Mike Martel's Blog

Mary Rose Crossing Gulf Stream; Stormy Day Ahead

2011-11-01T05:33:00.000-07:00

A few glitches in the DR plotting program – such as the computer trying to go to sleep at night – have resulted in some miscalculations, i.e., on the good side – my program had MR making less progress than actual. It didn’t look right this morning; so I manually re-calculated – the first 25 hours at 7.3 knots (6pm Sunday to 7pm Monday) then another 12.5 hours at higher rates, given the increasing wind speed, to 8.2 knots currently. During the last two trips on MR, when she was really moving along with favorable winds, she managed around 10 knots at times, though the average was 7-plus. Each 6-hour watch saw between 40-50 nm of progress, so I’m roughing it around there.
The good news is, that places MR much further along at 7:30 a.m. this morning – about 280 miles SE of Newport, and according to my chart, they should be approaching the SE edge of the Gulf Stream within a few hours, and then be out of it – a good thing with deteriorating wind and sea conditions out there.

Right now I estimate their latitude to be approaching that of Cape Charles, VA – just a little north, maybe 10-15 miles – and about 370nm east. On their course right now, according to PassageWeather, they are being headed – 25 knots of wind out of the SSE, practically on the nose; so Capt. Tom is going to have to turn either westward, toward the coast, or eastward, further out into the Atlantic, in order to continue making progress. Eastward will get him out of the Gulf Stream faster, but the winds are backing around more to the east and northeast, so his best choice for making progress is to head southwest, but wind-wise, it’s going to be a frustrating day and they’re going to lose a lot of time and progress. Winds will be shifting around, always on the nose, until late tonight, when the wind goes around to the NW and starts blowing hard.

It’s going to be a wet, gray, lumpy day out there with confused seas and changing wind direction, frustrating progress. The cabin below will be a real mess with damp clothes and wet foul weather gear hanging everywhere and in piles. The guys from the midnight-6am watch will be trying to sleep, probably on the cabin sole. It will be noisy, with the contents of the cabinets shifting around. Those who can eat will probably have hot tea, crackers, cookies, fruit, bread and peanut butter. Out in the cockpit, it will be a long, sloppy day with occasional spray blowing aft to drench the helmsman and his watch-mate. The engine is probably running to aid progress. It’s going to be a very long day, and the next 24 hours.

But the further south they can get, the further north the storm will pass, sparing them the centers of the highest winds, and the whole thing will dissipate quickly and pass well to the east by Wednesday afternoon.

Following the Mary Rose in DR Plot: 28 Hours After Departure

2011-10-31T16:23:00.000-07:00

Monday, Oct. 31, 7:30 p.m.
Dusk has fallen. It is overcast out there right now and that makes it very dark. The wind is freshening out of the east and northeast, and it will be blowing pretty hard by tomorrow morning, with seas building. It’s squally with occasional spitting rain which will increase as the night goes on. During the night, MR will pick up speed, and if they have not already reduced their sail area, they will probably have to before midnight. MR is heading southeast, so that means that she’s on a beam reach or a close reach, with seas coming onto the port bow (apparent wind is always forward of true wind direction when a vessel is moving). That’s going to make for very wet, sloppy, spray-drenched, rough times as MR goes through the night into early Tuesday morning. As a consequence, I’m going to increase her DR (dead reckoning) forward speed plot to 8.3 knots before I go to bed. I currently have them a little more than 150 miles out of Newport.

Seas are probably only 4 – 5 feet but will be building. Oddly, passageweather.com does not predict significant wave heights building, perhaps in part because the storm will be a fast mover. Mary Rose will be out of it by Wednesday night as the storm passes to the SE. That’s good news for them – more comfortable – but unfortunately the national weather service is not in agreement; it predicts higher seas, up to 19ft at the worst, and if they happen to be running through the Gulf Stream late tomorrow night (as I predict), the seas could be much higher, particularly with the NE wind blowing in opposition to the current. Right now they are heading over deeper waters, leaving the continental shelf, and in 2600 fathoms; they are less than 100nm from the average center of the Gulf Stream (it moves around a bit) and making good time. They have some rough travel ahead tomorrow late, and the worst will be Wednesday morning, but by Wednesday midnight the storm will be gone and their ride to Bermuda will be a lot smoother thereafter.

Bermuda Dreaming

2011-10-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one gets taken by surprise, caught off guard. I went out this morning to town on an insignificant errand. The nuisance storm that had assailed our land’s world for the past two days was passing off to somewhere else, taking its gloomy gray skies and rain with it. But when I stepped out into the day, I noticed immediately the low scudding clouds, the freshening wind smelling of the sea, the unseasonable warmth and the sticky humidity, and I realized that this was the same sort of morning as last November, nearly a year ago, when we had sailed into St. George’s, Bermuda, after a stormy, cold crossing from Newport and a wild, exhausting night beating back and forth offshore whilst waiting for the light of day so that we could safely make our way into the harbor.

As I sensed this, I was immediately drenched by an equally-unexpected rogue wave of melancholy washing over me, the kind of melancholy that a man may feel when left on the beach, while others sail away; or perhaps even a man bound and harnessed, feet in his traces, with no option but to continue pulling endlessly like an ox for his daily bread while time and life slip away, and opportunities for exploration, adventure, and mental and physical refreshment diminish as the road to life’s terminus grows ever shorter. I looked around, frantically, and saw only my life, proscribed by circumstances, with its attendant baggage of stagnation, frustration, and endless demands. I turned, turned again, and found I had made a complete circle, like a broken compass, knowing no direction for progress away from the center.

I yearn to go, but not on a comfortable cruise-ship; I don’t want a stateroom, but rather a hammock in the fo’c’sle. Give me strong black coffee and let me handle rough lines in the middle of the night. Let me know the feeling of being there, for then I will know that I am truly alive.

I remember that it was still blowing half a gale on deck as we motored around the channel markers and into the narrow cut – Town Cut – a channel blasted through a limestone cliff – and into a strange calm peacefulness that we had not known for a week. It was sunrise, orange, groggy, damp, fatigued sunrise, my mind dulled by lack of sleep, sights and sounds coming to me as through a frosted lens, fuzzy and dark around the edges.

Scrubby trees resembling windswept evergreens clung tenaciously to the rocky ledges around the harbor entrance and for the first time I realized that the strange sweet scent reaching my nostrils was the smell of land. Land does have an aroma, indeed, but one is not conscious of it until one has been away from it for a little while.

We passed through the cut and into the snug harbor lined with steep, close hillsides and pastel houses perched on their slopes, with tall palm trees between them. The strong wind made the palm fronds rustle noisily and angrily, and sent low clouds scudding across the sky seemingly barely above the rooftops. The branches and fronds on the top of every spindly-trunked palm tree had been turned into a windsock.

But now, my daydream was over; there was work to do, so once again I put my dreams aside, returned to the present, and drove home.

An Interview with the Press: Why Articles are a very hot and powerful marketing tool right now

2011-10-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

Video Interview with the Press: Articles as Powerful Marketing Tools

Filling the Hungry Stomach: Feeding an Information-Starved Manufacturing Industry

2011-10-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

The electronics manufacturing industry – and every American industry right now - needs articles; practical, how-to, short, information-packed easily readable articles that describe in detail how to do everything from the traditionally simple and familiar to dealing with emerging manufacturing and product packaging technologies. Editors of industry trade magazines are all but begging for them. This seems odd, does it not, considering that there are far fewer trade journals serving the electronics industry than there were a decade ago?

One customer of mine says, with exasperation in his voice, “People are hungry for information!” Why is this so? It isn’t just because there are fewer publications. The number of publications available is still actually sufficient to carry all of the information that manufacturing and process engineers need. But there are other reasons.

Many of the well-trained and experienced engineers who were around in the industry before the downturn have retired or left the industry completely. This has created a knowledge vacuum of sorts. Newcomers to the industry, young manufacturing and process engineers don’t have, in most cases, experienced colleagues and mentors to listen to and learn from as they once did, or at least not as many.

The U.S. Electronics manufacturing industry continues to survive, to morph, to grow in different directions. New variations on traditional packaging styles crop up, and there is no one around to help the engineer who, like Hemingway’s description of a modern writer in his Nobel speech, is “…driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.” It’s not quite that bad, but some of today’s engineers must sometimes feel that way when everything suddenly goes wrong in the assembly line!

I was listening recently to a radio program where a speaker was talking about problems affecting employment in my own state of Rhode Island. The speaker said that due to price pressure from China, American industry has begun reinventing itself, focusing on more sophisticated and higher tech applications and products that can’t easily be outsourced for manufacturing, and this trend is indicative, to some extent, the beginnings of a recovery in American industry, including electronics manufacturing. In fact, we’re already seeing it in such things as domestic production of high-powered LED arrays and power supplies, a greater focus among PCB manufacturers on new thermal management materials and metal core circuit boards.

All of these new developments, especially where they require a higher level of workforce training or technician training, also create the need for sharing up-to-date process knowledge, even including some of the most basic information such as how to get good soldering results with lead-free alloys and fluxing techniques.

Relative to the radio program, these more sophisticated products and manufacturing methods require a higher level of training in the workforce, something that is lacking in my state, where industrial technology is trailing an estimated decade behind the rest of the country. This results in a skills drain from the state as those with advanced knowledge, skills, and training leave the state for better opportunities elsewhere. Although that seems to be another story, it may well support, in some way, the basis of my argument, which is the need for more content – articles – of value to be submitted to and published in industry press.

So there is a greater need for information, and yet there are fewer publications to provide it. However, people will get their knowledge where they can get it, and the primary source continues to be the trade press. I find editors constantly scrambling for articles and how-to feature pieces to fill holes in their publications. Part of the problem is that so many magazines and publications have gone electronic. The shelf life of an article in an electronic publication is not very long.

Thus, editors are constantly seeking new, good material to fill their pages, because they can’t get enough of it. For them it really is a new kind of ‘Tyranny of numbers.’ Those deadlines for publication keep coming up, and they need material to fill those pages but for some reason can’t seem to get it.

But who is available to write these needed articles? The many benefits to any company that provides such materials to the industry are abundantly clear; but as I mentioned earlier, many of the old hands have retired. With regard to today’s hard-working engineers, few have the time to pen articles for the trade press. Indeed, engineers themselves have less time to read. Their attention spans are shorter, in part due to the nature of modern electronic media, the Internet, and the demands of their jobs. The 10-page white papers of the past, the peer-reviewed articles, etc. are being increasingly replaced by pithy, to-the-point practical and pragmatic pieces of no more than 900 or 1,000 words, because that’s all the time and attention that today’s engineers can squander on absorbing information. They have to get access to it, get it in, and digest and absorb it quickly and get back to work and hopefully apply what they have learned.

Another reason why there are fewer articles, and this is an uncomfortable point to make but no less true, is that there are a great many younger people today who simply cannot write skillfully, clearly, or well. It is not through lack of ability, but through failures of our educational system. Perhaps it’s the fault of modern media, the sound-byte, the Internet, less emphasis on writing and grammar skills and more on ‘practical’ training and social media. But within the past few years, I’ve noticed a shocking lack of skill in written construction and skill in major newspapers, complete with spelling and grammar errors that would never have appeared in these legacy publications years ago. Who is minding the store? As a result of lack of training, writing becomes even more difficult even for those of ample ability. Many engineers who have process knowledge are unwilling to make the extra effort outside of their own duties on the manufacturing floor to write and publish articles due to the difficulty involved in creating them, thanks to their inadequate education in the areas of expository writing.

In some ways, as one CEO pointed out to me, the publications that are remaining are in some ways their own worst enemies. For example, I often find myself unwittingly ‘subscribed’ to yet another e-publications newsletter, without my knowledge or consent. Besides being unsolicited and borderline SPAM, they are crammed full of commercial content, with very little substantive technical content. So many engineers simply don’t bother to read them because they have very little intrinsic value. Everyone needs to make a profit, and many of these publications are using the advertising revenue generated by their E-newsletters to support unprofitable print versions that are no longer paying their own bills; hence the high ratio of commercial content (made worse by the fact that it costs less than print media advertising), annoying pop-ups and ‘welcome screens’ that discourage in-depth navigation.

The end result is that today’s engineer, who is hungry for information, has to sort through a lot of unwanted commercial content to find information of value. It’s a hit or miss situation; finding what they need to know is difficult and takes time and the use of search engines.

At the same time, the relationship between trade publications and industry manufacturers and suppliers is utterly co-dependent and symbiotic. If the trade journals die, the industry dies. Advertising, though expensive, is a must. Without the support of industry, information-carriers go out of business, and the result is the Dark Ages. Forget about your web site, no matter how good it is; it is passive. Only the trade publications have the capability of reaching out to your market to drive people to your web site. Forget your mailing list; that’s the Devil You Know. The trade publications help you find the Devil you Don’t, and unless you find him, you won’t grow or increase your market share very effectively. Advertise, yes, but also provide quality content for publication; after all, they have nowhere else to get it from.

In summary, there is a growing need in industry for short articles, between 700 and one thousand words, that are clear, to the point, begin with stating a problem, and then describing a solution in detail, with no obvious commercial content (people are sick of it), plus links and references for further information for those who need it. Companies whose engineers don’t have the time to write these articles themselves should hire a competent writer to do it and submit the articles to industry editors for consideration for publication. The same article can be condensed or modified for voiceovers to create instructional videos, posted to the company’s web site, excerpted for the periodic company newsletter, blogged, translated for global use by distributors and service centers, and made available in other ways (such as a printed process guidebook or CD) to maximize exposure and get maximum mileage out of the cost of creating the article in the first place. In a globally competitive marketplace, companies are seeking ways to stand out and get the attention of their existing customers and prospects. This is one very good way to do so. Follow the link for a few ideas in an interview I gave last month with the folks at PCB 007.

http://realtimewith.com/pages/show.cgi?rtwsid=47&rtwvid=2012&c=0

Getting Annoyed at the Whining Ninnies

2011-09-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

Just sent this in to the local newspaper - the Bristol Phoenix, in response to silly-assed letter writers who, over the past few weeks, have been complaining about local farming practices:

Volunteer to be a Scarecrow

Dear Editor:

I love locally-grown food. Our local sweet corn is the best; we wait for it, every year, to appear in the roadside stands in late July. I like the fact that it is grown here in Bristol in fields less than a half mile from my house, in fields that the Indians farmed for ten thousand years or more. As farms dwindle in the face of encroaching development, they become a treasure, especially nowadays when our corn usually comes from Florida, our salmon and shrimp come from stagnant, polluted fish farms in Indonesia, and our nuts and other products come from China, where lead and cadmium are apparently considered condiments.

So it irks me that a couple of spoiled locals, who seeminglywould like to see our local farms turned into gated communities for the snobset, have written in to the Phoenix whining about the propane cannons that pop off every now and then to keep the crows from decimating the corn crop. Drive the farmers out of business, and you drive away locally-grown produce. Farming is hard work, and these folks, who have probably never worked a real day in their lives, have little clue about what is involved. Profits are meager, days are long, and disappointments are many. Farmers have a right to use bird control technology. I hear the cannons all summer long very clearly from my home on Birchwood Drive. To me it is a small price to pay to keep small family farms in business. In fact the artillery-like concussions remind me that there is a war on between the interests of a selfish few ninnies and the good of the greater population.

But one exasperated letter-writer wrote something to the extent that “what about using scarecrows”? Beyond the idiocy of the remark, I suddenly had an idea; it was like, well, putting two and two together. These privileged folk who object to the cannons – who have more time and money than they probably know what to do with, and have their food delivered to their doorsteps by Ohio Steaks and Peapod – could volunteer their time to be ‘living scarecrows’ a part of each day in the farmer’s fields. They could dress up in chic designer ‘scarecrow’ outfits – bring wine and cheese too – and dance around the fields for a few hours, chasing off those nasty corn-pecking crows.Great aerobics, a dedication to ‘green’ farming, no cannons, and plenty of fresh air.

Perhaps they could get a few complimentary ears of corn for their trouble. After all, has anyone seen the price of arugula lately?

Sincerely,

Mike Martel

Progress on PRIVATEER's Restoration

2011-08-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

Work is progressing on PRIVATEER – it took months, but I finally converted PRIVATEER's basic hatch into a traditional butterfly hatch with a lot of thought and my own design principles, modeled in some ways after Mary Rose (Herreshoff) but making allowances for the original hatch and available materials. This was the most complex boat project I have ever done. And this was just a hatch! I now think that RETROFITTING and CONVERTING is a lot harder than building from scratch or original plans or specs!

Riding Out the Gale – The Return of Mary Rose

2011-07-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

Great, steep seas of liquid sapphire rolled toward us in everlasting succession, lifting Mary Rose up, up, balancing her on their peaks, and then passing under, letting her down gently, and rolling away to leeward. Fast and busy; that was my impression of them, as though they were creatures intently focused on some urgent business somewhere far to the southward, with no time to pause or pay heed to us. Some broke briefly in curling splendor, and on such occasions, if they broke against the hull, we were showered in the cockpit with warm, sweet-salty, clean water, as thoroughly as if one had thrown buckets of seawater directly at us from only a few feet away. It was tepid and pleasant, under a brilliant sunny sky dappled with jolly white cotton-balls of cumulus clouds, and it reminded me of a day at the beach, running in the surf, but without the bright-yellow oilskin weather-repellent gear and safety harness in which I was, at the moment, attired. The ever-present roar of the wind and sea in motion filled our ears; we had to shout to be heard.

“This must be the Gulf Stream” I commented to Captain Tom. “It feels so much like it; and the color of the water…” But we feared the Stream, which was supposedly flowing in a northeasterly direction, and in opposition to the 30 knots of northwest wind that were now roiling it, stacking up the seas dangerously. Opposing northerlies make the Stream formidable; seas can become mountainous, steep, and short, and when they begin to break, a small vessel such as a cruising yacht can find itself in grave peril.

We were clawing our way northwestward from Bermuda to Newport, Rhode Island, and the wind had been in our teeth all the way, with a big nor’easter brewing south of Nantucket. We had been battling this storm for a few days now, four of us in the 80-ft. antique wooden Herreshoff staysail schooner Mary Rose, on her return trip to New England for the summer, having wintered over in Tortola, BVI.

To get home, or to get anywhere back along the coast of the United States, we had to cross the northward-flowing Gulf Stream. The stream turns northeastward beginning around the latitude of Maryland, and heads off toward the British Isles. So it loomed, in my imagination, like an Atlantic Wall, blocking our way home with peril; the seas were already high; how much of a tougher time did we have in store for us ahead? There was no turning back; Bermuda was three hundred miles and more behind us. So we had decided to go westward toward the coast of Virginia, Maryland, or Delaware, since going in our chosen direction toward home was utterly impossible, and would be thus for several days yet. What little information we could obtain suggested that the storm would remain stationary for some time still, with winds out of the north, frustrating our passage home. So we sailed due west, sometimes a little more northerly when the wind shifted north or northeasterly, keeping the towering seas on the starboard bow, motor-sailing to windward under Mary Rose’s two staysails only.

Captain Tom was at the helm, having taken over the watch at noon; I had been steering all morning since six, with my watch-mate, Andy. I stayed in the cockpit with Tom for awhile; I was not in a mood for sleep.

“Seas must be eighteen feet,” I commented to Capt. Tom.

“At the very least,” he replied, and muttered a curse under his breath. “We must be in the stream. I can’t imagine that it can get any worse than this!”

Sparkling, glistening, sun-drenched, blue and more blue; a terrifying beauty. It was a scene that was awe-inspiring and lovely while at the same time dangerous and without mercy. But, as the fisherman Santiago observes in The Old Man and the Sea, also without malice, after all.

I had remained in the cockpit with Captain Tom even though my watch was over, and I ought to be napping or trying to manage a bite to eat, perhaps an orange or a slice of nut-grain bread with peanut butter, but I had the nagging suspicion that we were indeed in the Gulf Stream. I remained on deck also because I was in a state of semi-rapture, I suppose; I could not stop watching the magnificence of the sea, in what Slocum once called “its grandest mood.” But finally I went below with the intention of confirming or invalidating my suspicion that we had indeed entered the Gulf Stream, which can be anywhere from ten to twenty miles across.

I had brought my notebook computer along, loaded with a chart-plotter software program and a GPS antenna device that plugged into the computer. Once it picked up the satellite signal, and I zoomed the chart in, the program indicated that our position was right smack-dab in the middle of the Stream, positioned on the ‘estimated axis’ of the Gulf Stream. I breathed a sigh of relief, and passed the word around. “Well that’s good news,” Captain Tom said. “We’re doing all right, right now. If we can get through this, we’ll probably be fine the rest of the way.” Indeed; after a short nap, I awoke again at watch-time, at nearly six in the evening, and emerged on deck to an entirely different scene; the water was dark green and there was a distinct chill in the air. It was the North Atlantic that I was used to, a half hour before sunset. “We’re out of the Gulf Stream,” Captain Tom announced. From this point, I thought, there is nothing in our way; let it blow. We’re getting used to it, and the boat can take it.

Now, it stands to reason that a man who has stepped inadvertently into a bucket of fish-offal will henceforth be more mindful of where he puts his feet when walking down a dock, with the intention of avoiding the repetition of such a mishap. But can you fathom a man deliberately stepping back into that same bucket the next time he walks the dock? And do so with enthusiasm, and deliberately so, at that? This is what the person who does not love the sea cannot understand about the sailor. To him or her, the bucket of offal and going to sea are one and the same. But why would an intelligent fellow who has experienced a rough ocean passage readily sign up to endure the same ordeal again only a few months later? Because he or she is a sailor, of course, and will not only repeat the experience of being tossed about in a small boat in the middle of the vast ocean once, or twice, but moreover will repeat the same again and again and again. I thought about this as I lay in my berth in the darkness, trying to hang on, trying to grab a moment of sleep as the Mary Rose slammed about noisily in stormy seas, and occasional droplets of cold water, seeping through the deck, dripped onto my face or into my eyes, or wetted my pillow and blanket. Here I am again, I thought; I shook my head in bewilderment, and quite nearly laughed at myself; incredibly, I realized, I was in exactly the same pickle-barrel as I had been this past November, only now in even worse circumstances. And I had told myself, at the end of my November passage on Mary Rose to Tortola, that I would be most reluctant to ever again embark upon such an uncomfortable misadventure! Now why in the hell, I queried my conscience, had I signed up for this trip, and with an eagerness that bordered upon frenzy? It seemed to be the very stuff of madness. As the wind topped and exceeded fifty knots during the night, I thought, well, you fool, you’ve done it now, you came back for more, and got a full ration of what you had before plus some. Now you’ve no choice but to ride it out, and make the best of it. But as every silver lining has a cloud, so the obverse is true; at least my stomach was the least of my worries. I might find myself adrift in a raft, but my own hold would be well-stowed; after the second day out from Bermuda, I’d acquired my sea-legs, and no amount of motion of the boat, no matter how violent, had upset it since.

The Mary Rose had sailed to Tortola, BVI, by way of Bermuda, in late November. I had been aboard for that stormy trip south. She had spent the winter cruising the Caribbean, topping it off by sailing in Antigua’s Classic Yacht Regatta and taking home an award. But when it came time for the springtime trip back north to Newport and Bristol, I had not been called; I was disappointed, but I understood; a one-way air ticket to Tortola from New England is an expensive proposition and the Captain was on a tight budget. A young fellow from Maine, seeking passage north, signed on. I knew when they left, and I followed them with my chart-plotter in dead reckoning mode. It turns out that they arrived in Bermuda only three hours earlier than my ETA for them!

But in Bermuda, the sailor from Maine left. He’d had a rough time of it with seasickness, and was not willing to continue on. Airplane turbulence was as much now as he had stomach for. On a Sunday morning, two days after they had arrived, I received a call on my cell phone. It was Captain Tom. “So, Mike, are you busy?” He laughed. I was on a plane the next morning, on a remarkably short – 90 minute – flight out of Boston. Once the young man from Maine had left, there were only three remaining to take the boat home, across 630 miles of open North Atlantic. Captain Tom, his lady Bonnie, and crewman Andy. Andy was the only sailor familiar with the boat other than Tom and capable of working the foredeck. So there were not enough sailors aboard, and thus I was summoned to rejoin the crew, and no one, I felt, could be more delighted than I at the prospect of sailing on Mary Rose once more!

There were many boats in Bermuda, and five times as many sailors, seemingly bottled up, itching to be on their way, but a continuous pattern of bad weather had kept them in port. Two boats left the day I arrived, and returned the next day, battered and beat up. Some said it would be more than a week before anyone could safely leave. But our captain had his doubts; the forecast days ahead was nothing if not vague; but it suggested that the low that had driven those boats back in was passing well off to the east. Yet oddly this had been an off year; a succession of lows had moved like a parade across the U.S. from the Pacific, developing into gale centers in the North Atlantic. The jet stream was off, some said. But after mulling it over, our captain decided that the outlook was favorable enough to go, and it looked that way to me, too.

The night before we left, we attended a lively party at the home of a local sailmaker. Many cruisers were there, and it was a wonderful evening of wine, hors d’oeuvres, and camaraderie among sailors, long-distance passagemakers, and cruising lifestyle people. If you are one of them, or even doing such a thing as making a deepwater passage in a sailboat for the first time, you will find only friends in that gathering; and even if you are acquainted with no one, you will still find a willing ear, a friendly voice, and an outstretched hand of welcome. And although we sailed out of sunny St. George’s the next afternoon to friendly cheers and waving hands, I heard much later on that there were not a few among them who felt that we were earnestly out of our minds to be leaving when we did.

The morning that we crossed the Gulf Stream, I went topside with my cup of tea in hand, to begin my watch with Andy, just before six o’clock, to find the wind light and the seas moderate. The sun was up but it was behind a low layer of dark clouds. The air was warm and moist; in the distance, beneath the dark clouds, cone-shaped funnel clouds were trying to form in a couple of different places. “Waterspouts!” I exclaimed, and cursed; another hazard to look out for. The sea was purple beneath the clouds, and the thought passed through my mind that perhaps we were in a warm eddy of the Stream, or approaching the Stream itself. Little did I know that we would be in it by mid-day, with winds piping up to thirty knots plus and seas building to blue hills.

We had seen so many Portuguese Man-o’-War jellyfish that I could only imagine that millions upon millions dotted the seas beyond the scope of our vision. Indeed, they were everywhere, deadly iridescent blue bubbles that looked at first like partially-inflated plastic sandwich bags floating on the surface. We had seen dolphins, flying-fish, and a couple of large, slow, green creatures beneath the surface that might have been sea turtles or ocean sunfish. A grey-skinned whale surface briefly near the boat once, and another did, unseen, but we smelled his dank, fishy, malodorous breath when we passed over the spot where he had just been before sounding. Occasionally, a white-tailed tropicbird circled for a little while overhead.

The sea is a painter’s canvas, and light is the artist. It is not dull, nor empty, nor simply water and sky, but an ever-changing tapestry, always different, always refreshing itself. Clouds change the way light paints the sea and sky; they change color and texture, sometimes dramatically and sometimes with great subtlety. But it is no still-life; always in motion, it is a performing art.

But the interpretation of the masterpiece is done by the mind and the imagination. Where there is nothing familiar, the mind struggles to add it. Sometimes I have felt as though land was near, or that a reflection of light from an instrument was, in the corner of my eye, a marshy shore off the coast of Virginia. But most remarkably, one night as we sailed through a strange moonless night with clouds stacked at different levels of the sky and occasional heat lightning, I could have sworn that we were sailing through a dark forest of impossibly tall pines, or redwoods, on either side, rather than hundreds of miles from the nearest coast. And two nights later, in the midst of the gale, spray blew across the Mary Roses’s foredeck, illuminated by the surreal green glow of the starboard sidelight. It was a plunging, lashing, spray-whipped vision of water traveling horizontally athwartships as Mary Rose beat strongly and doggedly to windward, powerfully, unstoppably. I watched this unlivable no-man’s land of the foredeck through the clear panel of the savagely shaking pram-hood dodger. Ship against the sea, challenging, persevering, taking a beating in the process.

We could not get home along our chosen course. Thus, in a few days we sailed exhaustedly into Cape May, NJ to dry out the boat and take on fuel and to rest. Two days later, in much better conditions, we steamed northeast on a beeline for Block Island and arrived in cold, gray, windy Bristol Harbor after nearly 19 hours of motorsailing. It felt good to stand on the pier in my own town again, next to all things familiar, home, family, and little dog. And, once again, I stood in awe of the antique wooden vessel that had carried us home, kept us alive, and had survived a rough sea and a nasty gale. I had to go home, but I could not but pause for a few moments to look back at her, suddenly and oddly emotional, with feelings of deep affection. And I then understood what it has meant, for centuries, for a sailor to be attached to a ship. You cannot explain it, but you know it when you experience it.

The nor’easter we sailed into didn’t have a name, but it had an eye, and back home, our families watched in horror as the thing developed and unfolded on the evening news reports on television. We saw winds in excess of 50 knots, days with the winds between 35 and 40 knots, unrelenting, unrelenting. Two vessels sank; one a hundred miles south of Nantucket, another one somewhere out off New York, their crews rescued by the Coast Guard. At the time of this writing, it is now midsummer and Mary Rose rides contentedly on her mooring in Bristol Harbor, enjoying the kind attention of Andy’s skilled varnish brush and patient care. Where she will cruise to next, one can only guess!

Privateer work continues

2011-06-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

In the next few days, I'll add a new blog post detailing work to Privateer's mainmast and rigging, as well as completion of a number of items including the finished butterfly hatch. Check back after the 4th of July!

We Are Safe

2011-05-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

We are in Cape May NJ. we survived the storm. Arrived yesterday (Thurs) battered and weary. It was the only option, could not get back to New England. out of food, out of fuel. As a final insult to us, we picked up a 100ft length of line wrapped around the prop a mile from the jetties and almost did not make it in.

took us 7 days and we still could not get home but we stayed afloat.

Everyone is well. Tired and tense but drank most of that away last night.

2 other boats did not make it - sank, CG rescued them, 1 sank off New York and one 150 miles S of Nantuck.

Heading home tomorrow (Fri) leaving at dawn, route up the NJ coast into NY and up LI sound.

Expect to be back in Bristol Sunday morning.

Boat beat up pretty good but she is a well-found vessel and took care of us altho some things broke and she took a frightful pounding.

So we are fine and getting the vessel prepared for the final leg home. Everyone bruised and sore. Endured almost 6 days of constant howling gales, 35 knots and 3 days of steady 40 knots, horrendous high seas and never-ending tension, I was wondering when her seams would finally open up but they did not.

"...But the Hand that held these (seas) also held the Spray" - Joshua Slocum, in Sailing Alone Around the World.

His hand held the Mary Rose and delivered us safely at long last to peaceful waters. No more than a pin-prick on a chart covering thousands of square miles of open waters, we were completely at the mercy of wind and wave and dependent upon the whim of the weather. Oddly enough we made it in an 80-plus year old wooden boat! I praise the genius who designed her sturdy and strong - the brilliant engineer and naval architect Nat Herreshoff who designed her well - and all those men, now all of them long dead and gone to dust, who carefully built her so many years ago in Bristol. Their good and solid work saved our lives.

Mike

Mary Rose Heading for Bermuda?

2011-04-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

Where in the world is the Mary Rose? Going to Bermuda?

Yesterday afternoon, Linda Knowles told me that the Mary Rose crew had wanted to stop in Bermuda on the trip back. This is possible, since one of Bonnie’s last posts the day before Easter was “See you in a few weeks”. Perhaps they are planning to stop there, so….

I modified the MR track to Bermuda instead, which puts MR on a course of 001 degrees True, pretty much due North. Winds and seas in the area are still around 22 knots, moving more astern, as are the seas at 3 meters in height. The more aft-shifting wind and sea conditions are not that favorable for MR; she becomes the ‘Mary Rolls’ as we called her on the way down. Why? Because she is long and narrow and her sail plan does not favor a wind and sea from astern. She likes a beam reach, close reach, broad reach.

So, for about 12 hours while winds were up towards 25 knots, I had her DR speed at 7.8 knots, but as the wind and seas have dropped a little and shifted aft, I have dropped them back to 7.3. Fascinating to me, she is now progressing over slightly shallower water – the “Bermuda Rise” where the bottom of the sea is 4,515 meters deep – rather than 5,160 meters, or 16, 930 feet – more than 3 miles deep! The Bermuda Rise surrounds the volcanic archipelago in a circle nearly 300 miles in diameter, which suggests to me that this was a site of major-league, ancient volcanism on a massive scale possibly billions of years ago.

On her current, revised track, I have her 170nm from landfall in St. George’s, Bermuda. That puts her at the entrance to Town Cut tomorrow morning, around 8 a.m., perfect timing. Let’s see if we can contact anyone on MR around mid-day tomorrow. It might be possible to reach Bermuda Harbour Radio by telephone to see if they have arrived or called ahead (as vessels are required to).

Mary Rose at the customs dock in St. George's, November 2010

Bermuda forecast for Friday is for winds south-southeasterly 12 to 18 knots, isolated showers, seas outside the reef 2 to 5 ft.; pretty easy stuff. Sea temps at 69 degrees F., and they will be arriving an hour or so after high tide, and well after sunrise (6:31 a.m. local time, which is Atlantic time).

So we’ll keep the speed at 7.3 knots and assume that they will get in to clear customs early in the morning – if indeed they are headed for Bermuda. If they stay in Bermuda for a few days, they’ll see partly sunny skies with the occasional chance of a shower, and temps between 70 and 75 degrees F. – just perfect!

Time for cocktails and a bite at the Wahoo! Or a bus ride into Hamilton to hit the Hog Penny Pub!

The 'Virtual' Crewman - Plotting the Mary Rose's Voyage North in DR Mode

2011-04-27T06:12:00.000-07:00

(8:30 a.m., April 27, 2011)

Well, I couldn’t go along on this trip – I wasn’t asked – so I decided to go anyway, but as a ‘virtual’ crewman. I am plotting the Mary Rose’s journey north using Dead Reckoning with my ‘Cap’n’ software program and wind and seas information for the Caribbean and North Atlantic provided by passageweather.com. This information, plus my personal knowledge of Mary Roses’s speed under known wind and sea conditions (I did sail around 1500 miles on her last November) gives me what I think is a pretty accurate DR position and progress estimate for her.

Her current position (and I would put her ‘in the vicinity of’) is estimated to be 26° 20.5N, 066°.55.9W, at 8:30 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 27, 2011. This puts her at the same latitude, for the moment, as Boynton Beach, Florida.

