Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Doing More With Less - Entertainment

Crossing the Sea
Crossing the Sea
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
The boat teaches many lessons in conservation. This is part of an ongoing series of posts about how we boaters do more with considerably less. The tips are valid for land based life as well, though, so hopefully folks can use some of these ideas.

* * *

No matter how long I cruise and no matter how many times and in how many methods people ask this question, the answer to "How do you entertain yourself on a boat?" remains a helpless shrug. In the Real World™ we had so many distractions, even after we turned off the television and discontinued cable. We could go to the movies, a museum, the zoo, the beach. There were restaurants and cafes. Our friends were nearby, our shelves filled with books…. oh god the libraries. The libraries.

Let's pause for a moment to contemplate the duel wonders of the Internet and Libraries. You people who live with ubiquitous access to both resources should never ever EVER take them for granted.

After you cut the lines and head out into remote anchorages, foreign countries whose primary language is not your native tongue, places where going out for pizza really isn't an option, it is an interesting question just how to spend copious free time. However, despite the paucity of civilized amusements and the wealth of free time available, I have yet to meet a bored cruiser. Tired, frustrated, dirty, miserable, or unhappy, but never bored. I haven't even met a bored boat kid which -- given the nature of children -- seems somewhat miraculous. So just what are we doing?

Read Anything -- At this point, I think every member of this family is willing to read absolutely anything published in English, up to and including computer user guides. If you start your cruising life as a lover of science fiction or fantasy, you'll soon learn to enjoy mysteries, diesel mechanic manuals, and even… say it isn't so… romance novels. Alternatively, if you enjoy a good bodice ripper but haven't read great literature since English 101 in college, you'll start to find yourself reading H.G. Wells and Shakespeare. Reading taste for cruisers is largely determined by what you find at the many book exchanges along the way. Every marina, yacht club, restaurant, and laundry room patronized by the cruising community has at least one shelf… in some cases an entire wall… devoted to casual literature. It is crucial to your happiness that you become agnostic regarding genre and open to new literary experiences. Consequently, I can now list Two Years Before the Mast as one of my favorite books of all time. However, I never want to read another account of sailors lost at sea again. Ugh.

Get a Hobby -- We've seen cruisers that knit, quilt, cook, and bead. There is one that crochets handbags out of plastic grocery bags and another who specializes in shell earrings. Like DrC, many cruisers take up an instrument or revisit one they learned many years ago. Others write stories, poetry, or blogs, carve wood, work on their photography, make videos, or build elaborate web sites. It is a good idea to become invested in your hobby before you leave, particularly if the materials and tools are going to prove difficult to find in other countries. Also, be open to discovering new hobbies while you are out here.

Walk… A Lot -- Hiking is our passion. We walk everywhere. One of the limitations of cruising the Pacific Northwest is that it is far more challenging to walk around up there than it is down in Mexico. In the desert, the horizon is literally limitless. We walk in the wilderness and in towns, up ridge lines and over to remote anchorages. Walking is good for the health, kills hours of time, and enables you to dramatically expand your horizons. A pastime which we did not take up but which many of our fellow travelers endorse is kayaking. I think of this as walking on water providing similar benefits and pleasures.

Learn to Play -- I think adults outgrow games and play as we age. Forgive me for saying so, but I attribute this loss in no small part to the industrialization of education. Somewhere between 6th grade and graduation, we tell our children to stop screwing around, stop having fun and get to work. It's a shame. We should never stop playing. From play comes some of our best ideas and our happiest moments. DrC and I, and even to a lesser extent our daughters, have reacquainted ourselves with the pleasure of play. We play Scrabble and Sorry, Gin and Rummy. We enjoy video games on our computers and handhelds as well as solo logic puzzles such as Sudoku and Crosswords. Mera and Aeron have sustained The Game long after I think most children would have abandoned it. One of our favorite games is Mexican Train which we enjoy with our cruising buddies on warm evenings.

Do It Yourself -- Boat life requires constant work and maintenance. It forces you to think creatively about how to fix, create, repair, replace and build it yourself. Once you start down that path, it seems increasingly stupid to buy. Don Quixote sports shelves, curtains, lockers, hooks, and covers all made by a member of this family. We make our winter Solstice gifts each year, and we spend a lot of time sanding, painting, varnishing, cleaning, polishing, waxing, and lubing. You can either suffer through all this work (which I do) or you can try to enjoy it. I'm working on this. I enjoy some of it.

