Well, we finally put our drinks down long enough to update the website. Check out the new pictures section, by clicking the pictures link in the navigation bar. We will put up a bunch more about our preparation and what we have been doing soon.
Well, the disgusting funk became just too much for us. The holding
tank(where the poop goes, for ye' landlubbers) had been leaking 'juice'
for a while and we had some interesting fun trying to pumpout the damn
thing. Today as we were pumping it out again, it became a bit stuck. So
Matt gave it a few stiff flushes and POP...the hose connecting the head
to the holding tank comes off. This is how boat a project presents
itself to you. So Matt and Casey begin working on the head. The existing
hose is original, which means it was installed in 1984 and is fucking
gross. Anyways, once the hose was removed it was quickly determined that
the fittings that attach the hose to the holding tank needed new bolts,
as did the access port. 
Bolts you
say? Yes bolts. Not screws that could very easily be attached from the
outside, but "stick your hand into the pot of rank nastiness to put
the nut on the other side" bolts. At this point, all the cruising
boat owners in the audience are shuddering as they remember their
personal variation of this story and how it felt to have poop on them.
To put the nuts on the bolts, you had to shove your arm into the access
hole as far as it would go and then feel around with your fingers for
the bolt. A few times, instead of a bolt, I found a remnant of some long
past dinner. It was pretty gross. Oh, and did I mention the fact that
you had to get your head down within gagging distance of the top of the
tank in order to stick your arm into it? But, in the end we were
victorious. We went through a bunch of latex gloves and we have a bucket
of tools with crap on them soaking in soapy water out on the dock. And
for dinner we had Fettucini Alfredo. Casey cooked. I'm not sure if he
washed his hands.
Both Casey and I worked at Cypress MicroSystems and I just stumbled across pictures from each of our going away parties. For my party, we had a barbeque at work, but Casey had his in July down at Edmonds where Matt and I brought the boat. Once his lunch was done, a bunch of co-workers came down to the boat. A bunch of us went sailing and Casey never went back to work. . . kind of sailing into the sunset. These are great pictures of the boat from friend of ours Eric Blom.
My aunt and uncle came dowm from Los Angeles to visit us today. I gave them Matt's cell phone number because I am always suspect of the reliablity of my phone. It was a good thing because none of the buttons on my phone work any more. Anyways, they showed up around 12:30 today and came on board for a tour. The got here about an hour early, so Casey and I scrambled a bit downstairs to get some of the garbage picked up. They took us all out to brunch and then I had to go to The Men's Warehouse to get fitted for a tux. It was right next to a Best Buy and they suprised me with a Birthday/Christmas/Going Away present of a digital camera. It was a great day (not just because I got free food and a camera). It reminded me of what a strong and supportive family I have.
Here is a video of the dolphin encounter. We will be attempting some video editing on it and a few other videos, but until we do, this is a sample. It is about 32Meg, so it will take a while to download and we might exceed our bandwidth. If we do, I'll have to take it down or have one of my friends with lots of bandwidth host it. I would suggest (to those not so computer savvy) that you right click on the link and select "Save Target As" and save it to your desktop. Don't just try and open the link.
This video really doesn't do justice to how many dolphins there were. There were just as many in our bow wave as were on either side and then in our wake and in the surrounding waves. Dolphins are a good omen for sailors. Enjoy.
So one of the wonderful experiences of boat ownership is the head (or toilet for ye landlubbers). As I write this, the head is not exactly flushing and as Matt pumps it, it kind of just mixes all the "material" into a chocolate pudding of nastiness. Also, earlier today we had to pump out our holding tank. The first pumpout dock that we hit didn't have a pump that was strong enough to raise our "material" up to the level of the deck fitting, where the vacuum hose gets pushed on. We finally gave up and headed to the local fuel dock, which also had a pumpout station. This one worked for a while, until we got to the bottom of the tank and the heavier "material". Then the pump machine started making funny noises and just kind stopped working. Score: 1 for the sohcahtoa and it's resident turd factories, 0 for the pumpout stations of San Diego.
Casey and I were just talking and we remembered that we saw a bunch of Sunfish, or Mola Mola on the trip to San Diego. I saw one that was at least as big as a front door of a house and had a fin that was sticking about a yard in the air. They are apparently incredibly poisionous, being of the same general family as the pufferfish. Here are some underwater picures of the Mola Mola
There should be some pics and maybe video from our last passage up on the site soon. So, without further ado…
August 23rd, we finally cast off our lines from our slip in Shilshole Bay Marina in Seattle. We moseyed north, spending a night in Port Townsend and another in Port Angeles where we provisioned for the passage ahead. We spent several days in Neah Bay waiting out a low front a gale warning that had moved in. While in Neah Bay we befriended a Dutch cruiser named Egar who ended up giving us electronic charts for the entire world after we had him over for dinner one night. Egar has been cruising his boat for the last 15 years, after a pretty impressive racing career including two Whitbred around the world races and surviving the ill-fated 1979 Fastnet race.
