CHAPTER NINETY TWO: IDLING IN CAPE MAY AND DELAWARE AND CATCHING UP WITH FAMILY

CHAPTER NINETY TWO: IDLING IN CAPE MAY AND DELAWARE AND CATCHING UP WITH FAMILY

We are going to New York this summer, up the Hudson River and through the Erie Canal. It may not seem like we are going to New York this summer, since it’s August 16 and we are tied up at Delaware City, Delaware. Again? Yes, again. This has become our favorite new marina. The parasailing crews at Utsch’s Marina in Cape May finally started getting to us, with their evening beer busts after hard days of having fun dragging daring, shaking tourists out into the skies over Delaware Bay. Our neighbors in the Chris Craft, Christine, Ted and his wife, were ideal dock buddies. They were quiet, cheery, full of information about the Jersey Coast, New York and the Erie Canal – did I mention “quiet”? That’s the most important characteristic of the people in the boat tied up in the slip right next to you. Except for the occasional very loud boat with the over-sized outboard motors that go by us in the old C and D Canal, which now serves as the Delaware City Marina, it is very quiet here at Tim’s place.

This is very much Tim’s Place. He is the most hands on marina owner we have met in our 14 months of travel along the coastal waterways. At 5:45 p.m. today, Saturday, August 17, he was operating his boatyard’s lift to haul up a boat that had nearly sunk in Delaware Bay an hour before. The Coast Guard had rescued the boater and towed the waterlogged boat to Tim’s Place for a haul out. As night fell, the boat was still dangling in the straps above the canal, allowing the gallons of water it had taken on to return to the sea. This boat is another reminder to us that what we do can be treacherous, and we have to be prepared at all times. The Admiral is re-checking the weather, the tides and the currents for our second attempt to head to New York starting Monday. Every day so far, the weather reports have changed. What was predicted to be a calm bay on Monday is now 2 to 4 feet of wave action. And it only gets worse as we go up the Jersey Coast. But stay tuned until tomorrow, when there will most certainly be another very different prediction – hopefully one that makes the bay water calm again on Monday.

The day before we left Utsch’s Marina in Cape May my brother paid us a visit for several hours in the afternoon. He was amazed at the height of the flying bridge and the view we had looking out on to the water. He and Lois are looking for the perfect RV to travel through America. As the Admiral explained the various systems on Slow Motion – electrical, plumbing, air conditioning and heat, water pressure pump – and pointed out all the things that can go wrong (and did!), Rusty said that he could never own and operate a boat. For him everything has to be in perfect working order all the time, or it drives him crazy. Welcome to Crazyland, non-boat owners. Every day something needs to be fixed, or maintained, or washed, or upgraded, or replaced. Recently, the Admiral has been working on the Achilles Project. This entails painting the sundeck roof, while suspending Achilles above. And that means that the Admiral is either lying down to paint or crawling around on his hands and knees on the sundeck roof. Most of the work that is done on a boat of this size requires a fairly flexible body with joints that give a little and muscles that can be contorted to get into small spaces or around corners. So it is not just the work that is hard under a blinding sun or inside a sweltering engine room, but also the unnatural positions you have to be in to complete the work. Hats off to the Admiral, who turned 70 this year, for keeping his body fit enough to paint the sundeck roof, put water in the engine batteries, and check the diesel fuel tank gauges.

And now that the sundeck roof has been painted, the next part of the Achilles Project is to fix it firmly to the sundeck roof. Our temporary solution is using small fenders to support the V-shaped hull. But soft chocks, which can only be obtained from Bixler’s near the New Jersey/New York border (when they are in stock), are a better solution. However, the best solution is to put Weaver snap davits on the swim board and attach Achilles to the swim board, setting it upright against the stern. If and when we get the soft chocks, the Admiral can do the installation. But the Weaver snap davits require a person trained by Weaver in the installation of the snap davits, so we won’t be moving Achilles from the sundeck roof to the swim board any time soon. In the meantime, if you have a 6 horsepower boat motor, give us a call or email us. Our “power” at the moment for Achilles are the oars that came with her. Still, we have a lifeboat, at last we have a lifeboat! And for that I am very grateful, as the big, bad currents of the New York Harbor and the Hudson River loom ahead of us – assuming we safely maneuver the fickle waters and waves of the Atlantic along the New Jersey Coast.

