The Adventures of Sailing Vessel Macha

If I Could Just Accomplish One Simple Thing Today...

2010-05-20T13:31:00.001-07:00

So often, owning a boat feels like a chicken fight with Entropy.

The other day I was stomping around in the dark, perhaps on my way to change a crappy diaper, perhaps on my way to do some other chore. My foot caught a piece of wood trim near the base of the companionway ladder and cracked a big piece right off.

That was weeks ago. Work, grad school, baby all intervened. I just got around to gluing and clamping it today. Ah, the small satisfaction of a day where I fix more than I break!

Now going to attempt a rescue mission for a kerosene jug that was glassed into the stern anchor chain locker when we had the cockpit redone. It won't fit through the access hatch, so I've got to cut it into tiny chunks, then mount a strong eye down there so we can secure the bitter end of our rode. Any chore that can be done with a Sawzall is typically a good chore!

- Ari

Yemaya's First Sailboat Race

2010-05-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since Yemaya was even tinier than she is now, she has laughed whenever she gets a gust of wind in her face. She closes her eyes and puffs out her cheeks and sputters and chuckles. It was so funny that we made up a rhyme to go with it:

Breeze in the face
Breeze in the face
Just enough for a sailboat race!

Last night Yemaya got introduced to the thrilling white-knuckle world of sailboat racing... which for her was much the same experience as the thrilling world of sitting in the backseat of a car on land...

Our courageous crewmember had all the latest high-tech sailing gear:

Stuffed dog. Check!
Rattle ball. Check!
Jingle bell bracelet. Check!
Soggy Ak-Mak cracker to slowly masticate into paste and rub into carseat. Check!
Mama's sunglasses to open. And close. And open. And close.... Check!
Jammies in case I fall asleep. (Don't worry, I won't) Check!

We weren't planning to fly the spinnaker, but Yemaya held onto (and chewed on) the pretty yellow pole topping lift just in case.

Since beer can racing on the Oakland Estuary is such a serious, competitive pursuit, I diligently printed 2 out of 3 of the available documents on the oyc.org web site:

Course Map. Check!
Sailing Instructions. Check!
Fleet Assignments. We'll never need that...

Flash forward to 6:25pm. We are circling the starting line with a few dozen other boats of varying sizes trying to find other boats that look "like us." I see a Santana 25. That's gotta be similar rating to a Santana 22. I sail close enough and ask "Do you know when we start?" He replies "Are you racing non-spinnaker? You guys are all Fleet A. That was your warning gun." Doh! We were kinda slacking because, being slower, we're usually among the last boats to start. We are nowhere near the start.

Minutes after our starting gun, I'm still singlehanding the boat towards the line while Sarah breastfeeds Yemaya down below. It's a little dodgy trying to steer and trim both sails while peeking underneath our 155% Genoa. The two boats that started on time are miles ahead of us, but miraculously there are boats behind us too!

In light wind, less-wetted surface trumps longer waterline. In our small, stripped-down boat, slowly but surely we pull away from the pack of longer, heavier keelboats. The wind is coming over Alameda instead of down the Estuary, so what would normally be an upwind-downwind course is a reach both ways. The wind direction favors a genoa over jib+spinnaker, and later we even pace some of the spinnaker fleet.

Some of the racing highlights were slaloming the narrow gap between two Columbia 5.5's, rolling one to windward and one to leeward, while the baby shrieked "DADADADA" (I'll never get tired of hearing that!) and the other yachtsmen looked on in horror at being overtaken by a floating pack-n-play.

We finished just as we started, with Sarah down below breastfeeding Yemaya. The race instructions specify two laps around the course, but we heard a horn as we finished our first lap. "Hmm, I guess that's it." We looked around and kept sailing just in case, but it seemed the other boats are dropping headsails and going home.

In the end, we came in just ahead of the middle of the pack. But I think we won a moral victory for proving we could sail well with the baby, and enjoy almost every minute of it!

SAIL #	SKIPPER	BOAT NAME	BOAT MODEL	RATING	FINISH	ELAPSED	CORRECTED	PTS.	COMMENTS	YC
562	Joey Hansen	Magic	Mercury	234	19:22:10	0:52:10	0:41:15	1
18686	Fred Minning	Svenska	Peterson 34	123	19:17:49	0:47:49	0:42:05	2
53	Ari Rubenstein	Mardi Gras	Santana 22	237	19:27:56	0:57:56	0:46:52	3
3674	Robert Hamner	Pequod	Catalina 27 Tall	189	19:33:31	1:03:31	0:54:42	4
18020	Roger	Mystic	Newport	177	19:35:56	1:05:56	0:57:40	5		SSS
157	Leroy Gilles	Summerplace		198	19:37:27	1:07:27	0:58:13	6		EYC
285	Warren Taylor	Kiwa	Ericson 32-2	183	DNC	:	:	8		OYC
535	Paul Mueller	Iskra	Mercury	234	DNC	:	:	8

It was amazing how Sarah multi-tasked between sailing and mothering. At one point she was literally trimming a genoa sheet with one hand and a putting on a puppet show with the other. Damn. There are moments in any marriage where you think, "If I wasn't already married to this woman, I'd get down on one knee right now..."

Great Vallejo Race

2010-05-05T19:06:00.001-07:00

I think Craig said it best: "These two sailing days are ones to remember as the good old days!"

The intrepid crew of Chorus raced downwind from Berkeley to Vallejo on Saturday, and back upwind Sunday.

Conditions on the first day were gorgeous: warm sun, flood tide with us, just enough wind to move the boat at a good clip, but light enough wind to make spinnaker handling drama-free.

When we arrived, we saw the entire boat population of the Vallejo Municipal Marina had been emptied out. (Where did they all go?) which left room for hundreds of race boats of every size, shape, and age to raft up in every available slip (and even rafted four deep in the fairways.)

We stayed for a few beers and deadly Tequila Sunrises. Toby the dog ate about 30 leftover sparerib bones, to his later intestinal distress.

The single and childless among us rocked out in Port Costa at a bar and former-brothel-turned-hotel, while Sarah and Yemaya and I headed back to Macha for bedtime stories and diaper changes.

Sunday morning's low tide was VERY low. On the way out of the marina, boats were getting stuck in the mud left and right.

Anticipating problems, we pre-emptively warped the boat around so she'd be pointed straight out the fairway. We moved all crew to the shrouds, and gunned the engine full forward. (Hey, isn't this blog supposed to be about engineless sailing?!?!?! Well, I'm not so purist as to refuse rides on beautiful sailboats with engines!) Another boat was already stuck in the middle of fairway, so we aimed for the narrow space between the boat and the dock. With about a foot of clearance on either side, the skipper of the other boat started yelling "What are your intentions?" In fact, I think our intentions were all too clear!!! Despite our strenuous hiking, we slowed slightly as we dragged the tip of our keel in the mud. Rock the boat slightly, we inched slowly, slowly forward. Freedom.

The second day's race opened with an exciting downwind start under spinnaker, followed by a run down the channel between Vallejo and Mare Island. Bain, our mast man, re-injured his knee, so he went below for Ibuprofen and beer while the remaining three crew members multitasked for the douse.

The finish was amazing. Latitude was reporting that about 200 boats finished within 20 minutes. Ahead of us, we caught sight of Kame Richards on Golden Moon and our moral and spiritual advisor Peter English on Sunda, so we figured we were headed towards the line even if we couldn't see it through all the traffic!

We finished 2nd for our class, 3rd overall for PHRF boats. Not bad for a bunch of Uzbeks!

- Ari

Sailing with BGIers

2010-04-27T17:03:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, I went sailing on the Tuna with friends from BGI. We had a great time dodging cargo ships on the Estuary. It was really cool to see the team dynamic we've developed in writing papers and case studies together transferred to the water. We then went back to Macha for Solar Curry. Aw yeah.

Wooden Boat Forum: Sailing with No Engine?

2010-02-19T11:54:00.000-08:00

(This blog post is a slight edit of a response I wrote on Wooden Boat magazine's online discussion forum. You can find the whole conversation here.)

We have a fiberglass hull, but I read this forum because I love OTHER people's wooden boats, and because wooden boat geeks frequently have insights and wisdom to share about gaffers, traditional seamanship, etc.

I was really very impressed to see how respectful and thoughtful this thread was! Normally, discussions of engineless sailing quickly devolve into explorations of alternative propulsion (electric engines, bicycle geared propellers, cold fusion drives, etc.) -- which respectfully is a completely different topic than sailing without any sort of engine.

Nevertheless, the various forum posters collectively enumerated many of the tropes, misunderstandings, and frequently asked questions we hear about sailing without an engine.

"For open water sailing the engine is just dead weight and wasted space, but if you routinely sail where there is lots of traffic and tricky channels, the engine is a piece of safety equipment and definitely worth the trouble."

"For long distance stuff an engine is nice. I remember reading something by the wife of the builder of the Spray replica Scud, about how painful it was to sail past beautiful Pacific atolls because they would have needed an engine to get in or out."

What I love about these mutually contradictory opinions is that they really elluminate the difference in philosophy between cruising by motorsailing, and cruising under sail.

Yeah, it's too bad that there are parts of the world that you can't get to with an engineless sailboat. But, if you're a skier, it's also too bad that there are parts of the world that don't have snow.

If you're a surfer, it's too bad that there are beaches in the world that don't have waves.

But for sailors, skiers, surfers, and anyone else who takes part in a weather dependent sport, it seems to me that seeking out or waiting for proper conditions is part of the sport.

I choose to focus on all the places in the world I CAN sail to, rather than the few places I can't. And I also realize that as my skills improve, there are more and more places I can get in an out of. For example, the latest edition of the Pardey's book describes sailing in and out of the coral atolls described above.

"For me using the engine is largely a safety thing."

Another way of saying this is: "Every time I motorsail somewhere that an engine is REQUIRED for safety, I'm implicitly trusting my life to my impeller, my fuel filter, my alternator, etc., etc." Modern diesels are pretty reliable, but there are still way to many single-points-of-failure for me to feel comfortable trusting my life to one.

I've heard somewhere that mountaineers say, "it's never the first thing going wrong that kills you, it's the third thing going wrong" I would argue that motorsailors often forge the first few chain-links of a tragic cascading failure without even realizing it, by placing their craft into a pickle they can't safely sail out of. By the way, this is true whether or not they actually even use their engines when sailing. The point is if and when they NEED their motor, they are literally betting their boat and maybe their lives that it will start on cue.

"Our Great Grandfathers sailed in a world with far far fewer vessels in it."

Not necessarily true. At my marina in Alameda California, there were more (and bigger three masted) sailboats at the turn of the last century than now. You could practically walk across the Oakland Estuary on the decks of the Alaska Packer fleet tied up there.

Of course, in those days there were harbor pilots and warping bollards and skilled line handlers, etc. See below.

"Yacht harbours are no longer set up for pure sailing."

That is definitely true!!! If you want to sail without an engine, you need to be choosy about where you keep your boat. Mooring or anchoring is definitely easier than docking. We keep our boat in a marina, but we shopped around carefully for an end-tie that would be easy to sail in and out of. Again, I think this is part of the sport for me. I would no more choose a slip I HAD to motor out of than I would choose a bicycle trail I HAD to drive to. Interesting thing is that side-ties around here seem to be easy to find, since the long walk from the parking lot is perceived to outweigh the short sail from the Estuary... :-)

"If you work for a living and need to get back, you probably could use an engine."

I totally agree. This is the main argument I see for engines. This is me trimming a gennaker with my teeth AND rowing so I could get home in time for a school-related conference call. Sarah was on baby duty down below.

But there is a difference in priority between boaters and sailors. If there is light wind, I find it insanely challenging and fun to try to keep the boat moving. If there is NO wind, I'd rather be reading a book than motorboating. And if there's an irreconcilable contradiction between working for a living, and sailing, who to say it's the sailing in your life that's the problem? :-)

"What did our great great grand fathers know about sailing that we dont? they sailed up the rivers what did we loose when the engine became king?"

Ultimately, this is why I sail engineless. I want to learn how to SAIL. If those salty old buggers could do it back in the day, why can't we?

I hear a lot of people say things like, I can't sail engineless in (location X) because there are currents of up to X knots here and the wind is unpredictable. I always want to say, "Yes, the moon's gravity also affects the ocean near where I live!" Pretty much anywhere you go, there will be tidal currents.

Pretty much anywhere you go, the weather man's forecast will not be 100% right. And yet, intrepid sailors have historically ventured into all these areas. (Hopefully at slack tide!!!)

To quote Charles Stock:

"the cruising man will take a fair tide as naturally as he selects the up or down escalator at the underground station depending on which direction he wants to take."

When people say they NEED a 50 horsepower engine to stem a 5 knot tidal current, to me it's like saying you need a gasoline-powered pogo stick to go up a down escalator!

- Ari

Scull This

2010-02-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

Looks like the oarsmen is relocating his floating home as well as a goodly number of his neighbours.

The Stone Age Didn't End for Lack of Stone

2009-12-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

"The Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil."

This fabulous and pithy quote from former Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani in a 2005 New York Times article 'The Breaking Point' is often trotted out by those who wish to ridicule the concept of peak oil.

The quote itself is a wonderful piece of rhetoric. It uses the literary device of parallel structure to make a point that is concise, funny, and dead wrong. It contains an unwritten appeal to technology and to linear historical progress (after stone comes bronze and after oil comes hydrogen.) Unfortunately , this otherwise perfect sentence falls victim to the fallacy of False Analogy. One could unpack the sentence further to make this logical error stand out in greater relief:

"Stones are not scarce. Therefore the reason for the end of the stone age was not scarcity. Therefore all resources are not scarce..."

The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the first two premises.

Until now, that's been my pet peeve with this particular quote. But now, in a news headline worthy of The Onion, it now appears that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia IS actually suffering from a shortage of stones! (specifically rock and gravel for concrete construction)

Saudi Arabia Runs out of Sand!

You can't make this stuff up!

- Ari

Peak Oil Debunked

2009-10-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

I still can't tell if this is a joke.

"This video exposes the eco-socialist Gaia conspiracy to rob hard working Americans of God-given V-8 power and tax them into the poorhouse. Combined with the Global Warming hoax, this will bring our ravenous economy to a halt by 2016.

Don't believe the Marxist geologists with their sky-is-falling doomsayerism. T. Boone Pickens got lucky with some price pickings, nothing more. Technology has act More..ually made oil easier to find every year and high prices are not due to extraction costs. They are the result of Green Hollywood propaganda attached to hidden tax code amendments after the recent Democratic takeover."

Solar Cooking

2009-09-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

Ari asked me to post this here, but I also posted it on my new, more baby centered blog, Boat Mama, http://boatmama.blogspot.com/ You are welcome to keep up with our silly baby posts there. They are mostly intended for those who want to know what our daughter is wearing at all times. If you happen to be one of the three people that read this blog we didn't know if you needed that much baby all the time.

