Don't Screw Up!

Schooner in fog, Cutler, Maine

Sometimes the biggest danger in cruising is the stupidity of the captain. Like when we sailed into Cutler, Maine, and entered the harbor in a dense fog without radar (and of course no GPS—this was in 1985). After two days and nights of idyllic sailing across the Bay of Maine, we reached Cutler about noon with the fog so thick we couldn't see more than a few boat lengths in any direction. What I should have done is contact a local fishing or lobster boat and have them lead us into the harbor. But what I did was station Angie on the bow, listening for the bell buoy that marked the entrance to the harbor, and forged ahead as she directed. We made it into the harbor, where the fog blanket ended. Looking back, we could see the giant rocks on all sides that we had miraculously missed foundering on. Neptune was kind to us that day.

I'm not sure I want to tell you about all of the stupid things I've done aboard boats, but here's one that wasn't too serious and which ended up with a good result. We were heading for an anchorage at the Niantic Yacht Club in Connecticut, off Long Island Sound. To get to it we had to go up the Niantic River past a railroad trestle and through a swinging bridge. As we entered the river, I slowed Escapade because I couldn't see around a bend of the river to where the bridge was. Suddenly I noticed that the boat was being swept by a stiff current toward the pilings of the railroad trestle and we were in danger of being pinned. I gunned the engine and we made it through the bridge, which had just swung open.

After the bridge, the river broadened out in a wide expanse, but there was only a narrow winding channel with water deep enough for Escapade. We proceeded up the channel with Angie on the bow sighting the channel markers. Suddenly she indicated that the channel made a sharp turn to the left. But directly ahead I saw sailboats anchored and two rows of buoys leading to them. “I think this is a short cut, I called to her. “No,” she called back, “the channel goes this way!” But I took the short cut. Suddenly the depthsounder plunged and the boat came to a stop. We were aground.

OK, the drill when you go aground—especially in soft mud like this—is to put an anchor in the dinghy, along with lots of line, run it out in the direction you want to go, set the anchor, and then try to pull the boat free by hauling on the anchor. It's called kedging. I tried winching the anchor line in, while Angie gunned the motor and swung the tiller back and forth. The boat didn't budge. A guy came by in a canoe and offered to help. “Maybe if I hang on the end of the boom, it will heel the boat over enough to help it break free,” he said. “Won't hurt to try,” I answered. Then a couple of young guys in a launch with a big outboard came up and offered to help. I was throwing them an anchor line and securing it to the mast, when a warden came up, his blue light flashing. He was right inbetween us and the boat that was trying to help. “Tides going out,” he said, helpfully. “Better just stay there until it comes back in and you float free.” Then he took off. Wait until the middle of the night and the next high tide was just what we didn't want to do. So I gave the signal to our two young helpers, and they started to pull on the line. The line stretched tight—then gave way with a bang. Luckily I had a brand new, spare anchor line, which I broke out to replace the old one. Again they hauled, Angie swung the rudder back and forth, the canoeist hung from the end of the boom, and I gunned the engine. Suddenly Escapade broke free and shot across the channel like she had been shot out of a slingshot. Luckily, Angie got her headed up the channel before she went aground again on the other side.

An hour later, we were safely anchored in the yacht club anchorage, and Angie was sitting on the cabin top fuming. She was silent, and when Angie is silent, I know I'm in deep _____. “I hate this place,” she said. “The only reason I'd ever want to come back here is if you proposed to me.” I knew I was in trouble. In a few moments I came up out of the cabin with two gin and tonics in my hands, sat down next to her, and said, “OK, will you marry me?” She began beating on me and yelling “Don't play with my mind!” But I was serious. I didn't want to lose the best first mate I was likely ever to find. And so it happens that 27 years later we're getting ready to embark on another sailing adventure together. Oh, and the “short cut” channel markers? They were lobster trap buoys.

"The best first mate I was likely to find" guiding Escapade up the East River, NYC

 

 

 

 

The First Mate Speaks: Take 2

Angie Modeling Scarf for Nile Styles

When we lived aboard Escapade we had to learn a lot of new things about sailing and anchoring in tidal waters, but the technology was fairly simple. We had a LORAN, which would tell us our location within a quarter of a mile, a depth sounder, and a compass. Now we will have radar, GPS, a chartplotter—all new technology that we will both have to master, a mast so tall that we will have to duck when going under bridges on the intracoastal, huge sails twice as big as those on Escapade, a windlass to raise and lower the anchor, refrigeration, propane gas oven, generator, inverter—the list goes on and on. It's a different ball game now, and I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it.
At 42 feet, Outrageous is a lot longer and heavier than Escapade, a mere 30 feet long. So this summer we will be practicing and learning in the Chesapeake, sailing out of Annapolis, home of the U.S. Naval Academy. When I was younger, I thought if I ever joined the service, it would be the navy, and now I'll be sailing in their waters. 

