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.