My hands may never be the same...

Well. It's been a while again. But boy do I have a good story for you.

So this past spring, my friends Mark and Christine and I decided to take a trip. We'd been discussing a nice sail to Chestertown for more than a year and we decided it was time. Christine was early in a pregnancy and once the baby was born, who knew how long we'd have to wait to cruise? Spring was the perfect time -- the only time -- for our long-awaited cruise.

Also, Mark and Christine being a pastor and student pastor respectively, we couldn't go over a weekend. No problem! I work a lot of weekends... why not take four days off?

We decided to take Mark and Christine's newly acquired boat, Dreamscape, a 30-foot Catalina. It was only fair. They'd both been aboard for parts of the trip to Washington, D.C.

It all seemed good the day we left. Preparation was a little involved as it was the boat's first trip of the season. And, of course, they don't live aboard, so they wouldn't have as much stuff aboard to start out as I did.

All in all, the Catalina 30 is a solid boat. She's fast, and with a wing keel she can go where my boat cannot. After a few hours dockside, we were able to take off with a favorable wind direction and head to the Chester River.

Relaxation at last!

Yeah right.

No sooner had we decided to turn the engine on a second time (the wind died midday) than it started to overheat and, finally, it shut off. After anchoring in the middle of the Chester, I set about to take a look-see.

You know it's not a good day when I am the most-knowledgeable "mechanic" aboard.


I gamely cracked the engine ports -- all four of them, easy access be damned -- and set out to check out with a flashlight why we were in such trouble.


It was easy enough to find. Two jets of brilliant neon green fluid were leaking out at an astounding rate. Yup. That was the coolant. Now we knew why the engine was overheating at least.

No problem, thought I. I'll patch it up, add more antifreeze, and we can limp into Chestertown and buy more. That'll get us home. After all, this was a sailboat! Motors are for people who don't know what they're doing.

Right.

Well, first off, there was no antifreeze aboard at all. And few tools. And still fewer things to patch holes with.

Duct tape. It was all we had. And it can solve any problem, right?

Sure it can. So laying on my stomach with the side door to the engine propped open with my head and a flashlight between my teeth, I set about patching the leak with Christin handing me duct tape to my exact size specifications. I wrapped that heat exchanger (the source of the leak) like a Christmas present. I wrapped it with layers and layers of tape.

There was still a little fluid left in the resevoir. We'd sail into Chestertown the next day and buy more.

We sailed all day and came to anchor under sail in Chestertown around 2 p.m. the next day. We'd hit a patch of dead air and lost some time, but we got there.

Mark and Christine inflated the dignhy and Mark rowed us ashore. Yes. Rowed. They have no outboard. Miraculously, we got there. The Chester has a little current the way the North Atlantic has little waves.

And then we found a shop with antifreeze! Pay dirt! And they had a gallon of distilled water! We carried our booty to the dinghy and proceeded to have a lovely evening of walking around town and having a nice seafood dinner.

When we got back, we went to bed to tackle the heat exchanger in the morning.

See the lovely green liquid on the galley table? That's what antifreeze looks like. I wish I could tell you what burning antifreeze smells like.

We filled it up and ran it... and it worked. For a time. We hit Queenstown that night in need of still more antifreeze -- and we ran aground a few times by losing power in the tiny chanel that marks the entrace to Queenstown -- a one-horse town in posession of a post office and a pizzeria. No gas station. No marine supply store. The kind harbormaster offered to drive us for some in the morning, but being intrepid walkers, we asked directions to a gas station. Five miles away. Some nice people in the pizzeria gave us some antifreeze.

It took three gallons of antifreeze and half a roll of duct tape and some JB weld the dockmaster gave us, but we made it back. We sailed the entire trip. Sailed to anchor four times. I sailed into the dock in Queenstown without the motor once. And we made it.

It's all about resourcefulness, people.

But I think my hands still smell of burnt antifreeze...

Last day: The final frontier...

OK, so I'll admit. It's freezing in Baltimore and I'm taking two months off to live at my parents' home where there's central heat. So it's been tough to motivate myself to write in my blog about living aboard when I'm not, in fact, living aboard.

Anyway, I'm at a sailing convention stuck on hold with the airline, so let's talk about my last day.

Yep, you heard that right. Last day. But, you say, there were supposed to be four days! You've talked about only two!

Well, dear friends, I mentioned the increasingly scary forecast. That forecast started to foretell a possible blizzard the morning of the third day. Blizzard? No thank you. So I made an executive decision. We'd do the last two days in just one marathon day.

We woke up that morning and discovered small, dinner plate-sized sheets of ice floating next to the boat. Bad sign. I'm not ashamed to admit I said a little prayer before we started the engine that day. Thankfully it started and we puttered over to the fuel dock to drop Peter off, pick up Andrew and wait for the attendant. We fueled up and the nice fuel dock man found a way for us to get some water (there's not much in the shop at the fuel dock in Solomons).

