Keeping Water Out of a Boat

Haverstraw – 0 nautical miles and 0 kilometers walked

For a boat, it’s important to have the water on the outside. Outside water provides buoyancy, a means through which to move to place to place, and a place to swim and fish. But outside water is also required for a few key boat systems - the trick is to draw outside water into the boat in a controlled and predictable fashion. If you get too much outside water inside the boat, then outside water becomes inside water and inside water becomes outside water and you have just sunk.

 

Outside water is drawn into the boat via thru hulls, which are open holes below the waterline protected by opening/closing valves called seacocks, which are installed with strong adhesive to make them waterproof. This outside water is used for engine cooling, air conditioner/heating units, toilet flushing, and sometimes to provide water to the galley sink. Fresh water for drinking, cooking, and showers is also stored in onboard tanks, and they are filled by removing a screw-on cap from one or multiple deck fittings and pumping in the water, usually from a water source at a dock, or from large portable containers. Pumps then move this water from the onboard tanks to all the taps, showers, ice makers, and anywhere else where water is required.

Where can things go wrong? Leaks in the thru hulls, leaks in the deck fittings, leaks in the taps or drains, leaks in the hoses that move the water throughout the inside systems, or leaks in the systems themselves. 

 

Outside water can also get into the boat in a less controlled manner. Rainwater or splashing ocean water can get in through leaky windows, leaky hatches, at the mast step or through the mast, or cracks or holes in the topsides of the boat. There are other places water can enter – through the shaft seal, which is where the shaft from the engine exits the boat, and protected by either a dripless shaft seal or a traditional stuffing box that drips in a predictable way to provide lubrication. Another way is through the rudder, as the place where the rudder connects to the steering system is often below the waterline. Yet another way is through the keel bolts, which is where the sailboat’s heavy keel is bolted through the fibreglass. There are a couple of less obvious ones too. Air conditioners create condensation, as do windows when there is a temperature differential between the inside and outside of the boat. There are also refrigerators and iceboxes that have drains for collected water and fluids. 

 

Fortunately, boats are designed to expel any outside water that gets inside. The controlled systems usually have their own pumps and thru hulls. For example, the engine draws in water then expels it through a wet exhaust hose and hull fitting, usually above the waterline. Boat heads and galleys use pumps or gravity to remove grey water (from showers and sinks) and toilet pumps move black water into an internal holding tank, which is later pumped out at a marina through a deck fitting. The air conditioner/heating unit also has a pump which discharges the water via a thru hull.

 

What’s left is the bilge pump, which is the final defense against outside water when inside systems fail. The bilge pump (or pumps, as it’s better to have two or more for redundancy) lies at the bottom-most part of the boat and the hull is designed such that any leaking water should eventually find its way there, usually through a series of drain holes. Most boats have a series of floor compartments which channel the water into the main bilge so it can be pumped out.

 

Which brings me to SeaLight. She’s generally been a pretty dry boat, but this year she started collecting water in the bilge compartments. It began slow at first then got slightly worse as the summer progressed, but not to the point of panic. Every week we’d come down to the boat and I’d have to remove a salad bowl full of water, and this water collected in a place where it didn’t quite reach the drain hole to make it into the centre compartment where the bilge pump is. It was an annoyance, but we had so many other projects to do to prepare the boat for this trip that we weren’t able to focus on that problem.

 

For the past two weeks, the problem has been getting worse. More water seemed to be collecting when we were underway with the engine, but not all the time. We also discovered there is a large cavity below the visible bilge compartments that I could draw at least a gallon of water out by using a vacuum on the drain holes. We checked all the thru hulls and looked for leaks anywhere we could access the hull from inside the boat, but found no sign of leaks. Also, up until this point the boat was in fresh water so it was impossible to tell if the water was coming from our fresh water system, rainwater, or lake/river water. We had our buddy boat friends come over and look at it and provide advice. Ben suggested that instead of drinking rum every evening for cocktail hour we should be removing a salad bowl of water and doing bilge shots, to detect changes in salinity, not to mention delicate bouquets of diesel and mold. Jeff figured we should take a grinder and shave off the fibreglass from the drain holes to see what the hell was going on down there. If there was indeed a leak coming from the outside, then we were going to have to haul the boat and have it repaired as incessant leaking was going to do some major damage to the integrity of the fibreglass. Two excellent suggestions, but I wasn’t quite ready to go that far.

 

I had been taste testing the river water and today I could finally detect salinity, which was going to prove once and for all if the water was coming in from the outside – now it was time for bilge shots. The other factor was that we had some pretty major repairs done to the hull this past spring which involved cutting out fibreglass, re-glassing, and re-bedding the entire keel, which was required due to an unplanned encounter last summer between our keel and a underwater Thousand Islands boulder. The guy that fixed it – Peter Jones from Niagara-on-the-Lake – is a real pro and I could just not fathom that he could have done anything other than a perfect repair.

