Sovereign Nations

The last post ended with an epic walk for groceries and suchlike.  It was about 5 miles, not counting the up-and-down-the-aisles part.

Then we wanted to go to the USS Nautilus museum – it’s all about submarines and the first nuclear sub is on display there.  Google maps gave me the helpful information that there was no public transit between New London and Groton.  I mapped it as a walking route…4.7 miles each way.

And then we walked.

The best part about walking through strange towns (or even strange parts of familiar towns) is finding the unexpected.  This qualifies:

John Winthrop the Younger was the son of the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was himself a governor of Connecticut.  He build the mill above in 1650.  Pretty neat, eh?  Note the freeway bridge in the background. The mill is actually situated right in the middle of three such bridges arranged in a major convergence leading to the bridge over the Thames River.

Can you imagine the battle to save that mill?

When we showed up, a cop was hassling a very tidy homeless guy.  He had a pack and a gallon bottle of water on the picnic table and it looked like he had camped the night before.  This was before 9am, so the guy was trying to be subtle, I guess, packing up before most people would be around.  I wonder who bothered to call the cops on him.  He wasn’t hurting anyone or anything.

Anyway, we used the long, tall I-95 bridge across the Thames River and then the narrow road along the river to the museum.

What we saw: missiles, officers’ histories, sonar and radar histories.

What we didn’t see: the people and systems that make submarines possible.

I (James) grew up in Austin, TX, where I met a man who, at the time, was teaching physics at the University of Texas.  His name was Saul Sternberg.  He was on the original designing team of the USS Nautilus.  At the age of 19, Saul designed and built a valve system that would ultimately be applied to every working nuclear submarine in the Navy.  And that was the main reason why I was motivated to walk 10 miles to a military installation.

When I met Saul, he’d been retired from active duty for 15 years.  He told me that the most coveted secrets that the Navy had at the time were the silent propulsion systems that drove the submarines of the cold war.  He also told me that although all of those systems would be officially declassified by the year 2000, they would never reveal to the world the people that made those systems happen.

As Dena stated above, we saw weapon systems, decorated submariners, and control consoles of almost every system aboard a working submarine.  When we toured the USS Nautilus, the tour ended at a sealed hatch that lead to the reactor bay.  We were conspicuously kept out of the bridge as well. The engines, generators, and propulsion systems are aft of the reactor, which of course is behind the sealed hatch, where lies the history of all the great scientists who never held a gun but made it possible for over a half century of nuclear power at sea.

Saul was not only my friend but after my biological father abandoned his family he unofficially adopted me and I called him dad until he committed suicide in 1993 at the age of 64, less then a year after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease.

And, he was right.

The mill built by Winthrop, the homeless man, my dad, all essential parts of what make this country work, and all of them forgotten or locked away.

Dena jumped over me at 0445 and that’s weird. No, I mean she was up before me at 4:45 in the morning and that’s weird, or rather not the norm, but that just shows you how motivated we were to get the hell out of Hamburg Cove. Don’t get me wrong, it was a breath taking environment, a beautiful sheltered cove and the best ball-shagging we’ve ever done but after an entire weekend and a rainy Monday in the place, we were both freaking out to get underway.

When we clipped onto Miss Sue’s mooring Friday morning there were maybe 15 boats in the cove which is about a 1/4 of a mile circle. We thought we were in the perfect situation for a couple of folks like us that just wanted to kick back and let a busy summer weekend on the water go by.

The odd seagull circled, but we were entranced by the bald eagles, cormorants, and osprey.  There was also a small diving bird, so cool in its fast banking and sudden dives.  All the birds were hunting successfully, but the fish jumped right out of the water all around the cove.  One cormorant caught a catfish so big that it had to carry it around the cover in circles, tearing it to pieces as it went.

Oh, how sweet and cool the water was!  There was a biological life to it, no doubt, but it was fresh and we needed that pretty badly.

A lovely calm lay on the water and, refreshed from a swim, we got in Tinker and rowed up the river, seeking the truth of the rumored old-fashioned general store.

I (Dena) caught sight of a stone building behind a small dock and watched it appear as we started around a bend.  It resolved itself into the only land-dwelling I could imagine inhabiting.  A two-story (living above, workshop below) old fieldstone boat shed with a second floor balcony.  I imagined setting up there for the winter and tearing into all the projects that require space or make the boat hard to live in.

We knew that the marina specialized in restoring wooden boats, but we didn’t know they did such beautiful work.  As soon as we approached the dock, we were treated to this lovely transom.

Thought most of the boats there were in Bristol Epifanes condition, we love a hard luck case and, apparently, so do they.

We’ve all seen pictures of perfect brightwork, but check out the ratlines on this wooden staysail schooner!

A short walk up a long driveway brought us to the main reason we came to this little town: H.L Reynolds, the rumored general store.  It proved to be fact, indeed, and just as old as we’d heard.  The woman who owns the store and works the counter, Jane, has been in that room since 1953. Her great-grandfather started the business back in 1850, as you can see on the sign.

Back to the boat with our overpriced groceries, we were met with the following sight.

I (James) counted 163 boats by the time the sun went down.  Our lonely sheltered cove had just started to fill up.

So there’s this thing called rafting.  One boat ties up to a mooring and the other boats tie up to the first boat.  Or, to the outermost boat of however big a group they’ve amassed.  Ideally, you want to keep the boat that is tied to the mooring in the middle, but the high school environment of the yacht clubs encourage in-groups within cliques, leading people to tie up depending on which boat-folk they like better rather than creating a properly balanced mooring.  For example:

Play Penn, the blue boat, is the boat on the mooring, with three boats on one side and one boat on the other.  They were swinging in the breeze like a flat tire, tugging on that mooring directly in front of us.

That’s when our rum came out.

We’d maintained complete sobriety up to that point, in case Miss Sue came back and claimed her mooring from us.  That’s the protocol – take any mooring but don’t bitch if the “owner” kicks you off. (The “owner” being the person who pitched a tent on a public camp site, remember that?, but at least here in CT, we can use it if they’re not around.)

We had a nice, quiet evening, if you consider a muscle car rally at a 4th of July picnic at the local water park nice and/or quiet.  Everyone was having fun, the assholes were few, and a sailboat threaded through the mooring field, checking everyone out.

By noon on Sunday, there were well over 200 boats in the mooring field – so many we couldn’t even count them.  By seven that evening, there were twelve boats and an oily slick on the waters of our quiet little cove.

In the sky, a storm was brewing.

Our planned Monday departure was shelved.  We spent the day below as the lighting struck, dragging thunder close behind, and sheets of rain half-sunk Tinker.  Michael Chabon tickled my (Dena’s) funny bone with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union while James devoured Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.  We played dueling laughter from the salon and the v-berth, and there was not a jet ski in sight.

Back to jumping out of the berth this morning.

