Better Than Real

Her: I'm so glad to be back in Kodiak.

Me: I know. It's such a real-world place.

*Thoughtful pause*

Her: It's better than real.

Metaphor alert! Stepping off the boat...

I'll begin with a note on congruence between life on a traveling boat and life in Alaska. They're both all about the people.

We have been met by our old crowd in Kodiak with typical understated Alaskan hospitality. Friends met us at the dock with ice cream and beer and home-cooked treats. In the days when we were freshly back, people stopped by the boat to give us halibut and salmon.

Friends who are off the island offered up a truck that we could drive for a month while we were looking for our own vehicle (thanks so much, Heather & Pete!). And friends who were going to the Lower 48 for a family visit kindly offered up their house as a place we could stay if we wanted to get off the boat.

We didn't really want to get off the boat - except.

Except that the middle of summer is the perfect time to haul out a boat in Kodiak. The days are super-long, the temperatures are conducive to painting, and the yard is mostly empty, as Kodiak's working fleet is out working. We always prefer to move off the boat when she's in the yard. So, we took the opportunity of a place to stay (thanks, Sara and Ian!) and hauled.

Real help: Joe and I watch the slings come off.

Pretend help: Eric pressure washing.

Fuller's boat yard is part of the "delightfully real" aspect of Kodiak that Alisa and I were commenting on. At most yards where we've hauled through the years, there is a driver for the travelift and a yard worker or two who pressure wash your boat and position the jack stands. In Kodiak, there are first of all no jack stands - those tall boat stands for sailboats. Commercial fishing boats don't use them, so Fuller's doesn't have them. We had a set of our own ordered and waiting at Kodiak Marine Supply when we sailed into town.

And, as for the yard workers who pressure wash and set up the stands, that would be the crew of the boat being hauled. Who also have to provide their own pressure washer (thanks, Debra!).

Another friend, who just happens to be the second owner of Hawk, which he took through the Northwest Passage, stopped by at just the right moment to give us a hand with the stands.

And so it has gone through our time in the yard. People just stop by now and then to talk and look at the boat. It's part of the pace of life in a small town in Alaska. And it's part of the process of our re-integration into this town, one conversation about this and that and nothing at all at a time.

Elias in a triumphant mood.

Allright - listen up you dreamers who want to chuck it all and sail away but don't know much about sailing. Find someone who has a boat and volunteer to help them with their next haulout, start to finish. You'll learn a hundred times more about the sailing life that way than by taking one of those "learn to cruise" classes.

What Was I Thinking?

So, the time came to pull Galactic out of the water and give her a new coat of bottom paint.  It had been a year and four months since we hauled out in Valdivia, Chile, and we were pretty sure we didn't want to haul out in the Caribbean, which will be our next chance after South Africa.

I enquired at the boat yard here in Simon's Town, and found out that in a week their lift would be going out of service for two months.  They could get us out of the water.  But we'd have to do it that very afternoon.

Well!  Normally we plan our haulouts weeks in advance, giving us time to go through all the steps of locating the necessary supplies in a country where we know nothing, and then blocking out the time for me to do the work. (More and more, as Eric gets older, Alisa has also been able to help in the boatyard.)  But just then, I was buried in science work.  Haul out today?  It seemed impossible.

But then - deus ex machina - there is the cost of unskilled labor in South Africa to consider.  One side of this is a lesson about mastery that I am not keen for my sons to internalize: black people work on boats, white people sail them.  Another side of this is that we could haul out Galactic and I could continue to work at my science obligations while someone else painted the boat for us.

This is a very common approach for some yachties.  Really it is a cultural divide in the sailing world. Some people paint their own boats, others have them painted.  This one bit of information about a boat owner is all that you need to make all sorts of inferences about their approach to the grand adventure of sailing the world.  We are very much of the paint your own boat world.  I like to think of Enki as our great friends from the other side of the divide.

So, after a flurry of quick strategic thinking, it was on.  We would come out on the tide, with only four hours' notice.

We came out.  The tractor pulled us up the ramp.  I climbed down the ladder to look at Galactic's underbody, exposed to view.  And I was a little dismayed at what I saw...

I will pause here to note that there is another divide in the sailing world - between those who haul out regularly, and other people, like the wonderful crew of Mollymawk, who, if I have it right, last hauled out seven years ago.

Once again, there are all sorts of inferences that you can make about someone's approach, and their budget, based on which side of the divide they fall on.

