Taking Back The Holiday

A view from the travelift

I visited my sailing blog recently because I was bored, and because visiting my blog registers a visit, an important consideration if ever I am to reach Internet critical mass. Presently I’m the only one visiting me, but sooner or later you will too because Google's algorithms, impressed by my overly frequent visits, will recommend that you give me a try.

That's why it’s important to remain relevant. So it’s with a certain skewed sense of pride that I announce we are finally back in the water just in time to have attended the 2013 edition of the fireworks display in Hempstead Harbor, one year to the day after we’d discovered we were sinking.

It was on the previous 4^th of July, with our niece and a group of her high school friends aboard, that a distressing amount of water was discovered in the bilge after we’d returned to our mooring. After pumping the water out that night, I’d checked again early the next morning to discover it had opted to return.

I’m going to skip over most of the details since they were covered in my last post (which you should also read along with all the other posts), though I'd like you to know that Emily is now graduated from high school and onto new adventures. So the lessons to be learned herein are: 1) study hard, grasshopper, and 2) if you have a boat, you will be working on her a lot whether she’s brand new, or say forty-something years old. Our boat happens not to be new.

I’ve poked a lot of fun in the past at boaters who seem to have more interest in working on their rides than sailing them. There is an honorable aspect to the tinkerer, who will always find something more to do on his project before he’s prepared to declare it finished. And I must say I’m thankful to our yard that they allow us to do our own damage to our investments with minimal interference. Yards like ours are going the way of the local seaside dives, which are being pushed out by what are charmingly referred to as developers. Development is what happens to an otherwise vital community when people with excessive amounts of ill-begotten money interfere.

While I worked away these last few months, sanding and grinding and sweating and swearing, abutting my stern was the skeleton of a condo development rising from its seaside foundation. Those nascent parapets will doubtlessly soon house a gallery of blue-hairs, staring with pinched looks of disapproval (just wait till they get an ear-load of the sound of flailing winter halyards) at the eyesore that has been servicing sailors since long before they were soiling their cloth diapers. And there will have gone the neighborhood.

But that will be then. During the last few months I found myself spending a lot of time amid the subculture of owner/fixers, an elite group of mostly guys with bottomless to do lists. Even amid this rarified clique there are distinct subsets. There are, I imagine, more guys like me, who wish the first item on their lists was “burn this list,” (and perhaps wonder if a buyer could be found in this anemic economy), guys who religiously maintain their boats for racing purposes (shysters of the sea, I'll call them), guys like my pal Ron, who lapse into depression if there is nothing to fix at all, and perhaps the most intriguing, guys like Zoltan, who claim to despise every blood-soaked second of the work, yet perversely insist on rebuilding every square inch of their boats to Stradivariun specs.

My punch list consisted of rebuilding our stern tube, which required the demolition of my aborted attempt to 5200 back into place the old failed tube. Guys had warned me never to use 5200 if ever I intended to undo the repair. They were right. Also on the list: refit the new driveshaft and associated components, repair the blisters revealed by a thorough hull sanding (never thoroughly sand your bottom, as it will reveal what you are truly made of), as well as grind, fill and fair a disturbing symmetrical gelcoat crack running the entire length of the keel.

Also on the list would be the cosmetic improvements I could give a rat’s ass about, but which make my mate happy. And you really need to keep your mate happy, because in truth she is what makes the boat go. So it was one more go-round of brightwork “varnishing” (Cetol this time - you fetishists can squeal all you want) and hull polishing, to spiffy up the sad state of affairs brought on by lack of attention.

George, our yard manager, gave us the call to ask, "Ready to see if she'll float or not?" and I wont deny to a plague of butterflies as he drove the travelift down the tracks to lower us into the ocean. While our Laura Lynn’s tush dangled in the water, George let me scamper aboard and check my work. Inexplicably, the repair was holding.

So there we were one 4^th of July later, watching the fireworks on the kind of night that'll make a man say out loud to anyone who'll listen, “This is why you buy a boat.” After we'd made it back to our mooring around midnight, I threw the switch on the bilge pump to hear the satisfying gurgle you get with your last slurp of soda through a straw. Sweet.