Donnie Cahn, Rest In Peace

Donnie Kahn died last week at 87, from the cancer that had attacked her body. She was a member of the Harlem Yacht Club for 40 years and though I met her when I joined, 22 years ago, I didn’t get to know her until 2006 when I retired and joined the “Club Within The Club” (See Blog, 7/26/12), of which she was a charter member. 

Donnie was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and escaped when the Nazis were invading. She continued to sail her boat, a lovely and well built and very well maintained Bristol 36’, “Dido,” after her husband died, before I joined the Harlem, and up to and including 2011, after which her illness sapped her strength this summer. 

I attended her funeral service on Manhattan’s upper west side, her burial in Mt. Carmel Cemetery near the Brooklyn-Queens border, a Shiva call in her apartment overlooking the Hudson River and a small informal dinner in her memory at the Harlem. She was always cheerful and always game. She will be missed.

Rendezvous with "Autumn Borne"

We met up with Dean and Susan of "Autumn Borne" in South Carolina and Maryland. They are live aboards, this being their sixth year without a land base. I had hoped to visit with them by auto in Hop-O-Nose Marina in Catskill NY where they spent this summer during a projected trip to the Berkshires, nearby. But best laid plans ....  We're having too much fun so the Berkshire weekend hasn't come off yet and they are headed south. They are holed up at the Atlantic Highlands YC on a mooring behind the seawall, on their way south, waiting for a good weather window So I drove to Atlantic Highlands (just a bit over an hour) to spend  a few hours telling stories and what else, oh yes, eating. And having a car, I was able to take them to West Marine (for a fresh water pump -- and how could I resist picking up a few little useful things for ILENE?) and later to the supermarket -- the two sites that cruisers sometimes need a car to get to. Their plans this winter, past Florida, are up in the air. I guess the obvious meaning of that idiom would be wind related -- important for sailors, but in their case it also depends largely on what the friends who they plan to meet there will decide to do. Dean and Susan have promised to stop by at the Harlem on their way north next summer. Fair winds, AB!
OK I admit it. With this visit and reading the blog of our friends on Pandora (southbound and currently in the Dismal Swamp canal -- sailpandora.com),  I am a bit jealous of my southbound friends. Even Lene has expressed a longing to be back afloat!

A Fun-Filled Non-Sailing Weekend

Saturday was "work weekend" at the Harlem. This event is held each spring and fall to get a lot of projects done at the Club with free labor -- except that a delicious "free" lunch is served. "Will work for food" is what my sign reads. If you don't show up you are encouraged to pay $25, but this "rule" is not enforced and I do work on other days for the Club so I did not pay when we missed the event the last few years. But I like work weekends because they are a great way to meet our members - working alongside them and talking. Such members, co-workers really, become friends in the process.

 I was assigned first to pull weeds on the north side of the clubhouse. This was a solo job and damned hard work. The last stage was pulling little ground weeds like the ones a person would find in a garden. These did not become visible until the huge vines, growing through the chain link fence, were cut away. The vines blocked the narrow passage between the property fence and the refrigeration equipment hidden away near it and removal of this thicket was the purpose of the project. I would have been well served by a pair of pruning shears; lacking such, wearing work gloves, I ripped the damn things out. All except one vine that looked to me like poison ivy.  Then, before and after lunch, I worked with two others on scraping, priming and painting the wrought iron outdoor deck furniture. After washing all the green paint off my hands (when will I learn to wear rubber gloves?), I helped Rhoda and Lloyd remove their sails, it being such a windless day.

Finally a Club membership meeting from 5 to 7. I rather enjoyed the civility of it all, especially compared to the past, when ad hominem attacks were regrettably common.

Sunday I worked from 6 am to 6:30 pm, cooking a “gourmet dinner for six”  that I had offered to the Club in a "Goods and Services Auction". The auction was held last winter while we were away. In the past, for other organizations, I have offered a ride on our boat, perhaps a dozen times, but such an offering would not work at the Club because we all have boats.  This dinner had been "won" by three of our past commodores, Ernie, Stu and Mark, and their wives. The guests were all friends who we have sailed with and hence people who I would have liked to have invited to a dinner party even absent the auction. 


