The Westlake Pirates

With the survey completed and the title transfered, Kristin and I bid farewell to our time on the lake, with just the kayak remaining as our link to the water. It was fun, educational, occasionally annoying, and overall a very good experience (other than a few days last November!)

This blog has now run its course and reached its final harbor. The archives are securely anchored for future reading, but new comments will be turned off in a few days' time. You can always contact us by e-mail.

Many safe sailings to one and all.

-S & K (and the cats)

Posted by Steve at 1:04 PM | Permalink

Once again the nice weather seems to have us doing things other than updating the website. It's not that we haven't been busy, but a lot of it has been dull and uneventful.

The garden was quite prolific this summer, and I'll have a report on that once it's done producing. We recently sold our kitchen nook and table and are in the process of making the front living area into a much more comfortable 'living room' oriented room, rather than the big hard-seated kitchen it was. There will be some pictures of that as soon as we've made one or two more trips to Ikea.

There are a few big construction/repair projects afoot in the near term, too. One involves finally installing a range hood to help vent all that steamy air when we cook. That's about half done and nearly ready to install - I just need to find my hacksaw and cut a few pieces of sheet metal for the venting!

The bigger project is going to involve repairing/replacing all the rotted bulkheads beneath the floor. We knew when we got the boat that they were in bad shape (for some reason the Cruise-A-Homes were built with cheap normal plywood instead of marine-grade, and the ends of the wood weren't sealed with epoxy, so nearly all the boats have had similar problems.) This has finally reached the point where most of the dividers are flaking, cracking and generally breaking apart. The repairs appears to be straightforward, though noisy and probably a bit messy.

The added advantage will be that we could also remove the original aluminum gas tanks and holding tank and replace them with fiberglass tanks that are easier to maintain and clean, or leave one fuel tank out for additional storage space.

Posted by Steve at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the Fourth of July, we had every element - wind, water, earth and fire. A lot of fire. Nature started things out early with a thunderstorm in the wee hours, sending me scrambling out of bed to close a few windows and cover a cardboard box that was sitting outside on the front deck. That passed by rapidly enough and the morning was partly cloudy. Decent weather to set everything up for fireworks, and to tend to the plants and do some weeding.

The afternoon was beautiful, with the sun out and almost every boat on the lake occupied by crowds ready for a party. Shortly before the fireworks a second thunderstorm rolled through with about fifteen minutes of rain and lots of impressive bolts of lightning, which is plenty unusual for Seattle. Things cleared up again in time for the fireworks, which I'm sure Kristin has lots more to say (and post pictures) about.

Little did we know the real adventure of the evening was to follow about two hours later. Kristin returned from retrieving Delia (who was safely housed elsewhere due to the evening's noise) and commented about something apparently burning across the lake. I went out on the pier to discover this:

That's a massive four-alarm dock fire directly across the lake. Lots more pictures and background below the fold.

Continue reading "Smoke on the water" »

Posted by Steve at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Posted by Steve at 8:39 PM | Permalink

This lemon queen sunflower heard there were going to be lots of photos and a post about all the plants and rushed to pop out. Alas, she's a little slow. A late bloomer, if you will.

Posted by Steve at 10:34 AM | Permalink

Happy spring, everyone! We've been treated to some ridiculously beautiful weather lately, and I've been told it's a bit of a fluke since we're not supposed to see the sun til after July 4. Well, tell that to our "Autumn Beauty" sunflower that bloomed yesterday! Like any good Seattle-ite, she's not waiting for an invitiation to enjoy some bright sunshine. A few months early, but hey -- we'll take it.

I love plants and flowers and gardening. In theory. What this means is that I dreamed up a fantastical garden brimming with a million species of flora, and I tell Steve about it. He buys the greenhouse, the seeds, the soil and supplies, and then waters the babies diligently daily. Then I enjoy the fruits of his labor. I am quite grateful that not only does he have a green thumb, but a green brain and heart as well.

The plants that I actually take responsibility for are my collection of succulents because they live in sand and can go a month between waterings.

So in our dreary February, I had visions of morning glory vines twirling about the handrails, moonflowers climbing the radar arch, sunflowers bursting from their pots, and the air heavy with the sappy smell of sweet peas in bloom. And Steve pretty much made it all happen. Most of the plants I have pictures of here were grown from seeds in our tiny Ikea greenhouse on our kitchen counter. The sunflower, if you can believe it. The clematis was actually a sprout when we brought it home, but it's now taking over the portside upper deck.