  

As we prepare for this adventure, my life is already beginning to change. The second most difficult thing for me to do was to give up my job at the U of M Medical School working with medical students and residents. I loved the job that I had been doing for eight years, and there were tears in my eyes when I resigned. The most difficult decision was to give up our Sophie, our 17 year old cat. Since her sister and littermate, Georgie, died four years ago, she has become much closer to us. I decided, though, that she was too old and set in her ways to go to sea. Fortunately, I found a new home for her with a really nice couple who love cats and who live on a lake. She will be able to look out on the water from her balcony, and that is the closest she will ever want to come to open water. I know that the new owners will take really good care of her, but I will still miss her terribly. When I'm sitting on the sofa and she hops up to cuddle next to me I begin to choke up thinking about it. She's been my entertainment and my buddy for seventeen years.

My Dream Hat at Fleur de Paris

If you know me, you know that I am fashion conscious and love hats, scarves, boots, shoes, hair fascinators, etc. Women travel from all over the world to buy custom made hats at Fleur de Paris, a shop in New Orleans. I bought one a year ago when we were in New Orleans, a summer hat, and had my eye on another one for winter. Jim secretly planned to buy it for me for Christmas, and when we were in New Orleans in December for our 27^th wedding anniversary he would have bought it for me. I'm sure Jim was amazed when I turned him down. I told him we could buy a new anchor for what the hat would cost. (My wedding presents to myself twenty-seven years ago were a 33 pound Bruce anchor and a rigging knife.) I think of what we have to buy for the boat—a life raft, perhaps a new motor for the dinghy, new cushions for the V-berth (forward cabin), a new anchor. . . and the list seems endless. What was I thinking when I yelled at Jim to come look at those photos of Small World?

The Final Step_Surveying Outrageous

The last step in our decision whether to buy Outrageous was to have her examined by a marine surveyor. In the event, this turned out to be Gale Browning of Hartoft Marine Survey. Gale has a fantastic history: she's sailed to nearly all points of the globe, raced a 22 foot boat across the Atlantic singlehanded, sailed her 65 foot schooner up the East Coast with her three children as crew, surviving a brush with a hurricane,  and took part in a cross country motorcycle tour undaunted by a broken foot when she "laid her bike down" on it.

We board the boat where she rests in her slip in Grover's backyard, and Gale starts by going over every inch of her deck with a mallet and moisture meter, looking for areas where the water might have permeated the hull.


















Gale insists on removing some cabinetry so she could get a better look at the engine




















Our broker, Richard Kahn, stands ready to guide the bow as we leave Grover's slip to head for the boatyard for the rest of the survey.

 Grover takes the helm as we head down the Severn River toward Annapolis.

Outrageous waits at the yard before backing into the hoist for to have her bottom inspected.

Grover and Jim look at the prop and prop shaft.

A few days after the survey was completed Gale sent us her report, a 40 some page document detailing everything that she had inspected. She gave the boat a good report, pronouncing it fully capable of coastal and bluewater (open ocean) sailing. She did, however, also give us a rather long list of things that we should give some attention to--ranging from a cracked faucet to sticky seacock valves, to the need for a ground fault interrupter in the AC wiring.  Almost everything on the list was minor and could be easily corrected.  A few things, like the need to replace the liferaft, would involve considerable expense. After a little renegotiation with Grover, we sent in the required paperwork (and the final payment). Outrageous became our boat and our future home!

The First Mate Speaks: Take 1

Several years back I came up with the idea of buying a lobster boat and converting it into a craft we could live aboard with our two cats, Georgie and Sophie. I envisioned us cruising the intracoastal waterway along the East Coast, and perhaps taking it to the Bahamas.

We've spent a lot of time on the East Coast, especially in Maine, taking photos, and a lot of that time was spent in harbors. I was always looking at boats and talking about going to sea again. So we began looking at lobster boats and trawlers. Lobster boats seemed too small to go cruising in. We looked at Grand Banks trawlers, but I didn't like the design, especially the high bridge from which you pilot the craft. I also had a hard time listening to the diesel and smelling the diesel fumes. Not my kind of life on the water. I did like the Nordic Tug; they seemed closer to sailboats, but still there was the diesel. Anyway, they were way out of our price range.

But every time we looked at boats, my eye would go to a Hinckley or some other beautiful sailboat. So why were we looking at power boats? We talked about motorsailers but I really don't like the design of that kind of boat—halfway between a true sailboat and a power boat.

