It Must Be Good

Great friends of ours recently bought their first cruising boat.

In the nautical world, this is recognized as a dark and lamentable turning point in anyone's life.

Just joking.
Sort of.

We spoke with these friends of ours - really some of the most remarkable, steadfast, and simpatico people we have met in our decade afloat - right in that awful extended moment when the depths of their predicament had become fully clear. (Drop us a line, guys! We want to know how it goes.)

Everything on their new boat boat seemed to broken. They were looking at that insurmountable job list that is a part of most stories of how someone acted on the dream and bought their own traveling boat. And, I think, they were trying to figure out if the lake of expense and angst that had suddenly opened at their feet, demanding to be swum, was really going to be worth it.

We talked with these friends, just when they were re-evaluating their view of the sailing life through the new prism of boat ownership. At one point, one of them asked me if I ever got off the boat.

"Sure," I said somewhat defensively. "I get off the boat."

We have just spent a couple weeks anchored in Las Perlas Islands in Panama, poised on the verge of our big jump to Hawai'i.

Granted, I have been pouring heart and soul and considerable time into the scientific research that keeps us going financially, so my time budget would not be representative for most yachties.

But still, a few days ago I looked at Alisa, wiped the dust from my brow, and said to her, "I had my answer wrong. I should have said, 'Get off the boat? Why would I ever want to get off the boat?'"

Because, when I haven't been trying to understand the ecological implications of sea surface temperature-sea level pressure coupling in the North Pacific, I have been pouring heart and soul and discretionary hours into projects like those illustrated above: fixing the wind generator (partly successful) and renewing the nonskid deck paint in crucial areas (generally regarded as a stunning boat maintenance coup).

Meanwhile, our transmission has developed a leak that seems to have eluded my first attempt at a fix. And our busted telescoping whisker pole seems likely to set out for Hawai'i in a still-busted state. This is a really classic boat problem - it was broken when we reached Cape Town, got fixed there, failed nearly immediately on the trip back across the Atlantic, got fixed again at Ascension Island, and then broke immediately again.

So this is us, a decade into the sailing life, on a well-used boat, which are generally less maintenance than the marina-sitters of the world. We're always fixing something.

And yet, for all that effort, we are all four of us completely enthralled with the sailing life. Consider the days we have just spent at Las Perlas, off a deserted beach, in waters thick with life, at a spot that you could only get to your own boat.

See the beach fire pic above from Las Perlas - I expect that our next beach fire will be in Alaska.  See the photos of Eric below, swinging from a halyard.

And see the happy family, very much together, very much in the same boat, below.

Buying your way into that kind of living with some boat maintenance...who wouldn't make that trade?

Brown pelican, catching dinner

Freak of the Week

This one is for all the boat maintenance aficionados in the audience.

The shot above is the back of our engine instrument panel in the steering pedestal.

As with nearly all the wiring on Galactic, it's a neat, professional looking job.

But I was motivated to dig in there because our tachometer has stopped working, and I wanted it operational for the Canal.

A quick fix got us through the Canal experience with some evidence beyond that of my ears for judging how fast the engine was turning.

A more thorough investigation on the Pacific side showed this:

We've always known there was a bad cockpit fire on Galactic two owners before us. And this appears to be the last damage from that fire to be found and remedied.

These cables run from the engine room, through the stainless steel tubing of the pedestal, to the instrument panel.

The heat of the fire was apparently enough to melt the insulation off the wires. So for years - and for us, for two crossings of the Pacific, and two crossings of the Atlantic - the ignition switch and engine instruments were served by nothing more than bare corroding wires, surrounded by ash and melted insulation.

How they ever worked in that state is beyond me...

So. The fact that I've been getting through jobs like this speaks to the fact that we are getting closer to setting out for Hawai'i.

And in addition to these boat jobs, I've gotten through a pile of science work and we've finally been able to leave Panama City.

We're all happy about getting away from the Big Smoke, none more so than Elias:

Unhealthy Living/Nice Work If You Can Get It

The beast in situ

I swear up and down that I want nothing to do with that awful sailors' habit of talking about boat maintenance.

(Just kill me now!)

