June 16 - 26— Ten Days on the Mooring Before a Short Sail

         A sad situation that was getting tiresome. It is true that we spent several days with appointments in the City, and six days with friends on Long Island, New Jersey (2),  Great Barrington MA (2), and in New York City, and I love sleeping on the boat, but without the sailing it was getting tedious. 

         During our two days in Massachusetts we improved the lives of our crew, compared to the two days they spent on ILENE on a mooring in Badeck, in Nova Scotia in 2017 while Lene and I drove and explored the Cabot Trail. That time we gave them a lot of food and water and access to both the cockpit and cabin. And their relatives, the African big cats, eat only every few days, when they make a kill, so our kitties can (and did) survive from one morning to the next evening. But, this time we came up with a better plan; one of our Harlem launch operators, when going off shift at 1 A.M. on the first day, was happy to feed them and tipping him $20 for the service made all of us feel good, including our junior lions.

Ruth, who lives on LI.’s South Shore, invited us to her newly renovated ranch style house. Thoughtfully, she saved a brochure, an inset from the local newspaper, that catalogued all of the marine related businesses in her neighborhood. I thanked her but alas, I knew not one of them; the South Shore’s boating community, due to the shallow water there, is a world of power boats and perhaps Hobie cats and boats with retractable keels. We have sailed to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, which is technically on that shore’s extreme west end, perhaps five times, and I have traversed that shore four times, but never on my own boat and never stopping in any port there: twice in the Around Long Island Race on a 30 foot Oday and twice helping on deliveries: from the Connecticut River to Hampton VA, and the other time (OK, this is a stretch because we were hundreds of miles off shore) from Bermuda to Halifax.

            It is not that nothing was done for ILENE: 1. The tiny new plastic and brass bit for the Autopilot arrived and I assembled and attached it with a bit of help from Lene. Laying on my back under the cockpit I had to screw two machine bolts through the little plastic piece and into the underside of the rudder’s arm. To get the screw driver into working position (enough vertical space between the bolt and the hull) required Lene to turn the wheel to the side and hold it there -- a small but needed task. 2. A small leak from the hose where the hot water leaves it’s tank for the boat’s faucets was discovered while I was down there and fixed, by tightening the second hose clamp. 3.  I bent the Genoa on. Hoisting it by its halyard was not difficult, nor furling it once it was up. The difficulty was in feeding the plastic luff tape, a bead  the leading edge, through the groove in the extrusion that surrounds the forestay. The job does not require strength, just patience and balance to slowly feed it in while avoiding getting blown off the bow by the sail which billows out and moves from side to side. Again Lene was great. 4. The last work was compounding and waxing a bit more of the cockpit gel coat. It’s a job that I must admit I do not enjoy and hence it goes very slowly. There have been mornings and evenings with proper weather when I could have worked a couple of hours and done a few square feet of it — but I just balked.

        Planning cruise itineraries, on the other hand, is never “work” to me. Assuming we can get away July 1 and return on September 14, that will leave 76 days most for passages from port to port and others for lay days to explore in port or wait out bad weather. So a lot of ports and anchorages to be selected and placed in a logical geographic order. The Admiral wants me to report to you only that we plan to “just take it a day at a time and see where we get to”.  But that high a degree of laissez faire is impossible for me. As the saying goes: “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” My plans are never rigid, always subject to change based on any number of factors including health and weather, but the first draft of our itinerary is shaping up. “X” number of days to get to Maine, “Y” in Maine, then “Z”  from Eastport Maine to St John, New Brunswick. There the timing of the crossing of the “Reversing Falls” at the mouth of the St. John River (at the slack of the daylight high) must be factored in. I’m thinking to spend three weeks visiting maybe 15 of the “best rated” strategically located among the 35 anchorages, towns, and clubs in the 160 miles of the St. John River, with a stop for at least a few more days on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy during the way back to Maine, and thence, also slowly, back to the Club. 

