1800 Days – Seg. 13, Ch. 3, pg. 8-13

    By Wednesday, June 19 and Day 38 of our new lives, we were ready to go. All the boat work that we had deemed essential had been completed. Although we still had a long list of things we wanted to do, Summer School was now much safer and more comfortable, and the boat was well prepared for the rigors of cruising, or so we thought. Again we were confronted with the question of where to go. Of course, it was possible to stay at Summit North but our annual lease would soon expire and the monthly rates without such a lease were expensive. We had to make a decision.

    We knew that there was a maritime festival at Havre de Grace, Maryland, on the mouth of the Susquehanna River at the northern headwaters of the bay, with festivities lasting from Friday, June 21 through Sunday, June 23. This was not far from our location, only 25 to 30 miles we estimated, and it was in an area of the bay that we had never visited. Havre de Grace was a familiar name to me since my boyhood days but I had never been there, although I had always heard it was a very attractive small town. Our perusal of the cruising guides confirmed this impression, and we decided we would go there in Summer School. Havre de Grace is seldom visited by migrating boaters on the Chesapeake since it is off the main navigational channel at the northern end of the bay. But just the fact that it is at the mouth of the Susquehanna made it an interesting destination for us. This river, we read in the guides, contributes about half of all the fresh water that feeds the Chesapeake, an astonishing fact when you consider the size of the bay and the many large rivers, such as the Potomac, that enter it. A trip to Havre de Grace would be a good shakedown cruise, we thought, and it would introduce us to a small town where we just might find a slip for a month or two. If this was not the case, perhaps this short cruise might at least attenuate our impatience to be off traveling in our boat.

    We left after lunch on Friday. It was a clear warm summer day with a brisk northwest wind. As usual we followed the canal to the Elk River, on past Town Point and the mouth of the Bohemia River to where it empties into the bay proper at Turkey Point. Instead of continuing on the main shipping channel to the south, however, we turned to the west toward Spesutie Island and the western shore of the bay, which is off limits to boaters in this area because it is part of the huge military complex of Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Once clear of the extensive shoals that build south from the mouth of the Susquehanna, we followed a marked channel to the north. We were heading into a 20 knot wind which gave us a two foot chop but it was a pleasure to be out in the open traveling on our boat. We followed the channel for eight miles, passing a large Coast Guard boat on our way that also seemed to be heading to the maritime festival. According to our new cruising strategy we kept our engine speed to about 1600 rpm, which gave us a "speed over the ground" against the current and wind of about 6 mph. We arrived at Havre de Grace at 5 p.m. where we took a slip at the Tidewater Marina right in the center of this small town.

    Once ashore we found that Havre de Grace was a delight, even exceeding our expectations. It was a good walking town with broad shady streets lined with old and sometimes spectacular stately homes. There were interesting shops, two museums (the Maritime and the Decoy), and a number of good restaurants. We had an excellent and leisurely dinner at MacGregor's overlooking the harbor.

    We were well satisfied with our cruise during the day and our evening ashore, but there were two occurrences that marred the whole experience. One was a bout of strong ulcer pains before dinner that forced me to sit on a bench and wait until they subsided. The other was what we found when we returned to the boat at 10 p.m.

    I knew immediately that something was wrong as soon as we arrived because there was no seawater discharge from the air-conditioner pump coming from the through-hull fitting on the side of the boat above the water line. It had been a warm evening when we had departed the boat and we had left it closed up with the air-conditioner on. In our absence the air-conditioner had shut off for some reason and the interior of the boat was now stifling. There was no alternative but to change clothes and go to work on the boat to try to find the cause of the problem. The outside temperature had remained high and I knew that sleep would be almost impossible for us without air-conditioning, especially since the interior of the boat was so hot.