For several breezy hours on the sundeck last week, we exchanged fishing stories and other adventures with Rusty during his visit to Slow Motion. We did not give him a ride this time, but that only means that he has to return with Lois for their maiden voyage on our cruiser. It’s great to share this once-in-a-lifetime experience with someone who has known me since I was 4 years old. I’m sure my brother did not see a 50 foot cruising boat in my future several years ago, when I was still prosecuting murder cases in Monterey County. Nor did I. I knew that he and Lois had been looking for a new place to live when they retired from their professions (nursing, hydrology/geology), and I knew it was going to be near water, preferably fresh water for trout fishing. They found their dream home -- they built their dream home around a modest cabin – next to a lake in the Poconos. Lois is enjoying mountain life full time, and Rusty is counting down the months until he can completely live there and enjoy the trees, the lake, the peace and quiet, the trout, and the end of commuting too. But they’ve got the travel bug too, so they’re looking for the ideal RV to take them to Colorado and points west.

My sister Sue and her husband traveled in an RV for three years after they retired, and they loved almost every minute. Alaska stands out as one of the best places they have ever seen, and they vow to go back for several more months of natural splendor like the aurora borealis. I don’t know which of our parents had the Wanderlust gene – probably both, because it’s so strong in me and all of my siblings. My oldest sister, Jean, had a long list of places she had wanted to visit, but she died at age 55 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Maybe Sue and Rusty and I are dedicating our travels to her and going where she wanted to go, but couldn’t. I like to think that her spirit is cruising with the Admiral and me, along with my mother’s rolling stone spirit as well. Thank you, Jean and Mother, for teaching me that no one ever lies on her deathbed saying: “Gee, I wish I had spent more time at the office.” In the past year I have had more “Wow!” moments than I had had for many years as a prosecutor. Don’t get me wrong. I really, really enjoyed doing everything a prosecutor does, especially winning jury trials in child molest, rape, gang, and murder cases. I loved the intellectual challenges, from the intensive legal research to the intuitive selection of jurors. There were lots of adrenalin rushes just about every day. But rarely did I see a bald eagle, even more rarely a great blue heron, and never did I get to go back in time to re-discover our American history from pre-colonial and Revolutionary War times through the Civil War to the present day environmental crusades against concentrated animal feeding operations. While I miss being a part of one community and trying to do good for the people of that community, for the time being, I have opened my eyes and ears to a much larger “community” of waterways, plants and animal life, populated by boaters and marina owners who generously share their marine experiences with us and help guide us safely up and down the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.

Friday night we had dinner with my cousin, Shippy, and his wife, Linda, at Crabby Dick’s at the Delaware City Hotel. Tim had given us coupons for two free balls – crab balls – and they were delicious. Shippy was/is a big shot with the Delaware Parks Department and even came out of retirement to take on an acting parks superintendent’s job here in Delaware City. I spent part of my summers growing up with cousins Shippy and David and their parents, Uncle Clyde and Aunt Ruth at the hunting lodge at Bear Hollow in the woods of central Pennsylvania near Liberty. Shippy and Linda took family there for a week recently, and they filled us in on all the changes – not for the good – that are taking place in and around Bear Hollow. First there were the giant windmills that took over the mountain ridges around Bear Hollow. David fought the good fight in court against them, but ultimately settled for a lump sum payment and some concessions about the number of windmills and where they would be placed. Now there is a much greater disturbance to that formerly peaceful environment – fracking. It turns out that Grays Run, the neighboring hunting group, owns all the mineral rights under Bear Hollow’s acres. They’ve owned them since the 1920’s. Unless the Pennsylvania Legislature enacts a pending bill which says that owners of property who lost their mineral rights more than ten years ago have a say in whether their land gets fracked, then Bear Hollow is going to be fracked very soon. The roads to the potential fracking sites have been plowed, the guardhouses with live guards have been posted (fear of saboteurs?), and the companies are ready to pound the shale layers with water and unnamed chemicals to release the natural gas contained within. Will there be earthquakes? It’s likely, but no one can predict when with any accuracy. Will the ground water be contaminated? Most likely, and we don’t even know what chemicals will cause the contamination. Bear Hollow deserves better, for all the decades of natural beauty it has bestowed upon the planet and for all the years of enjoyment it has given me and my family, as we walked the trails up the mountainsides, bordered by the biggest, greenest ferns, and as we fished for rainbow trout in the clear stream running right past the lodge. Now we can’t even drive into our beloved family vacation place without having the combination for the locked gate that keeps us and everyone else out. I know that you can’t live in the past, but living in the present and the future with a severely compromised Bear Hollow ecology is utterly depressing. Some people will get rich from the natural gas, but our family times at Bear Hollow were priceless.

