Hilton Head Island: And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

In 1981 I was in Darwin, Australia for the first time.  I have been there three times since.  It took me a moment to know whether it was three or two.  My life has become complicated to remember.   I was sailing CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE.  The year before she had pitchpoled and I had drifted for two weeks living on six sips of water, a half a can of tuna fish, and a vitamin pill a day.  Thanks in part to the generosity of Honnor Marine, CTs builder, I was able to put her back together and continue the voyage, until finally we were stopped not by the ocean, but by people.

While in Darwin, Suzanne, who was then my wife for the second time, joined me and lived on board CT at anchor off Darwin Sailing Club.  One evening we attended a free concert given by an Australian band, The Bushwackers.  We sat on the grass and heard among other songs, ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, which has always stayed with me.

This evening sitting sipping Laphroaig a half a world away after Carol has gone to bed I chanced upon a video of the man who wrote the song and then found one of the Bushwackers’ version.

I have had difficulty in copying the links.  I hope these work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFzCmAyOp8 

https://youtu.be/dtgInNEuhbI?si=J-

And perhaps you will permit me to add a poem of my own.

I have sailed to Tahiti six times.  To French Polynesia seven.  I do not expect ever to do so again.  I do expect the monument on the Avenue Bruat is still there and I expect that no one notices it.  

I have also lived in Sydney, Australia for two years on a mooring in Elizabeth Bay not far from Circular Quay.

Hilton Head Island: done—for now; behemoth; land pier and giving supreme pleasure

 

I woke at 5:35 this morning, glanced at the time and rolled over trying to go back to sleep.  I did not succeed in that and soon got up and brought a glass of grapefruit juice and a cup of coffee back to bed where I read what those who publish news think probably accurately interests people, followed by some poetry and Tim Robinson.  My 7 AM commutes to GANNET are at an end, which in some ways is regrettable.  Skull Creek and the marsh are lovely those first minutes after dawn and I have come to look forward to saying ‘good morning’ to a great egret who stands on the port stern dock line of a large catamaran and merely looks at me as I bike past a couple of feet away.  Yesterday he had just caught a fish and was concentrating on turning it in his beak so he could swallow and didn’t even give me a glance.

As planned Thursday I sanded and painted the cockpit, despite a few drops of rain, and yesterday I installed the new cockpit bags.  There are still two items on my to do list, but they are minor and may not need be done at all.

I don’t know who makes the new cockpit bags.  I found them at three different sites with three different names on them.  I originally ordered from another firm, but they never shipped or responded to my emails, so I cancelled and ordered from Harken who charged a bit more but shipped in twenty-four hours.  I like these bags.  They are attached by three snaps along the top.  The bases have screws for which I drilled holes and easily inserted.  Naturally the sharp ends of the screws extend through GANNET’s thin cockpit walls into the space beside the pipe berths.  I have a Dremel tool used exclusively to cut off the ends of such screws and bolts.  However the cutting disc wore down after removing the ends of ten screws and I found the tool had so rusted that I could not replace the disc.  Not surprising considering I’ve had that Dremel for ten or twelve years.

I replaced almost all the tools on GANNET after her circumnavigation because they had become exceedingly rusty.  A lot of water came over and into GANNET during that voyage, but I keep my tool bag inside a sealed trash bag at sea, so the tools were seldom wet.  

Very little water has come into GANNET in the past five years, but after the Dremel became inoperative, I found that a hand hack saw blade holder was also frozen with rust and that a pack of ten spare hacksaw blades had rusted into a single lump.  These are obviously not tools I often use.  The marsh has high humidity and that must be enough.

I ordered replacements of all from Amazon with delivery due today.  The new Dremel tool is operated by an internal rechargeable battery which will be an advantage.  The old one was 110 AC and I had to plug it into a small inverter.  I covered the ends of all the screws cut off and not with sealant and assuming the new tools are delivered as promised will go down tomorrow and cut off the two remaining intact screws.

GANNET is restored to workboat condition.

I have a friend who has named his boat BEHEMOTH.  Not that she is big, only about 40’, but after the cat in Bulgakov’s great novel, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA.

