Author: Juan

Welcome to the Hotel California…
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!
– Eagles

It’s getting dark and it’s time to call it a day. We are dirty, hot, exhausted, thirsty and hungry after making a minuscule amount of progress in our daunting list of projects. All our dishes are dirty, piled up in two overflowing buckets in the cockpit. Washing the dishes outside—with a hose in our improvised washing station made out of a block of styrofoam—is such a chore that we keep cooking to a minimum and try to reduce, reuse and recycle. “Was that the bowl I used for oatmeal this morning? Then it’s perfect for tonight’s lentils!”

A bunch of tools, boxes, books, some trash, half-used clothes, shoes, a cat and the occasional frog contribute to the mess that covers the entire floor. As we fail to find any energy (and any clean dish too), we decide to innovate and order pizza. There’s one catch, though. We have no cell signal reception.

We walk half a block to the boatyard’s office. It’s closed, but we can still use the wi-fi from the porch. Fending off the also-hungry mosquitoes, Kathy calls the pizza place, and with an amazing amount of willpower from both ends to repeat every sentence three times, they manage to agree that it’s all about one large vegetarian pizza (through a lousy wi-fi connection chilean and virginian accents seem like entirely different languages). She gives the address, and warns them it’s not a house but a boatyard.

“Our boat is…”

“No, just the address is fine.”

“But it’s a boatyard. There’s a hundred boats here.”

“The address is good.”

There is no point in arguing, since most likely the driver is going to get just the address anyway. We have to be alert for any signs of pizza coming in our direction, so we spread out: Kathy stays in front of the office while I grab one of the yard bikes and move to the boat. 45 minutes later our fears materialize: a car comes into the yard, the driver figures it’s the weirdest place to deliver a pizza, and decisively U-turns without a hint of slowing down, right in front of Ñandú. Before I can react he’s gone, leaving a faint smell of cheese and olives behind. I bike back to the office to give Kathy the news. She calls the pizzeria again. They say the driver will be back soon. They tried to show confidence, but were clearly just guessing. They were not entirely wrong, though. A long while later, when we were already resigned to a bowl of cereals for dinner, the driver comes back, this time actually looking for a potential delivery target. He apologized profusely, but that didn’t change the fact that the pizza was cold. Oh well. Still less depressing than corn flakes.

At least we escaped the cold pizza/warm beer combo, since the ice I brought on the bike from the gas station was still keeping things cold in our non-working freezer. When the boat is out of the water our keel-cooled refrigeration system doesn’t work. We downgraded the refrigerator to a pantry and the freezer to a cooler, which needs to be regularly replenished with ice. The ice of course takes half the space of an already small box.

Life on a boat is complicated when the boat is on the water. It’s twice that much when the boat is on the ground. And thrice as bad when she’s on this particular boatyard. That’s in part because of the water issue. The well water here has so much iron it will stain the boat yellow if you dare to use it straight from the well. The water in the restroom and showers is treated with salt which somehow makes it “softer”, less yellow, and, well, salty. Very salty. (If someone can explain to me how adding even more minerals to already impure water makes it better, I’m all ears). Since we don’t fancy brewing coffee with brine, every few days we have to request the boatyard’s courtesy car to drive to the fire station where drinkable water is provided at 10 cents per gallon, and survive for as long as we can with our 8-gallon load of potable water.

With so much time and effort needed just for the day-to-day domestic tasks, there’s little time and energy left to make progress with the boat projects. And the longer we take, the more likely we’ll break something or find more things to fix, in a never-ending, inescapable misery. And just in case you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a non-exhasutive list of our projects, large and small:

