing the massive framing of the ship, showing the vast ventilation systems, and showing even more of the great bundles of wiring that form the nervous system of a modern warship. Wandering down the average corridor, you might already imagine you were seeing most of those cables and ducts; I frequently hit my head (helmeted, fortunately) on wire bundles in the narrow passageways. Many of them are exposed for rapid inspection and damage control. But it turns out they are only a fraction of the total. I have a hard time tracing my paltry 12v systems around… suddenly, a 2500-person crew starts to make a lot of sense.
Of course, such a big crew demands a great deal of support, which demands even more crew. The specialization began to boggle as we toured one of the mothballed messes, where we met two Culinary Specialists who, when not painting or mopping, spend their time making up box lunches for pilots who might not be able to make regular mess hours. Commander Johnson had scads of statistics at hand designed to illustrate the grand scale of the vessel, but they were unnecessary. Everything aboard her speaks to the complexity of the design and operation.
And yet, there are surprising commonalities with average boats and sailors. The focus on constant maintenance and upkeep as a necessary bulwark against chaos and danger was reinforced with a call over the 1MC, repeated each day, for the crew to man cleaning stations. At that point, almost every rating around us obediently stopped their refit job, got out brooms or rags, and started to tidy up. In the middle of unfinished construction. To a lubber, this might seem madness, but it brought home our own efforts during projects to try to keep the boat clean and orderly; when you’re living and working on her, you can’t let entropy get the upper hand.
Pri-Fly Graffiti
We tromped up and down a bewildering array of ladders, through identical gray passageways, across the vast flight deck cluttered with materials and parts awaiting installation, and around the “island”, the signature structure of a carrier sticking up awkwardly off to one side. Most of the activities on the ship are coordinated from the island when she is operational, but the spaces there were largely abandoned as the guts were being worked on below. The primary flight control deck was mothballed, screens and consoles wrapped in plastic, waiting for the return of planes, looking lonely with the sole stretch of graffiti visible on the ship scattered across a pillar in the middle. Signed by visiting luminaries such as Aerosmith, the pillar seemed like a testament to the rebellious, testosterone-fueled nature of the pilots who normally dominated the space and made it seem even emptier.
Bridges and Pri-Fly, from the flight deck
One level below pri-fly is the main bridge, which we snuck into quietly as a small team of sailors and contractors were working there. In another echo of the concerns of the sea that absorb sailors on big ships and small, they were discussing man-overboard recovery drills. A 100,000 ton behemoth doesn’t make a Williamson turn in a flash. Of course, having helicopters as an option puts a different spin on the problem.
Our group filed quietly past that small team and then huddled up on the opposite side of the bridge to listen to some of the details on the day-to-day activities of managing a busy carrier. The radar was running, the consoles here were energized, and the picture was much different from that one deck above: the bridge spoke of a ship, even in the middle of a refit, that was very much ready to go. There, to my astonishment, Commander Johnson launched into his own story about, you guessed it: a Russian “trawler.” The tour was not yet over, but my Nimitz experience was complete.
A boat is no place to be sick
I don’t mean seasick, although boats are obviously popular sites for that malady as well. No, I just mean plain-old, stuffed-up, head-achey, nose-drippy sick. Which I have been, for the past week.
When we were in high school, some friends of mine dubbed this sort of illness “The Mongolian Death Flu.” It’s the one where you start to sound like Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” and fluids begin to emerge from every bodily orifice in prodigious quantities that no earthly box of Kleenex can hope to keep up with. This sort of cold laughs off common medications, reducing NyQuil to a quivering, half-hearted fraction of an hour of relief so shallow that it seems like a hallucination. As you lay prone on the settee waiting for death to take you, hallucinations may be your best form of relief, in fact.
I usually get this once every couple of years but this is the first time it has struck while I have been living aboard. As miserable as it always is, being on the boat has magnified the suffering immensely.
For starters, it’s just not possible to go lay someplace and pass out until you either recover or pass away. As long as there is more than one person aboard, the ineluctable Laws of The Sea dictate that wherever you are, is someplace that eventually they will need to be. So rather than rest in peace, I am forced to slump about the cabin, muttering ungraciously, as my wife finds necessities located in lockers beneath or behind my current berth.