Here is a real behemoth.  Well, actually only part of one which when assembled will be the world’s largest single masted yacht.  85 meters.  285’.  The anti-GANNET.

I first read of this at Sailing Anarchy.

For more astonishing photos of shiny aluminum.

https://www.royalhuisman.com/ready-to-roll/

From Tim Robinson’s STONES OF ARAN:  PILGRIMAGE.

The pier itself was built in 1893, when the Aran fisheries, which had dwindled almost to extinction in the post-Famine period, were being refounded by the Congested Districts Board.  It has never given much satisfaction, as there is insufficient depth off it at low water for any but very small boats.  As one shore-critic put it, “You don’t build a pier on dry land; that’s my policy anyhow!”

and

A last impression:  a stumpy-legged dog, white with brown blotches, mainly gundog but “with a bit of seal in him” according to his owners; our adopted pet, Oscar, dearly loved and sadly missed as the death notices put it.  I used to throw a ball for him on the strand, a game that almost killed the neglected creature with delight.  If I stood forgetful with the ball in my hand, lost in my musings over the riddles propounded by the sea to the sand, he would wait patiently at my feet, looking up, and very delicately place a paw on my toe to recall me.  Then I would glance down and catch him saying, “There are just two ways, or perhaps three, in which you can hope to give supreme pleasure to another living being.  You can go home and make love to her who loves you, or you can throw that ball for your dog.  This is the time for the second alternative, for the third is to go on trying to perfect your book, which I do not believe you have it in you to do.”

Hilton Head Island: Quench Sea; work

I thank Brett for bringing a startlingly low cost hand operated water maker to my attention manufactured by a company called Quench Sea.

https://www.quenchsea.world/

I had not known of them.

I have given more thought to using such a device on GANNET and with her quick motion it would be difficult, even often impossible, unless I were willing to put a fitting through her hull, which I am not.  GANNET has no through hull fittings and I intend to keep her that way.  I would have to dip a bucket over the side, pull it on board, and pump without it falling or splashing over.  I read a comment that a sailor might produce more sweat in hand pumping than he did pure water.  That might be true.  However I have bookmarked the Quench Seas site and if they are still in business two years from now I expect I will buy a device from them and take it on GANNET.  It will not take up much room and might be useful in an undesired emergency.

Yesterday I biked to GANNET at 7 am, spread out an old bathmat to soften the dock, lay down, and waxed and polished the port side of the hull.  This took two hours.  The first was pleasant, the second hot, with several water breaks.  I found a few places I missed touching up, but it is done.  When I left at 9 I walked my bike around to the B dock and looked back at the little boat.  She passes my myopic sight test.

This morning I was again at GANNET at 7 am and spent the next hour and a half removing the five old cockpit sheet bags which were falling apart, a job I thought would take thirty minutes.  That it took longer was not a big surprise.  I knew that each bag had four anchor hooks.  I thought they were screwed into the fiberglass, but found that they were bolted, so a lot of climbing into the cabin to attach a vise grip to a nut, then back up to the cockpit to unscrew, repeat, although I was grateful that the bag in the back of the cockpit was held only by bolts.  No nuts.  It would have been a blind reach to get them on back there and so obviously I didn’t.  Laziness rewarded.  I then filled the holes with epoxy putty on the outside and covered them on the inside with Life Seal.

Weather permitting tomorrow I sand the cockpit and maybe paint.  I am getting to the end of the list.

Hilton Head Island: a day off , water, and recently read

After being on my bike by 7 AM for more than a week, sometimes reluctantly, I took today off and lolled in bed until 8 reading and sipping coffee.  I will be back on the job tomorrow, touching up paint on the port side of the hull.

Yesterday while applying another coat of Deks Olje on the companionway wood and touching up paint around the compass I noticed that conditions were perfect for turning GANNET around at her slip.  A light wind from the south and just after high tide, so both wind and current would push the little boat out of the slip.  I tied two long lines together and attached the end of one to the port bow cleat and the end of the other to a dock cleat.  Pushed GANNET back and when she was clear spun her around and pulled her in.  I have done this before and it went smoothly and now her port side is against the dock, so tomorrow I will touch up her topside paint and wax and polish Tuesday.

