Monthly Archives: April 2013

It’s not even Talk Like a Pirate Day and arrgh is all I can say. Last night we had a rollicking broad reach of a sail that made doing Monday Beans night like an evening in the fun house. It was my turn to cook. This is not an elaborate affair, especially on a passage with eight foot seas.

Open a can of Bush’s vegetarian baked beans and dump them into a pot while bouncing around Escape Velocity’s galley like an astronaut showing off in the space station. If you got any in the pot you’re halfway home. Next wedge the pot on the stove with other pots and lids because it’s not staying there otherwise. Maybe it’s best to just hold it there. Now if you thought ahead one of the pots used to wedge in the bean pot would be the frying pan so you can cook the frozen hot dogs. Throw them in and clamp down the lid because, in a labor saving miracle, EV will roll them back and forth until they are beautifully evenly cooked to perfection!

This next bit gets tricky. Get two passage bowls with non-slip rubber on the bottom — here on EV we call them dog bowls — and unwedge the bean pot, and here is where Marce and I bifurcate on technique, she spoons the beans into the bowls suffering a death by a thousand cuts where I just go for it and plop it in there. Assuming you got some in the bowls we set up a bucket brigade to get the stuff out to the patio dining table because there’s no way you’re going to eat inside. Of course it takes about five minutes for the quease factor to settle down.

Ah, Monday beans.

This morning the wind clocked around to the south which forced us a little west of south which means bashing into big seas and running one motor just to keep our speed up. Still working on that patience thing.

The beans were easier.

Escape Velocity doesn’t have a proper sea berth, although in most circumstances as a catamaran we don’t need one because we stay pretty upright and don’t heel over with the wind like monohulls do. But the past few days muscling windward in 7-9 foot seas I sure wish we did. It gets too much like a carnival ride down below.

A sea berth is a narrow bed amidships where the motion is less violent, usually a settee. So that you don’t fall out when the boat leans the other way the berth is fitted with either a lee board, a stowable rail like you’d use on a hospital or child’s bed, or a lee cloth, a canvas or net contraption rigged to keep you from falling out. I like lee boards because its easier to get in and out of the berth but I saw one break once as a result of a particularly heinous wave in the Gulfstream, dropping the berth’s occupant — Jack — against the saloon table and engine box narrowly missing serious head injury. In any case, the idea of a sea berth is to hold you snugly at shoulder width so you can sleep no matter what wild corkscrewy motion the boat might do.

I know, sounds claustrophobic, right? I was afraid of that too before our first sea passage. It was on Victoria, our friend Stan’s lovely and sturdy 34-foot Tartan. We were on our way from Annapolis to Martha’s Vineyard, a trip that would take several days. When it was time for me to go off watch and sleep I dreaded crawling into that skinny little berth, especially since I like to flotz aound a fair bit while I sleep and there’s no chance of that here. But once I hiked myself over the leeboard and got settled It was surprisingly comfortable. I put on my headphones and pressed play on the old Sony portable CD player and the Flecktones took me away. A minute or two later someone shook my shoulder.

“Five minutes,” I heard through Flight of the Cosmic Hippo.

I looked at the clock. Four hours had gone by. I was out cold and UFO Tofu had played over and over again while I slept.

We don’t get that on EV. We don’t sleep in our own bed on passages because the autopilot is below our berth and it makes a high-pitched whoopwhoopwhoopwhoopwhoop! sound that reminds me of Curly from the Three Stooges. Plus, in a queen size bed there’s nothing to keep you from rolling back and forth with the boat’s movements.

We have a settee in the main saloon and that’s generally where I spend my off-watch nap time but since this passage is so incredibly bouncy and rolly I have to spend a lot of physical and mental energy just staying put because there’s nothing to keep me from going airborne or whacking some delicate body part against the edge of the saloon table. I’ve developed all kinds of cricks and stiffness from being clenched for hours.

