Blasting off

We are finally ready to leave Fort Lauderdale!  Maybe!

   Yesterday, we took a serious walking tour of Fort Lauderdale in search of the two parts that would finally fix our toilet.  We started at Sailorman, which is a gigantic used marine stuff store, where "every day is a flea market."  It was awesome.  It was like the part of the quest where we met The Sage- a gigantic room full of mysterious treasures and wizened, gnomelike old men who know everything.  We found a new deck fitting for our water fill, a twisted shackle for the traveler, 15 feet of 3/16th line (much to the chagrin of the salesman, who really thought I needed 18, or even 20 feet.  Shows how much he knows) and best of all, a new clevis pin to replace the one I dropped in the water.  That last one was most satisfying- the clevis pin is what connects the open end of a shackle.  It is tiny and looks like this:

What up, clevis?

   We were looking through card catalogs full of these things, trying to match the length, diameter and head size exactly.   It was like looking for a needle in a haystack made out of other needles.  Also like looking for shark's teeth at Calvert Cliffs.  When we finally found one, they let us take it for free, impressed by our persistence. 
   We also found out a lot about our toilet.  Erica came up huge by remembering what brand it is, and by flipping through the catalog we found the toilet that is the modern equivalent of the one that we have.  That let us find the number of the replacement parts for the ones that I broke.  The gnomes at Sailorman told us to go to the marine wholesaler down the street, who unfortunately did not have the part on hand.  They in turn sent us to the Raritan store, where they had no idea what we were talking about.  In the end, we didn't get the part we needed...but, we at least found out that it exists, and have come up with a scheme for a temporary fix until we can track down the real part.  It was more walking than we had planned on, but it was fun to enter the world of people who actually know about boats, where you can actually get parts to fix things instead of replacing them entirely.   Then we went to West Marine and didn't buy anything- another major triumph.
   This afternoon, we overhauled the rigging.  All the halyards were run so that they needlessly crossed over one another at the top of the mast, so we untwisted all of them.  We put a reef in the mainsail, because unreefed it is too big for the boat. We rerigged the boom lift, and took two mysterious bolts out of the mast that were supporting the bottom of the boom for no particular reason.  Actually, I have a hypothesis, which is that if the boom lift doesn't work because you tied it in stupid knots, and you wanted to lift the boom so it wouldn't swing at head level, you might think that it would be a good idea to shove two bolts into the mast underneath the boom to hold it up, instead of just fixing the boom lift.  It's just a theory, but I defy anyone to come up with a better explanation. 

   Tomorrow, we're going to get up early and start heading south.  The plan is to go to an anchorage about 13 miles south of our slip, so when things get complicated and we don't actually leave early it will be okay.  It looks like we'll have about two days of motoring until things open up enough for us to start sailing for real. We also got the camera back today, so we will get back to putting up our own pictures.

