a lovely farewell evening on the Creek

It is January the 26th 2010, one day past my due date to get the heck out of False Creek - but here I am, still about two hundred meters from the Cambie Bridge.  I've had visits from the VPD two days in a row, but since I haven't been able to start my engine there hasn't been much I can do.  Yesterday I managed to get my engine started again, and today I blew a large portion of the day working on day-job stuff and reprovisioning Tie Fighter for an extended stay where there isn't a grocery store a block away.  I'm still here, but I'll be leaving in the morning.  Tonight is my last evening in the Creek for a while, so I figured I'd relax and enjoy it.

I thought I'd update the blog with a few notes on what has changed in the neighborhood over the past month - besides the constant visits from the VPD, that is.  As I write this, there is a massive inflatable boom across False Creek, about ten meters west of the Cambie Bridge.  There is a gap of about thirty meters across, and that gap is currently being patrolled by no less than four RCMP boats.  Still, I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start from the beginning.

denied access to my favourite bike path!

Southeastern False Creek is home to the newly-constructed Olympic Village.  The Village will be home to all the athletes during the games, so of course security is a big question - but the sheer amount of money being spent on this project is astounding.  The most recent roadblock to go up, a block or so from my boat, was being staffed by seven people at last check, including three uniformed police officers and four people in VANOC jackets!  As far as I can tell, there is a similar roadblock on every road adjoining the Village.  The entire area is surrounded by tall steel fences.

Still, this is all stuff you can read elsewhere.  This is my blog, and so I will tell (and show) you what I am seeing from the water. For instance, my favourite bike path - the one from Cambie Bridge down towards Science World, past the shiny new Olympic Village buildings, over the boardwalks and sculpted bridge, past the immaculately landscaped gardens and artificial peninsula built for the wildlife - has been blocked off.  To get downtown I have to skulk my way through five blocks of alleyways and several blocks of fenced-in sidewalk.  I hate riding on the sidewalk.

CFAV Glendyne placing the buoys - intimidating!

Anyhow, about a month ago, a large, scary-looking navy tugboat pulled into False Creek.  I did a bit of research and found the tug to be the Canadian Forces Auxiliary Vessel (CFAV) Glendyne, a Glen-class tugboat based out of CFB Esquimalt, near Victoria.  The Glendyne put a pair of large, orange buoys in place just short of the Cambie Bridge, complete with orange flashing lights on top.  I knew that this would be the beginning of the promised 'boom' under the Bridge, but I still hadn't seen any documentation about what the end result would look like, and so I watched with interest as they set the buoys in place.  I figured they'd be back in the next couple of days to finish the job, but once they were finished they motored slowly away and never returned.

Off-topic, one of my neighbors has mentioned that he expects to see at least one military gunboat in the Creek, paired up with the RCMP zodiacs and whaleboats currently patrolling the boomed-off area.  I am not convinced, but given the focus on security I wouldn't be shocked if there were some kind of small, fast Canadian Forces gunboat deployed here during the games.

holy crap, a hovercraft!

Anyhow - a few weeks went past without any change to the buoys, but one morning last week I awoke to the sounds of something very large cruising past me.  I popped my head up out of the hatch to see a Department of Fisheries and Oceans and/or Canadian Coast Guard (both were painted on the hull) hovercraft making its way slowly down the creek!  The hovercraft - which later research found to be the CCGH Siyay based in Richmond - was outfitted with a crane and a large cargo of cement blocks.  I figured they were planning to work on the boom somehow, but instead they spent the day lining both sides of False Creek with smaller, lighted channel buoys, indicating the shipping channel in the center of the Creek.  This of course was followed by several days of the VPD visiting any boat anchored too far out into the middle of the Creek, issuing warnings and referring everyone to the notice that anchoring within the commercial shipping lane is banned by Transport Canada.

Personally, I think the buoys are actually a nice touch, and I hope they stay past the Olympics.  It's nice to pull into a bay and have your way clearly marked - it makes everything feel a little bit safer, a bit more professional... dare I say "a bit better-managed"?

mmmm, sausages

Anyhow.  Sequential Circus 7 was this weekend - it was excellent, thank you for asking - and as such I didn't spend much time on the boat.  When I returned, I found that someone had been busy, and there were now several large black inflatable sausages stretched across the Creek!  They're about two and a half meters in diameter and appear to be made of a thick rubber, with webbing straps every three meters or so, tie-down grommets on those straps, and large metal rings at the end to fasten the sausages together, or to the shore.  In other words, the sausages are clearly designed and built to do one thing only: to operate as a boom or blockade over water.

One question we'd be bantering about on the Creek was what exactly they were planning to use for the boom.  One guy thought large logs, another thought a very thick rope - I had no ideas, but apparently the answer was easier than we thought.

While rowing back to Tie Fighter yesterday, I made a short detour out to the opening in the boom, where an RCMP whaler was sitting.  As I approached, he was quick to lean out the window and let me know that the area past the boom is now restricted waters - as an aside, I have gotten similar warnings from the people manning blockades as I approached them on my bicycle.  Seriously?  The huge black barrier, the orange flashing lights and the menacing police boat - or in the case of the roadblocks, the seven people in official-looking uniforms, the flashing lights, the pylons, the big orange-striped barrier sawhorses and the police car parked perpendicularly to the road - do other people really not understand these signs?  Or maybe it's just that the barricades are so universally unpopular that anyone approaching them must be some kind of threat.  I don't know.  Anyhow.

