Frugal warriors

Well, our chickens are coming home to roost. Before we left and all along this journey I have been crowing about how cheaply we got out our door. As much as I can, I attribute our success to our frugal product workarounds, Harmony’s brilliant space management purchases, or my financially efficient engineering structures and machines. These are all euphemisms.

Now look where it’s got us. The poor wind turbine ground to a gravelly, rusted halt in La Paz after the old blades flew apart in a sudden storm.  It has yet to be returned to service. The solar panels look just a mess. They look like bacon strips held up by mismatched dental floss. They give the boat some ugly frilling hips. Ten feet long. A full third of our length. Other boaters will stop to reflect on the aesthetic in front of them, and when they ask how much energy the setup puts out, and I reply “140 watts”, they become suddenly uncomfortable with the opinions that have just erupted inside them. I can take it.

To get the full effect of the baconing, I’d have had to get in the dinghy and row out a ways to take the picture, but I didn’t feel like bailing out all the water.

Say goodbye to the white LED solar powered Christmas lights that Harmony bought and strung with care on a cholla husk in the shape of a ‘y’ on the stern pulpit. After taking them into the Sea they quickly began to work erratically, until the insides rusted and the solar panel filmed over. So much for having cool night FX in the anchorage.

People still visit the proud Youtube videos I put up of the self-steering wind vane, Mark II. It makes me ashamed to think that they don’t know that sometime after Mark IV (but before we left Portland) it went in the trash.

Our dinghy, Miss Nomer (the Porta-Bote) continues to barely hold it together. Intended to be our backup “hauling trailer” dinghy for the folding bikes, Miss Nomer has become our “serious dinghy” for any anchorage where we’ll be more than two days, which is frequently the case. Last registered in Montana in 1986, she cost $80 from the garage of a retired airline pilot, which beat $1500 new or somewhere thereabouts (Sorry Porta-Bote company, I don’t remember, but I love your boats!) We’ve patched her, we’ve gooped her seams, we made new wooden seats, rope handles, and lock pins, all of which already show signs of wear and tear. We bail out about 15 pints of water a day before piling it with our land-ho supplies and setting off. On occasion we’ve had to bail out a quantity of water in the vicinity of 60 pints. Such is the life of homebodies in the great outdoors. We have yet to try putting the bikes in it, and I’m not sanguine about the prospects of doing so in the future.

Worse than any of these ravages of time and thrift, worst of all, Harmony’s beautiful paint job is marred! There are (a few, small) scratches! The red is sacred! Nothing should touch it, that’s our badge of boating honor!

Not only that, but the letters in our name sticker have started to peel off. We just last week had to repaint the “SEATTLE” on the transom with the best tool at hand: Sharpie pen. It looks good from a not outlandish distance away, and if you got any closer you’d notice that the varnish on the transom is peeling anyway so there’s no point to keep up appearances. I like to think we’re radio pretty.

We have a few new inventions, though, that continue to make life incrementally easier for very little money. Harmony and I designed and built a gimballed stove to allow level cooking indoors (Guess who is so excited about this invention? Both of us. Guess why? Because it means that Harmony will cook more happily in rough conditions and thereby continue to cook the majority of the time.).

Despite its appearance, the gimballed stove is a definite value-add. Normally these things cost upwards of $150 if you can even find them anymore on ebay. This cost us around $15.

We also “invented” a new shading system for the cockpit, which consists of a tarp that came with the boat and the boom and some string. We are so very proud of this one, and grateful for its presence.

We’ve built shelves and cranes, special tools and custom jobs. Every corner we can cut, every piece of garbage we can repurpose, every luxury or vanity we can forego will help to make this trip not the foolhardy financial misadventure of a lifetime. So far, so good.

Frugal as we want to be, there’s a limit that kills our budgets every time. If Serenity needs it — treating Serenity as a separate entity from the boat we’re living on, which is a shabby nest of human conveniences — she gets it. Keep that in mind, future potential buyer . . .