This was a crazy tense period due to the pressure Huguenot puts on boaters to get launched early under threat of financial charges. It is not that they need the land on which the boats are stored on jackstands for parking cars or any other summer usage. Nor is “the rush” needed so they can lay off their yard people for the summer because they keep their staff salaried year round. I like to launch early which is better than the Harlem’s policy, under which launching is just getting underway and our parking lot is still full of cradled boats. It seems a friendlier middle ground would be preferable. For me, the rush involves responsibility (to get launched) without authority (over those whose efforts I need to coordinate to get me launched) which combine to aggravate my underlying anxiety. Here’s what happened.
Monday April 24: I got two calls five minutes apart. David Detailer called to say the freeboard was done. “What about the bottom?”I asked. ‘Oh, you wanted me to do that too?” He had forgotten (it is the height of his short busy season) but he promised it would be done on the 25th. Next a call from the Huguenot: “We will launch you on Wednesday the 26th.” “When is the high tide that day?” was my question. “At around five in the afternoon.” So I figured this might actually work out. I called 2Cs, our mooring maintainer, saying I’d be on my mooring on Thursday, the 27th, and please call me if for any reason you won’t have my mooring set up for use by then.
Tuesday April 25: I was there from 2 to 5, but David’s crew was painting another boat and told me they had one more to do after that before they would get to ILENE. I used a roll of their tape to tape off about half of the waterline and some of my half gallon of bottom paint to hit the spots that need two coats: the leading edges, the tough to get spots and those where the barrier coat was showing through. At five I looked up and David’s trailer was gone! So that leaves tomorrow morning for the painting and I called David when I got home but he said that his team had gone to dinner and was actually painting ILENE’s bottom as we spoke.
Wednesday April 26: I took the three sails down from my locker at the Harlem and loaded them into the SUV. Arriving at 1:30, with plenty of time to get ready for a launch around 5, I found the Huguenot’s yard men, Orlando and Gus, busy removing the tacks of ILENE’s two head stays. Her bottom was painted except for the seven spots where the jackstand poppets were pressed against her hull. It turns out that with the dredging done during the winter, the Huguenot is not dependent on high tide to launch and planned to launch me much sooner than I had thought. I carted each sail from the car to the dock where they would tie me up for the night. That way it is a lateral heave of each sail from dock cart to deck. Parking the car I returned to the boat and she was up in the slings already with one of David’s guys rolling bottom paint onto the seven poppet spots. Not a lot of time for that paint to dry. Hope for the best. They were ready to drive the travel lift to the launching well but I said wait a minute, put the ladder back up and went aboard to reconnect the raw water intake hose with its hose clamps and check that the seacock was open so as to be able to turn on the engine when the seawater intake got lowered into the water.
Launched at about 2:30, and that’s when the problem started. 1) The Yanmar purred to life as if she had only been shut down two minutes ago; that’s good. 2) No water running into the bilge; that’s good too. 3) But unless cooling seawater is pumping through the engine, it will burn itself up in a few minutes. And no water was coming out of the tailpipe, seen to port in the upper photo, above. I let it run for about a minute hoping for a delayed reaction, but no luck. So I shut the engine down. What to do? I called the ever helpful Dean of “Autumn Born”. He was still in Vero Beach, Florida, awaiting the start of their migration north to their summer berth in Catskill, New York, near Albany. Dean is an engineer and has helped so many people so many times. When I told him what had happened he said, “Oh, that’s an airlock.” My next question: “What is an airlock?” He explained that an air bubble can block the passage of water to the raw water pump and what I should do about it. Meanwhile, I helped the yard men tow ILENE about 100 feet from the slings to the dock where she is seen in the lower photo above using her dock lines. I put the sails on deck, filled the port fresh water tank with the dock hose through the filter, and washed off much of the topsides before taking the ladder back to my locker at the Harlem for the summer. Not a good night’s sleep - worrying about how I was going to accomplish something I had never done or seen done, just by following Professor Dean’s advice.
Thursday, April 27: I dropped off the SUV for an oil change at the auto mechanic and walked the last .8 miles to the boat, arriving at about ten to fix the airlock and get ILENE out of Dodge. When the water enters the boat (through a seacock, so it can be shut down when a link in the hose is open) it goes through a raw water strainer, then by hose to and through the condenser of the refrigeration unit and finally by another hose to the raw water pump on the engine which pumps the same seawater through the engine and out the tailpipe. First step was to remove everything from the aft cabin including the mattress and the boards covering the aft end of the engine, setting up work lighting and the heat gun used to soften the rubber hoses so their ends can be taken off the fittings they are attached to and gathering the tools needed. Then came the hose removal. I took off the one from the raw water strainer, opened the seacock, saw water gush into the boat, closed the seacock and reattached the hose. This was proof that the airlock had not been reached. The same operation at the other end of the same hose where it enters the bottom of the Condenser. Open seacock, see lots of water gush in, close seacock. Next came the hose from the top of the condenser.
This photo shows the condenser, it’s discharge vent, top left, with it’s hose taken off, sticking up on the right, next to the toe of my blue sneaker. But this time, when the seacock was opened, no water came running out of the Condenser. Airlock found! But how to get rid of it. I couldn’t pour water into the plastic fitting shown at the upper left because water does not flow uphill. (Later I figured that if I took a short hose, inserted it inside that fitting, bent it upward (U shaped) to a higher level than the fitting, and put a funnel in the other end of it, I could have poured water into the condenser. But all I could think of was Dean’s reference to the dock hose. But how? I tried to tape the end of the dock hose to the empty fitting but this wouldn’t work.
But by now it was after two, time to shove off if I’m going to get on my mooring before Harlem launch service ends at 4 pm in this early fringe part of the season. No time to mount a sail as I usually do. I came out from behind Glen Island on its western side and ran the engine at 2000 rpms. With both seas and 12 knot winds on my port quarter and a perfectly clean bottom I was making 7 knots!
And great news: the 24 year old reinstalled autopilot worked like a champ. One feature of it is a three digit display of the boat’s magnetic heading on the key pad in inch high LCD numbers. I had always ignored it, looking at the actual compass instead, because the LCD display was always some 20 to 35 degrees wrong. Now it matches the compass reading. It is better than when I got the boat! After testing it I let it steer us home while I went forward to gather the dock lines and fenders, etc. and coiled and stowed them and the hose etc. Rounding Belden Point into Eastchester Bay, we were in the lee of City Island. I got a phone call on my cell phone, from who? Oh, it’s 2Cs: “We saw you come into the Bay, we are on our way, and will have the bridle on your mooring ball in ten minutes. So I circled, they attached and the bridle hardly had a chance to get wet before I picked it up. Boat secured I called the Harlem’s Senior Launch Operator, David, a constant at the Harlem for many years. He came “alongside shortly” as he responds to the VHF, and took me to the dock. I chatted with him about my plan to have Uber drive me to the auto mechanic to retrieve my car and he said if I could wait til he got off, five minutes, he would drive me there because he passes the place on his way home.
So while sails are not mounted, the season has begun . But ILENE is lonely out there (in the gap between the right two Adirondack chairs).
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