The Fake's Progress

Another season over

2011-10-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

The Scapegrace turns into a pumpkin, as far as the 79th Street Boat Basin is concerned, on November 1. So this weekend I finally bowed to seasonal necessity and took her around to the Bronx, to Charlie Evers' wonderful boatyard, for the winter. I was expecting a milk run, having done this trip now a number of times. But I should have known better. Dat ole debbil, sea!

Here's the first odd thing. Getting out of the boat basin's crowded mooring field in a three- or four-knot current is a little tricky. One of the things you learn, after you've done it a few times, is what an mooring buoy looks like when it's been pulled mostly underwater by the current. (You do not want to run into one of these.)

They're round, the buoys, and they're never far underwater -- barely submerged, at most. So the water pillows up into a little smooth mound over the buoy, and there's a little turbulent wake downstream of it.

I worked my way through these menaces out of the mooring field into the channel -- or so I thought -- and started to breathe normally again, when I noticed, slightly off the starboard bow, a little lump of water, smoothly pillowed-up over something round, way further out into the channel than I would have expected a mooring buoy to be. And the wake looked different -- not just a patch of lumpy disturbed water downstream of the buoy, but a distinct vee-shaped wake, like what a boat would leave, or a rock in a fast-flowing freshwater stream.

Ten seconds' observation revealed that this object, whatever it was, was not stationary. It was forging upstream, at maybe two knots over the ground; five or six through the water.

Mooring buoys do not behave this way.

It was a whale, of course -- clearly a deeply bewildered whale, headed for Rockland County, with very little to expect in the way of cetacean amenities when it got there.

I tried to follow this poor devil for a while. All I could see was the very top and back of his or her head -- grayish, or rather tarnished-silvery in color; smoothly rounded; a conspicuous blowhole, single, not twinned, as far as I could tell. No clear idea how big the the underwater part was. I'm guessing maybe twenty feet.

He or she was stemming the current a lot faster than I could do. If I could have kept up, I think I would have followed this critter till I ran out of gas for the outboard. But no way; Leviathan had the advantage of what, a few million years of evolution, and Leviathan meant business. After five minutes of vain pursuit, Leviathan was a mere indistinct bump on the water, two hundred yards ahead; and so I reluctantly turned and left Leviathan to his fate, and pursued my own.

After this memorable encounter, it was an otherwise uneventful trip. Night fell, as it is wont to do. But I know the Hudson River and Hell Gate quite well, now, and motored -- no wind, alas -- blithely around the island and under the bridges and through the crazy swirling currents of Hell Gate without even glancing at the chart. (Ordinary I am a compulsive chart-watcher, so this was unusual, and I felt rather smug about it.)

Got into Eastchester Bay, and dropped anchor at about the spot shown on the map above, around 10 PM. I didn't want to try getting into Charlie's yard in the dark. Here's a closeup that may explain why:

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Close quarters and tricky turns.

I have anchored for the night at more or less the same position before, at the entrance to the bay, and spent a quiet night snoring tranquilly in the vee-berth. But this was not to be a quiet night.

Soon as I turned in, a nor-easter promptly blew up, sent big rollers all the way down the Sound and into shallow Eastchester Bay, where they turned into steep peaky nasty choppy things. Tossing the boat around on the anchor rode like a tetherball; I was worried that the rode might actually snap.

That big bruiser of a Bruce anchor wasn't going anywhere, though, not in that gluey muck of a bottom. Not a hair of anchor dragging, according to the trusty GPS, confirmed by my worried eyeball popping out of the cabin every half hour or so, into a very nasty cold damp night.

It was nasty damp and cold even in the cabin. When I noticed that my hands were shaking, I finally cranked up the little propane heater I bought two years ago, while marooned in Kittery, Maine, and that helped a lot.

Thirty knots of wind, gusting a lot higher. Crazy. Finally got so worried about the anchor rode that I pulled it up and went motoring further up into the bay, looking for a more sheltered spot. While I was doing that it got light.

Still didn't want to try going into the marina with a thirty-knot tail wind -- it's very confined in there and sailboats aren't that maneuverable in tight spaces. But as I was casting about for a suitable anchoring spot, there was a lull in the wind -- down to a reasonable fifteen knots or so -- and it started to snow.

So I nipped into the marina and if I do say so myself, got the boat into a vacant slip rather neatly.

Why is there never anybody watching when you do it right for once, I'd like to know?

Exhausted. Took a little nap on the boat, not having had much sleep during the night, then walked to the subway. Downed trees in the park, garbage cans blown all over the homely streets of the bungalow Bronx, and fat damp snowflakes landing on the hood of my jacket with an audible thump.

There's no such thing as a milk run.

And now for something completely different

2011-10-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

That's the Scapegrace, looking almost as out of place at Fire Island Pines as her skipper. (Click to enlarge as usual). Note the ugly sludgy ring of gunk at the waterline; that's the Hudson River for you.

Penelope has friends staying here at the Pines, so she wisely took the train and ferry out, and I sailed the Scapegrace -- probably my last hurrah this season -- and joined them. I expect it's a pretty lively place during the season, but it's very peaceful now.

Took off from the boat basin about five PM yesterday; motored down the Hudson. Once past the Verrazano Bridge we picked up a light northwest breeze and moved along at three or four knots. A bit after midnight I got so cold and so tired that I hove-to on the starboard tack -- just off Long Beach Island, I think -- and took a nap.

Awoke about three, a couple of miles farther out, but having lost no ground. The wind had strengthened a good deal and so we bowled along at five and six knots. Reached Fire Island Inlet about eight, and motored in against the current.

Once inside Great South Bay it proved to be possible to sail (under jib alone) most of the way to the Pines, though I went slightly aground once, on the soft sand, trying to creep from buoy to buoy in the twisty channel. The motor backed the boat off quite nicely.

Then a squall blew in, and the jib sheet jammed on the winch, and I went in circles for about ten minutes in alarmingly shallow water, swearing at the top of my lungs the whole time. Finally got the jib sheet free, and decided the better part of valor was to motor the rest of the way to the Pines marina:

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The marina is a very nice spot:

Photo gallery

2011-07-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

Click to see full-size, as usual.

Aquambulists at Milford, mentioned earlier. A close look at the satellite view in that original post -- you may have to zoom in -- will unravel the mystery.

The electricity perplex.

I've had the terrible experience of having the nav lights go dim and then dead at the Hour of the Wolf, in the middle of Cape Cod Bay. This is a bad feeling. I replaced my inherited battery -- a starting battery, actually, which I don't need -- with a more capacious deep-cycle battery; but I'm still very paranoid and Pere-Goriot about amps. So I've embarked on an amp-saving campaign. Among other things, I've replaced the incandescent cabin light bulbs with LED versions. Here's the old inefficient bulb:

And here's the nice new efficient LED bulb, consuming, what, a tenth of the current the old one did. It's shown in situ:

It may be more efficient, but it sure spoils the retro Jetsons look of that original-equipment 1970s light fixture, doesn't it? Looks like some ill-bred child sticking his tongue out. The light quality is colder and less homey, too.

LED replacements for the nav light bulbs are next, though that may have to wait till next year.

I also sprang for a solar panel to charge the battery whenever the sun shines:

This image also shows the new dinghy -- I have yet to tell that story -- and a weird cylindrical object on the rail, over to the left, which is the receptacle for an imposing seven-foot LORAN antenna, now languishing in a Harlem storage locker.

You don't want to touch that antenna without gloves on -- it's made out of somewhat sun-degraded fiberglass, and it's like handling a cactus. Tiny splinters of glass fiber work their way under your skin, and itch for the next week.

There's a LORAN unit in the cabin, which actually worked when I first got the boat, and of course works no more, because the Coast Guard finally shut down the LORAN system last year.

I only once ever navigated a boat using LORAN, and that was, what, twenty years ago? The charts then used to have a Cabbalistic LORAN overlay.

Ah, progress. GPS is a lot easier(*). So I ought to take the antenna receptacle off the rail, and remove the obsolete receiver from the cabin. But I probably won't. I have a kind of preservationist mentality. I like the Scapegrace's period feel and won't change it any more than I can help.

Finally, here's the sort of thing you can see off your starboard quarter, at anchor in Port Jefferson, if you happen to wake up in the middle of the night:

It's not quite as scary as it appears. There's a big industrial mooring buoy a hundred fifty feet or so from where I anchored in Port Jeff, and tugs and barges use it a lot. This particular tug came in, during the wee hours, and tied up to the buoy. The subdued rumble of its idling engines woke me up, and I took the picture. The next morning, shortly after sunrise, a huge fuel barge came majestically into the harbor, bound for the Port Jeff power plant, and my neighbor cast off and went to help it dock.

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(*) Though the FCC has apparently given GPS' adjacent frequency band to some fella called Sanjiv Ahuja, proprietor of an outfit called Lightsquared, whose business plan is to sell wholesale wireless data channels; not to people like us, but to "people" like Apple and Verizon. The sages predict extensive interference. I can't wait. Groping my way into Buzzards Bay at three AM, in the fog, and suddenly I've got no GPS because Sanjiv just cut a deal with Rupert Murdoch.

All downhill from here

2011-07-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

When I took the dinghy out of the semi-idyllic Sand Hole, there was actually some wind. By the time I got back on the Scapegrace and got the anchor up -- dying, dying, dead. So in the heat of the day I anchored again and tried to nap, a couple of miles west, off Oak Point:

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After several uncomfortable and steamy hours there, a bit of a breeze came up, from the north-northwest, and I was able to make a long board on the starboard tack past Sands Point and finally anchor, in the dark, in about twenty feet of water off Barkers Point:

View Sands Point, NY in a larger map

In the morning the gloomy vista of Hart Island, mentioned here before (scroll down), was visible a few miles across the Sound. Hart Island is New York's potter's field, where our penurious dead are parsimoniously salted away in six-deep tenements. But at least there, they need no longer fear being rousted by the forces of order or the the indignant proprietors of property. The place is a sort of memento-mori for me, in a way that a more ordinary graveyard is not, and I can never set eyes on it without falling into a very thoughtful state of mind.

A discovery

2011-07-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

Attempting to leave Oyster Bay, I found myself becalmed, as usual on this trip, at the very mouth of the harbor. So I decided to improve the time by exploring a place I have often wondered about: the Sand Hole, on the west side of the outermost part of Lloyd's Neck (which forms the eastern side of the Oyster Bay/Cold Spring Harbor complex.) You can see the Sand Hole in context, a little vermiform appendix of water, bounded by sandbars, at the top of the satellite photo on the previous post. Here's a closeup:

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The chart shows enough water for the Scapegrace (which draws four feet) in most of the Sand Hole, except at the narrowest part of the inlet, just after you round the tip of the long rock jetty on the west and head south for a couple hundred feet. At low tide the chart shows three feet of water just there. High tide, of course, would be no problem -- the tide rises about seven feet in these parts -- but then the jetty would be submerged and invisible, a scary idea.

It was low tide when I decided to do my exploring, so I anchored the Scapegrace in the slightly shallower (lighter-colored) open water you can see to the west of the jetty, and take the dinghy in.

The throat of the inlet was indeed very narrow and very shallow -- certainly no more than three feet, maybe less. The current was still running out of it, creating a pleasant little bumpy rapids over the bar. It's one boat at a time -- if somebody's coming out, you wait before you go in.

Once inside, there's a nice Lost World feel, somewhat impaired by menacing signs around the first (southern) baylet you enter: PRIVATE NO LANDING PRIVATE NO ANCHORING PRIVATE PRIVATE PRIVATE GODDAMMIT HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU. But once you round the point that forms the eastern side of the inlet, and head north into the second baylet, it's all public land, apparently.

This was a Saturday, and the Lost World had apparently been re-found by some denizens of Stamford and such places. But there weren't many -- three or four boats when I came in, and they were all pretty well-behaved. Nobody playing music or shrieking with mirth.

I went to beach the dinghy in the little corner pocket on the west side of the northern baylet, and found to my surprise that you can't. The shore climbs at a forty-five degree angle, or nearly, and the bottom drops off an what appeared to be an even sharper angle below. So you don't slide up onto the sand; you bump into the bank, and your bow is nuzzling it while your stern is in maybe eight feet of water. But there was some kind of wrecked framework of big timbers a few feet up the beach -- the remains of a pier, perhaps? -- and the dinghy's painter extended far enough to secure it to this picturesque ruin.

I walked along the shore toward the east and north, exchanging civilities with a well-spoken small young family -- mom, dad, and tot -- paddling in the water near their motorboat, which they had backed up to the shore; that tells you how fast the bottom falls off. They had brought an anchor twenty feet or so up the shore, buried it in the sandy gravel, and put a big flat rock on top to keep the boat in place. Perhaps there was another anchor out in the water; I didn't notice.

There's a path that leads up into the scrub woods toward the north. Twenty feet from the water and all the smells change: dry, spicy, a little sweet and floral. There were some kind of cactus, or what looked like cactus to me, growing rife in little clearings, with very showy complicated big yellow flowers. Somehow I don't associate cactus with Long Island. I wish I knew the names of plants and birds, but alas, it's a closed book to me.

I wandered up a couple of the little ankle-deep rivulets that drain the big salt marsh to the east; this was really a lost world -- not a human sound; just the distant growl of the surf on the outside of the sandbar, the trickle of the little streams, the various cries of birds, so unintelligible and meaningless to an ornithomoron like me; it was like walking down the sidewalk in some parts of Queens and hearing languages that you can't even begin to identify; couldn't even tell what part of the world they might be from.

Had a quick and refreshing swim in the northern baylet. It was starting to get crowded -- some idiot even had a jet-ski, though he hadn't started using it yet -- and I packed myself into the dinghy and returned to the Scapegrace. I'd like to come back, on a weekday perhaps, after Labor Day, and try to bring the sailboat in -- though that initial entry would have me chewing my knuckles.

Ruled by the wind...

2011-07-08T17:16:00.000-07:00

... and circumstance.

An east wind this morning, after very discouraging progress toward Maine. And much to do back in New York. I hate a ticking clock -- they make me utterly miserable -- so I took the hint and turned back toward New York.

The Gods, acknowledging my submission, were kind.

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all, 
But will its negative inversion, be prodigal!

The east wind remained steady and whisked me across 24 miles of Long Island Sound in an afternoon, a very pleasant ride -- the sort of thing that might make a sail-hater reconsider.

But then the sail-hater would have re-reconsidered. Just outside Oyster Bay harbor, the wind died, and the rain came; but I motored in, glad for the coolness and the wet -- wearing a bathing suit and a ratty old cotton polo shirt for the first hour, and loving it, till finally I had to put on a jacket.

Oyster Bay/Cold Spring is a much-recessed harbor, a hassle to get in and out of. I want to be out soon, and I'm not expecting any heavy weather, so I dropped the hook in a non-standard anchorage:

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Weird waters -- the depth goes from sixty feet to twelve in half a second.

I continue to be amazed by the relentless voracious beach flies -- "greenheads", I think they're called, at least on Cape Cod. Sunset, temp in the sixties, rain pouring down, I'm scrambling around trying to dowse the mainsail and start the motor and keep the dinghy's towline from fouling the motor's prop; and a dozen greenheads are circling my naked shins like, I dunno, bail bondsmen at The Tombs. Every five seconds or so, one darts in like a dive bomber, grabs a chunk of high-fed Upper West Side flesh, and flies away before I can even start thinking about swatting him (or her? I can't tell).

The rain does slow 'em down. But even so, they're too fast for me.

About last night...

2011-07-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

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Here's where I spent it, anchored behind Charles Island off Milford, Connecticut, a pretty spot. The town of Milford is a mixed bag. The public library (for fast free Wifi) is within walking distance of the town landing, as are several restaurants and the Metro-North suburban rail station, but apparently no grocery store, at least according to the pleasant girls in the restaurant where I ate dinner. (Of course suburban notions of "walking distance" are problematic and highly variable.) Anyway, no orange juice for me in the next couple of days.

While I was dining in high Milford style, another boater had come into the anchorage and situated himself far too close to me. I monitored the situation at intervals for a couple of hours, and finally concluded that we were going to bump into each other during the night. So I hauled up the anchor and moved.

It wasn't as difficult as it might have been, since the little anchorage has a nice even bottom with no nasty rocks. I had to put-putt around for a quarter of an hour so so, to find a spot that was reasonably sheltered by the island, and far enough from the other eight or nine boats, and far enough from the island that I wasn't likely to swing into shoal water.

Considerable rain and thunder during the night, which brought the temperature down nicely -- I was still sweating when I went to bed. Now a gray and cooler morning, with muttered threats of thunderstorms on the weather radio and a wind from the southeast.

What is to be done?

Escape from Port Jefferson -- sorta

2011-07-07T15:50:00.000-07:00

When last heard from, your correspondent was languishing on a windless Wednesday in Port Jefferson, New York, which is a nice anchorage and not altogether an uninteresting place. There is a ferry which runs from there to Bridgeport, Connecticut, a place that will live in infamy as the home of Joe Lieberman.

I regret to say the ferries are car ferries; but as a result they are impressively large craft, and it's quite something to see them surging in and out of the narrow harbor. One of them is named the P. T. Barnum, which tickles me when I hear it calling on the VHF: "Securite securite, P T Barnum leaving Port Jefferson." I want to call back and say "This way to the egress, PT," but so far I have restrained the impulse. Wisecracks don't seem to be much indulged in on Channel 13.

Anyway, I ended up spending all day yesterday (Wednesday 6 July) and last night in Port Jeff. No wind in the morning, and then I had to wait for high tide to bring the Scapegrace up to the fuel dock and fill up the water tank. That was about 3 PM, and once it was accomplished, the weather radio was uttering dire threats about severe thunderstorms; and I don't love sailing at night, anyway. (I was planning on heading for Mattituck, which is about 24 miles away, and there's really nothing resembling a harbor or an anchorage anywhere in between.) So discretion -- or laziness -- triumphed and I dropped the hook again in Port J and spent the night.

The thunderstorms never materialized, though it did get a little breezy for about an hour.

This morning the wind situation looked a little better, so I fared forth. Of course, half a mile out of the harbor, the wind died.

Okay, I thought, I'll wait and see what happens. It's really quite unpleasant being out on the boat on a cloudless day in July, with no wind; the sun beats down into the cockpit, the cabin is an oven, and the sweat runs off you in rivers and literally pools under your ass if you sit down, and drips off your face if you bend over.

Finally a breath of breeze -- but dead foul; from the east; so I decided to modify my plan and head across the Sound to Milford, Connecticut, a place I've never been.

The little easterly breeze moved me along at two knots or so for a couple of hours -- then, you guessed it, died. In disgust I motored the last eight miles into Milford harbor, which has its charm. I'll write more about it anon.

Two hours of motoring full-throttle with my little Tohatsu 6 hp outboard consumed a gallon and a half of gas (or maybe a little less). It moves me along at four and a half knots and a bit, if I'm towing the dinghy (as I am). It's nice to know these stats but I never seem to take note of them.

Being in Port Jeff reminded me of a crazy windsurfing incident when I was much younger (though still old enough to know better). Maybe I'll write that up one of these days.

Sights of the Sound

2011-07-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

Holed up in the Port Jefferson public library; no wind. Here are some pictures. Click on 'em to get a bigger version:

Escape from New York:

Monstrosity in Oyster Bay, from the water. Looks like a branch of the US Mint, doesn't it?

Same, from above. Apparently it's actually somebody's house:

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Anchorage off Eaton's Neck. The Sound seems to be reclaiming Long Island. There are a number of houses perched above bluffs like this.

Clouds with shadows of other, lower clouds (maybe contrails?) on them. The sun had already set so the light was shining up. A curious sight.

Another monstrosity, this one in Port Jefferson. Note the denudation of the hillside. Possible the landscaping isn't complete, but the slope looks very steep to me, and the all-holy lawn may not be an option. The chainsaws were still busy in the woods to the right as I was anchoring. I don't believe this thing was here last time I visited. Surely I would have remembered?

From above. The hillside looks downright scrofulous.

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Slow progress

2011-07-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this, 72 hours after starting out, from a highly characteristic restaurant in Port Jefferson, Long Island. Haven't gotten very far, as you can see.

The project may have to be re-thought -- may turn into a little cruise in Long Island Sound, researching harbors I haven't visited before.

I might try the Connecticut coast for a change, though the charts make all the harbors look very intimidating --narrow crooked channels and rocks all over the place.

Spent Saturday night at anchor in Manhasset Bay; then after a discouraging slow gray rainy day ghosting along with almost no wind, the second night off a place called Peacock Point (if memory serves -- I didn't bring the log or the charts ashore). Lat/long, for those who know their way around Google Maps, is 40.901366,-73.61342. Don't have enough bits to embed a Google Map myself just now.

This was a little tiny cove half-protected by a cat's claw breakwater. Interesting as a glimpse of an older Long Island; there were rich people's houses on shore, but they were almost entirely hidden by trees. The more recent Long Island look is to build a grotesque monster McGormenghast and cut down all the trees for a quarter-mile around, so the glaring horror is set in a staring bare-faced lawn which extends right down to the beach.

I once wrote an essay that began, "The only thing more vulgar than a lawn is a view." Perhaps I'll try to find and post it. Long Island wealth these days seems to do both the lawn and the view con brio.

Third night, after another frustrating slow sweltering day wallowing at half a knot across the entrances to Hempstead Harbor and Oyster Bay, I dropped the hook on the eastern side of Eaton's Neck and spent a quiet Fourth of July night there. There's a long spit of low-lying sand called Asharokan (or Asharoken?) Neck connecting Eatons Neck with the rest of Long Island, and apparently it is a local custom to light bonfires every hundred feet or so along the beach on the Fourth. I think this is much nicer than fireworks, which always seem very Westphalian to me, not to say Louis XIV.

