How Does This Story End?

No, these aren't my new shoes.  But I live a rich fantasy life.

I’ve been in a major funk.  Major enough to make Dan ask, “Is it over?”  (“It” in this context referred to our time of living on the boat, not, thankfully, our marriage.) “Do you want to move ashore?”

Maybe the funk is contagious.  I’ve been thinking recently about the variety of reasons that the cruising/liveaboard dream ends.   Money runs out, health deteriorates, family needs help.  One couple we know ended the liveaboard phase of their lives when their boat proved unseaworthy and started twisting and flexing in a storm.  Another couple moved back to shore after they successfully completed their planned 4-year voyage around the Atlantic.  But for some other friends, nothing concrete, reportable, or dramatic marked the end -- they simply decided that cruising wasn’t being fun any more, and put their boat on the market.  “I miss long hot showers … and toast,” Ean explained in an email to me. "Turning live fish into dead fish makes me a little sick to my stomach. … I don’t even like nature.  You know what they say, ‘you can take the boy out of the city...’ You hear ‘secluded anchorage;’ I hear ‘solitary confinement.’ What WAS I thinking?” 

But I think the thing that put me into a funk was my BFF Karen’s cute new shoes.  We visited her a couple of weeks ago, and I complimented the shoes, and she suggested going to the store where she had just bought them – on sale! And she had a 30% off coupon! And they had them in my size!

The question was not in finding or affording them, but where to put them.  Every liveaboard we’ve ever known has had the issue of limited storage space aboard.  Our total indoor living space is, after all, less than 200 square feet.  Personal possessions are minimal in this lifestyle.  Generally that minimalism has felt freeing.  Sailnet poster “elspru” explains that “being on a travelling sailboat isn't so much about luxury of the body, unless very cozy simple living is your version of bodily luxury, it's more about luxury of the soul and mind, having many different experiences, seeing beautiful scenery, interacting with new people.”  So here were these cool bronze and black ballet flats -- that were right in front of me, that I had in my hand and could easily afford.  But I couldn’t have them -- unless I could find a storage space for them. The situation just awakened my inner girly-girl and she was pissed! Thus my obvious funk.

Remember the old Monty Python skit about “The Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things?”  That’s what my storage life is like, all the time.  Our galley is a study in organization, nesting pots and pans and bowls, collapsible silicone colanders, and multi-use gadgets.  Two cubic feet holds what would have filled an entire cabinet in our kitchen on land – but it’s impossible to get any one item without moving four more items first.  And the shoe locker we share has room for about six pairs each, no more.  Compared to the space available, it sometimes feels like we have just a bit too much of everything, in every category – too many clothes, too many shoes, too many books, too many tools. (I know, I know, a very “first-world problem” to have, right?) So I either take my best estimate of the most useful item in each category and move the others off the boat – and then get frustrated when I later discover that the one that would meet my needs perfectly, is just the one I got rid of a few weeks ago – or I keep them all and cram them into an already-overstuffed locker and can’t access any of them easily.

Was this going to be the way our liveaboard lives ended?  Not with a bang, but with a whimper?  I always joked that our “exit plan” when we get too old and feeble to live on the boat, is to find or fund an assisted-living marina.  Was I really going to cut it short instead just for storage space for pretty new shoes?  Dan was super supportive through all of this angst (obviously, it was about more than the shoes).  Karen reminded me that every lifestyle, every situation, every decision, includes an element of compromise. (Wise girl, it’s not for nothing she’s my BFF). 

This story doesn’t have a happy ending, or a sad ending, or a funny ending, or really, any ending at all.  Because our life afloat didn't end over this mini-crisis after all. Karen’s right, it is all compromise.  This life afloat isn’t exactly perfect but it’s pretty darn good.  And it’s a balance, because even the best life has some bad days.  I don’t remember exactly what got me out of my funk and got me back on track; there was no specific event.  There’s still gonna be some great days, and some grumpy days.  My funk just began to lift, and then lift further.  We sorted through lockers and organized shelves and donated items to Goodwill and The Clothes Box.  We still store all our things on top of other things.  I can have anything I want; I just can’t have everything I want. (At least, not all at the same time). 

All our galley stuff: neatly stowed

The exact same stuff, no more, no less, spread out. (The nesting pot-and-pan set stows inside the pressure cooker, which is why you don't see it in the first photo.)

