Dena Hankins's Blog, page 18

…on the Prodj

It’s the only work doing!

When I (James) posed that hypothesis to a woman on the docks in East Hampton, New York, she laughed at me and replied, “Motherhood is the only job worth doing!” And I, of course, replied in absolutely the worst way I could…

I laughed, deep from the gut, completely speechless.

…I no longer have that job.

Feet on the docks in Boston, I went to work proving my worth to my new crew by finding all the things wrong with my new environs, documenting them, and silently, stealthily fixing everything, making it look easy with a wink in my eye and gleaming smile on my totally manufactured mouth, all the while inspiring my new coworkers to continue to perform admirably.

Easy-peasy…

And Dena, she got to to do the only work worth doing.

From my perspective she inspired and activated an entire marina to get to work, for their Indian Summer days were surely numbered!

Every single one of the two-hundred or so people living and boating off these docks had to stop and admire the work she was doing on the caprails on S/V S.N. Cetacea.

Clean, tape, epoxy, sand, repeat

It’s no joke. I (Dena) had more conversations since starting this project than in the six months prior to arriving here.

Reinforcing scarf joints

These caprails are about four millimeters thinner than when they were installed, so the fasteners were showing all over the place (having busted their bungs). Rather than sand them smooth, losing another couple millimeters of thickness, we decided to fill the grain with West System G-Flex and go from there. Next steps: prime (2 coats) and paint (3 coats).

Meanwhile, I also got the key to being a bike-only family.

Color me thrilled! They don’t seem to be making these anymore, so I felt lucky to find one.

We also sorted a couple of odd problems…

We’re pretty confident that this was done when the fuel tank was replaced by a previous owner. The PO or their minion cut the propane solenoid switch power cables and spliced in some more so that it would lead around (rather than over) the new tank. Of course, that means 8 butt connectors in a damp environment. We fixed the butt connectors, but running unbroken cable is on the to-do list for later.

Another strange thing about this boat is that there’s no dedicated negative bus bar. Whoever put the system together used the electrical meter’s shunt instead. What a mess! And one cable fried its end meaning…yep, we fix it and now everything’s fine again.

And that whole thing gives me hives, so there will most definitely be a redesign! Of course, there’s a different large project that is now in its initial phases…

I kept what I could and dumpstered the rest.

These projects (among others!) have given me a significant boost in feeling part of the neighborhood. With James working for the marina and me working on the boat, we’re becoming established faster than ever before.

But down belowdecks Dena was turning our little whale into a winter belly we could thrive in every morning. She draped our shitty cushions with the textiles we brought back from India, turning brown into autumn with a single wonderful idea.

She starts every day freshening our home by touching, cleaning and interacting with each part of our living environment.

And from my (James’) admiring perspective, it seems only after these duties to her Cetacea can she let loose and get lost on the prodj.

…like falling

I (James) didn’t just trip and stumble into being a marine industry specialist. I live here, this environment is my home and I know it and its related industries better than anything else in my life.

So when I interviewed for the position of Facilities Manager of a brand new marina in Boston, I knew this was my new job 2 minutes into the interview. All of this is not only well within my comfort zone. It’s ultimately my center of focus.

The U.S. marina industry has only just now (in history) decided to clean up after itself. For decades our public waterways have been devoured by an industry run amuck, one based on short-sighted greed applied to long term degradation of basic marine infrastructure. Meaning when shit starts to break down the industry cuts and runs, leaving a hazard to navigation in their wake. A broken marina that is fucked back together by under-qualified, under-paid and under-motivated workers that could give a shit about a job well done will never stop failing.

We’ve seen it too often. The mom-and-pop operation inherited by careless kids who hire a management company that either pockets or fumbles the money that should have gone into upkeep. The corporate behemoth that treats paint and signage as the important part while the piers rot.

This marina does not appear to be doing that, and so we sailed to Boston.

We sailed away from Portland yet again after some time of thinking we’d probably winter there. The friends we made last time are still close enough for visiting, so there’s no real sadness to it.

We wanted to do an overnight to Provincetown and then make our way back using the coming south winds, but the good breeze turned into 30 knots and we resigned ourselves to hopping down a bit at a time. Our second idea was Portsmouth because it’s cool, but the timing didn’t work out for approaching on the flood and the side-trip didn’t seem all that enticing while beating hard down the coast.