Once could see, through binoculars, the silhouettes of the celebrating local citizenry in front of the fires. It wasn't apparently all left up the The Experts and The Professionals; a rare thing these days.

Then today a slightly brisker run to Port J -- 2.5 knots or so, but the wind died a mile short of the harbor entrance and I had to motor in. The dinghy, which I'm towing, had banged at some point against the outboard, and jammed its bracket, which I had to pry loose, with much swearing, in order to get the motor back down into the water. Outboards! They'll be the death of me.

Into Port J for groceries and fuel and a meal that's been cooked, also a few beers. The city dock charges $12/hr to tie up your dinghy, but posh Danford's Marina only charges $10/day. Go figure.

Escape from New York

2011-07-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

I wish I had a picture for you. I don't, for reasons that will appear below.

Once again, I've taken off for Maine -- Quixotically enough, since it takes forever to get there, and I have a million indispensable things to do this summer.

Well, maybe they're not quite indispensable; but I'll be severely criticized if I don't do them.

Still, bloody-minded and self-indulgent as I am, I'm on my way. How many more times, at my age, will I have this opportunity? Not many.

I got a little portable 3G/4G mobile hotspot from my ISP, and it actually sorta-kinda works -- I'm writing this update by lamplight, on anchor in Manhasset Bay.

Took off from 79th Street at 3 PM or so, motored down the Hudson against the wind but with the current; timed it just right and caught the turn of the current at the Battery at 5 pm, and eased up the East River and through Hell Gate on a following wind. Didn't even bother to raise the mainsail -- anything for a quiet life. Used the old creaky self-furler to open up the oversized genoa, which I'm using these days for reasons that require another post.

Much to reflect upon: the anxious knot in one's gut before one sets out on a mad adventure like this -- now gone, of course, twelve hours after its worst. The mental weather got better as soon as Scapegrace and I left the mooring.

Oh, and why no picture? Because the 4G/3G guys charge me by the bit. There'll be pictures as soon as we tie up somewhere and can use somebody else's network.

A collision, you don't need

2011-05-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

My mooring was supposed to be NE-14, at about the latitude of 89th Street, a big improvement from previous years when the boat was a half-mile or more farther up the choppy churning Hudson. When I arrived, however, NE-14 was maybe 20 feet from NE-13, and the Cap'n on NE-13 was watching my approach with very worried eyes.

I was worried too. There just wasn't enough space between the two moorings. Slack water, cross wind -- the boats would have tangled. No doubt about it.

I circled and circled, trying to make up my mind -- to the point that the Boat Basin guys called my cell phone, wondering what I was up to. (Of course I didn't have the VHF on. Of course. Idiot.)

I finally decided to grab unoccupied NE-15, at least for the time being. The handy-dandy snap hook, discussed here before, did its job flawlessly, and I was able to button up the boat and dinghy back down to the dock, against a fairly strong upstream current, in reasonably short order -- though the mooring pennants, as usual, were tangled up in a nightmarish knot under the water, and I had to half-immerse myself again, sorting them out beneath the buoy. But this sort of thing keeps one's joints limber and one's mind alert, so it's all good, as they say.

At the dock, I encountered NE-13's Cap'n, Hector, a very amiable chap, who definitely thought I did the right thing by avoiding NE-14. The Boat Basin guys thought I was a bit of a wuss -- you can tell -- but they were very forgiving and what-the-hell about it.

Surrounded by the kewl kidz

2011-05-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

Turned out my little anchorage was quite close to a little regatta course, with a bunch of very new and obviously very expensive J boats -- each with a crew of six or seven -- rounding marks and yelling "starboard tack" at each other. (I didn't take the picture above; it's from a J one-design site.)

They are handsome boats, no doubt about it. But I can't love that bowsprit. For one thing, it retracts and extrudes -- tucks itself back into the hull when the spinnaker is dowsed, and then bones up again when it's time to re-pop the chute, five minutes later. It made me think of some exotic insect's intromittent organ -- a praying mantis', maybe. Is there some poor drudge under hatches, up in the bow, who works it in and out? Or is it done from the cockpit?

All these boats also had sails made of some exotic material that made a distinctly unpleasant metallic rattle when the boat luffed up. It was this very un-nautical sound that awoke me from my nap.

They all pretended I wasn't there, but at least they didn't yell at me, "starboard tack" or anything else.

Slack water in the early afternoon, and the obliging south breeze still blowing steadily. After the usual struggle with the mucilaginous and malodorous muck of New York harbor, I recovered the anchor and took a nice leisurely sail up the Hudson.

Back into the Hudson

2011-05-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

That's the ruins of the sanatorium, on North Brother Island, where Typhoid Mary lived out the last of her days. (If you click on the image you'll get a higher-res version). North Brother is also the island where the ill-fated General Slocum grounded after it caught fire, a terrible, terrible story. Quite a haunted place, North Brother Island.

My path from Charlie's yard, on Eastchester Bay at the western extremity of Long Island Sound, leads under the Throgs Neck and Whitestone bridges, past Riker's Island, another Mordor-like fastness of the Incarceration Sector, and between the two Brothers, North and South. I left Charlie's yard about 6:30 AM, and motored against a steady but mild south wind out of Eastchester Bay. Once I made the right turn to head west under the Throg's Neck, I was able to shut down the outboard and sail, at least as far as Riker's. But the currents get crazy in those waters, and the winds get fluky, so I fired up the motor again to negotiate the narrow passage between the Brothers and thence on to Hell Gate and the East River.

Foreground, the Hell Gate railroad bridge, a very handsome structure if you ask me; and behind it, the Triborough Bridge, like the Whitestone and Throgs Neck a cheesy, shoddy Robert Moses monstrosity. If you ask me.

The Triborough has recently been renamed after that creepy little runt Robert Kennedy, just to show us all that the Kennedy family still has some clout. Although there's a certain suitability -- crummy bridge, opportunist politician -- I resent renamings and will continue to call it the Triborough, as will most New Yorkers, I expect. Only out-of-towners refer to Sixth Avenue as Avenue Of The Americas, and that's been, what, seventy years now?

Caught the current at Hell Gate just about at maximum ebb, about 9:30 AM. I'd say the current was running about four knots. Just ran the motor enough to be able to steer, which you need to do a lot in Hell Gate; there are weird cross-currents and back-currents that can send you shooting fifty feet sideways in ten seconds, or spin you around and send you back the way you came. On this particular occasion there was a very odd series of stationary swells -- standing waves of some kind, it seemed -- about seven feet crest-to-trough, which the Scapegrace shouldered her way through in her usual unfazed don't-fuck-with-me manner, sending rather spectacular sprays of water to either side of the bow.

A Coast Guard cutter came roaring up the other way, and though the Coasties are usually pretty considerate of small-boat traffic -- unlike the NYC boat cops -- this particular skipper didn't touch his throttle, and left a nasty wake which I had to cross at a shallow angle. Perhaps the ongoing campaign to turn the Coast Guard into yet another overgunned police force is working all too well.

Down the East River on the ebb, still running the motor just for steerageway.

Foreground, the Manhattan Bridge; background, the Brooklyn Bridge. Both a big improvement over Robert Moses, and the Brooklyn Bridge, of course, a thing of real beauty. You can just see the Statue of Liberty under the bridge spans, out in the harbor, particularly if you click on the image and get the big version.

Made it around the Battery, for once, without being scared shitless by the Staten Island Ferry. Of course it was a Saturday, so the ferry wasn't running as often; and I had brought along a timetable. As it happened a ferry arrived at the Manhattan terminus about fifteen minutes before I got there, and departed again ten minutes later. So I followed it out of the narrow stretch between the Battery and Governor's Island.

Since the wind was still from the south, I tried sailing up the Hudson, though the current was still against me. Found I was getting nowhere fast, so I scooted across the river and dropped the hook in about ten feet of water just north of Ellis Island and waited for the current to change direction. Nap time!

Back in the water

2011-05-20T17:11:00.000-07:00

The Scapegrace weathered a dire winter of undeserved neglect this last year; but she weathered it awfully well. I was so happy when I finally went to see her, back in February, and found her stoutly unaffected by a winter that may have aged me ten years, but left her looking very much like her sturdy indomitable self.

There she is, above, after I touched up the paint on her hull and Charlie, with his amazing gingerly touch on the crane, dropped her gently into the water again, like an Easter egg. How I love that boat.

I took the subway out to Charlie's on Friday the 13th, with a bottle -- or maybe two -- of cheap boat wine in my knapsack. I strolled through Pelham Park and stopped off at Barino's -- I have to tell you more about Barino's, some day -- and bought a wonderful sandwich, prosciutto and mozzarella (pronounced brozhiutt' e moddzarell', in The Bronx).

Climbed on board. When she's in the water and you step on the gunnel, she gives you a little nod. A living thing again. What joy.

Lit the oil lamps -- yes, they're smelly and smoky, and Penelope hates them. But they seem very homey to me. Slept on the boat happily that night, and then -- at the crack o' dawn -- took off for Hell Gate and the Battery and the Hudson.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

2011-04-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of other Pearson 26s out there. Scapegrace's next-door neighbor, through this last harsh winter out in Charlie's boatyard, was a sister ship. Here's the sister's keel:

Scapegrace's wasn't quite so bad this spring. You can see her keel in the background; but that's after a scraping and a pass with the wire brush in the drill, and a coat of paint. Before all that, there was a lot of rust.

It's that way every year. The keel is cast iron, and the critter-proof bottom paint doesn't keep the water away. Over the years before Scapegrace and I became acquainted, water got in under the paint; and now the iron has developed vacuoles, buboes, voids, blisters; pockets that rust from underneath. Even after that first coat of paint, you can see the Invisible Worm starting his riots -- and the boat isn't even in the water yet!

The sages at Charlie's boatyard tell me I have to take the whole keel down to bare metal and paint it with some kind of adamantine primer. Then they take a look at my little Sears drill and gently intimate that it may be time to move up to some Big Boy gear.

Night on the Hudson

2010-09-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

As promised, a wind came up from a little east of north at around 11 PM, just when the current turned to the ebb. Convenient. The moon was nearly full, the sky clear; a beautiful, beautiful night. I ran down the Hudson at five knots or so, never touching a sheet. It took five hours and change to get back to 79th Street.

I didn't turn on the radio, which is unusual, for me, when I sail at night. I couldn't tell you what I thought about all that time, with nothing to do but just lightly steer the boat. You can get into a strange trancelike contemplative state, sailing.

The current was running pretty strong at 79th Street when I got there. Managed to pick up the mooring without disaster, though. It was four or five AM and I didn't feel industrious enough to button up the boat and take the dinghy back to the marina, so I just bundled up the mainsail untidily around the boom and went to sleep in the vee-berth.

Ultima Thule (this time)

2010-09-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

Speaking of odd sights on the upper Hudson: this rather eccentric sculpture adorns the entrance to the Haverstraw Marina, where Lindsay and I were to meet for brunch.

In spite of the sculpture, I recommend the marina. It's very well-run and extensive, and the water is reasonably deep inside -- ten feet or more in most places. It's also very luxe and I suspect fairly pricey, though I don't actually know that for a fact, because when I hailed 'em on Channel 9 and explained that I wanted to tie up for a couple of hours and have brunch at their restaurant, they gave me a slip gratis. I can't be sure this would have happened before Labor Day, but anyway, that's what they did, in the friendliest way imaginable, and it deserves recording.

A helpful chap on the fuel pier directed me into the right finger of the dock, and an amiable open-faced gap-toothed carrot-topped young fella took a stern line as I came scooting into the slip. I was rather priding myself on my boat-handling -- made the turn crisply from the very narrow fairway into the slip, and then shifted the little outboard into reverse at just the right moment to take the way off the boat.

Unfortunately, as soon as I had completed this rather elegant maneuver, I somehow managed to shift the motor into 'forward' rather than 'neutral'. The motor was only just idling, so no serious damage was done, but I found myself very confused, when I hopped off the bow to secure a bow line, to find the boat insistently nuzzling up into the slip like a horny young dog trying to hump your leg.

Turned out the restaurant wasn't going to open for another hour or so. Lindsay and I sat on the riverbank to wait, and had the great pleasure of watching eagles fishing -- I thought they were ospreys at first, but they were just too big and the wrong color. And a kindly birdwatching gent, who was a dead ringer for Vladimir Nabokov, finally set us straight.

It was almost as much of a pleasure to watch him, sitting on his log and staring through his very high-end binoculars, as it was to watch the birds themselves. The look on his face -- sheer bliss.

The eagles were quite something. Made me realize that Tennyson must have actually seen them -- this wasn't just Lit'rachoor:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The 'thunderbolt' part is just right. Though "falls" is an understement. They bide their time, soaring lazily fifty or sixty feet up, and then suddenly drive themselves downwards, and fold their wings, and plummet like a cinderblock into the water, with a spectacular splash.

About half the time they emerge with a struggling silvery fish in their talons, thrashing this way and that. As with most raptors, it seems to be hard work for them to regain altitude, particularly since they have the writhing fish to deal with at the same time. But they manage. They manage admirably.

Lindsay and I finally had our brunch, and gossiped like grigs about all our old schoolfellows. Then it was time to go.

The current had just turned to the ebb, but the wind was from the south. I could tack, though, and as I may have mentioned, the Scapegrace points very well into the wind. So that's what I did for a couple of hours, until I was back in Croton Bay...

And the wind died. A painted ship, upon a painted sea, as the man said.

So I listened to the weather radio. Wind shifting to the north at 11 PM. And by chance, the current would be turning to the ebb again, just about then.

Hmmmm.

I anchored in Croton Bay again, maybe fifty feet from where I had anchored the night before, and took a nice long nap.

Up the river, a little farther

2010-09-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

A trip up the Hudson offers many wonderful sights. Above, a sewage treatment plant, somewhere in Westchester, designed in what, the 1950s? by somebody who clearly admired Palladio but perhaps didn't admire him quite enough. I especially like the ductwork on the roof. A closeup (click on the image) will reveal a wealth of graffiti, tastefully restricted to the virtual voids of the facade, which enliven the building considerably. In fact it's hard to resist the conclusion that the graffitists had a better eye than the architect.

After my morning coffee in Croton Bay, we took stock of our situation. A mile or so of open water in every direction. It's shallow, ten feet or so, but not alarmingly shallow (the Scapegrace draws four feet) and there are no nasty rocks or bars to worry about anywhere nearby. There was a mild breeze from the southeast, just begging me to ride it the five miles upriver to my rendezvous with my old school friend Lindsay.

Usually I am very paranoid about anchoring and the reverse -- up-anchoring? De-anchoring? Is there a word for it? But I suddenly felt strangely bold and determined to sail the Scapegrace off her anchor. So I raised the mainsail and let the sheet run free, and sauntered like a gentleman of leisure up to the bow and hauled the anchor rode in till it was vertical. I let the boat's motion bounce the anchor out of the muck, and once we started to drift slowly downwind, I hauled the anchor up, bouncing it a few times just under water until most of the bottom silt had washed off, and took my time fastening it to its improvised fixture on the pulpit rail -- I owe you a picture of this very ghetto arrangement.

I hadn't even put the motor down into the water, much less started it and left it idling, which is what I usually do, in my paranoid way, when it comes time to up-anchor. So I didn't have the motor running, and then I took my time securing the anchor, rather than scrambling to get it aboard any old how and then scampering frantically back to the cockpit. (Which is what I usually do.) This all felt like a strange heedless God-tempting way to act. But the big tranquil bay and the sweet small steady breeze and the tiny lapping waves encouraged a certain uncharacteristic confidence.

It worked out. Once the anchor was aboard and secured, we were fifty yards closer to our destination, and in deeper water. The jib's roller-furler did its job without a squeak or a moan or a jam, and we bowled along up the river toward Haverstraw at four knots or so.

Haverstraw itself may have to wait for another diary entry.

Up the river

2010-09-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

That's Sing Sing prison, in Ossining, New York, which was not my destination on this trip, and I hope never will be.

I haven't done enough sailing this year. In particular, I didn't get my sail up to Maine and back. I was looking for a job, you see. In the event I got neither the job nor the sail. Perhaps there's a lesson in that.

So last weekend I decided to take the Scapegrace up the Hudson. The pretext was visiting an old college pal of mine -- call her Lindsay -- who lives in Rockland County, near Nyack. (I seem to need to have a destination -- can't just take the boat out and potter around.) The plan was to meet Lindsay at the Haverstraw Marina, in, where else, Haverstraw, about 25 miles upstream.

Got a late start on Saturday, and the wind was very light and variable. Took a couple of hours to get to the Cloisters, shown below --

-- which was looking very pretty in New York's surprisingly Mediterranean low, level evening light. I was starting to think I wasn't going to make it to Haverstraw in any reasonable amount of time; that I'd have to turn tail ignominiously and head home. But I decided to keep going until the current turned to the ebb, later that evening, and see how far I got.

As it happened, the wind freshened and scooted me rather nicely right up the river to Croton Bay, five miles from my destination and a mile or so from the aforementioned prison:

Croton Bay, as you can see, is a big piece of water, but it's quite shallow -- about ten feet on the outer margins, shoaling up, as you approach the shore, in a forgivingly gradual way. And it has a nice clean even sandy-clay bottom that doesn't stink when your anchor brings it up. It was about 11 PM when I got there, and the current had turned against me, and the wind had died, so I took advantage of the nice clean bottom, as everyone should do when they have the chance, and dropped the hook.

On one side I had the depressing prison, sprawled hugely like a lounging Behemoth escaped out of Paradise Lost, glaring over the water with an infernal brimstony light from its thousands of sodium lamps. (What must their electricity bill be, even now that the Rosenbergs' old chair has been deactivated?) On the other side was Croton Point, which has a park, nestled in the shadow of a semi-disguised landfill.

Now I have never been an inmate of Sing Sing. But I do have a connection with Croton Point Park. Both my kids went to a nice high-minded private school in New York -- let's call it St Cosmas and St Dismas. SS C&D used to have their annual Family Field Day at Croton Point Park, a tiring and tedious bus ride from New York. Neither of my kids was all that into field sports, and neither their mom or I was very good at talking to other parents about investments that we didn't have. So these outings had a curious emotional quality. We always embarked on them with some kind of strangely unfounded high hopes, and always returned in a deep state of gloom and irritable misanthropy.

SS C&D, in spite of its sanctoral patronage, turned out in the end to be just another evil careerist meat-packing plant disguised as a school. So my memories of Croton Point Park and its associations are not, generally speaking, happy memories, though there are of course happy moments among them -- gleams amid the gloom.

On the one hand, recollections of the credentialling sector. On the other, the relentless searching glare of the incarceration sector. Not for the first time, I found myself pondering the affinities and symbioses of the two.

* * * * *

But enough of that. I curled up in the vee-berth and awoke with the bright clean dawn next day, made my coffee, and took off for Haverstraw.

Freeze, motherfucker. It's Independence Day!

2010-09-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I sorta dropped the story a couple months back.

Penelope and I arrived off Coney Island as dusk was falling, to encounter four interrelated problems:

1) The wind had died down to a very mild and unhelpful westerly zephyr;

2) The current was strongly on the ebb through the Narrows;

3) I didn't think we had enough gas to motor, against the current, all the way up through the Narrows and into the Hudson;

4) It was the Fourth of July, and because of the Macy's fireworks, Homeland Security and other elements of the Enforcement Sector had taken the opportunity to declare a celebratory lockdown of the Hudson River. Why? Because they can.

So I disappointed poor Penelope yet again, and dropped the hook out in the middle of the outer harbor on this quickly darkening eve of Year CCXXXIV of American Liberty:

It's not quite as bad as it looks. The shipping channel is about a half-mile to the west, and that's seventy feet of water or so. But here on the East Bank flats, there was maybe twelve feet under our keel, and no weather expected. Good holding ground, though the sludge is incredibly stinky and foul when the anchor comes home. I paid out a hundred feet of rode and figured we were probably safe from anything except a blind-drunk patriot doing twenty knots in a planing hull. But it's a big body of water and the odds were on our side.

I hung a flashlight from the signal halliard on the starboard spreader, by way of improvised anchor light, in case the blind-drunk patriot wasn't entirely blind. I loathe fireworks, and I don't have much use for patriotism either, so I crawled up in the vee-berth and went to sleep. Penelope took care of our patriotic duty and watched the fireworks.

I was awakened by a change of timbre in the sound of the current under the hull, and the wind in the rigging -- about eleven PM, I think. Crawled groggily out of the berth to find my two girls, Penelope and the Scapegrace, both looking bouncy and energetic. I was looking, and feeling, anything but.

Still. The current was with us now, and the wind, still westerly, had freshened again. So we raised the main and sailed the anchor out of the East Bank muck -- first time the Scapegrace and I have done that. Set the jib and went bowling at four knots or so up toward Giovanni's bridge.

About a quarter-mile south of the bridge, the cool fresh sea breeze gave way to a hot sulfurous simoom off Staten Island. It was still wind, of course, and a sailor is always grateful for wind, but this was a very downscale wind -- a wind full of monoxide and motor oil and Axe armpit deodorant. Not to mention, fifteen degrees warmer than what we'd been used to for the last few days. Oh. July. In New York. Right.

You get used to the smell, if you live here. The mephitic wind took us up under Giovanni's bridge and almost to the Battery and then died. But we were near home now, and we had the current with us, and enough gas for the home stretch. So we doused the main and kept the jib up, for what little help it might provide, and dropped the little old outboard and fired her up and started chug-chugging up the river.

