Hilton Head Island: incomprehensible excess; finished with Connemara; the virtues of poitin; the ruined maid; cleared

Above is the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day from June 24.  Here is the explanation:

What if we could see back to the beginning of the universe?  We could see galaxies forming.  But what did galaxies look like back then?  These questions took a step forward recently with the release of the analysis of a James Webb Space Telescope image that included the most distant object yet discovered.  Most galaxies formed at about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, but some formed earlier.  Pictured in the inset box is JADES-GS-z14-0, a faint smudge of a galaxy that formed only 300 million years after the universe started.  In technical terms, the galaxy lies at the record redshift of z=14.32, and so existed when the universe was only one fiftieth of its present age.  Practically all of the objects in the featured photograph are galaxies.

The underlining is mine.

It is now thought the universe is 13.7 billion years old, so the light captured recently by the James Webb Telescope was emitted more than 13 billion years ago.  

I noted the inhuman scale of ‘only 300 million years’.  Nothing really.

And that practically all the objects in the photo are galaxies.  

There are differing opinions as to how many stars are in a galaxy.  Estimates of those in our Milky Way vary from 100 billion to 200 billion.  Quite a variance.  Though both numbers are beyond our comprehension.  As are the number of stars in the photograph which covers only a tiny fraction of the universe.

You may think you know what is going on.  I don’t.

As it happened this morning I read in CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY ‘The Question of Heaven’ written about three centuries before Christ by a poet whose name is variously translated into English as, among others, Chu Yuan.

The poem is too long to publish here completely and I have not found a satisfactory translation online, so here is only the beginning.

We have been asking those questions a long time and must still, perhaps forever, live with uncertainty.

As I have said here before, all I think I know is that consciousness resists unconsciousness and DNA seems to impose an imperative that it be transmitted endlessly into the future.

There is no meaning there.

Of DNA being transmitted, I became an adult coincidentally with the use of the birth control pill.  A most fortunate coincidence.  That was sixty years ago and there has not yet been discovered an effective birth control for men other than vasectomy.  An article I recently read suggests an unusual method of rubbing a gel on one’s shoulders may change that.  I know.  I too thought ‘What?’

Here is the link:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mens-health/male-birth-control-gel-results-promising-rcna153349

A second ‘What?’ came to me on reading that reducing sperm count to one million sperm per one milliliter of semen is considered effective at preventing birth.  Now you may have observed that nature or the elan vital or whatever you want to call it does not proceed economically.  It proceeds by throwing a lot against the wall with some tiny proportion sticking, but even by that inefficient standard this is ridiculous.  The article states that normal sperm count is 15 to 200 million per milliliter of semen.  Unless I have this wrong, it only takes one.  Talk about wretched excess,

This morning I finished the third and last volume of Tim Anderson’s incomparable Connemara trilogy almost with regret.  Actually there is regret, but it is tempered by my having his two books on the Aran Islands, where he lived and wrote before he moved to Connemara on the mainland, still to read.  

From photographs Tim Robinson was built like me.  A lean and physical man who biked and walked all over the lands of which he wrote.  He said that he learned Connemara through the soles of his boots.

He must have been an engaging man for he was an outsider, an Englishman in a part of the world that has reason not to care for the English, and an unbeliever among people with so deep and divisive religious beliefs that they often killed one another for them.

In one of the books he mentions that he and his wife, Mairead, had obtained pills from a physician friend that they intended to use to die on their own terms when faced will final illness.  I was sorry to learn that it did not happen that way.  COVID caught him off guard and he died at age 85 in a London hospital probably with a ventilator stuck down his throat.

Near the end of the trilogy Tim Robinson quotes a song about the virtues of poitin, the local illegally distilled moonshine:

What a fine thing is poitin in this land,

It would pay the rent and the poor-law tax.

It would cure the night-time cough,

And straighten the bent old man.

Slainte.

I am now reading a book of some of Thomas Hardy’’s poems.  Hardy is among my favorite writers.  Among those I read this morning was one of his most famous, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, a fine poem, but you probably read that one in school.  Here is one you probably didn’t read in school.

On Tuesday I had a routine follow-up visit with Dr. Culpepper, the surgeon who repaired me.  We both pronounced ourselves very satisfied with the results.  I am told that my repair is better than factory specs.  Not his exact words.  I asked if the bulge at the surgical site is permanent and was told that it will soften and reduce some with time.  I asked when I can go swimming and was told ‘Now.’   However I haven’t yet despite having a choice of four swimming pools.  Maybe tomorrow.

