Evanston: wind; Bach; Steve blushing

After being stuck in Customs for several days, my OpenWind instrument arrived yesterday.   I bought mine through MauriPro here in the US, but OpenWind is a German company and my unit was shipped from there.  While only time will tell, initially I am very impressed.

The solar powered transducer is at the top of the photo.  It appears to be solidly built and came with a useful instruction manual.  

Setup was a cinch.  I put the unit in direct sunlight on our balcony for a half hour, which proved unnecessary.  The battery was still fully charged.  Turned the small on/off switch on the bottom to on.  Downloaded the free OpenWind app from the Apple app store.  Opened it and the unit instantly connected via Bluetooth.  There is also an app for the Apple Watch.  I installed it and have double read outs.  Actually triple because it connects to my iPad Pro as well.  Using the iPhone’s GPS, the OpenWind app can display SOG, COG, and other information in addition to apparent and true wind direction and speed.  This has all been utterly painless.  I am pleased and relieved.  Connecting TackTick transducers to displays was often chancy and frustrating.

I can now view everything I need to navigate, except depth, on my iPhone, iPad and even my watch.  Dick Tracy never had it so good.

The unit comes with a standard rail mount.  I also bought an optional mast mount which may not have been necessary.  It will enable the transducer to be mounted on the forward side of the mast.  The top half of the rail mount can be used to mount the transducer on the mast top.  I will try the rail mount first.

Elegant.  Simple.  And comparatively inexpensive.  I can hardly wait to get it on GANNET.  But I’m going to have to.

If you want to know more here is a link to OpenWind.

https://www.openwind.de/




I thank Andy for an excellent fifteen minute video about my favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, but you already knew that, just as you know my favorite liquid, some of which I sipped last evening.

https://youtu.be/kcvUHdhROrk

I had not heard of Rick Beato.  Obviously others have.  The video has been viewed more than a million times.  

For what it is worth, I, who have no musical talent, agree entirely with his choices of Bach’s greatest compositions and listen to them repeatedly, most recently his Mass in B Minor over several evenings last week while Carol was watching what poses as the evening news. 

Toward the end of the video Rick Beato mentions an hour and a half video narrated by Sir John Eliot Gardner, Bach:  A Passionate Life.  I watched it and have the temerity to believe it has some defects, including a psychologist who tries to judge Bach as she would an average man.  He wasn’t.  He may be the least average man our species has ever produced and he is, I believe, beyond her understanding and even imagination.  Nevertheless I found the film interesting and entertaining.  If that is not too much Bach, here is the link.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o1DZPqqx-M&t=50s




Google again notified me that I am being talked about.  This time it was a sailing forum in which a man was seeking a link to a free version of THE OCEAN WAITS.  He said he had been ‘looking everywhere.’   Others said they had been too.  Still others provided them with links.  All they had to do was google my name, find inthepresentsea.com and it is there on the ‘books’ page.   I would rather people buy my books, but if they can’t or won’t, almost all have long been available for free.  I would have told them that, but to enter a comment I would have had to open an account and that was not going to happen.



Steve Earley is blushing.  Mark Twain said, “Man is the only animal who blushes.  Or needs to.”  That seems perfectly straightforward, but when I googled to be certain I had the quote correct, I found several sites offering explanations.  What is there to explain?  

Steve has no need to blush, but he has advised me of glitches with viewing his track page and asked that I provide a new link.  

Above is his position within the past five minutes.  I think he has already had lunch.

Here is the link:

https://maps.findmespot.com/s/P14M

Evanston: quotes; ‘adventurer’: arts and culture; sailing Steve

From Larry came some quotes for which I thank him.  Three I especially like:

Politicians should wear sponsor jackets like Nascar drivers, then we know who owns them.
                   —Robin Williams

In America they call it ‘lobbying.’  Everywhere else in the world they call it, ‘bribery and corruption’.
                    —anonymous

Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining.    
                    —Theodore Roosevelt

Another quote is incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein.  ‘A ship is always safe at shore, but that is not what it’s built for.’