Anyways, Ari bought us a solar cooker a few weeks ago. He found it on some boat website I think (perhaps Ari can fill in the details). It is called Hot Pot and comes with a metal reflector and a glass bowl and lid that a black bowl fit inside. So far it has just been taking up space on our boat. In fact, Ari was quite surprised when I used it today. In his own words he said, "I just assumed you thought it was another one of my crazy ideas." Well, it was not a crazy idea at all. More like a miracle in cooking.
I decided to start with something simple and that would not be inedible if it didn't really cook all the way. I picked veggies enchiladas as my first solar cooking project. (To be honest I have made some kind of solar cookies at some workshop I went to, but I was only sort of involved.) True to my boat cooking principles I like to see how many "bilge ingredients," canned goods, I can use in a recipe. These enchiladas are about half from the bilge, half fresh. I did not use the pickled asparagus in the end because I felt like it was plenty of food, but I know it would have been great too. I took maybe five minutes of prep including cutting the mushrooms, broccoli, cheese, and red peppers, and then making the layers. The five minutes of prep puts it in a special category of good boat cooking in my mind.

We had some errands to do during the day and I intended the enchiladas to be dinner. The recipe I used as a guide suggested two hours of cooking. The book also suggested that you can sort of use the sun as a timer and turn the solar cooker so that when you put it out the sun is not directly hitting the cooker and it is turned towards where the sun will be when you really want it to start cooking. So, I put it out about 11:30am (see the first close up of the cooker) and turned it so that it would be in direct sun what I guessed would be a few hours later. We returned from errands around 3:30pm and Ari was already hungry because he had gone without lunch. The enchiladas looked cooked and when we took off the lid they smelled yummy and I stuck my finger in and it was HOT! (I want to buy a little thermometer that I can just put in there with the food.) The cheese on top was starting to brown and the top tortillas were a little crispy. I was surprised how wet the bottom layer was, but I read that all the water will come out of the veggies in the cooking process. The lid is tight so none of it evaporates.I served it up with sour cream and salsa. Ari said it was the best, and only, solar cooked meal he has ever had. And it really was great. A few bites were too hot to eat with out blowing on themwhich really surprised me. I will definitely make solar enchiladas again.
In case you want to do some solar cooking of your own here is my recipe for what it is worth. But, I recommend using what ever you have in your bilge. And for you land lubbers out there I sure your cupboard has some cans dying to be used as well.

Solar Veggie Enchiladas

5 Corn tortillas (I recommend 6, but that was all we had)
1 small can green chillies
1 small can enchilada sauce
1/4 cup sun dried tomatoes
1/2 jar roasted red peppers (about equal to one red pepper)
4 brown mushrooms
1 small bunch of broccoli
1/2 cup cheddar cheese

SalsaSour Cream

Cut up all veggies and cheese into small pieces. Lay down two tortillas in bowl. Put half of each of the veggies in a layer in top. Pour over half the enchilada sauce and sprinkle on one third of the cheese. Lay down two more tortillas. Layer on the rest of the veggies, pour on the rest of the sauce, saving just a little to go over the top, and one third of the cheese. Lay down the last two tortillas and sprinkle on the remainder of the cheese and enchilada sauce. Place solar cooker in the sun for 2 hours or more until the cheese is melted and browning and the inside is hot. Serve with salsa and sour cream.

Anthropological Field Guide to Common Peak Oil Debate Participants

2009-08-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

This post was inspired by the now infamous Michael Lynch piece in the New York Times.

Rather than a point-by-point scientific rebuttal of every point in his op-ed (which is hard because it's relatively "content-free"), I decided to answer the more pressing question: "Who the heck is this idiot and what's his angle?" To help, I compiled a field guide to the types you're likely to encounter while reading about Peak Oil.

(Spectrum is from total denial to extreme paranoia)

Abiotic Oilers: Related to creation scientists, these folks believe that oil is not a "fossil fuel" but is generated deep in the earth by mysterious geological processes. No really. There's plenty of oil, we just have to put on our tin foil hats, drill deep down into our Flat Earth, past the underground cities of reptile aliens who control our secret Zionist world government, down into the petroleum-rich "Creamy Nougat Center" of the planet.

FUD Peddlers: Snazzy professional deniers on the payroll of the PR/consulting firms in the high-stakes "denial racket". Given enough money, a good haircut and well tailored suit, these guys can wedge a crowbar of doubt between the links of even the most obvious chain of causality: cancer and cigarettes, processed food and obesity, carbon emissions and climate change, finite oil reserves and oil depletion, gravity and falling down, etc.

BAUers: Peak oil? Never heard of it. Go away, I'm watching American Idol and microwaving a Hot Pocket, in the back seat of my Hummer. Unfortunately, this group is also known as "Nearly Everyone You've Ever Met in Your Life."

Drill Baby Drillers: These folks get that our dependence on foreign oil is a problem, but haven't yet gotten that we depend on oil because... um, we don't have that much NON-foreign oil. (The U.S. only has 3% the world's proven oil reserves, and it's sure not for lack of looking.) Like the old aphorism says "Wish in one well, and piss in the other. See which one fills up first."

Not Yetters: Of course the world will reach peak oil... decades from now. Plus, we have 400 years of coal. Often Oil Company CEOs or OPEC oil ministers. (For example Shell CEO recently reassured the world press that we have 40 years of oil left -- when did 40 years become the foreseeable future!!!)

Government Softpedalers: It is vital for our national security that we strive for energy independence. But not THAT vital. Certainly not important enough to switch party affiliations or anything. Please go back to worrying about your job and health insurance.

Free-Market Cornucopians: If the world demands energy, the free market will find a way to supply it. Likewise, if three hungry economists are locked in a bank vault, the free market will provide them a sandwich. (Of course, this turns out to be true if the first two economists decide the third would look good between a couple slices of bread -- see "Doomers, Cannibalism" below.)

Techno-Utopians: The world's oil production will peak (or has peaked) but it's no big deal because we'll just run our "hyper cars" on organic bat spit or cold fusion or nanotechnology or hemp seed oil...

Peak Oil Liters: Of course I don't believe in that lunatic Peak Oil theory (because then I'd be ostracized as a weirdo). I just believe that over time, oil will get more and more difficult to extract... so we won't be able to pump quite as much as we used to... and therefore energy will be really expensive... and it will have far reaching economic effects on our society. (Dude, that's Peak Oil in a nutshell!) Like the many "postfeminists" women I have met who vehemently shirk the feminist label because they don't want to seem extreme or strident, but certainly want to be treated as equals, and can't really name any substantive disagreements they have with the central tenets of feminism.

Just the Facts Ma'am'ers: In this camp I would include the originals like King Hubbert, Colin Campbell, and Matthew Simmons. They noticed and spoke up about the geological facts, without drawing a lot of far-out sociological inferences. (And really, I think that's the strongest critique I have of "peak oil theory". The geological science seems rock solid (groan, sorry), but does that mean that X, Y, or Z will happen in N decades from an economic/political/historical perspective?)

Mainstream Gentle Nudgers: Well spoken, reasonable sounding guys like Jeff Rubin, who has done a lot to promulgate the view that due to peak oil, everything in your life will change without standing wild eyed on a soapbox screaming "OH MY GOD, EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE WILL CHANGE!!!!"

Locavore Mafia
(a.k.a. Bike-Lane Fundamentalists): Peak oil is here, and will fundamentally shift our civilization. But that's good, because our civilization sucks and the SUV-driving earth rapers out there deserve to suffer for their eco-sins! Once the global economy collapses, finally we'll be able to get a decent salad!

Long Emergency Preppers
(a.k.a. Kunstlerians/Orlovians): Things are going to get crazy!!! We could see the collapse of nation states, and certainly things will be different and harder than we've ever seen in our lifetimes. Time to start stocking up on canned food and learning to scavenge wild foods.

Neo-Malthusians: Ditto. Oh yeah, we've also massively overshot the non-petroleum carrying capacity of the Earth, and are headed for a massive die-off. Time to get your swine-flu vaccine.

Doomers: We are so completely screwed that it’s not even worth planting a community garden. We are headed for the neo-neolithic ages, so better get ready to fight tooth and nail for a good cave. Complete collapse of the grid will be followed shortly by roving hordes of cannibal former-suburbanites.

Welcome Yemaya

2009-07-15T11:21:00.001-07:00

Yemaya was born July 11! She is healthy, happy and very cute. So far she seems happy with life on the boat. Ari and I are never far and there is plenty of milk, blankets, diapers, and arms to hold her. She has not been bothered by the piledriver that has been here since we came home. Although, I do think that Ari and I will go crazy soon. Luckily, they work very fast and it seems in a few days they are likely to be finished.
It is one of those hot weeks here in Oakland so by mid afternoon we are quite toasty on the boat. My sister brought us a fan and some ice yesterday that really helped morale. I hope that global warming gives me a break soon and we have some nice cool Bay Area summer days that I love.
One of our neighbors saw Ari on the dock and asked him how things are going. Ari explained the crazy cycle of sleeping a few hours at a time and then tending to Yemaya's needs. Our neighbor suggested it was like single handed sailing. At the very least Ari and I are practicing a watch schedule for cruising. Ari does better at the 2-6am shift than I do.
So far we have been able to cram all the needed baby items onto the boat and have turned down all sorts of offers of unnessasary baby junk. Of which there is no short supply. The baby industrial complex will cretainly be one of the first to fall in the peak oil scenerio. Everything is made of plastic and apparently we "need" the items for our babies survival. How anyone ever raised a child with out all the junk is hard to say, but I am sure that many, many generations of humans came about without it all.

Volitan: Bad Design, Wharram: Good Design

2009-06-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

This Volitan boat is featured prominently on a number of "Green Design" blogs, as well as June's Pacific Yachting magazine. I saw it at the checkstand while buying lines at West Marine. Google "Volitan boat", you'll find it.

This is literally the dumbest boat design I've ever seen. Where do I start.

First., we already have an existing technology for eco-friendly boat propulsion. They’re called “sails”. Hey genius, you're 5,000 years behind the news...

The site touts the twin 225 horsepower electric engines. At approximately 746 watts per 1 horsepower, that's 335,700 watts. Judging by the picture, the wings are about 92 feet tip to tip by about 10 feet wide. That's 920 square feet of solar panels, or about 86 square meters. Because of the X-wing design, only one of the wingtops will ever be facing the sun. (And the solar panels on the bottom of the wing never will be, what's that about?) At a charge rate of 150 watts per square meter per hour times 43 square meters, and assuming climate and weather allows 10 hours of direct sunlight per day, you'd need to soak up over 5 days of blazing sunshine to motor for one hour at full throttle. Well, maybe that tiny wind generator at the top of the mast will help. Or maybe you can throttle WAY back and just kinda bob around...

Notice the entire boat is enclosed:

Less usable deck space than a Colombian Narcosub:

This starship/greenhouse design makes it impossible to actually interact with the ocean. Now in order to "sail" (I cringe at the thought of using that term to describe motoring VERY slowly while powered by tiny windmill) you'll no doubt need a bunch of sensors to let you know wind direction and force, sea state, etc. Since the "sails" are solid (and not foil shaped -- how's that gonna work?!?!?!) they offer no visual or auditory feedback that you're luffing or stalled. More sensors I guess? The systems are all electronic and hydraulic. And new and custom and untested and non-redundant. This is the type of thinking that Michael Pollan describes as splitting a holistic, elegant solution into multiple, discrete problems.

The sheer dimensions are ludicrous: a 100' boat with a 92' beam -- good times docking this beast! The building materials are pure Unobtainium and the scale guarantees that only billionaires will be shopping for this marvel of sustainability.

Shift your eyes away from the big picture down to the details: Where are the deck cleats to tie this montrosity to a dock? Where's the anchor windlass? Missing are the myriad and sundry details that allow you to live, work, and play on a boat. Has this guy ever even been on a boat? The propellers are at the very bottom of the x-wing keels. Hmm, do you think over hundreds of years, naval architects might have found propellers mounted just under the surface, directly behind the keel/skeg to be a little less, um, exposed? Can you imagine trying to navigate kelp or crab pots or coral reefs with fragile ducted fans on underwater stalks as your primary propulsion?

The kicker is that Volitan won the International Design Award for the best transportation vehicle of 2007!!! This abortion is the symbol of everything that is wrong with "sustainable design" : the belief that giant, expensive, overengineered gadgets are the solution to the world's problems. It's clearly dreamed up by an industrial designer with a deep, abiding hatred of everything boat-like about boats...

Sigh... OK... done ranting. For a link to a guy who HAS advanced the art of sustainable boat buidling, check out James Wharram (the guy often credited with the catamaran revival of the 50s and 60s.) Lately he's been doing great work designing boats to revive sail-powered trade routes in the Pacific.

His designs are an elegant blend of high tech, low tech, tribal tech. When you look at his boats: the lines, the simplicity, the ruggedness and yet performance, they're clearly drawn by the hand of a man who's been to sea.

One of the things I've learned my involvement with open source software as well as boats: the best human tools come from thousands of incremental improvements made by generations of average working people working and living with the product, not from ego-driven idiot-savants incented by the marketplace to create mystifying objects of passive aggressive novelty, rather than simple, honest artifacts of enduring utility.

Incidentally, I believe Macha, descended as she is from hardworking channel cutter and sailing lifeboat lineage, is an another example of evolutionary rather than revolutionary design. The builder and previous owner Jay definitely added some cool innovations, but the basic design is pretty darned traditional. In sailing her, and living aboard her, even still when I'm faced with a new situation or a new maintenance/repair task I'll frequently notice some new detail replete with robust elegance, and think "Oh... that's why it work's like that..."

A well designed tool or vehicle should feel like that to own. It fills you with confidence that generations of intelligent people have stood in your shoes, experienced the pickle you're now in, and tried their best to design and build for it... Good, traditional, evolutionary yacht design is a subtle, nonverbal communication from a lineage of seafaring forefathers, quietly whispering reassurance when the sailing gets rough. "Don't worry, this boat can take these conditions." In contrast, when I look at a boat design like the Volitan, (or a Hunter, or a MacGregor 26X), I feel like I know more about boats that their designers. And that frankly scares the hell out of me, because I certainly don't know much!

Top 10 Reasons I'm Having a Kid Even Though the World is Going to Shit

2009-06-10T11:28:00.001-07:00

This is a repost from an another forum, in response to a dear friend who called BS on me. I was taking the position that overpopulation is a central, but often unspoken issue in the context of sustainability, economic justice, limits to growth, etc. And she replied, "Wait a minute, how can you say that when you're having a baby any week now?!?!"

Disclaimer: I say "I" and not "WE" in the post above cuz this is how I feel about it. Let's see if Sarah has a follow up post...

(As a quick aside, we've nicknamed our soon-to-be baby "Tree Frog" because we know her primarily by her kicks and jumps, and because her legs and butt seem about as long and boney as picture above)

So here, dear friends, are the Top 10 Reasons I'm Having a Kid Even Though the World is Going to Shit:

10 - Because I want to. I'm an American damn it! It's my God-given right to do what I want whenever I want. You're not the boss of me and I don't have to tell you why. If I ever feel twinges of guilt in the middle of the night for the way I live, I can always fall back on my fancy education or hire a shrink or a life coach to help me muster rationalizations to justify my actions. Just joking. (An alternate #10 for a lot of folks might be "because the condom broke" or "because I live in a Red State where we learned that storks bring babies", but Sarah and I were actually trying.)

