I am deluded.
I expect that many of you are pleased with the acknowledgment of what you have long known, but perhaps less so when you discover that I confess only to being regionally deluded. You see I think of myself as a California sailor when the numbers prove that I am a Midwesterner, having lived the first 21 and last 12 years of my life there, and an East Coast sailor, having sailed this coast from the Florida Keys to Maine, up twice, down twice, plus about halfway up and partway back this year. I have only sailed the west coast from San Francisco to San Diego. Still I have begun three of my circumnavigations from San Diego and, time and chance permitting, will be back there next year, and I do have a history in California going back to the 1950s.
I have found myself wondering where if Skull Creek becomes my home waters I will sail, other than locally.
Having seen the Chesapeake, there is no where left on this coast that attracts me.
I look at charts.
Bermuda 700 miles away is a possibility. As are
the Bahamas 400 miles distant.
That wouldn’t be until at least 2020.
Assuming I reach San Diego next year and the condo problems ashore are resolved, it makes no sense to have GANNET towed back here until the hurricane season is over.
It may be a self-solving problem.
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You may have observed that while I am glad to have sailed to Saint Michaels, while there I started to develop a mild case of captiaterraphobia, fear of being trapped by land. Being the discoverer of the disease, of which I am not the sole victim, it should perhaps be renamed Webb’s Syndrome.
At Saint Michaels I was a hundred miles from two small escape openings in the bridge/tunnel into the North Atlantic Ocean. I was surrounded by land. Land everywhere I looked. North. South. East. West. I became slightly nervous, and I must confess that the instant GANNET passed through the northern opening in the bridge, I felt instinctive relief.
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The sail from Saint Michaels to Hilton Head took just over eleven days to cover 609 miles. One of those days we were becalmed. For two and a half days we were anchored, waiting for Hurricane Michael to pass. And I took one day off to catch up on sleep rather than beat into a south wind when the wind was forecast to go north the next day and did.
Except for one potentially serious debacle with the furling jib, it was not a difficult sail, but it was a tiring one, with far more sleep deprived nights than many 3,000 mile ocean passages. Always there was land on one side and ships on the other, though usually I could see neither. Certainly I never entered the monastery of the sea.
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I biked to a supermarket yesterday and felt the loss of my legs which always follows time at sea. I don’t walk around a lot on GANNET. Biking four miles to the store and back on level trails and roads was a trifle difficult. With use muscles rebuild even in the old. I’ll do better tomorrow.
One delightful result of my biking was fresh blueberries and raspberries on my uncooked oatmeal this morning. I have not often bought them here because they didn’t last even overnight in the heat. With highs in the low 70s, I have hopes they will still be good tomorrow morning as well.
The other simple pleasure was a row across Skull Creek to Pickney Island.
I needed to touch up paint on GANNET’s port side, which is away from the dock, so pumped up the dinghy to work from it, and when I was finished rowed.
It felt good to row. I like to row and haven’t for a long time. GANNET has become a marina dweller.
About twenty pelicans were floating in the middle of the creek. They all remained in place until I approached to within twenty yards and a quarter lumbered into the air. When I was ten yards away, half the rest took flight. I didn’t get any closer, and the remaining birds, whether better at risk assessment or just lazy, remained on the water.
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I thank Douglas for a link to the half hour video, EARTHRISE, about the Apollo 8 mission which went around the moon without landing and provided the first views of our planet from space.
I was an adult then and excited about the space program, but I had forgotten much about that mission.
The comments by the astronauts in the last few minutes of the film are particularly interesting.
The comments by the astronauts in the last few minutes of the film are particularly interesting.
