Century Club: Jeffrey Halpern

This was a good one. I raced on the Tartan 101 "Starbird". The owner was not able to be on board so Julian Richards was the helmsman for the night. I got to call tactics, fly the chute, and otherwise pitch-in where needed. The crew work has greatly improved as the season has been progressing.. We seemed to have really good boat speed even on the legs that are not normally Starbird's strong suite. Except for picking the wrong end of the line at the start, the tactics worked out well and we once again continued the trend of improving our finish place place with each race.

Despite the dire predictions the day before, it turned out to be a lovely evening on the water. . 

I love the races to Oxford. Those are the perfect short-handed race with long enough legs make to sense short-handed, but not so long a course that you need to have 'watches'. They typically occur in the early spring and beginning of fall and so typically have decent winds and acceptable temperatures. There are bound to be tactical and strategic challenges. Tred Avon YC is a great host club at the finish.

This Saturday was the AYC Spring race to Oxford and I was psyched. Ten days out I started watching the weather. It was showing a 10-12 knot gusting to 20 run down the Bay with a following current. Then a beat through the Dogleg and up to the red before another reach down the Choptank and a beat to the finish. Perfect! Synergy is competitive and a hoot in those conditions.

AYC was not permitting any single-handed entries, so I was planning to sail with my friend Julian, which as much as I like single-handing, was an added bonus.

But as the race approached I began seeing predictions of lighter and lighter winds with a big zero-wind dead-spot in the middle of the race. Its rare that there is a convergence between the various weather prediction sources, but by Friday the projections for this weekend they all matched perfectly.

Not to be deterred I did my usual weather routing study. The dead-spot hit the course about an hour after the start. It hit the next weather station heading down the course about an hour later, and the one after that roughly another hour later. Overlaying my anticipated speeds in those light winds, it became apparent that the dead zone would essentially follow the racers down the Bay, and that even with a shortened course, I could not make the finish line by the deadline.

Beyond that, serious rain storms and high winds were predicted to start a couple hours after the race and rain was predicted the next day, so burn and turn wasn't even a good option.

I probably would have chanced it if I was single-handed, but knowing what I knew about the predicted weather, I could not ask a crew to do that. This weekend became the race to nowhere as I decided to not even try to start. Those who did race said that the predictions were basically right with even the grand prix boats taking five hours to finish the shortened course 15 nm course with a knot of following current.

Instead I went out day-sailing. It was a lovely day for that. The dreaded dead spot showed up and as predicted slid off quickly to the south, so I had nice breezes for most of the sail. On the way home I ducked into Annapolis Harbor. Coincidentally my wife and a friend were walking in the Naval Academy as I sailed past and called to me.
 

I swung around and went back to say Hello....

Barbara beat me home and was relaxing in the Adirondack chairs up on the bluff at the house. She snapped this picture as I motored in towards the dock.

Today I continued with the survey prep. I checked all of the seacocks.. They all worked, but the seacocks for the cockpit scuppers were a bit stiff. Those are 65 mm (roughly 2 1/2") gate valves. Big hunking, industrial looking chunks of carefully machined bronze.

When I bought Synergy the purchase survey suggested that gate valves are discouraged for seacocks, but since the scupper thru-hulls are above the waterline, the surveyor passed them back then. Replacing them would be scarily expensive since the thru-hull would either be an odd 65 mm metric size, or else I would need to glass over the hole in the boat and then cut a new hole to install a new Imperial Unit thru-hull and seacock. Those seacocks always work when I use them, but I almost never use them and so they tend to stick the first time I try to close them. All lubed up they turn easily now.

With the port cockpit scupper seacock closed, I was able to disconnect the old bilge pump discharge hose from the Tee fitting and continue installing that end of the new bilge pump discharge hose.

Then I started working on the bilge pump end of the hose. I had decided to replace all of the fittings as well as the hose which meant unmounting the bilge pump and disconnecting all of the old hose parts. In doing so, I managed to break the water pump housing. I had replaced that bilge pump when I bought Synergy so the pump was now 23 years old. It had faithfully performed its services and was given an appropriate burial in the recycling bin.

With everything out of the sumps, I decided it was a perfect time to scrub the bilges. More archeology this time in slimy layers punctuated by decades of lost small fastenings.

I made another a quick trip to West Marine before closing time to pick up a new bilge pump, some liquid insulation and a few more hose clamps.

The next morning, I finished installing the bilge pump, wiring it and attaching the hoses.. More Boago.....

Its a tough job but someone had to do it. I have been helping a friend set up her boat for single-handed sailing. We added  some new and some savaged and freshened deck and mast hardware and swapped out running rigging. We wrapped that up on Friday night, but not before I had to go up the mast to clear a jamb (or my own making) at the masthead and then feed the new main halyard through the sheave box.