Syzygy Sailing

“Fuck this hose!”

It was 1 AM, and I’d been working for 17 straight hours on our damn water tanks. The hose we’d bought was inflexible yet annoyingly curvy, and slightly larger than our old hose, making it extremely difficult to shove it onto the fittings. One fitting that was supposed to attach to the water inlet hose was so tight that I spent 20 minutes, splayed out on the floor, with my arms scrunched into a tight crevice between the water tank and a bulkhead, struggling, pushing, pulling, leverlng, to no avail. Swearing seemed to be called for.

All I wanted was to get one step closer to finishing our new water tanks, a battle that by then was stretching into its third week. By now the project was so consuming that I was forgetting to eat meals. Even though we were now so close to the end, I still felt defeated and resigned to failure. “I can’t do it,” I said to Matt, and I’m not sure if I meant the water tanks or this entire god-forsaken sailboat fixer-upper nightmare I’d gotten myself into.

Matt had showed up at 8:00 that morning, chomping at the bit to do some work after too long away from the boat. July 4th was only a few days away, and we figured that if we wanted to take friends sailing around the Bay to watch the fireworks, we’d have to wrap up the watertank project at long last. While some might call this overly optimistic, I prefer to think of it as inspirationally motivating. Matt called it stressful. He was going to make a go at it though.

I stared at the water inlet hose with disdain, then turned to Matt. He’d gotten the hose on the other tank attached somehow. How? He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, mine was a bitch also.” I had put this type of hose on many other fittings, but every other time I’d always had more room to twist the hose around the fitting, following the grooves of the hose, and greatly helping it along. How could I twist it now in such a small space? Ah! An epipheny! Detach the fitting from the tank, connect the hose on the fitting, then reconnect the fitting with the hose on it. It almost worked… except for the enormous kinks that ended up in the hose. So I tried again, kinking the hose in the opposite direction before starting. Success! By 3 AM I was screwing on the last hose-clamp, meaning the water tanks were completely fitted.

Before calling it a night, Matt and I had a beer. We didn’t say much; we mostly just looked at the water tanks, which were shiny and waterproof and strong and at long last permanently bolted in place. We knew that after 19 hours, just as much or more work was still needed to be done to sail by the 4th. But beneath the exhaustion and frustration there was still a moment of satisfaction. The god-forsaken sailboat fixer-upper nightmare seemed, at least, an inspired god-forsaken sailboat fixer-upper nightmare.

I’m here! After months and months of anticipation, I’m at the boat, eager and excited, a teenager at prom. It’s especially exciting, because for months I’d been listening to Matt and Jonny talk about everything they were doing with the boat, and I felt so left out, missing great adventures and stories, and wanting so desperately to be there. It was agony; but no more.

The first night in Emeryville, Matt filled me in on some projects that I could get started on. We needed to create lifelines, he said, by lashing skinny lines around thicker lines. We needed to remove the ineffective and messy sound insulation in the engine room, probably by using a putty knife. Also, the old resin in the bottom of the bilge needed to be chipped smooth; for this Matt recommended a wood chisel. Easy enough, I thought: lashing, putty knife, wood chisel. No problem.

The next morning, I sprung awake at 7:30, earlier than I get up when working during the school year. I went looking through the tool bin for the various equipment Matt mentioned. Lashing: check. Putty knife: check. Wood chisel… huh. I found about 5 chisels but none of them was a wood chisel. So I put that off, and busied myself taking off the sound insulation. I finished that by 11:00, had lunch, and then wrapped up my last little bit of schoolwork, and submitted my stundents’ final grades.

I met Matt back at the boat that evening and he asked what I had managed to accomplish.

“I took off all the sound insulation, and started looking at the lashings, but I couldn’t find any wood chisels.”

Matt seemed confused, and glanced down at our array of tools. “What are you talking about,” he said, while picking up a chisel and showing it to me, “there’s four of them right here.”

I grabbed the tool from his hand and inspected the chisel more closely. “This is made of metal!” I sputtered. “You said a wood chisel!”

Matt just laughed and laughed, and I’ve laughed at myself quite frequently since. Oh well, I suppose someone has to do stupid goofs like this.

At 6pm wednesday afternoon, as we were sailing out of the Berkeley Marina, there was substantial reason to be proud of ourselves.

We had replaced all of our standing rigging–the very important wires that hold up the mast–by ourselves.

We had replaced the bearings in our supposedly un-maintainable furler (”Profurl bearings are sealed and can’t be replaced,” said the rigger at Svendsen’s).

We had sanded and painted the bottom by ourselves.

