Syzygy Sailing

What was it like to go sailing for the first time on my boat? It was a feeling not easily expressible in normal sentences; rather, much more elusively affective. And sensory. But read this and maybe you’ll catch a breeze of what I felt that day.

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.

Continue reading “How to describe the first time I went sailing on my boat”

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 unmaintainable furler (“Profurl bearings are sealed and can’t be replaced,” said the rigger at Svendsen’s) by ourselves. 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.

Continue reading “Pride and Slapdowns”

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 ins and outs of our boat, nuances, and feel pretty clueless, while it seems like Jonny and Matt know everything or are at least learning everything.

Continue reading “Jonny and Matt have all the fun, and what I’ve been doing”

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.

Continue reading “I’m broke, but happy”

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”

Happy Birthday to me. I turned 31 on January 1st, and spent the double holiday with Matt and Jonny, on our new boat. I haven’t spent a birthday with good friends in a long time. Everyone it seems, travels for the Christmas-New Years holidays, including me, and so I just haven’t seen any close friends, which is too bad, because I don’t celebrate any holidays really. You could say that I yearned for when I was with friends partying it up for my birthday, not for new years, but me.

So being in Mexico with Matt and Jonny over my birthday was, deep down, pretty exciting and important to me, though I didn’t want to let it on too much. They came through though in a great way. Continue reading “Feliz Ano Nuevo y Feliz Compleanos”

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”

Our first day in the work yard, we met a fellow gringo-boat-owner named Richard. He’d just recently bought his 10th boat, a trawler, and was busy painting it. She’s not nearly as elegant as Syzygy, but she’s definitely cleaner and shinier.

Richard asked us if Syzygy was our first boat. We told him it was. His reply: “Wow, you guys went big.”

You could say that made us proud. Continue reading “Good vs. Better”