sunday february 1^st 2009 (auckland, new zealand)

Here we are on the first day of the shortest month that’s notoriously difficult to spell correctly. A good enough day to end the dry spell and bring you up to speed.  Some notable highlights which took place during our six week slaplog sojourn:

-          Against all probable odds Jaime did not leave me. Thank you all for your support. She has returned from her foray into our frozen homeland. I suspect that this decision had more to do with the timing of her visit (which coincided with Canada’s recent decent into the next ice age) and less to do with my attempts to become the next low budget (and some would say off key) but real life version of Guitar Hero. In any case she is back on the boat randomly moving ‘household’ (boathold sounded funny) items to new locations on a daily basis. She claims that this is for the greater organizational good but I suspect that she is simply doing her best to expedite my decent into madness and in doing so save herself another long ocean passage with me; this time accompanied by my new guitar and hand-me-down harmonica

-          The boat did not sink. We are both alive, and forays into self made acoustic music aside, are getting along famously.

-          We are still in Auckland, and still floating happily in the Westhaven marina. I will spare you the details of our recent disputes with marina management regarding the length and beam of our boat (marinas decide how much to charge you based on these measurements) and state simply that we have been relocated to another slip. If we were a square peg, then this slip was a round hole. In other words we didn’t fit. Not for lack of trying either. Just check out the picture for proof of our efforts. So after spending time in 2 (and a half) slips over the past several weeks we are now happily tied stern-to on the K pier with a nice view of the Auckland tower from our cockpit. In fairness to the good people at the Westhaven marina these tribulations can just as easily be attributed to our own scrooge-like reluctance to pay for a 12 meter berth as they could be to any of their own rigidly enforced policies. I only bring the matter up to provide context for what we think is a pretty funny picture of us stuck half in and half out of a slip on the M pier.

-       What are they calling it? Oh yeah, this little global economic meltdown thing. I use it in defense of our aforementioned Scrooge like reluctances. Yes, it’s taken a pound of flesh from the Slapdash crew as well. Jaime wasn’t quick enough on the camera to catch the facial expression which accompanied my recent gaze into our portfolio, so to complete the visual simply look into the mirror while passing a kidney stone then simultaneously pluck a nose hair. Much navel gazing and self pity followed our initial shock. We commiserated with friends, drown our sorrows, wept and gnashed our teeth. After shaking all that blubbery off, an in depth review of our financial status and realistic evaluation of our plans soon followed. Suddenly things were on the table and being discussed that we had never considered. Sell the boat? Sail home in a single shot? Take out large policies and fake our own deaths? All bets were off. Even some really shocking off-the-wall things were kicked around like get jobs or… put adverts on the website! Yeah, that bad. I’m making a long story short (and hopefully readable) but the end game is this; we think that we can do another season on our own steam. From there we’ll play it by ear and see what happens. I guess you could say that we sort of adopted the same strategy used to get this trip off the ground in the first place… Which is? I don’t know, f***k it all and just see what happens I guess. It’s worked so far.

In apparent contrast to the last paragraph we’ve also been enjoying our Kiwi time immensely. I hate to say the most cliché sounding thing you’ve ever heard but the people here are great. Take this for example; Jaime and Seth enter the video store and ask if it’s possible for a couple of non-resident boat living degenerates to rent movies. “Strictly speaking”, the helpful clerk replies, “no it is not”. So what does she do? Tells us to go ahead and pick out our movies - she will just rent them to us using her own personal account. I don’t know about you, but where we’re from that’s about as likely to happen as someone coming along and giving you their car. Oh wait, that happened too! I bought a car while Jaime was in Vancouver and told the seller that I wanted it right away. He was taking off for Christmas holidays for a couple of weeks though. The solution? “I’ll just bring it around the marina on our way out of town and we can sort out the details when I get back” he says. A couple other examples that come to mind include the girl I approached late at night on my way home for directions. I stupidly realized too late that given the circumstances (late, unlit parking lot etc) that I was as likely to get a face full of mace as I was to get any help. Instead of a kick to the groin she offered me a ride home. Dropped me off right at the boat. Then there was the guy who helped me tie the lines up when I first arrived. He came by the boat a week later, handed over a nice French red and said “we remembered that you said your girlfriend was in Vancouver for the holidays, here’s a bottle of wine from our family. Let us know if you need anything else”.

wednesday february 11^th 2009 (auckland, new zealand)

We’ve spent nearly every day since that last post working on the list. The engine has been shampooed, scrubbed, scraped and is ready for paint. Jaime secured a storage locker. She has carted 3 car loads of stuff off the boat now, which makes working on these projects a lot easier. The starboard side fuel tank has been emptied, removed, cleaned and reinstalled. Our primary filter met a similar fate; removal, complete disassembly, thorough cleaning and a rebuild. Even the head has been the recipient of our undivided attention this past week, and not in the post Jose Cuervo or Dehli belly kind of way either. No, it was more of a tear everything out, clean, fix, and replace kind of attention - which for the record is equally painful and messy.

With the help of a garden hose Jaime and I have also managed to track down a couple of annoying leaks to their source and hope to be able to go to work with our trusty marine grade sealant and put an end to them soon. Only a boat owner could possibly understand how exciting this is. Leaks are terrible, the bane of a live-a-board’s existence. It’s hard to overstate the demoralizing effect of living in a leaky boat, and sooner or later every boat will develop one. After days of work and hard won successes it rained a bit this weekend. Instead of feeling the sense of accomplishment we thought that we deserved we just felt miserable sitting there watching this little pecker of a drip… drip… drip.

Sure, it’s easy to locate water that has made its way into your boat; a puddle gives it away every time. Once you have found the puddle you can easily wipe it up, pump it out, mop it up or just put a towel down. In fact, we’ve employed each of these strategies at some time or another with varying degrees of success. The inherent problem with each of these systems -however tempting they may be- is that in failing to locate and address the source of the leak you ensure the need to mop, wipe, sop and pump as long as you own your boat. Unless it never rains again. That could work, but so far it’s always rained again so we’ve decided to just go ahead and attempt to address the annoying leaks at their source. I’ll try to describe why this is easier said than done:

Once you have determined that you in fact have a leak (ie, found the puddle) you must endeavor to figure out how and where it entered your boat. Boats aren’t like houses; most of them are smaller, and as far as homes go, are shaped funny. So water enters a boat and then, as water tends to do, takes the path of least resistance. Due to the boats inherently funny shape, this path ends up resembling an exceedingly complicated game of chutes and ladders. After doing its best to throw you off (no leak wants to give away its source) the water will eventually pool into some distant and remote part of the boat nowhere near its entry point and once settled will begin taunting you. The only way to connect the gloating puddle to the source is by reverse engineering its intricate pilgrimage.

It won’t take you long to realize that the water has cunningly trickled it’s way along a series of panels, around bulkheads, through electronics, irremovable structural additions and other boat-y type things. In the interests of staying afloat (the boats primary function) many of these areas are sealed off and difficult to access. The leak knows this and will invariably use it to its advantage. After encountering these obstacles many would-be repairmen have turned to the towel or the mop in a self destructive never ending cycle of abuse. I know, because I was one. But not this time. We removed panels with gusto. Stereos and circuit boards were pulled apart. We employed mirrors and flashlights to expose tiny passageways and corridors. We simulated rain in order to replicate and test various theories, and in the end… we won. Well, almost. As it turns out, there was a surprise Hitchcock-esque ending waiting for us after all of this.