Hilton Head Island: le vent nous portera and a poem

 

You have seen variations on this image before.  It is a beautifully frequent part of my life.  Not entirely by chance,

This evening Carol and I watched about half of HAMNET, an original version of the young Shakespeare’s life, before she retired to the bedroom and I came to the screened porch to enjoy the beauty and sip Tasmanian Pure vodka and listen to music and bird calls.  An app I have identifies the bird as a Carolina Wren.  He or she is heard but not seen.

The music at the moment comes from the woman on the screen of my iPad Pro, Margarita Pirri who is singing ‘Le Vent Nous Portera’ which translates as ‘the wind carries us’, as indeed it does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyzBuo53u_0

I very much like the song and the video.

In one of the scenes young men going off in a train to fight in WW2 are smiling and holding young woman against them.  When I see such images I wonder, as I do of those of the young Germans smiling as they marched into Poland in September 1939, how many were still alive six years later.  

I pause.  It is completely still and calm.  The Spanish Moss hangs motionless as the light lingers to the west over Pickney Island after the set has sun.

I am preparing to sail for a few days or weeks offshore.

I have not sailed in many months and GANNET is no longer always ready to go to sea as for many years she was.  

I biked down this morning and took inventory of food and clothes and equipment and found, among other things, that I had only one working headlamp on board and it needed charging.  The others had died.  I brought it up to charge and ordered two more from Amazon.

I will sail as has become my custom to no where in particular.  How far and how long will depend on the weather and my enjoyment of the experience.  I may briefly touch, but do not expect to enter the monastery of the sea.  I may never again.

I have been working a few hours each morning on GANNET.  Routine cosmetic work.  She needs more, but that will have to wait until I return from the ocean and until I finish GANNET 6.  I only do one thing at a time.  That is called focus.  Carol and another sailer have been proofreading the manuscript.  Both are almost done and when I return I will incorporate their corrections and go over the manuscript myself one more time.

As some of you know I have written that the defining responsibility of the artist is to go beyond the edge of human experience and send back reports.  Not only have I defined that as well as anyone ever has, I have lived it.  GANNET 6 is almost certainly my last long report.  I do not expect it will be much read.   No scout is responsible that his reports be read by headquarters.  He has no control of that.  Only that he go beyond the lines and report truly.  There is satisfaction in knowing that I have.

I hear a motor in the distance. I think it is on land.

I will resume listening to ‘Le Vent Nous Portera’.

And from theTenth Canto or Lord Byron’s DON JUAN.

Hilton Head Island: painted

 

GANNET is an old boat.  She was launched in 1979, so sometime this year she will be 47 years old.  Old boat.  Old sailor.  Early next month I will have owned her for 15 years, longer than I have owned any other boat.

The wood in her interior is marine grade plywood and over the years it has been sanded often, at least by me, to the point where the surface veneer is in places worn away.  I have filled and patched, but finally the partial bulkhead around the companionway had become unacceptable, so this week I sanded one more time and applied three coats of white Pettit Easypoxy.  After and before photos are above.

I like the new look which makes the interior brighter.  However the newly painted bulkhead makes the rest of the interior look shabby, so I will have to repaint it.  Not a difficult or long job on a boat as small as GANNET and I had been considering doing so anyway.  But it will have to wait.  Carol’s birthday is next week, and consistent with having owned GANNET longer than any other boat, I have spent more of my life with Carol than any other person.  After her birthday I am going to go to sea for a week or two.

Hilton Head Island: a Bondathon

Carol and I have just completed a Bondathon, viewing all twenty-five James Bond movies in sequence.  While Amazon has bought the Bond franchise, for the past few months all the Bonds have been on Netflix.  However, most or all are leaving soon.

The Bond movies coincide with my adult life.

I saw the first, DR. NO, in late May of 1963, a few days before I graduated from college and set out for California with my first wife in an old Chevrolet station wagon hauling a U-Haul trailer in which there was, among far too much other stuff, ten or eleven boxes of books.  Now far more than that are in an iPhone in my pocket.  

