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Monday, November 28, 2011

Lexi and Samantha are, for the time being, couch potatoes.

I would have taken them out on Bluebird yesterday if there had been a dock. Then it would have been easy to get them aboard.
But the docks were hauled two weeks ago, so to get to the boat now requires rowing. I suspect that introducing the girls to boating aboard the dinghy would not be the most farsighted endeavor.
It was a perfect day on the water, no reefing necessary, but plenty of wind to get the Mariner going, some times in great sprints. We sailed in triangles and circles, with no destination known.
Once again, our only company was a john boat with two guys aboard and the same catamaran-type hydroplane we'd seen a couple of times before, its outboard shooting it across the flat river, the owner and his black dog in the cockpit.
Should have been two black dogs aboard Bluebird. But that will have to wait until April, when the docks return.

Monday, November 21, 2011

We got some new crew for the boats.

Lexi's in the foreground, Samantha in the rear. They are 3.5 months old and their Mom was a Sheltie. Looks like Dad was dominant, probably a black Lab. They're sweet and seem fearless, which should work well with their new duties on deck.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

It was a great day yesterday, sun out, wind blowing, but something was missing out on the Delaware River. I realized what it was only this morning.
In the nearly five hours I sailed, i was looking for it and not seeing it.
What I did see were occasional gusts coming from the west, turning the otherwise blue surface black with bunches of hard little waves as I raised Bluebird's sails, the main reefed, and cast off the mooring to sail with the current and against the wind.
On a long tack toward the Pennsylvania shore, I heard gunshots and located them coming from behind what looked like a 30-foot-high silver-gray fabric curtain, hung on telephone-type poles. As I drew nearer, I noticed a small powerboat anchored just offshore from the curtain. And even closer, I saw the power boat start up and head for me.
"This is a security zone," the captain of the boat called to me. "Change your course."
I tacked, and then I called back.
"Whose security zone is it?"
I got no answer, and tomorrow I'm calling the Coast Guard to find out.
Bluebird and I sailed past Beverly Point, to where you can look due west to the Philadelphia skyline about 15 miles away. That fetch in a westerly builds up a pretty respectable chop, and although this time it was sailable, I wasn't interested in more than a pleasant little cruise, so I turned and headed upstream.
I saw some people walking along the bank, where the tide had fallen toward low. One had a white boxer-type dog with a black spot on its left eye, like the mutt in The Little Rascals. Someone sitting on a park bench up in the trees took a photo of Bluebird.
But there were no boats on the water, and in the solitude, I kept looking for something that I couldn't identify. I looked upstream, toward the lift span bridge, thinking I'd see it -- maybe a ship heading out to sea, or a change in the weather, but there was nothing there to capture my interst.
I looked up to the sky. It was full of jet condensation trails, long white ones, the recent ones thin as an ink stroke, the older ones fat as an earthworm. They crisscrossed the blue, and caught below them were wisps of white, like cotton pulled out, swirling between the tendrils.
But that wasn't what I was looking for.
The sail went well but at the end it was somehow disappointing.
And then this morning I realized what I'd missed.
When you are out on a boat on a perfect day, the only thing you need for success is to feel the movement, sense it in all parts of your body. I'd been too focused on things and had missed the pure pleasure that's possible on an autumn day in a little boat.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

The leaves, on this gray morning, are raining from the trees, racing each other to be not the last to fall on lawn and gravel driveway, on car roof and house roof and bird feeder roof. A wind, forecast to grow stronger yet, sweeps them from the branches, now nearly all barren save for a few low on the maples. Blizzards of yellow gust across the street, frantic, each leaf, not to be left behind. By day's end, autumn may well have reached its somber, naked terminal.
In one week, we give thanks for the harvest of leaves and roots, of stalks and fruits, even as we sweep and sweat to move this fallen foliage off the grass and to the curb in a ritual that defies nature's plan of rot and regeneration. A smarter folk would leave the leaves where they landed, smell their decomposition, witness their disappearance into compost, food for the future.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

In a world in which gossip is the most common form of social discourse, is it a sign of humility or of conceit to think of one's self as uninteresting to the gossips?

Monday, November 14, 2011

Bluebird has the distinction of being the only boat left on its mooring down at the boat club. Yesterday, with mainsail reefed, we went out for the afternoon in gusts of 18 to 20 knots and a more-or-less steady 10 knots the rest of the time.
With the sails raised, I prepared to slip the mooring when I saw a not-quite-mustard yellow boat coming out from the marina breakwater on the Pennsylvania side of the river (the same marina where Robin is wintering.) It happened to be friends Andy and Kathy and their son on an afternoon sail to no place in particular.
I sailed over and said hello, then shadowed them as they sailed upstream on a beam reach flying Genoa alone. Before the lift bridge, they turned around. Their mast is too high to clear the bridge when it is closed. Bluebird can make it under three of the bridge spans easily, so I sailed on up to Bristol, PA, perhaps a three mile sail from the club.
As it happened, Monica was attending a play in Bristol at a riverfront theater, having been invited with a group of women. So I sailed as far as the theater parking lot and then headed back. It was about 3:15 p.m. when I turned, giving me a little more than an hour before the sun set.
Now I was tacking against the wind, but I had the current with me and sailed onto the mooring at about 4:15.
By the time I rowed the inflatable to shore, the sun had set, illuminating the clouds a raspberry red, complementing the lavender gray of their shadowy sides.
Now at 10 a.m. I can see the maple leaves, bright yellow, tossing in a breeze that is crossing the yard, and I wonder whether perhaps I should head down to the river once more.
I hope to sail until the last leaf has fallen and, when I step ashore from the dinghy, ice crystals crunch under my shoes.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