       My friend, retired Captain Jim, was reminiscing about the canvas bag with leather handles in which, daily, he carried sailing stuff back and forth. I remembered that the canvas sides were printed with a nautical chart, but that I could not recall what body of water was portrayed on that chart.  He looked and it was the Royal River in Maine, which I don’t recall that I had ever even heard of.  So I checked it out in the Cruising Guide and the Royal flows into the west side of Casco Bay, north of Portland but south of the Harraseeket River, home of L. L. Bean, in South Freeport, which we usually visit. The Royal has moorings and is now on the itinerary, whether while outbound or during the return trip, not yet decided.

       And I nagged Lene about going sailing, at least a bit, even though she says she will be doing plenty of that starting in July. The weather report today was lousy, but lower probability of rain starting at three and so we set out. With wind behind City Island from the east, we put the Genoa out to starboard and planned to circumnavigate Stepping Stones Light, clockwise. But out in the Sound, the wind was more from the south and the wind dropped from six knots to near zero. We were not able to clear the lighthouse without tacking. Also, with only the Genoa, the sail plan was not “balanced” and it was hard to hold a close hauled course. So we fell off a bit and ended near the ramp of the Throggs Neck Bridge, where all we had to do was fall way off, to come home along the coast of Throggs Neck. But the wind came up to 16 knots. When it came time to jibe across Eastchester Bay, we swapped the Genoa for the small jib.  Elapsed time, 100 minutes, and the computer said we travelled four miles. A very short but pleasant “shakedown” cruise that tested the systems.

June 11 - 15 —- A Sail, Committee Boat Service and Repairs

                The sail was with Bennett on Ohana, just the two of us, on a whim, for four hours, out to Peningo Neck, Rye, NY and back. Wind was from the north giving us mostly beamy reaches and got to sixteen knots for several periods interspersed with other periods of six knots. Auto steered most of the way. Ohana is 37 feet long and easy to handle. The exception is that the beamyness of the cockpit makes a single jib trimmer’s job a bit more of a challenge. A picture of the cockpit with eight old salts in it which shows its breadth is in the most recent prior post. I suggested the addition of telltales to the in-mast, non-battened roller-furled mainsail to check its trim if they can be added without jamming the furling system. The sail is easily shaped by its outhaul and main sheet but without telltales I was not sure that we were optimizing its performance. The jib is smaller, not a Genoa, but Ohana has a spinnaker style reacher for lighter wind. On the return we transited Hart Island Sound, and only needed one pair of tacks after leaving the red buoy marking the No Nations to starboard, to clear The Blauses. A delightful warm sunny afternoon. 

                 The Committee Boat duty was for the Wednesday Night Races. They always need volunteers and we will be gone most of the summer. There were intermittent periods of strong winds and heavy rains in the afternoon and during the race, but racers are a hearty lot and Dave and his assistant Cristy were delivered to ILENE with their gear by the CIYC launch with plenty of time for us to motor out to position, test the wind, select an upwind start for a five mile triangle race 1) to a mark by the Bronx approach to the Throggs Neck Bridge, 2) then a broad reach east to buoys marking the channel in the Sound off the eastern side of  Manhasset Bay and 3) back. It was the little observed Flag Day holiday in the US and Dave put up all of his signal flags to dry. Dave races his boat in Friday night and weekend races but for the Wednesday night series he runs the committee boat each of the 15 or 16 weeks of the season. Though an unpaid volunteer, he is a real “pro” and was responsible for a well run race.

I missed a great photo op at the start by my lack of preparation. The favored end of the start line was our dinghy, mounted on its davit bar on ILENE’s transom. Four boats of Division One, the spinnaker division, passed almost simultaneously, the nearest about three feet from our “fender” and the furthest  about sixty feet away. so it was close with lots of intra and inter crew yelling. Sorry, too much adrenaline and testosterone in racing  for me. Winds of more than twenty knots which died down and then got stronger. And all boats including ILENE got back to their moorings before dark.

