22. Summer Closeout: Hemlock Cove I

After a week of getting the boat varnished pretty and cleaned for visitors, including some last minute scrubbing on Saturday as thunderstorms loomed overhead, we were able to get out to Hemlock Cove with friends AJ, Brett, and Dan.

The wind was from the north, which is somewhat unusual for the summer (summer is usually S-ish and winter usually gives us big N), so we were able to sail the entire way.


'Twas a very nice sail over there and we arrived to quite a crowded Cove. It seemed like everyone was already there: most of the powerboats to the east and almost all of the sailboats to the west. We stuck ourselves into the northwest corner of the cove and while my first anchoring wasn't in such a good spot we moved up to another spot that worked out nicely.

We were all starving, so we set up the BBQ immediately, threw on some burgers, dogs, and a pan of sauerkraut. And then promptly ran out of propane. Fortunately, we were able to phone a friend and borrow some gas from Uncle Larry and Fam on MIss Gracie. What a break!

Even the ice cream man was in the Cove!








As we were eating we realized we were not alone. Visiting the Cove with all the people were dozens of red, basketball-sized jellyfish, complete with menacing, stringy tentacles. They prevented us from swimming, for a little while at least, but the siren call of the sandbar proved to tempting to our Viking souls, so we jumped in, sprinted over there, and did a little exploring. We found to snails in spiral shells, and these weird blobs of clear, jelly-like nothingness anchored to the bottom. No idea what they were. Probably the first phase of an alien invasion; nothing to see here, folks; move along.


We had some nice visits from the other rafts, and then went on our merry way, hoping to return the next day.

brightwork, or, the varnish process

This section of teak is going to serve as our example. What we have here is one of the forward navigation lights. This is Redwing's starboard side, or green, light. This is the new teak rail that we installed in the Spring of 2007. Now, the process we went through this year is what one has to do when one skips giving the brightwork the attention it needs because say, there was an engine rebuild to get through. Normally, if the teak is well-maintained, a simple rough-up with some 150 or 220 grit sandpaper should prep the surface for some glorious shine.

Step One: Start with some crappy looking teak. And by start I mean start sanding. And keep sanding until all the grey is gone and you're left with nothing but golden, honey-looking teak. Some purists might demand you hand sand the entire boat, and that may be fine if you have, say, a MacGregor or something modern like that, but for the classic and classic-looking boats it's just not a practical strategy. You'd spend your life sanding your teak. So I use a combination of random orbital sander (to cover the acreage as fast as possible), one of those pointing corner sanders (for the corners, edges, and small spots), and good old fashioned sandpaper.

Almost there. There is still some of the old varnish and some silver teak here that needs to be addressed. And by addressed I mean destroyed.





And then, once you feel satisfied that you have sanded the teak to the best of your ability and nobody is going to steal your lunch money at the next raft up, go ahead and tape off. This is the most physically demanding part of the process. Pull some tape, rip it off, get it just next to wood, but not on it, so that none of the deck/light/winch will get varnished, and don't fall overboard. Miles of tape. Miles.


Finally, after all of that work, you can start to apply the varnish. Watch for drips (holidays), and be especially careful that you don't bump into the wet varnish.

I try to remove the tape after I finish my post-varnish, ice-cold beer. You can probably leave it for a while, but soon the adhesive from the tape begins to stick to the boat and you'll wind up having to clean the glue off. Another annoying job that you don't want to do.

Now, just repeat that until you have eight, count em, eight coats.

And here is the same with the toe rail (sorry about the toes shot):





And you are probably wondering what we do about the spring line, where it crosses onto the boat it pretty much lays on the toe rail (and destroys the varnish with its slow, constant rubbing). Well, my first piece of advice would be to do your varnishing in the boat yard when the boat is in the cradle and no lines are in the way. Failing that, you have to wait for the wind - in our case the port spring line has to be on the boat all the time, while the starboard can be eased or taken off. So the port side toe rail has a big patch on it with no varnish on it right now, and we'll get it when the wind shifts enough so we can switch spring lines. (The spring line keeps the boat from drifting forward (and for us, into the dock).)