We caught the current ebbing downriver and shot out to the Long Island Sound in half the time it took us to get up.

Past the shoal, we put up the main and beamed reached up the Sound.  Rather than our speed slacking off, we shot ahead.  We hammered down that second reef within five minutes of setting sail.

Still, we ranged between 5.7 and 7.1 knots over the ground all the way up to the Thames River a mere five hours later.

This river, like so many in the area, is watched by twin sentinels at the entrance.

This, we learned today, is called a mansard roof.

Fuel and water tanks filled at the first marina inside the river, we scooted up to the municipal moorings, not one of which was occupied.  We took our pick and, as we so often do, set off on an epic walk immediately.  Groceries, falafel sandwiches, and a toilet paper purchase later, we returned to our home on the Thames – pronounced thayms on this coast.

Tomorrow, we museum.

When last we spoke, we were irritated by a bay full of mooring balls. Our solid anchor job improved our mood and we decided to take a day for stick-around type fun. Rather than leaving first thing the next morning, James went aloft in an attempt to stop the banging inside the mast.

The VHF antenna is at the top of the mast and its cable runs down a channel inside the mast, along with electrical wire for the anchor light. A couple more electrical wires (foredeck light and steaming light) begin under the spreaders. Some or all of these wires have come out of the channel and they bang around inside when the boat moves in certain ways. Not while sailing, but while motoring sometimes and definitely at anchor. He took apart the foredeck light, hoping to reach into the mast from there and pull the cables forward with a zip tie, but the hole was too small to work with, disappointing him. Putting that back together involved two screws and a gasket, all of which had to line up perfectly on a surface pointing down. Of course, dropping any of those bits would have been tragic, since they would almost certainly have bounced right off the boat.

He kicked that project’s ass.

We still didn’t want to leave, so we went sailing.

I know, sounds like we left. But I’m talking about dinghy sailing.

The dinghy – Tinker – is a Dyer. After all that work we did, she rows wonderfully and it was time to find out how she sails.

The answer, to our great pleasure, is wonderfully.

Tinker wouldn’t sail into the wind before and still doesn’t point too high, but now she moves along nicely and tacks with ease. I found that I like sitting on the bottom rather than on a seat so that I can steer more flexibly.

We took her into the Setauket River, tacking back and forth, making the most of the soft wind. We were headed to a small store that sells ice – always good to have a goal, right? The tide turned and the wind died before we got to their little dinghy dock, so I beached the boat and James walked the rest of the way (not far). I spent the time being amused and disturbed by the antics of two horseshoe crabs. They were attached – for sex? – but the big one seemed to want to get away. It weirds me out when animal sex doesn’t look consensual.

When he got back with the ice, we each had a nice cold cup of iced tea before heading back.

And we didn’t make it back for quite some time. For a good reason, though. The beach across the bay looked too inviting, so we sailed past our boat and beached her for the second time. In moments, I was swimming while James tromped over to a sign. If we were breaking a rule, he wanted to know.

I sat in the sun, soaking up the D, while James skipped rocks. We drank more tea and swam again.

Ah, the hard life.

I felt like shaking up my system, getting my blood pumping, so I decided to swim back to the boat and leave the dinghy sailing to James. I was surprised, somewhat, by his lack of discomfort with the idea, since I would have to cross the channel on the way. He, of course, was planning on sticking close enough that he could head off any boats that came too near.

Stretching out in a crawl woke me up and made my muscles tingle. Sailing is exercise like pilates is exercise. It’s more about balance and grace and core strength, not so much about using those big slabs of muscle attaching the limbs to the torso. I didn’t have goggles, so I stopped occasionally to check my heading and to keep an eye on where I was in relation to the channel, but even those pauses felt good. I made it all the way across without seeing a single boat come along, but I did have a lovely vision to watch when I took a moment.

James sailed zigzags and circles, tossing Tinker around the bay with abandon. I could see how cutting the weight in half had freed the dinghy up to sail more dramatically. The wind was steady and the waves small. Perfect dinghy sailing weather. They were pretty as a picture, passing in front of our big boat again and again. I wished in that moment that I had a waterproof camera, but you will have to simply imagine it…

That evening, Dena and I (James) sat around and drank iced tea and had a wonderful pasta.  The sunset on the mooring field was truly inspiring.  We watched a local oyster harvester working his way through the ebb.

We laughed until it wasn’t funny anymore about the local ferry being named after P.T. Barnum.  We can only assume he was from there or something.

Early to bed, early to rise, got us out of Port Jeff at 0730. We motored through windlessness until noon, when the breeze picked up from behind and we started a downwind run to The Thimbles. So called, I imagine, because they are very small, somewhat tall islands. For this area, they’re practically mountains. I’d read that they were like the San Juans (not true) or Maine and also that they weren’t for the faint of heart.

We’re not faint of heart!

When we approached, I realized that the channel was smaller than I’d pictured. As we have been getting used to, every good anchoring spot was marred by a mooring ball. These all looked to be private – installed by homeowners on the islands, probably. Neither of us liked the first option (between West Crib and East Crib), so we continued around Pot Island to the east side. On the way through the little channel, a woman came out of her house and yelled at us. “There’s a reef off that rock. You want to come closer this way!”

There’s faint of heart and there’s due caution. We threw the plan into the wind – wheee! – and motored right out of the Thimbles. Sails back up, we slid up the coast at 5-6 knots on a beam reach, shaking out reefs as we went. Only a few hours east, we downed sail and puttered into Duck Island Roads.

The Roads are protected by the Kelsey Point Breakwater to the west, the beach to the north, and by the Duck Island breakwaters to the south east. There are gaps in this coverage, but it looked good enough for a fairly calm night.

We rowed to the beach – beached the dinghy again! We’re going to owe her some paint on the bottom! – and walked to Boston Post Road. Had a great conversation with a local guy who was a total sweetheart and offered us a ride to the supermarket, which we declined. A huge meal later – salad and great bread, fried fish, shrimp, scallops, and clam strips, with french fries and cole slaw – we stumbled back to the dinghy with Talisker’s and without ice.

The sand bar we bumped on the way in had become a serious problem. I was rowing, so James hopped out of the dinghy into the surf and jiggled us over the half-foot-deep sand. Over and free, he jumped back in and we returned to our home, which rode proud and light on her bridle.

I put the bridle to good use as a bathing seat.

This morning, James sips his coffee and says to me, “I see Jesus and her two dogs, Jesus and Jesus. They’re right here by the boat, walking on water.” They were walking on the nearly-dry sand bar.

