Posts Tagged ‘sailboat’
Into boats?
Into boats? I am. Here is a link to boats that I have owned, chartered, and crewed on.
 Puget Sound – Sailing out of Shilshole |
36 Foot Ketch on Puget Sound
36 Foot Ketch on Puget Sound
Before discussing the sailboat, worth identifying are the mountain peaks in the background. These peaks are the higher two peaks of the southern end of the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, a peninsula. First is Mount Ellinor, elevation 5,924 feet (1,805 meters), and to its right is a higher Mount Washington, elevation 6,259 feet (1,908 meters). I used these mountain peaks as an opportunity for a backdrop in order to achieve an enhanced composition for when a boat would pass by. I was rewarded when this beautiful twin-mast sailor with clipper-style hull indeed arrived! This boat, a beautiful sailing ketch, glided smoothly past on the sailing position known as a reach – with wind hitting its port beam. A number (“36”) clearly visible below the peak of the mainsail indicates the length the boat.
Sailboat at Rest, Westsound, Orcas Island, San Juan Islands
“My favorite Northwest boating destination is the San Juan Islands, because somehow I am drawn, impelled, pulled by some unknown force located there – perhaps a fantasy almost realized but yet, not quite. I try to shake it, even neglecting these islands for years, but alas, when I’m back, and I always seem to come back, the islands continue to exude their charm, their beauty.” – J. R. Hudson
Rare and Fantastic Sail
J. R. at the helm of Clipper Mac
A Rare and Fantastic Sail –
Ship’s Log – 1975 – Aboard Sloop Clipper Mac
After an uneventful morning, I found myself simply going with the motions of riding into the mid morning on the deck of my small fiberglass sailboat. No work, no commitments, at least that I can think of at the moment. I was bothered by a plugged feed to the alcohol stove which made brewing coffee a little difficult. This was resolved however by dismantling the tube from a small tank using vice-grip pliers. I was finally able to have my coffee.
With the mainsail up tight, I motored along the shore pondering how these people can afford the waterfront properties I see along this shore of the island. Furthermore, most of the houses seem to have no activity. Either most of them are at work in other locations, such as in Everett or Seattle, or they are sleeping in. Ten o’clock? I don’t get it.
The drone of the motor, the ensuing vibration through the hull and up through the deck and picked up through my posterior, and the low cloud ceiling, all, placed me into somewhat of a numb trance. I leaned on the tiller as necessary to round the point into the wind. Wind!
I dropped off the throttle to one-third power, pointed the bow into the wind, and hiked forward to where the jib sail was stuffed into the bow pulpit railing. Just as soon as I got forward, the boat pointed away from the wind. This caused the mainsail to fill with wind pressure causing a bit of a heel that made me a little uncomfortable. If I fell overboard there is no one else on board to come back for me – the boat would simply sail on. I ran back to the tiller and pointed it back into the wind which was coming around the point.
I repeated this trip to and from the bow several times before I came up with an alternate plan. I released the main sheet, the main rope that cinches in the main sail, so that when the wind catches it again it will just release the pressure leeward and I can get on with the business of raising the jib sail. My plan worked and soon I had two sails set and I could sense the increase in hull speed. The motor was not necessary any more so I shut it down.
I sat back to relax again just applying the right amount of pressure necessary on the tiller to maintain a good heading. My goal was to cross the strait into the next set of islands. That would be a good place to be for a couple of days while I contemplate what I am going to do with the rest of my life, or at least until next week.
Back home in Seattle I have a bedroom in a bungalow that a friend is fixing up to sell. He is the son of the landlord and this is what he does. He paints and performs yard work for his dad and stays in these little houses until his dad buys another one for him to move into and clean up. His dad works for Boeing, the aircraft company in Seattle. I just got off working two years managing a small camera store and got tired of working day and night and on weekends and had enough cash to hold me over for a few months if I am careful how to spend it.
Now caught up in the motion of the waves, I let my mind wander. A classic rock tune enters my head, the remembrance of a perfume from a former lover, I visualize an exotic color with an exotic name . . . hmmm, how high can a seagull fly? Nothing in particular. I let my spine oscillate to the predictable frequency of the waves. Some get sea legs, I get sea spine. I ponder heavily that I am riding on top of very deep water, hundreds of feet to the bottom.