So after skipping Isles of Shoals the first four times we did this stretch, we hit it twice in quick succession. Easy in, easy out.

But the real story from this trip is taking the Annisquam River and Blynman Canal to avoid going around Cape Ann in the most adverse conditions to date.

If you remember…

The first time we came around Cape Ann was in 2012 as we were making our way Down East from Beverly, Massachusetts. It was a completely unremarkable passage around the Cape mainly because 1) we had a fair southwesterly breeze and 2) we broke the boat on the overnight to Casco Bay and everything else fell to the wayside after that drama.

We actually entertained the idea of going through the canal on that trip (2012) but opted out for an offshore sailing adventure that damn near killed us both.

This time we knew the winds would be kicked up and on the bow all the way around Cape Ann so we did it, we shot the canal and…Wow!

The Annisquam River entrance is well-marked and utterly featureless. I (Dena) got us just inside when the bells called out the hour. Shift kiss! And we settled into the roles of navigator (me) and helmsman (James).

It isn’t until you get sucked into the river’s flow that it gets interesting. We went from 4 knots to 6.5 knots almost immediately and that’s where the river gets serpentine skinny.

The shoaling is bad enough that we had to do the trip near high tide and the current is odd enough between the two ends that we wanted to hit it near slack. The channel is pretty well marked with buoys, but the moorings line the channel like a curb and often provide the more easily followed directions.

Three bridges attach Gloucester to the mainland. The first (heading south) is a nice tall one. The second is a railroad bridge that’s ordinarily open and yes, it was open. On the other hand, it’s a total nightmare to approach.

Sidling up to it, there is no way to see whether boats are coming the other way until you’re committed. As James started his approach around the red buoy a little power boat darted through the blind side of the bridge. He slowed us, but they were gesturing that one more boat was coming. Now he has almost no steerage because we’re almost dead-stopped and then a third boat shows itself. We’re swinging sideways across a channel we almost span and these little powerboats with their little men are charging at us like they don’t know that full-keel sailboats have limited maneuverability in reverse…probably because they don’t.

James saved our lives on that one and then sent us through the narrowest bridge opening I’ve ever seen.

Soon afterward, we were looking at Gloucester Harbor on the other side of a bascule bridge, counting down because the bridge tender said it would open in seven minutes. James kept us moving nice and slow and we had a little bit of current against us (good for nearly stopping without losing steerage), but we had counted straight past zero and were well into double-time before the guard rails came down to stop traffic.

We didn’t even try the inner harbor, just anchored near our last spot and left the next morning. Again, Gloucester gifted us with fog that fooled us into thinking it was lifting, but we simply pushed on for Salem.

A visit to the Satanic Temple and a 3-pound lobster later, we were back on the boat, stuffed.

And since we were heading somewhere specific, we set off mid-morning the next day. We’re coming, Boston!

At barely two knots, we eased around Marblehead and watched another puff chaser for a couple hours.

The wind came straight on and built. We tacked and tacked, then pulled a reef and then dowsed the yankee. The weather got more exciting and we got further into the navigational challenges of entering Boston Harbor.

But what better way for us to honor our sailing roots than to change our destination?

The current was against us and we were about to be driving directly upwind. Absolutely unnecessary!

Side trip, Long Island.

The next day, though, we pulled up to our new home: Charlestown Marina.

So I’m (James’) going to work here and we’re going to live here and maybe, just maybe, we can open ourselves up for some positive impact on us all the while doing the same for our new home.

The Wilds of Maine

We spent just enough time in Bath to get the duties done (like buying coffee…not okay to run out) before taking off for the wilds of Maine.

Ecology Flag vs The Man

It’s not that hard to go from town to being in the wilds when you’re on the water in Maine. We’d invited Michael and Ashley to share the experience, but they’d made plans with a friend who needed them that day.

Speaking of needy…osprey rely on their parents for a long time and they get pretty freaked out. Why they’d put their nests on channel buoys would be a puzzle except that I’m pretty sure they don’t understand the concepts of “channel” and “buoy”. What they do understand is a “good staging spot for fishing to feed these demanding kids”.

