Launched!

She finally made it back into the water on Friday! The boys at the marina picked her up unceremoniously and plunked her down on the pier and that was that- she bobbed along, new painter and stern lines tied up and ready to go. That morning i had bought a small suzuki outboard and had hoisted it into the cockpit, so i figured it would be a good start to mount and test that. Not much to it, the usual procedures and it fired right up. Nothing for it then but to hoist the sails and get a couple pictures since i'd never flown the original main and genoa before. The breeze was fresh but seemed mild so i ran up to the van and got Andy, then shoved off straight away, sails full and pulling hard. 

Immediately out of the harbor i realized that a few things were different: first, i was singlehanding for the first time, second, i had never handled a jib that size before, third, Andy was worse than useless as a deckhand, and last but not at all least, there was way more wind than i could handle. I luffed both sails but she still heeled hard over, and the flapping was not helping me think clearly. Finally i decided i had to drop the jib entirely in order to regain control so i pulled up into irons and released the halyard, but the wind was so strong that the jib was pinned to the windward spreader and wouldn't allow me to pull up again into irons. The jib sheets were free of their blocks and were thrashing around so hard that they immediately tied themselves into a big flying knot, the jib was tearing out at the seams where it was snagged on the spreader, the winches were underwater half the time and Andy was scrabbling away from the water for dear life. 

At that point i backwinded the main and finally swung into irons, yanked the jib down and managed to unclip it from the stay and get it stashed in the cockpit, and the world was calm and quiet again. 

Andy stuck his head out from under the benches and decided he was safest looking out from between my knees, which actually seemed to give us both some comfort. 

The wind was gusting hard but she handled nicely with the main alone, so i pressed on westward out of the bay and toward New York Harbor. Past Breezy Point the swells were rolling in heavily and i realized that hurricane Bill was not far off the east coast, but she handled wonderfully and gave me complete confidence to press on, so i fell off a little, toward Coney Island, and it was a fantastic ride, riding the swells on a beam reach and listening to the sound of the breakers on the shoals falling away behind. 

Riding those waves for a while i saw the horizon darken over Sandy Hook, and since the forecast called for severe thunderstorms i thought it prudent to not be too far from home, so i came about and beat up to the beach at Rockaway, and sailed along the beach, checking out the boats at anchor, waving to the swimmers and fishermen all along. Andy held his head abovedecks and watched the beaches roll by, happy and content as i was. We got to the Gil Hodges bridge and when i fell off across the bay to the marina and i realized that the wind had picked up while i was cruising the beaches and i was flying with the boom on a full run, spray flying off the wavetops. Unfortunately the entrance to the marina is shoal, with a sandspit that you have to sail around and beat back up a narrow channel, and i wasn't sure that the motor could overcome what was quickly approaching a very fresh breeze, so i decided to sail down and around, beat back up past the marina so i wouldn't get blown onto the piers and drop the main just outside the breakwater. I had to tack a couple times within the hundred feet between the pier and the sandspit, and even with the main luffing hard, the turnbuckles were still underwater at each tack, Andy was nowhere to be seen and i was wondering how i get myself into these situations. Fortunately i pulled it off, came around hard into the wind and dropped the main, boom and all, into the cockpit. I knew it was a special entrance when i realized that an old-timer on the pier watched the whole thing and gave a hearty wave when i rounded safely in out of the blow and the whitecaps. Dropped the motor and it fired right up. Steering the motor with my hand and the tiller with my feet, i pulled into my slip pretty as you please and got everything lashed tight and stowed.  About then the storm blew onto us so i crawled into the cabin, Andy came in and curled up on the sailbags, and we slept like champs while the halyards chimed around and the thunder banged overhead. All in all another fantastic day of sailing, one of the funnest and most exciting i can remember since the day that Steve and I flew into Friday Harbor, flying ahead of a storm in the San Juans. I'll attach a video i took out by Breezy Point and although it's hard to see the situation, it conveys the feeling. On the right you can see Coney Island to the north, the disk shaped tower is at the rides on the boardwalk. From there you can turn north into the New York harbor, under the Verazanno Narrows Bridge and up to the Statue of Liberty, then up the Hudson or the East river around Manhattan. That's where i want to go on my next trip. 

Almost there! So i broke it down to areas that i have to work on before i can launch again, and decided to just complete the interior and hull. Last weekend i was going to fix the ballcocks and finish painting the cabing, but when i started to paint around the valves and tried to turn their handles, i realized that they were really corroded and not likely to be repaired in situ. So i tried to figure out how they were held in place on the hull and one thing led to another... The grinder came out and in a coffee fueled nut, i ground them all off and pulled them out. Then i was able to clean and prime all the scary areas around and behind the valves, and get a proper coat of paint everywhere. The forward bulkhead was cracked and the fiberglas tape was peeling so i cut it away and reglassed that joint, then primed and painted everything inside. 

Moving to the cockpit i reassembled the benches and installed them, then sanded the cabing bulkhead and decided the mahogany ply was beyond redemption and painted it white. Then i repainted the inside of the hull. The tiller was splitting and peeling so i sanded it and filled the splits with epoxy, then gave it a coat of varnish. The way the the hiking stick was screwed to the tiller always bothered me so i chucked it in the milling vise and relieved the fitting with an endmill. 

Last weekend i started to install the new rubrail that Hollis bought but soon recognized what a mess the original was. I pulled the old one off and cleaned off the years of glue and ended up painting the entire joint where the deck meets the hull. Next time i'll install the rubrail for good. 

