Unmooring and unmoreing: How we've done it

Slightly cobwebby, but in good working order

This was the good, if slightly neglected, ship Alchemy a couple of days ago. Good, because I try to leave her ready to sail and motor at all times, but neglected, because several weeks of this rapidly expiring summer has been spent on processes and events both tangential and necessary to slipping the dock lines. Our levels of effort, labour, confusion and delay have been so high as to cause the greatest gap in blog posting (horrors!) of at least the last decade. But on that fact hangs a tale.

Had you asked my wife and I, say, three months ago, if we were particularly materialistic, we would have demurred. We've never owned a car, never had cable TV, and have not, having lived in half a house with tenants above, had the space to acquire much save books...or so we thought. But as the date of the close of the house sale approached, we realized that our nearby flat, rented for just one year so that our son could finish high school nearby with minimal disruption (and, to be fair, so we would be no further away from our boat and its later refitting stages) was in no sense large enough to accommodate our vast amount of "stuff". Furthermore, we needed to rent a garage from our new landlords just to hold my power tools, things migrating to the boat over the winter, things I would want in our new, out-of-town place (more on this below), and the sort of heavy-duty racking, sawhorses and bottle-jacks one hesitates to just put on Kijiji.

The new flat's living room was quite spacious until I put in a load of dining room furniture and six seven-foot bookshelves.

A particular struggle were my books. Bibliophilia is only a problem in confined spaces, and our old house only looked small because there were so many damned books. Maybe two or three thousand, down from four or five thousand before I did a radical cull a few years ago. Now, apart from service manuals, almanacs and "how to cruise" books, the approximate space budget on Alchemy for recreational reading in paper form is probably five paperbacks per crew. So disposal, even in terms of getting to the interim land-based habitations, was going to be a big deal. And so it was.

These are just two of the half-filled boxes of just sea-related books I either sold or gave to my club, which had to build a new set of shelves to bear them. The filled boxes numbered at least 15, all transported by bicycle cart.

So the Great Culling commenced with nautical books. Keeping in mind I run a business from home and am not actually retired, this took a couple of weeks, and, as is the way of such things, the idea of lifting boxes up a flight of stairs at the height of summer led to an increasingly unsentimental attitude to the keeping of books I would not be taking on the voyage. Off about 500 salty volumes went. Enjoy, National Yacht Club members and visitors: I did.

You know what's large? A windvane in an aft cabin is large.

Certain other pieces belonging to the boat had to vacate the garage also. The wind vane above was one. Oddly, because I have complex reno plans for the aft cabin this winter, I will likely install it on the stern, but not make it functional with lines until next spring's launch. I'll fashion a cover to keep the weather out.

Atomic 4 oil pan, one of the many valuable pieces that came, sales pending, to the new garage.

While I made a nice little packet in July on some Atomic 4 parts, I had to haul (via hand-cart, see below) a few items to the new garage, which we have rented only until November 30 and which is not quite filled, but certainly piled higher than I'd hoped.

The vast uncluttering included the running of a garage sale (once enough crap had been removed from the garage to permit the sale!); two separate visits to load up a van with scrap metal, surplus racking and far too many fence posts; the rental of a dumpster bin in which went a brim-ful collection of unwanted piano (I tried to give it away, as it was free to me 10 years ago, but you can't give them away); and a visit from a two-tonne "GOT-JUNK" truck we filled with the remainder of our crap.

Moved by mechanical advantage: it's good to be a sailor.

Amid all these focused efforts were a constant stream of chests of drawers, boxes of books, racking, flooring, fans, heaters and related mildly desirable acquisitions to the curb in front of the house to be sold, where the magic of big-city salvage made most of it vanish. We also used the garbage and recycling bins at both properties (our landlords are away on holiday) and some bins at the club to dispose of things like sails I'll never use.

Not materialistic, eh? Reality and the terrified housecat, who was moved last in an increasingly barren, echoey house, begged to differ.

She is not coming out until you've damned well finished moving.

But, painfully (for I was moving the three blocks from old house to new flat via hand-cart, the process of which ground down the turning wheel bearings to little shavings), the decluttering proceeded.

A typical array of Not Wanted on the Voyage.

We were astounded, as was the buyer of our house on her final walk-through the day prior to the scheduled close, at how much space was actually on the property once we'd nuked, shifted or otherwise vanished our ridiculous amount of possessions. 

The mancave returned to its original form as a stable.