I am writing at 7:30 PM, sitting by our bedroom window.  We have not yet had our daily thunderstorm, but the sky to the west looks as though we soon will.

We have been rewatching LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.  At almost four hours, it has now stretched across two nights and we still have most of an hour left.  

I have been thinking about water, which certainly comes to mind when watching the desert crossings in the movie.

Permit me to think aloud here.

Water presents problems on GANNET.  Both sea water coming over and in and having enough fresh water to drink.  

Fresh water weighs 8.34 pounds a gallon.  Out of curiosity I goggled and found that sea water weights 8.57 pounds a gallon.  For those of you who live in sensible countries that use metric measurements I ask forgiveness for not converting the numbers.

There is an old rule of .5 gallon of fresh water per person on an ocean voyage.  However during GANNET’s circumnavigation I found repeatedly that I use .37 a gallon of fresh water.  I also have other liquids.

The weight of carried water is significant on ultralight GANNET.

When I left Darwin, Australia, for the 6,000 mile passage to Durban, South Africa, I had about 35 gallons of fresh water on board, which weighed almost 300 pounds.  At .37 a day that should have lasted me 94 days.  Far more than enough.  But as you may know I have twice almost died of thirst and don’t want to face that again.

Now this is not for public consumption.  This is between friends.

You know I am planning another voyage and I want to make as few stops as possible.  I have seen a lot of the world and while I like many places, I really want not land but the experience of the sea.

I don’t think I can carry much more than 35 gallons of water on GANNET.  Maybe 40.  But I want to make long passages, perhaps longer than the 6,000 miles GANNET and I have already done and I don’t want again to be living on six sips of water a day.  My body shudders with the memory of that now forty year old thirst which is still indelibly imprinted on every cell.  So I am considering a hand operated water maker.  One company now seems to have a monopoly on them and charges a lot.  They would be awkward to use on GANNET, but could be at times.  And when adrift after CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE’s pitchpole I would have given anything for a long drink of water.

Here is some of what I have recently read.

Wei Ying-Wu 737-792

William Butler Yeats 1865-1939

Po Chu-I. 772-846

William Butler Yeats.

I recognized this one having heard it sung on a Chieftain’s Album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUp8IO48ma8

The photos are two old ones I chanced across.

I wish you well from the dimming marsh.

Hilton Head Island: MAN OF ARAN; joys of travel; early bird.

 

For months I have read about ten pages of Tim Robinson each morning.  First the three volumes  of his Connemara trilogy and now PILGRIMAGE, the first of the two books he wrote about the Aran Islands just off the Connemara coast.  When I finish it I will start LABYRINTH.  PILGRIMAGE describes walking the edge of Inishmore, the largest of the three islands, eight miles long and two miles at it widest.  In LABYRINTH  he explores the interior.  At ten pages a day I have two more weeks with Tim in PILGRIMAGE and two months with him in LABYRINTH.  I will be miss visiting him and western Ireland when it ends.

Tim Robinson writes about a famous film about and filmed on Inishmore by Robert Flaherty in the early 1930s.  Flaherty is better known for his earlier NANOOK OF THE NORTH.

I found the film at YouTube and Carol and I watched and enjoyed it last evening.

There is controversy about the film mostly by revisionists who dislike any effort that is inconsistent with their political or religious agenda.  I consider them irrelevant.  A work should be judged as it stands by itself, and on that basis, MAN OF ARAN, does very well as a depiction of people living a hard life in a hard world.

Above are two of the posters promoting the film. Here is a link to an article about Flaherty and the film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Aran

And here a link to the film itself, which runs an hour and fourteen minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwmc05qW0xc

From what I have read it depicts life as it was lived on the islands, though not at the time of filming, and it includes dramatic and spectacular footage of a sea swept coast.

Flaherty praised the courage of the local fishermen, particularly those in the scene toward the end when they are trapped between lines of breaking waves.  He commented that in one filming the men were not able to make it through the surf and had to row twenty miles to Galway Bay on the mainland to reach land until the seas diminished.

