Hilton Head Island: two emails

I have little personal contact with others of our species except Carol, so I am defined in part by emails to others, some of whom I will never meet in person.

 I truly have lived beyond my time. I watch sports and deplore the grandstanding, usually after what are very routine accomplishements. I know that is generational. I could be those young men and women's grandfather or even great-grandfather. But I will say that I expect that even if I were young now I would not be one of them. 

I have different standards which I accept are outdated, perhaps to the decline of the species. I have written about a world beyond us. 

 https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lastborn.html 

 I have been and am a sailor, who believes he has no living peers. His peers are the Phoenician who might have made the first circumnavigation of Africa before the time of Christ and the Polynesians who colonized the Pacific. I could have done that. 

 So two emails from beyond the social media world that may help define one who chooses not to be a part of it. 

"I trust that you and N. had a safe drive home. I regret that we could not spend more time together while you were here, but personal problems precluded that. 

 I wanted to learn about your health evacuation and also to know what you think of the boat you came to see. 

 You asked about my books.  

Unlike many, perhaps most, I consider my job to write words, not to sell them. I have outlived most of my contacts in the publishing world, which is odd because I took infinitely greater risks than they. So because of what you asked, I went to my main site, and found that either Kindle editions or PFDs of five of my books are available there. https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/books.html 

 N. asked good questions about me as a writer. I answered superficially about what I was paid last year—one of the reasons I prefer writing to spontaneous responses. Money is not important except that it measures respect. The current editor of SAIL begged being reduced by the Internet, which to some extent is probably true. 

 So to N., whose intelligence I sensed in our brief time together, I still write in my online journal, which is to the disappointment of those who only care about sailing, about more, as I am. https://self-portraitinthepresentseajournal.blogspot.com 

 I regret not being more social to you when you were here, but it was not possible. I wish you joy on land and water.’

 And to D. 

 Of QUAL—and I confess I had to go back to your entry to get that: Quality of Life Years—of which I expect I have had many because unlike most I did not expect my reward in heaven—-Christian or Muslim or any other—-and knew I needed to find whatever joy I could in this butterflies cough of life, as I defined life once in an acceptance speech. 

 Of the sailing book you mentioned in the previous entry, that might be one in which the author wanted to include me but asked questions about my life before I sailed that I found irrelevant and refused to answer. They reflected to my mind a deficient intelligence. He persisted citing his editor’s wanting the answers. I refused and told him to exclude me from his book. That did happen with one writer. I am not sure it was that book. 

 As an economist you will know Gresham’s Law. Not being an economist I am not sure how I do except that I read a lot. 

 I long ago knew that it applies to more than currencies and have found from time to time that others do too. 

 The bad often drives the good out of circulation, and I expect that in our present time of social media dominance, I will be lost. That may be the species’s loss, but is not my responsibility.  I have done my job. At 82 I am doing it still. I write and also bring some words written by others to the attention of people who would not otherwise have known them, and if I am still alive and healthy in a couple of more years I will take GANNET on another voyage more difficult than her last circumnavigation probably pushing limits of age which do not interest me. Making that voyage will just  be me being me, though I do wonder that I have gone on so long. 

 When you have lived as hard as I, and have read as much as I, you know there is no reason to justify joy over despair.  So beyond logic the animal I am prefers joy, and I wish and advise you to seek whatever joy you can.

From STONER by John Williams:

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said.  “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”

Hilton Head Island: a sonnet; a straw; tourism; memory; plans

I came upon Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet in a fine novel, STONER, by John Williams, which I am rereading.

I do not recall much liking Shakespeare’s sonnets when I read them in college.  Perhaps I was too young.

In Tim Robinson’s STONES OF ARAN:  LABYRINTH, I read this morning of a determined drunk.  The wife of a Doctor Stoney “was a drunkard.  He used to lock her in the bedroom to keep her away from the public house, and still he would find her roaring drunk when he returned home, for the old crone from the shebeen would come round with a sup of poitin (moonshine) for her, which Mrs. Stoney would suck up with a straw through the keyhole.”

