Matt and I had meant to install the mast steps when the mast was out of the boat and lying flat on the ground, but we got sidetracked. Actually, the mast steps were a side track, and the main track was: fix things that need to be fixed before putting Syzygy in the water.

So now installing these 2-inch aluminum “steps” — which John Ryan custom made for us at his machine shop — requires ascending the mast 21 inches at a time. Twenty one inches seems a good height for a step — it’s about knee height for Matt, Jon, and I — and though we could certainly step higher in present conditions, it seems prudent to make the steps climbable in the rain, in the dark, while the boat is swaying madly.

Today, I noticed that the higher I get, the better the view. Already I can see every boat in the marina, and the bay beyond the marina (covered in whitecaps), and Mt. Tam and fog rolling in through the Golden Gate. I also noticed that the higher I get, the more I can feel the sway of the boat, too - which makes drilling even more of a challenge — more on that shortly. And the higher I get, the longer it takes to scamper back down, to get the tools I need.

Hence this afternoon’s approach: harness plus haul bag, climber-style. The haul bag was key, since I need to carry so many small parts — rivets, washers, steps, punch, guide, hammer, and tape measure. I’ve been carrying the drill over one shoulder (I tied a loop of line around it) and the riveter (which is about 2-feet long, and looks like a giant pair of scissors) over the other.

Until I got to the spreaders, about half-way up the mast, I was just using a five-foot loop of rope around my waist and the mast as a quasi-anchor, as tree-climbers do. The more I leaned back, the more secure I was — assuming my rivet work was solid. Just above the spreaders, I’ll admit I was relieved to clip into the baby stay block. From there on up, though, It’s a straight shot, so it’ll back to tree-climber style, with a prussik on a spinnaker halyard as a backup.

About halfway up the mast (five feet beneath the spreaders), I ran into a bit of trouble while drilling today. Now, drilling through a quarter-inch of aluminum while dangling there at a funny angle isn’t the fastest operation, and I regularly had to shake out my hands to get the blood flowing again after pushing on the drill for so long. But one hole seemed to be taking longer than the others. Lo and behold, there appeared to be another piece of metal inside our mast. (I’d been careful to avoid the conduit that carries the wiring up the mast.)

Perplexed (i.e. unwilling to drill into the unknown), I scampered down, and called Fred, at Valiant Yachts (in Texas). He said that it’s common for factories to order masts made of two sections, with a 4-foot sleeve welded in the middle. Why two sections? Because mills can only produce aluminum extrusions so long, and shipping shorter segments is cheaper. So, on second look up there, I found the little spot where the two sections are welded together — it’s barely detectable. At first I was freaked out, but further research (aka Brion Toss) has revealed that this is not a weak part of the mast, apparently — at least not if it was welded properly. So I grabbed the drill and continued, and confirmed that a) I hadn’t drilled into something I hadn’t intended to, and b) the mast is indeed twice as thick there. Who’d have thunk it? Of course, now I need four longer rivets for two of the steps.

I’d been sorta hellbent on making it to the top of the mast this evening, but in the end, the drill got the best of me: the battery died, and I’d forgotten to toss an extra in my haul bag. So it’s back to it tomorrow — here’s a snippet from when I had a free hand:

Thanks to megan and lee for taking some photos, and thanks to all of our friends that came out (please come again!).

And until the computer ran out of battery power, the gps recorded our track. Note the backtracking that happened between angel island and treasure island–that’s where we decided to furl the jib and put up the staysail. During that process we were sailing with just the main, and that’s how well our boat sails to windward in 20 knots under main alone.

View Larger Map

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.

Liberating. Freeing. Bliss. Matt at the wheel, slightly nervous; he hasn’t steered our boat since barely getting into the dock a month ago.

Motoring out of the marina. All of us, grinning like sloppy newlyweds.

Jonny on the foredeck, watching for other boat traffic. I slap Matt across the back. Whoop! Holler! I’m giddy.

The hard work was worth it. 19 hour work days. No climbing. No biking. Just working. Doesn’t seem like work now.

Time to raise the main sail. I don’t know how to do that. I’m about to learn. Wow, using the winch isn’t easy. That’s a lot of friction. Add it to the list of things to fix.

But I don’t want to think about that right now. Cause the main sail just caught some wind; the boat begins to heel. I’ve never felt my boat heel. Look at it, you can see the wind flowing around the sail. Pushing us forward.

Cut the engine: sweet! no more engine noise. water. listen to the water. The chop of the bay, hitting the boat. Wind. Listen to the wind. Whistling in my ears. The main sail flutters. It’s musical, poetical.

Time to roll out the jib? Really? No problem captain. Wow using the winch isn’t easy. That’s a lot of friction. Add it to the list of things to fix.

Rail in the water. Hard to balance. What fun!

Matt has a sweater and heavy jacket on. Apparently it’s cold. I don’t notice. I’m in a T-shirt. Too busy soaking it all in. God, it’s beautiful. Can’t take 30 seconds to go put on a sweatshirt. Don’t want to. I might miss something. Too busy soaking it all in.

Reef? Too much wind; bring in the mainsail a bit. Yep let’s practice. ’cause I don’t know how to do that. I’m about to learn. At the mast, holding on. It’s kinda bumpy up here. Bay chop. and spray. Fun! Pull the main sail down, ring around the reef hook. I can do that. “Hold!” Can’t… quite… get… ring… around…hook… ok! “Made!” Have fun with that winch Jonny.

Keep winching Jonny. Woah! “What was that?” Something broke and flew off!” Bye bye reef hook. Add it to the list of things to fix.

