Boatyard Purgatory and the Plan to Escape

Travel Banter. We are "on the hard", preparing the boat for the ocean.

A boatyard is a place of dichotomy. Each day, it crushes your spirit and depresses you with dust, heat, and an endless queue of impossible tasks. But each week, boatyard is where you build your dream, if you dream of freedom from routine and travel to places hugged by the ocean. Boatyard is a purgatory you must survive to sail to paradise.

The boat is ‘on the hard’. She is dirty.

We are in the boatyard now, preparing our boat for a long passage across the Caribbean. I thought I would hate it. I was sure of it. A long time ago, before my cushy office work, I fixed semi-trucks. The dirty, oily, in the winter frigid to the touch, unfeeling trucks. I had greasy nails and cracked skin. I had wounds on every knuckle. Bumps on my head. Cuts on my wrists. Eyes red from grease and melting ice dripping into them. I had enough. I hated the wrenches.

But I like this boatyard and this work. Love - is not what I can say. But ‘like’ is right. Because the results of the painful hours are ours. Alex and I will saddle Monona, our sea-kindly, ocean-going sailboat, and will launch in a week away from the happy madness of Key West and the sad madness of Trump’s America. We sail in pursuit of a simpler life, where the focus is to create and to relate through stories the beauty of places and people free of the greedy impetus to acquire. Will we like it? Indeed. We lived this life for two years.

All of it is a week away. We still have to peel away the layers of the onion that is our boat. The layers of systems that keep you alive and independent. Watermaker turns seawater into fresh. Solar and wind make us power and charge the laptops we need for our daily jobs. The diesel engine powers us in and out of the tight harbors and into the open sea.

All those systems require attention, a lot of care, and a little bit of love. They pack a soul into their inanimate frames, and if you stop caring for them, they rebel. They go offline when you most need them. You must turn them into friends with grease, or new gaskets, or fresh halyards. Then, like good friends, they will show up when you are blue and need a saving.

Remember when I said the boat is an onion? Not only because it makes you cry. That too. But because it hides important things into successive layers of other things. You must remove four others to fix one.

I am peeling the onion today. There is no room to get to the engine. I can fit one shoulder and two half-collapsed arms into the compartment. No room for proper tools. I push back the drive shaft, but first, I loosen the dripless seal. Of course, it is stuck - the saltwater welded metals. One hour lost to remove a screw. The drive shaft is back. Take off the transmission, but the bolts seven and eight cannot be reached without Harry Potter’s wand. Three hours to remove two bolts. The transmission is off, but I can’t pull it from the compartment. The hole is too small with the engine in place. So, the transmission must stay. It sits there, picking at the skin of my hands each time I carelessly move them.

But there is a problem. The engine is mounted by the transmission on the back. So, we rig a pulley to our boom to keep the engine hanging without it dropping into the pan. Precarious leverages, pulleys, blocks, many feet of rope… The dog is fascinated. I am afraid.

A full day has passed, and I am twelve percent done. Why am I doing all of this? Because I need to replace a seventeen-dollar part. A stupid seal that lives deep inside another onion, which is the engine.

The work is challenging, but I learn how things connect and interact. So when a strange boat noise jolts us from a nap somewhere in the ocean, we know what noise can wait. We can go back to sleep without panic. The boat will make it, and we with it because we spent the days fixing the little things.

Still a purgatory. But in a week, we will sail past the reefs into the Gulfstream to a place of mental quietude and a welcome sea. There, we can unfurl the sails, shut down the noise of the engine, and the noise of expectations inescapable on ‘civilized’ land. It is all worth it.

It is exhilarating to move past stubborn problems and to collect small wins. Addictive even. The small wins accumulate into accomplishments and hand you a sense of power over your circumstances and agency over the chaos of life. Little things, to bigger things, to a satisfying knowledge that you can steer your own ship, and your own life.

Fixing, fixing, fixing...