Our First Race

We were lucky enough to be invited to race in the first icicle series race of 2014 this week. At first Fred planned to go alone, not knowing how much space there would be for crew.  After a little bit of pouting from me though Freddie secured me a spot on deck. I knew going into the race that this was going to be pretty scary for me. Going quickly around other boats while heeling, and being splashed by cold water are not my favorite parts of sailing. I had already thrown a fit to be invited though, so there was no backing out now.  

We arrived at the Antares around 10:30 a.m. after a quick trip to west marine to buy Freddie some new sailing gloves and shoes. In hindsight what we really needed was some waterproof pants. We quickly found the Cal 40 and began to meet the crew as they arrived.

We cast off around 11:30 as our start time was at 12:05. We motored for very little time before putting up the sails. It's amazing how quickly things get done with a full crew. However, I immediately understood why everyone was wearing full foul weather gear. The cold waves immediately came crashing over the boat as we passed Kemah Boardwalk. The water started at the bow but ran like a river down the side of the boat. Of course me and Freddie are sitting on the rail as ballast and had a stream of cold water instantly soaking the butt of our jeans.  

The sail boats circled around under sail near the start line. It felt like we were fish in a bucket. Boats were narrowly missing us on either side. Some people were playing chicken with other boats. I guess these racers have a love for danger that I will never understand.

Finally the first leg of the race kicked off. It was a broad reach, and we were gaining on a lot of boats. I couldn't believe how much the boat was tipping, or how fast we were going. It's amazing to be so close to so many other sailboats. It's interesting to see the different strategies. Some people heel over so far I swear I could almost see their keel.  

After a yelling countdown from the captain we turned the first marker, an abandoned oil platform, and the crew was already putting the spinnaker up. Our giant orange sail was quite the sight to see. They are so light weight, and seeing them put up with such ease makes me want to try it. Although I don't know that it has any practical use for cruising. Maybe a screecher is more of what I want. 

On the last leg of the race we were close hauling with the boat tipped as far over as she would go when we hear a thud, and the captain yells "I've lost steering!  Let the sails loose!" Everyone started to panic in what can best be described as a Chinese fire drill. First the crew manning the sails lets them completely out so as to slow the boat down. Then another crew member jumps down into the cabin to inspect to see what the problem with the steering is. Meanwhile someone else is emptying out the lazarette looking for the emergency tiller. Lawn chairs and cushions are being passed around the boat frantically. Meanwhile someone produces the emergency tiller from the cabin and we all wonder why we emptied the lazarette in the first place and begin putting everything back. Before they even get the tiller in place they are already trimming the sails back up and bringing the boat back up to speed.  

After drifting around, the only way for us to go was directly through the lines of boats that had been behind us. We had right of way and just sailed right through the column at full speed. The skipper was yelling "starboard" as we went through, and no doubt the other boats cursed as they had to let out sails and slow down trying to avoid hitting us. We had one more tack and we were on our way to the finish line.

Obviously we didn't have very active roles this time out. We mostly added ballast and shot photos -- although we did help take down and stow the kite and occasionally unsnagged a snagged line. Thankfully the "icicle series" did not live up to its name since it was about 60 degrees Saturday. That really helped the wet jeans be less miserable. However, Mary is correct that next time we're wearing different pants.

It was interesting to see the difference in fore deck crew versus cockpit crew. The fore deck guys basically stand up front getting soaked and beat up the entire race. Meanwhile the cockpit crew are sitting back, staying dry, and sipping beers when they're not trimming lines. Hmmm.

Despite losing the steering cable, the Antares still took third in class. Once docked and cleaned up, the end of the race was celebrated with a shot of rum. It's been a long time since I've had straight rum. Mary took one small sip and passed hers on to me. I get the feeling this is a taste we'll have to acquire if we keep racing.

Will we go again next week? The juries still out. It was storming Sunday morning, so I got zero work done on Gimme Shelter this week and the list of repairs is growing. If we want to be making overnight cruises by March when it's warm enough to sleep without a heater, I may have to spend some Saturdays at the dock. We'll just have to see.



  

Going cheap and getting burned

I always get on to Mary about planning and taking logical steps -- not jumping into purchases before we have measurements, not sending out wedding invitations before we have a set date and location -- that kind of thing.

When we bought Gimme Shelter, the mid-ship Bomar hatch had a cracked lens and was leaking. It's been on the never-ending to-do list but didn't take priority until I ended up sleeping under the hatch in the rain and realized just how badly it was leaking. That's about the same time we realized the leak was also seeping into the headliner and warping it. It was time to move it to the top of the list.

I DID take measurements before I started. Unfortunately I only measured the length and width of the hatch, not the thickness of the acrylic lens.