She departed Soper’s Hole in light airs on Sunday morning (Easter) and probably motored for a while until the wind picked up. Mid-day I heard from Linda Knowles (yacht anchored in Soper’s) that a breeze had come up and it was the first decent breeze they’d had in a couple of days – it had been hot and fairly calm.

Winds are currently 20 – 22 kts out of the SE, wave heights approximately 8 – 9ft. Mary Rose is most likely on a broad reach, running at more than 7 knots (I suspect 7.5) and making good time with a quartering sea. Seas are out of the SE.

I’ve plotted Mary Rose at various speeds since she left, assuming that at first, in rather light airs, she would be motoring or motorsailing the first 24 hrs., then would put up more sail as wind speeds increased, and her speed over the ground would also increase.

At 7.3 knots, she would cover 43nm per 6-hour watch, which was similar to the performance I saw on the passage down. Her hull speed is around 7 kts but under press of sail in winds exceeding 20 knots, she will do better – in 25-30 knots of wind she will do 9 knots or so and cover nearly 50nm per 6-hour watch, but that is unusual and she doesn’t have that kind of wind out there right now.

Long-term forecasts are for winds along her path to lighten up considerably in the next couple of days as she makes more northing, so they may end up motorsailing once again. Right now they have been given a 2-day ‘push’ by a disorganized low that is dissipating. According to the models, they can actually expect diminishing winds somewhat a couple of days from now. There are no storms or severe weather in the forecast for the MR track at this time.

I estimate their course at 346 degrees True, assuming that they have no intention of stopping off in Bermuda (and I doubt that they will), so my rough estimate right now is that they are at 8:30 a.m. EDT, Wednesday, about 490 nm NW of the Windward Passage entrance near Soper’s Hole on Tortola, and making good time with steady good winds and tolerable seas.

This gives them another 935nm to go to reach the entrance to Newport. At 7 knots, average, that’s 5.5 days, or roughly, getting in around midnight next Monday, May 2, or even slowing down to come in Tuesday morning after first light with a mid-morning or mid-day arrival Tuesday May 3^rd. This would coincide with Tom’s need to be off to NY on Wednesday, the next day, to run his tug boats on Thursday May 5.

Capt. Mike Martel

The Bucket List Continued; Rebuilding PRIVATEER's Butterfly Hatch

2011-03-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

Privateer's Main Hatch Before

Mary Rose's Butterfly Hatch

Keep the good base, build on that

Privateer’s previous owner before me did an extensive amount of restoration of the vessel. However, he did not have enough time or resources to finish in detail certain things that required a deeper level of time and complexity. For example, the main hatch, the butterfly hatch in the center of the foredeck, is supposed to open up from either side for ventilation, in such a way that the side panels lift up, hinged at the top inward facing side, and are held open by risers to allow air to come in. However, when he rebuilt the boat, he rebuilt the hatch but built it as a single entity without functioning butterfly-type wing panels. Thus, to open the hatch it was necessary to lift the entire box, which was hinged at the aft end, but was heavy and unwieldy and did not ventilate well.

Use a dado cutter to make lap joints

Now, I've taken it upon myself during this restoration to make a winter (now spring) project of rebuilding the main hatch in the proper way. The main hatch as he rebuilt it is solidly built of oak, and thus I decided to retain the foundation since it was so well made. However, I removed the top panels, and discarded the wood as well as the thin plexiglass panels. My plan was to build actual hatch wings out of teak, put in real safety glass, and build a protective grate over the top such as we see traditional butterfly hatch configurations.

This is the way they will open.

This turned out to be a very complicated job, using up a lot of expensive teak, and required the purchase of some pricey metals, in this case brass strips or flat stock, and round 3/8” rods of naval bronze. I decided that if I were going to do it, I was going to do it right.

Bottom half of each panel

In one photo, you can see the canvas-covered hatch in its original configuration. I took this photo when I found the boat down in Maryland before bringing her home. There is a GPS receiver mounted in the aft part of the hatch as you can see. In another photo shown, you can see one of the butterfly hatches the Mary Rose schooner, the same vessel that I helped sail down to the British Virgin Islands. This is a classic Herreshoff configuration for a butterfly hatch, and although it's quite a bit larger than my own Privateer’s hatch, I decided to let it serve as a model for my reconstruction.

Lap joints, epoxied and joined

The first thing I did was to build the bottom half of a two-part teak sandwich that would enclose the glass panels. As you can see in a photo, I began with the basic frame of the hatch, keeping what I wanted and discarding the rest.

I then cut the pieces for the bottom part of the window frames, and used a dado cutter to make lap joints, which were then bonded with West epoxy. I felt that full lap joints would be strong and the appropriate construction for these window frame halves, which needed to be thin but strong.

Never too many clamps.

See where the glass will fit in

I measured the angle of attack of the butterfly frame panels to the center beam of the hatch and noted that it was 20° ; thus it was a simple matter then to set my table saw blade to 20° cutting and to use the rip fence to create the pieces.

In one photo, you can see the bottom pieces held up in the open position that they will assume when the hatch is open for ventilation. There will be brass risers in the hatch with friction knobs to hold the wings of the hatch open.

Naval bronze 3/8" solid rods

In one photo you can see the small teak pieces that have been drilled and finished, they will hold the framework of bronze rods to protect the glass. The purpose of these rods is to prevent a sailor’s foot from going through the hatchway glass when scuffling around on the foredeck in a blow. There will be three on each side; the center one is drilled through and the end pieces are blind mortised halfway through. That way the rods are held in place but not fastened in any way, so that they can expand and contract as they need to.

Teak rod holders

In another photo, you can see the two halves of each hatch now clamped together with the window panel inside. I set the glass into the bottom frame half with clear caulking and let it cure overnight, before putting the top part of the frame on the next day and clamping and letting that cure as well. Now I had everything in position, and firm. At that point, I drilled through and hardware fastened the top to the bottom and set in teak bungs or plugs to protect the screw heads.

Solid teak added height to hatch ridge beam

There is no such thing as too many clamps in a wooden boat shop.

The added height - meaning thickness - of the new window panels required me to raise the height of the center beam of the hatch so that when the panels are in place, they will be even with the top and the hinge will have plenty of meat for the screws to grab. I'm using stainless steel piano hinge from the marine store, opting not to use the Herreshoff design which, although it provides a gutter for water to flow away from the hatch, it creates some problems on the Mary Rose in that the hatch occasionally pops off because it's not fastened down with a hinge.

Brass stock cut and silver soldered for drip stop

In one photo, you can see the end of the rods of the naval bronze. I have not cut them to length yet. I did cut the flat brass stock to make two perfect rectangles, and silver soldered the corners together to make them rigid as well as watertight. These will be set partly into the base of the hatch window on either side, and they will also fit into a cut recess in the top panel, to keep water from going down into the cabin when the hatch is shut. They act as a knife-edge. Setting them into the wood is not going to be easy. I will be able to use a plunge router for some of the work of cutting the channels, but some of the cutting will also be much more difficult and will have to be done in a different way. I'm not looking forward to that job, because it will have to be positioned just right, and the cuts in the top coordinated so that the hatch opens and closes perfectly aligned. Then the brass rectangles will be epoxied into the hatch foundation.

Two halves sandwiched and fastened with glass panels installed

#1 On The Bucket List; Repair, Re-launch PRIVATEER

2011-03-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

Spring is almost here. With it comes the restlessness of knowing that it is time to get to work on PRIVATEER outdoors. In the passive-solar boat shed, I can work in just my shirt on a sunny day – no need for a coat or even a sweater until late in the afternoon when the strength of the sun begins to fade. So I go after the boat’s biggest problem, the awareness of which has been gnawing at me all winter – the rotted transom.

I start ripping off planks, slow, dirty, hard work. I save as many of the good stainless steel wood screws – put in there as reinforcement by a later owner – as I can. They are expensive to replace and if they are in good shape, which they are, there is no point in wasting them. They will be re-used.

The planks have some rot, but they are in better shape than the oak frames, which are literally rotted away to dirt at the top. The planks are some sort of pine, perhaps longleaf yellow pine. I will replace them with tropical mahogany, or a mahogany-like substitute. I will replace the rotted frames with white oak, and will treat the wood with copper preservative or traditional red lead primer.

Since I have known for a while that I would have to do this job, I have gradually been acquiring planks of mahogany from my friend Steve's lumber company over in the woods of Tiverton. He sells teak, mahogany, and other boatbuilding imported hardwoods, and the teak is quite expensive; if you must have teak, you’re going to pay for it. But there are substitutes for Philippine mahogany that are quite as attractive, and have all of the workability and resistance to decay that tropical mahogany does. So every once in a while, I go over there, I make a trip and buy a few planks here and there. I use them for shelving in the shop, but now it's time to pull them all together and mill them into planks that I can use to re-plank the transom.

The first step is to run them through a thickness planer so that they are all of a uniform thickness. In this case, I want them to be 7/8 of an inch thick uniformly. I want one side clean because that will be the outward facing side that is finished. Then, I have to run them through a jointer, to make sure that the edges are perpendicular to the flat sides of the plank. Also, I want the edges of the plank to be smooth. One edge will have to mate very tightly with the adjoining edge of the next plank. But there's another problem. If I get one side of the plank smooth and straight, I have to make sure that the plank is of uniform width all the way along. So, I set the rip fence on the table saw to the narrowest part of the plank width and then run the planks through the saw with the smooth edge against the rip fence. This ensures that I have a plank of uniform width throughout its entire length. It also ensures now that both edges are parallel completely along the plank.

In the pictures in this blog, you can see a view of privateer up in the yard in Maryland when I found her. The areas of trouble on her transom are clearly evident. In these pictures you also see a plank being run through the jointer, a plank being run flat through the thickness planer, and then the planks laid out on the floor of my workshop. I estimated that I needed 50 inches of wood in order to re-plank the transom from top to bottom. 50” was being generous, I probably don't need quite that much, I was measuring with a tape. So if I have 50 inches, I've got some wood to spare. Also, the width of the transom is about 7 feet, and the planks are 7+, so I've got plenty of extra here and I should not have a problem.

Although I plan to use wood screws to fasten the planks of the new frames, I'm going to build in some added insurance by bolting the planks through the frames in several places. I'm not going to bolt exclusively, I'm only going to put one in each plank at each frame junction, and the rest will be wood screws. Joshua Slocum bolted SPRAY’s planks to her frames before he set out on his globe-girdling voyage. A lot of people have missed that detail over the years. A through-bolted plank will not pop loose. However, I'm going to have to countersink these bolt heads, and with the washer under the head which is a hex configuration, I need a three-quarter inch wide diameter hole. I’ll cut that with a Forstner bit. Not sure if it will fit or work on my plunge router, but if it can, that will be an ideal way to go because the depth can be absolutely controlled each time and the cut will always be perfectly perpendicular.

So, naturally, I also had to buy a three-quarter inch plug cutter. I will cut shallow plugs of mahogany which I will set in these holes to cover the bolt heads.

Once I have the transom completely off, I can address that other nagging problem that the last yard owner complained about before I brought her North, specifically, a leaking diesel fuel tank. PRIVATEER has two welded aluminum diesel tanks under her after deck. Once the transom is off, it will be relatively easy to remove those tanks and inspect and test them. If one or both are bad, it will be fairly simple to put new ones in while the transom is off. In fact, before I put the new transom on, I am going to paint inside as far as I can reach and dress it up nicely, because it's much easier to work in that space from the outside, rather than crammed up in that claustrophobic little spot under the after deck. In one photo here, you're looking forward from the hole in the transom, all the way into the forward cabin.

So I’m going to use the opportunity presented by having the transom off to get a few things done that would otherwise be very difficult or impossible without ripping something else out.

One thing is for sure, though; when I first started working on this boat, when I first bought and owner her, it was September, 1994, a little more than 16 years ago. It was a whole lot easier to crawl through those hard, uncomfortable spaces back then!

So What is 'Skiff Sauce' - and What is it Used For on a Wooden Boat?

2011-03-01T17:22:00.000-08:00

Wooden cleats soaking in a bucket of Skiff Sauce

'Skiff Sauce' is a wood preservative mixture for wooden parts of traditional wooden boats. It is called that because in some parts of the world that's all they use as a preservative for small boat parts - I believe it's a big deal in Scandinavia. Skiff sauce is a mixture of linseed oil, tar, and other solvents and elements that help it soak into porous wood. Once it soaks in and dries, it prevents water from entering the wood and rotting it. Petroleum oils such as diesel fuel and motor oil in old motor boats also soak into wood but they break down the lignins - the components in wood that make it strong, so they are not really beneficial even though they keep water out. Petroleum-soaked wood becomes spongy, soft and weak.

However, skiff sauce is not good for mahogany. Gives it a sick look/color. Not for teak either because teak doesn't need it. Use it for all other boat woods - longleaf pine, oak, locust. Here's what I use it for on PRIVATEER:

- Parrel beads (black locust)
- Mast hoops (bent oak hoops)
- Cleats (black locust)
- Ash shell blocks (just the shells, remove the hardware including the sheaves, but you can leave the strops in)
- White oak belaying pins (turned on the lathe)
- Deadeyes for the shrouds (black locust or even lignum vitae).

There are probably other parts in traditional boats where exposed wooden parts can be treated this way.

The aroma of the stuff is just wonderful especially if you use real Stockholm tar. I won't say that it gets you high, but it's a close approximate for the wooden boat guy!

Skiff Sauce is, I confess, a wonderful concoction. I have never read a 'complete' recipe - like Coca-cola, it is a closely guarded secret:

But I will share my personal recipe with you. Remember that this concoction has gone through a number of revisions over the course of 20 years, but it is, in its final embodiment, a really jolly mix, and my own personal refinement of the recipe.

If it weren't toxic, I would recommend drinking it, although a Guinness (or a Gritty's) is far preferable!

32 oz. boiled Linseed oil
8 Oz. Raw linseed oil
2 cups Stockholm tar, or if you cannot get that, Bicknell's Pine Tar
1 cup PENETROL
1 cup Star Brite Teak Oil
1 quart real turpentine
3 tblsp. Japan dryer

Mix, stir this all together until well blended. Keep in a sealed container with wood parts, must be airtight seal. If the stuff starts to reduce, evaporate, or shows signs of beginning to gel over time, add more turps or mineral spirits to thin it and keep it liquid.

Soak parts in it for weeks or even a couple of months, then remove and hang to dry for a few weeks until dry to the touch. Then either install, or rough and varnish or clear coat.

Wood parts to be soaked should be quite dry and/or seasoned to facilitate maximum penetration of the wood.

Winter Boat Projects on PRIVATEER

2011-02-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

Restoration: Replacement of Scissor Jacks, making new wooden cleats out of native Black Locust wood.

Like many traditional sailing boats, Privateer, being a gaff-rigged vessel, has a sail plan that includes a gaff mizzen mast and mizzen sail, with the mizzen boom protruding a number of feet off the transom of the boat. Because it's a bald-headed gaff rig (no topsails), its distribution of sail area tends to be lower and wider overall than that of a Marconi rig, which has a much taller profile. This allows a boat such as mine to carry an appropriate sail area to drive the vessel. However, the mizzen sail must be controlled with a sheet like any other sail, so a structure known as a scissor jack is used for the mounting of the sheet blocks to control the sail. This is because the sheet must connect to the boom as far out toward the end as possible for proper leverage and less stress on the boom itself; mount the sheet blocks and bail in the center of the boom and the boom might just break in half under strain!

Scissor jacks really consist of two oak timbers that, when mounted to the deck of the vessel, create a triangle shape which is very strong. To counter the upward pull of the sheet, a jackstay is used to provide stability. This jackstay connects to an eyebolt that is bolted into the dead wood of the vessel, or the horn timber, and then to the outermost end of the scissor jacks. On top of the scissor jacks, we have a forged steel galvanized bail, much like a small traveler, that the lower block of the mizzen sheet is shackled to.

The scissor jacks on Privateer were made of oak, I'm not sure what kind, and had thoroughly rotted and have to be removed. So I made similar scissor jack timbers, two lengths, out of white oak, which is very strong and resistant to rot. I made a plastic bag enclosure from sheet mylar and put the two timbers in it after they were fabricated, and let them soak for a year in this bag surrounded by skiff sauce. Skiff sauce is a formulation of linseed oil and other solvents and products, and it is designed to soak into the wood over time and thus give it even greater resistance to rot. The linseed oil will fill the pores of the wood and then will dry and can be varnished over. It soaks into places where water would otherwise go, since the scissor jacks will be exposed to the elements all the time.

Tired old oak cleat, meet Mr. Locust Log

Every boat builder has their own recipe for skiff sauce; it is something you develop over time, with experimentation, but in addition to linseed oil, it usually contains turpentine or another solvent to help it soak in, pine tar or Stockholm tar, and some Japan dryer so that it doesn't stay wet forever once the products of been removed from the sauce.

After the scissor jack timbers were removed from the sauce, and allowed to dry for a few months, they were coated with Cetol base and then Cetol clear coat. Then, the ends were cut on an angle and brought together and bonded with West Marine epoxy. I was careful to make sure that the length of the scissor jacks and the angle were the same as the original ones. After bonding together, they were through-bolted at the juncture like the originals, but what I did differently was to bury the carriage bolt inside and seal the ends to prevent deterioration or rusting of the bolt. This, even though the bolt is hot dip galvanized. I sealed the ends where the bold ends were countersunk with a cap of oak and epoxy. I cut the caps out of the cut off angled ends, so it’s the same wood as the rest of the jack timber. It has the appearance of a very large dowel to the eye, but it is not. However, it's a lot neater looking than an open hole.

Beautiful golden wood - Black Locust

Next, the bail, which was forged by a blacksmith in Waldoboro, Maine, in 1930, was reinstalled. Although most of the galvanization had worn off, when I first restored Privateer I had all of the steel parts hot dip galvanized once again at a galvanizing plant up in Everett, Massachusetts. I still like to paint galvanized hardware however, I use gray enamel that approximates the color of galvanized metal, simply because painted galvanized hardware lasts even longer, significantly longer, than non-painted galvanized hardware exposed to the salt elements.

As a final touch, I mounted the antique bronze stern light at the outer end of the scissor jacks. Then, I drilled through the inboard ends of the timbers in the proper locations to install the large carriage bolts that will fasten the scissors jacks to the timbers of the deck.

Drilling holes for the carriage bolts

It remained however to replace the two well-rotted wooden cleats on the inboard ends of the scissor jack timbers. These cleats had been made by the previous owner, and appeared to have been made out of red oak. Red oak is an inexpensive wood and is very strong, but it is extremely susceptible to rot and is really not suitable for use in wooden boat building. One very good wood readily available in the United States for boatbuilding purposes, and often overlooked, is Black Locust. Black locust is an American wood that is very hard and dense with a closed grain and it is also very tough wood like Hickory. Yet, it is also highly resistant to rot, and in the old days was used for fence posts, since it would stay in the ground for many years without rotting through, and it did not require treatment with creosote or other chemicals. Many items of traditional wooden boat wooden hardware such as parrel beads and cleats are made from black locust. These parts are then soaked in linseed oil or skiff sauce for several months to give them much greater durability once they are mounted on the boat.

Cleats soaking in skiff sauce

Using the old cleats as a template, I fashioned new cleats from a chunk of black locust that I had found in the woods while hiking. This log had sat in my woodpile for a year drying out and seasoning. Now, I cut the log into a square block, and then further processed it down until I had to lovely blocks of honey-colored black locust wood suitable for the fashioning of two new wooden cleats. I marked them off, and cut the profiles with the bandsaw. Then I cut the camber of the cleats in the vertical direction using a tilted tablesaw. Then I sanded, shaped, and smoothed them into the proper shape. I made them a little higher in the base than the originals so that I could use heavier line on them. These cleats basically serve as stern cleats for tying up to a dock, or towing a dinghy. Lastly, I drilled the holes through which the two galvanized carriage bolts will bolt them to the scissor jack timbers. Now they must soak in skiff sauce for a few months until they are ready to actually mount on the scissor jack timbers, which themselves will be mounted on the after deck of Privateer once the transom has been replaced.

Here is where the cleats will be mounted.

Voyage of the Mary Rose

2011-01-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

Here is a photo of the Mary Rose entering calm Soper's Hole, Tortola, BVI, the morning of our arrival. Tropical paradise at last!

Sailing to Paradise

2010-12-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

The Voyage of the vintage 1926 Herreshoff staysail schooner 'Mary Rose' from Rhode Island to Tortola, BVI, by way of Bermuda

Part 10, Finale - Tortola at Last – A deflating dinghy – Rum punch and social calls – Island Life – Tropical evening falls – Dinner, Hail and Farewell, and a salute to our Captain

We arrived in Tortola on Saturday morning, December 4, passing between the islands of Jost Van Dyke and Tobago, and then into the passages between the islands to finally moor in Soper’s Hole, a harbor on the western-most end of the big island of Tortola. We were surrounded by islands that are basically steep mountains covered with dense vegetation. Jason and Andy had worked hard the day before to ready the Mary Rose’s old, sun-baked, inflatable dinghy, a thing that looked for all the world as though it had been conceived and built from the sap of the very first rubber tree that grew in Eden. The forward part of it would not hold air for very long, and after Tom, Andy, and Jason had made a valiant attempt at patching its holes, it held air for a little while longer, but still needed occasional re-pressurizing with the foot pump. It looked as though it belonged to one of the natives, or some expatriate down on his luck. On top of that it leaked water, and the hand-pump could not empty it, so the best way to get it dry was to operate it at speed so that its leaky hull would self-bail.

The day was warm, the sun strong, the temperature in the mid-80s, with light breezes, low humidity, and happily, no insects. The water was a deep, lovely, clear blue. After the preliminaries of clearing customs, we explored the harbor – with particular attention to its two bars, Pusser’s Café, and the more affordable Jolly Roger, which came alive at night with music and all the local live-aboards including a couple we knew from Bristol, the Knowleses; some folks from New Bedford; we even saw a Swan yacht of mostly jolly Finnish fellows whom we had met in Bermuda come sailing in on Sunday morning. They had left Bermuda the day after we did, on Monday, but encountering lighter airs, they had taken longer to reach Tortola. “When did you get here?” the skipper called out, in perfect English, as they cruised by our mooring on their way to the fuel dock. “Three days ago” I lied, with a straight face, and saw the frowning shadow of consternation fall across his. Jason could not abide my deception, however, and told him the truth, which relieved them somewhat and generated a chuckle all around.

There isn’t much to do in Tortola, or the other islands, beyond pure recreation. Sail, swim, snorkel, eat, drink, socialize, and soak up the sun, dab a little varnish, clean up, visit the grocery store, the fueld and water dock, the chandlery, and the bars. There is no need to be productive in the northern Yankee sense, in fact any sort of productive work ethic is entirely un-cool and generally frowned upon. One may explore, but remember that the roads are poor and generally go around the island perimeters rather than through the steep, hot, mountainous interiors. But in practically every destination, where an anchorage is half-encircled by a pink-sand beach and a few seemingly ramshackle tiki bars and beach hangouts, the food is excellent, the rum punch is marvelous, and the companionship of other cruisers is the real treasure.

In the open-air Jolly Roger bar at night one meets everyone who lives out on a moored or anchored yacht, and who has come ashore for the evening, the dinghy dock crowded with inflatables nose-in and nestled together, waiting obediently at the ends of their painters, ready to head back out into the dark harbor and home aboard once the evening is done. There is laughter; there are friends new and old to meet or become re-acquainted with; the sun sets in a blaze of color, the dark rounded peaks silhouetted against the fiery sunset as the first bright stars peek out of the deep blue that slowly descents in the west with the last curtain-call of the day. Laughter and eager conversations ring out; the aroma of food grilling on the open-air barbecue wafts about, spreading its happy news of steaks and spiny lobster.

It is my last evening in paradise. Tomorrow I will board a plane with my Captain, bound for San Juan, then on to Philadelphia and at last to Providence. Andy will stay behind, in his new job as caretaker of the Mary Rose; Jason will leave in a day or two, after the two guys have explored the island without the old guys looking over their shoulders. I should feel sad, but I do not; too much happiness is welling in my soul. Our voyage was a success; I am with my shipmates and friends with whom I have been through ordeals as well as swell times, adventure and discovery, through the cauldron, through the eye of the needle and have lived not only to tell about it but to savor this moment. Another round of rum punch comes to the table; we three crewmen of the Mary Rose stand and toast our Captain; and suddenly and spontaneously, everyone seated at the tables around us, hearing what we were about and most of them already familiar with our story, rises and joins in, with hearty shouts and earnest well-wishing, much to our delight and surprise. It is the community, the fellowship of cruisers and adventurers, Hermandad de La Mar, the Brotherhood of the Sea. Captain Tom is grinning; this is his moment, saluted by his crew and fellow captains and sailors and bon vivants all encircling. We vow to return again, and to meet again. But for now, we will think only of the joy of this moment; tomorrow is a different day, and by God, it ain’t here yet!

Sailing to Paradise

2010-12-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

The Voyage of the vintage 1926 Herreshoff staysail schooner 'Mary Rose' from Rhode Island to Tortola, BVI, by way of Bermuda

Part 9 - Flying fish visits – Favorable winds and calmer seas – 200 miles a day roaring south - The galley gets more use, finally – Jason and I trade off on making the mid-day meal – the happy fate of a fine bag of Rhode Island potatoes.

Small-boat sailors since before Joshua Slocum have mentioned the phenomenon of flying-fish coming aboard at night, usually attracted by the vessel’s navigation lights, or a lantern in the rigging. They have very large eyes, and although they have been described as tasty and very adaptable to the frying-pan, I have never eaten one, but I told Andy that if one came aboard during the night at any time, if he could get it quickly enough to the reefer to keep it cold, I would surely fry it for his breakfast, just as Captain Slocum did for himself. Andy thought this was funny, as he had no desire to eat a flying fish at all. The problem with flying fish, however, is that they don’t keep. If they land in a coil of line, they flop around violently and their fins go all to pieces and make a mess. They bleed, making more of a mess, and they seem to be particularly strong – smelling (and likewise flavored, probably) like cooking a menhaden, or bunker. One did come aboard one night and land in the coiled mainsheet on the after deck behind the cockpit; but was not discovered until mid-morning on our watch by Jay, and by that time it was stiff, its skin had dried in the warming sun, and I presumed it spoiled, so back to the Deep it went, after having posed for a ‘photo op’ on the cockpit floor.

The first three days of the second leg of the voyage, from Bermuda, were marked by finer weather and more favorable winds. We had two days of wind two points abaft the port beam, which was a wonderful wind direction for the Mary Rose, what sailors call a ‘broad reach’. The winds were steady and blew hard, in the high 20’s and often gusted to 30 knots, so the Mary Rose, even under reduced sail, was making an average of 10 knots, occasionally hitting eleven, and as a result we had two days where we made nearly 200 miles per day directly toward our destination.

As the week wore on, the seas subsided, and the wind moderated; the galley got more use. I percolated pots of coffee more frequently, as did Captain Tom, since both he and I are coffee lovers, although not so much the younger fellows, oddly; they seemed fonder of tea, their water-bottles, and powdered vitamin mix, while lamenting the boat’s lack of Gator-ade. On that Sunday morning in Bermuda, however, Captain Tom sensed that my head was a bit heavy from the night before, and brewed a pot of strong coffee, and when I emerged from my cabin to greet him, he offered me a hearty mug of it, black and strong the way I like it, but one sip told me that he’d ‘put a stick in it’ as they say, a generous dollop of pot-stilled rum, and he let out a mischievous chuckle when I complimented him on his coffee-brewing talents. Did I not mention that Captain Tom was also the official ‘Doctor’ aboard the vessel? Jason and Andy had their vitamin water. This illustrated, more than anything else, the ‘generation gap’, however subtle, between Tom and I and the young men; but it was a jolly thing nevertheless, for there was never friction aboard resulting from the comparative differences in age, in fact it was often a cause for amusement, the dichotomy of attitudes, expressions, viewpoints, and perspectives that we often shared across the age ‘divide’.

Whenever the engine was running, there was hot water in the tank, heated by the engine, always at a steamy 180-degrees F., so we never had to boil water for tea. One simply ran the hot water in the galley for a few seconds and it came out of the tap steaming and piping hot, hot enough to brew tea, and thus we filled our cups, a quick way to get a ‘pick me up’, and there were many times on a dark, wet, lumpy night that I blessed the sainted Earl Grey, whoever he was, in my heart.

During the second half of the second leg, with the advent of calmer conditions, Jason and I began making the mid-day meal for all hands. Since our watch ended at noon, when the Captain and Andy assumed the watch, Jason and I began making a solid daily meal that would be ready when the other watch woke up. We were motoring now, and the autopilot was engaged, so one man could be belowdecks preparing food. Captain Tom was a fine cook himself; on two occasions, he made superb cheeseburgers, served on 15-grain bread, with tomato and lettuce slices, onions, condiments, chips and pickles. But for the final three days, Jason and I traded off, making pork chops and peppers, Salisbury steak and gravy, chicken and rice stew, and other fare, accompanied by vegetables and hearty mashed potatoes. I had brought a 10-pound bag of good Rhode Island potatoes along, grown and harvested right on Aquidneck Island, long known for its potato farms since Colonial days; and although the bag of potatoes was sadly neglected during the first stormy week of voyaging, it was nearly used up – all but for two lonely spuds – by the time we reached Tortola. I had also brought along a frozen quart container of fine fish chowder that I had made, from native Tautog, a rock bass, caught off Newport a couple of weeks earlier; but this lasted only for one lunch, and the Captain finished it off at the same sitting!

Sailing to Paradise

2010-12-16T09:43:00.000-08:00

The Voyage of the vintage 1926 Herreshoff staysail schooner 'Mary Rose' from Rhode Island to Tortola, BVI, by way of Bermuda

Part 8 - Bermuda at last, sympathy for Tantalus – Counting the minutes ‘till Dawn – A good night’s drunk, a good night’s sleep – Codfish for breakfast in St. George’s – Good-bye to Bill - Los Cantos de Los Muertos

The progress of our journey was such that, in terms of timing, we would reach Bermuda sometime around two o’clock in the morning, and during yet another 40-knot gale. Bermuda is a dangerous place; it is surrounded by a 10-mile deadly perimeter of coral reefs, and there are perhaps two major entrances, at St. George’s where we were planning to enter the channel, and at Hamilton, where the cruise ships put in. One must approach Bermuda only from certain directions, additionally, to enter these channels and passages safely. Thus, Captain Tom decided that the only prudent course was to remain offshore until daylight, and then feel our way in, the channel markers and other landmarks as shown on the chart now being visible.

The wind increased as the day faded into evening, and in the distant darkness, many miles distant, we began to see the very faint glow of Bermuda, still out of sight beyond the horizon, against the bottoms of the cloudy overcast. Land! Relief! The wind had freshened out of the southwest, and I suggested to Captain Tom that we approach from the northwest and get in the lee of the island, putting it between us and the force of the wind and the seas, as much as we could. I marked a position that was north-east of the outermost shoals, a mile or more outside of Kitchen Shoal Light, on the assumption that the island would shelter us; but it did not. Bermuda is low, and Captain Tom went further around the island while I was off watch and we moved back into the exposure of the southwest flow.

That was the longest night, even longer than Tuesday night, our first night in the gale, which had been quite uncomfortable; the minutes dragged like hours, the hours like days, for we were practically mad to get ashore and rest, even if briefly. The Mary Rose slowly beat in rough circles offshore while nobody slept, and finally at first light, we began our approach to Town Cut, a narrow channel between rocky promontories that leads into St. George’s harbor. It was a wild, wet, rough morning, the entire deck of the Mary Rose soaked with seawater, and I noted a strange scent, which I suddenly realized was the smell of the land. We had been a week at sea, our senses filled only with the smell of the sea above, or the mustiness of the boat below. We rejoiced, and motored into the turquoise harbor waters and to the Customs Dock to clear in before we could get fuel and water, or tie up and rest. On the way in, I noted the many lovely and traditional sailing vessels in the harbor, the white and pastel buildings dotting the slopes of the hills, and thought, what a wonderful, mid-ocean oasis this is, these ancient sea-volcanoes that have become a coral reef-encircled haven, a tiny paradise in the middle of the Atlantic.

Once we had taken on fuel and water and tied up at the municipal dock, we had perhaps a day and a half before we would leave. Cold beers were brought out, and in my state of fatigue, the first one made my head swim. Captain Tom slept for twelve hours, and then repaired the water maker; Jason and Andy went a-prowling, and later, Andy and I took a bus to Hamilton, a forty-minute ride, and found the Hog Penny Pub, and later a cab home, with my jib bowsed up fairly tight! In the morning we breakfasted at a place called the Wahoo Cafe, where I enjoyed a Sunday morning Bermuda codfish breakfast of poached reconstituted salt cod with a fresh tomato sauce, boiled eggs, a banana, toast and coffee, hoisting in a good meal before we once again set out to sea. Bill sadly took his leave of us, planning to spend another day on the island before flying home. We liked him a great deal, and we all had that final breakfast together at the Wahoo before saying our good-byes, wishing him a safe flight home and hopes that he would be feeling better. We all felt that Captain Tom had made the right decision, and even Bill admitted that for his own sake, it was the prudent thing to do. He brightened a little, said he would stop for a day perhaps in Puerto Rico and visit the shops for a day, and then fly home after soaking up a little warmth and sunshine.

Although our trip to Bermuda had been a rough one, and the night before we made landfall an unending hell of being tossed around in confused, steep seas and gale-force gusts, I did not entertain the thought of getting off the boat. Although I had my feet on shore, I knew that my stay would be brief, and that in another day or so, I must once again head out from the safety of St. George’s Harbor and into the unknown, like the writer, as Hemingway once said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, out beyond where anyone can help him. But now I had more confidence in the Mary Rose, in my Captain, and in Jason and Andy; these were capable, brave fellows, and we had, through the crucible of the gale, become a closer team, shipmates and friends, as much as we were remarkably different individuals. Going through rough times at sea together makes a tight crew, even if its members are people with little in common on the land, and who would probably not become friends, or close friends, normally due to disparate personalities and interests. It is a different sort of friendship, developed of necessity, common weal, common risk, and shared exposure to danger and harsh conditions, where the absolute focus of mind, body, and energies is bringing the ship safely to port. In some ways, the voyage is a metaphor for life, with the safe arrival of the vessel in tropical paradise like the safe arrival of the soul in the paradise of heaven. And have we not been taught, by faith, that we must achieve that salvation not merely alone, but in concert with one another?

