Dena Hankins's Blog, page 7

The electric advantage

We just heard that the guy who was prepping his NorSea 27′ for an electric circumnavigation from Seattle is approaching Hawaii. We were thinking he might be the one to challenge our potential world record as the smallest electric boat to circumnavigate. The only problem: he’s not on an electric boat. He says he is, and he has an electric motor aboard, but discovering he backed it up with a gas generator that he ended up using all down the California coast was a shocker to say the least! That’s not an electric boat, that’s a gas boat!

Beluga Greyfinger prefers electric

I (James) am so fed up with that stupid bullshit! I am so sick and tired of these people who claim to be doing something revolutionary like taking an electric sailboat around the world and at the last moment packing a cheap genset aboard, 50 gallons of gas, and taking off under the false pretenses of going electric. That’s not revolution, that’s a fucking lie supporting the status quo.

(For those of you who don’t know: genset is the term for generator-set meaning a combination of diesel or gas engine and electric generator.)

The wind is free after you pay for the gear

We’re on this leg of our life’s adventures at sea to prove -once and for all- that the world can be discovered under sail with a completely electric auxiliary motor as back up.

I get the idea of wanting to cover all your bases for the sake of self preservation and the ‘Prudent Sailor Survives’ and all that crap but you are either going electric or you’re sucking at the petroleum tit. And that’s all there is to it.

Away from Sao Jorge at Latitude 38

Now backing up a few years, when we first started batting around the idea of going electric, we were looking at a beautiful Tayana 37 Pilothouse with a dead diesel and a working inboard genset. We were stoked to dip our toes into the experiment of going electric by pulling the dead motor, installing the electric propulsion system, a bunch of wind generators and solar panels, and using the genset as little as possible until we could sell that sucker. Well, it turned out the owner of the boat didn’t actually know when the last time the genset had been run and he thought that it might’ve been frozen-up for quite a while. (The boat was hauled out at the time with a bunch of dead batteries so we couldn’t actually test the genset ourselves.)

Gatolichous my editor

That was a real heart-breaker, but as we gained some distance, emotional and physical, we came to recognize that just dipping our toes into the electric motor reality was bound to be a disappointment. If we still had to do maintenance on a diesel motor and carry diesel motor spares and buy fuel even oh-so-occasionally, we wouldn’t be getting what we wanted from going electric.

We waited for the right boat to reveal herself to us the very next year.

Enter S/V SN Cetacea.

The wind and the sun…Yeeeeah!

When we first stepped aboard Cetacea, we knew this was the boat we would go electric on. It was part of the plan. The diesel was running and there was a whole monster list of other upgrades that were more pressing than replacing a working piece of equipment. We checked things off the list as we could afford and ultimately just ignored the dreaded weight of our petrol-addiction…until we couldn’t any longer.

When we set off in the unrelenting cold spring of 2022, we did our best to ignore the fact that our dreaded diesel was on its last leg and barely standing with the one it had left. It was hard starting, spewed oil like a recalcitrant old Volkswagen, and absolutely drove us nuts every time we had to start the thing. By the time we got to Florida from Nova Scotia, we’d had it with that ancient destructive tech and we decided it had to go.

Q: Hey buddy, how do you get to Carnage Hall?

A: Practice, practice, practice!

“This is how we do it baby!”

So we did. We practiced sailing on and off the hook, we practiced sailing up rivers and through cities and bays and Sounds and Oceans and ultimately we felt as though that diesel was superfluous and had been for some time.

So we went all-electric and sailed across the Atlantic Flow to the Azores.

If you’ve been reading our work as we went along, you’ll know a whole lot of this but it feels like the moment to reiterate that…

Before we left the US, the one thing we didn’t even consider bringing aboard was a fucking genset.

We’ll just let that sun shine…

This past week the article we wrote for Practical Boat Owner Magazine about sailing to the Azores went live online. We did the whole media-bomb thing (Dena more than I because I just can’t stand the FaceFuck reality) and it is truly amazing how many people in our online community are so bound up in that world-killing petroleum addiction.

I mean, most of the people I have known throughout my life agree that the oil industry is choking the Earth but I can only count on one hand the number of my friends who have given it up…and Dena and I are on two of those fingers.

pumping for real!

I just recently read in the Guardian that an old bandmate of mine is on his second circumnavigation on his hippy-ship touring the world with a group of artists playing music and spreading the word of global climate change on a great big steel schooner. Of course that ship has a diesel “auxiliary” engine and a fucking genset to light the party. What-The-Actual-Fuck Grey!? That’s not revolution, that’s just more of the same old shit and you/they know it.

The only flag that matters…

My dear friend Raf used to say, at this point in my rant, that I was dangerously treading on self-righteousness and that I should consider how I got to this place before harshly judging anyone. Yes, it’s true, I am the former owner of a candy-apple-red 1967 Mustang Fastback with a fully-blown 289 that got about 4 gallons to the mile on high octane dinosaur-juice. I have done my damage and I feel the weight of that destruction deeply in my conscience but I have changed and that change has made me happier than I ever thought possible because revolution makes a body feel good.

…it’s about the sailing!

