My new best friend...

I would like to announce to the entirety of the blogosphere that I, Aleksandra Robinson, have a new best friend.

His name is Buster. Dust Buster.

For the past six months I have had a tiny shop vac. It's a workhorse. It's a great vacuum. Except when it comes to the small stuff. It just doesn't have a lot of sucking power. It makes cleaning the little bitty dusty bits difficult, I'm sad to say.

But the other day, my mother offered me a DustBuster. She originally bought it to vacuum crumbs off of my grandfather. Lately? She hasn't needed it for that. Poor Buster has been sitting -- unloved -- in my parents' basement.

I'd forgotten to take him with me the last few times I'd visited my parents, but when I went over to do laundry and give blood (at a donor center, not at their house) this week, I finally remembered to take Buster with me.

He needed a bit of a charge when I got him home, but then he was ready for action. This morning I pulled him out and got all the itty gritty little corners and cobwebs that plague me. Seriously. They plague me.

Now my floor and nooks and crannies are all clean and dust-free.

I'd recommend a DustBuster to any liveaboard for this reason. They're easy to pull out and use quickly. My shop vac is a bear to get out and use. This little thing is a breeze.

When you've got a tiny space to keep clean, it's much more of a challenge than a large space because any clutter or dirt makes the whole deal look dirty. For instance, today I had crusty bread. Normally, I'd break bread outside, hanging over the side of the boat to keep the crumbs away.

Today? I broke bread with abandon and Buster was there to clean up the aftermath.

I'm telling you. Buster is my new bff...

Wordless Wednesday... on Thursday...

There's no place like home...

Well, folks, I just got back from a gloriously relaxing and rejuvenating weekend with my friends on the beach in Virginia. We actually stayed in a town on the Bay called White Stone. I checked? Three days minimum to sail there. Too bad we didn't have the time! It was a beautiful weekend with perfect perfect weather. Steady, light breeze every day and lots of nice warm sun.

I feel so relaxed right now, but I can't tell you how nice it is to be home. I set out my beach chair when I got here, and I've been sitting on the dock watching the sunset ever since.



I guess it really is like they say. It's very nice to go traveling. But it's oh so nice to come home...

The solution to all my boat problems....

Pack up books. Take them to boat. Read books. Pack books back up. Take them home. Pick out new books. Take them to boat. Read books....

Seriously. That was my life up until recently.

It seemed my car was always filled with books. The boat had them crammed into her shelves willy-nilly, while my canned goods were relegated to a dark and scary cabinet.

It wasn't pretty, readers. It wasn't pretty at all.

But all that changed recently.

No, I didn't stop reading. Oh no. I got an iPod touch. And discovered the Amazon Kindle application.

My mother has had a Kindle for years and for years the darn thing has cramped my style.

"Oh that book?" Mom would say when I inquired after the sixth book in a series we both read. "I read it on the Kindle."

And then my hopes for not having to buy that particular book were dashed.

Now, I can download and read books.

Now I know what you're thinking. I've always been a purist, too. I love the feel of paper in my hands and the flutter of the pages.

But the eBook? It rocks for liveaboards. It's the perfect solution.

I can have hundreds of books in a space that isn't even 6 inches square. Romances, mysteries, fiction, non-fiction, Shakespeare... it's all there for my reading pleasure.

And if there's nothing that meets my reading whims? I can download something else.

It's amazing.

Of course the screen my iPod is pretty small, so I won't lie, I'm holding out for one of these:


But we can't have everything can we? Oh well... Christmas is coming, right? All joking aside, this is a great solution to the age-old entertainment problem. You're cooped up in a tiny boat with no TV and limited Internet and you're running out of books... the eBook comes to the rescue.

It's also great because you can have a newspaper delivered. Any other liveaboards out there miss having a paper delivered every morning? Now you can have papers delivered to your eBook and you can read from the comfort of your vee-berth without arguing with the newspaper delivery people at The Sun over why they should toss a paper 100 yards from the production plant and into the boat. Not that I've done that. Lately.