The officer, once he understood that I was just there to ask questions, was quite friendly and explained that the boom would be closed to all boats except official VANOC-approved vehicles.  The boom is apparently scheduled for removal at the end of March, but the officer did not know whether or not the shipping lane buoys would be removed.

Speaking of speaking with officers, I've spoken with two different sets of VPD in the past two days, both of whom were somewhat interested in the fact that my anchoring permit had expired.  Each time the R.G.McBeath shows up there are at least two officers onboard, and often more.  Yesterday there were four officers, none of whom I recognized, and when I explained to the officer doing the talking that I was planning to leave as soon as I could get my engine started, he answered "I'll believe that when I see it.".  He then pulled slowly away without saying another word to me.  In contrast, when they came by today, it was another batch of officers I'd never seen before, and when I showed them that I'd just gotten my engine running again, the officer in charge said "It's almost 5pm, why don't you wait until morning before pulling out, it'll be dark very soon.".  Nice!

Anyhow.  I've only blown my deadline by two days, but it's definitely time to go.  The only thing I know to expect is significantly rougher waters - False Creek is very protected, and I'm really not looking forward to just how bad the February weather can be out in the open.  Rest assured, I'll blog about it as I go.

Ok, so I figured I'd write this "tomorrow", but that "tomorrow" was Christmas Eve and well... you know how it goes.

official notice from the VPD

So!  December 23rd, I got a visit from the Vancouver Police Department, in the R.G.McBeath.  They were quite friendly, as they often are, but they explained that unfortunately the court battle between the city and a False Creek liveaboard had come to a close, with the judge ruling to uphold the 2006 Vancouver addendum to the Canada Shipping Act.  The Act, translated to layman english, says that no person or group can "own" a navigable water - ie anywhere that the tide goes in and out.  Navigable water is public land, and anyone can anchor in any navigable water for as long as they like as long as they're not blocking shipping channels or in military areas.

...or as the Addendum states, "or if it's False Creek, Vancouver, in which case all bets are off.".

Anyhow, the officers told me that they were now under orders to enforce the anchoring bylaws, and that I would have to get an anchoring permit if I wanted to stay in False Creek.  They gave me an informational pamphlet detailing what to expect in the Creek during the Olympics, and they served me with an official notice saying that I must have said permit by January 4th, or that I'll be towed from the creek at my expense.  That's not an insignificant expense, either - the towing includes a haulout, which requires a special mobile crane lift to pull the boat out of the water and up onto land storage.  Usually a haulout costs around $200 per trip, and the officers made sure to point out there would be added storage fees racking up daily while the boat rests on their land.

Just as an aside, I wouldn't be surprised if the VPD marine dry storage place didn't actually have the capability to lift a boat of Tie Fighter's size out of the water - she's about 7.5m wide, and most travel lifts can only handle a boat about 5m wide...  not that I have any inclination towards putting that theory to the test!

the outside of the VPD's pamphlet

There are folks around in the Creek who have their hackles raised by the ruling.  Honestly, I must confess there's even a little anti-authoritarian anarchist part of me left over from my teens - that part of my mind has built a mental barricade from a burning, flipped over Prius, and is screaming "WE WILL FIGHT THIS!" - but the reality is, I have no intention whatsoever of fighting it.  I'll go.  Frankly, I kind of needed the kick in the ass; if you're going to live in an apartment that can travel around but you don't actually take advantage of that fact... well, you might as well be living in a trailer park.

If you're reading this and you're not from Vancouver, you might not realize that False Creek is pretty much ground zero for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.  I am currently anchored just west of the Cambie Bridge, about 300m from the Olympic Village, future home to the illustrious athletes while the games are ongoing, and future snooty yuppy condo village for decades after that.  It has actually been a real pleasure to watch the Village rise from the unused industrial plots over the past few months, and the bike ride around the seawall from the Cambie Bridge down towards Science World has become a tour of some the most beautiful architecture in the city.  I will deeply miss calling this neighborhood my "permanent" home.

pamphlet, inside

Of course, with the Olympics being a huge political and financial debacle, forethought is critical.  I can certainly understand the need to crack down on anchoring given the situation; hotel rooms are pushing up to $5000/night during the games!  Anyone within boating range would/should/will jump at the chance to come and spend a few days staying on their boat free of charge, anchored pretty much directly in the downtown core of Vancouver.  There's a serious potential there for chaos, with hundreds or perhaps even thousands of boaters of various skill levels attempting to anchor in the notoriously foul weather of February.  A single dragging anchor can mean many thousands of dollars of damage to a boat... or more importantly, to other boats or property nearby.  The city would be crazy to stand by and let it happen, which is why I've been saying for months that there'd be absolutely no way they'd allow us to stay on, unfettered, through the Olympic games.

So what does it all mean for me?  Well, when I first heard the news I took it as bad.   After reflection, I have now I have come to realize that it's just the change of a chapter for this lifestyle; sometimes you get to pick when the next chapter begins, and sometimes you just have to roll with it.  I've grown very complacent in the past few months, settling in to the easy life here in downtown Vancouver.  There are groceries, laundry and many coffeeshops and restaurants within an easy walk.  If I want to go to Canadian Tire, it's a hundred-meter row followed by a three-block bikeride - anchoring anywhere else that could be a two-kilometer row followed by a five-kilometer bikeride, or even much further.  I'm already in decent shape, but I suspect that I will be in much better shape by summertime.

