Feb 1 - 19, 2022 — Only One Work Day On The Boat But Lots of Activity With Sailing people

 The one work day was Feb 18, a beautifully warm uncharacteristically spring-like day. I got supplies from our locker at the Harlem and spent 3.75 hours at the boat st the Huguenot. There I connected our boat, Bennett’s, Roy’s and David’s to shore power. Roy had connected ILENE twice, for a total of 2.5 hours in the interim, but she was not hooked up with the battery charger on, as she is now, so those hours were wasted and her charge was low. Next time I’ll get her batteries filled to the brim. 

Primary activity was final scraping and first sanding of ILENE’s prop and shaft, and lubricating her prop.

This picture shows one side of one of the three blades of the prop sanded. I did the other five as well. It also shows Roy’s boat to ILENE’s starboard side, coated with grey barrier paint. Before I finished, the merry cheerful ban of five Hispanic coworkers had returned and Roy’s boat’s bottom is now barn red. I was somewhat envious of the jollity of the painters, though my prop work is a one man job. But my constant companion, National Public Radio, makes the time fly by.

Lubrication consists of pressing fresh heavy yellow grease into the prop’s hub. It is an annual springtime ritual. Three Allen nuts are removed, one at a time, and replaced with a zirc fitting. Placing the discharge end of the grease gun over the protruding end of the fitting and squeezing the gun forces fresh new yellow grease into the propeller hub, which forces the air, seawater snd dirty brown grease out of the hub between the two sides of the hub and through the three holes in the hub from which the blades protrude. Then I remove the fitting, reinsert the Allen nut, tighten, and it’s done. Only problem this time was dropping one of the Allen nuts from my greasy fingers onto the camouflaging blanket of gravel on the ground. No problem, because I have a spare, but a diligent search discovered the errant nut.

I also brought the last two Dorade cowls home for painting the inside white and shining the stainless of the exterior. 

   

Lene’s birthday and Valentine’s Day occurred during this period, the first with a good steak dinner at Quality Meats steakhouse in midtown, and the latter for a good home cooked and home baked dinner at our home with sailing friends, Bennett and Harriett.Two lunches out with gentlemen from by book club and a meeting of the club to discuss our February read: “How The Word Is Passed” by Clint Smith. A very worthwhile book, it tells a lot of facts about the history of slavery in our nation by describing what the author learned during visits to eight sites that exemplify the horrors. One of those horrors was the dreaded “middle passage” in the holds of slave ships. (a nautical angle). Also, Lady Liberty, the gift from France to celebrate immigration, was first intended to celebrate emancipation: she held a broken chain in her hand rather than a book. And the chains are still in the version of the statue that has stood in our harbor for 150 years, but they are at her feet, visible only from the windows of a helicopter. Why the change?  Fund raising to build the pedestal was not successful with a racial theme. Nowadays it would not have worked out with a pro-immigration theme.  A zoom meeting of the Map Society of New York featured the presentation by its author/illustrator of her book showing the development of Manhattan over the past 400 years through maps.

Our Club’s fifth land cruise of this winter came off last week. We visited the Queens Museum, with its vast 1” = 100” scale model of the city built for the Worlds Fair in Flushing Queens and last updated in 1992. (So the Twin towers still stand on the model, not the Freedom Tower.) Above is the apartment house where Lene and I live, in the red circle with the green of Union Square to the left.

But we discovered an error in the diorama which purports to have a scale model of every structure in the city. City Island is of to the side but zooming in we saw that while the clubhouse and locker house are standing, but not our dock — and it has been there, on the same concrete pilings since way before 1939.

But why get upset. Delicious lunch was partaken at the nearby Parkside Restaurant.

