A Great Day!

Morning on Back Creek

Finally! We disconnected the umbilical cords (the two shore power cables, that is) released our dock lines, and headed for the bay!

We had adapted pretty well to this life on Back Creek. Too well. The longer we sat here at the dock, while Ted and his gang work on getting our problems sorted out, the more apprehensive we became about taking the boat out and actually sailing it. It didn't help that the last time we moved the boat, to have it hauled out for installing some of out new navigational equipment, I managed to turn the wheel the wrong way, driving us into the end of the dock and scraping a bit of paint off the hull. And that was with Ted's whole crew of four guys helping me and Angie handle the boat.

The list of things that should be done before we set sail seems to keep growing just as fast as we check things off. (Sailors we talk to say that at some point you just have to throw off the dock lines and go. You never do run out of things that have to be fixed or could be improved.) So we sit here, and we tell ourselves that there are much worse places to be than sitting on our boat in Back Creek. And the cruising life isn't much different, no matter where your boat happens to be. But the truth is we get a little down spirited about the whole thing, and especially this morning when we got the updated bill from Ted (actually from Ted's office manager) and found that we had just about used all the money we had set aside for refitting the boat. And Ted had taken off for a long weekend without telling us. So we were sort of left hanging without being able to move forward on any projects.

Ted installing the new chart plotter

Fortunately Ted had gotten the engine running reliably (it had been developing an air lock after running twenty minutes or so every time we started it up), and so theoretically we could take advantage of the lull to go out and practice boat handling. But did we dare? Neither one of us quite trusted ourselves to get our sixteen ton ship out of our slip safely, or more important, back into it. Then we had a brainstorm. Tom Yoho. Tom is kind of a jack of all maritime trades who lives on his boat here at Jabin's.  He does deliveries and just about anything else that people want done. (There's a picture of Tom in an earlier blog helping Dave the rigger with the mast.) So I went to find him to see if he would go out with us. He had a diving job to do, cleaning the bottom of a sailboat that, like us, had been sitting at the dock too long, but said he'd be happy to when he was back up from his dive.

New Turk's Heads marking the master spoke

So, finally, with Tom's guidance and help,we threw off our dock lines. We eased the boat out of her slip without incident and spent about an hour pirouetting around mooring buoys, approaching them from all angles, forwards and backwards, with Angie standing on the bow giving directions by mouth and hand signals. Then we headed down the creek and out into the bay. There was a nice breeze and a gentle chop, which Bel Canto plowed through effortlessly. After about a half hour watching the birds and the waves and the boats under sail, we turned around and headed back for the creek, our new chart plotter showing our position and our autohelm guiding the boat when asked to. Back in Back Creek we practiced once more coming up to a buoy and then brought the boat into the slip, with a bit of scuffling for lines but no real problems. Hurrah! a successful outing. Next time . . . we raise the sails!

Blackened Mako shark, avocado stuffed with shrimp, and spinach

Life on Back Creek

We're still at the dock but we've learned to enjoy living in our cabin on the water. We joke about having our vacation cottage on the ocean and talk about how nice it would be to just move it from city to city and experience living in each one for a while, then moving on. We are thinking Beaufort, South Carolina, Charleston, Savannah, St. Augustine. We could take that life for quite a while before we got tired of it.

After weeks of temperatures near 100, a cold front just came in and it's beautiful here. Ted is installing the new pod at the pedestal in the cockpit for all the new navigation instruments--a depth sounder, knot meter, and GPS, along with a new chart plotter that that will show us where we are and what progress we are making against the background of a navigational chart of the the area we are in. That sounds great--and it will be when we are able to leave the dock. We're making progress, but it seems real slow. We keep finding new little things like the manual bilge pump (a back up for when the so-called automatic electric ones fail) doesn't work. We'll get there. Our dinghy motor conked out, so we're debating whether to buy a new one. I met a sailor on another boat who may be able to look at it and diagnose the problem. Ted said he would fix it, but he has other projects to work on; we don't want to distract him. Jim is sanding the bright work on deck, trying to bring it down to bare wood for revarnishing. It seems like an endless task, but Jim regards it as a Zen exercise. I will eventually help him, but it's not my cup of tea. I'm very content sitting in the cabin reading Jane Austen.

