Readings from the Book of Chapman

That would be the Chapman Book of Piloting and Seamanship. 

My lovely wife and I have gone back to doing daily readings from the Book of Chapman. It’s a great way to stay up on our skills. It also gets us looking forward to getting the sailboat back in the water. 

We still have our Oday 19 sailboat. This is the same boat we once spent 10 weeks on. One winter we sailed down the west coast of Florida and crossed Florida Bay to the Keys. Good times. We really haven’t gone on any long sailing adventures with it since 2019. Like many people we were dealing with other things. 

The boat is basically in pretty decent shape still. Thanks to Spud I have a nice little Honda outboard on it. What I’d like to do is to completely rewired everything. With a boat that small it’s not really that big a job. The available switch panels don’t impress me so building one from basic components is the way to go. It also needs the shelves rebuilt. Adding more solar electric is also an option. 

The thing about boat repairs is knowing when to stop. You can spend all your time doing upgrades and never get on the water. On the other hand, the boat has to be safe and comfortable. 

This coming season I’d love to get back out on the big wilderness lakes near me. My lovely wife would like to get back out on the Hudson River, which is where she grew up. The coast of Maine is also an option. 

Right now the boat is still buried under a couple feet of snow. In the mean time, we have readings from the good book.

-Sixbears

Avoiding the deep freeze

The weather back home is cold, but it’s supposed to warm up a bit . . . then snow for a couple days. After that sub-zero cold is predicted.

Here I am in the San Francisco Bay area, enjoying sunny days that get into the high 70s. Seems like a good time to visit my daughter here on the West Coast. I’ve worn shorts and t-shirts almost every single day since we got here. It has dropped into the 40s at night, but when the sun comes up it quickly gets comfortable.

Of course, I’ve lucked out as we’ve avoided most of the fire problems, only getting a little smoke one day. My daughter was also lucky to not have her power shut off. All those clear sunny days make it tinder dry. Then there’s the constant earthquake danger.

Just like everything else in life, you have to take the bad with the good. While I wouldn’t want to live here full time, this has been a great vacation for me.

We plan on heading back to New England just before Thanksgiving. At the end of the month we have to go back to our home to finish packing for Florida. The house has all the plumbing drained, Internet turned off, and most of the power shut down. On the bright side, we can light the woodstove and get some heat into the building while packing. It’s going to take plenty of hot coffee to get the job done.

Originally the plan was to have the Blazer and boat packed and ready to go. As the day of our California trip departure crept up, we concentrated on that. Even so the boat is about 95% ready and the Blazer about 90% packed. It shouldn’t take too long . . . except for cold, snow and ice slowing everything down.

There’s some slack in our schedule. There’s no need to pull a boat trailer through a snowstorm.

-Sixbears

Prepare by doing

Back when I was a kid my family was into canoe racing. We acquired our fair share of trophies and ribbons. There was a paddling team that had developed a special series of exercises to prepare for races. Those guys looked in great shape. They had fantastic precise technique. Dad and I left them in our wake.

They asked us what exercises we did to train. What we did was paddle rivers . . . a lot . . . as hard as we could. As dad figured it, if you wanted to get good at something, do that thing as much as possible.

With that in mind, all the sailing I’ve been doing on my small lake is good practice for this coming fall’s sailing adventure. It’s not perfect as there’s no tides, currents and shoals to deal with. It does offer good practice with variable winds, busy boat traffic, anchoring, and lots and lots of tacking and sail adjustments.

Normally coastal sailing doesn’t involve a lot of tacking. Even when sailing into the wind, one usually does a few long tacks rather than a lot of short ones. That’s a lot more efficient. Should I ever be in a narrow channel with a dead engine, all that small lake tacking practice will come in handy.

My lovely wife and plan on doing some sailing along the coast of Maine, so that’ll be perfect. Looks like we are canceling our Lake Champlain plans. A number of the lake’s bays are suffering from toxic algae blooms. People’s dogs have died from contact with the water. There’s no need to take a chance while that’s going on.

