Syzygy Sailing

(concerning events: July 3rd -July 6th)

People have lived in French Polynesia for around 2000 years and ever since have been eating fish.  Lots and lots of fresh fish.  We have not been eating lots and lots of fresh fish.  We have been eating little to no fresh fish.  This vexes me to no end.  We had fresh fish once in the two weeks I have been here.  Native Tuomotians Ken and Martin caught it for us.

Karen is a fantastic cook.  She probably cooks the most dinners, though I cook my fair share.  Matt and Karen seem to have tired of their repertoire of recipes.  I certainly haven’t though and everything that Karen makes I think is delicious.  Everything that Matt makes I think is delicious.  Everything that I make…. well Matt and Karen eat it, so it must be edible.

But we all acknowledge that our meals are with drawbacks.  Nearly every meal is ‘x’ number of cans + [either] pasta or rice + alcoholic beverage of choice = meal.  Sometimes this is canned spaghetti sauce plus canned chicken plus pasta equals a meal.  Sometimes this is canned roast beef + canned corn + canned mushrooms + canned yams + canned gravy + boxed potatoes = meal.  I think they are delicious every time.  But something fresh would be wonderful.

When Karen makes various fresh bread, it’s a little slice of heaven.  Sometimes sourdough english muffin.  Sometimes tortillas.  Or sourdough french bread.  Or puffy donut holes with cinnamon and sugar, oh sinfully delicious.  So bread, bread we can do fresh.  Otherwise, cans.

I feel like we should be eating fish.  For one, it’s free.  For two, it’s not cans.

Matt and Karen reported no luck fishing while sailing across the Pacific and while cruising the Marquesas and the Tuomotus.  This poor showing on the part of the fish to readily enjoy our lures, combined with Matt’s reticence at the idea of cutting up live things with guts in them has led to a decline in fishing attempts onboard s/v Syzygy.  Who can blame them?  They never caught anything.  With my arrival, I bring fresh hopes and renewed vigor to the idea of fishing.  And an indefatigable arrogance that it has to be possible to catch something.  Anything.

And I have failed.  Failed as all other attempts at trailing lines has failed on s/v Syzygy.  Please other cruisers who are able to catch fish regularly,  tell us your exact set-up of trolling lines and how you catch fish, down to the minutest detail.  Because we are incompetent.  We have read a book and we have not learned.  Nearly all things done on this boat, all the sailing knowledge, all the boat projects completed are because we read a book and learned about it.  We read a book about fishing, but we cannot seem to learn how to fish.  Please tell us everything about your set-up.  Length of line out, type of knots, length of mono-filament.  Type of lure.  Color of lure.  Number of lures.  Depth of lure.  Time of day.  Depth to ocean floor.  Distance to land.  Boat speed.  Wind speed. Current. Hook size.  Hook placement within lure.  Allowable rust level on hook.  Bait used or not.  Leader weight used or not.  Chum used or not. Teasers used or not.  Pagan gods to whom you might give sacrifice in order to make the ocean share its bounty.  Please include video of ceremony, text of chants and incantations, list of all incense types used and step by step instructions for actual sacrifice.

I have, actually, caught some fish.  But I was only able to do that at anchor.  When we were in Apataki, and in having beer and an excellent lunch at the cargneage(boat haul-out center)/pension/restaurant/happy hour/pearl farm establishment, fishing was brought up with the family who owns all this enterprise, Alfred and his wife.  They said they had a surefire way for us to catch fish involving hermit crabs as bait and that next time we come to shore, they would show us.  The next day, we show up but Alfred is off fishing and his wife is gone.  Karen manages to relate to the very nice ancient lady that met us at the dock (Alfred’s mom??) our intentions.  So before we know it, this 80-ish year old woman has grabbed a hermit crab.  Matt and I are hustling around trying to watch every little step of what she does.  She then gets a hammer, one shot smashes the shell, grabs the hermit crab, one hand around all it’s legs and claws, the other around its guts and rips it in two pieces.  She threads it on the hook and done.  30 seconds have passed.  I am in awe.  In a couple of days, I will no longer be in awe of the process.  Instead, I will be a one-man professional hermit crab death squad.

We collect a dozen hermit crabs and head back to the boat.  At dusk, apparently good fishing time, I retrieve a hammer, a cutting board, and a hook.  I ask Karen to retrieve a video camera.  The nice ancient lady completed the steps in about 30 seconds.  It takes me 30 minutes.  So despite that it is now dark, I try to fish anyway.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.  I take solace in the fact that it is pitch black out and vow to try again in the morning.