Then there’s the noise. Right overhead are plenty of mechanical bits that clank and squeak and groan, and below is the banging and crashing of waves against the bridgedeck. Sometimes a wave hits us so hard that everything in every galley cupboard and drawer goes airborne for a second then lands with a huge crash so loud you’re sure everything’s broken. (It isn’t.) Even the oven shelf clatters with the waves. It’s hard to hold a conversation, let alone sleep.

Jack made a nest in the Presidential Suite using rolls of fabric and other piles of storage overflow to limit the rolling distance and he likes it. I tried it but the sounds are so completely different down there that I kept jumping up and running out to the cockpit convinced Jack had a terrible fall, or we hit something, or the mast fell down. (It didn’t.)

Tonight, after a very bouncy day when I was feeling a little queasy Jack offered to take the first watch and I accepted, figuring I could sleep off the stupor induced by the non-drowsy formula Dramamine. Ha! I stuck the earbuds in and tried to drown out the sound long enough to get to sleep. I went through Gomez, Mumford, the Punch Brothers; even Adele at top volume couldn’t knock me out. I dozed a little and finally gave up and went outside to relieve Jack early.

“I was going to let you sleep another hour,” he said. I told him I couldn’t sleep and curled up under the blanket in the corner of the cockpit, our coziest spot.

“But I’ll nap here for an hour if that’s ok,” and within a minute I was asleep. The cockpit sounds are familiar and comforting, and the space is small enough to feel secure.

An hour later Jack nudged me right in the middle of one of the vivid dreams we’ve both been experiencing off-watch. In this one I’m having breakfast with my family in New Jersey.

“Oh, man! You woke me just as Dave was offering me a flagel!”

“Sorry.”

And with that he went below to the Presidential Suite and I shook myself awake and started my five-hour watch.

I can almost taste that flagel.

The day never dawned. It kind of morphed into a somewhat lighter version of the night we just went through. Hourly line squalls, huge confused seas with winds up to 33 kts, and how do I know the wind speed? The wind vane perked up just in time to scare the crap out of me. Not much rain but a whole lotta wind, which would suddenly die, wait five minutes and start all over again.

By 10:00pm Marce had had enough, I took over so she could get some sleep. We’d left the second reef in the mainsail and without the electric winch there was not much I could do about it anyway. I kept her pinched into the wind just jogging along until the worst was over. Then I would bear off south until the next squall would hit out of the east and then head EV up into the near gale force winds. It kept me busy.

We also had a visitor. The Goodfaith bound for Rotterdam at twelve kts and aimed right at us. AIS picked her up 18 miles away and said that our closest point of approach was .01 of a mile. That’s a first. A squall came up and I feathered EV up close to the wind and we slowed down and let Goodfaith pass on her journey. Never even saw her.

As I say, morning found us surrounded by deep dark low storm clouds. Nothing to do but soldier on. Sailing into one of these behemoths is a little daunting when your brain is screaming Run Away! We went through two early storms without much rain but plenty of wind, if the vane can be believed, and I think we’ve gained some confidence dealing with these systems even with our crippled sail controls.

Still sailing 165 degrees south east into the wind. Hey what happened to that turn the corner and an easy reach to St. Thomas thing?

That’s what it feels like. Well I’m still not much of a piano player yet but just as we think we can turn the corner and head South the wind veers around and sends mountainous seas right at us. We are so close, but we find we have to tack North East for more Easting but there’s a storm up there. So we tack South East and before long high seas and current along with the ever amusing wind, clocks around which has you thinking ok its South West but at least you’re heading towards your destination but you can’t give up your progress toward 66 degrees, and many say it aught to be 65 degrees.

Heading South early is so tempting because heading into this ESE wind is so painful, but if you do that, once you get below 23 degrees you have strong East tradewinds and current to deal with. That’s worse but…

Last night at change of watch I was pinching EV up into the South East wind and I noticed the wind had backed enough that we could claw back some of that Easting and still head South. Just enough.

