Fame, spares and the Great River

Unless one is moving house, you can never have enough spares. OR CAN YOU?

The above assortment of Atomic 4 parts, surplus to my needs and to my garage as I no longer own a boat with an Atomic 4, and we've sold the house and the garage with it, recently left the premises in a mutually agreeable exchange. The buyer saw my ad in Kijiji and an identical notice in my club's buy-and-sell section got a few nibbles but this one actually showed up. I've sold Atomic 4 parts before, including a working rebuilt block and a good-condition oil pan..and there's still more to come...but the approaching move has underlined the fact that we have Too Much Stuff. A large percentage of this are Boat and Boat-related Odds and Ends.

Decommissioning possessions, however, is tricky. We are moving in stages: we will attempt to rent an apartment or condo locally so our son can finish school and I can continue unimpeded (save by my own levels of competency) to make Alchemy livable. I am loth to sell off or reallocate tools, but the facts are stark: I have a lot of duplication between the boat and the garage, because I haven't been keen, for instance, on lugging entire socket sets back and forth. Ever dropped a socket set while descending a boat ladder...in winter? I have. Two hundred bucks to avoid it by buying a second set for the mancave seems cheap.

Now, the process of selling boat gear is complex due to the valuation. A 40-year-old carb for an engine that hasn't been made since Pierre Trudeau was last prime minister is either junk or gold, depending on who needs it. But Lake Ontario still has a few thousand of these engines in equally venerable, freshwater-only boats: it would be stupid to repower most of them with modern diesels when the gas inboard is still reliable. So the trick is to put out the word and to be flexible on price. My fellow boaters are resigned to certain levels of expense involving the word "marine" (as, alas, am I), but everyone likes a bargain. Price to move unless you want to carry it to the next shack. I have a friend who does vintage car parts for a living and is basically in "continuous auction mode" for the very limited number of people on Earth who need the obscure things he sells. He says I should sell and keep selling. I think he's got a point.

Boats are finite in carrying capacity, although we have, with a steel full keeler, more stowage than most. Every kilo carried, however, slows the vessel down if only by a tiny fraction; every metal object on board is a potential projectile if not secured and a locus of rust if not protected. Unless one sails in a TARDIS, one must choose wisely which spares and tools to bring. Equally true is that most boaters should review what they've hoarded, or scavenged, or bought and never used, or used once and never again, and critically think if it would be better in the hands of others than on a blockaded shelf in the garage. Or in a sail bag hooked to the ceiling. Rum's not getting cheaper, after all, nor are boat interiors getting bigger.

Speaking of which, this genuine CQR is for sale.

As is this 27 lbs. "Kingston" CQR knock-off. Drop me a line.

So, the garage mining proceeds. Interestingly, the buyer of the first lot has a number of boat restoration and fixing projects on the go, and already knew of me as a long-time reader of the blog. He knew I was moving, for instance. While this isn't the first time I've met in real life blog followers, and with the number of "hits" approaching one-quarter million, odds are good I'll continue to do so, it's still a touch disconcerting. When we actually depart, I will rejig the blog and add a great deal more visual content as we start going to interesting places; perhaps by that point, I will be more accustomed to having strangers know things about me because I've posted them online...I am more surprised than I should be, I suppose.

And by way of the rather obscure post title, my family is watching 20-year-old episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on DVD. Our son, who is 16, hasn't seen them and is enjoying them; we've half-forgotten many episodes and are equally entertained. The one we saw last night was this one, and "the great material continuum" referred to a mercantilist philosophy of having discrepancies between having and wanting, i.e., the basis of commerce. Besides, as a person who went to his first Star Trek convention as a teenager in the 1970s, any excuse to wed Trek and sailing will do.

That sinking feeling

Not a pleasant vista. Photo (c) J.C.