We had replaced the through-hulls and added backing plates ourselves.

We had repaired our delaminated rudder by injecting epoxy, ourselves.

We had glassed over damaged areas of the keel, ourselves.

None of us had ever done any of these things before, never even seen them done. Without tooting our own horn too much, some of these jobs are a hell of an achievement for inexperienced guys like us. Things like getting the rigging to fit perfectly the first time, and creating beautiful through-hull seacock installations, and replacing sealed bearings are almost always jobs left to the professionals. We did it though, and we are FAR from professionals.

But above all else we felt proud because at 6:30pm on Wednesday evening we were heeled over and hauling ass on a close-reach, pointed directly at the Golden Gate Bridge, just before sunset, in 20 glorious knots of wind with waves splashing over the bow and down the deck. We felt proud because we had done all of our yard work all ourselves, in just two weeks and were already in the water, headed for our slip ready for us in Emeryville.

Now for the slapdown part. Right when you’re feeling on top of the world, like you pulled off some sort of sailing coup d’etat and maybe this whole thing isn’t all that hard after all . . . that very moment is the perfect time for a dose of humility.

I did not succeed in parking the boat in our slip. As we pulled into the Emeryville Marina a low was moving in, and it was gusting to maybe 15 knots in the marina, which are somewhat challenging docking conditions especially since our slip was downwind but honestly not particularly abnormal. However, I am completely inexperienced motoring our boat around. With her long keel and skeg rudder, she turns like an elephant and backs even worse. As we approached our slip my anxiety skyrocketed–rightfully so, because I was realizing far too late that I had almost no chance of getting us into the slip without damaging a boat. Our boat weighs 22,500 lbs–you can’t hold that off with brute strength–and the wind, not me, was in control.

I barely got the nose in the slip before the wind rotated the rest of the boat right past the slip. To avoid hitting the neighbors boat I threw it in reverse, sending us backward across the narrow fairway and leaving Jonny and Karen on the dock. I proceeded to carve a full circle as I was blown down the fairway, able only to motor forward and backward enough not to hit other boats. Syzygy came to rest, mercifully lightly, on the stretch of dock at the end of the fairway. I didn’t hit any boats, but I also didn’t get in our slip and we were in a tough spot blown up against the dock. Compassionate bystanders came to our aid (I give thanks) and helped with docklines while we formulated a plan. We ended up powering off the dock (a delicate task, with no room to maneuver) and parked in a massive, uninhabited, upwind slip that even I couldn’t mess up. We would move in the morning when the wind had abated.

After the pride I have rightfully taken in our successes, it was important to receive this slapdown–this reminder of how much we still have to learn, and how this isn’t a game in which our failures have no consequences. Skippers all over the marina park their boats without mishap every day–it is no particularly impressive skill. Yet it is a skill that I lack and that I must acquire.

The next morning the wind had not abated at all, but we needed to move out of the slip that wasn’t ours. I cannot tell you the anxiety this caused me. Jonny and I spent over an hour motoring in the empty space of the marina, practicing parking around a downwind buoy, pretending it was our slip. It was horrifying how infrequently I was able to accomplish the job, even around the buoy, and when we finally turned towards our slip to do it for real, I felt more fear of the consequences of my imminent failure than I have in years. I had very little reason to expect that I would accomplish the task any more successfully this time than I had the night before. In truth, I had more understanding of how likely it was that I would fail, given the failure rate while practicing with the buoy. It was as if I was readying myself to go out on the stage for some recital, knowing full well that I couldn’t perform the piece.

Well this time I got us into the slip without damaging anything. I felt immediate and overwhelming relief–of the sort that makes you want to hug everyone in sight and makes you feel like you could exhale for a whole minute from all the pent-up air you were holding. Not pride though–I’m not proud of it because I have no right to be proud of a success that resulted from luck more than skill–and even if any of it had been skill, it is a basic skill that a dozen other skippers a day perform all over the marina.

So Syzygy is finally resting safe in her home, her slip. For now. I have as much curiosity as the next person about what will happen the next time we take her out and try to bring her back!

Three months ago, when we were contemplating having our boat trucked up from Mexico to San Francisco, we picked the last week of March, because it was my spring break, to go down and get the boat ready to truck up. Unfortunately, that week didn’t work for the haul-out company; tides were too low. So Matt and Jonny got to go down to the boat two weeks later, work their butt’s off, get to know our boat, and have fun. Me? I got to sit around and do a whole lot of nothing, and a little bit of school work.