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Why Liveaboards Don't Do Sailboat Races

(from my friend Steve P.  Thanx for my daily chuckle.)

Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff

Tidal height predictions for Rock Hall for May 26.

For the holiday weekend we planned to sail to Rock Hall with friend Phil.  He’d never been to the little historic town on the Eastern Shore.  The weekend getaway also would be an excellent chance for us to see how compatible our two boats were on a longer trip – handy to know, since he was one of the folks we had planned to sail south to Florida with this autumn.

The first test came with the weather forecast for Saturday: near gale-force winds.

“What do you think?” Phil asked.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” I replied, “but I’ll tell you what I’m going to do … which is to delay my trip until Sunday.  This is supposed to be fun, and beating into a gale for 4 hours is not my idea of fun.”

I was encouraged when he agreed.  We called the marina to change our reservations; they were really quite understanding about it all.  Even though it was a holiday weekend and they had a cancellation policy that entitled them to charge us the first night’s dockage, the manager told me she’d waive the fees.  “I’m not going to penalize you for weather beyond anyone’s control,” she told me.   Ah, small-town friendliness!

So we got together in Annapolis Saturday afternoon to go over some of the trip details.  Phil is an engineer by training, like Dan and me, so the planning was careful.  “Here’s my dilemma,” he explained.  “I have a small boat and not a lot of extra power, so I’m trying to decide when to leave.  If I go early in the day, the wind is light, but the current against me is the strongest.  If I wait until later, the current is milder, but the wind will be stronger.  It sounds like a trade-off, can’t win.”

I was remembering some challenging times in big currents in Georgia, and was pleased that our future travel companion was taking trip-planning seriously.  “Actually,” I countered, “current isn’t such a big deal here in the Chesapeake.  The worst foul current on the trip will be near the Bay Bridge, and that is only about ¾ of a knot; not very much or for very long, and certainly not something that will control our trip planning.  But I’d like to consider the height of tide when we get into Rock Hall Harbor; the entry is known to be shallow, and low tide tomorrow is at about 3:30 PM, right about the time we’d come in if we leave mid-morning.  Ideally, we’d come in on half-tide rising, but that’s not going to happen; by the time it’s half-tide rising it’ll be getting dark and the marina staff goes home at 5.”

Back and forth we went, plotting the wind against the tide and the time of day against our convenience to make the trip ideal.  Every scenario had its drawbacks.  Pour another glass of wine and think some more.

I pride myself on my navigation, but I just couldn’t make this simple 4-hour trip come out without leaving at 5 AM, or getting in after 8 PM, neither was an acceptable option.  Or fighting foul currents, or risking coming into a shallow, unfamiliar harbor when the tide was at its lowest.  I was staring at the tide chart again when it struck me: I had been so focused on not arriving at the bottom of the tide curve that I forgot to look at the total size of that curve.  Phil is from Maine where the tides can be 11 feet; and I was thinking of the 8-9 foot tides in Georgia, so that’s what was the back of both of our minds as we framed the problem.  Crossing a shallow spot with 8 feet of high tide adding to the water depth would be stunningly easy; crossing that same spot at dead low tide could be tricky.  But we weren’t in Maine or Georgia, we were in the Chesapeake.

“Phil!”  I called excitedly. “I had a revelation!  Do you know what the difference between high and low tide is on Sunday afternoon?  Ten inches!  Ten inches!  We’re both so used to places with big tides that we never thought to check.  We’ve been driving ourselves crazy for less than a foot of water difference between high tide and low!  We can travel in comfort and come in whenever we want!”

Moral of the story: Big problems can seem insoluble until you put them in context.

(PS: We had an absolutely spectacular sail and came into the harbor carefully, at low tide, lightly touched bottom once but that was due to inattention, not channel depth.)

Originally published in the Annapolis Capital-Gazette, May 28, 2013

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Location, Location, Location

It’s a truism in real estate that the 3 most important things in selling a property are location, location, location, because everything else can be fixed.  (And real estate is admittedly on my mind right now; we’re trying to sell our townhouse.  Don’t worry, this is an investment property, not our home; the sale isn’t indicative of any big changes going on in our cruising life).

