Longtime Sailors Explore Life Aboard a Nordhavn 43 Trawler
We are tied up to to the guest dock at the Causeway Marina in Victoria Harbour with a front-row seat of all the bustle and glamour that waterfront Victoria provides. Continue reading “Canadian Gulf Islands – A Magic Kind of Medicine”
Our first week in the islands was a blur. It usually takes about three days for us to lose our landward ways and find our sea legs, but our entry seemed easier this time. The pace of life on a trawler forces you to slow down, let the stress fall away – very much like our years under sail, but with so much comfort! Continue reading “Wind in our Hair, Water in our Shoes”
I’m writing this in the red glow of the wheelhouse courtesy lights on this calm night at Spencer Spit on the northwest side of Lopez Island. Lisa and Connor have retired to their respective staterooms, bushed from a long day of sea air. I’m tired, but I want to capture some of this experience while it’s fresh in my mind. Continue reading “Spencer Spit”
Our voyage has begun! We cast off the dock lines in the wee hours of Saturday morning to catch the ebb tide and are now comfortably anchored in Hunter Bay on the Southeast part of Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands. Continue reading “A Passage of Firsts”
I’m writing this tonight from the settee of Indiscretion’s wheelhouse — one hell of a place to put down words. It’s just past twilight now, and I’ve turned on the red courtesy lights that provide just enough glow to see my surroundings, but not enough to spoil vision while voyaging at night. Ahead of me lie the helm chair, the ship’s wheel and the wrap-around pilothouse windows that look out over the bow and Quartermaster Marina. Continue reading “A Wheelhouse at Night”
When we purchased Indiscretion late last summer, we knew we needed help in getting to know our new vessel, the systems on board, and in particular, maneuvering her 60,000 pounds around docks and other boats. Coming from a smaller and lighter sailboat, operating this trawler was a whole new experience for us. Continue reading “Backing to Port”
After two decades of sailing, we have crossed over to the dark side.
A few weeks ago we bought a powerboat, a Nordhavn 43 trawler, that we’ve named Indiscretion. She isn’t a typical go-fast stinkpot kind of powerboat. Her cruising speed of 7 knots isn’t far off from sailing. We won’t win any races. But she’s a stout little ship, with the displacement and hull design to withstand open ocean conditions, and an engine and fuel supply to take us from Seattle to Hawaii on a single tank of diesel. A sistership circumnavigated the world a few years ago. We don’t expect to cross oceans, but we do have plans to go places that require blue water passages, up to Alaska or down to Mexico, and going there in a boat that can handle just about anything provides real peace of mind.
I knew letting go of sailing would be tough. For a long time, my happy place was at the helm of a boat under sail. No matter what might be stressing me out at work or at home, it fell away as my hand grasped the tiller, the engine noise died away to a blissful quiet, the sails filled and the boat put her shoulder down into the waves and wind. There’s so much to do to sail well, it took my whole attention, leaving little room to fret about anything else. And the connection to the wind and waves and water was magical, particularly at night with with the feel of wind on your cheek for sail trim and the amazing glow of phosphorous lighting your wake.
Yet as the years piled on, I found that my aging body wasn’t quite as lithe and agile as it once was to cope with the physicality of sailing. Low back pain turned into something worse a few years ago and it literally pained me to go sailing, though my desire for voyaging remained strong as ever.
So we turned to a logical alternative for old sailors: the trawler yacht. It turns out trawlers and sailboats have some things in common. First, as mentioned, they take a leisurely pace in getting places, relishing the journey more than the destination. Second, they are both fuel efficient, at least for boats. A trawler nearly rivals a sailboat for fuel efficiency while motoring, and is laughably better than those planing motor yachts. Finally, blue water models are quite seaworthy with many, many ocean crossings under their belts. These similarities brought us comfort as we climbed aboard trawler after trawler over months of boat shopping. We knew we found our boat when we stepped aboard a Nordhavn. Overbuilt, incredible build quality, redundant systems, a track record of open ocean journeys and a terrific support network of existing Nordhavn owners. Our 43′ version is on the small side for Nordhavn, but perfect for our needs. After a little back and forth, a sea trial and survey, we proudly became the owners of this beautiful vessel.
