December 25 31 Final Work Day and 2015 ROUNDUP A Great Year!

I had planned on more than one final work day before the end of the year, what with such good warm weather so late this year but a wrenched back put the end to that. The last work day was devoted to the cabin sole. I want to check out how good the pieces I have done look, before committing to do the rest. I have been doing the bottom side of this flooring to encapsulate the wood in plastic to avoid a softer surface on which mildew could potentially grow, not that mildew has been a problem for ILENE.

Another non-boat day for calling Dave to make an appointment for January to work with me on cleaning and lubricating the winches and steering gear and fixing some pesky wires that no longer transmit sound to the cockpit speakers, etc. And then I had to figure out what parts and supplies I need for these jobs which involves a lot of calling and computer searching before ordering. But the non-boat water relatedday involved some play too: While my two favorite ladies, ILENE the boat and Lene, her mate, are thoroughly land locked on the hard in New York in late December, I had fun with Dames at Sea:

And while laid up resting the lumbar-sacral region I have been reading this months selection of my book group (all right, it was my suggestion): Jules Vernes "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea". So avid readers may expect another book report soon.

So what can I say about 2015. I sure got a grand dose of sailing and boating related activities - a lot of water under our keel. It was a very satisfying year, the year that my beloved Lene finally lost her ability to continue to claim "Im really not a sailor.".
We began the year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to which we returned on March 5, after a lovely multi-stop visit to Key West Florida and 20 miles past that. Next were a lot of great passages and ports until we got back to the Harlem on May 26, the 146th day of this calendar year. Also: a two day trip down to Gravesend Bay to sail with LHermione, 17 days on the Club Cruise to Block Island, five days with Bob on s/v Pandora from The Connecticut River around Montauk Point to Hampton Virginia and 22 additional days of day sailing from our mooring and back for a total of 190 sailing or living days. My career high total, and possibly a number that what with aging, may never be equaled or exceeded. And as they say in the infomercials: "But wait, theres more! Add on 21 days involving the water that are not related to living, sailing or working on a sailboat, and 25 work days on ILENE. (Or course, many of the cruising or living days also involved some boat maintenance and repair, but those are not counted as lowly work days.) So the grand total this year was 236! A goodly percentage of the 365 available. I have nothing to complain about.

The way I have looked at it, sailing is a social activity with much of the fun coming from sailing on other peoples boats and inviting them onto ours. Most of the sailing days, including the first 146, were aboard ILENE. But 5 were on Pandora, 4 on Deuce of Hearts, 2 on Ohana and 1 on Pas de Deux, totaling 12 -- 178 out of the 190 were aboard ILENE.

Continuing my lifelong desire to share my boat with present and future friends, a total of 38 different people in addition to Lene sailed with me on ILENE, at least once day this year. Some sailed multiple times and others, not counted among the 38, did not sail, but came aboard for meals. Friends of mine, of Lene, from the Yacht Club, from our Synagogue, and from our condo.

And 2016, with a three month cruise to Nova Scotia as a goal, starts in a few hours. Before Nova Scotia comes after both a week with Bennett and Harriet (in whose home we will celebrate the New Years arrival) on s/v On Eagles Wings in the Virgins in early April and a week with Lenes family on a cruise liner from Galveston Texas in the Gulf of Mexico in early June.

On the macro level, the world may be going to hell in a hand basket with democracy threatened by big money at home, climate change destroying the world, gun nuts (both domestic and foreign) running amuck, a certain redheaded egomaniacal reality show star trying to move us from love toward hate, educational standards low and sliding, etc. But all I can say is that focusing in on the micro level I am blessed to have such a great life. And I recognize and am very grateful for the bounty bestowed upon me and my family.

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April 4 Titusville to Rockhouse Creek New Smyrna 31 2 Miles

Well the good news is that apparently felines have short memories. So Witty is not a permanent victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but his old pesky self. It was Saturday, the day before Easter, and warm and sunny so EVERYONE was out on the water. We saw hundreds of boats from Stand Up Paddleboards, to kayaks and canoes,

to fishing boats of all sizes,

to what I call motorized rafts.

