something or another

     So a lot has happened and today's post will double for yesterday and today. There has been a bunch of work done but very little finished. That gets old, and today was a long day of traffic. I'll let the pictures/video speak for me today.

getting the outboard off to bring to the mechanic

tool organization

drive to san diego to sell a bunch of extra stuff 

I'll add some details of these adventures tomorrow.....maybe

Doin Work

     What a day! It feels like we actually got some things done, and for the first time we took things off our to do list. The sails we are keeping are stowed, the V birth is basically ready to be lived in, the pile of death trap life vests has been disposed of, we tested all the hatches for water tightness, and we inflated and tested the dinghy.

     Having said that, almost all the hatches need new gaskets, the dinghy has one small air leak we need to patch, and we still have 3 spinnakers to deal with. We also need to pull the dinghy's wood floor out and test it, as you may have noticed the lack of a floor in the video. We are going to replace one maybe two hatches as well,  that will be an interesting job. 

     To my great pleasure, Andy woke up this morning swearing his head off, absolutely certain he had completely ruined his tattoo. When I asked to see what he was talking about he pointed out a tiny spot where his shirt had stuck overnight, and I told him it looked fine. He then went on a rant about how he knew he would mess it up, and of course I spent the drive to the bagel shop (who has wifi, where we do these posts every morning) winding him up and doing my best to drive him crazy. When we got there and checked it against the photo from just after it was finished, we both quickly concluded that there wasn't even the slightest change. Andy think's this morning was awful and I couldn't disagree more.

The Song Remains the Same

     This is it! Your chance to help us stay sane, stay loose, and survive this all to stressful undertaking. We want your music. Make us a mix CD, recommend an album, record yourself whistling a tune, and whatever else you would either not want to leave behind on a big trip or think would be fun for us somewhere along the line. A cd full of sea chanties, nothing but pop music, Hawaiian ukulele tunes, Pink Floyd's The Wall, whatever. If you think it's great we want to know. If you want to make us a mix CD, you can send it to Lisa and Leslie at the Brooklyn address as long as it is there before Jan 20th:

186 Meserole st.
Apt. #4
Brooklyn, NY 11206

    Any whole albums you want to recommend you can put in the comments of this post or simply email us. Now get to it! This is critical stuff. We have said many times that if anything is going to get us on this trip it won't be the sailing, but the crew. So help sooth our collective savage beast. And to get the ball rolling I am going to call Chris Raymond out; Chris, we need the name of that Remains album and the name of the Rolling Stones album that were staples of our Friday night caps.

No Turning Back

     At some point during the planning of this excursion we all agreed that some sort of tattoo to commemorate it was in order. After a bit of deliberation we all agreed to get an anchor. No specific anchor. No specific place. No specific size. Just an anchor.....somewhere. So here we go. A complete photo essay on the making of Andy's tattoo.

     4 1/2 hours of pain, is how Andy refers to it this morning. Nate was real nice and fuckin good at what does. Check out his stuff here.
     It's also worth mentioning that we were up at the buttcrack of dawn for Andy's HAM radio exam. As usual, our resident kiwi represented beautifully and is now a card carrying radio operator. There you have, and here's one more pun for the Henkel on crew; Anchor's Away!

What the Hell

     Seriously, I have no clue how any of this works. I don't even really feel like we are doing anything, and yet days slip by and things manage to get done no matter how much of a mess we try to make them.

     I left New York in a malay of emotions. Somewhere between and amazing going away party, saying goodbye to friends, packing up my life, and a nephew getting diagnosed with a brain tumor I have managed to actually get to California. 

     Andy has been here a few days. His first day was a fairly intense experience. Being here solo and having the whole thing land in his lap was a bit much. I am not going to write much more on that as we will be conducting a dramatic reenactment and posting photos in the next day or so. 