9 - Because I'm curious and in love. When all is said an done I want to have a kid because I have a deep longing to see what a tiny human being comprised of half me and half the love of my life will be like. I literally can't wait to meet her, take care of her, teach her, learn from her, love her.

8 - Because my parents did. And their parents did. And their parent did... It's a tautology to point out that all of us were born to people who consciously or otherwise ended up as parents -- but still, it's pretty cool. Each of our matrilinear mitochondrial DNA stretches back in an unbroken lineage that started with the first single celled mother of all life. I'm not saying that the purpose of human life should be procreation, and I'm DEFINITELY not saying that the only purpose of procreation should be creating life. (that wouldn't be fun) But, I'm saying that we're wired such that the instinct to procreate and therefore create new life as a frequent side effect is incredibly deep and primal. Capitalize the "L" in Life and it approaches religion for me... If this all sounds like heteronormative biological essentialism run amok, let me say that recent evolutionary studies in "community selection" seem to confirm that it literally does take a village to raise a child. There are many ways to serve nascent Life; parenthood is just one... The world needs aunts and uncles and teachers and mentors and role models. And yes, we'll be calling on all of you loved ones to fill those roles...

7 - Because kids don't know any better. I was just listening to a public radio show with people telling their childhood stories about growing up in the Depression. The common theme was that it was a fun time to be a kid: lots of family/neighborhood togetherness, simple games & activities, etc. Kids that grow up during crises or wars always seem to find way to enjoy life and have fun. When I was in middle school, I was on a school trip to the parliament buildings in Quebec City when an ex-soldier burst into the room next door with a machine gun and started killing people. In retrospect, it seems pretty scary. But at the time, we were in the next room, so heard shots but didn't see any blood spatter or dead bodies, didn't really believe the guy would kill us, and it all just seemed like a cool adventure. I remember hiding under a table and really wishing I was hiding under the same table as this girl I had a crush on. I was listening to a neuropsychologist on the radio the other day who categorized stresses as either Positive, Tolerable, or Toxic. The first category are normal emotional growing pains. The second category are major life traumas, but which can be overcome with good family and community support. The third category are deep traumas like abuse, neglect, etc. What stuck me was that the researcher used hurricane Katrina as an example of a "Tolerable Trauma." I was heartened, because I think most of the problems our children's generation will face will similarly fall within a tolerable range. Our kids will adapt to the unfolding post-peak-oil & climate change world and will have challenges, triumphs, loves, losses, depressions and exhaltations just like any other generation.

6 - Because it will be a wild ride. Why deny the next generation ringside seats to the greatest show on Earth: the collapse of postmodern global capitalist civilization? The next few decades will be fascinating!

5 - Because limits to growth are soft not hard limits. The population of humans this gorgeous little planet can support is not a number, but a spectrum of numbers. On one side of the scale, a pristine Earth ecosystem with a "leave no trace" standard of nomadic human civilization would probably allow a human population in the high hundreds-of-thousands to low-single-digit millions. A sustainable Earth ecosystem with decentralized agrarian societies based on permaculture principles could probably support a human population in the hundreds of millions. If everyone lived the way North Americans currently do, the earth could probably support about one billion people. With two-thirds of the Earth's population living on two buck sa day with a lifestyle resembling a scene from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, we've proven we can support high single digit billions. If we choose to transform our planet into "Factory Farm Earth (tm)", exploiting every photon of sunlight, every drop of water, every speck of ore, eliminating in the process every "competing" species, we can probably support many tens of billions of people. Note that we're currently on trajectory for the final and most extreme scenario. Good times.

4 - Because human timescales are different than geological, civilizational, or even historical timescales. The problem I see with dismissing peak-oil or climate-change believers as "doomers" or "neo-millenialists" is: it's like the proverbial wheezing, hard-drinking, 400-pound, 4-pack-a-day-smoker, bacon-double-cheeseburger eating, stunt-motorcycle riding, chainsaw juggling, shark wrestling, russian-roulette playing guy who says to his doctor's repeated warnings, "Well, this lifestyle hasn't killed me YET, so I don't think it ever will..." When religious leaders tell me the End is Nigh, I blow them off. When scientists tell me so, I listen. The heuristic "this is the way things are; therefore this is the way things will always be" is one of humanity's most odious varieties of stupid. As many people point out, people have been having these end-times debates for a long time... but only a long time in human terms. Climate change is happening in a geological blink of an eye. But in human history, uncertainty of plus-or-minus a generation or two means that my kids' might be relatively unaffected by the unravelling future, and MAY not be part of the generation to be left without a chair when the music stops. Maybe even their kids?

3 - Because kids make us think differently about our lives and our place in the world. You really can't argue with Whitney Houston that "children are the future." Without some sense of responsibility for the legacy of coming generations of human and non-human life, I believe people on average would be LESS eco-correct, MORE hedonistic and self-indulgant. I mean, why turn down the thermostat, carry around goofy looking water bottles, carpool, etc. etc. if my life, right now, is all that matters?

2 - Because maybe our kids can fix it. I've been watching the bailout and the futility of trying to sustain the unsustainable, and at this point I'm not even sure what "fix it" means any more. Perhaps "heal it" is a better phrase, since mechanistic rather than organic thinking seems complicit in this epic mess. Maybe we've passed the point of no return, but maybe we haven't. If anyone can do it, our kids can.

1 - Because I'm an optimist. No, really. Look, I think a lot of people (and frankly a lot of people especially in the sustainability movement) don't understand the difference between thinking and feeling. I THINK (in simplistic terms) that the world is going to hell in a handbasket (for all the usual reason: peak oil, climate change, economic meltdown, yada yada yada.) But I FEEL challenged, curious, engaged, and even cheerful about the coming changes. I don't feel postive for any particular REASON (because then it would be thinking, not feeling...) but because the basic orientation of my personality is optimistic (underneath the crustiness.) To recap: what my rational thought leads me to believe will happen (or not happen) in the future is not, I repeat, not what determines my place on the optimist-pessimist spectrum. The attitudes, feelings, and most importantly ACTIONS with which I meet the future ARE. I'm often accused of being a pessimist, but like Jay (a sailing peak-oiler friend of ours who's now homesteading in Hawaii) says "Pessimists don't plant trees." I think that goes double for raising little humans...

Volvo Ocean Race Game

2009-06-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

This online video game is currently destroying my life: Volvo Ocean Race Game

It's a deceptively simplistic flash game. All you do is point your boat and pick your sail. But, the addictive part is that it happens in real time, with 300,000 real time competitors and real time wind downloaded from real life GRIB files. All this encourages sleep deprivation (which I keep telling Sarah is good practice for the baby.)

For a sweet, brief, moment at the start of Leg 7, I was tied for #1 (with about 10,000 French teenagers I'm sure)

The exigencies of my job, relationship, social life, and need for sleep conspired to distract me from the game. I went aground, and have fallen back to #30,113. Still, I'm finding it's a great way for us cubicle-bound sailors to experiment with VMG and route strategy.

Master Mariners Regatta 2009

2009-05-25T17:52:00.000-07:00

On May 23rd, I got to crew on Bradley's boat Chorus in the wooden boat regatta sponsored by the Master Mariners Benevolent Association.

My dad was in town, and despite the overcast, chilly weather it was simply a great day of sailing with some great friends, and the man whose infectious love of the water got me into sailing, windsurfing, and all manner of ocean-based activities in the first place: my father.

It was an amazing learning experience to sail with such a wide variety of boats: large, small, old, "old at heart". There were boats from such venerable SF Bay one design classes such as the Bear and the Bird boats, there were gaffers in all shapes and sizes, lovely schooners and piratical square riggers.

It's a fun-loving event, as evidenced by the "potato rounding rule." Less weatherly old girls who can't quite round the weather mark can opt instead to throw a potato at it. Close counts; just like in horseshoes and hand grenades.

I was on foredeck for the first time; and had many fumbles and recovery due to my unfamiliarity with the role and various equipment gotchas.

Bradley was on the helm, Craig trimmed spinnaker.

Aaron, who I've sailed with on the Ultimate 24, was on mast.

Our tactition (as well as moral and spiritual advisor, hehe) Peter English, sailed such a perfect course that despite our (I should say my) clumsy hoists and douses we won our class by 6 seconds.

It was a literally photo finish, with the second place Farallon Clipper right on our quarter as we heard the shotgun blast signalling our win.

We relaxed as we sailed down the Estuary to the post-race party at Encinal Yacht Club. Seeing the stately wooden craft rafted up three or four boats deep, I was reminded of the pictures I've seen of the three-masted Alaska Packer ships that used to raft up in the spot now inhabited by our marina. It was easy to half-close my eyes and daydream about a not-so-distant past and rapidly approaching future where "wooden boats and iron men" (these days a growing sisterhood of "iron women" too!) are central to Alameda's economy and culture.

That night we enjoyed a celebratory dinner and reception put on by the Encinal Yacht Club.

It was a great weekend with friends and family, and a great introduction to racing! We plan to practice as a team until we get our symmetrical spinnaker mojo working better!

Baby Aboard

2009-04-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

Our biggest question about having a baby has been how to keep her safe in the marine environment. We have bought all six books that I could find on Amazon about cruising with children. Clearly tons of cruising families have lived with children from newborns to teenagers on sailboats. And it just so happens that everyone that writes a book about it says it is a great experience. If anyone knows of a book about how unhappy a family was cruising with children, let us know.

Most of the suggestions I have read have been the same. To sum them up:

Put the kid in a life jacket when underway.
Devise some kind of toddler harness and tether system when ever kid is above deck.
Teach them to swim.
Teach older children to row the dingy. Started by having them practice row with the painter still tied to the boat. As they get better give them more line.
Put netting up around the life lines.
Lash a car seat above or below deck.
Have some kind of playpen area, either a commercial "pack and play," or create one in a bunk with netting or lee cloths.
Bring things to entertain them like toys and books.
Let them participate in sailing, steering, etc. But don't push it because it is really not that fun for kids for very long periods of time.
Find other kids and cruising families. Meet up with them again if possible.
Hide fun treats and toys to take out for long passages and bad weather.

In addition I have found some unique ideas online. One family created a flotation system for the car seat, and tested it in the pool. Not sure if we will do this, but it does seem like there is an untapped market for various baby flotation devices. I really enjoyed one families description of buying an immersion alarm for their three year old. I won't ruin the funny part, so you can read it yourself. On one online forum I found some interesting posts including one that has some pictures of hanging the infant seat in the companion way. I'm not sure that the carseat companies have safety tested all the ways that parents are using the seats on boats, but it does make me think.

Carseat flotation
http://www.sailjazz.com/editorial/read/27

Immersion Alarm (LOL)
http://www.weliveonaboat.com/2008/07/keeping-kids-safe-on-a-boat.html

The V-Crib
http://www.searoom.com/sail_baby.htm

Comments by Gaff Cutter family and Hanging Carseat
http://www.ybw.com/forums/showflat.php/Cat/0/Board/pbo/Number/397323/an/0/

What is it like to live on a boat?

2009-04-20T20:24:00.000-07:00

Our friends and family have been asking what it is like to live on our boat. We have been on our boat almost two months, and I keep waiting for the boat to be clean to take pictures to post. Well, today I decided that we should just tell the truth. Neither Ari nor I excel at picking up. We even got rid of most of our stuff, and yet there is still clutter.

So life on a boat is exactly like life on land, we are surrounded by junk. Above is our Nav desk where we we put project and mail junk. Ari has been constantly doing projects since we moved aboard. I doubt we will ever really clean this area up.

This is the "nursery." Most day we keep this clean, but today is laundry day, well really yesterday was. We have friends who are expecting a baby a month after us, they already put the nursery together, we try and keep it clean.

Here you can sort of see our bed. I didn't make it up all nice, but it is small. I bought a foam mattress pad to make it softer. We have to tuck the full sized pad in to make it fit. We have worked out a clever system of taking turns sleeping on the inside and outside throughout the night. I think soon I will be too pregnant to sleep on the inside. It is getting hard for me to roll over when it is time to switch.

Despite the mess we are loving living on the boat. Like tonight when Ari took the little boat out for a row, and later a sail. The sun was setting, it was warm, and we enjoyed a cool drink on deck afterward.

We are excited for the little one to join us on our adventure. More pictures of boat life soon.

Sailing Home

2009-03-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

We had a great sail back from Berkeley to Alameda with our friends Bradley and Craig. I love sailing with those guys. Bradley is like some kind of crazed sailing prodigy: he's only been sailing for a couple years, but he brings so much passion and intensity to it that he sails way better than folks I know who have been sailing for decades. Craig is a super experienced, experimental, and intuitive sailor. I'd sailed with him a bunch on my old Catalina and his old Catalina, but it's only in sailing with him on engineless boats that I really began to appreciate what a truly gifted sailor he is.

While the wind was light, we warped from one side dock to the fuel dock. Basically, this involved giving the boat a giant bobsled shove and letting it coast around a corner and upwind to the fuel dock. We kinda bungled the maneuver. We had two crew aboard, but the two "pushers" failed to jump on in time, so we had to sprint around the docks to get in position to catch Macha. We got to the other side of the dock in time and no J24's were harmed. Phew.

We debated just sailing out, but we had previously arranged a tow out of the breakwater from Steve, the guy who did our cockpit. He arrived in a vintage wooden mini-tugboat and, as soon as the towrope was made fast to our samson post, dragged us straight upwind at 4 knots. It was only the second time we've towed the boat. It's always a blow to the ego, and reinforces the perception that engineless sailors get towed everywhere. Still, it really helped, as the flood would otherwise have been setting us right into (through) the pier. Basically, it turned what would have been a two day sail into a one-day sail.

Once past the end of the Berkeley pier, I faced a moment of truth. The winds were REALLY light. Should we drop the tow rope now and sail behind Treasure Island? (much shorter, but less wind) Or radio Steve and ask for a further tow around the front of Treasure Island? It made me realize that the reason I don't have an engine is the same as the reason I don't have a TV or a Playstation. Not because I'm a self-righteous purist, but because I find it REALLY hard to "unplug" from addictive technological conveniences...

With some urging from Craig, I decided it was time to stop motoring and start sailing!

With the extremely light wind, we got to rotate through every sail: main, topsail, staysail, jib, yankee, tow staysail, asymmetrical kite. Great learning experience!

We ghosted along, drifting with the current with just enough way on to keep steerage. We ran a slow-motion slalom course through the anchored construction barges near the Bay Bridge construction.

As we got closer to the bridge (right by Clipper Cove), we picked up the strongest wind of the day (probably 7-9 knots) which we used to maximum effect to work Westward to pass through the upwind gap in the bridge. Once on the other side, we drifted again until the flood carried us out of the wind shadow of the island. We bore off on a broad reach towards the entrance doused the headsails and hoisted our giant asymmetrical spinnaker to fly wing-on-wing.

At one point coming down the Estuary, Craig suggested we take down everything except the kite so it could draw better. I was skeptical to take down the mainsail, since I figured we had more sail area going wing-on-wing, and that raising the main again would be a pain. But with so many crew aboard, I figured it was worth the experiment. Wow -- we instantly gained a half-knot. We had been pacing a pretty little navy blue Etchells the whole way down the Estuary, but we figure we would have beat them if we had taken down the main sooner.

