Virginia, the bumper-boat state

We are underway southbound in the Pamlico Sound, finally back in motion after nearly a week pinned down by weather. We're not alone; with the first good weather in that long, everyone, it would seem, is on the move.

This serving tray was on the wall at Back Bay Ale House. I grew up in a Ballantine household.

When last I posted here, we were underway offshore to Atlantic City. We made good time and thus arrived a bit ahead of the flood, pushing our way in Absecon Inlet on the last of the ebb. We had the hook down in our usual spot (map) just before 5:30 and we immediately splashed the tender and headed to dinner at the Back Bay Ale House in Gardner Basin. We decked the tender as soon as we returned home, for an early morning start.

Saturday morning we weighed anchor at 5 AM to catch the tail end of the ebb. Conditions looked good for a straight run to Hampton Roads, but as cheap insurance we ran closer to shore on the route toward Cape May instead, giving us both a calmer ride and also an easier bail-out. The slight diversion added just a mile to the Hampton Roads route.

Leaving Absecon Inlet at zero-dark-thirty. Taken through a messy window.

With the forecast holding and actual conditions 3nm offshore excellent, we made the call about halfway to Cape May and came left onto the direct route. With westerlies for the whole ride, I plotted the course very close to shore off Assateague Island. The longest fetch was the open jaw from Cape May to Lewes, and even that was decent.

Traffic offshore was very light. We were passed by a couple of power cruisers, and we passed a couple of sailboats. I had one tug towing a barge, the Bart L, going the other way that I had to dodge; he was doing exactly what I was doing and "running the beach" as my tow-skipper friend calls it. By contrast, all the pleasure traffic was another ¾ mile or more offshore.

Our view underway when maneuvering I have towels over the plotters to see out the window.

We had a fair current the whole way, and before the start of solo watchkeeping I dropped the rpm so we would not arrive too early. As expected, though, we reached the mouth of the Chesapeake while I was still in the berth. This was the first open fetch since Delaware Bay, and here toward the end of the good window we found ourselves in 2-3 footers on the beam. Louise increased rpm accordingly, and I ended up waking up a good hour early and took over the watch at 8 AM, before we even reached the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.

Our intended destination was the anchorage at Phoebus, as we always prefer anchoring over docking at the end of an overnight passage. I will spare you all the gory details, but while we were offshore I spent hours Saturday working out travel arrangements to go back to NJ for a visit with my folks from the Hampton area, since the weather had us whizzing by them without being able to stop as I had planned. I had the perfect trip arranged by train out of Newport News.

Sunrise over the North Atlantic.

What we learned before Louise even turned in was that there was not a dock to be had anywhere near Hampton on Monday for love or money. Evidently the enormous "Salty Dawg" offshore rally was staging in Hampton Roads and waiting on good offshore weather (they all left this morning). I call every marina from Newport News to Portsmouth and nary a space was to be had. I had cancelled all the travel reservations by Sunday morning.

What that also told us was that it would be a very, very tight squeeze into Phoebus, if we could fit at all. All of the rally boats who could not get a dock, or those who simply did not want to pay for one, were packed into every anchorage in the Hampton Roads area. And so it was that we decided to wave off Phoebus even as we were crossing over the Bridge Tunnel.

Sunset and a blurry crescent moon over Assateague Island.

Fortunately, we had the flood behind us coming into the roadstead, and that flood would take us as far down the Elizabeth as we cared to travel. We decided we could muster the energy to get tied up at High Street in Portsmouth, or maybe even Great Bridge if necessary, since it was the middle of the day in fair conditions. We knew wherever we stopped, that's where we'd be pinned down for the impending winds.

Normally I cross the ship channel and run down the northern part of the Elizabeth just outside of the green side. But an hour out we heard an announcement that they were moving dredge pipe and the whole channel would be closed until after noon, and so instead I swung wide and took the red side, where we could get around it. A cruising sailboat under power whom we had seen offshore, who does not understand the special channel rules at Thimble Shoals, nearly ran us into one of the reds in the Auxiliary Channel, even after clear communication on the radio. Clueless skippers in the very busy Hampton Roads area was a key reason we slowed down enough for me to be on watch as we arrived.

Lots of offshore wind farm activity now in Norfolk.

The diversion proved wholly unnecessary, as they had reopened the channel by 9:45, well ahead of the noon estimate, but I was already on the red side and had to stay there. Just as well, because by this hour the ship pilots were already fed up with the pleasure craft operating erratically. One pilot on an ultra-large (a special category with special rules) had the patience of Job explaining how, yes, he was indeed going to need the entire channel.

We arrived to High Street right around noon, and, unsurprisingly, the basin was entirely full. Our secret-squirrel spot on the outside bulkhead was open, but we had to think long and hard about spending three days pinned down there in a windstorm. In the end, we opted to pass it by and press ahead to Great Bridge, taking a chance on there still being room at the bulkhead.

Lots of activity on the water, at least for now while the last of the funds holds out.

Our planned fuel stop at Top Rack is between these two docks, and even though it meant arriving an hour later to Great Bridge, we decided to make the stop and fuel up. We took on 750 gallons and left the dock in plenty of time for the 2:30 lockage at the Great Bridge Lock. The bridge past the lock, normally hourly, is opening only on the even hours now due to mechanical issues, and we had the lock to ourselves.

