Raft-Up: Counting Heads

Who Me?
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

"I feel like I'm forgetting something," I muse, staring at the skyline as if miles of ocean horizon can reveal the secrets of my forgetfulness. It is calm, cloudless, and unfortunately almost still as we crawl slowly off the Mexican coastline heading south and west for the equator.

Aeron helpfully peeks into the dodger locker, "Cat is here."

DrC grumbles something about fuel from the galley where he is preparing dinner.

Jaime more or less completely unhelpfully notes that she remembered to check her Facebook account before we left the marina three hours ago.

And then there is silence.

In case you haven't been following along, I have three children. Aeron, Jaime, and Mera. We all wait for a few breathless, still moments, the only sound the flapping of the main as it luffs in the gentle swells and off shore breeze. Almost as one, we turn to look at the smudge on the distant horizon.

"I'll look," says Aeron, jumping down off the cockpit seat and scrambling into the port hull.
Jaime, Dean and I don't move. We are all sharing the same, miserable thought. Oh shit. We left Mera behind.

It's not like we haven't done this before. In fact, it is something of a habit, leaving Mera behind. Mera is our quiet, studious, bookish middle child. For years as we learned to drive the boat, we would take Don Quixote out every Thursday night for the Elliot Bay Marina races. Roughly half the time, we'd leave her on the dock and for many of the remaining evenings we could honestly state after sailing for an hour that we didn't actually know whether or not Mera was on board. It got so bad that DrC insisted we put a check list on the helm: dock lines and fenders stowed, instruments on, electrical unplugged, radio on, Mera on board.

Fortunately, the silent miserable tableaux of the three senior crew of Don Quixote is broken mere moments later by a relieved, high soprano voice shouting up, "She's here! She's HERE!"

Maybe we are just rotten parents. If so, we're probably bad pet owners, too. Twice we more or less accidentally left Dulcinea behind. Once we left the dinghy behind. And on one memorable occasion, we kinda sorta accidentally snuck out of an anchorage in the wee hours of the morning abandoning a pair of particularly obnoxious 'buddy boats.'

Yet I must confess that my biggest fear cruising has never been that I would stupidly head off shore for a 2000 nautical mile trip one head short of a full deck. My children are clever, capable souls and can handle being alone for a few hours. At age 5, Aeron proved the point when we drove to the grocery store one day and left her at the marina. As an aside, this was also Mera's fault, as Mera's seat in the van was next to Aeron's. How she could get all the way to the store and into the produce section failing to notice something as loud and noisy as her sister was missing baffles me to this day. A panicky 15 minutes later, we arrived back at the marina and found Aeron eating donuts and entertaining the staff in the office where she had -- quite correctly -- immediately tromped after discovering that her bonehead family had driven off without her.

No, my fear is almost exclusively the loss of one of my beautiful family overboard in the night.

The odds of finding someone -- even someone wearing a life jacket -- in the middle of the ocean at night are astronomically low. If everyone else is asleep when you fall over, the phrase 'zero chance of survival' is not hyperbole. Beacons, personal EPIRBs, and proximity crew alarms all improve your odds, of course. These options were simply not priced in the affordable range a mere five years go, so the Conger family travelled from Seattle to Auckland without them. If we could have, we would have. If you can, do. If you can't...

Well even with all the fancy shmancy gear in the world, surviving a midnight fall off an ocean going yacht is mostly a matter of not doing it. Doctor, it hurts when I do this! Don't do that. My fear of falling informs our boat rules and gear. A simple but well-cared for system of jacklines, harnesses, clips, and life jackets tie the helmsman to the boat no matter what the weather. On passage, no one is allowed to step so much as a toe on the deck without this gear from the time the sunlight turns to burnished gold on the horizon to the moment in the morning where the coffee is steaming and its possible to read a book in the salon without additional light.

Misty Beaches
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

And still I am afraid. I still experience panicky moments when I come up at 2 AM for my watch and die a little when I can't instantly track Jaime's movements. Nights when I leap out of my cabin at 10 during DrC's watch, heart pounding, sure he's gone forever. I have tended the boat through 90 knot hurricane winds, managed sails while balanced precariously on the bimini  as we pitched in a heaving sea, leaped overboard at midnight to clear a prop with my feet when we were moments from being driven ashore, and watched my children leap like billy goats along a traverse in Zion with a 1000 foot drop on either side. Yet nothing -- absolutely nothing -- scares me like these moments in the night when I know with a certainty that leaves me cold that one of my loved ones is gone.

Our fears can not define the boundary of our existence or the limit of our reach. To watch my girls swim with whales, I have to let them stand watch in the night. To love them -- to let them live -- I have to trust them not to die. It's hard. It's so hard to count heads and come up one short. And yet every night, we do it anyway.

I keep counting and counting and counting until the number is five plus a cat, and every time the moment of relief is pure and fresh and profound.

 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

October's Raft-Up Writers

The topic this month is fear. We all have different fears and different strategies. If you haven't already subscribed to these authors, I encourage you to explore the excellent writing my fellows in Raft-Up:
2 Behan sv-totem.blogspot.com
3 Steph www.sailblogs.com/member/nornabiron
4 Stacey http://sv-bellavita.blogspot.com
5 Tammy ploddingINparadise.blogspot.com
6 Ean morejoyeverywhere.com
7 Lynn sailcelebration.blogspot.com
8 Diane www.maiaaboard.blogspot.com
10 Jaye lifeafloatarchives.blogspot.com
11 Verena pacificsailors.com
12 Toast http://blog.toastfloats.com
15 Dana svnorthfork.blogspot.com

Communication Plan for the Passage

Jaime at the Mast
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

A brief message from your author to let you know that even though we'll be transiting the Pacific, this blog will continue with its endlessly narcissistic accounts of the adventures of the cast and crew of s/v Don Quixote. To make sure that you don't miss any of this scintillating content, the following outlines our communication plan from April to October 2011.

Blog

Articles will appear through the next six months more or less on the same publishing schedule (twice weekly) to which you've become accustomed. However, there will now be three categories of articles:

* On the Go – We can post blog entries even from the high seas over our SSB radio/email connection. While we are passage making, I'll try to post at least a position update on a daily basis along with more extensive weekly reports on what we're doing and how we feel about it. When anchored in the islands, I'll continue with weekly articles about our experience. Unfortunately, due to bandwidth constraints, I will be unable to post pictures to most of these Coconut Milk Run articles until well after the fact. I will let you know when we get places where I can engage in wholesale uploads of images.

* Retrospective – In November 2010, I participated in NaNoWriMo. Actually, I participated in December as well though technically that's not the way NaNoWriMo works. I just kept writing until I hit 50,000 words. The result was roughly 50 articles, 30 of which I actually believe are worth editing into readability. I've queued the ones I like best to post once a week for the next six months. The articles speak to boat issues as well as our time in Mexico and New Zealand. Of course, I intended to prep these with pictures... but life intervened. More picturelessness. However, you can always head over to Flickr to browse for photos of that time frame.

* Ship Log – In February, we recommenced posting our captain's log. Historically, this is about as exciting a read as watching paint dry. Position and weather reports, equipment maintenance notes, provisioning status. *yawn* Just because it's an important part of being a sailor, doesn't make it very interesting. When the original log was stolen in New Zealand, we were incredibly glad I'd typed it up and posted it online. And oddly enough, very salty friends of ours over the years have told us they appreciate that highly factual window into our experiences as we travelled the coastline of North and South America. Perhaps, the details found there will prove interesting to cruisers considering a Puddle Jump in future years.

