Ready To Launch!

 

Welcome to our blog.  We’re Damon & Janet Gannon, two marine biologists and unabashed ocean lovers.  The past few weeks have been pretty amazing.  We just quit our jobs in academia, sold our home (yeah housing bubble!), and moved aboard our sailboat.  We’re setting in motion a plan that we hatched over two decades ago.  

Our general idea is to migrate between the tropics (Bahamas) in winter and New England/Canadian Maritimes in summer.  Along the way, we hope to do some research, teaching, public speaking, photography, writing, and blogging.  A large part of our plan is to revisit field stations and marine labs where we’ve conducted research in the past.  We can’t wait to re-connect with friends and colleagues who collaborated on the various research projects in each location.  These people and places were key to shaping our personal understanding of marine science and to igniting our love of the ocean. 

Our plans are open-ended.  We don’t know how long we’ll do it for.  That depends on whether we can make money along the way and on whether we’re still speaking to each other while being confined to a very small living space.  As Lin and Larry Pardey said, we’ll keep doing it for “as long as it’s fun.”  

We’ll really miss all of our land-based friends, but will keep in touch with our blog posts. The topics will vary from sailing travel logs, to the absurdities of living aboard a small boat (with a large dog), to marine science and conservation.  (Note that in the past three weeks we’ve posted about manatee farts and headless fish.  Real highbrow stuff on Fulmar.)  We’ll try to keep it light and fun, even when dealing with heavy issues.  Our hope is that this blog pushes us to get out there and explore the ocean and meet the people who work every day to protect it.  

Check out the pages in the blog site.  Stay a while and make yourself at home.  Besides our regular posts and the narcissistic “All About US” pages, we have some pages on the wildlife we encounter, sounds in the sea (Jacques Cousteau lied to you when he said the sea is silent), and we have some great resources for young people interested in exploring marine biology as a career.  Check back frequently as we’ll try to keep the pages updated.

See you “out there.”

Solar Cooker Baguettes

It's hot here in Georgia.  Flippin' hot.  What's a girl to do?  

Mostly I hide down below, where we have some minimal AC (usually it's around 85 degrees in the boat).  But this weekend I got a hankering for some fresh-baked bread.  No way was I going to fire up the oven in the boat, so I broke out the solar oven.  This is the thermal version of "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

My amazing parents gifted us a GoSun Sport solar oven a couple of years ago.  I generally like the oven, although it has limitations.  One the one hand, it's small and straightforward.  On the other hand, it's small and hard to clean, especially on a boat.  It's great for things like pieces of meat or burritos.  I find it has limitations for things like rice though (I'm determined to solve the problem and use it more).  I've seen others make bread.  Given the very bright object in the sky that's smashing us with radiation, I thought I'd give it a try.

My recipe is very simple -- 2 parts flour to 1 part water plus a little salt.  I proof the yeast in the water with a little honey.  I could go no-knead with this but decided to give it a good knead just for fun.  After letting it rise and double in volume, I punched it down and divided it into two balls.  The GoSun was perfect for each 1/2 recipe.

Mixing the dough in the warmth of our galley

Pre-bread

Once a loaf was loaded into the canister, out in the blazing sun it went.  Just how strong is the sun here in Georgia?  One way to find out:  get out the UV heat gun and measure the temp on the dock:  142 degrees.  YIKES.  Bad for us, bad for the environment, great for cooking bread.  

When we say it's hot, we mean it's hot.

Under these conditions, the bread was mostly cooked after 45 minutes.  I pulled the canister out and removed the parchment paper at that point, but put the bread back in to brown up.

Mostly cooked but not browned.

Another 15 minutes and we had an amazing load of bread.  It was nice and browned and smelled incredible.  They say you're supposed to let bread cool before slicing it, but seriously, who do they think they're talking to?  Wait?  No way.  We sliced off a couple of chunks of baguette to check it out.

It looked great and smelled even better!

It was really good!

The verdict?  B for aesthetics and A+ for flavor/texture.  If any of you wonder why we're getting wider and wider, it's because we'll be enjoying solar cooker bread from now on.

Dinner featured split pea soup and grilled baguette (the sky clouded up for the second loaf so it didn't brown).  We love a terrific dinner aboard the boat.

  

In which we become houseless but not homeless

We just crossed the finish line of a marathon, and we're pretty dang happy about it.

Janet doesn't look too sweaty, considering she just finished a marathon!

Damon doesn't even have chafed nipples!  (If you're a man of a certain age and have ever run a marathon, you know about this.)  What's going on here?

Although this marathon didn't require us to strap on running shoes or cause body parts to chafe, it did require discipline, deprivation, and endless work.  Anyone who's made the transition to living aboard a boat full time can tell you that making the transition was an arduous task. We can attest, it's true.  Today, after almost a decade of planning, we succeeded in de-housing ourselves.

