Lungta Life – Kathy and Dan's Cruising Blog

It seems like it was a long time coming, but we’ve finally begun the travel portion of our adventures.  We are now cruising around Vancouver Island, passing through the San Juan Islands and up the Strait of Georgia.  There’s not much wind today, so we’re motoring at the moment, but we had all 5 sails up earlier this morning.  Hooray!
We spent longer in Astoria and worked on more projects than we planned.  The bowthruster we bought earlier in the year and expected to install here turned out to not fit our boat very well (it’s intended to attach to a flat section of the keel or the stem, the leading edge of the bow), so we ended up purchasing another one.  We’ve sent the original one back to the distributor, and he’s hoping to sell it to someone else for us.  A good lesson in – hmmm, well I’m sure we learned *something*!  The new thruster is a more conventional design, which required a transverse hole (or “tunnel”) to be drilled through the bow – not a huge deal for a fiberglass boat, but more difficult for our ferro-cement hull.  We contacted a local concrete contractor who hooked us up with the regional experts in complex tasks like ours, and helped us figure out exactly how to position it.  Since the hull is curved in all directions, it was not necessarily straightforward to find the “true” horizontal & vertical frames of reference.  Then the contractors had to figure out how to mount their drill to a curved surface in order to core the 13″ tunnel where the propellers sit.  That was a really fascinating job, and took the entire first day they were here.  The second day they drilled a vertical hole to “T” in with the first one, for the electronics and motor.  These folks really knew what they were doing (although they admitted that they had never been asked to put a big hole in a boat before), and we had a beautiful tunnel through our boat that was the talk of the neighborhood.
Then it was up to us to install all the pieces and build up a pair of fairings (bumps on the leading edges of the tunnel to reduce the drag caused by the water hitting up against the back walls as we move forward).  We did this over the Memorial Day weekend, switching to a different type of fiberglass resin partway through because we ran out and virtually everyone who carries this kind of product was closed, except that Home Depot had something similar.  Anyhow, we managed to get the whole thing done and painted up before the boat went in the water that Friday, and were thrilled to play with our new bowthruster and rudder.  We had a big scare the next day, though, when we tried to use the bowthruster again and it didn’t work in one direction.  Turns out that some water had gotten in the hold from the exhaust of the water-cooled generator, and we believe the electronics were wet.  Once it dried out, things were fine, but then we spent a few more days working on a better way to make sure that water can’t accumulate in that hold (and this involved drilling another small hole in the hull, to pump out).  This puppy uses a *lot* of power and a short could be a pretty dramatic event.
Altogether we spent almost a month in Astoria, and we wish we could have spent a bit more time enjoying the town.  We worked our butts off!  Whenever we did get into town, we encountered friendly helpful people who made the whole experience a pleasant one.  It’s an odd experience seeing your home get hauled up in a crane and set on half a dozen blocks of wood, balanced between stands made of 2″ pipe looking for all the world like schoolchildren pushing with their little hands against a whale.  We climbed a 15′ ladder innumerable times each day to get in and out of the boat, carrying our groceries and tools, bicycles and laundry.  Because of environmental concerns, they restricted our activities to those that don’t release water outside the boat, making laundry and and dish-washing a bit challenging.  Fortunately we were allowed to use the bathroom facilities of the marina a half mile away.  We had a wonderful view of the Columbia Bar, and we saw cruise ships, freighters and even a pair of tall ships come in and go out.  Our experience with the Port of Astoria was excellent: they’re extremely helpful and very competent.  Also Englund Marine is within walking distance and they have (almost) anything a mariner could ask for!  We probably took an average of 4 trips to Englund a day!
