Blogging – Page 13

Sticky Docks, Stripped Screws

Lee’s Landing, Lake Union, Seattle, Wa, 7-Aug-2019 – We haven’t left on our shakedown and won’t until next week, it seems. We may instead sail around Puget sound for a bunch of days until we’re confident everything is good and then take off without coming back to the Lee’s.

Yesterday, while I worked on trim in the cabin, Harrison installed the ‘‘zinc’’ on the propeller shaft*. When he came up, he said that one of the screws that holds in the propeller shaft bearing (cutlass bearing), was hanging from the wire that keeps the screws from loosening.

Short Update while Jennifer sleeps

Lee’s Landing, Seattle Ship Canal, 1-Aug-2019 – Jennifer is asleep; Seattle’s traffic volume across the ‘‘99’’ bridge above me rises. The sky is clear, and there are two hurricanes, Erick and Flossie headed to Hawaii.†

Sometimes it seems better to write about a task beforehand rather than during the throes of frustration during the task. Today, we install the windows.

Tasks have been going very well, all-in-all.

We finished painting the hull above the rub rail so Caro Babbo no longer has her distinctive blue livery (more about that in the footnotes*).

Better in the living

More than a week has passed since I wrote this. Jennifer has returned to Seattle, and I have been head down working on what needs to be done before we leave and what I’d like to be done before we leave.

DL1077 ATL-SEA twenty minutes outside of Atlanta, 20-JUL-2019 – As an adult, I’ve always lived a double life, or more. A life in one city, a second or third in another. It has been a life out of a movie sometimes: I worked at a movie studio, fell for a Russian I met there and followed her to Paris; I was profiled in a magazine and worked in dozens of countries; I owned that same model sports car that James Bond drove, but it was always a life better in the telling than the living. Long distance relationships seem to be more about pain and heartbreak than anything else, life on the road is exciting and tiring and forbids other parts of life.

One last round with Hilary

Hilary doesn’t yet visit me in my dreams but she will. When time enough passes that she and I should have seen each other by now, she will appear to fulfill that timetable. I wonder if she’ll speak or just be present, communicating by her heat next to my face.

Seattle, WA, 14-JUL-2019 – The radar is installed and working, so is the new autohelm.

I’m your (almost) Captain. Goings on ashore.

Port Townsend, Wa, 18-May-2019 – Call me Almost Captain. I’ve passed all the tests, taken a Red Cross-approved first aid course, had a physical. There is only getting a TWIC card (background security check), getting a drug test and assembling 720 days of sea time, and then, with the addition of another few hundred dollars I will have a 25-ton master’s license for near coastal. Oh yeah, I also will have sailing, and assistance-towing endorsements.

This will allow me to captain, for money, power vessels up to 25 tons gross vessel weight based on volume (not displacement); the vessels will weigh, empty, much less than 25 tons. I can also master a sailing vessel of unlimited weight and get paid for towing boats that need assistance. In the US, it seems I can do all of this on non-commercial vessels, for no pay, without any license. (In other parts of the world this isn’t true: one must actually have training before doing these things.)

Taking a few minutes to play Hooky

Lee’s Landing, Lake Union, Seattle, WA, 7-MAY-2019 – Tests for my Master’s (Captain’s) license start tomorrow evening. I’ll take a few minutes to play hooky and tell you about the experience before the reckoning.

I row to class in our Portland Pudgy each afternoon, a little after 5pm and then home at 9:30. The row is around 50 minutes, five or ten minutes longer than walking, but if I paid attention to where I am rowing, it might be the same or less. When rowing, I only see where I have been, rather than where I will be.

At night, I will see only three or fewer boats on the lake on my row home.

Lake Union and the PNW boating community is as much my home, as any I have had. I think of the three places I’ve lived where I would run into I people I knew: As a young adult on Long Island, I would always meet people I knew at Smith-Haven Mall. As a slightly older, young adult in New York’s west village, and now sailing here.

rough draft 4 minutes memoir

Jennifer is starting a memoir about our time sailing with Hilary. This is a four-minute piece, when read out loud, that Jennifer wrote for a seminar she attended. The event described took place in 2016.

Date: Friday, May 3, 2019 at 1:35 PM

Topic: rough draft 4 minutes memoir

Hilary is my mother.

At the deepest extent of our swing we were in over 60 feet, but when the tide reversed we had drifted and settled such that our keel was two feet above the bottom. The next low was forecast to be three feet lower, so John and I set up a double anchor system, one off the bow in deeper water and the Danforth off the stern in shallower. We could thus pull ourselves out into deeper water if the clearance between the bottom of the keel and the ground grew too nervous-making for me. Positioned in this way, with the golden sun filtering down through the clear water and hints of fantastic wildlife just around every bush and boulder, John started the task of fixing the Webasto heater.

I was looking through the binoculars at shore watching for bears or another wolverine, and Hilary was puttering in her way: untying the stopper knots in the jib sheets and coiling the lines into kinks. Why not let her, I thought, as we weren’t traveling that day and it was so serene and lovely.

Back in the classroom again

Port Townsend, WA, 27-APR-2019 – I’m working on a Master’s (Captain’s) license – I think the last time I was on the student side of a classroom was around 1981. I was still working for Digital Equipment and was regularly being sent for training.

I did corporate training for a number of years as an instructor, but I was never on the student side again, until now. It’s reassuring to know how much of the material I already know, but I’ve always been a poor student in that I never cared about grades. I didn’t know it at the time, but I am classic software engineer (or race care driver) in that sense. Artificial and external appraisals don’t matter to me†. It may be why I like single-handing a sailboat so much.

Here, it is different, I must get certain grades in order to get that license.

Hilary Has died.

At 7:42 pm, Atlanta time, Jennifer sent a text: ‘‘30 breaths per minute, hard, normal is 12-15.’’ At 7:54pm, ‘‘37 bpm.’’

Lake Union, Seattle, WA, 5:30 am PT, 12-Apr-2019 – At 6:03 am this morning, Atlanta time, with Jennifer holding her hand, Hilary drew her last breath and breathed no more.

Her passing was as Jennifer has hoped, peaceful and quiet. Jennifer was with her and Hilary was not afraid.

Life is a Mangle

7-APR-2019, Port Townsend, WA – Contranym – a word that is its own opposite. The noun mangle and verb mangle are life at the moment. A mangle is a machine with rollers that smooth cloth. I think of them as the wringer rollers on a washing machine, or the machines that iron sheets in a hotel. The verb is to destroy usually by twisting and cutting.

Hilary is dying. It blots out much of what I intended to write about.

She stood in front of the temple and spread herself upon the wind, thinner and thinner, until only the wind remained.
Apollo referring to Hera in Star Trek episode 33, Who Mourns for Adonis