I biked to GANNET yesterday morning at 7:30 and touched up the starboard rub rail.

Like most of this country the marsh is hot with heat index numbers day after day over 100F.  Our temperatures and humidity are both often above 90.  Outside physical activity must be performed early in the morning.  I will go sailing when we get back to only normal summer heat.

Hilton Head Island: waxed

As is to be expected the marsh is getting seriously hot.  Outside activity during the day must be planned.  Heat indexes must be considered.   Other signs of the change of season are that each morning I again check the National Hurricane Center site and download GRIBs.  But the past two days have been pleasant with highs only in the low 80sF and a cooling breeze strong enough to cause Small Craft Advisories for near coastal waters, though no more than ten or twelve knots on Skull Creek.

So this morning I biked to GANNET at 9 AM intending to wax as much of the starboard side of her hull as my body and the heat permitted.  Both cooperated and I waxed the entire side.  Another of the many virtues of small boats.  GANNET has only 2’/.6 meter of freeboard so there is not a lot of area to wax.

Here is what I use:

It is a very good product.  There may be better, but I wanted to buy another quart and found no one had quarts in stock so I bought a gallon which is a lifetime supply for me and would be even if I were considerably younger.

I apply it with a plastic scrubbing pad and remove it with paper towels.  I have a buffing attachment for my drill but do not like using it with the boat in the water.

GANNET’s hull is far from perfect, but when I left to go home I walked around to the next dock and looked back and she passes the viewed from a boat length away test.  She has battle scars.  They are honorable.  She has been in battles.

Hilton Head Island: quick; No Ears on moving; surviving the TITANIC with regret

I have observed and often noted during the past several years that I heal more slowly than when I was younger.  However, I seem to have healed from my recent slicing unexpectedly quickly.  I’ve had no discomfort since last Thursday.  On Saturday I rode my bike.  On Monday I carefully did fifty of each exercise in my standard workout.  I certainly do not want to rip anything apart inside me.  Yesterday I did my full weight workout, which of course is mostly upper body, but includes 100 crunches with 20 pounds of weight on my chest and two minutes of planks.  And today I did my full workout without a twinge.  Tomorrow I plan to go down and wax some of GANNET’s hull.

I just finished reading Larry McMurtry’s BUFFALO GIRLS.  Light entertainment, I thought, until an unexpected twist at the end gave it greater depth.  Many of the characters are historical:  Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody;  some are not, including as far as I know an old Indian, No Ears, who got his name when at age ten his people were attacked by French trappers who killed everyone except him and cut off all their ears.  He was shot but survived.  You know that I would like this passage.

I am nearing the end of A LITTLE GAELIC KINGDOM, the last volume of Tim Robinson’s Connemara Trilogy.  Fortunately I have his two Aran Island books still to look forward to.

Yesterday I read of Bruce Ismay who hid himself away in Connemara after the sinking of the TITANIC.  Ismay was the President and Chairman of the White Star Line, which owned the TITANIC, and was on board when the ship sank.  According to an official inquiry, he helped women and children into lifeboats and when finally there were no other passengers around got into the last lifeboat to be launched and survived.  There were many who thought that he, like the ship’s captain, should have gone down with the ship.  In public disgrace, even slandered that he had put on women’s clothes to get into the life boat, he and wife exiled themselves to isolated Connemara for a quarter century.  After his death his widow had a chunk of limestone placed in their garden as a memorial to him.  On it is inscribed:  He loved all wild and solitary places where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see is boundless as we wish our souls to be.

Hilton Head Island: biked; wrong; buoys

The sun as it was fifteen minutes ago.

I am still sitting by the bedroom window, but the sun is now below Pickney Island and the sky is not so dramatic, though still quietly beautiful.  Shades of lavender, silver, gold and blue.  Skull Creek is glassy and the Spanish moss is hanging limp.

Eight days after being sliced I am pretty much my old self.  Emphasis perhaps on the old.  And have been since Thursday when I walked to GANNET and climbed on board.  I did not attempt the long step down into the cabin, which almost requires doing the splits, but will in a day or two. 

Today I went for bike ride.  Only a couple of miles.  I did not want to go too far in case I had problems and had to limp home.  It was good to use muscles I have not for more than a week.  On Monday I will see what parts of my workout I can perform.

I recently read ARABIA FELIX by Thorkild Hansen about a Danish scientific expedition from 1761-67 to what is now Yemen.  Arabia Felix translates from Latin as ‘Happy Arabia’.  I have been there, completing what still might be the longest non-stop open boat passage ever, 4,000 miles from Singapore to Aden.  I wondered at the ‘happy’, as have others.  The book explains the confusion in the name and is an interesting account of an extraordinary expedition from which only one of the six men who set out survived.  I very much enjoyed it, but am writing because of a sentence near the end.

