It Gets Better

Newport found us feeling torn. We need to push to get south before the weather changes for good, but we needed a little break, a few repairs, and wanted some family and friends to come for a visit while we were still within driving distance. We squeezed in our work and a little play and said a few last goodbyes. A good friend came to visit, brought us bread and butter and took us to lunch and the grocery store. We had a day of eating and playing with my family and jokingly celebrated Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and the 4th of July. Hannah preemptively pinched everyone who wasn’t wearing green and we sang Christmas carols in the Mo’s parking lot until much too late.

We spent a couple of nights in the ocean, and I came up on watch Monday morning just in time to see the sun rise. Clouds extended off to the north and sun shone bright off to the south. The dividing line was sharp and appeared just over the Oregon/California border, as if the strength of sunny California could overcome even the mighty power of Oregon’s gray weather.


Crescent City, CA was a delightful stop. The marina is still under major reconstruction after the 2011 tsunami, so we anchored out in the bay and rowed (and rowed and rowed) into shore. We spent 2 nights and a couple of beautiful, sunny days running errands and exploring the town.  



In the evening, the tide was low enough to walk over to Battery Point Lighthouse, a privately owned lighthouse near the entrance to the bay. We’d motored past it the day before, but it was fun to see the sea from the other direction, without having to worry about all the rocks and sea stacks that necessitated the lighthouse’s placement.



We still have miles to go to get clear of the impending autumn weather, but getting to California feels like a good start. And taking a day or 2 to explore the novelty and beauty of new places sure helps shift the balance of frustration and joy back in the right direction.

It’s an Adventure, not a Vacation

Sailing Away in St Helens (photo credit: An Der Chang)

Do you really want to hear all about it? Can't you just imagine that 4 people on a 50-year-old boat heading south on the Oregon Coast would have had a few breakdowns, some bad weather, some good weather, some good days, and some bad days without hearing every detail? No? OK, here are the details.

We took a few days to reach Astoria. Our first night downriver, a thunderstorm revealed a few leaks, mostly in newly installed deck hardware (After all that work poking holes in the boat, now we have to seal them too?!)

The next day, we stopped in Cathlamet, WA for the night after a day of motoring downriver.

OK, that last sentence, while technically true, doesn’t really give the whole picture of how the day went. I spent the morning throwing a mini-tantrum, pulling out soggy paraphernalia from various compartments and wondering how I was ever going to feel at home in the tiny, messy galley. There was still miscellaneous stuff all over the settee from moving aboard so clearing any space necessitated moving about a dozen other things in the right order. Even making a simple sandwich felt overwhelming. When I finished up what I could and took over for Bryan on watch, he came down to a mess in the V berth where a blackwater holding tank valve had ruptured. Yes, that’s just as icky and smelly as you’re picturing.

By the time we reached Astoria on Saturday, it had become clear that our head’s sea cock had broken. This valve keeps the ocean out of the boat but allows us to dump our holding tank while out at sea. The valve is below the waterline, so sensible people replace them when the boat is out of the water. We’d recently replaced another one when we did our bottom paint, but this one had looked fine then.

We spent a few days in Astoria. By Sunday afternoon, we had things put to rights enough to welcome some friends aboard for a potluck lunch. They’d been camping in nearby Fort Stevens State Park and we were so glad to show them around the boat and see them once again before we left.

Photo Credit: An Der Chang

Monday, we finished up the head repair job. Meira relayed directions from Bryan, who was leaning over the side of the boat holding his hand over the hole, to Hannah, who “really quick!” pulled out the temporary plug on the inside and screwed in the new sea cock. Whew! Since we were already in this deep, Bryan replaced all the head and holding tank hoses and took advantage of the marina’s free showers.

Tuesday morning, we checked the weather one last time (yup, north winds to blow us south predicted to stick around another day) waited for the fog to lift a bit and headed out across the bar. The fog may have lifted in Astoria, but was still hovering thick over the several-mile bar. We sent Meira up on bow watch, Hannah and I each kept a close eye out on either side and Bryan drove carefully, just on the edges of the busy channel, blowing the noisy fog horn every few minutes. Once, a deeper horn responded from just ahead and we blew back and forth until we heard them shift safely off to port.

There’s no picture here. Go hold some dryer lint in front of your eyes to get the same effect.

By the time we cleared the mouth of the Columbia, the fog had cleared away as well and the wind filled in for a few hours of sailing. In the afternoon, the wind picked up a bit. We had our light-air drifter poled out with our whisker pole and just before we went forward to change sails, the whisker pole broke. Getting the sail down took a bit more fuss than usual, and when Bryan finally had it tied down on deck, I looked up to realize our spreaders had both fallen out of place.