So, kids, keep those bilges clean, free of debris and attached to decent batteries! This was the scene about a week and a half ago at the marina where I keep the 33-footer. This is an older sort of small powerboat, arguably dirtier than mine but of a similar vintage, I would guess. It sank due to some sort of unknown bilge pump failure, but why water was coming in in the first place remains unknown.

Actual salvors doing actual salving. Not seen often around these parts.

Also a mystery is how this boat could be refloated, pumped out and then...not immediately sink again. Seen here is the handy work platform from which the guys brought in to fix the "sunken, fuel-dribbling power boat hanging off the dock" situation.

That's gasoline dispersant in the water, and an absorbant boom to contain (partially, at least) the fuel spillage.

I think for these salvors it was a nice and easy day to resurrect a boat sunk in a marina, as opposed to a freighter run aground in a storm or anything during the winter. I enjoyed their casual way with tossing live AC power cords hither and yon. 

Rises again, only to be hauled away.

The owner was surrounded by a cloud of unknowing: he had no clue as to why his boat sank, or, indeed, why it was floating again. But to judge from the slightly gritted teeth I encountered at the marina office, plus the very tatty look of the boat, I suspect Mr. Grew will be trailering his powerboat from now on, as he has Left the Marina. Just another day on the water. Keep those hose clamps tight, kids.

Looks great, less filling

Part of my income is made from writing and editing and another part is made from graphic design. Just as sail tactics books from the '70s and '80s (when our boats were made) are of interest to me, so are magazines from the mid-'90s, when I began to learn computer-based graphic design as a side effect of being a partner in a now-extinct music magazine. I didn't know at the time that such skills would pay mortgages and buy boat gear. But then I didn't know in 1995 I would ever own a boat, either.

The past is always low-res, alas, but I was proud of this one because when it ran in 1995, it made largely accurate predictions of how the internet and computer-aided music production and distribution would transform the music industry. And so it has come to pass.

But there you go: the butterfly effect of small decisions leading to large change strikes again. Another side effect of being a newbie sailor at the end of the '90s was being an avid consumer of the monthly glossy sailing magazines of the day. In 2013, I subscribe to Practical Sailor and Ocean Navigator only, but both are at the point where the return on investment in time and subscription fees is nearly zero: between doing my own sailing and working at a so-called career, at parenting or at boat restoration, and given the value I place on more interactive contact with better sailors online, perusing even the decent sailing magazines is for me getting less attractive. I have a small stack awaiting me at the breakfast table, but there's never enough time, or so it seems, to read their shiny pages.

Looking good and weighing less

Not that they aren't well-produced: Graphically, both PS and ON look fantastic, particularly ON's writer-supplied shots of distant anchorages in ridiculously high-numbered latitudes. My knowledge of print production means I know that they are produced at a lower cost and with fewer staff than in the past. Content-wise, however, there is simply less text and more ads for underbuilt, too beamy dock queens. These days, I find my remaining sailing magazines subscriptions indifferently edited, either because they let Microsoft Word do it, or because even the editor in charge can't recognize errors in English composition any more. I used to be a copy editor, too; think "designated grammar/spelling Nazi". It's the publishing equivalent of a buggy-whip maker: not a job worth paying for, whether you require it or not.

Back in the day, however, my favourites were Cruising World and Sail, both still extant. In one sense, I grew out of them as I had my own sailing experiences and made (and, it is hoped, learned from) my own bone-headed decisions at the tiller. In another sense, they grew away from me. Recently, I picked up in my boat club lobby the May 1994 issue of Cruising World, which came out exactly five years before I began sailing in earnest (or in Lake Ontario).

Large format and chock-full of content. Even the ads seemed educational.

I was struck by several things: the length of the articles, the depth and breadth of the seamanship discussed (this was at the dawn of affordable GPS rigs and therefore pilotage techniques and celestial navigation were still used and respected), and the pretty much equal focus on new boat reviews and the care and repair of the older boats it was clearly assumed most of the readership of that time would own.

These days, would the article read "New app for locating a sail-furling repair tech using your iPhone 5"?

