Fall cruising in the Pacific Northwest brings such a variety of weather conditions. Full sun, clouds, rain, blustery winds, even hail and thunderstorms. We canceled many cruising opportunities on our sailboats when the forecast was iffy, but not anymore. This trawler provides a comfortable sanctuary for just about any kind of weather. And beautiful sunsets too. Trawler life is good!
I spend a lot of time with my nose in a book. Last year, I read 61 books, and I'm on track to read that many again in 2021. Yet, as fast as I read, I can't seem to make a dent in my To-Be-Read pile. So many books, so little time. Sometimes it feels like I'm running on a treadmill with an ever-increasing speed.
Lately, I've been questioning whether this strategy of gulping down so many books is wise after all. When I scan down the list of the books I've read so far this year, a few stand out, but many are already a blur. I hover over a few on the list — wait, did I actually read that?
I'm pretty good at taking notes and highlighting favorite passages for most of the books I read. I subscribe to ReadWise, which provides a terrific way to resurface the best parts of past books I've enjoyed. That review process, along with the ability to automatically import those highlights into Obsidian, prompted me to switch my reading notes over from Craft. And while I do see benefits of these daily reviews and the curation of my reading notes and quotes into a personal knowledge management system, I still feel like I'm somehow not getting the most out of all these hours of reading.
Maybe reading more books isn't the right answer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us to shoot for big goals with his advice to "aim above the mark to hit the mark," though I'm sure he didn't mean that for a reading quota. In Experience, he finds himself drawn to just "the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton." Gustave Flaubert seemed to agree: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."
Could deeply reading (and rereading) a few classic books be better than my shotgun approach of inhaling a book or two every week?
In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov said: "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." In a series of university lectures, Nabokov shared his take on a half-dozen classics from Marcel Proust, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and others. I've read most of these, but after reviewing Nabokov's deep analysis of these books, I realized I had merely skated over the icy surface of these great works. I did not probe deep enough into the book's structure and writing techniques, did not discover, in Nabokov's words, that "shiver of artistic satisfaction" when a reader truly communes with the author.
Is this kind of deep, analytical reading necessary? I mean, can’t we just enjoy the books in the way the author intended them? Life is short; why read the same books again and again? I imagine Vladimir looking at me over his reading glasses as he delivers his judgment:
If a person thinks he cannot evolve the capacity of pleasure in reading the great artists, then he should not read them at all. After all, there are other thrills in other domains: the thrill of pure science is just as pleasurable as the pleasure of pure art. The main thing is to experience that tingle in any department of thought or emotion. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I slink a little lower in my chair under Nabokov's withering gaze. I know he's right. If I'm going to spend all this time reading, why not aim a little higher?
Last year, I joined a group of like-minded readers on #BookTwitter to read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I had a few false starts over the years with this six-volume masterpiece, known for its pages-long sentences and intricate narrative style. Reading just ten pages a day with a cohort of distinguished readers helped me stay on track and enjoy it more. During the hard going parts, I felt better after seeing tweets from others who shared my exasperation. Misery loves company. We finished the final volume together in June — a voyage of more than 4,000 pages — and I was glad to be done with it. Few tingles, and even fewer shivers, I'm afraid. But, I wonder now if that first reading of Proust wasn't simply the preamble to a second, more profound reading? Could I start again, now knowing the storyline and themes, and burrow deeper under the skin of this recognized classic?
I'll be honest: I'm not ready to dive back into Proust. But, I do believe I need to change my approach in reading these classics.
I've joined another #BookTwitter group this month to read George Eliot's Middlemarch, considered one of the greatest novels of all time. I read this a long time ago but remember little about it. With Nabokov's advice fresh in my mind, I've decided to use this book as an experiment in deep, focused reading. For Middlemarch, I'm making some pronounced changes in my reading style:
After finishing Middlemarch, I'll have a better sense of whether this deep reading approach provides the kind of return I expect. If it does, I'm very tempted to change my approach to reading in 2022. Forget the pressure of a sixty-book GoodReads challenge or an unending "To Be Read" pile to tackle. Instead, I'll spend the year reading just a few great books, deeply, with fun reads thrown in at bedtime.
We can't slow the race of time, but we can choose to be more discerning and diligent in making use of the time we have. Augustus had the right of it: Festina lente. Make haste, slowly.
For the past ten years, I have been on a mission to eradicate paper from my work and home life. I can now access information more quickly and from anywhere, whether at sea or at the Apple Store where I need to produce the invoice for a dead MacBook Pro. And yet, one hold-out refuses to go gently into that dark night of paper annihilation: my Field Notes notebooks. These pint-sized memo books with their quirky designs and durable paper still travel with me just about everywhere. I sometimes wonder at the irony of using a $1,000 iPad Pro as a lap desk to scribble in a $4 notebook.
With everything else in my life so digitally focused, why do I still fill one of these 48-page Field Notes every three or four weeks?
This morning, I pulled out a year’s worth of tattered notebooks to see if I could solve this mystery. To be honest, I was apprehensive at looking too closely. Part of me wanted to leave well enough alone and not probe, perhaps fearing that I would find a bunch of meaningless jibber-jabber and force myself to give up these little books that I love so much. With some trepidation then, I skimmed the scribbles, diagrams, lists, weird dreams, single underlined words, whole paragraphs of intense, slanted scrawl, arrows, and lots of scratched-out words. Each notebook told a confused story about my state of mind at the time: hopes and worries, looming decisions, crazy, half-baked ideas, and incomplete solutions to problems that troubled me. As I flipped the pages, I watched meandering thoughts morph and solidify under the pressure of continued probing and analysis.
Give me a small canvas of blank paper and a pen, and I can slip into a deeper mental state than I seem to achieve in front of a blinking cursor. After a few minutes of doodles, I may even open a tiny crack into my subconscious. The physical act of handwriting may provide a familiar comfort that allows my mind to settle and focus. Perhaps it’s the simplicity of the interface: no buttons, no battery to charge, just me and my ill-formed thoughts. Maybe the old leather cover I use to carry the notebook and pen, scuffed and softened over many years of use, sends a chemical signal through my fingertips to open, to relent.
Psychologists have shown that writing things down on paper helps you remember better. The folks at Field Notes understand this:
Jamie Rubin, a writer and technology enthusiast, recently returned to notecards for his reading notes after struggling to reap the benefits he expected from keeping these inside Obsidian. I store my reading notes in Craft but have encountered few of the promised eureka moments since adopting this Zettelkasten technique of hyper-linked notes. While I appreciate the ability to retrieve and update these notes quickly, I don’t seem to be able to think as clearly (or as abstractly) within an app like Craft as I do on paper.
In one of Nabokov’s lectures on literature 1, he defines memory as one of the four key attributes of a good reader (or thinker). Whether you remember things by writing them down or searching your Obsidian vault might be a wash. He calls having a nearby dictionary the second important attribute. Here, I tip my hat to the internet. How satisfying it is to tap an unknown word on the screen of a Kindle with my finger, and as if by magic, a well-crafted definition (or translation, or Wikipedia page) appears without leaving my place in the text. But, it’s his final two attributes of a good reader, that of having an active imagination and some artistic sense, that strike me as the hardest to achieve digitally. Artistry and imagination are still the dominion of pad and paper.
When I’m stuck on something, I instinctively reach for my little notebook — not my iPad. And while what I capture is often raw and disjointed, I review these notes every morning over coffee, checking in with my subconscious, allowing fragments to inch together as if by magnetic pull. It might take days or even weeks of scribbles and circled words to reach true clarity of thought.
When Jimmy Buffett has an idea for a song — sometimes just a phrase — he writes it down on any available scrap of paper and stuffs it into an old sea chest. When he’s ready to write some new music, he sits down and pulls out all those scribbles, which I imagine must be torn off bar napkins and beer coasters, and sorts through them, one by one. He says many of his most popular songs marinated in his sea chest before emerging as lyrics.
I do something similar in Field Notes. I reserve the last page of every notebook for my “Compost Heap,” a technique I borrowed from Neil Gaiman’s wonderful MasterClass on storytelling. Here, I write down bizarre images from dreams, lines from songs, evocative phrases, short descriptions of people I’ve met, places I’ve visited — really anything. Over a few weeks, the list grows to a page or two of disconnected images and ideas, and often, I discover a larger mosaic than my conscious mind could articulate on its own.
The whimsy of Field Notes encourages this kind of abstraction. These little books would be plenty happy to record Scrabble scores or grocery lists or meeting notes. I’ve used beautiful leather-bound journals in the past and felt that unease at despoiling that first cream-colored, thick-stock blank page. Something fancy like that would freeze me in my tracks. But a wee Field Notes notebook urges me to scribble thoughts that haven’t left that gauzy symbolic state in my mind or bump together two very different lines of thinking whose offspring becomes a new insight.
Don’t get me wrong: a computer is terrific for capturing, storing and retrieving transactional or reference information. I would never go back to the stacks of files and paper that once littered my office. And while I love the promise of technology helping me uncover new insights and connections, I have come to accept — and celebrate — that my best thinking still takes place within the humble confines of a pen and a Field Notes notebook.
In my office, I keep an old photograph of the Buckaroo Tavern in the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont. The photo truly captured the character of the place: two chrome-festooned Harley Davidson motorcycles parked up on the sidewalk out front, bright orbs from the lights hung over the pool tables, and an outstretched arm and pool cue of a patron poised in mid-shot. I spent many nights at this dive bar as a young man. My eyes burned from the cigarette smoke, and the rough-looking biker crowd that congregated at the bar would often chuckle over their beers at this clean-cut accountant toting a pool cue case, but I loved the place. I had the photograph framed when we first moved to Vashon Island. It hangs between a picture of Mark Twain standing before a pool table considering his next shot and a signed photograph of Jack Dempsey in his famous boxing stance. But, it’s the tavern picture that has caught my attention lately as I think back on that long ago life before kids.
You see, Lisa and I returned from a 3,000-mile road trip to drop off our son at college last week. And then, a few days later, we waved goodbye to our daughter as she drove off in her loaded-down Nissan to start her public accounting career in Los Angeles. In the space of a single heartbeat, the house went from cacophony and laughter to a hushed stillness.
We’ve been moving toward this day gradually for decades, but the suddenness caught me off guard, like a stiff poke to the solar plexus. For the first few days, I felt listless, perhaps depressed. It helped to keep busy, cleaning out the clutter and detritus left behind in the wake of these departures. My daughter’s old bedroom is now a nicely furnished guest room. I pass by it on the way downstairs each morning, and the shock of seeing her personality stripped from the room has not worn off. I should probably close the door.
Now I’m doing what any reasonable dad would do in this situation: I’m organizing the tool shed. I’ve measured out the available wall space for an elaborate tool storage system to deal with twenty-five years of disarray. I woke up last night dreaming of tools and freshly-shined equipment hanging in perfect order on the south wall of the shed, which I’m pretty sure has a clinical name in psychological circles.
At night, I’m reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart to see if some old-fashioned Buddhist wisdom might help. The title felt appropriate for my situation. The advice here is blunt: lean into the loneliness and despair. Accept that life is impermanent and hopeless. “Nothing is what we thought,” she writes.
Even Rosie, the robot vacuum that haunts our rooms and hallways in search of dust and dog hair, seems out of sorts. Amidst the typical family clutter, I swear she steered for the stray charging cables and hair scrunchies that littered her path, opting for a short night’s work as she squealed out error codes in protest. Now, with no obstacles in her way, she carries out the nightly routine in sullen silence. I’ve watched her run into a wall, back up, and run into the same wall, again and again. I know how she feels.
