Chili and Chance

Rick and I are enjoying the upper regions of the Chesapeake. Eventually, we will go through the Chesapeake Canal and make that (often) dreary slog down the Delaware Bay. But the best weather for that appears to be still a few days away, and in the meantime, we are visiting some choice spots en route. Rick has long talked of a favorite anchorage in Queenstown Creek off the Chester River, a place I’ve never been to, so that is our destination for tonight.

Galley cooking can be cramped, uncomfortable and even possibly dangerous in a moving boat, so we typically don’t cook the evening meal until we have stopped for the night. Quickly cooked meals like steak or pasta with sauce are staples on Valkyrie. In the past, I have found myself hungering for comfort food that cooks for a long time, such as stews, braised pot roasts, or homemade soups and the like. This kind of cooking is just not practical on a sailboat with limited propane. We also would have to babysit the cooking pot since you can not leave a lit stove unattended. I’ve tried using a pressure cooker, but the results were less than wonderful.

Thermos Nissan Thermal Cooker

Through numerous internet searches these past two years, I have come up with a solution – thermos cooking! Yes, you can cook food by trapping its own heat in a simple thermos. For a big chuck roast though, you need something bigger, so I bought a thermal cooker, made of course, by Thermos. It is essentially a pot with a lid that you can use on your stove to heat your food, bring it to a boil for five minutes, then put the whole thing inside a vacuum insulated shell and let it sit for four to eight hours. When you open it up, you have a fully cooked meal waiting for you, piping hot. Kinda like a Crock Pot, but without the electricity. Perfect for the boat!

I make up a pot full of chili in the thermal cooker, and we head over to the Chester. Rick is so right; the anchorage here at Queenstown is lovely. We are surrounded by a near perfect horseshoe of natural shoreline, unspoiled by even a single cottage.  We’re also the only boat in here, making it feel like our own private Eden.

Lounging in our (now shady!) cockpit after a swim, we notice another boat coming in to anchor about three hundred yards away from us. “That reminds me of John Merrill’s boat,” Rick comments. John is a recently retired violinist from my section at the BSO, who has long been a passionate sailing enthusiast. He belonged to Get-Away Sailing where he could sign out boats, until last year when he sought Rick’s advice in the purchase of a boat of his own. Rick gets out his binoculars. “By golly, I think that IS John Merrill!” “No it’s not,” I say, rolling my eyes, “don’t be ridiculous.”

But immediately I am hit with a pang of guilt. Earlier in the spring we had promised John and his wife Julia a raft-up with our boats. This invitation had been completely forgotten in our boat mania.  Until now. “Let’s call them up and see if they can meet us somewhere in the Chesapeake before we go through the canal.” Unfortunately, I can’t find John or Julia’s phone number, but I have John’s email address and shoot him off an invite. Pretty soon, I hear back from him.

“Rebecca,” he starts off. “Too bad. There’s no chance we can meet up. I am currently anchored for the night out at Queenstown off the Chester River, all by myself.”

!!!!!

There are only two boats in this anchorage at Queenstown, and one of them is us – that other boat MUST be John’s!

"Is this your boat?"

I take a grainy picture of the boat in question with my iphone, and send it to him. “Does this boat look familiar? Come over for dinner!” We wait awhile, but John does not answer. He’s no doubt not reading his email right now. Not willing to wait any longer, Rick and I dive in the water and swim over to him. “Surprise!”

After a good laugh, John invites us aboard. He’s not expecting company, and in fact we have interrupted the cooking of his own dinner. Rick and I are wet and dripping from the swim, so we only stay a few minutes. But before we go, we invite John over for breakfast in the morning, and this time, he accepts.

Our chili dinner is wonderful, just as envisioned. There’s a problem though – I’ve made enough to feed an army! Even if John had joined us we would still be eating chili for a week to get rid of it. The thermal cooker only works if the container is almost full. It’s the heat in the liquid that does the cooking, and any air in the container reduces the heat retention. I may need to rethink this latest innovation…

In the morning, Rick motors our dinghy over to pick up John, and delivers him to our boat for breakfast in the cockpit. We have a wonderful time catching up on news about boats, family and politics. The menu? Eggs with – what else – chili!

The Great Escape

It’s so hard to actually leave. Getting away from the dock seems like escaping the earth's gravity.

We loaded up the boat with provisions, left the house with the house-sitters (two of Rick's students), but then spent two more days living and working on the boat while sitting in the slip. Our thought was that we could clean up the inside of the boat in about an hour, put away all of our gear and groceries, and then take off. Mais non! Pretty quickly we discovered that our water tanks were leaking, the inverter (that allows “normal” household electronics to run on 12-volt boat batteries) had stopped working, and in our rush to get out of the house we had forgotten some key items, like dish towels and a sleeping bag (mine). Too embarrassed to make the drive all the way home, I made two separate trips to the local Walmart for a cheap sleeping bag, batteries, flashlights, a bucket, various other things, and still forgot the dishtowels. Oh well.