All that hidden storage works against me in other ways, too. Should I need rapid access to medications, toilet paper, or more Kleenex, I am flat out of luck… it’s all stowed with varying degrees of inaccessibility, each little puzzle exacerbated by my diminished mental capacity and badly reduced dexterity.
Dexterity is also in play when it comes to something so simple as moving about the cabin. Balance is a great necessity for graceful movement in an always-moving structure with unpredictable and curving decks, and sinuses clogged to overflowing with green slime badly inhibit proper functioning in the inner ear. As if that weren’t bad enough, all the cold medications add their own flavors of loopy, causing me to crash about wildly during any ambulation requiring more than three steps.
If this were all taking place on one level, that would be one thing, but there are also ladders to be negotiated, lifelines to be crossed, and berths to climb into. I like to think I am pretty flexible for my age, but with every muscle aching and my head pounding, it is now utter agony to clamber out the companionway without first removing (and then replacing; it’s cold out now!) every single hatch board. After doing that, I have to rest in the cockpit (in the cold) for a good five minutes to recover before I dare to attempt to step over the lifelines and onto the dock. And god forbid it’s been raining and made things slick along the way!
Oh, being on the boat like this is not entirely without its advantages. I’m always close to the head, for example, and should I succumb to the attraction of an early exit, I can always throw myself overboard into the sweet, compelling throes of hypothermia. So far, though, the thought of having to negotiate the companionway ladder again to get out there has been keeping me alive.
Kinetic Weekend
If you have no plans for the first weekend in October, then a quick autumn trip up to Port Townsend is never a bad way to fill the time. The winds are brisk, the marinas are on off-season rates, open slips abound, and best of all, you will be in town for the annual Kinetic Skulpture Race.
Since 1983, an ever-rotating group of oddballs, misfits, and folks who are all here because they are not all there have been cobbling together (with varying degrees of success) human-powered kontraptions designed to be propelled over land, sea, sand, and mud, and racing them around Port Townsend the first Sunday in October for the glory. If you have never taken the opportunity to watch or participate in–and that line can blur rapidly–this annual event, you are missing one of the quintessentially Northwestern experiences available to the all-weather cruiser.
Over the years, the event has expanded to fill the weekend. Hard-won experience lead to mandatory pre-race brake and float tests, preceded by a general parade, on Saturday afternoon, followed by the all-important Koronation Kostume Ball Saturday night, during which the Rose Hips Kween is selected and crowned. The Kween then presides over the race itself, traditionally started in front of the American Legion Hall by a cheap shot at low noon on Sunday. By rule, in case of sun, the race is held anyway. That was fortunate this year, when the cool, low clouds and showers were broken up by bothersome periods of blue sky and bright sun.
Float Test
We like to get to town early and attend the Saturday events. By Sunday, everyone has been on the hill and in the water already and have proven they can stop and float. On Saturday, these capabilities have not yet been established, and the process of doing so frequently proves more exciting than the race itself.
With friends and family, we drove to town and parked near the marshalling area for the parade in the US Bank parking lot adjacent to the ferry terminal. Racers, spectators, and hangers-on milled about the parked skulptures. An impromptu drum circle serenaded the crowd and the event’s enforcement branch, the fearsomely mustachioed Kinetic Kops, circulated, maintaining disorder and soliciting bribes.
Kinetic Kop
Given the nature of the event and the participants, it can be difficult to determine exactly who is racing ahead of time, but this year as usual there appeared to be about twenty skulptures entered. These range from massive, specialized vehicles powered by sophisticated drive trains with up to four people pedaling at a time, down to folks with some styrofoam strapped to a bicycle. Each year, there is at least one novel approach to addressing the problem of building a human-powered vehicle capable of negotiating roads, sand, water, and mud. This year, it was the Mousetrap, a big hamster-wheel with a single racer walking inside.
Having looked over the field and privately ranked the entrants, we decided to get to the site of the upcoming “break” tests to get good seats. Walking up to the Wooden Boat Foundation, adjacent to both the hill where the mandatory brake checks are conducted and the ramp where the mandatory float tests occur, we passed a lone skulpture pedaling frantically back along Water Street. In the finest traditions of the race, they were running a little late and going in the wrong direction.