The phone rings daily with questions and puzzlement: what kind of pots and pans should I buy? Why isn’t the internet working? And most recently, a texted picture of a massive drift of white suds covering the kitchen linoleum after using Joy dish soap in the automatic dishwasher. Still, I know these calls are numbered. Their lives will soon blossom out in every direction, with little time left for mom and dad. Cats in the Cradle has become the soundtrack playing in the back of my mind.
I’ve pondered my own abrupt departure from home at seventeen and the impact I must have had on my parents. I don’t recall any remorse at leaving, so desperate to begin a life of independence. It seems Karma has found me on the receiving end of that same natural impulse.
To be fair, we did plan for this eventuality, knowing the two of us would need to fill in the vacuum of our departed children. We bought an ocean-going trawler yacht that will take us on amazing adventures up to Alaska and down to Mexico — something Lisa and I dreamed of doing long before we started a family. And we still have each other: two lovebirds and best friends who laugh and grow quiet at most of the same things.
As I consider my options for pegboard (galvanized steel, ABS plastic, or good old-fashioned fiberboard?) and the kind of hooks and baskets I will need to organize all my tools and gadgets, I understand this present obsession isn’t healthy. I should be provisioning the boat for an extended fall cruise through the Gulf Islands and Desolation Sound, glad we’re not encumbered with school-age children. Or taking my beautiful wife to Tacoma to find a new dive bar where we can resume a 25-years-in-waiting game of nine-ball.
Yet, I can’t shake this feeling that If I could walk through my little shed and admire the nicely spaced rows of hammers and garden implements, the gas trimmer hanging just so, the old jumble of tools and tarps and junk transformed into calming straight lines and order, then ... well, then I could begin to accept this new reality, to acclimate to a universe where the axis is just slightly off-kilter, like the deck of a sailboat under a broad reach. Call it a last-minute negotiation in a deal already struck — a vestige of permanence before we set ashore in this undiscovered country while the ships burn, leaving no trace but rusted keels in the shallows.
On a boat, the most basic conveniences of life — like running water — require forethought and attention. In this post, we explore how we manage water aboard our Nordhavn 43 trawler.
Ample fresh water aboard Indiscretion is one of the many extravagances we enjoy aboard this expedition trawler. Our Catalina sailboat had just 50 gallons of fresh water, which we stretched to six or seven days of cruising with careful dishwashing and quick cockpit showers for the kids. The trawler holds 300 gallons of fresh water with onboard water-making capability that, in theory, provides us with an infinite supply.
With greater supply comes greater use. Besides washing dishes, we take hot showers every day and wash our clothes in a Splendide combination washer/dryer. Every toilet flush uses fresh water. I wash down the boat using fresh water outlets in the bow and stern after most passages. Even the watermaker uses fresh water during its flushing routine. Between two people, we use about 50 gallons of water a day when we’re cruising. With our 300 gallon tank, that equates to six days of water — ironically, the same as our sailboat.
Water treatment on our sailboat was pretty simple. Once a year, I treated the 50-gallon tank with a small amount of bleach and let it sit overnight. I drained and refilled the tank twice, then patted myself on the back for a job well done.
On the trawler, it’s not so simple. For one thing, draining and filling a 300-gallon water tank takes a long time, let alone twice. And wasting that much fresh water makes me cringe. But more importantly, bleach damages the expensive membrane in watermakers that use fresh water for periodic flushing and is, therefore, a no-no in our trawler’s water system.
Without our bleach routine, I had concerns about the potability of water from the tanks without some kind of water treatment or filtering process. I considered installing an inline water treatment system, but in the end, we opted for the simplicity of a dockside water filter setup that many RV owners use. We bought an Ultra with VirusGuard from ClearSource that filters incoming dock water in three stages: a 5-micron filter that removes any sediment or rust in the water; a 0.5-micron coconut shell carbon filter for improved taste and smell; and finally, a NASA-designed filter that removes any bacteria, cysts, and viruses from the water before it enters our tank. We keep a Brita water filter pitcher in the galley for drinking water.
We keep the Ultra in the lazarette locker and pull it out when we take on water at docks. The filters last about a year and a replacement set costs about $60 from ClearSource. While dock water here in the Pacific Northwest is generally potable, we definitely noticed an improved taste in our water after switching over to this filter system.
Besides a large water tank, we have a Spectra watermaker that transforms seawater into drinking water using a desalination process. The system makes 12.5 gallons of fresh water an hour, so we can keep up with our daily usage by running the system four hours a day. For expeditions like our planned trip up the inside passage to Alaska, we’ll run the watermaker in open water while underway and never worry about running short.
Making water at anchor is also possible, but comes with some cautions. Our system utilizes two pre-filters — a 20-micron filter and a 5-micron filter — before seawater enters the watermaker itself. When making water in open sea, these pre-filters might need to be cleaned every two or three months. When making water at anchor, the pre-filters might need to be cleaned daily or even hourly. The Spectra provides a pre-filter status on a control panel in the pilothouse during the water-making process that helps you track how mucked up the pre-filters have become.
The process of cleaning (or replacing) pre-filters is straightforward, if a bit disgusting: First, the seacock that feeds seawater to the watermaker must be turned off to prevent flooding the lazarette. Then, you unscrew the filter bowls from their housings with a filter wrench, careful not to spill too much seawater. I learned to keep a disposable aluminum baking pan nearby to catch the inevitable spills. Once the filters have been extracted, they get rinsed using a seawater wash-down hose on the swim platform. Words fail to describe the smell coming off these filters during this hosing-off process: a bouquet of rotten eggs, seaweed, decay, and a dark, primordial stench you hope washes off as it splashes around your bare feet. When the filters look clean and the water runs clear, they get a final rinse of fresh water and spend a couple of days of drying in the sun to kill off any lingering sea life before being put back in rotation for the next filter swap. A pre-filter can withstand a half dozen cleanings like this before needing to be discarded. I pop in a clean pair of filters from a supply I keep near the watermaker and apply a little silicone grease to the o-ring of the filter housing to keep a good seal before reattaching. Finally, I reopen the watermaker seacock, and we’re back in the watermaking business.
We had family join us midway through a long stretch of anchoring during a recent cruise through the San Juan Islands. I had neglected to run the watermaker, and our water tank was getting low. We were anchored inside Garrison Bay on the northwest corner of San Juan Island, which was crowded with boats ahead of the July 4th holiday. I decided to make water in the morning and night to coincide with our daily running of the generator to boost our water supply. However, after just one hour, the pre-filter alarm sounded in the pilothouse. The brand new pre-filters I installed at the start of our cruise were miserably clogged. I cleaned the filters and tried again, only to have the alarm sound again the next hour. Either the bay was too shallow (we had just five feet under our keel at low tide) or too crowded, but I gave up trying to make water after the second alarm. We had to watch our water usage for a couple of days — no showers, careful dishwashing, etc. Leaving Garrison Bay, I ran the watermaker on our two-hour trip to Sucia Island without any trouble and again once we were anchored in Echo Bay to replenish our tank.
I learned I need to be more proactive about managing our water levels when we’re away from docks. I had many opportunities to make water ahead of our stay in Garrison Bay, but became complacent. Likewise, I discovered that some anchorages are much better for making water than others, that making water is better on an incoming tide, and that the best water you can make is underway in open sea.
Indiscretion has Tecma electric toilets that magically flush with fresh water at the touch of a button. I still delight in this technological marvel after so many years of pumping seawater by hand into the heads of our sailboats.
About halfway through our recent cruise, I encountered a problem with our master stateroom toilet. Pressing the flush button caused the toilet to make all the sounds of a proper flush, but no water flowed through the bowl. Huh.
I tried the nearby sink. No water. I tried the galley sink. Nothing. I knew the tank couldn’t be empty. If a tap had been left open, we would have heard the water pump cycling. Could the tank itself have developed a leak? My mind raced through all the dependencies we had on running water. Toilet flushing rose quickly to the top. No water, no toilets. I began cursing myself for not keeping a spare pump aboard. A Marco UP6/e supplies our water and runs about $700 to replace. I was waiting to buy one on sale, but hadn’t found a deal before leaving for this trip. Ugh.
I powered off the water pump at the distribution panel and waited a few adrenaline-filled moments before powering it back on. Resetting power to the water pump restored water pressure. Whew! A scan of the Marco operating manual led me to a series of coded blinking lights on the pump itself, which could mean overheating, an obstruction, or a leak somewhere in the system. A quick search on the Nordhavn Owner’s Group forum revealed that other owners with this pump had similar malfunctions without a clear resolution apart from powering off and on.1
That morning, I ordered a spare Marco pump from Fisheries Supply in Seattle by express delivery to Roche Harbor Marina. I may be $800 poorer, but I’ve eliminated a critical dependency aboard this expedition trawler that would disrupt our cruising plans. A captain must keep the water flowing and the toilets flushing!
Questions or comments about water systems aboard Indiscretion? Leave us a comment below.
One of the great joys of anchoring out in a beautiful bay is the free time you have to focus on lingering boat projects. When you’re away from the boat, these issues seem to stack up until a later day. But here in Hunter Bay in the beautiful San Juan Islands? I had plenty of time.
My focus of the day: a wiring problem lurking somewhere in the pilothouse that randomly kept flipping our Maretron system circuit breaker. This happened when I opened or closed the ship’s service panel door, so I suspected a loose wire somewhere.
I had done just about everything I knew to do: wiring checking and connection tightening, temperature reading with an infrared thermometer, voltage checking with a voltmeter, and wire tracing to the Maretron computer. It all seemed fine, which led me to think the breaker switch itself must be failing. This conclusion troubled me. The internet is full of caution about replacing a circuit breaker when the real problem is a short somewhere, akin to bringing down a new canary to your coal mine after the last one up and died.
As I pondered this dilemma, I watched a fellow trawler yacht drop its anchor out in the channel for at least the tenth time today. The boat left the anchorage early this morning, headed out of the bay, only to stop about 500 yards out and drift. They soon dropped their anchor again, but out in the middle of the channel. I thought initially they meant to do some fishing. But an hour later, the boat pulled up the anchor and headed out again, only to stop and drift, then redeploy their anchor. The process repeated all day. It sure seemed like engine trouble.
I decided to take a break from my circuit breaker problem and head over in the tender to see if I could lend a hand. The idea that I might help another boater with an engine issue would have been preposterous three years ago, but I’ve learned a lot since then. Who knows, but maybe I could help? At a minimum, I could tow them into the anchorage for the night.
I arrived alongside the boat to find a flustered skipper. The boat's gas inboard was overheating, and he had run out of ideas on what could be wrong. It was the hottest day in history here in the northwest, and he was drenched in sweat. His first mate smiled, but looked worried.
We talked through the possibilities: clogged raw water intake? Good flow and no obstructions. Bad impeller? Replaced, though the old one looked fine. Coolant level? Topped off. He thought it must be a clogged or corroded heat exchanger. I asked him if he had an infrared thermometer to confirm it wasn't just a bad gauge. He didn't have one.
I motored back to the boat to retrieve my Fluke 62 Max IR thermometer. I learned the importance of carrying one of these indispensable gadgets aboard after our first Northern Lights Training class with Bob Senter. I take temperature readings of a half dozen areas in the engine room when I complete my routine checks underway. Knowing the baseline temperature of your coolant tank, stabilizer system, alternator, prop shaft, etc. can help identify potential problems early if something is running hotter than normal. These point-and-shoot thermometers can also verify temperature readings from digital and analog gauges that can sometimes produce erroneous, heart-thumping readings.
After checking all parts of the engine with the IR gun, the trawler skipper was able to confirm that his engine wasn’t overheating, despite a gauge in the pilothouse saying otherwise. It turns out he had pulled out a faulty temperature gauge on the flybridge last week and planned to replace it at some point. He reinstalled the non-working gauge, and voilà, the pilothouse gauge started working correctly again. He promised to buy an IR thermometer when he got back to his home port in La Conner. His smile as he waved goodbye was priceless.
