What a long, strange trip it’s been…

I set out from San Diego on Christmas Day 1975 for what I thought would be “the trip” – sail my boat out to Hawaii and on to Guam, work two years and continue on around the world. But that trip ended on Guam in May 1976 when Typhoon Pamela sank my boat.

October, 1977, I arrived in Silicon Valley with the woman I had met during my sailing adventure. The plan was to work hard, save money, build a new boat and go back to sailing. I had fallen in love with California during the year that I worked and lived aboard my boat in San Diego so it was a no brainer to come back to California to look for work.

Before I got here, I hadn’t even heard of Silicon Valley. I came looking for a job that would pay well and finance a new boat and a circumnavigation. A friend pointed me toward San Jose. I quickly found a good job and it looked like I was on my way. But, as is often the case, the plan didn’t quite work out.

It is heartbreaking to look back and see how easily it could have worked if I had stuck to the plan. The employee stock plan I signed up to when I went to work at Four Phase Systems would have been golden if I had stuck with it. Motorola bought out Four Phase and the stock turned out to be worth considerably more than I had paid for it.

Unfortunately, I had gotten caught up in Silicon Valley’s “money, sex and power” ethos. I left Four Phase thinking I would become an entrepreneur and get rich quickly. I sold my stock, squandered a windfall from an earlier startup and lost my sailing companion, friend, lover and wife through my foolish behavior. I had bought a lot of steel and parts for the new boat and ended up selling them off for next to nothing when I lost my focus.

Some wonderful things did come out of the disaster. I learned to fly and enjoyed two years of working as a flight instructor teaching everything from basic private pilot skills to aerobatics. I learned to fly sailplanes and worked as a tow plane pilot. I experienced life in the desert – 11 years in Phoenix, Arizona.

I remarried and became the father of two girls who brought me great joy. They taught me about dimensions of love that I would never have known otherwise. The marriage ended but I have been fortunate to be able to continue the relationship with my daughters.

Through all of this, I continued to think of myself as a sailor – a boat person. It wasn’t a daily obsession but there were recurring flashes of the contentment of being at sea, of standing night watches and watching the moon go through its phases, of learning the names of stars and using them to navigate to a little island in the Pacific, of being self-sufficient, of learning to plan to deal with all the things that could go wrong, of tying knots, changing sails, sleeping in a berth with the sound of water rushing past the hull.

By the time my marriage ended, I had pretty much convinced myself that I was never going sailing again. I married again and enjoyed six years with a woman who is as close to an ideal partner as I can imagine. Our relationship started in Placerville, CA, and took us to the Portland, OR, area. I retired (I thought) and we moved back to Placerville to renovate our house and settle into a quiet, orderly life.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. (Do I hear the universe laughing at my plans again?) I felt smothered living in Placerville. Placerville is in El Dorado County – the second most conservative county in California. I am nowhere near being a conservative. It was hard to find like minded friends. I had planned to develop my interest in photography and, perhaps, sell some of my work. I thought I might start writing. I wasn’t sure what – but surely something would surface.

As we worked through refurbishing the house and trying to find our place in our community, the sailing dream/fantasy resurfaced. After finishing one of the milestone projects on the house, we took a weekend off to go to Santa Cruz, relax and talk some more about what we wanted to do with the rest of our life. At some point, I blurted out that the only real passion in my life was to finish my uncompleted dream – build a boat and sail it around the world.

My wife/friend/lover/companion did not take that well. From her point of view, this was pretty much out of the blue. She knew of my past sailing adventures but believed (as I did) that it was all in the past. She had never spent time on boats and had no desire to learn to love sailing. Things spiraled out of control and, in short order, I had used my 401(k) money to buy a boat, moved aboard and started working on fixing it up for the long dreamed of circumnavigation. We are struggling to keep some semblance of a marriage together under these new conditions.
The boat, Laelia, turned out to need more improvements than I anticipated. That translates to needing money. I started looking for work again.

Thirty five years after I arrived in Silicon Valley with a dream, I am back. This time, I have a boat but I still need money to finish outfitting and go sailing. I have learned the value of staying focused so I think this time, the dream will be realized.

I am working just a few miles from where I first lived when I arrived in Silicon Valley and started to work at Four Phase Systems. As Yogi Berra put it so well, “it is déjà vu all over again.” Sorta. Lots of things have changed. When I arrived, Apple Computers was just past the garage shop stage and was advertising to hire software developers. I didn’t take it seriously – they were just hobby computers, not real computers.

Now, the apple orchard I used to walk through on the way to work is now Apple Computers’ headquarters. The old Four Phase buildings were damaged by an earthquake and have been torn down. Apple has built new buildings and expanded into that space too. The place where I now work used to be known as Hewlett-Packard but some years back, HP divested themselves of this operation and it became Agilent Technologies.

The house that I lived in when I arrived was a post WWII flat-top cracker box that our landlords upgraded by putting on a pitched roof. It has since been entirely rebuilt and is not recognizable as the same place.

But, despite all the changes, some things have not changed. I am still working toward the dream. Some of the friends I had back then are still here. We get together once a month to have dinner and compare notes. As old farts are wont to do, we talk about the old days as well as where we are today. Traffic is even worse that it was then and the general pace of life is even more frenetic than thirty five years ago.

So here I am after thirty five years. I am back in Silicon Valley. I am working toward the original goal - a boat and a round-the-world sailing trip. I alternate between the joy of being on a boat, living on the water again and despair at the condition of my marriage.

So much has happened and I am back and barely past the starting point.

What a long strange trip it has been...

... and it’s not over.

The tireless crewmate arrives

As much as I love sailing, I don't much care for spending a lot of time steering the boat. That situation is compounded when I'm sailing alone and there are so many other things that need doing - like eating and sleeping and tending to the sail and navigating - just to mention a few.

The solution to this is either an autopilot or a wind vane. Autopilots require a lot of electrical power when they are in continuous operation - especially when I'm sailing down wind. I hope to do a lot of down wind sailing. It is so much more pleasant than beating into the wind and the waves.

A wind vane is a logical choice for a sailboat. It uses wind power and water power to do the steering. It consists of a vane that senses wind direction and some kind of linkage to a rudder to make corrections so the boat stays at the same angle to the wind. Since sailboats are wind powered, this makes a lot of sense. Yes, when the wind shifts, so does the boat's course. That's when I get up out of my bunk, reset the vane and retrim the sails. With an autopilot, the course would stay the same but I still would have to do the sail trimming. All told, I would say the wind vane is the hands down winner in the autopilot/wind vane competition on a sailboat.

One of the really great things about a wind vane is that it is a silent crew member. It doesn't complain. It doesn't eat. I doesn't get tired of steering the boat. What more could I ask for? Well ... we won't go into that here.

Way back in the dark ages - about 1960 or so, an Englishman by the name of Blondie Hasler came up with an arrangement called a pendulum-servo wind vane. It consists of a vane that sticks up into the air and can be turned to the desired angle between the boat and the wind. If the boat goes a bit off course, the vane is blown over to one side. The vane is linked to a rudder-like device (an oar) in the water that, in addition to being able to turn, it swings from side to side like a pendulum. When the oar turns, the pressure of the water flowing past it causes the oar to swing to one side. There are lines (ropes) attached to the oar that, in turn, are attached to the tiller or steering wheel in a way that causes the boat to return to the original angle relative to the wind.

I'm sure that is confusing. Maybe it will be more clear as this discourse progresses.

When I sailed my old boat, Chatelaine, out into the Pacific in 1975/76, I had an early model of the wind vane now known as the Monitor. At the time, it was considerably cheaper than the Aries, the only other pendulum-servo wind vane on the market. When I started thinking about a wind vane for Laelia, I was delighted to find that the Monitor had become easily the most popular pendulum-servo wind vane on the market. I visited the manufacturing facility at Scanmar International in Richmond, CA, and found that my beloved Monitor has been much improved over the years. It is built of better quality, more robust materials than my old vane. Additionally, the Monitor has been installed on a number of boats identical to mine so ScanMar had detailed drawings of the installation.