Normally, I talk about boat maintenance only with Alisa, after the kids are asleep, in the dead of the night, with the curtains drawn and a "to do" list growing under the pen held in her shapely fingers.

Boat maintenance. It's personal that way.

But, for all my denialism, boat maintenance is a huge part of my life. It's my hobby, it's how I while away my idle hours (ha!). It's how we've managed all the crossings that have gotten our family safely (so far!) from here to there. And, with my sideline career in marine biology that both allows us to keep sailing and keeps me forever slightly time-poor for doing the sailing, boat maintenance is my nagging regret, that part of life that I always feel just a little behind on.

So, with all that as a background, perhaps it's appropriate to, well, celebrate boat maintenance for once. Sure, the individual jobs might still give me varying degrees of heartbreak and heartburn. I'm not really handy, and even nine and a half years in, some of these jobs can be too much effort to be healthy.

But on the other hand...how good a problem is that, to have a life that is dominated by the maintenance of your own magic carpet?

So, here's a photo essay celebrating a boat maintenance victory - getting rid of our clunky old genset in South Africa.

The dang thing was occupying about a third of my maintenance time budget all by itself. We have beefed up our solar and wind power to the point where we didn't really need it. And finally getting up the gumption to rip the thing out gave us two things that every sailor should crave - simplicity and space.

How good is that?

The beast in cartu

And the scabby hole that was left after it was gone

The hole, de-scabbed.
Below: Nature abhors a vacuum, nowhere more than on a traveling sailboat.  We now call the hole the "sail locker"

And my next trick! Replacing the transmission in Curaçao. 95F/35C in the engine room.
Learn a lesson from the Brazilian sailors - only a speedo will do in this situation.

Professional Help

OK, here's how you tell if you're a yachtie or an office drone.  

(Nothing against the office drones among you, of course.  Some of our very best friends work in offices.)

A yachtie, I reckon, will be able to tell what is missing from the engine in the shot below:

Give up?  It's the header tank and injection pump.

(Don't worry if you didn't get the answer - you might not be an office drone, just one of those poet-yachties that you hear about...)

So, anyway, said picture was taken just minutes ago, and it shows the state of our donk after those two really important bits were taken away to some place where they can be made well.

And that also gives you the answer that we've come up with to this winter's much mulled-over question - to replace the donk, or not?

We figure that, at this point at least, new donks are for office drones with steady paychecks.  So we're going to fix two out of the three outstanding problems with the current beast and just get on with things.

I certainly could have taken off the header tank myself, and the injection pump, too, for that matter.  But we decided that this was an instance when a little professional help would be in order, so we had an actual mechanic do the job.

We've had almost no professional work of any kind done on our various boats - I usually just muddle through myself, semi-demi poet-yachtie that I am.  But every now and then you just want to pay someone else to make a job go away.

We always get an incredibly satisfied feeling when we decide to pay someone to cross a cantankerous item off our list.  And then, in our experience, we get a really rotten feeling when the "professional" stuffs the job up for us.

I'm sure that won't happen this time!

Sisters, Far Apart

One of the highlights from our stop in Tahiti last year was the chance to meet our sister ship, Silver Lining.

That's Galactic on the left, and Silver Lining on the right.  One is a cutter and the other a staysail schooner, but they're two versions of the same hull - the only two Noble 451s that were ever built.

One of the things that helped us to feel better about taking the leap into the unknown of a non-production sailboat was finding the blog that Margo and Frank and their two boys kept - they were sailing Silver Lining all over the South Pacific, and apparently having a great time doing it, so we figured the design must be pretty good.

And now, nearly a year on the dot since we met them in Tahiti, Silver Lining has just left Kodiak, on their way to Homer, where they plan on settling in for a stay.  And we, of course, are down here in Tassie - the two boats are about as far from each other as they could possibly be while still being in the same ocean.

You get so used to sailboats being slow; I thought this was a great example of just how much travelling you can do under sail.

Perfectly Fine Procrastination - Ruined?

We had finally and completely decided to put off any thoughts of repowering Galactic until we got to New Zealand next summer.  All indications were that the job would be about 25% cheaper there, which was enough of a difference to justify the huge kink in our New Zealand sailing season that swapping engines would create.