Today's work (may I call it a labor of love) was after more than a day of planning the menu, shopping for ingredients and doing the cookie baking beforehand. But the folks came and enjoyed so the challenge was worth it. Lene helped with preparing some of the ingredients, printing out the menu, setting the table and serving and clearing, tasks which would have been quite difficult for me without her. Unfortunately for Lene, her current dining plan precluded her from joining in the eating part of the evening  -- enjoying the fruits of her labors. 

The menu:

 Dinner for Three Past Commodores and Their Commodorables

                                          October 14, 2012

                                            Theme:  Circles

     Wines:

         Shiraz  --  Nine Stones --  Mclarenvale, Australia – 2008

         Pinot Grigio – Bollini – Fruili Grave, Italy – 2008

     Before:

          Green olives, Dates with edible pits, Pate of truffled livers

     Bread, home baked, with butter

     Soup:   Peach and Pumpkin

     Salad:  Beet, Orange, Fennel and Calamata, vinaigrette

     Entrée:

          Pork Loin stuffed with Drunken Prunes

          Garlicky Mashed Potatoes

          Stir Fried Snow Peas, Scallion, Ginger, w/ Pecans and black and white Sesame Seeds

     Desert:

         Roasted spiced pineapple a la mode (pineapple and Vanilla) over Strawberry Coulis

         Rugelach and Biscotti

     Coffee or Tea

     After:  La Grenade Liqueur -- product of Grenada

I always search for themes for our dinner parties. This time the theme of "Circles" came into my mind 

when I realized that many of the dishes were round: olives, dates stuffed with almonds, soup (in 

bowls), beet and orange slices, pork and pineapple. So I cut little circles of the pate with an apple 

corer and portioned the mashed potatoes in a half-cup measure to form timbales, to augment the theme.

The salad:

Altogether a very fun filled weekend, without being aboard a boat, other than a boat on the hard in removing sails.

Warm Feelings About a Good Deed

 Enjoyed a very pleasant day with Nick and others. Nick is a member of the Harlem who has been placed in a nursing home, probably for the rest of his life, as a result of memory issues.  But his non-recent memory is fine. While visiting a while ago, he expressed a keen desire to go sailing again. I thought: Why not?!  And the nurse said "Sure, you can take him out for a ride as long as you do not keep him out overnight." I am a member of a group who is trying to look after Nick's interests. The leader of this group, Alan, "cleared" me with the authorities there, viewing the need for such a clearance to prevent strangers from "taking Nick for a ride,"  in the slangy sense of that phrase

On the day in question, after several adjournments due to questionable weather days, Harry, a long time friend who is not from the Harlem, joined me in picking up Nick before 11 am. He was crying, literally,  when we arrived and complaining about his “prison”. We said: “Well not today; you're going sailing today!” and that was the end of tears for the day.  He drove with us to the Harlem YC where we all got sandwiches from the local IGA because the Club dining room is closed on weekdays for the remainder of the season. We ate aboard after getting underway. There had been some fear about Nick’s ability to walk the length of the dock, climb into the launch and from the launch onto the boat, but he handled these tasks as well as the six others of us. There were seven men altogether. The four in addition to Nick, Harry and me were fellow members of the Harlem: Brian, Al,  Mike and Howard, of "The Club Within The Club." Every man enjoyed the day. Both before and after the sail, Nick went over to his boat, on its cradle, at the side of the Club parking lot, and admired her lines. 

We were underway from shortly after noon until just before six pm.  The winds were moderate and we used the full main and small, self-tacking jib. Nick took his turn at the helm and handled the boat well and conservatively. We went out to close by Rye, NY and then tacked on the way back and used the motor for the final hour because our launch closes at six these pre-winter evenings so we had to hurry. Nick and all the rest of us amused each other by telling each other stories. After returning to shore, Harry, Nick and I had dinner at Artie’s Italian restaurant (Thanks Harry) and we drove Nick back to the nursing facility, arriving at about 7:30. 

I will definitely be looking forward to a repeat sail with Nick, et al.,  next season.

Nice News Today

I was at the funeral today of a good guy, who died without pain at age 83, surrounded by three daughters, their husbands and his six grand kids. But the good news is that there I met a woman who told me that eight years ago I had taken a group of Temple Youth Group kids out for a day sail. Her son, then in the fifth grade, was among them. Now he is on the sailing team of his university. It's nice to think that our little positive gestures can have such good results.

