![[Photo: Lea on the tiller]](leasteer.jpg)
In which something unspeakably awful occurs... Tangled lines... Marine mammals... Sights and conversations of the San Juan Islands...
Friday Harbor 1998 Aug 03 Monday
Pumping out is theoretically a simple process. You open the waste fitting, set the valves to direct the holding tanks to the waste fitting, hook up the waste fitting, turn on the vacuum, and off it goes. When done, turn off the vacuum pump, pull out the waste fitting, close everything off. There was only one minor catch: none of us had done this before.
So there was much confusion and debate over what the right way to do this was, whether it was working, and how to go about doing this. Another boat pulled up and waited impatiently to use the pump-out station. Well, under pressure and in confusion, the hose came off from the deck fitting. The result: Scarlet, Lea, and I got splattered by sewage, with Lea getting the worst of it. "Thanks, I needed that!" I said. "Quit whining, Piaw, Lea got the worst of it." The boat that was waiting was suddenly no longer so impatient. Back to the water hose dock, Lea wiped off and the three of us prepared to take a shower. One of the few times when you could have said to us, "You smell like shit" and be literally right. EW!
I was glad that I'd had some quarters handy. Because I'd had quarters, I'd been in charge of feeding the coin-operated pump-out machine and had been far away when things got nasty on the boat. Actually, when I'd approached the pump machine, there was already a quarter stuck in its coin slot. When I twisted a knob trying to get that quarter out of the way, the pump had started. This was fine, except that even when we were done, even after we'd had our accident--I couldn't figure out how to turn the pump off. Showers seemed like higher priority than getting this thing to stop; after all, this way the next people in line would get a free pump-out.
Back on the water dock, I sat and guarded the boat while the others ran to land for showers. The heat beat down, and I gradually felt all conscious thought dissolve. Eventually Piaw came back from his shower. I headed back to the shower/restroom building to use the restroom. Scarlet was outside, perhaps waiting for Lea to finish her shower. She said, "Hey, I'm sorry if it seemed like I was snapping at you on that water thing. It really wasn't you I was mad at." I nodded, looked away, said, "Piaw's suggestion really was good. He couldn't know..." She said, "Yeah." Here I was all worried that there was some kind fury to smooth over, and she'd already worked things out. I breathed a sigh of relief. Scarlet was going to be all right.
After my shower, I came back and got between Larry and I, started hosing off the boat. When the crew was back on board, we cast off and headed away from Friday Harbor, away from unpleasant memories, and total embarrassment. I needed to keep the engine running for a bit to recharge the batteries, so I asked for music to be turned up, and headed north, towards Reid Harbor on Stuart island. After an hour, we raised the sails, and once again traveled the ways of the wind. Except there wasn't much wind. But as Butch Cassidy said to us, "Motor boats just want to get somewhere. Sailboats are already there."
As we motored out of Friday Harbor, I sat up front with my back against the mast, enjoying the view. I'd really liked Friday Harbor's relaxed feel, in spite of the shit that went down there. It had taken us until 2:00 to escape, but it was a beautiful afternoon. As we headed out, a seaplane took off next to us, glinting in the sunlight.
Raising the main sail was pretty complicated. In my role as ship's behemoth, I was again on winch duty. I cranked and cranked and--suddenly the winch was stuck. I leaned all my considerable bulk into it, but it still refused to budge. Lea and Scarlet were yelling something from where they stood, by the mast. They wanted the boathook. The main halyard (the line which hauls up the main sail) was caught on our mast light, far overhead. I sat by the winch while they fiddled with the line, trying to shake it loose. Lea yelled back to the cockpit/winch area: "We could use a behemoth." I said okay, and started to get up. Piaw looked up, groaned, pointed, and told me, "Look, the main halyard's tangled up in the lazyjack." Sure enough, it looked like the lazyjack, meant as a convenience, had turned into a nuisance: the halyard was wrapped around it. I wandered back to the mast, where Lea and Scarlet tried to hand me the boathook. I looked up. If I got the main halyard untangled from the lazyjack, maybe the resulting slack would allow me to get the halyard untangled from the light--and I wouldn't even have to mess with the boathook.
