Spring Break at Camp Parsons

Andy and I just returned from Camp Parsons, where we've been for the last 10 days. Spring Break started off badly for me - I came down with a mild flu two days after arriving at camp, and to make matters worse, I also had to finish writing two short papers for one of my classes - the very last assignments I had to do before I could finally bid good riddance to Winter Quarter 2011 forever.

Once I submitted those hateful papers, and after I shook off the flu with a good night's rest, I felt my whole demeanor brighten, and the rest of my stay at camp was thoroughly rejuvenating and carefree.

Although I let Spring Break pass at a fairly relaxed pace, I nevertheless managed to cram it full of wonderful experiences and exploits. I took advantage of the sunny days by going canoeing and teaching myself the J-stroke, and I also badgered Jim into letting me go sailing on his Kent Ranger 26. When we finally did, he said it was the first time he had ever sailed it, and it was the first time he had sailed a boat that he owned since about 1995.

When Andy Hoyle, Anthony, and Daniel came, we had a rowing lesson in choppy water, which was good practice - I think I now have feathering down. I also did odd jobs like chopping wood (something I had never done before), digging up a tree stump, cleaning Folton Creek Cabin, and so on. And with Andy's help, I also made a lot of progress in restoring the old Camp Parsons sign that went at the end of the pier.

What I've really enjoyed about this week, and what I enjoy about being at camp in general, is that I learn something new practically every hour that I'm there. It's a way for me to compensate for the many skills I never had a chance to learn as a child. I spent most of my younger days with my head buried in books, so although I can easily spout out esoteric facts like what languages are spoken in Belgium, I never learned practical things like what the difference was between a table saw and a chop saw. I also never had a reason to swing a maul (why would you build a fire in Hawaii? It was 85 degrees outside), so I never even knew that such a thing existed. And rowing just isn't done in the Islands, so until this past summer, it was completely alien to me. So it seems like every time I do something at camp, I'm quite literally experiencing it for the first time in my life.

I've done about as much with the camp's sailboats as I can do without spending money, but alas, money must be spent, so now comes the delicate task of figuring out how much Ken will let me spend. So far I've ordered a new $40 rudder pin for one of the Zumas, and I ordered a new drain screw for the Holder 12. But I'm certain that we'll discover many more little expenditures that must be made once we test-rig all of the boats. With luck, the test-rigging will occur next month, and everything will be ordered in time for camp.

The biggest headache so far has been the new mast section for the Hobie 21. We bought one used for $100 in Sarasota, FL, and it's all boxed and ready to go - it's just a matter of shipping it to Seattle. FedEx wants $550, but that's just not going to happen. Things started moving forward when Mike enlisted Tom Roger's help.  As an Alaska Airlines pilot, he flies between Orlando and Seattle, so he can have it put on his plane for practically nothing. But the trick is getting it from Sarasota, where it was boxed three weeks ago, to the Alaska Airlines cargo center at Orlando Int'l Airport, where it must be delivered in person. Tom tried to enlist his pilot friend who lives in Tampa to pick it up, but this friend is flying all the time and hasn't had the chance to trek down to Bradenton. Plus, I found out today that Tom's father-in-law passed away recently, so he's understandably focusing exclusively on his family for the time being. All is not lost, however - I just got permission from Mike to have the mast shipped via FedEx to Max Frisch in St. Cloud, FL, and then have Max drive it to Orlando when Tom is ready for it. Once I get an address from Max, I'm going to make the shipping arrangements.

Al Hutchison has graciously offered to pay for the new vinyl names for the sailboats. They are drawn from the names of the olden-day ferries that used to convey scouts to Camp Parsons. They are as follows:

Ranger 20: TYEE SCOUT

Hobie 21: SKOOKUM

Hobie 16: TILIKUM

Harpoon: ROOSEVELT

C-15: ADVENTUROUS

Flying Junior: KINGSTON

Flying Junior: CARLISLE

Flying Junior: REEVES

Flying Junior: MANITOU

Lido 14: TWANA

Holder 12: ROLLING HITCH
Laser: HYAK

Zuma: FORTUNA

Zuma: CONCORDIA

Zuma: ATLANTA

CP Sailboat Repairs - Progress Report

It's certainly been a long time since I've updated this blog. Not that I regret it, necessarily - not having time to update a blog means that I've been busy doing other fun things. Classes have been eating up a lot more of my time this quarter, especially my diplomacy course.

The premise of this course, which is instructed by two Foreign Service Officers, is to simulate the Six Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear weapons program.  We are divided into six "delegations" that represent North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, and we're trying to hash out an agreement to denuclearize North Korea. Needless to say, it's been great fun for me so far, but also massively time-consuming and energy-depleting. Plus I'm on the American delegation, so we have to work about three times as hard as everyone else.