Hit it with a hammer

Thank you, Alik.
   I can tell you that that was not what we were saying yesterday when we tried to go sailing for the first time.  The weather was beautiful, the jib went up fine, we turned off the engine, and things were looking pretty good.  When I went to untie the mess of knots underneath the boom, in preparation for putting up the mainsail, I realized that instead of being a half-assed measure to stop the boom from swinging around, these knots were actually a half-assed attempt to rig the mainsheet to the boat (Erica's "sailing for dummies" note: the mainsheet is the rope that's used to control the mainsail).  This mess was apparently meant to stand in for a traveler, which is a complicated little metal piece that slides back and forth on a track, and is the point on the boat where the mainsheet attaches. So in essence the traveler was nonexistent, replaced by a terrible, terrible tangle of lines, knots, and random blocks, which held everything in place, but was not at all conducive to actual sailing. 
   Undaunted but mildly distressed, we sailed back in and then motored up to Lake Sylvia, which is about two miles north of our slip, where we gently ran aground.  We got floating again pretty quickly, though, and were more mindful the second time of the cruising guide's advice to "hug the eastern wall".  We hugged it so close, in fact, that we got to talk to a nice man lounging on shore, who complimented my orange hat, and helped guide us in by waving his arms to direct us where to turn to avoid the shallows (I guess he didn't help the next boat to come in, because they ran hard aground and had to wait for the tide to come up).  Anchoring in the lake was a bit of an adventure, too, because we had never done it before as a team. It took five tries- the first time we got the anchor set, but were only about 8 feet away from an extremely skeptical looking gentleman in a very fancy boat, so we kept trying...under his watchful eye.  Finally, though, we got the anchor properly set at an appropriate distance from all the other boats, and settled in for some well deserved wine and party mix.  It was really nice getting to hang out on the boat and not work on it for a while... hopefully a hint of things to come. 
   This morning we motored back to our slip, and I started trying to address the rigging while Erica took a stab at fixing some lingering issues with the toilet.  After a fruitless trip to West Marine and the hardware store, spirits were running a bit low.  And then, a miracle!  I was looking in one of the random stuff drawers, thinking that I had seen a traveler in there somewhere, and indeed, there it was.  It didn't fit the first time I tried it in the track, but after I wailed on it with a hammer for a while, it slid right on.  This is a part that starts at a minimum of $100 dollars, and would probably have required a special order to get one that fit properly.  Instead, I gave it a special order with my hammer and now it works beautifully.  So thank you, Alik, for having the proper hardware somewhere onboard, even if it wasn't in exactly the right place.
   After that, everything started coming together.  Working together, we made major progress on the toilet, rewired the boom lift, took out the frozen deck fitting for the water tank, and made a solid start at attaching the mainsheet to the traveler.  Tomorrow, we're hitting the used-marine store that we finally located, and also the tent sale at West Marine, where Erica claims there will be free hot dogs. 

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (literally)

I am sorry to report that tragedy has finally cast its pall over our grand adventure.

Now, some would say that racking up a 15-year-old honda civic's 195,000th mile is not something to be attempted on a 1000 mile road trip with the car packed completely full of stuff, and toting a homemade wooden roof-rack to boot. Some would see that little car, in all its duffle-bag-filled glory, and say "what is this, a joke?"



But we really believed that Little Blue had it in him, so we went for it.

The idea was to deliver the Little Blue Car (full of all of our non-boat stuff) back to Maryland so that we could formally take our leave of Fort Lauderdale, footloose and automobile free, and head for the keys. Everything was business as usual for the first two legs of the journey (apx. 300 miles to Gainesville, and a subsequent 250 to Hilton Head). After a delightful evening in South Carolina in the company of our dear friends the Hursts, we woke up the next morning refreshed, and ready to put the ole' pedal back to the metal. Which we did.... for about 6 miles.


It was in the midst of a left hand turn in a crowded intersection that Little Blue conveniently began its death throes, locking into fifth gear and coming to a complete stop. With the flashers on, I managed to gun it hard enough in fifth gear to get it through the intersection, and turned immediately onto the nearest residential street, where we had a jolly time waiting for triple A to arrive and haul us to the mechanic, where the verdict was that for $900 worth of what basically amounts to vehicular life-support, we could cruise out of there some time in the next week and probably get the car back to Maryland. So I said "what is that, a joke?" and promptly divested Little Blue of all of our worldly treasures and donated it to Habitat for Humanity.

Good thing for us, Rob has been secretly converting the Hurst Mansion to a storage facility (shhhh - don't tell Sarah!!!), so we were able to store some things with them, and the rest of our belongings accompanied us on the 11 hour journey on the Palmetto Express Amtrak from Savannah, GA to Union Station. The journey was relatively uneventful, with the exception of a rather large man two rows behind us who snored loudly for about 9.5 out of the 11 hours of the ride, and at one point snored so loudly and with such gusto that the everyone in the train car busted out laughing.

