WELCOME BACK TO BLOGSPOT! Dec 28, 2021- Jan 31, 2022 —It’s Slow as Molasses in Winter

Thirty four days with only one visit to the boat! Almost five hours that day to charge batteries and clean up a few things, bring things from home and take others home to work on there. I took the three sheets of plastic that can mostly enclose the cockpit on cold and rainy days into our shower at home to give them a thorough soap and fresh water cleaning. The dorade cowls and stanchions need to be touched up here as well. 

In my last post I reported that the Huguenot YC was taking an apparently unreasonable position about the charging of batteries. I’m pleased to report that, as usual, they do listen to reason; that problem has gone away.  Thanks, guys!

Another trip to the boat was to heave the heavy snow off the winter canvas cover (enroute to a shopping trip with Lene in Westchester). However, on arrival we could see that the wind had blown the snow off; no need to even exit the car.

A lot of days were devoted to visits with Ilene to her doctors, in the hospital for pre-tests, the surgery itself and post surgical visits, plus duties at home for Nurse Roger during her recovery from the removal of a tumor. But all is good, the margins are clear, the lymph nodes show no migration and she has a zero count of cell division.  So I’m blessed to be having my mate hanging around for a while.

Two nights out alone at off-off Broadway theater and one on Broadway with Lene and Bennett and Harriett.  Three good dinners, two at the homes of sailing friends, one with Tom and Marie and the other with Fred and Rebecca, and the third with Ken and Mendy  here in our place.

I enjoyed my visit to the NY Public Library’s exhibit of selections from among its treasures: e.g.,  a Gutenberg Bible, Charles Dickens‘ writing desk, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick and hundreds of other “things”. 

Another day saw my first visit to the Queens Museum, in Flushing, the former New York City “Pavilion” of the World Fair of the mid 1960’s. Admission and parking are free but I took public transportation. It features a 1” : 100’ model of almost the entirety of the New York City land mass, studded with scale models of almost every building. But because it has not been updated since 1992, it still has the twin towers and not the new Freedom tower. Here is a section of Manhattan featuring Central Park. I hadn’t planned it that way but this section happens to include the locales of three of the Harlem’s prior winter excursions: to Randall’s Island (near to the left) and Central Park (in the center), both last year, and Roosevelt Island (the narrow one, two miles long, in the East River, to the right). (Rikers Island is in the extreme upper left.)

It was fun seeing the apartment house where I grew up in Washington Heights (3 miles to the left) and the one where we live now in Greenwich Village (2 miles to the right). City Island is on the map, in the corner, off the upper left. They turn the lights off for a few minutes every once and a while to show sunset, night and sunrise. A little model airplane periodically takes off (on a wire) from LaGuardia Airport. I had such a good time by myself that I’ve organized a visit there by the Harlem on February 19. (By the way, these excursions are available to all members of the Club and their friends; the later category includes you, my dear readers, so if you are interested, contact me for details. Lunch will follow at an ethnic restaurant for which the neighborhood has become famous.)
This will be our fifth winter excursion this season, including Sunday hikes organized by Dave of the HYC,  with more to come. When I announced it at the very pleasant, efficient and short first Club Zoom membership meeting of 2022 I prefaced it noting: If NYC can call itself “The City That Never Sleeps”, well then the Harlem can be called “The Yacht Club That Never Hibernates!”

Otherwise, in addition to lots of TV: 
— the movies - Licorice Pizza (save your money), 
— an interesting Zoom presentation from my alma mater on employment law, economic and ethical issues relating to the gig economy and the great resignation, 
— a zoom meeting of my Book Group, lively, by and large, because we did not enjoy the book,
— the transfer (with professional help) of the contents of my aging lap top to the iPad I’m now using to write this blog, 
— a ride with my nephew, Mendy up to Goshen NY where he bought a part from a junk yard to install on the car he bought at auction to fix up and flip,
— visits by two interior decorators one of whom Lene wants to engage to redecorate our apartment.

