July 20. - 24 — Old Salts on Ohana and Weekend Mini-Cruise to Rye Playland.

 The oppressive heat wave has continued: my mate, Lene, unwilling to subject our feline crew to the heat on board. My argument that felines have lived in equatorial climes for thousands of years without air conditioning fell on deaf ears. So we have remained living in the apartment.

Twelve lunched together at the Harlem on Wednesday but only six ventured out in what seemed like no wind. We sailed on Bennett’s Ohana and drove mostly on the engine, to keep the air moving past us, until three. Then a nice SW breeze came up. We circumnavigated Steping Stones Light, counter-clockwise, then beat past the Throgg’s  Neck Bridge, before sailing back to the mooring wing on wing. Dave, of Lady Cat is a much better tactical sailor than I had realized. Everyone had a good time. The only pic is of Dave and Beau.

We had so much fun that except for beverages consumed underway to avoid dehydration and a few peanut butter filled pretzel nuggets, no one missed the customary post-sail libations.

All was well until we tried to furl the in-mast mainsail. To make a long story short, we got half of it rolled in but the rest would not come.

Karen had to go to work so we got onto the mooring and called the launch for her before noodling about the sail. The dark black slot in the grey rectangle shown under Beau’s chin in the photo is where the furling line wraps carefully around a worm groove spindle. Pulling the line back out turns the spindle which is below but attached to the line on which the luff of the sail is attached. Pulling the line turns the worm gear which also turns the spindle, furling the sail. Simple! But not this time. Bennett‘s theory is that when unfurling we had paid insufficient attention to maintaining tension on the furling line allowing it to overwrap and create a blockage. 

It is the potential for just such a blockage that has kept me from roller furling mainsails, though they are increasingly popular on more and more boats. (Bennett admitted that he is getting tired of being lectured about them.) 

But the immediate problem was that we could not leave the boat with half the main out there catching wind. I came up with what turned out to be a very bad idea: Lets remove the grey cover plate, held on by four Allen bolts to open the slot and look inside. We did, but the grey “cover plate” was not a cover plate. It was the aft side of the rectangular block in which the worm gear turned. Removing it did not provide access but made it impossible for us, with our tools to put it back together, and the sail was still flapping. Social Member Anne, a former West Coast sailor and frequent Salt, came up with the temporary solution. We detached the outhaul from the sail’s clew, and then rolled the sail on itself into a vertical coil. Until it reached the mast. Then a line around both coil and mast, lashing the coil to the mast, just above the boom. But we were not done yet because the wind was pulling the sail out of its coil. Bennett has a high quality Bosn’s Chair in which I went up the mast, trussing the coil like a bunch of sausage links at perhaps 18’ intervals. Back at the Clubhouse, Bennett treated us to a round.  He called the rigger, Jeff Lazar, and while I don’t know how he did it, by Saturday the sail was off the mast.

The weekend was for the mini-cruise by the Harlem and City Island Yacht Clubs to the free mooring field at Rye Playland.

Eight boats, some shown above, enjoyed the weekend together.

ILENE to the right; I don’t know who took the photo, but it was taken when I had dinked over to another boat. The moorings are a bit hard to grab, no pickup sticks, especially for me, because I sailed solo, Lene, home with  our feline crew. 

The place is very easy to enter and well protected by two curving sea walls, except from due southerlies. (Dave, of Lady Cat, has been there and had promoted the place but it was a new port for me.) 

Only two of the eight boats were from the Harlem: ILENE and Zephyr, a 31 foot Pearson with summer affiliates Mark and Sherry and their two sons. The kids loved the rides at Playland (as all of us did when we were kids).

I took a refreshing dip. 

A highlight for me was a reception aboard ILENE, on which about 25 folks clambered, mostly arriving by the free launch (but tips accepted). Everyone brought large quantities of food and interesting beverages.

Next, after dinner at the restaurant, its rock band serenaded us aboard our boats. Some boats left at dusk, seeking practice at night sailing. 

Another highlight for me was meeting Serge and Julia aboard their almost brand new spacious Beneteau Oceanis 38, Gypsy Jake. They belong to the Morris YC but will be joining us on the eight day HYC/CIYC Club Cruise starting August 2. 

Outbound on Saturday the passage was little over two hours, motoring all the way except for about 45 minutes of sailing at four knots with weak winds on a beam reach and near flat seas near Rye.