First of all a ship is not an ‘it’ but a ‘she’ and I don’t care how politically incorrect.  Second, as those of you intelligent enough to visit the main site from time to time know, the correct quote is:  ‘A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.’  And it comes not from Albert Einstein, but from Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hooper.  You can find it on the ‘lists’ page under ‘quotes used in front of my books’.

http://inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lists.html

You can get a free education here.  Don’t waste it.



Google has recently notified me that I have appeared on the Internet a couple of times.  This has been caused by YACHTING WORLD posting my article about GANNET approaching New Zealand in a gale.  A few other sites have picked it up as well.  The introduction reads:  ‘Single-handed adventurer Webb Chiles outruns a south pacific storm as he sails between the US and New Zealand’.

You know that I deny being an adventurer.  ‘Amateurs seek adventures.  Professionals seek to avoid them.’

http://inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lines.html


While there, you might also note:  ‘Define yourself, or others surely will.’

If you watched THE LAST DANCE you may recall that Madonna gave Dennis Rodman the same advice.  I’m impressed.  I didn’t know she read me.



I happened across mention of Google Arts and Culture yesterday.  There are apps and there is a website.

https://artsandculture.google.com/

I am amazed at what is there.  It is almost enough to cause one to wonder if the Internet might be good for something other than spreading hate, fear and lies.




Steve Earley is on the Chesapeake again.  Above is a photo of his SPARTINA taken by Curt a few weeks ago.  Having retired earlier this year from a long career as a news photographer, Steve now has more time to sail.  Good.

His tracking page is here.

https://maps.findmespot.com/Track?ishr=0694b931-25a4-44a2-9298-abb200c8db4b#panel-history

And I expect that as usual in time he will post his log on his website.

 http://logofspartina.blogspot.com/

I get a huge commission for every viewer I send his way, so please go.  

Actually I don’t.

Steve will be embarrassed when I say that he has the right stuff, but he does.

Sail on, Steve.  Sail on.

Evanston: cockatoos and coyotes; lucky

From Pat on the better side of the Equator in Queensland, Australia, come these photos taken from or near the deck of his house.  Above a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo.  Below, Little Corellas, also known Pat tells me as Blue-eyed Cockatoos.  I thank Pat for sending the photos and for permission to share them with you.

Walking through Calvary Cemetery Saturday afternoon we saw three coyote pups.  Or rather Carol did.  By the time she pointed them out to me, two had scurried back into their den beneath a long flat gravestone.  The third, about the size of a chihuahua dog, bolder or more curious remained above ground and seemed as interested in watching us as we were watching him.  We were about fifteen yards away on the main drive that bisects the cemetery and no threat.  

Subsequently we have learned that coyotes in urban settings like cemeteries.  We did not see the adults, who presumably were out hunting rabbits or squirrels.

I found myself wondering whether curiosity and boldness are advantages or disadvantages in survival for a coyote pup.  Or any of us.  I can see it both ways.  He was an appealing little animal.  I wish him well.




I do not really believe the pandemic is over just because it has been pushed from the front pages by other bad news.  However, restrictions are being eased and behavior, even my own, is changing.

The road blocks preventing non-residents from entering the Florida Keys have been removed today, and South Africa is permitting liquor stores to open for the first time in two months.  They are still not allowed to be open at night or on weekends.  The fear was of an increase in domestic violence with men at home more.   Here in the United State liquor stores are considered essential businesses, along with gun shops, and have always remained open.  Surely this is a constitutional right.  Or something.  And there can not be an increase in domestic violence when the mobs have taken to the streets and no one is at home.

I am in fact just back from bicycling to the liquor store to pick up an order placed online.  They will deliver, but inspired by the coyote pup I decided to be bold and actually went into the store during their geezer hour from 10 to 11 AM.  There were only two of my peers in the supermarket-size store.  We all had on face masks as did all the employees, who outnumbered us.  We were almost out of gin and Laphroaig.  Intolerable.  

The virus numbers in two or three weeks will be interesting.




I have long been on the record as believing that my luck is only average and that I am not brave.  However I am beginning to reconsider.