The dark spot in the middle is where the horse-pee drained away to whatever sewer arrangements pertained in 1900.

Quite airy, minus mahogany accents and IKEA shelving.

Somehow, we managed to jam in an end-of-August day trip to the nearby town of Trenton. I had been surveying real estate there on the basis of several parameters, which can be summed up as follows:

• 1) We wanted to maintain a Canadian, and specifically, an Ontario, address while we were off a-voyaging. We did not want to "sell up and sail", but to keep a toehold in our native country. This would simplify certain interactions with the government if we had just one principal residence, even if it was a pied-a-terre in the basement of a place we otherwise rented out.
• 2) We needed this place to be within driving distance of a relative skilled in property management who would be our point person with said tenants and who could do, or arrange to have done, maintenance as needed.
• 3) We needed to be beyond the "halo of greed" generated by Toronto's insane house valuations in order to maximize our bang for buck of our Toronto house sale. We did not care to tie ourselves or our gotten gains to Toronto, with its high taxes but limited upside for rent (and ease of access to our possessions, when required). At the same time, we needed the place to be of sufficient size to have a train and a bus stop, and to be close to a major highway. Trenton has all three and it's 130 km. or 90 minutes by car east of Toronto.
• 4) We needed said house to be of sufficient value to hold its purchase price for the next five years in a town with both a tight rental market, but also with relatively high incomes. Trenton has a nearby university, light manufacturing, a big new marina and recreational industries (it's the start of the Trent-Severn Canal system) and a large airforce base (CFB Trenton).

So we saw five places with the rather odd request that "a separate entrance granny flat plus a garage and shed...the rest just has to be rentable" was the mandate. Our Trenton-area real estate agent complied as best she could in a place where maybe a couple of hundred houses of any type change hands in a year. A couple of hundred houses within walking distance of me, by contrast, are getting quarter-million dollar renovations as I type here in Toronto. Our old house is also slated for some version of creative destruction.

Just as an addendum to how we afforded the house (and, by extension, the good ship Alchemy) in the first place, I'll recap by noting that we paid off our house in 2006. It had doubled in value since 1998 when we bought it, paying it off via tenants' rental income and dedicated (bi-weekly mortgage payments) debt reduction, so once paid off, we borrowed against it to the tune of a 40% loan structured as a new, first mortgage. As we had paid off the house in seven and a half years once already, we got attractive terms of about 2.15%.

We had tenants paying down the mortgage and we kicked in a few thou a year as a top-up. Long story short, we were down to $60K owed (still at around 2%) last summer. We wanted to have the flexibility to sell the house, now valued at over a million due to location, so we converted that to a HELOC and the last pair of tenants conveniently moved on. We paid off the HELOC at $1,000/month and are once again mortgage-free. The line of credit also allows us to renovate in anticipation of sale, which we never actually did, opting for an "as is, where is" exclusive listing, and because we had so little to do directly with paying off the 2006 loan, we essentially consider the passagemaker we will shortly move aboard to be "a free boat".

Of course it isn't. There's tens of thousands in gear and (mainly my) labour aboard. But it was a smart way to afford a boat using the house as a successful and friendly bank. Let's face it, no bank would loan money for a 30 year-old boat! Also, few home owners would live as on-site landlords in the less appealing part of the house without car or cable TV or much in the way of vacations for years on end  in order to eliminate debt. But that was the only way to pull this scheme off, which I described to Mrs. Alchemy in 2006 as "a sleigh ride you can't leave once you've started down the icy slope." Which was, in retrospect, a little melodramatic.

Sticking with the real estate component of making the crusing life possible, I won't bore my long-suffering readers with the saga and photos of the somewhat odd places we saw, but they were all of a price that our house sale in Toronto would have allowed us to buy all five, with a bit left over. But we settled (very rapidly; having Mrs. Alchemy's retired home inspector father's input helped here) on a house very reminiscent of my youth in the suburbs. Behold: The Storage Locker.

I am easily swayed by proper drainage.

This house has everything we wanted, save for the separate entrance. We will have to sort that out with whatever tenants we acquire, but it's no biggie. Some of the features were fated to appeal to me: a separate, automated 17 KW, natural-gas genset that will heat and light the house should the main power fail...

It's called a Generac, and it looks clever.

 ...plus "hydronic heating", which the home inspector deemed a very tidy installation.

I like tidy installations.

