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 this particular hose fitting or the 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.

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.

First it was the cushions. Now it’s getting the boat across the border.

We’d planned, months ago, to have Syzygy trucked up to San Francisco in mid March, during Jon’s spring break. Before Jon bought plane tickets to Mexico, I talked to Jazmin, at Marina San Carlos. She told me that the wacky spring tides were too low, preventing us from getting Syzygy out of the water until April 9th. (We later heard stories of other boats scraping against the bottom and getting stuck, right at the launch ramp.) So we rescheduled our trucking for April 14th, and pushed back Jon’s visit to April 25th. Since trucking Syzygy from San Carlos to San Francisco takes a week, we expected Syzygy to be here, well, now.

Then Jazmin quit (or got fired), and things got shuffled around.

Continue reading “Mexican shipping blues”

Matt and I spent a day last week cutting the new rigging for Syzygy, after we spent a day going over the numbers that we collected in Mexico. Why a whole day looking at 10 numbers? Because there were, uh, discrepancies between Jon’s measurements and Matt’s measurements. Sometimes those discrepancies were only 1/8 inch; sometimes those discrepancies were 1 1/4 inch. Fortunately, that’s why we have turnbuckles — so that we can tune the rig to the proper tautness, even if the shrouds are a bit long or short.

Continue reading “Cutting the rigging, and hoping we cut it correctly”

Matt and I spent last week in San Carlos, Mexico, readying Syzygy for shipment. It was a week full of victories and discoveries and very satisfying moments, in which our labors appeared to have paid off.

We flew to Phoenix on Friday night, and then hussled over to the Tufesa bus station, to catch an overnight bus down to San Carlos. At midnight I gave Matt a pack of Mentos, and wished him a happy 30th birthday - what better place to celebrate than on an uncomfortable plastic chair beneath fluorescent lights in a shady part of Phoenix? We rolled into Nogales at 6am, and I laughed as yet again, after all these trips to Mexico, we got green lights at the border. All these trips, and never searched; while in the States, airport security takes my toothpaste because the tube exceeds 3 ounces.

Continue reading “Victory in San Carlos, Mexico”

I’ve heard married friends say they nearly got divorced over curtain, rug, and paint color choices, and — maybe because I’m a 31-year-old bachelor — always laughed at such stories. Those stories, incidentally, normally ended with the wife making a decision and saying to her husband: Trust me. You’ll love it.

Then I bought a boat, and, apparently, without my noticing, I got married to Matt and Jonny. Thus began remarkably similar dramatic domestic disputes.

Continue reading “Honey, does this color make me look fat?”

Boat news has been a roller coaster lately: up, down, up, down, up, down.

It started when I stopped by the Emeryville Marina two weeks ago, and found a slip for us. I’m not much of a believer in omens, but I took it as a sign when the skies cleared and a double rainbow came out just as I rolled in on my bike. I was drenched, and my glasses were all foggy/drippy, but I was smiling. I could imagine Syzygy, sitting there in the rippling water, with a view of the whole of San Francisco bay — From Mt. Tamalpais to the Golden Gate Bridge to the city to Treasure Island to the Bay Bridge. It would be perfect. Continue reading “The sailboat roller coaster”

Almost every day, I tell my students, “Trust me, you’ll need to use this math someday.” When they’re learning about arcs of a circle, and how two rays of an exterior angle cut through the circle can be subtracted and that the result equals half the exterior angle, their eyes glaze over and I wonder how better to convince them. “Well, I know it’s slightly boring, and maybe you don’t see the relevance now,” I say, “but trust me!”

Well, kids, take a look at this: Eight pages of mathematics, all done for the practical, real-world purpose of making new water tanks. Continue reading “A hail to high school mathematics”

A couple of friends have emailed me, asking about our progress. Have we sailed Syzygy yet? Is the engine running? Have we practiced motoring around the marina, in and out of our slip? Have we fixed our leaky water tanks?

Until last night, my answer was a sad litany of qualified justifications and hedged excuses. Continue reading “a challenge already”