Motoring is not my favorite thing, but this was kinda nice. All the fireworks fans were gone. The river was empty. No commercial traffic, and the tall buildings on either shore half-lit -- in each of them there were probably a few driven cubicle rats still slaving away in chase of an ever-more-remote career prize, but surely, surely not many?

The water was calm and oily. One felt like a burglar, or a ghost, creeping along through the night while all the good citizens were asleep. It reminded me of a little book I used to read my kids, when they were small, a sweetly illustrated version of Robert Louis Stevenson's nice tiny poem "The Moon:"

The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;
She shines on thieves on the garden wall,
On streets and fields and harbour quays,
And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.

The squalling cat and the squeaking mouse,
The howling dog by the door of the house,
The bat that lies in bed at noon,
All love to be out by the light of the moon.

But all of the things that belong to the day
Cuddle to sleep to be out of her way;
And flowers and children close their eyes
Till up in the morning the sun shall arise.

The book I used to read to the kids must be long out of print. I can't find an image of it online, and the vicissitudes of modern domestic life have shuffled the actual physical volume off into some parallel universe where parents don't fuck up. But I remember the pictures: the darkness, the few dim warm lights from the houses, the dad and the little child going fishing, and the harmless comic-opera burglars climbing over the garden wall in the background.

On this tranquil and sentimental note I lay down on the starboard cockpit cushion, my head awkwardly propped against an empty gasoline jerrican, and fell into a deep deep primordial reptilian sleep, while Penelope steered the Scapegrace up the river.

She didn't even have to wake me when we drew abreast of 79th Street. Amazing how one knows where one is, and what time it is, no matter how shut-down one's brain seems to be. Or perhaps these profound slumbers are not so shut-down as we think, and our waking life is just a series of footnotes on what happens when we're asleep.

Whether or no: I popped awake, much refreshed, promptly forgot my travels in the land of the Mothers, and whatever I might have learned there. Saw vigilant Penelope at the helm, wide awake, looking as capable as stout Cortez and a lot more fetching. Our mooring was a quarter-mile away. The dinghy was still there -- not a thing to be taken for granted. I rummaged down in the cabin and found the clever quick-release hook and we crept up to the mooring and grabbed it on the first try, then closed up the poor boat any old how and dinghied back to the Boat Basin and slogged up the hill toward pavement and taxis.

We lucked out: the moment we emerged from Robert Moses' dank perverse subterranean Boat Basin, there was a cab, idling right in front of us, with a cheerful carefree young Chinese guy behind the wheel. Not a good place to look for fares, statistically speaking. One had the sense that this was maybe his first night on the job, and he was loving it: You mean... they pay me... to DRIVE? What a country!

We had to direct the happy young explorer turn-by-turn to our door, and you could just see him filing it all away for the benefit of the second fare of his career -- which may not happen for a while, unless he finds a better place to look for fares than the Boat Basin at two AM on a holiday weekend.

And so home, and so to bed, on a deck that doesn't move. What a concept.

Yo, Giovanni

2010-07-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

Above, Giovanni, a famous Boat Dude, wearing the sort of expression a Cap'n gets when some hapless other Cap'n ignores the Starboard Tack rule.

I got up at an uncharacteristically early hour, for me, in order to catch the beginning of the ebb and have the whole day to tack up toward Giovanni's bridge -- or no, that's ambiguous, the bridge indirectly named after Giovanni. The weather radio was still predicting wind from the west.

Made my coffee, took the picture on the previous post as soon as it was light enough, recovered the hook and groped out through the sandbars of our little cove (locally known as "Sore Thumb", a helpful commenter informs me). Penelope awoke in time to help me with the buoys -- I'm color-blind, or partly so, and it's hard for me to tell a green buoy from a red one at any distance, which is a serious problem amid the kinks and curlicues of Fire Island Inlet. Fortunately, Penelope's color vision is flawless.

She is not, however, so fond of heeling (though she enjoys high-heeling, and looks wonderful doing it). Once we cleared the inlet, the wind was blowing a nice fifteen knots or so, and we were pointing as high as the Scapegrace would go -- which is pretty high, bless her. So there was a bit more heel, of the undesirable variety, than Penelope could quite like. Seas were three feet or so, and choppy, which made for a bumpy ride, too. So Penelope wisely got herself wedged back into the vee-berth and went to sleep.

Now I normally don't love tacking the Scapegrace by myself. The winches aren't self-tailing, and there aren't even any of those nice cam cleats -- the jib sheets go around a plain old cleat, and securing them is a fussy process when you're trying to do ten other things. Moreover, cleating down the sheet removes your concentration, for a few seconds, from your steering, during which interval the S. comes smartly up into the wind, backwinds her jib, and laughs a killing little flirty laugh at you as you go back onto the former tack and try again. This leads to much swearing on the skipper's part, which in my case makes up in volume and copiousness for what it lacks in originality. (Fuck ... fuck ... FUCK! Double fuck! -- That sort of thing.)

There is still another wrinkle. The Scapegrace has a very useful traveller, stretching all the way across the cockpit, for the main sheet -- sorry, I don't have a picture -- which is a boon when you're sailing close-hauled. I find that if you haul the traveller all the way up to the windward side and then ease the sheet a little, the mainsail takes on a better shape, and the slot between tightly-boused jib and easier main is still wide enough to let lots of air through, and move us all along at a nice brisk pace.

You see where this is going, right? When you tack, not only do you have all the usual pain-in-the-ass multitasking that tacking always requires, but you also have to move the traveller from the former to the current windward side. Impossible. You'd have to be an octopus with opposable thumbs.

On this trip, I made a discovery: This is not a yacht race. Elegance is inconsequential -- though nobody, of course, ever wants to look foolish, even if there are no human spectators around to laugh. There are always the Naiads, and no guy wants a Naiad laughing at him.

Still. I think I have found a way to keep the Naiads' laughter down to a small not-unkindly smile, even though William F Buckley -- dead, and not a minute too soon -- might have sneered, curling his reptilian upper lip back from those horrible rabbit-like incisors he had. But the hell with the Buckleys, and all these over-funded Connecticut "yachtsmen". Give me the Naiads any day.

Here's my trick: You heave-to.

That is, you come up onto the new tack. But you don't bring the jib around; you backwind it, and bring the tiller smartly up so the jib stays backwinded, and there you are, hove-to and riding incredibly quietly, a downright halcyon upon the waves, going very slowly at more-or-less a right angle to the wind. I love heaving-to. It's fucking magic.

Now you have some options. You can relieve yourself over the side if you need to, or go down into the cabin and make some more coffee so you will need to relieve yourself in an hour, about when the next tack comes due. You can creep forward and untangle the anchor line, which you just scattered any old how all over the foredeck when you weighed.

Or you can catch your breath for thirty seconds, while William F Buckley and his ilk wonder what the hell you're up to; then move the traveller to the new windward side, at your leisure, and uncleat the jib and let it pop over to the new leeward side, and take off on the new tack like a bat out of hell, without ever having broken a sweat or said "fuck!" even once.

You learn something every day -- if you're lucky.

Home again, home again -- sorta

2010-07-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Penelope and I timed our departure from Bellport to catch the ebb current at Fire Island Inlet (or in this case, of course, Outlet) -- left at noon, expected to get there sixish in the evening, and then the plan was to sail through the night again. The wind was from the south when we left, but by the time we got to the inlet, the weather radio was glumly predicting a shift into the west -- dead foul for us, of course.

Now the Scapegrace points very nicely and sails very sturdily close-hauled, but somehow I had no appetite for beating up, board upon board, through the night, after having spent six hours already groping through the labyrinthine shallows of Great South Bay. I should have just said so and determinedly dropped the hook in the pleasant little cove mapped above. But I knew Penelope wanted to get home, and I felt a bit wuss-like hanging it up after a half-day, so I dithered. Not something you want to see your Cap'n doing.

Penelope could tell what I really wanted, which was to anchor and go to sleep, so that's what she advised -- against her own inclinations; and I fear she was disappointed when I allowed myself to be persuaded (twist my rubber arm). This is an old domestic-comedy motif, isn't it?

We had some not-too-bad food to eat and some wine to drink and so we got back on good terms pretty soon. The anchorage was crowded and a bit noisy, but sometime during the night all the day-trippers had vanished, and this was the scene from our cockpit at dawn:

Another note on Bellport

2010-07-12T14:01:00.000-07:00

This image is very unfair to Bellport, where the lots are bigger, the houses are nicer, and the street grid is sanely rectilinear -- none of these stupid Levittown swoops and curves, designed to entertain people in cars, people half-catatonic with boredom after their two-hour commute back from the Office.

Ludwig, mine host, mentioned to me that he had an old car -- a nice old car; a Jag? An Aston-Martin? Can't quite recall -- hidden in his garage. He had to hide it because the Bellport civic authorities have outlawed the possession of unregistered, un-tagged cars. It's thought to be a very white-trash thing, in Bellport, to keep an old car around for parts.

The stated reason for encoding this prejudice into law, however, is that old cars kept around for parts "lower property values". An argument which, apparently, everybody accepts.

This is not, after all, my political blog. So I will just ask two questions here:

(1) Why are low property values a bad thing? If food and medicine gets less expensive, that's a good thing, right? Why are there different rules for houses and house lots?

(2) We Amurricans like to believe that we are sturdy rugged individualists, resentful of nannyism and intrusive gummint. So how does it come about that so many of us live in places where the Authorities can -- and do -- tell us what color to paint our houses, and what we can keep on the lawn?

Tomorrow Penelope and I are back on the water, where property is -- forgive the pun -- a more fluid thing.

Bellport

2010-07-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

We didn't take any pictures in Bellport. A Google image search for "Bellport, NY" will turn this up, around page three or or four:

... the work of some deservedly little-known American abstract-impressionist named Pinajian, or so he claims. This was in fact the most interesting image of Bellport I could find.

It really looks more like this:

... which is, of course, from a real-estate shark's site, where it is accompanied with this breathless prose:

OLD SCRATCH PROPERTIES is the leader in seasonal rentals in the Bellport area. Nothing compares to experiencing quiet time by the shore in this beautiful community. Be sure to contact us soon because there are so few rentals available.

("Old Scratch Properties" is my inspiration, naturally.)

Our friends' house looks a little like this, actually, except the house is nicer and the pool smaller. Let's call the friends Ludwig and Maria Theresa von Hapsburg.

Bellport is really a pretty town. I don't want to be unkind here. The marina is efficiently run and has a sturdy wave-wall sheltering three well-built docks, with a few transient slips available. Maria Theresa met us on the middle dock and waved us toward one of these transient slips, which I miraculously got us into without dinging the hull or even swearing. Not even once. Honest.

Still. It's not just Long Island -- it's the South Shore of Long Island, and not a million miles from the dire Hamptons. As we strolled up the street from the marina to Schloss Hapsburg, we passed a pleasant grassy field where a bevy of nice-looking young people, with even tans and perfect teeth, were de-rigging and stowing their bran-new shiny-bright Laser fleet, after a day of schooling on the water. Jeunes filles en fleur, and garcons too, for those whose taste runs that way. A delightful sight -- if it weren't for the voices.

Is there anything more grating than a Long Guyland accent? A South Shore accent, at that? I despair of rendering it. Dickens and Trollope and Thackeray tried to do dialects, and failed dismally. Where they failed I am unlikely to succeed. Let me just observe that there are no simple vowels on Long Island -- no eh's and ah's and oh's. There are only diphthongs, and triphthongs, and tetraphthongs: Eeeuuoowww!

The Hapsburgs don't talk that way, thank God, being transplants from elsewhere, and people with an ear as well. They're a charming couple, with a very likable teenage son, and they had, on this occasion, some amiable and clubbable houseguests. Penelope and I spent a very pleasant evening chez Hapsburg, grilling chicken and talking about everything under the sun, and then we strolled back to the boat, in its quiet slip, and turned in.

Penelope on board, Day 2

2010-07-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

Above, a butterfly who butterflew our way and rested chez nous as we motored our cautious way up Great South Bay toward Bellport (previous posts have the back-story and the map). We saw a good many of his ilk -- who can identify him? -- but this particular individual stayed with us for a good long while. Perhaps he had made quite a night of it. Yesterday, he was in Charleston, maybe.

Great South Bay is a scary place for a sailor. The average depth is what, two feet? The Scapegrace draws four. There is a channel -- a nightmarishly shallow channel, by my standards, with the depth gauge reading nine feet -- seven feet -- seven and half. Five!

And it twists and turns fiendishly, and it's really narrow. If you lose your focus on the next buoy for ten seconds, and go fifteen feet off your course, the depth gauge starts doing that terrible thing where the water is too shallow to compute, and the display just goes blank. Aiieee!

White-knuckle stuff for me, as sailing in the dark was for Penelope. Funny how this stuff works. A beautiful bright sunny calm blue day, with the motor put-putting along; no heeling, no bouncing around. Penelope was happy as a cat with a bowlful of cream, and ten times as attractive. And I was a nervous wreck. What goes around comes around, as they say.

We managed to grope our way up the channel to a spot not too far from Bellport, and then realized that we were in danger of arriving early, an unforgivable social sin. So we dropped the anchor in eight feet -- which was already starting to sound like deep water -- and took a nap.

What a day!

Penelope on board, continued.

2010-07-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

Would that one had so much crew.

The story so far: Penelope and and have sailed out of New York harbor, en route to Fire Island, and night has fallen. Penelope is scared, and of course so am I, though I would never admit it to her.

The wind was brisk, from the southwest, which from a sailing point of view was great, but didn't enhance Penelope's peace of mind. The Scapegrace steers a little skittish in a quartering sea, and being a small boat, after all, bounces around extravagantly at the slightest opportunity. Poor Penelope -- who is, at the end of the day, a highly intelligent girl -- decided that if she had to die, she'd rather die in her sleep, so she went and curled herself up in the vee-berth and dove into unconsciousness.

This left me in a position both familiar and unfamiliar. I'm used to sailing through the night -- used to all the surprising reveries that come to mind, used to the deceptiveness of distances, used to the boredom that imperceptibly transforms itself into a kind of contemplative trance. Used to the strange lifting happiness that comes with the first faint hint of a lightening sky in the east -- just that tiny finger-sized corner of the firmament a shade less black, and hosanna, it's officially a new day. Above all, used to being grateful for the moon, which on this night shambled reluctantly up, gibbous, misshapen, unshaven, unwashed and surly, a little after twelve.

What I wasn't used to was worrying about Penelope. Should I heave-to and go below and try to comfort her? Console her? Reassure her?

You can forget the reassurance, actually. She wouldn't believe a word I said, and quite right, too.

While all these thoughts were chasing each others' tails in my head I became aware of a strange rhythmic sound, not one I'm used to on the boat: a gentle woodwind burr, like an oboe d'amore heard through a velvet curtain, on and off, a few seconds in each phase. What on earth is that?

It took a few minutes and then the penny dropped: it was Penelope snoring. Gently, peaceably snoring, a lovely familiar domestic music, though never heard before on the high seas, and surprising in this new context.

The rest of the night was very happy: a good steady breeze moving us along at five or six knots; moonlight on the water -- splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus -- and my dear girl down in the cabin, making a noise like a small contented sawmill, no doubt dreaming of posh hotels and nice restaurants.

We got to Fire Island inlet about four AM, just when the blush began in the east. The current was still on the ebb through the inlet and I didn't want to fight it -- and I wanted daylight to find the channel, too. So I crept cautiously up into about twenty feet of water off Democrat Point (why is it called that, I wonder?) and dropped the hook. Bundled the sail up any old how on the boom and gratefully dove below to curl up next to my favorite sawmill for a few hours' rest.

Penelope joins Odysseus on the boat, part 1

2010-07-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

That apparently leaning lighthouse above is the Fire Island light. Penelope and I set sail from our Hudson River mooring last Thursday -- July 1, I guess -- to catch the evening tide and ease down the river and through the Narrows and out into the trackless Atlantic, for a trip to Fire Island inlet and through that into Great South Bay and up to Bellport, where we have friends. Map:

We had a nice west wind and bowled down the river like kiss-my-hand, narrowly avoiding the Staten Island Ferry as usual, and were past the Narrows and well on our way East when it started to get dark.

One was, in a sense, prepared for this contingency. It happens every day, more or less, and the plan had been to sail through the night -- nothing too hard about it, three or four miles offshore, with no rocks to avoid and plenty of room to see any shipping there might be. Just run down the latitude and you're at Fire Island before you can say "fabulous"!

And yet and yet -- there's a certain sinking feeling when the sun goes down. Ogg the cave man and Oggette his better half must have felt it long ago; it's encoded, no doubt, in our primate brains. Night coming! Get into cave, or climb tree, or something!

I always feel it, every time, though I'm sorta used to it. Penelope wasn't used to it, and she was scared to death.

To be continued...

Tour de Bronx

2010-06-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

I mentioned Charlie's boatyard a while back. Above is the nearby Pelham Bay landfill (this is the Bronx, after all). Below is the tricky narrow egress, difficult for a duffer like me to manage in a crosswind, as I may have mentioned before:

Charlie is at least the second generation of his family to run this boatyard, or so I hear. I wouldn't dare ask Charlie himself any questions about his family history, or indeed any questions at all not absolutely necessary, because I am rather in awe of Charlie.

Not that Charlie is a hard case, or an unfriendly guy. On the contrary: like most Boat Dudes, he's hospitable, kindly, sociable, and generous, which you don't realize at first because like most Boat Dudes, he has a somewhat laconic just-the-facts-Ma'am manner. Here is an exterior shot of part of Charlie's house, in the yard -- sorry about the Dumpster; I couldn't find an angle that didn't include it:

Charlie noticed me taking pictures, which piqued his curiosity since he wasn't expecting to see me again until October. He promptly invited me to take a picture from inside his house:

Nice, huh?

Charlie has a colleague named Emil, or maybe Emile. I would no more dare take a picture of Emil than I would twist a lion's tail, though Emil is also a wonderful guy and took suitable measures during a winter gale when a tarp I had secured badly over the Scapegrace blew loose. (He cut it away and let it fly off in a 40-knot breeze into Eastchester Bay, before it could pull the boat right off her poppets.)

Here's where Emil lives, or so I'm told:

I imagine Emil is very aware of the weather.

Eastchester Bay is very urban. Just on the other side is the New York police shooting range, where they also take bombs, or possible bombs, and the occasional bag lady's bag, to dispose of them "safely". It was probably illegal to take this picture, but I took it anyway:

Most afternoons at Charlie's yard one hears the ominous mechanical bang-bang of automatic weapon fire sounding flatly across the water from this dismal fortress. I didn't know what it was, at first -- thought it was fireworks, then realized there just aren't that many holidays. Unless you're a cop, and then every day is about gunpowder.

Whom, exactly, are they practicing to shoot? Not me -- not in their minds, anyway -- but having had some of those guns pointed at me, in my day, it's an unpleasant thing to hear. Whomever it is they're practicing to shoot, they won't shoot in the service of my interests.

I don't know how many of my fellow Boat Dudes at Charlie's yard would agree with my suspicion and dislike of the police. Some of them are retired cops, others retired firemen (who would possibly be more sympathetic; there's no love lost between the cops and the firemen).

The Boat Dudes don't love authority, but they don't love the underclasses either. So -- much as I love the Boat Dudes, I stay away from this topic.

On my way back from Charlie's, I took a detour to pick up an outboard motor part at Sheila's outboard motor place on City Island. I parked illegally and wandered for a few minutes through Pelham Cemetery, a very nice spot to be buried, if buried one must be:

Off across the water there is Hart Island, with its melancholy abandoned smokestack. Hart Island is New York's potter's field, where we bury our dead on the stingy taxpayers' tab when nobody else can be found to pay for the Dead Dude's last piece of private property.

Not too many people know about Hart Island, but it has a certain morbid fascination for me. I have sailed around it. There are signs warning you to keep away -- the burials are handled by prisoners from another island in the New York archipelago, Rikers Island, and so Hart's itself, and its humble dead, are now a fief of the Incarceration Sector.

Sheila's outboard motor place is right next to the dock from which Charon's ferry takes the unwanted and uncherished -- or at least, unpaid-for -- dead over to Hart's. The dock is plastered with dire minatory warnings from the wonderfully-named "Department of Corrections", but maybe one of these days I'll feel bold enough to take a picture.

Ah, technology (Part Deux)

2010-06-03T08:24:00.000-07:00

While I was out on the boat yesterday, I was looking reproachfully at the nifty little hook which failed me so disastrously as I was trying to get on the mooring the other day.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it had failed to close properly around the whatchacallit, shackle? on the mooring buoy. The opening of the hook was clearly large enough to accommodate the shackle; you could see that by eyeballing it.

So I put it back on the pole and walked up to the bow and darted it at the mooring buoy -- while still safely attached, this time -- and eccolo:

(As usual, click to enlarge.)

Doin' what it oughter, right? So why didn't it do that when I needed it?!

With the profound superstition of sailors, I can only think it was a message from the gods: Take nothing for granted -- especially technology.

Belt and suspenders

2010-06-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

It may have been mentioned that I once lost an outboard motor overboard -- a brand-new one, I might add -- thanks to the New York city police. (No, I haven't ever actually told the story. What am I waiting for? A book contract, maybe?)

Anyway, I don't want to lose another. Motor, I mean, not book contract. So when the Scapegrace is moored on the choppy turbulent roller-coaster waters of the Hudson River, I wrap a dock line around the motor and secure it on either side, in case the motor mount itself -- which frankly isn't that sturdy -- should work loose.

Now this is ugly as sin, as you can see from the photo above. (Click to see more detail). But it does help me sleep better at night, which at my age is a great thing.

