Friday 10/2/09

We have had a hellish nightmare all late last night/early morning. The winds died down around a quarter to two, so eric decided to give the sails a boost with the engine. He switched from the port fuel tank to starboard tank in order to keep the weight of fuel on the boat balanced, and a few minutes later the engine died. I couldn't help but think how this was reminiscent to the engine going out on the GoldenFleece in the middle of Drake Passage, the sail boat shelley had joined for a voyage to antarctica, except we are in the middle of the the North Pacific in October, a place I am sure couldn't be much worse. At least the winds have been calm for the while, but that could change any time. We wrenched all night on the engine and discovered the problem. Although my mechanical abilities are limited, the very basic law of engines i have learned over the past few years is that most all problems come down to one of three things: air, fuel,  or fire. An obvious concept, but much harder to actually pinpoint and diagnose a problem. We checked the first of 3 fuel filters and it was absolutely packed with crud. We thought, "aha- dirty fuel" and we cleaned out the filter and put it back on. The strange thing was that we took it off about 7 times and each time it had housed a completely new layer of crud. This didn't solve the problem and we painfully listened to the engine choking as we turned it over and over, slowly draining our batteries away. We changed the other fuel filters, one of which separates  any water that finds its way in the fuel, and the other of which is a high pressure filter through which fuel passes before entering the engine. Eric thought that there was air in the system, so we bled it by opening various valves and sending compressed fuel through the lines. He was right, air bubbled and hissed out, yet the engine still would not fire. We tried various other tricks-spraying ether in the air intake as we tried starting the engine, same as well with gasoline, neither of which worked. He exhausted his reserve of tricks and ideas, and though quite confounded, kept a cool head. He then had the idea to test the diesel itself so we poured some into a small tin, made a wick, and attempted to burn it on deck. Strangely enough, it wouldn't even hold a spark! The only explanation then had to be that there was water in the fuel. We went back down into the engine room, he switched back over to the port fuel tank, and we proceeded to drain all the bunk fuel we had been trying to force through the system. After an hour we had about five gallons of water drained out! Dutch Harbor not only sold us extremely dirty fuel, but fuel with water in it! (unless it got in after we had filled our tanks-but we checked all caps and lids and they were tight). We drained the system of any air one final time, and using the gasoline in the air intake trick(we were out of ether by this point) we tried starting the engine. Disgruntled and unwillingly, she slowly sputtered and finally roared to life. She ran for about 5 seconds and died. We repeated this several times, and with each try she ran a few seconds more. Finally although by no means smooth and healthy, she was able to hold onto life, and we let her run for a good 20 minutes, trying to run out all the poisoned fuel we had abused her with. It was close to 9 in the morning and we hadn't slept all night so we decided to see if she would fire when she was cold. We shut her down, cleaned up, and fell into our bunks. 

It turns out there is a happy ending to this little saga. She fired right up when we asked her to, and not only that but we dared switching to the center tank(which we weren't sure if it still had water mixed with the fuel). Everything seems to be running okay, and after an hour or so we shut it off and sailed as we had a stiff southwest wind. Again i spent a few hours on deck soaking in the magnificence of this great ocean. This has been a spiritual journey for me as well, and i am doing my best to exercise an open heart and tune in to surrounding wonders that are ordinarily overlooked. It is also an exercise to keep my ego in check as i constantly question whether i am just falling prey to hogwash/hocus pocus or whether its all in my head. But like i say i am firmly sticking to what i feel inside-following the heart and refuting the head, so to speak. Much further i am not really able to explain-and it boils down to the simple fact that i am humbly grateful for each breath i draw. I have still been reading Loren Eisely with great pleasure. I relish each word and purposely limit myself to a chapter a day as to draw out this small enjoyment of mine. Not only is he such a fantastic writer, but his subject matter hits straight home to my heart and to where my thoughts have been dwelling as of late.  I am reading "The Star-Thrower" which is a compilation he put together in his last years of many of his unpublished works, as well as essays and poems that were his own personal favorites. I'd recommend it to anyone who is a lover of nature and a contemplator of the inherent qualities of mankind and the maddening mysteries of the universe. He writes with an unmatched intellectual dexterity and a vulnerable sensitivity. He even taught at University of Kansas at one point. I'm just sad i missed him by half a century-he is definitely someone i would have liked to meet.

where be high noon?

