Syzygy Sailing

Bought a boat, fixed a boat, sailed to Australia, sold the boat.

Category: humorous

  • Take it from a sailor: It’s All Lumber; Throw it Overboard!

    [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.

  • For janky pieces of shit, Syzygy is #1!

    [reposted from my outside blog ]

    A year ago, back when Syzygy was named Sunshine, and her port of call was listed as Portland, OR, I set to scraping off the old name and cleaning up the paint in preparation for applying the new vinyl letters.

    The boat was up on stilts, then, at a workyard in Berkeley, so I had to climb a ladder to get aboard. I dragged the ladder back a few feet, closer to the stern, and climbed up five or six steps and from there began scraping off the letters. The letters were white vinyl, about eight inches tall, on blue paint, and it was just luck that I started on the left side, and not the right, so that after a little bit of work SUNSHINE became UNSHINE. I giggled at first, then thought about the irony, or the truth, as it were, in the new name. I sorta wished we hadn’t sent off our paperwork to the US Coast Guard with the name Syzygy, because UNSHINE was so perfect. It was our style. It was unique. And it was so easy — I’d barely started, and the job was already done. Voila, name removal and reapplication complete! If only other boat projects could be like that.

    But Syzygy (which was my grandfather’s favorite word) it was, so on with the work I  went. Maybe it was an omen, this little taste of completion well before it was deserved. Or maybe it was an omen that before things would be completed, they would lack a certain luster. Or maybe it was an omen that painting (or preparing to paint) is a bitch. Or maybe the omen was this: there will be jank. Lots and lots of jank.

    Now, it has recently come to my attention that my sailboat is the 5th thing that pops up if you Google the phrase “janky piece of shit.” If you don’t use the quotes in your query, my sailboat pops up 8th on the list. Given how much there is to be proud of onboard Syzygy, the amount of satisfaction I gain from this little internet phenomenon is perhaps disproportionate to its actual value. I’m not concerned though; you take from life what joys it provides, and if those joys come wrapped in a package with a return address from Janky and Co., in Gary, Indiana, you don’t return the package to its sender and ask for a refund. You open it up, and enjoy the contents, even if the contents are pieces of crap, as janky as janky gets. So that’s how it is, an that’s why I now officially want my boat be at the top of the online janky list. When people around the world look up “janky piece of shit,” I want THE answer to be Syzygy.

    This is no unsubstantiated desire, as Matt, Jon, and I derive great (dare I say intense?) pleasure from removing janky parts from the boat. Lately, I’ve discovered a new twist on the jank removal: if I’m good, I can double the fun by selling the janky stuff that we don’t want. This being America, eBay and Craigslist being only a few clicks away, perhaps this should have occurred to me earlier. I would never claim to have overlooked this option because I’m such a nice guy. No, I overlooked this option because the sheer removal of janky pieces of shit overwhelmed my senses to such a degree that rational thought was unavailable to me for the next half hour, and by then it was too late, because by then the janky piece of shit was in the middle of the dumpster. 

    So I’m not sure how this realization came to me; I blame poverty. And for the poverty, I blame the boat. Take warning, would-be-boat-owners! A sailboat will do that to you. It will eat your money, and force you to sell your trash, and trick you into thinking you are some kind of entrepreneurial genius for having thought of (aka resorted to) it. Take it from me!

    Nevertheless, I sold the old metal radar arch for $300. I sold the old fiberglass propane locker for $150. I sold the old 15-gallon water heater for $100. To think: people want to pay me for the crap I don’t want! Amazing! What a world! Gooooooo capitalism!

    Some jank, though, is so janky it’s hard to get rid of. I tried to sell a few cans of freon refrigerant from 1989, but my listing was removed from Ebay, because I’m not licensed by the EPA to sell that stuff. So what am I supposed to do with it? It’s janky, it’s toxic, and it eats holes in the Ozone layer — and some poor sailor out there is still using a refrigeration compressor older than I am, and probably could use it to keep his lemonade nice and chilly. I’m sure it’s illegal to ship the stuff, too. A conundrum, no? All I want to do is get rid of this jank, but the law won’t let me. Curses! I sure would like to barter it for something… ehem ehem.

    So here’s one more effect of boat ownership: me and janky pieces of shit are now best buddies. In fact, I’m thinking of pointing jankypieceofshit.com to syzygysailing.com. Not bad, huh? That’s probably because I don’t own any more, because I’ve weeded them all out. It’s also probably because my last name isn’t Janky.

