Remember when I said we were going to Block Island after Newport? Well, I was just kidding. Really, we changed our plans this morning when we finally got out of Newport.
Monday in Newport was pretty blah. It rained and it blew. We mostly sat on the boat all morning and then biked around a bit in the afternoon. It was great to be back on my fabulous bike again! Our anchoring job held all day and night.
We got up at 5 this morning and left the harbor around 6:30am. Our plan was to get a head start on the wind so we could make the trip to Block Island before the increasing wind forecast for the afternoon. It was glassy calm heading out of Rhode Island sound. The swells were pretty big so the boat was bounding and rolling all over the place. As we rounded Point Judith I suggested that it was kind of pointless to waste fuel motoring all the way to Block Island, which is a bit out of the way. Stonington started to sound appealing to we altered course and made our way to Fishers Island sound.
The wind did eventually pick up to about 8-10 knots. It was perfect! An absolutely picturesque sail! It wasn’t very warm but Pirat sailed beautifully in the light wind and wide, rolling swells. I really love how well we perform upwind (at least in relatively flat water so far). We got to Stonington around 1pm, filled our diesel tank, topped off the water tank, and rented a mooring from Dodson’s Boat Yard for the night. We’re glad we’re on the mooring now. There are thunderstorms moving in and the wind is howling at 30+. Our wind generator is threatening to fly off the boat. We’re also really glad we’re not still out in the sound, where these thunderstorms produced very strong, shifty wind, big seas, and lightning. Not my idea of fun.
Once again, sorry for the lack of pictures. Still no good internet and uploading images through Lee’s cell phone internet would take decades.
I really felt it sink in today. We’re actually doing this. This isn’t a vacation. it’s our life. We’re home in our boat but we can go anywhere! Tomorrow: South, somewhere between here and Stratford, CT.
Yesterday was fabulous! We sailed to Newport, arriving in the early afternoon. Meeting with the sailmaker didn’t work out and we couldn’t get a hold of anyone to get a mooring so Lee got out the anchor. I’m happy to say our first time anchoring went smoothly and we stayed put all night.
We had dinner with Lee’s parents, brother, brothers kids, brothers girlfriend and her kids. It was a gorgeous evening in Newport: nice and calm and relatively warm.
This morning we awoke to a cooler, foggy harbor. We headed over to the public dock at Sail Newport and picked up the sailmaker there around 9:30. We did a little test sail across the bay and got the spreader chafe patches put on the main. Lee’s family was in the park when we got back to the dock and they gave us a good send-off complete with multiple pictures of everyone on the boat.
Lee and I were a little unsure about heading to Block Island at that point. We listened to the forecast, calling for 10-15 knot winds, gusting 20, and a small craft advisory for Rhode Island Sound. We motored out into the bay, thinking we’d give it a try, but when we got out there I decided those were not the conditions I wanted to tackle for our first passage. We went back and anchored in our spot from last night.
Now we’re successfully anchored and glad we didn’t sail to Block Island. The wind picked up even more later on. We’re hoping head out again on Tuesday since thunder storms are in the forecast for tomorrow. Meanwhile we can explore the Newport waterfront, such as this cafe whose internet we’re borrowing. It will be fun to bike around tomorrow and watch the action in the harbor.
I left my camera on the boat, so no pictures yet. I’ll try to get some up tomorrow.
Really, we did it. We took our home and brought it almost somewhere else. We are now unshowered transients transporting ourselves by sail, dinghy, bike, and foot. I can’t believe we’re actually doing this a year after envisioning it back in Denver!
I am totally exhausted after a full day of running around, trying to finish provisioning and generally get things in order. At least it was a beautiful sunny day.
Yesterday was a bit of an eye-opening experience. We got our sails from Hood and went for a little test sail/rig tune with the rigger and sail maker. Of course it was blowing 15-20, gusting to 25 or more. We got the main and 125% genoa up even though we know Pirat would be way over powered. It was good to have all that wind to tune the rig but we were flying all over the place and Lee could barely hold onto the helm.