Still, when we left Bermuda on Sunday afternoon, I felt the familiar pang of anxiety, of separation from the land, of a wish, after darkness fell, that the fading glow of the island on the horizon astern would not disappear, but remain with us. The smell of the land had once again vanished, leaving us with the cloying salt tang of the Deep, and my uneasiness would not go away. We were motor-sailing in moderate airs, heading off the wind, and we had engaged the autopilot, whom I judged the best helmsman second to myself, and thoroughly indefatigable, unerringly accurate, and quite capable now that the high seas of the first leg of our passage were, at least for the time being, behind us. So we sat in the cockpit, checking the navigation system, keeping a lookout for other vessels, and occasionally taking turns going below for a hot cup of tea or a snack, usually multi-grain bread smeared with chunky peanut butter. But my uneasiness would not go away, and I was still tired, drowsy, nearly nodding off, when I heard something, a sound that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck (or so I thought) and sent a shiver through me, a shiver of what I can only describe as deep, subliminal terror. I heard music. It was unearthly, ethereal, and faint, like a choir of angels; the music was high, and strange, just out of my range of hearing, and the more I strained to hear it, the more elusive it became. I was fully awake now, and intensely focused, entranced; the music came from nowhere, and everywhere at once, and was incredibly lush and melodic, ornate, sweet, complex, and captivating, yet again, just beyond the range of actual hearing, yet I knew that I was hearing it with my ears. I thought of Mozart, writing for the choirs of angels; no music ever heard on earth; the singing of the sirens. But then came the darker thought; what grave of sunken souls at the bottom of the abyssal plain has the shadow of our keel crossed this night? What sad wreck of drowned souls in the still blackness of the depths has the proximity of our passage disturbed? Los Cantos de Los Muertos. I whispered a prayer for them, if indeed we had passed over a wreck. Jay came back on deck with a cup of tea and a sandwich; this broke the spell, and I heard the music no more that night, or any night, but the memory of it haunted me for days afterward.

Sailing to Paradise

2010-12-15T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Voyage of the vintage 1926 Herreshoff staysail schooner Mary Rose from Rhode Island to Tortola, BVI, by way of Bermuda

Part 7 - Captain Tom Gets a Dunking off Newport – Mal de Mer, for a while – Full Beaver Moon, and the Friendship of Dolphins – Water, water, everywhere, our own unfit to drink – Into the Gale, and Beneath the Panoply of Stars – The student of Physics.

As we headed out of Newport toward open water that Monday afternoon, a stiff wind was blowing out of the Southwest. Set against the outflowing tide emptying from the bay, this created what the local fishermen refer to as ‘the Washing Machine’ – a few miles of short, steep seas that are remarkably rough. But I had never seen it this bad. I was on the helm, and Captain Tom, Jason, and Andy went forward to sort out a problem with the ‘Yankee’, our jib out on the bowsprit that is hanked onto the forestay. It was furled but was becoming undone and had to be secured before it got loose. This sail would cause us much grief several times during the voyage. All of a sudden, three impossibly steep waves at least ten feet high in quick succession brought the Mary Rose – all 85 feet of her – into an incredible up and down pitching, with the result that she plowed into the third wave and took green water over the bow. Captain Tom, who was up there at the time, disappeared under water for a second or two, and then emerged, saucer-eyed and not knowing whether or not he should be surprised, angry, or both; he was thoroughly drenched, dunked, and doused in November water, and the rest of us were completely astonished. Little did we know that it was a harbinger of things to come.

There is an old weather-rhyme pertaining to the barometer, that says, in part, “Long foretold, long last; Short notice, soon past.” What applies to weather also applies to seasickness with me. The rough seas, as we headed southeast from Newport, soon had me feeling queasy; I became seasick quickly, but was also over it in a matter of a few hours. Although I am not particularly prone to seasickness - I was never seasick as a young man, even during a hurricane off the coast of Florida on a Coast Guard ship – I find that later in life, my first day at sea, or first few hours, can be my toughest; I think that anxiety has as much to do with it, with me, as the physical causes of motion and the inner ear. It came on fast, and I had to lie down in my bunk for a few hours. Come 6 p.m. however, I was called to go out on deck, and I had no choice but to tough it out. I felt better rather quickly thanks to the bracing, cold air. The full moon was up – November’s full moon is the “Full Beaver Moon” as our native Indians so designated it – and the sea was beautiful and the wind brisk. The distant light of Gay Head, or Aquinnah, on Martha’s Vineyard flashed against the sky every few seconds; and we occasionally saw the lights of fishing boats, headed in, from time to time, one of them presenting an eerie, phantasmic image as it steamed past a mile away, flocks of sea-birds circling around its stern, in and out of its bright lights like a swarm of fireflies as it passed.

Out of the corner of my eye, off the port side of the Mary Rose, in the shimmering white path that led to the rising moon, I thought at one point that I saw something in the water, a black silhouette of a dorsal fin. I rubbed my eyes, and looked again; nothing. Then moments later, more black silhouettes, dolphins leaping and shooting like torpedoes through the waves, following us, staying alongside, one, then two, then a half dozen, keeping with us, companions on our trip. They cheered my heart; they reminded me again of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, where Santiago, far out at sea and alone in his fishing boat, notices the birds and other creatures and muses that no one is ever truly alone on the sea. The dolphins followed us from time to time, both day and at night, but after Bermuda, we never saw them again, except for the odd beauty of a long whip-tailed white-tailed tropic bird, or so it is called, that hovered above our masts from time to time from the day that we left Bermuda. This strange but beautiful bird has a long, single tail extending out astern, the length of its body, like a kite-tail, and it reminded us that we were passing into a new and exotic climate as we wove our way south toward the promise of the tropics.

The Mary Rose’s voyage was a shakedown cruise as well as a delivery, as I have mentioned before, and as every sailor and skipper knows, a shakedown cruise is the time when everything that can go wrong will go wrong, with a few bonus breakdowns or failures thrown in for good measure. One failure we noted from the outset was the fresh water maker. This reverse-osmosis machine, when it is working, makes fresh water from seawater at a rate of 5 gallons per hour, which is why, apparently, the Mary Rose has only a 60-gallon fresh water tank. 60 gallons doesn’t go very far with four fellows aboard who need to wash themselves, drink, cook, and clean dishes. So, we had to conserve water with the idea that we would refill our tank once we reached Bermuda. Compounding the problem was the apparent fact that there was water remaining in the tank from, quite possibly, before Mary Rose’s restoration, a year or two old in a metal tank, and when Captain Tom topped off the tank before our departure, he neglected to flush the tank out before adding fresh water. The result was the worst tank water I had ever tasted – it made me gag one morning, even though I was awfully thirsty, and I would have almost have preferred a fresh draught of my own urine to it. Metallic, stale, and musty, it tasted as though someone had blown down a boiler into the tank, I thought, and was utterly horrible. In Bermuda, though, Tom refilled the water tank, and was able to repair the water maker, so that from that point on, we had sweeter and sweeter fresh water, with the memory of that horrible sludge from the first leg of the trip finally diminishing in memory as we neared Tortola.

We sailed into the teeth of a roaring gale; it was not due to a low-pressure system, but rather a major cold front, a huge high pressure system moving eastward from the continent and the dipping Jet Stream. So we had high winds, but no rain or stormy weather. Winds were 30 – 35 knots steady, gusting to 40, and one gust hit 49 knots. Big seas built up, and we could only hang on, try to sleep, steer the boat, keep hydrated by drinking that horrible tank water, and try to stay warm. At night, the masts swayed wildly in the darkness beneath a sky brilliant with stars that instead of twinkling, remained cold, fixed points of light. The Milky Way glowed as a belt of light across the heavens; the wind howled and the seas roared as they broke alongside. The moon rose later each night as it waned from full, but it illuminated a wild ocean scene under a clear sky, a scene of foaming crests and silver hills rushing by as spray dashed over the foredeck and blew aft.

It blew like that nearly all week, so that when the wind diminished at last to around twenty knots, it felt like a calm. Then, the night before we reached Bermuda, we picked up a radio broadcast that warned that yet another 40-knot gale was about to hit. My heart sank; but at that point we all accepted it as “more of the same, bring it on and let’s get it over with.”

Being below decks in rough weather is an interesting experience in physics. In the first place, nothing moves relative to you, you move with the ship, so you have no reference point to the outside world. You feel the G-forces as your body is suddenly thrown against the port side settee, then as quickly as you are thrown with an audible “Oof!” bodily against the starboard berth, with its lovely varnished trim and drawers, with a violence that knocks the wind out of you. Then you are back again doing a push-up against the port settee, or the door to the head, constantly repeated. It is unfortunate that human beings, the primary creatures who go to sea in boats, have been given only two arms and hands by our Maker; we would be better off going to sea with at least three, and perhaps four, because in such conditions, with only two, one can do very little; one hand is always holding on – sometimes two – and it is very hard to do anything at all with only one hand, especially while one’s body is being tossed about a lovely and well-appointed cabin. At such times, the glory of such superbly-crafted woodwork and detailed finishing is lost on the occupant; appreciation for such has been temporarily replaced by more pressing issues. Getting dressed, relieving oneself, preparing food, even the simplest functions take five times as long (or more) than normally, and whatever one does is usually accompanied by a good bruising. Drawers that were literally taped shut still manage to throw themselves open; doors bang, pots rattle, things fly about, never still even when they find the lowest point in the cabin, i.e., the deck. And there is reason to be extra careful. Without constant vigilance, I might be thrown bodily against something unyielding (as I was frequently) and break a rib (which I did not), which would incapacitate me and doom us; we were short-handed as it was; or I would have to go on deck with a cracked rib, a very painful thing, and still do my duty. Knowing this potential for injury made me extra-cautious, to the point where I seemed to move about like an old man, crawling, crouching, slowly negotiating my way around below, but there was no other prudent way.

Sailing to Paradise

2010-12-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

The Voyage of the vintage 1926 Herreshoff staysail schooner 'Mary Rose' from Rhode Island to Tortola, BVI, by way of Bermuda

Part 6 - To sea, at last – An immediate casualty, and a change of course – Bermuda bound – Captain Tom sets the watch schedule – Discomforts and sleeplessness – Exposure to the elements – Perils of the ‘Hamster Cage’.

When we left Portsmouth on a cold, gray, windy Monday, November 22, we had departed with a crew of five, not four. Bill, an older gentleman, a friend of Captain Tom’s, had asked to go along weeks earlier and Tom had happily agreed. But where Bill’s spirit was willing, his flesh let him down, like the treachery of Santiago’s cramped hand in The Old Man and the Sea. Bill was of a fragile constitution to begin with, and shortly after we put to sea, he became violently seasick and could not recover or adjust. Nearly four days went by during which time he never emerged from his cabin except to vomit in the head. He was not eating, nor drinking water, nor did we hear from him. We all began to be seriously concerned for him, particularly that dehydration would kill him, and thus we three crewmen got together outside in the cockpit and had a confidential discussion with Captain Tom, where we voiced our concerns. He shook his head, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to bring a corpse to Tortola,” he said gruffly.

Reluctantly, we altered course eastward toward Bermuda, two hundred miles out of our way, to put him ashore and on a flight home, for his own good. We all agreed that we would say nothing to Bill, but would let Captain Tom break the news to him when he felt it was the right time. The afternoon before we reached the island, Tom told him plainly, and Bill became very upset; but Tom told him that there was no other way. His decision was final. Bill was a sweet old guy and it disappointed him terribly, but in the meantime, there were only four of us now to manage the schooner in rough seas. Bill was as useful to us as sack of sand in the hold.

Captain Tom had therefore divided us into two watches of 6 hours each, and 6 hours is a long watch especially in bad weather. Jason and I had the 6a.m. – noon, and 6pm – midnight watches every day; Captain Tom and Andy took the other two. This meant a full 12 hours each day on watch and on the helm for each of us, every day, albeit split up. Mary Rose’s traditional cockpit offered no shelter from the weather whatsoever; rain, spray, wind, and cold were our enemies as well as our constant companions. There was no wheelhouse, no cockpit dodger, no awning, no Bimini. Only a small dodger covered the entrance to the companionway going below. There was no place to hide. We each took turns on watch hand-steering for two hours each, then standing by in the drenching cockpit trying to stay warm and stay awake. Our faces burned from the effects of driven spray, salt and wind; it was as though they were badly sunburned, and the skin felt hot and angry when we went below and even touched it with a damp wash-cloth. We each wore layers of wool and polar fleece, covered by foul weather rain gear, and wore inflatable life vests and harnesses in the cockpit at all times in rough weather. There were plenty of places to ‘clip on’, and we went nowhere on deck without being clipped to a pad-eye or a jack line.

The problem with cold weather is condensation under your ‘oilskins’ or rain gear. It doesn’t breathe, so even if your oilies keep the spray off of your clothing beneath, soon your perspiration and body moisture condenses on the inside surfaces and makes your clothes damp. They don’t dry appreciably during your 6 hours off watch, so we slept in our clothes so that our body heat would help accelerate their drying before we had to go back on deck, but during the worst times, we got ‘suited up’ for watch and put the same dank, damp, wet, chill, sweaty-salty clothes and gear back on, like a recurring nightmare from which there was no hope of awakening. Sometimes there was an emergency and we all had to turn out on deck even if we were off watch.

The two young guys, Jason and Andy, handled the foredeck work, at the Captain’s direction; my specialty became the helm, keeping her controlled and steady while the young men did their dangerous work on the plunging, soaked foredeck managing the sails, fixing problems, reefing, whatever was needed. At night, we turned on the spreader lights to illuminate the deck, and it was a scene out of a wild, wet Hell in motion of deadly swinging spars and luffing sails snapping like cannon-shots, surrounded by roaring darkness, wind, and blowing spray.

During the first week, sleep was nearly impossible in the rough seas. We all became terribly sleep deprived, so we tried to sleep whenever we could, whenever we were not on watch. Fixed berths tilt, pitch, and yaw with the vessel, unlike hammocks; so in order to get to sleep, one must immobilize one’s body. If your body moves or your head rolls, you will not sleep. So I packed nearly a dozen pillows and cushions of all kinds around my body, something akin to chocking the wheels of a truck, to immobilize myself. Then I had to learn to ‘tune out’ the creaking of the vessel, the slamming, hammering of her hull, seas washing aboard, cabinets emptying their contents onto the deck in the main cabin, and other loud noises. At one point, an entire cabinet of books blew open and spilled all over the cabin deck, where one of the young guys was sleeping. Another time, a heavy metal winch handle came happily dancing down the ladder from the charthouse enclosure above, making a racket but thankfully not gouging up the woodwork.

The Mary Rose has two separate ‘heads’, or bathrooms, as landsmen say. Each has a marine head (toilet), sink, medicine cabinet, and a small hand-held shower head at the end of a flexible metal hose attached to the sink fixture. It is good for sea-showering; that is, turn it on, wet yourself down, wet a washcloth, then turn it off whilst you soap up and scrub down. Then you turn it on again and rinse off, aiming it with particular effectiveness to those recessed areas where soap suds and the fruits of perspiration might attempt to hide. It saves water, and water and suds drain through a teak grate in the floor that one stands on, and drains into the bilge where it is pumped overboard by the bilge pump. There is an electric light as well as natural lighting through a frosted glass panel overhead that faces the inside of the chart room. For some reason, everyone but me used the forward one of the two, rather than the one nearest my cabin – which was fine by me. But since there is virtually no ventilation for either ‘head’, which are rather small rooms indeed, they soon became damp, musty, and malodorous places. Andy began referring to the other head as ‘The Hamster Cage’ and was reluctant to use it, but later in the voyage, after Bill had been put ashore in Bermuda, when asked, he told me, quite happily, that the air in the place had decidedly improved.

Sailing to Paradise

2010-12-11T14:44:00.000-08:00

A November voyage from New England to Tortola on the 1926 schooner Mary Rose

Part 5 - Thoughts on the design of the Mary Rose, and why I went in the first place.

Mary Rose is a unique lady. She’s full-keel, rather narrow, stable and quick to right herself, and although she was designed with a schooner rig, she has nothing in common with the classic image of a schooner such as the ‘down-easters’ or even Alden schooners. No, put your hand over her sail-plan, and what you are left with is the hull of a Herreshoff racing yacht. For my own opinion, I would say that Mary Rose is perhaps an example of the finest of Nat Herreshoff’s prodigious genius. She is a racing yacht and performance cruiser designed for blue water; he conceived her when he was at the pinnacle of his powers. Indeed, on a reach, close reach, or even windward beat, she moves like a racehorse; fast, smooth, capable, cutting through seas like a hot knife through butter, and she loves a capful of wind. But she is not happy with a wind directly behind, so the wind must come off the quarter, and she does not like a heavy sea off the quarter either. She rolls terribly in a quartering sea with not enough wind, or even with enough, and we had not been at sea too many days before we were referring to our ship as the ‘Mary Rolls’.

The weekend before our departure, I could barely contain my excitement. I knew that this voyage would have some element of risk, as any November venture into the North Atlantic on a sailing vessel would. Yet I felt that it would have taken an army in my way to stop me. I was excited about going to sea again, about making a voyage on a well-found ship. The Mary Rose’s grounding had scared me; just my luck, I thought, to have the voyage terminated before it had even begun by events beyond my control; but the worst had not happened. The night before we departed, a Sunday, the four of us, plus our wives, friends, and the younger fellows’ lady friends, had met at Aidan’s, our favorite Irish pub in Bristol, for a pre-departure party, food, pints of ale, and an evening of getting to know one another; it had been Captain Tom’s idea. It was riotous fun; Hughie and Gerry Purcell, our long-time musician friends who are originally from Ireland, played fun and bawdy tunes, and the guitar and fiddle rang out. The spirit was infectious; energy ran high, and I felt charged down through the very core of my being. People who did not know us joined in the fun, danced, and spilled beer. Hughie sang ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’ and substituted his own satirical lyrics to give Captain Tom and the rest of us a chuckle. Earlier in the evening Tom and I had been to the supermarket, filling three carts with groceries and provisions for the trip. Andy had helped load them aboard the Mary Rose down at dockside in Portsmouth. We had extra fuel aboard and gas for the dinghy motor. We were ready.

When I was a young man in my twenties, the world was indeed my oyster. I felt that the possibilities for me were endless; I might become a millionaire someday, who knows. I would journey here, voyage there, and see all of these wonderful places that I read about as a youth in my grandparents’ subscription to National Geographic. But as I grew older I realized that these opportunities were slipping by as were the years; there are simply too many things no longer achievable to a man past 50. So I have come to realize that when an opportunity for travel or adventure presents itself, seize it; there are only so many opportunities left. Life is linear, and has an endpoint. Squeeze in what you can, while you can. So what if it has risks? When I was young, my life was more precious; now, I realize that its terminus is closer with each passing day, and although I fear death, to avoid risk is pointless, because death is eventual anyway. I went because I also wanted to prove certain things to myself, and not especially to anyone else. I wanted to prove to myself that I could still follow my dreams of adventure, still hold up physically, and still function with a clear mind in difficult or dangerous situations. And although the body complained mightily at times, I nevertheless surprised myself with my ability to endure, and brought new and wonderful experiences and destinations into the portfolio of my life, experiences that as I will write further, were the best of all things – new, dangerous, and characterized by the sublime paradox of being both frightening and awesomely beautiful at the same time. No experience has such awe-inspiring power over a man’s soul as the latter does, the paradox of ‘terrible beauty’.

Sailing to Paradise

2010-12-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

A November voyage from New England to Tortola on the 1926 schooner Mary Rose

Part 4 - Hallucinations and Rough Seas - The First Leg

I was hallucinating, and I knew it. I’d had very little sleep for the past four days. I was at the helm of the vintage 1926 Herreshoff wooden staysail schooner Mary Rose, steering her on a southerly course through the rough North Atlantic night. We were under reduced sail, fighting our way through high seas and gale-force winds in the impenetrable blackness of a deeply overcast night, and I had been guiding her with the help of two orange-amber-lit analog wind indicator dials. I had been staring at them for nearly three hours, keeping the Mary Rose’s unseen sails full as we lunged ahead, slogging to windward.

Now, these two luminous dials with dark centers, crusted with salt and spattered with drops of sea-spray, had become two lovely orange-frosted doughnuts, and I could not get that image to change in my mind. It was true that I had eaten very little for several days and two luscious frosted doughnuts would have been heavenly, even at that moment. But the odd image inversion, much like what sometimes happens when viewing an aerial photograph, when the high and low features reverse in optical illusion, only made the dials harder to see, and I cursed. It was bad enough that I was wet and cold and constantly being drenched with chilling salt spray from seas breaking over the bow in the darkness, but I couldn’t see a thing – neither the big seas, nor the sails, nor anything that was not illuminated. Yet I could feel her hull slam into a sea, and two seconds later, after just enough time for me to turn my head, I was doused as effectively as if someone had thrown a huge bucket of seawater at me from only a few feet away.

Of course, I was not the only one of the Mary Rose’s four-man crew who had seen things. Crewman Andy Furlong, on his helm watch, had imagined a coil of rope to be our Captain, Tom Bradford, sitting in the darkened cockpit hunched over, avoiding the spray, and began talking to him. Only when Captain Tom did not respond did he look closer to see that Tom had become a big coil of three-strand polyester, the main sheet, as it were. On another occasion, my watch-mate, Jason Baker, thought he saw me in the cockpit at night, and spoke to me, and when I did not respond, he looked down and was startled to see that I was not there. I had actually gone below briefly, but he had not seen me leave, and was as alarmed as poor Andy was, in his weariness worrying that Captain Tom had accidentally fallen overboard, leaving only the coiled mainsheet in his stead.

There were four of us; Captain Tom Bradford, me, Jason Baker, and Andy Furlong, bringing the Mary Rose, 65ft on deck and 29 tons, from Bristol, Rhode Island down to Tortola, BVI for the winter. It was more than a delivery, though; it was a shakedown cruise, because the million-dollar insured classic yacht had undergone a major refit over the past two years and had recently been re-launched. She had gone ashore in a storm and had been badly damaged, with holes knocked into her sides that a man could walk through. But she had been carefully restored and robustly repaired, her double-planked topsides rebuilt and some of her steel frames – composite construction for 1926 – replaced. Jason Baker, my watch-mate, had played a large part in her rebuilding and his careful, robust craftsmanship had stood Mary Rose in good stead already during this rough ride.

Nevertheless, Mary Rose had already experienced a mishap that quite nearly doomed the trip. In a northerly blow a couple of weeks before our planned departure, she had broken loose from her mooring in Bristol Harbor – a top chain link parted – and she had run aground at Love Rocks, the one-time home of her designer, Captain Nat Herreshoff. Her bowsprit practically reached the lawn of Herreshoff’s old homestead. But miraculously, she had slid gently into a sandy cleft between two big underwater ledges, and stood upright – held there safely and immobile even on a falling tide. Everyone said that Captain Nat’s hand had guided her into the only soft and sandy slot on that rocky point. Indeed, she was refloated that night, towed to Little Harbor in Portsmouth a few miles away, and hauled out briefly for inspection; she had not even suffered a scratch! It was utterly amazing, and I thought it a good omen at the time that she had emerged unscathed.

(Next - A Sick Crewman, and a Change of Course)

sailing to Paradise

2010-11-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

A November voyage from New England to Tortola on the 1926 schooner Mary Rose

Nov. 22, 2010

part 3 - Underway.

Still within wireless range for internet connection. Happily, I found that the 110V outlets in my cabin work fine, and the desk is perfect for my notebook. By tonight, I will be out of range. But I have also rigged the GPS receiver and am running the Cap’n chartplotter software – so I can actually navigate from my cabin desk! Of course, we have a chart plotter, but mine will serve as a backup and a nav resource for me. We also have a radar, VHF radio, Single sideband radio, registered EPIRB, the only thing we miss for constant contact is a satellite phone, but the captain does not want the expense of one so we did not get one. But I am delighted to have my workstation here up and running as we set out to see, especially the GPS charting and navigation feature!

We bought all the ship’s provisions last night, loaded them aboard, then off with a fair tide!

Sailing to Paradise

2010-11-20T18:53:00.000-08:00

A November voyage from New England to Tortola on the 1926 schooner Mary Rose

Part 2 - November 20, 2010

One of my fellow crewmen, a young guy named Andy Furlong, showed up this morning as we were getting the boat ready to move over to the fuel dock. It was windy and grey and cold, and he seemed a little under the weather, and I confess that I was too, and he asked me, “Are you ready?”

I responded, “I’ve been ready, I’ve had my seabag packed for three days.”

He grinned knowingly, adding, “I’m excited about going.”

“Me, too” I said.

I’ve had a difficult time relaxing these past few days; I am constantly checking the weather forecasts; it looks as though the first few days of the trip are going to be a lumpy ride, with 8 to 10 foot seas.

Mary Rose was re-launched a few days ago after the surveyor gave her a clean bill of health. There was absolutely no damage resulting from her grounding a week ago; I think the ghost of Nat Herreshoff guided her into her soft sandy cradle in the shadow of Love Rocks, his Bristol mansion, from where the old engineer left this world from his tired bed in 1938, only months before the devastating hurricane of that year. Its awful damage to the Herreshoff Manufacturing company would have broken his old heart had he lived to see it.

Last night, Denise and I went downtown to our favorite Irish pub and had a few pints of Guinness. They were also having, at the time, a promotion for that other Guinness product, Smithwick's, so we were given a couple of pints for free, which is not a bad thing considering that their Imperial pints of beer cost more than five bucks apiece. However, Smithwick's has a bit of a kick to it, and we needed that last Smithwick's like we needed a hole in the head. So this morning, I was a bit unsteady on my feet, having bowsed up my jib pretty well the night before, but nevertheless I was there at the dock at 8 AM as Capt. Tom had requested, to take the boat over to the fuel dock to make final preparations. Unfortunately, the Capt. was about a half an hour late. This is fine I thought, because I was 20 minutes late, and it's always okay for the Captain to be late, just not the crew. Of course, the Capt. was not here long before he was cursing the other crewman for not being there on time. But that is a Captain's prerogative. I had no idea at that point where the other two crewmen were and whether or not they would show, but they certainly weren't there this morning. It was a nasty, gray, windy day with a brisk wind out of the West, and it was difficult to maneuver the boat into the fuel dock. Oddly, when I first arrived there, fearing that I would be chastised for being late, I rejoiced when I saw that my Captain was not there yet. This is good, I thought, because he won't know that I wasn't here at eight o'clock sharp.

I called him on his cell phone, and kindly said that I would be going for doughnuts and coffee and would wait for him at the boat. When I came back, I did not see him, and I thought, good, I will wait another 20 minutes and then I will leave. I also noticed something amiss – there was now a paper coffee cup with a cover on a box on the dock next to the boat. Yet I saw no one around. I went up to the coffee cup, and felt it – it was warm. I began thinking of the old legend of the Mary Celeste, found abandoned mid- ocean, with no one aboard, but with a hot pot of coffee still on the galley stove.

So I went for a ride to see if I could find Capt. Tom over at the ships store. I came back, and he was now on the boat, and explained that he'd seen me coming and going, but that he'd been in the toilet, or head, and could not call out to me even though he watched me come and go. I laughed; then we got to work, and shortly thereafter crewman Andy showed up. We had a lot of work to do today, and tomorrow we will provision the boat, that is, purchase groceries necessary for the trip, stow everything aboard, and prepare to leave fresh on Monday morning.

This evening, Denise and I had a little dinner together, with a few couple of lobsters and a few rare delicacies, since we will not see each other for another eight days or more. Tomorrow morning I must contact the Captain, to meet up to purchase the ship’s provisions. He said that we should go in the afternoon, after he and Miss Bonnie, the Captain’s Lady, have been to church services. I thought about this for a few moments, and, realizing that I myself have not seen the inside of a church for awhile, resolved that I should do the right thing and go to church tomorrow morning myself, with Denise, and perhaps seek God’s blessing and protection for our voyage on His vast ocean. For, as Joshua Slocum once noted, “There are no atheists at sea.”

Sailing to Paradise

2010-11-15T21:12:00.000-08:00

A November voyage from New England to Tortola on the 1926 schooner Mary Rose

Part I - November 16, 2010

Mary Rose went aground last weekend when she parted her mooring chain in Bristol (R.I.) Harbor in a northwesterly gale. Miraculously, she seems to have suffered no damage. Indeed, she nestled her keel in between two large rocks over a sandy bottom, and the rocks held her firmly upright until the tide floated her off again, with the help of a tugboat. Now she has been for a week at the fuel dock in Portsmouth, still waiting to be hauled briefly for a day so that her bottom can be inspected to make sure that there was no serious damage beyond a few lost flakes of paint.

I spoke Capt. Tom this evening, by telephone, and his plan is to return from his tugboat job in New York harbor on Thursday evening, so that on Friday we can purchase several fuel jugs at the ship’s store nearby, fill them with diesel, and secure them to the foredeck. Although the Mary Rose has enough fuel to reach Tortola, he would rather have some in reserve in the event that we run into rough weather and end up motoring more than we would like. He knows this trip, he has made it many times before. He explained that the trip up north in the spring is usually fairly easy and doesn't require that much fuel, but rather it is the trip south in the fall that can be problematic. When we get to Tortola, he says that the jugs will be given away or discarded, as he does not want them hanging around the boat during the charter season. On this Saturday, he and I are to go around to the various markets and buy provisions for the boat. There will be five of us total, and I suspect the younger fellows will generally eat much more than we older fellows will. Capt. Tom does not want to run the freezer, or the refrigerator much if he can help it, because they draw heavily on the batteries and would necessitate running the generator more than he would like, using up fuel and in general making a lot of noise. So he plans to rely on canned goods such as canned ham and tuna fish, and will draw on his experience provisioning tugboats down in New York as he has done for some time now. He explained that he certainly knows what to purchase, what quantities, etc. This gives me some comfort, because I was hoping that we wouldn't be living on peanut butter and stale bread for the duration of the voyage.

His plan is actually to leave on Monday morning, which is actually two days later than I thought we would leave, but which is really irrelevant, since I am ready to go, and in any case we will miss Thanksgiving anyway no matter which day we depart after this week. We have all the necessary safety equipment, including a registered EPIRB, but there is no satellite phone, so most of the trip we will have no connection whatsoever to the land, or to the Internet, or for our cell phones. We expect the trip to last approximately 7 days, although this could be longer depending upon the weather and the time made good, which takes into account sea conditions and wind direction, which may not always be favorable.

My sea bag is already nearly packed, and part of the problem of course with this sort of trip is that you absolutely must have heavy clothing for the first part of it, for the first two or three days, then as you get into warmer weather you don't need that stuff anymore, but you still have to carry it the rest of the way and onto the airplane home, so you have to try to strike a balance between heavy woolen sweaters which you will need, and short-sleeved shirts and sunblock which you will need in the latter part of the trip, items which seem at this point almost absurd to be packing into the suitcase. Outside, the trees are bereft of leaves, under a raw, late fall sky that threatens sleet; we had a dusting of snow last week. So packing sunglasses and shirt-sleeves feels odd. Still, I am only praying that there will be enough coffee.

My old sailing pal Bruce used to sail with Don Street in the Caribbean. Writing to me the other day, he waxed nostalgic: "Ahh, that November weather in pointing her south! I remember it well. Two (2) pairs of woolen sea trousers, and oil skins and sea boots...and you still are NOVEMBER COLD. But, with the NW wind on the quarter, on the broadest reach possible, you soon are into the bright blue of the Gulf Stream and OFF COMES THE HEAVY GEAR!" He wishes he could come along with us; I wish he could, too.

Schooner Mary Rose Aground, Refloated in a Day; Minimal Damage Anticipated

2010-11-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

Storms around here blow in and out fairly quickly. Only this morning, at the height of the blow, at moon high tide, 1926 Herreshoff schooner Mary Rose snapped a chain link or shackle while riding on her mooring in Bristol Harbor. Crewman Andy Furlong was below, working on some projects, when he felt her break loose. Moments later, she was 100 yards downwind and aground on Love Rocks, the point of land where, curiously, her designer, Captain Nat Herreshoff, built his home in the 1880s. She could come no closer to her master’s homestead unless she literally barreled up into the backyard.

There was no time to get any engine going. Oddly enough, by luck or miracle, she wedged her keel in gently between two rocks below the surface, in quite possibly the only sandy spot anywhere near that rough point. They held her all day like a cradle while salvage experts from New Bedford loaded up their rapid response truck and headed down to Bristol. Even at low tide, no damage was visible, although it is quite likely that there is some paint scratched on the keel’s bottom. She was refloated early – a couple of hours ago, well in advance of the evening high tide – and has been towed to Little Harbor in Portsmouth, where she was re-launched only a couple of weeks ago. Presumably, she will be hauled tomorrow by the big travel-lift, inspected, touched up, and readied once again for her voyage south. Crewman Andy spent the whole day stuck on her, and will finally get to go home tonight to a good night’s sleep. Of course, he won’t be the only one getting a restful night’s sleep after a trying day!

A Fall Foliage River Cruise on Spray

2010-11-03T03:27:00.000-07:00

Captain Slocum came to mind again last weekend, probably because I had been given a rather unique boat delivery job by a yacht broker friend. I was to bring a Bruce Roberts ‘Spray’ up the Taunton River in Massachusetts from a marina in Mount Hope Bay to a boatyard in Dighton, where she would be hauled out for the season. She had just been sold.

It would be the second time in the season that I had delivered this same boat from one place to another for this particular friend and customer.

Bruce Roberts-Goodson is a well-known yacht designer in the UK who has designed and built many yachts inspired by Captain Joshua Slocum’s original Spray, a derelict oyster dredge very similar to the few remaining antique wooden skipjacks on Chesapeake Bay today. Slocum rebuilt Spray and sailed her around the world in 1895, becoming the first person to ever circumnavigate the globe single-handedly. His subsequent account, ‘Sailing Alone Around the World’ became a heart-warming classic.

But Slocum’s Spray was really a work-boat for oyster fishing, sloop-rigged, shoal draft, impossibly beamy. The design is not particularly fast, in my opinion, but the boats are roomy below and good for living aboard or extended cruising. The shallow draft is great for going into bays and rivers, but for blue water sailing, experts disagree. Roberts referred to Spray as ‘the ultimate cruising boat’, which is extremely helpful if you are selling Spray-inspired designs; but famed (and controversial) naval historian and architect Howard Chappelle pronounced Spray a horrible boat for going offshore and went so far as to say that the only reason that Slocum and Spray stayed ‘on top’ for so long was because Slocum was an extraordinary mariner.

