And Now for Something Completely Ridiculous

This is the uniform you get when you pass your ham exam!

Since things have been so hectic over here lately, I thought I'd lighten the mood a bit with this picture Vlad's friend Charles made for me using his brilliant PhotoShop abilities. That's right. General Hamster.

I think Charles really captured my best features, especially with the whiskers and the beady eyes.

I Am No Betsy Ross

Famous last words: "But it all looked so simple."

The good news is we have a bimini top. The bad news is I sewed it. I admit, it was a fun project, and I had a good time turning several yards of white 10 ounce, GVC vinyl into a shade from the unrelenting sun. But please don't look too closely at the stitching or you will come to understand why the only "C" I ever made in school was in home economics.

Maybe it was me. Maybe it was the material. Probably it was a little bit of both, but whatever the case, the bimini, while in the correct size and shape, has some really not pretty seams - often bunched up and crooked as though someone in a mental institution hemmed it together. But, hey, it works, though we still have to put in the grommets and then attach it to the dodger. The woman who had the boat before us was a seamstress, and I can't help but look at all the cushions and bolsters and sail covers and gear bags she made in awe. What a truly useful skill.

On the boat front, things are coming along. The engine is working well, and our diesel tanks are all filled up. We have a few more little things to take care of and, of course, more stowing. Also, I would like to thank our friends Scott and Natalie who were gracious enough to let me invade their apartment for a couple of days to work on the bimini. Without such a nice, quiet space to work in, there would have been a lot more cursing.

Update on the Madness

This pic pretty much sums up how much stuff we have left to do.

It always seems as though there's plenty of time to get things done - that is, until you realize that the project you thought would only take an hour actually took 10. Strange how that works. Anyway, I'm sure you'll all be happy to know that the flurry of activity surrounding our departure is culminating into some real results. Yesterday, we got our shots (which I totally forgot about until last week!!), registered the eprib, stowed more stuff, got the solar panel installed, and thanks to Vlad's dad who is here helping us we now have a new homeport on the stern. I also passed my next level ham test, still without having any clue as to how to use the radio. Nevertheless, I keep trying to get Vlad to salute me while saying, "General Hamster." He hasn't been super cooperative on that front, though.  

Today, I get to finish the bimini top, while Vlad gets the engine in tip top shape and his dad does some general maintenance on our batteries. And then, I get to vacuum seal all of our dry goods. It's all coming together somehow, someway and despite my increasing panic attacks. One good thing about all this extra stress is that I haven't been able to feel the least bit anxious about heading out into the Gulf. Everyone around here describes it as an uncomfortable ride, akin to being tossed about in a washtub, but to be honest that sounds kind of nice and relaxing right now.

Oh, and a huge thank you to Vlad's dad who has been a machine. Because of his hard work, we've been able to get our shots and do a couple of other errands without completely falling behind.

Burning the Midnight Oil

This is a week of halves. We are half done installing a solar panel, half done with stowing, half done with the bimini top, and half done with all the other tiny projects we've got to finish before we leave next Monday like putting dowels at every seacock and adding the finishing touches to our ditch bag. 

To make matters even more complicated, I'm going to attempt another ham radio test today, and Vlad is going to clep calculus on Friday (don't ask!!). A friend of ours suggested that we also try to learn the basics of nuclear physics this week because obviously we don't have enough stuff going on. As you can probably guess, not all of this is going to get done, and I'm trying to step back and take a more zen approach, despite the muscle tension knots that have developed in my shoulders. We don't have to complete everything, just the essentials, and we'll have plenty of time along the way to accomplish some of the less pressing tasks as long as we have the parts. 

On the plus side, we now have a somewhat functional watermaker that Vlad traded work for. We have also purchased all of our supplies, and we have finished the painting and have reattached all the hardware. Here's what the workshop area looked like during the painting process:

And here's what our salon looked like while we were painting:  

It needs some of that yellow crime scene tape, don't you think?

After this experience, I have two pieces of advice for people who are fixing up a boat to live or cruise on. First, do everything you can to the boat before you move onboard. I hadn't really considered this until we started painting, but we could have saved ourselves a lot of misery if we had painted or varnished the inside prior to moving into the space. Living like an episode of Hoarders for a week was not good for our general mental well-being, though it was great for our social life since we jumped at every opportunity to get away from the tower of stuff tottering on our settee and pilots berth.

Second, if you're ever getting ready for a cruise, I would recommend a good solid month of uninterrupted work on your boat. No visiting home. No working. Just focus on getting the boat ready to go. It really is easier said than done, though, as we discovered. We needed to visit our families, and Vlad had a lot of commitments to work on other people's boats. Throw in helping out a neighbor here or there and you get what we have now. Total. Complete. Chaos. 

