July 11-21 -- One Other Day, Two Work Days And Seven Sailing Days

The Other day was a delicious dinner with Harriet and Bennett at their home in Alpine New Jersey. But adding one of the work days, on the boat, to the seven day sails means I was at the boat for eight of the eleven days in this period. It seems we could have saved on gas and tolls by remaining living aboard with the kitties. But quite the heat wave!

That workday was four hours of mostly compounding and waxing part of the topside and that part I now gleams beautifully. It’s chalky surface now shiny, instead. But that part it is on the infrequently-seen port side. I also glued the shutter to the porthole in the aft cabin but the glue failed so I’ve purchased new Velcro dots. And I used the old cherry colored wood stain pen to “repair” the appearance of several small blemishes in ILENE's interior woodwork that only I had noticed.

The other work day, actually spread over several, involved about seven hours of joyfully planning ILENE’s late-August Hudson River cruise to Albany. Such fun to plot out various marinas, yacht clubs and anchorages along the way, meshing them with days for meeting three different groups of friends in different ports, calculating the distances between the stops, making reservations, and making changes as needed such as based on the tide at The Battery on the first day. My best effort was in searching for and finding local knowledge to confirm the feasibility of anchoring in a side channel of the Hudson off of Athens, NY, a dinghy ride across the river from Hudson, NY, with good restaurants.

The newly purchased charts suggested that such anchoring was feasible but they were published in 2010. The 2010 Cruising Guide mentioned several anchoring spots in the Hudson but not off Athens. So I needed local knowledge to confirm. The cruise is shaping up, subject to weather, as a good one, to places I have never been by boat, though much of the cruise will sadly require motoring. Readers will be able to read about it, day by day, in this blog, starting next month. In the interim, I also planned a ten day cruise to the area between Long Island’s eastern forks but this was easy — familiar waters and mostly anchoring at night so no reservations required, except to meet friends.

Our seven day sails (Lene came along on four of them) averaged more than four hours each. Six of them were aboard ILENE; the other aboard Bennett’s "Ohana", with two of his friends.

Three were windless or partly windless days during which we stopped, with sails down and rudder locked hard over, and drifted while swimming. The first of these was on Ohana, which is configured to allow a swimmer to slip between the hanging dinghy to the swim platform and thence into the water. Ohana has a Code Zero sail, of lightweight spinnaker nylon but on a roller fuller, which is not only attractive, but permitted sailing when the heavier sail cloth of ILENE’s Genoa would not have caught enough of the whispers of wind to move the boat.

In fact we had to motor back. Ohana, at 37 feet, and with roller furling in-mast Main is so much easier to sail than ILENE in terms of muscle powered needed. On the return, we noticed a tug pushing a barge overtaking us and who we thought would need to cross in front of us. We hailed him on Channel 13. He confirmed do we did a small diameter 360 degree turn to let him safely pass ahead of us. The slow motor ride home provided lots of time for one of sailors’ favorite activities, the telling of sea stories of passages past.

The other two swim days were on ILENE, on which I have to lower and later raise the dink to gain access to to the boat after swimming. One was with Lene’s friends, Jeff (who brought a delicious gazpacho that was well chilled in the reefer, and cookies) and Sharon.

With the dink down, after the swim, Sharon and I drove it over to inspect the stone fort on the Queen’s side of the Throgs Neck Bridge. She teaches English at Manhattan Community College. Unlike the Ohana swim, during which the boat drifted only one tenth of a mile, ILENE drifted seven tenths, but still there was plenty of water from the rocky shore. Here are Sharon, Lene and the top of my head.

The last swim day was with Fred, a neighbor in our coop. He sails in J-24s owned by a private for-profit club in the Hudson near the Freedom Tower, but only about ten times a year. But he and his wife charter and suggested we do so with them in the Aegean next year. Lene is game; the rest is details. He suggested that with the addition of a second suspended side step we could avoid the routine with the dink that is now required for a swim. With the swim first, at the mouth of Eastchester Bay, the wind came up and we sailed under full sails on starboard tack out about a mile and a half past the last green buoy of the Ex Rocks complex before returning on port. Fred had the helm and we almost cleared Hart Island’s day marker but turned on the engine for five minutes to steer high enough to get past it.

