Hilton Head Island: GANNET’s new home; an odd life; and two poems

After a week of almost constant gale warnings, though as usual there was not that much wind on this side of the island, Monday morning was calm as forecast and slack water coincided with first light at 7 AM, so I biked down and moved GANNET from slip A5 to A21.  

AyeTides showed the turn from high water at the mouth of Skull Creek to be at 7:30.  It is about 40 minutes earlier at the marina, but I was surprised to feel how strong the current already was in the first hour of change.  I had to compensate for the tide pushing GANNET toward the B dock.  The tidal currents here make this the most difficult place to leave a slip in any place I have ever kept a boat.  

I am happy with the move, even though in time there will probably be boats on the end tie outside of our new slip that will compromise the view, and even though the wakes of passing boats are much more felt than they were in A5.

Here is a wider view.

You are looking south on Skull Creek.  The land ahead is Hilton Head Island.  About two miles on Skull Creek makes a sharp turn to the right before going under the only bridge onto the island.  The land to the right is Pickney Island, a National Wildlife Refuge, on which there is no development.  A red marker on the Intracoastal is visible.  Heading south it should be left to starboard.

GANNET needs a lot of cosmetic maintenance.  

I go down daily and do some.  Today scrubbing the deck which very much needed it.

I will go sailing soon, but I don’t know where.  

While down below on GANNET yesterday sorting out the interior, I heard my name called.  I stuck my head through the companionway and found a man who I learned is named Mark and is a decade younger than I.  He has a sloop about the size of THE HAWKE OF TUONELA  and lives in Massachusetts.  I conclude he is a snowbird for he has passed this way frequently enough to know that GANNET has moved.  He also knows of me and our voyage and he told me that when he stops here he goes to GANNET and meditates.  I did not think to ask about his meditative thoughts, and I am not sure I would have anyway.  That might be too private, and though I have shared much of my life, I respect privacy.

Still it gives me pause.

I often wonder about the value of my life.

Perhaps it has touched some of whom I do not know.

In three days I will finish THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ENGLISH POETRY.  This has been a tough passage.  I commend myself for having almost completed it.

It has not been all bad.  The anthology includes Chidiock Tichborne’s Elegy and a few other poems that I admire, but I have enjoyed less than one hundred of its eleven hundred pages.  This is a rarity for I have no problem of stopping reading a book I do not like.  I persisted with this anthology because I was curious if it would get better.  It didn’t much.

Here are links to two poems I have enjoyed.  They are too long to include here.

The Sword of Achilles by W. H. Auden

and

The Pike by Ted Hughes.

Hilton Head Island: Narelle again; sextants; an impressive weather app; three poems about men and women

 

As noted in a comment to the previous post about cyclone Narelle, the storm has tracked all the way across Australia and then turned south and has made its third landfall and looks to pass east of Perth.  A truly long lived and unusual storm.

I am moving GANNET to a new slip at the end of A Dock.  It has the advantages of being the only single slip on A Dock, will be easier to enter and exit, and as you know I like edges.  In doing so I have moved the considerable stuff in my dock box.  It took three trips with a dock cart.  Mostly paint and maintenance supplies, but also a bosun’s chair and the Jordan drogue.  I came across a bag in which I found my long unused sextant.  Although it was in a case as well as the bag, I expected the mirrors to be ruined by time and moisture, but they weren’t.  In fact the sextant, a Davis Mark 25, cleaned up well and is in excellent condition.

I am among the last to have had to navigate by sextant.  My first was a U.S. Navy WW2 sextant made by David White Co. in Milwaukee that I bought used in the late 1960s for $100 which according to an inflation calculator would be a startling $939 now.  I checked and David White is still in business making surveying instruments, not sextants.

I taught myself celestial navigation from books and used that sextant on EGREGIOUS and CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE until it was lost when CT pitch-poled.  When I resumed the voyage I made the passage from Port Vila, Vanuatu, to Cairns, Australia using a plastic sextant.  I found it to be accurate, but had to realign the mirrors after every sight.  In Cairns, I bought a good German Zeiss Frieberger sextant.  I checked and they are still being made and have one model for $1022 and another $1584.  

The Davis Mark 25 can be bought for as little as $367.

