Aboard No Boundaries
July 31, 2009
When my daughter or my son in St. Louis discovers in the midst of meal preparation a need for a green bell pepper, either of them can step outside, get in a car and drive less than a mile to the grocery store. They could discover the need for the pepper, solve the problem, and be back on task making dinner in thirty minutes.
Not so for us. We live and cruise on a sailboat, we have no permanent address other than our mailing service, and our car is an inflatable, soft-bottomed dinghy. When I discover in the midst of meal prep that I need a green bell pepper, I must either have one on hand or do without, because I am not likely to be near a grocery store. Even if a grocery store is less than a mile away, as when we were moored in the harbor in Camden, Maine, the process required to get to and from that grocery store would stop anyone from casually running out for one little thing like that.
When we were in Newport, a little boy waiting with his parents for a harbor cruise to start watched us getting in our dinghy. We were loading our shopping bags and trying to arrange everything so there was still room for us, and he watched intently.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“We’re going home,” I replied.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“We live on a boat. This is our car,” I replied.
When we need to get the “car” ready for a shore excursion, it isn’t as simple as jumping in the car parked in the driveway.
Because our dinghy is soft-bottomed, it can be completely deflated and folded up. We can tow it behind us if we wish, but we can also deflate it, fold it up, wrap it in a cover and strap it down on deck. When we are traveling long distances at sea, this is a good solution. It is certainly possible for anything on deck to become dislodged and blow away, but when this dinghy is wrapped up and strapped down, it is very secure. As we were transiting the Cape Cod Canal on our way to Maine, we heard a sailboat captain reporting a lost dinghy to the Coast Guard. He was towing the dinghy in a gale with thirty-five knot winds when it flipped over and became separated from the sailboat. He made the report in hopes that someone would find it on shore and report the discovery to the Coast Guard. It sounded a lot like wishful thinking, because the most common theft from sailboats is the dinghy. Still, my first thought was that a dinghy firmly compressed and strapped down to the deck was less at risk of such an accident than one dragged behind the boat.
However, the down side of our plan is that if the dinghy is strapped down securely for our passage, there is a big job ahead of us after we anchor. When we do decide to go to the grocery store, or sightseeing, or whatever, we must remove the straps, unfold the cover, spread out the dinghy, inflate it, attach the oars and the seat, and then lift it up over the side in order to drop it in the water. Inflating it would be a breeze if the battery-powered inflator ever actually had a charge when we need it; usually, Larry winds up doing it manually (which should be “footfully,” since he pumps it with his foot). Then we need to pull our “car” to the stern of the boat where our boarding ladder is located.
Ah, but we are not done yet. It is highly unlikely that we want to row the dinghy to the local town dock. It might be very close, as is the case when we anchor in Baltimore near the Safeway store, but more than likely, we will be far enough from our destination that rowing is not the most desirable solution. In this case we need the outboard motor.
When not in use, the motor is mounted on the stern rail of the boat. As you might guess, Larry doesn’t grab the motor and carry it down the ladder to mount it on the dinghy. Instead, we have a block and tackle on our stern arch that allows me to easily lower the motor to the dinghy where Larry can screw it on securely. It isn’t hard to do, but it takes more time.
Next, I hand the gasoline can and hoses down to Larry. He attaches them, pumps up the gas pressure, and starts the motor. That is, if he remembered to take the key with him. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t. The key is stored in the main salon, so if he forgot it, I run down and retrieve it.
At this point, the dinghy is ready to take us to the grocery store. However, we must still get ourselves ready to go. We won’t be able to park the dinghy in the grocery store parking lot, so we must be prepared to get our groceries from the store to the dinghy dock. When we go shopping, each of us wears a backpack with several large tote bags inside. These bags hold more than the grocery store plastic bags, and they are more durable, also. We use the backpacks to carry heavy items like milk, meat, and cabbage. We put crackers, cans and bread in the tote bags. You would be surprised how much we can carry back with us at one trip. It would usually be an option to get a cab for the return trip, but these bags have worked well for us to date. And the cab solution doesn’t help with getting the items into the dinghy or up the boarding ladder at the boat. Our tote bags can be stuffed and stacked in the dinghy so that things don’t fly out or get wet from the spray as we go back to the boat. They don’t prevent things from getting wet if it has rained and there is water in the dinghy.
That situation presents another problem we must solve. Most of the time, when someone gets into a car to drive to the store, there won’t be water all over the floor. Often, when we get ready to ride somewhere in the dinghy there is water inside. Whether or not there is water when we start, we must be prepared for spray to fly in, and of course, it could rain. We have two small plastic storage bags just the right size for a pair of shoes, and a large bag that is big enough for our computer backpacks, or jackets or anything else we want to keep dry. Getting our “car” ready to go takes some time.
After we get ready, and after we do our shopping or computer work or whatever is the purpose of our journey we must return the same way we came. Arriving back at the boat, our first challenge is actually to grab the ladder. We are getting better at it, but it isn’t a guarantee yet that we will do it on the first try. Having grabbed the ladder, we must position the dinghy so that I can get up on the ladder and hitch the dinghy’s painter to the top rung, the one that doesn’t move. (Don’t ask me why the rope on the dinghy is a painter when the rope on the jib is a sheet. I live a nautical life, but I am still adjusting to the lingo.) Then while I stand on the ladder, Larry hands me one bag at a time and I hoist it up on deck. When everything is unloaded, we let the motor run the gasoline out before we stop for the day.
If we expect to use the dinghy again while we are moored or anchored, that is the end of the work on our “car” for a while. However, if this is the last trip, then we must reverse all our getting ready – hoist the motor back onto the stern rail, drag the dinghy around to the side, lift it up on deck, remove the oars and the seat, deflate it, fold it up, wrap it and strap it down.
It gives new meaning to the question, “Honey, is the car ready?”
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.