Mousetrap
We wandered up to the upper deck of the new Foundation building and got good spots along the rail. Eventually, the parade made its way down to us and the racers took turns going up the hill and coming back down, generally managing not to crash along the way. The float testing was not as successful; one of the first skulptures in the water had a propulsion failure, and a later one capsized.
We were back on Sunday at exactly noon, but other than the usual shenanigans and rambling speeches from the announcer’s stand, nothing much was happening. Nothing moves quickly during anything Kinetic, and part of the fun is chatting with others in the audience and gawking at Kops and offishuls as they attempt to manage the unmanageable. This year, the audience included a real offishul, as Governor Christine Gregoire quietly came up and found a spot on the rail near us to watch the racers brave the frigid waters. Since her term is up in January, there was some speculation that she might be contemplating a run for higher office as the Rose Hips Kween. Keep an eye on CNN for updates.
The Governor Gets a Ticket
The K-Kops were, as usual, liberally distributing tickets, probably in the hope of soliciting more bribes. Anyone, or anything, can be ticketed, and being a member of the audience is no defense. If you are in a position to offer a gratuity, mini-donuts usually go over well. On the other hand, it is sometimes more fun to be ticketed than not. Governor Gregoire got a ticket for being “Best Gov in US” but that seemed like a bit of a kop-out on the part of an admiring K-cop. More typical were tickets issued for being too sleepy (to a skulpture made up to look like a bed), excessive laughter, insufficiently gaudy costume, egregious combovers, and, to one unsuspecting pooch, “Dog Gone Mad.”
It didn’t matter that no one appeared to be in any hurry, however. The top prize one can aspire to in the race is not that for first place, but rather the coveted Mediocrity Award, bestowed upon the skulpture that comes in dead middle in the field.
Eventually, the Kops and offishuls got a majority of skulpture pilots lined up at the start, and sent them off with a siren blast (an actual gunshot would be a little too violent for Port Townsend). The pilots mounted their machines and took off pell mell across the starting line. Half of them promptly turned in the wrong direction and went off-course, careening about in the crowd and forcing some extraordinarily belabored three-point turns.
The first leg was a short around-the-block warm-up to get some speed up before heading into the water for cold and wet stretch out around a buoy and back again. No short float test this; skulptures without well-considered marine propulsion systems are in for a long afternoon fighting wind and waves. Predictably, more than a few exercise the pilot’s privilege of cheating to either get a tow from someone more favorably equipped, or to simply splash in and back out again and claim they went the distance.
Although the skulptures all reached the ramp at about the same time, there were still a few either steeling themselves for the passage or laboriously re-configuring their craft into aqua-mode by the time the hard-charging leaders were coming out of the water. We took this as a sign that it was time to head to the next obstacle, the Kwik-sand next to the Marine Science Center at Fort Warden. Since there is a big hill in between, and it was after one o’clock, it was also a sign that there was time for lunch, which we snagged at the ever-popular Waterfront Pizza on the way back to the car. A lot of spectators walk the route; it’s not hard to keep up with the actual contestants.
Cheatin' Time
The Kwik-sand is a recent addition to the course and I have not been a big fan. Even having stopped for lunch, we got there early and waited quite a while in a cold breeze off the Strait for the first skulptures to show up. Once they arrived and entered the beach, it just seemed cruel to watch. Apart from the tension of wondering whether or not the tide will sweep them away before they get through the course, it’s all just watching the poor pilots grunting and heaving until they get tired and start cheating. I’m not saying that isn’t why I watch in the first place, only that the Dismal Bog is a much better place to see it, because then they are all muddy and miserable at the same time.
The Dismal Bog was up next, at the county fairgrounds. It consists of two trenches filled with water and left to marinate overnight. The skulptures must each pass through one or the other of these within fifteen minutes of entering them. This year was less dismal than some, thanks to relatively dry weather. Still, few skulptures managed to escape the bog unscathed. In fact, the first three to plow in promptly got badly stuck and bottled the course up for a half hour or more. Some years this results in an impromptu chain of spectators wading in and hauling on tow ropes to get the pilots across the line, but no one was so inspired this year.