Knitting Solstic Gifts
Knitting Solstic Gifts
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
Relax Your Mind -- The need for speed in the real world drives our entertainment consumption as much as it does our work life. There is an urgency to everything, a constant requirement of movement and activity. Cruising life teaches lessons about patience and relaxation. It is okay just to sit still for awhile and listen to the water sluice past the hulls, to lie in bed and watch the sun rise through the port hole, to sit in a palapa and watch the children play on the beach. This one catechism is so difficult for me; I am a Type A, hyperactive, pressure addict. DrC, though considerably more silent, is arguably even less capable of sitting still. It has been hard for us to learn passivity. However, the most elusive yet satisfying moments of our lives are those wherein we just sit side by side contemplating the horizon and feeling warm, happy, loved, satisfied with a moment requiring no embellishment.

Hours go by, days vanish, entire weeks and months simply slip into the past and never do we hear or feel the plaint, "Are we there yet?" When the journey is the destination, it's easier to be entertained by the present.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

(Recent) Lessons Learned About Boats

Our New Tramp
Our New Tramp
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
Every phase of our boat life has been marked by a series of very hard won lessons. Even though DrC tends to be absolutely pathologically diligent with the research and study routine, even though I have tendencies as an OCD project manager, we still manage somehow to break shit, forgot stuff, screw up by the numbers. It's a Thing We Do. So it is without too much surprise that I report to hitherto unexpected trials in prepping the boat for sale and moving back to land.

Catamaran Tramps are Structural -- Don't let anyone tell you that catamaran tramps are just a pretty little play space at the front of the boat. It took DrC and I two and half days working sun rise to sun set to install the new tramp on Don Quixote. To string the tramp from edge to edge, we had to put the webbing on a winch and pulley system… every two loops. DrC estimates we put at least a 1000 pounds of strength into the corner. Our hands were raw, back sore, muscles aching. No amount of tequila made it easy to sleep at night. There is no question that our boat must be designed to account for the tramp quite literally holding the front of the hulls together in rough seas.

Confirm the Presence of Hot Water Before Picking a Haul Out Yard -- I really don't think this requires elaboration.

Don't Clean Anything Until You Move Off -- Every time I think something or somewhere on the boat is clean and ready for the new owner, DrC smashes a bloody mosquito on it, the girls walk on it, or the cat rolls in it. I've had it. We're going to find a really cheap motel in town, and I'm going to move the family off before I clean even so much as a single additional square inch.

Things Break Because You Plan to Sell Them -- For no particular reason, systems that were otherwise 100% functional have decided to behave like gimpy pieces of crap. Murphy moved on to the boat about three weeks ago. We're spending a lot of time cleaning up after him.

Don't Attend A Swap Meet Until You Are Actually Done -- We sold everything about three weeks ago at the monthly swap meet. Then -- as I noted in the previous point -- stuff started breaking. And of course, the part we need? We sold it. Murphy tipped back a pint and snickered at us when the spark plug on the outboard decided it needed to be replaced. It's not hard to get a new one, and we'll have it installed within an hour… after shlepping into town to buy it and bring it back to the boat.

The Boat Smells - Actually, every place we humans live stinks. Your home has a unique odor that is probably just fine for you and your loved ones. You may not even notice it. When you walk into another home, however, your nose is assaulted by the odor of different soap fragrances, variations on cooking themes, and someone else's farts. Boats are more pungent than houses and not just because people are living in a more constrained space. Add to normal home smells the piquancy of a mobile sewage system, two diesel and one gas engine with associated fuel tanks, and the unique eau de bilge -- an unavoidable miasma of damp goo, mold, and wet wood of which no boat is completely free. However, when a buyer arrives for a sea trial it's not a good idea if his first thought is, "Oh my god this boat stinks." The Cruiser Dream just doesn't extend to the reality of Boat Smell. I've been trying to figure out how to fix this on Don Quixote. I think the only solution is again… move everyone off the boat and explode an incense bomb in every cabin and locker.

