Life goes on, I forget just why

I promised a photo of what's left of the Morris Canal, at the Jersey City end. That's it, above.

The tide is relatively high, so that sunken lumberyard of imperishable 19th-century timber, to the left of the photo, isn't as impressive now as it will be six hours later.

The narrow body of water shown once stretched a hundred miles or so, over hill and dale, to the Delaware River.

This shot was taken at about 7:30 AM. This is what I do, now, weekdays: I ride my bike from Chateau Smithbowen down to 39th street, and from there I catch the 7 AM ferry to Jersey City. I ride the bike from the ferry landing up LaSalle Street and then, when that peters out, up Grand Street -- a busier street, full of the usual obnoxious aggressive entitled Jersey drivers -- to the unpropitiously-named Jersey Avenue(*).

Then south to the footbridge where the photo above was taken. Through various cunning byways I find my way into the boatyard. I go into the office and pester the boatyard guys, in my ineffectual, polite way -- I'm a squeaky wheel, but I squeak very softly -- and then I clamber up onto the boat and potter. Here's the result of some recent pottering:

Yes, the solar panel -- the thing that might have prevented the most recent disaster, if it had been installed three weeks ago.

Or maybe not.

That rail-mounting looks simple, but reflects a few false starts, and the unlovely but quite serviceable plastic rail clamps hide several uselessly drilled holes. (Who knew that when you order a stainless-steel U-bolt with an inner diameter of one inch, it arrives with an inner diameter of 15/16"? Clearly I went to the wrong schools.)

Back to the Morris Canal. Here's the view looking West, toward New York Harbor:

We take our pleasures where we find them. At the moment, mine are the joys of Jersey City.

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(*) Google Earth will show you all this if you're really interested.

Disaster strikes again

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Well, semi-disaster. No pictures for this one, but the satellite photo above shows the present residence of Ginger, to wit, the Liberty Landing boatyard in Jersey City. High and dry.

I've had a hard time sitting down to write about this.  Let's start at the beginning.

When I bought the boat there were, of course, several things to worry about, at least a bit.

1) The drip through the stuffing box -- that is, the fitting that carries the prop shaft through the hull -- was perhaps a bit more rapid than it should have been. They say a drop every thirty seconds or so is to be expected. This was more like a drop every ten. Still, it didn't seem likely to sink the boat, especially since there is a nice automatic bilge pump that kicks in when the water in the bilge gets more than a couple of inches deep. I found that the pump would come on every hour or so, pump for a minute or two, then shut off with a self-satisfied gurgle.

2) The batteries. Who knows how old they were? They had been sitting for two years on a shelf at the yard where I bought the boat. Supposedly they had been trickle-charged and were in fine fettle, but I had only the yard's word for that.

Still, everything seemed fine for several weeks. I would go out and potter around on the boat at the mooring, and we took her out for several day sails, and there was never more than an inch or two of water in the bilge. The batteries always delilvered plenty of current and the engine always started after a second or two of cranking.

I figured running the engine regularly would keep the batteries topped up. So I did that.

I had ordered a nice solar panel as well -- belt and suspenders -- but it arrived without any hardware to mount it to the rail, and it proved surprisingly difficult to devise a mounting for it, and then find the right parts. A very different experience from the panel I got for Scapegrace -- that one came with a bracket and clamp and it was the work of three minutes to secure it to the rail. Strange. I'll devote a post to the solar panel one of these days; you'll laugh at the solution I came up with.

Anyway, there was no solar panel on the boat on the fateful Sunday, Quatorze Juillet, when I got a call from the nice people at the boat basin: "Uhh, Mister Smith? Your boat is kinda... low in the water."

Oh shit. I got on the bike, scrambled down to the boat basin, into the dinghy, out to the boat. Hip-deep water in the cabin. Batteries submerged, dead. Engine half-submerged. Tried bailing, but there was no way. Called Sea-Tow. They had to send somebody all the way from Sheepshead Bay, which took a while.

I would bail for five minutes, then rest for five minutes, just to keep the situation from getting any worse. Wherever the leak was, I could bail faster than it could leak, and my bailing lowered the water level several inches. So I figured we wouldn't sink -- as long as I could keep bailing.