           We anchored in position in about 16 feet of water, ILENE’s first anchoring experience of 2023, and the first chance to test out the new low friction ring and Mantus hook for the snubber line. Once deployed, the hook held the chain well and the ring position decreased the boat’s “hunting” back and forth on its anchor. But overall the new system is not a success — yet. The problem is that the Mantus hook with its shackle is too large to fit through where I ran it, making it too difficult and dangerous to deploy it and more importantly, to retrieve it.  So it is back to the thinking stage: maybe I can 1) tie the snubber directly to the hook without the heavy shackle thereby reducing the overall size of the metal, 2) run the line through a different slot or 3) use the inferior hook that we have used since 2015. Time will tell.

             The repairs mostly involved water. A fresh water leak under the galley sink— again! My friend, retired Captain Jim, of “Aria”, had suggested that the last fix (wrapping the smaller hose with electrical tape so it’s outside diameter was equal to the inside diameter of the larger of the two hoses, jamming it in, and securing it with a hose clamp)  might not work in the hot water hose due to the heat. But running water through both hoses I felt the hot water hose get warm, marked it for future reference and saw that the leak was in the cold water hose. So the solution I had suggested to the plumber was not erroneous in concept, but just in his execution of it. I took off the old electrical tape, put on a neater thicker band of tape, heated the larger outer hose with the heat gun to make it soft, jammed the two together and tightened the clamp as tight as I could get it. Then, with pressure water pump building to maximum pressure, no leak! Success.

             The other water problem was more serious and potentially dangerous. The new electronically controlled bilge pump that I installed last spring had worked well all last season, but it did not come on this spring. I  figured that the problem might be in the pump itself or it might be in the electric wiring which runs from the batteries through two fuses (which seemed sound) and two switches to the pump.  I finally called  Ed Spalina, who has helped me so often in so many ways in the past. He has been ill and is not looking for work, but came over and with an hour of poking and prodding he determined that the wiring was delivering electricity properly; the pump was bad. Ed does not charge for travel time and his hourly rate is so low that was very pleased to give him a 50% tip. The next thing was to get a new pump and I asked both Defender and Westmarine, my two main suppliers, to look at my purchases last year to determine when I had bought the pump. But I had bought it from a different retailer and my paperwork is in our apartment which is a sealed construction site while new wooden flooring is being installed. So I looked at posts to this blog last spring to determine the installation date in late April. Then I called Rule Pumps which is now a subsidiary of Xylem, Corp, to tell my story. No problem, the very pleasant and efficient customer service people said, the warranty is three years and all we need is the dating number pressed onto the pump itself. 

Yep, there it was and the new pump will be on its way!

And expert rigger, Jeff Lazar, figured out what was wrong with the roller furler drum of ILENE’s Genoa that prevented it from turning freely to furl up the sail. He took out a part, disassembled it, filed down a rough edge, reassembled it and replaced the part. The miracle in this in my eyes is not that he knew what to do, and how to do it, but that he did not drop parts or tools into the Bay while crouched over the bow! Next calm day I will mount the Genoa. 

And we have been getting good reports from Paul Beaudin of Doyle Saile on the progress of the new mainsail.  

Maybe we can actually be off cruising by the end of the month!

June 7 — a Sureal Salts Sail

      We are continuing to enjoy living aboard each night. The big news on Eastchester Bay was the same as that all over the northeast, the pall of wood smoke. But nine of us sailed on Bennett’s Ohana for about 2.5 chilly hours.

The sepia tone of this photo was not added by any photoshop type manipulation. (And it’s the wind under my jacket that creates the illusion that I’ve gained 150 pounds. Photo credit to Bennett. 