It's Expensive to Sell Your Boat -- Did you know that brokers take 10% when they sell your boat? I didn't. Call me just royally big-word-starting-with-an-F stupid, but this was a surprise to DrC and I. So let's say you buy a boat for $100,000. The day you take ownership… even if you could sell it for the same amount you purchased it for… your boat has depreciated $10,000. Hate this. I was figuring the broker fee would be similar to housing in the 4 to 6% range. Somehow, however, brokers have managed to maintain a stranglehold on the 10% price point. I have no idea how they do it.

No More Procrastination -- Another way your boat costs money to sell is that you have to do all the deferred maintenance tasks you never bothered to get around to while you were living on it. In the case of Don Quixote, these items are largely aesthetic. For example, we replaced a bent lifeline, took the sails to a loft for patches on spots which were starting to show a little wear, sanded and varnished the table, touched up the paint on the outboard mount and the windlass case. The boat looks fantastic, but it all adds up to money, work and time. One of my readers said there is a 95% point where only the previous owner sees the problems. Other than the layer of boatyard/child/cat dirt coating every surface, I think Don Quixote is ready for her new owner. It's true that the remaining items are mostly bits that only DrC and I know and care about. The next owner might not ever notice those items and instead find other reasons entirely to curse us.

Mexican Gotcha
Mexican Gotcha
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
It's Emotional -- A boat is more than a home. We pour so much of ourselves into our boat identity. We pour so much of our time into just keeping the thing functional. It is very hard to let go. Then suddenly, you're done. You've let go. But the boat -- stupid, expensive bitch that she is --still sits there sucking up money like a high power ShopVac. I've begun to resent all this work and time and money. Worse are the moments when I regress and start crying when I see her on the horizon as we dinghy back after an evening at the taqueria. Don Quixote is a beautiful home. I panic sometimes that we will never have anything even fractionally as nice ever again. Talking me off this particular ledge is one of DrC's most challenging ongoing tasks.

* * *

I don't want to learn any more boat lessons for a long long while. The family is ready to start screwing up our transition to New Zealand with glorious failures of cultural understanding and financial ignorance. The countdown to our departure is well underway.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Time to Go

5 Peso Shades
5 Peso Shades
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
Today is the day. It hurts. It hurts a whole lot. In a few days, a few weeks at most, I'll recalibrate. My sense of humor will return, my ability to write about our lives resurface. Until then -- and until my posse queen art maven Keetster gets my graphics done -- you're going to see canned writing I did over the past 6 weeks. Still about cruising rather than our new life. Check the Twitter feed for where and what we're actually doing.

In case I have not made this clear with all my prior posts, I can think of no better way to raise children than on a cruising sail boat. There are many successful, wonderful ways to raise children. There are undoubtedly safer or more economically responsible methods. However, it is almost inconceivable that our family will ever stumble on one that suits us better. We can only hope we find methods and places and people that come close to the incredibly stimulating and rich lifestyle we have led for the past two years.

Today we walked away from Don Quixote. I'd say there is a better than even chance we'll never see her again. Today we walked away from the docks at Marina de La Paz, away from the Sea of Cortez, and away from the nautical based cruising world. I hurt in places in my soul I didn't know existed. I'm filled with a senseless fear that we'll never live this well again, never see the world and feel each other with quite the same intensity. I don't want to let go of the notoriety of Don Quixote or the special relationship the girls forged between our family and cruisers throughout Canada and Mexico.

However, for now... we are done. It's time to go.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

TechTip: Get Yourself A Good Ride

Short Story
Your dinghy is the only way off the boat short of swimming. Do not skimp.

Long Story
Our first opportunity to prove ourselves and our dinghy mojo came in San Simeon as we travelled down the West Coast. We failed miserably. It wasn't just embarrassing. We made a costly mistake, lost some valuable gear, and nearly decapitated our youngest. It was not a good time had by all. However, dumping our dinghy in the surf early in our Pacific career taught us a very valuable lesson in caution and the value of appropriate equipment for the dinghy. Before you consider cutting corners, remember this important relationship: car is to house as dinghy is to boat. Unless you want to remain housebound throughout your entire cruising life, I strongly encourage thoughtful and copious investment in a quality launch.