I finally scraped together the money to buy the Monitor about a month ago. It looked to be a pretty simple proposition to mount it on the transom (the rear-most part of the boat). There were four mounting brackets and four stainless steel tubes that positioned the wind vane. I went to work installing the upper brackets and did a trial fitting to see how it would all work.

Remember that Laelia is a ketch. She has two masts. The boom on the mizzen (the aftermost sail) sticks out over the transom a bit. I figured that ScanMar had dealt with that. Much to my dismay, the initial fitting ended up looking like the picture to the right. The mizzen boom overlapped the wind vane by a good four inches. That means that every time I tack or gybe and the mizzen boom is going to swing across the boat, I have to remove the vane, do the maneuver and reinstall the vane. Not good! With Chatelaine, the wind vane did most of the steering during these maneuvers leaving me free to deal with the sails.

I talked to the folks at Scanmar and after some discussion, they agreed to make a custom mount that would put the wind vane an additional six inches away from the boat. This meant adding two more stainless steel tubes for extra bracing. They did this at no additional cost to me. I call that great service!

It took a while to get it all mounted. I spent the biggest part of the time drilling holes in the stainless steel tubing. One of the holes took over two hours! Fortunately, I work with people who deal with fabricating complicated devices out of exotic materials. One of them spelled out a better way to go about the drilling and it went much faster after that point. The final mounting left about two inches between  the mizzen boom and the wind vane. The finished mounting job is shown to the left.

That left me with the task of attaching the lines from the servo oar to the steering wheel and running a line used to turn the vane to point the right direction. All it took was another $350 to buy additional blocks (pulleys) to route them properly and keep the friction in the lines to a minimum.

Sunday, July 29th was the day of the first sailing trial. My neighbors, Eric and Diane, were eager to go along and see how an experienced sailor handled a boat. (They were talking about me!) They live on a boat just a few feet away from mine so they had been spectators to the whole ordeal of mounting the vane. They would come to look at it, shake their head and say that it was hard to believe that it would work.

The day looked perfect from my berth at Pete's Harbor. Lots of sun, enough wind to ensure a good sail and tides that would work in my favor for the sail. When I say "would work in my favor" I mean that we set out a low tide. If I run aground at low tide, the rising tide will eventually float the boat again. If I run aground at high tide, I could be there for 12 hours and 45 minutes until the next high tide. If the next high tide wasn't as high as the previous one, it would be another 12 hours and 45 minutes before the next. This could go on for quite a long time until either I get a higher high tide or I pay someone to come drag me off the mud.

We left the slip with minimal fuss - quite a feat (if I do say so myself) given that this is undoubtedly the worst berth in the marina for getting in and out. We motored down Redwood Creek toward South San Francisco Bay and discovered that the wind was going to be from dead ahead as we went up the channel to the bay. Not to worry. The engine was running fine and we plugged along until we finally cleared the narrow channel leading to Redwood Creek.

Now, readers of this blog may recall my experience of moving the boat down here from Sausalito (see "A wild ride"). It doesn't take much wind to kick up a nasty short, steep chop in the shallow waters in the south bay. On this day, with only about 10 knots of wind, it was definitely lumpy sailing.

Nonetheless, I unrolled an appropriate amount of jib for the conditions and turned the helm over to Eric while I started messing around with the wind vane. Remember what I said about lumpy conditions? In a matter of about 10 minutes, I was hanging over the rail feeding my last ten meals to the fish. I would have one of those gut wrenching episode, do some work with the wind vane and return to feeding the fish.

The result? When Laelia was going to windward, the wind vane did an excellent job of steering. But then again, Laelia will sail herself for short periods when going to windward so that wasn't much of a test.

By the time we had tried this out, I had my third trip to the rail and I was ready to call it quits for the day. We turned downwind to return to Pete's Harbor. The vane didn't do quite so good a job downwind. Laelia was out of trim (my fault) and she tends to wallow in a following sea to begin with. I had to keep on the helm and add corrections to keep her on course. I thing that this was mostly because of the arrangement of the steering lines. There was too much slack in them and I had no good way of adjusting them. I was able to both tack and gybe with the wind vane doing most of the steering and the mizzen boom did not hit the wind vane.

Sad to say, I was paying too much attention to the wind vane and not enough to navigating. At some point, Diane pointed to a channel marker some way off to starboard and asked if that was the one we were suppose do be sailing to. I pulled out the GPS unit and saw that she was correct. It was actually the second marker - we had missed the entrance to the channel Redwood Creek channel and were sailing merrily along toward the main channel toward the Dumbarton Bridge. In my debilitated condition, I made a bad decision. I decided to cut across from the channel we were in to the one we wanted to be in. It was just past low tide so it is no surprise that in short order we were stuck in the mud.

I figured that the rising tide and the action of the waves lifting the boat would eventually get us off the bottom. I was right, but it took a little over two hours. In the meantime, we were getting beaten up by the choppy waves. We were turned beam on (sideways) to the waves. They would break against the side of the boat and the spray would douse us all. Fortunately, I had put on my foul weather pants earlier so I wasn't in too bad shape. Eric and Diane didn't have foul weather gear but they took it all in stride. They sat out in the cockpit with me for a while getting doused by breaking waves and even went up on the bow for a bit to see if the weight shift would float us off. It didn't. I suggested that they should go below where it was warmer and drier. Eventually they did and passed up the jacket to my foul weather gear so I was pretty well protected. It was just a matter of waiting it out until we floated free.

At long last, we floated/motored free into the Redwood Creek channel and headed home. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful except that with the wind and the tidal current, I managed to scape the piling on one side of my slip. I scraped it hard enough to remove several feet of varnish from the cap rail (the wooden trim rail around the edge of the deck.)

I think that there's nothing wrong with the wind vane that another hundred or so dollars worth of parts won't cure. Everyone who has ever owned a boat is aware of the saying that a boat is just a hole in the water that the owner tries to fill up by throwing in money. I have some of the parts on order and I look forward to getting it all rigged and trying it again.

It will be a blessing if the next time out does not include seasickness and getting stuck in the mud!

Now I'm cooking with gas!

Back in the days of my youth, we lived in caves and cooked over campfires using wood as fuel. It worked but it was awfully slow when we were standing around with an appetite and waiting for a slab of woolly mammoth to be reheated to body temperature. One evening, our cooking session was interrupted by a large dinosaur - a brontosaurus, as I remember. We dove for cover in the cave while the bronto sniffed around hoping for some form of food. Being strictly vegetarian, he/she didn't find anything of interest. Being strictly vegetarian, the critter also farted prolifically. One of these expulsions of gas came when the bronto was close to the fire. The ensuing explosion frightened the critter away.

As with many disasters, there was a lesson to be learned. Acting on a hunch, we went looking for brontosauri the next day. We carried with us some size able clay urns. The objective was to get close enough to catch an urn-full of flatulence. We were successful. The evening's cooking session went much faster as we released the urns of brontosaurus gas through large diameter bamboo tubes in the vicinity of the fire. In short order, we were eating dinner. Thus came the expression, "Now we're cooking with gas!"

Fast forward now to life aboard Laelia. Since I moved aboard in December, I have been cooking on a single burner hotplate. You can see the hotplate in the picture to the right. I did have a section of counter top over that big hole, but you can kind of get the idea what my galley (kitchen) looked like. It works but the hotplate is sometimes maddenly slow. I timed how long it took to get a half filled pasta pot to boil - 45 minutes! Not satisfactory! I like my pasta and when I get home from work at 7:30 PM, I don't feel like waiting 45 minutes for the water to boil. What to do?

My first thought was to go back to the olden days but I quickly realized that there were no longer any dinosaurs roaming nearby. I suppose cows would be an adequate substitute but those are about as available as dinosaurs here in Silicon Valley.