Comments and Replies

Sadly, we will not be able to regularly receive or respond to comments during the next few months. My sincere regrets and apologies for that. I enjoy the suggestions, support and input. Unfortunately, bandwidth is at a premium for this journey. Most places do not have connectivity, and those that do cost a fortune. However, sometimes we need your help. I've asked in the past for assistance and the reading/cruising community has come through with valuable information and even physical aid. We have arranged a shore-bound contact who will regularly read our blogs and the responses – both on the blog and on my Facebook account. Be assured that if I ask for ideas, information, or aid, this contact will relay your responses to us even if we're in the middle of nowhere.

Twitter

My original thinking was to the Twitter feed into two accounts so that the position reports would go somewhere else. Then I decided that was too complicated. It'll all spam toastfloats. The GPS points will duplicate content we post to YOTREPS. Our family and land-based emergency contacts relied on our SPOT tracking in the past, but unfortunately the SPOT doesn't have coverage in the middle of the Pacific.

Snail Mail

Really? You want to send packages? I don't think so. Let's not even pretend that's going to happen.

* * *

I think that about covers it. Please reply immediately if you have any questions. We'll be heading out in just another few days so this is your last chance to let me know we're insane.

Investing in a Future

Daddy is Home
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

DrC calls it deferred maintenance. I call it B.O.A.T. days. We keep buying stuff. We keep fixing things. Spending money is becoming a way of life. I really want this phase of preparing for the Puddle Jump to be over. The combination of no income, downward spiraling economies, and repeated hot exposure of our credit cards to merchants all over La Paz is causing me to lose sleep and burn holes in my stomach.

My good friend Behan (s/v Totem) reassures us that this is a temporary phenomena and must be done to keep us safe and happy. I know she is right… and I know this at both the intellectual, objective level as well as the instinctive twitchy level. When I was a whipper snapper n00b five years ago and almost divorced my husband on the spot when he spent an insane amount on our windlass, I was in error. Yelling about all the purchases of books, parts, oils, and tools over the year was a mistake. The Toast of today preparing for the jump does not complain to DrC while paying the Visa, Defender, West Marine, Moore Medical, and Gallery Marine bills. All of these decisions are the correct ones.

Buy the immersion suits.
Haul and paint the boat and replace the sail drive seals.
Get the third reefing points added to the main.
Replace the 200' of G40 chain with new chain, not used. Keep only the best 100' of the old chain for the stern hook.
Get the second computer, the GPS units both USP and handheld, the extra paper charts, and the backup radio units.
Load nearly 6 months worth of staple goods and household supplies, deferring only the purchase of fresh items for the crossing.
Add diesel and water capacity to the boat and get a replacement throttle head for the outboard.
Pay the stainless steel guys to build the frame for the wind generator and buy that second pair of blades from Maitairoa.

I do not regret any single purchase. However, collectively we are spending more in six weeks than we did in the prior six months. We are spending more specifically on Don Quixote than we have in five years… which is probably why DrC is correct; Many of the additions, changes and fixes are simply deferred maintenance on a cruising sail boat. Other major purchases are specifically and solely for disaster mitigation and recovery which -- I admit it here publicly -- we should have undertaken prior to leaving Elliot Bay in Seattle. Mea culpa.

On the the hand, I read the news and listen to the Morning Talk here in La Paz and recognize a simple truth: the Zombie Apocalypse started years ago. I don't know why DrC and I thought we were preparing for its coming when in reality it started long ago. Like a frog slowly being brought to a boil, we weren't paying enough attention to get out of the pot before getting hurt. Now, however, I go online to transfer the last of my US dollars into my visa to pay off bills to Amazon, Seattle Fabrics and Fisheries Supply and reassure myself that I'm buying the nautical equivalent of gold. These things we are investing in are portable wealth. And unlike gold, Don Quixote can sustain us and feed us. She provides shelter, water, power, and sewage disposal. She is a form of safety net.

On the whole, we are very fortunate. When all is said and done, we'll have a well-equipped, well-founded sailing vessel which we can take nearly anywhere. The boat will be stocked with enough food and supplies to keep us going for a half year, longer if we push it. With the oil market going berserk in the face of revolutions throughout the Arab world, I think it's time the Conger family started going all Purist Sail-All-the-Way rather than loading up on more jerry cans.

Let's see… If I extend our fresh food supply for the first leg from 4 to 5 weeks, we could simply drift along until we get there. I think there might be a tiny bit of room left in the locker under Jaime's bed...

Pwnd

Comic DQ
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Pwn is a leetspeak slang term derived from the verb "own", as meaning to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival. - Wikipedia

Perhaps the single lesson that defines our entire last five years -- which I should have engraved on my forehead so as to never forget -- is the following:

Your things own you.

It is a mistake to believe the common myth that you buy things and then you own them. In reality, you work very hard at some task and then convert that effort into stuff which then consumes your very reason for being. You pile and store and stash. You organize and inventory and display. It lives in your basement and under the bed. It sits in the driveway or hangs on the wall. And every bit of that stuff has ties to your soul, your reason and your sanity. It requires effort to keep it and money to sustain it. It needs a place to live, and it builds friends and a following and a life of its own. Your things are alive in your life, influencing your behavior and decisions in ways that even your family frequently fails to achieve.

I remember walking down the long Marina de La Paz dock a year ago with two distinct thoughts warring in my mind. First, I will never live in a house as nice as Don Quixote ever again. Second, I never want to own another house or boat again. It was simultaneously sad and freeing -- the depressing realization that the era of free money and living profligately as only two young professionals with very high salaries in the early 20 oughts were able combined with a sense of elation that we were now only responsible for the clothes on our back and the bags we dragged banging along the dock with us.

In New Zealand, we didn't have much in the way of material goods. In fact, arguably we started with nothing. We brought those few bags of things and then some ass hat stole them. Some of it was found; Thanks to insurance we replaced a lot of it, but we had the new versions sent to my Mom in the States. And as a side note having now said "Hello, how are you?" to these new things, they are not the same. The binoculars, in particular, look and act just like the old ones but don't have a whiff of the fine people who worked for me and with me for seven years and gave me the original pair. I don't like them, and they don't like me. We can tell we're not going to get along. But to the main point… We had a few beds, a table, some smelly couches and a pressure cooker. A stack of boat cookware I couldn't part with and a cast iron skillet. That cast iron skillet was DrC's first priority purchase on our arrival, by the way, which speaks volumes for his priorities. On those infrequent occasions when we would have people visit us in Chicken House, I remember a vague feeling of embarrassment. I'd wave helplessly at the battered dining room chairs and invite my guests to sit down and drink from the Kiwi equivalent of BamBam glasses and jelly jars. With just the family, however, it didn't feel empty. We tossed our clothes into misshapen piles at the bottom of built-in closets and considered it well stored and well cared for.

That moment was probably the nadir of the trajectory of Conger Family Ownership. We will never be associated with such a small number of things again. When it came time to leave, we gave a bag or two to Debbie for her church, delivered a box of condiments and spices to Deb, and sold five things on TradeMe. Then we flew away.

Don Quixote was waiting. She missed us. On our arrival, she was dusty, dry, and petulant. It's taken me nearly two weeks just to get all the basic systems to a point where she'll admit that she is a boat and not simply a large piece of semi-white plastic floating in apparent relationship to a dock in Mexico. She's always been a cranky bitch, so it comes as no surprise that getting her engines going has been a herculean effort. Every day, Don Quixote reminds me that she didn't like being left alone. She complains. It's in the sticky shackles and the squeaky hinges, the clouds of dust that poof up when I sit on her cushions or the way all the really important tools have managed to settle into the bottom of the back end of the deepest part of whatever locker I look in.