And people were wading and swimming in the ICW too.

I put out the genoa and later the small jib but the wind was too close to our bow much of the time and too erratic. Anchor to anchor from 9:30 to 3:00. Only two opening bridges, one on request and the other every twenty minutes, which we made easily. The tide helped us the last third of our passage, except the last mile, once we got to Ponce de Leon Inlet, and we turned down the engine to near idle speed to give the watermaker two hours to make water before we arrived. We passed some nice modest waterfront houses

and some waterfront trailer parks also known as fishing camps....I think.

Rockhouse Creek runs east-west, connecting two  N-S waterways. (It is the horizontal in an "H".) When we arrived it was very crowded with perhaps fifty small boats and a few large ones. Folks had gone to the beach. We can only enter from the ICW, western end because it gets too shallow for us at the other end, but many powerboat people think that circumnavigating the unnamed island that forms its south side is a nice trip. We heard five of them comment on ILENEs name as they passed us. We had dropped anchor and settled in and by six p.m. there were only three boats left (one other sail and a trawler)

and we were too close to the sailboat, especially because there was so much room everywhere else and strong winds from the east were expected. So we picked up and dropped 150 feet further away from that sailboat. Our other neighbors were a family of campers.

There was no one on the other side of us, where we would turn right and be back in the ICW.

Im having trouble with the new snubber hook, (as well as the underline function) specifically in getting it to stay hooked onto the anchor chain; it falls off and dangles uselessly under the boat instead of doing its job. I tried tying it on but this wasnt working well so I next tried wrapping one side of the hook with rubbery tape to narrow the slot into which the chain sits, but that fell off. 

Here in Rockhouse, I knew it had fallen off when the wind came up at night: the chain took the load instead of the snubber and when ILENE hunted from side to side, the anchor chain snaps over in the bow roller making a sound like the boat is being pounded by a sledge hammer.

I created a way to mount the red and green dinghy navigation light using a suction cup, a piece of scrap plexiglass, a nut, some washers and a piece of thin line.

We have been noticing that Florida has given nicknames to its geography much as in Manhattan, neighborhoods like SOHO and Tribeca that have no legal or governmental significance  are used to define neighborhoods. The southern part of Florida: Miami, Fort Lauderdale and maybe Boca is called the Gold Coast. Heading north, next comes the Treasure Coast including Palm Springs, Stuart and Fort Pierce, so named because Spanish treasure galleons sank off this part of Florida. Cocoa, Titusville and New Smyrna are called the Space Coast. I hadnt noticed this before.

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HYC Cruise Day 7 July 31 Second Lay Day in Block Island

Shanghai departed after the fog lifted and CJ reported that they made it to a mooring in South Cove at old Saybrook in the Connecticut River.
True North rested up after Bruce felt ill from the dinner the night before. The folks on Blast continued exploring this island via automobile and planned dinner at Deadeye Dicks.

We detached and stowed Ohanas dink engine and then hauled the dink aboard and discovered the cause of the leak when water that had entered the inflatables starboard tube flowed out through a separation between that tube and the blue conical cap at its aft end. Drained of air and water it is rolled and stowed with the outboard.

Ohana and ILENE then took advantage of our rafted condition to take a 4.5 hour day sail past the southern coast of the island aboard Ohana, leaving ILENE on the mooring. We experienced moderate winds under clear sunny skies accompanied by big ocean rollers from yesterdays winds. We saw Mohegan Bluff and the SE lighthouse from the sea, from a distance.

Our fastest speed was sailing back into the Great Salt Pond.

After our return, Rolo, Laura and Christain headed off to swim and dinner while Lene, Bennett and Roger dined at Elis, a small gem of a restaurant one block back from the main road through the Old Town. Elis is a fine dining experience that Ken and Camille, who plan incidentally to meet up with us in Stonington CT, tomorrow,  introduced us to a few years ago. This was my third time there and we have never been disappointed. It opens at six, takes no reservations, does not advertise and is always full. I got there early and  waited on line while Lene and Bennett shopped for souvenirs. Im not going to describe the menu but it is imaginative and if we paid a lot more for this food in Manhattan we would not be dissatisfied. And the walk back to the Boat Basin helped the food settle.

