We live on board a Bristol 45.5 sailboat and are cruising as the seasons allow and our interests suggest. We are June Wan and Bruce Clark. June is an IT person who 'retired' when the economy went sour and her company in Jersey City cut staff. Bruce is a retired high school teacher and sometime author of geography textbooks. This blog will chronicle their lifestyle and will also include general observations on life, politics, international development, and geography (broadly defined of course!).
Here is Ainia after the "accident". You can see where the hole is just below the dock line. The teak rail just below the deck was also crushed.
The 'new' Ainia:
Repairs to the collision damage are now complete (except for varnishing that we are doing Here is the boat after painting. The insurance (other guy's not surprisingly) paid for the repair including painting one side of the boat so that the colour would match. We paid the extra to get the entire boat painted since the finish was getting pretty tired and banged up when you got close to it. This meant that we were on the hook for about US$2600 rather than almost US$12000 for a separate paint job. The total cost was more than US$16000. Top level yards in New England are famous for being expensive and this one was no exception. The work seems first rate but the cost is nasty indeed.
We thought about going with same colour as before (Aristo Blue) but it is not the most practical choice even though it looks wonderful and is the most common colour on larger Bristols. The gray colour has some particular advantages though. Scratches do not show up nearly as much as on a darker hull. There was a Bristol 41.1 next to us out of the water that was in impeccable shape except for a lateral scratch about 8 feet along at about dock height. You could see it from over a 100 feet away even though it was not a wide scratch. Also the gray keeps the interior of the hull much cooler on sunny days. This makes it more liveable and reduces the load on the freezer and fridge units. At first I was prepared to give up some measure of beauty for practicality but the boat looks terrific - more streamlined than before and a bit more modern. BTW, the colour is not as blue as it appears on my monitor - more of a light, neutral gray.
**** Big Bill Hurricane Bill gave us some anxious moments but turned out to be a non-event for southern coastal New England. Early projections were not good but the closest approach was about 150 nm and Noank is behind Fisher's Island which is a very substantial, 4 mile long breakwater. The VHF marine forecasts include both the coastal weather and the offshore weather (from 20 to 200 miles offshore). The offshore forecast for eastern George's Bank (east of Cape Cod) had winds to 90 knots and waves to 44 feet. The wave forecasts acknowledge that the biggest, individual waves can exceed the average by 1/3. This means that there could have been waves of 66 feet - not a happy prospect.
**** What Now? June is now back in Beijing for three weeks or so to visit her ill father and spend time with the rest of her family. I drove her to JFK airport before continuing on to Toronto for a week or so. (Time for a brief rant - is there any excuse for flights to Beijing from New York being half the cost of those from Toronto? To add insult to injury - the flights from New York fly directly over Toronto on their way to China. End of rant.)
After dropping June off I went to visit our friends at Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City. It was most pleasant and almost felt like coming home. It was a bit bittersweet because we left there because of someone else's decision (essentially the world economic system) rather than our own.
Next week I will be heading back to CT to work on varnishing the replacement of the plastic (polycarbonate) in the hatches and ports. Also I will be checking out the installation of our now rebuilt generator.
Oh all right, so the demand was from two people. Anyway, a couple asked if we had a blog and we had to say only in Chinese (June's blog has been well-received by those who have read it). The result is that I will do my best to keep up this blog. This should prove a bit easier since the amount of work to do on the boat is declining substantially, if only because of all the work that has been done in the past 20 months.
Rather than trying to summarize what has been happening in the past year since the last blog entry I think I will pick up in the past month or so. If anyone has questions about earlier events, please let me know. Our recent time on board started in Noank, CT (a lovely village to visit, go to Abbott's for lobster - if you are old enough to appreciate it, there is a Costello's nearby that specializes in crabs) where we had the boat out of the water for planned maintenance. The biggest jobs were doing the bottom and installing both wind power and two solar panels. The bottom job included a lot of fairing (filling in low spots to make the bottom more streamlined) and raising the waterline about 3" in the bow - something about the 100 gallon water tank and 400+ pounds of ground tackle up there I guess. Raising the waterline meant painting a nifty red stripe after some careful measuring - every metre of length meant that the waterline changed by 3 to 4 mm. The solar and wind power were not too difficult - just running a lot of wires through very constricted spaces.
After leaving Noank we wandered east and north with the general goal being to go to Maine for several weeks. We certainly did not hurry (very used to this retired business now and June seems to be a fast learner too). Some highlights (or not) of the journey):
Fisher's Island, NY - FI is only about 3 mi from Noank but I just wanted to somewhere different from where we had been for about a month; we anchored in the West Bay of this island that is about 2/3 private and has summer houses on it that would be bigger than the biggest houses in the Post Rd area in Toronto.