The fog kept visibility down around 1 nautical mile. Fishing boats appeared and disappeared suddenly, closer than comfortable, but it eased by the time we got out of protected waters and we had no need to turn on the radar. I’m rather excited to use it in fog – not excited enough to head out into fog for no reason, but still. It’s why we have it. The mist faded the horizon into a dingy band around the world. New London on a weekend sounded less and less inviting as I researched pricing. For a floating dock with all the amenities, we’re looking at $100 a night and a torn-up old fixed dock (not even a nice strong fixed dock) would be $75. The municipal moorings are $35, but we had hoped for water to wash the boat down. We could get stuck because some rain is scheduled to come through and, at those prices, we’d bust the budget in no time.

Another option caught my eye. Flipping through the cruising guide, the Connecticut River sounded intriguing. Protected anchorages, decent current. Up at the end of my paper chart, there’s a place called Hamburg Cove. The cruising guide says pick up a private mooring – it’s not considered rude as long as you move if the owner shows up. Or pick up a $20 marina mooring.

Free rocks.

And it’s fresh water. So we could spend the busy weekend in an out of the way river, with fresh water for washing the boat and our bodies, and a free mooring? I love changing my plans.

We rounded the Saybrook Breakwater Light around noon and started up the river.

The railroad bridge is a bascule type, but it is up unless a train is coming. It was up when I first saw it, but it had time to lower, let two trains go by, and rise again before we got to it. Very cool.

This river stuff is lovely. I’m liking Connecticut in a lot of ways. It’s still too full for me – too many people, though the density is suburban – but the feeling is good.

We’re in Hamburg Cove now, clean and desalted. The water is a perfect temperature for swimming on a warm day and tomorrow we’ll clean the boat and, maybe, get some paint on the bits we’ve banged up so far. Maybe do a little caulking on the cockpit coamings. Shrug. Who knows? We’ll chill out here in no-internet land until Monday. We’ll head to New London and grab a spot on the town dock – 4 hour maximum, but no one monitors those things on weekdays!

I (James)  finished the engine just outside the Norwalk entrance channel on a heading of 100 East for Port Jefferson, Long Island, NY with two reefs in the main and the jib paid out all the way to 130%. It was one of those sailing experiences that you never read about, meaning, uneventful. The wind was perfect, the seas were with us and we only saw a handful of boats for the entire adventure. It was a prime example of why we live this way. On the VHF radio we heard about a research vessel that had lost its Diver Propulsion Vessel, which was jetting itself all over the Norwalk channel, but that was behind us. There was a NOAA survey vessel, R/V Thomas Jefferson, doing maneuvers and making depth-soundings all the way across the Sound but again no concern of ours, just a minor course adjustment is all.

The most excitement we had was shaking the reefs out when the wind softened and pulling them back in when it stiffened.  Both events were handled, one each, by the one of us on watch, single-handed, without trouble.

Coming through the narrow cut between Mount Misery Point and the Old Field Beach, we slid through the water as though oiled.  The fresh bottom paint does have an effect.  The wind was southern but scheduled to turn west overnight, so we skipped anchoring in the Sand Pit from which a century of Manhattan concrete was taken.  Instead, we turned starboard just before the red nun 4 in order to run up the small channel between Strong’s Neck and the beach.

Even before making the turn, we could see that our Snug Harbor, our Sheltered Cove was speckled with mooring buoys.

A little background on the humble mooring buoy.

A mooring buoy is a privately owned anchor with a ball attached by stout chain.  The anchor (or mooring) is usually a mushroom style because they tend to bury themselves deeply in sand or mud and are very hard to break loose.  A boat comes up to or alongside the buoy and attaches to a ring at the top of the floating portion (the buoy itself).  This is considered preferable to anchoring because more boats can be fit in a smaller bay (due to the heavy anchor requiring less rode and giving a smaller swinging space).  Mostly, though, people do it because they can’t be bothered to set a proper anchor watch.  Tying to a mooring buoy is easy and secure even in stiff winds with a heavy boat, provided all the pieces are in good shape and inspected regularly.  Of course, you can’t count on that.  In the winter, most mooring balls are pulled up and kept in dry storage.  But in the summer time, the public anchoring fields are littered with them.

The Coast Guard designates certain areas as “Special Anchorages”.  One of the categories is anchorage for recreational boats.  That’s us!  They don’t allow the placing of any pilings (permanent poles driven into the ground), however, they do allow moorings.

Now we have a section of water set aside for recreational boaters.  The marinas and yacht clubs and various other money-grubbing cartels see these areas as revenue-drivers.  They put mooring buoys all over these public anchorages, more closely than I (Dena) consider truly safe, and charge outrageous prices for the privilege of not having to set an anchor.  Those prices range from $2 per foot all the way up to $6 per foot, depending on the popularity of the anchorage.  That’s almost $200 a night for a boat our size, and you don’t even get to plug in for electricity or step right off the boat to use the restroom or showers!

This is robbery.  And it’s in public space.

It’s like the forestry service setting aside a free camping area, and then a for-profit organization coming in, setting up tents on all the camping pads, and charging people by their height to use them.

These tactics are as exclusionary as a yacht club, but they use public space in a way that pushes out the public.

It’s pay or shag a ball, if you can’t find enough swinging room for anchoring.  And picking up moorings without paying doesn’t work in summer, especially weekends, because these capitalists hire enforcers who drive around and collect money from boats on moorings.  They’re officially called “launch operators”, because that’s about the only service they really provide – a ride from the boat into the marina.  Although that’s usually included in the mooring fee, drunken tips are expected (meaning bills with multiple digits).  After all, this is New York.

Back to us, heading into the channel.

We scoped out the situation and realized that there was a gap in the mooring balls right next to the channel.  We would still be some distance from the lee shore and the nearest buoy.  Sneering as we went, we passed up the plethora of empty moorings – because most of the time, the mooring-choked bays are empty or nearly so.  From Monday morning to Thursday night, the moorings are nothing but litter in the water and navigational hazards.

James motored up to the best spot, I started dropping the anchor, chain, and rode as he backed down.  I made the rode fast on the bollard and we made sure that the anchor had a good bite on the bottom by reversing on it.  We went nowhere!  He put the engine in neutral and told me what our depth was.  I multiplied by 5 and let out almost that much rode.  At the very end, I formed a lark’s head cinch with the rope rode around a stainless steel ring and attached the two 12 foot bridle lines I’d created in Norwalk.  This gives us a little slack in the anchor rode and puts the center of effort lower, which is more stable.

We spent a lovely ten minutes watching our sighted bearings – red nun against a specific hill, green can against a twisted tree – and became confident that we were holding as firm as any mooring buoy.

That’s all it takes, guys.  That and the willingness to keep the boat’s status and position alive in our heads until we pull the anchor and leave.

