Shipyard

We are under way southbound in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of New Jersey, on an all-day passage to Altantic City. We left New York City this morning at twilight, and, if conditions remain favorable, we should have the hook down sometime between 7 and 8pm. A long offshore passage is just what I needed to catch the blog up a full month. (You can relax; I'm not going to cover it day-by-day.)

This morning's sunrise from the middle of Raritan Bay.

When last I posted here, we were under way en route to the shipyard. Well, apart from my post about responding to Hurricane Helene, which is again applicable in the wake of Hurricane Milton. And while I was hoping for something closer to a two-week yard period, we ended up spending just over a full month in the yard.

This big work boat came in a few days after us.

It's hard to complain too much; we had a pleasant month at a dock with water and power in a town that is now a favorite of ours. And when the yard bill came, it was just a few bucks more than what it would have cost us to dock for a month at the marina next door. Not a bad deal, actually.

I caught the tail end of the Broadway music concert at Harbor Island Park on one of my evening walks.

The principal reason for our yard visit was for some warranty work on the paint job we got here last year. There were a number of "holidays" (voids in the paint) that had started rusting, and an area where the outer coat of paint was separating from the inner coat. In all the yard had over 20 hours of warranty labor, plus the shop supplies and disposal costs that go along with that. There was no arguing, and we're happy with the way the work turned out.

20 years of water damage from the flybridge hatch.

As long as we had to be in the yard anyway, and in the way of throwing them a bone with some revenue work, we asked them to take on three other projects: remediating some rust in the engine room bilges and re-coating them, repairing and painting the gouge we put in the new paint in Solomons, and repairing water-damaged woodwork underneath the hatchway from the pilothouse to the flybridge. That hatch has leaked on and off for two decades; there was already considerable damage when we bought the boat, and damage continued on our watch.

The original installer's choice to hide a seam between two pieces of veneer right under the edge of the ladder channeled the water deep into the wood all the way to the sole.

We had planned our arrival at the yard for the weekend for a more relaxed arrival and to give ourselves some time to unwind from the passage from Port Jefferson and to get the boat squared away for workers. We arrived Saturday afternoon (September 7th) to an empty yard and tied up in our assigned spot on the west dock (map). We would remain in this spot for the entire month, although we did spin the boat around twice for the painter to reach everything he needed.

Vector at the dock. Behind us is the Harlem Rocket, a go-fast tour boat.

It's not possible to offload the scooters on that dock, and we ruminated about stopping at one of the other docks first, just so we'd have them available. In the end we decided to make do with walking and an occasional e-bike run or transit for the short time we'd be there. In hindsight it might have been worthwhile for the full month. The e-bike only got used a half dozen times, for a few grocery runs and a few hardware/supply runs.

Mid-project boatyard chaos in the pilothouse.

When we were here a year ago for paining, the yard had subcontracted the actual paint work out to a guy who kept crazy hours. They could be painting late at night, for example. One consequence of this was that I never had a weekend off. I had to be at the boat every single day. I had more work of my own than I could finish even being there every day, so it was fine, but in nearly six months we only had two weekends away from the yard, once to visit friends in Long Island, and once to visit my cousins in New Hampshire.

This heron was a near-daily visitor. Apparently this was his fishing spot.

The yard had a falling out with that contractor, and so they fixed all the problems using their own workers. Yard hours are 6:30-3 weekdays, thus our evenings and weekends were our own this time. We had five weekends in all, including the one on which we arrived, and we tried to make the most of them. Starting with a quick visit from our niece that first Sunday, on her way back to California from a whirlwind Europe trip, by way of a family wedding in upstate New York. We were happy to be just a ten-minute detour from her route, and we had a nice dinner together.

Flying the oyster boat Page Lane back to the water. It's a little nerve-wracking to be in the path of the boom if the boom hoist lets go.

The following Saturday we hopped on the train for the short ride to the Bronx, where we visited the New York Botanical Garden. This is one of the great botanical gardens of the world, with iconic conservatory greenhouses reminiscent of Kew Gardens. It's easy to forget you are in the middle of New York City here, and we had a very enjoyable visit, including lunch at the very nice Hudson Garden Grill on site. Even with the tram taking us all around the park, all the walking did Louise's feet in, and it took her a couple of weeks to recover.

NY Botanical Gardens conservatory.

Aquatic plants from around the world.

Tropical water lilies.

The current theme at NYBG is "Wonderland" and here we have the rabbit. We saw several little girls dressed up as Alice.

A week later we were back on the train, headed in the other direction, to the end of the line in New Haven, Connecticut. My cousins drove down from New Hampshire for a weekend meet-up, and we all rendezvoused at the Hotel Marcel, in the iconic former Armstrong/Pirelli Tire headquarters building. We all really just wanted to visit with each other, with New Haven chosen only because it was as close as we could reasonably get on the train. As long as we were there, though, we made the most of it, with a visit to the wonderful (and free) Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, on the college campus, and dinner at Consiglio's in Little Italy.

