After a couple of solid months of work, I think I can finally call TIE Fighter’s electrical system complete. Well… arguably finished – I’d still like to add a bunch of solar and possibly a wind turbine, to remove myself even further from the grid, but at least now I know that there’s a very solid base to build upon.
the new wiring, inverter and charger
When I took possession of the TIE Fighter the electrical system was working, but it was a mishmash of new and old components, new and ancient wiring and… well, frankly it was obvious that several different people had had their hands on the systems over the years. Some of the work was efficient and solid, other areas were sloppy and a few were downright puzzling. When I traced out the existing wiring, at least half of the leads didn’t actually go anywhere, ending in unexplained ring terminals or even just exposed wiring, posing a fire hazard. With several false starts, I finally decided that the only way forward would be to tear everything out and start fresh.
And so starting fresh is exactly what I did. I began with the charging system, as the old twenty-amp charger and charge manager were barely functional, charging the batteries at a trickle of about five amps, which meant that a full charge cycle for the existing ninety-amp-hour house battery bank would take approximately fifteen hours of running the generator. Fifteen hours pretty much every single day – that adds up to a lot of gasoline! I was going through about a hundred litres of gasoline per month just keeping the lights on and the laptop charged up.
the galley panel up close
The new charger was a ProMariner ProNautic 1250 C3, which worked perfectly for approximately two weeks, then died. The charger would power up but showed an “Under Voltage” fault light – according to Google this is a pretty common failure of this particular charger, possibly caused by using it with a generator instead of shore power, and they’ll replace the faulty circuit within four to six weeks of mailing them the charger. Several forum posts reported that the replacement chargers died the same death however, and so rather than spend months on this problem I decided to jump ship and go with the much cheaper Iota DLS-55 charger instead. The Iota charger has far less bells and whistles – pretty much none, to be exact – but comes with glowing reviews of reliability by happy owners. So far it’s performing exactly as advertised, charging my batteries at a very acceptable 50a. Once the ProMariner charger is repaired, I’ll be selling it on Craigslist.
TIE Fighter also came with a variety of professional-looking circuit breaker panels from Blue Sea Systems, which as it turns out are well made, well designed, and startlingly expensive… the eight-switch panel comes in around three hundred dollars, and TIE Fighter came with three of that panel. The puzzling part was that though the components were expensive, the installation was awful, using wood screws and rough-cut wood paneling, with the wiring wrapped in electrical tape and dangling over the navigation table. I ripped all three panels out and rewired them, ordering in labels directly from Blue Sea. One of the panels was installed into the galley, and as shown in the photo the panel is now active and happy. There’s even a label for the watermaker, which doesn’t currently exist, and a spare switch for something else down the line… a refrigerator perhaps?
four trojan t-105's and wiring
The biggest and most expensive upgrade to the electrical system – after the ProMariner charger, of course, but since it’ll be getting repaired and sold I don’t intend to count it in the bottom line – was a brand-new set of Trojan T-105 golf cart batteries. These are six-volt batteries, which means that you have to run two batteries in series (ie connecting positive on one battery to the negative terminal on the other) in order to get 12v out of them. Trojan batteries in particular have a very strong reputation in the liveaboard world as being very resilient and reliable – the lead plates in golf cart batteries are much thicker than the plates in a standard car battery, which means that they can be charged and discharged thousands of times. I purchased the batteries from Norm and Dave, aka Century Batteries, and they were prompt and helpful and delivered the batteries right to the dock.
In order to install the new batteries I had to completely rebuild the battery compartment, removing the old battery box and constructing a new one out of 3/8″ marine-grade plywood, epoxying the corners for strength. The fit is tight but secure; I measured very carefully and there’s less than 1/4″ of extra space on any side! Four batteries, connected in two sets of two, cost me approximately $600 and should last for at least five years if maintained properly. There was easily another hundred dollars or so in custom-built cables and terminal fittings, but as I said, I now have a stable, reliable, modern electrical platform on which to build. The new batteries give me a grand total of 450 amp-hours of capacity. which so far has proven to be about four days of regular use between charges. Suffice to say, the boat is a much more peaceful, relaxing place without a generator running on the deck every day!
