Um... NO!

The weekend of the 19th and 20th was a RECORD heat wave.  Birds or no birds, there was NO WAY we were going near the boat.  My activity for the weekend was watching YouTube sailing videos and trying not to leave the house.

We'll see if all my bird tape worked next weekend.

Didn't Know We Had a Poop Deck (Sailing with Winson, Helen & Winston)

I love nature... I really do.  

But sometimes...  shaking my head.

Let me start the story.  First, this post is a couple of weeks old.  It was Saturday, the 13th... just a week after our sail into NY Harbor for this year.  Yet, here we find ourselves at Liberty Landing, ready to take the ferry into Manhattan.  The Morris canal was just as busy as ever.

We landed at the World Financial Center ferry dock and walked across the street to our hotel where we paid extra for a room "with a view of the Hudson".  Yes... this little sliver of the Hudson river below is indeed visible from my hotel room.  Why do I always feel that NYC is charging big bucks for very little delivered?

We are here to meet up with Winson, Helen and little Winston.  This is the family that owns the company that Vicky works for and we wanted to make a good impression.  (You did see the photo at the top, right?)

So after spending the night at their hotel, we all boarded the Liberty Landing Ferry for the trip (via car) back down the Keyport and Seas The Day.

We had debated if we wanted to sail from Liberty to Keyport, but with it being little Winston's first boat ride, we decided to keep it simple... sailing from Keyport would allow us to get off the water relatively quickly, if needed.

We wanted to make a good impression.  They KYC Launch service is great for that... always spectacularly clean and professional.

However, stepping off the launch aboard Seas The Day, we were greeted with this sight.

Seas The Day evidently has a poop deck (and it is most of the boat)!

The birds evidently had a drunken drug infested orgy bender of a party.  All the seats on the cockpit were covered, the floor of the cockpit was covered, and of course all the canvas was covered.

Did I mention that our water pump wasn't working properly?

We didn't take any photos during the 20 min. mad dash to clean as much as we could from the 2 or 3 quarter buckets of water we could extract from the tank.  It was impressive.  Fortunately, the bird chasers on the foredeck did their job so we had our guests sit up there while we swore (mostly) under our breaths and made it barely presentable.

We then took them sailing.

The photos below will look predictable.

 
We're going to sincerely hope that Winson is better at helming a company than he is at helming a boat.  But we did learn that Helen can easily back him up.  😉

I'm joking... they did fine.

As expected, after a brief sail, winston got bored, and we headed back to the ball.  Vicky ordered me (we KNOW who's really at the helm in this case) to stay behind and take care of the bird stuff while they went to Keyport Fishery for some grub.

So I cleaned until the pump went belly up (which was relatively quickly), and then rushed to put out maybe 10 to 12 yards of bird tape.  (I'm going to start buying it by the case.)

I hopped on the launch and headed back (spending a bit of time with our neighbors from Sugah) and had a wonderful fish dinner on the KYC porch.

I do love nature, but I just wish it knew it's place!

2019 NYC - Liberty Landing Trip - Day 4

Liberty Landing Marina has a 3 night minimum around the 4th of July, so having spent our time, we headed home today to avoid another $250 charge and to get ahead of storms they said were approaching.  We always end up leaving later than I had hoped, this time delayed by an unusually long wait at the fuel dock for a pumpout (emptying the sewage holding tank).

We departed out the Morris canal

Then turned to starboard and headed to NY Harbor.

Shortly after passing the statue, it started to rain.  Since rain was in the forecast on and off during the day, we put in the center panel in our Bimini top and continued south.

NY Harbor is a BIG body of water for a rowing boat like this one.  They seemed to be enjoying themselves, though I doubt they do it when it is a choppy as we've seen it.

The wind was coming from the direction we were heading, so wanting to stay ahead of bad thunderstorms, we motored.

I guess all the rains recently had flushed the harbor somewhat.  What is typically a dark green/brown water had a decent shade of blue-green.

I had time for a couple of selfies while going under the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge.

But once we made the turn into Hoffman Narrows, fog obscured all our landmarks... I was grateful for modern technology like GPS.

The Raritan Bay was blue... it looked incredibly pleasant, so I diverted south (once I could) so we could maybe sail a bit...

... but by the time I had everything ready, a glance north let me know we were not going to sail, but gun it for Keyport.

As we crossed towards Keyport, we watched this thunderhead start building right over where we were heading.

The final approach into Keyport was threatening.  Vicky readied everything below for a quick departure and we tied up, and quickly stowed everything - ready to leave Seas The Day for a week.

The KYC launch captain was rushing around trying to pick up everyone and our friend Bill assisted to ensure we could stay aside long enough to throw all our gear aboard.  You can see the storm rushing in.

We beat it.  Barely.  As we raced off the dock I retrieved our vehicle and we threw our bags inside just as the first drops of rain were coming down.

Which...

Turned out to be the last drops of rain as well.  We had our traditional drink at the bar afterward only to realize that the storm we were expecting to watch had fizzled out.

Remembering that we forgot a few items in the rush, we headed out for a quick retrieval of a few items (especially my camera), then headed down the Turnpike towards home.

2019 NYC - Liberty Landing Trip - Day 3

It was pretty much a lazy day.  Seas The Day stayed in her slip at Liberty Landing for the entire day.  Vicky had pulled an all-nighter for her work, going to the lounge for a 2 AM conference call that lasted almost until I woke up.  So I puttered around the boat while she slept.  I tried more troubleshooting of the water system to no avail.  I did manage to finally install the furling line guides for our spinnaker.  I finally called for service from the service guys at Liberty Landing and Jose showed up to double check the packing box and try to troubleshoot the water system.

I always have someone check the packing box for me... not having grown up with boats, this common procedure scares me.  It's mostly related to the speed with which water can come into the boat when something goes wrong.  (For those interested, the packing box surrounds the propeller shaft... with the engine being inside the boat and the propeller outside, it has to go through the hull, but the propeller has to spin, so the packing is what allows that to happen without water getting in - in theory.)  The previous time Jose had visited my boat it was literally sinking.  We had noticed the bilge pump going off every 15 min or so and a simple bilge pump failure or dead battery would have been catastrophic.

It turns out that the water pump is starting to go.  I'll have to figure out how to get this done.  Staying at Liberty Landing means $250 per night and the service guys only work on weekdays.  It's much better to try and find someone locally near Keyport.

That's pretty much it.  After lunch we did our best to imitate slugs... temperature was mid-90s outside and inside it was quite a number of degrees above that.  Running the engine to go out for a bit would have added MORE heat inside.  So we toughed it out and then went to dinner at Maritime Parc.

As I said, Seas The Day stayed in her slip.