In the morning at 6 am I begin setting up to try again. Success!  Within a half an hour I’ve hooked two fish.  Karen comes on deck.  I ask her what to do now that I have a fish flopping around in a large green bin.  She says I have to kill it.  I don’t know how to do that I reply.  She fetches the book.  We read it.  We learn.  The fish dies.  Knife shot to the brain, one inch behind the eye.

After reading the book for each step in the process of gutting and cleaning we take the fish into shore to make sure that we can eat them.  Some fish you can’t eat because of a nasty little disease called ciguterra  I refer you to a blog post from our good friends Mike and Hyo aboard Io, Mike is a marine biologist and so can explain all the nastiness of ciguterra better than I.

Matt gets the job of cooking the fish and that night we finally dined on fresh fish.  The next night we again dined on fresh fish.  It was wonderful, albeit a bit bony.  Then we moved anchorages, losing our source for local knowledge of ciguterra (Different fish on different atolls have it) and we have not had fish again.  Back to cans.

So fellow cruisers, please help us become better fishermen and fisherwomen.  Please help us spare the cans.

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We just arrived in Nuku Hiva after crossing the pacific.  Good lord was that a long time to be out in the ocean.  I’m going to ramble on and on now.  Let me tell you, there’s not much of anything out there. In terms of tourist attractions, you’re not missing anything. I had expected to see a fair amount of wildlife, different views of the ocean, something. Nope. It all looks the same. For 25 straight days one of us checked the horizon at least every twenty minutes–over 2,000 instances of climbing out of the cabin to check the horizon, and every time seeing exactly the same thing: nothing. The only thing we saw during that entire time were a few birds and a bunch of tiny flying fish. Not even other boats–for three straight weeks we saw no other boats.

The pacific ocean does have boobies, I’ll give it that. Near the coast, at least. We had an exciting Booby-caused moment that I will now relate in entirely too much detail. A booby is a very annoying bird. For the first 5 days of the passage, we were frequently targeted by boobies. They want to land on the boat, hang out, and shit. There is no equivalent to a floating island in their evolutionary history: they do not need to do this. What I am saying is: don’t feel bad for them. Moreover, they have a hard time making the landing, but they are stupid and stubborn enough to continue attempting it without regard to the bodily risk. They will get smacked by the sail, tangle in the rigging and bounce off the deck into the water–then get up and try it again. The first time one landed on our solar panels, I was nice and let it hang out. Then a river of bird poop spilled into the cockpit, narrowly missing karen. Booby’s welcome expired. I took our boat hook and gently nudged him off (he didn’t like that–kept pecking at the pole and squawking at me). He came right back. I pushed him off again. A few dozen more times he came back, with progressively more aggressive expulsions on my part and angry squawks on his part. Eventually, I was flicking him a good ten feet off the boat before he would fall in the water and repeat his attempt. Like a bonk-the-booby video game. He landed high up on the spreaders; I duct taped all my long poles together and continued to battle him. Finally, at dusk, he landed on our spinnaker pole, from which our spinnaker (largest sail on the boat, by far) was flying. I shooed him out along the pole (funny image, a squawking sidestepping out of balance booby) until he was over the water and not the boat–i.e. a poop safe zone. The sun sets. I hear a noise. I look over: the booby has fallen off the pole and has his foot stuck in the tripline running down the pole. I know what’s coming. As he drops like a stone into the water, he triggers the release, opening the jaw and letting the tack of our spinnaker fly free. This is not something you want to happen to you in the dark with 15 knots of wind and a big spinnaker. Anyway, it took a half hour to get everything contained and put away–a frantic half hour reminiscent of racing on the bay when something goes horribly wrong. Boobies, man. No booby love, no more.

What we did see: we saw beautiful sunsets and blue water. Moonless nights were very dark; you could see bright stars reflecting off the calm ocean. The milky way was prominent. The moon would often make a dramatic appearance–sneaking up from behind a cloud, bright orange until it got some searoom off the horizon.  Lots of sky, lots of water, that about sums it up.