There’s a local flock of birds that frequent the boatyard (flying overhead most of the day and congragating on the pavement at dusk in regiments which made Kathy think of the Buckingham Palace Guard), and which have a harsh grumpy sound to their call.  We never found out specifically what they are called, but we took to calling them the “querulous terns”.  The week before we left, something odd happened in the tern community, we’re not sure what, perhaps an illness, but three birds turned up dead in the parking lot one morning.  The entire flock stayed away for 3 or 4 days, and the silence seemed a bit eerie to us after becoming accustomed to their constant complaining.  Eventually they did return, and we wondered whether they missed their compatriots or just how much they “knew” about what had happened.
After we went back in the water, we spent about another week at the dock, reinstalling the generator, reattaching the stays for the main mast (which had to be removed in order to fit in the travel lift) and securing as much “stuff” as we could manage for the ocean passage.  During this time we realized that our main bank of batteries was not charging as quickly as they should and discharging much more quickly.  We found the receipt and it turns out they were 9 years old. Man time flies.  So we decided to spend a day replacing them.  12 batteries in, 12 batteries out: roughly 750 pounds each way – but now we can feel more secure about our water, refrigeration, lighting and pumps (especially since we don’t yet have our solar panels in place!)
Fortunately we found a wonderful window of weather and (except for a sighting of three Orca just as the sun set) the trip north from Astoria to Victoria was uneventful – an event in itself!  As usual for this time of year the wind was out of the Northwest; exactly the wrong direction – so we motored the entire way.  The seas were extremely calm, even glassy at times and we rolled into Victoria Sunday evening.  We found the customs dock and went through the customs process over the phone, then went around the corner to find a slip in the Port of Victoria’s guest docks.  We all needed a good night’s sleep – but it was not inexpensive!  We paid over $200 for a night in the middle of the city, walked to dinner and slept like it was going out of style.  Monday Dan & Kathy rode the city bus out to Butchart Gardens, a must-see tourist attraction that Kathy’s mom has been espousing for years.  This may have been the first sunny day of the year, and the whole town was out wearing shorts and smiles.  The gardens were spectacular in the early summer sun, and we especially enjoyed walking around the Sunken Garden and Japanese Garden.  Dan’s sister (Aria) and father (David) preferred to spend their day in town, visiting a coffee shop and catching up on email.  It was a pleasant day for all.
However we’re pushing a schedule a bit now.  David will be leaving us on Friday from Campbell River, a town halfway up Vancouver Island.  He’s got a professional conference to attend in Bulgaria, so his tickets are fixed.  We left Victoria early this morning, and have spent the better part of the day motoring.  We were pleasantly surprised to catch a glimpse of the peak of the elusive Mount Olympus, covered with sunrise-pink snow.  We’ve seen quite a bit of traffic today, from ferry-boats to tugs pulling barges to 3 Canadian military ships on exercise to tiny pleasure-boats fishing.  We haven’t seen any whales (yet) today, but we’re certain they’re waiting for us further north.  Fortunately we’ve made good time today, so if there’s some wind tomorrow we can spend a little time doing some real sailing.  Tonight we’ll spend at anchor in Nanaimo’s harbor.  We’ll need to pick up a replacement pump for our main water, because we’ve got a bit of a squeak and a leak, but that may be a story for another day…

