Syzygy Sailing

We made a lazy departure from Santa Barbara mid-morning on the 17th. Our priorities for the passage were to avoid motoring if possible, and to make our next landfall (wherever it might be) during the daylight–no more anchoring during the dark if at all possible. The first half of the day was the most pleasant sailing so far, in consistent ~10knots of wind off the starboard beam, with a 3 foot 15 second swell.  Meaning: the wind was a decent breeze coming directly in over the right side of the boat, and the ocean waves lifted us up 3 ft and down 3 ft (total 6 feet peak to trough) every 15 seconds, which is a barely discernible rise and fall.  Further meaning: the motion of the boat was extremely steady, the sails stayed nicely filled, and the wind was light enough that lounging in the cockpit still felt warm and balmy.

We had bit the bullet and purchased a cruising guide to the islands offshore from the West Marine in Santa Barbara–that turned out to be a very good decision. My charts for most of the channel islands coastlines are not very detailed, and the two anchorages we have experienced so far are small and difficult.

The purpose of an anchorage is to 1) provide shelter from wind and waves, in that order, respectively and 2) to provide access to land.  The unfortunate trade-off of being in an anchorage is the possibility of contact with land.  It is difficult to overstate exactly how undesirable it is to make contact with land in a sailboat.  For a boat even to “bump up” against any piece of land will almost assuredly result in the boat sinking (unless of course your boat is made out of metal, as Pete never loses a chance to mention–but his metal boat is very heavy and sails very slowly though, so I forgive him for remembering the benefits of metal whenever possible .

Anchoring up against the land is like bringing your hand up next to a candle flame for warmth–the warmest you will be is right before you get burned.  Anchoring is just such a gambit: you are angling for protection, but the most protected spot is right up close against the very land that will sink your boat at the slightest contact.

We pulled into the “Scorpion” anchorage on the night of the 17th just before dark, and it was easy to see that being in that spot provided very little in the way of protection from either the wind or waves.  In this case, the word “cove” was completely misleading.  The cliffs were sharp and hard looking, and instinctively I wanted to stay away.  However, a comfortable half a mile away from land, the depth was well over a hundred feet and we may as well have just floated around the ocean, for all the protection to be gained by the spot.  A quarter of a mile away, the depth was finally shallow enough for us to anchor.   It felt very close to the rocks.  Pete assured me that we would experience anchoring situations far closer, so we dropped the “hook”.

Part of the anchoring process is to “back down” on the anchor: one puts the motor into reverse and backs up on the anchor to better dig it into the bottom, and to test that it will hold well.  The first time I backed down on our anchor that night, it started dragging.  I let it settle (did nothing else) and backed down again and it held.  The process had taken close to an hour and we were tired and cold and the wind was blowing us away from the land, safely out towards open water, so at that moment it seemed like our anchoring job was perfectly safe and solid, well done let’s get warm and have a drink, etc.  Then of course the wind shifted just after we got into bed, blowing us diagonally towards the land, and all of a sudden those rocks looked much closer, and much much sharper than they had a few hours earlier.  The fact that the anchor had dragged the first time I had backed down on it came back to haunt me–why did it drag the first time and not the second?  I didn’t do anything differently the second time.  Was it just chance?  If I had backed down on it a third time, would it have dragged?  Given these thoughts, of course I couldn’t sleep well.

We didn’t drag that night, and everything was fine.  I paid for this lesson with lost sleep, elevated anxiety.

The next day we departed for Catalina.  We arrived at the twin harbors area the following afternoon, after a sleepless night on passage bobbing around in zero wind (yet another eventually fruitless attempt to avoid using the motor).  After checking out and dismissing the cherry cove anchorage (full of moorings, not a single spot to anchor) we radioed the harbor patrol to ask where, exactly, was a spot for us to anchor that wasn’t completely full of mooring balls.  We ended up in little fisherman cove.