Fraternal twins 6'2" "the kiwi"
and 7'2" "bon voyage"

     So what have we been doing? Well we caught up with two friends from our distant past at Copper Mt. Colorado, Gabriel Ryan Davis (don't call him Gabe, although we all do) and Jeff Hull. It was a good little time warp for the first beer or so. Instantly sent 8 years back. During our subsequent beverages Jeff told us of the progress on our surfboards for this trip.

close up on the brain cloud anchor and signature

     Jeff has his own board company called Resist and he is getting us all set up. Andy and I are more than a little excited for these beauties and this blog post is the first time the rest of the crew will see them. Hope you guys like them! Haha. 

one of our better spinnakers

     Anyway, we have actually done some work with the boat. We have been organizing the work schedule for the next few weeks and deciding where and when each job would be addressed. Once the schedule started to take shape we began dragging sails out of the boat. In case we haven't made this clear in past posts, we have a ton of sails. 5 spinnakers, 3 headsails, 2 mains, 1 trysail and 1 staysail. Yeah 12 f'ing sails. They take over the boat and need to be sorted out. So andy and I start carting these things out to the small yard at the entrance on the dock.

another spinnaker all chute'd up

After dragging out 6 of our 12 sails, we found most were pretty beaten and one or two pretty good ones. One of the cooler things we found was the spinnaker was flying in a photo mounted in Aldebaran's nav station. With a huge bull in the middle and the eye, Aldebaran in the constellation, as a star. I was hoping we would get this sail but he had said it was blown out. It was tucked away down in the V-berth and had a huge tear through the whole thing but luckily the entire graphic was intact, so we salvaged that section and will use it for something. 

What a load of bull

     Andy and I will tackle the exhaust manifold when it gets here on wednesday, and the prop will get re-pitched one day this week as well. Maybe a trip to the used marine store. Then around next weekend we will set off for the land of tequila and spring break regret. The biggest addition, or maybe "rework", to be added to the crew will be Andy's new tattoo. The artwork is being finalized as I sit here in the tattoo parlor harassing the artist with my camera, torturing Andy with evil thoughts of doubt and impending pain, while occasionally typing a bit of this gibberish. Check back tomorrow for the complete tattoo post. 

Clutching his soon to be colorful forearm

Thankfully, Silas' prognosis is looking good so far. Get better already would ya!?

Aldebbie's Smooth Move, Part Deux

or, Part Two of The Heartwarming / Heartbreaking Holiday Tale of Moving Aldebbie Out of Sausalito, Told Semi-Backwards.
by Leslie, photos and captions mostly by Don

Five hours and 57 minutes until 2011 comes crashing through the snow, on a four-horse open sleigh, screaming for the start of our own mini apocalypse; the end of our New York/Seattle/Colorado lives as they once existed in 2010. Don has already waxed sentimental on this note, so I'll go ahead and get to the point.

View Larger Map

Aldeberan will be hanging here for a few more days

Don and I sit before our tempura and sashimi platters, oddly reverent and with a peculiar, dumb-founded expression on our faces. It's not so much that we are hungry for a meal that isn't larabars or canned tuna; it's more that this particular meal is a celebration for what we had accomplished. This was the first sake cup and Sapporo pint ever to clink over the entwined thoughts: "Holy crap, we made it!" and "Holy crap! We have a boat! We are doing something huge with this boat in less than two months!" This was the first time that our proposed adventure really became really real to us.


Santa Barbara has a lovely harbor, but it is retardedly expensive to stay here, and, I'm sorry Lauren Henkel (my sister who went to school here and loves this place), the people are kind of...weird. On the way to our Farewell Captain Mark breakfast, a gaggle of middle-aged joggers wearing reindeer antlers came bounding up to us. "Chocolates!!! Have some chocolates!!! Merry Christmas!!!", shoving little foil-wrapped balls into our hands with manic grins. Now, some might call this wacky, fun, festive behavior, and that's all well and good, but what do you call the woman who lets her little dog sniff all over Don while he's sitting on a bench trying to talk on the phone? Weird. That's what you call that. Weirdly entitled to have your dog rub his snout all over strangers. Yikes! Let's shove off! 


It's t-shirt weather in SB, which is indeed a notch on the nice side of "reasons for staying here," but not enough of a nice reason to outweigh the cost of staying here. So hey! Let's motor out! Let's...bump our bow into the dock? Oof, Aldebbie's got quite the off-kilter prop walk on her! Okay, okay, we're off the dock, oh no, the reindeer women and their little dogs are coming!!! OH MY GOD LET'S GO! Wait! No! We forgot to unplug the shore power! It rips out of the socket and drags behind us like long, sinewy yellow entrails. "Pull! Pull like your life depends on it!" screams Don. I do. It's back on board, apparently undamaged, and all is well. Now, out into the sunshiny sea! Maybe we'll strip down to our u-pants just because we can, finally! Break out the sunscreen! The tanning oil! The...um? Don?! 