While perusing a West Marine catalog, I came across a Shipmate 3 burner propane stove that looked like just the thing. It even has gimbals. Gimbals are devices to keep the stove level while the boat is rolling from side to side. I paid an outrageous amount of money to have a propane locker installed in the lazarette (a storage compartment in the very farthest aft section of the cockpit). Unfortunately, this used up all my money. I had to wait until I found a job and paid off some bills before I could actually buy the stove.

Last weekend, I ordered the stove. On Wednesday, I got a call telling me that the stove had arrived. I left work early to pick it up and hot footed it back to Laelia to install it. Amazingly enough, it turned out to be not much of a problem. By 11 PM, I had it installed and I was boiling water in my tea kettle. See the picture to the right.

This evening, I did a comparison. I was lusting for a pot of spaghetti so I hauled out the pasta pot, filled it, turned on the stove and started a timer. Fourteen minutes later, I had a vigorously boiling pot of water. Huzzah! I'm back to cooking with gas!

By the way, the wind vane project is moving along. I am waiting for some parts so I can finish it off. I will post pictures and commentary on the process after the first sailing trial. Stay tuned!

The Great Transmission Adventure

... in which I learn (and re-learn) lots of things.

The first effort at getting the transmission problem resolved involved a fellow occupant of the marina who claimed some expertise in engine and transmission matters. He came to the boat, looked it over and said he would pull the transmission out and take it to his shop. In an effort to save some money, I said I would pull the transmission and have it ready for him later in the week. Wrong answer! I didn't hear from him for a couple of weeks. I ran into him one day on the dock and he was not happy that I was doing the part that was going to earn him some money. I was having trouble getting the transmission out so I offered him the chance to finish the job. He declined. Oh well!

Did I mention that I was having trouble getting the transmission out of the boat? Well, I was. It all sounded so simple. 1) Disconnect the prop shaft. (That was easy). 2) Remove the four bolts that hold the transmission onto the engine. 3) Beat on it with a rubber hammer until it comes loose. This is where the fun (?) began. I beat on it periodically most of one weekend. It wouldn't budge. I periodically applied a mixture of automatic transmission fluid and acetone as a rust penetrant and beat on it some more in the evenings of the week following. Nothing moved. The next weekend I was in Placerville so nothing got done. The following week was a repeat of the previous - come home from work, brush on a little more penetrant, beat on the transmission and give up in frustration.

Finally, the next weekend, I rigged up a block and tackle arrangement  (see picture to the right) to put a healthy pull on the transmission while I beat on it and (ta-dah!) it came loose. Much to my chagrin, the place I had been applying the rust penetrant was not the place where the transmission mated to the engine.

So, OK, now I have a transmission lying in the cockpit ready to be repaired. The only problem is that I don't know who does that. I did an Internet search and didn't come up with anything that looked promising. I lefat a message for a yard foreman who didn't return my call and another one for the surveyor who did the survey on the boat when I bought it. The surveyor returned my call. I described the problem. He said he would get back to me with some information on where to go for the next step. After I had hounded him with three more calls, I gave up on him.

The next move was fairly obvious. I called around to some boat yards and asked who could look at the transmission. A place called "The Boatyard at the Grand Marina" in Alameda said they could do it. The gentleman I talked to said they were open 8 - 5 weekdays. I explained that I work 9 - 6 in Santa Clara so that was going to be a problem. After some back and forth conversation, he said that one of the mechanics usually showed up at 6 AM and I could leave it with him.

Monday morning, I was out of bed at 5:30, ate breakfast and hit the road to Alameda. For those of you who do not know the SF Bay area, there are three bridges across the bay that handle all of the traffic going from SF and the peninsula to the south to what is known as the East Bay. That means that the morning commute gets pretty ugly. Going over was not too bad. Traffic moved at the speed limit across the San Mateo bridge and then crawled up the Nimitz Freeway (aka Interstate 880). As I was approaching Alameda, the morning radio show I had tuned in announced that there had been a fire on the BART line (the commuter train that runs under the bay from East Bay to SF) and both tracks were shut down. This put a whole bunch more traffic on the road headed for the bridges. It was looking pretty grim for the trip back to Santa Clara.

I pulled into "The Boatyard at the Grand Marina" a few minutes before 7 AM. With some luck, I could make it to work pretty much on time. Unfortunately, the luck was not with me. The shop was locked up tight. I sat in my car and watched the front door waiting for someone to arrive. Finally, at 8:10, a car pulled up and a man jumped out and ran for the front door. He unlocked it and went in. I followed closely. I explained who I was and why I was there so early. He apologized profusely and explained that USUALLY someone was there early but for some reason no one was this morning. Oh well!

I explained the problem I was having with the transmission. He wrote up a repair ticket and hauled the transmission into the shop. I beat feet for my car and left in a hurry in the hpe that I wouldn't bee TOO late for work. I promptly missed the turn onto the freeway and spent 10 minutes trying to find my way back. Once on the freeway, the traffic was slow and go - remember the BART problem? By the time I got back to the San Mateo bridge, the lane for getting onto the bridge was backed up for at least two miles. I kept going South in the hope that the Dumbarton Bridge would be better. It was.

Once back across the bridge, the normal thing to do would be to get on highway 101 south. As I drove over the overpass, it looked like it was pretty badly jammed up so I decided to be clever and take some back streets to bypass the mess. Unfortunately, I don't know the back streets very well and I spent a frustrating 15 - 20 minutes finding my way to Interstate 280 where I was pretty sure there would be no traffic problem. For once, I was right. It was the ususal 75 - 80 mph all the way into Santa Clara. I was only 30 minutes late for work. Not that anyone noticed - but it did mean working late.

Two days later, I got a call from the boat yard. They had done some minor adjustments and said there was nothing wrong with the transmission. The thing that bothered me about that was that I had made the same adjustment and it hadn't made a difference. I drove over to the shop early Friday morning, talked to the mechanic who had done the work, paid $150 for the work and took the transmission back to the boat.


Damper plate - most of the splines are gone!

Transmission shaft - splines on the left.

Saturday morning, I put the transmission back in place. It still did not work. I pulled the transmission back out (it was easier this time) and looked at the place where the transmission shaft went into the engine. It is an gizmo called the damper plate. I removed the damper plate and looked at it carefully. Aha! The center of the damper plate has a hole with splines (little ridges and grooves) that are suppose to match up with the transmission shaft. (See picture to the right.) Most of the splines were stripped. The engine would run merrily along turning the damper plate - but with no splines, the damper plate spun freely around the transmission shaft. (The transmission shaft is the next picture - below to the right.)


Another Internet search turned up a dealer for the engine. He was in Fairfield - a good hour and a half drive from here. I called and found out that the replacement damper plate would cost $225 and they could UPS it to me. The problem with that is that I didn't have a local mailing address. I had them send it to Placerville and picked it up the next weekend on my regular trip home.

It took a couple of evenings in the following week to install the damper plate, reinstall the transmission and verify that it appeared to fix the problem. Encourage at this, I hooked up the propeller shaft, started up the engine and put it in gear. Voila! Laelia moved forward against her dock lines. I put the transmission in reverse and she backed up! It looks like we have a fix! The one remaining concern is that the transmission shaft splines look kind of beat up and it looks like the shaft does not go all of the way into the damper plate. It felt like it was a nice snug fit when I did a trial fit on the transmission shaft before installing the plate on the engine. I wonder when (or if) it will fail the same way.

Later that weekend, I backed Laelia out of the slip, turned her around and backed her into the slip (with a little help from my friends) in preparation for the next big adventure - installing the wind steering vane.

So! What did I learn from all of this? The biggest thing was that I need to look into these repairs and upgrades myself before I call in the paid help. Most of it is not rocket science and there are plenty of knowledgeable people on the Internet willing to give advice. Of course, one has to do some sanity checking on the advice, but I did get some good help this way. I need to know how to do a lot of this stuff if I am going to sail off to places where it is hard to find help.

