Syzygy Sailing

[Reposted from my Outside blog]

A couple of days ago, I helped my friend Liz move out of her fancy apartment. She’s lived in San Francisco for five years, and, as landlubbers tend to do, acquired nice furniture, a bunch of art, and a few acres of books, as well as all those little gewgaws that sit atop shelves and coffee tables. I was enlisted to help move the “heavy things” and “very heavy things” down three flights of stairs, so that she could transport them and store them elsewhere, until further notice. My help, unsolicited as it was, began immediately, over the phone. “Sell it all!” I said. “Put it on Craigslist. Put it on the street. Just get rid of it!” I tend to treat unwanted objects like jank.

Liz, who fancies her possessions, likes her lot of things, was not amused. And her initial experience with Craigslist — some scam artist claiming he was hearing-impaired, hence the unusual shipping and payment arrangement — was not encouraging. She rationalized her situation. If she couldn’t sell her unwanted furniture right away, she’d put it in storage, and sell it in a few weeks. This was even worse: this was like being a slave to your possessions. “Just get rid of it!” I said again. “It’s not worth the trouble!” Liz’s uncle, a sailor, who was also there to help, agreed with me. While Liz crammed things into cardboard boxes, I offered to throw some stuff out her 3rd floor window. He said he’s already suggested that. We laughed: a laugh, perhaps, that only sailors can share. Liz didn’t laugh. She ran around packaging things up, making her life difficult, chained, apparently, to her stuff.

I’ve always been a minimalist, but living on a boat makes you an austere minimalist. You don’t fret over things, or lament their loss. When deciding whether or not jettison possessions, the default becomes Get Rid of It. I’m sure the habit will come back to bite me in the ass later in life, but for now, I’m proud of it. I am the Jank Remover, and when the question is “To take or not to take,” I have my answer in 3 milliseconds. Beat that processing speed, Google.

So after I carried Liz’s sofa bed, bookshelf, carpet, coffee table, and huge TV down the stairs, and had a couple of beers, I recalled a certain relevant literary anecdote. It’s a tongue-in-cheek story of three overworked, partied-out, permanently-hungover English lads — George, Harris, and Jerome (and their dog) —  who decide to rejuvenate themselves by taking a week-long boat trip up the Thames River. It’s called, fittingly enough, “Three Men in a Boat,” and it’s hilarious. The story is classic — it’s #33 on the Guardian‘s list of “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time” and #2 on Esquire‘s list of “50 Funniest Books Ever.” It was written in 1889, and has never been out of print, and is freely available online, courtesy of the Gutenburg Project.

The part that I thought of, and later sent to Liz, is from the planning stage of their voyage. Here’s an extended excerpt:

George said: “You know we are on a wrong track altogether.  We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”

George comes out really quite sensible at times.  You’d be surprised.  I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally.  How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with – oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! – the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man – all lumber!  Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness – no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man!  Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water.  You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life’s sunshine – time to listen to the Aeolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us – time to… Well, we left the list to George, and he began it.

[Reposted from my Outside blog]

In late November I flew to the East Coast to visit my family for Thanksgiving. It was the first time I’d spent 10 days away from the boat in six months. They gave me an earful, my family.

On a walk in the woods with my mom, she asked if I was “prepared to weather a downturn in the economy.” I hemmed and hawed, and admitted all my savings were sunk into the sailboat. Then I tried to explain that cruising is really cheap — you load up on rice and beans, and just take off and go, like a climbing road trip. She seemed unconvinced, and rightly so.

My cousin Myles asked if I was done fixing up the boat; I told him it was complicated, that the boat was sorta like his house — a huge, ornate 1880’s Victorian, perpetually mid-repair, in a historic town. He grasped the situation immediately, and said, “So you’ll never be finished.” I smiled. “Exactly.”

My cousin Joel told me to read “Adrift” — Steve Callahan’s terrifying story of shipwreck and survival — and I told him I had, and that if he thought that story was good, he should read “Survive the savage sea,” by Dougal Robertson.

This got them — my whole extended family, now — riled up, and the comments began to pour forth. Myles, reasoning that piracy was more of a threat than sinking, suggested that I acquire cannons. My dad chimed in: torpedos! Myles: machine guns! My cousin Jim: Missiles!