Some years ago, when I was younger, more idealistic, purist, and clueless, I had the shameless audacity to tell Mr. Roberts-Goodson at a Slocum Society meeting that his ‘Sprays’ were hardly Sprays at all, being designed, some of them, with two masts, hulls made of fiberglass, much longer hulls than Slocum’s 38- LOA Spray and with different cabin layouts, etc., which reddened his face considerably and made his facial hairs twitch. It was wrong of me to be so impertinent, of course. Indeed, the 33-foot Spray that I was now taking upriver – motoring, by the way, into the teeth of a cold northwesterly Autumn blow – had little in common, it seemed at first, with Joshua Slocum’s famous vessel. But then, as I once again felt the sluggish mass of her barn-heavy hull beneath my feet, as Denise and I chugged along, I entertained the possibility that perhaps it had more in common with Slocum’s dredge than I had initially thought.

Two months earlier, my broker friend had first hired me to bring this boat around to the marina when he had purchased it outright from its previous owner. That delivery began on a mooring in the Warren River, a distance of about twelve nautical miles from where she was now tied to the dock, awaiting the next leg of her journey. My son Tom and I brought her around from Warren that first time, and slow going it was. The bottom was foul, and the 3-blade bronze propeller was little more than a barnacle-muffin, essentially; when it spun on its shaft, it generated about as much thrust as a candied apple spinning on its stick.

We motored, we sailed; the day grew hot. We ran out of our shared bottle of water, and grew hungry. Then the wind piped up, and with the big genoa out full, we managed about four knots, going with the help of a 1-knot current. It became an interminable voyage, taking all day, akin to trying to sail a cement barge across a sea of molasses with a handkerchief.

Now, the situation was different. She had been hauled and cleaned and returned to the water. It was late October, with a blustery northwest wind piping up to twenty-five knots and more. There were whitecaps on Mount Hope Bay. It was bright, sunny, and almost cold, and the leaves in the trees along the shore, past foliage peak, were brilliant yellows, reds, and brown, mostly golden.

The boat had been built in the 1970’s or 80’s in England. Heavy and strong, stable and beamy, she also therefore possessed a great deal of inertia. i.e., once she got some way on her, she was going to keep going. I had no trouble getting off the dock and out of the shelter of the breakwater and into the blustery bay, but unlike the original ‘Spray’ of Captain Slocum, this boat was afflicted with a large tiller. I hate tillers on all but small sailboats, where their advantages of precision and quick control are matched by a small boat’s speed and responsiveness. In a large boat they obstruct the cockpit and are tiring for any passage lasting more than an hour or two. No boat greater in length than twenty-five feet ought to be steered with a tiller, and certainly never for offshore passage-making. That is my truly opinionated opinion.

In any event, now underway, we were about to encounter our first and only real obstacle, the Brightman Street Bridge across the Taunton River. This iron drawbridge was built in 1908, the same year that Joshua Slocum disappeared at sea. I do not know whether or not Slocum ever sailed the original Spray up the Taunton River. He might have, although there would have been nothing up there for him to see or do. The bridge is low, and I had known in advance that it would have to open for us. I did my homework beforehand and learned that the bridge keeper monitors VHF Channels 16 and 13. I tried him on both, on my hand-held, as we approached the bridge. No answer. Again. No answer. The tidal current was with us, surging us toward the bridge. Fortunately I had obtained the telephone number for the keeper’s station on the bridge. I gave Denise the number and she called on her cell phone (I was busy managing the stubborn tiller), and he answered the phone. He apologized; he’d had the VHF radio volume turned way down. I silently wondered why. Perhaps so that the occasional crackle would not interrupt the mid-day soap opera on his portable TV, I imagined, or maybe a game show.

He asked Denise, who was still on the phone with him, what the name of our boat was. Denise looked up, squinting. “What’s our boat’s name?” She asked. I thought for a moment. I had not looked at the transom before leaving the dock. “Spray” I replied, which she relayed.

“OK, Spray” he responded, and the bridge began to open.

Later at the dock in Dighton, she looked at the transom as we disembarked, and saw that the name of the boat was the 'Cyndi Jo' or something like that. She was aghast; she had believed that the boat’s name was actually ‘Spray’, and couldn’t believe that she had given a fake name to the bridge operator.

“We had to tell him something” I said, “He only wanted a name so that he could put it into his log. I’m sure that every time he opens that bridge he has to log it.”

She thought it was funny that I had made up the name on the spot, but what else was I to do? “It was all I could think of at the moment” I told her, “And it wasn’t completely a lie anyway.”

Our little trip, with the incoming tide, took us much less time than expected. We sailed past lovely, quaint little Somerset Village, a well-kept secret, and narrowing riverbanks lined with tall, yellowing eelgrass and colorful trees shedding their leaves under a deep sapphire sky.

We had left a car at the destination boatyard in Dighton; so once we had the boat secured to the floating dock, with ample fenders and spring lines set, we reluctantly said good-bye to her. That’s one of the greatest perks of the delivery Captain business; you get a few hours to cruise on someone else’s boat, perhaps on a lovely day, up a river, call it even a ‘fall foliage cruise’, and at the end of it all you not only just walk away, but you get paid for it, too.

Denise had packed a little picnic lunch; a couple of sandwiches, chips and cookies, and a thermos of tea. Two little personal-sized bottles of wine and cups were included for when we finally reached the dock and tied up; we could each have a glass of wine and toast the day, the trip, the Autumn, the bittersweet end of the boating season in New England.

Before we left the yard, I took a few moments to check things out down below, to make sure that the breakers were off, that there was no water in the bilge, nothing unusual going on, while Denise went to the car to wait. It was quiet down below, late afternoon golden sun slanting in through the cabin portlights, ripples lapping dully against the hull, slap-slap of a loose halyard somewhere above. I peered into the darkness at the starboard quarter-berth, and chuckled as I remembered going to a party a week earlier where an old friend of mine, John from Edinburgh, reminded me of my little prank some years earlier when there was a major Joshua Slocum exhibit at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. There had been a half-cabin life-size mock-up of Slocum’s aft cabin on the original Spray, complete with a bookshelf, his Martini-Henry rifle mounted on the bulkhead, and a bunk with a straw-filled mattress, thin, covered with white and blue-striped old-fashioned mattress ticking, in full view. It had been re-created from Slocum’s own drawings and the illustrations in Sailing Alone.

Somehow, I could not help myself; no others besides me and my friends were there, so I ducked under the ropes, ignored the signs, and climbed into the berth, spending a few moments in Joshua Slocum’s bunk, much to their astonishment and amusement. For a moment or two, anyway, that was as close to being Captain Slocum as I would ever get.

Now, as I looked around at this unkempt cabin in need of real sprucing-up, I wished the old girl good fortune, new life, and many safe sea-miles in her future, and luck and perseverance to her new owner, whoever he or she might be. Then it was time, reluctantly, to go.

A Last Good-bye to Captain Slocum

2010-10-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

November 14 of last year was a rainy, gray, dark, leafless, blowy day, the kind of day that makes one want to hoist sail and head south for the winter. It was also the 100th anniversary of the last time that Captain Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail around the world alone, was last seen alive.

It's an odd anniversary because it is the last anniversary of any kind to do with Slocum that falls within the century mark. After this, regardless of the meaninglessness of dates, days or years following one after another, there is the sense that a boundary has been crossed. Slocum is now, I suppose, truly gone, adrift among old books, statistics, and sepia-toned photographs from another age; a certain finality descends on the legend and last mystery of Captain Joshua Slocum. He's as gone as he ever has been since 1909, but somehow, it seems, he and Spray have finally disappeared beyond the horizon.

According to Slocum’s great biographer, Walter Teller, Slocum was declared dead (it took some years for Slocum’s second wife Hettie to get it officially declared – even until 1924) as of November 14, 1909, the day that he officially set sail from Martha’s Vineyard for the last time with the intention of exploring the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. He was never seen or heard from again. He set out in his aging craft in a rising gale, as he had every fall for a few years, headed for the Caribbean and southern waters to avoid, he used to joke, the expense of having to purchase a winter coat. More probably, he didn’t like New England winters or the prospect of being cooped up for months inside in close quarters with Hettie. No doubt Hettie felt the same way about being cooped up with him.

Slocum was 51 years old when he left on his history-making voyage in 1895 – and 51 was not ‘young’ in those days. Some might say that even today it is not especially young. Now, at 53, I can say that Captain Slocum has been part of my life since my childhood; so it was with some odd sense of personal loss that I marked the 100th anniversary of Slocum’s disappearance.

When I was a boy, I read everything that I could get my hands on that was about the sea. This was because I spent so much time on the water with my younger cousin Dan and our grandfather. Grandpa was a boatbuilder, sailor, fisherman, water-man, and a member of Bristol’s little old-Yankee yacht club; he was also semi-retired, so in the summer time, we spent many days down at the Club and out on the bay with Grandpa, putting around in skiffs, fishing, sailing, and getting ourselves suntanned and salt-crusted. We spent more time in those days with Grandpa than without own fathers, at least in the summer when school was out. This was not the fault of our fathers, who were hard-working men putting in long hours to earn a living for their families in the mid-1960s. But Grandpa was a wonderful and patient man who knew all the things that young boys like to do, from building forts in the rocky shoreline to exploring the shores of Hog Island, and he indulged us endlessly in those things while encouraging our imaginations to roam. If a boy is lucky enough to be raised by, or spend a great deal of time with, a grandfather, then he will be blessed by that experience for the rest of his life. So I wanted to grow up to be very much like Grandpa if I could.

The ladies in the Public Library always knew what section and shelves I would be visiting when I came in the door. I made a bee-line for the books about the sea; I discovered the wonderful world of the ‘Vagrant Viking’, Peter Freuchen; I became enthralled by the Bounty trilogy, and the strange allure of the tropics, which, to a New-England boy hiking through winter slush in his galoshes and overcoat, seemed the very vision of Paradise. I eagerly followed the adventures of Robin Lee Graham as he sailed Dove around the world single-handedly, in real time, in 1965. Grandpa and Grandma subscribed to National Geographic, and I followed the older boy’s adventures from month to month; he became a current-day hero to me, someone whose path I could follow, too. Indeed, I once took a world map out of National Geographic, and marked it up, tracing a route in pencil around the world, a voyage that I would make in my imaginary sailboat, Resolution (I had been reading a book about Captain Cook). My mother found the map, and was not impressed. As far as she was concerned, I could do nothing great, and indeed nothing right. Never delicately spoken, she pronounced it a good map, other than the fact that I had drawn it “full of sh_t.”

One day, in elementary school reading class, we were introduced to a new scholastic program designed to encourage us to read. Once a week we would read a folding card that had an excerpt in it from a different famous book, and then we would write answers to essay questions about what we had read. The excerpts were tantalizing, for the most part, and they had been designed to be that way. But on one occasion I read an excerpt that riveted me. It was about a man who, many years ago, had sailed around the world alone, and had been the first to do so; I recognized the name from the Robin Lee Graham’s accounts in National Geographic – Captain Joshua Slocum. But what caught my attention was Slocum’s account of speaking orders to his ‘crew’, and then answering them himself; and how the crew never, of course, had any complaints for the cook! I decided that I had to find that book at the library – ‘Sailing Alone Around the World’. I found it, certainly, and what followed was a lifelong adventure, a one-way friendship if you will, an obsession, a fascination, as I first sailed with Slocum on his boat Spray around the world, and then repeated the adventure, over the years, again and again.

Growing up with Slocum was an interesting experience. You cannot know Slocum in any different a manner than anyone can know a person no longer physically living. On top of that, Slocum was and is, in his literature, a master of controlling just how well he wants us to know him. He pays out slack in that line slowly, in a measured way, always in control. He isn’t stingy, nor is he careless; and now that he is gone, the body of knowledge will never change, and perhaps he is comfortable with that, wherever he is.

But the Slocum persona fascinated me. I grew up with Sailing Alone, and the folklore that goes along with everything Slocum. One wintry Saturday, Grandpa was driving Dan and me down through Tiverton, R.I. and over into Westport, Mass. – lovely farm country down by the sea, a favorite place of Grandpa’s to take us for a drive when we boys were feeling restless on a sleety, cold afternoon and needed to get out of the house. Across a potato-field and pasture, down near the Seapowet marsh, there stood, out in the middle of a cow pasture, a magnificent tall oak tree, with a great trunk – perhaps 150 years old – all by itself, exposed to the gales blowing in off the ocean and the Sakonnet River. “Look” I exclaimed to Grandpa, “There it is – a pasture oak, just like the one Captain Slocum cut Spray’s new keel from.”

Anyone who has read Sailing Alone understands the virtues of the pasture oak ; because it stands alone unprotected by any other trees around it, it grows strong and sinewy, tough and worthy of being cut for a keel. Thus did Captain Slocum’s lore and teaching infuse my life. The tree, by the way, still stands, remarkably; and even now, when I drive down along that route, I think of Slocum; and when I have driven my kids by there, I have explained its significance to them, but I have to speak loudly to get past their ear buds and the sounds that the little electronic music players are blasting into their ears. They give me quizzical looks, and roll their eyes.

I often dreamed of following in Slocum’s wake – as many others have done, since – but always feared that I might not be up to the task. My mother told me that it was impossible – that I could never do it, that I was not mentally stable enough. And who doubts their mother’s word, when they are a youngster? But in the years since then, I have met many solo circumnavigators, which opened my eyes quite a bit; they are a special bunch all right, and I have come to realize that on a solo circumnavigation, total sanity might be a liability, not an asset. Cynics like my mother might point to the example of poor Donald Crowhurst, who went insane and reportedly committed suicide during the Golden Globe around-the-world race. But to those doubters I would say that Captain Crowhurst reportedly left England a sane man; to survive a solo circumnavigation, you have to be a little barmy before you leave, and every solo circumnavigator I have ever met has appeared, to me, to have always marched to a different drummer.

The key, though, as Slocum reminds us, in a strong, clear voice, is knowledge, preparedness, confidence in oneself, and faith in God. A sound ship, of course, is a great help too. But in Sailing Alone, Slocum summarizes, and encourages. His words, over time, blow the fear out of our souls the same way that a brisk, cold northerly wind under a deep sapphire sky on an October morning blows the stagnancy out of the sea air and refreshes the heart and mind:

“To young men contemplating a voyage I would say go…Dangers there are, to be sure…but the intelligence and skill God gives to man reduce these to a minimum…You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.”

Captain Joshua Slocum belongs to another age; but like the endless wash of surf on the shore, Slocum’s story and message of the unconquerable human spirit, and the possibilities inherent in it, is timeless, if not always in vogue with the times. It is about what a man can do, with naught but his knowledge, his faith, his ingenuity and self-reliance; and what we admire most about Slocum is that whatever befalls him, he finds a way to be cheerful about it, or philosophical, or even amused. He never complains or whines. He never sets himself above us, but instead tells us that what he has achieved, we can also achieve, if we will only apply ourselves and rely on our inner strengths. Is it any wonder, then, that Captain Slocum continues to inspire, 100 years later, small-boat solo circumnavigations of the globe? Captain Slocum and Spray have been gone for a century now; but for all true sailors, and young men and women who dream of adventure, he is very much alive; and best of all, he was kind enough to leave us his charts. All we need do is follow.

Sailing Up the Historic Coast to Maine

2010-08-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Sailing to Maine! Anticipation of the trip quickened my pulse, and filled me with childlike eagerness and excitement. Our boat, a J-37 performance cruising sailboat, waited patiently at the dock in Plymouth, Mass., as the orange July sunrise and warm humidity betokened a hot day. But the forecaster’s promise of a brisk westerly wind, the result of the passage of a cool front from the north the night before, would hopefully provide relief.

My 20-year old son Tom and I put our bags aboard as my wife Denise saw us off; she had dropped us off at the marina and would drive the car home. The water was still; gulls circled about; a zephyr from the northwest fanned my cheek. The early morning drive had taken us through the winding streets of old Plymouth, clustered clapboard houses with massive central chimneys, chunked together on either side like a monopoly board that had been jostled. Could there be any place in America more storied, more steeped in the earliest history of this country, than Plymouth’s waterfront? In my mind, our J-37 became a 17th-Century shallop on a dangerous voyage up the sparsely-populated coast. This trip was simply a boat delivery for a broker, but I asked myself, why allow it to be ho-hum? The mind is its own place, as Milton said, and with the help of my imagination, would turn a chore into an adventure; indeed I was determined that it would.

The sloop’s little Volvo diesel grumbled to life; we cast off, and eased her into the fairway and through the mooring field. The wind came up fresh and strong out of the northwest as we followed an eager lobsterman out through Plymouth’s winding channel and past the Gurnet. Flat, shallow, inviting Duxbury Bay stretched away inside the shelter of the Gurnet, to the north. I made a mental note to explore it, someday. In addition to my own notebook computer (hastily jump-wired into the radio circuit) with GPS and chart plotter, I also carried with me my dog-eared 1902 copy of Samuel Adams Drake’s ‘New England Legends and Folk Lore’, long a favorite. For I was thinking that this voyage, which in the end would take 18 tiring hours, passes by some of the most historic and legendary territory of the coast of New England, involving the coastlines of three states, and everything from the earliest settlements to battlegrounds to pirate lairs of old, landmarks and treacherous shoals are described and recounted in Drake’s wonderful book.

I eagerly anticipated the promised west wind, but it never came. Instead, it blew stiffly, and occasionally unreliably, directly out of the Northwest. That made our trip a windward beat the entire way – a single port tack for nearly 100 miles. Sometimes it was wet, as the boat’s dodger had not been rigged. But it was exciting work, with whitecaps blowing across Massachusetts Bay for most of the morning, the tiny bluish skyline of Boston visible off the port beam, and in sight for hours on end as we clawed our way toward distant, unseen Cape Ann.

This is a coastline I have traveled many times by Interstate 95, and have sailed out of at various points, but now I was connecting the dots. Blue sea, blue sky; the high land of the South Shore – Ocean Bluff, Scituate – remained visible for hours as we crossed Massachusetts Bay far out, and didn’t disappear until we were quite near Gloucester. The strong wind filled our boat’s big tawny Kevlar main. We rolled out the 130 Genoa only halfway, and that was plenty, for the lee rail was spending as much time underwater as the keel was. But it was glorious sailing! I thought of how, in the 17th Century, no Boston skyline would have been visible from here. In the distance I spied Boston Light, and the big white wind turbine at Pemberton Point in Hull.

We never went in close enough to follow the curve of the coastline under Cape Ann; to see once-strange Marblehead, where fisherman Philip Ashton became, for some time, a captive pressed member of a pirate crew in 1722; the strange origins of the tale of Skipper Ireson, tarred and feathered and immortalized by Whittier; but soon we were in sight of rocky, forbidding Thacher’s island with its twin stone lighthouses. Strong currents swirl around that place, the very outermost part of Cape Ann, and on this day we were stemming a strong current flowing from the north. Thacher’s is named for poor Anthony Thacher, who was shipwrecked on the island with his family in August 1635 by a hurricane, and was forced to survive there for some time, eventually escaping back to the mainland, but at the loss of most of his family during the ordeal.

As a sailing friend of mine recently commented that when sailing the coast north, after Gloucester Harbor, “You’re going to Maine”, meaning, quite accurately, that there is virtually no easy place to tuck into for the night until one reaches Portland. The Merrimack River has a vicious current; I know that this is so, since I once lived in Newburyport Mass, along its banks. Anchoring is discouraged, and there are few piers or dockage facilities for transients. The same is true, I am told, for Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the Piscataqua River. Well certainly there are a few harbors and rivers, usually shallow, narrow, lined with sandbars and shoals (such as the Hampton River), and York Harbor, Maine, seems pleasant but small, and you had better know your way in and around.

We sailed past the distant, bluish, undulating hills of the North Shore, Ipswich, Newbury, and further, and I remember how lovely the ancient land looked from the sea. Since major topography doesn’t change much in 300 years, I imagined that my view was not much different from what the captain of my imaginary shallop might have seen on his way up the coast. Here, he would know that there were settlements ashore, if he had need to take his vessel to land; but the further north he went, to Maine, the more likely the shore dwellers would be native peoples, and not necessarily friendly to stranded Englishmen.

Catching a glimpse of a familiar landmark is always a comfort. It lets one know, with some accuracy, one’s approximate location, and that you are making progress toward your destination. Otherwise all you have to go by is your chart and the boat’s apparent wake.

It took forever, like losing the Boston skyline, to put Thacher’s over the horizon. We sailed past the starkly beautiful Isles of Shoals – no protection or anchorage there – a rumored hiding place for pirate treasure, a place where a number of silver bars were discovered in the 19th Century by a land-owner who reportedly used the proceeds to construct a needed breakwater.

I saw the unmistakable arched I-95 highway bridge over the Piscataqua, the high bridge that connects Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine, and this cheered me. Mount Agamenticus loomed ahead, surrounded by piney green; full-sized sailboats with sails seemingly the size of tiny white butterfly wings skimmed and passed to and fro across the surface, in slow motion, miles distant. We would see Agamenticus for hours yet, only losing sight of it near dusk as we approached Kennebunkport. In Adams’ book, Agamenticus is a great landmark, the Sailor’s Mountain, visible for sixty miles in either direction up and down the coast. The Native peoples considered it a sacred place, he relates, and folklorists have woven the “Indian legend of Saint Aspenquid, whom some writers have identified with the patriarch Passaconaway” around it. Passaconaway was the great Sachem who lived to a very advanced age, and who sadly foretold the demise of the Native peoples in the face of European expansion in New England.

We sailed onward past Point Neddick, past The Nubble as the sun was sinking low in the sky; looked out at distant, lonely Boon Island, where ten of the poor shipwrecked sailors of the merchant ship Nottingham Galley were stranded for twenty-four days in the wintry months of 1710, resorting to cannibalism before they were finally rescued. Along this coast, I was amazed at the tens of thousands of lobster buoys everywhere – perhaps more pots and buoys than lobsters – stretching on for miles and endless miles. The sunset was flaming, wildly beautiful; and to the east, a three-quarters moon rose out of a pinkish luminous haze above the horizon. The wind died at dusk, off Cape Porpoise; thereafter we motored over calm seas under a brightening orb.

The most brilliantly-lit part of the entire coast was Old Orchard Beach. We watched fireworks burst in the distant sky above the town, and it seemed, miles away, to be an island of celebration and frivolity amidst the deepening darkness of the coast.

In time, we rounded Cape Elizabeth, and began heading up toward Hussey Sound; our goal was a marina in Falmouth. The cool, clammy-sweet scent of the deep left us, replaced by the complex, warmer scent of the land, borne on the gentle night-currents of air still floating down from the west. Islands now surrounded us everywhere, and blinking lights of all colors mounted on channel markers, ledges and shoals made it a potentially confusing situation, but I had done my homework. Strange birds made odd calls and sounds in the trees on the many wooded islets and peninsulas that we passed. I caught the scent of flowers, and honeysuckle, mingled with the incense-like aroma of wood fires, from cottage fireplaces and camps.

Finally, at one-thirty in the morning, we gently edged up to the dock, secured our vessel, and in the cool stillness of the Maine night, turned in for a well-earned, bone-weary rest and sleep.

In the bright morning, I looked around at the beautiful scenery, and was told that these were the ‘Calendar Islands’, so named because there is an island for every day in the calendar; and I secretly promised myself that I must, unquestionably, return soon in my own boat and explore this wonderful Maine coast which, I suddenly realized, I could never live long enough to grow weary of exploring.

What Today’s Grass-roots Movement Has in Common with the American Revolution

2010-05-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

In one of the final episodes of HBO’s much-beloved John Adams biographical mini-series, the elderly Adams is asked to view a recently-completed painting by famed colonial artist John Trumbull, titled “The Declaration of Independence”. It’s the same image that we see reproduced on the back of a two-dollar bill today. In the painting, the members of the Continental Congress are seating in orderly fashion, legs crossed, in line, while those standing seem engrossed in grave consideration of the act of affixing their signatures to the great document, each waiting to take his turn at the inkwell. In the film, Adams takes one look at the painting, snorts, and, in a huff, dismisses it as a shallow, superficial ‘shin piece.’ He rather insults Trumbull, and bemoans that “No one will ever understand our Revolution.”

Adams certainly meant that Trumbull did not. History has recorded that the Declaration was not signed by all the delegates, or even by very many of them at all on July 4, 1776. Adams saw that this painting, created nearly fifty years after the actual signing, had already softened and idealized the event, in much the way our memories selectively sort out the unpleasant over time. There was too much of a halo; Adams was a realist, he remembered the contentious birth of the Declaration, and did not want posterity to forget the truth or the raw emotion of our Revolution. Our freedom was not bought easily, nor was the transition to an independent nation a smooth one. History, according to Adams, is always a messy thing, neither neat nor lovely. He looked at this largely symbolic painting, with the figures in it more akin to classical Gods than ordinary men, and despaired. It was an idealistic misrepresentation, if a well-meaning one.

Adams could see that people no longer felt or understood the passions that Americans of his generation had known and died for. Imagine what motivation it must have taken young soldiers at Valley Forge in the terrible winter of 1777-78, with no food, few supplies, and little or no pay, to stay on and fight under deplorable conditions. What manner of ideals can be so powerful as to motivate men to die for them? And to do this while knowing that they themselves would probably not live to see or experience the blessings and benefits of their struggles, but they were willing to die believing that their children and posterity might.

What we all must remember is that the generation that paid the highest price for our Liberty was comprised of flesh and blood people who were, in essence, no different from Americans today. All across America right now, common folk are rising up, speaking up, rallying around the Constitution, around the flag, and around the sacred ideals upon which this nation was founded. These are not the malcontents of the sixties, the anti-establishment free-love hippies who have for so long been the iconic folk-image of protest and dissent in America. The 60’s radicals were people whose freedoms and liberties were not in danger, and who often sought to use their right to dissent in an attempt to tear down the fabric of the very structure that protected them. But we have seen this time, and again. The only people who cherish their liberties are ultimately those who have come to the realization that they are about to lose them.

Today’s concerned citizens who have joined the growing grass-roots movement across this nation have little in common with the anti-establishment radicals of the sixties. Amusingly, today’s Liberals think that they are America’s only true dissenters – as though their participation in anti-American demonstrations decades ago was somehow noble, exalting, and that it made dissent in America their own province and possession. In the Leftist media, they ridicule today’s grass-roots movement, inventing lies about us, insulting us, seeking to discredit and demean us. But this only proves the old saying that the more things change, the more they remain the same. They hated all that was good in America back then, and they still hate it today with an unparalleled malevolence and moral depravity that increasingly inspires revulsion among good and patriotic Americans.

But we the people are people who love our country, who cherish our rights, and who recognize with absolute clarity and vision the dangers facing our nation, our way of life and standard of living, our economy, our Constitution, and ultimately the stability of our republic. These threats have come from irresponsible and ulterior-minded radicals currently holding sway in the highest offices of American government. These arrogant and corrupt activists seek to tear down and re-make the fabric of America for selfish gain, in accordance with foreign principles and alien ideals that are the antithesis of the educated, representative self-government that is the legacy of our Founders. These schemers’ greatest allies, here on our native soil, are apathy, lack of will, lack of knowledge and awareness, and gullibility. We must deny them the aid and comfort that they seek from these sources. As Jefferson said, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Even recent history has shown us ample, bloody proof of the truth of this maxim, many times over.

Today’s grass-roots groups of concerned citizens, such as East Bay Patriots, who do such things as to demand fiscal responsibility from irresponsible, reckless State and Federal governments, are much like the common folk of 1775. Not like the Minutemen on Lexington Green – at least not yet – but more like the people who gathered in the taverns to debate and in the churches to sing ‘Chester’ and pray to God for strength. These were people who would rather have kept to their farms than become active in a dangerous revolt; but they knew that their freedoms were at stake, and recognizing the precious value thereof, they made terrible sacrifices to preserve them, and to win them back from the military minions of a tyrant king an ocean away. They turned away from the false comfort of doing nothing, of looking the other way; as Ben Franklin said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". They also knew that the road to true security and independence ran through such places as Lexington, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Yorktown, and not around them. They were not willing to surrender or compromise their rights or ideals; nor did they; and out of that cauldron of blood that was our Revolution came the germ of our Constitution and all that we hold dear.

Thomas Jefferson realized, perhaps more than any of his peers, that the greatest threat to our liberties might not come from a foreign power, but from within our own country, and he reminds us in numerous writings that we must be ready, unflinchingly, to oppose such threats even when they come from elements on our own soil or from within our own government.

A month ago, at the first meeting of the East Bay Patriots Bristol gathering, an expected crowd of twenty-five became a crowd of nearly one hundred. A look across the room revealed a cross-section of the community, of many people – nearly half – who had never attended such a meeting before, who never probably thought that they would need to, who never felt such motivation, and in my own lifetime, not a long life yet but some years accumulated, I have never seen the likes of it, and would never have expected to see it, being of a cynical mind, more or less; more expecting, and more accustomed to, public apathy rather than patriotic idealism. When I was growing up during the 1970’s, patriotism was ‘un-cool’; the flag was ‘un-cool’. For a long time I felt isolated and alone in my love of my country and appreciation for its wonderful system. I wasn’t alone, but few of us in my generation were willing to speak up about how we felt for fear of being ostracized by other kids. Now that has all changed, and I am glad that I have lived to see this day, this sea-change in the America around me. I am anything but alone, and it gives me heart.

Perhaps, now, John Adams, in Heaven, can smile; for just as a spark, flying from the hoofs of Paul Revere’s steed kindled the dry tinder of the Lexington countryside ablaze with ‘a cry of defiance, and not of fear’ as Longfellow wrote, so also do we see the growing flames of resurgent idealism and awareness of a people who see the precious gift that they have been entrusted with being whittled away by selfish and unprincipled men who presume to govern not by the just consent of the governed, but by their own private and dangerous ambitions. Maybe we feel it, now; maybe we are beginning to understand John Adams’ Revolution, and the sentiments and energies of the generation that paid for it. The wolf is at the door; our liberties and our Constitution are like the ‘pearl of great price’ in the Gospel of Matthew; worth sacrificing all we have, not to purchase it, but rather to keep it.

The ancient Celts and peoples of the British Isles likened life to the passing of a swallow through a brightly-lit banquet hall at night. It emerges from the darkness, into the feasting and celebrating in the hall, and then passes out of the hall once again into darkness. Likewise, for us, the dead are dead; and the future has not yet arrived. Those of us, who are alive at this point in time, are the only holders of the lamp, because those who came before are no more, and those who will come into the world are not here yet. In a hundred thousand years of human history, we are nonetheless utterly on our own, the stewards and the keepers of the legacy and gifts of the Founders, which in themselves give us ample guidance. Each generation has its duty not to fail, for the consequences are too awful to countenance.

This, after all, is why many common Americans have gathered in various venues around the country, among other reasons, to stop the reckless assignment of a terrible burden of economic slavery onto our children and grandchildren, and even beyond. And make no mistake; in seeking to destroy our liberties and take control of our lives, those trying to establish control over us and future generations have adopted a scheme as evil and malevolent as anything ever devised by Hitler, Stalin, or Mao; economic slavery is as true a form of slavery as ever was characterized by shackles and the lash. Once we no longer have the luxury of time or resources to organize and effect change within our society, when we are too busy trying to feed ourselves, keep warm, and support the crushing taxes, fines, assessments, penalties, fees, and sanctions that are the foot-soldiers of economic oppression, then our remaining rights will be stripped away with remarkable speed, and will not be restored but at terrible cost.

I can almost hear the voice of John Adams ringing across the years, calling upon us to understand their Revolution – indeed, our revolution - what it cost them, what they gave us, and why we must never fail to protect our freedoms and the foundations of this great nation and its unique and universally-envied system of self-government:

"Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it."

Michael L. Martel

Part 4: A Full Gale, and Not a Wink

2010-01-31T09:54:00.001-08:00

Part 4

It seemed as though I had been asleep for only an instant, when all Hell broke loose. I awoke to the sound of terrible wind – blowing a full gale – that had apparently descended upon the harbor like a thunderbolt. It came right out of the North – dead North – the only point of the compass from which Brenton Cove, the place where we were moored, was not superbly protected. Now, winds of forty knots or more were funneling down the bay right into the cove. The boat was actually swinging on her mooring, and at times heeling, first to port, then starboard; seas kicked up in the cove – real seas – and she began plunging and pitching on her mooring. Loose halyards rang and clanged angrily against the aluminum mast. They were high up on the mast and there was little that could be done in the darkness and madly rocking and gyrating boat. I was used to the sound, in some ways, even though I hated it, because at the time I owned a fiberglass loop with an aluminum mast. And while an aluminum mast is an excellent support for modern rigging, it is also a wonderfully efficient transmitter of sound, and the standing part of the mast that bisected the cabin, from the overhead to the cabin sole, was a perfect loudspeaker, bringing the horrendous cacophony of all that was amiss in the 40-odd feet of vertical darkness above into the main cabin in high-fidelity.

The three men were worried; I went topside, held on, and inspected the boat in the darkness as truly cold wind buffeted me. All was in order, despite the awful conditions; the mooring painter was well secured and wrapped in chafing gear. There was nothing to do but ride it out. I went below. The wind blew stronger. I lay back down. The guys could not sleep, though. Tony was worried that we might sink. At one point, even George went up into the cockpit. He thought we had broken loose from the mooring. The clanging of halyards whipping about against the mast – and the humming of the wind in the standing rigging, the stays – was loud and constant. But I drifted back off to sleep. At one point, after a particularly jolting lurch, I awakened somewhat, though not completely, and realized that if the boat should break free, she would be ashore, on the sandy beach to leeward, in moments; there was nothing to be done, the shore was too close, the harbor too crowded in the dark to try to maneuver, and the storm too furious. No one would die. The boat, on top of that, was insured. She would probably only sustain cosmetic damage from the beach if she did not swipe anyone else on her way to the steep shoreline. I went back to sleep, because I had ridden out an even worse blow once on an anchor in my old wooden yawl in Vineyard Haven. We were on a secure mooring and were going nowhere. But that did not help these three fellows get back to sleep; they were certain that we were doomed.

In the morning, the wind was still blowing briskly, but it had moderated greatly. I was a bit groggy for not having slept a solid night, but I had slept nonetheless, and I yearned for a hot cup of strong black coffee to awaken body and mind. I emerged into the cockpit to greet a cool, breezy day, much cooler than the day before, but bright, clear, and blue with a solid North wind. It would be a good autumn sailing day, I thought. The front blew through during the night and would blow out by late afternoon, possibly becoming calm and even perhaps shifting around to the Southwest, as the forecaster was predicting. My three jolly tars were slow to get going, though; Tony took awhile to get the coffee on, and then only I really wanted any. I realized that, quite possibly, none of them had slept a wink.

But today was a different day, especially for me. The trepidation of the day before was gone; I had sailed this boat for a full day, knew how she behaved in blustery airs, and felt a new confidence in myself and my ability to handle her. The three guys sat in the cockpit, leaning forward toward the center, hang-dog, groggy, quiet. “Well gentlemen,” I piped brightly, feeling a bit jaunty, “What adventures are in store for today? Where can I take you?”