When I get my anchoring permit on January 4th, it will be valid for twenty-one days, meaning I will have to vacate False Creek on or before January 25th, 2010.  Normally I wouldn't wait until the last minute, but I have obligations here in town on the 23rd, and I am hoping to travel a bit earlier on in the month.

To be clear, this isn't the end of an era - the permit only really says that I have twenty-one days in which I can stay in False Creek out of any sequential forty days.  I can return to anchor False Creek in March, ideally just after the Olympics finish, but at that time the forces-that-be will have switched over to the summer permit rules.  In the summertime one can anchor in False Creek for fourteen days out of any consecutive thirty days with a valid permit.  Anchoring permits are free; the only thing that really changes here is my stable, unmoving spot, where I have been squatting at anchor without a permit for the past five months or so.

So now, on top of my usual pile of duties, obligations and stresses, I have a half of a month to finish all of my maintenance tasks, tie off any loose ends in town and find a new place to live for a month or so, and my ability to stay in one place for months at a time has been more or less permanently removed.  As of January 25th, I will officially be a nomad!

The Man: Just This Guy, You Know?

Rather than evangelize, let me just say this:  maybe you've planned go to Burning Man but something got in the way, or maybe you've seen images or TV shows about it and thought it sounded interesting.  Maybe you've just seen the deranged, happy looks in the eyes of folks who've recently returned from the desert, and noticed the lasting changes in the way they look at the world around them, and maybe that made you wonder just what the whole thing is all about.  Do yourself a favour and just get there.

It's not too difficult; the trick I've used to great success several times now is to get a ticket when they first go on sale in February, then stick it somewhere that you'll see it regularly, like on your fridge.  If you have the ticket and it turns out you can't go, you can easily bounce it on Craigslist pretty much right up until the day the event starts, for as much as you paid for it - so there's almost zero financial risk.  Drop the $250 when the tickets go on sale, and your life will mysteriously get out of the way and allow you to go to the desert.  However, if you tell yourself you're going but wait until August to buy your ticket, your life will conspire to prevent you from going, be it work-related problems, or financial or whatever.

Anyhow.  After a few frantic days of last-minute preparation (ok, I admit it, mostly costume shopping), Carrie and I loaded up her truck with a huge pile of camping equipment and headed down to Seattle to meet up with our three-RV convoy.  After being denied a border crossing back in February, I didn't want to take the chance of having our whole RV turned inside out - or worse yet, having the whole RV turned away - just because of a little black mark on my record.  We made it across with zero hassles, and spent the night in a Super-8 before reconnecting with the rest of the motley band at the Seattle REI.  Interesting fact(*): the Seattle REI is the second most visited tourist attraction in Seattle, after the Space Needle.

(*: by "fact" I mean that someone working the door at the REI told me this, so take it with a grain of salt.)

Carleigh and Bayrock in the Monday sunrise

We drove looooong through the night and arrived at the Black Rock Desert at approximately 2am, where we had to wait in a long, dusty lineup of RVs, trucks and cars for the next three hours.  When we finally arrived at the Greeters Station, all the first-timers ("virgins") were pulled out of the RV to roll in the dust, ring the welcome gong, and receive a certificate good for one spanking at the Greeters Camp.  I thought the certificate was pretty lame, personally - in previous years the spanking was administered promptly and with great enthusiasm shown by both spanker and spankee, but apparently there have been complaints.  *sigh*.

Setting up camp while the sun rose was gorgeous, and went smoothly - we were all far too excited to sleep, so we broke out the costumes and ran giddily around the playa all day, hitting up bars and checking out art.  Most of the big sound stages weren't yet setup, so Monday night was by far the quietest of the week, but that didn't stop us from tracking down bar after bar and partying as hard as possible.

Tuesday was much of the same.  The first 'real' day of Burning Man; wake up, struggle into consciousness, clean up with babywipes, apply sunscreen, don your most fabulous, anticipated costume and stumble out into the blinding white desert in search of adventure.  Of course there was no shortage of adventure, and the day was mostly spent riding from art installation to art installation, making new friends at the Man, gathering and subsequently losing a posse, and drinking fabulous martinis at Martini Village.  Sleeper hit of the day: Lollipop Shot Camp, where we were served shots of Ketel One vodka and Tootsie Roll Pops in custom take-home glow-in-the-dark shot glasses, on lanyards for easy access of course.  The procedure - dunk the lollipop in the shot glass, twirl it around for a minute, take the shot, repeat - was both fun and dangerous, and we all agreed we needed to take a break from drinking shortly thereafter.

Drew and a new friend at Lollipop Shot Camp

By Tuesday night the Opulent Temple was up and running, and the throbbing house music could be heard from one end of the playa to the other.  Shortly after we met up with them the crew decided to head for the other side of the playa to catch DJ Dan at another stage, and Carrie mentioned being tired and planning to head back to camp.  When she left, I decided I'd had enough of house music and headed off to find some dubstep, eventually meeting some folks who told me that DJ Mimosa was playing at the Space Cowboys stage, so I took off like a shot to get there.  Mimosa was hands-down my favourite act from the Emrg-N-See festival in Oregon earlier this summer.