When last in San Diego I had lunch with an old friend who drove down from Los Angeles.  We ate at the Royal Rooster on the other side of Quivira Basin from GANNET’s dock.  The Royal Rooster was a new business.  I wonder if it has survived.

As we were enjoying the world’s best tacos, the topic of luck came up and I said that I consider mine to be average.  My friend said with raised eyebrows, “After all those voyages?”  I said matter-of-factly if immodestly, “I’m good at what I do.”  She said, “Yes, but still...” and we went on to talk of other things.  However that bit of conversation stuck in my mind.

Long time readers will know that I do not deny time and chance.  I have just thought that in my case chance has evened out.  But maybe I have been wrong.

At sea a couple of ships have come close to running me down, one close enough to break RESURGAM’s starboard spreader, but I have spent a lot of time out there and who knows how many might have come closer but for minor changes in their courses and speed and mine?  Or, despite the number of knock-downs my boats have experienced, how many other waves broke a second or two earlier or later?

I think that most experienced seafarers are fatalists because they know that no matter their strength and skill, they are dealing with forces far beyond their control.  Perhaps considering the amount of time I have spent at sea on the sometimes ragged edge, as my friend implied my survival into old age, no matter my skill, is proof of exceptional luck.

I have always acknowledged my good fortune in meeting Carol during the only brief time our lives could have come together.

And I know that my body is a great gift of the genetic lottery.  All I’ve done is ride the horse I came in on, take pretty good care of it, and get back on when I fell off.

So upon deliberation, that I have lived the life I have and become seventy-eight years old in good health, though frayed by time, and with the love of an exceptional woman, may be proof that I have been exceptionally lucky. 

Who knows?  I may next decide I am brave.

  

Evanston: Pytheas; green flash; the first three parts

Pytheas.  Now there is a name you shouldn’t say in public these days without a face mask.

I knew of the circumnavigation of Africa around 600 BC reported by Herodotus and have mentioned it somewhere in my writings.  Although that voyage may not have happened, I hope it did.  I have touched on Africa several times, north and south, east and west, and to have circumnavigated the continent 2600 years ago fires my imagination.  It would have been wonderful.  I would have loved to have done it.  I like to believe I could have.

However, I did not know of Pytheas’s equally wonderful voyage until I recently began reading Farley Mowat’s THE FARFARERS.

Around 330 BC, Pytheas, a Greek merchant in Massalia, present day Marseilles, France, set off west through the Gibraltar Straits, then the Pillars of Hercules, and headed north.  He may have touched Brittany.  He did continue to the modern United Kingdom, probably making landfall in Cornwall.  He is the first Mediterranean sailor known to have reached the British Isles.  He continued up the west coast to Scotland and beyond to Thule, which may have been Iceland.  He reached the frozen Arctic Ocean, before turning back south, sailing down the east coast of modern Scotland and England, then east into the Baltic and possibly continuing as far as the Vistula River in modern Poland, before retuning to Massalia.  What a world to have sailed.  What a voyage to have made.

If you want to read more:

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1078/on-the-ocean-the-famous-voyage-of-pytheas/




I have sailed into or looked back at thousands of sunsets and I have never seen the green flash.  The image above from The Astronomy Picture of the Day shows green flashes not just from the sun, but from the moon, Venus and Mercury.  I really must be blind.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html




I have written that I have formulated a plan for the next several years.  In the unlikely event I complete it, I will have the tedious task of making another, but that is years away and the problem may have solved itself.

Here are the first three parts.

1.  2020  move GANNET from San Diego to Hilton Head

2. 2020-2022?  explore Hilton Head waters and anchor with alligators, possibly sail to Bermuda and the Bahamas

3.  2023?  cross the North Atlantic to the UK and Ireland, specifically Islay, the home of my favorite liquid, possibly with stops in Canada and Iceland

The question marks because the timing is uncertain.

The fourth part is more audacious and I will keep it to myself for some years to come, assuming some years do come.

I have looked at the chart catalogues of both iNavX and iSailor.  Both have had significant price changes in the past year or so.  For GANNET’s circumnavigation, charts from iNavX were considerably less expensive than those from iSailor.  For a prospective voyage to Iceland and the UK, they are now less expensive from iSailor.