218 Days and 218 nights

OK, I confess. Yes, I am a bit compulsive about counting things. By recording facts in a log one gains the ability to see patterns that are interesting to me -- and perhaps to some of you. Actually the "log" is more of a diary than a traditional sailing log. It is the source from which the posts to this Blog are drawn, but has a lot more detail. Many have asked where we went and what we did on a daily basis or on a typical day, etc..  So here goes. No photos this time.

The on-board portion of last winter’s return trip adds up to 218 days and nights.  This began with ILENE’s splashdown into the brownish waters of St. David Harbor, on the SE coast of Grenada on November 7, 2011.
And it ended with our arrival at the Harlem Yacht Club, City Island, New York, on June 12, 2012. The 218 exclude our thirteen days in a hotel at St. David's while preparing the boat for her voyage after her summer on land in Grenada.

Where did we go? We visited 17 nations aboard ILENE, which are listed below in the order we visited them. Following each is a parenthesis with numbers in it.The first number represents the number of separate ports, anchorages or marinas at which we stopped for at least one night in each nation. Then, following a dash, the second number shows the total number of nights spent in that nation. Seven of the seventeen nations, those with an asterisk following the parentheses, are nations we did not visit on our way south the winter before  -- “new” nations to us.  An 18^th nation, also with asterisk, would be Saba, Dutch West Indies, but we visited this nation by ferry from Sint Maarten rather than aboard ILENE and we did not spend a night there.

          Grenada                                            (4-20)

          St. Vincent and the Grenadines         (4-8)

          St. Lucia                                            (2-3)

          Martinique                                        (4-9)

          Domenica                                         (1-1)

          Guadeloupe                                      (5-10)

          Antigua                                             (3-7)

          Nevis                                                (1-8)*

          St. Barts                                            (2-2)*  

          Sint Maarten  (Dutch)                       (1-10)*  (ILENE was in French Saint Martin last year)

          Anguilla                                            (1-3)* 

          The British Virgin Islands                (6-9)

          The US Virgin Islands                      (5-9) 

          Puerto Rico                                      (8-25)*

          Turks and Caicos                             (5-10)*

          The Bahamas                                   (14-34)*

          USA                                                (19-45)

We spent six nights “nowhere,” that is, underway, at sea.  (Two nights during which we got underway in the dark of the early morning hours are counted as if we “stayed” that night.)  All of the eight total and partial at sea nights were in the final 43 percent of the days of the trip. We stopped in 84 ports, but Lene spent 19 days in 18 of those 84 ports without going ashore. I had only 18 "stay aboard" anchorages because I went exploring at St. Louis on Marie Galante Island in Guadeloupe while Lene remained aboard there. Most of these stay aboard places were either due to high winds which would have made dinghy rides problematic, or because there was simply no nearby attractions ashore; and one was due to customs and immigration. You don't have to check in and out if you stay only one night and do not go ashore which we did in Domenica.   218 nights divided by 18 nations means an average of twelve days per nation; median - nine.    There are many other places that we would have liked to stay longer and many others that we had to skip, and any return trip would surely also include a return to some of our favorites.

How often and how far did we move?  ILENE made 83 passages which, with overnight passages taking more than one day, means she moved during 89 of the 218 days or 41 percent of the days --about two of five. So three of five days were "lay days."  When I was younger I would have despised such a lazy plan but now  ....  we had lots of sailing, thank you.
Our stays in any one spot ranged from one day, e.g. in Prince Rupert Bay, Domenica to ten days in the lagoon in Sint Maartin. Average duration in each port: 2.6 nights. Interspersed with longer stays in some ports were periods in which we made a new passage each of  four or five consecutive days, as in the lower Bahamas and approaching home.
The length of each passage (excluding the overnight passages such as 300 miles during all or parts of three consecutive days (from Boqueron, Puerto Rico to Big Sand Cay in the Turks and Caicos) ranged from 88 miles -- from Anguilla to Virgin Gorda in the BVIs -- to as little as two miles when we transited from Gustavia to Anse de Columbier, both in St. Barts.
Total mileage (measured by the shortest logical safe route from port to port (excluding additional miles spent tacking,  and searching through an anchorage for a good spot, and rounding each day’s voyage up or down to the nearest whole nautical mile) aggregated 3281 nautical miles. Not so very far – just a bit more than 1/8 of the earth’s circumference as a straight line. Our course, however, was quite jagged and generally was a gentle "S"-- shaped curve northbound up the Windward and Leewards, then west curving to WNW from Anguilla to Florida, followed by a curve to NE and North up the coast of the States. And we averaged 37 miles per day for the 89 days of travel, with a lower median because some long days skew the average.