I opened another beer, and tried not to get defensive. Maybe I should bring their phone numbers, so that I could have the would-be-pirates call them directly to negotiate the ransom?

While home, I also added a few more names to the list of People Who Wish They Could Come Sailing With Us:

-My mother’s boss
-At least one of my folks’ neighbors
-Half of my friends, including one who’s just finishing grad school and afraid to look for a job
-At least one former coworker

Heckling and eager stowaways aside, it felt good to get away from the boat and gain some some perspective. Onboard Syzygy, it’s easy to get so involved, so focused, so lost within a project that it’s impossible to decompress or relax. At the same time, being away from the boat was also disorienting. Soon enough, withdrawn from the boat, I found myself getting antsy. I chalked it up as an urge to tinker. The urge to repair and build was so physical — like I needed to hold tools in my hands lest they curl up and wither — that I had to wonder if the sailboat thing hadn’t changed me.

I climbed up onto the roof of my folks’ house and did some caulking. I put down some new roof with my dad. I cleaned the gutters. I tried to go with the urge, but this was just regular maintenance. I still yearned to build something, and the opportunity that presented itself came, courtesy of my mother, in the shape of… a squirrel-proof bird feeder. It was no sailboat, but it was a challenge: could I use a little ingenuity to outwit mother nature? (The answer, sadly, was no. Squirrels are tenacious little things.) As I dug through the garage looking for parts, I wondered: do I enjoy asking for trouble? Do I tend to invite problems my way? In another sense, I was looking for an opportunity to solve a problem. Such opportunities are often compelling. Can I get up that rock? Can I get up that mountain? Can I get down that canyon? Can I run those 26 miles? Or how about: Can I fix up an old sailboat and sail it around the world?

I spent last week away from the Syzygy, too, visiting my family again. The urge to tinker was still there — I climbed up the Chestnut tree in the backyard and hacked off some dead branches, and sanded and painted the rusting wrought iron railings on the front steps — but even more evident was the urge to nestle in, stay put, have some coffee and just relax. After all this fixing-up-a-sailboat work, I needed a break. I needed to, as they say in the South, “set a spell.” So I sat. And that’s when I noticed the coolest thing: I’ve changed. I’m way more patient than I used to be (though still no saint). I’m way more eager to immerse myself fully in a task. And I’m more comfortable without distractions, just me and my thoughts.

This last realization occurred near the end of a six-hour, coast-to-coast flight, when I noticed the passengers near me getting fidgety, almost childishly so. I sat, knees bent, safety belt buckled, neck squished against one of those godawful airplane headrests that comes standard on those godawful airplane seats, and thought: this is nothing. This aint no sailboat, and this aint no ocean.

[ My Outside blog, reposted here ]

There’s no shortage of advice at the marina. One guy in particular, Steel Boat Jim, who I refer to as Maine Guy on account of his Downeast accent, is a treasure trove. You’d be hard-pressed to carry on a conversation with him and manage to sneak away without having received a point in some direction.

The first time I met Maine Guy, back in November, he was wearing a gray t-shirt from which his stomach protruded, and he had a beer in hand. It was maybe noon. I liked him already.

“So when ahh you leaving?” he asked. I was up on deck, the grinder in my hands, and earplugs in my ears. I pulled them out, and said, “Huh?”

“When ahh you leaving?”

“Not for more than a year,” I said.

“Well, remember, after yooah all stocked up on food, then buy yooah electronics.”

“Sounds like good advice,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’ve wrecked all my fuckin’ electronics.”

He went on, providing more detail — but the pattern had been established: 1) question; 2) answer; 3) unsolicited advice. Technically, the advice also goes unheeded, but he doesn’t know that.

I stopped by Maine Guy’s steel boat, the Arctic Tern, a couple of weeks ago, and after checking out his new solar panels, got to talking about wind generators.

“Yooah totally fuhcked if yooah relying on a wind genertah!” He said. “That thing’s a piece of fuckin’ gahbage! You gotta undastand, theah’s no wind from twenty degrees to twenty degrees. In the tropics, that generatah’s gonna be worthless.”

Maine Guy says that a lot: “you gotta undastand,” as if he’s the purveyor of ancient wisdom. That’s the prelude to his free advice. It’s not patronizing so much as amusing. Of course, he had a point. Wind generators produce no power in winds below about 10 knots, and much of the ocean is festooned with such light air.

