Imperiled on a Lee Shore

As in life, disaster at sea sneaks up fast. Conditions deteriorate in a downward spiral, quietly closing off options while you fiddle with trivialities, driving you inexorably toward a dead end long before you realize it. At some point, the vague dread you've been feeling all day snaps into sharp focus; it's no longer a colorful NOAA movie of well-fletched wind arrows against a colorized map of gales in the Strait... it's here and now. Buoys that were way over there are suddenly right here; forget lunch, start the engine, turn on the windlass breaker, throw me the leather gloves, we gotta get out of here or we're gonna lose the boat!

It wasn't supposed to happen that way, of course. I had known for two days that Saturday was going to be feisty, and fully intended to get off our completely exposed "anchorage" against the lee shore of Camano Island long before it became an issue...


I had no illusions about any protection here, but it was close to the lab and handy logistically for the week that us cruising riff-raff had to vacate the marina to make room for go-fast toys in town for their annual regatta. It had been a mostly-calm stay but for an early lightning storm and a few gusty late-afternoon Force 4 northerlies that were only mildly alarming.

But there were unexpected complexities. Off the coddling of shore power for the first time in a while, my 8-year-old battery bank revealed the quiet disaster that resulted from the Prosine forgetting during a crash that they were AGM, charging them for months as generic gels. They were nearing end-of-life anyway, but this sped the decline, necessitating a somewhat ridiculous transfer of 560 pounds of new Group 31 Fullrivers off the beach via dinghy, followed by the same load in the opposite direction to shed the old ones. That was Friday, and I was playfully making jokes about A Salt and Battery while flexing long-dormant arm muscles, monitoring current flows, and planning the installation of the new Outback inverter/charger that has been patiently waiting in a box since fall.

Up next was a sailing weekend with friends, including an overnight of crabbing and dining in a protected anchorage, but watching the unfolding weather predictions I knew we were in for a blow. We had to get off the lee shore anyway, so might as well make an adventure of it, yah? If conditions get sloppy, we'll just duck around to the other side of the island, drop the hook, and play there until the system passes.

All this carried a sort of energizing buzz of anticipation, but shoreside events conspired to delay departure into the danger zone. The lab security system was triggered by a spider having dinner in front of a PIR sensor at 1:30 AM, leading to a flurry of activity including a police visit, and twelve hours later, still trying to get out the door, a puddle that I initially attributed to the canine child-surrogate turned out to be the hallmark of an iced-up freezer that needed immediate defrosting (food was already mushy). More lost time, more hassles... and more rising wind.

We finally made it to the beach and undertook three back-to-back dinghy shuttles. I was knocked flat by a wave that dumped the boat on top of me, Bonnie got a leg caught and barely avoided getting slammed, Sky had a close call with a seawall, and Suzanne did quite well after being the first to brave the paint-chipping transfer to the stern of Nomadness, still stately compared to the dancing boatlets all around but starting to pitch in the building seas. While our guests worked to stow gear and food, Sky and I wrestled with the dinghy hoist, finally getting things tidy enough for what was obviously going to be a pounding.

That's when I noticed that we were dragging anchor on 120 feet of chain, drifting into a bevy of little motorboats, the beach dangerously close astern. Red alert!

The Battle

I fired up the diesel, grabbed the headsets, threw one to Sky, donned leather gloves, and made my way to the pitching bow. "No time to change, screw the dog, we're going now. Keep the bow pointed into the wind!" It began as it usually does; she got the boat creeping forward as I started to bring in chain. But something quickly went wrong... the bow was blown off to starboard, and we came up tight on the still-fast anchor. Coupled with the violent vertical motion, the force of this was enough to yank the chain free. The slipping windlass clutch was no match for the momentum of a running chain, and within seconds all 300 feet of it had flown off the bow roller while I yelped and tried (pointlessly) to slow it down by hand.

I've never even seen the bitter end of my anchor rode, and had no idea whether it would disappear completely - something normally considered a disaster. In this case, that would have actually been OK, since we could have sent a diver after it the next day and avoided being pinned to a lee shore. The more likely possibility is that the end would be bent to a length of line that is in turn made fast to an eye in the anchor locker, allowing the ground tackle to be cut away in an emergency.

But it was neither. I didn't have time to examine it closely, but there was a big knot of chain, apparently seized or clamped; this slammed into the bottom end of the hawse pipe with a loud bang, and held.

