Free At Last!

Baltimore Harbor fireworks we enjoyed from the Federal Hill roof-deck of our friends Paul and Marguerite

So, after two more weeks, the mast is finally ready to go. Rick has been sanding, painting, and putting on new mast steps, while the boatyard guys have been putting in all new wiring, as well as replacing all of the various do-hickeys that were scraped off in the bridge accident. The painting turned out to be one of the most pesky tasks, because the weather had simply not cooperated. We had rain, or more accurately, a little bit of spitting every single day until after the 4^th of July. Plus, the temperatures were ungodly hot.

Rick steams Valkyrie over to the boatyard from Canton and I meet him there with my car. I’m hoping to catch some real “boaty” action, but mostly it’s just a lot of waiting around. 

I watch as the forklift pulls a motor boat out of the water.

 I suppose that’s how they get the boats onto this double-decker rack.

I especially like the container garden that’s being maintained at the end of the dock.  Somebody is really taking advantage of all the sunlight here, and it helps to beautify the industrial surroundings.

Top of the mast, with new equipment

There will be work to be done once the mast is back in, like connecting wires and bolting in the cabin table, but our hope is that we can get it all done today and then leave first thing in the morning. We watch as the boatyard guys do a kind of reverse version of taking out the mast. The crane arrives and they wheel over the mast to its spot beside the boat. Then they hook up the crane to the mast, haul it up to a vertical position, and lower it carefully into the boat.

The whole procedure takes up most of the day, the remaining work in re-connecting the moving parts still undone. Plus, we still have to do a big grocery run as well as last minute business involving the house we are about to leave behind. We’re both exhausted, so we decide to provision the boat tonight and leave the remaining mast work for the morning. Tomorrow we’ll leave the cars in the driveway at home, and take a cab down to the boat.

There is kind of a phenomenon among boating couples that Rick and I have observed over and over again. When anchoring or docking, a couple will split up their roles, one on the bow of the boat and the other at the helm. It doesn’t seem to matter which one is at which end of the boat – the husband will invariably be barking orders and swearing at his wife (we’ve seen the same dynamics among same-sex couples as well, by the way). Thankfully, Rick and I have managed to avoid this stereotype – that is, until today…

Rick needs to do something involving the mast that necessitates his climbing up about midway – twenty to twenty-five feet or so. My job is to spot him from down below, and he explains how I am to do this, but we’re in the taxi cab at the time and I really don’t have any idea what he is talking about. After our arrival at the boat he starts climbing the newly installed mast steps, wearing a harness of some sort that has lines he has rigged up to catch him in case he falls, or one of the steps should give way. The only flaw in his plan is that I’m the one who is supposed to be winding the line on one of the winches, and while winding winches is fairly simple, understanding how this all works is not.

He gets up there alright, but now he wants me to do something else. “Get a knife and cut the tape on the blim-blam-whosey-whats-it.”

You know, I’ve come a long way. I know my port from my starboard, my bow from my stern, and I know how to jibe and come about. It’s of course true that I continue to say, “going downstairs,” instead of “going down below,” and I still call it a “kitchen” and not a “galley”. But I do know the proper terms and what they mean. What the devil is a “blim-blam-whosey-whats-it”?

I clearly don’t know what Rick is referring to. “The blim-blam-whosey-whats-it – it’s right next to the shimmy-thing-a-ma-do-hicky – over THERE!” Well, he’s way up in the air, and from my vantage point it is impossible to tell where the heck “THERE” is.

And of course, it’s always helpful in these situations to speak much more loudly. “The BLIM-BLAM-WHOSEY-WHATS-IT!!!” Well that clears it right up.

Then, I’m supposed to get a knife and cut something? When my husband is suspended in air by cuttable things (they’re called lines, I do know that much)???!!!

It turns out that Rick was referring to the “intermediate staysail shroud” which was taped to the “forward lower shroud” (silly me). I was able to cut the tape, but the knife was totally inadequate and I had to use scissors – clearly a breach of sailorly equipment judging by the rolling of eyes that ensued – but together we got the job done. I think Rick is somewhat sobered by the thought of going up those steps in the future with me as the spotter.

