Kaimusailing

I dawdled as usual in the morning on another overcast day, made a BLbfhT sandwich, it is a BLT with crispy black forest ham instead of bacon. Phone calls kept coming in, mainly due to the effects of Hurricane Helene. People called me to find out what the local conditions were in St Marys, GA, but I am not down there yet. I did find out from people who were actually down there. Conditions were like what I have experienced down there a few times, winds in the 35 to 50 mph range and rain damage.
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The most disturbing hurricane report I got was from Cedar Key, home to Tony's World Best Clam Chowder, where my daughter and I spent some time, cute little town. Not any more. We stayed in a place that was all new, had been renovated after getting trashed by a hurricane a little over a year ago. The report now was video of waves crashing into the place we stayed as well as the restaurant next door, we knew it as Steamer's. They will build back. The insurance companies have to draw the line somewhere. Hate to see it like that.
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I've been observing a YouTuber, Wildling Sailing, who is a youngster with a cheap old Wharram catamaran project. Oh no, I declare, you're not going to do that are you? And yes, he does it. His folks help out, shame on them, their kid is going out into the North Sea on a home built plywood catamaran. As much as I cringed, watching him do the boatbuilding stuff that I did, and learned from, I felt elated in his recent posts where he is actually sailing the boat.
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He has drone footage, which is very desirable, and I can see he works hard to make his videos coherent and well produced. That is why I watch everything he makes. He is effectively conveying to me those very things I remember from not that long back, in my mind, and he is doing it almost the same way.
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His mast is bending, it is a condition that is like an oscillation. Sooner or later the mast will fail. I can see it. He needs running backstays. He has a mast that is trying to go out of column. He needs a rigger to help him settle his rig down. He is going into a boatyard to do more work on the boat. He admits maybe he was pushing too hard to get out to sea.
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He has Hanneke Boon, the codesigner of the boat, helping him. I could feel that she was capturing some of her Dutch roots into the sailing rig, and maybe some other areas of the design. She is closely in touch and can probably advise him about the bendy mast.
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There were more phone calls, invites to go out, I stayed in. It was an overcast day with the weather deteriorating all day long. Brief semicloudy sunshine, then darker and darker, rain, dark. Wind, dark.
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It cleared up the next morning, slowly. I had planned to go to Pocomoke to get a big bag of frozen shrimp and some cheap wine. I wanted a set of spark plugs for the Atomic 4, I had a plan to use the old ones to help lift the flathead head off. Cuddily needed some shower door edge thingies. It turned out she ordered them from Amazon and didn't need to go shopping. We went anyway.
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I smelled the unburned gasoline smell again. The dashboard engine light didn't come on, but the Torque Pro app on the car radio said we had a "sensor 2, bank 1" anomaly. I think it has something to do with driving through the flood waters.
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We went to Verizon where Cuddily inquired about a new phone or more memory for her old phone. She has 32 gigs of memory on that one. It took a while, but now she has a Samsung S24+, a year newer than my phone, a nice phone. We shopped in Walmart for a few things, then went to Sysco for a big wine purchase. We got there at 4:00 PM. They close at 4:00 PM. Sheesh.
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We went to Cuddily's house to stow our groceries, mainly ham and potato salad and walked to the Legion, not that far away.
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There was an event with a famous country music star and parking was limited. There was a crane hoisting a huge American flag, a sound stage, lights, cars, and one with an old member of the Bad Crowd driving in, then another with another of the old Bad Crowd. Teri arrived and would have turned around and left due to the parking lot being so jammed, but I valeted her car into a narrow spot.
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Inside so many old friends, an endless stream. The country singer was sitting at a table basking in the adulation of his fans. Later I went outside and could hear some of the concert. It was better than expected.
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The day was dawdling while the NFL reports came in. The NY Jets who were 8 or 9 point favorites lost their game with the Denver Broncos. There is a lot of back story. The Jets offensive coordinator had been the Broncos head coach and was fired before the end of that season. At the Jets he was given a lot of grief about their lack of offense. The Bronco's new head coach said the Jet's OC had done the poorest job as head coach at the Bronco's. Now was the Jets chance to revenge him . Nope. They lost 10-9.
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We were at Jane's Island State Park which is a major draw to the Crisfield area. It was nice to have a cookout right by Daugherty Creek. The mosquitoes came in at dusk and we skedaddled. I called Hawaii, as usual. A football game was going on, Sunday Night Football, but in Hawaii it was afternoon.
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I had been trying to get in touch with Eloisa up in the North Carolina mountains. The devastation from flooding had erased some communities. The death toll was growing past 100. The footage on YouTube was astonishing. The interstates were washed away in places. Airports were flooded.