Thursday 10/1/09

It is the first day of my favorite month, not that it means anything but i guess its worth noting. The wind died down so we are motor sailing. We are doing about 8 knots. As far as sailing goes we have been averaging around 6. Today we have hit the quarter mark of our journey, right around 500 miles. Since the gale we have had very favorable conditions. What is strange is that we have been sailing in a small patch of clear skies for the last couple of days, and are surrounded by ominous clouds ringing us round on all sides. Maybe the thoughts and prayers from friends and family have made the difference, but at any rate it is a bit uncanny. Last night I poked my head out on watch and got a beautiful view of the stars in our little hole in the clouds. I think I saw scorpio. Yesterday morning when i woke up i was moved to tears when i saw the sun reaching down through the clouds in the most serene kind of way all the while seabirds dipping in and out of the big ocean swell. I feel so fortunate to be having this experience-not many people truly get to sea the ocean in its rawest form out here on the deep.

The wind picked up a few hours ago, except its right on our nose so it has been a tough ride since we started sailing again. We switched tacks and we're now leaning hard over on the starboard side. Everything in the cabin is on a steep 45 degree slant, and it is quite a task to move about-it is a bit reminiscent of childhood days on the monkey bar or jungle gym, swinging about on poles from point A to point B. For some reason this seems to be a particularly violent ride and we are really banging into the waves. The boat shutters with each crash, and its tough to sleep-it is a bit disconcerting on the heavier bangs. We are hoping the wind changes direction soon not only for a break from the beating, but it is blowing us south a good bit off course. There isn't much we can really do about it. Our other option would be to sail Northeast, but thats is even more in the wrong direction than due South. Eric gave us a lecture today during happy hour about navigation. He is probably the most learned man on such manners that i will ever meet. He gave us the history(at least the European way) of finding latitude and longitude dating all the way back to the Vikings. There was no real accurate way for them to know the longitude back then without a chronometer, but using the sun or "noon sight" they were able to know their latitude providing they had a sunny day. In fact, the reason so many pirates had eye patches was because they were burning their eyes out looking at the sun as they tried to align themselves with its zenith and the horizon. There are a few details that still elude my understanding but i plan to research it further as soon as we get into to port. In fact if we get a sunny day Eric said we could do our own "noon sight" and check it against the gps for accuracy. He navigated for 20 years with a sextant before using gps so he really knows far more then the average sailor. Anyways, in the 18th century, the brits(who were really the pioneers of marine navigation)put out a reward of  20,000 pounds to the one who could invent a system for finding longitude. A man by the name of John Harrison came up with the chronometer, a unique invention to keep the time. And because wikipedia does a much better job of explaining how it works, i cut and copied a quote from the internet; "The purpose of a chronometer is accurately to keep the time of a known fixed location, for example Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This is particularly important for navigation. Knowing GMT at local noon allows a navigator to use the time difference between the ship's position and the Greenwich Meridian to determine the ship's longitude. As the Earth rotates at a regular rate, the time difference between the chronometer and the ship's local time can be used to calculate the longitude of the ship relative to the Greenwich Meridian (defined as 0°) using spherical trigonometry. In modern practice, a navigational almanac and trigonometric sight-reduction tables permit navigators to measure the Sun, Moon, visible planets, or any of 57 navigational stars at any time that the horizon is visible.

The creation of a timepiece which would work reliably at sea was difficult. Until the 20th century the best timekeepers were pendulum clocks, but the rolling of a ship at sea made a simple gravity-based pendulum useless. John Harrison, a Yorkshire carpenter, invented a clock based on a pair of counter-oscillating weighted beams connected by springs whose motion was not influenced by gravity or the motion of a ship. His first two sea timepieces used this system, but he realised that they had a fundamental sensitivity to centrifugal force, which meant that they could never be accurate enough at sea. Construction of his third machine, designated H3, included novel circular balances and the invention of the bi-metallic strip and caged roller bearings, inventions which are still widely used. H3's circular balances proved too inaccurate and he eventually abandoned the large machines. Harrison solved the precision problems with his much smaller H4 chronometer design. H4 looked much like a large five-inch (12 cm) diameter pocket watch. In 1761 Harrison submitted H4 for the £20,000 longitude prize that had been offered by the British government in 1714. His design used a fast-beating balance controlled by a temperature-compensated spiral spring. This general layout remained in use until stable electronic oscillators allowed very accurate portable timepieces to be made at affordable cost."  It was an extraordinary feat of engineering for its time. Eric went on about various other aspects of navigation that were a bit complicated for my novice brain and i have to admit i wasn't quite able to grasp. He also talked about how the Polynesion islanders devised their own system over hundreds of years. It was fascinating to look at the evolution of navigation as a whole, and the centuries of trial and error it took for man to figure out the pathways of the sea. It is much taken for granted now as we simply look at an electronic gps screen, but now at least i have a slight appreciation for it and certainly hope to educate myself more on the matter. Eric made macaroni and chili tonight, of which i was hesitant to eat too much once we started getting tossed about. My stomach still feels a bit unsettled, but then again i wonder if it wouldn't have anyways in normal conditions-there was spam in the chili and the macs were totally mushy(it is imperative they are aldante for the best taste). Eric does all the cooking on board and the crew is responsible for cleanup. He is not a bad boat cook- just very set in his ways and i don't think he is open to the idea of letting the crew cook. For lunch we always have some type of soup with a sandwich(we have had egg salad sandwich, salmon salad sandwich, and cheese and tomato sandwich). For dinner he has cooked spaghetti, canned beef and instant potatoes, rice and curry, and tonight's macaroni and chili. We have happy hour everyday at five with a snack(usually crackers and cheese)and a Fiona cocktail which is a splash of barbados Mount Gay rum and apple juice with a twist of lemon. It is quite nice and he is usually in his best spirits or storytelling mode during that time.

