In Praise of the Lousy Sailor

Can you spot a lousy sailor in this photo?

(Hint: There are four of them)

Much is written about the lousy sailor. He provides grist for cautionary articles in boating mags, and fuels derisive email among internet user groups. I decided it’s time to take a fresh, unjaundiced look at this misunderstood and mostly unappreciated creature. 

Of the countless benefits the lousy sailor provides, I have observed the following: The lousy sailor...

… keeps our beloved mechanics, marinas, chandleries and waterside bars solvent. He does so with amazing efficiency by buying the wrong equipment and vainly refusing to return it, going through expendables like there is no tomorrow, destroying equipment long before its service life is up, losing things overboard at an alarming rate, and failing to maintain systems which must as a result undergo untimely overhauls. Being generally incompetent at repair work, the lousy sailor must hire out skilled labor for the most basic of services, among them the repair of attempted repairs he has botched himself. Seeking solace from his ineptitude, he hastens to the local watering hole for his penance. Mea culpa, mea culpa, may I buy another round?

… provides the boating community at large with countless hours of entertainment while attempting to maneuver his vessel, comprehend the laws of physics, flout nature, remain onboard, return to his mooring, and preserve his marriage.

… provides free on-the-water clinics on how not to conduct one’s self on a waterborne vehicle.

… tests the Coast Guard’s response system.

… keeps other boaters alert.

… invents new knots for which one day there may be found valuable purposes.

… gives racers a dynamic obstacle with which to test their tactical skills.

… puts fellow boaters in good stead with the Almighty by offering them frequent opportunities to perform as Good Samaritans.

… fills said boaters with smug satisfaction over their own nautical prowess.

Finally, the lousy sailor helps beautify your harbor with the scenic addition of his pride and joy, regardless of his inability to commandeer her properly.

And she’s a sight to behold, let me tell you.

In Memorium

The skipper, in his reconstructed retirement home

   I met Bob Carter, skipper of Hakuna Matata, online. He'd responded to one of my desperate posts on the Morgan Owners website, this one having to do with the repair of a busted portlight I'd put a frantic foot through during Deb's and my boat trip. Clear packing tape just wasn't cutting it anymore as a window to the world.

   It turned out Bob and I had sister ships in the Morgan 34, mine a '70 and his, I think, a '68. In the boat ownership biz that's plenty close enough. Bob helped me with my problem, emailing me detailed descriptions and photos of his own portlight rebuild, even shipping me left-over spline to finish the job.

   I got a chance to repay Bob some time later. He wanted to take a boat trip south with his wife, Ovida. Deb and I had already taken ours, and it was easy to assure them that if the two of us could do it, they could do it.  

   And do it they did, despite the fact that Bob had one glass eye, two hearing aids, and a crew consisting of a tentative first mate and four cats. I think I got the count right. Anyway, they didn't make it quite as far as they'd planned, but on this kind of trip that's not the point. They left the dock, which was the main thing. 

   I think it was a busted drive shaft. Or maybe a motor mount? Could have been the motor mount issue caused the shaft issue. Anyway, Ovida ended up enjoying an extended visit to the southern terminus of their trip, St. Augustine, while Bob enjoyed extended playtime in the engine compartment, where he flourished.

   Bob seemed forever the restless tinkerer. He was a toolmaker by trade, an engineer by inclination, and when his own designs failed his inspection, he was an idiot by self-proclamation. His inspired alterations of Hakuna Matata were further fueled by recent memories of the exploratory trip, and Bob was planning to move aboard full time with Ovida to cruise the eastern seaboard and beyond. Further medical complications put an end to those plans.

   We got a chance to see Bob last summer, when Deb and I took a trip to Block Island. On our way home, we anchored in Hakuna Matata's home port of Stonington, where we all got together for some good times. Bob and Ovida took us on an insider's tour of Mystic Seaport, a place he knew particularly well.

   The etherial among us might say Bob's restless spirit has finally found its way home. A tiny rebellious part of me always wants to believe such things. Generally I settle for a parting shot, in this case imagining the recipient has his hearing aid turned up.

   Fair winds, Captain, and rest in peace.

