June 21 - 26 -- Back to Urban Normal

Only two day sails, first with Lene, Mendy and Christine and Heather. We had 4.5 delightful hours off the mooring going to Rye Playland and back with a small but adequate breeze from the north, followed by dinner with Mendy at the club; the girls had to go back.

Mendy is extremely strong and is getting to know the ropes. He also steered for about 2.5 hours.  I have to give him a set of written instructions as to each set of lines and how to use them, and he will quickly become a competent sailor.











The other outing was with the Old Salts aboard Morty and Clara's 30 foot Catalina "Easy Living"

with eight souls aboard: the owners, Mike and Sandy, me and Bennet, and Claire and Janet, a newbie to our group, but she knows the ropes. She immigrated from England 35 years ago.







 Here she is in the launch after the sail between Clare and Bennet, who have appeared in this blog many times.

The only problem was extremely light wind though we did get up to two knots of boat speed while tacking back and forth across Eastchester Bay to as far as Big Tom before motoring back to the mooring for the libations.
Three work days for a total of 14 hours: one to get the dink down from its inverted position atop another hard dink on top of the dinghy rack, bring it to the seawall, inflate it, drag it to the dock, pull it our there, flip it over and tie it down. Another to scrub the bottom and treat it with Aeroprotectant 303, get down the outboard from the locker and attached to the dink with a lot of help from the ever helpful Pat and then buy gas, connect the tank to the engine and hold my breath while hoping it would start -- which it did. Then driving the dink to the boat, hoisting it onto its davits and cinching it in. We are ready to cruise!

The third work day I did several very small things and worked with Bob and Laura who helped with the removal of the broken stanchion and preparation for installation of the new. we ended up with one of us using my pipe wrench to twist it back and forth in its socket while the other grabbed the top end of the fragment and pulled it upward with the vise grips. We tried to remove the other damaged stanchion, which has only a slight bend, but could not get the stainless screw out of the aluminum casting where it has been sitting peacefully for the last 20 years. We tried to undo the four bolts that hold the base to the deck but could not reach it from the lazarette because it is too far forward, nor from the cutout in the ceiling of the aft cabin because it was too far outboard and my arm could not
bend to reach it. Bob ultimately concluded that he could bend it back straight, not an ideal fix but adequate. We also removed three of the four diagonal braces and Bob will unbend them at home.
Other events: Bennet's birthday party at his home with good food and good friends. We finally had the occasion to give him the large octagonal paving stone with pieces of stained glass picturing swimming goldfish to be placed in the ground by his koi pond. We had seen and bought it in Maine last August and waited for the birthday. I'm lousy at selecting gifts so finding this one was like a gift to me.  We also saw Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing outdoors with 1800 other folks in Central Park. Lene had gone up in the morning to wait on line for the free tickets but the line was already too long. As she was walking disappointedly away, Mike and Sandy saw her and hailed her. Each person can get two tickets so she waited with them and they gave us two of theirs.  An unusual and excellent modern production, breathing new life into the 500 year old words, set in an upper class black suburb of Atlanta Georgia with an all black cast.