Dena Hankins's Blog, page 20

Trusting Ourselves

I (Dena) woke at four in the morning and spent an hour and a half pondering dread. It’s not an emotion I spend a lot of time with, but I’ve learned that I ignore it at my peril.

We’re anchored in Dutch Harbor, Rhode Island, and we are in the middle of nowhere.

The town has filled the good space with hundreds of moorings (I’m not the broken record; they’re the broken record!) and the only place to put the hook down is about halfway between Dutch Island (abandoned but fun to visit in warmer weather) and the much-larger Conanicut Island.

We provisioned up at the local supermarket, which is a social-distancing nightmare of narrow aisles and cul-de-sacs.

We weren’t even allowed to fill our backpacks in the store because of temporary rules against reusable bags. The cashier got halfway through before having the excellent idea of just putting the items back in our carriage (as she called it) rather than into plastic that we would just get rid of.

It can get pretty rough in here, not a lot of protection, and this has been a windy, gusty month on the boat. This was going to be a stop on the way, inching ourselves along the Long Island Sound and toward the Chesapeake, because the weather…wow. Cold, contrary winds and rain every time that changes.

We’ve been talking about bouncing to a more-protected spot like Old Saybrook. If it stays stinky weather-wise, at least there’s a grocery store within walking distance. It’s a fairly small basin and so doesn’t build truly fierce fetch like it does here in the Narragansett. But the main reason it felt like a no-brainer is that it’s progress…motion toward the places we plan to be going.

So why did I wake at four in the morning with a mild but demanding sense of dread?

Because we don’t have to go anywhere. Because today is a Bad Day and tonight will be a Bad Night with Rain and tomorrow is a Worse Day by Far. Because getting to Old Saybrook means navigating gusts to 30 knots into a rough anchorage and then a ten-hour day in the cold and rain with more 30 knot gusts. Because there’s some chance of getting hassled or even evicted from Connecticut due to the wide-spread fear of Covid-19 transmission…and the same chance in New York and in New Jersey.

Destination fixation warning light. That’s what dread so frequently communicates to me.

We’ve already been in Rhode Island past the required quarantine period, so we are not worried about being either forcibly quarantined or required to leave. This anchorage is fine, if rough, for the Bad Day and Night and Day (or maybe just Morning if the rain clears tomorrow afternoon). There’s no overwhelming safety reason to get underway today, so…

Don’t.

I (James) remember a time (September 2001) when I too woke in the middle of the night and listened to the wind howl through the rig and was overcome with a sense of complete dread, not fear, as much as absolute doubt.

When we talked about it the next day we were both relieved to find out that our feelings were mutual.

I’m not talking about superstition and I’m definitely not talking about some special abilities on our part, I’m just talking about a feeling is all. A profound feeling that is now, after over 20 years of cruising, recognizable and easy to fix by staying right where we are until we’re damn good-n-ready to carry on.

Another boom rebuild

There was a mutual, audible gulp between us when we saw that future storm bearing down on us from all our media sources.

It sucked!

Some said 50 knot gusts with sustained 30 knot blasts throughout the day.

We trust our ground tackle and our skills at anchoring but who wants to put themselves through a New England wind storm at anchor if you have choices? Nobody, right!

So we decided to pull into a marina, get some hot showers, do some laundry and of course rebuild the in-boom reefing system for our new mainsail.

Backing up.

On our way back from Oklahoma, we stopped in Annapolis, Maryland, to pick up the mainsail that we had built by Bacon Sails last year. We installed the sail just after we’d splashed the boat while at the dock in Wharf Marina.

…a near perfect fit!

We didn’t want to hang out in a marina any longer than we had to after launching the boat. We wanted to finish all of our recommissioning projects in our natural environment. Not only is it free, anchoring puts us where we want to be, on the water where we belong.

But 6 days later when we saw the storm rolling in we figured we’d go in and take advantage of some dock space to rebuild all the internal systems on the boom, before the storm hit if possible.

The boom is a very intelligent system. It has two sheaves and cam cleats on the forward end and two sheaves aft for running the reef lines inside the protection of the aluminum boom. It also has a block-n-tackle rig with a 3:1 purchase inside the boom for the clew outhaul.

The problem with smart systems of course is: the operator must be smarter than the system operated.

At some point in S/V S.N. Cetacea’s illustrious sailing career her outhaul rig had come loose inside the boom (primary user error), making it a completely nonfunctional knotted mess up inside the boom. That mess also made it impossible for a fish-tape to run the length of the boom, which was of course the first thing we tried, so we got to disassemble the entire rig, fix it and put it back together before the baleful storm descended from above.

We rocked it!

The dissimilar metals issue worried us, but we only had one stainless fastener refuse to leave the aluminum extrusion and luckily we didn’t need to remove that part anyway. We fixed it and re-rigged the outhaul to its proper position inside the boom then ran both reef lines internally as well. Everything went back together like clockwork then we ran the reefs in the mainsail, done!

