A Day At Work
Liberty Landing Marina is located in Jersey City right by Liberty State Park. The Marina offers multiple services to its customers and tenants, such as pump out, service work, fueling up. Liberty Landing Marina has a location at Pier 25 in Manhattan. Pier 25 is the one with the skate park and mini golf on it. The location that Liberty Landing operates has a mooring field and a dock.
Today, Sunday the 26th, upon arrival at the Marina in New Jersey with Joseph, our job was to get to Pier 25 rig up the bridles, the lines that you put on your boat to keep you on the mooring, for the 38 moorings that's are present.
Greg, the dockmaster, hands joseph and myself radios and tells us be safe and head on to Pier 25. Joseph and I a little confused, check the fluids of our ride, the Liberty Launch. It's small but it sure does move.
I would think that just because we are fairly new to the Marina that there would be a little hand holding. But I am happily surprised. Both dockmasters we've worked with, Greg & George, allow us to do things on our own. They will properly train us, showing us how to do certain things and giving aid as needed but they give us real responsibility.
After checking fluids and equipment on the launch, we let Greg know we're heading over and we drop our lines and set off to Pier 25. This means we have to cross the Hudson, boat traffic and all. The trip is about 20 minutes until we meet the dock on the other side. I find this launch easier to go forward and reverse on than Indy 7. Once tied up and shut down, we find all the bridles for the mooring field, all 39 of them. There are 2 sizes that are used, shorter ones that are used in the first two rows closer to the south side, and longer ones on the moorings in the 2 rows closer to the dock. After dividing the sizes up, we find the cones we put atop of the moorings and load up all of our gear in the launch.We set out to tackle all 38 moorings in our workday. Each mooring needs a bridle put on which requires tightening shackle pins with the thimble in the shackles. Then placing cones on the moorings to protect the shackles from rubbing against the boats. And finally hose clamping the cones down so they don't move & covering the clamps with tape to avoid scratches on the hull. Maneuvering around with the launch while approaching moorings gave me a feel for the boat and its capabilities. It also gave good practice on boat handling, Joseph would also agree. Sometimes we did overshoot moorings on our first approach but we recovered. We both took turns at the helm. While approaching the moorings and docking. We didn't finish all 38 but we did finish 30 of them if I remember correctly. We were being called to head back to the Marina and call it a day. We cleaned up, locked up our spaces at Pier 25, dropped lines and off to Liberty Landing Marina we were. I'd call it a productive workday.