douglas a. Campbell's books

2012-02-17T14:08:00.002-05:00

Just about to go over and work on the mast, but for anyone who might have wondered where I've been the past week, here's the answer.

I got rolling on a new youth novel. Into it 10,000 words, or about one third of the way if my estimate is accurate. The process of writing is trying and, at times, triumphant. I start out telling a story, realize that it isn't very exciting and then stumble on a way to inject conflict that I didn't start out envisioning. I started this one with a beginning and an end. I knew the middle more or less, but not the details. So I started writing, and the muse is apparently nearby, helping me out when I don't have an original thought. I guess that might feel creepy in a different setting, but I'm glad for the assist.

I wanted to end the week where I am, so now I'm free to grind some paint etc. until the work resumes Monday -- or sooner. It's more fun than the Super Bowl when it's going well.

2012-02-10T13:05:00.002-05:00

Every morning, I read something called The Writer's Almanac, which is the written version of a radio program hosted by Garrison Keillor. It starts with a poem that is followed by nuggets about people who were born on this date or historical events that happened on this date.
A few days ago, it was the birthday of John Grisham. The item related that Grisham wrote his first blockbuster, The Firm, after reading Brian Garfield's Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction.
I'd never read the rules so I looked them up, not because I admire John Grisham's writing but because I know that I'm deficient in my understanding of the structure of writing and appreciate that suspense is probably an important ingredient in all writing, if you really want it to be read.
For a few months, I'd been struggling to find the right approach to the next youth novel I wanted to write. It is a story based on my own summer at age 14, and I didn't know how to make it compelling, since although it was a wonderful summer, it didn't lead to anything terribly suspenseful.
Now I'm off and running, having written the first two chapters after reading Brian Garfield's rules. I'm excited by the story and the way it is pulling me along.
Here you can find the rules:
Well, if I could figure out how to link you to the web page, I would. Since I can't, just search Brian Garfield's 10 rules.

2012-02-10T10:32:00.002-05:00

Crocuses blooming

in the back woods,

clouds of lavender

just above

the dried leaves.

It must be February.

Snow falling

on grass and gravel,

then melting before the sun sets.

It must be New Jersey.

2012-02-07T19:05:00.002-05:00

The "pirates" we met back in August finally had their day in court. See below.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/30397480/detail.html?taf=bos

2012-02-02T14:45:00.002-05:00

Just got back from walking Lexi and Samantha to the river at the end of the street. Walking two exhuberant puppies on 16-foot retractable leashes is quite similar to flying two model airplanes on control lines.
That's a guess. I never did fly two model airplanes on control lines simultaneously. In fact, I think the only time I ever got my hands on a set of control lines, I put the model airplane in a magnificent arc that ended in a nose dive and a wreckage in a cow pasture.
The similarity is limited to the challenge of controlling two objects -- dogs or model planes -- without geting their lines entangled.
Were our just-completed walk actually model plane flight, there would have been several wrecks. Not a few neighbors have asked, when encountering the three of us on an outing, who was walking whom.
My childhood friend, Johnny, was a model airplane enthusiast. (I don't think we said people were "into" a thing back then.) He made model after model, but he seemed to be more interested in flight than in actual model making. I once saw him put an engine on a two-by-four and fly it.
Johnny's father was an engineer who had worked, in the 1950s, on the earliest nuclear generating plants. Johnny had the makings of an aeronautical engineer, although I don't know what path his life took after high school because our courses diverged in adolescence.
Beforethat, we'd go out behind Johnny's house with one of his models, a tiny internal combustion engine screwed into a block of wood at the front. He would pump some fuel into a miniature tank. I can recall the smell of the fuel -- intoxicating stuff, but we weren't sniffers. I suppose I was relegated to holding the model while Johnny took the handle joining the two control lines over to the place between the cow flaps which would become the center of his plane's circular flight pattern. Then (although I don't recall if this is true) I probably would release the plane and it would climb into the sky.
Johnny and I did any number of things together. We shot frogs in the woodland ponds with our .22 rifles. We made watercraft, some of which floated.
One in particular that did float was called a coracle and consisted of a tarp, a large wreath made of sticks and grass, and some twine. You placed the wreath on the tarp, tied the tarp edges up over the wreath and laid some sticks or boards across this doughnut-shaped thing to make a seat. Then you tried to paddle it.
The coracles always floated, but getting them to advance in one direction was tricky. They wanted to spin in place.
The highlight of our boating career came when Johnny bought a kayak that his classmate, Skippy, had made with firring strips and Larro feed bags. Skippy had done a remarkably good job. The kayak was pointed at both ends, it was light, its frame was sturdy and he had painted the feed bags white and blue, as I recall. The paint made the bags waterproof.
I say Johnny bought the kayak. He may have traded something for it. But I coveted it and so I asked him what he wanted.
"Your pup tent," he said.
My Uncle Donald had given me a little, two-man Air Force pup tent that seemed like it was state of the art. It had a built-in mosquito screen and windows at either end. I was willing to give up the tent because I had secret knowledge about its shortcomings, and the trade was made in the cluttered garage at the rear of Johnny's home.
We had, a few days earlier, taken the kayak to one of the woodland ponds some distance away from Johnny's house, and he had paddled it successfully. The pond was nothing more than rainwater captured in a depression in the granite outcroppings at the top of a hill. It was filled with rotting leaves and sticks, but it was good for watersports in the warm months and skating in the winter.
So I knew I could navigate the kayak successfully when I handed the tent over to Johnny.
We were about to take the kayak to a small water hole behind his house where the cattle drank when Johnny's mother came around the corner. She had an axe in her hands.
"You boys take this and chop that thing to pieces," she commanded.
The scowl on her face left no room for argument, and we did as instructed. Satisfied that she was not going to have to attend our funerals, she went back in the house.
It might seem like I got the bad end of my deal with Johnny, but I didn't.
I didn't have a kayak.
But the tent leaked.

2012-02-02T12:53:00.002-05:00

The Home Depot sold me a new angle grinder for under $30 (plus tax) and so this morning I put Lexi and Samantha in their crates for a couple of hours and drove across the toll bridge to the marina, ready to finish wire-brushing the first side of the mast.
You can imagine my displeasure when I opened the box and found no wrench to put the wire brush onto the grinder. I can't count the number of times I've bought things at home centers that didn't have all their parts.
So of course I was mildly steaming when I drove back across the bridge, and a half hour later arrived at The Home Depot, tool and receipt in hand. I explained (politely) that there was no wrench in the box. The lady at "returns" told me to go find a box with a wrench. But after opening the half-dozen boxes on the shelf, I found them all devoid of wrenches.
Amazing, and a bit disconcerting. I rechecked the boxes but still had no luck. So I went back to the returns counter.
A fellow was there with the lady, and he examined the box. At first, he was as dismayed as I. She called for help from the tools section, and he proceeded to open every plastic bag in the grinder box.
You probably have guessed the result. He found a wrench, inserted conveniently in the end of the handle that screws into the side of the grinder. I hadn't opened that bag since I hadn't found a wrench in the box and as yet had no need for the handle.
This is a lesson I'll probably never learn, akin to closing the refrigerator door completely, of which I am found guilty on a regular basis. I'm not certain what the lesson actually is. I just know I feel stupid.

2012-02-02T10:20:00.002-05:00

This is the top of Robin's roller furling, a long tube around which the foresail -- called the Genoa -- is wrapped like a window shade when you don't need it. As you can see, it is bent. The whole thing should be in line.
I can't say with certainty, but I believe the part was bent when the mast was taken down. The good news is that the rigger I've been consulting thinks there is a pretty easy fix. I have to take a photo of the bottom end of the system and then he will order a part.
A boat has so many parts that I can say with complete honesty that I never studied this one before I saw that it appeared to be misshapen. That's why I had to show it to an expert before I was sure I had a problem.
Now that I know the truth -- or at least this limited truth; not the one about how the universe was formed -- I can put the solution on my to-do list. The list gets longer every time I visit dear Robin.

2012-02-01T13:42:00.002-05:00

Here's the current project on Robin. The white on the near end of the mast is the scaling paint which I've been removing with a circular wire brush on an angle grinder, leaving the bare aluminum (farther away in this shot.) Today, I almost completed one side before the angle grinder slowed down and began smoking. Guess there will be a trip to the hardware store before the project continues.

Today was perfect for the job -- way over 60 degrees with a warm sun and a nice breeze. I'm still dreaming of skiing, not boating. Still, I'll use these spring-like days to get a jump on Robin's 2012 spruce-up.

2012-01-31T13:35:00.002-05:00

I took a lunch break from wire-brushing Robin's mast -- peanut butter and raisin sandwiches, as always -- and sat on the rear deck of the Forester. Above, three turkey vultures were gliding in a nice breeze. Their flight, as always, was beautiful to see, nearly perfect gliding combining elegant swoops and hovering in place as if painted there in the sky.
And yet, they are such a grotesque-looking beast up close, with their featherless heads and carion-ripping hooked beaks.
In nature if not in Hollywood, you don't have to be gorgeous to create beauty.

2012-01-30T11:51:00.002-05:00

It is too cold outside to work on the mast. The temperature is around 40 degrees Farenheit and there is a breeze. Tomorrow and Wednesday are supposed to be near 60 degrees, so I've put off that work for then.
Last week, in a couple of hours, I used a circular wire brush on an electric angle grinder to remove about 30 percent of the easily-reached old paint job, down to bare aluminum. The wire brush took off the tips of a thumb and a forefinger of my heavy leather work gloves, but I escaped injury. I'm guessing the whole job may be completed in another 10 or 12 hours.
The next step will be to apply two types of chemicals to the bare aluminum. These should protect the metal from corrosion in the salt air.
There will then be three issues with which I must deal before the mast is again raised. One is the bolt that goes through the base to hold it in place. It's an inch-thick bolt threaded on both ends. The old one was sawed through in order to get the mast down. I have to acquire a new one. The second item is the electrical connections for the radar. Before I raise the mast, I'll have to be prepared to reconnect the dozen or so wires and shrink wrap them to prevent corrosion. The third issue is the roller furling. There is an odd bend in the part that attaches to the top of the mast, and I need to find a rigging expert to look at it and see if repairs are needed.
Those considerations visit my consciousness from time to time, worrying me as any as-yet-unresolved issue will.
At the same time, I should begin removing the thick, old bottom paint from Robin's hull. I'm not yet sure how I'll approach that -- a sander-grinder? a power scraper? hiring someone with a soda blaster? The first two methods require hard labor by me. The last requires hard-to-find money.
The bottom, which has at least some blisters, will need time for the water to drain from the blister cavities before I set about sealing the whole bottom and putting on a smooth coat of paint.
At the same time as the boat work is being done, I need to get into the next writing job. I've pretty much decided to combine two projects into one -- a new youth novel and a book about my father.
I made one phone call today to advance that project. I'll make another one, too. Progress some times can be slow.

2012-01-25T12:17:00.002-05:00

I was digging through one of my desk drawers, looking for a large envelope, when I unearthed a sketchy Xeroxed copy of a hand-written report composed in 1974 by my late college friend, Bill Gartz.
Bill had manipulated his blood pressure test in order to be accepted by the Army flight school during the height of the Vietnam War. Once through school, he served a tour in Vietnam flying fixed-wing aircraft. After that year, he went through helicopter school and returned to Vietnam, flying gun ships and passenger helicopters, delivering troops to the fighting and back or flying cover for other choppers doing that work.
By 1974, the United States was drawing down its force in Vietnam and Bill found himself no longer needed in the Army. Back in the states, there had been no jobs for a chemist, the profession for which he had been trained, and after a while he had taken a job with Air America, the CIA's private air force.
Perhaps you recall, if you are old enough, the iconic photo of the helicopter on the roof of the United States Embassey in Saigon where refugees were huddled, hoping for a ride away from the collapsing city. Here (with apologies for missing segments that I cannot read) is what Bill saw.
"On the morning of the 29th of April, 1975, I awoke, due to incoming rocket/mortar fire in the vicinity of 259 (the USAID building), at 04:30 hrs. From the roof where 10 - 20 other people were, we could see fires in the Tan Son Nhut area as well as small arms tracer rounds throughout Saigon. Nothing significant occured until Air America helocpters started landing and shuttling crew members to the AAM ramp/operations area at TSN. I was on the second shuttle (Fosburg was the pilot) out of 259. We arrived at the AAM ramp, which was receiving 9incoming rockets/mortar fire, at 9:30 hrs. I immediately gathered my flight gear and luggage and placed it (uninteligible) there ouside the operations building were other people were placing the belongings. A short time later while we were waiting instructions, Frank Andrews came running in saying that the VNAF were taking our helicopters from the FCCS ramp. Myself, Collard, Genz (?), Vaughan & DeJesus grabbed our flight gear, and whatever personal belongings we could carry, which was minimal, and jumped on a helicopter (Freedman) that took us to the FCCS ramp. There were a few VNAF/ARVN in some aircraft and around the area. I took A.C. 115 and departed, along with two armed ARVN/VNAF who asked me to 'please help us'. Upon landing at the AAM ramp, Ed Adams disarmed and dispersed my univited passengers, and instructed me to depart the AAM ramp area. Since the Air Traffic (AAM/VNAF/NVA rockets & mortars) was heavy in the TSN area, I went downtown to the Brinks BOQ (Ha Ba Truri (?) Street) area and awaited further instructions which came shortly, telling us to find a suitable roof top to oand on and shut down to conserve fuel. I considered landing on helipad #'s 21 or 22, however, since there was no one on either pad, and I wasn't certain there were any Americans in either building, I decided to look for a more suitable place to shut down. It was then I heard Fosburg say that he thought the embassy roof top (H-749) where he was shut down, could hold two helicopters. I went over and landed there. Fosburg and I were invited down for some coffee. We tried to contact AAM operations by telephone but were unsuccessful. After an hour, we were asked to take some people to the Blue Ridge, which we were told was near NEWPORT. We both questioned the lcoation since the Blue Ridge was 20 miles off the coast of (unitel) a day earlier, an there was heavy fighting for 36 hoursin the NEWPORT area. We were assured that they ahd the location correct; fortunately for all concerned, they were never able to get the passengers together before we confirmed our suspection that the Blue Ridge was still off the coast. An hour after landing on H-749, Fosburg was directed, by V-01 operations, to another helipad to pick up some people . I departed an additional hour later, the time was now 13:00 hrs, with a load of eight American passengers for the DHO t4ennis courts (DAOTC). Upon returning to H-749, I was directed to shut down while more passengers were assembled. The Embassy was obviously having trouble getting people in position to be picked up on the roof. I don't know if they were having difficulty deciding who should go but every helicoptr had (unintel) ground time while loading up passengers. The number of passengers was not always as large as it could & should have been also. I tried to explain Williams [?] and his assistant that fuel was going to be a problem and that time could be running out so it would be best to maximize the loads and minimize the ground time. Fifteen minutes later, I departed with another load of 8 passengers (they really paid attention to me)for the DACTC, returning to H-749. I then made a few shuttles from H-749 to the DACTC. At 14:00 hrs I was directed to 35A. I didn't know where it was and didn't have a Saigon helipad map and no one on UHF or VHF radio could help me out, so I took an Embassy guide who directed me to H-21. I never did figure out what the 35A was. He kept showing me a piece of paper with 35A on it while directing me to land at H-21, which is where we landed. We departed H-21 with 20 people (6 Americns, 8 Vietnamese and 6 children) and headed toward (unintel). I passed on to VOI operations my intentions and that there were still 10 - 20 additional people on H-21. Within 15 minutes, one of our helicopters reported that he landed and cleared H-21 of people. When I arrived in the vicinity of the Blue Ridge, I was told to land at the Oklahoma City, which I did, with 100 lbs of fuel left. All the passengers, except the embassy guide, deplaned. After refueling, I headed back to Saigon. The time was now 15:30 hrs. Prior to landing at H-749, I checked H-21 for any additional Americans. There were 10 - 15 orientals peacefully sitting there but no Americans. Since Victor operations was direced me to H-749, and H-21 was reported cleared of people over an hour earlier and there was no American currently on H-21, I landed at H-749 to drop off the Embassy guide, waited 10 minutes for passengers for DAOTC. Victor Operations then directed me to 259 (USAID Building) where I made several shuttles to the DAOTC. The operations at 259 was very smooth with minimum gorund time and full passenger loads. When I was down to (uniteligible at length)at 259 and headed for the Blue Ridge. This time I was directed to the Midway, where I landed at 18:00 hrs and secured, since we were directed to be on the ships prior to sunset by ACP/(?) All things considered, AAM did an outstanding job. I only wish we had started earlir and that fuel was available in Saigon. The treatment I received during my nine (9) nights on the Midway was excellent. The communications or rather the lack of communications from Air America proved to be my only problem. After nine nights we still had no instrucitons , from the company, on what we shoud do with ourselfs or the aircraft. after arrival at the Philippines our processing smoothed out and we were on our way to HKG the following day. At HKG, the only backlog was at the travel desk which did a commendable service considering the extremely heavy work load. I wonder why AAM didn't get some additional help in this area. Any questions will be entertained at . . . "
Bill Gartz never did work as a chemist. He married his Vietnamese girlfriend, and he kept finding work flying helicopters in remote corners of the world. He died in a helicopter crash while one of his students was flying over an Asian jungle.

2012-01-19T11:01:00.003-05:00

I returned last night from four days of skiing with college friends Charlie and Curt in New Hampshire. The weather was ideal and the snow conditions nearly perfect.
Since this was the first time since last February that I had skied, my skiing was at times imperfect, my control often borderline.
Skiing is unlike bicycle riding in that it all doesn't necessarily come back to you once you step into the bindings. But it is like bicycle riding in the sense that to do it successfully requires faith. Even more so than bicycle riding, skiing is a fine metaphor for how we succeed or fail in life.
I had skied from the age of five when I joined the ski team my freshman year in college. I was in great physical shape and, in the autumn training which involved a lot of running, I excelled. Once the snow fell, however, I discovered how inadequate I was as a skier.
But one team member, a senior who was an elite racer and who, today, would have been an olympic candidate, took the time to explain to me the fundamentals that every good skier understood. His name was Pat Cunningham, and that he stooped to encourage and instruct a hopelessly green and untalented kid speaks to his qualities as a human being.
What Pat told me was quite simple. Keep your (body) weight forward and on the downhill ski.
When your weight is forward, it is concentrated on the balls of the feet. When wearing ski boots, your shins are pressing firmly against the tongues. There is no weight on your heels.
Your downhill ski is the one nearest the bottom of the slope. In practice, when your weight is on this ski, if you tip uphill, you can catch yourself with your uphill ski. And if you tip downhill, you can simply slip that downhill ski back under you.
The issue is that most of us have a natural fear of falling and so our normal reaction is to lean uphill, away from the danger. We'd rather have our weight on the uphill ski. We'd rather be standing on our heels if they are farther away from the dropping landscape.
Leaning back, standing on one's heels leads to disaster. When the skis slip downhill, as they certainly will thanks to gravity, you are left with no way to catch yourself. That which supports you -- the skis -- have abandoned you and you fall.
In order to ski successfully and in control, you must lean forward and embrace the danger. And here to me is the metaphor. Success in any endeavor requires diving fearlessly into it, abandoning all reservations, flushing from your mind any potential negative consequences, adopting totally the confidence that you will succeed.
It takes me a few days before I can reach this blissful state every moment I am riding skis. And so, in any one run, I may be doing extremely well in the business of committing myself and, the next moment, be sitting on my heels, unconciously retreating from the constant threat presented by the slope.
Four days was not enough to get past the flaws.
But there were those moments, those exhillerating few seconds when, approaching the crest of an extremely steep pitch, I was able to throw myself forward, leaving feet behind, bending body in order to angle the steel edge of the downhill ski sharply into the firm snow so that it bit into the crust, directing the inertia of my plummeting body left or right, again and again, slingshotting from one turn to the next as the speed built.
In those moments of abandon lie ecstacy, the life fully lived.