  • Gaining Perspective

    [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.

  • working with your hands

    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!

  • Seeking volunteers for…

     

    …Boat work!

    It’s slow! It’s frustrating! It’s messy! And expensive!

    There’s tons to do!

    You won’t finish half of what you started, and you won’t start half of what you wanted to!

    Small project? It’ll probably grow bigger than you ever feared possible!

    Big project? Just be glad you don’t have to deal with it for the next month!

    • Unemployed? Come on by!
    • Energy to burn? Come on by!
    • Unskilled? That’s OK! On-the-job training provided
    • Like drinking on the job? So do we!

    Why not? Who cares? NOBODY!

    For more information, contact Jonny, on Syzygy, at the Emeryville Marina.

  • Me and my boat

    If you couldn’t tell, things are coming along swimmingly aboard Syzygy. I’m immensely proud. (Yes, that’s me on my banjo on my bike on my boat, drinking a beer, in black and white — how’s that for vainglory?)

    I’m writing regularly about Syzygy — the work, the preparations, the doings in this new sailboat world — for Outside magazine’s blog — we have our own little Syzygy page, even.

    I’m proud of these ramblings, too, and should have re-posted them here, but I hope you’ll understand that I was busy. I was probably cutting another hole in the boat. I’ve written about the hundreds times I’ve done that (cut holes in the boat, and also written about San Francisco’s notorious wind, about removing janky parts, about the modern history of metals, about the love/hate nature of sailing, about waging a war on stainless steel, about the cult of the Valiant, about inspiration from a sailing legend, and more. The pipelines are full, too.

    Enjoy,
    -Jonny

  • April Fools

    I’ve never been much of a prankster. The furthest I ever took an April Fools joke involved telling someone I didn’t like his shirt. Yes: lame. I know.

    As the day crept up this year my friend Amy regaled me with stories of epic April Fools jokes in her family. They sounded like so much fun. I felt so left out. To hear Amy tell it, April 1st was the only holiday worth celebrating.

    So I got to thinking about a prank. I started by searching for a victim. An obvious target was Amy, since she so enjoyed such shenanigans. She’s a professional April-Fooler, though, and I figured she’d see right through my meager attempts. What I needed was unsuspecting victims. Someone who trusted me totally. Someone who’s known me for years, and as such, never heard me pull an April Fools caper. Oh, Matt and Jonny: I would pity you if it wasn’t me doing the pranking.

    The three of us lately have been pushing our fingers into our temples, frowning in thought, throwing fake smiles every once in a while as our minds wandered toward the financial challenge before us. We have little money, a lot more boat parts yet to purchase, and (most importantly) a two year trip to save up for. We’ve tried prioritizing projects, but that only made the monstruous task before us more evident. What we needed was some levity.

    So I sent them this e-mail:

    —–

    From: Jon Haradon
    Subject: umm….news
    Date: April 1, 2009 5:52 PM
    To: Matt Holmes, Jonny Walman

    So the Superintendent of my district swung by our school today. Apparently she didn’t get the message about me leaving. She said the district was starting a STEM (science technology, engineering and mathematics) charter school in the district and she asked if I would be interested in running it. She basically implied that if I wanted the job it was mine. It would pay a bundle, and as director of the school, I would get to decide exactly how it looks. Couldn’t be be more perfect with where I want to go with my career. I have to admit, I’m strongly thinking about sticking around and taking the job…. I’ll give ya’ll a call to talk about it tonight.

    —–

    I let them sweat on it for four hours while I busied myself. I actually forgot about it. Matt and Jonny didn’t. I’m not sure what happened, and they seem unable to recall the events during the time in question, so traumatized were they. I heard hints, though, of emergency meetings, soul-searching conversations, and maybe — OK, definitely — some searing words for me.

    At 9PM, I called Matt.

    “Hey what’s up?”

    I feigned ignorance. After some pleasantries, Matt, slowly started, “So… uh… that was some bomb you dropped on us.”

    I couldn’t hold the facade any longer — I told you I’m no prankster — and offered “April Fools?” I felt like a little kid lighting a fire-cracker the size of a torpedo, and sprinting away while the fuse quickly burned down.