We were relieved to find two spots left on the bulkhead just before the bridge. Had there been none, we would have had to lock back through the other way and go back to Top Rack. We were tied up before 3 PM (map) and got secured for the coming winds. Louise, who had been fighting a severe allergy attack all day and did yeoman's work to dock, lock, and dock again through all the sneezing, crashed.

Vector at the Great Bridge bulkhead. We never saw anyone on the sailboat behind us, which seems to be just stored there.

She was in no shape to go out to dinner, and I ended up walking to Jersey Mike's, in the plaza that replaced our beloved Mexican joint here, for an Italian sub and some chips for dinner aboard. I had to walk right past the now-shuttered Vino's Italian Bistro, which had been our go-to since the Mexican place closed, until they moved out of walking distance earlier this year.

Monday the winds started building as forecast, but it was still a pleasant enough day to get off the boat and walk. That let me go straight to Kroger for emergency supplies. Louise had gone through every tissue on the boat over the course of two days of heavy allergies, and I had to replenish the Strategic Kleenex™ Reserve. She felt OK by dinner time and we walked across the bridges to the Lockside Grill for dinner. Monday turns out to be $6 burger night (we had no idea) and the place was packed, with people mostly older than us.

Coming home from dinner we got a strong smell of diesel crossing the bridge, and we could see a sheen moving past the boat. I made a report to the Coast Guard. I snapped this picture a full 17 hours later. There is a fuel dock just the other side of the bridge from us.

Tuesday was the most intense day of the storm, with winds gusting to 40 and heavy rain all day. We stayed cooped up inside all day, surfing the web and checking off indoor projects. Except when we were paying attention to the parade of boats that, for some reason, were still coming through the lock and bridge. Many never got the memo about the reduce openings for the bridge and had to station-keep for over an hour. And the weird schedule had too many boats to fit the lock on some openings, leaving the latecomers with unplanned two-hour delays.

By dinner time we were stir-crazy, and when the rain let up to something less than torrential, we grabbed our umbrellas and walked to the closest place. With Vino's gone that is now Chili's, and despite docking here for a decade we had never set foot inside. I think the last time we ate at a Chili's was on a Red Cross disaster deployment maybe 15 years ago, and we are no longer acclimated to this kind of American chain-restaurant fare. At least they had several beers on draft.

Vector on the wall as boats wait for a bridge opening.

Wednesday morning we could have gotten underway and made a Thursday window to cross the Albemarle, and in hindsight I am really sorry we did not. But Louise's phone went to the great cell tower in the sky in Atlantic City, and the replacement I ordered on Amazon had not yet arrived to the locker. By the time the notice came in the afternoon we had missed the window to depart. I took the e-bike down to the locker in light rain, hitting the dollar and grocery stores again on the way home. We walked to dinner at Kagura, with acceptable Japanese fare at an all-you-can-eat price of $26. Louise reported the sushi as a B-, but everything else was decent.

At 11 PM, after Louise had already turned in, I listened to a latecomer as he came through the lock. Apart from towboats, almost no one comes through the lock after about 6 PM. He asked both the lock and bridge tenders if they could see any room at either of the free docks, and as it turned out there was a big space right in front of us. Being nosy I watched him out the back door as he approached from the lock, and then I moved up to the pilothouse to watch him dock.

As seen from across the canal. We have three fenders out "just in case."

As I looked out the pilothouse door I was aghast to see him rapidly approaching Vector, and I flung the door open in my bathrobe just as his starboard side made contact with our port. We had set three fenders out on the port side as a precaution, and the center one saved us from what would have been a lot of damage from his rub rail. It cushioned the blow enough that Louise said it was my screaming rather than the impact that woke her up.

Unfortunately, his complete lack of skill and panic of the moment meant that he turned hard to port and applied power to get away (hard to starboard and rocking astern/ahead was the correct maneuver) and he swung his stern right into us, missing the aft fender and putting a deep gouge in our hull paint. After that he managed to get it docked, and I took a photo of his transom and told him to come by in the morning to provide his insurance. I did not want to go back out  in the rain.

This gouge is about 3" long. Fortunately not down to bare steel, but it's well into the fairing and will need to be ground, faired, primed, and painted, "hoping" it will blend in.

In the morning we heard him calling the bridge at 7:45 for the 8:00 opening. He had not said a word to us and I marched over there to get his info. Never even an apology, just some mumbling about how "these things happen." I showed him the damage, told him there might be more we have not found yet, and got his name, number, and insurance information. He was already gone by the time we called the Virginia Marine Police to come take a report.

There are few words to express how upset and disappointed I am that we have been hit yet again and need paint repair yet again, but while we are literally headed away from the place that should do that repair. We managed to go ten years without anyone bashing into us, and this is now the third time this year. Arranging repairs is highly disruptive, and we are never made whole for that disruption.

Buckets, a sports bar, is one of our dining options. Not today.

Any thought we had about shoving off Thursday morning went out the window as we were waiting on the marine police. Realistically we would have had to make the same 8 AM bridge opening as Dimwit had, and, even then, we'd be stuck in the North River for two nights waiting on today's window to cross the Albemarle. We decided to overstay our welcome by yet one more night, and I had a nice walk in the afternoon. We just went back to Lockside for dinner, which I guess will be our new standard here. It was very quiet in comparison to Burger Monday.