The tenants will have to pay off all the utilities, and we'll handle the taxes. We'll be doing some minor repairs and will have to shift the garage contents from here to there by November, at which point we will know how much space the rest of our possessions will take up. This crazy plan may actually come together. In the meantime, we are renters who will also be owners who will be prepping to be landlords who live on a boat.

A colourful symbol of hope and refraction.

So now we are ensconced in the new and frankly very nice apartment. Boxes are being (finally) unpacked, and after a titanic struggle with the idiot phone company, my landline is working.

One of the five technicians over four separate visits dispatched to fix what was essentially a work order screw-up. Can't wait to install my SSB.

We are enjoying the balcony off our bedroom and have recreated, sort of, the "fire pit" area of our former back yard, minus the fire, save for a candle or two.

At night, the trash pandas sing.

Now that I am beginning to unwind from the ridiculous level of dirt, detail work, sweating and hauling and lifting that this interminable process has demanded, I've come to the realization that all those who intend to cruise must come to terms with: possessions not directly related to the safe operation, repair and maintenance of the boat must be ruthlessly reduced and scruntinized, because there's not only limited space on a boat, but you can't leave most things unstowed when underway, because of the rather good chance they may become projectiles. Extending this (minus outside of earthquake zones the projectile consideration) to houses has made us realize that the urge to acquire, whether it be through inheritance, scavenging (much of our furniture was cleaned-up curbside acquisitions or bargain-hunting (we have enough tinned food to last a year) is, or can be, pathological. Material goods can save your life, but they also have the power to restrain your life. Sentiment can be a set of chains, and so can fear of poverty: we gave to charity about a dozen full bags of surplus clothing but really, the boat's only got room for maybe 10 days' of t-shirts and shorts and two sets of "shore clothing"; the rest is foulies and boat-specific gear. So there's still work to be done on that front. We all need, I feel, to "unmore" our lives. This process has taught me that less is more.

I have also come to terms with not, in the usual sense, anticipating missing our house much. Partially, this was because we paid it off (twice) via rentals to a rotating cast of tenants of varying degrees of aptitude; we lived in the dimmer, less renovated, more cluttered half and while I enjoyed and continue to enjoy the surrounding neighbourhood, the house was a means to an end. It's certainly paid off in the monetary sense, but that same advantage is driving us out, ultimately, of our home town: we didn't want to own another "crap shack" at Toronto prices just to rent it out for five years for little return when we could spend a fraction of what we've cleared down the road and make about two-thirds in rental income. The arbitrage wasn't sentimental, either.

On that personal front, while all but about 12 months of my marriage was spent in the sold house, not all the memories I have of it were positive. One of the reasons I have a free hand to sail away today is because my mother, father and only sibling have all died since 2002. There's not a lot holding me here now...my nephews live elsewhere in Ontario, as do my wife's extended family. A lot of friends have, prompted by the increasingly hard logic of overpriced housing, moved away from Toronto. So unmooring in terms of sentimental attachments has been made easier.

Long-haired hippie crew with the infamous cart on its 100th shortcut from Crap Shack to Chateau Nouveau

My wife and son put in Herculean efforts to make this happen: the phrase "worked like a two-dollar mule" was not used figuratively this summer: I thank them both. And now we return to boat-fixing and, I hope, a few sailing expeditions prior to haulout at the end of October. More to follow soon.

Cabin Boy's "back to school" haircut, done at his request.

A very moving process

Our agent, besides being an excellent dancer, is also a sailor.

I haven't posted in some time, as for some time, it's been a very busy time. Haulout happened, and with a dodgy repair on a cracked pipe stub, I was fairly cautious about driving the boat even the short distance from our dock to the sea wall for its bi-annual appointment with the concept of flight.

The stick is keeping the boat off the wall . The human is awaiting instructions as to the sling positioning.

Boats are supposed to have "sling marks", bits of tape or paint that indicate where the sling straps (as seen above) ideally go so that the boat is hoisted skyward in a more or less level attitude. The problem with the good ship Alchemy is that I am frequently in the course of our refitting moving fairly significant weigh forward, aft or , as was the case with about 200 kilos of lead shot in bags serving as "trim ballast" in the forepeak workshop, off.

The first attempt suggested my old sling marks had migrated. Photo (c) Frederick Peters

The effect as seen from the water seemed, at best, "bow down".

So we tried again.