We also have some trips planned to some large wilderness lakes. That should be fun -and good practice too!

-Sixbears

Places to go, things to do

We have a friend who posts on Facebook all the events she says she's going to. Maybe she'd like to go to them, but it's physically impossible to be two places at once. The poor girl overbooks like crazy. My lovely wife and I have a saying: we can't be at all the places doing all the things. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many resources at our disposal. You have to pick and choose.

For years I've been looking to sail the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) from mile marker 1 all the way to southern Florida. I even had a nice ICW guidebook for the trip. That was lost in our shipwreck before we even got a chance to use it. Oh well, such is life.

We came very close to doing it this fall, but then I woke up one morning and decided it wasn't the year to buy a bigger boat. While it's possible to do it in an Oday 19, it would not be very comfortable for us. We decided to do one more year of shallow water sailing. The little Oday is well suited for the shallow waters of Florida's Gulf Coast, Florida Bay and the Keys. There are some pretty cool places that you can't get into with a greater than 3 foot draft. We figure the ambulance/camper van has at least one more long road in it. After that, who knows? For now it's a pretty good tow vehicle for the sailboat.

Here it is August and we are making winter plans, but it's not too early. There are places we want to go that will require reservations well in advance. Fortunately, there are also plenty of places where we can probably get into by just showing up. We have back up plans in case those places are not available. In a pinch we can always dry camp for the night as the van is pretty self contained.

One of the things I'd like to get before the trip is a decent waterproof camera. Camera phones have come a long way, but having a stand alone camera would be nice. My poor phone is already doing heavy duty as everything from a chart plotter to the heart of a music system.

Yesterday my lovely wife and I made a list of all things we have to do before we go. It's a long list. Some things are more critical than others so it's good to have it written down. Of course, if you know anything about lists, they tend to never get much shorter as new things are added. Eventually enough of the critical stuff is done and it's time to go.

My lovely wife and I are looking forward to doing some more traveling. There's a lot of things to do here in New England and Canada before the snow flies. Let's not even start on the house projects yet to do.

-Sixbears

Trips and talk of trips

It's funny. My lovely wife and I can spend day after day together in the same house, but nothing stimulates travel plans like going for a drive. I'm feeling better and so is my spouse. We decided to head over the mountains for dinner and a movie.

The weather looked mild with a chance of rain. It wasn't bad except for when we were crossing Pinkam Notch in the White Mountains. On the way back home the rain turned to snow. The new snow tires made all the difference. We didn't break any speed records but we never slipped one bit either.

Over dinner we started talking about possible travel plans later in the winter. Right now we are kicking around two options. One idea is to take the camper van and tow the sailboat to Florida. Once there we'd do a mix of camping and sailing. The Oday 19 is a bit small for us after having been on the Ranger 23. Four feet doesn't sound like a lot but there is a big difference in interior volume. With that in mind we'd only spend a few days at a time on the boat. Since it's on a trailer, however, we could leap frog all over the state and sample a number of different areas.

The second idea is to go minimalistic. We'd toss camping gear and the inflatable kayak into the little Nissan hatchback and go. That would allow us to go into some places our big rig can't go to. There are some nice camping spots that are tent only. That would require more research. We haven't stayed at some of those places in years. Other places we've only heard about.

One advantage of taking the little car is that my lovely wife is comfortable driving it. She's driven the van before but really does not like it. Towing a boat isn't something she wants to do either. By switching drivers we could go a lot further in a day.

On the other hand, with the van we don't have to drive as far every day. We can stop anywhere along the way and sleep in the back. While it takes longer to get anywhere we are lot more rested once we get to our destination.

We aren't even 100% sure we are going south this winter. If we do go it won't be for the 3 – 6 months we've done in the past. Right now we are thinking maybe a month, month and a half. Of course, with us everything is subject to change. We are nothing if not flexible.

-Sixbears