By morning we were still rollicking along, still on course. Finally the long forecast East wind, maybe. We decided to shake out the nighttime reef in our main. Disaster, the Harken electric winch froze, which wouldn’t be so bad but our winch Handle won’t go into its socket because of some safety thing stuck in there. Really stuck.

I knew we’d have to head up into the wind to relieve some pressure on the sails. It’s about this time when I discovered that the starboard engine suddenly wouldn’t start. Bad six month old battery, hmm, but I can combine the port start battery with the starboard.

The workaround took awhile but I have the lines led out to a block on the side decks, turning to a manual winch on the cockpit back bench that we never use. Whew!

Clock strikes 6:59. Good morning, Punxsatawny! Same day, just different stuff getting broken.

They call it Route 66. You sail east, preferably north of the Bahamas to avoid the trade winds, then turn right at 66 degrees west longitude, although most experienced sailors say 65 is better. That’s how you get from the east coast to the Virgin Islands. Why can’t we just sail straight there, you ask? Because that’s where the wind is coming from. We left the Bahamas on a predicted SE wind hoping to sail eastward as far as we could get before the wind was predicted E a few days later. We figured we’d motor the rest of the way east until 65 degrees W then turn south and enjoy a lovely fast sail south to the islands.

But it was not to be. The predicted SE winds were E accompanied by wind-driven waves on the nose, which meant motor-sailing into the seas and a total waste of fuel. By the time we got ourselves almost to the turning point the winds kept shifting on us but the waves kept up their relentless pressure on our bow. We tried going north to get a better angle on our course. We tried going south. Nothing seemed to work and by that time we were concerned with our fuel consumption and decided to just wait for things to change, which eventually they did.

Despite the winds not arriving as predicted we’ve been lucky in the weather. We’ve had a few minor squalls but mostly every day has been beautiful.

We were facing yet another day of wind less than 5 kts on the nose, motoring slowly on a flat sea. It sounded like a perfect time to attempt a mid-ocean repair on the jib. The darn thing is complicated by a big curved spar that fits into a pocket in the sail, attaches to the forestay on one end and the sheet at the back, making the sail self-tending and self-shaping. Hard to describe. The important thing is that because of this spar we can’t just drop the sail, wrestle it over and stitch up the torn bits.

The good news is that without wind it’s just hanging like laundry so we think maybe we can sew it in situ, one of us on one side, one on the other, passing the needle back and forth. I got out the sewing kit, Jack dug up the sail repair material and we went forward to asses the situation.

One thing to know about catamarans is that most of them don’t have solid front decks but rather open spaces between the hulls spanned with heavy netting called trampolines. This keeps the weight down, and the tramps make great places for sunning. They don’t make great places for standing with a sharp needle in your hand while bobbing along in the ocean.

I told Jack I thought we should just take this old rag down and put on our new jib. With that we both gathered the tools we’d need, looked up the appropriate pages of the manual, planned the disassembly of the lazy jacks and the spar and set to work. It went so well for a while.

We got the old jib off, oriented the new one so we could get the spar in the pocket without too much ado. I guided it in one end and Jack reached deep into the other end to guide it out. “I feel like a large animal veterinarian,” he said, buried up to his shoulder in the spar pocket.

Now the hard part. Two people, one bolt, four washers, a nut, a heavy spar with a wheel on the end that has to line up with the headstay while attaching two grommets on the sail. Then, with both of us hanging over the bow wrestling the parts together, the one crucial irreplaceable part squirted out of my hand and dove to a watery grave.

I can’t believe I did that. Neither could Jack, and he let me know about it in oh, so many colorful ways. For what seemed like a long time.

But life is short and we’re in the middle of the ocean and here’s this beautiful new jib — hey, wait a minute! It’s just a jib. We can fly it without the stupid camber spar, I told Jack. But he was still inconsolable so I set about figuring how to attach the self-tending sheet thingy when another idea hit me. A shackle could replace the part I lost! I said this to Jack, who immediately rejected the idea but set about unearthing our shackle inventory anyway, God bless him.

