It’s winter now. The rain has set in, it’s 41 degrees outside and I have a cozy fire going in the woodstove. It is comforting to know that our C-Dory 22, Sea Lab, is sitting safe on her trailer just outside. Though I miss the sense of possibility that comes with having the boat in a slip, ready to go, I also don’t have to run down to the marina to check that the bilge pump is still working or that the dock lines aren’t chafing through the chilly, stormy months.
As soon as I accept the fact that I’m probably not going out on the water again until sometime next spring, my mind wanders. I start thinking about the upcoming Seattle Boat Show and all the cool boating stuff to look at, which in turn really gets me excited about the coming season. Of course, the next stop for that train is: What did we do this past year? It’s a perfect question as this year draws to a close. So, I pull out my boat log and, sure enough, it’s all there.
Thumbing through our log, there aren’t very many pages for 2024. This year was meager in the boating department! We certainly had some good times out on the water, but not nearly as many as in past years—only seven days on the boat! Usually, we get at least 30, some years more or slightly less… but seven?
I am able to reference this information because, ever since we started with our first sailboat, I’ve been keeping a record (call it a journal if you want) of every time we go out. And really, it goes back further than that. Tekla and I have journal entries of pretty much every trip we’ve been on in our 30 years together, whether it’s canoeing, backpacking, cross-country car camping, or poking around in England for a couple weeks—it’s all there. We started out thinking it might be a nice thing to read in our dotage, but my practice of log keeping began with my career in horticulture. At the botanical garden where I have spent most of the last 35 years, I was tasked with propagating plants from all over the world, many of which were not in western cultivation and consequently no information existed on how to propagate and grow them. This necessitated obsessive record keeping, without which it would have been nearly impossible to figure out cultural requirements associated with these scientific collections. This attitude valuing the process and benefits of written logs seemed to bleed into the rest of my life. And here I am, a dedicated and enthusiastic record keeper.
Plenty of ink has been spilled about the importance of log keeping in boating, but I’ve personally found my propensity for it has come in handy in many ways. I keep three types of records while we enjoy our favorite pasttime: a daily start/stop log with engine hours and tide/current timings; a trip journal of where we go and people we meet; and a maintenance and fix-it log for when things break and how long it takes me to make the repair. This last one is especially helpful because, if I don’t write down things when they become non-functional, I won’t remember it until next time I need it—which causes double frustration!
Not long-ago, Sea Lab’s trim tabs quit working and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. When we pulled her out of the marina for the winter, I asked the shop to have a look at them while they were winterizing the motor. It turned out to be the control switch and it took a couple weeks for the replacement part to arrive. After it was taken care of, I picked Sea Lab up and went on my way to winter storage. The next spring when we put the boat back in the water, there were 73 more engine hours than when we had pulled out in the fall, and I had the records to prove it. It’s a good shop and, when I called months later, we figured out that the key had been left on after the work was performed. They agreed to replace the hour meter and run it up to the number of hours it had when I had brought it in to them. If I had not kept that log documenting when we start and stop, I probably would never have known that I had that much extra run time on the hour meter but not on the motor.
In our little notebook, I like to jot down other information about our journeys, like whale sightings, things on shore that I want to look up later, fuel stops, and tide and current timings. Often, I will refer to the little underway notebook when I am writing in the boat log, which I often do the following morning with coffee—my favorite time of day. Thinking about the previous days’ travel while getting my brain started in the morning is always a very pleasant way to begin the day.
Looking back through the boat log now, it’s fun to revisit some of the things we wrote early on in our learning-to-sail years. Our first night staying on the boat in Point Hudson Marina in Port Townsend is one example. We were on our first sailboat, a little Venture 17 called Seashell, that we trailered from our home at the time in Buckley to Boat Haven in Port Townsend. Once in the water, we sailed one mile to Point Hudson Marina to spend the weekend camping in our little boat and running around town having a great time. On Sunday morning, we pulled out of Point Hudson and motored our Johnson 3.3 one mile back to the Boat Haven. We ran out of gas at the marina entrance but fortunately we had a canoe paddle on board and were able to make it back to the ramp. We loaded up and went home, and had a grand time imagining all the places we could go in that little boat. Our first overnight “sail” trip 22 years ago paved the way for so many adventures to follow, and it’s rewarding to relive its details in our log. Many entries and boats later, we have the stories of Juan de Fuca crossings, trips through the San Juan and Gulf islands, lightning storms and calm weather—our rich history on the water.
Only one of our boats came with a log that was passed down to us at purchase—the Cal 27 Moondance. It was a nice thing to have while we were getting to know Moondance, and had records of all the maintenance and installations the previous two owners had performed.
We are the fourth owners of our current boat Sea Lab and, while we didn’t get any records from the previous two owners, we did inherit a notebook kept by the man who had Sea Lab built in Kent, Washington. His name was Earnest A. Dahl, and he had a special purpose for the boat—he was doing research for the U.S. Navy on an electronic system called Two Wire Automatic Remote Sensing Evaluation System (TWARSES for short). We were quite puzzled when we first looked at Sea Lab and saw this acronym alongside the boat name, but didn’t think too much of it other than it seemed like an oddly named boat. Digging through the couple boxes of stuff that always come with a pre-owned boat, we found E.A. Dahl’s build journal of notes he made during the assembly of the C-Dory that became Sea Lab—literally his laboratory for electronic research in Ventura, California—including how he would fit it out for his lab work. While it’s fascinating to have a window into our boat’s backstory, the one thing in his journal that I really like and now use is a simple magazine cutout of a Coleman stove with two clay garden pots turned upside-down over the burners, explaining how the pots will hold onto and radiate heat “like rocks in a sauna” and can thus be used as a cabin heater. I had never heard of this idea before and tried it on Sea Lab’s Origo alcohol stove; sure enough, it works quite well, certainly well enough to warm up our small cabin on a chilly morning while I’m sipping my coffee and swinging on the anchor in a secluded bay.
Back in real time next to the woodstove, I’m grateful for these logs, and the practice of keeping them. Their tangible utility notwithstanding, paging through and remembering these trips is satisfying like looking at old photo albums. Though we have many years of happy boating adventures ahead of us, it’s fun to reminisce and track our whereabouts, memories, and learnings. At the very least, records like these come in handy if you ever want to write a column for your favorite boating magazine.
Dennis, Tekla, and Tim Tim the sailor dog recently changed their home cruising waters from Tacoma to Case Inlet.
