Posted on October 14, 2016
On the move.
After a long couple of weeks of waiting for weather, our boat is finally back on the move south.
We spent a lot more time than anticipated in the Chesapeake. First, we were waiting for some regular old wet-and-stormy weather to pass; then we were waiting for Hurricane Matthew to make up it’s mind; finally, we had to wait for the after-effects of the hurricane (combined with a wicked cold front) to pass through. It’s getting cold. We’re ready to go south.
Unfortunately, the south might not be ready for us. We’re not the only boat that was waiting on Matthew; lots of folks stayed north longer than expected, and the ones that were already south of us parked and waited. Now traffic following the Annapolis Boat Show is piling on, and on top of everything, the Dismal Swamp is closed due to flooding. That means everyone is headed for the Virginia Cut, and traffic is nuts.
We’re trying to slow down, to let things clear out a bit. We hear the Alligator Creek is jammed with debris, and we’d like to let it recover. We also hear Madison got some frost last night, and it makes the sunshine and sand we’ve come across feel that much sweeter.
We absolutely do feel like we’ve entered a different landscape. We are approaching the Carolina lowlands–away from the Bay that felt more like the southern Great Lakes. We’re sad to say good-bye to the crabs (although we hear they’ll range a bit further south!) but are ready to find some shrimp.
These guys turned into nori rolls…
Mostly, we feel like we are once again turning a corner.
This trip has naturally divided itself: first, Lake Michigan; next, the North Channel; Erie and the Erie Canal; The Hudson and New York City; Delaware and Chesapeake Bay. Each segment means applying skills to new conditions–tides, bridges, anchoring. While our current skills seem to involve Dealing with Crowds, we hope things will ease up in the Albermarle Sound. We’re looking forward to what the Carolinas will bring.
Posted on October 11, 2016
What the other one has been up to…
One of the cool things I noticed when we started writing was that very few other blogs had two voices consistently providing content. I thought it was great that you could hear from both Michu and I; we have pretty different writing styles, and what we have to say is obviously not the same. But Michu’s been absent from the blog lately. Maybe you’d like to know what he’s been up to?
Since we left the boatyard up the Milwaukee River, Michu has:
- Connected the solar panels
- Installed and configured the solar charge controller
- Wired in and attached the (useless) Wifi antenna
- Installed a professional-looking loud hailer on the radar arch (doubles as fog horn, not just for yelling at drunk college kids)
- Installed lifting points in the dinghy
- Marked the anchor chain
- Installed a thwart and oars in the dinghy
- Rigged the dinghy to hoist off the arch
- Finished installing the autopilot
- Installed the inverter
- Fabricated and installed a panel at the nav station with a USB charger, A/C power and our sat phone
- Installed the sat phone antenna
- Replaced the drain hose for the galley sink
- Installed a flag halyard
- Fabricated and installed a new panel for the automatic bilge pump control panel
- Wired in a new bilge pump
- Installed a new high-capacity backup bilge pump
- Replaced the throttle cables and gear-shift cables for the diesel engine
- Repaired the diesel engine cooling system after a near-catastrophic failure
- Caulked the cockpit floor
- Repacked the stuffing box
- Fiberglassed repairs to the hand rails
- Aligned the diesel engine
- Planed down various cabinet doors to insure latching
- Tuned the rigging
- Resealed the lower unit on the outboard
- Installed a new mirror in the head
- Changed the oil in the diesel five times
- Finished installing the remaining LED cabin lights
This doesn’t include the many, many hours of general engine futzing (that’s what the professionals call it), both with our diesel and the now-defunct outboard. It’s also important to keep in mind, too, that everything takes much longer on the boat. There is no running out for the part you’re missing; there’s no setting up the table saw; there’s no leaving your project sitting out until tomorrow—someone probably needs to walk or cook or sleep in that space. If you spill diesel oil, it is a serious disasterville.
We are currently anchored next to a couple who’ve been cruising for almost seven years. They’re very do-it-yourself folks—they built up their boat from a blank hull—and when Michu opined about not yet having things done from his launch list, they laughed. They still have unfinished work, too—things they had felt were important before they left. In the meantime, though, they’ve been all around the Caribbean, to Colombia and to the San Blas.
So that’s what Michu’s been doing, instead of blogging. I would argue that our time overall has been better spent doing this work while we travel; obviously this is easy for me to say, since I’m not doing the work. Michu might argue that his life would have been much easier if we’d left a year later, and he’d been able to get more done while availing himself of certain crazy luxuries like “a car”, or “income” (and yeah, some of these projects have made a noticeable dent in our budget; see: outboard motor). But I’m not sure it would have been easier to pull F out of middle school; T might have had an even harder time leaving his friends. So the work will continue, at anchor or underway, as it does on all cruising boats, and hopefully someday soon, Michu will be able to tell you all about it.
Updated on October 5, 2016
More DC
Edit: this post was written last week. Since then Hurricane Matthew has crushed Haiti and is headed for the US via the Bahamas. We are safely hidden up a creek in the Chesapeake, and plan to wait for Matthew to go offshore before heading south.
We had to pull ourselves away from DC.
