Random Boat Work.

We’ve been keeping busy doing random boat work since hauling Pegu Club out for the off-season. The shut-off date for water in the yard was November 4th, so we made sure to give Pegu Club a much needed bath before it was too late. With her deck and hull washed and her stainless polished, she was put to bed for the winter nice and clean.

Pegu-teeny was also hauled out of the water, and her carpet of marine growth scrubbed away. That’s a gross job – one we had to do several times this season. Now that we know where her waterline is, next season we’ll put a coat of hard bottom paint on her before she goes into the water. We use ablative bottom paint on Pegu Club, but we don’t want to use it on Pegu-teeny because it will get all over the foredeck when we haul her up there for longer trips.

Pegu Club was also winterized, which is a very easy job when you don’t have a standard marine head or pressurized water system. All we had to do was empty her water tanks, change the oil, and run anti-freeze through Thumper. The anti-freeze process was zero stress, unlike last year which had been the first time we winterized an engine. We had read last year that all we needed to do fill a bucket with anti-freeze, putting the raw water intake hose in the bucket, and run the engine until anti-freeze came out the exhaust. We were skeptical that it would actually work, and we nervously started the engine promising that we would shut it off if anti-freeze didn’t start coming out the exhaust within 15 seconds. Needless to say, it worked, so this year we flushed the engine for ten minutes with fresh water and then put the anti-freeze in. No problem.

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Yikes! We’re going to have a slip next season.

We’ve had a boat for four years, always on a mooring. Moorings are cheaper, cooler in the summer (because the bow is always pointed into the wind), you can grill on your boat on a mooring, and they offer more privacy. Sure, they can be inconvenient when you’re working on the boat, realize you need something on land, and have to jump into the dinghy to get there vs. simply stepping off the boat onto the dock. But if you had asked me before this past June if we would ever have a slip, I would have said no way. We even received a call from the dock committee last year asking if we wanted a slip for the season, and we turned it down without hesitation.

Then June came along and we started hitting the bottom while on our mooring during the perigee moon cycle. Perigee is when the moon is closest to the earth, and it results in lower (and higher) than usual tides. It would be one thing if Pegu Club simply settled into the bottom and floated back up again, but the motion of the water resulted in about an hour of bump-bump-bumping along, then a period where she was simply in the mud, and then another hour of bump-bump-bump as the tide started to rise again. This was simply not acceptable. Besides the fact that it interfered with our sleep, we didn’t want to risk any damage to the hull or rudder, so we asked for another mooring assignment.

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Haul out day. It was an adventure.

Sometimes I really don’t know why we bother checking the forecast. It was Sunday, October 16th – haul out day. The predicted 5-10 knot overnight winds had, in reality, been 15-20 knots and when we woke up in the morning they had increased to a steady 20+. We literally had whitecaps in the mooring field.

Earlier in the week I had been thinking about launch day. All I had wanted was for decent weather with light winds, and for Pegu Club to be facing bow out when she was splashed. We went zero for three that day. I knew that this time I would be motoring her into the liftout well, so I didn’t need to worry about backing her out, but I was still hoping for decent weather and light winds. Well, it was going to be sixty degrees and sunny, but we had white caps in the mooring field. The winds were worse than launch day and we were going to have to dock. I was not happy.

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The season comes to an end.

I like to think that our season lasts until mid-October, but I’m slowly having to admit that it’s not necessarily the case. Last year we hauled out Pegu Club in August so we could get to work on her, but I remember in 2014 we were able to get very few sails in after Labor Day. Typically as temperatures get cooler a series of northerlies start to drop down. Throw in an occasional hurricane threat and nor’easter, and it seems like more often than not we end up not heading down to the boat at all.

This year between work obligations, a lingering head cold for poor Jeff, the threat of Hurricane Matthew, and some ill-timed northerlies and general rainy weather, we ended up with a repeat of 2014. We’re going to have to do some thinking about our haul-out date next year. If we haul out early we may miss some good sailing. If we haul out late, we might get lucky and have a few good weekends but we’ll have no choice but to work on Pegu Club when it’s cold. Maybe the solution is to simply to permanently untie the lines next fall! Ha! I wish.

So the last post left off with the weekend of September 24th and our skill building sail. On the weekend of October 1st, it was raining on Saturday, and we both had to work on Sunday, so unfortunately it was a no-go for the boat.