I’ve been neglecting the blog, which is something I need to remedy. In my defence, I’ve been very very busy. So, in lieu of posting the ten or fifteen posts that I should have been posting all along, I’ll have to just get the queue out in a very condensed fashion.
Returning to the format of the ‘What I Did On My Summer Vacation‘ series of posts, here’s a rapid-fire “clips show” of the last two months.
staring down the barrel of a yanmar diesel
I started and finished a two-week class in ‘Advanced Diesel Engine Maintenance’, in which we tore the above Yanmar 2QM marine diesel engine completely apart and put it all back together. I’ll probably never take the camshaft out of my Yanmar 3HM, but at least now I’m pretty sure I could if I absolutely had to.
notice to move from the Kitsilano anchorage - click for higher-res
This one warrants a blog post of its own – but then again a lot of these pics do. This is a formal ‘Notice To Move’ from the Vancouver Port Authority, as delivered by the VPD while I was sitting safely and soundly at anchor just off Kitsilano Beach. The officer explained that everyone was getting these notices as an advance move, so that if the Port Authority decided at any point to tow boats out of the harbour and impound them, they could do so without warning. He also explained that the notices were the result of meetings between the City of Vancouver Parks Board and the Port Authority, over just who’s responsibility it was to pay for the cleanup of Kitsilano Beach after anchored sailboats were blown ashore and wrecked in windstorms.
What really bugs me is that since then, talking with other liveaboards here in False Creek, it would seem that this notice was only delivered to abandoned or unattended/derelict vessels left out at the anchorage, and that I was the only liveaboard sailor to receive a notice. Strange, especially since I feel like I’ve proven myself to be a responsible and conscientious mariner, and I have never been blown ashore.
The notice says that I am anchored without having seeked permission to anchor, but as of now the Harbour Master has still not replied to my email requesting permission to anchor. I really do hope that this notice is the first and last interaction I’ll have with the Port Authority, but I can’t help feel a bit of foreboding.
goodbye, creamcycle. you were a good bike.
In my ongoing quest to simplify and minimize my life, I finally realized that my beloved bicycle just doesn’t fit “indoors”, and storing the Creamcycle outdoors all winter was slowly killing her. There’s room for a bike in the starboard ama if I arrange things very carefully but that’s a lot of valuable storage space taken up, especially with the prospect of Miya also having a bike aboard. After much research, I decided that the path forward would be to purchase a Montague Boston folding bike, and migrate all of my pro-grade components from the Creamcycle over onto the Boston frame, and vice versa, and then sell the result on Craigslist. More on this soon.
snow drifted up against the generator
February 26th 2011 brought the first and last big snowstorm of the season. This pic is a little difficult to make out, but if you look closely you can see the snow drifted up nearly over the cabin window, with a melted/windshaped cutout around the Honda EU2000i generator, wrapped here (as always) in a white tarp to keep the weather out.
March 4th was my 35th birthday, and we celebrated by sailing the TIE Fighter across the Georgia Straight and over to Pender Island for a weekend-long multi-birthday party with twenty or so friends in a mansion on the highest point on the island. Seriously swank – a hot tub on the roof, and 360º view of the Gulf Islands!
Miya took this video at a particularly stressful moment during the journey across the Straight – we’d had lovely 10-15kn winds coming out of English Bay, but as we rounded UBC the winds jumped to 20-25kn and we struggled to reef the mainsail, which wasn’t rigged properly for reefing. Shortly after we succeeded, we suddenly lost steering…
The rest of the trip got steadily worse, and by the time we arrived at the west side of the Straight the wind was blowing a steady 30kn with pouring rain and 3m waves occasionally breaking over the decks. We arrived shortly after dark on Friday night, exhausted and happy to be somewhere warm and dry – I don’t think my boots dried until Sunday.
DR spraying the sails down with fresh water
We moored the boat at Otter Bay for the weekend while we relaxed at the mansion. This pic shows Dan Ross spraying down the sails with fresh water, after being soaked with seawater. You really shouldn’t allow sails to sit with salt on them – the salt attracts moisture from the air so the sails will never really dry out completely, which is really bad for the lifespan of the sails, not to mention the probable cause of the large rust stains visible on the headsail.
new battery charger installed!
