The hardest part about living and blogging a life that is constantly in self-inflicted turmoil is that post-worthy come at a very rapid pace. If you don’t keep up with it, the blog posts pile up like Visa bills and suddenly you’re drowning in a glut of interesting things to write about, without the time in the bank to keep the bill collectors at bay.
So I just have to start writing again, and gloss over the lesser stories from this epic past six months. I will try to keep up better.
In the news – the engine is almost repaired! The cause of the whole overheating fiasco? Some well-meaning previous owner installed the wrong head gasket. The water jackets were completely blocked off, and three of the cylinder head bolts were missing. How it ever worked at all, I have no idea. This is just in time to cruise back to Vancouver…
Wait. Let me start again! I’ve spent the last five months living in Richmond, three of those months out of the water, with Tie Fighter in a glorified parking lot at the Shelter Island Marina boatyard. The amount of work was staggering, but I am finally finished… ok, the work will never really be finished, but at least the boat is stable and dry and improved in a hundred ways. This is good, because Miya is moving aboard as of tomorrow…
Er – ok, one more start. I have a girlfriend now! She’s moving onboard, and eventually we will be leaving on an epic sailing adventure with no set destination or schedule. The first direction is ‘south’, and from there we’ll roll with the punches…
Argh – I would like to write about the week I’ve been having. There have been so many things happening!
UNFORTUNATELY, one of those things that has happened is that I managed to wipe out on my bicycle, pulling a tendon (I think?) in my wrist. As a result, I have had to have my right hand – my dominant hand – in a splint for the past three days. This has also meant that I cannot safely ride my bicycle, so I’ve essentially had my wings clipped. Furthermore it makes typing very uncomfortable!
On top of that, the winds have been blowing strong from the northwest for the past week – this wouldn’t normally be a problem, but what with my diminished capacity for all things manual, rowing included, I am somewhat landlocked. I’ve spent the past two days working from my friend Carrie’s living room couch, while she is on an epic rock-climbing adventure in Thailand.
Lots has happened, and things are moving forward in my grand scheme at a very rapid rate – I’ll update this site as soon as it is more comfortable to type.
Well, that wasn’t so bad after all – I mean, I didn’t get hardly any sleep, but I did make it through ok.
Watching it now I can see that it’s really hard to tell the height of the waves in a 2D video – next time I guess maybe I should get lower to show some perspective. Suffice to say that at the peak of the storm the occasional wave was breaking up onto my deck, which is unnerving at the best of times, but twice as scary at 3am when everything is cold and black.
Because Tie Fighter is a trimaran she is not vulnerable to the severe rolling, or ‘heeling’, that a regular sailboat would see in a storm like this. Instead she jumps to the top of each wave, but due to the anchor line pulling her into the wind she often cannot ride gently down the other side as she’d like. In a strong wind, her bows point anywhere from 90º off of the wind, and when she’s pointed directly into the wind she’ll sometimes ride to the top of a wave and SMASH her bows down into the trough of the next, pressing me bodily into my foam mattress.
Due to their width, multihulls are much more vulnerable to “corkscrewing” in a wave system; this means that one bow will head up the incline of a wave, followed by the stern, followed by the other stern, followed by the other bow, while the first bow and stern are already on their way down the other side of the wave. Think of a bowl of soup, and imagine dipping the edge of the bowl in a circle, causing the soup to slosh in a circular wave. Now imagine that you are the soup. Corkscrewing is hell for people with motion sickness! Nights like last night make me realize just how phenomenally lucky I am that I don’t get seasick.
Engine repairs have jumped up on the priority list, yet again. I think it’s time to just have the engine pulled out and overhauled; it’s something that I really need to be stable, and currently it just isn’t. I’m now hunting for a boatyard that will do this for me, ideally one that will let me hang around and watch.
Environment Canada has issued an advisory for tomorrow, calling for northwesterly winds of 20kn to 33kn. Two weeks ago when the massive windstorm sent seven boats up onto the beach and wrecked several more along the coastline, they weren’t calling for much more than that.
really should have rowed over to get a better shot of this
I’m starting to think that Kitsilano Beach might be unlucky for boaters. On Saturday night I left the boat at about 6pm, heading off into Kits in search of food. When I returned at about 9pm there was a new sight in the water; at first I thought it was a small tugboat with a boom of logs attached, but at I got closer I saw that the boom was one of those inflatable booms for containing oil spills, and the “tugboat” was actually the upper platform of a luxury motorboat, with the rest of the boat resting on the ocean floor!
I have no idea what the story is, but I watched on Sunday as the tide went out and a few folks in wetsuits went inside, ostensibly plugged the (hole? burst hose? broken through-hull fitting?) and pumped out the boat. I didn’t notice any oil slick, and the boom was gone by mid-morning. The police and the Coast Guard also made appearances during the day probably to check out the damage. I didn’t actually see the boat leave, but I did see a couple of tow-boats hovering like vultures nearby, so I assume the sunken vessel was towed away.
this neighborhood is so surreal sometimes!
