December 10 - 31 -- Three Brief Work Days With Others; But Only 2.5 Hours Work On ILENE

Each of the three days was fun due to my companions and my accomplishing what little I had set out to do. The middle day was after the big snow; Lene was my chauffer on the pleasant drive, round trip, slow due to the snowy roads but no traffic to speak of. My mission was to shove the snow off of the canvas cover, while my chauffer sat in our warm car. The snow was all on the starboard side of the cover and its weight had distorted it way off centerline. Putting my back under it made fast work of causing the snow to slide off the cover except for the smaller amount atop the part of the canvas which pressed it down on the solar panels. I could not make much progress working between the panels and the cover and left the snow there to melt. Half an hour. The plastic sheeting which is shrink wrapped onto most of the boats that get covered these days has an advantage (in addition to allowing a trickle charge as discussed below): a lower coefficient of friction. This means the snow slides off more easily, perhaps without the need for human intervention. The downside is about $1000 per year for the non-reusable plastic sheeting and the labor of professional installers.

The other two days involved teamwork with David of "Hidden Hand", his 40 foot C & C, while interesting conversation ensued. I hope we will enjoy more such days as the winter progresses, though David will spend a good part of it out west in New Mexico and sailing with a friend who keeps a boat in the Sea of Cortez. (Am I a bit envious?) Our routine begins and ends at 96th St and First Avenue where I pick David up and drop him off. From there we go to Consolidated Yachts on City Island where his boat is and then after a brown bag lunch, to ILENE at the Huguenot.

The first day we could not gain access to David's boat because the inverted "U" shaped zipper-closing "door" had not been installed in the plastic cover. The starboard side of his boat is about 18" from the eave of a shed with a crenelated tin roof. David has a good ladder to gain access to the roof, from which we can step across the gap through the door and into the covered boat. Our second day was delayed because while the door had been installed, the yard had not attached a two by four on the eave of the slanting roof to prevent us from accidentally sliding off the roof, which could cause severe injuries. The yard workers bolted on the 2 x 4.  I gave David a four foot length of former genoa sheet  to tie the top of the ladder to the 2 x 4 so the ladder can't blow away. David used a batten and tape to snake the male end of his shore power cord down from the boat between the boat and its plastic cover, off its port quarter. Then I ran it up to the outlet box for shore power. He gave me a short piece of thin line and a short wooden stick which I attached to the tang of the zipper to make it easier to slide it up and over the "U" -- to lessen the need to lean over the 18" chasm from the slanting metal roof. David experimented and learned that a small amount of sunlight makes its way through the translucent white plastic cover creating a trickle charge to the batteries when he is not there and the sun shines. He gave me a couple of Velcro loops for use on ILENE, and gathered some fishing, communications and navigation gear for use on his winter sail. And we were off.

At ILENE, the first day David helped me with the electrical problems I identified a few posts ago. The radio could not be turned off unless I removed a fuse: The answer was simple! The AM/FM radio is powered by two different wires. The one that goes to its on/off switch on the breaker panel works fine. The other supplies constant power to keep track of preset stations and the clock in the radio. But this radio has no clock so that power source served no useful function and simply leaving the fuse out, as it has been since I have had the boat, is the solution.

The other issue was the fused wire that hung over the others behind the breaker panel. When fused it lit the backlights behind the labels of each breaker on the panel, whether the specific breaker called "Panel Lights" was on or off. Those tiny lights are useful at night. The answer was to detach one end of that wire from where it was attached (and David knew which end of it to detach). The next step was reattaching it to the specific breaker called "Panel Lights", fourth from the bottom in the second column from forward. David's first guess was to reattach it to the aft end of that breaker, which did not work. But the other end did. The problem then became unscrewing the tiny bolt which held existing wires in place, putting the loop at the end of the mystery wire around that bolt with the other wires already there,  it and screwing it back in. In no way do I blame David for dropping the bolt, which skittered off the outboard side of the tray into an unreachable no-man's hands land. I'm so clumsy, I'd have dropped ten of them! Eventually, after ILENE is tossed and turned by the waves in a storm next summer, that bolt will work its way down to the bilge for retrieval. In the meantime I rooted in my new trusty box of bolts of all sizes and found one of the correct diameter and thread, and a bit longer. Problem solved. The shiny new bolt is indicated by the blue arrow I have drawn and the wire runs up from the bottom indicated by the yellow allow. It looks like the fourth breaker form the "top", but when the hinged board if lifted up and closed, it is the bottom. The picture also shows the grey plastic sheet off of which the old bolt skittered.

Our other day on ILENE I wanted to install the new plastic liquid transfer pump ($13 from Amazon, including shipping.)  This has only 1/2" outside diameter flexible clear plastic tubing so it is way to slow to bail out the boat in an emergency. But the idea was simply to get out the small amount of water that the pick up ends of the much more robust electrical and manual bilge pumps cannot reach. My thought had been to afix the bottom end of the uptake tube to the bottom of the bilge with wire ties. But David had a better idea, to tape a wooden rod to the side of the hose so, like the attachment to his Zipper entry, it could be held to the bottom without reaching one's arm way down there. It worked and lowered the water level in the bilge from 1/2" to less than 1/16", pumping 3/4 of a gallon into an empty antifreeze bottle which was easily dumped. I'm just leaving the apparatus in the bilge so it will be handy for the next time. The other task de jour was figuring out where and how to hang the coils of newly laundered spare lines in the lazarette (instead of their laying on the inside of the hull at its bottom. Objectives were ease of installation and removal of the coils and that the coils would not impede my access to the places in that lazarette to which I need to reach or go. And this is where those Velcro loops will be used and I will buy enough more of them

This is the final and 47th post of 2020. I look forward to continuing to sail, and work on, think about and write about boating in 2021 and beyond. Happy New Year everyone!