I have not taken a sextant sight for more than twenty years, but I believe that if you go offshore it is wise to have a sextant and the current Nautical Almanac on board and know at least how to take a noon sight for latitude which is simple and does not even require exact time.  This seems particularly true when one reads increasingly of GPS jamming, which in case of a large scale war would surely be extensive.

I chanced across a new to me weather site, zoom earth.  This is a screen shot of its  pressure map.  As you can see on the left there are other overlays.  You can zoom in and out.  There appears to be world wide coverage.  All the basic functions are free.  For $11.99 per year you can go ad free and get hurricane alerts, which I have done.  I am very impressed with the app.

https://zoom.earth/

I am nearly at the end of the 1100 page trek through THE PENGUIN  BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE, and trek it has been.  The editors of this anthology and I have very different tastes in poetry and when I have made it to the end I will delete the book from my library.  Most books of poetry I reread often.  Not this one.  However I have found a few poems I enjoy and admire.  Here are three from last century about feelings between men and women.

And this by A. E. Housman.

Hilton Head Island: boat house or house boat; reacalibrating

In searching for photos for GANNET 6 I came across this appealing structure.  I did not take it and don't know its source.  Perhaps someone sent it to me or I happened across it online.  I wouldn't mind living in it.

For eight or more months I have worked every day on GANNET 6.  Usually two factory shifts of a couple of hours each.  One in the morning.  One in the afternoon.  I haven't missed a single day, though once or twice when I had a doctor or dentist appointment I only worked in the afternoon.  As of today GANNET 6 is pretty much finished.  There will probably be more to do, but not immediately.  

I am momentarily at a loss.  There will be no factory shifts tomorrow.  So I will go down and do some work on GANNET and maybe one of these days I'll even go sailing again.

Hilton Head Island: Category Five; obsolete; finished (for now); some poems

 

Each morning I check the Earth Wind Map 

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=132.13,-30.00,1002

and this morning I found the above.  That is a cyclone which I have learned has been given the name Narelle.  You probably know what I think about giving storms names, but that is a rather attractive one.  The storm itself is expected to be making landfall about now as a Category 5 near Cape Melville in far northern Queensland.  I know that coast better than most, having sailed it four times in four different boats.  There are very few people up there, which is one of the reasons I like it.  I hope they survive.

I have become obsolete, if I was’t always.

I saw my demise in the above chart from the WASHINGTON POST yesterday.  Writers and authors are a very small dot on the extreme right.

Another reason not to want to be young now.

Ah, well, it was good while it lasted.

I have just finished the second rewrite of GANNET 6.  I may go over it again sometime, but not immediately.

Immediately I have to sort out formatting.  I write on my 11” iPad Pro with attached Apple keyboard case using Apple’s Pages app.  Unfortunately Pages for IOS does not export perfectly to anything, including my MacBook Air.  So I have a lot of clerical work to do.  I expect this is a task that AI could do quite quickly, but learning how to use AI to perform that task seems more complicated than just doing it myself, and since I am now obsolete, I have the time.

I have been asked what I will do with the book when it is publishable.  

All my publishers, editors and agents have either retired or died.  That happens when you get to be 84.  I have sent out four queries.  One to a publisher.  Three to agents.  I will wait awhile to see if I get any replies.  This is like being twenty again and unpublished, when I am old and very published.  I am curious to see what happens, but I will not wait long.

I think the book in its present form is not publishable except as an e-book.  There are too many charts and photographs for it to be profitable in paper.  I am willing to make some compromises, but, while I am a writer/obsolete, I think the reader’s experience of the voyage is much enhanced by the images.  So most likely I will publish it in a Kindle edition myself.  If so, I will price it modestly and donate all the vast royalties to charity.  I wrote the book for the same reason I made the voyage:  because it is what I do.  Not for money, which of course makes it a very suspicious activity in our society.

Some poems.

A few of you may remember that I have posted this one before.  I just came across it again in JAPANESE DEATH POEMS.

You may have read this in an English Literature class.

An excerpt from Lord Byron’s DON JUAN of particular interest to me.

And from Edward FitzGerald’s translation of THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM.