Then we were on our way. Having learned our lesson from Cobb Island, and being a little freaked out about the coming blizzard, we turned on the GPS and I obsessively listened to the weather radio every time I was off. Between Andrew and I we did some pretty fancy-pants navigation to cut miles off our trip (Andrew races a lot, so he knew some nice tricks from his Annapolis to Solomons racing experience).

Once we got close to Baltimore though, past the Bay Bridge, the trip was cake. No one removes navigation markers in Baltimore harbor for cold weather (stupid Cobb Island). It was dark, but we had it covered. This was easily the part of the trip I knew the best and was most comfortable with.

At any rate, we made in to Oak Harbor marina in Pasadena -- right by White Rocks -- two hours before the snow started to fall.

I was so eager to get off the boat, I just left everything aboard. Tossed off my boots and foulies, put on a baseball cap and sneakers and Dad and I took Sam and Andrew to Little Havana's for a cheeseburger since we had to drop Andrew with his car at the sailing center. I have to say though, I was starving and wanted a Coke really badly, but I felt awful at dinner. All shivery and achy.

I spent about 45 minutes in the hot shower when I got home and slept until about 12 hours straight and felt right as rain the next day. We ended up being snowed in, so I took a couple nice naps the next day too. It was the perfect time to come home, really -- nowhere to go.

We'd left two huge light bulbs on in the engine compartment and left instructions for the marina to winterize, so as far as I was concerned, I was good to go.

Getting the stuff (extra food, all my clothes, bedding, etc.) off the boat to wash and put away was another story. It took a couple weeks to get rid of the snow, get time to go down (I was beset by a multitude of serious car problems).

But it's all off now and I can't wait to move the boat to Baltimore to live in March.

Next up? Some thoughts from the National Sailing Programs Symposium -- aka, how I am now obsessed with Stand Up Paddling.

The next morning...

My alarm went off at 6 a.m. and all I could think was, "Do I have to?" Before you could say, "Jack Robinson," Peter was up and had disconnected the heater.

"Noooo!" I thought. "Leave it in until the last possible second!"

Then I got over myself and got dressed. I looked like that kid in "A Christmas Story." Seriously. Underwear, long underwear, sweatpants, a sweatshirt, my foul-weather overalls, the matching foul-weather jacket, a hat, a scarf, hiking socks, tube socks, the furry snow boots I bought for Iceland, gloves and hand warmers. Whew. I just prayed I didn't have to pee. (Later I just had to do it and it took about 10 minutes. TMI? Maybe. But it's important to know these things when you plan your winter trip.)

Now where was I? We put all the stuff (my lamp, the bilge heater, the hangers for the fancy-pants D.C. clothes I had no need of on the trip...) into my car and were all set to throw lines when... cough... cough... the engine decided to give us trouble. So, OK, maybe it was cold. Maybe it was 29 degrees out. Cough... cough... rumble.

Thank goodness for Sam. Peter and Sam put my drinking water hose on top of the fuel line for the engine. I never would have realized THAT one. Then again, I wouldn't have put the hose there in the first place. Hmm. Point was, we figured it out.

Finally, we warmed the engine up and were ready to go!

To the fuel dock.

We got to the fuel dock before it opened (this will be a trend for the trip) and set to for 7 gallons of diesel. Anddd... maybe I had to make two passes at the dock to get close enough. It'd been a while. Over the summer I was a Misty-docking master, but not so much after a few months sitting at the dock. I ignored my mild embarrassment, however, and soldiered on.

We figured the best way to tackle the trip was in shifts. On the way to D.C. we just.... did whatever. I'd steer awhile, Mark would steer... This time we went with a regimented rotation. So I started out steering for an hour while one of the guys was below and one was topside with me (technically you should have a lookout topside with you if you have more than one person aboard -- and it's safer in my opinion.) Then the second hour, I went below and made oatmeal and hot drinks and rested. So two hours topside and one hour below wrapped in blankets (and napping).

We ended up going to Cobb Island the first night, and we didn't get in until full dark. Cobb Island is the first sailboat-able (?) anchorage between D.C. and the mouth of the Potomac. The Potomac is all kinds of shallow and it winds back and forth and there is almost no way to sail unless the wind is full behind you because you have to change course like every half hour.

So we get close to Cobb Island while I'm below, which is one of the few things I regret about this trip. I'd been doing the navigation and should have been up there for the trip into the anchorage.... but I wasn't. So we ran aground several times.

This isn't AS big a deal as you may think. The bottom was soft mud, as is most of the Chesapeake bottom, and, well, if you sail on the Chesapeake for long enough, you'll run aground a few times.

Add that to the fact that the entrance to the anchorage is about 10 feet wide, and there's some problems.

In addition, we discovered the next day that many markers that are shown on nautical charts as lighted are replaced with unlighted day markers in the winter. Whose bright idea was THAT?

