Dena Hankins's Blog, page 16

Installing the AET Part 1

One of the biggest set-backs you can come up against when your boat is your workshop/is your home is the weather. Springtime is the worst when it comes to relying on the weather!

Last weekend was a total bomb. It was cold and blustery and about as uninspiring as it gets for working outside so we completely blew it off for a raging Cetacea Dance Party!!!

But this past weekend was absolutely perfect for doing the worst job ever. Through-bolting the primary support bases for the Alternative Energies Tower (AET).

We’ve had the AET aboard now for three weeks but because every part of installing this thing is a two person job we really did just have to wait until the time was right.

The first thing we did after a healthy breakfast at The Capitol Cafe’ was pull all the tie downs and mock up the AET (above).

Next we drilled the holes and emptied the lazaretts.

Now I can’t exactly remember who once, a million years ago, compared every job in a lazarette to dumpster-diving but that’s what I think of every single time we get to do some work in a lazarette. Diving in a dumpster sucks and so does every lazarette I’ve ever dove on.

I didn’t take any pictures of us in the lazarettes this time. We both just wanted to get the job done as soon as we could before the weather went tits-up again in that uniquely- springtime in New England- kind of way.

Like every project we do together we split the work into left-handed and right-handed gigs. Dena (lefty) dove the portside lazarette first. She nailed that shit in a mere hour and a half. During that time she invented the butyl-tape-on-washer-and-wrench (BTWW) method of fastening an unseen through-bolt from a lazarette. It was a painful process to watch but her persistence ultimately payed off and we moved to the next dumpster, mine.

Because of Dena’s BTWW I was able to get the first three of mine in record time but I couldn’t even feel the fourth one, I mean, not even close. So Dena jumped down in dumpster numero dos for the day and, to much avail, nailed that fucker! While she was in my lazarette she also discovered that one of my washers had fallen away before I got the nut in place so she took the liberty of fixing that mistake. We celebrated with a nice big lunch then epoxy-n-lagged the aft AET supports. There, done!

With the AET through-bolted on the forward supports and epoxy-lagged aft we now have a completely secure support system for the tower. All-in-all it took only 7 hours to install four bases and sixteen bolts. That’s damn good if you ask me!

This next weekend’s weather is looking pretty good again so we’re hoping to hard-wire and install our new solar system on the AET next.

We shall see!

That Holy Shit moment

It’s fun to talk about adventure and it’s always stimulating to hypothesize on the possibilities of profound life changing experiences at sea. Then you start fantasizing, then planning and at some point in a planned adventure the reality of it descends on you with all the weight of its potential for calamity. That split second when you can clearly see all the different ways you can kill yourself just by living life the way you do.

Well, the way we do.

That’s a Holy Shit moment.

We’ve been looking at charts of the Azores, Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands for years. Over this past (fucking brutal!) winter we started lightly making plans and whispering about sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in the spring before hurricane season. But suddenly, like we do, the decision was made over a tasty meal to sail transatlantic at our first opportunity. The foot/feet went down! That was in the dreary depths of a particularly bad New England winter so it was still a bit on the fantastical side of the imagination.

Until one day Dean called to let us know that he was tired of waiting and totally behind us going transatlantic. Not soon, this year, now. To prove it he hit us was with a nice big grant. Enough funds to really make it happen right. Well, we were both immediately blown away thankful and inspired to move on to the next major leap that could make all of this happening actually happen. Dena’s wage-slave gig had to go. She dropped a three-weeks notice on them-‘cuz she’s cool like that- and that was big-time profound.

But that moment, that Holy motherfucking Shit moment didn’t happen to me (James) until…

…My friend Michael brought our Alternative Energies Tower (AET) down from Maine and it actually fit!

Okay so, just to catch you up on this deal…

Last September I traded our badly-fitted full-cockpit-cover for an aluminum tower I found at the Mass-Marine boat salvage yard. The tower was originally built for a totally disgusting powerboat so Dena and I did some measurements and sent it up to the wilds of Maine to be manipulated by a local artist that my friend Michael knew of. Michael didn’t actually know the guy but he got it from a reliable source that this dude was the shit…and believe it or not, he definitely was the shit!