Time seems to be an intangible concept for me. Cruising sailboats are not fast. I can barely see any wake behind me, but my craft and I are plying along at what would be jogging speed on land, and I’m not breathing uncomfortably. Nor am I burning any fuel. Yet the shoreline I left behind is fading though the shoreline on the other side is still hardly to be seen. There is nothing to do but to settle in and hang onto the tiller while leaning on it to make minor corrections to the boat’s heading every few moments.
I suppose I should attempt to increase my awareness of my current reality. One can never know what their particular future holds, and one day this will all end and I may never be in such a situation again. And, this is certainly a nice situation, at least I think it is. That has got to matter somehow, but I am sort of numb to it all. Seems unreal.
Off in the distance a crack is forming in the cloud cover. Rays of sunlight angle down to the water lightening it up with a sparkling sheen. Soon another break, and another. Multiple bunches of rays hit the water on several compass points. There is a bluff on the windward side of a distant island that is now fully illuminated by the sun. It glows a golden yellow and appears to have a tuft of vegetation at its summit.
A white sail balloons above the deck of another sailboat, larger than mine, just appearing out of the direction of the wind. Finally I get it. This is a beautiful day and I am alive doing something rare and fantastic!
My boat “Clipper Mac”
When Did This Happen? 7 – Photography and Sailing
PHOTOGRAPHY AND SAILING
During my tenure as a manager of camera stores, the popular cameras of the day had shifted from European to Japanese cameras. Initially the stores were overstocked with brand-names such as Leica, Contax and Rollei and were being transitioned and replaced with names like Pentax, Minolta, Canon and Miranda. My shop had a European camera, Hasselblad, a precision high-end box-like camera which had three Zeiss-Tessar lenses to compliment it. The complete system was several thousand dollars. I took it out and shot images of the Seattle Space Needle. I wanted to have the experience of shooting what was one of the photographers’ cameras of choice. Hasselblad’s were selected for NASA’s Apollo missions because of their precision and ability to hold up under adverse conditions and I wanted an experience with what has been determined to be the world’s best camera and optics.
A dapper young self-employed photographer was interested in our Hasselblad. He came in a couple of times scrutinizing the system, and examined how the three lenses looked through the camera’s prism viewfinder. I asked him if he was really interested in the camera and he assured me he was. He indicated that once he sold his sailboat he would by the system. Having sailed a couple of times I was interested in sailing so I tentatively asked him about his boat. It was a small sloop named Clipper. Early one Saturday morning as we neared the end of summer, according to our plan, we rendezvoused at the shop. We groggily discussed logistics of cars and timing and finally made it down to Seola Beach just south of Seattle on Puget Sound where “Clipper” was moored.
It was a lot of effort and many miles of driving that early morning. The weather was dull and I was tired. I worked many hours at the camera shop and spent as much time as I could on getting out on photo shooting exhibitions. It seemed such an inconvenience when I found the little sloop moored nearly a quarter mile offshore in shallow water off the beach. We clamored into a little pram, a small dinghy, and oared the distance out to the Clipper, and crawled up onto her as she bobbed in the waves. She was a white fiberglass boat that was a little weather beaten, but she felt very solid and at peace bobbing in the short chop that was spread over the surface of the sound.
Her owner, Mike, placed the rudder into place, lowered the keel, and raised the mainsail and replaced the pram behind on the small buoy where she was connected and the wind carried Clipper away. Mike raised the foresail. We healed at a slight angle and I could feel the increase in speed when my body moved back a little. “We’re sailing” he commented. I was pleased. I was very pleased. The feeling was great. There was no engine sound. There was only the creaking and chiming of various parts on the sailboat. I knew I was hooked on sailing that moment.
Back at the shore I wrote him a check after a brief negotiation on price, and papers were signed. Clipper was mine!
The following Monday Mike came into the camera store and wrote me a check for the Hasselblad camera system. Being a careful businessman, I inquired into the validity of the check. “Is this good” I asked? To which he responded, “It’s only as good as yours.” And, in that way I made a sale and got my sailboat.
My Clipper sailboat became a great platform for many of my photographs. My lifestyle really then changed into that of a sailor-photographer. I added scuba diving to the mix and for the next two summers I immersed myself into life on and in the water.