Built into our character in the U.S., I think, is an underlying assumption that is so ingrained that we aren’t even aware of it.  We believe that your life can be improved if you just move to the right location.  Maybe it comes from being a nation of immigrants and second sons who crossed the ocean in search of adventure and opportunity.  The belief applies whether the move is on a local scale, just across town to a new house in a new neighborhood, or a major move across the country.  At its best, it gives us an attitude keeps us mobile, keeps us open to new ideas and new places, keeps us from getting complacent.  There’s a down side to this as well, I’ll get to that in a bit.

In our home marina, we have a nice slip on the outer row with easy access to take the boat out and go sailing, and a pleasant view from the cockpit when we’re in the slip. But when you live on a boat, this whole moving-for-a-better-life thing is even more so, because the moving is so easy.  No packing, no househunting, just up the anchor and go.  Find the new better place, drop anchor.  So it was with our boat slip.  We have been extremely happy with our specific spot.  Until, that is, our friends vacated their slip, just a few hundred feet away, same marina, same dock,  better view, but more exposed.  Would our lives get better if we moved over there? The ultimate local-scale move, about 150 feet further north.  Would this improve our lives? I was all for giving it a try; Dan had all kinds of concern about whether the geometry of the new slip would allow us to tie up securely against wind and storms.

With the tolerant permission of the dockmaster/slip administrator for our marina, we arranged to spend a weekend at the new location to check it out.  Friday afternoon we gathered some spare docklines and headed over.  It was a 5-minute trip that ended in a graceless docking debacle, fortunately with no witnesses, but a short time later we were tied up.  We were expecting some stronger winds on Sunday that would give us a real chance to test how well we’d resist the wind, so Dan spent what seemed like a couple of hours fine-tuning the docklines.  When he was satisfied we headed to the cockpit to unwind with a beer and check out our new, if possibly temporary, view.  It was indeed nicer than our old slip.  The friends who had been here before had said that it was so peaceful and private that it felt like they were anchored out even when they were in the slip.  The view out one direction was the anchorage; the other way was a carefully landscaped sloping hillside. In our old location, the window above the range gave a view of the side of the neighbor’s boat; here, it showed water and the boat traffic further downstream.  “So, what do you think?” I asked.  “It’s pr-r-r-etty nice,” Dan agreed.

We had an ordinary weekend planned, filled with minor errands, relaxation, some time with friends.  But every few hours we interrupted ourselves, asking each other whether on the whole, this location was better or worse than our last one, cataloguing the plusses and minuses.  For the big ones, view and exposure, we already knew what the tradeoffs were.  But there were lots of little subtleties.  Wifi speed? Plus one for the new slip.  Finger pier on the starboard side of the boat instead of port? Plus one for the old slip. It should have been a perfectly nice weekend, except we had this decision hanging over our heads, a decision that grew in importance until it became monumental and drained the pleasure out of everyday things.   Everything we did was examined and compared.  The walk to the car?  Shorter; plus one for the new slip.  Stern access for the winter? A bit worse; plus one for the old slip.  We were closer to the party pavilion: peoplewatching the guests?  Plus one for the new slip.  The guests walking the dock watching us? Plus one for the old slip. And we could better hear the music for the parties: that could be plus one for the new slip or the old one, depending on whether we liked the genre they were playing. We exulted in the new view and the light that reflected off the water and danced on the ceiling and cringed when the wind blew us toward the pilings or shifted a boat in the anchorage to come closer to our exposed side. We asked the friends that came to visit, and polled our Facebook page, for their opinions.  View? Or security? We walked back to the old slip and stood there for a while, gazing out to the creek.  Then walked back to the new one, and looked around.  Then back to the old one.  By Monday morning, we had to commit -- call and let the marina know, one way or the other, where we were going to stay for the rest of the season, and maybe longer.

What was weird, though, was that Dan and I had changed viewpoints.  Now he was the one who was enchanted by the view, and I was the one who felt vulnerable and exposed.  Now he wanted to stay and I wanted to go back.  File it under “things that make you go ‘hmmmm.’”

