Glimpses of Belgium

We're steaming quitely into the fishing port in Oostende, Belgium. In the streets across from our berth, a motorcycle race is in progress, crowds milling about and bikes of every description tearing down the dockside at close to 300 km/h. I'm stunned. This would never happen in Norway, I'm quite sure, as it is precisely the type of activity that The Nice People would like to pretend isn't going on. Let them do it at their race track in the woods, so far away that we can't hear the noise, but in the streets downtown? Surely not. In fact, I thought that the Isle of Man TT and the Macau GP were among the very last road races remaining, but apparently I was mistaken. And the best thing about it? The locals just don't understand why I think it's strange. That's true grass roots motorsports for you.

Fast forward to The Jolly Sailor. I'm hanging out with Erik and Ludvig, local marine engineering maestros. Like myself, they're right off work, still dressed in overalls. Right next to us is a group of businessmen in suits, and the rest of the crowd is made up of everything in between, all interacting freely. This is a true melting pot for the social classes. My lifestyle has quickly branded me as "interesting", and the retired cop, the barmaid, the shipping coordinator, the down-and-out fisherman, they're all buying me drinks at a faster rate than I can responsibly down them. When I realize that I must either get out of there or compromise the next day's productivity, producing my wallet only generates a quick shake of the head from the barmaid. Like most nights in The Jolly Sailor, I leave without paying anything. Oh well.

Fast forward to the motorcross track. Erik has taken it upon himself to ensure that I'm not alone on my Sundays, and he is the perfect guide to the local motorsports culture. He used to be something of an MX star back in the day, and it seems that he knows everyone. Like everywhere in Belgium, this place is lubricated by beer, and the day hardly gets started before I have to politely decline offers left and right. Being Norwegian, that is not an easy thing to do. Where I come from, declining the offer of a drink from a stranger is tantamount to spitting him in the face, but here it's apparently OK. Erik provides me with a running commentary of the events, so that I soon know who to cheer and for whom to hope for a big mouthful of dirt. The day passes in the incessant din of high performance engines, with enormous clouds of dust drifting across the field.

Fast forward to The Barbeque. I'm with a bunch of people I just met. They're not really into the music, but they brought me here out of curtesy. Let the stranger have his heavy metal. Do you know how to spot a genuine heavy rock pub? It's not the music, the bourbon behind the bar or the biker insignia decorating every surface. It's the toilets, and not just their smell. Cobwebs in the urinals is the true mark of seriousness for a place like this.

Fast forward to Gent on a friday night. The scene is like something out of a movie. We're walking between all kinds of cathedrals and other historic buildings, and everywhere you look stages have been erected, with DJ's performing or live bands playing. Every hundred meters or so there is a booth selling drinks, one selling fast food, and a block of porta pottis. It is just as well, because the crowd density is out of this world, and moving anywhere fast is completely out of the question. Basically the whole downtown area is one big party, with different sections catering to different tastes. There's even a "quiet" corner, not in the sense that it is sparesly populated - the crowd is just as dense, but the dancing is a little less crazy, and the noise level is down to a point where you can actually maintain a conversation. It is a night of pure poetry in blurry motion. The party goes on and on, and when I give up at seven o'clock in the morning, it is still going strong. Yet again I fail to explain just how different this is from home, and I'm given the answer I'm starting to expect: "But this is just normal, no?"

Fast forward to the beach off Bredene. We're skinny dipping at midnight. This one was actually my idea, but if I'd hoped to shock anyone, I was in for a disappointment. They just quickly agreed that yeah, that's a good idea. Now we're back crawling lazily into the incoming surf, illuminated by the ever present phosphoresence in the water and the odd flash from the lighthouse at Oostende. We try to body surf, but the waves just aren't big enough, or maybe our movements aren't quite coordinated. When we finally crawl back up on the beach, freezing and utterly exhausted, I'm left wondering how I can be in a developed European country, and still so very far from home. It's beautiful, all of it.

