You’ve been selected by __Jonny Waldman___, of ___Emeryville, CA___ , and pre-approved by ValueAddedHolidays, LLC, the internationally-recognized leading creator of Premium Quality Customized Branded Holiday Gift Solutions (PQCBHGS’s), to receive a unique, personalized holiday message!!!

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Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, etc. etc.,

ValueAddedHolidays, LLC
custom. holiday. communication. solutions.
1-(800)-PQC-BHGS
PO Box 391986, Las Vegas NV 89117

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Your personalized holiday message*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Is this working? Hello? Hello?

Uh, hi everyone — friends, colleagues, mom, dad. it’s Jonny, calling — uh, I mean, writing, I guess — to wish you happy holidays and and seasons greetings.

Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukkah! Happy Kwanza!

Sorry for not sending out holiday cards to you individually, but who has time for that anymore, right? And, well, you know what a technophile I am, so I’m doing a little experiment this year. My buddy James told me about this new startup, and it just seemed too good to be true. I mean, sending out Christmas cards is sort of a pain in the ass, right — and this company does it for you! Plus, they sound really professional, and you know what kind of standards I have.

They told me this message would have a few advertisements on it, like ads in magazines, you know, which pay for the whole enterprise. I’ve been promised that they are unobtrusive and that, furthermore, they are targeted to your demographic, so hopefully the ads are for things you need anyway. I dunno what you got, but I’m guessing that if I’d sent myself a card, I’d probably have gotten ads for fifty percent off boxes of macaroni and cheese or a really sweet pair or skis, or cool stuff like that.

Anyway, the company, value added holidays, is just starting, and they’re still fine tuning the system, you know, making it scalable and stuff, but so far it’s really awesome. All you do is go to their website, upload your address book, and then call their 800 number, type in a code that they texted to you, start talking, like I am now. Then, using speech recognition software, they digitally transcribe it, and squish it into a PDF, and email it out — all for free! Also, they do a little bit of internet research on you guys, so that they can figure out what kind of ads to put in. It really is smart, and you know how much I hate Hallmark cards.

Anyway, I just wanted to say happy holidays and merry christmas and happy hannukkah and kwanza and all of the other ones, and i hope this message finds you well and warm, maybe in a lazyboy chair next to a fireplace, but not one of those stupid fake gas-burning fireplaces; you know I can’t stand those.

Also, I wanted to let you know that this year’s xmas mix, a really good one, is available online, at goatless productions dot com.

Hmm. I wonder how to get this thing to stop recording. Am I supposed to hit the pound button? That didn’t work. Shit. I wonder if… [beep] uhhh. [Beep]

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*End of your personalized holiday message*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

We hope you’ve enjoyed your unique, personalized holiday message!

ValueAddedHolidays, LLC
custom. holiday. communication. solutions.
1-(800)-PQC-BHGS
PO Box 391986, Las Vegas NV 89117

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***

If you build it, they will come: this is the lesson.

If you build it, and it is a network of 12 million miles of paved roads — enough roads to circle the planet 500 times — the cars will come. They’ve come into our cities, our homes, our way of life. Meanwhile, though bikes on this planet outnumber cars, the bike lanes we’ve built amount to only one fifth of one percent of the roads. What gives? How can we build a more bike-friendly environment, a more bike-friendly city?

If you build it, and it is a bicycle network in San Francisco, Rob Anderson will see to it that a lawsuit will come. The former District 5 candidate for Supervisor will assure you that the issue is “procedural,” but you’ll know a bike-hater when you see one. Even if your bike plan is passed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors, signed by the Mayor, and touted by bicycling-advocacy groups (as San Francisco’s plan was) — no matter. A judge will grant Anderson an injunction, and your bicycle network to-be will get hung up in courts and legal battles for at least three years, maybe more. Yet, still: the bicyclists will come, in ever greater numbers, and they will wait.

If you build it, or, rather, plan to build it some day, the bicyclists will meanwhile turn to Portland, Oregon — the only American city that earns a platinum rating from The League of American Bicyclists — and it is there that their dreams will come. Portland is home to the country’s greatest collection of practical bicyclists (there are now more bike commuters in Oregon than farmers), a hearty, happy bunch of such critical mass that they no longer have any need for Critical Mass. Portland is home to a bike temple, the editor of one esteemed bike journal, and more cargo bikes, fendered bikes, and panniered bikes than I’ve ever seen before. Riding around Portland — up Ankeny, down Harrison — a San Franciscan bicyclist can relax, revel, and soak up the urban bike glory. He can also learn a lot. Here is what I recently discovered on the Willamette: Portland is turning to Copenhagen (where 36% of residents commute by bike and only 27% commute by car), and the concern isn’t merely bike-friendliness, but a “cyclocentric approach to urban design.” I liked the sound of that. These, then, are the lessons from up the coast and across an ocean, so that someday, hopefully soon, San Francisco can build it, and become the best bicycling city in America.

If you build it, first envision a tropical island with a reef around it. That’s what a city should be, according to Mikael Colville-Andersen, Denmark’s unofficial bike-culture ambassador and the author of Copenhagenize.com. The reef protects the island from most — but not all — of the waves, leaving a safe, calm, tropical paradise for people: bikers and pedestrians.

If you build it, make it ubiquitous. A proper network is planned and cohesive, not just a collection of opportunistic segments. Right now, 28% of all Portlanders live within five blocks of a bike route; under Portland’s new 2030 plan, that number will leap to 80%. Good news: San Francisco is three times as dense as Portland, so numbers like that should be reachable here. Better yet: Mayor Gavin Newsom and the SF Bicycle Coalition agree on one primary goal: a single large citywide bike network of bike lanes, bike paths, or traffic-calmed streets interconnecting every neighborhood in San Francisco.

If you build it, be practical. There are currently 208 miles of bike lanes and bike routes in San Francisco, and they are not evenly distributed. In some neighborhoods, where traffic is calm, there’s no need for separate bike lanes. In other neighborhoods, where traffic is heinous, bike routes are more needed than ever. As Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams says, he’s all for “different applications in different parts of town.”

If you build it, be sure to secure local or state funding — anything besides federal funding — because federal transportation funding stipulates compliance with clunky American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) standards. In Portland, all the planning rage is with international practices; planners there seem overjoyed to let other cities wallow in the bureaucratic swamps of yesteryear.

If you build it, install bike parking everywhere – even (or especially) in places typically allocated to cars. In the last year, engineers in Portland have converted a few dozen car-parking spaces to bike parking spaces. I asked Mayor Adams if this conversion was especially challenging. He smiled. “Would you believe we have a backlog?” he said. “What is it, a hundred something businesses want racks in front of their stores. Think of it this way: two parking spaces used to serve one or two customers. With the bike racks, that’s 10 or 20 customers — AND you can see the storefront.” More good news: SF’s bike plan will add thousands of bike racks — on sidewalks and streets.

If you build it, make it mainstream. In Copenhagen, riding a bike is neither ultra-hip nor ultra-lame; it’s about as normal and practical as using a vacuum cleaner. In all of America besides Portland, riding a bike is still a cultural statement. As such, all sorts of biking sub-cultures have emerged, and it’s tempting to feel like you’ve gotta be part of one to be get on a bike in public. Identifying with others who ride fixies, or wear lycra, or like to sniff bike seats, or whatever, is great, but let’s all get over our soft squishy egos a bit and welcome newbies to the best way of exploring the city.

If you build it, consider first the position of a greasy cheeseburger on the USDA’s inverted food pyramid. It may be tasty, but it’s at the bottom, all by itself, unhealthy and undesirable, far from the fruits and grains and other good stuff. Planners in Portland, using the “green transportation hierarchy,” treat single-occupancy vehicles as greasy cheeseburgers. To them, the good healthy stuff at the top is human-powered transit (pedestrians and bicyclists); almost as nutritious are public transportation and buses.

If you build it, make it visible. Paint it green, or blue; demarcate it with white lines and reflectors; label it; and put up signs.

If you build it, don’t be reluctant to identify what Mikael Colville-Andersen calls the bull in the room. The car is the bull, the city is the room, and we’ve gotten complacent about who we want running around in there. The car owner, after all, has 500 million miles of roads to play on. Remind him of that. Some ideas: lower the speed limit downtown, as Copenhagen has done. Maybe increase the price of parking, or the cost of gas, or the taxes on car ownership. At the same time, reassure drivers that more bikers means less traffic, calmer traffic, and lower insurance rates, among other benefits. It’s a delicate issue, requiring, as Andy Thornley, at the SF Bicycle Coalition puts it, “some dainty footwork.”

If you build it, be patient. The first bike lane in Copenhagen was built a hundred years ago. San Francisco and even Portland are generations behind. Remember that change is often sluggish because it takes us time to adjust. We need time to learn, to become accustomed to a new environment. As such, go easy on enforcement at first. Give bikers and drivers a chance to become familiar with new painted lines and traffic signals.

If you build it, and there’s a body of water dividing it in two or three, necessitating bridges across that body of water, make those bridges bike-able. Six out of nine bridges in downtown Portland are bike-friendly. Only one of two bridges leading out of San Francisco is bike-able. Ehem, ehem.

If you build it, do everything you can to destroy the myth that bike infrastructure is bad for business. Back in 1996, Mia Birk was Portland’s bike program manager; today, she’s the Co-Chair of Portland’s Master Plan Steering Committee. Jonathan Maus, the editor of BikePortland.org, recently asked her if any of the business community’s fears have come to fruition. “None of the fears from the 1996 plan were realized,” she said. “Every single place we’ve put in bike lanes, the businesses have not been hurt. In fact, they’ve helped with a lot of other problems and have helped create safer streets.” San Francisco: take note.

If you build it, give out maps of it for free. Portland does, and they’re great — they fold up to the size of a credit card.

If you build it, keep in mind your target demographic. About this subject, I chatted with Todd Borkowitz, a planner at Portland’s Bureau of Transportation. Over coffee, he opened up Portland’s new 2030 bike plan, and pointed to a diagram. It divided Portlanders into four groups: 1) strong and fearless, 2) enthused and confident, 3) interested but concerned, and 4) uninterested/unable to bike. Todd rested his finger on the “interested but concerned” group, which made up 60% of the total. Portland’s bike plan targets those people, he said. That’s what makes it an “equitable network.” San Francisco’s bike plan is similar, but worded differently: it’s meant to create an environment suitable for any biker from age 8 to 80.

If you build it, and the climate where you build it is not that of San Diego, don’t let that get you down. If Copenhageners can do it, and Portlanders can do it, and Minneapoliseurs can do it, surely San Franciscans can do it. Gather your wool garments, ditch your excuses, and go forth!

If you build it, advertise it. But don’t preach about the virtues of cycling. In Copenhagen, more than half of bicyclists say they ride because it’s easy and fast; less than 10% say they ride because it’s cheap or good for the environment. Let everybody figure out their own motivations, and instead, focus on education and awareness.

If you build it, show it off. Most of your bike network won’t be glamorous, but hopefully a few key projects will be eye-catching. The Sunday Streets events, on the Embarcadero, come to mind, as do car-free days in Golden Gate Park. So does an idea to make Market Street more bike friendly — a project Mayor Newsom has already signed on to. Even Portland’s mayor thinks it’s a good idea. “Gavin’s gonna kill me for this,” he told me, “but I get the sense that bike lanes on Market street would slow down traffic, and make some, uh, challenging retail locations more attractive.” We’re titillated.

If you build it, use some imagination. Imagine what it’s like to ride a bike next to high-speed traffic, and imagine what it’s like to drive next to slow, swerving bikes. Do everything you can to avoid putting bikers and drivers in tough situations. It may demand separated bike lanes, or bike boxes at traffic lights, or special traffic signals that give bikers a head start (the same way pedestrians get a head start at crosswalks.) As Mayor Adams told me, by removing perceived conflicts between bikers and cars you’ll remove a lot of real conflicts, too.

If you build it, and your model is a certain progressive city in northern europe that begins with C and ends in -openhagen, don’t focus too much on the comparison. It’s not a competition, and besides, this is America we’re talking about. Our fondness for cars is genetic.

If you build it, incorporate the green wave. Timing the traffic lights so that it’s possible to ride for blocks at a time makes everybody — bikes AND cars — happier. Example A: Valencia Street.

If you build it, enforce the laws and regulations that govern it. Don’t let cars or trucks or cabs park in bike lanes, and don’t let bikers run stop signs or red lights. Nobody wins if bikers get hurt, or ignored, or special treatment.

If you build it, remember one of Mikael Colville-Andersen’s favorite aphorisms:  “Cycling is a multi-vitamin Viagra pill for urban environmentalism.” Building San Francisco’s bicycle network will increase health, happiness, vigor, and most everything else we hope to see in a vibrant city.

If you build it, get the mayor on board. San Francisco has done this, and so has Portland, but Portland has a leg up, so to speak. When I bumped into Mayor Adams at a bike event, I noticed that he had placed a sticker on is left shirt pocket that said GET ON YOUR BIKE. We talked for a bit, and then I thanked him for his time, and effort. “Welcome to Portland,” he said. “Spend a lot of money while you’re here.” I shook his hand, then followed his instructions.

****

ADDITIONAL ELBOW-RELATED PUBLIC HEALTH PRECAUTIONS FROM THE CDC REGARDING THE TRANSMISSION OF SWINE FLU
11/10/09

*Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze.  If
you don’t have a tissue, cough or sneeze into your elbow; not into
your hands.

*Minimize nudging, prodding, and elbowing. Poking is OK, as long as
it’s not near elbow regions.

*Use modified hugging procedures, as detailed in a video on the CDC’s
website, www.myhealthyelbows.gov, to minimize elbow-to-body contact.
Use disposable sterile elbow covers, available at most drug stores, if
absolutely necessary. Discard of elbow covers as you would any other
biohazard.

*Refrain from reaching into long/narrow places, as accidental elbow
contact is likely.

*Discontinue certain dances: the hokey pokey, the chicken dance, all
square dances, and any other dance procedure involving wild and/or
aggressive elbow activity.

*Do not lean on elbows, especially in public places and at tables or
bars. Armrests are not OK. If exhaustion and/or fatigue make elbow
leaning necessary, use CDC-approved elbow covers, and dispose of them
properly.

*Practice good elbow hygiene by washing your elbows often with soap
and water, especially after coughing or sneezing. Be sure to scrub
outer elbow (medial epicondyle, or “wenis”) extra well, as germs can
hide in the folds of wrinkly skin. Alcohol-based elbow cleaners are
also effective.

*Modify standing “at-ease” posture such that inner elbows (lateral
epicondyles) are not forced into ribcage. Clasping hands gently behind
back is OK.

*Do not cross arms, even in critical business or social situations, or
when otherwise under pressure, uncomfortable, standoffish, defensive,
antagonized, confused, ponderous, or isolated. If absolutely
necessary, wear sterile gloves and elbow covers, and dispose of them
properly afterward.

*Do not store long-sleeved articles of clothing, such as shirts,
jackets, coats, and sweaters against one another.

*Mark all contaminated clothing with CDC-approved bright yellow tags,
as required by federal law. Tags are available for free at most drug
stores and supermarkets.

*Store clothing with contaminated or potentially-contaminated elbows
in a separate CDC-approved “elbows only” laundry bag. Wash these items
separately, in a separate washing machine, with bleach, in an isolated
facility. If not possible, discard these clothes.

*Discontinue mending old clothes, as installation of elbow patches,
buttons, cuffs, hems, and/or zippers increases potential elbow contact
scenarios.

*Remember that arm-wrestling can now be prosecuted as a Class II
felony, carrying a penalty of up to 5 years in prison and a fine of
$100,000.

*If you see someone practicing risky or illegal elbow behavior, call
the CDC Elbow Hotline, at 1-(888)-MY-ELBOW, or alert a local law
enforcement official by dialing 911.

*For further information and updates, consult the CDC’s website on
Elbow-Related Transmission of Swine Flu (ERTSF), at www.myhealthyelbows.gov
.

*Talk with your health care providers about whether you should have an
elbow amputation.

***

WEST COAST SPAM
10/25/09

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Want to be more MANLY? We have an outrageous selection of hoola hoops…

***

NEW BOOKS FOR THE PERFECTIONIST IN YOUR LIFE
8/31/09

-So You’re Becoming a Perfectionist (Just Like Your Father)

-How to Suck the Most Possible Fun Out of Life

-Raise Your Standards and Annoy Everybody!