Honestly, I was a little excited when I started this project because I thought, hey, this is going to be cheap because I can just use stuff from Home Depot instead of having to buy ridiculously priced boat parts to fix this.

Off I went to Home Depot and grabbed the only smoked acrylic they had in stock, which was only $25. I scored it and snapped it to the size we needed and then proceeded to cut the old lens free, so I could trace and cut the rounded corners. Everything was going to plan.

Once I removed the old lens, I immediately noticed it was much thicker than I had estimated. I weighed the pros and cons of replacing it with a thinner lens and decided that while the thinner one may crack sooner, if it lasts a year, it was worth it and we'd have the leak stopped, so let's just be cheap and progress with the project.

The first setback came when my dremel tool died after rounding just two corners. It was a really hot day and the tool was even hotter, so it wouldn't charge when I set it on the charger. I could have gone and bought a new corded dremel, but I was being cheap and didn't really want to have to go buy new tools for this project.

I got impatient and grabbed the jig saw. I was rounding the last corner when a big chunk snapped out of the plexi. Time to start over.

I carefully measured and scored another piece. Unfortunately, the snapping didn't go so well.

I was down to the last portion of my sheet large enough to make a new hatch. I decided scoring and snapping this one was too risky, so I began cutting it with the somewhat charged dremel. It died again. I let it charge another half hour and then got another five minutes out of it. After suffering in the heat all afternoon my neighbor loaned me his corded dremel and within 10 minutes I finally had a correctly cut sheet of plexi. Why didn't I just save myself a ton of frustration and go buy a new dremel in the first place?

Once the lens was cut, I rummaged through the toolbox and grabbed a very old tube of silicone, unplugged it with a drill bit and used that to seat the lens. Why did I use old silicone?

The next morning I stopped by West Marine to see what kind of UV protected silicone they had for the outer bead. The cheapest stuff was $16, so I went back to Home Depot and grabbed some indoor/outdoor waterproof window silicone for $3. The cheap disease had me in a death grip at this point. I was going to get this lens replaced for less than $30 and then brag about it over beers for at least the next two weekends!

Mary took time to mask off the lens, so our outer silicone bead would look nice.

I then went to town with the white silicone around the edges and did my best to get it into a nice smooth bead. It didn't look half bad.

One last job remained -- screwing the hatch dogs back onto the lens.

One problem -- the lens was too thin to snug the dogs up.

(As an aside, Bomar has a horrible latch design. These sort of mushroom shaped stoppers stick down through the hatch on a very small O-ring and then the handle screws onto them. Then the entire piece turns. It's like a third grader engineered it. In fact I called their customer service department to ask if they had an updated design because cinching down an O-ring when you still need it loose enough to turn is never going to be a great seal. The Bomar lady on the phone got pretty defensive and said if the O-rings on a hatch that was 31 years old were leaking, that certainly couldn't be considered a design flaw and I just need to do proper maintenance. I'm just going to say that the dogs on the Lewmar port on my Starwind sealed on the outside and only turned internally, so there was no chance of a leak ever. They could also be tightened or loosened. In other words, Lewmar actually engineered a real solution, they didn't just poke a stick through the hatch lens and call it good.)

We'd spent Sunday morning cruising through other marinas in our friends dinghy and showing off the pool of the new place, so at this point it was late Sunday afternoon. Once again it was super hot, and we were starting to get pressured for time.

I made a run to West Marine for large washers that I could shim the latches with. Now they DEFINITELY weren't going to be water proof, but maybe I could at least get them tight enough to lock the boat.

I think it was during my second attempt to install the latches that the unthinkable suddenly happened. I tipped up the latch for a better angle, and the lens fell out of the frame.

Yes, the super old silicone from my toolbox that I'd applied the previous day completely failed to hold the lens in the frame. I managed to grab it before it fell completely out and got white silicone on everything, but the damage was done. It was at this point I began cursing, and I'm not sure poor little Tex will ever be the same after hearing the things I said to the boat.

I calmed down, I gummed the lens back down in the frame and squished the white silicone back into place -- destroying the nice bead -- and I left.

Mary wanted to tarp up the boat in case it rained, but I just didn't care. I wanted to go home. I was tired of that hatch. I was tired of plexiglass. I was tired of silicone that didn't cure. I was tired of the horrible latches that only fit one particular thickness of plexiglass. And above all, I was super mad that I had been so cheap and muddled through this project instead of being patient and buying the correct tools and supplies for the job.

This morning I ordered a sheet of 1/4" acrylic for $36 and a tube of black Dow Corning 791 for $15. I'm also going to go pick up a new corded Dremel for $50.

Instead of telling stories about how I replaced my window for only $30, I'll repeat my cautionary tale about how I once went cheap, ruining an entire weekend, just to end up spending all the money I should have in the first place.

