Traveling Soon

We are headed home soon to our sail boat in the Caribbean. We are still at out little house out on the prairie where it is becoming more our home to us as we spend more tine here. Summer are good here with how hot the Caribbean can be living on a boat. To our first time readers Pam and I have lived on boats longer than we have lived in houses. There is nothing as constant as change. We are getting older now and our needs are changing but our love for our life style is still as strong as our love for each ether. The trip is getting harder each time we leave our boat to here and go back. The way we have always lived has not been good for our bank account. One funny note in our life style is Pam is a shopper and if you know something about us from our blogs you know we ran away when she was 15 and I was 17 and got married. Pam had never had an allowance or had money to spend on her own but my first paycheck she said. I’m better at shopping than you with me being a girl so I will handle our money. Now 60 years later that hasn’t changed. We have always kept good credit if we needed it but if we have a little extra money we go do something. We have family members that say we have always lived hard.

Pamela Ann resting at a dock.

I guess with our old now home built boat we designed and built ourselves, with us living without a washing machine and a built in dish washer we are living hard. Stopping some where working hard saving money stocking the boat for our next trip. One note here even if you’re working hard there is an adventure in stocking the boat. Finding simple thing on sale that you know is cheap not just mark down like razor blades. Buy a year supply at one time. Having a well stock boat is like money in the bank. Remember I’m not the only one needing a razor. Pam is not living in a swimming suit with hairy legs kind of girl. Another note, Pam is the only girl I know that can wear out a bathing suit. Now with the change from when we stared sailing it is getting harder to make a living working on sails traveling on our boat. The change is in how boats have changed over the years. When Pam and I stared dreaming about living on a boat most boats were around 30 feet. Today any one trying to live on a boat under 30 feet makes people laugh. Our boat is 46 feet on deck and 61feet over all. Not considered a big boat now. Most sails today are so big and heavy we need a bigger sewing machine. A machine that big cost more than we spent our first year traveling on our first sailboat. Pam and I have had a lot of careers in our long life together and have had a lot of adventures the way we see it. Maybe a new adventures is coming, Our boat is in a boat yard and we have replaced her motors. During the COVID-19 pandemic we needed to come back to the US. Really difficult to do. Getting back to our boat even harder. Had a friend watching our boat hooking up our power one hour a week to keep the batteries up. The sectary there thought we were steeling power and cut the power off on the dock when our friend found out what she had done now the battery were under water now with the heavy duty battery charger on one hour a week it destroyed the battery and electrolysis destroyed all the aluminum on the motors. The water over the floor when we finely were allowed back in Guatemala the interior of the boat need serious work. Its always money and time. With all this time we are just now getting the boat back in shape. The new careers is just a maybe with getting the boat back to the us and in boat shows along with my art and writing.

                                             The Adventure of Life Goes On

 

Tweety Bird

Painting of Farm Girls

 

 

 

 

What It’s Like Building A Boat

Last week I said I would tell more about us designing and building our sailboat Pamela Ann. In designing her I’m not a navel artistic let me make that clear. I hope this don’t sound like a brag but I have all my life been good with my hands and always doing art work. In the old days most of the best engineers were artist before degrees from some schools were so important. I come from a long line of carpenters, builders and people that worked with there hands. Going to a trade school for a short time I learned to read blue prints. With doing art all my life drawing plans for anything I wanted to build is just drawing to scale. Now drawing what we needed in a sailboat I used what I had learned from old time boat builders, I talked to and books along with having sailboats and sailing for a long time. One thing I do believe in is there is no perfect boat. You needed to build a boat for what you planned to use it for. A fast race boat with a fend keel and a spade rudder can be fast and easy to handle but can be seriously damage if you run it aground and storage for what you need to carry with you is very limited. I chose a wedge keel not for if I ever run aground but when we run aground. Less likely to be damage and easier to get off. I won’t go through how we designed the whole boat but it took a lot of research. Simple to fix was what we needed if something did break was a must. One thing we didn’t have a plan for with us building the boat was how many people would criticize us for almost anything we were doing. From it’s design with me only having made the eight grade in school to the materials we used to how long it took to build it. Even today the comments after all these years can very from our boat is worthless being home-built to it being a classic and shows well being a fully rigged top sail schooner. How ever someone sees it she has taken us on some great adventures and it has history now. They used it in the series Dawson’s Creek on TV. It has been in the Great Chesapeake Schooner race, a mention in Cruiser’s World magazine, appeared 118 times in print from articles to something in news papers. One of the biggest problems in building was money. We had to raise the money for ever piece we used to build with. There were times when it seemed hopeless, trying to find away to buy or get what we needed. We can’t tell about all the times this happen in this blog but this is a good example. I wanted wooden mast and finding the type of wood glue and what we needed to build the mast cost several thousand dollars. A women we helped a lot there in town died and with out us knowing about left enough to come close to what we needed. Building the mast we still needed to buy enough materials to build a table jig to build the mast in. Another man it town had a old house trailer he needed scraped and tore down so he sent some of his employees to do it and they disassemble it piece by piece. He had a fit when he found out they had all the 2x4s stacked neatly. He meant for them to take a chain saw to it. He gave me the 2x4s and I built a table 40 feet long with pieces of plywood every two feet to form the mast and it didn’t stop there. When the mast were build in Pam’s sail loft we needed to move them out in the parking lot. After we stopped working in the afternoon so I could sand them out and finished them. Moving them only cost us a few beers. Then it got even crazier when we needed to move them to the boatyard to be put in the boat. I ask the chief of police if he had any problem with how I wanted to move them. He said he didn’t want to even hear how crazy it was with how I was going to do it when I told him. Later he came by and said, when you planning to do this. I told him and he said, don’t you ever say you talked to me about this but they won’t be any police on that streets that after noon. I had to get some friends to help load the mast. I used a pickup truck laying a 4X4 across the bed with the tailgate down and hung the mast on a rope so it would swivel. The other end I placed on my dolly I used to move my cutting torches with, tied securely with a rope. This meant the back of the mast was about a foot of the road. We left and only had to get across the main street coming into town and we were on a side streets the rest of the way going to the marina. As we made it across and turned on the first side street there were about 20 people on bicycles with flags and lights following us like this was a parade. I can only wonder what we looked like with the rig I was using to move this 40 feet long perfectly round highly varnished mast with all these people on bicycles behind us moving along very slowly to the marina. Now Pamela Ann is a schooner and we had to do this twice. Schooner have two mast. I was told the large fork lift they use to put boats in the water would be $65 an hour. We put them in the next day with lots of people there some helping some in the way but that afternoon Pamela Ann had mast in place setting peacefully in her slip on the waterfront. There was lots of criticism as it has always been but the boatyard only charged us for one hour and it took a long time getting them in. There was help there when we needed it and the chief of police did stop by walked up looking at the mast in place never said a word but he winked at me as he got back in his police car and left.

Pamela Ann setting at the dock with her mast installed.

I said Pamela Ann has taken us on some real adventures but building her and it taking us ten years to do it was an adventure in itself. There us more crazy things we had to do building her but remember she was built for sure not assembled. We built it all, steering wheel, mast and her rigging, cut and made her sails.

The Steering Wheel  we made for Pamela Ann. We have been using it for a lot of miles.

Wonder where the name came from. If you read our blog I think you know. The adventure is still there with us getting old. To our friends in the Caribbean, Pam and I will be back on the Pamela Ann soon.

                                               The Adventure of Life Goes On

This picture was made about two months into the building of the Pamela Ann.