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Donald Trump quickly attacked the current administration about their response to the crisis. They replied with a presser showing their support. As usual it was political spin while a real problem needed attention.
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I finally got word that Eloisa was at a remote location and OK, as well as Bleu, her black American cocker.
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I went back to Sysco and bought a couple boxes of Barefoot on Tap pinot noir as well as bottles of Saddlebred to replenish Cuddily's wine rack. I also bought a 2 ½ lb bag of shrimp, this time frozen raw, peeled, deveined, and tail off. After filling the wine rack I was leaving and we started talking. Let's sample the wine. I was only subjected to one bottle.
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While sitting around prior to our scampi feast I resumed some work on the Atomic 4 engine.
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The engine was locked up. Water backed up in the exhaust has seized exhaust valve #4, a common occurrence. I should have tried starting the engine on some two stroke gas and maybe the valve would have freed itself. I procrastinated and now found the engine would not turn over. I tried pulling the plugs and putting Blaster penetrating oil in the cylinders. It looked like I would have to remove the cylinder head.
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I removed the nuts on the studs that held the head to the block, but the head was stuck on the studs or the block or both. I tried hammering at the seam between the block and head with a chisel to no effect. I tried Blaster on the studs and hitting with the chisel several times.
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Moyer Marine, who are the experts on the Atomic 4's, recommend pulling the studs out. They sell a tool to do this. $175. You can try to butt two nuts together on a stud and try to unthread it, but it probably won't work, hence the expensive specialty tool.
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Save your old spark plugs. My idea is to knock the porcelain out of the plug, resulting in a handy hollow sort of nut that threads into the head. A bolt, let's say a 1/4-20, can be thrust up through the hollow spark plug before it is screwed into the head. Put one in #1 and one in #4. Make a short beam with a hole for the 1/4-20 bolt and block it onto a couple of the studs. Tighten up a nut on the 1/4-20 bolt and draw the head up. Do this simultaneously on #1 and #4.
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You can also drill and thread the inside of these spark plug plugs, like maybe an all-thread standard size. Then you can buy a piece of all-thread that you can screw down into the cylinder and push a piston, can free up an engine that way.
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I had a conversation with Teri about scampi at Cuddily's, that she didn't need to bring salad, what?, yes, she had forgotten, no problem, just bring intelligence. Too many cooks. Everyone wanted to chip in, peel this, peel that, don't we need water for the pasta, NO PASTA? Yes, I have to carry out what I envisioned, some kind of scampi with Cornelia Marie's crispy garlic bread, and then a salad.
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We had to take turns in the kitchen. Two's company and three's a crowd. Just make it. It was like a symphony of cooking. You'd like to be the diva, but you just have to wait your turn and deliver your little bit to the whole thing. It can turn out well in the end, as it did, we enjoyed it.
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I like to think I have sharpened my skills, but the proof is in the pudding, so they say. A simple dish with shrimp, not overcooked, but absolutely delectable. The juice of the matter, the gravy, that shrimp and garlic essence that ends up in the bottom of the bowl, sopped up with various kinds of bread, garlic bread, italian tufts dipped into the garlic butter oil shrimpie essence, essence.
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You have to cook for your constituency, the problem being that maybe we are not on the same culinary page. It's hard to argue with shrimp scampi though. We had a talk about protein prices. It's like chicken and pork might be on the low end, real wild caught fish way on the high end. Shrimp is kind of in the middle. Much of it is being farmed. The farming process isn't bad, but I worry about what they might do in the field, or shrimp pond, as it were.
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In this digression I would like to remind my subscribers that sleep is just a few paragraphs away.
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I had a new technique with the tomatoes in the salad. I had never done this before, but I recall a show that Anthony Bourdain put on about essential cooking skills, and in that show an Italian chef showed how to prepare tomatoes for a sauce. He blanched them, skinned them, sliced them across the Equator, and squeezed out the liquid and seeds. Then the tomato flesh could be cooked. I kind of did not do the blanching, but that could be a good way to go, I just cut across the equator and squeezed out the seeds and liquid into the sink.
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I learned to enjoy preparing salad items. You learn to consider the human that will try to eat the salad. We would much like something else than rabbit food. The salad has to have some character, oh, come on, not just the chef, the salad has to have some character like an entree might. I try. I think about how someone might pick up some salad item in their fork. I like to size things accordingly. It's not too much trouble when you really like what you are doing. When we put grilled chicken or something else on our salad, we are dismissing our salad. You are not good enough, we have to add THIS.