Of the survivor who advanced science in profound ways without much recognition in his lifetime, the author writes of him as he became old, “All men, when they grow very old, babble about going home.”

I know of at least one very old man for whom that is not true.  

I was sitting on the deck yesterday morning eating my uncooked oatmeal and listening to Yo Yo Ma playing the Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suite Number 3 in C Major, looking beyond the live oaks and Spanish moss to the marker buoys on Skull Creek when I wondered if there are places where on inlets or rivers the buoys are reversed and the sailor does not have red right returning or as here on the Intracoastal red right to starboard while heading south.  So I emailed Steve Earley who has much more experience on the Intracoastal than I and found that does indeed occur.  I thank him for his reply.

Steve wrote:

Yes, there are handful of places where the markers switch sides.  The one that has always baffled me is inside Cumberland Island near the sub base.  In the top photo you can see (going north to south) red is to starboard until marker 78, then switches to port at 44.  It took me sailing through this stretch three times, and finding myself outside the channel, before the light bulb went off over my head on this most recent trip.  No doubt this is the red right returning for the subs and boats coming off the ocean and heading to the base.  The second image shows where the markers switch back at the St. Mary’s River entrance and match the red to starboard on the icw  (also being red right returning for Fernandina Beach).

And provided these images.

As you may know the world has two contradictory buoyage systems.  One for North and South America, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in which it is red right returning and another for the rest of the world in which it is green right returning.  We are a most logical species.

I knew an American boat to sail through the pass into Apia, Samoa, whose owner had never been offshore before and after anchoring asked if the channel markers had dragged.  At least he had the sense to stay in the deeper blue water regardless of the ‘misplaced’ buoys.

 

Hilton Head Island: on surgery, poverty and Gaelic music

I am well aware that hernia surgery is not major and that many, possibly most of you have had more serious surgery, but when a knife is stuck in your body even for its own good, the body does not like it.  So being curious I googled ‘How many surgeries does the average person have in a lifetime?” and found some interesting information.

The United States has a little over 4% of the world’s population and by the above numbers 12-15% of the world’s surgeries.

I had not thought to include eye operations and do not know if skin cancer removals should be counted.  

Prior to last Friday’s hernia repair, the only time I thought I had surgery was when my tonsils were removed at age four or five, but I have had six eye operations and more skin cancer removals than I know.  Probably fifteen or twenty.  So depending on what is included I may have had far fewer than the average nine or far more.

This is the one I find most startling and distressing.  One in three Medicare patients has an operation in the last year of their life, suffering more than they needed to often for reasons of financial gain by others.

I draw no conclusions.  I am glad to have my skin cancers removed and my hernia repaired and probably my tonsils removed, though that is so long ago I don’t remember the details.  Except for cataract removal, my eye operations were a waste.  

I have and do give thought to what I am willing to undergo at my age.

From THE POETRY OF ZEN a short poem by Kobayashi Issa 1763-1827 that brings a smile.

And from Tim Robinson again:

There is more than Irish words and twiddly little notes to Gaelic music.  There is loneliness in this music, loneliness of hill and glen and sea; there is terror in it—the terror of death—there is weariness in it, the weariness of the grave.  It has every power that is associated with the music described in the old stories—it would load you with sorrow, it would fill your heart with pride, it would put your mind into a swoon, if it is but understood. 

Hilton Head Island: an epic life indeed; two hemispheres; two poems of Richard Murphy; two lines from Tim Robinson

Yesterday I changed a door knob.  Today Carol and I walked down to the marina pier.  Well, some days are more epic than others.

However each day I am improving.  No.  That’s wrong.  I am pretty much as I have been for decades.  But each day since being meshed I have decidedly less discomfort and move more easily, which is something.  

My friends, Michael, Layne, and their trusty dog, Rusty, have been living on board their Dodge van named GANNET 2 for a couple of years, traveling for the past year south through Latin and South America.  The van has a custom interior and life on board is much like living on a boat, though GANNET 2 points higher than GANNET.

They have just entered Ecuador and are about to cross the Equator, if they have not already done so.

I knew that 90% of our species live in the Northern Hemisphere, but I had to google to learn that 68% of the world’s land is north of the Equator. 