George looked up at me, wincing at the brightness of the sun reflecting off the water, and asked, “Can we just stay right here?”

I was quietly aghast; oh my, oh no, this wouldn’t do, I reflected. They had paid a price for this charter, I had seen the articles when I signed my page of the contract before we left, and there were still more than 24 hours on the clock. They had to get their money’s worth, I thought. Good and hard.

“Oh goodness, you certainly don’t want to stay here all day. After all, I did promise to take you offshore today. Upper bay yesterday, out Block Island way today! Now we had best get underway.” I turned the key and the diesel engine rumbled to life, puffing white smoke out astern.

There wasn’t much breakfast – Tony sent up some fruit (again) and bread. We rounded Fort Adams and began our trip out into the sound, past Castle Hill on our port, past distant Beavertail Light on our starboard. It was a truly sparkly day with a good breeze, and once again I rolled out the big Genoa, but there was no talk this time about raising the mainsail, or trying to ‘lay her over’ to get the lee rail awash. In fact, later, as the wind moderated to a gentle breeze, I offered to raise the main, but George said, “No, I think we are just fine, no need to do that, really.”

As I put Point Judith abaft the starboard beam late morning, and all the open Sound lay before us with Block Island clearly visible in the distance, George turned to me and, seeing the bulk of the mainland recede into the distance astern, said, “Hey Mike, there is nothing to see out here. Shouldn’t we go someplace where we can see things?” I understood his meaning immediately. So I played along to save face for him.

“Well, you’re right, George, and we’re still a long way from Block Island. But back there, you can see all the great mansions lining the Newport coastline – is that more what you had in mind? Do you want me to take us back to the coast for a water-view of the mansions?”

“Yes, yes!” He replied, “That’s a great idea, let’s do that!” So I brought the boat about and headed back toward the mainland, where George would be happy and feel, perhaps, a little more secure. When we were only a couple of miles off the land, the wind moderated even more. The airs were light, now, and the seas relatively calm. I invited Tony to take the wheel.

The previous day, George had steered for awhile, and he was a fair helmsman, but did not want to do his ‘trick’ at the wheel for very long. Dick could also steer, not terribly well (as he was used to a little tiller), but he caught on fast. Tony, though, was another matter. It wasn’t as though he were unfamiliar with sailing, no; it was as if he were blind, blind as a clam. At times we would be going ninety degrees off course, and he seemed not to know the difference, even though the land was plainly in sight for a reference. The rest of the time, our wake looked like a meandering river, reminding me of the old Coast Guard Chief who, on my first time at the helm of our ship, had drawled, “Son, there’s a (unprintable) snake following this ship.” But he did not want to relinquish the helm, and Dick and George were quite happy to let him do his worst as they looked on in poker-faced amusement. The meanest thing I would allow myself to say, after correcting his awful steering multiple times, was to cheerfully observe that “It’s a good thing that we’re out here in open water; it’s good place to learn to steer because there’s nothing to hit.”

Finally it was time for Tony to go below and make sandwiches; it was early afternoon, and George said, “Mike, let’s head back in now.” So I started the motor again, furled the Genoa, and we began heading back toward Newport Harbor.

Now, the gentlemen seemed to wake up; they became chatty, happy, animated. They were going home to their hot showers, beds, families, and familiar comforts. They had an hour and a half drive to their homes north of Boston; they would survive that. As soon as we tied up to the dock to unload, they had already packed up all their gear and goods; they paid me, tipped me, and complimented me so kindly and generously that I was, for a few moments, quite sorry to see them go. But I have never seen folks get off a boat so quickly. You’d think that it had been on fire, or that they were rats deserting a sinking ship, although we were hardly sinking by any stretch. Even George was a chubby bundle of perspiring energy, trundling his own overstuffed Pullman bag up the noisy aluminum ramp in double-time, wheels grumbling across the uneven planks of the dock; and then they were gone, a miniature motorcade in a hurry, like JFK headed for Parkland Hospital. I phoned Kiwi Dave; he was across the harbor at the Newport Boat Show, which just happened to be going on that weekend; he would be over in a little while to check the boat over and release me.

For the first time that weekend, the boat was quiet and, oddly, empty. I felt alone. Tony had left me an entire box of nice multigrain breads, an assortment of premium quality fresh fruit, and a few other items; but of course they had taken all of the wine and beer that was left over. But I was happy with the fruit and bread, it was a bonus. Finally Kiwi Dave showed up, and took a few minutes to make sure that all was in order aboard Sea Adventure.

“Well,” he said, “You’re released, no need to keep you around now that they have gone home.”

“That’s swell” I said. “My wife and I were invited to a dinner party this evening at the home of some friends of ours. I was disappointed that I would not be able to go, that she would have to go without me, but now I can. I even have some nice bread and fruit to bring. I guess they didn’t want to bother hauling it back.”

“They took all their booze, eh?” He laughed.

“Sure, but they tipped me nicely, no issue there.”

“Good enough. Any idea why they ended the charter early?”

“Well, I don’t think they got much sleep last night with the wind storm. I don’t think any of them are used to sleeping in a rocking bed with a horrendous lot of noise going on.”

He started to grin, and let out a low, evil, knowing laugh. “But I did take them for two good days of sailing” I offered.

“Did you leave them good and tired, worn out?”

“Oh absolutely” I said. “Although if they had slept last night, we might still be out there right now.”

He was grinning. “That’s the whole point, you know. Get them good and tired, any way you can, bushed, worn out. That way they feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth.”

Part 3: A Rollicking Good Time

2010-01-31T09:36:00.000-08:00

Part 3

We prepared to leave the dock; just before we shoved off, David took me aside; “Good show, talking them out of the Block Island thing. Have a safe time and really wear them out.” I was not especially clear about what he meant by this, but there was no time to ask for clarification.

The wind had piped up smartly now out of the Northwest. When we left Newport harbor, there were whitecaps on the bay and the wind was blowing around twenty to twenty-five knots. The men were seated in the ample cockpit, grinning, excited, anxious for a good time, and jaunty. George shouted something to the other two about some prior adventure down in the Caribbean where it had been blowing and the skipper “had laid her right over.” At that moment a dark cloud blew over and obscured the sun; the waters turned steel-gray. “Hey Mike, let’s take this thing out and lay her right over, ha, ha” George said. “Put up all the sails!” He was making me nervous. I was steering. There were a number of large sailing vessels, including two day-charter schooners, tacking back and forth through the choppy waters of this congested passage between Newport and Jamestown; it was a moving obstacle course. A powerful gust slewed the bow of Sea Adventure off course even though we were motoring.

The boat had two sails – the main, which could not be reefed, and a roller-furling Genoa, a big foresail like an oversized jib. It would provide plenty of thrust in this wind, and be easy to control and reduce in size, on my own if I had to. “We’re just going to fly the jenny for now” I told George. “Tony, want to help? Those lines over there.”

Tony looked perplexed; Dick, seeing this, went over to the winch, grabbed the handle out of pocket; he knew what to do. I directed George to the furling halyard; “Release that slowly and in a controlled manner when I tell you” I said. George looked a little disappointed. “If it’s not enough, George, we can hoist the main as well, but let’s run with just the jenny first and see how she does” I said, sensing his disappointment. As he stood up, George whacked his head on the outer support brace of the cockpit’s dodger. It was too low. He glared at it. “Why is that so low, like that?” he complained, rubbing his head.

The big 140 Genoa rolled out, filled with wind, and Sea Adventure sprang to life, leaned into it, accelerated, and took off like a shot across the water, gradually hardening up to beat to windward up Narragansett Bay. “Where are we going?” George asked. “I thought we were going to Block Island for the day.”

“With these winds there will be six-foot seas out there, it’s all the way downwind, and then we will have to beat against them for more than twenty miles just to get back here” I replied. “You won’t get back here until very late, well past dinner time, if you even want to eat by then. Today we stay in the bay; I will give you the Grand Tour. Tomorrow, with the winds predicted to back around to the southwest, I will take you out there, and we will sail home with the wind behind us, a comfortable run home.” George had a skeptical look on his face. At that moment there was a big gust of wind and I deliberately bore away to leeward so that the puff caught the jenny full and laid the boat right over so that the rail was awash. The men quickly grabbed onto anything fixed so that they would not end up in a pile on the lee lifelines, but then roared with delight; they loved it, and George, momentarily startled, nodded his head in agreement, since he had been on the windward side of the cockpit and had to grab hold of a winch very quickly. “Stay in the bay, then, this is good” he acknowledged. I knew then that I had what I wanted, but had it good and hard.

The sun came out again, and we enjoyed a great sail up the bay toward Providence. I played the role of tour guide, pointing out the many geographical sites and sights, Warwick Light, the Aldrich Mansion, islands and the like, until early afternoon, when we rounded the north end of Prudence Island, Providence Point, and turned south to return to Newport. Even though it was later in the afternoon, they wanted to stop for lunch, so we went into the now-empty Potter’s Cove on the east side of Prudence Island, picked up a mooring, and lighted the gas grill that was mounted on the stern rail.

It was a beautiful afternoon. The clarity of the air was remarkable; dry and cool, and as my pilot friend Joe says, ‘clear in a million’. The tall grasses along the shore of the cove were yellowing from summer’s green, a sure sign of fall. The wind only darkened the surface of the cove as williwaws, coming over the island from the west, descended and made cat’s paws on its sheltered surface. Dick grilled steaks, Tony made a great salad, and George opened a bottle of Tony’s red wine. We raised the cockpit table and ate, for George had graciously invited me to sit with them. We toasted the weekend, and then as the sundry table items were cleared to the galley below, we cast off and sailed for Newport, with the now-westerly wind abeam or on a close reach. Clearing the southern tip of Prudence Island, we now felt the wind strongly anew; spray from the choppy waters danced aboard and shamelessly splashed the dodger. Near sunset we were at the entrance to the harbor; we furled up the Genoa, started the engine, and with the light that was left, I took them for a slow circumnavigation of crowded, colorful Newport harbor before going to the mooring that Kiwi Dave had told me was available.

In a little while, just around dark, the men emerged from the cabin down below, now dressed in their business suits, ready to go ashore for dinner. I thought the change of clothes odd; they were, after all, staying on a boat for the weekend, and in Newport, during the yachting season, one need not wear a suit to dine in most places because, after all, one has been yachting. In fact, if you’re dressed in a suit, it’s a sure sign that you haven’t been out boating at all, unless it has been on one of those mega-yachts where the closest one gets to salt water is a distant view through tinted mega-windows, where one is so far removed from the weather and the sea that there is no need for boating attire at all. You’re not really boating, after all if instead of wiggling your toes in the chilly water of a drenched cockpit, you’re wiggling them in a plush deep-pile dry carpet.

I helped them board the inflatable runabout, started up the engine, and dutifully motored them in to the dock, near their cars. “Call my cell phone when you get back” I said, “And I’ll be here to pick you up. Do you know, ballpark, when you might be back here?”

“Oh, we won’t be late” George said.

“That’s good,” I said, “because the weather radio says that a front is going to come through tonight with a lot of wind, later. I wouldn’t want to be trying to run a dinghy around in the dark once that pipes up.”

“Oh, but we are very sheltered in here, yes?”

“I hope so.”

I had seen a dark band of clouds, very high up in the atmosphere, to the Northwest, stretching from horizon to horizon, just as the sun was setting. A powerful cold front was forecast to roll through late that evening, bringing with it high winds. From the look of the sky, some weather was definitely on the way. I just hoped that my intrepid jaunty yachtsmen would be back before the fun started. Then I thought how fortunate we were to be on a mooring that night rather than riding on an anchor in Block Island’s lonely exposed harbor.

But now there was nothing to do. Properly, I should remain with the boat. But after all, it was on its owner’s mooring. There was no dinner, and I dare not rifle through my guests’ goods to furnish myself; I had no idea what meal-planning Tony had done, and I did not want to arouse his wrath by eating something that he might have plans for, a choice morsel intended for someone’s gullet other than mine. Yet, I was hungry; and my pickup truck was sitting patiently parked on the pier. So I motored over to the dock, secured the dinghy, and drove into Newport to my favorite Irish pub in the town for a generous portion of fish and chips, a pint of Guinness, and an hour of football on the big TV above the bar.

I had been back to the boat nearly an hour when my phone jingled. Somehow I knew that they were coming, and had already begun motoring toward the dock when I saw the bluish headlights of George’s BMW winding down the long dark road to the pier. I was waiting for them, and helped them aboard, all three of them happy, laughing, and reeking of Martinis and red wine. Luckily, I got them aboard without anyone falling into the water. My long association with boats, bars, booze, and benumbed sailing buddies had prepared me well for this job, I thought. Dick and Tony stumbled below after jolly good-nights, but George wanted to sit up in the cockpit for awhile to talk. He was pleasantly, happily mellowed by the drink, and talkative; he looked up at the clear, star-studded sky and spoke about his boyhood in Greece, growing up in a village right on the shores of the Aegean, a village so poor that there was no electricity, so there were no streetlights at night and the stars were bright and beautiful. I began to truly appreciate this man of poetic instinct, and was sorry when he finally went below to turn in. I stayed up for awhile and then retired below.

Sea Adventure had a large ‘owner’s cabin’ aft under the cockpit, the most luxurious in the craft, essentially a queen-size bed, and this was George’s private cabin. Dick, the eldest, got the Vee-berth up forward, also private, usually referred to as the guest cabin. That left two curved settees on either side of the main cabin’s folding dinette table. Tony of course took the larger one, intended to serve as a single berth in a pinch; I got the settee that was designed to be a settee and not a bed and was not very large nor wide nor really intended to be slept on, but I made the best of it, after all they were paying me, but I felt, as I threw a blanket over myself, like a servant rather than a Captain, but there was no other option, really. It was not my ship, it was theirs. But at least they had Tony to clean up the dishes, make the sandwiches, and fetch the liquor. I suppressed evil thoughts of resentment, and soon fell asleep.

Next - Part 4: A Full Gale, and Not a Wink

Part 2: A REAL Charter!

2010-01-31T09:08:00.001-08:00

Part 2: A REAL Charter!

But if I thought that was a lucky break, an even greater opportunity was in store. A lady captain friend, Dana, working long hours on a bay rescue and tow boat patrol, called me a couple of weeks later, really ‘out of the blue’, saying that she had been asked to skipper a weekend sailing charter on the next Saturday out of Newport, but was simply too busy, and would I be willing to do it? I was excited, and delighted; why of course I would!

“Three businessmen want to go sailing for a 48-hour charter, it begins Friday morning” Captain Dana said. “The boat will be at the dock at Fort Adams, waiting for them and for you. So will the owner of the boat, the charter company that they have contracted with. None of them are sailors, so it’s up to you. They want to go overnight to Block Island.”

“Block Island?”

“Friday night. They want to go out to dinner, you know, a business meeting sort of thing.”

I thanked Dana, but my heart sank. It was now off-season, late in the year and the weather in New England can be quickly changeable offshore, and can make for rough going. Also, the only restaurants that would be open would be those in the village at Old Harbor, on the east side of the island – a good mile or more walk from the New Harbor anchorage on the west side, down dark roads, unless taxis were still in service. Block Island essentially shuts down after Labor Day; launch service stops for the most part, shoreside restaurants in New Harbor are shuttered. We would be fairly alone in a large, cold, dark, windy harbor, at night, a long way from the warmly lighted glow of the National hotel and other hospitality on the Old Harbor waterfront.

“They also want to spent Friday and Saturday night at the island, come back on Sunday. The charter is forty-eight hours; it begins at 10a.m. on Friday and ends at 10 a.m. on Sunday, with the boat back at the Newport dock” Dana said.

“Well then there is no way that they can spend Saturday night at Block Island” I said, “because it takes four to five hours, depending on the wind, to get back to Newport from the island. We would have to leave on Saturday night or Sunday morning in the wee hours to be back by ten a.m., and I have no idea what conditions will be like.”

“Oh, believe, me, I know” she answered, “but that’s something that you’re going to have to work out with them.” It was obvious to me that the fellows who were planning to go sailing didn’t really have any idea of the time and distance considerations involved, particularly the vagaries of planning a sailing weekend. With a sailboat, you plan a route, you plan destinations, but you do not plan a rigid schedule, since that is largely unpredictable due to variations in weather, winds, and currents. One may sail downwind from point A to point B with the wind behind, at a steady pace, and arrive at B in X number of hours. But if the wind is from ahead and you must beat to windward in a zig-zag course to reach B, you can almost double your time, X, or worse if the current or tide has turned against you, and winds are light. Then it’s time to kick in the motor if you have one. But your schedule will still be different.

Now in simplest terms, people who want to charter a boat for a weekend simply contact a charter company – one that owns a number of boats in a certain area – and leases them out for the weekend. If the people chartering the boat are not good sailors, or familiar with the waters to be sailed, the charter company will put a licensed captain aboard, at extra cost to the charter customers, and also to satisfy the boat’s insurance company. So I was soon talking to David, the owner of ‘Sea Adventure’ charters, and also the office manager, Doreen, at the company where the three gentlemen worked. I explained to her that in the off season, two nights in Block Island might turn out to be unpleasant, and besides, there was no way that I could have the boat back in Newport on Sunday morning if they spent Saturday night out there. They could pay extra for extra time, but they did not want to do that.

It was soon agreed that instead of such an impossible itinerary, we would spend two days sailing around the bay and in Rhode Island Sound, and that the gentlemen could instead go to dinner in Newport, which abounds in fine restaurants and is easily accessible. I said to Doreen, “The gentlemen will have their cars right on the pier at Fort Adams; we can stay on a mooring nearby that’s owned by the charter company. I’ll bring them in to the dock in the dinghy after a day of sailing, and they can simply drive into town, not a mile distant, to a leisurely dinner. Then I’ll pick them up at the dock when they return and bring them back out to the boat. On top of that, I will take them out for two full, glorious days of sailing in perfect fall weather, as has been predicted.” Doreen felt this was a swell idea, and all parties agreed on the more prudent ‘float plan’ that I had suggested.

Down at the dock, it was a rather windy day, with frequent cool gusts out of the Northwest. The sun was still strong, and the sky as blue and clear and deep as one could possibly wish. It was going to be a beautiful mid-October day. I met David down at the dock; he was a tall, friendly New Zealander with a neat Kiwi accent, which is akin to a British accent though smoother and more mellifluous. I stepped aboard his boat, a 40’ C&C cruising sloop, which was aptly named ‘Sea Adventure’. “What are the names of your other charter boats?” I asked, thinking that there must be some variety in the assignation of names. “This is the only one” he grinned. Oh gosh, I thought, he’s a one-boat charter company. Well then I’d best not sink this one.

“Are the clients here yet?” I asked. He looked at me oddly, as if I had used a strange word; I was using my usual marketing business language, and not having been a captain before, I was not sure if it were proper to adopt a gruff tone instead and snarl “Them lubberly polliwoggin’ assholes crawl down here yet?” I was thinking that I should opt for the more prudent course and try to make a decent and respectable first impression, especially if I ever wanted this charter boat owner to call me up again when he needed a hired skipper.

“Ah, should be here soon, I guess” he replied, and then began showing me everything there was to know about the boat with dizzying speed - almost as if he expected me to already know most of it – every breaker, switch, cover for this, access to that, thing-to-do-before-doing-something-else, the whole drill. I wondered how I would ever remember everything. I pretended to be soaking everything in, as if he were simply giving me a refresher about how to run my own boat. The electrical system was tricky and complex; I despaired of ever memorizing all of it, but instead quietly hoped that his batteries were strong enough that I would not kill them before I could get his boat back to the dock.

Some things, I noticed, were not completely right, or were jury-rigged. A puff of wind nearly took off my cap. I looked at the puzzling array of lines on the end of the boom. “If we have to reef the main, what sort of arrangement do you have for that here?” I asked. He waved dismissively at it, “Oh, ha, well there’s some work I have to do with that, don’t worry about it, there’s no reefing, not just now.” I felt a funny sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. If you can’t ‘reef’ a sail, or make it smaller in area in strengthening winds, you and your boat can get in serious trouble.

Kiwi Dave and I had barely finished ‘orientation’ when three gentlemen pulled up to the dock in two cars, and began unloading boxes and duffel bags. My goodness, I thought, they look like they’ve brought a week’s worth of food and clothing at the very least. Boxes came aboard, an entire box of bottles of wine, a box of nothing but various types of fruit, presumably to ward off scurvy; a box of bread, salad dressing and fixings, a case of beer, a case of water bottles, in short, enough supplies for an extended cruise. I made no comment in that regard, but cheerfully helped bring the luggage and supplies below.

Friendly introductions were soon made. The leader of the group, George, was a short, heavyset man in his late fifties, the owner of the manufacturing company to which they all belonged, and a man who had the odor of money about him, his clothes of only the best make and quality from his windbreaker down to his boat shoes; everything he wore also seemed new. He had, as he later explained, grown up poor in Greece, immigrated to the United States as a young man and through hard work, self-improvement, and dogged industriousness, he had become a businessman of considerable success and property, and he had also acquired a good education. He was an earnest, warm, and very smart self-made man, passionately spoken in any matter he chose to discuss.

Second in command was Dick, the eldest of the group, in his early sixties, a true Massachusetts Yankee, old-school manufacturing sort, machinist by trade, thin, wiry and weathered, pleasant and practical, not especially talkative but friendly enough.

The junior member of the group was Tony, a sharp, serious, dark-haired and clean-cut young man with black square framed glasses. Tony was in his mid-twenties, a talented lad of third-generation immigrant Italian stock, who was learning to be a plant manager under George’s tutelage. Tony was an able cook (he did the cooking and meal-planning for the trip) and also made his own wine – which he brought along – and it was excellent wine, at that. Tony seemed always eager to please, nervous about his status, and anxious to fit into his place and do everything correctly. He was meticulous and prompt in his preparation of fresh food and sandwiches, which he seemed to have a talent for, and particularly good taste in his selection of ingredients. But he was also, it seemed to me, very ‘uptight’, and so I was very careful, throughout the trip, not to inadvertently give offense, or to be overly critical, as I suspected that he would exact revenge for any slight, real or imagined, sealing me up in the bilge perhaps with a cask of his own Amontillado.

George, by his own admission, had owned some large yachts in his time – but they were power yachts, and he had not done a great deal more than steer them briefly, at any one time, under the watchful eye of the hired Captain. Dick had sailed, all right, and had sailed New England waters too, but the largest boat he had sailed had been a ‘Laser’, which is a very small, albeit fast, one-person racing eggshell with a single triangle of a sail not terribly larger than a bed-sheet. Tony told us quite matter-of-factly that he had never sailed at all, and he demonstrated the truth of his statement later in the trip when he was given a ‘trick at the wheel’ for a spell.

Next: A Rollicking Fine Day

Another Satisfied Customer, and a Trial by Water: A New Captain’s First Charter

2010-01-29T13:13:00.000-08:00

Part 1: Going Back to Sea

I was a newly-minted Captain, and was faced with my first weekend sailing charter. This was what I had always dreamed of doing, I reminded myself, so why was I so nervous?

It wasn’t as though I were new to boats and boating. I have spent my life in boats, growing up in Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay. I served as a seaman on a ship in the Coast Guard as a young man, cruising down in the Gulf of Mexico, and have owned and sailed a number of boats since childhood, ranging in size from a canoe to a twin-screw cabin cruiser to a 45-foot cruising yacht. But I had never, in all those years, taken the time to become an officially licensed captain, except for once when, fresh out of the service, I had obtained a ‘six-pack’ limited license to operate our Yacht Club’s harbor launch. But that was more than thirty years earlier. Now, at age 53, I was standing on a pier in Newport, Rhode Island, on a warm October morning, waiting for three business gentlemen from Massachusetts. They would be my charges for a weekend’s paid charter on a 40-ft sailboat, and I was a mite jittery. It was my first real assignment as a hired captain, after all, with people aboard, not a simple boat delivery. Stress, and pressure, like nasty little devils, had bound me hand and foot, stretched me upon a rack, and were gleefully cranking it tighter one notch at a time. The more uneasy I felt, the faster they cranked. I could almost hear the pawls clicking.

Later, when I described this uncomfortable sensation to my friend Captain Tom, a long-time all-around skipper and tugboat captain, he laughed a hearty, but well-meaning laugh, and roared “Oh, I know! I know the feeling! And the worst part is you can’t show it, can’t look anywhere for sympathy! You have to step aboard like it’s the thousandth time you’ve done it, act like you know everything, calm, confident, in charge. You can’t screw up, not one little bit, or seem to be unfamiliar with anything! They’re watching you, and at the slightest sign of weakness or uncertainty, they will get scared, especially if they’re not sailors themselves! You don’t want that to happen.”

In the dark winter of the early months of 2009, business was scarce, and I had little to do. I felt that my world and all that I had accomplished or built in my marketing business over the years had been all for naught. I felt, as Joshua Slocum had written, ‘cast up from the old sea, so to speak’, but in my case the sea was the sea of life. One frozen February evening, at our local Irish pub, while talking to Captain Tom over a pint of Guinness and despairing over my poor fortunes, I listened to him talk about how busy he was running tugboats down in New York harbor, and in my envy, I suddenly had an idea, like a flash-bulb going off in my head: I resolved that I should ‘go back to sea’. He enthusiastically approved of this idea, and told me I should do so, that the change of life would do me good, would probably help me provide better for my family, get me out from behind a desk, and generally be a good move. “With all the sea time you have, you should easily qualify for a license,” he said. Captain Tom is a few years older than me, but not many, and since I have never believed that one is ever too old to change course, I thought, why not give it a try. My wife expressed doubts; “Your business will return when the economy begins to come around again” she said. “When it does, you will never make as much money on boats as you can with your business doing well.”

“It’s not just about money” I replied. “And besides, it isn’t intended to replace my business, only to supplement it. I could do boat deliveries and run charters on weekends. That sort of thing. All fun.” No matter, though; she was still skeptical.

So I maxed out what was left of a credit card and signed up for a full-time course in the spring at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. I went to class every day for nearly three weeks; studied hard; plotted courses on paper charts; re-learned how to spend hours focused in a classroom, a place I had not known since college; smelled the cool salt air blowing in from Buzzard’s Bay in the morning on my way in and saw the cadets marching around the campus. It reminded me of my days as a young man going through basic training at the Coast Guard training base in Cape May, New Jersey. I felt energized, invigorated, and the clean, military feel of the Academy’s campus made me feel, sometimes, dizzily caught between my past and the present, eerily intersecting, young again but for some reason trotting around in a pudgy old body.

I watched tugs and barges cruising up and down the Cape Cod Canal, right by the Academy campus, imagining that now I, too, could be a part of that scene, the skipper on the bridge, even though I knew that my license, once I earned it, would only qualify me to operate a vessel a fraction of the size of those craft. Indeed, this realization was driven home to me by my wife, in spades; she, being ever the optimist, suggested that I would ultimately be hired only to ‘captain’ rickety outboard-motor fishing boats full of obnoxious drunks for a day here or a day there, or to ‘deliver’ trashy broken-down sailboats from one mooring to another, alone, ingloriously, and for dirt money. She made it sound as attractive to me as cleaning an oily bilge with a toothbrush, or worse, being a glorified drink-server on a yacht full of sleazy chain-smokers. “Don’t think you’re going to wear a white uniform with gold braid and be Captain of the Love Boat” she advised.

But the process of obtaining a Master’s license from the U.S. Coast Guard is a complicated one, requiring letters, affidavits, drug testing, medical examinations, and much more. When I finally had the Master’s 100-ton License in my hand, a document that listed me as qualified for ‘motor, sail, or steam (imagine – steam! Images of side-wheel steamers of yesteryear churned ahead through the waters of my mind’s eye), I was excited and wanted to show the little orange booklet that looked oddly like a passport to everybody. It had mattered a great deal to me to obtain it, because it was a positive accomplishment for me after so many disappointing setbacks in recent times. I wanted to prove to myself that I could study, pass exams, and succeed in an academic endeavor, and when I scored well on my exams, I drove home feeling very emotional and moist-eyed. I had needed a win, and I knew that I had done it all by myself.

But now it was the end of the summer and in Rhode Island, any seasonal boating jobs were closing down for the year. My many inquiries usually ended with “Sounds good, drop me a line in the spring.” I wasn’t expecting much business over the winter – I would have to head well south for that, to Florida or beyond – but I would have been happy to get something before the New England winter put a stop to all but the big commercial traffic out on the sound.

Unbelievable luck visited me; an old friend and boat-broker, Greg, phoned me one day and asked me if I could handle a boat delivery. It was a short trip; he and a partner had bought, for cheap money, and old Beneteau sailboat, 34 feet long, and planned to ‘flip it’ fairly quickly, but they needed me to bring it from its slip at a marina in Greenwich Bay, Rhode Island, to their marina in Fall River, Mass., a distance of perhaps twenty miles, a few hours of motoring. They were simply too busy to take the time to do it. The destination marina was also home port to my friend’s brokerage. The boat could be serviced, stored, and sold from there. What would I charge, I was asked. “Oh heck” I replied, anxious for a day on the water. “Fifty bucks OK?” The proposed fee was cheerfully accepted.

Greg’s partner, Bill, drove me to the marina in East Greenwich on a warm September Saturday morning, and we boarded the boat and prepared her for sea, so to speak. The day was bright, sunny with puffy little clouds, and calm. Bill was in a hurry to get out of there and get back to work; but we had to get the boat’s little Volvo diesel going before he could leave it to me. The sails were not on the spars, and it seemed as though the boat had been there for a rather long time. Wherever one of the dirty, chafed dock lines hung partially in the water, it was covered with a hefty growth of green slime and sea-vegetables.

We cranked the engine until the batteries were almost dead, but the tired little diesel wouldn’t start. My heart sank. Oh hell, I thought, this is a bad omen for my first delivery. But at long last, with barely more than a turn left in the batteries, one of the engine’s two pistons began firing; at first very slowly, as though it would take forever to build up any RPMs, and I thought every moment that it was on the verge of stalling; but at last the other kicked in, and I felt confident to leave the dock. I saw Bill wave back at me as his pickup truck roared away across the marina parking lot. I was on my own; so I cast off the lines, backed out of the slip, and started on my way.

Wisely, so I thought, I had brought a ditty-bag with everything that I figured I might conceivably need that an unknown boat might not have. This included binoculars; a chart of the bay; handheld compass; rain jacket; handheld VHF marine radio; pistol and flares; inflatable life jacket; water bottle and snacks; and my little camera. This habit of thinking ahead served me well, because on that short trip I learned the first big lesson of being a boat delivery skipper; that more often than not, you will not be delivering fully-equipped luxury yachts in Bristol condition, but rather deficient clunkers with engines that don’t run right, toilets that don’t work, missing electronics, and weird rigs that have been rigged wrong and cause more problems than they provide wind propulsion.

Nevertheless, I brought my charge to the destination dock safely that afternoon after an uneventful few hours, was paid my fee plus a tip, and Bill bought me a few cold beers at the floating Tiki bar at the marina. As I took a few moments to savor the beer and the warm end-of-summer afternoon, I thought, this isn’t bad at all, really. What could be better than spending a day on the water in someone else’s boat and being paid for it too?

Next: High Anxiety

Morning snowfall

2010-01-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

Friday morning greets me with a light snowfall under a grey sky. Happily, it will not last long, so the weatherman says. Squirrels are busy in the yard, digging up acorns, and flying around on the corn-baited squirrel spinner mounted on the big oak tree. Finally, after months of not seeing him, Jack Cottontail is back out around the bushes by the boat-shed, looking fat and sassy. The bird feeder is a living, moving kaleidoscopic cluster of birds. Life is an eager, often desperate thing; the evident Hand of God is in motion, all around us, from the most subtle to the most grand manifestations.

Two Roads Diverged in...a Wood

2010-01-05T05:36:00.000-08:00

I received a note in my e-mail from JoAnn Stromberg, Executive Administrator at the SMTA, or Surface Mount Technology Association. Last year was the 25th anniversary of the SMTA, and that a group of folks who have been part of the organization over the years have already begun sharing their reminiscences and anecdotes, and she invited me and others to do the same. That started me thinking, thinking way back. Trying to think back that far however is a lot like looking down the middle of a stairwell to the ground floor many stories below; you feel a twinge of vertigo. So I held onto my desk, and went back to the beginning. I started out in the electronics manufacturing pretty much around the same time that the SMTA was being organized, but how I ended up in the industry is one of the most unlikely coincidences and twists of fate!

It all began for me in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1983. There were no faxes yet; no internet; no cell phones. A fairly new technical company in the industrial park out behind the town – we called the area the ‘Outback’ - had moved into a new building from its startup quarters in the old abandoned Caldwell’s Rum distillery building down on the waterfront. The old distillery had been slated for demolition. I was a part-time reporter for the Daily News and working freelance for a local advertising agency. One day the Daily News editor sent me over to interview the sales VP at the new company, a guy named George, and told me to write up a little story for the business page. The company was involved in electronics; that’s all that I knew. I knew nothing at all about electronics, although my younger cousin did. He liked to build radios. The whole business of circuits, capacitance, and all that sort of thing was something that he could explain with glee and thorough understanding, but the stuff was utterly confusing to me, like doing math, and I hated math, anyway.

“We make little ovens, infrared ovens” George told me, taking me on a walk through the small plant after I had presented my credentials. Like all management guys stuck behind a desk, he was tickled to talk to the press and spend some time impressing someone on the outside.

He showed me a crude sheet-metal-fabricated boxlike machine on a bench; it smelled hot, and there was a wire mesh conveyor belt slowly moving through it. “The product goes into the machine on that belt. The heat radiating from the panel melts the solder on the little assembly and makes the connections. It’s very controlled. Then the product comes out the other side and cools, and voila, it’s done.”

“What kind of products?” I asked.

“Mostly hybrids” he answered. The image of an ear of corn popped into my head.

“Also a new technology that we think is really going to take off, it’s called SMD, or surface mounted devices. Not quite the same as hybrids, but a similar idea.”

I went back and wrote my article, tapping it out on my old manual Royal typewriter. As usual, I was paid $25 for the article. If it doesn’t seem like much money, it wasn’t. Not even then. But being a business reporter always got me past the scowling receptionist and in to see someone important, in this case, this quirky guy named George.

However, at the end of the interview, before I left, I had popped a bold question to George. I did this to all of the bigwigs that I got in to interview, and I had an interview every week, because that’s how often the business page ran.

“George, who does your writing for your technical literature? Your other needs?”

