fetchinketch

We spent the other day wondering around downtown Newport. One of highlights was the Newport Shipyard.  A boat yard that specializes in REALLY big superyachts.  Just amazing the money flowing through that place.  I am used to boatyards and  marinas where Harmonie feels like a big boat.  Against most of these, she’s a toy!

Right next door, for full contrast, is the commercial fishing dock with it’s “rough” looking boats and the associated smells and sights.  From the commercial fishing docks, comes our blog quiz for the day.

Stacked all around the dock were lobster traps and fish traps of many kinds. Most of them I had a pretty good handle on, and could at least come up with a good guess for what they might be used to catch.  But one trap had me totally at a loss.

A stack of “whatsitfer” traps….

It didn’t look like it could catch anything.  Just a simple rectangular box with half the top open.  A bag or screen inside to hold bait.  Some weights to hold it on the bottom.  That’s it.  No doors, no tapering baffles.  Just an open box. Certainly easy and cheap to make, but not something that looked like it would hold anything inside long enough to bring to the surface. Only when we snagged a friendly commercial fishermen walking by was the mystery solved…

So today’s quiz is:  What animal is so dumb it can get into this trap, but can’t get out again?

A hint:  They sold for $4/pound at the dock.  OK, that’s not much of a hint, but it’s the best I came up with!

I’ll post the answer in a day or two.

Getting to Newport is a pretty easy excursion from where we are.  First, get on the radio and put a call out to the boatyard launch.  They come out and pick you up and bring you to the dock.  From the dock, it is about a mile walk to Downtown Jamestown where you pick up the Newport Ferry. A 20 minute boat ride and you are right in the middle of downtown Newport. The ferry runs until 10:30PM, so we could make an evening of it.

This time of year the Newport waterfront is full of huge superyachts and fancy boats.  It is a delightful town, lots of colonial era buildings lovingly restored.

We walked around yesterday afternoon and finally picked a dinner spot.After we relaxed and ordered, I had a horrible thought, “What time does the boatyard launch service stop?” A quick consult, and we realized that although we had plenty of time to catch the ferry back to Jamestown, we were running out of time to catch the last launch out to the boat!  If we were not going to spend the night sleeping on the picnic tables in the boatyard parking lot, we needed to get back faster than the ferry could do!  Uber to the rescue!

Many times in our travels so far the Uber car service has been a lifeline.  Many of the drivers are interesting people, and the overall experience has been great. It has always been easier and cheaper than finding a local taxi.

I have attached some photos from our excursion yesterday.  Enjoy!  Hopefully I’ll be getting more tomorrow as we explore further.

Our favorite boat in Narragansett Bay, our very own Harmonie!

This beautiful old wooden hulled yacht was docked in Jamestown across from the ferry landing.

Karen is happy to be out on the water again!

We arrived here at Dutch Harbor in Narragansett Bay after a delightful 24 hour sail.  It would be tempting to say we arrived “without incident” but that wouldn’t be true, we had plenty of fun and entertaining incidents in just 24 hours on the water.

We motored out of Sandy Hook Bay in variable and contrary winds, but once we were on the ocean, a sea breeze built up from the south and we sailed along all day at a good speed in nearly flat seas.  Sunny and warm, but out on the water it was not stiflingly hot like

Looming thunderstorms make for a pretty sunset.

many places we could see on land.  Afternoon thunderstorms built up over Long Island, for our visual pleasure, but steered clear of our course.  Over night we were treated to a continuous lightening show, but again we never saw bad wind or rain where we were.

Sometimes the entertainment came from our fellow humans in the form of traffic on the marine radio.  On fellow had taken his jetski from Montauk to Block Island in the morning, a distance of about 12 miles. In the morning, it was an easy trip.  Block Island would have been easily visible from Montauk.  Not the brightest knife in the drawer, this guy had no compass, and no gps with him.  Late in the afternoon, a light fog settled in. He leaves Block Island, and once he realizes he can not see Montauk OR Block Island and he NO IDEA which way to go.  Lucky for his life, and for our entertainment, he has a radio.  He calls the Coast Guard, “How do I get home?”

