Yeah Baby! Volunteers Tackle the Yokohoma Mess and Bring Order and Harmony to Dockside

I guess, that to understand why this is a big deal you have to have been on deck over  the past year, since that incident in heavy weather where the telephone pole snapped.  The Pole  normally strings three Yokohama fenders- huge hard rubber cylinders-, separated by several car tires. The whole arrangement wasintended to float in front of our face dock's vertical pilings, protecting the schooner's hull from pounding against the vertical pilings. Well,  in an unexpectedly powerful squall, which saw 75 knot winds pass thru, , the yokohama's all slipped out of place. The telephone pole bent around a piling and snapped, separating the whole system into two independent, useless floating hazards.   Since that time several attempts, some temporarily successful, have been made to reposition  Yokohama's against the pilings. always thwarted by the slack and tensions called by rising and falling tides.  

While Tony and David unlay strands
 to begin their long splice, Bryan, Lance and Maxwell
 discuss the difference between sailor and roping palms.

Our latest attempt, this previous Saturday, was no more successful. We needed a morning with Westerly breezes and low current/slack tide. And those conditions weren't present.  So today, Volunteers mustered at the usual time, a total of six of us, Walter Barton, Tony Marchesani, David Ried, Lance Halderson, and Maxwell Dale, along with his friend, Ashley, and me, Bryan. We started by reinflating the small boat in anticipation of Nick Swarts showing up to do some coxwain work.

 Next, Tony, and David gathered tools and began laying out the starboard boat falls, to turn in a long splice where a fathom of line had unlaid and frayed. Maxwell, and Ashley teamed up with Bryan to empty out then hose down and wipe the yeti cooler. Ashley produced a bowl of ice from the freezer to cool the just filled orange water jug. Between the two of them they should be each due for a 50 Volunteer Hour pin.

Walter, Tony, and Lance work
the aft Yokohama up to the gap
between the hull in the piling, as Bryan,
 out of picture, takes turns
 off the port side Quarter bit,
 to ease the stern further off the dock. 

It was less than an hour into our projects when Bryan looked out over the dock lines and noticed that the schooner was riding at least seven feet away from the dock. All the Yokohama fenders were floating out, away from the dock wall. Bryan immediately mustered all idle hands with boat hooks, fathoms of rope, and handy billy tackles, to the starboard rail, and over the next three hours,  orchestrated a series of attempts to pull, poke, twist, pry, and push the errant Yokohama's and their floating telephone poles partly connecting them into a more stable configuration of resting against their three pilings, as originally designed.  The final phase including easing the stern quarter line, allowing the stern to float outward four feet, enabling the aft-most Yokohama to float into it's desired position.  With Handy-billy's and boat hooks, the stern was pulled back into it's position next to the dock.                                                                                                                              

          

  Just in time to get below for quick final sign-off's of their reenlistment paperwork  and disembarking as a looming dark squall line crossed the harbor from the east. 

All Yokohamas' nicely centered on their pilings, for now.