Stay of Execution

Goal: Sail Every Day in August

I set myself a secret little challenge on July 31st: to sail every single day in August.  I haven't been able to do it (couldn't sail Friday -- no wind, or yesterday -- no time) but I modified it instead to: go on a boat every single day in August.  So far, so good. 

I think it explains why I'm in a much better mood.  I'm still lonely and wistful, longing for partnership.  I am still out of balance.  I still need to sort out how to earn enough money and how to manage all the physical details of maintaining an old house, a boat, and a car that all need attention. I still need to push my writing projects along in a more directed, focused, and commercially viable way. I still feel sometimes like my reach exceeds my grasp. I still have fragile moments when I feel like I'm not living up to what I wish to be in so many ways.  And yet, I feel good, generally.  I'm fumbling my way through all these brambles and it's hard work and sometimes it stings, but I feel kind of cheerful about it.  That probably doesn't make any sense at all but there you go.  And I think it's because of the time I'm spending on boats.

Last night I realized I hadn't been on a boat yet that day.  I didn't have very long; I had to feed my dog and then meet with Neighbor and 517 to talk about the ceremony for their wedding (I'm officiating, in 10 days, in case you'd lost track.  Yikes!).  I was tired and stressed out.  I debated with myself whether it was worth taking a treck out to the yacht club and jumping on the launch just to stick to a silly little goal. 

And you know what?  It was.  The water was blue and the sky a kind of velvety lavender-pink.  The launch driver was just getting ready to fire the shotgun and take the flag down when I arrived.  I waited with him, joking and looking out at the boats in the anchorage and smelling the salty breeze.  And I sat on the bow of the launch as we went out and picked up the J/24 racers who had finished for the evening.  The launch filled up with friends, who asked me about my mast and complimented me on the article I wrote in a current issue of a sailing magazine and handed me a beer.  And as the night turned blue-purple, someone pointed at the huge orange moon peeking over Clapboard Island and I felt both comfort and wonder.

On a boat every day: this makes me feel good. 

Pictures of Boats

I thought I might do a little photo essay for you of my trip, but I got derailed pretty quickly from that idea.  I'm not great with a camera and you would have had a disappointing array of pictures of grey-blue expanses, with distant green piney hills and some tiny triangles of white that all looked alike.  So I gave it up almost as soon as I got aboard my host's motorboat in Camden and headed across to the island. 

But here are some pictures of Camden Harbor, for anyone who hasn't been there.  I have complicated feelings about Camden, but one thing I really admire about the place is the variety and caliber of sailboats that come and go from there.  That's because it's a beautiful protected harbor, and it's an easy jumping-off point to East Penobscot Bay, which lots of people find the most wonderful and interesting sailing anywhere, and it is serviced by Wayfarer Marine, a marina with the capacity and the skill for very big projects.  And it's the seat of Maine's schooner fleet, which is a pretty interesting and special group of boats. 

Islesboro, the Fox Island Thoroughfare, Merchant's Row, the Barred Islands, and Jericho Bay are so gorgeous, and I gave up trying to take pictures of them.  Either I couldn't do it with my camera or I was busy sailing.  The smooth pink Stonington granite appears in East Penobscot Bay and it makes for a shoreline that tugs on you.  And there are so many islands and harbors, and something about the blue-green of the water and the way the sun hits the hills in the distance -- the Camden Hills and Blue Hill and Mount Desert Island -- and the way the fog rolls in, it's really the best place on earth.  But I didn't catch it on camera for you.  You'll have to come visit. 

Although the set of pictures is captioned Islesboro, there's only one picture of Islesboro -- my hosts' dock.  It's a special place.  We had a bald eagle living right nearby, who flew right over our heads as we drank wine and grilled dinner on the beach one night.

I Need A Stiff One

I have a t-shirt that I bought secondhand for 50 cents that says that.  It's a pink t-shirt, a little tight, with a picture of a martini glass on it, and it always seems to get attention. 

Anyway, we tried out the new mast today, and it's a stiff one for sure.  I think it's way better than our old mast, but we sure haven't gotten it tuned up right yet.  We were slow as death in the first race, because the rig was way too tight.  I backed off the uppers in the second race and that was better, but the lowers were still too tight.  And the headstay sagged too much.  And it was way more responsive to small changes in backstay than my old mast.  I wonder whether the butt of this mast should be moved aft a little bit, or the forestay should be tightened up.  Something's off, for sure.  But it was fascinating to sail with it, and to notice how many things felt different: the shape of the jib, the responsiveness of the backstay, the feel of the helm, the angle of the mast downwind.  It reminded me of why I find Etchells so mysterious and fascinating.  These masts are infinitely adjustable, and getting it almost right can feel nearly as slow as having none of it right.  I'm not sure which one we were tonight.  In the second race we were better than the first, but yikes.  It's a whole different boat with this mast. 

