The Way Out

The pace of the first half of the trip out has been quite intense. Not by need, but I was just in the mood to pass some interstate under the tires. That’s my kind of driving. I got all the way to Flagstaff before the eyelids started getting too weighty so I pulled off at a stop to close the eyelids for a bit. That plan worked until the truck cooled off and I woke up FREEZING!!!! It must have been about 35 degrees outside. The only way to warm up was to start it all up, so it was time to get rolling again.

It was starting to get light again and that made it far more entertaining as the interstate/americana passed by the outside. I just can’t get enough of the changing contours, random oddities, and all the neat stuff out here. The first half of this trip will go fast. If I stopped at everything I see, it’ll take weeks to get there.

It wasn’t too long until I found myself all the way into Oklahoma City. My clear skies were now randomly spritzing and going into heavy rain and thunderstorms. I was spending too much time looking at the lightning instead of the road so I took the next off ramp to watch the storm pass. I nested amongst an aluminum forest of light standard in a Wal-Mart parking lot for extra protection and watched the amazing show out the windshield and listened to the rain pounding on the roof of the truck. It was a good time for another nap anyway. Five hours later I woke up and all was clear.

The "Rest Area-2200" tour has been quite interesting. We all know CA has a few basic rest stops scattered around, and this trip I found the entire fleet on the 40 in Arizona was closed. I wonder if they were hacked from budget cuts? Farther East I go the better they get. There are also different classes of rest areas that offer varying degrees of services. The lowest of the scale are Picnic Areas and that’s about all they are(a few tables and some might be covered) . The higher end of these are Welcome Centers. These are usually the first rest area right when you cross a state border. They can just about be classed as parks. They are usually manned during daylight hours and offer up advise on what their state has to offer. It’s a nice break to pull into some of these. (This particular one even has Wifi).

A last marathon push today brought me through Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, and I currently sit on the border of Georgia with some time to burn. Time for a quick update and another nap. Normally, I’d check into a room but a friend insisted I swing by his house instead. (thanks Andre). If I continued on I’d be there around midnight and I’d rather not get his whole house up. I’ll bug out of here around four and bang on his door for breakfast instead.

Then to unpack and prep the boat...

55 to the 91 to the 15 to 40.

Continue for about 2200 miles. Heading through AZ, NM, TX, OK, AR, MS, TN, MS, AL, and ending up in Georgia.

I loaded with munchies, hooked up the wagon, loaded fresh tunes in the iPod, kicked the tires and put fuel in the hole. Within the hour I think I'm out.

What am I delivering? Boat #45(no name yet).

I'll be checking in when I sniff out some wifi at the stops. There is some interesting weather between here and there, but that just makes things fun.

The tracker is active and can be seen here
-or-
if that doesn't work right for you, cut and paste the following link to a new page on your browser.
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=KC6YNG

Cheers!

Assignment: Convexity

Convexity - 2006 Nordhavn 47

First look from online sales photo.

Mission Objective: (If you should accept it) Meet up with the boat in San Diego and run the boat up to San Francisco.

Time: You should show up Saturday Feb 13(ummmm... honeeeeey?), for departure Sunday. Should take about 5 days if the weather and waves treat you right. If not- find a hole somewhere and wait it out.

Crew: 2 of 2 Plus-> you will be accompanied by the two new owners. (yes- I'm the Gilligan)

Response: WTH!?!?!? Whadya mean IF I SHOULD ACCEPT IT?

I'll report in if I get a chance. Else followup later.

Cheated Death Once Again- Strumpet

Moving about on OPB’s - (Other People’s Boats)

Oct 15 - Packing the bags again
A skipper friend called me up the other day, seems he was in a bind. Up in Seattle his management company has been moving boats around at a furious pace. I guess if you don’t get your boat out of Seattle by the end of the season, it gets stuck there. His normal crew has been worked pretty ragged and he called me for assistance on one last delivery. Sure- I'll go pack my bags.

Strumpet - Our 55ft Fleming for the next few days.
The owner wants it in San Fran for the winter.

I met two other guys(crewmates) up in Seattle, went to dinner and walked onto the boat. It is a real nice 55 foot Fleming that is only two years old. It has all the toys: long and short range radar, AIS transponder and receiver (which overlays target info on the radar as well as the Nobeltec Navigator mapping program), Four engine room cameras (and a few others positioned around the deck), and in motion satellite TV, any of which can be called up on any of the five flat screen monitors spread out across the bridge. This was all observed from the super cushy command chair in the center of the Com. This thing also has active stabilizers to keep the boat level in rough waters and thrusters for docking. Down in the salon there was also about a 42 inch flat screen also hooked up to the sat tv. Yes- nice digs indeed.

