Hilton Head Island: 14.1; the taste of women; a poem

I have said that the fastest speed I have seen GANNET make was about 13.7 knots.  I was wrong.  In rereading the log of the passage from Durban, South Africa, to St. Helena, I found that one night I was awakened by feeling that GANNET was going too fast.  She was.  Her SOG read 14.1 knots.  The tiller pilot couldn’t keep up.  I quickly went on deck and reduced sail.

Also in that passage log I read:

        The monastery of the sea was beautiful.

Waves as low as the sun.  Directly toward the sun was a narrow inverted pyramid of blinding white.  Elsewhere millions of constantly changing facets of light, shades of blue, some white crests, near the hull white bubbles and foam.  Pristine, untouched natural beauty.  I had heard no world news for weeks.  Those last two sentences are not unrelated.

I was standing in the companionway, sipping red wine and listening to my requiem playlist.  A line from Lucy Kaplansky’s ‘Scorpion’, “I’ll sting you with a taste of my skin.” 

        Women taste best fresh from the sea.  

I thank Larry for reminding me of this poem.

Hilton Head Island: the stages of life

 In AS YOU LIKE IT, Shakespeare gives us seven ages of man.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I have divided my own life into three parts:  longing; being; dying; and I have written that life is only forty years long in that our lives are defined by what we do from twenty to sixty give or take a few years.

Recently scientists have defined five phases of life as shown in changes of the structure of the brain with significant transitions at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83.

They are childhood, adolescence, adulthood, early aging, and late aging.

I, who am 84, smiled at the statement that there is less data about late aging because researchers had difficulty in finding sufficient healthy brains at that age.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgl6klez226o

I have no particular memories of age 9, but what I call the being of my life began at age 32.  I believe that had less to do with whatever changes were taking place in my brain than that it took me that long after college to buy and prepare a boat and save enough money to make the voyage and free myself.

The transition to the third part of my life came between observed transformations.  I was 77 when I completed the GANNET circumnavigation.

Now at the beginning of late aging I am aware of changes.  New information that is not reinforced is often lost.  Connections in my brain are sometimes not made.  Words sometimes come less easily.  Memory is less reliable.

All these could be signs of something more serious, but i don’t think so.  My vital signs are still good.  I take no prescribed medications.  I use my body hard.  I am writing a book.  I sail.

There is a cliche, ‘Finish strong and show no weakness’.  To an extant it is good advice, but it can become delusional.  No one at 83 is what he or she once was and without weakness. 

To life.

Hilton Head Island: worked out and two poems

 

My calendar for this past week.  This has been the first week in two months since I started being chopped that I have done all my workouts.  X100 is the extended workout going to 100 push-ups and crunches in the first set, and 50 each in the next two sets.  W is my workout with two ten pound weights and two minutes of planks.  X is my standard workout doing my age, 84, of push-ups and crunches in the first set and 40 each in the next two.  B is a bike ride.  R my resistance bands workout.  Dr. McKinley is a dentist who added to my chopping by removing a bridge and an abscessed tooth.  This was much less painful than I expected.  I was told to take Tylenol if needed, but I took the universal panacea, Laphroaig, instead, slept well, woke without discomfort, and did my usual early shift at the factory.

I hope that the removal of parts of me has come to an end for a while.

HOJOKI:  A HERMIT’S HUT AS METAPHOR was written by Kamo no Chomei, 1155-1216.  In his 60s he built and lived in a hut 3 meters/10 feet square and 2 meters/ 6.5 feet high.  Almost like living on GANNET.

Here is the prologue:

And Cavafy’s ‘Second Odyssey’.  I like the poem but I think Penelope deserved better from Ulysses, though as I have observed you can never judge a marriage from the outside.

A little while after posting these, I was struck by the antithetical divergence of attitudes they express.  I encompass them both.

Hilton Head Island: the right way and a small boat to Antarctica

In rereading the journal entries for GANNET SIX I came across this originally posted on September 1, 2016.  I was impressed then by Mark’s and Ian’s phenomenal elapsed time.  I still am.  

Durban: the right way

Above you see Mark English and Ian Rogers.