Here’s the explanation if you care. A sailboat’s mast is held up by cables in front (the forestay), in  back (the backstay) and on each side. Our boat has 3 cables on each side, 2 lower shrouds that start about halfway up the mast and attach to the chainplates (remember the chainplates from the last post?), and 1 upper shroud  that starts at the top of the mast, travels over a wooden spreader and down to its own chainplate. The spreaders do just that: they spread the cables out at the correct angle to keep the mast up straight. They are very important. They should not flop around at sea.

See? Up there? Spreaders...spreading (Photo Credit: Jenny Riddle)

We’ve adjusted our spreaders before. Bryan had re-tuned the rig before we left St. Helens, in fact, and he was pretty sure that nothing was broken; the new chainplates were set at a slightly different angle than the old ones, and the spreaders needed to be lifted a little to compensate. But the wind and the seas had picked up a bit and he didn’t want to climb the mast under those conditions. Oh, and the only way to get the spreaders back up without climbing the mast (have you guessed?) was with our now-broken whisker pole.
We briefly considered heading into Tillamook Bay for the night, but the bar can be treacherous even for locals, and we’d never been across it before. We took a minute to think, almost always a good idea, and then splinted the whisker pole back together. Bryan made up for the loss of length by standing on the dinghy on the foredeck (tethered in!) and poked the spreaders back into place while I drove into the swells, trying not to think about what I would do if he fell.

The spreaders soon became the least of our concerns as a southerly wind filled in both earlier and stronger than predicted. We didn’t want to sail in wind this strong without a good inspection of the rig so we motored west most of the night just to keep from bashing around too much in the swell. Visibility dropped to not-nearly-far-enough and our auto pilot gave up steering. Bryan took the worst of the watch in the middle of the night, but it was a long night for both of us. Meira stayed cheerfully, helpfully awake through most of the night and Hannah stayed cheerfully, helpfully asleep. In the light of day, with a few extra hours sleep, it was easy to think of better ways to handle the bad weather. But at this point in our trip, our energy and excitement were pretty low; mostly we just gritted our teeth through a rough night and a long day slogging south into Newport.

Yaquina Bay Lighthouse

We made it across the bar into Yaquina Bay without any trouble, though we had some last minute excitement in the marina when our assigned slip was taken and our high-temperature alarm started blaring. Bryan killed the engine and we drifted in—watching the depth sounder drop—to an empty spot at the dock.
I think no matter how prepared, how rich, how experienced one is, the beginning of a trip like this is often a big adjustment. And we do not claim to be overly-prepared, overly-experienced, or anything resembling rich. Many sailing friends claim that getting away from home is the hardest part, and that may prove to be true in retrospect. But sailing off the Oregon coast is not usually easy, neither is living aboard an older boat with a family, and we didn’t expect it to be so. The frustrations, fears, and crises we handled might have been surprises, but they weren’t unexpected.

So we set the girls up with a movie on the computer, and went out to dinner at the nearby brewery, wondering, affirming, reminding…”It gets easier, right?”

Whatever you want is always at the bottom of the locker

And We're Off

You've been waiting for this post, I'm sure. I've sure been looking forward to this day! Sometime in the spring, we sat down to pick a departure date. We'd read that without a hard deadline, many sailors find it difficult to leave the dock. The Pacific NW coast gets dicey in the fall, so we knew we wanted to leave in early September. It seemed pretty obvious to us both to choose September 3rd, Bryan's birthday, as an ideal day to sail away.
First, we had to move aboard. We'd purged a lot when we left our house and little by little worked to let go of more after we moved in with Bryan's mom. But there was still an insurmountable pile to deal with in the last few days. We drove several car loads up to the boat and on Saturday, spent one last morning at the house getting (we hope!) the last of our things packed. Bryan's mom and aunt left today for a month in Africa and Amsterdam, so they were in the middle of their own packing frenzy, but somehow we made it out.

In a caffeine fueled frenzy, the girls and I spent Saturday evening and all day Sunday "stuffing the stuff" while Bryan worked on drilling holes in the boat to install the new, external chainplates. He broke a drill bit off inside one stubborn hole and spent most of the day trying to find a solution.

Our work started out tidy and sensible and devolved into randomness as we got closer and closer to Sunday night. Finally we stashed the last few boxes in the trunk of our car and went to bed because Monday was...
The Bon Voyage Party!
We'd been saying smaller goodbyes for days, even had a picnic in the rain at the park near our church for those who couldn't make it to St. Helens. But many of our friends and family had never even seen our boat, and we wanted to give them a good picture of our home for the year. Monday morning, Bryan spent more time drilling the chainplate holes and the girls and I found hidey holes for everything below.

Many of our dear ones were able to join us. We tested the buoyancy of our vessel for a few family pictures and spent a delightful afternoon shifting from the park to the boat to see everyone "one last time." 