Winter came and I continued to sail. I took two friends with me on a four-day sail exploring the southern Puget Sound past Tacoma and through the Narrows. In February, we were thickly dressed. Also, we were minimalists as it came to just about everything, including food. We ran short and resorted to eating rice and fried bananas the last day.
From Clipper’s log:
“ . . . and the small hatch popped open and a hot steaming plate was passed up through the opening without comment. Hmm. This was to my surprise since I had no idea they were cooking. Furthermore, I was under the impression we were out of provisions. I dug into what appeared to be a bed of rice and something fried. It was fried bananas. Fried Bananas and Rice! ”
The following summer I quit my job at the camera store which I managed nearly a year. Located in one of the two busiest malls in the northwest, it was exhaustingly active most all the time. The owner of the chain kept me under such a thin budget for personnel that I was stuck in the shop for 12-hour days nearly every day with only one or two other employees. I had no time for sailing and photography. Though I had no plan for income, except my wife’s meager retail clerk’s paycheck, I imagined that I would find money somehow. I tried earning money with my photography, but I limited myself because I refused to shoot weddings and take portraits which is where the money was for non-recognized photo-artists such as I envisioned myself as becoming.
Some people take summers off for snow skiing, others for surfing. I took a summer off to be a sailing bum. In early June I took off for a long cruise beginning from Gig Harbor, a beautiful little harbor with a stunning view of Mount Rainier, to north through the San Juan Islands near the Canadian border. Various legs of the trip were planned. The first one, just myself, from Gig Harbor to Seattle. By car, an hour and a half drive. By sailboat, a day’s trip.
After an uncoordinated departure from the dock which resulted in assistance from one of the other boaters, I sailed into the Narrows, then up Colvos Passage on the inside of Vashon Island to where the water opens up to become Elliot Bay, across from Seattle. It was mildly windy and the sky was gray. For sport, I got into the Sport-Yak dinghy, a bright orange plastic boat popularly used as a tender for sailboats in our region. The Sport-Yak, in tow of the Clipper with me in it fishtailed as I attempted to remotely steer the mother craft with a telescoping extension from the tiller connected to her rudder. I laughed in chaos of the wind and waves as the larger pilotless craft towed me forward in brisk wind, thus risking my life to be sure.
Disco was just becoming to be the big thing. I sailed into the Seattle waterfront and caught a taxi and met my wife in a nightclub. She had come up to meet me in Seattle to start her leg of the journey intended to take us through the San Juans. We discoed and crawled into the Clipper late that night and departed northward the next morning under cloudy skies and drizzle. Later that day we encountered some really rough water as thunder crashed over the shoreline in the distance. The weather remained like that for another day then the sun came out. We were in the San Juan Islands finally.
We spent the next week in the San Juans eating crab, salmon, oysters, clams, and mussels. We danced at two of the resorts. It was absolutely the most adventurous thing we had ever done in our lives to that point. Our time up there was filled with many mini-adventures, such as negotiating how to get a live crab into a pot of boiling hot water, how to cross channels churning with tidal currents, how to anchor in rocky harbors and so on. We hiked on the little islands and shopped in the gift shops that populated the little harbor towns. Tourism in these Islands was subdued in the period we were there, not catching on until several years later. It was really an idyllic time for us, and a discovery of our personalities. My wife, my high school sweetheart, and I separated at the end of that summer after little more than two years of being married.
I stayed committed to sailing. I bought another sailboat that was a little larger than the Clipper. Both were moored in Kirkland, on Lake Washington. I moved from my home town to Bellevue which was a shocking change for me. I went from my first world of weekend hippies, hikers, hunters, factory and post office workers to a world where money was plenty. Bellevue was the high-end bedroom community for Seattle. There were more Mercedes, BMW’s, and Porches than I had ever seen on any road anywhere.
In Bellevue I took a job in a photo lab next to an upscale mall. There I printed everything from absurd posters for drug-store promotions and portfolios for models. I made barely enough income to maintain my sailboat and pay for an expensive apartment in town.