The Mousetrap was the sole exception to the general misery. The pilot calmly shucked down to a bathing suit and promptly rolled her extra-wide hamster wheel right through the mud as if she were strolling down the sidewalk. Then she did it again, showing off by coming back through the other trench, earning herself a ticket for “Double-dipping” in the process.
Mired in the Dismal Bog
In the past, the Bog event was followed by a celebratory catapulting of teddy bears across the fairgrounds, but the trebuchet broke a couple years ago (the rule requiring each skulpture to have a teddy bear on board at all times, however, has not yet been exculpated, and several unwary pilots were ticketed for failure to have a teddy bear) so now everyone just heads for the finish line and the Survivor’s Party. This was our cue to pile back in the car and head back to Seattle.
We have rarely stayed for the actual end of the race. I can only think of one year I even found out who won, but winning isn’t really the point. The point is good old-fashioned zany fun, and we always get our fill of that.
For more information about the race, see the Port Townsend Kinetic Race website, or stop by Kinetic Koffee the next time you are in Port Townsend… it’s an easy walk from Boat Haven.
“For the glory!”
Decisions and Consequences
Awake at 0200 with the wind howling in the rigging on a cold morning this spring, I got up and started browsing Yachtworld, as idly docked sailors are sometimes wont to do (particularly with looming tasks of boat repair hanging over them). Like everyone, we have our bouts with “three-footitis,” that burning, feverish desire for a boat that is just three feet longer… just enough to make all those little annoying fit and function problems evaporate. We’re wise enough to understand that they never really go away, of course, that those problems are part and parcel of nautical life. But at 2AM, wisdom is at its ebb.
Mandy and I had long since decided that we did need a bigger boat someday, that living aboard a 33 footer is possible and even enjoyable for two people, but that living and working aboard required something with a little more space. The only real debate after making that decision was, how big, and how old? We started out thinking forty to forty-three feet, but after some consideration and experience, we scaled that back. Smaller is less expensive, both initially and down the line, for a whole host of reasons, and time spent ducking in and out of narrow and sometimes shallow anchorages and marinas has convinced us that it’s more flexible and manageable for us, as well. Taken together with the fact that newer boats tend to be roomier at the same length than older boats, we figured something in the 36 to 38 foot range might actually be better.
While the small/large thing was a matter of preference, the new/old debate settled itself quickly after a glance at the carnage several years of economic havoc had wrought in our savings accounts. Some day we might be able to afford a brand new boat in that size range… but not this year.
This is where the consequences come in, though. Money spent on an older boat this year probably isn’t going to be available for a new boat down the road… by sinking that cash into something right now, we are probably delaying that new boat by a few more years, or perhaps even torpedoing the possibility entirely.
This sort of cold, hard accounting can lead to a sort of decision paralysis, which I found it easy to indulge myself in through the early part of the summer with little opportunity to actively seek solutions. Now that we’re back in Seattle, it is time to look at boats.
After one day out on the docks, poking around at used yachts, the consequences of decisions became even more apparent. Months of comparison shopping on Yachtworld hadn’t adequately prepared me for the relatively high prices here in the Pacific Northwest, or the dearth of options available in the size range we are looking at. Finding the right combination of features, in the right size range, at the right price, seems impossible. All boats are compromises, but few have opted for the sorts of trade-offs I am interested in. It’s like hunting for a condo in a very small neighborhood split evenly between Tudors and ranch-style homes.
Since it will be our home, the decision is that much more portentous. It certainly makes me realize how lucky we are with our current boat. Having known almost nothing when she bought it, my wife ended up with a solid, well-performing boat that has a lot of features we like that turn out to be pretty rare in the wider world of yachts. More than once I have contemplated breaking out the chainsaw and fiberglass and extending her “manually” for that three extra feet. And it may be telling that my nautical dreams now, instead of depicting fantasies about light blue waters and warm breezes, consist almost entirely of visions of gutting and repairing old boats to bring them up to the standards I have become accustomed to.