Seven months later it fit the boat perfectly!

Holy Shit, it’s on!!!

The Holy Shit moment is good for many things. It’s that moment when you start making lists of survival priorities because have to. It’s also that moment where everything you do from then on is moving towards surviving the adventure in style.

The AET will support 400 watts of solar panels and a Rutland 1200 wind-generator which should be plenty for our needs and I can’t stress the word needs enough.

We very successfully lived completely off the grid last summer with only 200 watts of solar so the addition of another 900 (potential) watts is not only nice to think about it will give us enough power to run the decadent gear. The stuff that makes the adventure really nice. Things like the water-maker which we plan to run once a day around noon but the chart-plotter and the fridge we can run almost non-stop throughout the off-shore passages without the worry of running out of power over night. I mean, as long as we have wind.

The wind-generator has a potential of an extra 500 watts of charging input in relatively moderate conditions and starts charging with as little as three knots of wind. That fucking rocks! This wind generator also comes with a MPPT charge controller- also rocking- so we’ll be able to go straight to one of the house batteries with two of the four solar panels and the wind generator with the other two panels going to the other house battery bank. In other words: I honestly believe that power will not be an issue on this voyage because we just don’t use that much.

There’s another kind of Holly Shit moment. The dreadful kind!

Holly shit our windless totally sucks!

We love living at anchor.

When you are at anchor you are truly living aboard your boat. You flow freely with the forces of the world and it feels completely natural. It’s the only way for me to properly understand the motion of the Earth and I love that understanding from that perspective.

And the only way you can do all that- above- pretty-talk and actually sleep at night is to have the right gear.

This is the right gear: The Seatiger 555 by Simpson/Lawrence. Quite possibly my favorite machine in the world. It’s a two-speed anchoring windless and when your hauling hundreds of feet of chain on the regs those two speeds make all the difference in the world. They don’t make this machine any more so you kind of have to stumble across one and we did. It’s kind of a long and boring story about paying too much in shipping but we got one and now we get to install it before we leave the comforts of Lynn, Lynn-the city of sin.
We had a windless just like this one on S/V Sovereign Nation and it never let us down. It’s so much better than the one we are replacing which is also the same kind we had on S/V S.N. Nomad- and let me tell you- we’ve hated them both for the past 13 years because the one we have now is such a rare find. Not only that but it was inexpensive and works flawlessly which is almost unheard of. Yay us!

With the wind and the solar power secured above the stern the wind will flow freely to the windvane self steering system that will hopefully drive us most of the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

…And our Seatiger 555 will be ready for when we get there…

Whenever-wherever there may be…

Holy shit this is really going to happen!

Stay tuned.

I wrote a book

A long long time ago, okay 1983, a friend of mine by the name of Michael O’ Sullivan told me he thought the only two things that could bring human-kind together would be A) an alien invasion or B) a genuine messiah. He also told me that explained his initial distrust in the myth of christ. He said, “If he would have been the real thing everyone would’ve believed him.”

That one really soaked in for a few years. When I was a junior in college I told my friend Ann that, “when I make myself lunch everyday I fantasize about a rock and roll messiah named W.A. Steinway. A real messiah one who communicated through music that everyone loved.” She couldn’t wait to hear. I told her the whole thing.

While I was building my lunch- there was a whole lot of pb&j back then- I would set up scenes so by the time I was sitting and eating I could play out dialogue in my head like we were talking over a meal.

Ann was a writer herself and she told me that food preparation was actually a deeply creative and meditative state and what was happening to me was quite normal for a freaky person like myself.

The story was called W.A.S. and it went like this. The protagonist- a dude, a white dude, (sorry remember it’s the ’80’s) our so called- musical-christ- has returned to human kind after a prolonged unexplained hiatus (not at all unlike Robert Redford in The Natural) to write one final piece for Earth and Humanity before he dies. He doesn’t just do an interview with Rolling Stone, no, he’s telling his story exclusively to the daughter of the man who betrayed him and destroyed his musical connection with the universe.

