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.
Showing posts with label English. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English. Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
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.
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.
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.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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
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
Wow, there is nothing quite like a public denunciation of dignity...
...to trigger an outpouring of love and sympathy. Ever since I stopped pretending that everything was okay and started complaining like a little bitch, people have been showering me with care and attention. I've recieved food, visits and offers of accomodation elsewhere. Why is it that we love to hate the strong, but love the weak? I think that little bit of irrationality there has much to do with the explosive proliferation of humans across the globe. Although it is most definitely to my advantage at the moment, I kind of doubt that it is purely a good thing.
My good friend Lars treated me to a rock concert on Saturday. There was this spare ticket for Motorpsycho laying around, and in vein with the latest trend of being nice to Henning, it was given to me free of charge. Not just that, but he and Goffe acted like I was doing them a favour by staying sober and driving (like I could afford to get drunk), and kept buying me soft drinks throughout the evening. Yep, everyone is laying it on thick, but as I have no shame, I am also unable to cringe. Good times.
Motorpsycho were... fucking amazing. I don't think I can put it a lot more eloquently than that. They're one of those bands who don't really do a lot for me when played on the stereo, but who come together to demonstrate their worth in a live concert. Playing a 15/16 beat, mixing it up with a few bars of 17/16, throwing in some asynchronous tempo changes... that doesn't impress so much on a record as when you are witness to how they do it in real time, no second takes and tight as a drum. The crowd was also pretty amazing. Motorpsycho are the type of band who scare away all the hipsters, but retain a hardcore following of people who apreciate them for what they do best. It was by no means a get-up-and-jump type of concert, but with Rockefeller sold out to deeply involved fans there was a strong mood in the room. At the end of it, I was beat up, drained and blissed out.
We went in an hour early, so that we could catch a glimpse of the prize ceremony for the FIS World Championship. Or so we thought. I wouldn't have gone on my own, but I defer to my friends, especially when they bring me to concerts. We started hitting the outskirts of the crowd at the central station, but it was loosely packed enough that we could move around until we followed Karl Johan to Stortinget. From that point, the crowd was dense, unfriendly and outright nasty, most of the way across to the royal castle. There was a lot of active elbow use, as fathers were desperately trying to drag their families to the front. The scene was like something from a movie shipwreck, only with less anguished wailing and more forced cheering. Luckily, nobody has mastered the passive elbow quite like myself, so I got through it all in one piece. We never caught a glimpse of the stage, though.
There has been little boating going on lately, mostly due to my economic predicament. I've been trying to produce some boating related text, but it is not coming so easy. While my piece on the SS Norway has been one of the least popular in my entire blogging history, the positive feedback I've been getting on it has come from some highly rated sources, including people who worked there. Thus, I decided to make a similar piece on the Bourbon Dolphin accident. It should have been easy. The SS Norway thing just dropped out of me in a couple of hours, and the accident report didn't piss me off nearly as much as the one on Bourbon Dolphin. However, once I picked up the report for a quick re-read before I started writing, the process ground to a screeching halt. The report is teeming with troubling issues, and at 132 pages it is not very long, but once you start reading it, you'll realize that it's a high-density brick. That has got to be why it never got the media attention it deserved.
My good friend Lars treated me to a rock concert on Saturday. There was this spare ticket for Motorpsycho laying around, and in vein with the latest trend of being nice to Henning, it was given to me free of charge. Not just that, but he and Goffe acted like I was doing them a favour by staying sober and driving (like I could afford to get drunk), and kept buying me soft drinks throughout the evening. Yep, everyone is laying it on thick, but as I have no shame, I am also unable to cringe. Good times.
Motorpsycho were... fucking amazing. I don't think I can put it a lot more eloquently than that. They're one of those bands who don't really do a lot for me when played on the stereo, but who come together to demonstrate their worth in a live concert. Playing a 15/16 beat, mixing it up with a few bars of 17/16, throwing in some asynchronous tempo changes... that doesn't impress so much on a record as when you are witness to how they do it in real time, no second takes and tight as a drum. The crowd was also pretty amazing. Motorpsycho are the type of band who scare away all the hipsters, but retain a hardcore following of people who apreciate them for what they do best. It was by no means a get-up-and-jump type of concert, but with Rockefeller sold out to deeply involved fans there was a strong mood in the room. At the end of it, I was beat up, drained and blissed out.
We went in an hour early, so that we could catch a glimpse of the prize ceremony for the FIS World Championship. Or so we thought. I wouldn't have gone on my own, but I defer to my friends, especially when they bring me to concerts. We started hitting the outskirts of the crowd at the central station, but it was loosely packed enough that we could move around until we followed Karl Johan to Stortinget. From that point, the crowd was dense, unfriendly and outright nasty, most of the way across to the royal castle. There was a lot of active elbow use, as fathers were desperately trying to drag their families to the front. The scene was like something from a movie shipwreck, only with less anguished wailing and more forced cheering. Luckily, nobody has mastered the passive elbow quite like myself, so I got through it all in one piece. We never caught a glimpse of the stage, though.
There has been little boating going on lately, mostly due to my economic predicament. I've been trying to produce some boating related text, but it is not coming so easy. While my piece on the SS Norway has been one of the least popular in my entire blogging history, the positive feedback I've been getting on it has come from some highly rated sources, including people who worked there. Thus, I decided to make a similar piece on the Bourbon Dolphin accident. It should have been easy. The SS Norway thing just dropped out of me in a couple of hours, and the accident report didn't piss me off nearly as much as the one on Bourbon Dolphin. However, once I picked up the report for a quick re-read before I started writing, the process ground to a screeching halt. The report is teeming with troubling issues, and at 132 pages it is not very long, but once you start reading it, you'll realize that it's a high-density brick. That has got to be why it never got the media attention it deserved.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Today: A mixed bag of very little
I went into town to visit friends last night, and I chose the route across the ice to Rosneset, since it is a bit shorter and considerably flatter than climbing up to the road on land. In the end I didn't save any time, because the ice was really bad. Not only did I have to wade through several inches of slush, wich of course slowed me down a bit, but I constantly had to stop, re-evaluate and re-route due to patches of bad ice. After I passed point Kjellandsneset, the fog thickened so that I didn't really have another clear sighting of land until I made it to Rosneset. Walking into zero visibility in flat terrain gives me the strangest feeling - like driving a boat, only not.
I ended up spending the night with Lisette at her dad's. I've said this before, but I'll labour the point some more: Those of you who have the opportunity to sleep every night with your wife, cannot possible know how lucky you are. At least I didn't until I couldn't, and now our time together carries the bitter sweet taint of its limited duration. I'm starting to think that as humans we are unable to appreciate conditions, either good or bad, but rather respond only to changes.
Nimo is back from his last post-op checkup at the vet's, and since everything is looking fine, he was allowed to move back in with me here. That's a very positive change for me. I like a lot about 
my surroundings, but they do get depressingly lonely at times. It is amazing how much of a difference it can make to have some sort of companion animal, and as companions go, Nimo is the best. He seems pretty much unaffected by having a toe removed, although it does look ridiculous.Meanwhile, Social Security came through for me. They called me a couple of days ago, expressing both their concern for my problems and their consternation that the Unemployment people are refusing to help me out. They really don't like being stuck with the bill, and have repeatedly suggested that I register an address on land in order to solve the problem. However, according to the legal department of NAV, I should be entitled to unemployment pay as long as I have a PO box. I have a big problem with cheating to circumvent a system that seeks to unload its burden on a neighbouring department by means of dishonesty while claiming incompetence, so I'd rather just raise hell and file my complaint. The sad part is that the people who must foot the bill in the meantime, are the only people in the whole of NAV who have ever shown a will to help me.
Where was I going with this? Oh right, I just found out that they paid over six thousand kroner into my account, which is actually a whole lot of money. It's supposed to last for a month, but it is at least five times what I've had to spend for the past month. Thus I'm leaving for a grocery shopping spree, right this moment.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Quitting cigarettes: The cheap and easy way
First, let me make the point that nicotine is horribly addictive, for those of you who may still be in doubt about that. I once knew a guy by the name of Kato, who quit heroin a while before I met him. He did this on his own, going cold turkey with no outside motivation, not even his family nagging him along. Although I'm sure his story is not unique, I haven't heard of anyone else accomplishing the same. He told me that once he realized the immediate, destructive impact the drug was making on his life, he found the motivation necessary to get rid of it. Now the interesting thing is, Kato was never able to quit smoking, even though he tried. His personal take was that the addictive properties of Nicotine and Heroin were very similar, but the knowlege that smoking was taking ten years off the end of his life wasn't nearly enough to spur him on.
So we've got a guy saying that cigarette addiction can be as strong as Heroin addiction, and he's got the experience to back it up. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to quit cigarettes. I would know, as I have done so a number of times (please quit laughing). It usually lasts for about six months, until I'm completely rid of the physical addiction and start feeling like I'm back in control of my pet beast. At that point the temptation to play with it just a little overcomes me, and I go back to being a sometimes smoker for a few weeks. After that I'm back to twenty a day, every time.
This pattern of behaviour has puzzled me for a long time. Why would I exhibit signs of psychological addiction to such a shitty drug? Let's take a look at it: Cigarettes capture you in a horrible physical addiction, and immediately start impacting your health to the point where you notice if you're being honest with yourself. Over time the effects get steadily worse, up until the point where it kills you. Meanwhile you've got to deal with a reduced sense of smell and a considerable social stigma. And what do you get for all this? The most pathetic little trip in the whole drug book. It is insignificant the first few times you use it, then it loses its effects entirely.
Thinking about this, I had a eureka moment. What if the thing we like about Nicotine is the addiction itself? Look at it this way: Twenty times a day, you get to desperately crave something and then give it to yourself by simply taking it out of the pack and lighting it. It's almost like being desperately hungry and then treating yourself to a big meal - there are few things quite like it. Can you name any other context in which it is so easy to gratify such a desperate need with such frequency? I can't. In that context, the immediately visible cost of four kroner a pop doesn't seem so awful.