    I had always felt that reverse cycle marine air-conditioner/heater systems, although they provided central cooling and heating, were unnecessarily complex. They were also expensive to buy, install and operate since they required large amounts of electrical power. (Ordinarily we used two 30 amp. services to power the boat: one for the air-conditioner system and one for everything else!) The system we had on Summer School was typical. It included a main compressor in the engine room where the heat exchange was accomplished with seawater supplied by a pump fed from a through-hull fitting. The compressor circulated the high pressure refrigerant through copper lines to three evaporator/blower units located in the living quarters of the boat. It was the long length of the copper lines, the many fittings and the complexity of the system that had made it so difficult to leak-check the system back in May. And all of the units were very expensive; it would cost thousands of dollars to buy and install such a system on a boat, even a comparatively small boat such as ours. This all seemed ludicrous to me when I considered that the interior space being cooled or heated was considerably less than the space of a normal room in a house. Furthermore the whole system really did not work very well. Using seawater in the heat exchanger meant that the warmer the water (such as in the tropics) the less efficient was the cooling cycle. Conversely, the colder the water became the less efficient was the heating cycle. In fact, if the water were cold enough (below about 45 degrees in our case) the heating cycle would not work at all. Despite all of these disadvantages all boats that I knew that had built-in central cooling systems used this type of system.

    Although the interior of the boat was hot, the engine room, when I went below to check the compressor and pump, was sweltering. I found that the compressor still seemed to be operational but the seawater pump had failed. Without the seawater circulating through the compressor it would soon overheat and shut itself down automatically, which was apparently what happened. I would have to wait until Saturday morning to try and find a replacement for the seawater pump. I only hoped that the compressor had not been damaged as well.

    We attempted to sleep in the open air that night, up on the bridge on the two long seat cushions. The attempt was mostly unsuccessful.

    Luckily the marina had a service department and I was there when they opened on Saturday morning. I was pleased that they had the kind of pump that I needed, but I was shocked at the price, about $230 as I recall. There seemed to be no good alternative so I bought the pump. When I talked to the service manager about my problem he told me that these pumps relied on the seawater to cool them, and that if something interrupted the flow of seawater, the pump would fairly quickly heat up to the point that the interior on the pump would be ruined. And no, he replied in response to my query, there were no temperature or flow sensors with automatic shut-off capability built into these pumps. This was yet one more flaw in the design of these systems, I thought.

    I spent the rest of Saturday morning installing the new pump and testing the system. The system seemed to be working properly without any sign of other damage. By late morning the interior of the boat was pleasantly cool. We had an early lunch followed by needed naps.

    Later in the afternoon we toured the town including the Maritime Museum, the Decoy Museum, and the Coast Guard ship that we had passed coming in, which turned out to be a large buoy tender that was used on the bay. We were delighted with Havre de Grace and thought that we would like to live there on our boat for a month or two if possible. Unfortunately, though we visited all the marinas in town, none had an available slip for a long-term rental that would be suitable for our boat.

    We returned to Summit North on Sunday. Despite the air-conditioner problem, we were well pleased with our little cruise and what we had seen at Havre de Grace. However, this experience did not serve to assuage our impatience to leave Summit North; it increased it. We had a week to find another place, hopefully in an attractive small town, before we would have to commit to Summit North for another month. We thought immediately of Chestertown, which we had enjoyed so much the previous fall. There were two possible marinas there: Kibbler's Marina, near the center of town and located in front of the Olde Wharf Inn where we had such a fine dinner, and Rolph's Wharf, not actually in town but only about three miles down river. On Monday morning we telephoned each, found that slips were available at reasonable monthly rates, and immediately drove to Chestertown. We were disappointed to find that Kibbler's, which was our preference, had only one narrow slip available located right against the bulkhead only a few feet from the windows of the restaurant. Not only would this slip be difficult to get into, but there would be little privacy there and much noise. When we drove the few miles to Rolph's, however, we were quite pleased. It was a small marina in an attractive rural setting right on the Chester River. It would be quiet here, we thought, yet close enough to Chestertown. We selected a slip and arranged to rent it for the month of July.

    On Tuesday we began the process of getting ready to relocate. This included giving notice to the marina manager, arranging to leave our car there until we could retrieve it from Rolph's, servicing our bicycles and loading them onto the boat, terminating our telephone service, stopping our mail service until we could get a new address, and a variety of little chores on the boat. By the end of the week all was ready. We departed Summit North on Sunday afternoon, piloting our boat down the C&D Canal perhaps for the last time. We felt the unsettling yet exciting freedom of being vagabonds, knowing only our immediate destination and nothing beyond that. We arrived at Rolph's on Monday, July 1, Day 50. We were beginning the next phase in this new life.

