May 2 3 Portsmouth to Yorktown and Lay Day There 34 9 Miles

Well it was not our fault, and no harm done at our 9:15 departure from the Tidewater Marina. The lovely young lady who works in the office came to help us off the dock. It is obvious that she had never done such a task before, though we did not know this. I asked her to take the bow line while Lene undid the stern line. We were port side to the dock with the wind blowing from that side. What our willing and cheerful helper should have done was hold the bow line and walk aft as we backed out after which she should have tossed the line on deck. The wind would then have blown our stern to starboard, so we would be able to back up a little further, turn left and motor out. But she just threw off the line on our deck immediately and when we backed out we drifted sideways to starboard in the narrow lane. Fortunately there was a turning basin down a bit, which she pointed out to us, and we were able to turn around in it and head out.
But the wind gods were not cooperating. The first part of the passage was essentially north, where the wind was coming from, and about 15 knots actual, (20 apparent). Also, we had a batten problem. The Velcro strap that holds the batten (flexible rod that stiffens the sail) in its pocket in the sail, was partially torn off and not holding. So the batten was sliding out and this was not good for the sail either, so no main sail use today.  We passed the Navy Bases Destroyer Pier from which I did my

Midshipmans cruise in 1964, aboard the USS Dewey. DLG 17. As time passes destroyers get bigger and bigger.
Aboard ILENE, we cut across the Thimble Shoal. But our course gradually curved around to the west till we were heading west up the mighty York River. We got to where we could put out sail and put out the small jib which gave us an extra knot. But when we got to the river itself, where a beam reach could have helped us, the wind gradually died, so it was a motoring day -- again!
Once on the mooring, Roger the Tailor sprang into action and the batten problem is fixed. I lowered the dink for the first time since Beaufort SC and connected the two parts of the new, stronger, wider, easier to use ratchet strap.  We dinked in, paid for our mooring and had dinner with Stan and Carol, at the Restaurant in the Marina. We celebrated his retirement after almost 50 years of teaching Genetics, most of them at William and Mary. I called it fine dining based on service, taste and presentation, but Lene, who likewise relished the food, says that fried food cant be fine dining though it was mighty fine to me. I did have a "wardrobe malfunction" trying to get properly shod before dinner. Both are red, they are jumbled in a locker and I didnt notice this until after dinner.

Our friends again drove in their two cars and left one for our use for the next day! They also brought us the box from Doyle Sails with the five plastic panels with which we can now enclose the cockpit. A very peaceful night.
In the morning, we dinked in, brought the box with the panels from the car via the dink to the boat and installed them. It will take some getting used to for me to be comfortable sailing with them on. The rear one has to be removed to lower and raise the dink. When the dink is down, one has to crawl out under the rear panel to the swim platform to board the dink. With the side panels on, the handles for the big winches for the Genoa sheets can only go half way around, slowing operations. Many of these issues can be resolved when we get back and Junior, of Doyle Sails, puts straps on from the top so that the panels can be rolled up, and fasteners between the aft end of the dodger and the forward end of the new cover need to be attached.

It was beautifully warm and sunny and the adjacent beach in the river got a lot of use. There was also a food festival on Saturday and one for art on Sunday.

We did laundry, bought some gifts, and did the shopping.











Lene dressed for dinner and I shot her by the two green excursion schooners docked at the marina.

In the evening went to dinner at the home of David and his family.
David is Stans son, who I saw last when he was an adolescent and an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons.

David, Lene, Me, Davids wife Wendy, their son Josh, Carol and Stan. Their daughter, Sam, soon  to graduate, is the best looking of the lot of us, by far, but she was the photographer.

Three generations were enjoying each other and we enjoyed them all. They did the best dry rubbed ribs I have ever had, corn bread etc., and it was a delicious home cooked meal. And another very quiet night on the mooring with a full moon.

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April 30 May 1 Two Lay Days in Portsmouth Zero Miles

Lenes finger, at the right, is pointing out our slip on F Dock at this Marina, a huge one. In 2012 and 2014 we stayed at a free dock by the Radisson hotel, a couple hundred yards to the upper left of the poster but this time we wanted repairs and might have had to haul the boat so a marina was needed.

