Married 52 Years

In the last two blog I showed a little of our old boat. In the last few blogs I have been saying we are planing something and working hard to get ready. The first rule in cruising is never tell where you are planing to go. If for any reason you don’t go you will have to here “You didn’t make it.” This time I’m going to break that rule and say were planing a trip to England with the Pamela Ann. Why break that rule now. I hope the few people we know there will start looking for us a place to dock our boat and if we go we are planing to go as a tall ship. Why a tall ship? The Pamela Ann is home built , rigged as a true top sail schooner and all her rig is traditional. Nothing is modern. When she was in the movies the check stub had rental of tall ship. That the first time I realized they call old boats like the Pamela Ann a tall ship. They are events around the world that all these old boats show up to see and be seen. We are hoping the Pamela Ann will make some of these world events someday soon. We did the Great Chesapeake Schooner Race in 2001 we were well excepted there. The best we can hope for is to be invited to events some where. For all that don’t know us. We live on less money than most people we know. Pam is responsible for that. She doses the budget each week or sometimes each day if things are getting really tight but we some how get by. Maybe too if we get invited we can stretch that budget a little more and see more. How do we plan to do all this? First we need to go back to the US. We need batteries and other stuff. I have put in all our blogs if you hear you can live cheaper in the Caribbean than the states, we have not found it any where. You can live on rice and black bean “every meal” “every day” here and there are people here that do it but that’s not living well the way I see it. Maybe their drinking hard helps but we don’t drink. We are planing to go back and refit in New Orleans, LA. It will take us maybe a year there to get ready,then we plan to go back to Southport, NC with the boat where we built the Pamela Ann and leave there for Bermuda. We will be on our way but for now it’s working and packing in as much as we can here.

Today  March 20th Pam and I celebrated our 52 years of marriage. To do that we went to a restaurant under a bridge where they cook on a open wood fire. We are here so we were just going for the most true traditional restaurant here. Dogs and chickens running under your table as you are eating.

More chickens around

The kitchen

Kids playing in the street. Cold Pepsi in glass returnable bottles like it was when we were kids in the states. We had a lot of friends to show up. This made it better. There is no place in the US like this where you can go under a highway bridge set up a table and a grill. Build a fire with wood start cooking and run a restaurant.

Another restaurant being set up on the street

 

The owner of the restaurant Oskar and us getting ready to cut a cake. His Birthday was today and Happy Birthday to 2 of Tim’s sisters today also

Last year we celebrated by getting ready to come back to the states and ride our old motorcycle for two months out west to Kansas. That was good. The year before we crossed the bar leaving the Rio Dulce taking the Pamela Ann back to sea going to the Bay Islands. Next year we will just have to wait and see. It’s hot here, its always hot here and way past Christmas but I wonder what Christmas would be like in jolly old England. Maybe someday we can wright about that. Remember it’s always the trip that makes life so good for us not the destination but just being on the other side of the big puddle will have to feel really good if we make it.

More Boat “Pamela Ann”

Last week I wrote a blog about our old home built boat and what it like on the out side. This week I am doing a follow up on the inside of our boat. We have lived most of our lives heating the houses we lived in with wood. In our boat we have a little pot belly wood heater.

                               We are proud of our little Pot Belly Stove

I work a lot on boats doing wood work to make money so I keep a bucket near the miter saw and when the wood gets too small to use in goes in the bucket and we burn it at night. White oak, teak, cherry mahogany or ash, it all goes up in smoke. We like cold water sailing so our boat was built to be warm. Some of our best trips south from the Carolinas to Florida for the winter we would leave near Christmas. We have had great trips in the winter in the Chesapeake and in the sounds of North Carolina. You have never been sailing until you have sailed all day and it snowing all day. Watching the snow coming around the sails with Pam always having something cooking on our little Taylor 30 kerosene cook stove from England I converted to propane with burners I bought from Harbor Freight.

Taylor 30 kerosene cook stove, now uses propane

The cockpit was designed to take canvas well so it’s nice and warm when you’re behind the wheel and you’re heating the boat. Over the stove is a home made hood that vents outside. Inside that hood is a vent to the ice box that can be sealed tight but if you leave it open there a two vent in the bottom of the box to the out side of the boat to let cold air in, Hot air rises, cold air falls so when it’s cold outside and the vents are open the ice box holds last night’s coldest temperature naturally no moving parts and you don’t need refrigeration. It works better that you would think but remember for it to work it has to be cold outside. We have and evaporator inside the ice boxes that works on 12 volt when we need it. Turns the ice box in to a refrigerator when that on. On basely the same principal we have a cabinet with the bottom of the drawers open covered only with cross woven wire and a chimney or vent near the cycling for our vegetables, everything is in the dark inside. That lets air circulate naturally. The colder the hull is the better it works. If you are in maybe Virginia in late October and you wrap green tomatoes in paper and put them in there you will be enjoying them for Christmas. Works like and old time root cellar. We also have a home made kerosene furnace with ducks through out the boat that work on muffing fans out of old computers moving the hot air through the ducks and the boat. Works good on paint thinner too if kerosene is not available, uses very little power for the fans.

