Anchoring, a more personal note

There’s a lot you might quickly learn about your partner after moving aboard a 27-foot sailboat with the intention of cruising for a few years — especially if its a relatively new relationship.

Although Jim and I had lived together in Bangkok for our first five years as a couple, we had not actually spent much time together.

As an editor with the Bangkok Post, Jim worked evenings and nights, with Tuesday and Wednesday as his weekend. I taught school Monday to Friday from 8am to 4pm. So we had heaps of alone time and our relationship was not really tested to see how well we could get along confined to a tiny space in sometimes unpleasant conditions for months and months.

So when we moved aboard Quiver, Jim’s Vancouver 27, in southern Thailand with the goal of sailing home to Canada, we had some unanswered questions. There were a few hiccups as I got used to cruising and Jim got used to having a first mate, but it was all good, I’m happy to say, and Quiver soon became our boat.

A large part of our smooth transition to life at sea I credit to Jim’s patience. Not with me or with the changes I made and remade to Quiver‘s facilities below, but patience with whatever life dealt us. Combined with a quiet determination, he would just work away at whatever needed doing, and the most amazing thing was that he NEVER complained. Installing a toilet from scratch, twisted like a pretzel, sweating buckets in 38-plus degrees C (100F) on the hardstand in Phuket, he just went back to it day after day with a smile on his face. There are many examples I could regale you with, but he would humbly edit them out, I’m sure.

One time that has stuck in my mind was while cruising in the Philippines. Our relatively new anchor windlass had seized and needed to be removed and replaced with a spare we had recently brought aboard. Problem was, the bolts had fused and Jim could not remove it from the mounting. So anchored in some lonely bay off Busuanga Island he sawed through four inches of stainless steel with a tiny hack saw. When the first blade broke, he replaced it and went back to the task until another snapped. For two days he kneeled, bent over the windlass on the bow, sawing in the intense sun and tropical heat and humidity.

Periodically, I would come up on deck and position myself over him with an umbrella, but mostly it was just Jim and the sun and heat and the awful grinding as he slowly worked his way, millimetre by millimetre, through the steel.

I continue to see that patience often … like last winter when he spent weeks reinserting thousands of broken links in our seven cruising guides after the files were corrupted.

Another takeaway from that incident for me was how important a reliable windlass is. When we purchased Silom, our Tayana 37, in early 2013, she came with a Lofrans Tigres which had already seen some years of service. And she has been an impressive performer since, a workhorse over the last 10 years of guide research, four months every year, anchoring and re-anchoring in hundreds of anchorages.

But the winch is showing her age, so we figured she was due for a major servicing before we head off for Haida Gwaii in the next week or two.

Jim spent days in the garage pulling it apart with a blowtorch and anti-seizing lubricants, enlisting the help of a machine shop when bits refused to budge. He identified a number of parts he thought we should replace, which amounted to much of her insides. Its remarkable the way metal can twist.

I did some calculations. Assuming we had dropped the anchor three times a day every day for 16 weeks, not unrealistic when we are researching the guides, that would mean in 10 years we had raised and lowered the anchor 3,500-4,000 times. We deserve a reliable one.

So I put my foot down. Why wait for it to fail to replace it? At our age we can’t afford to manually haul up a 25 kg anchor and a 100 metres of chain. Do we really want to worry about our windlass failing? And, of course, boating being boating, it would fail just when we need it most.

We now have a new Lofrans Tigres sitting on the workbench waiting to be installed. It was not really a hard sell, though sometimes Jim views buying something new as a personal failure. After 18 wonderful years together, I’m just hoping buying new doesn’t get to be a habit and he doesn’t think maybe I should be replaced before I seize up! 

And if you see us out on the water this summer with our new windlass shining on the bow, stop by and say hello!