I unclipped the main halyard from the sail, brought it around the lazy jack, re-attached it. I shook the main halyard. It refused to come loose from the light. Okay. I tried using the boathook to shake the line. I was able to shake the line below the light quite nicely, but this seemed to have little effect on the line up around the light, which was a little ways out of reach of the boathook. I thought and thought and thought. I put a loop of the line around the boathook, and again raised the boathook. This loop meant that the line couldn't just slip along the boathook--I was able to get a big swoop of slack up close to the light. A couple of shakes, and the line was free of the light! It took another minute to get the boathook untangled from the line.
At this point, it became clear that the main halyard was entangled with the lazyjack. Apparently, when it had appeared tangled before, that had just been a side-effect of being tangled with the light. When I'd "untangled" the lines, I'd really been making things worse. Scarlet showed me the proper way of getting the line untangled. We'd have to unclip the main halyard again, get it around the lazyjack, which was a ways back on the boom, and then re-attach it. She unclipped the hayard, then attached the clip to her life-vest. I looked at her funny. She explained that she was going to walk it back to the lazyjack, and wanted to make plenty sure that she didn't lose hold of the halyard clip. They can get away, and dangle high overhead, which is very inconvenient and embarrassing. She started walking back along the boom, made it back to the lazyjack.
Scarlet's an experienced sailor, and has good ideas on how to do things. Still, I grinned and shook my head: I had a better way to safely move the halyard. I carefully unclipped the halyard from her life-vest, let her get the halyard around the lazyjack. And then I reached over, got the clip from her, reached over to the mast, and re-attached the clip to the mainsail. Scarlet's an experienced sailor, but no behemoth. Being able to reach things can make up for many things. Raising the main went pretty smoothly after that.
Back in the cockpit, somehow conversation came around to vinegar-swilling. Scarlet likes vinegar, and has drunk it straight. This was fascinating to me. I asked her if she had some kind of health-food-nut background. I like to drink straight vinegar. My mom was a health-food nut, prone to experiments with soy beans, wheat germ, and the like. My friend and ex-co-worker Heather Hanly (who was at this moment in the act of moving to Sacramento, of all places) liked to do vinegar shots on occasion. Her mom had run a health food store for a while. I'd wondered if there was a correlation.
There is none. Scarlet made it clear that she was no health food nut. Piaw piped up that his mom and aunt liked to drink vinegar, and they certainly weren't health food nuts. Another brilliant theory disproved. I considered trying to salvage the situation by forming, on the spot, a vinegar-tasting society that would exchange information on the best kinds of vinegar--but I thought better of it.
We sailed among wooded islands. One island had been set up as a sort of safari park. We scanned its shores for signs of wildebeest or zebra, spotted none. Piaw took pictures of a utility shed. So much for wildlife.
Then I spotted fins of marine mammals in the water. They looked too small to be orcas. What could they be? We got very excited, but the fins never got any closer. In fact, I think only Piaw and I were lucky enough to spot them.
We sailed past Danger Shoal. It was circular, and appeared as a circumference of choppy water around an area of near-total calm. No doubt, if we'd sailed upon the choppy parts, we would have discovered the rocks underneath. I considered asking Lea if I could borrow her celphone. "Hi, Mom? Yeah, I'm calling from the boat. We're going past some place called 'Danger Shoal.' Oops, hey, gotta go. Bye!"
We read. Lea was flipping through some Pediatric Medicine reference book. She looked at the table of contents. "What shall I study?" she asked. "Mood altering substances?" I asked. "How did you know that was in this book?" "I saw it when you were flipping through," I said. She began looking in the book, muttering something about substances and schizophrenia. I shuddered. I read in "Travelling Shoes," a travel 'zine. This issue was about Morocco. I concentrated on the list of 101 English words of Arabic origin. "Amalgamate." "Mohair."
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