We eventually furled the genoa and set up the solent. That little sail is awesome. I am going to call it the soothing solent. Going from a 125% to 86% headsail did wonders. The real trick was to drop the main. Once we did that Lee said steering became manageable. Pirat was still healed way over and doing about 6 knots upwind.
I think my heart was beating about a million times a minute the whole time. It’s been a while since I’ve sailed in significant wind, especially on my own boat! Various things down below went flying everywhere so now we know what we need to stow better. Lee and I also know that we don’t want to do any sailing in that much wind without a couple of reefs in the main and our solent up for a while. We need to get the hang of the boat on some calm days before tackling serious wind on our own. Either that or we need to take some crew with us on our trip.
I managed to pull my camera out a few times during lulls in the wind. Click for more photos.
Traumatic excursion aside, the new sails look gorgeous. They are very tough and seem to fit perfectly. I’m looking forward to trying the multi-purpose genoa (MPG).
On Wednesday I made a Costco run and filled a cart with more food than I’ve ever bought at one time in my entire life. It didn’t even fill the area we set aside for food under the forward bunk! Just picture giant jars of peanut butter nestled in with a generous supply of Rice Krispie Treats and oatmeal. Today I completed the second stage of provisioning at the regular grocery store (random canned goods, dried beans, grains, potatoes) and tomorrow morning I’ll get perishable stuff and ice.
Lee and I ran a bunch of errands this morning, including to Aquidneck Custom, the boat builder that did our deck reinforcement for the solent stay. Bill generously let us pick though their scrap material to find some foam to cushion the propane tank and life raft. The trimaran they’re building right now looks really spiffy!
Tomorrow we’re heading down Aquidneck Island to Newport. Hopefully we’ll pick up the sail guy there and finish what we didn’t get to with the sails yesterday. We plan to anchor or get a mooring in Newport for the night. On Sunday morning we’re leaving for Block Island! The forecast is for light to moderate breeze from a good direction and the warmest weather yet this spring.
Now it’s time to sleep our last sleep in Pirate Cove.
Technically, Lee and I are not really planning to sail away till Sunday morning. We are going to leave Pirate Cove on Saturday morning though, so I figure that leaves us with 3 days to prepare.
Pirat looks almost ready to go on a calm day at Pirate Cove.
Our last visit to Maine was nice. The weather was fabulous: sunny and warmish. I swapped out a lot of my civilized clothes for boaty things, hiking gear, and climbing equipment. The fact that we’re leaving for an excitement filled few years really started to hit home while we were packing.
We stopped at the MIT Media Lab where Lee used to work on our way south. The lab is in a really cool new building and the goings-on inside the glass-walled spaces were bizarre and amazing. A friend from the lab brought us in to use the water jet cutter, a machine that cuts through just about anything by shooting special sand laced water at it. Lee cut a piece of aluminum for part of our new chart plotter mount on the helm. Very impressive.
Now I am in the midst of some serious provisioning (just schlepped back a car load from Costco) and Lee is frantically trying to finish the binnacle modifications before our test sail tomorrow. The rigger and sail maker are due here at 9am. We’ll be tuning the rig, trying out the sails, and hopefully enjoying some nice refreshments. The weather is supposed to be good, at least an improvement on the last few days of rain. We need decent wind for tuning.
I won’t lie, this final week has been very stressful so far. It’s hard not knowing whether the sails will fit and the weather will cooperate for our departure but madly readying everything else anyway. I know that’s just how sailing is and I expected preparing our home to become mobile to be difficult. When Saturday comes we’ll just barely be clinging on by our pinkie fingers for the fun part.