The Peabody rivals the American, Smithsonian, or Field museums of natural history, to include an impressive dinosaur collection.

We were particularly taken with the geology and gemstone exhibits.

These are larger than they look in photos.

Transporting these undamaged boggles the mind.

My camera could not capture the colors in some of the displays.

In keeping with the theme, the following weekend we rented a car from Enterprise, walking distance from the boatyard, and drove down to the New Jersey shore to visit my parents. Ironically, we just passed within a few miles of their house on today's passage, and we could visit (and have visited) with them by stopping in Manasquan. But that requires a three-day weather window along the coast, a dicey proposition at this time of year (today we have barely the two days we need), and we'd still need to find ground transportation as they no longer drive. On top of that, docking in Manasquan for a night would have been twice as much as we spent on the car, the gas, and the ridiculous NY/NJ tolls ($60 for the round trip).

Union Station, New Haven.

Enterprise is closed Sunday so we had to take the car for the whole weekend, and as long as we had it, we ran a bunch of errands. That included provisioning runs to Walmart, Aldi, Stop & Shop, and Costco, which in Port Chester is two stories and includes a cart escalator. I also went to Home Depot to pick up 2'x2' squares of plywood and some other supplies for the flybridge hatch project, which I will get to in a moment. The car also let us drive to dinner at the nice Larchmont Yacht Club from our reciprocal list. On our way back from NJ we stopped for dinner at old standby the Larchmont Tavern as well.

Going up, passengers and carts share an escalator. Coming down they are separated. Our first two-story Costco.

Our final weekend in town would have been a nice opportunity for a final visit to the city, but I ended up working all weekend, which is a nice segue into the project rundown. First up was the painting, to which the yard assigned their best in-house painter, Jose-Maria. He did a great job, and was finished by the end of the first week, or so we thought. That gave me hope that we might be in the yard just two weeks, but, alas, it was not to be.

The yard's new six-figure vacuum. It has a big warning on it because it can remove body parts, We kept calling it the Binford 500.

Early the next week, we noticed that he had missed one section that we had originally discussed. This section was in a hard-to-see place and was also white, and had that been the only issue we might have elected to take care of it ourselves after leaving the yard. But also, in what can only be described as a stroke of good luck for us, the peeling paint issue that we had, on arrival, only on a piece of trim, started to happen also on the transom door. Literally a chunk of paint fell off over the weekend while we were just sitting there with nothing happening. The yard manager, when I told him about it on Monday, was incredulous.

Removing the flybridge ladder. It was attached at the bottom with two small angle brackets; the top turned out to be just wedged in place.

While we were very relieved that this problem made itself known while we were still in the yard instead of, for example, at our next stop in Atlantic city or even further away, it turned out that Jose-Maria had just left on a two-week vacation. Nothing at all would happen on the paint front for those two weeks. When he returned he fixed the missing spots, and spirited the transom door away to the shop to be sanded and re-sprayed. As always happens with such things, the color is not a perfect match, even though it was from the can of paint we took with us when we left the yard a year ago. It will all look even after the transom is again covered in exhaust soot.

The James Miller flies up to the hard stand. The landing craft Jennifer Miller is in the background.

The delay was no big deal, though, because we still had the other two projects to keep the yard busy. They sent a guy to cut out the beefy U-channel that had previously mounted an engine-driven emergency pump, which I had removed last year. That channel was in the way of getting to the worst part of the bilge, right under the engine. Even with that removed, however, the yard did not have a worker small enough to squeeze under the engine to do the work. The yard turned to another subcontractor.

Freddie wedged in the bilge under the engine.

That contractor sent us Freddie, a diminutive but experienced worker who was able somehow to contort himself into the space wearing a Tyvek suit and a respirator to remove all the rust with a scraper and a needle gun. Rather than the same type of two-part epoxy we had originally painted into the bilges, the yard opted to have Freddie coat them instead with a one-part product called POR-15, with which we were familiar from our days on the bus. This product can be painted over light rust and contains a chemical which binds with the rust and neutralizes it. It does not come in white, so some of our bilges are now gray in color.

End result, coated in POR-15.

The final yard project was to repair the damaged woodwork. While the yard has an extensive woodworking and joinery shop, and has even built and refitted wooden boats over the years, it's no longer part of their core business, and the yard manager did not have a worker to spare on it in the immediate future. He asked the same contractor who bid the bilges to look at it, but he declined. But this yard period was the time to do it, and so it was that I decided to tear into it myself, with the option for one of the yard guys to step in at some later date, if needed.

