Author Archives: Brenda

Beryl’s Winter Perch

Posted on by under living aboard, photos

Beryl Ship's Cat on top of spare sail

In the summer, ship’s cat Beryl spends her time sprawled out on the boat’s sole, taking advantage of close proximity to the year-round cooling of the Pacific waters. This makes a lot of sense because typically summertime Pacific water temperatures are in the 60’s wherever we’ve been and winter temperatures much lower. Water in the 70’s beneath the keel is quite a rare situation aboard Mahdee.

In the winter, Beryl finds the sole a bit cool for her liking and she climbs to higher perches in the boat. The closer to the cabin overhead, the warmer it is of course. We have the old mainsail as a spare stored adjacent the main saloon in an area we call “the storage bed” because it does nothing but store various things for us. In theory, it IS a bed, but… Back to the sail! with all its bronze sail slides attached, weighs over 100 lbs and takes up quite a bit of space as well. We move it rarely since it takes both David and me both to get it to a new location in the boat. The top of the sail sits about 24″ below the overhead and it just so happens that a fan we have hanging high up in the galley behind the solid fuel stove, pushes air across the stovepipe and directly to the area where the spare mainsail resides. This is a prime warm spot.

This year, when it got cooler, Beryl began to hang out near the diesel bulkhead heater — the heater we usually run 24/7 if it’s cold but we’ve decided to not use this year. Instead, we’ve been keeping the solid fuel galley stove stoked with cleaner burning Anthracite from Pennsylvania. It only took her a few days to relocate to a better, warmer perch atop the spare mainsail. There she sits, hours on end, watching all the goings’ on aboard Mahdee.

Swedish Mainsail or Trysail?

Posted on by under photos, Projects, sailing, Schooners, Wooden Boats

We have a photo of Mahdee from a late 1950’s newspaper clipping.  In it, she is sailing downwind under staysail, reefed foresail, and Swedish mainsail. In the pic, according to the caption, she is passing near Gloucester, MA and will touch at Newport and make landfall at Hamilton on her way to the West Indies. A Swedish mainsail is different from the regular one in that its seams are vertical and its size is smaller — much like a winter sail or a sail permanently reefed. We wondered about the use on Mahdee of a Swedish mainsail in that picture until we sailed Mahdee for a bit over a year. Then we totally understood. Her fore-and-aft sail balance is such that it’s desired to frequently sail with the mainsail reefed. Only in the typically mild Southern California sailing have we been able to consistently use the mainsail without a double reef in place. Everywhere else, she’s reefed and I’m thinking about a smaller mainsail. A good part of this is because we sail short-handed: just David and me. With only two of us, we’re extremely cautious about getting too much sail area up and having to deal with it if the wind suddenly pipes up. If we take the jib down, as it is in the newspaper photo, we must take the reefed mainsail down as well in order to keep the helm balanced. A small sail set on the mainmast is the solution.

Mahdee with Swedish Mainsail

I put it on my list of things to buy for Mahdee: Swedish mainsail or a trysail. Back and forth my thoughts go with whether the choice should be one or the other. Right now, I’m leaning towards the trysail and I just happened to run across this lovely video of the Schooner Adventuress with her trysail in use. A perfect example of a trysail in other-than-storm-use! Now I just wonder where they had it fabricated…

Trysail in use aboard Schooner Adventuress

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The Last Hurrah Before Christmas

Posted on by under anchoring, living aboard

Since we have had a busy autumn this year on land focusing on such things as Buttercup, Wesley, car parts, and the workshop–as well as Schooner Chandlery–somehow the sailing has gotten shoved to the side of the plate.  OK, perhaps back burnered so far that it’s fallen behind the stove and is in residence down there with the dust bunnies.  So it is appropriate that for a couple weeks in early December, David and I scurried around and cleaned up the dust bunnies whilst also preparing Mahdee for some time out on the water.  Last minute we found ourselves checking systems as well as putting the ground tackle in order for anchoring, checking shroud tensions, making sure the forecastle was organized and then digging out the autopilot tether from beneath the pile of unmanagable stuff in the engine room.  Oh, I thought “how quickly we fell into life in a slip where things can be in disarray without significant worry” and how quickly everything became a mess.  So after a bit of minor “stash and lash” for the Bay sailing we determined that if we didn’t get Mahdee out on the water the weekend of December 9th and 10th it would be a full month before we could do so again!  Our plans were to put on the Christmas lights after our jaunt about the Bay. Once the boat is dressed in Christmas lights, no sailing could be had.

The boat's wake


Motoring along with the solid fuel stove still heating the boat and the shorepower cord just coiled on the fairlead seemed the epitomy of “liveaboard” not “sailor” as we gazed forward over the less-than-tidy deck.

Tides were perfect with plenty of water under the keel for transiting our sometimes shallow channel to the marina.  The channel was to be dredged this year but the BCDC decided to flex it’s muscles and just say “no!” to that action.  So it will be another year before boaters with deep draft can breath easy during the zero or negative tides.  Ah, but depth was perfect on the 9th and off we went for our Bay adventure.  As we motored out of the slough and up the channel I wondered if we’d have any wind at all.  The answer: a resounding “nope,” and so we motored and contented ourselves with the lazy and sunny day.  Temperatures in the high 50’s and the heat of the sun with no winds made for sweater weather instead of windbreakers, too.  We meandered up the Bay and towards the Financial District wondering what we’d do with our weekend.  Here it was a Saturday with glassy calm waters.  We expected the power boats to be out and about but yet there was nobody on the water save us and a couple sailboats drifting about trying to find some wind but instead being carried by the strong Bay currents.  We’d considered anchoring at Clipper Cove (David’s choice) and Aquatic Park (my favorite) but lost our appetite for adventure along the Financial District and decided to turn back to the South and make Sunday a “decorate the boat” day getting the lights strung up in the rig.


One sure way to get a smile from David is to go somewhere on Mahdee. Anywhere will do.

We headed back towards our marina a few hours lazy motoring away.  An anchored ship to the East gave us the 5 blasts of warning — and we were nowhere near their anchorage or swing.  The anchored ship was pointed in our direction so it was conceivable they were about to get underway. With the binoculars, David scanned their hawse pipes and chains to see if they were making ready to leave.  No movement of the chains.  Not quite happy with the information at hand but yet not keen to hail the anchored ship on the VHF radio “um, why are we in Danger from you?..”, we upped the engine RPM and scurried on by remaining in the western edge of the channel and wondering what that was all about and the mystery still remains.

With no winds, it was easy to motor back into our slip for the evening.  Conflicting thoughts about “well that was nice to be on the water but now we need to put up the Christmas lights” and “now why didn’t we just go ahead and drop the hook up at Aquatic Park?” were dancing through my head, briefly, that evening.  The thought hit me after adding some Anthracite to the Shipmate and baking some banana bread — all of which could have been done at anchor.

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