(You may be thinking, as you look at this picture, that all the motor has to do is work loose and twist once arsy-versy and it's gone. What you can't see is that the deck line also goes through a handle on the front of the motor. So there, Mr Subtle Topologist!)

I have a number of these repulsive, un-yachty, Appalachian po'-white-trash improvisations set up on the poor boat -- which certainly deserves better, but when the Cap'n is basically a pauper, this is what you get. Here's another such desperate improvisation:

It may not be very easy for non-sailors to see, but sailors will notice right away that the boom is held down, not just by the taut main sheet in the center of the picture, but also by an ungainly and inelegant dock line -- yet another repurposed dock line -- stretching up from the starboard quarter cleat to the boom, around the boom in a clove hitch, and then down to the port-side rail.

Hey, as long as I was doing something ugly, I thought I'd make it really ugly.

Now the reason for doing this is that the boat rocks a good deal, and every so often gale-force winds come roaring down the Hudson and pry loose anything that can be pried loose. Last year -- before I started lashing these brutal unlovely corsets on the poor Scapegrace -- I had a very nasty experience: The boom whipped around so much in one of these winds that a pin broke, the main sheet collapsed in a heap on the cockpit sole, and the boom was unsecured by anything except the very permissive topping lift -- the little cable that keeps it up above head height when you're not actually sailing, and creates that insouciant jaunty cocked-up boom angle that you can see in other pictures of the dear boat here on the blog.

Now we must make an entry in the Kindness Of Strangers file, a very well-filled jacket in any boater's life. The day that I came out to the boat and discovered that this mishap had occurred, probably a day or two before, I also found that somebody -- presumably another boater on a nearby mooring, perhaps even the guy who has the other Pearson 26 -- had quietly boarded the Scapegrace and improvised a lash-down for the boom, so it didn't bang around any more and damage itself, or the mast, or the standing rigging.

Of course I was pleased and grateful. Oddly enough, on my way back to the dinghy dock -- about a mile and a half of boisterous Hudson that year -- I passed another boat where the very same thing had happened -- one of the fittings on the main sheet broke, and the boom was whipping back and forth like a spoon in one of those in-sink garbage disposals, with an equally nasty and scary sound.

I had a moment's hesitation. It's a huge taboo to go on somebody else's boat uninvited. But somebody had gone on mine, and I was glad they had. It's the Band Of Brothers here at the Hudson River boat basin. So I tied up the dinghy on the other boat's cleat, and climbed aboard, and found a few random lengths of line here and there in the cockpit that I could fit together to jury-rig a lashing for the boom and keep it amidships.

What goes around comes around, they say. But it seldom comes around so quickly and neatly. A nice moment.

Still afloat

2010-05-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

So there she is at her mooring, apparently unscathed by her captain's depraved negligence and folly in running her on the rocks, shown below:

She's floating as high as she ever did. A sturdy boat, bless her.

You can see the boil of the current around the mooring buoy -- it was running about three knots. And you can also see that there is apparently only one mooring line, not the two there are supposed to be. Hmmm.

A trip out to the boat and a closer look revealed this situation:

I don't know how clear it is from the picture, but the two mooring lines are wrapped several dozen times around each other, and both are wrapped around the chain under the buoy. In fact investigation later revealed that one was wrapped more times around the chain than the other, and I honestly don't know how this is topologically possible on any plausible physical scenario. It's a tangle that the Prince of Darkness himself might be proud to have contrived. Or Bernini.

The current and the chop weren't horrible enough to prevent me from disentangling the pennant lines, which revealed that one of them was already chafed so badly by the chain that I had to go back to see Seth at the marina and get a replacement. This after what, three days on the mooring?

Seth is a very good guy and he gave me two lines -- "Replace 'em both," he said, "and leave one of the old ones on for an oh-shit line." Good advice, I think.

Here's a slightly more cheerful view of the shoreline -- the troll's smiling face, you might say:

This shot quite unintentionally incorporates a building where I used to live -- just visible above the notch in the trees right in the center of the image.

Ah, technology

2010-05-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

That's the 79th Street boat basin, above. But the boats you see there inside the breakwater belong to the hereditary aristocracy. Apply for a slip today, and your great-grandchildren might possibly get it.

No, οἱ πολλοί, like me, get moorings, outside the cozy little enclosure you see, in a field extending uptown -- i.e. toward the bottom of the picture. You can see a few boats in part of the field.

It's a pretty convenient place to keep your boat if you live on the Upper West Side, but otherwise has little to recommend it. The current -- especially the ebb current -- is incredibly fierce, and it's completely unprotected from swell and chop and wakes from commercial shipping and big displacement-hull motor yachts, so your boat gets knocked around a lot. Your mooring lines chafe and sometimes part. Moorings have been known to drag. Stuff comes floating down the river at five or six knots -- logs, big pieces of timber, that sort of thing -- and bangs into your hull. A snug harbor it ain't.

Among other things, the wicked current makes it a tricky business to pick up your mooring. You have to creep up-current toward the mooring, as if you were stalking some skittish animal with a sensitive nose, grab the mooring lines -- which are probably tangled around the anchor chain under the buoy -- get them aboard and secured to a cleat, while simultaneously throttling down and shifting the motor into neutral. If you're single-handing this requires you to have three arms and be in two places at once -- the cockpit to deal with the motor and steer, and the bow to grab the mooring lines. Imaginative readers can probably visualize the scrambling, the swearing, the confusion, the Keystone Kops comedy of it all.

(Did I mention that it's a crowded mooring field, with other boats nearby to collide with if anything goes wrong; and that there's always a nasty crosswind?)

But help is at hand:

Last year I happened to see the ingenious device shown above in the Bosun Supplies catalogue, a favorite compendium of boat-geek gadget-porn. (You can click on the image to see more detail.) It's a hook, with a spring-loaded shackle that closes it. The shackle is held open by a clip attached to your boat pole; that's the state shown above. You get the hook around something -- an eye, a line -- and give a tug. The hook is pulled out of the clip and the shackle closes, as shown below:

Aha, thinks I, I can run a line back from the bow to the cockpit, attach this clever little widget to the line, bring the boat up alongside the mooring buoy, get the hook around the ring on top of the buoy (the one the mooring lines are attached to), and be fast to the mooring in one quick dart of the boat pole. Now I can throttle down and shift into neutral and take more than a millisecond doing it, if necessary, knowing that I won't drift any farther back down-current than the length of the line attached to my clever self-closing hook, which is to say something less than the length of the hull. And in fact without too much scrambling I can get myself up to the bow and pull the boat along the line up to the buoy and get the real mooring lines aboard before I've even drifted that far.

That was the idea, anyway, and it worked fine -- up to a point.

My mooring this year is number NE-18, which is closer to the boat basin and the dinghy dock than last year's was -- it's at about the latitude of 90th Street, or thereabouts, a half-mile or so from the dinghy dock. And it's in the row of moorings closest to shore -- maybe fifty feet -- and in fairly shallow water (fifteen feet). I was kinda pleased by this, since I figured the current and the chop might not be so bad closer to shore.

But of course, on the other hand, you're closer to shore. And this is what the shore looks like:

Can you see that the shore is lined with big rugged boulders, laid down to keep the landfill in place back when Robert Moses extended Riverside Park, and built the west side highway?

Perhaps you can see where this is going. I'll spare you the blow-by-blow. I crept up to my mooring, darted my boat pole at the buoy, heard the satisfying click as the hook escaped from the clip and the shackle snapped shut. I calmly throttled down, shifted the motor into neutral, sauntered toward the bow -- and then heard the unspeakably horrible noise of my iron keel grating against one of those Robert Moses boulders. It's a noise I hope you never hear, and I'll awaken in a cold sweat for years to come, hearing it in my dreams.

Here's what had happened:

The galvanized iron eye on top of the buoy, which I had hooked onto, was so thick that the clever spring-loaded shackle couldn't close all the way over it and secure the hook. I really ought to have a picture of this situation, because it may be hard to visualize; but alas I don't. At any rate the hook dropped off the buoy and without knowing it I was adrift, unsecured to anything, in maybe three knots of downstream current and five knots of west wind, which pushed the poor ill-managed and incompetently-captained Scapegrace right onto the rocks, in less time than I would have believed possible.

The next thirty seconds or so are a terrible gray fog in my memory, lit by a few lurid flashes:

Me trying to fend several tons of wind-driven boat off a troll's jaw of snaggletoothed rocks with a flimsy aluminum boat pole. Dream on.
A cyclist, along the riverfront path, maybe four or five feet from my face with its pale rictus of fear and horror, looking down at me and saying "Oh whoa ho ho" or "Woo hoo hoo" or something similar. I'm glad to say he was a very dorky middle-aged West Side cyclist, wearing a helmet, and difficult as it may be to believe, I was reminded even in these extreme circumstances of Dr Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield(*).
Feeling the boat rock a little with the swell -- not hard aground, then! -- and scampering back to the cockpit and shifting the motor into forward and gunning the throttle and praying, no-shit praying that we could horse her back into deeper water.

The gods gave us a break. We got away from the hull-crunching shore without any more grinding and grating. We came back up to the mooring and captured it again. This time, even though the shackle still didn't close, the hook held on and I was able to fish out the mooring lines and cleat them down on my poor ill-used girl's foredeck.

I don't think the hull hit the rocks. I think it was just the iron keel. There was no water in the bilge, and the keel bolts still seemed as firmly seated and as well sealed as ever, when I took a look after my pulse rate came back to a standard deviation or two over normal. But the only way I'll really know what happened is to put on the mask and fins and plunge -- facilis descensus Averno -- into the toxic soup of the Hudson and take a look. Which I will do, as soon as I've had a tetanus shot.

Meanwhile I feel, dear reader -- and pardon my language -- like shit. I feel incompetent, and foolish, and culpable.

Back in the day the Royal Navy used to court-martial any captain whose ship was wrecked. I see the point. My ship wasn't wrecked but I still deserve a court martial, and if I had one, the way I feel right now, I would plead guilty and insist on the death penalty.

-----------------

(*) "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?"

Back in the water

2010-05-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

It's a new sailing season, and the dawn came up like thunder a couple of days ago over Eastchester Bay -- well, no, not at all like thunder; that line never made any sense to me, actually. But it came up, anyhow, like nothing but itself, and looked damn pretty doing it, with the somber leaden gleam of the water, and the Rococo pink and gold of the sky, as I took the Scapegrace out of Charlie's boatyard in the Bronx, where she spent the winter, to catch the ebb at Hell Gate and so down the East River to dodge the pouncing Staten Island Ferry at the Battery and thence up the Hudson to my mooring at 79th Street.

(I should really say, of course, that Scapegrace took me, not vice versa.)

A New York hipster like me never goes anywhere, even to sea, without his fixed-gear bike:

... shown above, somewhat indistinctly, riding in the battered but still afloat dinghy (note the missing D ring at the bow). The bike was along for the ride because I had come up to Charlie's the afternoon before, via subway and bike -- this is one of the many charms of Charlie's boatyard -- and spent the night on the boat, in preparation for a crack-o'-dawn departure.

It was very nice to be back on the boat, and very cozy, but what with the excitement and the myriad of noises in the yard and a somewhat apprehensive ear involuntarily turned to the wind -- a bit more brisk and gusty during the night than I really wished for -- it wasn't very restful.

But I awoke, or rather got up, betimes, and made some coffee. The wind had died, which was fine with me; it's a rather tight and twisty path you have to steer to get out of the yard, and hard to negotiate with any wind at all.

(An earlier attempt, two days before, with a nasty crosswind, had led to an undignified debacle, with the boat blown involuntarily back into a slip thirty feet away from the slip it left. No harm done, fortunately, except to my self-regard, and of course to the schedule. But schedules are flimsy things compared to wind and tide.)

Even without the wind, on my second and successful attempt yesterday, I was kept rather busy getting the boat out, and forgot to snap a picture of Charlie's yard until I was well away from it:

I'll have to tell you more about Charlie's boatyard one of these days; it's a wonderful place.

Very little traffic about, and very little wind, so I motored down under the Throgs Neck Bridge and the Whitestone, arriving at Hell Gate after about an hour and a half. There was a good five knots of current running, but fortunately those horrific eddies that suddenly send you shooting off at a right angle to your course were not in evidence, or at least I didn't encounter any -- this time.

The East River was full of whirlpools and upsurges, and for the first half-mile or so gave me a roller-coasterish ride. But then it simmered down and ran smooth, though strong, and I cruised at about seven knots made good -- maybe three through the water -- past the UN, where no stormtroopers descended this time, and got to the Battery in an hour.

Gave the Staten Island ferry terminal a wide berth, and kept an eagle eye on the wicked bloody-minded vessel itself, which usually leaps from its slip like a cheetah and surges straight down upon me at flank speed, blowing its horn like the trump of doom, at the worst possible moment, every time I venture near. This time I was lucky and had completed crossing its track toward the Dismal Borough before it came bounding from its lair, licking its chops and seeking whom it might devour. I'd swear it deviated a little from its usual course just to give me an uneasy moment, but then I've been paranoid about anything connected with Staten Island ever since it put Giuliani in Gracie Mansion.

On the way up the Hudson I passed some of my own trash headed downstream:

Hey! That was a perfectly good plastic bucket! Penelope must have thrown it out when I wasn't looking.

My arrival at the mooring was, as so often occurs, attended with some excitement, but I'll save that for another post.

Homeward bound

2009-11-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

Each day in Maine is perceptibly a little shorter than the last. The leaves are still green and the air is still warm -- or as warm as it ever is -- but it's time to think about heading home. Across the Gulf of Maine again -- in hurricane season this time -- and back down into Cape Cod Bay and through that awful canal and down Buzzards Bay and through the scary Race and into Long Island Sound, which is of course practically home.

It's nice here in Maine but there is that itch to be afloat again, which raises the perennial question of why we do this crazy stuff.

Penelope's brother-in-law, Ted, a wonderful fellow who hails from Australia originally, is going to schlep up to Maine and keep me company for the first few days -- that long passage across the Gulf of Maine, when a comrade who can take the helm is particularly welcome.

We will be casting off the mooring and setting sail again in a day or two.

Serpent in the garden

2009-11-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

My own experiences with outboard motors have not been quite such fun as the image above suggests.

My little rubber-ducky dinghy -- shown below, in the very pretty Saco River below Biddeford, Maine --

... has a weensy 4 horsepower Tohatsu outboard, which I'm sorry to say has given me nothing but trouble. Earlier on, in our journey from New York to Maine, I had to spend an unplanned-for day in Port Jefferson, Long Island, getting its carburetor cleaned out, for the third time this season. I may have mentioned this. It depressed me so much I was tempted to sail back to New York and take the train to Maine -- euphony unintended.

After the ministrations of Port Inflatables, the dinghy motor worked fine all the way to Maine and continued to work fine for a week or so after I got there. Then one day, headed across the quarter-mile of water between my idyllic island and the mainland, the motor wouldn't rev up. It putted and sputtered and coughed and heroically got me within rowing distance of the mainland dock, and then died with a horrible Keatsian phthistic rattle.

Bummer. Like, majorly. I wanted to cut my throat. Am I cursed?

I consulted the outboard experts on the island. "Carb cleaner," one sage said. "Drain the sediment bowl," said another -- and actually showed me where the sediment bowl was, and how to drain it. Which I had not known, and am now grateful to know.

I tried both these remedies, and I believe they were both good advice.

But I also got to thinking.

This motor was bought used -- after the dinghy's first motor was lost, thanks to the New York City police department, a story that will be told in ten years or so, when I can tell it without going purple in the face.

Anyway. Used motor. Not much used. Looked brand-new. Chap I bought it from had found it underpowered for his boat, after a short trial. I thought I was getting a bargain -- a practically new motor for half-price.

However. He must have had it sitting around for a while in his garage. And more to the point, the fuel tank and hose must have been sitting around too, with gas in them. Gas with ethanol in it.

If I had known more about outboards, I would have discarded his tank and hose in a rest stop somewhere on the Long Island Expressway, the promised homeland of all things cruddy. But I didn't, and so (as I now think) I was feeding crud -- Long Island crud! -- from a deteriorated hose, and a varnished-up tank, into the poor motor's freshly-cleaned carb every time I ran it.

Having figured this out -- finally! -- I trashed the hose, and bought a new one, and miraculously found a Tohatsu fuel-line connector in Grover's wonderful hardware store, in Boothbay Harbor. Grover's also sold me, for thirty-five cents, a nice stainless-steel marine-grade hose clamp to attach the hose to the connector.

Just to be on the safe side, I also bought a new tank -- this, too, from the irreplaceable Grover's -- and gave the old one to one of my island sages, who has a two-stroke motor, much more forgiving of cruddy gas than my refined sushi-eating Tohatsu.

What with the carb cleaner, and the sediment bowl, and the new tank and hose, the motor miraculously started running again -- without taking it to a High Priest and paying $200, for the fourth time in one summer, to propitiate the outboard gods.

There's a bit more to this story, but we will get to that in due course, on the return trip from Maine to New York.

Back in the historical present, your narrator is still enjoying his long slow late-summer days in Maine, with the early misty dawns and the protracted glorious sunsets over the silvery Anonymascott River. The bell-buoy he nearly hit on the way in tolls the knell of every parting day. The kids are all here, Penelope curls up next to sea-weary Odysseus every night, the sweet corn is to die for.

Soon enough -- too soon -- Odysseus will have to weigh anchor again and head back to New York. But back here in the historical present, it's a very nice life, and we are loath to leave it.

Blogging from Patmos

2009-10-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

So here I am, in the historical present, on my island, like St John, shown above. Substitute a laptop for the tablet and you have me, to the life.

St John, however, used his island time to better effect than I did. I didn't see the new heaven and the new earth, much as I would like to.

On the other hand, the old heaven and the old earth have much to recommend them, and of those, as well as the old sea, I saw plenty.

Ate well, mostly from the old sea's abundance, and saw more of my kids than I usually see during the busy weeks of what we call, with bitter humor, "normal life." Played some music on the island's old piano and even older reed organ. Took the Scapegrace out for a few day-sails -- once with my brother and sister-in-law, once with Mrs Odysseus, once by myself.

Happy pleasant tranquil times are hard to write about, and hard to make interesting. The outboard-motor subplot advanced a bit during these Arcadian days, but perhaps I'll leave that for another post.

Day 16, and the following night: Odysseus reaches Ithaca

2009-10-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

Day 16 dawned bright and clear. Wind very light but steady and the Scapegrace would steer herself again.

About noon a tiny colorful bird came unexpectedly fluttering out of nowhere and landed, obviously dead-tired and miles from anywhere, on the Scapegrace's foredeck. I tried to take pictures of him, or her, not very successfully:

(More at flickr.)

Friends of mine who are strong in birdlore tried to identify this bold sojourner, but the sages were somewhat divided:

"A Blackburnian Warbler in fall plumage? Note the streaking and the wingbars."

"G. thinks it is a Magnolia but I think she's wrong (fall plumage is duller)."

"Or perhaps a Blackpoll?"

Since I can't tell one bird from another, it was nice to see the sages puzzled too.

Whatever his race and nation, birdie stayed on my deck for an hour and a half or so, then took wing and fluttered stoutly off southward. I wished him -- or her -- the very best of luck.

The pleasant sunny day passed without incident, apart from a gruesome Gothic floating snag that I nearly hit. A whole tree trunk, twenty feet long or so, with a limb stretching up into the air and a congeries of gnarly knotted branches that looked like a grasping ghoulish hand. Kinda reminded me of my first landlord in New York -- a chap who was actually, I kid you not, struck down by a cerebral haemorrhage at sunset on Yom Kippur.

Oh and I ran over a seal -- at least, I think I did. There was a thump on the hull and I looked around and saw, ten feet astern, the seal's sleek little round head pop up, and I swear to you he glared at me, then indulged himself in the kind of rueful "what are they thinking of" headshake that I reserve for drivers who try to bully me out of a crosswalk in New York.

As dusk fell, I entered the Anonymascott River, the last leg of my journey. (I was bound for a secret island whose name I cannot utter. It's a Masonic thing.)

Now this is Maine. So the wind died and the fog descended with an almost audible thump, so thick you could hardly see past your extended arm, and so damp that the sail and the rigging and my nose dripped, and my glasses fogged up.

It was more or less slack water, so there was no current to fight, and I was very keen to get into a real warm bed, on dry land, next to a wife whom I had begun to consider semi-legendary. I fired up the old engine and went roaring, heedless of rocks and ledges and shelves and reefs, up the black-as-your-hat foggy Anonymascott at six knots or so.

I sorta know these waters -- not like a lobsterman, of course, but I've sailed 'em before. Even so: this was an insane move. It's a miracle I didn't bring the Scapegrace and myself to grief, and sink us both without a trace, a mile or two from Ithaca and Penelope.

For one thing, I nearly ran us smack into a buoy. It's a buoy with a bell, and of course I heard the bell, but directionality at night, in the fog, is uncertain -- and then, oh shit, the damn thing materialized out of the fog, dead ahead, rearing up like a monster in a low-budget horror movie. I flung myself on the tiller and scraped past with maybe a foot to spare, and I swear I could hear the Scapegrace muttering, "Idiot!"

Then of course I mistook the island next to my destination island for the island I wanted, and nearly tore the Scapegrace's keel off on a ledge of adamantine Maine granite -- a very different affair from the soft sand of Billingsgate Island -- before I realized my mistake, twenty feet from disaster.

Finally I found the right channel. It's a narrow twisty one, say thirty feet wide. I groped my way through it and became aware of a soft light ahead -- what could that be? Moonrise? Another boat?