-The Perfectionist’s Guide to Having a “Good Time”

-How to Design, Build, and Maintain the Perfect Library of “How To” Books

-Zooming In: Imperfections and Their Causes

-101 Things to Know Once You Already Know Everything

-Secret Techniques for Finding Mistakes and Blunders

-Micromanagement: Tricks of the Trade

-Priorities: Why Everything Matters Now, and Nothing Can Wait Until Later

-101 More Things to Know Once You Already Know Everything

***

THE RECESSION-INDUCED DISSOLUTION OF MY EMOTIONAL WELLBEING, AS TOLD THROUGH WOULD-BE BRAND-NAME TEAS
5/7/09

Prosperi Tea
Quali Tea
Masculini Tea
Fecundi Tea
Sereni Tea
Austeri Tea
Fragili Tea
Temeri Tea
Absurdi Tea
Indigni Tea
Increduli Tea
Animosi Tea
Frivoli Tea
Mendaci Tea
Brutali Tea
Vulgari Tea
Pauci Tea
Calami Tea
Pi Tea
Bipolari Tea
Pover Tea
Duplici Tea
Immorali Tea
Depravi Tea
Insani Tea

****

LUKEWARM EBAY FEEDBACK
3/27/09

Depending on your definition of “good,” product arrived more or less as advertised!!!
Postage was firmly attached to box!!!!!
Seller does not have a criminal record!!!
Product has no mold or mildew and does not smell like vomit!!!!
Name and address on product were legible and spelled correctly!!!
Bubble wrap used as packing material was full of genuine air!!!!
Return address was properly positioned in upper left corner — exactly where it should be!!!
Seller only charged 8.5% sales tax!!!!!
Cardboard box is reusable, and recycleable in most states!!!!!
Seller is moderately proficient with email and replied to most inquiries!!!!
Pleasant transaction — no hassles or threats or coercion!!!!!
Payment by notarized, certified cashier’s check is annoying, but not terrible!!!
Seller’s ebay store has nice graphics!!!!
Product appears genuine, or very very very good imitation!!!!

****

APHORISMS THAT NEVER CAUGHT ON
3/19/09

16.5 one way, half the ounces in a Nalgene bottle the other
5 one way, half of your metatarsals the other
3 one way, half the number of beers in a six-pack the other
106 one way, halfway to the boiling point of water, in degrees Fahrenheit, the other
4 one way, half the number of pounds in a gallon of water the other
800 one way, half the meters in a mile the other
5 followed by 99 zeroes, half a googol the other

****
BAND NAMES THAT BABA, YOUR JEWISH GRANDMA, WOULD NOT APPROVE OF
1/28/09

Dr. Dreidel
Gephilte Phish, w/Leftover Lox
Limp Brisquet
Supatraif
Axl Rosenberg
Abba

****

YOUR LANGUAGE. YOUR ECONOMY. YOUR RIDICULOUS MARKETING THEME.
12/5/08

your security. your taxes. your local police department.
your desire. your money. your monthly credit card statement.
your health. your privacy. your public urinal.
your satisfaction. your thirst. your disposable coffee cup.
your freedom. your safety. your orange traffic cone.
your hygiene. your comfort. your toilet paper.
your personality. your style. your pre-washed snarky t-shirt.
your energy. your mobility. your gas station.
your pleasure. your bachelorhood. your lubricated condom.
your future. your retirment. your pre-recorded television gameshow.

****

MALE ANATOMY: SPAM OR SHAKESPEARE?
4/10/08

1) dart of love

2) one inch wonder

3) three inch fool

4) willy

5) roger

6) huge male meat

7) thumping latoya

8) potent regiment

9) potato finger

10) codpiece

11) trouser mouse

12) great tool

13) long tool

14) good root

15) bouffant body part

16) great natural

17) poll axe

18) sword

19) weapon

20) baby carrot

21) little finger

22) one-eyed monster

23) holy thistle

24) pizzle

25) prick

26) instrument

27) organ

28) stump

29) thing

30) cock

31) winter power

32) queen size fuck stick

Answers: 1) shakespeare; 2) spam; 3) shakespeare; 4) spam; 5) shakespeare; 6) spam; 7) spam; 8) shakespeare; 9) shakespeare; 10) shakespeare; 11) spam; 12) shakespeare; 13) shakespeare; 14) shakespeare; 15) spam; 16) shakespeare; 17) shakespeare; 18) shakespeare; 19) shakespeare; 20) spam; 21) shakespeare; 22) spam; 23) shakespeare; 24) shakespeare; 25) shakespeare; 26) shakespeare; 27) shakespeare; 28) shakespeare; 29) shakespeare; 30) shakespeare; 31) spam; 32) spam

****

August, 2009: A Minnesota woman, caught with a shaved, spraypainted, tied-up goat in the trunk of her car, is charged with animal cruelty.

March, 2009:  Assemblyman Gregory Ball, known for promoting animal rights legislation, finds a dead goat on his doorstep in Patterson, NY.

January, 2009: Police in Lagos, Nigeria detain a goat, claiming it is actually a transformed armed robber who tried to steal a Mazda 323.

January, 2009: Acclaimed New York Times war journalist Dexter Filkins writes a dispatch from Afghanistan about the ancient sport of Buzkashi, in which three teams of men on horseback in a dusty field compete to 1) scoop up the 70-lb carcass of a frozen, beheaded, disemboweled goat; 2) gallop around a pole 75 yards away with it; and 3) race back to their goal with it still in their possession. Each goal is worth 1 point, and games often go to 30. Basically, Filkins writes, it’s like “polo played with a dead animal.”

September, 2008: During a “routine jail visit” in Kinshasa, Deputy Justice Minister Claude Nyamugabo discovers one dozen incarcerated goats, and orders them released.

April, 2008: A resident in Maple Lane, Georgia observes a goat dancing on top of his car.

February, 2008: Health inspectors in Chicago force the TBS African Restaurant to shut down on account of bad goat meat, among other things.

December, 2007: As part of a 41-year-old Christmas tradition, residents in Gavle, Sweden, construct a a 40-foot-tall, 4-ton straw goat; and to protect it (in its 41 incarnations, the goat has been destroyed 28 times — 22 times by burning, and 6 by sabotage or crashing a car into it) they impregnate it with a waterproof/snowproorf flame retardant, monitor it via a webcam, and post guards overnight to protect it from vandals. The Christmas goat survives.

November, 2007: Tracey Arnold, a 26-year-old Australian woman, is fined, forced to undergo psychiatric treatment, and instructed by a court to apologize for getting drunk at a Friday the 13th party, stealing a goat, breaking into a church, slaughtering the goat in a satanic ritual inside the church, taking some photos of her friends and the detached goat head, and then putting the detached goat head in her freezer. Arnold’s lawyer tells the court that “when she drank alcohol she made poor decisions.”

September, 2007: The Goat Justice League successfully lobbies Seattle lawmakers to amend the land-use code to legalize goats in town as long as they’re dehorned, neutered, and kept in yards.  Upon the bill’s unanimous approval, Seattle Councilmember Richard Conlin, who sponsored the bill, says, “One small step for man, one giant step for goatkind.”

April, 2007: Sony Computer Entertainment apologizes for a publicity stunt promoting the launch of the PlayStation game God Of War II, in which guests at an event were invited to reach inside the still-warm carcass of a decapitated goat and eat offal from its stomach.

May, 2007: According to the New York Times, “It is a battle of man versus goat” on the Galapagos Islands, where park officials and the Charles Darwin Foundation are struggling to exterminate 140,000 goats with semiautomatic rifles, one million rounds of US-imported ammunition, exploding bullets, goat-sniffing dogs, and goat snipers in helicopters.

September, 2006: a Swiss man, caught in Ontario going 100mph in a 60mph zone, tells police that he was merely “taking advantage of the ability to drive fast without hitting a goat.”

August, 2006: After a Sudanese man by the name of Tombe is caught having sex with a goat, he is forced by the local council of elders to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars and to take the goat as his wife.

****

This is a stakeout.

I’ve showed up at the San Francisco Public Library early, locked my bike in the middle of the Grove Street bike rack — one of the most notorious for bike theft in the city –  and sat down 100 feet away with my hood up and my video-camera ready. Now I’m I waiting.

I’ve locked the frame and front wheel of my bike with a mini U-lock, and intentionally left the rear wheel unprotected, a mere quick-release away from getting nabbed. I figure if it’s going to go AWOL, this will be the place. I’ll be here to serve justice. I have the SFPD’s non-emergency number in my phone.

There are 19 bike racks in front of the library, each a three-foot metal circle bolted to the road. The whole area is protected from cars and trucks by five burly stainless steel balustrades. My bike is 8th from the west, and one of 12 bikes locked up with a U-lock (only two of which are Kryptonites). Three bikes are locked up with NYC-style chains, and four bikes are locked with metal cables in addition to U-locks. Three forsaken U-locks, no longer locking anything, two of which are tethered to snipped metal cables, attest to previous thefts. I have come to the right place.

Including my own wheel, eight wheels are unlocked, as are two helmets and one quick-release seat. Surely this bike rack is a sweet temptation. I’m waiting, and I’m watching.

Here’s what happens when you observe the behavior of people near the Civic Center: everyone becomes a suspect. The guys with weird limps. The guys who smell like piss. The guys with cRaZy hair. The guys smoking way too many cigarettes for a Monday. The guys with their pants half off. The guys who just exude sketchiness. The guy who looks like ZZ Top. The guys pushing shopping carts. The guy tattooing his left arm. The guy wearing socks but no shoes. The guys with obscenely large backpacks/duffels/garbage bags. The guys dressed like and talking like old war buddies, who make you wonder: could they ever have been fit for duty?

What about the balding guy in a brown canvas jacket and black Converse hi-tops, gesticulating wildly to himself/nobody/everybody, pacing back and forth, eying the bike rack, and then wandering off? Is that just a ploy? Is he crazy? Am I? What about the crazy lady in pink pants, and a pink sweater, with pink fingernails, who’s sitting down on the curb in front of my bike and talking to herself? Legit, or rouse? What about that lady hunting for coins on the sidewalk, and that guy screaming at traffic, and that other guy who’s spent the last 45 minutes perpetually loading and unloading his pushcart? Are they decoys in some giant bike theft ring?

Where is law and order? Sure, a library security guard occasionally emerges, and the Dept. of Parking cabbie zips by punctually on the half hour, but what about cops? What about law enforcement?

And then, shortly after noon: a tall guy in black jeans and a black t-shirt, with a black baseball hat slung backwards on his head rolls up on a crappy yellow and red Schwinn mountain bike, towing a red road bike far too small for him. He asks, to nobody in particular, “Hey, you seen a blonde girl around?” I approach. “Is that your bike?” He turns, starts riding away, and says, “Why? It’s my bike! What’s that got to do with it! It’s my fucking bike!” He rides off, mumbling. The red bike is stolen, I know it, and he’s a bike thief, I know it too. He’s nervous, and he’s getting away.

I pursue him, slowly, around the block, and I think: if someone steals my back wheel while I am gone I will be doubly upset, because it is one thing to come up empty on a stakeout, another to come back negative. I feel like I could blink and miss the action.

Around the corner the bike thief is gone. But I find another. He’s a bearded guy wearing a camoflauge jacket, sitting on a cement wall, and there are two wheels at his feet and a crappy mountain bike frame beside him. “Are those for sale?” I ask. “Yeah.” “What are they?” “Seven hundred series Deore, I believe.” I try not to laugh. 700 is the size, as in 700 centimeter road wheels, and these are 26″ mountain bike wheels. Regardless, nobody would ever call them 700 series. It’s hokum, hogwash, gobbledygook from a scam artist. “Are they OK?,” I ask. “I think so. Actually, they belong to my friend John. He’s over there, gettin’ ready to kill somebody.” “Is that what he does on Mondays?” “That’s what he does every day.” “Which guy is he?” He points across the street. “Over there. The white backpack with skulls on it.” “Great, maybe I’ll come back later.”

And just like that, my stakeout is sort of panning out. I haven’t seen a crime committed, but in three hours, I’ve seen one stolen bike, one stolen frame, two stolen wheels, and two, if not more, bike thieves. i’m just powerless to do anything about it. I think of all my friends who’ve had bikes stolen. Rachel’s was stolen on Valencia street, and she found it a week later at the Laney College flea market, in Oakland. She said that’s my bike, and just took it back. Sam’s was stolen right here, at the library, and he never found it. I feel his pain.

I walk back to my stakeout spot, more bitter and skeptical than before. Is that a midget eying my bike? Who goes to the library with luggage? Why are there so many jaywalkers here? Why are so few people carrying books, and so many people smoking? Is reading indoors that stressful? Is today Dr. Suess Lookalike Day? Is she a hooker? What is this, the Haight? And I wonder: what’s the difference between a street person, a regular, and a bike thief? Is everyone around here up to no good?

I’ve heard the theives work as a team. I’ve heard they know better than to steal fancy/blingy/distinctive bikes. I’ve heard they used to sell the bikes they’d stolen out of vans behind Best Buy, and that nobody knows where they’ve gone lately. I’ve heard the best thing is to yell at someone who appears to have in his possession a stolen bike is, “Hey, that’s my bike!” I’ve heard, from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, that there are worse places to lock a bike, like in front of the Metreon, or in any BART station. I’ve also heard that BART police are doing stakeouts of their own, with decoy bikes in BART stations. Oh BART police, in this quest, you have my support!

Still: why am I such an angry grouch? What about innocent until proven guilty? I’ve seen no action, no crime, captured no evidence on my video-camera. Just sketchiness and urban decay and a cross section of society so diverse it gives both society and diversity a bad name. And as much as I hate these maybe-bike-thieves, hate the idea of my bike getting stolen, I also love it. I mean, it’s just a bike. It’s not a Ferrari, or a Computer. That alone is kinda freeing, and makes me less angry.

Packing up, a homeless guy approaches me. He comments on the blueness of my bike, then asks for some money, and I decline. “One thing’s for certain and two things for sure,” he says, without finishing the thought. I tell him I like the saying. He asks for a royalty, and again I decline. And I think about it. One thing’s for certain and two things for sure: bikes will vanish, thieves will keep thieving, and justice will ride right on by.

Holiday / Years / Faith / Costs / Knocked

****

{A glorious holiday – 7/17/09}

In honor of Independence Day, and brave adventurers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, I dug up an American flag from the wet locker and hung the stars and bars from backstay. I hate to get all jingoistic, but there’s something fantastic about a boat, a flag, and the water, something almost timeless, something that people 233 years ago and long before that must also have recognized. I’d call the combination a triumvirate of awesomeness, were not that label already taken.

The flag, five feet off the deck, bestowed upon Syzygy some glory. That afternoon, the wind picked up from the west, and the flag began flapping loudly, wrapping around itself, fluttering and flicking about. I was working on the lazarette — aka stern locker — and kept ducking to keep from getting smacked in the face by the flag. There’s a metaphor for a boat: sacrificing practicality for beauty, functionality for symbolism. These are sacrifices worth making, sometimes.

So I kept my head low, determined to crank some productivity out of the holiday. Unfortunately, I kept my nose so close to the deck that the wisdom in the air almost blew by unnoticed. Almost, but not quite.

Jim, from Kanga, stopped by, and we chatted about ideal gasket-making techniques, the better to keep the ocean out of the new stern locker. “Water’s gonna come in the hatch,” Jim said. “You can’t force it, just direct it.” He paused. “Actually, you can’t direct it, just coax it.” He recognized the poetry he’d spoken, and laughed. It applied to so many hurdles before us. I told him I wouldn’t forget it.

An hour later, two of Jim’s friends stopped by. I was upside down and backwards in the new propane locker, fiberglassing away, and when they — a couple — yelled hello, I waved with my foot before extracting myself. They laughed because they’d spent three years fixing up (”nerding out” they called it) a 1988 Passport 42 before sailing it to New Zealand, and recognized what I was up to. Their work had paid off; their voyage wasn’t compromised by mechanical failures or catastrophes, and that bolstered my spirits. They recalled having to explain to friends that, contrary to popular opinion, sailing wasn’t all fancy drinks and white shoes; that nautical-themed pashmina afghans never entered into the equation. “You’ve probably heard this before,” he said, “but remember: It’s a lifestyle, not a vacation.” Here’s to the eloquence therein.

Two days later, still nose-down, Matt and I stopped by Svendsen’s, to empty out our bank accounts and acquire some information and goods in the process. I’d been having a bitch of a time polishing the metal of our new radar arch, so I stopped by Svendsen’s metal shop, and asked Chris for advice. He led me around the workshop, revealing industrial-grade tools I could only fantasize about. No, I could not borrow them, and no, I could not afford to pay $80/hour to have them polish the metal for me. Chris told me where to pick up jeweler’s rouge (aka grinding paste) and then, all Yoda-like, sans-pronouns, offered the best advice I’ve heard all year: “When faced with daunting task, lower expectations.” I may take him up on that.

-JW

***

{Two years on a boat – 7/21/09}

In 1834, Richard Henry Dana, a classmate of Henry David Thoreau, dropped out of Harvard because his eyesight was failing. He couldn’t study — couldn’t read — like he used to. So he joined merchant marine, to sail from Boston to California and collect hides. The voyage, which began with 14 other men on the 86-foot Pilgrim and took him around Cape Horn twice, lasted more than two years. When he returned, he went back to school, got a law degree, and got married. Then he wrote a book about it, called “Two years before the mast.” It, like he, made waves.

Edward Tyrell Channing, a professor of oratory and rhetoric at Harvard, reviewed the book in the North American Review. He wrote that it was “a successful attempt to describe a class of men, and a course of life, which, though familiarly spoken of by most people, and considered as within the limits of civilization, will appear to them now almost as just discovered.”

Indeed, it still reads that way. There are discoveries on every page.

The New York Review agreed, and published a review that said the book “will serve to dissipate all the illusions about the sea, which most young men are wont to cherish; they will learn from it, that the forecastle of a ship is the most undesirable of asylums, to any one who has had even a moderate share of comforts at home; and be convinced, that no reasonable man will choose it for his dwelling place.”