Take the wheel? Really? Feel the boat move. The wind pushes the boat down, the rudder pushing us up. Spray crashing, hitting me in the face. I love it.

Hey Matt, we’re getting close to the pier, what should we do? Tack probably. uh, ok. I don’t know how to do that. I’m about to learn.

Time to head in; do we have to?

Out for 4 hours today. Pretty soon 2 years. If you lose track of time, Is there much difference?

One of the first pieces of work I tried to do on the boat, back in January: “I know you said cut the through-hull flat, but is this 45 degree angled cut ok?”

From my first day of work here in Emeryville, “I couldn’t find any wooden chisels.”

When I said to Matt: “Is it bad that there is smoke coming from the Dremel?”

When I forgot to turn over a piece of wood I was epoxying, thus painting 7 coats of epoxy on one side of a piece of wood, instead of 2 coats on one side and 5 on the other side.

“It’s not my fault I dropped the Pelican hook in the water.”

To Jonny, “I don’t understand why the screws won’t go in.” He politely and amusedly noted there were already screws in there.

Overfilling our water tanks to the extent that a veritable waterfall poured out of the vent hose directly on our new stereo. (see more about this from Matt’s perspective in previous posts)

When I bought Matt a bright pink electric panel cover instead of the blue he asked for and said, “I don’t understand, you don’t like the color?” (ok that was a practical joke; I bought him blue also)

Accidentally shorting our engine’s starter motor with a wrench, resulting in A) the engine turning over (while I was laying on top of it), and B) a good-sized burn on my arm as a temporary momento. Jonny and Matt both mentioned it might be a good idea to disconnect the batteries next time. Who knew?

How many grommets does it take to secure a windlass cover?
The boat originally had 5, but Jonny determined that the best answer was 12. We can be assured that our new windlass cover will not be lost overboard. Ever. (n.b. the cover for our entire mainsail only has 8 grommets.)

How many hundreds of dollars of epoxy and hundreds of hours of time does it take to build and fiberglass wooden water tanks??
Roughly $1200 and 300 hours. We are now thoroughly convinced without one shred of doubt that we should have never torn apart our steel water tanks and we should have hired a welder instead.

Is it possible to start your engine with your arm and an errant wrench?
Yes. Jon freaked out when he was laying on top of the engine, working on the fuel filter, when he unexpectedly received a painful burn and the engine started cranking underneath him. Thereby accidentally discovering how to short the starter solenoid.

Why is water squeezing up from between our floorboards when we walk around?
Jury hasn’t yet returned a verdict on this one. Most likely explanation is a defective foot pump. No matter what, I can tell you this: it will require at least three more trips to the chandlery, approximately $1000 in unforeseen expenses, two gallons of epoxy, 300 rubber gloves, two days of sanding, and a whole lot of work we didn’t anticipate.

Here’s how it went down from my viewpoint: I’m standing in the galley at about 10pm, all is quiet and still in the marina, and I’m lost deep in thought about why our engine refuses to start (which was a long, unproductive, confusing thought).  Somewhere deep in my subconscious I noted a strange sucking, airy sort of sound, but my reverie was deep and this sound failed to warrant my attention . . . So I’m still deep in thought for another minute, when I notice something extraordinarily strange at the edge of my vision. A sheet of water about 2 ft wide has emerged from underneath one of our cabinets, at head height, and is pouring over the drawers onto the settee.  On its way from cabinet to settee, it also happens to be passing over our newly installed stereo.  And this is no drip.  It’s a veritable waterfall.  I mean volume. Like the rate at which one could empty a pitcher–quickly.  This sight is so astoundingly implausible that my mind refuses to react to it with anything more than a grunting, guttural, medium-volumed  “wha??”  The situation is clearly dire–I mentioned that it was pouring over the front of our new stereo–but I was just . . . confused.  All I could think of, over and over again (like 15 times in 2 seconds), was “where could it be coming from where could it be coming from where could it be coming from where is the water coming from water there what coming from where where what why why?”  Or something roughly like that.  Fortunately, Jon new exactly where the water was coming from and sprung immediately into action–Jonny said that his exit out the companionway and into the cockpit demonstrated record-making speed and efficiency of motion, as he sprung from the middle step to the dodger handhold and swung himself smoothly into a upright run for the dock.  Jon knew where the water was coming from because Jon was the one that turned on the hose full-blast to fill our freshly finished watertanks.  The amount of water that comes out of the faucet on our dock could quench a house fire, and Jon had it at 100%.  So Jon knew exactly what enormous volume of water was being pumped into our cabinet–via, it turns out, the tank’s vent hose.  Which is why Jon won first place boat move while I stood dumbly staring at the waterfall coming out of our cabinet.

This is what happened: Jon was watching the level of water rise through the (closed) access hatches on top of the tank.  The fact that they were closed was relevant.  The vent outlet does not come out of the very highest point of the tank, but is about 1″ down the side.  We thought that we were safe because the vent hose was routed to a point about 5 feet above the tank.  This would be true if even one of the access hatches had been open–in that case the water would have found its own height in the vent hose while air was pushed out of the open access hatch.  But since the hatches were closed, as soon as the level of water rose above the vent outlet, the extra 2 inches of air space above the water was irrelevant, as the air no longer had anywhere to escape to.  So we forced that water out of the top of the vent house, from where it proceeding to pour under the doors of the cabinet, into the drawer beneath the cabinet, around our stereo, and onto the settee.  We put an inch of water in the drawer before Jon turned the water off.  Preliminary investigations suggest that the stereo may be just fine, saved from certain death by the water collection properties of the drawer.

Lesson learned: waterproof everything.  On a sailboat, even the safest, driest corners of the boat will see water.

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.

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.

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!