I picked up a brand new modern battery charger for a little under half price on Craigslist and installed it, finally taking control over the charging of my batteries! Prior to this I had been charging the batteries directly from a 20a DC-DC converter, which is effective but inefficient, and very very hard on batteries. With the new ProNautic C3 50a charger, my time to fully charge the batteries dropped from seven hours to just under three hours. Take note of the mess of wires in the background – this was taken after I had already pulled two full laundry baskets of unused wiring out of the boat. Apparently at least one of the former owners of the TIE Fighter had rewired the boat, but hadn’t bother removing any of the old wiring!
winch maintenance begins
One thing I noticed during the Pender “sea trials” trip was that the winches on the mast had begun slipping. I’ve owned the boat for over three years now and have never serviced the winches, so maintenance was definitely overdue. I had dropped Miya and DR off at Swartz Bay, and TIE Fighter was now anchored in Sidney, BC, so I had my evenings free to work hard on boat projects. Servicing winches is messy work but quite introspective and satisfying, much like I imagine cleaning a rifle must be. This pic shows three of the mast winches disassembled and my first experiments with using ‘Simple Green’ to clean the components. Result: ‘Simple Green’ does not effectively clean winch components.
the daily ritual
Being anchored in a new place makes me quickly slip into a comfortable routine. I finally got around to repairing the broken Bodum hand-crank coffee grinder that I purchased last fall, and this pic shows my morning ritual in progress – a pot of steel-cut oatmeal and quinoa on the galley stove, with a Bialetti ‘moka pot’ of coffee percolating beside it, lit by a sunbeam.
new day tank, visible (barely) way in the back
Yet another project that I’d been putting off; the aft cabin furnace needed a day tank. The hard part about diesel furnaces is that they need to be supplied with diesel fuel at about 3psi – this can be achieved with either a small electric fuel pump, or with a gravity feed from a tank stored at least four feet above the fuel intake. The problem is that as far as I can tell, very few companies make a diesel tank with an outlet port at the bottom of the tank! After researching the costs of having one manufactured (about $300), I found this water tank, rated for chemical storage, at the wonderful Sidney Boaters Exchange for a whopping $8.00. Another $6.00 in parts, fittings and tie-downs and I was in business!
more splicing - the headsail sheets are now 340% better.
Evenings over the next two weeks were slow and quiet, so I got a few chances to move away from the “needs” projects a little and onto the “wants” projects. Here’s a pic of the snap shackles on the headsail sheets spliced into the sheets instead of tied in with bowline knots, and the bitter ends of the sheets backspliced. This is not only faaaaaar more attractive, but also much smoother for tacking as there is less to catch on the inner forestay while the headsail slips across.
winches, cleaned
More detail on the winch servicing project; the acetone in the back proved to be a failure as well. At some point a previous owner had serviced the winches by putting grease on the pawls. Apparently – and this was news to me – putting grease on pawls is a no-no, as the grease tends to thicken and build up, eventually causing the pawls to jam. For reference, you should only ever put oil on winch pawls; grease is fine (and recommended) for the gears, but the pawls only ever get oil.
The thick, gummy grease is difficult to get off of the components, but the ultimate solution turned out to be very simple: diesel fuel dissolves the grease and an old toothbrush cleans off the remainder. The glass and tupperware in the pic above are both full of diesel, stained an ugly greenish-black by the dissolved grease after soaking the components overnight.
winch 'spares'
While I had the winches apart, I took the opportunity to purchase a ‘rebuild kit’ from the local marine store, and replaced all of the pawl springs in each winch. In this pic, the silver chicklet-looking chunky steel bits are the pawls, which are held against the gear sprockets by the little flat circular pawl springs, which causes the characteristic clatter of the winch in use. Pawl springs wear out over time, but after cleaning the winches and replacing all the springs, my mast winches now work just like new.
mast winch mounts
The winch mounts during reassembly, after cleaning with diesel, brushes and paper towel. During this procedure it was so bitterly cold outside that I had to go back into the cabin after cleaning each mount to rub my hands together to regain feeling in my fingertips!
aft furnace installed and operational!
