Translation Madness

I've been pounding the keyboard like a gaucho's thirsty horse galloping for the nearest waterhole. Whew! I was almost frothing at the mouth by the time I completed the first version of a 56-page translation. Teka, the cat, slept right through all the action, as usual.

Lazy Cat

It was Tuesday afternoon and the translation was due the following Monday. That left me with plenty of time for the revision and final reading, and also some free time to do something worth doing.

It was too late in the day to go anywhere. I decided to update the confessional (blog), but it didn't take long to realize that my mind was drained and drifting. That's when a random unrelated thought popped into my head: Jakatar's Hurth transmission has lost that sweet "clunk" sound when shifting into forward. In fact, it has already given me a few "=/&$#, I'm screwed" moments while maneuvering in the marina.

That got me thinking about a 37-foot sailboat that lost its steering while exiting the marina and then rammed Jakatar (my boat).  His boat, with a blue hull is on the left, Jakatar is on the right facing this way. This is how the owner described the situation on the phone:

Accident scene

"I motored ahead and by the time I realized I had no steering, I was almost on the rocks. So I put it in reverse, but it began to go sideways before colliding with your boat. My God, your boat is built like a tanker, I barely scratched the gelcoat with the anchor. Anyway, you better come down and have a look."

Yeah, right! He forgot to mention that his anchor locked horns with my Voyager windvane, leaving it bent and cracked, before it proceeded to plow a nice long gouge in the gelcoat. Ouch!!!

Let his boat insurance take care of it.
I didn't want to inflict that sort of damage on any other boat, or my own, because of a faulty transmission.

Instead of meditating or going for a walk, I started thinking about my transmission woes.

Where the hell was I going to get a transmission in Portugal, and for a decent price even if I did manage to find one. It was time to saddle up the computer again and cruise UK sites for boat transmissions.

These are the times when I wish I was back in North America where you can get anyting you want, when you want and without hassles. Sure, I could order one through the Internet, but I'm through with importing equipment from anywhere outside the EU: the customs authorities crucify you with absurd import taxes and paperwork. You learn to take the path of least resistance.

Next Morning

So this morning I got up early as usual, around 6:30, exercised in the attic for 30 minutes, performed the morning rituals and plopped myself down onto the saddle to start revising the translation.

Just about fell off the chair when I opened the folder containing the original file and realised I had to translate five files.  How could I forget something like that? No wonder I was doing so well.

Some days I wish I could be a cat and sleep the day away.

Translation Blues

From my office window I watch the sunset while plugging away at another large translation. Zero Life on a short leash.

This Old Boat

Today was a boat day. That means I translate on the boat, make my famous vegetable stew and, if I'm lucky, do a bit of boat work.

Got the large translation done before lunch, way ahead of schedule. That's because I work like a maniac before boat days to get ahead. Translating at high intensity can distort your face...not to speak of your mind, as proven in the photograph below.

The pain of wrestling with words in the Toshiba

After lunch I took a relaxed walk through the marina to ventilate my spleen. Then I put another layer of white paint on the panels I had started to paint the other day and finished just Before Luis showed up.

Luis came to look at the gelcoat damage in order to write up an estimate for the insurance company.

Two weeks ago a 37 foot hunter lost its steering and rammed Jakatar (that's my boat) with its Delta anchor which then got tangled with my windvane. The skipper gunned the engine and now my Voyager windvane is toast. The other guy's insurance is paying the bill, let's hope.

Luis runs a boat shop and also owns a sailboat. We sat in the cockpit looking at this character boat that had sailed in yesterday.

Boat going to paradise

"Some guys are smarter than others," said Luis looking at the boat. "Some people work years and years to buy an expensive boat and these two [referring to the youngish hippie-like couple] probably paid next to nothing for the boat and here they are, going places we only dream of."

Although a lot of people would kill to be sitting on a sailboat on a beautiful sunny day, our minds were fixated on loftier goals. But don't worry, I won't start cackling about "living the life", since that topic has already been talked and written about to pulp...so much so, that it has become mere pulp fiction populated by faceless souls despairing about their personal doldrums. If you're reading this you must already know the score. Unfortunately, I know it all too well.

Welcome to Zero, it's time to find our Zen.

Boat Maintenance

Owning an old sailboat can be a curse or a blessing, depending on your personality, your mood at any given moment and on how many things need fixing, varnishing or just plain head scratching.

I've come to the conclusion that if you strive for perfection buy a new boat, otherwise you're likely to become crankier than an old Hurth transmission.


Having finished a fairly large translation on Wednesday, I drove to the marina Thursday morning to do a little maintenance. I could call it "Zen and the art of boat maintenance", but that would be about as kitsch as a flock of pink flamingos on my lawn. Nevertheless, boat maintenance can become a spiritual and liberating experience, to me anyway.

Today I decided to try some interior painting. The bare panel in the picture below has been bugging me far too long. It's also sagging and needs trim to hold the edges firmly in place.

Sagging panel with light fixture

While I was at it, why not paint the panel on the portside over the stove and, to get more mileage out of the brush, may as well paint the bare plywood in the pots and pans cupboard.
If anybody is looking for painting tips - forget it. I took the panels down, sanded them with 220 and slopped paint over them, one coat in the morning the other in the afternoon.

First coat

In the interval I made a tomato, pepper, onion, sweet corn and tuna concoction that would have tasted even better if I hadn't forgotten the wine. I also ran the engine for a while in reverse and forward to confuse the barnacles camping on the propeller. Amazing creatures, they could stick to a spinning propeller from here to China and arrive just as sane and healthy as if they had been sitting still all their lives.

That was enough "Zen maintenance" for the day. On the way home, I fed our vacationing friends' 7 cats and took this picture of the coastline.