The Sea-Tow guys arrived, finally. Very competent. They had a marvelous ultra-macho gasoline-powered pump which emptied the cabin and bilge in about ten minutes.

They called the Liberty Landing marina, about seven miles or so from the boat basin, and although it was a Sunday, Luis -- I didn't catch his last name -- and a colleague said they would come in and meet us. Sea-Tow dragged us down there. About a three hour tour, as they say on Gilligan's Island.

All who see him, laugh him to scorn. No other boaters waved at me during this Tow Of Shame, and I didn't wave at any.

Once we got there, Luis and colleague efficiently hauled the boat, considerately power-washed the hull, and put her up on blocks.

Since then my life has consisted of phone calls and emails between and among the boatyard and the insurance company. It's all incredibly slow. Just this last week the yard put the boat back in the water, to see where water was coming in. They report that the stuffing box is leaking like crazy -- 'gushing' was the word they used.

Sam Johnson once observed that he 'never had a Patron before'. Well, I never had an inboard before. Is this something that happens?  

I had planned on taking off for Maine on August 1st. Now, who knows when.

One thing that pleases me a bit: the Liberty Landing marina occupies the entry to the old Morris Canal. There's a footbridge to it, from poky downtown Jersey City, which passes over a slough of ancient timber, strewn like jackstraws, obviously a remnant of the canal days. I'll try to remember to take a picture.

Lord of all he surveys

The kids are sailing the boat, and I'm feeling smug. The unbuttoned bottom button of the shirt is of course an unfortunate lapse from nautical propriety, and tends to bring Mister Yachtsman back to human scale.

This was a little 'umble afternoon harbor sail. My daughter took a number of pictures -- will this link work?

We are still getting to know the boat. Really sails very differently from the Scapegrace, and the unreefed main is too much in anything like a wind. I need to figure out that reefing thing.

Sometimes the instruments work, and sometimes they don't. Bad connections? Fouled sensors? The lack of a knotmeter doesn't bother me, but I am very unhappy with the on-and-offness of the depth finder. 

Regime change

Ginger's former owner -- let's call him Tom -- was understandably sad to see her go. He came down to the pier on Sunday, showed me a few things on the boat -- which was very helpful -- and then took this photo when I finally cast off and headed for the Hudson.

Back in the Hudson

Ginger and I made it from Port Washington back to the Hudson today. Above, up top, approaching the Brothers -- you can just see South Brother to port, and North Brother, the bigger brother, to starboard. Below, approaching the Whitestone Bridge. Dull subject, ugly bridge, but I was bored.

In one way, it's become routine, this trip, though I always enjoy it more than I expect to. And there's always something a little different.

This time it was weird short steep standing waves in the East River. I think these may have been because the current was ebbing strongly but the wind was blowing upriver. Ginger shouldered them aside in fine style; once or twice I got a refreshing whisper of spray on my cheek, but that was it.

I like the boat a lot. It's a little strange, though -- as if one's wife had died and one promptly married her sister.

Afloat again (well, almost)

Meet Ginger, named obliquely after a very important person in my life (as Scapegrace beatae memoriae also was). Ginger's new name has yet to be painted on, and she will probably operate, as far as the outer world is concerned, under her former alias until she's back on dry land for the winter.

Sorry for the crummy phone pictures. More will be forthcoming. 

Ginger is a 1983 Pearson 303, with a 13 hp Yanmar diesel inboard auxiliary, which (with its 22 gallon fuel tank) will someday, I hope, help get me to and from Maine a bit more expeditiously than I could do before. I'd rather sail than motor, but when motor you must, it's good to be able to.

I am her third owner, and the very pleasant chap from whom I bought her has had her since '84.

And yes, I spent more than I could really afford. But I'm not sorry. Not a bit sorry.

She's in Port Washington, Long Island, at the moment, and now I have to find a time to bring her round to the Hudson.

the wake

My last moment in the cockpit of the dear Scapegrace. If you're thinking the heeling angle is rather extreme, you're right: she's lying pathetically on her side, high and relatively dry, having been hauled up yesterday after almost three weeks underwater since Sandy sank her.

Or rather, Sandy and I sank her. Of course I blame myself. If only I had doubled up on the mooring lines, or picked a different slip to put her in.

