Abescon Lighthouse Fresnel Lens

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So you turn around and head back home
To some apartment
On some main street of a pointless town
That you’re trying to put on the map
And you sit right down and write a big fat check
To the gas company
You drape your wet socks over the radiator
And you laugh at all the sailors
And you laugh at all the sailors
Freezing on the sea

If I’m glowing a bit, it’s because we just did a single day’s work that brought together months of effort.  Long time back, we tore out every speck of cabinetry, paneling, etc, down to bare hull.  We’ve been building that side back up slowly.  First, we built the battery box.  Second, we build the settee.

Third was to be the settee cabinet, but a winter intervened and I’m very glad it did.  We discovered that our old solid-construction fiberglass hull sweated like mad.  For the non-mariners in the group, that means that cold weather outside, contrasted with warm air inside, causes condensation to form on the inside of the hull.  It forms; it runs down; it makes everything that touches the hull sopping wet.

We quickly developed a plan to create a little open-air insulation.  Modern boats have a core sandwiched into the fiberglass hull that insulates; older boats need actual foam or at least some space for air to circulate and cool.  We decided that we’d make her look her age…ahem…I mean, traditional…by applying horizontal battens a half-inch from the hull, with a half-inch between, in order to encourage a dry hull.  The salty term for this is ceiling planking, where the ceiling on a boat is the “wall” created by the hull.  It reduces the sweating and, when condensation does happen, these battens will keep all our various fabrics away from the water.

We purchased 200′ of Spanish Cedar from Chesapeake Light Craft in Annapolis, MD.   John Harris was tremendously helpful, by reading and confirming/correcting my ideas.  They were a pleasure to deal with, and they got my 1/4″ x 2″ Spanish cedar very quickly.  Their selection of woods is excellent and they have a relationship with a mill that allows them to assist people like me without blinking and at a very reasonable cost.

I chose the Spanish cedar because of the description on their website:

“Spanish Cedar” (Genus cedrela) is actually neither Spanish nor a member of the cedar family.  It’s a member of the mahogany family, and we use it in all applications where we might have used the now-scarce Philippine or Honduras mahogany.  Even to a highly trained eye, the colorful reddish grain is indistinguishable from mahogany.  The fragrance, however, is absolutely distinct:  it smells like aromatic cedar, the kind they make cigar boxes and blanket chests out of.

When I picked it up, I was thrilled.  It’s gorgeous, with variety in the grain.  There are long straight-grained segments and some truly beautiful, almost curly-maple-looking parts.  The smell is unmistakable - yummy cedar.  The smell made us decide to leave the parts inside the settee cabinet unfinished - we can even scuff it with sandpaper once in a while to release new surface.  We plan to Epifane the parts that will show, but only on the front, top, and bottoms.  That way we get the scent out of the backsides even there!

It’s thin and soft enough to cut easily with a hacksaw, which is good.  Trying to cut it with a jigsaw made it bounced up and down with the blade - one of those moment when a real shop with a workbench and…okay, back to the real world.

Before attaching the horizontal ceiling planks, I had to create vertical attachment points.  We never want to screw directly into the hull, so we used part of the cedar for cleats.  Now, I’ve heard people say cleats and I’ve heard people say tacks - I’m going to try to be consistent and say cleats.  What I mean is this:

We needed 1/2″ thickness so we could give the screws good purchase and create a reasonable amount of air space.  This meant using two of the 1/4″ thick strips and laminating them together on the hull.  I cut the battens to length (and measuring along curves is always exciting) and then used West System’s G-5, a 5 minute epoxy, to glue them to the hull.  Before I got clever, I was gluing one, waiting 20 minutes (because really, who is going to trust them when they say 5 minutes?), then gluing the second on top.  Later in the process, I put the 5 minute epoxy on both pieces and put them up together.

It takes a thin, flexible strip of wood to conform to the complex curves of our hull.  I thought that every single one would be a struggle, but the forward ones were pretty simple.  Just brushed the glue on the wood and the hull, then warped them into place and braced them with telescoping boat hooks.  We bought an extra boat hook so that we’d have enough for the more difficult cleats.

When applying the second cleat, I wanted to see a little glue squeeze out if possible, but I had to smooth some excesses.

This laminates the two together, but it’s still not strong enough for me. Each cleat, now 1/2″ thick with two pieces of wood used, got a 6″ strip of fiberglass run down its length.