For those of you on dial-up connections, you can click on these photos to open up a larger version and see all the brightly colored detail. Oh and my parents finally got DSL! If they did it, anyone can do it. ;)

I wanted to plant Dahlias in honor of Delia, because her name was originally Dahlia. Then Dehlia. Then Delia. This pink beauty burst out to introduce herself last week.

This is the afore mentioned lotus blossom.

The fushia is dropping handfuls of gorgeous pink, purple and violet blossoms all over the dock.

There is absolutely nothing in the world like waking up and going to the upper deck to spend a few moments of early morning sunshine with a vine of bright purple blossoms nodding their heads in the breeze in a salute to sunrise.

Jasper likes to keep an eye on the marina. if anything is amiss, he sounds his Siamese foghorn.

Our new kayak!

I forget what these are named but I picked them out because they were purple.
I'm sure Green Boy knows what they're called.

Steve adds: They're petunias. And the red flowering plants between them are Salvia splendens. To be fair, I did have to go and check my notes.

I love that sunflowers look like they're waving and shouting an excited "HI!". This one is an Autumn Beauty, and the other blooms should be various October
colors like orange and yellow and chocolate.

Posted by Kristin at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

That's the boat, as seen by Windows Live Local, a new service by Microsoft that's meant to compete with Google Maps and Google Earth. The marina image in Google Maps (see the above link) is at least three years old, given the condition of Westlake and the parking lot, both of which were reconstructed by the city in 2004, and Google Earth uses the same images, so in both regards they're not as good.

The Live Local image shown above is much more recent, since we're in it. By the looks of the marina, it was taken last summer, perhaps in June. You can see the whole image here and wander around. It defaults to a more distant zoom, so click the big building image at top left to zoom in to the highest resolution. The one thing Live Local lacks is high-resolution images outside of major metropolitan areas, so Google's got them beat in that regard, even though the zoom on LL is a lot better (and more recent!) where it exists.

This at least explains some of those mysterious helicopters we saw hovering around town last summer...

Posted by Steve at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, delivery day passed without an entry (sorry!) but we haven't forgotten about you!

Year two kicked off with some excitement as we purchased a kayak! You can probably see it in the lower right of the webcam image - it's the red thing lashed to the upper rails. It's been out for a quick spin in the marina, but neither of us has braved the open lake yet to see just how good we are at keeping upright.

Meanwhile, on the construction side of things, progress continues as well! The final things on the bedroom to-do list are falling one by one. There are shiny new bookshelves against the closet wall, and nice hemlock molding around the ceiling, making that room look much like the front room does with wooden ribs. All that remains is a bit of molding around the port window and everything will be done.

One sticking point (pun intended) for a long time were the doors. There are wheels on the bottom of each door that are supposed to facilitate rolling them open and closed, but all three doors dragged unpleasantly for some time. The weather was finally nice enough to take the doors off for a while, put some screening up to keep the cats inside, and take a look at them. It's amazing what a little WD-40 and grease will do, and now they glide to and fro with the lightest of touches, just like they did thirty one years ago!

On all of this (and more, no doubt) Kristin has lots of photographs and lovely prose ready and waiting, so be sure to check back again very soon.

Posted by Steve at 3:51 PM | Permalink

Well actually, no... not quite. But it was a year ago today that we had the original boat surveyed and discovered that it wasn't up to snuff for the asking price. It's still afloat, mind you (and finally sold for quite a bit less to an older couple who had been doing quite a bit of rehab work every weekend until the weather got crappy...), but in the end we still made out much better that we would have.

The website itself turned a year old on Saturday, and next Sunday (April 2) marks a year since we put a deposit down on the new boat. Amazing how time flies when you're busy repairing thirty year old woodwork. Imagine if we'd bought a hundred year old house! (Well, the pirate theme would've been a bit weird in that case, but ignore that.)

Stay tuned, as year two promises to fulfill everything that year one hinted at.

...assuming the weather gets warm and sunny, of course.

Posted by Steve at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I promise we haven't been entirely slacking, despite the lack of recent updates to the site. (If you've been reading the Weather Blog, you'd know I've at least been trying to keep that page up-to-date.) Spring has sprung, and there's big plans for the boat this year, since hopefully we won't have much maintenance work to do other than a good scrubbing of the decks to wash off a year's worth of algae and grit.

