Summer 2022 prep starts NOW.

30-MAR-2022, Phoenix Arizona, USA – The preparation and crush to prepare for this summer sailing starts. It is no different than last year. The amount of work I expect that will need to be done before Caro Babbo can go in the water is much less than last year. But the number of non-boating tasks and leisure things that we are trying to get done before I fly to Alaska is an order of magnitude larger.

Things are complicated because I want to spend as much time as I can with Jennifer. I have spent five of the last fifteen months apart from Jennifer: I spent 3 months in New York preparing my parents’ house for rental. The executor of the estate effectively banished me from the project, so the house still sits, partially and illegally rented, not up to code, and neither sold nor fully rented. It is a cash cow, pregnant, but unable to yield any milk waiting for the birth of the calf.

I spent three weeks in Aruba, sitting on a dock waiting for parts; two weeks in Port Townsend while Jennifer was in Berlin, and then the odd week here and there.

Jennifer’s Port Townsend house has not been rentable for the last year or so because Jennifer’s daughter and a graduate school roommate are living with us so that when we go off sailing or are otherwise traveling, the house is not empty. This is straight bottom-line money: the expenses do not change whether or not the house is rented, but there is no income.

To compensate for this we are converting the house in Phoenix to full-time rental. That is the reason I am in Phoenix. It is sad to empty the house of all of Hilary’s belongings and artwork. We have found that we cannot find the small percentage of renters who value the house the way we do. We have found a few, and they effuse with praise of the magic of the house. But, the average renter wants what is currently called “neutral tones.” What we call beige, the very colors Hilary would rail against.

Unable to cruise three seasons of the year because Caro Babbo sits in the Homer, we have started road trips!

To date, our road trips have been to work destinations, usually related to real estate. Rather than make a twelve or 1800 mile straight-line dash, we meander two and three times the shortest route. We try to stay off the interstates, and disagree, amiably, about how far off the interstate to go. Are one-lane gravel roads, which still exist in the West, too far off the interstate?

I’ve always been charged with picking the hotels, and lately, I have foregone chains. I’ve spent thousands of nights in hotels. I chose hotel chains because of their predictability and avoided restaurant chains because of their predictability. I developed a reliable sense for restaurants. And now, I have been experimenting with that sense to pick small roadside motels. So far, we’ve been quite successful.

On this current trip, of which we are ostensibly only one-third through, I packed camping equipment. Given that the temperatures between Port Townsend and Phoenix would generally be below freezing, Jennifer was adamant we would not use that equipment until we were in warmer weather on the trip back to Port Townsend. However, like the passage that took us to the Aleutians rather than the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I learned, when we visited Arches National Park, that Jennifer had booked us into the 6000-feet-above-sea-level park campground: predicted nighttime low, 19°F (-7ºC), actual nighttime low 13°F (-10ºC). We had a wonderful time, as we always do when Jennifer does the planning. We’ll ignore the fact that we forgot to buy food: We feasted on rice noodles and leftover salami. El hambre hace la mejor salsa.

Until a few days ago the plan had been for us to pack up the house, Jennifer to drive a U-Haul back to Port Townsend, while I drive to Atlanta, stopping to see friends along the way. Then I would spend two weeks working on the house in Decatur, Georgia then drive to the Keys, seeing more friends along the way. Jennifer would meet me in the Keys where we would visit with our friends Jesus and Zoe, and then drive back to Port Townsend, where I would have some elective surgery and would then fly to Homer to prepare the boat. In Homer, I would do what needs to be done for the boat, working with the schedule that the tides dictate to get the boat in the water.

I can’t leave well enough alone.

Rather than being apart from Jennifer, I decided that I would drive with her to Port Townsend in a thirty-hour push, then we will catch an Amtrak complete with sleeping cars from Port Townsend to Phoenix, and then drive to Atlanta, stopping along the way to see friends. The rest of the trip would be as before, only Jennifer would be with me the entire time.

I have put off buying the Amtrak ticket so I can push the cost into the next credit-card billing cycle. Hopefully, that hasn’t screwed things up. The trip is absurdly expensive at two thousand dollars.* But, isn’t this trip something we all want to do?