So, to make up for this, I decided to take a week off from work to be in San Fran when the boat arrived so I could work MY butt off, get to know our boat, and have fun. Alas, this effort was also thwarted, as our boat arrived three weeks late in S.F., exactly one day after I departed. It was left to Jonny and Matt again to have all the fun, do all the work, and get to know our boat better.

I feel a smidge guilty about all of this, like somehow, my not contributing to all the effort is somehow my fault. And I definitely feel behind in learning about various in’s and out’s of our boat, nuances, and feel pretty clueless, while it seems like Jonny and Matt know everything or are at least learning everything.

When I think of working on a sailboat, I think of tight squeezes and awkward contortions to reach a bolt here or a fitting there. So In the spirit of working on the sailboat, I decided to find the tightest and most awkward area in my condo and do some cleaning. My efforts were captured in the photo below:

I’ve also been doing some other preparing for sailing, namely getting eye surgery. This way when the the weather is miserable, I don’t have to worry about water in my face washing out my contacts. Or when Jonny calls us on deck at 3:30 am because we’re about to crash into a rocky shoal, I’m not fumbling for my glasses. Here’s me all toked up on Vicodin right after my surgery, with clear plastic shields taped over my eyes and big sunglasses to boot. The picture is blurry to mimic what my eyes are still seeing…

You can tell it’s been a good week by looking at the contents of the big rubber trash can next to the boat: beer bottles and coffee cups and cans of beans, rubber gloves and dirty rags, rusty screws, burnt-out light bulbs, old bearings, bits of corroded wire, paper bowls lined with epoxy residue, stiffened paint brushes, three empty paint cans, three dremel bits worn down to the nub, two broken drill bits, and one broken dremel tool.

The broken dremel was our first tool casualty — I burnt out the motor while sanding the old paint off of the propellor. It popped, then stopped spinning, and then a few wisps of smoke snaked out of it. It was bound to happen, and I’d been kind of expecting it since meeting a guy in Mexico who broke half a dozen grinders in the process of refurbishing his Norwegian steel-hulled boat. So Matt went out and bought a new dremel, which we immediately put to use by grinding down a couple of our new backing plates. So far so good.

We’ve gotten very good at buying tools and parts; in fact, my mental map of this new place I call home consists mostly of places to get them. I used to know intuitively how to get to bike shops, bars, restaurants, friends, and parks. Now I know how to get to five local hardware stores, a screw manufacturer, a bearing distributor, a plastics place, a sailmaker, and three chandleries. It’s worth noting that at Svendsen’s, the best chandlery around (particularly since, as new boat owners, we get 40% off everything), I can name most of the staff.

They say that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into, and they’re 100% right. During the last two weeks, I’ve spent $1000 (2/3 or it at Svendsen’s) on two sanding bits, two hole saws, a depth gauge, a medium punch, die grinder, a tap, and scissors; 125 paper bowls, 200 rubber gloves, 12 plastic syringes, 12 small brushes, eight mixing sticks, two rolls of painter’s tape; three 3×3x1″ pieces of plastic, two rubber spreader tip covers, 15 feet of 1″ rubber tape, one spool of seiizing wire; two industrial bearings and four oil seals; four nav lights, four gold-plated coax connectors, two waterproof cable clams, a heat gun; four bronze through hulls, two bronze rods, one bronze seacock, one 4×6 hull zinc, two 1″ round prop zincs; 1 quart of epoxy primer, 1 quart of bilge paint, 16 ounces of marine-grade lubricant, 14 ounces of molybdenum grease, 12 ounces of epoxy resin, 8 ounces of anti-sieze lubricant, 1 can of penetrant, and a caulk gun; 30 6mm set crews, 15 5/16 lag screws, 12 2″ machine screws, nine 2″ cotter pins, eight 1/4″ phillips screws, eight 1/4″ socket screws, eight lock washers, six 1/4″ lag screws, four 1″ cotter pins, and four locknuts — all A-4 grade stainless steel, with less than .02% carbon and at least 2% molybdenum.

The worst part? Those stainless-steel screws aren’t cheap, but they’re nothing compared to bronze. Last week, at Svendsen’s, Matt was searching for 1″ lag bolts made of silicone-bronze, the most corrosion-resistnant marine-grade metal available. Instead of buying 18 bolts, he figured a bag of 25 would be cheaper. So we put ‘em in our pile of stuff. As Pat was ringing us up, I asked her how much the screws were.

-”Oh, you don’t want those,” she said.
-”Waddya mean? How much are they?” I asked.
-”Seriously. You don’t want those. They’re $144.”

