Then and now, now and then

Mrs. Alchemy can get jodgy about the tying off. So can we all.

DAY 7: Kingston, Ontario

We're in Kingston to see a friend and, oddly enough, to score some needed solar panel accessories. Note the end of the finger dock. Sweet. We like this compact club, as well.

Prinyer's Cove. Worth the drive to Adolphus Reach

We spent the evening of a long day's motor (the wind was strong from dead aft and we had some tricksy channels to navigate) in a quiet cove at anchor. We haven't anchored out much yet with this 30 kilo SPADE and 60 metres of chain, but we didn't budge all night, and the SPADE cut through dense weeds (which took 40 minutes to clear off) like a champ. The Thousand Islands will offer more opportunities, no doubt.

The anchoring went so well, we brought some of the bottom with us.

We had come from Trenton, where we spent three days (one free) at the Trent Port Marina, which is staffed well, but not exactly busy this pandemic season. But it's a good year for algae and muskrats.

Muskrat dinner is a little off-putting, really

We met the crews of "Other Woman" and "Captain's Daughter" at Trenton, and expect to see more familiar faces before the locks from our old club. It's that kind of place.

Backing out with Cabin Boy ready to fend. Photo (c) Shannon Greer

Prior to that was Cobourg, our traditional first stop, as it's a convenient 10-12 hour sail from Toronto. We left blindingly early in order to arrive while the COVID-proofed staff. The sight of the decorative ship's anchor reminded me of our boating history with this town, which has become a great deal more genteel over that time..

Lucas at age 4 (2005) in Cobourg Marina

Same lad in 2020...this is what happens if you feed them.

Today is a poring over charts day, as well as a provisioning day, as tomorrow we head down the St. Lawrence past the Thousand Islands, which shall be an interesting exercise in buoy-spotting. After that, the locks and the big letdown.

The matter of gratitude

Signalling our departure.

DAY 2: Cobourg Marina, Lake Ontario

Last few days in the home port and, of course, it's stinking hot here and has been for weeks and there's still a lot of jobs to do. But the forecast looks promising for Tuesday, the proposed departure date, and, while only a fool of a sailor hews to a schedule, it's not a Friday.

As we prepare to leave, it seems appropriate to express gratitude for all the people in our lives who helped us, either via encouragement or through very direct aid, to reach this point. No sailor is an island, after all, and while we have certainly done a lot on our our initiative to become sailors capable of sailing a good old boat, there have been some folk who've been constant sources of inspiration and sound advice. In alphabetical order...

Jonathan Bamberger: We met at a 2010 "Safety at Sea" course (at which I also met the renowned Herb Hilgenberg) and he was kind enough to let me on his crew for the 2010 Lake Ontario 300 race. It provided more than one teachable moment.

Andrew Barlow: Has seemingly fabricated half the stuff on our boat and is a hell of a nice guy, as well. No matter how odd the task, he has been able to turn my crude diagrams into reality. I hope to one day finally jam with him, seeing as he's building a studio.

Now, as intended, completely full.

Fred Blair: This pal of my father-in-law, Dave McMurray, from back in the '80s when both were in the boat building realm, really came through for us with a beautiful custom-made cabinet for our galley, which has solved a host of stowage issues and made our galley fully functional.

Paul Bond was one of the first guys I met at our boat club over 20 years ago and he and his wife Ruth-Ann were unstinting in their good advice and, later, when I stopped ignorantly damaging our first boat, were supportive when our plans for long-term cruising began to take shape.

Do not refrigerate this man's red wine.

John Cangardel has been so enthusiastic over the years on our behalf that his erudite and constructive advice has reignited our anticipation of actually doing this trip. More pertainently, he encouraged me to take two RYA courses aboard, one in Brittany, for which I was not entirely prepared, alas, but also another in Antigua, for which I was. Endlessly supportive, John will be our spirit guide as we go to places he's already been. And he also took the photo that is the background of the blog...our wake upon leaving Toronto Harbour.