The decision was made especially stark for me this afternoon as we tied up in our slip after a long, dreary motor south from Port Townsend. As I killed the engine, it occurred to me that it might well be the last time I do so on Insegrevious. Our plan now is to list her toward the end of October. It’s unlikely she’ll sell so soon, but on the off chance that she does, we could be in an apartment by Thanksgiving, and our next trip by boat would be aboard a different boat. It seems, suddenly, a much weightier consequence than I had imagined.
Wooden is wonderful
There is just nothing more salty and nautical looking than a finely cared-for wooden boat. Big, small, power, sail, a wooden boat glowing with oil and varnish applied by a diligent and loving crew tugs at the salt in the blood of even the most lubberly spectator. Combined with blue skies, fair winds, and warm sun on the decks, there’s just nothing like a collection of wooden vessels for getting me into a nautical mood.
So I always enjoy going to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, and this year was a particularly fine time for it. I can’t remember better weather for it, and coming at the tail end of a summer that has, for the first time in a long time, seen us tied up in town rather than out sailing, it provided a badly needed shot of nautical for us. My wife and I sailed up to Port Hadlock (a much less crowded port during the Festival weekend!) last Friday to meet up with friends and family for a long weekend of visiting and show-going.
The schedule was jam-packed with seminars and lectures, but we skipped all those in favor of boat-viewing. There are very few bits of nautical knowledge that we figure we don’t need to know, but wooden boat maintenance is among them. We like to look, not touch. And with eighty-odd boats on display, there was a lot of looking to do.
There is also a lot of history involved. There was a time when the broad availability of wood as a construction material roughly coincided with the explosion of international travel and commerce. The oldest wooden boats we have today are relics of the last dregs of that explosion, and provide a fascinating window into the daily lives of our forebears before roads and cars, when the vast highways of water were the main arterial of the nation.
If that fact weren’t interesting enough, the tides of history have selected for survival those that were beautiful enough or interesting enough or owned by folks famous enough to draw favor. So it’s not unusual for mortals such as ourselves to find ourselves aboard Howard Hughes’ old sailboat, checking out frequent guest Hugh Hefner’s favorite berth, or standing around on the Duke’s old yacht, listening to the current owner read out entries from the logbook of glittering Hollywood parties held aboard in the 1930′s.
Some of the more prosaic vessels have also gained fame through either longevity or proximity. On a snowy day last November, my wife and I had watched from across the bay as the tug Elmore, built in 1890 (and re-built often since) had her bow stove in at her dock by a loose fishing vessel. Through the winter, we had kept track of the repairs with some interest, driving through the boatyard in Port Townsend and watching as the planking was stripped off and slowly replaced.
Going aboard to see the interior after such a catastrophe, then, was an eye-opener; her forepeak, previously packed with random gear and filling the same role as the average quarter-berth on a sailboat, had been entirely re-done with a new berth and lovely wooden lockers to complement the new planking. She looked as if she easily had another hundred and twenty years in her. I wondered what one of her original passengers in the late eighteen nineties would have thought to see her still chugging along today.
If boating generally provides a community, then wooden boat owners and crew have their own distinct neighborhood in it. It’s this close-knit group that keeps all these relics not only sailing, but thriving. Watching them chat and compare notes, it struck me how dedicated they are. In comparison, I feel like a weekend sailor. Many of them make their living on boats as well as making a hobby of them. If you enjoy a life on the water, nothing could be more appealing.
Of course, as I dreamily contemplated such a life, the stark reality that I wouldn’t even make a halfway competent deckhand was driven home as I helped catch the lines for the Elmore as she eased back into her regular berth on the last afternoon. I managed to stand in the wrong place, look the wrong direction, misunderstand instructions, and generally prove more hindrance than help at docking the 78′ tug with a touchy clutch.
This weekend, of course, is the Lake Union Boat’s Afloat show in Seattle. I plan to go to that as well, this time avoiding any attempts to help out, and hoping that the newer, slicker, less ingrained presenters there will prove a little less salty and will make me feel a little less lubberly in comparison!
Flying through the air with the greatest of ease
We wandered back up our finger pier the other night after dinner to find our neighbors shifting supplies out of a dock cart and into their cockpit.
“Hi Bob,” I said. “Where are you headed?”
