Planning for next year, July-August.

Planning for next year, July-August. Still lots to do at home this year. Working on to do list for boat while we finish here.

Plans 2008

No sailing planned for 2008, at least not on Fiddler or the oceans. We have things to take care of here at home so we have a comfortable base to return to.

Since the world will have its little joke, I do not rule out a surprise opportunity arising later in the year.

Watch for more sailing in 2009.

Some adminstrative details

The last several posts were all originally sent as text messages from my phone. I have gone back and added some details. The original posts I left in normal text. I put the additions in italics following the original message.

Denver, Union Station.

Denver, Union Station.

4-5 hours late. Weather delays.

4-5 hours late. Weather delays. Waited 20 minutes in a roadcut for serious winds to pass. Heavy rain, slow speed across Nebraska.

We passed through one town to find the grain bins collapsed and fields flattened. People were just coming out of hiding to see what damage had been done. It seems we just missed a tornado, or at the very least very strong winds.

The train stopped on the tracks for a short while, then we moved into a road cut where the majority of the train was below grade. By going to the upper deck of the observation car we could see the storm clouds and the wind rocked us just a bit. There were a couple of places that looked like the clouds were trying to decide if they were going to form a funnel, but mostly this was one impressive thunderstorm. Very interesting to us with our renewed interest in weather patterns. Very frightening to the city girl from the East Coast who had not experience with this type of weather.

She was on the phone to someone, crying and saying she was afraid she was going to die when I first saw her. Another woman was talking to her, and I thought it was her mother. Turns out the older woman was just another passenger trying to comfort her. We sat with the younger woman for a bit and talked about the storm and what the train crew was doing to keep us safe. She finally calmed down.

This episode reminds me of how important it can be to manage your fear. I feel afraid at times when we are sailing, or at least get a little jolt of adrenaline. The trick is to not let that reaction take over and keep you from thinking about what needs to be done next. For all that I think of myself as a bit timid, I can see that in many ways I am not timid at all.

WATER. Other train passengers sent

WATER. Other train passengers sent by bus to Minneapolis. Tracks flooded. Some fields flooded. Corn fields look like rice paddies.

It had been raining quite a lot during our trip. The tracks going another route out of Chicago were flooded so the passengers headed that direction were loaded onto buses to catch the train at Minneapolis. I was much relieved to find out it was the other train. The initial announcement I heard had me thinking we would be on buses.

Looking out over the cornfields the water was high enough that the plants stood above it only a little way. The whole scene reminded me of the terraced rice paddies around Bagio in the Philippines.

Lunch in Chicago Union Station

Lunch in Chicago Union Station food court. Quick tour of Chicago River bridges near station. Different kind of boats on the river

The river boats are large, long and flat. With the bridges, they have no masts, and from the shape of the hull above the water line, I would expect them to be fairly flat bottomed. There were several tour boats moored along the wall as we looked down on the river. I saw one that is set up to serve dinner at tables as it cruises along. Something to consider another time when we get back to Chicago.

Syracuse, NY

Syracuse, NY

On the train. We do

On the train. We do get dinner! I get cranky when I miss a meal, so this is a good thing.

In Albany. Next train leaves

In Albany. Next train leaves around 7 pm. Thought we might have dinner on board. Brought some snacks just in case.

Homeward bound. First train west.

Homeward bound. First train west. Change trains in Albany, New York. and Chicago. Will swap boat fashion for work togs by Monday.

Last Day Here

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go.
I'm standing here, Outside your door.
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye.
The dawn in breakin' It's early morn.
The taxi's waitin', he's blowin' his horn.
Already I'm so lonesome I could cry.
Peter, Paul & Mary

In the morning we take a bus to Portland where we'll get a motel room and stay the night. Then EARLY Wednesday we'll take another bus the rest of the way to Boston South Station and catch the AMTRAK train west. We've found that cab fares in Boston are outrageous and the motels are through the roof. In Portland, they're reasonable. What can I say? We're cheap.

We should pull into Denver on Friday and Kathy will be going back to work on Monday next, a cause for celebration on the part of the folks who have been filling in for her I understand.