The final straw was when I looked into purchasing an engine GST-free in Oz, since we are after all a foreign-flagged vessel on an international voyage - an overseas port is our next port of call.  No dice.  The Kiwis, on the other hand, make GST-free purchases totally easy for foreign yachts.

So we once again resolved to skip the over-valued Australian dollar and wait on the job, and this time we had the added joy of deciding to skip the inflexible Australian policy towards taxing foreign vessels, to boot.  And, to make our happiness complete, we had an ironclad reason to procrastinate on an incredibly troublesome and expensive boat job.

But then, just to be sure of the facts, I called up an engineering shop in NZ and priced out the Volvo engine that had been suggested to us here.  And, low and behold - it'll cost us $700 AUD more in New Zealand than it would here.

Now, we're not at all sold on the Volvo.  Particularly since our good friends on Enki are currently going through the nightmare of a Volvo with mysterious debilitating faults that a parade of factory-trained mechanics cannot fix.  But even with the cheaper labor (and I cannot shake the prejudice that it is likely better labor) that we would find in New Zealand, there's no point in waiting until next summer if the engine will cost us more.

So, procrastination may be out the door.  We're going to price out a Yanmar in both countries, just to be sure.

The Old Girlfriend

When we arrived at the marina in Hobart a couple months ago, I immediately scanned the forest of masts  for the unmistakeable profile of Pelagic.  We sold her in Hobart a little more than a year ago, and I had heard the new owner was keeping her in that marina.

The thing is, I didn't really want to see our old boat.  I'm not sentimental about boats.  (Really!  I'm not!)  But we just had too much of a history with that old boat.  Seeing her again would be like seeing an old girlfriend - it would make me remember the good times, but also remind me that they were all over.

It turned out that Pelagic was staying on the other side of the Derwent estuary, so I was spared the sight. But Hobart is small, and we quickly met the new owner.  And then, this last week, he brought her to this marina for her annual haulout (above).

And I've got to say, it wasn't so bad to see our old home.  I even brought Elias by to take a look.

It's reassuring to see that she's in good hands.  And seeing her again really did bring back a few memories - I looked at the spreaders, high above the boat yard, and remembered standing up there, looking for coral, the afternoon when we first sailed into Tahanea.

And, maybe because we're busy making sailing memories on Galactic, it didn't bother me too much to realize how remote the Pelagic years are now.

What We Don't Like (And A Couple More Things We Do)

Alright, so what don't we like about this boat of ours?

Well, the list is pretty short.

The cockpit is too small - four adults can't eat at the cockpit table comfortably, which is a shame on a 45' boat.  Seating six adults comfortably at the table would be even better.

I don't know anything about the people who did the final fit-out, but I suspect they didn't know much about the sea.  The sink drains gave me the screaming horrors - cheap plastic piping that you would use in a spec house, with a bunch of very weak joints that were below the waterline, and therefore were trusted to keep out the big blue sea.  I replaced all those.  There was one portlight that was too small for its hole in the hull, with the resulting gaps just filled with globs of silicone.  Replaced that, too.  And there are these terrible cabin lights that I think were made for RVs, and have the bad habit of melting out.  Those are on the list to be replaced this winter.

The engine's too small.  We knew that when we bought her.  But we like to sail, and we aren't too bothered by it so far.

The structural bulkhead between the saloon and forward cabin is showing some cracks.  Gonna have to strengthen it this winter.

But really, that's not too bad a list of complaints!

And here are a couple other things we like...

The hull and deck are cor-ten steel, which is corrosion-resistant and also very expensive.  The gray area in the photo above is a section of bilge.  Not all of it looks this good, but a lot of it does.  The guys who fabricated this boat obviously had professional skills, and cared about what they were doing.

And (forgive all the boat details!) there's the access to the wiring.  Look how neat it all is...

So that's the boat in a nutshell.  At this point (touch wood), I don't think there are many surprises waiting for us.  Hopefully she'll continue to serve us as well as she did on the Pacific crossing.

