March 10 - 25 -- Corona Virus Slows Activity Even More

Yes, the virus has slowed life to a standstill. We are hibernating in our apartment, walking up ten flights to a higher floor and back down twice a day to keep the muscles from atrophy. Also walks, near salt or brackish water, across the East River to Brooklyn and back on the Williamsburg Bridge,

along the Hudson where we saw a shuttered party boat,

and to Marine Park in lower Brooklyn, a park I had not known existed.

The Defender Store, a discount chandlery, has a sale toward the end of March each year -- a fun drive with several guys from the Club almost to the Rhode Island border to buy things needed for our boats. Their warehouse annually becomes a happy mob scene so this year for health reasons they agreed to do it by phone or internet. After several hours with their catalog and website, I had my SKU numbers all in a row and placed my order: two kinds of paint and four lines ( from 0.8 mm whipping twine to a 1" double braid mooring pennant). Also, the two new aluminum diesel fuel tanks have arrived and are in the car's back seat and trunk.
The fuel tank project has progressed with the 40 gallons of fuel pumped by jigger siphon from the larger forward tank through hose led through the speedo hole to the empty pails and jugs in a plastic box on the ground below the boat. For the actual siphoning I was fortunate enough to have help from both Lene and Bennett. Bennett also lent me seven of his five gallon pails for storage and I have cleaned out the five gallon yellow diesel Jerry can for that use too. And the old tank is out of the pit in which it has sat these past 20 years. The cleaning of that pit, removal of the old and attachment of the new tank comes next. For the heavy lifting in that regard I am blessed to be able to call upon my nephew, Mendy. During this period I worked on five days (one from home) for 14 hours.
Early in this period, before the severity of the quarantine set in, we enjoyed a lovely social dinner at Bennett and Harriet's house.

March 4 - 9 -- Seattle and Portland

Wednesday’s arrival in Seattle was in good weather, perfect for the round trip ferry ride to Bainbridge Island, for ice cream. This after fish and chowders at Ivar’s on the docks. And the mild winters gave us a welcome view of sail underway. Our hotel was a short block uphill from Pike’s Market with its network of restaurants, crafts, and food stores.

Thursday we walked to the Center for Wooden Boats, a mile away. Students building them. Others restoring them, and in summer, free rides on their fleet of them. Their wooden schooner is a beauty.

The Center is next to Seattle’s Museum of History And Industry, “MOHAI”, which is the old navy base and tells the history of Seattle, a great deepwater seaport. Lene found that the municipal theater was staging “The Children” in which she is scheduled to perform in a scene with her acting troupe, WEDREPCO, so we took the performance.

Friday was the drive to Portland on I-5, past Tacoma, for our last glimpse at the Pacific, but not before a visit to a great map store a block from our hotel on the way to the Art Museum, two blocks further. There we saw a part of "Vertigo Sea"..

The slow motion videos of fishing birds hurling themselves into the water, whales cavorting, and old black and white films showing small steamships in big seas were all great. Not so interesting were modern pictures of a man dressed in 19th century clothing posed amidst furniture out in the wilds. And most disturbing were black and white films of men shooting and skinning polar bears.

In Portland family and friends, dance, art, shopping and dining replaced water related activities.

Due to COVID 19, airports, flights, restaurants and hotels were all sparely populated.

Feb 16 - March 3 -- Time Flies This Mild Winter

Only two days (six hours) at the boat. Lots of details about tasks getting ready to replace the fuel tanks; but I will spare you them this time. A bit of sanding of the cherry trim around the galley which I will recoat and the glueing together of the pieces of the "L" shaped wood blocks that were broken during their removal. Four per tank, they keep the tanks from sliding from side to side as the boat is heeled and from jumping up if ILENE was rolled.
I went to two watery evening programs.

One included a free round trip ride on the Staten Island Ferry to the National Lighthouse Museum which is a five minute walk from the ferry terminal. That museum may be the site for next winter's Harlem YC excursion. The program was called Life on the Water and  it was a well dome presentation but it amounted to a recruitment effort for the merchant marine, stressing the varieties and benefits of maritime careers as well as their downsides: being away from home and family a lot. I found aspects of this interesting though it was largely a wasted recruiting effort because the audience was mostly folks like me who are no longer considering their career choice.

The title of the other presentation is shown  in the slide above, It was given by the Secretary, Webmaster and in essence the driving force behind the Society. Newtown Creek is the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens and was once a pristine marshy tidal estuary and a place for palatial homes such as the one built by John Jacob Astor in about 1840. Its eastern end is where the speaker's family settled with him in a Lithuanian immigrant community when they arrived here in 1948 from a displaced persons camp in Europe. It abuts Long Island City, where the speaker lived when he was married. A hundred and fifty years of chemical, and slaughter house waste and sewage dumping made it a superfund toxic site. Restoration efforts to reclaim it for pleasure use, kayaking for example, have been making very slow progress since about 1990.
And speaking of slides, I obtained the services of a tutor, Glenn Harris who taught me enough about how to use Microsoft's Powerpoint that I have been actively engaged in preparing the long delayed talk on some of the interesting things I found in the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office charts at the New York Public Library.
A week in the Pacific Northwest, by air, is next. We will see whether I can include watery aspects.