WELCOME BACK TO BLOGSPOT! Dec 28, 2021- Jan 31, 2022 —It’s Slow as Molasses in Winter

Thirty four days with only one visit to the boat! Almost five hours that day to charge batteries and clean up a few things, bring things from home and take others home to work on there. I took the three sheets of plastic that can mostly enclose the cockpit on cold and rainy days into our shower at home to give them a thorough soap and fresh water cleaning. The dorade cowls and stanchions need to be touched up here as well. 

In my last post I reported that the Huguenot YC was taking an apparently unreasonable position about the charging of batteries. I’m pleased to report that, as usual, they do listen to reason; that problem has gone away.  Thanks, guys!

Another trip to the boat was to heave the heavy snow off the winter canvas cover (enroute to a shopping trip with Lene in Westchester). However, on arrival we could see that the wind had blown the snow off; no need to even exit the car.

A lot of days were devoted to visits with Ilene to her doctors, in the hospital for pre-tests, the surgery itself and post surgical visits, plus duties at home for Nurse Roger during her recovery from the removal of a tumor. But all is good, the margins are clear, the lymph nodes show no migration and she has a zero count of cell division.  So I’m blessed to be having my mate hanging around for a while.

Two nights out alone at off-off Broadway theater and one on Broadway with Lene and Bennett and Harriett.  Three good dinners, two at the homes of sailing friends, one with Tom and Marie and the other with Fred and Rebecca, and the third with Ken and Mendy  here in our place.

I enjoyed my visit to the NY Public Library’s exhibit of selections from among its treasures: e.g.,  a Gutenberg Bible, Charles Dickens‘ writing desk, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick and hundreds of other “things”. 

Another day saw my first visit to the Queens Museum, in Flushing, the former New York City “Pavilion” of the World Fair of the mid 1960’s. Admission and parking are free but I took public transportation. It features a 1” : 100’ model of almost the entirety of the New York City land mass, studded with scale models of almost every building. But because it has not been updated since 1992, it still has the twin towers and not the new Freedom tower. Here is a section of Manhattan featuring Central Park. I hadn’t planned it that way but this section happens to include the locales of three of the Harlem’s prior winter excursions: to Randall’s Island (near to the left) and Central Park (in the center), both last year, and Roosevelt Island (the narrow one, two miles long, in the East River, to the right). (Rikers Island is in the extreme upper left.)

It was fun seeing the apartment house where I grew up in Washington Heights (3 miles to the left) and the one where we live now in Greenwich Village (2 miles to the right). City Island is on the map, in the corner, off the upper left. They turn the lights off for a few minutes every once and a while to show sunset, night and sunrise. A little model airplane periodically takes off (on a wire) from LaGuardia Airport. I had such a good time by myself that I’ve organized a visit there by the Harlem on February 19. (By the way, these excursions are available to all members of the Club and their friends; the later category includes you, my dear readers, so if you are interested, contact me for details. Lunch will follow at an ethnic restaurant for which the neighborhood has become famous.)
This will be our fifth winter excursion this season, including Sunday hikes organized by Dave of the HYC,  with more to come. When I announced it at the very pleasant, efficient and short first Club Zoom membership meeting of 2022 I prefaced it noting: If NYC can call itself “The City That Never Sleeps”, well then the Harlem can be called “The Yacht Club That Never Hibernates!”

Otherwise, in addition to lots of TV: 
— the movies - Licorice Pizza (save your money), 
— an interesting Zoom presentation from my alma mater on employment law, economic and ethical issues relating to the gig economy and the great resignation, 
— a zoom meeting of my Book Group, lively, by and large, because we did not enjoy the book,
— the transfer (with professional help) of the contents of my aging lap top to the iPad I’m now using to write this blog, 
— a ride with my nephew, Mendy up to Goshen NY where he bought a part from a junk yard to install on the car he bought at auction to fix up and flip,
— visits by two interior decorators one of whom Lene wants to engage to redecorate our apartment.

So it’s not nothing, but it’s not a lot of sailing. I will be posting more often now that I’m back at Blogspot, all the news that’s fit to print.