Hilton Head Island: a Bondathon

Carol and I have just completed a Bondathon, viewing all twenty-five James Bond movies in sequence.  While Amazon has bought the Bond franchise, for the past few months all the Bonds have been on Netflix.  However, most or all are leaving soon.

The Bond movies coincide with my adult life.

I saw the first, DR. NO, in late May of 1963, a few days before I graduated from college and set out for California with my first wife in an old Chevrolet station wagon hauling a U-Haul trailer in which there was, among far too much other stuff, ten or eleven boxes of books.  Now far more than that are in an iPhone in my pocket.  

We had met in a Freshman English class and married during the Christmas vacation our senior year, supported by the money I saved from my jobs as a lifeguard at an outdoor pool in a suburb of St. Louis during the summers and on Saturdays during the school year at an indoor YMCA pool.  For both I was paid the then minimum wage of $1.25 per hour.  However at the outdoor pool I received time and a half for hours over forty per week, of which there were usually about ten.  Big bucks.

Our monthly budget during our first married months was $150.  $67.50 for renting the second floor of a house near campus.  $30 for food.  I don’t recall on what we splurged the remaining $52.50.

She was a kind and intelligent and lovely woman.  She was a talented violist who brought the very great gift of classical music into my life; but we were not right for one another and divorced three years later. 

There is an interesting Wikipedia article about the Bond films which shows the actual budgets and box office was for the films and those figures adjusted to 2024 values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_James_Bond_films

DR. NO was low budget, costing only $1.1 million.  It made ten times that and Bond was off.  

In DR. NO Sean Connery drove a Sunbeam Alpine, about the cheapest vehicle that might have been called a sports car.  Soon he would be driving Aston Martins.  And soon the formula would be perfected.

Handsome men.  Beautiful women.  Exotic locations.  Chases—on land, in air, and beneath the sea.  Sexual innuendo.  We had a character named Pussy Galore and lines like, “I always knew you were a cunning linguist”.   Repeated shots of digital clocks counting down to disaster—always averted with seconds to go.  A megalomaniac who is trying to dominate the world.  Explosions.  The Bond makers loved explosions.  And a big final battle scene—sometimes below water; sometimes above

In short, the Bond films were adult cartoons.

Despite the innuendo and scenes of the various Bonds in bed with various women, I don’t recall any intimate part of a woman’s body ever being shown other than in silhouette in the elaborate title sequences.

While all the Bonds had their charms, the middle films tend to blend together in my mind.  I like best the first with Sean Connery, and the last with Daniel Craig, which actually had less sex and a bit more depth than the previous films, including the death of the Judi Dench as M.

While there hasn’t been a Bond film now in five years, the longest interval between them, the Tom Cruise MISSION IMPOSSIBLE films are certainly a successful variation on the theme, and I read that Amazon is planning to make a new one in the next year or two.

If they do, and I’m still around, I’ll watch.

Hilton Head Island: the obituary of James Whittaker

I saw a couple of days ago reports of the obituary of James Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest.

I know little of James Whittaker.  He probably was a good man, but he was a member of a team.  That he was the first American was decided by others, as was that Hillary, a part of another team, was the first ever to reach the top of the highest mountain on this small planet.

I doubt that there will be media obituaries of the first American who sailed alone around Cape Horn, which I suggest is a greater achievement than being a part of a team summiting Everest.   

No team. Risking everything he owned in the world including his own life, and he permitted no one else to decide.  He decided.

Hilton Head Island: two storms

 

There are two cyclones in the western South Pacific Ocean.  This is late in the season which is said to end there May 1.  I have been watching them for several days.  I first saw them at the Earth Wind Map, the top image, and have continued with Zoom Earth, the bottom image.  At present both are Category 3 storms with 115 mph winds.  The one headed toward Australia has been named Maila.  The one toward New Zealand Vaianu.  The final dot on their tracks is their forecast position Sunday morning at which time Maila will still be a Category 2 storm with 80 mph winds and Vaianu will be an Extratropical Cyclone with 50 mph winds.  It appears that Maila will make landfall near where Narelle did last month.

Hilton Head Island: Reinhold Messner; love and death in Uruguay; $255 per mile

I thank my friend Michael for forwarding me the following from the famed mountaineer, Reinhold Messner. 