There was apparently, to judge by the tone of many of the articles, also the assumption running through many of these articles that not only should the aspiring boater (whether coastal or offshore) know a wide range of seamanlike techniques and repair skills, they would want to know such things: Calling in a consultant or repair person would be, if not an outright moral failing, a case of last resort. The option of hitting a big red "HELP" button was in the future, although realistically, even today, more than a couple of hundred NMs offshore is beyond the range of most countries rescue services, where such services even exist.

But this...this could be manual labour! Where's the A/C remote control?

Regarding repair and fabrication, I've reached the point (and purchased the right router and jig) that constructing, for instance, my own dorade boxes isn't out of the question. But there aren't many who wouldn't just outsource that to China these days (it's where the best stolen Burmese teak is, after all), due to the time investment in skills acquisition. And yet the sail magazines used to be premised on the idea that people in small sailboats would possess quite a few skills beyond that of sail handling/avoiding dock scraping, because "jack of all trades" wasn't just a catch-phrase, it was a way to save yourself from a damp fate. There is also a sense in this vintage of magazine that it is a Good Thing to save your wallet from indifferent/expensive/hurry up and wait repair or installation folk who themselves might be learning on the job. See "why I bought a welding machine".

So long ago, Beth and Evans were newbies.

To the right in the "Helpful, Strange or Irrelevant" portion of the blog is the website address of Beth Leonard and Evans Starzinger, who have been sailing for ages, and have been profitably (one assumes) writing about it. Beth wrote The Voyager's Handbook, which is a methodical and clear exploration of nearly every aspect of offshore planning, preparation and costing out, while Evans is also a writer, lecturer and a regular contributor to various sailing forums. I like their ideas and have had a bit of email/forum back and forth with Evans, who is pretty humble and still questioning even after two very accomplished circs.

In this May, 1994, article, however, he and Beth are relatively new offshore sailors in a tight spot with bad weather. They clearly list where and why things start going wrong...at a length inconceivable in a current magazine as attention spans have grown gnat-like...and their article's points are then critiqued at the end by a more experienced sailor.

Holy crap. The best article I've read on sailing to Bermuda in bad weather is 19 years old. It's one of the better things I've ever read outside of the first-wave cruising narratives of the Smeetons and Hiscockses. Boats change and sailors change. Our technology changes. The ocean, less so. Perhaps we may reconsider from time to time as we go forward that which we have left behind.

In which the blogger again advocates salvage as the key to cheaper cruising.

Speaking of which, I have long noted that people chuck things out at boat clubs all the time. From a locker at our club one step removed from the dumpster, I have retrieved perhaps too much stuff from the boats of others, including all of the mandatory foam-vest PFDs (some clearly never worn) I require for Valiente to be legal; lengths of tinned wire; new SS nuts and bolts...unopened in their packages (!); vast lengths of line (wash once in net bag, use as needed); light bulbs and cabin fixtures of every description; safety gear in new shape; boat hooks; winch handles; several fenders requiring only a power-wash; all manner of serviceable clips, shackles, brackets and small blocks; and truly impressive amounts of superannuated navigational gear. Don't get me started on the books!

Free to me: Unlike an eBook, may be read by oil lamp.

Now, I understand the impulse to upgrade: Life is short, boats are small, and old crap you never touch should be recycled. I myself have left old displays, bits of plumbing and VHFs I have no longer a use for (and yet which work) in said Locker of Free Stuff, but I think necessity and the expressed Scottish gene means I run a leaner operation aboard than many, if not most. Having a GPS on one's iPhone does not preclude owning a paper chart, so why have I scored three-armed protractors, dividers, parallel rulers and compasses and a perfectly good celestial navigation calculator for free?

Built like a tank, like the teak box it came in.

Don't get me wrong: I haven't stowed a bunch of dumped LORAN-C receivers in the garage...just a Furuno radar I plan to revive as a spare...and I remain pretty selective. Still, it never fails to amaze me what people will chuck out.

