There’s so much to tell, so much to say, and I keep not doing it because there’s too much, but then that doesn’t solve the problem at all, of course, because then there’s more. Like:
Riding the bus, going to a Greek Festival, staying too long at Lowe’s, missing the last bus and walking home six miles in the dark.
Going with friends to the Indian Festival, and dinner.
Grounding ourselves at low tide in the dinghy.
Grounding ourselves at low tide in the boat.
Stress, challenges, fear, conquering fear.
How your boat talks to you.
“Everyday” life on the boat. Not that there is such a thing, so far, for us….but there are common elements to most days.
Fun stuff. We do have fun, too. Actually lately, it’s running about 50/50, for me, between panic and fun. Last Monday is a good example of this. The day was full of challenges, some of which were actually planned. Contemplation of these alone caused me, in the morning, to confess to Bob that I felt like throwing up. If only I had known how the day would actually go, I probably would have gone through with that urge. But it’s hard to tell. Because if I’d known how the day would actually go, I would know that, by sunset, all would be well, and we would be peacefully at anchor, me in the cockpit reading a book and drinking a glass of wine, Bob down below taking a nap. So here’s the day, as planned:
1- Weigh (that is, haul up from the mucky lake bottom) the anchor, for the first time, on our own.
2- Motor the half mile to the fuel dock at the marina (also first time) and have our holding tank emptied.
3- Motor back to the cove by ourselves (first time), and drop anchor again (ditto).
We made all prudent preparations for all foreseeable challenges. We reviewed procedures. We tied on fenders. We got docklines handy. We “cleared the decks”. We called ahead to the marina, to tell them we were coming. We got our headsets out.
On a sailboat, the primary use of headsets is for communication during anchoring, when one person is at the helm and the other relatively far away, at the bow. Add in wind noise and physical obstructions (masts, dodgers, furled sails) and communication can be difficult at this rather crucial time. Our headsets came with the boat, and, like so many other things that came with this boat, are not the kind of thing we would normally even consider buying, especially since there is a perfectly good alternative (yelling) that is free. Headsets are also the kind of thing, I suspect, that others regard with derision. I mean, you’re just dropping an anchor from a sailboat, and you’re all rigged up like you’re landing a 747. We don’t care. We love them. They enable us to talk to each other in a normal speaking voice, from anywhere on the boat. The alternative, as I have mentioned, is yelling, or sometimes screaming if there’s a lot of wind. We have heard of one man who trained his wife to respond to a series of whistle signals. You know, like a dog? A more humane solution is hand signals, which some people use and swear by. But speaking of swearing, when it comes to that, there just never seem to be enough hand signals, and even the signalers resort to yelling at times.
Headsets enable Bob and I to say things like “Go to port now. A little more, a little more, okay, do you realize which side of the boat is the port side?? Okay, yeah, I’m sorry, I see now that you were trying to go to port, yes, it is really windy out here. You do see that catamaran we’re drifting toward? Yeah it is a cool shade of blue. More like turquoise maybe but still a nice color.” Stuff like that.
We discussed (not via headsets, actually, but face-to-face) weighing anchor with the man and woman in the “conventional positions”—who knew? But I had never actually driven the boat much before (the woman’s job, normally, in weighing anchor), and was not excited about the idea of learning that task now, so I elected to be up at the bow, with the resulting responsibility of hauling up the 80 feet of rope and 35 lbs. of chain, together with 35 lbs. of anchor. And I did okay too, right up until the end, when I just plain old could not break the anchor free from the muck.
Riding the bus, going to a Greek Festival, staying too long at Lowe’s, missing the last bus and walking home six miles in the dark.
Going with friends to the Indian Festival, and dinner.
Grounding ourselves at low tide in the dinghy.
Grounding ourselves at low tide in the boat.
Stress, challenges, fear, conquering fear.
How your boat talks to you.
“Everyday” life on the boat. Not that there is such a thing, so far, for us….but there are common elements to most days.
Fun stuff. We do have fun, too. Actually lately, it’s running about 50/50, for me, between panic and fun. Last Monday is a good example of this. The day was full of challenges, some of which were actually planned. Contemplation of these alone caused me, in the morning, to confess to Bob that I felt like throwing up. If only I had known how the day would actually go, I probably would have gone through with that urge. But it’s hard to tell. Because if I’d known how the day would actually go, I would know that, by sunset, all would be well, and we would be peacefully at anchor, me in the cockpit reading a book and drinking a glass of wine, Bob down below taking a nap. So here’s the day, as planned:
1- Weigh (that is, haul up from the mucky lake bottom) the anchor, for the first time, on our own.
2- Motor the half mile to the fuel dock at the marina (also first time) and have our holding tank emptied.
3- Motor back to the cove by ourselves (first time), and drop anchor again (ditto).
