Photo art by Anika Tizliarishvili
I have always enjoyed inventing, designing, and building things. In elementary school my pockets were always stuffed with scraps of paper and two-inch-long pencil stubs so I was always ready to work on my inventions if class got boring. Class always got boring. Most of my inventions never worked, but that didn’t lessen the pleasure of trying to solve the puzzles necessary to make them work. ‘Okay, that didn’t work, what about using two rubber bands instead of the string? That HAS to work!’ Nope.
Thomas Edison discussing his many unsuccessful attempts to invent the incandescent light bulb.
So it was a a dream come true to spend a year taking a bare sailboat and equipping it with all the equipment one would need to live aboard safely and self-sufficiently: kitchen: stove, propane tank, spice rack, pots and pans, silverware; food and water storage; music: cassettes and tape player; book shelves; kerosene lanterns, candles; ship to ship radio; every tool you might possibly need; spare parts; emergency equipment: fire extinguisher; flares, water plugs, life raft, life harnesses; overboard pole, and life ring; rigging: new halyards, preventer, topping lift; reinforce sails, sew reefing points, add reefing lines, battens; dinghy and oars; outboard motor, gas tank, gas cans; ladder; emergency knife in a scabbard attached to the cockpit wall, to be used only if the boat is in danger; navigation: charts, compass, sextant; radar reflector and running lights; anchor lantern; ground tackle: anchors, chain, anchor line in dive bag on deck; trip buoy. The list was endless, but whether it was on an adventure or as a lawyer, I always loved being in the middle of a huge task when I couldn’t see the end, but just needed to focus on what I needed to do today to make incremental progress toward the end.
This was our marina, our neighborhood for a year when we were working on the boat. It was always lovely to wake up, make coffee and sit outside and enjoy the morning with work boats leaving the harbor, and birds calling.
Our bare boat:
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Above, what a boat like ours looks like before we did anything to it. It looks like a toy.
Below, outfitted and underway in Mexico after draining our bank account:
Oh my goodness! I was in heaven! So many things to design and build between those two pictures above! One of my favorite little projects was building a galley for cooking. Eating is an important part of a cruising adventure because you have all the time in the world and nothing you are obligated to do for months on end, so you think a lot about food, and being able to have a nice, efficient cooking space was heaven.
This is the finished product, a propane two burner stove and inside the box with the sand dollars were the pots and pans and cooking implements. The spices were kept in the racks above the stove, and when we were not cooking the whole galley slid to the left, back under the cockpit seat, where it was out of the way and locked into place so it wouldn’t make any noise as we were sailing. I loved the efficiency of that silly thing and it still makes me happy just looking at a picture of it.
One of my other favorite projects was our kerosene lanterns. Our boat would have virtually no electricity. We bought two lanterns and then I had to make the wooden mounting brackets to mount them on the bulkhead, and then bend brass plates over the top of the chimney to keep the heat from scorching the cabin top, and brass reflectors which were polished brightly at the time.
Rebecka and I each had our own reading lantern, and trust me, when you are anchored in a quiet harbor, gently rocking, reading by lantern light in a sailboat which moves just as they have for hundreds of years, you feel the company of ancient mariners.
That lantern is mounted on our deck now and it gives me pleasure as I remember reading from it, and also each step in making it.
Rebecka’s sewing skills came in useful to reinforce the sail stitching and sewing splash curtains which lined the side of the cockpit and keep water from splashing in.
The inside of a boat like ours before we started outfitting it.
My niece KC helping us pack everything up before we left. You can see our state of the art cassette tape sound system we built in our boat.
And Dad coming to inspect. We offered to take him for a sail but he said after 20 years in the navy he had had enough of blue water travels. Our helper KC is standing by me and my nephew Gavin is fishing off the stern.
Rebecka had to practice sailing.
And she looks pretty comfortable doing embroidery as we sailed considering the size of the ocean swell in the background.
I went looking for an adventure and even before we left, life was grand.
Out for Justice 