Kristin has been plotting for how to turn the upper deck into an exciting Martha Stewart-approved resort, plush with plants, lights, and comfy chairs. I'm sure she'll have more on most of that later. On the plant side of things, though, we wanted to get an early start this year. The tomatoes last year were nice and all, but they really didn't produce like I was hoping they would, so this time around we're going a more floral and herbal route. Over the past few weeks we've picked up probably a dozen different types of seeds, from morning glory to poppies to sunflowers to cilantro. We've started them inside in Dixie cups, and they're at the point now that we're out of counter space and they need more sun, so on Tuesday, we bought a greenhouse at Fred Meyer, and I proceeded to assemble it in the light drizzle yesterday, so we could move everyone outside but keep them somewhat protected from the elements.

Continue reading "Green grows the house" »

Posted by Steve at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've moved the blog over to Movable Type, because Kristin promises me that it's much better than Pivot, and to boot she got a free copy through some complicated story involving having good timing on some deals they had and such.

The old entries (and comments) are still here, but some need to be gone through manually to fix things like all the links to pictures... if you find any broken links or missing images, let us know. The layout and other such stuff will be upgraded in the near term as well.

Plus Kristin promises she's going to blog like twenty times more often than she was prior to this upgrade.

Posted by Steve at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Apologies for the recent flakiness of the site. It seems that either our DSL modem has failed or there's water in the dockside connection box from the seven inches of rain we received in the past two weeks. Either way it means I have to reset the router when it craps out, which varies from between every five minutes and every few days. Hopefully things will resolve themselves soon on that front.

There are still lots of posts to get around to, including about the electrical system and our shiny new dining nook, but as usual, we're slacking with updating.

And in case you're wondering, we had a fine time ringing in the New Year at the Tractor Tavern with The Long Winters performing. Bring on the new year!

Posted by Steve at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The weather has been dry (though foggy) for many days now, and the camera was successfully dried out and returned to service. It's back on the roof for the time being, although still lacking a weatherproof enclosure... so it'll be back inside when the raindrops start falling again.

Meanwhile, there have been numerous construction adventures to report about. Primarily, the DC electrical distribution system was rebuilt this weekend (more to follow on that in a future entry), and I've just obtained a weather station so there will be real-time weather reports from the boat in the near future, as well.

Oh, and I've heard rumors that there's going to be a Thanksgiving feast of epic proportions coming this Thursday...

Posted by Steve at 12:43 PM | Permalink

My Dad took this photo when my parents were here visiting in August. You can pretend we live here, if it makes you feel better. It's actually the "gated houseboat community" next door. Our community is gated, too, but the gate's usually open during business hours.

Posted by Kristin at 1:42 PM | Permalink

Ahoy me hearties! Today be Talk Like A Pirate Day, ye' scurvy dogs! Ye' landlubbers best get to that webpage and laaarn some swarthy speak. If ye' don't laaarn right quick, ye' will be in Davey Jone's locker fore the morn!

Posted by Steve at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So this weekend I went to Fry's and picked up a D-Link wireless webcam. I saw this item in one of their ads many moons ago, but at the time it was sold out, so when I saw it on sale again I zipped over, hoping that everyone who wanted one had picked it up the first time. What luck, they were in stock!

Now, it's a bit wonky in the setup (such that you can't access it without using a password), so I've got a bit of hacking to do on this end to seamlessly incorporate it into the website. But, for the time being, you can check it out by doing the following:

First, remember this word: cam. That will be both your username and password (all lower-case for both) for when it prompts you. Then, click this link (opens in a new window) and follow the prompts.

That's all! You'll see a nearly-live still image looking east-northeast from the top deck of our boat. At the moment, there's a few obstructions, such as the rail with lights wrapped around it in the foreground, and the neighboring boat (with the tan top), but that should be resolved once I build a little rain hut for the camera and mount it on the radar arch.

There's also two buttons on the left that will enable a live video feed from the camera. The 'Java' button is the more likely of the two to behave properly, but the ActiveX one supposedly gives a faster refresh rate. Either way the video will be a bit halting as it isn't really designed to do full-motion video, but it's still cool to watch the seaplanes and sailboats drift by, should you be quite bored. Stay tuned for when I've finished the hacking and there's better ways to access it, too!