Ok, so it's not that bad, and I take comfort from blogs I've read where people say the last week is always hectic. And on the plus side, this last week will truly make us appreciate the next one.

How to Save Money While Outfitting Your Boat

I realize that I've done a couple of posts in a row now filled with numbers, but what with our pre-departure spending binge it's been hard to move on to other topics. This is the last one for a while, I swear! Here are a few ways we used to save money while preparing for our sailing extravaganza.

Buy in bulk. Whether it's food or your trip to West Marine, buying in bulk helps to save cash. We purchased all our dry goods at Costco, which, though an ungodly amount of food, should get us through the islands without having to restock at high prices. Also, we purchased everything from West Marine at once, giving us this handy little thing called bargaining power. By not buying an item here or two items there, we actually negotiated a pretty good deal on our West Marine trip.

Buy from places other than West Marine.  I don't know if you've noticed, but anything with the word "marine" attached to it seems to cost a gazillion times what it would in a regular store. When you're trying to get a boat put together without a ton of cash, that particular price discrepancy looms large, but with a little creativity you can find other ways to purchase the same thing. For instance, jacklines - the polyester webbing you attach yourself to when working on deck - at West Marine are more than $160 for 80 feet. You can purchase essentially the same thing from any sporting goods store that has a rock climbing section, and we bought 80 feet of nylon webbing for $0.38 a foot from REI, saving us about $130. Other places to look are used boat supply stores, Craigslist and eBay.

Do as much work as you can yourself. The cost of having a shipyard do most of your work can be huge. Thankfully, I have Vlad, who can fix pretty much anything that's fixable. Without his talents, we probably couldn't afford this trip.

Don't buy it if you don't really need it. I know this sounds obvious, but I can't even count all the times I've been in a store and purchased something that wasn't on our list and that we didn't need. Not only do you not have enough space on a boat to bring the kitchen sink and everything else, but it doesn't make sense for your wallet either.

I was talking to my mom a couple of months ago, and we were discussing why young people don't go cruising very often. My mom is a somewhat of an expert on this subject since when she was in her early 20s she sailed across the Atlantic twice and the Pacific once. Her theory is that sailing is just a much more expensive proposition now than it was in the 70s. These days, not only do you have the cost of the boat and its upkeep to think about, but you also have a ton of electronic equipment that just wasn't available when my mom went sailing. Chart plotters and AIS had yet to be invented. My mom and Bill used ropes (I'm sorry, lines!) for jacklines. They rowed into port, and their diesel engine didn't work at times, turning my mom into an excellent deckhand. And yet, they still managed to sail all over the world with nothing more than a solid boat, a sextant and charts.

Some people might say that you can't cruise without all of these new products, and undoubtedly those products make sailing an easier task. Case in point, the GPS! But it's good to consider, for those of us without a lot of money but the desire to go out and see the world, that it can be done without mountains of dollars.

Our Trip to West Marine

Look at all that stuff. 

We have officially almost completed everything on our "to buy" list (not so on our "to do" list!). Overall, we shelled out $4,200 on outfitting Bettie from West Marine. Our lovely dinghy took up $1,700 of that. Out of the $2,500 left, we purchased automatically inflatable PFDs with harnesses, two rearming kits, two tethers, a handheld marine GPS, a handheld VHF, two foul weather jackets, one pair of galoshes, oil, 4 oil filters, 200 feet of galvanized anchor chain, a macerator, a 500 gallon an hour bilge pump, a new washdown pump, a sump pump for the shower, spare headlamps, a giant spotlight with rechargeable batteries, a spare set of jib sheets, 80 feet of Vectran line (to use as backup rigging), 30 feet of shock cord, epoxy sticks, a fan, and 2 winch handles. Can you guess which of these things cost the most? The galvanized anchor chain, which came in at $600. Who would have guessed that out of all that equipment the most costly was basically a big hunk of metal?

I would like to give a big, humongous thank you to both of our families. They were all super generous to us for our birthdays. Our moms helped out by buying us safety gear, and Vlad's dad got us an extra VHF radio and light raincoats. My dad is helping us keep clean and caffeinated with a solar shower and a stainless steel coffee press. Thank you all so much for your love and support!

Not to give West Marine all the love, we've also outfitted through the Boaters Resale Shop in Kemah, REI, Home Depot, Sailrite, Amazon and Costco. I'll give a detailed summary of all the things we bought for the trip and where we got them in a bit. Here's a post from S/V Totem, a family who is currently cruising in the Pacific. They detailed their must haves and tips to finding good deals on expensive items, useful information for sure. 

