March 26 - April 19 -- Sheltered In Place by Covid 19

Twenty six days with just three visits to the boat, for a total of only about twelve hours of work. I wipe down our car's seat, armrests and controls (because our garage attendant may unknowingly be infectious) and then drive to the boat. Hardly anyone is working; the Yacht Clubs have been ordered shut down. The clubhouses are locked but from my parking spot at the Huguenot it has been a short, fortunately lonely, walk to ILENE -- easy to maintain social distance -- I never see a soul! And once the ladder is set up and I've climbed aboard, I'm hundreds of feet from any human. One short day Lene was with me and helped me lift a new tank from the ground to the cockpit and lower an old one. With her aboard, since we share a bed unmasked, it was a masks off day . But the day I got very much needed help from nephew Mendy, who lives with his father, who is sick, not from Covid 19, was a masks on workday.

All of the work has been related to the new fuel tanks, with some ingenuity and some stupidity in the process. Here is the pit for the forward tank, empty and cleaned. From aft (left): old aft tank, pit for forward tank, aft head's holding tank, bilge and base of mast.

 Here is the new forward tank before  being lowered into its pit and then me hovering over it attaching the fuel lines.

How to get the remaining clean diesel fuel from the old aft tank into the new forward tank? The siphon did not work after a gallon because there was not enough height differential. With the small brass hand powered cylinder pump got about four gallons out into an empty antifreeze bottle, and thence via funnel into the new forward tank. This worked especially after I repaired a small pinhole in the uptake hose of that pump where it had been bent. Self adhesive tape does work magic. The final few gallons were transferred by removing the same uptake hose from the hand pump, heating one end and sliding it onto one of the nipples for the fuel lines of the tank, sealing the other nipple with self adhesive tape and then lifting the tank, placing it on its end and watching the pink fuel trickle through the hose into the forward tank for about 20 minutes.

Ingenuity is usually the product of desperation. One bolt on one of the nose clamps that secures the 1.5 inch diameter rubber fuel fill hose to its pipe on the aft tank was rusted and in a tight space. After every other tool failed to fit, to hold or have room to turn, my new mini vise grip got its first chance to shine. I took up the two pieces of cabin sole in the aft cabin and cleaned the crud from the small void beneath them because that same hose passes to ILENE's port side through that void. This was so Mendy would be able to grasp and pull the hose to that side, off of the tank's aluminum tube. But that did not work, even with heat, because the hose passes through both sides of a fiberglass longitudinal stringer which provided way too much friction against its sides. In the end we used the heat gun to soften the rubber hose, stuck a thin flat screw driver blade between metal and rubber, sprayed in lubricant and then, after renewed application of heat, lifted the tank up and out toward starboard, away from the rubber hose --  rather than pull the hose away from the tank.

But that was when disaster struck. Well, maybe disaster is too strong a word for it because all it will take to fix the problem is two round trip drives to Luthers in Bristol RI, for that shop to saw 6.5 inches out of the length of the aft tank, weld the two parts back together again and pressure test it overnight to assure that it it is air tight. I am so angry at myself for my stupidity in causing this costly and wasteful problem. The fore and aft tanks are equally wide but vary in depth because the hull of the boat slopes gradually upward toward the stern. I measured the width and the depth at both ends and ASSUMED that the fore and aft tanks were equally long: 41 inches. So this was not a case of failing to follow the wise old maxim:"measure twice, cut once". I did not measure AT ALL, but assumed that the two tanks were the same length. And whoever assumes, as another pithy saying goes, makes an ASS of u and ME! Here are the old and new tanks, side view, in the cockpit except the angle exaggerates the difference between their lengths.

Mendy will accompany me on the eight hour round trip drive to Bristol.

We have been enjoying heated up takeout food cooked by the Harlem's excellent chef/caterer, Anne. The drive to RI will be an opportunity to
 pick up this week's ration.

The good news is that Governor Cuomo has permitted marinas to reopen and both the Harlem and Huguenot have done so, albeit with social distancing and masks required. I have been advised that it will be about three weeks until ILENE can be launched, time to finish the fuel tank job, the bottom, the freeboard and all of many other spring chores.
Speaking of old and new, good news about the crew: After almost a year of following his older sister, Alphie, around, Cruiser has finally become tolerated by her.