We are on the regular haulout side of the divide.  But this time we took it too far.

It turned out that the one patch of bottom paint that we had assessed from the dock when wondering if we should haul out or not - peering down into the water from the dock at the side of the bow in the sun - that one patch turned out to be by far the worst bit of growth on the whole hull.  And it wasn't bad at all.  The bottom paint looked fine.  We could have gone another year without hauling out, no problem.

Later, I had the leisure to reflect that this is exactly what we should have done.  But we were out of the water now, and the boat was being set down, and we let the momentum carry us along.  If nothing else, we reasoned, we would be resetting the clock with a fresh paint job.

Someone else painted the boat while I was working on my laptop.  It turns out that I didn't really like having someone else do the job.  I found the painters about to make one big mistake, and from that point on I was torn between needing to keep an eye on things and not wanting to seem like I was always looking over their shoulders.  (As an interesting tidbit, it was in the yard that I learned about immigrant labor in South Africa.  The workers I asked were all from Zimbabwe or the DRC.)

When the job was done, we went back in the water, wondering if we were any better of than when we came out.

One of the things I love about people sailing the world on a shoestring is how tough they are about money, how resourceful they can be about not opening their wallets to get things done.  In this instance, we rushed ourselves into spending money needlessly, and I'm sure we would've acted differently if I wasn't working, and we didn't have money coming in.

So all our friends on the cheaper side of the spectrum can reassure themselves with our experience.  There's one more reason not to like work - it makes you spend money!

I, meanwhile, have resolved to be a more savvy yachtie.  I've got to be able to hold my head up the next time we see Mollymawk or (God forbid!) Ganesh.

The side story is that the timing worked out that we were on the hard for Eric's sixth(!) birthday.  There were three other foreign boats in the marina, none of whom we knew very well at the time.  They all rose to the occasion.  I don't know which one of them heard that it was Eric's birthday, but the word spread and they all came by with presents.  Meant the world to little fella.  And reminded me, yet again, of how much I like your average traveling sailor.

That's a dassie ("duhssie") on his cake.  Closest living relative of the elephant, size of an outstanding guinea pig.  They've been our favorite African mammal so far.

Best-ish

We kept saying it - "this is the best haulout ever".

But then Alisa and I would follow that with a "not to jinx us", or touch wood.

We were very aware that we couldn't claim victory until we were back in the water.

We've been getting after our annual haulout in the Valdivia Club de Yates - the most civilized setting for a boatyard experience that we have ever seen.  There's only room for one boat (that would be us) and there's a lawn right next to the slipway, with a picnic table where the whole family has been eating lunch together every day.

Galactic is in phenomenal shape, since our to-the-mats haulout in New Zealand was only ten months ago, so there has been relatively little work to do.  And with that lawn right there, and a couple of very nice French kids on another boat in the marina for out boys to play with, and a few strategically-placed cartoon sessions on the iPad, Alisa was able to get off mom duty enough to do some serious boat work.

And, Alaskan readers take note - we had perfect summer weather each and every day.

So things went quickly - we came out Wednesday afternoon, and were meant to go back in the water today - Sunday afternoon.  That would make it our quickest haulout ever.

 And that's where things nearly went askew.

The parents of the nice French kids very kindly climbed up on Galactic to ride the cradle down into the water and help us with the business of steering backwards out of the marina on a windy afternoon.

They climbed up the ladder with us at the appointed hour - and then nothing happened.

The cable that was meant to pull us into the water had snapped.

No worries - it could be fixed.

But even with the cable fixed, the yard winch had a hard time pulling us down into the water.  We would sit and wait for a while, and then all 18 tons of us would suddenly lurch backwards just a little too fast before just as suddenly stopping.

It took us an hour to get into the water.  And by the time we did, the tide was going out and we couldn't reverse off the cradle.  So we winched ourselves off.

All's well.  After we were finally off the cradle we managed the part about backing out on a windy afternoon without any furhter drama.

So, all in a day's adventure.

But it was enough to qualify the whole "best haulout ever" label.

We'll call it "best-ish".

Great Things Ahead

This was the scene yesterday morning - 38 days into our two-week haulout, we launched.

The good part is that we did the right thing by the boat - the bottom has been professionally sandblasted and painted, and should be in good nick for years and years to come.  The bad news was the 38-day part, and the associated costs.