   

   The crew of Hakuna Matata

If you'd like to experience some of Bob and Ovida's well documented adventure, visit her blog at  http://hakunamatatayellowboat.blogspot.com

Wanderlust

Where to next, Cap?

Sailors are said to be a restless lot, which is a fairly encompassing statement. Like vegetables are good for you. I’ve since discovered that corn has no food value whatsoever, and I’m predicting that the whole nutritional house of cards will soon come tumbling down, which is why I’m stocking up on Twinkies. Or Germans are precision-obsessed. All my ancestors hail from Deutschland, and I’m scatterbrained as an Irish Setter. The warplanes I manufactured as a child in my bedroom facility were hasty amalgams of ill-mated plasticine parts and overzealous decal jobs. I pity the pilots cemented inside those fuselages. The adhesive, though, sure did smell good.

I suppose by definition sailors are generally in a state of motion. But then so are shoppers. I find myself not so much restless as antsy. Ants in the pants, Mom would say. “What have you got? Ants in your pants?" Well I didn’t know. I hoped not. Maybe it was the carpet pile I was allergic to.

My brother John, now that boy had ants in his pants. He was considerably younger than me on the Beaufort Scale, but the kid got around. I was content to stay in the yard, and maybe climb a tree. We had a polka dot play box chock full of anything I might need to get me through the day. There were blocks in there and, what else? Blocks was about it, and that was good enough for me.

As I matured I migrated to Estes rockets, but again would never bother to travel to a potential launch site with suitable open range. I’d set them off in the back yard as soon as I’d cobbled them together, doing my best to account for prevailing winds when plotting a trajectory that would hopefully bring the astro-cricket safely back home. I rarely got more than one flight out of each of my rockets, and I’m pretty sure they traveled farther out of the neighborhood than I ever did.

John needed room to roam, and he did it on his ridiculous Schwinn Stingray, with its wacky handlebars and banana seat. I can see him in my mind’s eye, tacking down the road, peddling like a banshee, four times faster than a normal kid would have to peddle on a normal bike. John was definitely not normal, but he got out and saw the world.

If I had three local friends, John had thirty. One of mine, John Marietta, always came over to our house because I was allergic to his cats. My brother and I shared John Marietta as a friend. I have a feeling the two of them had more fun when I wasn’t around, which is to say when they weren’t at our house. When they came back from somewhere else they usually smelled weird, and they’d hint at stuff they’d done that maybe they shouldn’t have. Then came the exotic name-dropping from far-off lands. Who the hell were the Hoekstras, and where in hell was Millwood?

After we’d grown up, John would continue to mention other people and places as if I’d taken the mandatory college course in childhood history. “Remember Bruce Tomlinson? When he got bit by that bee and swelled up? Lived over on Meadowbrook? Off Inkster? Next to the Hoekstras. Kim Hoekstra was a knockout.” It might as well have been Greece he’d visited, on a trip to woo Aphrodite.

John grew up and has over time owned about every aquatic vessel imaginable, short of a submarine. I imagine if I ever see a periscope poking up off of South Haven’s shore on Lake Michigan, that’ll be John, checking out the distaff population. John is a real boater.

I’ve always been pretty much fine right where I was at the time. Give me a cinderblock bunker in a PCB-laced minefield with my name on the mail slot, and I’m lord of the mansion. This was so for the fifteen-plus years I inhabited a shitbox in Manhattan’s East Village. I took the apartment before I saw the place, so happy was I that someone would allow me to sign a lease agreement on a space I could almost afford.

The apartment was three hundred square feet, about as wide as my arm span, on the first floor of a crumbling tenement. With barely enough room for me, it had at one time housed an entire family. I know this because I showed my place to an old woman who had once lived in the apartment one flight above. She'd discovered me lounging on our building's stoop while she was engaged in her own sentimental journey, and she related how she'd chat through the fire escape with her best friend living a floor below her.

As my apartment faced north, its gated window allowed virtually no penetrating natural light. And since passersby could peek in on me from the sidewalk, I further insulated myself with a diffusion panel so no one could gawk at the squalor in which I’d become comfortably ensconced. It was worse than living on a boat.

