As I lay in bed this morning I’m amazed that I’m waking up
inside a big piece of complex machinery that will not only take Connie and I
from one place to another, but is also our home, complete with bedroom,
kitchen, bathroom, guest room and salon.
Traveler is an amazing conglomeration of fiberglass, wires, wood,
plastic, piping, stainless steel and paint that is designed to be multiple-purpose. It is able to be a house where you can cook
and sleep, even doing so when tilted over 30 degrees. But while a home, it is a complicated bit of
engineering that is capable of traveling completely around the planet… by water,
exploiting clever loopholes in the fabric of space and time.
Starting at the bottom of this magic yellow submarine like structure,
the thick fiberglass hull does not have one straight flat area in its
composition. It’s shaped fore and aft
like a teardrop with a pointy nose and a perfectly rounded butt. At the bottom of the teardrop is a deep long
keel that weighs 10,000 pounds, a third of the overall weight of the ship. The keel extends 6.5 feet into the
water. With this much weight so low when
the boat gets tipped over by strong winds she will come back up to a vertical
position. She will; she must. It is science. 
Inside the bottom portion of the boat are 14 holes that
connect the sea to the inside of the boat.
This is done via various pipes that either bring in cool salt water or
push out waste water, warm water, or exhaust. Each of these through-hull fittings are double
clamped with stainless steel to insure they never fail. Inside the boat in the lower bowels there is
two to three feet of machinery, wiring, and piping necessary to keep the whole
shebang running. It’s a complicated
bunch of stuff down there below the floorboards. Remember the movie “Brazil” when Robert
De Niro, the renegade air conditioning specialist, opens up the wall and exposes
the mass of breathing pipes and wires?
That’s what it’s like when we pick up one of the floorboards to look
down into the bilge. It is my job to
make some sense of this mess and I’ve been spending my afternoons diving down
into the bilge with a flashlight and a pair of needle nose pliers to defend
myself. Occasionally when it gets too
overwhelming, I holler for Connie to come grab me by the feet and pull me out
of there.
With all this chaos down below it is surprising just how
civilized and clean it is above the floor.
To start with, everything inside the boat is made of teak. In 1981 when this boat was made in Taipei,
Taiwan those craftsmen had plenty of quality wood and great expertise creating
what is essentially one big piece of furniture 42 feet long that is the
interior of Traveler.
Imagine your
grandma’s fancy hutch with all its clean curves and curlycues. Now imagine that hutch growing out of
control, stretching 13 feet wide and 42 feet long. That’s Traveler. Every surface is precisely jointed. What is amazing is that not one part of the
interior, like the exterior, is in a straight line. Everything is curved and every piece of wood
is custom fitted. It’s like the fun
house at a carnival where up is down and something that looks tall is actually
uphill and short.
Starting Aft, on one side is a quarter berth where one person
can comfortably sleep. Across from that
is the master cabin, with a door that has a bronze plaque saying specifically,
“Captain’s Quarters”. This cabin contains
a double berth and a couple of closets and drawers, with lights overhead and reading
lamps for reading in bed. This is where we have our morning tea and contemplate
the pleasant day ahead. Forward of this
is a navigation station to one side and a galley (kitchen) on the other. The galley has a freezer, refrigerator,
sinks, hot and cold water, and lots of drawers and cabinets again with plenty
of lighting and an endless supply of bottle openers. The nav station has lots of gadgets and
switches and little red lights. I think
much of that stuff is connected to the morass below the floor boards.
Forward of the galley
is a dinette with a table and a settee (couch).
Again, lots of lighting and cabinets and bookshelves on all the walls up
to window height. Forward of the dining
area is a bathroom (the head) with a toilet, sink, and shower. And forward of
that is the guest cabin with a door and plenty of closet space.
Above and throughout the cabin are lights in the ceiling and
opening ports to scoop in cool breezes. All
in all there are eleven ports that can be closed tightly for when it rains or
when the boat is plunging into steep waves that sweep the deck. Handholds
abound throughout the cabin for holding on when pitching in rough seas. Every door, drawer, shelf, and cupboard has
safety latches that keep everything in its place, even if the boat pitches over
on her side. There are so many drawers,
and cabinets, and shelves, and cubby holes that we keep a database active so we
can find things. “Honey, were did we put
the whatchamacallit?” Don’t know? Gotta
boot up the laptop.
Keep in mind that while at anchor or at the dock, the boat
is calm and you can set down a glass of juice and it stays put. However, later,
once underway, everything must be in its place, secured. Otherwise that juice glass goes flying across
the room. Gravity ceases to exist at sea. We have a stuffed animal named Monkey who just
hangs out in various places. After a
brisk sail it is fun trying to find where he ended up. Needless to say, everything has its place.
A companionway ladder
leads from the back of the cabin up to the back deck and cockpit. There the helmsman and guests sit or stand drinking
foo foo drinks and having amazingly witty conversations while driving the
boat. This area is covered from the sun
and protected with canvas covers. Stepping
up to the side decks there are walkways leading forward on either side that
take you to the front of the boat and the front deck where the anchor is
located and there is room for sunbathing.
In the middle of the boat is a huge 40 foot tall mast held
in place by 13 large cables. On top of
the mast is a teeny tinny arrow that points towards the wind. There is some
magic involved there that I don’t quite understand. Sails fore and aft drive the boat when there
is wind. A diesel engine (sometimes)
pushes her along when there is no wind. In
this manner this cross between a tree house and a space ship is capable of
galloping large distances across vast expanses of ocean blue delivering us to
strange and foreign lands.
I’ve tried to explain the marvelous bit of machinery that is
our boat in a manner that landsmen and sailors alike can understand. It is a crazy life we’re leading where we’ve
given up our land based and sane activities and moved aboard this strange craft
that is two, three, or four things at once.
I remember as a child reading Jules Verne and I imagined what it would
be like to go off adventuring in an odd foreign contraption. I’m finding out.
We head south for Los Cabos on November 15th.
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