March 10 - 25 -- Corona Virus Slows Activity Even More

Yes, the virus has slowed life to a standstill. We are hibernating in our apartment, walking up ten flights to a higher floor and back down twice a day to keep the muscles from atrophy. Also walks, near salt or brackish water, across the East River to Brooklyn and back on the Williamsburg Bridge,

along the Hudson where we saw a shuttered party boat,

and to Marine Park in lower Brooklyn, a park I had not known existed.

The Defender Store, a discount chandlery, has a sale toward the end of March each year -- a fun drive with several guys from the Club almost to the Rhode Island border to buy things needed for our boats. Their warehouse annually becomes a happy mob scene so this year for health reasons they agreed to do it by phone or internet. After several hours with their catalog and website, I had my SKU numbers all in a row and placed my order: two kinds of paint and four lines ( from 0.8 mm whipping twine to a 1" double braid mooring pennant). Also, the two new aluminum diesel fuel tanks have arrived and are in the car's back seat and trunk.
The fuel tank project has progressed with the 40 gallons of fuel pumped by jigger siphon from the larger forward tank through hose led through the speedo hole to the empty pails and jugs in a plastic box on the ground below the boat. For the actual siphoning I was fortunate enough to have help from both Lene and Bennett. Bennett also lent me seven of his five gallon pails for storage and I have cleaned out the five gallon yellow diesel Jerry can for that use too. And the old tank is out of the pit in which it has sat these past 20 years. The cleaning of that pit, removal of the old and attachment of the new tank comes next. For the heavy lifting in that regard I am blessed to be able to call upon my nephew, Mendy. During this period I worked on five days (one from home) for 14 hours.
Early in this period, before the severity of the quarantine set in, we enjoyed a lovely social dinner at Bennett and Harriet's house.

March 4 - 9 -- Seattle and Portland

Wednesday’s arrival in Seattle was in good weather, perfect for the round trip ferry ride to Bainbridge Island, for ice cream. This after fish and chowders at Ivar’s on the docks. And the mild winters gave us a welcome view of sail underway. Our hotel was a short block uphill from Pike’s Market with its network of restaurants, crafts, and food stores.

Thursday we walked to the Center for Wooden Boats, a mile away. Students building them. Others restoring them, and in summer, free rides on their fleet of them. Their wooden schooner is a beauty.

The Center is next to Seattle’s Museum of History And Industry, “MOHAI”, which is the old navy base and tells the history of Seattle, a great deepwater seaport. Lene found that the municipal theater was staging “The Children” in which she is scheduled to perform in a scene with her acting troupe, WEDREPCO, so we took the performance.

Friday was the drive to Portland on I-5, past Tacoma, for our last glimpse at the Pacific, but not before a visit to a great map store a block from our hotel on the way to the Art Museum, two blocks further. There we saw a part of "Vertigo Sea"..

The slow motion videos of fishing birds hurling themselves into the water, whales cavorting, and old black and white films showing small steamships in big seas were all great. Not so interesting were modern pictures of a man dressed in 19th century clothing posed amidst furniture out in the wilds. And most disturbing were black and white films of men shooting and skinning polar bears.

In Portland family and friends, dance, art, shopping and dining replaced water related activities.

Due to COVID 19, airports, flights, restaurants and hotels were all sparely populated.

Feb 16 - March 3 -- Time Flies This Mild Winter

Only two days (six hours) at the boat. Lots of details about tasks getting ready to replace the fuel tanks; but I will spare you them this time. A bit of sanding of the cherry trim around the galley which I will recoat and the glueing together of the pieces of the "L" shaped wood blocks that were broken during their removal. Four per tank, they keep the tanks from sliding from side to side as the boat is heeled and from jumping up if ILENE was rolled.
I went to two watery evening programs.

One included a free round trip ride on the Staten Island Ferry to the National Lighthouse Museum which is a five minute walk from the ferry terminal. That museum may be the site for next winter's Harlem YC excursion. The program was called Life on the Water and  it was a well dome presentation but it amounted to a recruitment effort for the merchant marine, stressing the varieties and benefits of maritime careers as well as their downsides: being away from home and family a lot. I found aspects of this interesting though it was largely a wasted recruiting effort because the audience was mostly folks like me who are no longer considering their career choice.