Yet again, “cove” was innappropriately applied.  More like little fisherman beach, or even more accurately little fisherman bit-of-sand-next-to-more-sharp-rocks.  I positioned us equidistant from rocks and mooring balls, as far away from land as seemed sensible given that we still needed some bottom under us in which to anchor, and that the whole point again is to actually have some protection.  We set the hook, backed down, and all was well.  We went ashore, did shore stuff like shower and laundry and eat french fries, we came back to the boat and ate a great meal, we slept well, the cruising life was good that night, and in this case what I mean by that is that it was actually relaxing and free of anxiety.

Last night we woke up to the sound of our boat banging up against something–this is an unfortunate way to be awakened at 3 in the morning.  It turned out to be a mooring ball–the wind had shifted 180, and apparently our anchor rode was about thirty feet too long to come up short of the mooring ball, and forty feet too short to float past it and tangle us all up in it.  To be frank, at 3 in the morning in my underwear I could have cared less if our rode had fouled around the mooring ball, if only the damn thing wouldn’t have banged against our hull, and then I would have slept for a few more hours and the tangled mess would have at least been a post-breakfast task.

I pulled in 25 feet of our anchor rode–leaving 105 feet of anchor rode in 35 feet of water, or a scope of 3:1.  A scope of 3:1 is the minimum that I was willing to go to, given the situation (usually 5:1 is really nice and 7:1 is overkill).  The mooring ball floated about 10 feet astern of us.  I went back to sleep.  I had just enough time to fall asleep before the damned ball started banging on the hull again.  Given that I was unwilling to shorten the rode any more, I pulled out a second anchor, emptied out the cockpit locker to find the rope rode for it, tied the 300 feet of rope rode onto the anchor, dumped it into the bottom of the dinghy, spent five minutes trying to start the outboard, motored out the second anchor in the dinghy as far as I thought my rope rode would reach, lowered it to the bottom (about 70 ft), motored back to the boat . . . and ran out of rode about 15 feet away from the boat.  Spent 20 minutes pulling the rode and anchor back in, motored 30 feet closer to the boat, lowered the anchor again, went back to the boat, reached it this time, put it onto a winch, then fell asleep laying in the cockpit as karen winched the boat in a hundred feet toward the second anchor.

Moral: anchoring is a skill learned solely through trial and error, and each lesson comes at a high cost.  The price of the tuition is paid with sleeplessness anxiety and unwanted unexpected frantic activity in the middle-of-the-night.  The consequences of failure can be high.  Karen wrote a less serious post about it that I recommend, as an antidote to my worried writing . . .

Karen and I took the boat out to fill up on fuel over at the berkeley marina.  The engine overheated.  We will not be leaving tomorrow.

One of the very first jobs we did when we bought the boat was replace the standing rigging [1] [2].  To redo the standing rigging is to replace the most basic structural foundation of the boat.  All the work we have done since then has, in a sense, been built on that foundation.

Last week, less than a month before we are planning on departing, I discovered that the “knees” of the boat have come unbonded from the hull.  Partially ripped off.  If the rigging is the foundation, the knees are the bedrock underneath the foundation.  Imagine digging up your house to shore up the bedrock.  Of all the projects that I anticipated we would have to do on the boat, I never saw this one coming.  It was my assumption that the knees on a Valiant 40 were more than strong enough, for anything, forever.

After much difficult deliberation, Jonny has decided to move on to other pursuits.  It’s a private affair; this is a public forum.  Neither do I wish to gloss over it; do not confuse my brevity for lightheartedness.  My opinion is that Jonny is doing what is right for him, and I support that.  I wish him luck on his path.

This has been the blog of three friends whose paths have diverged.  In the beginning, this trip was about three guys sailing around the world and making a point to the world in the process.  The trip hasn’t turned out as originally conceived.  It’s no longer three buddies all together, and I no longer feel qualified to make a point to anyone.  I have taken down the Owners and Goal page, the tagline as well, and entered them as the very first blog entries (in the archive).  I think it is important not to ignore where we started; perhaps that way we will not ignore the lessons we have learned.

“The best laid plans of mice and man oft go astray.”