All in all, this passage was not as hard as our 9 days from Ensenada to Banderas Bay, but nevertheless it was harder than I expected it to be. I had heard great things about the trade winds and I was expecting good, consistent wind. Not for us, my friend, not for us. Two days out of La Cruz the wind died on us, and we sat bobbing around for a few days, not wanting to waste our fuel (we battled boobies during this time). Once the wind came back, we had a few good days of sailing before we hit the ITCZ (i.e. doldrums) and then the wind died again. Then we had 5 days and 5 degrees (300 miles) of doldrums, with no wind, occasionally punctuated by weak, unimpressive squalls and rain. On the other side of the ITCZ, the wind picked back up right in our face, together with a contrary current pushing us backwards as well, so we beat upwind and up-current for five more days before we could point towards our destination. Then, finally, the last week was glorious wind and glorious sailing in the southern trade winds.

Boats both before and after us had better luck with both the wind and the ITCZ; most people had less than a hundred miles worth of doldrums and experienced solid trade winds on the north side. We just got unlucky in that regard. The result was that we ended up doing a lot of work, putting sails up and down, changing things around constantly, etc, until the last week.

We crossed the equator in the middle of the night on May 3; Karen woke me up at 4 in the morning with a mixed drink (rum and jumex). Dutifully in my delirium I drank my drink.  In my state I was confused about what I was supposed to do. I watched karen pour some rum into the ocean. I believe I expressed gladness for our progress, and passed back out (memory of this event is hazy).

At no point during the passage was I bored. Both of us read at least 10 books–best way to stay awake during a night watch. I did some boat projects. I got out karen’s sewing machine and made myself a pair of shorts out of a pillowcase. I relearned the turk’s head knot. I studied french. I learned some new constellations. I consolidated my lists. We watched some movies, listened to music. I made iced lattes. I made iced tea. I drank beers. Karen read, wrote, baked bread. During a dead calm, karen cut my hair on the foredeck. I got the best tan of my life (better have–I was butt-ass-nekkid most of the time).

We made hundreds of entries in the log book.

Much of my time was spent messing around with the boat. Trimming sails, changing sails, changing the lead of lines, adjusting the self-steering, tweaking the course, reefing, unreefing, furling, unfurling. At best, this business–the business of sailing the boat–would occupy only a few hours each day (spread out). At worst–when conditions were constantly changing–it took all of my waking hours to keep on top of it. The primary attribute of “great wind, great sailing” is above all consistency–conditions that don’t require constant changes.

Watching our little boat depicted on the chart on the computer was strangely addictive–even though it was just a big blank white screen.

At least once a day we participated in a net on the ssb radio with the other boats out there, all watching out for each other and tracking each other’s progress. I would estimate about 10 boats participating each night. The community was solid; we made a number of friends over the radio, people we had never met in person. Occasionally we would even set up a radio date where we met on a particular frequency at a particular time to chat. I was surprised by the enjoyment to be found via the radio.  And now we already have friends to meet up with on land.

It was no problem staying clean; whenever we started to feel dirty we would take a shower with buckets of seawater. Maybe even use a little bit of freshwater to rinse, if we were feeling luxurious.

Lack of sleep was an ongoing challenge. Usually each of us would be on watch for half the night, so we could get a decent stretch of sleep. Even so, that meant that neither of us slept more than 6 straight hours in a row during the entire passage. We always had plenty of time during the day in which we could nap–but it’s not so easy to go to sleep on demand.  The lack of sleep wasn’t dangerous,it just sapped our motivation, made us cranky at times.  Both karen and I found that the surest way of getting sleepy enough to pass out was to go on watch–all of a sudden it seems like all you want to do is sleep!

During the final days, more than anything I just wanted the rolling to stop. I grew furious at the boat for constantly throwing me against the walls whenever I moved around, the same way one might get mad at being randomly shoved as you try to walk down the sidewalk. Didn’t matter that the boat is inanimate, still I blamed it for causing needless suffering. You try to walk from the head to the galley, and you get thrown on your ass on the settee. On your way past the mast, you get hip-checked into it by an unpredictable lurch of momentum. You’ll be slipping through a doorway and get a doorknob shoved in the gut. You’ll be standing at the sink and lose your balance, ending up all the way over on the nav seat with your feet in the air. The motion was incessant, inescapable. At the end, I just wanted to be still.

We made landfall (feels sweet to be able to say that–the expression itself indicates a serious passage–after all you can’t go out sailing in the bay for a day and then “make landfall” back into the marina, no you need to sail across an ocean and then you can make a landfall) at Taioe Bay on Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas, french polynesia, on the morning of Saturday May 8–a few hours ago.  We are both ecstatic to have the passage behind us.  I’m glad we did it; I’m more glad that it’s over.