I spend a lot of time learning about the boat. I've learned to listen to the a/c to hear if it's running properly, the water pressure pump to know when we are about to run out of water, and the engine, to know when it is about to die because of air leaking into the system. (Chris is supposed to come and fix that problem for us today, but he hasn't shown up yet!) I've also learned to tie a flying bowline with two quick motions of the hands.  Instead of going to the hairdresser or giving myself a pedicure, I make lists of what we need at the marine store and the hardware store. Washers, screws, sandpaper, work lights, tape, battens, inverters.

The inside of the boat is a mess because of the work being done. To get away, we hang out at a couple of different coffee shops in Annapolis and use the WiFi. We bought a hotspot device and internet service from Verizon, but we only get 5 gigabytes a month. Discovered that downloading movies from Netflix ate up too many gigabytes, so I had to quit Netflix, and now we're out of gigs until next month. We go to the movie theater instead. It's not the Michigan Theater, but we've seen a couple of good movies. The Lone Ranger and Red 2 both had us laughing. Tuesday is six dollar movie day, and since boat expenses have put us on a tight budget, we take advantage of that.

We eat like kings and queens. We're discovering every happy hour in Annapolis, and there are some great ones. We can eat dinner on half price hors d'oeuvres and a bottle of wine for less than we used to pay for a snack in Ann Arbor. Stuff like calamari, seafood egg rolls, crispy fried asparagus, lettuce wraps with grouper, Thai dumplings, avocado stuffed with crab. Cheap as it is, we can't afford to do that all of the time. We have been eating lots of seafood that we buy at the market. We'll probably start glowing in the dark from all the mercury. And Jim has learned to fry steaks that are almost as good as the ones he used to grill. There is a great Amish market in a mall not far from from the boat yard where we get good buys on meat and baked goods, and a market in the same mall, which we just discovered today, sort of like a combination of Whole Foods and Arbor Farms, where we got some excellent produce and good coffee.

We're surrounded by wildlife. Not only osprey and cormorants on the creek, but I've seen a fox several times at night time while walking alone to the bath house. Makes me really nervous because he/she stops and looks at me. Jim has never seen it. The other night we saw three river otters lying on a raft where our dock joins the pier. When they saw us, they slid into the water. They swam around looking at us for a few minutes to see if we were going to leave, but when we didn't, they did. And we've seen deer just outside the boatyard fence. This is all kind of strange, since we feel like we are right in the middle of the city.

Even though we've adapted to life in our waterfront houseboat, we are looking forward to the day when we can just take Bel Canto out into the bay and practice our boat handling. Our first experience leaving the slip wasn't auspicious. We had to take the boat just a few hundred yards to be hauled out again to have a through hull replaced and a new transducer installed for the new nav system. Leaving the slip, the boat got pinned against the dock, and Jim turned the wheel the wrong way to free it. The result was a bit of paint scraped off the hull. Ted's response, as usual, was, "We can fix that." There's a lot we have to learn about handling a 16 ton boat with a wheel, compared to our light weight Tartan 30 with a tiller. It's like going from a sports car to a semi-truck.

I watch all the boats leave each day to go day sailing. Hopefully, we'll be among them soon! 

Our Skirmish with the Navy

It's hard to get out and do anything with the temp up near 100 so I'm sitting in the air conditioned cabin of Bel Canto listening to Nat King Cole and trying to get my mind going to do some writing. There's a lot to write about, like our encounter the other night with the Navy. We were coming home from having a great seafood dinner at the Hemingway restaurant tucked in under the the Bay Bridge over on the Eastern shore. This was our first field trip by car to the Eastern Shore, and it was dark when we started the trip home on an unfamiliar route. I was just following the signs pointing to Annapolis, which also were pointing to the United States Naval Academy. In the dark I missed a sharp turn to the right and found myself in a narrow drive facing a military guard house. In her usual inimitable, quiet way Angie pointed out that I shouldn't be there. "Jim, you're driving over a curb and going the wrong way!" I was. But all I saw ahead of me was this gate and intimidating guard house. At this point a small but very solidly built creature in uniform came out of the guard house waving her arm at me, yelling "You can't go in there!" "I don't want to," I answered. "I'm lost. I just want to get out of here." "Can't you see the arrows pointing the other way," she demanded. "Somebody could be coming out!" (The parking lot was deserted.) "I told you, I'm lost.  I just want to get outta here!" "Don't interrupt me!" she snapped. "Just follow me." At the point I was ready to get out of the car and inform her that I was a civilian and she couldn't order me around like that,  but Angie restrained me. She walked away, waving for me to follow her around the guard house and pointed me toward the exit. "That's the way out!" But I told you I'm lost," I said again. Where do I go from there?" "Where do you want to go?" she asked. "I'm trying to go to Annapolis." She looked at me like I was an idiot. "You are IN Annapolis. Where in Annapolis do you want to go?" I told her that if she would direct me to the dock area I could find my way from there. She pointed to the left (the sharp right I should have taken). I still wanted to tell her that she had no right to talk to me like she had, but Angie convinced me that that would have been a bad idea, since all of the guns were on her side.

