Aboard No Boundaries
June 10, 09
Planning is one of my best things. I have been a planner for as long as I can remember. I make lists, put notes on calendars, estimate time to goal, and measure my progress. Even though I am retired and cruising, I can’t help myself. Before I start my day, I always go over my lists – little tasks that need doing, projects I want to work on, meal plans. I am constantly revising and editing my plans to accommodate our cruise plans. Some people think I just can’t let go of being a consultant, but the real explanation is that much of my success as a consultant was the result of this quirk of my personality.
Planning is a good life skill, I think. Because I plan, I accomplish some things that would be ignored or forgotten otherwise. Maybe those things don’t matter to other people, but they matter to me. It makes me very happy to cross something off today’s list. It makes me happy to see that I am more than half done with a project. It is exciting to think during the day about my meal plans and how I can make the meals more flavorful or colorful or whatever.
However, as good and valuable as planning is, sometimes flexibility is the better skill. Every once in a while, reality throws a party that simply blows away all the prior planning in the world. When reality slaps you in the face, whining, “but I had a plan” will not help.
Last night, reality slapped us in the face with a summer thunderstorm. We cruised from the Tidewater Marine Service Center in Port Covington about 11AM bound for Lankford Creek on the Eastern Shore. We had heard that there might be some thunderstorms late in the day, but none of the weather reports we heard referenced that area.
Just as we were circling the eastern branch of the creek, around 5PM, looking for a place to anchor, we heard a weather alarm that alarmed us. The Weather Service was reporting an imminent storm in the tidal Potomac with torrential downpours, potential for winds at 60 mph, and even hail. It was traveling up a track from the southeast. Such a track was like an arrow pointing right at us. We had to plan for the extreme likelihood that this storm would soon engulf us.
We already knew that the East Fork is a poor place to be in a big blow. On a memorable evening several years ago, we spent hours circling in the East Fork trying to find a place where the anchor would hold. In the middle of the night we gave up and picked our way through the narrow channel to the West Fork, where we also never found good holding. To hear that such winds might be in our near future in this location was extremely disconcerting.
We had the advantage this time of making our trip to the West Fork, on the other side of Cacaway Island, in daylight. Yet, as we rounded the tip of the island, hoping to find a little shelter there, we could see the clouds building up east and southeast of us. They became huge. There were the soft bulbous undersides that spawn tornadoes. Some of the formations we could see showed us tumultuous downdrafts and chaotic activity. We began to see lightning.
We made a circle around the available space for anchoring. Another sailboat was already anchored almost in the middle of the channel behind the island, leaving us plenty of room to anchor closer in. We set the anchor as the rain began to fall, and then the storm exploded. Our anchor was set as well as we could manage in the location, but it could not hold against the fury that had us in its power. The storm commenced about 6PM.
On the previous occasion when we were beset by a storm in the East Fork, the wind blew furiously from one direction for hours. It was easy to see when the anchor dragged as the bow turned away from the wind and the beam of the boat became like a sail that the wind used to push us where it would. It was, therefore, easy to figure out where we needed to find shelter in order to get some relief from the wind. Knowing what we needed did not, however, automatically produce what we needed. It was a memorable 36 hours.
This new storm, on the other hand, blew in all directions. It whirled around us, and it whirled us around. Ferocious gusts heeled us over as if we were sailing in a high wind, even though we did not have any sail deployed. It was an amazing sight to see the waves change direction so rapidly that we might have been in a huge mixing bowl. At one point, we realized that we were being dragged very close to the other boat in the cove, so Larry drove into the wind and avoided a collision. Some time after 7PM the wind fell below 10 knots and the rain subsided.
We had kept the engine running and the radio tuned to the weather station throughout. Originally, the storm was projected to end about 7:30, so we thought we might be able to reset the anchor and relax, but it was not to be. First, the weather announcers changed the projection of the storm to run through 9PM, and second, we soon discovered for ourselves that the lull was only temporary. We did reset the anchor, but that work was hardly done before the wind slammed into us again.
Again we were dragged this way and that. At one point we could see that we were being pushed very close to the island, where we would be in danger of grounding. At another point, we were pushed away from the island, whirled and tilted and shaken thoroughly. Whenever possible, Larry steered the boat where he thought we would be safest, but things changed so rapidly that it was almost impossible to guess where to point the boat or to put the pressure. We briefly grounded near the island, but the bottom is silt, the real reason it is so hard to get the anchor to hold, and another gust shook us loose. Finally the wind died down, the rain stopped, and we began to see small openings between clouds. The sun was setting in a fierce red glow, turning the storm clouds into innocent-looking little cherubs.