Then the wind died completely, and as the current was about to change, we towed ourselves with the dinghy lashed on the quarter for a little while. Again, I felt like I was cheating by using the outboard. But it ended up being a great exercise: we now know that in near-perfect calm the 15 horse two-stroke can push the big girl at 4+ knots. Something to add to our bag of tricks...

As we towed ourselves deeper into the Estuary, our wind came back and we sailed with the kite, dowsing it to put up tow staysail to slow ourselves, then lining up for final approach under bare poles.

Home sweet home!

Cockpit Work IV

2009-02-23T14:55:00.000-08:00

Wow. It's coming together beautifully. The cockpit is not 100% done, but the boat is sailable. Which is good, because we're moving aboard this weekend and we need to move her... We're hoping for some Westerly or Northwesterly wind.

Chorus Sea Trial

2009-02-07T20:40:00.000-08:00

This weekend we got to crew on Bradley's recently purchased 1958 Kettenberg 38 "Chorus". Wow. What a boat! I hope Macha's not listening when I say she's the prettiest boat I've ever seen. (There's different kinds of beauty, and Macha is still the boat of my dreams...)

I wasn't familiar with Chorus' boat racing record, or the sterling reputation of her previous owner Peter English in the San Francisco sailing community. So for the last few weeks I had been gently teasing Bradley based on all the stereotypes I had rattling around my head about wooden boats. "Biodegradable hull." "Needs some TLC." "Get the bilge pump handle and the varnish brush ready." Bradley would ask for advice on whether we thought Chorus was a good investment. Finally, I said "No boat is a every a good financial investment. But if it's love, it's love, and nothing I can say or do will change your mind."

All joking aside, it was clear as soon as we laid eyes on Chorus that she wasn't just any neglected wooden "project boat." From stem to stern, every brightly finished inch of her radiated an aura of meticulous care.

Her narrow beam and graceful overhangs looked fast even tied up to the dock.

Her running rigging and deck hardware indicated that rather than a flimsy showboat, this was a boat that had been set up to be sailed well and sailed hard.

Actually, while Macha and Chorus are very different boats, I think they both ooze with character and purpose. In Macha's case, that purpose is to be a home on the water: a comfortable, maneuverable and decently quick "Ark" for a nomadic family of seasteaders.

Chorus' purpose, as best I can tell is to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. It would be easy to see all that gleaming Mahogany and think "What a charming old boat." But if you're on the racecourse when you have that thought, watch out!

While Chorus is currently the flagship of the Master Mariners Benevolent Society (a group devoted to restoring and racing classic wooden boats), according to Peter she's aroused come controversy because she's TOO fast.

Below the waterline, she has a faired keel and a carbon fiber elliptical rudder has replaced the original keel-hung barndoor. Her stick is aluminum, rigged by Peter's childhood friend, Scott Easom. Her running rigging is all modern low stretch cordage, and her sails are all high-tech laminates. (As white as possible, to stealthily mimic Dacron from a distance.)

In short, she's the sailboat equivalent of dropping a V8 in a ford model-T to make a hot rod!

Chorus has won a number of local PHRF races and even raced in the 1996 TransPac.

We had a great spin from Sausalito around Angel Island and back up Raccoon Straits. Bradley was obviously thrilled to take the helm of his new baby, and Peter was obviously happy to know that the boat that has meant so much to him is going to a good home. From the sounds of it, he'll continue to be involved with Chorus as he shows Bradley the maintenance routine, introduces him to the Master Mariner crowd, and maybe sails some races.

Chorus has got a really nice feel. We found it pretty easy to get her going 6.5-7knots upwind. With the fancy rudder, she's got a really nice helm feel: responsive but solid. Aparently with spinnaker up she'll do 12-13 knots.

P.S. Speaking of Master Mariners, Bradley told us that one of their board members saw Macha tied up in Berkeley. Thinking, "What a beautiful old gaffer", he walked up to leave a note inviting us to Master Mariner events. When he got closer, he knocked on the hull and realized she was old growth fiberglass. Hehe.

Chorus

2009-01-28T15:28:00.000-08:00

Our buddy Bradley is buying this Kettenberg 38:

Kettenburg 38 “Chorus” for sale

Can't wait to crew on her!

- Ari

Cockpit Work III

2009-01-28T15:19:00.001-08:00

Despite the rain, it's coming together. Steve and assistant David are doing great work.

- Ari

Cockpit Work II

2009-01-15T22:18:00.001-08:00

At this point it would be easy to think "Holy !$@#%YY%Q, what have they done to our boat?!?!"

However, an even more natural reaction (at least for for us) is, thank God we paid a professional to do this...

Cockpit Work I

2009-01-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

Here's what's going on so far.

Financial Crisis and Peak Oil

2009-01-11T23:41:00.000-08:00

A friend recently wrote about the "Current Financial Crisis" in another forum. After posting a littany of economic horrors from the news media, he asked rhetorically:

"Does anyone know where some optimistic/realistic writings might be?"

Well, embedded in that question is the assumption that optimistic=realistic. That assumption in turn is rooted in our unique historical perspective about progress, prosperity, etc. The narrative we've lived our whole lives is about to begin a new chapter.

I believe every generation has an intuitive feel for the "speed" of history. I believe rate of technological change provides the externally measurable benchmark for that subjective experience.

My great-grandparents were surprised that certain technological breakthroughs made their lives slightly different and better than their parents. For example, on one side of the family they were able to travel between Europe and North America by steamer, and on another side of the family they were able to work in factories in addition to farms.

My grandparents became used to sporadic but not infrequent change. My grandfather on one side was fascinated as a kid by crystal radios and cameras. They adapted to cars, planes, TVs, etc. Still, every new labor-saving device, transporation method, or entertainment medium was met with surprise and delight (or horror in the case of "improvements" like the machine gun and atom bomb.)

By my parents generation, change was expected. Linear change that is. They grew up with expectations of predictable, incremental technological improvement. Cars and planes got bigger and faster every year. Radios went stereo and TVs went color. But still, you could chart your expected life's course by observing where technology stood today, and extrapolating a straight-line trajectory towards the future based on the steady rate of technological improvement. Often, these predictions based on linear extrapolations are hilarious to us now: moon colonies and flying cars and house-cleaning robots and atomic powered everything...

(I should say I've been blessed to grow up in a family where ecological and social limits to economic growth were part of the dinner table conversation -- I'm talking about the generational Zeitgeist.)

I believe my generation, our generation, expected exponential or even chaotic growth. As a computer geek, the career to which I've devoted the last fifteen years of my life literally did not exist when I was in high school. (I choose to believe that fact and not my restless and cantankerous nature is why my guidance counsellors had nothing to say about what I should do with my life...) Our generation has an intimate, intuitive feel for revolutionary technological change. We understand in our bones that if you invent something cool on the Internet, tens of millions of people can hear about it and just start using it overnight. We've seen world-changing innovations and micro-trends and global one-hit-wonders bloom overnight like mushrooms on a lawn and then fade just as rapidly. For the most part we've grown comfortable in a world where things get faster at an ever-faster rate.

Which brings us to now, and which brings us to oil. Because we tend to think of technology as separate from energy, when the two are inextricably tied together. The reason we DON'T have flying cars or moon colonies or jetpacks is NOT that the technology wasn't there. It's that while a '57 Cadillac with fins and a "four-body" trunk was a profligate and wastefully inefficient use of fossil fuel, a flying car is SO wasteful as to be completely insane. (There is also a human factor : most Americans I see cell-phone-chatting and Dorito-munching and honking and running into each other on the freeways find two-dimensional travel plenty challenging thank you very much...) We cannot and must not abstract the technological innovation necessary to invent our toys from the fuel needed to run them.

So, thinking ahead to future generations (as I find even a wriggling ultrasound salamander-fetus in my wife's womb forces me to do), what civilizational "velocity" can we expect? What rate of technological change will feel natural to my children? To my grandchildren?

There are a number of possible trajectories.

The simplest is we could imagine human technological progress as a parabolic arc -- the plot arc of a Greek tragedy. We achieve our greatest ease and comfort and speed and energy usage (we will continue to argue whether that happened in 2005 or the 2010's) and slowly, we lose steam. The coal-generated electrical lights dim and we fade back into a preindustrial past. World population and technology use decreases to a level sustainable by a "solar economy." (Remember, at the end of the day, the only 2 energy inputs we have as a planet are solar and nuclear).

A variation on this theme is a more sudden and calamitous crash. In financial terms, we're already starting to hear mutterings... Instead of a "V-shaped" revovery versus a "U-shaped" recovery, what if we're looking at an "L-shaped" non-recovery? An idea I just picked up from my dad: the tipping point between gradual decline (managed contraction) and cataclysm will have to do with social cohesion. A few years back, power to a large swathe of Eastern Canada was knocked out due to a giant ice storm. For the most part, communities pulled together. People were skiing or snowshoeing to their neighbours, making sure everyone was safe, warm, had food and water, that the elderly and the sick were OK. In the United States... not so much... The response in NYC after 9/11 was amazing and inspiring -- everyday heroics and simple kindness turned a major metropolis into a small town for a few weeks But then you have the counterexamples like Katrina where the social fabric broke down completely within days. In this country we have such a history of NOT caring about each other, and such a bat-shit crazy obsession with violence and firearms, that I basically feel most US citizens are a few hot meals away from looting, murder and mayhem of all kinds.

A third scenario, and the most hopeful one, involves the simulaneous growth and dematerialization of our economy. Simply put, we could trade less atoms and more bits. That's the geeky way of putting it. The woo-woo way of putting it is that "primitive" societies with limited material economies had rich economies in information: relationships, art, music, myth, ceremony, food!. We can have unlimited growth in human culture and science without digging or drilling ever more out of the Earth if we have technology which is focussed "inside" instead of "outside." Technology that allows us to communicate without travelling. Technology that allows us to improve our lives without destroying the lives of our human and non-human neighbours. This could work in a financial as well as technological sense. For example, Polynesians had the concept of "mana", a broad-reaching spiritual concept roughly translated as personal power and social status -- almost a spiritual currency. Mana could be won, lost or exchanged through various social transactions or acts of bravery, artistry, or generosity. The First Nations of the Pacific Northwest have a similar notion of social hierarchy, and one's social standing can be enhanced by potlatch, or competitive gift giving. I believe humans will always be motivated by rational self-interest, but it's easy to imagine myriad ways in which we could harness human greed and self-interest to a spiritual currency in which personal "mana" is earned by giving rather than taking. All very utopian stuff, and I'm not optimistic that "NASCAR nation" is going to have this ego-shattering, soul-opening epiphany the next five to ten years; which is unfortunately when it would need to happen.

Notice that one scenario I didn't mention is the "Dallas" ending. We wake up tomorrow and it was all a dream. The stock markets recover. Oil prices stay low. Obama fixes everything. Rainbows and puppy dogs. Hydrogen powered flying cars even? I don't think this will happen, even though I fervently want to allow myself to believe it will. I'm a geek; geeks trust numbers. We can achieve a lot of things as a civilization, but I don't think we can achieve more than 87 million barrels per day of petroleum production. The decline rates that the IEA have estimated for fields using modern technology are 6-9% per year. For fields using more traditional methods, it's 3-5% per year. Let's be extremely generous and assume that at some point in the next few years we plateau at 87mbpd, and start seeing annual declines of 3% (for comparison, the "demand destruction" that caused the fall in price from $147 to thirties is estimated at 3.5%) So in 200x (could be 2008, could be 2015) we're looking at:

87.00 mbpd
84.39 mbpd
81.86 mbpd
79.40 mbpd
77.02 mbpd
74.71 mbpd
72.47 mbpd
70.29 mbpd
68.19 mbpd
66.14 mbpd
...

Assuming even this very generous 3% rate of production decline, within 23 years we're at half or our current production. If the rate turns out to be 6 percent, that halving will happen in about 12 years. So while I can't predict the future, what I do know is that my children, and your children will know in their bones this inexorable "compound interest in reverse". There are a lot of people talking about running our current civilization on hydrogen, or ethanol, or biodiesel, or organic bat-spit. But you'll notice very few of them are engineers. While there is theoretically enough solar energy hitting the earth every day to power our entire civilization, there are a lot of theoretical and practical limits to doing so. I believe we are looking at a massive wind-down of our civilization -- whether orderly or not.

Honestly, I'm not sure how to wrap up this train of thought. Except that I want my kid(s) to know how to make things, how to do things, how to go places (without petroleum), how to get along with people. Understanding is great if and only if it helps them actually live in the real world. Otherwise it's just mental wanking.

Some things I've been pondering lately. Very concrete, down-to-earth stuff:

- Where does my food come from? My friend Carrie once asked me to identify some green stuff in our friend Dan's garden. I answered "salad". That doesn't bode well for my health and safety in a post-peak world... I need to learn about gardening, permaculture, gathering, fishing, etc.

- Where does my water come from? I recently learned that my island-suburb of Alameda has about 75,000 people and no natural fresh water sources. Of course there are a lot of flat roofs that could be fitted with catchment tanks for the rainy season, and from what I've heard, aquaducts are incredibly low in energy usage and pretty easy to maintain. Still.... A meme I just heard from Jay's blog: In hawaiian "wai" means water, and "waiwai" means wealth. (Reduplication is used to indicate "more".) I always joke with my family and friends in Eastern Canada that the Great Lakes are the "Saudi Arabia of fresh water." In contrast, most of So Cal would be a desert without irrigation, and parts of North Cal aren't too much better. Our multi-year "drought" may turn out to be the new normal. ("drought" is the ecological equivalent of the euphemistic and optimistic term "current financial crisis")

- What do I actually know how to do? I.e. with my hands, in the physical world. That's not to say that the liberal arts are dead in the post-peak world, just that literacy or math, or perl scripting, or accounting, or economics or theoretical knowledge of any kind will help me only insofar as it allows me to be more efficient, productive, graceful in procuring food and shelter. An perfect example for me of "practical theory" is celestial navigation: a science handed down from the ancients which requires skills in geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and geography. Some would even say the skill of locating yourself within the celestial spheres even has spiritual dimensions. Oh yeah, and it will get you home when the batteries die in your GPS. (Or when the GPS satellite fall out of orbit and no one has the money or rocket fuel to put 'em back up.)

- What do I actually own? Until this year I calculated my net worth by tallying a bunch of numbers on my brokerage statements. This year, I find I'm "taking stock" of my actual physical resources. I have a property that I rent out. I have a boat. I have a bunch of tools and even know how to use most of them. The thing I don't have is arable land. That's a conscious strategy; we've made the decision that rather than committing to a particular homestead location, having a boat allows us to go where we need to go. It's a calculated risk. Particularly in the US, having farmland close to a big population center could be economically advantageous in the next couple decades as "farmer's markets" become the way most people get food. On the other hand, you could end up overrun by urban hipster refugees ready to kill for a Venti latte. I'd prefer to keep my nomadic options open...