On Sunday the 28th, we decided to use the tail end of the low to shoot us out to the trade winds waiting offshore. It almost worked too. We made it about 30 miles offshore before the wind totally died on us. After a few hours of floundering, we fired up the engine to avoid the fishing boats around us and make some progress toward the offshore high and it's steady winds. I'm not going to try to describe the entire passage; instead I'm just going to chronicle some events I found significant. This is only partly due to my laziness. The other part is that I've read countless books, magazine articles, blogs, and anything else I could find on offshore cruising in the last few years and not one of them described the experience adequately. I doubt anyone can describe it adequately or prepare someone else for what to expect so I'm not going to try. I will say that it was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had in my life and that the last couple of years of preparation were worth this passage alone. It's profit from here on out. Anyway, here are some highlights.
Tuesday morning as my shift was starting and Jeff's ending our hand line, a 200 lb test line with a simple lure on the end that we trail behind the boat, signaled that we had a fish on. Moments later Jeff reeled in about a 20-pound blue fin tuna. I gaffed it when it got close enough and we decided to haul it into the cockpit. I must have gaffed it in the carotid because it was shortly lying in a huge pool of blood. Then the fish gave a couple of death-flops and the entire cockpit looked like horrible crime scene. It was only after we had it filleted that we realized that we'd brought wasabi but no sushi rice. We still made some good sashimi out of it among other things
During our night shifts, dolphins had visited both Jeff and me for a few nights in a row. Then, on Friday night about 20 of them showed up during the end of my shift. Jeff and Matt were soon up watching this amazing show. The phosphorescence was really active at the time so even though it was dark out, you could see the dolphins under the water as these glowing blue green torpedoes. It was absolutely spectacular, like some kind of underwater fireworks show. They'd come shooting down a wave 3 or 4 abreast and split off in all directions. Words can't do it justice. The next day I was pondering the idea that we were seeing some kind of vampire dolphin since they only appeared at night. But, before I could start stuffing sardines with garlic, Matt spotted one behind us. Within 20 minutes fifty or more of the playful little mammals surrounded the boat. Matt took several pictures and some videos that should be going up on the website.
On Sunday, our boat decides to take a break. The main sail rips in the afternoon so we decide to take it down. This wasn't entirely unexpected. We got a quote for a new main (over six boat units) a few months ago and decided to run our existing one into the ground first. The bad part about this was that the main was the only sail we'd be using for a majority of the last week. With a preventer rigged, we were able to run dead downwind without worrying too much about an accidental jibe. This was great since the wind was blowing exactly in direction we wanted to go. Without the main we'd have to use the jib and take more of a broad reach to keep the sail full. About an hour after taking the main down and deploying the jib, Earl, our windvane self-steering mechanism, broke. I cannot praise Earl enough and the thought of losing him with three days left in the passage was scary. Luckily, we had enough spare parts and Matt's huge brain on board and Earl was up and running in a couple hours. While none of these problems were catastrophic, they did remind us just how alone we are out there when something goes wrong.
Finally, yesterday we completed our first offshore passage, arriving in San Diego around 1430 (2:30pm). It was nine and half days out of Neah Bay with 10-25 knot winds winds out of the northwest, swell ranging from 4 to 10 feet, and barely a drop of rain. Now it's time to focus on boat projects and getting prepared for our crossing to Hawaii in mid-October.
Well, we made it to San Diego and are tied up at the Public Dock on Shelter Island drinking Gin and Tonics. We got here yesterday and followed these easy steps for disembarkation. 1) Tie up boat. 2) Shower. 3) Find Bar. 4) Order drink with Ice in it. 5) repeat step 4 as necessary 6) Back to boat and sleep for a long time. It was quite nice to have something cold since we don't have refridgeration and the ice that we packed in our cold boxes all melted by September 3rd or so. . .which coincided with when the ice boxes started smelling a bit 'funky'. More details of the passage soon.
