Sea Trials...

Today was sunny and beautiful in Seattle so we did some more water proofing to fix leaky windows, dry-fit some more Flexi-Teak and then took Epilogue out for a little cruise around Lake Union. It's pretty fun to approach one of the three draw bridges on Lake Union in a 55' sailboat and not hail the bridge keeper. I was actually nervous passing under a bridge I normally see raise when underway aboard a sailboat. I imagine it's like having a phantom limb after an amputation. Soon enough I'll be nervous that the bridge isn't raised high enough for the 75' of mast she'll have.





Epilogue ran smoothly, cool as a cucumber and seemd to handle just fine. I'm confident she's ready to take the trip north to Everett as soon as the mast is ready to step.

Flexi-Teak

Flexi-Teak is a synthetic teak decking material that I'll be using in the cockpits and probably eventually in the cockpit soles. Today I installed the first two, of 10, panels just to get a look at how they look. I think they're going to be beautiful and virtually maintenance free! Tomorrow I'll go back and run a bead of black caulk around the outer edget to seal so water can't find it's way underneath. Tomorrow we may install the large center cockpit panel, depending on weather.

This is the main drum of the new roller furling system I'm installing. I've never seen a roller furling drum this big. We're hoping to take Epilogue north to Everett in a couple of weeks to have the mast stepped and rigged and return to Ballard for the winter. This will be a huge event. She'll look like a real sailboat and have a mast that is 73' off the deck.


This is the new mast collar and cut-out where the mast will enter into the boat. Have to get some work done before the mast makes it impossible get back in there.

Coasting...

There is in this aspect of land from the sea I know not what of continual discovery and adventure, and therefore of youth, or, if you prefer a more mystical term, of resurrection. That which you thought you knew so well is quite transformed, and as you gaze you begin to think of the poeple inhabiting the firm earth beyond that line of sand as some unknown and happy people, or, if you remember their arrangements of wealth and poverty and their ambitious follies, they seem not tragic but comic to you, thus isolated as you are on the waters and free from it all. You think of landsmen as on a stage. And, again, the majesty of the Land itself takes its true place and properly lessens the mere interest in one's fellows. Nowhere does England take on personality so strongly as from the sea.

- Hilaire Belloc, "Off Exmouth"

I'm reading Jonathan Raban's Coasting: A Private Journey - a story about his sailing in a small boat around his native England.

Shipwreck...

No other element has such accreted layers of significance for us, such complex archetypal meaning. The sea’s moods and uses sex it. It is the great creatrix, feeder, womb and vagina, place of pleasure; the gentlest thing on earth, the most maternal; the most seductive whore, and handsomely the most faithless. It has the attributes of all women, and men too. It can be subtle and noble, brave and energetic; and far crueller than the meanest, most sadistic human king who ever ruled. “I believe in the Bible”, an old sailor once told Lord Fisher, “because it don’t mention no sea in Paradise”. I happen to live over the sea myself, I watch it every day, I hear it every night. I do not like it angry, but I’ve noticed that most urban and inland people adore it so. Storms and gales seem to awaken something joyous and excited in them: the thunder on the shingle, the spray and spume, the rut and rage.
--John Fowles "Shipwreck" 1975

This passage came from The Oxford Book of The Sea, edited by Jonathan Raban. I was scouring it for inspiration and found myself quickly searching the web for other work by John Fowles.