Well, hell, now what? A quick glance to leeward revealed that we were between other boats and falling fast toward the rocks, and the only way out would be to recover 300 feet of all-chain rode and a 65-pound Bruce anchor with a failing Lighthouse 1501 windlass clutch and intermittent deck switch. Any attempt to haul the chain while 18 tons of boat strained against it was futile, so we had to work to windward to make slack, gain ground during the few seconds available, then hold it with the hook of a cleated snubber to keep from losing it again. This would have been impossible alone, and nearly so without the full-duplex hands-free communication afforded by our headsets (they're not industrial quality, and are prone to noise and interference, but they saved our asses on this day... $60 well-spent).

I can only describe the process as brutal, hard on equipment and bodies. I tried to keep Sky advised of the angle that the chain was running into the water, but it was all she could do to buy us a few precious moments of nose to wind... and that frequently involved going around and coming up hard. At one point, I saw us starting to encircle a mooring buoy, which would have complicated things considerably by fouling our chain with theirs, and shouted orders to hit reverse and do a 3-point turn. Bit by bit, I hauled in slack and manually attached the hook to keep from losing precious links.

We must have created quite a show for the vacationing folks in their beach houses, cooking crab and drinking beer, especially since Sky had thrown on a temporary miniskirt to get out of wet clothes from the dinghy mishaps. We're canvassing the neighborhood to see if there are any photos; if anyone stopped gawking long enough to grab a camera, I'll post them here (unless they're NSFW!).

Escape

After a 30-45 minutes of this ordeal, soaked by waves over the plunging bow and nearing exhaustion, the painted marks on the chain indicated 5 fathoms... meaning that we had broken free. Sky drove us to windward to get us off the deadly beach, slowing only when I got the anchor to waterline to keep it from flailing wildly. Once stowed, we powered up and headed for the lee of Whidbey Island, the anemometer clocking 30-35 including our own speed.

But now what? According to NOAA, this wind was going to be with us for a while, and there were no protected anchorages nearby (besides, at this point I was wary of anchoring; the windlass needs to be rebuilt). Cornet Bay, a cozy little nook at the east end of Deception Pass, was 3 hours away and likely packed with weekendeers seeking refuge... an assumption that was later proven correct when I had a chat with a friend who witnessed the gusty anchoring frenzy there. La Conner would be about the same distance and seemed alluring, but wind howls over Skagit Flats and the narrow channel is unforgiving... one error and we'd be aground on a falling 12-foot tide. I grabbed the VHF and called Oak Harbor Marina.

"I don't recommend it," the fellow said. "We have 30 knots over the seawall and the anchorage is all whitecaps."

But after much discussion, I made the executive decision to go for it anyway: it's familiar territory, help would be available, the anchorage would be a backup if docking failed, and if even that failed we could fire up the nav software and tiptoe out of the channel to motor around in the dark until things calmed down a bit. Set course for Red Buoy #2!

The Second Battle

Nomadness is a stout ship, and before she came into my life covered both coasts of North America, with a couple of Panama Canal transits and lots of time in the Caribbean. So I rather trust her, and the crossing of Penn Cove, where the gale in the Strait was only slightly attenuated by the narrow neck of Whidbey Island, was actually exhilarating. I drizzled a little hydraulic steering oil into the bouncing pedestal with a makeshift funnel, since the wheel felt bubbly after all the excitement, but otherwise all was well and the new battery bank was happily slurping up alternator amps.

The oil led to an amusing moment, however. I was peering around with the binoculars, trying to find the outlying buoy so I could keep it safely to starboard, when Sky called from the companionway: "Could you hand me the hydraulic fluid? Zuby really likes it."

"No! I need it for the steering system!" It took me a moment to see why they were all laughing at me...

But we had a job to do. Alternating between VHF and cellphone, I contacted Mack the harbormaster, Jerry of the transient Mirador, and Frank of the resident Blue Moorea... making sure that we would have the best possible chance of getting our lines caught before the wind started having its way with my sometimes recalcitrant vessel (she does not behave well without steerageway, making close-in maneuvers much too exciting in wind and current). This was about twice the wind speed I had ever had for a docking attempt... and the force rises with the cube of velocity. Doubling the wind speed means 8 times the force on hull, rigging, kayaks, and everything else that would conspire to blow us off.

The approach was dicey. Three boats in the whitewater anchorage bucked and strained at their chains, and I was being directed to the unfamiliar north entrance that included a skinny sidewind romp along the seawall with a hard U-turn at the end. I swung wide, lined 'er up, and was a little relieved to see the wind only a few degrees off the nose. OK, here we go...