2011-12-15T08:34:00.004-05:00

Endings -- of a life, a love, a season -- are the sad price we pay for having been selected to live. When we reach the end of good things, it's best not to mourn them but to look back with thanks.

I chose yesterday to end Bluebird's season on the river. It was not the ending I'd wanted, with a stiff breeze to stretch her sails one more time. The water was oily smooth, littered with a few logs and branches washed from the shoreline by a rising tide. And although in the morning there had been frost on the stones that pave the beach, it was warm when I launched the dinghy, no ice to crunch under my soles.
I rowed the 75 strokes to Bluebird's side, transfered the winter stick that would replace the mooring ball, along with the tools to accompish that job, into the cockpit and climbed aboard one last time.
The next few minutes were too busy to recall the good season that was ending. I had to splice two thimbles on the ends of a polypropylene line that attached the mooring chain to the winter stick -- a five-foot-long PVC tube, weighted at one end and sealed to float vertically and mark the location of the mooring throughout the icy season that is probably just beginning. Then I had to remove the mooring ball from the chain and put it in the cockpit.
Before I let the chain and winter stick go and allowed Bluebird to float free, I had to start the outboard motor. It fired up on the first pull. I let it warmn while I checked various lines. Then I cast off, leaving the sailing season behind.
It was a good season. Although Monica made it aboard Bluebird only once, she enjoyed the sail and, I'm sure, will be back aboard in the spring. And I had several pleasure-filled hours aboard alone, sails when the wind was just perfect and the feel exhilerating as Bluebird balanced between the forces of wind and water.
Twice, friend Rich Vishton came along for the ride, both times a mix of wind and calm that proved what a sweet hull Philip Rhodes had designed fifty-some years earlier.
Yesterday, Rich was waiting at the boat ramp on the far side of the river with Bluebird's trailer when, under outboard power, we slanted across the current, aiming for the breakwater and the end of a lovely season.

2011-12-13T20:28:00.003-05:00

This is about as close as I've come to sailing in the last 10 days.

Lexi (left) and Samantha play on the front lawn of the Red Dragon Canoe Club as Bluebird sits on the mooring in the middle of the Delaware River. There's not much time for sailing with two "toddlers" in the house. But we do ride the one block over to the club every day to help Lexi get over her car sickness (I've read it's a puppy thing involving the development of the pup's ear) and once we arrive, the girls get to play on the lawn. I get to stare wistfully at Bluebird. I'll probably haul her later this week. I'm hoping there's wind that day.

2011-12-05T09:59:00.002-05:00

I'd just opened the boathouse door yesterday afternoon when neighbor Rich Vishton drove down to the waterfront.
"Want to go out?" I asked.
He thought briefly of the chores he had to do at home and then replied, "Yeah."
So we launched the inflatable, attached the outboard and puttered out to where Bluebird was swinging in the current and a light breeze.
For the next two hours, we sailed gently, heading downstream with the current but against the wind at first, then edging back upstream in what proved to be very light air.
As folks will, we told old stories, some about boats, some about life. Rich steered and I tended the sheets.
The sun was falling fast as we crept toward the mooring near the end of another perfect autumn sail. But we were back ashore before dark. We hadn't needed the outboard. In fact, I don't think that motor is even broken in yet, it's been used so seldom.
This morning, there is a thick fog on the river and only occasionally can you see Bluebird's shadow. I probably won't take her out today, nor tomorrow, when rain is forecast. Then the temperature is predicted to drop, so perhaps the sailing season is about over.
I looked for the license plate and lights for the boat trailer this morning and couldn't find them. I'll need to act on that problem soon so that I can take the trailer to the launch ramp.
Pushing the sailing season is great fun when you get out on the water. But I don't want to find myself actually fighting the ice floes when it's time to haul.

2011-12-01T14:03:00.003-05:00

The first section of paint has been removed from Robin's mast. That leaves a bit more than 90 percent to do.
The paint itself came off quite easily with a brass wire brush about the size of a toothbrush. But that left, in most places, a layer that appeared to be some sort of primer. The surface was a blue-ish silver, and underneath was a white layer that, when sanded, spread like thickened paint over the underlying aluminum and was quite resistant to my efforts at removal. I went through several sanding discs before quitting at the current place.
Today, I went to Lowes and bought a circular brass wire brush (I think it's brass. The packaging didn't say.) I think it will fit either on an angle grinder or a grinder/polisher that I have in the basement. I'll see on the next trip if the stripping goes any quicker.
Suggestions from experienced aluminum strippers welcomed.

2011-11-28T11:48:00.004-05:00

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.

2011-11-21T13:15:00.003-05:00

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.

2011-11-20T11:30:00.004-05:00

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.

2011-11-17T08:28:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-11-15T10:52:00.003-05:00

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?

2011-11-14T09:34:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-11-10T13:14:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-11-08T15:09:00.006-05:00

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.

2011-11-08T09:44:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-11-02T11:56:00.002-04:00

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.

2011-10-31T09:50:00.002-04:00

Through the fog an hour after sunrise, Bluebird floats in the ebbing tide, awaiting the end of her season, the temporary death of my dreaming. It's hard to let it all pass. Just beyond her, in the trees on the far shore to the left, Robin sits waiting for my ministrations. No spare time to weep.

2011-10-26T14:41:00.002-04:00

I just returned from the river and a two-hour sail/drift aboard Bluebird. Our neighbor Rich Vishton came along. After showing a bit of passion as we stood on the dock, the wind withdrew, and to call it a sail would be to stretch the facts. Still, it was nice to be on the water.
My friend John Morrison is heading south today from our marina in Maryland. He plans to reach Marathon, Florida, where he will take a mooring for a few months. His wife, Fran, will meet him there. For now, he has as crew a fellow he knows from the marina. I've offered to spend a couple of weeks helping him along if he needs me. I owe him for the many times he's helped me with Robin. (And I enjoy sailing with him, truth be told.)
At the same time, I've applied for a job in journalism and have reached the point where I took a test yesterday. No word whether I've scraped by, and I'm frankly not certain I want to. Having spent more than two years unemployed, while I've missed the steady income and the sense of accomplishment that work provides, I've also enjoyed the freedom to move around, on the water and on land, and to be with my grandchildren.
I guess my feelings are the definition of ambivalence.

2011-10-20T12:17:00.005-04:00

Robin made it home to Cambridge, MD, and about three weeks later, Monica and I flew to Alaska for one of those glacier cruises.
First, we went to Denali, also known as Mt. McKinley, which we saw from a bus about 75 miles away.

We took a long train ride to Anchorage through your standard Alaska spectacular scenery.

This was followed by a week on a cruise ship that got close to several glaciers, close enough to hear the thunder rumble through the shifting ice and see shards of glacier fall, as if in slow motion, from the 200-foot-high face of the glacier.

When we flew home, I fetched Robin from Cambridge, brought her up the Delaware River to a marina on the far shore from our home. There she now sits on dry land, propped up by four jack-stands, her mast disconnected and down on the ground, all of her parts awaiting my winter-long inspection.
I've begun work on a new project -- a book or a long magazine piece -- a portrait of the small New England town where I was raised, centered around or focusing on a profile of my father, Archie Campbell, who, as a newcomer to the village, became a civic leader who, twenty-five years after his death, is remembered and revered when town folk gather to discuss their community.

2011-10-10T10:30:00.002-04:00

The thunderheads were in sight to the northwest, towering above North Jersey as they marched toward New York City. They would miss Robin.
But then the sky to our west began to gather in a steamy gray-gold wall and I suspected the city wasn't nature's only target this day. By mid afternoon, the lightning was visible over the shore towns north of Asbury Park. Robin was about three miles offshore, and soon the lightning was closer and the rain began. I had everything buttoned down, just in case the "severe wind" materialized.
It didn't, and by the time we were off the Shark River Inlet, the storm had passed.
Then a wind came up just off the bow and soon we were able to motorsail.
With the help of the wind, Robin made six knots or more all night. There was very little traffic off the coast, and I took ten minute naps to ward off that crash into sleep that can befall the sailor who attempts a true all-nighter.
Dawn came around Ocean City, NJ, and Robin was on anchor at 10:30 a.m. in Cape May Harbor, her passage from Manhasset Bay having taken an even twenty-five hours.
The anchorage was unusually full when I arrived -- unusual for a Tuesday morning in late August. I was forced to look for enough depth in parts of the anchorage I'd never before used, and I discovered plenty of deep water on the eastern end, near a green daymarker. I made a mental note to head for that spot immediately the next time I stop in Cape May.

2011-10-08T19:57:00.005-04:00

In preparation for this particular passage, I had studied the charts and the cruising guide specifically to search for a safe harbor in or near New York Harbor. Twice when I've made the trip down the East River, I've encountered brutal conditions at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Both times, I had help. This time I was alone.
The first time was the 2008 trip that Monica and I had taken to Cape Cod. All the way down Long Island Sound, the wind had been strong from the east. We sailed at top speed, enjoying the ride without needing the engine.
We discovered the cost of such sailing when we turned east to go under the Narrows bridge. There, the seas had been building for three days ahead of that easterly wind, and Robin confronted four to six foot walls of water, bucking her bow up to the sky again and again. On a day that we planned to end offshore with Cape May in our sights, we scurried for cover behind the arm of Sandy Hook to wait for improved weather.
The second time was in 2009, when John Morrison, Curt Michael and I ran into fog so dense that when we passed below the Narrows Bridge, we finally saw the structure, straight overhead. It was an action packed hour or so when we passed out through the ambrose Channel, searching for buoys while hearing the thrumming of massive ship engines passing by to our port, completely invisible to us.
Now, I'd searched the charts for an escape route and had found none. So my plan was to do my best to get to Sandy Hook, well beyond the Narrows by several miles, and spend the night there.
The day started overcast, and the image of a fog-bound Narrows filled my mind. I motored slowly, since I had all morning -- until about 11:30 -- to get to Hell Gate. First I passed La Guardia Airport and then Reikers Island Prison.

And then I was through Hell Gate and motoring south on the East River. There was very little traffic -- one tug with a barge and one New York State freighter connected with its environmental protection office.
As I approached the South Street Seaport Museum, I saw a high-speed ferry idling just off the wharf. I radioed on Channel 13, asking the captain where he was headed.
The surprise was that I didn't get the sarcastic response I'd earned in New London. Instead, a very polite captain came back to say that he would move out of my way.
Amazed, I took advantage of this gracious behavior to cross to the east -- Brooklyn -- side of the river in preparation for cutting behind Governor's Island, the short route to the Narrows.
Now the landmarks came one after another.

When Robin passed through the Narrows, the seas were calm, and at three o'clock in the afternoon, when we were off Sandy Hook, the sun was shining. The Coast Guard was transmitting an urgent weather bulletin on Channel 16, warning of severe thunder storms approaching New York. I could see them, but I was unconcerned. By now, I'd phoned Monica to tell her Robin and I were headed for Cape May, non-stop. I figured I be there in the morning around 9:30 if all went well. I'd be using my kitchen timer to take 15 minute naps during the darkest part of the night. But I felt invigorated and ready for the night alone at sea.

2011-10-08T19:03:00.005-04:00

Had it been colder on Sunday morning, the weather would have been raw. There was a damp in the rain blowing from the south that got under even good foul weather gear and an intensity that bordered on fog, limiting visibility in the anchorage when I was ready to head out. I got the anchor up and then followed on the chart plotter the reverse of the course that I had established entering the evening before.
This time, I ran aground.
It was a mud bottom and so the grounding was silent and deceptive. I didn't know it had happened until the bow dipped down as the after section of the keel -- the deepest part -- ran up onto a mud mound.
I worked the throttle forward and aft and shoved the tiller to port and starboard and eventually, Robin broke free and I was on my way west in Long Island sound, bound for Manhasset Bay.
The bay was calm when I arrived, and I steered for an area of about 15-foot depth near the western shore, well protected from the existing southerly wind. Once the anchor was down, I had an opportunity to examine the bungalows that lined the nearby shore.

While I probably do not agree with, or have unbounded respect for, many of the folks who recently have participated in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, I do however doubt that in many cases there is justification, either in terms of risks taken or talent brought to bear, for the amount that the owners of these dwellings draw from our economy in comparison with the compensation paid to, as an example, an inspiring middle school teacher who opens the minds of children who otherwise would likely live their lives without appreciating their world.
In any case, I had a good night's rest, preparing for the Monday passage through Hell Gate and the voyage down the East River toward an anchorage in Sandy Hook, NJ.

2011-10-04T16:27:00.002-04:00

My traveling for the next two days was controlled by the time on Monday when the current changed at Hell Gate Bridge, where New York's East River ends and Long Island Sound begins. You are best served by arriving at Hell Gate at slack tide, when the waters are calm and the current is slow. Earlier or later and you will be in a boiling sea that will have more say in which way your boat goes than you do.
I wanted to make as much distance on this day -- Saturday -- as I could so that on Sunday I'd not have to push too hard to get to Manhasset Bay, my favorite anchorage near Hell Gate.
As I studied the charts, I felt that my best choices for Saturday night were along the Connecticut coast, where there seemed to be a greater selection of anchorages. I had no plan to spend money on a mooring when I had two perfectly good anchors mounted on the bow.
By mid day, I saw that my progress was sufficient that I could probably make it with daylight to spare if I aimed for the Norwalk Islands. The cruising guide talked about one spot as a well-protected anchorage, although with somewhat shallow approaches. I decided that would be my destination.
By late afternoon, when I had the anchorage in sight, the wind had picked up from the west southwest. I followed the buoys toward the anchorage, in the center of a ring of small islands, according to the charts. But now I saw that some of the islands were little more than sand spits with no trees or structures to block the wind.
By now, however, I had cast my lot. I turned into a cut between the islands that the cruising guide said was my entrance. The depth sounder red 1.5 feet as I crossed the most shallow part of the entrance. Inside, the wind was blowing 15 to 20 knots, unimpeded. I took Robin up to the center of the anchorage, just short of where the chart said the depth was too shallow for Robin's 5-foot keel. Then I reversed the engine, halting Robin's progress. Knocking the engine into neutral, I raced to the bow and lowered the 45-pound plow anchor. Then I raced back to the cockpit to put the engine in slow reverse in the hopes of setting the anchor in the sand.
Somehow, the anchor dug in on the first try, and I was secure for the night. Frazzled, I went below and heated some dinner and hoped for the best as the wind moaned through the rigging.

2011-10-04T16:15:00.002-04:00

The morning was crisp and clear and we got started just after sunrise. We were greeted by the sight of Eagle, the Coast Guard Academy's tall ship, coming into port. (The Academy is in New London.)

It was another day of westerly winds, and so we motored all the way to the Connecticut River, our destination and Monica's final stop on this cruise.
It was mid afternoon when Robin's bow turned between the two jetties at the mouth of the river. I'm always wary of the shoals on either side of the river, always paying careful attention to the boats coming at us ahead and astern, and so I had reason to be studying the dark-hulled sailboat coming downstream toward us.
My mouth was just forming the words: "That looks like Mirari" when I noticed the captain was looking back at me with a smile. It was, indeed, Mirari and her skipper, Dan Stadtlander, he of Bermuda One-Two fame and a friend now for the last four years.
We waved and shouted hellos, and then we each kept on going, certain we'd be talking in the near future.
In a mile or so, we turned to port into North Cove in Old Sayebrook, CT, where we found a mooring with a yellow ribbon, indicating it was free for the taking.
One more splendid evening with Monica, and then in the morning she and I took a taxi to the Amtrak Station, where she boarded a train for New York while I returned to get Robin underway for the final leg of this summer's adventure.

2011-10-04T15:44:00.004-04:00

On Wednesday, we had motored most of the way to Stonington, slicing into a headwind much of the time. But today, there was some angle to the wind. At first, we sailed on a beat, crossing Fisher Island Sound on a slant until we were in danger of running aground on the far shore. Then we kicked on the motor and motorsailed much of the way to the Thames River, which separates New London, to the west, from Groton, to the east.
New London is home base for a number of ferries that cross Long Island Sound, and as we approached the mouth of the Thames, we saw a couple coming and going. We knew we needed to be careful.
Soon, we were in the shipping channel, where scores of United States submarines have, since the beginning of World War II, sailed their maiden voyages. (They were built in the shipyard at Groton, which is now home to the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics, builder of the nation's atomic subs.)
Ever observant, we noticed that a ferry was approaching from the south and the Sound while another was just leaving it slip to the north in New London. We decided that the best move would be to cross the marked channel and motor north, to the west side of the green buoys, outside the channel.
The two ferries drew closer and closer. We were glad we made our decision to get out of their way.
Then the outbound ferry slanted to its starboard, clearly aiming on a course that would take it outside the marked channel.
It was headed directly for us, and it was coming fast.
I grabbed the microphone.
"This is the sailing vessel Robin inbound on the Thames River near green bouy (let's say 19) calling the outbound ferry approaching us. Which way are you going?"
There was a slight delay before the voice replied: "South."
That wasn't what I wanted to know. Now we were very close to the ferry's bow. To turn to port seemed suicidal, and so I steered sharply to starboard.
The voice came back on the radio: "I'm giving the inbound ferry more room."
Thanks, we thought. Thanks a lot! Either decision I might have made could have been wrong in the absence of details on which way the outbound ferry was planning to go. As it turned out, I made a lucky choice and the boat raced past our port side perhaps 50 feet away.
This wasn't the best first impression a port could make on a visiting cruiser.
We had decided to take a mooring in the new city mooring field, just south of the ferry terminal, and moments after we passed the rude vessel, we turned to port and into the mooring field. We had called ahead and knew that we were simply to pick up a mooring and then go ashore to settle up. It turned out that the city didn't yet have a harbormaster to deal with transients.
The moorings were big and stable looking, and they were clustered just off the downtown district. From the water, the town looked suspiciously like Gloucester had -- pretty blue collar. With no harbormater and no apparent security, the setup posed some important questions.