He came up with four. One was clearly too large, two were a bit too long to keep the end of the spar against the forestay, but the fourth, now that one might work! We checked it out and sure enough, it was the perfect length, but the opening was a millimeter or two too small. Jack test fitted it over and over. It was a tight squeeze, and we have to do this while hanging over the bow. But at this point it’s our best option, so we go for it. And Jack got out a more serious persuader. “Frank taught me this,” he said, as he wielded a big wrench. Jack’s dad Frank taught him everything he knows about tools, mostly that bigger is better.

Duly armed, we got into our precarious positions on the bow and wrestled and wrangled and pounded and cursed until the shackle submitted and was bolted around the forestay to the spar. Success! We hanked on the rest of the sail and installed the battens. By this time we were exhausted.

“That was step one,” I said. Jack looked up in shock.

“We still have to figure out the lazy jacks.” These are lines that cradle the sail when we drop it so it doesn’t fall all over the deck, or worse, overboard in high winds. We discovered that our new sail is lacking certain crucial attachment points for the lazy jacks so we just had to wing it. Same with the downhaul, the line that helps us pull down the sail.

And then the moment of truth. We attached the halyard and raised her up. Woo-hoo! Nothing beats a nice new sail, and even with a jury-rigged spar attachment, she looks great. Three hours had gone by. Every toolbox and bin on the boat was strewn about but we had our great make-it-work moment. We spent some time straightening up, then looked at the chart and the wind.

Little wind, still on the nose. That nice new sail isn’t getting us anywhere.

Just like Roland the Volvo diesel mechanic has his Jesus Clip, we Manta Catamaran owners have our own version of the Jesus Clip. It’s one of the first stories I ever heard on Mantatech, a Yahoo group just for Manta owners, former owners, supervisors, designers, workmen, don’t even bother, you have to own one. We couldn’t even log in until they were sure we owned Escape Velocity. It’s a great group and a real lifesaver for a guy like me.

Mantas come with a rare bit of kit called a camber spar, I’ve made my peace with it but it took a while. It’s not important how it works but it has a heavy metal tube that is curved inside a pocket sewn into the jib sail. The tricky bit is how it attaches the jib to the forestay, and here is the Jesus part. On the front end of the Camber spar is a wheel that rolls up and down the forestay and on the other side, drumroll, a staykeeper! Never heard of it? Me neither. Manta folklore says to never try to bend on a Manta jib unless you are securely tied to a dock. Have I mentioned that our old jib has growing tears that are getting larger every minute? We went up on the tramps to mend the tears and realized that our old jib has seen its last rodeo.

I got out the Manta bible and looked up the Camber spar thingamajig and saw that the staykeeper came in two models. Ours has the bolt instead of the oft lost pin so no worries. Guys with the pin model say that when you lose yours, and you will, buy a half dozen.

Worry mate, worry. We sussed out the order of disassembly and got to work.

I’d have to say difficult but not impossible. Might have been easier if we weren’t out bobbing around in the Atlantic. The last bit of torture was assembling the…wait for it…staykeeper! Marce my faithful #1 was by my side hanging on out on the tramps. I looked at all the stuff in my hands and knew that if I dropped the…staykeeper…we would have no jib, at least one with a camber spar in it, and we still have a long way to go.

So I handed it to Marce.

Wouldn’t you?

Much more sure handed than me. Well this last bit is one of those fiddly things that takes finesse and brut force while holding on to little custom fittings, while trying to stay on the boat.

I saw it all in slow motion again. First it squirted out of her fingers spinning backwards flashing in the sunlight, bounced once on the fiberglass crossbeam, I had a thought that if I didn’t have all these parts in my hand I could make a dive for it, then it took on frontward rotation and disappeared into the steel blue Atlantic.

The look on her face was heartbreaking but I can’t imagine what my expression looked like. After writing the big book of salty sailorly expressions, I was calm enough to listen to her idea of how to improvise a solution. I was sure I could never find a shackle with anything close to the exact dimensions…but I did!