Three women stood by to toss lines aboard the closing Nomadness; five men on the dock prepared to catch them. I nosed in and a bow line made it, but I timidly dropped power too soon and started to blow back at an alarming angle while the guys fought to hold us. More lines, bursts of power, fast cleating, straining muscles... and at last we were made fast.

The dock angels drifted into the night after shrugging off our hearty thanks, and almost immediately I got to repay a bit of docking karma with the next white-knuckled guy. Later that night, one of the boats in the anchorage dragged down on the seawall and some brave soul leapt aboard, deployed fenders, and lashed her to a pole to keep her off the bricks. This is the best thing about the nautical community.

It was surreal, after all that, to be cracking fresh dungeness crab, enjoying salad from our garden, and drinking much-needed wine with Sky, Suzanne, and Bonnie. Wind whistling around, warm feminine chatter, laptop aglow, instruments still on to attach numbers to the howling outside... all quite cozy aboard our little ship after a vigorous day that already seemed dreamlike and impossible.

Rigging the sailing dinghy the next afternoon. In the dink, that's Bonnie on the left and Suzanne on the right; Sky is perched on the dock and has also blogged about this crazy day.

The Zen of Geeky Boat Projects

I'd like to welcome new visitors from Cruising Compass! Other nautical folk, if you haven't seen this, it's well worth a look - a great cruising-oriented weekly news source presented by Blue Water Sailing magazine.

I'm anchored north of Hope Island at the moment, the boat feeling much lighter off the dock, the rhythm of life distinctly more relaxed than the task-oriented staccato that has characterized the past eight months. There is much of the latter yet ahead, alas, but this break is a good reminder of why I'm putting myself through this.

As expeditions go, this is a minor one. There was talk of popping over to the San Juans, but my diesel is suddenly putting out black smoke above 1800 RPM or so and I have yet to diagnose the problem. (That typically means partially burned fuel from either restricted airflow, high engine load like a fouled prop, exhaust back pressure, or a bad injector.) I'll deal with it, but for now I am more focused on remembering life aboard... the best part of which is the pace.

At the lab, I juggle management tools, nudging a dozen parallel projects ranging from eBay and homeowner stuff to enclosure fabrication and boat network design. It is never simple, never feels calm, and only rarely gives any indication that it might end someday.

But now I'm swinging at anchor, a pasta in the oven, Sky off to give the dog a shore excursion, genset purring to slurp a few amp-hours back into the aging AGM bank, body pleasantly tired from unfamiliar exertions, a hint of sun-sting here and there, and really nothing I urgently need to do at the moment but write this blog posting. What a difference. One project can be the focus of a whole day, with time for a nap, a hike, a frolicsome dinkabout, and an eventful ride (complete with retrieval of a powerboat-pooped dinghy) over to Cornet Bay for ice cream with friends aboard Nereid... our buddy-boat companions on this little jaunt.

Projects aboard have more immediacy than the ones that involve Linux servers, distributed Arduini, and radio gear. Yesterday an intermittent in the engine-starting circuit blossomed into a full-blown failure, so I dug into the wiring harness, found a mashed-together butt splice that had not been properly crimped, fixed it, and vroom. It's no big deal, but there's a perverse, almost pleasant purity in having a single task in focus... and a real satisfaction in getting it done.

Especially when the engine starts again.


Random Thoughts on Boat Projects

This calls to mind a discussion that percolated on Cruisersforum recently... someone launched a thread on refit lessons and I was inspired to contribute. Given the focus of this blog, an edited version is worth including here:

1. Never hire a guy who hates his work... I'm still fixing messes left by the plumber-from-hell, and there were lots of clues while he was on the job that should have been grounds for termination. The latest discovery: instead of using the correct bolts for the SeaLand inspection plate, he just shot in some sheet-metal screws. This distorted the polyethylene Ronco tank material, with one screw even penetrating the sidewall of the oversize cutout... creating a gap that leaks under pressure and insufficient material for a proper re-installation. This hotshot charges $80/hour. Hiring him was a mistake even though some of the tasks were intimidating and I felt I needed his skills... but ever since, I have been chasing the leaks and cleaning up after him.

2. In that spirit, I've learned that DIY should always be first choice, with the hiring of professionals limited to cases of esoteric knowledge, true gurus, or jobs requiring expensive capital equipment. As I proceed with the geeking-out of the ship, my “business model,” although very casual, is publishing the designs and in some cases assembling kits. I think a lot of boaters are coming to the same conclusion, and the economy has a lot to do with it. (Speaking of kits, Navagear did a very nice post about my marine GPS datalogger based on the Sparkfun Geochron.)