Yesterday I spent the entire day sanding. Teak boogers! And then Alli came down (after work!) and did fully half of the taping off and varnishing. What a pal!

the varnish

The Redwing has a lot of wood, teak, on it: the toe rail goes pretty much all around the boat except for where the jib track sits; the hand rails on the cabin top; the dorade (the ventilation box for the head); and, of course, the coamings, which are prime real estate. When the teak is varnished and pretty the boat looks a lot better.

There are a couple of schools of thought concerning the proper care of teak, and if you every ask a sailor which method he or she prefers you'll probably get strong opinions about the favorite and the pretenders.

Some folks think it should be left plain, left to age and turn silver. I don't really care for this strategy. Certainly if the aging is uniform and the teak itself holds up to the sun and doesn't crack or start to splinter, it can look OK. But mostly when I see grey teak I think it looks old and dirty.

Some folks prefer to oil their teak. I'd say this is the suggestion I hear the most - just oil it and forget about it. I don't care for the oil because the teak doesn't POP!, if you ask me. As it mellows, the teak looks good, but it doesn't have the sparkle that can add a lot of class to a sail boat.

This site has an image of what untreated, silvered, and oiled teak look like: Teak Boutique.

Some folks like to paint their teak with this stuff called Cetol. It's like varnish like Bud Light is like beer. It does give a nice gloss, but I think it gives the wrong glow to the teak. The differences are subtle and having seen the differences between the two, I have to take a pass on ever using Cetol on the Redwing.

And that leaves the rest of us with varnish, which I like using for a couple of reasons.

First, it's traditional. Sailors have been using varnish on their boats for at least 4.5 billion years, and if it works for them, well, it works for me.

Second, I like the mystery of the exotic blend of ingredients. Like granny's recipe for _______________ (pick one: meatballs, sauce, stuffing, or brownies), we're not really sure exactly what's in it, but damn it's good.

And the third reason I like varnish is the way it looks when it's on the teak: like someone poured warm honey on the wood. It sparkles and pops and makes the boat look real classy. Like more than a regular, old boat; more like a yacht.

It's a lot of damn work, which I will go into next time, but it's totally worth it.

21. gotta get a clew!

Alli and I went out for what turned out to be a long sail. We haven't really taken the boat too far down the bay, though we have gone for long day sails. I like the idea of traveling down the bay, say, to Oakdale or Sayville. So when we got the chance to broad reach down the bay we took it. It was a windy day though nothing out of the ordinary, and we decided to go with just the jib. Seems like a lot of other people made that decision because none of the other sailboats we saw had their mainsails up either.

As we got down near Nicoll Point we caught up with Sea Fox, a beautiful boat that looks very much like the Redwing.

It got windier as we sailed and by the time we turned around the whitecaps were jumping at the boat.

We were close-hauled, or nearly so, all the way home and as we got close to the bridge, somewhere north of Red 6, - WHANG! - the clew blew out of the jib! For the non-sailors, this is the corner of the sail that is attached to the boat by the lines (ropes, to you lubbers), or jib sheets. (Pull in on the jib sheets to tighten the sail, let some go to ease out the sail.) So one second we were cruising along trying to line up for the bridge opening, and the next we were without power on a windy day.

So, what to do? I quickly rolled the sail up (praise be to the sea gods for roller furling!) and secured it with a bungie cord. So that gave us a quiet opportunity to think, albeit a short one.

And of course, because these things seem to happen when we are least prepared, we still had the main cover on! So we quickly took that off, flaked out the lines, and hoisted the main. Unfortunately there was no way the main was going to get us home by itself. We had to point to get through the bridge opening (the damn bridge, always that damn bridge!), and we needed a jib.

I guess now is a good time to admit a very UN-seaman like thing that I did. I left the dock with the gas gauge needle right on E. This was a very dumb thing to do and I assure you it will not happen again. The boat slip is very close to the mouth of the creek, and so we hardly use the engine at all - just in and out of the creek, so less than ten minutes out to the cove while we put up the main and then ten minutes or so after we put the sails away in the cove. I figured we had enough gas to do that for the day, never expecting to have to motor home from Bay Shore. No excuse! Pay attention, man!

So we found ourselves on the wrong side of the bridge, with no headsail, unable to use our engine for fear we would run out of gas. Beauty!

Fortunately I had the tool box and all of the racing sails on board, so this is what we did:

1. Anchored the boat
2. Took off the roller furling gear (no easy feat in the chop)
3. Put up racing headsail #3, the smallest
4. Hauled up the anchor

And then we had an uneventful sail back to the dock which I appreciated.