I know drivers who can notice the difference in the responsiveness of their car that different wheels have.  It's hard for me to imagine ever tuning into a car in that way.  But man, a mast? Worlds of difference. 

Boat Update

Here's a boat update:

We've borrowed a mast from my dad, who's not using his boat this year, and stepped it.  We've run most of the rigging, although a few things have us scratching our heads.  Tonight before the race we'll tune the rig and try the main halyard for the first time. 

The Mast Fund has been an unexpected success.  23 of you have contributed, and the total is $1964.68.  (Typepad/Paypal appear to take an 8% cut, which makes those numbers look a little wonky.  I think what you guys actually pledged comes out to $2010.)  There was one anonymous donation that was exceptionally generous, and I actually got nervous and tearful when I saw it, and tried to figure out how to give it back.  To you, I say, wow.  I wish you could see my face.  I wish I knew who you are, except partly I love not knowing.  It feels a little bit like magic, this way.  And to all of you, I say, thank you.  I can sit here quivery and get all teary at this sense of support from so many people I've not yet met.  It's a powerful kind of gratitude you've inspired in me.  I don't have the vocabulary to write about it, really, which is why I've been speechless about it for a few days. 

And my cup runneth over, because amazingly, the insurance company is going to send us a check for the mast, less our $250 deductible.  So we can replace the mast, and if we are lucky enough to find a used mast that could work, we might have money left over to make a bunch of other necessary repairs.  Ruby and I sat on the boat last night in the gathering darkness, running lines and halyards and making a list of all the things we should repair/replace. 

If it's okay with those of you who donated, I'd like to use those funds for boat and house repairs, if insurance money fully covers the mast.  If that's not okay, please let me know -- I can give the money back.  I don't want anyone to think that I solicited money for false pretenses or anything like that. 

The boat repair list that Ruby and I made last night:   

More Thoughts about PDEL

The other day I was powerwashing the bottom of a boat that I'd helped haul out.  I loved powerwashing -- what a satisfying activity it is, holding this Ghostbusters-like nozzle and shooting this jetstream of water that scrapes away all the growth and goop on the bottom of a boat.  It's immediate and obvious and clear the impact of what you're doing, like vacuuming a very hairy rug and making a clean line there. 

But as I washed I thought about how my sense of overwhelm and helplessness doesn't apply to boats.  There's plenty about boats that I don't know, plenty that I haven't done, but it doesn't scare me the way house and yard stuff does.  And it interests me -- I WANT to learn and try the things I don't know how to do.  I can sand and varnish, do fiberglass and rigging work, repair a torn sail and dive on the bottom of a boat and clean it.  I can fiddle with an outboard motor and operate a crane and drive a trailer.  I can jury-rig a broken boom vang and powerwash a boat and use a grinder.  I can splice and rivet and swage.  And the stuff I don't know how to do, I know who to ask and how to get help and I'm not afraid of it. 

I want to get that same sense of undauntedness -- courage and curiousity and confidence -- about my house and yard and car. 

Boats

Here are some pictures of our sail on Ocean Planet, so you'll get a sense of the boat that I wrote about the other day, and a glimpse of what it's like sailing around here.  (It was a light air day -- we often get more breeze than this, and of course you can't really see the islands or the shore or the birds or the seals or the lobster pots that make it so scenic and wonderful around here, and you can't smell the great salty air.)

Today a surveyor is coming to look at our mast, sent by the insurance company.  I got a quote for the price of a new mast and it is jaw-dropping.  I will report when I know more about what will happen, and what our options are. (Because it will be your mast, too.)  In the meantime, my dad, who owns an Etchells that he's been too busy to put in the water, has offered the H.O.T. girls his rig until we sort out ours.  Hooray!  Another Etchells fleet member whose boat is not in the water offered, too.  We have such a great fleet.  So I've been trying to find a tow vehicle and coordinate the logistics of fetching his mast and getting it to our boat so we can step it and set it up this weekend.  Haven't figured it out yet but am optimistic.

