throwing our hat over the wall

The saying - with a dash of rephrasing - goes a little like so: "If you need to get over a wall you can't get over, throw your hat over the wall." Once your best hat is lying on the other side of the wall, your ass will find a way over to go get it.

Christy just walked up to the marina office and resigned our comfy, safe, shore-powered south-facing slip in Shilshole. After May, we have no place to park Hello World so we're leaving whether we're ready or not. Our hat is now officially lying on the other side of the wall.

We're gonna go get it.

public service announcement

I read sailing blogs incessantly. Virtually everything I know about cruising aboard sailboats came from someone who is out there and doing it and good enough to blog about it. That's what I want our blog to be. I want people to read our blog and be inspired. I want folks to learn from what we're doing and the mistakes we make and realize that they can do it too.

Towards that end, we're going to have a new and unfortunately all too regular feature here on svhelloworld.com. It's called Things Jason Fucked Up Learn From Our Experiences! (OK, we're still working on the title.) When we screw something up, do something wrong, break something, injure someone or just generally cock something up, we'll put it up on the blog so y'all can learn from us. I just wonder if the internet infrastructure can handle the bandwidth it will take to document the sheer volume of buffoonery. So, welcome to our first installment.

(Note: it's going to get a little graphic from here on out. If you a.) get queasy easily, b.) are currently eating or c.) are my mom, it's best you stop reading)

Our story begins at the pumpout dock. For those unfamiliar with life on a sailboat, the pumpout dock is a necessary evil. Sure, we have toilets on board but where does all that "stuff" go? We are not connected to any sort of city sewer system and dumping that "stuff" directly overboard into the marina where all of our boats are parked is pretty gross. So we direct it into what are euphemistically called "holding" tanks. What do they "hold"? Stuff.

At one end of the equation, we have a 10 gallon "holding" tank on board, bursting at the seams with fetid, rotting "stuff". Now, the stuff that comes out of each and everyone of us starts out as fairly unpleasant. But when you let this stuff sit in a tank for two, three, four weeks at a time, it transforms into an unholy solution of everything wrong in the world.

At the other end of the equation is the waste pump. It's a simple nozzle connected by 20 feet of hose to a pump like no other pump. A stadium full of Turkish hookers couldn't match the sucking power of this pump. The theory is that you hold the nozzle onto the fitting on deck called "waste" that leads to the "holding" tank, turn on the suction at the nozzle and the pump will suck out the "stuff" into some mysterious tank somewhere and out of your life for good.

Here's the part that I need you to listen to very carefully. Lean forward closer to your monitor if you must. If you're listening to music, turn it off. Just turn it off. This is something you will thank me a thousand times over for telling you. When holding the nozzle onto the deck fitting:

PUSH THE NOZZLE DOWN ONTO THE DECK FITTING LIKE YOUR VERY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.

When you apply that suction force from the pump to the "waste" outlet, the contents of the "holding" tank will come roaring up that outlet hose like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If you do not provide a strong enough seal between the nozzle and the deck fitting...

Ahem.

I've taken three showers and I still can't get the smell out of my brain.

47°40'49.04"N 122°24'30.54"W

going up the mast

I've rock climbed. I've even skydived. That's all well and good but I do not like heights. I don't like 'em, no sir. Never have. Never will. So when we needed to get someone up our mast to fix our spreader endcap, I cashed in the boy,-I'm-too-heavy card and got out of mast climbing duty. Of course, Christy is fearless and was nearly shoving me out of the way to get hauled up the mast. (How do you not love this girl?) So haul her we did.

Here's the setup we used. We tied our jib halyard off to the bosun's chair using a figure-eight loopback knot and then attached the shackle back to the chair to prevent the knot from slipping through. We used our spinnaker halyard as safety and attached it to her climbing harness using the same knot/shackle backup. With this setup, the only single point of failure we had was the mast itself. Either halyard could fail and the other would back it up. The halyards were on separate sheaves on separate pins. The chair could fail and the harness would back it up. The shackle would prevent the knot from slipping through. The shackle could open but the knot would be the primary attachment point.

Fisher tailed the safety halyard on the mast winch while I hauled her up on the cabin top winch. Les stopped by and tailed the jib halyard for me on the primary sheet winch. Ben was good enough to warn me that he had been properly lubricated on Jack&coke so we put him on photograph duty. And like ever, his photos kick ass. Nice to know he can photograph under the influence.


Haulin' away.










Checking out the ailing spreader endcap.








We got the jib halyard secured off on a rope clutch, the cabin top self-tailing winch, the port side primary self-tailing winch and the starboard side primary self-tailing winch and then I handled the safety line while Fisher ran to get some 4200 so we could seal up the end cap good and keep it on the spreader until we can get a replacement. (My junior year English teacher, Mrs. Chenoweth, would be aghast at that run-on sentence. Sorry, Mrs. Chenoweth! I really did pay attention in your class. Most of the time.) (She also hated parentheticals. Man, did I ever stray from the grammatical path she laid out for us.)


Les gooping up the endcap with 4200.


We did eventually let her come down.