The title of the other presentation is shown  in the slide above, It was given by the Secretary, Webmaster and in essence the driving force behind the Society. Newtown Creek is the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens and was once a pristine marshy tidal estuary and a place for palatial homes such as the one built by John Jacob Astor in about 1840. Its eastern end is where the speaker's family settled with him in a Lithuanian immigrant community when they arrived here in 1948 from a displaced persons camp in Europe. It abuts Long Island City, where the speaker lived when he was married. A hundred and fifty years of chemical, and slaughter house waste and sewage dumping made it a superfund toxic site. Restoration efforts to reclaim it for pleasure use, kayaking for example, have been making very slow progress since about 1990.
And speaking of slides, I obtained the services of a tutor, Glenn Harris who taught me enough about how to use Microsoft's Powerpoint that I have been actively engaged in preparing the long delayed talk on some of the interesting things I found in the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office charts at the New York Public Library.
A week in the Pacific Northwest, by air, is next. We will see whether I can include watery aspects.

Jan 31 - Feb 16 -- Some Activity But Not A Single Visit With The Boat

I think ILENE must be lonely for me and a visit to her is planned for this week; it's been a long time for my dear girl to be alone.

On the boating side of life, I measured a few more times and contracted with and sent a deposit to Luther's of Bristol RI to fabricate the new replacement thicker-walled aluminum diesel tanks (125 vs 90 thousandths of an inch). He had done a tank for another Saga 43 and his mechanical drawings looked great. I coached him to be able to draw the forward tank: Same length and width but two inches deeper and same fittings but in different locations. I am also having him move the viewing port for the forward tank so it will not be directly under the single most difficult to remove structural thwart. Removing it requires me to remove all of the cabin sole to get a look! His design of the ports will be much more solid as well. I'm very pleased with his reputation, website and the satisfied Saga owner; and the price was less damaging than I had feared.

I've also been reconsidering the Newfoundland cruise; No, don't get me wrong, we ARE going. I checked the calendar and we have 77 days, not just 70 as previously reported. But this is still not enough time to put into all of the 39 ports planned, considering that many of them are worth a lay day or two. And some of the 77 days will be involuntary lay days, i.e., stormy or foggy. So the first cut has been made: the NW part of the loop featured in the prior post, including Prince Edward Island.  A different province for different cruise; think ahead!  Also, there are 17 nice looking ports and fjords along the south coast of Newfoundland. They are near enough to each other so if I pick let's say the seven best ones, we can get ten more days back.  Like I said, every cruising itinerary remains a perpetual work in progress draft until we arrive back in our home port.

We did have  a nice dinner and theater evening with our sailing friends from  "Ohana", and two other dinners with them without the theater in celebration of Lene's birthday. I have been to two other nights of theater an orchestral concert, a book reading, two classes of an NYU Adult Education course in ethics, and a lecture about the role of war games played at the US Naval War College in Newport RI in preparing our Navy for the war against Japan.  And between conception, shopping for exotic ingredients and the actual cooking and baking, it took me most of three days to cook a Libyan dinner for nine. This was for the meeting of my Book Group last week. Interesting cuisine, consistent with the setting of the book, but not all of it was very tasty. The guys appreciated my efforts though. So I keep learning interesting things. But that's not sailing.

Yesterday was the Harlem Yacht Club's Ninth Annualish Winter "Land Cruise" which I have been organizing since 2009. For our 2020 outing we went to the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers New York. Hmmm... if I was more quick witted, I might have called it: "The Harlem Goes To The Hudson!"  We took in the star show at their planetarium and at the beginning of the show our Club was recognized by name explicitly. But the star show was at two pm and we were warned that seating might well sell out (and it did) so I had to make two changes to our normal practice:  First we had to buy our tickets in advance (at sharply reduced group rates which permitted me to make the event a fund raiser for the Club again) rather than at the gate. I felt bad that a few people who had planned to attend had to cancel due to last minute work or health problems and had to pay for tickets that they could not use.

Secondly, we ate first at Dolphin Restaurant, also along the Hudson but a nine minute drive south of the museum. This broke our tradition of "learn first; eat second". Altogether about 30 folks participated though a few only could join the eating part and a few others, only the learning part. The planetarium show ended at three and we had two more hours to tour the museum's other exhibits including many with a nautical motif from canoe on Catskill Creek, to sail and then steam on the Hudson.

