Dan and Jaye's cruising blog: Kumatage (reflections on the water)

This chilly drizzly weather had me making a pot of bean soup ... and philosophizing while it simmered. Originally Posted in the Annapolis Capital: September 9, 12:24 pm | (permalink) | (0 comments) [ the galley aboard our boat ] Living on a boat inspired Ken and Nadia to a career change, as I wrote about in a previous post. Thinking a little more about their transformation made me reflect on our own. Living in a small space makes you really question, and explore, the difference between what you truly need to live a good life and what you think you need. Dan used to own a kitchen design/remodel business. In fact, that’s how he got into sailing. Not obvious, you say? When we lived in Colorado and had the kitchen business, one of my colleagues asked if we could replace the laminate on the galley countertop of their boat, a small Catalina 24 that they sailed on summer weekends on a nearby lake. This was a small, easy job – the countertop was so small that instead of having to go to t...

Originally Posted in the Annapolis Capital: September 6, 10:05 am | (permalink) | (0 comments) One Saturday afternoon last month found us at the Gangplank Tour of Boat Homes as I described in an earlier post along with 300 other people for the sold-out event. I was looking for inspiration in ideas that other liveaboards had incorporated into their boats that I could incorporate into our own; but mostly, I was looking at people. I thought the folks at Gangplank had an interesting idea in trying to educate others into their way of life, now I was curious about how it would be received. Of the people who attended, you could see some folks just got it, and were thinking yeah, I could live like this. You could see others just didn’t get it at all, and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live in such a small and seemingly precarious space. David and Paulette Craig came from Bowie just out of curiosity and fell into the former group. I met them aboard the Sara K, a 1972 Trojan ...

We were lucky, Irene wasn't a non-event; but the only damage done to our boat was to our rum supply. 33-foot boat in new sturdy 50-foot slip is a story with a happy ending. We were without power for several days, but hey, we're a boat, we're used to making our own. As for the rest of the posts today: Okay, it's kinda cheating to repost stuff from Life Afloat. Yeah, I agree. I have more photos for each of these, that didn't make it into the Capital, but at the moment we still have limited internet post-Irene, so I'll add the extra pix as soon as I can.

originally posted in the Annapolis Capital: August 29, 1:17 pm | (permalink) | (0 comments) [photo: satellite view of Irene on her way towards us; courtesy U.S. Navy] Now, it’s calm and dry and sunny – as though Irene has used up our quota of wind and rain for the entire week (month?) in one single tantrum. Now, it’s laughing with neighbors and surveying the relative lack of damage to our boats. Now, it’s sitting in the cockpit with a cup of coffee. But only yesterday … Being on a boat in a hurricane has different worries of course than being on land for a hurricane. We’re not worried about power; we’re used to making our own – it’s not like you can run an extension cord out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Or water; we topped up before the storm and that supply generally lasts us 3 weeks, more if we’re in careful-conservation mode. Or flooding; hey, we’re a boat after all, we’ll just float above it. Or even falling tree limbs; no trees out here. But remember I just rec...

originally posted in the Annapolis Capital: August 27, 10:18 am | (permalink) | (0 comments) [ photo: satellite view of a typical hurricane. Irene is bigger!] Our very good friend and sailing mentor in the Caribbean, David Kummerle, once told us that it takes 4 days to have a hurricane on a boat if all goes well – a day to get ready, a day to have the storm, a day to rest, and then a day to put the boat back together. And that’s if there’s no boat damage. We learned the truth of that in two previous hurricanes, Lenny in the Virgin Islands, and Isabel here in Annapolis. We’re about to test that advice again. Earlier this week we started our pre-prep. That’s my self-justifying description of spending lots of time in internet chats with my sailing buddies, and checking multiple weather sites as soon as they were updated. In addition to the biggies like Weather Underground and Accuweather and NOAA , we like the graphics on Stormpulse . We ran through our standard list of preparat...