The rest of the work takes quite a bit of time, particularly the cabin table which doesn’t fit quite the same way now that the mast has been altered. Rick does some master carpentry work, and finally in the late afternoon, we are ready to take off.

At long last, beyond the Key Bridge, we are on our way!

Dismasted!

All right, that's not our boat - just wanted to see if you were paying attention!

Our boat, Valkyrie was involved in a little altercation with a railroad bridge. The bridge won.

So, what’s the damage you say? Unknown as yet. Rick thinks it’s probably not too bad, but it really can’t be assessed without taking down the mast. The top is pretty far up there (49 feet – the lowered bridge was 47 feet) and you can use binoculars, but you can’t totally see everything. Rick thinks that the mast itself is ok – if it turns out to be bent, then we’re talking about a whole different ball game. You can’t just bend it back. No, we’d have to have a whole new mast made, and that can’t be done overnight. We would definitely lose the whole summer for sailing, not to mention paying a real fortune.

The guys at the boatyard will take out the mast, but you have to make an appointment to have that done and they are booked for the next four days. Rick spends three days preparing the boat for mast removal, and three sleepless nights worrying about what we will find when the mast comes down. He has to remove all of the sails and halyards from the mast, disconnecting all the complicated wiring (lights, wind indicator, radar, etc.), plus he has to remove everything that holds the mast in place at its base. That includes roping up the cabin table that is normally bolted to the mast.

Meanwhile, the boat has no slip – we gave it up for the summer with the idea that it didn’t make sense to pay for an empty slip while the boat was in Maine. Rick has Valkyrie anchored in Canton, and when he wants to work on her he has no dock for easy access to equipment, and no electricity for power tools. Rick feels like he has to babysit the boat too, since it’s not on a secure mooring or tied up to a dock. What if the anchor should give way in a sudden storm and he’s not there? I've become a boat widow.

The day finally arrives and Rick motors the boat over to Tidewater Marina in locust Point. The guys hook up an enormous crane to the mast and carefully pull it out. They maneuver the mast over to the side of the dock and put it on big, wheeled sawhorses. Then they wheel it over to a spot in the yard where it can be worked on.

The moment of truth has arrived. Rick and the rigger inspect the mast and determine that the mast has made it through relatively unscathed. Various things will have to be replaced – for instance, the spinnaker attachment was mangled - but the mast itself just got some paint scrapes. The rigger tells Rick that this kind of thing (running into bridges) happens all the time. Somehow, I don’t think Rick finds this very comforting…

Mangled Spinnaker Crane

We’re still not sure when we might be able to leave for Maine. Rick wants to take advantage of the mast being down by making some improvements. There are things that he has wanted to do but thought it wasn’t worth taking the mast down for. You know, like your car mechanic will tell you, “As long as you’re in that part of the engine you should have your timing belt replaced, and this and that replaced, etc., etc.” Now he has a golden opportunity to do more work and spend more money! A number of parts need to be ordered, some specially made, and even though Rick can do most of the work himself, he still has to coordinate his efforts with the jobs that need to be farmed out.

The man at work

Meanwhile, Valkyrie has been moved back to Canton. She looks kind of pretty out there, even without her mast, don't cha think? 

Bridges to Nowhere

Chesapeake City

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Becky and Rick are going off on another sailing trip, leading exciting lives, making everyone else feel badly that they have to stay home and work. Chumps all, soldiering on with mundane existences.

Well, let me just tell you how it REALLY is…

We had a terrific plan this year. Rick was going to leave by himself in early June, getting up to Portland by the end of the month. I was to join him up there on July first, when my orchestra’s winter season is over. Then we could spend the summer sailing north, exploring the coast of Maine – a famous sailing ground that we have been unable to enjoy together due to lack of time.