- Who are my friends? Who are my enemies? How do I feel about violence?
Y'all may have seen the riotting going on in Oakland lately. Without condemning or condoning looting (but while vehemently condemming shooting an unarmed kid in the back!!!) I have to acknowledge certain potentially unbridgeable rifts in my community and in this country. This nation was founded on treating people of certain races and classes as a waste by-product of agriculture and industry. (Van Jones and others are doing amazing work at trying to "close that loop" -- but quick enough?) Since they've been treated as disposable for generations, I can't rely on my neighbours to treat me any differently when push comes to shove. On the violence/self-defense front I have a longstanding fear of and abhorence for firearms. But like all this peak-oil crazy-talk, I think it's good to go into this new world consciously. Sarah and I had a conversation awhile ago about about guns, and both decided we didn't ever want to own one. But I felt better having talked about it -- it was a conscious decision rather than sleepwalking. Most people I know who own farms seem to have one around. For us, again, the boat seems like a good short term strategy; Oakland could be burning to the ground, and if we're anchored a few hundred yards off Treasure Island we'll miss the worst of it. Greg, an in-law in Canada (who's a sustainable-fund manager) has been predicting this meltdown for years and has a friend who describes "tank-and-a-half" strategy. Basically, if the average car holds 10 gallons and goes 20mpg, in the event of a complete urban shit-storm you need to be able to go at least 300 miles to get out of the epicenter of the craziness. So he keeps a couple of jerry cans of gas in the trunk. When I talked with friends last year about keeping extra food around the house, folks responded with jokes about Mad Max, and with suggestions that community gardening rather than six weeks of canned goods are the long term solution. True; but in order to execute the long term strategy, you need to make it through the short term happy and healthy. I believe that in the next twelve months we could see interuptions in gas supply at the pumps. (Long story and a topic for another post -- but Ukraine and the recent bankrupcy of a major refinery on the US West Coast give clues how oil expresses it's dual nature as a recently-deleveraged-investment-vehicle and a necessary-for-survival-fuel) If that happens, I don't think US cities will be a safe place to be. Just getting through the first few weeks could make a big difference.

My point in all this is that it's better to have the conversations, make the decision, get the experience, and tools, and training NOW. I believe it will be much harder to "wing it" five to ten years from now.

- Ari

Cockpit Ideas

2009-01-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned in previous posts, we've been thinking for a while of reconfiguring Macha's cockpit. Here's how the cockpit is layed out today:

Features we want to keep:
- small footwell to if swamped by following seas
- giant hatch for loading/unloading dinghy, outboard, cargo, etc.
- general simplicity and ruggedness

Features we want to change:
- better jib winch placement
- easier handling of mainsheet
- coaming boards to keep water out
- room for two (or more)

In deciding what we wanted to do, we looked at a LOT of other boats and pictures of other boats, specifically gaffers and double-enders. Actually, more important than the cockpit work itself, this is a practice I would heartily recommend to any boat owner. Macha's builder and previous owner Jay kept a physical scrapbook of ideas from other boats. It's a great practice; my last boat was a Catalina 30 -- a boat so common I could walk up and down my dock and see 15 examples of different ways to set things up. But with a less common boat, it's great to document clever, graceful, strong, simple, complicated, elegant design solutions to various parts of the boat.

Next time you're wandering around a strange marina, bring a camera or a sketchbook!

For example in thinking about a new mainsheet for Macha, one mainsheet layout we knew wouldn't work is the traditional traveller aft of the rudder posts:

Since Macha is double-ended, with a stern-hung rudder, this arrangement wouldn't work.

We considered something like these boats:

We liked the fact that this "upside-down-V" arrangement wouldn't require a traveller. Since we've found mainsail sheeting angles to be VERY non-critical on our gaffer, we didn't think we'd miss a traveller, and hey, simplicity is best when you can get away with it. On the downside, we could imagine the mainsheet getting caught up on ourselves and deck hardware when jibing.

We also thought about raising the traveller high enough to clear the tiller, like these boats:

Notice that these boats all have a transom rather than a pointy stern. Also, Macha's mighty tiller is bigger and higher than all these examples, so traveller high enough to clear it would have to be massively braced and might look ridiculous.

After all this looking at other boats, our final decision (surprise surprise) is an incremental rather than radical change. We're moving the traveller forward by about 12", the jib winches will go about 18" forward and out on the wooden coaming boards. The footwell will stay narrow and pretty shallow but will get extended about 24" forward. Hard to visualize based on that, but we think it's going to be funcitional and beautiful...

Macha's current traveller is a bronze 1-1/4" propeller shaft, with a bow shackle as a slider. The shackle usually binds on the windward side, then slamming to leeward when you least expect it. I'd like to find a nice bronze bullet block or slider. Something like this:
Problem is I can't find one anywhere that will fit a 1-1/4" traveller, but since the bronze rod is thicker than it needs to be, I'm going to look around for a 3/4" propeller shaft for the new traveller.

We're also getting new winches for staysail and jib sheets. Nothing I can say will logically justify these:
Except that the Pardey's swear by them and they're the prettiest hardware I've ever seen in my life!

We have plently of time to blog about this non-trivial undertaking, because we're not actually doing the work... We hired a guy named Steve Hutchinson who works out of Berkeley. He comes highly recommended, and we'd seen his carpentry and finish work on classic/wooden boats and were really impressed.

Seawolf

2009-01-04T19:05:00.000-08:00

We read about this family in Latitude 38:

http://svseawolf.blogspot.com/
http://www.latitude38.com/LectronicLat/2007/0407/Apr11/Apr11.html

We don't know them from Adam (but the guy's name is Adam.) Still, any family raising a toddler on an engineless wooden gaff-cutter in the Sea of Cortez seems like kindred spirits.

- Ari

Macha's Haulout

2008-12-14T21:22:00.000-08:00

We just hauled Macha out at Berkeley. Getting new bottom paint (while we're at it) and shuffling around cockpit layout. (Adding coaming boards, moving jib winches and traveller, maybe adding purchase to the mainsheet so Sarah can deal with the mainsail singlehanded while I'm pulling up the anchor, etc.)

We had a GREAT sail from Alameda to Berkeley. It was like the old saying, "an instant sensation years in the making." This time of year there is basically no predictable wind. So we watched the weather for days, fretted, planned, and when we left the dock brought enough food for an overnight.

We drove to the Berkeley Marina for a scouting mission, and were about to call the whole thing off. Their guys hadn't made room for our boat. There wasn't any room at the fuel or guest docks. The only guy working didn't want to go outside and shuffle powerboats in the pissing rain. Eventually we persuaded him to get to it, and he warped parked boats to make us a nice, big parking spot.

We had a great crew: our friend Bradley who is the most enthusiastic and useful guy you could hope to have on a boat. And our friends Craig and Evvy. They sail a "mostly engineless" Gemini 105 catamaran. The diesel died, and they use a 1.5 HP electric outboard hanging off the back to maneuver around their marina. More on that some other times; we've learned a ton sailing with them. In any case, many (competent) hands make light work.

In the end, it all worked out effortlessly and we got there in two hours. The mini-storm we'd been watching roll in gave us perfect SouthEast wind. For the first time in our lives, we broad reached UP the Estuary and into the bay. With the full moon, our dock experienced a nine foot tidal range the day before, so in addition to the favourable wind, we were being sucked into open water by an ebb that maxed at 2 knots. Damn. Once out into the bay, we were doing 6.8 knots over ground (hull-speed?) with jib, staysail, full main, and topsail in 10-15 knots of true wind.

Rather than short-tacking for hours, we made it to the Berkeley Pier on port tack the whole way. Once out there, it was SO tempting to go out and sail. But since it was 2pm in the afternoon, with sunset at 4:30pm and uncertain wind, we figured it was best to stay focussed on our goal of delivering the boat from point A to point B.

We jibed smartly and headed through the hole in the Berkeley sea wall. With so many crew, everyone had a job... Sarah steered. Bradley and I dropped the main while we coasted beam to the wind towards the guest dock. Once it was down, we moved to the rail to man the dock and spring lines. Evvy dropped the headsails for final bare-poles approach. Craig got on bow-line. Our approach was dead on in terms of speed and angle. We had a brief foul up with the midships spring line, but with so many big guys we were able to grunt Macha to a halt by grabbing her stays.

It was still cold and raining, so we fired up the diesel fireplace, drank ale and rum-spiked-tea and played poker while we warmed up and dried out. Suitably fortified, we ventured above deck to put away the sails and lines and retract the bowsprit.

The next morning, the boatyard guys pushed, warped, fended Macha through the crowded Marina. Like ballroom dancing with a 16 ton partner. Hehe. I asked them if it was a headache that Macha's engineless. "Ah no, we never use the customers inboards. This space is way too tight!" Lurking in that offhand comment is some profound wisdom: So engines are unecessary in open water, and unecessary (according to the pros) in confined marinas. So where are they necessary?

(Now, if the wind had died halfway I guess I'd be singing a different tune.)

All in all, short but sweet intro to winter sailing engineless style. Good crew and good weather planning (and weather luck) made it an amazing day...

Next steps: we gave notice at our old Marina, so when our cockpit work is done in January we'll be moving aboard at our new marina. I'm sure it will be a big adjustment, but the time seems right...

- Ari

Jay Fitzgerald and Macha on Furled Sails Podcast

2008-09-03T15:12:00.000-07:00

This is Macha's builder Jay Fitzgerald, founder of the infamous oar club. More on Jay and the oar club in a later post... From the furledsails.com web site:

FurledSails.com Podcast #141 We talk with Jay Fitzgerald who is a die hard engine less sailor who started the Oar Club for others who are interested in the same ideas. He is also the author of several books such as "Sailing with purpose: the Pursuit of the Dream and two others. See you on the water!

FurledSails.com Podcast #142 We talk with Jay Fitzgerald who is a die hard engine less sailor who started the Oar Club for others who are interested in the same ideas. This week Jay tells us all about the Oar Club and how you can join. See you on the water!

Honeymoon

2008-08-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

Another old, old story from August of 2008. Sarah and I got married on July 19th 2008 (apparently I am supposed to remember that day every year!) Sarah says I got some of the days in this recount wrong, but hey, we were on "cruising time."

After our wedding, we spent the next week in boat preparation, provisioning, and general scurrying. The boat was pretty much ready to go, but we gave her a wee nip and tuck. Some cleaning, some rig tuning, a few tweaks to gear or lines.

Although we knew we'd never be far from grocery stores during our trip, we decided to practice provisioning for a longer trip. We imagined we were provisioning for an open ocean voyage instead of a bay circuit, and brought only foods and beverages that would keep without refrigeration. Sarah was reading "Care and Feeding of a Sailing Crew" by Lin Pardey, and got REALLY into provisioning, stowing, cooking. So much so that I started to call her Lin Junior... Sarah packed fruits and veggies in special green plastic bags.

We bought a cornucopia of dried, canned, and pickled treats. The checkout people at Safeway and Trader Joe's gave us weird looks as we brought shopping carts stuffed to the gills up to the front of the store. "Where are you going?!?!?!" We did go a little crazy (most of the durable food is still on the boat) but three weeks later when we were eating delicious treats after a day of hard sailing, I knew the old adage about an army marching on its stomach was really true.

We got more and more excited to leave as our departure got closer. We had looked at the tides and figured out that Tuesday July 29th gave us the best chance of catching the ebb out of the Oakland Estuary early enough in the day to get to get somewhere, but late enough in the day to have wind.

Our friend and long-time boat neighbour Darrin came over Monday night with some cold beers and the best cookies we've ever tasted. Darrin is not a man who believes in moderation in many areas of his life, and this proved true for his baking as well. He brought us giant, succulent cookies stuffed with oatmeal, dried fruits, chocolate chunks. Each cookie was nearly meal-sized, and for the first few days we'd just munch one for breakfast or lunch.

Tuesday morning, Darrin also helped us warp our boat slowly around so her nose pointed out in the Estuary. We've found the best way to do this is to run an extra-long stern line around the whole outside of the boat: from the stern, outside the shrouds, around the stays on the bowsprint, back to the dock. We then run a bow line to the dock to act as a pivot. With a slack tide (or a wee touch of flood) we found it pretty each to flip the boat end-for-end. Darrin sweated the stern line, Sarah kept tension on the bow line, and I used the bowsprit as a lever (a maneuver that somehow always reminds me of leading a bull by the ring in it's nose...) With the boat pointing out towards Jack London Square, we found the wind angle allowed us to raise and luff all working sails (mainsail, staysail, jib) before departing. Darrin and our boat neighbour Kim gave us a good bobsled shove-off, and there was nothing but for us to trim our sheets and glide off the dock.

In many way, our first day of sailing was our hardest and scariest. The Oakland waterfront is very much a working waterfront, and we share the Estuary with craft as small as kayaks and as large as Panamax container ships. With everything in between -- a constant parade of powerboats, tugboats, racing and cruising sailboats, pilot boats, coast guard cutters, giant tour boats, ferries.

Our departure was timed great with respect to the current, the ebb was just starting to pull us toward the open Bay, and it would only strengthen throughout the afternoon. The wind was another matter. When we left the dock, we had a light breeze, but certainly enough to move the boat. Maybe 7 to 8 knots? We soon got into the rhythm of short tacking: zig a hundred yards from the Alameda side to nearly the concrete sea-wall on the Oakland side... ready about... zag back to the rock breakwater off the deserted naval base on the Alameda side. Zig... zag... zig... zag... Sarah likes to count tacks and estimate how many more it will take to reach some goal. I find it just demoralizing to do so... With the light wind we weren't setting any speed records but our course made good to windward was pretty darn tight with the ebb helping us. We settled into the slow, steady routine, slowly making our way up the few miles to the Bay.

The wind lessened, and we were continually dodging commercial and recreational traffic. Powerboaters doing their well-meaning but misguided drive-bys (they always come extra close to take a look at Macha, yell "beautiful boat!", then speed off directly in front of us, leaving us to slat sails as their wake checks all our way. We maneuvered around tugboats , and looming on the horizon we saw giant container ships the size of tipped-over skyscrapers puffing black smoke on their way towards the cranes we were passing.

Still, we felt OK. We were making slow but steady progress and had plenty of room to maneuver. Until we got to nearly the mouth of the Estuary. That exact spot is nearly always in the lee of Treasure Island, so less windy than the Bay in general. But as it was now mid-afternoon we would have expected the thermals to kick in like clockwork and give us plenty of juice as we left the Estuary. In fact, we have a "no topsails in the Estuary" rule exactly because we've been surprised by the sudden wind-blast at the mouth of the Estuary too many times (and short tacking across a narrow channel there's really no time to hand the topsail on a single tack...) Not that day. There was the beginning of a heat wave that ended up lasting a few days. Some kind of thermal inversion had destroyed our trusty San Francisco-to-Sacramento pressure gradient and turned us North Cal sailors into de facto South Cal sailors. Bobbing around in short sleeves instead of jamming rail down bundled in Gore Tex...

The wind continued to die as we continued to short tack out of the Estuary. We could see a windline agonizingly close... it seemed just a few hundred hards away... speed and maneuverabilty and freedom... so close... At this point we were starting to lose the ebb and we started feeling the first stirrings of a flood pushing us back into the Estuary. I was hugging the starboard side of the Estuary to avoid the latest container ship (we squeaked around four that day!)