The other thing I learned yet again is that a lot of people are not too good on follow-through when they say they will help. Best to do it myself, if possible.

Stay tuned for updates on installing the wind vane. It is a beautiful, ingenious piece of hardware that will steer the boat for me using only the wind and water to power it. It is a major "must-have" item for sailing alone. It is a big milestone in getting ready to go.

Sailing from Pete's Harbor

This weekend was the first weekend since I've been living on the boat that I have not been cold! Added to that, Judy came here for a weekend on the boat and a sail. It was looking like a great weekend! I haven't been able to get out for a sail since I pulled in five weeks ago. The roller furling jib needed repairs and I needed to ( and wanted to ) spend some time in Placerville.

Judy arrived Saturday about noon. We spent the rest of the day catching up on the time we have been apart as best we could. Sunday was sailing day. The good news was that there was wind. 5 - 10 knots. The bad news was that it was from the NE - almost directly down the channel from Redwood Creek to the bay. Laelia is a bit big to be tacking back and forth in a narrow channel with a crew of two so we motored until we were out into south SF Bay - 1 hr, 20 minutes under power making about 3 knots plugging into an incoming tide and the wind. That's agony to a sailor!

Once out on the bay, the sailing was quite nice. We worked our way up toward San Mateo Bridge then turned around and headed back. About the time we turned around, Judy called my attention to a sound that I hadn't heard before. It seemed to be coming from below so went below to check it out. I pulled up a section of the cabin sole (the floor) to find that the prop was spinning madly and making a grinding noise in the process. I was able to find a way to tied down the shift lever in reverse that stopped the noise. Unfortunately, when we got close to Pete's Harbor and I started up the engine, there was no thrust when we were in gear. It sounded like the engine was under no load at all despite my attempts to shift into either forward or reverse. Luckily, wind and tide were in our favor and I was able to sail into the guest slip without damaging anything. Judy was wonderful through all of this confusiont. She did a great job of steering when needed and passing me a line when I most needed it in the last few frantic moments of docking.

After getting all tidied up and fortifying myself with a glass of wine, I pulled the shifter cable off the transmission, started the engine, let it idle and used the lever on the side of the transmission to try to put it in gear. I was hoping that the problem was that the shift cable was loose. No such luck. When I put the transmission into forward gear, the drive shaft did not move for several seconds, then started to move with an expensive sounding noise somewhat like stirring a stick around in a can of bolts. Reverse was no better.

As of this evening (Monday), I am looking for solutions to the transmission problem and I am looking for a way to get the boat from the guest dock to my slip. I feel kind of vulnerable here. All sorts of people bring their boats in here - and not always under control!

The day started out overcast and cool and, as of this evening, still has not gotten back to the glorious summer weather of the weekend. Judy went back to Placerville this morning. The boat seems empty without her.

Life as a wage slave

It has been about three weeks since I first pulled into my slip here at Pete's Harbor. I am coming up on the end of the second week of my new job. What do I think?

Well, first the working world. I can sum it up by saying that I have returned to being a wage slave. When I was working before, I knew that work ate up a lot of my life - even though I enjoyed my work. Once again I like my work but it consumes most of my life. I wake up at 6:30 and hurry to get off to work. The commute is between 45 minutes and an hour depending on traffic. Then there is eight hours of work plus whatever lunch break - usually about 45 minutes. Then drive home - again 40 minutes to an hour. If I do nothing else, I am home just a few minutes after 7 PM. By the time I make dinner, eat it and clean up it is shower time and bed time. I need eight hours of sleep to survive when I am working.

If I didn't have nine months of retirement to compare it to, it wouldn't be quite so grim - but I do. Two weeks down - fifty to go.

And then there is Pete's Harbor. I liked Sausalito better. Sausalito was bright, Pacific blue. The water was everywhere. I could see Alcatraz and the Oakland/San Francisco Bay Bridge. When I backed out of my slip, I was five minutes away from great sailing.


Pete's Harbor is brown. See the pictures to the right. It is surrounded by marshes. To go sailing, I have to be careful to time my sailing by the tides lest I run aground in the narrow channel formed by Redwood Creek. Once out into the bay, the sailing room is limited. There is a relatively narrow channel running north/south along the bay. There is a lot of water that is less than six feet deep at low tide once out of the channel.

The best news is that tomorrow is payday. It will be good to have some money again and to feel like I am making some progress toward living out my dream. If things work out well, I will pick up the jib I left with Pineapple Sails for repairs and I will get to go sailing this weekend. It will be the first time in three weeks. I am ready! The rest of the weekend will be boatkeeping (the nautical version of housekeeping) and perhaps I will be able to start on some of the fixup stuff I need to do before I sail away.

Onward!

A wild ride

The plan for today, Saturday, March 18, 2012, was to move the boat about 30 miles from Sausalito to Pete's Harbor in Redwood City - weather permitting. I was feeling some pressure to make it happen on schedule since I hoped to start work on Monday. The thought of commuting from Sausalito to Santa Clara 55 miles one way plus a $6 bridge toll each day was not particularly appealing.

Yesterday, it blew and it rained. Fortunately, it didn't keep Ben from Hirshfield Yachts from coming out and doing the annual maintenance on the engine. I don't think it has been done since sometime in 2008. I didn't relish the thought of taking off on what could be eight hours of motoring without the maintenance.

When I went to sleep last night, it was still blowing hard with gusts up to 25 knots. The boat was rocking and rolling me to sleep. Sometime during the night, I woke up and realized that it was dead calm. The marine weather forcast had been calling for winds of 5 to 15 knots with a chance of showers and a thunderstorm. By this morning the chance of showers had dropped to about 30% with a slight chance of thunderstorms.

When I woke up, I stuck my head out the hatch expecting to see fog. There was none. It was mostly overcast with a patch of sun to the south. The move was on!

I made breakfast, finished putting things away and pulled out of the slip by a little after 10 AM. I made a brief stop at the fuel dock to pump out the holding tank and the trip began.

There was so little wind that I fully expected to have to motor the whole trip. I did hoist the main to keep Laelia from rolling so badly in the wake of the ferries and tour boats. I got a closer look at the a tour boat called Golden Bear than I wanted. When I first spotted her coming from behind Angel Island, I thought she was a Coast Guard cutter headed out the Golden Gate. Her course would take her well astern of me. When she got closer, she started to turn toward the SF waterfront putting her on a collision course. I had the right of way but she didn't appear to have any intention of altering course. I didn't feel like playing chicken so I changed course to pass behind her.

This was my first trip out using a GPS unit on the boat. It is a hand-held Garmin GPSmap 76Cx. I had plotted out the trip on OpenCPN - a marine mapping program - and transferred my waypoints to the hand-held unit. The GPS unit does nice things like tell me how fast I am moving over the bottom, how long it will take me to reach my next waypoint, how long until I reach my destination, etc.

The first part of the trip took be past Alcatraz once again. The boat speedometer told me I was making 4.5 knots through the water but the GPS said I was making 2 knots over the bottom. That was expected - the tide was going out.

Conditions stayed pretty much the same for the first three hours as I passed Alcatraz, passed the SF waterfront and went under the Bay Bridge. Shortly after I passed the Bay Bridge a bit of breeze came up. I unfurled the jib and got a little boost from the wind. With the help, Laelia was cruising along at almost 5 knots.

Then the wind started to pick up. I shut down the engine and hoisted the mizzen. The wind was a good one for a ketch - a broad reach with the wind coming from a little abaft the beam (a little behind straight from the side.) In short order, Laelia was up to 5 knots again without the noise of the engine. Then she was going 5.5 and then 6 knots. Great sailing! According to the anemometer, the wind was around 10 knots with gusts to 15 - for a while.