If you're nurturing the salty dream, and have plans of sailing the world's oceans in your own boat, beware of the maintenance surprises that will come along.  Plan, if you can, for the unplannable.

Pulling off the last of the blastyard wraps after we're afloat

But beware, too, just how firmly the sailing life might grip you, unpleasant surprises be damned.

A friend of short acquaintance came by in his dinghy to help us manage the lines as we slid into our barely-big-enough pile mooring on the Hatea River.  Another friend, someone whom we've known for five years or so, but, in the way of sailing people, have only shared a couple anchorages with, happened by in his dinghy.  Soon we were all having a coffee and a chat in the cockpit of Galactic.  These two sailors who were aboard are both of the "all-in" variety - been doing it full-time for decades, still have big goofy grins on their faces showing how much they're loving it, and have no plans to stop.

It was fun to watch the big globe-circling worlds of these two sailors overlap in a quick chat.  And, sitting there in our own expression of the maritime dream, floating once again, I realized how much I enjoy the company of other sailors, how much I enjoy being part of this international group of people who honor life by being forever on the move.

I guess I'm still hooked.

The boys, meanwhile, loved the boatyard.  (Elias said that he wants to own a boatyard when he grows up, which sort of has me worried.)

"Mommy, I measured the roof!  It's two minutes long!"

We got back in the water just in time for the arrival of cyclone Lusi (left).  It felt a bit odd to be hurrying to get into the water in time for the arrival of a blow, but the system appears to be giving us nothing more than a day or two of agreeably rainy/blustery weather to snuggle down on board and think about the future, near-term and far.

Near-term, we have a month or so of prep time left to us, then we plan to jet eastwards, bound for French Poly and Patagonia.  I can't shake the conviction that great things await - it's the incorrigible dreamer in me.

Longer term, I can't shake this idea of the family doing some serious sailboat-based biology in the Arctic a few years from now.

It's the incorrigible dreamer in me…

Hostage

"This is the part that Cruising World doesn't ever mention," says Alisa.

The barky - behind a fence and under wraps

And the view up close - feeling blue on the bottom

Sailors talk about being "free", and I suppose our lives are very free, more than most.  But more so than freedom, I think it's self-determination that characterizes our life afloat.  We choose our destinations.  We shape our own course, literally and figuratively, and go where wind and whim will carry us.

Because everything is usually more or less up to us, we sailors are masters at getting stuff done.  When it's crunch time for boat maintenance, we make every hour tell a tale.

But when you pay someone else to work on your boat, you give up that self-determination.  Suddenly your progress depends on someone else's ability to finish their work.

I think this is one of the greatest drawbacks to not doing all your own work on your boat.

Temporary quarters

So when we made the decision to have the hull professionally spot-blasted, we knew we were buying a ticket for an uncertain ride.

From our perspective - well, it feels a bit like the boat is a hostage.  From our go-go pace of getting stuff done every day, we've gone to hauling out and then waiting two weeks to get into the blasting yard.  Now we've been in the blasting yard for five days - and the blasting isn't finished.  Note that I am NOT complaining about the pace of work per se.  The business can't be expected to have Galactic as their central priority, the way we do.  From their perspective, we're one of many jobs that are getting done in this busiest time of the year.

So we wait - and every day the yard bills mount, and, at least until the blasting is finished and we can take the wraps off Galactic, the bills for temporary housing mount.  We keep a good contingency fund for just this kind of expensive surprise, so in the big picture the expense isn't too bad.  But sailors maximize their use of money even more than they maximize their use of time - we happily squander an afternoon on doing nothing at all (outside of boat maintenance season!) but we never blow a hundred bucks for the hell of it.

But now we wait, with money and time both pouring away…

Luckily, we know two other boats in the yard who are either doing much bigger jobs, or have had found much bigger surprises, than we have - and the sailors involved are smiling through it all.

They give us a good model to emulate...

Do The Lot - Or Not?

This is gonna be messy.  And expensive

There's a boat in there somewhere

Big doings yesterday.  One, our house-sit came to an end, and two, areas of failing paint beneath the waterline of Galactic would finally be sandblasted.

Camping out at the boatyard office

The blasting/painting yard is conveniently right next to the boat yard where we hauled out - it's only a $140 travel-lift ride away for Galactic.  Our plan was to have the blasting and priming done, start living on board that night, move Galactic back to the old spot in the boat yard the next day after the primer had dried, then continue to live aboard while we finished painting the bottom.