I'd said to Bryan the night before, "I wish I could filter out all the exhausted and the freaked out and just leave the excited for a little while." At the party, people from all of our circles—family, church friends, sailing friends—intersected and their excitement for us overshadowed, just for the moment, all the hard work, the frustrations of the past months, and the uncertainty about the next. We've read other sailors' accounts of these events and imagined our own, but nothing prepared us for the outpouring of love, food, cards, gifts, and well-wishes.

OK. You're reading a sailing blog, so I know you're not too annoyed with sailing lingo. But just in case you don't know, the chainplates are the lower attachment points for the shrouds (the side cables holding up the mast) and ours were fiberglassed into the hull of the boat, 50 years old and un-inspectable. We'd manufactured new ones out of aluminum-bronze (that's a story in itself!), and planned to install them on the outside of the hull where we could inspect and maintain them more easily.

Before we could leave our dock, with readily available power and borrowed power tools, Bryan had several holes to drill, starting on the outside of the boat, working through the old chainplates, piercing through to the inside. He'd already finished the starboard side before the party, and it had gone relatively smoothly. Tuesday started off well, with 5 chainplate holes drilled in 2 hours. but this one hole on the port side seemed to be actively resisting. He broke several bits, dropped a few more (we've more than paid the obligatory sacrifice to Neptune) and borrowed a bigger drill. Nothing seemed to help and every pass with the drill produced a miniscule amount of metal shavings, just enough to keep him at it. Bryan assumed he was drilling through the old chainplate and likely a tie-bar, originally installed across all three chainplates, but even still, we couldn't figure out why it was taking so much longer than the other holes. Some friends (H&A) stopped by with helpful essentials—fresh strength, good attitudes, and gatorade. After 5 or 6 hours of drilling in the sun, the bit finally broke through to the other side. The whole marina heard us shouting! 

Later, the men realized they'd likely hit a weld and that bit of reinforced metal, in addition to the ½-¾” of stainless steel they'd drilled through was the reason our friend thought we'd discovered a new element—Un-obDrillium.

We scrambled to get cleaned up and our generous friends took us out for a celebration dinner. I don't know if we were more excited to celebrate Bryan's birthday or the fact that we'd finally poked the last hole in the boat. Either way, we took over a corner of the local Thai restaurant with our cheer.

By the time we walked back from dinner and cleaned out the truck one last time, Bryan's mom and aunt had arrived to see us off. We debated tossing everything on the deck and motoring over to nearby Sand Island, just on the principle of making our deadline. But Bryan's back was starting to seize up from the day's work and we made the sensible decision to stay for the night. “What if our first port of call is...the lovely St. Helens Marina?” Bryan joked. “It's conveniently located, with very friendly locals, and it seemed to take no time at all to get here!”
We said a last goodbye to Bryan's mom and aunt, off on their own adventure, and walked back to the boat, breathing a little deeper than we had in weeks.

Epilogue: It was Wednesday afternoon before we raised the drifter and eased away from the dock under sail. H&A had come back with more provisions (the boat is so loaded down with treats from friends—chocolate, quick breads, miso soup fixings—I think I could have skipped provisioning) and stood on the dock taking pictures and cheering as we slipped across the river to the Sand Island dock. Our journey of (many more than) a thousand miles had begun, not with a single step, but with a sail just about as short. Hannah, the official log-keeper, enjoyed recording the exact times of our departure and arrival: 4:07pm and 4:15pm. Symbolic? Yes. But meaningful just the same. We'd untied the lines from our old lives and crossed the river into our new one.

Transition Means You're Almost There

Nearly all women have a moment in labor, right in the middle of transition, when they think they can't do it.

I'm finally coming up for air enough to realize that we're really doing this, REALLY for REAL. I've been plugging away at to-do lists and plans and trying to stay present in the moment as I go, but I am turning the talked-about, prayed-over, yearned-for dream into the true story of my life. My spirit, in this 36 year-old body, is going to sea in a 32-foot boat.

We plan to leave 2 weeks from today and our marina friends have promised to untie our dock lines whether we think we're ready or not. I've had more than one moment (in the middle of my own sort of transition) when I've been pretty sure I can't do it.

I know you're supposed to take each moment as it comes and that I have the skills and fortitude to handle each moment of our trip. I know I'm not supposed to sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff). I know we've planned and fixed and list-ed ourselves half to death to do this thing, but none of that can negate the natural fears and self doubt connected to turning a life upside down in pursuit of a dream.

I was driving to my regular Tuesday morning meeting, along a well-worn route, in my familiar car when I finally named the fear. I'm pretty sure I can't do this. 

Can I really leave the comforts of home for the hot, sticky, dirty, wet, messy life at sea?

Can I really live without weekly (or even daily) contact with these people I love so much?