To be honest, this is the largest spending spree I've ever been on in my life, and it's been a strange experience. At first, it felt kind of good to get all the stuff we needed after a period of extreme frugality. It was comparable to avoiding sugar for weeks and then eating a big, scrumptious slice of chocolate cake. Initially, there's a rush of excitement, that endorphin burst that comes with the first bite or with breaking through whatever budget prison you've locked yourself into, but eventually you just want an apple and to not spend your cruising kitty on an endless array of boating products.

The Dinghy and the Life Raft

It's finally happened. The guns have been holstered. The treaties have been signed. The dinghy wars have come to an end with no injuries and only slightly more tender feelings about tenders.

We wound up purchasing a new dinghy, a compact RIB from West Marine. It's light weight, rows decently, planes well, will be easy to get in and out of and is relatively easy to get on and off the boat without davits. Plus, the dinghy has a folding transom, making it easier to store on deck, and it's rigid bottom should protect us against most run-ins with sharp rocks or coral that would shred the average inflatable (even so, we've already been heckled by one of our dock friends who said he'd give us a patch kit as a going away present).

And it has its own handy carrying case!

We got a decent deal on the dink. The price was discounted about $200, and with the sale of our previous dinghy for $300, we wound up paying about $1,400 for the new beauty, our most expensive boat purchase by far but not bad by marine standards.

Why did we decide on this dinghy? Well, we researched and looked at each possibility, but what finally pushed us over the edge was the life raft issue. The life raft issue, you ask? The thing about life rafts is that they're expensive to purchase ($3,000 new) and, for some reason that I've yet to figure out, they're expensive to maintain (think $500 to $900 every year or two depending on the age of the raft just to inflate it and replace the flares, food and water). But on the other hand, when your boat is sinking you'd kind of like to have something to sit on that isn't sinking too.

We started looking at used life rafts, but nothing fit within our price range. Everything was either too expensive or too old, and we realized we couldn't afford the maintenance on our budget anyway. So we bought a RIB and an epirb. The epirb will tell people where we are, and the RIB will give us something to hang onto if all hell breaks loose. Our main plan is to never abandon the boat unless it is actually sinking and we can't fix it. Period.

Many people may not agree with our decision, but after looking at a range of new life rafts I feel pretty all right with it. No matter which one you're in, it's a horrendous and uncomfortable situation. Sure, a life raft would be more pleasant, relatively speaking. It's got a fancy tarp, more tubes and ballast pockets. But we can use a less fancy tarp, inner tubes, a bicycle pump and homemade ballast and still survive. Is it as nice a set up? Nope. But it'll do.

But that's enough of the worst case scenario. The new dinghy is both fun and functional and will, with any luck, serve us well.

Foul Weather Gear

Check out our new foulies!

While in Arkansas, my sister mentioned to me that she had a cardboard box labelled "foulies" tucked away in her apartment and that maybe, just maybe, there might be something we could use on the boat in it. She used to live up in the Pacific Northwest with her dad, who is a big-time sailor and took her on various boating excursions off the coast of Washington state. When I got to her house, she opened the door wearing this magnificent Henry Lloyd jacket from the 70s or 80s and a pair of white bib pants made out of PVC. She looked like she stepped right off of a Japanese fishing boat.

We spent the next 45 minutes trying on her two sets of jackets and bib pants as though we were playing dress up in our mom's closet, except this time it was foul weather gear instead of high heels. Needless to say, I took the whole box back to Texas. I mean, who can pass up free foul weather gear steeped in family history? Not I. Unfortunately, Vlad's arms were too long for the jacket, and the other jacket had a bum zipper. But the bibs fit perfectly!

We're topping it all off with a couple of jackets that were on sale for $99 from West Marine, and we should be set. According to the Cruisers Forum, there's foul weather gear available for $85 on Overstock.com. I believe our fellow cruisers in training over at Sundowner Sails Again got their foulies at Overstock, and they seem pretty pleased with them.

I realize that we're not going to be using this gear often as most of our sailing will be in tropical climates. Even so, there are no substitutes when we do need them. So I want to give a shout out to my sister Emily. You saved us a bundle of money on something that will keep us dry on the stormiest of seas.

Blogs Galore

Lately, I've been wanting to add a ton of blogs to the blog list, but space was becoming a bit of an issue. Solution? An entire blog page! I've added it to the header bar under Blogs Galore. I hope you find them as useful and entertaining and inspiring as I have.