But now on to camp matters. It was a great work party this weekend, stormy weather notwithstanding. Brian Horch, the camp's volunteer boat-fixer extraordinaire, had come in last weekend and finished the Coronado 15 glass job, so we moved it back to the boat house, and I put all the hardware back on it. The cockpit floor was soft and we worried that it might crack, so Brian and I had reinforced it by laying down another layer of fiberglass.  Except for some minor touch-up glass work that I could do myself, it's pretty much ready to go. Camp Parsons now has one more operational sailboat.

Meanwhile, Meredith began building a sailing equipment storage unit in the boat house. This has been on the aquatics to-do list for about a half dozen years, but now it's finally getting done. In just two hours, it went from being a twinkle in our eye to being an almost complete frame, and when Meredith finishes it off, it's going to have crown molding, a cool New England paint scheme (blue-grey with white trim) - the whole works. Most importantly, it's going to have padlocks, so that everything stays where it's supposed to be.

I feel like a lot of things that people have been wanting to do for years are finally getting done now. There's the sailing cabinet and the C-15 project. There's the Hobie 16, which has sat in pieces for years - it's being reassembled, and its frayed shroud is being replaced. One of the two boats that broke last year is patched and ready to go again, while the other one is just one step away from being ready to go. The sails are sorted and labeled, and the torn ones are being re-sewn. Ralph, the camp's volunteer metalworker, reconstructed the brass and aluminum fittings for the C-15. He also welded the gooseneck back onto the boom of the Ranger 20, the old boat that's been sitting on that rusty trailer for three years, and we've diagnosed the Ranger's keel problem as being a relatively simple fiberglass repair.  Even I could probably do it - the hard part is tilting the Ranger so that the keel is accessible. And Greg Hammond is sprucing up the four new FJ tillers that he made last summer.

Back in September, I was afraid it might be totally unrealistic to try to repair the entire sailboat fleet before next summer. Well, it's only been five months now, and I'm actually running out of things to do. I've started fixing broken canoes.

November Work Party

Yesterday morning, after sleeping for half a day, I woke up, looked at the clock, and realized I only had a few minutes to do my Arabic homework, shower, get ready, and run out the door in time to catch my 10:38 a.m. bus. I somehow managed to do all of that, and as I waited at the bus stop in the rain, it suddenly dawned on me: it was only 9:38 a.m.

In my defense, that sort of disorientation is to be expected after a weekend as wild as this past one.

I’m happy to report that we made huge progress on the sailing equipment. Over the past month, I got in contact with Brian Horch, a Port Orchard scout master who has worked extensively on the camp's boats in the past, and I cajoled him into coming up and doing some glasswork on the sailboats.

Thanks to Brian, both the Harpoon and Hobie's impact damages are patched over. The two boats somehow managed to crash into one another last summer—I may or may not have been skippering one of them at the time.  Brian also repaired the Hobie's rudder blade, which saved us a good $300, and he made some progress on the mast, grinding off the broken CompTip and chiseling out its remnants from the lower mast. Brian says the mast is semi-salvageable - it just might be a foot or two shorter.

Meanwhile, Steve Petek and I inventoried all of the sailing equipment, collected and properly stowed all of the sails, which had been stuffed away haphazardly at the end of the season.  We also determined which sails were for sailboats that we still owned, and we planned out a new shelving unit in the Boathouse for sails, rudders, centerboards, and other sailing equipment. Tom Rogers is already starting to work on it.

Not bad for just one weekend.  Much more remains to be done, but I'm impressed by the progress we've been able to make so far.  At this point, I'm confident that we can get at least 10 sailboats in the water for next summer.

Weekend Sailing Excursion

I had another great weekend, this time spending it on Puget Sound aboard the Perspicacious, a San Juan 28, owned and skippered by the WYC Head Fleet Captain, Goran. We were among a party that included all of the club's three keelboats, as well as Idefix, the sailboat that won the 2010 Transpac Race from San Francisco to Kauai. We all set out yesterday morning for Kingston, where we spent the night aboard the boats before sailing back today.

Goran's quite the sage when it comes to sailing, and we also had a few interesting discussions about foreign affairs, among other things. He took a walkabout after college and has been pretty much everywhere in the world, so for an International Studies student, he made for great company.

The first task was sailing through the locks between Salmon Bay and Puget Sound. We all got into the locks and tied off, and bantered with some of the many kids who were watching from the bulkhead above us.