And I'm looking forward to a trip up to Islesboro, in Penobscot Bay, next week, for three or four days of sailing a J/100 by day and sleeping in a cottage on an island by night.  I offered my registration in the 10K road race to Neighbor, and we've been running this week to get her ready for it.  I'd much rather sail than run.  Although I had breakfast the other day with a woman who had just completed the Ironman at Lake Placid, and it sort of made me feel like a lazy oaf.  I'd like to step up the intensity of my own workouts, and get to a place where I truly feel like an athlete.      

Okay, Now You Can Help

I've never done this before, and don't anticipate doing it again, but I've enabled a "tip jar" for anyone who wants to help contribute to a new mast.  I feel sort of sheepish about it.  There are many other good causes in the world.  And I am happy if you read forever and never donate.   

But a new mast -- even a new used mast -- is expensive.  They're hard to find.  There's one in California, circa 2001, for $1500, although getting it here would be another thing altogether.  I've heard tell of one in Massachusetts for about $2000.  For someone who frets about filling her car up with gas each week, that's prohibitive.   Someday, my ship will come in and I'll feel a sense of abundance again.  But right now, I'm pretty poor. 

The boat is insured and I've made a claim, but I'm not optimistic about what I can get from the insurance company.  We'll see.  The mast was more than 30 years old, I'm sure.

I was talking to the HOT girls about the idea of having a party where we charge $5 a head, or pass around a tip jar, to raise some funds.  We will sail again.  We're talking to people in the fleet about borrowing a mast, or a boat.  We will sail again.      

I'm trying to think of a good carrot to dangle to encourage you to donate.  I could send you something, but what?  A picture of something?  You could request a post -- like a premium "All Request" service?  We could do another Blog Party, but this one for people who tip?  Other thoughts?  Let me know what would be a fun inducement, and I'll do it.  The link should be right there in the sidebar, or you can click here to donate. 

Dismasted

We got a great start, and our nemesis was starting to power through below us.  I said to the girls, "Just once I'd like to go up against him in a fast boat, because I'd like to see if I could hang with him."  We tacked away, bit into a header a little bit, and then tacked back to starboard, leading a couple of boats back.  It was blowing pretty good, maybe 15 knots, enough that I had Cinderella playing the traveller for me in the puffs and we had a lot of backstay on. 

And then there was a loud bang, like a gunshot, and at the same time I saw the mast bend sharply at the deck.  The lower shroud was off, and it looked to me like the mast was in danger of snapping.  I headed to wind and we lowered the main and detached the boom.  I worried that we would lose the mast on the way in, but decided to sail in carefully with the jib.  I took the VHF and hailed the race committee.  I was hoping to alert them that we might need a rescue, but they didn't copy very well, and were motoring around adjusting the pin, so we just sailed in. 

Ruby reported that she'd seen a puff of smoke right when the bang hit.  Cinderella didn't see the problem with the mast at first, and was optimistically saying that maybe we could pull the mast, put the shroud back on, and go back out sailing.  I was watching the wobble and planning out what we might do if it broke on our way in, or when we were hauling it. 

We got to the dock okay.  While we were there the breeze came up pretty hard, making me worry even more about pulling out the mast.  I was afraid it would snap and collapse, and I was concerned it would hurt a person, or the boat, as it did.  Of course, we couldn't leave it up.  But a friend from the J/24 fleet came by, and we got the gin pole up, and then my insurance agent wandered by, and he helped too.  I loosened the rigging very carefully, and we held the mast tight with the gin pole before I released the starboard shroud completely, and we got the mast out and down. 

There's a 30 degree angle of bend just above where the mast goes through the deck.  Our mast has an aluminum or stainless sleeve around it at that spot, riveted on, that I've always suspected was a repair job to a weak place on the mast.  The sleeve is deformed, and one of the rivets is half out.  There's a couple of decades of accretion of salt that's gotten in between the sleeve and the mast, and it was this crusty powder that Ruby saw as smoke when the mast failed. 

We took everything off the boat and put it away, without the mast.  We carried the mast up to the back yard of the club, and took the wind indicator off the top of it.  I need to go back and inspect it by the light of day but I am certain the mast is gone.  I don't know what we'll do.  I don't know where to get another mast.  I haven't started to think about that stuff yet.  I dread what I'm going to learn.

I'm sort of overwhelmed by my life right now -- all the practical details make me feel like an inept failure.  The check engine light is on in my car; my garage door has stopped opening and I think there are carpenter ants.  My shower drain is clogged, and my toilet has a quiet slow leak and my garbage disposal doesn't work anymore and my lawn, always my lawn, is overgrown.   Losing the mast feels like another thing I can't fix.  And unlike all that other stuff, this matters a lot to me.