There's a very sad photo gallery.

The cabin is full of Bronx muck. I picked up my snazzy inflatable life jacket and no kidding, a live crab fell out of it. Everything is tossed this way and that. We were able to retrieve a few sentimental objects. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as the poet says. But it was clear that even before she sank, the Scapegrace was practically turned upside down.

This is, was, a boat that saved me many times from my own incompetence. My last attempt at competence -- taking her to Eastchester rather than leaving her in the Hudson -- doomed her, as it turned out. I don't exactly feel guilty about that, anyway -- I did what everybody thought was right -- but I feel very unlucky; and in the unjust arbitrary pagan world sailors inhabit, that's a very bad thing.

As another poet says, there are so many we shall have to mourn -- and so many we already have to mourn, come to think of it. So maybe it seems very shallow and selfish to mourn a boat.

I don't deny it. And yet I do mourn. I loved that boat. I claim the sailor's superstitious privilege: I believe boats have minds and souls, and I ask the dear Scapegrace's pardon. I will never forget her.

Scapegrace, 1979-2012, RIP

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I didn't take a camera when I finally got myself up to Charlie's boatyard today, to find out definitively what had happened to my dear old girl -- the first time I could get there, and Charlie has had his hands full, and for a long time he didn't even know which wreck was which. I wasn't optimistic, though hope dies hard; it was clear from earlier, fragmentary conversations, that the outlook was not good.

Since I didn't have the camera, I can't show you her spar, all that you can now see of her, still bravely bolt-upright above the water, in another marina a few dozen yards up-bay from Charlie's. Her hull is submerged, even at an exceptionally low tide, but she seems to have gone down plump on her bottom into the muck of Eastchester Bay, like a dowager duchess into an armchair. That was a hell of a boat. How I will miss her.

It was the storm surge that did it -- many feet over anything ever seen in Eastchester Bay. Waves -- big, solid, green waves -- were breaking over the asphalt in Charlie's yard, and undermined the pavement beneath the boats he had already hauled. His own sailboat, with all the rest, went toppling off her poppets, and ended up driving her bow through the windows of his house, before finally ending up on the riprap beneath. The yard looks like a demolition outfit has been at work on it with jackhammers -- big gaping voids in the pavement, a tricky shifting surface underfoot that feels more like quarry rubble than anything meant to be walked on.

Scapegrace had not been hauled yet, so what seems to have happened to her was that storm surge and wind and wave either tore her away from her float, or indeed may have torn the whole float away from its pilings, and she drifted -- bow to the wind, of course -- up the bay until somehow she grounded in this other marina. I have to assume the hull is holed, or she would have gone farther, with the water so high, and been beached at the head of the bay; wind and swell, I'm told, were driving right in from the south at the height of the evening tide, about 9 PM or so on that dramatic Monday, the 29th of October, 2012.

The map above shows you her resting place, at the arrow -- not, alas, her final resting place.

I would rather she had disappeared without a trace, somewhere in the ships' graveyard of Long Island Sound, among other respectable and long-lived vessels, finally and honorably done in by the insuperable greatness of sea and air. Strength and courage will take you far, whether you're a boat or a person, but there are divinities in the world much mightier than any virtue of ours, and when those divinities hand down their judgement, we can only kiss the rod. Complaint, somehow, seems more feeble and undignified than acquiescence. If you contend with the gods -- as all sailors do, ex officio -- you had better prepare to accept defeat like a man.

But alas, to disappear without a trace -- that noble fate was not Scapegrace's. She is now blocking traffic in a Bronx marina, and though I greatly approve of blocking traffic, in general, this means that her passing will be attended by squalid negotiations with insurers and the folks who will haul her out of her muddy armchair and off to -- what? I don't even want to think about it.

The Boat Dudes at Charlie's yard were very kind. More than kind. Oh, they weren't effusive; there weren't any man hugs, or anything like that. Not their style. They too were men who had had losses, many much greater than mine, and took them in a fine heroic spirit; they even seemed to find a certain pleasure in rehearsing the spectacular horrors of that unprecedented night. Tony took me on a tour of the disasters, and hard-bitten Emil softened his expression momentarily and made a cell-phone call to somebody I needed to talk to. It doesn't sound like much, I know, but for the first time I felt like one of the boys, rather than a merely acceptable, polite, and well-tolerated outsider.

