Leaving the city wasn’t so hard.  As I said, my heart wasn’t in it.  Not anymore.  For some reason, the family trip across the continent and the month in Europe had disconnected me from the cul de sac and I just wasn’t ‘fully there’ anymore.  So contemplating leaving was not hard for me.

Bit of a leap for Sal, tho.  She did not go unhesitating into that small inflatable dream-boat to travel to the wilds with not even a house in which to create a semblance of a home.  She couldn’t even visualize it.  Neither could I. That took some time.  That took some faith.  Lots of research, too.  And it took not just a few promises to sweeten the slowly simmering pot of her interest.

Commitment would have to wait for awhile.

Even making it an interesting idea wasn’t an easy sell.  To be fair to her, it was a bit ‘early’ by the standard rules of retirement.  In fact, we hadn’t even thought of it as such yet.  So far, it was just loose talk.  Sally had a good job, good pay and the kids were mostly fledged.  And talk was cheap.  It was really just exploring an idea.

But it was also true that Sal (and I) was emerging from the GIANT ‘take-good-care-of-all-the-family’ responsibility phase and passing into the ‘got-your-back’ phase of parenting.  We were going from the full-time press to the emergency response team and the pressures were reducing.  There was a bit of room for dreaming, anyway.

And, I confess, I was on that dreaming-about-retirement-thing a bit sooner than most.

And it was all going smoothly.  Pretty much.  My son, more naturally independent than a baby turtle – right from the start – was well established in his routine, going to university and being a young man.  He was doing good.  ‘Specially at snowboarding, surfing and making twenty bucks last a month.

My daughter, naturally a bit more inclined to family and the ‘pack’ had a scholarship to York University in Ontario and, not in the least intimidated by the distance, eagerly headed east to further her education.  Though the tentacles are still stretched thin-and-will-always-be-connected, she has been independent since 17.

The point: having your kids go ‘adult’ on you before the age of 19 is freeing but it comes with a ‘worry’ component.  But we honestly didn’t worry too much.  Having them successfully ‘go adult’ is quite a release of everyday responsibility but even that comes with a ‘stand-by’ mode attached.  Our ‘stand-by’ role was rarely activated and never relied on.

Having established themselves as adults for a good long while is absolutely, positively liberating.  You never stop being a parent but we are now very much free to also be ourselves again.

Their independence, competence, ability, health and sanity are a huge credit to them but they are also huge gifts to us.  They allowed us to leave and do what we wanted to do.

We just had to figure out what that was.

But, of course, Sal was dragging her feet a smidge.  To be fair, I was not putting much pressure on her.  She was happy doing what she was doing and I didn’t really have any plans so what would be the point in pushing?  I had no idea where to go or what to do next.  It was mostly just ‘doing the next thing’ to see where that led me.

Well, I had an idea.  But, honestly, I was not ready.  Not even close.  I didn’t know what we might get into.  Not in the least.  I was still trying to wrap my head around the process of leaving.  I had not really addressed the issue of arriving somewhere else at all.  There was a lot to think about.  A lot of preparation.

And, of course, you never know what it is that you don’t know.

I had, admittedly, wandered through salvage yards and second hand stores, garage sales and recycling depots unconsciously picking up ‘finds’ and ‘treasures’ for a while.  Maybe as long as a year or two.  But, I had no plan.  No shopping list. I was really in the day-dream stage still.

Whenever Sally would ask with a sigh and a tone of resignation, “OK, sweetie, what that hell is that for?  What does it do?  Why do we need it?” My usual answer was an embarrassed, “Well, I don’t know, actually.  But I am sure it will come in handy.  And it is cheap.  I am only paying $40.00 for this old winch and I am sure that I’ll have to winch something someday. That’s what people do out in the bush!”

“They winch?”

“Yep.  All day long.  I am sure of it.  Winch, winch, winch.”

Our garage filled up.  Our cul de sac runneth over.  It was a great time of searching and finding things we had no previous idea even existed but that looked like things one might need. Someday.  Maybe.  To go with the winch, perhaps?

I distinctly recall the one night Sal arrived home late from work.  It was pouring with rain.  She was all dolled up and looking cute in her little business attire complete with fashionable briefcase.  She came to the front door and called for me to get a coat and follow.

“What’s up?”