Allison was excellent crew throughout the entire blowout and recovery: she was super helpful with the pulling down the big cruising jib, removing the roller furling, and putting up the racing sail (which doesn't roll up), and getting us back to the dock safely. I think the biggest help was her calm, helpful self. No panic - just steady. I was stressing hard, jumping around like a spider monkey, headed in five different directions at once, trying to make sure we didn't drift too far north, or that we stayed out of trouble with other boats.

So I'll take the sail to Jim at Sailor's Choice and ask him to patch it back together. I was hoping to get the rest of the season out of it, about 5 or 6 more weeks (more on winter plans soon), but alas, it's not to be. Jim's great and if you need some sail work done I strongly recommend him.

Cosme & his mother's most unprecedented adventure

Here is a former student of ours who is riding his bike from NYC to Maine! With his mom! How cool are they?

Cosme & his mother's most unprecedented adventure

And the coolness continues: Cosme built his bike!

Visit this blog early and often!

20. It was the calmest of times; it was the windiest of times.

Alli and I went down to the boat expecting to go out to Great River to meet some work friends (who have a powerboat). Shortly after we got to the boat they cancelled, thinking it wasn't going to be a bad day on the bay. True, it was more cloudy than not, but none of the weather folk were saying anything about rain.

So we went sailing anyway. And by the time I got the roller-furler jib back on the boat the day was hot and sunny. As soon as we got out of the creek we realized why - hardly a breath of wind was stirring. Not many sailboats on the bay. We saw Kevin in the cove cleaning the bottom of Rettsie in anticipation of the Foulke Trophy race (which he later won).

So we messed around, with the pole holding out the jib, on the Babylon side of the bridge until the wind picked up, when we went down to Bay Shore. It went up to "pretty windy" on my personal wind scale before it calmed down again on our way home.

As we ate lunch, we hove-to. I have never done this before despite reading about it a million times. And it's so easy! In the link the guy who explains it has a wheel, so we have to translate back down to tiller-speak, but his description of the process is pretty good. We drifted north (light breeze from the north, pushing us along) until we were down eating (and just in time because we bumped the bottom just as I released the boat from the heave-to).


Then, because the sunset looked promising and the moon was about to come out, we decided to pick up some sushi and get back out on the boat. What a great day!

19. Racing on Redwing (3)

First, let me say thanks to Jack, Dan McM, and Greg for coming out to race.

We went down to Bay Shore to race and had a great time. We came in 8th out of 11 (results). There is no spinnaker start in Bay Shore, and I like that a lot. I also liked learning the new course - it's an area that I haven't really mastered, even though it's right next door.

Once again, I learned a lot. It was good to hear Jack and Dan discuss strategery and tactics.

And the best part of racing in Bay Shore is the sail back to Babylon. We had a steady SW wind and sailed pretty much right into the creek. Night sailing is so different - in the darkness the bay gets a lot smaller, what you can see is either really far way (the lights on shore) or really close, the 10' or so right next to the boat. I think that smallness, or closeness, makes the sailing better.

18. Racing on Redwing (2)

I'm tellin' ya, every time I go race the boat I learn more than I can tell you. I'm getting some serious XP.

Last week it was just Mike and I and we went non-spinn. I may be ready to dedicate myself to non-spin until I get a crack squad of crew together. Of sailors more nimble and flexible than Mike and I. Ideally I'd like to have Jack every week, but he likes a steady ride and my racing schedule has been anything but steady.

We heard a few comments from the spinnaker racers for being too close to the start as the first gun went off, but I think that was just them giving me the business because I'm new (or, to be more clear, new as a skipper). We got back down by the non-spinn boats and gave all the hot dogs their room.

It was a pretty hairy start - as we approached the line we ducked just higher than a boat that tacked between us and the committee boat and I'm real glad we did. There were about four boats below us at the start as we were crossing the line and they were all acting like we were playing bumper cars. There was contact between more than one boat and some yelling as we all took off for the first beat.

As we did, just about everyone rolled past us. It was not a good feeling and I'm still trying to figure out what we should have done (adjust sails, tack and go away).

We chased everyone around and had a good downwind leg toward Buoy 6. There was that awkward maneuver at the bridge, but overall we had a pretty good race and came in 7th out of 11.