I returned to my Indiscretion and my circuit breaker problem, feeling good about helping another boater in a jam. Lord knows I’ve been the recipient of some good boating Samaritans these past three years. I finally got to pay some of that goodwill forward. I inspected the circuit breaker again, thinking I would detach it from the ship’s service panel to see if I could detect any cracks or corrosion. That’s when I noticed the single screw that attaches the circuit breaker to the panel was loose. Really loose.
When I opened or closed the panel door, the loose screw allowed the circuit breaker to shift just enough to nudge the switch off. Tightening a single screw solved the entire issue.
I laughed at myself when I realized how simple the problem was. Sometimes we look too far beyond the most obvious solution in front of us. A faulty temperature gauge, a loose screw. As the old saying goes: “When you hear hoofbeats in the night, look for horses — not zebras.”
With most of my nautical life spent on sailboats, marine electronics has never been much of a focus area. Our most well-equipped cruising sailboat carried just basic navigation equipment: an autopilot, a chartplotter, and instruments for speed, depth, and wind. I knew that more sophisticated systems were available; I just didn’t see the need for anything more complex, though radar would have been a welcome addition with all the fog we have here in the summer.
Indiscretion has navigation instruments and electronics that are far more advanced than any of our sailboats. Besides the basics, we have an open array radar with a satellite compass that overlays radar images right on the chart. We have an NMEA 2000 network running throughout the boat that tracks all sorts of information when we’re underway or at anchor. A Maretron monitoring system tells us, for example, how much fuel and water sit in our tanks, the angle of our rudder, the temperature of the sea, and how far we’ve drifted from our anchor — all from a computer screen in the pilothouse. In our three years aboard the trawler, I haven’t felt the need to add much to our electronics suite. A compass, an open view of the water ahead, and a good chart felt like all I needed.
That is until I spent some time this spring buddy boating with marine technical wizard Steve Mitchell. Besides being a super nice guy, Steve knows more about boat electronics than anyone I’ve ever met, and he freely shares his expertise on his blog, SeaBits.com. If you have any interest in marine electronics, especially getting internet on a boat, have a look at this wonderful resource.
Steve has equipped his beautiful Ocean Alexander with practically every electronic tool you can imagine. He gave me a boat tour of Rendezvous when we shared a dock at Fossil Bay on Sucia Island. While Steve pointed out all the myriad screens and panels from his helm station, I felt a little dizzy. So much information. So many gadgets! He showed me his navigation software, TimeZero Professional, and screen after screen of critical navigation information. My head hurt a little after trying to understand it all.
I invited Steve aboard Indiscretion for a tour of our pilothouse the next day. He took in our instrument panel like a veteran quarterback scanning down field for an open receiver. In a few minutes, he was flipping through never-before-seen setup screens on our Furuno TZ Touch chartplotter and our Furuno NavNet MFD 12. He poked button combinations on our Furuno autopilot that I didn’t know were possible. He turned back to the chartplotter.
“I don’t see any saved routes here. How do you navigate from place to place?”
“Oh, I just use the autopilot and spin that little course change dial,” I said.
Steve studied my face for a moment to make sure I wasn’t joking, then shook his head. “You should enter your route into the chartplotter and let it steer your autopilot for you. That way, you aren’t constantly changing course, and you can keep a better watch for logs and other boats.”
“This chartplotter can talk to that autopilot?” I asked. The possibilities bloomed in my imagination. I could sit back like Captain Kirk and hand off navigation duties to Ensign Furuno.
After a few more minutes of poking around, Steve gave me his verdict. “You’ve got a good set of navigation equipment that will work well with modern electronics, but the brain of your system,” he said, pointing at the NavNet MFD, “is beyond obsolete. You’re probably due to replace both Furuno MFDs and the TZT Touch with current models.”
I swallowed. That sounded expensive.
“Or you could just get a NUC and run TimeZero,” he offered. “That’s probably what I would do.”
After Steve’s visit aboard Indiscretion, I found myself dreaming about the boat steering herself for long passages while I sat back in the captain’s chair, gazing at the sea ahead and taking note of the many wondrous sights in the ship’s log. I tallied the cost of replacing our older NavNet 3D units with the current generation of Furuno chartplotters to modernize our pilothouse and flybridge navigation systems. The total cost, including an estimate for professional installation, would run close to $20,000.
I researched Nobeltec’s TimeZero navigation software, which runs on a Windows PC (no Mac version) and can interface with most modern marine navigation equipment. After reading and rereading online features and capabilities, what I saw during my tour aboard Rendezvous began to make more sense.
I discovered that a NUC is a tiny Windows PC made by Intel that many trawler owners use to run TimeZero. They are popular because of their small size, impressive performance, low power needs, and relatively low cost. NUCs also appeal to the DIY crowd because swapping memory and storage is dead simple.
Fate and good karma conspired a month later when I won a raffle prize of a free license of TimeZero Navigator at the 2021 Nordhavn Rendezvous (thank you, Nobeltec and all the event sponsors!).
That settled it: Indiscretion would get a second brain.
I purchased the latest generation NUC with an Intel i5 processor for about $500. Another $150 for a 500 GB SSD hard drive and 16 GB of RAM, and I had a versatile onboard PC that would run any software I might need on the boat. I picked up a DC converter on Amazon to use 12V to power the NUC to minimize battery drain. I rounded out the setup with a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Next, I spent $1,000 to upgrade my free copy of TimeZero Navigator to the Professional version. Typically, a recreational boater wouldn’t need this extra functionality, but in our case, I could upgrade to ultimate navigation software for $1,000 or pay $500 to unlock the module to connect TZ Navigator to our Furuno system (Professional comes unlocked). I went big.
Indiscretion has a 15” marine-grade Furuno monitor in the pilothouse that provides an easy-to-see screen even in direct sunlight and dims automatically to preserve your night vision during nighttime passages. We use this monitor for our Maretron system and a variety of cameras on the boat. I connected the NUC to its last remaining video port, eliminating the need for another screen on the pilothouse dash.
A week later, the boxes arrived with the computer and its innards. The TZ Professional software license codes sat waiting for me in my email inbox. All I had to do was set it up. I installed the hard drive and RAM modules in mere minutes. That was easy. But when I powered up the NUC, I learned that Windows wasn’t installed. Uh oh. I would need to download the Windows installer program on another Windows computer. Ugh. This is why I use a Mac.
Luckily, I keep a cheap HP laptop in a drawer on the boat for updating our Maretron monitoring system. I used it to download Windows 10 onto a thumb drive and, after deciphering some cryptic installer options, had Windows 10 Professional running successfully on the NUC.
Next, I installed TimeZero Professional and then all my charts. Another benefit of going with the Professional version is that the charts I bought for our existing Furuno NavNet system transfer over free.
Then, the moment of truth. Would this NUC and TimeZero software connect to my Furuno navigation instruments and radar? I powered the Furuno gear up, plugged in the NUC to our NavNet network using an ethernet cable, and ran the connection wizard in TimeZero.
After some initial failures, I received navigation data in TimeZero, but no matter how many configurations I tried, I could not get TimeZero to send steering commands to our Furuno autopilot. I spent a long weekend searching Furuno and TimeZero forums and tinkering with settings unsuccessfully.
I called TimeZero technical support on Monday for assistance. A friendly support technician named Lucas picked up on the second ring, and I described my problem.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “You can’t connect to your old equipment using ethernet. You need an Actisense NGT-1 USB cable, so you can connect directly to your NMEA 2000 network.”
I found the $240 cable on defender.com and a $20 T-Connector to patch into the boat’s network backbone.
A week later, the cable arrived, and I installed it in place of the ethernet cable. I ran the TimeZero connection wizard. Still, no luck.
I called TimeZero support again. Lucas answered on the first ring. He started asking questions about network settings and whether TimeZero was connected to the NMEA network. My uncertain replies must have been a clue that I didn’t really know what I was talking about. “Do you have boat internet?” He asked.
“Yes, I do.” Finally, a question could answer.
“OK, great. Let me take over your TimeZero system, and we’ll figure this out.”
In a few moments, Lucas had full control over my system. I watched as screens quickly appeared and vanished as we chatted.
“Yeah, so you aren’t connected to your NMEA 2000 network. Did you install the drivers for the Actisense cable?”
“Uh …” I stammered.
“No worries. I can do that from here. Also, the firmware on the cable needs to be updated to work with the latest version of our software.”
After a few minutes, Lucas had the drivers and latest firmware installed. He ran the connection wizard in Time Zero again, and this time the software connected to the NMEA 2000 network. A simple checkbox near the end of the connection process integrated the autopilot. Another click added TimeZero’s cloud service for my iPad. The system was now fully integrated and operational, thanks to terrific technical support from TimeZero.
We had a chance to put Indiscretion’s new navigation system to work on a cruise to the San Juan Islands last week.
The night before departure, I built the route for our first leg of the trip: Quartermaster Harbor to Port Ludlow. I plotted the course from my easy chair at home using TZ iBoat on my iPad. The iPad app lacks much of the functionality of the desktop software, but the touch interface for plotting a course is terrific.
The next morning, I powered up our navigation equipment and the new TimeZero system as the engine warmed up. The route I created the night before on the iPad appeared as if by magic, ready to activate on the pilothouse screen.
TimeZero provides an estimate of the best time to cast off using a route optimization routine. Currents can run pretty strong in Puget Sound and the northern islands, so planning your trip around them is critical, especially on a slow boat like a trawler. Before this, we cobbled together a few different tide and current apps to make our best guess on when to leave. TimeZero turns this into a more exact science, providing a departure time to the minute to minimize your voyage time.
As we left the marina and steamed out of Inner Quartermaster Marina, I activated our chosen route and turned the helm over to TimeZero. The route transformed into a highway shape with an icon for Indiscretion chugging down it. I sat back in the helm chair and watched the magic unfold. Waypoints arrived and passed astern, with the autopilot responding perfectly for each course change. Instead of focusing on our course, I could simply watch for boat traffic and obstructions in the water. Other than diverting for commercial traffic and a few logs, I rarely interfered with the helm. On the five-hour trip, TimeZero steered 99.5% of the time without needing a single coffee break.
Between the NUC PC, TimeZero software, and the ActiSense cable, I spent about $2,000 to equip Indiscretion with this new navigation setup. This a terrific bargain considering these benefits:
Two Are Better Than One. Before this, I relied exclusively on the 14” TZ Touch chartplotter for navigation. That worked fine, but having two independent navigation screens directly in front of the helm is much better. The TimeZero screen shows our route, radar overlay, AIS targets and closest points of approach, and time and distance left on our trip. I use the chartplotter screen for all other chart-related information. I can zoom out and pan forward to check the waterways ahead while keeping tabs on our current course at a zoomed-in level on the left. Or, I can zoom in to a much finer detail on the chartplotter to check charted depths, again without disrupting my view of our current voyage. Both screens show similar information, but I can tailor the views to fit any navigational need I might have.
The Power of the Cloud. TimeZero connects wirelessly to the internet for chart and weather updates and extends the reach of AIS by incorporating vessel tracking via MarineTraffic.com. For me, the ability to plan a route on my iPad in the salon as Lisa and I discuss our next destination and have that route ready to activate from the pilothouse is a killer feature.
Potential for Future Expansion. This NUC computer has the horsepower to run more than just TimeZero Professional. We need to update our Maretron MBB200C “black box” computer, which runs our vessel monitoring system. This unit is seven years old and can no longer run the current version of Maretron’s N2KView software. A quick call to Maretron support confirmed that the diminutive NUC could take over that function for us, saving us $1,500 in computer replacement and the power drain of running two separate pilothouse computers.