Bruce Clark versus an Atlantic gale. Best to stay hydrated.

Bruce and June Clark: Gave me my first offshore crewing experience, and I must say, it was a doozy. Completed their own circ a few years back, and we still have the Portabote they sold us and it's not yet entirely shot. Were I to be deterred by the realities of offshore cruising, this trip might have done it...but I remained enthused.

Jeff Cooper: A consummate sailor in both racing and cruising modes, and a shrewd judge of the human condition, we shared the care and feeding and costs of my first boat, Valiente, and stayed friends despite that! Jeff is a brilliant bargain-finder, and aside from his considerable knowledge of good gear, he's been responsible for our acquisition of durable gear at reasonable prices, without which refitting would have taken longer and costs us more. He is so gracious, he never complained when I think he aggravated a hernia helping me bring an absurd number of large batteries aboard.

Dan Erlich: Another Viking 33 owner, Dan and I became acquainted via a mailing list back in the dark days of the internet concerning the repair and maintenance of the Atomic 4 gasoline inboard. Dan seems to know everything there is to know about this vintage motor, and was generous with his advice and guidance when I had to rebuild not one, but two of them, sourcing a block and parts that still run 15 years later for the new owner. Inventive and funny, Dan made motor mechanic skills acquisition easy.

Goshka Folda and Earl Bederman: Since 1996 (pre-boats!), Earl and Goshka were my primary clients for my freelancing efforts as an editor and graphic designer, Goshka, who now runs the firm Earl started, kept me working steadily and were very supportive of our goals to cut the dock lines.

Jay German and Rob Lamb: Fellow steel boat liveaboards and cat fanciers, Jay and Rob have been a source of friendship and sound steel boat advice for many years, and I expect them to get out of fresh water shortly after we do. Rob is particularly skilled at the art of winter battening-down, which helped us overwinter our boat last year.

Ken Goodings and Lynn Kaak: The couple with whom I took my Canadian Power Squadron Boating Course in 1999 as a know-nothing squib weren't a couple then, but they got married and sailed away on a Niagara 35 and have been taunting us ever since with tales of tropical paradises. Well, we're coming out shortly! Ken has given us excellent advice on the mysteries of the single-sideband radio (we are installing one this winter...finally) and is another marine bargain-hunter, as are all the best sailors.

Ian Grant works on his tan and his Zen-like calm.

Ian Grant: Antiguan-based, unflappable RYA instructor who managed to pack five days of instruction into a four-day week for my first step on the RYA ladder.

Tony Johnson is a boat repair guy so booked you might get him for 2021...but he has been very generous in giving me advice that allowed me to solve a difficult fuel supply problem satisfactorily. He is one of the few people in the boat trade local to Toronto I would recommend unreservedly....but be prepared to wait.

Mitch Kitz works for Genco Marine, as did my wife Rebecca for a few years when our favourite chandlery was on Queen's Quay West. Mitch's encyclopedic knowledge of boat gear, and his frankness in sharing his opinions, has served us enormously well in making the right decisions and using the right materials and techniques. If Mitch doesn't know the answer, you may be phrasing the question wrongly.

Alex baffled that Cabo S. Vicente was not "a washing machine" the day we rounded it.

Alexandre Mathias Kossack, whom I only knew from an internet comment site and a phone call, allowed me to visit him in 2007 and help him deliver his 12 metre raceboat Giulietta, which Alex, an engineer, had a large part in designing. He showed me, and later Rebecca on a later delivery, every courtesy. I didn't realize it when I met him, but he is one of the top amateur sailors in the world and competes now on a 53-footer at the ORC class level, and with a crew of Portugal's best young sailors. Boa sorte!