“It’s BIG garbage day in a few days, ya know?  And people are putting junk out for the spring-cleaning collection.  Some guy has a bunch of winches on his lawn!  He’s throwing out winches!  And there are lots!  Big ones, small ones and a whole bunch with gears on them!”  The rain was pouring down her face.  her hair was plastered flat from being wet and the weather was fierce.  She was excited and had a grin on her face. “C’mon!”.

We went down the street and, sure enough, there were a lot of geared winches on the lawn.  We checked with the owner.  They were free for the taking.  From 1/2 horsepower to 5 hp.  The ‘five’ weighed so much that Sal and I had to lift it together to get it into the trunk of her car.  She was in a skirt and business shoes.  Not easy.  We took about eight or ten winches and then, soaking wet with the car dragging it’s rear end, we made our way home to the garage and unloaded our treasures.

I knew then that Sal was getting on-side even if we didn’t quite know what game we were going to play.  It is great when a team starts to gell, isn’t it?

I think my daughter was 12 and my son was 15.  My contract with the Provincial government was over and I was feeling free and footloose.  Felt like traveling.

I rationalized that the kids were at that age where they were going to be making most of their own decisions soon and I wanted them to have some perspective from which to make them.  So Sal and I decided to take them out of school and drive across Canada, go to Europe for a month or so and then drive back across the United States.  It was 1998.  I was 50.

On our way back and, as we approached the junction with Interstate 5 somewhere around Bellingham, I realized that I had no desire to go home.  “Ya know………….it is just as easy for me to turn left at Bellingham rather than turn right.  We could go to Mexico and kill a few months driving around down there.  Waddya all think?” 

“What!!  What kind of irresponsible parent are you?  We’re just kids, for Gawds sake!  We have school to go to.  Lives to lead.  Classes to attend.  We gotta get an education.  Stop already with the hippy thing, dad! And get us home!”

So, I turned right and wondered who their real father was.  But Sal made me feel much better by assuring me that she was 100% sure that they were hers and that that should be good enough.  And so we returned to the cul-de-sac.  Physically, anyway.

I had left my heart somewhere on the road.  I just couldn’t ‘plug back in’.  Not like I had before.  I worked, of course.  Had to.  I made money like a good husband.  I was a responsible parent.  And I didn’t buy a red sports car and try to find a secretary.  But, despite the adherence to normal suburban behaviour, my mind started to wander.  I was looking for something.   I had no idea what.

The only hint I had was a bit of nostalgia for the 60’s.  It wasn’t that I was much of a hippy back then.  I wasn’t.  I liked to play sports.  Didn’t do drugs.  And I didn’t smoke.  Not anything.  And I wasn’t inclined to live communally either.  Well, better put, no community-of-free-love wanted me.  Same thing.  Still, there was something idealistic about the hippy era that still appealed to me.  There was something good and healthy and interesting about it all. Back to the land?

I found my old Whole Earth catalogue.

Then I discovered the Mother Earth News forum on the internet.  Back in the old days – around the year 2000 – it was a really good forum.  Lots of daily writers, lots of give-and-take, lots of people talking and writing about living off the grid.  I was hooked.

And that is where it all started.  At step four.

Step one had to be the somewhat nomadic existence I had always lived.  My upbringing and my early adult years were always changing and, in a way, were a preparation for developing a lifetime attitude of becoming comfortable with change.  Had to be – there was lots of it.  So, step one was being groomed to expect and to want change in my life.

Step two was stone-cold bloody LUCK.  It was like winning the lottery.  I got into some kind of hormonal-like frenzy when I was around 25 about needing to buy a piece of land.  Since I had no money, I borrowed all that I could and went as far as I had to go so as to afford a piece of dirt.  Any dirt.  I found acreage on a remote island up the coast and bought it.  How crazy is that?  I didn’t even like dirt.  And I hated bugs.  But I bought it anyway.  And then put it out of my mind for the next 25 years.

This was not, at the time, a rational thing to do by any definition.

Step three was mentally drifting out of the rat race and the cul-de-sac.  Step three started at the Bellingham junction.  Honestly?  I think a lot of people would feel step three if they got off the merry-go-round long enough to feel.  We had been gone almost four months.  It takes awhile for the numbness from the daily grind to subside.

Did you know a lot of big law firms won’t allow lengthy leave-of-absences for young lawyers because they found that once they get off the tracks, they wouldn’t get back on?

