Lulu

One of our daughter's patients is apparently reading our blog. Their request was to hear something about Lulu. So here's a little something about my sweet wife. And to whoever asked Cody to request this, keep doing whatever exercises Cody's assigned to you. I know they're a pain but you won't get better unless you do them.

Lulu is 5 years younger than me and so, not exactly eligible for retirement. However, she told me that if I got to retire, she got to quit working, too. And, since I couldn't really see spending the first 5 years of my retirement all by myself on some sun-washed atoll, this seemed like a good idea to me as well.

So, after nearly 2 decades providing the kids at Silver Crest school with superb breakfasts and lunches, now she has only me and herself to feed. She's adapted to cooking on board quite well. In the picture above she is cutting butter to put into a batch of croissants she's making. The little oven on the boat hasn't slowed her down a bit, nor has the loss of 2 burners. The hardest part of cooking on the boat is the lack of counter space but she's adapted to that uncomplainingly as well. Probably the hardest adjustment has been her outlook on bargain shopping. She has always tried to stretch our food budget as far as possible by buying stuff on sale, buying larger size boxes/jars/bottles, buying in bulk, etc. Well, on the boat there is precious little room to store mass quantities of stuff. Also, two small bottles of spices, for example, keep better than one large on since one of the bottles remains sealed until you need it. Besides that, every item we consume on the boat is carried on our backs so buying a case of canned green beans would make for a rather tough trip back to the boat. She is slowly becoming accustomed to having to buy in smaller units and getting screwed on the price because of it. But she doesn't like it!
In this picture Lulu is stepping aboard with her half of today's beer run. Her pack contains a 30-pack of 12 oz. cans of fine American lager. Including the pack, that's about a 25 lb. load. I also carried one. Then we went back again in the afternoon for another load. Now, we took the bus to the store and back so we only actually had to schlepp the beer 3 or 4 hundred yards at each end of the bus ride but believe me, that was plenty.

All in all, I feel pretty darn lucky to have gotten the wife that I did. Not many would be willing to toss off 32 years of accumulations to join their hubby on a tiny little boat to sail off to faraway places with no particular return strategy in mind.
Right now, as I sit at the Newport library writing this, she's back home on the boat with her sewing machine a-whirring, making canvas covers for our propane bottles to protect them from the sun. She recently re-covered a whole boat's worth of cushions on a friend's boat earning enough in the process to buy us 200' of new anchor chain.

So there you have it: she cooks, she sews, she carries a load, she's adventurous, she's willing to put up with me and even thinks I'm funny from time to time and to top it all off, she's cute as a bug's ear. No wonder that when we leave in July we will have been married for 33 years. So far.

Let the sun shine, PLEASE!

I made a move today that I've been procrastinating about for way too
long. I ordered 2 solar panels and an MPPT charger for our onboard
electrical needs. The reason I've been procrastinating is that solar
stuff is VERY expensive and I know so little about it. But, I finally
decided that I'd learned about all I was going to w/o actually having
the equipment in hand. And, if there was any chance to get it
installed and working before we leave in July, I'd better get on it.
So, after a reasonable amount of cost-comparison shopping on the
internet, I ordered 2 80Watt BP panels and a Blue Sky MPPT
controller. One of the bummers about a small boat like Siempre Sabado
si that there is very limited real estate fro mounting things like
solar panels. The 80 watt units were about as large as I can go. The
sad part is that I could get a 135 watt panel on sale for just a
little more money (maybe even a little less) but there's just no good
place to put it. Oh well, look at how much we save in bottom paint.

So, between the 160 watts of solar power, our 70 amp engine-driven
alternator, and our Honda 2000 generator, we should never need to
connect to shore power while we're out traveling. That's good because
different countries often use different power systems (220 V 50 Hz vs.
120 V 60 Hz for example). Also, shore power connections are reputed
to be one of the worst sources of stray voltage leading to
electrolysis. And, besides, shore power is available at marinas and
we're hoping to primarily be anchored out away from shore.

There, the money's gone so now I can just relax and get on with it.

Is that ham I smell?