      Fifteen knot winds from the north gave us boat speeds over seven knots and without large seas. Winds were from near the beam both outbound and on the return. We got to Green Can # 1, east of Execution Rocks, and back, passing north of the lighthouse both ways. Uncharacteristically, I did none of the helming and almost none of of the trimming. Being a mere passenger was fun, though I’d like to not make a habit of it.

      But the atmosphere was surreal. Like sailing in a fog. The helmsmen, mostly David and Beau, eschewed reliance on the chart plotter and compass. After all, these are our home waters. But for a while we were so disoriented that we mistook Long Island for Hart Island! The sun, at about 3 pm, way up overhead, above the spreader (yardarm) in the upper right corner in this photo:

June 4 — New Friends From Across The Pond

       A blue hulled, fifty-foot cutter-rigged, aluminum sloop, “Stenno”,  had been on a mooring two boats from us for a few days. It’s name was revealed to me by AIS. Our Chief Launch Operator told us she was a guest boat from Scotland, here for a repair to a sail. She has the appearance of a cruiser (the white above her deck just forward of her hast is another boat moored further away. Lene met the owner in the club  and we agreed to meet there that evening. When two or more cruisers meet and talk, it is called a gam. But they have cruised far more extensively than ILENE. 

They are not from the mainland of Scotland but from the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland.

        They have been out for a year, heading south through the Irish Sea, with stops in the Canaries, Madeira, the Azores, Morocco, and the Cape Verdes (I hope I got those places all in their geographic logical sequence) before hoping across the Pond to Tobago and thence up the islands to Florida and up our coast. With a 60 foot mast, Stenno cannot use the intracoastal waterway so all passages were outside. 

       Alistair’s wife is due here any day now for a visit and Alicia, a high school graduate, is a rather accomplished sailor, and will enter the U. of Edinburgh this fall to study medicine. They have had a crew member as part of the team, who, is leaving, to be replaced by another man flying into Boston. They are planning to meet him in Provincetown RI and drop him in Shelbourne NS from which he will make his way to Halifax to fly home. 

       I was very pleased to be able to provide them some local knowledge of Provincetown and Shelbourne. Alistair is retired from a career as a dock builder and both of them were interested in Bella Bathurst’s “The Lighthouse Stevensons” (reviewed in this blog several years ago) about the building of Scottish Lighthouses by three generations of the family of Robert Louis Stevenson and lighthouses and Scotland in general.

       Boaters have a natural affinity for each other that makes acquiring them as friends very easy.

June 1-3 — A Nice Sail And a Round Number Day.

 The first of the three days was first day this season of Lene not going ashore at all, and her first delicious boat-cooked dinner. I checked a lot of little chores off my list including going ashore for a couple of errands, but I did not venture off the Island.

The last of the three days marked the end of our first two weeks of living aboard, and the first in my life as an eighty year old, culminating with a vegan dinner with friends in the City.

In between, a sail date with the Salts, but on a Friday and with dinner following instead of lunch before. I’m not sure why these changes were made but the good wind came perfectly timed—  between 3 and 5:30 — and the rain and lightning (not much wind or thunder) came during the dinner that the nine who had sailed plus Lene enjoyed in our snug clubhouse. I was picked up by social member Todd who came down from Westchester and drove us across the Throggs Neck Bridge to the Douglaston YC where we met social member Beau aboard his 27 foot 90’s era Pearson, “Courtship”. Cute name for an attorney’s boat. Todd in green, Beau in red. All three of us current or former lawyers. One drawback to Douglastown is that the local wild birds drop their guano on the boats at that club much more frequently than they do in the Harlem’s mooring field.

Courtship was a pleasure to sail with her tiller, a nostalgic reminder of my years with ”Just Cause”, my first boat, a tiller driven older model Pearson that I sailed from about 1989 to 2000. Pearson made very sturdy boats.  Beau’s boat had a four foot draft, easier to avoid going aground.