They explain he needs to go west, “toward the setting sun”.  The Coast Guard realizes from their radio fixes he is actually driving in circles.  Finally, they have him follow a cargo ship he can see that is headed in the direction he needs to go.  The cargo ship slows down so he can keep up.  They finally give up on trying to talk him home.  When the cargo ship passes a buoy, they tell him to stay right next to the buoy, we’re sending a boat to pick up up.  Darwin is not always right, sometimes the unfit DO survive!

In a less comic, and potentially more tragic scene, early this morning a call comes in to the Coast Guard, “I have lost a diver!”  A young guy was free diving and spear fishing with his friends.  In the fog they lost track of him in the fog and currents.  A very tense 15 minutes was spent on the radio with the CG getting them the information they needed to start a search.  Suddenly, the boat skipper says, “I have to turn off the radio, I can hear him!”  A few minutes later, everybody was safe, very scared, but safe.

Here in Dutch Harbor, we are on a mooring, not in a marina.  More services than if we anchored, and more money, but much nicer.  A beautiful breeze.  We have both taken naps to recover from our overnight excursion, and new we are ready to call the water taxi to take us to shore and explore! It’s picture postcard pretty!

The view from our mooring: Dutch Island Light.

I got the “all clear” from the eye doc this morning, so tomorrow we will be headed off to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.  Not exactly a major sailing trip, only 24 to 30 hours.  Except for the possibility for scattered thunderstorms, the wind forecast looks great.  We should have an easy trip of it.

We have a mooring ball reserved in Dutch Harbor.  It will be nice to live life out side of a marina for a while!

We’ll have an early morning getting the last minute things ready and the boat good for an ocean trip.  An early bed time, and tomorrow we are sailing!

Our plans aren’t all that precise, because there really are not any big consequences to changing them.  We had hoped to be headed north to Narragansett Bay near Newport, Rhode Island in a few days.  Unfortunately, I (Bill) caught a nasty eye infection that left me looking like the star of a zombie apocalypse movie (and NOT one of the good guys!).

After a week of dosing with various forms of antibiotics, you can once again see the whites of my eyes.  Since the Doctor wants to see me one more time before I leave, our departure plan has been modified to Saturday the 13th.

We’ll spend as much time as we are comfortable with along the coast of New England, going to where ever we can find space and entertainment.  Our only goal after that is to be in the Chesapeake Bay in early October, and then in South Carolina in early November, then the Caribbean before it gets too cold!

Of course all that is subject to change at the whim of the weather, or just our own fickleness!

For those of you who have followed our travels, we have been a bit quiet with posts recently.  My (Bill) family is almost all located within an hour’s drive of the marina where we have settled in, so a lot of time has been devoted to family and friends who I haven’t seen in a long time.  That’s my excuse for my lack of posting!

The marina here is nice, with a few caveats.  When they quoted a 7’6″ depth they were a bit optimistic.  Our 6’7″ draft bumps bottom when ever the tide is less than zero, and the entrance has a significant shallow spot I have found several times.  The marina is also right on the edge of the main channel in and out of the Shewsbury River, a very busy boat highway.  Even though it is marked as a “No Wake Zone” the locals seem to regard that as little more than a suggestion.  As a result we roll and bounce to boat and ferry wakes especially on a nice weekend day. From our dock we have a view across New York Harbor to Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

We have been out sailing a couple days since we got here, mostly to go fishing.  Slowly I am reacquiring the skill set need to catch the local aquatic culinary delight, the summer flounder, locally know as the “fluke”.

We have been making progress on a couple of boat projects. Yesterday was a bit of an unusual day.  I actually crossed more projects off the list than I added!  A cause for celebration.   We have a new dinghy, and I have worked out a safe, easy, and reliable system for going up the mast which was needed to repair our anemometer.