We've spent more in the past 60 days prepping this boat to cross the Pacific than we did during our entire year in New Zealand. We arrived in Mexico with a van full of stuff, more stuff then we ever possessed while living on the hard last year. Why spend so much? Why so many items? You could say it's because we need all these things to cross the Pacific safely. Arguably that's true, though no doubt purest sailors would point out that Kon Tiki made it across in a raft so all of this expenditure is superfluous. In reality, we bought all this stuff because Don Quixote is a really expensive lady who requires boat jewelry. Our mistress exudes dominatrix level power over our submissive, awed and beaten selves. We bow down before her line wielding superiority. We are pwnd by the boat we call home.

I don't really like it. I like being here in La Paz. I actually love being back on the boat. We all snapped into place, the girls noting within days that it felt as though we had never left. I'm comfortable here at a bone deep level I never achieved in Chicken House. It is possible that I might actually BE a sailor and not just play one on the interwebs. So the thing I don't like is that I am constantly spending money now to take care of this place, this house, this boat, this thing. Money pours through my fingers like mercury in a glittering torrent returning in the form of more things to take care of, more items to stow, more bits to keep track of. I'm not sure this is an improvement. The verdict is out on whether or not on balance being owned by this beautiful, French, production, plastic catamaran is a boon and salve to my sailing soul or merely another pile of bricks in the backpack of life.

Communication on the High Seas (Part I)

“You can get Internet in the middle of the Pacific? No way!?” – Typical reaction when I post from the ocean

Give Em Sh* Mom!
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Yes way. And at the same time, no... not really.

In a series of articles, I plan to discuss at length the various means that boats in general and Don Quixote in particular communicate with the rest of the world. We'll start this series with radios, in particular, the VHF.

Don Quixote is equipped with two forms of radio communication: VHF and SSB. VHF (Very High Frequency) radio is used for relatively short-range voice communication. It is used by local emergency services, for example, within a municipality. Essentially, VHF is good only for line of sight, though every once in awhile weather conditions will refract signal to our radio from up to 100 miles away.

We use the VHF primarily to communicate with our fellow cruisers and occasionally with naval authorities or other types of ocean travelers such as the big ass floating hotel about to run us down in the middle of the night. Somewhat illegally, we also use the VHF ship-to-shore with the hand held whenever we send crew off the boat and on to the dry. This leads me to a few recommendations for those preparing to cruise:

Security Measure – Do not stint on a good quality, high-powered VHF radio. If you can't tell someone your boat is sinking, you're going to be in a whole lot of water with nothing to hold on to and no one coming to your rescue.

Social Impact - The VHF is the cruiser party line. I don't mean beer and silliness, though there is some of that too. I'm suggesting that without a really good radio you will be completely cut off from the people who are your best resource for advice, assistance, and companionship.

Mirror to Helm - Make sure you can at least hear your VHF at the helm. If you can, put a radio at the helm as well as down below... and if you can only have one, the helm station is more important. When you are about to be run over by an asshat weekender, you don't want to release the helm to run below to yell at him over the VHF.

Handhelds - I recommend one or more handheld VHF radios. Walkie-talkies work, but they do not work nearly as well. I know that at $100 plus a pop, it may seem extravagant. I can't tell you, though, how many times we wished for more than the one we have. The scenario is mostly one of the family splitting up in town or on remote islands. DrC heads off to rummage for hardware, Toast to find the markets, the girls to locate ice cream and entertainment venues. Reliable communication is a boon in these situations.

Radio Protocol - Teach everyone on the boat to master the VHF. One afternoon up in Desolation Sound we listened helplessly over the VHF as the Canadian Coast Guard tried to talk sense into a woman whose husband was disabled – perhaps with a heart condition, hard to tell. It wasn't voyeurism, we literally had no choice. We were underway and so required to leave our radio on the dedicated marine channel... and she literally had no idea how to change channels. I didn't know whether to feel sorry for her or shake both her and her husband until their teeth rattled. She had no idea how to operate the boat or the radio, read the GPS, or describe her vessel. Don't do that to your crew. Even underage crew can become radio experts. Aeron was running net control down in Zihau at age 7.

Family Channel - However, this scenario of everyone in the crew with and on the radio leads to another tip, the family channel. The VHF spectrum in the nautical world consists of roughly 30 channels accessible for receive and transmit by most marine radios. Of those, no small fraction are dedicated to a specific, single purpose. For example, in virtually all U.S. waters Ch. 16 is used exclusively by nautical authorities and for ship-to-ship hails. A private yacht monitors Ch. 16 but rarely uses it except to signal intentions to nearby vessels and to hail authorities or other boats. On establishing contact with another boat, you must immediately switch channels. Authorities will direct you to another channel, but it's a good idea to have a number in mind in advance when calling your own crew. There are two reasons for this: First, getting both parties to actually hear a number on a busy channel can sometimes be surprisingly difficult. Second, you might not want the entire anchorage following you and your spouse as you switch channels to argue about what to have for dinner that night. The girls, in particular, attracted lurkers... benign, loving and friendly fellow cruisers who just enjoyed their piping voices and ridiculous requests as we'd head off to another channel to discuss whether or not they could have their third ice cream for the day. Agree in advance that the family always switches to 72 or 68 or ... pick your channel. Program it into your radios as a favorite. Then when you hail family, just say, “Switch to the usual” and off you go. Pick a channel way up there out of the way of most local traffic.

* * *

One of our greatest pleasures in Mexico was watching the kids – ours and those from other boats – blossom into radio experts. VHF protocol teaches us all how to respect and listen, choose our words carefully, and communicate clearly and precisely. Use your radio as a teaching tool and trust that you'll never regret spending the extra money on this particular piece of equipment.

The Girls on the Net
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Good Crew

It Was His Idea
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I wouldn't say that DrC and I are experts at being crew or hiring crew. We've taken on a few, volunteered ourselves on occasion. We've read numerous accounts and spent hours and hours drinking beer with both captains and crews. Over time we've developed a laundry list of attributes and behaviors which we believe make “good crew.” I'd like to offer these to readers of my blog as a starting point for a discussion. For those in particular with experience on either side, let me know what you'd add or change about this list.

A lot of being good crew is about being a courteous guest. It is also about being a competent, contributing employee. Crewing on someone else's boat can open opportunities to learn, travel, and expand your understanding of the cruising life. It is not, however, an easy role to undertake. Here are our thoughts:

Pack Light – Add-on crew doesn't live on the boat. As a result, your stuff is extra, and it will be hard to wedge into existing lockers which are chock-o-block with stuffed owned by the owner's family. Ideally, all you bring with you can fit into a single duffle which you can comfortably fit on your bunk … even when you are yourself lying in that bunk. A small day pack with your electronic toys (e.g. laptop, iPod, books) is also acceptable if it too can fit on the bunk and do double-duty as a pillow.

Be Prepared – Like a Boy Scout, assume responsibility for your own gear. From foulies and life jacket to iPod/laptop chargers and reading material, supply it yourself. Ask the captain in advance regarding linens (towels, bedding), fishing gear, and items. Personally, I'd also take my own GPS, charting tools, handheld VHF, and personal EPIRB since no boat can have too many redundant safety and communication systems.

Food Issues – It is really amazing how many captain-crew relationships die on the issue of food. Set expectations between you and the captain regarding your dietary requirements, food preparation, and clean up responsibilities before you leave the first port and the last grocery store. The more open-minded and less picky an eater you are, the better. And while you shouldn't expect surf-and-turf with fine cabernets every night, you should be fed well. At minimum, crew and captain should eat from the same trough – and yes, we have heard of boats with the captain drinking the expensive chardonnay and the crew expected to survive on reconstituted gatorade drink mix. If you have special, specific dietary requirements, it is your responsibility to be up front in advance. For some items such as your favorite salad dressing, salsa, or tea, bring your own. Someday remind me to explain to you why I must have rice cakes during night helm watches.

