Test Sail: Beneteau 323

Kris and I are going to take this little beauty out on Saturday. She's not the world cruiser we expect to head for blue water in, but we are thinking a couple of years of river sailing in something like this, might be the best next step as we build our skills.

I think that future boat is going to be an Island Packet. Those boats really speak to me.

Anyway, this one is affordable for now, in great shape, and possesses the important things that Kris looks for in a boat: built-in wine racks.

An August Passing

This blog took a new tack back in September, inspired by Kris's and my determination to set ourselves a new course in life. I recounted that in our Bidness post.

Just this week, Adam over at Messing About in Sailboats posted his own manifesto, or at least the opening shot. He has set his year and intends on sailing off to the Caribbean in 2014. We are supposed to track him and hold him to his word, in support of his pursuing his dream.

Kris and I have an article posted on our home office wall. It's a similar piece to the one that Adam references in his post. If you look around enough, you can find them. They are the one's telling you to make the leap.

I told Kris about Adam's post and read the inspiring passage to her. She was as touched as I. Today she sent me her date. We have been shooting for somewhere in the 4-6 year range, with our eye on 2014, also. Now we have an actual month, August, and a day, the 15th.

Thanks, Adam.

Our Dinghy Adventures

I am going to start another blog to cover our adventures in our dinghy. I'll keep it here. I don't know how practical it is to keep two of these things going, but the Log of the s/v Clarity is for the boat that we plan on sailing out of Portland with someday and I started this blog to track our progress to that end. I'll keep up with that progress here and chart our dinghy learning curve at Love and Coconuts.

Where did the name come from? Look back through these old posts and you'll see where love and coconuts came from.

In the search to satisfy our dinghy longings, we looked around at a few boats and debated how much time and effort we wanted to put into restoration, versus buying something that we could sail away in tomorrow. I looked at a Lido 14 on Sunday, but it had a few issues, including a need for new hardware and fabrication to get the tiller back in place. On the way home I stopped by the local yacht dealer to see the new big boats just arriving. They have a couple dozen big cruisers in the water, and a handful of trailerable boats in the parking lot.

This day I saw a newly arrived Hunter 170, very clean and they hadn't even put up signage. It also hadn''t appear in their brokerage list yet, so I had to track somebody down and find out the details. I went looking for somebody on the docks and took the girls along to also look at boats. We were down there for about ten minutes before my 5 y/o fell in the river trying to step across to the transom of a Hunter 38.

They are both very polite and the 7 y/o had asked "Permission to go aboard, sir." Unfortunately, sibling rivalry took over at that point and in the mad dash to be onboard ahead of one another, the younger mis-judged the gap and went in feet first.

I was able to fish her out pretty quickly, since she had on her super-floaty lifejacket and was armlength's away from me when she went in. We dried her off with some towels borrowed from a passerby and had to head home early.

I called back and got the scoop on the boat. Went and looked at her this morning with the broker. Took Kris over there to look at lunch and then made an offer, it got accepted and the check is now on the way from the bank. I'm expecting to swap the money for the title on Thursday/Friday. Here she is, sporting fall colors just off Tomahawk Island Drive on Hayden Island.

The 170 is an all plastic boat with a self-furling foresail and a nicely roached main. This one is in excellent condition. The previous owner bought her new in 2000 and has only sailed her about 20 hours, while storing her indoors. The sail covers are still a shiny dark Hunter blue and the sails are very crip.

The only thing I plan on doing right away is adding a boom kicker to save everyone's heads. Don't want to lose any crew to a head injury before they get a chance to give it up for some other reason, like having to sail in rain all the time.

Woohoo!

The Dinghy Search

I looked at the Lido 14 this morning. It's nearly ready to sail, so not a complete project boat, but it could use some more care. The 'nearly' is because the rudder apparently fell off, owing to some problem with the hardware attaching it to the boat, so it needs some repair and/or possible fabrication.

The woman who's selling didn't have the rudder handy. Apparently, she bought the boat from a guy who has used it for a few years to teach boy scouts how to sail. He sailed with her each time they went out and he's got the rudder. I don't know if that's because he was planning on getting the repair work done.

The sails were in fine shape and the rigging is all in good shape, with the running rigging having been replaced this summer. Kris is going to look at it this week and we'll make a decision before next weekend. The plus is that it's under a thousand bucks to get into and restoration will be inexpensive and good experience for us.

Hmm...

International Lido Albacore Pelican

Part of Kris's and my mission is to sharpen our sailing skills by getting as much time under sail as possible over the next couple of years, before shoving off for blue water. We've been looking for opportunities to crew with other folks, as well as searching around for a reasonably-priced sailing dinghy to get some practice on while we target our finances on the big boat purchase.

In the process I've spoken to, or exchanged emails with owners of each of the title boats from above. I've also considered a couple of lasers that the local clubs have listed on their sites. The Lido 14 looks the most promising at this point and there's an active fleet ten minutes from my house. Although I haven't heard from her owner yet (a yacht broker we have been working with on the big boat is putting us in touch with her), I've got high hopes.