There are many ways to quit smoking, and I've tried a few of them. There's the cheap and hard way - going cold turkey on your own. Then there's the harder way, to go cold turkey for your friends and family. You've got the various schemes for stepping down your usage over time, which soften the blow somewhat, but which require even more willpower. There's the easy and expensive way, namely prescription drugs such as Zyban. Now I'm about to try the cheap and easy way: Having no money. I'm down to my last three Lucky Strikes, and I just turned down Lisette who stubbornly keeps offering to buy me more. I've thought long and hard about it, and the truth is that there are other eighty kroner a day habits which will give me much more pleasure. Increased inside temperatures, larger dinner rations, or perhaps even the spare diesel to go places. Such luxuries are hard to imagine now, but through a little abstinence, they are there for my taking.
...
Other side of the night: Wow, that was sooo easy to say yesterday, when I still had three cigarettes. Now I have none, and I CRAVE! It's times like these when being isolated from humanity is a good thing.
So we've got a guy saying that cigarette addiction can be as strong as Heroin addiction, and he's got the experience to back it up. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to quit cigarettes. I would know, as I have done so a number of times (please quit laughing). It usually lasts for about six months, until I'm completely rid of the physical addiction and start feeling like I'm back in control of my pet beast. At that point the temptation to play with it just a little overcomes me, and I go back to being a sometimes smoker for a few weeks. After that I'm back to twenty a day, every time.
This pattern of behaviour has puzzled me for a long time. Why would I exhibit signs of psychological addiction to such a shitty drug? Let's take a look at it: Cigarettes capture you in a horrible physical addiction, and immediately start impacting your health to the point where you notice if you're being honest with yourself. Over time the effects get steadily worse, up until the point where it kills you. Meanwhile you've got to deal with a reduced sense of smell and a considerable social stigma. And what do you get for all this? The most pathetic little trip in the whole drug book. It is insignificant the first few times you use it, then it loses its effects entirely.
Thinking about this, I had a eureka moment. What if the thing we like about Nicotine is the addiction itself? Look at it this way: Twenty times a day, you get to desperately crave something and then give it to yourself by simply taking it out of the pack and lighting it. It's almost like being desperately hungry and then treating yourself to a big meal - there are few things quite like it. Can you name any other context in which it is so easy to gratify such a desperate need with such frequency? I can't. In that context, the immediately visible cost of four kroner a pop doesn't seem so awful.
There are many ways to quit smoking, and I've tried a few of them. There's the cheap and hard way - going cold turkey on your own. Then there's the harder way, to go cold turkey for your friends and family. You've got the various schemes for stepping down your usage over time, which soften the blow somewhat, but which require even more willpower. There's the easy and expensive way, namely prescription drugs such as Zyban. Now I'm about to try the cheap and easy way: Having no money. I'm down to my last three Lucky Strikes, and I just turned down Lisette who stubbornly keeps offering to buy me more. I've thought long and hard about it, and the truth is that there are other eighty kroner a day habits which will give me much more pleasure. Increased inside temperatures, larger dinner rations, or perhaps even the spare diesel to go places. Such luxuries are hard to imagine now, but through a little abstinence, they are there for my taking.
...
Other side of the night: Wow, that was sooo easy to say yesterday, when I still had three cigarettes. Now I have none, and I CRAVE! It's times like these when being isolated from humanity is a good thing.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Ellen's painting
It's a while now since Ellen finished her painting of Nemi. I think it's a beautiful picture, of how she should have lived rather than how I let her go to waste. Ellen is turning into quite a productive painter, and while most of her work relfects a sense of stark realism, this painting is more of a foray into the abstract. Despite the sad realities it will forever make me remember, I'm in love with it.
The word is that once Ellen is done with her service with the royal guards, she might accept commissions for more of the same. Or something entierely different; I think she is starting to show that she can deliver pretty much whatever you ask.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
How to give the DNV guy bad dreams
I was tempted to title this post "Jury Rig of the Century", but that would have been to ignore the proud traditions of the American Redneck. While this is not up there with some of the worse AC installations I have seen, it has got to rank as the worst fix I have ever made myself. These are desperate times, and they have been ripe for desperate measures for a while now. Previously, I have kept warm by burning copious amounts of "odorless" paraffin indoors. When I got tired of the 40 NOK / Liter price of the stuff, not to mention the inevitable fuggienss resulting from releasing so much water vapour and CO2 indoors, I cut back to burning very little of the same stuff to keep warm. While a couple of oil lamps will keep temperatures above freezing, it is hardly sufficient to maintain a cozy atmosphere, so when I got tired of freezing my ass off, I resorted to running the electric space heater.
Now that's idiocy in its purest form. While the heater itself is 100% efficient, the overall adiabatic efficiency coefficient of the generator I've been using is around 0.25, probably less. In plain English, that means that less than a quarter of the heat content of the diesel going in gets turned into electricity, while the rest goes towards heating up the great outdoors. While that's not the sort of thing I should be doing, considering my present economic predicament, it is a prime examples of the power of apathy. Yesterday I finally pulled myself out of the mire, so without further ado, here's my how-to guide for giving your insurance inspector and/or classing agent a hissy fit:
Take one diesel fired pot burner, set it on the floor next to a window, and fasten with screws. Install one short length of stove pipe. Next, remove said window and replace with a piece of plywood or other, unsuitable material. Fit a short length of flexible, PVC-coated aluminium ducting over the stove pipe, crimp in place with a hose clamp. Run the duct through a hole in the plywood sheet. Finally, run a fuel pipe from the engine room, through the shaft space to the burner, and secure with zip ties. Not enough hose clamps? Don't worry, it's just a fuel line adjacent to a heat source. What could go wrong?
Aside from the horrid looks of the "installation", the obvious fire hazards and my much too detailed knowlege of the combustion by-products of PVC, I'm reasonably happy with the results. With the thermostat turned up, the stove gets red hot, but nothing seemed to want to catch fire. With the thermostat turned down low, the temperature levels out above where it used to be while running the electric heater at 1250 watts, and I haven't yet seen a noticable level change in the day tank. This project is teaching me all the wrong lessons, but at least I'm staying warm.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Poor Jarle Andhøy
Those of us with an interest in boating will probably have noticed that Jarle Andhøy's Berserk has been missing for a week, in the waters off Ross Island, Antarctica. The news went out on Wednesday last week that the EPIRB on board the Berserk had been triggered, only to stop transmitting a little over a half hour later. This happened in exceptionally bad weather, with temperatures around minus forty and the wind kicking up a violent storm. My initial thought was that there wasn't much hope for the guys on board, and with the EPIRB gone, searchers probably weren't even going to recover the bodies.
It is just too easy to imagine what might have gone wrong under such circumstances. Freezing spray can sink a boat in a frighteningly short time, impacting an ice berg in ten meter seas would lead to massive damage, and otherwise trivial technical difficulties can quickly escalate to an emergency under those conditions. Once the boat is gone, the survival time of the crew would be measured in hours, not days, if they even made it into the life raft. Thus, while the rest of the world (or at least the newspapers) seemed to live on in the hope of a miracle, I quitely resigned myself to the infinite sadness of what has happened.
As luck would have it, Jarle Andhøy was off the boat at the time of the incident, taking one crew member with him on an overland expedition by ATV to the South Pole. While I was definitely happy at this news when it emerged a few days after the sinking (I think we can call it that now), I couldn't help but feel a big pang of "Ouch!". Can you imagine what Jarle has been going through the past week? Travelling for days through the desolate ice deserts of the Antarctic with all that solitude and time to ponder the loss of his friends and crew, knowing he could do nothing to help once he made it to the coast... Man, I feel your pain, and it's damn near enough to make me cry. For the first time, I don't envy your life.
Now that searches have drawn to a close, people are waking up to the fact that the three men on board must be dead, and they are levelling an unusual weight of criticism against Jarle. Some of the stuff being said seems relevant, and if it's true that they only had two survival suits on board... well, I wouldn't have done that. 'Nuff said. Then there's the bureaucrats complaining about the proper forms not being filled out. I guess that's their job, being bureaucrats and all, but if they possess even a shred of integrety, they should be able to point out that it wouldn't have made a difference this time.
However, the shit storm doesn't stop there. Now there's a sea captain who proclaims to the world that he observed the Berserk being dangerously overloaded. Excuse me? What the fuck do you purport to know about the stability requirements for that boat? A seasoned naval architect would know enough not to make a statement about it without measuring everything thoroughly and making his calculations. For all your experience, you don't know shit, so please sit back down and stop picking on a man who is in too much pain already.
At first, I was puzzled why people have reacted so strongly this time. I mean, it's not the first time a sailing yacht has been tragically lost at sea, but we don't usually see their captains being subjected to a public humiliation like this. However, when I stop to think about what Jarle Andhøy represents, it is not so puzzling any more. He has been following his dreams, which have also been the dreams of many others. In a short few years he has seen more of this world than most people do in a lifetime, and he has done so with a certain attitude. He has made the happy-go-lucky approach his trademark, and he has rubbed our faces in it by making it all seem easy. The introduction to his blog makes this point more clearly than I ever could.
That is after all the reason why the public loves him, and I for one cannot fully express my admiration for what he has done. Not the going places part - a lot of people could have done that - but putting the ragged people on the map. In some ways, he is a modern working class hero. Sadly, we know all too well what The Nice People think about working class heroes in general, and with him having invaded one of their exclusive clubs, namely bluewater cruising, it is no wonder that they have long carried a thorn in their side for him. As long as he was winning, he was damn near impossible to target, but now that he is down, TNP are flocking around for the kill. May the shame rest with them.
EDIT: The motherfuckers definitely aint done yet
It is just too easy to imagine what might have gone wrong under such circumstances. Freezing spray can sink a boat in a frighteningly short time, impacting an ice berg in ten meter seas would lead to massive damage, and otherwise trivial technical difficulties can quickly escalate to an emergency under those conditions. Once the boat is gone, the survival time of the crew would be measured in hours, not days, if they even made it into the life raft. Thus, while the rest of the world (or at least the newspapers) seemed to live on in the hope of a miracle, I quitely resigned myself to the infinite sadness of what has happened.