The Douglaston club, in the SW corner of Littleneck Bay, is very barebones: a shack where the security guard sits, a dock, a launch, it’s driver and a mooring field. No clubhouse or Club activities. That’s why Beau, who lives nearby, is also a social member of the Harlem. We drove his boat over to the Harlem, and back at the end of the day, with almost no wind. But during the pre-dinner sail the wind came up nicely, maybe 12-13 knots and we sailed back and forth in company with  “Lady Cat”, Dave’s 28 foot Oday, with Chris and four social members aboard. “In company” is misleading: being a foot longer and with a larger Genoa, Lady Cat, was considerably faster. Here she is underway:      

My favorite moments were near other boats. First behind Lady Cat:  a good photo op but none of us were quick enough to realize it until it was too late to turn on cameras, etc. Then  a big tug pushing a big barge, eastbound, passing stepping stones light. We were southbound and it would be very close, but I fell off just enough to cross her wake about 30 feet aft of the tug. Lastly, headed west to round Big Tom buoy #2, we passed aft of Hidden Hand heading south, too far off to be sure but I yelled “David!” And he turned his head.

A good day on the water.

May 26-31 — Three Day Sails on The Three Day Weekend and Damage

 Most of these days were devoted to many additional “errands” getting things squared away in anticipation of ILENE’s  scheduled June 1 departure for 3.5 months in Maine. Hurried hectic days in New York, separated by peaceful nights aboard. No real rainy days yet. 

Friday evening we enjoyed dinner with Jamie and Laurie at a Bulgarian restaurant near Lincoln Center where they had come in from Boston for the ballet. Lots of talk about boats and sailing and we are again invited take a mooring at their Club, Manchester by the Sea, this summer

Saturday we sailed with Elaine, nurse-actor, center, and Sharon, professor of English literature, right.

A lovely peaceful day on the water— too peaceful for my taste: in three hours off the mooring our round trip measured three nautical miles and we did not get out of Eastchester Bay. Much of the time we drifted with the tide and achieved a maximum speed of 2.1 knots,  briefly. But the repair I had made to the autopilot recently came out. I later put the joint back together as best I could and asked Raymarine for any better ideas, but no response yet.

Sunday we sailed with Rhoda and Lloyd on their Catalina, Jazz Sail. Enough wind during our two hours underway. Rhoda elected to not raise the main and yet we got to almost five knots. Dinner at the Club followed, after which we all drove to the NewRoc multiplex to take in the recently released and critically praised:  “You Hurt My Feelings,” with Julia Louise Dreyfus.  Let’s just say that the critics liked it a lot more than we did.

Monday saw the best wind of the weekend, gusting to more than 20 knots in the morning and gradually diminishing. Yet I put the first reef in the main and kept it there until near the end. Our guests were Sid, who worked with me back in the day, Jan and their daughter, recently graduated Danielle with a degree in Marine Biology.

We made it deeply into Little Neck Bay, out and under the two bridges to the longitude of Laguardia Airport, beat back out and through the channel off Kings Point  before heading for home.

And upon shaking out the reef I noticed the rip in the sail:

It could be patched again, but Tuesday we let Paul, our sailmaker, persuade us that a new sail was needed. Yes, he could put on another patch, but the sail was original, 24 years ago, and had seen a lot more usage than most sails get during our stewardship of ILENE. The problem, in addition to the expense, is that we are delayed four weeks here at City Island, true not the worst place in the world, while the new sail is built. We will be able to day sail our boat using headsails only and sail on friends’ boats and go to events in June that we had turned down because we were planning to be off cruising.

So the 2023 cruise will be only ten weeks rather than fourteen, and in Canada we now plan to visit only New Brunswick rather than Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and or Prince Edward Island. But I’m grateful that my cup is still more than half full.

We also enjoyed dinner with Dave and Chris after some wine in their apartment. Dave truly runs the Harlem’s Old Salts and the Winter Hike programs. He has no title, but, like the officers and directors, is a mainstay keeping the Harlem humming.