Set Expectations in Advance – The pre-negotiation required for food can and should be extended to just about every boat issue. In particular, make sure you understand what the captain expects regarding watch schedules and boat maintenance. You don't want to learn two days out of port that the captain plans to sand down and revarnish the teak deck during your voyage... and you've been volunteered to do the work.

You Are a Consultant – I have a rule as a consultant which I believe applies well to being a crew member. You are on the boat because you know stuff and can do things. In exchange for your labor and expertise, you are “paid” in room, board, transportation, and sometimes even money. If you believe a captain is making a mistake and you have experience and advise to offer, it is your responsibility to do so. Once. However, if the captain chooses to ignore you and your life is not in any danger, keep your mouth shut. Captains need to break things; It's part of their learning process as both sailors and managers. The title captain – like manager, director, vice president, team lead, or doctor – does not confer infallibility, but for most newbies, it feels like it should. Only after breaking something expensive and/or inconvenient do most newly minted authority figures understand that nothing magical happened to transform them when their title changed.

When to Mutiny – On the other hand, no matter how valuable the lesson is to your manager, a captain doesn't have the right to break crew in the process. This isn't the British Navy in the 1700's. No, a boat in the middle of the ocean isn't a democracy. But if your life is in danger and your captain is a royal flaming idiot, you have the right to mutiny. We read about these accounts in sailing magazines, online, and in books. Sometimes, you really have no other choice. While I don't want to blame the victim, my recommendation here is not get on a boat with a captain whose expertise is considerably below your own AND the captain appears to be completely disinterested in taking your recommendations in serious conditions. Hard to figure that out in advance; Try anyway.

Take the Drugs – If you have any tendency to nausea, start taking Meclazine a day before you board. Keep taking it until I tell you to stop. If you start to feel gimpy, take the drugs immediately. Do not use the trip as an opportunity to experiment with holistic herbs, naturopathic patches, acupressure bands, or tantric chants. Unless you know that one or more of these work on you already, save them for your own boat. You have the right to drive your own family nuts, but you have a responsibility on someone else's boat to not vomit on the cabin sole if you can possibly avoid it.

Pitch In – As crew, you should help whenever and where ever you can. Show up prior to departure ready to assist with loading and provisioning. Contribute to cooking, K.P. and boat maintenance during the journey. Don't leave the boat on arrival until the boat is clean and buttoned down tight. Your contributions will ease relations between you and the rest of the crew. More practically, it'll give you something to do and an opportunity to see that the work is done carefully and correctly the first time.

Our New Electric Guitar
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Entertain – Find some way to contribute to the social well-being of your boat as well. Do you play an instrument? Sing? Tell stories? You could bring cards or small, lightweight games such as Yahtzee, chess or mancala. Be generous with the use of the media – music, books, or movies – that you packed. Maybe no one will take you up on your social offers, but the offers nevertheless indicate your desire and willingness to be a part of the lives your fellow travelers.

* * *

Now your turn. What would you add, remove or change about this list?

Registering for International Service and Rescue

SSB Station
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

UPDATE 7/12/2010: Incorporate comments from readers.
Virtually every country on the globe with navigable waterways has a maritime search and rescue service of some sort. Larger nations with highly capable navies and marine services offer considerable protection and support to the vessels traveling in and near their waters. An important part of preparing yourself for cruising is to enable your vessel to communicate automatically to these services, particularly in emergency situations.

First, a few acronyms and definitions:

Digital Selective Calling (DSC) – A designation under the GMDSS “primarily intended to initiate ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore and shore-to-ship radiotelephone and MF/HF radiotelex calls. DSC calls can also be made to individual stations, groups of stations, or "all stations" in one's radio range.”[1]

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – The United States federal agency responsible for registering and maintaining radio communication licenses.

FCC Registration Number (FRN) – A unique number used by the FCC to identify license holders. This abbreviation is used synonmously as the username on the FCC web site. The idea is that a single FRN can be used to register multiple radio operators and devices. If you already have a HAM and/or operator license, you probably were prompted to register with the FCC. At that time, you would have been assigned an FRN. If not, the first step is to go to register on the FCC web site and obtain an FRN.

Global Maritime Distress Safety System (GMDSS) -- “An internationally agreed-upon set of safety procedures, types of equipment, and communication protocols used to increase safety and make it easier to rescue distressed ships, boats and aircraft.”[2] While small craft are not required to maintain radio equipment capable of participating in the GMDSS, it is a very good idea to do so anyway. Most SSB radios include DSC capacity which enables them to participate in the GMDSS.

Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) – “A series of nine digits which are sent in digital form over a radio frequency channel in order to uniquely identify ship stations, ship earth stations, coast stations, coast earth stations, and group calls.”[3] For US flagged vessels, you can register with a third-party such as BoatUS for an MMSI valid for coastal waters in the United States. However, you must register with the FCC when taking your vessel outside U.S. waters.

SA – When you register a wireless device with the FCC, you must select a radio service type. An SSB radio on a recreational vessel is considered a Maritime Mobile device of the category “SA – Ship Recreational or Voluntarily Equipped”. According to the FCC “Smaller ships used for recreation (e.g., sailing, diving, sport fishing, fishing, water skiing) are not required to have radio stations installed but they may be so equipped by choice. These ships are known as "voluntary ships" because they are not required by treaty or statute to carry a radio but voluntarily fit some of the same equipment used by compulsory ships.”[4]

Universal Licensing System (ULS) – An online tool maintained by the FCC for the purpose of using “any PC with Internet access to research, manage, renew, and pay any applicable fees for your wireless licenses through a password-protected account.”[5] The FCC site is, to be blunt, very poorly organized. Use this link to go directly to the ULS home page. Typical of most cruisers, Don Quixote's ULS account includes: the captain's radio operator license, our HAM and SSB call signs, and our international MMSI.

The two principle methods used by cruisers to communicate distress automatically are an EPIRB and the emergency signal issued by an SSB radio. An Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) is a dedicated device which broadcasts a maritime distress signal. As of February 1, 2009, all EPIRBs carried by U.S. flagged vessels must transmit at 406 MHz, as satellites no longer receive transmissions at 121.5 MHz. BoatUS provides an excellent guide to how an EPIRB functions. A single side band (SSB) radio can transmit a digital signal call. Both of categories of device communicate with the Cospas-Sarsat satellite monitoring system. The system is monitored both domestically and internationally by maritime rescue services.

To take full advantage of publicly available search and rescue services, you must register your emergency beacon and obtain an MMSI. EPIRB and SSBs broadcast a the MMSI to the satellite monitoring system. Since in an emergency, you might not be able to follow up these signals with a call to explain who you are, how many passengers are on your vessel, and what you look like on the water, you must register your devices in advance with this information. In many countries, you can register your device domestically for free. If you plan to spend a long period of time in a single country, it is a good idea to do the research to identify and register with these agencies. For example, in the U.S. you can register your beacon with BoatUS. In New Zealand, you can't register a U.S. device, but you can contact them and they will “keep an eye open” for your beacon. The agency is the Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand (RCCNZ). I envision this as “a guy” with a stack of email messages next to a radio receiver. It sounds ricky ticky, but the RCCNZ is reknowned for saving people and boats; So however they do it, the system works.