Okay, there is so much wrong with that, and I totally get it. I didn’t write that book.

I wrote a messianic-rock and roll-sea-story as told by “Judas” or rather Layne Perry an aging rock star carrying the weight of a lost revolution on his conscience. It’s called The Colors of Sin and I can’t wait to share it with everyone. I think it’s a pretty cool story.

It took me a year to the day to write this draft of this crazy book and the only reason I say crazy. Shit, I experienced something while writing this story that I’ve never experienced before in my life. This story quite literally wrote itself. I couldn’t wait to sit down at the computer every day just to see what these people were going to do or say next. I never knew until I was actually writing what I wrote. The story just played out in my head.

Don’t get me wrong I still have my private pb&j conversations with myself and my characters but that’s just grist.

As of now I have completed my first draft and I am fortunate enough to have American Author Dena Hankins as my primary reader, editor and confidant (among so many other things).

In other words she takes my commas away!

Dena’s reading the book now (when she’s not dedicating a third of her life to paying for everything) and I’m freaking the fuck out!

No really it’s cool, I’m okay!

But I did, I wrote a book. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. And that in itself is an amazing feeling. I highly recommend it.

Now if only I can sell a copy to everyone who would be interested in reading such a thing we might be able to live off our art for another while.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Geographically inspired

I (James) have a winter problem.

My problem with winter in New England isn’t that it’s cold. I don’t really mind the cold that much. My problem is nothing, meaning no one, works and you can’t go anywhere without a great deal of effort.

I mean, we travel through the universe on bikes and boats so if we’re frozen in with both we get kind of itchy. Every ride is slow and careful, especially with some thawing of the snow mounds and refreezing at night. It’s a dance of glare – the wet glare of the melt water vs the glassy ice.

…and ultimately that leads to powerful inspiration. Not only visually but geographically!

And what does being geographically inspired mean to us? Well, it means Pointing The Boat and that means travel, serious travel.

I (Dena) have been holding down the straight job for just over 11 months. It’s a big question mark on whether they value my work enough to keep me, meaning offer me the money that would make spending on the boat improvements more attractive than traveling on the boat itself in the state we’ll get it to before summer.

During this last snow storm we pulled out the Cornell books and went to work on a Northern Atlantic route that would be a profound ocean passage while working with the prevailing weather systems.

We discovered that we are in a very nice position to do a haul-out then sail from here, Lynn, MA to Block Island at the beginning of June. That shakes us down for the tight reach across the Atlantic Ocean to the Azores Island chain. We’re expecting that crossing to take 15 days to a month. I have less information about my mom’s Azevedo side than her Miller side, but I’m intrigued by the opportunity to find out what being an Azevedo’s daughter means to that part of the world.

After exploring the Islands of Dena’s ancestry, we’ll catch the trades NNE to Ireland. That’s a ten or eleven day broad reach that should get us to or close enough to Cork to visit for a spell. We hear there’s some really good anchorages in the Lough Mahon. We’d also like to explore Dublin and Belfast before heading back into the North Atlantic to the southern Hebridean Island of Barra. Depending on whether we beat feet or explore, it could take anywhere from two weeks to a month.

Barra is the former home of my great-great-grandmother on my mother’s side, Rose MacNeil. To return to my family’s home with the perspective of an ocean navigator is something I’ve always wanted to do and this is the opportunity to do that. On the way to the Faroes Islands anyway? Time to hit Barra for the first time since I was a rock star.

From the Hebrides to Torshavn, the capitol of the Faroe Islands, should be a nice long exploration in jibing downwind. From Torshavn, Reykjavik shouldn’t take more than two weeks, which puts us there at the end of August if we continue to be our slow-ass selves. It’s the perfect time to skim the coasts of Greenland and Newfoundland on our way back to a more southerly winter this time next time around the sun.

We’re floating here

Struggling Between the Extreme Laundry Service and…

The Eye-Cicle Queen!

