Monthly Archives: August 2012

We’re still figuring out where to put things in this boat. Our abundance of tools and spare parts have made this 3-bedroom catamaran into a 2-bedroom with garage. My jewelry-making supplies fill up the guest closet. And our overflowing pantry encroaches on the adjacent bookshelves. I’ve had to pile various bookshelf items on top of food containers, like my wireless keyboard, a pile of greeting cards rubber-banded together, and oh yes, the ashes of Jack’s dad and my mom, each in their own pretty silk boxes.

Tonight, the clutter started to get to me. I wanted to make hot chocolate but in order to get to the box I had to move things out of the way and balance them until I can pile them back in place.

“Everytime I make hot chocolate I have to move two dead parents!” I barked to Jack.

“That’s no good,” he said. “Mistakes could be made.”

We’ve been boatbound since Sunday afternoon because our dinghy outboard is being serviced. We’re in a quiet and beautiful anchorage and we’re taking the opportunity to catch up on normal maintenance tasks, like defrosting the freezer, changing water maker filters, ordering parts and supplies and reading up on Pacific islands so we can plan our voyage.

There’s a summer camp nearby and every afternoon when a little breeze kicks up eight or ten little sailboats tack away from their moorings. Sometimes the counselor gives instructions, but mostly the kids zip around, often sailing very close to Escape Velocity yelling “nice boat!”

When we moved out of our house we transferred a few precious items from the freezer to Jack’s brother’s house. Then in April when we went to Pittsburgh to arrange for movers and pick up Izzy we took the frozen items to my sister’s house in New Jersey. Last Saturday they brought them to us here in Rhode Island. Why go to such pains for frozen food?

It all comes down to how we feel about food and the part it played in our Pittsburgh life. For twelve years we subscribe to an organic CSA farm. For those who aren’t familiar, CSA stands for community supported agriculture and is very popular in many areas of the US. We paid for a share of the farm’s output at the beginning of the season and every week we received a crate of whatever was harvested that week. A typical week would include corn, tomatoes, beans, zucchini, various greens and herbs, broccoli, cauliflower, cider, strawberries, blueberries, apples, etc. The haul would vary with the season, more lettuce and spinach early in June, more tomatoes and zucchini in mid summer, then winter squashes and apples in the fall. We loved our CSA and the fresh produce was the key ingredient in our diet. We miss it so much.

If the farm had a bumper crop of something they would offer it in quantity for an extra price. Every year we bought a half bushel of basil and spent a day making batches of pesto for the freezer. This frozen pesto we considered fast food, because if we needed a quick meal for unexpected company or we were late thinking about what to cook for dinner, there was always pesto in the freezer. Cook up some pasta, add sundried tomatoes and corn and olives and oh my! Great dinner. We had quite a few batches of pesto left in the freezer when we moved and we weren’t about to toss it out.

Every week in the fall our farm crate included a bag of apples, mostly obscure heirloom varieties, and no matter how I tried to use them all in baking, we ended up every couple of weeks with a big pile of apples that needed to be used now. When that happened I made a batch of the most delicious apple sauce and froze it in meal-sized bags. There was some of that left in our freezer too, and you can’t throw that out!

When Jack’s parents died we took on the job of clearing out their house in Florida in preparation for sale. We spent a week cleaning and sorting and taking many trips to Goodwill and the church and the neighbors. When we were about to leave we took one last turn around the garden they loved so much and I saw that the lemon tree was overloaded with ripe fruit. We filled a giant carton with as much as we could and drove it back to Pittsburgh where I squeezed all the lemons and froze the juice in 2-cup bags. We used one bag in making food for the house party the day before Drew and Ericka’s wedding, and we’ve used some here and there for other special occasions that remind us of Jack’s parents. There’s some left, and you can’t throw that out.

So there you have it. Three things from our old freezer that we couldn’t give up. We were thrilled to finally have it all in our new freezer and last night we pull out a bag of pesto. We opened a fine Barolo and had a dinner worthy of Gettysburg street but with a better view of the horizon that beckons us.