Okay, so I realize that all of this calls for something of an explanation. I'll get around to that. Maybe.

SNAFU

Ha ha, "Situation Normal", that's rich! Still, I thought things had stabilized right around a low point for me. How very wrong I was. It started with a phone call, while I was hanging around Chris' camp and having a good time. It was Kjetil from Kambo Marina, who called to tell me that my boats were northbound with the current, headed out to sea. With Chris assisting I had Jonas started up within half an hour, and we made our way out to the boats. The mooring lines had indeed broken, sort of like I had intended, but only after dragging the mooring and buoy out to deep water. Damn.

With the only solid point in my life gone, I did what I usually do in those situations: Moored the boats in Moss (where I am forbidden to visit), curled up in a ball of apathy and cried about it. That got old after a week or two (I've sort of lost track of some of the time), so I started sanitizing Nemi for a spot of illegal dumping. While I was extracting the last drops of diesel from the tank, a guy turned up and bought her for 15k. That's less than 10% of what I've spent, and I haven't seen a cent of it yet, but I do have a piece of paper saying that she's not mine, which is worth a hell of a lot to me.

While I was still giddy with the joy of having one of the deeper shadows lifted from my life, Dad offered me a job in Hundested, Denmark. I jumped at the chance, and got busy readying Nemi for her first major voyage. I enlisted Chris as crew, which turned out to be a major mistake. He's been fucked up in the head lately, I think from getting dumped repeatedly by Kaja, and he had no inhibitions towards taking it out on me. It started with bitching about everything, to disobeying direct orders while taking his turns at the helm, etc. It ended in Hundested, with him on a train and me single handing it home.

Meanwhile, the recent turn of events has given me back my urge to write. Sadly, my internet hardware has yet again committed harakiri, in yet another interesting way, so I've been prevented from updating since I left Moss. I'm now in Rörö, where The Nice People have made a spectacular entrance, shitting their idea of architecture all over the waterfront. While the looks of things are nearly enough to make me puke, at least they have given me a plethora of Wifi connections to choose from. I guess there's a silver lining in this one, too, but the weather it's brought is such that I don't care if it was solid gold. So-called progress can be an abhorrence.

I finally figured out what's wrong with the Autopilot. The fluxgate sensor, which for some reason was mounted in the mast, was half filled with water. Amazingly, after I drained it, shook out a few components that had corroded off the PCB and let it dry out in the sun for a few days, it's started generating a signal again. Sadly, the resolution seems to be about ten degrees, which is hardly sufficient for autopiloting. So far I've done most of the helming inside, using the wheel for steering and the radar as a turn rate indicator (it is more accurate than the human eye), but today the weather was so spectacular that I steered most of the way from the flybridge. With push button steering and no rudder indicator i've made a shamefully meandering track, but it was worth the extra fuel spent. What a day!

When I checked in here today, I expected my readership to have imploded on itself in my absence. Strangely, that was not so. I thank you for your patience. Twelve hour days take their toll, and the local hospitality is outstanding in the off-season, so I shall now proceed to hit the sack. I will be back, though. Promise.

Fumbling in the dark

There is nothing quite like boating in the dark. When the landscape is stripped of its color and shapes, leaving only lights behind, the darkness also strips all the noise out of the navigation task. You're no longer going to be wondering about the shape of that point or whether or not you recognize a certain ridge on land - instead you will see only what you need to make your way safely where you're going. Some people find this lack of sensory input boring. I find it serene. Waiting for the next light to appear while basking in the ghostly glow from phosphorescent plankton takes me out of this world, to a secure bubble into which only the elements and the journey itself may intrude.

When I decided to take Jonas home last night, this was only partially on my mind. The greater part of my mind was preoccupied with getting home in a hurry. I had been socializing with Goffe, and as I'd stayed well stuck into his sofa until he proclaimed it was bedtime, the clock was nearing midnight as I walked into downtown Moss. From the canal bridge, the walk home takes over an hour, whereas the boat ride takes about twenty minutes. It seemed like an easy choice to use Jonas, and for the first five minutes I regretted nothing.