We are enjoying the weather here more than in Florida.  While there are days here when is it hot, those days are separated by days when the temperature stays below 85, and more importantly, at night it drops below 70!  The other night it went down to 62, a temperature lower than we have seen in many, many months.

Here is an example of our time use these days:  Tomorrow Karen is hopping on the ferry to Manhattan, and I am visiting my Dad and some of his friends. Saturday we are going to visit my brother in his new home, and Sunday we are sailing with some of my oldest and best friends.

We’ll be here for a couple of weeks before heading a bit further north.  We are expecting our first stop to be in Newport, RI.  Then further north as remaining summer time allows.

Sometimes you wonder how the government ever gets anything done…

DHS is the “Department of Homeland Security” a catch-all behemoth of an organization that includes Customs, Immigration, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Airport Security, and who knows what all else.

This morning a Customs Service helicopter was on what I assume was a routine patrol of the harbor.  They called in a report that in our marina, and the larger one just up the coast,  there were “boats flying foreign flags.”

Two hours later, (They had to drive from Newark) a pair of armed officers show up to walk the dock and find the boat in question.  There were none.  But for a moment, they thought they had found their quarry!  A sailboat with a foreign name!  No flag flying, but you know those sneaky foreigners!  Oh, no…  wait a minute…  It’s from Laguna Beach.  (They had seen Harmonie.)

Other than the silliness of two agents spending most of their day on a wild goose chase for some unspecified foreign sailboat that was up to some unspecified no good, there is the total inefficiency of the operation.

How hard would it be for the helicopter spotter to reach out the window with his cell phone, take a photo, draw a little circle around the boat in question, and email it to the boots on the ground instead of sending them to look for an unspecified boat among hundreds in the marina?

Why don’t I feel so much safer?

In one of our underway posts I mentioned in passing the special downwind rig that Amel boats use.  By special request, here is a more detailed description of that rig. This might be a bit technical for non-sailor types. Also, I have no good photos (yet) of Harmonie sailing off downwind, so I had to find some on the internet to help with my explanations.

Like many things on Amel boats, the basic concept might not be unique, but the execution is uniquely well thought out.  An “old fashioned” rig for downwind sailing is twin jibs, poled out to either side.  This is the basic concept Amel has taken and refined.

Here is a photo of an Amel running with her downwind rig fully set:

The two sails combined are large, over 1400 square feet.  The second sail is called a “ballooner” and is made of lightweight nylon.

Most of the time when boats are sailing straight downwind they roll very uncomfortably.  When twin sails like this are trimmed properly (which means not too tight!) they dampen the roll completely.  We ease the sheets when using this rig out until the top 15% or so of the sail is right on the edge of luffing.  We can watch one sail’s head fill, and then the other constantly pushing back against the direction of roll as the boat sailed along totally flat even as the following sea rolled underneath her.  With just one sail on one side, the boat rolls dramatically as the top of the sail alternately fills and then luffs.

So far this is nothing you might not have seen written in a book about cruising sailboats  75 years ago.  Joshua Slocum used a variation of this rig sailing around the world in the 1890’s and he didn’t invent it.  Amel’s modern implementation of this old system make it very easy to use.

First, are the poles that hold the sail out.  Unlike standard whisker poles, each pole is two pieces, with an articulating joint at the shrouds. This means the outside length of the pole can pivot back and hook on the rail.  Like this:

Attached to the pole are four lines.  A topping lift, a fore guy, and aft guy, and a downhaul that are tied off at marks, no fancy adjustments required.  With the sheet fit into the block on the outboard end of the pole, the outhaul lifts, and the fore guy pulls forward, and it is ready to go.  The first time we did it it took us 5 minutes.  The second time, it took half that.  So, Amel Invention #1 is the easy-to-rig twin poles.

Amel Invention #2 is even cooler.  Carrying that much sail is great when the wind is light, but if it picks up you need to reduce it quickly.  Ordinarily, that would mean taking down the 2nd jib.  Captain Henri Amel had a better idea.