But then the blasting began, and plans changed.

Big flakes of paint came shooting off under the blasting nozzle, exposing the bare steel beneath.  There was much shaking of heads from the blasting crew, and the opinion that there was not enough good epoxy paint left on the hull to warrant a spot blast became universal.

I made the butterflies-in-the-stomach decision to have the entire hull beneath the waterline blasted and repainted.

Now, we were not planning on this expense this season.  The thought kept occurring to me that we could have Elias read about this job on the blog in eleven years, when we would be breaking the news to him that he couldn't attend an American university.

A full blast also meant that Galactic would be in the painting yard, tarped and uninhabitable, for days.

Which meant that we suddenly had nowhere for the family to stay.

We found a place, of course - after some quick work online and on phone, Alisa found a two-bedroom unit, with kitchen, in a motel reasonably close to the necessities of life in downtown Whangarei.  At $150 NZ a night, it's a further blow to the budget, but not having a backup plan organized in case we couldn't move on the boat meant spending the money.  And the woman we had been house-sitting for very graciously offered to drive Alisa and the kids and all our gear over to the motel, so the problem of transport was solved as well.

But, it was still a bit of a low point for Alisa and me - camped out in the dusty boatyard, with dinnertime a few hours away, and bedtime soon to follow, and having no idea where the family would be staying - well, that's not the sort of situation that we seek out.

The kids, though, made it as smooth as could be.  "Are we going to another house-sit?" Elias asked as he was getting into the car to leave the boatyard.  When told that we would be staying in a motel, he answered, "Hooray!  A motel!  I've always wanted to stay in one!"  The motel rooms turn out to be a very clean version of the painted-cinderblock variety.  Elias calls them "the best rooms in the whole world!"

Say what you will about that kid, negativity is not his strong suit…

This morning the full blast commenced - and then halted.  It turned out that the view of paint quality had been too pessimistic the day before, and there were actually acres of firmly-adhered epoxy that were hard work to remove with the blaster.

So we're back to a glorified spot-blast.  All the antifouling paint will be blasted off, leaving the epoxy beneath in place.  Any failing epoxy will be blasted away to bare steel, and the coating built up from there.

We'll still have to spend a few nights in the motel.  But we should be saving thousands of dollars on the cost of the job.  So though Elias may not get to go to an American University, I expect we'll be able to afford to fill the tanks with diesel before we set off from New Zealand...

Anticipatory

That's our prop shaft.  Pretty mundane looking, you might say.

And that's the point!  You're so perceptive!  It's in completely fine shape.

But it's not in the boat, joining prop to engine.  Instead, it's sitting on a pallet in a corner of some boatyard in Whangarei.

The prop shaft is stainless steel, and it is 25 years old.  Stainless steel rots in low-oxygen environments, like the stern tube of our boat.  But the low-oxygen places where it rots are, by definition, hidden from view.  So, with a trip to Patagonia in the cards, I decided it was worthwhile to go to the trouble to yank the thing out of the boat and see how it's faring.  All well.  Now it just has to go back in the boat.

There are a lot of jobs like that going on on Galactic.  Anticipatory jobs, you might call them.  Making deadlights for all the opening portlights to keep them watertight when things get too nautical.  Beefing up the companionway hatch for the same reason.

I figure that's a big part of the game for sailing ocean passages, especially once you get out of the tradewinds.  You have to put the work into solving problems before you have them.

Here's the most anticipatory job of them all: adding cones to the series drogue.

There are 147 little cones on that long piece of line, and the idea is that if things get way too nautical, you chuck the line over the back of the boat, all the cones catch water and slow you down and keep your stern into the waves, giving you the chance to wait for everything gets better.

Meanwhile, our visit to the boatyard is past the three-week mark.  We've been waiting to get into the painting yard to get some sandblasting done on the hull, but the company that does that work has been over-the-top busy, so we've waited two weeks.  Today the travel lift finally took us to the blasting area, and the blasting and priming should happen tomorrow.

No prop, and no rudder

And not a day too soon, as our wonderful house sit is at an end, and we move back aboard tomorrow.

We had a dinner of fish and chips to celebrate our final night here.

Is this haircut getting too young for him?

Oysters collected at the beach at the house sit

Help From Afar

When my family told us they'd like to visit in February, we were torn.  Our first reaction - "GREAT" - bumped right into our considered reaction - "but we'll be right in the middle of the haul out then."