Gliding slowly out of Moss, running the engine up to temperature while leaving the arc lights of the city behind and approaching the moonlit landscape ahead, I was quickly transported to my favorite bubble. It burst with a resounding crash when I hit the first ice floe, a heavy piece which kept rotating in my wake. I should have been able to see that, even with the moon behind me, so I stood up and started taking notice. I could see other lumps ahead, but I kept running into thin ice sheets which were impossible to spot on the calm surface. After a while I was running through an unbroken layer of thin ice, invisibly transisting into thicker patches which jarred the little boat, sometimes striking hard enough to knock the screw into neutral.

It was around this time that I started thinking seriously about finding my anchor point on the ice. I'd actually thought about this when I left the gear behind, reasoning that I would probably find it if I took good notice of where it was in relation to the surrounding landmarks. Now that I found myself looking for a blue rope on the ice in the darkness while blinded by the lights on the FK wharf, I suddenly wasn't so sure any more. There is no shred of serenity to be found in a boat at night if you don't know exactly where you're going, and it only took a few minutes for me to start doubting that I was going to find the anchor at all.

I had taken down a detailed, mental image of the position of my mooring point, related to the features of the landscape south of FK. Thus, I knew when I was getting close, I knew pretty much exactly when I was abreast of it, and I knew when I had passed it. Still there was nothing to be seen, save for ever undulating shades of gray across the ice sheet. I kept going north after I realized I had passed my point, knowing that my only hope was that I would recognize something as it glided through the reflection of the moon, which extended in a stripe to the SW. Just as I was about to turn back, not knowing what to do next, I saw a dark shape in the moonlight stripe.

It might have been anything, but I had a pretty definite idea that there was nothing on that patch of ice except for my mooring gear, so I turned back. I don't know what I would have done if the lump turned out to be sleeping swans, but luckily it was the fender I had used to buoy the anchor in case it melts through. Such a fantastic release of tension! In the blink of an eye I went from uncertainty to security, from staring into the murky darkness with my heart racing to trudging happily home across the ice, and a little while later I slept like a baby.

So what did I learn from this? Nothing significant. Others might have gleaned any number of valuable lessons, but I'm too stubborn to go that way. Thus, this story hasn't earned a Lessons Learned tag. However, I did come away with a tiny piece of wisdom: If you're planning to return to a specific location along the edge of an ice floe in the dark, leave a stake with a reflector on it. That is all.

Slow Spring

I just noticed that the annual thaw has started. I think it was when I forgot to install the redneck insulation back in the door of the wheel house, without feeling it immediately when I woke up the next morning. Or maybe it was when I realized that the break along land has opened up for real, without freezing back up. At any rate, I suddenly sat up yesterday and saw that spring is coming. In a spontaneous fit of premature celebration, I stripped out the rest of the temporary insulation (which was easy) and went on to fire up the main in an attempt to create a break to open water (which was impossible).

I succeded in getting unstuck this morning, after running astern for half an hour in order to loosen up the ice ahead. However, the ice is still thick enough that moving forward required running the engine at its maximum intermittent rating. While that is not an insurmountable problem on its own, doing so requires burning quite a lot of DFO. With the two forward tanks empty, I only have the twenty litres in the day tank, plus whatever I can extract from Nemi. In other words, freedom will continue to elude me until I have some warmer weather to soften things up a bit more. The over all ice thickness is still around half a foot, so there's plenty of room for improvement.

I spent last night with Lisette, as physical isolation poses some challenges which cannot be solved over the phone. On my way there, I stopped by the canal to have a look at Jonas. He has been stranded there since the ice came while Lisette and I were enjoying our cruise, and all the while he has been gnawing at the back of my mind. He's a brave little boat, and it'll take a bit more than ice in the bilges to threaten his well-being, but this time I did find a serious problem. Someone has stolen the swim ladder I had lashed to the docks so that he wouldn't get trapped underneath on a low tide. With the tidal variations being especially great these days, I decided to move him immediately.

