Today, Day 7, is for rejuvenating , re-provisioning, and re-orienting. Courtney is on her way north from Saratoga to retrieve Matt; she’ll arrive in his truck looking as fresh as if she’d just bopped down to the corner store for the paper instead of having traveled 250 miles and through Customs before breakfast.
In the
meantime, Matt and I have work to do.
Up off the
dock after a night on the boards, Matt cleans his boat and packages his stuff
for the trip home while I decide what to send back from my own too-heavy
stores. I’ve been freighting around clothes I will not use, gear I will not get
to, and gadgets I don’t even know how to deploy, and it’s time to shed a few
pounds from the boat. After an hour of intense decision-making, two sea bags
and the detritus of a week on the water are culled from my boat for the trip south
in the truck; my boat is now lighter and marginally faster; less is more! |
| Clean up that room! |
This morning
I also covet the newer mechanicals in Matt’s boat; after all, the building St
Lawrence is no place for equipment failure, right? Our boats are identical, but Matt's
borrowed boat is very-low mileage while mine is showing some worrisome wear and
tear. We wonder whether Bob Ashton will object to some temporary swapping-out
of parts from his boat and while we debate his response, we swap out the parts:
new floorboards, the rails for the sliding seat, and the sliding seat itself
are purloined and installed in Old Paint while Bob’s boat takes on the old gear.
Later that
day I call Bob to ask permission. Whew. Knew he would. This is the stuff of
friendship. Courtney arrives right on schedule at 0930 and Telemachus morphs back into McGuyver, master rigger, as Matt secures Bob’s boat to the truck. Straps, ratchets, and lines knit it all together and within ten minutes they are good to go. (I make this point now only because later on it will take me, the alleged tree for this acorn, the better part of two hours to tie my boat (badly) onto my Mini. I have no such intuition about straps, ratchets, lines, and such.)
Courtney cheerfully jumps into the passenger seat for the rest of her 500 mile-day (Unsung Heroine Award #2!), Matt gives me the big bear-hug and as they pull away from the marina, I find myself welling up for a minute. Great kids, a wonderful week, the blessing of sharing….Al is a lucky man for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with rowing.
Time to get
back to work; this may be a day off the water, but there are things to do.
We have
rowed off the charts and I head off to find a map of the St Lawrence. Sure, I
could have procured charts at any freaking time during the four freaking months
that have passed since I hatched this freaking plan, but why would I do that
when I could struggle at the very last minute? After walking around for a bit I
find a map that covers the next leg to Quebec City but nothing for the waters
beyond to the Saguenay. Quebec City is a big place, I reason. Surely I will find my next necessary
charts there, right? Sounds reasonable, yes? This is the way I operate, Gentle
Reader: superficially reasonable logic meeting uncooperative reality.
Anyway, when
I return to the marina from my MapQuest, I spot Phil and his 42’ Beneteau at a
public dock about half a mile away, a massive crane on the pier holding his 50’mast
high in the air while he crouches on the deck trying to guide it all into
place. His wife, sitting on a bench back at the marina, calmly suggests that I might
consider joining this tableau. I note her furrowed brow.
Never having
raised a mast so consequently not feeling very much like the cavalry coming to the rescue, I
nevertheless quickly clamber down the steel rungs of the pier in time to “help”
Phil with the placement of the foot of the mast into an impossibly tight
fitting on deck. Even a child could see that there is no tolerance for error in
this procedure. “I’ve never done this before, Phil,” I confess, “but I’ll do
what you need me to do.” Phil advises me that this is a first for him as well…quite
an admission as fifty feet of aluminum seeking a home bobs over our heads with
each passing wave and wake. “But I’ve seen it done before.” Last night over cocktails
on this very boat I learned of Phil’s engineering and design background, and it
is the recent memory of this conversation that sustains my hope.
High above
us, out of earshot but responding to our hastily contrived hand signals, the
crane operator moves the mast in small increments as we try to
guide this huge spear to the target. Since the boat is in the water and the
deck is moving, the target is in perpetual motion. Holding this mast in place by
hand is impossible; its mass is too great. All we can do is use the motion of
the boat to “guide” it to a metal fitting on the cabin roof, and it takes many
tries to finally get a hit. But it’s the spaghetti mix of stainless steel shrouds
and stays that actually holds a mast in a vertical position, so while the crane
guy holds the new line on the mast, we quickly scramble to affix the hardware. Excitement
builds for me when, for some reason or other, I look over my shoulder and
notice a huge freighter heading our way. It’s generating a very large cresting
wake that will reach us in probably five minutes or so and if the mast is not
standing independently and secure by then, who knows? The crane operator sees
this unfolding drama as well and, after a surprising eye roll, smiles and shrugs.
(I say “surprising” only because an eye roll is not what I‘d expect from a crane
operator at a poignant moment such as this.) Phil, to his credit, misses this
silent exchange and has his head down, doing the necessary work, totally
focused, taking it step-by step, calmly giving me my next task which can best
complement his task.
Gotta love an unflappable,
sequentially-thinking engineer. I bet he has all of his charts, too.And...hey, where is McGuyver? This is his bread and butter!
 |
| Depiction of the relative mechanical skills of McGuyver and his father |
Anyway,
hours later, as we toast the apparently successful completion of this task back
at the marina in the cockpit of the Beneteau, the mast towering straight and
true above us, I secretly both wish and lament the fact that I’ll not be on
this boat when the sail is next raised and real tension and torque is applied
to this assembly.
The proof
will be in the pudding, as they say….but I’ll be sitting at a different table.
I hope it all works out.
 |
| Sunset in Sorel |
Tomorrow will
come early. Spaghetti in Sorel, then early to bed.
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