It’s not hard.  It’s just not as easy as pulling up next to a mooring ball.  I (James) saw so many customers from West Marine that had had terrifying or uncomfortable anchoring experiences simply because they didn’t pay out enough rode.  People drop anchor, pay out five feet of rode, and wonder why they’re drifting off with the tide.  When I told them that an anchor will not hold unless you have at least a 5 to 1 ratio of rode to depth, nine times out of ten, you could see the light go on in their eyes – “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

Anchors are designed to hold with a horizontal pull and release with a vertical pull.  With chain holding the end of the anchor down, the diagonal line created by the rode coming up from the bottom needs to create an angle of 30 degrees or less.  If they weren’t designed like this, you couldn’t pull the anchor loose when it was time to go.  This design makes for strong holding and easy retrieval.  It’s a centuries-old, tried and true method that has been all but forgotten in the Long Island Sound because of this atrocious crime of capitalism.

We’re drinking coffee, relaxed but excited that we’ll be underway again soon.  This haulout has gone pretty damn well, considering we went into it without planning ahead.

The insurance adjuster showed up the day after we were hauled.  His visit was an all-day event.  We showed him the damage, told him what we wanted.  He hemmed and hawed and said there was no way they’d pay to paint the entire boat.  The adjuster went back to his running car to start writing things up.  In the heat, we fumed that there was no work being done while we waited around for him to come back and talk to us again.

That’s when we brought over the manager of the yard and the master painter.  We all debated for a very long time.  First he tried to say it could be spot painted.  The hull isn’t uniform enough for the painter to find a good feathering place for blending the new and old.  Then he said it could be gel coated and washed and waxed. I told him that the painter was not wrong about the hull being non-uniform, but that I’m also not wrong that it would look silly as shit to have a patch of perfect new paint in the middle of the boat.

This guy is a car and motorcycle person.  He doesn’t really know what boats require.  He just knows it sounds like more money than he is supposed to approve on his own.  Just when it was about to get really upsetting, the adjuster retreated again to his running car.

He must have deliberated with his bosses.  An hour later, he came to the side of the boat and I clambered down the rickety ladder.  He held out a sheaf of paper an inch thick.  On top of the mass sat a check.  Whatever happened in his conversation with his bosses, I imagine it went something like this:

“The yard wants $10,000 to paint the whole boat or just over $5,000 for one side.  The owners want the whole thing done, but I think they’ll take half.”

“If they’ll take half, pay them quick before they change their minds!”

So we took half.

Out of that money, we pay the yard for the haulout and we do the repairs and a bottom job, plus replace an old seacock and add a zinc anode to the prop shaft.

They pay for the rental car.  Which, by the way, was a 2013 rag top Mustang.

With the money left over, we go cruising for a couple months.

We were upset about having to haul out for the inspection because it causes and reveals problems.  Pressure washing peels paint and we had to fix about fifteen significant chunks that had come off all the way down to gel coat.  Popped and cleaned a few blisters too.

To those of you who have no idea what all this means…sorry.  It’s a big job.  One that we hadn’t planned on doing at least another year.  And it could have waited!  We will still have to do this again in a year or so, with a complete bead-blasting and new barrier coat, so this really isn’t the best way for us to have spent this time or money.

But hey, we’re still coming out ahead financially.

An anode on the rudder created some turbulence that pulled the paint up.  That repair was an epoxy/colloidal silica job and went pretty damn well.

The other big bottom task was fixing a new found gap between the fiberglass of the hull and the lead keel.  There was a considerable amount of separation and deterioration that needed quite a bit of epoxy filler and of course it was at an angle that was a pain-in-my (James’)-ass to get at.

The keel is the counter weight that essentially keeps the boat in the upright position and keeping it on and secure is fundamental to the sailing experience…

Remember what really matters: *Keep the water out. *Keep the crew on the boat. *Keep the keel side down. *Keep the mast up. *Keep the rudder on.

This one is number 3.

Some G-Flex and colloidal silica, and that thing is sealed.

The gel-coat repairs involved tricky taping.

Now the boat is protected and, from 20 feet, looks good as new.

After a day’s work was done, I (Dena) took the opportunity to practice my splicing.  I did two shackle splices for our anchor bridle and two eye splices at the other end to go over the bollard.

I also did a 12-strand eye splice around a thimble – 4 times – to reduce strain and chafe on our Amsteel lifelines.  I need to put a couple more thimbles in and then add the pelican clips that will make it easy to open and close a section for stepping through.

But the day work was brutal.

While James did the detail work on the gel-coat, I washed and scrubbed the bottom with a brush.  Then I did it over again with a grill screen, used by diners, but very effective on bottom paint as well.  We usually use griddle bricks (same idea, but pumice rather than metal) but couldn’t find any in this town.

This process?  Messy.

Then we suited up for the last portion of the bottom job.

Once the surface is cleaned and smoothed/roughed up by the grill screen, we smooth the paint by rubbing the entire hull with Interlux 216.  That softens the paint that remains on the hull and smooths it out.  Immediately after finishing the rub down, we painted.

Just like that, our boat went from this:

To this:

That slight red tinge is reflected from the red on the concrete.  It’s truly black – a good match for our sail covers.

She looks great and is in cruising condition.  Let’s get out of here!

On the 10th, we set off from our anchorage at Liberty Park.  And yes, we had a quintessential NY scene.

We left NYC via the East River, getting a nice shot of the Pier 17 museum this time.

We passed the entrance to Newtown Creek (boo, hiss) and under the Queensboro Bridge.  Lovely thing, it is!

We were running with the current, having made it out of the Liberty Park anchorage at the exact right time.  When we got to Hell Gate, the current was flowing like mad.  Whirlpools swirled visibly and jerked us around like an amusement park ride.  It was cool as fuck.

This is a 6 knot boat under most circumstances. James started singing, “So we crashed the gate doing eight point eight,” but by the time he reached the end, we were bouncing over 9 and saw our top speed at 10 knots.  Ten knots!  Wow!

Rikers Island creeped us out and the rest of the area between Hell Gate and Throg’s Neck didn’t offer much more.

We passed into Little Neck Bay, Long Island, and settled the hook just of the coast of the city of Great Neck, NY.  The area didn’t have many boats in it and it was pretty peaceful once the water skier got tired.  A couple of other boats swung our way to get a good look – because we were looking great on the hook!

We know this because we launched the dinghy and gave her a maiden voyage, rowing to the little semi-public park meant only for the residents of the stuffy neighborhood.  The tony subdivision has a fancy name, but I can’t be bothered to remember it.

The row went swimmingly (not literally), with all our hard work resulting in a nice firm caprail that gives us plenty of purchase with the oars.  Once on land, this is what we saw.

Pretty, right?

As we walked the mile and a half to the nearest grocery store, we mulled over the Great Neck connection.  What was it?  Why do we both feel like there’s something significant about this town?

And then I blurted out, “Capturing the Friedmans.”

For those of you who haven’t seen this incredibly strange documentary, we by no means recommend it.  However, it is a fascinating expose of the beginnings of the heightened paranoia around sexual predators of children.  And it all began right here in Great Neck, NY.

From the moment I identified the Great-Neck-Connection, we were freaked out.  We increased our pace back to the boat.