On a day before these swims I noticed, from the vantage of the launch when leaving the boat, that following Mendy’s swim in Oyster Bay, about fifty nautical miles earlier, I had failed to raise the swim ladder; it had been dragging in the sea all that way. Oops! And, I worried,  how to get it up without lowering and raising the dink, But the next sail, once underway, on autopilot, the force of the water rushing past the hull swung the ladder up and aft from vertical against the boat’s stern and I learned that I was able to squeeze my arm down, through the gap under the raised dink and the top of the aft gate and with the short boat hook, grab the swim ladder and bring it up.

We sailed with Lene’s friends, Rhonda and Sheila: the former from third grade and the latter from almost fifty years ago. Rhonda lived for many years in Great Neck so we sailed past it — all the way to the mooring field at the southern end of Little Neck Bay, then through the channel off Kings Point, before a counter clockwise circumnavigation of Hart Island. Good winds most of the trip and all points of sail under main and small jib. Rhonda is an athlete and enjoyed the helm quite a bit of the way. This picture at The Black Whale, after the sailing.

I learned some truths in an interesting conversation with Ilene later that day. Her head was not in the sailing and I asked her pay more attention — to anticipate our next moves, like I do. But this was on a day when her primary interest was her friends and she told me that she will actually never be as “into“ the sailing as I am. This was all accomplished without yelling or anger. I remain grateful that she cruises with me after our 23 years together. Few wives do.

I spent a day with Madanda, a gentleman who I had chatted with for ten minutes at the co-op’s holiday party last December. Lene thinks I’m a bit crazy for going sailing with people who I hardly know, but it seems to have always worked out for me. Madanda is a retired PhD financial hedge fund whiz and with the round trip car ride and dinner at the Club after our sail (thanks again, Madanda) we had eight hours to get to know each other. He retired shortly before the pandemic and has not been really able to try out the anticipated pleasures of his new retired life yet; I gave him several suggestions from my experience. The winds were lighter and we headed under the Throgs Neck Bridge toward the Whitestone. But our SOG on the very broad reach was quite slow, at times less than one knot. At the green buoy off the rock pile on the Queens side about 1/3 of a mile before the Whitestone Bridge, it became apparent why: the tide, as I had suspected, was flowing to the east. Three tacks took us back out to the Sound, making five knots SOG, which provided refreshing relief from the heat.

On another sail Lene and I were joined by her long time girlfriend Rudy, and Rudy‘s new boyfriend, Darryl.

We met him for the first time and he had the helm much of the way — before discovering auto. The winds were from the south, and quite strong. After the first tack out of Eastchester Bay, it was a single tack all the way to Matinecock before another straight shot all the way back to Big Tom, both ways with the wind forward of the beam.This was our furthest day sail so far this season and, again, it was good to make speed because it reduced the apparent heat.

And we sailed with Lene’s friends, actress/comedienne Jackie and her husband, musician Steve. Steve is strong, willing, a fast learner and did a lot to help out my tired old bones. He had the helm close hauled into Little Neck Bay and Jackie most of the way on a very broad reach out, through the Kings Point Channel and Hart Island Sound. Approaching Big Tom we hailed Bennett on Ohana who was outbound. It was near a run from there to the mooring and a new problem emerged, which has since been fixed: the main halyard was tangled and it took a while to untangle it so we could drop the main. While I was working on the untangling, Lene continued, at good speed, in the Channel, past the Harlem mooring field toward the City Island Bridge. So we motored back south to our mooring.

Another problem got solved during this period: in the first few days afloat, I had to scoop diesel out of the bilge! A leak in the NEW fuel tanks or one of them, and which one???!!! But none since then, despite some vigorous 30 degree heeling. I’m calling it “Problem resolved!”