Sunday, there was wind, but from the WSW, clocking to SSW. The passage lasted 3 1/2 beautiful hours with motoring the last two miles to rendezvous at the Club with Lene, who gave me an air conditioned ride home. First tack was on starboard from Rye to the mouth of Hempstead Harbor. Then on port to the towers of New Rochelle. About a dozen race boats with full crews and black racing sails all safely passed my bow before I tacked  back onto starboard and followed the racers (I used only the small jib). This last tack passed Ex Rocks and Kings Point to port and Hart island to starboard. A nice gentle day of sailing. The wind cooled me better than air conditioning, until we were on the mooring with the work of putting everything away taking off the garbage etc.

It would have been better with Lene.

July 18 — Winslow Homer at the Met

 I was lucky to stumble into this show today and it ends July 31, so act fast if you want to see it.

Winslow Homer painted action scenes in the US Civil War and continued painting into the earliest decade of the 20th Century. He painted scenes in a lot of places I have sailed: Key West, The Bahamas, Bermuda, and along the coast of the Atlantic coast of the US, especially Florida and Maine. He also painted in places I have never sailed: England, Cuba  and where the waters are too shallow— the Adirondacks.

He painted houses, fish, fruits, troubled race relations, hunters and bucolic childhood scenes, but mostly sea scenes, of trouble, terror and rescue. Here are a few of my favorites from his watery genre.

I cropped this one,  “Gulf Stream”, erroneously, clipping out the waterspout to the right, but the man has no propulsion or rudder and is surrounded by some hungry sharks. The schooner in the background may save him; otherwise he is doomed.

Next “Fair Breeze” a happy broad starboard reach, the boat’s sole has fish eyes staring out  and the lighthouse is just off to the port bow in the distance. Happy campers, the boy at the helm, the man at the sheet but no life vests and the kid forwards is sprawled dangerously.

Some rocks at Proust Neck in Maine after the “Nor’easter”:

“Fog Warning”, is next but in my experience fog does not give you a warning. Some big cod if he can make it back to the mothership. Have you noticed that he likes to paint from off the port quarter?

And finally one of Homer’s dramatic rescue scenes, this one involving a new tangled apparatus:

A good show with many more pieces as well, but only until the end of this month, so I rushed home to get this out to you.

July 2 - 17 — Home With Covid and then Getting ILENE Ready For Canada

 Yes the dreaded Covid! No worse for us than the common cold, but it kept us away from the water quite a while.

The windlass is fixed. The third day of working on it, alone, I gave it the acid test: it  passed.

The first of the three days my new mechanic, Pete, who I recommend (516-807-5340), (petemarine27@outlook.com) worked with me. (Well let’s be more accurate: he worked and I watched and helped) I’d seen him working under a power boat at the Huguenot and after chatting with him, figured he knew his business so took his number. He removed the electric motor which I took to Bronx Ignition for what turned out to be a free bench test. Five minutes. The problem was not the motor. The motor is to the right in the photo. I’ve cleaned the corrosion off of the aluminum attachment plate and will coat it with grease to prevent recurrence. Those are seriously large wires to carry the heavy electrical power that the Windlass requires.  I also purchased two 150 amp buss fuses and installed one, the other a spare. These are 15 amps higher than recommended, which I learned is OK. Pete did not leave until we saw that the motor turned the windlass to raise when the up button was pushed and lower it when the other button was pushed. Great. We’re done, but for the test. 

Next day I reattached the anchor to the chain and discovered two mechanical problems I had caused.

First, three strands of chain were hanging down out of the bottom of  the chain pipe through the upper portion of the anchor locker: (the white fiberglass tube in the background left of the photo) the correct one and two more representing a loop of chain that had somehow been pulled up into the pipe and jammed it. I tried to free it from the top but my tool (dentist’s pick taped to the side of a long screw driver) was ineffectual. How about from the bottom?  I had a piece of 3/8” dowel, almost four feet long left over from making bungs for the cabin sole project a few years ago. Just the sort of scrap that the Admiral is always after me to throw out. But I get it inserted from the bottom, twisted and the extraneous loop of chain fell back down! Hooray!  But not so fast, mister!  Yes, with chain attached, the windlass raised and lowered the anchor all right,  but only about two inches each way, followed by a loud “Clunk!”  A telephone consult to Pete. He said to check out the “stripper” — but ONLY AFTER you make sure the breaker is off — we don’t want mashed fingers. I tried to describe what I did to cause and then fix this problem to my mechanically astute friend Jim, in words, but failed, so here is a picture:

The stripper, that I have circled in orange, rotates on the central shaft, between the upper and lower plates of the capstan arrangement, marked in blue. (The chain runs around the gap between those plates - their ridges grip and their rotation lowers and raises the anchor chain.) Well I knew that the stripper could not be to the right of the vertical orange Allen bolt through the upper housing, labeled 34 in the diagram, so I put the stripper to the left of the bolt and it was the stripper that was causing the Clunk. Taking that vertical bolt out, I noticed the vertical hole through the stripper, and reinserted the bolt through that hole, locking the stripper in its proper place. No more clunk!

