Pups, boats, neighbours, Wwoofers and all things pressing and current.
I need a better boat. NOT a great boat (all fancy and shiny) ’cause I am a local now and real locals drive crap-boats with brand new, more-expensive-than-a-car outboard motors. Locals do not use radar, or sat-nav or even e-charts on their phones. Real locals just ‘feel’ their way up the coast in the fog or the storm or the raging gale. Real locals do not use VHF radio, either. They say they do but they do not. A wire broke or a knob fell off or the fuse blew a few years ago and they just haven’t gotten around to fixing it.
But, anyway, I need something a smidge bigger in the boat department. Ideally, around 18 or 19 feet. Usually, I went bigger on things because well, I, myself, kept enlarging. Ergo bigger shorts, shirts, bigger beds, bigger cars. But, in my old age, I have actually halted corporeal expansion and am likely getting ready to shrink. It’s not my size that needs the size, it is my balance. My balance is no longer excellent. It is no longer good. It is no longer even adequate. I am a bit tippy now. So, as a tippy boater, I need to have a less-tippy boat. I have been looking.
One of my neighbours is a senior-ish, single woman and she has all the challenges of keeping hearth and home together as we all do but, unfortunately, she (like us) was raised urban and she has not developed all the skills and such that are needed. In and of itself, that is not a problem…well, at least not a long-term problem. She has money and she hires people. They come and fix things. It all works. But hiring people is a logistical nightmare. Travel time, pick-up and return trips, parts, materials…..it is a very difficult thing to run an OTG home using hired help if, for no other reason than getting things back in order in a timely manner. Can’t be done. To keep the house going, one really has to know at least level 1 DIY. By her own admission, she is level zero. I am level one. But I am encouraging Sal to get to 2.
Anyway, I took my level 1 skills over to her place yesterday and properly diagnosed a mystery electrical problem. But I did not have the level two skills required to fix it. I mention this only because living OTG can be very hard and only skill, knowledge, some money and attitude can keep it all together all the time and, even then, you have to be living in the house a lot of the time as well. She winters in Mexico. Springs are a bounty of surprise for her.
The pups are still good. Definitely showing their different characters more and more. Pretty cute. Daisy gently squeezes in a partly open door and, in so doing touches nothing. Gus stumbles and thuds through the same opening sending the door flying and the house a-shaking. They are very good pups. And…….
……..segue to Wwoofers, of course….Willing Workers On Organic Farms. Wwoof is an organization that joins young people from different countries with farms, rural enterprises, homesteads and even just very rural cabins like ours. They do some chores on the place and the host provides a bed and food. We have had over a dozen (maybe two) and it has always been fun. Sometimes you get a great Wwoofer (Christoff had skills and experience and more energy than a 20-mule team) and other times you get a city tourist-type who likes to go to Starbucks for an adventure but all of them were young and pleasant and we liked having them. After a three year hiatus, we will be hosting a young woman from Germany in June. She’s not huge. She’s too young to be skilled. But that is a good thing when the main chore you have is cleaning. This could work out just fine.
All of that was a long way of saying, ‘we can feel Spring is just around the corner’. It is not looming. Spring is not yet quite ‘in the air’ but flowers are a’popping and life is starting up….it’s subtle at this point but we are now pretty attuned to it. Spring is on the way.
Our Off the Grid Home 
Wow!
Your daffodils are doing much better than mine in Burnaby.
Miserable, cold, wet , never ending spring.
But the hummingbirds never left last winter….so there’s that
LikeLike
Depending on your waters,of course…
We have a 22′ aluminum landingcraft boat. It seemed sooo big when we checked it out and had it on a trailer,and espec when crossing the country towing it, but once out on Johnstone Strait it kinda felt like being out there on a 4×8′ sheet of plywood. Do not be afraid to go 24 or 28′, you know, depending!😉🤩🤣
LikeLike
It is truly amazing how big a boat looks when out of the water and how puny it seems in a storm at sea. One of life’s greatest illusions. But I cannot really go larger than 20 feet. Our community dock is 60 feet long and we all kinda expect that three boats will be able to tie on each side. There is always some dingbat with a 30 footer but the smarter longer dingbats tie up so their bow hangs past an end. They do not take the middle spots. It works. I have enough dingbat credits to my reputation…I do not need to add more. I’ll stick to 20′. In contradiction, I have found a 22′ dory. But the 22′ includes the engine and so I think I kinda make it on a ‘technicality’. Later to be referred to as the ‘dingbat exception’. But that 22′ has yet to be seen, the engine turned over and the tires on the trailer need some kicking, fer sure.
LikeLike
An important point to keep in mind with “go big or go home” in the boat department is the fuel bill is somewhat tied to size and tonnage. Not an issue for those with deep pockets, but, for the rest of us…. Our first off grid boat was a 14-foot Lund, open boat, riveted aluminum, with a 35 hp outboard. Very fuel efficient. No fun for winter crossings in a SE gale. Not even fun in no wind, but heavy rain.
Then came a 26-foot welded aluminum Lifetimer with a marinized 350 Chevy V-8, 245 hp. Good solid boat. Okay in all but the worst SE blows. It held 100 Imperial gallons of fuel. It burned too much to keep it going by bringing jerry cans from town. So, it became pay the premium for always buying mid-grade (no regular available) gas from the fuel barge and filling up our 200-gallons of capacity at home, or always taking the boat to C. River and getting fuel at the fuel dock. That’s what we usually did. Always cost about $500 to fill up, and that was not starting with a dry tank. That was more than 10 years ago, and I think gas is more expensive now. Correct me if mistaken in that regard.
Now, we have scaled back to 18′ welded aluminum with 150 Yamaha to move it. Costs more than moving a glass boat of same size. The bare hull weighs 2,800 lb. Like many things, this boat is a compromise, but works out okay for most needs.
LikeLike
Love the dogs, love dog stories, dog pictures, just love them. So glad your are writing your blog again – I missed you. Hope you find the boat you want. Daffodils and kale already !!! Hi Sally too.
Joy
LikeLike
Glad you wrote. Nice to hear from ya! Sal’s great (as usual) and the dogs are a joy (pun!).
LikeLike
Some of us know it was the loss of your last dogs that kept you without for these last 4 years or so.
In case you are not aware, please,,, no ingestible flea and tick meds, and best if no topical either
Thousands of dogs around the world suffer terrifying deaths and their owners the most hurt full grief.
google “does bravecto kill dogs”
LikeLike
Good luck with the boat search. Right now they seem to be more expensive because city people want to do things outdoors during the pandemic. Maybe the hasty purchasers will be offloading them now that lives are getting back to a more normal routine. We could have used your electrical expertise this trip. One of our inverters (we have two separate systems) fried on startup. It was working fine when we left in October. A bench test proved it was toast. The new one fortunately has a gfi breaker otherwise it would have fried too. After a day of testing we tracked the problem to a fault where the wiring enters the cabin. Our cabin system using the same route isn’t affected for some reason. John is out of town so we are leaving him a project to complete when he returns from Bella Coola. And we are off to Arizona for the last segment of our Snowbird trip. We’ll be back in May for a glorious summer up the lake. – Margy
LikeLike