Pickings seem kinda slim around here for a trailerable sailing dinghy and the guys who have them and post them for sale seem reluctant to part with them even though I found them precistley becasue they had been posted for sale. Lest you think the problem is on my end, I have not asked about price, nor did I send annoying strings of emails asking questions about boat equipment or condition. I've simply requested a time/place to check the boat out.

The guy who posted the Albacore lives in a small town, eighty miles south of us, fondly referred to as CowValley. They have access to the Willamette River, which is pretty sheltered by high banks at this point, so, I imagine, this guy must have to drive an hour to the nearest lake to get in any real sailing and, being a farm town, I also imagine the sailing community is, well, standing long watches.

I found the Albacore posting last Friday and emailed him immediately, since Kris and I were headed down to Corvallis for the weekend. Serendipity, I thought as I hit the send button on my email interface. My son was playing on Saturday night and we had already planned to head down with the vacation home on wheels to spend the weekend. Maybe we come home with a new boat too...

So, what does the guy say? "Sorry, I'm out of town this weekend."

Here's a clue for you folks, if you post something on Craigslist on a Thursday/Friday, expect to be around that weekend.

Makes me think his wife made him post it and he didn't really want to sell.

Either that or it was some elaborate secret agent message that I stumbled into and gave the right response initially, but missed the follow-up code words.

Oy.

The search continues.

Pu'uhonua

We were shopping for a house this past year and had found something that we thought would work for us. It was going to give us more room than the current place, and it had a floorplan that we liked. Kris was ready to sign off on it because it had a retreat off of the master bedroom, which she imagined as her safe haven from a hectic world of me and two little girls. Also, it was new construction. If you know her, you know she's a particular girl and likes things just so. She spent the afternoon today (a Sunday) blowing the pine needles and leaves out of the driveway and vacuuming her roadster's interior. The latter task gave her the chance to use the shop vac; possibly the gift I've given her that she has enjoyed more than any other, with the exception of her extra-large red Coach purse.

We named the house we are in now the Hale Nani Mino'aka, which is Hawaiian for House of the Beautiful Smile and describes how I felt about Kris and our new home together when we moved in to this place 2 1/2 years ago. Although it looks small from the angle in this picture, especially dwarfed by the McMansions we are trapped between, it has a 100 ft. driveway and plenty of room inside.

However, like I said, momma likes new stuff, so we began our search for a new retreat, which when we found it, we were leaning toward naming Pu'uhonua, Hawaiian for Place of Sanctuary. So, there we were, all set up to make the move to the new retreat when the builder filed for bankruptcy protection.

We had made an offer and they had accepted, but we'd given ourselves extra time, planning on closing in 45-60 days. Kris had a bit of a breakdown and cried it out on a Friday night and we spent the weekend hashing out our options and deciding how and what to do. I called on Monday and told the realtor we were going to withdraw the offer. We were able to back out of the deal, since the situation had changed with the builder, and that was the point we started asking ourselves what we really wanted to do with our future.

A couple of the places we looked at were very nice, lots of room, great neighborhoods, and the sort of houses where you end up for the rest of your life. That's where I get stuck. It would be great to move into some place, live on a hill, hoity-toit with neighbors and friends and live the good life, but then what do you do after a year or two has gone by? You're still there, god willing, and a long life ahead of you. That is where the dream of the s/v Clarity starts.

We have talked about looking for a resort in the South Pacific that we could run as a couple, or possibly moving back to Hawaii and living working there, but, still, there you are and the rest of your life is coming at you down that same one-lane road. I want to sail away. I love Portland, I love Hanalei, and I love my friends and kids, but I also know that there is a world out there that I belong too and I want to go be part of it.

Now more than any time it's possible to stay connected to family and friends with email, blogs, etc. Why not take advantage of that and go live our life traveling? That's where this adventure began. The first thing we worried about was leaving family and friends. We aren't leaving, we will just be living in another home. Now, rather than live our life on that one-lane road, waiting out time, we are sailing away and we expect you all to plan the occasional trip to share in our life. We'll supply the accommodations.

Tillerman's Other Quest

Our sailing Bucket List? Here we go:

1. Liveaboard.
2. Cross the Columbia Bar, turn to port, go South for a month.
3. Costa Rica to Galapagos with Aunt Dodo.
4. Galapagos to Marquesas passage.
5. Spend a Northern Hemisphere winter in Kiribati and surf deserted reef passes everyday, while living off the hook.
6. Sail into Sydney Harbor and spend a couple months on Mark Gately's lanai.
7. Up the inside of the Great Barrier Reef.
8. A season in The Maldives.
9. Back to Africa in a boat (Kris).
10. A season in the Caribbean on the hook.
11. Crew a Transpac race (Greg).