Let us make this point very clear: S/V SN-E Cetacea is an electric sailing vessel through-and-through. We make ALL of our own electricity with the wind and the sun, we make our own water from that home-made electricity and that makes us off the grid no matter where we go on this planet. I understand that that (above) statement makes us sound self-righteous as fuck but I’d rather be happily self-righteous than guiltily propping up the disgusting status quo any day.

Shop Sitting

Having space to lay out our projects is a rare opportunity for us.

Shop Keeper

When you live aboard, your home is your workshop until you turn it back into your home and vice versa. It’s a dynamic we’ve long since learned to live with, but it does mean that set-up time and clean-up time eat into project time pretty intensely.

Our friends Nancy and Glen are ex-pats living here on Ilha Terceira, Azores, Portugal. They are in the process of shutting down their lives in the US after six years of establishing residency and building a house with an incredible workshop here on the island. They had a whole bunch of family and property to deal with back in the states, so we’re house-sitting–or rather, shop-sitting–while they wrap things up back there on the crazy continent.

I (James) say shop-sitting because, well…

We can’t leave gato alone!

We’re taking care of the house and checking the mail as well, but it’s not even tempting to sleep over. My (Dena’s) dad came to visit and he did the cleanup when a northerly bearing torrential rain flooded under the old front door and the living room became a shallow lake. It is good to have someone looking in on things, if not staying full time.

The place is absolutely beautiful with a breathtaking view but Glen and Nancy are boat people. So of course we fell in love with that workshop!

Sanding, sanding, sanding!!!

We made a list, like you do, of all the priority project that we absolutely had to get done while we had this totally awesome opportunity. What requires shelter from the almost-incessant winter rains and benefits from easy use of power tools?

At the top of the long term wish-list was the dinghy sailing rig.

Oh man!!!

…and let me (James) tell you, that shit was fucked up!

We sailed most of the way down the Florida coast and three-quarters of the way across the Atlantic flow with the entire dinghy sailing rig dressed on the midships butterfly hatch. No bag was included in the perfectly reasonable $500 price (Fatty Knees with sailing rigs don’t usually go so cheap but it did have a big ol’ hole in the bow), so the rig got a little sun on the way here.

But like all thing built by humans, we can totally rebuild that shit to make it look and act like new.

That’s what I’m talking about!

While we were waiting for the epoxy to dry, we pulled the windlass off the bow for a paid rebuild. Practical Boat Owner Magazine offered us a handful of commissions this year. We already used a good weather day to do the one about end-for-ending lines to make them last longer, so we thought we’d move on to rebuilding the Simpson-Lawrence Seatiger 555.

The greatest machine ever made!

If you remember, we bought this machine used from a friend at Bacon Sails at the beginning of 2022. S/V SN-E Cetacea had come with the little sibling of this titan, and that poor thing was not really up to how we use a windlass. Once we installed the 555, we anchored over three hundred times in a little over a year and never had any mechanical issues with the device.

The chain stripping pin (barley visible above, located below and forward of the gypsy) had been bent to a crazy forward angle and it was allowing the chain to randomly bind up under the gypsy. It was bent when we got it but we didn’t realize prior to installation that it was supposed to be vertical. We installed the windlass on a mooring in Gloucester, Mass, and we soon discovered the issue of jamming under a serious load (like the time we pulled up a Catalina 22 in New Smyrna) but…other than that it worked flawlessly.

…Tell me we don’t look totally awesome at anchor!

We did not end up doing a full rebuild on the windlass once we got it open and realized that, well…it was totally fine. James knocked the pin back into shape and we bolted the bottom cover back in place.

The boarding ladder was another random project that had been waiting for a good opportunity. We needed to clean it up and cut off the factory-installed legs, which were too short to keep the body of the folding steps off the rubrail. Can’t do that kind of thing at anchor since the ladder is essential gear while dinghying in and out. Also, the legs were on sleeves around the body of the ladder, which meant that cutting them off was a delicate operation. A little bounce from a wind wave or boat wake could have been utterly tragic. The cut-off tool we bought for removing the bronze coupler from the stainless prop shaft (one of those unexpected electric motor conversion expenses) did the job and it was luxurious to set up the whole project at a comfortable level for patient grinding.

The windlass and the boarding ladder are both now back on the boat. High humidity has stalled the dinghy’s sailing rig varnish, but we are now tackling one of the big, crucial jobs: the sliding hatch for the companionway.

We’ll do a whole post about this rebuild but…spoilers…it’s fundamentally sound and yet so fucked it’s incredible.

We got this.

I (Dena) am in the house putting the end on this blog post while James is out in the shop, sanding. I’ll tap him to re-read this and add/edit to his heart’s delight and then publish it, while I get back to digging out the half-hardened, half-dirty-oil-textured mastic that should have been keeping water out of Cetacea’s cabin this whole time.

It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

We got back to the boat the other night after a long day of sanding and I (James) said to Dena, I honestly hope we can electric-motor-sail all the way around the world and have this kind of hook up every step of the way. We both laughed hysterically at that fantasy but remarkably we keep falling into relationships with these amazing people who have exactly the resources we need to make this adventure of ours just a little more doable.

…And how fucking cool is that?!

