Month: April 2014

April 17, 2014

That’s right… our dreams of real wine glasses are shattered and lay in pieces in the kitchen sink after a big, big gust from today’s passing storm.  We weren’t even at sea – just tied up in our slip when the gust pushed us over a few degrees.  That was enough to send a drying wine glass tumbling to its demise.

These glasses were a recent experiment.  We bought new plastic ones but when attempting to give away the old ones, the proprietors of Phil’s Place restaurant shook their heads at us and said “tacky, tacky, tisk, tisk, tisk.”  We were shamed into buying real ones.  (We also found we really liked drinking wine from glass during our rather extensive wine tasting trips.  It just tastes better than from plastic.)  The first two glasses lasted a few weeks.

We actually have two more glass ones left but if I were in the life insurance business, I don’t think I’d underwrite them.  Soon, it’ll be back to plastic.  -Rich

Update:

I guess things could be worse…

This storm that is passing through right now is actually the remains of cyclone Ita.  It started out as a bad tropical storm that killed people and flooded the parts of the Solomon Islands.  Then it turned into a cyclone and hit northeastern Australia.  Now it’s come to our neighborhood.  It’s no longer a cyclone, but we just saw 60 knots. We’re really healing over now – much worse that the wine-glass-killer gust.

April 15, 2015

I’ve never been what you’d call high-functioning when it comes to the mundane things that society expects – things like taxes, balancing a checking account, registering cars and the like. The cruising life is the answer for me. I’ll never have to register a car again!

Wrong-o-roo Rich. A lot of those mundane things followed us out here. We bought a car and naturally, had to register it. We sold a car and had to report the sale. We had to insure the car. Insure the boat. Insure our health (at least we probably should). The IRS didn’t give us a pass on taxes because we were anchored in a remote bay. We still had to file a return. (Though we’ve found a way to pay no taxes – make no money!) There seem to be just as many of these pain-in-the-ass-tasks out here as there were in “real life.”

Some of the tasks are easier out here, but yet, they feel just as impossible to me as they did back home. Taxes for example. Edie does our taxes. All I had to do was to go online, download a few forms from our banks, email them to Edie, then sign electronically and it was done. Nothing so hard about that, right? But, to me, it felt like someone was asking me to calculate the trajectory of an unidentified asteroid while swimming the English Channel.

Some things are harder out here. Internet isn’t a given. Sometimes, when we need it most (to download those forms), we don’t have it. It took all day to send a FedEx package to the states. During a Skype call to our bank the other day, I was disconnected five times before the business got done.

I think the big problem for me is that I just don’t feel like doing this stuff while cruising. (Yea, yea, I didn’t feel like doing it while living in the real world either!) Out here, having to deal with this tedium just seems like more of an insult now.

If you’re not cruising and you look at our lives with envy, just remember, we have to do all the same crap you do. We just get cocktails in the cockpit at sunset to help us forget. -Rich

April 9 2014 in Tauranga, New Zealand

Top Ten Reasons To Do Your Own Boat Work

10. You know who to blame when something isn’t done right.
9.   You know where the corners were cut – you cut them!
8.   To save money (sometimes).
7.   So you know how everything works.
6.   ‘Cause sometimes you’re all you’ve got (like in remote locations)
5.   You just care more – your life might depend on it.
4.   Many “experts” know less than you do.
3.   What else have you got to do out here?
2.   You don’t have to wait for someone else to get around to it.

#1 — You might notice something like this crack…

While installing a new bilge blower I glanced over at my stern chainplate and noticed a tiny line of rust that looked suspicious. (The chainplates are the anchor points for the wires that hold up the mast. When they break, the mast falls.) I scrubbed the chainplate clean and couldn’t see any sign of a defect. Yet I was uncomfortable.

I bought this dye penetration kit…

With the penetrant, multiple cracks showed up. I removed the chainplate and am in the process of getting a new one made. I feel great about catching this. It might have lasted forever, or it might have failed half way to Fiji. Needless to say, I’m going to spend a day or two carefully looking at all the other chainplates.

I really doubt that anyone else, while changing the bilge blower, would have caught this. It’s not that they wouldn’t care or that I’m so much better than anyone else, it’s just that I care more – I have more at stake. -Rich

P.S.  Reason #786 to love Tauranga… I was able to swing by Engineer’s Supply on the way to lunch and grab this penetrant kit, on sale no less.  Even in Los Angeles, finding this could have been an all-day affair.

April 6, 2014

We’re back home after a wonderful road trip to Gisborne and this is how Tauranga greeted us this evening…

April 6, 2014

In the town of Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand’s north island is a very unique “museum.”  I had a lot of fun there but I’m a bit strange, I guess.  Here are some pictures…

Here are a lot more of our pictures from our defunct Google+ page. Fitting for this place, they are unedited and in no particular order. You have to dig through the pictures for treasures just like we did through the amalgamation at the museum. -Rich