Progress and friends

Roger here. Lots of progress the last two days, except in learning how to get photos labeled and put in the right location. As discussed below, left is ILENE's starboard turnbuckles and right is Jim and Robin with Ilene at lunch.

Propane: It seems we suffered without coffee on the way down needlessly. The propane tank took only $2.02 worth of gas after sixteen days of use on the Club Cruise back in July and August. The attendant told me that the valve was "frozen" and tapped the tank on the curb. Voila! But his scale was broken. So to double check, when we visited our friends, Stan and Carol Hoegerman in Williamsburg VA, we brought the tank along and weighed it on their scale; it's full! The Hoegermans have moved to a large (compared to our NYC apartment) home in a newly being built community decorated with the magnificent quilts that Carol makes. And they fed us a delicious dinner.

Inspection: ILENE was inspected by Davis (Barefoot Dave to his friends), the spitting image of a beach bum with long wild blond hair, but quite knowledgeable about boating. ILENE passed the inspection with one exception to be corrected. The type of life jackets we use, Type 3, are worn comfortably and get inflated if one falls in the water, via a cylinder of compressed CO2. But the rally is required by some rules of the sea to require us to have Type 1 preservers -- the bulky orange "Mae West" style. An email to the crew who are going on the rally procured agreement by two of them to bring the required five Type 1s with the only remaining problem being where to put them on this increasingly crowded boat.

The Rig: Not part of the required inspection, but Dave also noted that the nut on the bolt that holds the horizontal boom to the vertical mast had almost come off. Now it is quite tight. He also helped me tune the rig (the wires that hold up the mast by running from it to chain plates (strong points) at the sides of the deck. I had known that they were too loose, but now they are tight through tightening of the turnbuckles, reinserting cotter pins and taping over those pins so no one, and no lines, get caught on their jagged ends.

Single Side Band (SSB) radio: This expensive toy was installed last summer by Chris Berger, back in New York. It is the means by which we will be in communication with the rest of the rally boats and receive weather information, so it has to work. But I had had some doubts about that status. Enter Tim Hassan, a marine electronics technician who is affiliated with the rally. We had heard him speak at the seminar we attended in Annapolis last winter and he tested the SSB by calling a station in mobile Alabama who replied "I hear you loud and clear!" The rest of the hour of Tim's time was a tutorial on how to use the SSB radio, a much better explanation than in any of the books I had read.

Old new friends: The announcement of our blog was emailed to Roy Smith of the Harlem Yacht Club, who forwarded it out to all of the other members. The Club's alums are also on the mailing list and we received an email from Robin and Jim Roberts, long standing members who became alums about a year ago. Robin's father and grandfather were members of the Harlem and she showed us trophies and medals he won in 1916 and 1917, with the club's pennant enameled onto the metal. They have lived aboard their LeFever 49 trawler, a Cadillac among trawlers, for about six years now and traveled extensively. Their boat is quite large and luxurious with every device one might want to have and lots of electric power to run them all. They filled our heads with useful information and one of the bits was a reference to a book about a voyage similar to ours from Toronto called An Embarrassment of Mangoes. Carol Hoegerman had given the book to Ilene just two days before.

Finally, our new insurance company, Pantaenius, has finally approved our policy.
Lots of progress and the benefit of good friends