30ºF -1ºC

11-MAY-2024, Northern Enterprises boat yard, Homer AK – It was thirty degrees Fahrenheit last night. The coldest it’s been since I arrived nine days ago.

Abe, who in addition to restarting his life after losing the girl, the house, and boat and wallowing in depression and god knows what for more than two years, has taken a non-paying crew position on an Irish-flagged, 50-foot Halberg-Rossy and gone completely European, asking if I meant Celsius, here in Homer, so I translated for him. It’s good that he’s moved on for however a limited time. He started in St. Martin (St. Maarten?), is now in Bermuda (he didn’t know it was so far north), and is headed to Halifax. I haven’t been to Halifax in a long time I told him. I recently mentioned how old I was when we started adventure sailing to a young British woman on a French boat here in the yard; she decided not to come visit.

It’s been fifty years since I went to Halifax on a jaunt to buy land. Abe said he’d never been.

Tiff’s offer on a very nice project boat to replace her not-very-good project boat in hurricane-ridden Florida has been rejected. I advised her to let it sit six months and then make the offer again – I should have said to offer 10 percent less. She’ll get that boat if she waits that long. In the interim, she can get her project boat to a place where it will float and be easier to unload. I worry that she’ll instead need to have her boat crushed and her hard work and money will go to the crusher as well. But, you never lose the experience, and each time you do it, you do it better.

When I arrived at Northern Enterprises on the second of May, there was no ladder for my boat, so Brenda came by to fetch me so we could go to her house to fetch a ladder and Don’s truck to carry it. It was in the low forties, sunny, but the yard was full of puddles from the nearly ceaseless rain. I bought a cup of tea at the restaurant in the yard, and then bought Brenda a cup of coffee, so I would have time to finish my tea before we left. It had been a long night. My flight left Seattle at 9:30pm, landed in Anchorage at 1am, the RAVN connection took off at 8am. There was no Delta lounge.

Brenda left me the pickup truck and I bought groceries and five gallons of kerosene.

No bilge pump of mine makes it through the winter without failing: generally, a fuse blows. I only left one pump with a fuse, from the other I pulled the fuse. The bilge or the line freezes and that’s the end of the game. If the fuse doesn’t blow, it drains all the batteries to death. The fuse is preferable since the bilge water outcome is the same.

This year in the yard was hard. The weather had loosened the main sheet, which Don had been nice to retighten, and blown water through cabin doors. The water has over the floorboards with lots of muck in both bilges. On the engine, the flywheel pulley and the impeller pump pulley were partially submerged. The paint had lifted off, and the uncovered metal rusted; no water in the crankcase or transmission.

I spent three days emptying the bilges, cleaning and painting the engine and reattaching the forward bilge pump and solid-state switch. It all works now. The list to be completed was large when I arrived, it is still large now, but only about half its size. More mail orders are coming the next week, and I have more to order.

On my first Friday, I was invited to dinner at Don and Brenda’s. Morgan and Ryan were there as was an elderly friend, whose name I can’t remember.

I remembered Morgan as tiny and beautiful and Ryan as somewhat obnoxious the way young men can be. It’s been two years since I’ve seen them. Morgan is as tiny and beautiful as I remember, Ryan much more hirsute, but the frenetics have subsided. They are now a wonderful couple who own a house halfway up a ridge, twenty miles outside of town.

Ryan has spent the last two years writing a book about backwoods living and has the interest of an agent. (Writing is a tough business to make a living at.) When he and I last dealt, his youth and need to tell me everything he knew made it difficult to tell whether he knew anything. This time the conversation stayed on the topics of the night: Ryan and Morgan are going to marry. They brought a test of the wedding cake, which was dense and wonderful: non-gluten chocolate with a vanilla frosting. They both thought the cake had cooked too long. Perhaps. I can’t tell.

Tuesday, a bicycle I ordered arrived at the yard, which I assembled in thirty minutes, and the next day rode into town to buy supplies. When I was at the office to pick up the bike, I spoke with Carol and Aaron about what had happened with the fleet and the yard since I’d last seen Aaron at the commercial fishing exposition in Seattle, last December. Carol and I scheduled June 1 at 11:10pm as the date and time we’ll put Caro Babbo into the water. It will still be daylight.

The days have gone by quickly. I’ve had the alternator tested: it works. I needed to ride there twice because the first time I grabbed the wrong package, which contained a winch. I went to Ace for additional supplies and rode back while I waited.

I thought a $200 bicycle would make it through the season without problem. On the third day, the shifter handle seized up. It would take another week to get one here under warranty, so I loosened the brake handle and the gearshift handle and relaxed the metal tensioner washer and all is better. I suspect I will do this again: having a boat means that one has all the tools one needs.

The outboard was frozen last year: a valve was sticking, I was sure. But this year the outboard pulled cleanly, and wouldn’t start. I stripped the engine down but found only some passages blocked. The replacement head and other gaskets arrive Tuesday and we’ll see what happens when I reassemble. Perhaps I just didn’t pull long enough. The valve seats look good…I wonder.

The stern cabin leaks are completely fixed, it seems. There is no water in any of the aft cabin lockers. I’ve removed the main halyard winch with great effort from the mast using a heat gun and a long extension cord. My anti-seize compound doesn’t seem to work well with brass/bronze through stainless steel screws on aluminum. I’ll buy some T-gel when I buy the replacement screws. (I bought a better winch.)

After a four-year absence, we found the set of keys for the cabin doors that we’ll need this winter in Point Hudson Marina. There was a canvas bag that we took on our most recent tour of America by car. At the end of the trip, Jennifer was unpacking and there they were, in a small zippered compartment. I somehow remember that bag and those keys… but not quite.

I’ve checked electrics and electronics, started the diesel engine, tested and retested the bilge pumps. I’ve gone through every locker looking for things I need and generally just looking. I still must go through the basement, then:

• I must find the freshwater leak from the freshwater tank: is it the hoses or the tank? Hoses I think.

• I want to replace a bearing on the steering wheel. I’ll remove the wheel and take a look, I’m not in any danger of losing the wheel,

• A leaky toilet. I need to get it to leak again, and then, and then,

• onto the dozens of smaller tasks I continue to do when I take a break.

I know it’s been six months since I’ve written. Thank you all so much for questioning me and urging me on. I’ve written half a dozen or so unfinished pieces about places we’ve been and things we’ve been doing. I may try to finish and post some of those.

Our Starlink should arrive in the next week or so. We’ll be in touch less often because of the power it uses, but we’ll have very good weather prediction, complete email, and internet when we turn it on, at least twice a day.

Adieu my friends, from Homer where it is still snowing.

—j