Yesterday morning we dropped lines at 5:45 for the 6:00 bridge opening. It was just us and the towboat Island Fox pushing a deck barge. We had to close the blinds on our back door as his floodlights were coming right in and ruining my night vision. Me made the 6:30 opening at Centerville Turnpike, just before it locks down for morning rush hour, and I moved over to let Island Fox get ahead of us.

Sunrise as we approach North Landing Bridge. That's Island Fox ahead of us.

Normally I have to either run wide open throttle to make the next bridge a half hour later, or else slow roll at idle to make it a full hour, and in the pitch dark it would have been the latter. But they open on demand for tugs with tows, and we just followed Island Fox through the bridge at 7:20, and just stayed behind him the rest of the day. With such an early start, we had time to make it all the way across the Albemarle and to an anchorage off Croatan Sound, but it was still blowing 25 when we got to the south end of the North River.

I called ahead to one of the faster boats that decided to plow across the sound and asked for a condition report. "Breaking over the windscreen" was all we needed to hear, and we pulled over to a familiar spot in a partial lee off Camden Point (map) for the night. We had the hook down before 2 PM. The new solar kept us topped up all afternoon and through dinner, until we needed heat in the evening.

Sunset over Camden Point last night from our anchorage.

This morning we slept in, getting underway around 8 AM, and the conditions have been perfect. Which is why pretty much every boat on the east coast is on the move. These are great conditions for the Pamlico Sound route, and yet still hardly anyone uses it. We've seen only three other boats since leaving the North River, while watching a whole conga line headed for the Alligator on the marked ICW route.

Peeling away from the conga line.

The downside to this route is a dearth of reasonable overnight stops, and tonight will find us in a lee at the Long Shoal River. We will be online entirely courtesy of satellite Internet. Tomorrow we should be back in civilization.

A week in Brooklyn

We are underway southbound in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of New Jersey. Today is the first good weather window for this since I last posted here, and if the forecast holds, we will have another two days before the window slams shut. We are hoping to make it all the way to Hampton Roads while the going is good.

A final glance over our shoulder at The Battery as we leave Manhattan for Brooklyn.

As predicted, the nor'easter had us pinned on the boat the rest of Sunday and all day Monday and we did not leave Port Washington until Tuesday morning. We had a very early start on account of tide, and I was sorry I did not deck the tender Sunday when the wind was still low enough to do it. Judicious timing let us run the entire Harlem River with the mast up, and we had a fair tide the whole trip. We had the hook down in our usual spot in Anchorage 17 (map) before lunch time, and were looking forward to a nice stay.

The fall view from Anchorage 17 is spectacular in the daytime ...

Alas, it was not to be. A relentless north wind battered us our whole stay, and while the river was fine while it was ebbing, once the flood started the wind against current stirred the river into a choppy mess that pinned us on the boat. And the flood started before dinner time and went until past dark each evening. That first night we put our inflatables on and braved the river, but Louise nearly went for a swim boarding the tender.

... and also at night. One of the charms of this spot.

That was on her birthday, and so we were perhaps too invested in getting ashore for dinner. Once ashore we had a nice walk to our favorite neighborhood joint, the Tryon Public House. When we checked in at the marina we learned they would be closed for the next two years for renovations, leaving us with nowhere to land the dinghy in all of Manhattan. We also learned the current administration has cut funding for the renovation of the 79th Street Boat Basin, leaving that project in limbo.

Birthday toast at the Tryon Public House.

That would be the last time we made it ashore for dinner in Manhattan. Wednesday we never left the boat at all, and by Thursday we were stir-crazy and so went ashore during the ebb just to get a walk in. We decided we needed to get off the Hudson, and we booked a mooring ball in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn to wait out the rest of the weather. Expecting to be in Manhattan for a week, each of us had placed Amazon orders due to arrive Thursday, but they had not yet by the end of the ebb.

Quisqueya Plaza on Dyckman is decorated for the holiday.

As it turned out, we both got the notices as soon as we had settled in back aboard Vector. I decided to chance a wet return ride and I zipped back ashore during slack, hoping to beat the worst of the chop. I power-walked over to the Amazon locker, which is located in a housing project. I had a little bit of a splashy ride home but it was not too bad.

Obligatory photo. I weep now when I see her.

Friday morning my decision to race ashore Thursday proved prescient, as we woke to the worst seas yet. Vector was pitching so hard it was challenging to pour a cup of coffee, and the rollers coming down the river were surfing the dinghy right into the back of the boat. At one point it over-rode the swim platform and came down so hard it took a big chunk out of the paint, so now I have another thing to fix. We pulled it around to the side and hip-tied it so we could weigh anchor and get out of dodge before things got worse; there was no way we could hoist it in these conditions.

Attacked by our own dinghy. You can not normally see sky in this camera; that's how much we are pitching.

Having the dink on the hip in these conditions limited our speed to just over idle, and so as soon as we passed under the bridge we decided to trail it. That was a strategic error, or more precisely we need to work on a better technique, because the combination of 4 knots of headway and the steep waves nearly ripped it out of Louise's hands as she moved the lines and I had to stop the boat anyway. By the time we were abreast of Edgewater things had calmed down enough for us to pull over, drop a lunch hook, and hoist the tender on deck for the rest of the trip. No way did I want to tow it through the heart of NY harbor.

The result.

