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.