The kids fight. All the time.
DrC isn’t Mr. Happy Pants.
I still want to rule the world.
No one said selling everything, throwing the rest away, moving on a boat, and sailing to Mexico would make it all better, but somewhere I must have gotten the idea. I know this because now I’m disappointed that it hasn’t happened. My family is living proof that you can change literally every aspect of your physical and economic life and still be a typical, moderately dysfunctional group of strong-willed smart asses.
We woke up this morning, and I realized we had not achieved our fantasy objective of being a perfectly happy, well adjusted family. DrC stretched on the bed and listened to my maundering tirade on misery looking for all the world like an advertisement for boxer shorts. All by itself, the situation made me bitter. In six months that man has lost his slight, upwardly-mobile-middle-class-professional paunch and added 15 pounds in all the best places. He’s tan, his beard makes him look distinguished, and I swear he’s losing all his grey hair and growing back in new soft curly brown stuff. I, on the other hand, look very much the way I have since Aeron was born: 20 pounds overweight, completely incapable of managing even the most basic female skin care rituals, and gaining grey hair at the rate of three per day. Yes, I take inventory.
So there we are -- DrC stretching and preening and making my mouth water -- and me trying to explain why we’re completely hosed as a family unless we do Something Drastic. Unfortunately, my husband didn’t disagree. The negative energy vortex on the boat has reached some sort of critical beaufort rating where the waves are flattened and the wind spume is hissing across our nerves with a low steady roar of frustration, sarcasm, and snarky comments.
I would love to blame this on my eldest. Teenagers are a fabulously convenient scapegoat for familial conflict. They are such monsters that it is easy to credit them with converting an otherwise happy, loving family into a six pack of spitting, barking rabid weasels. However, it’s not her fault. Jaime is what she is. We have allowed heat, dirt, close quarters, and over-exposure to transform us all into big bad meanies. The process took all five of us, and it will take all of us to take the energy out of the negative shit storm, calm the waves, and start moving in a new direction.
Aeron’s idea is to reinstitute Happy Bean Day.
Mera wants us to talk about how we feel. Every day. Or every other day.
DrC is committed to smiling at least once a day. He’s also agreed to try to first assume the positive rather than going with the foregone conclusion that none of the rest of us know what we’re doing.
I plan to pretend that my posse are standing behind my shoulder listening to every word I speak. My girlfriends, Mom and MIL love me but have little patience with my avowed suspicion that my children are actually Spawn of Evil from Planet Zoor.
Jaime just smirks. Did I mention she’s a teenager? We’ll work around her.
DrC once told me that he saw no point in getting divorced and finding a newer, better, younger model. He figures all the problems in our marriage are at least half his fault, and he’d just take them with him. No point in going to all the work of finding a new woman if she’d still only want to have sex about one out of every ten times he did and only after having a meaningful conversation.
This is more or less true for most major changes in your life. New job, new house, new city, new lifestyle -- each brings an opportunity to modify your core. But you can only shift the fundamentals of yourself and your family with a great deal of concentrated, deliberate effort. To make our family behave like a team, we are going to have to start working together. Simply putting us on the boat and assuming magic would happen was a disappointing failure -- albeit in retrospect a not particularly surprising one.
So this month we’re going to work on our attitude. I promise I’ll work on my flab next month.
Now look who’s smirking.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Doing More With Less - Electricity
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.
We have to make every erg of electrical energy we use. Not surprisingly, this makes us very stingy consumers of electricity. On a boat, there are five ways to produce electricity:
Hook to shore power - You can buy electrical at a marina. Sometimes it comes with the dock fee, sometimes there is an extra charge. In either case, it costs a lot of money to tie up. We anchor out as much as possible so it does not behoove us to rely too heavily on topping off the batteries on a dock.
Generators and engines - You can use alternators to charge your batteries by burning fossil fuels either in your engines or a generator. In both cases, however, you are engaged in that environmentally icky and incredibly expensive process -- converting dinosaurs to lumens. We prefer to charge our batteries this way only as a by-product of moving the boat. It is depressing how often weather and timing force our sail boat to be a very slow motor boat. When this happens, we call the energy that flows into our batteries “bonus points.”
