Never, since boats first began to be built, has a boat been ready to depart on its scheduled departure date. Noah didn’t shut the hatch on his famous ark: God had to do it for him, no doubt while Noah ran around looking for a spare set of bilge pump gaskets and maybe some more fruit hammocks.
So neither was Ganymede ready to sail when, groaning under a load of food supplies worthy of a doomsday prepper, we cast off from the dock in Stockton that had been her home for the three months since her launch. It wasn’t for lack of effort, either: it was just that every weekend and spare day isn’t enough to set up the rigging on a newly-stepped mast, bend on sails, and troubleshoot what doesn’t fit. Especially while trying to figure out what you need for an open-ended voyage with three small children, and where to put it.
I would have liked to have a lot more sea trials—everything was brand new, and what we hadn’t designed and built we had installed hoping everything would more or less fit together without major snags. But you simply can’t have a proper sea trial in the narrow upper reaches of the Stockton River where the wind rarely blows and there’s no wave action to speak of. Ranging further and returning would have been nice, but the season was getting on. Oh well, I figured, it’s like Captain Ron said: “if anything’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen out there.” Only thing to do was get out there, shake things down, and let them happen.
Since the girls were still so very young, and what was going to happen could be anything, I left them behind and took on a crew of three friends to help with the voyage. Sal and Hannah had worked on megayachts and at least knew what the sea looked like from a deck. John Worden had watched with interest the construction of the boat in our yard, and even been roped into a good deal of fairing. But he had no idea what to expect in a small boat on a rowdy ocean. Still, he was game, and that’s all you can ask of anybody.
Looking back at all the things that needed sorting right from the get-go, it’s kind of a miracle we didn’t pull the plug when we got to Richardson’s Bay in Sausalito. The self-steering trim-tab proved a total waste (more on that later); my genius idea for a removable tiller to make more room in the cockpit tended to deploy unexpectedly, leaving the helmsman randomly unconnected from the rudder. The double-tackle mainsheet with carabiners for quick release added an awful clatter to all the other clatters we endured for the thirteen days it took to sail from Half Moon Bay to Cabo San Lucas.
On the bright side, the things that worked well more than balanced out the other sort. The major bits of Ganymede—rigging, sails, rudder, and all her inward construction—proved up to task of blasting south in 17-foot swells. Riding down the face of one comber after another with storm try’sl and staysail was exhilarating, and making 180 miles in our first 24-hour run was deeply satisfying.
The rest of the trip was varied: a lot of bobbing becalmed off of San Diego; a lot of experimenting with different sail combinations as we worked down the coast of Baja. Ganymede was my first gaff rigged boat ever, and I had no idea the potential for keeping up speed she could offer, and how much sail she could carry into rough conditions. It took me ten years of sailing her to realize just what she likes and how hard she can be pushed. Even now, thousands of miles later, there’s still nuances to discover, and subtle tweaks to the rigging can bring palpable advantages.
The biggest lesson of those early days has really stuck with me, in part because Ganymede’s gelcoat still bears the gouges of superfluous metallurgy. I had an unhealthy desire toward shackles, snaps, and carabiners, thinking that they constituted the quickest, easiest attachment method. And while they are quick and easy, they’re also heavy, expensive, prone to corrosion, and they really bang up surfaces. I don’t believe there’s a single original bow or D shackle left on Ganymede now—I’ve eliminated them in favor of something that, ironically, I had onboard all along. For some reason, I’d made the throat halyard attachment from a Dyneema loop with a hardwood toggle. Just to see if it would work, I guess. Well, as all my fancy Wichard wiregate carabiners developed crevice corrosion (they don’t last long when in and out of salt water), I slowly worked out ways to replace them with toggles or soft attachments.
Not too long after sailing up into the Sea of Cortez to switch the crew out for the family, I eliminated the chain hook from the snubber, going with just a rolling hitch (more on this lots later), and nearly every stop along the way down the Central American coast saw more excess hardware divested of in swap meets and next to rubbish bins. Surprisingly, I felt very little pain at leaving for scrap even the self-steering trim-tab strut I’d worked so hard on. Nothing I ever got rid of was ever missed later, nor hardly thought about. There has to be a lesson there.
Fast-forward fourteen years, and after several major external refits, including two cockpit re-dos, I still have some mainsheet-lead tweaking to do. All it involves now, rather than bolting on another bronze chainplate or padeye, is simply a drilled hole with a G10 sleeve that I can push a soft loop through. If only I’d known back then what I know by now! But of course, knowledge is more valuable now because I learned it by doing things a bunch of worse ways first.
And so, arrived at last in Conception Bay to take on the family, what was going to happen out there had happened, and I felt pretty confident that Ganymede could keep our family safe and dry on any sort of voyage, as long as we handled her well. All the tweaks, details, and clangs could be dealt with as we went. What mattered was that we knew we had a decent boat to start with, one that would be worth all the necessary re-work, even if it took years to chip away at it all—or even if we’re never finished, and every voyage is taken without being quite ready yet.