Evan and Maia pulled the boat into the Guaymas marina the day before they joined me in Tucson. We’ve been back for a few days, but we haven’t gotten around to pulling back out yet. For one, it’s cheap--at around $15 a day it’s not too huge a splurge. We’re also really taking advantage of the convenience of dock life to get stuff done.
Well, mostly Evan’s doing that. I’m so snowed under by deadlines that I’ve barely left my desk. And because I’ve been so scarce, for the second time while out cruising I’ve run into someone who thought I was a figment of Evan and Maia’s imagination—and didn’t actually exist. That’s a weird conversation to have with someone by the way…
Anyway—we’ve acquired a lot of crap this year. I really don’t know where it came from, but we (meaning Evan) have been making our way through each locker and offloading stuff. Then he (yup, I'll admit it, I’m totally not involved) wipes down each locker and carefully repacks it with way less stuff.
Partly I think what happened is when we moved aboard our good intentions gave up on about day three of unpacking. Catamarans have big storage areas, and after a while it’s just easier to stuff them full of bits and pieces rather than making yet another decision about the value of yet another piece of rope, or which of the selection of kid’s lifejackets we own, we should keep…
When we’re not (meaning Evan) cleaning lockers, we’re painting (I point out the flaws). We’re also installing a new water tank. After making five (and counting) attempts at making the newly rebuilt integral tank on the starboard side watertight, we decided to go with a fabricated plastic tank on the port side.
Evan assured me this would be a much simpler solution. So we’ll (meaning me) just ignore the fact the new tank is currently sitting on the dock leaking…
We had just returned to the boats after snorkelling with the folks on Hotspur when we saw the boat. Actually we heard it first. A frantic (no, it was enthusiastic) air horn blasting away, over and over.
Then as the monster boat got close, with laundry flapping from every line, we saw kids up on the bow waving and cheering.
Third Day! Aka S/V Hugeness.
Lori and Rich toast their return to the cruising life with the only cold beer I had.
We haven’t seen Lori, Rich, Jason and Amy since we were in La Cruz together--and all our South Seas bound friends were departing. Since then they’ve headed to Mazatlan, bought a new boat in San Diego, travelled up to San Diego to retrieve it, sailed it back down the Baja to Mazatlan, transferred their gear from old Third Day to new Third Day, and then sailed non-stop from Mazatlan to here. Hotspur saw them more recently— when they also were in Mazatlan getting their own mid-cruise-boat-swap new boat set up.
Switching boats mid-cruise is more common than you might think. We’ve known several people who have done it. Most seem to do what Evan and I did—cruise for a while then stop to earn more money for the next boat and the next leg. But for growing families, who set out on one boat and discover they really enjoy cruising, and suddenly have large children rather than the little ones they left with, the overwhelming need for more space can come on rather quickly.
I know some people will argue for having the right boat, right off the bat. But for many people having the right boat seems to equal having a perfect boat. And honestly, those perfect boats never seem to leave the dock. There is always one more thing to do, or one more payment to make.
The other side of the ‘right boat’ argument is you can’t really know what you need until you are out here. No matter how many books you read, and how many seminars you attend, perfect boats aren’t created when you have a West Marine down the street and a reference book in your hand. They happen gradually, as you put on miles, and sort out your real needs and wants from all the theoretical ones that you thought made sense.
We have old friends (who are still cruising after 20+ years and who did their own mid-cruise-boat-swap about four years ago) who offered us this advice when it came to outfitting and choosing boats: Go with the simplest, least expensive version of whatever it is you need. If it doesn’t work, you can upgrade. But if it does work, and often it does, you’ve saved money and you’ve done something the easy way.
I guess the point I’m getting at is the same one that cruisers make over and over, don’t wait until its perfect, just go. You may end up needing a bigger boat, or a smaller boat (or one with more hulls) than the one you started off with.
these guys care less about the boat and more about the life
But this isn’t a lesson you can learn at the dock.
Well, we’re ready. Or ready enough.
We had a lovely good-bye evening with old sailing friends, Karen and Chris (and offspring Ryan and Mya) from Dessert First (who traded in their boat for a house and minivan and are currently enjoying the vegetable part of life), went to bed early and woke up to wind.