Well, my big news today is that I passed my General class HAM license test this morning.  I've been stressing about it for a month.  Last month I took and passed my Technician level test but it was fairly easy (missed one out of 35).  But the General was much more technical and covered stuff that I either have never seen before or haven't seen since I was going to FT"A" school in the Navy some 40 years ago.  And I didn't really get it then.  But I managed to pass (missed 4 out of 35) so now I'm good to go.  What does this do for me? Well, when there are various "cruising nets" that take place on the HAM frequencies.  These are groups of cruisers who check in, give their position, ask for help if needed, get weather forecasts, chat, etc.  Since they mostly take place on the HAM bands, all you can do without  license is listen.  Now I can talk.  But the other reason I get it is so that I can use AirMail.  It's possible to get and send low-bandwidth (read: "text-only & no forwards") e-mail via HF (high frequency) radio anywhere in the world, even out in the middle of the ocean.  You don't need a HAM license to do this if you're wiling to pay an organization called SailMail $250/year to administer your mail.  Now this is a fair price because that's what it costs to run the program.  But, with a HAM license you can get the same service, administered by fellow HAMs through a program called AirMail for FREE.  And, as we all know, free is a very good price.

So, passing the test was my first big difficult hurdle.  Now the next one is to try to figure out how to connect my radio, Pactor modem and compute together so I can actually send and receive HF e-mail.

-Steve

KJ4STN 

Food Find in Newport

(first, let me apologize for the dearth of entries. I can update my blog with text-only entries via e-mail, allowing me to compose them off-line. But so far, I haven't found a way to compose entries with photos while off-line and I don't always want to spend a whole bunch of time hogging one of the only 2 broadband hook-ups at the marina. I composed this entry at the library. Anyway, if I ever figure out a way or another blog site that allows off-line composition, I should get a little better about updates. Until then, on with the story...)

Food find in Newport:

Who knew? Right here in Newport there are at least a couple of food finds that rival what we've read about in less-industrialized countries for price and quality. Lulu found out about one of these quite by accident. Last week, while doing some laundry, she got to talking with some guy in the laundry room who told her about this really good deal on lunch at someplace called "The Sword Shop" in Aquarium Village. Now, Aquarium Village is a short walk from the marina but we've pretty much ignored it. It's full of kitschy little tourist shops and looks like a low rent theme park.

Somewhere in this mess there was supposedly a place called "The Sword Shop" that supposedly served a lunch consisting of a salad, an entree, a small drink and dessert for $3.00. Now 'm not usually a skeptic (okay, yes I am) but c'mon, the SWORD Shop? Three bucks? This had to be investigated. So, one beautiful day this week Lulu and I wandered over. We were tempted to wear Groucho glasses & nose disguises in case anyone we knew saw us wandering around Aquarium Village. But, it being mid-week we figured we were pretty safe.

Well, we found the Sword Shop and looked through the windows. Looked like a shop that sold swords to us. No food in sight. So we wandered around the corner. The pink and blue place in the photo is a place called Screme's Deli. It's actually also the back entrance to the Sword Shop. Inside we found a few small tables full of apparently happy eaters. The staff was bustling back and forth between the kitchen and the dining area. We checked out the signage and the deal is that every day the deli serves a lunch. Just the one lunch, no choices. If it's what you want, great, if not, come back tomorrow. The lunch consists of a green salad, an entree and a dessert as well as a small (12 oz.) drink. And, yes, it does cost only $3.00. They serve from 11:30 to 1:30, if memory serves. The entree the day we tried them out was a pork chop and baked potato:

It was really good. The pork chop was nicely seasoned and very tender. The spud was baked to perfection and had real butter as well as sour cream

if you wanted it. The salad was good and about the same size you always get as a dinner salad. Since there was just the one entree, service was virtually immediate.

For dessert they offered these humongous homemade (okay, deli-made) cookies. They had at least three varieties that I noticed but there may have been more. I had a chocolate chocolate chip one and Lulu had a sugar cookie:

And all this just a hop, skip and a jump from the boat. We haven't been back yet but we will be. And maybe while we're there we can pick up a sword or two

Learning Spanish

Since Lulu and I plan to spend many, many years in Mexico and Central
America, it would be silly not to try to speak the local language.
Granted that in most of the towns that cruising sailors frequent much
of the population speaks very good English, but still there will be
the occasional villages where no one speaks English. Besides, it just
seems right to be able to converse with the locals in their own
tongue. Toward this goal, we have taken quite a number of Spanish
classes over the years. Of course we both had high school or junior
high school Spanish but that was a really long time ago. I was,
however, amazed at how much of it came back to me when I first started
attending some weekly brown bag Spanish lessons at work a number of
years ago. We also attended some evening Conversational Spanish
classes put on by the community college at Silverton High School. Our
big plunge was when we celebrated our 25th anniversary (back in 2002
in case you're curious) by spending 3 weeks in La Paz, Baja California
Sur, attending a Spanish immersion school. The idea was to live with
a local family and attend class for 4 hours a day. The rest of the
day would be spent visiting with your host family (en español, por
supuesto) as well as seeing the local sights. We dutifully attended
class every morning and tried to converse with our hosts, Antonio and
Cecelia in Spanish. Trouble was, our Spanish was so bad and their
English was so good and we genuinely liked each other. So, unless we
wanted to talk endlessly about how good Cecelia's cooking was (and it
really was) or what funny guy Antonio was (and he really was), we
naturally reverted to English. Made for a great visit but we didn't
learn an awful lot of Spanish. And, I must add, this was entirely our
fault. Antonio and Cecelia (ESPECIALLY Cecelia) really tried.