Ted, I guess you'd call him our marine contractor, says he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. Nearly all of the systems on the boat have been repaired or replaced. Tomorrow the sailmakers are bringing the last two sails to the boat, a spinnaker and a storm trysail, and also the missing battens for the mainsail. Ted and his main helper, Tod, are tackling the stuck head valve, and we are waiting the arrival of our all new navigation system.  We may actually get to go sailing one of these days. Meanwhile we are enjoying the fact that while stuck at the dock, we have air conditioning (which we won't have once we are out "on the hook"), a great seafood market nearby, a line on several good "happy hours" in Annapolis, and comfortable living quarters on the sea.  Life is good.

Fourth of July fireworks as seen from our deck

We're ln!

The Derecho--from the bathhouse window

Finally, Bel Canto is in the water and we are living (more or less) aboard. We were both excited to be spending our first night as actual liveaboard sailors! Jim was sure that he would get his first good night's sleep, without worrying about the next problem we were going to run into trying to get our boat ready. It seemed like every time we turned around, something new would crop up to delay us. Like when the electrician who was attaching all of the wiring from our newly rigged mast pointed out a through hull fitting, called a seacock, that looked like it wasn't seated properly. (A through hull is a hole in the bottom of the boat for water intake or outgo. If the fitting, valve, or hose connected to it fails, your boat begins to fill up with water and could sink.) He could move it with his hand. He said we'd better have it checked out while the boat was still “on the hard” (i.e., out of the water). So we called in Ted, owner of Seaside Marine, to give us his opinion. Ted took one look and began singing a requiem for drowned sailors. The seacock had been put into a hole that was too big for it, with 5200, a high grade marine putty, used to fill the gap. (Make up your own jokes.) It could have been okay for years before it began to leak, but then again . . . The solution was to take out the fitting, fiberglass the hole, then drill a new hole the right size, and reseat the fitting. This involved about five people and ended up costing us a whole boat unit ($1000).

So the mast was stepped, the through hull fixed, the stuffing box repacked, and we were ready to launch. The launching went without a hitch, with the owner of the boatyard himself towing Bel Canto to her temporary berth at the end of the pier. We had to be towed because Chris, the engine mechanic still had some adjustments to do on the engine. We moved a bunch of stuff from our car, where it had been sitting for more than a week while we moteled it, to the boat. Meanwhile, another Tayana 42 had come in and docked at the pier across from us. We went over to chat with them and ended up on their boat for “cocktail hour,” (sometimes referred to as sundown g & t). When we got back to our boat, the alarm indicating too much water in the bilge was ringing. We checked the stuffing box, and instead of the two to six drips a minute that were supposed to be coming in to lubricate the propeller shaft, a steady stream was flowing into the boat. To top it off, the automatic bilge pump which was supposed to react to problems like that wasn't working, and the switch had to be operated manually. So we were awake every hour pumping out the bilge. We got a great night's sleep the second night, though, and last night we sat in the cockpit under the light of the full moon, on our new cockpit cushions, delivered yesterday, listening to music from our cockpit speakers, and cooled by the gentle breezes that had come up after a near 90 degree day. Even though we are still in Bert Jabin's Boatyard, we could have been in the islands.

How many does it take to . . .

How many people does it take to get Bel Canto ready to sail? Well, there's Rob, who has been helping us all along. Then there's Dave, the rigger, and his helpers, Tyler and Tom, Richard, the electician and his partner, John, Mike, the diver, Ann, in charge of the bottom painting, and her two workers, Chris, the engine guy, Sean, the canvas guy, and on and on. Our count was up to twenty when Richard found the problem with the through hull fitting. That brought in Ted and his helpers, Todd, Brendan, Brian, and Benjamin, and a couple of others whose names we've forgotten.