We had met in a Freshman English class and married during the Christmas vacation our senior year, supported by the money I saved from my jobs as a lifeguard at an outdoor pool in a suburb of St. Louis during the summers and on Saturdays during the school year at an indoor YMCA pool.  For both I was paid the then minimum wage of $1.25 per hour.  However at the outdoor pool I received time and a half for hours over forty per week, of which there were usually about ten.  Big bucks.

Our monthly budget during our first married months was $150.  $67.50 for renting the second floor of a house near campus.  $30 for food.  I don’t recall on what we splurged the remaining $52.50.

She was a kind and intelligent and lovely woman.  She was a talented violist who brought the very great gift of classical music into my life; but we were not right for one another and divorced three years later. 

There is an interesting Wikipedia article about the Bond films which shows the actual budgets and box office was for the films and those figures adjusted to 2024 values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_James_Bond_films

DR. NO was low budget, costing only $1.1 million.  It made ten times that and Bond was off.  

In DR. NO Sean Connery drove a Sunbeam Alpine, about the cheapest vehicle that might have been called a sports car.  Soon he would be driving Aston Martins.  And soon the formula would be perfected.

Handsome men.  Beautiful women.  Exotic locations.  Chases—on land, in air, and beneath the sea.  Sexual innuendo.  We had a character named Pussy Galore and lines like, “I always knew you were a cunning linguist”.   Repeated shots of digital clocks counting down to disaster—always averted with seconds to go.  A megalomaniac who is trying to dominate the world.  Explosions.  The Bond makers loved explosions.  And a big final battle scene—sometimes below water; sometimes above

In short, the Bond films were adult cartoons.

Despite the innuendo and scenes of the various Bonds in bed with various women, I don’t recall any intimate part of a woman’s body ever being shown other than in silhouette in the elaborate title sequences.

While all the Bonds had their charms, the middle films tend to blend together in my mind.  I like best the first with Sean Connery, and the last with Daniel Craig, which actually had less sex and a bit more depth than the previous films, including the death of the Judi Dench as M.

While there hasn’t been a Bond film now in five years, the longest interval between them, the Tom Cruise MISSION IMPOSSIBLE films are certainly a successful variation on the theme, and I read that Amazon is planning to make a new one in the next year or two.

If they do, and I’m still around, I’ll watch.

Hilton Head Island: the obituary of James Whittaker

I saw a couple of days ago reports of the obituary of James Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest.

I know little of James Whittaker.  He probably was a good man, but he was a member of a team.  That he was the first American was decided by others, as was that Hillary, a part of another team, was the first ever to reach the top of the highest mountain on this small planet.

I doubt that there will be media obituaries of the first American who sailed alone around Cape Horn, which I suggest is a greater achievement than being a part of a team summiting Everest.   

No team. Risking everything he owned in the world including his own life, and he permitted no one else to decide.  He decided.

Hilton Head Island: two storms

 

There are two cyclones in the western South Pacific Ocean.  This is late in the season which is said to end there May 1.  I have been watching them for several days.  I first saw them at the Earth Wind Map, the top image, and have continued with Zoom Earth, the bottom image.  At present both are Category 3 storms with 115 mph winds.  The one headed toward Australia has been named Maila.  The one toward New Zealand Vaianu.  The final dot on their tracks is their forecast position Sunday morning at which time Maila will still be a Category 2 storm with 80 mph winds and Vaianu will be an Extratropical Cyclone with 50 mph winds.  It appears that Maila will make landfall near where Narelle did last month.

Hilton Head Island: Reinhold Messner; love and death in Uruguay; $255 per mile

I thank my friend Michael for forwarding me the following from the famed mountaineer, Reinhold Messner. 

