Daze Off

As more than a few Town Dock readers have reminded us, our Shipping News has been on hiatus for much of the past year. But we’re back, and will be watching the Town Dock and waterfront, on the lookout for boats, their captains and their stories.

It just so happens -- honest -- that the first boat’s captain we talked to in 2006, delivered a line that will sound very much like Shipping News is picking up from where it left off:

“I bought the boat in the US and am sailing it back to England.”

That’s what Peter Ramsden said over his morning coffee at the Bean on the first Friday of the new year. An innocent enought line, but for several who heard him say that, it brought a smile and visions of another Shipping News and another British sailor.

But all boats and their owners have their own story.



Peter Ramsden’s starts with the mountains.

He climbs them, has done so most of his life, he says. And, having sailed since he was 8, he wanted to combine the two. He wanted a boat that could take him to mountains around the world.

Thing is, a lot of those harbors with those extreme land masses near the water turn out to be in the more extreme latitudes. There’s Greenland and the fjords of Scandinavia in the Northern Hemisphere. Patagonia in the Southern. Places that, as Peter Ramsden understates it, “have difficult water.” For that he needed a boat that could bash about, and not be thwarted by the occasional scrape with ice. A “plastic” or fiberglass boat wouldn’t do. He was looking for metal.

He found the boat he was looking for -- “Daze Off” -- in Annapolis in August of 2004. Compared to the teak-laden Taiwanese-made boat next to it , he says, “Daze Off” looked like “a 4x4 off-road vehicle.”

It’s a Trisalu, made in Quebec, one of only six in the world. She’s 37-1/2 feet long, cutter-rigged, and though made of aluminum, the hull does not have the hard-chines usually associated with metal boats. She draws 3-1/2 feet with the centerboard up.



When he bought her, “Daze Off” -- he declined to change the name for fear of bad luck -- needed a lot of work.

Among other things, a new centerboard. Looking for details on how to do that, he found the boat’s designer, JP Brounes on the Internet. He says he called Brounes in France, and they talked. “It turned out, “ Peter says, “that he’d never been paid for his design” by the company that made the boats. It fell on Peter to pay him for plans so he could rebuild the centerboard. That set him back 200 Euros.

In the lazarette, he says, he found the fittings for two dagger-boards -- since blocked up. It’s one of the projects that lays ahead.

In between stints at his job in England -- he encourages entrepreneurship in England’s more economically challenged regions, among groups such as women who have traditionally not gone in to small business -- Peter flew back to the Chesapeake and worked on fitting out the boat.

Though his intention is to eventually sail it to chilly mountains-- “I like cold places” he says -- cold boat yards don’t hold the same charm. 20 degree temps on the Bay this past December set back the boat work, and prompted him to move southward in search of warmer weather.

Peter’s stop in Oriental came on his trek toward Jacksonville, Florida. He plans to do some work, then leave “Daze Off” there for several months, go back to work in England and then fly to Florida to sail her to England before hurricane season starts in June.

Sailing and Mountaineering
Because this boat is linked with Peter’s plans to go to mountains, we were curious about the comparisons to be made between mountaineering and sailing. He’s done both for most of his life. As a child he learned to sail off the English shore and spent much time hiking in the Midlands and the mountainous coast of Britain. (A point of reference: till recently, he lived about 5 miles from the Peak District manse in the newest film version of “Pride and Prejudice.”)

There are, he says, similarities that ‘sort of thread’ through both sailing and mountain climbing. And while he says that “climbing is a challenge in a ‘purer’ way,” at the moment he describes the sailing as “the important thing”.

By his quiet telling, sailing brings its own particular challenges .. and rewards.

One of them came a few days before we spoke. He'd sailed in one -- very long -- day from Manteo to Oriental on January 4th. He’d left Manteo after first light because of the ‘tricky channel’ there. That late start meant it was an hour before midnight by the time he was approaching Oriental, or as he saw it, “coming in to a harbor I don’t know.”

He found the ‘green buoy’ -- we’re presuming Oriental #1. Everything, he says, was going “brilliantly.” So much so that he “ decided not to use GPS”.

He’s not against GPS. He has three on board. And as he says, “God knows how sailors survived before GPS.” But at that moment, he simply didn’t want to use it.

There wasn’t much in the way of moonlight, just him ‘shining a torch” (flashlight) to pick out the next mark, a red one.

Now, at this point, Peter says, he had to “concentrate phenomenally about which side of the red buoy to stay on.” ( We pause for a moment here to address any smirking American sailor who may be wondering how someone could possibly forget the red-right-return mantra. A reminder: that British-American difference of opinion over which side of the ‘road’ to stay on, applies on the water, too. In Britain, it’s green-right-return.)

That confusion is likely what led Peter to sail to the right of the red maker. This would have been okay in England but near Oriental, this put him and “Daze Off” uncomfortably close to the rip-rap boulders of the harbor’s breakwater. He backed up in time, returned to the green mark, got his American R-R-R bearings, made his way to the harbor and at last, dropped anchor.

In the grand scheme, Peter says, getting in to the harbor that night “was a small thing. ” But there was at the same time, “that total experience of being very much there in the moment. Being out .... and then suddenly.... in.” Peter says, “That same sense that sailors have had through history,” of finding safe harbor. (And without GPS. )



There may be parallels on mountaintops. But you can fully appreciate a calm harbor only if you’ve been battered about by the sea and the winds, or just had a close shave.

In a quiet manner, Peter Ramsden makes a case for other under-appreciated challenges and rewards of sailing. Namely, problems .. and solving them. There was the line that wrapped around the prop in the Dismal Swamp. In which instance, he learned the virtues of his new boat’s transom and a few bruises later, the limitations of the ladder he had draped over to cut off the wrapped line.

Getting a boat ready for a big voyage -- such as the one he has planned across the Atlantic -- tests a person, too.

“It’s complicated,” he says, “fixing a boat. A lot to sort out.” One lesson came on yet another late night while he was in Oriental. He realized that the water tanks he’d installed had not been riveted properly. So, he says, “at about 11pm, I had to drill out the rivets and then re-do it.”

The nuts and bolts reason: “When on the boat, there’s no point in having something half-finished... cos you know it will break.” But beyond that, he finds something to savor in what many might dismiss as the drudgery of boat work.

He says these jobs help him “rediscover my own ability and...determination .. and resolution..." He pauses... then adds, "which I think I’d lost.”

Once he gets the boat back to England this summer, he says he may live on board, if he can find a spot near London where he’ll be working. His work may keep him from tackling Patagonia right away -- it would require a lot of time off. And as much as he’d love to go to Sweden or Greenland eventually on “Daze Off” Peter is re-thinking some of the original mission for the boat. For one, he says, he’s wondering where he’d put all the gear necessary for mountaineering. . And as for sailing in to a harbor and then climbing mountains nearby, that could mean weeks away from the boat.. and the need to find crew to stay with it.

Those though, may just be some more challenges to be met along the way.