Things I’ve Learned From Sailing
1) A boat is a good teacher.
Living on a boat provides moments, hours and days to learn. Technical malfunctions require attention to debug, read manuals, draw diagrams, turn wrenches and most importantly to visualize what is happening and what should be happening. Mary Beth and I marvel that people who have not learned their boat’s systems can do extended cruising at all. Many do this, but they either spend a lot of money and time in boat yards or they keep close to home.
The engine, the fresh water system, the heads (aka bathrooms) really don’t care whether you can fix them or not, but they do enjoy malfunctioning in ways big and small. On our boat many of these critical bits and pieces are 28 years old and, like people, get cranky, injury prone, stiff and obstinate with age. On boats most of these bits are hidden away out of sight making access and debugging difficult and awkward.
A paradox of boat maintenance and repair is the need for both patience and for quick response and the wisdom to know when each is needed.
The latest example of this happened yesterday. The last two days have been brutally hot and humid. We decided to stay in a marina where we can plug into shore power and run our air conditioner. We got all settled into our slip and were satisfied that our dock lines had the boat securely tied, quickly changed into our bathing suits so we could go cool off in the pool and turned the AC on so the boat would cool off while we were at the pool. And…..nothing…..It took us about 15 minutes calmly working together (well there was some muttering from one of us) with sweat dripping down our faces to figure out that the pump had lost prime and how to get it re-primed and started. It would have been easy to get upset, throw up our hands and give up and pay someone at the marina to fix it the next day. But it's so much better to figure it out ourselves and just get it fixed together.
So we learn how to get to parts, how to get light on the subject so we can see, how to collaborate (e.g., argue without getting violent), and sometimes how to get 4 hands into small spaces with each holding something essential to the repair. I am also, very slowly, learning patience with troublesome repairs and am also starting to suspect that yelling and cursing at the broken bits doesn’t help much (but maybe a little).
2) There are some wonderful people, perhaps angels, out there.
We’ve met some wonderful people. In the midst of our engine issues at one of our first marina stays in the southern bay after a very long day, we staggered off the boat to walk to a store to get some drinking water (our water tanks had somehow become fouled). I didn’t think to get my backpack and Mary Beth had only her small pack. We brought no carrying bags, we really didn’t know where we were going, and we were hot and exhausted. As we stumbled up the little rutted and deserted road in what we thought was the right direction Mary Beth mumbled “if someone stops and offers us a ride I’m taking it”. Not 15 seconds later a small car came by, slowed beside us and offered us a ride! We both got in, met and talked with a delightful lady, and got a ride to a real grocery store rather than the convenience store we were stumbling in the general direction of. She waited for us to finish our shopping, drove us back all the way to the boat, and gave us her home number to call if we needed anything else. Her act of kindness totally changed our outlooks on what had been a very long and not so fun day. Who does that?!
At another anchorage we met some other boaters who live on the ICW (Inter Coastal Waterway) when not cruising and they gave us their phone and address. They also said we can stop at the dock at their house on our way back to NC and use their water and power and even do laundry at their house – even if they are not there. And, it being a small world in the cruising community, they knew the previous owners of our boat!
3) Friends from faraway places pop up in unexpected ways.
When we were in a marina in Deltaville VA we noticed a familiar boat, Tatiana, belonging to friends we met in the Bahamas (James and Kristen). We’ve already had one coincidence with them. After the Bahamas they picked New Bern NC to keep their boat (not at our marina, but not far away) and we were able to meet for dinner back in December. We emailed them after we saw their boat to say hi and tell them we were in the same marina as their boat. It turned out they were in Tennessee visiting family. A few days later while anchored and enjoying a dessert of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven with Joe and Tine (MB’s parents who were cruising with us for a week), we heard a knock on our hull (boater’s door bell). There were James and Kristen who had just arrived in our anchorage and seeing our boat dinghied over and helped us polish off the cookies. (By the way, "dingy" is used as a verb as well as a noun. To dingy is to get into the tipsy little boat that many boaters have attached to their boats and to row or motor someplace in it.)
4) Sometimes there’s no substitute for someone with a lot of experience with boats.
On the way to Solomon’s MD we were still trying to localize our engine issues. Running with an improvised fuel pickup tube in the fuel tank (a piece of fuel hose instead of the metal pipe/valve/fittings) verified that our problem was in the pickup tube. Keep in mind that we have looked at the pickup tube many times, pushed wires through it and blown through it, and it never seemed blocked, but our test pointed to it as the only possible problem area. We got into Solomon’s and got a mooring on a Saturday evening and figured we’d have to wait until Monday to even start a discussion with somebody on what to do to fix the pickup. We envisioned that we would need to order new parts which could take many days or pay exorbitant marina fees to get the existing pickup tube cut apart and put back together.
Sunday morning we went ashore to check in and pay the mooring fee and asked if there was anyone working that day who might be able to help us. We had brought the fuel pickup, although I personally thought that was a waste of time since the chance of a mechanic working on a Sunday was remote at best. The woman in the office said the marina manager was working and she would page him. I thought, “oh great we’re going to go through the whole thing with a manager who will then tell us to come back on Monday and they would get it scheduled to be worked on”.
Finally Jim Sharkey, the manager, stopped by. He looked at the pick up tube and grunted. Then he disappeared into another room. After about 20 min he came back with the pickup and a rag with what looked like a wad of steel wool on it. He said that was inside our pickup tube and there was a little more that he had to drill out. This "steel wool" had 28 years of accumulated gunk stuck in it and this was clogging our fuel supply to the engine. Although we could still blow through it, it restricted fuel flow.
When he finished cleaning it up he apologized for having to charge us, but said it took longer than expected. We would have been happy to pay him whatever he asked for, but the charge was only $55.
We felt like a criminal must feel when their sentence is commuted. I was almost dizzy realizing that this problem which has been lurking morning, noon and night, and especially any time we are moving under engine power was gone. We were in a stupor as we left the office. We felt lighter, less tense and were both struck that now we could go anywhere, anytime again. We no longer had to always have a sail up when motoring so we could have some control when the engine died. We no longer had to sit at anchor on a still day rather than moving under engine power to a place we wanted to go. We no longer had to pick our next anchorage based on where we could sail into and drop the anchor under sail power alone. We no longer had to wonder what we would do with our boat since there is no way to traverse the 3 ½ days of the ICW between the Chesapeake and New Bern NC without an engine (very little of the ICW can be sailed).
5) It’s ok to ask for help and to accept kind offers:
Living on a boat without a car ashore can teach us to rely on others to be there when needed. A big positive out of this that Mary Beth and I value is that not only has it reaffirmed that we are a pretty good team in solving problems, inventing work-arounds, and anticipating issues, but also that other people are out there who are willing and able to help, to share time with us, and to add wisdom, joy and humor to our days. Numerous people have provided rides to stores and advice and we have had so many fun conversations with people.
These experiences and many other small things that have happened help to make cruising more fun and enrich our days. Is it angels, destiny, coincidence…? You decide for yourself, but it seems a bit too much for coincidence alone. We do a lot of praying along the way…
We've been followed by hundreds of dragon flies throughout the Bay:
The Bay is full of beautiful peaceful anchorages:
Tangier Island: a step back in time
A working skipjack: (in MD oysters can only be dredged under sail power at times during the season)
My parents boat Perseverence II (we heard one person say "I guess Perseverence I didn't live up to her name!!"). It's been a joy to be able to cruise with them for a couple weeks.