Boat party

With Gimme Shelter safely berthed at Marina Del Sol, it was time to let go of all the anxiety that had been incurred over the past couple weeks of discussing this purchase, surveying, getting loans, finding insurance, etc. This is Mary's boat, so she was taking care of most of that stuff, but not being in control of any of it was stressing me out.  This boat was my first major purchase, and the first time I've ever taken out a loan.  At first the thought of spending this much money really made me sick to my stomach, but as the day got closer and closer all I wanted to do was get it over with and start enjoying my new boat.

Everyone in the marina got a tour Friday night. Then Saturday I went jogging (just had to brag a little, didn't you?) and had a late breakfast with the crew of the Tina Marie while Mary disappeared to Wal-Mart for two hours.  I got super lost.  The Walmart in Kemah is off the google maps.  

We went back into Houston for lunch with my parents who were visiting, and then it was back to the marina just in time to start the boat warming party.

Hamburgers were grilled.

Guitars were played.

Rum was drank.

It doesn't always turn out nice when your friend bubbles collide, but in this case everything went well.  My friends are mostly French speaking, and our friends on the dock happen to be French Canadian, so the conversation flowed nicely.  It was nice that my friends got to hear Freddies singing/guitar playing for the first time. 

I showed my friends the "little" boat and they were impressed.  

I went to bed around midnight, but I'm sure the neighbors hated us because I heard our overnight guests still stirring at 4:30 a.m.  Not everyone goes to bed at 11 on Saturday nights!

Sunday arrived with a ringing in my ears and a pounding in my head. Mary tried to sneak through the salon to make coffee, but with two people on the fold-out and two people in the aft berth, there was no way to be sneaky enough without waking them all. (I knew we should have held out for a center cockpit with an aft cabin!)  You lose the large cabin in a center cockpit, and besides how often do we have three couples on our boat?  Once so far.  

I went to work making pancakes, eggs, and bacon for both our crew and the crew of the Tina Marie. Then Mary served breakfast using her new nautical themed plates from West Marine on the Edson table in the cockpit. I think everyone was quite impressed.  There's nothing like waking up to a sunrise behind palm trees.  You sort of forget how magical it is when you're there every weekend.  It's nice to have fresh eyes look at your life to get some perspective. 

The survey

Since Mary was dead-set on spending her life savings on the very first boat she looked at, I wanted to make sure we had a thorough survey. She still hadn't convinced me that jumping aboard the O'day was the right thing to do.

Generally, surveys are expensive -- about $500 -- and you never know how skilled or thorough the surveyor will actually be. Since Ben and I purchased the Seahorse tied to a dock and sitting full of water for $1000, we obviously didn't bother getting a survey on that boat, so it was the first time I'd gone through the process.

Thankfully one of our friends who has forgotten more about boats than I ever hope to learn had started doing surveys last summer after returning from a year of cruising. With the promise of some rum he agreed to survey the O'day.

I followed him back and forth throughout the boat as he lifted hatches, flipped switches and checked hoses -- all the while jotting down notes.

Each time he pointed something out to me I'd cautiously ask, "Is that a deal breaker?"

"No, that's not a deal breaker," he'd reply.

Most of the conversation was between the men, which was so frustrating.  When I finally did get them to explain to me what they were talking about I still had no idea how serious the issues were.  Thank goodness me and Freddie are a team. 

We motored over to the Texas Shipyard and they hauled the boat.

The yard crew went to work pressure washing the hull while we analyzed the state of the bottom paint.

Once the spraying had stopped, our surveyor went to work pulling and shaking and checking the rudder and prop.



In the end, the survey report came out something like this:

• Hoses permeated in head
• Starboard forward lower shroud corroded in below deck connection
• Shaft seal breather plugged and lying below water line
• Galley sink drain has very long, scary looking through hull adapter
• Rudder post bent at some point, not binding, seems ok
• Main sail blown out
• Prop loose -- corrected during haul out
• Winches dry, need to be lubricated
• Mast step showing corrosion
• Mid hatch lens damaged
• Manual bilge pump leaking at cuff
• Port aft locker drain hose degarded beyond service
• Needs bottom paint

  

One thing and one thing only in that report caused a massive drop in my enthusiasm -- "hoses permeated in head."  Now that the boat is really something I am personally invested in, I am excited to learn how to fix her one piece at a time, but toilet hoses were not where I wanted to start. Especially with someone with as weak a stomach as Fred.  I can't even count the times I've seen him almost throw up while working on the head in the other boat.  At least after spending three years working at a preschool my nose is a seasoned veteran to horrible smells.   