I dinghied ashore and met the young lady who collected the fee. Then Monica and I both went ashore for dinner and ice cream. When we returned to the dinghy, we were met by the skipper of another sailboat that had just taken a mooring. He had noticed that our hailing port, lettered on Robin's stern, is Burlington NJ. "I was born in Camden and grew up in Moorestown (where our local Wegman's supermarket is,)" he said.
Small world.
We settled in for our next-to-last night of the cruise, and I wondered whether we'd be visited in the dark by any pirates.

2011-10-04T15:36:00.003-04:00

Stonington has all the comforts. There is almost no room to anchor, so taking a mooring from Dodson Boatyard is a prerequisite for a stay in this well-protected (by a seawall) harbor. The staff running the launches at Dodson's was more than helpful. All young men and women, they picked us up, delivered us to a dock in town near a bank (we needed cash) and answered all our questions, all without a fee.
Make no mistake, we paid for the launch in the $45-plus-tax mooring fee, one of the highest we encountered on this cruise. But the kids were nice and good looking, and we later discovered they had been trained by none other than our old friend, Curt Michael, aka The Old Mike
Monica liked the launch drivers. She also liked the cute shops in Stonington. And she liked the one Main Street restaurant that we patronized for both breakfast and a late lunch before we moved on on Thursday for our next stop, New London, CT..

2011-10-04T15:22:00.004-04:00

We stayed two nights in Newport. When we arrived, we took a mooring rather than attempt to set the anchor in a crowded harbor during foul weather. But the next day, we slipped the mooring and motored around Goat Island, which separates Newport Harbor on the east from Narraganset Bay on the west. There is a low bridge that connects Goat Island and the Newport mainland, so you can't take a sailboat with a mast directly north from the harbor.
Once around and off the north point of Goat Island, we set anchor in a stiff breeze just outside a small mooring field. Because the wind was from the southeast, we were quite protected by the mainland and the island. Should the wind have veered to the west, we would have been exposed.
But the wind stayed steady throughout the day and into the night, and all the boats on anchor -- a half dozen of us -- rode comfortably.
We were the next to the smallest boat. This one was the smallest.

The boat belonged to a middle-aged woman and two teenaged girls, from our observations. It was equipped for long passages but was not a vessel I'd choose to cross oceans. That may well have been what the ladies had done, however. We never got to find out, because the next morning -- Wednesday -- we left for our next stop, Stonnington, CT, which became Monica's favorite port.

2011-09-25T10:16:00.003-04:00

Saturday began with some wind from the south, so before noon we hoisted our anchors and both Cailte and Robin headed for the Cape Cod Canal. Our course was a bit more westerly than the direct route for the canal entrance, and then the wind veered to the west. As a result, our progress toward our goal was slowed substantially.
In time, both boats were motoring into a brisk headwind. My first time making this particular crossing was aboard Cailte. This time, Robin was in the lead.

Perhaps due to the strong southwesterly breeze, although we entered the eastern end of the canal right on time for the current to change in our favor, we found an adverse current. That lasted a good half way through the canal, and it warned us of rough seas once we exited the canal in Buzzards Bay, a body of water notorious for its southesterly afternoon chop.
That complicated things, because to enter Onset Harbor, within a mile of the western entrance to the canal, requires some rapid maneuvering. If the water was bumpy, that sharp turn to starboard might be dodgey.
For once, I was introducing Tom to something new. He'd never been to Onset in his 29 voyages to Maine. So I had described the Onset entrance in detail: The green tower on a pile of rocks that marked the near end of the entrance, the green can just beyond that marked the far end, and the currents that sawed in opposite directions within a few feet and that tried to shove your bow onto the rock pile.
I radioed Tom just before we reached the entrnce. Fortunately, we were through the worst bucking that the Buzzards Bay breeze created on the ebbing current.
I made my sharp turn into Onset and, glancing quickly so as not to lose my bearing, I looked back to see Tom, his teeth gnashing as Cailte went through the Onset Waltz.
We both anchored outside the mooring fields of a marina and a yacht club, and the next day all of us went ashore for dinner with my relatives, Betty and Ted Campbell, who live nearby, and with my sister, Janet, and her husband, Dennis.
On Monday, we parted company with Tom, who waited for the arrival of his brother, Mike, to help him take Cailte back to New Jersey. It was another day of motoring, but one punctuated, when we arrived off Newport, RI, our destination, with a fanfare of lightning and thunder that escorted us into Newport Harbor.

2011-09-25T10:02:00.003-04:00

The next morning, we were encumbered by a schedule when we motored out through the Gloucester breakwater and headed toward Provincetown, about 40 miles to the southeast. We wanted to be in Onset, at the far end of the Cape Cod Canal, on the next day, Saturday, so there was no chance of waiting for wind to blow us there.
The Sea was slick as oil, with gentle swells, and in the sky sunshine filtered through thin clouds.
We reached Race Point -- the northern tip of the Cape -- at mid afternoon and rounded the southern tip of the hooked beach off Provincetown an hour or so later. The beach was remarkably unpopulated.

It's about three miles from the tip into Provincetown Harbor, where we expected to find Tom Gilmore's boat Cailte anchored. We spotted her from a mile away and made straight for her, anchoring about 150 feet to her north. Later, Tom joined us in the dinghy for an examination of the Provincetown wildlife, which is mostly nocturnal. After dinner and ice cream, we dinghied back through an anchorage dotted with derelict-looking craft that may well have been occupied dwellings.

2011-09-05T16:50:00.013-04:00

Out at the York, ME, sea buoy, the wind was blowing.
Hallelujah!
With the Autohelm 4000 doing the steering, we sailed all day long, reaching Cape Ann, MA, by 3:30 in the afternoon, a voyage of 35 miles. The wind had been from the northeast, on our port quarter until we were just offshore from this new cape and about six miles from the entrance to Gloucester Harbor. It had been the perfect day.
But now we had to turn to starboard to make a straight run for the Gloucester breakwater -- and a run it was, with the wind directly from behind along with a following sea that wanted to shove Robin's stern one way or another.
The smart move would have been to keep on a reach until we had the breakwater on our beam, and then to tack toward shore.
Instead, when the action got rough, I brought the sails down and motored for the next hour.
We had called ahead for a city mooring in Gloucester, a port we'd never visited. I grew up in Massachusetts but had never been in downtown Gloucester, a town that played a central role in the book (and movie) The Perfect Storm. It was that book that helped sell me on the Westsail 32. One Westsail had been caught in the storm and easily survived, and that convinced me this was the boat for us.
So our visit to Gloucester seemed in a sense preordained.
There was a drama going on when we reached the breakwater. A sailboat had sunk just off the entrance, and crews were attempting to raise the boat. We went around the two boats on the scene and motored up the outer harbor, about two miles long, while three guys in an old Irwin 30 made us look like neophytes, sailing along with Robin as her exhaust spit out water and steam.
The harbormaster met us when we were inside the inner harbor and led us to a mooring, collecting his fee and offering suggestions for our visit.
But we decided to stay aboard Robin. The dinghy was lashed on the foredeck, there was food in the icebox and we'd had a wonderful day on the water. Why not stay there?

The boats moored near Robin made clear this was a working harbor. This lobster boat, rather trashy looking, was not quite as picturesque as those we'd seen in Maine.

Nor was this commercial fishing boat going to win any councours d'elegance. There was not a waterfront mansion in sight . . .

. . . only blue collar tenaments. With no glitz to lure us ashore, we had dinner, read our books and watched the sun set behind a cathedral that stood on the far side of not some fancy waterfront bistro but a steel-sheathed warehouse on a barnacle-encrusted wharf, just north of the harbor's Coast Guard station.

With darkness came sleep. Monica was in the V-berth, where there really is only room for one, particularly if one needs to make middle-of-the-night visits to the head. I was in the main cabin on the starboard settee.
It was about 10:45 p.m. when I woke. I saw Monica, only a shadow, up in the cockpit, moving around.
Why is she out there, I wondered? The night was pleasantly cool, and Monica seldom wakes once she falls asleep.
Then she began fumbling with the companionway screens.
"What are you doing?" I asked. I couldn't imagine why she had gone to the bother to replace the screens if she went out to get some air.
She hadn't.
I knew this now because there was a flashlight shining through the screen into my face.
As I climbed over the lee cloth and out of my berth, the shadowy figure moved to starboard. A moment later, I was standing on the companionway ladder, fumbling with the screens.
Just beyond the dodger, two feet away from me, a large man was attempting to climb over Robin's two-strand lifeline.
Then I saw the boat and the other man. The boat was small as was the other man.
It was still confusing me, what was happening, so at first I didn't realized that the man in the boat was trying to start an outboard motor, maybe flooding the engine.
There was nothing I wanted more for the big man to climb over the lifelines. And now there was nothing I wanted more than for the outboard to start.
But I was also now aware that we had been boarded by thieves, and I was angry. Although they hadn't been aboard long enough to take anything, I didn't want them to get away with their felony.
So I reached down inside the companionway where two headlamps are hung by their straps over a regular flashlight mounted there. I seized one of the headlamps, brought it up, turned it on and shined the light at the bow of the theives' boat, where I could read their registration number. I tried to memorize it.
MS 0106, I thought.
"We've got a gun," the scrawny man operating the boat hollered. "Don't come any closer or we'll use it."
I had no intention of getting any closer. But now I was forced to think about our vulnerability if the invaders really had a gun. We were unarmed, I thought, and I got the feeling in my chest you might get staring down the barrel of a loaded pistol.
I kept the light shining on the boat, and finally the outboard motor caught and the boat began to ease in reverse away from Robin's side.
When the scrawny guy -- he reminded me of the rock star Kid Rock -- got the boat far enough aft, he motored slowly past Robin's transom. I stared into his eyes, the flashlight still shining on the boat.
"Don't try to follow us," Kid Rock said. "Or we'll come back and get you."
I realized now that he was the brains of this nincompoop operation. I also saw now that the boat was a center console about 16 to 18 feet long and that, on a tall antenna amidships, it flew -- a Jolly Roger, a pirate's flag.
The thieves motored west, toward the cathedral, and then south, near the Coast Guard station, which I was now calling on Channel 16.
"This is the sailing vessel Robin calling the Coast Guard or any law enforcement agency in Gloucester Harbor," I said, and then waited.
It was probably 15 seconds later that a young woman Coast Guard watchstander responded. I described what had happened and the culprits. She asked for my cell phone number and the called me.
The watchstander told me that a 25-foot Coast Guard boat was being dispatched to investigate.
By now, Monica had been awakened by the commotion and was standing on the companionway ladder while I stood in the cockpit, watching the thieves circle the harbor, heading now east and stopping in what I thought was called Smith Cove. Once again, the big guy's flashlight came on, bobbing about as if he had boarded another boat.
"I can tell you where they are right now," I told the watchstander.
Moments later, Monica and I saw the red and green lights of the 25-footer emerge from the darkened Coast Guard station and move slowly across the harbor, heading toward the flashlight.
Half way there, the red and green navigation lights disappeared, but we could see the silhouette of the 25-footer advancing toward the thieves.
Suddenly, a blue police light was flashing and a flood light or spotlight was piercing the darknessand we heard excited voices.
It was a few minutes later that we got another phone call, this one asking whether the Coast Guard could bring the culprits by for my identification.
Of course, I said.
The Coast Guard had the center console cleated alongside the 25-footer, and two Gloucester City police officers were in the center console, where Kid Rock was handcuffed in his pilot's seat and his beefy sidekick was in the bow facing aft, handcuffed.
The police sergeant asked if I could identify the suspects. Yes, I said. Pointing to Kid Rock, I said: "He was driving and he made the threats." Then I pointed to the big one and said, "He came aboard."
The sergeant turned to the big one and said: "What do you have to say to that?"
"I swear on my childrens' graves, I never was on that boat," he said.
"Shut the f... up," the sergeant said. Then he looked down to the deck of the boat, turned and, directing his next question to Kid Rock, he asked: "You have a permit for those lobsters?"
The two were locked up that night. Kid Rock was wanted on outstanding warrants. They both were charged with breaking and entering a vessel at night, which apparently is a federal offense. They were also charged with threatening bodily injury during the commission of a felony and threatening a witness during the commission of a felony.
Monica says she never wants to return to Gloucester.
I thought it was a much better time than reality television.
By the way, the thieves were captured at a place called Pirate's Point.

2011-09-04T18:46:00.003-04:00

Wednesday morning, Tom got out earlier than we by perhaps 45 minutes. He was heading for the Isles of Shoals, off the coast six miles from Kittery, ME, and Portsmouth, NH. We were going to visit cousin Carol and husband-in-law Buzzy in York, ME.
Weatherwise, the trip turned out to be a carbon copy of one John Morrison and I made a year earlier, when we left from Boothbay Harbor and stopped in York to visit my college friends, The Old Mike, The Old Flag and The Old Hol. The sun was out and shining brightly in a cloudless sky and the ocean was oily flat.
And just like the year before, the wind finally arrived when we were about five miles north of Cape Neddick Lighthouse on the north side of York Beach. Some say it is the most photographed lighthouse in the world.

By the time we passed the lighthouse, we had a good breeze, enough to motorsail by the cliffs where Buzzy and Carol have their camper. But the sails came down quickly so that we could enter York Harbor. The path into the harbor is bordered by hidden ledges, and there is a spot where you have to make a sudden turn to starboard, crossing a current that seems determined to drive you on a point of land no more than 150 feet away.
We took a town mooring -- there is no room to anchor in York Harbor -- and got showers in the nearby marina. Showers posed a greater risk to life, if not limb, than the navigation into the harbor. There was standing water in the pan of the shower, water that only drained by spilling over the top of the pan, grungy water that one suspected harbored as yet undiscovered life forms. Tom's PhD Candidate daughter, Rosaleen, who is preparing for a disertation in marine biology, could break new ground in that shower.
Buzzy and Carol picked us up after our showers and took us back to their camper, parked on the top of that cliff with a spectacular view of the ocean and the rocks below and Carol fed us a wonderful dinner while we exchanged stories in the cool evening air.
We slept aboard Robin, but in the morning we went to breakfast with Carol and Buzzy at a place on the beach before we caught the last of the ebbing current out of York Harbor.

2011-09-04T17:36:00.013-04:00

Tuesday morning we steamed out of Boothbay Harbor and headed for Casco Bay. We knew that Tom Gilmore had spent a couple of nights at Jewell Island, northwest of Portland a few miles, and we decided we'd go there, too.
This was our first return to Jewell Island since our very first cruise to Maine in 2006. Jewell was our first stop then in Maine, and we arrived in a thick fog with almost zero visibility.
At that time, I had second guessed my plotting and decided to redo a critical waypoint where we planned to round the western end of the island. I thought we would be passing between a red buoy on our starboard and a green one to port.
Then, in the fog, I saw the red to port. I steered sharply toward the buoy, which vanished in the fog before I reached it.
Next thing I knew, there were waves breaking over the top of rocks fifty feet ahead of our bow.
That was then. This time, we returned with a bit of trepidation, but also with a chart plotter.
A foggy day had turned clear before we crossed by the first islands of Casco Bay. But then, as the afternoon sun began slipping from its high perch, a wall of dark clouds appeared in the west. Lightning came a bit later, and soon, with the radar on and Jewell in sight, we stopped dead in the water. The radar screen was nearly filled with solid green splotches, indicating thunder storms.
We were about equidistant from Jewell and a rocky outrcopping offshore with a lighthouse. My concern was whether the storm brought winds that could blow us all the way to the rocks -- about two miles to the southeast.
Monica went below while I stood under the dodger with a foul weather jacket on and my eyes scanning through the heavy rain that arrived with the storm.
The wind never built, and in a half hour, the storm had passed by. We resumed motoring toward the east end of Jewell, now accompanied by a pod of mink whales off our starboard beam a couple of hundred yards.
(Mink whales look like dolphins in the way they swim, curving up to the surface in gangs. Their dorsal fins are sharper and relatively smaller than those of dolphins, but the animals themselves are larger than their mammal cousins.)
The sun was sparkling when, at about three o'clock, we rounded the end of Jewell to head into the narrow slit of an anchorage on its northeastern shore. We could see four or five boats already there. One looked familiar.

Cailte, Tom's Creekmore 46 which he built himself, was the first boat inside the anchorage. We circled and anchored off his transom. Soon, he had rowed over in his 10-foot Cape Dory dinghy, and Tom and I went ashore to hike on this historic island, where during World War II submarine chasers were stationed to hunt German U-boats.

First we crossed to the ocean side of the island to see the "Punch Bowl", a lagoon that fills with water at high tide and empties only partially when the tide ebbs. There was the caracass of a dead seal on the bank of the Punch Bowl.

We hiked to the western end of the island and climbed one of two concrete towers used by the submarine hunters to triangulate the position of subs offshore. (I believe Tom told me they never actually intercepted any subs.)
Then we dinghied back to Robin, where Monica prepared dinner.

Another storm cell threatened and Tom woofed down his meal before rowing back to Cailte. When the storm passed, the scenery in the setting sun was unbeatable.

2011-09-01T19:49:00.003-04:00

Not so fast.
The fog had lifted in Seal Cove, and there was almost no current when we got outside and passed through the narrows.
But we found fog farther down the Damariscotta River. There was a little visibility -- one hundred feet, perhaps -- so we could see the lobster pot buoys ahead, and we could see the lobster boats before we were immediately upon them. Because we were motoring, it was no problem to turn on the radar.
Boothbay Harbor was in the next notch west along the Maine coast. John Morrison and I stopped their in 2010, and Monica and I had visited one rainy summer day by land several years ago. But this would be Monica's first visit by sea.
The fog was relentless, and on the radio we heard chatter between boaters and the Coast Guard about a 26-foot sailboat that had run aground on a rock entering Boothbay Harbor. Between the chartplotter and the radar, however, we were able to reach each of the navigational buoys on our route outside, and soon we were turning in toward Boothbay.
Now, however, we became disoriented, at one point heading on the wrong side of an island. When we determined our actual location, we once again found the right buoys and, after calling ahead, tied Robin to a mooring at the Carousel Marina. The showers were clean and inviting. And then we took the dinghy across the harbor to have dinner in town.
Monica had her first lobster of the cruise in a waterfront restaurant, and I was able to sample that most delectable of deserts, orange-pineapple ice cream. I got the five-scoop dish, which came with a warning from the cashier that I was attempting an absurd feat.
I ate the whole thing.

2011-08-31T14:21:00.009-04:00

The rocky edges of Seal Cove were there the following morning, August 1, as were the fragrances of pitch from the spruce and pine that grew above the rocks. But the blue sky was gone, replaced by a low cloud that blew from the south, curling over the trees at that end of the cove and dipping down closer to the water, flowing above all like a magic carpet. We put the dinghy over the side and, with our morning coffee in hand, we motored south, toward the seals we knew to expect.