Point Judith Pond, RI - I thought this would be a bit more pastoral than it turned out to be. It is long, shallow bay inland from the coast. We barely managed in a channel that the cruising guide said should have been a bit deeper than it turned out to be. We found a good place to anchor that got nicer as the weekend crowds disappeared.
Between one rich area and another - we were passed by this boat as we were heading toward Cuttyhunk. They were going from Newport to either Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket -- rich places all. Our boat seems big at 45 feet. This one apparently was 45 m long (judging from the emblem on this sail). Registration was in Bermuda
Cuttyhunk, MA - This is a remote island (by the standards of the region) that has a few hundred summer residents and less than 100 during the winter. You feel that you are in a different kind of place here, more like Maine or Nova Scotia.
The harbor is wonderfully protected but it is almost full with moorings - a common theme in New England south of Boston (and even parts north of it). We did anchor in close company (us on the left of the photo) and spent a couple of nice nights although the weather was cool and gray.
I had anchored at Cuttyhunk in the early '80s. It seemed much more crowded now and there were even moorings in the outer bay that were open to winds from the north and northeast. Cuttyhunk was also overrun by bunnies as well as tourists (actually more bunnies than tourists I think). They had little fear of people and I had to stop June from adopting one (or more).
Marion, MA - we anchored in a crowded harbor here as well. They have left a little marked anchorage that has room for two boats at most. We ended up here for two nights as there was a gale warning for the area including nearby Buzzards Bay which is not very large and pretty well-protected and I am sure not an area prone to gales in July. This storm caused considerable damage to boats in the area including a couple ending on the beach at Block Island.
From Marion you have to time your arrival at the Cape Cod Canal. Currents in the Canal can be up to 5 knots. We avoided the full ebb tide but still did more than 11 knots over the bottom for a time. The canal allows you to avoid a very long trip around all of Cape Cod. There are three bridges over the canal - the nearest one is a railroad bridge which is rarely lowered. The others are high level highway bridges.
Plymouth - as in Rock.
Not one of our favourite places for a variety of reasons as you shall see. There are not many places to stop between the Canal and Boston and this was positioned well although you have to go in for almost an hour from the sea to the harbour. Not sure what the Pilgrims saw in this place that made them want to stay, although there is a very good stream available. The very large harbour is mainly sandbanks (green on the chart), many of which appear at low tide (the tide range is 9'+ rather than the 3' or south of the Canal.
Problem #1 - In the narrow channel next to Plymouth Beach (A on chart), June went forward to pull some chain on deck so we could anchor efficiently when we got to the deeper area parallel to the channel after it turns westward (B). Next thing we knew, the anchor ( a lovely and effective 60 lb Manson Supreme) had slipped off the windlass and was heading to the bottom taking our anchor chain with it (almost $4 a foot x 200 feet). It was tied to a rope that was pulled on deck after all the chain was gone and just pulled out the knot. I assume that the knot had loosened as it was under the chain that was constantly moving as the boat rolled and pitched.
When we got to the supposed anchorage area we found that it was pretty much full of moorings. We ended up taking one of the town moorings. These were $45 a night and that did not include launch service or showers ashore. We hired a work boat and guy with a grapnel to try to snag the anchor chain since we knew where it was. After about 3 hours we had pulled up four old lobster pots, assorted rope and wire cables and an anchor - but the wrong one a small Danforth-style. We gave up on this and chalk it up to a (pricey) learning experience. The new anchor and rode are now eye-sliced to a couple of hundred feet of 3/4 rope which has a large shackle at the other end that it too large to come through the hawse hole. The shackle is then tied securely inside the boat as well.
Problem #2 - While we sitting at our mooring with no other boats witin a quarter mile a sailboat ran into us! There was no reason for this at all. Winds were about 10 knots and the tide was high so they could go where they wanted to. The owner and his wife were below apparently and their adult daughter was at the helm. I think the closer she got to us the more she just froze up. She could easily have turned right or left a bit and missed us, but ... The damage consisted of a hole about the size of a walnut near the bow and about 6" below the deck. The lovely teak rubrail was also crushed and there were assorted scrapes and scratches.
The culprit (below) was only 22' long but weighed around 6000 pounds. It also had a bronze forestay fitting that was quite sharp. This fitting was torn off his boat in the collision but it took all of the damage.