May seems to have been a long month and for me I don’t think the now forgotten pandemic has been the reason.  Maybe because it has rained so much in Chicago.  Today is a lovely day and the forecast is for fine weather for the coming week.  I suppose it has to happen sometime.

I did my standard workout the maximum thirteen times this month and went to 100 push-ups and crunches in the first set, and 50 each in the second and third, seven of those workouts.  Carol has suggested that in view of my torn shoulder and considerable age I am pushing myself too hard.  I appreciate that she cares about me, but I am going to use my body as hard as I can as long as I can.

If you were to venture to the Lines page of the main site, you would find that no matter what additions I make, the last line is:  go out, going forward.

‘Forward’ is subjectively defined and there are no guarantees, but I hope I do.

http://inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lines.html

Evanston: hibernation; shorter; Bundesliga

I thank Lee for the photos of GANNET in hibernation taken yesterday or the day before.  Above the waterline she looks as I left her.  The birds seems not to have found her.  They prefer higher perches.  Below the waterline she must be foul.  She was last anti-fouled in January of last year.



I have said that I expected it to cost less to have GANNET towed across this big country than it did to have her towed 50 miles across Panama.  I now know that as a fact.  I checked some websites and made a phone call and have a quote of $5600 San Diego to Hilton Head.  I am reasonably certain I can improve on that.  

I have never known the full cost of GANNET’s Panama transit because I paid the various boat yards, marinas, cradle makers, materials suppliers, and the trucking company at different times and with different pieces of plastic; and because I don’t want to know.  However, I have bills totalling more than $7,000.  The real total probably approaches the $9,000 I paid to buy GANNET.

I was under the impression that the US is 3,000 miles across.  From New York to San Francisco or Seattle it is.  But the country curves inward toward the south on both coasts and the distance San Diego to Hilton Head of 2,418 miles is not much more than the distance from San Diego to Chicago 2,077 miles.

I don’t see this happening before September at the earliest.



The German Bundesliga is the first top flight soccer league in Europe to resume play.  Some minor leagues never stopped.  The matches are televised and I record and watch them.  The only real sport going.

Being played in empty stadiums with 80,000 empty seats, voices echo.  One team places pictures of fans on several hundred seats on one side of its stadium, and I sometimes hear what sounds like crowd noise, but do not know if it is being broadcast in the stadium or just on television.  The play is good.  

The matches unquestionably lack something in the absence of live fans.  But is it better than nothing?  I think it is.

Evanston: it’s over; poor Bill

Obviously as proven by the crowd photos in what poses as the news, the pandemic is over, which is a shame just when people were becoming more like me.  But ‘Hooray’ anyway.

Yesterday Carol and I celebrated the end of the virus by going to a tennis court.  A few days ago Evanston put up the nets on some of the public tennis courts.  Usually every other one in the interest of now antiquated social distancing.  Carol knows of two rarely used courts and we found them empty with a net on one.  With my cyclopean vision I cannot return balls except by pure chance, something like batters facing Pedro Martinez in his prime when their only hope was to stick out the bat and hope he hit it with the ball.  However I can hit balls to her and then retrieve her returns.

In the afternoon Carol repaid my services by cutting my hair.  This was not pandemic induced.  When I had hair I cut it myself.  I did so once last year at sea after not getting to a barber shop in Panama.  But for some years Carol has cut my hair.  She always takes too much off the top, but for what I pay her I don’t complain.

I saw the heading of an article several days ago about a young man who allegedly drove 500 miles to get a haircut.  This raises several questions about the young man’s vanity and sanity, but I did not read the article and have no answers.

Yesterday as the number of deaths in the United States from the former pandemic approached 100,000, the NY TIMES ran a rolling list of the names and ages of 1000 of the dead.  I watched it for a while and was struck by how very few were under age 60.  We have been told that the virus is killing mostly old people, but perhaps in an attempt to make us all feel that we are in this together, the few young who have died get disproportionate coverage.  