There’s a theory that our decision-making style has an effect on our happiness.  The theory says that there are two types of people, one who obsesses about making the best possible decision, the other wants to make a good-enough decision.  Say you are trying to decide where to live.  You could list your 3 or 4 most important priorities in a place to live, attributes like climate, recreational opportunities, job market, culture, cost of living, whatever matters to you, and the very first place that has those things, you make a good-enough decision and move there.   Then you stop spending energy on deciding, and go on to build your life there, and don’t look back. No what-ifs.  Or you could spend months looking for the very best possible combination of those things and many others, spending lots of time and energy to refine your choice, and even after you have made the choice, you always have this nagging concern, you are always second-guessing your call, that maybe if you had changed this one minor feature, your total happiness might be just a tiny bit more.  But meanwhile, and maybe forever, you spent a lot of time worrying.  The downside of being in a culture that believes that you can affect how good your life can be by choosing or changing your location, is that wherever you are, you are not content to simply enjoy it, you are always looking over your shoulder to see if there is an even better place you could be.  As my friend RoseAnn puts it, you miss the good thing you have right in front of you because you’re so busy looking for the next, better, thing -- because if you find an even better place, you will have an even  better life.

I began to fear that the great boat-moving experiment was going to be a bit like that obsessive second type of decisionmaking.  We were going to be in the same marina, same dock; all we were doing was moving 150 feet.  A lot of angst over a difference that really made little difference.  Both places were okay!  One had a little nicer view, the other was a little more protected.  And it’s a boat! It moves; that’s the whole point! Four months from now, we’d be taking the boat south for the winter and it would be all moot.  So why was this so hard?  Maybe because the differences were so minor? As another friend, Margo, asked, “If this opportunity hadn’t come up, would you have been unhappy enough where you were to consider moving, or were you satisfied there?”

Bingo! Thanx, Marg!  That answer was "no." We sent the email to the marina and moved back to our old slip after work on Monday.  Just the comfort of the familiar?  Maybe.  But then we realized what we had seen in the new slip, the one where first Dan, then I, was concerned about exposure to the north wind.  This photo shows the bumper on the piling at midships.  See the abrasion?  Granted that their boat was a different size and shape than ours so our results might not have been the same, but during at least one storm over the last couple of years, the former slipholders couldn’t quite keep the wind from pushing them onto the pilings.

Abraded dock bumper: this should have told  us that the problem of strong north wind was significant.

(Originally published in the Capital-Gazette on May 22, 2013)

What Kind of Error Would You Rather Make?

Yep.  It's another anchoring post.  My last one is here.

The plan was to get a few boat friends together, pick up a Navy mooring in Weems Creek, raft together, then go out to Mexican Café on Saturday night to celebrate an early Cinco de Mayo.  If we had one too many margaritas, we only needed to walk/row back to the boats to sleep instead of driving home.  The weather report was encouraging, for warmth and some sunshine after a chilly spring that has seemed to go on forever.  We arrived at the planned meeting point at Weems Creek after a brief pleasant Friday afternoon sail to find … disappointment.  No moorings were available; they were occupied by a number of dilapidated, neglected or abandoned boats – one covered with a threadbare tarp, one without a mast, one trailing a deflated waterlogged dinghy. There was still some prime anchoring real estate available, so we set the hook and let out plenty of chain, and got our heads into weekend mode.

We spent a pleasant day chatting with other boats in the anchorage, old acquaintances who had returned to the Chesapeake for the summer.  We met some new folks who, drawn by our hailing port of Northport, Michigan, came over and introduced themselves as fellow Michiganders new to the Chesapeake.  And then our gang showed up, some by boat, and others came to the restaurant by land.  Much laughter ensued; later there were even fireworks we could watch from the cockpit.  The derelict boats spoiling the mood were reduced to a minor annoyance, grit under my fingernails or pebble in my shoe, but the irritation never completely went away.  As the boats themselves will never go away, which is of course the issue with abandoned boats – they cost tax dollars to remove.

There was a recent situation elsewhere in A.A. County that was diametrically opposite: a police launch came along side an anchored boat and very politely said that one of the shore residents had suggested perhaps that boat had stayed long enough and should be moving on.  The heavy irony here is that the boat in question was an extremely beautiful and well-maintained one; the owners, Evans Starzinger and Beth Leonard, long-distance sailors well-known in the cruising community, were aboard; and there was no chance of mistaking this for a dilapidated boat about to be abandoned.   (For Evans’ take on the incident, go to their blog  and scroll back to the post from 4/16/2013; another blogger's reaction to his post is here) In addition, there are no regulations prohibiting anchoring in the Chesapeake as long as the boat is properly lit and not blocking a channel or access, so I'm not sure which I find more disturbing, that a shore resident thought he/she had a right to control who anchored nearby, or that the local law enforcement did nothing to disabuse him/her of that notion.