Our toerail is bolted through the deck, and the nuts are right along the inside of the hull.  I had to be careful to leave enough room above certain cleats so that we could still get to those nuts.  You never know when you’ll have to remove/repair/replace any part of a boat, so making something inaccessible is always a bad idea.  Besides, we plan to do a big deck-cleaning next spring, wherein we will strip all extraneous fittings, fill all the holes from old water fills and such, and recover and repaint the whole deck.  For this, though we cringe at the idea, it may be a good idea to remove the toerails from both sides while working.  So yeah.  No blocking toerail nuts was the rule.

Not so hard to measure for.  What I didn’t foresee was the cleats sliding up the hull due to the angles of the boat hooks.  I was seriously aflutter, trying to hold it down against a strong upward pressure while casting about for some way of bracing it in place.

It’s not elegant, but when needs must…

So yeah.  And don’t worry - the epoxy in the cup had already hardened - that’s why I couldn’t use just the glue brush by itself!

While all of this was going on (this was one day’s work), James was earning a living on the very same dock.  He visited periodically, helped brace cleats so I could get boat hooks in place, placed boat hooks while I braced cleats, etc.  The last two were the hardest, but we got them in place, working together.

I love him.

Okay, enough sappiness for the moment.  (Though there could be a resurgence at any time…brace yourself.)

The next photo shows my work setup.  I had purchased about 20 glue brushes and a huge stack of little plastic cups.  Each time I mixed up some of the 5 minute epoxy, I had to use a fresh stirrer, cup, and brush.  The stirrers and cups got reused eventually - once the epoxy is cured, it’s easy to break out/off.  The glue brushes were trash.  I also had to do a small amount of chiseling to make things fit correctly.  I made a tremendous mess, but in a space this small it still only took a half hour to clean up.

I was infuriated to realize that the last two cleat I’d applied refused to adhere to the hull.  The curves were too intense, and I tried twice, ruining good wood in the process.  I had a full-on destructive moment where I ripped a section off with my bare hands.  When I calmed down, I chiseled what was left into a shape I might be able to add on to.

I was stumped.  Luckily, I called my dad (for an unrelated reason) and chose to complain at him.  He was interested in the project but not impressed with my problem.  He has many years and airplanes of experience fitting thin strips of wood to complex curves.  With no more than the expected amount of teasing, he reminded me that one can cut along the back of the curve in order to make the wood more flexible without losing overall thickness.  Since we intended to fiberglass over these cleats, this was a perfect answer to problem that had driven me to violence.  I was so happy that I made James take me out for a nice dinner…oh wait, that was the night we tried Annapolis’ version of Mexican food.  Is Annapolis really farther from Mexico than Seattle?  It is - at least culinarily.

I was convinced that his idea was going to fix my problems, so I removed the pieces that had remained when I restarted the project.  After the struggles at the end of the previous attempts, this day’s work went quite, quite well.  I glued in the cleats over the electrical box (where we intend to build a tool box at the back)…

And then began work on the two that had foiled me before.  This time, I used my Dremel to cut channels in the backs of the battens.  It took a little trial-and-error to get the best gap between channels in order to have enough bend, but I got it.  The channels ended up far, far wider than I’d wanted, but I didn’t have a Dremel bit that would make a thinner channel.  Oh well - doesn’t this look great?

The curves were still intense, and the cleats had to be seriously braced.

Here’s the aft portion, glued and glassed.

Primed.

Painted.

After all that - because it takes days to prime and paint, what with drying times and such - applying the horizontal battens was an absolute pleasure and a pretty quick project.  We started at the top in order to get a good line and useful gap.  The method we developed came quickly.  Hold in place, using two pieces of the 1/4″ scrap to ensure a 1/2″ gap.  Screw the batten into the two middle cleats and then warp down the forward parts with the scrap bits and screw, warp down the aft parts and screw. Each screw was driven only most of the way in, because we had one more task before we were done.

The first couple went smoothly, but we were expecting that.  The curves don’t get intense until the bottom.  James and I did the top seven together yesterday morning before he went to work.  I put up the last eight while he was at work.  They did get harder and harder, but just inching the scrap along each board worked to bend the board into place.

Adding finish washers and epoxy was the one-more-task I mentioned above. I removed each screw, put a finish washer on it, wet the end with epoxy, and drove it.  There is enough pressure on some of the battens that I need those same scrap pieces to maintain its position.