Swell blogger

I started following Liz Clark's adventure on her Cal 40 "Swell" after reading about her in one of my surf magazines. She's a cute little surfer girl, but no lightweight. She knows her surfing and writes honestly about her struggles with backside barrels on Tuamotu reefs, amongst other adventures. She gets down and dirty in the maintenance of her 40+ year-old yacht and she is doing a ton of solo sailing, making stops at isolated reefs all around the Pacific.

I love her blog and find her pictures outstanding! Tons of great shots at sea, as well as in places like Kiribati, Bora Bora, Tuamotus, on and on. She's got a great eye, capturing the beauty in details of local life, realistic shots of the daily life in the boatyard, alongside postcard-worthy images of islands adrift in amazing seascapes. AND the girl can write. I predict a successful book in the future.

Our hopes and dreams in a spreadsheet

Which is kinda like a bottle, but not really at all. Kris and I had a follow-up to our initial meeting, this one being a more practical, logistical type thing, and we put our hopes and dreams into an Excel spreadsheet. We have a project plan now (which I'll post here eventually) and can chart our progress toward boat ownership, living aboard, and eventually casting off the dock lines and sailing across the Columbia Bar for a warmer port.

The beauty of laying it all out in the spreadsheet is that we can see each step on our journey and we can chart or progress as we make way toward the larger goal. There are a raft of boring logistical tasks to take care of now, but each one (selling household items, etc.) is made more interesting for the progress it gains us in fulfilling our dream; the sails are beginning to rise up the mast, where they will eventually fill and be trimmed to our liking.

We are spending a lot of time looking at boats now, these initial explorations helping us to negotiate what design elements are essential, important, and attractive. I like the solid practical feel of the Catalina yachts, while Kris is drawn more toward the French design aesthetic in the Beneteaus and the appealing little liveaboard touches of the Hunters. Of course, spending time in any boats salon reinforces the dream. We had the opportunity this past Sunday to look at a boat that currently has a couple living onboard and Kris was much interested in how they had appointed themselves inside, taking note of the hooks and snaps holding pots and pans on the galley wall, the candles burning in the main salon, incense in the head, and a few of the other creature comforts that fit in a small space.

Selling the house is the next major step.

Bidness

Kris and I packed up some notebook paper and a couple of reference books and went looking for a coffee shop one Saturday morning with the intent of creating a plan for our life. It very quickly started to feel like a business meeting, so we surrendered to the moment, threw everything back in a bag, went to Kris's office, which was nearby, and started drafting our ideas with a more formal approach.

The s/w firm I'm currently working for (look for this to change soon) employs an agile development approach and at the end of each two-week sprint we do a post-mortem exercise to review what is working well and what isn't. The approach there is to have each individual write down on post-it notes the things they want more of, less of, and stay the same. Kris and I took the approach of writing down every discrete item we were thinking about with regards to our desire to make the move to a cruising life.

We took all of the notes and stuck them up on the wall. There were about sixty notes posted all over and the next step we took was to begin moving them around and arranging them into groups that made sense. We ended with three groups: business/financial concerns, transition tasks, and knowledge and experience we need to gain over the next five years.

After this we pinned up a couple of 2'x3' sheets of paper on the wall, added headings to the top and ended up with four categories, having split the business category into a Portland living-aboard phase and an underway phase.

The next step we have to take is to organize all of this into a timeline. So, that's where I will be this coming Sunday morning.

Oh, yeah, the intial phase involves selling a bunch of stuff, including a house, a condo, a BMW Z4, a pick-up, and a bunch of smaller things. I took the first step and posted a surfboard and a bike on Craigslist. The bike went the first day.

Boat Shopping

The Sailing Life on Hayden Island was our first stop in the boat shopping journey. They have a deal on Sundays where they open all of the boats they have in their inventory and let you wander through and explore what's available. That's a good marketing plan, my friends. Let me tell you why.

They're beautiful.

Look at that main salon. Of course, you might not want to have white cushions in a living room that's going to be rolling around, but not many people think about that on Sunday afternoon, sitting with a charming yacht broker in a beautiful, teak-accented, French-designed sailboat cabin. Another exciting thing is the stripper pole right there in the middle of everything. Can't wait for the first Friday night we get to spend in our own version of this dreamboat.

I digress.

And so but then this how it all started for us, at the least the shopping phase of things. I have actually been dreaming about making a move aboard a boat of my own for more than thirty years. I started reading sailing stories as a boy and was immediately drawn to the independence, self-reliance, and freedom to wander.

Now as Kris and I search for our perfect boat, the boat that speaks to us, we find ourselves passionately engaging over each bit of each boat. What works, what doesn't? And we haven't even begun to factor in how things will be when we are underway.

So, the shopping continues, while we also are scheduling charter trips. Our first mission will be to charter with a qualified teaching captain, to help us gain the knowledge we'll need to set out into blue water. The British Virgin Islands seem to be a hotspot of sailing and chartering activity. Our first trip is tentatively planned for next April, when we'll fly down and learn the basics of keelboat sailing over a weekend, and follow that up with a week-long catamaran charter.

Bon voyage!