June 2 - 10 -- Alaska, Part One -- The Cruise

Our first day was in Vancouver, Canada, a big modern city with lots of its old buildings spared from urban renewal -- so far. We visited The Royal Vancouver Yacht Club in Stanley Park, with the city behind and the cruiseships a white blur at the left side background.

And we visited Granville Island which is an artisanal shopping mecca, surrounded by marinas. We somehow skipped Vancouver's maritime museum but we saw lots of boats.

The next eight days, seven nights were aboard the Crystal Symphony. This was our tenth cruise and a much more luxurious experience than we have ever had in the past. (Two in the Eastern Caribbean, one Western Caribbean, and one each in the Sea of  Cortez, L.A. - Acapulco, New York - St. John's Newfoundland, Athens - Istanbul, a river boat on the Danube and Amsterdam - St. Petersberg.)

This was a much smaller ship than most, a max of 922 passengers (we sailed with less) as contrasted to up to 3500.  A sense of spaciousness was everywhere and no lines. Our cabin had a big picture window but no balcony -- it's Alaska after all. We found we liked the main dining room (come when you want and no lines) better than the four specialty restaurants: Japanese, Chinese, Brazilian and Italian, but they were very good too. So much redundancy to delight passengers! Plus the Lido Deck buffet and another small coffee bar with lots of food. One afternoon, they pulled together a few of their 20 entertainers to serenade us with Mozart during which a huge Viennese table was kept full by the wait staff, dressed in period clothing. It killed off appetites for dinner but we ate anyway -- late. One hundred of the 550 crew are involved in cooking and baking.  It was my Birthday so they said to have the "Special Breakfast".

I did not order this stuff but kept coming including caviar in this course and steak and eggs in the next! When we got back to new York after two weeks away I found that I had gained nine pounds, though most of it is off already. They had specialty wines at $100 per bottle but all other beverages were included as were the tips. I found that I was drinking two glasses of excellent, to my taste, wines with most lunches and dinners, as well as having deserts, which I usually skip. As you walk around or sit in any of the spacious seating areas, entertainment venues or lobbies, waiters come around offering whatever you want. Everything about this experience was first rate.

Two examples. I tried to sign up with the concierge for a tour of the bridge. "I'm sorry sir, since 9/11 we are not allowed to to them any longer." I expressed disappointment; "I'm a sailor and interested in such things". Two days later: "Please don't tell anyone but it is arranged for four this afternoon." Lene is in the Captain's chair wearing Conrad's hat. Crystal has a saying: "Once you have been Crystalized, you will never ride another line." They are right!

Symphony was built in Finland in 1995 and extensively renovated recently. Length 781', beam 99' and draft 25'. Diesel electric power turn the conventional shafts that drive the boat. Speed is controlled not to increasing the rpm but by varying the pitch of the props. Max speed is 21 knots but she cruises at 15, or slower when the distance/time/speed formula permits. She has a full set of paper charts and it must be immense because she cruises around the world, but the two large display chart plotters in the bridge were what they used. There are always two officers on deck while underway in addition to a lookout and the Captain, when he chooses to appear. The first officer announces his decisions as to all course and speed changes but they are not executed until the second officer concurs. Two heads are better than one is the reason.

The other special experience was Friday night religious services. They followed shortly after a Mass, led by a priest who was very friendly to us, comes from  Westchester and is invited for a sail on ILENE. The ship not only announced the venue in the daily newspaper (in the motion picture theater) but provided prayer books, two electric sabbath candles, yarmulkas, good red and white wine, two ship-baked braided challah breads and a plate of gefilte fish with hard boiled eggs and horse raddish!

One of the best features of the trip was getting to know Chris and Tom, who we shared many moments with. They are Aussies and while we may not go "down under" to visit them, they travel a lot and we will see them in New York.

The entertainment was excellent and imaginative and we played trivial pursuit during the three at sea days, taking one first place and two seconds. I worked out in the gym most days and partook of the sauna, though the steam room was shut down due to a broken part.

Our route: We departed from Vancouver on a glorious sunny afternoon and, after stops in

Ketchican, Juneau and Skagway, and three days at sea, disembarked at Whittier for the start of our land adventure. See Alaska, Part Two, to be published soon. Our route was via the Inside Passage, a channel created by a lot of off shore islands. These are not a barrier reef and not continuous but rather a series of islands off shore. The passage is sometimes quite wide, perhaps ten miles, and narrows to a fraction of a mile in other spots. The only gthing I would do diffwrently if I was running Crystal Cruises would be to post both small and large scale charts showing where the ship was and had been.We took tours from Ketchican (a totem pole park, paddling an Indian canoe and visiting a salmon hatchery)

And visited the Mendenhall Glacier, which is right next to a waterfall so you have both a frozen and a liquid river side by side. Yes it rained that day.

In Skagway, (which translates to Windy Place -- and it is) we took a free tour with the National Parks Service ranger, followed by a hike uphill to woodland fresh water Lake Dewey. Here is a view of Symphony, dwarfed behind the larger Holland American boat.
The shore experiences, however, were not the most impressive part of this cruise. Two of the "at sea" days involved getting the very large boat inland through huge fjords with high waterfalls

and glaciers that came down to the sea (as compared to the Rocky mountain glaciers, which end on land).





s/v ILENE's binoculars got us a closer view of the glacial faces.