Richard Henry Dana destroyed illusions alright, but he also wrote about boredom, fortitude, discipline, and perspective. He wrote adventure and tragedy, history and legend. The book, which is on most current lists of best-adventure books, still floats.

He showed up with a chest of stuff, and spent his first three days at sea puking. Recalling that first night, he wrote: “I had often read of the nautical experiences of others, but I felt as though there could be none worse than mine; for in addition to every other evil, I could not but remember that this was only the first night of a two years’ voyage.” He goes on: “There is not so helpless and pitiless an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life.” Weeks later, a different kind of misery: “However much I was affected by the beauty of the sea, the bright stars, and the clouds driven swiftly over them, I could not but remember that I was separating myself from all the social and intellectual enjoyments of life.”

But he was getting the hang of it, learning about the boat and how to sail it. He wrote of “the routine of sea-life which is only broken by a storm, a sail, or the sight of land.”

“The discipline of the ship,” he wrote, “requires every man to be at work upon something when he is on deck… You will never see a man, on board a well-ordered vessel, standing idle on deck, sitting down, or leaning over the side. It is the officers’ duty to to keep every one at work, even if there is nothing to be done but to scrape the rust from the chain cables. In no state prison are the convicts more regularly set to work, and more closely watched.”

He spent two hours each morning washing down the decks, then filling up the fresh water bucket, then coiling up the rigging. There was no end to the work. “When I first left port,” he wrote, “and found that we were kept regularly employed for a week or two, I supposed that we were getting the vessel into sea trim, and that it would soon be over, and we should have nothing to do but to sail the ship; but I found that it continued for two years, and at the end of the two years there was as much to be done as ever.”

The work then wasn’t so different from what is required today: “If we add to this all the tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, and scrubbing which is required in the course of a long voyage, and also remember this is all to be done in addition to watching at night, steering, reefing, furling, bracing, making and setting sail, and pulling, hauling, and climbing in every direction, one will hardly ask, ‘what can a sailor find to do at sea?’”

Sailing south soon became monotonous. He wrote of the “unvarying repetition of these duties,” and spelled out the predicament: “No one who has not been [on] a long, dull voyage, shut up in one ship, can conceive of the effect of monotony upon one’s thoughts and wishes. the prospect of change is like a green spot in a desert, and the remotest probability of great events and exciting scenes gives a feeling of delight, and sets life in motion, so as to give a pleasure, which any one not in the same state would be entirely unable to account for.”

He thought of home: “Everyone away from home thinks that some great thing must have happened, while to those at home there seems to be a continued monotony and lack of incident.”

The monotony worsened on the return trip: “The sole object was to make the time pass on. Any chance was sought for, which would break the monotony of the time; and even the two hours’ trick at the wheel, which came round to each of us, in turn, once in every other watch, was looked upon as a relief. Even the never-failing resource of long yarns, which eke out many a watch, seemed to have failed us now; for we had been so long together that we had heard each other’s stories told over and over again, till we had them by heart; each one knew the whole history of each of the others, and we were fairly and literally talked out. Singing and joking, we were in no humor for, and, in fact, any sound of mirth or laughter would have struck strangely upon our ears, and would not have been tolerated, any more than whistling, or a wind instrument. The last resort, that of speculating upon the future, seemed now to fail us, for our discouraging situation, and the danger we were really in, (as we expected every day to find ourselves drifted back among the ice) “clapped a stopper” upon all that. From saying—“when we get home”—we began insensibly to alter it to—“if we get home”—and at last the subject was dropped by a tacit consent.”

“I commenced a deliberate system of time-killing, which united some profit with a cheering up of the heavy hours. As soon as I came on deck, and took my place and regular walk, I began with repeating over to myself a string of matters which I had in my memory, in regular order. First, the multiplication table and the tables of weights and measures; then the states of the union, with their capitals; the counties of England, with their shire towns; the kings of England in their order; and a large part of the peerage, which I committed from an almanac that we had on board; and then the Kanaka numerals. This carried me through my facts, and, being repeated deliberately, with long intervals, often eked out the two first bells. Then came the ten commandments; the thirty-ninth chapter of Job, and a few other passages from Scripture. The next in the order, that I never varied from, came Cowper’s Castaway, which was a great favorite with me; the solemn measure and gloomy character of which, as well as the incident that it was founded upon, made it well suited to a lonely watch at sea. Then his lines to Mary, his address to the jackdaw, and a short extract from Table Talk; (I abounded in Cowper, for I happened to have a volume of his poems in my chest;) “Ille et nefasto” from Horace, and Gœthe’s Erl King. After I had got through these, I allowed myself a more general range among everything that I could remember, both in prose and verse. In this way, with an occasional break by relieving the wheel, heaving the log, and going to the scuttle-butt for a drink of water, the longest watch was passed away; and I was so regular in my silent recitations, that if there was no interruption by ship’s duty, I could tell very nearly the number of bells by my progress.”

Thank god we’ll have books, and plenty of ‘em, with us, on board Syzygy. Richard Henry Dana was so overjoyed to discover six-month-old newspapers that he pored over them, again and again, for a week, “until I was sure there cold be nothing in them that had escaped my attention, and was ashamed to keep them any longer.” I’m bringing the complete works of Shakespeare.

At sea, he saw pirates. He learned some new sea shanties. He saw “”one of those singular things called catamarans.” He sailed across the equator. He experienced a gale, and learned how to reef quickly, without “sogering.” He experienced man-killing weather for 20 days straight — weather that ripped apart sails, weather that blew “like scissors and thumb-screws.” He experienced the glory of sailing 1300 miles in seven days, and the glory of sealing a wooden boat so well that even smoke couldn’t find a way out.

He wrote a thrilling chapter on rounding Cape Horn; it features snow, hail, fog, and sleet; violent wind; seas breaking over the bow, burying half the ship up to their chins. “We hardly knew whether we were on or off,” he wrote. He spent ten consecutive days reefed, and a few hove to. “Our clothes were all wet through, and the only change was from wet to more wet.” On the misery the wet entailed: “snow is blinding, and very bad when coming upon a coast, but for genuine discomfort, give me rain with freezing weather.”

By and by, his experiences turned to hardened wisdom: “No time is allowed on board ship for sentiment.” And: “Whatever your feelings may be, you must make a joke of everything at sea; and if you were to fall from aloft and be caught in the belly of a sail, and thus saved from instant death, it would not do to look at all disturbed, or to make serious matter of it.”

When he arrived in San Francisco, there was no bridge, no city; just the Spanish mission (still here), and one other boat in the whole bay. There was also constant rain, cold, fog, and strong currents. But he recognized the splendor of this area. “If california ever becomes a prosperous country,” he wrote, “this bay will be the centre of its prosperity.” He called the bay “fit for a place of great importance.”

Later, he was amazed that a letter made it from California to Boston, via an overland route from Mazatlan to Veracruz, in 75 days — “the shortest communication ever yet made across the country.” Now there’s history.

After far too much time sailing up and down the California coast, he packed up, and headed home, loaded down with 40,000 hides, 30,000 horns, several barrels of otter and beaver skins, spare spars, a dozen pigs, a dozen sheep, 40 chickens, as well as stores — food and water — for five month of sailing.

One of the crew was lost, and Richard Henry Dana captured the devastation. “Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea. A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and “the mourners go about the streets;” but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies on shore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. You are often prepared for the event. There is always something which helps you to realize it when it happens, and to recall it when it has passed. A man is shot down by your side in battle, and the mangled body remains an object, and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”

“All these things make such a death peculiarly solemn, and the effect of it remains upon the crew for some time. There is more kindness shown by the officers to the crew, and by the crew to one another. There is more quietness and seriousness. The oath and the loud laugh are gone. The officers are more watchful, and the crew go more carefully aloft. The lost man is seldom mentioned, or is dismissed with a sailor’s rude eulogy—“Well, poor George is gone! His cruise is up soon! He knew his work, and did his duty, and was a good shipmate.” Then usually follows some allusion to another world, for sailors are almost all believers; but their notions and opinions are unfixed and at loose ends. They says—“God won’t be hard upon the poor fellow,” and seldom get beyond the common phrase which seems to imply that their sufferings and hard treatment here will excuse them hereafter,—’To work hard, live hard, die hard, and go to hell after all, would be hard indeed!’ …Yet a sailor’s life is at best but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous.”

Take that, Shakespeare.

He gets used to the sailor’s life. He learns that “an overstrained sense of manliness is the characteristic of seafaring men, or, rather, of life on board ship. This often gives an appearance of want of feeling, and even of cruelty. From this, if a man comes within an ace of breaking his neck and escapes, it is made a joke of; and no notice must be taken of a bruise or cut; and any expression of pity, or any show of attention, would look sisterly, and unbecoming a man who has to face the rough and tumble of such a life. From this, too, the sick are neglected at sea, and whatever sailors may be ashore, a sick man finds little sympathy or attention, forward or aft. A man, too, can have nothing peculiar or sacred on board ship; for all the nicer feelings they take pride in disregarding, both in themselves and others. A thin-skinned man could not live an hour on ship-board. One would be torn raw unless he had the hide of an ox. A moment of natural feeling for home and friends, and then the frigid routine of sea-life returned.”

Even though life before the mast, life in the forecastle, is at times miserable, he knows it well. “To be sick in a forecastle is miserable indeed. It is the worst part of a dog’s life; especially in bad weather. The forecastle, shut up tight to keep out the water and cold air;—the watch either on deck, or asleep in their berths;—no one to speak to;—the pale light of the single lamp, swinging to and fro from the beam, so dim that one can scarcely see, much less read by it;—the water dropping from the beams and carlines, and running down the sides; and the forecastle so wet, and dark, and cheerless, and so lumbered up with chests and wet clothes, that sitting up is worse than lying in the berth! … A sailor is always presumed to be well, and if he’s sick, he’s a poor dog. One has to stand his wheel, and another his lookout, and the sooner he gets on deck again, the better.” Nevertheless, he starts to prefer it. It offers him a better perspective on life.

“We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.”

He discovers, approaching Cape Horn, that “a ship, unlike people on shore, puts on her best suit in bad weather.” He discovers that “no one knows what he can do until he is called upon.” He discovers a penchant for good, solid, practical boats: “There was no foolish gilding and gingerbread work, to take the eye of landsmen and passengers, but everything was ’ship shape and Bristol fashion.’ There was no rust, no dirt, no rigging hanging slack, no fag ends of ropes, and ‘Irish pendants’ aloft, and the yards were squared to a ‘t’ by lifts and braces.” He discovers that he’s become a sailor: “Give me a big ship. There is more room, more hands, better outfit, better regulation, more life, and more company.”

Yeah, and more money.

-JW

***

{Faith – 7/29/09}

A mile out of the channel, John lost control of his rudder. One of the shivs holding the steering cable taut between the wheel and the sector had ripped out of a piece of oak one-and-a-half inches thick. These things happen.

John is the captain of Faith, a 40-foot wooden ketch built in 1946, that sits across from Syzygy. John’s also the pilot of an IAR 823, a 1979 Romanian four-seater that he keeps up in Napa, and he tends to keep his cool under duress. His steering had failed. It’s not like he was a mile high and leaking fuel or something.

He rigged up the emergency tiller. It was made of old wood, and it snapped in two like a baseball bat. John has since fabricated a new one out of a steel bar.

With the engine still on, John raised the mizzen. The sail steadied the boat, kept her elegant bowsprit nosed into the wind. Everyone, including his eight-year old daughter Elizabeth, was fine. It was a Sunday in July. Everyone had a PFD, and dry clothes. It was windy, gusting to 30, but sunny and clear, at least on this side of the bay. Classic fogger weather.

John radioed the Coast Guard, and asked for assistance. The Coast Guard, by then, was busy; so busy that Jim and Jeannie, who were out that same afternoon aboard Kanga, picked up a sailor in the water before the Coast Guard was able to get to him. He’d been in the water for half an hour, and was blue. He was shivering uncontrollably. His 15-foot dinghy had capsized, and he’d been unable to right it. To the Coast Guard, this was typical: vessels without steering, vessels upside down. (A couple days later, I heard someone declare “Mayday,” and heard the Coast Guard respond casually to the call.) Over the radio, they instructed John to drop an anchor, so that he’d stay put. He did.

A little while later his engine died. He’d run out of fuel. This is when John started to get irritated, at least in recounting the story. “There are so many things Ian” — the previous owner — “didn’t tell me,” he said. Welcome to the complexities of a new (technically old) boat. “These things” included the locations of the manifolds to the reserve fuel tanks. John is now much more familiar with the fuel system onboard Faith.

The Coast Guard arrived, saw that Faith’s engine was dead, and instructed John to pull the anchor. I can’t, he said. He couldn’t sail up over it without steering, and he couldn’t motor up over it without his engine. A conundrum. Faith alone wouldn’t suffice. Cut it, the Coast Guard said. So he did. John’s anchor, and 200 feet of 5/16-inch galvanized chain, ended up in shallow water about a mile west of the marina. He marked the spot on his GPS.

At last, the Coast Guard agreed to tow Faith — but with the steering all funny, the rudder shoved to starboard, they wouldn’t risk bring him through the tight turns at the entrance to the marina. Instead, they brought him to the nearest safe harbor, on the east side of Treasure Island. The next morning, John paid Vessel Assist $250 for a tow back into the marina.

I bumped into John a couple of hours after he returned. I told him I’d seen him go out on Sunday afternoon, and had wondered if he had intended to spend the night elsewhere. He laughed. The height of his spirits seemed unwarranted, but I’m not complaining. Cheerful sailors are welcome around here.

He recounted the details of the story, then zoomed out and assessed the big picture. “Stuff broke, but nobody got hurt,” John said. “It was a grand adventure, and a steep learning curve.” He paused, and smiled, and allowed a smidgeon of resentment to invade his sunny demeanor. “OK, it was brutal.”

A week later, John and I tried to retrieve his tackle from the bottom of the bay. We took his inflatable dinghy, five-horsepower Nissan and all, as well as a grappling hook and 50 feet of line. We headed out before noon, before the tide and chop picked up. We both had on PFDs, and I brought a handheld VHF radio, inspired mostly by the leak John had just discovered in his dinghy. We brought a bailer, too, and a pair of oars. Perhaps we lacked faith.

While John tended the throttle, I watched the GPS, and called out our coordinates. As we neared the spot on John’s map (which was more of a doodle), I tossed the grappling hook over, and waited for the line to draw taut. I pulled it in, dribbling water all over my legs. Nothing. John threw it out with more vigor, and I pulled it back in. Nothing. We spent the next hour motoring around, bobbing up and down in the building chop, tossing the grappling hook into the deep, and dragging it back and forth over the the silty bay floor. Nothing. All we got was water. But it was a faithful effort. I’m pretty sure John’s gonna call his insurance company, and see if they’ll spring for a new anchor.

-JW

***

{Bring on Another Thousand – 7/31/09}

There’s a cliche about boat-owning: they say that the best two days of a boat-owner’s life are the day you buy your boat and the day you sell it. Anecdotal evidence already suggests the opposite.

First, buying Syzygy was no fun. Buying the boat — literally paying for it — entailed electronically wiring the largest check I’d ever written to some obscure bank in Seattle, while at the same time second-guessing myself and wondering if I’d made a grave mistake. Was I buying the right sailboat? Had I taken a big hasty jump too soon? Did I just screw myself for the next three years? Five years? Life? My concerns ranged from tiny to huge, such that the actual boat-buying was fraught with anxiety and concern and distress. Which is to say that the day I bought the boat was not one of the best days of my life — 99% of the other days in my life, in fact, were better. A bad day at the dentist was better, because at least there was progress. With the boat, I wasn’t sure if I was going forward or backward. I can’t fathom how the first part of this myth was born.

Second, I saw Syzygy’s previous owners a year and a half ago, when we met them in Mexico to take the boat for a sea trial, and I would testify in court that they assuredly did not enjoy selling their boat. I think owning it made them feel young, spirited, engaged, and adventurous, and that selling it only reminded to them that life’s circumstances — increasing age and flagging ability and mobility — had finally caught up with them and forced their hand. It took them three years to sell their boat, and it’s difficult to imagine that, at the end of the ordeal, there remained, as far as Pavlov could be concerned, any joy still associated with their boat. Relief: sure. Annoyance: yup. Finality: fine. But exultation? No way. That’s not what I saw.

There is another cliche about boats and money that does hold true: they say a boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into. Some say BOAT stands for Bring On Another Thousand. Absolutely. Here’s how you quantify it: You think a project will cost $500? Triple it. Even if you’ve already beefed up your estimate, added some wiggle room — triple it. It’ll cost $1500, I guarantee it. It is absurd how much stainless steel, copper, and “marine-grade” parts cost. The only way to spin it positively: at least this isn’t aeronautics.

On top of projects and maintenance, there’s the cost of keeping a boat at a marina or, if you’re really feeling flush, at a yacht club. To most sailors, this is an extra cost, in addition to rent/mortgage for a dwelling on land. When the economy sours (as California’s has), boat owners promptly stop paying their slip fees. Marinas, in turn, chain up boats belonging to such delinquents, so that the owner can’t just sneak in one day and sail away. There are a few such boats here. Apparently, you can put freedom in shackles.

