Well
it looks like summer has finally faded into the distant past. The sun is lower
on the horizon during the day and the days are drawing in. By all accounts it
has been an exceptional summer in Washington state and British Columbia, with
over 85 days without rain in the past few months. Until this week that is. The
temperature gauge is in single digits overnight and barely makes double digits
during the daytime. We have had the first series of autumn storms passing
through, one of which gave us 47 knot gusts in the marina (glad we were in the
marina). The rain is now back and the forecast for the foreseeable future has
no sunshine included and has either rain or showers every day. This cold and
wet weather brings a new set of challenges for us liveaboards: Staying dry,
warm, how to dry wet clothes and dealing with condensation in the boat, which
gets worse with a greater temperature differential between the inside of the
boat and the outside. So keep the inside cooler and have less condensation or
keep the boat warm and have lots of condensation. Naturally the problem gets
worse at night when the temperature outside drops and the differential is
greatest. Jude is putting on extra layers each day. I don’t think she has got
to putting on two pairs of socks yet but I can see it coming. Katya is coping
with it well and does not seem to feel the cold as much as we do. I have been
prone to that rather annoying habit parents seem to acquire and that is to
regale stories of hardship “when we were young” Katya sighs, rolls her eyes and
mutters expletives as I tell the story of how “when we were young” Sara and I
used to share a bedroom in our house in Wales, that during the winter used to
have ice on the inside of the windows and have mushrooms growing on the walls.
The house was only heated by wood burning stoves so to get warm involved going
outside, sometimes into the snow to get logs.
Bla bla bla. You get the drift. It also reminds me of the famous Monty
Python sketch four Yorkshiremen. “ Oh you were lucky”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo&feature=youtube_gdata_player To top all this off the
rain has shown up a small leak in the forward cabin where the windlass (a
device that brings up the anchor chain) comes through the deck. For those who
own boats will know, leaks on boats are part of the everyday struggle. They
appear, you spend an inordinate amount of time tracking them down, they are
always in the most inaccessible place and when you fix one another one appears.
This very small leak, a mere drip, requires taking the windlass off the deck
resealing it and replacing it. It is probably a days work and may involve
another problem showing up. Needless to say we are now looking forward to
arriving in Sydney, seeing Mike, Irit, Gabe and Daniel and going for a swim in
Mahon (rock) pool.
One
of the jobs on our amaranthine list is to get the life raft serviced. The life
raft is a six man inflatable raft that weighs about 40kgs. It sits on deck and
in the event of impending doom you are supposed to throw this overboard, watch
it self-inflate and calmly step “down” into the raft. i.e. you are only
supposed to get into it when the boat is about to go under. These life rafts
are supposed to be serviced every 3 years and ours is overdue for a service.
Given that we are planning to go to Alaska next spring we thought it would be
prudent to make sure it works. We therefore booked the raft in for a service
and ourselves in for a 3 hour course on “life raft Deployment – The doos and
don’t’s of abandoning ship” So we all trooped off to Tacoma, south of Seattle
for our course. We were given a fine demonstration of the art of life raft
deployment and were pleased that indeed that there was a liferaft in the sealed
container and not a bag or rocks, and that it was in good condition. Phew. A
new one costs around $6,000. We were
shown how to deploy the raft. How to get into the liferaft from the sea. How to
make sure that we cut the line that attaches it to the boat if the boat is
sinking. Always a good thing to know, and many other facts that we were
blissfully unaware of but are actually quite important.
We
are all managing to quench our thirst for internet related activities despite
having no fixed line, unlimited plan, blazing fast internet. We have a 5GB 3G
data plan with ATT which provides access through the tethering facility on the
iphone. It is not the fastest I admit but I bet it is faster than dial up. It
won’t allow us to stream any movies and we have to watch the excess use charges,
but it is sufficient. One thing that is frustrating is that we cannot leave it
on all the time as our computers seem to be browsing on their own and use data
when we are not using them. We did turn off Windows updates after we found that
one update was over 500mb. I replaced the ancient Windows XP PC that was on the
boat when I bought it with the one that we had at home. This has now had all
our navigation software installed, runs our radar and is connected to the flat
screen so we can watch rented movies. We unsubscribed from cable TV in Denver
two years ago and went to Netflix only TV. No commercials and a good selection.
Katya does miss Netflix but is reading a lot instead. Although she has read
many books she finished her first “major” book yesterday and is moving on to
the next. I have been reading books to Katya and Jude in the evenings. When the
temperature drops, we climb into bed and I read a book to Katya and Jude. At
the moment I am reading “The Light on the Island” an account of a 20th
Century families’ adventures and strife living on an island in the San Juan
islands. The book was kindly lent to us by Ken, a friend of Steve and Sandy who
lives on Lopez island.