The Ride, Evaluated

OK, so this whole crazy year of travel that spawned our new blog began when we threw up our hands at the apparent impossibility of finding a semi-affordable boat to our liking in Australia.  Our backs were a bit against the wall:  we had an infant, we had been serial house-sitting in Hobart for ten months, and we were feeling that if we didn't get a boat, soon.... well, it felt like something awful might happen, like we might have to give up on the whole sailing thing for a while and start living a semi-respectable life ashore.

And that didn't sound like fun.

So I flew to California with a fist full of Australian dollars from the sale of Pelagic and spent a very frantic week trying to evaluate this totally off-the-wall steel boat on which we had an initial agreement.

And of course we bought her.

And now that we've sailed this new ride across the Pacific, and turned the odometer over on the 10,000 nautical mile mark just as we entered Hobart, the logical question is - are we happy with the choice?

Let me presage my answer by admitting that I don't really like boats.  Sailing is great.  But boats are unfortunate sorts of things, forever demanding time and sweat and money from their owners.  Some guys get all weak-kneed about the line of a sheer, and enjoy walking marina docks looking at boats and all that sort of thing.  That ain't me.  But as long as we're going to be full-time sailors, boats are something that I'm just going to have to put up with.

When we were boat shopping, we had very general criteria in mind.  All we wanted was a reasonable cruising boat that we could raise the boys in and sail pretty much wherever we wanted to.

The kicker was that I have this long-standing itch about sailing the Northwest Passage to get back to Alaska.  That's the route that goes right over the top of Canada.  Don't know if we'll actually do it, and if we do it will be years away.  But we've got a bad track record when it comes to poorly-advised ideas for big trips - we seem to end up doing them.

So that meant a metal boat.  I know that people sail the Northwest Passage in fiberglass boats.  It's just that we weren't going to.

We wanted an aluminum boat.  Specifically, a French unpainted aluminum boat with a lifting keel.  But who could afford one of those?  So instead we ended up with this very obscure design, the Noble 451, a 45', 18 metric ton steel boat, one of only two that were ever built.

And, I gotta say, we're pretty happy with her.

First of all, she sails pretty damn well.  She was rock-solid when the wind speed pushed past 30 knots at the end of our Bass Strait crossing.  It doesn't take a heap of wind for us to make 8 knots.  And we can fly the spinnaker in 6 or 7 knots of breeze and keep her moving at a respectable rate.

And, for a boat her size, she's pretty easy to single-hand.  All the sheets and furling lines and traveller lines and running backstays are right at the wheel, so you can tweak all that good stuff from a single spot in the cockpit.  The main is easy to reef.  The boat is balanced under sail.  It's all pretty good.

The interior is not production-yacht quality.  No expanses of teak, and certainly no old-world craftsmanship.

And that's actually something that we were looking for, as we figured that giving up the typical floating bordello interior was a way to reduce cost.

And then there's the space.  We'll pay the price for having a 45 footer in terms of maintenance hours and dollars, both of which increase exponentially with length.  But in return, we get some very concrete advantages.

The galley is (relatively) vast, but also secure at sea.

The engine room is, well, actually a room.  I can get at the stuff I'm trying to fix.

The boys' room should be big enough to hold them both in relative comfort for as long as we're living aboard.

There's enough storage space for months and months and months of supplies.

And there's huge deck space - we carry two dinghies pretty easily.

We didn't get the deal to end all deals.  But, having said that, we saved ourselves fifty thousand dollars or more on the price that we would have paid for a comparable boat in Australia.

And that's enough to make a sailor who doesn't really like boats smile.

Tomorrow - the stuff that we're not so happy about...

She Sails

Well, it happened - we finally got out for a sail on Galactic.

And we liked what we saw.

The boat is a lot bigger than what we are used to, but she doesn't feel too big to handle.  Much of the core sailing gear - sails, mast and boom, rigging - is brand-new and higher-quality than what we would have bought if we were fitting out the boat ourselves.  One of the benefits of all this good sailing gear is that she sails quite well in light airs for a boat displacing 20-odd tons.  Alisa and I agreed that she promises to be a good sea boat, and we are looking forward to some heroic sailing when we get to the trades.
 