 Some of the icebergs were black from earth and rocks that covered them, those solids will fall to the bottom as the ice melts. One such black spot moved! A seal, sunning on it who lifted his or her head to give a wary eye to the behemoth nearby. The landscapes are so big that the sense of scale is distorted.

I was amazed that they brought Symphony in through waters filled with small iceberg to within three miles of the glacier faces.













Look at the tiny whitish dot to the right side of the narrow entrance through which we entered.

Not such a tiny dot afterall, but a Disney boat larger than ours.

May 29 - June 1 -- Three Work Days Arranged Around The First Old Salts Sail

Sorry that this posting is so very lately publishhed. It's because it was not ready before we left on our recently completed Alaskan adventure (not aboard ILENE but largely waterborn, so subject of future posts).

So the work days: A lot of arranging with Mars Metals of Ontario Canada (for the castng and shipping) and with the Great Island Boatyard in Casco Bay Bay, Maine (for the installation, by lag bolts and epoxy) of an 1100 pound lead slab under the flat bottom of ILENE's keel. I also spent some time arranging  for storage of ILENE at a dock at Minneford's during the Alaskan trip -- more protected from storms than the mooring. But this had to be abandoned at the last minute when I learned that the slip in question, though it berthed a sailboat last summer, was not deep enough at low tide for ILENE. To paraphase George Orwell: "All sailboats are not equal."

But most of the work invovled wiring up the new Raymarine electronics -- which process is not yet complete. Each problem, when resolved with the help of ever helpful Ed Spallina and the Raymarine tech reps, led to the next. The white cable from the new Ray 70 radio mounted at the side of the binacle, to a white socket in the new five socket "bus" junction panel we mounted under the cockpit sole, was not long enough. That connection is needed to get AIS data from the radio, on which it is received, to the Axiom Multi Funchion Display (MFD), formerly known as the chart plotter, on which the AIS data is displayed. No problem, the Raymarine tech admitted at last: That cable just has three wires in it, so just cut it in half and splice in a five foot length of three strand of adequade guage, available from any store, between the halves and plug the lower end into the five way bus. Next came the cable from the MFD itself, also at the binnacle, to the same bus. The unit came with two wires that connect to make one that is long enough. The problem here was that the two wires connect in a metal screw-in connector that is about three inches long, rigid and hence incapable of fitting through the hole in the side of the one inch diameter stainless steel tube that holds up the instrument pod and leads down to the bus. Next day the Raymarine tech rep again said "No problem: put the white end of the wire into the white end of a white-to-blue plastic connector and a three meter blue cable from the blue end of the white-to-blue, connector." The three meters is long enough so i will have to coil  the excess below. I stow the plastic connector in the ever more crowded instument pod and insert the lower end of the blue cable, which does fit easily through the hole, into one of the two blue sockets in the bus, rather than into a white socket. That's intuitive, isnt it? NO IT IS NOT!!! Why color code them if the color does not matter. Am I geting angry?  Any way, though frustrating, we are getting closer.

But the Old Salts sail was a pleasure. My only fault was that in trying to "organize" it and knowing that most of the other boats were unavailable so far in this season, I actually told a few folks that there was no room for them, which turned out to be false. All I  can do is apologize to them. In the end, with a few late cancellations and two small boats coming forward, there would have been room for all. Six sailed on ILENE, all of whose smiling faces have been seen in these posts before. Three more came over for the apres sail liabations. I have noticed over the past few years that with an increase in the percentage of female Old Salts, possibly a side effect of the change of the group's name from "Old Fa_ts", we have migrated from Gin and Tonic toward wine and the solid offerings have improved both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Anyway, we were underway for about 2.5 hours with near perfect winds of 10 to 15 knots under main and small jib. We zigged and zagged: through the channel off Kings Point, to the bridge and back, north of Stepping Stones. Only one of the crew, Peggy, wanted the helm and she steered about 95 percent of the time, and well, autopilot not yet reconnected. There was an unusual occurence for the early afternoon on the waters of western Long Island Sound: fog, though not less than a quarter mile of visibility. Yet we were "out of sight of land", rare for most of our crew. And the fact that we do not have electronics required me to be more watchful too. Best sail of the still young season.

Two mishaps. The first was discovered early in the sail and fixed easily, instantly, on the spot. I had led the port side sheet (barberhauler) for the small jib aft, but NOT through the forward block!The second problem was the result of 19 long seasons of extensive use: the braided outer cover of the double braid main sheet chafed through at the point where the clutch holds it under pressure when the sail is up. The inner core is strong enough to hold up the sail, but due to a narrower diameter at the chafed spot, the main slid down about six inches when sailing and lowering it proved a slight problem of pasing out through the clutch until I cut away the ragged part and taped it to get a decent taper. This can be fixed by application of the "green poultice", about $150 for a new line. The next problem, or let's call it an opportunity, will be to learn to use a fid to splice it around the halyard shackle. The drawback to this plan, and I could practice on lots of small pieces of old line, is that if I managed to learn the new skill, I would surely forget it during the next 19 years. So I may get the job done by a pro.