I am also reading TRAVELS WITH MYSELF AND ANOTHER by Martha Gellhorn, a talented war correspondent and writer who was also for four years Ernest Hemingway’s third wife.  The ‘another’ in the title is Hemingway, who is not mentioned by name.  I am not far into the book, but am enjoying it.  Here is a selection that you may enjoy too.

I have been dutifully biking to GANNET around 7 AM each morning.  In doing so the early bird disturbs the birds.  I am the first human about the docks and birds who are diligently seeking their breakfasts are not pleased.  Egrets, both great and snowy, often hold their position as I bike past.  So does a Great Blue Heron, but the numerous smaller green herons vehemently express their displeasure as they take flight, often landing five yards ahead of me and taking flight again and again as I herd them toward A Dock.

This morning I applied a second coat of Deks Olje to the interior wood and chipped some loose paint on the deck between the pads of Raptor nonskid.  Then, it still being relatively cool, I took a five mile bike ride before returning to the condo and a cup of coffee.

l have not yet marked ‘oil interior wood’ off my list because the floorboards and the wood around the companionway are going to require a third coat, but I have reduced list by more than half, and again have the illusion that I am in control.

Hilton Head Island: three marriages

I have written that no one can judge a marriage from the outside, although we all do.  Societies.  Courts.  Neighbors.  Co-workers.  Casual acquaintances.  Celebrities we don’t even know.  And we are always wrong.

Even when we’re right, we’re wrong, because our opinions are based on inadequate information.  Marriages are too complicated and too subtle.  They turn over the years on words said and unsaid, tones, pauses, touches gentle or rough, welcomed or shunned, sex or lack of it, money or lack of it, gestures, expressions, a face turned toward or away.  Thousands and thousands of bonding or eroding moments.

Sometimes I wonder if marriages can be understood even from within.  This came to mind recently from an email from my friend, Tim, suggesting a piece of music by Max Richter, and a section in a book of poems by Thomas Hardy.

My reply to Tim’s email first.

Sitting at the bedroom window, a bit of Laphroaig at hand—the bottle was almost empty and begging to be so.  The sun has just set behind Pickney Island and is heading your way.  Actually it is stationary and we are spinning, but it doesn’t seem that way.

I just watched and listened to the Max Richter.  Pleasant, but I think that is all.  Not equal to his splendidly daring version of The Four Seasons, the score of The Hostiles,  The Waves, Return 2.  And perhaps others.

I look out at Skull Creek.  Completely still.  The Spanish moss is hanging motionless.  The sky has some gold to the west, but I see mostly gray and sliver and green.  I am often amazed that I am alive at my age and living in the presence of such beauty and with Carol.  And yet if I am still alive and healthy in two and a half years I will leave this and go to sea.  Risking a life that almost all would desire, but risking much less than I did when I sailed out fifty years ago.

To life.

The reference to The Waves is what is relevant to marriage.

Here is a link to a YouTube video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=597lnTSyTyI

The words at the very beginning are Virginia Woolf’s suicide note to her husband of almost thirty years, Leonard.  If you can’t understand them as spoken:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.  V.

Although it is not related to marriages, permit me to suggest a second video of music by Max Richter, Return 2, in which I believe the sepia images match the music perfectly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-IxkvaXlzE

I have the collected works of Thomas Hardy, but he wrote so much that I also have some volumes of his selected poetry.  I recently reread THE POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY SELECTED BY CLAIRE TOMALIN.  Of these almost fifty pages out of one hundred and fifty seven are devoted to poems about Emma, Hardy’s first wife, most of them written after her death in 1912. Here is just one.

You can find many more, all full of nostalgia and regret for what has been lost.  You imagine a great love, until you read about what from the outside seems not to have been at all a happy marriage.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Gifford

I find myself wondering what Hardy in his 70s was remembering fondly other than early physical passion or the first real love he knew breaking into his isolation from other humans.  Perhaps I read too much of my own life into his.

I have continued to go down to GANNET each morning and get some work done.  I go earlier each day to avoid the heat.  I have found that 9 am is too late.  So is 8.  I usually wake at 6 or 6:30 and like to take a glass of juice and a cup of coffee back to bed and read for an hour or so.  No longer.  I woke at 5:30 this morning and biked down to GANNET a little after 7.  Sunrise this morning was 6:27.  I completed three of the tasks on my list before drowning in sweat at 8 and biking back home.

