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.
I mean, they could be progressing smoother, of course – I still don’t have a tenant lined up to move into the apartment, and April 1st draws ever closer. I’ve had a few people in to look at the place, but twice now people have come by, looked, told me they’d get back to me in a few hours and never bothered to call back. Rude!
The boat progresses quickly – I’ve posted a few pictures of the progress on my other website, of the aft cabin and a few pics of the outside. She still needs a lot of work, but the more I work on her, the more I realize that all of the work is well within my abilities – to quote Trent, “it’s not rocket surgery!” I’m actually quite enjoying learning about epoxy and fiberglass, and the finished product is immediately gratifying; fix a leak, and water stops coming in. Boosh!
I was hoping to make it out to the boat this week to do a bit more on it, but I’ve managed to score a free pass to the CanSecWest network security conference here in town. I can’t really spare the time off work, but given that a conference pass costs $1700 for the three days, I could also argue that I can’t afford not to go. I read an article yesterday that had a quote from Benjamin Franklin; “If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.”
The apartment is slowly emptying – more and more furniture is going away, and decisions are being made with regards to the layout of storage in the boat. I’ve decided that the starboard forecabin bunk is going to have to be sacrificed in order to make room for closet space; that’s not such a bad thing though, as it’ll mean a “proper” closet can be made, as well as a lot of extra space for boxes and such.
Anyhow – back to work. This week’s task is to get the Evil Masters’ main website up and running in the Amazon cloud, and that means finishing up these i386 AWS AMI’s and building an x86_64 AMI for use as the database server and NFS server…
So Tuesday I went back out to White Rock to work on the boat again. This time, Bill and I spent the day grinding down various problems in the fiberglass of the deck and removing the nasty huge “lifting bridles” (huge 6″ chunks of steel sticking out of the deck for use lifting the boat up with a crane, almost completely useless since cranes have lifting straps, and a great place to stub your toe). I actually had a really nice time – the work is far easier than I expected, and even – dare I say it? – fun. The process goes something like this:
find a place on deck where the fiberglass is cracked or chipped, exposing the wood underneath. this usually constitutes a leak into the cabin, and will lead to rotting of the wood if left unchecked for too long.
grind down the area about an inch around the crack, all the way along. clean up all the dust.
paint the newly-ground section with epoxy, and lay down a roughly-sized strip of fiberglass matte. paint more epoxy over top of the matte, soaking it into the deck.
wait four or six hours for the epoxy to cure.
That’s where we’re at currently – we’ve fixed almost all the major problems on the deck, leaving just the rebedding of the traveler and some kind of issue with the main bow. The next steps are to add fairing compound, then sand it all down, and then paint the whole thing. Bill is teaching me as we go, and I am an eager student. I’m going back out on Tuesday, weather permitting, to do another four or six hours of work on her, and by then hopefully she’ll be tight as a drum and ready to be moved onto!
Next step: figuring out the toilet. It appears there’s a Y-valve that lets you select between flushing straight-into-the-ocean or into a holding tank, but there doesn’t appear to be a macerator pump. If that’s the case, the only way to empty the holding tank will be to use a pumpout service, which can get pricy pretty quick.
I spent all day Saturday on the boat, sailing around White Rock. It was eye-opening; a lot of the things that I’ve been taking for granted will need a re-think.
For instance, there was a lot more mildew than I remembered. Mostly this was because there was a lot more *water* than I remembered, due in part to the massive snowfalls of the past two months. I think a lot of the mildew will be easily taken care of with Tilex and some elbow grease, but it’s certainly changed my plans with regards to what can and what can’t immediately move aboard! I’ve packed all my sci-fi novels (well, “all” meaning “those that have survived the massive culling”) into a cardboard box, assuming that I would be moving the books aboard, unpacking them, and getting rid of the cardboard box. As it is, I’ll definitely want to keep the books in some kind of plastic tub for at least the first little while, while I track down and eradicate the leaks in the roof.
Frankly there was a lot more water than I expected – I know, that doesn’t seem like rocket science, but seriously – under one of the bunks there was a good two inches of water pooled up! That’s just not acceptable – at least the water is coming in from the roof, and not from the hull, but with Vancouver’s weather patterns I get to look forward to living in a state of perpetual damp for the next few months. Part of my original plan involved bringing my main synthesizer onto the boat, but now that I’ve seen the reality of the water situation, the synth’s soft nylon travel case seems woefully inadequate.