So it’s not nothing, but it’s not a lot of sailing. I will be posting more often now that I’m back at Blogspot, all the news that’s fit to print.

SV ILENE’s SAGA INTERRUPTED FOR ALMOST A YEAR BECAUSE OF MY MISPLACED TRUST IN A VENDOR.

[THIS WAS THE ORIGINAL TEST IS THIS POST BUT BELOW IS THE UPDATE] 

This was supposed to be the final post  to ilenrtheboat.blogspot.com:

“Yes, due to increasing technical difficulties with my using Blogspot, the continuing saga of the sailing vessel ILENE will henceforth appear at ILENEtheboat.com. The same name except without blogspot in the middle. The first post is already there. Blogspot was totally free, but my mate, Lene, got tired of hearing me cursing at the laptop (I don't curse at people, except for rubberneckers). And this blog is my hobby so I've spent a few bucks to make it easier for me, and hopefully for you as well.

I'm told that the 730 posts at blogspot will continue to be available to be viewed here, and a banner at the top of the new blog will be advising folks to go to blogspot for descriptions of the events of 2010 to 2020.” 

BUT AFTER ABOUT 40 POSTS UNDER THE NEW TITLE, COVERING ALMOST A YEAR OF SAILING, THE FIRM THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HELPING ME GOT MORE AND MORE RAPACIOUS, DEMANDING MORE AND MORE MONEY FROM ME UNTIL I HIT ON MY ONLY REMEDY. I WENT BACK TO ILENETHEBOAT.BLOGSPOT.COM.

FOR ALMOST A YEAR, MY ADVENTURES AND ACTIVITIES, APPROXIMATELY 40 - 50 POSTS, WERE REPORTED AT ILENETHEBOAT.COM.   WHEN I STOPPED PAYING, THEY NOT ONLY STOPPED HELPING BUT THEREAFTER ERASED ALL OF THOSE POSTS. 

I’m sorry for myself and for you my dear readers.

Feb 8 -- 21 ---- Two Winter Walks, Two Snow Removal Days And the Electrical Work Finally Done

As more and more snow makes the wooded trails impassible (or at least unpleasant) with shush or ice,  Dave has scheduled more "urban expeditions". Six us us, including Lene and I, met at Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard (originally Sixth Ave) and 110th St, in Harlem. That is the Manhattan neighborhood where our Club was first located, when it was founded in the 1880's, We made the loop of the closed and plowed road, counterclockwise around most of the interior of Central Park. Well Lene and I got off at 59th Street to take the subway home. but the rest of them were more intrepid. 

The next week ten of us met at the Staten Island Ferry terminal at the Battery for a free boat ride to the United States Lighthouse Museum. a seven minute walk from the S.I. terminal. Here are all of us except your photographer (Lene had other plans that day) listening raptly to the excellent talk by Jim Sarlo, the Museum's enthusiastic and knowledgeable Supervisor. His card describes him as an "Avocational Historian" and he jammed his free illustrated talk with many little known facts about lighthouses and Staten Island.

Following our time in the museum we repaired to a nearby inexpensive Italian restaurant for lunch before the return ferry ride and a planned walk up the Hudson's shore path. But various of our group detached themselves along the way until only Dave was left alone. 

I have to hand it to Dave. For several years I had been considering the Lighthouse Museum as a venue for the Club's annual-ish winter land excursions for learning and lunch that I have been leading since 2009. But I was deterred this year by Covid. David pulled it off with much less planning and anxiety than I put into such outings, and it came off perfectly; everyone had a good time and learned.

 The two snow days were different from each other. 