After 9PM, the rest of the evening was predicted to be relatively calm. Winds were not projected to exceed 15 knots. We observed that the wind fluctuated between 5 and 15 knots, but we were no longer dragging. We had survived the assault and were little the worse for wear, except for complete exhaustion.
Of course, like always, I had a meal planned for this evening. I had thought we could dine on deck and watch the sun set. Needless to say, reality swept away that plan completely. Somewhere around 8PM when things were beginning to calm a bit, I thought I might make something to eat. We finally settled for some chicken salad and cottage cheese in the cockpit still watching the radar to see if more storms were coming our way, still watching in every direction, trying to be sure that the boat was still at anchor, not dragging again. All the planning in the world was irrelevant right then. The only plan that mattered was to continue to pay attention and be ready to do what it took to save the boat and ourselves.
I like being a planner. It gives my life order and direction. I am not happy without a plan. Cruising, however, teaches me that planning is only good when predictable conditions continue. When the unpredictable, the unexpected, the unwanted, overpowers your plans, it is time to flex. It is time to use God’s precious gifts of intelligence, courage and faith to get through the storm.
June 9, 2009
All the wise planning in the world will not prevent the regular need to shop for groceries. I suppose we could live on survival rations and buy a year’s supply at a time, but where would be the fun, not to mention the flavor, in that? It is fairly easy to buy fresh meat and produce for about two weeks, but that is very close to the outer limit of both refrigerator space and the life of fresh produce. Meat can last quite a while if frozen, but our marine refrigerator does not reliably freeze things. We try to manage to keep it just at, but not past, the point where things would freeze, and that gives us two weeks or thereabouts with fresh meat.
Eventually the day comes that we have eaten everything in sight and it is time to go shopping. Yesterday was our first shopping day as cruisers. By the time it was over we discovered that we had planned pretty well, but we learned a few new tricks.
In strange places, the first challenge is to discover where the grocery stores are. Cruise guides often include notes that groceries are conveniently near one marina or another, but one still must flesh out that information. For our first go, however, we used information we already had, but for the first time we used it starting at anchor. We had gone into Baltimore on Sunday evening in order to use the Port Networks wifi, but that experiment proved to be a disaster. Nothing worked. However, we anchored in sight of a big Safeway store where we have shopped for years, and that was a good thing.
Come Monday morning, yesterday, we got ready to shop. We started by getting out our shore-shopping backpacks. Each of us has one, and each backpack is stuffed with two big tote bags. Not knowing with certainty how things would go, never having done this before, I dragged out another big tote bag to add to the supply. Into the backpack went my billfold, my shopping list, a pen and some extra index cards. My shopping list always represents some specific meal plans, but in case I find something more appealing than my plan, I use the index cards to record my revised meal plans.
This would be the first time to leave our boathome at anchor in a metropolitan area with nobody aboard. We were a little bit paranoid. We locked up everything, then remembered that we needed something, unlocked, rummaged, and locked up again. Finally, we were ready.
We let down the boarding ladder on the aft deck and pulled the dinghy around. We are still learning this drill, but each time we do it, it is easer. Larry got in first, I handed the bags down to him, and then I boarded. For the short jaunt to the dinghy dock, we didn’t bother with the motor. Larry rowed. He is getting to be pretty good at it!
If boarding the dinghy from the boat is a challenge, debarking from the dinghy at a strange dock is moreso. However, I eventually managed that trick. While I held the dinghy’s painter, Larry ran a cable through the dock structure and locked down the dinghy. Many is the dinghy, both with and without outboard motor, that has disappeared while cruisers shopped or dined out. We knew we could not swim back with our groceries, even though the boat was in clear view from the dock.
As I shopped, the grocery cart grew heavier and heavier. We looked the situation over and worried that we needed to buy more than we could carry back at one trip. We decided to stop without the meat or dairy items. We paid the bill and packed our bags. We were amazed that about $100 worth of produce and assorted other things fit easily into our prepared bags, with bags left over. We walked back to the dinghy dock, just across the street and down a little path.
The next challenge was to get the groceries back to the boat without losing anything in the water. We passed the bags carefully into the dinghy and rowed out to the boat. Holding that dinghy reasonably still and passing the bags up the ladder to the deck is not rocket science, but it does take coordination.
Of course, after lunch, we had to go back to the store and get the rest of our groceries. This time we were familiar with the drill, so it wasn’t such a big deal. It just takes patience and careful handling.