The seasons

One of my most profound memories about Hawaii is the absolute lack of seasons the year we were there.

Oahu ho!

I mean, I (James) understand that “season” might mean a different thing in the middle of the Pacific flow at 18 degrees north, and I might not have been particularly attuned to Hawaiian seasonal change given the fact that I was all involved in survival of the wage-slave fittest the entire time I was there.

Ala Wai at golden hour

It was 80 degrees Fahrenheit every day we were there and seventy-something every night. I stopped giving a shit about the weather after a while which (I know) is a little weird for a sailor.

…no, seriously!

It’s not like that here on the other side of Earth in the Atlantic flow. We have some serious season-age here in the Azores for sure!

Change is dramatic and obvious on every level. The ocean rolls in with a vengeance some days like it was actually pissed off at you. The banshees in the marina cry and mourn with the modulation of the cyclonic winds spinning off into the Atlantic flow like a pair of googly-eyes.

Charlie Noble reporting for duty

The island of Terceira is an incredible environment with obvious active change going on around us constantly. It’s tiny and grand at the same time. It’s completely exposed to the angry winds from the northeast and the protection we get from the southwest is restricted to the shadow cast by a volcano (Pico) about 96km from us. That huge mountain shatters the winds that come over the Atlantic so by the time they get to us here in Praia da Vitoria they’re kicked up with a kind of confused fury. And then there’s the fact that this is an active volcanic zone. Yeah, that means earthquakes sometimes like the 5.6 quake we got the second week of January.

…Bring!

And then it got wet!

The temps have been in the 16-18 degrees Centigrade range, with our most extreme dip so far being 11C (better than 50F). That’s not bad, especially compared to two winters ago in Lynn (the city of sin), Massachusetts, or even Florida’s cold snaps (we got 34F [or 1.1C] in Cocoa Beach one year and one week ago). On the other hand, the air is so thick with the ocean around us that it’s nice to light up the wood stove every now and then just to dry things out.

And, holy-shit, the mold here in the middle of the Earth’s Ocean is feral as fuck! It has been a war of chemistry-vs-evolution aboard Cetacea since we came into the marina and we’re not entirely sure we can win it this time. Better move on before we have no more white flags to fly.

and then the sun comes out and everything’s just fine.

I (Dena) know that the Gulf Stream isn’t far away and that the ocean itself has a steadying influence on weather but damn! Watching storms twirl across the open waters like ballroom dancing done by meth heads gets a little old. The gale season started early and that’s not just our impression…the marina didn’t manage to haul most of the boats that were supposed to come out because you can’t put boats in the slings while it’s gusting to 40 knots.

Early out

And we have seen a lot of that kind of thing. The same way that the polar vortex being weak lets Arctic air sweep south over the continental US, the Azorean high being flighty out here leaves the islands vulnerable to a degree that’s unusual. It’s the climate change prognosis no one wants to hear and some of us can’t stop thinking about: the weakening of well-established systems introduces chaos and while, yes, I can dig me some chaotic generative periods, this is rather impressively unpredictable.

Looking north east at sunset

A recently seen headline trumpeted that the Azores are the Hawaii of the Atlantic. That’s ridiculous on the face of it…Hawaii is at 18 degrees north and the Azores are at 38 degrees north. It would be incredible for them to be too similar. Both volcanic and both active, both with lush growth (at least in some places), sure. But the Azores has a seasonality that roots me in the yearly cycle of change whereas Hawaii seemed like a place that could make you lose track of the passage of time. Seasonality also gives the local folks a break from tourists, something that Hawaiian servers and cashiers and guides and charter captains don’t get access to, which shows in the generally tense and grumpy feeling of the Hawaiian islands.

When it comes down to it, even with the maniacal, unpredictable weather here, I’m happy to be wintering in the Azores. It’s a good place to witness the here and now.

’23

If you’ve been with us through this incredible year, then you know…fucking wow!

We started this calendar year with an unreliable dying diesel engine and more anecdotal evidence of climate change in Vero Beach, Florida, trying to get south to celebrate my (James’) mother’s life. One loop around our local star later, we are in the middle of the Atlantic flow enjoying our winter in the Azores.

We’re learning Portuguese on Dena’s phone, rocking the boat projects, not using the electric motor much but also not having to work on it, and house-sitting with the goat-lawnmower…

Goats are so freaking cool!

But how do you get to here from there?

If there is Vero Beach, and there was, you start with the New Year’s Day breakfast buffet to beat the band. For a couple of Jacksons (NDN killer), it was every damn thing I (Dena) associate with getting what I want for breakfast, right down to eggs Benedict and unlimited oysters on the half shell. The decadence couldn’t continue nonstop, but we’ve done a good job this year of eating inexpensive food aboard so that we can go all in when it really seems worth it.

We did grinding little hops down the ICW for a while because the usual winds weren’t happening for the offshore jumps we’d hoped to make. A broken bridge locked us north of West Palm Beach and we slowly watched our window of opportunity to visit the Bahamas narrow and close.

Instead, we finally got a hard dinghy, a good rowing vessel with a full sailing rig and put our energies into easing toward the Keys while fixing up that poor mistreated boat.

The gaping hole in the bow had kept the price waaaay down in our vicinity.