Size Matters -- As with an anchor, invest in a dinghy at least one size larger than the directions on the package call for. Don Quixote carries a rigid inflatable which is rated for eight people. We have five. That's about right. We discuss whether or not we'd want a smaller dinghy were it just the two of us, and frankly, neither of us is convinced. A ten foot dinghy for a couple is essentially like owning a minivan or an SUV as a couple. You don't really need it all the time, but when you need to haul something around, it's very nice to have.

Power Up -- It probably goes without saying that a bigger dinghy needs a bigger motor. This is another place you do not want to skimp on either size or quality. When you consider a motor, put it on your dinghy, load up your entire crew plus two bags of groceries, laundry or garbage. If you can plane, the motor is big enough. If you can not, keep looking. Have a mechanic look it over from top to bottom to make sure there are no hidden gotchas. Outboards are pretty easy to maintain, but you want to start with one in very good shape. If you are cruising down to Mexico, I recommend Yamaha motors only because they are absolutely everywhere so finding parts and a mechanic are very easy.

It's Nice to Stay Dry -- Some landings and traverses are going to be drier than others. Equip your dinghy with at least one dry bag. We also recommend a Pelican Case for transporting your computer.

Keep It Together -- When you flip your dinghy -- and you will someday, some place, in some swell -- everything is going to want to escape into the depths. Create a simple clipping system to tie down your dry bag(s) and cases. It doesn't hurt to also have a quick and easy way to nail your shoes into the boat though the ubiquitous presence of Crocs down here pretty much assures your footwear will float. You might have to go swimming, but you'll recover your goods.

Night Lights -- We've seen a few dinghies with really nice navigation lights, usually mounted on the motor. While I like these, you don't have to get that fancy. You do, however, want to have at least a flash light or head lamp for after dark passages. Don't tell me you won't have your dink out at night. We all lose track of the time over sundowners and suddenly realize that the sun is actually down, we're more than a bit snookered, and our boat home is over there in a westerly direction… I think. Use the light to keep other launches from smacking into you as well as a tool to find your own boat. For ideas on how to make your boat uniquely visible at night with a flashlight, see my article on anchor lights.

Tie It Down -- Do not underestimate the power of your dinghy to spontaneously launch itself off a cleat and wander around the anchorage. We use both a strong primary painter which we monitor assiduously for chafe as well as a secondary chunk of line. Double tying the dinghy at night has a secondary advantage in that it makes it a wee bit harder to steal.

Security System -- It's not as dangerous out here as folks might lead you to believe, but of all the types of crime you might be exposed to while traveling, the most probable is "dinghy ransom." You wake up one morning to find your dinghy has miraculously come out of its two ties and moved upwind and across a bar into the care of a very friendly local who will charge you a 300 peso tip to give it back. I've seen several ways to discourage this type of blackmail. Some cruisers actually lift their dinghy on davits or with their main halyard up the side of the boat at night. Others like ourselves cable the dinghy to the boat and the motor to the dinghy. Another creative way to prevent theft is to paint your motor entertainingly obnoxious colors and mark up your dinghy so that it's resale value is minimal.

Wheels Rock -- Retractable dinghy wheels are a hugely valuable addition to your dinghy. They enable a single adult to relatively easily move a large heavy dinghy and motor from the surf up the beach and out of the tide line. A secondary benefit is that as you move into the shallow water, dinghy wheels can partially protect your prop since by the time it's shallow enough to eat your prop, your wheels are hitting the bottom. Without reservation, I recommend getting your dinghy wheels from DaNard Wheels. In addition to an awesome product, he provides unparalleled customer support. The guy is fantastic.

Teenage Driver
Teenage Driver
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
Hoisting System -- In the northwest, folks often just drag their dinghy around. You don't really see that as much once you head out. The distances you travel are long enough that the loss of efficiency is a big problem, and it's simply dangerous to drag a dink in big wave or swell. So you'll need a simple and highly functional method to move your boat from its secure "passage position" into the water with its motor. An infrequently mentioned yet obvious advantage to catamarans is that you can easily put davits on the back of the boat and haul the dinghy up between the hulls. We've seen similar systems on monohulls with wide afts, and there isn't really any question that davits are the easiest solution. However, I've seen many clever methods to use halyards and lines to quickly move the dinghy from deck to water and back again. Ideally as a safety measure, you'll be able to do this procedure single-handed. I like our boom extender for moving the motor, however it requires two people. Our "next boat" will have a method for me to splash or haul the dink and motor without aid.

