May 9 --18 - One Day with Autumn Borne, GIC, and Four Work Days on ILENE, and She is Ready To Sail

I was away from the boat for eleven days, a long time in this busy season, and off solid food and not pooping. (Roger: TMI!)  My first day up and about found me driving down to Atlantic Highlands for lunch and a supermarket trip with Dean and Susan of Autumn Born, their 44 foot CSY. We met them in Beaufort SC in 2012 and several times since then. AB is one foot longer than ILENE but weighs twice as much; slower but more stable. She has now reached her summer home at Hop-O-Nose Marina in Kingston, NY, from which they will visit their new granddaughter. This winter they did not go all the way to Marathon in the Keys, but hung out in Vero Beach, a nice spot with a community of sunbird sailors.  Lunch for me was oatmeal and chicken noodle soup, "but please strain out the noodles".  They are great folks and I never cease to learn from Dean.

This time Dean's words of wisdom were for me to send back the beautiful shiny new stainless steel Wichard anchor shackles and buy less shiny galvanized ones from Crosby, which are stronger and much less expensive.  You can see that the pins are moused in with monel wire to prevent them from accidentally working themselves out.

One reason that boating supplies are so expensive has to do with the need to inventory such a large number of different items. Another is the amount of customer service time it takes in getting the right size, etc. This was the third shackle order I placed this winter, with the other two being returned.

Also, Pandora, Bob and Brenda's 47 foot Aerodyne sloop, the one that I helped sail from Essex Ct to Hampton VA last fall, has completed her two month clockwise circumnavigation of Cuba and reached her home. See: Sailpandora.com.

Then I went to the boat for a seven hour day. The doctor said no lifting more than ten pounds. My first day out of hospital that seemed reasonable to me but four days later, I could tell that I was stronger. Next day I confessed to the doctor who said, "well, you can tolerate it so do it!" He also let me have solid food at last.

That first day back, I did not do the very heavy stuff but got in a good day's work, feeling tired but satisfied at the end of the day. I began by unloading some winter stuff from the car at the Club locker. Next I visited Doyle Sails who loaded all three of my sails and the dodger into the trunk for me. Then to Home Depot's parking lot where I met Jorge, a day laborer. I figured I only needed him for a few hours but he wanted $100 for a full day and in hindsight he was right and the money was well spent and less costly, on an hourly basis than I had planned to spend.  He lifted the very heavy folded up sails from the ground to the deck, about 12 feet up, finished the compounding and waxing of the freeboard,

and washed the accumulated fallen spring tree buds that had accumulated on the deck and scrubbed with soap and water getting rid of 99 percent of the staining this creates as it rots (the last one percent, on subsequent days, took twice as long as the first 99 percent). He helped me bend on the main, including the battens in it, and install the dodger's center section. The dodger is definitely a two man job, one heaving on the frame with all his might to stretch the fabric while the other grapples with affixing the zipper ends and tabs. The last thing we did was to try to bend on the small jib. But after attaching its three corners, when it was time for Jorge to winch it up with the halyard, I noticed that the top two inches of the 'bolt rope" (which slides up in a groove in the foil of the forestay, thereby securing the luff of the sail to the stay) was defective. So we rolled it back up and after dropping Jorge off at Home Depot, I returned it to Doyle where the bolt rope was fixed, it on the spot. He cut off the top two inches of its sixty foot length with scissors and cauterized the new edge with a soldering iron; it is plastic.

I will probably never see Jorge again. A great worker. He has been in the States the last three of his thirty years and misses and sends money to his wife and ten year old son in Guadalajara, Mexico. He is also an entrepreneur, operating a party business on the weekends in which he rents a limo by the hour and sells tickets for traveling parties that he chauffeurs through midtown Manhattan with a bar. He advertises this business on the internet. He inquired whether I would run such parties aboard ILENE, but while I have had hundreds of guests aboard my three boats during the last 27 years, no has ever paid a cent, or ever will. Jorge is one of the eleven million immigrants that one of our candidates for the presidency wants to deport. I needed help and he fit the bill. Thanks Jorge!