The third day, I motored to deeper water, lowered the anchor, got it set and used the windlass to kedge (pull) the boat to the anchor, putting maximum strain on the windlass. It works!

Also poured more than three pints of distilled water into the eighteen cells of the six house bank batteries, and closed up the aft cabin so that Lene can store our stuff where she wants it.

ILENE IS READY FOR NOVA SCOTIA AT LAST!  But a change in plans. All this Arctic, Covid and repair work made for a very late start and Lene had to be back early for a wedding and family visit in August. So Canada must wait until 2023.

But Eastchester Bay is not a bad spot in which to be stuck. We can go on the Eight Day Club Cruise that I organized, other local club cruises and some solo ones plus day sails with friends and the Wednesday Old Salts sails. We plan to bring our kitties aboard next week and live aboard, with access to our car in the Club’s parking lot this summer and New York’s cultural attractions.

June 20 - July 1 — Arctic Adventure

 This vacation was canceled for a year, twice, due to Covid. Exotic locales are sometimes difficult to get to. Our flight out was to Munich, to Copenhagen, to Oslo, and finally to Longyearbyen, capital of the Svalbard Archipelago. It has two thirds the land mass of Iceland, is located above the Arctic circle between Iceland and Norway and is part of Norway. The Germans named Svalbard Spitsbergen, “sharp mountains” as the scenery attests. The area was exploited by man, first for whales, then for walrus tusks, then for seal skins, then for the furs of land mammals and finally for coal until each was commercially extinct. Now it has come to depend on tourism.

[Before Svalbard, an afternoon in Copenhagen which featured a thorough docent-led canal boat cruise through the harbor on a brilliant day. Better not stick your neck out going under the bridges, though.]

The French luxury cruise liner Le Boreal, operated by Ponant cruises, was our home. With 156 passengers and 146 crew we were pampered and fed lots of delicious French food. The cruise organizer, for the US  passengers, was Gohagan which does alumni association travel. And the English speaking passengers on this boat were educated, interesting, and entertained by learning rather than by nightclub acts (though Le Boreal had nightclub acts). Two professors and several of the 14 naturalist/guide/armed guards taught us about the cosmos, aspects of nature  and global climate change and a Ukranian pianist played a concert of Mozart etc.

More than half the passengers were French speaking and all announcements and most programs were presented in French first followed by English. The focus of the cruise was the excursions: to land or afloat in Zodiacs. The fleet of about ten such inflatables were lowered from the top deck to the water and raised up again, twice on most days.

One day, with no zodiac excursions, we sailed the ship to the polar ice cap and into the first hundred yards of the ice there. We were at 81° 16 minutes north latitude which I calculate was 601 miles from the north pole. Further north than I expect I will ever be again. Pictured is different Ponant ship, in the ice, taken from Le Boreal. From here on north the ice gets solid.

The most magnificent animals were the polar bears. Svalbard has more of them than it’s human population   and the males amongst them (and the mothers when threatened) are the most dangerous animals around. That’s why whenever we went ashore our naturalists had high powered rifles to kill them with if they threatened us. I believe this signifies “Welcome to Svalbard; beware of polar bears,”

The naturalists knew where the bears had been the week before and look for them from the bridge of the ship with very high powered binoculars. From the zodiacs, at about 300 yards, the mother and two cubs looked rather like yellow smudges in the white snow. My cell phone, fully zoomed, captured them, but not well. With ILENE’s binoculars, which we took along, after 22 years of sea service since our wedding (thanks Jim) this scene of domestic tranquility, was clearly visible. But the best pictures were taken by professional photographers with long telephoto lenses. (Thanks Jan!)

The bears were staying where they were because mama had killed a walrus; it’s carcass kept wedged among some nearby rocks, the meat kept fresh by natural refrigeration.

We made several stops for different herds of walrus. They lie about on beaches, snuggled together for warmth, but these two were out playing.

This seal was lying out on a fresh new iceberg calved off one of the magnificent glaciers we observed. 

The scale of the height of glacial front is suggested by the zodiac in a bit closer.

The last of these three pictures shows the aftermath of what our guides called a “submarine calving” ; we saw a huge iceberg at the face of the glacier break off underwater and hurlitself upward before settling back down.