"No problem," came the reply.  "We know you're busy.  So we'll watch the kids while you and Alisa both work in the boat yard.  That still leaves coffee time in the morning and beer time at night for us to visit."

So they all came, all the way from Boston to New Zealand - my parents, my sister and her two kids.  And it worked out exactly as planned.  Alisa and I teamed up in the boat yard every day that it wasn't raining, and as a result we got way more done than we would have had I been soldiering on alone.  Our kids had a great time with the family, who stayed at the beach cottage just down the hill from our house-sit.  The whole mob made a few sightseeing trips out into the country, cause, hey, this was looking pretty certain to be their once-only family trip to New Zealand.  And we got that coffee-time and beer-time to visit.  (I notice that nearly every picture of adults taken during the visit features wine glasses or beer bottles.)

I'm very glad that they were willing to make such an expensive visit under less-than-perfect conditions.

Alisa and I made great progress on replacing portlights on Galactic while they were here.

The new event for the Yachtie Decathlon - painting with exam mirror in hand 

Busted knees and fierce concentration

Only the advent of a rainy spell kept us from finishing all five windows while we had the gift of unlimited kid-minding.  Yesterday the family left and the rain cleared in the afternoon.  Alisa and I got two more windows sealed up, even with the kids aboard the boat.  It was a pretty good performance by team Galactic - we got them sealed up just before the rain resumed, I only yelled at Elias twice (or three times?) and we were back at the house-sit in time for dinner.

The Long Yard, or Doubt

Where to begin?  I guess by observing that if it were easy, a lot more people would be doing it.

Let me be clear - no pity is looked for!  When we look around at what our peers living ashore are up to, we're pretty sure that we wouldn't want to trade with any of them.  Nothing against what they're doing, of course, but just to say that we're generally very very happy with family life afloat.

Alisa, and a boat cabin in transition

But it does take a heap of effort to secure enough research funding, and do enough research work, to pay for it all, at the same time that we're keeping the boat in the kind of shape that we'd want her to be in if we were doing ocean crossings with the family (which we are), at the same time that we're keeping family life going.

Normally I don't spend too much time worrying about any of that - we just do what it takes, and we love what we do, the effort be damned.

But the annual trip to the yard is when I wonder about it all - all the effort that just disappears on boat maintenance and improvements (what if I worked this hard at writing?) and all the money that gushes into the boat, despite our efforts to staunch the flow.  And the dark thoughts of safety, or the opposite, when I consider this possible contingency or that aboard, and how we might anticipate it now.  When I take a break from thinking about all that, I give a thought to all the multi-day projects that I have awaiting me before we're "ready" to go.  Ambitious sailing, like our plans for Patagonia, definitely increases the work load beyond what we'd be doing if we only planned more downwind sailing in the tropics.

So all that, psychologically, makes the annual haulout tough for me.

Luckily, this year we have some helpers from afar who are watching the kids so Alisa and I can both work in the yard.  Everything, physically and mentally, is much easier when two are working together.

It Happens

Yes, it happens - the annual trip to the boat yard.

Hauling out Galactic always feels so odd - the family home/mothership/repository of all our hopes and dreams is suddenly parked on some obscure patch of gravel and taken all to pieces, and the long uphill journey to getting back into the water begins.

There's a funny transition where you go from being the master of your own ocean-going vessel, in your own watery realm, to being a mere rent payer in someone else's domain.  The yard guys know more about hauling your vessel than you do - they do it all the time, after all.  But you've also got to watch every decision they make, since you'll be living with their mistakes.  A funny transition.

And there's also the funny transition where you start thinking exclusively about the things that are wrong with the boat, and need to be set right.  This begins to open the door to self-doubt.  Who are you to be sailing the world with a boat that isn't absolutely perfect?

Everything will be fine once you get in the water again, and you retain a faint memory of how good it will feel to really shove off and point the bow to somewhere a hundred times farther than you can see.  But to get there you've got to put in the boat yard time.

Our bed, disassembled in order to drop the rudder out of the boat - for the second year in a row!

Of course, any fool could take care of a simple haul-out if that were all they were doing.  But I'm also coming up on the one month mark until the PhD thesis is due, I've got a brand-new biology project beginning this month, and we're now less than two months away from the day when we'd "like" to be ready for Rapa.

I feel strangely calm - is this a bad sign?