The max winds for the following day’s excitement reached 50 knots at it’s peak and of course we had to go for an epic walk!

The next day, as is often the case, was a perfect sailing day.

The rig performed perfectly without glitches or failings all the way to Dutch Harbor from East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

Starting Fires

Starting a fire is the very essence of human technology.

If you’ve ever built a fire, you know — it’s an awesome achievement! It’s the fundamental step in the manipulation of our environment that ultimately leads to a damn-near unstoppable god-complex.

The control and sublimation of heat and radiation were the visions of gods to our primordial primate predecessors, and fuck them, we win!

But it’s no joke, fire takes vigilant attention, constant care and a seemingly neverending labor that is demanding on almost every level. And on a sailboat it becomes a simple mater of life and death…like everything else!

If you don’t watch the fire, it goes out and you freeze to death.

If you don’t feed the fire, it goes out and you freeze to death.

If you don’t ventilate the cabin properly, it smokes up and you asphyxiate.

If you don’t forage for fuel, it goes out and you, well…you know this one.

As a matter of fact, the colder it gets the more of a slave you become to the fire so that ultimately one’s survival depends on its constant upkeep.

Sounds like a job worth doing!

Fire doesn’t give a fuck.

Like the universe, fire is an absolute slave to the laws of physics.

Meaning, you either control the physics of fire or best get out of its way.

It’s almost like a deal in some ways. If you start a fire, you agree to: feed it, watch it, respect it, and interact with it. In return, it will keep you alive and endlessly entertained but don’t fuck up. Fire doesn’t care.

Seth Thomas – It Works!

We got this Seth Thomas striking watch-clock at Captain Jim’s Marine Salvage in Portland, Maine last year when we first made landfall there as a boat-warming present to ourselves. It was over wound and frozen up. We took it to a local clocksmith and he told us to buy a new mechanism and replace the guts!

That was a stupid idea!

We stowed it away for the cruising from Maine to New York City and back to the Narragansett Bay…then we hauled the boat and went India for half a year.

When we got back to the boat the very first project we broke into was this old clock. Fix it or chuck it we said…

Well, we opened her up, manually started up the rockers and she’s been keeping time and chiming the watches ever since!

She’s a little ahead when dialed to Fast and a little behind when dialed to Slow, which means she’s actually keeping time impeccably! We waited to find out whether she’d keep going and do a reasonable job of telling time before committing to more holes in the bulkhead, but we’re dedicated now.

No Longer Pushing Rope

Hands are sensory organs, and the difference to the hand between old and new lines is emotional, encouraging, adventurous. A soft handful of control, thick enough to grip and pull, easy on the skin: that’s what our new lines mean to me.

The rough stiffness of the old stuff didn’t run through blocks smoothly and required that we, literally, push the boom out by hand in anything but a near-gale. My hands shrank from grasping the old salty UV-degraded polyester which sucked the moisture from my skin across improbable gaps. It had been stretched beyond its ability to retain its original flexibility because, did you know?, when you cycle-load a rope or anything, really, with a pull-tight-release, pull-tight-release, it melts a little every time and becomes, eventually, brittle.

And every little brittle point in each of the threads that make up the strands that are braided into the rope is a potential breakage, a tiny sliver protruding from the remaining structure.

But oh, the new line!

On SVSN Nomad, we invested in about 60 feet of Regatta Braid for our mainsheet, which had to run from the back of the boat to the back of the boom four times. When hauled in, there was a gorgeous coil of line hanging easily at hand. When let out for a downwind run, it eased through the hand and all four segments lengthened as the boom swung wide, until the four-part span arrested the eye.

For SVSN Cetacea, we’ve gone all out. Soft, supple Regatta Braid for the mainsheet, for the staysail and yankee port and starboard sheets. Five lines, five eye splices, five lock-stitches and whippings.

I had done the mainsheet while still in the motel room. It was a good project for that ridiculous place, but spreading my marlinspike tools around me on my own boat is a much larger pleasure.

Since Regatta Braid (and yes, I’ll stop capitalizing it every time, though it is a proper name) is constructed with twelve strands braided into a hollow ring, it’s easy to splice using the technology of the good old finger-trap. Simply figure out where to start the eye, loop it to eyeball how big it should be, taper the end, and then push the end up the middle.

I mean, I wouldn’t try this at home with only those directions, but that’s basically it. Recipe in the comments.

The lock-stitching and whippings were much the harder part, but without them I would be more nervous. The entire point of the finger-trap is that you can get out of it by relaxing which lets the tube shorten and broaden. Sheets are alternately slack and taut, especially while tacking, so I’m sure the splice would work itself loose without this belts-and-braces method.