* * *

Our dinghy system isn't perfect, but it has served us well for nearly two years. Frankly, our only real problem with Rocinante is our eldest daughter. Watching her zoom around the anchorage makes me dread the looming challenge of teaching her how to operate a car. Ugh. Teenage drivers.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Hard Times

Butt First
Butt First
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
"Where's the key to the showers?" asks DrC after yet another day on the hard. The family looks around helplessly. There are tools, plates, dirty clothes, rags, cleaning supplies, painting supplies, wood scraps, and chandler receipts scattered on every surface. The key is a silver needle in a nautical haystack.

I muse, "I know it's here. I saw it." Once. A few days ago. Somewhere.

Here is how I explain being "on the hard" to folks who are not familiar with boating. Take your house. Put it on stilts 5 to 15 feet off the ground in the middle of an auto repair shop. Make sure the shop also does body work from 8AM to 5PM which involves a great deal of sanding and spraying of highly toxic substances. Put the repair shop downwind of an open air sewage treatment facility. Disconnect the electricity and the water and make it clear to the entire family that yellow, brown and everything else must mellow until you put the house back in the water or live monsters emerge from the stew to strangle you in the night, whichever comes first. Now while your house is on stilts without water in the midst of the loudest, dirtiest place on earth, set yourself a list of tasks which require concentrated, highly physical labor for 16 hours a day. Finally, locate the only possible place to shower, piss, and wash dishes at least 200 yards away with two temperatures, cold and frigid.

We have tried two different methods to live and work on the hard. Our first attempts involved paying as little as possible to the yard. We paid for a "round trip", e.g. pull us out of the water and put us back in, and we also paid a daily rate for sitting on the hard. While there, we did all the painting, sanding and engine work ourselves. This was possibly the least expensive way to do this, but it was astonishingly hard on the family. I don't think Dean and I have ever worked so hard in our entire lives. We were pulling out flood lights at night and working round the clock. I remember the alarm going off at 3AM once so that we could go down and put another coat of paint on the sail drives at the interval recommended on the can.

Here in Mexico, however, many of the yards do not let you do your own work. Instead, you arrange a preset price for them to round trip plus do all the sanding, painting, and other hard manual labor needed. The advantage to a pre-negotiated price is that you know precisely what you are getting and how much it is going to cost. It's also a huge relief not having to do the sanding and painting ourselves. However, unless the yard has a line of boats waiting to have work done is roughly a mile long, they have little incentive to get you off the hard quickly. It doesn't really cost them to have you sitting there, and if a bigger, sexier, more profligate boat comes along, your work gets bumped to the bottom of the work sheet.

We have been on the hard in Marina Singular Fidepaz de La Paz for eight hellish days now. The dirt on my feet has ground in so deep and so permanently that even shaving my heel with a razor has failed to reveal pretty clean skin. The deck is black with yard dirt despite drop cloths and paper barriers. The sinks are crusty, it's not a good idea to look at the dishes too closely before using them, and I know something died in the refrigerator but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Mera Painting the Sail Drives
Mera Painting the Sail Drives
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.
To compound our misery, DrC's work ethic is a combination of Capn Bligh, a road crew prison guard, and the holier than thou self-righteous rectitude of a virgin, non-smoking member of the Sierra Club. I don't think he's stop moving since we were pulled from the water. When we started to run out of tasks that were on our haul out list, he insisted we tackle other enjoyable projects such as replacing the tramp, servicing the outboard, and scraping the barnacles off the dinghy bottom. The bad news is that our hands our sore, our clothing destroyed, and we're exhausted. The good news is that the 479 tasks in the PrepForSale project are down to a mere 253, most of which involve cleaning things right before we get off the boat.

The key is a potentially expensive casualty of emptying out the lockers in the salon, though. DrC gets his Big Voice, "Who Was the Last Person to Take a Shower?"

I sniff my armpits experimentally. Okay definitely, "Not me."