Saturday September 8th...... Hudson River

It was apparent early on today that even at 6 miles an hour we were going way too fast to deal with the history that was racing by on each shore. Thanks to Kurt (and his dad) we had in the cockpit, a mile by mile guide to the Hudson River complete with a description of all the castles, mansions and other cool stuff. It was a long day motoring and not without excitement. On our way out of the Creek our engine started racing plus or minus 300rpms .... it turned out to be a primary filter so I switched to the back up and ran smoothly all day. Then, with our anchorage in sight a few miles away, our bilge pump went off and wouldn't stop which is a real bad sign...I checked all the thru-hulls and everything was fine. The only thing left was the packing gland on our drive shaft which is located in the basement of our boat.... and boat basements are not the easiest places to operate a wrench. After emptying the area under the cockpit, I slid down...did I mention that it has been about 90 degrees the last week....and found a steady spray instead of the one drip per minute that is normal. So the good news was that we were not going to sink... the bad news was that as soon as we were anchored I had a nasty job with which to deal.

Anyway, it was a great day. Hot, long and loud with the motor running all the time and tons of traffic. Even better when Ellie called with football scores... we won and THEY didn't for the second week in a row. We passed West Point today and there looked to be tailgaters everywhere. The roof of one of the building said "Beat Air Force" so I assume they had a home game as well. By the way, West Point looks a lot like Hogwarts from the water... but with the haze, photography was tough today.

We are about 30 miles north of New York City and hope to anchor at the Statue of Liberty tomorrow afternoon. It looks like we may be there for a couple of days. Our next run will be in the Atlantic and we would like to dispense with New Jersey in one fell swoop... 120 miles to Cape May. We'll see. There are lots of places to bail if we decide to, but if we leave at about dusk and sail all night, we'll be there with good light.

We met some folks last night in Catskill who are heading the same direction as we..... their boat is a Valiant 42 that is not only beautiful but equipped as a cruising boat should be. We were moored next to them in Put in Bay but never spoke. We saw their boat in Waterford as we were leaving but never had the chance to chat until last night.

Later....

I would like to add that we drove through mountains all day and they were beautiful, reminding us of the Smokies. It has been HOT and humid. We have sunshine every day and have had unbelievable weather.

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Wednesday and Thursday September 5 &6 Catskill, NY

We arrived in Catskill on Wednesday afternoon. It was a pleasant ride down the Hudson River past Albany and some other towns. We took a walk when we got here. There is a nice park across the road from the Riverview Marina, which is located on Catskill Creek, the park is on the Hudson River. Then we walked up to the town to look around. It is a cute town and they are doing lots of renovations, but many stores are empty. There are cats everywhere on the sidewalk on pedestals, each decorated a different way, apparently playing on the "cat" part of the town name. There is also a wooden carving of RipVanWinkle in the center of the street, as this is allegedly his home town.

Since that nice walk, we haven't had time to do anything except work on the mast business. I won't bore you with the details of that. It is now Friday morning and Mike is working on the wiring now, and then it will be finished. We are happy to be put back together and look like a sailboat again.

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Sept. 4th ...Waterford, NY

After coffee we were off the Laundromat and went around the corner for breakfast while the clothes were drying. Don and Paul's was small, shabby, there were some neat historical photos on the wall and a huge coke machine in the middle of the room. There was a door open to the back room and we could see and hear an active pool game in progress at 9a.m. The service was excellent and food was ok...

I called Riverview Marina in Catskill, NY which is about 45 miles south, to see about stepping our mast and made an appointment for Thursday a.m. We will motor down there on Wednesday and spend the night.

With clean clothes back in the boat we hiked over the Hudson River to Troy, NY to a very nice grocery store. We picked up supplies for the next week and were leaving the parking lot with their cart when its wheels locked up. We had read somewhere that we had to ask the management to "unlock" the wheels before we took off with their carts but there didn't really seem like anything to unlock. Wrong....it took both of us dragging and pushing the cart at the same time back across the lot where I stayed while Kathy went in to find an unlocker. After a couple of minutes Kathy brought back a lady with a little plastic box that magically unlocked the wheels. She then walked with us explaining that the locks were set for a distance and that she would need to unlock them again before we were on our way back across the bridge to Waterford.

Since we had the time, I wanted to check a few things on the engine which entailed emptying the storage stateroom and removing the mattress to check the seawater strainer... which was found to be reasonably full of seaweed. I turned off the valve, cleaned everything out, replaced the impeller, and checked the zinc in our heat exchanger. I have decided to remove the prop shaft alternator, but today was not going to be the day.

After getting the boat back together we hiked to the Library to post some blog entries, check our email and find the part number for a new lift pump. ( I think were up to 5 or 6 miles of walking by now.) We stopped at the post office on the way back and then had a late lunch of Jarlsburg swiss, apple slices and Triscuits.

After reading for a couple of hours... I grilled some fresh Haddock, made a lemon/butter/olive oil/dill sauce while Kathy outdid herself again in the salad arena.

Bye for now...

Hello, just a note . . .

I went into the Welcome Center today because they have a book exchange and we are in need of new books. The wonderful book store in Brockport was too long ago. As I was looking around I thought I saw a boat just like ours in a large (16 X9?) picture on the wall. I had to get closer and look and it was "Celtic Song" in front of their old welcome center. It may have been a picture taken before Jackie and Chris owned it, but since we saw "Celtic Song" several times in the North Channel this summer, it brought back good memories!

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