I have learned a lot from these guys, at a time of life when learning isn't so easy.

On the mooring at last

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I don't suppose that's actually the Scapegrace in the satellite photo, though it could be; I have pretty much the same mooring I had last year -- right in front of the Normandie apartment building, and less than half a mile from the 79th Street marina, which is convenient. Here's the Normandie building (not my photo):

Named, I gather, after the ill-fated luxe passenger liner which burned and capsized at Pier 88, now the Passenger Ship Terminal, in 1942:

I assume they named the building after the ship before it sank.

I hate to see pictures of sunk boats, though there is a certain gruesome fascination in it. And I may have mentioned that my own poor dinghy -- almost brand-new -- sank at Charlie's dock, sometime in the week between the day I inflated it and put it back in the water and the day I came back to take Scapegrace and dinghy back to the Hudson.

Naturally I thought the project of taking Scapegrace back had been scuttled by the loss of the dinghy; how would I get back from the mooring to the marina?

Fortunately I had enlisted the company of an individual more resolute than myself, a friend of some years' standing -- let's call her Ariela. Ariela is a keen sailor and a great problem-solver. Her brother Pete also keeps a boat at 79th Street, and Ariela, upon receiving my dismal email canceling the trip, called up and said, Don't be silly; when we get there, Pete will come and fetch us in his dinghy.

So last Sunday morning Penelope drove Ariela and me up to the Bronx, and I'm sure she heaved a sigh of relief, as she drove home, that she, at least, did not have to spend the next six hours or so on the boat. Ariela had brought much nicer provisions than I usually get for myself, and the day was warm and sunny. We managed to get the Scapegrace out of her temporary slip and out into the bay without mishap, and sailed pleasantly south down the bay with a ten-knot west wind.

Then of course we hung a right at the Throgs Neck Bridge and the wind was in our teeth -- and it had freshened, too. If I were single-handing, would I have tacked all the way to the Brothers, or would I have motored?

Who knows? But certain it was that with Ariela on board, there was no question of motoring. So we did tack from Throgs Neck to Brothers, Ariela at the helm and me working the lines, and I got quite a workout, particularly with that balky mainsheet traveller -- can't recall whether I've mentioned it before, but it requires some serious manhandling. All quite exhilarating though, heeling fifteen degrees and more, and spanking along at six knots plus.

The wind kept backing southerly, and by the time we got to the Brothers -- the gateway to Hell Gate -- I really didn't feel bold enough to tack through those narrow waters, particularly with the current running four knots or so. We furled the jib and let the main free and just motored through the tricky bits. Ariela had brought along some homemade Bloody Mary mix -- with fresh horseradish -- and the other necessities, so on the principle that the sun was no doubt over the yardarm somewhere, we hoisted a convivial glass to the East River, not ordinarily my favorite body of water, but much pleasanter with a cheering beverage in hand.

Down the narrow river, current strong in our favor but wind fluky and mostly foul, so we just idled the motor -- enough for steerageway -- and let the river take us down to the Battery. Needless to say, as soon as we cleared the last pier and headed west -- under sail again -- for the Hudson, my old nemesis the Staten Island Ferry leaned on its direful horn -- tuba mirum spargens sonum, as the song says -- and even though it was Sunday morning, leapt at us from its slip, fangs bared, seeking whom it might devour.

This was the first time Ariela and I had sailed together, so our attempt to do a few 360s until the ferry got well clear were highly comical -- missed signals, fouled sheets, a certain amount of decent profanity directed at no particular target. The jib managed to wrap itself fiendishly around the forestay, but we somehow got that sorted out, and once the ferry had gone its dismal way to Staten Island -- facilis descensus Averno -- we headed up the Hudson.

Encountered a blustery cold wet squall at about Canal Street which lasted maybe fifteen minutes and left us both drenched and cold but did no other harm. We were a little early for the turn of the tide, and there was a half-hour or so after the squall when the wind wasn't strong enough to stem the current and we had to motor again. But as the current slackened the wind picked up, and we ended up making our way up to the Boat Basin in fine style, under sail and looking very competent, I think.