There were some other things that we liked about the new boat a lot.  All the control lines for jib and main are in easy reach of the wheel, making it easy for one person to sail.  And it turns out that there is plenty of room under the dodger for both boys - Eric in his car seat and Elias on a cushion.

And, just to make it a real-shake down sail, we got some unplanned action out of the day: the wind blew, the boat heeled, two drawers emptied onto the sole and a coffee pot ejected its contents all over the galley.  Meanwhile, that part of the crew who was down below changing a stinky diaper began to harbor dark thoughts about that part of the crew who was on deck and apparently making the boat heel for the sheer dirty pleasure of it.

We had both stayed up late the night before, and in our tired and grumpy state we found ourselves enjoying a spirited discussion about who had the tougher job - the person changing the 10-month old's diaper down below, or the person watching the antsy four year old in the cockpit while sailing the boat between the pylons of the Bay Bridge under conditions of shifting wind and adverse tide.

This is the sort of moment that I suppose might lead some people to reconsider the whole notion of sailing with small children.

Alisa and I, though, having been through it all before, kept in mind that most of the program of sailing with the family is wonderful.

We finished the day with a lovely sail down the narrow ditch separating Oakland and Alameda.  Our spirits revived, I risked a look back by saying to Alisa, "You called me an ------- back there."

"Don't be silly," she said.  "I would never call you an -------.  Or at least not in front of the boys."

Day One

Ha!  Gather around and observe this one moment of joy that way too much money, way too much effort, and many nervous moments of what-the-hell-are-we-doing introspection have bought us.

Today we christened our boat.

We launched early on a rainy morning.  The yard guys kindly let the family wait in the workshop while the travelift was doing its thing.  By the way, we hauled at Svendsen's, which was also the scene for out last haulout for Pelagic before crossing the Pacific.  We generally cannot say enough kind things about that yard.

Galactic leaving the hard.  That's one long drink of water!

Alisa letting the champagne fly, and making the name official in a way that no Coast Guard paperwork could.

The crew on our maiden voyage, from yard to marina, about a half mile down the much-abused waterway that separates Alameda from Oakland.  Left to right: Cabin Boy Second Class Eric Litzow, Cabin Boy First Class Elias Litzow.

And so that's us.  By naming the boat, we of course also named ourselves.  Wonderful sailing friends whom we haven't yet met will soon, if everything goes to plan, be referring to us collectively as "Galactic".  I could explain our choice of the name, but I think that would belabor what is essentially the process of us amusing ourselves...

And now, back to the job list!  We have six weeks until we want to be leaving San Francisco, and a heap of boat prep, one book re-write, and a round of family visits to accomplish in that time.

Waiting for the Paint to Dry

That's exactly what we've been doing.  First it was too rainy to paint, then when we did get the paint on it was too cold and wet for the paint to dry.  We painted the last coat of bottom paint on Thursday, and it was finally dry enough for us to go into the travel lift slings today - Tuesday.

Now the painting is done, and the new name is on the hull, and the California "champagne" is cooling in the reefer.  Tomorrow at 0700 the yard guys will lower us into the water.  But before they splash her we'll take a moment for a bit of maritime ritual, and thereby mark and observe this remarkable moment,  the launching of this new boat that we have selected to be the home for our family and the vessel for so many of our hopes.

So tomorrow is a beginning for us, a beginning of things that we cannot yet guess at.

But it is also the end of something, the end of what happened when two people, a bit startled at what they found themselves taking on, sailed away from home with their ten month old son, completely unsure of their ability to carry through on the plans they had set.

Those of you who have been following the blog know that the three years that followed that departure day gave us more than we could have reasonably have hoped for.

This will be a different trip; we are four of us now, and Alisa and I (and Elias) know much more of the sea, and ourselves, than when we left on Pelagic.  And since we know more, we are of course looking for different things with this second incarnation of our life afloat.

So, to mark the transition between boats, and the "ending of the beginning" of our maritime lives, we'll be moving to a new address for the blog - if nothing else, the name of this blog demands the change.  And it's also nice in a way to end this particular blog, to declare a wrap on this particular phase in our lives, and to mark the start of something new.  We'll link to that new blog once we've christened the boat - I hope you'll all come along to the new blog to continue finding out what happens next.

-Mike