In this picture, the screws above the pieces of scrap are completed - the rest are yet-to-be.

Cutting the curves in around the electrical box was tricky, but the end of the day saw me well satisfied with this.

And with this.

Now.  Just for contrast, please see exhibit A, from just after we demo’ed the old, jerry-rigged and ridiculous cabinetry.

And exhibit B, wherein I sit on a chair made of two cushions placed on bulging tool bags, with my West Marine shirt on and my hair looking pretty damn good, if I do say so myself.

Now contrast that with this happy man, who just came home to an unexpectedly finished project.

And can you blame me for looking a little bit smug?

We’ve spent the last three days Hauling her out of the water,

putting in two new through-hull’s! One in the Galley…

…And one in the Head.

The thru-hulls turned out to be easy, no really(!)

…So we could take our sweet time on the bottom and get it done right.

Day one and two were picture perfect best-case-scenario, haul-out days. The weather was cool and clear on the first day and cool and damp on the second day making for comfortable working conditions both days.

This is our first go-round with the Trinidad S.R., the most pricey of West Marine’s bottom pain offerings, so doing the job right was a luxury we could afford on this haul-out. The first step was to chip-n-scrape every square inch of the bottom of the boat to make sure none of those pesky Chesapeake Bay Critters survived the power washing. Next, we griddle bricked from stem to stern using griddle cleaning pumice bricks to wet-sand every single part of the boat that makes constant contact with the water. It was indeed a back-breaking job that coated us both in a thick black goop made up of YEARS of local crustacean life from here to Key West, FL…

Day Two was also spent buffing out the top-sides with 3M buffing compound and that made the boat look incredible!

After that we prepped her bottom for a serious Petit, Trinidad SR bottom-painting. Interlux 216 is a special solvent that leveled the paint on the bottom.  It gives it a smoother look and helps the new paint adhere better.

On day three we gussied-up in our best bottom-painting gear and put a new thick coat of bright red bottom paint on our beautiful home…

…The last job was a fresh coat of wax on the top-sides to keep her looking fresh through-out the coming winter months, T’da!!!

It’s been by far the most relaxing haul-out of the 7 Dena and I have done together and that’s not from a lack of huge projects on this one, I believe we can attribute our good fortune this time around directly to patience, experience and a love for the work that can only show through a job well done.

But that’s a bit off topic, eh?

The topic is this: the dodger had been painted with some sort of epoxy paint and then some other materials.  It was a mystery mix that was cracked and peeling all the way down to the fiberglass of which it is made.  I haven’t gotten in the habit of getting before pictures, so you just get the process here.  It’s pretty simple, really, if time- and energy-intensive.  I picked one area for close-ups so you can really see how it started and went along.
The first step was to scrape off all the old material.  Patience and persistence are key here, because every single bit of material that isn’t 100% adhered to its substrate will need to go.  I used a painter’s scraper with a long flat edge that is blunt on one end and pointed on the other.  I used the pointed end to pry large sheets away and the flat edge to make sure the remaining material wasn’t going to come up.  After scraping all the loose bits away, I sanded everything in order to soften the edges for fairing.

The next step was fairing everything.  I made the fairing compound with regular West System epoxy (several batches) mixed with 407 low density filler.  It’s a blended micro-balloon based filler that has decent strength (not my main concern) and is easy to sand (yep, that’s why I picked it).  As you can see below, it cures to a reddish brown.  That’s nice because it’s easy to see where you’ve missed.

The wood trim is screwed and bunged, and I also filled the spots where the bungs didn’t suffice to make a fair surface.

I made one mistake on the filling - didn’t leave enough material in some places.  I was using a spreader and flattening it out pretty well.  That means that some places didn’t sand smooth - they still show concavities - but it’s not bad enough to go back and do it again.

Here’s the same spot after sanding.

Then there’s the primer.  We use Interlux (partly because it’s easy to obtain, partly because we like their Bristol Beige and Sea Green) Brightsides one part polyurethane and the Pre-Kote that goes with it.  It already looks pretty good with just primer.

From here on, wet-sanding was the name of the game.  It leaves a really nice surface and keeps the dust down.  The dust isn’t just irritating to the eyes, nose, and throat of the sander; it is also difficult to clean off every part of the boat in order to keep it from settling back onto its previous home while the paint is wet.  Dusty wet paint is super-annoying, not to mention ugly.