The title is from a line of Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse”; also the source for Steinbeck’s title “Of Mice and Men”

I was taught when growing up that at times it is important to sacrifice current pleasure, satisfaction, or happiness in order to achieve a greater amount of it at some point in the future.  I was taught to save money for later, to educate myself now to prepare for later, to work hard now so that the future will be brighter.

I also learned, largely in my late teens and early twenties, that it is important to live your life in the present, and not sacrifice everything for some future gain, because of certain obvious truths:  many people die too young, having worked and sacrificed for a future they were unable to experience.  Many people work and sacrifice for future gain for so long that they forget they are eventually supposed to reach–and enjoy–that future.  Working towards a goal always in the future becomes an ingrained habit, they work until the day they die, and, just as surely as those that die young, never benefit from the sacrifice.

I feel that at each extreme, both viewpoints are unassailably true:

a)  In the extreme of always working and planning towards a never-reached future, the reward for that work is never realized.  The definition of “sacrifice” contains the notion that there is some future gain that will be achieved by the hard work.  The online dictionary I just consulted gives the definition of self-sacrifice as “sacrifice of oneself or one’s interest for others or for a cause or ideal”.  Where’s the value in spending your whole life, without cashing in at any point?  I.e. what’s the cause?  For some, it can be justified on the basis of improving the lives of their children, or for their children’s children.  But as a universal philosophy, if each successive generation is supposed to sacrifice for the next, exactly which generation is supposed to stop to enjoy the reward?

b) Neither do I wish to genuinely “live every day as if it was the last”, as the popular advice goes.  The advice is easy to pass around among a society that has erred towards constant work and sacrifice, but if I were to pursue the advice literally I would have degenerated long ago into hardcore drug use, breaking the law, and a life generally devoid of the very inspiration and enlightenment that the expression “live every day as if it were the last” is intended to achieve.

(I consider all the rest that I have written below to be highly assailable.)

There are no shortage of activities for us to engage in that are characterized by a high reward to risk ratio.  Usually, the biggest dilemma is selecting between these winning activities rather than a lack of them.  Should I save money for a car or a house?  Either choice has a significant reward (assuming of course that I want those things), and the sacrifice or risk required to obtain it–such as passing on buying a new set of furniture, or eating out less, or working overtime–is small in comparison (which is not to say that it is easy to achieve, only that the value of pursuing the goal is rarely questioned).  If you eat out less for a long time in an effort to save money for the house, and you never end up getting the house anyway because the stock market tanks, you don’t lie awake at night thinking about all those missed restaurant meals–you just think about how frustrating and hard it will be to go through it again.  It is common to hear people lamenting the difficulty of pursuing their particular goal, but uncommon to hear people questioning whether their goal is worth the sacrifice.  When it comes down to it, there are so many things that seem clearly worth the effort (different things for each person, but still many for each) that it is rare for someone to pick a pursuit where the value of the sacrifice is in question.

I happen to have found myself in just such a pursuit, in which I am deferring current happiness and satisfaction for a future gain.  Is it worth it?  On the face of it, this is a simple question that will be answered in time.  If the trip is a success–i.e. we leave the dock and sail as far as the south pacific and enjoy ourselves during that time–then the time, money, efffort, and deferred happiness will have been worth it.  The reward will have justified the sacrifice.  If the boat burns up and sinks in the slip tomorrow, then I will say “no, it wasn’t worth it”.

There are those that insist to me that it will have been worth it (should have been worth it), regardless the outcome–that even if the boat burns in the slip tomorrow, that I should still answer yes.  Many other people in my position–i.e. making preparations for a long sailing trip–find no need to make the sacrifice that I have: they enjoy every minute of the preparations, and the money they put into the boat does not detract from the satisfaction of their life.  They are able to always answer “yes, it was worth it” no matter the outcome.  This is the answer I have for everything that has happened in my life up to this point, with very few exceptions.  Indeed, I vowed at the beginning of this whole plan that my goal was to proceed such that no matter what happened–if the boat went up in smoke at any instant–that the effort and money would have been worth it, in terms of experience and education and enjoying the process.  However, this is no longer true for my pursuit of this trip–things have become complicated regarding friendships, social dynamics, my life away from the boat, and so I can no longer answer that it will have been worth it regardless the outcome.