Solar panels - We have two panels and a solar charge controller. The entire setup, including DrC’s nifty kludge of a mounting panel, cost us roughly two boat bucks. We consistently get about 15 amps an hour during the day. Let’s call it about 100 per day. More panels gets you more power. On a boat, it’s rather challenging figuring out where to put them. The great thing about solar panels is that if you set them up correctly, you can then forget their very existence. They just keep pumping out power.
Wind generator - Many cruising boats travel with a wind generator. We do not, but maybe someday we’ll add it to the boat. The principle advantage of a wind generator is that it can produce energy 24 hours per day. The disadvantages are the noise and that they require a lot of baby sitting. It is a very bad idea to forget you have a wind generator when you are in high winds. Even so, it’s very tempting to add one to the boat.
The final way to generate power is the most important -- don’t use it. Just as on land, the amp you don’t use is the cheapest one to generate. Boaters in general are pretty clever about reducing consumption. I’d like to think on Don Quixote we’re doing a reasonably good job. I’ll start with a list of ways we conserve, but this is one of those times where I would really like people to actively contribute additional suggestions. Other boaters have no doubt developed very creative ways to reduce their use of electricity.
LEDs - An expensive but very efficient way to reduce consumption is to switch all the lights on the boat from incandescent to LED. The masthead light, for example, burns all night to alert boats moving through the anchorage of our location. At 2 amps per hour, that’s roughly 24 amps a day. The LED version consumes roughly 2 amps for the entire night.
Ditch the Power Toys - Some power tools make for a much safer cruise as you can fix your own equipment, sew your own covers, or build your own furniture. Others just take up space and weight and consume a lot of power. Ditch the microwave, bread maker, hair dryer, coffee maker, and blender. Dispense with every power sucker and change your lifestyle. As an example, we use a manual coffee grinder from the Lehman’s catalog. It’s beautiful and slows our consumption considerably.
Guard Against Vampires - Chargers for phones, iPods, laptops, GPS and VHF handhelds, and other such little toys consume energy, even after your device is fully charged. Surprisingly, the amount of energy they draw even fully charged is actually quite substantial. We put all these devices on a single power strip. We control the entire strip with a single button. This enables us to charge everything for a few hours, then cut off the charger vampires in one swift stroke. A side benefit is safety since batteries, battery chargers, and transformers have a well-deserved reputation for periodically setting themselves ablaze.
Change Your Sleeping Habits - Wake with the dawn, go to bed at sunset. There is something satisfying about this from a biorythmical standpoint, and it saves a great deal of juice. Another benefit of going to bed early is you watch a lot less television. We thought we’d watch movies regularly. Instead, we’ve been traveling for seven months and have watched a mere handful.
Plan the Refrigerator - We still haven’t mastered Ninja Refrigerator Stowage, but done correctly you can substantially reduce consumption. Organize the fridge so that the things you need are in the front, easy to get to. Meals are grouped on back shelves. True ninjas can actually restrict opening the fridge to a three times a day activity, once for each meal. We know of one family that has it down to once a day. I dream of this capacity for advanced thinking.
So, now you. Boaters, tell me how to save more power. We had reached that enviable state where we could live on the hook for nearly a week, but as we dropped to warmer latitudes, the increased power to fridge and freeze tipped us over into running the engine every third day. Help me out!
We have to make every erg of electrical energy we use. Not surprisingly, this makes us very stingy consumers of electricity. On a boat, there are five ways to produce electricity:
Hook to shore power - You can buy electrical at a marina. Sometimes it comes with the dock fee, sometimes there is an extra charge. In either case, it costs a lot of money to tie up. We anchor out as much as possible so it does not behoove us to rely too heavily on topping off the batteries on a dock.
Generators and engines - You can use alternators to charge your batteries by burning fossil fuels either in your engines or a generator. In both cases, however, you are engaged in that environmentally icky and incredibly expensive process -- converting dinosaurs to lumens. We prefer to charge our batteries this way only as a by-product of moving the boat. It is depressing how often weather and timing force our sail boat to be a very slow motor boat. When this happens, we call the energy that flows into our batteries “bonus points.”
Solar panels - We have two panels and a solar charge controller. The entire setup, including DrC’s nifty kludge of a mounting panel, cost us roughly two boat bucks. We consistently get about 15 amps an hour during the day. Let’s call it about 100 per day. More panels gets you more power. On a boat, it’s rather challenging figuring out where to put them. The great thing about solar panels is that if you set them up correctly, you can then forget their very existence. They just keep pumping out power.