Yep, Pat was right. We didn’t want those. $6 per screw was too much. (And that was with the 40% discount.) So we got stainless steel lag bolts, for about 50 cents each.

This week, we had no choice. We rebuilt the zinc on the hull, and the 4″ screws that hold it there had to be conductive. Bronze it would be. No two ways about it. The price: $12 per screw. We bought ‘em.

And that right there is one of the best analogies for owning a boat: spending an exorbitant amount of money only to get screwed.

But… then again, the hull zinc is mounted perfectly. Our seacocks and through-hulls are now bombproof. Our engine exhaust now spits out above the waterline. The four coats of bottom paint I just applied should last years. Our rigging — knock on wood — is burly. Our mast is wired elegantly. Our bow pulpit will be mounted solidly. Everything we’ve done, we’ve done by the book, as it should be done. We’ve cut no corners. After just two weeks, I think our boat is at least 20% less janky than it was before.

I sanded so much today that my fingers were still tingling 20 minutes after I put the sander down. My shoulders ache, my hands are sore, and if you were to ask me to pick something up off the ground, the manner in which I’d bend over to do so wouldn’t be very graceful. It reached 90 degrees here today — probably a record — and I spent most of the day in a full-body Tyvek suit, with rubber gloves and a face mask on, while holding a 10-lb sander above my head. My hair is matted with sweat, and my shirt (the same shirt I’ve worn all week) is a little bit stickier. My fingers are covered in blue dust. So are my feet. And my hat. And my cheeks. I’m about to go take a shower at Matt and Karen’s place, and am contemplating taking a bath in Gojo instead.

How much work was it? I’ll put it this way. After two hours of sanding, and little to show for it, I asked Nick, a yardworker more or less my age, how long it takes him to sand a 40′ sailboat, to see if I was on track.

-Nick: “Oh, I’m lucky. I hurt my shoulder, so I never have to sand any boats, because I can’t lift my arm above my shoulder. I can’t even do a pushup.”

-Me: “How’d you hurt your shoulder?”

-Nick: “Surfing. But I can still surf.”

So the guys who work here, the guys who get paid to do work: they dislike sanding to the extent that a personal injury seems like a blessing.

At any rate, Matt and I finished sanding the bottom of our boat (he sanded the port side, and I the starboard) and it looks really good. Actually, it looks bad, because the bottom is all scratched up and patchy, but it’s a good sanding job. In fact, Carl, our much-revered yard manager, walked by and said of our sanding work, “Wow, it doesn’t get much better than that. I like to see professional work.” That made us proud.

So the bottom is almost ready to be painted. Of course, almost is a weighted term as far as sailboat repairs go. Almost means it feels like we’re done, even though many tasks remain. We’ve still got to prime on the bare metal parts. And we’ve got to lightly sand the parts that we fiberglassed and smoothed with fairing compound (aka marine-grade spackle). And we’ve got to put the through-hulls back in…It’s worth noting that putting the through-hulls back in isn’t the quickest task, either. We’ve got to level the backing plates (aka grind away the high spots), and measure the depth of each through-hull, and cut off the extra threads. Then we’ve got to mark the spot where the seacock rests on the backing plate, and drill holes for the lag bolts that hold the flange of the seacock in place. Then we have to fill in those holes with epoxy, so that the backing plates don’t rot. Then we have to let the epoxy cure. Then, at long last, we have to squeeze in a big glob of marine-grade caulk, and screw the seacock onto the through-hull, and insert the lag bolts.

There’s a good analogy for this: Xeno’s paradox. After hours of grueling work, we’re half way done. Hours later, we’re half way through the remaining work. Hours after that, we’re halfway through the little bit that remains. Ad infinitum… and we never get there. We never finish. But like I’ve said before, it’s fun, and it sure beats an office job.

Some friends stopped by this week. Dave and Ben, both engineers, spent an hour poking around the boat. Kevin did too.

-Dave: “It’s so cool how everything fits together.”
-My thoughts: Cool, maybe, when stuff works. Not cool when it needs to be repaired.

-Ben: “This is totally comfier than a tent, and bigger than the back of my truck.”
My thoughts: More expensive, too.

Kevin: “You don’t get anxious? I’d be anxious.”
My thoughts: I think the anxiety has been replaced by excitement.

Phil wins the best-visitor award, though. He stopped by with a cooler full of sandwiches, cold drinks, chips, salsa, and brownies, and then lent a hand cleaning the bottom of the boat. Those beers at the end of the day were delicious - thank you, Phil.