Getting underway earlier than planned, even at the slowest speed we could comfortably keep, put us at Rockaway Inlet at low tide, and we ended up dropping a lunch hook off-channel for an hour to wait for more tide entering Sheepshead Bay. There is a narrow, shallow bar at the entrance, which kept us out of Sheepshead for several years. Now that we have Corps of Engineers surveys available it is doable, and we've been meaning to try it for a couple of years. North wind gave us the perfect reason.

Hard to see but this is literally a hole in the river. Sheet pile goes to the bottom so they can work on the new rail tunnel.

The sounder said we could have made it at low tide; good to know for the future, but better safe than sorry. We were picking up a Miramar Yacht Club mooring (map) before 2:30. At an average of $70 per night, the mooring is double what we were paying in Manhattan, but it comes with launch service, and the harbor is far more protected.

The QM2 was berthed in Brooklyn as we passed.

We prefer our own tender to a launch, and after splashing it I headed over to get the gate code and the lay of the land. Before I even left the boat we noticed we were bumping the next ball over and I thought I would ask if they had one with more room. They did not until the following day, and then they wanted us to move anyway because they thought the anchors where we were would be too light for the forecast wind coming later in the week. I took a short stroll and when I returned to Vector we moved the eyes of the two mooring pennants directly to our cleats, eliminating the few feet of our own line that was in the lash-up, and that stopped the bumping. We did have to stow the dink on the hip.

Sheepshead vibe. This is Lokum; that disco ball is 2' across.

We ended up spending a full six nights in the harbor. Saturday we moved as requested to a beefier mooring, and that proved essential as the winds built to 40+ steady for nearly two days. By the end of our stay we had chafed both pennants, one nearly completely through, and they had to find us another pair. The two 400-lb mushroom anchors did hold us firmly in place, but we set an anchor alarm just in case. Our first mooring had two 250-lb mushrooms.

Port pennant chafed through to two strands. The starboard was not much better.

Sheepshead Bay, named after a fish, is both the name of the bay and the name of the neighborhood to its north. South of the bay is Manhattan Beach (confusingly not in Manhattan), but there is no landing on that side and it is a long way around by land. We spent most of our time in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, which, while diverse in the way all of NYC is, has a distinctly Eastern European leaning. Lots of Russian is spoken and lots of signage is in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Local fixture. Cheez on Anything! I passed this every day.

In the same way that we could get any cuisine in Inwood but all of it had a Dominican flair, we could likewise get any cuisine here but all with an eastern European flair. In the course of our stay we dined at Patrizia's (Italian), Lokum (Mediterranean with a Turkish accent), Next Door (Italian), and Emmons Palace (Azerbaijani). During the worst night of wind we took the launch ashore and stumbled to the closest joint, Roll'n'Roaster, which is a quick-service place that has been here forever. They at least have beer and wine, and the sandwiches were good. Our best experience was our final night, at Oda House, serving authentic Georgian food.

They no longer have skating car hops, but it was the era.

I had expected to spend more time in other parts of the city via transit, but the weather was not conducive to it, and a giant project kept me tied to the boat for part of our stay. But we did get into Manhattan once, taking the Q train from the Sheepshead Bay station to Times Square. I had errands to run, and Louise wanted to explore the New York Library. My errands were a success, but the library, overrun by tourists, evidently no longer allows you to just walk the hallowed halls and take it all in. Which is a shame.

Atlas.

We enjoyed a street-vendor pretzel, one of my NYC weaknesses, in Bryant Park before heading home. On some future visit I would like to explore more of the interesting neighborhoods in Brooklyn, which are a shorter train ride than Times Square. It's a safe bet we'll be back with Dyckman Landing closing.

British Empire Building.

I did enjoy walking around Sheepshead Bay most days, and we found a decent bagel place, a close market with great prices and most of what we normally buy, a dollar store, several pharmacies, and even a UPS Access Point, where we had our mail service send our mail. Somewhat out-of-place is an Applebees not far from the dock, which we did not sample even though it probably has the best draft selection in the neighborhood. An Aldi is also a short walk.

Skating before Prometheus has already begun.

The project that drained some of my time and energy was replacing the helm computer which provides our navigation charts and drives the boat to pre-planned routes. We've been scraping by with an old Windows 8.1 machine (the chart software is Windows-only) that I beat into submission a decade ago, and I have been nursing it along every time it has a hiccup. It's down a USB port due to a lightning strike and it goes through a CPU fan every couple of years, but I can no longer reliably get parts.

Old helm PC vs. new. Quarter for scale.

One of the Amazon deliveries in Manhattan was the replacement, a diminutive Windows 11 machine that I ordered when the current CPU fan started making its impending-death noises. In addition to heading off the fan crisis, the new machine allows us to upgrade the chart software to a more current version and also will stop all the drama from various things telling me that Windows 8 is no longer supported.

Installed and connected to instruments. This scrap-wood shelf originally held a laptop.

I'll spare you the gory details, but anyone who has ever done this kind of upgrade will tell you that more things break in the process than just transition seamlessly, and I spent many hours getting it all running, our charts and licenses moved over, and all the instrument connections working. Even with all the testing it would not talk to the autopilot when we left the dock, and I had to hand-steer and fix the problem at the next stop. So far today in the Atlantic it's doing fine, although I learned I need to tweak the screen colors in night mode.

They're building the winter market in Rock Center. Also Bryant Park.