Wind generator - Many cruising boats travel with a wind generator. We do not, but maybe someday we’ll add it to the boat. The principle advantage of a wind generator is that it can produce energy 24 hours per day. The disadvantages are the noise and that they require a lot of baby sitting. It is a very bad idea to forget you have a wind generator when you are in high winds. Even so, it’s very tempting to add one to the boat.
The final way to generate power is the most important -- don’t use it. Just as on land, the amp you don’t use is the cheapest one to generate. Boaters in general are pretty clever about reducing consumption. I’d like to think on Don Quixote we’re doing a reasonably good job. I’ll start with a list of ways we conserve, but this is one of those times where I would really like people to actively contribute additional suggestions. Other boaters have no doubt developed very creative ways to reduce their use of electricity.
LEDs - An expensive but very efficient way to reduce consumption is to switch all the lights on the boat from incandescent to LED. The masthead light, for example, burns all night to alert boats moving through the anchorage of our location. At 2 amps per hour, that’s roughly 24 amps a day. The LED version consumes roughly 2 amps for the entire night.
Ditch the Power Toys - Some power tools make for a much safer cruise as you can fix your own equipment, sew your own covers, or build your own furniture. Others just take up space and weight and consume a lot of power. Ditch the microwave, bread maker, hair dryer, coffee maker, and blender. Dispense with every power sucker and change your lifestyle. As an example, we use a manual coffee grinder from the Lehman’s catalog. It’s beautiful and slows our consumption considerably.
Guard Against Vampires - Chargers for phones, iPods, laptops, GPS and VHF handhelds, and other such little toys consume energy, even after your device is fully charged. Surprisingly, the amount of energy they draw even fully charged is actually quite substantial. We put all these devices on a single power strip. We control the entire strip with a single button. This enables us to charge everything for a few hours, then cut off the charger vampires in one swift stroke. A side benefit is safety since batteries, battery chargers, and transformers have a well-deserved reputation for periodically setting themselves ablaze.
Change Your Sleeping Habits - Wake with the dawn, go to bed at sunset. There is something satisfying about this from a biorythmical standpoint, and it saves a great deal of juice. Another benefit of going to bed early is you watch a lot less television. We thought we’d watch movies regularly. Instead, we’ve been traveling for seven months and have watched a mere handful.
Plan the Refrigerator - We still haven’t mastered Ninja Refrigerator Stowage, but done correctly you can substantially reduce consumption. Organize the fridge so that the things you need are in the front, easy to get to. Meals are grouped on back shelves. True ninjas can actually restrict opening the fridge to a three times a day activity, once for each meal. We know of one family that has it down to once a day. I dream of this capacity for advanced thinking.
So, now you. Boaters, tell me how to save more power. We had reached that enviable state where we could live on the hook for nearly a week, but as we dropped to warmer latitudes, the increased power to fridge and freeze tipped us over into running the engine every third day. Help me out!
Thursday, January 08, 2009
The Kid Party
It’s fair to say that we planned this party for nearly two years. My earliest recollections of family conversations about cruising in Mexico involved staging a party for the kids on the Baja Ha Ha. The Ha Ha promised many boats, many crews, many kids. The Ha Ha was in Mexico where the water would be warm, the air soft, and the sun strong and dangerous. As a family, we developed a vision of Don Quixote as a gathering place for Ha Ha families.
And the boat was loaded with this party in mind. We arrived in Bahia Santa Maria -- the anchorage between Leg 2 and Leg 3 of the Baja Ha Ha -- with everything a boat needs to throw a really good kid party. For Solstice last year, DrC made a slide out of plywood. The slide is rough on one side to serve as a gangplank and smooth with beer labels and hard varnish on the other. Strapped to the starboard transom, it serves as a chute. Pour a bucket of sea water and ZOOM down the side of the boat. In Emeryville, Aeron worked with Jason to figure out way to use the spinnaker halyard as a swing. They worked out a system to drop the lazy jacks and jib lines, and leap off into the air to swing around the front half of the boat. Nearly two winters ago, we purchased a floating island at Costco. In San Diego, we stocked up on munchies, chips, trail mix, and cheap red wine. We packed kid movies, popcorn, and spare towels.