After this we were able to move to a Plymouth YC mooring (C on chart)that was the same price but included launch service and the use of the club's facilities. PYC is a 19th century club and very friendly but still a bit traditional. They have an 8 am and sundown cannon for example. In contrast to most clubs on Lake Ontario their membership seemed quite young with many young families. Our mooring was quite close to Plymouth Rock (D on chart
I know it has been a very long time since my last confession (er, blog entry), but I do have an excuse - for some time I was very busy with finishing the student book and teacher resource for the second edition of our grade 12 world issues book (it is now out, btw, and would make a lovely Christmas or birthday gift for that special someone). Also there seem to be a never ending list of jobs to do on the boat ranging from the very big to the very small.
Thought it was time to show off Ainia a bit more. First pic is an overview taken this spring. Since the time that photo was taken the canvas (dodger and bimini) have been replaced and the exterior teak has had 11 coats of varnish.
Ainia is a Bristol 45.5 designed by Ted Hood and built in Rhode Island in 1982. The main dimensions are LOA 45' Beam 13' 4" Draft 4' 10" and Displacement 34,500 pounds. The two of these that need comment are the shallow draft - this is because, like many Hood designs, the boat has a centreboard with 12' draft when the board is down. The C/B has both advantages and disadvantages - the shallow draft means that you can get into shallower places like much of the Bahamas while still having good pointing ability with the board down. The main disadvantage is that it is just one more thing that go wrong - either the board can stuck up or stuck down - neither is a good thing.
Ainia is the first centre cockpit boat that I have had. Again, like most things on a boat, this is good and bad. It gives you a private aft cabin, good engine access and better visibility when docking. On the other hand, you end up with very limited storage for big items like sail bags because, at least with this design you have no large cockpit lockers.
Hood designs are quite heavy but he did a good job of making them not look too fat. This was accomplished by having hull shapes that are very full below the waterline - they are sometimes called "whale-shaped". As well as having an aesthetic advantage it means that are lots of places to store stuff below where other boats do not typically places at all.
It is hard to take decent interior pictures without a wide-angle lense but here are a few so you get the idea of what it is like. Bristol built with lots of heavy teak everywhere and use much more substantial construction methods than most builders (which may explain why a) they went out of business and b) their boats have such a good reputation).
Here is June in the main cabin with the picture looking forward. There is a cabin and head beyond the mast and bulkhead shown. To starboard there is a settee with lots of storage. All of the boat's water and fuel tanks (400 + gallons in all) are below the floorboards so it makes the areas below the furniture available for storage.
This is the passageway to the aft cabin with the nav station on the right and storage behind it before the cabin door. You get a sense of the woodwork here. There are no areas of fibreglass liner anywhere - even in the overhead. Instead they just finished the bottom of the very thick deck.
This is taken looking into the aft cabin. You can see about 2/3 of the berth here. Around the corner to the left is the head with a separate shower cubicle.
All for now. Lots more to talk about in later posts.
First of all, I must apologize for not keeping this blog as often as I intend to. There are reasons (there are always reasons), I am being kept very busy by the many editors at Pearson. For those who don't know, I am nearing the end of a new edition of my grade 12 world issues book. The topics in this book are so interesting that it is not an unpleasant task but there are just so many details (and people) involved in the process that it keeps my busy. There are constant queries about everything (photos, captions, thinks that are not clear) as well as editting the chapters several times each as they go from Word files to something that looks vaguely book-like to proofs of the pages (without all the illustrations) to, well, you get the idea. It gets to be a problem when three or four editors working on different aspects of the book all want your attention at the same time.
To be subject at hand, weather. Compared to the Toronto area we have had a pretty easy time of it here, although it has been colder than average for this time of year. We did get about 8" of wet snow one day (pictures below) that I shovelled off the boat with a plastic dust pan and deck broom - that worked pretty well and got 98% off before the freezing rain came that night to make things really hard. The marina staff shovel a path down the docks so it is pretty good overall. This morning there was a bit of ice around the boats - they did not put the bubblers on until this morning and they were breaking up the thin ice that had formed. It is supposed to get warmer starting on the weekend. It will be nice to do some boat work outside when it happens.
Only one entry on the derivation of the name Ainia. My younger son, Ian, showing a willingness to do research that was not altogether present when he was in school, came up with a totally different explanation for the word, which works really well.
Where the name came from - "ai ni" in Chinese means "love you". We added the second 'a' to make the name longer (there is a big transom) and to make it (possibly) easier to say. It also is a palindrome which is of interest only to nerds like me I fear. A final take on this name - it could be seen as very Canadian, as in "Love you, eh".