Can I really stay patient, kind, and sane while navigating the new coastline, the new language, the new cultures, the new everything?

I'm not at all sure I can do this.

And just that fast, the truth spoke back, "Maybe that's not a bad thing."

For years now, I've awakened confident that I can handle my day. Oh, I have bad days, of course, and circumstances that blindside me. But I've found a relaxed routine that fits m

e and I sail through the majority of my life doing pretty well on my own. It's not comfortable, living beyond my capabilities, but it might not be such a bad thing to live a life I'm not sure I can manage.

The voices of my encouraging friends, the voices (well, blogs and facebook pages, anyway) of those who've gone before me, the still, small voice in my own spirit all say that (with quite a bit of help) I can do this hard, amazing, beautiful thing.

Nearly all women have a moment in labor, right in the middle of transition, when they think they can't do it. The lucky ones have someone nearby to say, "Yes, but you are."

Sea Change

"...that's what happens when you separate the things that don't matter from the things that really do. You end up with a big pile of nothing, next to a very small pile of everything."

--Mike Lescarbeau

We're still very much in the transition stage. Yesterday, a new friend asked me where I live and I hesitated before answering. Long enough that she probably thought I was one shroud short of a full rig (oh, that's not a common saying?) We're so glad to have moved out of our house, leaving it in the very capable hands of our delightful renters. And we're tremendously grateful to our family for opening their home to us and our boxes and our endless parade of dishes and laundry. And we're looking forward to moving aboard next month and beginning to settle into the new routines of life on LiLo. But still. It's a lot of work, this transition thing.

Bryan went straight from all the extra work of moving out to the challenge of boat repair. The boatyard had a unexpected spot in their haul-out schedule so he spent multiple days last week driving to Astoria for bottom paint and other work and then back to Beaverton for the job that pays the bills. I've hardly seen him lately, but I think he's holding up OK.

I've gotten a few breaks here and there, so it feels like I shouldn't have anything to complain about. Physically, I'm recovered from the big push of packing and cleaning. Mentally, I feel capable again, but underneath all that, my spirit is still churning.

In the last few weeks, we've had a spate of breakdowns: the truck, the car, the ipod, the truck again, the house's main water valve (just hours before the renters arrived), the truck again. I may have had a breakdown or 2 myself. My stress level appears to be an inverse function of the countdown to September 3.

We expected this when we set out on this path--the flurry of busy days before the adventure--and I'm choosing to see this as part of the journey instead of just payment-in-advance. Every life has seasons of sifting. Many people don't get to choose the season; we are embracing these good/hard days willingly, but transition has been building for a while.

In the midst of our seismic shift, smaller tremors are shaking my world. A dear friend is moving away, my time of work at our church is ending, the girls are more independent by the hour. Friendships, schooling, creative work, family relationships--so much is shifting, irrespective of our plans. This is a sea change year.

What are you doing here?

If you're reading this and you don't also already read my friend, Beth's blog (FiveKidsIsALotOfKids) you should go over there right now and get caught up on her archives. And then maybe you'll want to take a look at today's post because sometimes she posts words from guest writers and today I'm there talking about the myth of balance. Well, actually, today I'm painting my bathrooms and moving all the furniture out of my bedroom before the carpet cleaners come tomorrow. But I can do both!

For once, the internet is helping me multitask instead of procrastinate. Gotta get back to it!

Moving LiLo

Cousin K. sailing into her first night watch in the ocean

I'm taking a break from the mess of packing the house to look at sailing pictures and remember what all this trouble is for. We spent Memorial Day weekend moving LiLo from Port Hadlock (near Port Townsend, WA) to Astoria and my brother-in-law and his oldest daughter came along as very able-bodied crew. She's been in a Sea Scout for several years now but this was her first trip out into the Pacific. It was delightful to have company on long night watches and extra hands for the trickier than usual bar crossing into the Columbia. It was a typical boat delivery trip, with wind on the nose the whole way. Toward evening the first day, we put up the sails for a little bit anyway. The sunset was so beautiful we didn't care if we were sailing backwards for a while.

We celebrated Meira's birthday with a quick stop behind Pillar Point for homemade clam chowder. Only after we all ate did I notice I hadn't put the clams in the chowder. Worse things have happened on sailing trips. Nothing broke, for once, but we were boarded by the Coast Guard for a random inspection on our fuel stop in La Push. It's hard to search a 32' boat with 6 people already on board but they managed.

We made it across the bar and into the Astoria mooring basin just before the tide turned against us and spent a wet day packing up and getting back. Transportation logistics on the way up included a car, a bus, a van and a ferry so we really appreciated my dad's chauffeur service on the way home.

We can control many steps in this process or work a little longer if we need. We can't control the wind and waves, though, and we are so glad we managed to cross this off our list as planned. Next step: move out and paint the house!