About 5 years ago, Jim said that he thought he might be getting too old to go cruising on a sailboat. But ever since we spent the year on Escapade I've yearned to go to out to sea again. In my heart and soul, I am the Water Gypsy. So now, Jim has decided he's not so old, and I get to go “down to the sea again” with The Old Man of the Sea.

Outrageous

Outrageous at Grover's Dock

November 22

We went directly from the airport to visit Grover, owner of the Tayana 42, Outrageous, who kept the boat in a slip behind his house on a branch of the Chesapeake. Grover told us that if we bought the yacht we could keep her free in his slip while we got her ready for sailing in the spring and got used to her. That was a big attraction! What's more, he would spend as much time with us as we needed to learn everything we needed to know about the boat. This was a strong incentive, since Grover is a licensed captain who had worked for many years skippering large yachts and delivering boats all over the Atlantic Coast. He was the original owner of Outrageous, and though he is eighty years old and has two artificial knees, he was definitely capable of continuing the sailing life as long as he wished, but he and his young wife were running a business that ate up all of his time, so he had reluctantly decided to give up his sea home.

The boat was in beautiful condition, newly painted deep blue (a Hinckley color that appealed to Angie), and with a warm teak interior and many upgrades that a seagoing man (or woman) would think of to make a boat more comfortable and more seaworthy.

We spent the next two days looking at the other boats on our list, and several more to boot. They all looked good in the Yachtworld listings, but none matched up to Outrageous. They had worn teak decks that were going to need replacing soon at huge expense, or obvious structural flaws, or showed signs of neglect by their previous owners. Or they just didn't feel right inside.

There was one boat, a Valiant 40, listed with one of the brokers we talked to, that sounded like she might match up, but she was located in Florida. She had been completely rebuilt and re-outfitted by her owner, who apparently got more pleasure out of refurbishing yachts than he did sailing, since this is the third Valiant that he had done this to. She had a new engine, all new rigging, and was basically a new boat except for the hull. We went back two more times to see Outrageous. We debated whether to delay our decision until after a trip to Florida in February to see the Valiant. In the end, though, we decided that Grover as a resource outweighed some of the apparent advantages of the Valiant. Before we left Annapolis to catch our plane we called and made an offer, and after a little bargaining, it was accepted.

The next step in buying the boat was having her surveyed (like a contractor's inspection when you buy a house). We'll tell you about that later.

Grover at the helm

Nightmares!

The nightmares don't have to do with the scariness of buying a boat and deciding to take up the cruising life again after 27 years (or not all of them anyway).

These have to do with trying to deal with Google and its subsidiaries. (Google owns Blogspot, Blogger, Gmail, and GoDaddy web domain registration).

As you probably know, we've been having trouble getting notices about our blog entries to you. That  explains the emails with the convoluted directions. Well, it turns out that somehow our blog URL (www.fotogypsiesatsea.blogspot.com) got eamarked as SPAM, either by Google or by Comcast. So any email with the URL in it goes in the SPAM folder. We even had to  (still have to) fish your replies to us out of SPAM.  I called Comcast, and after about 17 hours on hold (you know what that is like), I was told that someone would look into it and that I would hear back in 72 hours.

In the meantime, I knew there was another way around the problem.  If we used our own domain name (in the URL above, fotogypsiesatsea is a subdomain and blogspot is the domain), we should be able to get around the spam problem.  That would be simply www.fotogypsiesatsea.com.  I sent us an email containing that url, and, Yep, it worked.  Blogspot invites you to use your private domain as host for the blog.  If it's an existing domain, like our fotogypsies.com,  it's a very complicated process. But they tell you how to create a new domain and supposedly your blog will automatically switch to it. This involves finding out if the domain name is available, and registering it with GoDaddy for ten bucks a year.  No problem. The domain name fotogypsiesatsea.com worked and we registered it. It's ours!

BUT, when I tried to go to it I got an error message--no page for that URL! Well, there's no way you can get tech support for a problem you have with any of Google's companies. They won't let you talk to a person.  They send you to a web page that cites common problems and you can search for the solution to yours, if you are lucky enough to find it. The solution to our problem was to go go to GoogleApps to register our domain name with Google (I thought I had already done that.) So I went to GoogleApps and was immediately asked to sign in with my user name and password. WTF was that?! I kept guessing, and trying different passwords that we commonly use, and nothing worked. So I found the link that said if you are having trouble signing in go here. So I clicked, and got a message that told me what my user name was (bloggeradmin--I never would have guessed) and said they would email me a link to change my password.