Well, we’ve really done it now – we’ve quit our jobs (or “retired”) in order to start on the Big Adventure that we’ve been talking about for so long! March 4th was the last day of our employment at Xerox, and the rhythm of our daily lives has changed quite a bit since then. In a way, it’s like we’re living a *really long* weekend. It still hasn’t completely sunk in, that we aren’t going back “any day now”. We keep pinching ourselves and reminding each other that rush hour still happens – only now it’s on days when we’re at home.
Our social life has remained pretty active, in part because we know that time is short to nurture relationships with many of our friends in Portland. Sometimes we get together knowing that we’re really saying goodbye, but other times we think that the relationships are sturdy enough to survive the protracted distances. I guess time will tell which is which. And there will most certainly be surprises. As with so many facets of life, it is not really possible to predict. It’s sometimes a bit unsettling, even though we both recognize that this was part of what we have signed up for.
As we planned, we’ve been very busy working around the boat to assure we’re seaworthy in just a few more weeks. We are immersed in what seems like a myriad of projects, at various stages of completion. We’re still unable to tell whether we’re on track for an early June departure or hopelessly unprepared. We have lists but the sub-tasks of each of the projects seem too numerous to enumerate and everything takes so much longer than anticipated. We both vascillate between exuberance and feeling overwhelmed but since we’re not on the same cadence we can generally encourage each other. Kathy’s friend Wayne sagely advised us to try to focus on only three projects at a time, to reduce the “deer in the headlights” sense of not knowing where to start. Here are the three biggest projects right now:
– We’ve been replacing all of the standing rigging, the wires that support the boat’s two masts, two or three lines at a time. Whenever there’s a break in the weather, Kathy puts on her climbing harness and Dan cranks her to the top of the mast. He loosens a cable using the turnbuckle at the bottom, and she detaches the fitting at the top and lowers the line to the deck. When she is done and comes back down, we coil them up and take them to the rigging shop to clean the fittings up and replace the cable. Our type of rigging uses connections called spelter sockets and which are also used on suspension bridges. The cable is inserted into the bottom of a fitting that is like an open funnel, with a turnbuckle attached to the top wide end. The strands of the cable are splayed out, and then molten zinc is poured into the funnel, binding with the cable’s strands to prevent them from sliding out the bottom. The shop takes roughly a week to do each batch of cables, and we had about 20 to do. We took down the last three on Saturday. The final one was a bit trickier than all the others. It connects the top of the two masts together (we just recently learned that it’s called a “triatic stay” – always new vocabulary in the marine environment!). We took a rope from the top of one mast up to the top of the other, tied it off, and then winched it tight, taking the pressure off the cable. Then Kathy was able to remove it and lower it down. She noticed in the nick of time that the main sail was suspended from the same shackle, and needed to be removed first. Whew!
– Another project, which is halfway done but keeps morphing from one phase to the next, is the updating of the anchor rode, from all-rope to half-rope/half-chain. We’ve done that part, but then we needed to update the windlass so that it had a chain-wheel in addition to the smooth cyinders used for rope. Then we realized that in order to get a good “bite” on the chain, we would need to have it drop straight down instead of pulling it out to the side to pile on the deck. So we bored a hole through the deck and built out a chain locker in what used to be the very front part of two very tiny staterooms. These rooms used to each have two single-size bunk beds. We’ve gutted that space and are rebuilding it to have one (sorta) double-size bed and a lot of storage underneath. We actually hired out the structural part of that job to Firehouse Boatworks, an outfit that has helped us with several of the projects that we’ve needed to get done. Now we’re picking that job back up, finishing the space. We’ve covered the floor with more of the jatoba tongue-and-groove flooring that we bought last year. Now we’re building out the storage space, where we’re gonna keep the scuba tanks. And the saga continues…
– The third project that we’ll share with you this week is the installation of our solar panels. Dan has been researching these for months, even years, and we finally decided that the time was ripe. We purchased 4 panels to be shipped to us at the Xerox dock just before we left. It was definitely the 11th hour – they arrived at noon on the Friday that we were leaving! To complicate matters, Dan’s car had given up the ghost the week before (and Kathy’s Honda Insight was not a good choice to carry the panels home). Kathy’s dear friend Ron loaned us his big old pickup truck to bring them to the boat on Friday, and we traded vehicles for the weekend. What a breeze that made things! We got the panels safely down the 25 steps to the marina docks and around the 5 corners without mishap. They’ve been sitting safely on the deck for the last week as we design the mounting system and lay the foundation. (In the meantime, Ron detailed the Insight and found a buyer, and we purchased a small pickup to use for the next 3 months. It doesn’t get any easier!) We’ve decided to hang the panels in each of the 4 corners of the boat (OK, use your imagination). They’ll hang from the top lifeline, so we’ve replaced all of the rope lifelines with galvanized cable, to better support the weight. We’ve bought most of the material to fabricate the mounting system, and expect to spend the next week or so doing that work. This will require Dan to brush up on his aluminum welding skills. If only the weather would clear long enough for us to spend this time outdoors…
This period is a very busy one for us, but we don’t expect life to always be so full. Other cruisers have described this time as being intensely stressful, and sure enough we’re not immune. But we keep reminding ourselves that all of this is just part of our lives, and we can approach it joyfully or miserably – and that choice is clear!
We’ve had a couple exciting updates to our departure plans: Dan’s father David and sister Aria are planning to share some time with us as we leave Seattle and head north. David will be with us for a couple of weeks, probably heading home from Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Aria will stay a while longer, perhaps as much as a year, traveling up to Alaska and down to Mexico. Both are delightfully welcome additions to the journey!
That’s it for now, until next time – Kathy & Dan