While I was crossing the Indian Ocean in GANNET, they were using another Moore 24, MAS!, as the boats were intended to be used:  to go fast.  

In the Pacific Cup race from San Francisco to Hawaii they went very fast indeed, covering more than 2,000 miles in ten days, fourteen hours and thirty minutes.  They won; but that pales beside their sailing a race for the ages.  If not perfect, and it may have been, then inhumanly close.

If you have read the passage log of GANNET from Darwin to Durban, you know that I have said that GANNET is capable of 200 mile days, but she won’t do them unless I am willing to hand steer more than I care to.

Mark and Ian did hand steer; and every day after the first two, when they were breaking clear of the coastal weather, was a two hundred mile day.  Mark tells me that their best twenty-four hour run was 240 miles.  That is a ten knot average.  Their highest speed was around fifteen knots.

If you have ever made an ocean passage, you know that the key to making a good average is not so much going fast as avoiding going slow.  Obviously Mark and Ian never went slow.

Standing watch and watch is tiring, but they kept MAS! moving to the end.

I think I can imagine what it was like, and maybe someday, sometime I will push GANNET as hard as I can for as long as I can.  I am filled with admiration for what Mark and Ian have done.

In one account of the race I found their boat described as a “humble Moore 24”.  I think not.  Small, unquestionably, but is a Stradivarius violin humble just because it is not as big as a double bass?     

I’ve said it before, the Moore 24 is a masterpiece.  What other forty year old design simultaneously blasts across the Pacific and goes six thousand miles across the Indian Ocean?

In preparing for the race Mark made substantial modifications to MAS! and I inherited his old carbon fiber tiller, so he had part in both passages; and I am honored to have a part of MAS!.

I thank William for bringing to my attention a voyage to Antarctica by a Japanese sailor, Kataoka, in a boat the size of GANNET.

While I find the voyage remarkable, I do not find the writing compelling.  I think there is a good story here, but it is not clearly told.  Still you may find it to be of some interest.

https://en.aomi-sailing.com/index.html

Hilton Head Island: a night on board

 

I spent last night on GANNET.  

Temperatures have returned to normal.  Highs around 70F/21C.  Lows around 50F/10C.  One day of winter was enough for me.

Music, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and chicken and bacon sliders in the cockpit during a lovely sunset.

I went down earlier and scrubbed mold from the underside of the spray hood and the overhead.  A solar light disintegrated in my hand.  I have others.  Device charging cables had corroded.  I have others.

I slept well in the heavier sleeping bag with a lighter one on top as a blanket.  Woke at 5:25 and walked home just before dawn.

  

Hilton Head Island: record cold and a very small boat

 

A screenshot taken of the Apple Weather App on my iPhone this morning.  I realize that it is cold in most of this country, but it is more unusually cold in the South.  I believe the previous record low for this day in Hilton Head was 34ºF.  Fortunately as you can see this is not going to last long and soon the island will return to paradise.

I don’t often watch sailing videos, but I thank Mike for a link to this one about a very small boat, which despite its size, with a gimbaled stove, plumbing, and a few through hull fittings, is in some ways more complicated than GANNET.  In the video she sails better than I would have expected and I particularly enjoyed the father and son sharing the experience.  

Who knows how I would have turned out if I had good parents?  Perhaps less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MB5fNIyq4I&lc=Ugy3ZLiKpO_mnpavJGB4AaABAg

Hilton Head Island: a solution from GANNET

 

As regular readers know for decades my breakfast on land and sea has been ½ cup of uncooked oatmeal, ⅓ cup of trail mix, a scoop of Vital Whey protein powder, berries, milk.  On land the berries and milk are fresh.  At sea the berries and milk are dried.

Recently I have been adding to the mix.  Two dried figs, a dried Medjool date torn into small pieces, another half scoop of protein powder, and more berries, usually blueberries, blackberries and raspberries, but sometimes strawberries, and more milk.  This has resulted in filling our cereal bowls to spilling level.  The solution was obvious:  do as I do on GANNET.  So I ordered another Oxo 4 cup measuring cup from Amazon and spill no more.