“Get me outta here!”

The next day, we moved northeast on Long Island Sound.  The day was glass-water calm.

We raised the main at the first ruffle on the water.  At first, it was a meditative sailing experience although the winds were light and variable.  We passed some great lights, including this one at Execution Rocks.

Execution Rocks.  It’s so much fun to say that.

As the morning wore on, the calm fled before a wind that was far more east than south (not quite what we’d expected), meaning that we ended up beating into a 3-5 foot ragged chop.  We adjusted our course for the easiest ride over the chop, reefed the sails, and started the engine.  By 1100, the wind had moved around to its projected southeasterly direction, creating a perfect situation for going pure sail once again.

It was a lovely couple-few hours on the Sound before we rounded the rocks off Rocky Point and made our approach to Oyster Bay.  We’d heard about the town’s history as Roosevelt’s summer white house and the more recent wonders of an artist’s community in a gorgeous place.  The real draw was the great holding in peaceful surroundings on the water.  Protection from wind and wave action, greenery and “some lovely estates”.

We learned that this meant a marina that scoffed at the idea of allowing us landfall with our dinghy, a Coast Guard designated “Special Anchorage” that had been completely littered with private moorings, and a whole lot of ostentatious housing.  The good stuff, so we hear now, is on up around Centre Island.

Well, okay.

Meanwhile, I had signed up on Couchsurfing.com to see if we could get a flat place to sleep were we kicked off the boat while it was being worked on.  Remember, we have been dealing with Progressive Insurance on the gouges made in Lincoln Harbor Marina.  We narrowed it down to a couple of yards in Norwalk, so we headed on over and I contacted a person on Couchsurfing.  This has been a great success for us, since we have been pleased to meet Sequoia.  He took us around town yesterday and has invited us to a storytelling evening on Friday…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

We couldn’t make landfall, so we couldn’t get rum.  Our sober selves ate burritos in the cockpit and I got this shot of a passing gaff-rigged sloop.

No reason to hang around, we left early the next day on our way to Connecticut, the place of my (James’) birth.

Leaving Oyster Boy  at 0645, we had the sails up in less than an hour.  The winds were in the perfect position for running, but not strong enough to make much speed.  Sailing in light winds and a following sea is such a gentle experience that it really doesn’t feel like sailing at all.  The boat moves itself through the water like a whisper and allows one to slip into an imaginative reverie.

The winds died out completely by 0915 so we motored into Norwalk through the Sheffield Island entrance channel, rounding Greens Ledge.

We were met in the channel by a truly amazing topsail schooner, gliding under light sail out to the sound.  We didn’t catch the name of it, because the dinghy covered their transom.

This really was our first experience with navigating through a rocky channel on this coast.  The channels are well marked but the tides are starting to get really dramatic.  Seeing a light that is normally awash showing its underskirt of rocks adds a paranoid edge to a couple of sailors that have spent the last few years in the muddy Chesapeake.

So, we shagged a mooring ball in Norwalk Harbor, less than 100 yards from our new friend, Sequoia, who invited us over to his boat for a nice lunch and a few good stories.

This morning, we started the motor at 0825 and motored over to Norwalk Cove Marina for our haulout and damage estimate.  The short story by the painter is $5000 per side and we want both sides done so the boat won’t look ridiculous with mismatched sides.

I’ve never seen anyone with two different sides – one new, one old.  Sure, we want to be unique, but that’s just jankey.

So they hauled us.

Hauling a 13000 pound boat on two strings is always a dramatic event.  This, piled on top of the fact that we were hit in NY, we’re underway in unfamiliar places, just added to the tension.

These guys were so pro that it went flawlessly and quickly.  But still.

We’re a bit freaked out here.

So, this is our new home.  And yes, it’s raining.

Norwalk Cove Marina, East Norwalk, CT.

May we not be here too long.

We’d dealt with the crazy dock hand, the rickety piece-of-shit dock, the boat next to us that somehow hit our boat while we were off in the city being very cool, the insurance company and more wake than either of us country mouses have ever even seen and it was time to move on.

We started the engine at 1500, kicked her in gear, and backed out of our slip into the fairway. I was on the bow helping us out when I heard the distinctive sound of Dena  putting the engine in forward but something was different. I didn’t feel the surge of forward motion that usually comes with such a maneuver. We started to drift and Dena kicked up the RPM’s a bit, still nothing. The wind caught the bow and we started to swing back towards the dock and Dena drove hard to lee but we obviously had no helm, adrift in a marina, completely surrounded by millions of dollars in plastic-destroyers.

Oh wait – did we forget to talk about the boat that hit us at the dock?  Funny, right?

Wrong.

We wrote the blog post about being aground at the slip while still in the slip.  Once the water rose enough, we moved to the fuel dock with the idea of changing to a deeper water slip after filling the diesel tank.  Before we had even cleated a line, James became somewhat distracted.

“What the fuck is that?”

I saw the odd area on our port side, midships, but continued to focus on tying the thrusting boat to the heaving fuel barge.  Sounds sexier than it was.

Once we were safe, I could turn my attention to the matter at hand.  The matter was a series of gouges about 4′ long and 3′ high, running from the teak toerail down almost to the waterline.  Cracked paint and gelcoat flaked from the gouges, and naked fiberglass could be seen in a few.  The detective work was brief.  James saw the blue paint and remembered that the boat next to us in the slip was a blue Catalina 22.

I (James) always notice that boat.  It was the first boat that I’d owned, when I was 17 years old.  Actually co-owned, with my best friend.  So whenever I see one, I say the same shit over and over again.  “Look – that was my first boat!”

So yeah.

This became the source of much tension in our little family.  The feeling was reminiscent of the last time I had a bicycle stolen.  A sort of violation of my world.  An impingement of badness on the bits of life I consider good.

I really, really don’t want to spend too much time going on and on about this.  Suffice to say, we got the insurance information from the boat’s owner and placed a claim.  They couldn’t get an estimator out until the next day, but we were stuck in the marina overnight anyway, right?

Except this meant we’d miss the tide change again.  Oh well.  That wasn’t as upsetting as the damage.

The estimator – nice guy named Kyle – came about 1pm the next day.  That dude was out of his element.  He was practically sick at the dock and openly admitted that this was not his specialty.  Motorcycles were his specialty.

He took lots of pictures, but said we’d need to arrange a haul out to get a real estimate.  Great.  Like we know where we’re going to be from day to day?

We told him as much and he insisted that he couldn’t get a good idea of the damage where the boat sat.  Basically, he couldn’t focus his eyes because they were wheeling too hard.

So granted.  It’s a busy dock.  But I find it hard to believe that a company the size of Progressive doesn’t have a boat surveyor in the NY area.  Really?

Anyway, he left and we tried to.

See above.

Reverse, power.  Forward? No power.