I suspect that John Tierney, in last month’s NYT science column, called “When Money Buys Happiness,” was right. He examined the relationship between money and happiness, and reported that houses, higher education, travel, electronics, and fancy cars, though expensive, tend to provide happiness. On the other hand, there’s children, marriage ceremonies, divorces, and boats. These things are also expensive, but don’t provide happiness. Tierney sums it up: “Boats: very costly, very disappointing. Never buy a boat.” I wish he’d told me that a year and a half ago.

There’s a corollary rule about time that’s related to money and happiness. If you think a project will take 5 minutes, that means 10 hours. If you predict 3 hours, that means 6 days. The rule: double the number, and step up the unit – from seconds to minutes, from minutes to hours, from hours to days, from days to weeks, and from weeks to months. Accordingly, as projects abide by this rule, and drag on and on, it’s easy to see where the happiness goes. It swims for shore, headed to Colorado. Boat owners chase after it, and before they know it, a few years have gone by and the bank account is near empty. So it goes.

Perhaps the best rules of all, though, I learned last summer from Tim, a friend who also owns a sailboat. We were at a bar, yabbering on about the ongoing nature of boat projects, when someone interrupted and asked if there were any general principles to sailing. He answered immediately. “Keep water out of the boat, keep people out of the water, keep the girls warm, and keep the beer cold.”

There’s only one last important rule, lest you are prepared to lose all of that happiness, time, and money: Keep the boat off land.

-JW

***

{Knocked Up – 8/30/09}

Over the last five hundred years or so, if a sailor did something stupid like neglect his duties or disobey orders or insult his captain, or strike an officer, or desert the ship, or display rank incompetence or drunkenness or insubordination, or steal a dram of rum, or spit on the deck, or fail to stow his things properly or to clean his clothes adequately, there were any number of punishments that could be meted out: the sailor could be flogged, or whipped, or pickled, or cobbed, or made to run the gauntlet or to clean the head or to carry a 30-pound cannonball around the deck all day or to station himself at the top of the mast for a few hours or just to stand still until told otherwise. He could be lashed on board every ship in the fleet, or he could be tied to the mast for a week, or keel-hauled, or he could have had his feet bound and covered in salt and presented to goats for licking, which quickly went from ticklish to agonizing, because the goats don’t stop licking before the sailor’s feet have become bloody stumps. Or, if the sailor had mutinied or murdered, he could be hanged, shot, or have his head cut off, boiled, and then shoved onto a spike above decks, and left there for a week or so, to serve as an example to the remaining and hopefully far more loyal crew. Magellan preferred this latter technique. If the sailor had buggered (aka sodomized) another sailor, that, too could earn him the severest punishments. The sea was not San Francisco, man. But, if the sailor, while meeting the locals on some tropical island far away from home, knocked up a local woman, or a bunch of local women: nothing. Getting a girl knocked up was what sailors did when they weren’t sailing, like Genghis Khan, or Mulai Ismail, the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, who had something like 1400 sons and daughters before he died. Most sailors probably never knew how many women they knocked up on their voyages.

How far we’ve come since those days. I can neglect my duties all I want; I can make fun of Matt’s mom and call Jon a cabron and not get punched in the face; I can run off to Yosemite for a couple of weeks; I can trim the sails poorly and sail us home by some unimaginably indirect course; we can get so drunk that we decide to clean up our spilled wine with spilled beer; I can drink all of Matt’s beer and Jon’s expensive whiskey; I can spit on the deck or anywhere else on the boat I feel like it; and I’m not sure if I’ve ever stowed my things or washed my clothes properly. The boat is my oyster. If I were so inclined, I could invite over all the gay guys in the bay area with one simple Craiglist post; instead, I have tried my hand at luring girls here, all the while wondering what girl would really find this sailboat alluring. Remember: according to Google, Syzygy is a janky piece of shit, and based on the information in this paragraph (swearing, drinking, spitting, dirtying), I’m no example of fine manners, either. Finally, the biggest change of all: getting girls knocked up is decidedly not what sailors do. This is the 21st century, man, even if it is San Francisco.

So I’m 31, and dating, and it’s always a mystery when and how to tell girls about the boat. They always have a ton of questions. Is it small? It’s like a New York City apartment, you know, a 400-square-foot studio. Is there a fridge, and a stove? Yup. Is there any headroom? I can’t jump up and down, but I don’t have to squat. Is there a bathroom? Yup, but I prefer to piss in the bay. Is it noisy? Seagulls squawk in the morning, and sometimes the wind howls in the afternoons, and sometimes the docklines creak as they stretch taut. I try to make it sound romantic. Does it rock back and forth? The boat moves a little bit when tied up, but nothing crazy. And get this: the boat is so burly that if it gets knocked over 90-degrees it still pops right back up. In fact, if it gets knocked over 120-degrees, it still pops right back up. Do you get seasick? Not in the marina, but at sea, sure. Most sailors do occasionally. Is it cold? Not really, and I have a diesel heater. Sometimes I feel like a caveman, proving that I exist in modern times: yes, I have electricity and laundry and cell-phone service and an internet connection. Yes, a sailboat. Really, it’s not a big deal. It’s got a certain allure, I know it, but somehow I end up on the defensive.

And here’s how I can tell my dating life isn’t going so well: I’m sleeping with Bob Seifert. Not “sleeping with” in the euphemistic sense, but literally, as in sleeping beside the book he wrote, called “Offshore Sailing: 200 essential passagemaking tips.” I have a hardcover copy of it in my bed, and I cuddle up to it every night like it’s some titillating classic or a book of translated swooning poems. Page 27 describes one of my favorite projects: boom preventers. As if I need those. There’s no other way to put it: it’s my boat porn, full of seacocks and cockpits and blowers and interfacing electronics and deep-cycle batteries and coupling nuts and prop shafts and large tools and lubricants and docking equipment and proper bedding techniques. Talk about a change. I should be punished for my behavior.

-JW

Advice / Perspective / Shit / Lumber / Hump

****

{Free Advice – 6/10/09}

There’s no shortage of advice at the marina. One guy in particular, Steel Boat Jim, who I refer to as Maine Guy on account of his Downeast accent, is a treasure trove. You’d be hard-pressed to carry on a conversation with him and manage to sneak away without having received a point in some direction.

The first time I met Maine Guy, back in November, he was wearing a gray t-shirt from which his stomach protruded, and he had a beer in hand. It was maybe noon. I liked him already.

“So when ahh you leaving?” he asked. I was up on deck, the grinder in my hands, and earplugs in my ears. I pulled them out, and said, “Huh?”

“When ahh you leaving?”

“Not for more than a year,” I said.

“Well, remember, after yooah all stocked up on food, then buy yooah electronics.”

“Sounds like good advice,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’ve wrecked all my fuckin’ electronics.”

He went on, providing more detail — but the pattern had been established: 1) question; 2) answer; 3) unsolicited advice. Technically, the advice also goes unheeded, but he doesn’t know that.

I stopped by Maine Guy’s steel boat, the Arctic Tern, a couple of weeks ago, and after checking out his new solar panels, got to talking about wind generators.

“Yooah totally fuhcked if yooah relying on a wind genertah!” He said. “That thing’s a piece of fuckin’ gahbage! You gotta undastand, theah’s no wind from twenty degrees to twenty degrees. In the tropics, that generatah’s gonna be worthless.”

Maine Guy says that a lot: “you gotta undastand,” as if he’s the purveyor of ancient wisdom. That’s the prelude to his free advice. It’s not patronizing so much as amusing. Of course, he had a point. Wind generators produce no power in winds below about 10 knots, and much of the ocean is festooned with such light air.

“If you buy a wind generatah, theah goes a yeah of cruising,” he said. I’m not sure if I could survive for a year on $2,000, but I got the gist of it. He continued. “If you buy a radar, theah goes a yeah of cruising. If you buy a life raft, theah goes a yeah of cruising.”

I knew better than to steer the conversation toward money or the economy, as he had earlier e-mailed me a long rant about converting my savings from dollars to gold, so I played defense. I said, “Yeah, if you know what you’re doing, you may be OK without those backups.”

Maine Guy had an answer for that, too. “Hey, isn’t that what adventure’s about?”

Score another point for Maine Guy, but remember that there’s a line between adventure and recklessness, a line that we’ve gotten to know in the mountains. That and we already have a radar and a life raft, and we’re not about to sell them.

In the spirit of passing on more advice — this time literally — Maine Guy dug through his bookshelf and handed me a copy of “Blue Water,” by Bob Griffith, one of the circumnavigators on that list I found later. “If you read this book,” he said, “you’ll find out that the most important things on your boat are the anchor, the anchor, and the anchor. And that in two thousand years of sailing, not much has changed.”

“What’s the second most important thing,” I asked.

“A bottle opener,” he said.

-JW

***

{Gaining Perspective – 6/17/09}

In late November I flew to the East Coast to visit my family for Thanksgiving. It was the first time I’d spent 10 days away from the boat in six months. They gave me an earful, my family.

On a walk in the woods with my mom, she asked if I was “prepared to weather a downturn in the economy.” I hemmed and hawed, and admitted all my savings were sunk into the sailboat. Then I tried to explain that cruising is really cheap — you load up on rice and beans, and just take off and go, like a climbing road trip. She seemed unconvinced, and rightly so.

My cousin Myles asked if I was done fixing up the boat; I told him it was complicated, that the boat was sorta like his house — a huge, ornate 1880’s Victorian, perpetually mid-repair, in a historic town. He grasped the situation immediately, and said, “So you’ll never be finished.” I smiled. “Exactly.”

My cousin Joel told me to read “Adrift” — Steve Callahan’s terrifying story of shipwreck and survival — and I told him I had, and that if he thought that story was good, he should read “Survive the savage sea,” by Dougal Robertson.

This got them — my whole extended family, now — riled up, and the comments began to pour forth. Myles, reasoning that piracy was more of a threat than sinking, suggested that I acquire cannons. My dad chimed in: torpedos! Myles: machine guns! My cousin Jim: Missiles!

I opened another beer, and tried not to get defensive. Maybe I should bring their phone numbers, so that I could have the would-be-pirates call them directly to negotiate the ransom?

While home, I also added a few more names to the list of People Who Wish They Could Come Sailing With Us:

-My mother’s boss
-At least one of my folks’ neighbors
-Half of my friends, including one who’s just finishing grad school and afraid to look for a job
-At least one former coworker

Heckling and eager stowaways aside, it felt good to get away from the boat and gain some some perspective. Onboard Syzygy, it’s easy to get so involved, so focused, so lost within a project that it’s impossible to decompress or relax. At the same time, being away from the boat was also disorienting. Soon enough, withdrawn from the boat, I found myself getting antsy. I chalked it up as an urge to tinker. The urge to repair and build was so physical — like I needed to hold tools in my hands lest they curl up and wither — that I had to wonder if the sailboat thing hadn’t changed me.

I climbed up onto the roof of my folks’ house and did some caulking. I put down some new roof with my dad. I cleaned the gutters. I tried to go with the urge, but this was just regular maintenance. I still yearned to build something, and the opportunity that presented itself came, courtesy of my mother, in the shape of… a squirrel-proof bird feeder. It was no sailboat, but it was a challenge: could I use a little ingenuity to outwit mother nature? (The answer, sadly, was no. Squirrels are tenacious little things.) As I dug through the garage looking for parts, I wondered: do I enjoy asking for trouble? Do I tend to invite problems my way? In another sense, I was looking for an opportunity to solve a problem. Such opportunities are often compelling. Can I get up that rock? Can I get up that mountain? Can I get down that canyon? Can I run those 26 miles? Or how about: Can I fix up an old sailboat and sail it around the world?

I spent last week away from the Syzygy, too, visiting my family again. The urge to tinker was still there — I climbed up the Chestnut tree in the backyard and hacked off some dead branches, and sanded and painted the rusting wrought iron railings on the front steps — but even more evident was the urge to nestle in, stay put, have some coffee and just relax. After all this fixing-up-a-sailboat work, I needed a break. I needed to, as they say in the South, “set a spell.” So I sat. And that’s when I noticed the coolest thing: I’ve changed. I’m way more patient than I used to be (though still no saint). I’m way more eager to immerse myself fully in a task. And I’m more comfortable without distractions, just me and my thoughts.

This last realization occurred near the end of a six-hour, coast-to-coast flight, when I noticed the passengers near me getting fidgety, almost childishly so. I sat, knees bent, safety belt buckled, neck squished against one of those godawful airplane headrests that comes standard on those godawful airplane seats, and thought: this is nothing. This aint no sailboat, and this aint no ocean.

-JW

***

{Janky Piece of Shit – 6/25/09}

A year ago, back when Syzygy was named Sunshine, and her port of call was listed as Portland, OR, I set to scraping off the old name and cleaning up the paint in preparation for applying the new vinyl letters.

The boat was up on stilts, then, at a workyard in Berkeley, so I had to climb a ladder to get aboard. I dragged the ladder back a few feet, closer to the stern, and climbed up five or six steps and from there began scraping off the letters. The letters were white vinyl, about eight inches tall, on blue paint, and it was just luck that I started on the left side, and not the right, so that after a little bit of work SUNSHINE became UNSHINE. I giggled at first, then thought about the irony, or the truth, as it were, in the new name. I sorta wished we hadn’t sent off our paperwork to the US Coast Guard with the name Syzygy, because UNSHINE was so perfect. It was our style. It was unique. And it was so easy — I’d barely started, and the job was already done. Voila, name removal and reapplication complete! If only other boat projects could be like that.

But Syzygy (which was my grandfather’s favorite word) it was, so on with the work I went. Maybe it was an omen, this little taste of completion well before it was deserved. Or maybe it was an omen that before things would be completed, they would lack a certain luster. Or maybe it was an omen that painting (or preparing to paint) is a bitch. Or maybe the omen was this: there will be jank. Lots and lots of jank.

Now, it has recently come to my attention that my sailboat is the 5th thing that pops up if you Google the phrase “janky piece of shit.” If you don’t use the quotes in your query, my sailboat pops up 8th on the list. Given how much there is to be proud of onboard Syzygy, the amount of satisfaction I gain from this little internet phenomenon is perhaps disproportionate to its actual value. I’m not concerned though; you take from life what joys it provides, and if those joys come wrapped in a package with a return address from Janky and Co., in Gary, Indiana, you don’t return the package to its sender and ask for a refund. You open it up, and enjoy the contents, even if the contents are pieces of crap, as janky as janky gets. So that’s how it is, an that’s why I now officially want my boat be at the top of the online janky list. When people around the world look up “janky piece of shit,” I want THE answer to be Syzygy.

This is no unsubstantiated desire, as Matt, Jon, and I derive great (dare I say intense?) pleasure from removing janky parts from the boat. Lately, I’ve discovered a new twist on the jank removal: if I’m good, I can double the fun by selling the janky stuff that we don’t want. This being America, eBay and Craigslist being only a few clicks away, perhaps this should have occurred to me earlier. I would never claim to have overlooked this option because I’m such a nice guy. No, I overlooked this option because the sheer removal of janky pieces of shit overwhelmed my senses to such a degree that rational thought was unavailable to me for the next half hour, and by then it was too late, because by then the janky piece of shit was in the middle of the dumpster.

So I’m not sure how this realization came to me; I blame poverty. And for the poverty, I blame the boat. Take warning, would-be-boat-owners! A sailboat will do that to you. It will eat your money, and force you to sell your trash, and trick you into thinking you are some kind of entrepreneurial genius for having thought of (aka resorted to) it. Take it from me!

Nevertheless, I sold the old metal radar arch for $300. I sold the old fiberglass propane locker for $150. I sold the old 15-gallon water heater for $100. To think: people want to pay me for the crap I don’t want! Amazing! What a world! Gooooooo capitalism!

Some jank, though, is so janky it’s hard to get rid of. I tried to sell a few cans of freon refrigerant from 1989, but my listing was removed from Ebay, because I’m not licensed by the EPA to sell that stuff. So what am I supposed to do with it? It’s janky, it’s toxic, and it eats holes in the Ozone layer — and some poor sailor out there is still using a refrigeration compressor older than I am, and probably could use it to keep his lemonade nice and chilly. I’m sure it’s illegal to ship the stuff, too. A conundrum, no? All I want to do is get rid of this jank, but the law won’t let me. Curses! I sure would like to barter it for something… ehem ehem.

So here’s one more effect of boat ownership: me and janky pieces of shit are now best buddies. In fact, I’m thinking of pointing jankypieceofshit.com to syzygysailing.com. Not bad, huh? That’s probably because I don’t own any more, because I’ve weeded them all out. It’s also probably because my last name isn’t Janky.

-JW

***

{It’s All Lumber; Throw it Overboard! – 7/1/09}

A couple of days ago, I helped my friend Liz move out of her fancy apartment. She’s lived in San Francisco for five years, and, as landlubbers tend to do, acquired nice furniture, a bunch of art, and a few acres of books, as well as all those little gewgaws that sit atop shelves and coffee tables. I was enlisted to help move the “heavy things” and “very heavy things” down three flights of stairs, so that she could transport them and store them elsewhere, until further notice. My help, unsolicited as it was, began immediately, over the phone. “Sell it all!” I said. “Put it on Craigslist. Put it on the street. Just get rid of it!” I tend to treat unwanted objects like jank.