I’ve just scratched the surface of the capabilities of TimeZero Professional, but it’s already become an essential part of our navigation. This new setup has added a ton of new life into the boat’s aging electronics, which will allow me to defer this $20,000 replacement of those expensive chartplotters for at least another year. When I do buy new units, this NUC/TimeZero system will still provide all the benefits of a second navigation brain for the boat.
While spending money on a boat rarely provides a return, I can already tell that this particular setup will pay dividends for years to come.
Sometimes all it takes is a few quiet days and nights at anchor in some secluded bay. Any stress you might have brought aboard fell away in the wake of the voyage, but soon you rediscover a deeper level of relaxation and peace that you only seem to find on a boat. You slip into that easily misplaced rhythm of tide and weather and sky. Maybe it’s the primordial rocking, almost imperceptible on this heavy trawler, or the immediate connection to the fundamentals of life. You don’t dare examine it too closely. Allow the mystery of what drives us seaward be enough.
Part three: After a rough start (part one) and a nice passage north (part two), we concluded our three weeks of island hopping through the beautiful San Sun Islands, enjoying mostly fine weather and deserted anchorages.
After a blissful three days on Stuart Island, we plot the seven-mile course to Jones Island. A strong current flows against us between Speiden and San Juan Island, so we decide to take the northern route above Speiden to see if we could make better time. This turns out to be a mistake. An even stronger current slows us, and worse, a series of tidal eddies have us spinning this way and that as we make our way eastward through New Channel. At the narrowest part of the passage between Speiden and the Cactus Islands, I marvel at a flock of floating birds spinning on the water like they are riding an invisible merry-go-round. Moments later, we enter this vortex to hell ourselves.
Let’s just say we are still cleaning up the mess from our drinks refrigerator spilling all its contents into the salon on one particularly vicious careening lurch. Now I know to lock the refrigerator door before each departure, regardless of how calm the water might seem.
We find the northern bay of Jones Island nearly deserted when we arrive. The dock had been reinstalled a day earlier after being removed all winter. We take a spot along the pier, joining a small powerboat. All three mooring buoys sit vacant. Spring cruising!
We love anchoring and mooring buoys, but docks are incredibly convenient when traveling with dogs. After our ceremonial arrival beer, it’s a simple matter of stepping off the boat and walking down the dock for shore leave for the pups. No crane to lower the tender, no long motoring to the dinghy dock. This is especially welcome when it’s dark and rainy. We find ourselves gravitating towards state park docks a lot this trip.
Friends from Rendezvous and Alexandria join us at Jones for some buddy boating the next day. We enjoy hikes through the island, cookout meals on the dock, and merriment. Getting together with boat friends after a long winter of isolation and social distancing is like salve for our souls.
During a visit here many years ago when our kids were still quite young, we encountered miniature deer that came trotting straight up to us. We have deer on Vashon, but none so small, cute and friendly as these fellas. We watch for them during our hikes, but I’m guessing our two rambunctious dogs spooked them this time.
Jones Island when the kids were young. My, how time flies.
We have fantastic weather for two and half days, but a north wind rolls in on our last night. Our friends are on mooring buoys, and both boats roll and pitch from about midnight on, making for a very uncomfortable night. Even boats at the dock surge and lift with the waves. Our captain friends cast off their lines at dawn for a calmer anchorage elsewhere, and we depart ourselves soon thereafter.
We make a stop at Deer Harbor Marina on Orcas Island to top off our house battery bank, offload some trash, and pick up supplies from the little dockside store. We miss the cut-off for their delicious bacon-cheeseburgers by twenty minutes. Ugh! Next time.
The marina has ample guest moorage with little need for reservations this time of year. An added bonus: off-season moorage rates are less than half of what they will be in the middle of summer.
Deer Harbor at twilight.
We depart Deer Harbor after a single night for Sucia Island. We prefer Fossil Bay to the other anchorage options at Sucia because of the easy access to the shore via the two docks. On this visit, we take a space at the eastern end of the innermost dock. We expect high winds during our stay and don’t trust mooring buoys during a blow. We worry a bit about depth at the dock as the guidebooks are unclear about it. At a zero tide, we still have about two feet of water under our keel (Indiscretion draws 5 1/2 feet), but we wouldn’t want to dock here during a minus tide.
Flat calm in Fossil Bay
We stay three days at Sucia, taking in this beautiful island. We spoke with the park ranger when we first arrived, sharing our delight at how uncrowded it was. “Traffic has quadrupled in the last week or two,” she said. “For a few weeks in February, we didn’t have a single visitor here.” Wow.
We are joined at the dock by our friend Steve Mitchell on Rendezvous. We take long, picturesque hikes through the island trails and enjoy cocktails and boat stories together on the dock in the evenings. Welcomed by utterly flat water and sunshine, we take our tenders for a tour through Ewing Cove, Echo Bay, and even make a landing on prehistoric Finger Island.
On our second night at Sucia, a wind squall steals our Nordhavn welcome mat I left on the swim step. We search the shoreline but can’t spot it. It’s heavy, so it might have simply sunk near the dock. Steve brings out his underwater drone to see if he can spot it. I am doubtful, but I am learning never to doubt the ingenuity of boaters.
[youtu.be/9_B-B3lu4...](https://youtu.be/9_B-B3lu4MU)
We depart Sucia Island in a fresh North wind and uncomfortable seas en route to Friday Harbor. Two days of high winds have whipped President Channel into a maelstrom with rolling waves on the beam. Besides cooler weather, storms and high winds keep you on your toes when you cruise in early spring. This would have been a mighty uncomfortable passage without active fin stabilizers. Steaming along on an even keel in a cross-sea on a blustery morning like this reminds me once again why we chose a go-anywhere Nordhavn trawler.
We take a guest slip for three days at the Port of Friday Harbor Marina to enjoy some shore leave while we wait out another squall. We heard stories about a notorious current that interferes with docking inside the marina, but we hadn’t experienced it ourselves.
Our assigned slip is on K dock on the inside of Breakwater D. Winds gust to 15 knots inside the marina as we make our way between boats circling the fuel dock, then through the tight fairway turns leading to K dock. We don’t have much wiggle room to maneuver. A beamy trawler takes up at least half our assigned berth, so this is going to be a tight squeeze. An impromptu audience assembles along the encircling dock like fight fans at a boxing match to observe any miscues I might make. With prop wash and prop walk, I spin the boat around to face our slip, and slowly ease her forward. I don’t know it yet, but I’m about to experience first-hand the unwavering force of a cross current. I want to avoid hitting the neighboring trawler to port, so I favor the dock to starboard on my approach. With the bow about ten feet inside the slip, I get bad news from Lisa over the headset.
“You’re coming in too too close! Bow to starboard! OH! BOW TO STARBOARD! We’re going to hit the dock!”
These are not the words you want to hear as you dock a boat, especially with a crowd watching.
I find that the thrusters aren’t powerful enough to keep us off the dock, so I give the engine a healthy burst of reverse, and we back out and away from calamity. Once clear of the slip, we have about ten feet behind us before hitting a beautiful 60-foot motor yacht, with other sailboats and yachts in every other direction. I have nightmares about being in this kind of situation. I take a breath, get the boat aligned with our slip, and try again, this time with a little more speed, aiming for the beamy trawler next to our slip. It takes a certain amount of moral certitude to purposely aim your trawler at another yacht. This time, the current corrects our course and we squeeze in without a scrape on either side, though we only have inches to spare all around. The disappointed crowd shuffles off. There should be cheers, but none are offered.
We enjoy our stay at Friday Harbor, taking long walks along the harbor and to the off-leash dog park outside of town. We buy more provisions at King’s Market. We treat ourselves to a delicious date night dinner at Herb’s Tavern, where the two of us played pool so many years ago.
Date night at Herb’s Tavern!
Despite an improving forecast of sunny weather in the islands, family responsibilities require we point the bow south and homeward after almost three weeks of island cruising.
Before releasing the dock lines, I toss a piece of bread in the water off our stern. It bobs there unmoving until a seagull swoops down to devour it. No current. I smile.
We set out at 9 am through Cattle Pass to catch the flood. True to the forecast, the Strait of Juan de Fuca welcomes us with light wind and calm seas. At seven knots, it takes us around four hours to cross this large body of water, which is exposed to the vast Pacific Ocean. On a smooth crossing like this, we mainly focus on avoiding logs and other boats while keeping a keen eye for porpoises and whales. We take hour-long turns at the helm to break things up. I enjoy a hot shower, another cup of coffee, and time in the cockpit watching the islands sink over the horizon in our wake. At trawler speed, you have more time to meditate on life afloat: the changing colors of the water, the astonishing forms a single stretch of sea can take (so beautiful today, but the Strait can be harrowing in a small craft), and the almost evolutionary process of traveling to a new place on a slow boat.
Crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Goodbye San Juans!
The wind picks up and the seas grow as we approach Port Townsend and Admiralty Inlet. The next day’s forecast calls for heavy winds out of the north, so we decide to push on for Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island to make the final leg home shorter.
As we travel down the interminable coast of Whidbey Island, a confused cross-sea has our stabilizer fins working hard to keep us from rolling, though we can’t avoid a corkscrew motion as we navigate a following sea. A little uncomfortable, but nothing like it would be without stabilization. The current pushes us along in excess of eight knots, but eddies and cross-currents toy with our Furuno autopilot, which finds itself in a perpetual state of course correction. I tinker with the Furuno autopilot settings to account for rougher seas, and the steering improves.
After a nine-hour trip, we find space on the outside of the city dock in Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island. We postpone our arrival beers to allow the dogs their shore leave. After such short hops in the islands, nine hours must seem like an eternity to these little fellas. We arrive too late on a Sunday evening to take advantage of our favorite restaurants near the harbor, so we dig a bit in the freezer and cook our last boat meal aboard before home.
We leave Eagle Harbor at 8:30 am on our final leg home. We have a spirited trip past Blake Island and down Colvos Passage. North winds of 25 to 30 knots against an ebb tide work up quite a fetch. We toil our way south with the stabilizers and autopilot working overtime to keep us level and on course.
Gusty winds welcome us as we near inner Quartermaster Harbor. I watch the wind speed climb from 15 knots to 30 knots within a couple of breaths. Typically, a north wind lines up well with our slip, but today it veers in gusts to starboard as we make our approach. We arrive at low tide, which limits our maneuverability near the shallow marina. We consider anchoring out to wait until the winds dies down, but dropping the tender in this kind of wind and choppy seas can be difficult. Plus, we need the practice of docking in all sorts of conditions, right?
First Try: I make our usual approach, hoping the wind might be lighter near the dock. In and out of gear, letting the wind blow us inside our slip. I see that the wind is more abeam than usual, and when we are halfway inside the slip, a 35-knot gust takes hold of us (of course!), and we are pushed hard to port. We touch the dock briefly, but I give the engine a heavy burst of reverse, and we back safely away. I look astern and see mud spun up in our frothy prop wash. Ugh. Low tide has us nearly aground. I spin us around and head for deeper water to regroup.
Second Try: I aim upwind from the slip at the bow of a sailboat docked next to us. Like before, a heavy gust arrives as we near the slip, but the wind direction comes dead astern, pushing us dangerously close to a collision with the sailboat. Ugh! I back straight out this time, about 30 yards from the marina. I have a chat with Lisa over our Eartec radios, and we talk over our options: give it a third try or anchor out. I hold the boat in position in reverse gear as the wind buffets us from behind.