The week has flown by in a blur. One second it’s 10:20, and I’m kinda hungry, and the next it’s 12:47, and I’m so hungry I can’t think straight. Meanwhile, I’m neck deep in a project, so eating will have to wait. One second Carl walks by and, seeing me neck deep in said project, asks, “Are you winning?” My answer: “No, but it’s a good game.” A few hours later, I bump into Carl, and proudly report: “I won the game!” Carl: “Attaboy! Attaboy!”

I’ve learned so much, and kept learning so many new things, that it’s been impossible to revel in the glory of each new thing learned. That I will have to successfully figure something out and then move on to another thing is no longer a surprise. Only when I stop to think about it do I realize that this week I learned how to tap threads, how to disassemble industrial bearings, how to splice coax cable, and how to fiberlgass, such that I can drill a hole in my boat and patch it and still sleep soundly onboard that boat. That beats an office job, too.

We damn-near finished working on the mast: we rewired and re-sealed the deck/steaming light, and rewired and remounted the new ultra-efficient LED nav light, too. Matt installed new gold-plated VHF connectors for the antenna, after chopping off a foot of corroded wire on each end. I rigged up a new mount for the wind vane (the old one snapped off in a storm), and Matt cleaned the butyl rubber goop off of the anemometer connection. All that remains is the furler… and the much needed parts are coming tomorrow in the mail…

On account of all this, I’m feeling kind of giddy… like, well, like it’s almost time to paint the bottom, and almost time to put the mast back in, and almost time to put the boat back in the water, where she belongs.

I’ve worn the same pants for a week now; they tell the story of the last seven days — my first week living on the boat — better than I. Embedded in them are bits of caulk, epoxy, and grease; stains of sweat, salt, snot, and blood; smudges of pasta sauce, wine, and melted chocolate; metal filings, fiberglass strands, resin shards, and saw dust.

It’s been a week. I haven’t shaved. I haven’t washed my hair. I’ve been washing dishes with my fingers, pissing in a bucket, drinking wine out of the bottle, and sleeping sound as a baby.

If tools are like pets, and they enjoy being petted, or maybe just held, ours are very very happy. I’ve kept vice grips in my back pocket most of the time, and relied heavily on a screwdriver, crescent wrench, hammer, tape measure, and awl. I’ve alternated between the drill, dremel, grinder, and jig saw as if they were pens and pencils, occasionally using a drill press and a die grinder hooked up to our compressor.

Continue reading “My first week on the boat”

Jonny and I have worked moderately hard for the past two days and I am astonished at how much we have accomplished in just 20 hours.

This is what we did. We repaired the rudder delamination by injected epoxy and filling all the holes. We did all the keel glasswork also–sanded the crack, scrubbed epoxy into the lead, glassed over the crack with knytex (thick and sweet fiberglass), and filled all the holes I drilled to drain it. We repaired the “smile” at the leading edge of the keel the same way. We removed the 5 seacocks and through hulls that will require various glasswork and/or backing plates. We drilled a new hole in the mast to reroute the wiring in the bilge, and a new drain slot. We removed old wiring up the mast, pulled off the steaming light fixture, and rerouted a wire out the mast at the steaming light. We entirely dismantled the furler (jonny already had done most of this already). We located the wiring failure in the bilge that was plaguing the steaming light. Jonny pulled off the bow pulpit backing plates.

As Jon previously explained, every single job, no matter how infinitesimally small, turns out to require a hundred unforeseen steps. Doesn’t matter how small. Drilling a hole. You think it’s easy? You’re wrong. Because the bit isn’t right for the metal, or there is a wire behind the object that might be punctured . . . or . . . . or . . . or. I don’t even want to go into it anymore.

But it’s fun. It’s really fun. You see a problem, you figure out how to solve it, you solve it, it feels good. Repeat. Feel good again. That’s why it’s fun.

The video shows jonny fiberglassing the “smile” at the leading edge of the keel, drilling a new hole to reroute the wiring exit from the mast, and removing the engine exhaust through hull which was for some undecipherable reason located below the waterline.

It came on Monday, at long last. What an immense relief. I drove over to the marina and watched them pull it off the trailer. Travel-lifts are sweet–made our boat look like a toy. Since Monday I’ve had to earn money so I haven’t been able to work on it, which was proven very frustrating. Jonny started laboring away. Tomorrow is my first day off, so for me it all begins tomorrow.

My membership at cal sailing club comes in handy when friends come to town.  A prompt dunk in cold water is the perfect “welcome to the bay area” greeting.  Here is some footage of Jon on a JY15–a fast and tippy little dinghy–wetsuit required.