So, we were really pleased when Rosemary, one of my Aquarium shift-
mates, told us about a Spanish class she was taking at the local
Centro de Ayuda (Help Center) on Thursday evenings. I stopped by the
center and talked to Jorge about joining the class. He told me that
it's a sort of "survival Spanish" class. He strives to teach us
enough to be understood and, more importantly, to understand what
we're hearing, but doesn't delve deeply into the grammar rules, etc.
We went to our second session last night and this looks like it's
going to be a very helpful class. I'm not sure when the sessions
started but we're definitely not counting, or learning our colors or
even conjugating verbs except as needed to understand what we're
reading or to get our point across when saying something. Jorge's
emphasis is on trying to train our ears to hear Spanish. If you've
ever taken a Spanish class and then tuned in to a Mexican radio
station or eavesdropped on a conversation in Spanish, you know how
hard this can be. You pick up the occasional word that you're
familiar with but the rest just seems to run together. Don't blame it
on "they speak too fast". Think about how fast you speak English.
Probably doesn't seem fast to you but try slowing it down to
the word by word speed that you want to
hear Spanish spoken in so that you can
understand it. The problem is that we're just not used to
hearing the sounds and identifying them as words. This takes
practice. Can't remember for sure what Jorge said last night but it
was something like several hundred hours of listening was required
before you start to get good at it. He sent us home with a CD full of
a bunch of stories told in Spanish and they're not all told by
Mexicans. There are also speakers from Spain, Colombia, Venezuela,
Cuba, etc. so that we can get used to the different accents. Methinks
this is going to be good. The library also carries lots of foreign
language movies. I checked out a Cuban movie called "Hello,
Hemingway" to start. I think we'll try watching it (in Spanish) with
the Spanish subtitles turned on so that we can start to associate the
sounds with the words, although that may not be the right way to go.
The CD that Jorge passed out also contains pdf files of the stories
but he advised us against printing them out yet so maybe we should
just watch the movie w/o subtitles and see how it goes.

Our inspirations that keep us going include our nephew Jaxon and our
friends Jason and Deanna. Jaxon, armed only with a little bit of high
school Spanish, spent a year of high school in Spain. He was
surrounded by non-English speakers and was expected to do all the same
stuff that the local high school kids did (homework, tests, contribute
in class, converse with his host family, etc). He has told us that
after a certain period of time (can't remember how long he said for
sure) things just sort of "clicked in" and everything he'd been taught
suddenly made sense and he began to gain fluency. Jason and Deanna
met in Texas while they were both on a mission for the LDS church.
They spent their days proselytizing to the Spanish-speaking community
in a small Texas town. The LDS church has developed some very
impressive language-teaching techniques judging from what I've seen of
some of their returned missionaries. I don't know how much Spanish
either Jason or Deanna had taken in high school. We didn't know Jason
then but we knew Deanna and I don't remember her taking much, if any,
high school Spanish. Armed with their 6 week (or so) LDS class they
hit the streets. By the time they returned they were both quite fluent.

Besides our other resources, a boater we met on "A" dock loaned us a
copy of "Spanish for Cruisers". We'll definitely have to get our own
copy. You can spend a lot of time learning to speak Spanish and still
be caught short when you go to the local repair shop and have to ask
for a "packing gland" or a "glow plug" or you need repairs made on
your "working jib". Kathy Parsons has gathered all of these
specialized words together along with a bunch of essential phrases and
such into a nice little spiral-bound book that looks to me like a must-
have for sailors cruising in Latin America. We're also going to each
get a little electronic Spanish/English dictionary to carry with us.
They're cheap and small. They wouldn't be very useful for trying to
form a sentence in any kind of reasonable time, but we're hoping
they'll be useful for coming up with the occasional word that we need
to finish a thought. And they're easier to use than carrying around
an actual bound dictionary.