Third Try: I decide on one final try, this time waiting for a lull in the wind. Sure enough, the wind drops to 15 knots, and I edge forward. I was too close to the dock on the first try and too close to the neighboring boat on the second. This time, I choose a middle path with more forward throttle to keep steerage, coming in hot. I don’t realize it at the time, but our bow and stern thrusters have turned off (they shut off by themselves after a short period of inactivity). We slide into the slip at a 30-degree angle, and a burst of hard reverse with the helm hard over stops our forward progress. Prop walk and wind pushes the stern alongside the dock. Lisa has a spring line holding us in the slip faster than I could peek over the side from the flybridge. I try the thrusters to keep the boat positioned alongside the dock and realize the power is off. Good thing I didn’t need these coming in! We both have some adrenaline flowing through our veins for this landing.
Spring cruising in the San Juan Islands was pretty fantastic. Yes, we had some weather and wind, but we have a trawler that can handle just about any conditions we might face afloat. And I got to practice some challenging docking maneuvers that I can build on as we continue our adventures in more far-flung waters.
Across our three weeks of cruising, we had two and half weeks of calm, beautiful, sunny days and nights. We couldn’t help noticing that even better weather arrived in the San Juans after making our trip home, which attracted more boaters. At the start of our voyage, we marveled at the empty bays and anchorages. By the trip’s end, things had started to get busy. Docks began filling up. Mooring buoys were taken.
I think next year we’ll go again, but perhaps even earlier, and stay longer. Even after two decades of visiting these beautiful islands, We can’t seem to get our fill of these pristine islands. Maybe Indiscretion will be the first boat that intrepid Sucia Island park ranger welcomes in 2022.
Fair winds and smooth sailing.
Part Two: Having quickly resolved our hydraulic system problems, the crew of Indiscretion heads north for the San Juan Islands.
After departing Shilshole Marina, we arrive at Port Ludlow and spend the night at anchor to cross the Strait of Juan de Fuca with the tide in the morning. Weather on the Strait can be unsettled this time of year, but we have a nice window before a storm arrives on Sunday. This is our second visit to Port Ludlow and each time we wish we had more time to explore this lovely, protected bay.
Indiscretion at anchor in Port Ludlow
The crossing of the Strait is uneventful — just lumpy. High winds the night before leave behind a confused sea that has our stabilizers flapping this way and that to keep us on an even keel. I make more than a few trips to the engine room during the crossing to ensure the hydraulic system hasn’t sprung any new leaks. We’re steering for Roche Harbor, so we take the more exposed route through Haro Strait, hoping we might see whales again near Lime Kiln Point. No whales this trip, unfortunately.
As we weave our way through Mosquito Pass, we marvel at the empty bays. Not a single boat occupies Westcott Bay or Garrison Bay, and just one lonely sailboat sits at anchor in all of Roche Harbor as we make our approach to the marina. What an incredible change from our visit last September when anchored boats choked all three of these popular destinations.
Guest moorage at Roche Harbor can be challenging to obtain in the summer months, but we have our choice of a number of open slips on the old guest dock. We pick a slip that could easily accommodate a mega-yacht deep inside the marina. The dock is so high we need to disembark from the starboard side rail. Indiscretion looks tiny in this gigantic berth, but we like how close we are to the top of the dock.
On the morning of the storm, we treat ourselves to freshly baked donuts from the Lime Kiln Café, followed by a hike to the Mausoleum in the wind and rain. Despite many trips to Roche Harbor, we had never made the trek. We time our visit with the ringing of the bells from the Roche Harbor Church on this Sunday morning. A solemn dirge drifts through the forest as we take in these sacred grounds. I can’t imagine a more peaceful place of eternal rest than this magical spot, dappled by sunlight, in a forest by the sea.
The Mausoleum near Roche Harbor
We continue our walk in search of a famed isthmus that the guidebooks suggest is just a mile past the mausoleum. We ignore road signs that proclaim the road ahead is restricted to property owners and guests. About a quarter-mile in, I start to feel nervous. We are almost certainly trespassing as we walk by mansion after mansion along this private road. More signs remind us of our ingress. We later discover we each made up a different name of the family we were supposedly visiting in case we were stopped.
As we took in a spectacular seaside estate, I turn to Lisa. “If we were black, would we dare take this walk?” She shakes her head and we talk though this blatant inequality. A black man and woman walking down this country lane would almost certainly be noticed. We exchange waves and smiles with the locals as we make our way past these beautiful homes. I feel shitty about the racial privilege we take for granted and get a glimpse of what it must feel like all the time to be black in this part of the country. We are both unsettled.
We take the long way back to the marina to avoid further trespassing and end up on a gravel and dirt road the carries on up and up through dense woods for some long while in the rain before descending again past the airport and back to the harbor.
After the morning rain subsides, we take the dogs for a walk up the hill to the off-leash dog park. Franklin is a Puggle who simply can’t be trusted off-leash. One interesting smell and he’s gone, no matter how emphatically we implore him to return. Both dogs enjoy stretching their legs around the large park, but soon Frank begins a systematic search of the perimeter for a way to freedom. Sigh.
We return to the boat as the wind builds for storm watch. The marina is well protected from south winds, so there isn’t much drama. We get some hail and lots of shifting and swaying boats. A friend anchored in Prevost Harbor reports 40 knot winds, but the highest gust we see is far below that. It’s nice to watch it all from the security of the dock, all warm and cozy in the panoramic pilothouse.
We depart Roche Harbor the next morning for a short trip to Reid Harbor on Stuart Island. We motor slowly through the empty anchorage and vacant mooring buoys. Two small boats occupy the main dock, so we head for the floating dock. A north wind blows the boat off the dock as Lisa struggles with securing mooring lines to the bull rail. We neglect to don our headsets, so there may or may not have been some unfortunate curse words that carried over the quiet bay as we made fast (by the end of our trip, Lisa ties up to bull rails like a cowboy in a rodeo).
Within a couple of hours, the main dock itself is vacant, and we have the entire bay to ourselves.
In the tender on our way back to Indiscretion
We stay three full days at Stuart Island, establishing a pattern that would stick with us throughout our cruise. While most parks limit your stay to three days, this feels like the perfect amount of time to settle in and really see a place without feeling hurried.
Our first night on Stuart is magical. All is calm. The water reflects the hillside in near-perfect clarity. The sun sets against the backdrop of the western shore of the harbor. I put Linda Ronstadt’s Round Midnight on the boat’s stereo as the wonderful smells of Lisa’s cooking waft through the boat. I feel the stress of the journey sloughing off me, and something more: a warmth welling up inside me of peace, bordering on joy. We enjoy a fabulous meal and good red wine in the salon, taking in the beautiful evening, grinning at one another as if we’d just won the lottery.
The view from one of the hiking trails on Stuart Island
We tied up to the disconnected float in Reid Harbor instead of the dock because of our two dogs. Since there’s no access to shore, the dogs have free rein of the float for as long as no other boats join us. We had this romantic notion that the dogs might pee on the dock in the wee hours of morning and night instead of demanding us to take them ashore in the tender. They do race down the dock to chase off the cackling geese that dare to waddle too close to us, but alas, they fail to consider this 100-foot dock as a suitable place to pee, despite all forms of coaxing. Their dog-logic must consider the dock as part of the boat and thus off limits. Oh well.
The weather remains sunny and calm throughout our stay. I use the float to launch and land our drone for some aerial views of the bay, but my flying skills need a lot of work.
From the drone in Reid Harbor
We criss-cross the island on hikes, taking in amazing vistas and getting exercise in the process. We make the six-mile round-trip hike to the lighthouse on the western edge of Stuart. It feels like we have the whole island to ourselves.
The Stuart Island lighthouse
Our final night in Reid Harbor finds us lacking some important essentials. A trip in the tender to Roche Harbor would take just 15 minutes, but would involve crossing a pretty wide expanse of water in a small boat. The water inside Reid Harbor is glassy. After a little give and take with Lisa about the importance of beer on a boat, I make the trip alone in millpond-like conditions. I loved our sailing years and appreciate our trawler's fuel economy and ocean capabilities, but I sure love going 25 knots every once in a while.
25 knots across a flat, open sea
Keep reading for Part Three of our Early Spring Cruise in the San Juan Islands: Island Jewels.
Part One: The crew of Indiscretion sets out for an open-ended cruise through the San Juan Islands in early spring, but their voyage is in jeopardy within hours of departure.
The San Juan Islands are some of the most beautiful cruising grounds in the world. More than a hundred named islands and reefs with numerous state parks, anchorages, and destination marinas are scattered throughout this archipelago spanning the waters of northwestern Washington state. While currents can sometimes be tricky to navigate, the San Juans are perfect for slow boats like trawlers. The islands are close enough that your next anchorage is usually just an hour or two away, even at seven knots, and there are almost an unlimited number of harbors and inlets to explore.
We’ve made dozens of trips and are still finding new places to visit. Even with all this potential variety, we seem to return to the same places year after year because we love them so much.
Our family has spent many weeks and months boating in the San Juan Islands over the past two decades. Two separate month-long trips stand out as incredible memories we made when the kids were young. But our cruising always took place in the peak season due to school schedules and a general preference for warmer weather. Now, with an empty nest and a comfortable all-weather trawler, why not explore these northern islands in the less crowded off-season? And check out places we’ve always meant to visit, but never found the time?
As we would soon learn, cruising the San Juans in early spring is an incredible experience. Yes, the weather and wind can be a handful at times, but the deserted anchorages and parks are well worth the extra care in trip planning.
We depart Vashon at mid-morning on March 25, headed for Port Ludlow on the ebb, which is around the halfway point from Vashon to the San Juans. Rain flecks the pilothouse windows, but we are snug inside with the hydronic heater blowing warm air at our feet and music playing softly on the pilothouse stereo.
I spent the previous three days provisioning the boat and checking off maintenance tasks. I’m always nervous before casting off on an extended cruise. Will we have mechanical troubles? Do I have all the spares and tools I’ll need to fix whatever might break in a remote anchorage? These worries fade away as we put a few miles astern as the soft edges of a floating world replace the hard lines of a linear land-based life.
The view of the helm on the eve of departure
We enjoy a favorable current for most of the way. In the three hours it takes to travel the length of Vashon Island, we don’t encounter a single pleasure craft. Other than ferry boats, tugboats, and cargo ships, we have the sea to ourselves.
Seattle skyline from the water. Always beautiful
Just north of Seattle, Lisa takes the helm, and I tour the engine room. We do these visits every two or three hours to check the bilges, fuel filters, and temperatures of the engine and equipment. Usually, these inspections are ho-hum. As I wedge myself alongside the rumbling Lugger engine, I glance perfunctorily at the hydraulic system’s oil reservoir that feeds our stabilizer system. My eyes widen. Whoa! What? The oil level has fallen to dangerously low levels. In every previous check over years of doing this, the hydraulic oil level remained stubbornly topped off. Uh oh. The stabilizers minimize side-to-side rolling from waves and wakes using large fins jutting out from both sides of the hull, about four feet below the water. I return to the helm to check the stabilizer status panel just as a low oil level alarm rings out at the console. We center and lock the stabilizer fins and power down the system. Our smooth and level ride turns into a belly-churning rock and roll tumult in a matter of seconds. We decide to divert to Shilshole Marina to sort things out.
Once safely moored at the guest dock, I search the boat for the source of the oil leak. The actuators that power the fins sit inside closets within the master stateroom and head — no sign of leaks or problems there. Inside the engine room, I discover gallons of hydraulic oil sitting in the bilge. I trace the oil upstream to a pressure gauge that has failed under one of the engine room floorboards. A post on the Nordhavn Owner’s Group Internet forum confirms this diagnosis. Other Nordhavns, some far offshore, have experienced this unsettling failure and had to limp a long distance without stabilization. Many have preemptively replaced these time-bomb gauges with test ports where a gauge can be temporarily plugged into the system to check the pressure.