Michael and his wife, Layne, retired a few years ago to life in a Dodge van with a custom interior on which they have travelled the U.S., Central and South America.  It is much like living on a boat.  They are about to enter Uruguay, the nineteenth country on their voyage.  This reminded me of something  I wrote while in Uruguay with Jill in 1992 after a 6,000 mile passage on RESURGAM from Auckland around Cape Horn.  We sailed into Punta del Este, but then rode the bus to the capital, Montevideo, to obtain our visas for Brazil.  

    We rode the bus for a couple of hours through a gently rolling countryside and came to a city of narrow streets, elaborately carved doors, iron balconies and trees.  The trees are squeezed everywhere and line streets, often joining branches overhead.  In Montevideo you feel that you are in a Spanish city, while in Punta del Este you do not.

    Between visits to the Brazilian Embassy, we walked around the waterfront.  The mouth of the Rio de la Plata is wide--the Argentine side is 50 miles from Montevideo--and shallow.   Major shipping is confined to narrow channels dredged in those 50 miles.

    On one side of the city, near the container facility, stands a neglected statue of a conquistador, staring determinedly inland.  Beyond him is the stone wall of a decayed fort.  This is an old part of the New World.  Isla de Lobos, near Punta, claims to be the site of the first lighthouse in the Americas.  Only after sailing due west for several days would early adventurers have seen the south bank or known they were on fresh water.

    On the other side of Montevideo, a promenade runs along the shore.  Late one weekday afternoon, it held a curious tableau.

    Montevideo is not the mixture of urban and rural that one often finds in Asia and Africa.  It is definitely a city.  Yet in a park in front of an apartment building in the old part of town, we saw a goat kneeling to eat grass.  A boy turned  the corner from one narrow alleyway to another, riding a fine gray horse.  Fishermen perched on the seawall, dangling hopeful lines in the choppy water.

    We passed two couples, sitting on benches partially sheltered by the seawall.  They were only a few steps apart but oblivious to one another.  The first couple were young lovers.  The second, dressed all in black, were a middle-aged man and an old woman.  The woman, whom we assumed to be his mother, was quietly crying.  They seemed just to have come from a funeral.   Both couples were the same:  a man with his arms around a woman, whose face was buried against his chest.  The embraces of love and death identical.

    We walked back up the hill into the center of the city where, at a cafe beside the Plaza Independencia, we shared a bottle of wine in the evening dusk and watched pigeons settle on the statue of Artiga, Uruguay’s George Washington.

I have read that cruisers power about one-third of the time.  

In writing GANNET 6 I came to wonder how much I powered the little boat.

The daily runs for GANNET’s circumnavigation total 29,989.  Of those I powered less than 15.  

Out of San Diego 1 mile.

In Hilo .5 mile.

In and out of Honolulu 2 miles

In Apia .5 mile

In Vavau 1 mile.

In Opua .5 mile.

In Bundaberg .5 mile.

In and out of Durban 3 miles.

In St. Helena .5 mile.

Out of Marathon .25 mile.

In Hilton Head 2 miles

In Balboa .5 mile.

In San Diego .25 mile.

I left Hilo, Apia, Vavau, Opua, Bundaberg, St. Helena, Hilton Head, and Balboa under sail.

GANNET was also towed at St. Lucia about 1 mile and into Marathon about .5 mile.

This works out to about 1/2000th powering.  Obviously GANNET and I are not cruisers.

With an electric outboard whose battery is recharged by the ship’s batteries which are charged by solar power we spent nothing on fuel.  However, having bought two electric outboards and a spare battery during the voyage our cost were a startling $266 per mile.

Hilton Head Island: two alligators and a lot of egrets.

 

Carol drove us over to Pickney Island yesterday and we saw two alligators and a lot of egrets.  This is their nesting season and the photos show only a small portion of those on the island.  I am impressed that there are enough fish around to feed the population.  

To have an undeveloped wildlife refuge on the other side of Skull Creek is one of the charms of this place.

Hilton Head Island: GANNET’s new home; an odd life; and two poems

After a week of almost constant gale warnings, though as usual there was not that much wind on this side of the island, Monday morning was calm as forecast and slack water coincided with first light at 7 AM, so I biked down and moved GANNET from slip A5 to A21.  

AyeTides showed the turn from high water at the mouth of Skull Creek to be at 7:30.  It is about 40 minutes earlier at the marina, but I was surprised to feel how strong the current already was in the first hour of change.  I had to compensate for the tide pushing GANNET toward the B dock.  The tidal currents here make this the most difficult place to leave a slip in any place I have ever kept a boat.  