Rick called the inverter manufacturer who put him on hold forever, and then he figured it out by himself. The water tank problem was more pesky though, and made worse by the knowledge that it was self-inflicted. Rick had installed two ports into them for easier cleaning. The ports leak. Which means the water pressure pump gets very confused. Big job to find ports the same size that can withstand the pressure. Oh well.

We decide that if we wait for perfection, we’ll never leave, so rather than spend yet another day in the slip we take off under a beautiful sunny sky with a nice breeze. Rick comments that we have the bay all to ourselves – there are just no other boats out here. Hmmm… I wonder if they know something that we don’t. Rick checks the weather on his radio, and sure enough, there is a big storm coming through. Oh boy.

I don’t know if it is Rick insisting that we put on life vests and warning me with all kinds of instructions, or if it is simply my unfamiliarity with the motion on the boat after two years, but my tummy is now churning ominously. Pretty quickly I descend into sea-sickness hell, and am forced to take a Zofran and retreat into the forward cabin with my eyes closed. First day out. Oh no.

The tempest turns out to be more of the teapot variety, or at least the worst part of the storm passes us to the South, and Rick has no trouble steering us through it. I wake up with the sound of Rick putting the anchor down in Swan Creek. The boat is no longer bouncing up and down, and my mal de mer has completely dissipated along with the storm. We reward ourselves with steaks on the grill, and enjoy the charm of the unspoiled shoreline, decorated by the remnants of the storm - a beautiful rainbow. Oh yeah.

Home Improvements

We’re off at last! We actually had thoughts of leaving early, say the first week of June, but that just wasn’t happening.

Don't mess with a man covered in bottom paint dust!

After two years of neglect, the boat needed some attention. Many things were expected, like the deck needed a thorough washing, the brightwork (varnished wood on deck) needed multiple coats of varnish, and the bottom had to be sanded and repainted. These are yearly tasks, and pretty basic maintenance for all boats.

On top of that though, unexpected problems were found. The fuel tank leaked and had to be torn out and replaced. The cutlass bearing (this holds the drive shaft steady as it exits the hull) had to be replaced. We needed a new holding tank and all new batteries. Rick plumbed a new seawater pump in the galley, refilled the floating compass, did some rewiring of the previous owner’s electrical follies, and a whole long list of small but pithy jobs.

Then there were the unnecessary aesthetic changes that Rick insisted on doing, like totally redoing the bootstripe. The bootstripe is a strip of paint, thin or wide, sometimes even two or more colors that wrap around the boat right at the waterline, separating the above water hull from the bottom paint. Rick has always been unhappy with ours, firstly because it was crooked and didn’t accurately follow the water line as it should, and secondly because he wanted it a few inches higher to give the boat the optical illusion of a sleek, less tubby body. This turned out to be an enormous job, made even harder by Rick’s having left masking tape on the hull for a few weeks. It turns out masking tape adhesive turns somewhat stone-like if left on too long. Rick ended up having to chisel it off!

Old bootstripe

 

New bootstripe

One big improvement that we made to the boat is a brand spankin’ new bimini! A bimini is a canvas area constructed for the purpose of shading the steering wheel section of the cockpit. As a fair skinned woman, I have long lamented the lack of proper shade on our boat. “Couldn’t we have a bimini, like that boat over there?” I would ask pleadingly, while under my little umbrella. “Look at the amount of shade those people have in their cockpit!” I would exclaim, giving sidelong glances in Rick’s direction.  All to no avail. Rick loves having an open feel to our cockpit, and doesn’t like having his sightlines diminished while under sail.

This year, he finally relented, recognizing that if we spend a year in the Caribbean as we are still planning to do next year, the survival of my skin might depend on a bimini, and he himself would probably benefit from a bit of UV relief. He also thinks we might install solar panels later on, and a bimini frame would be perfect for that.

The cost of a custom-made bimini frame and canvas cover was way out of our budget, so we decided to do it ourselves. Rick came up with a design that worked for our boat, and we ordered the stuff from Sailrite – a DIY marine sail and canvas company. They sell a video that explains pretty thoroughly what to do. The only problem was that our needs and boat were not exactly what was shown in the video and we had to improvise where there were differences.

I have an arsenal of old sewing machines, so I dug out an old Singer that I had bought on Craigslist for $35, switched out a more powerful motor that I pirated from another machine, and set up the machine’s table next to our ping-pong table. Voila! An instant canvas-making studio.

