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.
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