After getting the boat in order, I had a beer, then slept for 6 hours.  Just woke up in fact.

Now it’s time for us to go explore land.

(post dated–this post generally refers to events on 3/29 and 3/30)

At midnight Karen grabs my foot and gives it a shake. I take off my eye mask and take out the earphones I’m wearing which along with my I-Pod and Sarah McLachlan, had me asleep in minutes three hours earlier despite the noise of the engine.  I was surprised at how much louder the engine sounds at night versus during the day.  I suppose the new soundproofing in the engine room was doing something, but I couldn’t tell.  I stumble around for about 10 minutes, getting dressed slowly and wobbly.  I can’t find my headlamp or my sailing knife.  I want some light and so switch on a light in the cabin, and quickly move the switch to the red light setting that is supposed to preserve your night vision.  The cabin now resembles a submarine on high alert.  I half expect Gene Hackman to barrel down the companionway yelling “down ladder!”  I imagine us on high alert.  Matt is up, walking around and off-handedly comments that he and Karen stopped using the red lights.  They don’t really provide enough light to do anything, which I quickly found to be true, and your eyes adjust fast enough when you are up on deck. High alert deflates immediately.  The engine continues to groan away as we travel through unfortunately light winds for our passage.  I plop down at the nav station to look at the log book and the AIS chart on the computer.  My night watch is about to start.

Before I even arrived, we had started talking about sailing a day or two north to San Blas.  However, the weather seemed to be less than ideal to the north, so Karen found a entry in the cruising guide that talked about a fine anchorage to the south that had some snorkeling and a fantastic sounding dinghy river trip.  South it was.  Next came talk of who was going to take what watch.  I knew this conversation was coming.  And i knew exactly what I wanted.  The night shift.  Wake me up at midnight or 1 am and send me out.  I wanted this for a number of reasons.  One, I feel, (it’s not just a feeling, I definitely am) behind in this obscure scale of mine that measures “personal discomfort” investment into the boat.  I don’t have much of this.  Matt has, well it’s somewhat amazing he hasn’t collapsed under the weight of how much he has endured.  Second, I wanted to experience as much of the cruising experience as possible.  Taking the night watch fit nicely there.  Finally, it just seemed the nice thing to do, to let Matt and Karen sleep together through the night.

After examining where we were on the AIS, I head up on deck.  Matt joins me and says we should put up the main sail and the drifter.  I’m super excited that we’ll actually be sailing on my watch, at least to start, instead of motoring.  It feels so much more pure.  After Matt helps me put up the sail, he heads off to bed, and I’m left alone on the night watch.  An alarm is set to ring every 23 minutes.  After two iterations of the alarm, I’m starting to get tired, and so lie down in the cockpit, realizing that I’ll be sleeping during some of this watch.  I’m looking directly up at the stars, and soon I’m dozing off, 1/2 awake, 1/2 asleep, dully waiting for the alarm to go off.  It does, I go through the watch routine, and quickly get back to lying down.  This time I’m out quickly.  Thirty minutes later Matt is in the companionway reaching out to the cockpit to hit my feet saying “Dude, you slept through the alarm.  You can’t do that.  Put the alarm closer to your head.”

On the night watch, there is one main responsibility.  Make sure the boat doesn’t hit anything.  Two lesser responsibilities are to 1) sail the boat well so you get to your destination faster. 2) control the boat so that it is easier for others to sleep.  Matt and Karen’s system they developed uses a watch that goes off at set intervals.  Pretty much all cruisers have an alarm set for certain intervals.  Matt and Karen have the watch set for 23 minutes.  So every 23 minutes, it’s the job of whoever is on watch to stand up, or wake up if necessary, look all around the horizon for other boats or land, and make sure you aren’t about to hit either of those.  It’s fascinating what you can see at night on the horizon.  All night we were in sight of shore so lights from there abounded.  At various times, other boats were on the horizon.  It’s enjoyable to spot lights on the horizon and watch over the next hour or two as they slowly move in relationship to the boat.  Of course if they are moving that slowly, it’s probably another sailboat.  The fast lights are the ones to worry about.  The cargo ships.