We made all prudent preparations for all foreseeable challenges. We reviewed procedures. We tied on fenders. We got docklines handy. We “cleared the decks”. We called ahead to the marina, to tell them we were coming. We got our headsets out.
On a sailboat, the primary use of headsets is for communication during anchoring, when one person is at the helm and the other relatively far away, at the bow. Add in wind noise and physical obstructions (masts, dodgers, furled sails) and communication can be difficult at this rather crucial time. Our headsets came with the boat, and, like so many other things that came with this boat, are not the kind of thing we would normally even consider buying, especially since there is a perfectly good alternative (yelling) that is free. Headsets are also the kind of thing, I suspect, that others regard with derision. I mean, you’re just dropping an anchor from a sailboat, and you’re all rigged up like you’re landing a 747. We don’t care. We love them. They enable us to talk to each other in a normal speaking voice, from anywhere on the boat. The alternative, as I have mentioned, is yelling, or sometimes screaming if there’s a lot of wind. We have heard of one man who trained his wife to respond to a series of whistle signals. You know, like a dog? A more humane solution is hand signals, which some people use and swear by. But speaking of swearing, when it comes to that, there just never seem to be enough hand signals, and even the signalers resort to yelling at times.
Headsets enable Bob and I to say things like “Go to port now. A little more, a little more, okay, do you realize which side of the boat is the port side?? Okay, yeah, I’m sorry, I see now that you were trying to go to port, yes, it is really windy out here. You do see that catamaran we’re drifting toward? Yeah it is a cool shade of blue. More like turquoise maybe but still a nice color.” Stuff like that.
We discussed (not via headsets, actually, but face-to-face) weighing anchor with the man and woman in the “conventional positions”—who knew? But I had never actually driven the boat much before (the woman’s job, normally, in weighing anchor), and was not excited about the idea of learning that task now, so I elected to be up at the bow, with the resulting responsibility of hauling up the 80 feet of rope and 35 lbs. of chain, together with 35 lbs. of anchor. And I did okay too, right up until the end, when I just plain old could not break the anchor free from the muck.
There being only two jobs available on the boat at the time (the breakfast dishes had already been washed), I ended up driving the boat after all, while Bob hauled and secured the anchor. Once the anchor is up, though, you can’t just sit back and congratulate yourself, no matter how much you might like to, because the boat will start drifting, on its own, in perhaps dangerous directions, so we were off to the marina, with me still at the helm. I know you think something bad is going to happen here but it didn’t—I handed the boat back over to Bob in time for the actual docking which went well, actually. He made the wide turn into the marina, where the dock hand waiting for us there was such a beautiful sight-- all youth, strength, knowledge and nonchalance. He took lines from me as we came sliding up, and we docked rather gracefully, for a sailboat.
Pumpout accomplished, we spoke a while with a friend, and I took a minute or so to sit in a chair at the marina office and decompress, something I do every chance I get lately.
Our next challenge was to get out of the marina without incurring losses--- mental, physical, or financial. But this is not easily accomplished, in a big, slow, hard-to-get moving and then even harder-to-stop sailboat. The most obvious method of egress would be to simply back up, and then go straight out, the way we came in. Bob was in favor of this, but its success unfortunately involved participation from me, doing yet another thing I have never done before, which was to “warp” us off the dock with a line from the boat. I told him that I would try, but I was, meanwhile, more than a little concerned about the fact that, as far as I could see, this plan brought into very close proximity three things: our dinghy, bobbing innocently directly behind Kalliope, our swim ladder, attached to her stern, and that huge metal pillar at the end of the dock (how do I warp around that?).
Our departure went badly. Several attempts, a long scratch down the side of the hull, lots of anxious communication, (no need for headsets, we’re practically tripping over each other now) lots of luck in not actually running into the million dollar yachts all around us, or the docks, or that huge metal pillar. The upside is that we now have a horizontal line all the way down the port side of our boat, which, if we wanted, we could label “hang fenders here next time.”
We motored back to the cove. This time I drove nearly the whole way, thus doubling my driving experience. We picked out what looked to us like a suitable anchor spot, donned our headsets and went to work, once again, in an unconventional arrangement—women apparently usually drop anchor (it takes no strength, but some finesse), while husbands drive. But Bob was at the bow and had already dropped the anchor when I was given the command to put the boat in reverse, which I did (for the first time), but for some reason, Kalliope started making very tight backward circles, which scared me, confused Bob, and no doubt amused everybody around us who happened to be watching. I found too that I could not read (because of too much sun on it, I know now) the indicator which says where the steering wheel is turned to, and I was, by now, not only unable to center the wheel, but for some reason could not make the thing move, at all.