We live in this world!

Winter’s upon us

…Like Iggy said that Soupy said, ‘do you’re shit in twenty-five words or less'”.

We live here in the winter…

We live here, in our world…

..And that means here and now.

…how’s bout 36.

It’s on

So, the past two weekends we finally did a project that we’ve been wanting to do since we got S/V S.N. Cetacea…

We isolated our starting battery away from the two house banks and built a place for it in a whole new environment.

First we disconnected the only group 24 battery from the two group 31s in bank 2. The cabling ended up being longer than expected and, yes, a negative cable leading nowhere was revealed and, yes, more deconstruction had to happen than expected, but we were encouraged by the perfection of the guy in the battery’s new home.

Same day, we built the platform for the battery into the new box (actually under the settee for the nav-station, aft to starboard). Looking at the new battery switch (a keyed on/off), we realized that it had an awkward cutout size. We debated using the jigsaw, but it would have been hard with the house battery switch right there.

This was one of those winter time projects that you can take a couple of weekends to get done so we ordered the tools we needed to complete the work and enjoyed the rest of the weekend.

This weekend, after we got the new hole-saw for the new on/off switch, Dena cut the hole, installed the switch, a new 50 amp fuse block and the ACR (for combining charging amps between the start battery and the house batteries) while I went to work building cables. I managed to keep handing Dena a newly constructed cable just as she needed one. We had a good pace with each other.

…then we loaded the locker back up and started the engine, done! The alternator feeds power to the start battery and, when the voltage recovers from the starter’s hit, shares that charge with the house batteries.

We’ve said it many times before that we were doing the upgrades on our systems as they present themselves as necessary. Even though this particular upgrade was a bit overdue, we got to take our time to do the research, trace every lead, build the new system to ABYC standards and actually have a lot of fun making it happen. So I’m glad we waited for the opportunity to do the project together correctly, once, so it’s a system we can rely on until we chose to upgrade to a better (electric) motor.

The Six Town Ride

I’m so glad that James took care of the Beverly Port story. I was still wrapped up in getting our money back from them (first she said no refund, then that she would charge us for transient dockage and refund the rest, and finally backed down to keeping a prorated daily amount). Even with all that, I had to contest the (super-random) portion of the credit card charge she kept.

Blegh. Okay, I’m glad he wrote that because I’m still putting my anger into the past. It’s righteous anger, the kind that is a life lesson about how to not get stomped on, and yet it is over. We’re settling into our place in Lynn, and setting up for winter.

For us, the number one thing that keeps us safe is being able to move at a moment’s notice. We were able to do that in Charlestown last winter and we were able to do that in Beverly. Our options may get narrower when these jolts appear, but sometimes a necessary flexibility results in to a real good turn.

I liked the location of Bev Port because it cut about a third off my bike ride to work. It seemed sensible to plan for bad weather (and don’t get me started about the double La Nina and the Farmer’s Almanac). With this move, we went the exact opposite direction.

In the morning, I leave Seaport Landing Marina and head east until a huge roundabout swings me northeasterly along the beach. When there’s a strong easterly wind, the waves crash up and over the reinforced cliff, up and over the walking trail. Already, I’ve seen the waves cross the street.

No, they didn’t wait for the light.

Partway along the beach, I go from Lynn to Swampscott. From what a coworker tells me, Swampscott was a sleepy, lovely place to raise a family and has gotten more and more crowded, more and more developed. My answer had something to do with how it could be otherwise, population explosion, et-cet, but it is both a densely populated area and a place with luxurious amounts of land for each house…when compared to neighboring Lynn.

Right beach, wrong time of day

There’s a bit of sadness leaving the waterside each morning as the sun struggles through the horizon’s clouds. Crumpled land makes for a hilly transition from beach to the strip-mall mile, which is too busy for good road maintenance. Sigh.

I don’t believe I ever actually enter Clifton or Marblehead, though they’re just…over…there. My brief time along Hamilton Pond often provides the eerie beauty of thin grasses waving through sea smoke. Why is it colder there than in the miles before or after? I have mused on this as my cheeks crisp. The trails on the other side seem promising, but I’ve yet to pass there with enough leisure to take a look.

