Sept 18 -27 —— The Last Old Salts Outing Of The 2022 Season and Two Work Days

 I am very far behind in my blogging but will catch up soon. 

This was my tenth Old Salts sail of 2022, the eighth aboard ILENE (the other two on “Ohana”). A pleasant easy afternoon, and, as it turned out, her last sail of the season, unless you count her passage to the Hueguenot to be hauled. Other Salts continued to sail on other boats on Wedsesday afternoons later in the season.

The two work days wore traditional after the last cruise of the season. Well the first of them is a necessity after every cruise: clean up and take home stuff forgotten the day before. Living aboard, even for only eleven days, gets the boat dirty.  

The other work day was devoted to putting the dink to bed. Actually, I’ve only brought the dink to the floating dock, waiting for a day when I’m there at high tide to pull it to the seawall and haul it up onto the sea wall for our volunteer yard crew to take it, via fork lift, to the rack and lift it up to its storage place for the winter. 

The hardest part of this operation is removing its outboard (after detaching the fuel tank and  running the fuel out of it) from dink to land. The outboard seems to get heavier each year. Chief Launch Operator David helped me with this hardest part— lifting the outboard from the transom of the floating dink to the adjacent dock. This particular part of the operation absolutely requires a second person. One person has to hold a line tied around it so it can be rettieved from the briny depths if dropped. I’ve not dropped it yet but, like I say, it keeps getting heavier and it is an awkward move from kneeling in the rocking dink, lifting the engine to chest hight and swinging it to the side — to land. And then David also helped me lift it to a dock cart to pull it to the locker house. Again, higher tide helps because then the ramp from floating dock up to fixed dock is not as steep. 

And then our Commodore helped me carry it up the flight of stairs to its winter home in the locker house. I could have done this part by myself, but help certainly made it easier. I told him that he was working way below his pay grade, a joke because all of our officers are unpaid volunteers and he was unpaid for helping me. Our officers and trustees are truly “trusted servants” rather than authority figures. I’m very grateful to both of my helpers. I have so mush to be thankful for.