Soon I was working in an upscale department store, which was promoted to be a “catalog showroom” for the Jaffe family from Seattle – Jafco was the name of the chain. I started off part-time in their camera department in Bellevue just before Christmas season hit. Disco was really big and I was lonely. Though I went out dancing weekend nights, I was very lonely. I drove what was becoming an older classic 1966 Mustang and I didn’t exude much stability or wealth so lasting female commitments were hard to obtain. But there was fun. I leveraged myself through knowing a guitar player in a popular band that was a friend in high school, and taking girls to dance with the band.
I became aware that most of all the people working at the department stores were in this “temporary” position of passing time until more profitable careers or partners came along. There was a kind of temporary hold ambiance around “so we might as well have fun” feeling. There were soon-to-be models, inheritors, and schemers alike. I became friends with some interesting people plus some very cold and indifferent ones as well. I met a lot of people and dated exhaustedly.
We did inventory counts at the large stores and afterwards go sailing until the sun came up, then go back to work having no real sleep. I had several people out on my boats. Some became pretty good friends, a couple of whom lived on the waterfront. We had barbeques and parties ashore and sailed quite a bit. Some girls took me water skiing. It was a good time, but I was still lonely.
Meanwhile, I still maintained contact with some of my old sailing partners from the old life and went salmon fishing with them. Salmon fishing was more salmon “wishing” as the Sound was pretty well fished out. Development in the area was directly responsible for the reduced the salmon runs. For every salmon caught, if caught at all, ten or more sharks would hook up. These “dogfish” as we called them were disliked because it was felt that they were eating all the salmon’s source of food, herring. These were silver large finger-sized fish and both salmon and sharks loved them. When a dogfish was caught, it was common practice among the fishermen to kill them.
The Clipper was still in Gig Harbor even though I had moved up to the Seattle area. I loaned Clipper out and when I saw the boat after their fishing expedition turned bloodbath for the sharks, the hull of the boat where the sharks were hauled in was covered in dirty brown dried blood. They didn’t clean up the boat, and I never lent it to them again. Things on the Clipper were broken, the boat was trashed. I guess it was this, the habitually stale poker nights, and a general shift in interest that caused me to divorce myself, not only from my first wife, but from my hometown as well. I had to do cut loose. I seldom visited my family for quite some time, which was all as well. They were quite despondent over my divorce. I had a new life.
I shared houses with some guys from the warehouse at work and taught them how to sail. Some of the trips were for fishing, some for scuba diving, and some for the sheer joy of sailing, winter or spring, the season did not matter. I would work retail most of the time and what time was left was used on sailing. But, I began to realize that the boats I owned were really quite small and I was wanted a larger, more adventurous boat. The job I held produced too little income for anything more. I began to realize that retailing was not going to be productive in the long run, not as an employee anyway. I was increasingly aware of economic limitations. Settling down was not a consideration, being in my twenties, I felt there was plenty of time, but a gnawing concern began during this time.
I dated quite a bit and often used the Clipper as a platform for diversion. A guy and a sailboat were an anomaly for them and, sadly, the novelty didn’t seem have any lasting effect. This was still during the disco era. Dancing and sailing were fun things to do, but there was a droning emptiness. I missed my former wife, and reconciliation was probably never going to happen. I had a lot of acquaintances but I really felt lonely.
I was in a rut driving an aging car, a Ford Mustang, a classic that needed constant repairs. My love was sailing. I had no home. I had little contact with family and old friends. I felt another change was necessary to break out. What will it be?
Soon I forgot my troubles. I was dating fairly exhaustively, and for the wrong reasons was taking out some fairly young ladies. Intellectual stimulation was lacking. There was no history to talk about. I was in what Jimmy Buffet called ‘bimbo limbo’. Some were pretty nice girls, but just as I realized that needed to class up my act, I met a very attractive lady.
My bachelorhood was in full swing. I was about to plunge into a relationship and was frightened about this prospect. Yogi Berra said ‘when you come to a fork in a road, take it’. I had to either turn right or left but instead I stood agape and frozen before the fork. I was about to quit my job in retail, sell the boats, go back to school and wrap up the college credits I had into a package that would enable me obtain a bachelors degree in business. I was thinking about computers, or accounting, or something along those lines. The lady I had just met wanted to go back to school also.
More later . . | Photos
Pacific Northwest | J R Hudson 