We saw reindeer, though they were not pretty, with their winter coats half shed off.

And antlers when we walked on a section of tundra, only its top inch unfrozen in the 24 hours of sunlight in this era of global warming.

Birds, Kittiwakes and Gulls, nested en masse in wee clefts high on cliff faces

except when they come down to take a swim from an ice raft.

A hike to the top of a ridge separating two huge bays gives a sense of the scope of things, with Le Ponant below.

These pretty purple flowers, Saxifrage, were everywhere, never growing more than a few inches high, and fauna grew higher.

The cruse ship fitted us with boots, life preservers and gave us, as souvenirs, the bright red foulie tops that we wore with waterproof trousers we had brought from home. 

The ketch in this picture (maybe 50 feet long and hauling tourists, went further into the protected but shallow bay of the former whaling station. The navigation team held Le Ponant in place with her props and thruster for several hours while we explored the shore, it being too deep outside to anchor.

We stored our boots, preservers and hiking poles on mats outside each cabin.

A nice feature of this ship, not allowed, or only by special permission, on some other cruise ships, was that the bridge was open for passenger observation whenever the sun was shining, which was 24/7.

At one anchorage we checked out this wooden wreck, about 45 feet long.

An interesting stop was at a former Russian coal mining ghost town, Pyramiden, once home to 700 men, 300 women and 100 kids, with its communal mess hall, gym, swimming pool and concert hall with bust of Lenin. It is now maintained, somewhat, by a force of ten caretakers after mining operations stopped several decades ago.

One relatively warm afternoon the air temperature got to 50 degrees and the ship pumped its pool full of clean salty Arctic ice water. I got a chance to swim in a wee part of an ocean I’ve never swam in before, for a brief few seconds. The rest of the swim team, professors at UP, may come sailing on ILENE this summer after a session of their work at the UN on climate change.

A happy camper:

All told a very interesting adventure and it’s good to be back home, even with a touch of Covid.

June 15-18 — Two Short Work Days Between Two Short Sail Days

 I had the benefit of nephew Mendy’s strong arms one day and we did two jobs on the boat. First was to disassemble, as best we could and only part way the problematic windless. Removing the chain from the anchor after securing the anchor took two applications of the roster numerous whacking with a hammer and Mendy’s strength. And then on the way home he help me get the outboard from the second floor locker to the dinghy on dark and placed it on the dinghy. Both are tasks that I would not have been able to do by myself. 

The next day I return by myself, bought a few gallons of gasoline for the outboard, attached the hose ends to the tank and the outboard, started it up (like a brand new engine on the second pull!), drove it to the boat and hoisted the dink to it’s davits. The broken “stripper ring” on the port coach roof winch has been replaced. They sell them in pairs so I have a spare part for next time. And then, while applying lots of zipper grease, I reinstalled the three rolled up plastic enclosure sheets at the stern and on both sides.

During the day I was in communications with s/v Shearwater. The Captain had read my Points East article on favorite Maine ports, which mention the Harlem, looked up the club and found my Fleet Captain email address, and written to me as Roger, asking about moorings at our club on his way there. I told him and had the VHF on when he called the Harlem launch; and made a stop at his boat on the launch ride back to the dock. I tried to give him and his wife a ride into Manhattan, but they were not ready, more interested in doing laundry and taking showers after cruising up from Virginia. If we get ILENE to Stonington when in Maine this summer, we can get to know each other better. He has long has a summer home there and now has a boat.

The first of the two sails was aboard ILENE, with a crew of happy Old Salts. It included Harry, at the helm in the top picture, who had been a friend of Nick, whose Ashe’s we scattered a few years ago, and a couple of new Harlem Social Members, in the second picture, who told me “We have never been on a sailboat before!”

The route included passage west through what I call Kings Point Passage and under the Throggs Neck Bridge. The computer says we traversed 11 NM during our two hours underway. Several others joined us for the après activities from the other boat.

The last sail was with Bennett aboard Ohana for 2.5 hours going out past Ex Rocks and back. There was good wind of 15 to 30 knots near the beam most of the way and we rarely were below six knots. I was not dressed warmly enough for the wind chill and Bennett lent me some clothes. He has finally come up with the equipment needed to keep the gulls from using his boat as their head; always a mystery why they choose one boat over another. We untie and remove a long strip of line with metallic fringes from around the shrouds and take them up by wrapping them on storage boards, and redeploy them to the shrouds before calling for the launch. Dinner at the Club with Bennett.

A lot of my attention has been devoted to preparing for our Arctic cruise, which will be the subject of the next post — with lots of pictures.