I kept the outboard quiet in hopes of blending in with the exquisite scenery. In minutes, the fog swirled around Robin, wrapping her in its gauze until we no longer could see her at anchor a few hundred yards away.
At the head of the cove, I stopped the outboard and we watched the fog lift and dip and felt a faint breeze that pushed us toward the ledges on the western shore.
The tide was rising, filling in the several mud-bottomed smaller coves that slit the edges of Seal Cove, in the middle of which were two clusters of rocky islands.
On the larger island, there was what could have been a stump. But as we drifted, we realized it was a bald eagle, standing motionless.
We drifted closer and the eagle spread its wings and flew toward the far, eastern shore, dipping toward the dark water and then rising in one powerfull swoop to perch part way up a pine tree.
It was a few quiet minutes later when we noticed another bump on the smaller of the rock islands. We looked through the binoculars and saw what appeared to be a face -- a white face -- just above the rocks.
We drifted closer.

The white face was that of a seal, staring directly at us. We waited for movement, and it came when the seal felt the tide rising around its fat flanks and wriggled a bit.
There were other bumps, in time revealing themselves as two seal pups, apparantly hanging close to Mom.

In time, the tide rose enough to float "Mom" off her rock. We drifted past the two "islands" which were rapidly becoming submerged. As we floated, the seals came up to port, dove, then came up to starboard. They rose at twelve o'clock and then at seven, always 100 feet or more away but clearly not startled to have human visitors.
Robin was back in view and the fog appeared to be lifting, so we returned to her to see what the morning would bring. If we timed it accurately, we could pass through the "boiling" narrows at slack tide around 11 o'clock and be on our way to the next stop, in Booth Bay Harbor.

2011-08-31T11:00:00.007-04:00

On Sunday, July 31, Monica and I filled Robin's tanks at a Rockland marina and headed toward Owl's Head Lighthouse, on the point of land reaching out from the southern side of Rockland Harbor..

We had decided to chance going through an inside passage to save a few miles leaving Penobscot Bay and to see some new territory. The passage runs between the mainland south of Rockland and Owl's Head and a string of rocky islands just offshore. The chartplotter made us more confidant than we'd been in the past, and just the day before, Tom Gilmore had negotiated the same passage.
Sunday morning was picture perfect -- temperature in the 70s and a clear, blue sky and bright sun. There was no wind should our engine fail, but we were pretty confident.
I'd taken John to the Manchester, NH, airport on Friday morning in a rental car and met Monica's flight there that evening. We'd spent Saturday provisioning Robin and getting settled in. Now we were aiming to get as far as Monica's two week vacation would allow.

And so we headed down the passage with the foreboding name Muscle Channel. I was glad to have Monica aboard and not all that sad that we were heading home instead of cruising north past Bar Harbor. The stress of the trip to Rockland was still gnawing at me, and although I'd dropped some earlier thoughts about selling Robin, I wanted to complete this voyage before determining the extent of our future together.
We had tentatively chosen to head for Seal Cove this day. Tom had spent a couple of days there and recommended it highly. On an earlier trip to Maine, I'd sailed up the Damariscotta River as far as a small cove without a name on our nautical charts. Seal Cove was a couple of miles upriver from that cove, and the cruising guide said it was also past a narrows where, on the ebb tide, the water "boiled" around a red buoy.
Once we were out on the ocean, around Burnt and Allen Islands, we picked up some wind, and we had a strong breeze when we rounded into the Damariscotta. We also had many, many lobster pot buoys. I wanted to sail up through them to avoid the risk of wrapping a line around our propeller, but Monica was concerned with the threat of the boiling water ahead so we doused the sails and began motoring.
About three miles up the river, we rounded the point near the cove where I'd stayed once before. In another mile or so, we were approaching a big, red buoy and the current was swift. And then we were beside the buoy, which leaned downstream under the thrust of the river pouring through a narrows just above.
Robin's speed dropped rapidly. Beside the buoy, we were making about 2.5 knots. With it off our starboard quarter, we were down to 1.5 knots.
We stayed at that speed almost all the way through the narrows and were still very slow when we were abeam of the point of land to starboard which marked the entrance to Seal Cove.
And then, quietly, we were in the cove, where the cruising guide warned of all sorts of hidden rocks and ledges. Emotionally exhausted, we set the anchor -- we had a debate concerning how far down the cove to go, and Monica won the contest. We knew there were seals to be seen near the head of the cove, but we put that experience off until morning and settled in for a quiet evening.

2011-08-30T16:21:00.010-04:00

Jonesy arrived by launch about 9:30 a.m. Thursday but he didn't board Robin immediately. Instead, he got out a clipboard and began sketching.
I looked down from Robin's rail, with John and Tom Gilmore peering over my shoulder, as Jonesy, a man in his 30s, I would guess, drew a diagram of the wires connected to our Beta Engine. Here, he said, is where he expected to find our problem. Here, in the harness with the two plastic connectors that I'd already, at Stanley Fiegenbaum's suggestion, inspected.
I don't recall if it were at this precise moment, when Jonesy was declaring his expectations, that I emphasized my desire that he check every possible point where our problem could originate. It probably was.
I remember Jonesy saying that in the vast majority of cases matching ours that he encountered, the problem was corrosion in those couplings.
Jonesy wonder aloud whether the engineers that designed electrical systems for boats ever were aboard boats. If they were, he thought they should know about the moisture in which their elecrical systems had to function.
In any case, Jonesy assured me that he would check everything, even if he found what he expected in the wiring harness.
He explained that a poor connection that didn't allow the current to flow where it was designed to go could actually result in the current finding another path -- one that could, in essence, confuse the alternator, making it work too hard. Enough bad connections and reversing currents could drive the alternator mad, burn it up.
He drew these reversing currents on his clipboard
John and I had unbolted the cockpit sole and removed it before Jonesy arrived, so he had complete access to the Beta engine. Once he boarded Robin, Jonesy settled in the cockpit, at the rear of the engine where, as I could have told him, the harness coupling was thoroughly corroded.
I took up a position inside the cabin, where I'd removed all of the companionway ladder steps and could watch all his movements.
I'd imagined that Jonesy -- his name is so close to Jonesport, a Maine harbor -- was a Maine native, so I asked. No, he said, he was from California. Grew up in Wassila, Alaska.
John and I had the same thought simultaniously.
"You and Sarah Palin," one of us must have said.
"Yeah, and I'm a conservative, too," Jonesy said. I don't know if it was a warning or a challenge.
Jonesy kept up a constant patter as he worked, so at this point he told us that Palin was a year ahead of him in high school and was in the glee club. "I was in the 'Don't tell my parents' club," he said.
We laughed.
Having seen the corroded connectors in the harness coupling, Jonesy began hard-wiring them together, bypassing completely the coupling, one color-coded wire at a time. First, he snipped one wire free from the coupling and trimmed the insulation back about a quarter inch. Then he crimped on a connector before snipping and trimming the end of the wire on the other side of the coupling. After putting on a piece of shrink-wrap tubing and sliding it down the wire, he crimped this second end into the same connector as the first, then melted the shrink-wrap over the whole crimped assembly with a butane lighter so that no moisture could penetrate the crimping.
Jonesy repeated this process until every wire was removed from the coupling. Then he wrapped the whole assembly with black electrical tape.
Jonesy worked methodically, steadily, occasionally having to relieve a cramped muscle as he crouched in the cockpit. Then he moved into the cabin and replaced the alternator with one that I had ordered from Beta, explaining as he went why he made each move.
I'd like to report that I'm such a fine student I remember every detail of Jonesy's instructions. He was a fine teacher, but I don't.
In the end, I felt Jonesy was the finest boat mechanic I've ever encountered. He was confident of his analysis. That's not particularly unusual. What was rare was that he went beyond the first thing that worked -- and would have even had I not insisted he do. He was systematic in his diagnosis and when he finally left Robin, she was in shape to complete her voyage.
He left initially so that I'd have two hours to run the engine and charge the batteries. He returned and performed what I believe he called a load test and found that the batteries -- they are four years old and their condition had to be questioned -- were strong.
At one point, he noticed the new pump I'd installed in Robin's air conditioning system and remarked that he had one just like it back on his bench that he'd removed from a boat that was changing AC systems. When he came back for the load test, he brought the pump, almost new, with him and gave it to me, along with instructions to get the old alternator rebuilt and keep it as a spare.
Compare Jonesy's time on Robin -- about three hours in all -- to the time the mechanic in Cape May spent -- maybe one hour. Jonesy's bill was less than $150, compared with $462.24 in Cape May.
You can guess which mechanic impressed us more.
Which is not to say that I wouldn't worry the whole way back to the Chesapeake.

2011-08-28T09:36:00.005-04:00

There was wind from the east at 6 a.m. Tuesday when I climbed back on deck. To the west, we could see Monhegan Island, a gray specter under dense clouds.
We turned Robin to fill her jib and resumed sailing into Penobscot Bay, where the wind seemed to turn to the northeast and make sailing straight toward Rockland a matter of pinching, of squeezing as much as we could out of close hauled sails.
We placed phone calls once we were within cell phone range. Monica was glad to hear from me and, I think, hadn't been too worried. But she issued an ultimatum. She would fly to Maine on Friday, as planned, only if I would agree that instead of cruising north as we'd planned, I'd agree to head back toward the Chesapeake with her as my crew. She didn't want to spend time frivolously cruising and then leave the stressful chore of the return voyage to me alone. And at that point I had no other crew.
I didn't know what awaited me in Rockland as far as mechanical assistance, so I agreed.
Tom Gilmore, up ahead in Rockland, was relieved, having expected us the night before. He warned us that we faced a thicket of lobster pot buoys. But thanks to the fact that we had no engine, I didn't need to concern myself with getting the propeller snagged on a buoy line.
At one point, we came up behind a lobster boat tending its pots directly on our course. Because we were squeezing every bit of northerly way from the wind, I didn't want to fall off to go around the boat, but I was certain I would have to.
In this instance, we were engaging a thoughtful lobsterman who noticed our predicatment and, when he'd deposited his baited pot overboard, moved his boat out of our path with a smile and a wave.
A bit farther up the bay, we saw a ketch coming from our port through a break in the chain of small islands there, and as it drew nearer, we saw that it was not just a ketch, but a magnificent example of classic yacth design, with long overhangs bow and stern that tapered exquisitely. It reminded me of Cotton Blossom, the William Fife-designed 72-footer on which my friend Richard Griffiths once served as captain. This prompted me to call Richard in Oxford, MD.
When I described the boat, Richard named it -- Belle Aventure, an 82-footer with a solitary doghouse cabin amidships.
We watched he sail past our transom and then were able to remain on a starboard tack all the way to a point about three miles west southwest of the Rockland jetty, off of Owls Head lighthouse. Then we began steering toward the harbor. I had decided that we needed to get a mooring in order to have a mechanic come aboard. I've found anchoring in Rockland Harbor tricky due to an unpredictable bottom.
But I didn't think it would be wise to sail into the vast mooring field to take a mooring. Robin is a cutter, which is a fine offshore rig. But in close quarters, it can be difficult to tack the Genoa around the inner forestay -- difficult and slow. And sailing with the staysail alone, which can be tacked easily, is best done with a steady, strong breeze.
I didn't want to risk either method, so I'd called TowboatUS and they had arranged for a local towing company to bring Robin to a city mooring once we had sailed into the harbor.
The tow cost $150 and took us perhaps 500 yards to a mooring. The towboat operator was a bit rough, banging into Robin's hull twice, roughing up her cosmetics.
Once we were secured to the mooring, I called the local Beta Marine dealer, Johanson Boatworks. Stanley Fiegenbaum at Beta had told me they were good people, and that their mechanic, Jonesy, was excellent.
I scheduled Jonesy's visit for Thursday, his next available opening, and John and I settled in for a couple of days of decompression. All the while, I reminded myself to make sure this Jonesy didn't settle for the first solution he found to Robin's problems.
Make him check everything became my mantra.

2011-08-25T10:55:00.007-04:00

That was it. The engine was gone. The alternator has a pulley at one end over which a belt runs. The same belt that turns the alternator also turns the water pump. We knew of no way to take the alternator out of commission to run the engine without also eliminating the pump that brings the water to cool the engine.
The issue was settled. We had to sail.
But at 5 a.m, there was no wind. The sun was about to rise when we both decided just to nap for a while to see what would happen.
Some time later -- perhaps nine o'clock -- there was a faint breeze on my cheek, just a kiss. I went below and hauled the big red spinnaker bag on deck and began the arduous process of sorting out the tangled lines. Robin has a cruisng spinaker which has four permanently attached lines -- two sheets, one downhaul at the tack and one line to control the snuffer or chute scoop, a long skinny bag or tube that holds the sail together until you want to use it. Then you pull its control line and the bag rises to the top of the mast and the sail billows in the wind.
It was this snuffer line that I got tangled on the first try. But once I had that line where it should be, the sail went up and began pulling Robin ahead.
We weren't heading where we needed to go to get to Rockland, but we were going in the general direction of Maine, which was acceptable.

We were underway. On a trip that I had planned would be all sailing, no motoring, I was finally forced to live by that edict, and it was beautiful.
Slowly at first, Robin made way. Then she gained speed and strained at her lines. John frankly didn't think much of the lashings that held a block to the stern pulpit and which the spinnaker was now straining. To appease him, I added a few strands of thin line.
But soon enough, the spinnaker needed help from larger sails. The mainsail went up, and then the Genoa replaced the spinnaker and then the staysail joined its larger partner and in time we were pointing toward the mouth of Penobscot Bay, home to Rockland.
It was Monday, and we'd told folks at home that we were aiming to be in port this evening. But now there was no way. When the engine quit, we'd been 90 miles from Rockland. Now we were about 70 miles, and it would be well after dark when we approached the Penobscot. I wouldn't enter that rocky bay at night, so it would be at least Tuesday morning before we were ashore.
My concern was that someone -- Monica or John's wife, Fran, or our friend Tom Gilmore, who already was in Rockland -- would report to the Coast Guard that we were overdue.
I picked up the VHF radio microphone -- we were too far offshore for a cell phone connection -- and called:
"US Coast Guard, US Coast Guard, US Coast Guard, this is the sailing vessel Robin calling the US Coast guard, over."
At first, there was no reply. Then the Coast Guard came on the radio to the "vessel calling the US Coast Guard."
I explained our situation -- engine quit and we're under sail. Then I explained that I was concerned someone would report us overdue and asked if they could call Monica at work and let her know we were okay but would be in port when the wind got us there.
That's precisely what the Coast Guard did, and we sailed on.
To the south, the sky became overcast and we anticipated rain at least. But the easterly wind was steady and we were making four to five knots regularly.
As the sky darkened, we noticed to the east an unusual movement in the water. Then we saw the whale, larger than your average school bus, with a blow hole the size of a serving platter through which at intervals of perhaps 20 or 30 seconds we could hear his powerful breath, escaping in long blasts.
He was headed toward us, about 100 yards away, and we could look directly into the blowhole.
I reached for the camera, and we saw him turn to run parallel to our course, about 100 feet to the east.

I say he, although it certainly may have been a female and definitely was a humpback whale.
John, being older and wiser than I, knew what the whale was doing -- preparing to dive or sound. So I wasn't ready with the camera when he rolled forward and his huge tail came up in the air.
Then the sea was still and once again we sailed alone toward the north, with the light growing ever dimmer
It was about three o'clock in the morning and we could see various nautical lights -- buoys, lighthouses and so forth -- that indicated we were approaching the mouth of Penobscot Bay. I knew these waters in a passing way from three prior voyages to Maine, and I knew I didn't want to challenge any of the rocks that guarded the Bay's entrance, so I decided we should heave to. The current was running out of the bay, the wind now was from the east. And when we turned to let the staysail backwind against the mast, we were slowed to a drift of less than one mile an hour to the south. In the next three hours, until dawn, we would travel about 2.5 miles generally in a direction away from trouble. I went below and slept.
John, not entirely comfortable with my decision, stayed in the cockpit and kept watch on the various blinking and sweepling lights.

2011-08-25T10:26:00.002-04:00

We were delayed in our departure on Sunday morning because we wanted to top off our gasoline cans, making sure we had enough fuel for the generator. And we needed ice. The Marina didn't open until 9 a.m., but then, when we explained our engine problem to the manager, he loaned us a can of spray used to clean electrical connections.
Through the tutelage of Stanley Fiegenbaum, the Beta distributor, I knew that there was a main electrical harness joining the engine's control pannel in the cockpit to the engine below. That harness, which carried about a dozen wires, was interrupted in two places by large plastic connectors -- each with male and female plugs and sockets for the dozen wires. I knew that the upper connector, in the back of the control panel, appeared clean but that the lower one, close to the bilge, had corrosion in at least half of its ports. I'd tried in Newport to use a fingernail file to clean the female sockets. But I wanted to try the spray, just in case. I dinghied back to the marina to return the spray, and then we headed out.
Earlier, while we were waiting for the marina to open, we'd stopped by the town dockmaster's office to pay for our mooring. There we asked for local knowledge to pass through Pollock Rip Channel.
"You don't want to do that," the dockmaster said, explaining that there was no need. Local fishermen avoided the channel, with its choppy rip currents, and simply hugged the edge of Monomoy Point. Just keep an eye our your depth sounder, he said, and you'll be fine.
Later, I was looking at the chart plotter, which showed a channel of deep water very close to the western shore of the point, and a depth of 27 feet when I happened to glance at the depth sounder. It read 2.7 feet. I steered abruptly to starboard, found deeper water out where there were small rips indicating current over shoals, and we made it around the point into the ocean at about noon.
The rest of the afternoon was unventful. The Beta ran smoothly, occasionally charging the batteries but not always.
We saved the leftover bluefish and had a simple dinner that night -- tuna sahdwiches as I recall -- and then began standing watch separately.
It was one of those clear nights when the stars are visible down to the horizon. Consequently, we kept mistaking low stars for the lights of approaching ships, too far a way to be picked up on the radar. Only when the stars rose from th horizon were we able to identify them and discount the possiblity of collision. But the stars and the moon, which at midnight rose as a huge orange scythe blade,kept us on our toes.
At the end of the 2 to 4 a.m. watch, I remained in the cockpit, dozing on one of the flattened cockpit seats while John stood watch. It was around 5 a.m. when he said: "What's that smell."
He and I both knew what it was: The odor of a heated electrical device.
I sprung from my pad and climbed down the companionway ladder, seizing the fire extinguisher mounted there before I opened the engine compartment and saw it.
Sparks and blue flames coming out the top of the alternator. I reached up to the cockpit and shut off the engine, then watched as the sparks and flames sputtered and died.