Liz, who fancies her possessions, likes her lot of things, was not amused. And her initial experience with Craigslist — some scam artist claiming he was hearing-impaired, hence the unusual shipping and payment arrangement — was not encouraging. She rationalized her situation. If she couldn’t sell her unwanted furniture right away, she’d put it in storage, and sell it in a few weeks. This was even worse: this was like being a slave to your possessions. “Just get rid of it!” I said again. “It’s not worth the trouble!” Liz’s uncle, a sailor, who was also there to help, agreed with me. While Liz crammed things into cardboard boxes, I offered to throw some stuff out her 3rd floor window. He said he’s already suggested that. We laughed: a laugh, perhaps, that only sailors can share. Liz didn’t laugh. She ran around packaging things up, making her life difficult, chained, apparently, to her stuff.

I’ve always been a minimalist, but living on a boat makes you an austere minimalist. You don’t fret over things, or lament their loss. When deciding whether or not jettison possessions, the default becomes Get Rid of It. I’m sure the habit will come back to bite me in the ass later in life, but for now, I’m proud of it. I am the Jank Remover, and when the question is “To take or not to take,” I have my answer in 3 milliseconds. Beat that processing speed, Google.

So after I carried Liz’s sofa bed, bookshelf, carpet, coffee table, and huge TV down the stairs, and had a couple of beers, I recalled a certain relevant literary anecdote. It’s a tongue-in-cheek story of three overworked, partied-out, permanently-hungover English lads — George, Harris, and Jerome (and their dog) — who decide to rejuvenate themselves by taking a week-long boat trip up the Thames River. It’s called, fittingly enough, “Three Men in a Boat,” and it’s hilarious. The story is classic — it’s #33 on the Guardian’s list of “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time” and #2 on Esquire’s list of “50 Funniest Books Ever. It was written in 1889, and has never been out of print, and is freely available online, courtesy of the Gutenburg Project.

The part that I thought of, and later sent to Liz, is from the planning stage of their voyage. Here’s an extended excerpt:

George said: “You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”

George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with – oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! – the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man – all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness – no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life’s sunshine – time to listen to the Aeolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us – time to… Well, we left the list to George, and he began it.

-JW

***

{Getting Over the Hump – 7/9/09}

A month ago, on a flight to DC, I started up a conversation with my neighbor because he was flipping through a catalog of farm equipment — $150,000 tractors and combines and such. I asked what he was up to. He said he was a South Dakotan, and had picked up the catalog for fun, since his dad used to be involved in farming. We talked for a bit about machinery and engines, maintenance and reliability, lifespans and longevity. Such was our common ground. Was he still involved in farming? No, he worked for the South Dakota Department of Education, and was en route to DC for meetings with South Dakota’s elected representatives. In particular, he was eager to talk to Senator Thune about getting funding for a program to deter bullying. I asked what he meant by deter, since it seemed bullying would always be around. He said I was right, and that the program would help teachers to better deal with bullying. This reminded me of John Guzzwell’s definition of sailing: “prepare and deal.”

I’ve been thinking of Guzzwell’s definition of sailing a lot lately. At first, it suggests a 50-50 cut: half preparing, and half dealing. That’s not the split on Syzygy these days. Lately, it seems like 99% preparing, and 1% dealing. It’s frustrating, because the adventure is in the dealing, and here the preparing part is languishing interminably. We tear stuff out. We fix stuff. We make a mess. We clean it up. We buy things. We install them. We imagine that we are improving our boat — that we are making it more suitable for long passages and burly weather and rugged conditions — and we are. It just all seems so theoretical, so abstract. We want some hard evidence, damn it.

Our current preparations — a new (way more efficient) fridge, a new (better located) propane locker, and a new (far stronger and more adaptable) radar/solar/wind-generator arch — are, of course, bigger and badder than those behind us, and for some ridiculous reason we’ve chosen to tackle them simultaneously. Matt and I have convinced ourselves that, as such, they comprise “the hump.” Getting over the hump is what we dream about. Getting over it will mean we’re about 75% through our refit agenda, an achievement so staggering I’m somewhat scared to mention it. We imagine that the pressure, the frustration, and the difficulty will wane once we get over the hump. But John Guzzwell didn’t mention anything about a hump. He just said prepare and deal. Believe me, we are preparing. If anything, we’re preparing so much that we have to deal with it.

Mid-hump, there’s only one consolation, and it’s not pretty. Schadenfreude bolsters our spirits, gives us perspective. Things don’t seem so bad when I think about Robert, whose boom snapped in two while sailing on a not-particularly-windy day. Things seem OK on Syzygy when I think about Jim’s mainsail ripping clear across. The pace at which we’re proceeding seems more tolerable when I think of Marcus, who spent almost $4,000, and six months, building a new fridge.

And then there’s Stuart, who returned two weeks ago, with a new engine and $17,000 less in his bank account. Not knowing quite how to ask if he was satisfied with the result, I asked him, “Does it sound good?” “It sounds like an opera,” he said. “Wanna see?” I was glad he asked. It was beautiful, bright red and shiny as a fire truck.

A few days later, Stuart invited me over for a beer. We sat in the cockpit, listening to seagulls squawk over fish guts on a nearby trawler. The sun was low, the wind calm. Without prefacing it, he said, “Wanna hear it?” I said yeah. Stuart turned a switch, the oil-pressure alarm rang briefly, and then the engine started up. It purred, smooth and confident. Stuart said he might not even install sound-proof insulation in his engine compartment, given how quiet it ran. I was impressed.

The schadenfreude faded to envy. I can’t wait to feel that way about my boat.

-JW

Love / War / Cult / Inspiration / Aesthetics

****

{Love or Hate – 5/7/09}

There’s a sign above the cash registers at Svenden’s, the local chandlery, that says, “Sailing: spending lots of time wet, cold, and uncomfortable only to go nowhere at great expense.” I always find it doubly funny that boat owners, about to shell out big bucks, do not alter their course after reading the sign. They buy their parts. They accept this reality, or try to ignore it, and get on with their business.

A sailor looking for positive reinforcement at the store must turn across from the registers, to the magazine rack. There, behind glossy covers featuring bikini-clad women, immaculate and lavish fiberlgass boats, and calm cerulean seas, he’ll find snippets of the dream he’s been harboring. The photos suggest freedom. Ease. Luxury. Peace. Happiness. The stories suggest, foremost, that mechanical perfection is attainable. It’s amazing what kinds of illusions pass for non-fiction.

Oddly enough, there’s very little middle ground. Sailing is either a fantasy or a nightmare, something you love or hate. It’s hard to find someone pontificating on the freedom of the sea or the comfort of self-reliance; most of the time, such rambling is too obvious or too ludicrous or too whimsical. Perhaps the logic is this: there will be time to talk about freedom when you are free; in the meantime, there’s work to do.

That certainly seems the case here at the marina.

On land, it seems, you start a conversation with a neighbor by chatting about the weather; if the chords and mood are right, it may segue into other matters, broadening into politics or the economy or health or even philosophy. Such an encounter may even lead to the sharing of something personal, about family or work or thoughts on the way things used to be. At the marina, or on the water, you start a conversation by asking about boat work. “How are things coming along?” you might ask, or “I saw you up there on top of your mast working on something yesterday.” If you don’t ask about boat work, you appear a moron or a millionaire, too naive to recognize the situation or too privileged to have to deal with it. If you know anything about boats, you know that they demand undivided attention and work, and knowing this, you ask how the work is going.

But here’s the difference: such inquiry at the marina rarely segues into a larger theme or thought. Instead, the conversation narrows as it proceeds, ever concerned with technical details and minutiae, until you’re commiserating about the difficulty of finding a store that sells long, metric, finely-threaded, 316 stainless steel hex bolts on a Sunday. Because ending a conversation in such a manner is awkward at best, the conversation often takes one final turn, which is always the same generality. The Universal Boat-Owning Sentiment is offered, masked as it is by a boat-owner’s personal perspective on life. The pessimist will look down, shake his head, clench his jaw, get his blood pressure roiling, and say: “It’s a total bitch,” or “Bring out another thousand” — the standard acronym for BOAT — while the optimist will chortle and quip, in a manner that suggests he’s laughing at the silly futility of it all, and say, “would you have it any other way?”

I would not have it any other way. The work is satisfying; the skills I’ve gained are useful; the knowledge I’ve acquired is enlightening; the lessons accrued invaluable. That, and having worked on our boat for a year, I’m starting to lift my head up and scan the horizon.

-JW

***

{A War on Metal – 5/14/09}

My buddy Kevin, in Colorado, called me ten days ago, exasperated. It was late Saturday night, and he’d spent all day trying to install 20 feet of copper pipe from his laundry room, through a small hole in the wall, and out to his yard, so that some other guy could install a sprinkler system for his lawn. Apparently homeowners do such things. At first, he called a plumber, but the $300 price he was quoted made him want to do the job himself. It’s worth noting that Kevin’s an electrical engineer, not a plumber.

Kevin related the story of his Saturday: he woke up by spending $200 at Home Depot, then for breakfast he had the city shut the main water valve to his house. For lunch, he slithered into the crawl space, twisted apart two pipes, and soldered on some new pipe, an elbow, a T-junction, a valve, and another elbow, and then called the city to have them turn the water back on. As you might have guessed, it leaked, so Kevin shut the water off again, grabbed a beer, made some changes to his Sunday plans, and called me.

If Kevin was seeking sympathy, he didn’t get any from me. “That sounds like boat work!” I said.

If only this week’s boat project had been so simple.

We’re installing two 10-foot poles, sticking straight up, on opposite sides of the stern — one for a wind generator, and the other for a radar dome. In between, on a crossbar, will sit our solar panels, which will also provide some shade in the cockpit. Each pole is supported by two smaller struts — welded on — so that the poles don’t wiggle or, god forbid, somehow break off. Each pole, and each strut, is connected to the hull by a 3″ metal bracket, and each bracket is fastened to the hull with four bolts. All told: 32 feet of pipe, 4 welds, 6 brackets, 30 holes, 30 bolts. No biggie. Custom setups like this cost a couple thousand dollars at places like Svendsen’s, causing guys like Matt and I to gasp in the same way that Kevin did. And, like Kevin, we figured we’d build the damn thing ourselves, the same way we’ve approached every other project on Syzygy.

Turns out the word “project” does this task injustice. It was more like a series of battles. We waged a war on metal this week — and not just any metal, but stainless steel, the ultimate foe. I couldn’t have said it better than Matt did yesterday, during a moment of enlightenment, as he watched an aluminum piece spinning on a lathe: “Aluminum makes things possible. Stainless steel makes things impossible.”

Stainless steel is hard to begin with, and it hardens as it heats up. One good way to heat it up is to try drilling a 3/8″ hole through it. The metal fights back with vengeance, dulling even the sharpest, most expensive bits if your technique isn’t perfect. It behaves like a true adversary, playing defense by suiting up for battle, and playing offense by destroying weapons pointed at it. Coaches and generals ought to be jealous. Welding stainless steel brings up still more threats. If you use too much heat (your TIG welding torch is up around 10,000 degrees), you alter the structure of the metal, weakening it, and inviting corrosion. Your welds get porous, inviting corrosion. Sugary granules form beneath the weld, inviting corrosion. This is stainless steel, of course, for use on a sailboat, and corrosion, whether or not it crashes the party, is not actually invited.

Once the metal yields, or rather, once you coax it into yielding, you can’t scratch it, unless you want it to rust. In fact, you have to polish it, because corrosion forms easily in tiny pits and crevices, which is why stainless steel is usually so polished and shiny. That luster is not for show, even if it does look spiffy. What? You’d rather paint it than polish it? Sorry: painting stainless steel deprives the metal of oxygen, which it needs to form a thin (12 atoms thick) outer passive layer of chromium oxide, which is what makes stainless steel “stainless” in the first place.

These are your primary constraints. Here are some more: The boat is curved, and rocks back and forth, and leaning slightly to starboard — so good luck measuring precisely. The machine shop where you cut and weld is 30 miles away, and the poles weigh a ton — so have fun making the little stainless-steel portage a few times. Oh — and you can’t just weld a strut onto a pipe any which way. You need to cope the joining edge of the strut so that it sits flush against the curved face of the pipe, at the proper angle.

To do this, you go to (I’m not making this up) metalgeek.com and type in the angle, tube diameter, and wall-thickness of the pipe you’re using. Then you print out what looks like a big sine curve, cut it out, roll it up, and tape it onto the end of the strut. Trace the curved line with a marker. Then, using a grinder with a cutoff blade — and great care! — cut the strut.

How do you know what angle to punch in? Build a prototype out of cardboard and PVC and duct tape. Then, like a befuddled caveman, spend half an hour tinkering with a little plastic protractor — the type you used in Geometry class — trying to determine the angles of the struts (moderately difficult) and the angle between them (extremely difficult). Try it from below, and from above, and express awe that someone like Shackleton was ever able to make a reliable sighting using a sextant, even in the best conditions. Measure, mark, double-check. Repeat many times. Compare notes. Pray that your number (40 degrees) is close to the number your buddy just got (36 degrees), and that the average will eliminate, rather than increase, any error.

Visit your local metal shop, and try not to get distracted by the volume and variety of metals available. Ignore the constant clanking and screeching, the smell of propane, and the buzzing of the saw. Focus. Use a cart if you need to. Note that the cart alone weighs 152 lbs. Use care lifting metal scraps — those edges are very sharp, and slice open fingers easily. Consider the density of steel (.2833 lbs per cubic inch) versus that of aluminum ( .0979 lbs per cubic inch), and how much some pieces of steel, at $2/lb, would cost. A one-foot section of 2.5-inch (which is actually 2.875″) schedule 160 (.375″ thick) pipe would cost $20. The same length of 24-inch (which is actually 24″) schedule 160 (2.344″ thick) pipe would cost $1084. Gadzooks! You’d need a forklift just to get that thing on the cart! A pipeline made of that stuff would cost more than $5 million per mile just for the parts! Inquire about the stack of two-inch titanium rods. $4/lb, huh? Might a tiny little piece, instead of a 10-foot section, be purchased? Why not? Ah, yes — not being able to cut it is a good reason. Focus. Remember the sailboat. Find your stainless steel pipes. Pay for them and load them on the car.

Practice TIG welding a little bit. Be patient, and remember the learning curve. Be supportive. When your buddy says, “It’s hard to get a result that doesn’t look like cyclops went wild on your metal with his phaser eye… all black and gobby and bubbly and crappy,” try not to let him despair too much. Remind him that elegance is not the ultimate goal. It’s just a sailboat.

Back at the boat, carefully transfer, while ignoring the clumsiness of your efforts, the marks and angles onto your stainless steel pipes. Close your eyes if you must. Cope the edges of the struts. Cut them to length. Label them. Take a breath. Know that you have trained well, and are as prepared for battle as you could be.

Begin the war on your terms. Refuel after the 30-mile stainless-steel portage.You’ll need energy for the battles that are about to ensue. Welding four pipes, cutting six brackets, and drilling 30 holes will probably take 12 hours. Stay hydrated. Use cutting fluid. Lay dull bits to rest and get on with it. That’s why you brought so many replacements. Be tolerant of the finicky band saw. Don’t space out while using the grinder. Focus. Tough it out. When the welding is done, near midnight, take comfort, even if the poles aren’t symmetric. Don’t get your nose too close. You’ll only find imperfections, and you can’t smell “strong like bull.” The poles will fit on the boat — hopefully — and that will be good enough.

Suffer through one more 30-mile stainless-steel portage, and take a breath when you deposit the finished parts next to the boat. Don’t check your work at 1am, though. Get some rest and return to it the next day, rejuvenated.

Accept that imperfections give things personality. That the poles fit, with slight modifications — a shim here, a new hole there — is all that matters. The war is won, the battles almost over.

Finally, like Kevin, have a beer, and recount your story to others late at night, so that they may laugh at your ridiculous effort to save time and money.

-JW

***

{The Cult of the Valiant – 5/20/09}

I’ve joined a cult. Not a big cult, like Harley-Davidson riders, but a miniscule, obscure cult, like hardcore Jewish death-metal fans, or ritualistic backyard goat sacrificers. This cult goes by the name Valiant Owners. There are only a couple hundred of us — as only a couple hundred Valiant 40’s were ever built — and we treat one another like blood brothers.

To join the cult, there are a few prerequisites in addition to owning a Valiant 40:

1) All hail Robert Perry! Valiants were designed by Robert Perry, a legendary designer known as the father of “performance cruisers” — offshore sailboats that strike a balance between speed and solidity. In addition to Valiants, which were inducted into the American Boatbuilders Hall of Fame, Bob Perry also designed Tayanas, Lafittes, Babas, Tatooshes, and Passports, among others — all told, about 5,000 burbly sailboats (most of ‘em still on the water).

2) Pick a theory, any theory. Valiants produced between 1976 and 1981 are prone to developing unsightly (but not dangerous) osmotic blisters on their fiberglass hulls, and there are two competing theories that explain the phenomenon. Members of the Valiant cult must have a firm opinion on the cause. The choices:
A) The 1973 Arab oil embargo made good fiberglass resins hard to find during most of the 1970’s.
or
B) Uniflite, the Bellingham-based company that built Valiants (as well as Swift Boats, for Vietnam) made a point of adding a fireproof agent to its resins — and this mysterious chemical never fully cured. (A lawsuit over the matter eventually put an end to the Uniflite company, and Valiants are now built in Texas.)