As I arrived at the stage, I rolled up on my bike at a reasonable clip.  I wove in and out of the hundreds of bicycles lying on the street, aiming to drop mine as close to the stage as I could to make it a more undesirable target for a bike thief, should any be around, and managed to make it within about twenty feet.  As I approached what looked like a good spot, I swung my leg up over the bike and rode on a single pedal, unravelling my long skirt and adjusting my hat while riding with one hand, and then gingerly stepped off as the bike reached the drop spot, allowing the bike to fall gently to the ground.  A nearby group of three girls, unnoticed until that moment, began a round of polite applause.

"That was the best dismount I've seen this year!", said one.

I took my top hat in hand and bowed low in acknowledgement, and at the lowest point of the bow I was startled to see that I had dropped my bike directly next to Carrie's - nearly on top of her bike, in fact.  I guess great music is universal; I spent the next half-hour tracking her down in the massive crowd, letting her know that it was just one of those quirky Burning Man coincidences, and that I wasn't in fact stalking her.

My custom-built Rad Playa Cruiser™

Wednesday I parted ways with my crew to meet up with Miya, whom I hadn't seen in a few months, and we spent the day riding double on my Rad Playa Cruiser™ which I had equipped with stunt pegs for exactly such an opportunity.  In four years of Burning Man I have yet to see a single other bicycle with stunt pegs, which confuses me somewhat - mine cost me a grand total of $6, and have come in handy numerous times each year.  What better way to meet cute girls?

"You're looking for Root Society, hey?  Hop on, I'm heading that way now..!"

Just as an aside, my Rad Playa Cruiser™ has now seen three Burning Man expeditions, and currently resides with my friend Dan Ross as his primary bicycle.  She began life as a $25 junk store bicycle and underwent massive reworking to become the jewel that she is today - please click here for a photo of her in the "before" state.

Rocking 'Hair of the Dog' with an impromptu band

Miya and I ended up bouncing from bar to bar, eventually finding ourselves drinking at 'Hair of the Dog', an open-mic bar a block or so from Center Camp.  Miya noticed a whiteboard behind the bar, listing things the bar could use as donations, such as orange juice, tequila, baby wipes and... "little people".  Apparently one of the bartenders had a thing for dwarves and/or midgets, but this entry spawned a furious row ending with Miya standing on a barstool and berating the bartenders mercilessly, arguing that her 5'4" frame certainly qualified her as "little".  She was quite convincing, and soon found herself working behind the bar helping random burners take the edge off the day.  I seized this opportunity to take the stage, and played and sang several songs with an impromptu band.  We were pretty bad, but considering none of us had ever met before, much less played together, we weren't terrible and the crowd was quite appreciative.

Thursday was much quieter during the day than the previous days, spending most of the time taking it easy and recovering from the past three days of lunacy.  Most of our camp napped intermittantly, and I had an excellent guitar and mandolin jam with Glyn and a few random folks that wandered under our shade structure throughout the afternoon.  Thursday night on the other hand, Carrie and I got into our most dressy costumes and headed out for a night of dancing.  We made our way to the enormous Root Society dome to see Bassnectar, which was apparently also the plan of about seven or eight thousand other burners.  The dome was packed wall-to-wall, and they'd configured soundsystems outside as well, with spillover crowds extending well out into the streets.  The bass could be felt from blocks away!  We danced well into the night, and I didn't get to bed until well after sunrise.

Miya attempting to make breakfast crêpes

Friday I met up with Miya again, who had had a very rough morning dealing with a medical emergency involving a member of her camp.  We spent the afternoon and evening just talking and wandering around from art installations to bars, spending an hour or so watching a terrible italian caveman soft-porn flick in the Bad Ideas Theatre and eating popcorn.  We ended up crashing reasonably early, in preparation for the festivities of Saturday.

Saturday, the day of the burn, felt like it arrived far too quickly.  Our camp, 'Team Gong Show' (a subset of the 'First Republic of Slacking') had planned a three-hour party in the afternoon and I had been elected bar manager.  In preparation for this, we had stopped at the Rite-Aid pharmacy in Alturas, California to purchase alcohol - the ridiculous prices of booze in the states never cease to astound me.  We purchased a grand total of twelve gallons of vodka and rum for just over $120, and in three hours of serving heavily-sauced smoothies to a crowd of about a hundred or so we went through it all.  The theme of the party was, unsurprisingly, "The Gong Show" and after buttering up the crowd with drinks and house music for an hour or so, the gonging began.  I went up to play and sing A-Ha's 'Take On Me' with my mandolin, to much acclaim, though I was gonged when I returned to the stage an hour later to perform Britney Spears' 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' on the acoustic guitar.

in the Deep Playa, surveying the land

The burning of the man was spectacular, with phenomenal fireworks and a huge fireball erupting from the base of the man to start the blaze.  The man himself was particularly well built this year, and it was a solid forty minutes or so before he finally fell.  I had plans to meet up with Miya at midnight, but I took a short nap after the burn which turned into a three-hour stretch, and I woke up at 1:45am, groggy and faded from the day's heavy partying.  Fortunately, I subscribe to the theory that every Burning Man meetup plan should have at least one backup plan, and so I had also made a plan to meet her at 2am at Center Camp should we miss out on the midnight meetup.  I raced over to Center Camp, losing my third set of goggles of the week on the way, and waited - but she never showed.  When I made my way back to her camp to see if she was there, I found her fast asleep in her tent - it turned out she had also partied way too hard during the day, and had slept right through the meetup times as well.  We ended up napping for another few hours, intending to wake up for sunrise, but we even missed that by about an hour.  The early morning was spent riding around in the deep playa, checking out the furthest-flung art installations, talking and enjoying the morning sunlight.