Matt disappears back down the companionway, leaving me alone fuming at myself.  My first night watch and I’ve made a HUGE mistake.  Damn it.  Not how I wanted to start.  Not the impression I wanted to make on Matt and Karen that I was a competent addition to the sailing team.  I am furious at myself and embarrassed.  Sure, the likelihood that at the exact interval I fell asleep 1) another boat would be just over the horizon that I couldn’t see on the last sweep, 2) wasn’t on the AIS that would alert me to boats further out, 3) was headed on a collision course with us and 4)  did not veer off that collision course because they of course don’t want to hit us…. yes the likelihood of all that happening is low.  Doesn’t matter.  Sleeping through a watch interval is way out of line.  I was not happy with myself.

Later in the night, the alarm goes off.  It is strapped to the band on my headlamp now, directly next to my ear, and so it wakes me immediately.  I get up and start to go through the routine I began to do at every alarm.  I rapidly check our compass heading and speed.  I then spend longer than necessary gazing in a slow 360 degrees off into the distance, looking for lights.  Each time I see lights, I get our binoculars (Thanks mom and dad!!!) and using the internal compass of them, note the heading to the lights and try to discern where it’s going.  If I see a red light, it means I’m looking at the port side of the other boat.  If I see green, I’m looking at the starboard side.  You can also tell things by the location and height of the white lights from a boat, but I’m not as sure about those. Need to learn that.  Next I slide down the companionway, moving as quietly as possible past the quarterberth where Matt and Karen are sleeping, generally with the door open to increase airflow and keep it cooler in the cabin.  I  have a seat at the nav station and take a look at the awesomest part of the night watch routine: checking the AIS transponder which is linked into the navigation software MacEnc, on the computer.  Matt has discussed his love for it in the past, and I have to back up that opinion 100%.  After checking the AIS both for ships and to ensure we are headed in the correct direction, I head back up on deck and do a quick scan of the horizon.  Finally, I look at our sails and see if they need adjustment.  Then it’s back to reading, writing or sleeping.

At 2:30 am on the second night, I watched us thread the needle between two 900 foot long cargo ships doing 14-18 knots.  I had seen the two ships when they were 20 miles away on the computer, long before I would be able to see them on the horizon.  Nonetheless, as soon as I saw them on the computer headed straight for us, I excitedly hopped up on deck, grabbed the binoculars, and stared out into space to where the boats should be.  I was met with nothing but blackness.   A black sky with foreboding moon and a glistening, flat, black sea.  An hour later however, I could see lights.  Lots of lights.  High, towering lights.  That still seemed to be coming straight for us.  The AIS, though, showed their actual heading, and ours.  We would pass the first to our starboard, by a mere mile.  The other, five minutes later, passed to port by even less, about 1/2 a mile.  I didn’t sleep at all for that hour, and gained an enormous appreciation for the additional safety the AIS brought us.  I saw them when they were over an hour away and knew their exact heading relative to us.  If we didn’t the AIS, they would have been twenty minutes or less away on an uncertain course that would have looked extremely troubling.  With the AIS, we didn’t have to divert our course, and I felt no danger to the boat, though I did anxiously watch the AIS and the horizon for the entire hour.  I certainly was too excited to sleep, this being only my second night watch.  But I felt confidently safe.  Without the AIS, I would have had to hail the vessel, not always possible, and try and figure out a way by both ships.  I can envision this being a confusing hail, with both boats so close, heading in the same direction and with the approximate same speed.  With the AIS, there was minimal concern.  The rest of the night passed uneventful.  My second night watch slowly winding down, I finished most of the novel I was reading, enjoying the near full moon as it arced lazily across the sky.  My first real introduction to cruising.  I think I’m going to like it.

Jonathon here.  I thought I would post a couple of screen shots of Matt and Karen’s progress.  I know a lot of you have clicked through to the marinetraffic.com website with AIS tracking to try and find Syzygy.  Like Matt has said, if they aren’t in AIS range, you won’t see them.  But here’s two pictures of where they have been.

The first is from when they departed until I went to bed around midnight California time.  They had been sailing about 13 hours at that point.

The second is a somewhat overlapping track of their progress until about 6 am Thursday morning when they dropped off the map.  At this point they had gone about 110 miles in about 18 hours.  If they keep going through Thursday night they might be in the Santa Barbara/Los Angeles area Friday during the day sometime.  I imagine they will keep pushing through since wind and wave height seem to indicate good weather all the way down the California coast and Baja Mexico for at least the next 7 days. There are a number of AIS stations in Los Angeles and San Diego areas, so they might pop back up!