The "level best" was eventually located

The reason for the migration of the sling marks was that, despite moving a large number of tools and line to the workshop, I also removed several surplus anchors stowed forward and took off the new 30 kilo SPADE anchor, as there's no persuasive reason why it should remain in place while the boat's cradled on the hard for the winter. The net effect was to raise the bow about seven centimetres, or about a finger's width above its waterline stripe. My old bits of tape were no longer in full effect. Any new bits of tape may also not be correct, if I get the windlass on deck sorted this winter.

An added wrinkle was that Alchemy, having a full keel, requires a "cinch belt" to keep the slings from sliding on the angled leading edge of the keel. But all (eventually) went more or less well, save that the full keel interfered with the sling belt removal more than usual...

Padding about the cradle in this case isn't sinister

...and involved some extra chunks of wood to both support the cradle's keel board and to make a space to draw through the sling. Some crunching of 4 x 4 meeting 16 tons of steel was heard, but she settled nicely.

Done. Onto the next one.

As can be seen, the weather was calm and bordering on warm, which was nice as I had spent the previous day on the club work boat with other stalwart members of the Mooring Committee doing tows and other haulout-related tasks.

Tight to get a ladder and a man of substance up here, but perfefect for those needed to walk to the next boat.

As can also be seen, it's a bit snug to get the boarding ladder up, but on the other hand, I can wedge mystelf most of the way to the top, at which point I can tie up before I tip over. Such is the life of the land-bound sailor.

I always like this angle. It looks...purposeful.

Three days after haulout, I learned from my nephews that my younger sister, Dany Dacey, had died in her sleep at age 54. While this was not unexpected as she had been on the decline from liver disease (and not the self-created kind, either), it still came as a blow, although her two sons, Sean and Ryan, both in their 20s, have been coping well, or as well as can be expected.

She was 19 here, in happier days.

She was very supportive of our plans, although she doubted she would live to see them realized. I am missing her very much. When we started this journey to journey, althought my mother had died, my father (the original sailor in the family) and sister were still alive. I'm now the last one. Certainly, the "do it now" notion is top of mind.

Which brings us back to the enigmatic "For Sale" sign that doesn't actually say that. It's for our Toronto house, in which we've lived for just over 19 years. It's a semi-detached, three-storey "Vic-brick built in 1900 and sits on a typically narrow (19 feet) lot that, thanks to the park directly behind it, has an unusually long (165 feet) lot for the middle of a city. There's also a large (18 by 22 feet and 12 feet high at the double doors) former brick stable being used as a garage, but as we don't own a car, it's full of boats, bikes and mancave appliance, including a radar I'm trying to fix.
 

Which is not the radar I think I'll be buying this winter. This one is.

The house has a great location. The park behind us has been a huge plus and even allows cooling breezes (thanks to dozens of transpiring trees) in the summer. An enclosed porch at the front keeps most of the traffic noise out of the house; we rarely hear the streetcars passing. If we weren't doing this trip, I'd probably live out my days here, but we are, and to be blunt, selling up, even if we buy a place elsewhere in Canada (save Vancouver) could convert a "five-year passage" to "just keep sailing". It will give us options simply renting it out while we are off sailing in search of the edges would not.

"Exclusive", as the sign says, means we're not having an open house and will instead attempt to sell it to a person or person(s) who will meet our (slightly discounted compared to the surrounding market) price with the intention of doing a full renovation, like every other house in our vicinity has undergone, the curious fashion in which one buys a Victorian style townhouse, guts it and turns it into a skylit, pot-lighted, vaguely Scandinavian art gallery. Putting on the open market, or "listing it", in the real estate jargon, would require about $20K of scraping, painting and plastering/drywalling to get it to a faux version of vaguely current. Also, cheap by chic furniture would have to be brought in to "stage it". Then 200 people tromp in. We and our tatty inherited glum furniture would have to be out...you can't live in a house that's been staged, because it must look as if the next owners already tastefully live there, not the grubby peasants selling up. There's no use in doing a cheap paintjob if the walls are getting replaced, particularly if we are still in residence and it's winter, so we're seeking someone who can picture the place gutted and who has the coin to redo it to her taste.

We are living, again, in interesting times. Next, a fresh round of welding things.

Achieving attainable cruising and obstacles to that goal

Yacht piracy, 2016: Down, but not out.

Is cruising getting easier or harder? That depends on where and how one cruises.

In terms of rescue technology, safety at sea and tangible benefits such as making one's own power,  the sailing is fair, indeed. In terms of the chance that your vessel will be dogged by red tape, corrupt officialdom and crime, kidnapping or piracy, not so much. The high seas may be free, but clearing in and out of countries can still be a bureaucratic nightmare...and may be, in a world growing more hostile, be even harder ranging to impossible.