Also, before my illness, when I had removed the masking tape after painting the bottom, unfortunately, a shall chip, maybe 1/2" by 3/4" of the new All-Grip boot stripe paint came off on the tape. I took a picture of it and sent it to Fernando who replied that this was not right and he would fix it. Returning after my "vacation" at that luxury hotel (Langone Medical Center; excellent quality service) I looked for it and could not even see where the chip had been.Fernando truly stands behind his work. His company is named Farol, which is Portugese for lighthouse.

The next work day I hauled the small jib from the ground to the deck: it is the lightest weight of the three sails. Then after rewashing the maple debris again, I filled the water tanks and pumped out the non-toxic antifreeze and restored the hot water heater. There is a problem with a cross connection between the AM-FM radio and the automatic bilge pump. To get the letter to work, I do not need to turn the radio on, but do need to turn on power to it at the breaker panel.

And then came GIC, the Harlem's 134th annual spring Going Into Commission party, after a shower and change at the Huguenot. It is always great to see your friends after a long winter apart. The best part of the food at this dinner dance party is served during the cocktail hour after the ceremonial raising of the flags. I missed some of this, which was probably good for my stomach's health, because I had to leave the party to fight wicked traffic to pick up Lene who came to the end of the subway line in Pelham, fashionably late. We are fortunate to have Anne"s excellent cooking again this year. This was the 134th (but probably not the last) time that the folks complained about how long it took to serve the entrees. Our kitchen is fine for serving dinners, ala carte, to up to 100 folks during the course of a dinner period; but despite the hiring of extra servers, the kitchen is simply too small to serve 150 people all at once. Someday we may figure out that we should just not keep complaining again and again.

Then two more work days including the launch day: pump out and refill the fresh water tanks, clean the water from the bilge. really scrub the decks so the topsides is ready for compounding and waxing, scrape and paint the small sections of the bottom of the keel which sat on the wood blocks and were inaccessible (Orlando did this for me), fit, measure, drill a hole through the toe rail for, and install one of the two new toe rail pads (the other has gone missing!!!), install the new up to date electronic charts, cut small pieces of dark blue vinyl tape to cover the gouges in the first "E" of ILENE that were created by contact with the launch on rough days (looks good as new from more that twelve inches away), tie the anchor more securely, tie up the electric cord and shoreside rubber water hose, fold up the tarp, take the ladder and remaining winter stuff to the locker, stage the lines for installing the head sails and preventers, tie off the lines to the shrouds that otherwise slap against the mast, install the dodger's two side panels and then its two outboard hand rails, test the electronics and the engine and vacuum part of the interior. And I checked the bilge to make sure that excessive water was not leaking in. A couple of days ago. a big power boat sank at this dock when its owner failed to do this check but went home for the night with a plug not reinserted.

On the last of these work days, at high tide, I slipped the dock and exited New Rochelle through the back door (rather than under the drawbridge and around David's Island and motored home. Much easier than when I came in via this route last fall because of the absence of other boats at the docks that line the channel. Less than five miles and it appeared to me that with having pitched the blades of the propeller two notches higher, I am able to get more speed when motoring. The problem with this strategy is that if you pitch the prop too high, the engine will not be able to get the rpms that make it efficient motoring.
Once on the mooring I mounted the two headsails. The only problem encountered with the big genoa was a nick in the fabric covering of the bolt rope. I fastened a two inch piece of the very sheer tape designed to cover small holes in light weight spinnakers over the snag which let me slide it on. I also used the remaining contents of the can of McLube Sailcoat to lubricate the bolt rope to ease the raising. This is a job better done by two people, one operating the winch while the other guides the sail into the groove, but I did it alone, going back and forth from one task at the bow to the other at the mast, a few feet at a time. The small jib was more of a problem, but for a different reason. I had rolled its furling line around the base of the drum so that by pulling on it, the sail would furl up on itself. But I did this winding backwards so when it came time to pull, the unprotected white side of the sail was exposed to the harmful effects of the sun's UV rays rather than the side with the blue canvas protective border. What to do? I could have lowered and detached the sail and unwound and rewound the furling line and started again, but instead I sat on the foredeck and unwound the furling line, one turn at a time and rewound it the right direction.

Summer is almost here!