I am happy with the move, even though in time there will probably be boats on the end tie outside of our new slip that will compromise the view, and even though the wakes of passing boats are much more felt than they were in A5.

Here is a wider view.

You are looking south on Skull Creek.  The land ahead is Hilton Head Island.  About two miles on Skull Creek makes a sharp turn to the right before going under the only bridge onto the island.  The land to the right is Pickney Island, a National Wildlife Refuge, on which there is no development.  A red marker on the Intracoastal is visible.  Heading south it should be left to starboard.

GANNET needs a lot of cosmetic maintenance.  

I go down daily and do some.  Today scrubbing the deck which very much needed it.

I will go sailing soon, but I don’t know where.  

While down below on GANNET yesterday sorting out the interior, I heard my name called.  I stuck my head through the companionway and found a man who I learned is named Mark and is a decade younger than I.  He has a sloop about the size of THE HAWKE OF TUONELA  and lives in Massachusetts.  I conclude he is a snowbird for he has passed this way frequently enough to know that GANNET has moved.  He also knows of me and our voyage and he told me that when he stops here he goes to GANNET and meditates.  I did not think to ask about his meditative thoughts, and I am not sure I would have anyway.  That might be too private, and though I have shared much of my life, I respect privacy.

Still it gives me pause.

I often wonder about the value of my life.

Perhaps it has touched some of whom I do not know.

In three days I will finish THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ENGLISH POETRY.  This has been a tough passage.  I commend myself for having almost completed it.

It has not been all bad.  The anthology includes Chidiock Tichborne’s Elegy and a few other poems that I admire, but I have enjoyed less than one hundred of its eleven hundred pages.  This is a rarity for I have no problem of stopping reading a book I do not like.  I persisted with this anthology because I was curious if it would get better.  It didn’t much.

Here are links to two poems I have enjoyed.  They are too long to include here.

The Sword of Achilles by W. H. Auden

and

The Pike by Ted Hughes.

Hilton Head Island: Narelle again; sextants; an impressive weather app; three poems about men and women

 

As noted in a comment to the previous post about cyclone Narelle, the storm has tracked all the way across Australia and then turned south and has made its third landfall and looks to pass east of Perth.  A truly long lived and unusual storm.

I am moving GANNET to a new slip at the end of A Dock.  It has the advantages of being the only single slip on A Dock, will be easier to enter and exit, and as you know I like edges.  In doing so I have moved the considerable stuff in my dock box.  It took three trips with a dock cart.  Mostly paint and maintenance supplies, but also a bosun’s chair and the Jordan drogue.  I came across a bag in which I found my long unused sextant.  Although it was in a case as well as the bag, I expected the mirrors to be ruined by time and moisture, but they weren’t.  In fact the sextant, a Davis Mark 25, cleaned up well and is in excellent condition.

I am among the last to have had to navigate by sextant.  My first was a U.S. Navy WW2 sextant made by David White Co. in Milwaukee that I bought used in the late 1960s for $100 which according to an inflation calculator would be a startling $939 now.  I checked and David White is still in business making surveying instruments, not sextants.

I taught myself celestial navigation from books and used that sextant on EGREGIOUS and CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE until it was lost when CT pitch-poled.  When I resumed the voyage I made the passage from Port Vila, Vanuatu, to Cairns, Australia using a plastic sextant.  I found it to be accurate, but had to realign the mirrors after every sight.  In Cairns, I bought a good German Zeiss Frieberger sextant.  I checked and they are still being made and have one model for $1022 and another $1584.  

The Davis Mark 25 can be bought for as little as $367.

I have not taken a sextant sight for more than twenty years, but I believe that if you go offshore it is wise to have a sextant and the current Nautical Almanac on board and know at least how to take a noon sight for latitude which is simple and does not even require exact time.  This seems particularly true when one reads increasingly of GPS jamming, which in case of a large scale war would surely be extensive.

I chanced across a new to me weather site, zoom earth.  This is a screen shot of its  pressure map.  As you can see on the left there are other overlays.  You can zoom in and out.  There appears to be world wide coverage.  All the basic functions are free.  For $11.99 per year you can go ad free and get hurricane alerts, which I have done.  I am very impressed with the app.

https://zoom.earth/

I am nearly at the end of the 1100 page trek through THE PENGUIN  BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE, and trek it has been.  The editors of this anthology and I have very different tastes in poetry and when I have made it to the end I will delete the book from my library.  Most books of poetry I reread often.  Not this one.  However I have found a few poems I enjoy and admire.  Here are three from last century about feelings between men and women.