Somewhere in there, I think, society gives my surroundings a new name: Salem. Through a part of Salem I barely knew, I approach the place, after Loring becomes Canal, at which I hit the midpoint of my ride, 5.7 miles in.

My previous ride? 5.5 miles.

As I roller-coaster through Salem, I’m getting myself loosened up and shaken out for the new-old part of the trip. I’ve done this section five days a week since last March, but it was a 10 minute warm-up leading to a bad-ass bridge after which I yoyoed up and down the rolling hills of Beverly to work. Now, I’ve come farther than I ever went before I ride upright for a while, resting my hands and wrists, and then tackle the bridge with seven miles under my tires.

There was a moment when I said goodbye to this view, with a real pang of loss.

And then there’s now. Only two little sailboats remain, neighbors of the couple of lobsterboats and the lone cabin cruiser that looks abandoned.

Have you noticed how few pictures I have? It’s a problem endemic to commuting. The top of the bridge is a good stop, with the slowing of my roll and the promise of an easier trip down. Pretty much every other part of the ride…is about riding.

On other other side of the bridge, I’m in the fourth town of my morning. From Lynn, through Swampscott and Salem, to Beverly, and I’m still 20 minutes away from work.

I arrive, I stretch, I work.

When I leave, I take a different route. Now that it’s dark for my entire ride home, the most important factors are safety and safety. The inland route has a couple-few cemeteries and a pond that protect my right side, a real boon in making sure I don’t get hit.

I leave Beverly for Danvers almost immediately and cross three rivers (Porter, Crane, and Waters) that feed into the one I cross in the morning. Pretty quick I hit Peabody (PEA-b’dy in case you want to sound like a local), pass an example of local humor (Lynnapesaukee Four Winds Pub & Grill), and do a fancy transition on a very busy street to the other strip-mall mile of my day.

From there, I feel like I’m almost home. It’s not complicated, though the road surface sucks. It’s not as dangerous as you’d think, though cars are very aggressively parked in the bike/bus lane. And it’s not as close as it seems. By the time I stand for the whoopdies in the waterfront park, my crotch is happy to leave the saddle and my legs are looking forward to the end.

Lynn to Swampscott to Salem to Beverly on my morning ride, and Beverly, Danvers, Peabody, and Lynn in the evening. That’s a shit-ton of towns.

Home. Ahhh.

Wintering here

Over a month ago we tossed off the mooring in Salem and headed for Beverly.

Not much of an adventure to be sure but we absolutely made the best of it and settled right in. Beverly Port Marina is a run down family “owned” dump that has recently had a run in with the local waterfront revitalization community. The marina has fenced off a rather large section of the public waterfront for it’s private usage and the revitalization people want to take it back by imminent domain to continue the public hike and bike trail ultimately scheduled to go from Cape Cod to Cape Anne.

The imminent Domain has already been won the by local and state voters so it’s inevitable that the marina will have to clean up their act and let the public stroll right through the middle of their shit.

Anyway,

We paid up front and they invited us to come in early.

I did laundry on our first day there and it caused raw sewage to boil up from the floor drains to swamp a 2 inch funky bog throughout both the men’s and women’s restrooms. There is so much oil and toxic goo on the concrete between the docks and the restrooms that it’s guaranteed you’ll track it aboard on even a single trip to the head.

We were there for almost a week when the old guy that runs the machinery caught us on the dock and told us we could no longer ride our bikes on the property of the marina. From then on we had to walk our bikes from the entrance of the marina to where ever we were going to lock them.

Of course they had no bike racks so we had to improvise a safe spot behind a wall on a metal structure not built for locking bikes about 100 yards from the entrance.