Hilton Head Island: frozen not chopped; leaves

 

On Monday I biked five miles to my regular six month skin cancer appointment.  The marsh is having a period of perfect weather and the ride mostly along bike trails through woods was a pleasure in 64F/18C going and a bit more on my return.  I have seen enough skin cancers to know when I have one and I didn’t think I did this time.  The doctor confirmed that I didn’t and only froze a few spots on my face.  I am now good for another six months.  Maybe.

As you can see from the photo leaves are falling.  I am having to sweep our deck almost daily.  Above is two day’s collection.  Most of the trees on the island remain green year round, though a bit duller in winter than summer, and this is spring, not fall.  So I googled and AI informs me:  Live oaks (Quercus virginiana) shed their old leaves in early spring as part of a natural ‘molting process’ to make way for new, fresh growth and blooming.  Although considered evergreens, they do not hold leaves forever; instead they replace last year’s foliage simultaneously, allowing them to remain green year-round.

Thank you AI.

This is also the start of pollen season so what is not knee deep in oak leaves is covered with yellow dust.

Still it is paradise.

Now I have to go sweep.

Hilton Head Island: martini with heron; and three poems

 

Some people have their martinis with olives or a bit of lemon peel, the last few evenings we have had ours with a Great Blue Heron who sits on a limb of one of the Live Oaks just beyond our deck and porch, preening himself and contemplating the meaning of life or perhaps the presence of fish in Skull Creek.  In the above photo, which really does not fully portray the beauty of the evening, he is hidden behind the corner porch column.

The marsh has been perfect in all but one respect for several days and is forecast to continue to be.  The one lack has been wind.  3 knots today.  2-7 knots forecast for tomorrow.  3-7 Saturday.  And that is at the airport which is more exposed than Skull Creek.  I would like to take a break from writing and go sailing.  I will know better when that might happen after being seen by the skin cancer doctor for my six month visit Monday morning.  It would be nice if I need only to be frozen and not chopped.

From William Blake, 1757-1827.

And two Japanese death poems.

This from Raizan who died in 1716 at the age of 63 I know I have posted here before.

  

Hilton Head Island: prescient

Sixty-five years ago a brilliant nineteen year old college sophomore wrote a paper with the deliberately provocative title, ‘The Peasant Class”, in which he postulated that during the history of the mis-named Homo Sapiens species the vast majority of its members had provided muscle power and a gene pool and that neither was any longer needed. This was long before genetic engineering, robots, drones, or AI.

Perhaps a few others had reached a similar conclusion, but he had figured this out for himself, as he had that we are Home Insipiens, not Homo Sapiens, and as he grew older perhaps Homo Narcissus.  For more than a thousand years we thought we were the center of the universe.  

He had a rarely original intelligence as well as time would reveal a rare body and will.  

All gifts.

How can one take pride in gifts, but most of us do.  He tried not to, but sometimes gave himself credit for persevering on his own, which was probably a gift too.

He got an A on the paper. 

If you read the news you know that the present has caught up with his hypothesis.

Here is a recent example

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/

That prescient student has unexpectedly survived a life of calculated risk and is now an old man.  He does not know how this will play out, but he does not see a pleasant outcome.

Hilton Head Island: sunset at Mallory Square

 

While looking for a particular photo of GANNET for GANNET 6 I came across the above.  I liked it but for a while I couldn’t figure out what it is.  Finally I did.  The silhouetted man is a sunset street performer at Key West’s Mallory Square.  Carol  and I were married in Key West and returned for our 25th wedding anniversary in August of 2019, four months after the completion of the GANNET circumnavigation. 

Hilton Head Island: a beautiful bird; drinks on deck; three poems

 

I thank Roger for permission to share the excellent photo of my favorite bird, which he captured during a recent trip he and his wife took to New Zealand and kindly sent to me.  Unsurprisingly they like the country and the people.

The past few days have been delightful in the marsh.  Highs in the 70sF, low 20sC.  Shorts and t-shirts.  And drinks on the deck for the first time this year which was a great pleasure.  Unfortunately a front passed last night with some rain, rapidly decreasing temperature, and a gale warning.  As usual we do not have the full force of the wind on this side of the island, but there are white-caps on Skull Creek and the Spanish moss is in a frenzy.  

My morning poetry presently comes from JAPANESE DEATH POEMS.  Not as grim as that sounds.  Most are calm and accepting.  Some, such as this one by Moriya Sen’an, who died in 1838, hopeful.

