[In lieu of some real foul weather, here’s a photo from Cape Foulweather on the Oregon coast. (800×600)]

We got up the other morning—or rather, I got up and Joshua followed three hours later—to the trees bashing against the side of the building and the windows sounding all ghost-mansion with the wind sucking in and out of the house. Outside was gray and the trees across the street were violently shedding the remainder of their fall leaves. Idly, I thought to just check the marine forecast because, well, wonder if it is windy out there if it’s windy over here. The offshore weather for N Oregon/S Washington was this: 45kt wind and increasing with gusts to 60, 25-foot seas with a 14-second period increasing to 30 feet later in the afternoon.

Oh my hell.

Not that small boat folk like us would be likely to be caught in such weather but it really drove home the fact that I was sitting comfortably (and still) in my robe on the couch with a cup of steaming coffee (decaf!) balanced precariously on the couch arm, and not freezing my ass off in my foulies on a lurching boat.

When I was growing up—well, actually always until getting on a boat—I always thought extreme weather was terribly exciting. Record freezes, heat waves, blustery wind, violent thunderstorms, even earthquakes… Clearly I led a very sedate life. I guess growing up in an area where extreme weather just did not really exist (non-coastal Oregon and Humboldt, but I always missed the really big earthquakes) made it all seem so exceptional and interesting.

All that changed of course the minute we started sailing. Suddenly wind was a two-timing, back-stabbing friend. You depended upon it and it could be brilliantly beautiful at times but there was a fine line between good and suddenly rather… unpleasant. That line was around 19 knots. (Or 29 knots if going downwind.) Of course other friends could gang up on you to make things difficult as well: wave height/period and temperature. If it was cold, that fine line hovered more around 9 knots for me. I have a low tolerance for unrelenting, damp, bone-crushingly cold wind. I know, such a wuss. They have yet to invent long underwear that would allow me to merrily cope with the above conditions. They have, however, invented duct tape, so at least any forced coping may be done without any bitter and vociferous complaints.

Naturally, we (cough, I) became neurotic weather checkers, never failing to listen to VHF weather in the US, then SSB and internet weather south of the US. No trips anywhere were ever planned without first convincing ourselves that the weather would not do anything… unpleasant. In hindsight, I feel we did pretty well, really, with only a couple unfortunate situations. At the time, of course, I was not a happy camper and Joshua was probably wishing we had duct tape on board.

Of course, the moment we landed in Texas, we stopped listening to the weather. A norther headed this way? “Ho hum.” Massive black flickering storms on the horizon? “Hey! Look at all that lightning!” A far cry from the liveaboard battlecry: “Batten the hatches and put the GPS in the pressure cooker!” Then we’d spring into action and neurotically pace the perimeter of the boat making sure everything was tied down. Afterwards, I would sit tensely below, gnawing at my cuticles and gazing up at the hatch counting seconds between flash and crash. If we were at sea, I tended to pester Joshua ala: “Tell me again the story about the little trimaran who didn’t get struck by lightning because it was MOVING…”

There are a lot of differences between living at sea versus living on land, the more obvious include the following: industrial-strength plumbing vs. porta-potty, refrigeration vs. tepid beer, or dinette/nav. station/bed-all-in-one vs. hell, a whole ROOM for each of those things. It is perhaps the more subtle differences that really make all the difference. Like which way the wind is blowing.

And while I feel you are at the mercy of your surroundings no matter where you live, you take for granted a sense of control over them when you are a land-dweller (even if it is a false sense in many ways). At sea, you take it for granted that you don’t have any control over the surroundings and you simply learn to not fight it, to just move with it and pay attention to things. You learn to appreciate simple things, like a cold beer, calm weather, clear seas, and duct tape.

Larry made a couple of delicious pies from this beautiful squash.

I’ve been hounding Cheyenne for months to mock up a new skin for the blog. Maybe I was too critical of an early draft, but after a few half hearted attempts I haven’t been able to get her to budge. Reaching a point of desperation, I had to take matters into my own hands. You see the result now.