As luck would have it, Jarle Andhøy was off the boat at the time of the incident, taking one crew member with him on an overland expedition by ATV to the South Pole. While I was definitely happy at this news when it emerged a few days after the sinking (I think we can call it that now), I couldn't help but feel a big pang of "Ouch!". Can you imagine what Jarle has been going through the past week? Travelling for days through the desolate ice deserts of the Antarctic with all that solitude and time to ponder the loss of his friends and crew, knowing he could do nothing to help once he made it to the coast... Man, I feel your pain, and it's damn near enough to make me cry. For the first time, I don't envy your life.
Now that searches have drawn to a close, people are waking up to the fact that the three men on board must be dead, and they are levelling an unusual weight of criticism against Jarle. Some of the stuff being said seems relevant, and if it's true that they only had two survival suits on board... well, I wouldn't have done that. 'Nuff said. Then there's the bureaucrats complaining about the proper forms not being filled out. I guess that's their job, being bureaucrats and all, but if they possess even a shred of integrety, they should be able to point out that it wouldn't have made a difference this time.
However, the shit storm doesn't stop there. Now there's a sea captain who proclaims to the world that he observed the Berserk being dangerously overloaded. Excuse me? What the fuck do you purport to know about the stability requirements for that boat? A seasoned naval architect would know enough not to make a statement about it without measuring everything thoroughly and making his calculations. For all your experience, you don't know shit, so please sit back down and stop picking on a man who is in too much pain already.
At first, I was puzzled why people have reacted so strongly this time. I mean, it's not the first time a sailing yacht has been tragically lost at sea, but we don't usually see their captains being subjected to a public humiliation like this. However, when I stop to think about what Jarle Andhøy represents, it is not so puzzling any more. He has been following his dreams, which have also been the dreams of many others. In a short few years he has seen more of this world than most people do in a lifetime, and he has done so with a certain attitude. He has made the happy-go-lucky approach his trademark, and he has rubbed our faces in it by making it all seem easy. The introduction to his blog makes this point more clearly than I ever could.
That is after all the reason why the public loves him, and I for one cannot fully express my admiration for what he has done. Not the going places part - a lot of people could have done that - but putting the ragged people on the map. In some ways, he is a modern working class hero. Sadly, we know all too well what The Nice People think about working class heroes in general, and with him having invaded one of their exclusive clubs, namely bluewater cruising, it is no wonder that they have long carried a thorn in their side for him. As long as he was winning, he was damn near impossible to target, but now that he is down, TNP are flocking around for the kill. May the shame rest with them.
EDIT: The motherfuckers definitely aint done yet
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Changeable Conditions
You may have noticed in earlier posts that the ice is a dominant factor in my life. I like it strong or absent, as conditions in between pose many interesting challenges. The forecast thaw started in earnest last night, and combined with the snow it has had an immediate impact on the structure of the ice, which has become coarse and slushy on top. It will take days for the thickness to be significantly reduced, but the ice has already softened enough that it might be possible to break it with Oscilia. If the weather develops as they say it will, I'm pretty sure I will be able to establish a break to open water early next week, without burning too much diesel.
In the meantime, I've got to come up with a way to bridge the gap that's formed between the ice and land. Ellen delivered a care package this morning, and it was high tide when I went to meet her up in the forest. Thus, most of the break was 2-3m wide, but I found a point where I deemed it safe to jump across. Luckily it was low tide when Lisette arrived this afternoon, so she didn't have to jump the gap. I don't really want to ask her to do so when she's leaving tomorrow, which means that I must reach for the stash of 2x4 on Nemi. The trouble with structures resting on the ice in warm weather is that they tend to get heated up by the sun, melt through the ice and dissapear, but I think a surplus water drum might solve that.
Right now I'm enjoying the sight of Lisette preparing to cook a proper meal, something which hasn't happened in my galley for a while. While it's nice to watch, I think I'd rather join her, so I say goodbye :-)
Friday, February 25, 2011
The day I learned to respect fog and shipping lanes
The worst of the damage was done on my first kayak crossing of Lake Vänern. I had been making my way down the Dalslands canal for about a week, and as I got closer to the great lake, so grew the scepticism of the people I met. "Really?! You're just going to paddle across? You do know that she eats up a couple of Germans every year?" they would tell me. Being only eighteen, my answer came easily: "Well, I didn't embark on a kayaking trip from Halden to Stockholm because I wanted to stay safe, now did I?" I wasn't too worried about it. If you go into the Dalslands canal system, you'll see more Germans in canoes and kayaks than you can count, and watching them struggle to maneuver their craft on the glassy smooth surfaces of the upper lakes, it is no wonder that some of those who venture onto Vänern do end up dying. At the time, I considered myself somewhat closer to the Inuit, who use kayaks as a viable means of transportation around the icy waters of the North Atlantic. "If they can harpoon a whale from a kayak while surrounded by ice bergs and growlers, then surely I can get across this pond" I thought. Only after sailing to Greenland myself have I grown to apreciate not just the tremendous hardiness of the Inuit, but also the general cheapness of life in those parts.
Despite my cockiness, I had a bit of a lump growing in my chest on that bright and sunny morning as we got out of our sleeping bags on Hjortens Udde ("Deer point") to make the crossing. Memories of the tremendous bonfire we'd built the night before mixed with the mental imagery of Germans suspended face down by their life jackets. "That was a great night yesterday. I hope we'll live to see another!" said Per Otto, only half joking. Once we sat down and started going, however, it all became much too easy. The lake lay ahead of us like one great big unbroken mirror, and we powered across with long, easy strokes. The only valuable lesson we learned was that going up onto the Hinden reef to stretch your legs is worse than just keeping on going, as it is a smelly, bug infested and thouroughly inhospitable place. I also came away with the not so valuable impression that crossing Vänern is a piece of cake, and this would come back to haunt me.
My second Vänern crossing was a much more constructive lesson in risk assessment and proper planning. This time I had brought Magnus Hansen along for the ride. I wasn't scared at all, and to my enduring shame I even laughed at some of the people who tried to warn me. I wasn't even worried when the news struck that four tourists in two canoes had perished in light weather on the lake, only a few days before we had scheduled our crossing. We camped a bit further into the bay than I had with Per Otto, and as morning dawned there was a breeze blowing from the SW. It was supposed to freshen somewhat, but it didn't seem particularly bad to begin with, so we set off after a quick power breakfast of oats and jam.
It quickly became apparent that the tall pine trees on the shore had been shielding us from the wind, and as we made our way into the bay it started hitting us with increased force. Having it on our quarter meant that it was more of an aid than an impediment, until we were a couple of hours into it and lost the protection of Hjortens Udde. That's when the important difference between an offshore wind and twenty-odd nautical miles of fetch was driven home to me. In a short time the waves quadrupled in size, and they started tossing us around. I had to use a lot of rudder input to stay on course, and we had to work harder with the paddle to maintain balance and momentum.
The conditions steadily deteriorated during the next hour. The waves grew to a size that obscured the horizon when we were in the troughs, and now came with angry heads of white froth. The conditions were such that I couldn't focus my attention on the compass, and with land beneath the horizon all around us, my only visual reference was the direction of wind and waves. The resulting zig-zag course combined with the sea state to make our going painfully slow, and at times our VMG was well under three knots. We were getting tired as we passed the midway point, and I was having private doubts about the wisdom of our undertaking, but then a thin gray stripe appeared across the blank horizon ahead of us. We both cheered loudly, and then things went to hell very quickly.
Keeping a kayak upright under such conditions has nothing to do with stability as most boaters think of it. It is all about dynamic forces, and can be compared to riding a bicycle. As a wave pushes you over, you lean your hips into it and dig your paddle down on the opposite side to right yourself. Another important part of the equation is to maneuver your craft so as to avoid the brunt of the shit coming your way. However, with my kayak being 6.5 metres in length, having a straight keel line, displacing over a quarter of a ton fully laden and moving ahead with the all the speed and grace of a drifting log, that wasn't much of an option. We were struck by a particularly nasty breaker, and as we leaned into it to stay level, the aerated water at the crest swallowed the whole length of the kayak, and our paddles found no bite in the foam.
With no time for further analysis we found ourselves submerged and upside down. "Well, that took a big dump on a beautiful day!" said Magnus when we popped to the surface, either side of the capsized hull. I couldn't think of a way to disagree. Somehow I hadn't counted on this happening, and it didn't take much time for me to realize that we were in a very bad situation indeed. Bit by bit, it dawned on me that I hadn't brought any emergency equipment at all. No bilge pump. No flares. Not even a pail to bail out the water. We quickly established that my hat was useless for bailing. After that we tried pretty much everything, to little avail, and we started losing hope. Thankfully, although we both admitted it later, none of us said it out loud. There are few things more detrimental to the soul than thinking that you are going to die surrounded by a blank horizon, and such things are better left unsaid.
Desperate times bring forth desperate measures, and in the end we resorted to using the cooking pot. The only problem with that was that it was packed all the way into the bow. Have you ever crawled head first into the hull of a flooded kayak in open water? If not, you can just take it from me that it's not a fun thing to do. Even with the pot in hand, the task of bailing proved near impossible, as the waves crashed over us and re-filled the kayak every five-ten seconds. In the end we soved the problem by having Magnus push the stern so that the bow pointed into the weather, while I lay across the fore deck to break the waves with my body while I bailed from the front cockpit.
On his part that was such a Herculean feat of strength and endruance that to this day it leaves me deeply humbled. There is no doubt in my mind that if I had brought anyone else along for the ride, we would both have died that day. By the time we were back up and going, we had spent about eighty minutes in the water. Do you have any idea what it means to spend that amount of time struggling in water at fifteen degrees? If you're a doctor, you'll say that it means you're approaching unconsciousness. To me, having near zero body fat, it meant that I was at the bitter end of my rope. Or so I thought.