And the Parade Goes On

Vlad's daughter Natasha came to see us, arriving 45 minutes after Sally, Apache and the two dogs left. Natasha got to experience the mad scramble our life has been lately as we try to get ready to leave in something like three weeks, but thankfully she seemed totally relaxed with the madness and the scramble. She also got to experience what life looks like after you buy a ton of stuff from West Marine - basically filled with cardboard, navigation tools and the touch of shame that comes with spending that much money.

Vlad and Natasha are expert dinghy unpackers.

And she made some rocking waffles with Vlad's prized waffle iron. Natasha is going to take good care of the waffle maker for us while we're gone, and she's going to come visit us on some tropical island. We just haven't quite figured out which one yet. Thanks so much for coming to see us, Natasha!

I Am a Ham!

No doubt all of you are wondering how my ham radio test went on Saturday, and I'm ever so happy to report that I passed! I'm a Technician class ham radio operator, though I haven't been able to use the radio yet because the FCC hasn't issued me a call sign. 

The test consisted of 35 questions, ranging from FCC regulations to semiconductor components, and I studied using a book of Vlad's written in 1993 and by reading the question pool that the American Radio Relay League provides. I also had a healthy dose of test anxiety, since as an English major semiconductors are not my forte. But now I know all about Ohm's Law. And the ionosphere. And coaxial cable! Plus, I got to take the test at NASA. How cool is that?

Theoretically, I will be able to use the Internet and thus update the blog and email while in the middle of the ocean. That is, if I can figure out how to actually use the radio. I have a feeling that Vlad knows how to do all of this stuff but made me take the test because I looked so excited about the idea of becoming a ham radio operator. At least, I hope he does, or we're going to seriously offend some hams. There's a lot of etiquette involved, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to get blacklisted for talking to close to the microphone. 

The only downside to all this is that I have to take another test to be able to use marine frequencies, which will no doubt mean another round of memorizing radio frequencies in between boat projects. My favorite. 

And More Wonderful Visitors

Our most fantastic friends, Sally and Apache, came down this weekend with their two dogs, the latest in our troupe of visitors and, in the case of the dogs, the furriest too. Of course, since we had visitors in town, it rained all weekend. Not that it really mattered because we've been so busy working on our boat and on other people's boats that we can't even think about sailing. Instead, we got to build a tarp tent over our cockpit, making the boat look somewhat like a shanty town.  

Shanty towns are good times. And dry too!

Introducing Barry White.

And the unflappable Snarface.

Having dogs on the boat was a hoot. Barry White took to boat life pretty quickly, jumping in and out of the companion way with zero fear. Snarf, on the other hand, needed a little more loving care. Either Vlad or Apache would have to lift him in and out of the boat as he splayed his legs out in terror, clutching at every ledge with his paws. He spent most of his time lounging on our memory foam. I'm pretty sure sure there's now a permanent Snarf indention. 

We loved having Sally and Apache on the boat. I felt a little bad because we are in a "remodeling" phase - think, the giant mess that comes with working on your boat while provisioning it while living on it - but they took it totally in stride. I know that traveling is time consuming and expensive, but I really hope that they get to visit us in some faraway land. Getting to explore new places with Sally is one of my favorite things. She always shows me how to slow down and how to look, to truly appreciate how unbelievably amazing the world is. You can't beat friends like that.    

A Very Special Visitor

As I've said before, we've been inundated with visitors recently - all of our friends and family stopping by to say goodbye before we cast off those dock lines. But our most recent guest was a little more, well, let's say two dimensional. And I don't mean that in a bad way! One of my wonderful friends from high school is a third grade teacher, and she asked if we would host Flat Stella so that her students could see what our life on the boat was like. Flat Stella is, as you can see, a paper doll. Somewhat like the traveling garden gnome, teachers send these dolls to people all over the world, and those people take photos of Flat Stella doing way cool things like flying a kite.

Or riding on the carousel.

Thanks for the visit, Flat Stella! We very much enjoyed your witty conversation, your thoughtful insights on world politics and your unwavering quest for adventure. Now, back to studying for the HAM radio test. I have to take it tomorrow, and, shockingly, I've procrastinated. Shockingly.

Go Fly a Kite

What do you do when you're leaving on a massive sailing adventure in less than a month and have a gazillion things still to do on your list to end all lists? Go fly a kite, of course!

I got Vlad a kite for his birthday, which I gave to him several days after his birthday along with a cake that I baked in between putting on coats of primer in the v-berth. That's how behind I am. At least the boat smelled delicious, which kind of made up for the fact that I took all of our belongings out of the v-berth and stacked them into a terrifying tower of clothes, drawers, tools and miscellaneous miscellany right in the middle of our living space. Kind of.