 

The other day I thought we had cracked the problem as we discovered a plugged anti-siphon valve which was causing engine cooling water to be ejected from a hose into the bilge. Well, after extensive testing over days, turns out that was not the entire problem, as we were still getting water. So today we ripped open every floorboard, sucked every single drain hole and compartment dry and went through our systems one by one, testing, and monitoring for leaks. And we found two. The accumulator tank under the main galley sink had a slow but steady leak, so I removed it, and with the help of Ben we took it apart and discovered the bladder was ripped. So I bypassed the accumulator, plumbed the line directly into the pump, which stopped the leak. We hadn’t noticed this before because we had so many cleaning supplies and brushes and other junk rammed in below the sink. Secondly, we discovered the main shower room has a gap at the fitting where sink and shower water drips down, slips into a drain hole, and was eventually finding its way into the bilge. But you could only see it happening when the shower was on and you had your head jammed into the small cabinet under the sink.

 

By the end of the day, we were able to confirm there is no more water collecting in the bilge. Even better, Ana discovered a marine store just a mile away from our location and ordered a new accumulator tank, plus a few other bits and pieces we need.

Thanksgiving in Central America

Chelsea Yacht Club to Haverstraw – 23 nautical miles and 3 kilometers walked

For the first time since the day we crossed Lake Oneida, we awoke to rain. The weather we’ve experienced so far has been incredible – favourable winds, sunny and warm days, cool nights, and getting a little cooler as the days pass. At some point our pursuit of sunny southern climates will overpower the relentless orbit of the Earth tilting us Northerners further and further away from the sun. But we aren’t there yet – this is still a race against winter.

 

We had consumed one of our water tanks and about a quarter of the second, but had forgotten to ask the members of the club we met yesterday if and where we could fill up the tanks, so we left the mooring and started our way down the Hudson looking for options, and we found one such option at a marina near Newburgh. We pulled in, got docked with the help of a friendly Quebecer there with his catamaran, and proceeded to fill up both water tanks. We asked him the protocol for water fills – payment and such – and he said, “Just fill up and leave – nobody’s around!” So we did just that and could now be fairly accused of shoplifting 400 litres of fresh water. In my defense, I did try to get to the marina office to ask somebody, but it was behind a locked gate and I didn’t want to strand myself in case nobody was there.

 

The sail today was pleasant and uneventful, and an hour into the trip we passed right out of the big storm system passing west to east and found sunshine. We passed by West Point military school which looked like a damn Game of Thrones stronghold. By about 1:30 pm, 45 minutes before low tide, we approached the entrance of Haverstraw Harbour, a sizeable anchorage with 360 degree protection and room for at least twenty boats. The only problem was this: the charts showed 4.5 feet of depth at the channel entrance at low tide, and SeaLight draws a full 6 feet. I didn’t think there was going to be enough water for us to get in so I foresaw us dropping anchor in the river and waiting 3 – 4 hours for the tide turnaround. We dropped the dinghy and I ripped towards the channel entrance checking the depth at various points with our handheld depth sounder. The lowest I found was 6.5 feet so I raced back, tied the dingy to the arch and hit the gas. As we approached, we both stood at the helm watching the boat’s depth sounder nervously and there was no way to guarantee the entire channel held enough water. Our sounder displayed the depth of water under our keel – 14..11..8..3..1..0.5..0.3..0.1, 0.0.. We waited for the boat to skid to a halt but she floated through magically on a cushion of luck and we got ourselves anchored and secure in a most amazingly protected anchorage.

 

We took the dinghy into the public dock to explore the town of Haverstraw, expecting to find English pubs and biscuit shops judging by the Britishness of the name, but we found anything but.

We had been dropped into the middle of Central America and the Latin Caribbean. Main Street was a bustling affair with packs of Latino men with perfectly chiseled facial hair gathered outside of shops speaking in rapid fire Spanish, with accents from a dozen countries. All the business signs were in Spanish or Spanish and English or Spanglish. Latina hoochies in camel-toed stretchy pants strutted past the groups of hot blooded gangstas, attracting attention. Little kids darted in and out of stores, through the legs of loiterers, and one did a catwalk on his bike along the sidewalk for an entire block. A soul-vibrating wall of bass came up behind us, nearly knocking us off our feet, and I was sure the home made spoiler on the driver’s Honda Civic was going to rattle right off. Music blasted from every shop – Bachata, Reggaeton, Salsa, Ranchera, Merengue. We walked the entire length of the two commercial streets and found a repeating pattern of shops – densely packed bodegas with identical specialty Latino grocery offerings such as tinned Goya products, hot sauces, rice, and spices. There were Sports Bars, Barber Sports Bars, beauty salons, restaurants, hot pants clothing stores, cafes, laundromats, money transfer places, plus a Catholic church or two. And people everywhere, in the shops, in the streets, cruising in vehicles, in stark contrast to the many upstate ghost towns we visited.

 

Ana and I have been in a hundred neighbourhoods like this – in Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, but never in one with people from all of these places. It was a kaleidoscope of vibrant Latin colour and food, fashion and sounds, skin tones and accents, men and women and kids, and it was on the Hudson River in the USA. I loved it.