Suzanne Manvell has been "three-quarters" around the world by sailboat in her own right, and the love of boats brought her to us when we were attempting to sell our first boat, Valiente. While that didn't happen, we did become friends and Suzanne, a real estate agent par excellence (as well as a snappy dresser and a gifted dancer and party-thrower) ended up selling our Toronto home. When we missed our "departure window" in 2019, we decided to keep Alchemy afloat in a marina so as to make a quick exit in the spring. How that got sabotaged is still in the news, but, as we needed a place to stay, Suzanne unhesitatingly offered a flat in her house. This was after finding us a different flat post-house sale in 2018-19. Now I recommend her, again, unreservedly.

Dave McMurray is my wife's father, my son's grandfater, a former boat designer and builder and the man who didn't shoot me when, at age 31, I started dating his 19 year-old daughter. He has been unfailingly generous with his time and energy, including multiple trips shuttling possessions into storage, as has his wife Joan, and, despite knowing of our skills deficits, has been a great supporter of our efforts to get this old girl to the ocean.

Aubrey Millard, who, only coincidentally, was the husband of a dentist I had decades ago, owned Veleda IV, an Ontario 32 he and his wife Judy had sailed for many years. In 2010, Rebecca was given a chance to crew for him from the Bahamas back to Lake Ontario. Alas, mechanical and rig breakages put an end to that plan by South Carolina, but Rebecca learned a great deal on the voyage, which still informs us both today.

Matt Phillips is not only a friend since high school, a gifted director of photography, a B&B owner and a fellow steel boat owner, it's his influence I can credit, or blame, for getting me (and us) into sailing over 20 years ago. Constant as the northern star has been his friendship and his counsel.

Dave Rogers is a RYA instructor based out of Vaannes in Brittany and while I faffed my Yachtmaster course by forgetting the difference between IALA A and B, he still impressed me enough that I recommended Becky take her Day Skipper course with him, which she passed. I suspect we'll be sailing with him again on Tamara.

Andy Schell and Mia Karlsson are the couple behind 59° North, a charter outfit with a strong adventure and educational streak, and the people who gave a very informative day-long seminar I attended a couple of years ago. Andy was raised on a boat from childhood and is not only a person who sails expertly, but who also thinks about sailing constantly. His wife Mia, by contrast, didn't sail until she met Andy, but is now his equal. They are very positive people, and as an aspiring geezer, it's very heartening to see people 20 years my junior so deep into the adventure cruising lifestyle.

Paul and Sheryl Shard are probably the pre-eminent Canadian sailing couple. Via their Distant Shores media mini-empire, they've shot hundreds of hours of cruising lifestyle shows, given hundreds of seminars and presentations and worked probably more boat shows than they care to remember. Yet they remain very approachable and friendly, down-to-earth people whose love of sailing remains undimmed after three decades. I've learned a lot from that attitude.

And lastly, we've been members of National Yacht Club in Toronto for 21 years. Arriving first as crew and, four months later, as boat owners, we came there thanks to proximity to our house, but stayed because of the myriad kindnesses we were, and continue to be, shown by its members, some of who now are passed on. Particularly when we spent three years cradled in the parking lot, at various points minus diesel, roof and batteries, and were even more of a dusty, sweary, sweaty, annoyance than usual, we were shown near-infinite support, aid and good advice,including the teaching of sailing by patient instructors to our son, and that is why we eventually pulled this off. Thank you all so much.

So long for now! Photo (c) Shannon Greer

By way of introduction...

S/V Alchemy, the vessel in question, May 1, National Yacht Club, Toronto, Canada

Hello there, gentle readers. Most of whom I will assume are new, and some of whom have travelled from our sister blog of some antiquity, which describes how our crew and vessel have taken several years to get to this place, from which we plan to encompass the world.

The Cabin Boy predictively renders a verdict on future pretension.

All right, perhaps that's a pretentious introduction to be avoided in the future.

 

 

The point of this blog and the main cast

Our goal here is simple: to share with our readership, some of which I suspect will migrate from my venerable "repair and refit" blog, to follow our adventures by sea and land and see as we see the world in which we live. We plan to feature a lot of photos, eventually videos and even drone and underwater media, both of which we've found impressive additions to the blogs of other cruisers we admire, and some of whom we know, such as the fine people at Distant Shores and 59 North.