Every morning for the past few days Lee has informed me that we have X number of days left till it’s time to leave. I think we’re both in a frantic state of near panic at this point. At the same time, the list of things to get done is getting exponentially shorter by the hour. The rigger installed our new solent stay today, and I must say, it’s pretty spiffy. I haven’t had a chance to take and pictures of it yet but those will be up soon. I think it’s going to work fabulously and make my life on the foredeck much easier.
Yesterday we checked a fun item off the list. We tested out the BBQ that came with the boat. We weren’t sure how well a charcoal BBQ was going to work in this instance but it did quite well. No sausages were lost overboard, although I think some sort of mini lifelines around the edge of the grill would be an excellent idea. We let the auto pilot steer us around Mount Hope Bay while we enjoyed our dinner. It was a lovely evening that reminded me how much I want to start a cooking blog to highlight sea-going food adventures.
Lee tending the grill on the stern. This would be a lot harder if we were actually sailing.
Will we really be ready to leave on May 1? I have to admit, I’m still skeptical. I have plotted our first few legs down the coast using free online chart plotting software, which makes setting out a little less daunting. I’ll devote an entire post to our planned route in the nest few days.
Before our departure, we’ll be making one more trip up to Maine, stopping to pick up various items along the way (at Trader Joes, for instance). When we get back next week it will really be crunch time. The sailmaker and rigger are tentatively planning to come sailing with us on Thursday to tune the rig and test the sails. Hopefully everything works (and the weather cooperates)!
Lee taking a break in the swing chair he got me for valentines day.
New lettering (plus an album of mast stepping photos etc.)
Our mast came back from Hall Spars with bran new rod rigging a few new features for our solent stay last week. It’s been sitting on saw horses in the yard at Pirate Cove while Lee installed the radar and TV antenna as well as patching up the general wiring. We also put the spreaders back on ourselves while we waited to have the mast put back in.
Things are getting pretty busy around here now that it’s warming up. Covers come off and the marina is packed with people working on their boats every weekend. There was finally time for the busy boatyard to re-step our mast this morning. I came back from a swim in the middle of the operation and snapped some pictures. It’s nice to see Pirat looking like a sailboat again. Now we are really just waiting for our sails, which should be done at the end of this week, and a few more additions from the rigger. Our life raft arrived this afternoon so that needs to be strapped on. The bits and pieces are all coming together and I think we’re on track for an end of April departure…if not very early May. We’re still flexible.
Lee and I just stuck the new vinyl lettering name on the stern of the boat. It looks great! We found a font that is almost identical to the Baltic 38 logo and it looks great as Pirat. Now we’re an official documented vessel with our name and hailing port displayed. I never thought I’d be using my museum exhibit installation skills to apply vinyl to a boat!
When I really think about it, there is really only one thing about boat life that gets to me: the smell. Boat smell has never bothered me. The damp, salty air musty boat odor evokes my childhood aboard Unbroken Wings. Bilge smell, however, is very different and there is nothing pleasantly sentimental about it.
Lee and I noticed early on that Pirat’s bilge was rather stinky. When we pulled up the floorboards there was a bit of grungy liquid and a distinctive fragrance similar to that of raw sewage (We’re pretty sure there isn’t actually any human waste in there but you never know!). Lee has made some attempts to clean the bilge. He has at least sponged out the water that the pump misses from time to time. Every once in a while we got a whiff of bilgy boat smell in the main cabin and anything stored in lockers has taken on the same scent. No matter how much body splash I spray on or smelly lotion I wear, my clothes still smell like boat.
Just imagine what it’s like now that things are warming up. There’s nothing like a nice, toasty bilge to bring out the pungent fragrance. On a warm day, I get a powerful whiff that almost knocks me over every time I open the locker under the galley sink or even bend down to pick something up off the floor. Lee was sponging out the bilge a couple of weeks ago when our carbon monoxide detector started beeping and telling us to “move to fresh air”. We headed for the cockpit.
