Year two of retirement

I feel like the last year has gone by really fast. I don't have any regrets about retiring nor do I feel that I'm missing any sense of accomplishment from not working. This second year I feel like I've got the hang of retirement.. establishing new routines and habits that keep me busy in ways that I truly enjoy. It was my son's senior year of high school and I'm really glad that I was around and truly present for all of his lasts. 

This year he aged out of Scouting and I backed out of my leadership role there. It was also my last year as head coach of the High School Trap team which I'm now in the process of handing over to another dad who's son is on the team. As a family we were able to travel a bit visiting my daughter when she was working at Disney, on the boat, we took a cruise over spring break, and still have a lot more planed for this year. Staying busy has not been a problem.

In about two weeks we will be dropping both Annabelle and Max off at college and that will be quite a change for us. We will officially be empty nesters! It may be quite different without any kid activities to attend, coach, or lead. We will need to find a new rhythm in our house that is not centered around our kids. But next summer we plan to start our circumnavigation which may take anywhere between 2-4 years. So we have that to look forward to and start preping for.

As far as what I had imagined doing in retirement so far none of that has really come to fruition. At one point I thought I might follow up on that offer to teach at the community college or one of the local private schools. I thought I would be playing video games more. I frankly had notions of all sorts of ways to spend my time that I have yet to get to. Of course I also thought I would have a great looking yard, be caught up on all the projects around the house and would have a regular workout routine. Well it seems I failed at all of those but maybe the workout routine. I've been doing really well at getting to the gym or something equivalent 3-4 times a week this year and have continued walking a few miles each day with the dogs. 

Financially its hard to complain the stock market has been doing great which has put us in a better position then we planed for. Our rentals are having a rough year as we had a lot of turn over coupled with a few expensive repairs but I'm optimistic that we will break even with those this year.

Looking back I was never the person that didn't enjoy working or all of the chaos or challenges that came with it but at this point I can safely say I don't miss it nor do I even think about it other than to reminisce with a former colleague from time to time. Retirement has been a great decision for me and I'm really looking forward to our next chapter!

Lowering the mast

While we have had several sailboats before I've never really been comfortable when it comes to lowering a mast and have always relied on the boat yard for help. Historically they promised a lot and generally disappointed in this area. My experience has been that they will generally operate the crane for you while you do all the work. This time may work out to be the exception?

The yard called in the crane company. Helped get everything disconnected. I'm a bit worried about getting all the wires that were running through the mast connected again when we get to our destination but that's a problem for later. For now they are labeled showing what connects to what so I can join wire 1 to the other part of wire 1 at some point in the future. Needless to say there were a lot of wires and no easy disconnects. Fortunately we only ended up cutting one wire that we could not trace. It will be interesting to see what it might have been and how many smaller wires are in it when the time comes to join it back together.

The crane showed up around 1130 on a day that was 89 degrees and very humid. Luckily the yard treated this event as an all hands on deck maneuver from a staffing standpoint I think I had 5 guys plus the crane operator for this project. Getting it off proved to be pretty easy. Unfortunately the yard had not got around to making the braces/brackets they had committed to prior to lowering the mast so there was nothing to lay the mast in on the boat once it was removed. They ended up moving it over and setting it on some blocks on land. At this point everyone took a break and started scratching their heads on next steps. I realized there were also no straps to tie it down and asked Amy to make the 35 minute drive to the hardware store to buy everything they had in the racket strap section.

Meanwhile the yard guys found a spreader bar to help balance the mast as it would be moved over the boat. They had also decided to use some of the blocks they set boats on to temporarily rest the mast on my boat with. Unfortunately these were to be stacked on each other until the actual supports could be made. The new plan was to later use their smaller crane to raise it on deck enough to get the promised supports under it the next day. I was not very excited about this idea but unfortunately it seemed like a reasonable approach for what we could do at this moment and I was not very excited about paying the crane guy to sit around any longer then we had to or worse yet come back the next day.

Now that some informal plans were made up it was time to set the mast onto the boat. Unfortunately because of the way our mast is rigged to rake back there is some diamond shaped rigging starting midway up the mast that makes that happen. This rigging seemed to be hitting our bimini top and limited how far we could push the mast towards the back of the boat making it hang over the front of the boat about 15ft. It seemed we had a few options:

1. We could disconnect it which would allow us to push the mast back further and better balance the boat but would require a rigger when we put it up somewhere that understands our boat, why it was shaped that way, and knows how to get it back to that shape for optimal performance. This did not sound like a great idea as a good rigger can be hard to come by.
2. We could raise the mast up higher on deck (about 3-4ft) to ensure the cable would clear our bimini but then we might be to high to make it under the lowest bridge along the canal. 
3. We could take the top and windshield down which would provide zero protection from the elements during the 2000 mile journey and possibly make our helm position very uncomfortable. 