The failed pressure gauge
I share the diagnosis with Lisa as she lounges in the cockpit, warmed by the sunshine on a beautiful March Seattle afternoon, taking in the bustle of Shilshole Marina.
“Well,” she smiles. “This is as good a place to be stuck as anywhere. And you’ll figure it out. You always do.”
Our first mate is not concerned
I toss and turn all that night, worrying about whether I can find the right parts here in Ballard without having to abort our trip. I search for nearby hydraulic outfits on my phone at 3 am when I can’t fall back to sleep.
I rise early. I am chatting with a friendly Uber driver from the Philippines at 7 am. Within an hour, I find the exact replacement gauge at Nebar Hose and Fittings in Ballard. Covich-Williams, right next door, sells me a 5-gallon bucket of hydraulic oil. I convince the Uber driver of a newer Prius to allow me to stow the bucket of oil in his trunk, and we’re on our way back to the marina. I wedge myself inside the engine room by 9 am, my first cup of coffee steaming on top of the engine’s coolant tank. Since the oil has already drained out of the system, it is a simple thing to replace the gauge. The more difficult job is removing the spilled oil from the bilge and cleaning it. I pump the oil into a waste bucket for safe disposal, but more oil soon oozes out from the upper bilge where the leak originated. After three flushes of the upper and lower bilges, I finally have a spotless, dry bilge — what a pain.
With some trepidation, I energize the stabilizer system with the engine running at the dock. No leaks. We complete a sea trial once we clear the breakwater. Again, all good. We are underway again by noon. All systems go.
Every great adventure should start with some mechanical failure and a flood of oil in the bilge; otherwise, we’d take all the elaborate systems aboard these trawlers for granted, right? And honestly, it feels good to solve a problem like this with my own two hands without having to cancel or postpone our trip.
Keep reading for Part Two of our Early Spring Cruise in the San Juan Islands: Heading North.
Back to reality: the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs pressure washing, the bills need paying … but a part of me is still afloat, feeling the gentle sway and rock, marveling at the colors and hush of twilight on a boat in the islands.
I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to be adventuring with this beautiful woman. She’s been putting up with me for almost 25 years, raising children, managing a career, and making the best of the challenges in life. Through it all it seems like she’s always smiling.
I snapped this picture of her in the cockpit at Shilshole Marina. We had to divert there on our way to the San Juan Islands because of a low oil alarm from our stabilizer system. Our first day out on an open ended trip North. Right before I took this picture, I filled her in on the problem: a pressure gauge on the hydraulic system had failed and it allowed all of the hydraulic fluid in the system to dump into the bilge. We were stuck until I could find replacement parts and a 5 gallons of hydraulic oil.
She honestly laughed when I told her this. She said: “Well, if we’re going to be stuck somewhere, this is as good as any. Plus, you’ll figure it out.”
I wasn’t quite as cheerful or confident, but it turns out she was right. An Uber ride to central Ballard put me in walking distance of everything I needed. I might have been covered in hydraulic fluid for a good part of the next morning, but I fixed the problem. And we were back underway.
But, even if I hadn’t been able to fix it, I’m pretty sure she’d still be smiling and making the best of things. I am one lucky guy.
It’s that moment before a cruise when you sit back and consider. Everything is stowed. We have more food than we will likely have a chance to eat. My maintenance list is checked off. The engine room check just now was fine. All systems are go. The boat is literally tugging at her lines to go.
Still, I have that nagging feeling I’ve forgotten something important, that familiar disquiet before casting off the dock lines on a long voyage. I’ve learned to savor this unease. Caution is good at sea. But I also know this feeling flies away like morning fog as soon as we’re 50 yards away from the dock. Heading north tomorrow!
With a welcome change in the weather, the crew of Indiscretion made immediate plans to cast off our dock lines. We unloaded a dock cart full of too much food, topped off the water tank, and set out for a much-needed winter cruise through central Puget Sound.
We decided on Dyes Inlet and the Port of Silverdale as our first destination, though we also considered favorites like Blake Island and Poulsbo. Dyes Inlet provides an ample secure anchorage, and the dock at the Silverdale Waterfront Park is rarely crowded. The nearby park is great for the dogs, and the town of Silverdale is walkable. We’ve visited here a couple of times before on Indiscretion and many times on our previous sailboats.
While we enjoyed calm seas on our trip north, a brisk south wind materialized as we made our way up Dyes Inlet. The marina is near the end of the inlet and lacks protection from southern winds and waves. As we neared, I could see quite a fetch had worked up and wind waves were cresting over the empty dock. I steered from the flybridge while Lisa waited in the cockpit to handle dock lines. With our Eartec headphones, we could talk over our options and discuss any last-minute change in plans.
“The wind’s holding steady at 25 knots, so I’m going to turn up into the wind and dock to starboard,” I said using my confident Captain voice.
“OK, I’ll tie the stern first and then the forward spring.” She sounded pretty confident too.
Docking in windy conditions is my least favorite thing about boating. From my perch on the flybridge, I felt the full force of the wind as we made our turn upwind. There’s a feeling of detachment up this high, like I’m a fascinated spectator and not the person driving the ship. Part of this stems from the distance. On the flybridge, I’m too far away to help with dock lines or position fenders. But I sure can see everything unfold before me. If you’ve ever watched those “Bonehead Boater” videos on YouTube, you’ll agree that this would be a marvelous spot to capture a boat docking debacle.
I approached the wave-splashed dock at a 45-degree angle, feathered the boat slowly through the wind and nosed the bow forward to keep the steerage needed to make one last turn. Despite the wind and heavy chop, control over the boat was steady and controlled. I wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting this in any of our sailboats.
Lisa’s running commentary through the headset provided comfort as we approached the dock: “twelve feet, ten feet, eight feet, FIVE feet.” This last came across with urgency. I took one long breath, then swung the wheel hard to port and gave the engine a heavy burst of reverse power. As I hoped, the prop walk from the propeller against Indiscretion’s massive rudder pushed the stern sideways, right up to the dock. Lisa scrambled to tie dock lines while I kept the boat in position with thrusters and the prop. Stronger gusts heeled us against the pier, and I had to really work the thrusters to keep the boat off long enough to drop extra fenders to cushion the hull.
Once we were safe and secure, I had a chance to philosophize as we served up our traditional celebration beers in the pilothouse. We could have taken the safe route and dropped anchor in Dyes Inlet to wait out the squall, but surely we needed practice in carrying out these kinds of docking maneuvers in all types of weather. Besides anticipating the worst (i.e., featured video on Bonehead Boaters), we carried out a drama-free, textbook docking aboard a very capable and forgiving trawler. Each experience brings us more competence and confidence. And, as always, that beer tasted delicious.
And yet, when I shared my recollection for this blog post with Lisa, I got a slightly different perspective on this particular docking experience.
“You weren’t the one on the dock with the waves splashing over it, and the fenders nearly popping as the boat pushed against the dock,” she told me.
“Well, what about the way I used prop walk to bring the stern over?” I asked, a little defensively.
“Yeah, well, we basically slammed against the dock. If that was what you were aiming for, it worked great.” She then reminded me how stressed I was in those minutes after arriving as I attempted to squeeze every fender we had between the undulating dock and my precious Indiscretion before the hull caved in.
“Well,” I laughed. “Maybe stress during docking is something you forget, like the pain of childbirth.”
“No, that’s a myth. You don’t forget that. That’s why we only have two children.”
Like I said, every challenging docking situation is a learning experience.
We anchored out in Dyes Inlet during our previous visits to Silverdale, but chose the convenience of the dock this trip for taking the dogs ashore. The marina has a good number of slips, and each time we visited, we noted available space along the outside dock and fingers. An area for dinghies lines the northern end of the dock near the ramp for easy access to shore for anchored boats.
Moorage rates are reasonable — $10 per night for boats under 28 feet, $20 for larger vessels. Shore power costs just $5 per night, though it is turned off for the winter season. The maximum stay is three consecutive nights. During our two-night stay, we were the only boat on the dock. Moreover, pedestrians are prohibited from walking the docks while the county completes a construction project near the landing. We truly had the place all to ourselves.
The park at the head of the dock is perfect for boaters with dogs. Plenty of grass to sniff and trash cans to dispose of dog waste along a nice waterfront walkway. We made our way through what seemed like dozens of hair salons (why so many in Silverdale??) and busy construction sites to find a nice trail system along the northern edge of Dyes Inlet. After about four miles of walking, we ran out of steam and still didn’t find an end to the trails. Our two dogs slept pretty well the rest of the day after that trek.
We departed Silverdale for Illahee State Park just north of Bremerton off Rich Passage. We visited here many years ago on our sailboat but chose not to stay because of the wake from the ferries and the dilapidated condition of the main dock. Big improvements have been made since then. The old dock now serves as a floating breakwater for protection from the exposed northern waters. A new dock offers some 300 feet of side-tie moorage. We experienced some ferry wake, but the motion hardly moved our 60,000 pound trawler. We spent a relaxing day and night enjoying hikes through the park and marveling at the view astern from our sunny and sheltered cockpit, though we probably would only stay the night here in settled weather.
This streak of fine March weather has us poring over charts and reviewing marine forecasts for crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A cruise through the beautiful San Juan Islands sounds awfully nice right now. However, family responsibilities require we point the bow south after too-short a cruise. Call it a pit stop before we head north again.
I could see the problem from the very start. This complicated trawler yacht with all her engines and systems required more attention than I could possibly dedicate on nights and weekends. She needed a full-time captain and engineer to keep her Bristol and ready at a moment’s notice to cast off and make for remote destinations.
So, I ran the numbers. A Captain with the skills and resourcefulness to manage a yacht like Indiscretion wouldn’t come cheap. The minimum salary for a professional Captain runs $150,000 a year, plus travel and meals. It turns out I’d also need an engineer for another $90,000 to $100,000 because the complex mechanical systems are beyond the skills of a mere crewman. On a larger yacht, the costs would even be higher.
Then, there’s travel. First-class flights to French Polynesia to meet your boat don’t grow on trees. And to be honest, Indiscretion is a bit small to host a crew while we tool around these remote destinations. I’d probably end up upgrading to a larger vessel to accommodate decent crew quarters. Now we’re talking big bucks. Maybe millions.
When I added the extra costs to my current boat budget, I grew concerned. Boats aren’t precisely the best place to invest your money in the first place, but adding a crew to the annual tally sure didn’t help matters. I dreaded the conversation I would need to have with my better half as I explained this financial decision. She once took away my eBay privileges for an entire year for buying too many rare first edition books. I can’t imagine what she might say about this.
Even with a professional crew, things don’t always work out well. I’m a fan of Kenny Chesney’s No Shoes Radio station on SiriusXM. Kenny keeps his boat down in the Caribbean and routinely complains about being stuck at the dock because Boat Captain Ben couldn’t get the generator running, or some such issue. If that stuff happens to Kenny Chesney, it could happen to me too. That would be super irritating.
And then it hit me. My Eureka moment. What if I took the job as Captain? I’d have to quit my day job, but after running the numbers six different ways, it would be cheaper and better for me to do it than pay someone else.
So, that’s what I’ve done. After more than thirty years of various finance and strategy roles, I have officially retired from traditional corporate life to become Indiscretion’s full-time Captain. I can’t believe how much money I’m saving! I sure hope I can keep that generator running.
Boat Captain Bob
I’ve kept a personal journal for most of my adult life. These journals have helped me wrestle with every significant decision and manage through the many stresses of everyday life. Last month, I put down my millionth word in over 40 years of self-reflection.