Rest of the pictures here.

momentum

It's been a month and a half since Hello World showed up from Mexico. During that time, pretty much every evening after work we go straight over to the boat and work on it until bed time. Most weekends we've spent doing boat work. We've turned down a truckload of invites to do fun things with fun people in fun places. This amount of work has clearly been wearing on us. At this point, we go over to the boat and do about an hour's worth of work and spend the rest of the time scratching our heads at projects we should be doing but can't seem to motivate ourselves. I'm worn down and ready to be done with the all-work/no-sail part of boat ownership. We still haven't actually sailed this beautiful boat.

I can't tell y'all how much I want to sail this boat. We put the staysail on last night and I damned near wet myself to see a sail on our sailboat. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I really can. It's quite possible we can sail this weekend, if we can knock off this last punchlist:

• send Christy up the mast to fix the starboard spreader end cap that came loose during the mast step and angle the spreaders correctly


• tune the rig at the dock


• get all the cotter pins in and secured


• pull the boom off so we can run the main outhaul line inside the boom (because we didn't run a messenger line when we pulled it off in Mexico)


• put the boom back on


• hoist the genoa


• unfurl and re-furl the main - we have no idea what the trip on a truck from Mexico did to the furled sail inside


• GO SAILING!

Fisher and I poured Spartite into the hole where the mast goes through the deck (I know there's a salty nautical term for this boat feature but I don't know what it is so I'll just call it mast hole, k?) on Tuesday night. This stuff is supposed to seal said mast hole from water entry and hold the mast in position so it isn't rattling around in the hole chewing up the deck. We made an absolute mess of things, primarily because I screwed around too long before and while doing the pouring. It set up on us before we got half done. Fortunately, I bought the large kit with two cans (actually four - it's a two part compound). So on Wednesday we pulled out the last bit and poured over the previous attempt. This came out way better. The trick? Tape visqueen around the mast partners and get the area sealed off really well. Then just pour gobs of that shit into the hole while it still has liquid properties. You'll make a mess onto the visqueen but it will spread out into all the nooks and crannies it needs to. Then after the spartite has a chance to harden for a couple hours, do your cleanup. It will be in a state where it can be cut to make the pour clean but it will come up off of stuff pretty easily.

Once the spartite cures (three or four days), I'll run a bead of polysulfide over the top of it in case it shrank during curing. Then I'll roll mast boot tape over the whole install mainly to keep UV off of the spartite.






Our sailboat has a sail on it! I can't wait to get out there and try out our stays'l.

boat friends, revisited

Christy and I enjoyed a weekend out in Minnesota for my cousin Erin's wedding. Fisher was tasked with looking after Hello World while we were away. And what do we find in our boat when we come home?



More on this admittedly well thought out gesture on Fisher's blog and Ben's blog. Remember this, Fisher and Ben: revenge is a dish best served cold.

And laced with stool softener.

re-naming party

I promised an update on the re-naming party beyond a picture of me eating the GPS reciever. Here's some more pictures from the event. It was wicked fun and we were really honored that people came by to ring in this new boat of ours.


After the crap Auguary weather, it was nice to have a beautiful September evening.


We overtook our finger pier so apologies to Ian, our neighbor to the west sharing this finger pier. I promise we're not always like this.




Ken and Erin pondering our complete lack of boom.


Like all of our parties, Christy MC'd and I just poured champagne everywhere like a howler monkey flinging poo.


Boat warming gifts from friends. "Cardboard flavored sesame seed horse feed cookies?? You shouldn't have. Really. No really. You really shouldn't have."


Poor Alison, she's always the island of lucidity in a sea of liquored fools.


Fisher measuring out the exact amount of mixer to go with his rum.


Not only was I calling in an airstrike with our GPS, I was also dialing 867-5309. "Hello?" [snicker] "Is Jenny there?" [howls of laughter]


Fisher working on his Blue Steele look. My friend, there's a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking.


Gotta move on. Gotta move on. Gotta move on. Won't you take me to Funkytown?


Paul and Erin from Windshadow, a wicked cool Fuji 32, clearly regretting ever accepting this invitation.


Oh that's right. I can open a beer with my armpits. Who's thirsty??


KEN: "I'll eat this for a dollar."




Ken's stripping career comes crashing to a mercifully early halt as his hammy lets go like a busted guitar string.


The next morning. That lump on the settee is Ken.


The cockpit was not pretty the next morning. No, not pretty at all.

Thanks to Ben and Gina for most of these pictures. Especially the ridiculously embarrassing ones of me. No really. You shouldn't have.

The rest of the pics are here.

i feel like...

... a bag of hammered shit.

Hello World's official re-naming party last night. I may have ever so slightly over-libated.



To the best of my recollection, I was calling in an air strike by shouting into our circa-1990 GPS. More later when that guy ringing the cathedral bells directly behind my eye sockets knocks it the hell off.

mastless in seattle

We splashed her on Friday sans mast and she's currently sitting on F-dock in a sublet slip at Shilshole. Patiently (nooo, not really) waiting for a slip assignment from marinacrats at the office.

We're working furiously (nooo, not really) on the mast to get it prepped and ready to step. Our goal is to get her rigged and ready for an end of week re-naming party and a Labor Day maiden cruise.

Here she is sitting outside of Canal Boatyard in Salmon Bay, happily back in water.

47°40'43.37"N 122°24'25.65"W