The dream vs. reality or only the tough survive

Irene a-coming

Okay, I admit it.  I shed real tears yesterday. Yes, I was the wimpy, blubbering girl who decided I didn't want to be tough anymore.  I'd had it with this *&%$#^ boat and everything breaking and the incessant rain from tropical systems and the fact that I wasn't getting anywhere near the writing done that I had hoped.

But let me back up.  Back to the title of this blog.  The dream.  "So you want to quit your job, move on a boat and write."

Are you sure about that?

Let me inject a little reality here.  The whole boat thing is not just sipping rum cocktails on the afterdeck as the sun slips into the west and you are waiting to see if you can see the green flash and finding your muse in the natural beauty of your surroundings.

Sometimes the boat demands all your attention because things are breaking faster than you can fix them and the situation becomes overwhelming.  Yeah, they don't usually write about that in the boating magazines, but anybody who has cruised or lived aboard for any length of time is probably nodding his or her head about now saying yeah, that's about right.

So here's my story.  About two weeks ago when I was in Solomons, I got up in the morning planning to leave and found my bilge full of oil.  I had blown the main oil gasket around the timing case and had to get a mechanic to replace it.  It wasn't something I could do on my own.  At $100/hr. plus parts it was nearly a $1000 repair.  A friend of mine refers to boat yard repairs as boat units and they equal one grand.  He estimated that my problem was one boat unit and he wasn't far off.  How I wish I had majored in diesel engine repair instead of English lit.

So, I left Solomons trying to head up Chesapeake Bay to get ahead of Hurricane Irene and I found myself running up the bay with 25-30 knots of wind behind me and without an autopilot, it was an exhausting sail.  I made it to the South River and when I attempted a controlled gybe to enter the South River, the windward block on my mainsheet traveler exploded. I made it in to a safe anchorage for the night, but it meant that my main was then out of commission.

Before

After

The next day, I made it around the point into the Severn River and eventually up to an anchorage to ride out the storm, but when I attempted to lower my jib, the halyard jammed.  I got the sail down after a friend hoisted me up in the bosun's chair and I released the shackle at the head of the sail.  However, for the future, my jib was out of commission.

Then, while waiting for the hurricane, I noticed that my alternator wasn't charging (probably as a result of that repair in Solomons), so I shut down my fridge which is the main user of electricity.  My solar panels and wind generator do fine to keep the batteries fully charged if the fridge isn't running.

And if this story isn't complicated enough, right after Hurricane Irene left the area, I had to catch a plane to fly to New Orleans to attend a writer's conference called Writers for New Orleans that I had booked back in March.  I left my boat anchored in Weems Creek and flew out of BWI.  Of course, that meant that I got to hunker down in New Orleans for Tropical Storm Lee, my second named storm in a week.  I stayed in the Hotel Monteleone and while I'll admit that I did party on Bourbon Street in the rain until 3:30 a.m. on Friday night, I hunkered down on Saturday listening to the flash flood warnings on my iPad.

My panel at this conference was about "Re-energizing and Re-juvenating a Writing Career."  I was very honest in stating where my career was and what I intended to do.  Everyone agreed that in the would of writing today, you had to have a thick skin.

I wanted to say, "Puleeze. You think it takes guts to write a book or two?  Try single handing a sailboat through a hurricane or figuring out how to keep a 20+ year old boat running!"

When I flew back into Baltimore and returned to the boat, I tried to start up my fridge and discovered that it now didn't work.  Okay, no mainsail, no jib, no ability to charge my batteries, no fridge, and I found that my engine hours meter (my only way to judge my fuel usage since I have no fuel gauge) wasn't working — and that , too, was probably related to that boat unit that I spent in Solomons.

And since my return here, it has been raining non-stop.  I am now getting whacked by TS Lee's remnants – which is the second time for me.  The rain just won't quit.

I had planned to accompany another boat to a different anchorage and it was blowing 20 knots and I balked.  I said I wasn't going out into the bay because I just couldn't take one more thing breaking on this boat.  That was when I broke into tears.  There were two things I needed to do at the moment — fix my boat and get my writing out there earning money.  It just didn't make sense for me to take off and break something else.

So here's my current situation:  tomorrow morning, I'm headed for a marina to have a refrigeration guy take a look at my fridge.  I've contacted George McCreary at Caliber, and he is  contacting Lewmar to see if he can find the parts to repair my 1989 vintage mainsheet traveler. I've phoned the yard in Solomons to try to figure out what they did when repairing my oil gasket that might have knocked out my alternator and engine hours meter.  In the marina, I'll get someone to hoist me up to mast and I'll free up my job halyard. One way or another, I'll get all this put right and still manage to get some writing done.

That's what I do.

So, are you sure you want to quit your job, move onto a boat and write?

Crazy as this may sound, I don't have one smidgeon of doubt.  I love this life.

 

Fair winds!

Christine

 

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