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!
Sunday morning I was comfortably sleeping off the effects of Saturday night’s party in Gastown when I was rudely awakened by a phonecall from Brad, another one of the False Creek liveaboards.
“Hey, uh, that cabin cruiser dragged his anchor again, he’s banging into your bows, you should probably get down here…”
I hurried back to the boat to find that the same old cabin cruiser had one again dragged his anchor and was indeed bumping into my bows, scuffing them up and causing a few little dings to the fiberglass. I stepped aboard and let out another twenty feet or so of his anchor line, and then with Brad’s help I pushed him off of me and brought him up alongside Tie Fighter. I deployed a few fenders and then lashed the boat to mine, so that he wouldn’t keep slamming into me, or drag further and hit Brad’s boat or fetch up on the rocks.
fenders deployed, bring her up alongside
The last time this happened, I asked the powerboat’s owner, Brendon, to put a bit of paper with his emergency contact info into the window of his boat, which he agreed to but unfortunately didn’t manage to actually do. He spontaneously showed up about twenty minutes later – apparently he has a friend with a condo overlooking False Creek, and that friend watches his boat for him and calls him whenever he drags his anchor. He apologized yet again; admittedly his apologies are starting to wear a little thin. Last time there was minimal damage, but this time there were numerous scuffs and scratches on my bows from his boat. Each time I’ve helped him out he’s promised to come back with beer as a thank-you and/or apology, but I have yet to see that. If it happens again, especially with similar scratches and scuffs, I’m going to insist that he chips in a bit on the paint fund for the haul-out and repaint this coming spring. At least this time I managed to get his cellphone number – he promised once again to post it on his boat.
are those overalls?
It’s confusing how someone with a large ‘bruce’ anchor can drag so often, but then again, this is False Creek. When he pulled up his anchor, there was something attached to it; to my eyes it appeared to be a full set of men’s overalls!
I re-battened the hatches and prepared to leave – at this point my neighbor Theresa rowed over from her sailboat ‘And-E’ to let me know that she’d gotten a few photos of the incident and offered me her camera’s SD card to transfer the pics. I didn’t have my laptop handy, so I asked her to email the photos; the email arrived yesterday, and I’m just now getting around to posting them, in an attempt to catch up on even more news on the blog. Once I was sure everything with Tie Fighter was solid, I returned to the house party, still under way with breakfast now prepared and waiting for me.
the cruiser lashed to And-E, Tie Fighter in the background
The next day, I got a text message from Theresa asking for Brendon’s cellphone number – apparently he had dragged his anchor yet again in the night! When she had woken up at 3am, she looked out her window but could only see white, and wondered what was going on – she eventually figured out that it was the cabin cruiser, resting gently against the side of her sailboat, so she lashed him in place, and, noting that he still hadn’t posted his cellphone number, went back to bed for the night.
Honestly, when it comes to False Creek I’m all for freedom and equality, but it’s just this sort of thing that gives the live-aboards a bad name. The reason the laws were put in place in 2006 to prevent long-term anchoring in False Creek was to prevent people from essentially abandoning their derelict vessels, becoming both eyesores and liabilities to anyone anchoring – or for that matter, occupying paid legal moorage – in the neighborhood. There’s another sailboat just down the Creek from me with no mast or engine, anchored in place with yellow nylon rope, slowly rotting away; when I saw the owner paddling his inflatable kayak out to it one day, I asked him what the deal was, and he explained that he lives in Hope. In HOPE! That’s about a two-hour drive away from False Creek. His boat has hundreds of hours of work needed before it can be considered seaworthy, and I’ve seen him on it no more than three times in the past six months.
Oh well. All this will be changing very soon; more on that shortly.
It would seem that my engines and I just don’t get along. Last night my trusty Honda EU2000i generator stopped working, and this morning she continues to be unresponsive.
Actually, I’ve been really impressed with the Honda in general; it’s definitely the quietest model of generator that I’ve heard. The ‘Eco-Throttle’ feature keeps the engine running at just high enough an idle to provide the needed current, and spins the engine up when the demand increases. I can always start her on the first pull of the starter cord, and she’s exceptionally good on gasoline.
the manual clearly says "do not operate in the rain or snow"
That being said, she’s been running about six to eight hours or more per day for the past six months. I’ve changed her oil¹ and installed a new sparkplug², but the guy at the Honda dealership said that he’d never actually heard of anyone using an EU2000i that much. Apparently you’re supposed to do a bunch more maintenance at regular intervals, like cleaning the air intake and changing the oil at every fifty hours of use, and cleaning the carborator and checking the valves with a set of feeler gauges after every two hundred hours – things that I have absolutely no idea how to do. He also said that using the generator in the harsh marine environment would probably accelerate the wear-and-tear. I left the generator with him, and he said he’ll give me a call sometime between noon and 3pm tomorrow.