Coastline view. Click on the picture and you'll see the "Cabo Carvoeiro" cape in the distance and the Berlenga Islands to the left under the cloud formation.

Boat Maintenance

Owning an old sailboat can be a curse or a blessing, depending on your personality, your mood at any given moment and on how many things need fixing, varnishing or just plain head scratching.

I've come to the conclusion that if you strive for perfection buy a new boat, otherwise you're likely to become crankier than an old Hurth transmission.


Having finished a fairly large translation on Wednesday, I drove to the marina Thursday morning to do a little maintenance. I could call it "Zen and the art of boat maintenance", but that would be about as kitsch as a flock of pink flamingos on my lawn. Nevertheless, boat maintenance can become a spiritual and liberating experience, to me anyway.

Today I decided to try some interior painting. The bare panel in the picture below has been bugging me far too long. It's also sagging and needs trim to hold the edges firmly in place.

Sagging panel with light fixture

While I was at it, why not paint the panel on the portside over the stove and, to get more mileage out of the brush, may as well paint the bare plywood in the pots and pans cupboard.
If anybody is looking for painting tips - forget it. I took the panels down, sanded them with 220 and slopped paint over them, one coat in the morning the other in the afternoon.

First coat

In the interval I made a tomato, pepper, onion, sweet corn and tuna concoction that would have tasted even better if I hadn't forgotten the wine. I also ran the engine for a while in reverse and forward to confuse the barnacles camping on the propeller. Amazing creatures, they could stick to a spinning propeller from here to China and arrive just as sane and healthy as if they had been sitting still all their lives.

That was enough "Zen maintenance" for the day. On the way home, I fed our vacationing friends' 7 cats and took this picture of the coastline.

Coastline view. Click on the picture and you'll see the "Cabo Carvoeiro" cape in the distance and the Berlenga Islands to the left under the cloud formation.

Marina Visit and a Sad Story

Sunday 6/11/2011

I drove 15 km to the marina to check on the boat on a typical autumn day in Portugal, under a patchwork of grey clouds splattered onto the sharp blue sky.

The port’s parking lot was still fenced off because of the recent stormy weather, so I parked the jeep near the fort and walked across the empty cheerless pavement to the marina entrance feeling the breeze that had lost its warmth.

At the boat, I dried the bilges, changed the alarm battery, readjusted the fenders a bit and left. It was one of those days when you don’t have the time or the inclination to start doing any real maintenance work. This, of course, triggered a vague feeling of guilt and sorrow.

On the way out I checked on Ryker, my Dutch buddy who has been living mostly in Peniche for a number of years. I found him sitting in the cabin of his 7 m fishing boat reading a magazine.

“Come with me,” he said, “I want to show you something.”

We walked to the transient dock and stood looking at a beautifully varnished 13 m ketch with wood masts. The lifelines were cluttered with drying clothes, but nobody was aboard.

Ryker told me how the French owner had worked seven years to restore the boat to its current pristine condition, during which time he was consumed with the dream of sailing to the Caribbean with his wife and daughter.

The hiccup was that they got caught in some nasty weather sailing down the coast, and that was it. The wife and daughter were through with sailing! This was the end of the line.

Anyway, the owner wanted my opinion on the best place to leave the boat for the winter. I told Ryker that Nazaré, only 20 miles north, would be my pick. It’s a small sheltered port and the marina is tucked into a corner protected from the wakes of commercial fishing boats. He could also put it on the hard, if he wished.

As we stood there discussing the situation, part of me wandered off into a daydream in which I sailed to the Caribbean, crossed an ocean again and lived carefree in warm foreign anchorages.

Then I though about how the French owner had worked during his spare time for seven years driven by daydreams of embarking on this very voyage that had now shipwrecked at this sorrowful marina. That's when it occurred to me that it was no longer autumn, it was already winter.

Checking a lonely boat

Stormy Weather

I'm pretty much always working on one or various translations at the same time. Right now I have a legal document due on the 11th, a one-page assignment due tomorrow and another that I finished today right after lunch.

Since Windguru is forecasting stiff wind and waves of nearly 8 meters from the west for tonight and tomorrow, I drove the old jeep out to Peniche to add an extra fender and more lines to the boat. Waves that high will leap over the breakwater and wash into the marina causing the boats to strain at the lines and to act like rocking horses.

I was going to work on the boat (translating, not boat work) Thursday, but it doesn't seem very feasible trying to concentrate with the wind whistling off shrouds, halyards slapping against masts, nylon lines groaning against cleats and the constant rocking action.

Here's what it looks like on a bad day.

The picture was taken by someone else from a marina pontoon.

Here's the unfortunate result. Picture taken from a local newspaper report last year.

The same breakwater on a normal day. Note the number of tetrapods for added protection.

This aerial view gives you an idea of the port's configuration.

And then there is this google earth shot.

This big boat has been here for a couple of weeks with lots of young people aboard. I hear the captain discovered that one of his wooden masts is rotting.

Zero is Now

I'm back to zero!
I'm standing still again.
I'm watching the parade.

The economic crisis rained on my escape plan. It's not that I'm broke, I've merely been short-changed.

The tide has changed and so has the blog. Forget about my past. Nobody wants to read yesterday's news, even if it's a good story. But if you're still curious about how I got this way, then read the early blog entries. That's all the information you'll need to make sense of this journey.

"Zen to Zero" is a metaphor for what is happening now, for my current predicament after taking that one damn wrong turn. Years of struggling for total freedom wasted like all the hats I've lost at sea.

As of today, I unveil me, right now, right here in Peniche.

Maybe I'll still reminisce about the glory days now and then, but I'm sure you'll forgive me for it.



Jakatar, my white Corbin 39 pilothouse sailboat in the center. The strange yellow boat was built in a nearby town by a Russian carpenter.

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