Boats

1) I went sailing on Ocean Planet yesterday.  I was impressed in spite of myself.  I guess at this point, I've sailed a lot of boats in a lot of places and I feel like I shouldn't be impressed.  So I tried not to be, but the boat got to me.  It's very fast.  And it's very cool.  The big carbon rig is unstayed, and that is new and foreign to me.  (My grandparents' Nonsuch, and the Laser I sailed when I was younger, are the only freestanding rig vessels I've been on, and neither of them are much like this boat.). There were very few shackles on the boat -- line is used instead, and the effect is light and strong and interesting, and oddly old-fashioned.  For some reason those fasteners (I don't know wht they're called) reminded me of the schooners I've sailed on.  It's a big boat, obviously, 60 feet long, and so everything is big and takes teamwork or leverage or steps or assistance to do.  The idea of sailing that boat, alone, around the world, amazed me.  I still can't imagine sailing around the world -- I don't have the imagery or comparisons to fill the void in my head for something like that.  But walking around on the boat and imagining being alone on it, for a week, and then another week, and then another, sort of blew my mind.  After five of us heaved the main up I tried to imagine doing it by myself, in breeze and waves.  Bruce was sailing alone for 109 days.  We put up a couple of spinnakers, and the boat moves well.  It was a fun sail.  It was a photo op of some kind, so I imagine there will be pictures on the Ocean Planet website one of these days.

2) After getting off the OP I went to my boat to meet Ruby to take the mast out.  Our main halyard jammed on Tuesday night and I feared the worst.  But the operation was the quickest and easiest I've ever dropped a mast: we unhooked the boom and the stays, put the gin pole up, pulled the mast, and discovered that the halyard had jumped out of its sheave.  We pulled the sheave out and freed the halyard, and actually decided to replace the sheave because its inner sleeve was worn through.  Simple.  When do repairs ever go without a hitch?  We popped the mast back in and my friend Diva and I and an off-duty launch driver set the boat up and made it out to the starting line just in time (well, a tiny bit late) for the start of the beer can race.  Excellent. 

3) I have a boat crush.  On Sunday I was sailing with my parents and spied this gorgeous wooden boat, maybe 34 feet long.  Maybe 36.  I don't know.  It was lovely enough that I forgave it the silly off white fake-canvas sails it had.  (They gleam slightly pink in polarized sunglasses, and something about the high tech material posing as old-fashioned canvas rubs me the wrong way.)  I don't know what kind of boat it is.  It's wooden, and old, and beautiful, and I couldn't take my eyes off it for too long.  A man was sailing it, alone and shirtless, and we overtook him and rubbernecked at the boat a little bit until we passed.  As we approached the boat I had a daydream that the man would turn out to be handsome, young, and single, and somehow we would lock eyes from across the water.  That didn't happen, and indeed he turned out to be older, with the aggressive tan and physique of a bodybuilder, and a smoker.  Probably not my type.  I kept looking at the boat, though.  Beautiful.  On Monday evening, when I was sailing with the Special Olympics athletes, I saw the boat again.  Sail number K-32.  Flying a Centerboard Yacht Club flag.  I'm going to have to go down there and investigate, I think. 

4)  To the vandals who covered the Hooked On Tonics with Oreo cookies: you think you are very funny, but this means war.  We know who you are and have begun scheming our revenge.  Soggy Oreo cookies make a mess, but it's nothing compared to what's in store for your boat.  Watch your back.  I just hope no innocent bystanders get caught in the escalating crossfire of this dangerous mischief you've begun. 

Choices

Yesterday I got an invitation to sail in a J/100 regatta up in Penobscot Bay, with a skipper I like very much.  Sounds like a slam-dunk for me: one-design racing, in the most beautiful sailing venue around, with a good skipper, on a new J/100.  Cool. 

But on the Sunday of the regatta I am supposed to run a 10K.  I signed up months ago.  I haven't exactly been training, but I've had it in my head as a goal for a long time.  Some friends of mine are doing it, although the friend I signed up with just told me she's dropping out.  I don't particularly want to do it, but since I've picked it as a goal and a milestone, I am pretty resistant to dropping out. 

I'm thinking I'll let myself go to the regatta if and only if I can come up with a replacement milestone/goal to do instead.  Maybe I'll run 10K around Islesboro instead.  Something like that.