“If you buy a wind generatah, theah goes a yeah of cruising,” he said. I’m not sure if I could survive for a year on $2,000, but I got the gist of it. He continued. “If you buy a radar, theah goes a yeah of cruising. If you buy a life raft, theah goes a yeah of cruising.”

I knew better than to steer the conversation toward money or the economy, as he had earlier e-mailed me a long rant about converting my savings from dollars to gold, so I played defense. I said, “Yeah, if you know what you’re doing, you may be OK without those backups.”

Maine Guy had an answer for that, too. “Hey, isn’t that what adventure’s about?”

Score another point for Maine Guy, but remember that there’s a line between adventure and recklessness, a line that we’ve gotten to know in the mountains. That and we already have a radar and a life raft, and we’re not about to sell them.

In the spirit of passing on more advice — this time literally — Maine Guy dug through his bookshelf and handed me a copy of “Blue Water,” by Bob Griffith, one of the circumnavigators on that list I found later. “If you read this book,” he said, “you’ll find out that the most important things on your boat are the anchor, the anchor, and the anchor. And that in two thousand years of sailing, not much has changed.”

“What’s the second most important thing,” I asked.

“A bottle opener,” he said.

Matt, Jon and I couldn’t help noticing the recent NYT  Magazine article, “The Case for Working With Your Hands, about the value of the trades – how they are real, knowledge-based, tactile, lose-yourself-in-the-work, challenging, valuable, and fun; how they bring moments of elation and failure; how they’re high-stakes, with an always present possibility of catastrophe, and how they demand and produce plenty of integrity and responsibility. As one commenter noted, working with your hands brings to mind a certain Danish proverb: “You can do the work of the mind without the hand, but not that of the hand without the mind.”

Of working on old motorcycles, the author writes:

“Imagine you’re trying to figure out why a bike won’t start. The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips head, and they are almost always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch if each of eight screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments have to be taken into account. The attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand. The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms.”

It’s the same on boats and bikes! He continues:

“Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.”

I particularly liked the author’s disenchantment behind a desk, pushing paper, representing an organization and its purported mission. I also liked his loathing of a style that demands an image of rationality but not indulging too much in actual reasoning, and his confoundedness of an inner-office ruled by provisional morality and logic, and his recognition of the divide between reality and official ideology.

Get reading!

In the midst of boat work we frequently acknowledge the “right tool for the job”; tonight it was all about the “right person at the right time”.

I had a frustrating day trying–and failing–to drill a few holes in a piece of stainless steel. Drilling a few holes was my ONLY goal for the day–it has to be done before I can move forward with my current project–but after driving a hundred miles, stopping at various specialized establishments, spending an emotionally debilitating amount of money, and carrying multiple heavy metal objects back and forth multiple times, this task went unfulfilled. Along the way I did some other errands fine but Damn! I really just wanted to get those holes drilled!

One would think that drilling holes is not that difficult. But sometimes Oh hell yes it is. In the past month I have learned how to TIG weld, use a mill and a lathe, how to adjust and replace blades on a serious band saw, how to properly cope a piece of tubing to mate to another piece of tubing, and designed and insulated an icebox. I assure you! drilling large holes in thick stainless steel remains the MOST IMPOSSIBLE TASK of everything we have done on the boat so far. Seriously, harder than everything else. Why? This amateur can offer only justifications (since I haven’t found the answer). Stainless is much harder than “mild” steel. If your drill bit doesn’t cut into it, dig into it properly, than all of the energy of spinning that bit goes into friction–thus heat–and when you heat stainless steel it only gets HARDER than it already is. I tell you truly: a quarter-inch thick slab of stainless steel is where drill bits go to die. You can drill all you want, you can press as hard as you can–with a drill press–you can pour cutting fluid on it, you can use exactly the right speed, you can buy expensive cobalt bits, but at the end of the day you’ll end up with a pile of dull drill bits and a piece of metal with a partial hole in it. And all of your efforts will have served only to harden the metal via that excess heat. It’s a downward spiral leading to frustration and despair and wasted money and broken drill bits, and yes I will shamefully admit that my failure to drill holes in stainless steel ruined my day today, has ruined many of our days in the past, and will probably ruin plenty more. What a silly thing to ruin a day! It’s only metal and a hole! But when there’s no one who can do it for you, and you can’t get it done, and you absolutely need to . . .