Matching seam in the underlayment ensured water got well into the wood. Large round hole at bottom was for the cats to access their litter box.

We were already two weeks into our visit when this came to pass, and I marched upstairs to the purchasing manager to have them order me a 4'x8' sheet of cherry veneer plywood. That took a week to arrive, and it took the yard another few days to have someone cut it to size on their shop saws -- I'd never get it right with my handheld 5" circular saw. And thus it is that we are already underway, but the flybridge ladder is lying on its side in the saloon, and behind me as I drive is the uncompleted wall with the third coat of varnish still drying, outgassing and killing our brain cells as I type.

When you work at a boatyard, turning an old keg into a water cooler is a five-minute project.

While the work on the flybridge hatch area has consumed the greatest number of my hours, I did knock out a few other things as well. With a good delivery address, I ordered yet another computer monitor for the chart computer, in hopes that it would be compatible with my sunglasses. It was, but it's poor quality and I'm already on my second example, having sent the first one back. Long story short: the vendor refunded my money and I will keep it until I find something better.

The biggest problem with the new monitor. An artifact of the backlighting.

The new monitor accelerated a long-standing project to get a VESA mount for it. Our previous monitors had stands that, while not great, were at least usable, whereas this one does not, and a VESA mount would make it easy to change to something else later. After spending hours looking at VESA mounts online, I determined none was really usable in a moving boat, and I decided I had to make something.

A fiery sunset over a flat calm harbor made for as nice a shot as one can take in a shipyard.

My first attempt involved RAM mount balls and arms, but that was too wobbly. One of the great things about being in this yard is the metal scrap bins, and I rummaged through the scrap aluminum until I found enough bits to fabricate something usable. It's hard to describe so you'll just have to look at the photo. For now it is screwed down to a piece of scrap wood; if it proves to be acceptable in underway conditions, I will bolt it down to the helm console directly so it can't move in any type of seas.

This beefy square tubing with a metal plate welded to the end was a scrap in the recycling bin, as was the metal plat bolted to the back of the monitor. I perched our hot spot atop the open end.

I had some wrap-up work from the project to repair my laptop a while back, which involved yet another parts queen for testing, consolidating parts, and selling a working unit which just got mailed yesterday from Staten Island. And I sold the old Furuno FA-100 AIS, which I had been keeping as a spare, and that, too, involved ordering parts. I had to solder in a new backup battery to even erase Vector's ship details, and the working battery made it mush easier to sell as well.

Paint repair on the foredeck involved sandblasting. A week later we found our lockers full of blasting media.

I listed a number of other things on eBay, some of which turned up during two days crammed under the helm cleaning up and moving wiring. This due to the monitor change, as well as needing to rewire the satellite compass to facilitate my continued efforts to get the autopilot working properly with it. I also spent a day trying to polish the crazing out of the flybridge hatch acrylic with a buffer and plastic polish, but it seems I am going to need to instead spend even more times with progressively finer grades of sandpaper, a project for another time.

Our very own ply.

Our entertainment for part of our stay consisted of listening to the radio traffic associated with the security zone closures for the UN General Assembly, especially during the President's visit (what do you mean, "the river's closed"?), and various other quintessentially New York radio conversations. We also enjoyed watching boats flying around the yard on the enormous crane, and we always enjoy seeing the variety of commercial vessels in the yard for service. We toured through the two hybrid-electric ferries that the yard is just completing for the Savannah Belle ferry service; we watched them lay the keels last year.

The two new hybrid Savannah Belle ferries. They both had complete pilothouses when we left.

Work smarter not harder. Instead of fabricating access ladders from scratch, the yard ordered aluminum Werner extension ladders like you'd buy at Lowes, cut sections to fit, and welded them in place. I kept seeing the leftover bits of ladder in the scrap bin.

We enjoyed going out to dinner most evenings, to all our favorites from our last stay. Hannah, the waitress we liked so much at our favorite dive bar, The Village Station, has moved on, but we returned several times anyway and have a new favorite waitress, Cindy. We even met up there with our friends Tim and Crisalida on their drive to Brooklyn from their boat in Connecticut. And our favorite bar tender at Frankie & Fanucci's, DJ Dave Ali, has also moved on, which actually made that place a bit less appealing.

Final night at Village Station with Cindy, who bought us our final beers.

The one new restaurant in town, Jill's, was OK but nothing special for the price, and we ate there just once. Three new bagel places have opened: Brooklyn Bagels, Sofia's, and Mamaroneck Bagels, all of which outshine the lone place on our last visit, so bad that we seldom went. Of the three, Brooklyn is best, but the bagels are huge and we can't toast two at once.

I cut up two 2'x2' squares of ply from Home Depot and replaced the worst sections of underlayment, which let me get rid of the obsolete cat door and an obsolete flushing fan. The remaining rot was trimmed back, treated with wood hardener, and filled with wood filler.