For our maiden voyage, we “steamed” Indiscretion from Elliott Bay in Seattle to our home port here on Vashon Island, getting our first opportunity to experience what trawler life is like. Conditions were superb, temperatures in the eighties and calm seas, hardly a challenge for this go-anywhere vessel. The coastline streamed by faster than when sailing. I’ll admit that making a consistent 7 knots in the direction you actually wanted to go is damn refreshing after years and years of zig-zagging under sail. The boat is 60 thousand pounds with a full displacement keel which makes the ride steady and sure. Hydraulic stabilizer fins work like ducks feet below the water serving to smooth out the side to side roll from passing boat wakes. The low-RPM diesel engine buried deep in the bowels of the ship’s engine room serves up more of a low rumble than the high-pitched roar we suffered on our sailboats.
There have been a few times when I’ve been out in the rain and wind in the cockpit of a sailboat and cursed aloud at these big trawlers as they passed, the captain visible behind the steamed windows in the wheelhouse, perhaps sipping a hot cup of coffee from his high warm perch, maybe taking pity on my miserable wet self. Now that I have held that same perch myself, I marvel at the comfort and ease of passage-making these big trawlers afford. Had I known then what I know now, I would have cursed all the louder out there in my damp misery.
It’s not all downwind sailing though. This boat houses the equivalent of a small municipality’s worth of systems to decipher, operate and maintain. There are three different diesel engines, each with its own peculiarities and needs, a watermaker which can magically turn seawater to pure drinking water if you know how to keep it clean and happy, heating and cooling systems, hydraulics, pumps of all sorts and sizes, electronics spanning two different helm stations … the manuals alone for all these systems take up a good size shelf. In our first weeks of ownership, we have had these manuals out on the pilothouse table, scratching our heads over all the new terminology (what exactly is a galvanic isolator fault?) and trying to inch our way up a very steep ramp of learning. We have already enjoyed the generosity of our fellow Nordhavn owners who actively participate in an online forum to help out rank novices like us. So far, every question or problem we’ve encountered has been addressed before by someone in this treasure trove of online help. I’ve been thinking I needed a new challenge in my life and I think I may have found it with the upkeep of this sophisticated vessel.
We keep the boat at Quartermaster Marina on Vashon. It’s a low-key friendly marina without pretensions. I find myself down on the boat a lot these days, poring over system manuals, contorting my body into strange positions within electrical cabinets or storage lockers, and sometimes just relaxing in the wheelhouse, listening to music or a Mariners game, enjoying the beautiful nautical space. During my time on the boat, many longtime marina friends have stopped by for a tour and a beer. The novelty of a new boat at the marina has a magnetic appeal and I’ve already met a lot more of my fellow boaters here at the marina simply by being aboard and welcoming a tour of the boat and a cold drink. As you should know, boaters are some of the best people on earth and our marina has more than its fair share of these kind souls.
While relaxing and socializing at the dock is fun, it’s the voyaging we truly love. So far, we’ve only taken short shakedown trips around Puget Sound: Blake Island, Elliott Bay, Penrose Point, all within a half day’s motoring. These have been useful trips as we learn the boat and all its intricacies. Last night we anchored off the port of Silverdale in Dyes Inlet for a couple of days of gunkholing. We’ll take more weekend trips like these through the fall and winter as we gain confidence. We’re talking about spending Christmas in Victoria aboard the boat, an absurd idea aboard our sailboat, but warm and inviting on a trawler. Then, next summer we’ll return to the San Juan and Gulf Islands to see what’s changed in our old sailing stomping grounds, with a bucket-list trip up the inside passage to Alaska the following year, and beyond that? We’d love to take this boat down the coast for a winter in Mexico. I know this boat could handle it. We’ll have to see about the captain and crew.
So that’s it, then. We’ve shed our sailing skins and are slowing finding our way in this grand trawler. This morning as I sip my first cup of coffee and look out over the quiet bay with the boat’s mirror image captured in the still water from my perch on the flybridge, it’s hard not to be moved by the amazing vista an anchored boat provides. Sailors, kayakers, fisherman, stinkpotters, 150-foot mega yachters, and us trawler types all share that same passion for water. Perhaps the salt content of our blood is just slightly higher than normal, pulling us back to the ocean of our long ago birth. I count myself a lucky member of that large seafaring tribe.
When I was starting out in public accounting, nearly thirty years ago, I got the chance to work for a new partner who had just joined our firm. His name was Joe Sambataro, an Italian-American from New Jersey, full of blunt honesty and character, and we hit it off right away. He became an important mentor and eventually recruited me to join a small staffing firm in Tacoma as a financial analyst when he joined as CFO. He would later retire, then come back as CEO. Joe is now the Chairman of the Board of this multi-billion publicly traded staffing firm.