When you put up the ballooner, its halyard would normally prevent you from using the roller furling because it would get twisted around the top of the headstay and very bad things would ensue.  On an Amel, the halyard is used to raise the sail, which then is caught by a latch at the top of the roller foil. Then you take the halyard down. Now you can roll both sails together.  Like this:

The foil actually has three tracks on it.  One for the jib, one for the ballooner, and the third track is used when you want to take the ballooner down.  The halyard is used to send the “mouse” up the foil which opens the latch holding the sail.  Pull it down and stuff it into the sail locker up on the bow. Easy!

Here is a more detailed visual of what happens at the top of the mast:

This system allows a two person crew to fly a huge sail plan even in changeable weather, because they know that they can easily and quickly reef down if things get gnarly.

Many modern boats on passage will fly a spinnaker during the day that is taken down at dusk so they don’t have to deal with the takedown of a free flying sail in the dark if a squall comes up. On an Amel you leave your tradewind rig up all night, and if the weather turns bad a lone watchkeeper can easily furl both sails.  So at night on the Amel, you go flying past the “faster boat” because you’re sailing at full speed all night.

Some details of the poles:

This is the outboard end of the pole. The pin retracts so you can drop the sheet in, and the whole assembly rotates around the pole axis, and of course the sheave turns.

The articulating joint at the shrouds. Originally made by FranceSpar, that company has been out of business for many years. The fitting on the inboard end of the pole is a standard big boat spinnaker pole end. The socket that receives it is modified to fit the end of the jockey pole, and to be able to swing in and out, and pivot up and down.

This is a wider view of the holder that clamps on the shrouds that supports the outboard end of the jockey pole.

The inboard end of the jockey pole has a composite ball that fits in a socket welded to the mast. A pin drops through to secure everything.

This is a rig that most other sailors do not understand, and hence do not appreciate. On most other sailboats there is no combination of sails that allows you to sail straight downwind with any efficiency, safety and connivence. Yes, most sloops or ketches can run wing-on-wing, but that introduces the danger of a catastrophic accidental gybe that has to constantly be managed. On many boats, a wing-on-wing configuration also can cause the boat to roll intolerably under some wind and sea states. Proper sail trim on the ballooner rig as described above prevents this.

There is no question that a very large, free flying sail–under the right conditions–will get to a downwind destination faster than this rig; but that sail is a great deal more difficult to handle, and typically is confined to a narrow window of wind strengths. It can not be reefed, and is an all or nothing thing.

We arrived yesterday afternoon, safe and sound at the Sandy Hook Bay Marina.  I have updated the posting about catching the wahoo with photos, so if you’re interested, page back and have a look!

The marina is nice, so new that all the facilities aren’t completed yet.  We came in at close to low tide, when the current was ripping across the entrance of the marina.  We found the shallow spot just inside, but were able to back off and get positioned to get into the slip.  A strong cross-current had me making several passes before getting lined up well enough to get in.  Struggling with getting into the dock was entirely to be expected, since a number of my family members were on the dock to greet our arrival.

Back to boat projects!

Time: 10:10 local
Lat: 37 33N
Log: 73 03W
Distance from Port Canaveral: 667NM
Distance to Sandy Hook Bay Marina: 176NM

The models have us arriving at the Marina between 1 and 6 PM tomorrow.

Right now we are motoring between weather systems, bright sun, flat sea, and no wind. If the forecasts are right, once we get back in the breeze again, it will be a straight line sail to the tip of Sandy Hook at the southern enterence of New York Harbor. Oddly, here 50 miles offshore we have suddenly been invaded by a variety of flies and bugs. I’m guessing they were blown offshore during last night’s storms and are just happy to find a hard place to land.

We avoided the worst of the weather last night, but watched storms around us on radar and in the sky. A thunderstorm at sea is a dramatic visual event, and once you can tell on the radar it is not coming in your direction, it is even a pretty one.