Anyway, step four was when I started daydreaming seriously.  Imagining.  Reading.  Learning.  Buying junk from salvage yards for no particular purpose.  Getting into alternative energy.  Learning about construction.  Buying tools.  From about the year 2000 til we left in 2004, I found myself spending every free moment thinking about and preparing to live off the grid.  Step four looked like the beginning.  It was step four.

I can’t explain any of that anyway.  Gail Sheehan wrote in PASSAGES that everyone continues to go through phases as they live their lives.  Maybe it is just a phase? The world was learning about pollution, Globalization, Monsanto, Bush politics, Big Oil and various other major institutions in decay around the time I was tapping into Mother Earth News…………maybe it was just a timing thing?  Maybe it was just a fear thing?  Fight or flight?  And I was choosing flight?

Maybe it was the time when Sal and I went up to see our land of ‘rocks and Christmas trees’ one summer and it all struck me as being so incredibly beautiful?

I really don’t know how it happened.  But it did.  There was no plan.  Not really.  But, after turning 50, there was a definite wandering in a certain direction.  Actions were taken.  Decisions were made.  Things were put in place.  We made it happen.  Somehow.  But, honestly, we were not in control.  There was some kind of gentle influence nudging, guiding and helping us along.

We got here with a lot of mysterious help.

C’mon?!  That is kinda weird, don’t you think?

When I was younger the doctor I was seeing asked me about my family history.  He was speaking, of course, about our family medical history.  Genes.  Heredity.  That kind of thing.  As I recall, it was because I had relatively high blood pressure for a guy in his twenties.  300 over 250 or something.  High.

So, I asked my mom, “Do we have any history of heart disease in the family?”

“No dear.” she smiled.

But then I got to thinking………….“Well, what did aunt Hilda die from?”

“Well, She had a heart attack, dear.”

“And, auntie Joan?”

“Well, that was a heart attack, too, sweetie.”

Uncle Sammy?  Gwyneth?  Granpa?”

“They were heart attacks, too, dear.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE NO HISTORY OF HEART DISEASE!!”

“We don’t, sweetie.  There was no history.  It was bam!  They just dropped dead on the spot!”

And so it goes in my family.  I have no real idea about them.  It is not like we are close.  Plus, my parents have passed.  But I think those of us who are left love each other plenty.  Kinda.  You know, if there is nothing else going on at the time.  No appointments to keep or something.  We’re good.

But we live outside each other’s sphere.  I don’t really know my brother and sister as well as I would like.  Not on a day to day or even month to month basis.  Sometimes not even on a year year basis.  They get busy, ya know?  Still, I get a call now and then.

The one good thing?  We do seem to understand each other.

My brother called.  We got to talking about eyes.  His have never been very good and now I have to see to mine.  “Yeah, I said, seems I have cataracts.  Need an operation.  Hate that.  Hospitals are places where you get sicker than you were when you went in.  Don’t wanna go there.”

“Yeah.  Feel the same way.  Had cataract surgery myself a year or so ago.  They almost made me permanently blind.  Not good.” 

Seems he had high eye pressure and, if it gets too high, it kills your eye.  His was beyond eye-killing levels but the doctor who had operated wouldn’t bother seeing him after the operation.  “If you have any problems, go to emergency.”

All this is by way of saying that I am not overly impressed with the current state of our health care system.  ‘Course, I am not alone on that.  Still, I can ignore the system’s problems when I am well.  I really only focus on the damn thing when I need it.  Pathetic.

It’s like politics.  You only think about it when it is too late to do anything about it.

For the record: best health care experience I ever experienced was in Thailand.  Sal fell ill.  We went in an ambulance to the hospital and a doctor greeted her at the emergency entrance and didn’t leave her side until every thing that needed to be done was done.  Then she was sent to a hospital room that was better than our hotel.  Came with a kitchenette and a bed for me.  All the nurses were really cute, wore white high heels and tight uniforms and worked like little bees to keep Sal comfortable.  And every once in awhile a nurse would make sure I was doing OK, too.  I actually had a good time!

Service?  Like the Ritz.  Skills and proficiency?  Like NASA.  Cuteness factor: almost equal to that of the patient.  Cost?  Less than dinner out in Vancouver.

I am thinking of going to Thailand for eye surgery.

How weird is that?

Got some clams today.  From the lagoon behind the house.  They are currently sitting and sifting sand in a bucket of water on the porch.  Should be clear of grit by tomorrow afternoon.  Their eventual fate: clam chowder.

Clams!

OHMYGAWD, Sal makes good clam chowder!