He thought for a moment, brows knitted, but then his face brightened. “Funny you ask that. I used to do it, but then I got too busy and we hired a freelance guy, he’s been OK, but just last week he took a full-time job down in Waltham.” He handed me a small stack of product sheets for the various models of ovens they made. “These all need to be rewritten and updated” George said. “I don’t have time to do it. Have a look at them and see if you think you can write this stuff.”

Six months later I was so busy for George that I had finagled a desk in a corner with a spare IBM Selectric typewriter to use. “It will save time, me running back and forth and all, and besides I can help out immediately when you need something.”

“Well fine, but remember that you still don’t work here!” George growled, cautioning. “You’re not an employee. This is just for convenience.” I smiled, nodding in agreement; this pacified George, but of course I had other plans. Three months later I was brought on as an employee, first part time, then soon full time.

Many things happened in quick succession after that; I attended my first trade show, a PCB show in Worcester, Mass; and then one day George told me that I had to get out to some trade show in a place I had never been, California. “It’s the grand-daddy of them all for our industry” George said. “It’s called NEPCON.”

Soon there was a new organization for companies like ours called the SMTA. The old-school hybrid people in the ISHM organization didn’t like them; they turned up their noses. “Plastic boards, plastic components!” they scoffed. A new all-SMT board was small, .060” thick, single-sided, and the biggest component on it was a 20-pin PLCC. Boards were cleaned with Freon solvent. No one outside the electronics assembly industry knew what in the world we were doing. Then one day a local fellow came in and set us up with our first computer, a finicky thing with a little built-in monochrome monitor screen with a green phosphorescent display, a blinking cursor, and a noisy dot-matrix printer. “This is the future” George said.

It seems such a long time ago, in part because technology has changed so much since then, and our lifestyles with it. There have been so many shows, companies, and people we knew that have come and gone, some friends forever. I never thought I would make a life in it, or out of it, but when you get busy, time flies by so fast that you forget where you are and just keep to the path like a jogger, following the winding curves. But that’s how it began for me, totally by chance, in an industry I never knew existed, and if I had been told, previously, that I would soon start in and make my living for a subsequent quarter century in the electronics manufacturing industry, I would have laughed and asked that person what they had been smoking. In the end, some of it has been fun, some of it has been exasperating, and I can imagine that our shared experience in the 25-year evolution of the “killer app” SMT has been repeated countless times in other industries by so many people all over the world. And, of course, the SMTA has been there all along the way for us, an odd assortment of friends, flakes, minds both great and small, a social and learning club of engineers and specialists in this funny little industry whose technology – SMT – has been so important affecting the everyday lives of common folk and electronics consumers worldwide, but the vast majority of whose faces would still draw a blank if you asked them if they had ever heard of SMT or Surface Mount Technology. So it goes!

Now, SMT is a commonplace, established assembly technology. There is very little new under the sun. When people write about SMT, it’s more about the business end of manufacturing and bean-counting, or adapting to trends like ‘lean’ manufacturing than about the nuts and bolts of how to solder a quad flat pack or a BGA. But that’s the way manufacturing technologies evolve, from a mad thirst for know-how, to the ho-hum. But Happy Birthday to the SMTA, 25 years down a road that no one, in the beginning, had any idea how far it would go, and we’re not at the end of it yet.

On Speaking Your Mind

2009-12-31T04:14:00.000-08:00

Never be afraid to speak your mind honestly, because it is the truest form of expression. Everything else can be easily misinterpreted. When you begin to write, you realize that you are immediately at a crossroads; you can open your heart and put it on paper for the world to see, or keep it in a diary, hidden away from the light of day. A true writer - or at least one who wants to be successful - really has only one option – bare your soul. But he or she need not be afraid; open your heart and soul to the deepest corners, and you will find that it is like a billion others. Once you realize that, you can chuckle, and rejoice in your common humanity, and it is less easy for others to wound you.

Men of the Sea - a boyhood recollection

2009-09-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

Santiago, Hemingway’s old fisherman, wisely reminds us that young lads sleep late and hard. It’s true; having once been a young boy, and later a father, I can attest that the only reasons a young boy will get up out of bed in the middle of the night are either to visit the bathroom, or worse, to throw up all over the hallway on the way to the bathroom, thanks to the nasty little stomach-virus he picked up at school the previous day. Oh, and there is one other reason – the prospect of going on an early-morning boat-ride with Grandpa in Uncle George’s new Luhrs power cruiser. Otherwise, most boys, if not all, never willingly get out of bed before sunrise.

Many years ago, my Uncle George bought a Luhrs powerboat. It was wooden, lap-strake planked, twenty-something feet long, with a clipper bow and a single inboard engine, a Chrysler Crown, the old flathead six-cylinder type. It wasn’t new, but it was in very nice shape. It was located at the old Tripp’s boatyard in the Westport River, across the little harbor from the fishing docks at Westport Point, Massachusetts. Uncle George and his dad, my Grandpa, planned to bring the boat from Tripp’s to Grandpa’s Bristol, R.I. mooring in Bristol Harbor one Saturday morning in early September. George’s son, Dan, and I were invited along for the cruise. Dan was almost my age – a year younger – and we were used to spending a lot of time together in Grandpa’s boats. Dan was a chubby kid with blond crew-cut hair and he looked a little like the ‘bad boy’ cartoon decal that one occasionally sees on large pickup trucks, an image of a naughty lad relieving himself someplace where he ought not to be doing so. Dan had a bit of a mean streak in him, but that normally didn’t bother me and both Dan and I had twelve-foot wooden skiffs that Grandpa had built for us and kept on the dinghy floats down at the Bristol Yacht Club.

Grandpa also had a gaff beetle cat that we had each learned to sail. Thanks to Grandpa’s boatbuilding and wood-working skills, the old Beetle-cat, which bore a heavy, multi-layer coating of Kirby’s green paint, never leaked a drop. Dan used to always try to run over people’s mooring floats, or swamp the boat when we were sailing together, usually out in the middle of Bristol harbor, but because a Beetle cat is so difficult to capsize due to its width, Dan never succeeded, which is probably why I am here now to write this story. And although we spent a lot of time together in small boats, we were excited because we knew that this day would be different from the others. We were going for a ride in a big power boat, and the prospect of a day-long trip across distant waters was exciting, especially since we would be going with the men! This made us feel special, important in a way, just a little more grown up, perhaps, than we really were.

Grandpa’s plan was to leave Bristol for Westport well before dawn, to get an early start on the day. It was fall now, Grandpa said, and the weather out on Buzzard’s Bay and off Sakonnet Point could be changeable. Grandpa said that it could get rough later in the day, so it was wisest to leave early, riding together in the old Ford Country Squire station wagon. I don’t remember if Grandma rode with us, in order to drive the car home after we had left the dock, since we would not be coming back to Tripp’s; but she probably did.

Dan and I slept over at Grandpa and Grandma’s house that night. Of course, we were excited, and stayed up late talking; Grandma knocked on the bedroom door once, and scolded us, telling us that it was time to be quiet and get to sleep; when that didn’t work, finally, Grandpa came upstairs and sternly told us that we must ‘pipe down’ and go to sleep because we would be rising very early, and if we didn’t go to sleep very soon, we would not be allowed to go at all!
Well, of course, that stern admonition worked; the light went out, and we each tried very hard to go to sleep, which, due to the lateness of the hour, came along naturally all by itself. But as I drifted off, the tantalizing aroma of chourico and peppers cooking reached my nostrils and made my belly grumble. Downstairs in the kitchen, Grandma was making tomorrow’s lunch for the boat ride.

Chourico is a red, spicy, delicious Portuguese sausage. As one who grew up in Rhode Island and nearby Southeastern Massachusetts, I can say that Portuguese people were my neighbors, schoolmates, and friends; their cuisine had become so well blended into mainstream New England cooking that one did not even think twice about it; my Irish-ethnic Grandma could whip up a batch of chourico and peppers as convincingly as any Portuguese lady in Bristol; and furthermore, of all the things one may stuff into a sub-roll or ‘torpedo’ sandwich roll, few things are more satisfying, appetizing, or tasty as chourico and peppers.

Grandma would slice up the chourico and fry it in a black-iron skillet in a little olive oil with chopped green bell peppers, onions, and garlic; then she would add some Portuguese red crushed pepper, tomato paste, and a few other unknown enhancements (‘a little this and that’ she would say) to make a thick saucy filling, which would then be stuffed into the top of a torpedo roll, in similar fashion to a meatball sandwich, and served hot.

I don’t remember waking up that morning in the pre-dawn darkness; Grandpa had a gentle way of waking us by touching one foot and wiggling it a little bit until we woke up – and because we were too young to be allowed coffee, that was an adult drink, Grandma served us tea – she had boiled the kettle before we had been awakened. The aroma of re-heated chourico and peppers filled the house. She had re-warmed the skillet so that the mixture was piping hot, and then filled nearly a dozen torpedo rolls with the spicy filling, and wrapped each sandwich individually in waxed paper. Then, she had packed them snugly into an old, round, potato-chip bin. I remember it well; it was a sturdy, cylindrical container, much resembling a hat box, with red printing on it – an image of a housewife and the words ‘Made-Rite Potato Chips’ printed on the side. Even though the potato chips were long gone, it was such a handy and durable container that it was perfect to pack a bunch of chourico and pepper sandwiches in. Grandma pressed the lid firmly in place; I lifted it, and it seemed heavy, and just slightly warm, with the aroma of the sandwiches barely seeping through.

Grandpa brought the old galvanized steel Coca-cola cooler up from the cellar. It had an aluminum upper tray in it and was painted red, with the Coca-Cola logo script in white lettering on the sides. It was all metal, old-style, heavy, with a drain spigot on the bottom and a handle on top that snapped closed over the lid and held the lid shut. It would keep things cold for a very long time when Grandpa put a piece of block ice in it, and the rugged cooler was a necessary companion on all boat trips and picnics. Grandpa put the water jug into the cooler with a bunch of large ice cubes from the freezer, and some bottles of Fanta soda (in Massachusetts they still call it ‘tonic’) and in particular a few bottles of orange Fanta, because Grandpa knew that I liked orange Fanta especially.

We left in the darkness, but once the car was moving, I could see the blue of the lightening sky to the east, toward Fall River. The lights of the city still twinkled out of the black mass of the land as we crossed the Taunton River on the old Brightman Street Bridge and drove up along Route 6 through the city. It had become fairly light – and both Dan and I were yawning – when we passed east of Fall River and into Westport, wending our way in the gathering dawn along the winding road to Tripp’s that passed by Horseneck Beach. Little scrubby pitch-pines lined the dune-like landscape that flanked the road, and the high tree-covered dunes along the shore loomed high above us and hid our view of the sea.

An old wooden freight barge, massive-timbered like a great old sailing ship, had been beached next to Tripp’s dock and although it was half sunk, the part of it above water at high tide was used as a dinghy storage dock, and support for the dock and float framework. Tired now and open to the sea, it had become a permanent part of the marina’s pier system, but to me it seemed ancient, a relic of bygone times. As the golden sun peeked through the still-leafy treetops and began to beam down on the still harbor lined with bright-green spears of eelgrass, I climbed out onto the old barge and looked down through a hole in the deck while Grandpa and Uncle George were busy getting the boat ready. Through the hole I peered into a dark cavern illuminated by shafts of sunlight from the outside, filling the great dark void with an eerie golden-green glow. Through the semi-transparent, deep water, I glimpsed the massive sunken skeleton-timbers of the barge, the side-planking long gone, the great square frames reaching down and disappearing into the lime-green depths of the harbor to an unseen bottom way below. It was high tide. This scary, fantastic back-lit vision of the deep, heavy with shadow and seaweed, fired my imagination; it could have been a vision of the hundreds of wrecks of centuries of wooden ships in the lost mire of the Sargasso Sea. But it was a short –lived vision.

“Hey, get out of there!” Grandpa’s angry voice called out. “You’ll get hurt over there! You’re not supposed to be climbing on that!”

Dan was in the boat, sitting on the engine-box pretending to be a good boy, smirking at me with an air of ‘ha, ha, you got in trouble. Bleeaahhhh.’ He had one up on me – ever so slightly – and he savored the morsel, small as it was.

Now the engine had been started and it grumbled and rumbled with a deep-throated voice and belched clouds of white exhaust and steam while the water coughed and burbled around the exhaust pipe just below the water-line off the transom. I could smell the odd old marine gasoline engine exhaust smell – not especially unpleasant – as we backed out of the slip. The engine had warmed up, and was ticking and purring, the way the old flathead engines used to, clickety-smooth like a big sewing machine, and then commenced to roar in its authoritative way as Grandpa throttled up and we powered out into the channel toward the river mouth. The water boiled behind us and big clouds of misty exhaust poured out behind into the cool air and as quickly disappeared into nothingness as they drifted astern.

Dan and I went below to explore the main cabin; there was not much more than a vee-shaped room with a berth on either side, and what looked like a cramped closet with a funny-looking little toilet in it. We lay down on the berth cushions for a few moments, just to try them out, imagining that we were on a long sea voyage; but we were too excited to remain in them for very long, and soon we were back on deck.

I remember one particular image, still alive in my mind after all these years, of exiting the river mouth and heading out onto Buzzard’s Bay in the cool morning, the sea mirror-calm, and the sky a lovely blue with horizontal steaks of mauve stretching away across the southern horizon. I thought that I never would have imagined that early morning at sea could be so beautiful. Directly ahead lay the sad, rust-colored wreckage of the old cement barge on Hen and Chickens shoal – Grandpa told us the story of it, how an old tug and barge of cement had gone aground on the rocks during a hurricane in the 1940’s – and added quickly that ‘we weren’t going over there’, which disappointed me slightly, because although the visible wreck was a fearsome thing, my young boy’s curiosity drove me to want to see the wreck anyway.

Picture it now, if you will; we are heading out into Buzzard’s Bay; the sandy shoreline and green land beyond, the high dunes of Westport Point, and the grey roofs of Acoaxet recede into the distance behind us as we glide out across the vast expanse of the bay. The island of Cuttyhunk rises above the sea to the left, but does not close; we are not going there, either. Somewhere in the distance, off toward the endless ocean to the southwest, there is a plume of dark smoke; it rises and rises, as if surfacing like a great whale out of the sea, to gradually reveal the wheelhouse, high prow, and low hull of a big brick-red ocean-going tugboat and towed barge well behind it, laboring up the bay toward the Cape Cod Canal. We will stay out of his way. The water around the boat is clean, aqua-blue, with a white foamy wake trailing astern; Grandpa and Uncle George are taking turns at the helm, behind the windshield, talking, but Dan and I cannot hear much of what they say. Grandpa lights his pipe, and the aroma of toasted vanilla Cavendish floats back to Dan and I; that is the aroma that we always associate with Grandpa.

Halfway to the strange, rugged rock-island boulders of Sakonnet Point, our stomachs are growling again; salt water and sea air do marvelous things for one’s appetite, especially for the appetite of a boy. I have been thinking about the sandwiches in the potato chip drum; the red-inked smiling image of the lady with a pearl necklace, printed on the outside, is happily calling me to lunch, I imagine. Perhaps we are all thinking the same thing; Grandpa opens the lid and distributes the chourico and pepper sandwiches. They are still warm! I eat quickly – one, then two – thinking that I have never tasted anything so wonderfully delicious in my life, washed down with an orange Fanta. Normally chatty Dan is unusually quiet; his porky face seems to be actually enveloping his sandwich, like a starfish’s stomach around its prey, or folding around it the way a tree slowly absorbs a metal sign that has been nailed to it for too many years; or even the way a baseball might sink into a soft loaf of risen bread dough if dropped into the middle of it. I am still at the end of my first sandwich when he has already finished his second. He wants my second sandwich; I say no, and we start to fight. Grandpa turns around.

“Hey you guys, cut that out! Get along with each other!” Dan looks like he is going to pout; his lower lip puffs out and forms an arch.

When we are done eating, there is red tomato sauce smeared all around our mouths, and Grandpa gives us soft paper napkins to wipe our faces clean.

Our trip took us around Sakonnet Point, up the Sakonnet River, and into Mount Hope Bay. As we passed under the century-old derelict swinging railroad bridge in Tiverton – since torn down – Grandpa told us about Great-grandpa McGrath, Grandma’s dad, and how, as a young man, he was an engineer on a steam locomotive that used to cross that bridge, back in the 1900’s when he worked for the Old Colony Railroad. Fishermen with dark faces, Cape Verdean men from Fall River, are fishing from the bridge. They smile, and wave to us as we pass; the four of us wave back.

We turn at Common Fence Point, and head southwest, to round Bristol Neck; passing under the Mount Hope Bridge, now, we are heading for Bristol Harbor; it is early afternoon, and the wind has sprung up brisk and cool out of the northwest. Little whitecaps scud across a lightly choppy Narragansett Bay; puffy, fluffy white cottony cumulus clouds are frolicking across the deep blue September sky. We tie up to the dock, and step off – Dan and I – feeling like the greatest seamen who ever lived. That night, as I fall asleep, the bed will move, seemingly, ever so slightly, like the deck of the boat, rocking me to sleep with unforgettable sensations and images of our grand seagoing adventure that, like the enduring love for a Grandfather and Grandmother remembered, will never diminish or fade from the unclouded crystal spyglass-lens of mind and heart.

#####

A Hike up Mount Washington

2009-08-27T06:25:00.000-07:00

I had been suffering from a terrible case of cabin fever in mid-August and realized that the only cure could be a good old fashioned road trip – specifically, to go hiking and camping up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I invited my son Tom (who is 19) and when I asked him along (after all, his summer vacation would be over in a couple of weeks and he would be headed back to college) he readily agreed. Tom has never been on a real camping trip, although we did stay at the Appalachian Mountain Club lodge in Pinkham Notch a couple of years ago, on Labor Day weekend, and hiked the nearby trails for a day. We stayed at the Joe Dodge lodge, or bunk-house, which is adjacent to the AMC camp’s main building where we had a great dinner in the dining hall the first evening that we were there. But staying at the lodge is not the same as camping, certainly.

Tom and I embarked for New Hampshire on Friday afternoon, August 17, in my trusty pickup truck, the cargo bed laden with hastily-assembled camping gear – what little I had left from the old days – covered by a tarp bungeed down. We started out fairly late in the day – three-thirty in the afternoon - which meant that it was unlikely that we would find a campsite vacancy anywhere up in the Whites when we arrived much later in the evening. Years ago, when my wife Denise and I and my two oldest – then toddlers - used to go camping, we would invariably drive by campground after campground late at night, most with ‘FULL’ signs posted; and when we finally did find an open campsite, we were setting up a tent in the buggy dark at midnight, and I have even done it in the rain, mud and wet grit sticking to everything and tracking into the tent, icing on the cake. No more. Age does bring wisdom, if not common sense.

This time, I was able to reserve (via cell phone, which we didn’t have back then) two bunks in the Joe Dodge lodge at the AMC base at Pinkham Notch. I must stress the ‘luck’ factor here in finding these vacancies; the woods were literally alive with campers, traffic was thick through North Conway NH., and cars and vans sporting kayak roof ornaments were at least one-third of all the vehicles on the road. This arrangement was very convenient because it is at the base of the Tuckerman Ravine Trail, which winds to the summit of Mt Washington, and it was our intent to hike that trail this time. I have hiked Tuckerman’s to the top two or three times in all, but that was 25 or so years ago.

We arrived around ten o’clock p.m. – we stopped on the way for a meal of smoky ribs at the Yankee Smokehouse in Ossippee – and were tickled when we reached the AMC to find that we were assigned to the same room in the lodge that we had been assigned the last time we were up there, in the ‘Pine Marten’ room. All the rooms have bird names carved into a plaque on the door. Each bunk room sleeps four persons each – bunk beds on either side of the room, a threadbare woolen blanket and flat pillow for each bed, and a thin mattress beneath all. To sleep well in one of these Spartan beds, it helps to be mortally tired.

Deja-vu: It was eerie, perhaps, but once again we were assigned to a room that had only one other person in it already (the 4th person never showed up - rooms are all male or all female, alternating down the hallway) and this trail-trekking aficionado stank, just like the roommate we had the first time we were there. I concluded that our fellow roommates, typically, are guys whom I suppose have been hiking the trails all day and then go to bed very early, right after dinner, being extremely tired. They do not smoke, drink, carouse, socialize, or, apparently, bathe regularly. But there are showers down the hall and nice bathrooms so there is no excuse for a man to smell like a goat, methought the first time around, and now this time as well. Also, the rooms are close and stuffy, and quite warm, since air conditioning is not used because it is not ‘green’, although for $60 per person per night I would have appreciated a fan or some manner of induced airflow. The window (screened) was open but there was not much air exchange.

So here we were, Tom and I, again with a different smelly guy. When we entered the room we startled him terribly, he had his equipment scattered all over the floor, probably thought that he had the room to himself. Oh, did I add that these fellows seem to be sociably-challenged? They are neither friendly nor eager for conversation. Our roommate had been sound asleep and snoring, and the first thing that met us as we entered the room was a blast of rancid warm air, carrying a heavy burden of primordial animal effusion with an aroma that seemed to combine the best essences of rotted armpit, fermented cow-flap, and vinegar. It reminded me of the Monkey House at the old zoo in the summer. All that was missing was the ammonia of decomposition.

“Do you mind if we turn on the light for a few moments?” I asked him, chokingly.

When he did not answer after a couple of seconds, I turned it on anyway. He squirmed about in his bunk a bit like an earthworm disturbed by the lifting of a rock, and he then pulled his threadbare blanket up over his head. I was trying to respect his privacy and not look at him. Unlike the skinny, bearded, antisocial little billy-goat with the self-stand-up crusty socks on the floor that had inhabited the room the first time we stayed there, this fellow was big and musky, and he reminded me of colonial Indian fighter Capt. Benjamin Church’s description of King Philip, lying on the ground in the swamp after he had just been killed in 1676; a “doleful, great, naked dirty beast”.

Being considerate fellows, Tom and I soon relied on our flashlights and shut off the room light. Then the doleful beast settled back into his bunk and recommenced snoring. Happily though, it seemed that the less he moved, the clearer the air became, and I soon fell asleep, which was quite pleasant because, as someone knowledgeable in medical matters might tell you, the sense of smell does not work when one is asleep.

Like billy-goat the year before, our great doleful beast was up at dawn, packed, and out of the room before we arose, probably off onto the trails before sunrise. Good luck, good health, and good riddance to him! May he roll in clover before his next bunk reservation, I thought.

I arose, washed and dressed, and went off to breakfast in the nearby AMC dining hall. Tom was still asleep, but I would make sure that he was up before they stopped serving breakfast at 8:30 a.m. (they begin at 6:30). In The Old Man and the Sea, the old fisherman, Santiago, observes that young men sleep late and hard. This is very true of Tom. But once he is up, the magical effects of a good steaming mug of coffee will reliably bring him back to the world of the living every time.

The evening before, on the phone, the very nice lady who took my reservation informed me, in a very delighted and bubbly manner, that her husband was the chef in the dining hall kitchen, and that he was a very fine chef and the only issue she had with him was that she thought the home fried potatoes were too spicy but that he didn’t agree and that everyone else liked them, she giggled. Regardless of the apparent oddity of this sudden and unexpected hard-sell (of the husband, or his cooking prowess, or both, which was far more information than I wanted to know) I replied, on the phone, that I was sure that they would be exemplary, and I looked forward to breakfast. Indeed, the next morning, the coffee was excellent, scrambled eggs and little sausage patties just fine, home-baked yeast breads and French toast delightful. But the oft-praised home fries were literally dessicated potatoes, dried out to the point of being a vegetarian substitute for jerky. I lolled a piece around in my mouth for a few minutes until my saliva reconstituted it, and then commence to chew. It would clearly be a leisurely breakfast for any man with a yearning for home-fried potatoes, I mused.

The dining hall boasts a cathedral ceiling with great rustic beams and broad windows overlooking the mountainous slopes on the opposite side of Pinkham Notch. Ah, Serendipity! I was enjoying this serenity until a young woman at the next table – college-age, with a group of fellow hikers – proved to be the loudest non-stop hyperactive popinjay in the place; no low volume setting for anything she would say, or would not stop saying. Everyone else quiet, peaceful, enjoying the placidity of the mountain morning and lovingly nursing their mug of fragrant coffee; but from her, a constant barrage of loud, instructive chatter to her cohorts; running back and forth from t he cereal bar, stating the obvious about everything that everyone in the world already knew, spouting it as if it were newly-discovered knowledge, an epiphany, and a revelation. Noise shattering the peace, the poetry enshrined in frames on the walls,

“…First a curl of birch bark as dry as it can be,
Then some twigs of soft wood, dead, but on the tree,
Last of all some pine-knots to make the kittle foam,
And there's a fire to make you think you're settin' right at home.”

How high, I thought, would the peak need to be to throw her off of it, to ensure success? Evil thoughts and images forced their way into the forefront of my mind; it was time to leave the dining hall and begin our hike. Perhaps the trail would provide the serenity I sought.

I returned to the Joe Dodge lodge to wake up Tommy, and as I walked through the halls I noted that the AMC is no slouch when it comes to spreading the word about recycling, ‘green’ practices, all the buzzwords. In fact, they are so enthusiastic about it that there are little signs everywhere urging people to be ‘green’ with different little hints about how to be absolutely the most ‘green’ person in the world. The level of indoctrination is Orwellian; pervasive, as one would expect in a Red Chinese re-education camp. I think Ray Bradbury wrote a few Sci-fi short stories that imagined an extreme future that is actually in many ways a lot like life at the AMC. Now, I think it is a wonderful thing that the AMC preaches the gospel of conservation and greenness and preserving the environment. It’s as close to being a religion as a doctrine can be and there really is nothing wrong with conservation. I’m a conservative myself so I figure I have been supporting conservation all of my political life. But like any other religion, there are always areas of distortion in the doctrine.

For example, I was washing my face in the tin basin in the Men’s bathroom at the Joe Dodge lodge. In front of me was a placard extolling the virtues of sweeping one’s driveway versus hosing it down, because “sweeping your driveway instead of hosing it down can save up to 150 gallons each time”. OK, now, I am washing my face in a tin basin in a mountain lodge that is more than 200 miles and 2,000 feet in elevation from my suburban driveway – and this placard is in front of my nose. I am nowhere near my driveway or a hose. Also…150 gallons would fill a kiddie swimming pool. Anyone who uses 150 gallons to hose down his or her driveway will have to be doing it for at least an hour or so – or be washing down the driveway at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or flooding a neighbor’s basement. I have seen people hose down their driveways and the average amount of water they will use will be 5 – 6 gallons at the most for a ten-minute job at that. But when you are preaching the doctrine of ‘green’, facts don’t count – passion and gullibility on the part of the young and impressionable recipients of the message do.

Now we are off, up the mountain. I am slow (recall the fable of the turtle and the hare) and decide to leave early, allowing Tom to take his time enjoying a late breakfast just before the kitchen stops serving. The weather is superb; clear and warm, a few white fluffy cumulus clouds here and there blowing over the summit from the west. I give Tom the keys to the truck; get what you need last-minute out of there, I tell him, and lock it up. You will easily catch up to me in no time.

He catches up to me in an hour. I am huffing and puffing my way up the trail like the old steam locomotive grinding its way up the Cog Railway on the other side of the mountain. I sweat profusely, wipe my brow, and drink lots of water. It is hot and humid. Lanky rail-thin Tom catches up; he has not broken a sweat. Kindly, he waits for me to lumber up the trail behind him, making heavy weather of it, and he is patient when I pause to rest. Another fellow nearly my age, heavyset and blond, face ruddy with exertion, beaded with sweat and with rivulets of perspiration running down his neck, eyes me, I him. We both understand each other, silently in our mutual suffering, watching the younger guys and gals hippity-hop past us like so many bunnies off to an Easter egg party. They are mostly a decade or two younger, weigh less, and have more energy. There are a lot of people on the mountain today. This fellow stops, I stop, in different places, and resume. His lady friend is hiking with him. Sometimes he passes me while I am stopped, sometimes I pass him. At one point he is stopped by the side, resting on a rock. He asks me as I go by, “When you get to the top, will you tell them to turn on the air conditioning?” We all laugh, but the heat is sapping our strength, and we old guys know it.

After what seemed to me an eternity of struggle, we are nearing the Hermit Lake shelters and caretaker’s cabin. We have now been hiking – climbing – for nearly two hours. A tall, thin, elderly, energetic man with a walking stick was descending the trail; I recall seeing him pass me on the way up more than a half-hour earlier. “Been to the top already?” I asked. He laughs as he passes me; “Oh, Nooooooo!” he replies in a loud, laughing, deep, jolly voice as he disappears down the trail. All of a sudden, I don’t feel so badly after all about the possibility that I might not be able to hike all the way to the summit.

We reached the Hermit Lake Shelters, on the last flat piece of ground before the summit, at the gateway to Tuckerman’s Ravine itself. Much has changed since I ventured there last; now there is a caretaker’s cabin, equipped with a fine open but shaded porch and many places to sit and rest. It is the last area protected by forest and trees before one hikes up a steep rocky trail with the stones arranged like steps into the sky, going from that point on above the tree-line; but the little plateau of Hermit Lakes is a pretty place, with dark fir woods all around, some little alpine ponds, and a squeaky old cast-iron pump that draws water up from a deep well, situated in a shaded grove of white cedar a hundred yards down the trail from the cabin. The trees are short and thin-trunked up there, cedar, hemlock and fir growing close together, creating a cool, dark, haunted atmosphere below, shutting out the sun. I pumped water from the well to fill my canteen; the water was ice-cold and crystal-clear, quenching and clean. I drank my fill until I was no longer thirsty, then rinsed my bandana in it and used it to cool my neck and head.

There were many people hiking, almost a procession of people hiking to the mountain top; but I was becoming fatigued, resting more frequently as we hiked into the bowl of the ravine, crossing several crystal streams gurgling happily over smooth rocks on their long way ahead to the base of the mountain. I looked up and faced the headwall; several little streams were cascading down from the top, beautiful little waterfalls, reminding me of the image of fire-boats in New York Harbor on some grand occasion, shooting streams of water in great arcs into the air. It was at the same time both primordially beautiful and celebratory; and it saddened me to watch it, because I knew, at that point, that I had reached my physical limit and could not ascend the headwall this day. My legs were cramping painfully each time I tried to climb another vertical step. Perhaps I had perspired out too much water, or too much potassium, or too much electrolyte, or something; or maybe I was just plain too out of shape at 53 to hike this mountain. I had not prepared for it, built up to it, nor attempted such a hike in more than twenty years. I felt betrayed by my body, it simply said ‘no more today’. It would be less dangerous and humiliating, I thought, to turn back now, rather than get stuck in a narrow defile halfway up the headwall, where the path is single-file and treacherous to the fatigued – that is where balance and agility and a clear head is needed most. In my mind’s eye, I could see the boulder-strewn field above the rim of the ravine – hikers up at the rim of the bowl were disappearing over it and moving on up the last half-mile or so of the cone of Mount Washington proper – and I remembered hiking it years ago, an endless climb until one suddenly emerges right at the summit and the parking-lot at the top of the auto road. Not today, I said, and not for me, not this time. But there will be another time, and I will be ready, then.

“You go on to the summit” I said to Tom. “You master the mountain. I’ve had my turn, now it’s yours. Plenty of people are hiking along with you, and you’re two-thirds of the way there. Go on. I’ll go back down to the truck and then drive up the auto road so that you don’t have to hike back down the trail.”

Then, remembering that someone had said something about a bike race today up the auto road, I pulled out my wallet. “Here’s forty bucks. Just in case I can’t get back up there in the truck – if the road is closed to tourist traffic – you can get something to eat and probably catch one of the stages down to the base if they are running.” Tom, nobly, offered to hike back down with me. “No, I’ll be fine; you go ahead on to the top. It’s a beautiful day, and that’s not all that frequent up here, so take advantage of it.” The sky was clear with occasional puffy clouds blowing past the summit. Winds were stronger up in the bowl of the ravine and they made everything cooler.

My trek back down was easier – going down almost always is, but the last mile was difficult; I was exhausted and my legs were now complaining in many different places. My knees were wobbly. It would feel good, I thought, to sit in the air-conditioned truck and drive up the scenic auto road to the top, where I could congratulate my son.

Then, a half mile from the base camp, as I was recalling the events of that morning, I also remembered that he – Tom – still had my truck keys.

I had left the AMC camp and headed up the trail early, the reader may recall, and I left him the keys to get whatever he needed out of the truck, with the admonition to lock it up. At the base of the headwall, I thought enough to give him money, but forgot that I had given him my keys. Now what? Would he wait up there hour after hour for me to pick him up? Would he realize that he had them? I could not call him – there was no mobile phone service or signal up there. I could only hope that he could use the money to find his way down. I felt, all of a sudden, as disconnected and powerless as though I were back in the 19th Century.

Forty-five minutes later, after resting a bit at the AMC lodge and washing up a bit (in front of the don’t-wash-your-driveway-but-rather-sweep-it plaque), I began to get anxious; I was without a solution. But shortly thereafter a Stage van, densely packed full of hikers, pulled up right outside of the AMC main building, and out popped Tom – and I don’t think I have ever, in recent memory, been so happy to see him. Apparently he realized, before he ever reached the summit, that he had my keys, and that I could not drive up to get him. So, after enjoying the summit views for awhile and getting something to eat, he bought a one-way ticket down the mountain on a Stage van for $29 and was brought, conveniently, right to the doorstep of the AMC lodge. Apparently it was a new service run by the Stage company, just for hikers, one-way from the summit to the AMC lodge.

It was not yet three o’clock; I was happy. “Let’s go camping” I said.

We found an open campsite (read: gravelly dirt patch) in the National Forest’s Dolly Copp campground a few miles north of the AMC complex, on Route 16. We set up our tent, inflated the air mattresses, ran into Gorham for ice and beer, lighted a campfire, lighted the grill, and relaxed, grilling leftover smoky barbecue ribs and heating a can of baked beans in a pot over the fire. No bears or animals of any sort visited our humble abode that evening, and in the morning, I lighted a cooking-fire in the campfire pit and made a breakfast of coffee, corned beef hash, and scrambled eggs. Then we broke camp, heading south back to Rhode Island for showers, clean clothes, and a well-deserved rest!

#####

Weathering the Recession – and Remembering Maxx

2009-05-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

I figured out some time back that I am too young to quit, and too old to start over in a heavily physical job. But I cannot be idle, either, moping doesn't work, and when money is tight, I can't afford to spend my time drinking and feeling sorry for myself. So what's left?

Keep on plugging and just don't ever give up or quit. When business is really down and I can't afford to do anything including buying paint to paint the house, I put on my hiking boots and spend a couple of hours in a vigorous hike in the woods. It clears my head, gets me into a soothing environment and helps me plan new strategies.