Arrrgg-curses on yeh, curses on yeh...

Wednesday 9/30/09

I am on night watch right now-the 2 to 4 shift. my next shift will be 8-10 in the morning. Things are really rockin and rollin. We are in a following sea and are surfing the waves as they roll in from behind. When we come off a wave(or rather when it overtakes and rolls out from underneath us) the boat rolls fairly violently. I poked my head outside to check things out. The moon is shrouded by clouds and casts an erie light on the sea. The clouds themselves are grayish white-a silvery mantel blanketing us over.  Giant black mountains of water come looming out of the darkness, lifting us forward and leaving us lurching. It is terrifying in the most wonderful kind of way.

I am on my morning watch now drinking liptons tea. I just spilled my mug of coffee all over after carelessly leaving it unattended on a bad roll. As i sopped up the mess and scrubbed the stains i decided to quit drinking coffee for awhile-at least until i begin my climbing/dirtbagging adventure. So i guess the spill was a good thing as it inspired me to make a change that I normally wouldn't have. Using this incident as a slight example, I have been trying to make it an exercise to turn small mishaps and annoyances that usually bring out a barrage of curses under my breath into a positive experience. I figure any negative energy we feed into our environment- albeit slight and harmless- must disperse somehow and has a very direct affect on ourselves and those around us, just as truly happy individuals have a contagious effect on those surrounding them. Besides, it feels good to be positive, kind of like sinking into a comfy couch after an intense workout or jumping out of an ice-cold river after a steaming sauna. The effort alone to be consciously aware of our feelings and emotions is in itself gratifying. I have been listening to Tom's Ipod and just heard a new Yo Yo Ma album that I thoroughly enjoyed called "Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon". It is filled with eastern music similar to that in "Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon" and brings the range and capability of the cello's tone to new heights. Now I am listening to one of my own favorite albums of native american flute and guitar called "Burning Sky". I never grow tired of it and it fills me with peace and calm.

  Spent a good portion of today on deck. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, and definitely one of the most refreshing ones i have had since hunting with Gary. Seas 12 to 18 feet but not too rough as it was a gentle following swell. I have grown used to these big open ocean waves, and my body has acclimated well. My appetite has returned full force and I eat whenever and whatever i want without feeling any kind of effect from the constant rocking motion of the sea. I love it out here-i think i was made for this sort of thing-my viking ancestors would be proud. I hope to have my own sail boat someday.