You may recall my writing that we are not all in this together.  Once again the world is catching up.  A recent magazine cover reads:  One Nation Divided.  Certainly there is a virus age divide and the young have every right to feel put upon by having their partying disrupted by something that will be a mild case of flu to them.  If they pass it on to some old geezers whom it kills, well there is a geezer surplus and more are entering the supply chain every day.  Kill off enough and it may even save Social Security.

For myself I am giving serious thought of attending the next orgy.




Poor Bill Gates.  Not often one says that of the world’s second richest man.  As if being demoted to second isn’t bad enough, according to a recent survey half of Fox News viewers believe that he “is planning to use a future COVID-19 vaccine to implant microchips in billions of people in order to monitor their movements.”   44% of self-described Republicans share belief in this lunacy, as do 44% of those who voted for Donald Trump.

https://www.cnet.com/news/over-40-of-republicans-wrongly-believe-conspiracy-theory-about-bill-gates-and-covid-19-vaccines/

Long ago I wrote that democracy doesn’t work and never has except possibly on the village level.   At the time I labeled that an hypothesis.  Sufficient evidence is now in to state it as a proven fact.



I have continued to listen to one or two of Alastair Cooke’s Letters From America every day.  In addition to Harry Truman’s election and the atom bomb warning, I have now heard about Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Rudolph Valentino, the Augusta National Golf Course, and how ice cream changed America.  All a delight and in delightful contrast to the talking heads on television today.  I wonder what Alastair Cooke would have said about recent events.  It really is our loss.

I’m repeating the link in case you missed it.  You can thank me later.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p010fyzg

Evanston: Mother, let go; egotist; Alister Cooke; Helen Humphreys

From Kent, who maintains Audrey’s Armada and sometimes acts as moveable ballast, comes the story of their oldest son’s first time on the helm of their Drascombe Lugger, ONKAHYE, which means ‘dancing feather’ in Seminole.  On the little boat sailing out of Corpus Christi were Kent, Audrey, their son, and Audrey’s father, Jack, who then owned the boat.

I quote Kent:

Many days were spent tacking out through the breakwater, picking a long beam reach across the bay, singing a song or two and then heading back in before the Corpus winds started blowing over 20. Our oldest son took the tiller at age 5, spoke the words “Mother, let go,” then expertly sailed ONKAHYE across the bay and back.

Kent later added:

Audrey looked up at her Dad and Jack repeated the command, "Mother, let go."  Being a pirate, of course she didn't want to...but being a good Mom she did.

Perfect.  Mother, son, grandfather.  I expect that Kent behaved well too.

I note that at age five the biggest body of water I had seen was a bathtub.

I thank Kent and Audrey for permission to share the story with you.



In the last post I referred to Victor Vescovo as an egotist.  This is not an insult.  We all are.  We are all the centers of our own universes, despite Copernicus.  And I expect we would all like immortality of a kind.  I, who have always sought to quantify what I could, as a solitary boy in a landlocked suburban house formed an ambition to be loved by one woman and to write something that would be read for a thousand years, having concluded that words that lasted a thousand years would last forever.

I like to believe that I have been loved by more than one woman, but I don’t expect any of my words will last through the third millennium.

In the long NEW YORKER article is a good quote from Victor Vescovo:

“Control what you can; be aware of what you cannot. Death, at some point, is a given—“You have to accept it,” he said—and he reasoned that the gravest risk a person could take was to waste time on earth, to reach the end without having maximally lived. “This is the only way to fight against mortality.”

And later in the article I was intrigued by what was observed in the Java Trench:

These were bacterial mats, deriving their energy from chemicals emanating from the planet’s crust instead of from sunlight. It was through this process of chemosynthesis that, billions of years ago, when the earth was “one giant, steaming geological mass, being bombarded with meteorites,” as Jamieson put it, the first complex cell crossed some intangible line that separates the non-living from the living.

I thank Paul for reminding me of Alistair Cooke.  

I doubt that the young have heard of him.  Their loss.  I expect that most of you have.  He was born in England and became an American citizen, best known for his ‘Letters From America’ for the BBC and as long time host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater.  He was an intelligent, charming, clever, eminently reasonable man who gave journalism a rare good name.