2011-08-23T18:00:00.005-04:00

On the mooring in Newport, we found a 3/4 inch stainless steel nut on the deck. We checked everything at deck level and found no missing nuts. Then I climbed the mast and checked all fittings. To this day, the stray nut case is unsolved.

Still there was no wind, so on Saturday Morrison and I steamed out of Newport early and headed east. We expected to anchor for the night in Vineyard Haven, a funnel of a port open to the north but protected from southerly winds that had been forecast. As we crossed the mouth of Buzzards Bay in calm seas, we trolled a silver lure. John was below when the reel began zinging, paying out line. I grabbed the rod from its perch on the stern pulpit -- the fish had nearly yanked the whole thing overboard -- and began reeling in.

It wasn't a record bluefish -- 31 inches -- but it was good, with lots of flesh. After thanking it for its meat, I slaughtered it on the starboard deck and took the carcass below for fileting while John washed the blood from the teak.
By noon, we were near the entrance to Woods Hole and not five miles away from the mouth of Vineyard Haven Harbor and I decided to check the charts once more. To my astonishment, the chart indicated that we were within four or five hours of Chatham, MA, at the very elbow of the bent arm that is Cape Cod, and very close to Pollock Rip Channel. We decided to spend the night in Chatham and then go for it.
At the same time, the sky to the west was changing, first becoming hazy and then folding into the most strange cloud formations -- smooth slabs of opaque gray against rolls of lighter gray and more slabs that appeared like ribs in a skinned animal's chest.
Then the lightning began, the thunder crashed and the rain blew in sheets that stung your eyes when you tried to look into it around the edge of the dodger. One thunder clap seemed to come from directly beside us. Had we decided to enter Vineyard Haven Harbor, we'd have been attempting to anchor in this blow, so we happily steamed ahead, the sky clearing and bringing back a brilliant sun about forty-five minutes later.
The entrance to Chatham Harbor seemed daunting on the chart -- a tight channel between sandbars -- but the actual passage was so simple that a large ketch handled by a man and woman entered before us under sail. We followed them well into the harbor, where we'd called for a mooring, and watched as they sailed beyond to their mooring.
More consultations with Beta Marine caused me to search the wiring thoroughly, trying to resolve the electrical problems. But I made no more progress, so as we settled down for the night after our bluefish dinner, we had the same plan.

In the morning, we'd sail around Monomoy Point and enter the Atlantic Ocean, where we would head due north for Maine, about 30 hours away. We had the Honda generator as our backup, so we knew we'd have enough electricity to run our navigational lights, our radio and, in short bursts, our radar.

2011-08-23T08:16:00.002-04:00

Robin's engine ran through the night, charging the batteries although at a somewhat lower level than I was accustomed to seeing. By Wednesday morning, we were veering offshore from Long Beach Island, NJ, aiming generally toward Vineyard Sound. Although I had planned this to be a sailing-only cruise, we had no wind and I decided to make up for the day lost in Cape May.
The forecast had been for winds of 15 knots gusting to 20, but at first there was nothing. Then, around mid morning, a breeze came up from the southeast and soon we were able to shut down the engine, making a good six knots under sail alone. I had visions of a silent passage all the way to Maine.
In six hours, the wind was gone, followed by haze tending toward fog and limited visibility. I turned the engine back on, then checked the volt meter for both batteries.
Nothing.
The alternator was not charging, and we were 24 hours from the nearest port. I decided to head for Newport, RI, the home of many boat mechanics, to learn what the mechanic in Cape May had missed.
The fog never let up, and by the time we were passing Block Island the next morning, we had about 200 feet of visibility. We ran the radar from time to time, using the Honda 2000 watt generator to recharge the batteries. Still, we missed the large object lurking in the mist just off our port bow. Suddenly, we were facing a large (maybe 90 foot) motor yacht as it crossed our bow within that 200 foot limit. The yacht disappeared to our east -- probably entering Great Salt Pond on Block Island, and then we turned around the green buoy north of the island and aimed for Newport.
It was about then that we heard the fog horn of a ship and then on Channel 16, the call of the ship's captain. He was steering a 600-foot tanker east on Block Island Sound, generally in our direction, and was gaining on us.
I called the skipper and gave him our location. He said he had slowed and that we would clear his bow.
We never did see the tanker, although we heard his repeated blasts on the horn. But now the wind came up and we sailed into Newport Harbor on a steep following sea, blinded by the fog, unable to see even an outline of the shore. With the sails down as we approached the inner harbor, we motored and navigated by use of the chart plotter. There were large sailboats moored everywhere, and I became disoriented for a few minutes, until I noticed the profile of the Ida Lewis Yacht Club and used it to find the channel.
Once we had taken a mooring, I called Beta Marine and got a number for their local dealer, who said they would be able to visit Robin the following week.
That would not do, so with the help of the folks at Beta in North Carolina, I began examining the engine myself and came up with a plan.
Using the Honda generator, we would proceed toward Maine, passing between Cape Cod and Matha's Vineyard and then taking the Pollock Rip Channel to reach the Atlantic offshore from the Cape. I'd wanted to make this passage for a long time, and I wasn't going to be deterred by engine problems.

2011-08-21T16:54:00.002-04:00

John and I awoke the next morning -- Tuesday, July 20 -- aboard Robin in Cape May Harbor, anchored off the Coast Guard Station. We started the ending and, to our surprise, the alternator was charging the batteries.
Fortunately, we looked again and found no charge. So I called across the Harbor to Utsch's Marina and asked whether they had a mechanic. They did, so I reserved a slip -- at $2 per foot (Robin is 40 feet overall) -- and we hauled the anchor aboard and motored across the harbor.
Utsch's mechanic borrowed my multimeter and determined that the job was beyond his ability. He suggested that we call Engines Inc. in Pleasantville, NJ, about 30 miles to the north.
I'd already called Beta Marine, the manufacturer of our engine, and determined that they had no distributors in New Jersey. But the Utsch's mechanic assured us that Engines Inc. was a reputable firm.
Engines Inc. dispatched a young mechanic, a polite and handsom young man who had his own multimeter. He looked at the engine and then laid on his hands. What he found was that our two batteries had wingnuts fastening the cables to their posts. Not a good idea, he said.
"You can't tighten wingnuts like you can a hex nut," he explained. And a loose wingnut could interrupt the charging of the batteries, damaging the alternator. He went to his truck and brought back four hex nuts, which he tightened on the two batteries. Then we started the engine and he checked the alternator's output. It was fine. Problem solved.
In the end, those four hex nuts cost more than $100 each, an expensive lesson if, in fact, I had learned that particular lesson. But there was an even more serious lesson to be learned.
The final bill from Engines Inc. is now lying on my desk. The young mechanic had spent less than an hour at Robin. The hourly rate was $120, he told me. I had to pay him to drive to Cape May from Pleasantville. The total bill was $462.24.
As soon as the mechanic was off the boat, John and I prepared once again to go offshore. We made good use of our time, getting showers at Utsch's facilities, and about five o'clock, we were ready to cast off the dock lines.
Joy's family was still in Wildwood, so once we made it outside the inlet, I called her and told her we were about to motor down the beach -- there was no wind this time.
We were the only sailboat off Wildwood when we passed, and the entire Butler family was able to see our limp sail as we kept parallel to the coast about a mile offshore.
And then we were on our own, steaming into the night on a northasterly course, aiming for Vinyard Sound south of Cape Cod and then an outbound passage to Maine off the coast of that cape.

2011-07-29T16:50:00.002-04:00

There has been no opportunity, since July 18 when John Morrison and I departed Cambridge, MD, aboard Robin, to check in. A lot has transpired since then, however.
At the moment, I'm sitting in a motel room in Manchester, NH, awaiting Monica's flight to arrive just up the road. John left here for home on an earlier flight. I shook hands with him and thanked him for sharing the experiences of the last 13 days. He said I will have lots to write about. I know he will have many stories to tell, some of which perhaps will not enhance my reputation as a sailor.
The primary feature of this voyage of about 550 miles to Rockland, ME, was engine trouble. It began when we departed Cape May, NJ, on the evening of our second day.
I had a plan to sail all the way once we had left the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays behind, and after we had motored out of the Cape May inlet through a boistrous chop and steered north, we began sailing with the Genoa alone, doing a solid six knots over the bottom with the wind on our starboard quarter.
In no time, we were passing along the buildings of Wildwood Crest, a couple of miles north of Cape May, and we turned the engine off, settling in for a long, dark evening of quiet and the motion of strong swells over shallow water. We both had on our harnesses, tethered to the jackline, when I decided to go below for something. The autohelm was steering and John was seated on the high, starboard side of the cockpit.
I dialed daugther Joy, who was vacationing with her family in Wildwood, so that they could go down to the beach to see us past. We were traveling so fast that I was concerned we might just blow by before they could react. She said they'd try to gather the kids and get to the beach.
I'd just stepped through the companionway opening a few minutes later and had a foot on the ladder when John noticed a "Low Battery" message on the autohelm screen. This surprised me since we'd been motoring for two straight days and, the night before, had plugged in to shore power in Chesapeake City.
I checked the volt meter above the chart table. Both batteries registered less than full readings, with the No. 2 battery -- the house battery which was now running the steering -- quite low.
I reached up into the cockpit and turned on the engine, then rechecked the volt meter. What I should have seen was the needle jumping up into the green realm of the gauge.
But there was no change. We were running on our batteries alone. For some reason, the alternator was not charging the batteries. In time, if we fed off the batteries without help from the alternator, they would go dead. We'd have no juice for our instruments, our running lights or any other electrical equipment.
So we turned Robin around and, with the engine running -- a diesel engine will run as long as it has fuel without need of any electrical current -- we headed back for the Cape May Inlet.
By the time the inlet came in view, it was dark. The furious chop was still filling the entrance, but now we faced an additional problem. We could see the green light on the end of the southern jetty, but against a backdrop of a dozen or more red lights ashore, we could not find the red light marking the tip of the northern jetty.
Now I became confused, forgetting for the moment the old saying "Red on right returning". For some reason, I had the green light to starbaord, meaning we were about to go on the wrong side of the southern jetty.
With perhaps 150 feet to go, I saw the reflection of the jetty stones below the green light and turned sharply to starboard.
But our mutual confusion continued, prompting desparate questions about "Where the hell is the red light?"
Eventually we saw the light -- a dim glow behind Robin, which had already entered the inlet safely.
We anchored in the dark amidst a half dozen other boats and left it to the morning to unravel the mystery of the low batteries.
It would take eleven more days to solve that probelm, a span of time during which we would have many more adventures, some of which sailors actually anticipate with eagerness.
More to follow.

2011-07-16T07:46:00.002-04:00

I was thinking ahead to the voyage that begins in less than twenty-four hours, and a scene of a landfall came to mind, a pleasing scene when, after a long night at sea, you see in the early light the coast and, as the sun rises, you draw near your destination, with wind filling your sails and pride swelling your chest, and I thought: This is the metaphor for all of life's achievements, not an evening landfall, but an early one, because like all achievements, the landfall at sunrise comes after long, lonely hours, often filled with struggles, despair, self-doubt, and when you finally reach your goal, rather than being the culmination of a beautiful day at sea with warmth and hope, the landfall washes away all the imperfections of the night before and you can savor the accomplishment.
An evening landfall, when you beat the sunset into port, brings a quiet end to your travel, the way desert after supper prepares you for sleep at the finish of an unremarkable day.
A morning landfall stimulates you, despite your fatigue, and spawns shouts of exultation. Yes! We've made it!

2011-07-15T19:59:00.002-04:00

The replacement outboard worked fine. Everything is now loaded on or in Robin. Tomorrow at noon, we drive south to Cambridge, where John and I will say goodby to Monica and Fran early Sunday morning and aim generally north. Then the adventure begins.

2011-07-13T18:52:00.002-04:00

The Forester is squatting on its springs. Inside are the outboard motor; a large suitcase containing my essential clothing for six weeks, minus a few items; a large Rubbermaid tub in which are collected basic, non-perishable groceries for two weeks; a 35-bottle case of spring water; two 12-bottle cases of green tea; three first aid boxes; four new flares; a book of tide and current tables, and a guitar. I'm just waiting for Monica, who is now home from work, to assemble her clothing for her two-week stay aboard Robin and then the packing will be complete.
The plan is that I drive to Cambridge, MD, in the morning and store all this gear aboard Robin before returning home. Saturday morning, we and the Morrisons will drive back to Cambridge, and early Sunday -- just after first light -- John and I will be on our way.
That's the plan.
I also plan on knocking on some nearby wood. About a cord's worth.

2011-07-11T13:54:00.005-04:00

We discovered on the July 4 weekend, when we prepared to visit another boat in our dinghy, that our outboard motor, now about 15 years old, couldn't be started. I've never taken good care of it, so there was no surprise. Indeed, the great surprise was every previous year when the little 4 horsepower Evinrude actually started.
Today I picked up a replacement motor from our friends Bill and Debby, who had moved up in status from their 2.4 horsepower Yamaha to an 8 horspower motor that causes their new dinghy to get up on a plane.
The 2.4 is in the car now and today or tomorrow, John Morrison will bring an inflatable dinghy to the boat club and well try out the engine just to see how it pushes two men in a boat. Then I'll take the motor -- and a lot of other supplies -- to Robin later in the week in preparation for our annual cruise. As we did last year, Monica and I are going to Maine.
Actually, John and I are going to take Robin to Maine. We're the delivery crew. Robin will be met in Maine by her owner, Monica, just as she was last year. (You can read about that trip in the August issue of Soundings Magazine.)
My plan is to point Robin's bow northeast when we reach Cape May, New Jersey, and, with the wind as our engine, sail as we might to Martha's Vineyard, where we'll stop and wait for a favorable current around the outside of Cape Cod. Once clear of that cape, we'll sail straight for Maine.
The trip involves, then, two offshore legs, each of which, with good wind, could be accomplished in two days but which may take a total of eight days or more. I've set aside plenty of time for the trip, so we should not squander any petroleum products.
There is still a lot to do before Robin will be loaded with all her supplies for the two-week stay in Maine. My goal this year is to go as far east as we can in those two weeks and to see some unspoiled waters close to Canada.
Some time in mid-August, I'll steer southwest and head back to the Chesapeake. So far, I have no crew for the return leg. But that's okay. I'll just take my time.

2011-07-10T12:33:00.003-04:00

I went out to Bluebird on the Delaware River yesterday afternoon, readied her for a sail and then motored back to the dock at the Red Dragon Canoe Club where, once the dock lines were fastened, I took out my cell phone and called Monica. In about three minutes, she was coming down the gangway onto the floating dock.
It was a perfect afternoon. The wind was from the northwest, and since the river here travels from southwest to northeast. that meant that we would have a beam reach. We restarted the outboard, and with Monica at the tiller, I shoved Bluebird's bow toward midstream and hoped for the best.
Since I bought the O'Day Mariner two years ago, Monica has had some disparaging comments about our need for "another boat". I had hopes this sail would result in some fondness in her heart for this particular vessel.
The jib was already up when Monica steered on a slant toward the shipping channel while I raised the mainsail. Then she steered upriver, toward the Burlington-Bristol Bridge, about a mile and a half away.
Bluebird behaved splendidly. In light gusts, she skimmed the surface, always stable and tracking perfectly.
After a bit more than a mile, we came about and sailed downstream, with the current of the falling tide, and in no time we were offshore from the riverfront mansions of Edgewater Park.
Monica by now was remarking on what a great sail we were having, and what a really nice boat Bluebird is.
The sail lasted a bit less than two hours, I think. But the feeling was timeless. You sit low in Bluebird's cockpit, never needing to hike, with the coaming as a backrest. Your feet rest on teak floorboards, under which rainwater slops. I think of her as an old-fashioned boat and of the sailing arrangement as very traditional.
Monica thought her new boat was perfect.

2011-07-05T11:16:00.002-04:00

In the morning, when one eye struggles to open from a night of sleeping aboard your boat anchored in a Chesapeake Bay cove or tributary, the first sound you'll likely hear will be that of a V-8 engine in near-idle or of an outboard motor, either one passing near the other side of the hull of your vessel. It may take a few minutes for your other eye to open. The sound will still be there. Should you go to the companionway before visiting the head and look out, you will probably see this fellow, or one who shares his purpose.

This fellow, aided by his black Laborador retriever, was passing Robin on July 4 at 6 a.m. A radio was playing aboard his Johnboat as he worked his trot line, harvesting blue crabs. For those unfamiliar with a trot line, it is a long -- up to several hundred yards long -- line onto which are knotted at regular intervals pieces of bait -- often chicken necks -- that are allowed to settle to the muddy bottom of the anchorage. (In our case, the average depth at low tide appeared to be around 10 feet.) One end of the line is fastened to a small buoy. It could be a plastic antifreeze jug.
The crabber -- or trotliner -- has a pulley mounted on the side of his or her boat. He or she lifts the end of the line onto the pulley and then motors forward, hoping to see a crab, its claws gripping a hunk of meat, each time a bait comes up to the pulley.
The crab is not hooked, only holding on to its meal. A trotliner waits with a net on the end of a pole and, if experienced, sweeps the net under the crab just as it lets go of the bait. The movement of the net can be graceful, tracing a shallow arc just above the water and then lifting up over the boat's gunwale where, with a twist of the crabber's wrist, the hooped end rotates and the crab falls into a waiting five gallon plastic bucket and the dog wags its tail, congratulating his friend on another fine catch.
I have been reading James A. Michener's book Chesapeake and had on Sunday just read a passage describing the lives of the Canada geese that migrate from the Arctic to the Chesapeake. Late that afternoon, as I stood in the cockpit looking to the west where a cove indented the shore to my left, I saw the head and shoulders of a Canada goose swimming out of the cove, close to its bank, toward me. He was followed by another goose and another, and his companions followed him as he turned toward my right, still hugging the wooded bank.
I counted twenty-eight geese in that line by the time they had all rounded the corner. Each one followed the bird before it. No one strayed from the line. Their progress was quiet. I heard no honking from my position on the boat about 150 feet from the birds. It was a sight at once curious and pleasing.

2011-06-26T20:21:00.003-04:00

Bluebird got her first sea trial yesterday following the centerboard repairs. Someone on shore snapped this photo.

She passed her tests, sailed perfectly, first in light air, against the current of the falling tide, and then in a stiffer breeze, tacking back to her mooring, which she acquired under sail. There was a collection of rainwater in her bilge but no apparent leaks. And so far, the centerboard winch seems to be working well.
Next, Monica goes for a sail and falls in love with Bluebird.