The first involved a lot of powdery snow, most of which had blown off. Getting off the remainder took only five minutes. But I stayed a total of four hours to complete the electrical projects.  As previously reported, I replaced the sockets behind the switch plates in the salon because plugs inserted into the old ones frequently fell out -- way too easily.  The other two electrical projects were the battery tangs and the wires to the water maker switch. Neither were broken; this was preventive maintenance before the damage could occur. I made the battery job a bit more difficult for myself  by not taking photos before taking the tangs off the battery posts of the seven batteries. This caused me to worry at night about how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. But years ago I had drawn a map showing all the wires attaching the batteries to the boat and to each other, which I was able to find at home. It saved the day. I crimped a new small ring tab to one thin wire of the pair connecting the solar panel regulator to the batteries; thin wires because they are short runs and do not carry much electricity at any one time, just a steady flow charging the batteries whilst the sun shines. And I took off, emery clothed, vaselined, reattached and bolted down the many battery cables involved for the four aft-most of the six six-volt house batteries. Then its just putting  away all the tools, replacing the boards atop all the batteries upon which the aft cabin mattress lies and that job was done. 

Next, we go forward to the other end of the boat: to the forward head and its hatch leading even further forward to the anchor locker. Strong task lighting and the small portable electric space heater moved into that small confined space with the door between the head and the forward berth closed most of the time (except for the times when I had to go aft to find a replacement nut for the one that I dropped into the anchor locker and again to turn on and off the water maker switch by the electrical panel to make sure that the new electrical connection was solid) made for a warm enough work environment, even without the short bursts of concentrated heat from the heat gun that shrank the shrink wrap tube over the new splice to keep out water.

The heat gun did its work and I rotated a fastener 90 degrees to accept a wire tie to pull the top of the heat shrunk closed joints to the top of an inverted "U". The red and yellow on the right side come from the batteries, while the red and black to the left go to the switch. 

For those that don't remember, here is what the connection looked like before:

Two other small matters. The new carbon monoxide alarm squawked and it is LOUD. A good test for me because the sound was unfamiliar and it took me a few seconds to locate the source and turn the alarm off. Then opening hatches for a few minutes and all was clear. The alarm goes off when a tiny fraction of a lethal dose of CO is detected, to warn us before it gets lethal.

And I had put one of the small cabin sole boards in backwards: detectable because the thin holly strips separating the wide teak strips did not line up with the strips in the adjacent boards. An easy fix: unscrew, turn around and re-screw.

The second snow day involved no boat work other than removal of the snow, but this time it was not powdery but heavy and wet and without wind it had accumulated atop the cover. It took half an hour, not five minutes, while Lene waited for me in the car, but it is done. Thus was the third snow removal so far this season, a new record.

Jan 10- 24 --- Three "Other" Days and Two Work Days

The three Other Days first. One very nicely done memorial service for our late member, Hadley, presented by his widow and three adult kids. There was no minister and no religious ritual of any faith. Rather the so-called Sailors Psalm was read and John Masefield's poem: "I Must Go Down To The Sea Again".  And each of his family spoke about how much they loved, missed and had learned from him. Also, one of those slide shows that are de rigueur these days, over sailing music, again very well done. Then open discussion  in which I shared my many warm memories of him as did many others. 

The two other Other Days were Sunday walks in the woods. One along the ridge of the Palisades from the Stateline Lookout north to the state line

and the other in Westchester County at the Kensico Dam and nearby Cranberry Lake where the quarry from which the stone for the dam was cut (which reminded me of Maine). Both days were chilly and the later breezy as well but we all bundled up and the exercise kept us warm. The crew is becoming more regular, about seven to ten folks who gain masked outdoor exercise and sailing fellowship. Bravo to David for organizing these events week after week.

The two Work Days, totaling 5.5 hours of work, were mostly electrical. Before I get to that, I did attach a longer piece of wood to the cylinder of the new plastic hand operated bilge pump to permit easy uptake from the bottom of the bilge, but the damn thing then fell apart and needs to be fixed.

I got the water out using old fashioned methods.

 The good news is that the ILENE's seven lead acid batteries are not ruined after all. The reading I had gotten was a false one. But they are ten years old and the big bill for replacing them will be coming up soon. In the meantime, by temporarily joining both battery banks I can get the diesel started after which its attached alternator charges the batteries. And I'm planning to get a portable jump start battery for when the batteries get weaker.

