Great J/37 For Sale

Here’s the listing for Jeorgia. We decided to list her with the local marina here in Gloucester Pt, Va. They seem like a good group and have, so far, treated us well. Hopefully she’ll sell quickly – and we can stop eating beans every night. She has a lot of gear for a boat priced at this level. Plus, how can you beat a brand new Yanmar engine?
1988 J-Boat J/37  YachtWorld Listing

Gratuitous Relationship Joke

Thought I’d share this one, just don’t tell Chris I did.

---

Have you tried the New York Husband Store?

A store that sells new husbands has opened in New York City , where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates:

You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products increase as the shopper ascends the flights. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but you cannot go back down except to exit the building!

So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men Have Jobs

She is intrigued, but continues to the second floor, where the sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men Have Jobs and Love Kids.

'That's nice,' she thinks, 'but I want more.'
So she continues upward. The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, and are Extremely Good Looking.

'Wow,' she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going.
She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Good Looking and Help With Housework.

'Oh, mercy me!' she exclaims, 'I can hardly stand it!'
Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Gorgeous, Help with Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.

She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor, where the sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.

PLEASE NOTE:
To avoid gender bias charges, the store's owner opened a New Wives store just across the street.
The first floor has wives that love sex.
The second floor has wives that love sex and have money and like beer.
The third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors have never been visited.

New York, Just Like I Pictured It

Does this face look familiar?

This is what the lady looked like when we sailed past her in New York Harbor. Not only did she wave at us, but she actually winked at me. You can see how big this piece of copper is by comparing her size to the huge line of people walking past at the bottom of the pic. They seem to be stretching to look up her dress.

After we left Block Island, Rhode Island we sailed up -- OK, we motored up the Long Island Sound toward New York. We took a mooring at Port Washington in Manhasset Bay. Great deal. Two nights free mooring, free dinghy dock, great organic style supermarket, and water taxi. But the best part was that it was a 20 min (don’t let them tell you 15 min.) walk up the Main St to the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). This whisks you into Penn Station in Manhattan. Here you can endlessly connect to artistically named subways lines like A and B and C line.

It really was fun to check out all these places that I had heard of from years of watching NYC Blues, but never really knew what they were. I now know where Uptown is and where Downtown is. I’m guessing Midtown is somewhere in-between.  Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn Bridge, Staten Island, Hells Kitchen, Riker’s Island, Wall Street, World Trade Center, Ellis Island, The Battery, 59th Street Bridge (song), The East River. Even if you’ve never been there, NY is a big part of US culture.

We travelled down to the World Trade Center. And yes, the area and the subway stop is still called that. We couldn’t get into the 9/11 memorial because we neither had reservations or were apparently enough of a VIP.

You can see the 104 story One World Trade Center building going up on the left. This is the replacement for the WTC that went down on 9/11. This one appears to be being built without any bull’s eye. The 9/11 Memorial is to its right. We did get to go into the 9/11 Memorial gift shop. It actually has some really interesting displays and commentary.

No captioned needed

They seem to have censured the pictures of victims jumping from the towers. I think that is too bad. These are the searing pictures that define the attack for me. Its like documenting the Holocaust without the pictures of piled up corpses. Not pleasant, but the essence of the human tragedy.
We stopped at B&H Photo on 34 street, a few blocks from Penn Station. This is a geeks play store. It has every imaginable camera, lenses, computer, TV, and associated gadget. Neatly organized as a multi-story big box store. And for a little humor, most of the workers are dressed in Orthodox Jewish attire – its gotta be New York.

The ship at the right is the Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2 berthed in NY Harbor as we sailed by in the East River. All 1,132 feet of her. In 1956 when my family was immigrating to the US, we tied up near this spot raveling on the Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth.  

The RMS Queen Elizabeth, at 1,031 feet. I remember as a 4 year old kid seeing the Statue of Liberty. But what I remember most about the trip from Southampton, England to NYC was the day that they stopped my big brother (Mike, all of 6) and I from using the first class passenger’s shuffle board court. Pretty devastating for a 4 year old.

The Staten Island Ferry leaving the Battery in Manhattan on its way to, where else, Staten Island. I’m not a real big fan of the color scheme. The Washington State Ferries are much more esthetic.

Washington State Ferry - You be the judge

Staten Island has always been a mystery to me. The TV shows are always using the ferry as a back drop, but no one ever seems to actually make it all the way to Staten Island. We stopped at a marina on Staten Island to get fuel. It was a long trip under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge onto the south shore of the harbor entrance. I asked the dock master if the fuel was cheaper here than in NY, assuming we were in New Jersey. The dock master looked at me pretty strangely and noted that Staten Island is still New York. Who knew?

The famous Brooklyn Bridge from the East River as we are about to sail under.