Despite Sarah's warning, I got too close to a windshadow and we lost so much speed that we missed stays trying to tack back. Shit. The current started setting us outside the Channel to starboard, where there was nothing but evil ruins of pilings, sharp pointy rocks, a dredging barge. On the port side of the channel a container ship larger than some towns I've lived in inched towards us accompanied by a pilot boat. I broke out the mighty oar and began sculling us away from the rocks with all my strength. I asked Sarah to be ready to cut the stern anchor at any minute if we needed it to keep us off the rocks.

(all Estuary pics shamelessly lifted from Google images. We were too busy FREAKING THE HELL OUT to snap pics.)

A short digression on engineless sailing here... The crazy thing we've found about sailing without an auxilary is that there is simply no "routine trip". You're always sailing like the safety of your boat and crew depend on it. You're always racing the tide. I compare it to rock climbing without a top rope. The routes you climb aren't any harder. In fact, they might be easier -- but the consequences of any screw up are more severe. (I mean not to be overly dramatic -- we never felt in any personal danger: it would have been an easy swim to shore, but I was really worried about the safety of the boat!) The situation felt ridiculous. Here we were, 3 miles from our berth, in conditions that any motorsailor would regard as benign in the extreme (sunny, no wind) and we were fighting with every fiber of our beings to keep our boat off the rocks.

Gradually, we crept our way back towards the middle of the channel. We were getting uncomfortably close to the container ship, but there was nothing for it. We were between a rock (breakwater) and a two hundred foot long container ship.

However often I may rant about recreational powerboaters, I have nothing but the highest praise for the professional crew of the pilot boat that day. They saw the situation clearly: a "charming" gaff cutter, clearly without power, sculling their way across the estuary. They pulled within hailing distance and courteously asked if we would mind sailing downwind for a minute or two and hugging the other side of the channel while they passed. I mean, what were we going to say, "no"? Still, we found it classy in the extreme that the crew treated us politely and with respect. We didn't have enough way on to tack, but with the help of the oar we jibed and slowly picked up steerage way again. We ghosted along the extreme edge of the channel, dead downwind, giving up our precious distance to windward while the container ship churned past. At that point, we were completely demoralized. The thought of having to retreat to our side-tie on our first day filled us with disappointment. How tempting it would have been right then to fire up a diesel, to power directly the few hundred hards to the windline!!! What were we thinking?!?!?! Screw this boat, screw Jay Fitzgerald and his books, screw the Pardeys, screw the sculling oar. Give me a goddamned 50 horse Yanmar right fucking now!!!!!

This was indubitably the emotional low of the trip for me. I was tired and my adrenaline was surging from the close encounter with the cargo ship and the rocks. It all felt so impossible, and yet so trivial. So much anticipation leading up to this trip, and we'd screwed up already in water we knew intimately. Plus, it wasn't like we were rounding Cape Horn. There wouldn't be anyone to trumpet our success if we simply made it from a our slip into the bloody bay. A Hunter, a goddamned Hunter circled, motorsailing double-reefed in the 2 knot wind and asked if we were OK. That is rock botton -- how much lower can you get?

Pretty quick I pulled myself together. First off, we needed to break our "no topsail in the Estuary" rule right quick. Sure, it's tight to put it up between tacks when trying to get upwind, but ghosting downwind we had plenty of time. That was better -- we still weren't getting anywhere fast but we pointed back upwind and at least Macha answered her helm. Next were about to put up the Yankee, but as we often found to be the case later, the mere threat of that giant, light-air upwind sail on deck seemed to scare the wind into piping up a bit. We ghosted up to the windline, and within 10 minutes we had to take the topsail down as it was howling. Whitecaps and spray Welcome to the SF Bay!

We sailed into Clipper Cove, a protected anchorage nestled between Treasure Island and Yerba Buena. After a full day of sailing we dropped the hook six, count 'em SIX nautical miles from our slip... and we were never so glad to get anywhere. That night we slept like the dead.

Big lesson for us (once again) is that no wind is way more terrifying than nuking wind for the engineless sailor. Actually, to be more precise: no wind, narrow channel, big traffic. Give me any two and I'm cool. Give me all three and it's pants crappin' time.

Clipper Cove contains an interesting menagerie of derelict boats and anarchist liveaboards. Apparently, the spot is subject to two conflicting outposts of authority nearby, so that it is as lawless as the frontier. There is a city Marina on one side of the anchorage and a Coast Guard station on the other side. Apparently the City and the Coast Guard have been fighting for years about whose job it is to kick out the liveaboards. Meanwhile the liveaboards live their lives -- a tenuous existence, but relatively undisturbed so far. I feel there's a lesson in there somewhere for dealing with people in power...

In the morning, our boat was surrounded by a swarm of kids in Optimist sailing dinghys. Some kind of summer camp program. It was impossible not to feel cheered by the site of so many rowdy, smiling youngsters learning to sail.

We took the Zodiac to the beach. We rested. We read. We talked. We went back to the boat, cooked dinner, drank wine, and slowly felt the stress of the previous day leaving our bodies. Speaking of our bodies, Jay has mentioned how he has some problems with early onset arthritis. After a couple days we started wondering if the problem might be compounded by 16-ton-gaff-cutteritis, because damn did our bodies hurt the first few days. I can haul the halyards OK, but Sarah sometimes can't, and when the wind pipes up I need the handy-billy to firm up the peak or headsail halyards. At night over warm beers and sore muscles we began plotting and scheming about 6 to 1 purchases on the mainsail halyards. From looking at a couple books it doesn't look impossible. I can get into the macho allure of sweating lines, but double ended halyards with jiggers for purchase might be a worthwhile concession to marital harmony. We'll see.

The next morning we sailed out of Clipper Cove, and made a bee-line across "the Slot", around Angel Island, to Paradise Cove, tucked around the corner from Tiburon. A familiar spot -- we've anchored there perhaps more than anywhere. Our first night we anchored a little too far in for my comfort. We had the spot closest to shore. We were alone at first but were soon joined by revelers on other boats, boxing We've since found when sailing engineless, that it doesn't pay to be "greedy" when selecting an anchor spot. When approaching an anchorage to windward it always feels to me like I want to tuck right in close to land, but when leaving I'd rather be the further boat out. We carry lots of chain, so we've found it's worth the extra few feet of depth to be further out from the crowd.

Paradise Cove is aptly named. When the rest of the Bay was shrouded in fog, we were in blazing sunlight, in the lee of the Marin Headlands. The anchorage is off a nice little beach park where we were able to swim and hang out. It's central location meant that we spent more time there than just about anywhere else -- it was our home-away-from-home as we ventured out for other forays.

We decided to press on into the North Bay, but the wind had not filled in enough by the time we started to lose the favourable tide. Then the wind died. Sarah was against trying to go that day from the beginning, but I was restless and still hadn't quiet adopted the engineless sailors mindset that if the wind and tide are against you, you simply CAN NOT GO in the direction you intend. So we spent a frustrating day in lightish wind. We got better at setting and trimming the Yankee, and got tantalizingly close to the Richmond Bridge only to be driven back as the ebb gained strenght. Once again I was cursing and wishing for an "iron genoa." We backtracked to Paradise Cove, and while standing in towards our anchorage we got caught by strong gusts coming over the hills and swept backwards by the tidal current. While I was grappling down the Yankee, Sarah was on the helm. She was getting increasingly concerned that we were getting set backwards towards a point of land sticking out into the strong ebb. At one point it seemed like we were only a few boat lengths from it. I felt that the current would have had to carry us around rather than through the land, but it still felt like a precarious spot. I ran back to the cockpit and we sailed upwind, pointing for all we were worth. When we had gained a little on the current, we bore off a bit, taking the current at an angle and breaking free of the rip. As we approached the anchorage we'd left that morning, we decided to pretend we'd just gone out daysailing for Yankee practice. No one would be any the wiser that we'd been intending to get anywhere that day.

That night, a fisherman in an olive drab boat, dressed entirely in camouflage, approached our boat. At first we though he was some kind of ranger and that we were going to get an earful about some Park infraction real or imagined... But it turned out the infraction was all his. He'd caught one halibut over his limit, but the hook had gone so far down the fish's through that he'd had to kill it. Would we like it? I was at a loss. I mean, I love to eat animal flesh, but being a city boy I have no experience extricated that flesh from the animal itself. Sarah the vegetarian, armed with a fillet knife, scissors, and a Joy of Cooking (the older printing that still has instructions on how to skin squirrels) dove into the fish and hacked out pale white boneless chunks of flesh.

She fried them up in flour, spices, and Kraft parmesan (we found that "shakey cheese" as Sarah's family calls it was one of the beloved staples of our voyage -- what meal DOESN'T taste better with powdered cheese on it?)

The fish was no joke the best I've ever tasted. Beautiful, white, flakey, buttery, nuggets of halibut. Wow. I gotta learn to fish!

The next night, our friend Bradley came out with a couple of his sailing buddies to meet us in his chartered hot-rod Ultimate 24. It was wild because Wednesday night sails with Bradley are so much part of our usual routine, but being on the hook on Macha, we felt very much OUT of our normal workaday routine. We cruised around in the Ultimate. Such a different feel from Macha: lively to the point of twitchy. Responsive to ever breath of wind. We sailed over to Sam's Anchor Cafe, one of our favorite "sail up" restaurants in the Bay. Just around the corner in Tiburon. We took the opportunity to devour cold drinks and restaurant food. While Sam's is a pretty casual place, it all felt very "fancy" to be on land eating entrees with side dishes and garnishes on the plate and beers from a frosted pint glass.

Having "killed" a few days, the flood into the North Bay was now late enough that we could catch it while having reasonable expectation of afternoon thermals. In contrast to our futile attempts to "buck the tide", we now surged under the Richmond Bridge carried the flood. Past the East Brothers Island Lighthouse where are friends Katy and Elon are keepers (though we passed too far to wave).

We rounded the corner past the Sister Islands, near San Rafael. Having once made the mistake of anchoring too close, we now made the mistake of anchoring too far -- surrounded by anchored gravel barges, we were still out in twenty knot winds and strong current. Still, it gave us a chance to eat a snack and examine the chart more closely. We picked depth contours that looked friendly, fixed our position by triangulating bearings, then raised sail again and nudged our way closer towards the fishing pier at McNears beach. McNears and China Camp (separated by maybe a half-mile) were great. McNears had a free hot shower, a snack bar (where we tore into a couple of ice cream bars like they were the last food on Earth) and a swimming pool. China Camp has some great views and hiking trails, but the main attraction is a museum on the site of an old shrimping operation run by an old time Chinese family. There were buildings frozen in time (a 50's style diner that still sold shrimp sandwiches, a drying shack from far earlier) and a number of historic boats in various states of preservation. Some cool old Monterey-style fishing boats, an 1850's-style junkrigged saipan built by the wooden boat center in Sausalito.

From McNears, we debated proceeding to Benicia. We'd motorsailed there in our last boat, and liked walked around the town, checking out the gold-rush-era Victorian architecture. Eventually we decided the pain of threading the narrow, infrequently dredged channel to the City marina guest dock wasn't worth it. And the anchorages our charts and guidebooks described seemed tenuous in the high winds and strong currents we knew to expect there. Screw it. We decided our next stop would be Aquatic Park in San Francisco, a historic pier now part of the National Park system. Motoring inside the park is forbidden because of the many members of the "Dolphin Club" swimming in the frigid waters, so we felt right at home approaching under sail.

A short digression on engineless de-anchoring: damn near every sailing book you'll ever pick up (if it has a section on sailing out an anchor at all) will show a tidy little diagram of tacking up to the anchor. A series of clean, geometrical zig zags gradually decreasing in amplitude as you near the anchor. Bullshit. What this "textbook" description fails to take into account is current. At McNears, the holding was good, but the currents were fierce. Many times we were beam or even stern to the wind as our full keel caught in the ebb. Since we de-anchored on the ebb (to catch a ride back to the central Bay) the current was pulling us upwind. Therefore we had to sail out the anchor downwind. Rather than zig-zags, we described slow, concentric spirals as we jibed down on the anchor. I suspect this is old news to all of you, but just another example of how you will NEVER learn this stuff from books alone.

After a roaring sail back across the Slot, we approached the long, curving breakwater around the small circular anchorage on a strong flood.

(image lifted from some San Francisco tourist web site)

We blazed in under mainsail and both headsails as we needed all our speed to counteract the current at the mouth of the Park. Camera wielding tourists walking on the breakwater shouted and waved as we hugged the upwind side, seeming to pass within inches of them. We dropped the hook in three fathoms depth, but weren't thrilled about our position. We soon realized what had appeared to be a solid breakwater was in fact a pier made up of concrete pilings, and that the flood was raging through the whole anchorage and we felt we might swing into a small cat-rigged gaffer owned by the local Sea Scouts. We'd learned early on that an awkward anchorage with the hook firmly set can be better than circling under sail trying to find the perfect spot -- at least you have time to collect your thoughts and plot the next move. We decided we should move into shallower water upwind of the Sea Scout boats and debated briefly whether to kedge with the extra bower. In the end, we decided it was just as easy to wait for slack water, raise sail to move closer in and re-anchor.

The next day we toured the restored ships. The highlight was a steel-hulled 3-masted tall ship called the Baclutha. We got to talking with a young rigger who was rattling down some shrouds on deck. Apparently seeing Macha cranking into the park the night before under full working sail was approximately like porn for the traditional-boat-nerd staff of the museum ship, and we got drawn into a lively discussion of the minutiae of Macha's rigging and sailplan. They were shocked when they eventually realized she was a fiberglass boat. I guess they assumed from across the anchorage that she was built in the 1890's or something. Hehe...

(another pic from the San Francisco Ministry of Tourism or some such)

That night, Sarah was having problems with the kerosene stove. The small leather cup-washer for the pressure pump had worn and ripped though. Our friend Josh met us for lunch and guided us to an "old-fashioned" hardware store in his neighborhood. A quick search of the plumbing department yielded a variety of leather washers and we were even able to match the outer diameter of the part we'd brought. However, when we got back to the boat, we realized the disc-shaped washer was too thick to be bent to the proper spare. Sarah got out an exacto knife, splitting and shaving with the grain of the leather to slice the washer in half to make it thinner. Have I mentioned my girl's a keeper? After permeating the washer with grease, it was malleable enough to form into a cup shape. We had 11 PSI in no time, and warm dinner soon after that.