I’ve written about the reasons to keep a journal, and by far the most frequent question I receive from readers is how to establish a regular habit of journaling. Many find it easy to start a journal but much more challenging to keep it up.
For years, I purchased attractive leather-bound journals to collect my thoughts, but some of these books took years to fill with my slanted, left-handed scrawl. There were a couple tumultuous years in my twenties when all I could muster was a single angst-ridden entry. It wasn’t until I moved to a remote island where I was forced to take a solitary ferry ride to work each morning and night before my journaling habit took hold. Watching a storm-tossed sea out the cabin windows of a ferry boat put me often in the mood to write.
Now, I realize that taking a ferry boat to establish a journaling habit isn’t practical for many people. However, I did learn something else about my journal keeping that might be more useful.
Eight years ago, I tried the Day One app to see if a digital approach might replace my cherished leather-bound books. Day One was one of the first journaling apps to come out for both the Mac and iPhone/iPad. My first entry wasn’t particularly optimistic about this new technology:
I think writing here in this way will have me more focused on the device than the words. Hard to imagine myself getting into the writing zone like this, always worrying about hitting the right keys ... Still, it is convenient, tapping away as I am now from my easy chair, writing this entry on my iPad instead of surfing web sites.
Journal entry: December 12, 2012
Despite my initial uncertainty, I adapted quickly to a digital process. Since 2013, Day One has been my sole journal writing tool, and I would never go back to hand writing my journals. A few years ago, I transcribed my old paper journals into Day One for digital safekeeping and to revisit my youthful writing. With all my journals reduced to ones and zeros, I recently measured my productivity before and after switching from paper. Here’s a chart of my journal entries over a long span of writing (eight years on paper, eight years using Day One):
In my final year of paper-based journaling, I wrote 33 entries. That’s a little under once a week. My journal output shot up five-fold in my first year of using Day One. Comparing eight-year time spans on both systems, I wrote four times more entries in Day One than on paper. Over the past couple of years, I’ve written just about every day in Day One. On top of this, I share more each time I write in Day One. My typical paper entry ran 300 words. In Day One, that has increased by 20 percent, now 365 words.
After all those years of writing on paper, how did Day One make me a more prolific journal writer?
I think the most significant breakthrough for me was ubiquitous access on mobile devices. I usually kept my paper journal in the glovebox of my truck, where I wrote during ferry crossings across Puget Sound. As a result, I seldom wrote at home, or at work, or on weekends. With Day One available on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, I could capture thoughts in many more places and times. I grew especially fond of writing on the iPad with its compact size, always-connected cellular radio, and comfortable keyboard. Last year, nearly 100% of my entries were written on the iPad.
Unlike a paper journal, Day One allows practically every form of digital communication to become part of a journal entry. Emails to friends and family, Facebook posts, and blog posts are just a copy and paste away from my journal. And of course, I can add photos. I have over 500 photos, videos and sound clips in my journal that bring a whole new level of intimacy that simply wasn’t possible in my old paper journals.
After I transcribed my old journals into Day One, I realized I had the ultimate personal knowledge system. Almost everything important that happened to me in the past 40 years is accessible with a quick search. What did my doctor tell me at that visit back in 2005? I can easily retrieve it. What were my daughter’s first words? I wrote about it (today, I would have recorded it!). I apply tags to my entries, which makes it incredibly powerful to review my personal musings on themes like fatherhood, marriage, spirituality, travel, etc. All of these thoughts were buried and locked away in my paper journals but are blissfully free in Day One. It’s become an incredible resource of information and insight about myself, which in turn has become a positive reinforcement loop to keep recording my thoughts.
Some other reasons that drew me a digital tool like Day One:
If you keep buying attractive blank journals, but struggle to fill them, you should give a digital option like Day One a try. Set a daily reminder and take the few minutes you might otherwise spend on social media to write to yourself. Write about the big things in your life, but also the small, precious things. Or answer the day’s writing prompt. You might be surprised at what you share. And trust me: your future self will thank you.
About a month ago, I started using a new Mac/iOS app called Craft to help me make sense of books I read and organize ideas and content for my own writing. I was intrigued by the potential of bringing all my disparate notes into one friction-free digital home, enabling new connections and insights from all these books and ideas. The inspiration for this came from reading Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes, which introduced me to Professor Luhmann’s famed Zettelkasten system.
Before discovering Craft, I used an assortment of tools that never really meshed with how I liked to work. I did my writing in Ulysses. I housed some frequently accessed PDFs in Apple Notes. I kept stacks of orphaned index cards with book notes and insights in a card box. I stored book notes and research references in DevonThink, along with lists of books I’ve read and others I wanted to read. While I enjoyed the retrieval power of DevonThink, its obtuse editing function frustrated me (why must I click into a different mode to edit a note?). Its inefficient sync process frequently had me exasperated, waiting for my notes to appear on whatever device I was using. There’s nothing that kills creativity faster than having to fiddle with technology before you can capture your thoughts. Or forgetting where you stored that quote you need for an essay you’re writing.
I was stumbling along unhappily with this setup when I heard about a new note-taking app that MacStories named their app of the year. That’s high praise for software released in November. So, what is Craft?
Craft shares note-taking functionality with apps like Evernote, Bear, Notion, or even Apple’s built-in Notes program. It works equally well on Mac, iPad and iPhone (no Android or Windows support at present). Its unique page and page-block system can include rich text, Markdown text, images, scans, Apple Pencil jottings, PDFs, and external links beautifully rendered on the same nicely formatted page. “Cards” of information and additional full pages can be inserted within a single page. With links and back-links between documents and even specific paragraphs on a page, It checks all the boxes for a proper Zettelkasten tool. Syncing is fast, sharing with others is simple and elegant, export options are robust, and real-time Google-like collaboration is built in. Ryan Christoffel’s in-depth review of Craft does a great job of showcasing the full functionality of the app.
The most important things to me were the ability to combine Markdown text and any kind of media on the same page, Zettelkasten-style links and back-links, and a native iPad app experience where I do most of my writing. I decided to give Craft a try over the holidays.
It took an evening to copy over decades worth of book notes and commonplace quotes from their various cubbyholes to Craft. I spent some extra time to drag book cover pictures my reviews and utilize the page styles that make this program so attractive.
Works great on Mac, iPhone and iPad
I began taking notes in Craft on the books I was reading. Gone were the editing frustrations and sync problems I’d faced with DevonThink. I found myself in the app a lot on whatever device I had near me — adding links to other books I’d already read with similar themes, more thinking, less fiddling. I felt drawn to the app, almost like the pull of social media apps like Facebook or Instagram, yet here, the content was my own creation.
It took another week to realize Craft is a writing tool that capably handles note storage and retrieval. To think of this as a mere note-taking app is missing the real power of the software.
The user interface is simply beautiful. Text and images are centered in the page with wide margins and plenty of white space. It reminds me of the Things task management app, which is high praise.
The beauty here is more than skin deep.
Hidden functionality awaits that is intuitive and powerful. Rearrange entire paragraphs or reorder lists by simply dragging with your finger. Pull a quote into an essay from your book review (also in Craft) using split-screen. Drag in a picture from a website or your photo album, and it appears just like you would expect. Performance is fast and stable.
Keyboard commands exist for practically everything. Markdown commands that my fingertips have long memorized transform into properly formatted text on the screen, so I don’t need to translate mentally. Links and style formatting are simple to apply, letting my mind stay focused on the content. The best way I can describe it is this: when I’m writing, I get exactly what I want without thinking about the technology. No friction. It just works. This is amazing for such a young app.
I came to Craft thinking it might replace DevonThink as my notes archive. Craft won that battle easily, at least for my needs. What I didn’t expect was a more fundamental shift in my workflow: that Craft might become my primary writing tool, replacing Ulysses.
With Craft, I seem to write better and with more focus. I’m not writing novels or a dissertation, so I don’t need most of the powerful features that come with a professional writing tool. Even so, immersed in my own curated knowledge sphere within Craft’s elegant writing interface, my elusive muse shows up and stays present much more often.
Could a beautiful, friction-free interface inspire better writing?
I have a few months before my Ulysses subscription renews. I’ll give this some time, but I do feel that Craft’s seamless, integrated writing experience could quite easily replace Ulysses as my primary writing tool. I don’t think early reviewers of Craft fully grasp the potential of this platform for writers. The tag line on Craft’s website provides a clue of their vision: “Craft brings back the joy to writing.”
My wish list for the app is surprisingly short. It needs end-to-end data encryption and better overall security. Capturing text from articles on the web with the iOS Share Sheet needs work. You can’t search inside PDFs like you can with DevonThink. Multiple windows on the Mac are a little hard to figure out. I wish TextExpander worked on iPad. But, honestly, these are minor complaints in what has quickly become an indispensable piece of software.
One thing I won’t bicker about is the subscription price. At $45 per year, it’s expensive when compared to note-taking options like Bear. But an app that handles note-taking and writing and Zettelkasten-style linking … for me, the value I’m getting matches the price. Rumor has it that a one-time purchase option may soon be available, hosted on your cloud platform of choice (iCloud, Dropbox, etc.) and without real-time collaboration, that may take away the sting of the high subscription price.
Most of all, I want to support the team that created this excellent new app to see what more they can bring to this emerging thinking and writing tool.
Give Craft a try. You might be very pleasantly surprised at what you find.
For the most recent update, see The Craft App —A Year of Magical Linking.
The crew of Indiscretion has fully embraced the Apple ecosystem. It doesn’t seem very long ago that the Mac was the underdog, but now, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Apple Watches, Apple TV's, and even the underwhelming HomePod have found their way into our lives. We use this technology in the pilothouse for music, audiobooks, our maintenance tracking system, backup navigation and our ship’s log.
Indiscretion has a Bose sound system that pipes music through zones in the salon and in the pilothouse, but it was limited to CDs or a subscription-based SiriusXM radio for music. We remedied this by installing a Bluetooth transmitter inside the media cabinet in the salon that allowed a paired iPhone or iPad to stream whatever we wanted throughout the boat or in a particular zone. This worked pretty well, but we ran into issues when the paired device moved too far away from the Bluetooth transmitter. Or, when I would watch a video on my iPad while lounging in the salon, only to have the sound came blaring out of the pilothouse speakers.
We had some empty space on the port side pilothouse dash, so we decided to replace the SiriusXM radio with a dedicated pilothouse iPad. This was the first time I made a significant modification to our electronics or dash layout. Unlike a car, the console of a Nordhavn trawler is meant to be easily customized. The dash consists of three adjoining plywood panels that can accommodate just about any layout you might want. If a complete revamp with new electronics is warranted, new dash panels can be designed online so that the cutouts for the new instruments are already in place. In the case of installing this iPad, the procedure was pretty easy.
Here’s the port side dash where the original SiriusXM radio was installed.
I measured and an iPad Mini in portrait orientation would fit perfectly in its place. I bought a nearly-new one with enough internal storage to house our entire music collection for $200 on eBay. I found a very clever 3D-printed mount with an incorporated power cord on ETSY for $40 that plugs into a 12 volt accessory plug behind the dash.
[caption id="attachment_809" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
Lots of equipment and wiring hides behind these pilothouse panels.[/caption]
Installation was straight forward. I removed the SiriusXM radio, drilled a small hold to feed the power cable through the dash panel, and installed the mount. Here’s the dash with the finished installation:
[caption id="attachment_808" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
The finished installation.[/caption]
I am happy with how this turned out. This dedicated iPad has our entire music library downloaded, so we have ample music no matter how far from internet service we stray. “Hey Siri” makes selecting music easy and fun. We have a few other music and audiobook apps for longer passages. I installed the Navionics boating app which serves as our route planner and backup chart plotter, even without internet. All our manuals and ship’s records are accessible through the fantastic DevonThink app. I’ve even customized the iPad ’s wallpaper to provide key specifications of indiscretion when we’re hailing marinas on VHF.