Since our recent trip I have been thinking about tourism, which has caused protests in many parts of the world this year.  Venice, Madeira, Amsterdam, Greek Islands, Barcelona and the Balearic Islands, Japan.  Tourism brings in money and jobs, but it also brings in crowds and raises prices to the point that many residents find themselves priced out of living in the places of their birth.

Hilton Head Island’s economy is based on tourism and the retired and those who service the two groups. Hilton Head has about 39,000 mostly affluent permanent residents and is visited by more than 2.5 million outsiders every year.  The island has been intelligently developed so that the two groups are able to exist mostly separately. 

Tim Robinson complained about tourism in the Aran Islands twenty years ago, though the islanders have almost no way to support themselves other than subsistent farming on rocky islands and fishing.  I assumed the trend has only accelerated since then and googled.  The ratio is astounding.  The Aran Islands have only about 1,300 permanent residents and receive between 250,000 to 400,000 tourists each year, almost all during the summer.

I have no conclusion.  I merely report what are given as facts.

For unimportant reasons I found myself thinking about the Virgin Islands, which is not unrelated to tourism.

When I first sailed to them forty years ago in RESURGAM from Portugal, their beautiful waters were already over run with chartered bareboats.  I have sailed there three times since then, again in RESURGAM from Portugal, in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA from Brazil, and in GANNET from South Africa via St. Helena.  Each time there were more charter boats, what had been lovely anchorages were increasingly filled with rental mooring buoys, and there were more regulations.  A version of paradise lost no matter what the charter companies try to sell you.

I found that I could not remember why I sailed to the U.S. Virgin islands during my fifth circumnavigation.  I did remember Carol flying down to join me while THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was anchored in Antigua, but no idea why I sailed to the Virgins from there instead of directly to Panama.  This journal proved its worth, though that of course has been proven now for eighteen years.  I went back and found the relevant entries from April 2009.  I had a skin cancer that needed to be removed.  A strand was broken on the mast’s baby stay.  And I needed to have an order of more than a hundred freeze dry meals shipped to me.  Back then I ordered from CampMor who would only ship to U.S. addresses.  The U.S. Virgins have a zip code and are included.

I got all three problems taken care of, raised anchor, and sailed for Panama.

I accept that those waters belong to the charter boats and do not intend ever to go back.

The marsh has been unexpectedly pleasant for August ever since we returned from The Azores.  Highs in the low 80sF/28/C.  Lows in the low 70sF/22C.  Often overcast and moderately windy.  The dangerous heat on the island usually starts in June and ends sometime in September, so this interval has been most welcomed.  Carol and I biked this morning nine miles round trip to a supermarket.  Serious heat is forecast to return again.

That summer is almost over causes me to consider the rest of this year and what I might do during the winter.

As is normal I have a new skin cancer to be removed.  My first appointment is tomorrow.  These things do not go as efficiently here as they did with the beautiful skin cancer doctor in Chicago.

I have made inquires about having GANNET antifouled.  There is a boat yard toward the other end of the island that will do this for a considerable fee.  I have not decided whether I will give it to them or continue to pay a diver to clean the bottom every other month or so.  I have noted before that getting work done on a boat is more difficult here than any other place in the world I have based a boat, and more expensive.

I would like to sail to Charleston.  I’ve sailed past, but never in.  From what I read it is possible to anchor in the harbor and of course there are marinas.

And I may make videos of my speaking my twenty-five remaining poems.

There was probably a Chinese poet whose name is translated into English in different ways, including Hanshan.  He was also known as Cold Mountain after the place where he lived.  Little is known of him, including whether he even existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanshan_(poet)

However part of the legend is that he wrote his poems on trees and rocks and walls of houses and they were later copied and saved by others.

There are already recordings of two of my poems, ‘Ithaca, Illinois’ and ‘Departure’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcKvHCTCU3M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYTwmVzCJh4

Recording the others would be like Hanshan writing his poems on trees and rocks.

You are, by the way, welcome to copy and share anything of mine you think worth sharing.