This is where the headsets came in really handy. I was able to speak into them, without actually raising my voice (albeit in a rather strained, high pitch, between clenched teeth): “Get back here and steer this boat, NOW.” Bob returned surprisingly quickly to the cockpit, worked his magic on the wheel just in time to avoid hitting the boat nearest us (the occupants now possibly not quite so amused as previously), and I departed for the bow. But when we finally dropped the anchor and payed out the 100 feet of line that Bob insisted on, we were crowded in too close to the boats behind us, a situation that I found intolerable.
Choosing the correct spot in an anchorage is, as far as I can see, completely comparable to deciding where to put your towel down at the beach. You arrive, you survey the scene, you find the two encampments furthest apart, you take up occupation in the middle of these two encampments. The next arrivals once again split the distance between the two furthest apart, and so on, until the beach fills up with towels, blankets, half-naked bodies and blaring radios. At the end of the day, everybody goes home, the beach gets quiet, and the next day it starts all over again.
What we had done, with this anchoring, was to take our beach bags and towels and sandy feet and go sit in the laps of some random, unfortunate family of vacationers. Okay, maybe not exactly in their laps. Maybe just on their blanket. Still, not good etiquette. So after a little while and much bugging, I was allowed to haul in some of the 100 feet of rope, and get us closer to our anchor, and further from our fellow beach-goers. Boats. Whatever.
Twenty minutes or so later, when the wind started blowing rather seriously, I glanced up from belowdecks towards the cockpit where I saw Bob sitting in the captain’s chair, happily absorbed in a book, while directly behind his head loomed the very large, getting larger all the time, way too large side view of the rigging of a sailboat. We were dragging anchor.
I flew up the companionway stairs, yelling the whole way "start the engine, we’re about to hit this boat behind us! (the one with the guy in the cockpit, waving his arms in that desperate pantomime. If only he had those nice headsets like we have! ) Bob calmly (too calmly for my taste) turned around, surveyed the situation, started the engine and put the boat into gear. Simultaneously, at our side appeared a dinghy with a man in it bearing the now-old news that we were dragging anchor. Would that we were happily camped out on someone else’s blanket, now, at the beach.
Bob drove the boat forward, well away from the panicky boat owner, and, engine idling, we attempted to calmly discuss our next step. Meanwhile, dinghy guy continued on his merry, carefree way to a nearby boat to chat with friends (possibly about the wording of the petition they were working on, to get us out of the anchorage). When he appeared to be about to depart from this other boat (petition in hand?), I called him back to our boat, and asked him, ever so nicely, if he would do us the honor of advising us as well as participating in our next attempt at anchoring, as I had pretty much had it, for the day.
This carefree Canadian, Rick was his name, was happy to help, and hopped aboard, bare feet and all ( anchors, anchor chain, bare feet—yikes) refusing the opportunity to go back to his boat and get shoes as well as the offer of a headset. So I stood with him at the bow and relayed (via headset) information between him and Bob, who was once again back at the helm.
Things went well until the anchor, on which Rick was hauling, came to an abrupt, muscle-jarring stop. We had snagged a mooring of some kind, apparently attached firmly to the center of the earth, and marked only by a dirty floating empty oil jug. With the help of the wind and the current, our anchor chain had become wrapped around this thing’s rope. Or chain, or whatever it was; it was hard to see. We stared at it for a while, dumbly, until Bob, on the headset, wondered aloud if a boat hook might be a useful tool for this situation. Rick liked this idea, and a boat hook was soon employed, and soon involved in the overall tangle, and before you could say “Let’s sell this boat!” Rick was leaning as far over the bowrail as he could, in a desperate attempt to maintain his dwindling hold on the boat hook, meanwhile imploring me in a small, choked voice to ask Bob to pull forward a bit. I did, Bob did, and I am happy to report that we were able to save both Rick and the boat hook! Quite a coup!
A few minutes later, the anchor, rogue rope and boat hook all three simultaneously disentangled, without human help, and we were able to drive the boat forward past the problem area towards a nice big comfortable spot, where Rick dropped the anchor, the chain and 70 feet of rope. Then all three of us sat on the bow, for as long as it took to drink a beer and feel fairly confident that the anchor was now actually holding. We thanked Rick for his help, and he got in his dinghy and motored back to his probably really boring life on his really boring boat, no doubt wishing he was still learning sailing and having all the great adventures we’ve been having lately.
So this is how I came to be up in the cockpit on anchor watch, drinking a glass of wine and reading a good book (not about sailing, thank you very much), and looking up every sentence or so, then after a while every paragraph, and then maybe every half page, to make sure that we were where we were supposed to be, and not drifting slowly, silently, malevolently into the lap of another boat. When Bob came to call me for dinner, and I told him I was hesitant to leave my post, he said “See these boats all around us? They’re watching us, every single one of them. We don’t need to watch a thing.”
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