Hilton Head Island: Saturday evening. The view from the deck

 Not a dramatic sunset, but subtle beauty.

I am sitting here listening to music.

Wind rustling live oaks and Spanish Moss.

We have a Small Craft Advisory for waters out to twenty miles as we have had for more than a week, daily renewed.  As always not as much wind on this side of the island.

Just after high tide.

No sound except my music,  Presently ‘The Lord’s Rough Ways’ from the soundtrack of the movie, THE HOSTILES.

I gain strength from such moments, as I gain strength from knowing that a few of you appreciate my words and what I am doing with my life.  I pause, for I tell myself I should need no strength from others, and I am certain I would live and write as I do if no one knew, but I am glad that a few of my fellow misnamed species do care and understand.  The present tense is deliberate.  Not even at eighty-two:  what I ‘have done’ with my life.  I sometimes think:  this has gone on too long.  It does not matter what I think.  I have no choice.  I am not yet over.

I am on that part of the bell shaped curve of life where on the far right the line parallels and does not ever touch the baseline, but of course in reality the moment comes when it does.  I started to say I face that without regret, but I do have regrets.  Yet the regrets are details.  Mistakes I made in ignorance and inexperience.  I have done what I was born to do and still am.  It takes more effort now.  Yet I have time, until I don’t.  And as I have written the secret to my success—which presumes that I have had any—is that I do so little.

So I will gather what strength I can and continue doing little.

Hilton Head Island: an apology; a perspective; and three poems

 

Above you have our forecast and radar from the Apple weather app.  You will note that the temperatures are moderate and we are going to have rain.  The extreme heat usually ends this month, but this is early.  In fact since we returned from the Azores on August 21, only two or three days have been uncomfortably hot, and that is very early indeed.

As regular readers know I like living here and may have sensed that I don’t like sailing here.  The summer heat and the hurricane season are among the reasons.  Another is that from GANNET’s slip it takes hours to be truly free of the land.  1.8 miles to the mouth of Skull Creek.  5 more miles to the mouth of Port Royal Sound.  7 more miles to be in 30’/9 meters of water and beyond the shoals.  And 3 or 4 more miles to be beyond most of the buoys and the line of anchored ships waiting to enter Savannah Harbor.  On a daysail you never make it.  When I invented the word ‘captiterraphobia’: fear of being trapped by land, I was thinking of being trapped inland far from the sea as I was growing up in a suburb of Saint Louis, but in ways I feel trapped by the land even here on the coast.  To escape requires a determined effort.

Now that the heat has ended, we still have the hurricane season which as you probably know has thus far been much quieter than forecast.  I do not criticize the forecasters.  Meteorology is a very young science and the variables are immense.  I don’t recommend that others follow my example, but there is still something to be said for looking at the sea, looking at the sky, and looking at the barometer, and having confidence based on experience in your own skill and ability to endure pretty much whatever happens.

All this is in way of apology for my not going sailing.  I expect that almost all of you are here because I am a sailor, and I haven’t sailed much this year.  So please accept my apology.  I had intended to sail soon, but have just learned that I have to go back in next week and have the skin cancer on my arm rechopped, so it isn’t going to happen at least until the stitches come out.

I have plans to sail to Charleston sometime this year and a plan to sail much farther, spending a month or two on GANNET, early next year.  And if I am still healthy and alive when I turn 85 in a little over two years, I will attempt to sail beyond the edge again.  So if your attention span is long enough, hang in there.  Some of this will be about sailing again.  Some, I hope, relatively soon.

I thank James for a link to a one minute video that puts our lives in perspective.

https://youtube.com/shorts/cHyrZEPbhxA?si=oQozRqzpKQv4ud6S

One might be discouraged by this.  But as I have written one might also take it as a challenge to do what we can in our brief lives.

The ANCHOR BOOK OF CHINESE POETRY ends with those written last century.  It even includes poems by Mao Zedung.  I prefer the older poems to those influenced by the modern West, but a few have merit.

This one was written by Dai Whangshu, 1905-1950, while he was imprisoned by the Japanese during what we call World War 2.

And from Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886:

The sea.  The sea.

Hilton Head Island: Saturday evening and some poems

 

I am sitting on the deck around sunset after a day of rain.

