Blogging – Page 16

So why aren’t we out in the pacific?

Off Point Flattery, 27-AUG-2019 08.11 PT– We set out this morning to lumpy waves in the Strait and are just rounding Cape Flattery via Tatoosh Island.

We may also have realtime tracking at: https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/CaroBabbo

Sorry about the unfinished blog post below. I was working from a tablet keyboard that didn’t like me.

The next 24-hours should be breezy and bumpy and then a predicted nice ride to San Fran.

I’ll spend some time later putting together real post. For the moment, wish us well.

Neah Bay, 23-AUG-2019 — Leaving Monday morning was a bit more rush than planned. I spoke with Frank at 11pm Sunday evening arranging a 6:30 am bridge opening. Jennifer and I got to sleep before midnight. I was up at 5:15 to get coffee started. Jennifer would get up about 5:45, which is plenty of time to leave slip at 6:20 and be ready for the opening.

At 5:30, Frank called to tell me we needed to make a six am opening. Could we make it? The question was rhetorical and disingenuous. If we didn’t take his offer we would need to wait until after rush hour traffic; the bridges don’t operate from 7 until 9 am each work day.

Island Chief, the very large tug that moves gravel barges to and from Lake Washington had a 6 am opening. We should fall in behind her.

I woke Jennifer to tell her the news, and walked over to Harrison’s boatm, Berkley to wake him and tell him the news. Harrison was already awake and on deck.

We had originally planned to leave on the 14th, but Harrison asks us to wait until the 19th to sail with him up to Port Townsend. We never would have made the 14th. We didn’t strap Hilary Hoffmann, our Portland Pudgy, rigged as a life raft, upside down on the foredeck until just before I called Frank.

Before Jennifer and I on Caro Babbo and Harrison and two friends, one asleep, and two dogs aboard Berkeley waiting outside of Lee’s Landing for Island Chief and her barge, we had listened on VHF 13 to the captain of Island Chief speak with Frank at the University Bridge.

Where is Jennifer’s Car and When are we leaving?

Lee’s Landing, Lake Union, Seattle, WA, 14-Aug-2019 – A fast status as we’re finishing up getting ready to leave.

There is a heavy and unrelenting feeling of pressure to get everything done, but as I sit to write this fast and hurried post, I realize that there are five days to go and there is no need to feel this pressure. Everything on critical path is easily accomplished. Yes, the list is unending, but that it is because it is a boat, just like a house, there is always more to do.

Shakin’ and Breakin’

P.S. Jennifer’s car was stolen

Port Townsend, in the rain, 10-AUG-2018 – There will be no wind today until after three pm, just PNW rain: may be a quarter inch (6mm) per hour. It is a dark Seattle winter day in early August. The temperatures are higher (low sixties), but no sailing.

We’re on our shakedown cruise.

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.