Picked up a dozen oysters while we were down there digging around in the  mud.  Result: muddy feet and paws (dogs like to help in the hunt) and oysters and Caesar salad tonight.  Picked up another pearl in one of them as a bonus, too.  Sometimes the oysters make pearls and we picked up a large misshapen one today.  Sal has a few little ones in a jar from previous oyster hunts.

Pearl!

If we keep this up, someday we’ll have a worthless little pile of misshapen pearls to show people.  Sorta like we have now……..but only more of them.

Storm last night brought in a beach full of seaweed.  We are likely to go get some for the garden tomorrow.  And, if I am up for it, we may cut a few logs up that also floated by and that we retrieved and tied up.  As you know from previous blogs, wood gathering is a constant chore out here.  But not an unpleasant one.  Kinda fun, most of the time.  I especially like it when the W’fers come to do the chopping.  I enjoy watching w’fers chop wood.

Sal does most of the log fetching and wrangling.  She just can’t help herself.  She’s like a cat on a mouse when it comes to drifting logs.  My role is mostly cutting them into manageable lengths, hauling them up the hill and then cutting them into rounds.  I ‘split’ sometimes but I have managed to pull the ol’ Tom Sawyer white-washing-the-fence trick on most of the w’fers and guests so far.  And the Chinese kids, too.

Couldn’t fool my own kids, tho.

So, there you have it.  Counting the couple of hours working on Sal’s boat, we only ventured about five hundred feet from home.  Got in some boat repairs, two dinners, garden fertilizer, potential jewelry and some winter wood.

And you thought living in the city was a life of convenience!

Community day takes many forms.

I went up to the bunkhouse to help with the ceiling installation but my assistance wasn’t needed.  Plenty of people there.  An abundance of labour.  Which is good.

So, I left.  Headed over to see a neighbour.

I had bought a mickey of rye for a guy who lives alone and, although, it was before noon, I thought I may as well drop it off.  You know?  Community day and all?

So, I got there, knocked on the door, gave up the Wiser’s Deluxe and sat down for a cup of tea.  I don’t drink in the day time as a rule and, if I ever do, it is never Rye whiskey.  That was about 11:00 am.  We had just about finished the bottle before I remembered the tuna salad sandwiches I had brought along for the so-called working part of that day.  And so we washed down the last ounce or two of Rye with tuna and a bran muffin.

It wasn’t all bad.  I managed to get a few rants out of my system.  And we had not just a few laughs as well.   And he felt warmed up by the visit and the whiskey.  Which was a nice change since he had run out of firewood a week ago and hasn’t had much heat on in his place for awhile.  Nuthin’ like drinkin’ rye in a cold damp cabin in the forest to be a real Canadian, eh?

I was a bit late in picking up Sal who had been working at the Post office.  “First time in forty years you have been late!”, she said, grinning. 

“How late am I?”

“Only about ten minutes, sweetie.  But it is not like you.  Been busy?”

“Well, yeah.  You know, Community day!”

Cashless Society blog was brought to you by a rainy day.  I cannot indulge my grinding and fibreglassing habit in the rain so I tend towards thoughts inner and dark.  Can’t help myself.  Especially after reading Vulture’s Picnic by Greg Palast.

Read that book and redefine your meaning of conspiracy, evil and even Public Broadcasting.  Sheesh!

And, on a slightly related but irrelevant tangent: the robo-call scandal is done, I am afraid.  Dead in the water.  Over.  Kaput.  It has fallen off the media’s radar screen already and this with over 4 years left in the government’s mandate! By the time we can do anything about it, we’ll have forgotten everything.

Hands up all who remember Plutonic Power and Basi-Virk’s $6 million dollar legal bill?  Sid?  Is that you with your hand up back there?

I can’t do a rant today.  Sorry.  I know how disappointing that must be.  Where’s the passion?”  I did a light piece on receptionsists for balance but that is the best I can do. 

I will say this: I am 64 and I’ve been around more than just a few blocks.  I attended 13 different schools before I graduated because – well, my family was less stable than migrant farm workers, that’s why.  Honestly, Bedouin and Romanian gypsy’s are rooted by comparison.

I also worked with the addicted and the delinquent, the insane and the demented (not to mention some of the clients and patients we had there!). 

I have also worked with refugees and immigrants and I have traveled a lot.  You’d think I would know evil when I saw it.  Or, at the very least, I’d know bad.  You know?  The bad guys?