You already know that I like the Southern hemisphere better, but I have never touched the land through which GANNET 2’s intrepid crew will be traveling.  I wish them land joy.  Assuming there is such a thing.

https://conchscooter.blogspot.com/

The collection of Richard Murphy’s poetry I am reading is titled, THE PLEASURE GARDEN:  POEMS 1952-2012.  Murphy was born in 1927 and died in 2018.  Here are two more of his poems, but they come with a caveat.  The poems that I have enjoyed and admire greatly, including these two, were written before 1974.  Starting about then he returned to the social world.  He was poet in residence at several U.S. universities.  And his poems mostly become about the petty trivial disappointments and aggravations of modern life.  Not surprisingly I like them much less.  He spent the last years of his life in Sri Lanka and died there.  I have not yet come to those final Sri Lanka poems and am curious what I will find.

From Tim Robinson’s A LITTLE GAELIC KINGDOM.

Lies and wonders are what the world wants to hear.

and

What is it that comes into existence when you step into it and ceases to exist when you step out?  The exact answer is your life, of course; but an island is an approximate answer, only slightly blurred by the aura of expectation extending before one’s visit and of memory prolonging it.

I very much like living on an island.

Hilton Head Island: meshed

I am repaired, though not to original factory specs, which is as to be expected for 1941 models that have long been out of production and were never under warranty.

The procedure took place at an outpatient surgery facility which was much less institutional than a hospital,  The staff were friendly and professional and I had the pleasure of startling several of them who looked at my chart, including the anesthesialogist, and asked incredulously, “You don’t take any medications?”  Obviously unmedicated 82 year olds are a rare and probably endangered species.  A small pleasure, but you take what you can in those circumstances and something for which I am in no way responsible.  I have written that at sea I do not consider myself either lucky or unlucky and so plan and prepare so as to reduce the effects of chance.  Yet clearly I was fortunate in the genetic lottery and in the timing of meeting Carol, so perhaps I am lucky after all.

Other than skin cancer removals and five operations on my dead right eye, I had not had surgery since my tonsils were removed at age four or five.  I got ice cream then.  Carol gave me ice cream last evening.  Rewards seventy-seven or seventy-eight years apart.  I was a good boy both times.

The procedure included inserting a piece of mesh into the muscles around the hernia to provide extra strength.  I was told that the mesh is made of polypropylene and that for a time they used Gortex, which was found to be too heavy and caused complications.  One of my suits of foul weather gear is Gortex and the anchor rode on the toy anchor that came with GANNET when I bought her is polypropylene.  Polypropylene line floats, so now I have added floatation.  Not enough to make a difference and as has been proven I am pretty good at floating anyway.

The post-operative discomfort has been much less than I expected.  I was given a prescription for opioids, but being a minimalist in this as all things, I have not taken them.  Tylenol has been enough, and I am very much looking forward to 5 pm when I can partake of my preferred liquid pain killers as I could not last night.  I may even move the time for evening drinks forward a bit.

I am told that if there are no complications I can ride a bicycle in a week and resume normal acivity in two weeks.  I expect that my normal activity is beyond the surgeon’s imagination, so I will be careful.  As you know GANNET often puts me in awkward and contorted postions, such as in retrieving the outboard from where it is stowed at the foot of the port pipe berth and when leaning over the stern and placing it on the outboard bracket.  I paid a diver to clean GANNET’s bottom this week and am eager to go sailing, but I don’t know when that will happen.

L’Chaim.

Hilton Head Island: Emae Island remembered; three new lines; a shrimp boat passing

A friend, Hugh, is presently sailing in the South Pacific.  His experience of the ocean is much different from mine.  Not better.  Not worse.  Just different.  His is probably much more like yours is or would be than mine.  He has a website which I view.  

https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/SeaChange/?mapMode=useGoogle&windSymbol=WindStreamlines&weatherSource=ECMWF

To my surprise I found this morning that he is anchored off Emae Island in what is now Vanuatu.

This is the island where I reached land and returned to the living after drifting for three hundred miles and two weeks, living mostly on six sips of water, a half a can of tuna fish, and a vitamin pill a day in a 9’ inflatable dinghy which I tied to CT after she pitch-poled.  I cut the dinghy free and rowed the last mile or two and went over the reef in breaking surf on the east windward side of the island.  I had no choice.  I thought then that CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE was lost, but after being kindly cared for by locals that night, the following morning I learned that the little boat had come over the reef and was on a beach at the south end of the island.  I was flown to what was then called the British Base Hospital in Port Vila—when I touched land the islands were called the New Hebrides; when I left they were the nation of Vanuatu.  I recovered.  New masts, sails, oars, rudder, floorboards, were shipped out from England; and in October we sailed just before the cyclone season for Cairns, Australia, and continued on another fifteen or so thousand miles until I was locked up as a spy in Saudi Arabia.