Well, we’ve really done it now – we’ve quit our jobs (or “retired”) in order to start on the Big Adventure that we’ve been  talking about for so long!

March 4th was the last day of our employment at Xerox, and the rhythm of our daily lives has  changed quite a bit since then.  In a way, it’s like we’re living a *really long* weekend.  It still hasn’t completely sunk  in, that we aren’t going back “any day now”.  We keep pinching ourselves and reminding each other that rush hour still  happens – only now it’s on days when we’re at home.

Our social life has remained pretty active, in part because we know that time is short to nurture relationships with many of  our friends in Portland.  Sometimes we get together knowing that we’re really saying goodbye, but other times we think that  the relationships are sturdy enough to survive the protracted distances.  I guess time will tell which is which.

And there  will most certainly be surprises.  As with so many facets of life, it is not really possible to predict.  It’s sometimes a  bit unsettling, even though we both recognize that this was part of what we have signed up for.

As we planned, we’ve been very busy working around the boat to assure we’re seaworthy in just a few more weeks.  We are  immersed in what seems like a myriad of projects, at various stages of completion.  We’re still unable to tell whether we’re  on track for an early June departure or hopelessly unprepared.  We have lists but the sub-tasks of each of the projects seem too numerous to enumerate and everything takes so much longer than anticipated.  We both vascillate between exuberance and  feeling overwhelmed but since we’re not on the same cadence we can generally encourage each other.  Kathy’s friend Wayne  sagely advised us to try to focus on only three projects at a time, to reduce the “deer in the headlights” sense of not  knowing where to start.  Here are the three biggest projects right now:

– We’ve been replacing all of the standing rigging, the wires that support the boat’s two masts, two or three lines at a  time.  Whenever there’s a break in the weather, Kathy puts on her climbing harness and Dan cranks her

to the top of the mast.   He loosens a cable using the turnbuckle at the

bottom, and she detaches the fitting at the top and lowers the line to the deck.  When she is done and comes back down, we coil them up and take them to the rigging shop to clean the fittings up and  replace the cable.  Our type of rigging uses connections called spelter sockets and which are also used on suspension  bridges.  The cable is inserted into the bottom of a fitting that is like an open funnel, with a turnbuckle attached to the  top wide end.  The strands of the cable are splayed out, and then molten zinc is poured into the funnel, binding with the  cable’s strands to prevent them from sliding out the bottom.  The shop takes roughly a week to do each batch of cables, and  we had about 20 to do.  We took down the last three on Saturday.  The final one was a bit trickier than all the others.  It connects the top of the two masts together (we just recently learned that it’s called a “triatic stay” – always new  vocabulary in the marine environment!).  We took a rope from the top of one mast up to the top of the other, tied it off, and  then winched it tight, taking the pressure off the cable.  Then Kathy was able to remove it and lower it down.  She noticed  in the nick of time that the main sail was suspended from the same shackle, and needed to be removed first.  Whew!

– Another project, which is halfway done but keeps morphing from one phase to the next, is the updating of the anchor rode,  from all-rope to half-rope/half-chain.  We’ve done that part, but then we needed to update the windlass so that it had a  chain-wheel in addition to the smooth cyinders used for rope.  Then we realized that in order to get a good “bite” on the  chain, we would need to have it drop straight down instead of pulling it out to the side to pile on the deck.  So we bored a  hole through the deck and built out a chain locker in what used to be the very front part of two very tiny staterooms.  These  rooms used to each have two single-size bunk beds.  We’ve gutted that space and are rebuilding it to have one

(sorta)  double-size bed and a lot of storage underneath.  We actually hired out the structural part of that job to Firehouse  Boatworks, an outfit that has helped us with several of the projects that we’ve needed to get done.

Now we’re picking that  job back up, finishing the space.  We’ve covered the floor with more of the jatoba tongue-and-groove flooring that we bought last year.  Now we’re building out the storage space, where we’re gonna keep the scuba tanks.  And the saga continues…

– The third project that we’ll share with you this week is the installation of our solar panels.  Dan has been researching  these for months, even years, and we finally decided that the time was ripe.  We purchased 4 panels to be shipped to us at  the Xerox dock just before we left.  It was definitely the 11th hour – they arrived at noon on the Friday that we were leaving!  To complicate matters, Dan’s car had given up the ghost the week before (and Kathy’s Honda Insight was not a good  choice to carry the panels home).  Kathy’s dear friend Ron loaned us his big old pickup truck to bring them to the boat on  Friday, and we traded vehicles for the weekend.  What a breeze that made things!  We got the panels safely down the 25 steps  to the marina docks and around the 5 corners without mishap.  They’ve been sitting safely on the deck for the last week as we  design the mounting system and lay the foundation.  (In the meantime, Ron detailed the Insight and found a buyer, and we  purchased a small pickup to use for the next 3 months.  It doesn’t get any easier!)  We’ve decided to hang the panels in each  of the 4 corners of the boat (OK, use your imagination).  They’ll hang from the top lifeline, so we’ve replaced all of the  rope lifelines with galvanized cable, to better support the weight.  We’ve bought most of the material to fabricate the  mounting system, and expect to spend the next week or so doing that work.  This will require Dan to brush up on his aluminum  welding skills.  If only the weather would clear long enough for us to spend this time outdoors…

This period is a very busy one for us, but we don’t expect life to always be so full.  Other cruisers have described this  time as being intensely stressful, and sure enough we’re not immune.  But we keep reminding ourselves that all of this is  just part of our lives, and we can approach it joyfully or miserably – and that choice is clear!

We’ve had a couple exciting updates to our departure plans: Dan’s father David and sister Aria are planning to share some  time with us as we leave Seattle and head north.  David will be with us for a couple of weeks, probably heading home from  Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island.  Aria will stay a while longer, perhaps as much as a year, traveling up  to Alaska and down to Mexico.  Both are delightfully welcome additions to the journey!

And to all who have expressed concern regarding our itinerary, please be assured that we have no intention of making a bee-line for Somalia. 🙂

That’s it for now, until next time – Kathy & Dan