3) Help a brother out. Valiant owners treat one another much the way cancer survivors treat each other: we’re all fighting the same battle, dealing with the mechanics and mysteries of toilets, water tanks, engines, achors, rigging, fiberglass, storage, electronics, refrigeration…you name it, so we might as well support each other, and help out when/where we can. An example: To get to the bottom of our engine-overheating problem, Matt recently posted a video of water splashing out of our exhaust — about as thrilling as a video of grass growing — and I know that not only will fellow Valiant owners watch it, but that whey will consider it, and put some effort into a thoughtful response. I’ve watched other sailors at the marina suffer their own problems — one guy dropped his outboard motor into the water, and another guy lost his anchor and almost his arm — but the problems never felt like my problems. With cult members, the problem feels closer to home.

As luck would have it, two fellow Valiant cult members, Jim and Jeanne, keep their Valiant (named Kanga) just a few boats over from Syzygy. Over the last six months, we’ve shared beta on fasteners, table designs, mast steps, boom preventers, propane lockers, running backstays, and all sorts of esoteric sailing minutiae. When we go out sailing, we look for each other. At the marina, we share tools, and parts, and advice. Often, at the end of the day, we have a beer and talk about non-sailing things for a while. On one such occasion, I got all amped up, and suggested that it’d be awesome to do boat work all buzzed, and was advised that such an approach only works on projects where randomness is important: sanding and spraypainting. Everything else, I was told, I wold botch, and have to do again. Jim’s an engineer, so I trust him. The advice was mostly heeded. Most importantly, our cult-relationship is such that when when Jim and Jeanne have a problem, we sympathize. (When we have a problem, they just laugh, because we’ve got three 31-year old guys to tackle it, and they’re jealous.)

Yesterday morning, Jim and Jeanne stopped by before heading out for a week-long sail. Jim’s brother and sister-in-law were visiting from Chicago, and were excited to bounce down the coast –from San Francisco, to Half Moon Bay, to Santa Cruz, to Capitola, and finally Monterrey.

I invited them to hop on board Syzygy, to see an older boat that’s not nearly as pretty. I pointed them toward the three-foot hole in the deck, in the stern, where the propane locker had been, and Jim said, “You can see the guts of the boat.” I said, “Yeah, it’s sort of like an ongoing autopsy over here… or at least some kind of open heart surgery.”

We chatted for a bit, and they told me to send in the troops if they weren’t back by next Monday, and then they took off. I busied myself with boat work to distract myself from the thought of a week-long sail. There’s so much to fix before we can sail for a week.

That evening, I looked up and saw Kanga back in her slip. Jim was sitting on the deck, drinking a beer. I walked over, confused. “Is everything OK?” I was half amused, half worried.

“Ripped the mainsail in two,” Jim said. “We had in two reefs, and we were out under the gate, and it was blowing pretty hard” — 25 knots — “and the sail just went bang!”

He showed me the tear, which extended from luff to leech along the edge of a seam. It looked, foremost, expensive. A new mainsail can easily cost a few thousand dollars. I shuddered thinking about projects like that, projects that declare themselves important and urgent, projects that declare it so loudly as if to be proclaiming, “Take that, you sonofabitch. I’m jumping to the front of the line whether you like it or not.”

Only a week before, Jim had invited a sailmaker to inspect his sails. After two hours of close examination, she’d said that his mainsail — about 20 years old — was “tired.” Looking back, now, Jim said he thought the boat was pissed about being judged and criticized by an outsider.

Jim took the whole thing pretty well — what choice did he have? — but I hated that his sailing plans had been ruined, at least temporarily. I told him I’d offer him Syzygy’s mainsail, except that the slugs on the luff wouldn’t fit in the track on his mast.

Jim said thanks, and that he’d figure something out. And then I reminded him, that as member of the cult, I’d trade sails — but only if we could trade engines, too.

-JW

***

{Inspiration From a Legend – 5/27/09}

At the top of the stairs, the receptionist interrogated me. “Hi, what kind of boat do you have?”
- “A Valiant 40,” I said.
She continued: “Are you a circumnavigator?”
-”Yeah,” I said. She reached for a button that said “I’ve sailed around the world,” and I corrected myself.
-”I mean, no, not yet.”

Instead of a button, I was given an adhesive paper name tag. It said:

‘09 Circumnavigator’s Rendezvous
AHOY!
I’m ___[your name]____
of ___[your boat's name]_____

This was at the Oakland Yacht Club, six weeks ago, and I was there partly to see what I’d gotten myself into, and partly to see a presentation by John Guzzwell, a sailor of legendary repute.

In 1957, Guzzwell saved the day (to say the least) when a 46-foot boat called the Tzu Hang pitchpoled (i.e. went ass-over-teakettle) and was dismasted in the Southern Ocean, 1000 miles from Cape Horn. (The story is chronicled in the classic, Once is Enough, by Miles Smeeton.) Two years later, when he was 29, Guzzwell completed a singlehanded circumnavigation on Trekka, a 21-foot wooden yawl that he’d built. It was then the smallest boat ever to have gone around the world. Since then, he’s designed custom boats, cruised all over the world with his family, raced from L.A. to Osaka, and twice raced singlehanded to Hawaii in the TransPac, once when he was 71 years old.

The 2nd floor of the Oakland Yacht Club was lined with framed photos of big sailboats, and flags — lots of flags. There was a large wooden yacht wheel, as obligatory as a horseshoe over the door of a barn. These things I’d expected.

Just past the door, I found a poster-sized document that I didn’t expect, and couldn’t stop examining. It was the Official West Coast Circumnavigator List, courtesy of Latitude 38, the local SF Bay area sailing magazine. It listed all of the boats, from ABV Amro One to Zoom, that had circumnavigated from the west coast. There were 270 of them since 1950 — about five a year. There were six members of the Valiant cult on the list — making Valiant 40’s the most common boat on the list. There was a 12-footer (that’s like sailing a toilet!), a 72-foot Challenger, and a 180-foot barque. A few had done it engineless, and only a few had done it in boats less than 25-feet long. The list included Sohcahtoa (our pals in Seattle), Awahnee (Bob and Nancy Griffith), Dove (Robin Lee Graham), and Seraffyn (Lin and Larry Pardey) — and it felt sorta funny — wonderful and crazy — to be following a path forged by such badasses. It’s like going on a hike with Lewis and Clark, or getting a tour of the Whitehouse from Obama,

I moved on. A quarter of the room was a bar — a good sign — but people milling about were drinking beer out of glasses — not a good sign.
There were lots of good-old-boy chuckles and “nice-to-see-you’s.” Apparently this was a salty group, but I wouldn’t have guessed it. There were about 200 people, more than half with gray hair, and half of those with beards, and thankfully, only one of those sporting a dorky sailor hat. I sat down next to a 49-year-old guy with a 2-year-old toddler, and thought: that makes me the second-youngest person in the room.

I looked around, and saw a guy with the cicumnavigator button on his lapel, and a copy of Guzzwell’s book, Trekka Round the World, in his hands. A first edition, signed. I said Hi. His name was Steve. I figured I’d get down to details.

Q: “Do you think the danger of piracy is overhyped, like shark attacks?”
A: “No, it’s fucking dangerous.” He told me about his trip through the Gulf of Aden in November of 1998. “It’s as serious as a heart attack,” he said.

Q: “How long did you plan before you sailed?”
A: “I did it many times in my dreams before I did it for real.” He continued. “If you wanna be a tourist, buy a plane ticket. If you wanna see the world, don’t take a sailboat. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

Q: “How long did it take you to readjust afterward?”
A: “I didn’t. I went to Barcelona and hung out. I haven’t worked for 11 years.”

The presentation started before I had a chance to continue, and I was drowned out by a round of applause for the circumnavigators, who, it was said, give so much inspiration to the “armchair circumnavigators.” That was me.

The emcee then joked about the size of crowd, and blamed the damn singlehanders — types who just don’t RSVP.

To set the scene, we were reminded that we were about to hear a story 50 years old, and that while time passes, some things change, while others never do. The gray hairs and boats on the wall were a reminder of that.

John Guzzwell got up, healthy and humble, charming and spirited, and started telling his story. He had a subtle British accent, from his youth on the Channel Islands. He pronounced sailing as say-ling. He summed up the sport: he said it was mostly “Prepare and deal. Prepare and deal.”

Guzzwell reminded us that his adventure was back in the days before GPS, or weather data. All he had was a radio receiver — for use as a chronometer — not even a radio transmitter. On board the Tzu Hang, he had a flax mainsail, manilla lines, tallow-coated sheets. There were no winches, no lights, no electrical system. “We were on our own,” he said.

He’d met Miles and Beryl Smeeton in Hawaii. They were true adventurers, and had climbed with Tenzing Norgay in the Himalayas. They were on their way to Australia, to see the 1960 Olympics, and invited John along. Before leaving Hawaii, Guzzwell helped them replace the rotten main mast. In Sydney, Australia, he replaced the mizzen mast for the same reason. He’d built his own dinghy. His carpentry skills were handy.

Guzzwell showed some footage from the trip — and the clips looked funny and old-timey, just a hair too fast, so people look goofy, clownish. There were shots of the Tzu Hang, 46-foot double-ender not too unlike Syzygy, out on the big swells. There were shots of Miles up on deck, slicing through stale bread with a saw, like a two by four, and smiling like a little boy.

Soon, Guzzwell warned us that he was nearing the end of the footage, and noted how big waves never look as big on film, but nevertheless assured us that we were looking at 50 knots of wind and huge seas in the Southern Ocean. An hour after he’d stopped filming, he said, the Tzu Hang pitchpoled, and was nearly destroyed. The doghouse, hatches, mast, rudder, and sails were all washed overboard. Beryl was washed overboard too, and swam back on her own, with a huge gash on her face. She started bailing water immediately.

He reminded us that they were 1000 miles from Cape Horn, and then he paused, and began to glow. He reveled, and the audience was captivated, as he described the decisions and actions that went into their struggle to survive. There was no politics, no finances, no concern with the rest of the world. Just three little mammals on a tiny wooden craft bobbing up and down on a great big ocean. I swear I heard the sound of the sea in that room.

“The great thing about wooden decks,” he said, “Is you can drive nails into them. I don’t know what you do with fiberglass.” He spent the next few days disassembling the cabin, and built an improv mast out of the wood he’d removed. He used a door as a rudder. “We felt very pleased with ourselves,” he said.

87 days later, the Tzu Hang showed up at a port in Chile.

There was one more story I really liked. Guzzwell made it back to British Columbia, and sailed around the world on Trekka… and years passed… and Beryl died… and he remarried. Then an old friend, whose own wife had died, invited Guzzwell to sail to Hawaii on the spur of the moment. He was thrilled, and his new wife was game. A few days down the coast, their self-steering wind-vane broke, and they planned to pull into San Francisco to have it repaired. By now it was clear to Guzzwell that his new wife didn’t like offshore sailing so much, and he knew that if they stopped in San Francisco there’d be no getting her back on the boat once she hopped off. The audience chuckled knowingly when Guzzwell mentioned a former crewmate who, in the middle of the Pacific, had said, “You know, this ocean thing might not be for me.”So in the middle of the night, Guzzwell changed course, and turned west, headed straight for Hawaii. The next morning, when Guzzwell’s new wife noticed, she threw a fit, and threatened to throw a Much Bigger Fit if her husband didn’t turn the boat around that instant. Guzzwell did what was prudent, and told his old friend that his new wife wasn’t too happy, and that she was threatening to make a big scene. “Oh John,” his friend said with a sigh. “I’ve missed those scenes.”

-JW

***

{Notes on Aesthetics – 6/3/09}

—

Sunday, May 10

I woke up, popped out of the boat, and saw a new, unfamiliar boat in the slip across from Syzygy, where Stuart had been. It was a big ugly bulky thing, a brand new Hunter 40, all curvy fiberglass and stainless steel, gleaming white, like a big toy.

Turns out it was Stuart after all – he’d just chartered a different sailboat for the weekend, since his boat is out of commission on account of the new engine he’s having installed at a yard in Sausalito.

I was offered a tour, and went down below. I didn’t like it. It was spacious and bright, but felt like what Jim calls a “floating condo.” It had a flat screen TV, leather couches, granite counters, and a smooth sculpted plastic headliner — like the dashboard on a car. It oozed sleekness, and lacked personality.

Besides: the traveler was up on the bimini, and it had no backstay, and the transom was scooped out like a giant shoehorn, just begging the ocean to crash on in.

I was glad to see it gone the next day. I hope Stuart has $10,000 for that new engine, because I like his boat much more, and can’t wait for him to return.

—

Saturday, May 16:

Matt and I got all fired up this evening after measuring the bimini and old radar arch. We cranked the Indiana Jones theme song, and started dismantling the affair like it was our job. I took down the bimini fabric, while Matt removed the frame. I disconnected the radar wire, and removed the dome. Matt undid the screws holding the base of the arch to the stern. We were both humming along having a grand old time, psyched to remove, at long last, this enormous piece of jankiness. Within minutes we had removed the beast, and carted it off to the bow, to deal with later.

Afterwards, the boat felt different. It felt naked. Smaller, more open, and way more vulnerable — like you could just trip or slip or hop and fall overboard. It was almost scary how dramatic the feeling was — how much of a shift it represented. We really are getting used to this boat.

We propped up our new radar and wind-generator poles, to finally see how they’d look. As we struggled, Jim [a different Jim; Steel Boat Jim, aka Maine Guy - more on him soon] yelled at us from across the dock, giving us a hard time about things being straight and square and level. He told us we should eyeball it from over there where he was. We were too proud to take friendly insults or conflicting opinions or any other shit, so Matt yelled back a couple of times, “I can eyeball it over here just fine!” The haggling ended… for the day.

—

Sunday, May 17

I ground off the radar plate from the top of the radar arch, and got metal dust all over the deck on the bow. I didn’t clean it up, and it’ll probably rust in the dew — but what the hell, we’re gonna paint the deck anyway.

—

Friday, May 22

It’s not the deep blue sea, it’s not churning wake, it’s not the Alaskan coast – but the marina has its serenity. Even on a calm day, when a boat is coming in to dock, you help out. You grab the bow, you catch a line, you snub a line off on a cleat.

Before jumping up on someone’s boat, you ask if you can come aboard. Even if you’ve been aboard 80 times before, you still ask. “Permission to come aboard,” is technically how you phrase it, and you almost choke recognizing the absurdity of the gesture. It’s silly. It’s not really a question, but a power trip. You might as well say “You’re the man,” or “Whatever you say, goes” or “I am but a pawn here.”

There’s something cool about these gestures. They connect you to a long history of sailors and sailboats.

—

Wednesday, May 27

As we go forward looking back, drawing strength from what we’ve done, we figure we can attack at will, and start projects at a whim. We figure, eh, might as well… and besides, it’s not gonna rain for five months, so we remove the radar arch.. and tear out the old fridge, and remove the old propane locker, and cut a huge hole in the stern.

Then, as we start figuring out a schedule, or at least an sequence in which to perform tasks, and once we figure out all of — no, wait, most of — the supplies we’ll need, our heads begin to hurt.

We bit off more than we could chew, and it’s bringing on cases of the 100-yard stare.

I’ve seen it before, with Matt, in the engine room. He was attacking the old exhaust system on the engine, a chunk of rusty pipes that wouldn’t budge. I popped in after attending to a different project, and asked how it was going.

“Did you get it?”
“No, i just sat here and stared at it for 10 minutes.”

That’s a good indicator.

Here’s another good indicator: the stove is on the cabin floor, the evaporator is in the quarter berth, the compressor is in a box on a settee, the tools are all over the place, and all you wanna do is leave the boat, so that you can get rid of this overcaffeinated/overwhelmed feeling, which is probably like what it’s like to come down off some crazy upper.

—

Saturday, May 30

A fancy 80-foot sailboat named Coconut showed up yesterday; she’s easily the biggest thing at the marina. Three guys sailed her up from Panama, and now she’s tied up at the end of our dock, her mast towering over every other. The scale of the boat is evident from here.

Someone told me you can lease it for only $21,000 a week. Wide eyes resulted.

Andy and Ingrid, my neighbors on Sea Ghost, a 33-foot wooden ketch, weren’t impressed. Ingrid: “Far as I can tell, it’s just big”

I pointed it out to Neil. “Woah,” he said. “You’d need a pack of gorillas to sail that thing.”

I met the gorillas. They’re nice guys, more or less our age, and full of adventure. They joked about the value of sailboats, and admitted even Coconut wasn’t worth a dollar these days, because her upkeep is so expensive.

—

Tuesday, June 2

A few months ago, just as I was starting to feel really good about boat projects, Matt and I went out for pizza and beer with two other sailors: Chris (who’s now somewhere in Mexico on Vela, his Catalina 42, ) and Marga (who’s fixing up Phlebas, a Pearson 30). We raised our pints and got down to business, talking about boaty things. Marga started telling Matt about a boat in Sausalito that she maintains for a Stanford professor.

Marga: “It’s 40 feet long, a double ender. A cutter. And it’s beautiful!”
Matt: “So it’s just like our boat?”
Marga (on cue): “No, it’s beautiful.”

A few weeks later, at a barbeque in Marin county, another friend asked me if, a year of work behind us, the boat was ready yet. Perplexed, she asked, “What have you been doing? Painting everything?” Painting? I laughed. “I haven’t even started painting yet!”

