Lazy jack repair

When we arrived to the marina this weekend, the Vberth was dry as a bone, so my anchor locker fix is holding. That meant a day of sailing instead a day of repairs.

The bay wasn't wild enough to be scary, but it was choppy enough to keep us on our toes. I only managed to snap a couple photos with the iPhone while we were out because it was just too rocky to bring up the expensive cameras.

However, no amount of rocking and rolling could deter Tex from napping. He'd get rolled off the cushions and then just climb back on top of them and flop down again.

At some point during the ride, the wind whipped around the lazy jacks enough that they came loose, so I actually paid some attention to them -- or what was left of them -- while cinching them back up.

The U-bolts that held the line in place towards the end of the boom had chafed  the line through on both sides. I dug through our storage bins and found more line of the same size. We don't really use the lazy jacks, but since it was easier to tape one line to the other and work it through the system than it was to climb the mast and remove the dangling blocks, I replaced the line.

For the most part it was smooth operation, but I was a little ticked that the U-bolt tore up the new line a but before I even finished getting it into place.

Despite the nick in the new line, it's now working properly. Dixie Belle kept a strict watch through the entire process.

Another job done -- that I wasn't planning to do.

And afterwards I was rewarded with a steak so fat it was actually too heavy for the neighbor's grill. The arm collapsed halfway through the grilling process, and he barely saved them from ending up in the water!

Lessons learned: Don't bother with lazy jacks, and don't overload cantilevered grills.

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. 

Delivery

I'd read about boat deliveries on other blogs, and a few of my marina friends will regale us with the tales of their weeks at sea and emergencies they overcame while delivering boats various places.

Well, I finally got to make a delivery -- sort of.

We had to move Gimme Shelter across Clear Lake from Seabrook to her new slip at Marina Del Sol.

This seemed like a very simple, straight-forward task. I took Friday afternoon off work thinking we might even take a little sail out on the bay before bringing her in.  Wow that was incredibly hopeful.  

We had only brought one car for the weekend, so we were either going to have to leave the car at Seabrook and beg a ride back or we could catch a ride over in a dinghy. Either way, Mary wanted to go to the new boat first to start getting her ready.  I was excited to get the boat cleaned up and aired out.  Unfortunately I had forgotten all of my cleaning supplies at home, expecting to make a quick run to the store for the essentials on arrival.  

As we arrived at Seabrook, our insurance agent started calling saying he'd never gotten the engine serial number for the insurance policy. I said, no problem, let me read it off to you.

It was at that point I realized the reason he didn't have the serial number was because it had most likely been unreadable for the better part of a decade.

This set off several calls to the broker who began placing calls to the seller who began searching documents to track down this elusive number while I headed to Marina Del Sol to take a dinghy ride back.  He ended up finding the number on a previous survey, and not on the registration papers like you would think.  

The first hitch in our plan came into play when I arrived at Marina Del Sol to find the lowest tide I'd seen since January.

There was no water.

Our neighbor said there hadn't been any water all week, but that MAYBE the tide was coming back tonight.

With Mary busy cleaning the boat, there was nothing to be done except to sit down and have a beer with my friends on the Tina Marie.

Perhaps that was a bad decision since I soon got an angry phone call asking why I hadn't come back to pick Mary up. Oops.  By soon Freddie means well over two hours later.  I was expecting him to come right back to get me, and having no cleaning supplies at all I was quickly lonely and bored on the new boat.  Feeling rather jealous and abandoned I might have been a little overly grouchy.  

I drove back around the lake and retrieved her, the broker retrieved the engine serial number, and soon Mary was on the phone with the insurance company again experiencing first hand why people say "boat" stands for break out another thousand.  I am thoroughly convinced I will never have money again.

I did a little more cleaning on the Seahorse and a little more drinking on the Tina Marie, all the while keeping a close eye on the tide.

Around 7:30 p.m. I said, "I think it's deep enough."

I really wasn't sure that it was deep enough, but the tide was coming in. I figured by the time we got across the lake and back, it would be deeper.

We hopped into our friend's dinghy and set off across the lake.  I just want to say thank you to Ray for taking us across the lake, but that Ray's dinghy is much too fast for me. We will not be putting a 20hp outboard on any dinghy we buy. 

Just as we were pulling up to the boat in Seabrook Marina, the dinghy suddenly died. Our friend Ray attempted to restart it, but it was locked up.

I grabbed a paddle and sculled over to the dock. A quick inspection showed that the painter had gone under the dinghy and gotten tangled in the prop. This seems familiar.  Unfortunately, it was wrapped too tight to untie and none of us were carrying a knife. Nor did we have a knife on Gimme Shelter.

No problem, I said. We'll just fire up Gimme Shelter and tow the dinghy back.

Everyone came aboard, and I began cranking the motor on Gimme Shelter. It cranked and cranked and cranked and cranked, but it never coughed to life.  Your new boat not starting seems like it would be your greatest fear, but after so long on boats you learn to expect problems.  It's the only way to keep your sanity.  

Call number two to the broker then occurred as I had to ask him the correct starting procedure. Embarrassing.

Once I'd heated the glow plugs with the electricity actually turned on to them, she started right up.

The guys helped me with the dock lines, and we were off -- making our delivery across Clear Lake just as the sun began to set.

Pulling into the marina on my new boat, standing on the bow, with all of our friends yelling and waving from the dock, was definitely a high point in my boating career. Nothing is as fun without friends to share it with.  

Even with the dinghy delay and the extended diesel starting procedure, the tide had not come in as high as I'd hoped it would, but we were able to plow through the muddy entrance to Marina Del Sol and get situated in our new slip with no issues.

We (I) finally had (my) our new boat. Just kidding, Freddie!

(And Ray's dinghy was fine. We cut the painter loose, pulled up the motor and had it running again -- no problem.)

Sign on the dotted line

Wednesday night we excitedly rushed out of our respective offices, met up at Mary’s house, raced to the car, and then ever-so-slowly drove down to Kemah in Houston’s rush hour traffic.

It was time to sign on the dotted line.

I wasn’t nervous at all – then again, it wasn’t my money.  Thanks, Fred. 

The paperwork at the broker’s office took about ten seconds. Mary signed, and it was a done deal.  Much less than I expected, so weird I got no papers at all on the boat -- not even a receipt.  Hopefully they come in the mail!

We had hoped to move the boat that night, but as it was cold and raining, we just went to sit inside of it for a few minutes and enjoy the ambiance instead.  We got to have that great moment, when you buy something new, where you just run around and open everything. It's even more fun in an old boat because there is so much weird stuff to find!  

The broker left us a bottle of champagne in the boat.

 

We decided not to pop it open because we immediately had to drive an hour back to Houston. Instead we left it in the refrigerator – something we couldn't do on the Seahorse. However, we probably should have gone for it because by the end of the weekend, we still hadn't had a chance to toast together to this new phase in our life.  Yeah, I don't understand how in a weekend full of celebration there was never the right moment for champagne.  

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.