2011-06-25T10:09:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, son Ted and his daughter, Zoe, were visiting when, out the back window, Ted saw some baby woodchucks on the ramp leading up to the utility shed. Their burrow is under the ramp, and they were on top, four of them, playing like kittens in a pantry basket.
Three of them played. One was stretched out on the ramp in a patch of sunlight, absorbing the warmth.
The more raucous pups were wrestling with each other, tumbling over one another's chubby, furry bodies, grabbing each other by the jowls, knocking each other down.
Until I saw this display, I confess, I'd always thought of woodchucks as mindless, vegetarian creatures whose only role in life was to forage. My opinion was formed, in part, by the behavior of my father, Archie Campbell, to woodchucks in our garden.
Archie, who was no vegetarian, planted about a half acre garden every spring with a vast assortment of food-bearing plants, from celery to blue hubbard squash. In the early years, another half acre was planted in potatoes. There is nothing like the smell of fresh earth opened by a potato fork with which you uproot a cluster of fully ripe spuds unless it is the succulent fragrance of green peas just as you snap open the pod.
In any case, Archie may have planted the garden because of the woodchucks. Not that he wanted to feed them. But it gave him an opportunity to pursue another of his obsessions -- hunting, or its necessary companion, marksmanship.
Every night, Archie would arrive home from work at 5:15 p.m., change his clothes, take the 30/30 Winchester rifle out of the closet and go down to a grassy driveway that led from our road to the garden. There, camouflaged by the tall weeds, he would wait.
Then there would be an explosion and a couple of minutes later, Archie would return to the house, where the smells of beef and potatoes and gravy would waft from the kitchen. Our mother would serve dinner and the marksman would consume, rarely a vegetable on his plate, as I recall.
Somewhere on the edge of the garden, a dead woodchuck would have already been buried.

2011-06-25T10:01:00.002-04:00

Indeed, the work is done on the heat exchanger and the bill is paid. Next weekend, we'll spend time on Robin and, we hope, there will be wind enough to leave the dock.
This week, I spent two days aboard, taking care of a number of minor items. These included removing a cell phone antenna from the top of the mast and replacing a bulb up there for the anchor light. The antenna was there to boost the cell phone signal when I was employed and working aboard. I had an air card for the laptop and wanted to be able to communicate and file stories from remote anchorages. Since I no long need that capabiity, there was no reason to clutter the masthead with the antenna, nor to have its cable climbing the outside of the mast.
I also managed to get working one item that proves we are not serious long distance cruisers -- the air conditioner. That's a good thing, because in the days when the temperature hits 90 degrees Farenheit and above, the AC makes staying aboard tolerable.
I'll be returning to Robin next week for two or three days with the hopes of getting her in top shape before the long weekend. A dab of paint here, some caulk there and she should be presentable in any harbor.

2011-06-09T13:08:00.002-04:00

The news about Robin's heat exchanger is in and my sins are revealed. The heat exchanger is shot because I didn't change the zincs with enough frequency. When I get home, the work will be done and the bill will be due. Swallow hard and get out the credit card.

2011-06-06T13:03:00.002-04:00

Bluebird has been on her mooring in the Delaware River for two days. Yesterday afternoon when I checked, the seepage amounted to less than one sponge full of water. If there is not substantially more water in her bilge tonight, I'll leave her floating until I return from Hawaii in a week. I'm visiting daughter Nancy and her family on the big island, an annual trek. It will be good to see them all. Perhaps I'll find something to report from there.
If I have Internet access, I'll be following the Bermuda One-Two on iBoattrack.com until all the boats are ashore. They will head back for Newport, RI, the day after I return home. They've had a fast run, with the lead boat expected in St. George's around midnight tonight, a passage of about 3.5 days. That's a very good run, and although no one is nipping at the lead boat's heals, several are poised to make it in under four days. If all goes well, the slowest boat probably will beat Robin's time in 2009, and that, we felt, was quite respectable.9

2011-06-04T08:19:00.002-04:00

The Bermuda 1-2 race started yesterday morning and the fleet is struggling to the southeast. You can follow the boats on http://cloud.iBoattrack.com . For much of yesterday afternoon, the boats were caught in what appeared to be dead air. It had to have been extremely frustrating for the skippers. This morning finds some of our friends at the tail end of the pack, others near the lead. Wish Robin could have been among them but we'll be cheering for them all to make a safe voyage to Bermuda and back.

2011-06-02T09:04:00.003-04:00

Robin's V-berth bulkhead is now patched and, apparently, is for the time being watertight. Constant vigilance will be necessary to avoid the rotting that occurs when a leak goes unnoticed.
I was lying on my back working on the overhead liner recently when I stopped to ponder what sort of fiberglass boat Robin is. It struck me that there must be significantly more wood than fiberglass in the boat. If everything that is wood was, instead, glass, there would be no rot problem. The bulkheads all are wood, as are the cabinets, storage bins, countertops, flooring, headliners, companionway ladder, caprails, rubrails, deck coring, cabintop coring, teak deck, bowsprit decking and stern pulpit decking and probably a couple of other items I've not thought to mention.
Robin still sits in her slip, awaiting the arrival of Dave Wheatly, owner of Generation III Marina, who two weeks ago had promised to work on her engine this week. I had asked Dave several times to let me know when he would come so that I could be there to open the engine compartment (and to watch how he worked on the engine.) There have been no calls, and so I have to assume that out of sight is out of mind. Perhaps in two weeks he'll have time. There appear to be no other qualified mechanics any place near Cambridge MD.
So we'll have to devote our love to Bluebird -- and hope she floats!

2011-06-02T08:31:00.002-04:00

Bluebird, parked at the boat club on the Delaware River, has a new paint job (hull only) and may, if all goes well, be launched today. Then we'll discover whether the leaks have been halted and whether the centerboard works properly. If those two items are fixed, we'll be ready to sail this weekend.

2011-05-23T13:30:00.003-04:00

The Bermuda 1-2 race begins in Newport, Rhode Island, a week from Friday. There's a lot that I will miss when Robin is absent from the starting line.
There is the camaraderie with the other sailors, several of whom have become friends since we first began competing in 2007. The regulars are a wonderful mix of personalities, the same juicy social concotion you'd find in any group of very active people; local legends and borderline lunatics, egomaniacle boasters, nearly shy wallflowers, the pretentious, the extremely competent and always the funny and the fascinating. I can't think of one of them I've not enjoyed, and so of course they will be missed.
I'll also not get to sail back from Bermuda with the best crew anyone could have -- Monica. Those two trips, in 2007 and 2009, were filled with adventure and were, in truth, the most intense sailing she and I have done together in our lives. First time it was eight days, and we arrived back in Newport at 3 a.m. under a moonless sky. The second time, we'd come through a storm that took our self-steering devices (both the windvane and the electric autopilot.) We arrived in about six days, under power and out of the race. But still, it was an incredible six days with the one I love.
But while I'll miss both of those components of this race, I've just recently understood that what I'll miss most -- since you can have both of the above when you're ashore -- is the wonderful, prolonged solitude that a singlehanded race affords.
You make a decision to sail singlehanded six hundred plus miles offshore with the knowledge that you are doing something with risks and that you, alone, are responsible for avoiding those risks.
The first time, you decide to go and hope that you have the knowledge, the skill and the good sense to reach your distination safely. The second time, you know you have those qualities, and you smile as you await the starting gun, welcoming the undisturbed days you are about to spend, prepared to find your way to fit into the rhythms of the sea and of the days and nights, ready for the blowing rain, the lightning, the crystaline pinpricks of stars on an otherwise black night where the heavens above reach down to embrace you, to take you in as one of their own.
I will miss all of that very much. It couldn't be this year, but 2013 will arrive soon enough and by then, Robin will, we hope, be eager and ready.

2011-05-23T10:29:00.002-04:00

The photos above (I think) are of work that was in progress last week aboard Robin. One is of the bulkhead repair in the V-berth. The other is of repairs to the caprail and the rub-rail. Looks pretty butchered. The finished product looks marginally better.
I'll probably be continuning with cosmetic work in the V-berth this week as I await, the following week, the arrival of the engine mechanic to address the problems in the heat exchanger. Robin will be the prettiest non-functioning boat in the marina.

2011-05-20T11:33:00.002-04:00

The white petals of the black locust trees along the driveway have fallen like blown snow, strewn by a breeze on the gravel as if to prepare for a celebratory arrival. In the full mass of the bordering shrubs and plants are pink blossoms and purple. One large white peony, too weighty for its stem, leans out over the lawn, more fragrant than an aging woman, insistant, demanding notice.
And it rains.
Except for a coat of paint, the boat sits by the river, ready to sail, eager to show that its leaks are healed, confident in its now centerboard winch, its repaired cleat, now held in place by a half-square-foot backing plate.
And it rains.
Robin sits at her dock, her V-berth repaired and painted, her rails fixed. She waits for a mechanic, who cannot visit until June.
And it rains.

2011-05-14T16:36:00.002-04:00

The unexpected comes in many forms. On Thursday, when an overly high tide caused the electricity in the marina to trip off, that meant that no work could be done with power tools, unless the battery-operated drill didn't drain its charge. But that wasn't the unexpected that thwarted my progress on Robin.
I had made an arrangement the afternoon before to have an electronics company look at Robin to give me estimates on three jobs: Recharging the refrigeration, installing the single sideband radio and replacing the several electrical switch panels with one modern one. I had to be at the company's dock between 7:30 and 8 a.m.
John Morrison was on board at 6:50 to help. I'd completed my morning run, taken my shower and was just finishing breakfast when he arrived.
We set about casting off the dock lines, and when we had only three still attached to the pilings, I started the engine.
It is a habit to look over the port quarter when the engine first fires to see whether there is water coming out with the exhaust. There should be. That's the cooling water that is sucked up from under the boat, passes through a radiator surrounded by the onboard antifreeze mixture, absorbes heat from the antifreeze and then gets pumped out the exhaust. The radiator is called a "heat exchanger."
I saw water spurting out as I looked over the side, but just then I saw a stream of water also coming from the bilge pump -- a stream like a garden hose turned on full.
Then I glanced back at the exhaust and only a sputtering of water was escaping. I mentioned the fact to John just as the bilge stopped draining, and then I kept looking at the exhaust.
Normally, water should come out in spurts. That's fine. But the spurts should be rhythmical. These were puny and only occasional.
Then another strong stream shot out of the side of the boat from the bilge.
What the . . .?
Then the combination of evidence that I was witnessing started to suggest the problem.
I dashed down the companionway ladder, flung out the boards and ladder steps to open up the engine compartment, and there I saw it: Water shooting out of the heat exchanger and spraying all over the engine and the engine compartment.
I reached up to the cockpit and turned off the engine. When I examined the heat exchanger more closely, I saw that a bolt had fallen out of the front end, allowing the water inside to escape.
I found the bolt. It had broken off at the threads, which meant that there was still part of the bolt inside the heat exchanger. That meant I had to dismantle the device, find the broken bolt, clean the heat exchanger once I had it apart and then reassemble it.
If I didn't run into anything more unexpected.
But I did.
To service the heat exchanger, you have to drain the antifreeze from the engine by means of a petcock on the lower side of the engine. When I went to use the petcock, I discovered that it had fallen off, apparently from corrosion.
The engine isn't seven years old yet. This never should have happened. In fact, when I called Beta Marine, the company that made the engine, their representative, Farren, told me he'd never heard of a petcock corroding off.
I will not blame Beta for the problem. There has been more corrosion in the engine compartment than I would have expected, and I guess it must have something to do with Robin other than the engine.
In any case, I canceled the visit to the electronics firm. I didn't really have a choice. I attempted then to clean the heat exchanger, but there was too much corrosion to get it apart. So I called Farren back, he gave me the name of a Beta dealer in Cambridge, I drove to that boatyard and arranged for a professional to look at Robin.
I did get the V-berth bulkhead painted, and I did complete repairs on the splintered rubrail and caprail.
So two steps forward and one step back.

2011-05-10T19:45:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I worked on Bluebird, today on Robin. It appears I've found a new vocation, if not a new job.
Both boats are in a state of disrepair as I work through the list of repairs needed to make each seaworthy. Yesterday, there was more done to try to keep the water on Bluebird's outside and to make it possible to winch up the centerboard. Today, I slathered epoxy and caulk, both in the effort to rebuild a bulkhead and to keep the water outside.
It is a gorgeous evening in Cambridge, MD. The sun is just now setting behind a large sycamore and the temperature is sliding back down from the mid 70s. John Morrison just bought me dinner in repayment for his ride here to his boat. Tomorrow we'll share the two meals that Monica prepared at home and that are now in the cooler on board Robin.
With luck, I'll finish all the carpentry here tomorrow and then will begin the painting that will make Robin spiffy for the new sailing season. If I get that work done, the holding tank is ready to be reinstalled. But as I was shown last week, some unexpected occurance -- a broken tool, an unforeseen flaw in my installation plan -- could cause me in a later visit to try to finish the work I'd hoped would be done today. This is the joy of boat maintenance. Monica thinks we'd be better off chartering a boat a couple of times a year. I think we'd be better off being filthy rich so we could pay someone to do the work.

2011-05-07T08:09:00.003-04:00

The bulkhead work never got completed this week. It rained, and I'm thankful it did.
On Tuesday evening, I was prepared to awaken the next morning, put some fiberglass cloth in place and reinstall the holding tank. The next step would be painting the V-berth.
But it was raining -- hard -- and water was dripping in at the pump-out deck fitting that I had re-caulked during an earlier visit to Robin. I'd have never known that and would have buttoned everything tight if the rain had not come.
So next week, I'll return, inspect the fitting, pour water over it and, if I can get the leak fixed, then proceed with the completion of the bulkhead project.
I had the wood and stainless steel trim ready to fix the splintered caprail and rubrail, but due to the downpour on Wednesday, I ditched that plan and went home.
Weather stalled my work, and at the same time made it more likely that it will be done correctly. I'm not complaining.

2011-05-03T19:27:00.002-04:00

Twenty-four hours later but the same cool breeze. A half hour ago, before the sun settled to the treetops, I was at a picnic table, eating the delicious bowtie pasta with meatballs in red gravy that Monica cooked and froze for me on the weekend. Out on the Choptank River, I saw a familiar boat motoring closer, the Nonesuch Serenity that berths at the outer end of my dock. I followed her progress as she drew near.
And then something stirring happened. Perhaps it is only stirring to a sailor, or only to a sailor eager for his next voyage.
When Serenity neared the zig-zag entrance to the marina, all but the upper half of her mast was blocked from my view. But there was majesty in that spindly pole as the vessel marched purposely up the fairway, heading for her slip.
The mast took aim at the bulkhead to my right without slowing. You didn't need to see anything else to be aware of the vessel's presence. The mast alone, slipping by and through the forest of masts of one hundred or more docked boats, was like the authoritative voice of an unseen leader. Enough to hold one's attention so that, at the end of a productive day, he yearns and is stirred.
The plywood is in place in the V-berth, epoxied and held by screws until the glue dries. Tomorrow, I'll add fiberglass cloth soaked in epoxy, and if I think it's appropriate, I'll re-install Robin's holding tank. I have the wood and the stainless steel strip to repair the rubrail and caprail that was splintered by the winter winds. That bit of carpentry should be completed before I leave some time after noon, ending this week's work on Robin.

2011-05-02T20:07:00.002-04:00

It is eight o'clock on one of those rare spring evenings when the breeze is soft, refreshingly cool and, just after the sun has settled in a layer of clouds over the
Chesapeake Bay, blowing from the south, according to two American flags still flying nearby.
The day was spent cutting three-quarter inch plywood into two pieces and fitting it to an opening in Robin's V-berth bulkhead. The rot seemed to be contained in one sheet of plywood of the two that comprised the bulkhead, so that removing only that piece will, I hope, restore the structure without the necessity of more drastic surgery.
Tomorrow I'll clean the flakes of rotted wood and the accumulated dust from where the old wood was and then, after slathering a generous amount of epoxy, bang the two pieces in place and fiberglass the joints between the new wood and the existing bulkhead.
Then I'll re-install the holding tank and Robin will, in future sails, demonstrate whether my boat carpentry skills are up to snuff.
Should I finish that project tomorrow, I'll be able to start on the repairs of the cap rail and the rub rail that were splintered in a wind storm during the winter.
I am scheming to become filthy rich so I can pay someone to do all the boat maintenance and repairs. Like the bumper sticker says, I'd rather be sailing.

2011-04-25T20:15:00.002-04:00

Back to Bluebird today, bailing out the water we shipped last October and then sizing up the centerboard pivot bolt for some leak prevention. A friend, Peter Carter, suggested the use of 3M's 5200 caulk, the stuff that is supposed to never let go. I'll give it a try. A visit to Home Depot got me two pvc caps with screw-in lids, one for each side of the bolt. The plan is to glue the caps over the bolt ends with 5200 and then insert the screw-in lids to hold the water at bay. If the 5200 does, indeed, keep the pvc in place, that part of the problem should be solved.
I'd be happy to hear from anyone who may have used 5200 on pvc, or who has a better suggestion.

2011-04-25T08:38:00.002-04:00

I've bought what I hope is an important safety and communications device for Robin. It will be mailed today in Maine, and when it arrives, I'll know whether it was a good investment.
It is a single sideband radio. With it, one can communicate at sea anyplace in the world. This particular one was bought by our friend, Rusty Duym, for this year's edition of the Bermuda One-Two race. Rusty was hoping to upgrade his Cal 30 Williwaw.
Rusty died last winter suddenly, and his brother, Tom, took on the job of disposing of Rusty's sailing gear. We were lucky to get Rusty's radio, and it will be a nice reminder onboard Robin of a decent person.
The particular unit is an Icom 718. We paid about one-fifth the brand new price. I'll have to hire someone with electronics knowledge to install it. I wasn't planning on such a major upgrade, but I decided it would be foolish to pass up the chance to make Robin safer.
With a future additional expense, this radio will enable us to send and receive email from any location, certainly an invaluable asset.