The inconsistent, in fact contradictory way local authorities react to anchored boats in the county is confusing, or worse.   In one case, boats are allowed to sit unattended for long periods; in the other, a properly-anchored and attended boat was asked to move.

In statistics they call them Type 1 and Type 2 errors.  The technical definitions include lots of confusing phrases like “failing to reject the null hypothesis,” but it’s simpler to think of them as “false positives” or over-reacting, and “false negatives” or under-reacting.  See, in the real world, no matter how you make the decision rules, it is likely that there will be a few extremes or special cases that aren’t properly covered.  The trick is to define the rules in a way that minimizes harm from these errors.  In some cases it is very clear to see which type of error is the more dangerous.  If the rule, for example, is about a new cancer screening, then a false positive means some people will get unnecessary followup tests even though they don’t have cancer.  But a false negative means some early cancers will be missed until it is too late, and people could die.  So you skew your test to have very few false negatives, even if that means you might have more false positives – you over-react.  The Coast Guard does the same thing with “mayday” calls – they’d rather go out on a false alarm or multiple false alarms, than miss someone in danger that they could have helped.  In other cases, false positives are clearly the more dangerous error: for all its faults, our judicial system is skewed to minimize the chances of an innocent person being found guilty, even if that means that some guilty may go free.

There are other cases when it is not clear whether type 1 or type 2 errors are worse.  My favorite example of this is the rules for eligibility for public assistance.  No matter how we write the rules, some people just won’t fit in those boxes and their circumstances won’t be covered properly.  If we write the rules too broadly, there is a chance that some freeloaders will game the system.  But if we write the rules too strictly, there is a chance that some folks who really deserve help will fall through the cracks.  There’s no obvious right or wrong answer, but which type of error we are more tolerant of says a great deal about our values as a society.

Perhaps the case of abandoned boats in Weems Creek is a “Type 2” error, and the seaworthy boat asked to move along is “Type 1” error?  In writing public policy, it is hard to find a perfect balance.   Write the anchoring rules too lax, and you get derelict boats that we all (somehow) have to deal with.  Write the rules too stringently, and no one ever anchors out and learns to appreciate the natural beauty of the Chesapeake.  Right now, we’re making both types of errors; do we have the worst of both? Which error are we more concerned about? What do we value?
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A slightly different version of this post was first published in the Annapolis Capital-Gazette on May 11, 2013:

Call Me? Maybe???

 We've known for a while that "something" was a little bit off about our boat's electrical system.  I really am obsessed with monitoring our power consumption and recharge from our beloved solar panels, and I had noticed that one bank of batteries wasn't quite recharging all the way, maybe they were just a few percent low, but something was still NQR (Not Quite Right).

I'm so glad we hadn't known how close we were to potential disaster! (Photo from here)

That's when we learned how hard it was to schedule marine electricians.  We left a message with one, who never called us back.  The second one, we were able to get on his calendar in a few weeks to come and diagnose the problem.   He was very informative about many issues and new ideas and standards that had come into existence in the 33 years since our boat was built to then-code.  No specific answers to our mystery lack of charge, but he pointed out some things that definitely needed attention.  We paid him for his time, but when we tried to schedule the actual work, multiple phone messages and emails were met with ... silence.  So, disappointed that we would now have to pay someone else to familiarize himself with our systems before getting actual work done, we phoned a third electrician.  Who didn't call us back ...

Back when we had our kitchen design/remodel business, we had at one time a 6-month waiting list for new projects.  We had told one potential client this, and offered some other names that could get to her work sooner, and she said, "No, that's okay, I'll wait.  I heard you return phone calls."  That's it? I asked myself.  Not that we're creative, not that we have good attention to detail, not that our work is on budget and on time, but that we return phone calls?  That just didn't seem to me to be a prize-worthy achievement; it seemed more like the foundation stuff, the goes-without-saying stuff, that should be taken for granted.  But now that we were the clients instead of the providers, I learned how frustrating it was to be so dependent.  Meanwhile, I was looking suspiciously at our battery-selector switch, seriously, dangerously undersized by modern standards, more and more aware that something was going to have to be done sooner rather than later.