Kathy promises to spend part of the time on the train writing about our experiences on the American Eagle which will get posted as soon as we get back and the cat lets us do anything but hold him. Our cat sitters report that he threatens them if they try to leave without letting him sit on them for a while. We hope he'll forgive us eventually.

So for all of you who have been following our misadventures, we hope you have enjoyed it. and we'll try to find time to expand/improve our account of things in the weeks to come.

Bye for now.
Dave

Cleanup

Well, now we're busy cleaning out the boat, packing and shipping things back to Denver and writing up a detailed task list for the falks here at the boatyard. Our bus leaves Tuesday at 1:00 PM and then it's south to Boston and the train home.

Tomorrow, we're going out with "Two Toots" to look as potential mooring sites before we go. This will be our home next year once we're in the water. The permit from the city will cost about $75 and the tackle will be $500-$1000 but it will be ours.

Kathy was supposed to write about the cruise on the American Eagle and I will keep after her about this. For now, I can only relate what Star said: "It was a magical trip and I want to do it again." "Nuff said?

Dave

On The Hard

We're out of the water now.

Fiddler was pulled up out of the water about 3:00 PM Thursday and placed on jackstands in the boatyard.

This is always a difficult time for us. We have so much to do and we really don't want to do any of it. We'll be cleaning and packing and shipping things home and making plans for the next year.

We don't know where we'll go, but we really want to try out Doug Pope's new sail and get to places we've never been before. Maybe down the coast or out east toward Fundy. But that's for next year. Right now we have to focus on the immediate jobs ahead.

Boat Fire

While we were waiting to be hauled out for the season, wewatched a sickening sight. A fellow pulled up to the fuel dock and topped up with fuel (gasoline). He then started off for his home on North Haven Island, about 13 miles east across Pennobscot Bay.

About 300 yards out, he suddenly swerved over to an approaching sailboat and jumped aboard leaving his boat adrift. The sailboat returned him to the dock where he announced that his boat had an electrical fire aboard.

We watched helplessly as the twenty five foot speedboat drifted into a neighboring cove trailing smoke, first white and then black. As it neared the shore the black smoke got thicker and orange flames appeared. There was nothing anyone could do as she burned to the waterline, fed by fifty gallons of gas.

The owner watched sadly saying "I've had that boat for twenty nine years." It wasn't insured and as he later said, I guess my boating days are over. It was a very disturbing sight.

Later, the burned-out hulk was towed in for the Fire Inspector and the Coast Guard to examine.

It's sad to watch a man's dreams die.

De-Commissioning

Well, we've had our last sail of the season. There've been successes and failures. On the plus side, we finally have a reliable fuel system and can count on the engine. We also have the GPS talking to the radar. In addition, we have completed our three year project of replacing the sails.

On the negative side, we didn't get to sail nearly as much as we wanted. Some of this was our own issues, some of this was the weather being uncooperative at varieous times and some of this was due to things taking longer to get done by the boatyard. The first area is one of our own procrastination. The second is the luck of the draw. The third area is that our boatyard is undergoing a period of adjustment following the death of Horatio Knight, who founded and ran the yard for forty years. His son and daughter are doing all they can to carry on, but the loss of forty years of hands-on experience is a tough job. We're trying to give them the time they need to make the transition, but in the meantime, there have been substantial delays as they struggle to pick up the slack.

In any case, today (Wednesday), we had our last sail and tied Fiddler up on the dock, washed her down from bow to stern and took her sails off her to be taken away for washing and stored by Doug Pope, the man who makes our sails.

Kathy and Star have gone through the galley and decided on the meals we can make with the food we have left. We'll be having four dinners aboard and two meals out. When we leave the boat, there will be nothing edible on board, unless you count a bottle of black pepper. We don't want to leave anything a mouse could live on.

We need to pack up and ship home anything we don't want to take with us on the train, give the inside a general cleaning, and load our pre-sailing/post sailing things on board before we leave.

Tomorrow (Thursday), the yard crew will take Fiddler out of the water and place her on stands for final clean-up and winterization.

This is always a hard time for us. We hate to leave Fiddler in the hands of strangers, but we can't stay any longer. Besides, we're homesick and miss our home and our friends. It's time to head west.