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March 21 22 Lake Boca to the North Palm Beach Marina and Lay Day There 31 Miles 12 Bridges

We hauled our anchor at 7:15 for the 7:30 opening of our first bridge and motored all the way, tying up port side to, at this lovely marina at 2 pm. More mega houses (but this is not a real estate blog) and in Palm Beach, we saw the largest aggregation of mega yachts in one place since St. Maarten. This is another of the places where very wealthy people congregate. There is a boat show next week and this may have attracted some of the BIG boats. The last of the bridges, the Flagler Memorial in Palm Beach, was the site of the most congestion I have ever seen at a bridge: about thirty boats, half going north and half south, were traffic jammed near the bridge before its opening, trying to get through, one at a time, in the ten minutes that the tender allowed for the scheduled opening. We spent most of the passage with s/v Elle & I, from Vermont, a 35 foot Beneteau or Jeaneau. Alas, we never exchanged contact information with her people.

We missed one opening which cost us half an hour, because of my confusion. I made a list of the bridges, in consecutive order, with their names (because they wont answer your call unless you call them by name). I also figured out the distance between the bridges and the times between their openings such as some on the hour and half while others at 15 and 45 minutes after the hour. Most of the bridges open at such fixed times but some open on request. But some tenders try to accommodate boaters by delaying the opening for a few minutes while fast boats cool their heels, in order to let slower boats catch up, so both can get through with one opening and less disruption of automobile traffic. We were the beneficiaries of this practice at one bridge and the victims of it at another. These delays make it almost impossible to plan your speed between bridges since the time is shortened, but the distance is not.
North Palm Beach Marina was dredged out of the west side of the ICW and enjoys decent wifi and the best restrooms we have seen on this trip -- large, marbled, each with a large shower stall that does not drain into the drying area, a bench, lots of hooks and plenty of flow of hot water.
We had dinner at the restaurant of the marina with Erwin.

He has been such a huge help to me ever since I joined the Harlem in 1990 --Wow, that 25 years ago! The list of favors is so long that I couldnt include it here. But we talked about several of the prominent ones over dinner, including the time he spent two days taking the head off the Atomic-4 gas engine of my first boat, machining the surface smooth again and reinstalling it with gasket, all just days before a two week Club Cruise. He said he would help me but in fact he did the work and I handed him tools. Erwin was Commodore of the Club for an unprecedented two terms, organizes fund raisers for the club and the annual weeks charter in the BVIs, is an accomplished Bermuda racer and a master engineer, mechanic and designer of boating things and breweries. We had a lovely and lively dinner with him before he drove us back to ILENE.
Our lay day here was just that. We did a cursory washdown of the topsides and a shopping trip to Publix (with a stop at a discount hardware store - I would have spent a lot more there but most of the tools did not say "stainless"). We went via the marinas free taxi service. Other than that I didnt do much of anything but loll around.
On our way south we went outside from the Lake Worth Inlet at North Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale, in a single day sail. But heading north we traversed a new part (for me) of the ICW with a stop at Lake Boca, and it took two passage days.

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January 30 31 Marathon to Key West And First Lay Day There 45 Miles

After fueling (33.25 gallons at 2640 engine hours) we cast off at 8:30 and were on a mooring north of Key West by 4 pm.  What a wonderful day of sailing. The wind was from the north and created a nearly beam reach over our starboard side, without big waves -- because the Keys blocked them.

I was impatient to put up sails, as I always am, but the Admiral wanted to put things away, have breakfast, etc. And a good thing because when we turned into the wind to put up reefed main and genoa, we were passed by s/v "Fur Ellise", a Hunter 38.

