Over the years I’ve gone to training courses I was offered including winter, desert and jungle survival. Some of them sucked worse than others. Also, over the years I became what is known today as “a Prepper”.
A Prepper is someone many people look down upon because they collect food, water, learn survival techniques, and “prepare” for a somewhat sketchy future in the “Not-Too-Distant-Future”. Whether they call it a Zombie Apocalypse, “The End of the World as We Know it” (teotwawki) or “The Stuff has Hit the Fan” (shtf) is not really relevant.
All preppers have some inner belief that something can go critically wrong in a moment of time which in turn will bring the end of Civilization.
The truth is, such a thing may never happen. Or it might and we may never know it happened.
For example, an errant asteroid might strike the Earth, without us first discovering it (or being informed of it’s presence). It could cause local damage or world wide damage. Surely it will cause world wide panic when or if it is discovered.
A smaller, local scale disaster might befall us. For instance in the United States we have “Yellowstone”, a wonderful Nation Park, which is known in the past to have been a very, very dangerous place more than once. At least four geological events have occurred there causing major destruction. Fortunately, the last one was about 640,000 years ago, long before humans are known to have roamed the Earth.
Yellowstone is past due for another event. It could literally destroy the United States as an entity. Ash and debris covering half the planet could bring about a massive temperature drop, causing a small “ice age”. It could gum up the works across the country or around the world. We just don’t know the extent of the damage that might be caused.
The human race might self-destruct and start a nuclear war, from which few of us would be insulated.
As a boat owner, extended cruiser and live-aboard, I have considered these things and tried to “prepare” for the worst. Before we lived on the ship, we lived in Colorado, in the midst of five US military installations within “nuclear blast range”. We figured if we were hit by the Russians, we’d have an extremely low chance of survival because we worked at separate installations with 40 statute miles between us. So my wife and I had set up our home as a survival place.
Even though we were pretty sure the house wouldn’t survive a multi-megaton blast on NORAD (in visual range of the house, where we lived on a hill, with nothing between us and NORAD) we hoped at least the basement would survive. We kept a pantry when the children were growing up, food for months and months. We installed a Hot Tub for fun and water supply. We set up shelving in the basement that could double as sleeping cots and had plans to put in “fall out insulation” (which would have been in the form of dirt in sand bags to help prevent radiation from penetrating to the basement level). We never finished that job of course and eventually sold the home.
Today, someone asked the question:
Any doomsday sea preppers out there? With the civilization seemingly inching closer to collapse, nuclear apocalypse and what have you, has anyone offered any thought as to how this will effect us sea people? Cruisers are inherently self sufficient, but we do in the end rely on mother earth and functioning societies to provide us with shelter, food, medicine, tools, parts, communication etc. This is a non political post btw, and feel free to delete if it doesn’t meet the groups standards. ⛵🌅
Now, me being me… I decided to respond and posted a couple of items. But then I checked and found no such group, at least not a public group I could see. There might be one, there might not, but there certainly is NOW.
I created the group called “Sailing and Cruising: Preppers” because there is a perceived need for such a group.
I added a few friends, and notified most of them of the addition, but interestingly enough, only a couple others have joined at this point, even after I posted the link. I expected with all the experts there, they would flock in. 🙂
In any case, IF you’re reading this now, and might be interested, and of course are on Facebook, the group is there now and you’re welcome to join.
I think I posted this before, but because it’s one of Kurt’s most watched videos, I’m going to post it again… with comments.
This video was shot by Kurt A. Seastead of s/v Lo-Kee. He is currently doing a refit of his boat.
Adventure was purchased in January of 2015 by Rick and JoAnne Donaldson (that’s us) for a long term cruise and travel. The boat had a few things wrong with it, but over all, she floated. The equipment was old (and mostly still is), but it all worked.
Some of the comments on the Youtube video included comments about how “sloppy” I am. 🙂 Another comment was about how dangerous in mast furling is (or perhaps could be?) and that the person writing the comment would NEVER use it.
I’ll make a few of my own comments.
I’m currently working part time in a marina. I’m handling boats coming through from the Caribbean and Bahamas headed north. I count the number of in-mast furling rigs I see daily. I see no less than 5-6 out of 7-10 sail boats. I find it interesting that there are so many who’ve traveled oceans with these rigs so far. I have traveled IN the ocean but not crossed it yet. But so far, the only issues I’ve had with the rigging was having to replace all the halyards and make sure the proper maintenance was performed on the rig.