The aft furnace was critical during this period – prior to having the furnace working I was mostly confined to the forward cabin for pretty much everything except cooking, working my day job from either my bed or the “guest nest”, which is what Miya has named the port-side single berth.
Upon first lighting of the new furnace, I nearly burned the boat down! It started up just like normal and worked great, but shortly after this photo the furnace began making a “chuffing” noise and the walls of the burn chamber started glowing red hot – I quickly shut it down, but it kept burning for a good five minutes afterwards. Apparently the diesel metering valve had been set for a much more viscous fuel, and when I measured and tuned the meter it was delivering more than three times the normal amount of fuel to the burner. Since the tuning the furnace has worked 100% as expected, keeping the aft cabin warm for days on end.
the 'boudoir' cubby, painted and shelved
Speaking of the “guest nest”, here is a pic of the newly-painted and newly-shelved cubby below the port side berth, which Miya has named ‘the boudoir’, and we’ve decided is her personal storage area while she’s living aboard with me. My personal storage space is the opposite cubby, which I have dubbed ‘the study’.
the yankee headsail, spread out at the sail loft
In the sail across from Vancouver, we tore the mainsail in no less than five places, mostly due to poor reefing skills but probably the fact that the sail is fifteen years old might have something to do with it. I brought the sails in to Sidney’s Leitch and Mcbride sailmakers to have it repaired and to get a quote on a replacement sail. I was impressed with their workmanship and attention to detail, and by the personal service I received – they even picked me and the sails up from the boat, and dropped me off again afterwards.
cutting the hole for the new switch panel
The biggest project of all, while living at anchor in Sidney, was to gut and replace the entire electrical system of the boat. This meant making final decisions on the organization and placement of the switch panels, and cutting into the walls of the cabin to install them. Here I’ve discovered that the panel above the stove is only 1/4″ plywood, and that I’m able to cut through it quite easily with my pocket knife.
LED lighting in the engine compartment
As a part of the electrical system upgrade, I installed LED lighting into all of the under-cockpit cubbies, with the engine compartment getting extra attention as it’s probably the one where having good lighting is the most critical. Amazing how much cleaner Maude looks with good lighting!
cubbies in the forward cabin, lit up with LED strips
The forward cabin cubbies – the ‘study’ and ‘boudoir’ – shown lit up brightly with the new LED cubby lighting system. What a phenomenal difference it makes, having these formerly dark and dirty spaces now clean, white and bright.
a new outlet beside the bed
I only have a 400w inverter on the boat currently, but that’s more than enough to run things like laptops and cellphone chargers – I really don’t have much else to plug in anymore! Still, it’s nice to have the convenience of being able to plug things in wherever you are, so I’ve installed GFCI outlets all over the boat. This one is only temporary – I’ve replaced it already with a more modern outlet that has a green LED, so that you can tell at a glance whether or not the inverter is turned on.
the finished electrical panel in the galley
The galley electrical panel installed and active! I’ve since also added a backlighting kit to this panel, so the panel labels glow a soft green at night. It’s the little touches that really make the work feel professional, and give me great pride in having done it all myself.
the completed electrical system wiring
I’m very proud of my wiring job – apparently fifteen years of being a network tech has some boat benefits after all! All wires to the switch panels are cut to length and terminate in double-crimped flanged spade connectors on terminator bars, all grounds are bussed together with appropriately-sized wiring, and every subsystem on the boat has an individual circuitbreaker. TIE Fighter now has a modern, well-installed electrical system, onto which I can build with confidence. Next steps: a much larger battery bank, then a powerful solar array and possibly a wind generator. The “grid” just keeps getting further and further behind me.
propane canister packed up for bicycle transport
On yet another trip to the Sidney Boater’s Exchange I found a pair of nearly-new horizontally-mounted propane tanks for $100 each. This was a great deal, as used horizontal tanks are very hard to find, and new ones are over $400 each – my propane locker can fit two twenty-pound propane tanks, but they have to be horizontal tanks, standard vertical tanks (like on a barbeque) are too tall for the locker. Packing a propane tank home on my bicycle garnered some strange looks from the locals.
