Where'd we go?

So often when we read blogs, the writers post a flurry of entries written over the course of a few weeks or months, and then suddenly - nothing.

What happens?

In our case, late in 2009 we lost our NYC apartment, winter was setting in, Honey Trout was on the hard on the East River and not even close to being ready to float again. We bought a cottage in St. Petersburg, FL with the idea that we would truck her down there, finish her and launch from down there.

But once we were down there we realized that, after all of that money and work, Honey Trout just wasn't worth rescuing. And neither was our relationship. Neither were strong enough to weather the storms that we faced.

I sold Honey Trout on eBay. Three times. It seems that people get caught up in the dream while watching the clock count down, bid, even pay the deposit, and then sober up in the morning and walk away. None of them even came to look at her. I spoke to one of the three guys on the phone. He said that he decided not to buy the boat. "No, that's not how eBay works. You already bought the boat. That's what that whole auction was last week." He was belligerent and argumentative until finally he broke down and admitted that he had lost his job the day after bidding on the boat, and that feeding his kids took priority over buying a boat. I can't argue with that.

I sold her for pennies on the dollar to a young guy who wanted to sail her around the Caribbean. Instead, he flipped her to another guy with the same idea. Come to think of it, I bought her from a guy who had a plan to fix her up to live on her with his family.

Honey Trout is a vessel for dreams more than a sailing vessel.

Now it is 2016. After stints in Florida and Washington DC, I am back in Brooklyn. My son Theo is a senior in high school here, about to graduate. Belinda is dividing her time between Tacoma Park, MD and India, teaching yoga and ayurveda. I'm still occasionally crewing for Andrew Kennedy, a friend who races a J-105 out of Annapolis Yacht Club.

I am a paper sailor again.

But that dream of sailing around the world still sits back there, simmering.

The Land of Misfit Toys

The "yacht club" in Queens where we keep our boat in the winter, where Honey-Trout is now during her rehabilitation, has inexplicably been featured in the New York Times today.

Paul, in the photo, is a dear friend of ours. (Belinda is convinced that he is my birth-father, that we are too alike to be a coincidence. The timing and location work.)

And already a Japanese public television station has seen the article and sent a producer down. On Thursday they are sending a camera crew and want to shoot us working our (very disassembled-looking) boat. "Our Japanese viewers love this kind of stuff" she said as she waved vaguely toward Honey-Trout. I can only imagine what their narration will say.

Accomplished a lot on Honey-Trout today

We started Sunday morning out overwhelmed by the very long list of things to do to Honey-Trout.

I started off by cutting two very large holes in the foredeck and getting ready to install two new Lewmar hatches in Theo's v-berth. His soon-to-be bedroom had no windows or portlights, and was terribly dark. Making him live in there would have been some kind of child abuse. Now there are two beautiful skylights, and a wonderful cross breeze.


Today was the first sunny day in weeks. Its been an ugly June, a rerun of April really. So I thought it would be a great idea to split open our water-logged rudder and let it dry out in the sun. We had read about how to do this in one of the Don Casey books, which went something like "Step one: slice open rudder around the edges. Two: separate halves (made this sound as hard as pulling apart a hard boiled egg.) This is the part that brings back memories of when Theo was a newborn and we read about how easy it is to Ferberize our baby. If I had met Dr. Richard Ferber then, I would have punched him. I'm better rested now, but I may still cause a scene. So three and a half hours later, Belinda and I finally great the rudder apart.
It definitely needed to come apart. At some point the previous owner had run aground, whacking the rudder and cracking it open and filling it with water, and bending the steel rudder post. And then it sat in the water for a couple of years. Considering this, it was in surprisingly good condition. And surprisingly well built.


The more that I take Honey-Trout apart, the more that I come to respect the O'Day's design and construction. Maybe this small ketch can take us farther than I first thought.

There are a few glaring exceptions to that, such as the deck/hull joint. But we have a plan. We'll come back to this later.

And then late this afternoon, as we were getting ready to pack up for the day (it is a school night), Richie came by asking if I was ready to pull the engine out. Now? Weeks ago had talked about making arrangements to pull out the old, deceased Atomic 4 engine using a crane. If he was ready to go now, then I wasn't going to say no. As he brought over the ancient crane truck, I had to get the engine ready to be lifted. The trick here is that the engine is bolted to the floor well inside of the engine room, underneath the cockpit. The Atomic 4 has to be unbolted and dragged out into the aft (bedroom) cabin, where the crane could reach it. Forty-five minutes of applying various theories of how 2x4 levers and fulcrums could persuade this 400 pound behemoth into the daylight, and the hardest part of this whole project was past us.


Richie, with Paul and I guiding, had the engine out and on the ground in a moment.


Not a bad day on Honey-Trout.

What did we buy?

It turns out that we didn't buy a boat, so much as a pile of broken parts that came in the general shape resembling a boat...

We are moving our focus, and our blog

The same day that we met the couple that ultimately bought Daria, we bought another boat.

It is not the boat that can carry us around the world, but we think it can carry us around Caribbean. This is going to be a stepping-stone, not our ultimate dream boat.

We have also changed the URL of our blog to CircumnavigationSailor.com

Read about how we are rebuilding this new boat for the open water.

Daria is gone

Daria has been sold.

We put her in the water on Friday, and her Yamaha 9.9 outboard started up right off.

On Saturday we delivered her to New Rochelle, where the new owners will be mooring her. The weather report promised a beautiful sailing day. Instead, we motored into strong winds right on her nose the whole way, three foot seas, a couple of nauseous women and finally a really hard sounding grounding on the rocks just outside of Echo Harbor.

When we pulled into the slip and stepped off of Daria, they looked as white as a ghost, and I'm not sure they are ever going back out on her again.

At least this is not Honey-Trout

I took the dink out to the mooring where Honey-Trout is on City Island, and came across this:



The different between comedy and tragedy is ... well, you know.
Honey-Trout's engine may be dead, but at least she is in better shape than this boat.