We wandered back to the dinghy, along the way discussing how on earth all these Latinos pronounce the word “Haverstraw” because that unruly sequence of consonants and vowels do not easily glide off the Spanish tongue.

 

Our faithful buddy boat Waddington had arrived shortly after us earlier in the day so we gathered in SeaLight’s cockpit for an afternoon cocktail and I sneaked a photo as the setting sun shone a beautiful colour into our space. Somewhere along the line somebody realized it was Canadian Thanksgiving, so cocktail hour turned into dinner and we enjoyed a fine meal together then finished up the night with a new game we invented with our friends Greg and Sharon back in Newport. Each person gets ten minutes to deliver their life story, from birth to now. Go!

Anchoring Chaos and Chelsea Yacht Club

Saugerties to Chelsea Yacht Club – 35 nautical miles

We awoke in a calm and picture-perfect village anchorage but the moment of peace was soon shattered when the anchor alarm on Ana’s phone started screeching. I looked out to see that some unusually strong wind gusts had somehow dislodged our aft anchor and we had almost completely turned around and were heading for the shallows. The only thing keeping us from grounding was the NO WAKE buoy, which was lodged somewhere beneath our boat.

 

I dropped the dinghy, revved it up, and rammed it into the side of our boat to push them back into place. Poor Ben had been out for a morning row and had to shift into Olympic gear as he saw the boats swinging around and us out there losing our minds. I managed to push the boats out enough so the buoy popped back up, then had Ana start the engine to try and to hold the boats steady while I hauled up the anchor and tried to reposition it while also doing the Superman pull with the attached anchor line to help pull the boats in place, which was difficult with all the wind. I got the anchor partially repositioned and the boats out of danger zone, then we decided to just leave the anchorage as it was already 8:30 and it was a little embarrassing having to see all the gape-mouthed fishermen on the banks pointing and laughing at the circus in front of them.

 

The initial plan today was to sail to the next major town of Kingston, but after arriving and anchoring, we didn’t much like the exposed anchorage and heavy winds so we decided to keep on going and find somewhere to stay further down the river. The tide had just turned which would give us a 1 -2 knot boost, plus the strong northerly winds were good for sailing and we could make some miles. So we sailed. The river here was much busier – freighters, barges, tugs, bass boats, trawlers, and many sailboats packed the river, some going south like us, others headed north. By 2:30 we were still looking over the charts and guidebooks, trying to find a decent anchorage for the night when we saw something strange in the distance. As we approached, we realized it was a field of mostly unoccupied mooring balls, in front of the Chelsea Yacht Club. At that moment Ana received a text from Kate and Ben, who were several miles behind us, telling us to watch for this place as the mooring was free to travelers. Ana called the club and they reluctantly assigned us a mooring ball – reluctantly because they normally accepted up to 36 foot boats and our fattie was 7 feet too long, so they were worried the concrete mooring would drag. Sure enough, after tying up, the club marshal came by and told us we were too big and staying here would be at our own risk. We took the risk, but sat in the cockpit for the next hour or two to make sure we were staying in place despite the high winds and currents.

 

Kate and Ben arrived and not too long after that Jeff also arrived, after sailing a very, very long day so we gave him a hand getting tied up then invited him over for dinner. But he ended up not being able to make it, so we had a quiet dinner of butter chicken, dal, rice, and warmed up, through slightly stale naan bread, then relaxed for the rest of the evening.

Saugerties Anchor Training and a Romantic Paddle

Athens to Saugerties – 14 nautical miles and 5 kilometers walking

After a couple of hours motor sailing we reached the channel entrance to Saugerties and slid slowly and carefully past the dredger. It was taking up most of the space as the giant claws of the backhoe plunged into the water, retrieved massive loads of sticky mud, then dumped it into the hopperscow.

 

We motored slowly down the channel, which became progressively skinnier until we reached the end where the anchorage was marked on the chart. Although beautiful, there simply wasn’t much space and we had to double check the charts just to make sure it was an anchorage. We inched into the space and found over 30 feet of water in the middle, but it rapidly shallowed around the edges, making anchoring a challenge. When anchoring, you should normally put out 5 – 7 feet of anchor line for every 1 foot in depth to ensure adequate holding power. So in the case where you have deep water with steep banks going up to the shallows, you need to get close enough to the shallows to drop the anchor, but the problem is the boat can swing right into the shallows if the wind or current changes. The solution? A stern anchor, set from the back of the boat which keeps the boat parallel to the shore, allows you to anchor in the shallows, but prevents swinging. This we did, but it was a minor shit show, as we’d never used a second anchor on this boat, and it happened to be buried beneath a couple hundred pounds of chain in the anchor hold. Between the two of us we managed to use the boat engine to first drop the primary anchor in the shallows, then reversed the boat to set the anchor hard, then used the engine to keep us off the shallows while we wrestled the second anchor out, launched the dinghy, got the rusted and filthy anchor into the dinghy, then carried the anchor out to the appropriate spot, dropped it, then set it. We had to reposition the second anchor a couple of times to get it right, but eventually we were happy with the position of the boat and the anchors were tight and holding well. Waddington had tried to anchor a bit further down the channel but found nothing but shale rock on the bottom so instead tied up alongside SeaLight (known in the boating world as “rafting”).