After cleaning the oxidation form the lugs, I tried to reattach the wire ends that had been joined at the junction box pictured in the prior post.  But the thing sort of fell apart and Mr. butterfingers dropped a few of the screws which fell under the 300 feet of the anchor line for the ort anchor so I came up with a plan B. A nut and bolt will hold the loops an the ends of the wires to each other, and the juncture will be sealed in a shrink wrap tube, then wrapped in electrical tape for insurance and attached to the bulkhead in the form of an inverted "U" so that any water (there will be water) will, hopefully, flow down past the ends of the "splice" rather than into it. But I had only one heat shrink tube of large enough diameter, so the job is still not done.

Finally to the batteries again, after clearing out and moving all of the "stuff from the aft berth to the pullman berth, forward. Sandpaper scraped off all the corroded oxidized material that grows on the copper battery cable lugs. After greasing them and vacuming up the dust, they are reattached to the batteries. But only half of the lugs are done so far. The benefits of a long winter--time to get these pesky tasks done.

2021 At Last --- Jan 1 - 9 --- One Work Day And A Walk In The Park

 The walk was organized by Dave, of the sailboat "Lady Kat", for Harlem members and their friends. Eight of us showed up for this inaugural winter walk, which was enjoyed by all. More of these events will be planned. An opportunity to get some socially distant but social outdoor masked exercise with your fellow sailors and swap sea stories in this not so cold but very cruel and deadly winter.

The site was the parkland at the northeast end of Orchard Beach, our route essentially the crudely drawn blue line on the chart. Orchard Beach, the yellow sandy crescent, is just northeast of City island, and northeast of the hike is the part of New Rochelle where the Huguenot is.

The red dot I drew in the water is roughly near where we turned back, and marks an off shore rock that the group jokingly called "Roger's Rock" over my protest. Rocks are named after the boats that go aground on them and my groundings have not been near this rock. Here is me sitting in front of "my" rock. Later examination of the nautical chart for the area shows plenty of deep 12' water at low tide almost to the edge of the rock. It is a place to anchor to shelter from a westerly storm.

 Finally here are seven of the eight of us on a crude wooden boardwalk over the marshy land, Lene leading and me next to last.

The work day. less than three hours, was timed so I could order and pick up $100 of takeout food that the Huguenot requires winter members to buy each winter. And I plugged in to shore power to charge both ILENE's and Ohana's batteries. But we only got about one and a half hours of charging because the Club's circuit breaker tripped, shutting off shore power. During that first part I had the electric space heater on and turned on a burner of the galley stove with a reddish clay pot inverted over it to act as a radiator.

I got 1.5 gallons of new rain water from the bilge but the stick cleverly used to hold the pickup hose for the new hand pump is too short to permit the operation to be easily worked with only two hands so I will bring a longer and stronger stick to the next work day. I coiled up a length of two strand electrical wire so it will take up less space, pondered how to get the new pump to pump air into fenders, and examined a junction box that I had installed on the port side of the bulkhead of the anchor locker six winters ago in Florida. I had read on the internet about a new, allegedly easy to use, all plastic, enclosed box for outdoor use. The anchor locker is not outdoors, but it is not exactly dry either. I had coated the terminals of the wires with vaseline, installed them horizontally so water would not run down them, hooded the box with a stiff piece of plastic bag to drain the water off the connection and forgotten about the matter for six years. Well the connection was still secure, but not at all pristine looking.

So I disconnected everything, sanded down all four of the the terminals to good red copper and reassembly will be for next time. 

But another problem is the possibility that one of the battery banks has died. To be investigated.

