Anchoring a boat has come a long way. On our sailboats, it always felt like a risky proposition. We'd make sure to set the anchor and watch our position in relation to a fixed point on land. I'd stand at the bow for a long time before turning in, feeling the pressure of wind on my cheek, wondering if I should let out more rode. Many nights I'd be up in a flash if I heard a strange noise or a shift in the wind, looking out for something familiar on the dark shore to ease my mind.
Over the past few months, we’ve been awakened by our Maretron monitoring system with a low-battery alarm during the wee hours. You cannot distinguish the low-battery alarm from the Anchor watch alarm, so on the times this has happened, I immediately launched myself to the pilothouse to gauge which way we’re dragging, peering out of the dark windows for some sign of a lee shore. Once fully awake, I noted that the battery level was perilously low.
Are you mechanically-inclined, perhaps an engineer? Are you inquisitive by nature, wondering how things tick? Do you like to fix stuff? If so, this post is not meant for you, although you might get a chuckle here and there if you decide to keep reading.
I wrote this for a different segment of the population, which I count myself a dues-paying member: the mechanically challenged. I’m pretty good with a spreadsheet, and I can make PowerPoint get up and dance. But fixing things? Not so much.
There is nothing so magical and comforting as the wheelhouse of a trawler at night. Words fail. Pictures can’t capture it. The gentle rocking, the warm light, the sense of adventure and impending expedition, the saltwater soaking into already salty veins. Some people spend their whole lives searching for their happy place in the world. This is surely mine.
Most captains pay close attention to weather forecasts and will postpone departures to protect the comfort and safety of the ship and its passengers. But what if the skipper has a track record of being too cautious? And what if the ship is an ocean-capable Nordhavn trawler?
I’m the first to admit it: I’m a cautious skipper. Even with decades of sailing experience across a half-dozen vessels, my nerves still rattle when the wind pipes up. Unlike a car, maneuvering a boat has an inherent wildness to it, an out of control feeling more akin to riding an elephant than the surety of a stick-shift, particularly in close quarters around docks and other boats.
We took our first cruise of 2020 aboard Indiscretion to Olympia last week. After a wet and windy start to the year, the weather gods smiled down at us and provided four days of sun and calm seas that perfectly coincided with our travel. That doesn’t happen very often in February around here, so we’re thankful for the reprieve.
I stood mostly naked near the bow of the boat in the early hours of a Thursday morning. The sun hadn’t risen, and it was damp and chilly in my underwear. I hoped other boats anchored nearby wouldn’t witness this act of indignity. Desperate times require desperate measures, I told myself, as I contemplated the orange traffic cone standing before me atop a square yard of fake grass.
We’ve been back ashore now for a few weeks, home from our month-long trip aboard Indiscretion in the San Juan and Canadian Gulf Islands. We spent the majority of our nights at anchor or tied to a mooring buoy, enjoying the onboard accommodations and tranquility.
I expected to run into some form of mechanical difficulty on the trip, having checked and double-checked our spare parts inventory before departure, and thinking through the various fall-backs and redundancies we might employ should a significant failure occur.
We are tied up to to the guest dock at the Causeway Marina in Victoria Harbour with a front-row seat of all the bustle and glamour that waterfront Victoria provides.
This for me is what’s great about boating. Anchored in a small bay surrounded by wilderness, birdsong, cackling geese, a faint cooling breeze. Far, far away from bustle and strife. Fellow boaters passing by in dinghies with smiles and waves. A sense of shared fraternity that we all found this magic place.
Our first week in the islands was a blur. It usually takes about three days for us to lose our landward ways and find our sea legs, but our entry seemed easier this time. The pace of life on a trawler forces you to slow down, let the stress fall away - very much like our years under sail, but with so much comfort!
I’m writing this in the red glow of the wheelhouse courtesy lights on this calm night at Spencer Spit on the northwest side of Lopez Island. Lisa and Connor have retired to their respective staterooms, bushed from a long day of sea air. I’m tired, but I want to capture some of this experience while it’s fresh in my mind.