Now, I think I'll dial up a vampire mystery. I mean, why not?

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...

Forgive me....

Well, as Steve at Condor once put it: "Forgive me Blogger, for I have sinned."

Yep. It's been a looooong time since my last blog post. What can I say? I've been sailing. It happens. Work and sailing, sailing at work... shoot. They're kind of the same thing, I guess. And I've been thinking a lot about that recently.

This time two years ago I was living in a cute apartment in Hyattsville, working on my master's degree in journalism and working at The Examiner in Baltimore. I wore high heels at least four days a week.

These days I find myself living on a boat and working at a sailing center and thinking about sailing 24-7. I spend more time on boats and docks than I do anywhere else and I wear shorts to work every day.

I guess it's funny how these things happen.

Now I don't mean to turn this blog in to a philosophical soliloquy about my life. I've just been thinking about how sailing and boats have taken over my life.

And about how I kind of like it.

Look for more posts soon, I've got lots to tell you all. I've got posts planned on titling my dinghy, jury rigging Mark and Christine's heat exchanger, living without air conditioning and becoming a real-deal boat owner... It's been a very exciting spring on the Misty Rose.

Is that a dinghy in your pocket...?

Just like every guy needs a wing man, every boat needs a dinghy. It's just a fact of boating. My dinghy? It was missing. Misty Rose was incomplete. She lacked her wing man.

We'd always kept the dinghy (which was new when we bought the boat) underneath the porch at Oak Harbor. And this year, when I moved back from Washington, D.C., and we decided to look for it, it was missing.



Luckily, when Dad called Oak Harbor to find out What On Earth They'd Done With The Dinghy, they admitted they'd moved it into the shed. Without telling us.

Good thing we asked.

So on my day off, rather than sail, we went down to Pasadena and muscled the deflated dink into the car. And no. I don't have an explanation for the plastic bag hanging out of the back of my jeans.



For the whole year I've lived on the boat there's been a mysterious orange thing in a plastic bag. Apparently it's the dinghy pump. Good thing dad wouldn't let me take it off the boat, huh? I have a whole cabinet on the boat dedicated to Dad's bric-a-brac and crock-a-crap.


Putting the pump together was not too much of a mystery. I mean, I've got degrees. I can handle a pump.


Sadly, the pump came with six nozzles and a pressure gauge, which I never got to work. Maybe I should have stayed back in grad school for a dinghy 101 course.


I resorted to everyone's favorite method of trial and error for fitting the correct nozzle to the pump ports. Interestingly enough the nozzles lock onto the plastic ports. There's a spring-loaded thinger inside each one that needs to be depressed, we discovered, in order for the air to stay in when the nozzle is removed. This was discovered after much pumping.


Here I am pumping.

Dad took a turn. And pumped about 10 times before handing the reins back to me. I am daughter. Hear me roar!


I finished up the job more or less quickly.

And then took a nap on the dock while dad went to get the lock. Pumping is no easy job, OK?


After that, all I needed to do was tie her up and lock her down. Of course I locked her down. I mean, people have no problems stealing hoses and hoses have a lot in common with dinghies. Like... they're both made of rubber.

Now I just need to wash it. It's looking like it spend a couple years under a porch in Pasadena and we can't have that now, can we?

Why did it have to be spiders....

Everyone has something they're afraid of. Something they wouldn't want to find in their house in the middle of the night.

For Indiana Jones, it was snakes.

For me? Spiders.

I cannot stand spiders. I loathe them. I fear them. They make me go all shivery. I once refused to allow my boyfriend to touch me after he vaccuumed up a few spider eggs sacs until he'd washed his hands 97 times.

I've gotten a little better over the years.

I am now a trained spider killer and I kill on sight.

Now, you may be asking yourself why I'm posting about spiders on a liveaboard blog. It's an interesting question. And if you haven't spent much time in marinas you probably don't know that spiders love marinas and boats. Love them.

And if you don't keep up with them they'll take over a boat. And they'll go sailing. And they never flake the sails correctly.

Ahem.