2011-04-21T07:51:00.002-04:00

I got to return to Robin this week, from Monday through yesterday noon. The project at hand was repair of the rotting aft bulkhead in the V-berth. There were some ups and some downs.
Climb up on the V-berth platform, do some work in a pretzeled position in the cramped quarters under the deck, realize I needed one more tool than I had brought and, unbending, climb down to fetch it.
This process was repeated -- for more tools, to make measurements, to see what things looked like on the opposite side of the bulkhead -- for most of two days. My lower back complained bitterly.
At one point on Tuesday, I thought I could make the repair without removing the waste holding tank from under the V-berth. The bulkhead is made of 3/4 inch plywood, and the less of it I had to remove, the better.
Early on I'd discovered the source of the rot. I'd thought that water had come in through a leak at the bow, traveled on top of the 1/4 inch plywood headliner until it reached the bulkhead where it was stopped, and there did its dirty work.
But I hadn't yet removed the final piece of headliner -- the one that butted against the bulkhead.
When I removed that last headliner section, I saw how wrong my diagnosis had been. To understand, you need to know the whole construction of the holding tank.
The tank is a rotomolded polyethylene box. It has three openings -- one where the waste enters the box, another where it drains from the box and a third small hole for a vent, so that a vaccuum doesn't collapse the box.
The tank is plumbed with a line coming from the head and entering one fitting and another 1 1/2 inch line exiting the box. That line leads to a T fitting. One line leaves the T and goes through a valve to the seacock which, if open, allows the waste to dump overboard. Another line leaves the T and goes up to a pump-out fitting on the deck. When the valve below is closed, the waste cannot dump overboard and occasionally has to be pumped out through the deck fitting.
The deck fitting was the source of the rot. More accurately, it was part of the route that water landing on the deck took to get to the bulkhead.
Robin has a teak deck. The teak is old and worn, and the caulking between the teak planks is shot. It is almost impossible to keep caulk between the teak planks because the wear is so extensive.
The result is that water had run into the spaces where the caulk was missing and followed along until it reached the pump-out fitting. Then it just dropped down through the hole bored in the deck and landed on the top edge of the bulkhead.
So the first thing I did was remove the pump-out fitting from the deck, clean out all the old caulk between the planks surrounding the fitting, recaulk those seams as best as I could, recaulk the fitting and return it to its place.
Once that job was done, I spent a lot of time probing the bulkhead. A sober assessment revealed that to get at all the rot, I had to remove the holding tank.
The short story of the arduous labor is that the tank is out and I have made a pattern of the wood that must be replaced. Today I'll buy a piece of 3/4 inch plywood large enough for the job and shape it according to the pattern.
In two weeks, when I return to Robin, I'll have to go slowly to make sure my repair is strong so that I won't have to repeat the project in the near future.
What this week's work has convinced me is that I can expect only more such problems until I've removed the teak decking, covered the underlying fiberglass with a new layer of glass and effectively sealed out the water.

2011-04-16T21:16:00.002-04:00

After I returned from Rooster, my life with boats was not on hold. The next day, I used $7 worth of gasoline to buy a $6 piece of 1/4-inch aluminum plate, which I needed to make a new mounting base for the centerboard winch for the O'Day Mariner, Bluebird.
I hooked Bluebird's trailer to the car (after first inflating a flat tire) and towed my little prize down to the waterfront on the Delaware River.
There she sits right now, in the midst of an evening downpour, waiting for my next free time at home when I will attack the repair of the winch and the sealing of a leak around the centerboard pivot bolt.
If I am diligent, I may have Bluebird in the water and ready to sail by May 1. Or perhaps not.
For the next week, I'll have free time for boats (except for my day with the grandkids, a must-have opportunity that I never willingly pass up.) My free time is brought to me by my youth novel agent, Jennifer, who, after leading me through six rewrites (if my counting is accurate,) has declared the little book ready for marketing.
I've never been so heavily edited as I've been by Jennifer, nor have I (I hope) learned more from an editor. It's been a remarkable experience. I'm crossing my fingers that some publisher will think the effort has been worthwhile.

2011-04-16T20:48:00.002-04:00

Bowels, in a mammal or a marine vessel, are no place to spend time. But there are situations where visiting a boat's bowels is unavoidable.
This past week presented one of those opportunities. There was a device in Robin's head called a Lectrasan, a waste treatment machine that supposedly made what exited through the "out" seacock as pure as what entered through the "in" seacock. But I had suspected for a long time that this machine was responsible for an unyielding odor that assaulted every nose that descended Robin's companionway ladder.
The machine had a blue plastic tank with a capacity of about two gallons, into which effluent from the head was deposited through one hose. It had some sort of grinding equipment, along with some electrodes that, I think, were supposed to neutralize any bacteria in the waste stream.
You'd flush the head into the tank and then push a button. Immediately, you heard a grinding sound something like a washing machine with a load of rocks. Then you'd hear a pump go on. At this point the effluent was, one assumed, exiting through a second hose leading to the "out" seacock.
The problem was that the pump never expelled all of the waste, so that in the tank and in the exit hose there always was borne a cargo of crap, treated or otherwise. And from there came the stink.
A Lecrasan is not an inexpensive piece of equipment. Ours was on board Robin when we bought her, and Monica thought it would be a waste to get rid of it.
But finally, perhaps overwhelmed by the impolite presence of the essence of bowel byproduct, she relented. And now was the time for the removeal.
I was aware that the several feet of 2 1/4 inch hose leading to and from the Lectrasan probably contained some leftover liquids. Thus informed, I took special care in removing the hoses.
Still, there was leakage, and when, after about three hours of work, all the machinery was safely overboard and in the marina Dumpster, there remained an olfactory reminder throughout Robin's cabins.
I went to the hardware store seeking a solution. In the "marine" aisle -- in any Chesapeake Bay hardware store it is wise to serve the needs of watermen and recreational boaters alike -- I found a biodegradable bilge cleaner. I bought it and, back at the marina, mixed three pints with a bucket full of tap water. I poured this solution into the cabinet from which I'd removed the Lectrasan, knowing the fluid would find its way to the bilge. Within a minute, the bilge pump went on and, for about a minute, it pumped a cloudy stream overboard.
I repeated this procedure and then dumped a third bucket, with water and a bit of bleach, into the same cabinet.
When I left the boat on Wednesday, it appeared to have a neutral aroma.
On Monday, I'll return to Robin for the next project -- removing a section of rotted bulkhead and replacing it with new marine plywood. My nose will tell me immediately whether I've scuttled the stink or whether I have to move on to the next step -- replacing all the old plumbing in the head with spotless new hoses and tanks.
It will be a spring filled with many such experiences, the instructional lot of the recreational boater.

2011-03-30T11:46:00.002-04:00

Spring has arrived on the Delaware River. Last night, we took Bluebird's mooring ball out and shackled it to the anchor chain, ready to hold our little boat's bow into the current whenever she's ready to be launched.
During the winter, the anchor chain was tied to a long section of yellow polypropylene line. The other end of the line was tied to a five-foot (about) section of PVC tubing, capped at both ends, with a ring at one end. This "winter stick" floated above the mooring but, unlike a mooring ball, was too thin to get tangled with all the debris that storms wash into the river, particularly during the winter.
Bluebird's mooring was the farthest offshore and upstream from the club dock. We had tied the polypropylene line only long enough for the stick to be visible at dead low tied. We actually launched the stick at low tide back in the autumn
So yesterday we waited until we thought the tide was low and went out in the Boston Whaler to look for the stick. The temperature was in the high 40s but there was a wind blowing over the cold river water. The three of us -- Del, Jim and I -- rode back and forth across the area where we knew the stick should be, but it was nowhere in sight.
The sun went behind the trees on the Pennsylvania side of the river and still there was no sign of the stick. So Del drove the boat on one more slant toward the far shore. No luck, so we decided to turn back to the dock.
Just then, off to port maybe 100 feet away, I saw the cap of the stick, only inches above the river surface.
We circled toward the cap. Leaning over the bow, I grabbed it and pulled the stick aboard. The chain was stuck in the riverbottom mud, so Jim, who was wearing work gloves took over, getting the chain aboard.
Now the white mooring ball, it's bottom half stained brown from spending last season in the river, it's top half lettered with "Bluebird", floats in its designated spot. Spring has arrived.

2011-03-24T07:41:00.002-04:00

The phone rang last night just after we had sat down for dinner. It was Lindsey, and she was calling to tell me she felt GREAT! I could hear her ear-to-ear grin over the phone, her giggling excitement. It was wonderful.
I had called her Saturday and Sunday to ask how she was feeling, and she'd answered just as I'd hoped she would. But then I decided to lay low to see what happened.
Her call last night proved to me that she got the message, and that she's enjoying feeling GREAT!

2011-03-21T08:43:00.003-04:00

Your life can be changed in the most unexpected ways. Al Jacobson changed mine ten years ago, and now I'm working to help him change the life of my granddaughter, Lindsey, 8.
Al was one of the eight survivors of the US submarine Flier that hit a mine and sank on August 13, 1944, in the Philippines. When I was asked to take on the job of writing a book about the Flier survivors, I flew to Michigan to meet Al, at that time one of only two remaining Flier survivors.
Al was a top executive in his family's industrial firm, a company that made enormous profits on such things as bathroom faucet valves. He was semi-retired at the time, although he maintained an office at the company headquarters.
Except for his brush with death on Flier, Al's life had been a combination of hard work and great fortune. Born into the Jacobson family, a pillar of the Grand Haven, Michigan, community, Al had been a success at almost everything he did.
By the time I met Al, however, the insults of aging were begining to take their toll on his body. There was no shortage of ailments about which he could, if he wished, complain.
But any time Al was asked how he was doing, his response was a resounding "GREAT!"
He found no reason to complain about the discomfort or disability he might have been enduring. He was, after all, alive and in many ways quite fortunate.
Over several years, Al and I became friends of a sort. And in that time, I grew to admire his attitude. And I adopted his simple verbal affirmation of life.
I had a friend who, for example, might respond to an inquiry about his health with: "I'm okay, but it's early yet."
Comparing that with Al's "GREAT!" explained why Al might be the happier person of the two.
Thus did I begin to employ the same response in my daily life, and I've never regretted it. For one thing, it makes the people around you happier than if you'd listed all your ailments, over which they had no control.
Lindsey was sick on Thursday and on Friday, when I was to take care of her and her brothers, Richie and Justin, she was on the couch, still home from school, when I arrived. She and the boys came with me, and when we reached my home, Lindsey got on our couch, a truly pathetic invalid.
And there she stayed, until I'd had enough. I told her she needed to get out of her footsies and dress for a walk down to the river. She did, without complaint, but when we got back, she dove into her footsies again
That's when I began telling her about Big Al's reply. I suggested she should tell me she was "GREAT!"
It took some work before she finally, with the cutest grin on her face, allowed, in a very soft voice, that she, indeed, was feeling great.
Over the weekend, I phoned her twice, asking how she was. And to my great reward, both times, she said: "GREAT!"
Al has now touched a life very important to me. I hope Lindsey continues to feel GREAT and passes along that attitude to those close to her, regardless of how she feels.
Coincidentally, August 13 is the birthday of my daughter, Joy, Lindsey's mother.

2011-03-16T11:30:00.003-04:00

To keep from doing harm to others, I've taken up a project.
Joy, my oldest child (and the mother of three) has in her home a toy box I made for her, Nancy and Ted almost 40 years ago. It's a red and yellow fire truck.
Amber, Ted's wife, apparently liked the idea that it had been passed along to grandchildren, and she asked me to make a toy box for Zoe, their 2 year old daughter.
I was delighted, and I went to Home Depot right away and got the lumber.
Amber wanted to paint the "treasure chest" toy box herself, and it is about ready for her. Just some final sanding and touchup and the paint can go on.
Here's hoping the treasure chest lasts as long as the fire truck has.

2011-03-16T05:16:00.002-04:00

I don't know whether it was my inability to say what recent product discovery excited me, but something in my phone interview with Tracey, the Wegmans recruiter, determined that I was not a good match for any of their available jobs.
Nor have I heard back from Home Depot after my in-person interview there. Ditto with the gas-pumping job at the Wawa convinience store, which never even offered an e-interview.
Yesterday, I finished the latest rewrite of the youth novel. So now I'm free to go back out in the job marketplace. Perhaps I'll hang out in the Home Depot parking lot, where some folks apparently go to find work. But I sincerely doubt that I have the energy to compete with younger men trying to feed families in Central America, nor would I want to deny them just because I'm white and local. There should be better reasons to get work.
I saw a help-wanted sign in a diner. I didn't apply, expecting that it would be minimum wage. Even if that's the best I could do, I couldn't earn enough to pay for gas to get to the job.
I'd really like to earn enough money to be able to visit daughter Nancy in Hawaii and her family. I've tried in the past few years to do that once a year. This year, the air fare is at least 50 percent higher than last year and that has already caused me to postpone the trip.
I try to imagine the hardship that unemployment inflicts on folks less fortunate than I. I ran into a neighbor whom I seldom get to talk with. He had lost his job as a welder at a trucking company a few years back. He told me that while he was able to get another job quickly, he took a $5 an hour pay cut that he has never been able to recoup. His wife cleans houses, so she took on a few more jobs to make ends meet. They have twin daughters in college. Student loans and scholarships are easing the burden, but still.
So I have much to be thankful for, and while the job search continues, I'll avoid the threat of becoming stir crazy.
There's always yard work to do right here at home.

2011-03-07T15:20:00.004-05:00

Last week, thanks to neighbors Pat and Ed Leaf, I had the opportunity to give a talk and sell some books. The event was an evening meeting of the Philadelphia Ship Model Society. It was held at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, and two dozen people attended.
This was the first time I'd had a chance to do a "reading" for Eight Survived. For my first book, The Sea's Bitter Harvest, I made several dozen appearances where I either talked to audiences or greeted passersby and engaged them in conversation, hoping for a sale. I set up my table at restaurants along the New Jersey shore, in libraries, at boating and SCUBA clubs, anywhere I thought I might find an audience.
And I loved the experience. I met some very nice people and got to tell a story that I'd spent a couple of years reasearching.
So I was elated when Pat and Ed invited me to talk to the members of their club.
For the event, I wore what for me is the high end of my wardrobe. I ditched the blue jeans and T-shirt and wore a button-down shirt, tie, Blue blazer and gray slacks. I felt pretty spiffy.
Once we arrived at the museum, I saw that I was a bit overdressed. Everyone was in casual clothes. So I started my talk with the announcement that I would be taking an informal approach.
How informal, I didn't actually realize.
First I told my audience -- men and women who build incredibly intricate models of a vast array of ships -- about the sinking of the US submarine Flier on August 13, 1944. (I let them know that I was humbled by their expertise and would claim no such quality for myself.)
Then I read one passage from the book -- about three pages -- where some of the most vivid action takes place.
After I'd wrapped up by telling of the cast of characters whom the downed submariners met in the Philippines, I took questions. As you might expect, the questions were thoughtful an numerous.
By the time the final question was asked, I really needed to use the head. And that's when I discovered just how casual my talk had been.
For the previous forty-five minutes, while my mouth flapped so did my fly, which had been unzipped the entire time.
I had to laugh at myself. I guess I've turned a corner that secures my place among the senior citizens of the world.

lDo we have a job for you?

2011-03-03T22:55:00.002-05:00

There was one question during the phone job interview for Wegman's this morning that stumped me.
"Can you name a product -- of any kind -- you've recently discovered that excites you?"
I couldn't think of a single product, of the millions that are out there, possibly because I seldom go shopping and, whenever possible, I buy "pre-owned" and save a ton of money. Most pre-owned things aren't very exciting, and you don't actually discover them. You've probably known for some time that Levis makes blue jeans, for example.
So when the nice lady, Tracey, asked that question, there was a period of silence followed by my answer.
"No."
I don't know if failing to be an excited consumer disqualifies me to work in a supermarket. Perhaps it does. I will know by the end of next week, because I was assured I'd hear from Wegman's by then.

Unparallel house

2011-03-01T15:03:00.002-05:00

Home Depot interviewed me today for an important position -- seasonal worker. I did not include this photo in my resume, so it can't be blamed for the fact that I was considered not for carpentry but for the garden section. I guess they were impressed with my brute strength, since that's where all the heavy lifting is done. My back aches at the prospect.
I've also applied to work in the bakery and the pizza shop at Wegmans supermarket, but they have yet to offer an interview. I've put my name in as gas pumper at Wawa convenince stores, as well. I'm getting a good look at Entry Level.

2011-02-22T16:44:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a very nice review of Eight Survived. I'll try to post it here. Wish me luck!

2011-02-22T14:16:00.002-05:00

I am waiting.
I'm waiting for an email that tells me what to do next with the youth novel.
I'm wating for the return of another email so that I can call a certain editor and talk with him about a project.
I'm waiting to assemble a proposal for that project, waiting because I haven't had that phone conversation.
I'm waiting, but I don't have to be idle. There are at least a half dozen stories I could start.
Instead, I visit internet sites, read the news, bang on the piano, talk to Zippy, the cat.
I confess that this is nothing new. The impending has always thwarted the fresh and new. I seem incapable of stepping on the kick-starter because another engine is running some place, and I can't have two of them working simultaneously.
So tomorrow, I'll probably drive to Robin and see how's she's fared during the recent wind storms and assess the work that needs to be done inside her frigid cabins. If I had a bit of carpentry waiting to be done, I'd be doing it. But the only such projects are boat work, and it's still too cold for that. So I'll visit dear Robin instead, talk with her a bit and then return here to my desk in the loft ... And wait.

2011-01-28T12:10:00.002-05:00

My shame has been my ignorance concerning computers. I don't know how they work, nor do I particularly care. And I probably should.
Instead, I treat computers as fancy typewriters that can answer many of my questions without need of a reference work.
Then I went to the doctor for an injury, and the doctor told me to see an orthopedist. The injury was to my shoulder, and the orthopedist said he would operate.
I said that's great, but I just happen to have a more significant injury concerning my hand. The ortopedist said: I'm a shoulder guy. You need to see a small bone doctor.
And that made me realize that I am living in a body -- a machine -- whose functioning I no more understand than do I that of a computer.
But whereas you have to be a particular kind of smart guy to understand a computer, the really smart guys -- the doctors -- don't understand their bodies in detail any more than I do. They may understand knuckles, for example, but the probably can't tell you about warts.
And yet, I'm able to use both my computer and my body with some degree of skill, regardless of my limited intelligence.
So now I'm content in my ignorance concerning computers. Same goes for bodies.