Tursiops took on Cetacea’s color scheme with pugnacious grace and fit on the bow like they’d been made for one another.

There’s a lower profile position for offshore travel but she looks great like this.

Projects and swimming, making water and tripping, we got down through the Keys to Key West, celebrated the incredible life of my wonderful mother…and then we went sailing!

The choices we’d started enjoying about when and whether to run the infernal combustion engine…meaning never if we could help it…put a new clarity on what was and wasn’t working on the Sovereign Nation named Cetacea. We got rid of the antiquated diesel tech.

Out with the old…

And dedicated our lives to a better way!

My (James’) favorite photo of 2023

We went electric…

…We did that as well!!!

We got rid of that stupid wheel steering system…

Earther Author Dena Hankins, underway

And then we went sailing a whole lot farther!

With the shoot up in the Atlantic Flow

For thirteen days, three hours, and thirty minutes, we wove our way through the massive ships and the looming storm cells and the wildest of life…

Swordfish follower

…to an island country at the very peak of the most notorious part of the the Atlantic section of the world’s ocean: Bermuda.

…by sea!

We sailed there in our electric boat through every kind of weather we could imagine and got a pretty good understanding of some previously unimaginable aspects as well. The world around us cared not at all but we were chuffed.

Bermuda is fascinating and gorgeous, but we couldn’t stay too long.

The expense of Bermuda was draining but the Azorean-Bermudan High refused to stiffen up this year. We waited a few weeks, enjoying the grocery store hot food and walking around as much as felt safe (there aren’t many sidewalks outside of the main town streets), and then cast ourselves into a favorable 10-day forecast for what was almost certain to be at least a 20-day trip.

The seemingly endless sea

And oh boy, was that optimistic!

On day 26, I (James) spotted Pico from 75 nautical miles out. It was a moment of profound illusion. Standing in the companionway, looking at something that took about five minutes to resolve into a mountain in the middle of the ocean, I couldn’t think of any words at all. Twenty-six days of nothing but giant-multiverse-insignificance and then suddenly there was a volcano in the middle of the sea. It was like I didn’t have the words in my vocabulary to say it but… “Holy shit that’s Pico…Land HO MOTHERFUCKERS!”

No, really, that’s real!

Seventy-two hours of beating and then electric-motoring on glass after that first sighting of Pico, we set the hook in Horta Bay on the Island of Faial. Twenty-nine days after setting sail from the island country of Bermuda, we’d reached another island realm, the Autonomous Region of the Azores (Região Autónoma dos Açores), a Portuguese-affiliated archipelago of nine volcanic island and the home waters of some of my (Dena’s) ancestors.

Hook down, Horta!

We spent a fortnight exploring Horta and it was an awesome adventure. We scaled two massive calderas…

Monte de Guia

…and,

Dena’s steps for the day

…And Monte de Queimado!

…what better view?

In one of many odd turns of this year, we took damage in Horta though we didn’t break anything on our two ocean passages. I mean, the gear just worked. It’s not like we took no steps to keep things working…knotting a chafed Monitor line being the most necessary…but please. It’s a wonderful thing to arrive in a distant, foreign port and know that all you need to do is figure out how to get by in a place where you don’t speak the language. Because that’s honestly enough.

James cussed like a…well, you know…trying to get the clamps to settle right on the curved surfaces of the caprail after a mega-twat created havoc in the anchorage.

There’d been a suspicion in the ether aboard Cetacea that the querulous high pressure zone could mean uncertainty throughout the fall and were we ever right. The pilot books use hundreds of years of weather reports to make statements of likelihood. You’d think they were bookies, the way they play the odds into these pretty symbolic shapes called wind roses. As the global climate has adapted to the intensification of the Anthropocene Era, expectations have been wryly loosened and hopes have been sadly, sometimes tragically, dashed.

I (Dena) wanted to see the island my family came from but I also wanted to keep moving. Instead of facing the disappointing but not terrible prospect of an excellent weather window that encouraged us to leave the Azores without exploring other islands, we saw storms after storm bearing across the Atlantic flow at speeds greater than we plan to travel. We don’t run unless we’re being chased, and we don’t set ourselves up in front of storms we’ll need to run from. That’s basic for us.

We didn’t follow the two young women who’d lost their rudder getting to Horta from the Caribbean. They headed into a hard beat because they had to be in the UK for the beginning of their new term at uni. We went to Sao Jorge and spent a few excellent weeks exploring the beauty within easy walking of Velas.

Cetacea at home, at anchor off Velas, Sao Jorge

After our Islay sojourn, a hard southerly was forecasted and Velas was a scoop for those southerly wind-waves that we knew were forthcoming. We decided we needed to get to Praia di Vitoria on Terceria, a better-protected harbor with no anchoring fee, by far the best deal in the central group of the Azores. An 18 hour hop to Angra, a jazz festival, and a skip-jump to Praia put us basically where we are now at the end of 2023.

…inadvertent jazz festival attendance.

Praia’s harbor is larger and more exposed than we’d understood from looking at the charts, guides and reviews. Perhaps we’d have been better prepared for the way the water chops up (intellectually, I mean, the boat was fine), if we’d known that this harbor…yes, inside the harbor…is a well-known surfing spot.