The chicks grow fast. Within a month, they’re about three-quarters of their adult size. They fledge a couple weeks later, but it takes about five months for them to be good enough at fishing that they can undertake a migration.

I (James) are thinking, five months, what is a drooling human five month old trying to put in its mouth about then.

This means they look like big weird birds before they’re really old enough to be held responsible for their own decisions. Sounds a little like how I (Dena) think of humans between 12 and 16.

But the wilds aren’t all about birds. There’s also the fact that some glacier scraped this land with rough indifference, creating the ledges and depths that remain to this day.

In the passage from Bath to Robinhood Cove via the Sassanoa River, there’s so much going on. It’s like deciding to walk from the bus stop in Midtown Manhattan to the rumored falafel place in the Lower East Side because you’re meeting a schooner but not until…

Okay. Maybe it’s not quite like that.

But the depths range and the widths get frightfully narrow and the currents are maybe a little too helpful like the dog that takes you for a walk at a speed you can’t really maintain…

Okay. Maybe it’s more like that.

The wreck at the entrance to Robinhood Cove gave us a cheery skeletal hello and we anchored deep, deep within.

Of all the places, on all the waters and lands of our lives (separate and together), this is one of those that is a home. Hi, home.

James had cast his line into the employment waters and he got a response in this wilderness. We don’t have signal there except with roaming and he’d used almost all his sending friends pics via Whatsapp, but then the email came and the response went and…

Our plans adapted.

We went down the Sheepscot rather than over to Boothbay and Linekin which, to be honest, was less exciting in Covid-days anyway.

Out and around…

And into the realm of Dolphin Marina but not quite there. We anchored in Ash Bay for the first time. A win for being free and a loss for the connectivity that could have had us meeting friends for dinner.

And from there to the Plan. The place we’d be able to shower and prep and primp and access all the tools that would get us to Boston. For a job interview. James was to be considered for Facilities Manager at Charlestown Marina in Boston Harbor.

So you rent the car and drive the drive and do the thing that gets you the gig that gets you the stuff that gets you…me, us… free, once again and forever.

Downeast Treat

One of the best things about being a reader of bloggy things is you don’t have to live through the doldrums!

We motored from the Isles of Shoals in New Hampshire to Cliff Island, Maine…and I (James) so wish it had taken as long to do as it took you to read just now.

I don’t even know how many times on this blog I have said, “Sailboats motor like shit. That’s why they’re called sailboats.”

Maybe never, maybe a thousand times, but guess what?!… We live on a sailboat!

When we rounded Cape Elizabeth, I texted my friend Michael to let him know we were in the neighborhood and he launched with his brother and Sky (bro’s BFF) to meet us at Jewel Island, our pointed-to anchorage for the night.

Because this is the sailor’s life, we ended up on Cliff Island instead. No room at the inn at Cocktail Cove.

No skin off my nose (me being Dena), since it gave us the opportunity to try a place we’d never…quite…been. We’d been in a different little scallop in the shore, but spring is intense here.

Michael and fam arrived and we rafted (What?!? Yes! That’s how much we like Michael!) and then James and Michael went to get Ashley and…

I (Dena) watched James leave with a gentle bewilderment. Barring bathroom trips, how long had it been since we’d really been apart?

Kate came to Chesapeake City on July 13th and we wandered off together. She and I came back with groceries and liquor, and James and I hadn’t been apart for more than a couple minutes since then.

So yeah. It had been a month and also a perfect eternity! Without wage-slavery, our apart times had been all fairly short all the way back to 3 Mile Harbor and a year ago.

Luckily for me, I felt safely anchored and enjoyed the company of Jay and Skye. We had a good time finding common ground and feeling out the cliff-edges where we weren’t in tune. When Michael zipped back into the cove with his 21′ center console and his Yamaha 150, he had James, Ashley and a huge stack of pizza aboard and all was well in the world.

We didn’t want to stop moving but a supply run was in order, so we aimed for Bath, Maine. That meant going up the Kennebec River, a joy and challenge of its own.

