In a sense, the season starts when the Club launches its Launch; this newly painted loyal old one is on the car and moving toward her splash.
ILENE’s progress has been slow, partly caused by delays by David, of Marine Detailer, in doing her bottom prep and freeboard. But this is obviously his busy season and ILENE is sitting so far back in the corner of the boatyard that if she was ready, I would still have to wait for her launch date until other boats are cleared away.
Progress has been made on each of four work days. The project that caused me the most anxiety was the reinstallation of the sliding batt cars (to which the mainsail gets attached, on their track, mounted on the aft side of the mast. The hardest part of the job, was removing and reinstalling the boom from its attachment to the mast, below the track, such removal needed to gain access to the track. Expert mechanic, Ed Spalina worked with me on this. We supported the forward end of the boom with the main halyard and tied it off to port, out of the way, with a piece of short stuff. The insertion of all the Teflon ball bearings in their rectangular races at each side of each slider car was easy, if tedious. Lining up the car on its plastic special tool, made it easy to insert each ball bearing, one at a time. Then aligning the top end of the tool with the bottom end of the track, we just slid the car from the tool to the track. Easy peasy!
Oh, but wait. The cars include tall ones for the battens and short ones in between. Get them in the wrong order and it won’t work. Well I have a lot of photos in the album in the phone, right? But most of them are with the sail down, and the others are at the wrong aspect. What to do? Well we could drive back to the Harlem, get the mainsail down from the locker and up on deck, unfold it and we could then see the correct order of the sliders which have to match the batten pockets in the sail; but that would be a lot of heavy and time consuming work, with the big sail then flopping around on the deck, getting in the way of the work. But wait a minute! Sometimes I’m not as stupid as I look. I had made a list of the order of the cars before removal and it was with the sliders!
I had also been worried about placing the metal slugs that fill the gap between the front of the track and the back of the mast, through which the bolts holding the track to the mast, assisted by Locktite, needed to be tightened. Well an old inoperative thin but stiff wire radio antenna that Lene had wanted to throw out did the bulk of the work (my idea), with final exact positioning of the slugs achieved by placing the side of the thin paint scraper between mast and track (Ed’s idea). Teamwork— its so much fun.
While he was there, Ed also drilled a right sized hole in the right place near the bottom of the new stanchion and I was then able to install the lifelines.
I retrieved the repaired Bimini from Doyle Sails and paid for the repair, which seemed reasonable to me. But I never know what the fair price is, being at the mercy of such experts, though I do trust them, somewhat of necessity. The Bimini is back up in place, as is the steering wheel, under its protection.
The prop and shaft are nicely painted, enhanced in appearance by their sacrificial zincs. The interior woodwork got its third coat of polyurethane and looks good.
Several days of interior cleaning, one with Lene’s help. She also organized the tool drawer identifying several redundant or never-used tools that are now stored in “lower priced real estate” on the boat.
…We took off the mattress, a 4’ by 8’ piece of four inch thick upholstered foam rubber (with curves and other irregularities) from the aft cabin. At home we took off its cover, stained in several places after 23 seasons, ordered new fabric and gave the old to Economy Foam, on East 26th Street, to fabricate a new one.
The interior reading lamps were rather ratty looking and four new ones have arrived from Defender, ready to be installed. With enough elbow grease and time I could possibly have gotten the old ones shined up …. but nah! Life is too short.
I’ve also finally tried to replace the light bulbs that provide dim floor lighting in the cabin at night. The existing ones work perfectly well (after all, they are turned on at most five minutes per night, only on nights when we sleep aboard) but the risk is that someone might accidentally leave them on all night or for days at a time when we are away, draining ILENE’s batteries. So replacement with extremely low energy LED bulbs is called for. But finding the ones that fit has involved quite the search among various venders. I think that is part of the reason why such items are so expensive— vendors’ high priced talent is tied up with me on the phone after looking at the photos I’ve sent them. Here is one of the old ones, and it is easy to find ones where the brass side prongs line up with the electrical contacts, but these are 90 degrees apart. And the new LEDs can’t be longer than the length of the original ones, installed in 1999. In May be that I will have to use Doctor LED’s generous returns policy if the new ones do not fit.
Boating life, and other life, goes on off the boat as well.
Lene and I were laid up by a URI for a few days, I devoted a few more to preparing a huge dinner for nine for the Passover Seder and enjoyed theater and my book group.
As Fleet Captain, an appointed position at the Harlem, my mission is to promote cruising, especially the Club Cruise. This year we were approached by our friendly neighboring club, the City Island Yacht Club, to “merge” our cruising program with theirs. I obtained approval from the Officers and have met, by Zoom and email with them. Their idea of cruising is different from ours: we háve had one long cruise of upwards to 16 days while they have planned monthly weekend cruises. So the trick has been to offer both of these differing experiences to all the members of both clubs. Early polling of the Harlemites suggests that some of us want the type of one or two week cruises we have been doing since I joined about 39 years ago, while others of us are quite content with weekend cruising. Time will tell, and all I can do is help them organize because Lene and I plan to go away to Canada for a two month cruise.
Points East magazine is getting ready to publish the article on our 71 day cruise mostly in Massachusetts last summer in their May issue. They like to edit my prose so I’m curious how it will come out. Here is a rough version of our track during the 48 days we were in Massachusetts, drawn by hand in red ink on a roadmap for Points East to adopt to their style. The red lines in the SW show our entry and exit from Massachusetts while those at the North end show our jaunt into New Hampshire, with the blue circle being the area, at a larger scale, to the left, of greater Boston Harbor, with each of the 24 ports visited labeled in black.
Soon the fun season will start. My mate is excited about it, issuing invitations to her friends, which gives me joys of anticipation.
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