Terceira offers a thrilling abundance of rainbows

Maybe we might not have anchored here…I mean there…STOP!

…Oh, wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey?!

If Terceria weren’t so damn beautiful, if the victuals weren’t so fucking good, we might have lost heart when our dinghy was flipped over by storm-driven rough chop. We lost both oars and, though one showed up on the beach, there’s no living at anchor without a reliable way of getting ashore for provisions. Cetacea, meet Marina Praia di Vitoria.

This spot is supposed to be for checking in but, at this time of year, there aren’t a lot of people passing through.

Due to the kindness of strangers (the one who spread the word and the one who came through with a couple spare little plastic emergency oars), we haven’t been locked to this dock the whole time since. We’ve gone back to anchor when the weather settled a bit or when the south end of the harbor looked more attractive than the north end. The traveling-sized weather windows never materialized, though. So we stayed and met some folks!

Home is where we are!

In Velas, I (Dena) did something I’ve never done before. I sent out a press release about our voyage with the new electric motor to my ancestral home. By the time we settled into the idea of a Praia winter, we had fulfilled a Dena-heavy commission for the boating magazine Practical Boat Owner and been invited to do more technical writing. James has gotten the thrilled attention of Latitude 38, a publication we’ve been reading for more than twenty years, where they are grappling with the question of how to compensate their writers fairly but deeply want his voice and point of view to be published.

…That’s right I found my voice!

As the temps dropped this winter, there’s a comedy to Florida being colder than here in the Atlantic High. Florida’s only upside was the wildlife in bird, fish, and cetacean form, but Praia has given us an octopus neighbor, scatterings of starfish, massive numbers of seabream, salmonete of all sizes, and a natural aquarium every day on the way to the shore-head. Emptying the sink strainer overboard after a rice meal creates a feeding frenzy of fun and we revel in having another year of adventure ahead.

Happy new year to all of our friends and family!

Writing about writing about sailing

I (James) love to say this in conversation: “and all of the sudden we’ve been doing this for twenty-four years!”

Gato incognito…

We’ve crossed two oceans under sail and worked on every one of our boat systems and that kind of makes us a hot commodity in an industry dominated by itself and the petroleum industry.

…Did I say that out loud?

Happy birthday Dena!

I recently got an amazing response from one of my all-time favorite sailing magazines. The publisher found an article I submitted by email in his spam-folder. He read it and kind of flipped out. He told me it was “one of the best things I’ve read in quite some time!” He asked me for a bunch of photos and they printed my story in the centerfold of the December 2023 issue of their magazine.

…just, you know, stuff

The lead editor for the magazine also stroked me hard on my “talent as a writer” and offered me a column in the magazine, then turned right around and mis-edited my article to make me out to be a liar. They never sent me any proofs of the edited piece, they just printed it. They also promised to pay me for my labors and I still haven’t seen any doubloons from those scurvied scoundrels.

The article looks totally awesome in print, it really does. There’s no getting over how cool it is to see your work immortalized on real physical pages. It just fucking rocks! Dena shot a bunch of great pictures of me, I shot a bunch of great pictures of us adventuring and we both look like the modern, totally awesome electric sailors that we are…

But!

…They totally fucked me.

Obviously I don’t want to burn anything in this incredibly small community of ours, so this is me putting down that can of gasoline and letting that bridge stand right where it is… by not naming names.

It’s not even our first rodeo on the bad-publication circuit. We wrote thousands of pages for those waterway assholes, got paid shit, and let go of without even atta-boy from the publisher we never met. It’s just a frustrating reminder that a certain portion of any given population is not going to do the right thing.

Feral

Conversely (thank Poseidon there is an opposite end to the creative side of the sailing industry) the British sailing industry publisher we were invited to write for adequately stroked us, then gave us multiple full-layout proof copies, then paid us, then asked us (weeeeeelll asked Dena) to do a series of how-to-while-underway articles for the next year of our electric-circumnavigation of the Planet Earth.

See, it can be done right!

Flipped lines

I love writing about sailing. I love taking pictures of us doing incredibly brave, totally insane shit and not only living through it but loving it more with each successful adventure. There is nothing we are more qualified to do than to sail around the world and freak out about how cool it is. This is our motherfucking happy place. And I think we’re great at documenting it! Hell’s bells, we should be. We’ve been writing this blog since 2008.

Now, none of these publications who are interested in our work still pay specifically for photography, which I think is tragic and has all but destroyed photojournalism. None of them understand what a great deal they’re getting with our photography. I mean, I shot the freaking Denny’s menu in 1988, the single most stolen menu book in history. I bet more people have seen my work than anything Banksy’s ever done and my industry doesn’t even pay for my art anymore.

Anyway, they’re all getting a great deal with our work: words and images.

The streets of Angra

We sail we swim, we hike we bike, we climb we explore this incredible planet of ours and we’re writing and taking pictures of it all. Now that the industry has pricked up its ears to our particular perspective of sailing around the world one wave, one cloud, one sea, one project at a time, well, it looks like we’re finally going to have our say.