Overall?  Amazing.  Very much a different experience from the previous two years, but that's pretty much always how it is - you go in with expectations of how things are going to be, but you can never really predict what will happen or how it will affect you.  I was a lot more 'crew'-oriented this year, instead of heading out solo like the previous years, and I stayed a lot more sober.

I will most certainly go again.

Gonzales Bay, Victoria

It's day two in Gonzales Bay, just east of Victoria Harbour.

It's lovely here!  Nicer even than Fleming Beach, from which I was evicted on Tuesday - and even nicer now that it's not pouring rain anymore.  I arrived on Wednesday afternoon to grey skies, and it rained all Thursday, so the sun is welcome - I had the sails up this morning for an hour or so to let them dry out.  Mildew isn't something I'm really interested in dealing with.

One nice thing that happened: about an hour after I anchored, an older woman with long white hair rowed out to say hello, and to offer me a shower, a dinner and the use of a bicycle, should I need one.  What a far cry from the surly stares of the Esquimalt fishermen, or the studied disinterest of the older sailors at the naval base!  She offered her back yard as a place to tie my dinghy, instead of the public beach, and told me to feel free to come and go though her property.  I took her up on the latter, and rowed my bicycle to shore in the pouring rain last night to go have birthday drinks with Oakley and Amanda.  Making my way home much later on was a bit of a trial to say the least, especially in the pitch dark with a head full of Jack Daniels - when I finally found the place, the tide had gone waaaaay out, and my dinghy was stranded about twenty feet up on the steep, slippery rocks.  I managed to get the dinghy, my bicycle and myself down to the waterline without falling - at least, as far as I remember.  Good thing I remembered my flashlight!

The bay is shallow - only ten or fifteen feet or so where I'm anchored - and I can see the bottom.  It's really nice being able to see the bottom, especially after so much time in the murky brownish waters of False Creek.  There are large shoals in the bay, and tonnes of seabirds - the only downside is that there's not really any shelter from the open ocean.  I get to rock around on the wake of every whale-watching tourboat that goes past - but between the gentle, constant rocking, the sounds of the seabirds and the waves lapping at the rocky shores nearby, it feels very much like the east coast here.  I can't see any crabs down there, but I might try dropping the trap later on just to see if I can snag some dinner.

If the sun sticks around, perhaps this weekend I'll get out the flippers and snorkel and give Tie Fighter's bottom a good scrub - she's starting to look pretty scummy down there.

Tonight, a house party.  Tomorrow, shopping for Burning Man supplies.  Sunday, who knows?

At my last major post, I was about to speak at the Open Web Vancouver conference at the Vancouver Conference Center.  My talk went pretty well, I guess - I mean, I definitely didn't win any awards, but nobody walked out either.  I met some great new folks and had a good experience overall.  I know now that speaking at tech conferences is almost exactly like doing live-pa techno in front of a big audience - the more prepared you are, the easier it is to let go and just be yourself.

Since then, there's been... God.  Seriously, where to start?!

I've had repeated, profound musical experiences on the boat, jamming with friends.  Picture if you will a mirror-smooth False Creek, with the boat anchored about fifty feet offshore.  Dan Ross playing guitar and singing, Chad Taylor playing muted trumpet and providing some percussive backup and myself on mandolin and backup vocals - folks walking past, double-taking and sitting down on the seawall to listen, applauding between songs.  Making music on the boat with friends has given me far more joy than I ever imagined it could.  Actually, making music on the boat at all - I've been spending on average about eight to ten hours per week sitting on my deck, playing my guitar and singing.  If there is a greater peace than playing music on the water, I haven't found it yet.

Yarrrr!

I've gone on three epic sailing adventures, the third of which is still ongoing - as of this writing I am anchored in this lovely little bay, surrounded by million-dollar waterfront houses and a beautiful cliff infested with rock climbers.  More on that in future posts - but suffice to say this ongoing solo-sailing adventure is not without its trials and tribulations.

The first of the three epic sailing adventures was with a beautiful woman named Miya who I met at Burning Man in 2008, and who had come to visit me several times over the past year.  Her confidence in my sailing ability was appreciated, though perhaps unwarranted, as we left Vancouver and immediately ran into eight-foot breaking swells just off Point Atkinson, enroute to the Sunshine Coast.  The sailing got a lot better after the first day, but we still had to spend a few days on Bowen Island with engine trouble - mostly waiting around for a mechanic, until we tackled the problem head-on with the manual and some elbow grease, finally solving it ourselves and getting the engine back up and running.  We then cruised up the coast to Secret Cove and Smuggler Cove, where we spent a night before returning to Vancouver.  It was an amazing trip; the ocean opened my eyes and put a good fear into me, and the company was exquisite.  The parting of ways at the end was wistful to say the least.

Drew and Laurel spinning fire on the boat at Diversity

The second sailing adventure was with yet another beautiful woman, Carrie, who joined me on a trip to the Diversity Festival on Texada Island.  Technically we were supposed to sail with a crew of six, but Vancouver being the city of flailers that it is, the crew slowly called in to cancel until it was just the two of us.  The winds were against us the whole way there and back, forcing us to motor around 90% of the tip, so it's debatable whether or not we actually saved any money travelling by "sailboat".  We did get the sails up once or twice, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.  The festival itself was excellent, with us arriving in full pirate regalia to great fanfare, spending a weekend surrounded by beautiful people and great music, and rolling out again on Monday with a grand exit.  Sunday was a bit crazy, as the wind suddenly went from 5kn up to 25-30kn, and Tie Fighter danced in four-foot swells for the night - I now have a lot more faith in my anchor than before.  Another boat nearby actually did slip their anchor, and came within a few feet of hitting us, but we held steady and Monday was much calmer.  Another thing learned: rowing a dinghy in calm waters is one thing, rowing through four-foot waves as they break on the beach is another thing entirely!  I made very good use of the drybags my sister gave me for my birthday.

