May, 2005. Non-sailing story: Retrieving Whisper from the marina.
First, I feel it necessary to complain that the past year or so has been really lousy. We wanted to go sailing, and a lot of other things besides, but our time and our energy were absorbed by the ardent efforts of our local community to dissuade a certain railroad from unnecessarily trashing part of our neighborhood for their own profit and convenience. We pretty much lost, but I do not envy the railroad. At least we earned honestly and are able to appreciate what they can only deface, degrade and destroy.
Anyway, all that stuff is just everyday work, worry, toil and trouble; now we have a chance to get back to real life.
Whisper needs a few things that we can’t very well manage to provide while she is bobbing happily in her slip eighty miles away. This list has been growing over the years, and getting especially annoying during the months that we haven’t had time to either sail or to fix up the boat. We’ve been paying for fun that we had no time for, while we might have been able to do our fixes right in our own yard. A new motor mount, some deck repairs and the mast mount replaced (more to follow on that), a radio installed, interior paint, electrical rewiring, that pesky back end leak, and certainly a few other things as we think of them. So, it’s been making sense to bring her home and save some of that slip fee money while we do this. The marina likes to hold onto you with yearly contracts, and it worked on us pretty good, partly because our deadline was in May. In May things are just getting interesting. What kind of nut pulls their boat out of paradise in May? No, no, no, it was past time to break the spell.
However, these things must be done delicately. We need careful timing so that the tide is high around noon or early afternoon, because the ramp is not usable at low tide. The weather should be cool and dry, and all other obligations and emergencies should be in abeyance. Finally, we should be healthy enough to stand up and move around, do some work. No flu, no colds, no surgery, no adjustments of medication. Oh, yeah, the car and the boat trailer should also work. Probably some other things that need to come out right, who can think of them all? The wheels of the cosmos turned, the planets creaked into position, and all of these things pretty much happened at nearly the same time. The magic weekend had finally arrived.
Friday evening, always planning ahead, I got out our rotor-tiller and made a few laps around the stump of a big old pine tree that hurricane Isabel left us. An earlier attempt at burning it out didn’t work, and I wanted to clear a space to move the boats into, and the blessed thing was just in the way. We shoveled a good while and exposed a few roots; cut them, dug some more, and eventually opened up a fair sized crater with that big, twisted, unmovable, charred stump sticking up in the middle, and then gave up around dark.
Saturday morning I checked the tire pressure on the boat trailer, filled up one of them and proceeded to wait a while. I needed to rest, it was hard to move around or bend over for some reason. Meanwhile, I had to park the trailer again and move my truck because relatives suddenly wanted to get a piece of furniture from our house. I really disliked this piece of furniture because it weighs a freaking TON, but on the other hand I was kind of sorry to see it go just then, for the exact same reason. (When your wife likes to rearrange furniture a lot, wicker chairs and lawn furniture can start to look pretty darn stylish for indoors.) We got the thing loaded and away it went. I got the trailer hooked up again and checked the tire pressure. One tire was perfect. The other had lost ten pounds in an hour and a half. A few seconds of mental calculation revealed that this was not going to work out very well.
Back to the trailer outlet we went to get it fixed. Even though the tire is new, the rim is as old as the boat and has likely rusted through, like the spare did. Our trailer guy was really good to us, as always, and loaned us a tire and hub while he fixes ours. He put it on, and we’ll trade back later. Last Tuesday, I think, was when we were supposed to do that.
Back home again; it’s early afternoon, still Saturday, now cloudy and threatening. We checked the forecast (always looking ahead) and found that we were in one of those watch-boxes in which meteorologists keep dangerous thunderstorms. Tomorrow was going to be nice. Typical, but no shaking my fist at the heavens very much just then, I realized that I had some time to putter around the house, maybe frown at that stubborn old stump for a while, learn a new knot, read a book, drink some wine, get some rest. Unfortunately I did not have any such time. Other chores and obligations; they swarm like flies to feast on my leisure time, as though my leisure time were something odious for them to feast on. As the sailor who taught me my first ropes would have likely said; "see what happens when you’re on dry land?" That’s the price we pay for our modern convenient lives, I guess.