The weather gods must be opera fans. They chose this moment to lift the fog -- whoosh! -- like a scrim, and reveal, through the suddenly crystalline air, the old familiar boathouse, with its homey porch lamp, on the island I sailed all this way to find.

Ithaca!

Got the Scapegrace on her mooring at the first try. Closed the hatch any old how. Piled into the dinghy, whose motor miraculously started. Staggered up the boardwalk from the boathouse.

Amazing how hard it is to walk fast on land after two weeks and some on a boat -- I reeled crazily from side to side, like an old gent much the worse for country-club gin. Once actually put a leg over the boardwalk's edge, knee-deep into the mosquitoey muck.

But I knew the way, and though no dogs bothered to turn out, and no swineherds embraced my mucky knees, I soon found myself at the door of the cottage where wife and children slept quietly.

Actually, that's a lie; they were all snoring like sawmills. Not that I minded. A nice noise. Sounded like a Tibetan monastery. I catfooted up the stairs, did off my rank nautical clothing, and snuggled into bed next to Penelope.

She stirred drowsily, murmured complacently, "Oh, there you are!" and went back to sleep.

Day 15, concluded

2009-10-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

After my visit from Leviathan, the Scapegrace continued to sail herself while the sun sank and set, and a bright clear moonless night -- did what?

"Ensued"? That's terrible. You can't say "night dawned." Why not? Why isn't there some equivalent? "Night sunsetted". Nope. No good.

You can say "night fell." But that doesn't feel right. I want to say something like "night rose".

Anyway, whatever it did, there it was, after a bit, bright clear and moonless, as I may have mentioned. You could see the Milky Way plain as anything -- an increasingly rare experience. But depressingly, the lights of Portland and its environs washed out almost the entire northwestern quadrant of the sky -- even miles out at sea, as the Scapegrace and I were, too far to see any land at all.

About 9 PM the wind fell and a following sea came up, so the boat would no longer steer herself. I steered by hand for a while, but by 1 AM I was tired, so I hove-to and went into the cabin and slept.

I woke up every hour or so and popped by head abovedecks just to be sure there was no shipping about. But I might as well not have bothered. I had the Gulf of Maine to myself -- me, and the streetlights of Portland.

Day 15: A distinguished visitor

2009-10-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

After dropping Ishmael off, and stowing my newly-filled gas can, I took off about 10 am to cross the Gulf of Maine:

This sounds awfully bold; but it wasn't really. The day was warm, the sun was bright, the wind was encouraging but not too exciting, and the weather radio bore nothing but good auguries.

The weather radio proved to be right. About noon I was able to peg the tiller and adjust the sheets -- half an inch makes a difference -- and once I got it right, the Scapegrace sailed herself, on a course ever so slightly east of the ideal but certainly close enough. I took a long-overdue shower on the foredeck with lukewarm water from my solar shower, a funky little plastic bag that heats up a gallon or so of water when the sun is shining, and then I went below to potter and, well, to be honest, I took a nap.

Sailboats, in their own quiet way, are rather noisy, and you don't always know where the noise is coming from. Pocketaqueek -- pocketaqueek -- the 'pocket' you know is the rigging, and the 'a' is the rudder post thumping in its poorly-bushed tube; but what the hell is queek?

You never find out, but even queek you get used to. What you are not expecting is an immense unprecedented noise like God clearing his throat: a-HEMMMM!

Just such a noise jarred me like an electric shock out of my nap and sent me scrambling, faster than I would have thought I could move, up into the cockpit. What in the name of all that's holy...?!

Nothing. Nothing unusual on the boat, nothing on the horizon, nothing nearby -- no boats, no change in the weather. Nothing. Sun still shining, wind where it was, Scapegrace sailing herself as sweet as you could wish.

I was starting to think I had dreamed it. But then, just off the starboard rail, the water surged and boiled, like I remember water doing below hydroelectric dams in Kentucky, where I grew up, and a vast dark something broke the surface.

"Vast dark something" is a little melodramatic. Oh, it's accurate enough. But the odd fact is, I never had a microsecond's doubt what it was. I didn't think it was an uncharted sandbar or a log or a submarine. I knew instantly, the way I would have known my best friend's face, that it was a whale -- five, six feet away; I could have touched him with the boat pole, if I had had the boat pole, and if I were ill-bred enough to do such a thing.

Funny how an animal knows an animal instantly. We must be wired for it, on some subcortical level. Not only did I know immediately that this was another animal -- somehow I also knew he meant me no harm.

I suppose, in retrospect, that he must have been surprised to see a sailboat scudding along with nobody on deck, and he came over to check it out.

He -- or she; who knows? -- was a beautiful animal, the deep deep brown that might as well be black, smooth, glossy in the bright sun, with an absurdly tiny sickle-shaped dorsal fin.

I could only see his or her back; his head and tail were submerged -- but what I could see, above water, was quite a bit longer than my little boat.

He or she swam idly along next to me for a few seconds, then exhaled again -- whoosh!

That was the sound I had heard, the sound that bounced me out of my bunk and sent me on deck with pulses pounding.

This second exhalation seemed to have a slightly humorous character -- a hint of a Leviathan laugh. Not an unkind laugh, but a laugh expressing the unfathomable mirth of a mighty creature at a joke you and I could never share.

And then he dove -- or I guess "sounded" is the right word -- and I saw him no more. But I will see him in my dreams until the day I die.

Day 15, continued: The sacredness of the stranger

2009-10-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

Ishmael and I raised the Rockport harbormaster on VHF -- he answered promptly and crisply, and gave us nice clear directions to the town float.

Once we were there, it turned out that the train station -- where Ishamel needed to go -- was miles away from the harbor. But the harbormaster, Scott Story, piled us into his truck and dropped Ishmael at the train station and then took a detour to let me fill up a jerrican of gas.

Perhaps I am becoming tedious on the topic of how kind and helpful to each other boating folks are. I wonder whether it's not a survival, in the suspicious self-interested bourgeois modern world, of something quite ancient: the sacredness of the suppliant stranger, a matter in which the father of the gods himself is said to take a keen interest, as in the case of Baucis and Philemon, shown below:

As Ovid sets it up --

Iuppiter huc specie mortali cumque parente
venit Atlantiades positis caducifer alis.
Mille domos adiere locum requiemque petentes,
mille domos clausere serae. Tamen una recepit,
parva quidem, stipulis et canna tecta palustri;
sed pia Baucis anus parilique aetate Philemon
illa sunt annis iuncti iuvenalibus, illa
consenuere casa paupertatemque fatendo
effecere levem nec iniqua mente ferendo.
Nec refert, dominos illic famulosne requiras:
tota domus duo sunt, idem parentque iubentque.
Ergo ubi caelicolae parvos tetigere penates
submissoque humiles intrarunt vertice postes,
membra senex posito iussit relevare sedili,
quo superiniecit textum rude sedula Baucis.
Inque foco tepidum cinerem dimovit et ignes
suscitat hesternos foliisque et cortice sicco
nutrit et ad flammas anima producit anili.

Golding's Elizabethan version:

The mightie Jove and Mercurie his sonne in shape of men
Resorted thither on a tyme. A thousand houses when
For roome to lodge in they had sought, a thousand houses bard
Theyr doores against them. Nerethelesse one Cotage afterward
Receyved them, and that was but a pelting one in deede.
The roofe thereof was thatched all with straw and fennish reede.
Howbee't two honest auncient folke, (of whom she Baucis hight
And he Philemon) in that Cote theyr fayth in youth had plight:
And in that Cote had spent theyr age. And for they paciently
Did beare theyr simple povertie, they made it light thereby,
And shewed it no thing to bee repyned at at all.
It skilles not whether there for Hyndes or Maister you doo call,
For all the household were but two: and both of them obeyde,
And both commaunded. When the Gods at this same Cotage staid,
And ducking downe their heads, within the low made Wicket came,
Philemon bringing ech a stoole, bade rest upon the same
Their limmes: and busie Baucis brought them cuishons homely geere.
Which done, the embers on the harth she gan abrode to steere,
And laid the coales togither that were raakt up over night,
And with the brands and dried leaves did make them gather might,
And with the blowing of hir mouth did make them kindle bright.

Baucis and Philemon's hospitality was recognized and rewarded by the gods, and so I hope will Scott Story's be. He wasn't the first and wasn't to be the last who received this suppliant stranger hospitably -- in fact the most remarkable story in this line is yet to come -- but if my invocations can catch any divine ear, may all of them be at least as kindly treated by the gods as they treated me.

Day 15: Solus rex, again

2009-10-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

Ishmael and I both awoke early on Day 15, drank our coffee, and took counsel. Ishmael had concluded, during the wise hours of unconsciousness, that he ought to go do his cousinly duty, and though I was sorry to lose his company so soon, it seemed like the right choice to me too.

Day 15 had dawned beautiful and clear and crisp -- a little bracing, with what felt like an anticipatory touch of fall in the air, though it was only mid-August. We got the anchors up and then motored, with a bit of help from the jib(*), through Milk Island Channel and into Rockport Harbor.

(Does anybody know, by the way, why there are two practically identical Cape Ann lighthouses?)

One regrettable thing about the Cape Ann lights is that they are said to have preserved the life of that bloodthirsty monster, President Woodrow Wilson, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, along with Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and the current Bombdropper-In-Chief:

Among the many lives potentially saved by the Cape Ann Light Station on Thacher Island is that of President Woodrow Wilson. After the Versailles Peace Conference that officially ended WWI, President Wilson was cruising home aboard the passenger liner America, when it was caught in blinding fog. Had its crew not heard the blast of Cape Ann’s foghorn and made an emergency course correction, the America would have smashed onto the island’s rocky shore.

Usually I'm quite grateful for navaids but this story kinda makes me wonder.

I will leave the much pleasanter topic of Rockport for another post.

-------------

(*) The roller furler was mysteriously working again. I hadn't done anything do it, other than dousing the sail and hoisting it again. Sometimes, of course, that's all it takes -- the jib gods just want a little respect. In this case the story proved to be a little more interesting, but we will get to that in its proper place.

Day 14: Farewell to Cape Cod

2009-10-17T20:35:00.000-07:00

Normally I love to sleep late. But I had a looming deadline. My family were going to show up in Maine in just a few days, and I had already spent two weeks creeping along the coast. I was eager to get under way, and so I woke -- uncharacteristically -- at dawn on Day 14.

Ishamel and I had discussed my battery problem the previous evening. I haven't mentioned it before. The problem was that the navigation lights wouldn't burn all night on battery power. Was the battery bad? Was the motor not charging it up properly when it ran?

Ishmael and I were both inclined to blame the battery, and we had mooted the idea of going back into Provincetown in the morning -- there is a great and well-stocked chandlery there -- and buying a new battery. (Hey, it's only money).

I was tempted, but I also wanted to get going. So while Ishmael slept -- and he snores like a buzz-saw, let me tell you -- I quietly made my coffee, and recovered the anchors, and made our escape from Provincetown.

The Pilgrim Monument was just a nick on the horizon when Ishmael awoke. He took the helm while I made some more coffee, and then like a stalwart fellow he kept the helm through a very lively day, crossing Massachusetts Bay from Provincetown to Cape Ann:

The wind was brisk, from the north-northeast, and we were quite close-hauled to weather Cape Ann. A stiff sharp swell had built up, sending spray over our bow with each sea. But Ishmael has a light steady hand on the helm, and kept us going where we were supposed to go, and seemed to be enjoying himself, so I very gratefully left him to it. I updated the log and pottered away in the cabin -- there is always something to do, on a boat. This observation may already have been made.

About midday we sighted some whales, maybe a half-mile or so away, leaping out of the water and blowing spectacular brilliant white plumes of vapor. Ishmael knows one whale from another, but we were too far away for him to discern what class of whales these were -- but he sus[ected humpbacks. I had never seen whales before, on the water, so this was a red-letter day for me.

As afternoon drew into evening, the wind diminished and the sea became more calm. We soon realized that we weren't going to weather Cape Ann on the starboard tack we'd been on all day, so we decided to anchor somewhere on the south side of the cape.

The place we finally found was a little shallow cove off Emerson Point:

It wasn't a great anchorage -- looked better on the chart than it proved to be in fact. Sheltered only from due north, rocky, narrow. We came in a little close to some nasty-looking rocks just barely submerged, then dropped one anchor and spent the usual fretful ten minutes backing down that anchor line, into deeper water a bit farther from the rocks, before dropping the other.

We drank some of my crummy boat wine and, though I didn't make a note of it at the time, I believe we cooked something to eat. We must have had some fresh food -- I remember that we got a new supply of ice for the cooler in Wellfleet.

Being an old Southern boy, I never feel quite at home unless there's an old grungy blackened cast-iron frying pan somewhere close at hand, and so I have one aboard the Scapegrace:

I think we deployed this household god for dinner, though what we cooked in it is anybody's guess. I'll ask Ishmael next time I see him. Perhaps he will remember. It vexes me when something like this gets lost: the details are everything.

Ishmael's plan was to accompany me all the way to Maine. But after dinner, he got a cell phone call. Family crisis. Cousin in a jam down South. Ishmael wondered whether he needed to cut his sail short and go help out. We kicked the question around inconclusively for half an hour or so, then agreed that we were both dead tired and should defer the matter till tomorrow morning -- there was nothing to be done tonight in any case.

I raised my improvised little anchor light and we turned in.

Day 13: from frustration to fabulosity

2009-10-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

Day 13 dawned clear off Barnstable, but there wasn't much wind, and what there was came from the north-northwest. I was pessimistic about getting anywhere, and resigned to spending the day exploring yet another unplanned-for harbor, namely Barnstable. But Ishmael was keen to forge ahead, even if it meant beating tack upon tack up Cape Cod Bay. After all, with two of us, it wouldn't be so difficult. His enthusiasm proved contagious and so we weighed anchor and set off.

Our faith -- well, Ishmael's faith -- was quickly rewarded by a strengthening breeze that also conveniently backed into the west, so we scooted up Cape Cod Bay uneventfully at four knots or so and came coasting into Provincetown harbor and anchored just after dark.

Provincetown is an interesting place. The structure shown above is the Pilgrim Memorial, and if it reminds you a bit of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, it should -- the latter is below:

Who, I wonder, thought that a knockoff of a mediaeval Italian building, from a time and place steeped in Popery, would be a suitable memorial to the Pilgrims? If any Pilgrim shades should revisit the town, just to check up -- what would they think of this oddball tribute?

They might not be too concerned. They would have other things to scratch their ectoplasmic round heads over. Shopfronts in Provincetown frequently display merchandise like this:

... and there was a very buff chap in the street, wearing a maillot bathing suit and promoting a show by a group called "The Nellies". "You'll eat it right down to the stick!" he promised.

It was kinda nice -- like being back in New York, though not on the upper West Side.

Day 12-13: Pea soup

2009-10-15T16:40:00.000-07:00

Ishmael called me around 10 PM. The fog had gathered, wooly and thick, and the air was so wet you couldn't tell whether it was raining or not. There was a barely-perceptible wind, but it was next to impossible to steer -- no reference point except the compass, and in light air the boat takes five minutes to respond to the helm. I relieved Ishmael and he went into the cabin and collapsed in his turn.

I fiddled with the radio and found a religious station, with a preacher engaged in earnest exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans. He had actually read the book and done some hard serious thinking about a hard dense obscure contradictory text. This is a undertaking I admire deeply, and have done a bit of, in my day.

My man knew his Greek, too, and though preachers usually make me groan when they start talking about the "original Greek" or the "original Hebrew", this chap got it right. So I followed his reasoning with pleasure and respect until the aether stopped cooperating and I lost his signal. I don't know quite where he would have ended up, but I was right there with him for a rather intensely focused half hour, which is longer than I can usually stay with NPR before I snort or chortle or say, right out loud, "Thou fool!"

By the time the radio preacher went away, the wind had gone away too. The Scapegrace was, for all practical purposes, adrift -- and so, of course, was I, without my radio preacher to guide me; but I'm used to that. I take my guidance where, and when, I find it.

The wind was more often out of the west than anywhere else, but you couldn't do a damn thing with it. So around midnight I hove-to against what wind there was and went and took a nap.

By 2 AM or so we had drifted almost back to Sesuit, but the wind had come up a bit, and the air was a little less thick, so I popped my bleary head abovedecks and set sail. By 4 AM we had won our way back out of the corner-pocket of Cape Cod Bay to the vicinity of Barnstable, where the wind failed us again. In the faint chalky pre-dawn light I dropped the hook, in twenty feet of water, and went to sleep.

Day Twelve: tedium and terror

2009-10-14T17:42:00.000-07:00

There's an old military aphorism to the effect that war is long intervals of tedium interspersed with moments of pure terror. Sailing is a bit like that too. Ishmael and I had our terror early on, as we were leaving Wellfleet harbor.

Wellfleet has a narrow, twisty, but well-buoyed channel, which leads you on a nice conservative course around various obstacles. The trouble is that the buoyed channel leads you the long way around, to the south, and Ishmael and I were quite keen to head north. So we decided to take a shortcut, over what used to be Billingsgate Island and is now a sandbar, exposed only at dead low tide. The Scapegrace only draws four feet of water, and though we hadn't really consulted the tide table -- well, to be honest, we hadn't consulted it at all -- we figured Billingsgate was well submerged. You can see it on the map below, a sinister blur of grey, like a tumor on an MRI:

You can probably see where this is going. It's late afternoon, the sky is overcast, the light has that peculiar coppery color. But then the light gets more and more yellow, the little wavelets just that bit more steep, and Ishamel and I simultaneously decide to check the depth gauge:

6.5 ... 6... 5... 4.5... 4...

... and then there's a gruesome grinding sound, like that noise when they're cleaning your teeth, except four octaves lower, coming right up through hull and deck and shinbones into your very bowels. I look over the side and there's the sand, clearly visible through barely four feet of water, racing along under our keel and grating against it with every little hummock or hillock.

Reader, I hate to boast, but I must say, to my own credit, that I kept my composure. Normally the idea of going aground absolutely unhinges me. But Ishmael is an experienced sailor, so I wasn't on my own. The ground was soft sand, not rock. The nice deep channel that we should have stayed in was maybe a hundred yards away, so if we had to kedge off(*), we could.

As it turned out, after a few more of those horrific gratings and grindings, the depth gauge started to tell a more cheerful story:

5... 5.5... 7... 9... 10.... 17... 25!

We were back in the channel, and from thenceforth followed the buoys with Pharisaic zeal, until we were well out in the bay and even your anxious old Granny would have turned off the depth gauge.

Night fell -- as it is wont to do, every twenty-four hours or so -- and we set a course for Provincetown. Ishamel took the watch and I went down into the vee-berth and collapsed.

--------------

(*) Kedge off. You take the anchor in the dinghy and drop it in deeper water at the very end of the anchor line. Then you pull pull pull on the anchor line and with luck, you drag yourself and the boat out into the deeper water. The one time I have had to do this, it actually worked.

Day 12: Into the fog

2009-10-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

Ishmael and I spent the first part of Day Twelve running errands: seeking butane tanks for my little gas stove -- they're not as easily found as you might think -- and trying to find a hand drill. I have a battery-operated drill but of course I left the battery on the charger at home when I set sail and anyway, who wants to depend on a battery?

I remember old hand drills from back in the day. I don't mean a downright mediaeval brace-and-bit, like this --

This sort of thing is for people doing high-end cabinetry, or building harpsichords. No, I had in mind a sturdy old pre-electric eggbeater drill, like every home handyman used to have in his garage:

Ishamel and I must have gone to six or seven hardware stores and drew a blank on every one. Finally, at the Tru-Valu in Orleans, Massachusetts -- a store I recommend without reservation to one and all -- we hit the jackpot: more butane cylinders than I could burn in a lifetime of cruising, and a wonderfully earnest clunky heavy Chinese knockoff of the old eggbeater drill.

Some years ago I went looking for a hand plane -- you know what I mean:

... and the best I could do in my local upper west side hardware store was the same kind of slightly approximate imitation of a generations-old First World product. The plane came from India.

I plan to keep the Chinese drill on the boat and the Indian plane at home, lest they fall to quarreling over Tibet.

Ishmael took his van into the garage in Wellfleet, where it lives during the winter, and I sailed the Scapegrace from Sesuit into Wellfeleet harbor, and we set off for Down East in the afternoon.

Day Twelve is not quite over, but I'll leave the rest of it for another entry.

Day Eleven: Jack ashore

2009-10-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

After my morning coffee in my tranquil slip in Sesuit Harbor, I was able to raise Ishmael on my increasingly squirrelly cell phone. We arranged for him to come from Wellfleet and pick me up.

I was a wee bit worried about this. I know Ishmael from a rather egalitarian setting in New York, and I didn't know what his place in Wellfleet would be like, or how he would feel about putting my smelly greasy gas tanks in his trunk to go fill them up. Will it be a gleaming Lexus, I wondered?

He turned up in an ancient rattletrap van full of unidentifiable junk even greasier than my gas tanks, with holes in the floor and doors held on with string -- well, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But let's just say my fears regarding the immaculate Lexus were laid to rest.

I had never before set foot on Cape Cod, and I took in the landscape with great interest as we drove back to Wellfleet from Sesuit -- a longer drive than I had expected. I had my nose out the window like some goofy Irish setter, sniffing the air and eyeing the older buildings for subtle differences from the New England vernacular architecture I'm used to.

The landscape is not unlike what the north shore of Long Island must have been before it got so crapped-up, but it's just that little bit farther north, so the trees are slightly gnarlier and the air slightly brisker and there's more of a piney-woods scent in it.