Once we had removed as much water from the kayak as was practical, we gathered up whatever equipment was still floating in the immediate vicinity and got going. We still had enough water on board to double our displacement, and this meant that the waves were breaking heavily over deck and slowly filling the hull back up. As I felt the water level slowly but steadily creeping up my thighs, I started resigning my last vestige of hope, but I retained my deepest resolve to go out fighting, and increased my pressure on the paddle. Still, the colors of the world were graying out, and I knew then that I was failing. Magnus felt this, and knowing he had no hope of survival if I quit, he pushed the one button he knew would bring me back to life.
The thing is, I like singing and Magnus doesn't like to listen. This had been an ongoing theme between us for a long time, so I was stunned when I heard his broken, unmusical voice utter the first phrase of Eric Idle's classic: "Some things in life are bad \ They can really make you mad" I perked up and joined in. "Da-da-da always look on the bright side of life!" Thus, singing and whistling, we made it into the relative calm water north of Hindens Rev. The last part of the trip is hazy in my memory, and many of the details are missing, but I do remember when the bow crashed onto the rocks on the shore of one of the islets west of Kållandsø. I also remember qutie vividly that I was unable to move my legs, so that Magnus was forced to tip the kayak on its side to extricate me and drag me up on land.
Usually when I've survived a traumatic experience such as this, I'm perversely happy about it. I somehow find a way to be grateful for the wisdom it brings. However, this one just left me drained and shameful that I could have made such horrifying mistakes. I learned a valuable lesson, but to this day the price almost seems too much to bear. What's worse, I didn't learn the right lesson, as my next Vänern crossing would demonstrate.
Fast forward one year, and you find Magnus and myself camped near the same spot, preparing to cross Vänern the next morning. This time we had all the necessary equipment on board, and the weather report sounded promising. We had a fantastic time, got ourselves thrown out of a midsummers night party and crashed in the tent with much too few worries on our minds. Morning dawned on a mirror smooth lake, and in the still air we hurried to pack our tent and get going.
Just as we were paddling away from shore, the fog came down. I didn't even stop to think about it. Sure it was a hassle, but we would be navigating by compass anyway, and we even had a GPS. Much more important was the dead calm, which still seemed set to last through the day. To stop and wait for the soup to clear would have put us at risk to windy conditions, or so I reasoned. As we kept going, the fog got heavier until we could barely see a boat length ahead. It was so bad that we nearly crashed into a little motor boat with a family on board, which had anchored in wait for clear weather once the skipper realized that he had blundered into shallow waters. We stopped for a chat, and they invited us on board for coffee. We talked for a while, and I showed the skipper how to enter waypoints into his GPS (of which he didn't seem to understand much), but he elected to hang around nonetheless. They even offered us to wait with them, but we were anxious to get going.
"Don't worry, you'll see that it clears up just nice once we get a bit further out" I told Magnus, who was having second thoughts when we got going again. I was in the rear cockpit with the rudder pedals and the compass, while Magnus was up front with the chart and the GPS. "What are these pink lines?" he wondered after a while. "Oh, those are just shipping lanes out of Vänersborg" I said, and we continued in silence for a while. "Aren't we supposed to worry about those?" I thought about it for a second. "Well, I guess, but I haven't seen much shipping going that way. And besides, even if there is one ship every hour, which I doubt, the risk of getting hit by one isn't all that bad. If the width of the ship is, say, sixty feet, we only occupy that space for much less than a minute. It boils down to a fraction of a percent."
We kept on going in an uneasy silence, and the fog got even thicker. Mathematic risk assessment aside, zero visibility creeps me out. Always has, always will. We had just made it into the southbound lane of the separation system when my ears picked up a faint throb. For a moment I hoped that it might be a helicopter, but no, it was the unmistakeable exhaust note of a very big engine turning at only a few hundred RPM. Magnus had heard it too, and he turned around. "Is that what I think it is?" he wondered. I just nodded, and we sat and listened for a while. The sound seemed to fill the air around us, and it was impossible to tell where it was coming from. Very tentatively, we kept going at slow speed, straining our ears.
The exhaust note was joined by the swish-swish-swish of a large propeller transmitting its vibrations through the water and into the hull of the kayak, and there was no doubt that it was getting closer. A minute later, another sound was added to the mix, this time a faint rumble, like a waterfall. I was increasingly certain that it was approaching us on the port side, which was bad news since we were almost in the middle of the southbound lane. It was impossible to tell if the ship was going to pass ahead or astern, and I was suddenly acutely aware that with the clutter controls turned up for the fog, the ship's radar operator didn't stand a chance of spotting a fiberglass kayak on the surface.
My instincts told me to go full steam ahead in a mad dash for the separation line, but logic told me to stay still until I had some kind of an indication of the ship's location. The rumble of the bow wave grew sharper, as we could hear drops of water hitting the surface, and in an instant it seemed like it was on top of us. I thought I heard voices, and then the sound passed in front of us. Seconds later we were struck by the wake, an indication of how incredibly close it had been. We breathed a collective sigh of relief, then we kept going forward. A short time later the powers that be waved their magic wand, and the fog lifted. We saw the ship then, a Vänermax cargo carrier, completely oblivious to the drama that had just played out a few meters off their starboard side.
Although these two incidents have taken a chunk out of my ego, they have taught me a few valuable lessons. First, I'm not invincible, and I need to act accordingly. Otherwise, I risk not only my own life, but also that of those who choose to follow me on my adventures. Bringing basic safety equipment along for a major crossing is pretty fundamental, as is respecting an uncertain weather forecast when I'm unfamiliar with the local conditions. Through the clarity of hindsight, it is shocking to see that I had to get into an accident to fully understand that. Second, never focus just on the factors which you know from experience, but take a step back to consider the full picture. Keep in mind that your experience might be downplaying the stuff that hasn't already smacked you in the face. Third, and perhaps most importantly, my risk assesment was badly flawed. Risk equals the probability of an event, times the consequence of said event. Rolling a thousand-sided dice for the end of your life is just plain stupid.
I'm sharing this with you in the hope that embarassing myself might save someone having to figure out the same thing for themselves. All of these are things I knew well beforehand, but I had to see them for myself before I really got the message. That's pretty fucked up. But you know what's more fucked up than that? Magnus still wants to join me on another major kayaking trip. Understand it, those who may.
Despite my cockiness, I had a bit of a lump growing in my chest on that bright and sunny morning as we got out of our sleeping bags on Hjortens Udde ("Deer point") to make the crossing. Memories of the tremendous bonfire we'd built the night before mixed with the mental imagery of Germans suspended face down by their life jackets. "That was a great night yesterday. I hope we'll live to see another!" said Per Otto, only half joking. Once we sat down and started going, however, it all became much too easy. The lake lay ahead of us like one great big unbroken mirror, and we powered across with long, easy strokes. The only valuable lesson we learned was that going up onto the Hinden reef to stretch your legs is worse than just keeping on going, as it is a smelly, bug infested and thouroughly inhospitable place. I also came away with the not so valuable impression that crossing Vänern is a piece of cake, and this would come back to haunt me.
My second Vänern crossing was a much more constructive lesson in risk assessment and proper planning. This time I had brought Magnus Hansen along for the ride. I wasn't scared at all, and to my enduring shame I even laughed at some of the people who tried to warn me. I wasn't even worried when the news struck that four tourists in two canoes had perished in light weather on the lake, only a few days before we had scheduled our crossing. We camped a bit further into the bay than I had with Per Otto, and as morning dawned there was a breeze blowing from the SW. It was supposed to freshen somewhat, but it didn't seem particularly bad to begin with, so we set off after a quick power breakfast of oats and jam.
It quickly became apparent that the tall pine trees on the shore had been shielding us from the wind, and as we made our way into the bay it started hitting us with increased force. Having it on our quarter meant that it was more of an aid than an impediment, until we were a couple of hours into it and lost the protection of Hjortens Udde. That's when the important difference between an offshore wind and twenty-odd nautical miles of fetch was driven home to me. In a short time the waves quadrupled in size, and they started tossing us around. I had to use a lot of rudder input to stay on course, and we had to work harder with the paddle to maintain balance and momentum.
The conditions steadily deteriorated during the next hour. The waves grew to a size that obscured the horizon when we were in the troughs, and now came with angry heads of white froth. The conditions were such that I couldn't focus my attention on the compass, and with land beneath the horizon all around us, my only visual reference was the direction of wind and waves. The resulting zig-zag course combined with the sea state to make our going painfully slow, and at times our VMG was well under three knots. We were getting tired as we passed the midway point, and I was having private doubts about the wisdom of our undertaking, but then a thin gray stripe appeared across the blank horizon ahead of us. We both cheered loudly, and then things went to hell very quickly.
Keeping a kayak upright under such conditions has nothing to do with stability as most boaters think of it. It is all about dynamic forces, and can be compared to riding a bicycle. As a wave pushes you over, you lean your hips into it and dig your paddle down on the opposite side to right yourself. Another important part of the equation is to maneuver your craft so as to avoid the brunt of the shit coming your way. However, with my kayak being 6.5 metres in length, having a straight keel line, displacing over a quarter of a ton fully laden and moving ahead with the all the speed and grace of a drifting log, that wasn't much of an option. We were struck by a particularly nasty breaker, and as we leaned into it to stay level, the aerated water at the crest swallowed the whole length of the kayak, and our paddles found no bite in the foam.
With no time for further analysis we found ourselves submerged and upside down. "Well, that took a big dump on a beautiful day!" said Magnus when we popped to the surface, either side of the capsized hull. I couldn't think of a way to disagree. Somehow I hadn't counted on this happening, and it didn't take much time for me to realize that we were in a very bad situation indeed. Bit by bit, it dawned on me that I hadn't brought any emergency equipment at all. No bilge pump. No flares. Not even a pail to bail out the water. We quickly established that my hat was useless for bailing. After that we tried pretty much everything, to little avail, and we started losing hope. Thankfully, although we both admitted it later, none of us said it out loud. There are few things more detrimental to the soul than thinking that you are going to die surrounded by a blank horizon, and such things are better left unsaid.