Retune the rig. Wax the entire hull. Fix gelcoat dings and cracks. Replace a chafed screecher sheet. Bring the jib to the sail repair shop. Clean stains from all of the metal parts. Mark anchor chain, again. Replace anchor rope with a longer chunk (after ordering the wrong size, returning it at a discounted price, and ordering the right one). Install clips to secure boat hook. Install padeye to shackle the main halyard when not in use. Make and install the final version of the rain catchers. Remove and reinstall two leaking hatches. Reorganize anchor locker. Protect tank tender hoses. Rethink and implement better way of attaching bridle to anchor rode. Put duct seal where the manufacturer forgot to. Change anchor shackles for ones with known rating. Fix watermaker, again. Pickle the watermaker. Change watermaker filters. Build and install spice rack. Improve food storage with hammocks, hooks and boxes. Heck, get boxes (of very specific sizes) for everything. Fix port diesel tank leak. Install box for bilge storage (to improve our autonomy without having to reload beer). Fix leaks in three windows. Fix daggerboard damage caused by angry anchor chain. Find freaking fuel blockage issue. Fix leaking diesel valves. Install mosquito-screen curtains in owner’s berth. Install latches to hold screens open for each hatch. Tighten a bunch of loose nuts and screws. Install shelves and holders. Install hatch for better access to storage space where the holding tank would have been. Install fairleads to prevent the screecher lines from ripping the composting toilet’s vent cover. Revarnish dinghy oars. Reinforce dinghy’s daggerboard. Fix dinghy scratches. Install additional oarlock (for sculling). Reinstall, correctly, a fairlead and block for the dinghy’s mainsheet. Bring dinghy outboard to a technician to change shaft seals. Repaint everything below the waterline: hulls, daggerboards, transducer, rudders, saildrive legs, propellers (requiring four different types of paint in total, each with its own idiosyncrasy and different instructions for surface preparation, application, and number of coats). Change saildrive, propeller and frigoboat anodes. Grease the propeller. Change engine oil and oil filters. Change fuel filters. Check raw water impellers. Wash the air filters. Retension alternator belts. Change saildrive oil. Reglue portside saildrive boot. Realign rudders. Align them again after I was told a more precise method. Find and fix source of rainwater leak into port engine room. Protect propane valves and regulator against potentially flying things in the propane locker. And there’s still a couple of things in the engine I’m supposed to check but don’t even know what and where they are (breather pipe, anyone?). And other things we should do but probably won’t, such as lubricating the winches.

Which brings me to the next issue. Having no internet access is perfectly acceptable if you are camping, but even though we seem to be camping (with a rather strange tent, I’ll grant you that), we are actually trying to get this boat ready for the ocean! And since we have no idea how to do half of the tasks in our list, we need those damn forums and youtube videos. So there you have an extra layer of complication, slowness and despair: your project is in one place and the instructions are almost one block away. And you cannot bring one to the other.

On the plus side, we do enjoy the camaraderie with our fellow boat fixers in the yard. We invite each other for sundowners, offer free and usually bad advice, make bets on who’s going to launch first, and talk about other neighbors on their backs. But mostly, we whine about our terrible life and share stories of boatyard misery and soul-crushing days.

How do you survive a summer in Virginia? Easy, you just go somewhere else. There was no consensus whether the heat, the humidity, or the mosquitoes were worse, but when you start thinking of laxatives so that you can spend more time in the boatyard’s air-conditioned restrooms… then it’s patently clear that mid summer in the Chesapeake Bay was not the best time to do boat work. After a week in that inferno, far from any shade, sea breeze or the cooling effect of water, you start hating everybody, including your formerly lovely spouse, especially if you spend any time together tidying stuff up inside a greenhouse-like cockpit.

It was time to abandon ship. Temporarily, that is. We put Oliver and some underwear in a suitcase (ok, two separate suitcases), closed the boat up, and enjoyed a little vacation in California with friends and daughters, which included a side trip to East Oregon to meet the solar eclipse’s path of totality.

To be on the safe side, we came back to Virginia two days after the official end of the summer. In the end the only casualty of our Virginian summer was my crocs. I now have to buy new shoes because the crocs I left in the cockpit got permanently shrank and deformed by the heat.

After a year in the water it’s time for Ñandú’s annual maintenance. It’s a cruiser’s life rite we’re not yet intimately familiar with, but we do know it’s not something to look forward to (unless you enjoy sanding and painting).

The first step was to choose a boatyard. It had to have a wide enough boat lift to haul catamarans; it had to allow us to live aboard with the boat on the yard; it had to allow us to do the work ourselves if we chose to; and it had to have experts’ help available if needed. The two cruising couples we’ve been the closest with independently recommended the same place: Stingray Point Boatworks in Deltaville, Virginia, a small town in the Chesapeake Bay that has more boats than people, and more boat yards than all other types of businesses combined. Since we had no reason to do any further research, Deltaville was declared our next destination. It took us five days and a scare or two to get there from Ocracoke.