The river is not something we wanted to fight, so we anchored outside waiting for a fair current. We ate little salmon cakes made up like falafel with hummus, greek yogurt with zatar, lettuce, cucumber, and tomato all wrapped in pita. Delicious!

The water was so clear that I swam (for the first time in 21 years!) down the chain to the anchor so I could see what it was doing on the bottom. I wore my racing style swimming goggles and beheld our CQR anchor laying on its side. One fluke was well out of sight, buried in sand, but the other lay in clear water. A good pull on the chain would have evened it up, but the insecurity vexed me until we hauled that fucker up and left.

I (James) was asleep. (Food coma.)

And then…

Seguin Island stayed in the distance. As much as we’ve enjoyed ourselves there, we got bit last time and maybe felt a little sore still.

Pond Island Light welcomed us to the Kennebec River and the current was nearly still. We’d done a good job of timing the wait.

Shallow water connects Wood Island to the whole Popham Beach area. Even seeing it on the chart doesn’t make it less weird when people are wading in what looks like the middle of the ocean.

I (Dena) became a bird-enjoyer only after becoming a sailor, but now I’m amazed and filled with gratitude at the amount of time I spend watching these animals live their lives. Cormorants surfacing, osprey diving, and the whole array of little warbling birds that visit…and the rockstar, the loon. The Kennebec shares with the Chesapeake a omnipresent osprey population.

I waited for the most beautiful moment to shoot this lovely inlet. Honestly, though, every moment was beautiful.

The Kennebec does some winding in the most hypnotic way through these green hills and most points are marked with lighthouses. Squirrel Point Light was visible for so long that we took dozens of shots, but this one has context. This is what you would have seen if you’d been with us!

And again with the birds. James spotted the eagle and I wasn’t sure but yep.

…Seriously?!

The lights aren’t there for their aesthetic appeal, of course, but range lights and lighthouses alike are made to fit their environment. The New England seriousness of them and the little whimsical touches, the impeccably maintained paint jobs and the heavy hand of the cold waters…these are compelling sights and they are everywhere we go.

It was a lazy glide up the river with that fair current and we landed on the dock in Bath with plenty of time to enjoy a beautiful Friday night right smack in the middle of everything!

Capes and Isles

Rounding Cape Ann has never been simple.

This time, it was fog. A thick mess had us sitting tight until it lightened to about a quarter-mile visibility. We didn’t have anything to do, really, except raise the anchor (all 200′ in 30′ of water), so it was a patience game. Finally, we agreed that it was dissipating and we set off.

The thinning reversed as we approached the breakwater, though.

By the time we were well outside the harbor, we were swaddled like babies…hungry, angry babies. I (Dena) sounded the horn anytime a radar return or engine noise encroached on us and James wove between suspected lobstering or fishing boats. Like I (James) do.

Lobster buoys appeared in the mist and, once we realized they weren’t distant boats, were useful for calibrating distances. It’s not easy without a horizon.

I (Dena) took over on the hour (shift kiss!) and worked to do three things. 1) Stay on course, meaning watching the chartplotter. There wasn’t a single visual cue in sight. 2) Interpret the radar splotches and weave between invisible boats. 3) Get my (fucking) head out of the cockpit!

The hardest one by far was 3. When the visual field gives you nothing and instruments do, that makes sense. Not all boats show up well on radar, though, and there was always the danger that I could come upon a low-sided wooden vessel from which an invisible person fished quietly…

And then the fog lifted. Well, more properly, we left the Cape Ann weird-shit zone and entered open Atlantic waters.

The wind began to drive us along better and better until we threaded our way between the Isles.

The Isles of Shoals sound much scarier than we found them to be. There is no doubt that these rocky outgrowths of deep water would have been startling at best and tragic at worst for the sailors of another era, but clear weather, our charts, our electronics, our tech, meaning, our phones and that ultimate bastion of civilization – the lighthouse – made us confident.

It’s the kind of place with bad anchor holding and extreme depths right up to land that ends up being filled with moorings. These are for the taking, with the caveat that the owner has dibs, so we took one that put us upwind of the inevitable generator fumes (our neighbor boats had no solar or wind what-so-ever).

The next morning dawned a hot red with a cool breeze.

…And off we went on another adventure.