The boat came with the rigging installed. I’m not going to undo everything just to make a couple of people happy so they can assume they are right. The truth is, if the rig gets jammed, the sail can be lowered and treated like any other main sail.
I wonder how many people who make claims about how “bad” something is, have actually used those pieces of equipment. I venture to say “Almost ZERO”.
As to my “sloppiness”… We had not cruised before we bought the boat, except on bare boat charters and a smaller boat in lakes using our trailer to get there. Out of necessity we packed lightly, moved the boat and sailed, but generally for 2-3 days at a time. We couldn’t get enough stuff on the boat to support us. That included food and water (rather important items).
We also LIVE on this boat, full time. We don’t have a house, don’t want to waste money on “storage units” we will never visit. Have no place close by to store things with friends and honestly, don’t want to do so. There is certainly only so much room on a boat. We have spare parts for a lot of things. We have tools to do repairs (and tools take up a lot of space, but without them, we’d be lost). Tools also can keep me working when necessary to earn some money, because, I know how to do a LOT of jobs.
So one person’s sloppy, is another person’s “organized chaos”.
Also note that we had been on the boat LESS than three months when that video was shot. We’d owned the boat less than a year and moved aboard in August 2015. We were still learning how and where to store things. It was somewhat haphazard at the beginning.
Truth is, we have gotten rid of a lot of things, BUT, we still have clutter and things we can’t yet part with, and until we can find smaller, like items to replace things we use we won’t be doing that just yet. We have significantly reduced the weight of several items though and we now have a car at our “new marina home port” so we use it to store extra tools I won’t need when cruising.
There are things on this boat a lot of people wouldn’t want. I’ll give you a little idea. Composting toilet (a lot of people HATE them, but have never used one. A lot of people swear by them. I’m still in the middle on this). OLD electronics. I have very old radio, doesn’t do AIS. Broken radar, I’m not paying 2 grand for a new one. Old, but functional chart plotter (old…. is 1990s, updated firmware for 2009 and no more support). But it has brand new charts (days old now). We have no microwave. We have no freezer. We DO have a working refrigeration unit (I repaired the ancient one and it works fine). We have a gas generator (Honda 2000eu version) which people hate because it uses gasoline. (A lot of people have a gas motor for their dink…../shrug). We have a propane engine for the dinghy (hard to get propane I hear…. so far, so good, no problem with that). We have a NEW stove and oven (ok a year or so old now) but my wife loves it.
And so on. I’m absolutely CERTAIN that if you’ve ever been on and sailed a sailboat something in that list will make you cringe. And some of you will think “Cool, I use one of those!”
Here’s my point, and the point of re-posting the video once more.
Everyone has their way of doing things. We each have an idea of what we like, don’t like, and how we would do it, and how we would NOT do it. You, me, him, her, doesn’t matter. There are people who wouldn’t GO in a sailboat, because they are power boaters. We have some who pick at us calling us “Blow Boaters”. I take it as a compliment, and point out the price of fuel, and the wind is free….
We’re on this journey because my wife wanted to travel. We think it is a neat way to see things. We love meeting people.
We’re not on this journey to please ANYONE other than ourselves. Perhaps that’s selfish, but after 60 years on this planet, doing everything for everyone else, I’m a little peeved at armchair sailors and snobs who nit pick everything anyone else does “because it’s not how *I* would do it”.
A few years ago, I stopped visiting Cruisers Forums, and Sail Net (and I HELPED form sail net!) because of the armchair sailors who would denigrate others for what they considered “dumb questions”. There is a large group of people out there that are at work every day, getting up, going to work, going home, and logging into the computer – and on weekends they go out to their marina where they store their boat, they climb aboard and drink “sundowners” and wake up with hangovers. On Monday they go back to work. During the week they call some company to go polish their boat or wash it, and pay through the nose for the privilege of sitting on the dock on weekends drinking their Bud Lites – but during the week, they bitch and complain about all of us who actually live on the boat, go places, and make due with significantly less space than they have, no or low income, squeeze Lincoln until he screams and buy our cheap beer at the grocery store, and our liquor from the local markets.
They do this because they feel as if they are better than the rest of the cruisers out there.
