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Updated Jan, 2014 |
The Cuckolds Light, Near Boothbay Harbor |
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The "ceiling" in a boat is not the same thing that the word denotes in a house. It is the lining of the hull, what one sees on the inside wherever there are not lockers or seats. Between the ceiling and the hull proper are the frames, and in our case, insulation.
This summer the ceiliing was a big push. Anyone from Maine knows all about living with "silver wallpaper," but I was/am tired of looking at the insulation vapor barrier and I was determined that it should be covered over. The first project, however, was the generator. I gave it some new gaskets and traced out its wiring. |
Getting Fuel Among the Fishing Boats, at Vessel Services, | ||
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The details are oomplicated, but the bottom line is that all the current required to keep the generator control system running ran up through the fire damper relay in the pilothouse and the stop switch on the electrical panel. This long wire run gave a lot of points where a poor contact or corrosion in a wire could shut the generator down. When I re-wired the fire damper/shut-off and the remote stop switch as shown in the manual, most of our problems went away.
We had other chores to do as well; we ran into Portland and took on fuel at Vessel Services, which made a pleasant day. |
Two Small Draggers at Vessel Services | ||
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As usual, we took the boat to Rockland for the Maine Boats and Harbors Show and had a fine time seeing old friends. This time we were not able to organize another driver, so I made the boat trip alone and Barbara drove the car to
Rockland to meet me.
It is always a pleasure to see the variety of boats in Rockland Harbor, from passenger schooners to herring seiners. If we found the show a little diminished, that was to be expected, given the perilous economic times. One evening we had a very nice dinner with Ann Mason, a friend from graduate school, at The Slipway, a restaurant on a wharf in Thomaston. |
Breakwater Light, Rockland | ||
| After the show I took the boat farther up the bay to Belfast, where she would be ministered to as uual by Front Street Shipyard. This year I thought there would be little to do except the eternal repainting of the bottom antifouling, but on the way the hydraulic pump that powers the autopilot began making bearing noises, and I made the mistake of inviting the chief mechanic at the yard to listen to them (never let a mechanic near your engine room!). As it turned out, at about 2500 hours the pump was just about at the end of its normal service life, so we replaced it. |
The Rockland Schooner American Eagle | ||
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Barbara Lying Way Offshore in Rockland Harbor | |||
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We also fixed two leaks in the exhaust water jacket and generally sorted things out.
While the boat was in the yard, I was back and forth to keep an eye on things, but when it came time to leave, our friend Ann was good enough to come to Chebeague and spend a night with us and drive us back in the morning, so Barbara and I could make the trip back together. At Front Street we met our friend Billy Black, the photographer, who was documenting the arrival and unpacking of the new 450-metric-ton travel lift. Unfortunately, we could not stay to see the assembly, but just the individual parts were impressive enough. |
Portland's Marcus Hanna on the ways in Rockland | ||
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The ceilings were not the only project for the summer. I built the kit for a locker in our cabin that would be a bedside table of sorts, with two file drawers for me (Barbara's are in her desk and finished), and several smaller drawers.
I also drew up the long-planned locker that would hold my big plotter and printer (on slide-out shelves) and let us keep office supplies (paper, envelopes, pens and such) in one place together. |
Barbara and Our Friend Ann at a Restaurant on a Wharf in Thomaston | ||
| Realizing that I could not put in enough hours to get everything done, I jobbed this unit out to our old friend Walter Greene. His lead boatbuilder, Charlie Smith, did a beautiful job. He came alongside with his workboat one day and we installed it. Charlie also built the raised-panel doors for the saloon and head but did not have time to finish them as set-up units, so they will not be installed until we are settled in the Caribbean. |
Tugboats and Pleasure Boats in Belfast | ||
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The summer was not all work. We had a nice outing when Barbara supplied transportation for a group from the Chebeague & Cumberland Land Trust to Ministerial Island, where they documented conditions for a Conservation Easement.
We also served as the Committee Boat for a Chebeague Island Yacht Club sailboat race, but we did not have to leave the mooring for that, as the race started and finished off our beach. |
Sunset, Front Street Shippyard -- the Last Days of Pre-eminence of the Old Travel Lift | In October Barbara went off to London for a few days to give a lecture. She was (as usual) a little apprehensive about it, but the talk was in the end a rousing success (also as usual). Sometimes I have accompanied her on these trips, but this time I felt that there was still too much to do on the boat, and I continued with the combination of maintenance and new contruction characteristic of my summers. |
Hauled for Bottom Paint |
| I made one change in Barbara's appointments. I have always felt that a proper ship should have a chronometer. Now, we do not need a chronometer; the GPS does very well, and a good quartz watch backed up by time signals is certainly adequate for small craft celestial navigation, where the accuracy of the sextant sight is the limiting factor,not the accuracy of the clock. But when a quartz chronometer from a ship scrapped at Alang came up on Ebay at a reasonable price, I bought it and made a nest for it in the pilothouse. |
Big Wheels for the New Lift | ||
| In early November it began to get cold, and I was thinking it was time to leave. We have stayed later in other years, but this year we decided to do something different. Barbara wanted to stay on Chebeague and sing in the Whalers' concert and perhaps spend more time at Harvard, but I was determined that the boat should be somewhere warmer. It is no fun going off in a punt to a boat when the beach is frozen. |
One Beam of the New Lift Being Unloaded | ||
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So we worked it out that we would take the boat to Baltimore, where we have been before and where my brother and his family provide built-in support and social life, but that Barbara would return by Amtrak and go on with her life.