Another winter in paradise

We have sailed the ocean blue and found a place of ancient familial connections. We put that hook down and laughed at the effort.

anchored on the North end of Praia da Vitoria

When you first show up to a place, newness is pretty much the dominating feeling.

Cabo da Praia (the south end of the harbor, where the fishers dock and industrial shipping happens) from Praia da Vitoria

The way the autumn light reflects off the particular stone making up the streets (not Fells Point serpentine, something volcanic?), the mysteriously timed bells that chime from the cat-licker buildings, the grudging smiles transforming the (is it just me or is it) ubiquitous resting-bitch-faces, and the way the non-sailors everywhere look at us and pass that very local version of judgment. It feels as if life starts anew every day and then again the next and the next one after.

Shadows of autumn

Then one day it all looks so familiar. All of a sudden, we’ve been here in the Azores for a nice long time.

At the pro-docks

We do our epic-walks and our projects and the weather descends upon us like the winter that could give-a-shit about our mortality…like it always does.

Refills

When anchored, we snuggle down south in southerlies. Shore access at the fishing docks fouls our shoes a bit but convenience and a whole lot of being ignored make us grateful. There’s a bad grocery store and an excellent restaurant.

At the northern end, we’re either anchored off the beach or in the marina. Storms spin across the planet and our safe zone shifts as they pass over. The fetch can be brutal, so retreating behind the breakwater has been a prudent move more than once. The marina is also our dinghy dock and we can use the bathrooms and showers and laundry whether we’re paying for a slip or not. Ultimately, the cyclonic reality of seasonal weather inspires us to descend upon another marina in Winter.

Not plugged in, not running a generator. We still haven’t burned fossil fuels for a single watt since April 23rd, 2023, when we grabbed the mooring in Marathon for the electric motor conversion…and we were floating on both banks before we ran that diesel for the last time, so I’m not sure that should even count! Today, 7 months and 16 days later, we’re docked and making water off our 1800 kw wind and solar system. We’ve got this.

That’s right we live here…

We love being at anchor… we love being underway with all of our powers…wind, electrical, emotional, et-cet and all that…but most of all we love this life with each other, ourselves and the gato…

…so special!

…et al!

…our octopus neighbor.

This! This world! We live here.

27 years of joy together, yesterday

James and I met in Seattle, Washington, in 1996. We’ve been together ever since and we continue to establish how well matched we are. Some of the stories are told in previous years’ blogs, so why reiterate when I can link back? But…

The way I (Dena) was attracted to James in the beginning was a solid foundation for where we’ve come together. Smart, focused iconoclast with a strong fuck-it tendency and a stronger give-a-shit? Sign me up. Here we are, that much closer year by year to our best selves in great part because James and I work together. My ethical bright lines and James’ energy for getting to the right side of history; James’ deep and thorough musical knowledge and appreciation and my scattered and strong tastes; my hunger for his presence, his body and James’…

And Dena, the person on this planet I (James) love the most! Her clarity, her passion, her hunger for adventure. Her willingness to learn and experience everything as it comes makes and keeps me the person I have always wanted to be. Her joy, intelligence and presence are my inspirations and have been for almost three decades now!

…And then there’s the music we created together. Not just the harmonies of the bodies and the swells of our emotions but the actual notes from things that inspired us. We bought a digital recording studio on the Big Island of Hawaii at a garage sale for a few bucks (that we could have bought some food with…talk about poor in paradise, word!), we taped the lyrics we loved to the cinder brick walls and marine-grade plywood bulkheads and wrote a bunch of songs around those words, then we made up some more words and adopted those that Dena’s dad had been writing and added more music to those inspirations and put up some songs online for the world to hear. They, the world have…still are… When you put yourself out there, sometimes they hear, sometimes they don’t , sometimes they do. Can you?

The years…wow 27 of them with her and I all in a row. We met, we got those “Expensive Dreams” (have we told you this story? it’s ridiculously funny), we made them our own, and then we went sailing…

and 10th anniversary sailing… and herding… and sight-seeing… and selfeeing… and bussing… and healing… and hanging… …and biking And dinghy sailing… Straight out of India (the first time) partying… in the shadows… more dinghy sailing… in the woods… got ready to go sailing… and Tinker sailing… And lived through Boston in a blizzard… And Isle au Haut climbing… And Chesapeake Bay sailing… And getting excited about each other yet again… And hoofing it around Akkulam Lake… And changing our lives in India… And partying in Bengaluru…like you do… And anchored for Thanksgiving in a blizzard… And wintering… And anchoring… And hanging in the city… And sailing… And hauling out… and bike riding to Varkala from Akkulam… and museum hopping in south India… and night time biking on Akkulam Lake bridge, New Year’s Eve 2019-2020 and biking just shoreward of Thumba, where they launch Indian satellites… and on the road to Kovalam… and bar hopping in Travandrum… and giant egg viewing in Kansas… and outdoor isolating… and hauling in… and shoulder season anchoring… and grocery shopping… and lovesailing and sailing… and sailing… and sailing… and sailing… and sailing… and sailing…

We discovered each other along the way, then that way, and this way.

