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?

The past week has been in and out of the 100’s like a Pynchonian simile (here)…

Damn, it’s been hot!

…So I had this customer come in to my (evil empire) work place the other day asking me if I’d ever heard of an “ice-box A/C unit”. I had never heard of such a thing but we, the customer and I, got into a heated (ha-ha) discussion about how one would go about making such a contraption. Anyway, inspired by the above record breaking temp’s in the Chesapeake Bay I went home on my day off and made one $17.00, 12 volt (off the grid) Ice-Box Air Conditioning Unit.

Here’s how I did it…

…First, I got a cheap, ok, it was free, cooler from work, an in-line bilge blower (far-right), two vents (left), a length of flexi-duct hose, a push-pull on-off switch and a drain plug…

… I installed the blower motor, the electrical wiring and the switch in a small group in the upper right corner of the cooler then I ran the 14 gauge wire out of the box.

…After that I cut an input air vent the same size as the blower output on the opposite side of the cooler, once again, in the upper right hand corner.

…I put a 12 volt cigarette lighter male-plug on the end of the wire and ran it into the cockpit.

… Then all you have to do is fill it up with ice, run the ducting to your favorite place (in our case it’s the companion way entrance) and turn that sucker on!

We’ll see how it goes, so far it’s been pretty cool, a bit on the loud side, even though the fan motor is inside the cooler, but I think it’s brought the temperature down in the main saloon about 10 degrees and for now I think I’ll just go off and pat myself on the back for a project well done!

For the most part, I like the sure thing.  I think a sure thing is a lovely planning tool.  It’s easy to make a budget when you know what kind of income you’re going to have.  Working for the census, I didn’t know how long the job would last (and I’ve already made it safely through two layoffs, with another set of pink-slips being handed out on Friday the 30th).  I didn’t know how much overtime would be allowed.  But I sure as hell did the math on the guaranteed 40 hours at $18.54 plus the health and wellness payout of $3.35 (for the first 40 hours, not on overtime).  And that money pays the bills.

There’s a problem with the sure thing.  It’s limited.  It’s sure, but it’s not going to result in fabulous unexpected gains.  It usually doesn’t even result in fabulous unexpected happiness.  It is what it is.  It’s sure.

James has long been a proponent of the gamble, the hope, the wish, the maybe.  If there’s a sure thing, it’s a trap.  And you know what?  He’s right.

Hawaii was hard on me.  It was hard on James, too, but he felt it more socially/interpersonally.  I felt it more as a contraction of options.  We had so few places to go, so few jobs for which we could apply.  Sure things were hard to come by, and every one we found spoke the same language of wait, wait, wait.  We were looking at a decade in Hawaii before we’d be in a financial position to leave.

That was unacceptable.  We’re leavers by nature.  Four months is our average comfort time, and we can sometimes stretch that by moving within a geographical area.  But there weren’t enough options to keep us in Hawaii for ten years.  Even at six months each, that would have required twenty marinas, and Hawaii doesn’t have that many!

There are more marinas in Arizona than Hawaii.  True story.

So the sure thing in Hawaii was the biggest bummer.  And because I couldn’t find a decent sure thing, we gave up a boat that was capable of taking us anywhere, any time, in comfort and safety and happiness.

Doggedly plugging away at debt, at the boat work, at our books…this is a good and needful thing.  But also needful is the opening up of opportunity.  I’m ready for leaps and bounds.

We have a friend (hi Jason!) who has a grandfabulous idea.  It’s an idea that needs the kinds of energy and skill that we have.  And it could very well represent a leap in our traveling lives.

It’s not a sure thing.  It’s a gamble.  And I’m in.  I’m throwing my time, energy, and expertise into the pot and watching the cards turn.  If I can make it come out right, it will.  If not, I will be richer for experience even if I’m poorer for some hours and attention I could have spent elsewhere.

So here goes.  I’m entering a new phase.  I will plug away and leap at the same time.  I will open myself up and budget myself simultaneously.  I will take on too much and make myself bigger so that I can handle it.

I will:

• Finish my book-in-progress and write the one that’s obsessing me right now.
• Bring our boat into condition to be more comfortable for the next winter than it was for the last.
• Maintain a connection with my body through exercise and other feel-good stuff.  Wink.
• Earn extra dribs and drabs through piecework editing.
• Explore the idea of being a hands-on sex coach.

And last but not least:

• Build a socially and environmentally sustainable company from the ground up and reap the benefits of an entirely virtual business structure.

Leaping and bounding toward so many kinds of happiness.  Keep your eyes open - who knows where we’ll be this time next year!

For example, Sherri S Tepper is certainly a person who has a philosophy that rings throughout her books, and her characters argue this philosophy through their actions, their interactions with each other, and sometime overtly in written conversation.  Or John Barth and Salman Rushdie, who do the same things in more elegant, ornate ways, with less of a traditional storyline structure.

