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.