Desperate times bring forth desperate measures, and in the end we resorted to using the cooking pot. The only problem with that was that it was packed all the way into the bow. Have you ever crawled head first into the hull of a flooded kayak in open water? If not, you can just take it from me that it's not a fun thing to do. Even with the pot in hand, the task of bailing proved near impossible, as the waves crashed over us and re-filled the kayak every five-ten seconds. In the end we soved the problem by having Magnus push the stern so that the bow pointed into the weather, while I lay across the fore deck to break the waves with my body while I bailed from the front cockpit.
On his part that was such a Herculean feat of strength and endruance that to this day it leaves me deeply humbled. There is no doubt in my mind that if I had brought anyone else along for the ride, we would both have died that day. By the time we were back up and going, we had spent about eighty minutes in the water. Do you have any idea what it means to spend that amount of time struggling in water at fifteen degrees? If you're a doctor, you'll say that it means you're approaching unconsciousness. To me, having near zero body fat, it meant that I was at the bitter end of my rope. Or so I thought.
Once we had removed as much water from the kayak as was practical, we gathered up whatever equipment was still floating in the immediate vicinity and got going. We still had enough water on board to double our displacement, and this meant that the waves were breaking heavily over deck and slowly filling the hull back up. As I felt the water level slowly but steadily creeping up my thighs, I started resigning my last vestige of hope, but I retained my deepest resolve to go out fighting, and increased my pressure on the paddle. Still, the colors of the world were graying out, and I knew then that I was failing. Magnus felt this, and knowing he had no hope of survival if I quit, he pushed the one button he knew would bring me back to life.
The thing is, I like singing and Magnus doesn't like to listen. This had been an ongoing theme between us for a long time, so I was stunned when I heard his broken, unmusical voice utter the first phrase of Eric Idle's classic: "Some things in life are bad \ They can really make you mad" I perked up and joined in. "Da-da-da always look on the bright side of life!" Thus, singing and whistling, we made it into the relative calm water north of Hindens Rev. The last part of the trip is hazy in my memory, and many of the details are missing, but I do remember when the bow crashed onto the rocks on the shore of one of the islets west of Kållandsø. I also remember qutie vividly that I was unable to move my legs, so that Magnus was forced to tip the kayak on its side to extricate me and drag me up on land.
Usually when I've survived a traumatic experience such as this, I'm perversely happy about it. I somehow find a way to be grateful for the wisdom it brings. However, this one just left me drained and shameful that I could have made such horrifying mistakes. I learned a valuable lesson, but to this day the price almost seems too much to bear. What's worse, I didn't learn the right lesson, as my next Vänern crossing would demonstrate.
Fast forward one year, and you find Magnus and myself camped near the same spot, preparing to cross Vänern the next morning. This time we had all the necessary equipment on board, and the weather report sounded promising. We had a fantastic time, got ourselves thrown out of a midsummers night party and crashed in the tent with much too few worries on our minds. Morning dawned on a mirror smooth lake, and in the still air we hurried to pack our tent and get going.
Just as we were paddling away from shore, the fog came down. I didn't even stop to think about it. Sure it was a hassle, but we would be navigating by compass anyway, and we even had a GPS. Much more important was the dead calm, which still seemed set to last through the day. To stop and wait for the soup to clear would have put us at risk to windy conditions, or so I reasoned. As we kept going, the fog got heavier until we could barely see a boat length ahead. It was so bad that we nearly crashed into a little motor boat with a family on board, which had anchored in wait for clear weather once the skipper realized that he had blundered into shallow waters. We stopped for a chat, and they invited us on board for coffee. We talked for a while, and I showed the skipper how to enter waypoints into his GPS (of which he didn't seem to understand much), but he elected to hang around nonetheless. They even offered us to wait with them, but we were anxious to get going.
"Don't worry, you'll see that it clears up just nice once we get a bit further out" I told Magnus, who was having second thoughts when we got going again. I was in the rear cockpit with the rudder pedals and the compass, while Magnus was up front with the chart and the GPS. "What are these pink lines?" he wondered after a while. "Oh, those are just shipping lanes out of Vänersborg" I said, and we continued in silence for a while. "Aren't we supposed to worry about those?" I thought about it for a second. "Well, I guess, but I haven't seen much shipping going that way. And besides, even if there is one ship every hour, which I doubt, the risk of getting hit by one isn't all that bad. If the width of the ship is, say, sixty feet, we only occupy that space for much less than a minute. It boils down to a fraction of a percent."
We kept on going in an uneasy silence, and the fog got even thicker. Mathematic risk assessment aside, zero visibility creeps me out. Always has, always will. We had just made it into the southbound lane of the separation system when my ears picked up a faint throb. For a moment I hoped that it might be a helicopter, but no, it was the unmistakeable exhaust note of a very big engine turning at only a few hundred RPM. Magnus had heard it too, and he turned around. "Is that what I think it is?" he wondered. I just nodded, and we sat and listened for a while. The sound seemed to fill the air around us, and it was impossible to tell where it was coming from. Very tentatively, we kept going at slow speed, straining our ears.
The exhaust note was joined by the swish-swish-swish of a large propeller transmitting its vibrations through the water and into the hull of the kayak, and there was no doubt that it was getting closer. A minute later, another sound was added to the mix, this time a faint rumble, like a waterfall. I was increasingly certain that it was approaching us on the port side, which was bad news since we were almost in the middle of the southbound lane. It was impossible to tell if the ship was going to pass ahead or astern, and I was suddenly acutely aware that with the clutter controls turned up for the fog, the ship's radar operator didn't stand a chance of spotting a fiberglass kayak on the surface.
My instincts told me to go full steam ahead in a mad dash for the separation line, but logic told me to stay still until I had some kind of an indication of the ship's location. The rumble of the bow wave grew sharper, as we could hear drops of water hitting the surface, and in an instant it seemed like it was on top of us. I thought I heard voices, and then the sound passed in front of us. Seconds later we were struck by the wake, an indication of how incredibly close it had been. We breathed a collective sigh of relief, then we kept going forward. A short time later the powers that be waved their magic wand, and the fog lifted. We saw the ship then, a Vänermax cargo carrier, completely oblivious to the drama that had just played out a few meters off their starboard side.
Although these two incidents have taken a chunk out of my ego, they have taught me a few valuable lessons. First, I'm not invincible, and I need to act accordingly. Otherwise, I risk not only my own life, but also that of those who choose to follow me on my adventures. Bringing basic safety equipment along for a major crossing is pretty fundamental, as is respecting an uncertain weather forecast when I'm unfamiliar with the local conditions. Through the clarity of hindsight, it is shocking to see that I had to get into an accident to fully understand that. Second, never focus just on the factors which you know from experience, but take a step back to consider the full picture. Keep in mind that your experience might be downplaying the stuff that hasn't already smacked you in the face. Third, and perhaps most importantly, my risk assesment was badly flawed. Risk equals the probability of an event, times the consequence of said event. Rolling a thousand-sided dice for the end of your life is just plain stupid.
I'm sharing this with you in the hope that embarassing myself might save someone having to figure out the same thing for themselves. All of these are things I knew well beforehand, but I had to see them for myself before I really got the message. That's pretty fucked up. But you know what's more fucked up than that? Magnus still wants to join me on another major kayaking trip. Understand it, those who may.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
On a positive note, while it's on my mind
I just recieved a care visit from my dad. He's a champ for making his way all the way through the woods and across the sea ice to my desolate little corner of the world, a journey which has unnerved many of my hardier friends. His gift basket contained a substantial meal, which I decimated in minutes. He also came lugging the highly important gift of fifty litres of fresh water. I don't need much, but without drinking water my life gets pretty desperate pretty fast.
We spent the time talking, as there is little else to do around here, and five hours passed in a flash. My old man has accumulated considerable wisdom, and now I'm more grateful than ever that he saw fit to dispense me a good dollop from his seemingly never-ending supply. Those of you who didn't find your way in here by googling "gift basket" or "substantial meal", but rather have been coming here for some time, might have realized that much of the conversation was about anger management (I hesitate to say "problems"). While we don't always agree on everything, he has an uncanny knack for making me see things from a new angle.
Earlier today, I made the snap decision to revert to writing in English. Yesterday I pissed off a good portion of the Norwegian speaking boating public, and I was never one for winning anyone back, so I might as well switch audiences again. Norwegian is such a bland language anyway.
We spent the time talking, as there is little else to do around here, and five hours passed in a flash. My old man has accumulated considerable wisdom, and now I'm more grateful than ever that he saw fit to dispense me a good dollop from his seemingly never-ending supply. Those of you who didn't find your way in here by googling "gift basket" or "substantial meal", but rather have been coming here for some time, might have realized that much of the conversation was about anger management (I hesitate to say "problems"). While we don't always agree on everything, he has an uncanny knack for making me see things from a new angle.
Earlier today, I made the snap decision to revert to writing in English. Yesterday I pissed off a good portion of the Norwegian speaking boating public, and I was never one for winning anyone back, so I might as well switch audiences again. Norwegian is such a bland language anyway.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Here are some pics from our time on Oscilia up untill now.
Just a little something to watch while we are waiting for Henning to be operative again!
Nimo in the mast
Nimo is anxiuos to get on land and is sniffing in the air
Captain and me, the wife :)
Henning is trying a new water sport.
Nice and new paint after a week of work.
Working guys.
Fireguard.
Our man on welding. A real quelt.
Pretty boat, ay?
Just a little something to watch while we are waiting for Henning to be operative again!
Nimo in the mast
Nimo is anxiuos to get on land and is sniffing in the air
Captain and me, the wife :)
Henning is trying a new water sport.
Nice and new paint after a week of work.
Working guys.
Fireguard.
Our man on welding. A real quelt.