That’s kind of our mantra: function first, form later.

In addition to the metal dust, which very rapidly rusted and stained part of the deck a nice yellow, Syzygy is splattered with splotches of epoxy, peeling varnish, faded paint, chipped fiberglass, bird shit, and all sorts of crap on the deck. And thanks to Matt, who in a moment of drunken pride Saturday night, poured red wine all over the cockpit, and then poured beer on top of it to “clean it up,” the cockpit has a slight purple tinge to it, and is good and sticky.

—

Wednesday, June 3

It rained last night, and washed away some of our sins.

-JW

Intro / Holes / Wind / Jank / Metal

****

{Intro – 4/1/09}

My sailboat and I are both 31 years old, and the disparity between the amount of maintenance we require is staggering. I require pasta, beer, a toothbrush, an hour or two of exercise each day, and six hours of sleep each night. The sailboat requires scrubbing, tuning, cleaning, tending, repairing, and monitoring the workings of a diesel engine, a self-contained electrical system, a few thousand feet of rigging, a few dozen gears and pulleys and cams, and the comforts of a regular house, kitchen and bathroom included — all of which is crammed into a tiny space, and sitting in saltwater, slowly corroding, rotting, rusting, mildewing, melting, rubbing, or leaking away — which is to say: it requires constant, round-the-clock attention, like some sort of overgrown baby with technical needs; a giant baby robot, maybe.

During my first week on my boat, I didn’t shave, shower, or straighten my hair. I washed my dishes with my fingers, pissed in a bucket, drank wine out of the bottle, and slept sound as a baby. My pants told the story of my existence; in them were bits of caulk, epoxy, and grease; stains of sweat, salt, snot, and blood; smudges of pasta sauce, wine, and melted chocolate; metal filings, fiberglass strands, resin shards, and saw dust. And I haven’t even started sailing yet. That’s still 9 months away.

I’m preparing to sail around the world. Two dirtbag friends (Matt and Jon) and I hatched the idea a few years ago, inspired partly, I’ll admit, by Joshua Slocum’s classic adventure story, “Sailing alone around the world,” which he wrote more than a hundred years ago. It resonated. That, and we were looking to up the adventure ante, so to speak. We wanted a bigger, more committing challenge, while we still had the chance. So we saved up. We crewed on other people’s boats. We compared boats for sale. And then, at the end of 2007, we boogied down to Mexico and bought a 40-foot boat for $60,000. It was, and still is, overwhelming.

We didn’t grow up sailing. (I spent a couple of weeks at a YMCA sailing camp when I was 12, dinking around on a tiny 14-foot Sunfish in the Potomac river.) None of our parents could tell a binnacle from a spinnaker, and until a couple of years ago, neither could any of us. But we’ve adventured in every other way, and developed strong technical climbing, mountaineering, and canyoneering skills. We’re hoping that the time we’ve spent tied to opposite ends of a rope, pushing ourselves physically, in uncomfortable conditions, out in the middle of nowhere, will prove relevant. We’re banking on it, actually.

Our sailboat is named Syyzgy (Greek for “the alignment of stars”), and she’s a Valiant 40, a sturdy, ocean-going vessel that’s sort of the Land Rover of boats. Of course, inside her thick fiberglass hull, she had her share of janky hoses, scary wiring, corroded fasteners, chipped plastic, fatigued lines, scummed paint, mildewy corners, and broken parts. We’ve been fixing her up for almost a year now, doing all the work ourselves, learning as we go. Among other things, I’ve learned to repair fiberglass, such that I can drill a fist-sized hole in my boat and patch it and still sleep soundly onboard that boat. That seems like a victory to me.

I’ll be blogging about fixing up Syzygy here, and hope to reveal the nitty-gritty of self-reliant sailing rather than the dreamscape fantasies of luxury-class yachting: stories about settling into a new pursuit, dealing with setbacks (mechanical, personal, financial), and working steadily, realistically, toward pursuing a wild dream — everything that goes into planning an adventure of this magnitude.

-JW

***

{200 Holes in the Deck and Counting – 4/8/09}

Our neighbor Greg walked over the other morning and asked what we were up to. Matt had strung up an extension cord on the deck, and had out two grinders, a drill, a hole saw, a shop-vac, a face mask, a respirator, a pencil, a ruler, an awl, and a hammer. Greg’s got a certain perspective on our goings-on, perhaps better than our own. His forty-foot barge, which he converted to a graphic-design studio, has huge windows, affording him a fine view of Syzygy and the mess about her deck. He must have known that something big was about to happen. (How he manages to work while we operate power tools all day is beyond me.)

“We’re adding four more windows,” I said.

“If you cut any more holes in your boat, there won’t be a boat left anymore,” he said.

It was funny because it was so true. In the last few months, Matt and I have drilled more than 200 holes in Syzygy’s deck, from tiny quarter-inch holes to a giant two-by-ten-foot rectangle. As we like to joke, cutting holes in our boat is what we do best.

I should explain: the deck is sandwich-like, in that it’s made of two layers of fiberglass with a layer of balsa wood in between. This design has its ups and downs. One down is that if you apply a lot of force, it’s not too hard to squish the sandwich, which weakens it. Another down is that if you drill through the sandwich and don’t seal the hole just right, water that leaks in ends up rotting the balsa wood (further reducing the deck’s strength) before it leaks all the way into the boat. (It’s strange, but if you have a leak, you want it to actually leak.) And the biggest down: after 31 years, most of the holes in Syzygy’s deck aren’t sealed just right anymore. You can tell by the little rust circles around every screw.

So the proper, by-the-book way to drill a hole through our deck is to drill a much bigger hole than you need, and then use a router bit to scoop out some of the balsa wood around the hole. Then you put a piece of tape on the bottom of the hole, and pour in a big glob of thickened epoxy, which is about as thick as peanut butter and about as strong as, well, modern plastics. Then, once the epoxy hardens, you drill a hole through the middle of it. This accomplishes two things: it provides some support for the deck (like the little plastic thingy that keeps the pizza box from collapsing all over the top of the pizza), and it protects the soft, wooden core of the deck from rotting if water leaks through the hole.

There’s no shortage of things screwed through the deck: a dozen stanchions (A.K.A. fence-posts around the edge); a five-inch chimney flu; hardware for flying the spinnaker; the life raft cradle; the dingy cradle; the fairleads (pulleys) that keep our lines in order; our new rope clutches; nine chainplates that keep the rigging tight; and two 10-foot tracks that the jib cars slide along. As you probably guessed, not one of these was things was installed by-the-book. Boat builders just don’t do that. As you probably also guessed, we’re changing that. It’s just one of many modifications we’re doing to beef up Syzygy for a circumnavigation.

That morning, Matt was starting a project that he’d been scheming up for a while: letting more light into Syzygy’s cabin. (Medium-sized holes, this time.) Jon was all for it; I’d spent months objecting on aesthetic grounds. I thought Syzygy would lose her classic look with additional windows, as a brick colonial would with asymmetric modern flourishes. I argued that, if anything, we should paint the interior white, to brighten up the dark, wooden cabin, as another Valiant owner has done. Finally, I consented. Why? Because I know Matt has higher standards than me in almost all regards, and figured he’d fix up whatever mess he made. Be my guest, I thought.

By the time Matt actually began cutting into Syzygy’s deck, I’d started cutting a different hole, just forward of the cockpit. I was cutting out an index-card-sized chunk of plywood beside the companionway (A.K.A. door), so that I could install a metal backing plate under a new rope clutch for two of the lines that run to the spinnaker. I had foam earplugs in, because the oscillating saw is loud in small spaces. Halfway though, Matt, up on deck, started using the variable-speed grinder, which is easily the most dangerous tool we regularly use, on account of its size and also because Matt removed the guard. The next 20 seconds were dramatic. Because I was squatted halfway inside and halfway outside the boat, I heard the roar of the grinder all around me. It was disconcerting – partly because I thought I had been making a racket, and Matt’s racket was even louder, but more so because Matt seemed to be destroying even more of the boat than I was.

Moments later, Matt, with a look of grave concern, put down the grinder, ran past me, opened up the port cockpit locker, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and ran back to where he’d been. Thin wisps of smoke were seeping out of the slice he’d cut through the boat — and he was worried that the balsa wood core was on fire. So goes using the grinder: it’s such a powerful tool that it’s easy to cause severe unexpected damage. A few days later, I’d have my own grinder-related accident.

Matt poured a glass of water on the seam and declared the situation resolved. The wood hadn’t been burning so much as smoldering, and there wasn’t much he could do to prevent that. I suspect that Matt’s reaction was essentially instinctive. Ripping a hole through a perfectly good boat already went against every nerve in his body; and ignoring signs of a fire went against thousands of years of evolution. It would have been impossible not to respond.

An hour later, Matt had cut a 6″ x 16″ hole — a rectangle with rounded corners — out of the side of the cabin top, and, unfinished as it was, it looked promising. From inside the boat, the difference was immediately apparent. Light streamed into the cabin, illuminating the large forward bulkhead. Outside, Matt traced the position of the windowpane (a 1/2″-thick piece of tinted acrylic) on the cabin top, and then held it in place. I realized I’d erred in being so cautious. The new window was, in sailing lingo, Bristol, as in “ship shape and Bristol fashion,” a classic Britishism for what in America we’d simply call “spiffy” or “sharp.” We were so encouraged by the window that we spent every minute of the next few days cutting out three more holes and installing three more.

Greg had mentioned that a big weather system was headed our way, but we chose to ignore the information. On Monday we cut the holes and cored the edges. On Tuesday, as the barometer began falling, we filled the edges with epoxy and sanded them smooth and square. I got a bit antsy, and resorted to what Matt called “strong-arm tactics” to remove some stubborn pieces of plywood. I didn’t want any hangups — standard operating procedure for boat work — to delay us.

By Wednesday the project became a race against the clock. Rain was forecast that evening, and rain + three large holes in the deck = not Bristol. That morning, as I painted the first coat of white paint on the edges, light clouds appeared on the western horizon. By 11am, after the third coat of paint had dried and the holes had been taped up (for applying silicon), wispy clouds were flying by. By 1pm, Matt and I had fastened the first window. Getting 18 washers, lock washers, and nuts on 18 nearly inaccessible bolts had required surgical precision with needle-nose pliers, and demanded patience. By 2pm, when a cold front swept through, we almost had the second window done. At 3pm, low, grey, mammatus clouds appeared, and the skies appeared ready to open up. We finished installing the 3rd window at 3:36pm — enthralled that we’d eked out a win. Matt figured the rain would arrive within two hours. I thought maybe three.

We opened up a bottle of Chimay to celebrate, then turned on some reggae, and spent the rest of the afternoon tinkering with small projects inside the boat until the alcohol rendered further progress impossible.

I awoke to hard rain, and spent a few fuzzy minutes observing the water on the hatch three feet over my head. Ovoid droplets collected into small puddles and then slid off, always along the same invisible route. Adjusting my focus, I saw the mast and spreaders pointing up, crucifix-like, into a gray sky.

I got up, and first thing examined our new windows, to check for leaks. All were dry except one. On the aft, starboard window, a small puddle had formed on the bottom edge. I’ll be honest; what I thought was: oh crap. I examined the rest of the window, and discovered a drop hanging from the fiberglass six inches above the puddle. The new window was waterproof; it’s just that in the process of exposing more parts of the boat, I’d discovered another leak that had thus far gone undetected. And that’s how it goes: you just barely finish one project, and have barely enough time to revel in your achievement, when another announces itself. Typical.

–JW

***

{San Francisco’s Wind – 4/15/09}

Let’s talk about wind a bit.

It can be anabolic or katabatic; barotropic or baroclinic; convergent or divergent; cyclonic or anticyclonic; veering or backing. One can measure its fetch, frontogenesis, and frontolysis, as well as its force on the Beaufort scale. On April 12, 1934, an anemometer on top of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington measured it moving at 231 miles per hour — the highest ever recorded. We understand that a 15-knot wind blowing all day will create waves five feet high, and that a 40-knot wind blowing for two days will create waves 33-feet high. We refer to it in various forms with terms like squall, breeze, gust, typhoon, gale, monsoon, and zephyr — words that are of Scandinavian, Spanish, Norse, Cantonese, Old English, Arabic, and Greek origins, respectively. We’re even familiar with the name for the place where there is none: the doldrums.

If, upon contact, a wind freezes with your beard or hair, it’s called a Barber. Off of South Africa, it’s called the Doctor, or a Bull’s Eye. North of New Guinea, it’s called a Warm Braw, near Santa Barbara, it’s called a Sundowner, in Southern Australia, it’s called a Brickfielder or a Cock-eyed Bob, and in parts of Alaska, it’s called a Turnagain. In New England there are Nor’easters, in New Zealand there are Nor’westers, in Texas there are Northers, and when that last wind reaches Mexico, it becomes known as a Norte.

An Arabic wind, the Mezzar-ifoullousen, translates to “that which plucks the fowls,” while a Spanish wind, the Descuernacabras, translates to “the wind that dehorns goats.” Don’t mistake it for its more blustery brother, the Matacabras,. That one actually kills goats. The Chocolatero (a Mexican wind) is so named because it’s dusty brown, the Harmattan (Arabic) because it’s blood-red, and the Haizebeltza (Spanish) because it’s black. The Melteme (Greek) is “bad tempered,” the Simoom (Arabic) is “poison,” the Tebba (Turk) is “feverish.”

Most of the names of Mediterranean winds sound like Shakespeare characters or prescription drugs: Borasco, Etesian, Gregale, Levanter, Leveche, Maestro, Mistral, Tramontana, Vardarac, Sirocco, Austru, Datoo, Ghibli, Xlokk.

Half of the winds in North America are Native American: Chinook, Squamish, Taku, Knik, Matanuska, Pruga, Stikine, Shawondasee. The other half have Spanish names: Santa Ana, Diablo, Mono, Papagayo, Bayamo, Brisote, Chubasco, Coromell, Cordonazo. This is the New World, indeed.

As you head down the east coast of South America, you’ll encounter Abroholos (Brazil), Suestados (Uruguay), Kolawaiks (northern Argentina), Pamperos (Southern Argentina), and Williwaws (in the Strait of Magellan).

In Africa you might find Haboob, Harmattan, Leste, Shamal, and Sharki winds; and in the Pacific you’ll find Barat, Brubu, Churada, Kona, Pali, Sumatra, Hayate.

Here in San Francisco, where there’s a regular onshore wind and plenty of it, the wind is nameless. Diablos — offshore foehn winds, carrying warm, dry air down canyons (Northern California’s equivalent of Santa Anas) — will sometimes blow in from the east, but what of the strong western wind that gets funneled through the Golden Gate? I hereby submit the name Fogger.

Twenty-five knots is standard fare for a Fogger. In 1835, Foggers made tacking out of the Bay a three-day affair for Richard Henry Dana, aboard the 87-foot Pilgrim. (Old boats couldn’t sail nearly as close to the wind as today’s can). Foggers, combined with strong currents and heavy shipping traffic, make San Francisco the most challenging place to sail in the country. They also keep the Coast Guard busy. The Coast Guard’s San Francisco unit conducts more search-and-rescue missions than any other — almost 3,000 each year. Every time we’ve gone out sailing, we’ve heard this transmission, on channel 16 of the VHF radio, at least once: “This is Coast Guard Sector San Francisco. What is your location and the nature of your distress?”

There are scores of books on shipwrecks, their scopes ranging from a hemisphere to an ocean to a bay. There’s a at least one book on shipwrecks for every state with more than 20 miles of Atlantic or Pacific coastline, and more than a few books on the shipwrecks of Florida and the Great Lakes. There’s also one on Cape Cod, New York City, Boston, the Juan de Fuca strait, the Florida Keys, and the mouth of the Columbia river. The only shipwreck book in this country not yet written is on those of Kansas. But the book that covers the smallest geographic area, and the shortest history, is the book about shipwrecks right here, at the Golden Gate. The wind and the water teem here.

The San Francisco Bulletin, in 1868, described the dangers: “The greatest number of disasters converge upon a few points — Mile Rock, Arch Rock, Little Alcatraz, South Bight, Fort Point and point Reyes, seem to have been the most fatal places.” It continued, “Every vessel leaving the port must either beat out of the harbor or take a tug. A considerable number of accidents have occurred in later years in beating out. Vessels have been either caught in an eddy, or missed stays, or both mishaps have occurred at the same time.”

Last year, a winter storm brought gusts of 70 knots, prompting officials to temporarily ban trucks and buses from crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. That was unusual. A few months earlier, three friends who were just finishing a circumnavigation on board the 44-foot SohCahToa stopped by, en route to Seattle. The winds then were not unusual. They sailed in through the Gate, hung out for a few days, and sailed back out. They said that was the most wind they experienced on their whole trip. Right here.

Matt and I went out on Saturday with a few friends, and as usual, had way too much sail up. Syzygy’s rail was buried in the water, the whole boat heeled over 40 degrees. By the time we’d furled the jib, hoisted the staysail, and put a reef in the mainsail, my hat had blown away. That’s the Foggers. Let’s just say we’re getting some good practice.