"Hot spots" for crime against yachts and yacht owners in the Caribbean in 2016 (c) https://www.safetyandsecuritynet.com/

In a recent post on Attainable Adventure Cruising, site owner John Harries penned an opinion piece on clearing customs and immigration, a process mostly orderly in his experience as a cruiser, but one, in light of certain political developments he sees as turning nationalities against foreigners, can cause foreigners to become

"...vulnerable to the bad-apple Immigration officer whose worst instincts are encouraged by arbitrary orders and rhetoric from on high. For in places where people with perfectly valid documents, including visas, are being turned away simply because of where they were born, we can never be sure that we won’t be similarly singled out for some arbitrary reason."

Although Harries received some pushback from what I perceived were politics-weary Americans, he's got serveral trenchant points when it comes to visiting countries with law-dodging, authoritarian regimes. We are daily seeing how xenophobia and bureaucracy are self-reinforcing tendencies, and that even the properly credentialled can be dealt with arbitrarily and seemingly on a whim when confronted by an overly zealous border guard. Or, one presumes, customs official or port authority functionary. Like the Canadian of evidently insufficient paleness stopped at the U.S. border, we are not Christians, nor would I surrender the contents of my phone to some functionary were I sure it was not required of me by law. Word get around about such places. They are better avoided than debated with, even though I would hope their own citizens challenge the erosion of the rule of law, if they are able to do so.

For services rendered? Some places, this is the reality of cruising.

To fail to consider both the politics and societal factors of a country to which one intends to sail one’s home (and, often, one’s dearest possession) seems to me unseamanlike, unwise and willfully naive.
Unless cruisers intend to go non-stop, the quality of the stops will be largely determined by such issues as the rule of law, the rate of crime/social disruption, and the level of tolerated or institutional corruption.

Collect the entire set while the data therein still holds.

We are already planning our circ and hope to leave June, 2018. Firstly in the planning stages, we consult Cornell and the Admiralty pilots to determine favourable times for passage. Sadly, climate change (which is felt often more keenly in the tropics than in, say, Canada) is gradually making pilots less helpful as “unseasonality” picks up.

Don't leave port without it.

After that, we read Noonsite.com and other resources that gauge the parameters discussed in Harries' article, including degree of corruption, xenophobia, and unreliable application of the country in question's laws. Too many “fails” means we won’t be going to a chosen port or country by boat because (mainly) of the perceived lawlessness of the country or related issues with crime. I choose not to be a victim, but rather than the “showdown” approach evinced in some cruisers' minds, we simply won’t stop at some places. Nor will our dollars. That, in some places, is part of the problem: in poorer countries, a yacht, even one of modest proportions and kit, is a bobbing pleasure dome compared to the squalid conditions ashore. Resentment of affluent sailors is nearly guaranteed. How one wishes to deal with that is an individual choice, as the decision to visit an interesting place as a rich (everything being relative) Westerner is going to be tricky in many places.

Realistically, this conclusion increases the need for independence from the shore: energy, food and spares storage and meticulous maintenance gain in importance when one cannot take for granted the civility or safety of every port available. I doubt it will actually shorten our plans for a five-year circ, but it will likely increase the time we spend between longer passages; New Zealand looks good on a number of points in this regard, particularly as a place to haul out for service “mid-circ”. The shortwave radio and occasional internet access will be of great help in speccing out the next area or countries we visit. It’s not all glum news, mind: a sharp reduction in Red Sea piracy has restored the option of “South Africa around the Cape or the Med via the Suez” to our prospects. But we remain watchful. A lot could change by the time we are, say, reading pilots in Galle, Sri Lanka.

We also believe that it is very possible that deteriorating political, economic and climatic conditions will make world cruising in the near future perhaps too difficult for the person of only average affluence to contemplate. Fixing up a boat, selling up and sailing will persist in places like the Caribbean, but we suspect we might be in the last cohort to actually be able to do this at a parsimonious price and as a family. Which means what people like the Smeetons and the Hiscocks pioneered in the 1950s and '60s, when cruising in small yachts was a far less supported pursuit in nearly every respect save for the ease of sourcing tinned butter, may be drawing to a close as a lifestyle, which I find sad, frankly. Bribes we can tolerate to a point, but a country that abandons its own laws will not see out sails on their horizons.