I got the kite at this cool little kite store just across the street from us in Kemah. It's called TradeWinds, and the couple who own it were former cruisers. They always fly these incredibly ornate kites from the roof, and we've been admiring them ever since we moved in.

The kite diversion couldn't have come at a better time because that tower of junk was really starting to get to us. Even the hedgehog was feeling the strain. Though we really wanted to, we refrained from flinging all of our belongings onto the free table and instead flew the birthday kite for a few minutes on the beach. Relaxing, beautiful weather, no painters tape that never comes off and no tower of crap. We only have a few more days to go.

Provisioning for a Cruise

Scary, isn't it?

You know that whole economy starting to rebound thing? Yeah, well, I think we might be causing it. We're in the process of purchasing a ton of stuff to get the boat and ourselves ready to sail away. We need a new anchor chain (shockingly expensive), a smorgasbord of safety equipment (PFDs, tethers, epirb, foul weather gear), a new handheld VHF and marine GPS, a new dinghy, new line, new clothes (shorts, swimsuits, sunglasses), and now ... our trip to Costco.

I've been wondering how we would handle provisioning for this trip. Do you take a ton of food? Or just buy food along the way? As you can see, we've gone with the former. When we finally got to the checkout line, it looked like we were getting prepared for a beach apocalypse, complete with swim fins. Seriously, I could barely push the cart.

We purchased 15 pounds of basmati rice; 20 pounds of flour; 10 pounds of sugar; 10 pounds of oatmeal; innumerable cans of soup, tuna, tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce; chicken stock; 1 package of canned chicken (still dubious about this one); pasta; batteries; paper towels; Ziplocks; peanut butter; olive oil; white vinegar; toothpaste; grill lighters; coffee; and an impulse buy of prepackaged lentils (why not just buy regular lentils? I don't know! I kind of lost it toward the end).

We also got a great deal on snorkel gear, a 1.5 terabyte hard drive, new contacts for yours truly, and some really handy reading lights. Perhaps we've overdone it. It's certainly more money than I've ever spent on groceries in my life, but how do you say no to 20 pounds of organic flour for $10? I've read that you shouldn't bring the entire grocery store with you when you go, but, honestly, except for the canned chicken we will use all of the stuff we bought, just as long as we store it correctly to protect it from moisture and bugs. And to repeat my new mantra, now we just have to figure out where to put all this stuff.

A Girl's Guide to Diesel Engines: The Transmission

I get to scrap the rust off of that. Yay!

First off, I would like to apologize for taking an extended vacation from my little column. There just wasn't much engine work going on, and then I went to Arkansas, far from the Yanmar and my diesel guru. But never fear. I'm back doing glamorous jobs like scraping the rust off the transmission. I've got a wire brush and everything! Tre chic.

But why do I care about rust on the transmission? What essential function does it perform? (Once again, it's shocking that I don't know this stuff!)

Not surprisingly, it's both remarkably simple and potentially very complex once you delve into concepts like torque, which I most definitely will not. The transmission sends the energy that the engine produces to whatever device does the actual work such as the wheels on a car or, in our case, the propellor. Essentially, it's just a metal box full of gears that turn with the crankshaft. When the engine creates power, as I described here, it turns the crankshaft, which has a gear on the end of it that connects to a gear on the transmission ** (See note). These gears turn the gears inside the transmission, which turn the propeller shaft, which then turns the propeller. I know this sounds like the inside of a Swiss watch, so please check out this excellent diagram of what a simple transmission looks like. I found it incredibly helpful. Here's a more complicated diagram from my new favorite book, "The Care and Repair of Small Marine Diesels:"

Perhaps it's not as simple as I thought.

This leads me to my next question though. Why bother with a transmission at all? Why not just have the engine turn the propeller shaft directly? If this were the case, each time you fired up the old diesel you'd find yourself ramming into the dock. You couldn't change your speed, and there would be no neutral. Plus, you'd either have to have a second engine to go in reverse or hop down in the water and change the direction of the propeller. The transmission is a much nicer option. 

Bettie has a very basic transmission. We only have one speed going forward and one in reverse. To speed up, we make the engine turn faster. In a car, however, you might want to go more than 5 miles per hour, so the multiple gears in a car's transmission allow you to increase your speed without making the engine run at such high RPMs that it would rather hang out with someone nicer. Like the guys at the scrap metal yard.

**Note: Vlad keeps telling me that transmissions vary, so please keep in mind that I'm speaking in very general terms and that I'm certainly not an expert on different types of transmissions. That's speaking the obvious, I know.