Along the way, we stopped at Starbucks for an iced coffee and a couple of internet hours. I barely got all my uploads and updates done in that amount of time. We probably should have gone there on Sunday night and returned on Monday for another two hours. After all these years of internet on demand 24 hours a day, I have a lot of things I want to do, and I didn’t get all of them done on this trip. This, too, is a learning experience.
Now we are provisioned for two weeks. We ate dinner on the aft deck and watched the sun go down. Tomorrow is a new adventure. What? Where? We will find it out when it happens.
Ship’s Log
No Boundaries
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Some people will think this post is boring. Pass it by and move on if you like. However, this post is for everyone who ever asked me, “How do you eat?” It happens just as soon as they realize we live on a boat. A person whose only image of a boat is a runabout or a bass boat might well ask that question. This post is a listing of our meals for a week. If you think we are camping out or living on canned tuna, this entry should be reassuring.
To list what we eat for a week may be more information than some people want. I well remember an ancient radio program on which one announcer read the hospital menus for her ten-day hospital stay after emergency surgery during a trip to Phoenix. Most people don’t love their hospital meals very much, but this lady loved hers. She loved them so much that she told us all the possible choices for each day before she told us what she actually chose. Bless her for making over the food service staff in a hospital. They probably still wish she would come back and be a patient again.
I won’t bore you with all our choices. I think a week of menus should suffice to reassure anyone who fears we won’t be well fed, and a few curious cooks will enjoy a look into our galley. These are the meals for our first week afloat, out of Baltimore, out of town. There is no running to the grocery store for some forgotten item; it must all be aboard, or it doesn’t happen.
Saturday
Breakfast
Hotcakes with fresh sliced strawberries for the topping
Bacon
Lunch
Cheese sandwich with tomato slices
Dill pickle spears
Fresh Rainier cherries
Dinner
Baked chicken selected pieces
Steamed broccoli
Fried potatoes with onions
Hot slaw (you can find this recipe on the website www.lkharms.com )
Sunday
Breakfast
Hotcakes with maple syrup
Bacon
Lunch
Salmon salad
Apple quarters
Ritz crackers
Dinner
Italian Sausage
Braised Fennel
Penne with red sauce
Sliced tomato with Italian dressing and sprinkled with toasted pine nuts
Monday
Breakfast
Special K Red Berries with milk
Lunch
Salmon salad sandwiches
Radishes
Dinner
Marinated Sirloin on iron griddle (too windy for grilling)
Oven-fried Russet potato
Jamaican Kale
Slaw
Friendship cherries
Tuesday
Breakfast
Oatmeal with apricots and almonds
Lunch
Leftover chicken legs, potatoes and hot slaw
Pasta salad made with leftover pasta
Peach Crisp
Dinner
Pork Tenderloin slices with Cajun seasoning
Rice
Cajun Zucchini (onion, tomato, spice)
Slaw
Peach Crisp
Wednesday
Breakfast
Special K Red Berries with milk
Bananas
Lunch
Sandwiches made of leftover sirloin from Monday
Dill Pickle spears
Dinner
Caribbean Lemon Chicken
Eggplant browned on griddle
Steamed broccoli/cauliflower/carrot mixture
Salad with golden raisins and honey-mustard dressing
Thursday
Breakfast
Bran muffins
Banana
Lunch
Sandwiches with leftover pork tenderloin
Leftover slaw
Leftover green beans
Dinner
Split Pea Soup with chunky ham and carrots
Apple Salad
Corn Bread
Friday
Breakfast
Boiled eggs
Toasted Corn Bread Splits
Lunch
Leftover Split Pea Soup
Leftover Corn Bread
Leftover apple salad
Dinner
Homemade Pizza
Salad with Italian dressing
So this is a week of food afloat. I hope folks feel better about us now. We eat a fairly civilized diet, and we enjoy interesting flavor. Can’t wait to get to the islands and learn some new tricks.
Ship’s Log
No Boundaries
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
What’s the Price?
Every householder knows the cost of running a home. The water bill. The electric bill. The phone bill. The internet bill. Nothing is free.
We have similar problems aboard a cruising sailboat, but they look a bit different.
For example, if you live in a house on a lot in a Baltimore suburb, when you decide to wash your hair, you go to the shower, fiddle with the water until it is the right temperature, and then let the water sluice over you. You wash head to toe with soap or body wash. You drown your hair in water and then continue to enjoy the lovely feeling of that falling water as you massage the shampoo to a lovely foamy suds. You rinse and repeat, all the while letting your personal waterfall carry all your troubles away. In the back of your mind, you may remember a few public recommendations that you take shorter showers, so you may work a little faster, but you probably never turn off the water until you have finished.