The next weekend after Diversity was the Emrg-N-See Festival just outside of Salem, Oregon.  I went to this festival with Trent last year, and it was probably the best festival I'd been to to date - it was as though someone had sent a personal invitation to every single gorgeous, blonde, dreadlocked, dubstep-loving yoga instructor on the west coast.  I cannot express how many times I had to stop and shake my head at the sheer beauty surrounding me.  This year was similar, though somewhat diluted, as though every guy who went last year went home and explained the situation to every guy he knew.  I know I did, which is why I was surprised that the crew going down fron Vancouver was much smaller this year.  Regardless, I definitely got my fill of amazing dubstep and bassline music, on very excellent soundsystems.  I also got to take a tablespoon of dancefloor dirt out of my nose every morning, which I am choosing to look at as preparation for this year's Burning Man expedition.

The weekend after Emrg-N-See was Sequential Circus 5, an electronic music event that I guess I'm sort of in charge of.  I say that with some reservation, because the show couldn't happen without every one of the seriously talented and driven people involved - we've got the whole thing pretty much down to a science now, and even with six live acts on a small stage, we continue to be efficient and competent, and we still have a good time doing it.  This SeqCirc was probably the best music to date, though we were up against some very stiff competition.  The capacity of the venue is about 180 people, and we had about 100 people, so while it was never packed, it never felt empty, and nearly everyone who was there at midnight was still there at 3am when we turned the lights on, so I count that as a win.  The next Sequential Circus, SeqCircSix, will be in January.

After recovering from SeqCirc, having a few sailing missions out and around English Bay, and basically settling down and focusing on dayjob work for a while, I took off on my first big solo-sailing trip, headed for Victoria...

Things That Don't Suck So Much:

Of *course* it's raining, and it's grey and cold outside, just like yesterday. It's also very windy out, with gale warnings last night that had me keeping an eye on my GPS long into the night. Furthermore I haven't had any coffee for two days, because my water supply has somehow become tainted, and my stove isn't working properly.

The water I suspect I may have had a hand in. On Saturday I noticed that an old can of paint that came with the boat was leaking from the bottom seal. The paint was "bottom paint", for painting the underwater portion of the boat, and as such is very nasty stuff, full of heavy metals. The paint was black, but whatever was leaking out of the bottom of the can was sticky and green, and made a big mess on the carpet - given the chemicals involved, this was the very definition of "toxic waste"! When I went to clean it up (wearing heavy protective gloves, removing and throwing out the carpet, scraping the underfloor with a scraper, and laying down new carpet), I noticed that it had also leaked through the floorboards and into the bilge, where it had pooled in a small corner. Lucky for me - if the leak had been two inches to the right, it would have gone into an extremely difficult place to clean. As it was though it was contained to a small area, and so I took up the floorboards, stood on the water tank, and cleaned up the toxic waste.

As I stood on it, the tank flexed a little, though nothing terrible - the tanks are made of heavy white plastic and bulge a bit when they're full. I suspect however that this flexing is why my water now has a distinct yellow tinge. I don't really know what to do about this, besides flush the tanks and start fresh, and to do that I need to pull the anchor and head up the creek to the filling station. I'm guessing there might be something I could do involving bleach? WestMarine sells some kind of water tank freshener stuff, but it's pretty pricy and who knows what it actually is. I think I'm going to try adding 1/4 cup of bleach to the tanks, fill them, flush them out, then fill them again and see what that does.

The stove I think I may have figured out - it's been throwing a lot less heat lately and a lot more soot, but I managed to find a manual for it online and it appears that it's pretty much half poorly configured and half me not knowing how to use it properly. There's a fan (unconnected of course) on the bottom of the stove that needs to be powered up in order for the burner to get the right draft needed to vaporize the diesel fuel, and right now it's just not getting that draft. I'm thinking that probably what's happened is that the fan not being on has caused the stove to produce more soot, which has clogged the air intake, causing the stove to produce even *more* soot. I think all it will need is a good cleaning and for the wiring to be set up to provide power for the fan, but man. Have you ever touched diesel soot? That stuff is black as night, and since it's oil-based you need soap and water to get it off of you - no amount of rubbing on your pants will suffice. I do not look forward to being up to my elbow in the stuff, but if it means I can have a hot dinner then it must be done.

...but not today.

God. Just a constant barrage of new, tangible problems. In one way it's really nice to have to use not only my brain to diagnose problems and work out solutions, but also to get my hands dirty actually implementing those solutions. Still, it's dirty, difficult work, and my hands are not only dirty but scraped, cut, bruised, bandaged, rough and sore.

I've already done so much to make the boat a better place to live, but there's still *so* much more to do! In order of priority:

Argh. On top of all the boat work, I've got just over a month to come up with and practice a 45-minute talk on cloud computing for the Open Web Vancouver conference. I'm pretty confident that I can be educational and entertaining for 45 minutes, but it will still mean a lot of work to get it all together, make slides, practice, etc.