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Rails and Teak Sliding Door To Cabin

Teak Anchor Pulpit and Samsonpost

1800 Days – Seg. 12, Ch. 3, Pg. 1-8

Chapter 3 – Full-Timers

 

    More than anything else now that we were living on our boat we wanted to cruise, to spend quiet time in secluded anchorages, to visit new places. But we knew that we could not do this immediately, that we would have to wait due to a number of constraints.

    A pervasive consideration and constraint was that of finances. We were very conscious that we needed to conserve our funds, though we did not want to be so frugal that we no longer enjoyed our new lives. But we knew that we could live this new life only as long as our money lasted. We were paying slip rent at Summit North according to a long-term contract that resulted in slip fees of slightly more than about $10 per day including electricity. If we were traveling it would cost us between $40 and $50 each night we stayed at a comparatively inexpensive marina, in addition to the expense of the diesel fuel required to run the boat. Nor was anchoring free; at anchor we had to run our generator to charge batteries and to provide air-conditioning, which we deemed a necessity in this hot weather. This also used diesel fuel to say nothing of the wear on the generator that would result in increased maintenance costs. And of course we could not stay at anchor indefinitely; it would be necessary to stay in marinas periodically to reprovision, get mail, see to personal business and perform required maintenance. We would need occasional shore leave.

    And then there were considerations of weather. When we moved onto the boat it was the beginning of summer. We knew that a Chesapeake summer could be uncomfortably hot without air-conditioning, and this was most easily and cheaply provided at a marina. Certainly, it was no time to head south. Our dream was to follow the seasons, to go south in the fall with the onset of cold temperatures. We did give some thought to cruising to the north but we knew from our own experience that as soon as we got to the Jersey coast marina fees would double and then increase even further if we cruised north toward New England.

    Finally we had to consider the condition of the boat. There was considerable boat work that we wanted to do before we departed for places unknown, including both improvements and needed maintenance, and Summit North was an ideal place to do this work. We were close to excellent sources of supplies, good hardware stores and boating stores, and we had our car for transportation, which would not be available when we were cruising. If we needed professional boat services there were many nearby resources. And Summit North's system of floating docks and finger piers that were low to the water made it easy to work on the hull while standing next to the boat. So we decided to remain at Summit North at least until needed boat work was completed. Then, perhaps, we could re-assess our possibilities.

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    The boat work began in earnest on Day 2, our first full day on the boat. We had known since we launched the boat in March that our air-conditioner was not working, and we knew that at any time the temperatures at Summit North could become hot enough to require air-conditioning, so we had made arrangements for a technician from Annapolis to come to the boat to repair our unit. We knew we needed professional help.

    What we had on Summer School was a typical marine air-conditioner unit, really a heat pump similar to that often found in houses. It could provide cold air to cool the boat in hot weather as well as hot air to heat the boat when the weather was cold. At least it could when it was working properly, which ours was not. Evidently, all the Freon (R22 unfortunately since it was an older installation) had leaked out of the compressor. Since we had put Freon in the unit only a year before when we were in Marathon, we knew we had a significant leak in the system. And we knew we could not keep recharging the air-conditioner so frequently; the old Freon was getting hard to find and much more expensive. So on this our first full day on the boat the interior was in disarray while the technician leak-checked the entire system and tried to repair it. Instead of finishing our unpacking and putting-away, we tried to keep out of his way and find other things to do. Finally after four hours he declared the system fixed and submitted his bill. We wrote him a check for almost $300, the technician went back to Annapolis, and we reclaimed the interior of the boat. Of course I knew by the time he finished that his charge would be substantial, but I was dismayed that we had encountered our first large maintenance expense on only our second day on the boat, and I could not help but feel that $300 was disproportionately large when I knew I could buy two good window air-conditioning units for a house for this amount. What was worse, and we had no way of knowing this at the time, the air-conditioning system was in fact not fixed, it was not leak-free, and this was just the beginning of a series of problems and expenses we would have with this system.