How did we secure ILENE at night?

Six nights we were underway.              Three percent  

38 nights we were on docks.                 Seventeen percent

43 nights we were on moorings.           Twenty percent

131 nights we were on our anchor.       Sixty percent

We used docks more as we got closer to home:
First 81 nights, zero docks.              Zero percent
Middle 84 nights, twelve docks.      Fourteen percent
Final 53 nights, 26 docks.                Forty nine percent

Where did we eat our 218 breakfasts, lunches and dinners?

We ate three breakfasts off the boat, 52.5 lunches (a half is used when one of us ate out and the other stayed aboard) and  60.5 dinners (11 of the 60.5 dinners were on other people’s boats or their land homes rather than in restaurants. And we had 16 meals aboard ILENE with people from other boats: mango pancake breakfasts or dinners, in addition to many meals aboard with others during the 14 days that three sets of guests voyaged with us during the trip. These “social meals” aboard with others are simply accounted for as meals eaten aboard.)  So 26 percent of all lunches and dinners were off  ILENE, mostly in restaurants. Figure about one lunch or dinner "out" each two days.

So there you have our great adventure, statisticalized. I would be happy to try to answer any questions. 

Sixteen Out Of Thirty

It has been a long time since my last post. Amazing to me, in the 23 months since this blog began on October 18, 2010, readership has gotten to more than 20,800 page views, for which I am grateful; though I am not sure what a "page" or a "pageview" is. Anyone know?

The period from August 25 to and including September 23, inclusive, was a period of 30 days,  sixteen of which included boating activities. 

Five of the sixteen were work days, actually not whole days but days on which a few hours of work were done such as: visiting various places at which I might keep ILENE this winter; working on the boat of a laid up friend to charge her batteries, check if her engine would still start (it did) and pumping fresh pink antifreeze (propelene glycol) into her engine to protect against the winter; replacing the impeller in ILENE’s waste oil pump I had broken back in Boqueron; and flushing her watermaker to protect it for the winter. An abler mechanic would have gotten a lot more done but ….

And one of these "work" days involved a visit to our home for a few hours one evening by a young couple, Paul and Tami, who live near us in Greenwich Village and who are planning to head south this winter on their canoe-stern 37 footer. They were given our name by our vet, Jill, who visited us during the "Welcome Home ILENE" party; she gave them our name because they are bringing their dog. What fun to be able to recount our adventures as a way to help others. Next day I learned from another Saga owner, who I have never met, that he plans to visit Nova Scotia next summer -- and promptly asked for the benefit of what he learns about charts, cruising guides and routing there.  Subtracting the five work days from the sixteen leaves eleven sailing days.

Three of these were with the O_d Fa_ts club, on two different Catalinas and lastly on ILENE. Our Yacht Club’s restaurant, what with the waning of the boating season, has closed the restaurant on Wednesdays. So we convened at a local diner one time and brown bagged it to the Club’s sundeck for the most recent of these sessions. Mike and Sandy on "Pas de Deux":

Regrettably, the last meeting was the day after a brief but punishing storm had hit Eastchester Bay on Tuesday, September 18. None of our boats broke off from their moorings, but a boat from a club upwind did break off and careened through our mooring fleet, damaging half a dozen of out boats, including two Catalina’s. So the last O.F. session involved a sail with Richie and Mike, on ILENE, during which we stopped off at Consolidated Boatyard to pick up Howard and Morty, who had driven Howard’s boat, "Power of Two" there, so that the damage (extensive) could be repaired. Power of Two is not an expensive boat, but one I had greatly enjoyed sailing; the cost of the repairs may exceed the value of the repaired boat. If so, the insurance company will declare it “totaled”. A sad day, but the O.F.s plan to continue to meet, weather permitting, through October, probably mostly on ILENE.