Our "take" will naturally develop as our journeys continue, but include those of a long-standing wildlife rehabber and holder of both a biology and teaching degrees and a man who never took a high-school shop class or owned a car, but who can talk about diesel repair with only a spot of drooling.

Also featured will be the views of our 18-year-old son, who was on a boat for the first time at five days of age and has had to listen to his parents talk interminably about the sea for much of the intervening time. It's going to be his world: his reactions to it should prove illuminating.

As noted, we are a three-person Canadian family, consisting of Lucas Dacey, 18 years old (he's much larger than in the above shot now); Rebecca McMurray (Mrs. Alchemy) and Marc Dacey (blogkeeper and alleged skipper). We live aboard S/V Alchemy, a Canadian-registered 12 metre, 16 tonne cutter-rigged steel motorsailer built in Ontario in 1988 and owned by ourselves since 2006. We have a long-held ambition to go around the planet in this boat, and to take five years or more to do it. We don't intend to rush, after all.

Alchemy in 2019, before some fairly signficant upgrades.

In 2018, we sold our house in Toronto and moved aboard in 2019. Technical difficulties precluded our escape to Canada's east coast for some shipyard tasks, and the current pandemic has delayed us further in 2020.

Until recently, that is. Our government allowed "pleasure craft" passage down the St. Lawrence Seaway as of Monday, June 22, and so we are in the final stages of preparing to leave for Halifax circa the second week of July. Our hesitation is related primarily to seeing if the near-inevitable "second wave" of this accursed pandemic threatens a fresh round of lockdowns and quarantines, as the only thing worse than not going at all this year, which, given the situation in Canada, was a strong possibility, would be to embark down the river only to be quarantined or otherwise stopped short of this year's goal, which is the Halifax region of Nova Scotia and a date with a shipyard to redo the bottom (essentially a paint job) and to rerig the mast. From there, we hope to cross the Atlantic in May, 2021.

The story of Alchemy

My wife and I joined the National Yacht Club in Toronto in the spring of 1999 as "crew". This meant learning to sail via a) an eight-week course and b) via joining the "crew bank" to supply bodies to the extensive sailboat racing contingent at the club. I was in my late 30s at the time and, while as yet childless, we had plans in that direction and had bought a house the previous year. When the internet service provider for which I worked as a marketing manager changed hands, I was given a modest sum to quietly go elsewhere. A sensible person would have shovelled the sum at the mortgage, but I decided by August 1999 to buy a sailboat of my own. Silly human!

Valiente, a 1973 Ontario Yachts Viking 33, hull 32, was named for an author we admired who diedon the day we bought her.

While my wife had grown up on boats, her familiarity was scanty in terminology and aspects of docking. She would happily go on the foredeck, however, to douse the sails in appalling conditions, which was good as I seemed to be able to steer pretty quickly. However, this was more "vintage hot rod" than "starter boat", and at 10 metres and 4 tonnes in weight, was interesting in terms of the learning curve. Also, we have never owned a car; I've owned a chainsaw and a moped, but I never took "shop" classes in high school, which was insufficient prep for dealing with a sailboat's auxiliary motor. The fact was this: I was woefully unprepared to own a boat, and mistaken, as is said, were made that led to a few scraps, a few repairs, and the rebuild of the engine. Twice.

Eventually, we got better, driven both by an urge to learn and, very quietly at first, the idea that one day, after the house was paid off and the baby grown, we might sail away to see the world. Not in the 33 footer, of course, but in a more suitable cruiser capable of taking on the ocean.

Like this steel Subrero Petit Prince 40 ketch

We had some guidance, which led to some preferences. My high-school buddy Matt Phillips had owned (and still owns) a beautiful Goderich 40 ketch in steel since the 1980s and we were keen on the perceived advantages of a ketch in terms of sail handling for a (as of the mid-2000s) shorthanded crew. Because our son was just a nipper at the time.