My Western poetry is drudgery.  It is in the PENGUIN BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE which is so long that I am forcing my way through twenty pages a day instead of the usual ten.  

The book includes blurbs of lavish praise from many presumably reputable reviewers, but I have found the first 340 pages hard work.  I persist in hope perhaps similar to Mr. Sen’an’s, that it will get better.  It has even has selections from Shakespeare that are dull.

Here are two I like.

And, perhaps apropos as I work each day rewriting GANNET 6–I am about halfway through and pleased to be making only minor changes—from Robert Herrick, 1591-1674.

Hilton Head Island: Steve Earley’s two favorite boats

Mine too. GANNET and SPARTINA.  GANNET is the big one.

Photographs by Steve Earley.

Hilton Head Island: fire

Indian Springs, our condo development, consists of four identical three story buildings constructed on a slight incline.  D Building in which we live is lowest and closest to Skull Creek.  Each building above us is higher and farther back from the water.  A Building has thirty or forty yards of grass in front of it.  The building in the center above is B.

The marsh is having a drought.  Most grass is brown and dry.  Not green.

Yesterday afternoon at around 2:30 I went for a bike ride.  I found a fire truck and another piece of Fire Department equipment in front of B building.  No one was around.  I assumed it was a call, as most are on HIlton Head, due to someone having a health issue.  But when I returned a half hour later, the fire truck was still there and a stream of water was running down the driveway.  

I parked my bike and walked back up.  Three firemen were feeding a hose back onto the truck.  I asked what had happened and was told there was a small fire between buildings, started it was thought by a window in one unit reflecting and focusing sunlight into a hot spot.

As you can see the burned area came close to Buildings B and A.  Only grass was burned.  I doubt the flames were high.  But all these buildings are wood.

A little excitement in the lives of the elderly.

 

Hilton Head Island: unimaginable and inescapable

I thank James for a link to a short video about the unimaginable size of the universe from which I believe inescapable conclusions must be drawn about some of the myths our species have created.

I know that I am repeating myself when I observe that for more than a thousand years we believed that we were the center of the universe, that everything revolved around this planet.  What egotism.  

When Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, got us beyond that, most scientists still believed that our galaxy was the entire universe until just over one hundred years ago when Edwin Hubble saw  a smudge on an image taken by the telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory that he marked ‘Var’ for variable that resulted in proof that there are other galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Now we have videos like this one.  Unimaginable and inescapable.

https://youtube.com/shorts/KIWG6_dAeg0?si=1L2Yuz1YL6pJwDYn

Hilton Head Island: here and there

When I returned to Evanston from Opua in late 2014 I wrote:

                Here a mix of rain and snow.  Temperature 32° and falling.

There 70° and sunny.

Here for breakfast I have uncooked oatmeal, trail mix, fresh blueberries, powdered milk and water and good coffee.

There for breakfast I have uncooked oatmeal, trail mix, dried fruit, powdered milk, and instant coffee.

Here, on weekends, the food is better.  Even during the winter, Carol usually grills something on the small gas grill on our balcony.

During the week the food is about equal.

     Here microwaved Lean Cuisines.

     There freeze dry.

Here there are ice cubes and drinks that should be cold are.  Martinis are sipped.  Wine comes from  bottles and is better.  I drink Laphroaig from a crystal glass.

There gin and tonics are air temperature.  Martinis are unknown.  Wine comes from boxes and isl       lessor.  I drink Laphroaig from a crystal glass.

There Laphroaig costs at least $85 U.S. a bottle and replenishment is four miles distant.

Here Laphroaig costs $45 a bottle and replenishment is a ten minute walk away.

Here I watch sports and movies on television and stream music to five excellent speakers.

There I listen to New Zealand Concert, the national classical music radio station, and stream music to quite acceptable bluetooth speakers.

Here I sit facing a fireplace.

     There I sit facing a companionway.

    Here I live indoors.

     There I live outdoors.

Here I vacuum rugs.

     There I scrub decks.

     Here I am mostly alone and silent.

     There I am mostly alone and silent.

     Here I walk down the hall to shower.

     There I row a couple of hundred yards and walk a hundred more to shower.

