For Ontarians, buying a boat in the US often means hiring a trucking company to bring the boat home.  Good boat shippers make this process easy but the costs are significant.  Before the buying Kinship our plan was to take Penny for a 3 week holiday on Lake Ontario.  So, spend a fortune bringing the boat home on a truck, or take a couple of weeks off to bring Kinship home on her keel?

So, on May 16th we set sail for Annapolis on our way back to Kingston.  We will sail up the Chesapeake bay, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to Delaware Bay.  Out into the Atlantic for an overnight coastal passage to New York City.  A day in New York to rest and relax, then off up the Hudson to Catskill to lower the mast.  Up to Troy to the Eire Canal to Oswego, up goes the mast, then a day sail across Lake Ontario to Kingston.

There is a little bit of everything on this trip.  A little bit of sailing the Chesapeake, a little bit of Atlantic coastal sailing and a week of docking practice on the canal system.  We have 2 couples, all NSC members joining us until New York so we have experienced crew for the overnight passage.  They have all sailed a Saga 43 so we have a great team for the trip.

Planning the trip has been quite an exercise, in theory, I am a qualified tidal day skipper, but this qualification was taken in the late 70s as a teenager.  We did some tidal sailing in New Zealand a couple of years ago, but it hardly counts.  The currents and tides in Delaware Bay are significant and need planning to ensure we have access to the planned moorings and to ensure we don’t end up in a shipping lane bucking the tide.

The passage to New York needs a backup route in case New Jersey turns into a lee shore.  There are few safe ports on the NJ coast in a strong wind with a easterly component, you have to commit to New York, or wait for a better day.

Skipper Bob has a great guide for the New York Canal System, we used this to plan the timing of our route from Troy to Oswego.

The Shards did an episode on sailing from Oswego to New York, this was handy as it shows how to get through the locks and showed a lot of the lovely scenery.

The plan is now a detailed float plan and we are almost ready to slip the lines and leave.  Next up, is the boat ready?

 

As Kathleen described, we spent the Easter weekend working on Kinship.  When you buy a boat, you are never quite sure what you actually did buy.  It is only when you get aboard and start to look at all the systems and lockers in much more detail that you really start to understand the boat and its contents.  One of my favourite parts of this is finding the little gems that the previous owner left on board.  Over the weekend we found a spare water pump and a fortress anchor and rode hidden in a locker that I missed in the survey, both really good to have.  As I am writing this I realise that I did not look in one area on the boat at all, the generator compartment, we don’t have a generator, I wonder what might be in there?

We are addressing the critical items from the survey, first on the list was replacing the starting battery.  Naturally, the new battery was slightly taller than the old one, so I had to reposition the hold-downs to suit.  In becoming one with the battery compartment I was really impressed with both the construction of the boat and the quality of the work done on the boat in the past. I am a great believer in the idea that to really own something, you have to work on it.  It will take a while before we really own Kinship, but today, I own the battery compartment.  I did discover that each of the 4 solar panels has its own controller.  This is great as shade on one panel will not impact the rest of the array.

The adjustable backstay project went well, Jack, Zahniser’s rigger, did a great job with the install,  I am a still getting used to the size of everything on Kinship, Penny has a 1 inch block on the end of the backstay and the adjuster is a 12:1 system I built out of Amsteel and 1/4 line.  Kinship has a 4ft long hydraulic adjuster going to a 4 inch block, the scale is so much bigger, to deal with the higher load and to allow a bigger safety margin.

The fun is just beginning, in May I will be at the boat for a week to make sure all the systems are working before we head back to Kingston.