Today, August 18, I drove my spiffy red Impala to Bryn Mawr to re-introduce myself to great nephew Bryce, age 3, and great niece Myla, age 2. Robyn and Dave, their parents, have just moved into a 1920’s house on a tree-lined street very near Villanova University. Robyn is the youngest of my brother’s three children. We spent a memorable Thanksgiving together at my home in California, when she was studying at Humboldt State to get a master’s degree in kinesiology. She’s pregnant with their third child and finally reached the stage of not feeling nauseated all day. So we went out to brunch, where Bryce showed us he has a prodigious appetite, as he easily downed two plate-sized chocolate chip pancakes and still had room for the strawberries and whipped cream I offered him from my crepes. Dave is an excellent building contractor, and he and Robyn have grand plans for their new digs – a kitchen that takes up the entire two car garage, an enclosed sunroom, a mudroom, a free standing garage, an office on the third floor and a guest bedroom across from it. They will accomplish these improvements – and more – you should have seen how they transformed a down-at-the heels Victorian in Belvidere, New Jersey into House Beautiful with the largest, most functional kitchen I have ever seen. Dave has an unenviable schedule, what with two weeks in Nevis working on new mansions for Four Seasons and two weeks at the new house, still on the Nevis job, but also being a full time father, while Robyn goes to her work as a surgical nurse. Somehow these two thirty-somethings make their peripatetic lifestyles work. And the children are remarkably well-behaved, not to mention smart, unspoiled and just plain cute. I don’t think they’ll remember me – one visit a year is not memorable – but they’ll have the cuddly bunny and flying dragon from Moravian Book Store to keep them company at night. And the insect book was a hit too. You leave your mark when and how you can.

Moving down the road to West Grove, Pa., I stopped by to visit with nephew Dwight and his wife, Brett, and their son, Patrick. Patrick greeted me with a hug, but then went off to play with a bunch of kids in his basement. He’s well past the stage of wanting to be entertained by a great aunt, and I respect this. We had our moments earlier in his life when we played a video game on his large screen TV for hours – cars racing each other over precipitous terrains – and he won every time. I certainly did not want to suffer that ignominy again. I gave Patrick a book on Fort Delaware, which I hope he can use to dazzle his teacher this year when they get to American history and the Civil War. Then Dwight and Brett and I got down to the serious business of catching up on family matters. They were taking a break from packing for their trip to Australia in a few days. Brett’s celebrating her 50^th Down Under. I know the 15 hour flight from LA to Brisbane will not be pleasant – think of how the airplane bathrooms will look after the first 10 hours. On second thought, don’t. But once they start their land excursions in the former penal colony, the plane ordeal will be a distant memory. Snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef will make it all worth the hardship of modern air travel. Dwight was the neatest four year old I have ever met, and he still has the same smile and sweet demeanor he had back then, when we went to Dean’s Toy Store every day in Belmont, California.

Seeing niece Robyn and nephew Dwight and their families, right after visiting with brother Rusty and cousin Shippy, makes me really appreciate and treasure my family ties. Traveling on Slow Motion has brought me close to them, and for that I am very grateful. But enough about family – on to New York!