Gradually, the wind picked up. In the relatively shallow bay waters, the waves build up quickly so it was not long before Laelia was starting to roll and yaw (turn from side to side) enough to make it a lot of work to keep her on course.

I dropped the mizzen - no small job under those conditions. Every time I would let go of the wheel to do some work, Laelia would try to turn to starboard into the wind. That got the sails to flogging (flapping) pretty hard. That's not particularly good. It accelerates sail wear and can cause some of the stitching to come apart. Nevertheless, I did get the mizzen down. It was a pretty sloppy job. Instead of being neatly rolled up and tied to the mizzen boom, the sail was mostly wadded up into a ball and tied. By the time this was done, I was starting to feel a touch of motion sickness.

Dropping the mizzen dropped the speed to about 5.5 knots with excursions to over 6 knots. Laelia was still rolling and yawing uncomfortably. I rolled up the jib a bit - maybe a quarter of the way. The wind was now a pretty steady 15 knots and clearly I was carrying too much sail. The remedy was to heave to (tack without letting the jib come across to the other side.) That pretty much killed the boat speed. Laelia was lying sideways to the waves and rolling heavily. It wasn't bad enough to be dangerous but it didn't do anything to help my already unsettled stomach.

I got the main down with some difficulty. By the time I got the sail down, I was feeling seasick. I made a dash for the wheel and got Laelia headed downwind again. Being at the wheel seemed to help my stomach feel better.

But lo and behold, when I looked up at the main, things were not as they should be. The main has several battens (plastic rods that lie parallel to the foot of the sail) sewn into pockets in the sail. I have never liked battens. They are supposed to help the main hold its shape in light air. What they seem to do is get caught in different parts of the rigging at the most inopportune times. That's what happened now. Instead of the sail falling down neatly between the lazy jacks (sort of a rope cradle to contain the sail when it is dropped) one of the battens got caught in the lee (downwind) lazy jack and was holding part of the sail cocked skyward instead of lying along the main boom as it should. I could only hope that the wind wouldn't catch it and pull the rest of the sail out of its resting place as well.

Laelia was still moving along at better than 5 knots with only the jib. I checked the GPS and discovered that if we kept moving at this pace, we would get to Pete's Harbor at almost dead low tide. That could be a problem since the Redwood Creek channel is fairly shallow at points. I needed to slow down.

I decided to roll up still more of the jib. Now, the people who love roller jibs say that they are wonderful because all you have to do is roll it up and it gets smaller. Before roller jibs, I had to drop the jib, unhook it from the forestay, bag it and stow the bag. Then I would pull out the replacement jib, hook it on the forestay, tie on the jib sheets and hoist the new sail. That sounds like a lot of work, but the mechanics of it are pretty simple and there isn't much that can go wrong with it.

I discovered that trying to roll up a jib under pressure is not a trivial task as its proponents would have us believe. I put the furling line on a winch and started cranking. It didn't appear to be working. I let Laelia turn until the jib started to flog and I cranked. That worked a little better. I got the sail area reduced to about 1/2 the amount of the full sail but the flogging makes a horrible noise and I wondered just how much of that the sail could take.

I got Laelia headed downwind again and she was still clipping along at 4 knots. Then, I noticed that there was a problem with the jib sheets. With all the flogging, the weather sheet (the one that wasn't doing any work) had pulled it self all of the way out of all its blocks (pulleys) and wrapped itself around the lee sheet (the one doing all the work.) My bad! I should have had a stopper knot (a knot in the end of the sheet) to keep the sheet from coming loose. It wasn't an immediate problem, but if I had to gybe (turn so the wind is coming over the other rail) it would be a problem. I wasn't eager to try to fix the problem. Laelia was still trying to broach (turn sideways to the wind and waves) every time I stopped paying close attention to the steering and my stomach was telling me that if I had to leave the wheel and do much work, I would be feeding my breakfast to the fish.

By now, we were down to the San Mateo bridge. I was hanging on hoping that as we got closer to Redwood Creek, we would be in more protected waters and I would be able to work on the problem in conditions where Laelia would be better behaved and my stomach would not be so queasy.

The wind continued to increase. I managed to roll up some more of the jib. Now we were down to about 1/4 of the full size jib and still doing 3.5 to 4 knots. The wind was blowing 20 to 25 knots and the waves were 2 - 3 feet. The fronts were steep, not nice big rounded swells like I would see on the open ocean.

As we got closer to Redwood Creek entrance, our course gradually curved toward southwest. Our course was taking us closer to shore so the waves did not have room to build up. Before long, the waves were pretty much gone and Laelia would steer herself long enough for me to fix some of the problems. I got the main straightened out a bit and got a sail tie wrapped around it and tied down the the main boom. I was able to unravel the stray sheet from the working sheet and get it run back through its blocks. I promptly gave it the stopper knot that I should have done long before.

The GPS was a major help here. I could see channel markers but the GPS gave me added confidence that I wasn't off on the wrong channel. It also helped me figure out just where Pete's Harbor was. Things look different from out on the water than they do when I'm standing on shore.

As I was getting close to Pete's Harbor, I started the engine and tried to roll up the remainder of the jib. I wouldn't quite do it. There was still a small corner of the jib peeking out. It wasn't enough to be a big problem, but I couldn't figure out why it was happening.

Even with the help of the GPS, I managed to go in the wrong entrance at Pete's Harbor and had to turn around in a very cramped space with the wind still blowing 15 knots in gusts.

When I did find the right entrance, it took some fancy maneuvering to get into my slip. I guess it looked like I was having a problem (I was). A man came out and hollered at me to ask if I needed help. I said I did and asked if he could take a line when I got into the slip. He had to go a ways to walk the docks to get to my slip and I had Laelia in the slip quickly enough that he turned around and went away.

What a relief to be in the slip! The wind kept howling as I straightened out the sails and did all the post-sail cleanup. If anything, the wind got worse. In what was perhaps a feeble attempt to make amends, Mother Nature put on a nice sunset. Too little, too late!

A close examination of the roller furling jib revealed that the jib had stretched enough that there wasn't enough furling line available to finish the job. Whoda thunk it.

I called Judy to let her know I had made it OK, ate the sandwiches I had intended to eat during the trip and went to bed. After a couple of hours, I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep so I got up and wrote all this.

Things I learned today: The big one was that I won't be singlehanding a trip like this again until I have a wind vane to help with the steering. Things were on the edge of getting really ugly today because I couldn't get away from the wheel long enough to fix problems. Also, I was reminded that I have a way to go before I get my sea legs back. I don't like being seasick, but I can deal with it if the boat can mind herself while I lean over the rail and call out my name to the fishies. And finally, I like roller furling jibs even less that I used to. I hope to replace it before I head offshore.

All is well that ends well. I got here. Nothing broke. I didn't run aground or run into any other boats. That makes it a successful trip in my book - but it was a wild ride!

And by the way, I found out I'm not starting work Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday. The background checks are not finished. The good news is that Judy and I can have some more time together when she gets here tomorrow and we won't have to drive up to Sausalito to rescue my car until Monday.

Into the belly of the beast

In the Fall of 1977, I discovered Silicon Valley. It was quite by accident. I really wanted to go back to San Diego but in those days there was very little work there for computer geeks. A friend recommended that I look for work in the rapidly developing San Jose/Santa Clara area coming to be known as Silicon Valley.

In short order, I found a job there at Four Phase Systems and proceeded to work toward The Dream. Simply put, it was to earn enough money to build a boat and go back to cruising as soon as possible. For about three years, I kept pretty much on focus. But then I started getting distracted by the "Money, Sex and Power" ethos that is so pervasive in Silicon Valley. In the end, my loss of focus cost me my marriage and my dream. I sold the steel I had bought for the boat at scrap prices. I spent much of my savings on learning to fly.