It is a wonderful place to be a cruiser, and a great place to visit with kids. Our spot in the Capitol Channel used to be wide open for anchoring, but development has curtailed that to a small spot near the police dock; our spot in the 6-bouy mooring field was serenaded each morning with construction and low-flying helicopters; but we were only blocks from the National Mall, two blocks from a great grocery store, and had access to the finest laundry and showers in all the land.
We started off our time just getting oriented–hiking the path from Air and Space, just north of our marina, all the way to the Lincoln Monument. It takes longer than you’d think. Fortunately–as we’d established in New York–our kids were built for walking.
All of the museums here are free, but as in New York, it’s easy to get overwhelmed; we had to be selective about what we’d choose to see. We already had our White House tour set up, as well as our Capitol tour; we decided to add to our list the Air and Space Museum, the National Archives, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Library of Congress. We also had to add in a few days for groceries, laundry, and relaxing; and visiting with Michu’s dad was high on the list. Honestly, we could have used two weeks, but even with an affordable mooring and free museums, being in a city is just inherently expensive. Oh, the coffeeshop temptations! Pizza, delivered to the marina! We are weak. We spend the money. So one week was our limit.
F has told us repeatedly that all she wanted for her birthday this year was a tour of the White House. It’s been one of our top priorities for the trip, and we’ve been managing our time carefully to make sure we didn’t miss our date. The tours are not easy to set up–you have to ask for one via your congressional representative, and your date isn’t confirmed until two weeks before the tour. There’s also a security check; I spend some cellular data inputting everyone’s passport info from our anchorage in Harbor Springs to keep our application moving along. Fortunately, we made the cut, and now we obviously don’t have to do anything else for F’s birthday.
The tour was restricted to the public rooms of the mansion, and is now self-guided–we think to allow more people to go through. F was thrilled. We did not see Bo.
I was more impressed by the National Archives, which contained not only the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but one of the original surviving copies of the Magna Carta. Rare documents: we are all about it.
Michu’s dad is a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, so he was able to give us a personal tour of the museum, including an exhibit he curated on the Inka Trail.
T’s top priority: Air and Space. Michu’s too, probably. It’s an amazing place–so much of the history there is recent, that they’re able to have the actual vehicles used in some of the first moments in flight. The actual airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk; the command module from Apollo 11; one of Amelia Earhart’s planes. Not to mention a fragment of moon rock that you can touch. There was so much awesomeness, we had to go twice.
We missed out on so much of the city: the National Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the Supreme Court…not to mention the new Museum of the African American, which is supposed to be amazing (and which we hear is booked through about April). But we’re headed down south–unwinding our route through the Potomac, checking out the southern part of the Chesapeake, and making our way to Norfolk.
Posted on October 3, 2016
Cost to Cruise: September
Boilerplate disclaimer: this is not what it will cost you to go cruising.
People’s constant advice, discussing cruising finances, always seems to be: It’ll cost what you have. We did not find this helpful in our planning, however true it may be. What we’re trying to show is the cost to us, more or less, for one month to go cruising. We’re going for monthly expenses, because they’re easier for us to track; so you won’t see the boat insurance amortized, you’ll just see that expense when we pay it. It won’t be what you’ll spend, but it was the kind of information that helped us out when we were trying to wrap our heads around that magical number for our cruising kitty.
Hey, remember last month, when I said we’d be returning to our frugal ways? Mwah, ha ha ha. Right. Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?
Marinas: $356 Grocery: $705.41 Restaurant: $369.78 Supplies: $534.76 Booze: $8.50 Ice Cream: $36.50 Laundry: $35.75 Transportation: $53 Communications: $50.10 Entertainment: $72.99 Pump Out: $20 Boat Parts: $1,599.90 Fuel: $141.27 diesel; $53.90 stove fuel; $10.50 dinghy Boat Work: $0
Grand Total: $4,348.86
I swear, we did better this month. We really did. Here’s what is throwing us off–two major capital improvement items:
- New outboard for the dinghy!! Because it has never run well. Because the parts we needed didn’t come in–again. Because Michu has devoted way too many hours of his life to resuscitating that sorry piece of equipment. We weighed the costs and the benefits and said, let’s pull the cord. Our new outboard is lighter, slightly less powerful, and doesn’t die. It’s the little things, I’m telling you…
- New violin for F!! We’d planned on replacing her half-sized violin in New York, but I had a hard time finding a place to buy an instrument that wasn’t a “purveyor of exceptionally fine strings,” which is not quite our wheelhouse. We were thrilled to find Music on the Hill in DC, within walking distance of the boat and carrying exactly what we needed. She’s practicing more with her new instrument, and the learning tapes are off. Success all around, even if it does make us look like budget-disregarding spendthrifts.
If you knock out those two big purchases, our budget for the month comes in at $2653.25. If we can shave down the restaurant expenses a bit, we’ll be looking awesome.
Posted on September 30, 2016
One Day in DC
We’ll cover our whole trip to DC later, but for now, I just want to tell you about our Thursday in Washington.