The important question is “knowing what you now know, if you went back in time, would you make the same choice to embark on this pursuit, and do it all over again, knowing what the outcome would be?”  One must consider the opportunity cost.

So on one hand, it’s only a matter of waiting to see what the outcome will be.  But that is not the point of this post.

Whether it ends up being worth it or not, there is a very large life lesson that I will be taking away from this whole experience: it is not true that every goal is worth pursuing.  The reward may be worth the sacrifice, if the reward is actually achieved.  But if the pursuit involves sacrificing towards a goal that may not be realized, then one should carefully weigh the risk of never realizing the goal.  The risk is that you will have wasted your sacrifice: that the years of time and effort and money you put into it are still not sufficient to assure a successful outcome, and that the work will have been in vain.  This is not to say that there won’t still be some value and some reward from the pursuit, especially if you were careful to carefully collect the valuable moments of happiness and satisfaction and meaning that you chanced by on the journey.  But there are some activities out there whose success is not a foregone conclusion, and there are some sacrifices you can make that you would not go back in time and repeat, now knowing what you know.  In my case, I gambled three years of my life–during which time such things as career aspirations, moving to the place I really want to live, and starting my new life with Karen would have taken place–all of my money–and a large amount of ego and self-worth–into the successful outcome of this sailing trip.  At the time, I thought that a successful outcome was entirely within our hands–that it was merely a question of adequate sacrifice–that if it wasn’t “working”, simply putting in more time and effort would resolve it, and that it was a matter of sufficient devotion and commitment.  Now I understand that the success of the trip is dependent on certain factors that I cannot control, and if I were back at the beginning, knowing what I know now, I don’t think that I would have taken the risk.

Over the last five hundred years or so, if a sailor did something stupid like neglect his duties or disobey orders or insult his captain, or strike an officer, or desert the ship, or display rank incompetence or drunkenness or insubordination, or steal a dram of rum, or spit on the deck, or fail to stow his things properly or to clean his clothes adequately, there were any number of punishments that could be meted out: the sailor could be flogged, or whipped, or pickled, or cobbed, or made to run the gauntlet or to clean the head or to carry a 30-pound cannonball around the deck all day or to station himself at the top of the mast for a few hours or just to stand still until told otherwise. He could be lashed on board every ship in the fleet, or he could be tied to the mast for a week, or keel-hauled, or he could have had his feet bound and covered in salt and presented to goats for licking, which quickly went from ticklish to agonizing, because the goats don’t stop licking before the sailor’s feet have become bloody stumps. Or, if the sailor had mutinied or murdered, he could be hanged, shot, or have his head cut off, boiled, and then shoved onto a spike above decks, and left there for a week or so, to serve as an example to the remaining and hopefully far more loyal crew. Magellan preferred this latter technique. If the sailor had buggered (aka sodomized) another sailor, that, too could earn him the severest punishments. The sea was not San Francisco, man. But, if the sailor, while meeting the locals on some tropical island far away from home, knocked up a local woman, or a bunch of local women: nothing. Getting a girl knocked up was what sailors did when they weren’t sailing, like Genghis Khan, or Mulai Ismail, the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, who had something like 1400 sons and daughters before he died. Most sailors probably never knew how many women they knocked up on their voyages.

How far we’ve come since those days. I can neglect my duties all I want; I can make fun of Matt’s mom and call Jon a cabron and not get punched in the face; I can run off to Yosemite for a couple of weeks; I can trim the sails poorly and sail us home by some unimaginably indirect course; we can get so drunk that we decide to clean up our spilled wine with spilled beer; I can drink all of Matt’s beer and Jon’s expensive whiskey; I can spit on the deck or anywhere else on the boat I feel like it; and I’m not sure if I’ve ever stowed my things or washed my clothes properly. The boat is my oyster. If I were so inclined, I could invite over all the gay guys in the bay area with one simple Craiglist post; instead, I have tried my hand at luring girls here, all the while wondering what girl would really find this sailboat alluring. Remember: according to Google, Syzygy is a janky piece of shit, and based on the information in this paragraph (swearing, drinking, spitting, dirtying), I’m no example of fine manners, either. Finally, the biggest change of all: getting girls knocked up is decidedly not what sailors do. This is the 21st century, man, even if it is San Francisco.