 

After all that stressful manoeuvring, we sat back to appreciate the anchorage. It was quiet and incredibly beautiful with a small park on one side, towering shale cliffs on the other, packed in with rapidly colouring autumn leaves, then the creek disappearing around a corner in the distance.

 

We paddled the dinghies over to the park then took a walk to explore Saugerties. After humping it up a long and seemingly never-ending series of inclines, we finally reached the downtown area and found an incredibly cute main street with a surprising variety of shops, not nearly as upscale as Hudson, but with just the right touch of it, alongside diners, hardware stores, and regular old bars. Kate and Ben hit the Ace Hardware to pick up a propane heater to warm up their boat on these increasingly chilly evenings, then went to Price Chopper for groceries. Ana and I just wandered around exploring the shops and people-watching.

 

Back at the boat we decided to take the ladies for a romantic dinghy paddle so Ana and I jumped in our dinghy, and I started rowing as I sang her a series of magnificently delivered Frank Sinatra classics and she drank her coconut-flavoured Buble, very fitting. Fortunately, before the romance became too overwhelming and a heavy petting session ensued, we were hit with a wall of sewer stink.

“Was that you?” she said, eyeing me suspiciously as I heaved on the paddles, sniffing the air.

 

I pointed towards the sewage treatment plant just beyond the trees and asked her to plug her nose.

 

We soon passed the sewage zone and came to a picturesque waterfall and the end of the navigable part of the creek. By this time Ben and Kate had caught up to us so we all eased back, enjoyed the rest of our drinks, and chatted about online dating, which seemed to be the only reliable way for singles to meet these days, making mine and Ana’s first contact at a slot machine in a Bahamian casino seem rather retro and dated.

 

We rounded up our leftovers and made a delicious chicken stir fry for dinner then sat with Ben and Kate for hours in our cockpit eating cheese Sun Chips, drinking Filipino rum, and scanning the sky for northern lights which everybody else in North America seemed to be seeing, but were mysteriously absent for us.

Highway Hot Dogs in Athens, Pupusas in Hudson, and the Wokest Street in America

Coxsackie to Hudson to Athens – 7 nautical miles and 14,000 steps

The hurricane season has been heating up and causing all sorts of chaos in the Caribbean and US. Everyone had been laughing at the weather forecasters who predicted a brutal hurricane season this year, but only a few storms had occurred. The end of September brought a little more action and now it seems there’s a new one brewing every few days. We are well outside of the regularly affected range of hurricanes but are sticking to a slower pace as we’ve heard a lot of boats are backing up in New York City waiting for these hurricanes to pass before they continue south. We are okay taking it slow for now as we are really enjoying exploring these new towns, getting used to the tides and currents, hanging out with our new friends, making great meals, daily cocktail hour, and taking advantage of all the free or cheap docks we’ve been able to find. The free options are going to dry up the closer to NYC, then after that it will be all anchoring, which is sure to bring its own challenges.

 

We left Coxsackie around 9:30 on an outgoing tide and most of the seven miles were spent dodging massive freighters and barges moving up and down the Hudson. Everybody here communicates on channel 13 and I’ve found the vessel captains to be extremely helpful on the radio in planning out how to manage the channel and keep out of their way. We reached Hudson but the free public docks there were far too small for our boats so instead we continued across the river to the much smaller town of Athens where we found, once again, magnificent and free public docks. These ones had large “NO OVERNIGHT DOCKAGE” signs, but everything we read online said this was not enforced so we tied up SeaLight then caught Kate and Ben’s lines when they arrived.

 

Athens is a cute little town, but once again we didn’t find much open, and the whole place was eerily deserted, looking almost like a movie set shortly before the zombies start piling up and eating everybody’s brains. It didn’t help when we came across a rusted out Hearse parked behind a derelict house and in the back window of the Hearse was a paper cut out of Joe Biden. I did get a little excited when we found a flag outside a brewery with the lettering DEEP FRIED BEERS, but the damn place was closed so I didn’t get to try a deep fried beer. I might go back tomorrow.

At 11:30 a loud siren went off and lasted for 4 excruciating minutes. I started salivating like a Pavlovian dog, trained at one of the previous towns which had a noon siren, signifying lunch. We’ve noticed most of these small American towns have sirens – another one had two per day – the noon one, but also one at 5pm which meant go home. There was one in a different town that went off very early so I guess that one meant wake up. But at siren at 11:30 didn’t make any sense. So we went to the Town Hall to find the mayor and get some answers.

 

The mayor hadn’t turned up for work but we did find a clerk who told us their sirens were used to call in the volunteer fire force for emergencies like cats in trees or gas plant explosions.

“But when the siren went off nobody came running out of houses,” Ana said.

 

“Well, they are supposed to come,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Wait, what time is it? Is it noon? They were probably going to the bakery first. It opens at noon.”

 

Bakery? We left immediately to investigate this new development.

 

As we walked back down the main street we saw a queue forming on the sidewalk and Kate got really excited – the most excited I’ve seen her yet. You see, Kate is English, and the English love nothing better than a good queue. It doesn’t even matter what they’re lining up for. If there’s a queue, there must be something at the end worth waiting for. We reached the queue and it was indeed the bakery with at least six people (presumed firefighters) waiting to buy bread. We didn’t need any bread and it took the strength of all three of us to pull Kate away from the queue as she was grasping onto a street sign, yelling and screaming for us to let her join the line, and we had her horizontal, pulling her by the legs. It was a little embarrassing.

 

To make her feel better we walked over to Stewart’s Shops, a gas station/eatery that seems very common in these parts. Ana, Ben, and I created a faux-queue by standing next to the hot dog roller and she jumped in line behind us, overcome with glee. I crafted a magnificent hot dog complete with ketchup, relish, and a bunch of steamy meat sauce while Ana and Ben went for a more basic version. Kate doesn’t dig on swine, so she ordered a waffle chicken sandwich, a very strange looking item and we all went outside, sat at the picnic tables, and enjoyed our highway lunch. Ana also picked up a big jug of fancy vanilla ice cream which we shared for dessert.

Back at the boats, Kate and Ben decided to hang back and do some boat jobs while Ana and I took the dinghy over to Hudson to see what that town had to offer. We slid the dinghy into the public dock, very excited to test out our new safety chain, then realized we have forgotten both the lock and the key, so had to do a quick return trip. The system is a super thick, ten foot long, bolt-cutter resistant chain with a big fat stainless steel lock which connects the motor and dinghy to anything solid - in this case a bow-roller bolted to the dock.

 

From here we walked quite far to the downtown area and reached the base of Warren Street and let me tell you, I have never seen anything quite like it. The street was arrow-straight and must have been at least a mile long, and on it was a never-ending sequence of fanciness. Art galleries, vintage clothing shops, fancy cafes, high end fashion stores, custom and vintage furniture shops, an opera house, a theatre, funky bookstores with Democrat-friendly titles, gourmet food boutiques, wine shops, hair stylists, and at the end was a Democrat campaign office. The trucks we’d gotten used to seeing everywhere else were replace with Tesla, Porsche, and Lexus vehicles. The people were either well dressed, or hippy’d up and there were plenty of same sex couples, all with beautiful teeth and classy footwear. The contrast with every other town we’d visited so far, with their Trump signs, beaten up downtowns, beaten up people, and deserted buildings was striking. And it made sense of the chaotic political situation we see in the US. It really is a tale of two realities.

Ana’s uncanny retail radar picked up a thrift shop and I found a super classy new shirt with snaps for seven buck plus a Richard Dawkins book on Athiesm, and a God book showing how quantum mechanic principles prove reincarnation, fifty cents each, sure to bring me fresh enlightenment. Ana struck out, but she gets a lot of joy just digging around in these places.

 

Ana found an Aldi store that was a mile or so away so we started walking and almost immediately came across a huge liquor superstore (where I bought a 1.75 litre bottle of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum for $37), then directly after that was an authentic Salvadorian pupusaria, where we enjoyed three delicious pupusas and made friends with the three sisters who owned the place and their kids who were running around causing trouble.

 

Aldi was a shopping extravaganza and we bought enough food to last us three weeks. An Uber picked us up, dashed us back to the dinghy which we loaded up with our bags, zipped back across the river to Athens, unloaded everything, then joined Kate and Ben for dinner at Stella’s Pizza, and came home with two days’ worth of leftovers.

That, my friends, is how you make a day feel like a week.

Solution to a Difficult Problem and Shopping in Coxsackie

Castleton to Coxsackie – 11 nautical miles, a walk around town

The only job we didn’t get to yesterday was putting up the headsail, which we did together then went for a little dinghy ride along the shoreline and found a huge bald eagle nest up in the trees. Steve had told us a story about one of the resident eagles who was seen scrapping with a seagull over a fish. Later that day somebody found the seagull on the dock, and all that remained of it was two perfectly placed wings minus the body, clearly left as a message to the rest of the seagull population. The message? Don’t fight with eagles.

 

We fired up the boat, rolled out the headsail, and began our way southwards on the Hudson. It was a real joy to see that sail up again. We kept the motor running at low RPM and enjoyed the ride, at least until I went below and found the bilges rapidly filling up with water. Remember that thing about sailing being hours of monotonous boredom, interrupted periodically by moments of chaos, panic, and terror? This was one of those moments. But first, the back story.

 

Last summer we struck an underwater rock while cruising in the Thousand Islands which did some damage to the keel bolts and caused water to start leaking into the boat. At the end of the season we pulled the boat out at Niagara-on-the-Lake to have Peter Jones patch things up, as he’s the best in the business. Spring arrives, the boat gets launched, and everything looks great, but soon a bit of water starts appearing in the bilge and we have no idea where it’s coming from. Over the summer I kept sponging up the water and investigating the cause. Was it lake water coming in somewhere? Was it a leak in our fresh water pressure system? Was it rain water getting in? It was very hard to tell and we pulled the boat apart trying to find the source to no avail. And by the time we began this trip, I was pulling out a salad bowl or two of water every day.

During the first leg across Lake Ontario, I discovered the water was coming in at a much faster rate, but we still couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Today, as the bilge was rapidly filling, I got the bilge pump working then also started frantically pumping the water with a manual pump. Once I got the water level down I realized the water was coming from the back of the boat so I opened up the engine compartment and found water pouring out of a hose which came from the engine’s anti-siphon valve. Now, I had looked at this many times before as I knew this was a potential source of water, but never saw any water coming out of it when the engine was running. Now, I finally had my culprit. I am sure the valve had been getting progressively more jammed up and had finally seized in an open position, so after the terror subsided I was feeling damn happy because I knew how to fix this. On a side note, as I was digging around the engine I also discovered the negative terminal attached to the alternator had nearly burned off due to a poor connection, which explained the strange smell I had been picking up recently.

 

After arriving at Coxsackie and letting the engine cool while I mopped up the remaining water I removed the anti-siphon valve, cleaned it up, and redid the alternator connection, killing two birds with two stones. Then we went for a walk to explore the town

 

Coxsackie isn’t pronounced the way your dirty mind would expect. It’s Cook-Sookie, likely because a mayor in the past gathered the council members together and said, “Folks, something has to change. Visitors are laughing at our name and vandals are drawing penis figures all over the municipal buildings and public spaces. I have an idea….”

 

The free public docks were lovely and even had a sign with a town map proudly showing all the wonderful things there – an oyster bar, theatre, brewhouse, restaurants, creamery, antique stores, bottle shop, general store, vintage clothing. The only problem is that most of them were closed, but we did go into the General Store and buy a few things. They had some neat stuff, but prices were outrageous and I didn’t feel like paying four dollars for an onion, but I didn’t mind parting with $2.79 for a package of cinnamon flavoured toothpicks, then a bit more for two pots of fancy yogurt and two local IPAs.

 

Our town tour concluded with a visit to the library, which smelled like farts and had a substandard magazine inventory, limited strictly to home and garden topics – no guitar magazines, no Economist, no Cigar Afficionado. I did find a Dolly Parton cookbook that looked pretty good but I wasn’t ready to commit to a Coxsackie library membership and my shoplifting days are way behind me.

Mast Raising and Seals on the Hudson

Castleton Boat Club – 0 nautical miles, a walk around town

What you don’t want to do on SeaLight is to overfill the diesel tank, which is exactly what I did yesterday. This causes pressure in the primary fuel filter which causes it to leak diesel into the engine compartment, which drains under the floor and into one of the bilges, creating a huge mess. I did an initial cleaning yesterday after I started smelling diesel in the cabin, but last night as we sat with our friends in the cockpit I could still smell it wafting around so I spent an hour and a half in the morning flushing it out.

 

Once that job was finished I went outside to check the weather – beautiful and calm, perfect for raising a mast. I also scanned the river to see if I could spot another seal. Yesterday during dinner Jeff saw a seal surface, roll around, then go back down. He couldn’t believe it, so was thinking maybe he had seen something else, but later that evening as we were in the cockpit I happened to look out to the water and I saw a seal head rise up, have a look around, then slowly sink back down. We were definitely not in the lakes anymore.

We were first up for mast raising and I must say it went splendidly. The same crew all helped out and we had it up and secured within about 45 minutes. We did Ben and Kate’s mast next, which took a bit longer, but it went very well too. It was sure nice of Jeff to let us practice on his boat yesterday. We were all relieved seeing those masts up, transforming back into sailboats again.

 

After a walk up and down the small main street of Castleton and finding absolutely nothing open, we got back to work on the boat – adjusting turnbuckles, cinching cotter pins, installing the boom, tying the lazyjacks onto the sail pack, raising the main sail, running the lines back to the cockpit, making all the electrical connections at the mast, coiling and storing all the lines we used for securing the mast on deck, then finally cleaning and putting away tools. It took hours to do all this, and shortly before dusk we motored out to one of the mooring balls across the river, for which they only charged thirty bucks a night. Ana whipped up a delicious meal then I zipped back into the club in the dinghy and brought out Jeff and Jenna (who brought out a box of cookies and a bottle of wine…not to mention the slick winch handles Jeff gave to both us and Ben and Kate earlier in the day) for cocktail hour, and Ben and Kate rowed over in their dinghy to join us. We had a rambunctious toast to celebrate the raising of the masts then eased back for another evening of laughter and stories.

Welcome to Castleton Boat Club

Waterford to Castleton Boat Club – 1 locks, 17 nautical miles

We tossed off the docklines at 8:30, bid farewell to Waterford and the Erie Canal and dipped the bow of SeaLight into the mighty Hudson River. The northbound Hudson leads to the Champlain Canal which in turn leads into the St. Lawrence river and the land known as Quebec. More on that later.

 

We coasted SeaLight into Lock 1, the final (or first, depending on which way you are going) lock of the journey, and the easy canal I was expecting turned out to be not so easy as they didn’t have any damn wall ropes to hang onto so we ended up floating aimlessly, bouncing from side to side, running from bow to stern holding the boat off the rugged concrete walls with our boat hooks, as the water level slowly dropped. The doors finally opened and we motored the hell out of there as I got an earful from the crew.

