Fair Winds...Following Seas..and Follow the Sun, dear friend...

"Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—

...half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." ~Kenneth Grahame

It’s over-quoted for sure, but the most aptly fitting line for today. We heard news of our dear friend Russ passing after a brave battle with ALS. He made us all laugh and was a true friend. Russ was there the day I met Peter and I can hardly imagine a world without him, but we are glad that his suffering is over. 

This is how I will remember Russ: fixing something on his boat or the countless races when we’d sail too close to each other's boats and some fool would yell, “STARBOARD!” just for fun, or sitting around after a race and arguing about time-on-distance vs time-on-time and who really won the race under the bridge.

The world will be a lot less fun without you, Russ. You will be missed.

Sharing these photos for all Russ's friends...so we can all remember him well.

In the summer of 2008...

A view of Pier 3, back in its heyday, looking west toward Philadelphia. Our first sailboat* Montserrrat in the foreground, headsail still hanked on (means we must have just come in, or we think we are going back out shortly.)

*well together anyway. 

The view across the Delaware River to Camden. We often sat on the patio looking across the river to the sunset reflected in the glass rectangles.

      Our friends Russ and Mike on Russ's sailboat sailing by the marina. Note the Customs House--familiar skyline site in Old City--squatting in the background. BTW: I think Russ and Mike won this race.

 Same race night probably. Andy's boat with Al as crew and Russ/Mike again.

      The race is over. Russ was having bow issues. Andy and Al are coming up on the scene.

Anchored out in our favorite cove for dinner with friends. Peter is on our sailboat grabbing some wine and snapping the moment. (There were always arguments about who had discovered the cove first. It’s no matter any longer, the cove is silted in. I think this very night Russ ran aground—his boat draws almost six feet—and we tried to lead the familiar way out, we got out and radioed back. I think he said his boat was taking on water and he was cussin up a storm.

Peter, taking a much-needed work break in mid-September. Russ sails his spinaker in the background under the Ben Franklin bridge.

  I found one album from July 2009. Intro: As we all watched the big July 4^th fireworks on the river, talk turned to racing the next day and it was settled. No matter that there was NO wind...we had plans to get to Cattails for dinner and race back!

So this is Russ’s sailboat, “Crash Pad.”

Russ sails by the Ben Franklin Bridge in preparation for the race. It's been determined that the race will run down river to the Walt Whitman Bridge and back.

Russ's crew: Jonathan, and (Terry & Ron’s son) Justin & his wife Emmy. Everything's still friendly--until the race starts! Still, I let them know, I'm setting the time stamp as proof. (We often spent hours back on the patio disputing corrected times and actual finishes.)

We decide that the wind is so light and it's taking forever to get to the start line that we'll just start where we are.

Russ looks over to check if Peter & I are ready.


See that look on their faces?

They're checking those luffing sails!

Hey--what happened? They're so smug!!

Shouts go out about right-of-way. The tension is thick. STARBOARD!

Plans for Cattails have been abandoned over the phone, but they don't believe it till they see us tack and head back. We don't have enough gas to motor and neither of us have working lights right now so we've gotta be back by sunset.

It took us til 5:24 to get under the Ben Franklin. I was wishing we were out for a bike ride instead of the torture of racing in light wind. But I have never known Peter to quit a race. Not even mutiny (or an empty wine bottle) can make him turn the engine on!

Hmm...Russ already has his sails down...very suspicious!
We'll cut him some slack this time--his crew got him to turn the engine on. There's a reason he usually sails solo!

Arriving in Block Island

We made good time, making up for any veering off-course to arrive at the entrance to Great Salt Pond with an hour or so of daylight to spare.  The anchorage was blissfully unpacked.  Despite loads of room to anchor, we found ourselves following Mike’s lead and took a mooring ball.  We’d talked to him about an hour or so before we were coming in the entrance and he told us the mooring ball behind Bent was still empty.  By the time we got there, it wasn’t and we picked up mooring ball number 37 and tidied up to meet our friends at The Oar.

		Arriving in Block Island VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Text messages

When we turned our phones on again, we were able to catch up with some of our friends via text messages.
 
· Sun Jun 24 12:55 p.m. Moon to Bent: How you guys making out? Are you there yet?! We are just north of ac. Al had an alternator issue but is fixed & they are ~25 miles behind us. What about you?