The engine was running great, and it built RPM quite nicely.  But no matter how I revved it up, I got no control.

Boats are steered by water passing over the rudder.  Without some sort of propulsion, there is no steering.  So we spun in the fairway, the wind and current doing different things, until we faced ass-in to the slip that had been next to us only moments before.

We gave in and tied up in the new slip.

No further damage.  Amazing, really.  If the wind had been coming from the east, we would have smashed into any one of a dozen boats worth 50 times as much as ours.  At least in the eyes of the insurance companies.

And so began the diagnostic portion of our day.

We tore the engine compartment open, checked the engine control linkage, followed the lines down to the engine itself, and then, finally, I noticed that the prop shaft was turning when we put the transmission in gear!

I hadn’t thought of that.  As soon as I did, a cold chill passed over me.  We must have spun the prop right off the shaft.

That part of the marina is basically in the Hudson River, which was flowing along at a good clip right then.  If the prop came off, it could be anywhere in the bottom mud up to a quarter mile down river.

Time to go swimming.

I changed into my swim suit and James got the dive mask and fins out.  By the time I was in the water, he had the step ladder set up so I could get back out.  I geared up and went down.

Flipping onto my back, I followed the curve of the hull down toward the aperture for the prop.  The water was not well lighted, but I could see about 1 foot all around me.  When I reached the opening and felt the shaft, I saw and felt the good news at almost the exact same time.

The prop was still on there.

At this point, I really needed a breath, but I had to know what was wrong.  I grabbed the edge and it turned.  Ah-ha!  The prop was spinning freely on the shaft.

Up I went to share the good news with James.  I mean, the bad news.

I mean, the news that is better than the bad news.

We still had a prop!

But what the fuck?

Taking another look, I realized that the shaft key – a small rectangular bronze stick that fits in grooves in both shaft and prop in order to make them turn as one – was simply gone.  It may have corroded until small enough to fall out.  Speculation was futile.  Time to search for a way out of this.

Within an hour – almost 5pm – we had a new friend at S&S Propeller who couldn’t help us but wished he could.  He told us exactly what we needed.  We had a diver coming at 6ish and a comrade from West Marine, Lodi, on his way to the boat with a brand new prop key.

GSD, baby.

By sundown, master diver Milton Rodriguez had diagnosed the issues and confirmed that the key was key to fixing our problem.

See how far away James is?  The slip was big enough for four of us.

By bedtime, we had that key.

The next morning, we did our coffee ritual and dock-walked with the camera in hand.

Milton came back and pulled the prop.  He was shaking his head and tisking his tongue at the improper job the last diver had done.  No cotter key in the shaft and no washer to press the bolts into the prop.

This gave us a good picture of what had happened.  The key shrank over time through electrolysis due to conflicting metals – bronze prop and stainless steel shaft.  Hitting reverse without a washer to hold the prop in place allowed the prop to slide back just a touch.  Just enough for the shrunken key to slip right the fuck out.

Unfortunately, the key we got from our buddy at West Marine was about twice as big as the channel it needed to fit in.  Milton had to do some heavy manipulations using vise and grinder and file.  He made it fit the channel first (side to side) and then tried fitting the whole thing in place and marked the depth.  When he came back from the second round, he was visibly pumped.  This was a complicated job that he was doing really, really well.  I love to see a person take pride in their work.

He dove for the 3rd time today and, when he came back up, our prop was installed properly.  He got the cotter pin from his son and put the last touch of safety in place.

And we were ready to leave.  No – for real this time.  Only 60 hours after we’d planned.  Not the worst marine delay in history.

We had 3 hours before the tide was going to turn around, so…we had to go see some scifi.  A couple hours of Ridley Scott’s version of gods and men put us in the right mood to take off – become once again the sovereign nation that we most enjoy being.

Our trip to the anchorage behind Liberty Island was beautifully uneventful and jam-packed with lovely scenes as shown below:

A beautiful gaff-rigged, staysail schooner in front of Manhattan.

Duh.

A steel topsail schooner, which we have photographed before…see the trip from Whale Creek.

Ellis Island, with a staysail schooner – technology from the same era that populated this country through that island.

The Verrazano Narrows Bridge with yet another photo of that gorgeous topsail schooner.

Tomorrow, we head for the Long Island Sound.  Not sure what the internet connection will be like, so keep an eye out but don’t be alarmed if our posts become somewhat more rare.

My reading was Wednesday night.  I’m only now writing about this because yesterday was a complicated bummer and I want to get across my real experience of that evening, without the later baggage.

We were considering whether to take a ferry over to Midtown and walk to a subway station or take trains the whole way.  That was an easy decision once we got a gander of the space shuttle Atlantis being barged up the Hudson to the Intrepid Museum.  Ferry, definitely.

The ferry got us pretty close, but we walked on over to see the last retired remnant of that step in the right direction.  Reusable vehicles that can land under their own control – awesome.  If only they could escape without the rocket.  Well, that will come…or we won’t have a viable space future.  I can’t bring myself to believe that’s a possibility.

Falafel was the name of the game.

James promised me that you couldn’t turn around without some street vendor handing you a falafel sandwich.  Pita bread, lettuce, tomato, white sauce, and hot sauce, all lovingly wrapped around the best treatment of chick peas I’ve ever experienced.

Midtown was a bust, on that level.  We got to the train station without any sign of food other than hot dogs.  The foot traffic flowed and we picked up the rhythm immediately, absorbing energy down 8th Ave.  A brief subway journey later, we were on the Lower East Side and, what do you know, there was falafel on the very corner on which we exited the Delancey Street train station.

And it was good.

We ate the falafel standing right next to the food cart.  It disappeared so quickly that, within moments of the last swallow, we started talking about getting another one before heading back that night.

We made our way over to Babeland and the workers there are cool as shit.  As is par for the Babeland course.  Made no purchases, but checked out the stock.

And that concluded all our plans for the time before the reading.

While Dena was freaking (the fuck) out with the pre-performance jitters, I (James) was very happy to be the cool one for a change. Her color had increased in intensity to a rugged pink and she had a charge for a cup of chai that wouldn’t let up. We checked in at Bluestockings then went up the street to a perfect little coffee shop to sip some chai and watch the people packed sidewalks of the Lower East Side of New York City.

I felt incredible! As Dena sat next to me and read her story, Modest Mouse played on the cafe’s sound system and the beautiful people flowed by like a noisy stream at the end of a sensual tide.

The whole time I (Dena) waited for 6:30 to arrive, the chai did its work.  My stomach was tight and I was worried about exhausting myself with the excitement of it all.  The warm milk eased my belly and the light caffeine buoyed my energy.

The woman working the counter was gorgeous and had a slight accent.   The shop was, I think, Swedish, but that’s not what I heard in her voice.  (James informs me that she was from Ecuador.  He asked her outside while smoking.)  We spoke about the reading and she asked about my piece.  I felt so at home when she blinked but did not flinch at the answer.  “It’s scifi dyke erotica about airlock sex.”

