The Blue Mass, September 21, 2014

Once again this year, we attended the Blue Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Norwich. If you don't know us, Norwich is where we keep our boat in the summer and over a number of years, we've gotten to know our dock mates and the city pretty well. Several boater friends are in law enforcement and we've come to like and respect them, in particular. When September rolls around, we always put on something besides shorts and attend Blue Mass.

The Cathedral of St. Patrick, where the Blue Mass is held, is simply beautiful and worth a visit if you come to Norwich. As with every church of this type, the doors are always open.

 This particular Mass is held in remembrance of Officers fallen in the line of duty and unfortunately, that list is several pages long.

It is always interesting to see officers from so many towns and cities participate. Some are part of the ceremony and others bring their families with the little kids who don't yet understand what all this means.

We put together some video, but tried to keep that respectful. This is a Mass, after all, and no one needs us running around the church with a TV camera in the middle of a ceremony that is important as this one.

 Now, back to boating

We are starting to off-load lots the summer things. The outboard went home last weekend and we collected all the winterizing stuff at Tractor Supply for a mere $104. It will be a few more weeks, but winter storage is coming.

Our final trip to winter storage in Portland, Connecticut is about 60 miles but only 12 miles of that is in open ocean. The the remainder of the cruise is in the Thames and Connecticut Rivers and they are usually beautiful in October. We hope to once again bring you video of the foliage on the river. We know you just can't wait for that!

Our plan, once we get to Portland, is to winterize the engines and water system and then begin to dismantle, at least partially, our starboard engine to install rebuilt cylinder heads. To get the old heads off, we'll have to remove the intake manifold and both of the exhaust manifolds. That's not a fun prospect since the intake manifold has never been off (from what we can tell) and the outboard exhaust manifold on that engine is within six inches of our water tank.

At least we have the rebuilt heads here. We got the from Mechanic's Select Cylinder Heads in Concord, North Carolina at a cost of $265 each plus $57 shipping. They arrived just one week after we ordered them, which is what was promised.

At 50 lbs. each it will be a task just to get them up onto the boat, which will be out of the water by then.

It doesn't make much sense to do a job like this without also replacing the exhaust manifolds so we're planning a road trip to Lighthouse Marine in Riverhead, Long Island to pick up a pair of them.  The manifolds are also a little over 50 lbs. each so we should be nice and strong by the time we finish this project.

We'd really like to finish this engine project before the weather gets cold. We have only a few small winter boat projects (some interior painting and installing a 110 volt AC outlet in the cockpit and probably a few we don't remember at the moment). This winter, we'd really like to take some weekends off and do some fun things together.