Having kept Jonas on the public pontoon overnight, I took him home this morning. It wasn't until I was cutting through the day-old ice sheet, accompanied by the thud of the Sabb and the tinkle of bits of ice skipping across the surface, that I realized how much I've missed boating. Of course ther was no question of taking Jonas all the way to the other boats, as ice too thick to break economically with Nemi is solid enough to support the full weight (2.5t) of Jonas. In the end, I mashed enough of a notch in the ice to get his bow into, and fastened him with an anchor in the floe at the end of 50m 14mm PP. Øystein dropped by with a few books for me (Thanks, pal!), and he laughed his ass off when he saw the rig. I must admit that poor Jonas does look abandoned this way, but I truly felt like I was abandoning him in the canal. This way, at least he is getting used every day.

...

I've been trying to channel my writing into fiction lately, but it is SO difficult! I keep producing highly worked, tantalizing little fragments of text which add up to nothing. My creative output is a bit like cancerous growth; It can be vivid and copious, but there is little structure to what's going on, and ultimately it serves no purpose.

I'm re-reading Stephen King's On Writing. Mom saw it for sale, and luckily she realized that there must be something for me in there. It must be over ten years now since I first read it, and I hardly remember anything. Still, now that I'm going through it again, it is striking how much it has influenced me. Nearly everything I've been saying about writing (but failing to implement), like my one-page-a-day philosophy, I have from Stephen King. Even the way I shape my text, with archaic constructs and copious adjective use, echoes his work.

Regarding Jørgen's suggestion: I would love to, but I'm in no position to pass judgement over Røkke. How great a percentage of his income does this yacht represent? I spend well over 100% of my income on boating. Of course it is sickening to see a yacht that size, knowing it will probably see little use, but if I were to crystalize my puke into text, it would carry with it the bitter taint of envy. If I want to be respected for my decision not to amass resources, then I must respect Røkkes decision to do so, and also his right to distribute them however he wants. Also, while it's a big yacht and all, there are more spectacular examples of resource squandering in yachting. How about the recent trend for The Nice People to have a supply vessel follow their megayachts around? That kind of says it all to me: Your 200 foot monstrosity doesn't have the necessary space and facilities, so you get a second ship to haul all your cars, boats and misc gear around with you.

Chinese Made Generators: Two Very Different Impressions of Quality

After yesterday's midday battery charge, my Kellen DG3600 generator shut down with an ugly, metallic rattle. I immediately assumed that to be the sound of its death, given my previous experience with the type. Luckily, this time it was only the exhaust muffler which had broken off at the weld. Thus, the set is still functional, but unbearably loud at full load. It is a good thing, then, that I never dare to run it for any length of time above 40% of its continuous rating.

The Kellen diesel generator isn't just my sole source of electricity, but also my greatest source of frustration. Ever since I picked it up from Smart Club in February (I think it was), I have been regretting my choice. Let's start with the name. Am I stupid for thinking that it would be a 3.6 kW set? Apparently, because when I took a look at the front page of the manual, it said "Diesel Generator 3.3 kW". Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time someone named a product for its peak rating, I thought. Then I looked inside the manual, where it said "Max continuous power 2.8 kW". WTF?!

After swallowing the disappointment of the blatant naming swindle, I started using the generator. It didn't even make it to its first oil change before it started developing interesting personality traits. The troubles began with starting difficulties in cold weather, which quickly developed into starting difficulties in any weather combined with black smoke at 50% load. Then the injection pump completely stopped responding to load changes, resulting in the frequency dropping past 45Hz @ 4 Amps, making the set near unusable. However, the logistics of organizing a warranty replacement were so staggering that I kept using it (only for battery charging @ 300W) until it shut down with a horrible screech and seized solid, around the 200 hour mark.