So, wish us luck and hasta luego.

PS: I'm also sending a copy of this to Antonio y Cecelia, so this last
part is just so they'll know who the heck this e-mail is from:

Hola Antonio y Cecelia. Es Lulu y Esteban. Esperamos a ver ustedes
en noviembre o deciembre cuando nos visitamos La Paz en nuestra yate.
Si quieren, leen nuestra blog a http://yodersafloat.blogspot.com .
Hasta la vista.

Alphabet soup

I promise to write something better than this pretty soon but for now,
this glimpse into the "simple" life of a sailor will have to do.

I got my new VHF radio the other day. The old one still worked but it
didn't have DSC. Plus, New Horizons came out with a new VHF with DSC
and AIS! Now I've been wanting AIS ever since I first heard about
it, so, considering the old VHF was getting a bit long in the tooth,
this seemed like a no-brainer. Well, when I was going through the
installation procedure, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the
VHF would communicate with my GPS via the NMEA protocol so I could see
contacts on my chart plotter. Now all I have to do is contact the FCC
to get my MMSI number, wire the whole shooting match together and I'm
good to go.

For the non-sailors or the KISS sailors out there:
DSC: Digital selective calling. This is used to call a specific boat
on the VHF radio by contacting it directly rather than just sending
out a broadcast and hoping they answer. It also contains info on my
boat so that any distress calls sent out from my radio will contain
information about me, my boat, emergency contact numbers and, once I
tie the two together, my GPS coordinates.
MMSI: Can't remember what the letters stand for but this is basically
the "phone number" of my boat which other folks with DSC would use to
call my boat specifically. This is also the identification number the
Coast Guard would use when a distress signal comes in from our boat.
AIS: Automatic Identification System. This is so cool. Basically,
ships over a certain size are now required to carry AIS transmitters
which send out a signal telling who they are, what direction they're
headed, speed, contact information, etc. Now, instead of wondering
whether or not that big old freighter on the horizon is headed for you
and whether or not he knows you're there, you can see his position,
etc. on your chart plotter. You now know who he is, where he's headed
in relation to you, how fast he's going, whether or not he's going to
hit you and if so, when, and/or how close he'll come if neither of you
change course. Very cool.
GPS: Global positioning system, but you already knew that.
NMEA: A marine electronics industry protocol which allows various
gadgets by different manufacturers to communicate with each other.
FCC: Federal; Communications Commission, but you already knew that, too.

OK, I've killed enough time at the library (Lulu's sewing on the boat
and needed me out of the way). Time to go to the Post Office and the
to the store to get the wire I need to perform the above miracles.

Meanwhile, back in Newport

Been raining like a big dog so far this week. Last Thursday, when I
went to the Aquarium to clean the otters' toys, it was raining
sideways. Didn't waste any time watching the staff feed the pinnipeds
that day. Got the toys cleaned and got back to the boat ASAP.

Yesterday, on a suggestion from our friends Rod & Jennifer Hill, we
went to the Newport Library to see if we could get library cards.
They have a 3-month visitor card that costs $5.00 or, since we are
paying for a slip at the marina and are, therefore, residents, we are
eligible for a regular card. Libraries have changed a lot. Sure they
still have books. But you should see the collection of DVDs they
have. Movies, TV shows, travelogues, how-to videos, etc. They also
have books-on-CD as well as a fair collection of music CDs. So I
guess we'll save our collection of DVDs and books for when we're away
from here and use the Newport Public Library's collection in the
meantime. Ben Franklin had a great idea when he came up with free
libraries. I'm continually amazed that they exist.

A new item in my keeping busy arsenal: tomorrow I'm going to spend the
day at the Aquarium helping to tear down the traveling exhibit (Odd
Water). The animals are being shipped to other aquariums and we'll
soon be stripping the whole exhibit down and rebuilding to house the
new Swamplands exhibit scheduled to open in May. Meanwhile, Lulu
starts her stint of volunteering at the Hatfield Marine Science Center
next week. Not sure how all these crossword puzzles are going to get
done with us running around doing other stuff. Guess we'll just have
to work twice as hard at them. Or not.

We've added a plexiglass insert to our companionway to brighten things
up down below. We already have plexiglass drop boards so now, we just
slide the hatch all the way open, lay the new plexiglass panel over
the opening and we're pretty protected from the weather while still
getting all the natural light afforded by a seemingly fully-open
companionway. Woo-hoo!