I am sitting by my favorite spot in front of the 6’ square bedroom window looking at Skull Creek and the marina. A quiet overcast morning with the likelihood of a tropical disturbance passing this afternoon. My morning check of the National Hurricane Center site revealed a low developing just offshore and heading this way.
It will not be serious, mostly a few hours of heavy rain if it develops at all. I don’t think storms should be named and particularly not those below Force 12. It only confuses people.
I biked down earlier to check GANNET and disturbed a great blue heron, a great egret, and a black crowned night heron. Fortunately none of them were on GANNET who was clean and secure. I had only to wipe a few drops of water from the bilge and find great pleasure now in being able to look up and see the top half of her mast from where I sit.
Carol observed a few days ago that the Earth Wind Map looked like Van Gogh’s STARRY NIGHT. Even more so this morning when viewed from a perspective above Antarctica.
Of particular interest is the tight low just off the mouth of the River Plate in South America.
David and Michael have recently written, one from Florida, one from Beirut, that they are reading or about to read RETURN TO THE SEA which has inspired me to reread it myself. I have not done so for a long time, perhaps not since it was published in 2004. Though I have always hated the jacket photo—and still do—it is a better book than I remembered. The writing is quite good. It is, of course, written by a sailing legend. I know this because it says so on the dust cover and dust covers never lie.
The photo at the top is the original of one in the book. To reduce costs the book photos are in black and white. It was taken of a charming woman I know at the west end of Faial Island in the Azores in 2001.
Here are two excerpts from the book, the first set in Montevideo, Uruguay, to which Jill and I had gone to get visas for Brazil.
In late afternoon we walked along the promenade beside the harbor. We passed two couples sitting on benches partially sheltered by the sea wall. Only a few feet apart, they were oblivious to one another. The first couple were young lovers. The second, dressed in black, were a middle-aged man and an old woman. The woman, whom we assumed to be the man’s mother, was crying. They seemed to have just come from a funeral. The couples were the same: a man with his arms around a woman, her face buried against his chest: the embraces of love and death identical.
And later in Lisbon I observed:
In sailing the world I have been most impressed by three achievements: the single generation in which tiny Portugal exploded over the globe and justifiably claimed “to be first in all oceans”; the earlier expansion of Islam in a few centuries from the Arabian Peninsula to islands just off Australia in one direction and the west coast of Africa in the other; and the British Empire. All were creations of people with relatively small populations who took incredible risks because they believed in themselves and their own myths. It did not matter that the myths were not real, only that they were believed in. As a child I made up my own myth about myself and then I lived it. Myths may be all we have.
I can hardly wait to read more.
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