Long, Long Day

SHIP'S LOG:

Yesterday was a long, long day of cleanup and restoration. Taking things apart is always so much easier than put them back together and that became abundantly clear yesterday, picking up after Irene.

I spent most of the morning working with 3 or 4 others trying to get the debris off the dock. There was even more than I first expected. A lot of sea grass and sea weed covered even more than could be seen at first sight. What was really amazing was that the sea grass had woven its way into the dock. It was not just a matter of picking it up. You had to really pull on it to get it to come loose and even them, you only go the exposed half, the rest fell back into the water . . . and later washed up on the beach where it had to be raked into piles.

Raking up all the debris off the beach into little, some not so little, piles left us with mounds of sea flaura and fauna that eventually was gathered into large piles and then into still larger pile for a later ride to the dump. It is clear that the Club will have to get a dumpster to haul away all the debris that washed up.

It took eight of us to get the metal ramp ( it leads from the fixed dock to the floating launch dock) from up by the dtreet, down the dock and into place. Someone brilliantly came up with the idea of using rollers to move it rather than carrying it. We had a fine selection (from the debris pile) of logs to use as rollers and what had been a lot of grunting and sweating straining during the removal, became a rather quick, painless and relatively easy job at the restoration.

By 1:30pm I figured I had done my bit for the Club and hauled all the stuff I brought ashoare abck to ABISHAG. The projects that I could do were determined by how the stuff inside the boat had been piled(stored "carefully" before the storm. The Bimini went on first and that took about an hour. Before it could be begun, the metal frame had to be untied from various places on the boat. Sounds a simple thing but when one goes through the process of tieing things down securely before a storm, the un-tying usually brings to light that one was to "aggressive" in securing things. And since the Bimini was made out of vinyal, it was stiff and quarellous and the 10 knot breeze didn't help. Three zippers zipped and two lashings lashed, and the Bimini was back in place. Liuke I said, one hour.

The next little item was the Genoa. If I had my druthers, it would have been last but I really couldn't get to anything else before it. Just getting the beast out of the cabin seemed to take forever. It is a heavy bit of cloth- 20lbs or more and a badly rolled bundle as well. Raise it is always something like wrestling a mattress up a set of stairs. I had to stretch it out and make sure it was folded correctly so that it would go up correctly. Put on the sheets and feed it into the luft groove and slowly raise it. Of course, as I started to do this the wind freshened just a bit and the sail was flapping all over the place. Doing this single-handed meant that I had to constantly go forward to make sure that the sail was feeding right and then go back to the mast to continue the "raising process."From grasping the sail below deck until it was furled in place . . . . 45 minutes.

The next task was relatively easy, removing the second set of pennants that I put on for the storm. That took about 10 minutes.

The next task was putting on the dodger. Both the dodger and the Bimini have these stainless steel frame works that really only stay upright when they are held in place by the Bimini and the dodger. Other than that they go their won way and if one is not careful, one gets bopped in the head or gets body parts caught. Like the Bimini, the dodger is attached by zippers and lashings. The zippers have to be lubed to work and the lashings never quiet fit the holes as intended. The dodger was like an unruly child that doesn't want to go to bed. The most difficult part of the process is to feed the bottom of the dodger into a groove that holds it to the combing in front of the cockpit( it attaches to the wall). It really is a two person job, one feeding the bottom into the groove and and other pulling it along. I was able to get Jim, the owner of a Jaguar 36 Catamaran, who with his wife, spent the "hurricane with us, to come over and help out. He did an the dodger process went a lot smoother than the Bimini.

While it probably doesn't sound like all that much done, lots of doohickeys and thingamabobs had to be found and put back into their proper places. All the lines needed to secure things to the deck had to be untied and coiled and stores. Getting things back into order is a lot harder and more time consuming than dismantling them.

About the schooner. There was a lovely 80+ foot schooner that has been up river at Burr's Marina on a mooring all summer. During the height of the storm, she disappeared.She was surrounded by breakwaters and rocks and I surely felt that she had come to bad end. Still, I couldn't see any trace of her, sunk or otherwise. It turns out that she somehow made it to the old bit of sandy beach north of her position and beached herself. As far as anyone knows, she is undamaged and will be floated of sometimes soon.