Lots of wind and rain.
A gale actually.
The first gale of the season.
So we’re not going anywhere today, because we don’t have to.
We’re kind of fair weather sailors.
Instead, I get to look around at the anchorage and contemplate some of the very special boats that are out there. We like to call them Island Boats. To an uneducated eye some of these craft might appear derelict, while others are simply odd looking. But if you know a bit about the history of boat building on Vancouver Island (think wild west frontier meets Gilligan's Island) you’d know these are special craft that combine island quirkiness and ingenuity, with the inspiration of a couple of visionaries.
Island Boats (by our definition) tend to be junk rigged (or maybe schooner rigged, or maybe ‘what the heck kind of sail is that, anyway?’ rigged) vessels that were owner designed and built (usually in a backyard, on the beach or on a deserted piece of crown land) and made out of materials that were either found (think telephone poles for masts), scavenged (furniture from the side of the road), borrowed (that friend won’t miss his decorative port lights) or acquired at deep discount (someone ordered this then never came for it, not sure what it is...).
While by our own definition we almost count as an Island Boat, there tends to be a few other distinctions; Island Boat owners rarely have any nautical know how and what they do have comes from a well-thumbed copy (probably borrowed) of “Sailing Alone Around the World” as well as those visionaries I mentioned.
The junk rigging part (as well as the idea that anyone can build their own boat using a few simple handtools such as an axe, saw, plane, and chisel.) comes from Allen and Sharie Farrell, who built 40 wooden boats up and down the BC coast. The two are folk heros in the region and inspired generations of island kids to become Island Boat builders. And thanks to their lovely boat, China Cloud, there are probably more Chinese style junk rigged boats in BC than anywhere else - except China.
The other inspiration was John Samson. He built the first ferro-cement boat in North America then sold plans to dreamers all over the world (although most of them seemed to be on Vancouver Island…) His book, The New Way Of Life, suggested anyone could (and should) throw off the shackles of working life, build a boat and sail off to the South Pacific. Then as a boat broker, he encouraged hundreds of green, blue-water dreamers that even if they didn’t want to build there own boat they could still buy an affordable one (probably built by some other dreamer who ran out of cash…) and head out.
So that’s the reason that if you pull into any Vancouver Island anchorage and play “what type of boat is that?” there’s often no right answer. Sure we have the glossy production boats, but alongside those staid white hulls will be boats of uncertain pedigree, built from welded steel, ferro-cement or wood timber. Their lines will have odd proportions and the rigs will confound you. Some will be covered in junk and barely afloat, while others will be lovingly cared for. A few of these boats have made it out of their home port: having crossed oceans and made names for themselves. But the majority were never finished. They still sit in backyards or on vacant land, their telephone pole masts toppled and their hulls crumbling.
When we see one afloat though – it’s hard not to smile. Their clunky hulls and mismatched sails are a testament to a sweeter, more innocent time when people thought all you needed to cross an ocean was the will to go and a boat made from a bit of timber glued together with some random substance.
July 4, 2009
CHARTS...
Boaters navigate from place to place using charts. Lots of charts. The world is big.
Finding the right charts tends to take up a lot of time when you're travelling to a new destination all the time. Luckily Evan happened upon the deal of century - a private yacht was updating their charts and was selling all the charts for the world for $900. That's about a $40,000 savings. The only problem was the charts weren't sorted - the skipper explained that it would cost more in man hours to sort the charts then to drop another 40k for new ones.
They just came in this huge pile. Pretty much enough paper to sink our boat.
So for the past four months Evan has been sorting the charts by geographic region and then by country. Putting all those pieces of paper in order... He even discovered enough duplicates that we've since made money reselling sorted charts.
Then he boxed them up. Next up is to convince his parents to let us store everything east of Australia in their basement. THEN we need to figure out how the hell to get all those charts to us. Where ever we are.
But the good news is we have charts for the whole world...
Lots of charts.
June 25, 2009
Honey, Maia's going away party is in 3 days you know?