So we were ready our first morning in Bahia Santa Maria to get on the VHF during announcements.
Toast: Don Quixote.
Poohbah: Don Quixote go ahead.
Toast: Don Quixote would like to invite all kids of the Ha Ha fleet to our boat for the evening. The Don Quixote Water Park will open at four PM. Parents can either drop their offspring or relax with us in the cockpit while the kids swim and then watch movies.
Poohbah: Don Quixote, are you saying you want all the kids? That’s great! Where’s your boat?
Toast: We’re at the back of the fleet. We crept in last night at about 3 am.
Poohbah: How about you move your boat over near us. There’s plenty of room for another catamaran.
Toast: Will do.
Poohbah: Okay, that’s Don Quixote for the Kid Party, Corenthia for Texas Hold ‘Em at 7:00pm, and Amani for the musicians in the fleet. All three catamarans will be over near Profligate tonight. Any questions?
Third Day: Don Quixote, should we bring anything to the party?
Toast: Third Day, I think the kids should start learning the cruising rule of bringing something to any gathering. We welcome shnick shnacks and finger foods, but no worries. We have plenty!
The kids actually started arriving about two in the afternoon. We had everything set up and the girls were already jumping off the bow. Parents dropped the kids off early and went back to their boats for a few hours of rest and clean up. They rejoined Don Quixote and their off spring at dusk. We had children everywhere. They were jumping off the bows, swimming between the hulls, sliding down the tramps, screaming in the island. The adults used the salon until the sun disappeared and the temperature dropped. We then moved children on to every flat surface in the salon and turned on a movie. Parents retreated to the cockpit for wine and the exchange of shared experiences. At one point, I counted 32 people tucked into various nooks and corners on our boat. We were probably well below our water line, but it felt wonderful.
Third Day and Calou. Bay Wolf, Leo Scotia, Odessa Mama and Sirius Star. These boats, their crews, their profile are now so familiar to me that I can spot one from three miles away as we approach an anchorage. I know their voices on the VHF, the personalities of their children, and their politics. But on that first night in Bahia Santa Maria, it was all very new. The families we met that night are the beginning of a small core of boats with whom we will spend many hours and share many experiences over the coming winter.
And we are so lucky. These are wonderful, fascinating people. Possibly, the reason it is so easy to spend time with them is that what we share is so much greater than our differences in background, economics, and education. We are all here; We have brought our children to a life that is so different from the norm for almost identical reasons. We all share a goal to make this experience a defining one for our kids and ourselves. We have sacrificed our careers, alienated family members, and fully intend to go stone cold broke in the coming months and years. We could literally be from anywhere, and I believe we would still enjoy each other’s company.
Everyone wound down after the movie ended, the dinghies disappearing into the background twinkle of the fleet anchorage. The party was everything we had ever hoped it would be. Two years of planning and six hours of perfect realization of our cruising dream.
And the boat was loaded with this party in mind. We arrived in Bahia Santa Maria -- the anchorage between Leg 2 and Leg 3 of the Baja Ha Ha -- with everything a boat needs to throw a really good kid party. For Solstice last year, DrC made a slide out of plywood. The slide is rough on one side to serve as a gangplank and smooth with beer labels and hard varnish on the other. Strapped to the starboard transom, it serves as a chute. Pour a bucket of sea water and ZOOM down the side of the boat. In Emeryville, Aeron worked with Jason to figure out way to use the spinnaker halyard as a swing. They worked out a system to drop the lazy jacks and jib lines, and leap off into the air to swing around the front half of the boat. Nearly two winters ago, we purchased a floating island at Costco. In San Diego, we stocked up on munchies, chips, trail mix, and cheap red wine. We packed kid movies, popcorn, and spare towels.
So we were ready our first morning in Bahia Santa Maria to get on the VHF during announcements.
Toast: Don Quixote.
Poohbah: Don Quixote go ahead.
Toast: Don Quixote would like to invite all kids of the Ha Ha fleet to our boat for the evening. The Don Quixote Water Park will open at four PM. Parents can either drop their offspring or relax with us in the cockpit while the kids swim and then watch movies.
Poohbah: Don Quixote, are you saying you want all the kids? That’s great! Where’s your boat?
Toast: We’re at the back of the fleet. We crept in last night at about 3 am.