And warming up after a long winter… and building an electric sailboat…

We discovered another way to do the things without cars and trucks, then without engines of any kind, but always together. Discovering each other first.

and head shaving in the Atlantic…

Now on October 25th, 2023, 27 years into each other, we rediscover a world under sail, under us, under our terms together.

and eating well in Bermuda…

So once again…

We hereby declare the promises we have made one another.  We invite you all to witness and take part in this celebration of our love.

We promise to work at loving each other.

We promise to take care of each other when we need it, to leave each other alone when we need it, and to ask when we do not know which is needed.

We promise to communicate our needs to the best of our abilities.

We promise to remember that we are individuals.

We promise to weigh each other’s wishes before making decisions concerning each other.

We promise to try to know each other to the fullest extent possible in each phase of growth and change.

We promise to keep these promises fresh and relevant and to keep our love young and new.

That was us, October 25, 1998

This is us now…

A windy, rainy day spent working on this, looking at the photos of our lives together, was a perfect way to spend our anniversary. We walked through the rain to sushi and red wine and then walked home so very deeply connected.

I (Dena) love James.

I (James) love Dena.

Un-still life in Praia da Vitoria

Autumn in the Azores is a fantastical experience!

At the end of the breakwater

The weather is the rockstar and you are only there to watch and survive if you can.

Our last post glossed over something we hoped wouldn’t be a big deal. When we anchored and went ashore on day one, right after the sail from Angra, the weather was already starting to get a bit overwhelming. As I (James) was getting in the dinghy, I got a gust that blew me hard into the portside solar panel corner and cracked another rib on my body…my 8th as an adult and, believe me, this one really hurt! I’ve done this enough to know that the first day is actually the best for the pain so we continued with our plans and I rowed us in to the marina. We checked in with officialdom and walked up the hill to the grocery store for a much-needed provisioning run. We were back on the boat less than an hour after making landfall.

Double rainbow off the bow

Two days later, we rowed back to the marina from across the bay (about a nautical mile each way), which proved that we hadn’t been doing that kind of rowing for a while. Even the downwind row to the marina kicked my (James’) ass but then again, I do have a broken rib.

Rowing like it doesn’t hurt

Dena rowed back against the wind and the fetch and it was kind of a huge deal. But she rocks like that and made it look easy.

Really, I (Dena) just kept on keeping on. I’m pretty good at the endurance game when I’m not wearing the wrong (i.e. knitted) gloves.

Captain Dena and her boats

The gales roll through like trains every other day or so, meaning one day you’re in paradise and the next you’re in Dante’s seventh circle with the hounds of hell howling through the rigging. We slept well through one storm on the south end of the bay on 60m of chain, pulled up the hook, and e-motored back over to the north side for the next few days of perfection.

The kids are alright.

A few nights ago, our weather apps flat out lied to us, revising the forecasts hours after they were being proved wrong. We got our asses handed to us by the wind and waves on the wrong side of the bay. A gale that started off from the south and clocked around to the north throughout a day and a night hit us hard from every direction. It filled the dinghy to the gunwales then flipped her over and we lost our oars in the struggle to right the boat in the storm.

Tied up, and not in the fun way.

So what did we do? Without oars, we were forced to dock Cetacea in the marina while we went on the Great Oar Hunt. One had washed onto the beach and was leaning jauntily alongside the (closed for the season) snack bar. The other? Good question.

We blew past the Portuguese language signs that were clearly telling us we weren’t allowed inside to inspect the rocks along the waste-water treatment plant…which smelled quite a bit better than the one in Portland, Maine…and then backtracked and followed the waterline all the way past where we’d anchored on the south end of the bay.

The fishing harbor isn’t filled with boats like this, but this isn’t the only one of its type.

Down to the fishing harbor and around the sheds and garbage areas we went, but it was all for naught. A little achy (too much time spent on board to keep the legs hardened), we stopped for pizza with azeitones and cogumelos, our usual. The unusual is that vinho de casa, tinta, is so ordinary and inexpensive an option that we have begun drinking red wine with meals. Surprise, surprise!

Terceira is winning my (Dena’s) heart partly because of how it cares for its cat population.

Heading back didn’t give us any new insight into where our second oar was, but it was a beautiful day and we were glad not to be anchored at the south end where folks were surfing.

The south breakwater behind the mole

As we worked on sourcing a replacement, it dawned on us that we might have to make one. The last couple beautiful days haven’t tortured us any but today’s rains dissuaded us from the several-kilometer walk to get raw lumber we’re going to want to epoxy-laminate.

Rock art is pretty cool

We’ve long been shoulder-season sailors and so changeable weather is no big shock. As we get the rhythm of this part of the World Ocean, we’re starting to think that we’ll wait out the worst of the October gales and then head toward Madeira to get south of the marching lows. From there, the Moroccan coast is less than a week’s good weather away.

Sunset over Praia da Vitoria

Meanwhile, there’s a lot to enjoy here and a big anniversary coming up next week. We’ll get some sightseeing in, do some projects, make sure we’re ready when our weather window flies open and we sail away like we do.

An overnight to another world

We set sail away from São Jorge in the early morning hours, ahead of the catamoron that rolled out backwards to set a main that they didn’t even use to blast ahead of us to Ilha Terceira. We sailed and sailed like we do to a place we’d never been.

