self-portrait in the present sea journal: Hilton Head Island: four small boats; longitude; and a poem

Yesterday I watched Pinckney Island appear and disappear in fog. Today I watch it appear and disappear in rain. But the forecast for next week is good and I have hopes of going sailing and anchoring out for a night or two. Before I do I will have to inventory what is still left on GANNET.

Steve Earley is coming this way next month. With the freedom of retirement he is taking longer cruises and venturing into new waters. He plans to launch SPARTINA in Charleston and follow the Intracoastal waterway to Jacksonville, Florida, or nearby. I am looking forward to seeing SPARTINA from our windows. Oh, yes, and Steve, too.

(Parenthetically I wonder how come I don’t get to retire. My friend, Michael, has his date. Carol has hers. Steve already has. Then I recall that my grandmother said that I retired the day I graduated from college, and that I have been free now for almost fifty years, and I have no desire to retire. Time will retire me soon enough.)

In a recent post in his Log of Spartina Steve wrote of two appealing small boats.

http://logofspartina.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-great-journey-pathfinder-launched.html

One is COD, a 23’ dory being cruised by a young brother and sister on the Intracoastal from North Carolina to Florida. Their story pleases me and I smile with admiration for them.

I copy the link Steve provides to an article about them which I believe you will enjoy.

https://towndock.net/shippingnews/brother-sister-dory-story

The other boat is a sister ship to Steve’s Welsford Pathfinder, ELIZABETH, which has been built with a cuddly cabin. I do not find the Drascombe models with cabins aesthetically pleasing, but ELIZABETH is. The proportions are right and I think she is lovely. I applaud Noah, the builder and I assume designer of the cuddy.

After receiving Ken’s email mentioned in the last entry, I have been thinking about navigation which brought to mind a very good book, LONGITUDE, about John Harrison who solved the problem of finding longitude at sea with his chronometers.

‘Genius’ is one of the most abused words. I have observed that mostly it is nothing more than an exclamation of admiration, like ‘super star’. A former President even claimed to be a genius which is clear proof of how debased the word has become. But if anyone is a genius John Harrison is. I prefer the word ‘original’ to ‘genius’ and John Harrison was certainly an original.

LONGITUDE, the book by Dava Sorbel, is well worth reading, but in looking it up I learned that there was a two part television series based on the book and with the same name. I bought it for $3.99 from Amazon and watched yesterday. While it is perhaps a little too long, the TV series dramatically depicts Harrison’s decades long struggle to obtain the £20,000 prize offered by the British Admiralty for the first to solve the longitude problem. How important this was to the Admiralty can be judged by knowing that would be more than $3,000,000 in present day money.

The series moves back and forth from Harrison’s time to the 1920s and 30s when a retired British Naval officer, Rupert Gould, found Harrison’s chronometers in poor condition and his own struggle to restore them.

Carol and I have seen Harrison’s chronometers at the Greenwich Maritime Museum. They are objects of beauty as well as technical marvels. We all owe both John Harrison and Rupert Gould a great deal.

Read the book; watch the TV series; or do both. You will be well rewarded.

Navigation from Harrison to GPS did not change much, although the means of obtaining accurate time did. On my early circumnavigations I got time signals with a Zenith Trans-Oceanic Radio. It was big and heavy and powered by 8 D cell batteries. How I kept it dry on EGREGIOUS I do not recall.