Paul sent me a link that leads to more than a thousand of his Letters from America.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/

I have listened with great pleasure to a few, including the one on Harry Truman’s unexpected election victory in 1948 and, after clicking on ‘more episodes’, the ‘Atom Bomb Warning of 1939’.  I will certainly listen to more.  Perhaps a new habit:  A Letter From America a day.

Many of the books I read come from BookBud—love the service; hate the name.  An email arrives every morning with four or five choices.  With none costing more than $2.99 I can be a big spender and take chances.  I probably buy books faster than I read them.  I share my Kindle library with Carol and her mother and will leave a legacy.

I had never heard of Helen Humphreys before I bought her novel, COVENTRY, from BookBud.  I finally read it after the bombing of that city was discussed in THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE and found it to be exceptionally good.

Two young women meet by chance on a double-decker bus in Coventry at the start of the First World War and then again on November 14, 1940, the night the city was all but destroyed by German bombers.  Much of the novel takes place that night, but there is more to it than that.  

I so enjoyed the writing that I sought another of Helen Humphrey’s books and bought THE FROZEN THAMES, which I just finished.  Part fiction, part non-fiction, it begins:

In its long history, the River Thames
has frozen solid forty times.
      These are the stories of that frozen river.

A clever idea.

The dates range from 1142 to 1895 with a postscript of 1927.  

All of the entries are brief, only a page or two.  They include a man who finds a field of frozen birds who are yet alive and warms them with his hands until they take flight.  A boy who follows his mother across the river while the ice barely supports them and refuses ever to cross it again, not even on London Bridge.  The beheading of Charles I.  

Several times the river froze so solid that Frozen Fairs took place on it, with tents and booths and entertainments.  In the entry for 1716, in one of those booths a woman, Bess, with a talent for words completes poems for customers who suggest the first lines.  Finally it is too much.

Bess is tired of being an oddity. Her gift has made her little better than a performing dog. It has not done her any good at all. The money they earn, Will spends at the ale tent. She is freezing cold from being all day out on the river. This is not how she wants to live. 

The only way out of somewhere is by the door you came in. 

“This day I trod upon the ice,” she says. 
“I paid and paid a dreadful price. 
  I will not pretend that this is nice. 
 A poet as whore will not suffice.”

Evanston: clever; absurd; $46,000,000; making it so

I thank Steve Earley for two links about a beautiful weather visualization app created by a New Zealander.  The images above are from the app.  The top one wind; the lower swell.

Here is a link to the app:

https://majicweather.com/index.html

And here a link to an article about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/19/fluorescent-fluid-psychedelic-visualization-reveals-magic-earths-

weather/

A heading of an article in the NY TIMES:  Now is no time to read alone.

First I’m not supposed to drink alone and now I am not supposed to read alone.  This is absurd.  Everything has to be done in a group?  I don’t think so.  Being alone at the time, I didn’t read the article.

Of group activities I stand with Ogden Nash:

Home is heaven and orgies are vile,

But you need an orgy, once in a while.

I thank Dan for the link to a long article about a very wealthy man who has become the first to go to the deepest points in five oceans.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea

Normally if the price of admission is in the millions I am not interested and while I agree that many so-called records are absurd, I do not agree that this is one of the last meaningful records that can be set.  I am also skeptical about reports of 90’ waves.  However, I found the article of interest in the process and the findings and the people.  We have a submersible designer who never read a book on submarines because he does not want his thinking tainted.  A businessman who takes on a project for non-business passion.  A very competent ship’s captain.  And a wealthy egotist who accepts tripling his original budget and spends $46,000,000 of his own money seeking immortality.

I finished reading the excellent SPAIN IN THEIR HEARTS about the Americans and British who fought in the Spanish Civil War, among them Bob Merriman who commanded the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades.  Six months before he was killed in 1938 at age 29 he wrote, “Life has been full because I made it so.”

I am a creature of words immorally written and read alone.  But sometimes words fail.  Music fails.  They did last night. 

Increasingly I long for the open ocean, to dwell again in the monastery of the sea.  And there is no prospect of that happening.  I am likely to be away from GANNET for at least five months.  A few weeks in Hilton Head will be a welcomed change.