by Michele | May 4, 2012 | Preparation Stage
 You think a giant mechanical shark was scary? Just wait til you have nightmares of monster waves eating your tiny sailboat in the Southern Ocean. |
|
So recently, Dan and I found this fantastic sailing blog called
Windtraveler, written by a couple from Chicago who is living the dream of sailing their boat
Rasmus on the open seas. (Actually, they are currently back in Chicago for a pit stop while they have their baby girl, but that’s irrelevant to this particular post.) So anyway, I’ve been reading their blog from the beginning and found a post about the movie Deep Water about the Golden Globe solo circumnavigation race in 1969. Windtraveler highly recommended the movie as “gripping” and says “there is definitely a lesson to be learned from Donald Crowhurst, may he rest in peace.” Well, I’d say I learned about 2 main lessons from the movie:
1. Never, for any reason, allow your husband to sail the open ocean without you.
2. Ever.
I mean, seriously, I don’t think I have ever watched or heard or read of a story that was so devastatingly heart-breaking. I mean, you could not make up a story so tragic as the story of Donald Crowhurst. Not to beat down on Brittany from Windtraveler or anything, but you could have warned me that I am going to have separation anxiety from my husband for weeks now, clinging to him like a two year old who thinks his mommy is never going to come pick him up from day care. Why? you may ask. Well let me give you a little breakdown of the solo race around the world.
Of the nine contestants, 4 didn’t make it out of the Atlantic, 1 got just past the Cape of Good Hope and gave up after having 27 straight days of terrible weather, 1 got 1100 nautical miles from the end before sinking his boat, 1 decided he would rather leave his family in France and keep on going around the world*, 1 committed suicide after losing his mind, and 1 finished. Not a great outcome if you ask me.
The movie focused mostly on the experience of Donald Crowhurst. He was left in an absolutely tragic state of trying to decide between death by drowning and absolute financial and reputational ruin after his boat started taking on water in the beginning of the race, and in the end he chose both. Truly, though, the real lesson that I took from his story was this: there is nothing so tragic as losing your life because you are afraid of losing it. You have to face your problems head on, even if there is nothing scarier that you can think of doing, especially if you have someone you love who will face them with you. It is always better to stand with your family, rebuilding out of the rubble, than being alone in the end.
So there you go, maybe I did learn something from this terribly depressing movie. (But seriously, Dan is never going to do a solo circumnavigation now.)
*So I know a lot of people are inspired by the writing of
Bernard Moitessier, but couldn’t he have just gone back for his wife and then gone to Tahiti? I mean, really.
by Dan | Apr 25, 2012 | Preparation Stage
After our second time sailing on the MacGregor, Michele and I decided to invite my youngest brother Alex, his girlfriend Stephanie, and my parents along for the ride. It was a bad idea. I guess after our second voyage I was pretty confident and felt that while I had not mastered sailing (if one can even “master” sailing) but I had at least established a foundation upon which to build. The wind was a steady 10-15 knots and gusting above 20… again a bad idea for trip number three. We had learned from our previous experiences when the river drops enough to lower the keel, when it was best to raise the main, etc. All in around 5-10 knots of wind. Not 10-15.
We raised the main too early. By “too early” I mean we weren’t yet in the channel and we couldn’t yet fully lower the keel… again a bad idea. This left us with two choices #1 sail with the keel not lowered far enough or sail with the keel dragging. We decided on not lowered far enough. This allowed us to at least move the boat into the channel at which point we would be able to lower the keel and point to wind. However, perhaps a little to leery of repeating my first sailing adventure, I did not want to go with the wind past the marina as we did in the first voyage. Again, a bad idea. Forcing the boat into the wind with the keel not in the correct position caused the high (for me) wind to push the boat down wind even though we were pointed around 60 degrees off wind. So at this point I have my parents, younger brother and girlfriend, wife, and baby on a boat that is pointed one way yet going another. Enough is enough, I am not too prideful to admit that I am not yet experienced enough to attempt the current circumstances. I decided to cut my losses and return to the marina.
