San Diego: what?

I looked down a few minutes ago and thought:  What the hell is that?  An elephants’s trunk came to mind.  It is, alas, my left leg.  

It is difficult to believe that beautiful women once told me I was beautiful.  That they were was beyond dispute.  Three literally stopped traffic.  Lights changed and no cars moved, until finally someone honked.  That I was is far less certain.  I like to believe that however misguided they meant it.

Note the Band-Aids.  I worked today and working on GANNET means scrapes.  There are also two open gouges on my right arm.  All in a good cause.

After a mid-morning row around the bait barge, I slithered aft on the starboard pipe berth and sprayed and wiped and removed mold that I can seldom reach, all in contortions unseemly for an old man.  Later I moved most of the stuff from the port side of the stern and did the same there.  GANNET is probably as mold free as she has  been since before the circumnavigation.  I only hope I killed more mold than inhaling the spray will kill me.

While emptying the stern, I took the Torqeedo on deck and fitted it.  It started as a good electric outboard should.  I then returned it below deck.

I also tested two of the tiller pilots.  They too worked.

And I sorted out various lines above deck.  Moved the running  backstays and the main halyard to their normal in port positions.  Removed other lines used to hold boom and mast in place while the standing rigging was being replaced.

Tomorrow I will scrub the dinghy and the deck and remove the Dyneema lines that backup the aft lower shrouds in preparation for them to the replaced by wire when Simon returns I hope on Monday.  As I have observed Dyneema doesn’t stretch much, but it does some.  Simon agreeds.

Clarity on the way forward is emerging.

I went to the uShip site and put in tentative details of trucking GANNET east.  I want to do this now.  Otherwise it will mean flying across this country three times rather than once.

If the price of admission is in the millions I am usually not interested, but Pat sent me a link to a video of COMANCHE’s record breaking Atlantic crossing that I enjoyed, despite the hyperbole. Perhaps you will too.  I thank him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmz9iqyeSU

Just after 8 PM and sunset.  I sit at Central watching the last light fade from the sky beyond the companionway hatch, feeling a slight cool breeze, listening to a scrambled non classical playlist—at the moment ‘Oh, Maria’ by Chico and the Gypsies; and sipping Laphroaig.

Only a few more days in Quivira Basin where important parts of my life have taken place for more than fifty years.

I look back, but I am moving forward.