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I am unable to send files to my phone to text, so here is a sought after recipe for gourmet mac and cheese, attributed to chef Terrance Brennan:
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1.Bring 2 quarts of salted water to a boil and add the elbow macaroni. Cook until it's al dente, approximately 6 to 8 minutes.
2.While the macaroni is boiling, slowly melt 5 1/2 Tbs of butter over medium high heat in a medium sauce pan.
3.Add the flour, stirring, cook together for a minute or so. Do not brown the mixture; you want a blonde roux. Add the milk, whisking to avoid lumps. Bring mixture to a boil and continue whisking. Lower heat and simmer for about five minutes until it thickens.
4.While the milk is simmering, combine 2 Tbs butter and the bread crumbs, and melt together in a separate pan.
5.Add the Parmesan cheese. This adds another layer of flavor so it's not one-dimensional. Just cook until the butter is melted. Remove from heat.
6.When the milk is ready, add the mascarpone cheese. Then add gruyere cheese and whisk it in, and as soon as until it's melted, remove from the heat. This will happen quickly because the gruyere cheese should be grated and at room temperature.
7.Season with salt and black pepper and whisk to combine. Add the macaroni to the cheese sauce, mix it well, and when it's nicely incorporated, spoon it out into a cooking dish. 8.Sprinkle the bread crumbs on the top, using your hands to pat it down to make sure it's nice and evenly dispersed all over the surface. The topping becomes very crunchy when it bakes. Cook for about 35-40 minutes in a 350 degree oven until golden brown and bubbly.
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My marina neighbor, Chef Jonathan, needed to go to Pocomoke, so I took him along in Cornelia Marie's old car, the Honda CRV. The check engine light had come on again, and it seems to coincide with driving through some of Crisfield's salty floods. I think the salt water causes malfunction of the oxygen sensors which results in the fuel/air ratio being wrong. The exhaust then starts to smell like unburned gasoline. I threw another can of Cataclean in the gas tank and after about 10 miles on the way to Pocomoke the check engine light went out. The stuff really seems to work.
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We discussed making Borscht and making Beef Stroganoff. These are both Eastern European dishes that use sour cream. Why not combine the two recipes?
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When I got back I cubed a chuck roast and browned the cubes in a soup kettle, then added mirepoix and diced potatoes, then a pint of water and let it simmer for about a half hour. I added sliced mushrooms and ten minutes later 3 cans of sliced beets and their liquid. A small sour cream was blended into the soup and it was allowed to rest. I used dill as the main spice along with some garlic salt and some balsamic vinegar. It tasted OK but seemed to need something, something was missing. I gave a large portion to my boat neighbors.
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The next day I asked about how they liked the soup and Jonathan did not say he liked it, but he said his partner did, but she is from Hungaria. I put away 5 portions of the soup in the fridge. They invited me over for a cookout later.
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I continued with the Atomic 4 cylinder head. I purchased 1/4-20 bolts from Lowe's along with a length of angle bar, 1/8" thickness. I cut off 4 five inch pieces and positioned them over the hollowed out spark plugs, each with a 1/4-20 bolt sticking up, and marked the angle bars to drill out ¼" holes. I put the angle bars together in pairs and ran the 1/4" bolts up through them and put washers and nuts on them. The bars were resting on cylinder head studs that are fastened into the block. I had been liberally spraying Blaster penetrating oil on all the studs so that maybe they would allow me to tighten the 1/4" bolts and pull the head up off the block. When I tried it, the head moved, I could insert my pry bar between the head and the block. Success.
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The news was ablaze with reports of Jets head coach Robert Saleh being fired after going 2-3 in this season's 5 games. Seems like a brutal firing, but he has been there over 3 years and the team is not doing as well as it should.
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The cookout with Chef Jonathan ended up being a dark affair in their cockpit, Magnum grill ablaze the only light. If you can cook a good meal like that you are really doing something. He made green beans with a sauce, told me how he made it, couldn't comprehend, I would have to write it down. Another sailing couple with a lot of experience, transpacific, etc., joined us. We ate steaks with green beans and what seemed like fried plantains, but they were slices of yams, yummie.
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I had a couple of cousins that had gone missing in North Carolina during the flooding. It turned out they lived not far from where Eloisa was staying and I was now in intermittent contact with her and asked her to scout around. I received a call in the morning from her and one of my cousins. They can be taken off the missing persons list.
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The image is of my improvised Atomic 4 head lifting apparatus. The bolt in the middle of the picture comes up from a hollow spark plug and it is bolted to a pair of angle bars about 5" long. They are positioned on top of each other, so it looks like metal channel. Under each end of the angle bars is a stud coming up through the head from the block. Tightening the bolt will pull up on the head.