So what needs to be done on CaroBabbo? The Homer-specific to-do list has forty-three items on it; there are a bunch missing, such as getting an insurance survey. I would like to have hull insurance on the boat; it is the marine equivalent of collision insurance.

I dropped a bundle of money having an enclosure built for the cockpit so that at anchor we can have an enclosed room and can spend time there during inclement weather. This is not an enclosure that we can use while sailing.

Last fall, as we were coming into the lift to pull CaroBabbo out of the water, the tachometer stopped working. This scares the hell out of me. It shouldn’t. But, is it the tachometer that failed? Is it the sending unit that failed? How does the sending unit work? Is it mechanical? Is there a pickup from a magnet someplace that was whirling around and has fallen off?

Other worrisome things include the engine becoming more difficult to start towards the end of the trip. I suspect it is a sticky injector, but I need to figure this out. What makes it difficult is that CaroBabbo is not in the water, so the water cooling doesn’t work unless I find a way to feed the cooling system water. There is no water that I can run to CaroBabbo. The engine can run for several minutes without cooling water, though I would prefer not to do so.

AND… what, if any, freeze damage is there? Last year there was none. Luck or skill? We find out once I get there.

Getting a boat in an out of the water in Homer isn’t like getting a boat out of the water in the more typical places. Unless the tide is unusually high, there is not enough water at the boatyard for a vessel like CaroBabbo to get close to the dock. I have an email into Carol at Northern Enterprises asking what are the dates when we can put CaroBabbo into the water in June, and what are the dates we can get her back out in September.

In September, I want to go to my fiftieth high school reunion. I’ve been to every one, but this one is more important. The life expectancy of someone born in 1954 is seventy-four years. Statistically, a number of us will not return or our sixtieth.

Where are Jennifer, Caro Babbo, and I going this year? We’re headed back into the Aleutians, I’m not sure how far west we will go, but the plan is to go west of Dutch Harbor. We had thought that Michael and Ola on Crystal would be heading from Hawaii to Attu, and we might meet them out West, but Crystal is a charter boat and business has scotched that plan.

Neither Jennifer nor I can wait to get back out there. We had thought we would explore the Bering Sea, specifically Bristol Bay, but there are absolutely no places to hide from weather, so for the most part we will stay on the Pacific side. Maybe we should sail up to Nome?

Will Flora, Jennifer’s daughter, join us this year? We hope so. We’d like her to join us for the entire trip. If she decides to only come for part of the trip, we’ve checked, and there is limited air service to almost every place we are going where there is even the smallest town. King Cove, which has a full-time population of sixty-five people, can get air service. It is merely a matter of how much one is willing to pay. There is also ferry service, but with the changes in fortune of Alaska’s tax base, ferries are infrequent, just a few times between April and September and then none the rest of the year.

I’ll spend two weeks in Homer before Jennifer arrives. The work I should do, all forty items, shouldn’t take more than six or seven days, but two weeks gives time for things to go wrong, time perhaps to do such luxury items as buffing out the hull.

I’ve invited the friends that I have met from the Zingaro YouTube channel (Zingaro II was the boat I was on in Aruba) to join us for a week or so. But, and there is no other way to say this nicely, they are all wimps. It seems the idea of three or four layers of clothing in the middle of the summer when one could be cruising in water where there is little danger of hypothermia has no appeal to these people. Armchair sailors! 😉

My friend Jesus has just bought a 46-foot catamaran that he will be taking ownership of in the Cayman Islands. If he doesn’t feel I will jinx him, I may fly there in May and sail it back to Miami with him. It is possible, though I’m hesitant to write this down, that Jennifer will join us.

The push to sail doesn’t leave me, even though I am now reading a book by a friend tentatively called Sailing for the Aging Sailor.

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* To call the Amtrak website is a disaster would be a polite understatement. Yeow. It seems six of the seven trains I could have booked were not listed. Trains that are listed disappear to someplace where even the call center people can no longer find them… the list goes on. The call center staff just laughed or were even more vehement about bad the website is than I was. Is this any way to run a railroad?