Aboard a boat, when you decide that you want to wash your hair, an accounting must be done. The same kind of accounting applies to almost any activity that uses water or energy or both. Hot water, for example, can hit all the issues.
On our boat, we have 4 water tanks that hold a total of 240 gallons when full. Experience teaches us that we can expect to use that 240 gallons in two weeks if we don’t do anything special to manage our usage when we are in a marina where we can shower without using water in our tanks. Washing hair involves at least two applications of shampoo and then a complete rinse. To achieve cleanliness and in order to rinse out all the shampoo, absolutely essential, we must use several gallons of fresh water. Neither of us has yet reached a comfort level with washing in salt water, and most people would agree with us. When we are out and about, at anchor in a lovely little cove, we need to use our resources wisely and efficiently in order to spend more time in lovely coves than in marinas.
Washing my hair requires plenty of fresh water. Fresh water comes from some source on land or can be acquired by running our watermaker which desalinates sea water. If we get water from land, for example we might be able to get water at a fuel dock if we buy fuel, then we must be sure that we do not run out of water before we have a chance to get more. Dirty hair is a trivial complaint compared to dying of thirst. Our 240 gallons seems like a lot until you remember that we cook, wash dishes, wash hands, wash our bodies, wash our hair, wash our clothes and so forth all with fresh water. Hmmm. Gotta be careful. Imagine that you had to live on 12 gallons a day, and that your supply had to last 20 days. You want to be able to eat and cook and wash your hands and your body. How often would you wash your hair?
And this is only the water account. Don’t forget that I want to wash my hair with hot water. Hot. We have a hot water heater on our boat. I can have hot water when I wash dishes and when I wash my hands, or my body, or my hair. However, that water is not free and the hot is not free.
First, the six gallons of water in that water heater (you read right – six gallons!) is a deduction from the total amount of water available to us. If it is in the hot water tank, it isn’t in the tank for drinking water. To be sure, when I mix hot and cold to a comfortable level, I use from the total 240 gallons available at the most, but I don’t have a forty-gallon hot water tank. I have six gallons. I could use up my whole six gallons in a leisurely shower.
Second, the water becomes hot by means of an electric heating element. In order to warm up the hot water, we must use AC electricity. And where does that electricity come from? Not from BGE. If we have electricity, we make it. We can run the diesel auxiliary engine or we can run our generator to charge the batteries. Batteries produce DC current, so we must run the inverter to obtain AC. Either the engine or the generator uses diesel fuel, so hot water ultimately is a charge against our fuel account. Those tanks have a limit, too.
Furthermore, running the inverter to convert DC power to AC power as required by the hot water heater results in a small loss of the total DC power in. The inverter gets hot, an energy loss that does nothing for us. For that matter, when operating, the engine and the generator throw off worthless heat also.
Oh, I do have another option. I could heat the water on the stove in a large kettle. Well, I still use water, and I add the use of propane. We have two fifteen pound tanks of propane that will in total last about two months. Two months, that is, if we do not use propane to heat the water for bathing and washing. Hmmm.
There is an energy price for charging the batteries. There is an energy price for converting DC to AC. There is a water price to fill the water heater, and there is an energy price to warm it up. Or there is a water price to fill a kettle and a propane price to heat it up. There is a water price for the cool water to mix with the hot water for washing my hair.
Whether I wash my hair or my hands, whether I cook pasta or green beans, there is a price to pay. The trick is to balance it all and still relax and enjoy life.
Which we do. This life has its challenges, but it has wonderful rewards. Another day we will share more of the rewards.
Ship’s Log
No Boundaries
June 1, 2009
We almost have Baltimore washed off our boat. It isn’t easy. Baltimore has been a wonderful home for almost eight years, but it has its drawbacks. For as long as we lived there, we battled with the black guck that falls out of the sky. Most people blame the unsightly muck on Domino Sugar. No matter where it comes from, it leaves a mess on the surface of a boat that is very hard to remove. Last year I learned that magic erasers do the trick, but it takes a couple of dozen of them to finish the job. We bought them through eBay, a hundred at a time, because the volume required would otherwise break the bank even at Wal-mart prices.