A small sampling of recent acquisitions bears this out.

Suunto hand-bearing compass: More portable and more accurate than my Davis "pistol grip" type, and I use these for pilotage.

This hand-bearing compass works, of course, on the plastic boat, but will work on Alchemy, too, if it is held as is its wont at eye level, about 165 cm (in my case) off the steel deck. My Suunto compass watch will, too, but this is easier and less fiddly. Chucked for having a peely label? No clue.

Quite illuminating, I thought.

This is an Aquasignal 40 masthead fixture. It's a well-made, not-cheap bit of gear, and this is slightly scratched on the Fresnel-type enclosure, but with the 25 W lightbulb clearly intact. Ten minutes of stripping and crimping with some old marine wire (also free to me) and it was restored to service. This is the same model of masthead light I carry on Alchemy's mast, with similarly oversized port and starboard fixtures on the pilothouse sides, so this can be a spare, or it can replace the one atop Valiente, which is just about shot. On Valiente, I could step down to either a weaker bulb or an equivalent LED as I'm not required to carry 25 W of dazzle on a 10 meter sailboat.

Used extensively this season to test conduits, and now fit for house "blackout" lanterns

This is a simple 12-volt battery I've used as a "tester" for all sorts of things, particularly as Alchemy's battery capacity is a mere Group 24 to power a single bilge pump until I bring aboard its half-ton of electron buckets. Also seen is the new Ancor double crimper, which along with the lightly used Klein wire shears I picked up recently for nine bucks and the Ideal wire stripper acquired last month, are making my electrical work considerably tidier, and, one hopes, longer lasting.

I neglected to get a picture of the tossed pump, but it resembles this.

I found on the same day a clean-looking Shurflo freshwater pump that resembles this photo. It's sized similarly to my existing FloJet pump, and might make a good spare, as might this cheap alternative, of course. The Shurflo, particularly if I can rebuild it, could also be part of an as-yet deckwash setup. It gurgled and spun up immediately upon hook-up to the battery pack, however; there may be nothing particularly wrong with it other than being No Longer New. A few cycles of disinfectant, and a close inspection of its innards could be worthwhile as I was thinking of building in a "cross-transfer" capacity to my planned new water tankage, wherein I pump water to whichever tanks will stiffen the boat on a particular tack. In the Trades, days can pass on a particular tack. Regardless, another nice little score for the maritime "freecycler" I seem to be.

The mother of all spreader lights, or something that would work in the engine compartment?

Here's a very solid deck or spreader light found in the chuck bin. I think everyone's going LED these days, and rightly so, in most cases, but the housing is top-notch, and if I need a strong, rarely-run light in the engine bay or to illuminate some seldom-seen area (like the steering hydraulics "locker"), I would want something this freakin' bright. With thicker wiring, naturally, and a fused switch.

Awww...it's the Cabin Boy's First Sextant.

Also found languishing and unloved was this boxed Davis 15 sextant, complete with instructions. I bought one without its box for $25 a couple of years back for my kid to learn celestial (the utility of which I will argue with any readers, if only for the mental exercise while on passage of doing sight reductions and running fixes).

The bit I can use is to the right

For me, the Artificial Horizon is the real catch. I have a couple of metal sextants, an Astra IIIB and a Freiberger, already, but an artificial horizon means I can do CN in the park, without having to haul boxes of optical gear down to the lake. While I have a very new handheld GPS, I don't care to lose more venerable means of navigation. No wonder I enjoyed that 1994 Cruising World issue.
 

Apparently, sharks have been known to eat the trailing parts.

Speaking of venerable, former commodore Henry Piersig very kindly gave me the device pictured above just before this year's launch; it had been passed onto him by another sailor who didn't have a use for it anymore. It is, like the label says, a Walker Knotmaster Mk. III A. This part with the dial is lashed to the stern rail and works by trailing a spinner in the boat's wake. A length of line is twisted and the twist turns gears and before you know it, you've done a nautical mile or two hundred. Besides making one's reckoning less dead, like the sextant, my Patay Ocean Master manual bilge pump, my Whale foot pumps, the Tank Tender and a decent spring starter, it does its job without electricity. I do not (clearly) wish to run without electricity...but I think, like possessing the skills and experience the sailing magazines write about less these days, it's a prudent option to retain.