Richard Kralok, our electrician

We had planned to go into the water a week ago last Tuesday after the mast was stepped. Then it was put off until Thursday so that the electrician who was rewiring all of the instruments could finish his job. Of course, his job was made harder by the fact that all kinds of things had been added over the years, and much of the wiring was unorthodox, to say the least. And nothing obsolete had ever been removed, so the electrical system was quite a jumble. Then the electrician noticed the faulty throughhull fitting. So then we had a hole in the bottom of the boat and an expected launch date of the next Monday. Some of the guys working for us are getting a hundred bucks an hour, so the old joke about a boat being a hole in the water into which you throw money and watch it disappear is hitting uncomfortably close to home. One of the sailors here at the marina says you have to count boat units instead of dollars, each boat unit being a grand, and it doesn't hurt so much. It seems like we get one problem fixed and we find something else that has to be done. I (Angie) think about the Tennessee Ernie Ford song that my father used to sing—Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

David van der Spuy, rigger

It turned out to be a good thing that we didn't go in the water on Thursday, since the derecho came through in two waves, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with wind gusts that we judged to be at least 60 mph. Todd had warned us to get out of the boatyard because boats sometimes toppled over in a storm. We took refuge in the bath house, in the men's bathroom because it had no windows. (In my younger years I had a reputation for hanging out in the men's bathroom--Angie) But Richard stayed on the boat, finishing up the wiring.

But now we're in the water and able to enjoy living aboard Bel Canto, even though we're sitting at the dock in a marina. Friday Tom (We'll have to tell you more about Tom later—he is quite a character) helped us get the sails back on. We figure we're about 90 % ready to sail away, at least out to the middle of Back Creek, where we can anchor for free. And then we will be able to go out into the bay and practice handling the boat under power and sail. Hoorah!

Tom Yoho, all around handyman

Mast on the hoist--going back!

"Easy, there!"

Now where do these go?

Back to the water.

Rod Jabin, boatyard owner, hooks on to the bow

A little help from our friends

Angie swabbing the deck with a toothbrush (in the rain)

Liquid Energy

Poco a Poco

Can you imagine us in a tropical lagoon, lying on the deck of Bel Canto, the boat gently rocking in the breeze, as we watch the the man-of-war birds swooping over the palm trees on shore and sip our rum and pineapple juice concoctions, the faint sounds of reggae from the natives wafting over the bay? Or perhaps ghosting along over gentle ocean swells, the white sails looking like a seabird's wing extending up over the blue hull, listening to the murmur of the wake as the boat cuts through the water.

That's not us. The boat is in the boatyard, on dry land, propped up on jacks, while her mast lies 200

Bel Canto "On the Hard" and unmasted

yards away. Shortly after we arrived home from our last work session in Annapolis, we got an email from David van der Spuy, our South African rigger, that the mast was coming down and he was ready to start measuring for new standing rigging (remember, the cables that hold the mast to the boat and keep it from tumbling down?) We wanted to see for ourselves that all this was really necessary, so we piled back into the Honda, loaded down with stuff that we will need if we ever do get under way, and headed back to Annapolis. The boatyard is sometimes facetiously, but accurately, referred to as “the dust bowl.” Dust from boat bottoms being sanded before the copper bottom paint, toxic to sea life and humans, is applied, and dust from fiberglass being ground down for repairs to damaged hulls settles over everything.

Looking over the rigging, we were convinced that David was right about most, if not all, of it. The inner forestay, a cable that runs from the deck in front of the mast about 2/3 of the way up the mast and to which the staysail is attached, was half severed at the upper end. This stay isn't essential for holding the mast in place, but two of the shrouds holding the mast latterly had broken strands, and many of the other stays, while seeming sound, showed rust. We decided that the prudent thing to do was to follow David's recommendation and replace all of the standing rigging that was original with the boat, hoping that when it came time to sell the boat, this would be a strong selling point.

