We are finally moving forward again. If you keep track of us, and I hope you don’t spend a lot of effort at it, you will remember that we left Harborview on May 1. We spent a week in the boatyard for bottom paint and new lifelines. We spend three weeks after that continuing to work through a lot of junk on the deck, fine-tuning some of Larry’s installations, and cleaning the boat. We spent some time at Rock Creek, made a trip back to Baltimore for groceries and departed again for the Bay.
We have bounced around a lot, and today we are in the marina only a few hundred feet from where we started. It sounds as if we are going nowhere, but in fact, we have made a lot of progress. If you had seen us on May 1 and then looked us over today, even the least nautical person would notice that this boat looks a lot more shipshape. That is the point of it all. Progress every day toward the goal. We are retired, after all, so we don’t have the sense of urgency that drives high-tech projects. We want to go cruising, but we are taking time along the way to enjoy the process.
Today we had the joy of attending worship at Christ Church again, since we are here. After seven Sundays away, it was wonderful to be there. That sanctuary inspires worship and sets us on the right course. It was also great to see our friends. Some thought we had finished our cruising and were returning for good. They could hardly take in the idea that seven weeks were devoted to getting ready and the real trip is still ahead.
We, too, get a little discouraged sometimes, but we will not stop working. It really is amazing the way each new task begins with a new problem. We are back in Harborview now simply because the people who sold us our life raft also sold us a bracket that didn’t fit the raft. Is that not weird? But we have learned that this is boat life. It is just the way it is.
In fact, we don’t have the worst of it, or we haven’t had the worst of it yet. I am reading Joshua Slocum’s book “Sailing Alone Around The World”, and I just read about a day on which he was hit by a huge wave. He noticed the wave building as it roared toward him. He dropped all sail and climbed into the rigging. He left the deck! I could not imagine why, but then the wave hit. He said that for several minutes he could not see the deck. Yet after the wave roared on, the boat shook itself and then continued to sail on. He climbed down out of the rigging to the deck.
So far, we have never had such an experience, and I hope we won’t. Joshua Slocum had no way of predicting weather at all, so he could not have known when storms were building until they were too close for him to run away. We plan to use all the weather information at our disposal to avoid known storms. Most people we know who take advantage of the information manage to avoid the kind of drama Joshua Slocum faced daily.
Tomorrow we will leave Harborview with a plan to continue cruising in the Bay while we store the rest of our gear. We look for that work to be finished within ten days. Please do not count the hours. We aren’t that good with schedules. However, if we are done in ten days, it means we should be headed out of the Bay by July 1. Stay tuned for further developments. The good ship No Boundaries will soon be on the move again.
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.