Just a look at our electric panel doesn't hint at the chaos behind,  but the hand-printed labels and multicolored breakers should be the first clue that this has evolved over time.  Four owners over 33 years had each added their personalization.

Aaaack!  This is what's inside!  The blue circle on the left side of the panel is the selector switch.  The wires leading up to it are the proper size, but the switch itself is small.  

 Enter Patrick and Rob from Marine Electric Systems.  We broke the project into two phases, partly due to the crowdedness of their work schedule, and partly due to the emptiness in our checkbook.  Phase 1 replaced the battery switch and rerouted the wiring.  The scariest thing they found wasn't the battery switch, though; it was that a few connections had vibrated over the years and were loose, as was one of the crimps on those big honking red battery cables.  I feel a lot better now!

After.  The negative wires (black, yellow, and gray) are grouped on  the back wall, and each  positive (red) is labeled.   The big heavy-duty wires that went to the battery switch have been re-routed to a new, larger switch right next to the batteries.  Shorter run of wire = a good thing.

Battery box "before."

Battery box "after." Big new fuses in the upper left corner, big new switch in upper right corner.

What Is Wrong With This Picture? (Dinghy Etiquette)

Annapolis is really welcoming to cruisers; there is dinghy access at the end of every public street that ends at the water.  It is legal to tie up your dinghy there, and leave it while you go ashore. Some of these public access points have floating docks, but at minimum there are ladders.  There are courtesies that have evolved among boaters, ways to cooperate so that everyone can share this resource.  Here's the end of one street in Eastport, plenty of room for dinghies and a couple of ladders to come up to street level.

One courtesy that boaters observe at a dock like this is that after they come ashore, they move their dinghy out of the way so others can get to the ladder; the dinghy on the right in the photo above did this.  Otherwise, they tie their dinghy on long painter (the line that goes from the bow of the boat to a cleat on shore).  This keeps your dinghy secure, but allows a latecomer to move your dinghy out of the way to access the ladder or dock so they can also come ashore.  Here's a bit of a closer view of the less-courteous boat on another day, looking back from the land side, do you see what's wrong now?

It's going to be tough for anyone else to get to the ladder, since this person has chained their dinghy so close as to take up all the available room.  

There's another dinghy-dock courtesy that says that wherever tides and water depths allow, you don't leave your outboard halfway up with the prop out of the water.  The theory here is that you could bounce on a wake or a wave, and your prop could come down and cut someone else's rubber tubes.  But that's not the problem in this case, the dinghy in question doesn't have an outboard, apparently they row.  Here's an even closer shot of the problem, do you see it now?

 I get that this person is concerned about security and dinghy theft.  At the same time, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  Great heavy chain here, two locks, secured at one end to the ladder mounted in concrete, and at the other end to ... ???

Coast Guard Safety Check

Passed first time! Pasting this year's sticker over last year's, at the base of the mast.

We do this every spring, the voluntary Coast Guard safety check.  Some of the things they look at seem more administrative than practical for a boat our size - checking our paperwork and current registration, of course, although the placards reminding us not to dump trash or oil at sea seem superfluous on a boat for two.  They checked our nav lights (all working properly, though they couldn't verify the anchor light at the top of the mast because it has a photosensor that turns it off in daylight hours), life jackets, air horn, emergency flares, fire extinguishers.   Every year we seem to learn at least one new fact from the visit, whether its because rules change, or because each examiner has a slightly different take on what's important.

It was easy and somewhat chit-chat; we know the drill and had all the paperwork ready.  It was also a bit of fun because the examiner herself was in training and being guided by another examiner, so we had the clear sense of knowing the basics as well as she did.  We learned about some new regulations being considered, and got an update on the latest developments in marine radio technology.

That's the thing about safety, though - you can never get complacent.  Coming back from a library presentation that evening, Dan went to check on the dinghy.  He stood up, pulling on its painter (the line tied to the bow of the dinghy, that we use to secure it to the dock), and in a moment of inattention, just kept going, toppling over backward for an unscheduled sea-bath.