That night we slept eleven or twelve hours and woke mid morning Sunday. I did not want to get up, but the sun was shining, the coffee was hot and there were no disasters or emergencies to put things off any longer. With our usual astonishing efficiency, we breezed through the hour and a half drive to the marina, arriving about two P.M. There, we discovered that our boat key was not to be found on their big board of keys. We had our own keys so it was no problem, but I searched a while anyway and, sure enough, it was not to be found - except by dumb luck, which for some reason we had an abundant supply of this afternoon. As soon as I stopped comparing their keys to the one I had, I noticed our name printed neatly on one of the key fobs. Ha! Things seemed to start really looking up at that point. We were then informed that we had arrived there to take away the boat ON our deadline day, the last possible day, and so had just dodged another year’s worth of obligations to the marina with no time to spare. We thought that deadline date came later in the month, even dumber luck! We snuggled our trailer down the narrow ramp, parked just above water line, and headed for the boat. Puttering her around to the trailer couldn’t possibly take much time.
There was a little rain water, as usual, to pump out of the back end of Whisper. The rest was just a matter of untying and motoring around to the ramp. Rhonda rode in the front and I steered, it was a pleasant ride. There were some handy pilings at the ramp and we were able to tie up without incident. Some boaters waiting for the ramp lent us some valuable assistance, I mean really valuable assistance, (lucky they were there) and we got her out of the water and into the boat yard without too much trouble after that. The motor and rudder stowed in the back of the pickup, lowering the mast . . . The mast is another story.
Let’s look on the bright side. The mast came most of the way down without incident. The incident occurred when it was time for me to step down into the cockpit and guide it the rest of the way to the mast crutch. I was just a little stiff and slow that day, for some reason, I guess. Because the mast was being held up by the jib halyard and mainsheet, which was working pretty well as far as it went; the mast was just passing through one of those mechanical arrangements wherein any deviation off course will quickly become increasingly difficult to correct. This is what happened. Using up my next-to-last ounce of dumb luck, I dropped the mast before it could reach the other boats near where we were parked. Nothing is broken on the boat that didn’t already need to be repaired or replaced anyway, and now we simply can’t neglect any more. Nothing was broken on me, either, in case you cared to know.
When we finally got everything tied down and on the road, I counted us 90% of the way home. The entire trip was uneventful, and was also the best part of the day. We backed Whisper up into the spare driveway (we should draw a map of our driveways for you some time) and parked her there. The lock securing the trailer hitch seems to have lost its key. Obviously that was the end of our dumb luck that day. Hmmm, no problem, just take off the whole hitch thing. Almost too easy, will have to find the key or cut the lock off before we can tow again. After we got the pickup truck freed, we emptied the stuff out of the back, and slept. That was Sunday, May 1, 2005.
Wrapping up.
Monday, May 9. Yesterday I managed to pull the stump out of the ground with a come-along and a chain, and a heavy nylon strap, and a hatchet and a saw, and a couple of shovels. I think it took me almost three hours, pulling it this way and that, though I spent most of that time catching my breath. It is a massive and gnarled hunk of wood. There are other stumps but they are small and will be easy to deal with by comparison, after that I will have an area of sorts in which to work on boats.
My sincere apologies to Whispernaut site readers who waited extra days for pictures of our rudder. Rhonda was gracious enough to allow the pictures to be taken on her kitchen floor, where the one foot tiles (tile plus grout = one foot) provide an excellent background for scale. Fortunately, we burned some toast in the kitchen earlier so the windows were open and a fan was going, so the smell of dead barnacles did not linger long in the house.
I called about the trailer wheel nearly two weeks after we borrowed the loaner, we had forgotten about it. The trailer guy was even more spaced out than we were and hasn’t gotten around to fixing it yet. My conscience is miraculously healed. Now if I can just find the key to that trailer hitch . . .
John
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