A Mass Bay

Back in truly familiar waters, the sail from Onset to Plymouth totally rocked. With the usual on-again-off-again sailing through the Bay we blazed in under main alone, you know, like we do.

Starting the ride on a screaming fair current, the Cape Cod Canal spit us east into the bay with the same name only an hour and a half later.

I (James) had almost forgotten how slick it is to max out the days at 6 hours. I mean, sailing in the world’s ocean on long offshore overnight adventures is cool and all but a true gunkhole-cruiser has coffee in the morning, waits out the foul current, adventures for a few hours, makes their two hour approach, puts the hook down and pours the rum.

We have done quite a bit of both kinds of sailing this year and I have to admit, I like a short day. Coastal cruising can be a lot of fun because you get to see so many estuaries, river bars and anchorages along the way but it can also be kind of a drag for the same reasons. Dedicating four hours to going into and coming back out of a place like Plymouth, Mass, can be a long and arduous task if all you want to do is get from point-A to point-B, like say New York to Boston. Gunkholing a run like that takes patience and abilities that you don’t exercise going offshore.

The next day we sailed out early until the winds completely died so we motored on into Hull, Mass, for another weekend hideout in the middle of everything!

A “special anchorage” is a designated area where you don’t have to show an anchor light or dayshape. They are primarily filled with moorings at this point in history, so we rarely enjoy that flexibility.

Hull is an exception. There are two large special anchorages empty of moorings south of the island that protects the town docks and the packed-full mooring fields. To our pleasure, we weren’t plagued by wakes as we’ve been so many other places. We discussed going ashore where someone else would make pizza for us, but in the end we didn’t want to give up our bubble of, safely distanced, happiness aboardship.

The weather was in a settled summer pattern and the iron genny got a workout. We stretched the winds as far as we could, though, partly because it was such a pleasure to watch the LoveBot work.

Once again, we skipped Boston for the out-lying Harbor Islands then struck the staysail and the Yankee for a downwind run under mainsail alone with a building following sea across Massachusetts Bay. It was an awesome ride! How can you blame us for doing the whole bay in one day when Gloucester is so photo-ready?

The schooners paraded, as did the recreational sailors.

And sometimes, they danced.

Then there was the perfect sunset glow…

It was a practical stop as well as a scenic one, and we did go ashore. Sigh. Once that nonsense was done with, we loaded the dinghy aboard and prepared ourselves and the boat to round Cape Ann.

A Good Hurricane

…Is one that doesn’t break anything, doesn’t kill anyone, and doesn’t drag our anchor.

Isaias, for us, was one such hurricane.

We perceived the danger early enough in the weather system to get to a secure gunkhole and prepare, so we did.

Onset Harbor has the odd and wonderful characteristics of being both spacious and protected. The east side of Wickets Island is less than half-full of moorings, with a mud bottom that is fairly flat. The perfect place to put out aaaallllll the chain and still have lots of room in case anything goes wrong.

Isaias had his start, like most pissed-off summertime low pressure systems, by dragging his ass up the Gulf Stream and putting some serious hurt on Cape Fear, of course!

Have you ever seen the statistics on documented hurricanes hitting the continental United States? That’s where most of those pissed off motherfuckers go to party: Cape Hatteras or Cape Fear and more specifically, Southport, North Carolina.

That’s where Isaias hit the dirt trail and got addicted to mud. That asshole and his tornado buddies left a trail of flooding and mobile-home carnage eighty miles wide all the way up the coasts of Virginia, Chesapeake Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and the Jersey Shore before spinning off inland for a date with a Canadian mud slide.

What we got was the outskirts of town, the suburbs of annihilation, the infuriated, rag-tag remnants of the johnny-come-lately dregs of mass destruction otherwise known as T.S. Isaias.

The cell in the bottom right-hand corner of that image above hit us full-on, and it started like this!

The four other boats in the anchorage were all very well behaved (meaning far from us and each other) with the single exception of a local pro fisher. He actually tried, and failed, to singlehandly anchor his 30 ton charter fishing boat for about two and a half hours before the final storm cell hit. He was a one man keystone-cop debacle.