Ishmael's place is the canonical beach house, though it's not actually on the beach. It even has that wonderful thing, an outdoor shower.

Ishmael had some work to do closing up the house, so I tried to lend a hand. I even spent an amazingly sweaty hour or so digging potatoes and onions out of the garden, which reminded me what backbreaking work agriculture is and has always been. Once the potatoes were dug I was very glad to have the outdoor shower.

We ate raw clams freshly-dug somewhere nearby.

Now being an old Southern boy, and only an adopted denizen of the Northeast, I am usually a bit squeamish about uncooked molluscs. But these were utterly delicious, and after bravely slugging down my first one, just to be polite, I had another and another and another... I probably put on more hot sauce than a Real Man would have done, but still: now I know what the fuss is about.

Slept that night at Ishmael's place, first night I've spent ashore since I set off.

Day 11: Ashore on Cape Cod

2009-10-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

The monument above -- made of first-class, small-grained dark granite -- commemorates a visitor to Sesuit even more exotic than I was: a manatee, who apparently blundered somehow into the chilly waters of Cape Cod bay last year, causing a local sensation.

Dennis -- as the poor lost critter came to be called, after the town Sesuit is part of -- was duly rescued by a consortium of animal lovers, bundled onto a truck, and driven back to Florida. Alas, he died as soon as he got there.

Not surprising, really -- Florida is where lots of folks go to die.

One wonders whether Dennis would have preferred to die in the water, and not on a truck. I personally would not like to die on a truck, though it seems like tempting fate to say that I would rather die on the water.

I would rather not die at all, actually, thank you very much. Sea gods please take note.

One also wonders whether Dennis really blundered. Was he in fact the Columbus, the Captain Cook, the Henry Hudson of manatees? Do the manatees tell tales, around the ruined kelp beds of Florida, of a great warm sunny bay, with abundant algae and no motorboats, that lies just beyond the chilly ordeal of the northern waters? Were one but bold enough, one might find it. Did Dennis go to seek it? Did three little manatees cheer him on, like a manatee Tamino, with music by some manatee Mozart?

Zum Ziele führt dich diese Bahn,
Doch mußt du, Jüngling, männlich siegen.
Drum höre unsre Lehre an:
Sey standhaft, duldsam, und verschwiegen!

Dies kund zu thun, steht uns nicht an --
Sey standhaft, duldsam, und verschwiegen.
Bedenke dies; sei Manatee -- 
Dann Jüngling wirst du männlich siegen.

Sorry, but I can't bring myself to print any of the translations I can find of this shivers-down-your-spine bit of Die Zauberflote. The metrical translations are incredibly dismal, and the prose translations lose all connection with the music. I bet Auden's was nice, but I haven't been able to turn it up on the web. Help me out here, somebody.

Here's to Dennis the Manatee, a fellow-mammal, and another crazy venturer into waters where he didn't belong. Sit levis tibi abyssus.

Day 10: Through the armpit of Cape Cod

2009-10-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

Having set my sails -- at leisure! -- I made about four knots, with wind and current behind me, up Buzzards Bay to the western end of the Cape Cod Canal:

Since Day Ten happened to be a warm sunny Sunday in August, I was greatly harassed by motorboats, both approaching the canal and especially in it.

I'm sorry to sound like a New Yorker, or something, but... Massachusetts drivers don't seem to improve when they get out of their cars and into a boat. Even when they've got lots of searoom, they come roaring past you at full throttle, ten feet away if that, and knock you around like a bowling pin with their wake. And when they don't have lots of searoom -- as in the narrow confines of the canal -- they never throttle down, in spite of the apparently unenforced signs setting a speed limit.

The wakes of course are much worse in the canal, since they bounce off the sides and revisit you four or five times before the next bathtub-like displacement hull comes shoving its way through the water at fifteen knots and adds its own reverberating wake to the pandemonium of apparently immortal wakes you're already trying to negotiate.

I had hoped to make it through the canal on the last of the flood tide, which sends a robust current roaring from west to east through the canal. I made it, but just barely -- the current had just begun to change and was swirling in sinister eddies and growling on the rocks that line the canal as I squeaked out the east end and into Cape Cod Bay.

I mentioned some days ago that I was planning to pick up a crewman, Ishmael, in Wellfleet, out on the sinewy forearm of Cape Cod. I hadn't really expected to make much more progress today in that direction than Sandwich, at the east end of the canal, but when I emerged into Cape Cod Bay I found a spanking south-southeast breeze and went bowling along on a beam reach, very exhilarating, hitting eight knots occasionally. (The wind was brisk but because I wasn't very far offshore, the water was comparatively flat, a combination the little Scapegrace and I both like very much. Oh and the sun was still shining and the air was warm; even a person who doesn't much like sailing would have liked this.)

For a couple of hours I made great progress and felt very much a peace with the world. But of course it was too good to last.

The wind backed into the east, then the northeast, and got a lot stronger, and the seas came up choppy and harsh, and lead-gray clouds covered the sun, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. It became clear that I was not going to make it into Wellfleet, which now lay almost dead to windward.

I wanted to furl the jib partway and reef the main, but the dear little roller furler chose this moment to jam, a thing it had never done before. I could furl it partway but then the fitting at the head of the jib wouldn't go any further, and the halyard wrapped around the forestay in a vile ugly corkscrew. I hove-to long enough to reef the main, which eased the boat's motion a bit. But where to go?

A mean drizzling rain had begun to fall, so wiping water off my glasses every minute or so, I squinted at the charts and finally found a tiny little harbor, Sesuit(*) --

... which seemed to have a crinkum-crankum narrow river twisting up a mile or so from the beach. I certainly didn't want to try making my way up this river, which appeared to be about as wide as a Greenwich Village sidewalk, with a sail I couldn't douse, in a lively wind -- and who knows whether there would be a place to moor or anchor anyway? But I figured I could anchor in the angle between the breakwater and the beach and at least ride out this little blow, and maybe figure out what was the matter with the furler.

So that's what I did. And just after I got the hook down, and lowered the jib to check out the furler, a little launch came roaring out of the mouth of the river, very official-looking, and my heart sank. Based on earlier experiences with the New York City police, I had some expectations in place.

Everybody has heard the salesman joke: traveling salesman has a flat tire way out in the country, discovers there's no jack in his trunk. Has to hike along the country road looking for a place to borrow a jack. It's a hot day. he takes off his jacket, then loosens his tie, then rolls up his sleeves, and he starts to think, How's this gonna go? I'm gonna find some hick and he'll want to jerk me around, or charge me some ridiculous amount, or he'll just be so goddam narrow-minded and suspicious he'll sic his dogs on me....

Finally our man arrives on the doorstep of a pretty little rose-covered cottage. He knocks on the door. A dear little rose-cheeked granny answers the door. Perhaps she even has a nice little apple pie, fresh from the oven, in her hand.

Our man stares at her for a long apoplectic moment and then screams, "You can take your fucking jack and shove it up your ass!"

That was more or less the mood I was in.

The little launch throttled back and eased up next to me. There was a chap about my age at the controls. "Do you need assistance?" he shouted.

I explained: trying to get to Wellfleet, couldn't make it, anchored here to sort things out.

"Follow me," he said, "I'll get you on a slip in the harbor."

Have I mentioned before how fond I am of Boat Dudes?

I got the anchor back easily, from the clean sandy bottom off Sesuit, with the jib still lying in a pathetic huddle of sodden laundry on the foredeck. The Sesuit harbormaster -- for it was he; let's call him Stubb -- patiently waited, idling fifty feet abeam.

I motored behind Stubb's launch up the little river I had seen on the chart, which proved to be every bit as narrow as I had feared but a lot prettier, past a waterfront restaurant and a rather imposing chandlery and boatyard, to the municipal marina, where he showed me to a slip. He intimated that the town would like to be paid for it -- $2 a foot, so for me, $52 a night -- but didn't seem very anxious on the subject.

He helped me maneuver the boat into the narrow slip -- always an ungainly process, with a sailboat. Then we chatted a bit.

Stubb is a retired schoolteacher from somewhere inland, whose post-retirement life at the shore now revolves around boats. Not a bad deal, and he's a very likable guy. He wants to do some cruising, but his wife so far is only ready for day-sailing, so we indulged in some comradely musing about how we might talk our respective girls around.

Stubb seemed to think that if Mrs Stubb saw how home-like I've made the Scapegrace, that might go some way to persuading her. I was very aware of the compliment, and pleased by it, but had some private reservations: her standard of homelikeness, I suspected, might be a bit more exigeant than his.

I tried to call Ishmael but my cell phone was then just beginning the last phase of its terminal illness. So I cooked up some of my dehydrated camp food, and showered in the marina's shower, and emptied the porta-potty again. Drank some of my El Cheapo boat wine and went to bed.

Sesuit is a nice quiet harbor and I slept like the proverbial log.

---------

(*)Pronounced, as I later discovered, with the accent on the second syl-LA-ble: Seh-SOO-it.

Day 10: A question of technique

2009-10-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

Once the tide turned, I recovered my anchors from the vicinity of the hedge-fund Trimalchio's villa, the one with the eleven bathrooms, or whatever it was, on Mishaum Point, and headed up Buzzards Bay with the current and a following wind. Nice bright clear warm day, after the deathly bone-chilling moonlit haze of the previous night -- more Hecate's night than Selene's.

I have been pondering the physics of heaving-to. You can't -- well, I can't, or haven't yet been able to -- do it under jib alone. I seem to need some force from a source other than the jib to bring the bow through the wind and backwind the jib. Normally, of course, this is supplied by the mainsail. Here's how you end up, more or less:

You can see that the jib is trying to do one thing and the rudder is trying to do a different thing. The jib is trying to push the bow off the wind -- counterclockwise in this diagram, or to port. The rudder is trying to do the opposite -- push the bow up into the wind, or to starboard. The jib is stalled -- that is, the airflow over it is turbulent and isn't creating any lift -- and the mainsail isn't getting much wind at all, and what there is, is also turbulent. So the boat makes a very slight forward progress and also sags to leeward -- downwind -- so the net motion is more or less at right angles to the wind, and quite slow -- maybe a knot or so. The motion gets a lot calmer too, for reasons that I don't fully understand but the sages talk learnedly of.

This morning it occurred to me: How about using the motor instead of the mainsail to get the jib up into the wind and then through it? So I motored away from my anchorage, and once I was in reasonably deep water, and well clear of the clutter of islets and ledges and sandbars that litter Buzzards Bay like popcorn in a downscale movie theater, I unfurled the jib with the handy roller-furler and when it was drawing, put the helm down and came right through the eye of the wind and bang, I was hove-to.

I probably could have just shut the motor off at this point, just as I usually let the main luff once the tiller is lashed down, but being a cautious fellow, I just backed the throttle down to idle. The Scapegrace rode as demurely as a debutante -- a lot more demurely, actually, than any debutante I ever knew -- and edged slowly out into the channel, just where I wanted to be, without any help from me.

Now you may be wondering, what is the point of all this? Bear with me for a moment.

When you're sailing alone, the most tiresome, and tedious, and difficult part of the whole business is raising and dousing the mainsail. The jib is easy: there's a roller furler for that. You haul in the furler's halyard, and the jib wraps itself around the forestay and pretends it's not there -- quite effectively. To get it back, you uncleat the halyard and haul on the jib sheet, and hey presto, you have a jib again.

(This idyllic picture was to suffer some disruption later today. But I anticipate.)

So much for the jib. But the mainsail! On the Scapegrace, I have to hook up my harness and creep forward to the mast and heave on the halyard while trying to guide the worn old slugs on the luff of the sail into the little channel where they run on the mast.

(I know, a picture would make this clearer. Sorry.)

This process takes maybe ten minutes, and meanwhile, who's steering the boat, if you're motoring away from your mooring, or anchorage?

You could, of course, raise the main before you leave your mooring or anchorage. But then the wind catches it. It gets a lot more complicated to make to boat go where you want it to. You have the forward motion that you get from the motor, but then you also have leeway -- you're being pushed downwind as well as forward. Figuring out exactly where you're going to be in the next 30 seconds becomes difficult, and if you're in any kind of a tight spot -- with other boats nearby, or a narrow channel to squeak through, or a hull-devouring snaggletoothed rocky shore uncomfortably close under your lee -- why then, you may find yourself experiencing levels of anxiety which at my age I prefer to avoid.

So the discovery that I could heave-to with jib and motor solved a persistent pesky problem. I can motor away from anchor or mooring until I have a comfortable amount of searoom between me and anything I'd rather not hit, then unfurl the jib easily, heave-to, and raise the mainsail at my leisure.

And I really like my leisure.

To be continued.

Day 10: A digression before it starts

2009-10-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

A short way up Buzzards Bay from my cold damp anchorage off Dumpling Rocks lies the town of Fairhaven, where back in 1894 or so, old Joshua Slocum, shown above, rebuilt the derelict Spray with his own hands from the keel up, and soon thereafter set out in her to circumnavigate the world, the first solo sailor, as far as we know, ever to do that -- without GPS, without radar, without a depth gauge, without even a chronometer.

But it wasn't enough for old Cap'n Slocum be first of humankind to sail alone around the world. Oh no. He also had to write about it, and he wrote one of the best, maybe the best, book about sailing, ever written -- titled, inevitably and perfectly, Sailing Alone Around The World.

It's never been out of print as far as I know from that day to this, and with good reason. If you haven't read it, stop reading this blog right now and go out and get it. The guy has a prose style to die for, and the way he constructs his narratorial persona would have Proust swooning with envy. And the story he has to tell is endlessly interesting, right down to his cuisine. Here's a sample:

I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The twelve-o'clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail. A short board was made up the harbor on the port tack, then coming about she stood seaward, with her boom well off to port, and swung past the ferries with lively heels. A photographer on the outer pier at East Boston got a picture of her as she swept by, her flag at the peak throwing its folds clear.
A thrilling pulse beat high in me. My step was light on deck in the crisp air. I felt that there could be no turning back, and that I was engaging in an adventure the meaning of which I thoroughly understood.
I had taken little advice from any one, for I had a right to my own opinions in matters pertaining to the sea. That the best of sailors might do worse than even I alone was borne in upon me not a league from Boston docks, where a great steamship, fully manned, officered, and piloted, lay stranded and broken.
This was the Venetian. She was broken completely in two over a ledge. So in the first hour of my lone voyage I had proof that the Spray could at least do better than this full-handed steamship, for I was already farther on my voyage than she. "Take warning, Spray, and have a care," I uttered aloud to my bark, passing fairylike silently down the bay.

Speaking as a human being, and as a sailor, and as a would-be writer...

I think I'll shut up for a while.

Day 9: Digression: The theory of waterfront property

2009-10-05T16:06:00.000-07:00

I awoke early, in my chilly anchorage at the mouth of Buzzards Bay. Had some time to wait before the tide started flowing into the Bay, which I hoped would carry me all the way to the west end of the Cape Cod Canal and, with luck, right through it into Cape Cod Bay.

It had been a damp night as well as a cold one, and the decks and cushions were soaked -- as if someone had been playing a firehose on the boat all night.

After the obligatory caffeine, I got out the binoculars and scanned the shore. Obviously a posh part of the world, especially on Mishaum Point, in the town of Dartmouth, MA. At the very end of the point was a house I tried to take a picture of, but I didn't have a long enough lens and the images I got couldn't do justice to the Pharaonic scale of the thing. Here's the Google satellite image, which may give you some idea:

What the satellite photo doesn't show you is the arrogant bearing of this swaggering, obviously bran-new structure -- the spelling is a little hommage to the Veneering family, in Our Mutual Friend:

Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.

192 Mishaum Point Road -- for such is the address of this ziggurat, if the Dartmouth town records are to be believed -- dates from 2006. Here's just-the-facts-Maa'm, from the town:


Property Information for 192 Mishaum Point Rd
Property Features  
    * Single Family Residence
    * Year Built: 2006
    * 5 Bedrooms
    * 9 Bathrooms
    * Approximately 19,138 Sq Ft
    * Lot size: 283,576 Sq Ft
    * Stories: 2
    * Rooms: 11
 
Financial History:

Last sold on 6/25/1992
Last assessed at $18,778,700 on 2009

Previous assessments

    * $18,778,700 on 2009
    * $19,113,500 on 2008
    * $10,115,400 on 2007

Source: Public Records

This vast overbearing structure apparently occupies part of the site of a former military installation, the Mishaum Point Fire Control Station. Here's what DoD has to say:

The United States acquired the site in 1943 and 1944.... The Army used the site, known as the Mishaum Point Fire Control Station, during World War II as part of the harbor defense of New Bedford. The Army built a battery for two 6-inch guns, barracks, an infirmary, a fire station, a radar operations building, a radar tower, two generator buildings, nine other temporary buildings, and a 40,000-gallon reservoir... In 1960 the 0.14 acre leasehold was terminated. In 1963 the 26.84 acres fee were reported excess to General Services Administration (GSA). GSA conveyed the 26.84 acres fee to Richard S. Perkins, et ux. in November 1964. The site is currently privately owned by several owners. The area is an exclusive beach front residential area.
SITE VISIT: A site visit was conducted on 20 November 1992 by David Larsen and Robert Martin of CENED-PL. They were accompanied by John Barrows, President, Mishaum Point Association (508-994-1042).
DESCRIPTION OF HAZARDS:
a. CON/HTW. CENED suspects that there are two 5000 gallon underground storage tanks (USTs) located inside buried concrete vaults at Battery 210. A third 1000-gallon UST is located near the generator house foundation on the Parker property. The tanks are a potential source of environmental contaminants.
b. OEW. The site was used by DOD as a gun battery. Initially there were two 155mm GPF guns. Upon construction of Battery 210, these guns were removed. Battery 210 consisted of two 6-inch rifled guns mounted on concrete gun emplacements 200 feet apart. Between them, in a concrete structure covered with earth, were powder magazines, shell rooms, compressor rooms, storerooms, a plotting room, a latrine, a circulating water system room, a water cooler room, a power plant, and a muffler gallery. Today Battery 210 has a modern dwelling built on top.

One can only hope a large number of artillery shells were left behind, and that they will spontaneously detonate while I'm passing on my next trip -- at a safe distance offshore, of course. I don't think I'll anchor nearby again. But I will try to have the camera ready, for a change.

* * *

Few waterfront "residences" are quite so grandiose as this 192 Mishaum Point Road. But it's by way of a type specimen.

Sailing the last couple of years along the New England coast, I've come increasingly to feel that the signal I am getting from the houses along the shore is a bit thin. I seldom get any sense of social geography: no sense that various kinds of people are at the shore for various kinds of reasons, no sense that in a given huddle of houses there might be any kind of social complementarity -- the doctor's house, the fisherman's house, the crazy sea-captain's widow's house, the parsonage, the grocer's house, the house with a car up on cinder blocks, the untidy boatyard where some boats are cared for and some have been long abandoned to the elements.

Of course you can't know these things. But there are streetscapes, townscapes, shorescapes, that suggest such stories.

The posh prosperous Northeastern coast seldom does that, I'm sorry to say. The stories it suggests tend to be "hedge fund creep" -- "successful plastic surgeon" -- "partner in a Boston law firm" -- "real estate speculator."

Buildings in general send many messages -- in fact any given building may send many messages. Up The Guelphs. Vikings Go Home. Benedictine Hospitality Here. The Middle Ages Weren't So Bad. Barberini Rule. Delicious Lobster Roll!

But for mile after weary mile of the Northeastern coast, all the buildings send the same message, in more or less loud voices: Waterfront Property. I Cost A Lot Of Money. You Can't Afford Me.

Day Eight, concluding in Buzzards Bay

2009-10-04T15:51:00.000-07:00

As I crossed Narragansett Bay, I found myself getting worried about two large container ships, at first barely visible, then plainer and plainer, and of course bigger and bigger.

They both appeared to be on a collision course with me, and I couldn't figure out what they were doing. It's suicide to insist on your theoretical sailboat's right-of-way with these leviathans, so I gybed to get out of their path -- and they promptly changed their own heading, so that I was no better off than before. Gybed back onto the original course, and they were still relentlessly bearing down on me. Were they going into the bay? Crossing it? Their behavior made no sense. Were they trying to run me down?

After a half-hour or so of anxiety, the riddle was solved: These ships were going nowhere. They were anchored, in eighty or ninety feet of water, well outside of Narragansett Bay, and the reason they had appeared to change course so perversely was that the wind and tide were swinging them around at their anchorages.

This was a striking phenomenon of this trip -- how little shipping I saw, compared to last year, and how much of what I did see was parked, awaiting further orders.

My local NPR station had a sort of promo going for a while, asking people to call in with their Uncommon Economic Indicators -- how easy it is to get a cab, how long you have to wait in line at Zabar's lox counter. I guess this was mine: the idle shipping littering the Eastern seaboard.

I glided past these pitiful helpless giants -- to borrow a phrase from the immortal Richard Nixon -- and poke, poke, poked along, past Sakonnet Point and on into the darkness, and finally, to a cold misty moonlit grope, around midnight, among the ledges and rocks of a little cove between Mishaum Point and Dumpling Rocks at the entrance to Buzzards Bay:

Buzzards Bay kept me windbound for about a week last year, on my trip home, so it is a name of fear to me, and its shoreline is rocky and treacherous. The anchorage wasn't all that sheltered, but the weather forecast was unthreatening. I put down my usual belt-and-suspenders two anchors, just in case, and turned in.

The night was uncomfortably cold and damp, so I put on the long johns and piled sleeping bag on sleeping bag and closed every door and hatch I could, and finally, after half an hour, my teeth stopped chattering and I drifted off to sleep.