When Danielle and Roger left the boat they also left a jammed-packed pantry. Jack and I had our own pantry items, and my sister and I spent days stashing the overflow all over the boat. Over the months we’ve been aboard we’ve eaten all manner of unfamiliar foods, and as we made room in the huge pantry cupboard I moved things from the bedroom drawers and closets into the pantry. And still, four months later, there are tons of packages and cans and packets and jars originally purchased by Danielle and Roger.

Today we discovered that our bread was moldy. No problem, I thought, Danielle left a couple of bags of bread flour. I’ll bake! I dug out one of the packages and turned the bag this way and that looking for the English instructions. There were none. Ok, no problem, I took four years of French in school. How hard could it be?


Hard, apparently. I realized they don’t teach you baking terms in school, and while I could get the gist of the instructions I decided to call in the expert, my sister, who also had four years of French and has a better memory.

I took a photo of the directions. She translated and I followed her instructions step by step.

Ah, but she had gaps, too. We couldn’t figure out why I’d need a robot and where I’d get one.

Word order is different in French so we had a moment where I added ingredients in the wrong order, but we figured with bread it wouldn’t matter much. After a while we abandoned the phone and got our iPads for FaceTime. I propped the bag with the instructions against the iPad and Nancy peered at the screen and puzzled it out word by word. In the background Dave offered to convert the oven temp from Celsius to Fahrenheit.

We giggled through the whole process and we remembered a time years ago when Drew was about 8 or 9 and we were visiting Nancy and Dave. Their friends came for dinner and afterward we all played Clue to amuse Drew, and decided to play in French to amuse the adults. The problem was none of us could remember the word for kitchen–yeah, I know, pretty basic, but we had wine–so we played the whole game calling it “la salle de fromage.”

I managed to get the dough shaped into une belle boule.

“I have belle boules,” I said to Nancy.

“Big ones,” she said.

I let it rise a temperature ambiante and baked it at something similar to 220 degrees C. Nancy and I wished our Mom had been here. She’d have been convulsed with laughter, just like us.

One year ago Jack and I took a road trip for my birthday, first stopping at Blennerhasset Island, a destination Jack wanted to visit his whole life. We took the little ferry across the river and rented bikes to circumnavigate the island. From there we drove to Nashville and spent a couple of sweltering hot days with Drew and Ericka. They took us to dinner and made time in their ridiculously busy schedules to show us their new city. Plus, we went to a Steely Dan concert and got aftershow passes to see Jim Beard, the keyboard player, a homey of mine from way back. On the way home we stopped at Mammoth Cave and visited the final resting place of Floyd Collins. It was a great birthday week.

What a difference a year makes! We’re still in our extended shakedown on Escape Velocity, getting things sorted out and fixed and replaced, a normal process on any boat. We’re way behind schedule because of waiting for our autopilot ram, and now we’re waiting again for a new carb on the dinghy outboard. So it’s no surprise that despite enjoying every day on EV we were feeling a little shackled.

Strifes to the rescue! Spending a birthday with family is always our first choice so we were touched and delighted that Nancy and Dave drove hours with a car loaded with our spare parts and champagne and coolers full of birthday treats. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate but Dave got to see the boat and Nancy got to see the progress since April and it was great just to be together.

The next day, as Jack reported, we were visited by Deb and Tim who brought pizza and salad for lunch. We’ll get to see them again before we leave the area since they live in Boston. And schlubs that we are, we forgot to take photos.

I am now 61 years old, an in-between year; not old enough for social security but too old to get rehired in my career. Which is why I’m here, living on a boat with my best friend, with an ever-changing view from the back porch and a sunset every night. I’ve got no complaints.

The phone call came as we were bobbing at anchor on a rainy day in Point Judith Harbor of Refuge. We were out of options. Marce’s sister and brother in law had decided to drive three and a half hours in the rain to celebrate Marce’s birthday. The Honda will still not start which means that the best we could offer them is a wave from the boat about a mile away from shore. The dink is a decent rower but not in current or wind, both of which we had in abundance this day.

I picked up the phone and called every marina I could find in the crusing guide and eventually found one that could take us…for a price.

It was blowing 20 plus knots and pelting rain out here in the anchorage and I had 100 feet of chain out, twisted every which way due to constant wind shifts. The thought of being tied up to something solid, albeit expensive, was starting to grow on me as I bounced up and down on the trampoline. Finally we had the anchor up and I looked back at Marce, and I knew she’d had enough too.

