GRAVLAX
The expletives came flying out of my mouth in a stream. Janeen had a worried look on her face, like maybe this 
sailboat wasn’t such a great idea after all if it was going to regularly make me pissed off. I took a deep breath and then much more calmly explained this was going to be par for the course with me trying to DIY most of the upgrades and repairs. Get used to it. No real worries, it’s just part of the process, along with some busted knuckles and head bumps. Honestly, all boats need a little encouragement every now and then, it goes along with the love.
After replacing the running light fixture and bulb, it still didn’t work, so the simple fix was getting more complicated (another typical boat thing). After a little more sleuthing it turned out a previous owner had butt-spliced two sections of wire to power the running lights on the bow pulpit and somewhere along the line the wires separated. It was a must-do project before moving Gravlax from Anacortes to her new home port at Tyee Marina in Tacoma. We weren’t planning on running at night, but if plans went sideways I didn’t want to get caught out on the maiden voyage without navigation lights. It was a simple butt-splice yes, but the only access was through a 1.5 x 2 foot door at the front of the v-berth. There was just enough room to get my head and one arm through and the end of the wire running up from the stern was two feet away with zero slack. Ever do a one-handed butt-splice at the very end of your reach? Give it try. The third time’s a charm along with a few choice words of encouragement.
As I approached my 60th 
birthday, I started thinking more and more about what I wanted to do when I retired. I was taking that line from a Tom Petty song to heart: “I don’t know, but I’ve been told, if you never slow down, you never grow old.” The only thing I made clear to Janeen was that I wasn’t going to be sitting on my butt when retirement came around. I’m a life-long learner and that wasn’t going to stop at retirement. So I started planning for a challenge and some adventure.
My thoughts kept turning to how happy I was on those trips to Blake Island with Janeen 
and Keegan, our cairn terrier, on the Temptress, a wooden Gillmer 29 cutter, and how bummed I was when we gave it away to the Center for Wooden Boats because it became too much upkeep for the partnership to handle. I have also become nostalgic about the places I visited in SE Alaska as a youngster on the Charisma during a family vacation, later as a crew-
member on commercial fishing purse seiners, on 
vacation with my Dad and Pat Anderson on his C-Dory, and as part of my job as a fisheries biologist. There are places I would like to revisit and many alluring places that we just cruised by without stopping.
I started “window-shopping” on Craig’s-list about 3 years ago, setting aside surplus discretionary funds instead of spending, and working on my pitch to Janeen. I worked my way up from “hey, I’m thinking we should consider buying another sailboat” to “hey, look at the pictures of this boat” to finally “let’s go visit this boat”. Along the way, I started thinking about what we could afford, how I thought we would use a sailboat, and what kind of specifications would fit our needs. I quickly figured out that a coastal cruiser would fit our needs, it would likely need to be an older boat to fit our budget, which meant some repairs and upgrades would be in order, and a wood hull was out of the question. We also honed in on a two-cabin solution because we wanted to be able to share passages with other couples.
We put in a successful bid on a 1989 Hunter 37 Legend. We loved the aft stateroom with a queen-sized bed that could be accessed from both sides, but after the survey, it was the only thing we loved about that boat. The high iron content in the transmission fluid and engine vibrations were the last straws on a long list of issues and the current owners were unable to remedy any of them so we walked away from that one. All old boats have a list of projects, but I didn’t want a full-on project boat.
Just a week or so after we walked away from the Hunter a new ad showed up on YachtWorld, a 1988 Ericson 38-200 (“Tranquilo”) listed in Anacortes. Two cabins…check, full galley…check, newish dingy, refrigeration, gimbled stove/oven, alternator, and fuel tank; shower, cruising spinnaker…check, check, check. A month later we nervously took possession of Tranquilo while it sat on-the-hard, renamed her “Gravlax”, and got to work on the priority safety items identified in the survey. After a long wait for the yard to finish the badly-needed bottom work, Gravlax splashed in early July and we 
made the 3-day passage to Tacoma with an experienced hand, Ron Campbell. We tied up in Everett for an overnight
and a picnic with family members.
Since then it has been boat work on Fridays and day sails on Sundays. We had plans for a week-long cruise in South Sound with our best buddys’, Glenn and Joyce, but we had to modify that plan after discovering our house batteries are at end-of-life. Okay, guess we have to reorder our upgrade priority list….that’s an old boat for ya.
It was fortuitous that the deal fell through on that Hunter as I think we have ended up with a much better sailboat. The Ericson 38-200 is a Bruce King design and well-thought of in the cruising community as attested to by a very active Ericson owners forum. This model is categorized as a relatively stiff, moderate displacement (nearly 8 tons) coastal cruiser rigged as a masthead sloop with reasonably good performance having a displacement to length ratio of 243, a comfort ratio of 26.8, a ballast to displacement ratio of 40.65, and sail area to displacement ratio of 18.3. It draws 6.5 feet and is outfitted with a 32 HP Universal 5432 diesel auxiliary engine for the times when the wind doesn’t blow for a cruising speed of about 6 knots under power. All halyards and running rigging route to the cockpit to aid in short-handed sailing. All of the stats add up to a stout sailboat for cruising in style with good performance and comfort for four people. The previous owners had the boat about halfway through the refit needed for extended cruises, so it was a perfect choice for us to pick up where they left off.
congrats you guys look forward to seeing the gravlax some day and you two real soon. great name by the way
Loved the narrative. Felt a little breeze in my thinning hair and sun on my face as I read this.. Next to marriage, there is nothing as satifying in a man’s life as as a sailboat on which he has spent hours and days and weeks and months of skinned knuckles, bumped head, and perhaps a skinned shin, not to mention an endless flow of dollars, all balanced with dreams of and real life cruises.
Loved the narrative. Felt a little breeze in my thinning hair and sun on my face as I read this.. Next to marriage, there is nothing as satifying in a man’s life as as a sailboat on which he has spent hours and days and weeks and months of skinned knuckles, bumped head, and perhaps a skinned shin, not to mention an endless flow of dollars, all balanced with dreams of and real life cruises.
Such a fun read, and inspiring! Thanks for sharing!
Great intro. Use your words! Best not to have the dogs on board when doing repairs. They don’t like repair words. You probably know all the words I know that are necessary to fix things, but if you get stuck some time, just put me on the phone and I’ll see if I can come up with something. Having owned boats for decades I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Definitely stringing a long list together works best.