A few years ago I knew a guy named Maxx Robinson. He was sort of an old-time hustler entrepreneurial type who had been in sales and marketing and PR and had grown up Bruce Robinson and changed his name for some dumb reason. Maxx grew up poor in Cherryfield, Maine, a one-horse town that still looks a lot like it did when the Civil War broke out.

Maxx was in his mid-80’s when I met him and unlike people of his generation, he was computer-savvy, knew the ins and outs of e-mail and desktop publishing and more. He was always trying to start new ventures, was a self-published author, cigar-chomping old-school guy who knew modern media and computers extremely well for a guy his age, who even in advanced age never lost his spirit for new entrepreneurial ventures. He wasn’t rich, was something of a boaster and a windbag, but was never down or discouraged and refused to believe that there was a time in life when you simply stopped looking ahead, or simply stopped trying. I liked his spirit even if he could be, at times, a real huckster.

He tried, as one of the last things, to get Maine lobstermen interested in branding, adopting a statewide "Genuine Maine Lobster" tag for their products. He was rebuffed and then disappointed by those 'crusty fishermen' from his home state who did not seem interested in getting on board with the idea.

Maxx passed on a couple of years ago in his 90's, his body finally gave out although his mind wanted to keep on going. Only recently, the "Genuine Maine Lobster" idea has caught on big-time up there. Maxx would have said that he told ‘em so. He was a visionary who had great ideas before the rest of the world was ready for them.

So whenever I feel like the world is closing in on me and no one wants my abilities or talent, I ask, "What would Maxx do?" The answer is that he would say "F**ck 'em, let's get something else going, I've got an idea, and we need to sell some people on it..." and he would be off on a mission. That was Maxx. Remembering him and what he might do gets me out of my funk and back to exploring fresh ideas, new possibilities. All of a sudden what looked like a dead-end street becomes a highway stretching off into the distance toward the mountains. My boots are laced and my backpack is snug and packed well; let’s go.

Boat Dreams

2009-05-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

When people speak of dreams coming true, the first thing that comes to mind, to the listener, is suddenness – a dream coming true manifested as a surprise, or sudden stroke of good fortune. But in reality, many dreams come true in the same way that a tree grows, or a wine matures; slowly, incrementally, in stages, more like plateaus, more like occasional pauses along the trail on an autumn hike up a New England mountainside. As one ascends the rocky-rubble path, first at the lowest elevations, and then later far higher, where the air becomes drier, cooler, and crisper; where the wind now begins to be felt; where the trees become straighter, thinner, and shorter, one still notices little but the boulders in the path; the sweat and exertion of climbing, gasping breath, the focused, intensive care of each footfall placed, so as not to stumble and fall. Every once in a while the climber pauses, for a break in the effort, to take a swallow of water, to look around; and he or she immediately realizes the extent of the progress made since the last pause; it is greater than expected. These are truly serene moments, mentally and physically, despite the vibrant pulse in one’s breast, and the decreasing urgency of breath; a sense of satisfaction comes from the realization of achievement; the summit is reachable, and will be attained. Thus the view of the end result changes, slightly; the mental image shifts, once again, and the urge returns stronger.

When the restoration of my old 33-ft. wooden cabin cruiser Fish Tales was nearing completion, she stood on blocks and stands in my driveway, as high and dry as a boat could possibly be. I could only imagine what she would feel like cutting through the clearing blue waters off Point Judith; what her engines would sound like, and such. I was anxious to take this boat, the largest boat that I had ever owned, out into waters that I had never traversed, except perhaps on ferry boats to Block Island. In the late fall of the year before she was launched – and the odyssey of her restoration had now absorbed three years and more – I purchased a used LORAN “C” receiver from a fellow in town who had advertised it in the local paper. I had wanted one, and they were not cheap, but his was offered for a reasonable price and was a good make and not very old. There were few GPS navigation systems in use among recreational boaters yet and LORAN was still in widespread use. This receiver was made by Furuno and these were the days before the simplicity of chart plotters. The LORAN set, using a triangulation technique based on the time difference between signals received from land-based transmitting towers, displayed a set of coordinates that gave the navigator a precise position fix, displayed in either Latitude/Longitude coordinates, or LORAN “TD” (Time Differential) lines which were marked on charts in semicircular patterns. Most commercial fishermen used the TDs; the rest of us non-professionals used the Latitude/Longitude readout. Even then, it was up to the navigator to take these coordinates and plot them on a paper chart to establish a position fix; there was no such thing as an electronic chart or graphic display. Still, to me it was absolutely magical that this receiver could, at any given time, display my actual position in real time so that I could plot it, in clear weather or fog. So on a few chill late autumn nights I stood at the steering console of Fish Tales, with the LORAN turned on, the manual open, learning how to use the thing, to zero it in properly and set it up right, pretending that I was out on the bay somewhere heading for Block Island or the Vineyard. Indeed, although the LORAN set would not work right with the boat out of water and not properly grounded, so the manual said, or because it was on land (unlike GPS, land masses interfered with LORAN reception – for it to work right you had to be out in open water), I still calculated the distance from where I was to an unseen goal, a waypoint, the 1BI green bell off the North Reef of Block Island. It was more than twenty-five miles, but I knew that, someday, most likely the following season, my boat and I would be there.

I remembered my first experience with LORAN as a young Coast Guardsman in 1975. Back then, LORAN “A” was in use, but it had limitations that I do not quite recall. LORAN “C” was more advanced and required an on-board computer of sorts but the results were more accurate. Our Coast Guard ship used both A and C but C only occasionally as it often malfunctioned. It also required a rather large module or unit and seemed clumsy, but this system demonstrated to me that in twenty years or so the technology had come a long way; the unit I purchased was the size of a small radio and gave highly accurate readouts on a backlit LCD screen. So I learned to use the unit, and played out my fantasies for the time being, navigating not an inch beyond my driveway, but I knew that I was getting there.

A couple of months later, a week before Christmas, the weather was unusually warm. It was a gusty, rainy night, and the Christmas lights in the trees and bushes throughout the neighborhood were jumping around in the restless wind squalls. We were hosting a a group of our friends over for a Christmas party and at one point it became so stuffy and warm in the house, and with everyone talking loudly and one of my tipsy friends couldn’t be pried away from the piano, that I felt the sudden need to go outside for a few minutes for a breath of fresh air, alone. I took my drink with me, and stood out on the front lawn, in the hour before midnight, and felt the occasional raindrops whip by and watched Fish Tales in the driveway, bow pointed ever-westward, waiting patiently for spring, her 1950s-era flared bow and graceful old sedan cruiser lines looking as though they were ready to cut through the seas at any moment. Like many powerboats of her age, she sported a small decorative mast, resembling a swept-back cross, mounted on the deck just in front of the windshields. I had strung a couple of sets of colored Christmas lights on her little mast and had run an extension cord up there, and had even arranged a 12-volt connection to her topmost white Perko light globe and her big luminous Fresnel red and green sidelights, so that her navigational lights would be ‘live’. She looked jolly with that little bit of Christmas holiday ornamentation and at that point I realized that indeed she would be launched, she would cruise, and that the long road of her restoration actually had a terminus, and that God willing, I would live to see it and have many adventures aboard her. It was a precious moment, and it caused me to forget the rain and the party noise inside and focus on a dream that was gradually inching closer to eventual reality.

After the Hurricane

2009-05-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

When I finally awoke, the morning after the hurricane hit St. Martin, it was nearly noon. The terrible wind had finally eased some time during the wee hours of the morning, and I had been able to stumble stiffly out of the bathroom and back into the bedroom proper and collapse onto the big king-sized bed. The wind was abating and I was no longer afraid that it would burst the sliding glass patio doors into the room and kill us with flying glass. That’s why Steve and I had been hiding in the cramped bathroom, sitting on the counter, in case the big glass doors exploded into the room. We would be decapitated, or worse, I thought, because there was no place else in the room where one could hide or be protected.

My friend Steve and I had just sailed a 45-foot French-built catamaran from New York to St. Martin. Steve, a seasoned sailor, had been hired by the boat’s owner, Wally, to help sail the boat to the island, where Wally had planned to lease it to a charter fleet home ported in Oyster Pond. It had been a difficult, stormy passage, and when we finally reached St. Martin we learned that a late-season hurricane had developed and was headed toward the island. Steve and I had spent the night of the storm in a little hotel up the street from the Oyster Pond docks. The skipper had arranged a room for us, since it was not possible to remain on the boat. Wally was staying somewhere else – we didn’t know where – with acquaintances, at a private home with plenty of food and comforts. We had been left to shift for ourselves which was, in our opinion, still much better than being stuck in the same place with Wally, whom, we discovered early in the voyage, was a weird, obnoxious crank.

As I gradually came to my senses on the damp bed, a gray light filtered into the hotel room. The air was hot and humid and there was no electricity and no running water. I opened the drapes and looked out upon the scene of devastation under overcast skies. The patio outside was a mess - parts of the roof had blown off and there were smashed, splintered timbers and roof tiles scattered everywhere. It was still windy, but the hurricane had passed.

There was no coffee and no hope for any. Steve awoke in the easy chair about the same time, and we both stepped out onto the patio, rubbing our eyes, still groggy from the nearly sleepless night, trying to take it all in. I had a small bottle of water – tepid but fresh – and poured most of it into a cup, filling it two-thirds, and the rest with Mount Gay rum from a half-full bottle that I had brought up from the Dinghy Dock bar down the street the night before. I took a big swallow and handed it to Steve. Instead of recoiling from the liquor, as he usually did, he took it happily, and took a long pull at it, even though it was warm. Any other time he might have gagged.

“I’m going up the hill to have a look around” I said, slinging my camera and a small knapsack with a water bottle and the Mount Gay. “Want to come along?”
“I’ll stay here in case Wally comes back” he said, “He might bring some food.”
“F__k Wally” I said. “He won’t bring us dogsh_t.”
“Fine then. Let’s go and see what we can find for ourselves.”

There was a path across the street from the hotel that led up a scrubby hill to a promontory with an overlook that provided a good view of everything around, including Oyster Pond. An ancient naval cannon was mounted on a stone base resembling a carriage at the top of the hill, pointing out to sea. The hurricane had not budged it, but the odd cacti, grasses, and shrubs that covered the hill had been strangely altered. Any part of a cactus – and these were sizable, tough cacti – above a point horizontally level with the top of the hill had been sheared cleanly off, as though a great scythe from the sea had swept across the top of the hill and had cut away anything not protected in its shadow, on a direct horizontal plane. It was eerie. Even from the hilltop, we could hear the roar of the breakers on the beaches below. White, angry surf and big swells were still rolling ashore on the unprotected beaches, while occasional drizzle and mist blew by. Down in Oyster Pond, we could see the crazed jumble of masts along the ring of the pond of all the sailboats that had blown ashore and now lay on their sides on the beach, at odd senseless angles to one another, stranded and damaged. “This island is one hell of a mess” I said. “Let’s go back and have another drink and a smoke.”

Back at the hotel, Steve and I moved a big piece of broken roof – part of an eave – out of the way, dragging it off the patio so that it would not be stepped on by bare feet or tripped over. It was a mess of splinters, nails, and jagged wood. As we did so, a door to a room on the second-floor opened, and a heavy-set older man stepped out onto the balcony. He was dressed casually in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts and spoke with a British accent. He and his wife had been staying there for some time, and had apparently come through the storm all right. She was still asleep, he said.

“Do you fellows have any bottled water?” he asked.
“Not really” I answered. “I filled our wastebaskets and every pot and pan we could find from the taps before the storm hit, so we have some clean water, if you need it.”
“Oh, no. I mean for you fellows. Here.” He reached down and handed us four liter-bottles of French bottled water. “Take care, conserve it. Trust me, chaps, you’ll be needing it later on.”
“Come have a drink with us” I offered.
“No, thank you mates, we’re all set here. I have to tend to the missus. Be careful and take care. Cheers.” With that, he went back into the room and shut the door.
“Decent fellow” I said to Steve, who nodded in agreement.

While we had been exploring the hilltop, a French couple had pulled up a couple of chairs and a table on the patio and when we returned they were still seated there, drinking a big bottle of wine. They spoke no English, but the tall, long black-haired woman that was the wife or girlfriend – they seemed young – was laughing and talking loudly and animatedly and was apparently quite drunk. At least she seems happy, I thought to myself.

I looked down into the hotel’s in-ground pool. The chlorinated water was still clean and clear, but the blue bottom of the pool was a crazy-quilt of black asphalt roof tile squares. There were some palm fronds and a couple of small green coconuts floating in it. The sun had begun to burn through and it was getting hot. “I’m going in” I said to Steve. “Sounds good to me too” he replied.
We stripped down to our shorts – after all there was a lady nearby – and went into the pool, removing the palm fronds and floating junk. The cool water felt good.

While we were thus splashing around, I suddenly noticed that the woman had stood up, and, despite the emphatic entreaties of her male companion, had stripped off her bathing suit, every stitch. Steve noticed too; then I saw his jaw drop as she hopped across the patio laughing and saying something very fast and very loud in French, and then swan-dove into the pool directly behind Steve.

A very loud and earnest exchange ensued between the laughing girl and her male companion, who was quite upset with her, probably because there were two other strange men in the same pool with her and she was completely naked. She was finally persuaded to climb out and put her bathing suit back on; Steve and I were mum, of course, and did our best to pretend that nothing was happening, Steve keeping his back to her while she was in the pool. Finally they stood up and took what was left of the bottle and made their way around the corner to a different hotel, presumably the one that they were staying at.

“She had very nice, long black hair” Steve said.
“Yes, she certainly did, didn’t she?”

A while later, we went down to the Dinghy Dock Bar looking for something to eat, and were happy to see that much of the debris around the docks had been cleaned up, or at least pushed aside, and we saw, to our delight, that the Dinghy Dock was, remarkably, unshuttered and open. It had suffered no real damage, and there was Ryan, its proprietor, the American hippie expatriate, behind the bar, operating some type of propane-powered portable stove linked to a big rusty gas bottle set on the ground. Steve and I had sauntered down to the dock – it was around eleven in the morning now – not expecting to find anything open; there were boat owners out on the docks, trying to assess damage to their boats, and salvaging clothing and other soaked items from down below. It was still a little breezy and overcast and an occasional rain shower spattered the docks. I could smell coffee brewing; the aroma was heavenly. The little bar was nearly full; people were drinking coffee, rum, coffee with rum, beer, every variety of beverage, mostly with alcohol. Ryan had put out open cartons of Parmalat milk on the bar so that folks could lighten their coffee. There was sugar in little damp packets. Ryan was busy, hopping around, and in response to a query from a fellow at the bar about running out of things, he shook his head and smiled, “Oh, no! I’ve been through this hurricane thing a few times. I know how to plan ahead.” Indeed, in the few days prior to the hurricane, when it was becoming near-certain that the island would be in its path, Ryan ordered extra cases of beer and liquor, eggs, bread, batteries, bottled water, propane, ice…as much as he could cram into the limited storage space that the Dinghy Dock building afforded. Now it would pay off. There was no food around, only at the Dock. Ryan had multiple pans going. He was making breakfast sandwiches for everyone. There was no electricity, so eggs were scrambled in a pan over the gas grill. There was cheese, there was bacon, and the bread was toasted, sometimes blackened a little, over the blue flames. It was grilled bread; a little crude, perhaps – like camping and toasting your bread over a fire – but it worked, and everyone ate.

Thereafter, ever day, in addition to breakfast, Ryan, who was a rather decent cook, made one main dish – and lots of it – for the rest of the day, lunch and dinner. These meals were planned, their ingredients ordered in advance, and it changed every day, although there was nothing else on the menu. But there was no need. Each meal was a one-pot type, spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken a la king, chicken curry, or a big stew, something that involved a main dish over rice or noodles. It was good, satisfying, and filling; the portions were generous and nobody starved. Ryan kept a log on a notepad of who ate and drank what, and everyone was expected to settle up before leaving the island – whenever that might be. If you wanted to sit at the bar and drink rum, you were given the bottle, a glass, and a little notepad and pencil to keep track of your own tally. You mixed your own drinks, poured them yourself – weak or killer, the choice was up to the drinker. So, depending on what sort of a day you were having, you self-medicated accordingly.

It went on like this for several days until we were finally able to get off the island on the first departing flight out of damaged Juliana Airport. Because the runway had been damaged, flights had to take off with minimal fuel, so we stopped in San Juan to fill the tanks before going on to Newark, New Jersey, not the last stop by far in what would be my long journey home to New-England. As we flew through the night, I looked out my window into the cold moonlit blackness at the sea below, the hundreds of leagues that we had taken many days to sail over, crossing our path, and now crossing that gulf in mere hours at more than five hundred knots and more than five miles up in the sky. I felt my tired body relax, settle, conform to the seat like a wad of silly-putty, and at long last fell into a brief, but deep, sleep.

Word Length - How Long - or How Short - Should my Story Be?

2008-12-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

A friend in Tasmania wrote a piece, which he sent to me, about his annual travels around Australia in his old diesel van. He makes the trip every year when it is winter in Tas; by taking the ferry to the Australian continent and then driving north and circumnavigating the continent over the course of a month or two, he drives to warmer weather for awhile. He sent it to me and of course I wrote back after reading it with questions about certain things that I thought he could have expanded upon to make them clearer, or to paint a picture for the reader. Eventually the question arose: How much expansion, or going into detail, is enough? How much is too much, at which time the meaning is lost and the section becomes bloated with too much detail, tiresome, or trite? There is no simple answer; there is a balance between diluting the power of a passage with too much detail, or not including enough to have the right effect, whether the point is to paint a picture with words, or to make a powerful point. However, my feeling is always that as much as possible that matters should be written down first; it can always be trimmed later.

So I say, based on my own experiences, never be concerned about the total length of a piece, ever, unless you are writing for a magazine and your article must fit certain word count or length requirements. Otherwise let the subject matter (and your heart) dictate length. Take your time and write it all out, tell the whole story, all the important details and enough description to put the reader in your place. Write it all down and do not stop until you are satisfied that you have said everything that you wanted to tell the reader, until you know that you have told the whole story. Skip nothing important. Leave nothing inside because whatever you leave there is as lost forever as a diamond buried deep in the earth where no one can ever mine it.

Conversely, do not artificially extend anything, or set a length goal; that is like overstuffing a couch, or diluting good whisky with too much water. Put it away and then go back to it in a day or so with a fresh mind and read it through it and when a picture appears in your mind that the words have not told, stop and add that picture or comment or observation to what is there but not yet mentioned. Then you will also remember important additional details that you were in too much of a hurry to write down the first time. Go back to it again later and trim, hone, smooth, polish, put weight in every word and make it flow like music. When you can no longer add anything to it that seems worthwhile, each time you revisit it, or that additional changes or embellishments don't feel right, then it is done. The same rule applies, the old proverb in wooden boat building: "What looks right, is right." Remember that you can always cut material away to suit your publisher's length requirements, but that adding material where there is none is infinitely harder after the fact.

Voices among the Old Cellar-Holes

2008-11-29T09:01:00.000-08:00

It all began at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford – but oddly enough, it was less about whaling than about something else – typical for me.

When I was a young boy – before my teenage years – my grandfather often took my cousin and I to visit the Whaling Museum in New Bedford occasionally on a grey wintry Saturday when there was not much else to do and the weather was not conducive to outdoor activity. It is not a long trip to New Bedford from where we lived in the East Bay area of Rhode Island – maybe a half-hour at best – but it seemed much longer then. We boys rode in Grandpa’s old Studebaker and took turns packing his corncob pipe with fresh tobacco. Grandpa had been a boatbuilder before his retirement, among other things, and he was full of the lore of the sea and never missed an opportunity to share it, and the history that he knew, with his young charges. I loved these trips to the museum, because it was, and still is, a very special place, full of bones, blocks, baleen, and musty old marvels too numerous and remarkable to list here.

The Whaling Museum was, and still is, owned and operated by the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, which, in addition to the magnificent centerpiece that is the museum, also had an interest in preserving the history of that delightful little corner of southeastern Massachusetts that includes New Bedford, Westport, and some of the surrounding area, and thus the museum had, in some small part, exhibits relating thereto. But whaling and everything to do with whaling has always been 99-percent of the museum’s offering. There seemed to be little else having to do with the rest of Old Dartmouth and its environs, which puzzled me.

Yet oddly enough, my favorite exhibit at the museum, one that was very easy to overlook, had nothing to do with whaling per se. It was a small room that re-created a 17th Century primitive household in what would presumably have been Old Dartmouth in the time of the earliest settlers. It was off in the eastern part of the museum building, a doorway off a hallway, not labeled if I recall, easy to miss, and might have been taken for a broom-closet except that it was not at the end of a hall, and the door was open. It was, in appearance, a dark room, small, lined with brown, rough-hewn beams and bare wooden walls, wide-plank floors and sparse furnishings. There was a big faux field-stone fireplace at one end of it, with a make-believe fire roaring in the hearth, little red coals and gold flames cleverly recreated with lights and technique such that it looked real, so real that I could swear that I felt the warmth from that primitive hearth when I stood in the room.

Of course, you could not actually go into the exhibit room and touch anything; a small square area inside the doorway was roped off, only enough room to stand and observe. I wanted to go over to the hearth and lie down next to the fire; it seemed like such a cozy, other-worldly place, a window into the past, a place to rest in snug comfort while, I imagined, the sharply-biting cold and sleet of the New-England winter lashed the outside of the crude dwelling and massive mortared grey stone chimney, and the forest primeval, populated by bears and hostile, skulking Indians, encircled it. Indeed, there was a little recording, I think, of wind – howling wind, as one would hear through the chimney-flue – playing over and over again in the background, adding to the ambience of the little place. Although I was young, I clearly understood the message behind it; it was a statement about the tough life that our forebears faced in the primitive land that was 17th Century New England. It spoke of their privations, hardscrabble life, and precarious existence, but also showed that there was yet comfort to be found in home and hearth.

The exhibit remained for many years – I have no idea how long, twenty, maybe thirty years; and as I grew older, and visited the museum less frequently, I nevertheless always made it a point to stick my head into that little doorway, and I had to smile. There was something unchanging and comfortable about it; the same vision, the same room, nothing unmoved; and why not? History is written; it recedes into the past, but it does not change. Facts, as John Adams pointed out, are immutable. The message too is unchanging. In a world where nothing seems sacred anymore, nothing seems stable or noble, everything is in flux, where uncertainty reigns and old values have been turned on their heads, this little room, in later years, offered me a connection to my youth, to the values that a young bright-eyed boy learned and embraced and had reverence for, once upon a time. I hoped that it would always be there.

Time passes all too quickly. The first streaks of gray in the once-boy’s hair have spread like mushrooms on a log to a pepper-and-salt beard with more salt than pepper. I went back to the museum a few years ago and to my dismay found the old room walled off, with a note saying that the exhibit area was being remodeled, and soon would offer a new display of some sort. My heart sank; if the ‘interpretations’ in the rest of the museum are any indicator of direction (and this is true of so many museums nowadays), the new display will be, or is, not about Old Dartmouth, not even about whales, but is quite probably configured as another tiresome paean to “celebrating ethnic diversity” or such, as if we don’t have enough of that theme being force-fed to us everywhere we turn nowadays. Is there some point in time when we can collectively get a point across to the politically-correct zealots that we do get the message? That we’re OK with it? That perhaps it’s time to move on and recover a broader and more inclusive view of history, one that once again includes our early local forebears? Perhaps not; the early settlers have too many things going against them, demerit check offs in the enlightened postmodern culture classroom. They were white Europeans; a good many of them males, at that; they were religious; and they even (and unfortunately) shot at Indians occasionally. They often did not pay their help – or themselves – a ‘living wage’, and did not practice ‘fair trade’. Still, that’s enough right there in modern revisionist culture to deny them any creditable place in history, even the place that they heretofore occupied as the founders of the country that we live in at present.

These days I hike the woodland trails of a large preserve in Tiverton, Rhode Island, fairly adjacent to the Massachusetts border and that whole area of Southeastern Massachusetts that contains Westport and Dartmouth. I hike during the cold months of the year, when there are few people to meet on the trails. I hike nearly every day that time permits, sometimes when a lovely dusting of snow has decorated the quiet landscape and my boots crunch with every step. Sometimes I go when the wind is blustering and roars in the bare upper tree branches, and other times yet when the weak winter sun shines golden in the late afternoon on the bright tan beech-leaf carpet of the forest floor and the green Boston ferns that hang from the rocky ledges and will not wilt and curl until they feel the deepest bite of January’s freeze.

I hike several miles of trails that include the old Eight Rod Way, an uncompleted road from the 17th Century that had once been planned to run to Plymouth. It is still, in places, paved with the small round cobbles that local farmers painstakingly gathered from their fields to deposit by the wagon-load yard by yard over decades. Areas of exposed ledge are worn and rutted from wagon wheels. This area was settled back in the early days, by subsistence farmers and pioneers. It is a haunted place and their voices whisper from the old cellar-holes that dot the landscape, foundations often hidden behind groves of lovely green mountain laurel, a shrub that remains green year ‘round, even when its upper branches are laden with snow and ice.

Little babbling Borden Brook, dark as English tea from the tannins leaching out of the Ice Age-era remnant cedar swamp from whence it originates in underground springs, murmurs its way through the woods. It flows under heavy stone slab bridges put in place by rough hands three centuries ago. The brook tumbles on happily beneath the jumbled collapsed stones of the raceway of the old Borden sawmill, its foundation and corbelled arch stone bridge still sound since the mill sawed trees into planks for Tiverton village houses in the 18th Century. There may be burials out here; perhaps, deep beneath the soft blanket of oak leaves, tangled brown roots and humus are the bones of Indians who never saw a European face; perhaps there are graves of slaves, or of the very poor, or of the early settlers’ children, for their mortality was very high.

I pause at the cellar hole of one man’s home, and this one has a name, in the guidebooks – Scipio Cook. I do not know who Scipio Cook, with his classical Roman first name, was, although there must be someplace where I can learn more about him. A little family of chipmunks darts in and out around the mortarless stones of his old foundation, all traces of wood or timber long gone. But I found Scipio’s little dug well one day, and the remains of his small garden – for herbs and vegetables, probably turnips and onions for his stew-pot – can still be outlined, for the vegetation is different there.

Further up the trail, there lies a group of stone-lined cellar holes that is most intriguing, for this was a small, closely situated community or farm with intersecting stone walls. The cellar walls are bulged in, looking as though they are ready to collapse, although they have looked that way, most probably, for more than a century. But these cellar holes, dating from the First Period, perhaps, are the same size as would fit the little re-created room that used to be in the museum. These were small houses, very small, very simple. Many has been the cold day’s hike that I wished, with the rustle of sleet in the upper tree-branches and little crystals speckling my hat and shoulders, that I could walk inside, warm myself by the fire, and have a bowl of stew, perhaps, or tea, at least haven and shelter, brief respite, from the weather, sharing a few moments with these early, hardy people.

There is a new neighborhood development nearby, cutting deeply into the Tiverton woods. Although this preserved place will, by deed, always be protected from the incursion of that development, in the nakedness of winter that plat of vinyl-sided plastic box-houses can occasionally be glimpsed through the woods, their treeless lots and loam-less lawns re-seeded desperately trying to grow grass before the rains gully them. But some of the boxes have fireplaces, though not built with stone or brick chimneys but siding-covered ones with tin caps. Burning seasoned hardwood produces the same aromatic incense no matter what it is burned in, however, and occasionally, as I pass these foundations on a day when the gray sky is lowering and threatening snow, I will catch a whiff of that burning wood, and it will overwhelm my senses. Even though that anonymous early home is no longer here, I can smell the aroma of its hearth on the cold air.

At such times, I will pause at the edge of a cellar hole, whose nameless inhabitants long ago passed to dust, and will whisper a brief prayer for them, to let them know that in the stillness of the woods, decades and even centuries after their hard lives have ended, in a small piece of land that in many ways has begun to resemble once more the world that they lived in, someone remembers them, cherishes the memory of who they were and how they lived, and what they sought to do in carving a settlement out of a howling and unforgiving wilderness. Despite their sufferings and losses, Puritan father William Bradford observed and wrote, “They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits."

They are remembered now by someone not confused or distracted by the myopic fad-currents of the moment, who does not judge them by today’s political cause-driven standards. History, after all, cannot be changed or erased, though many have tried to do both for selfish ends and private agendas. The glass that looks backward can at times be obscured deliberately, ignored, or trivialized; but I stand at the stone doorstep of a yawning hole filled with stumps and leaves, and listen for the whispering voices of the family that once lived there and the wind howling in the flue. It is there, they were there, and always will be for the patient listener with an open and uncluttered mind. Listen not with the ears, but with the heart, and you too will hear them, calling out to be remembered.

Engines, Angels, and the Meaning of Luck

2008-09-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

I’m not much for silly fads and new-age stuff – the whole concept of angels, for instance – but if there are angels, and if a good angel is watching over me, he earned his grog the other day when my old blue Perkins diesel blew.

Many people believe in angels. When I was a child, I was taught that each of us has a guardian angel assigned to watch over us, particularly our souls, though it was never clear to me which of the two the angel was charged with protecting specifically. As a youngster I actually preferred that, if I had such an angel, he or she would concentrate more on keeping me out of physical harm’s way, and the soul, for all practical purposes, could go to hell.

I think the whole angel concept is a fine idea but have often felt (for reasons that I do not choose to explain here) that my angel is of the lower-pay-grade kind, maybe even the variety with horns. Or, if I have a good angel, he or she is either asleep most of the time, or belongs to a union that happens to be in perpetua in a heavenly work slowdown or strike.

All such doubts about the quality and competence of my angel were dispelled, however, when my boat’s old 4-banger diesel auxiliary decided to sputter and die. Yes, I was underway. But in truth, there could have been few more auspicious times for the engine to fail unless it had been, for example, on a test-bench. This is why I am now a firm believer in angels. Mine finally woke up and came through in a pinch. He kept my engine alive just long enough for me to make it to my mooring.

My angel’s performance oddly reminded me of an old friend, Jason, who used to fly a great deal in his sales engineering job for the company that we worked for. Jason was a bright guy but he was also a bit of a smart-aleck. He was fascinated by air travel and commercial flight, which was fortunate because his job required him to spend so much time in the air. He used to like to hobnob with the pilots and once asked a pilot why, with so much automated guidance – planes practically taking off and landing by themselves – that pilots were needed at all, and might even be overpaid, given the nearly ‘hands off’ nature of their job in flight. The pilot cracked a smile, and replied. “Well, because every so often – and it may only be once in a great while – I have to step in and save your ass. Now isn’t that worth it?”

Now, after a miserably stormy summer in New England – and we have been praying for the long-absent Bermuda High that used to be a commonplace weather pattern here in summer – the forecaster promised that one would be settling in over the northeast. That meant sunny days, steady winds, all for a stretch of nearly a week. Bonanza!

I was thinking of heading out in a day or so and inviting along any of my ol' pirate crew of fellows who might want a berth on this floating spirits locker, to cruise to Nantucket, Block Island, or the Elizabeth Islands up in Buzzard’s Bay.

Planning in advance, I brought my old Gulfstar sloop to the marina dock for the weekend, tidying up, cleaning, and preparing the boat for a cruise of three days or more. On Tuesday morning, it was time to leave the dock – I had used up my allotted time – and since I was still a couple of days away from going cruising, I decided to bring the boat around the Bristol peninsula to her alternate mooring in the Kickemuit River, off Mount Hope Bay. Motoring leisurely, it’s an hour trip, no more. The boat had not been in the Kikky at all this season and I thought it would be nice to have her moored there for a couple of days. That mooring is near my house, and there is a right-of-way at the bottom of a nearby street where I keep a dinghy pulled up on the hard.

The water was flat, with a slight westerly breeze; it was a beautiful, warm summer morning. The engine seemed to be running fine, but as always, I was babying her. I had purchased this boat four years earlier, at a reduced price, knowing that it was a “project” boat. Her Achilles’ heel was her engine; an old 4-cylinder Perkins 4-108 that dated from the day the boat was built in 1986. It was 22 years old now, never having been rebuilt, with no hour meter; I estimated that it had perhaps a million hours on it, if it had a fortnight. Still, it ran fairly steadily and did not belch black smoke or knock unless one tried to make her work too hard – such as advance beyond 1/3 throttle – so I kept oil in her, since she oozed and burned a little, and I kept water and antifreeze in the coolant tank even though the blow-by from the pistons (or failed head gasket) kept exhaust bubbling out of the coolant reservoir and there was black oil in the coolant tank floating on top all the time. I had been told by a mechanic back when I bought the boat that the floating oil “was not a good sign.” But again, that was a few years back.

Now I was entering the narrow, twisting mouth of the Kickemuit River. I came around the last corner of the S-curve and saw my mooring buoy and pickup stick, or tall-boy, dead ahead. The tide was still incoming and the gentle current and light breezes were right behind me.

I was 50 yards from the mooring buoy when the engine blew.

A few minutes earlier, the engine had begun doing something unusual – slowing down, fluctuating in speed. It never had done that before. Problems came to mind – clogged fuel filter, pinhole air leak in the fuel line – but before I had the chance to do much more thinking, the engine began making nasty knocking noises, and then it quit. I restarted her once, but she ran only for a few moments. Then she would not turn over at all.

Old auxiliary diesel engines are a lot like old married guys, those of us who have twenty five years plus hitched to the old wagon. They work hard all the time, say very little (because complaining is useless) and then just die, all of a sudden, without any real warning, and all that’s left is a whiff of the stink of burnt oil.

The boat still had some way on, so I coasted right up to the tall-boy and grabbed the pennant and secured my boat.

How nice that I recently had a new 500lb mushroom anchor put down there and new top chain, good enough to ride out a hurricane. Now I’ll get the use out of it, I thought. Now I’ll get my money’s worth. Isn’t that the way it always happens – if you’re lucky?

Oddly enough the engine had not given any sign of overheating, and cooling water was still pumping from the exhaust before she died, so I had no idea what the problem was when she began acting oddly. Now it seemed (after it quit) very hot and I could smell something burning, like dirty engine oil. I pulled off some panels and noticed that one of the bilge compartments – not the one that drains to the bilge pump, thankfully –was full of all my engine oil. Don't know how it got there, did not see a point of egress or an obvious leak from the port side of the engine. Somehow it escaped, sump ran dry, engine seized. That’s all she wrote. I realized that the engine had been on life support for four years anyway, and didn’t owe me anything. But I think like what I am, a Yankee; if bolts still hold the damned thing together, and some of them are shiny on the heads where the paint has flaked off, then by golly it ought to be running. But engines need oil to keep running. I knew that my engine used some oil but I knew the rate and always added some after motoring for an afternoon. In this case, even after very little running it all got out, something must have failed.