We dodged a high speed ferry on the way into the harbor, fueled up, found our T head dock, connected the hose, spent three hours getting AC to the boat, due to a little negligent switching, and helped Nancy and Dave onto the boat like we’ve been here waiting for weeks.

We really needed a break from nonstop boat repair, although I just finished blowing up another bilge pump because of bizarre boat color coded wiring and my own ignorance. While they partied I had to row the dink over to the repair shop against the wind and current in the rain. Oh, the burden of command.

Nancy and Dave threw a great party for Marce but they had a long drive and left early to make it back.

The next morning, round two, sees us with the boat comprehensively torn up, trying to wash the salt off Escape Velocity. Marce has the washer going and the watermaker humming, clothes hanging everywhere, and still no starboard bilge pump when we hear “ahoy there!” My sister and brother in law have come for a visit, a sight for sore eyes, and another great time. We had to vacate our dock space by three so we had to cut short the fun. We motored up the creek to a beautiful anchorage we’d heard about from local boaters.

Nice old schooner anchored behind us. If we had the dink, this would be a great place to explore Point Judith Pond.
Now we wait for a call from the Honda shop. We’re getting good at this waiting thing.

Nice view included @no charge.

I had a much better day today. I learned that my washer flood was a result of operator error: I didn’t have the filter housing in tight so the water just came right out the front of the machine instead of into the tub. This morning I did a load of wash and that brought the level in the tank down low enough that I could start making water. First I filled every bottle we have with filtered drinking water, then I filled a 5-gallon carrier with regular tap water.

The pressure on the feed pumps on the watermaker is a higher than the manual recommends, so I ran it on one pump only in case I’m in danger of burning out the pump. The literature gave some reasons why the pressure would start to increase, and after checking the easy stuff we came to the conclusion that it’s time for a new membrane. These things used to cost five or six hundred dollars but I guess with so much reverse osmosis going on around the world the price is less than a third of that now. I got a recommendation from the Manta list on vendors and put in an order right away.

Meanwhile I let the watermaker run on solar power for a couple of hours on just the one pump and made about a third of a tank of water. Jack called the watermaker manufacturer about the pressure and he said it sounded fine, so tomorrow I’ll run it again on both pumps and should be able to get close to filling the tank.

My other job today was to change the map card on the chartplotter. Readers who’ve been paying attention will remember that when we got to North Carolina we ran off the chart and when I put the new card in it wouldn’t read it. It turned out to be the pin connector inside and I was so nervous about changing the card because I didn’t want to have to open up the machine and insert the pins manually, as the repairman in North Carolina did. I took the old card out and very, very gently eased the new card onto the pins, trying to feel if they were all engaging the holes before I gave it the last little push. Success! Now have a clear idea of where we are without having to look at the iPad.

Jack’s day was a little less than successful. He worked on the outboard, cleaning out the carburetor and checking the fuel line. We were about the lower the dinghy to see if it would start but it was quite windy and with serious wakes from the gazillions boats that showed up this afternoon so we abandoned that idea until later when it calms down.

He also spent some time on the phone chasing down an answer to our autopilot woes and then once again cleaned and checked every electrical connection of every instrument to be sure there aren’t any loose ones. Electricity is all black magic to us, and the error message we get doesn’t even make sense to the authorized service repairmen. I blame the Brits. That’s who made our instruments.

It’s stunningly beautiful here. Being out of the southern humidity is a joy and we actually have to use a blanket at night.

We’re happily in Rhode Island in a temporary anchorage that we thought we would move from today but it didn’t happen. Our passage here had some ups and downs. The crew performed well. We still aren’t entirely comfortable with raising and lowering the sails, only because there are so many lines in one place in the cockpit and we have to figure out how to keep everything sorted out and not tangled. Also, we were raising and lowering when the autopilot wasn’t working and having two people in one small space reminded us of our video production days where no matter how big the location is, the crew gets all bunched up in one tiny spot because we all need to see the action from the camera perspective.

We dropped anchor at Pt. Judith, just off Block Island sound and promptly slept for a while. Well, I slept. Jack finally woke me at 7 pm and asked if I was hungry. Why yes, I was, and he made spaghetti and we cracked a pretty nice bottle of wine to celebrate our first multiday passage in Escape Velocity. Then it was a little Rachel Maddow and back to bed.