Finally.  10 months after it started, the sail is finished.  It was supposed to be done by June.  Then…. that didn’t quite happen. And so it got put off.  And put off.  And put off.  And soon, the boat was threatening to leave!  So I doubled down over Thanksgiving break and brought the thought of the completion of the sail into the ballpark.

Those first days of sewing in the gym were fun.  Huge panels getting sewn together and enormous visible progress of work.  It was fun back then!  But at Thanksgiving, I was no longer in a large gymnasium.   I was squashed into the smallish living room of a house.  The sail’s luff was three times the length of the room.  At one point, I felt it absolutely necessary to stretch out the luff of the sail.  It went through the living room, through the kitchen, over the island countertop, out the door to a deck off the kitchen and to the other side of deck railing where I anchored it so that I could stretch it taught.  There was snow out on the deck.  It felt ridiculous.

I was stretching the luff line of the sail to try and see by how much I had to chop off the top of our sail.  The luff line, which came with the sail-making kit from Sailrite is made of T900 from New England Ropes, requires two double braid eyesplices, one at each end, to attach the sail at it’s head to the mast, and at it’s tack to the bow of the boat.  After making the first eyesplice, I then,carefully measured the T900 line to the exact measure ment of our luff, (48’9”)  and marked that point as where the other eye-splice should end.  I then remeasured it as I’ve had trouble measuring things in the past.

With the second eyesplice made I tried as best I could in a 18′ wide room to see how well the luff line matched up to the length of the luff of the sail.  And everytime, it seemed to come up short.  And then I remembered that when making the second eye splice the rope will bunch up, thicken and consequently shorten. This happens because the eyesplice is designed to have the rope double back on itself.  The core of the rope, after going around the eye, goes back inside itself.  It’s a very cool thing and it locks itself into place.  I highly recommend making them simply because they are so cool.  At any rate, I had to chop off about 2 inches from the head of the sail and short both ends just a smidge so that the luff line would be better aligned.  Such are the trials and tribulations of a first time sail maker.

A week after Thanksgiving, I took two days off from work during a major push where I was determined to get 30 hours of work done on the sail.  Sorry boss, priorities.  One half of one of these days was spent trying to figure out how to install the cleats for the leech line and the foot line.  My first issue was with the rivot/grommet thing they sent me.  Home Depot was baffled as to what tool should be used to both A: cut a hole through the 9 layers of fabric where the cleats were to be installed, and B: how to press home the rivot/grommet.  Finally a leather store, Tandy Leather Factory, came through for me with a suggestion, while I was there buying a sewing palm.  I Suffice to say I ended up using a cordless drill to make the holes in the sail, at very low RPM and with clamps within milimeters of where the drill bit was.  All of this was conducted in the kitchen.  See pictures.  I was at Tandy after suffering through a day of using a makeshift palm out of duct tape and a tiny plastic cup.  Tandy wasn’t open on Sunday and I had work to do, so makeshift palm it was.

Within that time, though, there came a moment of celebration when I could finally put the sewing machine away and move on to hand sewing.  My roommates were also happy that I didn’t have to rearrange all of the living room furniture every time I wanted to work on the sail.  To begin the hand sewing, I first installed metal rings next to the head and tack of the sail.  Then there was anchoring those to the edges.  Then there was sewing the leather patches on.  When sewing the leather patches (this was done in California after driving out there over my winter break with an unfinished sail in the back seat), I began attaching the sewing palm to a leg of a chair turned upside down so I could then more effectively use both hands and all my weight as leverage to drive the needle through 5 layers of 1.5 oz ripstop nylon, 5 layers of 4 oz dacron, and if it was near the edge of the sail, another two layers of the 5 oz Dacron tape folded around the sail edge.  By my count that’s 37.5 ounces of fabric to push through.  That means something, I’m not sure what though.  No easy task is what it meant to me.  I had to simultaneously hold the needle so that it wouldn’t flex and bend and hold the fabric around the needle and hold the chair with the palm attached to it with my feet so that it wouldn’t slide away and make sure I didn’t stab myself.  I’m impressed I didn’t draw blood more than twice.