Yesterday conditions were just barely good enough for us to move over to Atlantic Highlands, in Raritan Bay, where we needed to take on fuel. After dropping our moorings we briefly stopped at the yacht club dock to take on water, and we had a nice chat with Josh, a retired firefighter who maintains all the moorings in the bay and also drives the launch part of the week. We learned we can use the dinghy dock for just $25 per day when conditions are good enough for us to anchor in the limited space at the end of the bay..

These very nice (and expensive) stainless steel fences are all over Sheepshead, perhaps one house in three. A local style.

Rather than cut straight across from Rockaway Inlet to Sandy Hook in heavy westerlies, we hugged the Coney Island shoreline until the Hudson and then came down the Chapel Hill Channel into Raritan Bay. We bunkered 200 gallons of diesel at the Atlantic Highlands municipal marina before dropping the hook in the protected harbor (map). The fuel attendant was kind enough to give us a ten-cent per gallon discount for that quantity.

The market had this very tasty porter from Poland for less than three bucks per half-liter bottle. I stocked up.

I say protected, and it was comfortable enough as an anchorage, but we had quite the zesty tender ride to dinner. Just as last time, Thursday night was prime rib night at On The Deck restaurant adjacent to the marina. Louise also found the chicken pot pie quite good.

And every kind of candy, in bulk. If you can read Russian.

The current around the tip of Sandy Hook can be wicked, ramping quickly from zero to nearly three knots in the blink of an eye. In order not to have it against us this morning we weighed anchor at 4:00 AM, and I am a little bleary-eyed as I type. I did have a nap after sunrise, when I turned the conn over to Louise. The early start will let us get all the way to Atlantic City with a daylight arrival.

Final view of the city from our anchorage last night.

If this weather window holds, tomorrow we will depart on the direct outside route to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, bypassing the slog up Delaware Bay and back down the Chesapeake. We will make the final decision as we approach the sea buoy for Cape May.

Shipyard shenanigans

We are anchored in a familiar spot in Manhasset Bay (map), near Port Washington, New York. It's been nearly a month since last I posted here; we've been busy, and now I'm going to try to catch the blog up. We're hunkered down for a big windstorm and trapped on the boat, so I finally have the time. As a reminder, we were westbound in the Sound and hoping to head for the yard that Monday, but we diverted here to Port Washington since the yard was not ready. We would end up staying a full week.

Vector sporting her new solar panels, nominally 1,180 watts. Easy to get pics at low tide.

We arrived to the harbor and had the hook down by 3:30 in our usual spot (map) and got settled in for a stay of unknown duration. We ended up putting more scope out the very next day, as the forecast called for more wind mid-week. While we don't mind biding our time like this in such a good anchorage, the lack of information from the yard about when they could take us was both frustrating and challenging.

Sunset over Manhasset Bay during our wait.

In order to make good use of the time by continuing to make progress on the solar project, I needed to order parts that I had originally intended to have delivered to us at the yard. I found an Amazon locker in Manhasset, a three and a half mile e-bike ride from the Port Washington town dock, and I stuck to items I could get on one-day delivery in case the yard called us to come in. Manhasset turns out to be a cute little town, but sadly there is no easy way for both of us to get there for, say, dinner.

Installing the solar controllers and breakers, I pre-wired this outside of the cabinet and then mounted it.

With what ended up being a full week on my hands, I got the solar controllers pre-wired and mounted, dressed the cables, and ran cabling to the battery compartment. I also pulled the signal wire for the new battery monitor, and while I had the ceiling open, pulled wire to relocate the buffer battery monitor and removed some abandoned heavy-gauge power cable.

And here's why I did the wiring outside first and mounted it as an assembly. It was a very tight squeeze.

The big project was changing out the shunt for the new meter. I had intended to do this at the yard while we had shore power, but the timing was right to just get it done, and I ran the generator an extra few hours instead. The whole project took close to five hours, wrestling with big cables and working in a tight space. I had to use my step bit to enlarge the holes in the lugs, as the Victron shunt uses larger terminals than the Xantrex model it replaced. I also had to fabricate a shim to get the new shunt to sit level.

I drilled this 6" hole, now finished with a Beckson plate, in the back of an upper cabinet to access the wall cavity to run the cables up to the flybridge. We can use this space as an auxiliary snack hole if needed (it's bigger than it looks in this photo).

With all the critical parts of the solar wiring in place, I turned my attention to an override relay for the water heater. This will allow us to run the water heater from the inverter at the push of a button in the pilothouse, for any days where we end up with excess solar power. Lately we've had some issues with the engine heating loop for the water heater, and this will also allow us to run it with excess alternator power underway.

Installing the shunt for the new SOC meter. White Cat-6 cable had to run downstairs, through the ceiling, and back up into the pilothouse.

Wrapping up the project list for that week was relocating the SOC meter for the 12-volt buffer battery, and adding a new circuit to get our low-battery alarm LED working with the new Victron SOC meter, which did not have a way to power the LED like the old Xantrex meter. Meter calibration issues had us waking Saturday morning to find the inverter off, our finely-tuned procedure having been disrupted by the changes. 

Helm panels opened up to wire in the new SOC meter, the relocated buffer battery meter, and the low battery alarm light.

