Prologue
No doubt you have heard of mid-life crisis. Possibly you have not heard of retirement life crisis. The latter is how my voyage with Laelia started. About five months after I retired, I finished the major upgrades to the house that Judy (my wife) and I had decided to retire to. I was hit between the eyes with the big question, "What do you want to do with the rest of your life?" The only thing that kept coming up for me was that I wanted to finish the circumnavigation by sailboat that I had started in 1975.
My first attempt started when I left San Diego on Christmas Day, 1975 on a beautiful Danish built wooden sloop named Chatelaine (pictured above).
It ended on Guam in May1976 when Typhoon Pamela pushed Chatelaine against a seawall and beat her to death. The picture on the right is the bow (the pointy end) after Chatelaine was raised. The storm surge dragged the bow up and down against the seawall and ground off the first three feet or so.
I moved on to Silicon Valley in 1977 resolving to build a new boat and try again. Sadly, I got distracted by the "Money, Sex, and Power" attitudes around me and lost my sailing partner and my focus on sailing. I remarried in 1985 and have two wonderful daughters who have taught me about a kind of love that I had not expected to find in my life. That marriage ended in divorce after 21 years together. I met Judy in 2003 and we married in 2005. I thought that the sailing dream was behind me.
It wasn't. It would crop up from time to time when I saw a sailboat that looked like a true ocean voyager or when I saw one advertised for sale. I would shrug my shoulders (figuratively) and push it into the background - until November 2011. Judy and I took a weekend to get away from the house and the 101 little fixup jobs to be done and went to Santa Cruz for a few days. That trip got into the "What do you want to do with the rest of your life?" question again. When "The Trip" came up, it was like dropping a bomb into what I thought was my settled way of life.
Needless to say, it has caused a great deal of marital strain. Judy has never spent time around cruising sailboats. She loves the house in Placerville. She was looking forward to gardening, raising chickens and taking short jaunts to the coast for walks on the beach. I am looking at living on a boat, making long ocean passages to exotic places and not returning to California for some undetermined number of years. We have not resolved how to make this all work out.
Unfortunately, I have underestimated the amount of work involved. More importantly, I will have to earn some more money to finish outfitting and buying supplies. I am looking for work - preferably a 6 month (or thereabouts) contract job. I've been looking for two months now and have had some nibbles but no job offer yet.
Laelia has been owned by a series of owners who have used her lightly. That's the good news. The bad news is that the most recent owners appear to have used her very little in the last few year. Sailboats do not do well when left to sit idle. The marine head (toilet) was non-functional. Stuff grows in the plumbing when left to sit too long. The plumbing was blocked. In addition, it involved a sewage treatment device that treated waste then pumped it overboard. That's legal in many places but not in restricted areas like marinas or in areas like Richardson Bay that are zero discharge zones. So that system came out and was replaced with a holding tank. $2800 later, I am legal.
The stove was an alcohol stove which I strongly dislike but I could have lived with if only it worked - but it didn't. The external alcohol tank had been removed and the stove itself looked sadly neglected. The burners were rusty and the other surfaces were pitted with rust and growth. I have had a propane locker installed - another $2400 plus some hours of my own labor. All the wiring and plumbing is in place. All I need is the stove. It will have to wait until I save up or earn some more cash.
Most of this work was done by KKMI Marine. They do good work but, as you can see, they ain't cheap. While all this was going on, I have been going through the boat pulling out years of accumulated junk that the previous owners didn't take with them when they sold the boat. I have done a lot of scrubbing down and replacing bits and pieces. The electric bilge pump promptly broke and the manual pump doesn't work. I replaced the electric pump and improved the setup so the bilge is mostly dry now. I removed the old, rotten dodger and sold the frame. I removed the old, non-functional autopilot and I am trying to sell the components that do work. There is lots of little fixup stuff to do with the rigging. The way things are set up makes it obvious that things weren't used much. The halyard leads, the sheet leads, cleats available, etc, are totally unacceptable for single handed sailing offshore. All that is required to fix it is time, work - and money.
I hope to update this blog on a regular basis so my family and friends know what is going on. We shall see how it goes.
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