Dave and Jim examining the rigging

Angie: We met Dave at the boatyard on Saturday morning to help him remove the rigging and measure it to order new. If we hadn't done it he would have had to hire someone else, so we figured between us we were earning $25 an hour. That's better than we had been making.  Part of our job was removing the halyards (used to raise the sails) and topping lifts (used to control the boom and spinnaker pole) from the mast. These run up inside the mast, so we had to run messenger lines up as we pulled them out so that we'd be able to get the new ones back where they belonged. While we worked, we talked (can you imagine?), and I learned all about Dave. He is descended from Afrikaners, the Dutch settlers in South Africa. They spoke a form of Dutch called Afrikaans, and some of Dave's speech patterns and sayings come from that. For instance, he said that if we were to put an eye splice in the end of one of the lines, it would end up looking like a pig's breakfast. The Afrikaners hated the English South Africans, who they thought were trying to gobble up everything for themselves. Dave's mother is English, straight from England, so I guess his father got over the hating. It was fun working with Dave. He has an upbeat personality and makes us feel better about all of the work we are doing. He's says she's a beautiful boat and we'll have great fun with her when we get these major jobs out of the way.

Getting the prop ready to paint

Getting back to Annapolis enabled us to coordinate the work that still had to be done on the boat. We talked to Ann Miller, who was supervising the bottom painting, and Sean, who came out to measure for the new dodger (he's also making the new cushions for the vee birth). And when we saw the mast down, we decided we needed all new wiring that runs up inside the mast to and from the mast lights, the radar, the wind instruments, and the radio/tv antenna. Some of these were undersized for the length of the mast, and some showed signs of wear and were liable to fail. So we got hold of an electrician and went over all the electrical jobs to be done with him. Chris Oliver, the engine guy, came and finished working on the engine, except for a few tests and adjustments that have to be done once the boat is back in the water.

Cutting line for new fenders

Angie: Meanwhile we continued putting our things on the boat and trying to get it settled. This is really hard, because the vee birth is full of sails, and the solar panel, which came off the dodger so that it could be measured, is lying in the quarter birth. These are the two main cabins of the boat, and it makes it hard to settle these areas. And the galley is still partially disassembled, because you have to take that apart to get at the engine. Everything that goes on the boat has to come up the 15 foot ladder. I must climb the ladder 20 times a day. I don't think I've been on a ladder that many times in my whole life before, but I'm getting used to it.

In fact, I started cleaning and repairing a section of the rub rail that runs around the hull. To do that, I had to keep moving the ladder around the boat in addition to climbing up and down. It's no wonder that I'm exhausted at the end of the day! In my spare time (like when we're traveling back and forth to work in the car) I practice tying knots. I learned some essential sailor knots when we were on Escapade, but I'm more into it now. Jim just taught me how to tie a clove hitch around a piling. He said that when I get really good at it I'll be able to tie it around the piling from six feet away, and that will impress everybody. I've seen him do it, but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to.

We have been taking time to relax once in a while, mainly by going out to eat. We discovered a great breakfast place, 49 West, that has the atmosphere of a sixties coffee shop. They have great coffee and excellent quiche. That helps us not miss our Sunday brunches at the \AUT\ so much. We also stop in at night sometimes for chocolate covered almond biscotti and cappuccino. Our favorite place to eat is a Thai restaurant called Lemongrass. They have a great happy hour—all wine by the glass and hors d'oeuvres for five dollars, and their seafood dishes are out of this world! We've had dinner—three hors d'oeuvres, a main dish, and a bottle of wine—for less than going out for a snack costs us in Ann Arbor.

Steamed dumplings at Lemongrass

Two jobs we still have to get done before the boat hits the water is to repack the stuffing box and to fix a switch on the automatic bilge pump. The stuffing box is what keeps the water from gushing into the boat where the propeller shaft goes through the hull, and the bilge pump is, of course, what pumps out the water that does seep in. The list seems to go on forever, but we are making progress, little by little. And we passed one huge milestone. Just before we left Annapolis, the graphics people came out to put the new name on the boat. And yesterday we heard from the Coast Guard that the documentation, which makes the name official and also certifies her as our boat, was just completed. Here she is.

And the Beat Goes On . . .

May 10, 2013

Things a person must do before buying a 28 year old boat:
Get a thorough survey of the boat and read it carefully.

Get a survey of the standing and running rigging.

Get an engine survey.

We arrived at the boat on May 3, with a load of personal gear and equipment, ready to start replacing the 30 bags of stuff that the previous owner had left aboard with our own belongings, a major step in transforming Outrageous into Bel Canto. When we checked our messages before heading for the boat, we found one from David van der Spuy, the man we had chosen, at Tyler's recommendation, to check out the rigging, informing us that he and Tyler would be at the boat at nine o'clock to do the inspection.