The weekend of the 8th (Columbus Day weekend) had us hoping to spend the long weekend in Essex. Hurricane Matthew gave us some gray hairs until he decided to change his track, but Mother Nature still didn’t cooperate. As of Friday night things looked great, so we packed our bags. Just before leaving the house on Saturday morning I did a last-minute weather check. Good thing I did. Now we were going to get rain beginning in the middle of the afternoon straight through until Sunday night, followed by a small craft advisory for Monday. Sigh. However, we were really missing Pegu Club, so we decided to drive down on Saturday anyway to hang out until the rain started.

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We built some skills on this sail.

With Jeff and I both needing to work on Sunday, the weekend of September 24th was going to be a short one on Pegu Club. We made the most of it though, with a fun four-hour sail with wind conditions that made us very glad we didn’t have a specific destination to get to.

Now that fall has officially arrived the temperatures have definitely gotten cooler, but with bright sunshine warming our all-black clothing, we were quite comfortable. While I prefer sailing in t-shirts and shorts, I have to admit the cooler temperatures definitely opens up the water a bit more. People start hauling their boats out right after Labor Day, and as each weekend passes we see fewer and fewer people on the water. It’s substantially more peaceful than it is during the height of summer.

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First fog.

Saturday, September 10th saw us driving down to the boat with my parents who were visiting from Southern California. They had been sailing on Little Bristol a few years back, but this was going to be their first time meeting the new Pegu Club and sailing on her.

The weather forecast was decent – sunny skies turning to cloudy, winds of approximately 10 knots, and temps in the upper 70’s. Jeff and I hadn’t been back to Pegu Club since we had prepped her for Hermione the previous weekend, so we needed to put her back together before we could have some fun. We left my parents to hang out on the beach house porch so we could have a 15 minute head start, and then we got to work.

As Charlie dropped us off on the launch, we were very pleased to see that Pegu Club looked just fine. The boat next to us had a torn bimini and the mooring ball on the boat behind us was underwater for some reason, but other than that everyone’s boat didn’t seem any worse for the wear. By the time we had reinstalled the anchor, the Magma grill, the outboard, and had taken the jib up to the foredeck, Charlie was pulling up with the ‘rents.

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Storm Prep

Before the season began I noted to Jeff that this was going to be our fourth season owning a boat and we had yet to truly worry about a storm. I had a feeling that our luck would be running out soon. As we proceeded to enjoy one of the hottest summers on record on the Connecticut shoreline, and the water got warmer and warmer, I was even more certain that our streak would end. And so it has. But fortunately, while Hermine was concerning, we didn’t feel that we would need to haul Pegu Club out of the water.

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A change of scenery.

After several weekends at Shenny, it was time for a change of scenery. We tossed around different anchorages we could try as the weekend of the 27th drew closer, but by the time Friday rolled around it was clear that winds would be light. Still wanting to go someplace, we decided to head off to West Harbor on Fishers Island. At only four nm we could ghost there if possible, and at least if we had to turn on Thumper it wouldn’t be for too long.

We left Shenny by 8:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, trying to catch the last of the light north wind before it died. We made it about halfway there before we were becalmed, so we fired Thumper up and motored the rest of the way to West Harbor. After finding a good spot in the anchorage, we relaxed for the rest of the morning and watched boat tv. We even got lucky enough to watch Aphrodite come into the harbor.

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A spontaneous after-work sail.

The thought of going sailing after work on Wednesday, August 24th didn’t cross my mind until my co-worker encouraged me to take a walk outside at lunch. It. Was. Beautiful. It was sunny and warm with low humidity. Since I have a one-track mind during the sailing season, I immediately checked the Predict Wind app on my phone to see what the wind was like in Groton. Hmm. 7-9 knots. We could make that work. A quick text to Jeff followed. So it was that at 4:00 p.m., instead of sitting in my office, we were flying down the freeway to Shenny.

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Two consecutive days with nice winds in August? Hey, it can happen!

August brings warm temperatures and generally mild winds. We were lucky the weekend of the 19th though, because the forecast was for two days of winds at about 10-15 knots and warm temperatures. We were particularly pleased about Sunday’s forecast, because our friends Deb and Wendy were coming that day for their maiden voyage on Pegu Club.

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