Mera Monitoring the Net
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Unfortunately, registering with individual countries does not provide you with comprehensive, global coverage. Vessels which travel in international waters must also contact their domestic communications agency to register for an international MMSI number. Obtaining an international MMSI number ensures that your vessel is included in the International Search and Rescue database. The theory is that this database is maintained throughout the world. If you happen to have an emergency in the Tasmin Sea, both Australia and New Zealand will be able to know from your EPIRB or SSB signal the name and size of your vessel, your emergency land-based contacts, your emergency equipment, and the number of passengers routinely onboard.

The process of registering your emergency devices is fraught with the usual challenges and frustrations associated with government agencies. Everything that follows from this point applies to U.S. flagged vessels only. Readers with vessels flagged in other countries must do the research for their domestic requirements.

Steps to Register Your Emergency Beacon

1. Gather the following:
- FRN username and password – If you do not already have one, go to the ULS home page and register.
- Credit card
- EPIRB identification number – This number can be found on the side of an EPRIB device.
- A computer with a connection to the Internet and either Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser

2. Browse to the ULS home page and log in with your FRN and password.

3. Apply for a new license. As of the time of this writing, the link to apply for a new license is found in the left column.

4. Complete the form as prompted. Note that your vessel is a category SA radio service, you do not already have an MMSI (even if you've registered for a free one with a local service such as BoatUS or RCCNZ). The objective is to associate a new MMSI with your existing EPIRB and ensure that it is registered in the International Search and Rescue database.

5. Pay for the application. As of November 2010, the fee for registration is $160USD.

6. Monitor the ULS until your application is approved. Then print the resulting license. This process can take 10 days to 3 weeks. In our case, it took two weeks.

[1]"Global Maritime Distress Safety System: DSC." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 17 Nov. 2010.
[2]"Global Maritime Distress Safety System." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 17 Nov. 2010.
[3]"Maritime Mobile Service Identity." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 17 Nov. 2010. .
[4]"FCC: Wireless Services: Ship Radio Stations: About." FCC: Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. Web. 17 Nov. 2010. .
[5]"FCC Universal Licensing System (ULS): About ULS: Getting Started." FCC: Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. Web. 17 Nov. 2010. .

It Gets Boring

No, I'm Border
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Research research research. Write write write. As the post on ditch kits a week ago ably demonstrated, our focus is narrowing down on preparing for the Puddle Jump. I can not stress strongly enough to my non-cruising friends and family how very much DrC and I are aware that we are "taking it to the next level." It's a big ocean. Some bits of the trip are ugly. We get it.

We really really get it. So much so that we've doing some pretty heavy research on topics we've largely been able to fudge in the past when we were traveling along the coast line. Granted, certain planning myopia was just stupid (e.g. pathetic ditch kits), but a lot of it was simply unnecessary. For example, why worry about climbing the mast to keep a reef and coral head watch when there are neither reefs nor coral heads?

The results of our research are interesting to another set of the readership of this blog, our fellow cruisers. Many of them are providing the raw data that inform my posts while others are preparing for their own cruises. A very special few are getting ready to Puddle Jump with us next year and will no doubt be reassured that Don Quixote is planning on taking care of herself. Mostly.

So anticipate the periodic posting of incredibly dull articles. The next one in the queue, for example, is on the exciting topic of registering beacons for international search and rescue services. Try not to fall asleep... or better just delete it in bound. I'll tag all these as "Coconut Milk Run" and "techtip" if you want to do some agressive filtering.

Cruisers, all of these technical articles BEG for your input. I may Write Confident (which is somehow analogous to the infamous "Fly Casual"), but DrC and I are fully aware we are missing bits. We received some very useful input on the ditch kit post. Keep the outstanding information coming! We need it, we appreciate it.

Preparing for Disaster

Captain Potential
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

“Opinions are like -holes; Everyone has one. Unfortunately, not so true of ditch kits.” – Toast in a really bad mood after reading a million and one forum entries on the subject

If you are like most cruising sailors, you've made a completely half-assed job of putting together a ditch kit. I believe that the reason most of us do not have really good, well thought out ditch bags is that we are in a collective state of denial. After all, you are not going to need it. Like making a will, a ditch kit acknowledges mortality, puts straight in your face the depressing fact that life is fleeting and boats are friable.

And I confess, while we travelled the coasts of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, our ditch kit was pathetic. Oh we had one... at least we weren't that bad. However, it is true that the kit was neither well thought out nor was it particularly accessible. Had we needed to abandon ship, it is not clear to me that anything about that kit would have saved our lives. We also suffer from the fact-based, catamaran delusion that our boat won't sink. Another interesting trade off in the monohull/multihull debate is that catamarans are considerably less likely to sink to the bottom of the ocean. Most have positive flotation and are even more stable upside-down than right-side up. The situations in which it makes sense to abandon a catamaran rather than just attach yourself to it and ride out whatever broke the boat in the first place are limited to two: your vessel interacts with something super hard that breaks the entire thing into its constituent parts (e.g. a reef or cargo container) or the boat is on fire.

But those two catastrophes can and do happen to catamarans just as they do to multihulls, and it is a foolish crew who does not prepare for the ditch scenario. Even coastal cruisers are not safe from the need to have an emergency ditch plan. Witness the terrible events of the Baja Ha Ha 2009 during which a boat literally swept down the front of a wave and landed on a whale. The whale didn't like it, and the boat sank 5 minutes later. Sank. No more boat. Really. SANK.

This time, the crew of Don Quixote plans to go out with a well-thought out, easily accessible ditch kit and an emergency plan. There is the “abandon ship” option, and there is the far more likely “foundered and/or upside-down” option. We need to have equipment, survival gear, and communications systems figured out in advance. Over the years, we have individually read many accounts of emergency situations and preparedness plans. We have all sorts of ideas. I also made a foray on the Internet to see what the hive mind recommends. Two hours later, my head hurts, my stomach is growling, and I feel considerably less informed than when I started.

One quote that really made me think I found on Boatsafe.com: “While it may come as a surprise to some, by now most boaters realize that the survival equipment stocked in most life rafts, even rafts designed to meet SOLAS requirements, is often inadequate, sometimes woefully so. In many cases not only is the selection and quantity a problem, but the quality of the equipment and supplies is also less than desirable.” Wonderful. So right out of the gate, let us assume that we all need to build a survival bag, even if the boat is equipped with a “fully stocked” life raft. Also, there is duplication between what goes in a ditch kit, and equipment you need to have on the boat ready for regular use. For example, you need to have a handheld VHF and life jackets... but you use these all the time. Part of the “ditch kit” strategy needs to be a plan to gather these disparate bits and get them off the vessel with the crew.

Before I launch into the specifics, my personal editorial team for practical posts like this of s/v Totem and s/v Third Day came back with some questions I'd like to preemptively address:

Are you going to have a life raft or use your dingy as a life raft?”

This is going to probably generate angst, anger, and F.U.D. We are not going with a life raft. I don't think I've ever said this about a blog entry before but... please don't comment on this particular choice (all other comments still welcome!). You'll stir a raging debate that is likely to spiral downward quickly and irrevocably. All I am going to say is that we came to this decision not for financial reasons. Mr. Salty of s/v Totem reminded us to get our survival suits in order. I like to think we would have thought of that eventually, but full credit to our far more experienced friend for getting us moving early on the issue.

“Why would you even bother with a ditch kit if you don't have a life raft? Is it that much more helpful when you're sitting on an upside down hull?”

Yes, it is that much more helpful if you are upside down. In a turtle situation, everything you own is upside down, tossed like hell's breakfast, and mostly in water destroyed – particularly food stores and fresh water. However, if you have a ditch kit, you have all your emergency gear in a single place (accessible from either the topside or when inverted), it is in a dry bag, and it can be taken as a unit outside the boat if you plan to shelter between the hulls on the trampoline for all or part of the time.