3. To-Do lists are fractal. The closer you zoom into one item, the more it expands into a cluster of component items. I try to anticipate this with what I call "CDTs," or Clearly Defined Tasks. Writing these out ahead of time may seem like over-detailing, but pays off when it helps avoid gross underestimation of time and costs.

4. Project management tools can make or break a job. I like OmniFocus since you can list by projects and then review by contexts (like, "what else do I need to do now that I'm aboard with wiring tools spread out?"). And Scrivener is very useful for keeping the sprawling collection of design documents in one cohesive environment... before that, I had stray files everywhere.

5. If a project requires n components, there will be n-1 units in stock (quoting an ancient collection of Murphy's laws, circa 1969). It is really worthwhile to buy in bulk... and besides, you end up with repair inventory and trade goods. For hardware, McMaster-Carr is spectacular.

6. Tool duplication between home and boat is unavoidable. You'll end up needing 'em anyway. Expensive tools are usually good investments, though they sink just as fast as cheap ones (don't be too macho to use a lanyard when leaning over the rail). The new Li-Ion Makita LXT power tools are awesome... I love them, along with the best drill bits I've ever owned. This felt like a crazy splurge at the time, but has already been a winning investment.

7. Document, document, document! Buy a cable-labeling machine (I like the IDpal from Brady) and ID every cable as it is identified. Take the time to do good drawings (I use OmniGraffle Pro for overall diagrams, and Eagle for detailed schematics). Start a binder for the known-correct information that you will want to be able to find again... sprinkled throughout project notebooks and random scraps, it gets lost. Dedicate portable file boxes to manuals and individual projects. Use your digital camera to chase otherwise invisible mysteries, and save the images. Take photos before closing off an area so you will know later where not to drill.

8. Save labeled core samples from hole-saw adventures.

There are a lot more lessons that fall out of all this, and I'll share them as they occur. But for now, there's a bit of catch-up to do; somehow I let 5 weeks get away since my last posting here.

Stove Cage

The Navigator Little Cod wood stove that was installed last year was excellent company over the winter, but one job remained unfinished. The exposed stovepipe, especially with the related sacrifice of a wooden pole in the cabin, was an accident waiting to happen: hot or not, a lurch into sharp sheet metal during a hands-free transit at the instant of wave impact could have devastating consequences. So I built a cage:


I'll probably soften up the top rail and the upper halves of the verticals with St. Mary's hitching some night at anchor, but even as it is we already find it pleasant to use as both a leaning station and a grabrail when passing through. The parts are standard 7/8" rail and associated fittings, and the 60° angle of the struts both opens more rail to gripping and minimizes flexion of the top half.

Curtains

Another major lifestyle enhancement in the raised-salon pilothouse is a set of curtains... especially on the sloping front windows that make a highly effective greenhouse on sunny days. After months of frequent staring at the problem and a number of brainstorming sessions, we decided to take a novel approach and use high-power neodymium magnets sewn into the edges of the curtain panels... with matching ones attached to the window frame with double-stick foam tape. Our fabrics guru was not at all happy about trying to keep feisty magnets under control while sewing on her industrial steel machine, but eventually she got them all in there.

The panels are a lush patterned dark blue fabric inside, and a special light-colored UV-resistant material outside. And while there is a little gaposis and sag, they are a huge improvement in quality of life aboard. Peeking out is easy: just pop open a corner, have a look, and slap it shut. It is much tidier than rods and associated hardware.


(The black contraption at the top wrapped in foam and gorilla tape needs to come out - it's one of the old windshield-wiper motors. I'd like some, actually, but one of the three melted its wiring in the harness and I no longer trust them... and besides, they are head-bangers. One of these days.)

Bow Navlight Assembly

In my last post, I moaned about the mounting scheme used by the Aqua Signal Series 32 LED navigation lights, and I remain unimpressed... it should not have taken so much work to get them installed. One of the units, fresh from the clamshell packaging, had the key expando-plastic toy part fractured and useless, so any cop-out attempt to mount according to the nearly nonexistent documentation was out the window anyway.

Instead, I cobbled up a little machined aluminum assembly that bolts to the original mounting plate that carried a milky incandescent power-hog from yesteryear:


(That little black thing in the foreground is the broken critical mounting part, which is supposed to expand when a tapered knurled brass plug is pulled into it by the one and only mounting screw. I like my approach better... a longer #8 button-head, turned down slightly to fit in the metric-sized hole in the plastic, threaded into a block of aluminum. This might have to take green water over the bow someday.)