From his pilothouse down a ladder around a turn down another ladder to his foredeck to drop his tiny little anchor with its 6 feet of chain before he was blown too far from where he’d started, then back up to back down on it so hard that he ripped it right out of the mud. Then it was back down to haul it in, back up, back down, back up, back down…in a storm like a dumb-fuck. He provided hours of non-stop entertainment before he dumped enough rode overboard that his anchor finally set.

He ended up not quite perfectly upwind of us. This was not nearly as fun to watch, him being a dip-shit with inadequate gear upwind with an oncoming storm and all.

We had a fucking blast.

…And why was that? Because we anchored at 20:1 with nothing but chain and watched Isaias like a hawk as he sloshed his way up the Eastern Seaboard.

When it was all said and done Hurricane Isaias took his pound of flesh from this weary country and blew out in the Northern Territories where the caribou could use the rain and we…

We went sailing!

Our Lovebot!

S/V S.N. Cetacea used to have a pretty severe steering problem.

The Monitor windvane, a self-steering system that uses wind angles and water pressure to turn the wheel and keep the boat sailing properly, was installed quite a long time ago. It’s the older style with a bronze gear, so we know it’s from the 1980’s.

At some point later in this boat’s long glorious life, someone decided to replace the Monitor with dinghy davits. That decision is baffling to me (Dena), regardless of whether the sailor was gunkholing or cruising long distances. I treasure the freedom to move around the boat and fuss with the sail trim that the Monitor gives me…not to mention the time for reverie!

Regardless, the Monitor somehow tagged along through several owners as an “it also comes with”. We were the first to salivate over that detail, I guess, since it was bagged, in as many pieces as it can be broken down into, with spares and a rebuild kit.

This would have been no big thing except they put the boat’s only solar panels on the dinghy davits.

It was easy enough for us to reinstall the Monitor…they hadn’t even removed the through-bolted mounts! But we couldn’t use it until we could uncover it and we couldn’t uncover it until we moved the solar panels.

Removing them was no big thing…ha! They had bolted solid wood to the solar panel frames, split PVC pipe and forced it onto the stainless bar of the davit, and then screwed the shit out of a bunch of pipe hangars. Both plastic and galvie were represented, with no discernable pattern, and only two or three of the screw heads hadn’t been stripped.

And then we found the real problem.

I (Dena) had the fancy idea that we’d do one panel at a time so that we would be charging all day. I disconnected a panel, confirmed that there was still current reaching the charge controller, and we got to the process of installing the panel on the bimini frame.

Those snap-in connectors sound like a good idea, but water is relentless and will penetrate this kind of thing eventually. Gooping up the innards with water-repellent like dielectric silicone makes this take much, much longer, but nothing lasts forever in the rain and salt of a boat’s life.

Turns out, I’d pulled the two halves of the connector apart, but the pin that carried the current broke off inside and remained with its mate. Bonded for all eternity, which would be cute if I’d noticed before jamming the two halves back together.

Long story short (no pun intended), it fried the charge controller.

Dinghy to park (this was at Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis), bike to PKYS before they close, no-touch pickup of the new controller, bike back, dinghy back, install…just in time for the sun to go down. Oh well.

With both solar panels moved (after two days of labor), it was time to photograph and remove the davits so we could sell them.

The lines had gotten a green cast to them, so we bleached and sunned them.

And then came a moment we’d been waiting for since we bought the boat…the vision of cruising preparedness that is the Monitor, freed of all overhanging obstructions and ready to take us anywhere we want to go!

Except…somewhere along the way, someone had lost the wheel adapter. This is a $600 piece of kit new and we sold a used one once for almost $500. (S/V S.N. Nomad didn’t need it because of the tiller.) Since we have yet to do the tiller conversion on Cetacea, something had to be done.

Someone posted somewhere that the official Monitor wheel adapter was 5.5″ in diameter. These two deck plates are made to close a hole that is 6″ in diameter…which is close enough. Some West System G-Flex epoxy and some clamps…4 holes and two U-bolts…some old line and a few different knot configurations and…

Behold! The $20 wheel adapter!

And then another problem showed itself. The control lines go from the water paddle to legs on each side of the frame. They turn around sheaves at the bottom and run inside the legs then turn around sheaves at the top. At that exit, we needed to take them to the side of the boat and then to the wheel adapter.

