A Weekend Of Fun

SHIP'S LOG:

     Saturday was beautiful. Actually hot, a little too humid, with a fine breeze blowing. I spent most of the ashore, helping the Junior Sailing Director getting things setup for the Junior Sailing Program that will begin soon.  The E-mail Blast that was supposed to go out to members to elicit their help got fouled up and never went out and so it was the Director and myself, with a little help from anyone we could shanghai for a while. The most difficult and longest part of the day was removing the sail tubes from underneath the deck of the building. The sail-tubes are about 12 foot lengths of drainage pipe that are used to store the sails we used on the Junior Sailing Program boats. There are 25 of them and they were screwed to 2 boards, fore and aft, and were set on the sand under the porch. Over the years, they have been semi-buried due to flooding and filled up almost completely by blowing sand. As a result, they haven't really been used and the task was to get them out and to a new location where they could be used. Slowly, each had to be unscrewed, first at the front, then at the back. The front was no problem, but the back-ends were really buried and required that I (the Junior Sailing Director in approaching 80!) crawl under the house, dig them out, unscrew them, and then crawl back out and muscle them out into the daylight. A 12 foot sewage pipe, even made of PVC, half filled with sand, is quite a load! Once outside, they had to be flushed out with water and then carted to their new rack location.  Though it doesn't sound like all that big a deal, we began about 11 and finished about 4:30.  It could have been worse, it could have rained!

     Sunday was another beautiful day and this one I spent sailing, actually racing, with Jim Avery.  Jim is a great guy, approaching 82, and sails a NONSUCH, a modernized version of a catboat. It has but one large sail and is touted as easy to sail, and it is, but Jim's daughter, Ellen, isn't happy with him sailing by himself.  Actually, I don't think that Jim likes all that much by himself. He enjoys company, hence the crew. It was three great races, the second Sunday of the Chilli Series, and aside from the fact that we mis-read the course for the first race and so were disqualified from it, we did veery well in the next two and won our class in the over-all series. Not a baad Sunda of sailing.

     Monday started out gray and eventually turn wet, but nonetheless, I went and helped out Rich Weber get his boat ready to launch. It is an old boat, but new for him, and he had to remove all the lifeline stanchions as all were cracked, a a couple broken.They are a one-piece rod-&-base, held to the deck with four bolts. As seems common on all boats, taking them off was easy, but re-installing them was difficult. You could get to one or two of the boat rather easily in most cases, but there were always at least 2 that you needed to be a contortionist to get the washer and nut on, and most of the time, it had to be cone completely by feel, without being able to see what you were doing. The basic procedure was to put caulking around the four holes on the deck, a line of caulking around what would be the edge of the base, set the base down, insert the four screws, put on the washers and nuts and tighten the whole thing down, the inside make holding the nut while the outside man tightened. The toss-up between being the outside man and the inside man was choosing whether you wanted to be the contortionist or whether you wanted to be out on the deck in the rain. I got the rain!

     And it poured all night. Hard rain and lots of wind and it was rock 'n' roll all night long. Ah, the fun of baot ownership.