In the early years before gentrification (such an abomination!) I often had to step over what I could only hope was a resting person in order to get into my building. Had I been a mammal on display at the zoo I would have had scores of animal rights activists petitioning for my release.

The poet Emily Dickenson, who is said never to have ventured off the grounds of her childhood home, argued for the superior form of travel afforded by one’s imagination in the poem “I Never Saw A Moor”:

I never saw a Moor --
I never saw the Sea --
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be.

Emily loses me in the second stanza, and I'm sure she wouldn't have impressed any wanderlusting sailor in her first. In any event, I’ve been around the world some, and have had many eye-opening and nose-stifling experiences. Still, I’m convinced I will end up missing most of the solar system’s hot spots, and that does not bother me much.

The only lusting I experience is usually done in a relatively stationary position. When I have traveled any significant distance in life, it is because someone else has made me do it. I’d be living in Michigan right now if I hadn’t been accepted to school in New York City. School, at that age, is all one knows, and since I’d been accepted there, I went. Simple as that.

This is why I’m always correcting people about the boat trip. “Man,” they say, “how did you get Deb to do it? That must’ve been a hard sell.” And it was, for her. She was the one bugging me to go.

What I am is a follower. I like being the enthusiastic accomplice to someone else’s dream. I have little self-motivation, but as soon as someone else makes wistful mention of a pet project, I go to town like Mickey Rooney drooling over Judy Garland, on the list of things we’ll want. “Yeah, this is do-able! We’re just gonna need a Sawzall, an eleven sixteenth's Forstner bit, and maybe three tubes of 5200…”

That’s my attitude when the project seems a necessary one to somebody else. Make it my personal project, and the list I’m penning is entitled “Why This Idea Is One Big Boondoggle Waiting To Blow Up In Our Faces.” That list will begin and end with the first item, usually the requirement that some surface needs to be sanded.

Deb tore my first list up, and we started over. One of the things on the new list was Learn Morse Code. That ended up a strategic waste of time, but the kind of waste of time that helped convince us we could do just about anything, if we put our minds to it.

The author, putting his mind to work on the next post

Let's set sail, shall we?

Now why would anyone put something like that

out here in the middle of nowhere?

The Forces That Be

Cautionary tales teem among the pages of sailing magazines. One could, I suppose, pick up something like Modern Rock Climbers Monthly, and find repeated admonitions about making certain your carabiner is secured with, oh let’s say a triple-axoid escarpment hitch, or there’ll be hell to pay, but you know what I mean. Sailors wax effusive over tales of misfortune. We drone on ad infinitum when it comes to our own ineptitude. We take a perfectly lovely pass-time and drown it in enough maritime mayhem to drive listeners to the nightly news for succor.

What’s the deal here? What besides nautical hubris possesses us to rehash the same old fireside advisories? To be sure, there has always been much in the way of hazards to concern even the most casual day sailor. But beyond that I think there is the desire in most who have learned something the hard way to pass on knowledge to fellow enthusiasts in order to help them avoid the same calamities, while we incidentally get ourselves published. What goes around comes around. Then there is this: most of us have repeatedly proven that the message hasn’t sunk in yet. So here’s my story:

Some years ago my wife Deborah and I were sailing out of Long Island Sound’s Manhasset Bay on a borrowed twenty-eight foot O’Day. Between boats at the time (if you don’t have a boat, you’re between them), we were fortunate in that Deb’s father would let us use his when he wasn't on the water himself.

When not sailing, I was doing my homework: thumbing through Chapmans, practicing my knots, and following the adventures of others in magazines that have turned me down flat, the bastards. It was a fun way to pass the time waiting for my turn on the water. Knowledge is power, and the use of another’s valuables is further cause for due diligence. We’re not borrowing the hedge clippers here, after all.

On the day of my story, Deb and I would be hopping the boat one harbor over to enjoy the fireworks commemorating some holiday or other. The evening was shaping up nicely, and a light following breeze was forecast, once we cleared the point to starboard out of our bay. We were looking forward to sailing wing and wing, always an inspiring sight, and a technique that makes us feel particularly “salty”. Even the phrase has a poetic ring, don't yuh think?