Well, it seems I don’t.  I’ve been naive.  Sheltered somehow.  I had no idea what bad was.  I have no idea what evil is.  To know that kind of thing you have to look deep into the history of BIG OIL.  They are not only dirty and slimey but they purposefully violate laws, kill people and cultures and destroy the environment.  UNNECESSARILY!  NOT by accident or carelessness but on purpose!  BIG OIL makes BIG TOBACCO look saintly.  Read Vulture’s Picnic.

Then let me know if you can muster any passion.

People are pretty funny. I am currently being amused by receptionists although, to be fair, I have always been amused by receptionists.  Different reasons for different receptionists, of course, but basically I just ‘like ém’.

“Mr. Cox, where is this address?”

“You wanna come over?”

“No!  No, thank you.  It is just that I have never even heard of this place.  Where is it?”

“Remote island.  Up the coast.  Ferries, logging roads, small boat.  You know, isolated, lonely, dangerous.  Adventure.  Bears.  Wolves.  Killing deer to survive?”

“Wow, really?  You live in the forest?” 

“Yep.  The truth is that it is a bit more civilized than I just made out.  Got satellite internet.  Fridge and stove.  Telephone. There are wolves, though.  And bears.  But I buy groceries at Save-On.  So, it is not quite wild, wild, wild.  And I am sorry, but I got a wife already.”    

“Wha…?  Well, that is good for you.  I am sure!  She must be some woman!  That kind of lifestyle is pretty neat, I guess.  My boyfriend would like that but me, I like going to restaurants, shopping and my Pilates class and stuff.  That sounds too rough for me.  Now…….can you come in next week at 9:00 am?”

“Well, I can.  If I have to.  But you see……..I live remote.  Takes four hours just to get to town.  It works best for me if I can get an appointment around noon.  Can we do that?”

“Oh, gee.  The doctor has lunch at noon.  How about later in the day at around four?  I can fit you in at 4:10 on the 17th?  The examination takes an hour and a half.  You’ll be the last patient.”

“Well, I can do that, if it is all you have.  But you see, I live remote and I need the same four hours to get back home.  Could I see the doctor after she has lunch?  I don’t care how far in the future we have to go to get a 1:00 o’clock appointment but that will work best for me if possible?” 

“Wow!  How do you get anything done?”

“That is why I have a wife!  Oh, relax!  I am only kidding.  Mostly.  The key is not to try to get too much done.  We can do stuff as we come and we can do stuff as we go but shopping is about all.  No restaurants.  No visiting.  No browsing. 

“Or I can stay over.  But it is best for us to minimize our expectations and maximize our pace.  We try to hit the ground running, ya know?  Summertime is better.  We can get home later.  But the window of safe travel in the winter is small.  We try to get home before dark.  In a small boat, getting home in the dark is just tempting fate.  Plus we have dogs to feed.”

“Ooh!  Doggies!  I love dogs.  What kind of dogs………?” 

Receptionists.  What’s not to like?

Sweden is almost cashless.  Meaning: their system of making payments, purchases and paying bills is all done electronically now.  Money changing hands is almost ‘not done’ there at all anymore and, further, there are some things money simply cannot buy in Sweden.  Literally.  You have to use a card or something ‘electronic’ to make those transactions.

Of course, Sweden hasn’t erased all real money as yet.  They don’t figure to be truly cashless for another decade or so.  But, by then….well, all your transactions in Sweden will be electronic.  Read: monitored.

We’re headed in the same direction.

Cashless societies don’t have bank robberies.  And that is a good thing.  Right?  Well, I suppose it is good thing for the bank.  That much is true.  But going ‘cashless’ is also good for the bank in other ways.  They get to rob, now.  The banks charge transaction fees and we transact all day long.  Visa takes a cut of between 2.5 and 5% of any purchase they handle.  So banks get to rob Bonnie and Clyde now and they get to ‘charge’ all the consumers just a little extra.  What is not to like?

‘Course, they also get to track you. And what can you do about that – not spend? 

“But, who in their right minds wants to track me?”

I’m with you on that one.  Tracking me is like counting sheep.  But, the key phrase in that question is ‘in their right minds’. There may be plenty of folks not-so-much in their right mind that want to track you or me.  Seems identity theft and a few other self-serving things might come up for them.  I dunno.  Call me crazy.

