Fish My Wish

"Who wants fish?"
"Me!"
"Me!"
"Yes, please!"

Fishing, like most cruising pastimes, is easier than it looks.  Every morning on passage, Stylish tours the decks and clears the scuppers of the unfortunate tiny squid and flying fish that have landed overnight.  We don't eat these morsels, but the message is clear: for the most part, the fish come to us.

A Fork In The Road

The Papillon crew is a family divided at the moment.  While the girls and I visit long-lost friends and relatives, Erik is on the boat, hard at work welding fuel tanks and replacing swage fittings.  It is a little disconcerting to be so far apart after 2.5 years of togetherness.  The girls and I miss him.  But I also worry.  Because I get emails like this:

Subject: Think I just bought a car...

Up In The Air

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen; this is your captain speaking.  We have turned on the seat belt sign as we are experiencing light turbulence at the moment. We currently have a 101 knot tailwind up here in the jetstream...

I nearly fell out of my seat.  One hundred and one knots?  What!?  And this sleek bit of aluminum we were riding hadn't crumpled into a useless ball?  And I used to think that picking up an extra knot or two of current was a pretty big achievement.

In-transit Interlude: Q&A

Q:  What do you do when your parents take a breather from dragging you around to tourist hotspots?

War On Corrosion

 

My can opener didn't always have vice grips attached.  Once upon a time, it had a plastic handle.  And then one day last December, the handle simply fell off.  The plastic hadn't broken - the metal underneath had rusted away.  And so, in fine cruiser fashion, I improvised.

Not to be cranky, but metal on a boat is a pain in the neck.  If it is metal, it will corrode.  Unless I build everything out of Platinum, the salt water is going to get to it eventually.

Our hull is made of Aluminum.  That's great if you plan to ram into a tree trunk and not sink, but it has a downside: our hull wants to be a battery.  In the galvanic series for stagnant saltwater, Aluminum sits at position number 34 of 39.  That means that, in salt water at least, Aluminum is a giver.  Aluminum acts as a sacrificial anode for the 33 metals sitting above it on the list.  And guess what?  I don't want my hull to be so generous.  Keep your electrons, I say!  Don't accept that current!  Only Uranium, Cadmium, Beryllium, Zinc and Magnesium sit down below Aluminum.  And as I somehow don't fancy bolting a bunch of Uranium to my hull, I guess we'll just have to keep replacing our Zincs as they disappear into the salty blue.

Singing in the Rain

Rainy days are always a treat on board.  Well, okay.  Rainy days in the tropics are a treat,because it is warm outside.  Rainy days in, oh, I don't know, New Zealand, when it's Christmas and it's freezing and your in-laws are visiting and a gale is blowing and the anchorage is too bumpy to take the dinghy to land and you're all stuck below decks for five days and all you do is cook and peel excited children off the ceiling and cook and brew more tea and cook and cook... those days aren't my number one choice.  But warm + rainy = fun.

Back before we had a watermaker, we used our huge awning as a water collection device.  We clipped funnels in the lowest corners of the awning to port and starboard, and ran hoses to the deck fills.  Erik had fancy bits of mesh installed at various points along the line to keep out anything unwanted.  During the rainy season, we always had full tanks of clean rainwater.  Delicious.

Follow The Sound Of My Voice

Five a.m. is not my best time of day.  I know this.  And yet, when Bob May of Bob's No Wake Zone Boating Radio Show out of Clinton, Missouri asked me to be a guest on his show, we agreed that a 5 o'clock taping was going to be the best fit for our different time zones.  We all need to be flexible, after all.

My mother, she of the perpetual morning perkiness, will tell you that I am like my father's side of the family: less than fully functional in the a.m.  Only my sister inherited the early morning gene; my brothers and I are late night people.  Indy also shows worrying signs of being an early riser, although she has modified her habits to a more reasonable seven a.m. over the ghastly six a.m. she used to prefer.  Stylish, on the other hand, can hardly be roused with less than a marching band before nine o'clock.  Civilized.

But five it was.  Bob was going to talk to me about cruising and life aboard, and I thought, "Well, that is kind of early, but this is going to be fun.  I'll be alert because I'll be excited.  Plus, I've talked about cruising a thousand times.  I can do that in my sleep!"

Well, for any of you that may find yourselves interview-proximate in future, let your Aunt Amy give you some kindly advice.  Although you may think you can do something in your sleep, you should not, in fact, do it in your sleep.  And what you explain to friends and neighbours in the comfort of your cockpit is not as easy to distill into a pithy anecdote for a one-shot deal like radio.  I have great admiration for people like Bob who can just get up talk and still sound interesting.  They make it sound so easy.  I am a writer; I am slow.  I like to ponder, and write, and ponder some more, and edit and edit and edit.  And even then I'm often not satisfied that I made my point clearly.  So I was a little concerned that I would be a terrible guest, but I pushed aside those pointless worries and looked forward to the day.

At quarter to five I got up, closed the bedroom doors, and left Erik and the girls quietly sleeping.  Bob and I got started.  Like a pro, he guided me through the treacherous waters of the interview, and I think I was doing alright until he asked about the boat layout.