Tomorrow, bright and early, the forecast is calling for a lot of wind – to put it in perspective, at about 10kn of wind, the waves get up to about 30cm tall and the boat is in constant motion. At about 15kn, the waves jump to about 50-60cm tall, and rowing out to the boat becomes a little more difficult, and at about 20kn of wind I have to have everything in a drybag, as I’m not going to get to or from the boat without getting wet. Tomorrow they are calling for 20kn – 33kn of wind, which will mean breaking waves larger than 1m, probably making it impossible to get to or from the boat.
I know – or at least I’m pretty sure – that my anchor line will hold, but it won’t be a comfortable time. According to the weather forecasts, the wind won’t entirely let up until the weekend, so if I don’t get into False Creek before the big winds start, I am unlikely to be able to pull up my anchor and go until Friday. My current plan is to get up really early tomorrow morning and motor for False Creek, stopping at the dock at the Granville Bridge so I can fill up my water tanks, wash my dishes and give my engine a chance to cool down a bit before motoring down to Science World to anchor for a week or so. I guess we’ll see what time the wind starts! If I’m stuck in the waves, I’ll be sure to blog about it.
When I left for Seattle on Saturday afternoon, there were a dozen boats – possibly a couple more – floating just off of Kitsilano Beach. When I returned on Thursday, there were only two remaining in the water; Tie Fighter and a small, unnamed blue-hulled sailboat that I frankly don’t remember whether or not it was here when I left.
front-end loader digging out 'Tuesday Sunrise'
Of the other boats, two (Theresa on ‘And-E’ and Ryan on ‘Helen Kate’) escaped to False Creek – but seven of the others were washed ashore, with one of those smashed to pieces on the beach and another holed by the rocks and sunk. The popular news outlets reported three sailboats on the beach, but by my tally seven boats dragged their anchors and hit the shore. One boat, a large steel tug, fetched up against Randy’s boat and forced her much further up the beach, making it difficult for him to get ‘Tuesday Sunrise’ back into the water. The tugboat was apparently gone by the morning, possibly due to help from the Coast Guard, or perhaps it never went too hard aground and they were able to motor off without assistance. Earlier today I saw this scene; a front-end loader helping to dig out the area under the ‘Tuesday Sunrise’ keel so that hopefully come high tide she’ll be able to slip back into the water.
this used to be a Piver trimaran
Bob’s boat, the name of which I cannot remember, was not so fortunate. His anchor slipped and he was blown ashore, but the waves pummeled his home-built Piver trimaran literally to pieces. There’s no salvaging the wreck; he is out of a home. Speaking with Shauna this morning, she mentioned that she had run into a girl on Commercial Drive carrying a pirate flag, and the girl told her that she’d taken the flag from a wrecked sailboat on Kitsilano Beach. Shauna immediately recognized the flag as being from Bob’s boat – personally, I think it’s incredibly disrespectful to steal from a wrecked vessel when there is obviously a salvage operation going on! I can’t help but compare that girl’s actions with someone coming upon a burning house with people running in and out saving as much as they can, and that someone taking a souvenir from the pile of rescued items. Had I run into this girl on Commercial Drive I would not have been polite, to say the very least.
anchor rode, frayed and broken
Tie Fighter held up to the storm admirably, with the only casualty being the fraying of the anchor rode and the rub damage to the hull nearby. This isn’t as trivial as it would appear, however – the rode itself is a 250′ piece of heavy nylon rope worth probably $350-$400 new, but the rubbing has worn through one of the three strands, rendering it pretty much useless. This could have been avoided by adding what sailors call “chafing gear”, which usually amounts to a short length of old, used fire hose, cut lengthwise and lashed onto the anchor rode where it chafes against the boat. If the anchor rode had frayed through the second and third strands, there is no question, Tie Fighter would have joined the other boats on the beach – or perhaps been wrecked on the rocks! I rarely have more than 100′ of rode in use, so I will be able to cut the rode in half and use the unfrayed portion, but the rode will still need to be replaced in the near future.
Inside Tie Fighter there was almost no sign of anything having happened at all. The dishes in the sink were sitting a bit differently, but none were broken, the chess set and playing cards were on the salon bench instead of on the windowsill where I left them – nothing serious. I think partly this is due to my having been bitten once before; sailing through rough weather only to return below to find all of my tools spread over the floor of the cabin, and having to spend twenty minutes repacking my drill bits and socket sets. Now almost everything I own is compartmentalized using tupperware-ish plastic bins, which fit neatly into the lockers and don’t move around much even in the heaviest weather.
Overall, I dodged a serious bullet. Still, this is twice in a row now that I’ve been away on shore when the serious northwesterlies have hit, and part of me feels like I’ve missed out! However, when the 20kn winds from the northwest blew up again this morning at 5am and the boat jumping around in the 1m waves prevented me from sleeping, I realized that while perhaps it would have been interesting to be out here in near-hurricane winds, it wouldn’t have been anything you could call “comfortable”. Sooner or later I’ll be forced to face that weather, so there’s no sense wishing hardship on myself for no reason.