More than forty years ago.  I have experienced a lot.  I forget a lot.  I remember a lot.

 I can no longer update the main site without help.  That help is offered by Sheldon freely, but I don’t want to abuse his kindness, so here are three lines I would add to the lines page of the main site, but won’t.  I think they are good.  I also think the species will struggle on without them.

Stupidity multiplied a billion times is not wisdom.

Lust is easy.  Love is hard.

Social media:  mediocrity deified.   

I am sitting by the bedroom window, sipping Laphroaig and listening to music on AirPod Pros so as not to disturb Carol who is watching something on her MacBook Air a few feet away in bed.  Out on Skull Creek at sunset one of the few remaining local shrimp boats is heading in. They are no longer commercially competitive with farm grown Asian shrimp.  Thursday night.  The crew will spend the weekend with their families.  I am pleased for them. 

Our experience of the ocean is much different.

They would see an old man on a small boat and dismiss him.  I do not blame them.  But that old man has known oceans they have never seen and sailed beyond their understanding and imagination. 

And if time and chance permit, he will again.

L’Chaim.

Hilton Head Island: workboat; Mary Ure; halcyon days

 

While Carol played tennis this morning, I went for a bike ride and then to GANNET where I waxed the transom, hoping to blend the twelve year old paint with the new I recently used to cover around where I had to sand to expose the hull identification number in order to register GANNET in South Carolina and to touch up worn spots.  Above you see before and after.  It turned out better than I expected.  

Aesthetics count and I have budgeted to have GANNET’s topsides painted, but as I have noted getting work done in Hilton Head is more difficult than any other place in the world I have kept a boat for very long and I just do not want the hassle.

People often say that GANNET is a pretty boat.  In part that is because she has clear and simple lines and in part that I do not put a lot of stuff on her that clutters up those lines.  I am amused when I overhear someone say, “That boat doesn’t have enough stuff on her to sail around the world” as they have many times about many of my boats, which demonstrably did have everything actually needed to sail around the world because they did sail around the world.  So many things people say are ‘essential’ aren’t.

GANNET is not a yacht.  She is a work boat.  My standard has always been how a boat looks a boat length distance rowing away from her.  I am very pleased that waxing will keep GANNET passing that test.  I think when I am finished waxing she will look quite respectable for a forty-five year old circumnavigator, and that I will be able to keep her that way for the duration.

Richard Murphy has been a great find.  I like and admire almost all his poems.  I could easily post one here every day.  Here is one I read this morning.

These have been halcyon day in the marsh.   Not too hot.  Not much rain.  No insects.  Mosquitos are not often a problem on Hilton Head, which is surprising because there is so much standing water.  Hundreds of ponds.  But no-seeums are sometimes intolerable.  They seem seasonal, but I have yet to understand their cycle.  They are not now present and we are spending time on the deck, rather than in the screened porch.  Breakfast.  Evening drinks.  I like living with the least membrane between myself and the outside world.  These days we are.  Halcyon indeed.

Hilton Head Island: dates

 

Bach Inventions, coffee, and bird calls on the deck.  Sunny and calm.  Skull Creek glassy as you can see from the photo taken a minute ago from where I am sitting.  Quite pleasant.

I have long thought that ‘Yes, but what have you done lately?’ is a good question.  I am not sure exactly how ‘lately’ should be defined, but surely not longer than five years.  I confess that I had to go to the logs page of my main site to find the day my sixth circumnavigation ended.  From all my voyages I remember only two dates:  November 2, 1974, when I first sailed for Cape Horn, and December 12, 1975, the date I first rounded the Horn,   It was April 29, 2019.  Also a Monday, five years and five weeks ago today, so I no longer have an acceptible answer to the question.  However, on the plus side, twenty-three days ago, May 11, marked the halfway point of my five year plan and though at times becalmed and imperceptibly I am still moving forward with my personal definition of forward.

I have not yet heard if I will be repaired this coming Friday.  I hope so.  I do not normally workout on Sundays, but I have decided to work out every day until the surgery in the expectation that I will not be able to do so for a while afterwards.  I seek to go to the 100 level—that is 100 pushups and crunches in the first set, 50 of each in the second and third—110 side leg raises each leg and a total of 300 knee bends, once a month.  I have missed only one month in more than the past two years.  April of last year when I had one of my skin cancer surgeries.  I got June’s 100 level out of the way yesterday, in addition to taking a walk.  I bike or walk every day.  Aged bodies can still want to be used.