As usual, the place that had the best, cleanest, and easiest to understand list was found on Wikipedia. From this and reading a dog-awful number of bickering forum posts, we've decided on the following:

Dedicated Kit – We will prepare a large dry bag with the following dedicated items. This kit will be stored either in the helm locker or in the aft, moulded inset between the transoms. Both areas are highly accessible when the boat is overturned or from a floating craft next to the boat. What goes in the dedicated kit:
- Survival suits
- Small emergency medical kit
- Compass
- Flares, mirror, and smoke signal
- Solar powered AM/FM radio
- Emergency high-calorie rations and/or hard bread
- Fishing kit
- Rainwater collection equipment
- Seawater desalination kit
- Water
- Hatchet and knife
- Waterproof flashlight
- Heaving line
- Rope ladder
- Small sea anchor
- Bailer
- Manual bilge pump
- Bucket
- Water proof matches
- Marine whistle
- Zinc oxide
- Tarp
- Deck of cards
- Paper and water proof pencil (log book)
- Copies of passports, visas, and boat paperwork
- Secondary credit card (the one we don't normally use but is a valid account)

Stored at Navigation Station/Helm – The items that must come with us if we ditch that we use regularly are going to be stored at the helm, in the helm locker or at the navigation table.
- Life jackets
- EPIRB
- SPOT personal messenger (Yes, I know it doesn't work in the middle of the Pacific.)
- Flares
- Solar powered lantern (We use this as a boom, anchor-light. If you don't, put it in the dedicated kit).
- VHF handheld
- GPS handheld
- Boat hook
- Celestial navigation equipment
- 2 5-gallon water jugs
- Doctor's medical bag

Emergency Plan – We have been very successful training the Don Quixote crew on emergency roles. Depending on the type of emergency, each person has a specific series of tasks. If someone is unavailable for their assignment, we know who is to take their place. For example, when there is a Man Overboard, Aeron's responsibility is to stand on the deck and point to the victim, never ever taking her eyes off the victim. She might be the only reason we are able to back track and find someone who has gone overboard. If she -is- the victim or otherwise unavailable, Mera takes her place... and so on. We will develop “Abandon Ship” and “Pitch Poled” assignments and responsibilities and then regularly drill the crew as we have historically done for MOB, fire, and navigational hazard emergencies.

From the Bottom Up
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Lamintated Checklists – From s/v Capaz, we learned of the wonders of lamination. They make checklists, inventories, and radio scripts, laminate these instruction cards and place them near the radio and in emergency kits. This is brilliant and deserves an entire, well thought out article of its own that I'll tackle next week. For now, it's just on my list to review the Capaz list, update for Don Quixote needs, and include in the ditch kit(s).

Ditch Kits Plural – Another by-product of research was the notion of individual kits. These are small dry bags with individual water and food, emergency gear, and personal items. The hall mark of several survival accounts I've read is an individual escaping a sinking vessel where other crew and the principle ditch kit and/or life raft is lost, but the individual had their own, much smaller bag of gear which prove instrumental in their own survival.

* * *

Additions, suggestions, and deletions welcome! What do you have in your ditch kit?

Here's the Pitch

The Peaks We Didn't Climb
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I slam the book down on the table, frustrated beyond measure. "This is no good. I can't figure out what the hell they mean."

DrC mumbles something supportive but wholly incoherent.

There is the sound of stataco typing as I bang away at the laptop for a few minutes punctuated periodically by, "Yes... yes!... YES!!!"

Now DrC looks up. In retrospect, I suppose my vocalizations were suspiciously similar to something more interesting to DrC than immigration regulations. "You okay?"

I nod vigoursly and start copying and pasting like a mad fiend. "Two '10 jumpers blogged it."

DrC's eyes narrow as he parses this out, "Two of the boats puddle jumping this year wrote about the immigration requirements in their blogs."

"Uh huh."

"But how do you know it's true?" he asks.

This stops me absolutely cold. After 20 years, there are few moments in which I feel that my husband and I are not in sync. Even rarer are there times where I feel the man is living on a completley different plant. And now, here in this little kitchen in suburban New Zealand, existence shimmers like a Scobby retrospective into two distinctive planes of existence. In one, research is conducted in libraries and with government agencies. Academics and intellectuals ponder the evidence, write their results, and dispense their knowledge in academic journals and printed books.

And then there is where I live.

In the world I live in, the wisdom of the crowds is almost inevitably better than the research of any individual. This is the world of Wikipedia, Yelp, Facebook, Digg, slash dot and Twitter. This is a place where when I want a Word template for product planning, I can simply ask the hivemind, and four arrive within the hour in my inbox. Now that doesn't mean the crowd is always right. The crowd can make monumental errors; lolcats comes to mind. It also doesn't mean that you should take as writ that everything you read on Wikipedia is correct. It's not. We all know that. However, I'd take a Wiki entry over most static books as a starting point. Start poking the referenced resources at the bottom of the entry, and now you're getting to some serious solid research.

I'd also take a blog entry from a fellow cruiser over a 10 year old cruising guide. Every time.

It's not the author's fault. I find the whole concept of cruising guide authorship challenging at best. Even if the area about which you are writing is your favorite haunting ground, there is no practical way to visit each marina and anchorage every year to update the book. For parts of the world that are practical to visit only as a way point on a much longer, non-replicable journey, such as crossing the South Pacific or transiting the Panama Canal, there is no way at all that the author can maintain the accuracy of the content. Sure, the charts may stay essentially the same. Information about the facilities, paperwork, or local ameneties are too fluid to maintain.

This is why I have been monitoring with such glee the introduction of tools such as Active Captain and Wikitravel. I really want these efforts to succeed. There are, however, two problems with these resources:

* South Pacific - So far, no one has really started contributing to the South Pacific part of the map. Since this is where we are going, I feel like we're stuffed.

* Portability - Neither company/project has come up with a way to copy the entire database down to a local laptop, let alone print the relevant bits. Cruisers halfway across the Pacific have lousy Internet access.

So here I am, pouring over the three "must have" cruising guides for our Puddle Jump, and at least once every 10 minutes I slam them down on the table and retreat to Google. And when I can't get my question answered by the experts, I find that Quest or Tenaya or Ken and Cathy answered it. Browsing the blogs of this year's jumpers, I'm able to answer even the most changeable, challenging questions. All it requires is hours and hours of browsing, reading, trolling, and googling. And a constant connection to the Internet.

"What the hell are we going to do when we get there? No Internet." I've leaped past explaining to my husband his ludditic handicap; Twenty years has at least taught me that much.

"Write a book."

Recursive Photo Editing
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I do not groan when he says this. It is stupid and the trees are weeping, but I do not groan. I just point out that, "It, too, will be obsolete the instant I write it."

And at that moment, my lover redeems himself and proves why I used his genetic code to make the girls, "Well, put it online. Give it to next year's folks to maintain."

Wow. That could work. I could crowd source it. I could make it interactive. It could have a user forum and downloadable pages and people could print it using an on demand printer if I put into a PDF format and I could add links and there would be amazon affiliate links and a twitter feed and a faceboscr.a.bajkafd.cvja....*cough*

So rather than do anything useful for the rest of the day, I do what every good social media wonk does, I go buy the domain.

We Did WHAT?

Aerial View of Don Quixote
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

DrC: Did we really sell everything before we left the boat?

Toast: Yes. Don’t you remember taking it all over to the swap meet?

DrC: Why did we do that?

Toast: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

There are two ways to approach this situation:

1) We were incrediblly stupid. OMGWTFBBQ what the hell were we thinking? We sold everything? How in god’s name are we going to get reoutfitted to cross the Pacific? We’re not even on the boat!! Panic! Run around in circles! Tear out hair! Cry cry cry!!