    There were two large projects we wanted to complete before leaving Summit North. The first of these, and the more difficult, was to refinish all the exterior teak. The second was to thoroughly clean and wax the hull. Though not as big an undertaking as the teak project, it would be nevertheless very arduous. And both of these projects would use to good advantage the dock system at the marina, which allowed us to tie the boat close to the full-length finger pier while we stood on this pier to work on the sides of the boat.

    One criticism that many people have of traditional trawler designs is that they employ copious amounts of teak on the exterior of the boat, both for structure and decoration, as opposed to fiberglass and stainless steel. This was certainly the case with Summer School. We had a teak swim platform at the stern with a teak step on the transom leading down to it, a teak cap rail all around the boat that sealed the hull-deck joint, teak rub rails on the sides of the hull at both the bow and the stern, a teak bow pulpit with a large teak platform below it, a teak door and sliding cover on the aft hatch leading from the cockpit into the aft cabin, teak steps from the cockpit up to the bridge, a teak handrail all around the boat, and so on. Now teak is a beautiful, durable wood if it is maintained, but if it is not it assumes a dull gray color and is subject to rot and deterioration. The traditional way of finishing teak is to clean it, sand it smooth and cover it with coat after coat of high gloss marine varnish carefully and laboriously applied. There is no doubt that this produces a very beautiful surface, but the varnish is easily damaged and it deteriorates rather rapidly from exposure to the intense sunlight and salt water encountered by a cruising boat, necessitating complete stripping and refinishing. Alternatively there were a number of other products on the market, various synthetic coatings, stains and sealers, and I had tested several of these during the past winter while in Easton. After evaluating newer products that had become available, I decided that we would again use a brand of teak sealer that we had used three years previously. This had stood up reasonably well though we had used only one coat. This time we would apply two coats and hope that it would last while we were able to cruise and remain full-timers. It took us ten days to complete all the stripping, brightening and sealer application, but when we were done Summer School's appearance was striking and drew the attention of anyone walking down the dock. But more importantly, we knew the valuable teak was now well protected for our anticipated travels.

    Finishing the hull was a shorter simpler project but it took three days of arm-aching effort, Nancy and I working together in the developing summer heat. Previously, while the boat was in storage at Harbortown Marina in Fort Pierce, Florida, prior to our extended cruise in 1994, we had the hull professionally compounded, to remove all the accumulated oxidation, and covered with a high quality wax. Now we applied two coatings of a Teflon-based wax, standing on the finger pier and working on one side, then turning the boat end-for-end in the slip and completing the other side. When we were finished Summer School gleamed.

    There were many more minor tasks and projects we completed during those weeks at Summit North. I always kept a Maintenance Log for the boat where I recorded all work done, and there were a total of 87 items recorded for all the work we did while in our slip, including both improvements and routine maintenance. Some examples of the latter included washing and water-proofing all the canvas (the weather cloths around the bridge sides, the Bimini top, the bridge cover), repairing the air-conditioner thermostat (it broke the week following the visit from the repair technician), changing the fuel filters on the Perkins diesel engine, and replacing the raw water impeller on our old Onan diesel generator "Tommy." Some of the improvements were installing a carbon monoxide detector in our aft cabin where we slept, installing an excessive heat sensor in the engine room, installing a high water sensor in the bilge (both of these sensors could sound alarms in the main cabin and warn us of dangerous conditions), installing a new VHF radio on the instrument panel on the bridge with a PA speaker mounted on the front of the boat, installing a new horn (the old one was so quiet it was seldom heard by bridge tenders or other boats), and mounting stainless steel rub strakes on the edges of the cap rails towards the bow to prevent the teak from being marred when we rubbed pilings while docking. All of these tasks, and the many others I have not mentioned, were completed in about five weeks after we moved onto the boat.