Marine GPS Datalogger Kit

Thought I'd insert a quick plug for our little datalogger kit; my enthusiastic tales about various incarnations of this technology have generated a lot of interest over the years, so I finally packaged my favorite logging engine along with a sealed enclosure, charge cable, SD card, mounting velcro, and expanded how-to. These things are a hoot, and provide all sorts of graphic evidence of adventures (and embarrassing oops moments like trying to dock in a cross-current). The marine GPS datalogger is now in my online store, and delivery is typically a week or so (I configure and test each one). The unit can live permanently in some out-of-the-way location with a sky view, and is acessible via Bluetooth. Over 6 months of continuous track logs (one point per second) can accumulate in the SD card before it starts to get crowded in there, and the retrieved files can be displayed in Google Earth, Google Maps, or other formats with a free online tool.

Nomadness at Anchor, Part 2

This posting has been idle for a while, though I have occasionally poked at it with a stick or added notes about stuff to add. I should just do short postings and not make each one such a multi-threaded repository of techno-philosophical musings. Old habits die hard; I still think of these as articles and use my vintage live page for short news bits of interest to friends.

(That page has a new feature, by the way: it now has a retro HTML table with the most immediate temporal layer scraped from the epic to-do list, presenting only the things that need to be done next across a landscape of 30-40 project categories. It's a lot easier to grasp than the totality of All Known List Items, which get vapourous anyway when you try to look beyond the current wavefront of progress. Besides, all I really need to know when rolling up my sleeves is what needs to be done right now. I have made it public mostly to share with the NRL team, but also invite participation if something there catches your eye...)

Anyway, I'm at anchor again. A week or so has passed, and the big week-long regatta has taken over the marina where Nomadness has been moored. Us riffraff have been asked to vacate the docks to make room for all the go-fast toys, so for a while we will be gunkholing about, taking friends for long-promised sails, and returning randomly to the lab to keep the nickel generators sputtering along.

It has been a very eventful few days. Way back at the beginning of this post, I mentioned the black smoke above 1800 RPM. This was quite worrying, and I concocted a theory that the diver who replaced the nose zinc on my Max Prop had somehow fungled the pitch and increased engine loading. Only... it still went from forward to reverse so was not jammed, and an email exchange with helpful PYI tech support pretty well convinced me that such a phenomenon was not possible. I have the Classic 3-Blade model, shown here during the pre-purchase haulout before cleaning and zincage:


I was not happily contemplating either an engine service call or haulout with prop-removal... so, grasping at straws, I asked the diver to take a look even though it has only been a couple of months since the last cleaning. And guess what... this has been the worst year in memory for marine growth around here! It was fouled from bow to stern, the running gear covered with barnacles and other biology. They went back down the next day and polished her up, and yesterday I cranked the engine to 3200 RPM and purred along smoothly with nary a wisp of smoke. All betterz...

Feeling smug about a cheap solution to a scary problem immediately induced another one... I carelessly let the furling line get away when deploying the headsail, so at the end of the day, rounding up in a fresh breeze to anchor off a friend's beach, the sail got stuck HARD when still about 30% out. No amount of fiddling had any effect, so I cast off the furling line, wrestled the drum around until I had a couple of sheet wraps, and tied it off to the pulpit with small stuff. All day today, with gorgeous perfect breezes and sails dancing in bright sunshine, we swung at anchor waiting for enough calm to drop the basket and untangle the mess.

I suppose there are worse things than a day at anchor since we had no place in particular to go. "Cruising," quoth some ancient wag, "is the art of fixing your boat in exotic ports."

A Critical Comment

This is a good time to answer a comment from "Anonymous" that came in response to my blog post of a few weeks ago. Every now and then, someone will write a stinging criticism of my peculiar blend of passions, usually from the perspective of the traditional values associated with the most visible substrate. Someone in 1989 told me that I was "bastardizing the simple, beautiful act of bicycling" with the BEHEMOTH project, and a few years later, a guy in Arizona lambasted my transition to the Microship... insisting that I remove him from my mailing list since I was "abandoning my bicycle roots." One needs a bit of a thick skin when making a life public, and I was initially going to just ignore Mr. Anonymous. But he actually makes a valid point that I should address, even though he did not do so very kindly:

So mr nomad how's outfitting the space shuttle going? Excuse me for being skeptical, only you seem stuck in the yuppie yesteryear of "too much is never enough." Complex systems galore, oh...and you're going to swing it by going global and what... tweeting from fiji?