Xantrex LinkLITE installed and operational
I also picked up a Xantrex LinkLITE battery monitor, which conveniently fit into the hole from the ancient (and dead) Heart Interface battery monitor that was installed on TIE Fighter when I purchased her. Yet another step towards complete mastery of my electrical system – a former boss of mine was fond of saying “that which gets measured, gets managed”. This is absolutely true with regards to battery life; I can now measure how much electricity the boat is using at any given moment, and know at a glance how much battery life I have left before I have to run the generator to charge back up again.
sitting on a stoop on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico
After three solid weeks of heads-down work on the boat, a vacation was in order. Miya’s close friend and cousin Stacee was getting married in Puerto Rico, and Miya was the maid of honour so I was invited along as her date. We flew to Vieques, a small rustic island about an hour east of San Juan. Vieques is known for beautiful beaches, quiet towns and a large population of unfenced horses running free over the whole island. At times I really felt like I was back living in Costa Rica again, and within the week my spanish came rushing back to me.
Miya, post-serenade
At some point, walking from our budget hotel towards the posh resort the wedding was being held in, we were flagged down by pensioners in a small bar by the side of the road, invited in for a drink and to listen to the locals playing music and gabbing. Here Miya has just been serenaded with very decent spanish folk music by the man on the left, and the one-armed man on the right had just finished telling her the story of his being stabbed in the abdomen two nights earlier, on the street a block from our hotel.
first scuba dive!
We took advantage of the tourist industry on Vieques and signed up for a one-day ‘Explore SCUBA’ course, which took us out to the end of an unused (but heavily secured) military pier for a pair of dives. The waters under the pier were teeming with life, and I discovered to my great relief that the sinus and inner-ear problems that plagued me as a youth have not in fact followed me into adulthood – I am able to dive after all.
click for a high-res version
I’ve included this pic because I think it makes an excellent desktop wallpaper; subtle and not too busy. Click the pic – or for that matter, any of these photos – for a higher-resolution version. We saw many sea turtles, as well as several types of ray and many, many different tropical fish.
ripping around on a little Yamaha scooter
Vieques is fairly small at only about seven miles long, but we soon felt the pangs of not having our bicycles. Renting bikes was an option, but at $25/day per bike renting a motor scooter for $50/day seemed like a much better option. In the three days we had the scooter the island was opened up to us in a way that was impossible on foot, and we explored the tiny back roads of the island.
probably my favourite pic of the whole trip
There’s something about the sunshine that makes everything a little easier to take… after a few days on the beach it was difficult to remember why we’d been so stressed out about all the little things back home. This pic was taken at the “red beach”, on our way back from the “green beach”, where we’d discovered that tiny, vicious gnats come out in swarms as the sundown approaches. Miya was strangely unaffected, but bites covered my arms in itchy red welts that lasted for several days.
yet another splice - this time it's rope-to-chain
A month or two ago I visited Miya in Seattle and picked up a 150′ length of gorgeous barely-used eight-plait nylon anchor rode at Second Wave, yet another marine consignment store. I think I might be getting addicted to used sailing equipment – this 3/4″ nylon rode was a great deal though, at $50 for 150′, compared with $1.60/foot locally! I spliced the rope to a 40′ length of 5/16″ heavy steel chain, and this splice is currently holding me at anchor quite handily.
motoring away from Tsehum Harbour
On April the 6th, I left Tsehum Harbour and headed back towards Vancouver. I missed my tide window for Active Pass that day – with a sailboat you can only traverse the pass at slack tide, and slack tide was at 1pm. I ended up sailing slowly up the Trincomali Channel and spending the night in Montague Harbour, which is a lovely anchorage but in a complete cellular reception black hole, ruling out any extended stay. In the morning I packed up and headed out through Porlier Pass to begin my solo crossing of the Georgia Straight.
racing the rainstorm
The weather for the first days sail was a mix of sun and rain, with long periods of spring-like warmth followed by cold rains and wind. This rainstorm followed me up the channel for several hours, but when it finally caught up with me late in the afternoon it turned out to be an unexpected hailstorm!
sailing ninja self-portrait, about 4km into the Georgia Straight crossing
The only real downside to sailing in cold weather is the long periods of inactivity, requiring you to basically sit outside in the cold wind for hours on end with nothing to do. Even with proper foul-weather gear, two layers of wool sweaters and wool hats and gloves, it’s still freezing. Pair that with the inexplicable lack of a fly on my overall-style foul-weather pants, and the only real movement you have for the vast majority of the journey is the occasional trip indoors to pretty much completely disrobe to pee. Still, apart from the puzzling lack of zipper, I am completely pleased with my Helly Hansen foul weather gear.