After that i pulled off all the old lines and hardware off the deck and scrubbed everything with deck cleaner and was amazed at the transformation. She's almost new again! The sails were next, so i stretched them out in the parking lot and decided that i like the old ones better than the newer Hild sails. The Genoa is huge and i'm interested to see how it sets, since the blade jib never seemed to set properly. She's gonna be a sight with her original sails flying. 

black and white

6-7-09 Wow, i started to fix the split bench supports and once again one thing led to another... Over the weekend i disassembled the starboard bench, scraped all the old varnish and stain off and put on the first coat of poly. The old mahogany is beautiful and after all my experiments with various stains, i decided to just leave it natural. It looks like it was varnished without stain originally so i think it was a good decision. Jasmine and Andy came by to lend a welcome hand on Sunday too. Tonight i pulled the port bench apart and started to strip the wood, but didn't really have the motivation to work into the wee hours. Maybe it was because i never turned on the country music on the radio.  I'll have to cut away and splice the rotten end on that one port board, it's strange how some rot and others right next to them are fine, but since the ends of those boards all sit on the fiberglass deck I'm surprised they all haven't rotted out. 

If i can get one day this week to go install the floor, and get the benches back in before Friday, I'll launch her again this weekend and maybe go sailing on Sunday. I'd like to find a genoa one of these days to see how she handles with a big sail, but for the most part she's ready to go. Next week when all the woodwork is done I'm going to see if i can repair the 5hp Nissan outboard that came with her. Hollis said it made horrible death rattles so I'm not holding my breath. 

5-30-09 Yesterday i brought all the flooring and joists back to the shop where i ran everything through the widebelt sander. I t was a lot of work but i cant see putting this much work into the floor grate and having it look so rough. The boards are fairly beat up and it's going to be even more work to make it look good, but i suppose i have the time and inclination to keep working on it. Today i stripped the shelves behind the benches and replaced the plywood with pine planks. If i can get everything sanded and finished during the evenings after work this week, i can get it all reinstalled this weekend. I'd like to have the benches done then too, although i'll need to find a source to match the teak (or mahogany, not sure which) since i know the ends that sit on the fiberglass deck are rotten. 

History of Aquarius

5-29-09
Early this spring i was browsing the tool section on craigslist when i saw an ad to trade a sailboat for a tablesaw. Since i have a unisaw that i use pretty much as a work table in my shop and it had been a long and depressing winter, i replied that i was interested. The owner, a nice enough sounding fellow named Hollis, told me she was moored at Gateway Marina in south Brooklyn and that i was welcome to go see her at slip G36. So i rented a zipcar, loaded up Andy and Jasmine and we drove the half hour down that way, past Coney Island, and took a right off the Belt Parkway toward the Rockaways. That area seems like a different world from here, especially when you walk out to the Marina, and Andy was happy as a clam to run down the docks, even if he did crouch down in a hilarious stance before he got his sea legs. 

As i got close to her i was impressed by her sleekness of line and the wood trimming under the tattered brown plastic tarp that that been thrown over the cockpit. She obviously needed some love and a good cleaning but she seemed sound and true and floating on a small sailboat again just opened up a new world that i haven't had during my time in New York. 

We went down a few times, basically every weekend, to clean her up, check the rigging, sails and hardware, and finally one sunny Sunday we hoisted the sails and shoved off from the dock. She was solid and true and although she feels about like a Lightning, she has a lot of ballast and she sails like a bigger boat. The local boaters told me to go around the docks and keep close heading north since the bay is shallow and as soon as we were just getting under way on a port tack we smacked hard into something under water. Jas and Andy lurched forward and i made haste to come about and get back into the channel. From there we followed the channel bouys and had no more mishaps, although we didn't stay out for long. Sailing back to the slip has always been a trick and it was no exception that time although we made it mostly without incident. 

Two weeks ago I was down to bail her out after a week or two of unseasonably heavy rains and i noticed bits of the cockpit floor floating around in the bilge. The floor had always been suspect and spongy so i got down and had a hard look and saw that although the teak planks was in fair condition, the joists below it were thoroughly rotten. The fact that during our last sailing adventure i had let both halyards go and watched them race up the mast, prompted me to decide to pull her out for a good going over. So i scheduled it for a Tuesday morning, signed up for a membership to US Boat so they would tow her to the service dock at the Marina, and out she came. 

I pulled out the whole floor in the cockpit and indeed the joists were shot. My friend had some nice 8/4 white oak in his shop and was kind enough to rip me some new joist stock immediately, and i spent last Saturday scraping and cleaning the inside of the cockpit and the bilge and painting everything white. The sun was beating straight down and reflecting off the cockpit and i was seriously sunburned. It still hurts now, five days later. 

Installing the new joists was fun and brought out a whole new thought system than i've used in years. Boats are not flat or straight, and it took a while to reorient my thoughts to how to work on them. With a (smokey) jigsaw, power plane and belt sander i was able to fit most of them in place and reinstall the teak decking, and it feels completely different. The legs of the benches are supported on those joists too, and the benches always felt rickety to me as well. I think she'll feel like a good solid girl again when i get everything finished and screwed down. 

On our last sail we tacked up the harbor around to Breezy point, which is the last piece of land before you can head due south out into the wide open ocean. I loved the feel of the swells again, and the wind was stronger out there too, but more steady. As the land recedes a different mentality takes over, like the sea is formidable but simple and overarching, and the light takes on a strange hue, like in Montana. I'll have to get to know and trust her more this season, but i'd love to see if I could sail around Long Island. There's a race that does it in two or three days, but they sail all night, so i'd look at doing it in more like a week. 

I still haven't hoisted the genoa yet and the working jib is already a handful, so she's actually a pretty big and powerful girl and i've yet to singlehand her. It wouldn't hurt my feelings to have a motor either, which is my next purchase.