Ian's research found the following. "In Greek mythology, Ainia was an enemy of Achilles and an Amazon, one of the twelve who accompanied Penthesilea to the Trojan War. Her name means "swiftness."" I don't know if swiftness is the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about a Bristol 45.5, but i doubt that there was an Amazon whose name translated as "comfort". Anyway, I think that this is a really apt name for a boat so now we have two meanings from two different cultures.
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So much for the 'news', now on to the weather... it was really cold last night and today. Yesterday afternoon it was about 7C and then dropped like a rock as a cold front passed. Last night was very noisy with wind (~35 knots at times I would think) blew through the masts and the boat rubbed the fenders. Our normal problem with a bit of condensation on the hatches became a layer of frost on the metal parts of the hatches - which of course melted and dripped off when we turned the heat up. At night we tend to keep the heat down because it is too warm under the duvet otherwise. With conditions like last night we have to be careful to insure that the whole boat is warm enough so we do not get freezing in throughhulls or inside the water-cooled refrigeration system. It is very slowly warming but will still be -8C or so tonight. Too bad June did not get this job in San Diego or somewhere like that.
I imagine that I will be writing a few entries about politics in the US since it really is quite fascinating - and entirely a blood sport. The 'Tri-State' area (NJ, NY, CT) just had their primaries as part of Super-Tuesday. Not much evidence of it in JC though - the night before the vote some small Obama signs appeared and brochures were being given out at the light rail stations (looks like a street car to me).
Compared to Canada, people here take their politics very seriously and it causes some big problems - as does the whole primary/caucus system. This extended and costly pre-election tends to divide the supporters within each party. This can be seen very clearly in the Republican Party where the right wing talk show hosts are going after McCain with devastating attacks - calling him the Clinton's sock puppet and worse and saying that if he is the nominee (which looks certain) they will vote for Hillary out of spite - not at all sure how those two statements can be seen as logically consistent but logic and US talk radio have little to do with each other. The Republicans just have so many factions that often have fundamental disagreements with each other. You get the libertarian types who just want the government to do as little as possible. Ron Paul was their hero this time and he has considerable grass roots support and lots of money donated a bit at a time. You get those who are financially conservative but not socially so - they tend to keep their heads down, but have had some success in pointing out that deficits have risen with GOP presidents and fallen with Democratic presidents in recent decades. You get the war-hawks who don't much care how much it costs (lives or dollars), they want to rebuild the world in the form that they see as best - the New American Century guys. Finally (or perhaps not) are the social conservatives who have rallied around Huckabee. He seems like a pretty nice guy, but hard to take seriously a president who does not believe in evolution. Add to the mix, the recently departed Mr Romney who would be whatever you wanted him to be so long as he got to be president.
On the other side, you have the intriguing pair of Hillary and Barack and the possibility that the US will have a woman or black for president (not sure why he is considered black when he is only half black but that is a discussion for another day). I will have more to say about these two later, but there is a marvellous column in the NY Times today that goes a long way to explaining the different appeal that each has. I hope this link works when it is no longer 'today's paper' . Perhaps it would work with ref=todayspaper cut http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/opinion/08brooks.html?ref=todayspaper
I have lots of catching up to do - I am not very reliable when it comes to keeping a blog it seems, but there is also the stuff that is happening now to talk about too. Oh, the complications!
Anyway, I have to talk a bit about JC weather in comparison to weather in the Toronto area. Before we decided to move on to the boat I checked climate stats and it seemed that in the winter average monthly temps here are about 6C warmer than Toronto. Not to get too climatic (rather than climactic), that seems like a reasonable estimate for what we have been experiencing. When it is -2C there it will be something like +4 here. I suspect that this is mainly because of the moderating effect of the ocean rather than latitudinal differences, although the latter likely does contribute a bit too.
The big news today is the enormous difference. I checked the weather in TO and it is -3 with lots of snow on the ground and more coming tonight. When I arrived at the library to get the internet, the temperature in JC was 21c! Of course there is no snow on the ground an there reall;y; has not been all winter -other than a few mm once or twice. There is a powerful cold front just north of New York City that will arrive only gradually. Even tomorrow it is to be something like 8C. We will get rain tonight - hopefully after June and I get back on the boat.
We have been really lucky with the weather. Several storms have hit just on the northern fringes of the NYC area but have missed us. Noreasters are the big winter storms around here - a low pressure area passes out to sea and the return counter-clockwise circulation can produce nasty storms. There have been a few of these that have nailed Boston but so far, not here.
Maybe next posting I will try to do some catching up or look at interesting things around here like politics and immigration.