OK, maybe that wasn’t the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe one these is. Either way, there’s a lot of cool, old bridges that go over the East River from Manhattan to Long Island.

We said good bye to Lady Statue of Liberty and started heading out to the Atlantic. It took us 3 nights to arrive at Cape Henry and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. As it has been for this entire trip down from Cape Breton, the wind was on our nose. For most of the trip we would sail out about 70 miles offshore, tack and come into 15 or 20 miles off – then do it again. The Outbound was joy to sail in these conditions. Pretty comfortable, given the wind direction. Love all the hand-holds, and the easy, no stooping companionway steps. Can’t to sail her on some reaches and downwind.

In the last 3 days we have moved about 3,600 lbs worth of stuff off Jeorgia. Gotta empty her so we can make her pretty and sell her. The Outbound looks like a disaster zone with all the stuff laying around.

I took Chris to the airport yesterday (using the free loaner car from Yacht Haven marina) She’s got a 2 to 4 week job in Malawi and Tanzania. My job is to get Jeorgia on the market and the Georgia cleaned up, while she works on Midwifery education program evaluations in Africa.

Paul

NYC to Virginia

We had a couple fun days in New York City. I'll get the pics and blog together when we get back to Virginia. Right now we are about 30 miles off the Virginia coast, motoring south. We've had a couple of days of beating to weather since sailing around the Statue of Liberty and heading out of NY harbor. Kind of bouncy and uncomfortable, but at least we were sailing. Now it's motoring and doing battle with the nasty East Coast biting flies. 30 miles offshore and you can't sit still without an all out attack. There's a pile of dead flies in the cockpit where I've been mounting full frontal assaults on these buggers.
We should be into the York River and anchored early tomorrow morning.

Paul

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com

Artic Nova Scotia to Tropical Rhode Island

You know you are in Canada when you’ve found the town curling club.

After a rainy and cold day in Halifax, we continued the passage down the Nova Scotian coast. Next stop was Lunenberg. A couple of hundred year old fishing and boat building town. Probably most famous for building the Canadian fishing and racing schooner, the Bluenose, in 1921. Probably most infamous for contributing to the total collapse of the cod fisheries on the Grand Banks. It’s a pretty cool working/tourist town now. Lots of Victorian buildings.

(Steve C, here’s another one for you to fix up)
Mostly well cared for as private homes, B&Bs or businesses. The people are, how would you say it, talkative. Once you’ve opened up to them by saying something revealing like ‘Hi. Sure is wet today’. After that you are likely to get the town’s latest gossip, the fishing report, what boats are in bankruptcy and your new best friend’s life history. Great people!
We stayed 2 days in Lunenberg because of the winds, cold and dumping rain. We don’t have a lot of cloths with us we could only carry what fit in our airline bags. Getting all the warm stuff soaking wet in the dinghy rides isn’t helping in keeping the core body temperatures where they should be. We left Lunenberg for a slog to windward to Lockeport. The cruising guide describes it as a typical, down on its luck, Nova Scotian fishing town. Friendly enough place, with less to gossip about.
The next passage was a two and half day crossing from the bottom of Nova Scotia to inside of Cape Code, MA. We sailed it all to windward, blowing mostly about 15-25kts. We would sail a long starboard tack. Then when the wind got light or the tide turned against us, we’d do a diesel assisted tack due south. Cold on the night watches. Lots of good, hot soups out of the new galley. We ended up sailing back and forth in 25kts of wind for 3 hours in front of the Cape Cod canal, while waiting for the tide to change so we could enter the canal without bucking a big current.
All and all its been good trip down so far. The boat is pleasure to sail. Much easier on the crew than the J. We’ve had a few exciting docking moments, but that will get better. We broke the typical amount of things on a passage:

• Broke the toilet seat cover
• Wind instruments quit working
• The engine water-in-fuel alarm goes of intermittently
• Lost an anchor snubber overboard
• Skyed a jib halyard
• The pressure water is a bit flaky
• Got my foul weather jacket caught in the power winch (which Chris was too tired to even laugh at when I called her up to release me)

We stopped in Portsmouth, RI, (next to Newport) and cleared into customs. Very low key check in. We got to meet up with Bill and Lori on their Outbound 44 Toodle-oo who I’d been talking to on email as we considered our purchase (the only one on the market). Good to meet up with them in person and to check out what they have done on their OB. They plan to cut the ties and take off next summer!
We also stopped for the night in Block Island, RI, and had dinner on our boat with Tom and Cary off Dragon’s Toy, our friends from El Salvador. Huge beautiful anchorage with hundreds of boats and even more people who have come over to celebrate the 4th. It’s a beautiful place, we enjoyed our walk into town along the shore and old homes.
Tonight it is New Haven, CT, and more fireworks. Tomorrow it is NEW YORK CITY!
Paul