We rolled into Union Station around 8:00 on Saturday night, and dragged all of our belongings down to the metro station, where I proceeded to get stuck in the turnstile because of all of the stuff I was trying to carry before finally boarding the train, where we unapologetically offended the citizens of D.C. with our mountain of duffel bags and boxes. By the time we arrived in Shady Grove around 9:30, I was basically delirious but they (Charlie) tell me I ate an entire bag of jelly beans before passing out in Charlie's parents' basement.

But all's well that ends well, and after a really lovely, albeit brief, visit with parents and Gran, we flew back to Ft. Lauderdale today to find the boat still afloat (ohhhh yeahhhhh!!!!!), and with all of our stuff still in it (double ohhhh yeahhh!!!!). Tomorrow, we sail!!

We're getting there

Oh yeah

Gotcha!  Hopefully this is the last treasure we find on the boat, because if we find anymore they will be coming out of compartments that I don't know about.  I found this waterproof jumpsuit a few days ago, and finally got around to cleaning it today.  It's still pretty dirty, but I put it on anyway.  Sometimes you gotta do something, even if it's wrong.
For fairness' sake, here's a picture of Erica wearing a special suit, of sorts.

Gotcha

Today Erica went shopping at the bulk food store while I worked at the boat.  She got the biggest jug of Party Mix that I've ever seen, so if nothing else we can live off of that for several weeks.  She keeps talking about nutritional density, I'm not really sure why...it certainly can't be relevant to Party Mix.
I think that I finished fixing the head, but some of the hoses needed to be caulked together so we have to make sure that they sealed properly before it's totally done.  Just in case anyone wants to see what I've been doing for the last three days, here she is:

Notice the one shiny new hose

We got the boat mostly put back together today, so here are a couple of pictures of the inside. 

V-berth

That piece of plywood is bootleg- it doesn't actually fit that space yet, and it isn't fastened to anything.  But it does cover up an ugly empty space above the freshwater tank.  Here's what it looked like last week: 

That's our spare mainsail on the left

Here's the main cabin:

We're getting there

And before: 

Find 6 differences

It's funny, because I thought the pictures I took today would show how tidy the boat was.  When I look at them now, though, I notice the upside down table, the jug of stove alcohol, and the open knife blade.  Still, it is better than it once was.  Very few fishing rods.  Although I did find the giant owl again- either Erica hid it as a joke, or she thinks we really need it.  Either way, we need to talk. 

Tomorrow we're going to move our clothes and books onto the boat, then take off for Gainesville.  Hilton Head on Thursday, Richmond on Friday, then Maryland until we fly back Monday morning.  Then...off to Key West!

Anderson has asthma

Oh yeah

We had quite the whirlwind weekend.  On Thursday, we took the boat off the dock for the first time.  We didn't get to raise the sails, but we made it in and out of the slip successfully, so I consider it a great success.  Then we went to the hockey game and got to be in the intermission show, playing musical chairs.  

What is this, a joke?

We didn't get the chance to win a car, and they wouldn't let us wear sumo suits, but it was still excellent getting to go out on the ice.  Todd and I practiced checking each other into the boards, which is every bit as fun as it seems like it would be.  Then we spent the rest of the game heckling the other team's goalie, Anderson.

Back to work on Friday.  I started doing battle with the head, while Erica finished bleaching and washing the interior cushions.  Look at how sinister it is:

My worst enemy

My approach with the head was the classic strategy of immediately breaking part of it.  I find that it make a large problem seem more manageable, because it gives me a good place to get started working.  As it turns out, I think the head works fine, and the "problem" is just that the holding tank is full.  But, one of the y-valves was totally busted, so it was for the best that I broke it, too.  Now all I have to do is put it all back together, and we should have a working toilet.  

Sailing on the dock

Saturday we spent at the beach with Erica's cousin.  It was insane- turns out, spring break is real.  Who knew?