Today I planned to do some laundry. The generator started right up but the washer leaked, pouring water all over the forward starboard cabin but very little went in the washer tub. We checked all the water lines and didn’t find anything obvious. Hours later I’m still sopping up the watery mess. I’ll pull the washer tomorrow and see if we can figure out where it leaked. We’ve used the washer a lot but so far always at the dock with city water. I can’t see where the water source would be an issue but maybe it is.

My second project today was to commission the watermaker. It’s been “pickled” since we bought the boat because you can’t use it in the dirty water of the ICW. Now we’re in pristine New England waters and we’d like to be as self-sufficient as we can. We had one little mis-step, owing to conflicting sets of directions, but finally we got it up and running and cleaned out all the pickling solution and let it run for a while until we got a green light on the salinity. By that time it was late afternoon and Jack likes to preserve his solar amp hours so tomorrow I’ll start the watermaker again to fill our tank. I have to empty the city water out of the tank first so I’ll fill up our water carriers with that. I was hoping to empty the tank by doing laundry and maybe I still can if I can figure out the leaky washer.

Our third project today was to fix the broken switch on the bilge pump. It turns on ok, just not off. We would notice the light on and run down to see why the pump was running, only to find that the bilge was dry but the pump wouldn’t switch off. We have a replacement pump with a built in float switch so Jack tried to swap that out today, but he couldn’t make the wiring work because the old one was a pump with separate switch and the color coding was thoroughly confusing. So the bottom line on that is that the old pump is out, the new pump is in but the auto switch doesn’t work. That’s actually worse than we were with a pump that would turn on but not off. This is temporary until we can either sort out the wiring or get a pump that will work with the wiring we have.

Now the boat is torn up because we need to let the wet spaces from the washer flood dry out, and I think we need to turn it on briefly tomorrow to see where it’s leaking so we’ll have another controlled flood to clean up. But I really need to do wash!

This is all not to mention the outboard engine, which is still not working so we can’t even go ashore. That’s on the list for tomorrow, too.

As annoying as I find all these fix-it projects, I also find them challenging and fun. Everything we work on we learn a little more about the boat. Jack, on the other hand, hates it. He doesn’t want to have to fix things ever. He expected to get a boat where everything worked and never broke and every time we have to sort something out he gets near paralyzed with anger and frustration. I hope he gets used to it soon, because the boat that doesn’t need fixing doesn’t exist, no matter how much you spend on it.

I love it here. Just look at this view from the back porch. Block Island in the distance.

I’m always amazed by human perception. I consider myself to be passably conscious and observant of my surroundings, but it’s funny how things just sneak up on you.

Our last night in Lake Wesley was interrupted by a fancy police boat. My first thought was uh oh we are going to get thrown out of here, and then I remember the huge tent they’d erected on the corner of Rudee Inlet and Lake Wesley. I think it was a Romney event, it is Virginia, after all, so extra security goes with the gig.

There were some kids in a pontoon boat diving and swimming, anchored just off our bow. The policeman made them leave. He waved politely as he left. Ah, peace and quiet for our last night before the slog up north.

In the morning the EPA shows up in their fancy boat, and says,”sorry for the smell.” I said that it must be some kind of fish kill and it smells like it’s getting worse. He said, “Nope, it’s a main sewer break dumping everything into the lake.”

You know it did look kind of thick and brown. When we’d first arrived it was pristine, so that’s a lot of sewage. Come to think of it I had a mouthful when I did a last minute check of the speedo. It has a trap door which is supposed to spring closed when you pull it out. It’s amazing how much “water” geysers out of a 1 1/2 inch hole in the bottom of a boat. Of course I wasn’t ready with the plug because there’s no rush with the spring loaded trap door thingie. It didn’t taste very good.

The Honda refused to start so I had to row through the cesspool, about a mile against a stiff tide to get water and fill up some jerry fuel jugs, just in case. Not an auspicious start. The good news was that our completely remanufactured autopilot ram would be doing the steering. I was glad to get out of this stinking, rotting place anyway. I tried not to take it personally.