Hilton Head Island: a growing to do list

I went down to GANNET a few days ago to hook up one of the outboard batteries to charge from the ship’s batteries overnight.  That charger plugs into a cigarette lighter type outlet.  I was able to slither aft on the port pipe berth and bring the battery forward into The Great Cabin and attach it to the charger.  When I did a green light came on on the charger and a red light on the battery to indicate it was charging.  When fully charged the light on the battery turns blue. 

I returned the next morning expecting only to have to disconnect the battery and charger, but found no lights on either.  I plugged two other electronics into the lighter and established that the circuit was dead.  I wired GANNET except for the mast so I traced the wire and found that the positive cable to one of the two ship’s batteries had corroded through and was no longer connected.  I had a crimp end fitting of the right size and was able to reconnect it.  However it was not quite that quick or simple.  I had to remove and move half the interior in the process which necessitated contortions that provided definite proof that I am healed from my surgery.  In the end I plugged the charger into a new cigarette lighter outlet.  The green light came on.  Plugged the charger into the battery.  The red light came on.  And left.

When I returned the next morning.  The green light was still on on the charger and the light on the battery had turned blue.  Good.

While on GANNET numerous small needed tasks came to my attention.  My to do list is now twice as long as it was a few weeks ago.  So I have established a routine of biking down relatively early each morning to avoid the worst of our heat and doing one or two of them.  However it seems that while doing one task, two more appear.  Here is the list as it stands today.  The last five on the list need to be done by others, but the rest I can and will do myself, and hopefully if it does not continue to grow too extravagantly in a couple of weeks the list will be tamed.

Some of these I have already done.  Or at least think I have.  I have ordered two new flashlights after I found the two on board were irreparably dead and I think I have cured the compass leak. I have also waxed the stern and starboard side of GANNET’s hull and will do the port side after I go sailing and bring her into the slip bow first.  I will order new sheet bags today.  The Blue Performance bags in the cockpit have rotted beyond disgrace and repair.  The first set of these bags lasted for many years and I replaced them at the end of the circumnavigation only because they had become exceedingly moldy.  Sometime after I bought the first set Blue Performance went to cheap materials and production.  The ones inside the cabin remain satisfactory, but I will never buy Blue Performance again.

Hilton Head Island: possible explanations; relapse; death by moon; two poems

I wrote to Craig, the developer of LuckGrib and an American sailor I met several years ago in New Zealand, asking about the discrepancy between the wind I was seeing in the GRIBs and what was being reported by the National Hurricane Center.  Here is the relevant part of his prompt response:

Craig also advised checking the resolution of the GRIBs.  This is usually set to 0.5 of a degree of latitude, which is 30 nautical miles.  I did check and mine were set to 0.5.  I changed that to 0.25, which is 15 nautical miles, and subsequent GRIBs, while still showing less wind than reported by the National Hurricane Center, were much closer.

Bill in the UK suggested that the woman I mentioned who described ocean passages as sensory deprivation might have done so because she was more or less a passenger on boats, rather than responsible for sailing them herself, and upon reflection I agree that this may well be true.

After being told by the surgeon that I could resume normal activity, including going swimming, I did.   A few days later Carol and I swam in the condo pool, which is not huge.  I swam eight laps without any pain or problems, until the next day when I started having intermittent irregular sharp pains on random movement.  After five days they ended and I now again believe I am good.

To test that I walked down to GANNET this morning and stowed various items and brought the outboard battery from the area aft of the port pipe berth forward into The Great Cabin to charge it.  As you know GANNET imposes contorted positions and awkward lifting.  All went without pain or difficulty.  Maybe a sail and a night at anchor on Port Royal Sound is in my future.

Li Bai, 701-762, is considered one of China’s greatest poets.  I have mentioned him here before, but happen to be rereading some of his poems now in the CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY ANTHOLOGY.  I like the legend of his death.

Here is one of my favorite of his poems, which I have posted here before, but is worth reading again.  This is the enhanced translation by Ezra Pound.

I am also now reading a collection of poems by Thomas Hardy and read this one this morning.