Even if it involves a spot of garbage picking, or as I prefer to think of it, liberation from the dustbin of history.

Future hazards to navigation, present hazard to Ireland

In modern Russia, boat takes you!

This is M/V Lyubov Orlova in better days. It's a formerly Russian, or strictly speaking, Soviet, small cruise ship built in 1976 for circumpolar tourism.  It has come to a bad end after spending several years rotting in place after being left derelict in 2010 at the harbour of St. John's, NL. Its crew were left unpaid for months, and apparently lived on the kindness of strangers who took to leaving food for them in the same manner as feral cats.

In one of the vague transactions emblematic of the the modern shipping industry, Orlova ended up in the hands of a Canadian who apparently wanted to sell it for scrapping in the Dominican Republic. One wonders why it was thought a good idea to clap on an apparently inadequate towline (which parted twice) to an apparently inadequate tug in a clearly unsuitable weather window...in winter.

Imagine that as a yacht club's workshop.

Nor is this a particularly rare thing in Canadian waters. A freshly refitted destroyer, HMCS Athabaskan, broke a tow line in December 2012, narrowly avoiding an expensive fate.

Frigate, I'm upsizing the line

A year earlier, the Great Lakes bulk carrier M/V Miner broke its towline en route to a scrapyard in Turkey. Again, heavy weather was involved and its hulk still decorates the coast of Scatarie Island, which, given its position, is unsurprisingly known for a long history of eating ships.

Not the artificial reef they requested

As is predictable in these cases, there's legal and fiscal issues surrounding the salvage of Miner, which must be done in place, as she's not budging off that beach now. Timing is ever an issue in such matters, as ship-breaking is best done when the equally predictable gales and snowstorms of the Maritime region set in, and this year, they are coming every three or four days.

The commonality so far are the words "predictable" and "unsurprising". Weather windows are no longer divined by augury; experienced seamen generally can predict three or four days of suitable weather. And I understand that towing the dead weight of a pooched ship is a hazardous business, even under ideal conditions. It will never likely be easy, straightforward or safe. That's why the laws of salvage set down centuries ago remain largely unchanged: the salvor assumes the risk and the owner provides the award. Nonetheless, the phrase "tempting fate" alternates with "finding a plausible excuse for losing a ship" in this, and other, cases.

History demonstrates, and current events confirm, that governments, ship owners and other interested parties can't wait, in general, to abrogate responsibility for abandoned and derelicted ships. The preceding link may be the sole instance of me quoting my socialist MP on anything, never mind a nautical matter. But her observations are trenchant, and clearly cut across party lines.

The phrase "follow the money" has, as is so often the case, application here. While the titular owner of Orlova holds out a frankly suspect faint hope that Irish salvors will somehow corral his vessel before it potentially casts a shadow across one of my favourite Irish seaside pubs, it's considered unworthy of the attempt. Who is responsible for a worthless ship adrift? In theory, the owner; in practice, nobody. It seems we are able to find such vessels, just as we are able to find Afghanistani wedding parties, but lack the will to do much beyond buck-passing.

That'll buff out, I'm sure.

It's not adrift, yet, but I can come up with an example local to me. Because of the conflicts between local by-laws, maritime law and the bad PR associated with making a nice old sailor homeless, the saga of M/S Jadran, which includes a stab at charity, will continue until the nearly inevitable suspicious fire to the waterline occurs.

Not so much swimming in gravy as in red ink, unpaid taxes and utilities.