I was concerned about fuel so we stopped at OC Inlet to take on fuel and water. The kid working the fuel dock said, “That is one sick catamaran.” If he only knew.

36 hours of bliss later the first error message showed up on the autopilot screen. “Trip”. We knew it was the precursor to many more. It was. This time we were 110 miles from meaningful rest and no decent stopovers on Long Island, no AP and getting dicey with fuel again. Where does it go? We set sail and actually sailed Escape Velocity, making very good time and saving fuel at the same time, but It will mean a nighttime take down if the predicted storm finds us. Big drama on the VHF weather due to the coming storm. Storm of the century ect. It’s time to take down the sails. What an eerie scene, blackness all around except the strobing effect of hundreds of lightening strikes, millions of stars overhead, and the foredeck light bathing the deck in bright white light. We decide to head out away from land into the Atlantic because the storm looks like its heading up the coast and if caught in shallow water of the sound the waves can be treacherous. We’ve already tried that one.

We waited and slowly putted our way out into the briny deep. What a display of lightning! Truly amazing. After a while I noticed on the radar that the storm was coming out to sea after us. We turned around and headed back towards Montauk. Ever the artful dodger.

We dropped anchor at Point Judith,
Harbor of Refuge about noon.

Marce catching a catnap with Block Isl. in background.

The view from the back porch. Point Judith, Harbor of Refuge.

Well, our exuberance didn’t last. By the third day of our too-long journey to New England the autopilot crapped out again. And we were enjoying it so much! Now we’re faced with another 100 miles of ocean between us and a place to drop the anchor, and all the while we’ll have to hand steer on short watches. No more scanning the horizon then going below for a snack or a bathroom break. No more long and restful sleep. Nope. It’ll be an hour or two at a time, back and forth, until we reach Rhode Island. Rats! We are clueless as to why this thing doesn’t work, especially after getting the ram completely rebuilt. We’ve consulted (and paid) four professionals, certified factory technicians even, and here we are hand steering.

The only good news is that the wind finally filled in and we were able to raise the sails and turn off the engines for a while. The weather report says the wind will die later this evening but we’re enjoying the break from the engine noise and also gaining a little speed. Yes, we can sail faster in these winds than we can motor.

We’re just now starting to cross the last of the NYC shipping lanes but we haven’t seen a ship since last evening. We’ll be alert for subs off Montauk, though.

We survived our second night at sea much better than our first, mostly because we have an autopilot now and don’t have to steer every minute, which is absolutely exhausting depending on wind and seastate. This time around we have no wind at all and we’re motoring, which carries with it its own exhaustion factor: sound. Two diesel engines (or even one, as we did overnight) purring in your ears is like living in an airport with that constant din. Your brain takes over and filters it out, but it’s tiring to do so.

Bose to the rescue, though. A couple of years ago we used our credit card points on Bose noise canceling headphones. What a difference! They make even a long flight or unexpected airport layover bearable, and they work here on the boat, too. I spend my watches with headphones on listening to a book on my iPod nano and with the nano countdown timer set to 15 minutes. Even if I doze off the alarms wakes me and reminds me to get up, check the horizon for boats, look at the radar screen for ships or other obstructions my eyes didn’t pick up, check the chart to see where we are and make sure we’re on course, listen to the engines for any weirdness and look on deck for anything out of order. Then it’s reset the timer, restart the book and crawl under the blanket for another 15 minutes of la-la land. If I’ve had a good sleep during my off-watch I may be wide awake enough to sit at the helm for an hour or two, or like last night, lie in the corner of the cockpit and watch the last bit of the Perseid meteor show. There’s nothing in the world as beautiful as the night sky at sea.

We went into Ocean City inlet this morning and took on diesel and water. The young kid at the dock said we have a “sick” catamaran, which we take as a compliment.

As I write this Jack is napping because our watch schedule was screwed up by our stop this morning. We’re on somewhat shorter watches until this evening when we’ll go back to our regular sked. I just had a cup of coffee but it’s fighting the seasickness medication I take so I’m awake and alert, if a little droopy. Cape May is off in the distance, unseen. We’re out of sight of land again, and when I scan the horizon I see nothing but ocean. That will change as we cross the New York shipping lanes.

It’s good to be back in home waters.