2) Damn that was smart. Don Quixote is, for the first time since we bought her, flying nearly three inches above her water line. She’s going to be screamingly fast now that she’s so light. We got rid of all that crap that we never used. This time we know what we’re doing, and we’ll only put on that boat what we know we need and will use.

Of course, I would like to take the second, more optimistic and positive approach. It isn’t just sophistry, mind you. Any cruiser can tell you that after a few years, a purge of the lockers reveals a startlingly high volume of crap that no one is going to use and just takes up space and weight. Any multi-hull cruiser will follow that with a lecture on the extreme sensitivity of catamarans to additional weight. If we can keep Don Quixote high on her water-line, we might be able to shave hours, even days, from our Pacific crossing.

So we start fresh, will ye nill ye, and provision Don Quixote from the top of the mast to the depth of the deepest locker. We do not have even so much as a pillow or coffee mug left on the boat. We kept most of the spare parts onboard included in the sale package, but we sold or chucked all the old rusted and busted up tools. The sails and lines are in good shape, the dinghy and motor still fine, the water maker, solar panels, and electrical system all in place. However, we have no snorkling equipment, hookah, or fishing gear. There are safety lines, fenders, and a rescue pole, but our life jackets need new cartridges, the asshats in Pukekohe stole our handheld depth sounder, and we sold all the material I was going to use to make a better sun shade.

Playing in the Backyard
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

As the train moved DrC and I through the emerald green countryside this morning on our way to work, we began to brainstorm our to do and to buy list. Rather than get depressed about the volume, I immediately broke the items up categorically on to separate shreadsheets. A single list of over a 1000 items was more than I could mentally or emotionally absorb. My guestimate is that it will take us roughly ten grand to reprovision Don Quixote for the crossing.

It’s ugly, but someone has to do it.

It's That Time of Year Again

Black Magic Whacko?
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

About this time every year, boats start flocking like migrating birds down the west coast of the United States towards the beautiful harbors and bays of San Diego. By early October, almost everyone has made it at least as far as San Francisco, most are past Long Beach perhaps detouring out to the islands or lingering on Catalina for a week. But ultimately, the siren call of San Diego and the Baja Ha-Ha pulls them all south to the border.

The Baja Ha Ha is a rally of cruising boats -- mostly sail -- that leave San Diego at the end of October for a ten day run down the coast of Baja California to Cabo San Lucas. It's part party, part support group, part race, part rally, part event. It is a way to meet the other boats with whom you are likely to cruise the winter months on coastal Mexico or jump across the Pacific in spring.

There are purists sailors who poo poo the ha ha. "Too many boats with too few real sailors." "Just a party." "Dangerous with all those newbies." "Who wants to sail with a crowd like that." DrC and I, however, are strong proponents of the Ha Ha with nothing but good to say. Sure, you have to be careful as a lot of the boats lack experience -- best to always anchor upwind of the Ha Ha fleet and run at least 60 miles off shore to avoid the madding crowd. Yet, we met many of our favorite people during Ha-Ha 2008. Victory Cat, Sea Level, Third Day, Bay Wolf... these are all people whose lives made our own so much better and so much richer. And naysayers be damned, our girls absolutely adore Richard (the Grand Pooh Bah) and his lovely wife, and one of our happiest memories was a day the girls spent cruising at 18 knots on Profiligate during the Sea of Cortez Sailing Week then coming into the harbor dancing on the bimini cover to the blasting notes of "Walk Like an Egyptian." Had we not Ha-Ha'd, we wouldn't have had that opportunity... we might have known that such an opportunity even existed.

But I do have a few recommendations for prospective Ha-Ha'ers or, in fact, any boat migrating south to Mexico this winter.

Do NOT pack large amounts of rice, beans, and canned goods. Mexicans eat well, and food prices are on the whole considerably cheaper. The produce is often outstanding, and meat and poultry are healthier albeit considerably leaner.

DO fill the lockers with your favorite sauces, spices, and exotica. Mexican supermercados are well stocked, but you often can't find specific brands or particular condiments you love. This is true of New Zealand as well... probably of any country. Your favorite curry mix or salad dressing may only be available in your homeland.

Do NOT buy out the West Marine across from the Ha Ha kick off party, getting every possible part, nautical trinket, boat jewelry, or electronic gadget.

DO buy out the West Marine across from the Ha Ha kick off party. What the hell. It's the last time you'll see any of this stuff, your last time to indulge in American-style consumerism. From now on, it'll take a trip to fifeteen separate ferrerterias to accomplish anything. Actually, buy out the Home Depot while you are at it.

Do NOT get a new dodger, steel frame for your solar panels, dinghy cover or any other canvass work. All this can be done cheaper and better in Mexico.

DO buy Sunbrella if you plan to have said covers made. The stuff costs twice as much in Mexico and that is assuming you can find it.

Do NOT pack fancy clothes, cutlery, or makeup. You will not actually go out to a fancy dinner. Anywhere. For years.

DO pick up some wine glasses (if available) embossed with the Ha Ha logo. We have reason to be thankful for these (Ha-Ha Solves Robbery in Auckland).

Do NOT spend oodles purchasing every chart and cruising guide you can find on Mexico. Charts south of the border are notoriously inaccurate and essentially a profound waste of space and money.

DO buy whatever electronic chip you need for your nav system and the oldest copy of Yachtsman's you can find on eBay, Craigslist or your used nautical shop. Also, you must buy a copy of Sea of Cortez -- and if it's for sale this season -- get Blue Latitude's sequel on Pacific Mexico. Shawn and Heather's book(s) are more accurate than Mexican charts and a complete replacement of Charlie's and Raines. Even their draft of Pacific Mexico was a better aid to navigation when we were down in Bahia Banderas than our "legal" charts.

Do NOT take the Ha Ha lightly. It is not a downwind pleasure cruise comparable to taking a day sail in San Francisco Bay. Just look at the stories from last year -- even though you are leaving in late October, the weather can be awful and disaster can and will strike even highly prepared boats.


DO be prepared. I love the West Coast of the United States as a way of easing into the cruising life. First, you can learn the intracies of intercoastal travel and anchoring. Then you can dip your toe in short hop ocean cruising. The trip from San Diego to Cabo is your next big welcome-to-the-next-level moment where the smart bet is to take the boat completely off shore. You'll be doing round the clock watches for two to four days, sailing at night, and playing footsie with commercial, cruise boats out on the rhumb line. Head Latitude 38's warning that the Ha Ha is not a trip for beginner sailors -- beginner cruisers maybe but not beginner sailors. It is definitely not a trip for unprepared boats.

Do NOT overload your boat with stuff. Mexico is not a third country. It is a wonderful place with plenty of shopping opportunities. You can find pretty much anything you need -- clothes, household goods, food stuffs, tools, and most parts -- in the big cities.

DO contact Club Cruceros and see if anyone needs something brought south. It will usually be small and either hard to find boat parts or gifts from family. In fact, if you're willing to pick up a wind generator for me in San Diego...

Do NOT be afraid. You are considerably more likely to get hit by lightening than you are to be attacked by Mexican drug runners during your trip south.

DO leave American news-media induced fear, uncertainty and dread (FUD) behind. You are stepping into a whole new world now, and I don't mean Mexico. You are launching your career as a cruising sailor. This new life will be slower, quieter, and full of small wonderous moments. YOu may work harder physically than you have since high school sports, but the work is rewarding, satisyfing in ways that our daily works lives often are not.

And do look out for Don Quixote as you pass through La Paz. She's hard to miss as she's on an inner dock, right in front of the restaurant. She's dirty, lonely, and neglected. We've treated her badly. Give her a pat for me, and let her know we're coming home. We miss you all so much, cruising family. See you in February.

