Lake Forest: The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up; an article; last century

 

Well, not quite, but reminiscent. 

You may be familiar with the Turner painting with that title.  If not, here it is:

HMS TEMERAIRE was a 96 gun ship of the line launched in 1798.  She distinguished herself during the Battle of Trafalgar and was henceforth known as The Fighting TEMERAIRE.  She served until 1838 when she was broken up.

Regular readers will recognize the top photo as being of the somewhat less distinguished former New York Harbor ferry, FATHOM THIS, being towed from Skull Creek Marina to be prepared to be sunk as an artificial reef.  The photo came in an email from the marina I received yesterday.  I regret not witnessing the removal myself.  FATHOM THIS is presently in Georgetown, South Carolina, between Charleston and Myrtle Beach.  When she will be brought back and sunk off Hilton Head Island I do not know.

I was asked to write an article for the small boat issue of GOOD OLD BOAT, a publication of which I had not previously known.

Regular readers will not find anything new, but if you want to read it, here is a link.

https://goodoldboat.com/little-wings/

And here are the editor’s comments about one of Steve Earley’s outstanding photos of GANNET.

GANNET’s hull appears to be blue in the photo.  It was not.  Light gray as always.

I also wish to state that ‘Little Wings’ was not my title.  I called it ‘The Joy of Small Boats’.  Not great, but better than ‘Little Wings.

About fifteen years ago, not long after we moved to Evanston, I told Carol that we needed to buy more book shelves.  Then I bought a Kindle and bookshelves were instantly obsolete.  I now read on an iPad mini or my iPhone and rarely buy a ‘real’ book.

I’ve moved about a dozen books to Hilton Head, half of them ones I wrote.

We still have a couple of hundred books on shelves here at Lake Forest. 

I have bought e-editions of many I might want to read again.

Yesterday I went over the shelves to see if there were any I have missed and came across THE MAIAS by Eco de Queiros, considered Portugal’s greatest 19th Century novelist, often favorably compared to Flaubert and Stendhal.  I remembered admiring the novel and decided to reread it.  I went to Amazon to buy a Kindle edition and to my surprise found there is none in English.  I searched further without success.  My paperback is published by Penguin, which apparently does not think there is a sufficient English reading market to warrant an e-version.  Shocking.  This is one of the great novels in European literature.

So I am reading the paperback.  I am enjoying the novel, but not the paperback.  It is a thick book, awkward to hold and awkward to turn thin pages, and I can’t read it in bed at night after Carol goes to sleep.  So last century.