Gaston showed up with his assistant promptly as scheduled. I had cleared out the aft cabin to give access to the area of concern. He laid a pencil on the shaft, so light that it would easily detect vibration. Nothing. It does not happen at the dock, even when, tied onto it tightly, we run the engine in gear up to 2500 rpms, trying to drag the dock. He dissembled the flexible coupling again, tested for alignment with feeler gauges, reassembled it and pronounced that it was within tolerance. So the problem is outside the boat, at or near the propeller end of the shaft. He suggested that we wait until the fall and when the boat is hauled, we check the cutlass bearing and remove the propeller and ship it to California for what will be an expensive reconditioning job. He said that we are not in danger from the current situation.
Then he lent us his truck and we visited the supermarket, the drugstore, and a law firm where I signed a document and got it notarized. I spent a few hours planning the places we could stop along the Potomac on the way up and down to Washington DC. It is slim pickins for anchorages and marinas with water deep enough for ILENEs 58" draft. I have asked the 6500 members of a "private group" on Facebook for more information.
Later Gaston came over and paid us a social visit. He was born in France, raised in Israel and is an excellent mechanic. He was affiliated with and sailed in the Caribbean 1500.

The weather has been rainy most of our two days here and so we did little. I had visited the nautical museum and lightship in 2012 and toured the historic district. It rained then too!
They also have a Childrens Museum and one honoring Virginia athletes. I took a pass on those. There is a small Jewish Museum and a historic 1812 house, both of which can be toured, but only in season, not now.
So we took showers, took on water, cleaned the boat, blogged, read, cooked, ate and watched the first two episodes of the PBS series Wolf Hall, based on a novel by Hillary Mantell, which my book group read a few summers ago, about Thomas Cromwell, an attorney in the time of Henry VIII.

We would have left the second of these two days but the forecast of rain and 25 knot wind in our faces deterred us and the forecast came true.

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May 12 13 Last Two Lay Days in Washington No miles

No, not a Maritime Museum. This is one of the fishing boats used by the Danes in WWII to smuggle most of their 7000 Jews into neutral Sweden. It is one of the many artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I spent a whole day (10 to 5:15) here and did not see it all. Designed of the same beautiful pale yellow stone that is used in most other government buildings in this city, the interior has a long atrium around which the horrible history unfolds, as one starts on the fourth floor and works ones way down. This atrium is glass covered and reminded me of a railroad station  -- such an integral part of the Germans "Final Solution". I have been to such museums in NY, Jerusalem and smaller ones in many other cities but none that were as comprehensive, with a significant slant on US responses before, during and after the war. It showed how gradually Hitler came to power, consolidated his power and set to work first trying to drive the Jews out by making life unbearable and dangerous, then deporting them and finally, exterminating them. One huge wall of etched glass, has the names of the numerous European towns where Jews lived before Hitler, including my fathers birthplace, Untergrombach, middle row, right, with my imagined "RR Station" below.

The place was very crowded with lots of high school kids who were very respectful. I was quite moved by the experience. The museum repeatedly discussed the plight of the Roma (gypsies) and other victims. It also had exhibits on the three post-Holocaust genocides: Cambodias killing fields, the Serbo-Croation conflict and Rwanda. It seems humanity has not learned yet, despite the saying "Never Again! We had lunch in the museums cafe, located in a small building outside the Memorial.
Our final day was for Congress and the Library of Congress. We had planned to visit the adjacent Supreme Court as well. I had to be admitted to its Bar to oppose a Petition for Certiorari  in the late 70s. (Since about 95 to 99 percent of such petitions are denied, winning that one was rather easy.) But our tourism stamina gave out before we got there, which was a shame because Lene has never been there. On our way we passed the Frances Perkins Department of Labor Building.

Ms. Perkins was one of FDRs "brain trust" and the first female Secretary of Labor. She co-taught a seminar in labor history I took at Cornell in about 1964.
In 2008 Congress opened a huge underground entrance, visitors center, "Emancipation Hall," with Museum, gift shops, a large cafeteria and many restrooms to handle the throngs of tourists. We were shown an inspirational movie about how well Congress works, which is somewhat of a joke given todays hyperpartisanship. Leah, our assigned

tour guide was energetic and bright with the kids but the tour did not include either house of the Congress. We easily secured a pass to visit the House, which was in session, but just barely. The person acting as speaker recognized a stream of Representatives who rose to give speeches of up to four minutes. It was mostly women in red suits on the Democratic side and men in blue suits on the other side. Several democrats spoke in favor of refinancing the Highway Trust Fund and opposing yet-another bill to restrict abortion, which the Republicans are addicted to and will undoubtedly pass. The Republicans spoke in favor of the anti-abortion bill and in memory of slain police officers. They all spoke to an almost empty room. The speeches go into the Congressional Record and are fodder for the folks back home. "See how I represented your interests!"
After lunch we visited the Library of Congress through an underground tunnel which avoids having to go through security again. Our first time here.