Now I’m planning on exploring basic life themes through the book I’m going to write.  I have a character who is warming painfully from the frostbite of guilt and, strange to say, I’m not terribly familiar with guilt.  I know shame better but don’t even have much sense of shame.  Forgiveness, redemption, retribution…I need to get to know these things in order to question them deeply.

On a fundamental level, I am fascinated by, and confused by, the kinds of negative emotion that can ruin a life without any outside force whatsoever.  I believe in personal responsibility.  I believe that one must act in accordance with one’s own personal ethics in order to be a person of integrity.  But when I fail to do so, my next belief is that I should learn and do better.  I have never acted so out of accord that I have carried a debt of guilt.

One of the concepts I’ve been reading about is that people have a right to be punished.  That only in punishing misbehavior can society help a person exorcise guilt.  That guilt is responsive to punishment and forgiveness, not to change or an intention to do better.

Is this true?  Capital T True or true in some limited way?  Only in fiction can I ask all the questions and have different characters resolve them in various ways.

Externalizing punishment - is that the point?  Making it overt and discrete, with a specific duration and an understood amount of pain?  In this way, can a person release their guilt?

Do they have to trust their jury?  Can one be punished improperly for the crime, given a leniency one does not agree is warranted and therefore not be released from guilt?

One of the twelves steps in AA involves contacting the people you’ve hurt.  This has to be about guilt - only guilt can be expiated by forgiveness or punishment.  Right?  Shame is yours until you are no longer the person who acted in a way to create the shame.  But then maybe it’s about proving to oneself that you have changed, that you’re not the same person and so deserve not to feel shame?

I’m all question, no answer right this minute.  But that seems like a promising place to be at the beginning of this book.  I know what she did, I know how she has responded to her actions up until the beginning of the book.  She never dreamed a thaw was possible and is in horrific pain - worse than the shock-cushioned pain of understanding what she’d done.  (No, I will not give any hints about what that act was.)  Now I get to ask, through her and the people around her, all the questions I’m fascinated by.

Is self-punishment valid or does one need to be sentenced by the affected parties?

Does forgiveness by others equal release from the burden of guilt?

Can one live and love separately from one’s experience of guilt?

Once irrevocable action has been taken, can any further action balance out or pay back the harm done?

There’s a few of my questions.  Answers?  We’ll see.

Ok, I’ll start over…

Dena and I were eating sushi last last night contemplating a Monday morning sail. We’d get up… whenever, ready the boat…at the pace we feel is needed and go sailing. Destination, whatever…

It was incredible, the wind was a fresh 10 knots out of the North leaving the dock, meaning, to our broadsides but we slipped out between the pilings without even getting close and just like that we were out in the upper Middle River. As we rounded in to the confluence of Dark Head and Hopkins Creek we set sail and in less than a minute we were silently clipping away at five knots at a heel of about 15 degrees to starboard. It was perfect! We tacked twice before leaving Frog Mortar Creek aft and with it we payed out the sheets for a beautiful broad reach out towards the open Chesapeake Bay. Once again, Incredible, absolutely perfect sailing!

Before making the mouth of the Bay we rounded up to head back up river so Dena could make it to work on time. We had an out flowing tide on the way down river so we knew with the up wind beat and the ebbing tide we’d be in for a little bit longer trip going back home. On our second tack upwind we luffed up into a gust so as I tightened sail Dena fell off just a touch and at that very moment we got broad-sided by a massive rogue gust from the rivers’ confluence. In the next 8 seconds the boat would be knocked down, the forward lower shroud on the port-side would be ripped out of the deck and the rig would shudder with a terrifying groan. Within that aforementioned span of time I tossed off the sheets and Dena pointed our bow into the wind. In less than ten seconds we were sailing perfectly again and I was hauling in the genny with the roller furling. We were silent with adrenaline for a few long heartbeats afterwards.

I’ve heard it said by so many sailors I’d be hard pressed to find the original quote, that “Sailing is nothing more than a series of contemplative hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”. Today I am indeed inclined to agree with that statement.

When the water flowed over the leeward bulwarks in the knock down it scooped up one of our fenders, tossing it overboard. Without saying much to each other we both thought it a good time to do an under-sail “MOB” drill and go back and save our fender from certain piracy from the local suburban Reevers of Hog Pen Creek, Maryland. It wasn’t until we had tacked twice and gibed 3 times that we both realized we were just a little too shaken-up to do a maneuver like that, but, according to the U.S.C.G that is the absolute best time to do a “Man-Over-Board” maneuver; when you’re freaked-the-fuck-out…

We saved our beloved fender…

…But as we were settling back in to sailing up-river again I noticed that the forward-lower shroud on the port-side was tossing around the foredeck like a drunk’n sailor. I alerted Dena to the issue and went forward to inspect the damage and strike our main sail. The half inch thick chain-plate that supports the lower part of the mast on the port side of the boat had snapped in half when the spreaders went in the water during the knock down.