Day 8: Into Buzzards Bay

2009-10-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

Day 8 dawned bright and clear and warm, and I recovered my anchor from the malodorous muck of Point Judith and forged ahead.

Actually, "forged" is a more-than-slight exaggeration. I poked ahead. There was wind to be had, but not much of it. Still, it kept me moving and didn't frighten me, so on balance I was doing pretty well.

Except for the flies.

What's the story with those greenhead beach flies? Unless it's really cold, or blowing like crazy, you will find your boat practically covered with them by ten AM or so, even if you're two or three miles offshore. What's their evolutionary business model? They breed on land, surely -- so why do they fly miles out to sea, seeking their prey? And how does their energy budget support this? There's a lot of water out there and not much to eat -- or so you'd think. How do they make this strategy pay?

Are they looking for dead fish floating in the water, and settle upon my tender thin-skinned ankles as a meager second best? Do they bite whales when they come to surface and blow? Do they bite birds?

This much I can tell you: They bite me, con amore e con brio. And they're not like mosquitoes: they bite within a millisecond after lighting. And maybe I'm more susceptible or allergic or whatever, but after a bite from one of these infernal creatures, I find that the site itches for days. No joke: days.

So I hate them. On days like this, when they swarm thick and lively over my boat, I find myself playing an undignified game of 'gotcha' with 'em. And though they have small brains, and I have a large one -- though I have read Kant, or tried to, and they have not, as far as I know -- it's a depressingly even match.

They don't hold all the cards. They seem to need thin skin. If you wear socks, and slightly Audrey-Hepburn-like gloves that cover your wrists, and a cap to protect your pathetic pink bald spot, you've built the Maginot Line. The skin over your kneecaps is still vulnerable, unless you wear long pants -- and who wants to do that, on a boat, in August? -- but you can keep an eye on it. And the skin behind your knees is thin enough for them, but they can't get to that unless you're standing up.

Then there are chemicals. Bug repellent doesn't repel them -- they laugh at it, and in fact I think it attracts 'em -- but if I manage to spritz one with a direct blast of Deep Woods Off, a product with so much DEET that if Iran were making it, Mr Obama would send the Marines -- if I spritz 'em right on the shnoz with this deadly stuff, they fall stunned to the cockpit sole and thrash around spastically until, with a cruel petty sadistic laugh, I grind them under the sole of my grungy topsiders. Take that, I say, between clenched teeth, you fucking bug. You and your clever proboscis and your razor-like mandibles. Think you're the crown of creation? Think again.

They do have some advantages, though. They're amazingly quick. And they can read your mind. They know when you're getting ready to try something, and they take off at Mach Four a microsecond before you start to move. How do they do that? Credit where it's due.

Much of Day 8 was consumed in this immemorial war of vertebrate and in-. To be continued.

Day 7: Escape from Long Island Sound

2009-10-03T21:28:00.000-07:00

Day 7 dawned beautiful and clear, with a nice steady northwesterly breeze. Once I got myself awake and caffeinated, I consulted Eldridge --

-- and found that I could get myself through The Race, the crazy tidal bottleneck at the mouth of Long Island Sound, on a vigorous ebbing current, if I got myself in gear quickly. Below, a diagram:

It's a little confusing -- east is up. The previous night's anchorage, Truman Beach, is labelled near the bottom. Click on the image to see more detail. All the water in the deep bits at the bottom of the image and beyond -- that is to say, to the west of the bottleneck, in the body of Long Island Sound -- has to empty out on the ebb through the small area shown with a line labelled "The Race". As you can see, it's narrow and relatively shallow, so the current gets quite strong.

I had had some trouble with The Race last year, coming home from Maine, and I didn't want any more. So I scrambled up on deck in my underwear and weighed anchor any old how and set out.

Eldridge was right, of course, as Eldridge always is. I went bounding through The Race like a bobsledder, wind on my port quarter, sun sparkling on the water, as sweet as you please, past Plum Island and Gull Island Light and Fisher's Island, and after a pleasant uneventful day I dropped anchor in a long slow purple twilight inside the Point Judith Harbor of Refuge.

Zoom out, as usual, to see the larger context.

How I love that phrase, Harbor of Refuge. Duncan, Duncan, Fenn and Fenn's famous Cruising Guide takes a dim view of this particular Harbor of Refuge -- a view which on the return trip I was to find justified -- but on this occasion it couldn't have been nicer.

The breakwater, admittedly, was lined with huddled seabirds, black against the dimming sky, and they had a sinister look, like ill-disposed jurymen contemplating an obviously guilty defendant. But there were a dozen other sailboats already anchored inside, their cheery little anchor lights lit at masthead or spreader, and this always gives me a good feeling.

I boiled and ate the last of my fresh eggs, drank a glass or two or six of wine, and went to sleep. The Harbor of Refuge lived up to its name, and I slept like the proverbial baby -- though come to think of it, babies in my experience don't sleep all that well. Wonder who came up with that expression?

Day 6: From Jefferson to Truman

2009-10-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

Sailed through the night of Day Five and into the morning of Day Six: calm and clear, moon a little past full. Light wind from the southwest. This seems to be the phase of the trip -- there always is one -- when bits of poems start running through my head. Aeneid vii:

... postquam alta quierunt
aequora, tendit iter velis portumque relinquit.
Adspirant aurae in noctem nec candida cursus
Luna negat, splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus.
Proxima Circaeae raduntur litora terrae,
dives inaccessos ubi Solis filia lucos
adsiduo resonat cantu tectisque superbis
urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum,
arguto tenuis percurrens pectine telas.
Hinc exaudiri gemitus iraeque leonum
vincla recusantum et sera sub nocte rudentum,
saetigerique sues atque in praesaepibus ursi
saevire ac formae magnorum ululare luporum,
quos hominum ex facie dea saeva potentibus herbis
induerat Circe in voltus ac terga ferarum.
Quae ne monstra pii paterentur talia Troes
delati in portus neu litora dira subirent,
Neptunus ventis implevit vela secundis
atque fugam dedit et praeter vada fervida vexit.

* * *

Usually I like to translate stuff myself, but it's pretty hard to improve on Dryden:

He plow'd the Tyrrhene seas with sails display'd.
From land a gentle breeze arose by night,
Serenely shone the stars, the moon was bright,
And the sea trembled with her silver light.
Now near the shelves of Circe's shores they run,
(Circe the rich, the daughter of the Sun,)
A dang'rous coast: the goddess wastes her days
In joyous songs; the rocks resound her lays:
In spinning, or the loom, she spends the night,
And cedar brands supply her father's light.
From hence were heard, rebellowing to the main,
The roars of lions that refuse the chain,
The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears,
And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears.
These from their caverns, at the close of night,
Fill the sad isle with horror and affright.
Darkling they mourn their fate, whom Circe's pow'r,
(That watch'd the moon and planetary hour,)
With words and wicked herbs from humankind
Had alter'd, and in brutal shapes confin'd.
Which monsters lest the Trojans' pious host
Should bear, or touch upon th' inchanted coast,
Propitious Neptune steer'd their course by night
With rising gales that sped their happy flight.
Supplied with these, they skim the sounding shore,
And hear the swelling surges vainly roar.

* * *

Splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus

... may be my very favorite tag in all of Latin verse, but

And the sea trembled with her silver light

... hits the bulls-eye, doesn't it? It's partly the "her" that does it.

Oh and by the way, how great are those odd Alexandrines that old Johnny drops in --

And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears!

At any rate I kept well clear of Circe's enchanted shore and her herds(*) of wolfish beast-men on Long Island, until the late afternoon. The wind was diminishing and my eyelids sagging and finally, faute de mieux, I anchored in a shallow little bight off the ominously-named Truman Beach, near Orient Point, the jumping-off place of Long Island:

During the night the wind backed way into the north and then west, and Truman Beach, which started out rather quiet, became a roller-coaster. I woke up once or twice during the night and checked the GPS to make sure I wasn't dragging my anchors -- I had put both of 'em down, against just such a turn of events. I wasn't, and so I wedged myself into a corner of my little stuffy vee-berth so I wouldn't roll around too much, and went back to sleep. You can sleep very well when you're really tired.

---------------

(*) Do wolves form herds? Maybe under Circe's management they do.

Day Five: Escape from Port Jefferson

2009-10-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

Rose early, made coffee, pottered -- waiting for a call from Port Inflatables. A pleasant warm sunny morning, with little wind yet evident.

My neighbor Will was preparing to weigh anchor: He used his ingenious crane to swing his dinghy motor up and onto its bracket, and then hiked the bow of the dinghy itself well up out of the water, so only the stern was trailing. Then he fired up his engine and recovered his anchor and put-putted away out of the harbor, passing alongside the Scapegrace about 20 feet away, with a cheerful wave. "Fair winds!" he called out. I couldn't quite think of the equivalent thing to say, but finally came up with "Calm seas!"

Port Inflatables called about 10 and said the motor was ready. So I pulled up the hook and motored in to the town dock, where you can tie up for $12 an hour, a bit more reasonable than Danford's $20.

The town dock is an actual dock, not a float, and the tide rises and falls a fair distance here -- six feet, maybe more. I thought the tide was pretty much dead low, since my head as I stood on the deck of the boat was well below the level of the dock. So I tied my springlines without a whole lot of slack.

Port Inflatables showed up in their truck with my motor, and the town dock had a cart I could use to wheel it back down to the boat. But how to get it on the dinghy? The dock was probably twelve feet above the level of the water, and the only way up and down was slippery weed-covered vertical ladders.

Fortunately, the nice chap who runs the town launch offered me a place to tie up the dinghy at his float, so I could just wheel the motor down a ramp and then sit at the edge of the float and rassle the motor into the dinghy. That done, the motor started on the first pull and ran as smooth and sweet as you please. (But for how long?)

I took the opportunity to empty the porta-potty into the town dock's toilet -- I always feel a little furtive doing this, though I suppose it's OK. And I topped up my water tank, and then found that there were showers and washing machines available for town dock users, and so I went and had a long-overdue shower and did my laundry.

When I got back, I was mortified to see that the Scapegrace's mast was cocked at about a fifteen-degree angle. The tide, it seems, had fallen a good deal further, the springlines were taut as fiddlestrings, and the boat was sagging drunkenly to port.

Fortunately, Pearson built these boats very strong, back in the day, and the cleats were still firm on the deck. (Although one of the cleats on the dock had pulled away from the wood a couple of inches.) I quickly slacked off on the springlines and the boat came back upright with an audible and slightly reproachful sigh. No harm done, except to my already-fragile sense of competence.

A poem written by an old friend of mine, Bill Hedrington, came suddenly to mind:

The Boats

The boats that bump so docile at the dock
Are moored there slackly; no rowboat captain
Even, but knows the moon-called sea takes line,
And will have it, or hang the boats to break.
I’m not a boat, my will is not a rope,
And you, for all your changes and your pull
Tiding my heart’s rerunning salty well,
Are not the pumicestone that queens the deep.
Yet, I might as well be boat, and you moon,
For though I fight, my blood bends with the sea,
My body aching at my twisted will.
How, unless a man tie back the ocean,
Can taut lines help but snap, and how, once free,
Can any man but be a tide-bound hull?

* * * * *

I paid the town for my time at the dock, and almost literally sailed into the sunset.

The endless Day Four, concluded at last

2009-10-02T15:37:00.000-07:00

Shown above is the approximate site of my anchorage on Day Four. If you use the control and zoom in, you will see an immense mooring buoy nearby, trailing massive cables visible even from outer space in the shallow Port Jefferson water. (You can also zoom out, of course, and get a sense of the geography).

My anchorage was maybe 100 or 150 feet from this monster buoy, and I hoped devoutly that no barge would be brought in to moor at it during the night, a hope which was, fortunately, fulfilled.

One gets very superstitious on a boat, and thoroughly pagan and polytheist. I'm constantly saying little prayers to wind gods and sea gods, anchor gods and outboard gods, and I'm absolutely convinced that the Scapegrace herself is entirely sentient and taking close note of what I say and how I act -- more than that: I'm convinced she can read my mind. When I swear at something -- which is frequently -- I always add a mental footnote, which I'm sure Scapegrace can hear: "That wasn't aimed at you, darlin'."

Just to be sure, I often say it out loud, too.

Once the anchor was down, I lit my goofy third-world knockoff of an old-fashioned rural kerosene lantern. (I don't like to use the electric cabin lights, particularly since my battery seems to get drained very quickly.). Below, an image -- very blurry, alas, due to the long exposure -- of the Scapegrace's cabin by lantern light:

... and I started pottering, whipping the ends of lines and so on, when I hear a voice: "Cap'n! Cap'n!"

(I love the way everybody calls you Cap'n -- or sometimes just Cap -- on the water. Everybody, that is, except the oafish thugs of the New York City police department, who demand "ID" and then call you "Mike" if they call you anything at all. But that's another story.)

This particular voice, it turned out, belonged to the skipper of a nice homey-looking modest-sized motor yacht anchored nearby. He had come round in his dinghy just to be sociable. Let's call him Will. Will invited me over to his boat for a drink, and I didn't need to be asked twice. I extinguished the lantern and piled into Will's little inflatable dinghy -- much like my own, except that the outboat was working.

We crossed the hundred feet or so of quiet water to Will's boat and spent a very pleasant hour or so exchanging observations about this harbor and that. Will was -- is? -- a librarian in a Connecticut town, and if I understood him correctly, he was making a circumnavigation of Long Island, and was going to pick up his wife in a day or two, somewhere in Connecticut, to make the next stage or two of the journey together. He used to have a sailboat, but now has the "trawler" -- as many motorboat guys seem to be calling their boats these days -- because, let's face it, it's just so much easier.

I could see his point. He had more space on his boat than I've had in some of the apartments where I've lived. He had an ingenious little crane which enabled him to pluck the outboat off his dinghy and clamp it to a wooden block on his stern rail, which of course makes the dinghy tow a lot more easily.

We sat on lawn chairs -- lawn chairs! -- on the afterdeck and sipped thoughtfully at complicated drinks Will had made. There was whisky in them, but I couldn't tell you what else, nor do I remember what they were called. Rusty Scuppers? Sacrificial Anodes? Something nautical-sounding, as I recall.

Finally we both started to yawn. Will gave me a lift back to the Scapegrace, where I soft-boiled a half-dozen eggs -- not having eaten anything all day -- and ate them ravenously with the last of a not-so-fresh baguette, and then tumbled into my sleeping bag and slept very very well indeed.

Day Four, continued: outboard adventures in Port Jefferson

2009-10-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

Kinda left the narrative thread hanging there, didn't I?

When last heard from I was motoring to Danford's Marina in Port Jefferson, shown below:

The marina is in the center of the map; the ferry slip, for the Bridgeport-Port Jefferson car- and people-ferry, is a bit to the left. Unless Google have changed the satellite image by the time you read this, you can see a ferryboat actually approaching the slip. I may have a bit more to say about this ferry later.

This image must have been taken during the off-season; as I approached, there were a lot more boats around than you see here, and many of them were big intimidating boats, including the doltishly-named Prediction, mentioned in a previous post, a boat larger than many New York apartment buildings. If it had been there when this photo was taken, we might have had to back off on the zoom.

My goal was to get the outboard on the dinghy fixed -- for the third time this summer. Danford's is supposed to do repairs, and a breezy young lady had assured me on the cell phone that such was indeed the case.

Once I tied up at Danford's dock -- for which one is charged $20 an hour, a fee I shamelessly skipped out on later, and without permission, too -- the mechanic turned out to be a pleasant young man, let's call him Lycon, who enjoys tinkering with outboards. He and a couple of dockside sages confirmed what I already knew: the carburetor was gummed up and would have to be taken apart and cleaned.

Lycon wasn't quite ready to undertake this task, though I think he might have made a good job of it. But he knew just who to call: Port Inflatables, specializing in inflatable boats like my dinghy, and small outboards like the one that powers it.

Port Inflatables was willing to send a truck to pick up the outboard, though they wouldn't venture out onto Danford's dock. I got the impression that Danford's could be rather stroppy about other people trespassing onto their turf. So I had to rassle the outboard out of the dinghy -- a sweaty effortful business -- and then up Danford's dock and across Danford's parking lot and out to the sidewalk, which took a good deal more sweat and effort. Outboards, even Japanese outboards made of aluminum foil and sushi, are heavy, and awkwardly shaped to boot.

Port Inflatables showed up promptly, as promised, in their truck, and took the poor outboard into their care. They made a good efficient impression. "We'll call you tomorrow," Inflatables said.

I could hardly have expected better -- this was mid-afternoon, or perhaps a little later -- but even so, the line had an ominous ring: I'll see you when I see you. Don't call us, we'll call you.

But what can't be cured must be endured. So I resolved to use my time ashore well. I asked where I could find a grocery store. Blank stares all round, which became blanker still when I mentioned that I would be on foot.

The nice people who work at Danford's don't live anywhere nearby, it turns out. They live in Five Towns or Massapequa or Huntington Bay and drive fifty miles each way to their jobs, and they never, ever walk around on the streets of Port Jefferson.

Finally someone dredged up a memory of a convenience store, owned and staffed by hard-working entrepreneurs from the Indian subcontinent, a ways up Main Street, which runs away from the waterfront and climbs a rather steep slope to the bluffs behind the town. Thither I set off.

Now I haven't really set the scene very well here. It's a hot, sunny, still day. I've been tinkering with the motor, and then humping it off the dinghy and up the dock, and at this moment I'm trudging up furnace-like Main Street with Long Islanders' SUVs blasting past me and blowing exhaust in my face, and I'm starting to feel a little strung-out and a little parched.

When what to my wondering eyes should appear, but --

A cool, shady, caravanserai whose actual name I forget; but let's say it was something like Captain Jack's Bar and Grill.

Some bars appeal and some don't. This one appealed very strongly. Its entire front was open to the street, but set back from it, across a sort of terrace, and you could see the folks sitting at the bar, well inside and out of the sun, and other folks sitting at tables, and they all seemed to have tall frosty steins of beer in front of them, which my usually hazy old eyes registered with preternatural aquiline clarity.

This is the place for me, I thought.

By this time I'm scruffy, not having shaved or showered in four days, and sweaty, and thoroughly disreputable looking, and there can be no possible doubt that I smell like an old plough-horse. But I sat myself down at the bar and pulled a book out of my pocket -- I never go anywhere without a book, and reading a book makes you less alarming when your grooming is not what it should be. And the sweet young thing behind the bar came over and I ordered one of those frosty steins of beer I had seen from the street.

The sweet young thing -- let's call her Phyllis -- produced my frosty stein with admirable alacrity, and then to my utter amazement engaged me in conversation.

She's maybe twenty, and I'm sixty-plus and looking every minute of it. and surely as far as she is concerned I might as well be a dinosaur skeleton in the Museum of Natural History. But she took an interest in my journey, and plied me with questions, and even wanted to know what I did about sanitation on the boat, and wasn't grossed-out by the porta-potty.

Dear reader, perhaps you have a suspicious turn of mind. If so, let me reassure you: I do not flatter myself that Phyllis was coming on to me.

You're out on the water for a few days, and you start to have wild fantasies. In my slightly crazed Jack-ashore mood, I would have loved to think that Phyllis couldn't resist my threadbare charms, but it just obviously wasn't that kind of conversation. What was amazing me was her unusual curiosity and her openness.

Long Island is a very suburban place -- perhaps the most suburban place there is -- and suburban life is so impoverished, so limited, so narrow, so contrived and controlled, that its offspring usually end up somewhat atrophied. They don't understand any dimension of social or personal existence that they haven't already encountered in high school -- don't understand it, and don't want to hear about it. You mention anything they haven't seen on YouTube, or been told about by some slightly cooler coeval, and you get the Suburban Blank Stare.

But Phyllis wasn't like that. She didn't seem to be chafing at her circumstances, and longing to get over the wall. She was very much of her milieu as well as in it. But somehow she had escaped the lobotomy. She was quite keen to hear about the adventures of an eccentric, oddly-spoken and ill-groomed old man from New York, who blew into town on a far-from-fancy old boat and obviously doesn't have a pot to pee in, money-wise.

I can't tell you how much this cheered me up.

I had a second beer and then reluctantly left Phyllis to whatever life has in store for her -- and I hope it's something very nice indeed. I trudged up the hill, in the slightly cooler crepuscule, and found the Subcontinentals and bought a few necessities including some ice for the cooler, and trudged back to Danford's dock and, as already confessed, left without paying their robber-baron tariff and went to look for an anchorage out in the bay.

This entry is way too long already, and Day Four isn't even over.

That's because this was a turning point. I haven't really come clean about how I was feeling.

The dinghy motor failure -- third this summer! -- had convinced me I was cursed, numine laeso, hopeless. I was ready to take the boat back to New York and take the train to Maine.

Then I found Inflatables, or rather, Lycon found Inflatables for me. Inflatables gave me, on balance, a good feeling, and hey, it's only money. Then Phyllis made me start to think that what I had undertaken was worth doing and worth telling about, and most of all, a cell-phone conversation with my indescribably wonderful wife gave me a shot in the arm -- as she always does.

So I will suspend Day Four again as I putt-putt out onto the quiet shadowy waters, seeking a place to spend the night, a place that I don't have to pay for. The coming of the light today found me very dark, and now that it's dark, I'm feeling lighter again.

Day Four, continued: Boat names

2009-09-30T18:59:00.000-07:00

Danford's Marina is a large rather flashy but obviously well-run place frequented by some very big and expensive boats. There was a motor cruiser tied up there so vast that it figured in the dockmaster's directions: Come into the harbor until you get to the Prediction and then go left....