Eventually, I remarried and moved to Phoenix - a long way from the ocean. I was blessed with two more wonderful daughters and 21 mostly wonderful years of marriage. During those years, The Dream would resurface and I would try to stuff it back into the dark corners of my mind where it wouldn't bother me.

It worked - until I retired and started to wonder what to do with the rest of my life. (See the first entry in this blog for the gory details.) I have bought Laelia with the intention of fulling The Dream in some measure. I miscalculated - I bought more boat than I needed and it needed more work than I expected. I decided to come out of retirement for a year to pay for The Dream.

The good news is that I now have a job. The bad news is that it is in Santa Clara - in the belly of the beast, as I have come to think of it. It is stomach wrenching to be surrounded by ambitious, young hustlers, immaculately groomed, wearing ties and driving BMWs. It brings back old memories and fears. Once upon a time, I stuck my hand into the fire and got burned. Now I am reluctant to come close to anything that looks like that fire.

I believe that age and experience has brought me to the point that I will not be so easily distracted. Living on the boat helps keep me focused from one day to the next. Having a deadline of April 2013 to be heading south also keeps the pressure on. The deadline is pretty much non-negotiable. The hurricane season on the west coast of Mexico starts in June and I need to allow time for stops in San Diego and, possibly, Cabo as part of my shakedown.

It also helps that Judy is eager for me to get started. The sooner I start, the sooner I get back and we can, perhaps, resume our life together. From time to time she asks me how something I am considering will contribute to getting on with The Dream and I realize I am getting a bit off-track.

Additional bad news about the new job is that it is about 1.5 hours (55 miles) from my current location in Sausalito. With $6/day bridge toll at the Golden Gate Bridge and gas prices edging up toward the $5/gallon level, I figure it would cost about $500/month to commute from Sausalito. That's not acceptable. Saturday, if the weather permits, I will be giving up my slip in beautiful Sausalito and moving the boat south to Pete's Harbor on Redwood Creek in Redwood City.

Pete's Harbor is much smaller than Clipper Yacht Harbor and has "personality" - albeit a bit on the funky side. Also, it is located in the tidal flats. I have to pay close attention to the tides when I come and go. At low tide, the channel is quite shallow in places. Getting stuck on a falling tide would mean a long wait until the tide comes back in to float me free. Once out into the bay, there's not a lot of room to go sailing. Much of the south bay is quite shallow so I'm pretty much restricted to the channel that runs from SF to Alviso and it is getting pretty narrow by the time it gets to Redwood Creek.

The trip south will give me a chance to try out this newfangled GPS stuff. It didn't exist when I owned my first boat. Navigation was a combination of dead reckoning and celestial navigation. Now I hear that some foolhardy souls actually go to sea without learning celestial navigation and rely totally on GPS. It seems scary to me. Electronics and seawater are not a good combination! Nonetheless, I have bought a handheld GPS complete with marine navigational charts. I used a freeware program called OpenCPN to plot the course for my trip to Pete's Harbor and download the route and waypoints into the handheld unit. I am also laying out the trip on paper charts in the traditional manner - just in case.

So - back into the belly of the beast but with a difference. Forewarned is forearmed. Experience is the best teacher, etc, etc, blah, blah.

Sailing with Judy

The stars have finally aligned for Judy to come to the boat and go sailing. The weather was forecast to be sunny and warm with light and variable winds. What more could we ask for?

 We got to the boat yesterday evening after an enjoyable dinner with daughter Suzanne in Davis. This morning, I had a bit of work to do. The longitudinal bulkheads in the starboard cockpit locker were made of rotting pegboard and I had to replace them or run the risk of a bunch of tools and other junk falling into the engine compartment when the boat heels. I had made up a replacement while I was at home in Placerville last weekend.

While I was doing this, Judy took advantage of being away from home, the beautiful weather and the absence of other responsibilities. She was (gasp) reading a book in the daytime! Normally, her work ethic will not allow her to take time to read until she is in bed in the evening.

It took about an hour to install the new panels. Then it was time to put everything away and prepare to sail!

As we headed out the channel toward the bay, the wind was from dead ahead - of course. That meant we motored until we were well clear of the Spinnaker Restaurant. That it gave Judy a chance to learn to steer the boat under the easiest conditions. No problem - she's a natural! It was great to have her steer while I put up sails. It saved me racing back and forth between the wheel and the sails.

When we picked up some wind, I shut off the motor and we were under sail - a completely new experience for Judy. I am happy to say that she was practically jumping with delight!

We were on the wind making about 5 knots and pointed right at Alcatraz at first but as we got farther out into the bay, the wind direction shifted until we were running almost dead down wind to stay pointed at Alcatraz. Judy was steering off and on as I played with sails so she got to see how sail trim affects the steering. Laelia is a joy to sail when we are on the wind but not so much when the wind goes abaft the beam (i.e., it is coming from someplace between straight from the side and directly behind the boat.)

I had picked sailing toward Alcatraz again because we set sail just after high tide. That meant that the currents would be flowing out the Golden Gate and it might be hard to get back if we went out under the bridge and the wind dropped. It turned out to be a good decision. As we got close to Alcatraz, the wind dropped until we were doing 1.5 to 2 knots. The outgoing tide kept us from making enough progress to round Alcatraz. After about half an hour of dealing with shifty winds and getting nowhere, we gave up and headed back toward Sausalito. As soon as we did that, the wind picked up again and we were moving along at a comfortable 5.5 knots - for a while. Then the wind dropped again and our speed gradually fell off until we decided to crank up the engine and start motoring again.

We hadn't been motoring long before I looked astern and noticed that there was a line across our wake behind us. On our side of the line, the water was fairly smooth. On the other side, it was very choppy. The choppy water quickly overtook us and began pushing the boat toward the Marin shoreline. We had witnessed the birth of a rip current caused by the outgoing tide. It made me grateful we weren't engineless like the sailors of old. We might well have been pushed onto the rocks at Pt Cavallo.

We were back into the slip at 4:30 - just in time for a very pleasant happy hour. We drank wine and enjoyed a snack as the sun set behind the hills to the west.

Judy says she really enjoyed the sail and is looking forward to more. Now if I can just persuade her to sail to Tahiti with me...

Alcatraz Redeux - with pictures

When wind and tide cooperate, getting to Alcatraz is a breeze (pun intended - of course).

Today was a mixture of sun and clouds and (happily) some wind as the afternoon wore on. I started out wanting to try sailing Laelia with the main being the only sail hoisted. It is convenient sometimes to be able to tack back and forth without having to take care of the jib every time I tack. Laelia does not do this well. In a 10 knot breeze she gets up enough speed to do it - but she does it reluctantly. When the wind dropped, she wouldn't do it at all.

The wind picked up as I got out toward the slot - blowing 10 to 15 knots straight in from the Golden Gate bridge. To top it off, the tide was coming in and would be pushing me toward Alcatraz. Perfect!

I unfurled about half of the jib and set off. Pretty soon we were flying along at 5.5 to 6 knots. The wind was a steady 10 knots with occasional gusts higher. The waves were going pretty much the same way I was. Easy sailing!

In short order, I was getting close to Alcatraz - a little too close for comfort. I had to tack away to keep the incoming tide from pushing me onto the rocks at the western end of the island. I misjudged the speed of the current and ended up having to tack twice to make it past the end of the island.

In the second picture, I am sailing past the south side of the island - the side facing San Francisco. I can imagine how tantalizing it must have looked for prisoners to look out toward the city - so near and so far away!

Rounding the eastern end of the island, I got a picture just for Don Lundquist so he can understand why I don't pick up prisoners! And then there's the problem of no more prisoners. Oh well!

Rounding the island, I ran into an area of confusing winds - quick direction changes and variable strength. I was in the turbulence caused by the wind flowing over Alcatraz and back down onto the water. The turbulence last only a few minutes before I was through it and back into steady wind.

The picture to the right is the northern side of the island.