thar be stoms n' gales on ye high seas

Tuesday 9/29/09

There is a slight break in the weather and it is finally calm enough for me to write although there is still a six to eight foot swell right now. We have been sailing through a gale the last two days with winds averaging 35 to 40 knots. Definitely a rough ride. Tom has been down for the count pretty much the whole time, and i have managed to stay well by hardly eating anything. i learned my lesson the first day, and my fisherman hubris was humbled in the form of upchucked spaghetti. I ate a rather large portion with a beer thinking i was a hardened seaman, but as the water grew rougher the resilience of my stomach grew weaker. Yesterday i ate two pieces of bread in the morning and five saltines with peanut butter in the evening. I don't feel sick, i just can't seem to hold anything down. I have been sipping water throughout the day trying my best to maintain hydration. I am fine today and have eaten a bowl of tomato soup and a salmon salad sandwich. We had to furl the jib as the stormy black sea surged about us at 2 AM the first night for fear of the heavy winds tearing it to shreds. We had a hair raising adventure yesterday in the middle of the gale. One of the halyards on the stay-sail broke and i had to climb up the mast and restring the cable through the pulley. This was in 12 to 20 footers and 40 knot winds. Eric's last words weren't too encouraging-"i hope you don't fall". But it had to be done, and with all the concentration i could muster, i treated it has a hard rock-climb and tried to time my movements with the waves. After I got down the rest of the repair took an hour and a half in the whipping winds and heavy spray. Afterwards Eric complimented me on a job well done, and said he didn't think he would've had the gumption to complete the task, and even if he had, he didn't think he could've done so. That compliment left me feeling swell as i nestled into the damp recesses of my sleeping bag. Everything is damp right now as we haven't been able to run the heater due to the seas being too heavy and water filling the exhaust. It is particularly a test of spirit at night during watch. We rotate two hours on and four off, but since tom is down for the count eric and i have been rotating every two. There isn't much to do except huddle in the dark and watch your breath in the screen light of the gps. In some strange way i have enjoyed these night watches, cold and damp, nodding in and out of consciousness, not quite awake, but never asleep. I am trying to compose a poem about it, yet my mind is never fully sharp enough during the experience, so i suppose i will have to be patient and let it compose itself as it comes. I have plenty of more nightwatches and plenty of hours to spend in delirious state of the in between. We just set up a "wing and wing" sailing configuration, where the wind has to be at ones back, or in proper sailing terms,"before the wind"- typically this is in a following sea. The jib is set to one side and we set up a whisker pole on the windward side to stabilize it. We stabilized the main boom with a preventer line which runs from the end of the boom all the way up forward through a block on the bow sprit, and is then winched and cleated. This is a difficult configuration to sail as one has to be in the exact position with the wind to keep the both the jib and the mainsail full of wind. There is only about a 20 degree window, and it can be a bit finicky.  High winds forecasted for tomorrow so its likely we'll have to change our configuration. Most likely we will reef the jib, which means taking in some of the sail.  Our main sail is already reefed.

"Now...bring me that horizon!" -captain jack sparrow

Sunday 9/27/09

It is 12:10 and we just left Dutch Harbor. There is about a 5 foot swell right now, and ominous clouds on the horizon seem to foreshadow much more from whence they come. We had a bit of a fiasco this morning, a slight delay that was solely my fault. Eric is not much of a believer in survival suits-he has sailed for 40 years without them-twice to Antarctica, 4 times around Cape Horn, and now through the Northwest passage. He says that they are unnecessary, that if we were to go down there wouldn't be time to don them, that this boat can't sink unless we hit something or catch fire(it is a self-righting boat due to the ballast system), and lastly he has a life raft right behind the helm. None of those reasons were good enough to convince me that i didn't need one, and i politely told him that I hoped i wasn't offending his sensibility, and though i respected and trusted him as a highly experienced sailor, i still wanted to find a survival suit for purchase. The problem was that that there were no stores open on Sunday, but I at least had to try. To make matters even more awkward, Eric had wanted to depart at 11 in order to miss the heavy afternoon winds that had been forecasted for the harbor. I questioned myself whether this was the right decision, and I felt badly for doubting the experience of such a renown sailor, but i insisted on going into town. I asked a few employees standing outside a closed hardware store if they knew of anyone who sold them on a Sunday morning. They made a few phone calls, and one of them gave me a ride to the other side of the island to pick up a fellow named mark who owned a marine safety store. He opened up shop for me, found me a suit, gave me an expensive locater light for free, took me to a bank so i could get cash(the atm wouldn't let me withdraw the needed amount), he gave me the suit for less then it costed, gave me a ride back to the boat,  and wished me well on my way with a kindness that left me bewildered. I made it back to the boat at 12:00 and we were underway 10 minutes later. Starting today's entry with this account does not put Eric in the best light and that is certainly not my intention. He is in fact probably one of the most experienced seamen I have ever met. He used to be a fighter pilot in the british airforce in his younger days, after which he worked for a government laboratory for 35 years building particle accelerators and other highly complicated billion dollar machines.  He is more educated and cultured then any seafaring person I have ever met. I surprised him a little when i identified Beethoven's Eroica symphony(#3) after he put in a cd. I hadn't yet told him about my musical background, and he assumed i was just a young kid who listened to all the modern trash that is so prevalent in america's pop culture. We talked music for a while, and i shared a little bit of my family background, including how whit became a conductor in Germany. Our subject conversation somehow moved to the problems of the world and the state of affairs we humans have landed ourselves in, after which we poured ourselves a splash of rum to uplift our spirits disheartened by such depressing subject matter.