ILENE being longer, and hence faster, we made friends via VHF radio without having actually met Kevin and Mary Ellise, when we soon passed them. Under sail, our speed increased from about five knots under motor to 7.5, peaks of 8.3, under sail. Later the wind got lighter, we shook out the reef but they augmented their speed with the engine and passed us. But we caught up again when the wind picked up before we both furled sails to head north, all around the west end of Key West, to the large spacious mooring field east of Fleming Key. There we took adjacent mooring balls. During all of this passing and re-passing they took the best pictures of ILENE, underway, with full sails, she has ever had. One of these will go up on the walls at the Harlem, where, until now, we have not had a good enough photo. Which one of these two do you think is better? The first shows non-optimal sail trim, with the main not having enough "belly" in her yet.

This mooring field seems secure. We have two lines through the moorings eye, one to each side of the bow. But we are completely exposed to the northern wind which is kicking up waves around us. It is rolly.

As we approached Key West I noticed a large structure which seemed to be leaning over like the tower in Pisa, above the tree line.

When we got this close it was revealed as the stack of a cruise ship. And she came out through the channel as we came in, so we stayed out of the channel to give her room. I dont know when cruise ships started coming here but they were not here in August and September of 1965 when I was at the navy school here, learning to kill submarines.

Next day we dinked in to find the office where we paid our $18/day mooring fee and then to the dinghy dock. The office and dock are far apart and hard to find. We trekked over to the main Key West Bight where the marina in the heart of town is, to look over the slips and changed our reservation dates. There we met the folks of s/v "Into the Mystic" who we had last seen in Portsmouth VA. We also saw the schooners "Appledore" and "Hindoo", plying their excursion sail trade here. We had last seen them in 2013 in Camden, Maine and Provincetown, Mass, respectively, where they work in the summers. Lunch at Turtle Krall waterfront restaurant and a hike to the Publix preceded a taxi ride back to the dinghy dock with food. There we took wasted showers. Why wasted you might ask? Because the wind was "UP" on the way back to ILENE, kicking up waves that resulted in a pretty thorough salt water rinse.

A "discussion" took place, repeatedly, during most of the day, about whether or not to sail to the Dry Tortugas. We have given up on Cuba for this year. The new arrangement does not really relax the old rules except that the US government will not examine your paperwork very closely. In other words they invite visitors to lie. I could say that we were going for "educational" purposes, being a lifetime learner, or for "journalistic" purposes, because of the blog. But the regulations are clear that education applies to a matriculated student in an accredited school and journalism is much more formal than an amateur blog, however well written, if I do say so myself. So no Cuba this year, but what about the Tortugas?

Lene does not want to go for fear that we will face the continuation of strong wind in our face on the return passage. She also argues: "Why sail 120 miles for only a one day (two night) stay in windy conditions not ideal to the enjoyment of a tropical isle." And I have to count among my blessings the fact that my beloved is on this eight month sail with me; many wives just wont go. Dont push your luck Roger. So even though the forecast winds looked good (to me) for one day out, another day there, and the third day back, I finally figured out that Lene just didnt want to go. And a compromise miraculously appeared. Marquesa Key is only about 20 miles in the direction of the Tortugas. It is now our next destination and the furthest from home that we will go in our own boat during this trip. There is a high speed ferry which will take us to the Tortugas on a day trip. It departs at seven a.m. for the three hour trip and gets back to Key West at five p.m. Only $160 per person which includes breakfast, lunch, a guided tour of the fort and snorkeling. We are thinking to take this trip, though to me, it is just not the same as sailing there yourself. It is the same way that we visited Saba Rock in the Caribbean in 2012. So Im feeling a bit like a mountain climber who intended to scale a peak "because it was there" but has to content himself with only reaching the last camp before the dash for the summit. Life is a series of compromises and I have a lot of blessings to be thankful for. But still....

A lot has changed on Key West since 1965, with the construction of huge malls with big box stores, but some lovely older housing remains.

NOTE: We will have no internet, or phone connection during the next few days.
Here are Kevin and Mary Ellise, after our mango sweet potato pancake breakfast; sorry, I couldnt get this picture to go in at the correct space.

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