I headed back to Sausalito. The sky was getting progressivly darker and the wind was starting to pick up. The wind was from the right direction (close reach) for me to hoist the mizzen for an extra boost. For most of the trip back, Laelia was flying along at close to 6 knots.

As I got close to the channel to the marina, I started dropping sails - first the mizzen, then the main. That left Laelia sailing along quite nicely at 3.5 knots with just the jib.

I sailed past a Coast Guard boat that was headed out toward the bay as I was coming in. About the time I got to sailing under jib alone, I glanced back and saw that the Coast Guard seemed to be interested in me! They pulled along side, said something about checking for illegal boats coming into the bay and asked me for identification and boat registration. I passed them over and they pulled away a few feet after telling me to keep going toward my slip.

About five minutes later, they pulled along side again and handed back my documents, wished me a good day and departed. They were quite courteous during the whole thing.

I was relieved! I thought they might be doing safety inspections and I'm sure they could have found something to be unhappy about.

Getting back into the slip, I was very happy that the ends of the slip were heavily cushioned. I misjudged the amount of correction I needed for the crosswind and hit the corner pretty hard with the side of the boat about six feet back from the bow. Laelia weighs in at a litlle over 17,000 lbs so it could have been ugly. Thanks to the heavy duty padding, no damage was done - except to my ego.

By now, the sky was looking pretty ominous. I got Laelia all buttoned up and came below for a beer. As I write this, the beer is almost gone, the wind is howling and the boat heels over a few degrees every now and then. I am happy to be here and not out on the bay trying to get back!

Heaving to, reefing and other sailor stuff

All this job hunting activity is stressful. I needed a day to go sailing. Today was the day.

So far, my sailing has been pretty much basic stuff - learning how to get Laelia moving well, practicing tacking and gybing, etc. Today I wanted to start working on some of the things I will need to know when I get out on the ocean and things start getting a bit rough.

I got started about 11:30 - plenty of time to get out to The Slot before conditions get interesting. There was a fair breeze blowing when I got to the place where I usually start hoisting sails.

One of the things I often hear when I tell another sailor I have a ketch is "when the wind picks up you can just drop the main and sail with the mizzen (the little sail toward the back of the boat) and the jib". That's what I tried first. It works well except that having that little sail at the back of the boat makes Laelia try hard to turn into the wind. I can deal with it by using the rudder to keep it from turning into the wind. I briefly saw 3.5 knots under jib and jigger (the other name for the mizzen) and then the wind went away.

I could see wind lines farther out on the bay so I started up the engine and motored out to where the wind was blowing.

The wind was blowing pretty good in The Slot, 10 - 15 knots. That got Laelia moving again at about 4 knots. Great! Next, I wanted to try heaving to under jib and mizzen.

Yes, I've heard the jokes about heaving to!

Heaving to is a maneuver that is used when it is getting too windy and rough to keep sailing up wind but you don't want to lose too much ground by turning around and letting the wind blow the boat down wind. It is done by tacking but not letting the jib come across the boat to the other side. That means the wind pushes the jib against the boat and acts like a big air brake. In the picture, you can see the mizzen toward the left. It is being blown to port. The jib is plastered against the shroud with the wind blowing against it instead of along it. It stays there because the sheet (the rope) at the lower right is holding it there. The steering wheel is turned all the way to the right to try to keep Laelia pointed into the wind.

It didn't work quite as I would like. I think that partly it was because I have a lot of the jib unfurled. If I would roll some more of it up and make it smaller, it would help. I'll try it next time. As it was, Laelia slowly drifted downwind and gradually turned so she was pointing downwind. If I had left her alone she would have gybed and we would be off and sailing on the other tack. Not quite what I wanted.

I decided to try hoisting the main with one reef in it. That means that I didn't put all of the sail up - just the top 3/4 of it. The rest of it stayed bunched up along the main boom at the bottom. Having the main up generates more turning force and I hoped Laelia would turn more into the wind and stop trying to get sailing again. That was a bit better but I think I need to try all of this with less of the jib deployed. It would also help to not have the mizzen up.

With all of the sail work, I was up and moving around a lot. Suddenly, I felt that feeling I knew all too well from my early sailing days - queasiness and dry mouth. The heaving too experiments were about to turn into just plain heaving.

I gave up on the experimenting and headed out toward the Golden Gate again. Sitting at the wheel and looking off toward the horizon got the symptoms under control. It was a reminder that I need to get some more sea time under my belt before I head off shore - unless I want to spend a week being seasick like I did when I sailed to Hawaii.

Now we were on the wind (sailing up wind). When Laelia is hard on the wind, the air flowing off the main pushes on the back side of the mizzen (backwinds the mizzen) and the mizzen doesn't help Laelia go faster. Besides that, the trailing edge of the mizzen flutters. It is annoying to listen to and it is hard on the sail cloth. I dropped the mizzen. Laelia was quite happy now. With the main reefed and the mizzen stowed, she was doing 5 knots.

Two tacks and I was getting close to the bridge. The wind was coming in directly off the Pacific and there was a pretty good swell running. I watched another sailboat about a mile away to try to determine how high the waves were. The top of the boat's cabin nearly disappeared when they were at the bottom of the swell so I'm guessing the waves were about four feet from crest to trough.

It started to get rough enough that there was a lot of crashing and banging as Laelia cut into the waves. Spray started flying the length of the boat. I hadn't put on foul weather gear and I didn't really care for getting wet so I turned around and headed back to Sausalito.

As soon as I turned down wind, it was a different world. Now I was going with the wind so it didn't seem to be blowing as hard. I was going with the waves so they weren't throwing up spray. They weren't going a whole lot faster than Laelia. Under these conditions, Laelia did what most sailboats do - she rolled a lot.

The sail back was pretty uneventful. I lost the wind before I got to the Spinnaker Restaurant where I usually drop the sails. That meant a boring 20 minutes under power before I was back to my slip.

All in all, it was a very satisfying sail. I learned some more about how Laelia handles. I have more things to try next time I am out. Nothing broke. What more can I ask for?

Out the gate - and back

I've been off the boat for the last five days enjoying Judy's company in Placerville and an evening with old friends from my Silicon Valley days in the early 80's. By this morning I was eager to get out for a sail. The weather god(s) cooperated and I had a bright, sunny day with an unusual feature - WIND!

It started off like most of my other outings. I motored out the channel and started hoisting sails about the time I passed the Spinnaker waterfront restaurant. There was very little wind but with the help of my new tell-tales, I was able to keep Laelia moving for a while - then I drifted. I had to start the engine and motor for about 1/2 mile to keep from being pushed onto the rocks at Pt Cavello. Just after I started the engine, a seal popped up about 10 feet from the boat and just stared at me as if to ask why I was invading his territory. I bade him/her a good day and left the area.

As I was motoring, I noticed foam streaks in the water - signs of rip currents. As I motored across the streaks, Laelia would slew as much as 15 or 20 degrees when her bow was in one current and her stern was in the other.

As soon as I cleared the point, the wind started to pick up. In short order it was blowing 15 - 20 knots from the ocean into the bay. This area close to the Golden Gate Bridge is known as The Slot. On sunny days like today, the usual scenario is that about noon or a little past, the land mass starts to heat up, the air over land starts to rise and it sucks air in off the Pacific. The Slot makes a nice little venturi and accelerates the flow making for some exciting sailing. That's the way it worked today. I had the full jib, main and mizzen up when I hit the slot and in no time the boat was moving at 6 knots - my all-time high speed in this boat.

The boat was a bit over powered and heeling more than I was ready for. I hadn't put things away below decks well enough to deal with this kind of sailing. I turned down wind for long enough to roll up the jib about 1/3 of the way and then turned back toward the bridge. Laelia kept trying to turn into the wind and I had to work to keep her on course. Since she is usually quite well balance when she is on the wind, that meant she was out of trim. I dropped the mizzen and she was balanced. The mizzen hadn't been giving much help. When Laelia is close hauled (going up wind as much as possible) the mizzen is back winded by the air coming off the main and supplies little, if any, drive.