Well, after a while, I fished the email out of my SPAM folder and clicked on the link.  I got a page with one of those (I think they're called) CATCHA phrases--you know, the fuzzy, funny looking words that a computer, and most humans, can't read, that you type into a box to continue.  I typed in the CATCHA phrase, and was told they would send me another email with a link.  They did, I clicked, and got another CATCHA. This repeated a few times (you know what Einstein said about insanity--doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result). I felt like I was a rat in a maze, or a character in a Kafka novel.  I was ready to blow my stack!

Finally I did get a different email, and was able to check into the management page for fotogypsiesatsea.  I was told "You don't have any blogs yet."  Then I read that if I couldn't find my blog it might be because I had multiple accounts under different user names or connected to different email addresses. I knew there was a place on the management page for our original blog where you can add or change a domain name. I just needed to get there!   I knew how to do that.  I went to the blog and up in the upper righthand corner there is a sign-in button.  I clicked on it and it took me--not to the control page for our blog but to the page I had just been on--the one that said I didn't have a blog!  I went around that track a few times. Then I figured out that I might be using the wrong email address (the primary email for the blog is a gmail address, of course). The trouble was my computer was remembering the sign-in process and automatically sending my sign-in info. Usually all I had to do was click on sign-in and I would be in the right place--but now it was the wrong place. Somewhow, I solved that problem (I'm not sure how) and got to my control page.

Ah, there is was.  Add new domain name. So I typed in our new domain name, fotogypsiesatsea.com, and here's one I was told.  You can't use that--someone else owns that domain. (Of course, I was the someone else!) Haven't solved that problem yet.

So that's why you've been getting the convoluted directions for getting to our blog. If any of you are web savvy enough to help us solve this problem, come to our rescue!

Our van La Gitana (the Gypsy) at

City of Rocks, New Mexico

The Search Resumes

November 21, 2012

We hadn't given up our dream of going back the cruising life. In fact, we began planning in earnest how we would raise the rest of the money we needed for buying a boat, manage renting out our house, and provide for our nearly 17 year old cat, Sophie. The last was going to be agonizingly difficult for us. We'd raised Sophie, along with her sister Georgie (for Georgina) from kittenhood and since Georgie had died a few years ago, Sophie had become much more attached to us, and we to her. But could we let our attachment to a pet prevent us from fulfilling a dream? We weren't sure how we were going to deal with that.

We forged ahead with our plans, selling La Gitana, our camper van that had taken us on joyful trips all around, Mexico, the Canadian maritimes, and the southern and western U.S. We held a yard sale to get rid of extra stuff and prepare our house for rental. And then we set about trying to find the right boat for us.

The internet makes shopping for a used boat easier than it used to be. There is a great website, Yachtworld, where brokers from all over the world list boats. You can set the parameters of your search however you like--type of boat, age, size, price range, even the area where you want to look. My first search came up with more than 30 pages of listings—a bewildering number of choices! Soon I learned to eliminate all of the lightweight plastic boats churned out for the charter trade—the Beneteaus, Jeneaus, Endeavors, and the like. Since each listing contained numerous pictures, with Angie's help I began narrowing down the search to boats which appealed to our aesthetic taste. We were both drawn to a classic look (remember the Hinckley?) and so not interested in the overly beamy boats with interiors outfitted like RV's which seemed to be designed more for sitting at the dock than for serious sailing. 

We soon found that there were a few boats, by a very few designers, that kept catching our eye—notably the Bristols and Valiants and a few others influenced by them. I made a list of all of the available boats along the east coast and in Florida, and we began comparing specs. This one has a centerboard (a long extension that can be lowered from the keel to give the boat better performance to windward). Did we really want that? This one only has a 30 gallon fuel tank—not enough for long range cruising. Then I began reading reviews, seeing what the experts had to say about the construction quality, seaworthiness, and live aboard comfort of each one. One important criterion was headroom. Since I am 6'2” tall, in some of the boats we liked in the 37 to 42 foot range that we were looking for, I would be bumping my head every time I turned around below decks.

We finally had a list of about a dozen boats that we thought might suit us. Most of them were located in New England, around Annapolis, Maryland, or in Florida. Since our search was taking place in late October and early November, most of the boats in New England had already been or were about to be hauled and winterized. We decided to begin looking at boats in Annapolis, thinking that we could take a winter vacation in Florida to look for boats there, maybe hitting Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia on the way.

I emailed the broker Richard Kahn in Annapolis and asked him about the headroom On Outrageous, a 42 foot Tayana listed in Yachtworld that had caught our attention. Some of the designers—and all of the yacht brokers we later talked to—were short people and didn't envision six foot plus sailors clunking their heads as they tried to navigate below decks. “I'll have the owner measure it,” he replied, and a little later the answer came back that it was 6'4”. Outrageous was on a list of seven or eight boats in the Annapolis area that we were interested in, so we called some brokers, set up appointments and booked our flight.