Still, I am not so worried.  I am confused, though.  But not so worried.  You see, they already track me.  They know my spending patterns and, if I should deviate from the norm, they cancel my card.  Been there.  Done that.

But I don’t do anything wrong.  So, how can I suffer?  How could all of my personal information in the hands of the wrong people do me any harm?  Wouldn’t the government ensure my safety and confidentiality?  (from everyone but them, I guess).  I think so.  Eventually.  Someday.  Maybe.

And do I have to fear my own government?

And that is where the confusion starts for me.  You see, I do fear them.  It is the main reason I pay my taxes.  I fear the consequences if I don’t.  I drive the speed limit even when I am in a hurry because, well, I fear the consequences if I get caught.  I have to admit that fearing the government is pretty much in-bred in me.  Have you seen what a taser or tear gas can do when you don’t do as they say?

When they yell at you for no reason to ‘get on the ground!  Get on the ground now!’  Try standing up straight instead and yelling God is Great!

Listen up: if you are olive-to-dark skinned?  Black hair?  Don’t try that stunt.  Just get on the ground.  Really.  And forget that God is great for a few minutes.  Trust me on this.

But let’s leave that kind of sick paranoia aside for a minute.  So what if Big Bad Brother has more ways to bully me with the universal application of transaction monitoring?  I mean, it is not like I am safe from them now, am I?  They got CCTV, too.  So what if it gets a bit worse?  Waddya gonna do?

I don’t know.  Honestly.  But I will tell you this: I use cash a lot more now.  It seems like a tiny and silly way to rebel but I am using cash for no other reason than to retain the option.

And doing so keeps my whereabouts vague. Ya never know….?

It used to be that I ‘Visa’d’ my way everywhere.  Now?  I use it only for gasoline and airline tickets.

I have to keep Visa for that.  I may have to make a run for it someday.

……and it springs eternal.  Kinda like the leaks in Sal’s boat.

We did a good job yesterday.  Ground out the Ritz cracker and went about glassing up that pesky little spot.  I wasn’t hoping things would be good.  I was sure that they would.  While I was doing that, Sal was ‘waxing and polishing’ the hull (waxing and polishing is closely associated with cleaning.  They’re like cousins in the obsessive-compulsive world of perfectionists). Things were starting to look good.

“Hey!  Look here.  I have a drip of water here.  How is that possible?”

I took a close look and, sure enough, the hull seemed to be weeping a bit.  I poked it.  It burst into tears.  Not good.

“Looks like we got ourselves some kind of barely visible leak, sweetie.  I am gonna have to grind that area out and see what’s going on.”

“Noooohhhh………..I just waxed there!  Can’t we just let it go, kinda?  I mean, is it really bad or just a little bad?”

I picked up the grinder and took a few passes.  The hull (all of 30 years old) was remarkably thin at that location and it took nothing to cut through.  Under the skin was wet foam.  No question: we had a leak there and it was likely due to a simple manufacturing defect decades ago.  The skin was just too thin.  And so the cha-cha-cha continued.

I confidently assured her that it was a fluke.  “Don’t worry, this sort of thing doesn’t generally happen in Whalers, sweetie.  They are usually very heavily laid up.  This was just an anomaly.”

“Geez”, she said.  “I guess I better tell you about that second little drip, too, then eh?”

On the other side, there was also a little teardrop or two.  And a few extra began to flow from me, too.  Sob.  I ground out that next little weak spot, too.  Wet foam again.  And so a third patch is also now underway. Cha cha cha.

We quit working just after 5:00 pm to the extreme consternation of the dogs.  They are supposed to be fed at 5:00 and, if we are on site and near the kitchen, they don’t tolerate any tardiness lightly. There was a lot of whimpering and leaping about. So, we fed the dogs, had a glass of wine and contemplated our naval…er…navy.

“Good thing you have 15 hp on that boat instead of 10.  At this rate, you’ll need the extra five to compensate for all the extra water you are carrying.”

We calculated that, with the foam occupying most of the space between the double hulls (required on Whaler and oil tanker construction but not BC ferries) Sal’s boat might carry an extra five gallons of water.  50 pounds.  Not good but still functional.  For a while, anyway.

All of this got me thinking………….where do old boats go to die?

Mankind has been building boats for eons.  Why aren’t we up to our knees in old hulks?  Yes, I know a bunch sink.  And the steel ones get cut-up and recycled.  But that still leaves a lot of wood, fibreglass and other types of boats.  Where are they?

We concluded that they are in backyards.

