I HATE SHOES

I motored out to the anchorage last week and dropped it for the third season I've spent in Newport.  Soveraine  is finally ready to go, with her name painted on the transom in a font I'd like to call "10 minutes with a chip brush", and you would think a child in elementary school did it for some milk money. It should be temporary, since I plan on painting the topsides sometime soon, but its also a nose in the air salute to Newport in general. I've gotten some guff for it however I'm almost positive vinyl lettering won't improve my performance or safety. Memorial Day finally came, after 5 days of no sun and pissing rain storms. And with it, myself, Elizabeth (actually, there were two aboard), Seabass, Micah and Gretchen took Soveraine out for an inaugural sail of the season (a season I'm planning to perpetuate indefinitely). It was blowing out of the west for awhile before the sea breeze kicked in, and kick in it did. We had full sail up while it was ...

I honestly didn't think this winter was going to end. Even after the first sail on Lyra, even after 7 charters on Weatherly, living aboard through a blizzard, a hurricane, countless smaller snow storms, freezing fog, a desk job, and a troop of high school swimmers, it still seems surreal I'm on the other side of it. Friends are making their way back into town, and have been trickling in over the past couple of weeks. Every day I count more boats in the anchorage and mooring field. The pulse of Newport slowly begins to strengthen as she shakes off a long, cold hibernation. It was a strange path that led me back here and this past winter punctuated it well. Soveraine  is reborn as well, and when I get a new turnbuckle this afternoon she will be seaworthy for the first time since I've had her, and I'd guess a long bit before then too. The chainplates are finally complete and they mark the end of a long, long list of essential items I knew I had to tackle when I purchased...

First and foremost Sunday marked the first true sign, in my eyes at least, that the sailing season had begun and winter has officially kicked it: we went for a sail. Green's charter business On Watch Sailing  is open for customers and to shake things out after a long, cold and snowy winter he invited myself and Elizabeth to join him and his family on Lyra , their Reliance 44. We sailed down to Hammersmith Farm and up under the Newport bridge and got some great pics for his website. The shrink wrap came off Saturday. After nearly 5 months guarded from the elements of a New England winter that included a blizzard in the top five most severe of all time, a half dozen snow storms and lots of the delightful "wintery mix", she emerged unscathed. I wish I had the opportunity to paint the decks or something before her unveiling  but most of my projects this winter happened below. Most recently I completely redid the head, which started a few mo...

When I first bought Winchelsea  over three years ago, I'll admit it was on kind of an impulse. I knew my roommates were terrible and I hated my job, the sailboat was my ticket out of both. I had been reading about the lifestyle of cruising and voyaging since I had broken my knee the July previous (this was the summer of '09, I was still driving the desk at the engineering firm), which all started with Slocum's iconic  Sailing Alone Around the World . I read a lot of how-to books covering the technical aspects of sailing and the life aquatic aboard a boat, but they would only sometimes touch on the "why", outside of picturesque sunsets and pina coladas. Bernard Moitessier was my first inspiration outside the realm of conventional cruisers (which is obvious to anyone who knows me well). He starts voyaging to escape the chaos of Indochina during World War II, and in his later works he starts to develop his "why" as a spiritual quest dealing with some demo...

Currently in Maine visiting dear old Dad who has a wood working shop, including a C&C router!  I designed a logo a couple of weeks ago (see the top of the blog) and my dad helped with the toolpaths to carve it. We ran short of time to produce a finished product, but the mockup out of foam looks great!

I knew full well when I got Soveraine  that the transmission was stuck in forward. I thought it was probably a linkage issue that would be easily fixed. Once that possibility was ruled out, I toyed with the idea of leaving it stuck in forward, since I had throttle control. I would really only need reverse and neutral coming into a dock, and, and in all practicality not even for that. I got to the dock I'm at now slowly coasting in after cutting the engine a few yards before gliding alongside it. No sweat. But, since I have the time, I decided to get it looked at professionally. A friend of all Newport boaters and a lifetime diesel mechanic John Whitney came over to look at it and promptly said it had to come out for him to really diagnose it. He said it probably was just a worn part that needed to be replaced (he even narrowed it down to one or two specific pieces, given an exploded diagram of the reverse gear), not a huge deal, just not something he could do with it sitting in m...

I recently, as in last night, watched a documentary called Mansome. More or less it questions the present state, in our uber-modern society, of what makes a man, a man. It made me ask myself, as I near 3 decades of life on Earth, what kind of man-mold do I fit it into? When I graduated college and moved to Boston, I loved the idea of clean pressed solid colored shirts, with a color complimenting striped neck tie, shiny (but not too shiny) shoes stepping gracefully onto the T and starting up a conversation with the lady standing next to me; maybe something about how I recognized her for wearing a fragrance from Channel. Things changed though, once I got there and started living out that vision of what I thought I, or myself as a man, should be doing. Fast forward a few years and I'm a pretty scruffy guy with oil stains on his clothes, holes in his sweaters, and a slight musk of diesel and general "boat" scent. Does this make me less of a man? More so? I'm able to do ...