    Silence can reveal many emotions. In this long silence, I could hear disbelief and dumb-foundedness, and then relief mixed with incredulity.

    “You’re shittin’ me….”

    About all Matt could say after that was that I had better call Jonny. In the background, I heard Karen yell at me. She later flamed me on Facebook. I suppose I deserved it.

    I called Jonny. He asked if I had talked to Matt. I confirmed, which was about all I was able to do before spilling my beans.

    “Well I don’t know what he said, but I think I’m going to be a bit more harsh.”

    I cut him off. Yet again, I lit the fire-cracker and sprinted in the other direction. “April Fools,” I timidly let out.

    There was less silence this time. Jonny told me I ought to know how much he simultaneously hated me and was glad that we are the kind of people who are pranksters. He also said he’d need a week to get over the shock.

    I hadn’t thought about what the hoax might prompt as an aftermath; I was just hoping to fool them, and definitely succeeded. It’s strange, but swindling my friends made me feel really good. Not because I lied, but because my friends were truly moved and devastated by the possibility that I might not join them. Yes, love reveals itself in strange ways.

    In the next few days, Matt and Jonny mentioned that my firecracker actually prompted interesting thinking on their parts, something about soul-searching and opportunities in life and trusting your instincts and taking chances and friendship. For us to have conceived this adventure, have made it through over three years of planning, and be on the verge of leaving, there had to be some intense bonds of trust, respect, and compassion. Some serious man-love. And so while I might have severely severed that bond of trust, (and I currently don’t trust anything they say, because I know they are scheming up some way to way to exact revenge) I think I’ve nudged us all to think about what this journey means to us, together. We’ll need those bonds when confined for a months in a tiny, floating, 40-foot boat with no escape.

    Unless they prank me by throwing me overboard.

  • I gotta do something to keep me busy

    Matt gets to take apart and fix the engine. Jonny gets to work with the outboard. Matt enjoys the satisfaction of fixing our heater. Jonny enjoys meandering around the marina in Cabron, our dinghy, and saving other sailboats that have run aground. Jonny and Matt are currently enjoying what they described as ‘near tropical weather’ and are planning on going sailing Saturday. I sit at home while it’s 20 degrees and miserable out. It’s approximately 148 days, 10 hours and 30 minutes until I leave Denver behind for good and join them in San Francisco. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to keep my not-so-astounding handiness skills (and here. and uh.. here) from getting too rusty. So I’ve been looking for various things with which to tinker. Along comes my dishwasher.