And this by A. E. Housman.

Hilton Head Island: boat house or house boat; reacalibrating

In searching for photos for GANNET 6 I came across this appealing structure.  I did not take it and don't know its source.  Perhaps someone sent it to me or I happened across it online.  I wouldn't mind living in it.

For eight or more months I have worked every day on GANNET 6.  Usually two factory shifts of a couple of hours each.  One in the morning.  One in the afternoon.  I haven't missed a single day, though once or twice when I had a doctor or dentist appointment I only worked in the afternoon.  As of today GANNET 6 is pretty much finished.  There will probably be more to do, but not immediately.  

I am momentarily at a loss.  There will be no factory shifts tomorrow.  So I will go down and do some work on GANNET and maybe one of these days I'll even go sailing again.

Hilton Head Island: Category Five; obsolete; finished (for now); some poems

 

Each morning I check the Earth Wind Map 

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=132.13,-30.00,1002

and this morning I found the above.  That is a cyclone which I have learned has been given the name Narelle.  You probably know what I think about giving storms names, but that is a rather attractive one.  The storm itself is expected to be making landfall about now as a Category 5 near Cape Melville in far northern Queensland.  I know that coast better than most, having sailed it four times in four different boats.  There are very few people up there, which is one of the reasons I like it.  I hope they survive.

I have become obsolete, if I was’t always.

I saw my demise in the above chart from the WASHINGTON POST yesterday.  Writers and authors are a very small dot on the extreme right.

Another reason not to want to be young now.

Ah, well, it was good while it lasted.

I have just finished the second rewrite of GANNET 6.  I may go over it again sometime, but not immediately.

Immediately I have to sort out formatting.  I write on my 11” iPad Pro with attached Apple keyboard case using Apple’s Pages app.  Unfortunately Pages for IOS does not export perfectly to anything, including my MacBook Air.  So I have a lot of clerical work to do.  I expect this is a task that AI could do quite quickly, but learning how to use AI to perform that task seems more complicated than just doing it myself, and since I am now obsolete, I have the time.

I have been asked what I will do with the book when it is publishable.  

All my publishers, editors and agents have either retired or died.  That happens when you get to be 84.  I have sent out four queries.  One to a publisher.  Three to agents.  I will wait awhile to see if I get any replies.  This is like being twenty again and unpublished, when I am old and very published.  I am curious to see what happens, but I will not wait long.

I think the book in its present form is not publishable except as an e-book.  There are too many charts and photographs for it to be profitable in paper.  I am willing to make some compromises, but, while I am a writer/obsolete, I think the reader’s experience of the voyage is much enhanced by the images.  So most likely I will publish it in a Kindle edition myself.  If so, I will price it modestly and donate all the vast royalties to charity.  I wrote the book for the same reason I made the voyage:  because it is what I do.  Not for money, which of course makes it a very suspicious activity in our society.

Some poems.

A few of you may remember that I have posted this one before.  I just came across it again in JAPANESE DEATH POEMS.

You may have read this in an English Literature class.

An excerpt from Lord Byron’s DON JUAN of particular interest to me.

And from Edward FitzGerald’s translation of THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM.

Hilton Head Island: frozen not chopped; leaves

 

On Monday I biked five miles to my regular six month skin cancer appointment.  The marsh is having a period of perfect weather and the ride mostly along bike trails through woods was a pleasure in 64F/18C going and a bit more on my return.  I have seen enough skin cancers to know when I have one and I didn’t think I did this time.  The doctor confirmed that I didn’t and only froze a few spots on my face.  I am now good for another six months.  Maybe.

As you can see from the photo leaves are falling.  I am having to sweep our deck almost daily.  Above is two day’s collection.  Most of the trees on the island remain green year round, though a bit duller in winter than summer, and this is spring, not fall.  So I googled and AI informs me:  Live oaks (Quercus virginiana) shed their old leaves in early spring as part of a natural ‘molting process’ to make way for new, fresh growth and blooming.  Although considered evergreens, they do not hold leaves forever; instead they replace last year’s foliage simultaneously, allowing them to remain green year-round.

Thank you AI.

This is also the start of pollen season so what is not knee deep in oak leaves is covered with yellow dust.

Still it is paradise.

Now I have to go sweep.