4. 

   A problem waiting to happen

   We could let the mast hang over the front of the boat more than we would like which would somewhat limit our travel days on the Atlantic and Great Lakes to ideal weather only. 

In my mind all of those options sucked. I looked over to my left and started looking at the straps on the travel lift and decided to just get the mast on deck for now and hopefully we could use the travel lift to bring it back up to change the mast position vs being limited to their crane. Hopefully once they get some chalks made to hold the mast more appropriately we might be able to have a better idea of where our height cut off will officially be and with some creative engineering we may be able to move the mast back and keep our top and window protection. For the moment I'm pretty sure we can make it under the 20ft bridge but I would really like the option of making it under the 15ft bridge.

Some other fun challenges I have not mentioned yet. 

1. We decided to do all of this work while the boat is still on the Chesapeake Bay. It seemed like a good idea at the time as the yard we were at was willing to do the work and their labor rates are quite fair compared to doing this somewhere in NY. This means we will have to travel up the Bay, though the C&D canal, then down to Cape May, and then 18hrs up the East Coast in the Atlantic with our mast down before we get to the Hudson River where the conditions will start to become easier weather/element wise about 1/3 the way up.
2. We found out our mast is really 69ft long. This means we are now a 69ft boat which will make docking interesting, limiting, and expensive anywhere we stop. It also means a best case setup we will have 10ft of mast hanging over each end of our boat.
3. 
   Turns out there is no where in Buffalo, NY (the end of the Erie Canal) that can put a mast that big up on a catamaran. Luckily I found a place in Oswego, NY that can which is where we will come out if we go the Lake Ontario route.

Our current thoughts are that we would like to leave the mast down until we get to where we will have the boat hauled out on Lake Michigan. This will allow us to do some maintenance on the mast next spring. Items like cleaning up some of the rusted fittings so we can hopefully see where the rust is coming from, replacing the tricolor light that worked but had water in it, replacing some of the stainless bits on the roller furling that are showing their age, etc. Additionally if we leave the mast down there is a chance we might be able to get the boat into inside storage for the winter which would hopefully be easier on the boat as it seemed our gel coat did not appreciate all the freezing and melting last winter even though the boat was shrink wrapped. So lots of items to work though as we make this journey at the end of the month. But for now the big dependency we have is the yard getting the chalks made and placed under the mast then ensuring its tied down well enough to make this trip prior to August 25th when we get back to the boat. Any wagers if it will happen before we get there?

A change in plans

We have been planning to do the Down East Loop pretty much since we purchased the catamaran to bring the boat back to the Great Lakes. It was a trip we really wanted to do and frankly we were thinking this boat would be to high to get though the NY canal system. Unfortunately it seems we have just run out of time to make that trip happen this summer. So we are moving to plan b. I had forgotten that boats with 20ft of height can still travel the canal system. Unfortunately they can't do the Erie Canal but they can travel up the Hudson to Oswego, NY then out to Lake Ontario. Once on Lake Ontario we can travel west to the Welland Canal to Lake Erie then bring it rest the way around to Lake Michigan where it will be stored for the winter. This is our new plan.

The top of the mast on our catamaran is about 81ft off the water. I was guessing that our boat was about 15ft off the water which would make the mast some where around 60-65ft in length. Our original thought was to pull the mast and have it trucked to the marina we planned to store the boat at in Michigan this winter. I tried the UShip website that lets folks that do this kind of work bid on the job. I was get quotes in the range of $1500-1800 not cheap but we were thinking it would be much more convenient then having the mast on deck for the almost 2000 mile trip. I happened to find a boat shipping company and called them for a quote this is when they explained to me these guys had no idea what they were doing and I should avoid services like this at all costs. It seems anything over 50 some feet requires special permits and a specially marked car to follow it. Their quote was 15k for the job. I did some googling and realized what they were saying was correct and due to my mast length it might be best to put it on a special truck like they had to haul it vs letting it bounce around with 15ft or more hanging off the end. Needless to say I was not very excited about spending that kind of money. So it was time to consider other options.

The next option was to lay it down on the boat somehow. We have done this before with our first boat (you can scroll back and look at that trip further back in this blog) and it was quite challenging to move around the boat with the mast down to manage dock lines and fenders as we traveled through the canal system. But for 15k I figured we might be able to suck up the inconvenience :). I started measuring things on the boat. It seems our bimini is just under 15ft high, we might be able to make this work if I take down the wind generators somehow which the base sits about 6 inches higher than our canvas top. If we can get under 15ft we can travel the Erie Canal which would allow us to skip Lake Ontario.
So we decided to bring a crane in to lower our mast and transport the boat with the mast down via the canal system.