We packed things up and started loading the boat, and moved aboard November 14th. |
A Busy Shipyard | ||
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Barbara Anchored Off Ministerial Island | |||
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On the 15th we loaded and stowed the last of our gear, winterized the mooring, and left Chebeague at 18:00 to catch the tide at the Cape Cod Canal the next day. We had an easy run to the Canal and down Buzzard's Bay, and at 20:00 on the 16th we took a departure from the fairway buoy southeast of Block Island for Cape May, at the extreme southern end of New Jersey.
The next day we were in and out of fog banks, and the fog and rain squalls settled in in earnest as we arrived at Cape May just before midnight on the 17th. Once we got around into Delaware Bay, the fog eventually scaled and by daybreak we had clear skies, sun, and a favorable tide. Altogether a great lift to the spirit. We ran up Delaware Bay, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and arrived at Harbor East Marina just before 17:00 on the 18th. Here Barbara would stay until after New Year's. |
Barbara Off to London | ||
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I saw Barbara off on the bus to the railroad station and settled down to work.
Since there were several pieces of ceiling panel lashed down on the saloon deck and our daughter and her dog were coming after Christmas to stay for a few days, I felt a certain pressure to get those panels up where they belonged. I also wanted to activate the printer in its new place, since one often needs to print something from the computer.
At home the printers run from USB ports, but on the boat that would not work, as they are too far away. My printer has a built-in networking capability, and I had added a network card to the plotter, so all I needed to do was build in some power outlets at the back of the locker and run and terminate some ethernet cables. |
Barbara's New Chronometer and a Painting by Nancy Maull | ||
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Sunset over the East End as we Left | |||
| Before we left I had bought a spool of cat 6 cable, a baggie full of connectors, and a crimping tool. I now set about running cables from the ethernet switch in the pilothouse down to the aft cabin (so Barbara could also print on the network printer) and to the printer and plotter in their new locker. I found some instructions on the web for making the cables, so all was well. The LaserJet printer reponded immediately, even though the Windows "Network and Sharing Center" did not seem to see it, but the plotter would not show up, seemingly regardless of what I tried. Eventually, in Bermuda, I got it to work, but that is another story. |
Foggy Cape May | ||
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Baltimore Sunset | |||
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Life in Baltimore turned out to be quite social. My brother stopped by often at lunch time, and there were Christmas and birthday parties to go to. I found a couple of nearby pubs with relatively inexpensive food and TVs that showed either rugby, soccer, or football. One afternoon the niece who still lives in Baltimore came to visit with some friends, so I was kept busy. I did get the saloon deck cleared and all the tools, paint. etc. stashed temporarily in the forepeak.
On the morning of Christmas Day I set off in a car borrowed from my brother for West Hartford, where our niece Miranda lives. There I met Barbara, who had come down from Chebeague, and we collected Anne from the railroad station; she had flown from San Francisco to Boston. |
The Shot Tower in Baltimore | ||
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Although logistically complicated, Christmas was very nice. It was delightful to see all the nieces and nephews.
On the 27th we all drove back to Baltimore, arriving there just after dark having suffered through traffic jams on the New Jersey Turnpike. I am told these are quite usual nowdays. Our younger son, Seth, came for a visit, and we had an extension of Christmas for our immediate family, with presents on the boat |
Sunset With Contrails | ||
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We had one more dinner at James Joyce with my brother David and his wife, and then there were spectacular fireworks on New Year's Eve from a barge in the harbor, so we had a great view.
Gradually the party broke up, as Seth and Anne had to go back to work. I started getting the boat ready for sea, stowing all my tools and all loose gear. We went to David and Mary Ellen's house one more time for dinner, watched a playoff game at Gordon Biersch, and determined that the weather would be OK for leaving on Tuesday, the 7th. In the event, Tuesday was the coldest day of the year so far; it was 10° when I woke up. By the time we left, at noon, it had warmed to maybe 20°, but it was still chilly. What wind there was was with us, however, so we had a good overnight trip to Norfolk. |
Barbara's Christmas Tree | ||
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We arrived in Norfolk harbor the next morning and by 9:30 were moored alongside at Tidewater Marina, where we took on 330 gallons of Diesel.