Although I wake early, I do not eat my breakfast until around 10 AM and usually I eat only half or two-thirds then and put the rest in the refrigerator, eating it in midafternoon or sometimes the next morning.

Other than finishing off the oatmeal in the afternoon, if I do, I no longer eat lunch.  

I was never a big eater and in my old age eat even less.

Hilton Head Island: hurricanes; poems; Cape York

As you may know so far this year no hurricanes have made landfall on the United States coast.  It could still happen but the season is almost over and no activity is expected for the next seven days.  

I had the impression that this was rare.  I was wrong.  2025 is thus far the first year for a decade when there were no landfalls on this coast, but if we make it through, this will be the seventh year since 2000 and the seventeenth since 1951.

Those are years without hurricane landfalls.  During some of them landfalls were made by tropical storms.

I expected that AI will greatly improve weather forecasting and read an article this morning which indicates that it already is.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/googles-new-weather-model-impressed-during-its-first-hurricane-season/

I did not know of Google’s Deep Mind Weather Lab site.  

https://deepmind.google.com/science/weatherlab

I visited and am impressed and have added a bookmark to the list of sites I check each morning.

Unlike the government I do not shut down and am still going to the factory seven days a week.  I do not like Daylight Savings Time which has never saved anything and find my body has yet to adjust to the time change.  My shift now begins at what the clock says is 5 AM rather than 6.  I am 73,000 words along and have just sailed from Darwin for Durban.

The photograph was taken at Cape York when I anchored there in CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE in 1981.  I have not gone ashore on my three stops there since and am using it in GANNET SIX.  Cape York has not changed in forty years.  Or probably four thousand.  The pinnacle is an ant colony taller than I am.

Six poems.

The first was written by Liu Zongyuan  773-819.

This by Zhu Shuzhen  1063-1106.

Zhu Xizhen whose dates are uncertain, but about who lived about 1000 A.D.

And three by the Greek, C.P. Cavafy  1863-1933.

Hilton Head Island: active; fall; a lock-in

 

A sunny windy day in the marsh welcomed after three days of solid low overcast.  The Spanish moss seems to be reaching out for me.  

Carol and I walked to GANNET this afternoon.  The little boat is fine and clean.  The birds have been remarkably polite.  I wiped up a little water in the bilge with a paper towel.

Fall has come to the island.  50ºF/10C when I woke and went to the factory at 6:15 this morning.  In the first draft I have just reached Darwin.  Shorts have been replaced by Levis and we wore jackets during our walk this afternoon.

Most of the trees here remain green year round, though a duller green in winter.  There is a quarter mile long line of maples along a nearby street whose leaves turn yellow and fall.  The flaming colors of New England and the upper Midwest are missed.

The stitches in my shoulder are not due to be removed until a week from today.  The ones in my temple and ankle are dissolvable.  I don’t know why they used the different types.  I will ask.  However I am tired of being inactive.  My ancient body wants to be used.  So yesterday I carefully did my standard workout.  I did not believe the stitches in my shoulder would be stressed by push-ups and they weren’t.  I think they might be by my weight workout and so will not attempt it until they are removed. I will do my standard workout again tomorrow.

Carol and I have not been much affected by the government shut down.  A few websites I usually visit are not being updated.  Fortunately the National Hurricane Center site is.  But the shut down is unconscionable, especially when members of Congress are still being paid when most government employees are not.  Clearly they are not doing their jobs and I have a solution:  a lock in.  Assemble them all in their capital chambers and lock the doors until they come to an agreement.  Provide mattress for them to sleep on the floor.  Provide food, but no drink beyond water.  I doubt the shut down would have lasted thirty days as it already has.  I doubt it would have lasted two.

 

Hilton Head Island: Band-Aids; a good ad

I had my third and hopefully for a while last chopping yesterday.  I am now officially a piece of Swiss Cheese held together by Band-Aids.

Böcker, the German firm that manufactured the lift used in the Louvre robbery, has run ad extolling its virtues, among them “when you need to move fast” and that it is “as quiet as a whisper.”  

The ad has received widespread approval including from me.  My favorite of the comments on the ad:  ‘Your messaging takes the crown.’