2011-01-25T08:24:00.003-05:00

I was two years old when I first pulled the trigger of a firearm.
It was a leafless time of the year -- spring or autumn, I don't remember. What is vivid in my mind is the walk into the woods behind our house in rural Massachusetts. All four of us -- my mother, father, sister and I -- crossed the small, southern-facing field that tilted uphill to the right and then entered the fringe of the woods that started before the rim of the valley. The path to the valley floor was steep and passed a huge boulder on the left and then, below the boulder, a sheer rock cliff ten to twelve feet high. At the bottom of the cliff, the land sloped down gently to a swamp. Slender maple trees grew there among the hummocks of grass, and a seasonal stream flowed around the hummocks during the leafless months and into budding springtime.
My father, known to all as Archie, carried the weapon, a .22 calibre Colt pistol nicknamed the "Woodsman". My mother could have carried it just as easily. Before Janet and I were born, my parents hunted together in the forests of northern New Hampshire, and our mother wore a .38 Special, another, larger Colt pistol, strapped to her thigh.
I would have to assume that our trek out behind the house that day when I was two was part ritual, an event designed to indoctrinate me in the family bias for firearms and my father's belief in the wisdom of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
If that was the purpose, it apparently achieved half of its goals.
I no longer own a firearm of any sort, having made a decision against ownership many years ago.
But I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an important right in any representative democracy.
My good friend Elaine Foster recently introduced me to a quote by James Madison, the fourth United States President, who is credited with being the author of the Bill of Rights. He said, in part, "Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, as well as by the abuse of power."
The wisdom of Madison's observation can be seen in the recent events in Arizona. In a gun-friendly state, the alleged assailant had no problem buying a firarm and ammunition. His abuse of his right to purchase those items is now being used by those thoughtful individuals who believe firearms should be more heavily controlled.
(I make no comment on his mental health. Gun control advocates would no doubt argue that the question of his mental stability did not enter into the decision to sell him a weapon, and that it should have.) The desire of gun control advocates is, of course, to take away one of our liberties because they see it as a threat to society.
I do not own a firearm because I have seen how the availability of such a weapon to one whose judgment is temporarily or permanently impaired can lead to tragedy.
But I believe that I should be able to own a firearm and that government should not be able to prevent me from ownership.
An armed citizenry is a psychological check on government officials at every level, a reminder to them in brute terms that it is the public who elected them or their bosses and the individual members of the public who, ultimately, are their bosses.
We have sufficient laws that make the improper use of a firearm illegal. The proof is on display in Arizona. The alleged assailant is in jail, facing a life of imprisonment.
But there is a natural, and understantable, reaction to that young man's actions, a thought that had he somehow been prevented from acquiring a weapon, his attack would never have come about. The easy method to prevent his acquisition of a gun is at hand, one thinks. Pass a law.
But you cannot prevent insanity -- either temporary or permanent -- with a law. If guns are manufactured, they will be available. If they are not, then our Arizona assailant could have accomplished his initial purpose -- an attack on a member of Congress -- with a hatchet.
You cannot prevent human imperfection with laws.
On that leafless day in the swamp behind our house, Archie took an empty tin can and placed it upside down on a stick he had jammed into the mud. Then, twenty feet from the can, he wrapped his arms around me. He closed my small hand around the grip of the pistol, placing my right index finger on the trigger. He told me that we were shooting down, into the swamp, because then the bullet, when it passed through the can, would disappear harmlessly into the mud. He told me you never shot a weapon if you did not know what was behind your target. And he told me to never, ever point a weapon at another person.
Then he told me to pull the trigger.
What I remember most vividly is the smell of burned gunpowder. It was a wonderful smell.
And then there was the sight of that small hole in the can, our target.
In the years to come, I looked forward to getting my own firarm. It happened to be a Mossberg .22 calibre carbine with a carrying sling, like a military rifle. I believe I was fourteen when I received it -- probably as a birthday present. (There was a BB gun before that.)
I was allowed to roam the woods and the rural roadways with my rifle, for by then I had been taught an appreciation of the dangers it posed. I'm absolutely certain that my possession of that rifle, or the shotgun I got later, or of my father's 30/30 rifle that I took deer hunting in Vermont when I was in college, never was a threat to any other human (and very few animals.)
I don't know whether my mother ever shot anything more animate than a tin can. By the time I knew her, she was more intersted in looking at nature than in killing it. When she went in the woods, she brought binoculars with which she hunted birds to identify and put on her life list.
I probably was influenced by her when I decided I didn't need or want a firearm in my home.
But like James Madison, who authored the Second Amendment, I want to be able to have one, and I don't want a law in our land that tells me I can't.

2011-01-24T14:46:00.002-05:00

If I write a blog entry, it is because I'm at loose ends with no serious work to accomplish, or none right at hand.
I could just as easily begin writing a novel that has been in the back of my brain, fermenting, for at least twenty years. I call it my book about religion. The hero is a smuggler. But the lead character is the smuggler's long lost cousin, an upright, honest citizen who, by accident, meets the smuggler and begins to question his own beliefs and values.
Yes, I could begin writing that, but when I start telling that story, I don't want to be interrupted. And right now, there are things pending, commitments that might impose themselves right when I'm beginning to burn with that novel whose working title is, and has always been, Undercurrent.
Yes, there are boats involved. A kayak at first and then a commercial crabbing boat. But it isn't really a story about boats. Or about water. It is about honesty, I think.
Instead of writing Undercurrent, I could be putting the final touches on our home. My friend and former employer, Bill Haldeman, gave me a suggestion for a quick and inexpensive way to add a touch of class to our entrance hallway. (I guess it isn't an entrance hallway because when you step through the front door, you see a set of stairs straight ahead. The hallway is to the left and leads back to the laundry room, pantry, bathroom and a couple of bedrooms.)
In any case, the ideas is this: You take old five-panel interior doors, set them on edge against the wall, end-to-end, and they give the place the look of paneling.
Bill also helped me acquire seven of the doors. That was about four years ago, and they have been propped against a wall in the basement workshop, gathering dust and supporting a pile of scrap lumber, ever since. This past weekend, I began cleaning the basement, and when I was done, I had unearthed the doors.
I removed all the hardware, and now the doors are ready to install. The job probably will take two or three days, plus painting. But I won't have that much time in one shot until I get back from skiing next week.
Therefore, I am not panelling the hallway, not writing the novel, not doing much of anything except reading. And eating.

2011-01-23T19:44:00.002-05:00

Winter, the time some sailors dream of their boats. Our boats provide material for dreams. Robin needs a thick plywood bulkhead repaired and has sustained damage from banging her caprail and rub rail against the finger pier, probably when a wave slammed through the marina. Bluebird needs repairs to the centerboard winch and to the centerboard pin, which leaks.
So I dream instead of skiing. I've saved videos from the World Cup on the computer, and I've found a channel on the television that daily transmits video from World Cup races.
In a week, I'll drive north to ski a couple of days in New Hampshire with friends Charlie Flagler, who is sharing his time share, and Curt Michael. We did this last year. I came home with a torn rotator cuff. Hoping for different results this year.
A former neighbor, Jim, who is 86, suffered a stroke two weeks ago. He's back in his room at the assisted living place nearby. He is a hospice patient.
Jim had signed a living will that said he would not be given life support. In his case, it means that he is neither fed nor hydrated. I believe in a person's right to assisted suicide. But I'm not sure Jim is getting what he signed up for. I've visited him a few times. He wants to get out of bed, but he's kept there. His existence is too much like that of a prisoner to make me comfortable.
I would think that if he wants to get out of bed, he should be allowed to do that. He has the use of the left side of his body. He can grab the rail on the side of the hospital bed and turn himself up onto his right side. He can move his left leg in a way to maneuver his right leg. Were he on the floor, I don't think he would be able to hurt himself, so why not let him go there?
Because Jim cannot talk -- his tonghe won't respond to his commands -- he can't explain what he's trying to do. He becomes frustrated when he attempts to form words and cannot.
If he could tell me that he wanted to hurt himself, or perhaps to help himself, I would think that he has a sovereign right over his body to do with it what he wants, as long as he is not hurting someone else. If he wanted a glass of water, regardless of what his living will says, I believe he certainly should be able to have it. If he wants a hot dog, he should be able to try to eat one -- whether or not he is able to consume it.
Ah, I'm just not sure what to do with this. I need some help. More than that, Jim needs some help.

2010-12-23T14:03:00.002-05:00

Winter crept under my skin some time ago, slowing me as it slows the sap in the trees. I could tell you I've been busy, too busy to write a blog entry. But I couldn't tell you too accurately what has kept me occupied.
I'm in the final stages (I'm told) in writing the youth novel. Just a bit more tweaking (I'm told) and the arduous task of finding a good title.
But it's been more than two weeks since I got the last edit back from the agent and I've been too preoccupied -- with the season or other projects -- to finish that work.
Last week, I spent three days in Herndon, VA, interviewing Elaine Foster, my friend who provided me much of the research for Eight Survived. Now I'm trying to write a story about her amazing life.
But first, we are going to collaborate on a long magazine piece that she calls "The Truth about Thomas Paine." She is outraged that Glenn Beck has hijacked Paine to his cause -- which I would categorize as pumping up ratings. Her work was written some time ago. The task now will be to recast it as a broadside against Beck's claims of his affinity with Paine. She has the goods to make it work, and to break new ground about Paine's life.
When we get that done, Elaine wants me to help her with another project that she calls, in a subtitle, "What Ken Burns Didn't Tell You About the Civil War."
That's a great story, too. But I'm at least as intersted in telling Elaine's story and seeing her become, at age 86, the next feminist icon.
Two days until we get to see the grandchildren open presents. Monica is all atwitter! It should be fun.

2010-11-15T09:36:00.002-05:00

From my desk, I can see through the front window the brilliant color of the red maple by the driveway, its background the rust of a cherry tree foliage and the yellow of another maple. Nearly Thanksgiving and many of the trees won't let their leaves depart, hoping to preserve their own beauty, even as time makes other demands.
The skin hangs in wrinkled folds under my arms where, a year ago, there were smooth, rounded muscles. I am embarrassed, ensnared in vanity, and try to restore more youthfulness with exercize, but it does not work. Were I a tree, I too would cling to my colorful leaves.
And then I think of Elaine Foster, whose mind and thoughts and curiosity glow, at age 86, through the tissues with which time has left her, transmitting the beauty of her inner qualities.
Last week, I spent another eight wonderful hours talking with Elaine, learning more about her research and her discoveries. In the end, I believe I will be able to write a story that introduces you to this special person whom I've had the good fortune to meet.
Meanwhile, work on the second rewrite of the second youth novel was completed last week -- I may have been silent on the blog, but I've been busy -- and I sold a few books in Newport, RI, to fellow Bermuda 1-2 sailors.
Bluebird is on land and buttoned down for the winter. Robin is in her slip and waiting for us to keep the sailing season alive.

2010-10-18T16:20:00.004-04:00

The copper sailboat weathervane is spinning now atop the red sheet metal roof of the cupola and 1.5 of the 4 sides are clad in cedar shingles. One more project nearing completion while others simmer.
I've added one to the front burner. My working title is Battleaxe. Here's the pitch letter I'm sending to the agent, Mike Hamilburg.

The members of the Washington, D.C., church probably were unaware of the peculiar skills possessed by one of their members – Dr. Elaine Foster – when they agreed that she should investigate the congregation’s history. If they had known, perhaps they would not, in the end, have shunned her.
Parishioners did know this: Their church was founded by the very same Scottish stonemasons who built the White House. They took great pride in this and always had.
They must have been impressed with Foster’s credentials as a researcher, because they commissioned her to track down the details of that story for a book they were publishing.
But there was a problem. As always seems to happen when Foster delves into history, the story she unearthed took an unexpected turn or two.
The first side road led to the discovery that the dates were all wrong – that the White House and the church could not have been the products of the same stonemasons.
And that detour led Foster to a preacher who had run the church in the 1890s – a diminutive fellow who appears to have had a need to inflate certain facts in order to enhance his reputation.
Foster was only doing what she always does – laying out the facts as they are revealed by documents found in places such as the National Archives and the Library of Congress – when she wrote her chapter on the preacher. She told the story of a man in the grip of a Napoleonic complex; a minister for whom truth was an inconvenient concept. A man who made up the whole Scottish stonemason story.
And so, she was shunned. But she was proud, too, and to understand why, you have to know a bit about Elaine Foster’s life, starting when she was a child.
Foster is 86 years old. Her work has gone largely unnoticed, in great part due to the limits placed on her during that childhood. But she has taken on historical figures as famous as Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine and as obscure as a Civil-War-era West Virginia folk hero, and her powerful and entertaining writing in each case tells a far different story than other historians offer.
Foster wades into the same apparently clear stream of history in which more famous historians have created whole careers by reinterpreting the stones that pave the stream bed. Foster is not content to walk on those stones but must overturn each one. The results are “The Truth about Tom Paine” and several other tracts that reveal her electrifying intellect and the ruthless honesty of her investigations.
My working title for the book is Battleaxe, a term from Foster’s earlier life that cuts two ways, reflecting the prejudices that for many years kept her brilliance hidden as well as the take-no-prisoners approach with which she wades into the past.

2010-10-17T17:30:00.003-04:00

John Morrison described Bluebird's voyage yesterday in the Burlington Island race this way: Doug sailed and I bailed.
There were five boats in the race. Bluebird finished third. It was a great day for sailing and a good learning experience. Now Bluebird is on land for the rest of the year.
The forecast was for 20 to 25 knots with gusts to 45. At noon, the wind was a steady 14 with gusts over 30. The same was true when the race started at about 1:30 p.m.
No one was familiar with the unorthodox starting regimen: A blast on the horn at three minutes, three blasts at one minute, two blasts at thirty seconds and one blast at the start -- I think.
John and I got aboard Bluebird on its mooring and struggled with the rig, trying to get the boat ready to race. The jib sheets snapped back and forth and tied themselves into a knot. We spent time tying a reef in the mainsail, never before having done that. But we managed to be on the correct side of the starting line when the final horn sounded.
But we were about 200 yards from the line, whereas the smallest boat in the race, being launched from the beach, was right at the line at the start. The other three boats were behind us, including another O'Day Mariner, a McGregor Venture and a Sea Sprite, the only keel boat in the race, painted a dazzling shade of red.
The wind was from the north-northwest, so we were on a broad reach heading upstream against the current. The river heads east northeast for a mile, passing under the Burlington-Bristol drawbridge and then veering north northeast to round Burlington Island. We had a choice to sail around the island or to round a red buoy upstream of the island.
Before we reached the bridge, Bluebird was planing, skimming across the water with the centerboard raised not quite all the way. We were pulling away from the Sea Sprite, which at first had only its genoa raised. The other Mariner and the Venture were at the rear, but within sight all the way.
After passing under the bridge, we were abeam of the lead boat. But now, turning to port to round the island, we were beating into the wind, and the air was coming at us in blasts.
It was now that I made my first mistake as helmsman.
One blast heeled Bluebird sharply. I did not react swiftly to spill the air from the mainsail. The result was that we heeled all the way over and the river came in over the starboard rail.
When you do this on Robin or another big boat, the water may fill the cockpit, but it will drain back overboard. Not so aboard Bluebird, which has no self bailing cockpit.
I handled the succeeding blasts properly, and we rounded the red buoy in second place, about the same distance behind the lead boat, sailed by Paul Zeigler and his big son, as we had been at the start.
But Rich, Mary and Sarah Vishton in the Sea Sprite were closing on us as we tacked back along the side of the island. They finally passed us when we closed in on the bridge.
Now twice in succession I forgot to spill the mainsail when we were hit by blasts and river water was sloshing around in the cockpit and the cabin. John began bailing with a cut-off plastic gallon jug and I tried to keep from having to tack.
John turned 80 last month. Some 60 year olds make John look decidedly younger than they appear. He's in good shape, to say the least.
But what I did to him was obscene. There he was, bent over the centerboard or the port rail, his ass and elbows pointed toward the bright blue sky, his arm working furiously, emptying Bluebid. His was a gallant performance.
We managed to cross the finish line in third place, not more than four or five minutes after the Sea Sprite. I don't think the Zeigler boat was too far ahead of them. And the Frenches and the Rife's in the other two boats were close behind us.
As for poor Bluebird, she is on land. I need to figure out why she is taking on water -- and not the water she shipped during the race. Back on the mooring, I saw a thin stream of water entering at the centerboard bolt.
We had an exhausting but great sail, and we're waiting for next year to do it more often -- in a dryer boat.

2010-10-15T10:30:00.002-04:00

The wind has arrived and the grandchildren are here -- Richard and Justin. Bluebird is buffeted and her boom tent ripples in waves of blue. But the rain has gone and it is bright and sunny, with a few lingering clouds.
Richard just assembled a jigsaw puzzle (missing three pieces) twice and now is pushing a folding trike around the house. Justin, no Chauvanist, is pushing a baby stroller. Oops! He's now on the trike and Richard is playing with a truck.
We have a great time on Fridays when they visit. Their big sister, Lindsey, is in the third grade. We pick her up at 2:30 in the afternoon.
By Friday night, my back is in need of orthopedic attention.
Tomorrow I test Bluebird in the Burlington Island Race. (That makes the assumption that she still remains afloat.) The race starts at the boat club on the Delaware River and travels upstream about four miles. Then you have an option either of circumnavigating the island or of going a bit farther upstream and rounding a channel marker. (The leeward side of the island can leave you stalled.)
Any type of non-motorized vessel can compete. There is no handicapping and there are few rules. For years, the most successful racers have been in kayaks or canoes. But a good stiff wind could make a sailboat the favorite.
I won the race two years ago -- the last time it was held -- in Monica's kayak. Once again, there was little wind.
I had entered twice before in consecutive years in our 420 sailboat, a light, round-bottomed dinghy prone to capsizing. Both times I was sailing single-handed. Both times, in good air, I turtled the boat.
My guess is that with John Morrison as crew, I will be able to keep Bluebird upright. But I'm prepared to turn over the trophy to a new winner.

2010-10-14T20:06:00.002-04:00

I'm experiencing the nautical equivalent of having a teenager out on a date with the family car.
Bluebird is back on her mooring on the Delaware River, with a storm with 45-knot winds bearing down on New Jersey.
I've sailed Bluebird once -- as reported earlier. Then the centerboard cable broke and it has taken this long for me to install a new cable and a new winch. Part of the problem was the leaking that commenced when the 160-pound steel board fell from the raised position, pivoting on the centerboard bolt and wrenching the bolt sufficienty to undo the caulking we had smeared around the ends.
I launched on Monday, and the new caulking swelled as water seeped under it and stretched it like a balloon. John Morrison, who had come to the river for a sail in Bluebird, was recruited to fix the leak. He removed the caulk and used another type, which seemed to stop the leaking around the bolt.
But more water entered the boat from unknown perforations.
Oddly, when the water reached a certain level, still well below the cockpit floorboards, it stopped flowing in. I kept Bluebird moored to the boat club dock for two days and it did not sink.
So this morning, I started the outboard and towed the old, aluminum dinghy, steering against the current and wind to tie up to the mooring, less than 100 feet from the shipping channel.
And that's where Bluebird is tonight. It began raining around noon, but the wind won't arrive until tomorrow, I think. There is a blue Sunbrella boom tent over the cockpit, so I don't expect her to sink as a result of rain.
But I do worry about the integrity of the mooring line and Bluebird's ability to withstand tomorrow's blast. And I am concerned by the repeated seeping of water, despite the fact that it stops before sinking her.
Meanwhile, I've paid no attention at all to Robin. I stayed aboard her one night last week in the hopes of getting a jump start on traffic in nearby Washington D.C. the next morning. I had an interview for the next book I hope to write. I arrived at 11 p.m. and left at 6 a.m. and didn't even attempt to adjust dock lines, I was in such a rush.
By the way, in two weeks, I'll do my first book signing for Eight Survived. So far, I've seen no reviews. But my old employer, the Philadelphia Inquirer, has scheduled a review. I'm crossing my fingers.
The first signing will be at the boat club -- the Red Dragon Canoe Club -- where some of my friends and fellow sailors have asked for copies. That should be fun. I like to tell the story and hope there are a lot of questions from the audience so I can appear smarter than I am.