We left at 10:15 in the morning of Wednesday, January 8th, , but were not out of Chesapeake Bay until about 14:15, when we took a departure from the sea buoy at the entrance to the bay. The forecast from all sources was good, so we had hopes of an easy passage, and the first two days were indeed quite pleasant. |
Snowy Marina | ||
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Public Art on the Waterfront | |||
| We started out with light northwest wind and maybe 2- to 4-foot seas, practically ideal conditions, and the ice began to melt off the lifelines and bow pulpit. This was good, because I had developed a head cold (that later turned into a sinus infection) and was coughing a lot and generally not feeling great. |
Iced Up on Chesapeake Bay | ||
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Chesapeake Sunrise | |||
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We made up the Gulf stream about 15 hours out, at 03:00 the morning after we left. The crossing was uneventful, which is not always the case, and we kept the northwest wind until midnight Thursday.
The situation began to change on Friday, however, as the wind veered east, and then southeast, and the sea became markedly lumpier. A cold eddy held us back for while, which did not help morale. By Friday night the wind was up to 25 knots and the seas were 10-12 feet, right on the nose. I decided to slow down a little to ease the motion. On Saturday we had squalls all around us, and the wind rose pretty steadily to the high 30s with gusts in the 40s. The seas got bigger, and we were getting green water on the deck and back to the pilothouse. Early Sunday morning I cut her back until we just had steerage way, and we idled into it, heading for Bermuda, but not going very fast. The motion was not too bad this way, but every now and then a larger-then-usual wave would catch us at some unexpected angle and force the poor boat into all sorts of gyrations. Midday Sunday, as I was off watch and taking a nap, we were knocked down by such a wave and I was slid right out of my bunk onto the deck -- the first time that has ever happened in this boat. |
Banging Into It | ||
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Early-Morning St. George's | |||
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Barbara Alongside Waiting for Customs | |||
| The weather eased a little as we approached Bermuda and we could speed up, but just as we approached the sea buoy off St. George's the world went dark and fierce squalls blinded both us and the radar. What happened was that the front we had crossed on Thursday, when it didn't amount to much, caught up with us. |
In Her Usual Berth | ||
| It was too bad, because if we had been even twenty minutes earlier we would have been sheltered in the harbor as the front passed, but as it was I considered it much too risky to try entering the harbor with no visibility and no radar and a heavy sea running, so we simply hove to, drifting slowly off to the east, and waited for morning. After the front passed, the wind went northwest and the sky cleared, but by then we were tired and thought it safer just to wait. |
Empty St. George's Harbor -- Note the Water Color | ||
| Monday morning was a whole different story, and we started in at first light. At 08:00 were alongside the Customs wharf on Ordnance Island. As I got out the docklines and fenders, however, I discovered that one of the aft locker covers, aluminum and quite tight fitting, had disappeared, a testimony to the wind and wave action. Hinges and latches for these had always been part of the plan, but they had never seemed particularly necessary before. |
Heading East Out of Town | ||
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Even though it showed up a few problems, a few places where we had to do some more work, this trip increased our faith in the boat immensely. We are really confident that she will take care of us in just about any weather.
In St. George's we had planned to get pizzas at the Tavern by the Sea, but Steve and Suzanne showed up with a bottle of wine, so we had drinks on the boat and then went all together for pizza. |
Next to Ocean Sails | ||
| The next day Steve took me to MASS - Mid Atlantic Steel Supply - where I could have a new locker cover made, and from Ocean Sails, Steve's company, I ordered a lee cloth for our bunk to keep us in it no matter what the boat does. That night we went to Steve and Suzanne's for a delicious curry that Steve had made. |
Dinner at Steve and Suzanne's | ||
| We stayed a few days longer in St. George's, doing a little sight-seeing and working on the boat. Steve and Suzanne came for dinner one night, and the next day (Saturday) we went back out the Town Cut and over the Dockyard, at the west end of the country. There we moored to the wall next to Doug's travel lift and settled in. That night we had a delicious roast chicken dinner at Doug's. |
The South End of the Dockyard Fortifications | ||
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We walked around the former Naval Dockyard and saw that practically nothing had changed in our absence.
Down in the South Basin, at the commercial wharf, we found a cement ship unloading and the tug Michael J. McAllister. We had seen her on the AIS display just over the horizon to the North of us all the way from Norfolk. She was towing a barge to Bermuda, and her crew didn't like the weather any more than we did. |
Michael J. McAllister, the Tug that Came to Bermuda Along With Us | ||
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On Sunday we had our traditional breakfast at Café Amici with Doug and Kaitlyn and Gina, his new friend, and in the afternoon we watched the Patriots lose to the Broncos at Bonefish. Doug and Gina turned up too, so we had a light dinner there as well.
On Monday night Doug and Gina came to the boat for dinner for a change. It was beginning to look as though the end of the week would be OK to go on the the BVI, so we decided that we would go back to St. George's on Thursday. Wednesday night Doug and Gina appeared with pizzas, and our friends Al and Ilona turned up, so we had a nice party |
Dinner Aboard with Doug and Gina | ||
| The weather had not been good, as a series of lows went by north of Bermuda, but Thursday was fair and the wind eased off, so we had a very pleasant ride to St. George's. On the Friday Steve took me to pick up the new locker cover, and I helped him load some lumber that he had acquired. I decided that Saturday would give us a reasonable shot at the weather, so we spent the rest of Friday getting the boat ready and shopping. |
Barbara in the Camber | ||