We want to preserve the TimeMachine sailing stories on a stand alone site so that people can find the cruising stuff without having to wade through the pregnant/baby stuff. We decided that it might be hard to move our audience so we’ll just move the archive instead. It will be at searunner.sv-timemachine.net and we will continue blogging on the old address (ie sv-timemachine.net). All of the posts will continue to be available here as well and comments made on either site will magically appear on both. Two installations of WordPress accessing the same database introduces certain software problems that I’m hacking at now. The only real challenge is preventing users of the archive site from accidentally popping into current posts.

I plan a few final posts about sailing the TimeMachine, but after that it won’t be updated anymore.

[poll=3]

Also, if you notice any weirdness, please explain in a comment giving your OS and browser. I’ve only tested on IE6, IE7 and Firefox 2.0.0.9 under XP and Vista. Thanks!

The weather in Portland turned from ‘Suddenly Winter Already Haha You Suck’ to ‘A Little More Summer After All Score Ten Points.’ It’s been great. We had already started to fall into early hibernation mode in our apartment, spending too many hours on the internet and baking too many treats in order to harvest the warmth of the oven. The dark days lasted three weeks and then it just got shockingly sunny again. So now, our patterns have shifted back into too many hours on the internet in the mornings, then Excursions to take advantage of all that free vitamin D (one never knows what two years in the tropics might have done to our tolerance… gotta get that stuff when you can is what I’m thinking), then maybe a batch of brownies to take advantage of the oven heat because in reality, it might be sunny, but it is freaking COLD out there.

Increasingly, these excursions are tethered by the pregnant lady to bathroom proximity, but Portland is really a very public toilet friendly kind of town (at least, I haven’t yet had to pitch a fit to use anyone’s “customers only” restroom) and we still have lots of exploring room. Last week, at Hans’ suggestion (based upon Chuck Palahniuk’s Portland guide), we sought out the very immense and labyrinthine “City of the Dead,” the Portland Memorial Mausoleum. Ironically, only the day before, Joshua and I had taken a long walk from one end of Oaks Bottom park to the Sellwood Bridge and at one point, you pass by a marshy pond with a gray, several-story building looming over it on the hill. One side of the building looks like an abandoned power plant office building (dingy, block-like, oppressive) and the other side has more deco features (rounded facades, many-paned windows, moss); in the middle of the two halves is a fading, several-story high mural of a great blue heron. We hypothesized for much of our walk as to what the building could be. We didn’t make the connection until we got inside the mausoleum and looked out the back windows to see the pond and bike path.

[One of many, many corridors.]

We visited on a weekday, middle of the day, and saw no one outside around the grounds or inside. Around the front of the building (from the front, the building only appears to be a few stories—it is in the back that it descends down the hillside and is all of maybe seven stories altogether), there are manicured grounds and winding concrete paths, plus a small pond filled with squawking geese. We felt like we were trespassing since we hadn’t read the book description of what we were about to see and Hans really had no clue either what to expect; we were surprised to find the doors unlocked.

The second you enter, everywhere you look, you see large marble panels with names etched in them covering the walls, floor to ceiling, and in the middle of each is a built-in flower-holder. I didn’t see any real flowers in any of the flower holders and many of them are empty. There was immediately a long hallway (covered in marble panels) and little roomlets along the sides, all full of tomb markers. We wandered around this floor for a while; there were some fountains and statues of various religious figures, mini chapels, and boxes of kleenex unceremoniously stashed in the corners or at major hallway intersections. There is also furniture here and there—chairs and couches (with kleenex boxes) that look like they came from some of the dead inhabitant’s estate sales. We finally found some stairs and descended four or five stories and entered a section of mausoleum from the fifties. Here the tomb covers were not marble, but some bizarre composite and the built-in vases were made to look as though they were brass. We turned another corner and the tombs turned to molded concrete indentations. These gave you a little shelf to place your memorabilia, but most of these people had been dead for a very long time and memorabilia generally took the form of green molded glass vases (empty) or strange ceramic bric-a-brac.

[Joshua and Hans try out some of the furnishings.]

I should also note that there are a lot of sinks in this building, all of them different, and all of them weird. They are dingy, ill-fitted sink units sitting in nooks, often with a mop or bucket leaning against the wall, rust stains from the drips, and never any curtain or door.