OMG - I look just like my mother...

                                        

Despite being a great sewing enthusiast, I was very intimidated by the task of sewing anything involving canvas. I did a lot of studying (procrastinating), leaving the actual sewing until the last minute. In the end, I put in some very long days, trying to get the bimini done in time for us to leave. But I was so excited about the result that I went the extra mile and sewed up a “connector” piece that will shade the entire cockpit while at anchor. We now have a shaded patio with an ocean view!

All those jobs finally completed, our departure was delayed a few more days when the boat travel lift at the marina blew out a tire. 

Note the missing wheel (someone else's boat, thankfully)

         

It turns out we needed those extra days anyway, for provisioning, last minute cleaning of house and boat, packing, forgetting stuff – you know, the usual. By the time we left, we were both covered in bruises and small scratches, and sore from head to toe. The boat is now two years older… 

and it turns out, so are we.

New and improved Valkyrie

Boom and Bust!

So, campers. It’s certainly been a long time since my last post. Life got a bit complicated, and time somehow didn’t get the memo. It just kept marching along, until here we are, two years later.

In my last post, I talked about Rick’s family get-together in Maine/New Hampshire, and also about our visit with Rick’s father Dick, who had been recovering from a pretty debilitating stroke. If anyone actually follows this blog, it would seem that we dropped off the edge of the earth after that. Maybe the world is flat after all?

The story is that Rick and I made our good-byes, and headed back South towards Baltimore. We had made it as far as Chesapeake City, and were planning a leisurely few days in the Chesapeake before returning to house, jobs and responsibility, when we got a call from Barb, Rick’s sister. Dick had taken a turn for the worse and the end of his life was near. Rick needed to get back up to Maine as soon as possible, so we raced back to Baltimore in one day with the boat, and Rick flew up to Portland the next. Dick passed away a week later.

Dick had been one of my favorite people, and he had probably been my biggest fan and most avid reader of the blog. I’d had several blog posts yet to be written but still in mind when he passed, and I really did intend to write them up, but somehow – and please excuse the nautical reference – the wind had just gone out of my sails. After several months had gone by, I finally decided that I would just start it up again the next summer.

Dick and Rick, 2009

Barb and Rick talked often by phone that fall, and in the course of their conversations they hatched a plan, in part a tribute to Dick's memory, to charter a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands for the Easter break. David and Jane, who were friends of Barb and Jeff from Maine, would join us on a boat that could accommodate three couples. This was to be the trip of a lifetime; sun, surf and snorkeling in a sailing paradise!

And it Was!

 - until it wasn’t... Rick handed off the wheel to someone else, as he is prone to do, giving others a chance at captaining, and was standing in the companionway when the boat accidently started to gybe. Rick, acting on instinct, reached up to grab the lines, probably intending to prevent the boom from crossing over, or at least from crossing over quickly. Of course if he’d had a moment to think, he would have realized that this was a much bigger boat than any of the boats he had regularly sailed on. Bigger boat, bigger sail, there was obviously much more power in that accidental jibe than his arm could possibly hold. Unfortunately, he did not have more than an instant to correct his automatic response. The boom crossed to the other side of the boat in one violent motion, ripping Rick’s shoulder right out of its socket.

Rick was the only real sailor on that boat, and he was in a great deal of pain and obviously out of commission, but somehow he was able to coach the five of us in sailing craft, and with some luck, we managed to get the boat ashore. Rick spent a night in the hospital in Tortola where the excellent doctors (British health system) got his shoulder back where it was supposed to be. With his arm in a sling, Rick was able to join the rest of us on the boat where we finished out the rest of the week in a fun, but certainly more subdued manner.

Back in Baltimore, it became clear that Rick’s shoulder was much worse off than we had hoped. The MRI revealed that the incident on the boat had torn two of his rotator cuff tendons completely off of the bone, and surgery was necessary if he ever wanted to raise his right arm above his navel. The good news of course was that such a surgery was possible; the bad news was that the surgery required a recovery time of six months to a year for a successful outcome. No sailing.

Be careful what you wish for. Over the last several years I had been longing for a summer at home, relaxing in my sewing room, enjoying the farmers’ market and being near our friends. In my fantasies however, I had envisioned small outings in the boat, exploring the Chesapeake. I had not bargained for a husband in pain and with a broken wing. Considering, we had a very enjoyable summer. But we both missed the boat, which stood abandoned and ignored on the hard, and I let the blog languish as well.

More than a year after the surgery, and with Rick’s shoulder at 95%, we have finally managed to get the boat in the water, and are once again on our way up north. Yay – new adventures (and hopefully only minor catastrophes)!