New Adventure

Saturday 9/26/09

Today I embark on a new adventure. I joined the 42 foot sailboat Fiona as it sails from Dutch Harbor, Ak across the North Pacific ocean to San Francisco. This will be my first major sailing escapade, and it leaves me feeling excited, nervous, and slightly lightheaded in my disbelief of having this opportunity present itself. It has been a long time dream of mine to go sailing-I just have never been able to turn it into a reality. Shelley was the one who created this opportunity for  me. Her friend Jim Keely is an avid sailor in New York and emailed to her the blog of Captain Eric Forsythe, in which he stated he had one berth open for the leg to San Fran on his journey back from the Arctic circle through the NW Passage. Shelley immediately got a hold of me, and urged me to go. I was slightly hesitant at first as this all happened so quickly and I had already made other plans for the month of October(I had just bought a walltent and stove for a month long hermitage of meditation/surfing on a beach in Kodiak). She urged me to go on this adventure-that an opportunity like this one is rare, and that it was a window to fulfilling one of my dreams. She told me that it was her lifelong friend and inspiration Norman Vaughn who was always the voice of energetic prompting and motivation for her to seek out new adventures. His motto was "dream big, dare to fail". She is passing it on now, and in many ways has been a Norman to me over the last few years. So with much trepidation and giddy excitement, I emailed Cpt Forsythe, told him a little bit about myself, and requested to join him. He said if I could make it to Dutch in a couple of days that I was on. The last few days have been a blur as i have scrambled madly about trying to wrap up all my loose ends on such a short notice. Yesterday alone I dealt with last year's taxes, finished cutting up moose(a project that took several days), organized my things on the Shadowfax, moved things in and out of storage, cut down some dead trees and hauled them out of the woods to be split for shelley(something i feel guilty about because i promised repeatedly that i would be the one to fill her porch up and didn't have enough time to do so), wrote a few thankyou cards and sent a package(the line in the post office alone seemed to take up an eternity as it always seems to do-especially when one is in a rush), delivered moose to all the friends i have in Homer, and packed up my things for this new adventure.  By the time i finished everything it was 11 PM and I was exhausted. My stomach rumbled in complaint and I realized the only thing I had to eat all day was two small slices of wheat toast and honey that morning with a cup of coffee. There wasn't any food left on the Shadowfax besides a few moldy blocks of cheese, so i took mike's truck into town. I noticed the lights were on at Andy's and Sally's Mermaid Cafe and there were a few cars parked in the lot, so i stopped in to see if they had any left over pieces of quiche or something in the fridge. It turns out they had shut everything down for the evening and were just finishing cleaning the kitchen, but they insisted that I stay and eat with the chef and the waitress. It was a fine meal of salmon, asparagus, and spinach, complimented with a cold IPA. Salmon has never tasted so good! Stress does bad things to the body- for one i just forget to listen to mine, but as soon as a drop of that cold beer touched my parched throat it seemed to forgive me. Andy and Sally have always been so friendly to me, and in kind hearted generosity refused to accept my money. With a full belly and grateful sentiments i left the cafe, but i was still wired and i stopped at the down east saloon to hear a band called "three-legged-mule" play. I had met the accordian player a few days ago and he had encouraged me to come hear them. He was an interesting fellow and told me all about his days on the oil clean up crew in Prince William Sound directly after the Exxon Valdez spill. Together we cursed that evil empire of greed and corruption, and bemoaned how this corporation, this monopolization of great wealth and power could manipulate any system, sadly even our own courts. The music was okay, it was more folk then anything. My mind was elsewhere though, which was evident in my pool game-I hadn't played so badly in months! I took off and spent my last night on the Shadowfax for the year 2009. My dreams were filled with small boats bobbing about in huge rolling seas. I tossed and turned the whole night long, and it was soon time to head for the airport. The winds were blowing, but I made it okay despite a bumpy ride.

Mama told me when I was young
Come sit beside me, my only son
And listen closely to what I say.
And if you do this
It will help you some sunny day.
Take your time... dont live too fast,
Troubles will come and they will pass.
Go find a woman and youll find love,
And dont forget son,
There is someone up above.

(chorus)
And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Wont you do this for me son,
If you can? 

Forget your lust for the rich mans gold
All that you need is in your soul,
And you can do this if you try.
All that I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.

(chorus)

Boy, dont you worry... youll find yourself.
Follow you heart and nothing else.
And you can do this if you try.
All I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.

(chorus)