Evanston: hibernation; shorter; Bundesliga

I thank Lee for the photos of GANNET in hibernation taken yesterday or the day before.  Above the waterline she looks as I left her.  The birds seems not to have found her.  They prefer higher perches.  Below the waterline she must be foul.  She was last anti-fouled in January of last year.



I have said that I expected it to cost less to have GANNET towed across this big country than it did to have her towed 50 miles across Panama.  I now know that as a fact.  I checked some websites and made a phone call and have a quote of $5600 San Diego to Hilton Head.  I am reasonably certain I can improve on that.  

I have never known the full cost of GANNET’s Panama transit because I paid the various boat yards, marinas, cradle makers, materials suppliers, and the trucking company at different times and with different pieces of plastic; and because I don’t want to know.  However, I have bills totalling more than $7,000.  The real total probably approaches the $9,000 I paid to buy GANNET.

I was under the impression that the US is 3,000 miles across.  From New York to San Francisco or Seattle it is.  But the country curves inward toward the south on both coasts and the distance San Diego to Hilton Head of 2,418 miles is not much more than the distance from San Diego to Chicago 2,077 miles.

I don’t see this happening before September at the earliest.



The German Bundesliga is the first top flight soccer league in Europe to resume play.  Some minor leagues never stopped.  The matches are televised and I record and watch them.  The only real sport going.

Being played in empty stadiums with 80,000 empty seats, voices echo.  One team places pictures of fans on several hundred seats on one side of its stadium, and I sometimes hear what sounds like crowd noise, but do not know if it is being broadcast in the stadium or just on television.  The play is good.  

The matches unquestionably lack something in the absence of live fans.  But is it better than nothing?  I think it is.