Splashing SVSN Cetacea

Her first haulout was a long one – out last September and in at the beginning of April.

It really was the same thing in reverse. The guy who did the haulout also splashed her, and wow – am I ever glad he was willing! He’s in an age range that makes him Covid-19 susceptible, but he took care of us anyway. Being trapped on the hard was not an option.

And then we were really home.

Home

Sometimes our world changes so fast!

We left India when Wuhan was a whisper, we left Sallisaw as the coronavirus was an interesting topic and we returned to Covid-19.

Oklahoma welcomed us back to a beautiful spring. The dogs were let out of the house, the cats started collecting and distributing dead-gifts and the mercury skyrocketed.

I (James, with Bonny, below) cleaned the shop, organized the tools and trimmed the cedar in front of the house.

…then Dena and I went shopping for a power washer. We found a good one at one place, found a better one at a better deal at another place, tossed that sucker in the back, got home, and went to work on the front of Dena’s mom’s house.

We got to hang out with both sides of (Dena’s) fam and we got to earn our keep in both Sallisaw and Moses Lake. We both felt great about that.

The round trip from Oklahoma to Washington State and back was accomplished solely on Blue Highways. We eschewed interstate freeways altogether, and it gave us a humbling and fascinating view of the American West. Boy that sucker is huge!

On the way from Oklahoma to Maryland and thence to Rhode Island, we compromised. The long, long distances between small towns were not to be found, so the 55 to 45 to 35 to 45 to 55 routine got old pretty quick.

Not, however, before we drove through Beebe, Arkansas, one of my (Dena’s) childhood homes. I had some good times in that barn!

OK to AR to TN to VA…

We pushed our bodies to the rental-car limit to put this part of the adventure to bed…

…So, we went for a stroll in a Virginia forest to shake off the road. The mixed highway-freeway thing took us through the states that had not yet locked down their citizens, the better to access fuel, food, and rooms, but we found that folks were doing some version of what they saw their (wide-scale) neighbors doing on the news and via the internet.

Once we crossed the Potomac and entered Maryland, it was pretty clear that there would be no breakfast buffet at the motel, nor would we be using the pool. (Ha!)

We stopped in Annapolis to pick up our brand new main sail plus other important items and took another walk to get our heads on right.

I’m glad we started the day with some calm and friends (from 6′ away), because driving through NYC never gets easier, even in a pandemic, though Connecticut was smooth all the way through. The next hiccup happened in Rhode Island, where the National Guard was set up to stop all people with out-of-state license plates and take our information so that the state health department could…I don’t know what. We were asked to self-quarantine for 14 days if we were staying in the state. That will be easier to accomplish when the boat’s in the water and we’re living tight and happy.

We came halfway around the world, across the U.S. and back again in a little under two months and I’m happy to say, we’re both (James and Dena) still healthy and (finally) happily back to our boat, S/V S.N. Cetacea!

Birthdays

When I was in my 30’s I figured that when I made it past my fifth decade I would give up on celebrating the day of my birth. I was wrong about that.

As it turned out I was wrong about quite a few things concerning aging, duh!

I discovered that, unlike (the above) technology, I could change with the times and celebrate any goddamn thing I want!

I figured when we went back to India this past fall that we would be back on the boat in plenty of time to party underway. Damn, I was wrong about that as well. We were underway alright but not the way we like. We were traveling by Infernal Combustion Vehicle back across the U.S. from Washington to Oklahoma after helping Dean move into his new house.

So…

…We pointed the car at the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas and drove.

Once again we took the Blue Highways ‘cross-country and it was spectacular.

On our first night on the road we found a very cool place to stay via an old friend of ours in northern Idaho just under the Canadian border in a log cabin way off the beaten path.

It “belonged” to a wonderful sailing couple who had a beautiful retreat up in the mountains on a huge sprawl of protected land.

This was still very early in the road trip and the weather was awesome, then it got shitty.

Through Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska we never saw the sun and the temps stayed just above freezing, which assured that we would be indoors for my birthday.

It was okay, we still got to see the biggest hand painted egg in the world in Wilson, Kansas!

The road went on and on and ultimately ended us back in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. We’ll be here about a week before heading back to the boat and our more usual joys.

This road is not the Sea

…And this stupid infernal combustion plastic destroyer can’t possibly be a sailboat, but, wow, this country is freaking huge!

Drivetime is the place you go in your head when the miles add up to more than the words in the conversation. When the landscape changes faster than you can keep up with. When the road takes over your imagination right before you get too hungry or too caffeine deficient to function…your…mind…takes…over.

Blue Highways are the squiggly little lines that connect the back country of the Mid-North American continent to itself. They are the roads that weave our strangely connected communities into a country that is as huge as it is presumptuous.