Custom iPad Wallpaper[/caption]
With screens now on all three dash panels, I feel I’m one step closer to the bridge of my own private starship. Now, I just need to automate our ship’s log system to accept voice recording and transcription. And work on my best Captain Kirk impersonation.
Fall weather in the Northwest can be pretty iffy. Rain and wind are the norm for this time of year, which took its toll on our boating time back when we sailed. Unlike my more hardcore sailor friends, the novelty of freezing my ass off in the cockpit lost its appeal some time in my mid-forties. Each year, as fall turned its gaze to winter, I would grudgingly decide to put the boat away. Off would come the cushions and bedding to avoid mildew. Three or four dehumidifiers would decorate the cabins of the darkened boat to soak up the winter moisture. Dock lines would be inspected for chafe ahead of the winter storms to come. Sadness would creep over me as I walked up the dock, perhaps for the final time of the year, already pining for spring.
Trawler life has changed all that. We no longer hibernate. Why would we? It can be freezing outside but still toasty warm inside the pilothouse and salon. In fact, fall and winter cruising on a trawler here in the Pacific Northwest is downright amazing.
One of the great things we've discovered is how little planning or effort it takes to head out on an impromptu cruise. We keep Indiscretion’s freezer and pantry full of food. There are always cold drinks in the refrigerator. Her closets hold plenty of clothing for any kind of weather. She has plenty of fuel and water to go just about anywhere we choose.
So, when the weather forecast predicted a week of sunshine and calm seas in late October, we didn't think twice. A quick trip to the local market for fresh produce, fruit and snacks and then straight to the boat.
We decide to spend the week visiting the southern reaches of Puget Sound instead of venturing back north to the Seattle area or the San Juans. With our home marina on Vashon Island, it's roughly the same distance to Olympia as it is to Seattle. The only south-bound constraint involves timing the trip through the Tacoma Narrows with an appropriate tide. Currents run through the Narrows at upwards of six knots, so we must wait for a flood tide when traveling south and an ebb tide on our way back north.
Lisa and I have perfected our departure logistics. We work through our departure checklist: the forced-air hydronic heating system and navigational instruments are switched on in the pilothouse. Lisa stows the groceries and readies the cabins for sea. I visit the engine room to check oil, fuel filters, belts, and coolant levels. Lisa finagles the half-fender covering our exhaust stack with a boat hook (our low-tech way of keeping rainwater out) and pulls off the instrument covers at the flybridge helm. I fire up the main engine and energize the stabilizers. Lisa hands me the shore power cords from the dock as we talk through our departure from the slip: the wind strength, the order she'll untie dock lines, etc. The whole process from start to finish now is under 20 minutes. We make a good team.
When the engine is warm, I usually head for the flybridge, where visibility is terrific, and Lisa handles dock lines. Today is different. I untie us from the dock, and Lisa takes the helm. Before today, I'm the only one that has docked this big trawler, which is a safety concern. Should something happen to me, Lisa needs to be able to get safely back to port. I stand by, ready to offer pointers, but Lisa calmly backs the boat and spins us around like a pro. I put away dock lines and stow fenders, a job Lisa normally handles. I am huffing and puffing by the end. I hope I get my old job back.
We enjoy blue skies and flat blue water as we motor out of Quartermaster Bay. We catch occasional glimpses of Dall's Porpoises as we put the Tahlequah ferry terminal astern on the southern end of Vashon Island. Seals pop their heads up, watching us, like stray black labs. We ride a nice flooding current as we passed under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, past Fox Island, and on into proper South Sound.
The hydronic heating system has thoroughly warmed the boat by now. The system employs a diesel-fired boiler to heat a network of water tubes that run the boat's length beneath the floor. Forced air heating ducts in the salon, pilothouse, and the two sleeping cabins provide a pleasant warmth. We could heat the boat with our HVAC system, but that requires the generator and doesn't offer the same quality heat. The automatic thermostat clicks off in the pilothouse as the temperature rises to 70 degrees. Hydronic heating is a godsend for off-season boating.
We confer over our Waggoner's Guide and a nautical chart splayed on the pilothouse table and decide on Olympia as our first destination, which is at the far south end of Puget Sound.
We pass McNeil Island off to starboard as we proceed through Balch Passage. I give this island a wide berth. McNeil served exclusively as an isolated Washington state prison for more than a hundred years. In the early 1960s, Charles Manson did time here for car theft before becoming famous for his more notorious crimes. The prison closed in 2011 but now houses 214 of the most dangerous sex offenders in the state. These "residents" have served their allotted sentences in prison elsewhere but are now held indefinitely at McNeil under a controversial civil commitment statute. This is not a place you ever want to visit.
McNeil Island – not a place you ever want to visit
Rounding Harstine Island, we enter Budd Inlet. We have the water to ourselves. Throughout our five-hour journey, we see only three other pleasure craft — all trawlers. The empty water is so different from our cruise last month in the San Juan Islands. Like us when we sailed, the colder weather has chased almost everyone back to land.
We visited Olympia earlier this year and chose Swantown Marina for our moorage. This time, we opt for Percival Landing on the western end of Budd Inlet. There are two side-tie docks for overnight moorage, but only E Dock has power and water hookups. Space is available on a first-come-first-serve basis, and other than yacht club gatherings, you can't make an advance reservation. We arrive around 2 pm on a Tuesday, a little worried that the dock might be full, but find the dock completely empty. We spin around in the narrow fairway and tie up on our starboard side. It feels like we've parallel parked our trawler on the beautiful water-facing Main Street of town.
Indiscretion all alone on E Dock at Percival Landing
The historical treasure, MV Sand Man, graces D Dock at Percival Landing
A five-hour trip is long enough for our two trawler dogs to get antsy for shore leave, so we power down the instruments, plug into shore power, and head out. Up a nearby ramp is a park for the dogs, and many restaurants and shops beckon nearby. Two blocks north is the wonderfully serene Capitol Lake with spaced out benches, runners, walkers, and lots of ducks and geese on the water to tease the dogs. We follow the path that winds around the lake for a scenic two-mile walk.
Tied up at Percival Landing. The State Capitol building looms in the background
View from Capitol Lake
I pay for two nights of moorage at the registration office at the Olympia Center. $68 for two nights with shore power is a good deal for a 43' boat. The central location of Percival Landing is perfect for exploring the downtown area on foot. We broke out our Ninebot scooters to get around when we stayed at the more remote Swantown Marina, but we find we don't need those here. We walk a couple blocks to the famous Spar Cafe - McMenamins for dinner, passing a dozen or more restaurants on our way. We enjoy great food and safe distances between patrons at the Spar. We also have a delicous lunch on the deck at the Olympia Oyster House, which is so close you could hit with a well-thrown rock from the cockpit of Indiscretion.
During our two days at Percival Landing, a few other boats tie up, but most leave after taking on water, a few hours of free shower power, and running errands in town.
Water like glass at Percival Landing
Our only concern during our stay is the noise and foot traffic at night. The environment changes quite a bit after dark, and we feel a little nervous walking the dogs through the park at night.
We say farewell to Olympia after our two days and nights of exploring, but vow we will make this a regular stop on future South Sound tours. The weather gods treat us to another day of light winds and calm seas. We head north up Case Inlet, slowly making our way up the east side of Harstine Island.
An endless wake on flat seas
We arrive at Jarrell Cove on the northern end of Harstine Island after three hours of uneventful motoring. We see just one other powerboat during our trip. This bay is a popular summer destination, but we find it utterly empty of visiting boats. We wonder to ourselves, where is everyone? We tie up to one of the 14 mooring buoys that take up the middle of the bay and then notice that the state park dock has shore power. We cast off the mooring and are soon tied up to the dock, plugged into power. We're big fans of the Washington State Parks annual moorage permit, which allows you to use any state park buoy or dock at no additional cost. There is a $6 per day fee to use shore power, which we gladly pay.
Jarrell Cove State Park
The dock leads up to a nice network of trails and campsites. The main park facility has bathrooms and an outdoor amphitheater. The grounds are as empty as the bay.
Our night time walk with the dogs is quite a change from Olympia. A heron's grumble from the shore creeps the dogs out, and something growls at us from the underbrush along the trail. Back on the boat, we flip on our FLIR night vision camera to spot the heron (or bear!), but find only empty shore.
We spend two lovely days at the dock. We have the place to ourselves until our second night when two smaller boats tie up for the weekend. There's still plenty of space along the 650' dock for four or five more boats, and the buoys remain vacant during our entire stay — so different than our last visit in early May when every buoy was taken, and more boats were anchored in between.
We leave Jarrell Cove early to catch the ebb tide through the Tacoma Narrows. It's pitch black at 6:45 am when I planned to leave, so we dawdle until first light at 7:30 am to depart.
A beautiful sunrise greets us as we leave Jarrell Cove, and calm seas accompany us as we reverse our course back the way we came, through the Narrows and along the waterfront of Ruston and Tacoma. We decide to spend Halloween at Dock Street Marina near the end of the Thea Foss Waterway. We call ahead for a slip assignment and are told that there is plenty of space; pull into any vacant slip on G or H docks.
We end up taking the same slip we used on our last trip here, back when I was still learning how to dock this big boat. Fortunately, I've improved a lot as a skipper, and there is no drama as we tie up. We count just four other visiting boats in this spacious marina, with its convenient access to downtown Tacoma, the Glass Museum, and wonderful Foss Waterway Promenade.
Lots of space available at Dock Street Marina
We spend Halloween night on the boat watching scary movies on the Salon TV. A full moon shimmers through clouds out our port salon window, adding to the movie's suspense.
A full moon rising on Halloween night
The Marina offers a slip side pump-out system, which makes emptying the holding tank especially easy. The fee is $5, but the affable dock manager waives this if you handle the "dirty" end of the job.
We leave Dock Street around noon on Sunday for the quick trip home to Quartermaster Marina. Once back in our slip, I spend a couple of hours cleaning up the boat and putting on her winter covers. Our week of sunshine is ending as the forecast calls for rain, rain, rain, which of course is typical for this time of year.
Our first fall cruise of the year has been spectacular, and we're excited to take many more of these mini-cruises during the offseason. And yet, the sailor remains strong in me. I can't shake the notion that this all feels wrong somehow, like a Northerner spending Thanksgiving with family in Southern California, with its sunny weather and palm trees. It's nice, but not tradition to celebrate the holidays without rain, clouds and cold.
Though we've owned Indiscretion for more than two years, my memory of cold weather boating is embedded in my DNA. I recall that feeling of a deep, pervasive chill at the wheel in the cockpit while the rest of the family sheltered below. It was probably a cold spell in August, which, with our even-keeled Pacific Northwest climate, can be hard to distinguish from a typical day in February. The windblown rain found purchase inside my foul weather gear, and water squished in my boots as I tended the sails. Off to port, I watched a 50-foot trawler slowly pass us by to windward. The pilothouse windows were steamed up, but I could make out the captain taking a sip of hot coffee after a friendly wave. I waved back, usually a no-no to show any kinship between a sailing vessel and stinkpot, but I appreciated his kindness in allowing me right of way under sail. I am ashamed to admit I also muttered a curse of envy and spite at that happy captain, like Ahab and his bitterness about a certain white whale.
It took many years, but it seems I've now become that happy captain who waves with kindness and heartfelt concern from a steamed up pilothouse (yes, I wave to sailboats). Perhaps it's my long history of discomfort under sail that makes me feel so grateful for it all. Curse me if you want, I whisper to myself after a sip of hot coffee, but trawler life is good.
MV Indiscretion, all cleaned up and ready for her next adventure