Here’s a video, taken once everything had calmed down and I was moving steadily forward. After I came through Porlier Pass I was expecting some heavy winds and probably some waves, but the addition of the tidal surges from the pass made for some very, very stressful moments! I got my second reef into the main, but not before stuffing all three bows into the waves several times, strewing tools from one end of the cabin to the other, and spilling the contents of my cupboards all over the floor, breaking a bunch of dishes and making an awful mess. The rest of the trip across was spent with the double-reefed main and staysail, which I finally shook out near UBC. I made an average of about 6kn across the Straight, but once I got the headsail up in more protected waters I reached 9.2kn coming into English Bay.
creamcycle, built up and listed for sale
This is the “new” Creamcycle, built up as a fixie with all the brand-new components from the Montague bike and listed for sale on Craigslist. Do you know anyone looking for a rad (if well-used) bike for the summer? 🙂
off to class, with a 20kg outboard in my backpack
Yet another class with the Bluewater Cruising Association; this time an outboard motor repair and maintenance class. Here it is Saturday morning at 8am, leaving on my bicycle with the heavy outboard in my backpack.
The outboard, we like to say, “worked really great until it didn’t”. In Sidney, during a trip to shore, the outboard very suddenly quit with no warning, in the sort of way that makes you think something is very, very wrong. Reading up a bit on the internet, I found out that you’re supposed to change the gearbox oil regularly, which I hadn’t – though apparently when you go to drain the gearbox oil it’s supposed to be oil, not dirty water and metal filings.
outboard repair class, saturday morning, 10am
Sitting in class, we learned all about the workings of outboards, stripping out sparkplugs and taking apart carburetors, and I slowly dug down into the problem that had caused the outboard to stop so suddenly. Clearly the problem was in the gearbox, but could it be repaired?
what came out of the gearbox of the outboard - photo by Jennifer Craig
When I finally got the gearbox opened up and stripped, a few pieces fell out – and some of those pieces were ball bearings. Well – I use the word “ball” somewhat loosely there; the parts that fell out were anything but spherical. D’oh!
End result? The engine is apparently a write-off. I can probably get a few bucks on Craigslist for it, for parts – but the cost of the replacement bits to get her running again are approximately four times what I paid for the engine originally, and given that it was quite underpowered for the dinghy it was on anyway, I guess I’m now in the market for a good used 8hp motor.
freshwater system complete!
Lastly, I finally added in and plumbed the third 100-liter water tank to the freshwater system. This has been on the bench for a while, but now the freshwater system is pretty much 100% complete – there’s still a slow, weeping leak on the galley sink that I need to tend to, causing the water pressure pump to kick in about once an hour to keep the pressure up. As far as I can tell the only fix for that is to replace the whole faucet assembly it hasn’t really been high up on my list of priorities.
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Phew! And that brings us pretty much up to current! So many updates, with so little time. I’ve got to remember to try to spew this stuff out in smaller portions, but when things are moving fast it’s really tough to keep up.
Maybe it’s just February talking here, but I can’t think of a better way to spend a rainy Saturday morning on the boat than to make a pot of coffee and teach myself how to splice double-braid rope.
three eye splices and a back splice
Splicing is the method by which a rope is woven back into itself in a permanent way. Splices are most often used to create a loop (or ‘eye’) at the end of a rope, but you can also splice two pieces of rope together or splice a rope to a chain, and a ‘back splice’ is a great way to make the end of a rope tidy and fray-proof. There are probably some excellent reasons why splicing is superior to just using knots, but to be honest I think for me it just comes down to a combination of two things; a masochistic fascination for learning the arcane technical details and trappings of a hobby, and a somewhat puzzling affection towards ropes and wires.