December 10 - 31 -- Three Brief Work Days With Others; But Only 2.5 Hours Work On ILENE

Each of the three days was fun due to my companions and my accomplishing what little I had set out to do. The middle day was after the big snow; Lene was my chauffer on the pleasant drive, round trip, slow due to the snowy roads but no traffic to speak of. My mission was to shove the snow off of the canvas cover, while my chauffer sat in our warm car. The snow was all on the starboard side of the cover and its weight had distorted it way off centerline. Putting my back under it made fast work of causing the snow to slide off the cover except for the smaller amount atop the part of the canvas which pressed it down on the solar panels. I could not make much progress working between the panels and the cover and left the snow there to melt. Half an hour. The plastic sheeting which is shrink wrapped onto most of the boats that get covered these days has an advantage (in addition to allowing a trickle charge as discussed below): a lower coefficient of friction. This means the snow slides off more easily, perhaps without the need for human intervention. The downside is about $1000 per year for the non-reusable plastic sheeting and the labor of professional installers.

The other two days involved teamwork with David of "Hidden Hand", his 40 foot C & C, while interesting conversation ensued. I hope we will enjoy more such days as the winter progresses, though David will spend a good part of it out west in New Mexico and sailing with a friend who keeps a boat in the Sea of Cortez. (Am I a bit envious?) Our routine begins and ends at 96th St and First Avenue where I pick David up and drop him off. From there we go to Consolidated Yachts on City Island where his boat is and then after a brown bag lunch, to ILENE at the Huguenot.

The first day we could not gain access to David's boat because the inverted "U" shaped zipper-closing "door" had not been installed in the plastic cover. The starboard side of his boat is about 18" from the eave of a shed with a crenelated tin roof. David has a good ladder to gain access to the roof, from which we can step across the gap through the door and into the covered boat. Our second day was delayed because while the door had been installed, the yard had not attached a two by four on the eave of the slanting roof to prevent us from accidentally sliding off the roof, which could cause severe injuries. The yard workers bolted on the 2 x 4.  I gave David a four foot length of former genoa sheet  to tie the top of the ladder to the 2 x 4 so the ladder can't blow away. David used a batten and tape to snake the male end of his shore power cord down from the boat between the boat and its plastic cover, off its port quarter. Then I ran it up to the outlet box for shore power. He gave me a short piece of thin line and a short wooden stick which I attached to the tang of the zipper to make it easier to slide it up and over the "U" -- to lessen the need to lean over the 18" chasm from the slanting metal roof. David experimented and learned that a small amount of sunlight makes its way through the translucent white plastic cover creating a trickle charge to the batteries when he is not there and the sun shines. He gave me a couple of Velcro loops for use on ILENE, and gathered some fishing, communications and navigation gear for use on his winter sail. And we were off.

At ILENE, the first day David helped me with the electrical problems I identified a few posts ago. The radio could not be turned off unless I removed a fuse: The answer was simple! The AM/FM radio is powered by two different wires. The one that goes to its on/off switch on the breaker panel works fine. The other supplies constant power to keep track of preset stations and the clock in the radio. But this radio has no clock so that power source served no useful function and simply leaving the fuse out, as it has been since I have had the boat, is the solution.

The other issue was the fused wire that hung over the others behind the breaker panel. When fused it lit the backlights behind the labels of each breaker on the panel, whether the specific breaker called "Panel Lights" was on or off. Those tiny lights are useful at night. The answer was to detach one end of that wire from where it was attached (and David knew which end of it to detach). The next step was reattaching it to the specific breaker called "Panel Lights", fourth from the bottom in the second column from forward. David's first guess was to reattach it to the aft end of that breaker, which did not work. But the other end did. The problem then became unscrewing the tiny bolt which held existing wires in place, putting the loop at the end of the mystery wire around that bolt with the other wires already there,  it and screwing it back in. In no way do I blame David for dropping the bolt, which skittered off the outboard side of the tray into an unreachable no-man's hands land. I'm so clumsy, I'd have dropped ten of them! Eventually, after ILENE is tossed and turned by the waves in a storm next summer, that bolt will work its way down to the bilge for retrieval. In the meantime I rooted in my new trusty box of bolts of all sizes and found one of the correct diameter and thread, and a bit longer. Problem solved. The shiny new bolt is indicated by the blue arrow I have drawn and the wire runs up from the bottom indicated by the yellow allow. It looks like the fourth breaker form the "top", but when the hinged board if lifted up and closed, it is the bottom. The picture also shows the grey plastic sheet off of which the old bolt skittered.