                                          Home made  Kerosene Furnace

Pam has a built in sewing machine in our cabin so she can sew cloths. She can open the cabinet top and sew anytime anywhere.

                         We also use this machine to sew on spinnakers and light weight sails

We have a walk in shower with a good hot water heater, I reworked an Italian boat hot water heater where the inside is stainless and the out side is stainless with insulation in between the gaskets on them leak a lot. Not any more. I used a stainless plate and put in a American heating element and thermostat. Works great now. Everything on our boat I ether built , rebuilt or redesigned. We have very little money to do what we do. Pam calls it “Tim-A-Sizing”. In the main saloon we have a sky light. I was in a boat yard once where a man know for his find wood working was building one. A women walked up and ask if it would leak. He said. It will. Just the nature of the beast. We keep ours I built covered when it stormy but it really works good on letting in light and letting hot air out. Don’t leak on normal rainy days but I believe they will all leak if the wind is just right. The etched glass in the sky light we did our self with a sand blaster. There are deck prisms through out the boat like the ones on the whaling ship the Morgan letting in light too. Looks like big diamonds.

This is one of our 4 deck prisms we have on the boat to bring in light

A few things you want see on most boats today we have I built the electrical panel using a brass kick plate off a door. Polished and lacquered it and it’s looks different with the instruments and breaker necessary in a modern boat today setting in brass not aluminum or plastic.

Home built electric panel

In our cabin we have a clock and a upside down compass mounted on the ceiling,this throws people off a little when they see it. They think it’s there so you can look up and see if your on your course when you are off your watch but it’s there to see if the wind has changed and you’re laying a different direction to your anchor. It lets you know you may need to get up and go check and make sure everything is OK.

Our Boat “Pamela Ann”

In writing a blog every week I have tried not to get into how we are working on our boat in detail. That maybe too boring for some but I think we have a few people that want to know what we are doing to our boat and a little more about it. If you are just starting to read our blog our boat is home made. It maybe the most home made boat I have ever seen. We built most of it. We designed it from old working boats that were working before boats had motors. It’s a 46 foot on deck 26 ton topsail schooner. 61 feet over all. She is rigged with no modern stuff at all. Her sails are raised with block and tackle. She doesn’t even have hoops on her sails. Her sails are laced on. With laced sails you can raise them going down wind. Before motors were common place in boats turning up into the wind was a lot harder than today just to raise your sails. When we say we built most of it, we built the mast,the booms, the steering wheel and of course we designed and built the hull.

Steering wheel

We sewed the sails and made most of the hardware. We bought very little. The booms have forks that go around the mast with little wooden ball called pearl beads to keep them from sliding back just like in the good old days.

Fork on main boom

The chain windless is home built. Its a tooth and peg windless common on boats a hundred years ago.

Anchor wench

Some of her more unusual things is the drive unit for the auto pilot . Its home built too. Its a sure flow water pump motor off a water pump turning and acme screw with timing belts screwing the rudder to one side or the other. The rest is Furuno electronics telling the pump motor which way to turn. Her motors are old Volkswagen 1.6 diesels out of old Rabbit cars. The adapters for the transmissions is home built too along with all the stuff to make the motors work like the heat ex-changers built right into the keel. Her rigging is spliced not swagged. She has rat lines to climb the rigging just like the schooners of old. Her mast are built of wood and round so laced on sails will work. All her sails are worked with belaying pens. And art being lost in today’s world. When you hoist a sail you run the line under a bar near the deck and back up to the pens. Now the pens are being pulled down not up. Catching the line and pulling it out instead of down you can put a lot of force on the line. Taking the slack up as you go you can tighten the sail with out a wench. Her top mast are in collars so if needed you can drop her top mast and now her mast height is just 44 feet not her normal 61 feet. We sailed across Lake Okeechobee in Florida after dropping her top mast. There is a 49 foot train bridge that stops most sail boats from crossing the lake. Some people say we are nuts sailing around in a boat designed this way but we have had some nice comments too in our day. She has been in the movies. The Dawson Creek series. We feel like that was a comment.

On the way down we had the Mexican navy to bare down on us with a big black boat with big guns and when they came along side of us the young soldiers were along the side of there boat giving us the thumbs up sign. It happened again in Belize when we were bused by a helicopter checking us with soldiers hanging out the side giving us the thumb up sign. I guess its not everyday and old top sail schooner is seen plowing trough the Caribbean sea with her sails full and she is all powered up with just the wind in her sails behind the reef. The water is smoother back there. We hope it won’t be long before she is out there again with new paint and varnish. With us out seeing the world again and hopefully the world maybe will enjoying seeing her. We have been ask a lot why we designed her the way she is and I don’t have a true answer to that but I do like seeing her setting somewhere anchored where we have never been. You have no trouble looking out in the bay and finding her. Maybe next week we can write about how she is inside. She has a few things you never see on a boat today in side. Those few things make us feel like we are home and home is always where ever she is.

New club foot boom

Pamela Ann under sail