This morning I painted the tracks that attach the pipe berths to the hull and I am now finished. For a while. The cockpit needs to be painted, but it will wait.
I shot the interior with my iPhone 7+, Nikon AW1, and GoPro Hero 5 Black. The GoPro was the best and the above came from it.
Having moved the dinghy into the cockpit while I painted the track, I pumped it up and rowed once around the bait barge. Sea lions were sunning themselves and sleeping on the big floats at each end. Sea gulls, pelicans and cormorants crowded the bait tanks. Sometimes there are also egrets and at least one Great Blue Heron. The smell on the leeward side of the bait barge is breathtaking.
Yesterday a dingy boat slightly larger than GANNET pulled into the space behind her. Surprisingly for a boat that size she has an inboard engine, a noisy and odiferous inboard engine. After it was turned off the man on it, aged I would guess somewhere around fifty, and I talked briefly. The conversation ended when he asked what kind of engine I have and I replied a Torqeedo electric outboard. Rather aggressively he declared, “No matter how green you people try to be, the best, most efficient fuel is diesel.” I said, “No. You are wrong. The most efficient fuel is this.” I pointed to my mainsail.
His jib was lashed to the bow pulpit. His mainsail to the boom. Both were uncovered and in tatters and unuseable.
While sitting last evening on deck I realized that a good caption for the photo I posted yesterday would be ‘Home is the sailor.’
I did not remember that the source is Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die.
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die.
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
But what is a sailor to do if his home is the sea?
(This has decided to double space and I am tired of trying to fix it)
I have written that my home is where Carol is and where GANNET is.
I have also quoted in the front of one of my books, Nikos Kazantzakis in his THE ODYSSEY: A Modern Sequel, “My soul, your voyages have been your native land.”
Time to shower and sit on deck.
