Evanston: corrections

        I rarely comment on things written about me, but an interview just published in the May issue of LATITUDE 38 contains some errors.  Both the interviewer, Ronnie Simpson, and the magazine have been kind to me and no criticism of them is intended.

        Carol is my fifth wife, not sixth.  

        On her shakedown sail after the new mast was installed GANNET made while beam reaching more than 8 knots measured by GPS in 10-12 knots of wind with only her 110% furling jib and fully battened mainsail set, not her asymmetrical spinnaker.

        I do not intend to spend long periods hand steering GANNET, though I will if I must.

        My backup for the tiller pilots is not me, but sheet to tiller self-steering.

———

        I’ve finished my housework, packed, ordered a taxi for 1:15 p.m. tomorrow, and have the final check list centered on my desk.

Evanston: soot; Climate Earth 3D; losing a step; training

        After the last entry, Dick sent me a link to video of the boat fire at Driscoll’s, for which I thank him. 

        There can be no doubt that everything that happens in public—and perhaps private— is now recorded.  Be warned. 

        As he noted, the boat does not seem to have a mast.

        I have no recollection of her and may never have walked to the end of B dock.

        All that smoke is blowing directly toward GANNET.

        There may be a lot of scrubbing in my future.

———

        I thank James of the eastern mountains for the Climate Earth 3D app for iPad and iPhone. 

        This is the World Wind Map in app form.  I don’t see that it does much more than the free site, beyond being a little easier to switch from wind to ocean current view.  But I think the developer deserves to be supported for creating a most interesting and useful visualization, and hope others with Apple devices will buy the app for a very modest $1.99.  

———

        Last evening we rewatched BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, which was as excellent as the first time, maybe even better for I noticed and appreciated camera angles and other directorial details that I had not before; and the night before rewatched SKYFALL, the latest and one of the best James Bond films.  

        The pattern here is obvious.  I am rewatching and rereading because my mind is too preoccupied with preparing to be away for six months to deal with anything new.

        If you’ve seen SKYFALL you will recall that Bond is shot unintentionally by another British agent, and later told that perhaps it is time that he give up field work which is a young man’s game, and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in ‘losing a step.’

        Although I feel strong and, other than turning into a cyclops, have kept my health, being almost thirty years older than the current James Bond, I’ve certainly lost more than a step.

        I couldn’t survive some of the situations I have in the past.

        I couldn’t bail seven tons of water out of GANNET every day for months.  But then considerably less than seven tons of water would sink the little sloop and I wouldn’t have to.

        Without doubt I couldn’t swim for twenty-six hours as I did after I sank RESURGAM.

        Being adrift for a couple of weeks as I was when CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE pitch-poled west of Fiji, starving and living on six sips of water a day, doesn’t require much more than lying down and suffering and I can probably still do that, counting on adrenaline to row the last few miles to land as I did before.

        There is no conclusion here, only elderly musing.  

        I truly hope not to be put to the test, while yet wondering how at my age I would fare.

        My experience of life is that consciousness resists unconsciousness, which is perhaps odd for unconsciousness is peaceful and consciousness fraught with the possibility of pain.

        What I have called the animal always wants to live.  My animal is strong.  It is all that has kept me alive at times.  And I don’t believe that it weakens with age, until perhaps the very end.

        That is what is great about a voyage:  it is real, as so much of modern urban life is not, and filled with the simple, fundamental, beautiful, and true.

———

        I do not expect to write again before we board the Southwest Chief Saturday afternoon.  Homing again to the sea.

       Thanks to Bill for that line written during WWI.

Evanston: ordered; fire

        Accompanied by a Wagnerian thunderclap, which seemed excessive, a modest trumpet fanfare would have been enough, but I don’t manage sound effects, I pressed the ‘submit order’ button on Campmor’s site yesterday and 145 packages of freeze dry meals will soon be on their way to San Diego.

        Two of the items on my list, one of the wrap fillings and sweet and sour pork, were not available, so I ordered a few more of others.  

        Because each pack of Santa Fe Chicken makes two meals, this is a total of 152 dinners.

        $905, after a bulk discount of $145, was about what I expected, at an average cost of $5.95 per meal.  There are cheaper alternatives, but, barring damage to the boat, months spent as sea are inexpensive, and, for me, the convenience in provisioning and minimal preparation and clean-up are well worth the added expense.

        I also ordered several cheap duffle bags to help organize stowage.  This was guesswork.  I’m not sure exactly how I’ll use them.

        And I placed the order with JetBoil for a case of twenty-four 230 gram fuel canisters.  This is the middle size and best suited to GANNET.