Michael and his wife, Layne, retired a few years ago to life in a Dodge van with a custom interior on which they have travelled the U.S., Central and South America.  It is much like living on a boat.  They are about to enter Uruguay, the nineteenth country on their voyage.  This reminded me of something  I wrote while in Uruguay with Jill in 1992 after a 6,000 mile passage on RESURGAM from Auckland around Cape Horn.  We sailed into Punta del Este, but then rode the bus to the capital, Montevideo, to obtain our visas for Brazil.  

    We rode the bus for a couple of hours through a gently rolling countryside and came to a city of narrow streets, elaborately carved doors, iron balconies and trees.  The trees are squeezed everywhere and line streets, often joining branches overhead.  In Montevideo you feel that you are in a Spanish city, while in Punta del Este you do not.

    Between visits to the Brazilian Embassy, we walked around the waterfront.  The mouth of the Rio de la Plata is wide--the Argentine side is 50 miles from Montevideo--and shallow.   Major shipping is confined to narrow channels dredged in those 50 miles.

    On one side of the city, near the container facility, stands a neglected statue of a conquistador, staring determinedly inland.  Beyond him is the stone wall of a decayed fort.  This is an old part of the New World.  Isla de Lobos, near Punta, claims to be the site of the first lighthouse in the Americas.  Only after sailing due west for several days would early adventurers have seen the south bank or known they were on fresh water.

    On the other side of Montevideo, a promenade runs along the shore.  Late one weekday afternoon, it held a curious tableau.

    Montevideo is not the mixture of urban and rural that one often finds in Asia and Africa.  It is definitely a city.  Yet in a park in front of an apartment building in the old part of town, we saw a goat kneeling to eat grass.  A boy turned  the corner from one narrow alleyway to another, riding a fine gray horse.  Fishermen perched on the seawall, dangling hopeful lines in the choppy water.

    We passed two couples, sitting on benches partially sheltered by the seawall.  They were only a few steps apart but oblivious to one another.  The first couple were young lovers.  The second, dressed all in black, were a middle-aged man and an old woman.  The woman, whom we assumed to be his mother, was quietly crying.  They seemed just to have come from a funeral.   Both couples were the same:  a man with his arms around a woman, whose face was buried against his chest.  The embraces of love and death identical.

    We walked back up the hill into the center of the city where, at a cafe beside the Plaza Independencia, we shared a bottle of wine in the evening dusk and watched pigeons settle on the statue of Artiga, Uruguay’s George Washington.

I have read that cruisers power about one-third of the time.  

In writing GANNET 6 I came to wonder how much I powered the little boat.

The daily runs for GANNET’s circumnavigation total 29,989.  Of those I powered less than 15.  

Out of San Diego 1 mile.

In Hilo .5 mile.

In and out of Honolulu 2 miles

In Apia .5 mile

In Vavau 1 mile.

In Opua .5 mile.

In Bundaberg .5 mile.

In and out of Durban 3 miles.

In St. Helena .5 mile.

Out of Marathon .25 mile.

In Hilton Head 2 miles

In Balboa .5 mile.

In San Diego .25 mile.

I left Hilo, Apia, Vavau, Opua, Bundaberg, St. Helena, Hilton Head, and Balboa under sail.

GANNET was also towed at St. Lucia about 1 mile and into Marathon about .5 mile.

This works out to about 1/2000th powering.  Obviously GANNET and I are not cruisers.

With an electric outboard whose battery is recharged by the ship’s batteries which are charged by solar power we spent nothing on fuel.  However, having bought two electric outboards and a spare battery during the voyage our cost were a startling $266 per mile.

Hilton Head Island: two alligators and a lot of egrets.

 

Carol drove us over to Pickney Island yesterday and we saw two alligators and a lot of egrets.  This is their nesting season and the photos show only a small portion of those on the island.  I am impressed that there are enough fish around to feed the population.  

To have an undeveloped wildlife refuge on the other side of Skull Creek is one of the charms of this place.