I’ve yet to meet a long distance cruiser who has a perfectly clean, perfectly cared for boat, that isn’t somewhat cluttered, full of extra “stuff” they “need” (hoses, extra lines, pieces of “small stuff” – that’s bits of twine and line for those of you who might not know that), tools, the odd “silver tea service” or plastic wine goblets.
You know why? Because they are out there doing their thing, being happy and not complaining about how the other half lives.
Kurt and I are discussing a remake at some point. A follow up video to this one. It will address some of the questions you all have, assuming we find the time and can connect somewhere to do it. But, it will also be real, personal and it shows the truth.
The fact is, I write this blog on the same basis. I tell it like it is. Not how you want it to be. There’s no such thing as a perfect boat, day, trip, travel, or location. There’s rarely a perfect day of sailing (it happens, but it’s not often). Extended cruisers sometimes pick up jobs. They sometimes have to stop and work for a living. Sometimes they travel and are out of contact for weeks at a time. Sometimes they even catch fish. Sometimes they get hurt. Sometimes, unfortunately, they can die.
I write about everything. Good. Bad. Ugly. Fun. Doesn’t matter. I enjoy writing about our Adventure(s) and what we go through. I was beat up by a once-friend on Facebook because she disagreed about how I presented my store about a marina. We had a ROUGH time there. We had a lot of things go wrong. Most of them happened when we were not even at the boat. And yet somehow having these bad things happen and writing about them upset this lady to the point she de-friended me. I was, in her eyes “putting down her marina”. /Shrug
As I said, I’m not here to please anyone else.
Kurt wanted to do the interview above. It was impromptu, we had not really cleaned up the boat after having been traveling for a few weeks. The wife was off doing laundry. I was going Kurt the tour.
So, sometimes, sloppiness is a perceived thing (mostly to OCD people who have a penchant for correcting where someone sits their coffee cup) and equipment issues are almost ALWAYS, ALWAYS based on 3rd hand, biased reporting by people who have zero personal experience with them. I’m sure that a lack of spit and polish on the bronze pisses people off to no end. 🙂
When it all comes out in the end…. If we have a good time doing what we’re doing, why would anyone be upset? Except for the people in Florida that don’t want over night anchoring because, well, they are armchair sailors and boaters and honestly don’t know anything about how the other half lives. They just don’t want to see us in the waterways.
If we all had to please everyone around us, all the time the task would be to ensure everyone is happy. And you’re not.
That is not the way to live your life, friends.
Go out and be happy. If you’re going to sail a boat, do it. Don’t complain about how others do it, how they live, that their equipment isn’t like yours…. be happy we’re different.
First, my apologies to everyone who has been so diligent in reading the blog entries and not seeing one since January or so.
Second, not making excuses, but I’ve been pretty busy and I’m going to remedy the situation right now.
I’ve been pretty busy working a part time job in the marina, as well as on the boat.
On the boat, I have been working on varnish and fiberglass, some major (attempts) at cleaning and a few minor things like doing repairs as I need to. I’ve gotten to MOST of the teak and have three coats of varnish on them. I’ll be adding another when I have a few days to work on it, when it’s not scalding hot, or raining and blowing hard.
I did some glass repair work on the side of the cockpit the other day. I’m not sure about this damage I discovered – hidden under a “fake boot stripe” (I’ll get back to that in a moment). Along the top deck, where the house part rises from the deck, there’s a wall built around the cockpit. The coaming with a kind of removable door/wall in the cockpit has a straight crack along the length. It appears to me that something hit the boat and did some damage in the past, though I’m at a loss where the hit could have occurred unless the boat was dropped or smacked against something like a lift.
When we bought the boat in New York, a surveyor didn’t notice or mention any problems and I don’t recall them. Before we left Colorado in July of 2015 to collect the boat, we had a bottom paint job done by the marina.
Worst of the worst of the places we’ve been at, this marina. I called them and asked specifically about the paint, the type, how it was applied, and asked about them touching up the waterline and boot stripe. I paid for paint, their time and an extra $300 bucks for the rest of the work to be accomplished (this included zincs etc).
When we arrived, only two zincs were installed. The paint was haphazardly sprayed on, and intake grids were blocked by paint runs throughout the holes. I couldn’t find an indication where the “boot stripe” was painted/cleaned up.
It wasn’t until I made the painter come look at the boat and clean up the mess they made that they showed me the “boot stripe”. A maroon strip of “tape” had been placed on the boat on the cabin top, along both sides.
