Hilton Head Island: compensation; Conrad; worked out; sailing; peace

 

Within an hour or two from when I am writing this Wednesday, October 9, at 8 PM Eastern time, storm 13 will come ashore on the west coat of Florida.  I refuse to accept the naming of these inanimate storms.  M is the 13th letter in the alphabet.  I will continue to include the letter, so you will know what I am talking about, but I am through with this foolishness.  As Carol points out the naming of storms benefits insurance companies who have exclusions and demand higher premiums for ‘named’ storms.  An event is named a tropical storm at 34 knots, which is the lowest level of a gale, which is really just unpleasant weather.  I have been in more gales than I know.  Given sea room and not trapped on a lee shore I don’t even count them.   

I am perhaps the only US citizen who is not a scientist who wishes this country would give up and accept the metric system.  I have written this here before.  Only three countries on the planet do not use the metric system:  the USA, Liberia, Myanmar.  Quite a group of allies.  The five hundred years of European domination of this planet that began with the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama are over.  The American Century is over.  This country is still the richest and the third most populous—though that will not last much longer—but the historical aberration of our dominant position after the end of WW2 has passed.  Get over it and go with the world standard.

That was an aside.

Even the talking heads whose stock in trade is frightening the masses acknowledge that Storm 13 will have minimal effect on the Low Country.

I have sympathy for those in west Central Florida, but we all know where we live.  From at least Cape Hatteras south to who any longer knows how close to the Equator, hurricanes are a risk.  There used to be a southern limit, but that in recent years has been breached.

Yet this storm has been startling.

I wrote a long time ago and have been often quoted as saying of barometric pressure 1020 mb is high.  1000 mb is low.  And what matters is the direction and rate of change.  I understand barometric pressure in mb rather than inches.

I regularly observe barometric pressure.  I can read it out on my watch and the lock screen of my phone.  I don’t recall seeing a pressure here above 1025 or below 995.  But last Monday morning in a few hours this is what happened in Storm 13M:

Beyond belief, except that it happened.

Here is another quote from a weather scientist:

The talking heads and incompetent journalists who keep talking and writing about thousand year storms happening every few years are simply evincing their lack of intelligence.

I am among the last who circumnavigated using a sextant.  I also used pilot charts, which were large impressive portfolios of monthly charts of various oceans divided into five degree areas of latitude and longitude showing probability of wind direction, percent of gales and calms.  As I have said in the poem, ‘Ithaca, Illinois’ “he holds the world in his mind”.  I do hold much of the information in those pilot charts in my mind.  But what was collected from tens of thousands of reports from ships in the past is no longer relevant.  There has been a paradigm shift.

So Hilton Head has been passed in the past few weeks by a storm to the west and now one to the south.

I feel a bit like a warship in a naval battle where the enemy has fired straddling salvos.  Shells landing to port, then to starboard.  Assuming the enemy is competent they have our range.  Fortunately in this case the enemy is not sentient and so does not deserve a name.  But that a strong hurricane will strike Hilton Head Island is certain as it is every place on this coast.  I hope it does not happen in my life or Carol’s, but if it does, it is a risk I have chosen to accept considering I can’t live in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.

So the three progressive photos of tonight’s sunset are some compensation for the risk of hurricanes and alligators.  There are more compensations here.  Other beauty and tranquility.  Tranquility is not my highest value, but I have lived a life of sufficient stress that it is appreciated.

I am rereading Joseph Conrad’s LORD JIM for I think the third time and am thoroughly enjoying it.

When in the past I have been asked who are my favorite authors I have said Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola.  Reading as I am all of Zola’s twenty Rougon/Macquart novels has changed my evaluation of Zola.  His best half dozen or so are very great indeed, and he courageously wrote “J’Accuse” in the Dreyfus affair, but he also wrote to fill pages in serial publications, as did many others, and I find too many words and too prolonged descriptions in many of his lessor works. I do not find this in Conrad who almost always is a pleasure to read.  I recall reading Conrad first as a teenager in my room in that landlocked suburb of Saint Louis.  It was a collection of short stories titled I think TWIXT LAND AND SEA.  I did not want to be where I was.  Conrad pointed a way toward a better place.

I did my standard workout today for the first time in three weeks, since before my most recent skin cancer removal.  I was told not to exercise while the stitches were in for two weeks and then not to do much with my upper body for another week after they were removed.  That would have been tomorrow, but I have missed not using my body and pushed a day early.  No problem.  As is my custom I went to the next level a few weeks before my birthday and did 83 push-ups and crunches in the first series.  I am good for another year.  I have no idea how long I can keep this up.  One more each year.  My life has become beyond my imagination.

Despite the apocalypse to the south, our weather forecast is good and if it holds I will leave the dock Saturday morning and try to sail to Charleston, fifty miles away.

To do so I will have to sail more than fifty miles to get out of Port Royal Sound and into Charleston Harbor.  Little wind is expected Saturday and the tide will mostly be against me.  I hope only to get out into the sound or perhaps the ocean and anchor and be underway early Sunday morning.

I have not sailed since February.  I hope I never go so long again.

The circumstances are not important, but I said to Carol this evening, “The only peace I will find from now on will be at sea.  Perhaps it always was.”