The Worst Engineer

Big day on Galactic yesterday.  We finally got the windlass reinstalled.

The windlass is the gizmo that pulls up our very heavy anchor for us.  You might remember that it has been broken since Penrhyn, in the Cook Islands, which is a very very long way back up the track.  So we've been pulling the anchor by hand for a very long time (without, I should mention, a decent manual backup on the windlass).

A lot of effort went into replacing the faulty electric motor on the windlass.  We put time into ordering the new motor, and taking the windlass off the boat, and getting a machine shop to help with getting the old motor off the gear case, and then drilling / countersinking / buggering up the holes for the new mounting bolts for the new motor, then bolting and sealing the motor to the case, then looking all over town for the proper grease for the gear box, then giving up and ordering some from New Zealand, and...you get the picture.

Finally, it was a huge pain to bolt the very heavy gearbox and motor back to the underside of the deck.  And then the moment of truth.  I flipped the switch.  And nothing happened.

The old motor broke on us four times during this last Pacific crossing.  The first three times I was able to fix it (I now know all about sticking brushes on electric motors).  But on the fourth breakdown I just couldn't figure out how to get the motor going.  And now I know that was because the motor wasn't broken.  Something had gone wrong with either the foot switch or the solenoid or the wiring between the two.  (Not to get too technical!)   I had gone over all those things exhaustively when the windlass first broke, and ruled them out as the problem.  But by the fourth breakdown I "knew" that stuff was fine, and neglected to check them again.

So yesterday, as I turned the windlass on over and over again and watched it doing nothing at all, I had to quickly get used to the idea that I had spent days and days of my limited time replacing the windlass motor....for nothing.  

And then I was revisited by the old feeling that I just might be the worst marine engineer in the world, a hapless humanist sort of person who fell for the dream of sailing the world and finds himself stuck in a life devoted to the mundane, and brutally materialist, tasks of keeping a traveling boat in working order.

Alisa no doubt wondered why I was so grumpy after we got the windlass remounted.  I still don't think she figured out that we hadn't needed to go to all the trouble of replacing the motor at all.  And I couldn't bring myself to tell her.

I suppose she'll find out here.

Passing along dubious mechanical skills to the next generation.

The Real Work

Two of Elias' favorite things about living at the dock - 1) his friends who live on their family's boat just down the way; and 2) lots of space available for art projects.

~~~

I imagine that a lot of people reading this blog have their own plans for setting off on a sailboat at some time in the future.

It's a common enough dream, after all, this sailing-the-world stuff.  And there's a high bar to acting on the dream, since you have to break your links to life ashore before you can set off on a new life afloat, so that the dreaming-about-it and planning-for-it stages typically last for years before the actually-doing-it stage arrives.

So while people are getting ready for making the jump, they're naturally interested in what they might be doing to prepare themselves.

The same answer always runs through my head when I hear people talking about what you can do to prepare for full-time sailing while you're still living on land.

My answer?  "Nothing much."  (Exceptions to follow, though!)

Travelling long distances on a sailboat is just an incredibly multifaceted, irreducible, grease-under-the-fingernails sort of thing to do.  You can't learn how to do it without doing it.  You can't know if you're going to like it without giving it a try.

So the only meaningful preparation that you can undertake is to go sailing.  You can only learn on the water.  That's where the real work of the life afloat takes place - the sea is where you slowly, and ineluctably, turn yourself into a sailor.  Every time you round a headland too close, or miss the tide through a pass, or wrap your anchor chain around coral, or put a brass fitting in your boat below the waterline, or let a full pot of coffee slide off a counter, you're getting ready to sail.

The very best thing that Alisa and I did when we were thinking about chucking it all to go sailing was to buy a 25-foot trailerable boat for $6,000.  We sailed the heck out of the Little Auk all around the northeast side of Kodiak, summer and winter.  And after a couple years of that, we knew we were ready for more.  Pelagic soon followed.

Maria Island, Tasmania.

OK, now for the exceptions I mentioned.  I will admit to three things that you might do to prepare for full-time sailing while you're still living on land.

The first two stem from the Mike's First Law of Travelling Under Sail: It's all about the people, and the boat stuff is mostly a distraction.

Kind of hyperbole, but it does get at a truth - the best predictor of how well you'll take to the life afloat is the strength of your relationship with your life partner (assuming that, like most people, you'll go to sea as a couple).  If your relationship is strong, you'll get through any number of miserable days on the water with a "we'll look back on this and laugh" mentality.  If your relationship isn't strong... well, it likely won't get any stronger at sea.

So the first thing you can do to get ready to live on your boat is to make sure you have a totally bitchin' relationship with the one you love.

The second thing you can do is to smooth out the rough edges of your own personality.

The little theater of the absurd that will be your home afloat will quickly see you stripped of all pretense and camoflage and, under the pressure of one learning experience too many, reveal you for the person you really are.  Won't it be nice to get to that point and find that you're revealed as a decent and considerate person?

All of which is to say that a little therapy now might make you easier to live with when the dream starts showing its ragged edges on the eigth day of some passage or another that you had planned to finish in six days.

And the third thing you can do to get ready?

Read How To Sail Around the World, by Hal Roth.  It's the only "how to sail" book I know that's any good.

Sunday Mornings (And Friday Nights)

So this picture sums up Alisa's life, well, ever since we started sailing full-time in 2007.  She's the one who's got the kids.

That's not all she does, of course.  She stands watch and navigates and tells me when it's the right moment to drop the pick in a crowded anchorage.  She made our bimini and drilled holes in our toe rail when we needed a place to tie in the netting on the life lines.  She reefs the main and cooks both at sea and in port and she's the one who figured out how to tune our radar and she does all the provisioning for the boat.

But she does all that in breaks from childcare.

I watch the kids and brush their teeth and change their diapers/nappies, too.  Of course.  But the way that we've divided up the work of everyday life has me doing more of the non-kid things and her doing more of the kid things.  (Surprise!)

And on this last crossing of the Pacific Alisa was really watching the kids a lot.  I was doing the final re-write on the book and working on two marine biology research projects and playing engineer for Galactic.  So Alisa had the kids so much that friends even commented on the blog to ask if they could please see just one photo of Alisa without the kids.

I checked.  We didn't have any.

So when we settled into Hobart to take a break after that crazy period of simultaneously working and sailing across the Pacific, I had an idea:

I would take the kids every Sunday and give Alisa the day off.  That's me above, making pancakes for breakfast on the first of those Sundays.

But... it didn't quite take.  We were in the yard for two weeks so I didn't have the kids for those Sundays, and then even after we were back in the water other stuff kept coming up, and Alisa ended up not getting the weekly break from child-rearing that I had nobly promised her.

Luckily - there's another sort of break that's available to her: the girls' night out.

Our good friend M-A took Alisa out dancing last week.  This is a picture that surfaced from that night out on the town.

I think that the occasional Friday night out might make up for a whole bunch of Sundays spent with the kids.