Dawn Treader has been on land for 20 months, and we’re finally cooking with gas. We lit our new propane stove for the first time last week, and were both impressed and slightly intimidated with the heat and power of the burners. The new propane stove is faster and quieter than our kerosene primus stove, and this improvement happened at the perfect moment.
Let’s say that channel fever, a restlessness many sailors experience towards the end of a journey, begins when a passage is approximately 80% to 90% complete. And let’s assume that this refit is an ongoing journey, a stationary voyage, that began with Dawn Treader’s haul out and will end with her splash. Now, with somewhere between a couple and a few months left, we are restless with channel fever.
I feel it, and cooking faster seems to help tamp down my precipitous emotions. Furthermore, cooking with gas represents the act of nearly completing the galley rebuild, which feels good. Almost all of our projects, and the refit at large, are nearly complete. Although this state has infected us with channel fever, being nearly complete is still better than our prior state: indefinitely slogging onward.
We have been in over our heads for 20 months, but we’ve been fine with that. We know how to tread water. This refit demands constant energy and effort, and we’ve delivered both. Our dream, our memory, of a simple life on the water keeps us motivated. The biggest weight, however, and the one thing that threatens to drown us, is time. Time frustrates us because we have been unable to accurately estimate how long things will take. A sailor here recently told us this is Hofstader’s law (named after Douglas Hofstader). The law states that a task will always take longer than you expect, even when Hofstadter’s law is taken into account. We see this happening all around us. It seems impossible for most sailors to predict the exact length of their complicated projects.
Time becomes an important player when you are paying rent, when you’re in a boat out of the water, and when you’re managing expectations. Time becomes a nuisance. Time facilitates stress. Before this refit, we had benched Time. It sat on the sidelines of our lives while other things played for the win, things like beauty, curiosity, wonder, and simplicity.
Keeping up this blog has always been difficult. When we’re away from civilization or land, it is not easy to stay in touch. I thought that being present in both, for so long, would make things easier. But, we still haven’t found our land legs, and I’m not sure we will. Awkwardness and difficulty adapting to a busy, noisy life on land have gotten in the way of blogging. These refit months have also been packed with design, labor, material procurement, and research, and this has limited our bandwidth for creating complete written sentences.
Channel fever, however, has inspired impatience, and it seems wise to use this restless energy to blog, to connect and to share. Eventually, we’d like to show you some before and after pictures of our projects (whenever they are finished), and take you through our refit bit by bit. The transformation of our boat is almost complete. She’s not the tired, weathered old girl that sailed here. She’s almost ready for the next adventure.
I look forward to writing about sailing and traveling again. But for now, thank you for sharing my break from boat work, to read something of what it’s like in the boatyard, aboard Dawn Treader, where we’re happy to be cooking with gas.
sailing dawn treader 