That night, I rowed the dinghy (remember, no motors in the park) to shore to pick up our friend Bradley for a trip out the gate. By the light of the oil lamps we pored over our charts of the gulf of farallones and our Coastal Pilot #7. Fueled by rose wine (a long story -- an unfortunate wine-ordering miscommunication during booze ordering for our wedding had resulted in multiple leftover cases of pink wine which tasted like melted strawberry freezie) we plotted our plan for the next day. Bradley had three days off work, and we figured a day up to Drake's Bay, a day on the hook, and a day back sounded about right. The tides for the next day looked perfect: a weak max ebb around noon (a knot or less -- enough to give us a pull out the gate but not enough to make the waves gnarly in the "potato patch"). The forecast for the next day looked perfect too: 5-15 knots in the morning, picking up to 10-20 knots in the afternoon. Given the prevailing northwesterlies, and wanting to avoid the rough waters of the four-fathom "potato patch" just outside the Gate, we decided to hug the deep water shipping channel -- staying just to the North of the channel markers to avoid traffic, and sailing West or Southwest until we were nearly out to the Farallone Islands. We'd then tack and head Northeast to tuck inside the hook-shaped Point Reyes. Because Bradley needed to get back to work, and our strong desire NOT to float aimlessly near the shipping lanes at night, we decided that if we weren't at least 15 miles from the gate by 3pm, we'd turn and ride the flood back in.

Well, damn, the best laid plans of mice and men... The day started auspiciously enough. We left our anchorage at around 10am. The wind through the gate had already filled in nicely. As we tacked up to the bridge between cityfront and Sausalito, we took extra time to use our handy-billy to get the last inches out of all our halyards. No scallops in the headsails today kids, and let's peak up tight... like dressing up special for the prom or something, we wanted our trim to be perfect for our momentous trip out the gate. At 11:11 sharp we were at the center span.

The sun now filtered through cotton-ball fog banks as we tacked between Point Bonita and Ocean Beach. The short, stacked chop of the bay yielded to long rolling six foot groundswell. The color and even the smell of the ocean changed. We saw porpoises, seals, and birds. We heard the polyphonic bellow of the fog horns on the Golden Gate and the points.

Everything was perfect, but the further outside the Gate we got, the lighter the wind got. We put up the topsail and soldiered on. Then we raised the Yankee and attempted to keep it filled. Eventually, we missed stays as we tried to tack and had to wear ship instead. It got later and later. The wind died and the sails slatted as we rolled ponderously over the six foot swell with no steerage. The GPS showed that we were making just under a knot over ground, and by looking at the bubble trail alongside our rail we figured more than half of that knot was tidal current. The less way we carried, the greener I got as we rocked uselessly in the swell. Eventually I retched my guts out over the side, and as the afternoon wore on, we decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The night before, we'd decided on what we computer geeks call a go / no-go decision point and a back-out plan. Another way of saying it might be as scuba diving friends have said: plan the dive; dive the plan. By coming to decision the night before on a plan of action based on objective inputs and rational thoughts we'd sought to avoid an argument in the heat of the moment based on how each of us was feeling. We paid out sheet, gradually bearing off back towards the Gate. While I think each of us was disappointed to return to the Bay rather than proceeding, I think we felt a shared commitment to act on our prior decision rather than trying to improvise a new plan. I think in future, we'd consider a two day trip up to Drakes Bay more reasonable and would plan accordingly. I think in retrospect there's more we could have done to keep the boat moving -- perhaps setting the drifter while under the thumb of the Westerlies to get out South (and hopefully a little West) far enough from shore to pick up the Northwesterlies outside. We all agreed it was a preliminary forray and we'd all be back... Bottom line is next frontier for Macha and Sarah and I is to explore the extreme edges of light wind sailing!

The flood gathered strength and before long the foghorn blowing from the center span was guiding us back into our home waters. Once inside, the fog parted, and ironically, we were fully wound in our normal 20 knot thermals, jamming down Racoon Straight between Angel Island and Tiburon.

We had the hammer down, broadreaching at a solid seven knots, slalom sailing through the crowds of Sunday sailors. As we did, we had occasion to notice a bizaare phenomenon. Swarms of Hunters and Catalinas and Beneteaus with their mainsails reefed or even double reefed and motorsailing in the 10 to 15 knot wind. What the hell? Was there some wind around the corner we weren't seeing? We got closer to one boat and figured out a partial explanation. Two guys were standing near the wheel, and two attractive young women were perched on the stern rail, wearing short shorts, cowboy hats, and shirts knotted at the midrift. Clearly the lads didn't want the apparent wind to build to a level sufficient to chill bare female flesh. Ever since, Sarah has derisively referred to unecessarily-reefed-in-moderate-wind-with-female-passengers style as "Daisy Duke sailing". For my part, I'll just say for the record give me a girl in Gore Tex any day...

On the way through the straits, we saw that the moorage at Ayala Cove was nearly empty. A perfect opportunity to moor in what we normally consider a crowded, janky mooring field. It's actually so bad it's somewhat of a local scandal. Some local governmental organization took over administration of the mooring balls, and managed to replace the existing aging but effective mooring balls with moorings that dragged, anchored by floating line (lot of pissed boaters with fouled props), and laid out without regard to prevailing wind or current. We picked up our bow mooring, then deployed the Zodiac and some sheet-bended dock lines to pick up the stern mooring.

The mooring balls were pretty goofy: too close together, with our full keel in the current we dragged bow and stern balls right close to us, then hung off to the side at a bizaare angle.

Whatever. We foisted off some more rose on Bradley, prepared a giant dinner, and settled down for a night of quiet celebration. The next day, we arranged a ride for Bradley, took the Zodiac across Raccon Straits to Tiburon, and went out for lunch and drinks.

The next day we took a beautiful hike up to the top of the mountain on Angel Island.

Later that day after we'd hiked back down, we saw Graham, one of our sailing class teachers drilling students on picking up moorings. Good guy. Brit, older gent, physics teacher with vaguely socialist leanings and a long-time engineless sailor. When he saw us on deck, he complimented us on Macha. "I was just saying, it looks like that boat's crew knows what they're doing...", he said. Felt damned good.

The next morning, we used our bow and stern mooring situation to best advantage. We snugged in the bow mooring line and slacked off the stern line. As we did so, we swung head to wind and raised the mainsail. We then pulled in stern line and slacked off the bow line. When the sail was filled, we slipped the stern line and took off directly on a broad reach. It's so good when a plan works...

Thus began the best sailing day of the trip. We passed four bridges that day. We tacked up Raccoon Straits, across the Slot to cityfront, then South, under the bay Bridge. The wind was gorgeous, solid low twenties. As we passed further South, closer to the airport, the wind was shadowed by the hills a bit so we raised the Yankee. As we gathered way Southwards towards Coyote Point and Third Avenue, we felt to full blast of the afternoon thermal winds as we broad reached past the low gaps in the hills. Sarah wanted to take the Yankee down, as we were now seeing wind in the mid twenties. "Let's wait a sec. We're going downwind, the apparent wind shouldn't be too crazy, and the yankee's mostly blanketed by the main..." For the next few hours we caught the four foot chop in the channel, sailing on a deep broad reach at a sustained 7.5 knots. Sweet. Macha is too big to surf, but she'd surge a bit with each passing wave, and accelerate a wee bit into the trough. We were flying! The sun sank, and the moon was rising, three days 'til full). We slalomed through the San Mateo Bridge, then the Dumbarton Bridge, finally the unamed railway bridge just South of the Dumbarton. As night fell, we anchored in two fathoms just South of the last channel marker before the SF Bay turns into an overgrown mud puddle.

We awoke to find NO ONE around, except for a pelican who had taken up residence in our dinghy.

We prepared to catch the ebb around lunch. Our first obstacle was the railway bridge.

Going through it lengthwise downwind, the hundred foot gap for boat traffic had seemed pretty big. But now the wind was blowing straight down through it. Damn. I've normally found winds here to be West or Northwest, but this was straight North. Arggh. We took a series of practice tacks to see if we could find a course that would take us through the bridge on a single tack. No dice. Eventually, we realized we'd have to tack halfway through the bridge. Gulp. With sweaty palms and my heart in my throat, I steered closehauled into the gap in the bridge. Half a boatlength from a nasty, rusted girder structure that I was sure would seal our doom, we tacked smartly. The ebb sucked us away from the tower on the other side, and a few tacks later we were far enough from the bridge to exhale. Felt so relieved and so proud.

Less than a mile away we faced the next bridge. I was on the helm, and screwed up tacking the jib sheets. We barely made just stays, and consequently made it through with much less grace than the last bridge. We got closer to that bridge than I ever want to get to any hard object, but we made it through.

That experience led us to ponder whether the jib winches are really where we want 'em. When short-tacking in higher winds it's often hard to reach down and across on a heeled boat and make 'em off. Well, we want to add coaming boards anyways, maybe we can do add some cockpit layout tweaking to that project.

Once again, we relaxed a bit, and settled into the routing of tacking, slogging slowly up the mile-wide channel.

We navigated by braille using the depth sounder: the channel shelfs off REALLY suddenly. We'd be in 40 feet, with the depth alarm set to 20 feet. When the alarm when off, we'd start tacking immediately. Often by the time the boat turned we'd have coasted into 10 feet.

We were now pounding into the same chop we'd been effortlessly riding the day before. We forgot to stuff rags in the hawse pipe, so some bedding and clothes down below got wet via the chain locker. Whoops. A wet and woolly ride, but still a great sail. Macha was rail down wearing only working sail, shouldering through the chop like a football player attacking the opposing line. The past few days, the foredeck had been caked with mud and grunge from our anchor chain. Well, the foredeck was washed clean now! As we sailed North closehauled in 25 knots, we observed a completely circular rainbow in a cloud in front the setting sun. Beautiful.

Our plan was to anchor back at Treasure Island and proceed down the Estuary the next day. But as the evening sky grew orange, then purple, we lost our thermals. We set topsail, then Yankee to keep the boat moving. We decided to stop at the anchorage by the ballpark. From the shipping channel, the chart showed the anchorage shelfing off quickly to a depth of 5 feet at mean low tide, and we knew we'd have a minus tide in the morning. Candlestick Park is usually used as a temporary anchorage by powerboating baseball fans who draft up, watch TV, and kayak out to catch the home run balls that land in the Bay. Still, it looked like a good spot to rest for the night. The wind continued to abate as we made three knots through the water and two over ground against the flood.

I must confess I've got shitty night vision, and apparently I need new glasses to boot. Around midnight, I could see shapes and colours and vague outlines of the cityscape, but not much else. We slalomed through anchored cargo ships lit up like Times Square at Christmas. I sailed the boat while Sarah did the chart work and made the best damn snack I've ever had: oven baked sweet potatoes with hot sauce, maple syrup, and lots o' butter. After a cold and windy day and night of sailing if was food to warm you to the center of your soul. Hehe. Sarah navigated like a champ and guided us to a perfect spot out of traffic but not too close in. We cranked the diesel fireplace and set our alarm for anchor watches. The spot we'd anchored should leave us about 12 inches under the keel the next morning, but we figured when we swung with the current there was a good chance of taking the ground for a few hours. But all was well and we never saw less than six and a half feet.

The next day, refreshed, we broad reached fully powered with topsail set towards the mouth of the Estuary. We were inside in a jiffy and as the wind faded we began our slow dance with the parade of commercial and recreational traffic. We could have set more sail, but as the trip drew to a close perhaps subconsciously we wanted to make the honeymoon last. The last hours of sailing were a stately procession down the estuary. We docked slowly and without incident. Somehow in all our previous trips we've had to dock during max flood. With a slight ebb running, it was a simple matter to sail downwind past our dock, then tack and close reach back, luffing the boat early and stepping off as the current sucked the boat the last few inches up against the dock. We drank lukewarm champaigne, put the boat away a bit (but decided the big post-trip cleanup could wait.) Our buddy Darrin came over and we feasted on pickled vegetabless, jerky, and beer.

The trip left both of us with a strong sense that we want to "head out the gate and turn left" soon. It was amazing how our normal workaday worries and responsibilities faded once we threw off the docklines. It was also striking to me how much easier the "engineless thing" is when anchoring out versus marina sailing. Really made the whole engineless cruising endeavour seem not only possible but not even that inconvenient. :-)

If this is married life, so far I like it!!!

- Sarah

- Ari

Sailing with Brad & Marnie

2008-06-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

(Another ancient story. This one from June of '08. Still getting caught up... )

My life shifted and changed this weekend. I took a short sailing trip with Sarah and two friends. It was a short trip: overnight to spots we’ve visited before on other boats or by car. But this time, subtly, my mindset had changed. For the past year I’ve been taking sailing classes, reading sailing manuals, talking to other sailors. I’ve been surfing, windsurfing. I’ve sailed tiny boats designed to plane in the slightest puff of wind. I’ve sailed expensive race boats tricked out with carbon fiber and all the latest electronic gadgets. I’ve communed with the creaking anachronistic wood, bronze and leather fittings of our own boat.

I’ve felt drawn to the ocean for a long time. At first this took the form of separation. I windsurfed alone. I still feel that windsurfing is the purest form of sailing. A windsurfer is a craft with a single moving part that can be bought off the shelves for a few thousand dollars. Yet windsurfers hold the world speed sailing record against boats costing millions of dollars. Windsurfing for all its purity is a wordless, solitary pursuit. There are people I recognize from rigging our gear on the same beaches for years and to whom I’ve spoken ten words in my life. I first got into sailboats because I wanted to share the high I felt while windsurfing with others. A shared love of sailing is what brought me together with the woman who will be my wife. But ironically, as I’ve become more passionately obsessed with learning to sail our engineless gaff cutter, my sense of separation has intensified. Other sailors kept telling me we were crazy to sail without an engine. I felt crazy too, unsure of myself -- almost guilty for harboring some perverse desire for purity at the expense of convenience. Even long time sailing friends were surprised at my choice. When I owned my last boat, which had an inboard diesel, I was always impatient. I would be the first one on the boat to suggest firing up the engine when the wind died.

As I became more and more passionate about sailing engineless, I began taking sailing classes in earnest, working my way through the US Sailing series of classes. During the first set of classes, my instructor casually asked what my sailing plans were, I replied, “We want to go cruising in two years.” He then asked what kind of boat we own. “Macha is an Ingrid 38 rigged as a topsail gaff cutter.” I was shy at the time to admit she was engineless. I was afraid of his reaction. It was only the next day when we were practicing docking under power that he asked whether my propeller pulled to the left or right when backing up. Damn! My cover was blown. I couldn’t outright lie. “Umm. We don’t have… any… propeller… umm… engineless…” I managed to stammer. He stared at me for a moment in stunned silence. When he asked how much she weighed, I replied “34,000 lbs.” “Well”, he said, “you’ve got more balls than I do.” For a few heartbeats I felt honestly scared without rationally knowing why. I mean, what is the worst that this guy could say or do? Then he laughed a deep hearty laugh and the tension lifted. For the next two weekends and during subsequent classes, something had changed between us. He was still the master of his craft and I was still his student. Literally learning the ropes. But he seemed to regard Sarah and I with newfound respect. During our lessons, he would kindly point out how the maneuvers we were learning would work differently on a heavier boat. He had thousands of miles of blue water sailing beneath his keel, but humbly acknowledge he had little to no experience with gaff rigs, so asked for advice from another of his colleagues on my behalf. At lunch breaks or over beers after class, he would remark to other instructors “You’ll never guess what kind of boat these two sail!” And I’d be forced to tell my story again, and again. At first I was still tentative; I’d say something like, “Well, our boat is engineless now but we’re seeing how it goes. If we find we need an engine, we’ll get one.” But to my surprise, the higher the skill level of the sailors I talked to, the more likely they were to be completely nonplussed about our boat choice. They all reiterated that an engine should be a convenience device not a safety precaution for a competent sailor. After watching me sail for a few weeks, my teacher, said, “You’re a natural sailor. You two will do fine. You’ll love sailing down to Mexico” After watching Sarah glide to a perfect stop in front of a practice mooring he turned to me simply saying “You’re a lucky man.” He would continue to tease me about sailing a heavy boat, but continually reinforced that not having an engine was a perfectly seamanlike choice. Eventually, I started teasing other sailors we observed while maneuvering in class. We observed an elderly gentleman on a quarter million dollar, 50 foot sloop point his boat directly at a cement breakwater 200 yards away, engage his autopilot, and walk forward to drop his mainsail. Reflecting the engineless sailor’s view of the world, I remarked, “That man REALLY trusts that his fuel filter won’t clog just now.” The crew of our boat laughed and I think the point was made.