"Prediction" is an awfully dull and uninspired name for a boat, isn't it? Some tens of millions must have been spent on this monster, which was the size of a middling warship -- and they couldn't come up with a better name? I couldn't help thinking that it was probably owned by some hedge-fund creep and the name celebrated this parasite's prowess at anticipating the market. (Let's hope it was the previous owner's previous prowess, and that the self-celebrator is now living a lot less large.)

This got me thinking about boat names.

They fall into several categories. There are girls' names innumerable: Mary Ann, Rosalind, Geraldine, and every other name a female human being ever bore. (Well, maybe not Hrotswitha.) There is the clumsily jocular, a numerous category: Buona For Tuna and the like. There's the name you come up with because you can't think of a name: Come Si Chiami [sic], another boat in Port Jefferson. There's the name that advertises your ancestry: Cill Dara, though I think this one may have been spelled with a 'K'. There's the grandiose -- Astraea, with a rendering of the Pleiades on the sail.

There's the slightly wistful -- Serenity (very frequently encountered, this -- there are two of them at the 79th Street boat basin); Daddy's Toy; Magic Hour. Sailing, in my experience, doesn't really live up to these expectations, though it has its charm; and Daddy's Toy, in particular, was last seen half-sunk and sadly uncared-for in Eastchester Bay.

There's the original -- Ishtar and Hambo, and there's the slightly ill-omened -- Palinuro; what were they thinking of? And there's the enigmatic -- Pitchi Poï, seen in New Rochelle.

This last, a little Googling shows, is a Yiddish phrase, though I can't find either word in Weinreich's dictionary, perhaps because I can't correctly reverse-engineer the Yiddish spelling from the transliteration. But I gather it's a phrase with not entirely happy associations. So why did somebody name his boat that, and render the name in whimsical humorous lettering, which I wish I had taken a picture of?

I might have asked, if I had seen Pitchi Poï's skipper. But I probably wouldn't have. I'm rather shy about approaching other sailors. Or other people in general, actually. Fortunately this is not true of all the other sailors out there, and so some agreeable encounters occur in spite of one's own shyness. I experienced just such an encounter later on today, Day Four; but that, and the saga of the dinghy outboard, will have to wait yet again.

Day Four: Sing, Muse, the woe of outboards

2009-09-29T14:09:00.000-07:00

Spent a quiet night at anchor off Old Field Point, near Port Jefferson, shown below:

Awoke with the birdies on Day Four and wanted to take the dinghy, for some reason, and go into Port Jefferson. Needed gas, maybe? Can't recall. So I climbed down into the dinghy and released the ugly improvised lashing on the motor -- I lost a motor off this dinghy once, a story I may tell someday, and don't want to lose another -- and popped it down into the water and squeezed the little bulb on the fuel line and cranked and cranked....

It wouldn't start.

Now this motor and I have a history. It's a little Tohatsu four-stroke four-hp bijou of a thing. I bought it from a guy -- a guy on Long Island, now that I think of it -- after its predecessor was lost, as mentioned above. It was practically brand new: clean, pristine, all that. He had bought it and decided he needed more than four horsepower. It came with a tank and hose.

In retrospect, I think he must have left it standing around for a while -- who knows how long? -- with gas in the motor and tank and hose, and gummed up the works to a fare-thee-well. At any rate, from the day I bought it, it had been nothing but trouble. I had already had it in the shop twice this season to have the carburetor dissected -- an expensive hobby. Now here it was, dead again.

The second time I had in in for surgery, with Maureen the Outboard Queen of City Island, she sold me a new fuel filter and told me to be sure to put it in. Of course I had not done this. So with a sinking feeling that I was closing the proverbial barn door after the proverbial stolen horse, I changed it out on the water of Long Island Sound.

Which took forever. This motor is so intricately and compactly put together, with fiendish origami ingenuity, that it's like eating a lobster to get at any part of it. To reach the fuel filter you have to remove the little integral fuel tank, attached in three places with a highly refined arrangement of spacers, rubber washers (to prevent vibration, I suppose), nuts and bolts and little L-shaped clamps and lockwashers -- twenty or so different parts just to secure this schmoo-shaped little plastic tank.

Needless to say I dropped three or four of these parts in the water. You remove a bolt and don't realize that down where you can't see it, that bolt is holding something else on. It's like the ancient joke about the man with the golden screw head in his navel: when he finally unscrewed it, his ass fell off.

At last I got the filter changed and the motor put back together. It still wouldn't start.

My cruising guide told me that Danford's Marina, in Port Jefferson, did repairs. I called 'em up on the cell phone and they said, sure, bring 'er in. So I motored the Scapegrace, towing the poor dinghy, into Port Jefferson harbor and up to Danford's dock.

To be continued....

Day Three: Intermezzo

2009-09-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

Dawn of Day Three came up like thunder....

No, it didn't. It came up like a semi-trailer cresting a rise on an interstate highway, over the godforsaken blighted accursed Robert Moses-haunted sad spoiled landscape of Long Island. And in due course its busy old beams peeped into the cabin of the Scapegrace and fell on my sleepy eyelids and I slowly, reluctantly, roused myself and poked my head abovedecks and took stock of my situation.

I was still miles from shore and a few miles further toward my destination and had a hundred feet of water under my keel, all to the good. The air was clear and the breeze mild and the seas calm -- quite a contrast from the lively night before. I made some coffee and then freed the tiller from its lashings and let the jib come over to starboard and then I sailed for a while. In fact I sailed most of the day, not very fast.

Truth to tell, I don't remember a thing about this day, after that first matin observance. I probably listened to the radio a bit, and no doubt gobbled some raisins and peanuts, and may have made a call or two on my cell phone. But it's a lost day -- which probably means it was a good day.

That afternoon I anchored off Old Field Point, just west of Port Jefferson, and spent the night riding calmly at anchor.

Day 2, continued: A wild night

2009-09-26T06:16:00.000-07:00

Wind came back into the west in the late afternoon, so I pulled up the anchor and headed out.

The weather radio said short thunderstorms were "possible", and about an hour later it turned out this was understated. A black blinding squall, with rain falling in streams rather than drops, came roaring across the water like an express train and hit me a lot quicker and harder than I expected.

I was able to heave-to and reef the mainsail and partway furl the jib (thanks to the handy roller furler) and by the time I got that done the storm was over, the sky was clear, the wet decks were gleaming-clean and the little droplets of water hanging here and there sparkling like sequins in the horizontal light of the setting sun. Oh and the wind was a nice steady ten knots, a little north of west, and the seas were maybe two feet and leisurely.

This halcyon state of wind and sea persisted until nearly midnight. Then the wind got stronger and the water very choppy, hitting me pretty hard on the port bow and making it hard to keep my course. And I was tired: had gotten up in New Rochelle quite early -- for me -- and had been either sailing or hull-diving all day. I just don't have the dura-ilia for these 24-hour forced marches any more.

So I hove-to on the starboard tack about four or five miles from the Long Island shore. Went below and pottered a bit, trying to warm up. Then noticed that the GPS was telling me I was actually traveling a knot or so in the diametrical wrong direction: west, that is, back toward New York. My fuddled brain gnawed on this bit of data for a lot longer than it should have had to and then the penny dropped: if I heave to on the port tack instead I'll reverse my direction of travel by 180° and be making progress without having to do any work!

The half-tack required to get me there was a bit white-knuckle since the sea had come up a good deal and the wind was, shall we say, brisk. As I gathered way for the tack the swells were coming across my starboard quarter. The Scapegrace gets very skittish and playful under those conditions and I was slow and groggy. It took several tries: coming up into the wind almost almost almost getting the jib back-winded and then, bang, a wave knocks the bow back and it's all to do over again: fall off, gather way, put the helm down, mutter come on, come on... and then another damn wave. But finally I caught a break or the wave gods tired of toying with me and the bow came round as sweet as you please and I lashed the tiller and went below and fell sound asleep in the middle of Long Island Sound.

Well, not quite the middle, of course. I was pretty much on a line between Eatons Neck and Port Jefferson, on the threshold of the bight between them. If I can get the Google Maps api to play nice with Google Blogger -- which is not so easy as it ought to be -- a map will appear below:

So I was out of the shipping lanes. But still I suppose there's stuff to bump into, or be bumped by. As it happened no such disaster befell and I slept the sleep of the bone-tired until dawn -- which brings us to Day Three.

Maine-bound, day 2: Through the gut of Long Island Sound

2009-09-25T16:32:00.000-07:00

Awoke early in New Rochelle. Made a sincere attempt to find the harbormaster, but didn't see him; so as he suggested last night, I "forgot about" what I owed the fine city of New Rochelle for my transient slip, and put-putted out of the harbor.

A nicer day than yesterday: sunny and warm, with a promising breeze from the west. But as the day wore on it veered north, and then easterly, and pretty soon it was dead foul. So I put in to the mouth -- just behind the lips, really -- of Huntington Bay, and anchored west of Eaton's neck in 20 feet of water, just sheltered by the land. Not a real harbor at all, just a spot to stop for a few hours.

My depth gauge has been giving me funny unreliable info for a while, and I have speculated that maybe so much algae has grown on the bottom that the transducer is unable to get a signal out, or back, or whatever. So I stripped and put on the face mask and the fins and dropped the little rope swim ladder over the side and went down under the hull with a plastic Brillo pad to clean the transducer.

First time I've swum off the boat since I've owned it. I remember these waters well, from windsurfing here twenty years and one marriage ago. Warm -- soupy, even, in August -- and a little cloudy. My crewman-to-be, Ishmael, thinks this is because all the septic tanks and fertilized lawns of Long Island drain into the Sound and eutrophicate it, and the theory seems plausible. Also, of course, Huntington Bay is quite shallow and heats up nicely during the summer.

The algae theory abut the depth gauge had a lot to recommend it. The hull was shockingly overgrown. Isn't the poisonous bottom paint supposed to prevent this? Or is that just barnacles? The keel looked like one of those fur-hatted Hasidim in Williamsburg -- luxuriantly hirsute, trailing tendrils and fringes and skirts and lappets of sea-hair every which way.

I haven't been under water much, recently, and found I couldn't hold my breath for very long. But after half a dozen quick dives I had cleaned off the transducer pretty well. Time to get back into the boat.

This, it turns out, is not so easy. The swim ladder is not a rigid metal one; it's made from rope. And like an idiot, I've hung it off the bow, which falls away at a sharp inward angle. So as I try to climb the ladder, it swings inward toward the hull and away from me, and I'm hanging backwards like a tree sloth, trying to pull myself hand-over-hand up the rope like a kid in boot camp.

Which I am not.

After much ungraceful scrambling and the usual quantum of swearing, I made it back on deck, bone-tired as I always am these days after any modest exertion. Lay on the deck to dry off in the late afternoon sun and the mild warm breeze, which felt very nice indeed. Then boiled some eggs, and tried to go to sleep -- unsuccessfully, as the sequel will show.

Day 1, continued. The backside of America

2009-09-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

New Rochelle has a sweet funky municipal marina, with buildings in that cool Thirties ocean-liner style. (Of course I forgot to take a picture, which will also be a recurring theme here.) There is a restaurant in the marina, and I decided to go have dinner there.

This project proved more difficult than you might expect. I couldn't find the entrance. I could see the windows of the dining room on the second floor, facing out onto the water, but there was no stairway up to it, and no door. I walked around to the street side of the restaurant, which turned out to be a blank wall with a small door -- obviously a service entrance to the kitchen -- where several busboys were lounging and smoking cigarettes and conversing in languid drawling Portuguese.

Finally, after about 20 minutes of fruitless prowling around the perimeter, the light dawned. There is an elevated parking garage next to the restaurant. Another trip back to the street and then down the ramp into the garage and voila, an awning and a double door and a sign and a board with the day's specials.

Moral: If you want to find the front of anything in America, pretend you're a car.

The water side of the restaurant -- and this is true of most waterfront structures in America -- presents a gaze but not a face. It is a place intended to be seen from, not to be seen or approached. It has no expression, no iconography, it makes no sign to you, conveys no message of welcome or grandeur or menace. It is not expecting you to be there, and you always catch it unawares -- en déshabillé, so to speak.

As for the actual street frontage -- since the building is right on the street, there's no room for a parking lot in between. Now the public face of any American building must give onto a parking lot. This is literally the law. You will approach in a car. You will no more approach on foot than you will approach in a boat.

There are alternatives. Here's Dublin:

Here's Venice:

From a boat, as from a train, you see the backside of America, in all its unsuspecting bare-assedness.

Maine-bound, Day 1: Escape from New York

2009-09-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

Caught the ebb tide from my mooring on the Hudson at 11 pm, an hour after slack water. My mooring buoy is semi-submerged, and absolutely submerged when the current is strong, bounding around three or four feet underwater like a Rhinemaiden on methedrine. Left a note for Joe the harbormaster and buoyed the mooring lines so I could pick them up more easily (we shall see what became of that ingenious scheme).

Had to motor down the Hudson -- wind versus current, bumpy and disagreeable -- in that weird still wee-hours world, when the city isn't asleep but it's a little groggy and its eyelids are half-shut.

So much light. A big fish jumped out of the water and splashed back with a startling explosive noise and nearly startled me out of my skin.

Naturally the southerly wind died as soon as I rounded the Battery, so I also had to motor up the East River. Got through Hell Gate without any hair-raising encounters with barge traffic -- a first, actually -- at about 3 AM.

I've always loved the Hell Gate railway bridge:

There was a passenger train going across it as I approached. It looked like the Polar Express in the Chris van Allsburg book -- all lit-up with warm yellowish lights shining from the windows, snug and cozy-looking, the headlight from the engine illuminating the girders of the bridge from the sides and below, an angle of lighting you never see otherwise. Very beautiful, very poignant and evocative, I couldn't tell you why. Not just a mechanical vehicle passing over a dead piece of architecture -- more like the intertwined bone and sinew of some vast living thing.

Got to sail a bit after the Triborough -- if I ever call it the RFK Bridge, may all the gods simultaneously strike me dead -- and tacked twice between the Whitestone and Throgs Neck. Then the wind died and a grim steady cold depressing rain settled in, like Noah's flood come again, and I ran into dear old familiar New Rochelle and begged a transient slip off the harbormaster.

"Shall I settle up now?" I asked.

"Naah, tomorrow morning," said the harbormaster.

"I might be leaving early -- maybe I won't see you."

"If I don't see you, forget about it."

I love Boat Dudes. This will be a persistent theme.

Back on the grid

2009-09-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

Not to give the ending away, or anything, but I made it to Maine, and I made it back. I'll post a day-by-day account of the saga, in all its low-mimetic comedy, starting tomorrow.

El momento de la verdad

2009-08-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

So tonight's the night. Slack water at the boat basin around 10 pm, and then I can loaf down to the Battery on the ebb and catch the current up the East River and through Hell Gate in the wee hours -- assuming that the Staten Island Ferry doesn't finally get me, and that the current predictions are halfway reliable, which is about how reliable I've found them to be.

I'll be pretty beat by tomorrow afternoon, which with any luck at all ought to see me well into Long Island Sound. Where will I anchor? How far will I get? The unpredictability is kinda the point of sailing, of course, but just now I'm feeling a little jumpy about it. Coming home from Maine last year I made it from Huntington, Long Island, to the Battery in 12 hours or so, with very light and fluky winds. (What happened after the Battery is another story.)

So unless the gods are very displeased with me I ought to be able to get that far, anyway.

Be nice, ye Gods! If I've put a foot wrong and annoyed you -- I didn't mean to, honest I didn't, and I will pour you an ample libation.

Gassing up

2009-08-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

Manhattan is different. There is one gas station within walking distance of my apartment.

A gas station -- within walking distance; that doesn't really compute, does it? Normally, of course, Americans don't walk to the gas station; they drive there. But when I need to top up my antediluvian Johnson two-stroke 9.9 hp auxiliary outboard, I walk four blocks to my local gas station, which is on 96th Street between Riverside and West End. It looks nothing like the bit of American Pastoral above. It's set into the side of an apartment building, like a row of garage doors cheek-by-jowl. If you have a car, you pull into one of these little garage doors, and a man comes and fills your tank -- no self service here -- and then you have to back out onto 96th Street, which is always fun.

It's easier for me. I show up on foot -- which seems to faze nobody -- with a plastic jerrican or two, and the man puts two gallons of gas in each one, and then I take a taxi to the 79th Street boat basin, because you can't take a New York City bus with a gas can in hand; I tried once, and the driver was ready to call in an air strike.

Filling up the gas cans was on my list for today. But when I got to the station, I found that each little narrow garage door was blocked with a folding chair -- the sort of thing we might have sat on at a church picnic down South when I was a lad.

I must have looked a little puzzled, because a remarkably nice-looking -- though slightly grubby -- chap with a wonderful haircut emerged from the bowels of the gas station. I think he might even have been Brazilian, he was so ridiculously handsome. "Closed," he said. "Two how-ers." Rhymes with "showers".

How-ers... how-ers... Oh, hours!

I'll try again tomorrow, before my wife gets home. I don't want her meeting this guy.

After all, he's only four -- faugh-er? -- blocks away. And I'm going to be gone for a while.

Apprehension

2009-07-30T21:40:00.000-07:00

I enjoy sailing, really I do, and I'm looking forward to my trip to Maine, but I'm also scared shitless.

It's always this way. I took a little overnight down to Sandy Hook last week, and didn't sleep a wink the night before. How will I deal with that damn Staten Island Ferry? Every time I get near the Battery every Staten Island Ferry ever launched returns from the deep or the scrapyard and converges on my poor little boat, with Giuliani voters lining the rails and shouting coarse insults at me, like those French knights in the Monty Python movie --

... and the captains blaring their damn horns at a fiendishly calibrated molto-agitato, BURRRR... BURRRR.... BURRRRRR! guaranteed to turn your bowels to water. In New York, you can be honked at anywhere -- on the sidewalk, on the water, in the shower, probably in the cemetery.

This time I'm not so worried about the ferry, though I must beard it in its den to round the Battery. I'm worried about where I'm going to anchor on the way to acquire my crewman Ishmael in Wellfleet. I don't know that many places, and it's always kinda white-knuckle, especially if you're by yourself -- and it's dark -- and the wind is blowing -- to grope into an unfamiliar harbor and find the right place and shift the engine into neutral and then scurry forward to drop the hook, hoping that you don't go aground and the boat doesn't drift too far from where you want it to be while you're in mid-scurry.

Once the anchor is down you sit and try to figure out where you're likely to swing if the wind and current change, and how much water (if any) you'll be in, and whether you'll be on top of another boat.

And if you decide there might be a problem.... Then you have to shift the engine into reverse and carefully try to back up away from your anchor a hundred feet or so, hoping that you're not going to wrap the anchor rode around the prop.

(Did I mention that it's dark now? Black as the inside of your hat, and you can't tell what you're looking at, or how far away it is?)

Finally you drop the other hook, the Bruce that you'll spend an hour trying to get back up out of the muck tomorrow. Then you eyeball the two anchor rodes and see that their angle is way short of 180 degrees, and so you shorten up on both of them, and then you wonder whether you've got too little line out, and you don't sleep a wink. Again.

Hell, might as well just make some coffee and keep sailing.

Another mad expedition

2009-07-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready -- well, I should be getting ready, instead of blogging -- to set sail from NYC to Maine. I made it here from Maine last fall, in spite of two hurricanes and my own incompetence -- a story which I may tell one of these days -- so maybe I can make it back. The winds ought to be more favorable, and it's not hurricane season yet.

This year I have to single-hand as far as Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod, where I hope to pick up a crewman.

I expressed that badly. I mean, there's a guy I know -- let's call him Ishmael -- who summers in Wellfleet and has agreed to join me for the latter part of the trip, Wellfleet to the Sheepscot River.

There's always something to do on a boat. Here's my to-do list:

Change fuel filter on dinghy outboard
Attach mooring pickup hook to boat pole
Replace reefing line on mainsail (and whip ends, dammit, you lazy slapdash slacker)
Make sure outboard can't fall off dinghy (again)
Make sure nothing else can fall off dinghy (again)
Tell harbormaster (again) that mooring buoy has sunk, and only the boat is keeping it off the bottom
Replace stupid brass screws holding nav light in place with stainless steel ones, which you should have used in the first place, idiot
Figure out why the depth gauge is telling me I have 105 feet of water under my keel -- weed or barnacles on the transducer? Must I don mask and snorkel and pickle my puckery flesh in the Hudson River PCB soup? Maybe it'll correct itself.
Pack clothes
Fill up jerricans with gasoline
Steal towels and pillows and sheets from home
Get DC inverter from car

I also have a shopping list:

Contact lens solution (for wife)
Contact lens case (ditto)
Coffee
Artificial sweetener
That weird ultrapasteurized milk that you don't have to refrigerate
Olive oil
Mustard
Lots and lots of cheap red wine
Easy to cook camp food
Butane cylinders for stove
AA batteries and lots of them
Trash bags
Dish scrubbers (plastic mesh)
Effective bilge pump for dinghy (Query to self: Can justify to wife?)

The stainless steel screws mentioned above are a story in themselves: #4, 1" long, self-tapping, flat or oval head, Philips or slot drive. Easy, right? Wrong. This became a year-long quest for the Holy Grail: All the local hardware stores, West Marine, Home Depot, smallparts.com (a wonderful place, by the way) bosunsupplies.com (ditto), fairwayfasteners.com(ditto again). All out of stock. Had George Soros cornered the market? Are #4 stainless steel self-tapping non-panhead screws critical components of Iran's nuclear program?

Smallparts.com finally came through, and I now own a supply of #4 screws that ought to last for three or four generations.

Then there's the dinghy. But that's not just a story, it's a novel. Another time.