Now.  This ought to be a "gimme", right?  Do I or do I not live aboard Papillon?  And do I or do I not know what is where on said vessel?  I do.  But for some reason, when it came to describing the deck, I fell apart.  My five a.m. brain was suddenly convinced that a center cockpit had to be in the precise center of the boat - which is ridiculous.  I stumbled and equivocated and finally realized I was floundering.  I ground to a halt and commented to Bob that Erik was going to give me heck for my answer.  Bob laughed and, like the gentleman he is, moved on.

It isn't as complicated as I made it sound.  Here we are looking forward...

...and looking aft.  Not even the most urban landlubber could get confused.

We made it to the end, and Bob graciously thanked me for being on the show.  I took off my headphones, poured myself another cup of tea, and shook my head.  Did I make cruising sound like the great life it is, or did I just sound like a crazy boat lady?  I feared it was CBL for the win.

The bedroom door creaked open, and Erik emerged.
"You sounded good," he said.
"You were listening?"
He nodded.  "Yep."  He paused.  "But what was that nonsense about the center cockpit?"


My segment on Bob's No Wake Zone Boating Radio Show aired on Saturday, March 30th, 2013.  You can listen to the archived show on Bob's website.  Click on the On Demand Dock Box, scroll down to the March 30th show, and look for Amy Schaefer and Sailing Papillon.  Thanks for listening!

Taking Care of Number One

Looking back through my photos, I can see that we on Papillon are animal junkies.  Sealions, birds, dolphins, fish - all of these things get far more play than the landscapes we visit.  Only pictures of the girls on the beach outrank the animal world.  So it is no surprise that we went to visit to Kangaroo Island last weekend.  We have a mere handful of days left in Australia, and, although we have seen a lot of birds, we are running a major marsupial deficiency.

So, that means I saw all sorts of adorable animals, right?  Yes.  And.

And I saw every restroom on Kangaroo Island.  Because Indy is four.

It is a well-known fact that a child "needs to go" in direct proportion to the ickiness of the toilet facilities.  No kid will deign to do their business in a pristine, just-cleaned facility.  But if the only thing going is a murky bucket in an abandoned warehouse?  It is clear-out-the-pipes time.

We Make This Journey Together

 

A lot has changed since I started this blog two and a half years ago.  My original motivation for writing about our cruising life was simple: reassure the grandparents.  And I wasn’t always successful.  It never really occurred to me that anyone I wasn’t related to would ever be interested in our broken fingers and broken masts, our sealion bites and four-legged pests, or riding around in a Colombian police van.  Twice.

But new people came, and new people stayed.  The blog grew, SAILfeed invited me to join their site, and here I am.  And here you are.  And we are sharing this now.

The Art Of Making It All Fit (with helpful how-to video)

One of the more common questions I get about life aboard is, "How do you make it all fit?"  That's easy.  Step one: prioritize.  We follow a simple space allocation formula on Papillon.  I'll draw you a pie chart.

A place for everything, and everything in its place.  Provided it is boat related, otherwise it's out.

As I am (loudly) reminded every time we run out of something, I am the Provisioning Officer aboard.  We have lots of locker space so dry goods don't present an issue, but I did used to think my fridge and freezer were too small.  But when we were in Cartagena, Erik ripped them out and made them even smaller!  Ha ha, what a fool I was.

What's Cookin'?

 

The trouble with feeding a family is that it is relentless.  It can be fun to prepare a good meal - chopping vegetables, sniffing at the pot bubbling on the stove, watching everyone's smiling face as they dig in.  And then, zip! it's gone, you have a stack of dirty dishes in the sink and, four hours later, everyone is hungry again.  But the fact is, whether cooking is satisying or not, we all need to eat.  Even I can't survive on crackers and cheese forever.

I have run the gamut on kitchens from Well-Equipped Western World Standard to Fire On Beach.  And you might be surprised how they stack up against each other.

Rub-a-dub-dub

It isn't often that I really miss "land" things.  But every once in a while, I'd like to have a bath.  Unlike the kids, I can't fit in a five-gallon bucket.

I once made the mistake of musing aloud that I would like to take a bath.  Erik, fixer of all problems, immediately started offering solutions.

"Go swimming," he said.
"I said I'd like a bath, not a swim."
"What's the difference?"
"A swim is for looking at fish and giving the kids rides and moving around a lot," I said.  "A bath is for lying in warm water and reading a book.  Possibly with the addition of a lovely beverage."
"You can read in the cockpit."
"Then I wouldn't be in the water, would I?"
Erik gave me a look I know well.  It is Husband Look #5: Are We Still Talking About This?  I Thought I Solved Your Problem Eight Minutes Ago.  He put down his socket driver and sighed.  "Do you need me to build you a bathtub?  I can build you a bathtub.  You can put it on the back deck, and haul up water in a bucket.  It'll be a pain, but I can do it."
"Oh for crying out loud!" I threw my hands in the air.  "I am not asking you to build me a ruddy bathtub!  All I said was it would be nice to soak in a bath once in a while!"
"Why'd you bring it up then?" Erik muttered as he wandered off to find a problem that actually wanted to be solved.