This brings us nicely around to the only positive thing I have to say about this generator: Smart Club were really nice about replacing it with a new one, no questions asked. Also, the replacement has held up much better, and is now past 100 hours without any major breakdowns. Except for the exhasut breaking off yesterday, of course. Plus the circuit breaker won't trip - if I subject it to an 8 kW load peak, the motor just loses rpm until the voltage regulator loses control. Oh, and the starter motor fell off both generators around the 30 hour mark, due to the bolts vibrating loose. And neither of them would start with the supplied batteries if it was colder than +10 centigrade, forcing me to hook up a proper car battery. And the 12V charging hasn't worked on either of them, but at this point I'm nitpicking.

In short, the Kellen DG3600 is a festering pile of poo, which can not be sweetened by any amount of niceness from the warranty department at Smart Club. I will forever regret my decision to buy it. So how could this happen? I have, after all, endured endless hours of Lisette's ranting about the all eclipsing shittiness of Chinese made scooters and ATVs. A thinking person would assume that the same applies to Chinese made generators, no? Well, once upon a time I actually did, but then the Firman SPG2500 came along and shattered my preconceptions.

It was in the spring of 2008, when I was moving out here to the buoy with Nemi, that I found myself in dire need of a source of electricity. I picked up the Firman from Jula, reasoning that it should at least give me a couple hundred hours of battery charging and coffee brewing. I didn't really expect it to last through the summer, but figured that I could just pick up a new one under warranty when it broke, and the 2k NOK price didn't seem much to pay for an immediate if temporary solution to my problem. In the end, it didn't just last through the summer, but kept running until this winter. At that point it had endured several thousand hours of horrifying abuse, with only two oil changes and a top-up when it went into low oil shutdown.

In the end I was aware that it was a lot less efficient than when it was new, but I kept beating it to death, amazed and curious how far it would go. I won't go into too much detail, as I'm planning a video autopsy to document how internally messed up one of these Honda pattern engines will get before it quits. Of course all things must end, and the honorable Firman is sitting abandoned and unloved on the aft deck of Nemi. It shall never be forgotten, though, as it forever destroyed my bombastic views of Chinese build quality. If there is a Hall of Fame for generator sets which went above and beyond the call of duty, then this little guy has earned his place, right between a 25 ton Bickerton & Day and a million hour Fairbanks Morse.

P.S: One might surmise that since I abused the Firman, I did the same with the Kellen. That is not so - I stopped taking care of the Firman when it got past the point where I expected it to quit. Its outstanding endurance led me to believe that Chinese generators can indeed last for a long time, so I fully expected the Kellen to last a couple thousand hours if I followed the maintenance steps in the manual. Thus I fed it only the best fuel and lubricants, did everything at the prescribed intervals, but to no avail. To paraphrase Lawrence Block: "I think there is a lesson in here, and it probably wouldn't be lost on a martial arts master, but I'm not quite grasping it."

P:P:S: I dropped by Smart Club. They sourced me a new muffler on the spot, without asking for a receipt. At least they take responsibility for the crap they sell, which is more than you can say for some.

P.P.P.S: The engine in the Firman is called SPE160E and is manufactured by Sumec. The engine in the Kellen is an UD178, made by the United Power Equipment Company.

Defining Monstrosity

No Norwegians can possibly have avoided noticing that a new entity has made its appearance in the media: The Monster Pylons. The general sentiment seems to be that they are a bad thing, but still it looks like they are getting built, and people are screaming bloody murder. Especially local politicians and environmentalists have latched onto the subject with a vengeance, but a whole bunch of other politicians are following in their wake, sensing the scent of blood and publicity. My question to them all is: Why?