Ah, the city.

The music rolled on through songs we love, or at least song with which we are bone-deep familiar.  That settled me too.

When the worker turned a customer away because she was closed, James and I jumped up and gathered our things.  In a profusion of thanks and well wishes, we three beamed each other into the evening with good will.  We returned to Bluestockings.

Early.  Still early.

The nervousness was coming in waves now.  I would successfully distract myself or achieve some calm, but a sudden reminder or loss of attention allowed it back.

When D.L. King (The Harder She Comes) and Sacchi Green (Girl Fever, my book) arrived, I discovered that other writers had arrived as well.  We gathered around a table and made chat.  I kept expecting some sign of organizational effort, but it was all interpersonal conversation for quite some time.  The internal expectation that I should maintain some sort of professional demeanor – I am, after all, a paid author – melted into the understanding that I should maintain more of a shimmering, fascinating persona.  Right now, living the dream, I am pretty thoroughly mysterious to most, so it wasn’t too hard to describe my history and plans in a way that spun an idea of me.  An idea that often feels bigger than me, the person, but is born of my dreams and decisions and values and expectations.  Something with sizzle.

The bookstore morphed into a reading room – shelves shoved aside, chairs lined up tight, an audience that began drifting to those seats.  We writers took the first two rows and the editors got to the task of creating a reading order.

My jitters dried my mouth and I rose, sought out James.  He was in the back corner of the room, where he could get some photos of me while I read.  I retrieved my lip balm and got some water.  The moisture disappeared as quickly as I could sip it, but suddenly, the reading began.

Sinclair Sexsmith read a daddy/girl piece I’d seen on their website.  The next piece was, to my surprise, a bit of space-based camp about fueling an alien ship with sex energy.  As the other writers spoke, my attention was easily lost.  The distraction of my own upcoming moment made it hard to focus, especially on the stories that weren’t up my alley anyway.

And then I was being introduced.

Dena’s color had indeed intensified, her smile was peaceful and her demeanor welcomed her audience as she rose to her task. She was so beautiful and alive and all I could do was try to capture what I could see and feel with my pathetic medium, my camera. I was filled with every emotion almost for her and as I made my way around the room seeking the perfect shot she began her story.

I (Dena) saw open eyes, raised heads.  Attentive, welcoming, interested people waited to discover what I had wrought in my imagination.  The words were fun, but I felt drawn to perform for those people.  I wanted to give them the whole story, not just the words on the page.  They could have that for themselves from the book.

The podium was at the perfect height and the microphone, once tilted, was too.  I didn’t have to think about those thing, just talk story.  Just tell it the way I would if it were 2004 and Toys in Babeland’s crew was gathered around to hear about my weekend adventures.

I spoke to all of them, one by one and collectively.  I gestured to show how the straps went and shrugged where the character’s voice did.  In part because the others had done such straight, paper-focused read-out-loud versions of their stories, I succeeded in capturing the audience.  They smiled where I wanted them to, looked uncertain when I wanted, and shifted in their seats when the sex got heavy.

The nervousness didn’t last into page two.

I got applause, as did we all.  I got “good job”s, and wows, and other comments.  And at the end, I signed two whole books.  My anthology wasn’t available in the store yet, so I signed one author’s copy and then a copy of the other book that was being featured.

And it was over.

Energy flowed and James suggested food.  The street vendor was out of falafel, but we made do with crappy NY pizza to top off the experience.  After the subway ride back to Midtown, we found a falafel place we’d missed the first time and got one anyway.  We caught the last ferry back to Jersey and settled slowly from the excitement.

I’m glad I did it.  I now know that I can perform my stories and hold the interest of an audience.  I hope I get to scale up that experience and do large events as author of a scifi novel.  That sure does sound like fun.

We’ve already said we think this marina, Lincoln Harbor,  is the worst built thing ever, but now we know it is also being run by thoughtless people.

We came around from Brooklyn, as so vividly described here.  When we asked ourselves why the docks were jumping in place and wondered about the scream of tortured steel, we hadn’t yet felt the strange shudder that happened occasionally on a wave trough.  Didn’t figure out what that was until this morning.

Here’s a taste of a medium-bad wake.

Main pier, finger pier, and boat – all moving independent of one another.

The place works on 3 shifts.  The dockmaster, Janier, works days and two guys split the time between 4pm and 8am.  I called before we left Brooklyn and spoke with an office manager who told me candidly that it was her first week on the job (remember, this was Wednesday).  I was careful to tell her that we are a sailboat and that our draft is 4’9″.  Power boats are concerned with telling marinas their beam – how wide they are – but sailors have keels that go deeper than most any power boat.

She wasn’t confident enough to assign us a slip or give us directions into the marina.  We got ourselves over just fine and called the dock hand on the VHF, channel 74.

Every time James hailed the guy, he said, “…this is the sailing vessel Nomad…” because that’s what one is supposed to do.  Somehow this didn’t soak in and it seems he didn’t get the note from the office manager that we were sailors.  James even told him our draft!

He assigned us slip B-15, but when he saw us, changed his mind and put us in B-33.  Meaning he hadn’t thought this through at all.  How did he miss the “sailing vessel” part that James said a dozen times or the actual draft measurement we gave him?  He actually said to us, “I didn’t know you were a sailboat!”

The next morning, I introduced myself to the dock master.  We spoke a while about getting groceries, getting to Manhattan, and (not) getting a discount.  He and I looked at the tides together to see when we’d need to be out in order to catch the favorable currents around the Battery and through Hell Gate.  We agreed that it would be a good idea for us to be at the fuel dock around 6:30 and fueling up around quarter til.

This morning, we had a wonderful cup of “Mile High” Papua New Guinea coffee from a LES roastery called the Roasting Plant.  Before it was gone, we had topped off the oil in the engine and I started trying to get our line off the piling.

Strange – I couldn’t get the boat to move toward the piling.

Assuming I was dealing with current, I waited for James to get back from the head.  With him pushing and me pulling, though, we were still unable to move.  Foreboding in my mind, I touched the tiller and found it stiff.

We were aground in the slip.

On the small, pre-ferry waves, I could move the rudder when we lifted but not when we were down.  We tried pulling the boat back toward the fairway and tried to find a deeper area within the slip.

No go.

As time ticked by, I got more and more angry.  By 7am, we saw our window closing.  We wouldn’t be able to fuel up and still catch the flood tide around Manhattan.

Oh boy, is that a drag.  We missed our tide, meaning we can’t leave today at all, meaning we miss our head-start on the boaters heading into the Long Island Sound for the weekend.  Now we will arrive with the pack, and probably after the much faster power boaters.