In some ways I am relieved; I had been waiting for the axe to fall. But what kind of luck is that for the old gal to give up the ghost 50 yards from the mooring, coming in sweetly, instead of in trouble on a lee shore or 16 miles west of Block Island in a calm? Or trying to negotiate a narrow and unforgiving channel stemming a tide? I wonder if I have any luck left in the bank, for I used a good sum of it that morning.

So the engine is dead but at least the boat is safe on her mooring. She will have to be sailed away, anywhere she goes; but that’s not so bad. After all, Joshua Slocum sailed around the world alone in SPRAY with no engine at all. A sloop is very maneuverable even in light airs under just the mainsail. I’m afraid, though, that RagBagger’s 2008 cruising season is basically over. In the months ahead, I can stay aboard, like the boat-bums who live on the motorless hulks permanently moored in Key West’s backwaters. I have a grill to cook my burgers, and a cooler to keep the beer cold. My water tanks are full; the wind generator makes enough power to keep the batteries up if I use electricity sparingly.

It just might be fun for awhile, while I save up for that replacement engine!

Kenny Goes Home

2008-07-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

In the morning I was in the ship’s big lavatory, or ‘head’, washing and bleaching out a pair of white trousers in one of the round stainless-steel sinks that stood in a long row beneath a mirror-lined wall. It was Saturday – no work today, I reminded myself, no watch until later in the evening, a day to take care of personal things. I was concentrating on a stain – spaghetti sauce or something of that nature – when one of my shipmates, a fellow seaman named Doyle, walked up to the sink next to me, perhaps to shave. I didn’t really take notice of him standing there – the stain was stubborn – until I noticed that he was not running the water, and when I looked up at him he asked me if I had heard about Kenny.
“No,” I replied. Then he said something to me about a bunch of the guys going swimming last night, late, down by the Galveston shore. “We lost Kenny” he said.
“What?”
“He was out quite a ways, it was pretty dark, and then someone noticed that he wasn’t there, no one knew where he was.” He said this in low tones.
I felt disbelief; I stopped what I was doing. “He must have come in to shore” I said.
“Nope.”
“Well, he has to be all right” I said, not really grasping or believing what Doyle was telling me. Doyle walked away.

Our Coast Guard ship had put into Galveston for a few days. We had been on assignment in the Gulf; the Marine Science Technicians, or MSTs, had been taking water samples, temperature, and other data at various depths for the NOAA weather service, and we had come in for fuel and supplies. We had been at sea for a couple of weeks. It was quite warm – late summer – out on the Gulf and the water was a beautiful deep lovely blue but the weather was generally fine and pleasant and as a result the duty was fairly boring after the first couple of days. The ship moved slowly, the MSTs did their work, and the deck crew did the usual chipping and painting and watch standing. One day some squalls came through as we were heading to the next sampling location and a funnel cloud came down from a dark mass of clouds ahead of the ship. It was beginning to descend, well on its way to becoming a water spout, and the Old Man halted the ship and waited for it to pass. It never touched the water but it was an interesting phenomenon to watch and one of the officers commented that a waterspout, if it hit the ship, could do some damage and no one wanted any of that, so we would wait a few minutes to see what happened. The almost-waterspout was all the excitement we’d had for nearly a month of this oceanographic work out on the Gulf in summer.

So when we heard that we were finally going to take a break and go into Galveston, we were all fairly pleased with the news. It wasn’t the choicest place to go, but it was land, it was a port, there would be liberty, and that meant dry land, a change of scenery, bars, and girls. I had never been to Galveston before, so I looked forward to visiting a new place.

It was a long time ago and I do not remember a great deal about Galveston. It was surely much different then than it is today. I remember the long rocky breakwater in the harbor, the steep beaches where they told us that the undertow was pretty severe, big piers along the waterfront, high on pilings, and oil rigs visible out on the horizon. The first afternoon that we had liberty, one of the seamen had a car available and several of us piled in and rode around Galveston and along the barrier islands connected to it. At some point we ended up on a flat beach somewhere that had a shanty town on it, and it looked to be inhabited by Mexicans. We drove through it, people everywhere looking at us, streets of hard-packed sand, but I don’t remember where it was. Galveston was a curious, odd place, I thought.

But Kenny and a group of seamen had gone out drinking that Friday night and were drinking hard, and afterward had decided to go swimming, around one in the morning, on the steep beach by the piers that was marked “no swimming” where someone had remarked about the undertow and the strong currents and surf. They were all very drunk and Kenny along with them, and while they were out swimming in the darkness Kenny simply disappeared, slipped under the waves without a sound. One of the guys noticed that they had not heard from him for a few minutes and looked around to the last place that he had been and he was not there anymore.

I first became acquainted with Kenny on the midwatch, standing lookout on the flying bridge of the ship from midnight until four in the morning, while the ship was underway out in the Gulf. The nights were warm and humid and the phosphorescence in the water glowed green and blue around the ship. Only seamen were assigned the job of lookout, and the lookout’s job was to keep a sharp eye out for contacts – lights from other ships – and inform the bridge below, even though the exercise was basically useless because the ship’s sophisticated radar could pick up everything from the bow to the horizon and at far greater distances than our eyes could usually see in the humid nighttime haze that hung over the sea. The bridge was one story below and the usual personnel on duty at that time would have been the helmsman, a seaman or Boatswain’s Mate 3rd class, or BM3, and possibly one of the ensigns, the Officer of the Deck or OOD. Sometimes the cranky old BM Chief, Chief Smith, was on the bridge during the earlier evening hours and his favorite game was to watch the radar, to see when it picked up a contact at a great distance; he would then look in that direction until he could barely pick up a visible speck of light, since he knew where to look, and then would call down the lookout and dress him down. “My old eyes saw that contact before you did! What’s the matter with you, not paying attention? If I see one more contact before you do, you’re liberty is canceled this weekend” or such, or he would assign the seaman to some miserable task that no one else wanted to do. Inevitably, he always saw another contact before the lookout did, and made good with his threat. That was his way of getting ‘volunteers’ for the ship’s dirtiest jobs, especially on weekends. To compound matters, by some remarkable quirk of fate, we had an entire ship full of guys like Chief Smith, all of course above the rank of seaman. But I digress.

The flying bridge was actually rather large in area and one had to climb a ladder to get up there. The Chiefs and officers rarely ever went up there, and never at night. They could not be bothered, really, so it became a sanctuary for seamen, especially late at night. There was a wonderful old compass up there mounted on a beautiful sturdy yellow oaken base that was as high as your chest and housed in a heavy brass binnacle. Big iron quadrantial spheres, or Navigator's balls, painted red and green respectively for port and starboard, used to compensate the compass for deviation on an iron ship, were mounted on either side and were as large as cannon balls. A soft golden glow emanated from a lamp inside, illuminating the compass card at night. The compass and binnacle dated from the building of the ship – 1944 – and although nobody used it now because the ship was equipped with an internal gyrocompass, I used to enjoy gazing at it at night, and besides it was there as a backup in case the gyrocompass failed, which it actually did once or twice.

One fellow strung a hammock up there just for fun, to nap in when he was not on lookout duty; at other times at night, other seamen or firemen on watch with nothing to do, or simply ones who could not sleep, congregated up there to chat, smoke our pipes, and speak in low tones (since the leadership on the bridge did not want us concentrating on anything but avoiding collisions by detecting critical ‘contacts’), so that we would not be heard and chastised. Sometimes a fellow would bring up some coffee fro the others; always there was the throaty roar of the engines reverberating through the stack, and the diesel smoke billowing astern from the top of the stack well above our heads. The weather was usually warm, and we could spend hours up there talking about our pasts, our girlfriends back home, the meaning of life, and the entire universe of subjects. There is something about being at sea in the middle of the night under God’s great canopy of stars that stimulates such conversation and contemplation in even the dullest fellow. One was rarely alone up there during the middle of the night watches.

Kenny was also a seaman but a few years older than the rest of us. He was thin and slight of build, hollow-cheeked, gaunt-looking, very much the apotheosis of a backwoods Southern boy. He hailed from a tiny place named Greenfield, Mississippi, way up in the woods, as far from the ocean, just about, as one could get in the deep South and he had a thick drawl, slow manner of speaking, and dry, self-deprecating sense of humor. He was a real country fellow who seemed to like everyone, took everyone at face value and every bump in the road philosophically in stride. He wished no one any harm, not ever, and was well liked aboard by his shipmates, even though he occasionally got in trouble for drinking too much. It was infrequent that he did, usually on liberty on the first night ashore with his mates, and he liked his weed, too – this was the mid-1970’s, and practically all the enlisted fellows aboard did, which also got him into occasional trouble. But by some unhappy instance, a few years earlier, when he had been stationed in Alaska, he beat the tar out of his Executive Officer, or XO, and as a result was busted back to Seaman Apprentice, the lowest rate in the Coast Guard, and a few extra years were tacked on to his enlistment. He had, in fact, been only a few weeks short of getting out of the service; he had done a four-year hitch, and had been looking forward to going home to Greenfield. But there was some problem, the station’s XO did not like him, or as the story goes, actually liked him quite a bit in the wrong way and had made an improper sexual advance, and Kenny had rejected it. The XO then brought Kenny up on some trumped-up false charge in retaliation, dereliction of duty or something like that, and Kenny had imbibed some liquor and had caught the XO in town off duty one night and had whaled the bejesus out of him. When Kenny told me this one evening, I figured that the XO had been a small fellow, or Kenny had been incredibly angry, because the wiry, scrawny Kenny did not look like he could beat a spider into submission, but looks are always deceiving. Kenny was the sort who, slow to anger, might become a fury once aroused. He hated hazing and injustice, lies and mean-spiritedness. He was a mellow, laid-back sort of fellow who was easy to be around.

Kenny spent some time in the brig and also had time added to his enlistment. He had never advanced afterward; he was still a seaman, but over time he had learned how to get along even when pressed and keep his mouth shut, and had kept out of trouble when drinking, even though it was clear that he was at odds with the military life. Now, he told us, a few weeks hence, when we returned to the ship’s home port of Gulfport, his enlistment would be up and he would finally be going home and he had promised himself that he would not look back. He spoke of Greenfield often, his old friends, and how he yearned to get back there. A few weeks after this last stop in Galveston he would be on his way.

Now he was gone anyway and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. Our ship had its orders. I thought it would be appropriate if Kenny was found and his remains brought home to Gulfport aboard his unit, but by the time we had to leave after a few days they still had not found Kenny. I remember the image of the long rock jetties as we steamed out of port onto the broad Gulf, and the same image came back to me a few days later when we heard that Kenny’s body had washed up on one of the jetties outside the harbor. So he had gotten off the ship after all, and earlier as well, but in the wrong way and in the end it did not seem fair, not fair at all. But it was just another hard lesson in a quick succession of hard lessons to be learned for me, a very naïve young man of 18 years who, at the time, was going through the experience of watching all of his cherished dreams, ideals, and expectations turned on their heads or falling over like dominoes in the harsh light of day to day reality. And so I lost a friend, not the first, not the last. Life is not fair. Nor is it gentle.

They shipped Kenny’s body home to his beloved Greenfield for burial, and of course there was no service for him on the ship and we went back to chipping and painting as before. But one afternoon only a few days later Chief Smith called the seamen in the Deck Force, as we were known, together down to the sail locker and we pulled up chairs on the steel deck surrounded by bins filled with needle guns, hardhats, chipping hammers, and chain gripes and listened to the Chief tell us that the one thing that he liked most about Kenny was that when the going got tough, Kenny wouldn’t say anything but just shrug his shoulders and smile and keep on plugging along. Chief was trying to be profound, to use Kenny as an example of how we should handle the low points on a ship whose morale was already lower than the keel and mostly because the ship was top-heavy with a parcel of petty jerks with gold-plated collar devices running it. We all listened politely to the BM Chief knowing that it was pure horseshit because Chief had never really liked Kenny anyhow and had picked on and taunted him, just like he did not particularly like any of us either. But that was how Kenny got out of the Coast Guard and finally found his way home.

Church's Beach

2008-07-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

There is a crescent-shaped sandy beach on an island in New England where the salt water is crisply cool and very clear, almost like spring water, where you can watch the sun set in an orange fireball over the sea on a summer evening and where there is almost always some low surf. It is odd, of course, to be on any beach in New England and see the sun set over only water and not a coastline; one would naturally expect a sea-sunset to be characteristic of a California beach on the broad Pacific. Certainly the water on this beach is cold like the Pacific. Yet I have been on this beach at day’s end, immersed in the bracingly cold water, even in August, waving my arms to keep my body stationary in the surge, and watched the sun set over Buzzard’s Bay, the prevailing southwesterly blowing in my face and the rich salt-sweet chill fresh-lobstery aroma of the deep in my nostrils. The beach faces westward, and there is just enough distance between it and Sakonnet Point to put the land just beyond the horizon. I could pretend that I am somewhere else, but there is no need; this place is wonderful enough.

Up on the beach there is sand, ivory-white, deep and dry forming little dunes and studded with dune grass and beach pea, with occasional clumps of wild beach rose or Rosa Rugosa. My friend Bruce loves this beach; it is his favorite beach in all the world, and he takes no time at all to get wet; whereas I prolong the pain, he runs down the steep beach at a good clip and dives into the surf, then swims out into the swell, sounding and blowing like a porpoise and thoroughly enjoying himself. When you come out of the water, the sheltering warmth of even a threadbare towel feels welcome.

This rare place is known as Church’s Beach, on Cuttyhunk Island, a small gravelly pile of terminal moraine at the end of the Elizabeth Island chain, the last bit of land jutting out into Buzzard’s Bay. The beach is perhaps no more than a quarter mile long, with only a fraction of that usable, for the southwesterly end of it is all rocky. Sometimes the winter gales take the sand away and one spring Bruce and I went there and saw that the sand was gone; he shook his head sadly. But then we were back, as luck would have it, barely two weeks later and a change in the currents and the magic of nature had somehow returned tons of it to the beach, filling all the spaces between the round cobbles of the bottom and making a smooth, ripply, sandy, soft beach again charged every few seconds with another happy frothy laughing surge running up the incline only to fall back again and fade into the beach itself on its way down.

On a hot summer afternoon the water is deep blue, a clear and beautiful blue, and there is always a breeze from the southwest and the distant land of Westport, off to the north, looks deep blue or purple, undulating along the horizon. It is pleasant to float in the swells of the ocean-clean water and watch the sailboats in the distance beating to windward, heading out of the bay, or running before the wind, slow-motion and billowing white sails, cruising up the bay to the islands, the Cape, or to the Cape Cod canal and who knows what destinations beyond. It is a sweet place and for those moored in Cuttyhunk’s quiet inner harbor, one can always hear the surf on Church’s Beach on a still night, as regular as a heartbeat, the ever-present scent of the sea and the wild rose and honeysuckle on shore to perfume the air.

Ben Franklin and the Lightning-rod

2008-06-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

Of all the things that "Old Lightning-Rod" Ben Franklin is famous for - 2006 was the tercentenary of his birth - and there are quite a few inventions and discoveries of course - the invention of the lightning-rod is the one that truly launched his reputation. Nowadays, we tend to categorize this invention shoulder to shoulder along with his others - a better wood stove, or bi-focal eyeglasses. However, the invention of the lightning-rod was earth-shattering in its time, and saved many lives. Its creation launched Franklin's fame internationally, and the aura of that fame remained with him for the rest of his life.

In the electronics industry, we generally deal with comparatively small amounts of electricity, low voltages, low volumes of current at the circuit board level. Yet when we address concerns about static electricity and the damage that it can cause to circuits from what is known as ESD – Electro-static Discharge - we are not far from the phenomenon of lightning, albeit on a miniature level. It was, however, a phenomenon that people around the world were mortally concerned with in the decades and even centuries prior to Franklin's invention. Bench-level ESD won't kill you, but lightning will, and prior to the invention of the lightning-rod, it was killing approximately 300 people per year, the largest percentage of them being church bell-ringers! Before anyone could do anything about the threat, lightning needed to be understood.

I have always been a Ben Franklin fan. I have read Walter Isaacson's excellent biography, titled "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life." In it, I was surprised to read how the nature of lightning was thoroughly misunderstood before Ben. Apparently, attributions of evil were assigned to lightning, and thus it was thought that the 'purity' of church bell tones would drive lightning away. Thus, when a storm approached a village, the bell-ringers took to their ropes, and as a result, many were electrocuted when lightning struck the steeple, bells, or rain-soaked bell ropes. Many ships, homes, and other buildings were annually damaged and destroyed by lightning.

Franklin, a remarkably deductive thinker, theorized that lightning consisted of a sort of "fluid", and also that there was a certain polarity - and predictability - to its behavior. The "positive" and "negative" polar characteristics associated with the flow of electricity even today originated with Franklin! Franklin’s hypothesis that electricity is a single fluid that is never created or destroyed, but simply transferred from one place to another, was profound, and it greatly simplified the interpretation of many observations.

Franklin described the behavior of a Leiden jar capacitor by combining the concept of equal positive and negative states with an assumption that glass is a perfect insulator. "So wonderfully are these two States of Electricity, the plus and minus combined and ballanced in this miraculous Bottle!" He also made an analogy between electricity and lightning when he described a discharge through the gold trim on the cover of a book that produced "a vivid Flame, like the sharpest Lightning." Franklin began to use terms such as "charging" and "discharging" when describing how a Leiden jar works and he noted the importance of grounding when charging and discharging the jar. He also showed that the electricity in such a device resides entirely in the glass and not on the conductors that are inside and outside the jar. Franklin described how several capacitors could be charged in series "with the same total Labour" as charging one, and he constructed an "Electrical Battery" - a capacitor bank in today's parlance—using panes of window glass sandwiched between thin lead plates, and then discharged them together so that they provided the "Force of all the Plates of Glass at once thro' the Body of any Animal forming the Circle with them." Later, Franklin used discharges from large batteries to simulate the effects of lightning in a variety of materials.

Franklin had a few theories, and set out to prove them, even at risk to him, through experimentation. Which came first - the kite or the rod? History records that Franklin invented the lightning rod in September of 1752, though its purpose was not to protect the house, as would be the tradition. Franklin, whose English immigrant forebears had first settled on the island of Nantucket, had observed the damage done by lightning to ship's spars, and wanted to devise a system to protect vessels from this crippling damage.

First, he had to figure out how lightning traveled, and how it behaved. He devised an experimental lightning-rod apparatus which he attached to his house in Philadelphia, extended nine feet above the chimney, winding from the chimney through the staircase and finally into his study where it split into two rods with a bell at the end. Between the points of these two rods, a metal ball hung on a silk thread. Called "lightning bells," the bells would jingle when lightning was in the air. He wrote, "In September 1752, I erected an Iron Rod to draw the Lightning down into my House, in order to make some Experiments on it, with two Bells to give Notice when the Rod should be electrified... I found the Bells rang sometimes when there was no Lightning or Thunder, but only a dark Cloud over the Rod; that sometimes after a Flash of Lightning they would suddenly stop; and at other times, when they had not rang before, they would, after a Flash, suddenly begin to ring; that the Electricity was sometimes very faint, so that when a small Spark was obtained, another could not be got for sometime after; at other times the Sparks would follow extremely quick, and once I had a continual Stream from Bell to Bell, the size of a Crow-Quill. Even during the same Gust there were considerable variations."

Soon after this experiment, Franklin conducted his most famous experiment, flying a kite with a key attached to its string, proving that lightning carries an electrical charge. In July 1753, nine months after his famous experiment with the kite, he observed the relationship between lightning and metal "conductors." A house in Philadelphia was hit by lightning and, because of the building materials used in construction of the house, a person could trace the path the lightning took, including where the house was undamaged. The undamaged portions of the house all had one thing in common, they all contained metal. Franklin also made the observation that houses with metal roofs that had a downspout were rarely damaged by lightning strikes.

Franklin then deduced and proved that by affixing a metal rod to a house, giving the lightning a directed path to the earth, the metal would preserve the house from fire and prevent a strike to the wooden parts of the building itself. This was a major achievement that was soon recognized and implemented worldwide. In the following years, Franklin continued to gather information about lightning. Based on his own observations and those of friends and associates, he recommended using larger, more substantial conductors and a deeper, more extensive grounding system to protect the foundation of the house against the effects of surface arcs and explosions in the soil. Because all reports from North America showed that grounded rods did indeed protect houses from lightning damage, in January 1762 Franklin sent an improved design for "the shortest and simplest Method of securing Buildings, Etc. from the Mischiefs of Lightning," to Scottish philosopher David Hume. That letter was subsequently read to Edinburgh's philosophical society, which published it in 1771.

Ben's lightning-rod saved lives and buildings; his reputation as a man of great genius increased as the use of his invention became more widespread. Franklin's fame also gave him greater leverage when representing the cause of the American Colonies in France. His reputation as scientist, philosopher, and to no small degree, publicist who knew how to use the power of the press, contributed to the winning of the Revolution through the intercession of France and favorable world opinion in general.

In June 1776, the celebrated economist and former comptroller-general of France, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, composed a prophetic epigram in Latin that captures Franklin's legacy in a single sentence: "Eripuit caelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis" ("He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants").

Johnnycakes, and 'Growing Your Own' Indian Corn

2008-06-17T19:32:00.000-07:00

I went down to Gray’s mill in Little Compton a few weeks ago. It’s where I go to buy my johnnycake corn meal. This is a product mostly indigenous to the Rhode Island area. Quite simply, it is stone-ground corn meal, made from an ancient variety of hard corn that was once raised by the local natives long before Europeans came to America. The type of corn is known as white cap flint corn; the kernels are the size and shape of stubby thumbnails.

It was a staple food for the local Indians, who pounded it in stone mortars into coarse meal for practically every meal. After pounding, it was mixed with water to make a batter and spread and cooked on a heated stone. This is not unlike the native tradition in the south – Mexico, for example, and the origin of the corn tortilla.

Europeans quickly took a liking to this white corn and it was a significant part of the New England diet throughout colonial times and through the end of the 19th Century. Indeed, Rhode Island – and especially Aquidneck Island – was once dotted with windmills whose purpose was corn-grinding. Often, water-powered mills served a dual purpose – sawmill on some days, grist mill (corn and grains) on others. The corn keeps well; recall how the native New England Indians would bury it in the ground in baskets to keep it over the winter.

My recipe for johnnycakes is traditional. To a couple of handfuls of meal in a bowl, I add a few pinches of sea salt and a half teaspoon of white sugar. Then I add boiling water (or near-boiling) and mix to get a thick batter. Then I spoon the mix onto a hot cast-iron griddle. They are more flavorful if you fry them in bacon fat, but this isn’t the healthiest choice, so most of the time I use peanut oil. Cook over moderate heat for five minutes and turn. They should be golden-brown on both sides with crispy edges. Eat them plain or with maple syrup. After they cool, I often take them on woodland hikes, for I have learned not to mind them cold.

Gray’s Mill still uses massive stone grinding wheels to grind their corn, now electric powered (once was water-driven). See their web site at http://www.graysgristmill.com/. It’s a rather good site with a lot of excellent information but for some idiotic (perhaps marketing) reason they insist on calling the stuff “Narragansett Indian” flint corn, which is nonsense. Of course the Narragansetts raised it and so did the Wampanoags and the Pocassets and every other tribe within a 100-mile radius of this area.

What fascinates me is the lineage of this ancient corn. It is, as the mill’s proprietor writes, very difficult to raise; it is not very productive (two ears on average per stalk) and there are few farmers in the area still growing the variety. Once grown, the very light golden-colored corn must be air-dried for 6 months and more before it can be milled. It’s a long process!

But ah, it is really worth it. It is awfully good. We make an oven-baked treat called “Indian Pudding” here with meal, milk, molasses, spices, and five hours in the oven; I have a favorite way of preparing cod and haddock, which is to roll freshly salted and peppered fish fillets in the corn meal and then to fry them in salt-pork rendered drippings; a variation of this, on Martha’s Vineyard, is known as Captain Poole’s Fish.

So while I was making my purchase, I asked the mill owner if I might grow a few stalks myself. He cheerfully gave me a handful of seed corn, with a few suggestions about how to grow it, not to use pesticide, etc., and how to help it pollinate. I started the kernels – some did not take – in little peat-pots, then when the corn had sprouted and was a couple of inches high, I transferred the plants to my backyard garden. What surprised my was the deep, robust green of the early leaves; this very ancient variety of corn is nonetheless sturdy just starting out from the ground; a good sign, I thought, no wonder so many were able to thrive on it over the past thousand years. Corn is, after all, a native type of grass; but these fat, hard kernels, stone ground, have a wonderful nutlike, mild flavor, an earthy goodness that I have always liked.

By the way, no one is quite sure why they are called “johnnycakes” – either a derivative of journey-cake, as they keep well for traveling, or a corruption of an Indian word that sounded similar phonetically. The true origin is lost in time.

As these plants grow, I will follow up on their progress in this blog. What will I do with them? Oh goodness, if I get any ears at all, they will decorate the front door come autumn; I shan’t eat them. It’s much easier to head over to Gray’s for a tub of the wonderful stuff already ground between his fine heavy granite millstones.

Late-Season Ferry to Block Island

2008-06-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

The last time I took the slow ferry to Block Island, it was a late autumn afternoon, departing the dock an hour before sunset. It was a spur of the moment decision; a lark, a need to go out on the sea, even if just for a little while; completely impulsive. The sea was steely gray and calm as the big ferry plowed monotonously through it, plodding toward the island. It was the last week of October, the usual time for unquiet water, but the sea had no anger in it today; that moment had passed two days earlier when a gale sprang up out of the southeast. The weather could change fast and mercilessly at this time of year, I remembered. Daylight was waning; high clouds had moved in from the east, like a pall across the sky, but blue sky was still visible to the westward, beyond the encroaching blanket of clouds. It was just after sunset, and I had watched the fiery orange orb of the sun sink out of sight behind the dark mass of the island as the ferry pushed onward toward the harbor, whose twinkling lights had begun to appear against the darkling mass of the land.

A soft mist seemed to have risen from the sea, a slight haze or cold fog, barely discernible, all around the island, giving the distant harbor and waterfront an ethereal, blue-and-soot, darkened, Old World look. I stood on the uppermost, exposed deck, feeling how the days were turning cold. The ferry had few passengers on this late-day run, and there were no passengers on the open deck other than myself and an anonymous person in a parka with its hood drawn tightly, sitting motionless at the far end of the deck, unspeaking, remarkably alone. I could not be sure whether the person was a man or a woman; nor did I much care to discover, despite the usual natural curiosity inherent in every person to know all obvious things, at least, about another when only two people are on the deck of a steamer with naught but water surrounding. One usually senses intuitively when the other wishes to be left alone; thus, I did not disturb.

The ferry pressed along like the cold metal bulk that it was; ponderously, without the sweet sea-kindly motion that one would wish to feel under one’s feet, like the motion of a yacht, or sailing-ship in harmony with the forces around it. I caught a whiff of diesel exhaust, biting, pungent, fake-sweet but non-nourishing. It was decidedly unlike the incense-like wafting tart scent of a hardwood fire in a brick hearth hanging in the air on a crisp winter’s night; still, the familiar diesel stink reminded me of years gone by, of days and months serving on a small naval ship at sea in my youth, a youth long gone and misspent. I recalled how the pervasive flavor of diesel fuel permeated the entire ship, ultimately; even the loaves of bread in the galley, for it seems to me that bread has an affinity for raw diesel fuel and will absorb the off-flavor of it from the air no matter how tightly the bread is wrapped. After a month aboard ship I became used to the taste, such that after awhile I no longer noticed it, and might have considered it insignificant, forgetting my initial disgust. Only after a time ashore, eating fresh bread, did I discover, upon returning to the ship, how much diesel smell the bread actually did absorb. While the flavor was once again initially repugnant, I quickly became accustomed to the fuel-flavor in the bread all over again, as before; but I never preferred it.

I walked stiff-kneed down the iron stairway and pulled open the heavy door to the passenger deck cabin. The aroma of steamed hot dogs and hot coffee borne on a blast of warm, humid, engine-oily air greeted me; a cup of bilge-water coffee, more restorative for its heat than its content, seemed attractive. It will do more good, I thought, than those bloated, pale pink, limp, grease-sweating hot dogs rolling eternally on the steel rods of the hot dog grilling machine.
I returned to the open deck, to find myself truly alone; the parka-wrapped mystery person was gone. We docked; I looked over the rain and saw the shoreline, littered with the brown, torn and dying sea-vegetation that had been cast up by the storm two days before. Once the cars were gone and most of the people had left the ferry, I descended the last stairway and found myself ashore, like the seaweed, tossed up on the brown strand, cast up from the old sea with nowhere to go.

Ancient Dunes at Horseneck Point

2008-05-20T17:53:00.001-07:00

The place is called Horseneck Point; it adjoins Horseneck Beach on the eastern side of the entrance to the Westport River, Westport, Massachusetts. One may hike along miles of nearby beaches, being particularly empty, bleak, and windy during the winter months; but this is the best time. When the sun is out, keen and bright, and the surf rolling up the tawny sands of the gently-sloping strand, it is a beautiful time, no matter if it is blustery and cold, especially in winter, when the days are short and one cannot get enough sunlight in one’s soul.

But now it is springtime and warmer. The scent of the bayberry bushes is strong among the dunes and there are many wildflowers in bloom and flowery blossoms on the shrubs that grow down in the hollows. My favorite spot is a long, high ridge of ancient dunes that runs along the little peninsula for a few tenths of a mile. These dunes are covered by scrubby, gnarled pitchy-pines, and a walking trail runs the length of the crest of the ridge. Up to the crest, then down into the little valleys, the trail winds along, the pines providing a shady canopy and the ground covered with a soft brown blanket of pine needles and grass. Where the dune shows, it is a bluish-grey-white sand, not tawny brown like that of the beach. I get the feeling that these dunes have not moved in centuries; the pines protect them and keep them stable.

On the side away from the bay, the dunes descend into a thick woods of briars, creepers, and trees – impenetrable, it seems, and one has no desire to go there – but I would, if I could, pitch my tent in a small, tranquil, green spot along this trail, in a little hollow, perhaps – and there are many of them – and spend a day, or a week, come sun and wind or cool gray squall. The occasional views of Buzzard’s Bay, Gooseberry Island, and the waters beyond, from breaks in the pines, reminds me of some place on the Pacific coast, not New England, but indeed, this is New England. It is a beautiful, wonderful spot for a walk, a dream, or to cleanse and refresh the mind. The only problem is that one can never tarry there long enough. See my slideshow of the dune trail just over in the Right-hand column.

The Last Schoonerman - One Heck of a Compelling Tale

2008-05-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

In “The Last Schoonerman”, cruising sailor and author Joe Russell has put together a compelling biography of Captain Lou Kenedy (yep – only one ‘n’) that reads less like a biography sometimes and more like a whopper of a sea-yarn. But that’s because Kenedy was himself the stuff of folklore, larger than life, a tough, adventurous waterman who early in life embraced the old ways of wooden ships and iron men. In this book – which is meticulously told, and well-researched – Russell relates the life story of a man whose biography, without Russell, would probably have never been written, and that would have been a shame.

Lou Kenedy was the scion of a Connecticut publishing family who could have lived his life comfortably and broken a sweat only on the squash court, but instead he chose a hard life - to work aboard, and eventually own and master, wooden sailing vessels during the twilight of sail in the first quarter of the 20th Century. He bought and repaired derelict wooden schooners, hauled freight, and made them pay. He ran rum and refugees; he was a resourceful, crafty seaman in love with old wooden vessels, parsimonious and flinty. He was also a cheat, a swindler, a smuggler, and a true bastard, but some would argue that, to survive in his world and chosen profession, one would have to be. He was a dockyard battler who owned guns but never shot a man to death; he was a devoted (if sometimes clueless) husband and father.

Joe Russell does not disguise his admiration for Lou Kenedy, but at the same time he doesn’t sugar-coat the man; he presents Captain Kenedy, warts and all, for inspection; and we can’t help, in the end, admiring Kenedy, who lived life on his terms, followed his own drummer, and above all made it pay.

“The Last Schoonerman” is 254 pages, full of illustrations and photos (black and white), paperback, and published by The Nautical Publishing Company (http://www.nauticalpublishing.com/) in 2006. There are a few things about this book that smack of a self-published work, such as a few typos, and the need for a good editor who might have corrected some of the slang, grammar, and word-choice issues that I had with it. Some of the biographical material in the last chapters, daily family life and routine stuff, is a bit too detailed and tiresome – seemingly pointless. But Joe’s style of spinning a yarn overrides these small problems; it’s really a job well done for the most part and the book, once opened, will hold the reader’s interest until the story of Lou’s adventurous life is over.

The great mystery about this book – to me – is what ever motivated young Lou Kenedy to ditch a comfortable life at age 19 and, in 1929, choose one of the hardest and most dangerous professions going. Lou was a 19th Century man in the 20th; maybe he knew that, maybe he didn’t, and maybe he didn’t care. But the book is shot through with anecdotes that are the stuff of pure whopper – yet somehow, once we come to know Lou Kenedy, we have no doubt in our minds that they are true. One of my favorites is a story about Lou and his vessel and crew arriving late in a northeastern harbor near the end of a long trip up from the Caribbean. They have nearly run out of food, and Lou instructs his crewmen to go out in the dinghy and rob the local lobstermen’s pots for dinner. The crewmen protest; they will be shot by the locals. Lou, a liquor-smuggler who had a store of rum on board, tells them to bring bottles of Mt. Gay rum in the dinghy; for every pot they remove lobsters from, put in a bottle of rum as compensation. The evening’s activity nets 40 lobsters, which they consume for dinner. The next morning, they are surprised to find that the number of buoyed lobster pots in the harbor has nearly doubled, with a good number of new ones placed in the vicinity of Lou’s big schooner!

“The Last Schoonerman” is a great read; it’s one book that ought to be aboard, even if, to make room, one has to chuck overside one of those newfangled yachtie cookbooks. The reader can tell that Joe Russell’s heart was in this. He wants us to know and remember Captain Lou Kenedy, who passed on in 1991; to laugh with him, to chuckle at his exploits, to admire his often superhuman achievements, and perhaps toss back a tot of rum in a toast to his memory. In all of this, Joe has succeeded and done right by the old guy.

The Last Schoonerman, The Remarkable Life of Captain Lou Kenedy, by Joe Russell, ISBN 0-9789350-0-4

Michael L. Martel