The debate has been raging for a while now, and I thought it had lost its power, but then it popped back up on the TV when I was sitting with friends last night. Since I haven't really understood why people are so pissed off by The Monster Pylons, I asked the room, and my friends demonstrated what seemed like an encyclopedic knowlege about the subject, or at least about the complaints being made. Some people say they are going to kill all the birds in the area. Others seem to think they will create unsurmountable problems for local air traffic. Hidden deep in the Grade-A Concentrate of BS, there was the one argument which cannot easily be shot dead by logic, so it is also the one I shall address. It was Lars who put it like this: "They ain't exactly pretty."

Now that I can relate to. It happens every so often that I see traces of human activity, either on TV or with my own eyes, which piss me off deeply and permanently. Such as the recent Natonal Geographic documentary on illegal gold mining in the Amazon rain forest. It transpires that it doesn't just lead to the predictable large-scale defoliation, but also to the annual dumping of some sixty tons of mercury into the river. That shit is going to kill EVERYTHING and it's going to stick around for thousands of years. It's making my skin crawl, but strangely it is not the stuff with which to incite a crowd.

How about the creation of deserts, then? We are doing it in a lot of places, at a high rate of acerage. It is pretty much a permanent process, as most experts agree that once an area is thoroughly parched and devoid of sediment, it won't re-foliate until we have another ice age. What's more, deserts are pure ugliness. If you disagree, it's either because you grew up in one, or because you've never seen one at all. Still, I see people yawning in the back as I say this.

Okay, I've gotta try something else, then. How about my pet peeve: Our use of HDPE. High Density Polyethylene is a fantastic material. It has reasonable tensile strength, high resistance to chemicals, it's unbelieveably tough and it simply won't degrade unless you expose it to UV radiation. Add a couple percent of carbon black, and it will even live (be functional) for thousands of years with limited sunlight exposure. You can use HDPE for damn near anything: Water mains, sewage pipes, wear pads, shipping pallets, automotive parts... the list just goes on and on. Now take a guess what the most common usage is? It turns out that nearly one third of the annual global production of HDPE (about 8 million tons in 2007) is used for disposable packaging.

Of course, most of this is responsibly dumped at a landfill, where it may rest in peace for ever. However, a sizeable percentage is dropped in the oceans, where it joins thousands of acres of PVC tarps, Polypropylene lines and nets, Polystyrene food packaging.... the depressing truth is that we do not know how much plastic is presently either floating on the surface or crowding beaches around the world, but we do know that the amount is rapidly increasing. And there you have it: My prime example of the ugliness of the human impact on nature. It may not be the ugliest example out there, but it is something I have seen with my own eyes, and it makes me very, very sad. Still, it sometimes feels like I'm the only one who cares. I'm sure I didn't move you now, did I?

But you sure as hell are moved by the Monster Pylons. Back when I was having this discussion with my friends, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was sailing up the Hardanger fjord and unexpectedly came across a power line of monstrous proportions. Can you guess what I felt? Nothing much. Maybe a touch of admiration for the audacity of the human spirit. Sure, the huge pylons are expressions of engineering rather than art, so they're not exactly pretty. Still, the big, spindly things reaching for the sky don't seem nearly as ugly as some deliberate acts of architecture.

Have you ever seen an aerial view of a big city? It looks like an oozing sore growing on the earth's crust. Given that we somehow decide that our creation of "permanent" structures is a serious environmental/aesthetic issue which we need to solve, then cities is the place to start. If you abandoned a big city today, the scar in the landscape would be visible a thousand years from now. Not so with the Monster Pylons; If we in the future decide that they're too ugly to live with but lack the resources to tear them down, they're still just a five hundred year "problem" when we walk away from them.

Why, then, is it that the "environmentally and aesthetically conscious" politicians of this world are campaigning against the building of power lines, while at the same time completely ignoring the pressing issue of deleting all major cities? Okay, that was a stupid question, but I think I made my point. This has nothing to do with the aesthetics or environmental impact of building Monster Pylons, but it has everything to do with whoring your integrity for publicity. Incidentally, that seems to be the one thing you really need to be good at in order to succeed in politics. Which is why I never considered going that way.

EDIT: Finally, someone said something intelligent in this debate