It’s finished though and I have an enormous sense of exhaustion, elation and pride.  This was the largest boat project I got to be a part of, and it was pretty much all on me.  No help, no other expertise from the other guys.  It felt good to be the sole expert.  At one point, Matt said, “You better finish it, ’cause I sure as hell have no clue how to.”  Well I finished it, even if I stretched it out until December 28th.

After finally finishing and toasting, with a much deserved beer, the official hand-over ceremony of the sail to Matt, Matt began playing with the scraps of sail left over for repairs if that might ever be necessary.  Karen, please make sure you’ve made him some better shorts by the time I get out there.  Because if I ever see him in just the sail cloth like he was showing off, I think I might be permanently scarred.

I was back out in San Francisco helping with a big last minute push on getting work done.  And giving Karen and Matt, and me in particular a big morale boost.  There was mention of going sailing to see the sail get flown.  Given the state of the boat, I knew that wasn’t really a possibility.  But we did end up hoisting my sail in the marina just to see how it looked, and to cut some drifter sheet lines for it.  It looked beautiful.  I felt proud.  I also felt embarrassed that I left on highly visible small stickers identifying each panel. I think Karen took some pictures.  If so, I hope she posts them.  I was too busy just looking at it,  thinking about how long it had taken, and how much has happened in my life since I started it.  A ten month sailboat project was right there flapping lightly in the breeze.  The last ten month saga of my life was there, playing lightly in my mind.

I’m envious that I won’t get to be there when it is first flown.  But I looking forward to joining the boat in June and being there as long as my money can sustain me.  We’re not exactly sure where the boat will be.  I’m committed as I can be to being there.  And finally getting to use the boat, instead of just talking about it.  Looking forward to it.

A while back I designed a mast step for us, we had a sailor/machinist friend advise us and then make them up for us, and Jonny installed them.  We love them, and it turns out that others do, too.  We had enough requests that we decided to start making and selling them on a small scale, and see if it goes anywhere.

We’re calling it “Climb the Mast“.

They are sweet steps, as far as mast steps go.  They’re small, so lines don’t catch on them, they’re easy to install, and they’re cheap.  The only reason we made our own is because we weren’t happy with any of the other options available–the others are either to big (the fixed stirrup-style), too unwieldy (the folding ones), or too expensive (all of them).

They work so well that we’ve been running up the mast regularly while we are out in the bay under full sail.  It makes for good group pictures during our social sails, to do them from the top of the mast looking down with the sails flying and our wake spreading out behind us.

Anyway, we hope that maybe this little side project could help fund the trip, so if you know of anyone looking to put in mast steps, point them to the website Jonny set up: www.climbthemast.com.  Also, check out the original maintenance blog post I did when we first put them in, and also Jonny’s post about drilling the holes in the mast.

[geo_mashup_map][geo_mashup_show_on_map_link]

I built this:

Out of this:

I read Nigel Calder’s “Refrigeration for Pleasureboats” three times, I read Richard Kollman’s forum on marine refrigeration, and I spoke with Marcus a few times (a fellow cruiser-friend in the marina).  Marcus is lending me his top-quality, indispensable refrigeration tools (much thanks to Marcus!), and also turned me on to RParts, where I ordered all my stuff.  I learned how to “sweat” copper tubing (i.e. silver soldering copper), how to form flare fittings, how to use a refrigeration gauge set, the detailed principles behind refrigeration, and I built my own refrigeration system.  I’m pretty proud of this 1.5′ x 1.5′ x 1′ cube of refrigeration goodness–it’s hard to believe that a month ago I didn’t understand how this thing worked, and now I’ve built my own out of parts.  It’s not making anything cold yet, but I pressure tested it yesterday and to my immense satisfaction and relief I have no leaks!  (that’s huge–to find and fix a leak would have been a nightmare)

Refrigeration is a lot more interesting once you understand how it works.  You don’t want to hear the details, but I have admin access on this blog so I’m going to tell you all about it.

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A refrigerator works by moving heat from one place to another.  It does not “create” cold.  Heat is removed from the icebox and deposited at the “hotbox” (that’s my own term, it will be helpful for the discussion).  On our boat, the hotbox happens to be the storage space under the quarterberth; for your fridge at home, the hotbox is just the space behind the fridge.

On each side of the circuit there is a heat exchanger.  The heat exchanger transfers heat from the air to the refrigerant in the icebox, and from the refrigerant back to the air in the hotbox.  The heat exchanger in the icebox is called the evaporator; the heat exchanger in the hotbox is called the condenser.