Picked up the mooring without incident, and Pete came out in his dinghy and took us ashore. The sort of day that reminds you why you like sailing.

Take nothing for granted

No images for this post, alas, and no background. I should have chronicled the whole arduous process of getting the boat water-ready this year, including a preposterous comedy of errors in connection with the notoriously worn Pearson 26 lower rudder-post bushing, which I shimmed up in a very ghetto fashion. It might last the season; let's hope.

Finally, everything was ready. I inflated and re-floated the rubber dinghy. I retrieved the outboards from Sheila's Home For Wayward Motors on City Island(*), put one on the dinghy and one on the Scapegrace, and gave Charlie the green light to put Scapegrace in the water.

Came back a few days later, ready to take the boat around the Horn -- I mean the Battery, of course -- and into the Hudson. What should meet my eye but the dinghy deflated, sunk at the dock. Some kind soul -- I think it was Emil, whom I have mentioned before; I know his knots -- had tied a lined around the outboard and cleated it to the dock, so it hadn't been immersed, and that was OK.

But the dinghy -- a downscale rubber-ducky -- was a dead loss. It appeared to me that somebody had pinched it hard against the dock and driven an aluminum floorboard right through the walls of the starboard and port pontoons, making a foot-long tear in each. Maybe somebody could patch wounds like that; but I cannot.

I felt like cutting my throat. But the Boat Dudes soon made me feel better. I was invited onto one boat for meatloaf and mashed potatoes -- which were delicious, let me tell you -- and given some sage advice there. And I got plenty of other sage advice; the most creative was to fill the pontoons up with two-part foam and you'll never have to worry about inflating it again. Emil showed me a three-quarters-sunk dinghy which the cops had found floating in Eastchester Bay and dragged into the marina three years ago. A few bolts, and a lot of 5200, and it would be fine.

I'm sure Emil was right. In an afternoon he could have made that dinghy a thing of beauty. Bit too much of a project for me, though.

I had lined up a couple of prospects to come along on the trip from Eastchester to the Hudson, via Hell Gate and the East River and the deathly lair of the Staten Island Ferry. But this disaster seemed to have knocked that project on the head; once we were on the mooring at 79th Street, how could we get to dry land without swimming(**)? So I called my pals up and told 'em "indefinitely postponed".

As it happened, things worked out a bit better. But I'll save that for another post.

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(*) Sheila doesn't have a Web site: this is the best I can do: http://www.switchboard.com/business/ultra-sports-center-bronx-ny-3

(**) Which would be quite easy, actually. The mooring is maybe 30 feet from shore. But it seems unthinkable, somehow. For one thing you'd have to walk home starkers for a mile and change. I wouldn't mind if I were in better shape. But I'm not.

Spring is... springin'

So work has begun, belatedly as always, on the Scapegrace, who survived a remarkably mild winter remarkably well. The picture above kinda makes it look like she's in the water, but that's a ways off: bottom needs scraping and painting, the ugly blue patch of duct tape covers a hole where the thirty-year-old Ritchie compass came off the bulkhead to be sent home for reconditioning, and there's more work to do than I even want to contemplate.

Oh, and the human girl is my dear daughter who kindly accompanied her dad to the yard today.

It was a good day.

There are dirty days to come: here's the bottom:

Hibernation

Scapegrace is sleeping quietly on her poppets in the Bronx, and the outboards are sleeping quietly at Sheila's place on City Island, and the fishy-smelling folded-up rubber dinghy is stinking up our storage locker in Harlem. But the weirdly temperate February weather has started up the old itch, an itch that wouldn't have shown up for another month in a normal year: time to go out and scrape the bottom -- especially that dismal boot stripe; I owe you a picture but I'm almost afraid to take it. And the sails need some stitching, which I could have done two months ago and haven't. And I should take the covers off the cushions and bring them home and wash them; two sweaty bachelor weeks in Long Island Sound last year left them smelling like the lion house at the zoo.

Being a sailor is a bit like being a Mormon: you have more than one spouse, and strangely, the voiceless boat has her ways of invading your dreams too.

Another season over

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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

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: