Last Boat Out

"Sandy, my darlin', you hurt me real bad..."
                                   -John Travolta


     Most.
     Chronologically.
     Complicated.
     Haul out.
     Ever.

      Our winter haul out is usually not a very complicated process.  Reluctantly leave the Dock on the last day of the season, wipe away a tear or two as we sail or motor out of the Marina and up the river to the yard, strike the sails, strip the canvas, clean out a season of accumulated junk from the cabin, then segue into boat building season.

      This year, it was like one of those eight grade "If a train leaves the station travelling East and another train..." math questions come to life.

      Original plan:  Haul out on the last day of the season, October 31st, which also happens to be my day off.  Perfect!

       October 18, Complication #1 is introduced.  A sign appears in the marina, tersely warning that the lift bridge will be closed to navigation from October 29- December 15.

       Okay, so now that means we haul out on October 28.  The season is shortened, but not drastically.  No problem.

        Complication #2:  October 28 is Sunday.  A day of rest for the hardworking yard crew.  So, no haul out.

       Okay, I explain the issue to Steve at Bridge Yachts , Whiskeyjack's winter home and he tells me just to grab an empty slip.  No problem.

       Then, the big one, complication #3:  The impending potential arrival of Hurricane Sandy, and the attendant craptastic weather being pushed or stalled right over our heads, starting October 27.

        Sigh.  Okay,  so that is why we ended up scooting up the river with Wally on Friday October 26.

Since I work all weekend, it also meant that the wheels came off our usual finely honed haul out plan.  Whiskeyjack and Quack made it up the river, but Chirp remained on the lee side of the Dock until Sunday evening.

   SWMBO and I donned our foulies and hauled a rain-filled Chirp down the dock, until she ran out of wet stuff to float in.

   We emptied her out, which paradoxically led to me filling my boots with foul-smelling and fouler-feeling muddy sand. (Or sandy mud, depending upon your point of view.)

 

After rinsing my filthy and cold lower limbs in marginally less filthy and cold lake water, we backed Lady Liberty down to the foot of the Dock and  we wrestled the now-empty doughty craft from the grip of the bottom on which she rested, and manhandled her atop our shore transport.

     Leaving us with a final forlorn image of the season:

   
   


"Talk the Dock!"

Dock Six Degrees of Separation

     "You may ask yourself, 'Well, how did I get here?'"
                                                            -Talking Heads




     Let me tell you a story or two.

     You tell me what it all means.

      I've got my own ideas, but maybe there is a rational, logical explanation.   Or maybe it is just Dock Six.

      I started learning to sail back before anybody had ever heard of Luke Skywalker.  The summer of '76 found me enrolled in sailing school on the north shore of Pittock Lake, a man-made reservoir that, at that time, formed the northern boundary of the fledgling city of Woodstock, Ontario.  "Lake" is a pretty generous term for a flood control pond that is essentially a wide part of the Thames River which is emptied every fall. But, when one is an hour away from either Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, one works with what one's got. That summer, I learned the rudiments of sailing and capsizing the school's fleet of elderly second-hand Alcan Petrels.  I.  was.  HOOKED!  By the next summer my indulgent parents had finagled the acquisition  of a Mirror dinghy,  and over the next few summers I thought I was the scourge of the lake, sailing my Mirror through the White, Bronze, Silver and Gold Sail  CYA certifications.  Even then, I wanted a boat that could take me to distant shores, and I gazed enviously at the "big" boats on the lake, the Sirens and Matildas that had their own docks, separate from the lesser daysailers dragged up on the beach at the end of the day.  They had CABINS!  Hell, they even had heads!  Turns out, a man who worked with my father owned one of those Sirens, and it further turns out I went to high school with his son.  I thought the whole boat was great package, and unlike the slightly larger and more complicated Matildas, a Siren seemed... attainable. But, by the time I got to high school the Mirror was no longer seaworthy and I had dicovered internal combustion engines and girls, not necessarily in that order, so I figured I had outgrown my sailing phase,  replaced the Mirror with a Honda motorcycle and moved onto land-locked pursuits.
    Flash forward to the summer of 2010 .  I am in my third season of a happily revived "sailing phase", and a new boat appears on Dock Six.  Turns out that a couple of die-hard powerboating anglers on our dock had gotten bitten by the sailing bug.  They told me the story of their boat.  They started looking at boats, narrowed their search down to a Siren, found an example they liked, being sold by a gentleman who had reached the age where he couldn't sail his Siren any more.
     On Lake Pittock.
     Where he had been sailing since 1976.  Yeah, it was THAT Siren.  34 years later and 35 miles away, one of the reasons I am on Dock Six shows up on Dock Six.

     As I alluded in a previous post, I am a forum freak.  Sailing forums, wooden boat forums, car forums, writing forums, I've joined 'em, contributed to'em, moderated 'em, and been banned from 'em.  Back in '08 a new contributor joined one of the sailing forums I plague, introduced himself, and it turns out he lived in Woodstock and planned to sail his boat on Pittock Lake.  Later, he almost bought a house that was right across the road from the house I grew up in.  While I was building "Chirp," he was acquiring a wooden dingy about the same size.  We never actively solicited advice from each other, never had  contact beyond infrequent message exchanges on international sailing forums...  and the day I start this blog is the day that he puts down a deposit on a slip... on Dock Six.

I'm not saying that Dock Six is the center of the universe, but...