That might look strange, but the primer isn’t supposed to be a thick layer.  The instructions say to sand it to a thin translucency.

Next came paint!  We put an over-all coat of white on the dodger, though the porthole trim will be in green and beige.  The long trim piece where the cabin top meets the cabin sides is now green, its final and glorious color.

One touch-up coat on that and it’s done.  The dodger will get another coat of white, the porthole trim will be painted, and the handrails and solar panels will be replaced.  Keep an eye out for these remaining bits of the project!

We needed to CHANGE EVERYTHING!  I usually hate projects that start like that because, sooner or later, we decide to keep part of the old system after all.  And that’s where things get complicated.

But not on this project.  I removed the old faucet, household-style filter, and pump in order to install new everything and tee into the system for a water heater.  Sorry, no before pictures.

Replacing the faucet meant creating a new base.  Our new faucet has a different hole pattern, so I epoxied together 2 pieces of 1/4 inch Spanish cedar and took the hole saw to them.  I cut the new holes in the maple countertop with the jig saw.

And this is what it looks like installed, first with it in the upright, ready-to-dispense-water position and second in the out-of-the-way, downward-leaning position.

Of course, it’s hard to get at the bottom of the faucet in order to attach the female NPT to 1/2″ barbed fitting, along with the ever-important plumber’s tape.  Attaching the hose and tightening 4 hose clamps (because I wanted to have everything double-clamped if there is room on the fitting)…easy in comparison.

I attached the hoses to the underside of a shelf in the sink cabinet and then along the side…

The pump is living, temporarily, atop the lid from one of the integral tanks.   In order to leave myself a bit of play in the lines later, I wrapped them to get them where I wanted.  The input from the tank starts just above the pump and circles all the way around to the same place before going onto the pump.  The output goes to a tee.  One side goes directly to the cold water side of the faucet and the other side goes into the head, where the water heater is mounted proudly.

Now the heater…that was a project in itself!  When I first hooked it up, it fountained directly out in front, spraying the head (and drenching a roll of toilet paper).  I put it through a running test, with the input and output hoses in the same bucket and the old water pump providing the motion.  I powered the pump with James’ 12 volt plug for his air conditioner - no good invention goes underutilized!

Once I replaced the fitting that wasn’t, I did another test.  This time, I wanted to let it run for a while and then pressurize the system to really, really test for leaks.  Shazam!

And for those of you at home, who can’t quite tell what’s in the end of that hose…

Yes, I photoshopped that so that you can see that I have, indeed, hoseclamped a toothbrush into the end of the hose.  Well, hell, people - it did the job!  I found a slow leak and tightened the fitting involved.

After a half hour, the heater was holding pressure just fine.  So I installed it!

Part 2 of this project is hooking the heater into the propane system.  Busting open our integral tanks and installing flexible bladders…that’s Part 3, in which I will also install a filter system that has to be upright, or I would have installed it along with everything else already!

The whole play was like that - rococo with the language of romance-adventure and filled with sea-monsters, deserted islands, aboriginal maidens, and so on and so forth.  The form and content are well known and still enjoyable.

Rather than sticking to the 19th century version of the adventure, this is moves into the 20th century (though not beyond) by framing the story as an exhibition given by the main character, a storytelling that we have agreed to hear.  He begins by stating that it’s amazing and that IT’S ALL TRUE!!!  But the story doesn’t end at rescue.  Louis takes us into the London to which he returns, where his story is published, lauded, rewarded, criticized, and finally excoriated as mostly lies.  The overwhelming sadness of Louis (the exhibitor performing the amazing story) is played straight, with his cohort bringing a script on stage and prompting him to help him past the heavy emotion of his shame.

As with so many stories, this one questions whether fact and fiction are the important matters, or whether true and false are somehow, in a story, independent of fact.  However much of his story is made-up (and, unlike in Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”, there is no factual recap to restructure our understanding of the story), it is fun to the very end.  It’s a good story, and therefore has part of truth on its side.

The job was over… I had put all of my wage-slaving resources into that (broken application of an oblivious ideal) job and come out of my two month haze with a powerful sense of independence and caring.

The lines were tossed off, we were underway and it was 0630 hours.

The night before our escape we loaded up our little pick-up with all of our non-sailing gear and building supplies and parked it at the Liberty Marina about a quarter of a mile away from Oak Grove, where our boat was. I didn’t sleep worth a shit but by the time we got underway I was as freaked out and as ready for an adventure as I’ve ever been.

We set sail to the Sou-Easterly breeze freshening off our beam just East of the South River Bridge and I started up my computer so I could send off my resignation; it read…

Dear Carefree Boat club,

I quit.

My final day of work was Friday September 24th 2010.
Please attempt no further correspondence.

James

…And just like that, I was not working for the Carefree Boat club or rather, free of carefree.

I guess I have to give some kind of reason behind my abrupt retreat from my former employer or a passing reader might think I was little more than a disgruntled slacking dock hand… Oh, believe me it was so much more than that.

Here’s my take on the aforementioned ‘oblivious ideal’.

Let’s say you (not really you but some other you, whatever…) got “the hook” and you want to go boating but don’t want, or you think you can’t afford, a boat. Like most Humans and Americans in particular, that are used to getting pretty much anything they want, you look for an alternative to owning and actually working on a boat, and again, like most spoiled (fucking, top-of-the-food chain) Homosapiens you go to the internet and you find what you are looking for… A pretty website that tells you exactly what you want to hear.

What a “Carefree” customer wants to hear, and is told, not only by the pretty website but by a non-stop-barrage of e-mails, phone calls and slick office meetings with very motivated salesmen (with 6 or more children to feed), is that you can have a beautiful watercraft, anytime you want, it will run perfectly and you don’t have to care at all, that’s why it’s called Carefree…

Of course, in there lies, my problem.

I am a man who has spent the last decade living on and caring for my boat and I honestly believe that it is imperative that I, at the very least, give a shit. If I didn’t care, if I was care-free, I couldn’t do it and as a matter of fact, I don’t think anyone can. If you don’t care about the vessel and how it works and moves through the water than how can you care about the effects that vessel has on the environment and the other people that share that water with you. I believe that you have to immerse yourself, not only in the boat but the environment and the industry that surrounds boating if you’re going to be safe and respectful on the water, and I also believe, that is the only way to do it right. I’ve always told people that ask how Dena and I can live like we do; to do it safely and comfortably you have to change every single part of your life to those ends, or rather, you have to care, deeply and profoundly.

At first I was as idealistic as I usually am about a new opportunity, I told myself that there was no better person to teach the club’s novice boaters how to ignore the creed of the club they were giving all their money too and care about what they were getting into. Of course I didn’t tell the club owners that the above was my (nefarious) plan but that is the actual job that I set out to do.

What my carefree job turned out to be in reality was launching 15 carefree boats, twice a day with a compliment average of 3 to 5 carefree boaters per launch and then capturing the vessels and drunken carefree’ers upon their arrival, cleaning up their soggy carefree messes, pumping out their carefree urine and puke filled toilets and cabins and saving their carefree lives when they broke their carefree boats.
After getting overwhelmed immediately after starting the job by all the above Carefree-ness  I very quickly realized that there was no one in the company that shared even a hint of my on-the-water philosophy and finding the people that would respond to my expertise within the club its self was going to take a very long time if I didn’t have the right staff for the the project. The project of changing a bunch of dangerous carefree fools on the water into careful boaters.

Right out of the gate, the decision to hire me deeply hurt the feelings of the two guys that were working there for most of the summer. They both could clearly see, that after all the shit they had to deal with concerning the members of the club, that a company that would go off and hire an “outsider” to take over a job that they both wanted, wasn’t worth a shit and the only way they could see to get back at the company was of course, to monkey-wrench the manager. Both guys hated each others guts for various reasons so it wasn’t a unified concerted effort to bring me down but along with the other responsibilities of the job it did have a remarkable effect on me. Those guys believed, incorrectly, that they could do the job I was hired to do so both of them showed me nothing but contempt. And why not, they didn’t know me, I was just another manager, all they knew was that the company they worked so hard for didn’t care enough to pay them enough to live, didn’t offer them any kind of perks or benefits and didn’t believe they could do a job that they thought they were already doing. They believed, correctly, that the company they were working for was, in fact, Carefree.

But…
….I am also a man for whom life has endless possibilities and all that Carefree’ing got old enough to set our ship to sail on the MOST Perfect Sailing Day of THIS YEAR!!!