Anyhow. The stove is lit, and I've got some bottled water in the stovetop percolator - in an hour or so I should have coffee. Today I have to continue working on porting one of the gossip sites into the clouds - I've committed to having it up and running by Wednesday night, and I don't want to blow any more deadlines, so back to work I go.

Wow. Ok. So, I'm typing this from the boat. It's a gorgeous Friday morning, and my view from the deck is the stunning Vancouver waterline. The feeling of contentment is daunted only by the chill in the air, but after months of living in a basement with no control over the furnace level, it's not such a bother.

I. HAVE. ARRIVED!

Less than one year after I made my decision to become a technological nomad, I have thrown off the shackles of the office, cut down my consumption until a part-time job covers all of my expenses, moved out of my home, and now I live full-time on a large, sailing trimaran!

Ok - maybe that's a bit romantic. I now live fulltime on a big, leaky, floating wooden hunting camp older than a few girls I've dated in the last year or so. She's got soul though, and with a little work she'll last me as long as I care to keep this lifestyle.

To catch up a bit - the most remarkable part of this stage of the adventure is just how much the universe reminds you that it needs to maintain a balance. For every new freedom, there is a new and daunting responsibility, something new and important to learn about.

Let's start at Saturday - a friend and I went to White Rock on the bus early Saturday morning to pick up the boat. Fortunately water had been turned on at the dock, after being off all winter, so we flushed the antifreeze out of the water tanks and made a few repairs while getting ready to sail her to Vancouver. We talked with the former owner, squeezing as much final information as possible out of him, and then set out.

The first stress was navigating the Nekomekl River, which is a tidal river that gets *very* shallow at times. As the depth sounder showed 7, then 6, then 5... all the way down to *1*, we panicked somewhat and slowed to a crawl... then figured out that the depth sounder is measured in meters. Tie Fighter drafts about 2.5 feet, so we can float just fine in a meter of water.

We had to stand for about an hour waiting for a train bridge to open to allow us through, but then we were off into open water. Unfortunately, the lovely brisk winds of the morning died completely the second we left the river, and we had to motor the entire way. We made about 7kn though, which is very fast for a cruising sailboat - during the cruise we saw dolphins, ducks and sea lions.

As it grew dark and we approached Vancouver Harbour, I had the first scare of the night. I looked over and saw that we had missed a very large bell buoy - large like two stories tall, with a 10m concrete base - by less than 10m! This cemented into my head just how important it is to keep a close watch at night - even with a huge red blinking light on the top, I hadn't noticed the buoy until we were going past it!

The second scare came as we motored under the bridges towards my final destination, just beside Science World. The Burrard and Granville bridges, no problem - but as we whipped under the Cambie bridge, I happened to glance up and noticed that we had VERY little clearance. Like, just shy of a foot I would say! As the meaning of this sunk in, we realized that it was currently low tide, but if it had been any higher, we would have dismasted the boat! That would have cost *thousands* of dollars, and might even have been unrepairable - needless to say, I am now acutely aware of the height of my mast, and will be watching carefully from now on!

Anchoring that night took seven or eight attempts, and I slept pretty well, despite the harrowing experiences with the bridge and the buoy. In the morning, I was awoken by a slap-slap-slap-slapping sound on the deck, and poked my head out of the hatch to find two Canada geese standing on the starboard wing, as if to welcome me to the neighborhood. The morning was crisp, sunny and *gorgeous*.

I spent the night on Sunday as well, with no incidents, and Monday morning I returned to my apartment for a day of work. Monday night, on the other hand, a very stiff wind blew up and threatened to pull my boat into the shore - when I arrived at the boat I found that she'd already moved a few feet, so I pulled up the anchor and reset it with another anchor (a delta instead of a CQR), which seemed to hold much better. I spent a fitful night of sleep, the winds howling above the cabin, anxiously watching my GPS to make sure I wasn't dragging my anchor. The morning was gorgeous, however, easily the nicest day of the year so far, and I played hooky from work, spending the afternoon playing guitar on the deck. What a feeling of well being!

Wednesday afternoon was a lovely brisk breeze, and so I put the word out to a bunch of friends that I'd be going sailing, and invited them to join me. Unfortunately most of them could not, but as it turned out, that wasn't such a bad thing - as we pulled away from the anchorage and motored under the Granville bridge, the engine made a bit of a funny noise. I brought the throttle down and the noise went away, but it was curious nonetheless - then it did it again, just shy of the Burrard bridge. Directly after that, the engine quit, right in front of Sunset Beach! We quickly tossed an anchor over, which luckily hooked on the first try, and started to try to debug the situation.

The short version is that we ran out of gas. *sigh*. Always the easiest problem - but what made it worse is that running out of diesel is nothing like running out of gasoline, you have to purge the fuel lines of air bubbles which is a complicated and drawn-out process involving three wrenches, a few rags, and a close personal relationship with the engine! We ended up spending the night on the public docks just across from the beach, and a mechanic showed up in the morning to get the engine running and walk me through the steps should it ever happen again. How embarrassing!

Even further to this, he said to leave the engines running for an hour or so, just to charge the batteries back up. No problem, I thought, and he left the boat after getting credit card info and charging me a whopping $150 for the visit. Unfortunately, in the next hour, the tide went out...