We lower the mainsail and begin (electric) motoring back to the marina. At this point the wind begins blowing at a steady 20 knots. At least I made the decision prior to the wind picking up, right? Now all I have to deal with is a light boat that drafts 11 inches bobbing in 3 feet of water (can’t lower the keel) that is broadside to 20 knots of wind. With a trolling motor. Needless to say direction the bow was pointed had much less to do with the direction of travel than the force of the wind on the side of the boat. Even though we were motoring significantly windward of the marina entrance we ended up 500 or so feet down wind of the entrance. The little motor, while perfect once we are in the marina, was not capable of making headway against the wind. Dismayed, I turned the boat down wind and stopped at the free city boat launches about a quarter mile down river from our marina. The free boat launch lacks most things you would think are necessary at a boat launch… like a dock to stop at so you can disembark and retrieve the trailer. It fell to myself to jump in the water and walk the boat to a safe spot while I walked back to the marina. While I was moving the boat to a safe spot I kicked an underwater rock and broke a toe on my left foot. So let me recap my situation at this point for you, just in case you have lost track of the dismal events… I am standing in three feet of cold, murky water with only a coat, life preserver, and boxer shorts on pulling a boat that is being pushed by the wind, and just broke my toe with my family watching on. Extremely embarrassing. And now I am sharing this story with you… also embarrassing.
This pretty much sums up how I was feeling
I do not share this simply to embarrass myself. I share this story because it truly reminded me how different the cruising life will be from what I am used to. A more experienced sailor would have had no problems whatsoever in 10-15 knots of wind. Matter of fact we saw three other similarly sized boats sailing around. At the low point of the voyage (standing in the muck in my boxers) I couldn’t help but have a moment of introspection… What the hell was I doing?
No one but Michele and I are going to make our dream of cruising become a reality for us. I am acutely aware that there will be times when things won’t work out the way we expect, people will (and already do) think we are crazy, but we are following our dream. The purpose of buying a sailboat now was to learn to sail… and that’s what we’re doing. It’s not always going to be easy.
by Michele | Apr 20, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Sailing right were we are
Recently, Tillerman of Proper Course issued a “writing project” to complete his Top 10 list of best places to sail with one of your own. The challenge was open ended, the destination could be a favorite vacation spot, local secret, or anything in between. When I first read it, I thought “we haven’t really sailed anywhere too exciting” (though our first attempt was fairly exciting in itself even without an exotic destination.) But then I realized that I did have the answer to his question. What is the best sailing destination? It’s wherever your boat is floating right now.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m sure that there are much preferable places to sail a boat than the Illinois River, or some little lake by where you live. But isn’t the point of sailing to just be on the water? Anywhere? To throw off the lines and feel the wind in your face, even if it isn’t tinged with sea salt? Is the joy of the water dependent on the type of sand beneath it? I certainly don’t think so.
We are just beginning our journey to start our lives as cruisers and we still have a long way to go. We’re never going to learn to sail unless we go sailing, and if that means getting our feet wet in the muddy river with a channel hardly wide enough for decent tacking so be it. Sure we’re looking forward to the white sand beaches and trade winds in the future, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have some amazing days of sailing right where we are, enjoying the same sun setting below the distant horizon.
Those far off destinations might be fantastic, but you have to start wherever your boat is right now… you certainly won’t get there by sitting in front of a computer screen thinking about how nice it would be to be staring down at crystal clear waters in the Bahamas. White sand beaches, crystal clear water, and the trandwinds at your back beat a muddy river any day… just don’t forget that sailing in a muddy river beats sitting at home any day. Where’s the best place to go sailing? Right where you are.
Follow your dreams. Follow the Horizon.
by Dan | Apr 10, 2012 | Preparation Stage
So our most recent learning to sail expedition started out exceptionally poorly. We had just lowered our boat into the water and tied her off. Kyle was parking the Jeep while I was loading the boat with our toolbox (you never know) and other doomsday supplies and Carter was chilling on the bench beside Michele. The winch handle was chilling beside Carter. Carter has recently learned how to throw things, hes actually a pretty good shot for a 16 month old. While Michele turns to me and in the split second she isn’t directly looking at Carter (before you blow up and call child services, we all had life jackets on and Michele had a hand on Carter), he decides it would be a good idea to chuck the winch handle into the river. Now the winch handle is chilling (literally, the water is around 55°F) under 7 feet of Chicago sewer run off (Illinois River). After much debate and consternation, it is voted that I shall be the one to retrieve the handle. Oh joy. A change into swim wear, 15 minutes of hypothermia inducing water, and the winch handle is retrieved. Not a good beginning for our second voyage. If we want to sail around the world, we have to start somewhere.