So I’m 31, and dating, and it’s always a mystery when and how to tell girls about the boat. They always have a ton of questions. Is it small? It’s like a New York City apartment, you know, a 400-square-foot studio. Is there a fridge, and a stove? Yup. Is there any headroom? I can’t jump up and down, but I don’t have to squat. Is there a bathroom? Yup, but I prefer to piss in the bay. Is it noisy? Seagulls squawk in the morning, and sometimes the wind howls in the afternoons, and sometimes the docklines creak as they stretch taut. I try to make it sound romantic. Does it rock back and forth? The boat moves a little bit when tied up, but nothing crazy. And get this: the boat is so burly that if it gets knocked over 90-degrees it still pops right back up. In fact, if it gets knocked over 120-degrees, it still pops right back up.  Do you get seasick? Not in the marina, but at sea, sure. Most sailors do occasionally. Is it cold? Not really, and I have a diesel heater. Sometimes I feel like a caveman, proving that I exist in modern times: yes, I have electricity and laundry and cell-phone service and an internet connection. Yes, a sailboat. Really, it’s not a big deal. It’s got a certain allure, I know it, but somehow I end up on the defensive.

And here’s how I can tell my dating life isn’t going so well: I’m sleeping with Bob Seifert. Not “sleeping with” in the euphemistic sense, but literally, as in sleeping beside the book he wrote, called “Offshore  Sailing: 200 essential passagemaking tips.” I have a hardcover copy of it in my bed, and I cuddle up to it every night like it’s some titillating classic or a book of translated swooning poems. Page 27 describes one of my favorite projects: boom preventers. As if I need those. There’s no other way to put it: it’s my boat porn, full of seacocks and cockpits and blowers and interfacing electronics and deep-cycle batteries and coupling nuts and prop shafts and large tools and lubricants and docking equipment and proper bedding techniques. Talk about a change. I should be punished for my behavior.

It’s the nature of adventures for things not to go as planned, but that’s not much consolation when seasickness renders you as useless and immobile as a jellyfish and you’re out in the middle of the ocean and you’ve got miles to sail before reaching the comfort of terra firma. Only in hindsight, and only reluctantly — once you’ve got your wits about you again — can you call such an experience an adventure. Really, it’s much easier to call it what it was: a miserable, queasy, painful, wretched, torturous journey.

Matt, Karen, and I had decided it was finally time to take Syzygy out in the ocean, so we decided to sail from San Francisco 20 miles south to Half Moon Bay. It’s worth noting, now, that the Coast Guard had issued a small-craft advisory for the weekend, and that the forecast, which included an official “gale warning,” predicted 30 knot winds and 18-foot seas on Sunday, and 25 knot winds and 9-foot seas on Monday.

Continue reading “Anyone seen my sea legs?”

So the first three times we sailed Jon, Jonny, and I went out by ourselves. This turned out to be a smart idea, because three times in a row we went out and broke something.

On July 4th we broke our reefing hook–broke it right in half (the metal was corroded apparently). We were practicing reefing, we lowered the mainsail, Jon hooked the tack to the reefing hook, and when we started tightening the halyard back up half the hook just flew right off. Lesson learned: don’t trust even large, seemingly strong metal parts without good reason. So we replaced the reefing hooks; we even put one on each side so it’s easy to reef from either tack.

The next time out we blew up a rope clutch. I was unwinding the main halyard from the winch and as soon as the force was transferred to the rope clutch it just shattered, the top popped right off and the axle snapped out. Pretty dramatically. So we replaced all of our rope clutches, and our deck fairleads, and serviced the winches.

The third time the stitching on the luff of our jib came apart. This was to be expected I suppose, since the stitching that failed was the stuff that’s been sitting in the sun for a decade while the sail was wrapped around the furler. It cost $175 to have Pineapple Sails restitch it.

Ready to take people out.