Back when I first began working for Joe, he shared three wishes for me: Marriage, Mortgage, and a Boat. In that order. He figured that an employee with a spouse and a mortgage would stick around longer than a single guy with no ties to anything. The boat, he said, was just for fun. Joe liked boating and especially fishing off a boat.
I took Joe’s advice and in short order got married to my beautiful wife Lisa, and signed a mortgage on our Vashon Island home. I soon began looking for a sailboat.
In 1999 we bought our first boat, Wildfire. She was an Ericson 35 racing sloop that I dreamed of sailing around the world, but she was too much boat for a beginner. We had some crazy adventures, and learned a lot, but we soon downsized to an 18′ gaff-rigged Marshall catboat that was much more manageable by a novice sailor, then traded up for a larger 23′ model.
After a few more years as our family and boating skills grew, we traded up for a 32′ Catalina sloop, a cruising sailboat we named Parlez that we took on month-long trips up to the San Juans and Gulf Islands. We made a lot of memories as a family aboard that boat: crab feasts in the cockpit, game nights around the saloon table, hard-driving sails in pounding waves and rain, and windless days where we barely ghosted along, the boat mirrored perfectly in the calm water all around, the sails gently flapping.
After six or seven years of actively sailing and cruising aboard Parlez, I began to think of myself as a real sailor.
As the kids reached their teens, the appeal of long summer trips in the islands lost some appeal; they preferred instead to stay closer to home, their friends and a high-speed internet connection. I found myself spending more time maintaining the boat than sailing, and decided it was time to sell her.
That period of boatlessness lasted about two months. I bought a beautiful 33′ daysailor called Red Head that was perfect for summer daysails around Vashon, either alone or with a crowd in her glorious 16′ cockpit.
I’ve never felt more alive than at the helm of Red Head sailing into a fresh breeze, tiller in hand, feet braced against the opposite side of the cockpit as the boat heeled in gusts, the water racing by, the mast and rig groaning in protest, a grin on my face as I took in the shape of the sails, the wind anxious to fling my upturned cap into the sea; and something else too: a healthy sense of fear as I pushed myself and the boat maybe a little too far, Adrenalin surging as I caromed through the bay, tack to tack. At those moments I became part of the boat, one hand connected to the tiller and rudder, as if by electric current, my free hand ready to trim the main or the jib, a living thing cavorting through the water, exuberant.
These moments of sailing bliss mostly outweighed the drudgery that goes along with a sailing vessel. The long periods of motoring when the wind has died or is blowing from an inconvenient direction, the cramped quarters below decks, and the exposure to the wind and elements in an open cockpit on a long voyage at just a bit faster than a brisk walking speed.
Over the past couple of years, substantial doubt has plagued me about my future as a sailor. Beautiful sunny days would present themselves only to conclude there was too much wind, or not enough wind, or my back was acting up and I didn’t feel up to the exertion of hoisting or trimming sails. Or worse, I would wish for calm days without so much wind to bother with, enjoying the sense of tranquility of Quartermaster Harbor on a still afternoon. These are not the thoughts of a real sailor.
My desire for adventure afloat hasn’t waned. As we approach that empty nest waypoint in our lives, I dream of voyages up the inside passage to Alaska, a vast section of earth mostly uninhabited and pristine. Or braving open ocean to explore the Pacific coast of Mexico to escape the rains and darkness that pervades the Northwest in winter. I’d relearn my Spanish from high school, and attempt to slow the following seas of time slipping by.
Even before we began a family, Lisa and I dreamed of such voyages. Sometimes the destinations were landlocked – a ranch in Montana or a flat in Madrid – but they always involved a departure from ordinary life, selling up, traveling light, vagabond shoes. Of course, a sailboat would be a logical choice for such an adventure, needing only the power of the wind to push us along, free and easy.
About four months ago on a beautiful February day, Lisa and I were out for a walk along one of Vashon’s country roads. We passed a section of road with a terrific view of Puget Sound, the water blue and ruffled with an afternoon wind on our first perfect day of the year.
“Why don’t you go for a sail this afternoon?” She asked. “There’s wind and the time on the water would do you good.”
It hadn’t even dawned on me that I might sail, and as I considered the water and wind waves, I shook my head. “No, I’m not really up for it today.”
And as I said these words, I realized with certainty that I was no longer a sailor. And for Lisa too, it seemed. We were both ready to put that chapter of our life astern, though neither of us were prepared to move off the water to become normal land people. As we continued our walk, the seeds of a new boating life began to germinate.
“What exactly is a trawler?” She asked.
To be continued…