So this weekend we went sailing with another couple Brad and Marnie we met through the club where we take lessons. In the last few weeks we’d sailed with them quite a bit. We’d been flung into the water by a wildly broaching race boat and climbed back aboard smiling. We’d ghosted back into the dock at 4am after the outboard of our rented boat ran out of gas after an evening run to San Francisco. We knew they were skilled sailors, and more importantly we knew they had a calm and positive attitude.

The trip was an amazing mini-cruise packed into a weekend. Taking the knowledge we had learning individually and as a couple and sharing it with others. We short tacked out of our berth in the Oakland Estuary out into the open bay. We had timed our departure to the ebb tide, which helped pull us up the channel, but it still took dozens of zigzag maneuvers to reach the freedom of unrestricted waters of the bay. We crossed under the bay bridge, and then under the Golden Gate, then poked our nose out into the tangy rolling swells of the open ocean towards Point Bonita. Having enough of pounding upwind, we turned and rode the waves back into the bay, rounding the corner to seek slalom between Angel Island and the mainland to seek shelter in the lee of the Marin headlands. We dropped anchor at a spot called Paradise Cove. We talked. We drank wine and ate food rendered even more delicious by the special hunger you only feel after a long, satisfying day’s work. I slept soundly, waking only every few hours to verify our range against landmarks on shore to ensure our anchor was holding. We woke to the first rays of dawn; the anchorage was glassy, quiet. After taking in the sunrise we retired below to sleep for another few hours. Gradually we rose for coffee and oatmeal. The wind had shifted from West to Southeast, which required more careful coordination as we sailed off the anchor. Sailing home in the North Bay, we had every stitch of sail flying in the light wind: mainsail, topsail, staysail, jib, and jib topsail. And it’s then I realized that skippering a boat is a form of storytelling too. When windsurfing, it’s just me. I’m literally part of the craft -- the ballast and standing rigging. My semi-conscious changes in stance or grip affect the trim of the board with only peripheral awareness required on my part. When sailing a complicated sailboat with other people, the vessel is like a living organism. We’re her brains, muscle, and sinew. I realized all at once that as a skipper my job is to speak on behalf of the boat, to keep her moving through light air and on her feet in heavy air. In the past, I have felt frustrated when acting as skipper because it would feel for a moment that I was the only one noticing and responding to sail trim, boat speed, line handling. This day I realized that it was my job and no one else’s to notice and act as interlocutor between the boat and the crew. To communicate. To lead. As we moved out from behind the lee of the island and into the “Slot” of strong thermal wind in front of the Golden Gate the wind increased and we hustled to shorten sail by dousing topsail and jib topsail. We rollicked towards home in 25-knot wind. Macha really came alive. Where a lighter boat would leap from wave to wave, Macha just shouldered through the chop. Once at full hull speed, nothing slowed her down.

While we were rocking back across the slot, some guy in a Zodiac showed up and asked if he could take pictures of us. (Actually I thought he was my friend Zac who sometimes drives a Zodiac for the city of Oakland, so I greeted him with an apparently unexpected "Hey motherfucker!!!") I guess Mr. boat-Paparazzi runs a business taking pics of boats and selling them as stock photography. Anyways, fans of WN7435NN should check out:

http://lyonsimaging.smugmug.com/gallery/5076868_HC4Dm#P-1-20

Sailing back to the dock is always a tense time for me. Just as I’ve heard piloting a plane while landing is the most delicate part of a flight. Due to unanticipated light wind and strong flood earlier in the day, we missed the 4:30pm slack tide by about 45 minutes and instead docked in about 1.5 knots of flood. All the drunken powerboaters on our dock kept waving their arms and shouting useful comments like "watch out... there's a current" They always get really agitated when we take practice tacks across the estuary to line up the range on the end our dock. They think we’re in trouble, when we’re simply being deliberate. It's a classic case of human nature that these guy rarely leave the dock, and have certainly never docked a boat under sail. But sitting on the dock with a cold brew in their hands makes them self-appointed nautical experts. I realized in that moment that I’d unconsciously been looking to them for advice. Internalizing their fears, accepting their irrational doubts about engineless sailing as my own.

As we approached the dock, our neighbours all gathered at the "ready" to catch our docklines. We told them "No thanks, we've got it." Our boat's previous owner Jay Fitzgerald says "never hand a line to a bystander -- the first thing they'll do is pull it when you least expect it." With four aboard we had plenty of brains and muscle for the job. (If there is any doubt, Sarah is the brains and I'm the muscle...) Sarah practiced her precision tiller work on our approach. On our signal Marnie blew the staysail sheets at just the right time to kill our speed. Brad was on the bow line and I was at the shrouds holding the midship spring line and guiding Sarah's angle of approach. We just barely nudged the dock and lept off in unison to make off the lines. All our marina neighbours spontaneously broke out in applause and congratulated us on a textbook landing as we cleated off the dock lines. We celebrated silently for moment, sitting together on the foredeck in the sunshine, drinking warm beer, and talking. We then began methodically coiling down lines, flaking sails, and packing extra food and clothing to our cars.

I realized our neighbours were concerned because conventional wisdom says that no one docks a boat measuring 52 foot and weighing 16 tons under sail with a cross current and a 15 knot wind on the beam. It’s not impossible. It’s just a skill practiced so rarely in modern life that when you see it performed even crudely by a team of rank amateurs it seems like magic. I further realized in that moment that the sense of separation is a necessary pain to be born before you can do anything remarkable and return victorious (whatever victory means to you.) For months, my dock neighbours had been second-guessing and joking about our choice to sail engineless boat. I realized when someone tells you something is impossible, it really means it’s impossible for them. Their advice is useless to you. It’s not that you’re better or worse than them. Just different; their answer to your every question should in honest truth be “not applicable”. To even attempt to achieve anything different from others breeds separation and loneliness. The only cure for that loneliness is to find others who are seeking the same goals. When your goal is spending time in the ocean, my observation is that master sailors frequently manifest both confidence and humility. (It is hard to spend time on or near the ocean without feeling profoundly humbled by its power, beauty, and fury.) Those with lesser skill frequently have neither confidence nor humility, which is a deadly combination at sea. What we’ve set out to seek, and begun to find, is really self-selected community with those who have chosen the same crazy path; the joining of those who had previously thought separation from the “general population” was their only choice.

We had a final, ironic postscript to our journey. Across the Estuary from us upon our return was shiny new powerboat driven onto the rock breakwater in broad daylight by some careless drunk. His boat had bounced and splintered, landing about 3 feet above high tide line, so he must have really had the throttle wide open. The only thing crazier than a boat without an engine is a boat with a big engine and a guy at the helm with three neurons rattling around his skull immersed in a bath of alcohol and testosterone. One of our boat neighbors started in with his usual unwelcome patter, “If you want a motor, I bet you could buy that guy’s for cheap.” “Yeah”, I joked back, “lot a good it did him.”

Macha's Maiden Voyage

2007-06-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

This is a repost of ancient news. We bought Macha from Jay Fitzgerald in the Spring of 2007. We left her "up a creek" in San Rafael for a few months while we worked up the courage to sail her to her new side-tie in Alameda. The following is the story of our first sail on Macha, around June 2007:

We drove across the Bay to San Rafael on Saturday at the crack of dawn to practice setting the main and topsail in morning light wind. (Last week's practice session was staysail, jib, and jib topsail.) We had arranged a tow with a friend, but it fell through at the last minute as he was having carburator trouble. So we weren't planning on going anywhere; just practicing the moves we've been reading about in previous owner Jay's book; trying to integrate advice from other books, friends' advice, Internet posts, etc.

While we were messing around doing sail raising/lowering drills, a guy motored up in a hard dinghy.

"What's that sail on the top called?"
"Topsail"
"I should have guessed..."

His name is "Crispy" and he lives on a green double-ender a few slips over. Same hull as ours, but different rig; he has sailed her as far as New Zealand and all over the Pacific. One thing led to another, we started talking and explaining how we were literally up a creek. He offered to tow us out of the narrow tributary as soon as we could get the boat ready. At that point it was like 8:00 in the morning - high tide and perfect conditions for towing. We didn't know this guy from Adam, but from the way we saw him handle his boat we felt confident. We had a quick huddle and decided we were as ready as we'd ever be. Later turned out in addition to marine welding he ran a towing, refueling and rescue service. While I might not have trusted him to babysit a puppy, we met the absolute right guy to tow us out of the creek to freedom!

He nudged us with his dinghy over to a fuel dock 100 yards away. Definitely had a few butt pucker moments. The creek is so narrow that one point our stern was about 10 feet from a big beautiful houseboat on the far side of the creek. My whole financial life flashed before my eyes, but our tower had it under control at all times. We tied up at the fuel dock while he got his bigger work boat ready to tow us the 2 miles out of the creek, out of the channel into open water. Had a funny moment at the fuel dock: guess the guy working thought we were being towed because we were out of gas. He came running out, "Sorry we don't have any diesel." "That's alright, we don't have any engine."

The creek leads to the San Pablo bay: deceptively wide, but dangerously shallow. The whole area was a glorified 5 mile wide mud puddle with a mile-long 6 foot deep channel dredged through it. There is simply no way we could have sailed, sculled, kedged, or otherwise propelled or finessed our engineless boat out of there!

Once into the open bay, the sail was great. As is typical of the SF Bay, we had everything from 0 to 30mph winds.

As soon as Crispy dropped the tow line we hoisted our staysail to maintain forward motion against moderate 10-15mpg winds. That gave us time to deal with the mainsail. We could have tuned the sail better, but not bad for our second time raising it. Next came the jib, which sets at the very end of the 10 foot bowsprit. Finally, we raised the free-flying upside-down-triangular topsail, which requires juggling 4 lines.

As is typical for the mornings, the wind was blowing straight from the South, instead of the West or Northwest. What would normally have been a rocket ride broad reach home was instead a series of slow tacks back and forth. With each tack we figured out another secret of our mysterious new boat, and consequently with each tack she pointed a little higher upwind.

We passed under the first bridge of the day and into the main San Francisco Bay. Macha handled great!!!! When we were in "the slot" in front of Golden Gate there was solid 25mph gusting to 30. We waited just a minute too long to take down the topsail; which resulted in me wrestling a very feisty dacron opponent into submission on the foredeck while Sarah steered and tried not to laugh. With topsail down but all other working sail set Macha was rail-down, shouldering through 2-4 foot short-spaced chop. With her shape and weight she has a really smooth ride compared to our Catalina; you can see why people love these hulls for rough weather and open ocean.

However, it was definitely a wet ride compared to the Catalina. Since it was a "spontaneous trip", we didn't have foul weather gear. At one point I looked over and Sarah was in push-up position with a river of water running across the deck under her. We're thinking at some point we need to add some wood coamings to direct the water on deck and give "sheeter" somewhere to brace feet and back. Once in the lee of Treasure Island we had some time to dry out in the sun.

We had a brief nervous moment coming from behind Treasure Island into the channel to the Oakland Estuary. We thought we should be out of the lee of the Island, but were still in some kind of funky wind shadow. Current was setting us to the right of the red channel marker just drifting with the sails slatting. Arrgh! Sarah broke out the oar, I got ready to deploy stern anchor if we got too close to the rocks. Sarah's sculling with the oar gave us just enough steerage to gibe well before the marker and well clear of the rocks. Saw the first sweet "cat paws" of wind creeping towards us as the breeze filled back in and we knew we were golden.

We had a beautiful and stately sail down the Oakland Estuary, broad reaching with main, topsail, and both headsails in 5-7mph of wind. We were only going 2 to 3 knots, but everyone that motored by at 5 knots shouted over "Wow, what a beautiful boat!!" I'm sure there are a large contingent of gaff rig and engineless naysayers out there, but she also brings out some kind of primal longing in other sailors. She's the real deal...

As we got near our slip, Sarah hustled to get topsail and both headsails down. We deliberately went downwind past our marine. Then we made a couple practice tacks back upwind across the Estuary with just mainsail up to try and estimate cross current and glide speed & distance. I think in the end we came in with perfect angle but maybe half knot too hot. We had a spring line amidships and Sarah hopped off, took it round a cleat and killed our speed like a champ. With three big soft fenders off the starboard side we swung parallel into the dock, bounced a wee bit, then we made off the dock lines around 7:00pm. No sooner had we landed than a buyer called to say he wanted to buy my old boat!

Short digression -- the new buyer is a bit of a character. Quiet British guy - seems somewhat new to sailing. Last week he came to our prepurchase survey appointment in a spiffy dark suit, complete with shiny shoes and cufflinks. Not exactly ideal attire for sailing in 20 knots of wind. We let him suffer just long enough to appreciate the Goretex jacket we lent him. After the surveyor had hauled the boat out the water on a crane for inspection, we thought for sure he wouldn't buy the boat when he called a limo rather than sailing back with us. But in his defense he seems like a decent sailor as well as a conscientious boat owner. So he may not be the life of the parties down at the Emeryville firepit, but I doubt he'll sink the boat.

After our arrival in Alameda, our buddy Darrin came over the from next marina and we toasted our arrival with grilled cheese and rum (we didn't have time to fully provision before leaving, but we brought the essentials!) Our new slip has a beautiful view of the city and the passing sailboats, tugboats, and cargo ships. New boat neighbours seem cool.

Feel very excited. New boat is very demanding to sail, but very magical as well. We were more than a little nervous about sailing her for the first time, but now feel confident we'll grow to meet the challenge. Our teamwork and communication were great and I feel we learned more about sailing in one long day than we have in months. From what we've experienced so far, it's light wind rather than high wind that really raises the adrenaline levels. Sailing a gaff rigger is also a good equalizer, because I feel I know more about the physics and strategy of sailing in general (Sarah will respectfully disagree - and that's why I love her), but Sarah has way more experience with traditional sailing and knows all the skills and techniques that old fashioned style hardware requires. We both felt triumphant and elated at the end of the day!

Introductions

2007-06-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Welcome! My name is Ari. My lovely new bride Sarah and I live in the San Francisco Bay, where we sail "Macha", an engineless Ingrid 38 Gaff Cutter. Friends have encouraged us to chronicle our adventures learning the art and science of non-auxilary sailing.

So here we go... to start, I'll be republishing posts I've written in emails and other online forums, recapping our story so far.

- Ari