Perfect! The boat was moving about 5 knots and heeling about 10 degrees and well balanced - quite comfortable sailing. In short order, I was under the bridge. Shortly after passing under the bridge, I tacked. There was a tug coming up the deep water channel with a big barge in tow and I didn't want to be involved.

As I neared the south shore, I got the view you see to the right. Under the rightmost portion of the span you can see San Francisco. Just to the left is Alcatraz.

Just past the bridge, there was a distinct change in conditions. I could feel and see a 2 - 3 foot swell rolling in off the Pacific. This mixes with the local currents and the topography of the bottom to produce a stretch of water along the south shore known as the Potato Patch. It is aptly named. The water is lumpy and bumpy.

The last time I passed through this patch of water in 1982, I was helping my friend, George, move his boat down the coast to Santa Cruz. I made the mistake of going below to try to do some calculations for a sun sight that I had taken to keep myself in practice doing celestial navigation. I was immediately, violently seasick. That was only the beginning. I was seasick for the rest of the trip. We took two hour shifts steering the boat during the night. Every half hour or so, I would have to lean over the rail and try to empty my already empty stomach. Not fun!

I am happy to report that this was not the case today. I managed several more tacks before turning back toward home. I took this picture just before turning back.

I look forward to the day when I get to this point and keep on going!

Going back, I was going downwind. That meant that the boat speed was subtracted from the apparent wind and the day now felt warm and balmy. Going downwind, Laelia is not a lot of fun to steer. She wants to veer left and right as she rolls. With the swell rolling in, she was doing a lot of rolling and veering. Possibly, you can see a bit of the swell running in this picture. The Marin headland (north shore of the Golden Gate) is to the left.

As I passed under the bridge, I turned a bit to port to head toward Sausalito. Now the wind seemed to be in a place that would let me run wing and wing. It turned out to be a frustrating exercise. As the boat rolled, the jib would collapse and dump the wind. After the boat rolled a few times and the wind was just right, the jib would fill with a loud BANG and the whole boat would shake. I was afraid this would break something or split some seams in the jib so I gave up on that idea and gybed. If I had Laelia fully outfitted and we were on the open ocean, I would use a pole with one end attached to the main mast and the other to the corner of the jib. This would keep the jib from collapsing. I would also have a line running from the end of the main boom to the bow (front) of the boat to hold the main well out to the side and to make sure that it didn't swing across the boat in one of the rolls - an accidental gybe - and break some of the equipment.

Gybing is a delicate maneuver. Today the wind was coming from behind the boat and the main was on the port side of the boat. I wanted to turn far enough to port to get the main to come across the boat to the starboard side. If I just turn the boat until the main comes across by itself, it will swing across suddenly, fill with wind and slam against its sheets (ropes). With the amount of wind there was today, that would probably break something. I spent about five minutes pulling the main in with one or two hands and steering the boat with the other hand. Laelia was doing her trick of veering with each passing swell so it was a juggling act until I could get the main pulled in almost to the centerline of the boat. Then I could turn and let the main come across without damage since it could only swing a very short distance before getting to the end of its rope.

I had a very pleasant sail past Pt Cavello and the Sausalito waterfront and started dropping sails after I passed the Spinaker Restaurant.

Getting into the slip was more interesting than usual today. There was a significant cross wind blowing from left to right as I entered the slip. It doesn't take much wind to push the boat around so I was at bit nervous about the whole maneuver. I managed to get in without any damage. I wouldn't call it graceful but it worked.

It was another good sail with more lessons learned. I need to add reef points to the main so I can reef (pull it part way down) and not have a bunch of sail flapping in the breeze. I really, really need a wind vane to steer the boat while I manage sails. It would have been extremely difficult - if at all possible - to deploy the pole to hold the jib out when I was running down wind without something to steer the boat for me. I need to have the pole set up so it is easier to get it into position. These are all things that are not too hard to remedy - given time and money.

It was tantalizing to be outside The Gate and looking south past Land's End. Another tack or two and I would have been in the clear and able to run south. The day will come!

When is a tell-tale not a tattle-tale?

A boat is a collection of a huge number of details. A bunch of them get taken care of by the builder. Some more have been taken care of for me by previous owners. There still are quite a few left for me.

On my short outings so far, one of the details that I have been reminded of is the lack of tell-tales on the boat. Sailboats are dependent on wind. The direction and strength of wind is what tells me which sails to use and how to trim them. When the wind is blowing more than about 10 knots, it is not too hard to get the general idea about where the wind is coming from. When the wind falls light, it is harder to tell. Even when the wind picks up, it helps a great deal to have a visual indicator to figure out the exact angle the wind is making with respect to the boat.

Without some form of wind direction indicator, I am left to the old-time devices to figure out wind direction. Face into the wind and feel the cooling breeze on both cheeks. When they feel the same, I am facing into the wind. Alternatively, turn my back to the wind and feel the breeze on the back of my neck. When it feels like my neck is being cooled equally on both sides, I am looking dead down wind. These indicator are easily invalidated by physiological factors and even the clothes I am wearing. When the wind is quite cool, one cheek gets slightly numb and the balance of feeling is destroyed when I look into the wind. When I am wearing foul weather gear with a hood or even when I wear a life vest, the back of my neck is partially covered and that source of information is useless.

There are expensive bits of electronics that use a wind vane mounted at the top of the mast. The direction the vane is pointing is reported by a display mounted in the cockpit. Laelia has one of those but according to the display, the wind always blows straight across the starboard rail at right angles to the boat direction. If I were a wealthy yachtsman, I would call an electronics repair guy and have the problem fixed. That may happen someday but in the mean time, I need a less expensive way to deal with the problem.

That's where the tell-tale comes in. A tell-tale is just a piece of fabric tied to a shroud to help me figure out exactly where the wind is coming from. In the picture to the right, the tell-tale is the little red streamer flying from the shroud toward the right side of the picture.

For once, I didn't have to go to West Marine and part with my all-too-scarce dollars to add something to the boat. I stopped at North Sails and asked for some scraps of spinnaker cloth. They gave me one big enough to take care of my need for tell-tales for years to come. Spinnaker cloth is very light weight nylon with extra threads in it to make it rip resistant. When I cut it into narrow strips like this (1/2" x 6") it flies in the lightest breeze and gives me a good visual clue to wind direction.

Ah, would that it were so easy to tell which way the winds of fate blow. Knowing which way to turn in my life seems a dark mystery at the moment. I keep having tantalizing contacts with people who tell me my perfect job is out there and they will put me in contact with the company that will hire me. So far, that has resulted in two phone screen interviews and no offers. Without a job and money coming in, I can't do much more than go for occasional daysail trips, do basic daily maintenance and pray that nothing expensive will break.

To add to the money woes, when I figured out our taxes for 2011, I discovered that I had made a mistake and not nearly enough money was withheld for income tax. That adds to the urgency to find a job and start having some income.

On the positive side, Judy and I are making our peace with our differences. We have been wrestling with the changes in our situation and the effects on our relationship since I retired in June and especially since I bought the boat. We know we love each other and that it is important to keep our relationship alive. I will be spending more time in Placerville with Judy and less time on the boat for now.

But even this development is shrouded in uncertainty. I need to work and I will have to go where the work is. There's not a lot in the Sacramento area so I will most likely not be able to stay here in Placerville. Hopefully, something will turn up in the SF Bay area so I can at least get home on weekends.

In the mean time, I will be spending a couple of days a week on the boat doing whatever I can to get ready for the voyage. Our weather has been unusually warm and sunny for this time or year. I hope to take advantage of some more of those days. That will include going sailing and putting those tell-tales to work to tell which way the wind blows, how to trim the sails and how to set my course.

As for the winds of fate, I still have no tell-tale. Time will tell which way those winds blow.