Thursday - Made San Diego yesterday around 2:00. After calling around the 3$ a foot a day marinas we stopped off at the police dock. Here it's $10 a day for the first 5 days and $20 a day for the next 5. Trouble is you can only stay 10 out of 40 days. But there are free anchorages all around SD. Apparently you have to go through an inspection first to make sure you aren't a floating pile of shit. So we'll be anchoring around and spending our 10 days here sparingly. After dealing with all the moorage stuff we were each able to partake in glorious showers. Free. No time limit either . Hot. Finally shaved too. After 2 weeks I still wasn't much of a beard farmer. Then we went into town last night and had dinner and some drinks. Not having a good nights sleep in more than a week we were all walking dead by about 10:00.
Tuesday - 100 miles from San Diego. It finally got hot today. The 15 knot winds and 8 foot seas went away over night so we motored all day. We were hoping to get to San Diego only using 15 gallons of diesel or so. Just enough to clear the harbors at either end and to charge the batteries along the way. Silly navy exercises meant we had to do a detour around a "missile exercise". Wasted about 4 hours and about 6 gallons of diesel on that. All we really want to do right now is get to a dock in San Diego, take showers, and go get beers and some food, so having a detour at this point really isn't helping things. I know I should be on more of a cruising mindset where there is no plan and we're never late, or early but I just can't help myself
Sunday - Ripped the main the rest of the way today. At about the same time a tiny little clip that holds the Monitor windvane together let go as well. We dropped the main and kept sailing on the jib and steering by hand while I climbed over the stern of the the boat to fix the windvane. We have a plastic jar full of parts and after figuring out exactly what let go and what needed to go back on it only ended up taking about an hour and a half to fix. I'm not sure I like the design that relies on a few little copper clips that are susceptible to corrosion. So add in completely rebuilding the windvane and looking for a new main sail to the list of things to do in San Diego. Things we're going just a little too easy for us I guess
Saturday - Today was the day of the dolphin. You can hear them inside the boat whistling and clicking through the hull. Outside it's amazing. 20+ dolphins zig-zaging everywhere around the boat. Everywhere you look you see one, so it's really hard to keep any sort of count. You be watching a group of 5~6 or here, only to see 10 swimming abreast of each other on the other side. Then looking off into the distance you'll see a few lone dolphins coming through the waves toward the boat at high speed. Truly incredible. I took some video to try and be able to give everyone a taste. Later we ripped the main during a jibe. It got caught up in the upper spreader and since we've been going downwind most of the week that part had been rubbing also. Nevermind our sails are pretty old as well and have already done 50K miles
Thursday - About 80 miles off the Oregon/Cali border. Not much to write in the last few days since we've just been sailing. As mentioned in some of the many sailing story books that Casey and Jeff have read, there isn't really a ton of free time while you're making a passage. We're doing 4 hour watches during the day and 3 hour watches during the night. So I'm spending about 8 hours a day sitting in the cockpit making sure the wind steering doesn't do something stupid. So far it's been doing it's job perfectly. The other 16 or so hours a day I spend sleeping, eating, stumbling around the boat or just staring off at the water. Occasionally we see some wildlife. Today it was the little jellyfish like things that had a sail that stuck out of the water. No bigger than the palm of my hand but there were thousands of them. We're sailing downwind in with 15 knot winds and a 9 foot swell with 4 foot wind waves. The waves are going right with us which is way better than 90 degrees to us but still they push us around a lot. So the boat is rolling about 30 degrees either way almost constantly. This makes getting good sleep really hard. Not just to stay in your bed but to also relax enough to fall asleep. Haven't seen many boats in the last few days either. I think Jeff saw a freighter earlier today, but that's been about it. Most of the commercial shipping must stay closer to shore. I took a shower for the first time since Neah Bay. The water was cold since we haven't been running the engine and it was pretty difficult to stay upright in a slippery little room. The water out here is very blue. Like a deep steel blue. I should take a picture but I'm sure that it would not come out right. Still waiting for the weather to warm up too. I know we're barely into northern CA but it would be nice to not have to wear full foul weather gear at night. The phosphorescence out here is amazing too. At night we leave a trail that looks like boiling water with big bright chunks coming off all the time. Jeff said he saw some dolphins and that their trails were visible as they swam around and underneath our boat. I'm sure our keel and rudder put on quite a show for them too. We're able to catch a tuna yesterday and had some sashimi for lunch. Hopefully a giant tape worm isn't growing inside my soft tissue right now.
