It’s All Coming Together

The Great Hudson River Trip 2010 is quickly coming together. I’ve mentioned a few things we need to do to Sabine to make this trip a reality. We have a list, we’re already checking things off of it and we’ve barely scratched April’s surface.

1. We built the plywood templates for the new fuel tanks. We fit them into the space and then marked where the fittings are supposed to go for the filling hose, the feed and return lines to the engine and generator, the sender for the fuel gauge and the vents. On Saturday morning we drove the plywood templates across the bay to Bristol, RI where we met with the welder.

Going to the welder's shop was a nostalgia trip for me. I practically grew up in a machine shop much like the one we visited on Saturday morning. The smell of the machine oil, the sound of metal chips crunching under my feet as I walked, and the sight of the grease streaked walls were entirely comforting and familiar. I inhaled deeply and was instantly brought home. Normal people are brought home by the smell of baking bread, or cookies, or whatever Mom’s specialty was. Not me. It’s eau d’machine oil for me, my friends.

We’ll have brand new aluminum tanks in about two weeks. Better still, my boat will carry more fuel than the jeep for the first time in seven years.

2. Last weekend we installed a brand new alternator, pulley system and belt to Sabine’s Yanmar diesel engine. Last season the diesel, less than 10 years old, chewed through fan belts at an alarming rate. The smell of burning rubber singed our nostrils when under power, and a fine layer of shredded rubber coated every inch of the engine. A normal engine wears out a belt every few years. We were burning 3-5 belts a season, more of them as the years wore on.

When we pulled the pulleys off the engine, we noticed that they were precariously rusted to the point where the jagged edges caused Sabine’s increased appetite for fan belts. The rust was caused by an elaborate system of leaks remedied by the Great Paint Job of 2009.  We cleaned the layer of grimy rubber powder off the engine, installed a higher output alternator, pretty blue pulleys and a wider belt that is less likely to slip. The alternator will power our house bank of batteries so we can do things like turn on the lights indoors when we’re at anchor, and we’ll be able to do that for longer periods of time without fear of running down the batteries.

3. “But I thought you had radar aboard,” is something we hear from our boating friends. They point to the radar dome perched on the mizzen mast. I reply, cheekily, “Yeah, our radar dome is decorative. Sure is purty, eh?” But the lack of radar is becoming more and more of a problem. There have been many times where we’ve been stuck somewhere due to foggy conditions. A functional radar is a necessity that we’ve never had.

We’ve tried to make the radar functional, without success. Last week I spent an obnoxious amount of time on the phone with Raymarine tech support to determine what we need to get the radar functioning. We are currently waiting for just one more cable, and then we’ll be able to wire up the radar properly and hopefully check it off the list.

4. On Easter we cleaned out the gear room in our house in preparation of the Beej and Todd adventure season. In the ungodly mess that the gear room had become, we found bits and parts that we’ll need to work our way through the list for the remainder of April and May.

5. I’ve gotten ALL of my vacation time off approved. It’s marked on my Outlook calendar, and I keep staring at it longingly. We’ll be on the water for 2 weeks in July and then another week in August. I have the signed PTO forms in my desk at work, and I feel like jumping up and down every time I look at those as well. Just today, Todd emailed me and told me he was having a bad day. I took screen shots of my Outlook calendar and emailed them to him and said “Yeah, today you might be having a bad day. But look at this, we have a possible 25 days on the water coming up. Keep your eye on the prize!”

Now we just need to plan the trip… find amenities along the Hudson to make sure we can get things like fuel and fresh water. We’ve been reading guides and researching on the Internet on our spare time. More importantly, we also need to find a place where Todd and I will maintain one of our favorite vacation traditions: the buying of my vacation bling.

The Adventure is Almost Beginning

We’ve made a list.

It includes all the boat chores that need to be done. We need to fabricate a fuel tank that holds more diesel than my car can carry. (Seven years ago we installed a “temporary” fuel tank.) Also on the list are things like finally installing the anchor windlass we bought 6 years ago. We bought the chain to go with it. Six years ago. It’s been sitting in Maggie and Charlie’s yacht rigging shop since then. They used to tease us about it. Now they use the chain’s container as a table.

I put in for two weeks vacation in July, and got approved. I also requested two weeks unpaid in August. I don’t think I’ll get the August time, so we’ll have to figure something out with that.

I grabbed a book from the library about where we will sail to. Todd read some of it last night and used Google pedometer to plot how far away our destination is. 405 miles.

Destination: Chipman Point Marina in Orwell, Vermont. We will sail east through Long Island Sound to New York City. We’ll have the masts taken down and head up the Hudson River and into Lake Champlain.

We’re at that exciting and overwhelming time at the start of the trip. There is a lot to do; a lot of phone calls to make, a lot of plywood to cut to build the prototype for our custom fuel tanks, a lot of time spent trying to figure out why the radar won’t work, and a lot of calls to Raytheon technical support.

There’s a lot to do at work to make sure my absence won’t stress out my co-workers and boss.

There are provisions to plan out and buy.

There are details to arrange, like sailing the boat to Essex, Connecticut the weekend before the trip, then taking the train back to Rhode Island.

Then we need to figure out how we’ll get back to RI from Vermont.

Spreadsheets have been made; measurements have been scrawled in notebooks.

And we're loving every minute of it.