Dena sailing away from that home

Again the sailing was spectacular in ways that can not be understood by people who have never done this. There aren’t enough expletives, only images that can only be captured in the light of the sun.

The waterfalls of São Jorge

The sailing…was sailing… We gybed to a port tack about 45 minutes out of Velas and used that tack all the way into the open Atlantic flow and still didn’t have to gybe or tack, we just adjusted the sails for the wind and loved our planet the way you do.

São Jorge abaft

As the local star descended the horizon, Pico winked one last time from the stern of S/V SN-E Cetacea.

Pico’s wink

The open Atlantic welcomed us with a darkness that would not allow a moment of laxity. The local fishers don’t always adhere to norms of lighting, so the radar was a guide of sorts. Like all technology, it lied like a rug!

We swapped watches all through the night and watched as the traffic came and went. Somehow we all ultimately missed each other.

We made it…we’re the tiny dot just left of center

This wasn’t going to be an extended stay. The anchorage is open to the south and we had some bad southerlies coming, but it was impossible to resist getting a look at the town.

A waterfront water feature

And a very good lunch that started with the bread and cheese board.

Vinho da casa and Azorean cheeses

…at the fort that’s been turned into a hotel.

The Fort hotel…WTAFO?!

Like any good one night stand, it ended almost before it began. A jazz festival in the marina serenaded us on a night too rough to row back in, but we didn’t make it ashore again before heading to the east end of Terceira.

Ilheus das Cabras or rather ‘The Lungs’ from offshore

Praia da Vitoria is a mile-long harbor behind two long breakwaters. We anchored at the north end long enough to check in with the local officials and get some groceries, and then we tucked on down in the south end for yesterday’s and last night’s gales.

Now we’re chilling between go-rounds. Tomorrow won’t be nearly as bad, but still isn’t the kind of day where you want to increase the fetch and cope with big chop. We’ll go back north after that and get into provisioning for our next passage to mainland Europe.

Ancestral Azores

We woke up early to sail from Faial to São Jorge because we had no idea what it would take to get that hook off the bottom.

Horta’s treasure! An old carpet, a few hooks, and a ton of leader-line

It was a good thing too! We’d been warned by the guides that there was shit to pick up, but the most dramatic stories involved chain and home-welded grapnel anchors. It didn’t take Dena much longer to weigh anchor, she just got a whole lot of funky garbage up with the chain this time.

We’d been in Horta for what seemed like a really long time. I (James) don’t mean years, I mean weeks. After the 29 days crossing from Bermuda to the Azores, any time spent in any one place seemed like a very long time.

…another writing day

We did everything we wanted to do in Horta, like hiking, writing, provisioning, and repairs, so the next obvious thing was to sail away.

Sailing away from Faial

We had another incredible adventure between the islands of Faial and São Jorge! It was only 22 nautical miles but we were on a hard beat in 15 to 20 knots of wind with a double-reefed main and the staysail for about six hours. Finally, we were able to veer off to a close reach and take that all the way into the protected harbor of Velas.

The town of Velas from the Canal do São Jorge, between Ilha do Pico and São Jorge

S/V SN-E Cetacea performed like a dream and we had the hook down long before the day was done.

Captain Dena Hankins at home, anchored off Ilha do São Jorge

This was the big one, folks! We’ve been pointing the boat at the Azores and specifically São Jorge for about a decade now so, when we sailed into this harbor, we had some emotional gravity in our wake. Dena’s maternal family came from São Jorge by ship in the early 20th century then crossed the North American continent by thumb and train to the Central Valley of California. She grew up hearing about the epic adventure so seeing the ghostly island of São Jorge from Faial was almost excruciating for her from across the canal.

Getting into the harbor at Velas completed a goal I (Dena) have had since James introduced me to the very idea of sailing back in Seattle circa 1998. We have been on a few boats since then and on many bodies of water, but it completes a cycle to have sailed our electric vessel across the Atlantic flow of the world ocean to these tiny islands in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Our Pico

We took in the town from the harbor for a few days. We’d arrived to late to check in on Friday, but a few days at anchor in a protected spot is a good time.

The sun both sets and rises behind volcanic hills.

We had plenty of food. The harbor is wide open and good for making water.

The freighter Sao Jorge in Sao Jorge

Then there’s the self-reflective shot we can’t get without leaving the boat. We’ve gotten…I don’t know…hundreds of pictures, easily, of our boats looking gorgeous in amazing places. This, though, is one for the ages. Right up there with S/V Sovereign Nation in the anchorage off Doe Bay, Orcas Island, WA.

The cliffs are home to Corey’s Shearwaters and other loud-ass birds.

Our first walk was modest and took us to the top of the marina wall. I (Dena) am always thrilled at how James sees me but, I have to admit with no false modesty, I felt just as epic and heroic and on top of the world as I look in this shot.

…she is at home

This life is huge. We throw ourselves into the world and move along with its energies. We put up fabric and ride the wind; we put up solar panels and ride the sun. We do all this and more because we’re drawn to the questions and the answers, the states of uncertainty and the moments when we actually know something. Anything. Real.

And then we do laundry.

…and laugh!