Sunday - Neah Bay, about to leave for San Diego (4:30 pm). Pulled an Edgar last night. I can't believe we never thought of it earlier, but we just didn't go pay for moorage yesterday. We've not paid for state bouys before, but it never occured to go to a marina and just not pay. Anyways saved ourselves $40. Stayed up till about 1:00 working on the drogue and some more this morning. We might have 1/3 of the cones on by now. Had to cut a nice splice off one end of a piece of rope to be able to slide the cones on. Shame. A guy who was cleaning fish at the cleaning station came by with a bucket of halibit chunks and gave them to me while I was securing our liferaft to the deck. Almost enough to fill a gallon ziplock bag. So technically I've caught the first fish, ha. The lifelines are on. Everything on deck is lashed down well. We're expecting 7 foot swells w/ a 10 second period and small 1~2 foot waves on top of that. So off we head for 10+ days to San Diego. There better be another entry..
Saturday - Met Edgar on the Lariecook from Holland last night. Lariecook apparently means something like gobbledegook. He has been cruising and racing for about as long as we've been alive, so we traded him some spaghetti and peach cobbler for a few of his insights. Also he somehow had a copy of some charting software and also the entire world charts to go along. So now we have electronic charts of everything. We also got a tour and drinks aboard the Lariecook. Edgar designed and built the boat over 4 years and finished it about 13 years ago. Because of his racing background I'm sure, the thing looks nothing like our boat. No wood, well 2 pieces, a stove handle and a single tread at the top of the companionway. The 39' boat weighs 9K, where as our 44'er is 28K+. His entire interior is one open space. The shitter is in the kitchen. Headroom was maybe 5' tops. There was some sort of lifting keel that is still a bit of a mystery to us. Still the boat was pure function. No frilly crap like ours, but no way we'd last 2 years on that thing. The thing was subconsciously designed for single handing or mutinys, take your pick.
Friday - Anchored in Neah Bay last-night. There is hardly anything here. None of us get cell service because only Verizon has a tower. Also I don't see anywhere we might be able to get a wifi connection. So we're incommunicado save for a pay-phone, which means you really hope the person you are calling picks up the phone on the other end to make your trip up the dock worthwhile. We're on the Makah Indian res and apparently this is a dry area. So no booze but the rest fo the town is a bit crazy. One general store. Also they are having a festival this weekend (Makah Days perhaps) and we just heard some fireworks go off. Probably get to see some more later tonight after dark. It's a bit strange how urban the people here are. I mean that in that the kids all seem to listen to hiphop and talk like rappers and swear a ton. Mabye it's just youth mixed with growing up in a fishing village. Maybe I'm getting old. Still this is a different place from PA. Also it's more expensive to stay here. $40 instead of $20. We were thinking it would be cheaper, and considering the accommodations, and it should be. Set up the LCD and the laptop last night and watched the Incredibles. This is definitely not a technology lacking boat. We might not have satellite internet, but we have about everything else. 3 computers. 2 LCD screens (one for the nav station, one for the salon), SSB email, wifi, DVD burners, ipods, and I'm sure more I'm forgetting. Probably will pickup a sat phone in San Diego and be able to call people and recieve text messages in addition to emails, though not as cheeply as with the SBB. Then again the SSB had a not so shabby start up cost.
So far it's been 3 cooked meals a day and coffee in the morning. With all this free time it doesn't seem like a big deal at all.
Had a strange dream we drug anchor and caught another boat's anchor rode in the process. We both ended up a couple hundred feet onto land through a fence and on some pavement. Then the coast guard came and took our keys and said we couldn't have access to the boats. Not shortly thereafter i saw people climbing up into our boat and tossing stuff out, but this was all a dream. We did drag anchor, but Jeff and Casey were awake, and I figured we didn't need a third person up to worry. Also we might need a fresh body to take watch in a while so I should get my rest. Or maybe I just didn't want to get out of bed. But you can see where the dragging anchor dream comes from. Can't wait to see what dreams I get hundreds of miles out to sea. I'm sure I'll see our boat sink in my head a few times. Joy
Thursday - Boat Haven Marina - Port Angeles to Neah Bay. I made swedish pancakes and bacon for breakfast for the crew. That took a while but was worth it. Afterwards we left PA for the 8+ hour motor to Neah Bay. Winds were light and kind of going the direction we wanted, but still we haven't had a good reason to set sail. Soon... Worked on some double braided eye-splices for the series drogue. Need to do 6 or so. They take a while and when you screw one up and have to start over they take a really long time, well twice as long but you get the point. After the splices are done we need to weave about 150 cones into the drogue lines. Here is where a picture would be worth a thousand words, but basically we're making a long chain of small cones to act a break for when the shit hits the fan and the waves a so big we want to avoid surfing down the face and plowing into the trough of the next wave. That kind of maneuver is a good way to endo your boat and/or break stuff. We could have bought the entire thing assembled be we went for just the cones, knowing that we could get line cheaper and that the practice of splicing and attaching all the cones would be good be good for our constitution, and give us $1200 more beer money
Wednesday - Anchored outside of the Port Townsend Marina breakwater last night. First time since we've owned boats that we weren't paying for a place to stay. Before even when we were away from our dock we were still paying for moorage back at Shilshole.We arrived last night under calm seas and light winds around 10:00 and dropped anchor about 500 feet off the breakwater. We were exposed to the south, but with light wind from the NW the night was very pleasant. Jeff made Zatarain's and chicken for dinner. I predict a large amount of Zatarians being consumed on this journey, that is as long as we can still find places to buy it. We're thinking about writing the fine folks at Zatarian's and getting some sort of sponsorship. After the big Z we heated up some of my mom's peach cobbler. Good stuff. After that it we set up the LCD and watched a couple episodes of ATHF and Sealab 2021. Hit the sleeping bag on the port settee at midnight and slept great.