Hilton Head Island: books read

As is my custom here is the list of books I read in the past six months.  I am always reading, starting one book as soon as I finish another, but for some reason so far this year I have been reading even more.  The list numbers fifty-five books.  Of these twelve are books of poetry. 

All are readable or I would not have finished them.  I have no problem with putting aside a book fifty or a hundred pages in if I find it not worthwhile.  There is a cliche that life is too short to drink bad wine.  Even more so to read uninteresting books.

Many of these are books I was reading for the second or third time.

Eleven are about war.  I have noted that I read a lot about war.  Unfortunately it is one of the most fundamental human activities.

Of particular note are:

EIGHT DAYS IN MAY.   Nazi Germany between Hitler’s suicide and the country’s unconditional surrender.

UNKNOWN SOLDIERS.  An excellent war novel about WW2 Finland against the USSR.

THE FATAL SHORE.  Australia’s early days as a penal colony.

THE LUSIADS.  Camoes epic poem about the voyage of Vasco de Gama.

LISTENING TO THE WIND.  THE LAST POOL OF DARKNESS.  A LITTLE GAELIC KINGOM.  Tim Robinson’s peerless Connemara Trilogy.

BUNKER HILL.  VALIANT AMBITION.  IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE.  Nathaniel Philbrick’s American Revolutionary War trilogy.

WEST WITH THE NIGHT.  Beryl Markham’s nominal biography probably ghost written by her husband, mostly about her early life in Kenya.

THE DEMON OF UNREST.  Charleston, South Carolina, and the beginning of the Civil War.

L’ASSOMMOIR.  Zola’s great novel on the evils of drink.

CONQUERORS.  The brutal founding of Portugal’s overseas empire.

ARABIA FELIX.  The true account of a disastrous Danish scientific expedition to Yemen.

THE MIDDLE PARTS OF FORTUNE.  Said by some to be the greatest novel of WWI.  I am not sure that is true, but it is among the best.

Hilton Head Island: discrepancy; sensory deprivation

 

Each morning during the hurricane season I visit the National Hurricane Center site and I  also download GRIBs, both the European model and the US NOAA model, using the LuckGrib app. The European model has the reputation of being slightly more accurate.

Above you have images of downloads made about two hours ago this morning.  The top two are European.  The third NOAA.  The information in the upper right hand boxes of each are that of the crosshairs which I have centered on the highest wind I could find in each image.  You see a range of 72-77 knots.  At the very same time the National Hurricane Center Advisory stated sustained winds are 165 mph which is 143 knots.   Part of that considerable discrepancy may be due to the updating of the European model only every twelve hours and the NOAA model every six hours.  Both of the GRIBs were issued at 0000 UCT which was eleven hours earlier than I downloaded them.  Still the difference is dramatic.

Whatever its winds, Hurricane Beryl has by its rapid intensification again proven the present limits of our science which is incapable of predicting such intensification.  Perhaps AI will discover causal relationships not yet understood.

The other evening I heard a woman who has sailed as crew thousands of miles, including several crossings of the Atlantic Ocean, describe ocean passages as sensory deprivation.  I was  surprised and initially puzzled until I realized that she like almost all our species is a land and social animal to whom the ocean is an empty foreign element to be endured until land can be reached again.

As I expect you know that is not true of me.  I know I am repeating myself, but I am at home out there.  I want to be making progress.  I want to hear and feel the boat sailing well, but all my senses are fulfilled: the sight of the waves and sky, clouds, sun, moon, stars, and the books I choose to read; the only sounds natural ones of wind and water and the artificial ones of whatever music I choose to play; the iodine salt smell of the ocean; the touch of lines and winch handles and tiller; taste may be deficient, but then food is not of great importance to me, and some of what I eat at sea tastes good, and do the liquids I drink.  I am fulfilled at sea.

From time to time I am told that I seem most alive when I am at sea.  That is not completely true.  I am alive with Carol and I enjoy living here on the edge of marsh and continent, but that it is the edge is important.  Perhaps because I was born so far from the sea and took so long to reach it, I really do fear being trapped by land and am sustained by the hope and belief that I will yet again experience the monastery of the sea.