Dave working 5 stories up on the mast

David is a fascinating guy, a South African, slight of build and wiry, with a thick South African accent. After explaining to us what he was going to do, he strapped himself into the bosun's chair, attached the mainsail halyard to himself like an umbilical cord, and had Tyler begin winching him up the mast. Soon he was swinging around atop the 54 foot mast like an acrobat, calling notes to Tyler as he looked at every wire and fitting, from the mast top to the spreaders, and on down. He found several shrouds with broken strands, corroded fittings. 

His final report was not encouraging. He recommended totally replacing the rig, except for the headstay, which had been replaced fairly recently. We should have been prepared for this. Some people recommend replacing the standing rigging (shrouds and guys that hold up the mast) every ten years, and just about everybody agrees that you shouldn't trust it for more than twenty. From a safety standpoint the standing rigging is the most important part of the boat. If a shroud or stay breaks, the mast can come down. And in any kind of a sea, the mast in the water, still attached to the boat by all of the wires that did not break, can wreak havoc, even to putting a hole through the hull and sinking the boat. 

The report on the running rigging was just as bad. The halyards which are used for raising the sails, and most of the sheets and other control lines, had been left on the boat while she had been in storage at the owner's dock for the previous four years. Superficially, they looked great. Many were comparatively new. But almost all of them had spots where they had been exposed to water and weather, and these spots were mildewed and in some cases rotted. Lines used for running rigging are expensive. They must be strong, but soft enough to allow the crew to handle them comfortably. Like the wire rigging, most of the lines and the boat must be replaced. Dave demurred from giving us an estimate on how much all of this was going to cost until he had worked out a plan of action and priced out parts. Our 3 a.m. worry that night was that the cost of re-rigging might exceed the value of the boat. 

Meanwhile, we went ahead getting the boat ready to be hauled from the water for the bottom work. On Monday, the appointed day, Grover and Rob met us at the boatyard (so that we would have transportation once we arrived there with the boat), and we piled into the Honda and headed back to Grover's. It took an hour or so to get the boat ready to leave the dock. 

I wanted to handle the boat myself, but Grover convinced me that leaving his slip in the shallow creek was tricky, and that he should handle that part of it. As we pulled out, he demonstrated how by turning the wheel just so and gunning the engine in sync, you could get the boat to turn in it's own length. 

From that point on, Grover stood by giving me tips on how to handle a 33000 pound boat, and Rob, the great guy who has been doing some work for us, helped Angie handle lines. The four mile passage down the Severn River from Grover's dock to Back Creek and Bert Jabin's Boatyard was easy. I just had to steer the boat in a straight line from point to point. We were motoring because the object was to get to the boatyard, not enjoy the ride. And the slight drizzle would have taken the fun out of sailing anyway. But I was scared nearly shitless when I learned that I had to bring the boat in between two wharves with barely more distance between them than Bel Canto is long, especially when the dock hands instructed us to turn around in there in order to have the stern facing the hoist. 

Angie: We'd called ahead on the cell phone to let the yard know that we were coming in, and there were two workers coming out on the wharf to meet us. They yelled that we had to turn the boat around. I looked at the space and asked Rob, “Can we do this?” Now you have to know that this boat weighs 16 tons. That's a lot of boat to maneuver—about like driving a semi-truck. My job was handling the lines on the bow while the worker on the dock yelled out what we should do.

Jim: Grover told me to turn wide but be careful because she pivots near the stern. I nearly blew it by turning the wheel the wrong way at first, but then I corrected and gunned it and she turned on a dime, just as Grover had said she would. The stern swung a few feet from the wharf on the port side. The guys on the other wharf, where we were heading were yelling at me to slow down, so I threw her into reverse and gunned her. The dock worker reached out and stopped her with one hand and the prop rotation pulled the stern over to port. Everybody said it was a perfect docking, done like a pro, but I knew that I was just damned lucky!

On Wednesday we received Dave's estimate by email. It was bad, but not quite as bad as we feared. To make the necessary repairs and modifications to the rigging was going to cost $12000, more than a third of what we had set aside for all the repairs, additions, and other expenses we had planned for in getting the boat ready to sail.

