The Town to the Right

For the last handful of days, we've been spending our days living in the boatyard. It's a strange thing to be on your boat when it's not floating. It feels unnatural. Water is supposed to be under the keel. The normal movement of the boat in the water isn't there. The gentle motion of the ocean in a calm anchorage has no effect on us while we are blocked up in a concrete stall with the sound of grinders, air compressors, and workers scurrying around at 7:30 in the morning.

This is the first time in my 20 years of living on a sailboat that we've stayed on the boat while it's in the yard. We've always had the luxury of family and friends nearby who graciously offered up their homes and gave us a place to stay while we were working on the boat on dry land. It's definitely much nicer to stink up our friends and families homes than it is to be in a boat that we are constantly worried is going to fall over.

We've been told that boats don't fall over when they are in the yard, mainly by the people who work in the yard, but we also currently own a boat that did fall over once. It happened before we bought the boat during a big windstorm, and also happens to be why we have had to do so much work on the boat in the last few years. Our new mast and the re-fiberglassing of our skeg were both products of the fall, and also, of shoddy insurance work that really were a band-aid at best. It's a long story that I don't have time to get into right now, but basically, we found out about it after it was too late. We had already bought the boat.

So here we are, doing more repairs to a boat that is supposed to be taking us around the world.  Not sitting in a dirty, dusty, smelly yard that comes to life when we should still be sleeping.

You may remember that we did an emergency repair to our steering system in Newport, Oregon as we were coming down the coast. In that repair, we replaced one of our rudder bushings. Since our boat has 3 rudder bushings, some simple math will tell you that only 33.33% of the needed work got done. To finish the other 66.66% of the work, we needed to pull the boat out of the water and remove the rudder to get to the other 2 bushings.

In Newport, we did what we could and hoped that it would be enough to get us to a place where we were able to haul out the boat and do a proper repair. The one bushing we replaced made a huge improvement but the steering still wasn't perfect. The steering was still freezing up and making ungodly clunking noises, 33.33% less of the time, which was a serious improvement, but still 66.66% lacking. Especially when the seas were big and we needed the steering to just work.

Pulling out the rudder is no simple task. It's not a plug and play device. Cutting of fiberglass, pounding of the hammer, tearing the skin off my knuckles, and a slew of interesting language coming out of my mouth all had to come into play. And once the rudder came out, the real work began. The old bushings needed to come out, which you may or may not know, comes out easiest when you destroy your shower curtain rod while using it to drive out the pressed in bushings.

And this is where we currently sit. We are waiting for the machine shop to fabricate us 2 new bushings, which I'm told is happening pretty quickly.

Once we get the new bushings, we'll spend the next few days reassembling, fiberglassing, and painting before we get splashed back in the water. And then we'll be able to sleep in again and get back to our adventure. We can't wait.

One of the last things we got rid of before we left on our big sailing adventure was our car. If you aren't aware, we just couldn't bring it with us. No matter how hard we tried, the car wouldn't fit anywhere on our boat. And because of that we walk everywhere. When we get to a new island or town, we walk. When we get supplies or groceries, we walk. When we want to go out to a restaurant because we are too lazy to cook, we walk. When we want to see the sites, we walk. We walk because if we don't, we aren't going anywhere. And going somewhere is the whole point of this adventure.

The people at the yard we are in are pretty nice. They know that we are car-less and waiting for things to happen that are out of our control. Every single person we have run into here has told us the exact same thing. “If you want to go for a walk, take a left out of here. There is a cute little town about a mile and a half away with great restaurants and shops. But whatever you do, don't turn right.” Every one we talked to said nice things about the town to the left, but were very clear about one thing, “don't turn right.” Someone even said, “don't go right...you might die.” Wow. To the right sounds scary.

Yesterday, while we were waiting for some things to happen at the yard, we took the train into San Francisco to have some fun. We did the normal touristy things and had a pretty fun day. And yes, we walked...a lot. My phone told me we took 27,882 steps. I'm not sure how much walking you do in an average day, but my phone tells me on a daily basis that we walk too much.

Anyway, when we finished playing around in San Francisco, we hopped on the train that was supposed to take us back to the boat yard. Because of Brenda's excellent navigation skills, we actually took the wrong train (I'm going to blame it on her but it was really my fault). And guess where the wrong train was going to take us? The town to the right. The place that we were warned about. The place where we might die. It's obviously the scariest town in all the world, based on the repeated warnings we were given by all of the people at the boat yard.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in general, people are generally good. I don't care what neighborhood you live in, even the rough ones, most people are decent human beings. Of course there are neighborhoods I wouldn't visit at night and areas of the world we are going to avoid, but generally speaking, people are generally good.

The train was going to stop roughly 2 miles from the boat yard. That meant we would have to walk 2 miles through what was surely the most terrifying neighborhood on the planet. There may be snakes running loose, spiders the size of Volkswagens, crocodiles, bears, who knows? Not me, that's for sure. All I know is that we aren't supposed to go to the town on the right. Because we might die. Did I mention that part? We were warned we might die! That's serious business.

I don't normally get freaked out about a neighborhood. I don't even think twice about it. But thoughts of death kept coming back to me. As we were riding the train of death to our eminent doom, death was staring me in the eye, and I blinked. I couldn't take the pressure.

I grabbed Brenda, we jumped off the train at a stop before the town where we were sure to die, jumped on a different train that took us to Berkeley, which if you don't know, is a town full of hippies, jazz, vegan restaurants, and doesn't surely want to kill us.

We wandered around Berkeley for a while and finally decided to get a ride from a friendly Uber driver, just to avoid the walk from the train station through the neighborhood of death. And what do you know? Uber what a pretty nice way to travel. Cheaper than a taxi, with a friendly driver, we didn't have to walk, and we didn't die.

Checking out the sites in San Fran

Step 1.  Major surgery.  It's not looking good.

If you are thinking something looks a little off with this picture, you are right.  We are rudderless in San Francisco.

Me and my good buddy Mr. Muscles having ourselves a good ol' time doing a scavenger hunt at the miniature choo-choo museum.  They wouldn't let us drive any of the little trains.  Bummer.