-JW

***

{On Jankiness – 4/22/09}

Over the last few months, Matt and Jon and I have taken great pride in removing most of the final janky parts from the boat. You could say that’s how we prioritized our refitting projects: by endeavoring to eliminate jankiness. Whenever we discovered a severely corroded wire or a screw that had rusted into a pile of dust or a cracked and pathetically brittle hose or a rotten piece of wood, we’d throw the offending part onto the cabin floor, and yell, “Jank removed!” It’s amazing how much shit was crammed into a 40-foot boat. We took immense pride in casting off such crap, and in bringing Syzygy up to 2009 standards. That was the first stage of boat repair, and we’re largely through with it, thank god, because my tolerance for jankiness has bottomed out.

I used to get giddy with envy when I met people just starting to work on their old boats, enthralled by the great big exciting project that lay ahead. I was jealous of Gary, a bearded guy my age who I met four months ago on the way back from the grocery store. He was the happy new owner of a 1972 Columbia 28, which he bought at auction for $1600. What a deal! As Gary started laying out his plans, I realized that he’d bought a huge bag of mysteries and problems. The same went for Loren, who bought a Catalina 27 for $3,000 over the summer. Fantastic, I had thought. Then Loren invited Matt and I sailing, and after a brief pre-sail inspection, we were concerned enough with his boat’s condition that we brought along a handheld VHF radio just in case it sunk beneath us.

Then there was Edwin, a hearty Irishman I met on the dock a few months ago. He had the deep, booming voice of an opera singer — a voice that echoed inside his lungs before escaping. He was the proud owner of what was easily the marina’s most dilapidated boat, which gave me a headache just to think about. It had huge bare patches on the hull, a vegetable garden growing on the rudder, a wall-o-barnacles on the dinghy, worn, gray sails, and seriously corroded rigging — and that’s just what was casually visible. Below deck it was a disaster zone. I tried to peek in, and saw stuff strewn everywhere. Edwin justified it by saying he was divorced, and entitled to make his own mess. He also said he’d invite me on board when he cleared it up a bit. (This never happened). When he referred to a transmission as a “tranny” and a two-cylinder engine as a “two-banger” he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but when he claimed that within two months he’d have his jank-ridden boat fixed up and be sailing south to Mexico, his words became just words again. I’ll believe it when I see it (he and his boat are up at a boatyard in Berkeley), and in the meantime, I don’t care to think about it.

These days, gladly, we’re largely through with the jank-removal stage, and the few remaining janky bits are hearty stragglers indeed, hiding away in deep, unexplored recesses of our boat. A few weeks ago, I threw away the framed pastel watercolor painting of a sailboat that had been hung on the forward cabin bulkhead for so long that the wood beneath it was noticeably darker. Finally, I decreed that the time had come. As I threw the tacky artwork into the pile-o-jank, I almost declared it the “greatest piece of jank removed from Syzygy,” but caught myself, and rightfully so, because Matt and I just spent two days tearing out the craptastic 30-year-old insulation in the fridge, and what a laugh that was. Expecting a six-pack to stay cold in our fridge was like expecting a windbreaker to suffice in the Arctic. We filled up a few trash bags with the thin, cruddy foam and fiberglass, then swept up, and reveled briefly in our sailboat sanctuary, slowly coming along as it is, feeling the glory that shines only upon purists or perfectionists or masochists. You choose.

-JW

***

{A Little Metallurgical History – 4/30/09}

A hundred years ago, right around the time Joshua Slocum disappeared at sea, much of the country was busy bickering about steel. Train tracks were breaking — cracking, fracturing, fissuring, etc. — and derailed trains, the hazard of the day, were a hot topic. “Amazing Increase in Broken Rails,” announced a typical headline in an April, 1907 story in the New York Times.

From 1902 to 1904, 1,450 derailments in the US killed 184 people. Track failure rates, and casualties, peaked in 1907, and five years later they weren’t much lower. For each year over most of the next decade, 500 derailments, and 50 deaths, was about average.

The steel industry said it wasn’t their fault, but rather, the railroads’. It said the railroads were using trains that were too heavy (carrying too much cargo, or too many passengers), and going too fast (employing engines too large, taking turns too hard), on badly-shaped wheels. It said the railroads were being stingy, not buying heavy-enough rails. Of course, rail was sold by weight.

The railroad companies, and most engineers, said it was much simpler. As Scientific American put it, the problem was a “ring of steelmakers who make bad rails.” More specifically, the problem was bad steel.

Early specifications had dictated the chemistry of railroad steel, but high-grade ore was becoming scarce and expensive. Phosphorous content crept from .08% up above .10%, to the dismay of many builders. Carbon content crept up, too — making the steel stronger, but more brittle. Some steel companies added vanadium, aluminum, or titanium. To save money, others rolled their rails at higher temperatures. And when threatened, steel makers refused to comply with older specs.

Typically, investigations — private and public — followed. Pennsylvania lines began collecting failure statistics by manufacturer. Harriman lines, which began its own analysis in 1907, found that newer, heavier rails had the highest failure rates. Investigating a wreck on the Central of Georgia line, the Interstate Commerce Commission declared the track “deplorable.” An engineer from the American Railway Engineering Association (AREA) described production methods and steel quality of utmost importance. All of this led the New York Times to editorialize, “the manufacturers squirt molten steel upon a railroad… take their pay at $28 a ton, and expect their careless product to serve its purpose.”

All of this is in Mark Aldrich’s thorough railroad history, “Death Rode the Rails,” which is fascinating if, like me, you care to dork out when you get the chance. And here’s how I got the chance: I was up in Berkeley, at Bowlin Equipment Co. this afternoon, buying some stainless steel bolts for the boat, when Larry, the owner, asked me if I wanted to see something “really cool.”

Bowlin is my single favorite place we regularly go to get supplies, and here’s why: there are three employees and only three employees, always; there’s a bowl of Tootsie Rolls and Jolly Ranchers on the counter, and a pot of coffee; and they still do business with hand-written invoices and an old-fashioned, carbon-copy, non-electronic credit-card machine. It’s the kind of place where people walk in, dump their obscure projects on the counter, and say, “I need one of these,” and go home happy. Larry and his crew are experts — more familiar with fasteners than you’d believe is possible — and they always have the parts in stock. No, they don’t sell rivets. Just fasteners.

The last time Larry told me about something really cool, it was a five-minute video about how nuts and bolts are manufactured, and I thought it was awesome. So my answer was obvious.

-”Well, yeah” I said at the same time as Matt. This is, by the way, the best thing about going to such shops: you actually learn stuff. Actually, it’s the best thing about fixing up an old boat: you learn more than you ever, ever, thought possible about the simplest things.

Larry produced a singe piece of paper, titled “Fastener Test Report.” It was a structural analysis of a 5/8″ hex bolt, full of the information that we’ve always wondered about. We have, after all, purchased at least a thousand nuts, bolts, screws, and washers in the course of fixing up Syzygy, and sometimes the purchases made sense, and sometimes they didn’t. What size bolt ought we buy? What pitch? What type of metal? What’s the difference anyway, and why, and how can you tell?

The Fastener Test Report was produced by Infasco, a manufacturer eager to demonstrate that it makes quality fasteners, all marked with a little equilateral triangle on the head. Hence the test results: four bolts, out of a batch of 9,800, were tested until they failed, revealing a tensile strength of between 167,000 and 170,000 psi (or 42,752 lbs), a surface hardness between 56.7 and 58.2, and a Rockwell core harness between 35.5 and 36.6. Furthermore, a heat chemical analysis revealed that the bolts contained .35% carbon, .67% manganese, .007% phosphorous, .019% sulfur, .22% silicon, and .86% chromium. Because the bolts had been tempered above 900 degrees, and oil quenched, and contained no visual discontinuities, they were deemed to comply in all respects with these specs: SAE J-429 (grade 8) and ASME B18.2.1.

All that, when a couple of numbers, courtesy of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) would have sufficed. That and a library shelf of exceedingly intricate, expensive, unsexy reference volumes.

But that’s how I got back to the railroads and steel companies at the turn of the century: I started digging into the specs and industrial standards, and it was in that era that the standards organizations arose.

The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) was formed in 1898 (while Slocum was off sailing the Spray) and the American Railway Engineering Association (AREA), which proposed industry-wide testing and quality-control standards for steel manufacturing, was formed in 1899. The National Board of Standards was formed in 1901 (the same year as British Standards) and was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1903.

Why the huge impetus? Because in addition to the broken rails and derailments and deaths, electrical instruments couldn’t be calibrated, and because people measured a gallon eight different ways. Fire hydrants connected to fire hoses with more than 600 different couplings, rendering most fire departments unable to help others. Engineers building on the Washington Monument didn’t know what type of cable to use for the elevators, the Government Printing Office didn’t know what type of ink to use, and the military didn’t know what type of fuel to use in planes. The time had come.

Within a generation, derailments and related accidents dropped to a third of what they had been. And more importantly for me and my boat, thanks to such standards organizations, a whole bunch of specs on the various grades of stainless steel have been codified, making the metal magic slightly less mysterious

Stainless steel is a misnomer. It rusts. It corrodes. It just stains LESS than other metals. It’s also called Inox or CRES (for Corrosion REsistant Steel). Sometimes I think they should just call it CostMore Steel.

Like whiskey, not all blends of stainless steel are created equal, even though the guys at Home Depot would have you believe as much. There are a handful of common blends, dozens of lesser known types, and more than a hundred more known by specialists. Silverware and sinks, for example, are made of 304 stainless steel. Syringes and railings on boats are made of 316 stainless steel, which is also known as “food grade,” “medical grade,” and “marine grade.”Can you guess which name fetches the highest price?

That which we call a rose by any other name does indeed smell as sweet. 304 stainless steel is actually the designation given to it by SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers). The ISO (International Organization for Standards) calls it A2. BSI (British Standards) calls it 304S 18. ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) calls it S30400. JIS (the Japanese standard) calls is SUS 304. DIN (the German standard) calls it X5CrNi18-10. It’s also known as 18-8 stainless steel, because in addition to iron, it’s made of 18% chromium and 8% nickel. It’s also got .08% carbon, 2% manganese, .75% silicon, .045% phosphorous, .03% sulfur, .1% nitrogen. Got that?

Most stainless steel bolts are made in Italy or Switzerland, while most bronze bolts are made in Pennsylvania, and most mild steel bolts are made in Ohio, or Indiana, or Taiwan, or China. Stainless steel is not magnetic. Stainless steel bolts are cold-forged; nuts are hot-forged. 316 stainless steel is more corrosion resistant than 304 thanks to 2% molybdenum, but it is slightly weaker (and more expensive). And 316L — which has 1/5 the carbon — is more suitable for welding. Expect to pay even more for it, though.

One can learn to decipher the text on the head of a bolt without too much trouble. Bolts made by Lake Erie are marked with a little LE on the head; bolts made bu Nucor have a little n on the head. THE designates a Taiwanese company, not a definite article. Radial hatch marks on the head indicate a bolt’s strength, according to SAE specs. No marks is grade 2 (standard), 3 marks is grade 5 (automotive); 6 marks is grade 8 (construction). The grades matter: a grade 2 1/4″ bolt can safely hold 1,500lbs; while a grade 8 bolt of the same size can safely hold twice as much. In bigger bolts, the difference is more dramatic. A 1.5″ grade 2 can hold 52,200lbs, while a grade 8 can hold 189,700lbs.

Or look at it this way: Our 40-foot boat weighs 22,000lbs. To suspend her from a crane, you could safely use a 1.25″ grade 2, a 3/4″ grade 5, or a 5/8″ grade 8 bolt. I have no preference. And that’s allowing for a margin of error, too: a fastener’s “clamp load” is 75% of its “proof load,” and the proof load — the load under which a fastener deforms — is still less than its breaking load.

There’s lots more… a scary amount more… no end to it, really. Larry was right: this stuff is really cool.

-JW

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SUMMARY

Awesome the cat is a rugged beast who roams the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC, particularly Kilbourne and 18th streets. He has exceptionally thick black fur, with white spots on his feet, chest, and stomach. His whiskers are unrivaled, his tail is elephantine, and his dreadlocks approach Bob Marley’s in quality. He has never lived indoors, or used a litter box, or been bathed. He eats with his fingers, and licks his chops. He reacts to catnip much in the way that Marion Barry reacted to crack. He’ll eat canned cat food, but he prefers barbecued meats. He regularly catches squirrels and birds. He sleeps where he feels like it. He doesn’t take crap from anybody. He is a manly, rugged cat, even if he doesn’t have balls anymore.

Awesome the cat is also, behind the furry veneer, an exceedingly friendly animal. He is a neighborhood socialite, snubbing nobody. He’ll follow you for blocks. His meow is one of greeting, not one of whining. He’s an extrovert, and likes shoving his tail up your shorts or attacking your foot. He’s not all goth and creepy and reclusive and Unabomber psycho like some cats. Awesome is awesome.

AWESOME’S STORY:

Awesome was just a small, gender-neutral un-named furball when Jonny Waldman found him on December 29, 2005. This was at the Columbia Rd./Calvert St. gas station, where Jonny had stopped to fill up his tires. Awesome (then un-named) climbed out of a stack of tires, and inspected the inside Jonny’s Nissan like he owned it. It was a warm day. Jonny asked the gas station attendant about the lineage of the nascent beast, and was informed that the cat had been left there, abandoned. So Jonny adopted it, and brought it home. The next day, Jonny walked up to Petco, on Connecticut Ave., and paid $8 to have Awesome’s name etched into a small metal tag.

YOUTH, AND GENDER REVELATION

Less than two weeks later, big news reverberated around Mt. Pleasant. Here’s the original news announcement:

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VET DISCOVERS BALLS; AWESOME IS A BOY!

Jan 12, 2006 — Washington, DC — Shock! Disbelief! Insanity! Two weeks after being adopted and brought back to life, Awesome, and his/her/its true identity, has at last been revealed by a medical expert — and it’s not what anybody thought.

According to an unnamed, undescribable veterinarian at the DC Humane Society, Awesome the cat has two awesome tiny cat-sized testicles hidden somewhere amid his thick black fur, making him a full-fledged member of the male club.

Soon after Awesome’s balls were discovered, they were surgically removed, though, prompting calls from Mr. Milton Ballsman, the president of Washington’s Male Club Local Union 43, to deny membership status to Awesome.

Mr. Ballsman, though, retracted his statement after Jonny5, Awesome’s awesome owner, threatened to remove Mr. Ballsman’s balls if anyone so much as thought of messing with Awesome.

Employees at the DC Humane Society, overhearing Jonny5’s awesome threat to protect Awesome and Awesome’s awesome status as a male, cried out in support of Jonny5.

“Word up!,” one said.

“That’s awesome for Awesome,” said another.

“Meow,” chimed in Awesome.

And then, while nobody was looking, the unnamed veterinarian hung TBTFBTA (The Balls That Formerly Belonged To Awesome) from the rear-view mirror of his 1996 Toyota Camry, and sped off towards the Maryland suburbs.

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FELINE ADOLESCENCE:

Over the next seven months, Awesome thrived under Jonny’s care at 3161 18th St. Awesome grew furrier, and dreadlockier, and learned to fetch sticks. He learned how to antagonize the two huge dogs next door, while avoiding their wrath. He learned how to peek into the kitchen, and how to climb up onto the roof. His popularity grew, even though he never joined Facebook or Myspace. He humped every female cat in the neighborhood, and never wore a condom, and never fathered any offspring. Awesome was a party animal, and was a key part of the Triumvirate of Awesomeness, the other two elements of which were a Keg of YuengLing and a barbecue grill fashioned out of a 55-gallon steel drum. As always, Awesome didn’t restrain his awesomeness.

ALLEGED ABANDONMENT:

In July of 2006, Jonny moved to San Francisco, and left Awesome under the care of his neighbors at 3159 Kilbourne St. Awesome would have liked San Francisco, and Jonny wishes he could have brought Awesome to the west coast, but Awesome would not have fared well during a month-long stop in Wyoming, a land of much larger, furrier, ruggeder, more carnivorous beasts. So it was with great sadness that Jonny said so long to Awesome. “Keep on being awesome, Awesome,” he said.

BLATANT FALSEHOODS

Contrary to the opinions of some softer, wussier cat-owners:

*Awesome the cat would not “be happier indoors.”

*Awesome the cat would not be “happier without all those dreadlocks.”

*Awesome the cat does not “need to see a vet.”

*Awesome the cat has not “been abandoned.”

Additionally, a statement on one neighborhood forum attesting to Awesome the cat’s age (”this has been his home for almost a decade”) is untrue, unless 3.5 years equals “almost a decade.”

Furthermore, the statement “he was left behind by his irresponsible previous human” is both syntactically weird and unsubstantiated. First, “Previous human” suggests that Jonny was once, but is no longer, a human. This is not the case. Jonny hasn’t forsaken the species, and still has balls. And while “irresponsible” may be a suitable description for Jonny, it is unsubstantiated in this case, as Jonny carefully arranged for Awesome’s care after his departure. If anything, bringing Awesome to Wyoming to get devoured by a coyotoe/moose/bear would have been irresponsible. Last but not least, Jonny is not Awesome’s human anymore than Awesome is Jonny’s cat. Jonny believes that you East coasters gotta stop getting all possessive about relationships like that, loosen up a bit, maybe smoke a little bit of crack if that’s what it takes.