Sails for the Pathfinder
It seems as though it’s been a long wait while since I sent the measurements off to the sailmaker and then almost immediately drove to Norfolk for our summer break. Given that we were near Blakeney and my sails were being made a few miles down the road near Norwich I thought that there was a chance of coming home with them, as it happens they weren’t even started at that point but since then they’ve been paid for and delivered by courier. Of course, since then, it’s either been raining here or windy or raining and windy so the sails have sat in their neat packaging until this week when I was finally able to heave the boat forward, step the masts and have a first look at the sails. Naturally it isn’t the case that the sails went straight on and in fact what I typically thought would be 2 or 3 hours work has turned into 3 long days….so far.
Mainsail up for the first time……sort of !
Blog time – the painful part.
So, sorry about this but yes, today I seemed to be doing everything the wrong way around and back to front so I figure that I may as well extend that to include next week’s blog post as well. Obviously we have had a much needed break and getaway from home and what’s more we had wall to wall sunshine for the whole trip and I went away knowing that I had pushed the Pathfinder project along as far as I could and was looking forward to throwing on the posh new sails as soon as we got home. While away I even took the time to think about what I might actually do with the boat beyond my immediate plans which are still mainly several days of sea trials and then a proving passage of some kind : right now I’m leaning towards de-camping to Falmouth, doing sea trials there and then having a longer passage home – maybe done as easy day sails rather than a continuous delivery style sprint.
Because reasons !…….It might not be obvious but iv’e had to do a fair amount of thinking and planning about what comes next and most of that is based around wanting to do an ‘expedition’ style trip rather than just sailing locally . I could for instance set up the car/trailer/boat combo just for the short trip down to Plymouth and launch/recover there when it comes to sea trials. That’s all well and good but I want to finish that whole process with a longer passage with an easier recovery and short journey back to base to fix whatever problems arise. One of the problems it doesn’t really create is the potential road problems of doing a longer road trip towards a launching point nearer my intended expedition style cruise : for those that don’t know I live near the south west coast but for my first longer expedition style passages i’m thinking of a circuit of the Thames and east coast rivers…..mainly because iv’e not sailed on that coast apart from my delivery style voyage with the Deben gaffer (Inanda). Whichever way around I start that trip really means a long drive to get east of London unless I started with an ‘offshore’ voyage from somewhere on the central south coast – I could just about day sail my around to the Thames by launching anywhere from Poole eastwards and several of my potential launch spots would allow us to launch and get the trailer home on the same day…..any further I have to think about stowing the trailer in a boatyard somewhere. However, this is almost at the level of quite minor inconsequential detail…...first world problems if you will : what I really wanted to use this blog post for was to talk about slightly more serious problems so here goes.
Goodbye to all that.
In Norfolk I spent longer than is usual for me just resting and reading – more on that later, but what I did achieve is a lot of thinking about the obvious changes in my own health and life. I think I have to draw a line under any ideas that I may still have about exercise – at least in the ways that I have done in the past : long distance hiking and long walks around the lanes and trails here. I thought it would be a lot easier in Norfolk with it being basically flat but even shorter walks I found both tiring and difficult with my dodgy knees : my operated-on knee is, I think. coming to the end of it’s life and I get the impression that the other side is failing too. I could maybe put myself forward for a surgical revision on the already operated on side but that would mean having a total knee replacement that side and i’m less sure about going for surgery knowing that iv’e already had several events of minor strokes. That’s the same route my, now late, father’s health deteriorated added to which it was found that my late mother had had multiple small stroke events over many years and only discovered when MRI scanning became available where they lived. The result of a lot of thinking is that I have to say a sad goodbye to the hiker (and obviously climber) that I once was. When we talked about it we both agreed that we were glad that we did the tough stuff when we were younger and fitter : my only real regret is that we never got to hike around the Utah canyonlands after that planned and trained for trip was stymied by the travel lockdowns 2 years ago.
Technical details.
I came back from our break a bit refreshed and looking forward to offering the Pathfinder it’s new gladrags (sails) and silly me but I thought that the work would only take a few hours as everything, I thought, was in place already. Yes, silly me indeed, it’s now week 2 of a 3 hour job and the work has been trolling me mercilessly : in the first few days it seemed to take me at least five failures to complete any small task within the overall job, added to which I have had to take several major steps backwards to correct new mistakes. My most recent mistake was in realizing that I had stepped the mainmast with too much rake and that was starting to affect everything else : to alter it though involved one whole day spent lying on my side under the cuddy with a screaming power multitool trying to cut the mast step out so that I could reset it’s position slightly further aft.
That small mistake, once I had rebuilt the mast step and attempted to step the mast again, was made extremely difficult with the mast getting stuck repeatedly when we tried to lift it out again : the problem being that I cut the kingplank bore at exactly the right angle for the raked mast and now of course it jams. Yesterday, as I write, I even lost half of the days work when I managed somehow to drop my new sheerlegs and couldn’t then reposition them on my own. Today I’m both tired and listless having had only a poor night’s sleep ; one of the big causes of which is that I don’t seem to come equipped with a mental off switch and thus go to bed with a busy, fizzy, head. That’s the end result of a week of problem solving the detail work.
Postscipt.
In the past, in this blog, iv’e mentioned the work of psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson and medical doctor Peter Attia – both, I find seem to be of current relevance to me. I have long known that i’m an almost asocial introvert and have high trait withdrawl, our man Peterson says that introverts find great solace in the outdoors and that’s always been true in my case : now and with whatever changes have happened in my own life I wonder if I have lost some of that ability to escape into the outdoors. Recently I was listening to a podcast that Dr Peterson did with his wife (Tammy) and his daughter (Micheala). Part of that discussion, led by Micheala if I remember it correctly, was about psychological traits that, otherwise fixed and stable, can change in some circumstances.
Now, with even a minor stroke, it’s obvious to me that i’m not the same person as I was when I did my own online traits test (Big 5 model) and the obvious mental change is that I have become more volatile and emotionally labile. Most of the time I can allow for it but it doesn’t take much to have me flare up unreasonably – just on the fun side I had a mock Tourette’s style swear at the boat when something went wrong or I did something wrong for the N’th time. So that’s one part of this and even my partner says that i’m struggling a bit cognitively – posts like this now take for ever because I keep hitting the wrong key and driving seems to make me very stressed – I was exhausted and mentally fizzy after our long drive cross country.
The other aspect that I want to mention is something that iv’e taken from Dr Peter Attia’s work and it concerns his thoughts around what he calls our Terminal Decade – the last ten years of our lives during which, with modern medicine, we are slowly declining. One of his ideas is that if we want to have an active terminal decade then we need to alter our physical and cognitive training at an earlier age. I happen to think that I have slipped into that terminal decade – at least of my active life as I am quite suddenly a lot weaker globally, have poor balance and poor gait but also I note that this week’s problem solving has been almost more than I can deal with.
Today, i’m having the day completely away from the boat and it’s problems, tomorrow I have to go and buy a few bits and pieces to push the current jobs one stage forward but I also note that my expectation of detail completion, ready for tow, launch and sea trials, are delayed by another fortnight at least.
That’s all for today……I had thought to use some of my past hiking photo’s to enhance this post but I seem to have a new blog/website problem in that I can’t get my website program to load any photographs other than the first page so even right now iv’e had to go and find an old one to reload and download.
Hiking out to the Coromandel peninsular (NZ) I think….maybe 20 years past.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 