I don’t believe that the above distorted panorama taken with my iPhone fully expresses the beauty I am experiencing.  Skull Creek is glistening silver in the dying light and as I glance up two egrets are flying between the shore and the marina, left to right.

A slight breeze.  A pleasant temperature.

I cherish these moments.  I cherish this unexpected beauty.  I never imagined I would enjoy living in a marsh.

Carol has retired to the bedroom to read.

I came out here and was watching a video of Julio Inglesis “El Amor’.

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

I am still filled with passion.  Perhaps unseemly at my age.  For women and for life.

Of women, they became singular when I met Carol thirty years ago.  I admire the beauty of the young without envy or regret for I had my time with them decades ago and do not want more.

But, and not unrelated, I think about despair, of which I have known much, some with women, and still do.  That might be surprising.  I have done much with words and wind and women, but…And I pause at the ‘but’.  Perhaps it is just as I have written:  joy does not need explanation.  It is its own justification.  But we wish our suffering had meaning and I don’t know that mine does.

Artists have made careers conveying their despair to others.  That is appropriate for they are expressing an almost universal human experience.  I have in some of my earlier writings expressed despair myself.  But with time I have learned that the greatest strength is to absorb the evil that has been done to you without passing it on.  A Christian virtue not historically often practiced by Christians, of which I am not one.  And as an artist to keep my despair to myself.  Everyone already has enough of his or her own.  They don’t need mine.  And to offer as much hope as I honestly can.  

I do not claim any rational justification to be on the side of hope rather than despair.  I just would rather be.  Probably, as most is, a quirk of what I got from the genetic lottery.

So I sit here immersed in beauty and know that perhaps experience of beauty ought to be enough, but for me it isn’t.  

I have lived far longer than I ever expected, yet I confess at eighty-two I live in hope that I will last until I am eighty-five and embark on another voyage beyond the edge.  Somehow for me moving toward that gives meaning to all the rest.

An old man with hopes and plans is truly egregious, but then I always was.  In the root meaning of the word.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/egregious-word-history-and-meaning#:~:text=The%20Latin%20word%20grex%20means,Latin%20%E2%80%94%20something%20that%20stands%20apart.

As I have been writing the sun has lowered beyond Pickney Island and the colors of sky and water have become more intense.

I raise my empty glass:  To making whatever you can of our butteryfly’s cough of life.

Emily Dickinson  1830-1886

Xu Zenquing 1479-1511

William Shakespeare  1564-1616

Hilton Head Island: in the Great Cabin; a new meal; a mistake

I walked down to GANNET yesterday and spent the day and night on board.  Not sailing, only at the dock.  We have had some rain and more is forecast, and there is a small craft advisory which seems to have been in effect forever, though as usual we do not have that much wind on this side of the island.

I was able to be on board in relative comfort because our temperatures are running almost ten degrees below normal.  The dangerous heat, which I consider ‘feels like’ over 100F, generally ends in September, but not this early.  It may return, but the ten day forecast shows highs in the low 80sF and lows in the low 70s. Yesterday the Great Cabin was 81F with the hatches open and a moderate breeze blowing though, not the 100 it was a week earlier.  I didn’t even need to use my new fan.

I scrubbed away some mold, read, listened to music, found a place to stow the fan, sipped some wine, tested the deck running lights, and watched the first half of the Chiefs/Ravens football game.  Rain in the evening caused me to close the hatches, but it passed and I was later able to open the forward one partially and slept well.  

I enjoyed being on board and at Central again.

For dinner I had a new to me freeze dry meal from Trailtopia, a company I learned of from Steve Earley for which I thank him.  I bought eight or so of their single serving meals.  This, Beer Braised Chicken Stew, was the first I had eaten.  Although I did not taste any beer, it was very good and tasted ‘more real’ than some freeze dry food, and I will include it in future provisioning.  

My only criticism is that their pouches are smaller than other brands and pouring boiling water into them with GANNET underway would be hazardous, so I will prepare them in the big plastic measuring cup I eat from.

https://www.trailtopia.com/one-serving

When I suggested in the last entry that the intent of the first several of Shakespeare’s sonnets was to seduce a woman I was wrong. 

I vaguely remember from a college Shakespeare class more than sixty years ago that some of the sonnets were written to a man.  That becomes clear with the use of the masculine pronoun in Sonnet 19 if not before.