Other places to which we returned on this visit and which are still quite good are Sal's Pizza, Sedona Tap House, Herradura, Pizza Gourmet, Red Plum, Piccolo Mulino, Mr. Chen, Mamaroneck Diner, and Ginban. Of course, we could not resist the occasional treat from the Boiano bakery on our walk around town. We had found a dentist we liked here last year, and we both returned for checkups and cleanings. And, of course, I made several trips to the Half Time beer store to fill my growler or pick up cans.

The yard cut this new 4'x8' sheet of 1/4" cherry veneer to size using the two old pieces at left as a template. No seam now.

We asked the yard for someone to come wash the boat when all was finished, and this Monday none other than Freddie showed up with a coworker to get Vector's exterior as clean as it has ever been. We knew we would not have a weather window to get around NJ until Thursday at the earliest, and so we asked the yard if we could stay until Wednesday morning.

Test-fitting the replacement panel and it went it on the first try.

I spent Tuesday sanding and laying down a second coat of varnish. Ideally these panels would have been varnished horizontally in the shop, but we knew they could not be finished, dry, and installed before we left the dock, so I had to install them after the stain was dry and varnish them in place, which is how our final weekend went. That's more challenging for my meager varnish skills, and it will be next week sometime before I can put the ladder back in place.

Like Miyagi told me. Sand floor, side-side.

I was able to stain the replacement pieces while flat on the dock. I wish I could have varnished this way, too.

Wednesday morning we offloaded the final trash, shipped a box of quilts, and dropped lines for the East River just after noon. With close to a six hour trip I did not want to arrive after dark, but the noon departure had us pushing against a little current all the way to The Brothers. By the time we hit Hell Gate it was behind us and we had a good push all the way to Staten Island. We usually do this stretch on a fair tide the whole way and so we never see tugs going our direction, but on this trip we had a couple overtake us, trying to make the Gate by slack.

Mamaroneck has peppered the town with these whimsical scarecrows for October. I'm using our pizza carrier, just the right size, to schlep Louise's box of quilts to the post office.

With stiff winds out of the NW, we knew our usual anchorages either in Gravesend Bay or Sandy Hook would be untenable. We contemplated working our way into Coney Island Creek, or trying to find shelter in Atlantic Highlands, which can be a tight squeeze. We decided to try a new spot for us, proceeding in the lee of Staten Island to Great Kills Harbor, a protected basin along Staten Island's SE shore and adjacent to the eponymous National Park.

New panel in place and first coat of varnish on. It looks much the same today on the third coat. I'm pretty happy with how well it matches the other woodwork.

The harbor is mostly full of private mooring balls, but we found a nice empty spot (map) and dropped the hook just at sunset. We had a nice dinner aboard for the first time in a while. I was ready to start preparing the boat for an early morning departure, but Louise checked the passage weather and determined we would be much better off waiting until today.

I snapped this photo just as we were dropping the hook at Great Kills.

That left us with a free day, most of which I spent sanding and varnishing. I made a half dozen calls trying to find a place to land the tender so we could do some errands and have dinner ashore. The one place that everyone raves about being super-friendly to cruisers gave a flat-out "no," and our reciprocal yacht club wanted $55 (really) to land. One place quoted me $20 off-the-cuff, but I finally found a friendly voice at the Atlantis Marina who was happy to let us tie up for a couple of hours and gave me the dock code over the phone. There is a free dock in the National Park, but it's a very long way from town.

Obligatory shot of the statue en route, just past the tip of Governor's Island as we emerge from the Buttermilk Channel.

We tendered ashore at 5pm and walked to the UPS dropoff for an eBay shipment, ending at Goodfella's for a casual Italian dinner. It was quite good and the prices were reasonable for New York City. Strolling Staten Island, with its single-family homes, it's easy to forget that's where you are. If we had more time here, I would have made my way across the island to the ferry and ridden into Manhattan. Maybe on a future visit.

Goodfella's "pizza school." Lots of mob cultural references in Staten Island, as The Godfather was set here.

As I wrap up typing we are two hours from Atlantic City. I had to divert east a couple of miles to go around a dredging operation. Louise has dinner on the stove and we will be eating under way, so no shore visit this time. We still have a little window left tomorrow to make Cape May, but we can't dally.

Sunset approach to Atlantic City.

Update: We are anchored in Atlantic City, in our usual spot (map). We had a nice dinner under way and had the hook down at 7:40. Making the unmarked entrance in the dark was a bit unnerving, following our tracks on the plotter. "On instruments," as they say. I had to stop work on the blog a half hour or so before the inlet and have just now got all the photos in and captioned. We have a relaxed start to Cape May in the morning.