So there were eight other day sails:

One was on Bob and Jeanette’s “Sea Leaf”, a huge 72’ Ocean Alexander powerboat that I helped bring up from Florida (reported in May 2011 blog). This time we were about 15 folks including Ilene and her brother, Ken, and lots of food and drink. We motored out from New Rochelle to Oyster Bay for lunch on the hook, and then went back. Having steered her up from Florida, I was appointed and gladly accepted the appointment as Second Mate, to bring the boat back if both Bob and his paid crew member were incapacitated. Neither of them were, fortunately, but this "appointment" gave me an excuse to stay up on the flybridge.

A trip with Ilene and her friend, CarolAnn, in 8 to 15 knots, was fun and uneventful except that somehow in dropping the mooring we managed to run over the pickup stick and were moored by the rudder on its line. By the time I changed into swim trunks and was about to jump in to the water to clear her, the problem resolved itself and the rest of the trip was fun.

I sailed with Howard and Dave on Power of Two one beautiful Monday. These are OFs but it was not a Wednesday so we were just out enjoying. Dave, a fellow retiree, is embarking on a great adventure of his own next week, with three other guys: bicycling from San Diego to St. Augustine.

A day sail with Ellen, the racer, so she could see how we cruisers live. We went out past Execution Rocks, over to off New Rochelle and back – further from the mooring than Ellen, who races a lot, in Eastchester Bay had gotten this season.

We sailed with Jane, a friend of Lene’s from the same place where she met Judy and Medidel (who joined us in Turks and Caicos), and her husband Jack, who had done a lot of small boat racing on Long Island’s southern shore in his youth. 

We picked up Bennett as well.  A good time of schmoosing and noshing was had by all, but very light wind made the sailing that day very underwhelmingly exciting.

For the Vice Commodore’s Regatta, the Club’s rules require that each sailboat crew of two have two non-sailing members along. It is designed for fun and to comingle our sailing and non-sailing members as well. We were fortunate enough to get our Commodore and his wife, Art and Carolyn, who have a big power boat, to join us. Art said all they hoped for was “a nice sunny day sail” and from my viewpoint, it was unfortunate that this was all they got. ILENE is a fast boat with a strong handicap to overcome.In moderate wind and due to mistakes (I left the binoculars home and we were passed by the winning boat while looking for the third and last mark while going in not the right direction) we finished second across the finish line and fourth after application of handicaps – of five boats. Not ILENE’s best day, but a pleasant day on the water with good food that our crew provided.  On our last boat, ILENE I, a Tartan 34, we won the first two of these annual races.

We had a group of friends out for another day sail. This is mostly Ilene’s friends and their husbands, who have all become my friends too. Here are Ricky and Joel while the next has Linda, Ellen and Lene:

Rudy was also with us for a fun day.  We enjoyed so much noshing afloat that we had to cancel our dinner reservations: no one was hungry. Ricky was one of the four guys who helped me bring ILENE up from Baltimore in June 2006. He was not a sailor but cheerfully did everything he was told, and did it well. And here is the saddest news ever to appear in this blog: On September 21, at 11 a.m., having recently arrived at the gym in his building after an AOK stress test from his cardiologist about a week before, Ricky collapsed and died of a heart attack without regaining consciousness. Rest in peace Ricky; you will be greatly missed by all who knew you.

The last of the sails in this period was with my daughter, Devra 

and two of her friends. Jen goes back a long ways with Dev, was at Sharyn’s wedding, does IT for the NY branch of a big Chicago law firm and has sailed to Bermuda. (Her photo did not come out.) Ashley is renting a room in Dev’s new apartment, sells cosmetics to spas up and down the East Coast and enjoyed her first sail. 

I got to ILENE at ten and had two hours to set her up for sailing and clean her, take off the barbecue and bag it for transport home for cleaning, etc. We left the mooring at 12:15 and were back 4.5 hours later, having sailed out to Matinicock and then into Manhassett Bay to a good view of Louie’s.

I no longer have the same burning urge to go sailing every available minute of every available day. But I enjoy every day that I do sail; a gift from God.