Perhaps “not working” is a bit vague… last night she was idling a bit roughly, and then she sputtered and coughed, spun up to a higher speed, idled down to normal, sputtered and coughed, spun up to a higher speed, idled down to normal, sputtered and coughed and died. I can now get her to successfully start, and everything seems perfectly normal – but then she dies again after about ten seconds.
What this means for me, unfortunately, is that I have no electricity on the boat for the next few days. I have heat, because the diesel furnaces do not rely on electricity to run – but since my laptop soundcard ceased to function a few weeks ago, and I gave away my broken CD player in disgust, the only sources of audio on the boat lately are my voice and my guitar. I’ve not been able to watch videos on the internet, because without sound they’re somewhat meaningless. And now I’m back to reading books by flashlight again!
The generator is still under warrantee, but the guy said that this warrantee would only cover failure of parts due to “normal” wear and tear, the details of which would be examined by Honda Canada before any warrantee payments would be made. I am looking at $116 for the service call as a minimum, with possibly a lot more if the engine is damaged internally.
It remains cold, and today I saw the first snow of the year.
Nothing much to write about today. The weekend was a whirlwind of activities and too little sleep, and this morning I awoke to bitter cold, howling winds and a dragging anchor – but those sorts of things have become too common, too “baseline” to bother writing about. The winter has arrived, and I’m sure it will get even worse yet, so I’ll save my complaining for the days when things get really bad.
not a regular key in sight
Instead I’ll just talk about my keys; the small collection on a keyring that I keep on me at all times. I hadn’t put any thought into them, but then I noticed a few days ago that my keyring does not contain a single regular-sized key anymore! Every key is a mini-type; my keychain is five keys for padlocks and two keys for bicycle U-locks, and nothing more. It certainly drove home for me the idea that I’ve eschewed the ordinary life – no car keys, no house keys, no office keys. My entire life is secured with padlocks.
My keychain is a small plastic Davis “Key Buoy” keychain that contains a chemical pellet that, when immersed in water (due, say, to someone accidentally dropping their keys into the ocean), dissolves and creates carbon dioxide gas. The gas fills a small plastic balloon which unrolls as it fills, becoming a thin orange inflated tube which then hopefully floats the keys back to the surface.
I used to also have my sailing knife, a Myerchin LightKnife Crew Pro, attached to my keychain – but upon reading the specs for the Key Buoy I think the knife is a bit too heavy for that, and so I removed it and just wear it clipped to my pocket at all times. I love the knife, and recommend it even though the locking mechanism keeps breaking on me. The Myerchin lifetime warrantee covers that though, and they’ve replaced mine for free twice now.
*shrug*. I know keys are nothing exciting, but I figured what the heck, a short post about something trivial trumps no post at all.
Ok, ok. You’re right. I’m slacking and not updating the blog.
I’m not sure what the real reason is. I’ve been maddeningly busy, the kind of busy where it seems like every spare minute is taken up but nothing seems to be getting accomplished. Still, that’s not to say that life halts, and as such I’ve got a whole pile of micro-updates that I probably should have been posting all along. Nothing important or earth-shattering, no crazy adventures, just the usual day-to-day crap. Each of these stories should be its own update though, I just have to stop procrastinating and letting them pile up.
False Creek at night in the rain. admittedly gorgeous. I love my neighborhood.
To start off with, if you’re reading this from somewhere other than Vancouver, British Columbia, you might not realize that it’s been raining for something like fifteen goddamned days in a friggin’ row. I know that complaining about the rain is one of Vancouver’s favourite pastimes, and I knew getting into this that the rain would be something I’d have to face up to sooner or later. It’s not actually all that bad, once you realize that “being stylish” and “being comfortable” are mutually exclusive. I’ve gotten used to living in my tall, bright yellow rubber boots, and leaving the boat without wearing rainpants seems pretty silly these days. Wet clothes hung up to dry can take days to dry on a boat – my sweaters are still damp from laundry day, which was a week ago tomorrow.
The thing about rainpants and raincoats is that they look pretty dorky, but they really work. I have yet to find any that are waterproof, breathable, and look acceptable in public – it seems like you get your choice of any two of those features. I’m willing to pay extra for the good stuff, especially seeing as I use them pretty much every day! I have one set of Helly Hansen raingear that was quite pricy, but it has already paid for itself many times over just through regular use. The other day I caught the pantleg in the chainring of my track bike, pulling it almost the entire way around – but when I unwound myself and pulled it free, the most damage was a bit of chain grease; the rubbery material itself didn’t tear at all.
see the four or five inches of water in there? that's probably a hundred liters overall.