After returning home with an attitude of failure inadequacy and disgust, I chose to pursue a proper drink at the Trappist in Oakland (best source of real beer–i.e. Belgian–in the entire east bay) with Karen. At the Trappist, we happened to sit next to a guy who happened to be wearing his California Blacksmithing Society t-shirt and happened to have work-blackened hands which I happened to notice and on which I chose to comment. His name is Brad Faris, and had I tried I could not have found a more ideal individual to answer all my metalworking questions and ease the specific frustrations of my day. Brad’s father was a pinball machine artist, and Brad was originally a pinball machine designer, who became a blacksmith after moving to germany to build pinball machines, and is now a custom smith with a studio in Oakland. Hell of a story, hell of a nice guy. Brad is a stellar individual with a wealth of knowledge, and it was a pleasure to talk to him.

Brad and Karen and I talked technical stuff, like the reason why brass goes pink when it goes bad (the zinc in the alloy is oxidized, leaving on the copper, and porously weak) and what naval bronze does when welded (spitting zinc and producing salt-like deposits) versus silicon bronze (beautiful puttied welds), but we also talked about pinball machines and neat hot forges and old school metal suppliers in petaluma, which is to say that we weren’t dorking out at all–it was interesting and accessible and it was a conversation in a bar while buzzed that was filled with content and value and excitement to me and Karen both. He gave me the important names of the metal and tool supply places that I needed to know immediately, like KBC tools where tomorrow morning I’m going to get some new sharp drill bits and “TAP magic” cutting fluid for tomorrow’s second attack on the stainless. And US Metals which is a more standard supplier than ALCO metals which is like a metal flea market by analogy, and Metal Supermarket which is good for small pieces because they have smaller stock on hand and are more willing to cut and sell it in small quantities, and Van-Bebber in Petaluma which–even though it’s in a silly location for a place that gets all its raw materials from shipping yards in the bay–is apparently the type of customer-service rich operation that draws people from all over to make the inconvenient drive for a great product. Brad knows his shit! So incredibly fortuitous that we just happened to run into him at a bar on the day that I most needed his particular expertise.

There is an oft repeated saying on the boat, about having the “right tool for the job”. For the water tanks, it was the cutoff blade (yeah the cutoff blade is frequently that “right tool”) on a 4″ grinder, for the icebox insulation it was Japanese pull saw, for rebedding it’s 4200 UV fast cure, the list goes on and on. Tonight I have to say that Brad Faris was the right person at the right time. His expertise is exactly what I needed to know to turn today’s frustrations into an optimism for a different tomorrow. I’m excited about tomorrow because I have new ideas about how to properly succeed with that piece of stainless–tomorrow I’m going to do everything right and at the end of the day I’m going to finally be able to give a detailed technical dissertation on how to kick 304 stainless ass. Hell of a frustrating day, hell of a rewarding night.

Smart, responsible guy seeking cat to live onboard a small, clean, mouse-free sailboat. Cat must be trained to use litterbox and not get claustrophobic or seasick. Cat must not get scared near loud power tools or dig his/her claws into the sails or piss on the cushions or chew on electrical wires. Cat must not have allergies to epoxy or fiberglass. Cat must not mind swearing or heavy drinking or long, loud sea shanties. Ideally, cat would be a proficient swimmer. In a perfect world, cat would also be skilled at fishing and scaring away seagulls, and not mind drinking saltwater. International travel opportunities for the right cat. Ugly hairless cats need not apply. International applicants (with proper papers) are encouraged to apply.

Applicants should submit a video demonstrating their abilities to Jonny.

For reference purposes:

*This cat does not meet requirements, and should be sent to aquatic school for further training. Pathetic.

*This cat has sufficient swimming skills, and impressive navigational skills, but seems to lack the innate desire to attack ducks or go onto the boat. It would surely perish at sea.

*This cat also has sufficient swimming skills, and a demonstrated ability to return to the boat, but it’s pretty slow and appears to need assistance. I’d consider this cat for an apprentice-level position.

*This cat is perfect. Bold, assertive, strong, fearless, persistent. Note the cat’s skills with its claws: it doesn’t dig its claws into the inflatable dinghy, while it does use its claws to climb the rope. Impressive.