We ended up having two visits during the course of the week. Tuesday we ran into long-time follower Ed Starboard, who was anchored near us on his sailboat Freedom. I was able to help him out with some copper crush washers for his fuel system, from an assortment box I bought for my own troubles some time back, and we met up for dinner at Amalfi's. We also connected with Roger Long and his partner Patsy aboard Gypsy Star, whom we've been just missing at numerous ports for a few years. Roger had his in-laws aboard, and we all went out for dinner at Finn McCools in town.

Enjoying a pint at Finn McCools. The stark white interior is not very pub-like, but the proprietors speak in a thick brogue and are definitely Irish.

We made the usual circuit of restaurants, including Amalfi's, Finn McCool's (despite the hokey name, run by genuine Irishmen), Pepe Rosso 24, Salvatore's, and Ayhan's Mediterranean Market (where we ended up when Palazzo Ristorante across the street was mysteriously closed ). We also availed ourselves of the Stop & Shop as well as the hardware store. When word came Friday that we "might" be able to head to the yard Monday, we had the pump-out boat visit us on Sunday.

Hauling out a landing craft. Yellow, blue, and red vessel at left is a new high-speed crew boat for offshore wind farms, with a hook on top for being lifted onto a mothership. This is the same crane that lifter our solar panels.

Monday morning the yard texted to say they were ready for us, and we weighed anchor just before lunch to have a favorable tide in Mamaroneck. We were tied to the dock (map) a little before 1 pm, and I picked up my Victron control unit that I had shipped to the yard, the final piece of hardware for the solar project apart from the panels themselves. We were a little surprised to find the sailboat Jolokia Expedition still on the next dock; those poor guys had arrived at the yard a year before we got painted for what was to be a six-month refit.

New Victron SOC meter (center) and buffer battery SOC meter (left) installed. I reused an existing, slightly larger, cutout for the latter, so I trimmed it with a gray outlet cover plate I had in my parts box. I will replace it with a black one at some point.

Arrival day turned out to be a bad allergy day for Louise, and she was in no shape to go out at dinner time, so I ended up reconnoitering town stag. I noted that both the Social Club and the "new" bagel joint, both of which were in progress on our first visit and newly opened last year, have already folded. The Venezuelan joint with the live music had also closed up shop. I picked up a nice Italian sandwich for us to share for dinner at the Pisano Brothers deli, and some cookies for desert at the Boiano Bakery next door before walking home.

The gouge where we were T-boned, already faired, sanded, and primered.

The yard started on the paint repairs first thing on Tuesday. Apart from the required waiting times and some weather, the painter worked straight through. He was able to get a good match on all the spots, and the place where the sailboat T-boned us in Hampton is invisible now unless you know exactly where to look.

Gap between two plates, revealed by a rust spot and discovered after grinding.

One of the rust spots tuned out to be not just a pinhole, but a place where a gap had opened up between two steel plates that meet at a corner, in the Portuguese Bridge area. So after all the other painting was already done, they had to grind that back to bare metal to see if the plates needed to be welded. In the end we decided on a filler system called Blue Seal, as welding might well have damaged things even further. The plates are mechanically joined by a welded-on angle which was still intact.

Last Saturday I took the train to NJ to visit my folks. I'm standing on track 3, the southbound side, but my train to Grand Central has been diverted to track 4, normally northbound. I did not have to hustle nearly as hard as the half dozen people who ignored the repeated announcements and were still on this side when the train arrived.

I always like Grand Central, and early on a Saturday morning it is blissfully quiet.

While we were still in Port Washington I had made a guestimate and put a stake in the sand for a rental truck to go get the solar panels. With painting well under control we stuck with our reserved date, and I hoofed it to Enterprise on Wednesday evening to get the full-size pickup truck, which turned out to be a high-end crew cab GMC Sierra. That meant a short bed, but the panels would fit with the gate down and only overhang it by an inch. It was a very comfortable truck, with Android Auto and all the bells and whistles, but we certainly did not need the six seats.

It is often said that Penn Station is dangerous. Unspoken: this is the reason. Just one of many shops selling loads of delicious carbs to hapless commuters. I resisted.

We did not offload the scooters on this visit, since the paint repairs had us docked starboard-side-to. So we took advantage of having wheels Wednesday night to drive to dinner at the Larchmont Tavern, one of our old stand-bys. On the way home we swung by the Stop & Shop to replenish a few items. We parked on the street in front of the yard for a quick getaway.

With time on my hands before my train to Metropark, I walked to the new Moynihan Train Hall in the courtyard of the historic post office. It's quite nice, with, of course, more carbs.

Thursday morning we were on the road by 7am. The yard opens at 6:30 and we wanted to be available first thing for any questions or issues. From Mamaroneck to Manhattan we were going with the commute and it was relatively slow going, but once we hit the George Washington Bridge we were against the commute and it was smooth sailing. Of course, Mr. femto-bladder here needed no fewer than three potty stops after our usual morning coffee, the second half of which we brought with us in the car.

The Greentech guys wrapping our measly two panels onto a skid for us. These are normally sold by the skid or the 20' container.

The solar panels were at Greentech Energy in Pennsauken, which is more or less a suburb of Philly. Before arriving we stopped at a nearby Lowe's to pick up two 4' x 8' sheets of OSB to protect the panels in the truck (I did not want to drive the whole way down with the gate open, or we would have picked them up the night before). And we stopped at a diner for brunch, not wanting to make a lunch stop with the panels in the truck. Between the traffic, the rest stops, brunch, and Lowe's, it was 11:30 by the time we were picking up panels.