We drove the Blue Highways from Sallisaw, Oklahoma to Moses Lake, Washington via Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and the Palouse in about a hundred hours. It was a long and exciting visual extravaganza through some of the shocking biospheres this continent has to offer.

The states are divided in some very strange ways. Sometimes straight lines are laid over the land but other times geology defines the lines in ways that are both obvious and refreshingly not in our control. It’s nice to see humans tune into the realities of our environment enough to give them control over our little maps. That’s pretty cool.

Idaho has a national nuclear laboratory that gives a whole area a creepy feel, but even so, the singular mountains stunned the eye.

So much land to pass through without feeling it. The bubble of warmth we inhabited included a heated wheel, heated seats, and…well…a heater. And yet, we were visiting the Tetons in February.

We only slowed down for some ice-crusted, machine grooved mountain roads that led from the south end of the Tetons to Jackson, until…

Bison Traffic Jam

From there all the way through Idaho, snow showed animal and asshole tracks, skier-spoor and snowshoe waffles.

As far as stops go, the best part happened in Stanley, ID. -17 degrees F.,the water was 105 and, oh, the contrast was shockingly perfect.

As we came out of the mountains, the spring melt showed its stop/start best from the pullout on the highway.

And the power of the melting snow had only begun to show itself. February is still a little shy of spring in these parts.

The snow made the prairie far more interesting than usual, but the rock itself in the mountains outside Lewiston was worth seeing.

Coming from the southeast into a place we once called ‘a home’ gave the land an unfamiliar perspective that allowed us our Blue Highways prose all the way to the city around a lake known as Moses in the state of Washington across the country in winter time. We’re halfway to another ‘home’, another place away from our boat that will undoubtedly help us to clarify the many reasons we call a sailboat ‘our home’ on the Earth, ‘our planet’ in this time,

of,

now.

Spies on Bikes

This is our last day in India in 2020 and what a wild ride it’s been.

Our friend Prakash came to visit us this past weekend to say goodbye and we all got a big laugh out of our new conspiracy theory. It’s the one where everyone in Thiruvanathapuram (including the Air Force machine-gunner who hangs out, finger on trigger, in front of the gate sometimes) was thinking that we were American Spies in disguise as tourists struggling through the insane Indian traffic on bicycles. We were here gathering information on the cutting-edge space tech and the flagrant abuses of the word “communist”.

Of course, what we discovered was ethnic cleansing in the form of Modi and in the mode of Trump and Bonsaro, Johnson, etc etc. In India, the acronyms du jour of hatred are CAA and NRC, but those newish sectarian horrors have a familiar bitterness to the tongue.

It’s a bad spy that gets most of their info from news and from stumbling on protests and starving on nationwide general strike days.

This time, our third, we completed our co-written manuscript entitled Indoor Boh. I (James) finally finished my pirate radio adventure story called FUCC 89.1 FM and Dena started her new sexy novel The Pound.

We had one last Meal at Kochi Peedia out on the highway, this year’s favorite meals haunt. They had all of our favorites today as if they were anticipating our celebration. Samba rice, thick and imperfectly hulled, papadum, avial, kappa, beetroot theyal, pachadi, chimundi, salt-pepper, fish curry, sambhar, the keynote flavor pulissery, and payasam. Daaaaamn.

Chitra made us what she calls (for our benefit, I’m sure) fruit salad, which also has chia seeds, sweetened condensed milk, peanuts.

Another last-day win. It’s a time of plenty here now that the monsoon is well and truly gone.

These jackfruit are just hanging out at Prakash’s…mmm…cousin or second cousin whom he calls Reeta Chechi (meaning big sister)…anyway, they’re pendant from a tree that can obviously take the strain, though it’s a little disconcerting to realize you’re standing under a fruit the size of a fat pit bull.

As always, it’s impossible to boil down living here to a take-away phrase or message.

We zipped around as spies-on-bikes, recognizable in an instant to one and all for five months, sold those bikes and remembered what it was like to stop for an impulsive photo or fruit salad or a quick pic of rusty old sign telling you where you stood in the world.

We found the secret rot of Indian culture being shouted from the rooftops. We raged at the take-over of the tiny streets by large status-cars, SUVs and thousands upon thousands of Bullets.

Still, we felt better seen and respected on those crowded streets than we ever have in the US.

The sick Mallu pride in eating cow flesh, plus chicken and goat meat, didn’t keep us from eating hundreds of stunning vegetarian meals in veg only restaurants…and others with some kind of seafood element thrown in because the Malabar spice was so alluring.

So we’ll go back to our western hemisphere and report to our co-conspirators that India is still here. She’s still struggling to overcome the oblivion of the political elite, Death Inc. ignorance, hatred, starvation, classism, separatism, paternalism, ableism, racism, pollution, ageism, colonialism, heterosexism and of course nationalism, just like the rest of us.