Angie: (Wednesday, May 8) Another eight hour day working on Bel Canto. She's now in the yard, resting on her keel, braced by stanchions that keep her from falling over. So now we've traded a long ladder to board her for the 60 steps and Grover's steep trail. Yesterday we had monsoon rains and didn't get much done on the boat, but today is beautiful—cool, blue sky, light breezes—a perfect day to take the sails down. Oh, did we mention that the sails that we were so happy to get up the last time we were here had to come down again? Jim was awake a 3 a.m. the day we brought her over here worrying about how and when we were going to do that if it was necessary. Now we have some really big sails, especially the mainsail and the genoa (foresail). Together they would just about cover the floor space in our house. My trust level is really low, so when Jim said, “Let's take the sails down,” I envisioned a gust of wind toppling the boat over onto our car, or worse, onto the two brand new sailboats next to us. Our million dollars of liability insurance wouldn't cover the damages, to say nothing of fact that we would probably be severely injured or possibly die. Jim is a good teacher and has lots of sailing experience, but did I really trust him that it was safe to do this? Usually I just dive in and do what has to be done, but I was really nervous about this. But I knew that we had to do it because we were leaving tomorrow, and the sails had to come off for the mast to come down, and the mast had to come down for the rigger to do his job.

"On the hard" and ready for her new name

Jim: We lucked out on the weather. Taking down the sails would have been dangerous if there had been much wind from any direction but dead ahead. You see, the sails had to be raised in order to take them down because they come off the track starting at the bottom. But fortunately the breezes were gentle and right on the nose. 
 
Angie: We worked a good two and a half hours doing this. We had to sort out all the lines and halyards, and there are many, but we got the sails down and we were very proud of ourselves. After we got the sails down on deck we had to fold each one (there are three), because we had to store them inside the boat. You start by folding them like an accordion. The nautical term is flaking. After they were flaked, we rolled them up, tied them, and struggled to get them below decks. The biggest sail must weigh about 80 pounds. 
 
As we were stowing the sails, Ann Miller, who will be supervising the painting of Bel Canto's bottom, showed up. The keel is a reddish orange color now, and my main concern wasn't how much work the keel needed, or how much money it was going to cost (I let Jim worry about that). It was, “What are our choices of colors?” We all have our priorities, and I am bound and determined that we are going to make Bel Canto not only the best sailing vessel possible, but also the most beautiful. We finally decided on black for the bottom paint. It won't be visible except when we are sailing and heeled over a bit, but it will go well with the deep blue hull and red accents. 
 
When Ann left I thought I would settle down with my Kindle, take it easy for a while, and read. Dream on Banjo Picker. Did I actually think the captain would allow me to rest while he was working? Jim had been removing the name Outrageous from both sides of the stern when Ann came. To do this he had to balance on the ladder, using a heat gun (something like a hairdryer) to heat up the vinyl letters so he could peel them off. This left a sticky gunk, which he had to saturate with Goo Gone and then scrape off with a plastic putty knife. It was hard, tedious work. He was getting ready to go back to this when he saw me with the Kindle. “I'm sure you can find something that needs to be done if you look around,” he commented. I could and did. 

Beginning to make her ours with Sarah's spoons

Getting an older boat ready to sail and live aboard is a lot like what happens when you buy an older house, or as Jim says, when you get married. There are always a few surprises and things you don't anticipate, and some of them can be quite costly. As we were on our way back to Ann Arbor, we got a call from Chris Oliver, who was working on our engine. The heat exchanger, which cools the engine by transferring heat from fresh to salt water, has to be replaced. That's going to be another couple of thousand dollar bills. I have to say that this has been a challenging project, not to mention an expensive one. But we are having fun working together and still eagerly looking forward to when we can move aboard and set sail.

"Little did we know . . ."

Little did we know what it was going to take to get Outrageous ready to sail and to turn her into our boat!

Cutting away Outrageous's winter coat

We are in Annapolis, working 6 to 10 hours a day on the boat. (On the “short” days, we spend several hours running around Annapolis picking up stuff we need.) The boat hasn't been sailed for four years, and for four years dirt has been accumulating. I have never done so much cleaning, polishing, scrubbing, and painting, and placing my body in weird positions to do it all. We don't have to go to the gym. The boat is still at the previous owner's dock, in Saltworks Creek at Annapolis. Sixty steps lead down a steep hill to his dock, and we negotiate these several times each day. At night, we drag ourselves to our hotel room, too tired for a night out on the town or to play the games (scrabble, chess) that we brought along to keep ourselves from getting bored.