Don't worry...we do know that guy on the phone

 

Today, Erica made new covers for some of the storage compartments on the boat.  We got her a saw, and she didn't cut even one arm off.  

To a girl with a saw, two arms seems like a lot

I spent most of the day smearing caulk all over the boat.  It got in my hair, on my arm, on my pants...some of it even got onto the part of the toilet I was trying to fix.  You know the old saying: to a man with a tube of caulk, the whole world looks like it is smeared with caulk that will never ever come off.

Tomorrow, we finish the compartment lids, which will be great because then we can put the cushions back and put the inside of the boat back together.  I just bought a stove on Ebay, and once we get that we're practically ready to move onboard.

"Make cleaning your new favorite"

Charlie has his work cut out for him reworking some of the drains in the cockpit and wrestling with the bilge pump, so while he's doing that it's me against the dirt in the rest of the boat, and really, "dirt" is an understated way to describe what we're dealing with here - it's the kind of grossness that makes dealing with it feel less like cleaning, and more like doing battle with an enemy that has access to biological weaponry. So for the last two days, I've put on my little SARS mask and my knee pads, and wielded my brand new 14-functions-in-one paint scraper and my bleach spray bottle to the best of my abilities, blasting through all of the assorted rust and dirt and mold and general marine ickiness that has found its way over every inch of our poor boat.

Below: battle mode, and victory mode

It's been pretty intense, but I've found that with enough yelling and swearing, there's nothing so gross I can't deal with it (although, sometimes I throw up a little bit in my mouth/sars mask). Watching the boat get brighter and shinier with each swipe of the sponge has been very gratifying, and totally worth losing half of my brain to bleach fumes. Also, when I want to take a break, I just pop my head out of the hatch, and I see this:




... which is AWESOME! I think we've gotten enough done over the last couple of days to have earned some sailing time tomorrow, so hopefully tomorrow is the day when this officially evolves from a scrubbing and fixing blog to an actual sailing blog... stay tuned!

Science News

Oh yeah

Major score!  Erica found a gigantic fake owl in the v-berth yesterday.  And some more fishing rods.

We've gotten about a day and a half of work in so far.  Erica has had great success throwing things away and cleaning.  I have had somewhat lesser success fixing the drains in the back of the boat.  All of the joints where the drainhoses connect were completely clogged with a delightful combination of mud, bird droppings and fishing weights, so I had to disconnect all the hoses and clean the connectors out, like so:

Oh yeah

We had some good science learning moments today.  First, I noticed that there are two drains in the cockpit that go straight down and out through the bottom of the boat.  It did not seem intuitively right that those would actually drain, since they let water out below the waterline.  Then Erica pointed out, a la Pascal, that water won't actually support a column of water above it, if the top of the column isn't sealed.  She has some cockamamie story about the weight of air, but really it's just gravity.  Secondly, when I found the freshwater tank, next to the filler hose that runs from the deck into the tank there was a thin hose that looked a lot like a vent, also running into the tank.  But why would the freshwater tank need a vent?  Hours later, I had a eureka moment, realizing that if there was no vent, pumping water out of the tank would be really difficult, because you would be creating a vacuum.  Tomorrow, I think we'll learn about electricity, and possibly infectious diseases.

In other news, the sink works.  We can't really take any credit for that, though, because all I did to make it work was press the pump for the first time- good ol' Alik told me it didn't work, and I took him at his word.  He didn't use it as a sink so much as a place to put fishhooks and rusty x-acto knives, so that might explain why he misled us.

In between work days, we went to a hockey game.  It was excellent- there was a short-lived overtime, and several fights.  And a face off in the corner:

(

Oh yeah

Back to work tomorrow.  Hopefully we get the boat clean enough that we can take some respectable pictures of it.

Married to the Wocean

Boat Owner!

 We did it!  We successfully bought the first boat that we looked at, the sailing vessel Ubiquitous.