· Mon Jun 25 12:33 am (delivered Mon Jun 25, 2:15 pm), Bent to Moon: 25 miles from entrance buoy at block. Lined it up from 70 miles out and Laying it. Expect some turbulence in the straight. Keepin an eye on the weather.

And then there were two…

One of the hardest things about putting together any race, rally, raft-up is getting everyone’s schedules to mesh and then hoping nothing goes wrong.  Unfortunately even the best-laid plans go awry and all the boats we thought were coming on the rally dropped off one by one before we left the dock on Saturday morning.  Finally, by Monday afternoon, Al & Patty texted to say that they were not going to continue on the way to Block Island.  After alternator issues, and seeing the storms, they opted to stay put in Atlantic City for the rest of their vacation.

· 2:20 pm, Moon to Full Circle: We ran into some rain last night & storms this am but all’s well. We r 25 miles from marker & expect to be in Block by evening. Hope all’s well there.

THE STORM

That Sunday afternoon found us sailing up the New Jersey coast to Block Island. As afternoon turned into evening, I took my watch at the helm and about an hour into my watch, the rain began. Just a soft rain, but I threw all the cockpit cushions down below and ducked out of the rain.  Perched next to the computer with the AIS-assisted plot charter, I was listening for alarms, popping my head up in the companionway every 15 or 20 minutes to look out, and trying to stay awake.


Peter took over his watch sometime around four am and unlike the previous night there were no emergencies—no boat flooding with water, no bilge and auto-pilot switches accidentally bumped off. No incidents to report whatsoever.

A few hours later when I woke up, it was light out and it was still raining. I looked out at Peter. He was having fun. He had on his yellow rain jacket, his old one from West-Marine with the rip in the shoulder showing the navy blue lining, yellow hood pulled up to his steel-rimmed square glasses, cinched under his beard.  He was wet, but smiling. I stood on the companionway steps to look out and saw how windy it was. The wind was blowing the tops of the waves off! It looked like the waves were raining on themselves. I struggled to remember the Beaufort scale and where lopped-off waves fell on that scale. I kept pointing to everything like the flag flap-flapping and snapping in the breeze.  At sea, a storm of any degree always instills awe and I was amazed and a little scared of the power of the wind and waves.

With the flag blowing to the port side of the boat, I knew the wind was coming from the east as we close-reached on a starboard tack to Block Island. We were feeling pressed for time—we wanted to be in Block well before sunset to be able to see to navigate the opening and also to anchor. Peter always says it’s no good going into a place at night—it’s part practical know-how, part superstition on his part, but I’ve learned to trust his instincts. With friends awaiting us, we knew if we didn’t get in there by nightfall, we might not get in until the next morning and we’d be missing out on fun. Although we didn’t have cell phone service out there, we guessed Mike and Andy were probably already in Block Island and Liz was due to arrive by train that evening. We were still five or six hours away if everything went to schedule.

With our time schedule dictating the course north east, and the wind coming from the east, and the swell pressing in to shore from the southeast, the angle of the waves was making the ride uncomfortable.

Peter recounts his watch saying that as we closed in on Long Island the breeze was building.  The closer to land we got, the rougher it was because it shoals up and the seas stack up, making for steeper waves.  The wind getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It was not a dramatic sky at that point—the clouds were even showing signs of breaking up over toward the East and we were hopeful that it would clear up before long.
Gradually, the sky got greyer and greyer. It didn’t feel like a big system (to Peter!), but the breeze was building. As we closed in, 60 miles down Long Island, 15 or 20 miles off shore, Peter, ever the quiet, stoic captain, did not share what he later said he was thinking: “Fuck, this is big.”

The wind was blowing hard from the east. Peter shouted over the wind, “Which way you think that’s blowing?” pointing to the mass of black clouds. I shouted back with a laugh, “I don’t know! I was just thinking the same thing. The wind is blowing…that way,” I motioned to the flapping flag, “…it should be blowing it away from us right?” But within minutes, we had the answer—it was coming fast towards us and we knew we were in for a bit of an uncomfortable ride. We later admitted that we were both thinking, “Oh shit that’s coming right at us.”

Status updates via texts

Keeping tabs either  by cell phone texts or on the VHF radio when distance allows...

The Moon:

· 4:43 pm I text to everyone, “Hey all. We got a late start. Shaking things out here. Prob about 3 to 4 hrs behind al & patty. What time did mike & andy leave? We’ll monitor 16, 13 & 69.”
 