Pretty boat, ay?
Nice afternoons on deck, with food on the
barbeque, a good book in hand and a nice
little companion.
We barbequed on the afterdeck a lot this summer
From a trip to Bile.
And here is our captain, we are waiting for you, get well!
Saturday, December 25, 2010
How bad can it really be?
There's a question which has been asked a countless number of times, in many variations. Someone may ask "I'm looking to buy Boat X, but I don't feel ready for such a big boat without a thruster. How much do I need to budget to get one installed?" Someone else might say "I'm trying to choose between boats X and Y. Boat X is superior in almost every respect, but I really like that Boat Y has two engines, especially with regards to maneuverability. What's your advice?" I know this situation very well, because it appeared to me when I bought Nemi a few years ago. I asked the question in it's purest form: "How bad can it really be to maneuver a large single-shaft boat with no thrusters anywhere?"
As I soon discovered, there are as many ways of answering this question as there are of asking it, and the answers I got varied wildly. The most optimistic (people selling such boats) told me I wouldn't feel a thing, while the most pessimistic (people proud of ther new, huge 30-footer) told me in no uncertain terms that such activities were best left to grizzled old men with a lifetime of experience. In the end I listened to the poorly repressed optimist in my heart, and went for it. It has been an immensely valuable learning experience, maybe even enough so to justify the rather sad story Nemi has turned into.
You probably know most of the clichés by now, especially if you found this through Google. They're slow to react. They punish you severly for small mistakes. You must learn to think ahead. Yada yada. I'll cut all of that crap, and instead concentrate on the stuff I found out after I actually started using Nemi, which is hopefully the same stuff you haven't aready been told.
The first thing I learned is something I might have known on a subconscious level for years, but never thought enough about: When maneuvering at close quarters, it is more important to know what the boat cannot do, than what it can. If you figure that out, you can steer clear of any situation requiring an impossible maneuver to resolve. However, while this may be a simple concept, the details of the matter are rather complex. Most boaters of any experience will know that getting into a corner is a bad thing, but there is more to it than that. Initially I was highly skeptical about the boat's capacity to turn in confined spaces, and left myself a huge margin in every situation.
Having undertaken some maneuverability trials in open waters and learning more techniques for warping her around when there simply wasn't space to turn, I gradually gained the confidence to get into tighter spots. My experience with smaller single shafters was certainly a help, but there is a lot you won't learn if you don't have to. In other words, if it is at all possible to man-handle your craft when you need to, you will tend to allow the potential for such a need to develop. With Nemi weighing in at 35 metric tons, I didn't need telling that I must avoid those situations. Thus, there are a few widely discussed traits of such boats that I knew about on an intellectual level, but for which I had absolutely no feel.
Three of those traits come together to form an importan handling aspect: First, you must consider the direction of pull from your propeller. If it turns clockwise while under way, it will pull the stern to port when in reverse. Second, while the inertia of linear movement may seem disconcerting at first, it can be a great help in making tight turns. If you set the boat moving astern at half a knot, you can add quite a bit of power ahead before the movement reverses itself, and this helps inducing rotation. Third, the rotational inertia of a large boat can be considerable. This means that if you start a turn and let the boat sit dead in the water, it will keep turning for a while before it stops.
With the aid of the above, and considering that Nemi had a clockwise propeller and very little keel, I developed the following technique: Set the rudder 35 degrees to starboard, then alternate between forward and reverse at 30-50% rpm, so that the boat picks up 0.5-1 knot in either direction. Thus it is possible to make a full 360 degree turn inside a ~25m circle (roughly 1.5 times the boat length).
Having learned this, and having maneuvered alongside the dock on a spring a few times, I no longer felt intimidated by her, and this is when the joy of driving such a sluggish beast started sinking in. In Nemi, I can go alongside in a stiff offshore breeze, then peel and eat a banana before she starts moving away from the quay. Swell from passing boats no longer threatens to lift me onto the dock. And perhaps most importantly, as a friend of mine put it: "Wow, I just can't help getting a hard-on from controlling something this big!"
Nemi under way, with me on deck and the wife driving:
As I soon discovered, there are as many ways of answering this question as there are of asking it, and the answers I got varied wildly. The most optimistic (people selling such boats) told me I wouldn't feel a thing, while the most pessimistic (people proud of ther new, huge 30-footer) told me in no uncertain terms that such activities were best left to grizzled old men with a lifetime of experience. In the end I listened to the poorly repressed optimist in my heart, and went for it. It has been an immensely valuable learning experience, maybe even enough so to justify the rather sad story Nemi has turned into.
You probably know most of the clichés by now, especially if you found this through Google. They're slow to react. They punish you severly for small mistakes. You must learn to think ahead. Yada yada. I'll cut all of that crap, and instead concentrate on the stuff I found out after I actually started using Nemi, which is hopefully the same stuff you haven't aready been told.
The first thing I learned is something I might have known on a subconscious level for years, but never thought enough about: When maneuvering at close quarters, it is more important to know what the boat cannot do, than what it can. If you figure that out, you can steer clear of any situation requiring an impossible maneuver to resolve. However, while this may be a simple concept, the details of the matter are rather complex. Most boaters of any experience will know that getting into a corner is a bad thing, but there is more to it than that. Initially I was highly skeptical about the boat's capacity to turn in confined spaces, and left myself a huge margin in every situation.
Having undertaken some maneuverability trials in open waters and learning more techniques for warping her around when there simply wasn't space to turn, I gradually gained the confidence to get into tighter spots. My experience with smaller single shafters was certainly a help, but there is a lot you won't learn if you don't have to. In other words, if it is at all possible to man-handle your craft when you need to, you will tend to allow the potential for such a need to develop. With Nemi weighing in at 35 metric tons, I didn't need telling that I must avoid those situations. Thus, there are a few widely discussed traits of such boats that I knew about on an intellectual level, but for which I had absolutely no feel.
Three of those traits come together to form an importan handling aspect: First, you must consider the direction of pull from your propeller. If it turns clockwise while under way, it will pull the stern to port when in reverse. Second, while the inertia of linear movement may seem disconcerting at first, it can be a great help in making tight turns. If you set the boat moving astern at half a knot, you can add quite a bit of power ahead before the movement reverses itself, and this helps inducing rotation. Third, the rotational inertia of a large boat can be considerable. This means that if you start a turn and let the boat sit dead in the water, it will keep turning for a while before it stops.
With the aid of the above, and considering that Nemi had a clockwise propeller and very little keel, I developed the following technique: Set the rudder 35 degrees to starboard, then alternate between forward and reverse at 30-50% rpm, so that the boat picks up 0.5-1 knot in either direction. Thus it is possible to make a full 360 degree turn inside a ~25m circle (roughly 1.5 times the boat length).
Having learned this, and having maneuvered alongside the dock on a spring a few times, I no longer felt intimidated by her, and this is when the joy of driving such a sluggish beast started sinking in. In Nemi, I can go alongside in a stiff offshore breeze, then peel and eat a banana before she starts moving away from the quay. Swell from passing boats no longer threatens to lift me onto the dock. And perhaps most importantly, as a friend of mine put it: "Wow, I just can't help getting a hard-on from controlling something this big!"
Nemi under way, with me on deck and the wife driving:
Friday, December 24, 2010
Freehanding the propeller with a grinder: Excellent!
Okay, I'll be the first one to admit that the title of this post is misleading, if not outright erronous. Propeller blade geometry is an extremely complex area of expertise, and only a select few have the talent and experience to fully understand all of the aspects. I remember this clearly from my time wrenching Formula 2 boats. There are only a very few people in the country considered to have the necessary skill to carry out good repair, and even fewer who can carry out a meaningful adjustment. The pit area was teeming with stories about some failed adjustment that could never be corrected, carried out by the most skilled technicians in the business, which completely destroyed the properties of a match winning propeller. With that in mind, a layman like myself shouldn't even attempt to repair obvious damage, but leave this to an expert, lest I cause more harm than I remedy. However, this principle depends slightly on how bad the starting point is. If, for example, you are looking at a propeller with one blade broken clean off, chances are that you won't make matters worse by welding it back on, regardless of the accuracy of the operation. Of course, there is no guarantee that the end result will be good, or even acceptable, but it should at least be better than when you started. The screw on the Oscilia was such a case.
After this, we established a safe maximum speed of 4.5 knots, and excitedly awaited the first pull-out so we could have a look at things. I suspected that heavy marine growth would prove to be a partial explanation, but the problem was much, much too bad for that to be all. Indeed, when we pulled her out the growth turned out to be horrendous, even worse than I had anticipated. The whole bottom was covered in ~5" of shells and barnacles, totalling an estimated ton (!). It took a friend of mine well over an hour to simply shovel it off the slipway after we had spent 12 man hours with the high pressure washer to get it off the boat. However, that was not the worst of it. As evidenced by the pictures, the propeller had been severely mangled in a lathe. The Tenfjord CP system had originally been mounted in a large MFV, according to information provided by the seller, and had to be adjusted to fit the Oscilia. As it turned out, the "adjustment" had been carried out by simply turning the complete assembly down to the required size, and installing it on the boat. This procedure resulted in two ugly "corners" being left on each blade, which proved to be perfect starting points for tip vortex cavitation.
The month between the first and the most recent pull-out was partially spent looking up the price of new propeller blades, which turned out to be prohibitively expensive. It also came as no surprise that having the existing blades professionally cut down fell way outside of my budget. Thus I decided to have a go myself, using nothing more advanced than a grinder and my general knowlege of what a propeller should look like. Even though the leading-edge radius should be considerably larger than that of the trailing edge, I chose to apply the same 15 cmd radius to both, as I had no way of knowing what would be correct in either case. I selected a suitable paper disc as a template, held it against the propeller blades and shaded the area to be cut with a permanent marker. I then went to work with the grinder, cutting away as much of the shaded area as practical within the confines of the propeller tunnel. Cutting brass with a grinder is especially nasty work, as it does not produce sparks, but rather warm metal chips which tend to bury themselves in the skin and produce oozing sores afterwards. For this reason I was grateful when the worst of the cutting was done, and I could get to work with a hand file to debur the edges and produce the final finish.