I googled and learned that of the 154 sonnets, the first 126 are addressed to a man.  The last 28 to or about a woman.  Some scholars find interest in what seems to me the pointless pursuit of arguing about who the young man and woman might have been and in speculating about Will’s sexuality five hundred years later.

Presumably I was guilty of attributing to Will what would have been my own motivations.

Although as I think about it, I never tried to seduce a woman.  I did make overtures, but usually the woman let me know she wanted me to.

No seduction.  A mutual coming together.

Hilton Head Island: old boats; flat sails; Emily and Will

A sailing friend visited the marina recently to look at a 38’ sloop he is considering buying.  I walked with him and his wife to the slip and was struck by how big the boat looks compared with my memories of EGREGIOUS and THE HAWKE OF TUONELA which were only a foot shorter.  I shouldn’t have been.  I am aware of the trend in boat design toward ever greater interior volume for a given overall length.  30’ boats now have interiors at least equal to 35’ boats built a few decades ago, and I have never owned a boat built later than the 1970s.  

And, as I believe I have mentioned here once before I have never done a sea trial on a boat before I bought her.

I bought my first four boats new.  An Excalibur 26 in 1967 which I never named.  An Ericson 35 that I named EGREGIOUS in 1969. And an Ericson 37, which I also named EGREGIOUS without adding a 2, in 1973.  The two Ericsons I ordered off the plans before they went into production.  The Drascombe Lugger who became CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, I bought having only seen a lugger on a trailer in a driveway in Anaheim, California.  She was delivered in June of 1978 and I set off for The Marquesas five months later in what was probably the most audacious passage into the unknown I have ever made.  After that I became aware of the dramatic difference in the cost of new boats rather than used and never bought new again.  I was the second owner of the She 36 I named RESURGAM who I bought in 1983.  She was built in 1976.  I was I think the fourth owner, one of which was the U.S. Naval Academy to which she had been donated, of the 37’ Heritage OneTon I named THE HAWKE OF TUONELA when I bought her in 1992.  I think she too was first launched in 1976.  And I am I think the fifth owner of GANNET after buying her in 2011.  She is Moore 24 hull #40 of 156 and was built in 1979, and thus the latest built boat I have ever owned.  I had not until I saw the big 38’ and started thinking about my boats realized this.

I don’t claim that older is better.  Obviously it is cheaper and three of my boats—CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, RESURGAM, and GANNET were great boats.  GANNET still is.

Of GANNET I biked down to her the other day and when I opened the companionway the temperature in The Great Cabin was 100F38C.  When I came back to the condo I ordered another fan.

https://www.amazon.com/Caframo-Ultimate-Direct-Cabin-Black/dp/B00NYTN6LE/ref=asc_df_B00NYTN6LE/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693345907102&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13516757977467391859&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&h

It arrived from Amazon the next day and I took it down to GANNET for a test.  It is quite powerful.  It has two speeds.  The lower speed provides a refreshing breeze.  The higher speed is a wind tunnel.

From Dan comes a pleasing story about another old, but not as old as mine, boat that he built that has found a serendipitous home. I thank him for sharing the story with me.

https://smallboatsmonthly.com/article/hand-me-down/

I hope that link works.  It did for me the first time, but not the second.  The article is worth reading, and I happened to scroll down the page and found under ‘More From This Issue’ Audrey of Kent and Audrey’s Armada fame wearing a Tilley hat and looking good.

Eric wrote that he is watching YouTube highlight videos of the America’s Cup.   I know the AC is happening but have little interest in anything that cost that much money.  Nevertheless I did watch part of one of the races this morning.  Of course those things—I am not sure they are boats or that is sailing—go fast, but I am most impressed by how flat their sails—or are they wings?—are.  I cannot get GANNET’s sails that flat, but then I am sure they are sails.

For a couple of dollars I bought a Kindle of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Works.  I started reading and quickly discovered that is too much Emily Dickinson.  Although only ten of her poems were published during her lifetime, she wrote almost 1800.  So I decided to let someone else cull them for me and bought 100 POEMS BY EMILY DICKINSON.  Much better.  Here is one.

Impressed by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, I bought a Kindle edition of all 154 of his sonnets.  I have added three a day to my morning’s reading.

If I am understanding the first fifteen, they are mostly an effort to try to convince a woman to have a child.  I am suspicious that Will was more interested in the act of conception than in the result.