The previous, original owner of the boat is a really neat guy. (You met Grover in a previous blog.) After we bought the boat, he had it shrink wrapped and kept it heated until we were able to come and begin working on it. And he's letting us keep it at his dock free while we get it ready to go to sea again. But Grover is a bit of a pack rat. He tells us he can't bring himself to throw away a bit of line (rope to you landlubbers), and I believe him. You never know when you might need some! And he had spares for the spares for the spares. He had prepared himself and the boat for extended cruising in remote parts of the world, and he wanted to be entirely self sufficient. I'm pretty sure that whenever he replaced an old part with a new one, he kept the old, just in case he might have to piece something together sometime. It added up to 25 years of accumulated gear, spare parts, and such. All well and good, but Jim and I wouldn't know what to do with most of the stuff, and besides we have to make room for our own junk. Also, there were multiple books on every nautical topic and dozens of VCR tapes for a TV/video player which we also threw out.

So we've been up to our . . . ears in work, going through drawer after drawer and locker after locker, sorting through stuff and trying to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. I never knew that you could store so much on a boat. The first day of this (our second day here) we got rid of 12 big garbage bags full of stuff. After a few days of this, it began to get real discouraging. But then we just decided that what had to go, had to go, and if we found out later that we needed something, we'd just have to buy it. Every once in a while Grover will come across something we are throwing out and say, “Do you really want to get rid of this?” Sometimes we keep it. We ended up carting away over twenty five bags of stuff. Fortunately there's a trail from the boat up to the road, and Grover loaned us his golf cart to get stuff up the hill, so we didn't have to haul it all up the stairs. But taking the golf cart up and down the steep trail is as thrilling as a carnival ride.

When we're not cleaning and sorting and throwing things away we are running around Annapolis shopping for marine items and talking and working with the people who specialize in some aspect of boating, e.g., graphics, engines, electrical work, dodgers (the boat's windshield), cushions, bottom painting, etc. It's real easy to spend money on this project. The old saying is that if you want to know what sailing is like, just stand in a cold shower and tear up $100 bills. We're finding out what the tearing up bills part is like. Only, it could be $1000 dollar bills!

We are getting daily inservice training on the mechanics of the boat, including marine toilet, diesel engine, bilge pumps, water tanks, refrigeration, and on and on. We have a crew of experts working on the engine, rigging, and the canvas. Our sails have gone to the sailmaker's to be checked, repaired where necessary, and washed. We've even had our 120 gallons of diesel fuel polished. And Grover comes around every afternoon, after managing his four coffee shops (and remember, Grover is 81 years old) to answer questions and help us out. Some day we may even be able to sail the boat.

There are several things that have to be done that don't exactly take an expert, but they do take knowhow and time, both of which we have too little of. Things like installing a new water pressure tank or a vent hose to the diesel stove. To our great fortune, Grover introduced us to someone who is has quite a bit of both (knowhow and time). Rob Sutherland has owned boats all of his life and lived aboard for seventeen years. Compared to Jim, he's a young man (only 64) and can crawl into spaces that are getting a bit difficult for Jim. He's already helped us out a lot and will continue working on the boat while we are in Ann Arbor. Thank the gods for Rob!

Spring arrived while we were here!

We haven't tackled the technology side of things yet. One addition we'll be making is a chart plotter. It's a little screen, usually by the boat's wheel, that shows the nautical chart (i.e., map) and a little icon that shows where the boat is. Some sailors have actually sunk their boats steering the icon on the chart plotter instead of looking where their boats were in the water. Sailors talk about having a satellite phone to the tune of $1500 plus $50 dollars a month for about 10 minutes of talking if you are sinking. We decided that we'll just sink and not spend the money. We will have a life raft and an EPIRB that gives off a signal that tells someone where you were when your ship went down. I'm not sure who that someone is.

We're getting things under control, though. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and the boat will be beautiful when we get done with her. And we are having fun, even if we are exhausted at the end of the day. Jim says he never could have taken on this project without me. He says I'm the driving force. We're nearly done with this phase of our work and easing off a bit. Jim is out on the dock washing sheets (the lines that go to the sails). He says he will do the pillow cases next.

On our next trip here Outrageous will be taken to the boatyard and hauled out of the water to have her bottom done and for a few other jobs that have to be done while she is “on the hard,” as sailors say. One of those jobs will be to peel off her old name. Outrageous doesn't quite fit Jim's and my feelings about who we want her to be. The new name she will sport on her stern quarters will be BEL CANTO, Italian for beautiful song or beautiful singing. Home port, ANN ARBOR, MI.

Sails back on, ready to go!