    My dishwasher was broken. Not broken in the sense that it didn’t work, like our solar panels which do not currently work, but the door would no longer stay open at any angle of heel. The door would also would come crashing down if only partly open and then left to its own devices. The door used to stay open at any angle of heel The door used to not come crashing down. Thus, the dishwasher was broken. I was loath to do anything about it, however, since a) it didn’t affect actual functionality, and b) the last time I fucked around with major kitchen appliances, I broke a coolant tube in my refrigerator, necessitating a new refrigerator purchase, a minor $700 setback. This I did not want to repeat. However, the small annoyances of a broken dishwasher door got the better of me, and I began to poke around and see what was wrong. I originally imagined hydraulic arms were somehow at work and had stopped functioning; similar to the hydraulic arms that held up the hood of my now long deceased 1987 Buick Delta ’88; the car I rolled in throughout high school and was pimpin’ with in college. But it was an ancient car of dubiously questionable quality, not a young sprout like my dishwasher and not at all like the seasoned rock-solid champion of a sailboat we have in our Valiant. Lying down on the kitchen floor to look at my dishwasher, I immediately noticed a problem, not the problem, but a problem. My floor, surprise to all, was filthy. Not so coincidentally, like the floor of the boat when I was there all last summer. After a cleaning, I was back down to look and see this on the left side of the bottom. The white bracket is the key piece, as I noticed it hanging aimlessly on the right side, the starboard side, but here, on the left side, the port side, it is connected to a string, one could say line if it were on a sailboat, which runs over two pulleys, let’s be real: turning blocks, back to a large spring. This string and spring were not visible on the starboard side. Perhaps I conjectured, the string had channeled our old reef hook and broken, causing the spring and remaining string to go flying into the empty recesses in the corner of my cabinetry disappearing perhaps never to be seen again, a-la screwdriver that Matt dropped behind the water tanks. With this success of the discovery of the bracket-string-turning block-pulley disparity, I felt compelled to continue and attempt to fix the problem. Two screws held a black plate across the bottom. Quickly removed, it was obvious they did nothing, similar to many many sailing parts, but did hide a myriad of electrical and plumbing work, and there was an electrical wiring diagram attached to the back of this plate. Matt may have stopped here for a couple of hours distracted with electrical niceties, but I only saw the warning where it recommended unplugging the dishwasher before moving it. I didn’t even know how to do this, but saw things from under the dishwasher running into the cabinetry to the port, under the sink. Look at that! A plug and a drain. Amazing. Moving forward, further examination revealed two screws that did hold in the dishwasher. After quickly removing them, I began to tug on the dishwasher and soon it was out. I felt committed. It might as well have been a water tank sitting in the salon staring at you expectantly. After pulling the dishwasher aside, I looked back into the wasted space underneath the corner of the counter… and there it was! The spring! Lying there like a furtive chipmunk, hoping no one would see it!. . . Back to figuring out how to use that spring, this is what the port side looked like: . The spring was under some tension, but not considerably and so I disassembled the port side to get a better look at that plastic arm above the turning blocks. On the side that worked, the string went through the arm and then was frayed above the arm. It was impossible to pull through, which was a good thing, since quite a bit of force was exerted by the spring when the door was down. Force like wind. Gale force wind. However, it seemed inconceivable that the mere frayed end was keeping it from getting pulled through. There was no knot above the arm, nothing that would indicate to me some stopping type device. Perhaps it was an alien rope clutch which mere humans cannot open. I was baffled. Consequently, there was no way I was reassembling the broken side and getting the string back through the hole in the arm. The hole looked to be 1/2 as big as the string. The best I could come up with is the plastic arm was actually molded around the string, but that really doesn’t make any sense. I still don’t understand. I also don’t understand our sailboat electrical system, or the diagram Matt drew for it, communication devices, refrigeration, water maker, solar panels, the tow generator, celestial navigation, and women. But I make do. Luckily the arm had another attachment point that I could tie a NEW string to. Whip out some line, and tie a knot around the arm. Yep, that’s a double constrictor knot, something I picked up while tying stuff together on the boat. Sweetness. Now, to attach the other end of the line to the spring. Yes, your eyes do not deceive you! That, my friends, is a bowline! Yet another handy knot picked up during this whole sailing business. I reassembled the port side, measured the initial spring tension, and then marked that on the starboard side, the side I was aiming to fix. I put together the broken side with my knots and line. With everything assembled, it was time for the first test….. Failed! When the knots tightened down under the force of the spring, there was too much slack in the line, and therefore not enough force from the spring on the door. Or maybe I measured wrong, which has been known to happen. Luckily, I had tied a bowline, which we all know is easy to untie even after extreme loading. I shortened up the line, estimating this time a proper compensation for knot tightening. Second test… Success!!! The door remained open at all angles of heel! And all angles of deflection. Reassembly was easy. But this story, like all good sailboat maintenance stories, wouldn’t be complete without at least one more snag. After putting it all back together, the drawer next to the dishwasher wouldn’t open. So I had to take those two screws out again, push the dishwasher back a tad, and then close it all up again. Here, on the port, is the drawer hitting the dishwasher, and on the starboard, clearing the dishwasher by a fraction of an inch. Here’s the dishwasher all put back together and with all the tools I used at various stages of this three hour long project. Also note the shameless product placement. Are you reading this Huy Fong Foods, makers of Sriracha, the finest hot sauce known to man? editors note: No bananas were hurt, bruised, consumed, used to tease monkeys, or held-up-to-an-ear-like-a-phone during the completion of this project.

  • Summertime Flashback: “Jon, you’re scaring the guests”

    “Shut it off!!! Shut it off!!” I screeched, sounding much like an excited 16 year old girl. I was half excited and half  terror-stricken, because something dramatic had just gone wrong with the engine. This was 6 months ago, when I was hellbent on becoming Syzygy’s primo engine mechanic.

    The engine is a mystery to me.  I love working on it,  learning about it, figuring things out, but in the end, most things that would be good to know about an engine, like how tightly to crank down on a bleed screw, are a mystery to me.