Next is a portion of a huge, very long skinny relief map from the Hudson's source high in the Adirondacks to its discharge into the Atlantic. This detail shows City Island on the right and the Hudson in the top left corner.

I was very pleased with the event: all the anxiety was paid off with satisfaction at the end. I was even given a suggestion to check out for the 2021 event: a potential guided tour of the New York Ferry maintenance shop. Who knows? I keep fearing that we will run out of nautically themed destinations for our winter cruises but the New York area is so culturally rich.

Jan 14 - 30 -- Three Work Days and Five Other Days.

The work days at the boat totaled only ten and a half hours, mostly working of the two big projects of this winter: replacing worn pieces of the rope clutches and replacing the diesel tanks.

As to the clutches, I got help from the Saga Owners' Net and from Spinlock in identifying the existing clutches which had no labeling (Spinlock XTS) and finding the correct replacement parts. Actually they are the prior, 1999 generation, of XTS called XT, but the replacement parts in question fit both. It is nice to see that a marine manufacturer thinks of its customers in such a user friendly way; not all of them do. I also got help from Bennett, who I helped with his boat. His help was in unscrewing the bolts that hold the clutches, to the coach roof. It is a two person job, one holding the Phillips head screw driver in place atop the coach roof, while the other turns the nut with a ratchet wrench from inside the cabin. A tiny bit of Dremel grinding at the side of the opening from below was needed to fit the head of the ratchet unto the nut. Then came taking the side piece of the clutch off, during which we realized that to get the screw driver to fit we would also have to remove the hatch located adjacent. Bennett reached the same conclusion I did: the job is just too complicated to be worth it. The reason for the job was to replace the internal parts, top and bottom, that have teeth that grip the lines. The teeth show signs of wearing away, eroded by the line passing through them, but not so bad yet. Instead, I will try to swap adjacent lines, each through its neighbor's clutch, so that the lines that get very little use will be in clutches with mildly worn teeth while those that got a lot of use will pass through clutches that have virtually unused teeth. So one could say that we got nothing done; but on the other hand one of the two big projects of this winter is, in a sense, completed.

The other project is the replacement of ILENE's two aluminum diesel fuel tanks. This picture shows the aft one, from the top, with its thick fill hose to the left, its vent hose in the upper right, and the two lines taking the fuel to the engine and returning unused fuel to the tank shown at the right. Most other Saga owners have done this job: twenty years of erosion hold the promise of a big smelly mess. I have two sets of design drawings of the tanks showing the locations and dimensions of all of their fittings, from two owners via the Owners' Network. One design is higher tech, designed to increase the volume of the tanks but I'm going with simpler design, the exact replication of the existing, except to be made of thicker and a better grade of aluminum. At the boat I took up the cabin sole floor boards, removed the four wooden blocks that hold each of the tanks from moving from side to side (or upward if the boat rolled), and took my own measurements to confirm that the new tanks will fit! Now I am contacting vendors to fabricate the tanks, one in Rhode Island who has made these tanks before, and another in New Jersey suggested by Bennett, who knows about tanks.

The Other days were mostly fun days. Two of them were at the Harlem's booth in the New York Boat Show at the Javits Center. About 4.5 hours per day, and the only fun part of it was engaging with my Club members and meeting strangers. In former years a highlight of such service was taking breaks to tour the other exhibits. But this year's show was the worst in history. In the old days there were sailboat exhibitors and various vendors of chandlery supplies, tools, charts, magazines, etc.  The sailboaters dwindled over the years, getting down to just sailing dinghys but even these were gone this year; the power boat exhibitors have taken over more and more space formerly used by other vendors. Boring, though one vendor of Scotch whiskey gave me wee samples each day and I told them about our sail to New Scotland in the summer of '17.
I also visited the Hudson River Museum and several restaurants in Yonkers to plan the Harlem's "Ninth Annualish Winter Land Cruise" which will take in the Planetarium Show including celestial navigation after lunch at Dolphin Restaurant.