After we finally got in and anchored, we ran the engine on idle with the cover off below for warmth for an hour or two and I fried up the ham, potatoes and green bean mixture and made tea. And then we went to bed. Like... immediately.

The next day was EASY. We got up and left the second it was light and were docked into Solomon's Island while it was still daylight. Perfect day. Except for the fact that not one of us ate lunch. The water was rough on the second day. It seriously would not have taken a lot of convincing for me to hurl.

On a normal (read: warm-weather) trip, you just hang out on deck when you feel sick. This trip I'd have rather been warm and sick, so I just took Dramamine and WILLED myself to sleep for my hours off. But by comparison it was a great day. And we got tons of sleep that night since we needed to buy fuel in Solomon's and trade Peter off for Andrew the next morning.

Ominously enough, however, we kept getting reports of a snowstorm that would be hitting day four. Dun, dun, dun....

To be continued...

The moment you've all been waiting for...

We made it to Baltimore! (Well, OK, we made it to Pasadena -- my plans to change marinas will have to wait until spring.)

The trip was a little on the intense side -- sorry I didn't post when I got back. It took me a few days to recover, we had a blizzard, I finished school, Christmas came... I'm tired just thinking of it all. Sigh.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Well, I finally got everything planned out. Two days before the trip, I had a little monkey wrench thrown into the works when one of my crewmembers had a family emergency. I jumped into high gear, calling everyone I know. I had two people say that if I absolutely was in dire straights, they'd come... but finally I had a stroke of brilliance when Peter (crew for days one and two) was looking through his phone. I called Andrew, a guy I've worked with in the past and an all-around great sailor and he was just asleep enough to sign on for one day. The Solomon's to Annapolis day. (If you've been following along with the bouncing ball, you may realize that I had originally planned to go Solomon's to Galesville. Annapolis is just a bit farther and do-able, so I traded to make the trip more palatable to Andrew and easier to finish a fourth day early).

My dad would accompany us from Annapolis to Pasadena on the fourth day. And on the fifth day I'd graduate. Remember that sentence. It'll be important later.

Now, back to preparations.

The day before, I ran around like a crazy woman trying to get everything done. We were to leave Wednesday at dawn and there was a lot to do.

Monday night, my mom and I went shopping. First stop? REI. Despite the fact I lived in the Pennsylvania mountains for four years, I never acquired a great deal of outerwear. Perhaps because I like to be warm inside. I got new gloves, a big package of those handwarmer packets, a hat and two sets of long underwear. My parents were kind enough to make this gear my graduation present. My dad, apparently, had wanted to buy me a bilge pump. The need for warmth, however, was slightly more pressing than the need for a bilge pump.

Then to Wegmans, where I purchased $100 worth of food for three people, three meals a day, for four days. Not bad, considering.

Our meal plan was to have oatmeal and tea, coffee or hot cocoa for breakfast with blueberry muffins (which became our mid-morning snack). For lunch we had peanut butter and homemade jam with potato salad and more hot drinks. Snacks were cookies, trail mix, clementines, apples... and anything else leftover anyone wanted. For dinners, I tried to think of things hot and satisfying. For the first night I pre-cooked green beans, potato chunks and free-range ham (Peter eats only free-range meat) with homemade applesauce, cornbread muffins and, you guessed it, more hot drinks. Dinner on day two was free-range beef stew with cornbread muffins and salad. Dinner day three was supposed to be meatballs (which I baked in advance) and spaghetti with homemade sauce and salad on the side. That meal never got eaten.

I made just about everything the day before we left and packaged it into containers to be heated aboard the boat. The last thing I figured on wanting to do after a day of shivering was cook a whole big meal. So I made ahead. That took the majority of the day before, along with washing clothes, packing clothes, packing books and making lists upon lists of things to take and do. Peter, Sam and I would head down the night before so we could leave first-thing Wednesday morning for the long trip ahead.

Every time I take a voyage like this one, I get the pre-trip jitters. Forgetting something on a boat is nothing like losing luggage. You can't buy whatever you need when you get there. For the first two days I didn't set foot off the boat. Day three I stepped off to get diesel and didn't get off again until we were tied to the dock. If you forget it, you do without it. With the added factor of the cold, I had the jitters worse than ever before. Luckily Sam, one of my intrepid crewmates, had a class until 11 p.m. (he's about to be a diesel mechanic) so I wasn't pressured to leave early. As soon as Sam called me to say he was home from class and would shower and be ready when I got there to pick him up, I realized something -- I had forgotten to shower. The prospect of four days without a bath daunting, I took a five-minute shower and was out the door to the already-loaded car. I picked up Sam and then Peter and drove to D.C.

We stowed everything and, finally, at 2 a.m. we set alarms for 6:20 a.m. and settled in to spend one last night in front of the heater.