This is actually just off of point conception
but you get the idea

Don is down in the cabin, skillfully plotting our course on a newly purchased GPS. He tells me our heading and I steer to it. I squint far ahead of me. I take my power stance atop the helm bench just to be sure. I ask Don for the heading again. Yep, it's correct. Goodbye sunshine, hello never-ending fog bank, dead ahead. Ok...no worries. The Atari-looking radar works. I yell at Don every five minutes to check it, half-expecting little space invaders or centipedes to come peew!-peew!-ing up the hatch. Thankfully, we are as alone as we'd been the previous nights with Mark; which is both reassuring, and slightly eerie. You get to feeling a bit like Will Smith in I Am Legend out there, wandering around the ocean with nobody else around...and yet...we have the feeling that just beyond the fog, there are things out there. And of course, there are. But not zombies. Not even killer whales, great white sharks, or giant squid. The unseen creatures of the deep still aren't as scary as an unseen boat, buoy, or rock.  No matter what the radar tells you isn't there, not being able to see that "nothing" is unnerving to say the least. 


Eventually though, we get comfortable in this soup of fog obscuring all but 100 ft. of water all around us. Primarily because Don and I get into our new found trick of zig-zagging our heading to avoid all the rolling waves intent on hitting us abeam and making Aldebbie toss side to side like a drunken freshmen at her first kegger. 


That is to say, we were comfortable. 


The radar began showing us channel markers and land that we couldn't see. If navigating out of Santa Barbara Harbor this morning was navigation 101, then welcome to navigation 201! The next hour was spent moving at what has to be the most fast-paced 3 knots imaginable. One wrong turn into the shallows, and a quick correction. Knees shaking from what I then attributed to the cold (it might of been that, too). Trying to find our slip with a fishing boat in hot pursuit! Not finding our slip, but finally, after what felt like an hour (and may have actually been), tying off at a fortuitously available end tie. It was like the first time you ever tried to parallel park, except this time it felt like all coordination and reasoning skills had gone overboard in my last bucket. Again, the fault of a little dance called "the prop walk." But, at the end of it all, there was Japanese food, hot showers, real restrooms, and the incredibly sweet harbor office people with their mom-like reassurances and healthy supply of cookies, candy, tea and coffee. 


Nuts. I've somehow time-travelled back to the beginning (which is, of course, the end). So let's zoom back (or forward?) in time to the high point of the trip: that gorgeous, two-or-so hour stretch of time when Captain Mark was still on board, the winds were with us, the fog had lifted, the sun was shining, and we were sailing! Over the course of this trip, we learned that Aldebbie sure does move, even in light winds. In strong winds, however, despite her sturdy demeanor, she's all lean muscle! It was exhilarating, feeling the boat heel a bit leeward, charging through the waves at what felt like record speed, under full sail. It didn't matter that both our heads were now clogged and unusable; that a bucket was our only friend; that we'd each gotten between one and four hours sleep; that sailing at over 8 knots surely couldn't last, and that we wouldn't be making it to San Diego with Mark. We'd finally felt a taste of things to come, the good, the bad, and the bucket. And somehow, the good, in this case, the sailing part of all this nonsense, outweighed everything else. 

There was actually a lot of good to be mined from this trip, in spite of all our waiting and whining in Part One. Learning from Mark was a priceless experience. On a clear night, the first of our journey, he showed me Orion, Aldebaran, Hercules, and other constellations and planets useful for navigation. He informed us of the uselessness of 16 out of 19 of the life vests on board; the best way to fish; helped us figure out how things worked (or didn't) on our boat; and generally, showed us how to have a good time, even at 3am, with oil derricks that never seem to get any closer, shining in the distance, and a cold wind making Aldebbie whistle a lonely dirge. Oh yes, Aldebbie makes her own music, including video game peew-peews! from the rigging. 