Morning Fleet
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Guest Post: Just A Minute Needs Parts

Boat Kids!"
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

INTRODUCTION: s/v Just A Minute is a sister ship Lagoon 380. In fact, she was built the same year, just two hulls down. We stumbled on s/v Just A Minute two winters ago in the Sea of Cortez at Isla San Francisco's seaside anchorage. After a pleasant breakfast, they pulled the hook and ran away. This either indicated that they were new to cruising or that s/v Don Quixote terrified them. Probably both. After over a year kicking around in Mexican waters, however, they've settled into an enviable cruising rhythm. In addition to sharing boat geekery and Lagoon 380 tips, we share cruising-with-kids notes as JaM is another kid boat. The girls speak very highly of 12 year old Jack who is growing like an absolute weed into a handsome young man. Recently, Cap'n Patrick contacted us regarding replacing a broken rudder cable. We told him what we knew and then he ventured off into the Mexican countryside to replace it. This is his story.

Jack and I went into FerreMar in Loreto, and they had a decent assortment of small cables. They told us to try another place down the dirt road pass the cow on the right just before the river. So we did.

After finding a semi trailer with an old Mercury sign hanging on it all locked up, I went around back through the goats, chickens and dogs and found a very nice lady doing her laundry. Have you ever noticed how some Mexicans don't speak English a lot worse than others? Well, we spent the next half hour convincing this nice lady doing laundry to let us into the trailer.

It was very hot inside the trailer but Jack and I found piles of cables to dig through. All too small. After another half hour and I was ready to give up when a Mexican man came in and started talking to the lady as if we were not there. He started digging through the cables as well. It was all very strange.

He finally looked at me and in perfect English said, "How long is it?".

I said, "28 feet."

He replied, "Oh, I have one of those." He then marched passed me out the door.

We followed him around back passed the goats and chickens into the mercury grave yard and then into a large shop with brand new shrink wrapped Mercury 200 outboards lying on pallets and lots of other boat stuff. He reached up on the wall and took down a gray cable and handed it to me. Volvo Penta 28' stamped on the side of it. Used, but for 200 pesos I couldn't pass it up!

You can literally get anything in Mexico. At the risk of repeating something I've said in this blog about a berzillion times, if you plan to cruise Mexico, then just get the boat seaworthy enough to get it down there. Then park in La Paz until your boat is cruiser ready. My overwhelming impression of La Paz after my brief 4 day whirlwind return is that Mexico is a wonderful place to provision, and Mexicans are fantastically helpful people.

Event Horizon

Mera On the Headlands
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I used to be really good at planning ahead. In fact, DrC and I were arguably so good at planning ahead that we had our life mapped out clear to 2050. This was 1990 and we were young, very much in love, and -- in retrospect -- pretty dumb. I know that the politically correct term to use for our dimwitted certainty of our future path is "naive", but in retrospect I think we were stupid combined with misguided. Also, naivety implies that our myopia was entirely a by-product of youth and inexperience. Now, I believe that planning for the future requires assumptions which are built into the entire economy and social fabric in which we were raised. Our minds were threaded with notions of what was right, appropriate, necessary, and inevitable which made it relatively effortless to plan ahead.

Somewhere along the line, however, DrC and I fell off the track. Now we can argue ad naseum whether that fall from grace was a bold step into a unique and exciting lifestyle or merely a juvenile collapse into poverty resulting from severe mid-life crises. It doesn't really matter, though. The point is that once you extract all the "you musts", "you shoulds", "you can'ts", and "you won'ts" from the vocabulary of your planning horizon, life looks very different. From where we sit right now, it is almost impossible to figure out what to do next.

As a project manager, this problem makes sense to me as a classic one of resource, time, and scope. In the bounded world of musts and cants, society defines our scope. We are provided from the cradle with a set of parameters that describe what it is possible for us to become, what is required of us to accomplish. The timeline is an actuarially defined life span ranging from 70 to 90 years. As a result, the only real variable we can apply individuality and imagination to is the resource of our personal intellectual and physical capital. By improving ourselves through education and effort, we can increase our scope. Through exercise and good eating, we might increase our time. As a resource, our labor and effort can theoretically improve the probability of achieving the project objective -- a well lived, successful life.

However, the unbounded life destroys the planning process in two directions: time and scope. First, those who step off the track often make a big and scary leap regarding the available time on this plane of existence. When interviewed, these people repeatedly express some variation of the theme: "We only have one life to live. I don't know how long it will be and I don't want to miss any of it." The leap into a boundless lifestyle often follows personal crisis: lost family member, near death experience, children growing up more rapidly then expected. The time to achieve the project objective therefore is no longer a set value in the equation, but rather a variable ranging from two weeks to seventy years.

So too does the scope change utterly once you step outside the box. If the project objective is a "well lived, successful life" then we must look much more closely at that phrase, defining it with considerably greater precision. "The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates. Examining your life, however, leads you inevitably to the consideration of "well lived." I would hold it as a truism that "well lived" must be a completely subjective criteria, each of us shading meaning and value to every aspect of our existence. We must balance the relative value of goods, people, pleasure, and family. This becomes an entire branch of philosophy so I won't continue further on this line of thought. Let's just say for the sake of this thread that when you reject the classic definitions of "well lived" and "successful" and start exploring all the many alternative ways to bound these criteria, suddenly scope becomes a much messier variable. It's not that I expect everyone to throw away "money and material wealth" and replace them with "fuzzy logic, family happiness and pretty sunsets." It's simply that without the boundaries, there is very little way to predict scope; It becomes more whimsical. Scope changes over time as you grow, modify your expectations and desires. It changes when new people come into your life and other people leave. There is no hope of setting it at a predictable value and managing time and resources accordingly. Instead, scope is in constant flux and must be revisited continually.

Now to bring this down to earth, we now have a project with an ill-defined and changing objective of unknown duration. In other words, our lives are basically like every software development project every undertaken. The only way these projects ever get done is to first get a strangle hold on the marketing department and make them define the scope… at least for this week… and second draw an arbitrary line in the sand to define the completion date. Which explains, to my mind, why agile programming techniques are so popular amongst the digital natives. Instead of creative planning horizons which extend to infinity, project managers force the entire organization to focus down, in and sharply on a short term objective which is attainable within the known variables of what marketing and sales want now and what we can actually get done with the resources we have on hand. And the shorter the time horizon, the easier it is to know what we're going to build.

Which brings us to my personal headache. I fired the old marketing department and told the Sales team to go to hell about four years ago. And while I really like the new team a lot better, their instructions to "don't worry, be happy" are a bit amorphous and not particularly helpful. As long as I don't try to figure out what to do a decade from now, we can concentrate our family resources on what we need to be happy this week, next month, possibly next year. True, the event horizon must include enough recognition of the future that we don't block ourselves from the 70 year program during which the Zombie Apocalypse is a high probability, while eating every day and taxes are an absolute certainty. But those slow inevitable movements in our lives are merely counter-punctual bass lines on the melody of daily events.

Today, we focus on incremental wins towards our long term, life objective of the well lived life. We're coming out of our "Move to New Zealand" scrum, so it's a good time to look at the backlog and figure out what to do next. I spent a few days living in the Product Planning mode of a decade before migraines beat me back to the weeds of our lives. I just can't handle looking out there very far for any substantial length of time. The girls are happy right now and loving life. DrC is happy right now, getting his medical skills back to polish and learning how to play guitar. It's enough for now to know that by our own measure, we are still highly successful people.

Not a Good Place for a Boat
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

(Recent) Lessons Learned About Boats

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
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.