Another night I attended an exhibit in the rare book room of Columbia University's Butler Library. It was called "Awash in Books" and I did not know what to expect. It turned out to be a show of art books with watery themes from poems to the biblical book of Jonah. Very beautiful hand crafted books selling in limited editions for as much as $10,000! I admired them but fortunately for me, my acquisitive gene was suppressed. And they fed us wine and cheese etc. I invited the curator to a sail aboard ILENE.

The Harlem's annual International Night came off rather nicely after the first membership meeting, well led by our new Commodore, Frank. My contribution was a Linzertorte which was well received, i.e., they ate is all up!

A dinner with sailing friends Jamie and Lori who came in from Boston to see the ballet. They have sailed extensively in Newfoundland and been a big help to me with the last big item accomplished  over several days during this period. Guided by Jamie and the Cruising Guides I spent many hours planning our summer cruise which will take in the Atlantic coast off the Cape Breton Islands of Nova Scotia, the tiny part of France called St. Pierre and Miquelon Islands, then after abandoning the Euro and checking back into Canada in Newfoundland, a tour of the western half of its south coast (upper right in the chart below) before Prince Edward Island and completing the circumnavigation of Cape Breton and heading for home. A lot to do in only 70 days and some ports may have to be omitted if we get holed up in others by weather. An ambitious cruise, in my opinion (39 ports in 70 days), and one I'm looking forward to very much. I hasten to add that plans are always changed, even at the last minute while at sea, but at least it is a plan. The red rectangles represent the scope of charts, twenty of which I need to buy, but only shortly before our July 1 planned departure.

Dec 13, 2019 to January 13, 2020 -- YIKES!!! A Whole Month!

And very little in a boating way accomplished. Two dinners with long time boating friends Bennett and Harriet, and one with new boating friends, David and Debra. Their boat is next to mine in the yard at the Huguenot YC and we got to talking. I invited Dave to join my Book Group, thereby finally shedding my rookie status after 27 years. They want to cruise and so he was interested in our experiences, though my local knowledge on the Caribbean is now at least eight years old. The fond memories remain though.
Also, I have finally gotten started (inertia is such a strong force) on writing up a talk on the US Navy Hydrographic Office Charts 1870 to 1950, in the NY Public Library. I cataloged them, over 4000 charts, as a volunteer, during the period 2006 -2013 and have had writer's block about preparing the talk until now. Here is a detail of a tiny section of a 4' x 8'  1878 chart of the coast Newport RI to Beaufort NC. The fragment shows the extent that Manhattan Island was undeveloped at that time. and also says "Fog T." (Fog Tower?) at the north end of what we now call Hart Island.

I did visit the boat twice, but for a total of only four hours of work.
+Pumping the bilge. The water comes in through the top around the mast. I did it manually because the electric bilge pump burned up when I tried to run it with ice in it. Another project.
+Charging up the batteries.
+I'm trying to refurbish the rope clutches on the coach roof because, believe it or not, the friction of the lines they hold has worn down the metal teeth in the bar that, when engaged, holds the lines in place under tension. First step is identifying the manufacturer so I can ask about the process. ILENE's  clutches are unlike those in today's catalogues, an older vintage -- from 1999. For one thing, unlike the current models, the levers lift up at their aft ends. The littlest project take a while and there is a lot of winter left to get this done. One idea I had was to cross the lines so that those used the most would be slotted in clutches that have fresh teeth and those hardly ever used would be where the teeth are worn. Any readers with ideas, please comment. I used the flashlight for lighting.

+The new canvas bag covering the teak table in the cockpit is being fabricated as I write.
+I've measured, and using Pythagoreas' theorem, calculated the length of the hypotenuse to figure out how long the new 1/4" replacement whisker pole uphaul line should be.
+More stainless steel hardware is needed to reattach the MOM-8 life saving module.
+But the biggest project this winter will be getting new and improved fuel tanks to replace the current ones that are 20 year old. One of them has sprung a tiny leak which will stink up the boat if not fixed. Most of the other Saga owners have replaced the tanks by now. The new ones will be made of thicker stronger metal and will last 40 years, at least! In this regard I am very lucky that two other owners have offered me design drawings that I can take to a shop that welds metal tanks.  Less lucky is that to get to the existing tanks so I can measure their dimensions very precisely, I have to remove the cabin sole boards. Alas, my next task, in order to get the largest board up, will be to drill out one stubborn wood screw and then, probably, repair the hole I will end up making in the floor.
And so it goes!