At some time soon, Kathy has promised to add a synopsis of our cruise on the American Eagle. It was good to see them again and I don't think Star was quite what they expected in a seventy year old lady. We'll try to get photos of the haul-out and put them in an entry tomorrow.

Meantime, it's late and we have a lot to do before we can come home.

After Cruising on the American Eagle

Rockland Harbor
August 8, 2007

Well, it’s been more than a week since I sat down and wrote anything. We’ve been out on the American Eagle for a week letting Captain John Foss do the navigating and Rick Loaleo cook our meals. Then after being pampered silly until last Saturday morning, we were set loose in Rockland for the last two days of LobsterFest, Rockland’s big celebration of/for tourism.

It being impossible to find a motel room within 100 miles during this shindig, Dennis Stockwell kindly gave us shelter on his boat, Sky Breaker, which is confined to dry land until he can re-do the planking or else figure out a way to seal it up. Every two years or so, a wooden boat needs to have its planks examined and a few of them replaced. This is one of the reasons why fiberglass hulls have become popular. Anyway, Dennis has taken pity on us and kept us from having to find a bridge to sleep under until we could get back to Fiddler.

As you may recall, we left Fiddler in Stonington at Billings Diesel and Marine having her fule sustem cleaned out and improved. To get back to Stonington, we contacted Pennobscot Island Air Service, who, for a very reasonable fee, picked us up at the boatyard and took us out to the airport where they put us and our junk aboard a Cessna 206 (a beefed-up version of a Cassna 172) and flew us over in about twenty minutes.

It was an amazing experience flying over to Deer Isle at 2500 feet. We could see from Castine in the North to about Portland in the south and this whole area we’ve been sailing about in looks so compact and small. Of course, tripping along at 120 knots instead of 5 knots may have had something to do with it. Having flown Cessna 172s in the Air Force back in my salad days, I had the feeling that the poor thing was being held aloft by the bigger engine alone as a result of being burdened by our three lard-butts and our gear.

Upon descending, the pilot stuck the plane in what looked like a section of abandoned secondary road about 1500 feet long. We were unloaded at the terminal (a one-room building which was unlocked) while Billings Diesel sent a nice lady out in her car to collect us.

We got back to Fiddler about 1:00 and settled in. The work was done, bt the bill was not yet compiled, so we spent the evening trying to figure out what to eat for dinner, since we’d emptied the ice box before we left.

Along about 4:00, the sky got dark and then a squall hit us. The wind was howling straight down the dock we were on and Fiddler was bucking like a colt so I calmly(?) got off and put on a second set of dock lines and in a couple of hours, the cold front had passed and the fog settled in. We later found out that back in Rockland, the wind gusts had been about 55 knots and the catamaran of some people we know had been dismasted. She was still sitting on her mooring when we got back to town on Tuesday afternoon looking forlorn and unhappy.

On Tuesday, we went up to Billings’ office to face the music and pay the piper. To our amazement, the bill was only two thirds of the estimate, a nice surprise.
When we listened to the weather forecast, the rather thick fog was predicted to burn off about noon and was supposed to be moderate all of Tuesday and Tuesday evening, but to be foggy, rainy and windy Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. If we wanted to leave, Tuesday was the day. We fueled up and got the hell out of Dodge.

We motored across, wanting to test out the new fuel system. It worked flawlessly and we got across Isle Au Haut Bay in about 1 ½ hours, drove down the Fox Island Thoroughfare without incident, only to hit a cold wall of thick fog as we came out into Pennobscot Bay. Oh well, we’ve been in fog before. The GPS gave us our headings and we chugged across, blowing out foghorn all the way to the mid-bay bell buoy where the fog abated and we made into Rockland and picked up a mooring about 6:00 PM.

We all went ashore and ran off to the grocery store for ice and food (and booze) and ate dinner aboard about 10:00 PM. The New York Yacht Club is in town for their biannual do and we watched them showing up in everything from small (like ours) thirty foot boats to huge chartered and professionally crewed ships. They ignored us and we talked to the professional crew who were more to our liking anyway.

Today (Wednesday) we awoke to thick fog and rain and we all of us said "screw it!", slept in and spent the afternoon reading novels. A good time was had my all.