    We had just changed the fuel filters.  Doing this introduces air into the fuel lines which is bad for the engine.  The next step is to get the air out of the fuel lines; bleeding the fuel lines.  You do this by working a hand pump that is inline.  Then you open up three screws, one at a time, each further along the fuel line and closer to the engine.  Keep moving the pump, and air is supposed to leak out from each screw.  When air stops leaking out, tighten the screw down.  No problem.

    The next time you turn on the engine, you’re supposed to look at those screws that you loosened to make sure you tightened them down enough and fuel is not leaking out.  ’cause that would be bad.

    And sure enough, this time, there was fuel leaking out.  Slowly, but there it was.  So I got out the socket wrench and tried to tighten it.  Hmmm,  it’s still dripping.  Tighter… tighter….

    oh shit!  my wrist lurched forward and my body with it.  Liquid arcs out of the engine like water coming out of a garden hose.  Except water is innocuous, and to my racing heart, brain, nervous system, lungs, and vocal cords, this liquid represented certain chaos and destruction.

    “Shut it off!!! Shut it off!!” I screeched.  I wonder what went through Matt’s mind at that moment, hearing the hysteria in my voice, and racing to the shut-off valve.  Might he have been worried about my well-being, thinking, “is he hurt?”  Maybe, “What just happened to the engine?”  My money is on, “What the fuck did he break now?”  The level of my fixer-upper skills having been well-established at this point.

    As the engine died, and fuel slowly stopped pouring out of the bleed valve I had just broken off, I realized the situation had not quite called for such a sounding from me of imminent danger.  In my terror, I had thought of what I had learned about oil, and if the engine runs without it for even a few moments, very bad things can happen.  Without fuel, however, the engine would have just stopped on it’s own.  I also could have easily stopped the fuel myself, another shut-off valve located in the engine room being easily reachable.  Also, the screw I broke off was on the low-pressure side of the fuel lines, not the high-pressure side.  This is somewhat important, because highly pressured diesel can penetrate your skin and cause bad things to happen.  Like the sun when it penetrates your skin and eventually causes bad things to happen.  Kind of.

    Sailing was out for the day, as we had no replacements.  So we kicked back with a few beers in the cockpit for a couple of hours with the guests that had come over hoping to sail.  After a couple of beers, they felt safe enough to remark that, umm, my tirade had caused a bit of a scare.  For all they knew, the boat was about to blow up.  We all laughed at my expense, a frequent enough occurrence throughout the summer that I wasn’t too hurt by it, and was able to laugh along as well.  it became the running joke of the night to observe some behavior of mine and then add, “Jon, you’re scaring the guests,”

  • Not my best moments… Stoopid things I’ve done recently.

    Usually I think of myself as a somewhat intelligent individual. I did really well studying Chemical Engineering. I scored in the top 5% nationally on the GRE. I scored higher on a reading comprehension test than all the English teachers at my school. My parents tell me I’m smart. On the boat, however, I am constantly humbled at how many questions I have, how uninformed I am, and how many ridiculous things I’ve done recently. I love laughing at myself, and the boat has given me (and Matt and Jonny as well) plenty of occasion to do so. Some of those moments:

    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?

  • To start press any key. Where’s the any key?

    I’m here! After months and months of anticipation, I’m at the boat, eager and excited, a teenager at prom. It’s especially exciting, because for months I’d been listening to Matt and Jonny talk about everything they were doing with the boat, and I felt so left out, missing great adventures and stories, and wanting so desperately to be there. It was agony; but no more. 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.

    link to maintenance blog, jon chipping resin out of the bilge with a “wood” chisel

  • Honey, does this color make me look fat?

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

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

    Back up a few weeks to the end of a frustrating trip in which we a) didn’t fix the engine b) didn’t go sailing c) spent lots of money and d) ended up frazzled, we ran into Rafael. Rafael makes custom cushions, mattresses, and seats for sailboats. He showed us his work on other sailboats in the marina, and we were impressed.

    Nevertheless, we weren’t in the mood to spend more money. Somehow, though, Matt convinced us — he must have waved a pendulum in front of my eyes — that it would behoove us to redo our 30-year-old cushions/mattresses/seats with new foam and covers less, uh, overtly heinous. The way Matt saw it, Rafael’s Mexico prices were a mere fraction of what we’d pay back in the states, and besides, he couldn’t stomach looking at our yellowing faux-Navajo patterns any longer. He had a point there.