I went to tell the dock master and we “had words”.  He claims to have told us we’d have to be out by 6 or 6:30, which is ridiculous, since the tide was lower then.  Somehow, I was supposed to hear the misgiving in his voice and ask for another slip?  Bullshit.  We’re staying another night, but we are not paying for it.

We are writing this post while waiting for the tide to rise enough to move the boat into another slip.  We’ll fuel up on the way  to the new slip, but that only means that we’ll be able to get right out tomorrow.  Does nothing for us today.

Here’s where I sit:

On the one hand, the night dock hand was incompetent and the dock master lazy.  One put us in a slip that was too shallow and the other allowed us to stay there, though he did say he was surprised we’d been assigned that slip.  Really?  Just surprised?  Not going to have us move somewhere with enough water?

On the other hand, I’m on my sailboat, without a schedule and with all the chores done.  We finished laundry, grocery shopping, and boat washing yesterday by 1pm.

Life could be a lot worse.

We left Sandy Point before 8am, heading for the big city.  The trip was exciting, partly because it was uneventful.  Here’s a major moment of glee:

I really like the little lighthouses that lead from the Atlantic into NY Harbor.  That’s the Ambrose Channel West Bank Range Front Light.  Whew.

We had a fine time motoring into the East River.  Fretting at the cost of diesel only took a little shine off the morning, since there was no changing the fact that we were on a schedule and the wind was on the nose.

We played “Spot the Landmark”  – oh, I know this one!

This schooner, before the Jersey shore, was making great time.

And, of course, the Big Apple.

I always think “assault and” when I see, hear or say the Battery.

The Brooklyn Bridge is particularly effective in the kind of ominous cloud atmosphere we had today.

And a nod to our lovely Baltimore friends.  The Baltimore Domino plant is less of an industrial eyesore than this one.  Mmhmm.

And this is where the story gets good.

We motored up the East River and turned starboard into Newtown Creek.  The creek separates Brooklyn from Long Island City and provides raw sewage dumping in case of heavy rains, scrap metal barge storage, and the foulest smelling water this side of Fells Point.

As we traversed the murky waters, James began to wonder whether or not we would fit under the bridge we were approaching.  I had read that we could.  Shrug.  And James agreed.  But…Damn, that bridge was really short!

Our mast is about 36′ tall and we have a 3′ antenna on top.  The bridge height at max high tide is 36′ according to the charts, with an additional 4′ in the middle of the span because of the curve.  So I had heard, at least.

Being as though it was high tide, we felt a bit uncertain.  We called the bridge tender on both channels 13, which they supposedly monitor, and 16, which everyone should monitor.  No answer either place, but a helpful tug answered us with the cell phone number of the tender.  And they didn’t answer that either.

So we waited about an hour for the tide to drop some.  We were tied up at a  little park at the end of Manhattan Ave in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint.

After waiting for the tide to go out, we went for the bridge.  Boy, was it close!  We have never gone under a bridge that fucking short before.  Hopefully we won’t be doing so again any time soon.  James eased us up to it and then slipped us under.  A great sigh was heard across the waters.

And shortly thereafter, we turned into Whale Creek.  The loudest moorage we’ve ever experienced.

The park is kinda neat looking.  It’s got a lot of great botanical specimens, but it is still a shit processing plant and home of one of the worst environmental disasters of mankind.  An oil spill that lasted almost 25 years.

But we look great on that dock!

They were shoving, grinding, smashing huge sheets of metal into the bottom with a sound that must have topped 100 decibels of sheer pain.  The goal seemed to be to sheathe a dock so that industrial barges could bash it with impunity.

Meanwhile, right off our port after quarter were 4 barged stacked 15 high in destroyed automobiles.  Living the dream, baby.

All this would have been fine (they couldn’t work 3 shifts on that shit, right?), so James stayed to babysit the boat during the falling tide and I went for a nice long walk to the YMCA.  A great guy there let me in to shower for the first time in four days.  He was warm and sympathetic, and didn’t even charge me.  Perhaps I really, really needed that shower.

As soon as I walked out, refreshed, James called.

“Ok.  Let me see if I can describe this.  About 2 feet under the massive bolt heads that supported the base of the dock – the ones we were barely fending off?  There’s another level of structure sticking out 3′ further from the bulkhead.  I’m holding her off by hand.”

My response boiled down to gotta go!

That structure was covered in barnacles, so the tide dropped our hull against it and the result was a grinding sound.  James leaped onto the deck and found himself without any options.  He had to keep the boat off that damn wall until I could get back.  Being as though it was over a mile away, it took me a minute.

He slacked the lines, put his shoes on, fended off, slacked the lines more, and moved up and down the boat making sure we weren’t going to grind on those concrete blocks under the water.  My hero!

When I showed up, he was pretty mellow.  We smoothly released the mooring lines and shoved – hard – off that wall.

We were trying to stay, for free, in close proximity to my reading tomorrow night.  All we want to do is anchor out and row in  and take nice walks and do some grocery shopping and maybe pet a cat.  But no.  It’s NYC.

We ran aground.

After passing back under the bridge of fear, we decided to shag a night and maybe the next day at the park wall we had waited out the tide at.  James’ approach was perfect, but there was a strange point at which we stopped moving.  At all.  Just before the wall.

It was very low tide and probably a good thing.  If we had come in at another time, we wouldn’t have known we were going to be stuck fast aground.  Instead, we shoved off and went on our merry way.

That darkness in the sky presaged the light rains that harried us down the East River at 7 knots with the current and then crazy winds and more rain up the Hudson River at 1.2 knots against the current.

These waters are busy.  I don’t know how many ferry operations there are, but shit loads of boats pass between the shores over and over and over again, tossing our shit all over the fucking rivers.  We were pounded.  At one point, we were caught in the bear hug of two ferries that passed us fore and aft.  It was like slapping a mosquito with both hands.  If only the wakes had cancelled one another out.

They didn’t.

When finally we came to our resting place for this evening (the worst dock ever made), we couldn’t reach the dock person right away, so we went hunting for slip B-15.  The piers aren’t marked, but we figured that one out.  The usual dock number system would put an odd number on the A side of the B pier, so we headed down that way.  The guy showed up and waved us around the other side, so I made the first of two 360 degree turns in fairways barely wider than our boat is long.

The current rushes through here and the ferry and tug wakes pound through.  Just when I thought I had the current figured, a wake shoved me past our slip and I had to turn around again.  When I got the bow into the slip, the dock guy took our bow line and pulled with all his might, dashing our side hard against the unyielding “enviro-friendly” docks.

Ok, it’s okay.  Except wait.

Why are the docks jumping in place and groaning with the sound of tortured steel?

Ah, home sweet home.

Brooklyn and Jersey have about the same to offer.

Noise, motion, and insecurity.

Right now, the ferries have stopped so the movement in the marina is minimal.  It’s quiet and we’re happy we made it again.  We will get a good night’s rest here, but it sure ain’t free.