Hilton Head Island: The Azores: immortality lost

 

We are home and, although I like the Azores, very glad to be.

Carol’s planning of the trip was perfect, the experience not quite.  Partly that was predictable; partially it wasn’t; and part is on me.

The predictable was that we were going to arrive in Ponta Delgada on the island of San Miguel, the capital of the Azores, which are part of Portugal, very tired.

A week ago Monday we had a morning flight from Hilton Head to Newark.  Hilton Head is a small market and that was the only flight to Newark that day.  Once there we had a ten hour layover before the five hour flight to Ponta Delgada which was due to take off at 11:10 PM.  Carol had passes to United’s lounge, so we had some comfort and free food and wine and a fine view of the lower Manhattan skyline,

but we were also exposed to one of the many banes of flying, screaming children.  They dominated three of our four flights and two of the four boarding lounges.  Noise cancelling headphones are essential, and we had them.  If an adult made that much disturbance he would be tossed off the plane if still on the ground or arrested upon landing if already in the air.  I expect that children reflect upon their parents as dogs do on their owners.  Some children are well behaved and courteous; some scream because they have learned from their parents that is the way to get what they want.  This will prepare them well for their adult careers in politics.

Our flight took off at 11:30 PM.  Five hours is not long and Carol had paid for superior seats, but we got little if any sleep and landed at what our bodies felt was 4:30 AM, but was 8:30 AM local time exceedingly tired.

We stayed our first three nights on a houseboat in the Ponta Delgado Marina, to which we had sailed in 2001.

It was one of eight docked side by side and more house than boat.  Really a 20’/6 meter mobile home on pontoons, complete with artificial grass on the roof.  It did have a 9.9 hp outboard on the back and a steering wheel in what I suppose was the bow and part of our contract stated that we were not permitted to take it out of the slip.  We were not tempted to do so.

It moved about slightly and was heeled as were all the houseboats a few degrees to starboard, presumably the side on which the water and holding tanks are.

We walked around the marina and the city of around 70,000 and rode a trolly out to a nearby village and back.

In Tim Robinson’s books I have read of the stone walls on the Aran Islands constructed without mortar.  While on the trolly we saw that the Azores islanders have the same skill.

                                            

On Friday we flew a hundred miles back west to Horta, on Faial Island, which was our first port after sailing from Boston in 2001 and whose marina is still the center for visiting yachts.

There has long been a tradition of visiting yachts painting their names on stone and concrete surfaces around the marina.  Carol did when we were there in 2001.  You may recall that a reader sent me a photo he had taken of her effort.

He sent me that photo last year, but I don’t know when he took it.  Studying the photo we found that there is only a small area where it could have been taken with the double step and black rocks.  Nothing painted in the photo remains.  Not the blue whale, not the black letters on a white background in the upper left corner, and not the least sign of HAWKE.  It seems that immortality does not last.

I have driven around the island twice, but this time we hired a guide who took us into the interior to places I had not been, including this calderia more than a mile wide and a quarter mile deep.

He also took us to the west end of the island where in 1957 a volcano erupted for more than a year and destroyed a lighthouse and nearby villages.

I took one of my favorite photos of Carol there in 2001 and so took another.

                                                

Returning to Ponta Delgada we stayed our last two nights at a hotel overlooking the harbor.  Sitting on our sixth floor balcony in the evening, sipping wine, we saw a dozen boats out for a twilight sail.

I think the Azores are a very good place to base a boat.  The nine islands are all volcanic rising abruptly from the ocean so there are few, if any, good natural all weather harbors, but there are harbors with breakwaters and fair weather anchorages.  One site claims 16 marinas and 38 anchorages, which I think is a bit exaggerated, but the climate is good and the islands are out of the hurricane zone.

https://www.navily.com/region/The%20Azores/19763

Our last day we took a tour of ‘hidden gems’ of the island.  There are infinite beautiful vistas and sights.

