April 15 - 23 — Four Work Days, Three With Lene and a Maritime History Lecture

Good news and bad about this summer’s  cruise. Well my mate had five separate medical problems in March and April! Most have a new drug to try to control them. But the potential effects of the drugs on her and interactions between them are not yet known. So Newfoundland, where medical care may be as much as 36 hours away, had to be scratched. I often stubbornly take abandonment of goals badly, but not this time.  And Prince Edward Island, another place that neither of us has ever been to, much less sailed to, is being added. So the bad news is not that bad.

The good news is that I’ve never seen Lene so enthusiastic about a cruise before. She has purchased enough cat food and litter to last into September as well as pharmaceutical supplies. She is arranging for our crew to see their vet and actively planning with me. And she has worked on the boat three times during this period, partly inventorying what we have so we can determine what we need to bring on board. Because we plan to live aboard for a week before cutting the plug to home — to let our contractor move our furniture — to rip out the old and lay in new wood flooring, we will have time to “remember what we forgot”. The rest of her time was devoted to interior cleaning, a task in which I joined.

I also put the steering wheel in place, reinserted the canvas covered rubber rollers on the transom lifelines after a good scrub in strong cleaners and zinced and lubed the prop.

Lene watched the rudder while I pressed the Auto Pilot’s buttons and not only did it move, but it moved in the correct direction. Whether or not  it is calibrated remains to be seen. I finally got the wood around the back of the galley range back into place. I applied some stain to portions of the interior woodwork trim where needed.

I also poured 1/3 of a gallon of distilled water into the 18 cells of the six ”house bank” batteries. The boat is starting to look good. The only disappointment among so much hope is that when it rains hard water still comes into the boat through its coach roof. 

But it was not all work. Club Freetime advised of a free lecture on the concept of “Maritimity” in the time of Russia’s Peter the Great. He called St. Petersburg “The New Amsterdam”. I’m always interested in things salty and having cruised from Amsterdam to St. Petersberg and back on a floating hotel, and visited the Svarlbard Achipelago last summer on a different such craft, I figured this lecture would be in my wheelhouse. Our lecturer, who escaped from Putin to a position at the University of Genoa, his introducer, me and seventeen faculty and PhD candidates were in a seminar room in Columbia’s School of International Studies. His argument was that “The Great Divide” between the wealthy Western European nations and the poorer ones to the east, including Russia, was the result of the western nations developing and exploiting the sea.

Peter, he thought, was a visual rather than an analytical thinker. He made a grand tour of many European capitals which just happened to coincide with the year that the Atlantic yielded record tonnage of fish, and he could not contemplate that fisheries could become commercially extinct. 

Our lecturer described a nation’s “maritimity” in terms of its having a great port and an “Admiralty-like” organization. He tied in “Cabinets of Curiosity”, namely museums of sea specimens and cuisine: oysters and herring, which, after the Tzar acquired a taste for them, the lesser classes did as well. But those sea foods could not be grown in Russian waters. Though Russia had access to the Baltic and the Med, his fishermen, having fished out the whales from Svarlbard, reported to him that whaling could not be accomplished with commercial success. Peter ordered his shipyards to build Dutch style ships but they simply did not know how to obey his orders. So the lecture was somewhat more theoretical and abstruse than I had expected, though interesting.

Two other nights of theater with Lene and sailing friends who are also actresses. One with with Elaine in a MFA production up on Morningside Heights and the other with Dana, playing Titania in scene from A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Player’s Club on Gramercy Park.