The entrance hall reminded me of The Hermitage in St. Petersberg, with its staircase, marble, red, statuary and grandeur.










The main reading room is much smaller than the one in NY but more elegant.

A highlight of my stay here was a visit to the Geography and Map division, where I was given access to their collection of nautical charts published by the United States Navys  Hydrographic Office from about 1850 to 1950. The charts are numbered, to about 6500, with some omissions. I have been studying them and cataloging them, as a volunteer in the Map Room of the NY Public Library for about seven years now. They describe the coastlines of the world (excluding the U.S. and the Philippines which are the subject of a similar series of charts published by the Coast Guard. Each branch of the armed forces had its champions in Congress and back in the 19th century they worked out this geographic compromise.)  I had a good conversation with the director of the map room who invited me back. Maybe, by land, some day.

I also saw a German antiquarian map of the world, in Latin, published a few decades after 1492, purchased for $11,000,000 (less than half of it taxpayer dollars), an exhibition of Herblock political cartoons, and a recreation of Thomas Jeffersons circular library of Monticello (he sold it to the government) with mostly his original books. He was a well read man.

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May 27 29 First Three Days Home 0 Miles

John and I visited our mutual friend, former HYC member Nick, at the Hebrew home for the Aged in Riverdale, The Bronx, overlooking the Hudson. He has a nice single room with river view but we met him downstairs and had a pleasant time with him. Both John and Nick are retired carpenters and both agree that Nick taught John how to sail. We three will get together later this summer with some other current and former Harlemites and take Nick out for a day on the water. John left me in Manhattan and drove back to Maryland while I got picked up by Steve (who took us for a powerboat ride in Florida) to my first meeting of the Book Group, at the home of former Harlemite, Jim, in Chatham NJ, for a lovely evening with To Kill A Mockingbird.
I visited ILENE for about three hours by subway to pick up some things, clean and scrub out the refrigerators and empty the bilge. I also planned to "pickle" the water maker for winter. Winter is a long way off you might say. Well the water maker is a great tool for remote places where fresh water is difficult to obtain, but a burden in that it requires that it be flushed out for three minutes every five days. I can do this either by visiting the boat, or by leaving the electricity and fresh water pump on, in which case it will do this every five days, automatically. Another thing: It needs non-chlorinated water, the type it makes, for the flush. We have taken to keeping city water in the port water tank for our own use, and making non-chlorine water in the starboard tank for flushing. This also means changing the source of water to the fresh water pump to be from the starboard tank when we are about to flush and back again after the flush. A nuisance, and it means we use the water from only one of our two tanks. So this summer, when city water is available everywhere we plan to go, we have decided to shut down the water maker. This requires propylene glycol, the pink antifreese [My computers keyboard requires me to substutute as "s" because its key for the correct letter is broken] we use in the fresh water system and heads. I have to buy two gallons of the stuff, so another visit is needed -- in the next five days -- to do this job, and others.
I also calculated the mileage, dock to dock, for the nine planned passages of the Harlems 2015 cruise to Block Island and consulted with PC Bruce, who laid out the itinerary. Next step is to figure out what time the tide is favorable on the days for each of those nine passages, especially at the eastern exits from Long Island Sound, where the currents run wicked fast. I contacted (1) Barnacle Buster to set up a bottom cleaning schedule and to enlist him to fix the prop rattle by adjusting or removing the Spurs line cutter, and (2) my insurer, Pantaenius, to reduce the geographic scope of our coverage, now that we will not be going south of NY for the next few years.

Coming your way within weeks will be a statistical compilation of the 230 days of our winters cruise: passage days, miles per passage, total miles, nights on anchor-mooring-dock-or at sea, number of ports visited and how many times in each, how many were new first-time ports for ILENE, average number of lay days per port, how many lunches and dinners off the boat, etc. Yes, I am a confessed compulsive quantifier. I have done this following our prior long cruises. You could do it yourself if you were so inclined -- or should I say possessed) based on the data in the posts of this blog.



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