Of course you have to know that Dena’s responce to my initial grumblings of not wanting to take it for long was always a resounding, “Fuck it, let’s go!”
… So we sailed off into to the sunrise, away from the non-caring, from the careless, from the (fucking) carefree once and for all with my bridges thoroughly a-flame. I walked out without notice on a Saturday, dude, I was not going back to that job.
…And it was beautiful and inspiring and it reminded us of what it was we were doing, and how we were doing it, and how right it was for us, and that we were happy just to be doing it, just to be sailing off into the sunrise together. The sailing effected us deeply, in ways that are so absolutely profound that we couldn’t help but care.

…It looked like this.

The wind was on our starboard beams aft quarter for the first two hours under-sail but as we rounded up into the Chesapeake Bay-proper the wind, as foretold by our technology, changed its direct to our port-side broad beam. The gybe was invigorating!

North, north east for 8 solid hours when the wind changed again to give us an hour of wing on wing down hill running back up that old River to our familiar moorings in green water… Home, again, and as always, ready for the next adventure.

The End

It all started out as a regular, run-of-the-beautiful-mill sailing trip.

No really.

James has been doing the commute between Essex and Edgewater for a few weeks now, but the idea was always that we’d move down to the dock on which he works.  Rain stalled us on the two occasions we’d planned to make the 10-hour sail down. Yesterday was fine, though, and we got out of bed knowing we would be sailing all day.

We stowed gear, stored foodstuffs, and worked our mooring lines off the pilings they’d been wrapped around since we moved to Cutter Marine on April 20, 2010.  Setting off, we had no wind and resigned ourselves to motoring out to open bay.

The Chesapeake greeted us with vivid patches of blue sky behind the shifting drifts of dense cumulonimbus.  We motored; we sailed; we motorsailed.  The rhythm of wind-building and wind-dying was followed closely by our jib, which roller-unfurled and roller-furled in a flirty dance.  The main sail did a stately version, staying high but pulling in while motoring and drifting far out when sailing - we were broad-reaching all day long.

Have you ever been sailing?  It’s a lovely combination of doing nothing and being busy the whole time.  Watching for crab pot buoys, keeping on course, watching other boats approach or glide away, adjusting sail - none of it is stressful.  On a light-wind day like yesterday, we didn’t even observe our usual watch schedule.  We passed the helm off whenever it felt right and the person not touching the tiller was responsible for spotting buoys.  It was relaxing and happy and we loved on each other at every opportunity.

Slicing kalamatas to spark up our colby-jack sandwiches - that was the dangerous high-point of the sail until we got well into the South River.

I was at the helm and sailing obliquely toward the land just down-river from the Quiet Waters Park.  I scoped out the dark-bricked, castle-like dwelling on the cliff up-river from the park and just beyond the entrance to Harness Creek.  When James asked me how close we could get to the shore, I glanced again at the chart, confirming what I’d seen before.

“Pretty close,” was my laconic answer.

The depth sounder was showing a steady 14 feet.  That means about 16 feet of water depth - plenty for our boat.  Much of the Chesapeake and its estuarine systems run shallower than that.  I’ve been in channels with 7 and 8 feet of water.  To a Puget Sound girl, that sounds like nothing.  But I’ve been getting used to it.  And I was about to pay for my overconfidence.

The plan was to watch the depth carefully.  According to the chart, the bottom should come up to about 9 feet and stay there a little ways before jumping up to 2 feet.

It didn’t.

The depth sounder read 14 and then I felt a slow jolt, our momentum died, and the sounder changed its mind and told me - about 2 seconds too late - that I had 2.4 feet of water around me.

My boat is deeper than that.

James and I looked at each other, looked up at the full sails, and started talking.  Once we decided it would be useful to take turns with the talking thing, James began the conversation on the right foot.

“We are so fucked.”

I turned away from this statement of fact and started sculling.  That just means wiggling the rudder back and forth by pushing and pulling the tiller.  The point?  I was trying to power off of the soft bottom.  Didn’t work.

James backwinded the main each direction, one after another, while I sculled.  I thought I was breaking free because the rudder started moving more easily, but nope.  I realized that I was just using the rudder to scrape the mud away from that portion of the river and stopped pumping the tiller back and forth.

A weather eye showed that we weren’t going to sail out of this one directly - the wind was pushing us hard and harder onto the mud.  We pulled the jib in but decided to leave the main - it would be useful in heeling the boat over (which reduces the depth since the bottom of our boat has a wineglass shape).  Once we started to break free, that would be helpful.  We hoped.