Our trip started off with a visit to our Senator’s office. Tammy Baldwin was having her weekly Coffee With Constituents, so we hiked up the hill to the Hart Building for some pastry (Kringle, naturally) and caffeine. Apparently no one visits in September; we were the only people to show up! We talked about what she was working on, and about how, when Russ Feingold returns to the Senate, she will be the Senior Senator from Wisconsin—even though he has more years of service in the Senate itself.
We’ve been told on Facebook that if we wanted to meet with Senator Baldwin, all we had to do was stalk the aisles of Jenifer Street Market back home; but according to the kids, meeting her was the highlight of their time in DC. It was a pretty neat lesson in representative government, to connect a human being to this thing called “senator” that they’ve been studying. We had a tour of the Capitol at 10:20—set up by her office—so as we said our good-byes, we mentioned where we were heading. “Oh, you’re headed to the Capitol right now? Would you like to take the underground tunnel and the Senate tram?” Uhm—100% yes!
An aide walked us through, while we quizzed her about working for the Senator, and about life in DC in general. According to my brother, the tram used to be open to mere mortals; when he worked for the Senate, he said he took the tram all the time. Now it requires a special pass. We felt like visiting dignitaries!
We sped through the tour lines with our reservation, and were treated to an excellent tour of the Capitol building, including the old senate and house chambers. According to our tour guide, we lucked out—restoration scaffolding from the interior of the Capitol dome had just been removed the previous Tuesday. After a quick lunch in the congressional cafeteria, we waded through security lines and bag checks to make our way to the galleries of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
So here’s where things become additionally interesting. Congress had been spending the past week trying to pass a continuing resolution to keep the federal government funded and open until the actual budget could be passed. We spent maybe 15 minutes in the senate gallery commenting on the architecture, locating Baldwin’s seat, and watching the bored senate pages before we saw any action; finally, Senator Mitch McConnell strode onto the floor with a hive of aides to strip some provisions from the CR. (It was some excellent beurocracy—the presiding speaker stating the amendment, Senator McConnell confirming the amendement, the clerk starting to read the amendment, Senator McConnell asking that the reading be waived, the speaker asking for objections to the waiving of the reading of the amendment, the speaker confirming the waiving of the reading of the amendment…and then on to the next amendment.) At the end of a long listing of amendments to be peeled from the CR, Senator McConnell proceeded to make a short speech about how this was now a clean Continuing Resolution, and how everyone now needed to vote for it immediately.
At that point, Senator Barbara Mikulski from Maryland rose to speak for the Democrats. She addressed the continued lack of funding in the CR to address both the Flint water crisis and the impending threat of Zika, and said that the Democrats would be unable to vote for the CR until these issues were addressed. Lest you think she was using her time wisely to move sundry Republicans to her side of the issue, I have to say that you’re probably miasimagining the room. She was the only senator there; even Senator McConnell had exited after dispensing with his procedures.
OK, so, interesting; clearly some details of the CR were still being worked out. We headed over to the House, after some delays in security—something in F’s dress was not agreeing with the imaging system, and she had to be taken aside and frisked. Clearly a threat. Anyways—off we went to the House side of things, where the Democrats were pressing their case about Zika and Flint. Two Representatives spoke passionately about how these were actual crises facing the US, and how unimpressed the parents of the children affected by lead poisoning and encephalophy must be by federal inaction. A Representative from Texas rose on the Republican side, and we waited for his rebuttal. Surely there was something else going on here?
Instead he spent his time—and the time of some fellow Republican from Michigan—talking about the pressing need for a tax break on capitol gains for employees who had been granted stock options by their companies.
Now, my kids understand Zika. They’ve spent not a small amount of time defending themselves against possible tropical diseases. We haven’t fully explained the Flint water crisis, but they understand how problematic it is not to have safe drinking water (we’re about to run out, as a matter of fact—gotta’ get to a marina tomorrow and fill up). The contrast between what the Democrats were discussing, and what the Republicans deemed important—a tax cut that, let’s face it, would almost entirely benefit the wealthy and do very little for those living in poverty, despite the assurances of this congressman—well, it couldn’t have been more glaring. And all of these words, on both sides, seemed to be delivered for the benefit of the clerks; no other representatives were listening.
I am, I hope, not an idiot. I know members of Congress have more to do than sit in session and listen to their fellow members pontificate; but it made me sad to see that a great, impassioned, persuasive speech could be made, and it was purely for show; so that a member could show tape on a campaign commercial, not so that anyone could listen and be convinced of compromise or reason. I understand that the real business of swaying votes takes place out of sight, with swapped favors and adhesion to party lines. We were all reminded, in talking to Senator Baldwin, of the incremental rate of change required at the federal level. But I wish everyone could have seen the contrast between the two parties that we saw that day.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for us to keep posting cheery updates from our two-year sabbatical in the face of gaining momentum of a candidate for the presidency that is both dangerous and a fool. It is becoming painful to pepper Facebook with photos of our children having a great time, when so much of our feed is devoted to black citizens of this country being murdered. This isn’t a political blog; we have readers from all kinds of political backgrounds, and we have no desire to start a fight or ability to present a nuanced argument about the great challenges facing our country in this space. But we have to say, after this day in Washington, the Republican party is going to have a pretty difficult time recruiting our kids.