The riverbed is paved with stones polished round and smooth. A thin frosting of silt is settled over and around those stones that rest below the line of the low tide, where the waves ebbing and flowing cannot wash them clean. You step in at low tide and the muck just beneath the surface will suck your shoes off your feet.
On the industrial banks and in the marshes that border the river, where low-value trees and shrubs wet their roots, trash collects, blue plastic drums and empty soda bottles and chunks of dirty white styrene foam.
You see none of this from the middle of the water, out in the channel where large red and green buoys mark the limits for shipping traffic. On a November afternoon, you see ripples from the wind blowing obliquly from the south, crossing the current. You see a speed boat or two and, far down the fetch, a white sail.
You hear the lapping of the water against the boat's bow, coming at you from inside the cavern that is the little cuddy cabin, and when the breeze stiffens, you hear the hum of the cable that holds the steel centerboard suspended below the hull, a stringed instrument whose tone suggests power and purpose.
You feel the breeze on every exposed hair: On the back of your neck, on your stubbly cheek whiskers, your long, aging gray eyebrows, the thin filaments rising from the withered, nicked old skin on the back of your hands. The hairs tell you direction, strength.
In the wood of the tiller, you feel the tug of the water against the rudder that slices the river three feet deep, feel the straining and the easing as the sails fill and flutter, and somehow, in combination with the signals being transmitted through your neck hairs, your fingers use the report from the tiller to keep the little boat pointing carefully along the optimal line, aiming across that current that would drive you back to the dock.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

I cut the notch in the end of the stainless steel bolt at the bottom of the mast.

With the cold chisel inserted in the notch and the pipe wrench's jaws on the shaft of the chisel, I turned the bolt. It turned easily.
Too easily.
I looked inside the bottom of the mast, where the bolt passed through an aluminum tube.

The tube was turning, too. So I got out the reciprocating, Sawzall-type saw and, after a half hour of work and two saw blades, cut the bolt through.


If you look carefully at the ends of the sliced bolt and tube, you will be hard pressed to find where the stainless steel ends and the aluminum begins, so closely have the two metals shared molecules.
Now that this riddle is solved, it's on to stripping all the old paint from the mast. I was going to repaint it, but that would require removing all the hardware which, I assume, is just as welded to the mast as was this bolt to the tube. I'm looking into the virtues of leaving the mast a raw aluminum. I think I've found a substance that will stabilize the surface. If so, this chore will soon be completed.
If there was any breeze, I'd be heading to the boathouse for a sail on Bluebird. But the air is calm, so I'll drive across the river -- or maybe take the dinghy -- to work on Robin. I'll take a photo of my project -- removing the stainless steel bolt that is stuck inside the mast, frozen inside an aluminum tube by corrosion, a situation that Dick Mills tells me is called Galling.
When the boatyard went to haul the mast, they had to use a Sawzall to cut the bolt on both sides where it passed between the mast and the mast step. That left the plug inside the tube.
I've tried heating the tube with a blow torch before using the sledge hammer and a drift pin. That hasn't worked. I've poured WD-40 into the tube. It hasn't budged. So now I'm going to try to drill a slot into the sawed end of the bolt and then use a cold chisel and a pipe wrench to try to twist the bolt free of the galling.
I'll take the photo in case my description isn't sufficient and my next attempt doesn't work and I need suggestions.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

There was a brisk easterly breeze yesterday afternoon and I played hookey. Our inflatable is hung like laundry inside the boathouse at the Red Dragon Canoe Club nearby. Balancing it on my back, I hauled it to the gravel shore, attached the oars and the seat and rowed out to Bluebird, about 100 yards offshore.
After rigging the sails, we slipped the mooring and, sailing against the current and the wind, tacked up toward Burlington City, about two miles away.
One other sailor from the club, Del Rife, had a head start on Bluebird, so of course my little boat thought she was in a race.
Just before you reach the city, the Burlington-Bristol lift-span bridge looms above. Del turned back before he reached the bridge and before I had a chance to catch up. I sailed by with a wave and then slipped under the bridge in a weakening breeze. On the far side of the bridge, the river turns north and the wind did, too. On a beam reach, Bluebird made it all the way to the center of the city before turning back and running against the tide, which had turned.
There is no better time to sail than in autumn, when the air is crisp, the sky clear and the sun is lighting the muted fall colors on the shore. Bluebird is well behaved, liked a good dog, a perfect companion if you want to play hookey.