Posted by Steve at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

So we're totally slacking on updating the site lately. Kristin's got some great stories and photos to post involving our adventures battling the mold, and I've got great pictures and details about the (nearly) complete bedroom, which now has the bed in it (along with us at night.) Plus there's all sorts of other adventures to talk about involving new propane systems, the cat going on the dinghy, getting the mattress and box spring into the boat, figuring out how to remove the windows to clean the tracks, discovering random bonus holes in the floor... and that's just in the past two weeks.

Why aren't these grand stories getting posted in a timely manner? Well take a look at our weather forecast and tell me that YOU would want to sit inside and write entries! :)

Meanwhile, though, the server has now officially moved onto the new computer on the boat, so not only is this a website talking about our adventures afloat, but the site itself is also afloat. Pretty cool what technology lets us do these days, eh?

Now about those other 934737 entries...

Posted by Steve at 9:53 PM | Permalink

Fourth of July on Lake Union was an adventure. They set the fireworks off across from our boat, so a few of the explosions looked like they were going to wrap around us. Steve was ready to reach for the fire extinguisher. We would have had the hose handy, but the water went out in the marina that day. Ironic, huh? Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop...

Delia seems to have recovered after an extensive retreat beneath the bed, and the impromptu encore of leftover fireworks launched at 1:00 in the morning did not help any of our mental states. All in all though, it was a fantastic day full of sunshine and salsa and guacamole. And grilled pineapple. And we finally got to show offf our grape lights.

Posted by Kristin at 10:32 PM | Permalink

'round the Octopus of Loooove! Some colorful weather we have here in Seattle. I took these photos from the upper deck of the boat. These pics should keep you busy while I write a real entry.

Posted by Kristin at 8:22 PM | Permalink

Sorry about the lack of access to the site yesterday. We had a lot of people worried that the server was on the boat and ten feet under water or something!

It was actually just a wireless router kerfuffle at my house, and a quick swift kick took care of things.

There's about 923743 pictures and videos from the launch to be posted in the very near future, but for now you can rest assured that the boat is safely at dock, and Delia is already over her ten seconds of panic about moving to a new place and has discovered all the tiny hatches and pass-throughs so she can scrub the bilge for us.

Posted by Steve at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

All righty then. We took the field trip down to Raymond yesterday (surprisingly, it's actually on the big US map on the wall here... but I think mostly for lack of anything else in the entire region that would outshine it.) It's roughly a two-hour drive, and aside from the occasional nasty rain squalls that lasted for an average of twenty minutes each (followed by twenty minutes of glaring sunshine), it was a lovely trek down.

We met with the man selling this boat, who manufactures catamarans for a living. He's an entertainingly crotchety old guy, who has clearly been on or around the water from roughly ten seconds after the umbilical cord was cut. Between his random information and the guy who did the survey on the first boat, I think we've now got more names and information that could be useful for re-surfacing the Titanic, let alone just dealing with a thirty year-old houseboat that's still afloat. Of course, half of our new contacts are only known by their first names (such as "my buddy Mike down at the marina on Lake Union... go talk to him," or "you know Steve at Butterfly Marine, well he told me the other day...") Anyway, he showed us the two Cruise-A-Homes they had there, both already out of the water and on blocks. The newer (1979) one was in the process of getting polished up and repainted, while the 1975 one had already been mostly dealt with, other than a final coat of paint. Plus, did I mention that it was like 40% cheaper than the first boat we were looking at? SOLD!

Continue reading "Game On!" »

Posted by Steve at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So it seems our initial boat is basically a rotten piece of junk. The marine surveyor came, and after about 923437 issues (detailed below), came to the conclusion that we would be crazy to continue our interest in said vessel.

It all starts as follows...
9 am: I'm to meet with the marine surveyor at the boat. MS is to drive the boat to his facility, where it can be dry-docked, given a good powerwashing, and inspected inside and out. This in itself is apparently unusual, for virtually all boat inspections are performed by having the current owner drive the boat to the surveyor. Regardless, waivers are faxed back and forth and by about 9:45 we're actually ready to go. This is the high point of the inspection.

Continue reading "Pardon the interruption..." »

Posted by Steve at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here are five pictures from the online listing, which will have to do until the rain stops and we get over there again with a camera...

Exterior shot:

Front room (sadly, the couch is already gone):

Continue reading "Some shots from the listing" »

Posted by Steve at 10:24 PM | Permalink

...well, we will soon. We just bought a houseboat!

Continue reading "Hi, we live here." »

Posted by Steve at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)