I'm reasonably happy with the looks of the end result. As mentioned, the radiuses cannot possibly be correct for the application, but they are by far preferrable to the pre-existing sharp corners. Also, the propeller tips are now about 1/4" thick, whereas a professionally finished job would have these thinned down to sharp edges. Given the necessary space to work, I would have attempted to fair the leading face into the pushing face, so as to leave the pushing face curvature as close to the factory finish as possible. However, I was afraid of ruining the edge curvature by working with the grinder inside the tunnel, and I had no access to faciliate meaningful material removal with the hand file, so I elected to do this later on the bench, if I cannot locate reasonably priced replacement blades.
I first noticed this while undertaking maneuverability tests prior to signing the contract. I had brought a friend along as a deck hand, and he was lounging on the settee in the stern after we departed the harbor. After gently running the machinery up to temperature, I started adding rpm and pitch for a top speed test. My friend immediately came running up into the wheel house, screaming: "Stop! Stop! Something's come loose around the shaft!" As gently as I could over the ear-splitting din, I started explaining that it sounded like tip cavitation to me, but that it was by far the worst I'd ever heard. I was interrupted in the middle of this by loud crashing sounds from the stern. At this I backed off the pitch, and asked him to take the helm while I went back for a look-see. In the galley-cum-lounge I found numerous objects on the floor, including this laptop, and the objects still left on the counter and table were dancing around from the vibration.
After this, we established a safe maximum speed of 4.5 knots, and excitedly awaited the first pull-out so we could have a look at things. I suspected that heavy marine growth would prove to be a partial explanation, but the problem was much, much too bad for that to be all. Indeed, when we pulled her out the growth turned out to be horrendous, even worse than I had anticipated. The whole bottom was covered in ~5" of shells and barnacles, totalling an estimated ton (!). It took a friend of mine well over an hour to simply shovel it off the slipway after we had spent 12 man hours with the high pressure washer to get it off the boat. However, that was not the worst of it. As evidenced by the pictures, the propeller had been severely mangled in a lathe. The Tenfjord CP system had originally been mounted in a large MFV, according to information provided by the seller, and had to be adjusted to fit the Oscilia. As it turned out, the "adjustment" had been carried out by simply turning the complete assembly down to the required size, and installing it on the boat. This procedure resulted in two ugly "corners" being left on each blade, which proved to be perfect starting points for tip vortex cavitation.
The month between the first and the most recent pull-out was partially spent looking up the price of new propeller blades, which turned out to be prohibitively expensive. It also came as no surprise that having the existing blades professionally cut down fell way outside of my budget. Thus I decided to have a go myself, using nothing more advanced than a grinder and my general knowlege of what a propeller should look like. Even though the leading-edge radius should be considerably larger than that of the trailing edge, I chose to apply the same 15 cmd radius to both, as I had no way of knowing what would be correct in either case. I selected a suitable paper disc as a template, held it against the propeller blades and shaded the area to be cut with a permanent marker. I then went to work with the grinder, cutting away as much of the shaded area as practical within the confines of the propeller tunnel. Cutting brass with a grinder is especially nasty work, as it does not produce sparks, but rather warm metal chips which tend to bury themselves in the skin and produce oozing sores afterwards. For this reason I was grateful when the worst of the cutting was done, and I could get to work with a hand file to debur the edges and produce the final finish.
I'm reasonably happy with the looks of the end result. As mentioned, the radiuses cannot possibly be correct for the application, but they are by far preferrable to the pre-existing sharp corners. Also, the propeller tips are now about 1/4" thick, whereas a professionally finished job would have these thinned down to sharp edges. Given the necessary space to work, I would have attempted to fair the leading face into the pushing face, so as to leave the pushing face curvature as close to the factory finish as possible. However, I was afraid of ruining the edge curvature by working with the grinder inside the tunnel, and I had no access to faciliate meaningful material removal with the hand file, so I elected to do this later on the bench, if I cannot locate reasonably priced replacement blades.After our time on the slipway was up, I cruised out towards our mooring location, excitedly waiting for the engine to reach operating temperature so that I could evaluate the results. I was expecting a significant reduction in propeller noise and vibration, but no significant performance increase. However, once I set the engine to my previous safe cruise setting of 1000 rpm and added four dashes of pitch (on the instrument - I don't know what that equates to in hard numbers), the speed quickly shot up to 6.5 knots, with about the same amount of vibration as earlier. When I decreased rpm by 200 and pitch with one dash, I reached the previous cruising speed of 5.5 knots with nearly no vibration at all. I find this absolutely astounding. I aproached this project with the intent of attaining a small performance increase through minimal effort, knowing that the starting point was so bad that almost anything I did would have a positive effect. The significant performance gains are hugely motivating for me, and I can hardly wait for the 12th of July when I get pulled out again.
There's still plenty to work with, as the vibrations are still worse than any other boat I've tested, though no longer by a factor of two. I will try to apply a larger leading edge radius (maybe 30-40 cm?), and se if I cand find some way of thinning or applying a small radius to the outer edges. Also, I'm increasingly sure that the venturi needs to go. I love the idea of having a competent ice breaker, but at what price? I still haven't made any fuel economy calculations - look forward to an article on fitting a flow meter to the day tank pump - but I suspect that the Oscilia consumes about the same amount per nautical mile as some 100-footers moving at the same speed. I just love the potential for improvement!
Monday, June 28, 2010
Is this guy supposed to be a leading example?!
VG Nett
Video
I have often been asked the question "What do we need the king for?" by people sceptical of the Royal family in a country where they have no meaningful governmental function. I always answer that they are a focal point for the people's sense of unity and nationalism in times of need, and give WW2 as a perfect example of such a case. Also, I add, when somebody is looked up to just because of who they are, they can function as a fantastic vessel for imbuing good attitudes and showing people how to behave properly, just by a leading example. Giving people a good example of their own choosing is often a lot more effective than "motivatonal" campaigns orchestrated by people with scant understanding of PR and little to no understandig of young people's minds.
Of course, this poses the dilemma of what attitudes and practices should be officially sanctioned. Some are obvious choices, such as non-smoking (I'm a sinner!), whereas others, such as monogamy and other religiously motivatded themes, are more open to debate. Here's an easy one for you, though: Safe boating. That ought to be a no-brainer. Here we have a convenient, albeit expensive leading star, in the shape of the crown prince, and he loves to go boating. The very least we could ask of him, then, is that he does everything within his power to set a good example to other boaters. Then, he goes ahead and does this.
For the english speaking readers of this blog (are there any?), here's a short resumé of the above newspaper article. The crown prince goes boating in a high-powered RIB and gets ejected by a wave. At this point, it becomes obvious that he wasn't wearing his kill switch lanyard, as the boat runs in circles for 20 minutes before being brought under control. Then, the bastard gets away from it all without as much as a bruise to show for this exercise in public stupidity.
Luckily, I'm too experienced to be misled by his actions. Given my 100+ hours of driving time in small, fast boats every year, I'm pretty confident that if I don't clip in, I'll be killed for it sooner or later. And as one of my leading examples once put it to me: That's a pretty fucking stupid way to die. Besides, I've spent time in the water thinking I wasn't going to make it, so I don't need anyone to tell me that it's best to make sure the boat stops so you can get back in.
At this point, the RCP has performed pretty much the opposite of what I deem to be one of his most important functions. He has showed young, up-and-coming boaters that you don't need to wear your kill lanyard, because if you have an accident, someone will be there to rescue you. Besides, the royals don't wear it, so why should you? It all makes me wonder how many heavily funded, lightly pondered government motivational campaigns must be fielded to cancel the ill effects caused by our dear Royal Crown Prince on Monday. Haakon, your actions have disappointed me greatly. I don't think your public apology counts for much. After all, that's what you're expected to do when you misbehave, right? Just apologize, and everything is all right. At least, that's what all the young people taking your example are going to think. I hope you read this, and I hope you cringe. But then, who am I to make you cringe? I'm just a nobody, and you're our great leading star. Go shine!
Video
I have often been asked the question "What do we need the king for?" by people sceptical of the Royal family in a country where they have no meaningful governmental function. I always answer that they are a focal point for the people's sense of unity and nationalism in times of need, and give WW2 as a perfect example of such a case. Also, I add, when somebody is looked up to just because of who they are, they can function as a fantastic vessel for imbuing good attitudes and showing people how to behave properly, just by a leading example. Giving people a good example of their own choosing is often a lot more effective than "motivatonal" campaigns orchestrated by people with scant understanding of PR and little to no understandig of young people's minds.
Of course, this poses the dilemma of what attitudes and practices should be officially sanctioned. Some are obvious choices, such as non-smoking (I'm a sinner!), whereas others, such as monogamy and other religiously motivatded themes, are more open to debate. Here's an easy one for you, though: Safe boating. That ought to be a no-brainer. Here we have a convenient, albeit expensive leading star, in the shape of the crown prince, and he loves to go boating. The very least we could ask of him, then, is that he does everything within his power to set a good example to other boaters. Then, he goes ahead and does this.
For the english speaking readers of this blog (are there any?), here's a short resumé of the above newspaper article. The crown prince goes boating in a high-powered RIB and gets ejected by a wave. At this point, it becomes obvious that he wasn't wearing his kill switch lanyard, as the boat runs in circles for 20 minutes before being brought under control. Then, the bastard gets away from it all without as much as a bruise to show for this exercise in public stupidity.
Luckily, I'm too experienced to be misled by his actions. Given my 100+ hours of driving time in small, fast boats every year, I'm pretty confident that if I don't clip in, I'll be killed for it sooner or later. And as one of my leading examples once put it to me: That's a pretty fucking stupid way to die. Besides, I've spent time in the water thinking I wasn't going to make it, so I don't need anyone to tell me that it's best to make sure the boat stops so you can get back in.