The refrigerant is the medium that moves the heat around the circuit.  If the refrigerant was simply pushed around in a circle, it would not be inclined to transfer heat out of the cool icebox into the warm hotbox–that would be trying to push the heat uphill, so to speak.  The key is to pressurize the refrigerant, using a compressor.  When the refrigerant is compressed, it warms up; when it de-compresses (expands) it gets cold.  The refrigerant comes out of the icebox medium-warm.  The compressor pressurizes the refrigerant, which heats it up.  Then the pressurized refrigerant passes through the condenser–which looks like a mini car radiator–and as the refrigerant passes through the condenser its heat is transferred to the air (just like your car radiator, in fact).  The refrigerant returns to the icebox at a mediumish temperature, but this time it’s pressurized.  At the icebox, the refrigerant is allowed to expand–which causes it to get cold.  The cold refrigerant sucks up heat as it passes through the evaporator.  Then the process is repeated.  Good diagram.

There’s one more principle at work: phase changes.  If you just pumped a liquid around in circles, from the evaporator to the condenser to the evaporator to the condenser, etc, then you might be able to remove a small amount of heat from the icebox and dump it at the condenser.  However, you can’t suck up much heat just by warming up a liquid and then cooling it off.  The real way to suck up heat and drop it off elsewhere is to use a PHASE CHANGE to your advantage.  The phase change is the key to the whole process.

Consider heating a quart of water in a pot on the stove.  It takes 320 BTU of energy to heat that water from 33 degrees F to 211 degrees–320 BTU to change the temperature of the water by 178 degrees.  Then, to heat that water only 2 more degrees, from just 211 degrees to 213 degrees, it takes 1934 BTU!  Because at 212 degrees, the H2O changes from water to steam; this is the phase change.  During the entire process of converting water to steam, you keep dumping in large quantities of energy and the temperature stays the same–all the energy goes into the conversion from liquid to gas.  The message is that the energy required to do a phase change from water to steam is WAY GREATER than the energy required to change the temperature of the water itself.

In refrigeration, we store our heat as a phase change of the refrigerant in order to efficiently transfer it from the icebox to the hotbox.  We don’t use water though, because we want the phase change to take place around the 20 degrees F in our refrigerator (not very helpful to us for it to take place at 212 degrees).  We use refrigerant specially formulated to undergo the phase change near freezing (in our case, R134a).

We pump a liquid to the evaporator, and then let it expand into a gas; that expansion to a gas sucks huge amounts of heat out of the box.  Then back at the compressor we compress the gas, which heats it up (essentially exchanging “pressure energy” for heat).  Then we send it through the condenser, where the the hot gas dumps off all its heat and turns back into a liquid (condenses!) in the process.  Then we sent the liquid back to the evaporator, where it turns into a gas again . . . and so on.  The refrigerant goes to the icebox as a liquid, but it returns as a gas; the phase changes that happens in the icebox and the hotbox are the primary means of temporarily storing the heat in the refrigerant for transfer from one location to another.

Refrigeration is by far the single largest energy sink on a cruising sailboat.  In the average residential home, refrigeration is 5% of the energy bill–not an insignificant amount. One site says that the average fridge uses ~$8 of electricity per month, depending on how big, what kind, and where you live.  The efficiency of the refrigeration system depends very strongly on the refrigerant dumping off heat as it passes through the condenser.  Most systems use air-cooled condensers (I put in both air-cooled and water-cooled condensers–the air-cooled is the radiator-looking thing in the picture above; the water-cooled is the black circle of tubing on the top of the apparatus).  If the air-cooled condenser is located in a cool spot with good air-flow, this heat dump can happen very effectively; if the condenser is located in a hot spot with stagnant air, or even worse in the hot engine room, then the refrigeration cycle’s efficiency plummets.  Meaning that the fridge runs much longer, and consumes much more power.  Moral: the quickest improvement you can make to reduce your energy needs on a sailboat is to improve the air circulation around the refrigeration condenser.

You can do the same for your fridge at home: just pull the fridge away from the wall an extra inch, and you’ll greatly increase the air-circulation around the condenser, improving the efficiency.  Avoid shoving plastic or paper bags between the wall and the fridge for storage–that’s not helping out your fridge, or your electrical bill.  Even better, use a vacuum to clean off the condenser tubing on the back of the fridge–that gunk kills the condenser’s ability to dump heat.

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”