[Sink: Featuring Clippers on Leash]

We wandered the length of the building before heading back up a story or two. Curiously, we noticed far more ceiling water damage in the lower stories than the upper stories (leaky sink problems?). The tomb coverings got smaller; instead of being two feet square or more, they were maybe the size of a manila file folder. We found some very small ones down one dark hallway that looked just like post office boxes with little doors and some other small ones that just had copper plates with the names etched in them (some missing). Finally we found a very cool section of the building (this must be the part that looked deco from the outside) with stained glass windows, patinaed metal and beveled glass doors enclosing the remains. Urns were one of a set of perhaps ten different options (oval-shaped aluminum-like vases, leather cylinders) and to display them nicely within their glass cupboards, fake leatherbound books were used as lifters over pieces of velvet rumpled just so.

[1920s and 30s rooms]

We probably spent a good hour or two wandering around before deciding we needed to get back out to the vitamin D. The place really is huge, with something like 60,000 tombs and supposedly room for twice that many more. It is also very cold inside—not a good place to stop and sit around; best to keep moving, keep your circulation going. We spent the rest of the day wandering around in Forest Park, a place so dank and wet, even mushrooms won’t grow. Then we went home and made gingerbread.

[Rio Chagres, Panama; March 2007]

The Time machine is GONE! Bought sight-unseen. Joshua’s dad Jeff was in town (here in Portland) visiting the past couple of days and when he left Texas, arrangements were in the works to have John Dzerk, who runs the local boatyard, come with a crew and disassemble the boat, install in on a flatbed, and prepare it for the journey across the US to Canada (the new owner is from the vicinity of Georgian Bay, Ontario). We, of course, wanted complete photo documentation of the event. So Jeff flew back yesterday and we got the call a few hours later: there is now a big gaping hole in his yard where it used to stand. The boat’s already gone.

We were all totally shocked: that was FAST. And incredulous: it’s… just… GONE? “Like, what do you mean, ‘gone?’” We hoped maybe Dennis got pictures of the loading action. Jeff called back a second time: they forgot the motor!!! (We knew for a fact that the new owner would be wanting that.) Then we got another call: Jeff had hopped in his truck and drove the motor to the boatyard; the boat was there, sitting quietly in three pieces on the flatbed. Jeff took lots of pictures. Jeff’s assessment: boat looked good—ready for the road.

The buyer was a guy who found the boat through our website; he had been searching for a Brown 31 specifically and had looked at a number of them. However, he was in Canada and not able to fly off every time he saw a new Searunner to view it personally; instead, he arranged to have a surveyor come look the boat over and send him a complete survey.

Out of ten billion surveyors in the Rockport area, the buyer chose, at random, the one surveyor who for some reason had a poor reputation among the multihull crowd. Oh well, what can you do? We were a little nervous though because we didn’t really know what that meant. Did he consider them inherently poor vessels and created hugely biased reports? This was, after all, a home-built boat (albeit a damn well home-built boat); was it that he did not “appreciate” the fine aesthetic that is the backyard boat? The surveyor did the survey and sent it off to the buyer and the buyer was nice enough to forward us a copy. And, it was a great survey! The guy did a very good job from what we could see—thorough, very detailed, totally professional (and unbiased if it was in fact true that he did not favor multihulls), and best of all, very positive. All the problems he found and noted were things we knew of and he didn’t find any surprises. We were happy. The buyer was happy and emailed to let us know it was a go. Dennis, the broker in Texas we had managing the affair, emailed us shortly thereafter with the paperwork.

It is funny too because the night before we got the official “sold” emails, Joshua and I were taking a walk and talking about it as if it was still ours, as if we were just on our way back to it for the evening. We were talking about how easy it was to have such a little boat, how you needed merely three knots of wind to move, and how well the boat put up with an insane variety of conditions with nary a peep. It pointed awesomely (multihulls are not known to point very well). And it is a fast boat for one of its era—a cruising design from the 70s? And it routinely goes 7-8 knots like nobody’s business. We used the boat hard for over two years and had amazingly few problems—a busted traveler here, a sprung cheek block there, oh, and the rudder thing. But still, I think that is pretty good—nothing that we were never able to fix ourselves, certainly. The boat was really designed and built well. I’m happy someone will be able to enjoy it in our stead.