    So we told Rafael to bring us a few books of fabric swatches, with a wide variety of choices. This he did.

    I liked modern, pattern-less designs. Abstract. Random. Colorful.

    Jonny and Matt didn’t like my choices. They called them tacky, kitschy, and straight-out-of-the-1950’s.

    Jonny liked blues. Matt liked reds. Or maybe it was vice versa. Whatever it was, none of us agreed.

    So we rejected the first one thousand samples that Rafael had brought, and told him to bring more. He returned with another thousand, and after quickly rejecting 95% of them, we asked to keep them overnight, apparently out of stubbornness. Such is the nature of marriage.

    After dinner, we discussed:

    Q: “What about this yellow?”
    A: “Are you on drugs?”

    …The night wore on…

    Q: “I kinda like this one. Waddya think?”
    A: “It looks like a 50’s rug. We’re buying cushions. Not rugs.”

    …And on…

    Q: “This one?”
    A: “Too thin, easy to rip, and goddamn it, Jon, stop picking patterns you know we’ll hate.”

    Eventually, someone said, ‘If we end up with that color on the boat, I’m dropping out of the trip.” You think I’m exaggerating.

    By the wee hours of the morning, Matt and I reluctantly agreed to agree on a color that Jonny had previously brought to our attention. Then Jonny flipped a 180, said he had visualized it, and hated it, and that we were making a grave mistake.

    In the end it came down to a bluish beige called something like periwinkle cream (or something equally silly) that Matt favored, and a green-ish beige that I favored. In true womanly fashion, part of my objection was because I simply didn’t like the name. Jonny didn’t really like either of them, I think, but was tired of the impasse. He came down on the side of the blue, leaving me as the lone hold-out.

    Matt left for home early the next morning, before we’d made a decision. Before leaving, he made one small concession: He said if it came to it, he’d settle for the green, but that he strongly preferred the blue. The he advised Jonny to persuade me.

    By that point, though, Jonny favored a sleazy leopard-skin print, and I’m still not sure if he was joking.

    So with Matt, the husband, gone, I did when any good wife would do. When Rafael dropped by, I told him we’d take the green. Sorry Matt. Sorry Jonny. But trust me – You’ll love it.

  • Hi Jon, I’d like to introduce you to acetone.

    I’ll admit it, I don’t normally buy used. I bought a new car. I bought a new condo. Consequently, I rarely have to fix things. In fact, when I tried to make a very minor fix to something in my condo a month ago — my refrigerator — I ended up breaking it. Snapped a coolant tube. Oops. So I had to replace the fridge. You may have guessed it, I didn’t buy a used model; I bought a new one. I think I inherited this behavior from my parents, who also almost always do they same thing. I also never really had experiences hanging around with my dad on Sundays, head under the hood of the car, tinkering and fixing. I’m OK with that. I get to spend my time on other things. Hey, we all make choices on where our time goes. So this whole fixing-old-stuff thing, like a 30-year-old boat, is relatively new to me.

    So I spent a couple of days trying to fix our boat’s packing gland, which is the fixture around the hole through the hull where the propeller shaft enters the boat. Clearly, if this leaks, there is a problem. Ours leaks: clearly a problem. At least it only leaks sometimes…

    The packing gland is right next to the engine, so it’s kinda dirty. I wanted to clean it and asked Matt and Jonny how. “Use acetone,” they said. So I grab the acetone and pour it into a bowl in the kitchen. I dab the cloth rag I’m using into it, go back to the engine room (two feet away) and wipe along the propeller shaft. All good so far; it looks cleaner. I go back to the kitchen, dab, back to the engine room, wipe. Cleaner. This process gets repeated a few times until I’m finished cleaning and decide to tidy up my materials.

    Back in the kitchen, however, acetone has shown why it’s such a good cleaner, and has begun to eat through the cheapo plastic bowl that I put the acetone in. Oops. The bottom of the bowl is a gooey mess, and when I pick up the bowl the bottom separates from the rest of it, and acetone spills out of the now-bottomless bowl, and gooey plastic strings dangle in the air. Good stuff. Matt laughs hysterically at me.

    The plastic bowl happened to be located on our wooden cutting board in our kitchen and now we have a permanent red strain on our cutting board — a memento, if you will.

    At least the packing gland is clean.

    link to maintenance blog packing gland post

    And, a few months in the future…