Odalisque - May 14, 2005 Log

Log 2005 - May 14th

Saturday May 14, 2005 – “Mooring Drop”

The forecast was for rain at some point in the afternoon so I took my foul weather jacket with me on the trip up to Nyack from lower Manhattan. The only event worth noting on the trip up was the view of the collapsed retaining wall to the north of the George Washington Bridge above the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan.

Matt had nicely put together a mooring rode with new chain, a new ball, and a big old mushroom anchor (300#), which we needed to take out on the river and set into the bottom. The Nyack Boat Club has the necessary motorboats and a floating platform called a “cow” which gets lashed to the bow of a motorboat in order to drop the heavy mooring. A club member named George (who sails a Lightening) helped us set up the cow at the utility dock. Another member named Al showed up and also wanted to drop his mooring, which we happily agreed to as we had not done this before. We thanked George for his help and headed the assembled cow and motorboat slowly out into the river with Matt at the helm of the motorboat.

You could tell that the current was running up the river as all the sailboats were pointing towards Manhattan. What you could not tell was that the current was pretty strong, maybe 2 knots upriver. They call the platform the “cow” because when lashed to the motorboat it is a most ungainly vessel and not so easy to control in a current. When we passed the first moored sailboat I was a bit nervous that the current would take us on a collision course with it. Matt managed to get the behemoth safely around the sailboat by heading into the current and we slowly made our way to moorings M7 and N13. The marker for M7 had blown away so we dropped Al’s hook first after pulling up marker N13. The most dangerous thing about dropping the mushroom anchor and its chain is that once the anchor is away in the water, the chain pays out rather quickly and you need to be sure that your foot will not get caught in the chain. Once the anchor is on the bottom you attach the end ring to the cow and pull the anchor downriver to set it.

We then headed back to where the M7 marker should have been and picked up another boater at mooring M8 (I forget his name). The forecasted rain had not made an appearance and it had been a nice day for sailing and there were quite a few boats out racing on the river in a moderate southeast wind. In fact, the launch operator was out on his sailboat so the man at mooring M8 had asked us to pick him up. Even in light conditions I considered picking him up in the assembled cow a bit dicey but we managed to get close enough for him to jump on without hitting his boat. We rolled our mooring over and pulled the chain upriver to set the anchor. Matt, I and our new neighbor on the water all thought that our mooring was a little too close to M8 so we again tugged on the mooring chain only this time downriver until we were satisfied that we would be far enough away. We made our way back to the docks and unbridled the cow platform and tied it to its mooring (out to pasture) and then tied up the motorboat.

I can understand why Matt likes this boat club. Not only is it a ten minute walk from his house, the other members I met were friendly and helpful, and the club has many activities and programs for both kids and adults. I get the feeling that many of the members are racing enthusiasts with all of the Type “A” personality traits, but today they seemed to save their competitiveness for the races. I expect Matt to one day get bitten by the racing bug. For now we can discuss the respective usefulness of a storm jib versus a bigger genoa.

— Caleb Davison