So, when I was doing my work the other day and removed this stupid “tape” (and tape it was, a colored, stick-backed maroon-colored tape) I discovered this crack running the length of the starboard side of the cockpit and just forward of the cockpit in the coaming.
The crack was very “clean” like a break, but it wasn’t perfectly straight like a razor, but kind of jaggedy.
I ended up not being able to determine the cause, why it was there or even if they had attempted a repair (as it appeared to have some silicone material in it). I used my dremmel tool to remove the gunk, take it to the inner wood core, clean it up and have reglassed that part of the boat. I still need to sand and eventually paint this part of the boat.
As to varnish, I spent a few days cleaning, sanding, wiping, sanding, wiping, cleaning and then varnishing the cap rail, taffrail most of the wood around the boat. I have NOT finished (and have barely started) on the platform. I have completed three coats and will probably do two more, though I’m not sure yet. In any case it looks wonderful.
The topsides, near the waterline had a horrible, brown stain. I guess the stain has a name. It’s called the “ICW Mustache”, some people call it other names, which are not repeatable here. I had a few names for it, I won’t repeat either.
Anyway, we found that by using a small amount of toilet bowl cleaner with some water in a spray bottle worked wonderfully to remove the stains. I spritzed it on, went over with a soft bristled brush and it was gone in seconds.
I’m in the slow, laborious process of waxing the hull now, a little at a time to prevent this from happening in the future. I’m not going to haul the boat this year and likely not next eitgher, so I’m working from the dink on and off. A little here, a little there. When I get tired of one job, I go do another. And so on.
Being inside the marina as opposed to sitting on the transient dock is much better, and thankfully, cheaper too.
At this point we will likely remain here through October and depart sometime in November for the Bahamas (destinations to be determined) and stay from 3-5 months, depending on our ability to remain there.
Working at the marina has been a mix of very simple to very difficult tasks. I’ve done everything from repair the ramp for the golf cart we use to collect and move trash to the dumpsters (about a quarter mile away) to changing flats on the cart, bringing in boats, pumping fuel (diesel, gas) to selling ice, oil and collecting money, making change, putting up and taking down flags, handling the radios, coordinating slip assignments and boat moves during the dredging. Dredging was a royal pain in the rump too. Everyone hated it. Even the dredgers appeared to hate it. The poor manager here was inundated with constant complaints about noise to hating to have to move their boat for the dredgers to get their work done.
The dredge kept breaking. Things kept floating away. You name it. Thankfully, the dredging is finished. We’re slowly getting boats back into their proper slips, a few here, a few there.
The manager has called me in for extra hours several times to assist with various things. So, a few extra bucks is ok. I’ll feel more comfortable when the retirement pay kicks in from the military in a few months though.
Midges. AKA No-See-Ums. They are demons from hell. I hate them, and I will kill them all before I die. I’m apparently having allergic reactions to them. I get welts on my skin when they bite me, and they LOVE my blood type I suppose. If there were ever a true vampire, midges would be the creature. I am reasonably certain that the vampire mythology was built around these tiny insects. They run away in bright sun normally, come out when there is dampness in the air, and buzz around incessantly in your face, your ears, up your nose and somehow find places to bite you that is completely covered with clothing.
Deet does NOT help. So far, I’ve tried a dozen things. Today I used, Picaridin, a type of “Off” type stuff, which actually worked for about 5 hours today. The rest of it doesn’t seem to work. Home remedies, lemoneucalyptus whatever that is, somewhat worked. I’ve not yet been bitten by a mosquito, however, another of the creatures on this planet I’ve been trying to destroy my whole life because my body has begun to absorb deet to the point I feel I need it….. ok, maybe not true.
We went to Michigan in late January to go see my brother in the hospital. He is doing significantly better now, even though he doesn’t remember us being there.
We went for a day sail with our friend Jay aboard “Knot Working”, a 37 Beneteau. Beautiful boat, turns on a dime (ok, maybe a half dollar, and certainly in less than a full boat length I think – whereas we turn on two or MORE boat lengths given the conditions).
At some point soon, we hope to get out of the marina for a day or two, do a sail or two on our boat.
Finally, we’re going to try brewing beer in the next few days. Will be the first time for us to do that since we moved aboard. We will see how that goes.
⛵
🌅
Winds of Time 