Our other day on ILENE I wanted to install the new plastic liquid transfer pump ($13 from Amazon, including shipping.)  This has only 1/2" outside diameter flexible clear plastic tubing so it is way to slow to bail out the boat in an emergency. But the idea was simply to get out the small amount of water that the pick up ends of the much more robust electrical and manual bilge pumps cannot reach. My thought had been to afix the bottom end of the uptake tube to the bottom of the bilge with wire ties. But David had a better idea, to tape a wooden rod to the side of the hose so, like the attachment to his Zipper entry, it could be held to the bottom without reaching one's arm way down there. It worked and lowered the water level in the bilge from 1/2" to less than 1/16", pumping 3/4 of a gallon into an empty antifreeze bottle which was easily dumped. I'm just leaving the apparatus in the bilge so it will be handy for the next time. The other task de jour was figuring out where and how to hang the coils of newly laundered spare lines in the lazarette (instead of their laying on the inside of the hull at its bottom. Objectives were ease of installation and removal of the coils and that the coils would not impede my access to the places in that lazarette to which I need to reach or go. And this is where those Velcro loops will be used and I will buy enough more of them

This is the final and 47th post of 2020. I look forward to continuing to sail, and work on, think about and write about boating in 2021 and beyond. Happy New Year everyone!

November 25 - December 10 -- Six Work Days But Only Twelve Hours

 And what got done?

The prop and shaft: First I cleaned them thoroughly -- the tiny bits of old paint scraped off; I felt like my dental hygienist, working intensely in scraping small areas, not small compared to my teeth but certainly small compared to the hull of the boat. Then sanding with 80 grit to give the brassy prop and stainless steel shaft "tooth" for the paint to stick. A thorough wash with Acetone to get off all dust and oils is next and the problem, unsolved after all these years, is that the grease with which I packed the interior, the moving parts of the prop, emits greasy traces which need to be removed as best I can do so. Finally three coats of paint: first the green primer and then two coats of white paint. This picture shows the culprits after the brassy surface was primed but before the white anti-barnacle paint. One spring job done in the fall. I will paint the strut with regular (blue) bottom paint though it is brass, because it does not move.

I've also sanded about half of the port side of the companionway where the cherry wood veneer looked drab grey after 20 years of sun bleaching and occasional salt spray. I also vacuumed up the dust and other particulates in the boat that will work their way into the bilge if left unattended. and obtained the cherry colored stain that needs to be applied after all the sanding is done but before the top coats of polyuurethane. And I sanded down the brass light switch cover which likewise needs new poly before reattachment.

I learned of a way to get the last half inch of water out of the bottom of the bilge from the Saga Owner's forum and the cheap hand pump is en route to my home. The normal bilge bumps get most of the water but cannot reach down far enough to get that last half inch. Some of the guys suggested much more technically advanced electrical solutions but the volume of water to be sucked out is so little that a Roger-powered pump will suit my needs.

The only other thing I have done was to remove about 100 yards of old lines of various diameters and lengths from the bottom of the lazarette for processing. I did most of the processing at home on two of the days. I threw a few away and cut bad pieces out of others making more lines of lesser lengths. I whipped all the ends, laundered the lines in the big washing machine, untied the resulting not quite Gordian knot that the washing machine and drier had tumbled them into and coiled each.

While they are off the boat I will complete the cleaning of the lazarette into which they will be stored. But I'm trying to come up with a system of hooks from which I can hang them so they are each reasonably accessible but without denying me access to the lazarette.

Not a lot of progress but it gets me out of the house.