Monday - August 24th - Schenectady Yacht Club

We are at the Schenectady Yacht Club.  It reminds me of the Hempstead Harbor Club that my parents belonged to when I was young.  It is a bunch of floating docks and a couple of buildings.  We asked about a bar and restaurant when we called them and they said, no, we don’t have one.  We will give you a beer but we can’t sell you a bear!  As a point of reference for my Milwaukee friends, South Shore is way upscale!   We arrived late in the evening when our other docking options turned out not to be docking options.  Several members of the club were on their fuel dock to take lines and swap stories.  We had pizza delivered and spent the evening swapping tales.  We also met a couple that were transiting west, they had come east several weeks ago and were on their way home.

 

I have not blogged for the last couple of days as nothing much has happened, just more watching paint dry with one exception.  As we were transiting Lake Oneida we passed a powerboat exhibiting an orange flag with a black square and circle.  Jerry and I both dredged in our deep memory and finally said “ah ha” – that is a distress flag.  The guy waving his arms overhead was a clue too!  We were able to raise them on the radio to find out that their battery was dead and they could not start their engine.  We carry a jumper pack for just the possibility of the same problem so we figured we would go over and lend it to them.  We reversed course and headed back to them.  As we are making our approach they yell over that they have raised a friend on the cell phone who is coming to their rescue.  Given the relative shapes of the two boats we figured that it was safer not to push the point that we were there with the necessary rescue equipment but just said OK and reversed course again.  As Jerry would say, we checked off “rescue” on our experience checklist.

 

Everywhere we go there are signs of the bad economy.  The locals in every town mention how business is down; the marinas tell us that the number of transient boats is way down this year.  We went thru one lock where we were the only boat to transit the entire day – and this is high season.

 

Congratulations to my brother Ace on his 65^th birthday last Saturday the 22^nd.  He is now firmly in the grips of the government dole!  I guess it is time for him to join AARP and become a Democrat.  He also retires from the bank this next Thursday.

 

Our plan over the next couple of days is to finish the Eire Canal today and then overnight before transiting the “Federal Lock” that leads into the Hudson River.  I intend to do some preparatory work on the mast, then down to the Castleton Boat Club.  This is “the” place on the east end of the canal where everyone puts up or takes down their masts.  Once we have put the mast back up – a much shorter process than the two days it took us to take it down and build the supports - we will head down the Hudson River for New York and an in person reunion with my brother and sister-in-law Ace and Sally.  Of course, since I saw them at EAA a couple of weeks ago after not seeing them for several years it will no quite be the same.  Jerry will jump off at some point after we get Reboot back together and head home to attend to other things.  I believe he will then be doing a transit with friends to the Caribbean in late October or early November.

 

My plan is to muck around in Long Island Sound for much of the month of September.  I will visit Glen Head where I grew up.  I also plan on visiting my parents’ graves at Trinity Church in Roslyn, NY.  I have a bunch of stuff to fix and install.  Then down to the Chesapeake Bay for October.  At that point I will have to decide on next steps for the winter.

 

In the small world department the Dockmaster at SYC is from Long Island.  He tells me that visiting cruisers told him that the Manhasset Bay Yacht Club has the least expensive transient dockage on Long Island.  Of course I sailed out of Manhasset Bay several times as a kid.  It was (is) one of the most high end clubs on Long Island.  Go figure.

Reboot position http://www.winlink.org/dotnet/maps/PositionReportsDetail.aspx?callsign=W2ZDB