Our other two Monitors had these parts that drove us crazy. They’re known on the Monitor parts list by the lyrical name “Block Assembly, external, complete” and on both S/V S.N. Sapien and Nomad as “Those Fucking Things.”

They are suppose to be adjustable leads so that, from the body of the Monitor, the lines can go wherever you need them. With tiller steering, the lines cross and go to each side of the cockpit. With a wheel, they both go to one side. We cursed them because they didn’t stay perfectly adjusted and then the lines chafed. End-for-ending the lines extended their lives, but failure was still a near-certainty.

Cetacea still had the turning blocks installed (yes! seriously! after who knows how many years!), but we couldn’t use the first one without Those Fucking Things.

Rather than pay Monitor $150 to send them to us, we decided to rig a Dyneema line with two Antal rings at exactly the right place so that chafe would be minimized (if not eliminated) and we could use this wonderful piece of gear that we’d been hauling around for going-on 2 years!

And…it worked. Kinda. There was too much slop in the system and too much chafe on the lines, but a moderate wind was strong enough to make use of the Monitor windvane in the Atlantic Ocean on our 2-day trip from Cape May to Newport, Rhode Island!

Hmm. It occurs to me that I haven’t told you about yet another spit-and-bubble-gum fix we’d done in order to get that far.

The water paddle had been hit at some point. The whole thing is pretty sad looking but still shaped properly to do its job. We’d bolted it into place long before we ever could have used it, and it took a while for us to discover that there was a part missing. An Important Part. The latch that keeps it down in the water.

In the same hardware store trip that netted us the U-bolts for attaching the wheel adapter, we bought a C-clamp. Before we left Cape May, we simply clamped the two parts together and voila! A system we could use, but which could not be removed except from the dinghy or while swimming.

Because we couldn’t bring the paddle up, the thing took a beating in the Atlantic once the wind was too light for the sloppy Monitor set-up. We anchored in Newport and discovered to our distinct horror that it had come off completely! The safety line had done its job, and the paddle bobbed in the water behind us.

Okay. That didn’t work. Want to know what did?

Yes – you’re correct! That paddle is being held in place by vice grips!

Those things aren’t made for saltwater deployment so as much as we had loved the entire project of made-and-found answers to expensive problems, it was time to order the official latch. $100. Ouch.

A visit to Newport Nautical resulted in a couple of excellent used cheek blocks to replace the Antal rings. With the lines running straight from the Monitor to those blocks and then sideways to the coaming, the whole system became a tight, operational, and trustworthy option for steering the boat.

The most unexpected part of this story, for me (Dena), is that James has had an overwhelming inspiration and this Monitor, our third, is to be known from this day forward as our Lovebot!

Beware the wind noise

The Deck

The deck project has been moving along with the weather, since we started it in the Magothy.

There used to be these angled pieces of teak that protected your feet from the evil toe-stubbing sheet-tracks that really aren’t that bad. The many previous owners of this vessel made sure to make those toe protectors as ugly and useless as possible by years and years of acid cleaning thus dissolving most of the wood into toe stubbing toe protectors…in other words: stupid, ugly shit on deck. Best get rid of it.

In the Magothy River, Dena broke out the screwgun and pulled up all the old decrepit teak and we both went to work the next day filling the holes with epoxy. It took several go-rounds in several anchorages in several states to completely fill the holes but we ultimately got ‘er done.

Then it was time to clean and tape.

We did the entire foredeck section in one go last year before we went back to Kerala and relearned a very important lesson when dealing with Kiwi-Grip non-skid: small sections are easier to deal with and the warmer it is the smaller the sections should be.

You have to pull the tape as you go so we used the tape to mark our sections (which is a major pain in the ass) but it worked like a charm and we finally got the deck completely covered in the two days before T.S. Isaias.

So now we have a very safe new non-skid deck covering that looks awesome and feels great under foot. Best of all, I haven’t stubbed my toes even once!

A leap, with no faith

Our volte-face in the Chesapeake was an awesome call. We went sailing and Deale, Maryland, was were we gunkholed, then bounced on to the Magothy River the following day to survey for the Guide.