Aft- Main Salon looking forward. The galley is on the left, 3 steps down in the center takes you to the three staterooms, and a step to the right are 3 steps up to the bridge.

Fri Oct 16- Cast- off the lines!
We left out of Seattle early in the morning. It was raining, a bit blowy and a chilly morning but we had a day and a half of running in the protected waters of the sound before we get out to the real waters of the ocean. Outside is supposedly really bad right now(like REALLY bad) but a small weather window is predicted to get here in a couple of days and we have to be right at the corner to grab it when it shows. Otherwise it will be gone and the next one could be a week or two or maybe not. This is the tail end of the season. It only gets rougher out there till springtime.

All eyes were constantly watching the waters for debris. This area is infamous for deadheads (logs, sometimes partially submerged just below the surface) and “sometimes you get a whole dang tree stuck in the props”(so says the skipper), as well as a very high number of vessel traffic running around.

One of the many deadheads we were dodging. This one is an 8-bird.

Freighters and Ferries can come up on you real fast. This waterway is so busy it has traffic control always watching ALL boats on their land based radar. If you stray into a shipping lane they will call you and ask your reason for being there!


All day long we had pockets of light/heavy rain and varying winds that got up to 45 at times. We were lucky that it was mostly off our stern quarter and didn’t slow us down. It just whipped up the water for a while. The boat was handling it well. This was nothing compared to what it was doing out off the point. Reports were still quite miserable. We pulled into Pt Angeles in the early afternoon to top off the fuel and wait for our weather window.

This guy was flying all over the passage.
Apparently the extension helps him look for submarines

Saturday, October 17, 2009
We got moving as soon as it was light enough to see. There is still alot of debris in the water to dodge so we had to at least wait for the light. It was raining, mostly foggy and visibility was about 1/2 mile, but waters were calm.

We left Pt. Angeles and headed through the Straights of Juan de Fuca (about 65 miles) to the Pacific when the fog started to break up. This was our short term commitment/goal point. The water was still pretty calm, buoy reports from around the corner were showing smooth waters ahead and the predictions were for everything to lay down in the afternoon so we apparently timed it all perfect.

So we thought...
The water started to get frisky, but not bad. Throughout the next couple of hours it continued to build past sloppy, then progressed to plain old "snotty". We pounded 20 miles down around the corner (down past Cape Alava), the wind was a solid 30 on the nose, seas were 8 to 10ft at 8secs. This was NOT what was supposed to happen at all! The boat was handling it all quite nicely, but we were pounding every wave now and we slowed to 8 knots. The NOAA weather reports we were monitoring on the radio finally updated and NOW indicated it was only going to get worse in front of us for the next eight hours. Looking at the charts showed the next bail-out port was still 65 miles ahead! We decided to pass on the 8 hour bash-fest/beatdown and instead backtrack to Neah Bay and hide out till it got better.

We had Nascar on the Sat in the salon
and 10 ft seas outside.
Had chips & salsa too.

No- we weren’t pukin’.

We managed to get in just after dark and worked into a slip without problem. We made tacos. We have awesome Wifi, but picked up a slip so close to the jagged cliffs that we couldn’t get a satTv lock. I missed the end of the Nascar Race. We all agreed it was the better choice at this point to be tied up to a nice quiet dock instead of getting tossed around and all beat up in the dark. We'll see what happens tomorrow. The reports say it should all lay down again and we'll attempt another run for it.

Sun Oct 18
The next morning we got under way right at twilight to find the seas had indeed settled down to comfortable rollers covered by a light hazy fog. This was much better than returning the boat all beat up and probably creaky for the rest of it's life (this happens more often than not). Throughout the day the conditions kept improving and the further down we went, the day became more and more ideal. It appeared we hooked into our perfect weather window.

We ran this way all day, into evening and through the night. There was no need to stop, and in reality there was no place to stop at this point anyway. We were running the engines a bit harder than normal to stay in our weather and get through this stretch. Unfortunately we were burning twice the amount of fuel to do it. The next morning we timed it perfect and we pulled into Newport, OR for a quick fuel stop right as the day was getting light.