We enjoyed worship on the aft deck yesterday. When we are anchored out like this, we don’t have any easy way to get to church. Instead, we improvise an altar on the aft deck and take turns speaking and reading and praying. For now, we don’t have our sound system like we want it, but later we will be able to play our CD of Dr. Davis on the organ for a prelude while we get ready for “church.”
We are learning to live life on 30 amps. That is a major concern when cruising. Many items run on DC, which uses battery power. However, anything that runs on AC requires the inverter, and the inverter must use a little power for itself when converting DC to AC. Therefore, we are extremely attentive to the use of AC. It takes a bit of strategizing to reduce the impact of using AC, and it takes more to solve some interesting problems.
For starters, our water heater and our coffeemaker require AC. We have finally learned that it isn’t a good idea to start both of them the minute the generator goes on. The inverter overheats when it is hit with that demand from both at once. So, we start the generator, start the coffee (we do have our priorities!) and after a bit, we start the water heater.
We also run to our computers and work like little turks while the generator is on. Larry’s computer has a better battery than mine, but we both benefit by using generator time as computer work time. For me, running Dreamweaver or Photoshop is so resource-intensive that I can run down my battery in an hour or less that way, so web work is definitely generator time. My little Dell mini has a better battery than my big laptop, but it is not the right machine for Dreamweaver or Photoshop. I use it for blogging and other writing tasks in Word. I can move files back and forth between the two machines using my flash drive, so it, too, is part of my 30-amp strategy.
There are other cruising challenges, and we will pass on the strategies as we learn them. If anybody reads this blog and has a good idea we can learn from, please shout it out. We are always ready to learn a new trick.
People ask us frequently, “When you leave Chesapeake Bay, where will you go?”
The first problem with answering that question is that we have not yet left Chesapeake Bay, and we don’t know yet when that day will come. The departure date is important, because we will be sailing in a 45-foot blue-water sailboat, not an aircraft carrier or the QE II. Or the Titanic. We have some limitations inherent to our mode of transportation.
Limits? For starters, a sailboat needs wind. Oh, sure, we have a nice diesel engine for emergencies and for harbor navigation, but we want to sail. The sound of the engine not running is one of the best parts of sailing. We whiz over the water, the boat and the wind working together in happy concert, and there is no noise. The rigging sings and the wind roars, but there is no engine noise. Love it.
The consequence of actual sailing is that we do not speed toward our destination by most people’s standards. When the combination of wind and sail produces 12 knots or more of speed over water we feel that we are flying. To a land-based viewer, however, it is clear that we are not actually flying. Mathematically, a speed of 12 knots is equivalent to a speed of 13.8 miles per hour. Ooooh. From the deck of the boat, that speed feels good and looks good, but it is not rapid progress toward the destination.
So, the timing of our departure from Chesapeake Bay really does matter. Because there is another limitation we will face at some point. On the weather charts it is labeled “Ice Edge.” The “Ice Edge” moves northward in summer and southward in winter. Boats, which need to move in water, must always know when, where, and how the edge of the artic pack ice is moving. We might say that when we leave Chesapeake Bay we will go north, but we always know that we will not go farther than the edge of the ice, and in fact, we will likely avoid crowding that edge. No Boundaries is not an icebreaker.
For now, when we are asked this question, we can’t give a very good answer. We want to go north; we want to cruise in the islands off the coast of Maine. In fact, I would love to go to Newfoundland and see where the Vikings lived. However, the most honest answer is this: We will go north until it makes more sense to turn around and go south.
The beauty of cruising is that people do not need to have the kind of detailed advance plans that scheduled passenger vehicles require. If you carry passengers, they all want to know what time to arrive in order to board before departure and what time they will arrive at their destination. We, on the other hand, carry no passengers. We depart when wind, weather and our inclinations agree that it is time. We can make a sudden decision to “go over there” without notice.
Right now, we are cruising on an unannounced timeline to an unannounced destination. In fact, we are tidying up and putting away and trying to figure out if we need to throw away still more of the detritus of 8 years of marina living. One of these days we will absolutely depart our present location for some other.
Oh, we will actually be more responsible than that, because we don’t want anyone to worry. We will make sure somebody always has a fair idea of our plans. It is possible we will change any announced plans without a lot of advance notice, but we would hope we don’t make the people we love too nervous about us. Part of the purpose of this log is to let you know what we are up to. Most of the content will be a record of where we have been and what we were ruminating about along the way. We will also use this log and our website to give you some idea of where we might go next. We hope you will be interested enough to wonder, and we hope we will satisfy your curiosity in each successive post.