 

This was to be Mike’s final day as he had booked an evening flight from Albany back to his home in Chicago so he could see through the raising of the mast. It had been so great having him on the trip and all these hours on the boat provided time for us to really catch up. As we cruised down the Hudson, passing many towns, cities, factories, and working vessels, we talked and chatted about so many things. Mike, Ana, and I have been friends for over twenty years now and he has always been so good about keeping in touch. We talk on the phone every few months and meet up in person when we can. I wonder where we’ll met up next?

 

We reached the Castleton Boat Club and there were a couple of people at the fuel dock who caught our lines and helped us in. After docking we stood for a very long time talking to them. One was an outspoken American dude who claimed to be a chiropractor, scientist, boat builder, and competitive athlete, but as we’d find out later, also a trained partier who left a cloud of alcohol vapour trailing behind him. The other guy, Jeff, was also American, from Plymouth, and had, incredibly, single-handed his 36 foot sailboat all the way from Michigan, including the full length of the Erie Canal, which we struggled with having three crew. He had been helping the chiropractor scientist and his friend step their mast and was next in line to do his boat, but the day was becoming increasingly windy.

 

Castleton Boat Club is the only place that rents out their crane for boats to put up their own masts, and they charge only $100 compared to the full service marinas that will cost you five times that. You could say two types of transients stop there – those extremely capable and those extremely cheap. I knew which category we were in.

 

I got us checked in and paid up at the clubhouse and on the way back to the boat I met a local member who introduced himself as Steve and welcomed me then asked who had checked us in.

 

“Uh, it was uh, didn’t catch their name…” I stammered.

 

“Was it a chubby old cigar chomper or a lady?” he asked.

 

“Oh, it was the chubby old cigar chomper, for sure.”

 

“Ok, good. Well we’re all volunteer run here, 50 hours each we need to do every season, but most of us do way more than that. No paid staff, we do everything ourselves. Enjoy your time here, feel free to use the washrooms, water, electrical, and if there’s anything you need just ask.”

 

I liked this place. They bill themselves as the “Friendliest marina on the Hudson” and I believe it.

 

Ben and Kate arrived a couple of hours after us, but there was no space on the dock near the crane and Steve at the fuel dock was yelling at them to dock there, but because of the wind noise they though he was asking them if they needed fuel so they said, “No thanks!” So they continued past the docks and I jogged along them to see if I could help. There were plenty of slips available on the inside row, and once I got to the end I heard Ana yelling at me and pointing to an empty slip down the dock. I thought maybe Steve had told her to put them in there so I started frantically waving them into the channel. They turned the boat in but didn’t get too far before it came to a sticky halt. Grounded. I ran back to the boat and launched our dinghy then tried to pull them out but no luck, it was stuck in hard. As it was low tide they decided to just toss out the anchor, leave the boat, then come back when the tide was coming in. Ben went to the front of the boat and started lowering the anchor. The handle was still sticking out the water as it hit bottom – two feet deep. That drew a chorus of laughter from the bystanders. As they were checking in, Steve awarded them with the Fickle Finger Of Fate trophy for their spectacular grounding.

By early afternoon it seemed clear that our mast (and maybe nobody's) would be going up today because of the wind, so Mike decided to take a late afternoon flight instead of the later one he was scheduled for. We said our goodbyes and I watched him speed off towards Albany in a Uber. I was going to miss him.

 

Despite the wind, a few hours later Jeff decided to give it a go so he got his boat into position and we all took up stations to help him raise the mast. This was the first time any of us had done this. Of course we’d all seen it done many times, and helped many times, but doing it completely on your own is not quite the same thing.

 

As the mast was being hoisted up by a rope around the centre point it looked like the whole thing was going to bend in half. But it didn’t, and we eventually got it up and into place. Jeff’s boat was a keel stepped mast which meant the mast had to go into a hole in the deck, through the boat, then sit into a fitting at the bottom. This means it has to go in very straight so that it doesn’t pry the cabin deck apart. Between the huge gusts of wind, waves, and occasional wake thrown by passing boats, this was a bitch of a job, and there were some tense moments….but we finally got it. Whew.

We invited Jeff over for dinner as his fiancée Jenna who had been traveling with him for some parts of the trip, wasn’t here at the moment and he looked like he could use some nutrition after that nerve wracking experience. Jeff is a very funny guy and as we traded stories he told us of a program he is building to enable army veterans to learn how to sail, which is why he was transporting this current boat. Turns out, he also had an interesting experience in Amsterdam. He had called a local taxi company when the eighty-year-old driver arrived and Jeff was waiting in a different spot across the park, he flew into a rage and drove his car at Jeff and knocked him over. Jeff called the cops and they picked the guy up but said they couldn’t do much unless Jeff wanted to stick around for a couple weeks. Maybe they wanted to wait until he ran a few more people over so they could do a class action prosecution.