Having them on a skid meant they could just forklift them into the back of our rental truck. We were expecting to have to load them, individually, ourselves.

I had expected them to just hand over naked panels, and we brought not only the OSB, but also a pair of moving blankets we bought on Amazon, lots of rope, and four ratchet straps. Much to my surprise they brought the two panels out on their own 8' long pallet, and offered to shrink-wrap the whole affair and forklift it into the truck for us. Perfect. We left one OSB on the truck bed to protect it, and put the other atop the panels before strapping it all down. The two 590-watt panels came to just $495, NJ tax included, and they were happy to take a credit card.

All loaded up, sandwiched between two sheets of OSB with some moving blankets, and ratchet-strapped in. Complete with two red long-load flags from the checkout at Lowes.

We had the truck until 5:30, and being halfway down NJ anyway, we made the 40-minute detour to check in on my folks on our way back. We only had time for a 20-minute visit, but it was good to see them and to see that all was OK there. We made it back to the shipyard by around 4:30, which gave us enough time to unwrap the panels and offload them one at a time (they are 75 lbs each) to drag them through the personnel gate, as the drive to the yard closes at 3. We had the truck fueled and back at Enterprise right on time and walked to dinner from there.

We had some spectacular sunsets from our deck in the boatyard.

With the panels actually in hand, the yard manager met with me the next week to turn my idea for the rack and my freehand sketch into something the yard could produce. We ended up agreeing on basically a full extra day of machining to make some beefy mounting stanchions, loosely patterned on the clamp-on mount that holds one of our VHF antennas to the same rail. That would be stronger, and less visually jarring, than the square tube with U-bolt arrangement I had envisioned. We also agreed on 1" square tubing for the rack, with a 3/16" wall.

Four custom-machined mounts, sitting top side down on the workbench.

By the time they had all the materials and enough availability in the machine shop it was the latter half of the week, and fabricating the rack itself got pushed into the next week. The had us drive the boat around and up to the bulkhead dock so they could use the whipline on the massive yard crane. The smaller rigging crane, a better choice for the job, had a boat in front of it, and also they would have had a tighter workspace to assemble the system.

Each October, Mamaroneck's main streets fill up with these scarecrows that I think are made each year by schoolchildren. I snapped this UCLA Bruin for our niece, a UCLA alum.

With the rack system committed to a specific part of the soft top frame, I spent much of last weekend drilling and tapping the hole and fishing the wiring through the soft top to just under the aft port panel mount. It took both of us to worry the four wires up and around the sharp bend where the upright meets the top rails. That let me trim the excess wiring so I could use those pieces to pre-wire the panel frame before they lowered it.

This stainless 1/2" npt pipe plug is the only evidence of the hour-long struggle to get the wires around the sharp corner from the near-vertical pipe to the horizontal one. I stuck with this size hole in case I needed to just mount the 1/2" cable gland here instead.

The crew had the rack completed and the panels bolted on by the end of the day Monday and they were ready to fly it in, but I needed to get all the wiring done first, so they set it on some yard stands with the crane still attached overnight. I spent a couple of hours getting the wiring in place. The stock pigtails on the port side panel both reached to where I planned to make my connections, but I had to make extension cables for the two wires from the starboard side panel.

The underside of the panels as I pre-wired them on the frame. These are bifacial panels, meaning the cells can get light from the bottom as well as the top. Not a lot of light will get in that way in our configuration, but that's just how the larger panels come now.

First thing Tuesday they hoisted the panels into position and got them bolted down. I spent the next two hours wearing a climbing harness and hanging off the starboard side of the flybridge to make and secure the four connections to the wires we had run over the weekend. As soon as I flipped all the switches on we started making power. We had turned the battery chargers off first thing in the morning so we could test. I will be writing up the entire solar project in a separate post.

Hoisting the assembly into place. The 9-ton whipline was overkill for ~220 lbs, but it sure made it easy.

With that done and the last of the paint touchup finally complete, we were pretty much done in the yard. At the very beginning of our visit I had asked the yard to procure us 400' of anchor chain; our is worn to the point where it is skipping in the chainwheel, even after four end-for-end swaps and a full regalvanizing in New Orleans. As of the end of Tuesday the supplier still had not committed delivery, and we agreed to spend one more day to see if they could find the errant chain and make it happen. When it still had not arrived by Thursday morning we agreed to wave it off; we will, instead, cut the last 50' or so of chain — the most badly worn section — off at our next dock stop, and just live with 350' of the stuff for a while.

I ordered this new Hammerlok connector in anticipation of new chain that never came. We will still use it when we shorten the chain we have.

In the nearly three weeks we were in the yard, as usual, I spent every day working on the boat. Unlike the yard guys, I did not take weekends off. Lots of that work related to the solar project, including installing the Victron Cerbo-GX gateway that lets us talk to the solar chargers and the new battery monitor, adding a separate monitor for the existing inverter/chargers, pulling wire as already mentioned, and finishing up wiring in the battery bay.

Best shot I could get of the connections, which I positioned to be protected from the weather by the panel itself. That's about a 2" gap I had to work inside.

As long as I was working on the batteries, and now with full-time shore power available, I cut the batteries out of the system and pulled them all out of the compartment, the first time they've been out in the full five years since I installed them. I needed to retrieve a screw I had dropped earlier in the project, and while I was in there I found another screw and a driver bit. While I was cleaning out the compartment, I top-balanced all six batteries with my benchtop power supply.