Here’s where I’m proud of us.  We each have our own, idiosyncratic responses to urgent and/or dangerous situations.  James jumps into action; if he can’t, he gets upset and starts to freak out.  I slow down and start to work through solutions methodically; if I am rushed, I stiffen up in fear that I’ll make things worse.

We did all four of those things in this case.  James freaked and then calmed himself; I froze and then jumped in.

What we also did was this: we launched our dinghy in a new manner that we fashioned in the moment and instantly.  After rigging it out with oars and oarlocks, James jumped down into it, we filled it with an anchor and a bunch of chain, and he rowed out as far as the chain would reach.  He unceremoniously dumped the anchor over the transom of the dinghy and began rowing back.

I knew we had a problem before he made it back to the boat.

Turns out, our lovely anchor with its 150 feet of lovely chain?  Well, the chain is actually two shorter pieces of chain.  In two different sizes.  Neither of which fits properly into our windlass.

And here’s why that’s a problem.  The windlass has teeth in it that are spaced precisely to fit into the links of a specific size of chain.  The chain winds around the windlass and is guided off by a piece of metal called a stripper.  In this case, the chain got bound up in the teeth and the stripper couldn’t always break it off.

The upshot is that I spent a really, really long time turning a winch handle against both the entire weight of the boat and against the chain itself.  The whole point was to haul the boat off the mud, which is hard enough in the best of circumstances.  With old rusty chain that was never meant to be wrapped around a windlass?  Well, it was a long slog.

Why wasn’t James taking turns, you ask?  Well.  James started out taking turns.  At one point, the chain got so badly stuck that he leaned outboard, over the bow pulpit, in order to pull some slack for me.  Did the wind blow us a little harder?  Did James just pull too damn hard?

I don’t know.  But he pulled himself against the 1 inch stainless steel tubing that makes up the bow pulpit.  His ribs pushed into that tubing so hard that one of those ribs popped out of its accustomed home.  From one moment to the next, his groan of hard work turned into a moan of pain.

Of course, I stopped working to find out how badly he was hurt.  He’s done this before and it’s a long healing process - 4 to 5 weeks before he’s really better.  I got grim and he got upset.

“We could call someone.”

That was my suggestion, and I wasn’t talking about calling my mom to say hi.  (Hi mom!)  I sent James into the cabin to find our insurance information and the phone number for Tow Boat US.

Then I kept turning that winch handle on the windlass.  Right about the time James had everything in hand, I looked up from my Sisyphean task and realized we weren’t pointing the same direction we started in.

“James!  We’ve moved!”

And minutes later, I broke the anchor out of the mud and hauled it into its cradle on the bow.  James and I looked at one another.  “We can’t do that again.”

Rather than put ourselves through that horrible job for a second time, we dug out our secondary anchor, a Fortress, and all of its rode and chain.  In a now-businesslike fashion, we rigged this second anchor to a jib winch and I jumped into the dinghy.  After rowing about 200 feet out, I looked all around and really, truly believed that I was well into deep water.  I dropped the anchor over the transom and rowed back.

James had recovered somewhat from the shock and pain of popping his rib out.  He was scrambling around the deck when I got back and I couldn’t really chide him for it - I was going to need him if we were to get unstuck!

We pulled and pulled and pulled.  Eventually…after a long time…it suddenly got easy.  That meant one of two things - either the anchor had come loose or we were free of the mud.  Within another few seconds, the answer become clear as we sailed gently past the anchor!

James finished hauling the line in and, once we were completely sure we weren’t going to suck mud into the engine’s cooling water intake, we cranked her up and backed off the anchor to get our tail into even-deeper water.  Soon, James had pulled the anchor up (go Fortress!) and I was motoring into the channel!

Success!

We motored at a near-idle until I felt like any mud near the water intake had been washed away.  The rest of the trip was busy - we had a whole lot of cleaning and tidying to do.

We pulled into the Oak Grove Marina almost exactly 10 hours after leaving Cutter Marine.  Even with the running-aground adventure, we made it to our new home with plenty of daylight to spare.  We spent it cleaning.

Now we’re in a new home and we’re settled here until the end of November.  After that?  Who knows.  But I sincerely hope that our next move is, dare I say, boring?