Unfortunately, while we did like the looks of that boat, we did not like its upkeep and it looked rough in terms of corrosion and general maintainence. While constant vigilance and a willingness to fix things are the foundation of any successful small-boat cruise, this is particularly true with steel boats, which can and do dissolve over time in salt water. The answer to these problems are attacking rust when found, and preventing rust in the first place. As this is a rather multi-faceted and deep topic, I will direct the interested to my "boat-fixing/refitting" blog, which goes not only into the technical side of cruising, but my years-long process of changing Nearly Every Damned Thing Aboard in order to bring the boat we did eventually buy fit for the purpose of cruising our big blue marble.

We paid off our house thanks to having tenants in the nicer half, not owning a car, not taking vacations and a lot of macaroni dinners in about seven and a half years. The bubblicious Toronto housing market allowed us to remortgage it a second time, which gave us a boat and a refit budget we judged to be adequate. As carefully built steel yachts (there are many home-built boats of varying grades of amateur skills) between 36 and 45 feet in length are pretty scarce, I thought I would have to fly ourselves and a surveyor to one of the many "cruiser graveyards", such as Panama, to see acceptable boats made available through disinterest or divorce. Because it's a sad fact that some couples do not realize that the reality and the dream of sailing don't match up as expected. Sure, there's the travel and the interesting people, but it's unrealistic to think that the "boat repair in exotic locales" will stop or even slow down once underway. For us, that's just the price to pay for the freedom to cruise, which is allied to the high levels of competence we feel we now possess. But it's too much for some, and there's boats ready to go at certain crossroads around the world priced to move.

Our first view of the place, nearly 15 years later, we call home.

So it was with mild surprise we came across a suitable candidate in our home town. Alchemy is a 42 foot LOA pilothouse cutter motorsailer in steel. Built in Kingston in 1988 as a custom project, we are her third owners, after the man who commissioned her from Phil Friedman, N.A. from his 1982 design, and from Chris Barrington, who fitted her out with decent gear only to find his life circumstances changed and a world cruise was not in the cards.

Comfort over speed, but who's in a hurry?

At circa 16 tonnes, Alchemy is no racehorse and her sail plan and full keel suggest a leisurely, if comfortable, lope around the world. But our budget did not allow for a "performance cruiser", but rather a boat that could carry us safely and self-sufficiently was what we sought. And, in June of 2006, she is what we got. And a fresh mortgage, paid off by 2018.

I was able to speak by phone and email to both the designer and to the man (Prof. B. Jones) who had what is clearly an ocean-capable vessel built for him more than once. Mr. Friedman was kind enough to send me copies of his original drawings (the real Alchemy as built unsurprisingly departs from these in some minor aspects. Mr. Friedman liked the results so much that he built himself a sister ship with a canoe stern; these are the only two vessels built of this type. Prof. Jones never found the time to sail her to salt water and she was a Georgian Bay cruiser for over 15 years. His loss was our gain, as she's got very little in the way of corrosion in her, which is the death of many a steel custom sailboat, and, as her surveys have determined, would cost nearly a half-million dollars to build today.

That's not what we paid.

Alchemy in 2015 underway with a full hoist. Photo (c) J. Cangardel

To some people, the idea of a custom, one-off boat is daunting. There are no owner groups, nothing is standardized and the damn swatches don't match. For us, however, dedicated to having the boat we needed, not the boat built to sell to sailors with different goals, having a steel boat has given us a free hand to change things to our plans and liking. The bones were sound, but we've done a lot of cosmetic surgery. In the process, we feel we've gained necessary skills in boat handling, repair, servicing and keeping the whole effort intact. We now look to transfer those years for a five-year (or more) voyage. Feel free to tag along. We leave next week (circa July 13, 2020).

The author, on an RYA course in Brittany in 2013, reviewing French nautical terms.