As forecast rain has been falling since last night and is due to fall until dawn tomorrow. Sometimes heavy. Sometimes light. Sometimes with distant thunder. Thus far the official rain gauge at the mouth of Skull Creek has recorded more than 2” in the last 24 hours and almost 6” in the past seven days, which is nearly as much rain as had fallen prior to this since the beginning of the year. More is due Wednesday, but if it stops early tomorrow I should be able to make almost final preparations on GANNET and sail on Thursday. I hope so.
I have finished reading STORM PASSAGE and I have revised my opinion. It is no longer the book I would most like to rewrite. Except for a few early flippant entries after which I quickly mentally hardened, the book is true to the man I then was, and largely still am, and to my experience of overcoming adversity and completing a difficult self-imposed goal. The voyage and my endurance were epic.
There are a few things I would change. I termed a coast ‘treacherous’ which I would never do now and I wrote about ‘victory’ which I also would never do now. I have long understood, since that very voyage in fact, that we do not conquer mountains or oceans, we merely transit them.
I remember all the important moments. Reading of them again was a quiet pleasure. But I had forgotten a lot. How many times I went up the mast to replace broken tangs. EGREGIOUS had a tall double spreader rig. Fortunately the tangs broke at the lower spreaders.
I had forgotten that when I reached Papeete, Tahiti, after the first rigging breakage and contacted Ericson for replacement parts, the invoice on that package showed bolts to replace the ½” diameter ones that went through the mast and had sheered off, but there were no bolts. When they did send bolts a week later they were the wrong size. Both too thick and too short. I had to use a file to increase the size of the holes in the mast and could get only a single thread on the nuts.
I had forgotten that when we reached the Southern Ocean after making repairs, the breakaway coupling on the Aries broke away and I had to use sheet to tiller steering all the way back to San Diego after the rig broke again.
I had to repair sails even more than I remembered. In Auckland I had new main, jib, and storm jib made. The sailmaker counted twenty-one seams in the mainsail I had stitched, some many times. By the end of that five month passage the sail was unusable below the second reef.
There were more storms than I remember. They tend to blend together. And the waves were bigger than I remember.
There is more, but that’s enough.
I don’t know how much of the book I will post here. You can read it by buying it used in paper or in a Kindle edition from Amazon or for free by downloading the PDF at my main site. That is not good business, but the PDF was available on the site before the Kindle edition existed and I decided not to remove it.
https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/books_files/STORM_PASSAGE.pdf
If you read Kindle editions you know that they include lines that many people have underlined. I don’t know how that happens but it does. Here are the most underlined lines in STORM PASSAGE, not including the one in the previous entry. Some of them surprise me.
No comments:
Post a Comment