When Dena asked why it was okay for people in cars to be on the property but not people on bikes the old dude got all flustered and gave us some bullshit story about being a bad example for all the 12-year-olds (in winter time, at a marina WTAF?!)…and we could get hit by one of his machines and we have to live by rules that we all can live by etc, etc and stupid shit that doesn’t apply to us. (Most marina machinery that moves is slower than a turtle and big as a house, not likely to hit either one of us even on a bad day.)

When Dena approached the woman who said she “owned” the place the following Monday the woman essentially told her that it was her marina and her rules and if we didn’t like it we could leave. When Dena politely pressed the issue further (like she do) that sad, bitter old woman (who had just lost a battle over public domain for bicyclists) kicked us out right then and there.

We were back on the mooring and enjoying a great meal by sunset.

Those people at that marina truly missed a great opportunity to have us as neighbors. Not only do we actually know boating and the marina environs we don’t complaint about the little things like shit bubbling up in the showers. We also have a genuine respect for people trying to make it on their own in this industry. They blew it, they assumed we were their enemies to their detriment and we will get to watch them fail. Not much of a consolation being as though we had to scramble to find some new winter digs.

Dena works with a few people who live in Lynn, two towns south of Salem and one of her coworkers mentioned they had a city run marina. So, I went on a nice long recon bike ride to Lynn, Mass. I talked to the two guys that run the place and we made a play for a winter slip…Okay, I’m going to give you the short version. It was sketchy as all-hell but they ultimately gave us a slip assignment… a HUGE nor’easter, 70 knot winds, 13 foot seas in the anchorage while we were celebrating our 25th anniversary in Friendship, Maine.

We returned to a boat that was a dreadful mess but largely unhurt just in time for two days of storms and cold. By this time the cat was infuriated!

…until we got that fire going!

We got back on a Tuesday, Wednesday was the big storm, Thursday was our chance to clean up the boat and survey for damage, Friday…gales! Saturday…fucking storm.

…and Sunday we sailed away!

We sailed east, south, west and north around Marble Head to Nahant under main alone with two reefs tucked in all day long. The large north-east ocean rollers were on our good sides throughout the day and never once broke on us.

As we made our final approach one last squall pounded on through leaving us soaked to the gills with a glorious sunset off the port-bow and a magnificent double rainbow to stern.

We made landfall before twilight’s end on Halloween and were, once again, wintering here.

Because sometimes this happens…

I used to pretend to love listening to those “Salty ‘Ol Capatains Courageous” at West Marine drone on and on about the strange and impossible mishaps that occur on boats.

They’d say things like  “the darndest thing happened” or “you’re not going to believe this…” When it could almost always be attributed to either neglect or some kind of miserly chinzyness. More often than not, it was the latter.

Anyway…the darndest thing happened!

That (above totally bad kitty) cat managed to work a cardboard box, that we were saving to recycle, into a position to leverage the primary bilge pump switch to “off”.

…That’s right, that thing!

Now, we have a drippy packing gland, or rather “an active bilge” that is a total pain in the BODY to get to so, yeah, we like our bilge pump to work.

Anyway,

During the height of the storm, formally known as T.S. Henri, we discovered that the bilge was completely full of sea water, the #1 Battery bank was sunk and all the electrical connections to it were dissolved into the muck of our beautiful sailing vessel.

Battery 2 was at 30% but functional, so we shut everything else off and ran the (working absolutely perfectly) bilge pump for well over a hour.

After that, we drank rum.

The next day the storm was stalled over New England and we dinghy’d in. Which was still a really big deal.

We only went ashore to buy the main connection terminals to the big 8D, #1 battery bank. In fact, the only things we didn’t have as a redundancy on board were those two terminal connectors.

We got the parts (we bought 2 sets), got back to the boat, re-wired the bilge and then the sun came out.

As we were cleaning up later that day Dena actually witnessed Beluga Greyfinger, that totally bad kitty, playing the very game that damn-near sunk us the day before.

Of course he wouldn’t do it for me, he’s not really a performer like that, but I got it. Not only did he almost sink us with a cardboard box in a storm, that little shit stepped up, right to Dena’s face.

Once again, proving that Ship Shape = Kitty Safe but sometimes, WTF?!