The first day started with good sailing conditions in the Pamlico Sound. When we entered the narrow, dredged channel in the Roanoke Sound we had a gentle tailwind, so we kept just the head sail up and continued sailing. As we approached the Washington Baum Bridge the sky darkened ominously. We decided to turn the port engine on and furl the jib. A strong and sudden gust hit Ñandú on the port side and pushed her sideways out of the channel. I heard the now familiar beep of the shallow water alarm: 4.5 feet and decreasing, since the rudder wasn’t enough to compensate for the wind. I needed the starboard engine to point the boat against the wind and back to the channel, so I immediately turned it on, even though I was absolutely sure we were going to run aground, because the charts showed a depth of only two feet outside the channel. Then I saw a crab pot buoy right ahead, slightly to starboard. I had to chose between the risks of running aground or a line fouling the propeller. I went for the latter: I revved the engine up and hoped for the best. The buoy disappeared from our view… and seconds later reappeared behind our stern. Whew!

Very soon we were in the middle of a full-blown thunderstorm and could barely see ahead of us. We turned around before crossing the bridge to wait out the heavy rain and wind in a section of the channel that had more than two feet of water on the sides. When the visibility improved and the wind died down, we resumed our course and went under the bridge.

It had been a long day and with sunset approaching we dropped the hook at the tip of the Roanoke Island. We could see thunderstorms left and right, and the water was quite agitated. As soon as we finished the anchoring choreography, we heard a call on the VHF radio.

“Sailing vessel Nandu, this is the Coast Guard North Carolina Sector”.

Ouch. Unless I’m on distress, I’d rather not hear the Coast Guard mentioning my boat’s name. Did we anchor in a restricted area? Unlikely, but that was the only reason we could think of they were calling. Exhausted, and with a cold beer waiting, the last thing I wanted was to reanchor. We pondered not answering (“hey, we could have had the radio off, right?”) but then we could be risking a visit in person.

“Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is sailing vessel Ñandú”.

It turns out that people from a nearby house saw us anchoring in that unsettled weather. They have a private dock and they called the coast guard to let us know that we could use their dock if we preferred to spend the night in a more protected place. We declined the offer but went to bed with a warm feeling: people do care for each other.

The next leg was a few miles shorter than planned. We intended to cross the Albermarle Sound to rejoin the Intracoastal Waterway and spend the night at the beginning of the Virginia Cut, but a coughing engine made us seek an anchorage while we still had ample space around us to figure things out. A change of fuel filters appeared to have fixed the problem. At dusk the boat was invaded by a swarm of insects as we had never seen before. At least they didn’t bite, but they took possession of the boat. They covered the boat with little dots of excrement that would turn an intense green, spinach soup-like substance when washed with water. And they just refused to move from their chosen spots, even if you touched them. The next day we tried to suck them with the vacuum cleaner but progress was too slow, so we just waited for them to die, which took about three days.

From then on it was less eventful, except that the weather remained stormy and we continued with intermittent engine problems. In three days we transited the Virginia Cut to the Elizabeth River, followed the river to the Chesapeake Bay, and sailed up the Bay to our new temporary home in Deltaville.

Cape Lookout National Seashore offers a fully protected and beautiful anchorage surrounded by sandy beaches that we could watch but not touch, because we hadn’t formally checked into the States. Not that we had much energy to deal with the dinghy anyway, after four days at sea, so in a way having such restriction was a blessing, since we could fully focus on resting. Which we did for 24 hours. And we did it so well that—I’m now realizing—I have not a single picture of that place.

We called Customs and Border Protection the next day. After getting chastised for not immediately reporting our arrival, we were instructed to bring the boat to either Morehead City or Beaufort and call again. We chose the cozier Beaufort where an immigration agent and a customs official, both very friendly, boarded Ñandú. The immigration guy stamped our passports, and the customs guy focused mostly on food, including Oliver’s. His verdict was that an apple and a dozen eggs were not allowed into the country. However, he wasn’t very keen on carrying those items to his office for incineration, so on his suggestion we ate the apple and boiled the eggs, which made everyone happy.

After Beaufort, it was back to something I didn’t miss at all: the Intracoastal Waterway and all its bridges.