To see how the rails are used for launching boats at the Red Dragon, go to this site:
the East Coast Fall Series


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hsw2YiIOlM

www.youtube.com

In an earlier post, I described how a shroud on Bluebird had become detached from its chainplate during a sail. On Friday, when I went out to bring Bluebird ashore in advance of Hurricane Sandy, I discovered that the same shroud on the opposite side had become detached. I had checked and tightened that attachment when I found the first shroud flying, so I was puzzled.
Yesterday, I helped dislodge some large logs that had been washed by the flooding river up on the rails on which we launch boats at the Red Dragon Canoe Club. There were a half dozen tree-sized logs tangled between the rails and the steel pier that extends out to the floating docks.
When the work was done, we noticed a landscaping timber lying in the parking lot up where debris marked the high water level from the flood. And then we saw the two bolts, bedded in concrete at the edge of the parking lot bulkhead, from which the landscaping timber had been floated.
The timber had been secured on those bolts by two nuts. Clearly, the nuts would not normally have twisted themselves u[ward off the upright bolts. Gravity, if anything, would have caused the nuts to tend downward on the bolt threads.
So there seems to be a mystery there on the Delaware involving the disengaging of threaded fasteners. I'm not suggesting anything like the Bermuda Triangle. But the sequence of events is troubling to a mariner.

Sandy came, went and left a message.

You can't dodge every bullet.
A pin oak with a base nearly four feet in diameter toppled onto our deck at about 10:30 Monday night. We were asleep. The sound was that of a dump truck loaded with gravel falling beside your bed. We were both asleep and came to with the same "What the . . . " cry.
We were very lucky. The tree could have fallen on our bedroom and crushed the roof. Instead, it missed the corner of the house by about a foot.
One branch punctured the roof above the kitchen. When I came downstairs at 4 a.m. to quiet the pups, I heard a dripping and found that the roof was leaking directly into the kitchen sink! Could we be any more lucky?
I put a temporary patch on the hole in the roof after daybreak. We'll wait to deal with the tree until the insurance company has had a chance to inspect it. I suspect the entire deck will have to be replaced because it's sagging under the weight of this impressive tree. There is one hole punched through the deck boards -- about a foot square -- and if you look down on it you can see the broken end of the branch that made the hole, only slightly smaller than the hole itself.
The power came back about five o'clock after being out for about 22 hours. There was very little inconvenience caused by this. It drove us to play a full round of Mexican Train domonoes.
The first report from Maryland indicates that Robin survived intact. The same is true of all our friends' boats, apparently.
The bullet only winged us, and we sail on.

Sandy, be she a hurricane when she arrives or a tropical storm or a mere meteorologic event, prompted me yesterday to visit Robin in Maryland. In a small breeze, I removed her Genoa, took the staysail in its bag off the foredeck, stripped the dodger frame of its canvas, bound the mainsail tightly inside its sail cover, removed all loose obects from the deck, checked the dock lines and shrugged.
About 60 years ago, when my family was camping in Baxter State Park in Maine, a storm that had been a hurricane was approaching. The water it later dumped on Mount Katahdin rolled huge boulders down Katahdin Stream and washed out a crib-work dam in the campground.
The campground ranger, Fred Pitman, a tall, lanky man probably in his 60s -- tall and strong enough to lift over his head a 55-gallon steel drum filled with trash to empty it in his pickup -- was talking with my father about the impending natural disaster. My father remembered for the rest of his life what Fred said, words to the effect: "Hurricanes, storms, blizzards. Ain't much you can do 'bout 'em. No point worrying 'bout 'em."
That's where we are today. Letting Sandy come. I hauled Bluebird from the river on Friday afternoon. She's strapped on her trailer, mast down.
A strong enough wind visits Maryland or New Jersey, things can happen.

Right now, we've brought Zippy, the cat, indoors, much to his displeasure. He's washing his paws in a yellow wingback chair. Lexi and Samantha are on the livingroom couch. Monica is watching the pre-game show on ESPN, preparing herself to knowledgeably watch football, and I'm going to catch up on some reading and watch the wind rise. I hope everyone else is secure and ready to enjoy the storm.

Samantha, left, and Lexi at just under 15 months. Monica says they are adorable. Then they come indoors, get their treats at the door and, like the hoodlums they truly are, run past the baby gate on the stairs up to the bedroom, where they gobble down Zippy, the cat's, dry food. Dr. Spock blames the parents, says I should have closed the gate completely. Says if I keep this up, they'll grow up to be obese and indolent. That sounds like a solution. Get them fat and lazy and I won't have to chase them around. Then I can get obese and indolent, too. I think I'll have another Ritz with peanut butter while I ponder thus further -- or is it farther?.

There was change in the air yesterday.  A southerly wind stirred the clouds in odd configurations and it reminded me of a day in June 2009 when I was alone on Robin, sailing to Bermuda. The sky that day was not precisely like it was yesterday. I recall two long, towering columns of white, extending off to the southwest. We were about 350 miles south of the Gulf Stream, I would guess. The air was warm and, although I'm not skilled in forecasting weather shifts, I sensed as I looked down the canyon between the columns, that rain was coming, perhaps a storm.
Out there, you cannot run from a storm or put into some convenient anchorage. You have to take what is delivered.
So I simply enjoyed the view and awaited the inevitable, whatever that would be.
On that occasion, there was a brief rain, no big winds, and then the weather passed.
The memory yesterday was a pleasant one as I looked up at the sky and then went indoors.

Tonight, I'll give a talk at the Red Dragon Canoe Club, our local boat club. I've called the talk: Cruising the Coast of Maine: The Fun and the Fear. I've assembled a Powerpoint slide show, and I'll ad lib for about 90 minutes.  I find that when you know a subject, it isn't all that difficult to wing it, as long as you have a general outline of what you want to say.
In this case, since Monica and I have made several trips to Maine aboard Robin, there is a lot to talk about as long as I stick to describing what we've seen and how we've gone about plotting and executing a cruise.
What I have to avoid is finding myself in a place where I believe I have some expertise -- that I actually know something. As soon as you think you are an authority, I've found, you're on the precipice of a great and painful fall.
So I need to enter the talk with a robust sense of my own ignorance and with a few stories to tell that demonstrate my fallibility. A few out of many, many. All the near-misses, and some of that calamitous collisions that were not avoided.