So when I lived in DC, there was a serious spider problem at my marina and I purchased a corn broom from Wal Mart specifically for killing spiders and wiping away their webs.

Then winter came and the problem got a whole lot better.

Now that it's spring and I'm at the new marina in Baltimore, the spiders are back, pesky things.

Today, for instance, I went for a short afternoon sail with my pal Pastor Mark and my dad. And Mark points out a spider on the boom. So I take the winch handle (I'd just been tightening the jib, so it was handy) and swing it at the dangling spider... and throw the winch handle overboard.

Luckily it was the floating kind.

Also unluckily I don't have a net, so Mark did man overboard maneuvers, Dad grabbed my feet and I hung three-quarters of my body over the side and managed to snag the handle.

Unluckily I didn't kill the spider with the throw and Dad and Mark refused to let me try again with the winch handle.

So now, I must ask you, faithful readers, if any of you have any awesome spider repellent techniques. Do you? I hope so. Because there's a lot of spiders here and I have only so many winch handles I can throw overboard...

The nerve...

So I dropped home today in the middle of the day to get something I forgot. It's pretty nice to be living so close to work, I must admit.

And I'm walking down the dock and I see a new boat next to me. I say hey and nod at the guy working on her and I keep walking.

As soon as I set foot on my boat, the guy goes, "Oh, I'm using your hose."

I look over and darn if he hasn't gotten my hose all uncoiled from the tower and connected it to his own hose to make it long enough to reach his boat. And his hose didn't look like the nicest hose on the block either. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I DRINK the water out of my hose. I don't want it connected all willy nilly to suspect hoses that may or may not have the plague.

"Sorry," he says completely in a completely unapologetic tone.

"Um, it's OK, I guess," I say. "Please be careful with it, it's my only hose and I need it for my water."

OK, so maybe that was a dumb thing to say. "I need it for water"? Really? What else do people use hoses for?

And in a totally bombastic tone, he goes, "I'm just filling my tank, I'll be done in a second."

What? Excuse me? You are using my hose and you're not even going to be polite about that fact that you're using my personal hose from my tower without permission?

I tell ya, the nerve of these sailors. Bold as brass.

And he didn't even coil it back up right.

This is a great example of my the principle of liveaboard life in a marina. The liveaboard is exponentially more likely to have gear used without permission or borrowed because the liveaboard, in fact, lives aboard and is exponentially more likely to have stuff for other marina denizens to steal or borrow. The more stuff, the greater the chances of having it beggared away. The more time you spend on a boat, the greater the chances of having more stuff.

See where I'm going with this?

I'll tell you where I'm going with this. I'm going to Wal Mart to get a lock for my damn hose!

The neighborhood....

So a couple of weeks ago I set out to leave Oak Harbor Marina in Pasadena and head to Baltimore. Since I'm working in Baltimore full time now, I figured that living there would not only save on gas money since the commute from Oak Harbor sucked, but I'd also get to live in Baltimore, my favorite place on earth.

So I called around to all the marinas in Baltimore and kept a list of pros and cons on each marina. Categories included: Price, Internet access, location of bathrooms/niceness of bathrooms and overall location.

Tidewater Marina won in most categories. They have no Internet, but are significantly cheaper than most and were offering a slip close to the very nice bathhouse. Sold! Dad called Oak Harbor and they easily were able to rent our slip out (which meant we got our deposit for the 2010 season back -- to go straight into the range fund.)

I shanghaied yet another unsuspecting crew -- this time my dad and my boyfriend Jon. That's Jon in the center of the picture... and my dad's rear end off to the left there. Hi dad!

We actually had a beautiful trip. It was warm and the wind was blowing over our beam the whole time, so we were able to reach right into Baltimore. Overall it was exceedingly pleasant.



But now to the point of my post. In addition to being my home, Tidewater is a serious boatyard in a very industrial piece of the harbor. Want to see my new neighbors? Coincidentally, Jon snapped all of the pictures in this post since I left my camera home (well, I took the picture of him and he took the rest):





My other new neighbors? The cruise ships. It's like living in a row house in the middle of mansion-land...