…And that was the moment of sheer terror, the moment we realized we really had just barely escaped death.

The fact of the matter is, if we hadn’t rounded-up into the wind and tossed off the sheets at that very moment we would have been dismasted and the entire sailing rig would have come crashing down into the cockpit where we both were at the time.

Wow…

We made it back to the dock without incident and before I got back from the head at the top of the dock Dena was gearing up for her bicycle ride to work. We bantered back and forth a bit but as she took off we both gave in to that look that we give each other every single time we live through another one of our calamitous adventures, and together we said, I love you!

In early September of 2001 we were in the little town of Newport, Oregon waiting out the weather before heading South for the San Francisco Bay. On NOAA’s weather radio the forecast was for calming seas on the morning of the first so we decided to go into town, check our e-mails  and get one last hot meal before heading off shore once again. As we walked the four miles to the Newport Library for our half hour of free internet access we both were a little more than just quiet, a rare thing for the two of us for sure, we were down right scared that the weather was going to turn on us but neither one of us wanted to deture the other one from the excitement of continuing our adventures around the world! So, we walked on in silence…

…After doing our business at the library we set off for a local all you could eat buffet but before we got there we both came out of our terror closets.

I told Dena that I thought it was a bad idea to be in a big hurry and if we both had bad feelings about leaving than we shouldn’t go, period!

And just like that, we both sighed a big sigh of relief and resigned to NEVER go sailing when either one of us even felt the least amount of reserve. It was like having a giant weight lifted off the conversation, not-to-mention liberating, we were both happy and even a little content by our decision to stay in a sheltered cove for a few extra days if for nothing else, piece of mind!

It’s a good thing we did too, that night Dena got food poisoning from the all-you-can-eat place and she wouldn’t be ready for another off shore adventure for another nine days…(*)

Somewhere in that long lost dinner conversation I’m sure were the seeds of another rule-of-thumb that Dena and I have applied to our general adventure behavior; and that was all the other “No Sailing” days in any given year while sailing in the waters of the United States of America…

…Never, and I mean NEVER! Go sailing on Memorial Day, the 4th of July or Labor day, the three days out of the year that the waters of the US are rife with idiocy! Every single ass-hole who has ever been on the water WILL be on the water on those three days, it’s a guarantee.
…Well, This year Dena and I haven’t seen each other that much over the last few months and of course that means we haven’t been sailing very much either, ok, we haven’t been sailing at all since we made land-fall in Middle River, MD!

WHAT?!

That’s totally unacceptable so, last weekend we decided to go sailing on the only day that we both had off together in at least another two months. At the time it sounded like a great idea, a bottle of wine after a day on the water… As I’ve said before, I work at (evil empire inc.) and Memorial Day is one of their biggest sales days of the year so rest-assured the build-up to such a big deal is in its self a big (fucking) deal and I spent all week worrying about going sailing on one of THOSE days… By Sunday night this past week I had fostered a very BAD feeling about Monday’s sailing adventure and felt compelled to change our plans just a little…

… Sunday night we scrapped the first idea of going out all day in the big boat in trade for a full day of sailing down Middle River in our 9 foot Cat-rigged dory, S/V Tinker. We sailed up-wind and down river with Dena at the helm past five or six ship-wrecks to the “River Watch” restaurant and bar for some rich food and a few strong rum-punches! After that we sailed with the tide and the wind at our backs back up Middle River with me at the helm all the way to the Eastern Rd. bridge then back to our home and global-circumnavigation vector, the S/V S.N. Nomad. We had an absolutely incredible all day adventure that was free, fun and relatively void of the holiday ass-hole factor and best of all neither one of us got food poisoning!
* (September 11th 2001)

But there are other conditions…

I believe, as a species, we must concern ourselves with these other conditions.

A none-stop parade of broken bodies in dignity carts scoot the white top of neo-rural  Maryland. As the Slanted faces with a post digestive grimace, times 8, brighten my morning return from “The Thing”, I realize that retired-Baltimorians dressed in ancient suburbs just aren’t very pretty.

It looks much better from the water…

There are two major problems with this new marina.

I discovered the first one last weekend.  There’s a gate that is open only when the office is open.  Other times, we scan a card to open the gate.  It opens automatically when you drive up to it.  Can you catch the catch?  It doesn’t work when I’m on my bike.  James went to work on Sunday and I couldn’t get out of the marina!  I’m stuck in here again today, but I’m just working on the boat so it’s okay right now.  But please!  And they’re going to combine 1st and 2nd shift at work, so I’m going to have to switch to 6:30am-3pm.  How will I go to work when I can’t get out of the damn marina?!?

The second one introduced itself this morning.  I got up about 9am and made coffee.  The boat wasn’t moving much, but whatever.  By 10:30, the boat was heeling heavily.  They were wrong about how deep this slip is.  Want to see why this is a problem?

Sigh.  Here’s another view that shows how badly this sucks.