There’s certainly a lot of little fixes she needs – the fiberglass is cracked in quite a few places on the deck, and each place will need to be ground out and new fiberglass laid in and epoxied into place, then sanded and eventually painted. Bill, the current owner, assures me that the work is easy, just time consuming, and that she’ll be a beautiful vessel once the work is complete.
All that being said, sailing was glorious! She’s a huge boat, but she’s in no way unweildy – she’s fast and agile. I’d go so far as to call her downright nimble! We hit eight knots in just over twelve knots of wind; almost unheard of for a monohull, but no problem for my trimaran. The best part was leaving my coffee cup on the cabin roof while we hit eight knots, with no problem – a monohull would have been heeled over at four knots, spilling the coffee, but she stayed perfectly level the entire day. 😀
Tomorrow it’s back out to White Rock to spend another full day banging away at her; hopefully we’ll get some of the fiberglass repairs attended to, but I’ll be happy just to learn more about her systems and get her better ready to be my new home.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain
So yeah – after hemming and hawing for a few months, I’ve finally decided to go for it. I’ve agreed to purchase the trimaran – I’ve even paid the down payment!
She’s a 39-foot ‘Searunner’ trimaran, built in 1984. She’s fast and stable, and with a lot of work could be brought up to the point where she could undergo serious ocean voyages – yes, she is enough boat to do the trip to Hawaii. The life changes needed to move onboard a sailboat will be harrowing, I’m sure.
My thinking is this: if I can rid myself of my piles of useless crap, perhaps turning much of it into cash in the process, I’ll be better off in the long run. A friend once told me “You can never truly own anything that you can’t carry on your back at a dead run.” – we’ll see, I guess.
tacking amidships
I’ve just returned from an epic ten-day road trip rock climbing in Nevada, and I leave again in three days for a trip to Seattle. My house is a shambles, and it’s only going to get worse as I sort everything into four piles: going on the boat, going on Craigslist, going to friends to store, or going in the garbage.
I hope it’s not asking too much, actually. I’d really, really like to get away without having to pay for self-storage somewhere, but I’m not entirely sure that’ll be possible. The thinking goes like this: if a storage locker is $200/month, and my couch takes up 1/10th of the available space in that locker, then my couch costs me $240/year to keep. Everything I read on ‘live-aboard’ forums says that people returning to their storage lockers after two or three years away take a look at the stuff they’ve stored and are flabbergasted at the amount of junk they somehow thought they’d need! I don’t want to be that person, but I also don’t want to find out in six months that I no longer want to live on a boat, only to discover that I don’t have any stuff anymore…
Fortunately, most of the really great stuff that I have accumulated over the years is very much useful to friends and family – speaker systems, stereos, synthesizers etc will all go to willing “storage” homes, for use by folks who’ll appreciate them.
a lovely afternoon cruise
It’s amazing how much utter junk I have been finding though – going on a suggestion from another friend, I’ve made a change to my clothes sorting algorithm. Previously, I’d look into my closet and pick out a few items that I no longer wanted or needed; in the new method, I’ve removed everything from my closet, laid it all out on the bed, and picked out only things that I knew I wanted to keep. Applying this technique to my closet and dresser, I’ve taken four garbage bags full of clothes to the Salvation Army so far!
Another big one, from a suggestion on the Cruiser’s Forum, was books. I know, it almost sounds like sacrilege, but the theory is sound: pick any book from your bookshelf and consider it. Will you read it again in the next year? Is it a valuable reference? Does the book itself have inherent physical value (antique, sentimental, etc)? If the answer to all three questions is no, then the book is a trophy, a decoration, nothing more. There is no room on a boat for trophies! That being said, when cruising the coastal waters, there’s an entire economy of traded paperbacks…
A really tough one for me, however, is art. I have a decent collection of paintings and sculpture that I’ve collected over the years – none of it has any inherent value, but dammit, I like it. This is tough. Where do I store it?
Lastly, my computers – there is no faster-depreciating asset than a desktop PC. My machines are stable and fast, but they’re powerful machines and they operate on AC electricity, which can be pretty scarce on a boat. What to do? Sell them for a tiny fraction of what I paid? Store them?
Anyhow. No great adventure can come without a lot of discomfort, so that’s apparently what I must do. Expect to see a lot more posts on this forum as I make the transition between basement-dweller to coastal skipper!