Here hot water in the shower is free and untimed.

     There I have to insert a $2 coin in a box to obtain five minutes of hot water.

Here the room does not move.

                There The Great Cabin constantly moves.

                 Here there is constant background noise.

                There is often complete silence.

Here I am surrounded by land and ten million people.

                There I am surrounded by water and a few hundred people.

Here is flat.

        There is all hills.

                Here I walk down and look at empty Lake Michigan.

                There I climb the Opua hill and look down on boats moving about the bay.

                Here are Canadian geese.

                There once were gannets and now are terns, gulls, cormorants—shags to New Zealanders—and a   few ducks.

                Here the Internet is fast.

                There the Internet is not fast and more expensive.

                Here I can buy things with a click and have them delivered promptly.

                There I can’t.

                Here I look out windows at snow, undistinguished buildings, and a cemetery.

                There I stand in the companionway and am surrounded by beauty.

                There I sleep in a sleeping bag beside waterproof duffle bags and a sail bag.

                Here I sleep between sheets beside Carol.  Here has its compensations.

There is good.

                Here is good.

Hilton Head Island: a lamentable trend

 

We were on the southern edge of the storm and only got a little over an inch/3cm of snow.  Flakes began falling slowly late yesterday afternoon and continued until after dark.  This was a storm that moved in from the ocean, not down from Canada as most winter storms do.  

When I woke this morning at 6:30 the temperature was 21F/-6C and the wind chill 5F/-15C.  Now at almost noon it is just below freezing and as you can see the snow has already melted off streets and sidewalks.

However this is the third snowfall since we bought the condo eight years ago.  It snowed that month and it snowed in January of 2025 as well as this year.  That makes three snowfalls in eight years.  The snowfall prior to 2018 was twenty-nine years earlier in 1989.  And according to a local TV station this is the first time since 1917-1918 that Hilton Head has had snow in successive years.

We will be back in the 50sF/low teens C on Tuesday, but I don’t like the trend.

Hilton Head Island: great minds; passion; when to quit ; the love of the thing itself

I have started rewriting and came across the following which was written ten years ago.

great minds

  The cliche is ‘great minds think alike’ but I realized that is precisely wrong.  Great minds do not think alike:  originality is their greatness.

After reading my magazine article, ‘Use Yourself Up’, a reader, David, sent me a quote from George Bernard Shaw. 

        This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy... I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no 'brief candle' to me.  It is a splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

So perhaps I was left with:  great minds sometimes think alike.

passion

One afternoon I turned on the television a few minutes before a basketball game between Duke and Notre Dame and saw the last few minutes of an interview with Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski, who was about to have his sixty-eighth birthday and said:

         “I like to think that I’ve learned over the years, that I’m a better coach now than when I was just starting.  That I’m still learning.  But people somehow believe that you can only have passion when you are young and before you’ve achieved anything.  That once you have a certain amount of success you have nothing left to prove.  But I have not mellowed.  I have as much passion and enthusiasm as I ever did.”

when to quit sailing

A number of people wrote to me about their own rotator cuff problems.  I appreciated the benefit of their experience.

        Uniformly surgery had resulted in full restoration; and uniformly recovery had taken at least a half a year.

        One writer, Peter, was a bit older than I and living aboard his Sadler 29, in Cannes, France.

        In his email he quoted Mike Richey, who made Atlantic crossings in his 80s and said, “There is no reason to think of giving up sailing until your memory degrades to such an extent that you forget where you are going once you have left.”

the love of the thing itself

I had read Joshua Slocum’s SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD first as a landlocked teenager and again many years later after having circumnavigated several times myself and sailed to many of the places Slocum did, but I had never read his THE VOYAGE OF THE LIBERDADE which he made from Brazil back to the United States with his wife and two young sons in a 35’ boat he built after the ship he owned was wrecked. 

The voyage of the LIBERDADE was audacious.  Perhaps as much as setting out in the SPRAY to become the first man to sail alone around the world.  

        Slocum had his own doubts about moving down from sailing a ship to a vessel only 35’, but once underway he wrote, “The old boating trick came back fresh to me, the love of the thing itself gaining on me as the little ship stood out; and my crew with one voice said, “ ‘Go on.’ ”