Super sweet

And of course, the highest of highs: leaving Sausalito! Crossing under the Golden Gate! Maneuvering crab pots in choppy grey waters, while harbor porpoisi frolic behind us! That wonderful 30 minutes of steering remotely from midships, sprawled out in the sun, before the wheel spazzed out on its own and made us do donuts. But before all that...
The fog horns have finally stopped, so we uncleat the dock lines and toss them up on deck with a jaunty flourish. I've got my watchmen's cap and deck shoes on. Don's got his beard. Both of us are wearing nearly every warm article of clothing we've brought. We either look like sailors, or we look like people who think they look like sailors. We're way too Brooklyn-pale to actually pull off the complete nautical look, plus everything we're wearing was made by snowboarding companies, but we feel like sailors, at least. At last!
And so we are. Happy 2011! It's all beginning. 

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...

Intermission: Aldebaran's Holiday Card



One of the victims of the Fierros' rampage.

It's an interesting time in the lives of the Aldebaran crew. The Fierros, lacking their better halves, have set New York on fire with all-night binges, destruction of property, harassment of department store Santas (mistaking them for Greg--see Part One), cruelty towards pigs, and all around hooliganistic behavior. Maybe some pizzas have been made...maybe some records have been mixed and audio kits sold...I really have no idea. All I know is, watch out for Don and Lisa! 

#1. on the list: laser tag!

And Carl? Well, I have no clue what Carl is doing in Michigan, either, but  rumor has it he's been making a list and checking it twice, and this list (of things to do before he aborts his nice cushy energy management position in Seattle) keeps getting longer, much like Pee Wee Herman's proverbial sweater that he keeps knitting, and knitting, and KNITTING...To make matters worse for Carl, Raleigh hasn't been paying his child support(s), and is therefore on the run from Johnny Law this holiday season. Carl thinks he's snuck over the border to Mexico, but has high hopes that Raleigh will once again find a band of missionaries to infiltrate as a "rescue dog," and will meet us right on time in San Diego.

Andy's 200 yard espresso stare.

All alone in a cold, cold world.



At least I can always count on Andy to be fastened down to a reasonable schedule of sensible behaviors. Wake up at dawn, stretch, eat a bagel with hummus and avocado, teach snowboarding all day, come home, stretch, watch some sport, in bed by ten. Then again, he must be freaking out about the shitty espresso in Colorado, and missing New York, and Lisa, and the holidays with family...and he is definitely missing harassing and getting harassed by me and Don! He very well may be setting things on fire too.

I've just been getting set on fire by hot yoga in little old Fair Oaks, CA, and Henkeling around with the Henkels in a different pair of boat shoes every day. Mom used to work for Nike in the eighties, and has about a thousand pairs of shoes stored away in a bomb shelter, just in case World War III happens in our lifetime and there's a massive food shortage. It's good to know that we will be both well shod, and well fed, by her passion for fashion! Anyhow, I guess Nike owns or owned Spalding, who made some very nice topsiders which I now possess. Since I've been driving around in a car without a radio, I made up a song/rap about it. I hope to perfect it on the boat so I can make it a solid gold hit in New Zealand. Amy Poehler can come perform it with me, and people can see how much we don't actually look alike.

...I  make the more comical faces.

 

While we both enjoy a buttery chard...

Chorus:

I got more boat shoes than you!

I got more boat shoes than you!

I got more boat shoes, tell you what I'll do

Gonna walk all over the boats in the blue!

Walkin on the harbor, Ventura or Ann Arbor

Ain't no finer feet you gonna see

I got Sperry Topsiders, Spalding No-Sliders,
No one's got more boat shoes than me.

[Chorus repeats]

In Brooklyn they all got pairs, but they never go nowheres

Their boat shoes never ever seen the sea

But their fashion don't matter, don't mind their pitter patter

Cuz no one's got more boat shoes than me.

[Chorus repeats]

Aldebaran flees marauding gingerbread men.

Hmmm. Maybe I'm freaking out a little myself. Merry Christmas, Merry Festivus, Happy Haunikau, Jolly Qwansa, and a very Jingly Nothingness to the atheists! I promise Part Duex of Aldebbie's Smooth Move will be up by 2011!