View from the Commercial side of Newport OR.

No extra time spent here playing around and we were off as soon as the hoses were hung up on the pumps and got back out. Weather reports ahead still look real good for the moment, but we can hear bad weather building in behind us that might catch up and things could go all "snotty" again.

We cruised past places like Destruction Island and Cape Disappointment and gave them a wide berth(12 miles off) by coincidence (not because we were paranoid). Then there were times we were running "one foot on the beach" cutting corners and drawing a line as the shortest distance to the next course change.

Spectacular conditions. What were they thinking? I’m in command!!!!

We saw a few whales, but mostly one-sight and gone, or way off on the horizon so photo captures were very rare. We also had an occasional pod of dolphin come by and play in the wake for a while. We even came across a strange pod we thought were seals, but were actually dolphin without dorsal fins. Wiki says they were probably Northern Wright Whale Dolphin.

Northern Wright Whale Dolphin and Another frisky dolphin

Since there was no moon, the nights were incredibly dark. I was momentarily perplexed one evening when a light appeared out of the fog way off starboard side and I could not see it on radar. It wasn't long before I figured out it was a bright star (mars?) on the horizon. Even with the pilot house blacked out in night mode, the instruments were still a bit too bright to see most stars from the command chair. I did manage to get out of the chair a couple of times and poked my head out of the pilot house door to catch a bit of the meteor shower when it was clear. Other times we were running in varying degrees of fog, scattered showers, hazy sunshine then gorgeous sunny blue skies contrasted by inky blackness of night. We got into a bit of everything. Back at the HQ in Seattle, it hadn't stopped raining.

Continuous running put us rounding the point into SanFran around 4am Thursday morning. It was awesome timing between a few big freighters coming out and only one coming in behind us, but we hugged the side and out of the way enough not to freak anybody out.

Golden Gate at night ---- Snapshot of Radar into SF

We found our way over to the fuel dock just as it was getting light and tied up but had to wait till 8am for them to open. After our brief nap, we topped off all of the tanks one more time, got the boat into it's new home, and had Strumpet washed down, wiped off, and fully detailed inside and out by about 1pm. We were almost done when the owner arrived for the handoff and gave us the thumb's up. Our flight out was booked soon after our late lunch, had only a bit to sit and rest then off to the airport for the flight home. It would have been fun to run around SF for a couple of days, but that was not the intent of this trip.

According to Skipper Chris, we were hired to cheat death. Thankfully- this trip we did.

Wheel stop

There were a couple of great days hanging out with friends and gracious hosts Mark and Mary in Co. Don't imagine it was all sights and touring tho. We also helped out with projects around the house. There was weed pulling in the garden and flower beds, maintenance and adjustments on the tractors, and we even scored a load of manure from the neighbors. The days usually ended up with a great meal and soaking in the jacuzzi till midnight. Life and priorities are different out there.

We finally escaped (they got tired of us) and continued westbound through the rest of the state and into the cathedral canyons of Ootah (Utah). The transitions were quite dramatic as we watched the trees turn to scrub and grass and the granite mountains change to fire colored sandstone. There are several viewstops spaced along the highway and we couldn't help but stop in a couple of them to just stare into the canyons for a while and only pretend to touch a part of their history.

Down at the bottom of the state the highway goes through St. George and drops through yet another amazing canyon. Every turn exposed another face, jagged rock wall, or a brief 70 mph peek at a dark canyon. It would have been be neat to stop and check out all of these, but we were very close to input overload at this point and like many a rental horse, this one was heading to the barn and was difficult to stop.

We blasted through Vegas(thinking later: I should have at least gone down the strip), State Line, Baker, Barstow, Corona, and finally home, ending a 13.5 hour driving day and a 2 week trip.

6400 miles
15 days
415 gals fuel
2 bags p-nut m&m's

Please return your seatbacks and traytables to their upright positions and exit to your right.

We pretty much accomplished what we set out to do. We logged quite a few hours rolling along the interstates, and also spent equal time on 2 lane back roads passing through bits of Americana. We saw little cool towns and met some neat people along the way. There were miles of grassy fields and pastures, neat old farms way older than me, and watched endless miles of green mammoth trees scan past the windows. This changed to amazing flatness from horizon to horizon, and again to majestically painted cathedral towers. We overnighted in the occasional Best Western, camped in a few state campsites, and tilted the seat back for catnaps in truckstops and rest areas. We went all the way to a little corner of Maine, footed the chilly waters and had lunch on the boardwalk looking over the Atlantic Ocean and came all the way back again. Oh yeah- the boat delivery went very well.