Three days behind the “No-Wake-Zone” buoys up Cyprus Creek revealed a new free dinghy dock and an awesome Northern Chesapeake swimming experience.

We had our sights set on an offshore adventure so it was overnight stays only for the rest of the Chesapeake Bay. After just a single terrifying summer-squall, cool breezes and perfect sunsets were all we got north of Button Beach.

After one more perfect shallow Chesapeake gunkhole at the mouth of the Bohemia River, it was Chesapeake City for the last of the Kate-sustenance.

We didn’t even stay overnight, though. A few hours after sunset we moved out on an almost-fair current into the C&D Canal. A laying-on of hands was required and James provided it, after the middle cylinder’s decompression level somehow levitated far enough to make the engine run like shit. We met the middle of the night sailing the Delaware Bay and watched the Neowise comet blaze into the northern horizon.

Cape May is always the perfect place to get some projects out of the way before an offshore leap, this time to Newport, RI.

And then we went sailing! It wasn’t quite the first use of the Monitor, but close, and the system was not quite perfect.

As a matter of fact, the roughness disintegrated the rusted, aging latch on the paddle as we were making our big-seas approach to Newport Harbor. On a Sunday. In summer.

Why were we going there?

Oh right. We’d ordered the supplies for getting the watermaker working and would do an epic walk in order to pick those up. And since we were already hoofing it, may as well swing by Newport Nautical and get a couple perfect used cheek blocks to replace the Antal rings that didn’t quite do the job for the Monitor.

A dude in front of us at the local hardware store gave us the idea for a temporary fix (above) and it got us all the way to Onset, Mass, where we are today.

With the watermaker cruising kit delivered, the groceries stowed, the Kraken in the freezer and the weekend looming again, we couldn’t wait to weigh anchor.

We decided to spend a couple of days on a shagged mooring in Potter Cove again just like we did two years ago when we came through. The water was nice and warm and it was a beautiful night in the anchorage.

A challenging, enjoyable sail took us from Prudence Island to the Hog Island Shoal Light.

It was a 3-lighthouse day, and then we anchored as far from Sachuest’s (Third Beach’s) weekend crowd as we could while still getting some protection from the point.

Another short stay, another short trip, this time to Cuttyhunk. The waves weren’t all that comfortable, partly because there wasn’t quite enough wind to allow the sails to steady the ride. On the other hand, it was a day spent sailing, so we were well satisfied that we’d earned the gorgeous sunset.

We anchored well ahead of another boat, which promptly hauled anchor and moved farther toward land. Either they didn’t trust us or they were trying to get more protection from the forecasted 35-knot winds.

As a matter of fact, the entire experience was tainted…flavored?…definitely characterized by a near-dozen boaters who showed up only to show their asses. Folks dragging their anchors all over the place, hauling them up, clearing the weeds, trying again…to no good effect. Others (yes, plural) who let their genoas flog while preparing to roll them in, thereby tangling their genoa sheets so badly they couldn’t get the sail in or down or full.

But the worst…the absolute pinnacle of vicarious trauma…was the spindly grey-haired couple. They passed the red nun buoy marking Pease Ledge. He went forward to drop the main. She turned into the wind. He struggled for some time…

We were in our cockpit, watching casually and then not so casually. Don’t they know? Are they really…no, they’re turning away…wait, don’t turn back!!!

Our chartplotter was still on and their boat showed up on radar clear as could be. We watched in the real world while they drove slowly closer to the rock ledge and on the screen, their red fuzzy blob closed the distance to the green that denotes something that is covered at high tide and uncovered at low…

And then a sickening, deepthunking crunch matched the sudden cessation of forward movement and we knew that yes, they had hit the rocks. The wind should have pushed them off, but they spun in place first, either hard on the rock or still in forward gear, before finally coming loose and heading directly for the protection of the inner harbor.

We don’t know what happened to them from there, but they would have had plenty of help if the water was pouring in from a brand-new hole in the hull.

The next day we sailed up Buzzard’s Bay and then motored up the Wareham River. They have a retail weed store right across from a free dock, and a grocery store a mile away. Score!

But it was way too hot upriver and we left a little earlier than we’d planned. It was a short trip to Onset, and now we’re more-or-less at peace, safely at anchor, thoroughly at home.