Hilton Head Island: rain; charging; STORM PASSAGE

Rain fell yesterday afternoon accompanied by lightning and thunder.  More fell this morning.  And considerably more is due tomorrow, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.  If the forecast can be believed next Wednesday will be the start of a stretch of fine weather and I will be able to go to sea.  I hope so.

I am already provisioned, except for water, and I am well along with charging.  I now have few devices on GANNET that use replaceable batteries.  Almost everything has internal chargeable batteries.  So far I have charged the UE speakers and one of my headlamps, put the Raymarine wind display and a flashlight in the sun to solar charge, have the Velocitek charging on GANNET, the YellowBrick, the two GoPros, and one of the outboard batteries charging here in the condo.  When it is topped up, I will charge the second outboard battery.  My primary headlamp is charged. Unless I am forgetting something, that is it.

I just finished reading Emile Zola’s MONEY, the eighteenth in his twenty volume Rougon-Marquart Cycle.  It is about stock market speculation and I enjoyed it until the final chapter when after describing total ruin he felt it necessary to lessen the gloom.  That chapter is titled ‘From Horror to Hope’ and is not convincing.

I have already reread the nineteenth novel, THE DEBACLE, several times, so have only the final, DOCTOR PASCAL, to read next month.

After being impressed by A SINGLE WAVE, in my constant search for great literature I decided to read more of Webb Chiles and have started STORM PASSAGE.  The author has told me that was not his choice of title.  He wanted to call the book EGREGIOUS, both after the boat and the root meaning of the word—out of the herd—but was awakened one morning at 6 am in San Diego by a telephone call from the publisher in New York and being told that no one would understand or could pronounce ‘egregious’ and what about calling the book Storm Passage?   He said he did not like the title, but they were at a meeting and an immediate decision had to be made.  Webb Chiles doesn’t attend meetings.  Many of you probably do or did so you know better than he how these things go.

Webb Chiles has also told me several times that STORM PASSAGE is the book he would most like to rewrite, but doesn’t because it is true to what he was at the time.  In this reading he finds himself quite young.  Well at 83 almost everyone seems quite young.  He was then 33 and just starting out.  He does see himself in the book, but presumably he has learned a thing or two in six circumnavigations and five decades.  One certainly hopes so.  In some ways he sails even more simply than he did then, which is surprising considering that EGREGIOUS was a pretty simple boat with no engine, no plumbing, no electrical system, not even lifelines.  He also thinks he is even a better writer now than he was then, although he acknowledges that some of STORM PASSAGE is quite good.

Here are a few passages he has liked so far.  Be warned he may post more in this journal as he reads on.

This was highlighted by thirty-seven readers.

Just after turning away from Cape Horn and toward Tahiti after the rigging broke.