 

Kate and Ben joined us for post dinner postres and humour and there were more than a few gut laughs. I love this crew!

The Senior Sailor’s Plan and Midnight Relationship Coaching

Amsterdam to Waterford – 9 locks and 32 nautical miles

Today was going to be our last on the Erie Canal but we had a lot of locks to get through so by 8:15 we were already in Lock 12 dropping down, along with our new buddy boat Waddington, piloted by Ben and Kate.

The canal opened up today and became much wider and there was much more boat traffic than we had seen thus far – mostly fishing boats and pontoon boats, but also a lot more housing along the canal. We passed through the larger town of Schenectady (Skin – ek – tah – dee) then twisted and turned through the winding canal, dropped down locks, including Lock 7 where they crammed in four other boats in addition to ours, including a 70 footer, then by about 2pm we reached the final stretch of the Erie Canal – a massive guard gate, which held a frightening steel guillotine, large enough to slice a yacht in half, then a series of five locks in quick progression, each dropping down 35 feet. The first one went terribly as there were currents in the lock preventing me from getting the boat close enough to the side for Ana and Mike to grab the ropes. Total panic ensued and visions of the starboard side of SeaLight getting scraped to pieces seemed imminent. I finally managed to motor the boat into position after completely stressing the transmission and we got her secured. The lockmaster Leroy calmly moseyed over and informed us that we had not completely lost our skills, but that the valves were misaligned causing the fast current. Fortunately, the rest of the locks went well and by about 4:30 we finally exited the final one and found free dockage just outside the lock in the village of Waterford.

 

After getting tied up and plugged in we walked over to Ben and Kate’s boat and joined them sitting on the edge of the concrete dock wall for a sundowner. It was a beautiful moment – the view over the canal, the warmth of the sun, the sound of water, the cranes and egrets in the shallows dipping for minnows. I think it was at that moment I finally internalized our new reality: reaching the Caribbean on this boat is possible, we have nothing but time on our hands, there is no schedule to maintain, and we are sure to meet new friends and get the help we need along the way. It’s a good reality.

 

Mike’s been coaching us on what it means to be 67. When it was time to head into town for dinner, he used this interesting technique to get up, I’d call it the Roll, Crawl, and Hoist maneuver. He flopped down onto his back, rolled to his front, dragged himself by his elbows further onto the dock, then grasped for anything solid to hang onto, in this case it was a swim ladder, but I could visualize other objects too – a Burmese Mountain dog, vine hanging off a tree, a thick-limbed child, a passing bicyclist, a cute girl’s dress or pant leg. His whole body creaked and moaned as the heaved himself up to his knees then finally staggered to his feet, out of breath, beads of sweat dripping from his silver fox hair.

“You can see the old body doesn’t bend the way it used to,” he stated after finding his footing. “Kris and Ana have been making certain, uh, accommodations for me along the way.”

“Yes, we’ve implemented a Senior Citizens Crew Program on the boat,” I explained to Kate and Ben. “We bought those little cups for dispensing morning meds, made afternoon nap time mandatory, ordered all crew to wear name tags, hand out Sudoku puzzles each morning for memory strengthening, added porridge to the breakfast options, and I’ve ordered a mini crane for hauling the old fellers out of the locks when they lose their balance and flip over the lifelines into the churning water. We also give them a few menial jobs to do so they feel useful – like folding laundry (which Ana refolds), dusting, peeling potatoes, doing lookout, and fluffing pillows before bed. The key element of the program though is we let them pay for everything along the way. Mike’s been piloting the program and really enjoys it.”

We walked the short distance into Waterford downtown and found an Irish pub for dinner, The downtown area was cute and seemed lively enough for a Saturday night. We had a great conversation, talking about the trip so far, and put together a list of what we need to improve for the return trip through the canal next year (listed out below for the benefit of Future Kris, circa May 2025). After our meal we walked back to the boat and Ben and Kate met us there for a nightcap, which turned into several, transforming Ben into a life coach and he gave Ana and I a full analysis of our relationship, at least what he could infer from some of the yelling and screaming he heard coming from our boat in the locks. His relationship rebuilding plan for us was simple, yet to me seemed insightfully constructed. It seemed I would be in for more frequent back scratches from my wife and in return, I would more regularly tell her how amazing she is.

For the cost of mere few ounces of rum, Ana and I made out like bandits and I hoped for more future sessions.

Instructions for better locking: 

• -       Store boom on starboard side of boat
• -       Remove the flag line as it gets in the way
• -       Ensure all crew are wearing life preservers
• -       Get rubberized gloves that don’t soak up the line slime
• -       Enter the lock slowly and as parallel to the wall as possible
• -       Have three boat hooks available, one for each crew, plus a spare if one breaks
• -       Turn portside solar panel in
• -       Grab first rope at midpoint of boat
• -       Set fenders at regular length for down locks, but higher for up locks
• -       Put foam protection at edge of spreaders and sides of arch solar panels
• -       Put the big fender in the middle
• -       Person in the middle to hold rope while going down; other two crew use boat hooks; while going up have two people hold ropes and one to push off