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    But let there be no mistake: Nancy and I thrived on all that boat work and the lives we were leading at the time. Although some of the work was physically hard, much of the time we were working outside, enjoying the air and the water, the sights and sounds and the nature around us. Our lives seemed to be so improved now that our boat was our only home. We felt our manner of living to be all of one piece, to have a wholeness and unity that we had never known before. We were no longer living in a house waiting until we could go somewhere else, or merely staying on the boat knowing that we must soon leave to return to our "normal" life. We were home and this was our "normal" life. It gave us a wonderful feeling of completeness to be living full-time on Summer School.

    All the work that we did was immensely satisfying. Our efforts were no longer divided. We were free to focus on our one residence, our one home, our one center of living. We took great care with everything that we did, making sure it was done to the best of our ability. And as each task was completed, and each item was added to my Maintenance Log, our pride and satisfaction and sense of accomplishment grew accordingly.

    But of course there was more than boat work during this time. With the exception of a few days while working on the teak refinishing, we did not work all day. We made sure we had time for other things, time to enjoy all aspects of this life in our new home.

    I developed the practice of using at least part of the morning to work on my writing, a practice that is still with me. I now had a vision of what I wanted to include in Lessons from Summer School. I was finished and reasonably satisfied with the draft of the piece describing our first cruise south through the Chesapeake in the summer of 1993 and I had a tentative chapter outline, which, curiously, placed this piece approximately in the middle of the book. I was now working on what I thought would be the first chapter. Often I would awake early and get in an hour's work before Nancy awoke, at which time we would have our customary juice and coffee, pills and toast. I found working in the little office we had made in our forward cabin to be both satisfying and pleasurable. The desk surface was more than ample and everything was arranged conveniently with all my books and references surrounding me on the shelf that lined both sides of the cabin and the removable shelf that I had made to fit between these over the back portion of the desk. The feelings were of privacy and quiet with everything within arm's reach. The only feature that was not entirely satisfactory was the stool, which did not have a back rest. After about an hour I would find it necessary to get up and walk and stretch.

    Almost without exception we ended each day with a hot shower and a cold drink followed by a leisurely dinner in our cabin, always with a glass of wine and music from the CD player. Nancy would sit on the helm seat at our lower helm station just inside the cabin door, while I prepared our meal at the small galley area no more than seven feet away from her. Though the galley was small with a very limited work-surface, it did boast a four-burner propane stove with oven and a microwave, and I took pride and pleasure in preparing attractive, satisfying meals. During dinner we would talk of our day's work, of the other things we planned to do tomorrow, or next week, or next month. We would talk of ways to improve our boat, to make it more seaworthy or more comfortable or more convenient. And we would sometimes talk of the work of our writing projects, or the books we were reading, or those we wanted to read.

    The time after dinner was our social time when we frequently took walks along the various docks in the marina and talked to other boat-owners. Most of these were what Nancy and I called "weekenders" although there were a few other live-aboards at the marina in the summer months. Some boaters we had known since the previous summer but many were new to the marina in May and June of this year. We often talked with Charles and Connie, who owned a brand new Sea Ray express cruiser down our dock. They were new to boating and were finding it hard to learn how to handle their boat, but they had ambitions to travel the ICW in the fall to go to the seafood festival in Morehead City in North Carolina. There was also Michael and Sheri, a younger couple also having difficulties with their new Sea Ray. Sheri seemed very fearful but Michael was eager to learn. We visited with Glen and Robin, one dock away, who were making major renovations to their older 36-foot Island Gypsy trawler, including the complete repanelling of the entire interior with new teak. They were knowledgeable boaters. In contrast there were Dick and Janet who, in the middle of June, came into the slip opposite ours in their newly purchased 39-foot aft cabin style Marine Trader trawler. They had hired the previous owner to bring the boat up to Summit North from Baltimore because they were afraid to try to handle it themselves. However, they had ambitions to live aboard and follow the ICW south. They hired one of the technicians from Suburban Boatworks to give them boating lessons. And there were others. Although we got to know a few fairly well, we did not form any close friendships with any of these people, perhaps because we knew our stay at the marina was only temporary, that we would soon leave and probably never return.

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Summer School - All Finished