I had just finished changing all the hoses on the Seahorse, and I was soooo incredibly tired of working in poo water. However, when the access hatches were opened, there was no denying that the head stunk. In fact, Mary was in the cockpit and when the smell hit her up there she said, "Did you break something in there?!!!"

The smell is not super obvious if we keep the boat aired out, but after a week of sitting it's pretty bad. Also the smell arrives if you open any access hatch anywhere as the hoses seem to go all over the boat for some reason.

I sadly resolved myself to the reality that if Mary was going to invest in this boat, I needed to man-up and do one more round of head service, so that we finally had a boat that didn't smell. In the huge scheme of things, it was a small price to pay for a future on the water.

Just to be clear, I'm still not excited about it, I'm just resolved to it.

By the way, it's very cool to see a boat being lifted above you through the air.  It reminds you of the children's books where the ship sails off into the sky.  

We went over the survey results as the crane set Gimme Shelter back in the water, and Mary was all smiles since she knew she was getting a new boat.

Saying goodbye to the Seahorse

It all started with the Free Yacht Saga. Four years ago my brother and I decided to buy a derelict 27' sailboat. Four three and a half of those four years, I've wanted a bigger boat.

In the photography world it's called GAS -- Gear Acquisition Syndrome -- you can never have enough. I'm not sure what boaters call it, but it's the same principle. "If only my boat was a couple feet longer, I'd have so much more space," you think. "I'd be able to install that genset with a water maker that I'd definitely need if I ever left the marina or if zombies attack." And all of these rationalizations seem very reasonable. I looked at bigger boats weekly on craigslist and yachtworld.

Four years later, the derelict, sunken boat was more or less done. I mean, a boat is never really done, but all my upgrades had been made, and for the first time I could say, "everything works." She'd been re-powered, re-painted and repented. She was the Seahorse.

When you've spent that long pouring sweat into a boat, you get to know it really well. I crafted the bulkheads. I crated in a motor. I crawled into the depths of every nook and cranny with hoses and wiring. 

I still wanted a bigger boat, but I also wanted new cameras, and I wanted to take a real vacation this year. I'd gotten very zen about it all. I could accept the shortcomings of my 27' vessel. I could live without a refrigerator or an oven. It wasn't so bad for weekends and day sailing. I was comfortable and confident. I knew I could single hand her.

But I wasn't sailing solo anymore. I had a very lovely crew member that was here to stay, and in March we set off together on our first sail of season to Galveston.

It wasn't a bad trip. Yes, we got beat up by the waves all the way there on day one. Yes, everything in the cockpit stayed wet all day. Yes, I almost went overboard trying to drop sails. Yes, we could barely make coffee when our friends were on their dry boat making fresh pumpkin pie. But it wasn't a bad trip. It was an adventure.

Although I was focusing on the zen and thriftiness of the Seahorse, Mary was focused on her phone, sending messages to brokers on Yacht World.  Before we got back to Kemah Sunday night, she had an appointment to see a new boat on Monday.

Owning a boat is not a decision that one makes in a weekend, but great adventure can sometimes lead to sudden clarity. While Fred and I have been sailing for a couple years now, it was not until a very stormy and difficult autumn that I realized how important it was to me to be the captain of my own ship so to speak. My fall was filled with some difficult family times, long hours at work and 17 hours of post-grad classes. There were nights when I was horribly sad and things in my life seemed unendurable. I would find hope by imagining a different life where I had a great job and great friends, and for me, buying the boat symbolized the completion of this picture. Since last August I have seen so many of my goals reached. I hardly feel like the person I was then, but I am so grateful for the hard times. Sometimes we need something to fight against, before we know our own strength.  

During our weekend in Galveston, I think it was the deep reflection that can only be caused by having nowhere else to go that got me to assessing my life. The moment of realization was strangely familiar, like it had been close for some time. The time has come! I felt like I was nearing the top of the mountain I'd been climbing for years, and it was time to claim my prize. Honestly, being a woman, I picked the very first sailboat I looked at. Fred is going to kill me when he reads that! It wasn't completely fool hardy though. We had made a list together of qualities that we needed to have in our new boat. The list was highly practical, and I stuck to most of it.

When I really think about selling the "old boat," I try not to let Freddie see tears welling up in my eyes. After two years on that boat I really owe her a lot. She will always be not just where I fell in love with my boyfriend, but also where I fell in love with a piece of myself that I may have never have seen otherwise. There is something about being caught at sea in a storm, or walking barefoot on a dock that makes you feel rawly genuine. It's difficult to explain how simple, yet real things feel to you when you're out at sea.  

While it's going to be very hard to let go of the Seahorse, I can't wait to see what great adventures Gimme Shelter has in store for us. I hope that in the future, during good times and bad, this boat will remind Fred and me of how much we have already overcome and the strength we have inside of us.