Originally Posted in the Annapolis Capital: August 24, 1:56 pm | (permalink) | (0 comments) It had been a day of checking online weather forecasts and email and chatting with friends about how to prepare our boats for the predicted arrival of Hurricane Irene – taking down canvas and doubling up docklines and looking after the boats of friends who were out of town. I wish I could give you a unique firsthand boaters-eye-view of what it felt like to be aboard when the ground shook, but I wasn’t aboard. I was at Fitness Forum doing my regular Tuesday afternoon physical therapy session with awesome physical therapist and trainer Jen when the building started swaying. At first I assumed it was a heavy truck driving past in the elevated part of the parking lot, but as the shaking continued and got worse, we all clustered in doorframes and room corners until we were told to evacuate (I did get out of doing the last 10 minutes of my workout, though) And, all being the products o...

Originally posted in the Annapolis Capital: August 20, 7:22 am | (permalink) | (0 comments) Splash! By Thursday everything that had to be done on land had been done. Thursday evening, the boatyard picked up our boat in the big travelift and we “hung in the slings” overnight. Supporting our boat at different points than the jackstands held us allowed us to paint the sections that were blocked before so that every spot on the hull was protected. It also gave us a tiny taste of motion again, and a different vantage. Several folks asked about what it was like up there in the slings and whether it was safe? Well, actually, yes. First off, we were only inches above the ground; it’s not like we risked falling from a great height. Secondly, our support was more assured. One way that boats on jackstands can fall during hurricanes is not the wind, it’s that the rain turns the ground soft and mushy and one stand can slide out making the whole thing unbalanced. (Not that it happens ofte...

Originally Posted in the Annapolis Capital: August 18, 9:15 am | (permalink) | (0 comments) Two weeks out of the water are drawing to a close, we expect to “splash” (put the boat back into the water) on Friday … and it can’t come soon enough! The shaft and propeller are back in place, held in by a new cutlass bearing ( one , exactly one , cutlass bearing this time!), the bottom and new waterline have been painted and we are literally just hanging out waiting for the paint to dry. Dan, with his more practiced technique, did the burgundy paint; I was relegated to the underwater parts. Or, as Dennis, one of the yard guys, put it, “He did the parts people would see. You did the parts fish would see.” A lot of work for the marina staff, and us, but we’re incredibly happy that its fixed, and that we’ve gotten to the root of the problem – I think this means it’s likely to stay fixed! [ photo: Bottom paint is meant to repel marine growth, so it’s not likely to be too good for people, eit...

(originally posted: July 26, 9:43 am | (permalink) | (0 comments) [photo: s/v Elysium heads toward a new horizon] Earlier this month, I wrote about a visit from a couple of guys I had met online, Dave Dawson and Casey Langness, a filmmaker and his cameraman who were working on telling stories of living aboard and sailing. While we were sitting around chatting one evening after the days interviews were done, Dave asked, “Um, you know, I’ve been thinking about how we got here … you didn’t know me, save for a few posts on the internet … and you invited Casey and me into your home and contributed time and energy to our project … how did you decide to take that risk? How did you know I wasn’t another Craigslist killer?” I thought for a minute about how to articulate what I was thinking, because “intuition,” while true, isn’t a very informative answer. How did I decide Dave was on the level? The logical side of me did the logical things, I googled him and found a web presence consistent...

(reposted from Annapolis Capital) Originally Posted: August 8, 12:25 pm | (permalink) | (0 comments) If you’re a cruiser, you already understand the significance of this photo. [ photo – in the jackstands ] For everyone else, here’s the explanation. First, notice that this picture, unlike most of the pictures I post of our boat under sail or at anchor someplace beautiful, shows our boat on land instead of in the water. Remember I said we had to be towed back to the marina after our visit to Cambridge because the v-drive broke again ? And we couldn’t figure out why it didn’t stay fixed? Well, the good news is, now we know what’s been going wrong and how to fix it. The bad news is that we’re waiting for parts to fix it right. And while we’re waiting for those parts, we’re “on the hard,” with no refrigeration, no toilet, no air conditioning . In August . I described being on the hard two years ago, when we were getting the boat ready for our first trip south. It wasn’t fun that...