———

        James from San Diego sent me a link to a news item:  Sailboat destroyed by fire in Mission Bay.  The article stated that the fire was at Driscoll’s Marina and the boat 24’ long.  Hmm.

        Not having heard from the marina, I assumed that it was not GANNET.  However, almost all small boats are on A dock and I could not recall many that are 24’ long.  

        I called Driscoll this morning.  The fire was on B dock.

        However, I did come awake in the middle of the night thinking, “What the hell am I going to do with all that freeze dry food?”

Evanston: El Nino?; the divorce rate for birds; SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

        I first read of a probable strong El Nino this year in the NEW ZEALAND HERALD.  A little research reveals that the probability is high. 

        What this means varies by location; but for me it may mean weaker than usual or even reversed trade winds.  

        If you view the Earth Wind Map as I do each morning, you will have already observed rather weak trades and a substantial gap between them.  Heading to Hawaii first, I will be crossing the Equator in the Pacific more than a thousand miles father west than I ever have before.  GANNET doesn’t need much wind to keep moving; but she does need some.

———

        If I were a bird, I reasonably could expect to be an albatross.

        Except for that divorce rate.

———

        Saturday evening we watched SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.  

        If you saw it when it was first released in 1998, as we did, but not since,  I highly recommend you do so again.  It is an immensely entertaining movie with a superb cast.  Peerless.

Evanston: the consolation of water

As she squatted at the end of the wharf, as far from the city as possible, waiting for the others to return, an ocean swell lapped at the pilings and Mai understood the consolation of water.

        You of course recognize that from shadows.  Well, perhaps not.

        I thought of it while reading a fine article in the May issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC about the River Seine in Paris.

        Among the craft on the river is the ADAMANT, a floating psychiatric clinic launched four years ago.

        From the first day aggression evaporated.  Why?  No one can explain, clinic director Jean-Paul Hazan says.

        “Perhaps,” suggests Jacqueline Simonnet, the head nurse, “it’s the rocking of the boat.”

        “These are very sick patients,” Hazan says, “but there has been no violence.”  He pauses, “I think it’s changed us too, but I can’t say how.”

        The layout is open.  The space ‘fluide’.  Glass erases the divide between inside and out.

        It also, metaphorically at least, blurs the boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’—between the mentally ill and the presumably normal.  “We’re all in the same boat,” Gérard Ronzatti, the architect who designed the ADAMANT, told me.

       You and I already knew the power of water.  And that, if not in the same boat, then swimmers together.

Evanston: variations on a theme

        I like variations on a theme; perhaps because my life has been.  Certainly I have created more variations on a voyage than most.

        The above photo came from Zane in New Zealand who happened across it on someone else’s website.   I thank him.   The gimbaled backstay radar mount broke in the Indian Ocean in 2008 and was never replaced, so the photo dates before that.

        I think THE HAWKE OF TUONELA looks nice.  She shares with GANNET an uncluttered deck, as did all of my boats, except CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE who had no deck at all.  You can’t get more uncluttered than that.

        One of my favorite comments, which I took as a supreme compliment, was made when some people on another boat passed near RESURGAM while she was on a mooring in Sydney, Australia.  We were down below with the hatches open and heard one man say, “That boat’s sailed around the world.”  Another replied incredulously, “Really?  She doesn’t have enough stuff on her.”

        THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was only of moderate size, but as Zane points out, she would dwarf GANNET.

        Hopefully before the end of the year, I will have a photo of GANNET in the exact same location.

———

        I was formed in part by epics of ancient Greece and the opening of the American West.  Although the apposite Gateway Arch had not been built when I was a child, Saint Louis was a good place to consider the latter.  My mind went down the Mississippi to the Gulf; but even more it went west to the ocean.

        I read books about the West and I read the Greek epics.  I wondered, as the young must, if I could have done what people, real and mythical, in those books did; though in time as those of you who have visited the poetry page know, I chose to be measured by the ocean.

        I have no idea how many times I’ve read THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY in various translations or variations on them.  They are still being written, including by me, and I just finished reading for the second time one of the most recent and cleverest.

        First published in 2007, THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY, by Zachary Mason, claims in a brief preface to be a translation of a papyrus fragment recovered from a rubbish heap, containing forty-four variations on what has become accepted as the standard version.  Mason suggests that this is the freezing of what was fluid and multifaceted.

        The alleged papyrus provides us with quite different possibilities of Ulysses’s voyage, his homecoming, encounter with the Cyclops, Calypso, Circe, the Trojan War itself, and his old age, when in the last fragment, “Last Islands”, he and his men set out to retrace their journey and visit destroyed Troy, where they do not find what they expect, but Ulysses does find a kind of peace.