We made our way across the sound in a relatively short amount of time, helped along by a southerly wind. Having practised what we needed to practise and now having little else to do, Goran and I mischievously decided to show off our sailing prowess by sailing circles around Deception, one of the club boats, which was going far slower than it could have been going. Deception's crew just gave us a dumbstruck look and weren't lured into any friendly competition.

As we got closer to Kingston, there was still lots of both daylight and wind, so we decided to head back out. Along the way, we came across Rascal, the club's Ranger 26, which was skippered by the class instructor. Goran decided he'd teach me some racing tactics, so we came right up to Rascal's windward in an attempt to steal its wind. Rascal's crew, however, caught on to our malevolent intents and, after trying some evasive tactic, managed to pull ahead of us. They tacked upwind, and we followed in pursuit. The strong winds heeled us over to the point that our gunwales dipped down into the water and Rascal's crew, we later heard, could see our keel. Rascal was a slightly faster boat, and as it got farther away, I worried that we might lose, but it turns out that Perspicacious can point higher into the wind than Rascal by about 10 degrees.  We also did a better job of trimming or sails. So after beating upwind for a while, we did finally pull ahead, and Rascal never caught up again. Goran and I both, however, wanted to render our victory beyond dispute, so we sailed farther and farther ahead until Rascal's crew could read our boat's name on our stern.

As sunset approached, we headed toward Kingston, hauled down our sails, and docked in the harbour. It felt odd being in Kingston without continuing on to camp (where Andy was actually holding down the fort for Ken this weekend). But I didn't spend too much time thinking about it, since there was was much merry-making at the picnic hut on our dock.

I think I was the last one to wake up this morning, and although we only had a half-hour before shoving off for home, I thought that that would be plenty of time to get one of Kingston's famous crepes. Silly me. The line was out the door, and ahead of me were all these Californian women with a gaggle of bratty kids. I gave up and left with a snarl.

The journey back was great. The sun was shining and the winds were fresh but manageable. We stopped at the Shilshole Marina to "pump out," meaning empty the holding tank for the head. It's one of the less glamorous aspects of sailing.

We passed again through the locks, and again some little kids were waving at us. I took in the pleasant scenery along the passageway from Puget Sound to Lake Washington, and just for the fun of it, Goran and I calculated our speed by dropping potato chips off the bow and timing how long it took to reach the stern. We had just enjoyed a few beverages, so it was tough trying to convert from feet-per-second (28 ft / 3.9 sec) to miles-per-hour and then to knots, but we did finally come up with 4.4 knots, which seemed like a plausible answer.

All in all, it was a fantastic little cruise. But now I think it's time for a shower and a long nap...

Addicted to Sailing

Sailing this past Sunday couldn't have been better. Most of the cloud cover from Saturday has gone away, but the fresh breeze hasn't, so it made for quite the agreeable sailing outing. Normally in Seattle, you either have clear skies or you have wind, but this weekend we managed to have both.  

Next weekend, the class is taking the three WYC keelboats and two other associate members' boats and sailing from the university to Kingston, where we'll spend the night before heading back. I'm looking forward to that, since I'll be crewing on Perspicacious, the Head Fleet Captain's San Juan 28.  He's a bubbly character from Australia and the club's doyen of sailboat repair, so this is bound to be both entertaining and educational for me.  Unfortunately for us, however, the sunny weather we're having now is predicted to disappear by the weekend, but we'll muddle through somehow.

I was appointed Performance Fleet Captain last Friday, meaning that I'll be in charge of maintaining the club's high-performance dinghies. The Double-Handed Fleet Captaincy was already spoken for, so the club's commodore dragooned me into being the filling the vacant Performance Fleet position. It's supposed to be a rather big deal, but I can't help but be wary of a job that absolutely no one else seems to want to do. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, as they say.

The Camp Parsons work party is still two weeks away, and I have lots of graduate school work to do between now and then, but I nevertheless catch myself constantly thinking about the Camp Parsons sailboats.  This is mostly because I keep learning so many new things about fiberglass and sail repair at the weekly WYC volunteer work parties, and I can't wait to apply them to the camp's boats, some of which are badly in need of a fixing up.

The sailing class I'm helping to teach is hobbling along. The weather has been uncooperative, to say the least.  It has vacillated between being either way too strong for beginners or completely nonexistent altogether.  Also, because sailing involves so much complex detail, I'm tempted to try to explain it all at once, but I try not to skirt the edge of pedantry. It's much better to let them figure out the nitty-gritty fine points on their own. It'll all come to them in the fulness of time, if they're committed enough to learn, but at this early stage, it's just too much to process. In any event, I hope this will all be good experience for teaching sailing at Camp Parsons.  A Boy Scout, I find, is smarter than your average college student, so it should be easier going.