So, the push is on.  We gotta get this puppy back in the water or else it just may expire on the spot.  It makes no sense to have this unfounded fear, I know.  We should have control over these inanimate things.  ‘Specially when they become inanimate, as in ‘d-i-e’.  Right?  But, obviously, we don’t.   Do we?  There is no denying the ubiquity of boats in backyards.

‘They’re like everywhere, man!’

Face it.  Some things are out of our control.  Death, taxes, boats-in-backyards.  It is because of such things that we have to rely so heavily on hope.

You know the one…?  Two steps forward, one step back?  Like the cha-cha-cha only instead of music, it is the work-at-hand?

Sal and I went down on a beautiful day yesterday (about 8 degrees C) and went to work on patching the hole in her boat.  We ground, we sanded and we did what one is supposed to do in preparation for a f’glass repair.  We think.

“You ever done fibreglass repairs before?” she asked.

I’m not stupid.  I know what that question really means in fem-speak.  It means; íf you haven’t ever done it before and I haven’t ever done it before, I am taking over.  And furthermore, the first step is to stop everything and go look up the instructions on the Internet.

This question is very similar to the driving-in-an-unfamiliar-place question, “Do you know how to get there?  Do you have the directions?  Do you have a map?”

Like most guys, I drive by ‘feel’.  And fiberglassing is exactly the same.

“Yeah.  ‘Course I done it before.  Been there lots of times.  Plenty.” (adding ‘plenty’ was a verbal mistake.  I should have stayed with a simple, terse “Yes”.  She senses weakness if I use too many words)

“Yeah, right!  Like when?”

“Well there was a time long ago – long before I met you – when an old girlfriend and I did some fiberglassing.”

“That’s not true!  You and I discovered boats after we had been together.  You didn’t know the pointy end from the blunt one back then.”

This was not going well.  She was getting stronger.  I could see the next few hours slipping away getting advice from HOW-TO sites on the net.

“Well, there was that time I watched Bill S make his deck box.  And I helped him do it.”

“Doing what?  Cracking stupid jokes?”

“Well, it was pretty funny.  You shoulda been there.  Everything got stuck.  Ha ha.  But then there was the time Brian and I did the old boat decks”. 

“What did you do?”

“Lots.  Really.  I did lots.”

“OK, then. What do we do next?”

That conversational change of pace almost tripped me up but I am pretty quick on my feet with fem-speak and I had a fall-back position, a fail-safe thought-in-waiting at my fingertips.  It is my go-to answer when she gets me off-balance like that.  “Well, we start by cleaning.  Gotta clean away all the dust.  Then we gotta clean it some more.  And then again with xylene and do that a whole bunch.  Clean, clean, clean.”

Sal’s a sucker for the cleaning, fall-back tactic.  Deep down she is a clean-up-after-every-step-and-sometimes-in-the-middle-of-the-step kind of person.  When in doubt about what to do next, I just say ‘we hafta clean’ and that usually buys me enough time to make up the next step.

So, Sally cleaned and wiped and cleaned and wiped while I, in the meantime, read up on the mix ratios of resin to catalyst.  I also read:  Don’t do it if the temperature is less than 10 degrees C.  But we were too far into it to bother with that right now!

The guys who wrote those instructions are geniuses.  Seems I was to use 5 ml or 15 drops per ounce.  Think about that!  One measurement is in metric (milliliters) and the other is in Imperial (oz).  And the third is in ‘drops’ for Gawd’s sake!  I figured to do 60 drops in four ounces and asked Sal to check it.  I handed her the bottle.

She stared at it.  And then stared at it some more.  I helped with the math. I said, “60 drops in four ounces.  Waddya think?”

“Not using milliliters?

“Too hard to measure 5 mls.  Like that is just 60 drops, ya know?  Waddya use?  A mini-thimble? 

“You sure this is right?”

“That is the way I read it.  You read it any different?”

“No.”

“Ok.  Let’s do this thing!”

And so we did.  But the stuff ‘kicked off’ pretty quick.  Say, in under an hour or so.  So much for the temperature restrictions.  Made me think maybe 30 drops would have been enough.  So that is what I’ll try tomorrow when we do it again.

That’s right – do it again!  You see, we somehow let a bubble get trapped in the goo and so I will have an air pocket about the size of a Ritz cracker to grind out when it is set up enough.  And then I’ll do that part again.

Two steps forward, one step back.  I hope.