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Side note: There's a rumor among boaters that having one of these stickers makes you less of a target for safety inspections at sea, and at least once we proved it true.

The Coast Guard can also board boats underway at will for these random safety inspections, and there's a whole debate on the Fourth Amendment implications of that practice, which I will not get into; I respect the C.G. and the work they do a lot.  But scheduling an inspection at the dock is a lot easier than having them do it while you're underway.  We had one at-sea boarding, while we were underway in the Waccamaw River in South Carolina on a calm, sunny Saturday morning.  Pleasant, no big deal, we spent as much time chatting with the guys over their choice of careers as they spent examining the boat.

Alternatively, last spring we were in a line of boats, 4 little ducklings in a row following the marks up Currituck Sound headed to the North Carolina/Virginia border, as the Coast Guard hailed the boats one at a time to do inspections underway, perhaps also to give themselves some bad-weather boarding practice.  They hailed the first boat in line a big sportfisher, "Have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety inspection?" "Yes, here last year." And the C.G. said, "We'd like to do one again."  About 15 minutes later, they left that boat and hailed the next in line, an older sailboat.  "Have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety inspection."  "No."  They explained that they'd like to come aboard, and asked the boat to slow to idle.  Fifteen minutes later, they finished that one and left.  And I'm thinking, we're obviously next and the wind is stinky and we don't handle well in these conditions and what would they do if we asked them to wait until we got to the shelter of those trees about an hour ahead?  They hailed us, "Sailing vessel Cinderella, sailing vessel Cinderella, have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety inspection?" "Yes, a couple of years ago in South Carolina, and we had the dockside safety check a few weeks ago before we left Florida."  Silence.  Then, "Thank you for taking the time to do that, have a good trip."  Whew!  Then the fourth boat in line, "Have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety check?"  Four boats, three inspections, one not ... yes, I'll take that sticker ... and it's free!

The Coast Guard crew posed for me for this photo after they completed our inspection in South Carolina in 2010.

Boston

Image from here

They are referring to it as "senseless violence."
As if there could ever be any other kind of violence;
Have you ever heard of "logical violence?"

And several of my boating friends are saying
"See? This is why I want to sail away,
And live on some deserted tropical island
Away from all the madness."

Me?
I like to think I'd be one of the ones running in,
To try and help.

In Limbo (it's complicated)

image from here

About that sadly silent newspaper blog of mine ... it's in limbo.  I'm not writing for the Capital-Gazette at the moment; and I'm not not-writing for them either.  It's not because I don't want to, or have run out of things to say.  (Who, me?  HA!)  But. There have been a bunch of changes, some neutral and some negative.

The Cap-Gaz went to a new web format last year.  More modern, flexible, and interactive; except the blogs portion had some limitations.  I couldn't use links, for example, which meant if I wanted to comment on an article in the main paper, I had to give a long ugly url to let people read it.  And I could only include one photo per article, and that by a funky work-around devised by the online editor.  Most frustratingly, I couldn't preview items before they posted, and for the last few months, there have been no paragraphs in the finished post at all, even if they were there in the submissions.  Disheartening.

Then, the senior editor retired and the online editor who was directly responsible for my stuff left abruptly under very ugly circumstances.  Ugly as in, I-read-the-very-graphic-police-report ugly.  And it's not clear who my new point of contact is, and a few emails/voicemails to them have gone unanswered.  Maybe everyone who was even remotely associated with the old online editor was tarred with the same brush, maybe they're just busy with bigger fish to fry, maybe there are emails from them in my inbox buried in a mass of Facebook notifications and automatic sales pitches from my favorite bar, who knows?

It became one of those things that I never realized the value of, until it was (maybe) gone.  I'd been writing Life Afloat since 2008, and love (loved?) the opportunity to make a little contribution to the understanding of what living aboard a sailboat was really like, and the opportunity to articulate my own thoughts to myself.  And while I am never in it for the money, there were some pretty cool perks.  Most of all, the people I've met through writing, that I wouldn't have met any other way, really broadened my outlook and enriched my life in so many ways.  Hopefully, we'll get the kinks ironed out and I'll be back there, but until then, and always, writing right here!