 Here is the previous owner, Alik, explaining in a thick, Borat-like accent something that, judging by the look on my face, was apparently very confusing. It might have been about how Erica and I are now "married to the wocean" which he was extraordinarily fond of saying.  Or maybe that "if you sleep in the wocean, two hours only -- the same as if you sleep all night in bed.  In freshwater, maybe 4 hours." Or telling us how we could "find adwenture really easy on a boat.  Smuggle marijuana from the Bahamas, make a million dollars".  He was really something.  Also, he had a prosthetic leg.  And a friend named Boris.  And one time he put shampoo in the fountain by his apartment and covered the street in bubbles:  "It make police crazy!" 

Here she is!   This picture is from her most flattering angle, and certainly does not capture the unbelievable amount of junk inside.  Alik worked at a boatyard for a few months, and proudly told me how he snagged as much stuff as possible while he worked there.  To give an idea, here are a few of the things we've found:
10-15 fishing rods, 3 wetsuits, a boat autopilot, flipflops, swimfins, some nice Gap sweaters, several sets of foulies, more fishing rods, more wetsuits, a spare toilet, 1,000 gigantic fishhooks, some spare fiberglass,  a sledgehammer, and a giant bottle of vodka (that was in the icebox).  I think Erica will be very surprised at how big the boat is, once we clean out enough stuff that you can actually see it. 

So we bought a boat, then went out to party spring break style with Erica's awesome cousin.  Apparently, beards are not in, because I was quite literally the only person with a beard in all of Fort Lauderdale.  And tomorrow, we work.  Basically everything on the boat needs fixing, so, if anybody wants to come to Fort Lauderdale, we can trade sailing time for slave labor.  As Alik says, "from here, only 8 minutes to the wocean"

This Is What We Do Sometimes in Florida

What's better than one compass?

We looked at a 30' Newport sailboat in Ft. Lauderdale today. I'm no sailor, but as far as I can tell it floats, it has sails (in remarkably good shape), it's rigged right, the inboard engine starts up easy and sounds great while it runs, and there are some seriously badass winches for sheeting in the sails (Charlie used about seven adjectives to describe them... something to do with "reversible" and "self-tailing"). Charlie crawled all over it flipping switches and tugging on things, which all looked pretty thorough to me, and the verdict of his survey was that as far as the essentials go, it's all there and it all works.

The downside is that in addition to being full of all of the things that one wants in a boat, it is also full (like, seriously full) of all manner of accumulated crap that no one wants. The current owner, who is as strange and Russian as he could be, seems essentially to have been treating the boat as a floating storage unit for the past 8 months, leaving the inside in a state remarkably reminiscent of the far back corner of some old house's garage. We're talking everything from fishing poles (I think I counted five altogether) to coils of old rigging, boxes of rusted screws and empty cans of WD-40.

In summary - this boat is great, but it is dirty in a way that will require some serious sweat equity to get into live-aboard condition; however, since sweat equity accounts for the bulk of our wealth at this point, I think we very well may have found our boat. To quote Charlie (who has been talking more and faster today than I have ever seen in all our time together): "I'm seeing a lot of potential here." He's said it like seven times, so I think he really means it.

And, extra bonus: for some completely inexplicable reason, this boat has two compasses, so you can go double-north.

Taking our Talents to South Beach

Erica, buzzing along

We're in Miami!  Lounging poolside at Erica's aunt and uncle's beautiful house, trying out our new blog.  It's not a vacation, just our new, homeless, life.  The boat search has begun in earnest, and we have an appointment tomorrow to look at a 30 ft. Newport sailboat in Fort Lauderdale.  Ideally, it will be exactly what we want, and we will sail at dawn.

By the pool at Bill and Collette's

Two goals of mine for this trip are to swim every day, and to wear real pants as infrequently as possible.   Erica's goals are never to go in the sun, and to agonize as much as possible about grad school.  So far, so good.  Remember, if it's important, do it every day.