Our return should have been easier, with a day flight back to Newark, overnight there at the airport Marriott, and a short two hour daytime flight the next day to Hilton Head, and was except that a flight from Ponta Delgada the previous day was cancelled due to a broken water line in the plane and rescheduled to depart an hour before our flight.  That flight was delayed again and thus passengers for two flights were sardined for two hours into a boarding lounge that could barely hold passengers for one, including of course screaming children.  I rather wanted to scream myself.  I understand accepting suffering in order to achieve a goal, but to pay to suffer is perverse.

I have never liked crowds and noise and with diminished vision and hearing I like them even less.

Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed that Boston is the hub of the solar system.  Bostonians soon inflated that to Hub of the Universe and still refer to the city as The Hub.  With that in mind there is the anecdote of the wealthy Boston matron who in the early years of last century was asked if she had been to Europe.  Amazed at the question, she replied, “Why should I travel?  I’m already there.”

A thousand miles south of Boston, I am somewhat the same.  I have written that I live in proximity to beauty, but realize that is wrong.  I live in beauty and quiet.  The Live Oaks and Spanish Moss are little more than an arm’s length away and spartina and the changing light on Skull Creek not much more distant.  Almost three million people come each year to vacation where I live.  I am already there, and the only means of transportation I really like is sail.  I would be pleased never to make another long journey except in GANNET.

 

Hilton Head Island: flying

Tomorrow Carol and I start flights to the Azores, the first of which takes us to Newark where we have a very long layover, departing just before midnight for Ponta Delgada on San Miguel Island where we will arrive Tuesday morning.  We will be in the Azores for a week and then take two days to return to Hilton Head Island, having to spend a night in Newark at an airport hotel.

The trip is to celebrate Carol’s retirement and our 30th wedding anniversary.  Carol has asked that this time be just for us and I agree, so I will not be posting or answering emails between August 12 and August 20 or later.  As you know I cut myself off completely when I go to sea and this is not much different.

We sailed to the Azores from Boston in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA in 2001 and I had sailed there earlier with Jill on a 4,000 mile passage north from St. Helena in RESURGAM in 1987 or 88.  They are one of three places liked by everyone I know who has been there.  The other two are Ireland, which I have never visited, and New Zealand.  I hope they have not changed too much.

In the unlikely event you suffer Webb Chiles withdrawal symptoms, you can get a fix at

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/webbchiles.html

I leave you with a poem by Wang Wei, 701-761, and wish you  joy.

Hilton Head Island: shadows; ice; two laments and not going with the flow

Shadows is as I am sure all of you know the title of a novella by one of our finest writers.  It is also what the sun is casting this morning for the first time in a long time.  Blue sky with a few puffs of white clouds.  South wind ruffling Spanish moss.  

The USGS Skull Creek rain gauge shows 9.91” of rain in the past seven days.  A lot, but nothing like the 20”-30” once forecast.  There has been some damage.  The roof of a gas station collapsed and some homes have been flooded and roads damaged.  A thousand year storm it was not.  Even if it had been the greatest storm in the last thousand years, I expect it would be far less than another thousand years before it was equalled.

We walked to GANNET this morning.  There was a little water on both pipe berths, but much less than I expected reinforcing my opinion that the direction from which the rain comes is decisive.  From the bow and the forward side of the spray hood, not much.  From the stern and captured by the spray hood over the companionway, much.

GANNET’s bilge is a narrow sump, 18”  deep and a few inches wide.  It was almost full.  I used the portable hand pump to clear it.

It is very pleasant to see the sun again.

From NASA’s Earth Observatory site comes a counter-intuitive post about ice blocking the Northwest Passage.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153166/sea-ice-chokes-the-northwest-passage

In reading some ancient Chinese or Japanese poetry each morning I am struck, as I have been in sailing the world, how much we are mostly alike in times and places.  Mostly we want love and peace and enough to eat and a little joy.  Why, I wonder then, do we repeatedly let monsters of ego—Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, to name a few—kill millions of us?

Here is a poem by Pan Yue written almost two thousand years ago.  I include the introduction because I like the legend of his beauty.

