#24 Countdown!

Have you ever been in (or to) a drag race?

I think I see two parallels between this boating adventure and my old drag racing days. Let me try to explain…

Have you ever been in (or to) a drag race? Like on a regulation drag strip with a Christmas tree, (the start lights) a timer, a crowd watching, and cut-throat competition eyeing your car? To get there, months, sometimes years go into preparation for one moment in time; an intense few seconds-long blast of speed. The car itself requires modification, design, planning, and constant tweaking to make it go faster. Not unlike a Samurai’s thousand-times folded sword, the car and its modifications become an intimate relationship forged from hours and hours of painstaking restoration. Each part polished, massaged and carefully installed, a race car represents far more than a hobby. It’s more of a symbiosis, maybe how an artist feels about his sculpture, or the connection between a rider and his horse.

This is a little taste of what it’s like:

Once you get to the track and check in the excitement really builds. You can hear cars making timing runs in the distance and you smell fuel and rubber. The scene is beer, loud music, crowds, and cars everywhere. Good old boys zip around on four-wheelers like mosquitos. You unload the car, do one last check of fuel level and tire pressures, fire it up, get in line for a warm-up pass or two. Getting excited now.

Finally, the moment arrives. You make it to the front of the line and the hot black drag strip lies before you. The race is on! The car itself rumbles with excitement. The announcer is talking, you hear your name called as you pull up to the burnout pit. The crowd is paying attention now. As you pull into the burnout pit you light up the tires to warm them up, clouds of white smoke billowing as the engine roars like a dinosaur. Then you back up until the yellow light tells you the front tires are in the right spot on the line. This is it. All that preparation has compressed into a single moment in time, when that Christmas tree goes green and all the time, money, and preparation coalesce into a few endless seconds of acceleration. Your heart pounds like it did the first time a girl kissed you. The next few seconds will determine how big a trophy you might win and how big a payout, but the reality is, it will define this moment in time forever. Sitting on the starting line of a drag strip, encased in fire gear, gloves and a helmet, hot, nervous, excited, this is a moment that will never fade from memory. And hey, a payout would be nice, racing is like farming, you have to have a real job to pay for it. That’s not why anyone does it, of course, it’s all for that fleeting few seconds when you are so intensely focused and alive. All the prep is worth it, at that moment.

The Christmas tree light goes green. Faster than lightning you hit the gas and drop the clutch. A jolt of electricity, fear, adrenalin blasts through you as the rumble of the engine changes to a banshee-like scream as the throttle slammed wide open injects high-pressure fuel and the blower packs air into the roaring maw of the engine. The clutch bites, tires smoke and melt asphalt as your head slams into the padded headrest and you shoot off the line like a shell out of a cannon. You can’t hear, the world is drowned out by the bellowing exhaust, the car roaring like an animal, pulling like never before. You slam into second gear, a delicate and complex dance of shifter, clutch, gears and horsepower, the nose of the car straining for every inch. Your foot is holding the gas pedal down with maniacal strength, your leg a conduit of adrenalin into the car as you force the car faster and faster with pure will. Bam, bam, two more times you shift as you eye your tach so as not to over-rev the engine, and eye your opponent who is right beside you, screaming down the track with as much determination as you’ve got. We both intend to win.

The finish line flashes underneath you and… it’s over.

So what the heck does any of this have to do with boating? First, the preparation. Getting a boat ready to cruise for a year is every bit as all-consuming as prepping a race car. In my case, I want to make it around the Loop without any major breakdowns. With a race car, you want to make it down the drag strip without any major breakdowns. So the amount of thought you put in to each project, the preparation, the advance planning, is in spirit much the same.

Second, the feeling of pushing off the dock, of untying those dock lines, knowing you are not going to be coming back to the same safe and well-known slip, is a heady feeling. Maybe not as loud or exciting as launching a car down the track, but somehow, the sense of impending adventure is also, in spirit, much the same. I clearly remember the feeling of pulling up the anchor early one morning to head across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas for the first time. That is a memory every bit as vivid and permanent as any drag race.

Not the best analogy, perhaps, but it’s what I know. And yes, it’s an obsolete sport, in this age of silent electric cars and the need for renewable energy. I’m not blind to that. But 45 years ago it was a different world. What I’m trying to describe is what I think is a basic human desire for some; to pursue that heady feeling of anticipation, flavored with a bit of trepidation, and baked with excitement.

So, other than reminiscing about drag racing, what have we been doing? We made a quick trip up to Elkmont to camp, once again a very refreshing way to spend a couple of days. The weather was awesome, 50’s at night, 70’s daytime, it felt great. It gave us a chance to unwind and to enjoy all the improvements we’ve done to the camping trailer.

Somehow, all the work on the boat seems to be, impossibly, but remarkably, just about done. I started this with three yellow legal pad pages of lists, added to those almost daily, scratched items off as fast as I got them done so that they never seemed to diminish, and yet, bam! My list now has three items on it, none of which are big deals. I just wrote them down so I’d remember to do them. We have spares, solar, Starlink, AIS, more spares, and, well, just about everything we can think of. Everything works. The dingy starts with one pull. Icemaker, refrigerator, A/C, all are humming along. The generator, a problem for a while, seems to be whipped into shape. Turns out a bad starter was the cause of my fried wiring, all is replaced now. The boat has been polished, it looks great. Props are clean and painted. Fenders have been organized and all dock lines are ready to go. We get new canvas on top soon, as well as a sunshade over the rear part of the boat. iPad has all the apps, all working. We have NeboLink now so there’s a new menu item at the top of our homepage, “Where Are We?” That link will show you where the boat is, and if we’re moving, a live track. And finally, the unrelenting (and costly) flow of boat parts and packages from Amazon has tricked to almost nothing!

Cheryl has been hard at work cleaning and organizing the boat as the next thing is to basically move aboard. Am I going to be able to relax a bit now? I don’t know, really. I know I can and should, but I’m so used to going gangbusters it will take me a while to slow down. I told Cheryl maybe I’ll take a harmonica along and teach myself to play while we travel. She just gave me the eye, so maybe not. Cheryl is keeping track of the days left, as of this writing it’s at 63. When she puts it like that, departure seems imminent. (When she tells me two months, that sounds better.) A little unnerving to think I’ll be moving in 63 days from my house to a boat. That alone requires a list of things to do!

We have a couple of marina reservations made down south, and we have a tentative push-off date, November 1^st. We’ve signed up for the Rendezvous in Orange Beach so we need to be there by November 16^th. We have a month booked in Key West, so I’ll finally get to hang out there with old friends and bike ride all over the island again.

It’s not a drag race and we don’t have a Christmas tree start, but the light is going to turn green for us very soon. Both of us are excited to get this show on the road!

Here’s a taste of the Smokies. I really enjoy living only 18 miles from this!