So strange to think in a few days we'll be sailing into warm beaches and palm trees. First stops before that first though, Port Angeles and Neah Bay...
Made the guest dock in Port Angeles at 3:30 pm. It was nice to have the 140' Walkabout throw out a huge wake for us on the way into the harbor. Then it was off to get groceries and check for an internet connection somewhere.
Walked into town, ended up going a bit more than a mile. Bought as much essential groceries as I wanted to carry back. Jeff and Casey made the same walk a few hours later and made the smart move of taking a taxi back. Well they did buy $150 worth of stuff. Enough to get us to San Diego. Mmmmm Little Debbie's Nutty Bars, so good, so bad.
Put the Starboard lettering on for our name this evening too. We are now fully the sohcahtoa. We'll do some sort of ceremony to bless the renaming before heading to San Diego. I hear it involves drinking some champagne, but not breaking the bottle. The bottle breaking is reserved for the first naming of a boat, but since the first name of the sohcahtoa was the Rough Rider, there had to be some way to rename a ship while appeasing the gods of the sea.
4:22 Tuesday -Just untied from K dock at the Shilshole Bay Marina. Not quite sure what I'm getting myself into. The last few months and especially weeks have been so filled with getting everything ready that I haven't had a chance to really grasp what this trip might be. Then again I don't want to either, I want it to be like nothing I could have ever thought of before today. It's 2 plus days to Neah Bay, where we will top off our fuel, water, food, and get any final items before heading out into the Pacific. The plan is to follow some longitude line (cant remember which right now) south along the coast. Most of the time we'll be 50~100 miles off the coast, so we'll leave sight of land at Cape Flattery (tip of WA) and likely won't see land again until we head back in to San Diego. so I guess this is how it all began...
We are just finishing packing and are going to be heading out this afternoon. Thanks everyone for all the support and we will keep updating as we can. The next few days should takes us to Port Angeles, then to Neah Bay, then we will head out to sea and out south west to the W128 00.000 line and then head south. . .it's just that easy. The current rough estimate puts us in San Diego around Sept. 5-9th. Watch the forums, since we may be able to call someone here with our status and they can make an update for us. Well, until San Diego or a Starbucks in Port Angeles with free Wifi, hasta la bye-bye.
We are packing up the boat and running last minute errands. Tomorrow morning (Tuesday) will be our casting off date...until we don't at least. First stop, Port Angeles or Port Townsend. We have lots more to put up on the site, just no time to do it.
During a checking and tightening the hoses session, the raw water pump was found to be leaking from it's shaft. Now this is something that if we hadn't seen it, it would most likely gotten us to San Diego, but once you actually see it, you have to fix it. Anyways, lots of time and a new water pump later, things are back together.
We are still sorting/packing/throwing stuff away and handling our respective business. Leaving on Friday is bad luck, so this weekend might be a winner. I think that we may have just sublet our moorage slip at Shilshole, so we might have some extra incentive to get "off the dock"...and then "back on the dock" over at the guest moorage. Anyways, keep sending money.
Here is your opportunity to say what you really think about us. Click on the link to the forums (upper right corner) and fire away. You must register to post.
Okay, so we have been incredibly delinquent about updating this site. It has been funny to look at the web statistics for the page and see that the hits average about 5 seconds. Long enough for you all to think "those lazy bastards" and then go back to fark, CNN or slashdot. So, over the next few days we will put up a shitload of content (well maybe only a shitpile or just a shitmound). . .or I could be lying.
All contents of this site, unless otherwise noted, are © 2007 Casey McNeese, Jeff Stewart and Matt Smith. All Rights Reserved.