“Well,” he began, “There is this French couple who are sailing around the world, and they fill up their cruising kitty by performing acrobatics in the rigging of their boat. We sponsored them for a show this weekend at Point Hudson, so we’re heading up there tomorrow morning.”
This was not a particularly unusual pronouncement to hear down on our dock on a summer evening, but my curiosity was piqued. Bob handed us a flyer. Sure enough, there was a picture of a woman, spinning around in a manner that I most associate with the high flyers of Cirque du Soleil, in the rigging of a sailboat. The flyer announced shows at five and seven, with a potluck on the docks to follow the late show.
As it happened, we were sailing up to Port Hadlock that same day to visit with family. Watching death-defying acrobatics performed over water seemed like good family fun to me, so I told Bob we would try to make it.
“Great!” he said, “Look for us, we’ll be the ones in berets.”
Sure enough, the first thing we saw after carpooling into Port Townsend Saturday evening and walking past the new Center for Wooden Boats complex was Bob and his wife, resplendent in striped shirts and red berets, walking up the dock. They pointed us toward the west end of the marina and we joined the stream of other people already heading in that direction and found places to sit along the rim of the boat basin.
Franck Rabilier, Delphine Lechifflart, and their two daughters, all aboard their bright yellow 40 foot sloop La Loupiote, have crossed the Atlantic, kicked around the Caribbean, hopped over to Hawaii, and cruised BC before ending up in Port Townsend on a lovely August evening. The basin around the linear dock at Point Hudson marina formed a natural amphitheater, with the sloop tied off diagonally between the travel lift pier and the end of the dock. A good-sized crowd fanned out along the rocks, grass, and piers as Franck came on deck and announced that they were going to wait another five minutes before starting, because some folks on the ferry just coming in didn’t want to miss the show.
Paddling in Circles
Our neighbors told us that the late show is the more serious and impressive display of acrobatics, but I was just as happy to have caught the earlier slapstick routine. It struck me as being more authentic to our own cruising experiences, apart from, you know, spinning around upside down in the rigging. Although I don’t doubt that some day it will come to that.
Anyway, at first I didn’t even realize they were starting the show… two people in a blow-up dinghy paddling in opposite directions and going in circles is such an integral part of our own average routine that I just assumed they were trying to get back to the boat to get ready for the high-wire stuff. I finally figured out it was just a performance when they didn’t finish up by screaming at each other.
Getting Aboard
Things got progressively funnier and more acrobatic from there. They came aboard over the bows, had an altercation over the whisker pole, and got tangled up in the lines. Again, this tracks closely with our own sailing experience, except that when things get heated aboard Insegrevious we just throw things at one another; Franck and Delphine had a mad-cap chase up and down the mast and through the air over decks and water.
The pace built until they were frenetically popping up and down the mast and forestay like yo-yos, making ascents that take us five minutes of grinding in a matter of seconds.
Eventually, they transitioned from the comedic to the poetic as Delphine free-climbed up a halyard, entwined herself in a sail, and Franck started twhirling her madly around from the deck below.
I won’t say I haven’t been tempted to do the same with Mandy from time to time after hoisting her up the mast, but I am not sure she could hold on like that. Nor could I; I happened to get a look at Delphine’s forearms before the show, and they make mine look like strands of under-cooked spaghetti. In fact, through the entire show, what struck me the most was how free and easy she and Franck made the acrobatics look. There were no nets, no safety lines, nothing but their own strength and skill in an environment that was never designed for such manuevers. A profusion of stays, halyards, booms, and dangling sails strikes me as putting a lot of dangerous obstacles in the way of the aerialist. But you never knew it while watching Franck and Delphine’s performance. Their apparently effortless ascents of stays and halyards, all while acting out their slapstick routine, made it look fun and safe and easy.
If you missed the show in Port Townsend, fear not; La Loupiote will be booting around Puget Sound for the rest of the summer. They will be performing in Port Ludlow August 23rd, 24th, and 25th, and in Seattle at Elliot Bay Marina on August 27th. You can see their schedule, and more details, at their website, voilierspectacle.com. Prepare to be entertained, and to learn to look at your rigging in a whole new light.
Marty McOmber
Scott Wilson