Every day that I go ashore – which isn’t every day, mind you – I have to climb down into my rowboat and bail out the rainwater. I use a plastic bucket made from a cut-off 1.89l bottle of blueberry cocktail, which I assume to be roughly 1l in size, and to stave off the bitter cold and monotony of bailing, I count the buckets as I empty them over the side. My record to date is 120l of water in the rowboat from one night of rain. Seriously! I need to track down and cut up a bleach jug or something similar, bailing at 1l per stroke isn’t the most efficient solution.
One nice thing about my rowboat is that there are large chunks of foam rubber bolted to the inside of the gunwales, which I’m guessing are supposed to keep the boat afloat and upright even if it fills completely with water. This is reassuring – there are a bunch of other boats in False Creek, many of which aren’t liveaboards and the owners don’t come down very often to check on them. Those folks have dinghies locked to the nearby dock, but the rain tends to fill the dinghies up and sink them ever few weeks. Last week, one such boat belonging to my friend Eric had sunk in this manner. When I returned home from a night on the town, I heard strange splintering, cracking noises from the dock as I came down the ramp – it turned out to be Eric’s dinghy, sunken and trapped lengthwise between the heavy wooden dock and the rocky bottom. The tide was almost all the way out, but it still had a foot or so to go… and the noise was Eric’s little fiberglass rowboat, cracking and folding under the massive weight of the dock. Sad, but there was nothing I could do to help.
mmmm, hot cast iron
It has also been cold lately, and as you’ve probably guessed from my last post, I’ve been fighting with my furnaces again. The warmth from a diesel stove is delightful… when it works. I heard someone on another forum describe diesel stoves as “more of a hobby than an appliance”, and that pretty much sums it up. Twitchy things, these machines, and at times it almost feels more like I’m learning to play a new musical instrument than trying to heat a boat. They constantly remind me that they must be treated with respect – as I type this I have yet another slowly-blistering burn on my forearm from touching the wrong part of the oven door while toasting a bagel in the stove an hour or so ago.
When diesel stoves and heaters are working perfectly they’re lovely, but when they start to work badly it’s a slippery slope… give them a bit too much or a bit too little fuel and they’re inefficient, dirty, smelly and can even be dangerous. I’d been feeding the main stove a bit too much fuel, and it responded by filling up with soot. The last time I had an overabundance of soot, I used my little wet/dry shop-vac to clean it out. I was absolutely pleased as punch with the results – until I noticed that every bit of soot that I’d removed from the stove had been blown straight out the back of the shop-vac and all over the cabin, creating a nightmare of a mess to try to clean up. It was literally weeks before I got the last of it – and actually, from where I sit in the aft cabin right now I can see at least two spots where there is still soot from that fiasco.
This time I did not intend to make the same mistake – I researched shop-vacs and soot on the internet, and came to the realization that the root of my problem was simply a lack of a filter device on the shop-vac. Since I could not find any information about my ‘Stinger’ shop-vac on the internet, I made a plan to purchase a newer, more appropriate shop-vac – but when I went to the Home Depot to pick one out, I found that my ‘Stinger’ had merely been renamed to ‘Husky’, and the colours changed. This certainly wasn’t obvious from their website! Fortunately, the Husky model had filters available, and for a whopping $6.99 I left the Home Depot with a filter and a vision of a clean stove.
And it worked! Well, mostly anyway – the stove is now clean and there wasn’t a major mess to clean up afterwards. It still wasn’t a simple or tidy job, and all of my cuticles are still as black as night, but the stove is once again safe and clean-burning. The only real downside is that the filter didn’t seem to get *all* of the soot – I didn’t notice any in the air, but when I blew my nose later on I was startled by a pair of jet-black spots on the tissue. *sigh*.
In other news, I’ve been spending my quieter evenings watching movies I’ve purchased from The Sailing Channel – and actually, I’m really torn here. The Sailing Channel has made their DVD movies available for $29.99 USD plus shipping, or you can download them for $12.99. Wow! That is some seriously forward thinking for a niche video company, and I’m very happy to help support them; I have purchased four downloaded movies so far and will likely purchase more. The part that tears me a little is that for such a forward-thinking company, their website is hideous. Seriously.
One of the movies, Lin and Larry Pardey’s “Get Ready to Cruise“, had a bunch of tips that I’d already figured out on my own, but there were two in particular that were each alone worth the price of the video download. One of the tips involved seat cushions in the salon, which I won’t bother to explain here (yet, perhaps I’ll blog it when I implement it) – but the other was a simple and effective way to build a shower on a sailboat!
