The Excellent Adventure

One of the basic tenets of hosting non-sailors on your boat, especially when you’re liveaboards or cruisers, is “Never do anything differently than you normally do.” Well, this weekend, we absolutely exceeded ourselves in sticking to it.

My friends and colleagues Alec and Adriana, and their friend Geoff, came to visit us on the s/v Excellent Adventure for a Saturday sail. Alec and Adriana were over from the UK, and Geoff is a UK expat living in Seattle.

The trick is that when you live aboard and invite guests for a sail, you not only have to prepare the boat for sailing, you also have to clean your house completely. Thank goodness it’s a small space and that’s pretty easy to do relatively efficiently. Or so I thought. Naturally, the week before their visit was filled with insane last-minute firedrill kinds of activities at work, and a cold snap that made it difficult to contemplate anything that wasn’t snuggling down under as many layers of quilts and comforters as possible. So things were not as spiffy as I’d envisioned. In fact, they were downright ghastly. Thank goodness I have two small children and a dog to blame most domestic disasters upon.

About a week before they were due to arrive, we had a mechanical disaster. Being a catamaran, we have two of just about everything, including helms. This is fantastic from the point of view of a very small girl piloting a very wide boat through sometimes narrow spaces. I often find myself running from side to side to see what’s there, and conveniently, being able to steer from either side. Unfortunately, someone engaged the lock on the port side, and a small boy used the starboard side as a set of climbing rungs to reach the top of the bimini, thus stripping the gears of the steering box on the port side.

No worries, right? It’s a part, you can yank it out and either rebuild or replace, yeah? Wrong. In true French style, it is buried in such a way that we’re pretty sure they put the fuel tanks in *after* they put the gearbox in, and of course you can’t even get there without both dismantling the entire helm station in the cockpit *and* utterly demolishing the starboard aft berth. You know… the selfsame berth I talked about in the last post, where I made it all pretty? Forget it, it’s a construction zone now.

So for a solid week, I can’t clean the starboard aft berth, and I can’t clean the cockpit, and there are greasy tools and diesel streaks and much swearing and not a little mayhem strewn across the boat. And I am fretting the deadline far more than the mechanical issue, which really isn’t helpful when the mechanic in question has a wrench in one hand and a manual in the other, trying to figure out if the knee bone is indeed connected to the leg bone (hint: it’s a French boat, therefore, it isn’t).

Jason and I, internally, refer to this situation as “Thing 1″. We are firm subscribers to the Rule of Three; the idea that if three small things go wrong when you’re planning an activity, it’s time to cancel. I discovered and adhered to this theory back in the day when I was teaching scuba, and have never once regretted it. And upon beginning our fascination with sailing, we’ve discovered that quite a few legendary sailing types have the same general rule. It’s a basic nod to prudence. The more one reads tales of maritime disaster, the more one begins to recognize that most of them involve blowing right past the Rule of Three.

So anyway, back to our plan. Jason, amazingly confident skipper and relatively tall guy that he is (thus, he can easily see *over* the bimini), decides that the single helm is not a showstopper, and that we can go out as-is. So cleaning, demolishing, and industriousness continue apace.

Another thing to know about our boat is that we have a 35-gallon holding tank for the head. This is about a week’s worth of fill for a family of five, so generally, we mosey on over to the pumpout once a week, and empty the tank. This avoids disaster, keeps things smelling OK, and totally changes the trim of the boat.

The morning our guests were to arrive, the plan was to fire up the engines, head over to pumpout, and be back at the dock and ready to go by the time they arrived. I’d spent the day before prepping a huge pot of chili, I had snacks prepared for steady grazing, and two bottles of very nice wine set aside. All was organized, planned, and ready.

Can you see it coming?

On the morning, the starboard engine refused to start. Jason, with his usual lack of fear and trepidation, leapt into the engine compartment, tinkered, swore a bit, tinkered some more, and was still down there wrestling with it when the guests arrived. So off I trot, up to the lot to retrieve them, praying that magic will happen, and the engine will be running when we return.

No such luck. We arrive back at the boat to chaos and mayhem and boat parts and tools and Marc and Jason dashing from engine compartment to tool room and back again, pausing briefly to greet our guests, and dash back to what they’re doing. It is not looking good, sports fans. I paste a hostess-like grin on my face, and proceed to show them around the boat, make small talk, make tea, and generally pretend that Nothing Major Is Going On. I manage to keep this up, miraculously, for over an hour. My guests, consummately polite, pretend to not notice the clanking and cussing issuing from the engine compartment.

Jason finally emerges, and tells me that we’re going to try to make it to the pumpout (remember the pumpout? There are now three more bladders on the boat than there were before) on one engine and the opposite helm.

God, I wish I’d had video. As you can probably guess, the Laws of Physics chose that moment to remind us all about opposing forces combined with the mechanics of fluid and flow, and we managed to get away from the dock, into the neighboring fairway, and rotating in beautiful, perfect circles, three of them, before Jason managed to get us tied safely back to the dock.

At this point, I am resigned to the embarrassment of having promised a sail that is manifestly not appearing. Jason disappears back down into the engine compartment, and I dash below to the galley, and bring up the chili, bread, and cheese, which at least was as planned. Once the guests were busily eating, Jason motioned me over and said “That’s three. We’re done.”

Through social embarrassment, I am still wise enough to remember that you never, ever, mess with the Rule of Three. Not ever. And as I take a breath, to inform the guests that we are dock bound for the duration, I see Beverly, our neighbor liveaboard, peeking around the corner. “Quick!” I whisper to Jason, “Go see if Beverly wants to go out!”

Sure enough, she had been watching our drama (and laughing quietly at the whole thing) and was just waiting for us to come ask. She popped over for a quick bowl of chili, met everyone, and we decamped to her boat.

Once we were on the water, like usual, all my stress utterly melted. It was a gorgeous, sunny clear crisp day, there were bouquets of spinnakers all over the Bay, and just for a lark, we decided to pop out under the Golden Gate, and dip our spiritual toes in the Mighty Pacific. To celebrate our mutual achievements (us getting our guests out, and Beverly making her first ever foray out of the Bay proper), I poured a bottle of 2003 Ledson Sonoma Valley Chardonnay, which Adriana declared to be “fantastic”.

Back to the dock by sunset, and everyone declared they’d had a lovely time. Both my sons were absolutely smitten with the avuncular Geoff, who had occupied them during docking maneuvers with a brilliantly dramatic recitation of “Jabberwocky”. Adriana was grinning like a cat, and Alec was nattering with Jason about Bromptons (collapsible bicycles). I escorted our guests back to the lot, where they dashed off to a dinner engagement.

As I strolled slowly back down the docks to home, watching the stars wink into the darkening dusk, I mused about boating. It really offers unparalleled opportunities for highs and lows, for thrills and utter social devastation. But really, at bottom, it gives you chance after chance to be true to yourself, to stick to your principles, and to do the right thing, despite strong provocation to do otherwise.

I wouldn’t change a thing, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Tags: Jason, Maintenance, Sailing, San Francisco Bay, Sea Stories

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