Who the heck would give this charming place up? (Us. We did.)

We started our journey in a 2100 sq ft house in Maine.  Buying that house had been exciting -- never in our wildest dreams had we imagined that a couple of goofs like us would ever have the money to buy such a nice house.  But we found ourselves living in only a couple rooms in that big house, and we were putting most of our money into it.  It didn't make sense, and we started to ask what we really wanted to be doing with our time and money.  Mow a lawn?  Heat a big house (in Maine)?  Spend our summers painting that beast?  The answer, on all counts, was "no."  We wanted to spend more time on the water, travel to new places, and enjoy amazing people on the way.  In 2015 we downsized to a tiny condo across the river, a task that involved frenzied cleaning, yard sales, trips to Goodwill and the dump, and more than a little bit of angst.  That first step was key because it required us to shed most of the anchors that held us ashore -- furniture, knickknacks, most of the gadgets we had accumulated.  

We bought Fulmar not long after we moved into that condo in Maine.  Since then, we've moved to Georgia to be close to our families and for Damon to work at the University of Georgia Marine Institute on Sapelo Island.  We consciously chose to live in a small, simple home again, and purchased another little condo.  Last year, we finally made the decision:  it was time to go sailing.  Time to sell out and move aboard.  Time to take the final step.  Giving up the condo evoked mixed emotions.  On the one hand there is fear of the unknown, sadness in saying goodbye to our art and comfy furniture, and anxiety about what it will be like to live full time on a boat that's much smaller than even our tiny condo.  On the other hand, there is freedom, adventure, possibility, and beauty.  

Luckily, we are not alone in our task.  First and foremost, we've had the support of our families.  Thanks to them, we have a bit of a safety net if everything falls apart, a place to hide our most valuable things, and people who encourage us (even if they think we're a little crazy).  We also have a bunch of examples of people who've done it before us.  Sailing Uma famously tells us "Don't Buy a Couch".  Sailing Totem came out with timely advice on Radical Downsizing.  These folks showed us it can be done.  

We sold our condo to these lovely folks who are excited to explore the waters of the Altamaha Delta and the barrier islands of the Georgia coast.

How do you celebrate an accomplishment that took years to complete?  Well, on Fulmar, we break out some Veuve Cliquot, because we're fancypants like that.  We also break out veggie dogs and mac-n-cheese, because a) it was National Hot Dog Day, b) we have a fridge full of food that needs to be eaten, and c) we seriously can't afford an expensive meal out on the town right now.  Are you kidding?  Anyways, no restaurant could top the views from our very own cockpit.

Veuve Cliquot is excellent paired with Amy's mac-n-cheese and veg dogs

What restaurant has views like this?

Risking our lives for manatee farts

We warned you; this won't always be a highbrow blog.  Today, we're following up on that threat.  But can you really resist manatee farts?  

This has been a seriously wet week in Brunswick.  Like clockwork, at 3:30, we're deluged.  We've been hiding below but the dog's bladder doesn't really care about the weather.  As soon as the rain lightens up a bit, it's time for a walk.  Usually we get it done and get back to the safety of the boat, but yesterday we found a reason to stay out in the thunder and lightning -- manatees.  Not one but two manatees, and we were thrilled to get a chance to see them grazing along the high tide line.  It's not something you see everyday!

Manatees are well-known for their preference for sea grass.  That's all well and good in Florida, where sea grass is abundant (at least until recently).  Here in Georgia, there's not a blade of sea grass to be found.  Coastal waters here are much too turbid, preventing the sun from reaching the sea floor.  Yet we've seen manatees here during the warm months, begging the question -- just what are they eating?  

At least some of their diet comes from terrestrial plants.  Yesterday's tide was particularly high, due to the approaching full moon.  These manatees were taking advantage of the high tide to enjoy plants along the water's edge:

You were promised manatee farts, and we're here to deliver.  In case you aren't in on the secret, manatees are gassy.  Like, really gassy.  When you see a picture of a manatee, look in the background.  Are there bubbles?  Those are manatee farts.  Why are they so gassy?  Manatees and their close relatives, the dugongs, are the only marine mammals that are herbivores. To extract enough energy from plants, they need to have a serious digestive system.  They have incredibly long intestines -- up to 150 feet long.  Much of their body cavity is filled with these intestines, and they've got some serious fermentation going on in there.  Bacteria in their intestines break down the tough, difficult-to-digest plant material into simpler carbohydrates, which the manatees can absorb.  Carbon dioxide and methane are byproducts of the bacterial fermentation.  Thus the farts.  But the gas is more than just a byproduct.   Manatees use their gas to regulate their buoyancy as well.  They can compress the gasses in their intestines when they want to submerge, using their gut like a SCUBA diver uses a buoyancy compensator.

Don't tell us we don't know our manatee farts on Fulmar.

Another storm rolling in over the Georgia-Florida line.