Rick had spent a good couple of weeks slaving on the boat to get ready for the sailing season - re-doing bottom paint, re-fitting the head, and other not-so-enjoyable tasks. Thinking that the boat was now ship-shape, we had our traditional shake-down cruise the last week of May. The plan was to take three days and toot around the Chesapeake, so we headed out from the Baltimore harbor toward the Key Bridge.

I don’t know what it is about that bridge, but it is clearly cursed for us. It seems like every time we try to leave Baltimore we have some horrendous problem, and we’re always right under that thing when it happens. This time it’s the engine. Having just settled onto the foredeck for the cocktail hour, we look back and there’s smoke billowing out of the cabin hatch!

Rick races back to the cockpit and cuts the engine. A fire in the cabin would obviously be disastrous, but so far the smoke seems to be confined to the engine compartment. After some tinkering around down there, Rick determines that the problem is actually with the refrigeration unit – the thing that cools the icebox – and that the actual engine appears to be fine. We end up going out for our little shake-down trip anyway, but Rick admits to me the next day that after reading the manual for the unit (never bothered to read it before!) he now knows that he should have been monitoring the fluid levels. They were down to nothing, and he’s pretty sure he has blown out the compressor. Kinda like blowing a head gasket in your car. The icebox won’t work now, and if you try to use it like a cooler by just adding your own ice, you end up with a big tub of water after just one day. It’s not that well insulated and has no drainage holes.

A working cooler/fridge is something you wouldn’t want to be without on a two or three month voyage. It takes a load of money and another two weeks to get the thing fixed, but Rick is certain that he can still get up to Portland in time to stick with our original plan. He’ll just have to do it a lot quicker and give up on the idea of a leisurely, relaxed trip.

We load him up with provisions and have a tearful goodbye. When we made our original plan, I was looking forward to having almost a month of alone time in our house. Now, that period has been reduced to two and a half weeks, but I feel quite differently about it. My father passed away mid-May, and even though it was not completely unexpected, I’m still grieving and not particularly happy about spending time alone in an empty house. Plus, I worry about Rick going up there by himself. Kind of silly really – he’s done this trip six times by himself, and even when I’m on board it’s not like I’m any big help or anything. But I’m worried anyway.

A few mornings later, I get a casual message on my voicemail. “Hi sweetie, call me when you get up.” When I do get around to calling him back, Rick tells me he’s headed back to Baltimore and is only about an hour away. “What happened?” “Well, I hit a bridge.”

Uh…..what?!!!

Railroad bridge in Mass. - (not the one Rick hit, but similar)

Well this can’t be good. Having just left Chesapeake City, Rick was about to go through the canal that connects the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. You have to time your traverse through the canal with the tides so that you aren’t working against the current, and Rick was out there in the dark, having had very little sleep, at about 4:00am. There are many bridges that cross that canal, and one of them is a railroad bridge that lowers when a train is going through, but otherwise is raised up high. Rick has gone through there many times, and this was the first time he had ever seen it down, but he wasn’t at all worried because it still looked pretty high. Literally, just at the last minute, he realized he was going to hit and he turned the boat hard to port – not enough to save her, but enough to make it a glancing blow instead of a full on smash. The top two feet or so of the mast scraped against the bottom of the bridge, and all kinds of equipment, lines and debris came down onto the deck of the boat. The bow rail had been completely bent out of shape.

So, at least the engine still worked (and of course, the newly repaired refrigeration unit)… Rick motored back to Baltimore. I would be feeling sick about the damage, but Rick is a pretty positive guy and he says he mostly just feels embarrassed. It probably didn’t help that there was another boat waiting on the other side of that railroad bridge whose captain must have seen the whole thing. Good thing Rick doesn’t know them.

We don’t know the full extent of the damage yet, but it's doubtful that it'll be a cheap and easy fix. It’s unknown whether any of our original plan can be salvaged - we may be spending our entire summer on dry land after all (and in the Poor House). Who are the chumps now?

By the way, the bridge was undamaged by the accident.