At this point, the RCP has performed pretty much the opposite of what I deem to be one of his most important functions. He has showed young, up-and-coming boaters that you don't need to wear your kill lanyard, because if you have an accident, someone will be there to rescue you. Besides, the royals don't wear it, so why should you? It all makes me wonder how many heavily funded, lightly pondered government motivational campaigns must be fielded to cancel the ill effects caused by our dear Royal Crown Prince on Monday. Haakon, your actions have disappointed me greatly. I don't think your public apology counts for much. After all, that's what you're expected to do when you misbehave, right? Just apologize, and everything is all right. At least, that's what all the young people taking your example are going to think. I hope you read this, and I hope you cringe. But then, who am I to make you cringe? I'm just a nobody, and you're our great leading star. Go shine!
Nimo is gone!
We went into Moss on Friday to watch the new A-team movie. As usual, we let Nimo jump on shore and run around. So far, this hasn't been a problem, as he's always stayed close to the boat. This time, however, he was gone when we returned. We stayed until Sunday, hoping he would come back, but to no avail.
We are both really heartbroken over this. He was very, very dear to us, and life on the Oscilia seems empty without him. We've spent countless hours calling for him, in ever larger circles from the point where he disappeared, and we've put up over thirty posters with his picture, but so far nobody has called. If any of our readers sees him I truly hope they'll leave a comment to this post.
~Henning
We are both really heartbroken over this. He was very, very dear to us, and life on the Oscilia seems empty without him. We've spent countless hours calling for him, in ever larger circles from the point where he disappeared, and we've put up over thirty posters with his picture, but so far nobody has called. If any of our readers sees him I truly hope they'll leave a comment to this post.
~Henning
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Pulled out for repairs
Any of you reading this may have noticed that updates have been thin on the ground lately. I have just ended a construction job that required travelling up north and living on-site, and after completing a 7-19 shift I've simply been too exhausted to produce any meaningful writings. Now that I'm home I'm having to deal with the Oscilia being pulled out for extensive repairs of galvanic corrosion damage. Although this occupies all of my time at the moment, I'll be feeding you lots of updates about the goings on when things quieten down a bit.
I just finished freehanding the propeller blades into a more meaningful shape, and I'll be adding an article on this shortly.
I just finished freehanding the propeller blades into a more meaningful shape, and I'll be adding an article on this shortly.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Lessons in safe boat handling
I will never forget the second time I helmed a motor boat larger than twenty-odd feet. The Boss asked me to park a Princess V48 in the crane for a lift-out. The boat being equipped with twin shafts as well as both bow- and stern thrusters, I didn't worry much about the five inches of clearance to the lifting hooks, and approached it in a state of serene calm. This was soon to change.
I fired up the twin Volvos and cast off the mooring lines with the remote rumble throbbing underfoot. The stern line was last to go, and I pushed with my full weight against the pontoon from the swim platform. Slowly, the considerable weight of the boat set into motion, and I strolled up to the helm. There was no detectable trace of current, not a breath of wind to disturb the stern's steady progress away from the pontoon, and everything seemed just right until I pressed the bow thruster control. Nothing at all happened.
Concerned, I gave the stern thruster control a tentative prod to see if I could get back to the pontoon and resolve the issue safely. No such luck. In an instant, the prospect ahead changed dramatically. How would I be able to steer straight between those heavy, sharp, unforgiving lifting hooks and stop the boat without yawing? I couldn't tell as I started the procedure, and the ensuing drama was... well, interesting. Suffice it to say, I caused a massive productivity hit for the neighboring heavy industry as all the workers were standing by the fence, watching The Boss having a near heart attack. Somehow, the Princess came away from it all unscathed, mostly due to my luck.
From this I gleaned a valuable lesson, which came to be my First Golden Rule of safe boat handling: When taking control of a boat you don't know intimately, ALWAYS test all mission critical systems before casting off.
Fast forward three years, and this experience has saved me many times over as I'm taking delivery of my current home, a Steel Lady 43. The day has been one long, mad rush to get all the paperwork in order, sort out all the little niggles, and make her ready for her first voyage in over three years after only a short maneuverability test two days previously. It is darkening, the tidal current is starting to pick up, and in all the stress and commotion my golden rule fades to the glimmering figment of a memory and flutters away in the offshore breeze.
My wife is in the dinghy, motoring slowly out of the harbor as I cast off the mooring lines. Finally, the stress of the day is loosening its grip, easing with the promise of being under way. Getting away from the dock is the easiest maneuver in the book: Stick the transmission in gear, wait for the wind to carry the bow out to a suitable angle, add a couple of inches of propeller pitch, and proceed forward, out the harbor entrance.
Everything goes according to plan until I hit the button to add forward pitch. The expected rumble of tip vortices transmitting themselves through the steel plating of the hull, is completely absent. There is also a conspicuous lack of forward motion. Thinking I must have forgotten one of the myriad of switches, my eyes scan the dashboard for clues. PTO hydraulics look good. The pitch indicator is moving. Gear oil pressure is 5 bar... that's clutch pressure only. My first realization is that the small amount of oil I've spotted in the exhaust wasn't from one of the turbos, after all. My second realization is that I'm in deep trouble. Again, I have one of those perspective changing moments. I am no longer the master of a motorboat cruising through a spacious harbor basin, but the responsible passenger of 22 tons of jagged steel, drifting at an alarming rate towards rows of gleaming, fragile hullsides.
I run outside and look out to sea. My wife has just powered over the dinghy's bow wave, and is moving away at a rate of about twenty knots. Completely forgetting about the gargantuan air horn mounted on the coachroof, I whistle through my teeth, so loud it hurts my own ears. Her head turns a fraction. I whistle again, even louder, and she turns around in her seat to see me jumping up and down, arms flailing. She powers through a 180 degree turn, comes flying through the harbor entrance and drops down with a precision splash right beside me. She then gently nudges the bow of the dinghy up to my hull side, and applies 25 Tohatsu horsepower to push me back to the dock. Her positioning is so perfect that I don't have to move the boat at all in order to slip the springs over the bollards.
This time around I was saved not by my own luck, but by my wife handling the situation so magnificently that you would think she'd spent her whole life as a tug captain (for the record, she is a motorcycle mechanic, and hardly knew what a boat was until she met me). Maybe my pride at this will assist in maintaining my First Golden Rule, so I may never have to learn this again.
I fired up the twin Volvos and cast off the mooring lines with the remote rumble throbbing underfoot. The stern line was last to go, and I pushed with my full weight against the pontoon from the swim platform. Slowly, the considerable weight of the boat set into motion, and I strolled up to the helm. There was no detectable trace of current, not a breath of wind to disturb the stern's steady progress away from the pontoon, and everything seemed just right until I pressed the bow thruster control. Nothing at all happened.Concerned, I gave the stern thruster control a tentative prod to see if I could get back to the pontoon and resolve the issue safely. No such luck. In an instant, the prospect ahead changed dramatically. How would I be able to steer straight between those heavy, sharp, unforgiving lifting hooks and stop the boat without yawing? I couldn't tell as I started the procedure, and the ensuing drama was... well, interesting. Suffice it to say, I caused a massive productivity hit for the neighboring heavy industry as all the workers were standing by the fence, watching The Boss having a near heart attack. Somehow, the Princess came away from it all unscathed, mostly due to my luck.
From this I gleaned a valuable lesson, which came to be my First Golden Rule of safe boat handling: When taking control of a boat you don't know intimately, ALWAYS test all mission critical systems before casting off.
Fast forward three years, and this experience has saved me many times over as I'm taking delivery of my current home, a Steel Lady 43. The day has been one long, mad rush to get all the paperwork in order, sort out all the little niggles, and make her ready for her first voyage in over three years after only a short maneuverability test two days previously. It is darkening, the tidal current is starting to pick up, and in all the stress and commotion my golden rule fades to the glimmering figment of a memory and flutters away in the offshore breeze.My wife is in the dinghy, motoring slowly out of the harbor as I cast off the mooring lines. Finally, the stress of the day is loosening its grip, easing with the promise of being under way. Getting away from the dock is the easiest maneuver in the book: Stick the transmission in gear, wait for the wind to carry the bow out to a suitable angle, add a couple of inches of propeller pitch, and proceed forward, out the harbor entrance.
Everything goes according to plan until I hit the button to add forward pitch. The expected rumble of tip vortices transmitting themselves through the steel plating of the hull, is completely absent. There is also a conspicuous lack of forward motion. Thinking I must have forgotten one of the myriad of switches, my eyes scan the dashboard for clues. PTO hydraulics look good. The pitch indicator is moving. Gear oil pressure is 5 bar... that's clutch pressure only. My first realization is that the small amount of oil I've spotted in the exhaust wasn't from one of the turbos, after all. My second realization is that I'm in deep trouble. Again, I have one of those perspective changing moments. I am no longer the master of a motorboat cruising through a spacious harbor basin, but the responsible passenger of 22 tons of jagged steel, drifting at an alarming rate towards rows of gleaming, fragile hullsides.
I run outside and look out to sea. My wife has just powered over the dinghy's bow wave, and is moving away at a rate of about twenty knots. Completely forgetting about the gargantuan air horn mounted on the coachroof, I whistle through my teeth, so loud it hurts my own ears. Her head turns a fraction. I whistle again, even louder, and she turns around in her seat to see me jumping up and down, arms flailing. She powers through a 180 degree turn, comes flying through the harbor entrance and drops down with a precision splash right beside me. She then gently nudges the bow of the dinghy up to my hull side, and applies 25 Tohatsu horsepower to push me back to the dock. Her positioning is so perfect that I don't have to move the boat at all in order to slip the springs over the bollards.
This time around I was saved not by my own luck, but by my wife handling the situation so magnificently that you would think she'd spent her whole life as a tug captain (for the record, she is a motorcycle mechanic, and hardly knew what a boat was until she met me). Maybe my pride at this will assist in maintaining my First Golden Rule, so I may never have to learn this again.
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