Our voyage has begun! We cast off the dock lines in the wee hours of Saturday morning to catch the ebb tide and are now comfortably anchored in Hunter Bay on the Southeast part of Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands.
We have a new blog for our adventures aboard our Nordhavn trawler, MV Indiscretion. We’re leaving soon for a trip through the San Juan Islands, the Canadian Gulf Islands, and up through British Columbia to Desolation Sound in two weeks. We’ll post stories and pictures from our voyage on the new website. Hope you will check it out!
Here’s the link:
MV Indiscretion
Fair winds!
I’m writing this tonight from the settee of Indiscretion’s wheelhouse — one hell of a place to put down words. It’s just past twilight now, and I’ve turned on the red courtesy lights that provide just enough glow to see my surroundings, but not enough to spoil vision while voyaging at night. Ahead of me lie the helm chair, the ship’s wheel and the wrap-around pilothouse windows that look out over the bow and Quartermaster Marina.
When we purchased Indiscretion late last summer, we knew we needed help in getting to know our new vessel, the systems on board, and in particular, maneuvering her 60,000 pounds around docks and other boats. Coming from a smaller and lighter sailboat, operating this trawler was a whole new experience for us.
Indiscretion, our Nordhavn trawler, has a Maretron onboard computer system which monitors most of the vital components aboard the vessel. From a display at the helm or master stateroom, I can review the wind speed outside, fuel, water and holding tank levels, state of the batteries, engine temperature, rudder angle, water depth, etc.
Lisa and I attended a training session at Northern Lights in Ballard, the company that manufactured Indiscretion’s engine and generator. This one-day “Captain’s Course” is taught by Bob Senter, a respected authority on practically everything within the engine room of a trawler.
Lisa and I have celebrated 22 wedding anniversaries. For at least the past dozen years, we haven’t exchanged gifts beyond small tokens like flowers or chocolates. Instead, we go out to dinner, just the two of us, to celebrate the occasion. This year we celebrated at May’s Kitchen, a Thai restaurant on Vashon that is so good, it is worthy of special occasions like anniversaries. As we were heading out the door on our way to the restaurant, Lisa surprised me with a package.
“Wait, what’s this?” I asked with apprehension. She was breaking tradition. “I didn’t buy you a gift.”
“Don’t worry. It’s for both of us. It’s a marriage saver,” she replied with a cryptic smile.
After two decades of sailing, we have crossed over to the dark side.
A few weeks ago we bought a powerboat, a Nordhavn 43 trawler, that we’ve named Indiscretion. She isn’t a typical go-fast stinkpot kind of powerboat. Her cruising speed of 7 knots isn’t far off from sailing. We won’t win any races. But she’s a stout little ship, with the displacement and hull design to withstand open ocean conditions, and an engine and fuel supply to take us from Seattle to Hawaii on a single tank of diesel. A sistership circumnavigated the world a few years ago. We don’t expect to cross oceans, but we do have plans to go places that require blue water passages, up to Alaska or down to Mexico, and going there in a boat that can handle just about anything provides real peace of mind.
When I was starting out in public accounting, nearly thirty years ago, I got the chance to work for a new partner who had just joined our firm. His name was Joe Sambataro, an Italian-American from New Jersey, full of blunt honesty and character, and we hit it off right away. He became an important mentor and eventually recruited me to join a small staffing firm in Tacoma as a financial analyst when he joined as CFO. He would later retire, then come back as CEO. Joe is now the Chairman of the Board of this multi-billion publicly traded staffing firm.
Back when I first began working for Joe, he shared three wishes for me: Marriage, Mortgage, and a Boat. In that order. He figured that an employee with a spouse and a mortgage would stick around longer than a single guy with no ties to anything. The boat, he said, was just for fun. Joe liked boating and especially fishing off a boat.
I took Joe’s advice and in short order got married to my beautiful wife Lisa, and signed a mortgage on our Vashon Island home. I soon began looking for a sailboat.
Departing Quartermaster Marina