9.5 liters of pure, unadulterated cleanliness
I’ve been working a bit on that tip, and while I’ve still got a little ways to go I’m nearing completion. The premise is simple: use a basic pesticide sprayer, and refit it with a longer hose and a showerhead attachment with a simple valve assembly. I’ve expanded on the idea a bit, and replaced the 1/8″ feed tube in the sprayer with a 1/4″ stainless steel version, which should give me significantly more water flow, making it even more like a real shower. I also chose a black plastic canister, which should mean that in summertime I can just fill the canister with water and leave it outside in the sun and in a few hours I’ll have a hot shower. In the meantime, I’ll have to boil a pot of water on the stove, but given that there’s usually a pot of water on the stove for tea anyway, I don’t feel like this is a particular hardship.
After you’ve got the mechanics sorted, all you need is a spot in your boat configured to handle a bit of water splashing around and you’ve got a shower! My boat has just such a place – the bathroom, or ‘head’, right at the front of the boat has waterproofed walls, raised bulkheads and a simple floor to catch the water.
The remaining parts, before I can finally have a shower on the boat, are pretty easy – I need a piece of hose, I need to replace the carpeting in the head with some kind of raised plastic draining tile, I need to fit the bathroom with shower curtains and I need to install a small bilge pump in the bilge to pump out the used shower water. I hope to get those tasks done before the end of the weekend, but we’ll see how it goes.
On the engine front, I think the best money I’ve spent in ages was the $399 for the Cooper Boating ‘Diesel Theory – Advanced 5 Session Program’ course down on Granville Island. The instructor really knows his stuff, and even though the classes come out to about $25/hour, as Trent pointed out a visit from a diesel mechanic is about $120/hour. I’ve learned so much about engines in the past few weeks, and it has given me a great deal of confidence in my ability to tackle any problem that should arise on my boat.
rocket surgery!
That being said, Maude still doesn’t start. I’ve identified the problem; her fuel lift pump is either clogged or the pumping diaphragm has worn out and come apart. It isn’t rocket surgery; I have to remove the pump, disassemble it and inspect it. If it is still serviceable I need to clean it out, then purchase and install a primary fuel filter before the pump ($100-$200), then bleed the air out of the fuel lines, and Maude should then start. If the pump isn’t serviceable (apparently the diaphragm used to be a replaceable part, but they haven’t made them in years) then I have to purchase a new lift pump, which will cost me about $110. I spoke on the phone with Lindsay at ‘Stem To Stern’, the local Yanmar service center, and he was exceptionally friendly and helpful. He was my first contact with that company, and ensured my business – I’ll be heading down to their shop soon to pick up the parts, and I’ll probably also stock up on fuel and oil filters, zincs and replacement hoses while I’m there.
So what’s the holdup? Well, the fuel lift pump is in a very difficult place to reach without pulling out the whole engine, which is simply not an option at this point. None of my sockets are long enough to reach the bolts holding the pump onto the engine, and so yesterday I went to Canadian Tire to purchase a wrench to do exactly that. I figured a single 10mm wrench would do the trick, however when I saw the Mastercraft ratcheting wrenches on sale for $49 for a set of ten, I went for that instead. Comparing that to $16.99 for the single 10mm socket wrench, $50 was a great deal!
there's the problem...
Of course, the wrench doesn’t fit – I mean, the sizing of the socket to the bolt is correct, but the thickness of the wrench itself means that I can’t get it to set on the head of the bolt. I basically need to go back to Canadian Tire tonight to fetch yet another socket – a longer one this time – and then try my best to manoeuvre my hands in between Maude and the wall, remove the pump and then figure out the next step.
Once that’s all done and Maude is starting again, I’m not even close to finishing the other work that she needs. For one, before I purchased Tie Fighter one of the previous owners had had a pump failure while off on a sailing trip, and had to make some emergency repairs – she’s been converted to use raw water (ie straight from the ocean) for cooling. That’s… acceptable, at least according to the manual, but not optimal. There are a pair of heat exchangers bolted to the engine room wall, and a newly-rebuilt freshwater pump is waiting in the wings to be reinstalled. I’m not sure just how much work that will be, but I’m sure it’ll be at least twice as long as my best estimate, which currently is “a Saturday”.
Furthermore, I noticed during one of my extended stays in the engine room that the raw water pump belt is very loose! This is especially troubling, in that it could mean the engine could overheat and eventually fail completely. I won’t have her started up without first replacing that belt. I do have a replacement belt, I just have to install it – thought that means removing all the other belts first in order to get it on.
Lastly – and the most blatantly obvious to any outside observer – none of the instruments work. Nada. Not one. They’re not even hooked up! Neither is the key ignition or the starter switch, none of the gauges or emergency lights… nothing. I basically have to rewire them all individually, which isn’t actually all that difficult, but will take some time. Someone in the past has rewired the panel at least twice, probably due to using the wrong gauge wires originally and having them overheat and melt. I think it’s probably better to just rip it all out and install it fresh, so that I know the work is good from end to end.