 

Of modern Western poetry I am presently reading the works of Frederico Garcia Lorca who was  executed during the Spanish Civil War.  This morning I was very impressed by his ‘Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias’, a bull fighter.  I do not like bull fighting.  I do like the poem which is too long to include in this entry, but here is a link.  I believe you will find it worth your time.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/161884/lament-for-ignacio-sanchez-mejias-65a9932a17868

“Go with the flow” was popular with hippies in the 1960s.  I was in my 20s then, never a hippie, never a believer in going with the flow.  Neither was Tao Qian, who lived 1600 years ago

Too early for wine today.  So later, To Life.

Hilton Head Island: Debby 2; fools

 

10:48 AM as I type.  Above the view out our bedroom window. Light rain is falling.

I have learned that the USGS has a rain gauge on Skull Creek.  I have also learned that USGS stands for United States Geological Survey which is part of the Department of the Interior.  As of 10 AM their Skull Creek gauge has measured just under 8” of rain in the past 24 hours.  

This morning’s update from the National Hurricane Center now puts us in the potential rain range of 8”-12”.  Quite a contrast from yesterday and further affirmation of my experience that all over the world meteorological services give worst case forecasts rather than most accurate ones in the quite correct belief that if they say something severe is going to happen and it doesn’t, no one will care, but if something severe happens that they have not forecast they will provoke the now ever popular outrage.

The National Weather Service site at Hilton Head Airport three miles from our condo reported wind at 9:50 AM this morning of 14 mph with gusts to 28 mph and light rain.  The numbers are similar for all last night, although sometimes the rain is described as heavy and with thunderstorms.

Excitement came at 10:10 PM when Carol and I who had just fallen asleep were awakened by an emergency weather statement preceded by a siren on my iPhone.  A possible tornado had been sighted on radar on the ocean side of the island about four miles away.  We were advised to seek safe shelter immediately.  There is no safe shelter in this building.  The alert extended until 10:45.  We waited fatalistically and then went back to sleep.  I have not been able to find this morning that a tornado actually existed.  However, a nine foot alligator was found swimming on a local surface street by a driver who almost ran over him and naturally paused to take a photo.

You may have seen a news item about two fools rescued from a 34’ sailboat off the west coast of Florida during this storm.  Here is a link;

https://news.wgcu.org/section/weather/2024-08-05/coast-guard-rescues-2-adrift-after-boat-loses-sail-off-boca-grande-during-tropical-storm-debby

If you read the article you will learn that with usual journalistic insight they needed rescuing because “they lost their sail”.  In the photo the boat is intact, floating on her lines, and has a jib.  The mainsail looks damaged.

What they were doing out there is beyond explanation other than that they are fools.  This storm has been forecast and followed for days.  It has been about where expected when expected.  I have been in such conditions and worse more times than I can recall, but always they occurred after I had already been at sea for weeks or months.  No reasonable seaman would have tried to sail from Key West to Tarpon Springs last weekend.  They really didn’t deserve to be rescued.

Hilton Head Island: Debby

 

Above is the National Hurricane Center rainfall forecast for Hurricane Debby.  Hilton Head Island is well within the area of highest expected rainfall, perhaps 20 to 30 inches/.5 to .75 of a meter.  It is good to have a boat.

Our condo complex is on a slight incline—Hilton Head Island does not have anything that can be called a hill—and I do not expect flooding here, though some lower parts of the island will flood and Savannah has had serious street flooding after considerably less rain than this.

The GRIBs agree that the center of what is left of Debby after it crosses Florida will be over us tomorrow and then linger a while just offshore.  However they disagree as to what happens next.  The European model has the storm moving back west over Georgia before heading north.  The US model has it heading north just offshore.  Weather forecasting is better than it used to be, but still an incomplete science.  Perhaps Artificial Intelligence can solve problems that thus far we have not been able to including foreseeing rapid intensification, which did not happen with Debby but is especially worrisome to those of us who live in the hurricane zone. 

Talking heads are again calling this ‘a thousand year storm’.  It is more than time for them to wake up and realize that climate change has made ‘thousand year’ events normal.