Salt water, the motion of the ocean, an unrealistically long supply chain combined a global depression will have the final word on your work I feel.

Really, go cruising and report how the multitude of systems are holding up... that is if you aren't too busy maintaining broken systems. I'll give your techno path some credence if you can go a year or two of cruising without giving up in exhaustion.

There are a few things this fellow is overlooking, though his perspective on complexity is not uncommon in the cruising community and is not entirely irrational.

First, and I think most of my readers know this, my primary source of geek pleasure is the blending of passions. From my ancient 1983 "computerized recumbent bicycle" to this crazy starship-to-be, what has kept me going for a quarter-century has been the integration of geek delights into adventure substrates and then (usually) spending quality time playing with the quirky combination. So my initial response to his comment is that I am not just getting distracted by technology in what is fundamentally a cruising project; the whole point here is the combination of the two.

Of course, he is absolutely correct in pointing out the potential fragility. "Water corrodes; salt water corrodes absolutely." Systems crash, parts can be hard to get, and complexity is anathema to reliability. A purist would have already snorted at my furling drum problem; a hanked-on jib would never "jam." And if I do find myself dealing with constant electronics failures, then I have not done my job well, since a rather large percentage of the design is related to robustness, sealing, serviceability, isolation, backups, and easy replacement if it's all toasted by lightning.

But beyond all that, one of the fundamental design standards here is that none of this gizmology can be mission critical... at least in the sense of disabling basic ship operation if it fails (like requiring power to move a swing keel on a high-performance race boat). I still pull strings for sheets and halyards, there are TWO independent hydraulic backups to the autopilot as well as a wind vane and emergency tiller, I have an Astra IIIB sextant on board that will still work when the GPS toys crap out, I don't use microprocessors to control navigation lights, and safety-critical things like the marine VHF are not dependent on crossbar networks to get audio in and out.

So why, one might cynically ask, am I farting around for years with lab-logistics and development tools when I could just go cruising (other than the fact that I find the geek stuff fundamentally entertaining)?

In a purely practical sense, the systems that I am building address a very specific need that is not well met by existing tools. When I am off the boat, I want to be able to see it and scan sensors. When I am in bed and it gets bouncy, I want to reach up to a display and take a quick reassuring look at GPS guard zone, depth, and wind data. When batteries are sagging, I want to know why. When I forget how the 20 or so valves related to engine fluids are configured (3 tanks, 2 Racors, transfer pump, oil changing system, coolant loop pickoff for water heating), I want to see a live drawing with active lines a different color than inactive ones and relevant flow sensor values displayed in context. When I'm tired and try to fire up the macerator pumpout without first opening the tank vent and seacock (duh), I want something to yell at me very loudly. And so on.

None of this suggests that I should get lazy and hand all responsibility over to systems; instead it is an attempt to bring the insane complexity of a modern cruising yacht's systems into a user interface that looks and feels like a simple website... accessible from anywhere on or off the boat. If that fails, oh well. The boat still works.

A secondary benefit of all this, besides my finding it intrinsically fun and justifiable on that basis, is that a lot of other people are interested as well... so there is an associated business model that yields publications and kits.

Finally, a bit of broader perspective... sailing itself is not low-tech, even though it has been done for centuries. We've come a long way from square-riggers and tallow-tipped sounding leads; by the time you throw in N2K navigation networks, watermakers, high-brightness LEDs, windvane self-steering, carbon composites, FLIR, forward-looking sonar, broadband radar, and MPPT solar charge management, a cruising boat is a masterpiece of multi-disciplinary engineering. But I think I understand Mr. Anonymous' objection to complexity: it is anything that is not already a turn-key product.

Footnote: Life Under a Lightning Rod

I was just about to send this via the trusty EVDO link when I started seeing flashes outside, and emerged to observe huge cloud-to-cloud lightning displays covering many miles (with occasional ground strikes). When you're in a steel box with a 60-foot aluminum stick in the air, the tallest thing around with a hook down just off a lee shore as reversing wind gusts whistle the rigging, this is somewhat disconcerting.

The dilemma: stay aboard, let more chain out, and watch the sky show... even though swinging then becomes dicey if the wind shifts to the west... or hop in the dink and paddle to the home of an out-of-town friend. We opted for the latter, and have been watching my anchor light drift back and forth like a motile Venus against a backdrop of lightning-streaked clouds and distant shoreline.

A nice, primal footnote to all those existential questions about the essence of technomadics...

Fair winds,
Steve