Shipping, never a particularly clean business, has become increasingly sketchy. The phrase "regulatory vacuum" comes to mind when we consider the impunity with which ships change hands via shell companies set up in little countries with poor records of, well, pretty well everything. From illegal ballast pumping (and not just from rusty tankers) to illegal fuel spilling to illegal fishing alleged to have sparked the rise of Somali piracy, the business of ships is coming to have all the business integrity of a snakehead-run rub 'n' tug.

Nor is the danger restricted to near-shore. The Orlova had a chance of whacking an oil platform, and luckily, did not, as one can imagine the dents an ice-strengthened 90 metre vessel in a typical six-metre sea would leave. Non-trivial ones, I would suggest.

Both good example and horrible warning.

A commonality between commercial shipping crew and cruisers is that we are both strongly encouraged to keep watch via eyeballs, radar, AIS, for hazards to navigation (anything from a large branch in the water to, say, a drifting icebreaker). Obviously, even charted reefs and rocks are clear hazards, as are too-close approaches to land (see report and conclusions here). We already face keeping watch for debris of various sizes, sleeping whales and awash containers, but should we factor in abadoned ships?

This could totally work.

One wonders if the shifting economics of world shipping will send some cast-off, too worthless to scrap "big 'un" into our path in the future. There's a lot of ships out there: the IMO etimates over 100,000 ships carrying some sort of cargo at 100 tonnes and over. Of course,  they wear out regularly enough to have created an entire economy devoted to their cheap-ass and dangerous recycling.

At least it's safely beached (if unsafely being broken up) and is not lurching around in a Gulf Stream storm.

The odds of all of them being disposed of in a safe and responsbile manner are therefore probably similar to the odds every one reading this sentence has never chucked a dead AA battery into the regular trash rather than run it down to the special recycling depot, the address of which we've all memorized.

Cross-check against prevailing currents for best results

I couldn't wrap up this admittedly speculative (or predictive) entry on nav hazards to come without discussing the human tolla  poorly regulated shipping industry extracts from its workforce. Not only are most of the world's mariners drawn from poorer countries, but, like the Orlova's crew, they are frequently abandoned when the ships change hands or shady operators want to dump the ship, or just run it to the point of crumbling into a pollution hazard. Or the hapless crews are just told to quit starving and get back to work. Maybe they could stop begging for airfare home, while they are at it.

Needs a touch-up: Note the flag of convenience. It's Bolivian, a country without a coastline.

Merchant shipping has never been entirely on the level. The margins can be very thin, and fattening them up is the main reason for the creation of flags of convenience and the preponderance of Third World crews, who, whatever their other qualities, will work for far less wages than Westerners and may or may not be up to scratch with international safety conventions or levels of seamanship. The seamen in question are from a socially crippled dictatorship. Their country is unlikely to give a damn about them or their fates. So once we've dealt (or not dealt) with a rotting or adrift hulk left in one of our harbours, we have to deal with the crew. Fair enough: "Rendering aid" is a precept of seamanship. Whether it becomes an institutionalized "cost of doing shipping business" and whether we on passage will be keeping our eyes and radars peeled for football-field-sized wrecks too far gone to pull onto Third World beaches full of little fellows with hammers and chisels...remains to be seen.

UPDATE 13.05.27: The Orlova has officially gone missing. So for those of you trying to "lose" things, take heart. Well into the 21st century, it's still possible to lose track of 250 feet of ship with very little effort.

Not necessarily diseased-ridden cannibal monsters in this photo, but soon, soon...

UPDATE 14.01.14: The Orlova has apparently become host to an army of cannibal rats. Or so sez The Daily Fail, the British fish wrapper that makes Faux News nearly credible.

UPDATE 14.01.26:  Fond as I personally am of the term "Canadian cannibal rats" as a potential band name, there's some doubt that the Orlova is even still afloat. And here. And here. Not to mention here.
But the fact that the derelict Russian ship is very likely ornamenting the mid-Atlantic ridge hasn't stopped even reputable British papers, tongues perhaps firmly in cheek, from listing how one can survive the Orlova apocalypse.