I was sitting in the salon when I realized that the boat was heeling a little over to port. This is a bad thing - a trimaran doesn't heel unless there's a problem, like one of the amas taking on water. When I went up on deck, the problem was immediately obvious; one of the amas was up in the air, and the main hull was sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor! I watched in growing embarrassment over the next hour as the ama rose higher and higher out of the water, leaving me looking like a toy airplane lying in a puddle. I had to sit there, in full view of the beach and a thousand apartments, waiting for the tide to go back out. Eventually it did, and I motored back to my anchorage with my tail between my legs.

So that's where we are as of now. It's now 5:15pm, and I've just spent the day actually working from my berth on the boat, getting a reasonable amount of work done while taking breaks every now and again to go up on deck to sit in the sun and play my guitar and sing a bit. Life is pretty great!

...and now I have to bill my office for the work I've been doing, so that I'll actually get paid.

I'm in an airplane, headed to New Brunswick for my baby sister's wedding party. I don't know what it is about being in an airplane that makes people want to blog, but there it is.

Trent lent me a book last night, and I've already devoured half of it today - frighteningly interesting stuff, Neil Strauss (yeah, "The Game" guy) writing about survival in unstable situations. It ties in really nicely with the boat plans - he stops *just* shy of using the term 'technomadic', but references the lifestyle amid talks of hinting, lockpicking and foreign passport applications. And here I thought I'd be spending the day playing Final Fantasy XII on my Nintendo DS.

On the boat front, things are coming to a crescendo - I return from the east coast next Thursday, and will be heading up to White Rock to pick her up either Friday or Saturday to move her into False Creek. The apartment is looking more and more bare every week; Mike and Chris showed up to pick up the couch, speakers and coffee table late Tuesday night. It's a strange feeling, watching another life chapter draw quickly to a close - this one has been dragging on for a few months too long, but the excitement and trepidation is building.

Oh! The apartment is rented! Two nice young girls will be moving in, and they're raring to start gardening. Looking around the house I notice that there's quite a bit of work still to do, filling little holes in the drywall, cleaning, etc. I've also still got to sort out what to do with the remainder of my junk! Most of the bigger stuff is gone now, and the pile in the corner destined for the (unsourced) self-storage company remains more-or-less static, but there's still a bunch of stuff that I just don't know what to do with. I read a so-so ebook on the liveaboard lifestyle recently, and it had one good point to take away: when you sell your stuff for 1/10th of what it's "worth", you're not getting ripped off; you were ripped off when you bought it for ten times what it would bring on the used market.

Oh god, Toronto Airport is still fucking pay-for-wireless! Qué lame.

It was also my first "un-conference". The idea behind this is that there's a schedule, but none of the talks are booked in advance, and people come with a talk or presentation that they'd like to give and sign up to do so on the spot. In the end it's more about discussions than presentations, and in fact I was drafted (or more accurately, "tricked") into hosting a discussion group on scaling Drupal in the cloud.

Now *that* was an eye-opener - I had naïvely assumed that most people working with cloud computing were working with web applications, as that's what most of the documentation out there seems to be. Or maybe I just pitched my session wrong, and should have stressed all web applications and not just Drupal. Or perhaps I shouldn't have scheduled the discussion at the same time as Dan Kaminski's discussion on cloud security. Regardless, the room began with approximately eight people, and as it became apparent that we were really looking for a technical discussion but most of the people were in marketing and management, the room shrank to four people.

What was awesome was that the four people were:

Wild! I got more out of that half-hour session than I have reading documentation for the past month and a half. As the session started, we basically went around the room discussing backgrounds and technical histories, and it became apparent that I was really the only person in the room with any technical experience at all working with the EC2 cloud, I began to present my experiences to date, focusing on the three big problems that I had butted my head against - how to "auto-scale" web front ends using load balancers, how to scale MySQL databases elastically, and how to share storage between EC2 instances. As I discussed these, Dean Dierickx from RightScale showed up, and had some interesting notes to add from a high-level design perspective, which we talked about at length. We then started discussing database scaling, and it became apparent that nobody in the room had any practical experience with that at all.

Right about then, Jonathan Lambert from Work Habit let himself in, and after listening to us fumble about for a couple of minutes, grabbed a whiteboard marker and launched into a fifteen minute in-depth technical discussion on different methods of scaling MySQL. This was *great* stuff, though it pretty much cleared the room of the marketing and manager types. As he finished, he validated my whole trip with one statement - he said something like:

"Now, there are three major problems that everyone attempting to scale any web application in the cloud butts their heads against, and there's no simple answer to any of these: how to launch instances automatically from a load balancer, how to scale MySQL, and how to share storage between instances. We've fought these problems hard for two years now, and we still don't have a good answer, but here's how we've managed to get everything working so far..."

...and proceeded to lay out a basic, scalable platform for Drupal on the whiteboard. Most of his layout matched my work exactly!

To top that off, just last week I downloaded a script from the RightScale website that purports to set up a basic EC2 instance to be a "RightScale" machine, and poked through the script to see exactly what they're doing to prep a machine. I was shocked to see that every step of the way, their work matched what I was already doing to setup my own EC2 instances! That may not sound like much, but frankly after fifteen years of Linux administration, I have some particular ideas about how a machine should be setup for optimal networked administration; which additional packages should be installed, which default services should be turned on or off, what changes should be made to the default shell environment, etc. Seeing two large, successful operations doing exactly the same things as I do in my personal environments, and facing exactly the same challenges, was vindication to say the least!

Anyhow - even though it was a "free" conference (with the quotes of course implying bus fares and hotel fees), I think I got well more than my money's worth.