Wow. Thinking about it now. I Didn't have to show passport or ID once! Not too many places in the world that could still be done. America is a great country.

There were places along the journey where we thought about the first voyagers that did this in a covered wagon pulled by horse or oxen. Looking out the window at some of the terrain I would have just stopped right there and said "we are so screwed... ".

Black Canyon

Practically right off the doorstep of the M&M ranch (8 miles down the dirt road) is this little hole in the ground called Black Canyon. We actually approached via the lesser traveled North rim, but this made for less traffic on the roads and is more favored by the locals who know how to get there.

This water carved canyon varies from 1750 to 2500 ft deep. Unlike the Grand Canyon, most of the viewpoints were a sheer drop(really sheer). This made for breathtaking views over the edges that cameras just don't do justice for. For even more dramatic thrills, many other natural trails ended up with sudden ends with no railings at all. I guess that's the way they thin out the gene pool out here.

Approaching the edge you could feel and hear the water rumbling the walls of the canyon from the river a half mile below. While trying to soak it all in, we actually spotted a couple of climbers on the opposite wall. They were just dots. I don't know when they started, but it looks like they had a way to go (see insert). The optimist would say they might be almost to the top. The pessimist would say "Why the hell are you there in the first place?!?!?"

From falls, through flats, to peaks

With a sudden desire to pass some asphalt under the tires, we set out across the plains from Buffalo in the general direction of our next stop, Colorado. In between it was very flat indeed. Rolling hills and pastures passed the windows and day turned into night on this 22 hour run. We stretched in rest areas and had seat back-catnaps in truck stops along the way, but basically made a run for it. Did I mention how flat it was?

Odd things work into forms of entertainment out in the flats. For some reason a trucker hooked up with me and we traveled along for hours. When passing slower cars he made every move I did. We ran the same speed, he didn't want to lead, and even tho I passed a few of his fellow truckers running about the same, he stayed hooked with me. Occasionally another car would mux up a lane change/pass maneuver and he would get caught up behind a bit but it wouldn't be too long before I would see him back on my bumper again. I momentarily flashed back to a problem Dennis Weaver had with a trucker once and had thoughts this might not end well. After several hundred miles of this game, I finally had to pull off for a p-stop and he honked as we parted (whew).

------ Artistic Break ------

No matter how much he tried to ignore them all, little Splinter couldn't help but feel a little inadequate among his friends.

-------------

On down the road then...

Eventually, we hit these big things... (the Rockies). Faced with climbing through picturesque Colorado at night, we opted instead to bunk down in a room, freshen up a bit and wait till morning to make sure we didn't miss any of the sights. I'm soooo glad we did it this way.


Interstate 70 west of Denver is a masterful feat of engineering and a fabulous drive. I am very tempted to turn around and do it again. There are sections where the road is fully elevated as it snakes through a canyon with rushing river below. I don't know if this was by minimum footprint design or just because there was nothing but solid rock on both sides and this was easier. There is even a dedicated path for bikes and peds for several miles. There were several small and one long tunnel at the summit where they found it easier to just go through instead of around. Up near the top I noted my GPS display read 11.4 because it didn't have enough room to display my altitude. I would highly recommend this drive if you come this way but only for those with gutsy vehicles in perfect working order because some of the grades are very steep. I didn't see any signs, but they must have been around 7 or 8 percent climb/drop for 2500 feet and a climb again once you hit the bottom. It was pretty crazy.


Up around Aspen we pulled over in a viewstop and had the last of our manifold burritos, muffins and a cup of yogurt for breakfast. You can't beat that view for the buck.



Branching off the I70 highway to a smaller one gave us even more spectacular sights with every corner. We couldn't stop at them all or we would never make our destination. The road was very quiet and almost no other traffic. This took us to the small escape of Crawford where we found our even smaller road that eventually turned to gravel.


Way off the beat is where we are today, hanging out with friends Mark & Mary on their ranch sipping beers, and enjoying the 100 mile views from their jacuzzi deck. Birds sing, bunnies are chased out of the garden, deer roam around freely and I hear there is even elk around here on occasion.

Our hosts are running us around to all their favorite sights and points of interests (posted shortly).

I'm not sure how long we will hang out here, or when they will get tired of us and boot us back out to the truck.