This video pretty much sums it up:
http://www.prochan.com/embed?f=e53_1351184775

Boothby Bash

Well, it’s been a couple of incredible weeks with the Boothby clan. Whenever Rick’s family gets together it’s a high energy event, and this time around was exceptionally so.

Upon arriving in Portland, the first order of business had to be meeting up with Dick, Rick’s dad. Dick is a Maine native and octogenarian who belies his age by at least twenty years, and other than a little less height (and considerably less hair), is the obvious genetic source for his son, particularly his smile. Dick has heard a great deal about our new boat, but has yet to see it in person so we pick him up at the dock with a plan to take him out for a spin around the Portland Harbor. He is obviously very excited and comments on how much bigger this boat is than the Alberg, but these exclamations of size pretty much stop upon boarding Valkyrie and going below. I’m suddenly aware that we haven’t been very careful about what politicians call “managing expectations”. Seeing the boat through Dick’s eyes makes it seem like a very modest craft, and perhaps not quite up to the task of accommodating all members of the family for an important event he has planned for the following week. Oh well, we’ll just have to make it work when the time comes.

Dick is a graduate of the Maine Maritime Academy who served with the Navy in the South Pacific during the war, and proves that he still has the right stuff by taking the wheel and heading us out past Fort Gorges to Portland Head Light. He and Rick chat about various things and eventually get around to probably the most talked about and controversial topic in the Boothby family – beans. Baked beans that is. Not being a Mainer myself, I have to admit that I don’t share in the family fascination with this humble dish, but whenever they get together the big question of the day always concerns the “authentic” recipe used by Rick’s grandmother, Pauline. Everyone claims to know the right one but no one agrees with anyone else. Who knew there were so many ways to make baked beans? None of them, by the way, involves opening a can which is the way my family always did it.

After our brief outing on the boat, we take Dick to a seafood restaurant just down the street from the Centerboard Yacht Club and get a table outside. I can’t resist ordering my first lobster of the summer, and it is fantastic!

After a busy few days, seeing friends at Rick’s fortieth high school reunion, and then doing laundry and re-provisioning, we take off for a four day sailing trip. This time we’re joined by Rick’s sister and brother-in-law, Barb and Jeff Perry who live here in Cumberland and have taken time off from work in order to go with us. The sleeping arrangements are a bit cramped but the Perry’s are remarkably adaptable, and they are such a fun couple that we know it’ll be worth it. The first night out we pool all of our spare change and play a highly competitive poker game in the cockpit.

Our plan is to head north up the Maine coast to Mt. Desert Island and beyond, but in the morning of our first real travel day I manage to thwart that plan pretty quickly by getting seasick. Welcome Aboard, Barbie and Jeff! We’re forced to abort that plan and go for the much less ambitious destination of Southport Island, near Boothbay (no relation).

Unlike the old Alberg, Valkyrie's engine propeller has a nasty tendency of getting fouled with floating plastic line and debris, and twice Rick has to dive overboard with his handy knife and clear it. After Jeff joins him on one of these expeditions we celebrate by using the shot glasses that Walter generously left behind when he sold the boat to Rick. Tequila Slappers!

Nature sightings are abundant on this trip – we see seals, harbor porpoises, terns, etc. I am astounded by the osprey nest situated high up in the top of a tree. I’ve become so accustomed to osprey nesting on the top of channel markers that I had almost forgotten that there must have originally been a more natural setting for these birds.

The most unusual thing we encounter is an ocean sunfish. Mola Mola, or “head fish” as it is sometimes called is a huge bony fish that has no tail. It looks a lot like a giant fish head with fins – hence the name. About six feet long and about the same in width, this fish tends to lay over on its side and lazily swim along close to the surface, soaking up warmth from the sun. With no natural predators, this guy is totally unaffected by our boat and we get right up close to him. The look of this thing is so weird that it takes me a while to get my head around which body part goes where.