On the importance of ice and other essentials

As we left Philadelphia, we decided that despite our stores of dry ice and block ice and all our frozen items, we didn’t have a single cube of ice for a soda or a gin & tonic.

Over the past few weeks, as we discussed preparations and new improvements to the boat, finally realizing we wouldn’t get them all done, we needed a solution to our sans-refrigeration Tartan.  As a classic sailboat from the 70s, refrigeration was not an option and previous owners did not make the upgrade.  The Tartan does have a nifty cockpit ice box compartment in which we keep a few cases of soda cans and usually load up with six or more bags of cube ice, but exposed to sun and air, it isn’t very cool.  We battled the quick-melting ice cube method all last summer and decided we needed a smarter approach this year.

After doing some research, we decided that we would try the DRY ICE approach.  Our friend Mike offered to pick up a block or two for us on his way over from New Jersey along with block ice which is hard to find here in Philadelphia.  Mike picked up our coolers on Thursday and returned them on Friday afternoon, full of dry ice and block ice.  In fact there was little room for any food in the coolers!  We turned one cooler into a freezer—the critical point about dry ice is that it evaporates with exposure to air so the less often you open the cooler, the longer the dry ice will last—and in that cooler we sandwiched in all the vacuum packed frozen meat packets (chicken, steaks, fresh chorizo, pork chops) next to a big chunk of dry ice and a block of regular ice. The other thing I’d read about dry ice is that it will freeze everything in the cooler.  So in the smaller cooler, we had just one block of dry ice but no room for anything else at that point.  The nifty cockpit ice box compartment is not a good place for dry ice and unfortunately we had not planned a stop for bags of cubed ice.  With the departure already delayed by storms and oversleeping, we just ignored it.

After getting underway and realizing the warm sodas, the lack of ice cubes and the next stop 50 hours away would make for some disagreeable crew, Peter conceded to plan to stop in Delaware City.

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After getting everything stowed away in its proper place…

I tackled the formidable quarter berth in order to organize our little home away from home…     

Once I started moving tools, life vests, sail bags and the swim ladder, I discovered a small problem.  Without panicking, I called to Peter in the cockpit to say that something seemed amiss, not wanting to admit that I’d found hoses spraying from all sides somewhat resembling a fountain in both looks and sounds—wshhhhhhh! 

After checking out the source of the leak, Peter said we had so many stores on-board that the stem through-hulls were below the water line for the first time, forcing the seldom-used hoses into service.  The hose proved to be old and spongy—Peter could put a finger through them.  We moved the cases of water and gin to the bow of the boat and were able to get the through-hulls above the waterline, but a fix would be needed before too long.  Good thing we had a stop planned!

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As we motored into the infamous Delaware City Marina (we’d all spent too much time there a few years ago salvaging a friend’s sunken boat and had sworn off a return at any price…except ICE oh and a hose leak that matched Love Park’s fountain!), we thought we saw a familiar mast, then it was the hull, could it be….yes, we saw the blonde head pop up out of the companionway and we knew it was Terry and Ron on Golden Echo! Terry and Ron had been our dock neighbors for years until they retired and moved on.  It was great to run into them unexpectedly—they were there doing some work on their boat, getting ready for their next trip.

Delaware City was hot, buggy and the electricity was out, but the staff of the marina treated us like old friends.  Somehow our arrival there marked the beginning of vacation and we felt the cruiser vibe take over, foretelling the pace of our whole vacation.  We pulled up to the dock, hopped off, hugged Terry and Ron and then all went hose shopping in the marina store.  After jokes from the harbormaster about charging Philadelphia prices since the computerized price checking system was not working in the electrical outage, Terry and Ron offered to put the equipment on their bill (the credit card machine was out of order too!) so we could be on our way.

We bought five bags of ice and invited Terry and Ron back to the cockpit for gin & tonics.  The salon was in total disarray now that we couldn’t store anything in the quarter berth, but there’s one thing about sailboat friends:  they never see the mess and instead focus on the gimbaled mechanism on the stove and tell stories about mishaps and hard won solutions.  Over cocktails, we caught up on tales from our honeymoon sailing in the Grenadines and their winter cruise through the Chesapeake (these are not the usual in-search-of-tropics sailors, instead they both prefer cooler temps and dream of cruising as far north as they can go).  As the drinks ran low and the gossip slowed down, we knew we had to get going.  We were off again, motor-sailing to get out the mouth of the bay and head up to Block Island.