Some of you have hopefully read my too-funny-to-be-true story about my first venture into the world of sailing the high seas (or the Illinois River)… Everything that went wrong last time went right this time. Not exaggerating. Learning to sail the easy way indeed.
Our second voyage, 5 miles. Click to enlarge.
We were a little nervous about our new motor, it being a trolling motor and all. That little champ had no problems moving our 25 footer around the harbor and out into the open ocean (river). Once we cleared the mouth of the harbor we were able to successfully point our bow to wind. No windex though, that was a casualty of the last excursion. Bow pointed to wind, it was almost trivial to hoist the main, lower the keel, and sail up wind. Yes, I sailed up wind. In a boat. I was beginning to write off as sailor’s salty stories the tails of beating to wind for hours. Last time, I couldn’t point within 30 degrees of the wind. But it happened this time.
The wind was around 10 knots according to the weather man, but it was more like 3 knots gusting to 14 knots. This made it quite difficult to tack for us newbies when the wind was at 3 knots. We ended up cheating (only a little, mind you) and using the motor to help swing our bow through the wind. During the gusts it was another story. Being a sailor of but two voyages, I didn’t expect the boat to make any noises (and maybe it isn’t supposed to). When we were pointed approximately 40-45 degrees off wind the boat would begin to hum. At first we thought we had hit ground, but we were moving far too fast to be dragging our keel. Then we noticed that the boat only made the sound when we were pointed windward as much as possible. I still don’t know if that is supposed to happen or if I narrowly escaped my boat exploding.
For the return leg of the journey Kyle took the tiller and we sailed at a run back to home port. What took us an hour and a half into wind took around 20-30 minutes returning. We were able to lower the main and motor into the harbor like we knew what we were doing, which we didn’t. All in all it was a more successful voyage than I could have hoped for, especially after the previous debacle/attempt at wind powered locomotion. We are following our dreams. It may be baby steps at a time, but it is comforting and exhilarating knowing that we are moving in the right direction.
by Dan | Mar 15, 2012 | Preparation Stage
So my brother and I decided to take our (for now unnamed) MacGregor 25 out for her maiden sail… it was quite the experience. The first “O SHIT!!!” experience of my sailing career. Up to this point my sailing experience consisted of a tiny catamaran with a sail only slightly larger than a pillow case for less than an hour… not exactly America’s Cup stuff if you know what I mean.
We brought our boat to the local marina and started stepping the mast, only to find out that there is a low hanging wire directly above the boat launch. This should have been our first clue to stop and rethink our plan. However, we are like “Oh, no problem… we can just back the boat up until its past the wire and then step the mast.” Spoiler Alert: This is one of the only times that day that things went to plan (even if this was plan B).
 |
| Spindler Marina, East Peoria, IL |
So now we have the boat in the water, mast stepped, jib attached to the front wire thingy (I know… I’ll figure out what its called later), boom attached, motor lowered, the whole shebang. After some consternation we get the motor started and in reverse. I throttle the motor up to around 30-50% power and try to back off of the trailer to the small dock where I will meet up with Kyle. The boat doesn’t move. At all. I throttle the motor up a little more… still nothing. Eventually Michele, whom up to this point was videotaping my lack of intelligence, decided to point out that the boat was, in fact, tethered to the trailer via the trailer winch. Another omen.
We get the boat to the dock and Kyle comes down to the boat after parking the Jeep. We then have to decide if we are going to back out of the small marina into the main river channel or attempt to pirouette it around and motor out bow first. I was out voted by Kyle and Michele and it was decided to reverse out into the river. Needless to say our motor over heated and we were left adrift in the middle of a (thankfully empty) marina. An empty marina still has rock walls and docks, mind you. Of course we started drifting bow first towards a 10 foot rock embankment, it just makes sense. I waited until we were about 5 feet away from making the evening news, took my shoes off (I still don’t know why I took my shoes off), jumped out and pushed the boat away from the rocks and brought her around and held her port side while Kyle tried unsuccessfully to get the motor started again. Our only option was to shove the boat across the marina back to the dock and reassess our situation. I’m now on the wrong side of the marina, without shoes, standing at the bottom of a 10 foot rock embankment.