The high point of our little voyage is meeting up with Rick’s aunt and uncle – Barbara and Frank – at their cottage on Southport Island. We are treated to showers and then a delicious dinner of lobster rolls while enjoying their spectacular ocean views. Aunt Barbara is an extremely vivacious, well read and interesting person and she acts as a lightning rod for discussion at any family gathering. Of course, the topic of beans still manages to come up once or twice. I manage to get a great picture of Frank seated on the deck of their cottage, but I’m disappointed to discover that I have no pictures of Barbara. Rick tells me that she mysteriously tends to find something to do in the next room whenever a camera makes an appearance.

When we return to Portland we leave the boat on a mooring and all four of us drive up to the family “picnic grounds” at Turner. There is no cottage on this little parcel of wooded land, but located right on the edge of Pleasant Pond, it makes for a great place to camp out. Barb and Jeff help us out with some camping equipment and we are joined by their son Ross as well as Rick’s two brothers, David (nicknamed Woody for some unknown reason), his wife Bonnie, and Jim. Jim drove up from Annapolis, MD and brought his daughter Rachel as well as my son Dewey. Dick doesn’t actually camp out, but he spends the better part of two days with us, canoeing, kayaking, swimming and sitting around the campfire (talking a great deal about beans).

The family is scandalized to hear from Dick that Pauline’s “secret” baked bean recipe can easily be found on the internet (Cooks.com?) - exactly the same as his hand written copy. It is of course IMPOSSIBLE that this is the real recipe. The Boothby beans take all day to cook, and whenever someone in the family passes through the kitchen they surreptitiously add another spoonful of brown sugar or molasses to the pot. By the time the beans are ready to eat everyone exclaims that they are the best yet, but the recipe has been altered by so many people that no one knows exactly what went into that latest batch. Hence the intensity of baked bean discussion.

After two nights of camping on land, Rick and I are anxious to get back to the boat. We bring the Annapolis/Baltimore contingent of Jim, Rachel and Dewey for an overnight on the water and we have a great time swimming to shore at Jewel Island and doing some exploring. It’s wonderful to have Dewey with us; I don’t have to feel guilty leaving him in Baltimore, at least for this week. Rick and Jim set him to work at the wheel, and later on they rely on him as a lookout for lobster pots and buoys that we want to avoid. Rachel sits up on the foredeck looking amazingly glamorous, just like a movie star. On the way back to our mooring we get treated to a real surprise – The Pride of Baltimore! What are they doing this far north?

Back on solid land, the Boothby's convene once again at Barb and Jeff's house for a Mexican dinner. We are missing a few people from these family gatherings. Barb and Jeff’s daughter McCall is living and working in Denver now that she has finished college, and Jim’s wife and their other three kids are busy working or are in school and can’t be with us this time. But there is a much more noticeable empty seat, formerly filled by Carolyn, Dick’s wife and the family matriarch who passed away two years ago. There was a memorial service soon after her death, but her ashes have remained in a canister at Dick’s house. Carolyn lived in Maine for most of her life and she loved to go for walks and picnics along the shore. Dick would like to spread her ashes in the waters that she knew so well, using Rick’s boat to carry the family for a simple private ceremony. It’s going to be a tight squeeze with so many people but we can work with that. The only real problem is that the boat is rather difficult to get in and out of and could be the scene of a nasty accident for someone who is approaching ninety. With mixed feelings, we discourage Frank and Barbara from attending this part of the proceedings and plan to meet up with them afterwards for the signature Boothby dinner – ham, brown bread and of course, BEANS!

The day starts out ominously cloudy, but just as we reach Great Diamond Island the sky clears to a beautiful blue. We all gather in the cockpit and each person takes a moment in turn to speak about their memories of Carolyn and what she meant to them. Dick has been working on his speech for weeks, yet his desire to give his wife the perfect sendoff caused him to awaken very early this morning and completely re-write the whole thing. There are tears of course, but also laughter – Carolyn would have loved it. Then Dick casts a handful of ashes into the sea along with a fistful of cut flowers, and one by one, Carolyn’s four children do the same. A sublime tribute to a wonderful person.