Poohbah: How about you move your boat over near us. There’s plenty of room for another catamaran.
Toast: Will do.
Poohbah: Okay, that’s Don Quixote for the Kid Party, Corenthia for Texas Hold ‘Em at 7:00pm, and Amani for the musicians in the fleet. All three catamarans will be over near Profligate tonight. Any questions?
Third Day: Don Quixote, should we bring anything to the party?
Toast: Third Day, I think the kids should start learning the cruising rule of bringing something to any gathering. We welcome shnick shnacks and finger foods, but no worries. We have plenty!
The kids actually started arriving about two in the afternoon. We had everything set up and the girls were already jumping off the bow. Parents dropped the kids off early and went back to their boats for a few hours of rest and clean up. They rejoined Don Quixote and their off spring at dusk. We had children everywhere. They were jumping off the bows, swimming between the hulls, sliding down the tramps, screaming in the island. The adults used the salon until the sun disappeared and the temperature dropped. We then moved children on to every flat surface in the salon and turned on a movie. Parents retreated to the cockpit for wine and the exchange of shared experiences. At one point, I counted 32 people tucked into various nooks and corners on our boat. We were probably well below our water line, but it felt wonderful.
Third Day and Calou. Bay Wolf, Leo Scotia, Odessa Mama and Sirius Star. These boats, their crews, their profile are now so familiar to me that I can spot one from three miles away as we approach an anchorage. I know their voices on the VHF, the personalities of their children, and their politics. But on that first night in Bahia Santa Maria, it was all very new. The families we met that night are the beginning of a small core of boats with whom we will spend many hours and share many experiences over the coming winter.
And we are so lucky. These are wonderful, fascinating people. Possibly, the reason it is so easy to spend time with them is that what we share is so much greater than our differences in background, economics, and education. We are all here; We have brought our children to a life that is so different from the norm for almost identical reasons. We all share a goal to make this experience a defining one for our kids and ourselves. We have sacrificed our careers, alienated family members, and fully intend to go stone cold broke in the coming months and years. We could literally be from anywhere, and I believe we would still enjoy each other’s company.
Everyone wound down after the movie ended, the dinghies disappearing into the background twinkle of the fleet anchorage. The party was everything we had ever hoped it would be. Two years of planning and six hours of perfect realization of our cruising dream.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
TechTip - Water Sweet As Wine
Short Answer: Make your own water maker. It’s cheaper, it makes more water, and you’ll know how to fix it without a high-priced mechanic.
Long Story: DrC just finished making our water maker. We downloaded the plan off the Internet a few years ago. I understand you can now pay to download this plan. I recommend it highly. We’ve met three boats to date who successfully followed the instructions to build and maintain a high-volume water maker. Now we are the fourth who can make the case for a home built job.
In the interest of fair disclosure, building your own water maker is not for the faint of heart. It took a long time and a lot of hard work. It is also not exactly cheap. The parts for our water maker totaled just under two boat bucks. DrC estimates it took him roughly 50 hours of work effort from start to finish not including what felt like 100s of trips to the hardware store. He does recommend that you build your water maker before you leave the dock. The critical tool is apparently a car to get to a really good hardware store. The most expensive parts are the filter, the pressure vessel, and the pump. The pressure regulator and clutch can also run you some change. You’ll also need space for the installation (~1.5 cubic feet), a thru hull or T off an existing raw water intake, and hydraulic hose to get the water to your tank.
There are two major advantages to building your own water maker: price to output ratio and maintenance. Even two thousand dollars is cheap for a water maker that puts out thirty gallons an hour. A comparable volume Spectra will run you at least $4,000. For roughly another ~$400 we could double our output to 60 gal/hour with a second filter. We’re considering it, but we’re going to wait until we live with what we have for awhile. Also, we hear folks on the cruiser nets almost daily asking about how to get maintenance for their water makers. There is something of a black box feeling for these devices down here. However, all the boats with hand built jobs tell stories about how a trip to the hardware store solved this problem or that. When you build it yourself you know how to fix it; It’s that simple.
Yesterday, we stood on the deck passing around a glass of clear, clean water. The entire family was grinning like loons. The water tasted like ambrosia after all the effort DrC had put in. So maybe a third advantage of DIY water makers is the sweet taste of accomplishment.
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