[Published on Outside's blog]

Love / War / Cult / Inspiration / Aesthetics

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{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

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{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.

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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.

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Wednesday, June 3

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

-JW