The first bit, the drive to learn, isn’t even remotely surprising given my age and gender; all men need some sort of intellectually stimulating hobby. I guess in another dimension I could be putting that portion of my brain to work studying the minutiae of some athlete’s SuperBowl records, but frankly I just can’t seem to understand the drive to watch other people play sports. Back when I was trying to be a techno rockstar, I justified my obsessive gear hoarding, building and modification by saying “every man needs a model train set, in one form or another…“, and I think it holds true.
my old live-pa rig, with custom cabling
The second part is a little baffling though – as a techno guy, I noticed that studio audio cables came in all different grades, from $10 cheap-o patch cords to $150 ultra-high-end ones. I also noticed that the ultra-high-end cables could be built at home using the exact same components for about $30. I proceeded to buy connectors and cable in bulk lots from eBay, and build custom replacements for almost every last cable in my studio. I got a surprising amount of enjoyment out of this – something about sitting down with a fresh spool of cable and a baggie of specialized hardware… the smell of the solder and the feel of the connectors, combined with the sense of accomplishment from having built something excellent and useful. I’ve begun to notice that I get exactly the same feeling from making ‘cables’ for use on the boat; see my previous entry on making new steering cables for another example.
When I purchased TIE Fighter, one of the many, many extras she came with was a sailcloth “ditty bag” with sail-repair tools and a Samson splicing kit. I set it aside with interest, knowing that at some point I’d want to learn the art. In the past year, I’ve come to regard all of the halyards – with their snap-shackles attached with bowline knots – with disdain. They stand out like white socks against a dark business suit; once you’ve seen them, you can’t un-see them. A vessel as fine as TIE Fighter should be rigged appropriately!
the contents of the splicing kit
Earlier this month I picked up a fifty-foot length of nice yellow floating double-braid line at half-price – not more of that ugly yellow polypropylene garbage, but really nice braided nylon. I figured it would make a perfect new dinghy painter, given that the last painter barely survived the latest windstorm, and so this morning I set down to learn to splice. My kit came with a handy (if tattered and stained) splicing manual, and just by following the directions I was fairly successful. I mean, I do have a bit of a technical history, and I am pretty handy with rope, but I was still able to complete a half-decent eye splice my very first try. That’s a pretty far cry from the $35 – per splice! – I was quoted at the marine store.
I can’t, however, say I had perfect success. The yellow rope in the first photo was supposed to be a pair of three-foot ropes, joined in the middle by a pair of eye splices and a steel O-ring and with a steel carabiner at either end. Oh, it came together just fine – but the ropes, meant to be identical in length so that they could be used as a fancy towing bridle for the zodiac, were not identical in length. Despite my careful measurements, the two ropes are significantly disparate, with one rope about eight inches longer than the other, and this means the bridle is completely useless as it will cause the zodiac to veer strongly to the side with the shorter bridle arm. I’m not sure why exactly this happened, but I’ll mention it tonight when I go to drink scotch with my rigger friend Mike Flynn, in hopes that he nods knowingly and explains where I went wrong in his usual succinct way.
Anyhow. Things progress, and things are slowly calming down. I will hopefully have more time to write.
Today is the closing date for the sale of my house in Vancouver.
Yesterday I signed the last of the documents with the notary public and dropped off the last of the keys with the realtor, and apparently Monday I should see the mortgage accounts disappear from my web banking.
The sale represents both the severing of my biggest physical tie to the sedentary world and the un-shouldering of the single largest source of stress in my my life. My priorities and goals have changed, and while I know that real estate in Vancouver is a sound financial investment in the longer term, I also know that I’m not interested in settling down into a life on land right now. As long as I owned a property I would always have to be a landlord, something that I am neither good at nor enjoy.