Closing up the boat for almost a week while we were in Maine was disastrous. The smell was unbearable. Something had to be done. After consulting a few resources on the subject, I stocked up on bleach, Comet, dish washing soap, sponges, and scrubbers. Armed with this artillery, I tackled the bilge under in the aft cabin. It was a manageable size to experiment with and was among the dirtiest.
It's a dirty job, but my yoga flexibility helps!
I started by soaking up the stagnant water and removing some of the scum (who knows what it is. I sure don’t want to know). Then I sprinkled Comet all over the place, scrubbed that down with a damp sponge, and went a little crazy with the dish soap as a grad finale. I managed to get all the suds out and everything looked cleaner but didn’t smell any better. That was disappointing. I guess I’ll have to clean the whole bilge to make a noticeable impact.
As Lee and I update Pirat one piece at a time, we admire the boat’s design and construction more and more. Of course it has its flaws, like any boat. Right now it looks like a ransacked wreck with the mast down and Amazon boxes of parts taking over down below.
Tonight we rediscovered this YouTube video of another Baltic 38 that was for sale in Europe recently. The boat in the video is the standard model, while ours is the tricked-out racing model, but this gives you a good idea of what Pirat looks like. Of course Pirat is more attractive…or will be in a few weeks.
I find this video hilarious. It has cheesy techno music, a unintelligable narrator, and seems to objectify the boat like soft-core boat porn. Enjoy.
The original plan was to head South for the Caribbean in the spring, leaving as soon as possible after I finished my thesis and returned from California. That departure date began to seem unrealistic the more we thought about sprinting down the East coast and through the Caribbean to someplace relatively safe from hurricanes before July at the latest. We’re not sure how fast we can sail and everything is dependent on the weather. Various boat projects are also not complying with our original timetable. The mast is still out while Hall Spars manufactures our new rigging. Some of our sails should be done in the next couple weeks but our MPG (multi-purpose genoa) won’t be ready till mid-April. Piecing together the solent stay attachment and deck reinforcement is also taking more time than we anticipated. All these things will come together in the next month or less but there is no way we’re getting out of Pirate Cove in time make a safe passage to the Caribbean.
I must admit, we saw this coming. We have been mentally preparing ourselves for the possibility of cruising the East coast of the U.S. this summer and fall so it’s really not a disappointment. Last summer I learned that New England is actually really beautiful and warm in the summer so I’m really looking forward to exploring the Maine coastline.
The current plan, in all its vague glory, is to start sailing south by the end of April. Our slip lease at Pirate Cove expires April 30 and we might as well head for warmer water. This is where things get fuzzy. We’re not sure how far South we’ll sail. Maybe just to Annapolis, maybe all the way to Florida, but we’ll head back North eventually. That way we can enjoy New England in the summer and get lots of sailing miles under our belts. By the time we head for the Caribbean in November, the ideal time for that journey, we’ll be pros!
Lee has always told me to go with the flow. I think this new itinerary exemplifies that. Now it’s my job to learn to use the electronic chart programs and figure out where we’re going!
The wonderful, sunny weather is over and the rain has moved back in.
I arrived back in Rhode island last Friday to alternating rainy and sunny days. It’s finally Spring! Today was one of those sunny March days that makes you hopeful for summer. Lee set up the cockpit table and worked on projects outside. The canvas guy was also here working on our companionway dodger for most of the day. I organized things down below, ran errands, and did some much-needed yoga.
My trip to California was a nice break and my thesis defense went fabulously. It could not have turned out better. I still can’t believe I’m done!
Missing Lee was the only downside to my trip. He was all alone on the boat and really missed me too. Now, we have emerged from our time apart ready to take our relationship someplace new. We’re engaged! We’re thinking a wedding on some Caribbean island is in order.
Needless to say, the happiness on Pirat is pretty intoxicating right now. I’m sorry, it’s just too amazing not to share!
More to come on our updated sailing plans for things Spring, Summer, and Fall.
Follow us, a wandering family with a sense of adventure.