Close but not quite, It took hours of hard work and a certain amount of persuasion, but we made it work. Our new jib is bent on and if we had any wind it would be pulling us right along right now.

Now, where can you find a spare staykeeper?

It’s been a week since we’ve been completely cut off from the world: no cell phone, no Internet, no news. Four or five times a day I listen to the weather as broadcast by Chris Parker or the Coast Guard, and I spend what seems like hours scanning the radio dial looking for news. Of anything. Anywhere. I can always find religious stations broadcasting clear-as-a-bell entreaties to repent but I can’t find NPR or the Beeb.

Years ago I had my trusty Sony ICF-2010 shortwave receiver in the kitchen of our house and listened nearly every day to BBC World Service programming. Then they decided they didn’t need to broadcast to North America on shortwave because most people could listen to the online stream. A great hullabaloo ensued with petitions and letter-writing campaigns, of which I was a part, but the decision was made and now there are no shortwave frequencies in North America where you can find World Service. Armed Forces Network rebroadcasts some NPR programs on shortwave but I’ve been unable so far to tune anything in.

Imagine — especially if you are news junkies like we are — being so out of touch with what’s going on in the world. It’s torture!

This morning I was a little early sticking the earbuds in for Chris Parker’s 6:30am weather report so I scanned the regular AM dial just ’cause. Eureka! There was a garbled voice in English and I focused my whole attention on fine-tuning the signal. What joy, followed by disappointment, to find it was Howard Stern. I had a readable signal for about a minute during which I learned that Margaret Thatcher’s funeral is today and someone bombed the Boston Marathon. Holy cow! Then the signal disappeared and I couldn’t find another signal again. Rats!

Damn you, BBC.

It’s been days now that we’ve been slowly motorsailing at a walking pace. We’re lucky in that the weather is beautiful — clear, calm, not too hot — but unlucky in that this is a sailboat and we could be going at least twice as fast with a nice breeze. And for free. But it is what it is. The sea is glassy calm and the barest of breeze is dead ahead. We keep our poor torn jib up because we delude ourselves that it’s giving us lift but in truth it probably isn’t.

Yesterday a squall passed us by. We could see it, we could track it on radar, and we even got a bit of a wind shift as it rolled behind us. We actually hoped it would hit us so we could sail some and turn the engine off, and even raised the mainsail in anticipation. But after about 15 minutes we could see it wasn’t doing anything for us so we furled it again.

So day after day we sleep, read, eat, repeat. I finished “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,” read “Bill Bryson’s African Diary,” and “Silver Linings Playbook.” Tuesday it was so calm we fired up the grill and had dogs and beans, a day late for Monday Beans.

Today we siphoned three jerry cans of fuel into the tank. I’m concerned about fuel; Jack is worried about water. We’re in water conservation mode, and seriously, 80 gallons of water for two people will last weeks. Normally our toilets flush with fresh water so we’re using a bucket of seawater instead and only use the fresh water for drinking, cooking and washing up, which sadly doesn’t include a shower. As I said, it’s lucky it’s not hot so we’re not sweaty, but still, I think I’ll change my t-shirt today.

Neville Shute devotees will recognize the title of his quiet novel of people in Australia waiting for the inevitable deadly fallout when the rest of the world has committed global nuclear war. It was also a movie starring Gregory Peck and Fred Astair, among others. Good book, pretty good movie.

We haven’t seen a ship for three days now which makes us occasionally wonder if our AIS is working so that we go down to the closet in the Presidential Suite and check the status lights to reassure us.

We saw one dolphin a few days ago. Then a little bird landed on EV and died 12 hours later despite our attempts to give it water. He left a stain in the cockpit and Jack performed the burial at sea.

Other that, there are no signs of life around us or on the airwaves. Even the weather report is done by Iron Mike, a synthesized voice.

When we rode bike trails a lot back in Pittsburgh we’d sometimes come upon a small town empty of inhabitants. Or maybe we arrived too early for an event and found the place deserted. At those times we’d turn to each other and say, “On the beach!”

This is like that. Spooky.