Sailing Life
updated Jan 28 2001

People
There's usually been three people travelling on Mary Frances. Three or four folks is the most fun, and sailing things are generally easier to do. Passages are hard with two people: there's a lot of work and little sleep. There's been nine people on board since I left San Diego. Nine sounds like a lot, but most folks don't have the time to sail for more than a few months.

(Matt / Ana / Erik / Hillary / Allison)

I'm Matt.

Ana is demonstrating a fresnel lens.

Erik was with me from Rarotonga to Singapore. I don't know how long that is: we tend to keep time by places, as in: "Forget it, no one's seen it since Tahiti." Before Mary Frances he was on two other sailboats, and had sailed from Mexico in the Spring of 2000. He's off to teach English in South Korea. He made a cool web page about his travels.

Hillary was with us from American Samoa to Bali. She had sailed on other boats from Hawaii and America. She's now back in America.

Allison was on from Australia to Singapore. Now she's home in New Zealand, working as a chef for their summer.

Lucy

We picked her up at a t-shirt shop/animal shelter in Zihuatenejo: buy a T-Shirt, get a cat. She's an attack cat: pounces on us when we're least expecting it, attacks our feet as we walk around. On night watch, she sits on top of the dodger and watches the sails. She usually doesn't get seasick, though she did once while we were beating for days off Borneo. She usually just mellows out and gets more cuddly at sea. Cute.

There hasn't been much of a paperwork problem with her in any of the places I've been. In Tahiti a vet came to the boat to look at her and give her some shots. In Australia we couldn't stay at a marina and had to lock her in the bathroom when we pulled up to the fuel dock. They also wanted us to save all of her poop in a garbage bag, which we, umm....forgot to do. Every place else they either don't care or don't ask.

Navigation

In the South Pacific we usually ran on traditional navigation. With the GPS off, the speed, VMG, and distances weren't on the top of my mind; for some reason I relaxed and enjoyed the passages more. I didn't have to watch the miles count down excruciatingly slow, and it's easier to play pirate ship without glowing numbers in the corner. It's also fun to figure out, sort of like crossword puzzles, and kills time (especially when we're trying to be accurate). We've got a neat calculator that makes moving the DR and reducing the LOP's easy. We turned on the GPS when we feel lazy or I worry about clearing something.

Arriving in Darwin, I felt like I returned to the future. A huge millitary catamaran passed us at about 20 knots while we were sailling into the harbor. I felt ridiculous pretending that it was 1970 and doing all the navigation by hand. So I got a really cool computer vector charting program. I haven't used anything else since, and have turned thoroughly modern in my navigation. I don't tow the taffrail log or bother with magnetic bearings any more. Instead, I bought a handheld GPS as a backup. It's really cool to have the laptop screen glowing with the chart, a little picture of our boat drawn on it, and all the little buttons to press and play with. It's not pirate ship, but then, the parrafin lamps are usually too hot, and it fits the vibe of the big alternator, electric windlass, and motor dinghy better. It's the year 2000.

Food

At sea we usually make one huge meal a day, sometimes two smaller ones, and occasionally an elaborate dessert. We snack on left overs during the night watches. If there's still some in the morning, we throw an egg and some spinach, or whatever, in with it for breakfast. Hillary and Allison are both professional cooks, and Erik is good at jazzing up ordinary things and coming up with new dishes; I'm learning a lot from all of them. We don't run the fridge, and it's taken a long time to figure out how to provision well, then whip up good things with canned and dried foods.

This means we're usually cooking hippy. Boxed tofu, fallafal, veggie burger mix, mushrooms, Oriental noodles, hummus, canned Indian curries, packaged Thai or Indonesian spices. It seems easy to whip up something good with these things, and they last forever. We seem to go through cans of spinach, mushrooms, diced tomatos, green beans, and corn as fast as we can find them in the boat. There's also some good non-hippy dishes we dig, like corned beef and corn with mashed potatos mushroom gravy and saurcrowt.

Exercisce at Sea

All serious blue water sailors know the importance of keeping in shape. Todays cruiser lives an active lifestyle that demands top physical conditioning. During thirty day passages, it's very easy to slip into a sloppy, flabby, disgusting lifestyle. But true seamen know that its absolutely essential to stay in form to meet the changing demands that sailing places on their body. Activities include hoisting a fully battened mainsail, lifting large horsepower outboard motors, dragging dinghies up the beach, and weighing heavy ground tackle with a manual windlass. Seconds count, and the quicker you can accomplish these tasks, the sooner you'll be out of danger.

On board the Mary Frances, we've evolved a comprehensive exercise routine which ensures our physical conditioning doesn't degrade during long passages. This keeps our energy level high, which has increased both our enjoyment of passages and reduced our passage times. Sail handling is not a chore, but a chance to work some muscle! We call this Active Cruising. With AC, we don't hesitate to make sail changes, and relish the opportunity to throw in and take out reefs, one of the more demanding tasks on board. We use winches rarely, preferring instead to sweat up the jib sheets with raw will power. To keep the motivation level high, we time ourselves and write our scores in the ships log. Sailors whose scores start slipping are gently reminded that passage making on the Mary Frances is a team effort.

Just kidding.

Launch

Minisuper, dinghy #3. Notice the lack of freeboard, sitting room for one, and dysfunctional engine.
Launch: 12' long, aluminum, spacious and dry sitting room for four, a deep v hull up in the bow to cut through waves and a flat aft section for super planing. It couldn't be any bigger and still fit under the boom: a perfect fit. It rides more like a boat than a dinghy, and cost a third the price of a rigid inflatable. With the 8hp Yamaha I got for it, it'll take 2 people and a box spring mattress upwind in a short chop-- at 17 knots in dry butt luxurious comfort. It really is a good time. I've never had a nice motor dinghy before, that is, one that can plane, doesn't always feel seconds away from swamping, and the motor starts on the first pull. The biggest mistake I made when setting up Mary Frances for this trip was not realizing how much a bad dinghy sucks.

This dinghy love thing is hard for a land lubber to understand, so I'll try to explain it in other terms. You're old car could only fit 2 1/2 people in nice weather, maybe 1/2 a person in moderate weather. It wouldn't start very often, and when it did, it was slower than walking. Other cars that passed you too close would endanger you from running off the road and you'd have to swim to shore, towing your car behind you. Because your car sucked, you would only leave your home once a day. If you forgot something, you'd have to do your best without it, because you didn't want to go back in the car. You'd see other people zipping around in their cars and envy them for the charmed lives they must lead. You live like that for a year. Now imagine you get a super muscle car that kicks ass and beats the shit out of any pansy inflatable bullshit. Hell, you'll race any of those little fag mobiles in the anchorage, do circles around your opponent while throwing beer cans at him, then slam into his boat with aluminum indestructabillity to take his wife back to your boat for the party while he's still putzing around... Yeah! Really cool.