The emotional fallout from the sale has been slow to manifest – the house was the last relic of a failed relationship and a terrible downward spiral through the second half of my twenties; a dream that, once achieved, proved to be a huge disappointment. I am incredibly thankful that I was lucky enough to learn reasonably early the folly in living one’s life by others’ ideas of success.
the thing I'll miss most: my techno studio
At age twenty-eight, I figured I had won the game – I had a cute, successful fiancée, a great, high-paying job and a gorgeous home studio in my own house. I literally had the proverbial white picket fence! By all conventional logic, I should have been on top of the world, but instead I was falling deeper and deeper into depression. My relationship was failing and I was drinking far too much. I was rapidly becoming overweight and unhealthy. I was miserable at my job, and it showed in my work. Still, when I stepped back and looked at my life, I couldn’t see anything wrong with it! My ambition hit an all-time low – if the game is won, why bother continuing to play?
Fortunately that relationship fell apart in early 2007, and in the very same month the company I worked for was purchased and dismantled by the new owners. We received severance packages and pink slips and I watched, shellshocked, as my world crumbled around me. I spent the next few months fumbling about aimlessly, rented out the upper half the house and moved into the basement, and about a year later I started this blog.
onward, technomad.
The nearly four years since the collapse of that world has been a period of intense personal growth and discovery, of purging and change, much of which has been documented here. The house was the last reminder of the former life, and selling it has been both exhilarating and terrifying – not only was it a memento and an investment, but also a safety net should this crazy living-on-a-boat adventure turn sour! I think I’ve proven to myself over the past two years the value in trusting my instincts and following my dreams, and I have no intention of stopping now.
As it turns out, personal happiness has very little to do with the ideas portrayed in the movies – everyone knows that once the prince rescues the princess and carries her off into the sunset on horseback, they live “happily ever after”. So why wasn’t my ‘success’ a source of unending joy? Life is defined by struggle, by working toward goals – but when all of those goals are achieved, then what? How many women look as much forward to the six months following their wedding as they do to the wedding itself? What was Ward Cleaver really thinking?
In the past four years I’ve learned many lessons about the pursuit of happiness. I’ve learned to actively appreciate beauty, and that the time and energy spent to experience fleeting moments of intense beauty is not wasted. I’ve learned that while acquiring possessions stimulates a similar part of the mind, real happiness doesn’t require anything material. Most of all though, I’ve learned that happiness is subjective to each person individually, and that it is the sum of emotion and experience. For me, happiness is a combination of freedom, beauty and opportunity.
So! It is official. Apart from six tupperware bins in a storage locker and music equipment and furniture “stored” with friends and family, I have severed my physical ties to the land.
I’m realizing that I’m slipping into the old habit of not writing, which is especially irritating given that it was one of my unwritten (see? argh.) New Years Resolutions. For posterity, the list – I might as well get these down now, to help break the cycle:
write more,
develop and trust my emotions,
procrastinate less (see #1), and
seize any opportunity to gain new skills.
The first of the four is pretty obviously failing so far, but that is because #4 has been taking up a lot of my time. I’ve become involved with the Vancouver chapter of the Bluewater Cruising Association, a support network for offshore sailors who are either planning to head off into the great blue yonder, who are currently out there living the dream, or who have “been there, done that” and returned to tell the tale.
Miya on New Year's Eve
So far, I’ve been mostly taking advantage of the education offered through the BCA – I’ve enrolled in two classes, one for offshore meteorology and another for ham radio operations and licensing. Both classes are proving to be well worth the time and money spent – the more I learn about ham radio, the more it interests me! The world of amateur radio – and more specifically, ‘packet radio’, or computer networking over the airwaves – has a distinctive feel to it so far, one that strongly reminds me of learning about the world of modems and dial-up bulletin board systems, back before the internet gained popularity.
Furthermore, my day job has increased in responsibility, so now I am working very nearly full-time hours during the week. Part of me is tickled to spend my days working in cloud computing and my nights learning how to interpret cloud formations! Still, with full-time hours and courses five days per week, I’m not left with much free time to socialize.
Miya sadly had to move back to Seattle this week – her day job was only willing to allow her to work remotely for two months, and those two months flew by faster than either of us expected. Given that I spent a lot of time paring down my possessions and footprint to make room for a second human aboard the Tie Fighter, her moving off has left the boat feeling somewhat cavernous and empty. We’ll still be together moving forward, with her moving back onto the boat in a few months, but that’s a subject that could (and will) make an entire posting itself.