The part you see from the flybridge.

I have the three pairs of batteries paralleled with copper bus bars and attached at opposite corners, which is pretty balanced, but the center pair is ever so slightly out of balance with the other two when the current is high. So I "rotated" the six batteries, moving each battery one position clockwise when I reinstalled them, to even things out. I supposed I will do the same in another five years. Incidentally, this is the longest we've ever gone on a set of batteries, and while the capacity has dropped a tad, they still look brand new and are working well. I am very happy with the change to lithium, and we have already broken even on the price delta.

All six batteries out and getting top-balanced. They still look brand new. Blue tape indicates which position each battery held before removal.

Other projects included replacing the forward blinds in the pilothouse, replacing the hoses and barbs between the engine and the water heater with more correctly sized items (to help with the aforementioned problem), installing new downlights in the master stateroom, master head, and over the galley counter, relocating the anemometer and forward VHF antenna to make room for the solar panels, replacing a bad circuit breaker for the auxiliary charger, and changing the oil on the generator while we had used oil disposal readily available. I also installed Mint on Louise's Surface laptop, after her Win-10 installation bit the dust. It was a rather tiring three weeks.

Inside of battery compartment, under the settee, all cleaned up. I wrote up the original installation in the blog, here.

A couple of Saturdays ago I also went back down to see my folks, on a longer visit this time. My cousins we heading down from upstate NY by car, and so I took two trains and two subways to meet up with them in Metropark, NJ, about a two hour trip. The three of us spent a couple of hours helping them around the house and with bills and paperwork. They are in their 90s, and while generally healthy, they are definitely slowing down.

Our local pub, the Village Station. Always crowded when the Yankees are playing.

Mamaroneck is a very familiar place to us now, and we hit all of our favorite eateries. We were very happy to find Cindy still tending bar at the Village Station, and were delighted our friend Dave is back tending bar at Frankie & Fannuci's, as we had lamented his absence on our last visit. We hit each of those places three times, Pizza Gourmet just up Boston Post Road a couple of times, and Sal's Pizzeria a couple of times as well. We made it back to Herradura, Smoke House, Red Plum, and Mr. Chen's, all just as we remembered them. The diner right next door to the yard was good for a couple of brunches, and we made it down to what used to be a Sedona Tap House franchise, but has shed the brand and now goes by Barnstone. Similar menu, but they dropped from 50(!) tap handles down to just 10, and it's off our list since that was its main draw.

At the bar at F&F with the inimitable DJ Dave Ali.

The yard had our invoice ready Thursday morning, but the entire office staff then became wrapped up in getting ready for a launch party for the fancy crew boat they built for one of the offshore wind farm contractors. We agreed to come in on Friday morning to settle up. We got a couple of free beers as the big party wrapped up after closing time.

Battery bank all back together, with solar wiring connected.

When morning rolled around we hemmed and hawed about asking the yard if we could stay at the dock through the weekend. This storm just hitting now is a monster, and we'd have had lots of protection right where we were. On top of that, we'd still be able to get off the boat, as opposed to being trapped on board as we are now, and we'd have power to run the heaters — it's been cold here. But it had been nearly three weeks since we pumped out, in Port Washington, and the call we made to the East Norwalk Blue pump-out service never resulted in a visit in Mamaroneck. With the possibility the storm would not let us out until Tuesday morning, we did not want to risk running up against the limit of the tank.

Another sunset, this one over our new panels.

Instead we paid the bill and lingered at the dock until after lunch time, when we dropped lines and came right back here to Port Washington. We had the hook down a half hour before the pump-out boat finished for the day, and they were able to get to us just at closing time. We did not want to put it off, as the storm will make things challenging. In the evening we headed ashore for dinner at Bosphorous. We hit Target on the way home to stock up on provisions for our confinement.

This police boat, in for corrosion repairs, has gamma ray detectors on top, a common feature in the NYC area. They take the nuclear threat seriously here.

Yesterday was given over to cleaning everything up from the yard stay, and I actually got started on this post and uploading photos, but I ran out of day before I finished. We went ashore at dinner time for what is likely our final shoreside meal here, walking to Salvatore's Coal Fire Pizza. If the forecast holds. we'll be stuck on the boat until tomorrow night, and then Tuesday morning we will weigh anchor at 7:30 to have favorable tide to Manhattan.

My dad is 97 and no longer doing home repair. He keeps giving away tools to my cousins every visit. This Makita 6093 in mint condition is from the 80's; I remember it as the first cordless drill I owned, circa 1985. I think the pill bottle is full of bits.

One clue to the intensity of this storm is that the Coast Guard started making announcements yesterday that the drawbridges on the Harlem and Hackensack Rivers would be locked down from noon today until tomorrow morning. We are well-positioned in the anchorage and have extra chain out. So far the new solar mounts are doing great in winds up to 40 mph. It's been overcast, so we're only making a few watts of power.

I retired the last of the old bi-pin light fixtures, designed for halogen lamps, on this yard stay, leaving me with this box of drop-in replacement LEDs for those fixtures. All these different styles were from chasing the ever-elusive combination of brightness and color temperature to be an adequate replacement.

The North Atlantic will be miserable for at least another week, so we will enjoy the city and then start to look for our window to make Atlantic City. My next post here will likely be underway off the coast of NJ.