Feet aching, I get to the other side of the marina where Kyle has wrangled the boat around and supposedly fixed our motor issues. The water intake was bobbing out of the river due to the motor not being low enough, making the engine over heat. Motor issues fixed we begin motoring out of the marina into the river proper.
 |
| Our maiden voyage, South to North |
About 20 feet into the river (and around 500-1000 feet away from the channel) the motor dies again. Another omen telling us to stop whatever we are doing, thank God we are alive, and go back. Needless to say, we push on… we were going to cut the engine there anyways and begin sailing. Our plan was to sail for a bit with only the jib to get the hang of the boat without all of the power a mainsail would provide. We know that the boat won’t be able to point very well to wind with just the jib, but we think it’ll be able to go at least 10 degrees or so into the wind. The river is extremely wide (for a river) where the marina is so even if we can only go a few degrees into the wind, it isn’t an issue. The boat, at least with us manning it, cannot go into the wind whatsoever with only the jib up. Not even a little bit. The boat decides to go downwind and fast. We haven’t yet lowered our keel so the boat is healing quite a bit, reminding us of our most recent oversight. Kyle jumps into the cabin and lowers the keel a tad too much in his excitement, bottoming out the keel. The river might be half a mile or more wide, but its only a few feet deep everywhere except the channel. So bottomed out in the middle of the river we decide to take advantage of not moving and hoist the main. In hindsight this was a very bad idea because we were unable to point head-to-wind first. In both of our tiny sailboat experiences we didn’t need to point anywhere specific to raise the sail, we just pulled on the halyard and the sail went up. Wrong. The sail went up about two thirds of the way until catching wind, making it impossible for us to hoist the sail anymore than it already was. Ok, we think, we’ll just sail with the jib. Downwind. Away from the marina.
At this point we realize that we are still dragging the keel even though we thought we raised it enough to clear the bottom. We also just happened to notice a giant bridge pier directly in our path. As it turns out, a rudder doesn’t really steer a boat when the keel is dragging. At this moment Kyle turns to me and says, “You know, this is going to be hilarious afterwards… but its a complete disaster now.” I couldn’t have agreed more. Around 60 feet from bashing the boat (and ourselves) against the pier and making the evening news even more spectacularly, the bottom drops to the channel and our rudder begins functioning. Quickly steering away from the pier, our jib tacks uncontrolled and begins pushing us towards a man-made island under construction. We get the jib under control before beaching ourselves and, for the first time, have the entire boat under control. Albeit going the wrong direction.
I can finally call Michele and give her an update on our situation and ask her to meet us at the next marina downwind (but upstream) of Spindler Marina. One problem with this plan, however, is that the Jeep keys are on a boat in the middle of the river. She is forced to drive her car to the next marina where we will meet up and then go pick up the Jeep to bring the boat back to storage, assuming it is still in one piece when we get it to the dock.
|
| Look! The mainsail can actually go up! |
We actually had a peaceful sail from around the island all the way to the next marina. All the way until we had to dock a boat only under sail, no motor. Miraculously we were able to slide in next to the dock, lower the jib, and tie off all without a hitch. We had quite an experience getting the boat back on to the trailer (once we picked up the trailer from the other side of the river) that involved shoving the boat, good aim, and a lot of pulling.
So ended our maiden voyage on our new-to-us MacGregor 25. Would I do it again knowing what would happen? You bet. Do I plan on taking her out again without a reliable motor? No way. Even though it was the longest 3 mile boat ride I have ever taken I learned quite a bit. Under pressure of smashing our boat we learned quickly how to trim a jib, how to steer, and how to dock under sail. Instead of deeming the voyage a total and complete disaster (it nearly was… a few times), I like to say we left plenty of room for improvement.
We are normal (well ok, not so normal) people that have a dream to see the world and live life as it was meant to be. We both have successful careers in the healthcare industry, even in this terrible economy. We want to break free of the current cycle of trading time for dollars and dollars for more and more things we don't need. So, we have decided to forego the fruits of our economic success and "retire" well before we are 30 and set out to see what is over the Horizon.