        There is a pretty good review of a second edition of Mason’s book, published in 2010, at the NY TIMES, with which I do not entirely agree and find a bit too glib.  I also think it reveals too much that is better left to be enjoyed in reading and so have not provided a link.

        THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY is short.  I read it in two sittings on successive days with great pleasure, and I expect that in time I will do so again.

———

       I also reread last evening Carl Sandberg’s ‘Chicago’ which appeared in POETRY magazine one hundred years ago last month.

Evanston: bicycle: ride and THIEF

        Yesterday was beautiful and warm, so I dusted off our bicycles and we took the first ride of the year along the lake to Northwestern and back. Of course, everyone else wanted to be outside too after this winter of discontent, and it was no surprise that the bicycle path was a slalom course of pedestrians, children, dog walkers, and the oblivious.

        In certain light Lake Michigan looks like a tropical lagoon.  It isn’t.  One intrepid windsurfer was on his board.  It was not a day to fall off.  Only a few weeks ago that water was frozen; and it is still killing cold.

        People sitting on the grass at Northwestern

reminded me of Seurat’s, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”,

which hangs in the Art Institute twelve miles south.  But after I looked at the painting online, that’s a stretch.

        What looks to be land beyond the windsurfer is a cloud bank.  Michigan is fifty miles distant. 

———

        How I had never seen THE BICYCLE THIEF,  a film on everybody’s all time greatest lists and one almost as old as I, is inexplicable.  On Friday, two days before our bike ride, I finally did.

        Directed by Vittorio de Sica in 1948, THE BICYCLE THEIF is a memorable, thought provoking, troubling film with many images that remain in the mind.

        The plot is simple.

        In post-WWII Rome dozens of men wait outside a labor exchange seeking work.  A clerk comes down exterior steps and calls two names.  One is Antonio, but the job requires a bicycle.  He says he has one, but in fact it has been pawned.

        Antonio’s wife takes the sheets off their bed and pawns them so the bicycle can be reclaimed.

        On his first day on the job, pasting movie posters to walls, the bicycle is stolen.  

        Antonio, his young son, Bruno, and some friends, search Rome for the thief.

        I’m not going to refer you to any reviews, all of which are outstanding and most of which give away the ending.  And advise you not to check Wikipedia where the plot is accurately summarized in detail.

        If you like movies, this deserves its rank among the great ones.  

        I watched streamed from Netflix.  I believe it is also shown on Turner Classic Movies.

Evanston: dinner for the rest of the year

        When I return to GANNET in a little over two weeks, I have only to install the gudgeons for the emergency rudder and the chaffing plates for the Jordan drogue bridle shackles, provision and reconfigure the interior into passage mode.

        Ruddercraft has confirmed that the rudder will be shipped to arrive on or about May 6.

        A week from tomorrow I will place orders to be shipped directly to San Diego for freeze dry food and some extra duffle bags from CampMor and a 24 canister case of fuel from JetBoil.

        The title of this post is a slight exaggeration, but only slight.

        I’ve been considering the list of acceptable meals that I posted in January.  Since then I’ve experimented with a few new ones and rejected all except Natural High’s Beef Teriyaki.  This brings the total to twenty-two.

        Although I will eat ashore occasionally, I want to have aboard enough to  last me from San Diego to New Zealand, five months, 150 meals.

        While it has been my practice in the past to limit myself to fourteen different dinners and repeat every two weeks, this time I’m going to order seven each of nineteen of the meals, and four each of the Backpacker Pantry Chicken Salad Wrap and of the Mountain House Chicken Fajita Wrap, which are very similar, and of the Backpacker Pantry Chicken Vindaloo, which provides a welcomed change but is almost too thirst inducing spicy for a passage where fresh water is limited.

        If you do the math, you will find this comes to 145 meals, but as I noted in January, each packet of Santa Fe Chicken makes two dinners, so the real total is 152.

        Breakfast, as almost invariably ashore or at sea, will be uncooked oatmeal, trail mix, fruit—fresh ashore and in the early days of a passage, then dried, powered milk and water; juice; two cups of black coffee.

        I’ve determined that a container of Quaker Oats lasts me exactly two weeks.

        Lunch will vary some.  Canned fish, chicken, crackers.  Cheese.  Hummus while it lasts.  Maybe salami, though not as frequently as in the past.

        I used to have a can of Coke in mid-afternoon during passages as added liquid, but have lost my taste for soft drinks and now usually have a can of beer, though I seldom drink beer ashore.

        There will almost always be a drink at sunset.

        And there will be a bottle of Laphroaig aboard as long as I can find a source of supply.

        As I noted after being adrift when CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE pitchpoled in the South Pacific, if I ever get to the point of having only one last drink before I die, I want it to be something better than Coca-Cola.

        I’ve been asked about a specific departure date.

        I don’t have one.

        I have given notice to Driscoll that I’ll be out of the slip by May 31.  

        I expect I will be a week or two earlier than that.

Evanston: words; disclaimer

        Probably still under the influence of Ambrose Bierce and certain items recently in the news, I recalled my definition of royalty:  a mediocrity, or worse, with an ancestor who was the biggest brigand when the music stopped.

        Some of you will also remember:  a military genius:  a general of average intelligence whose opponent is retarded.

        Among the most misused words today is ‘adventure’.  ‘Hero’, ‘courage’, and ‘epic’ are not far behind.

        I’ve received several emails recently from friends wishing me well on my coming adventure.

        For many setting out on a voyage would be an adventure; but I am most definitely hoping not to have one.  To paraphrase the quote from Bilbo Baggins I used in the front pages of THE OPEN BOAT:  Adventures are nasty disturbing uncomfortable things!  Make you late for dinner.

        If I have any adventures they will be totally unintentional.  I’m just going sailing.

        An article of mine about preparing GANNET is in the May issue of CRUISING WORLD.

        I’m not sure when I wrote it.  For that matter they might have cobbled a couple of my pieces together under a title that if you know me, know I would never have used.   What most struck me is how out of date it is.  How much more I have done and GANNET has evolved.  

        They pay me for these things on acceptance and then run them whenever.  The longest delay I can recall is an article about visiting Lord Howe Island in the Tasman I wrote in 1987 that appeared a circumnavigation later when I was there again in 1991.
        I've spent much of my life waiting for the world to catch up.  I'm beginning to doubt it ever will.

Evanston: the bloodiest month; the highest paid; the perfect novel

        One hundred and fifty years ago the Civil War was moving toward its bloodiest month:  May 1864.  There was no single battle equal to Gettysburg or Chickamauga; but after Grant crossed the Rapidan River on May 4, fighting was almost continuous in what has become known as the Overland Champaign.  By the time it was over, the armies had sustained more than 100,000 casualties, and Lee was besieged in Petersburg.

        In the U.S. version of HOUSE OF CARDS, Frank Underwood, a Southerner meditating on the death of an ancestor who died fighting for the South, declares that Grant was a ‘butcher’ who prevailed only because he had more men.

        That is not the opinion of historians without a regional bias, who find Lee and Grant equal.  Grant persistently outflanked and outmaneuvered Lee, sliding always east, forcing Lee to follow to protect Richmond, until finally Lee could not avoid checkmate. 

        The siege and the war dragged on for almost another year.  Photographs of the trenches around Petersburg are reminiscent of those in WWI, which started one hundred years ago.  Wonderful anniversaries:  we are quite a species.

———

        Something called ‘sportingintelligence’, which might be an oxymoron, recently published their annual list of teams with the highest average starting team pay.  Clicking on the list will enlarge it.

        Some of my fellow Americans will be surprised to learn that seven of the top twelve teams play what we call ‘soccer.’  That being my favorite sport, I was not.

        I do find it interesting that four of these teams are from England’s Premier League, two from Spain, and one from Germany.  Considering the money they have been spending, I wouldn’t be surprised to find Paris Saint-Germain to be included in coming years.

        At least in soccer/football you get what you pay for:  with the exception of Man. U., which is having an off year, these are the best teams in Europe.

        In other sports, not so much.

        Two are American baseball teams:  the Yankees and the Dodgers.  The Yankees always have big payrolls and the Dodgers just gave a pitcher a fortune.  He promptly was injured.

        The biggest surprises are the three American basketball teams, none of whom are top contenders.    

        I couldn’t figure out why the Chicago Bulls made the list, until I remembered that a couple of years ago they gave Derrik Rose a hundred million dollar contract.  He has been injured ever since.

———

        I finished reading FAR TORTUGA this morning, and I am filled with admiration.

        Peter Matthiessen died on April 5 at age 86.  

        I read several of his books a long time ago, including THE SNOW LEOPARD and AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD.  I thought I had read FAR TORTUGA, but I hadn’t.

        The story is of a crew of men who go from the Cayman Islands to the cays and reefs off Guatemala and Honduras to catch sea turtles.  While I don’t recall that any exact time is given, there is a reference to the 1962 “Bay of Pigs” fiasco, and the novel was first published in 1975, so one can place it between those dates.

        I am a very tough audience for sea stories.  

        Matthiessen gets it all right:  the men; their minds; actions; speech; the sea; the land; the weather; the boats; the birds; the turtles. 

        I’m still thinking about it, but FAR TORTUGA is as good as writing gets.  It might even be perfect.

———

        The temperature at noon is 58°F/14.5°C.

        The snow has melted.