Trouble is generally more prosaic. The thing about it is that it so often visits when we’re perfectly at ease and all seems in order. I often look at the Long Island Sound now when it’s full of activity, and remind myself that a good percentage of the folks enjoying themselves out there still have plenty to learn about boating. Who doesn’t? And I think how easily bad things can happen to those whose perceptions are lulled by the apparent tranquility their liquid carpet provides. Not unlike a bird soaring gracefully through the air until the sky becomes a plate glass window.

To clear our bay, boats have to pass channel marker 27, a green can set and maintained by the Coast Guard to mark the Sound’s main thoroughfare for, let’s face it, the commercial traffic and big boats that regularly ply these waters, right? We had to round that buoy, or follow the time-honored tradition of cutting it inside, something folks do all the time, many in boats considerably larger than ours. All one needs to do is give plenty of room to starboard for the clearly viewable rocks at Barker’s Point, and watch out for the hazard buoy marking Success Rock to port, something you take on faith, since the rock never shows itself. We lined ourselves up, set our sails and headed downwind toward the fireworks display, having saved ourselves maybe fifteen minutes of sailing through a beautiful evening.

With Deb at the helm and Success Rock dutifully avoided, I went forward to pose like a precious bow ornament. It’s a great view up there, and I thought I’d enjoy it for a moment.

A moment was about all I got. As I gazed at the surface, what would have been a common and pleasant view in the Caribbean made my stomach turn. Just ahead, a patch of sea had turned a mottled light green, almost turquoise hue. That uncharacteristic color was news enough, but the surface had a boil to it that set off multiple alarms in my cranium. I had enough time to cry out an expletive useless to the helmsman, and then the boat shuddered, and rocked.

I will not bore with the details of the next ten minutes, since I don’t remember them with any reliability. What I remember are impressions, mostly those of confusion and fear. Thankfully we were making only a few knots prior to impact. Even so, tranquility turned to chaos as the sails attempted to drive us further on to the mysterious obstruction. We loosed the sheets and dropped the now flailing sails. Funny how only a few knots of wind will turn against you when you resist them.

One saving grace was the fact that the boat’s engine was an outboard mounted on a stern bracket. I lowered it into the water and started it up. All the while the boat bumped and rolled like a whale trying to beach itself. Since we hadn’t cleared whatever was down there, I tried to back it out. That’s when we discovered our steering was jammed, locked into a shallow left turn. Further, we had to battle a current that wanted to force the issue with the obstruction. Our outboard won the argument, and with its maneuverability we were able to counteract the boat’s tendency to head to port.

We were in the process of crabbing back home when Deb asked a reasonable question. Were we taking on water? I went below to check, and found a good deal in the bilge. But was it normal? I had to confess that I didn’t know the boat well enough to be sure. I also didn’t know if an automatic bilge pump should be working. I looked at the electric panel and found a switch labeled bilge pump, and threw it. I didn’t hear anything. I went topside and looked over the side of the boat to see a river of water coming out of the thingy. Yes, the thingy. Stress had reduced my vocabulary to little more than a few monosyllabic grunts in short order.

Not wanting to call the Coast Guard for fear of being made to sit in the corner of the harbor wearing a hazard cap, we instead called a loyal boating friend. He immediately hopped in his Tiara (God love any floating boat, sail or no) and showed up to give his moral support. He then double-crossed us and alerted the Coast Guard himself, and they showed up to escort us home, first instructing us to don our florescent orange, meet-you-in-the-shallow-end life jackets.

I deserved it. Something wasn’t quite right though with Deb’s ensemble, and I asked her where her shoes had gone, since she’d recently become barefoot. I didn’t want to break yet another axiom at sea, since I’d already been rebuked by the Coast Guard captain for leaning too far over the side to look for damage. It was then that my wife hit me with a stunning piece of logic. Upon hearing that I’d found significant amounts of ocean in the boat’s basement, and figuring that she might have to abandon ship, Deb had taken her shoes off and stored them in a portable cooler for safe keeping, figuring if we didn’t float safely to shore, maybe at least they would. Now hear this. There should be a woman on every boat that sails the seas. They sweat the details.

We made port, had the boat pulled, and discovered that a flexed keel was allowing water to enter at the hull/keel joint. The rudder, skegless and naked to the elements, had sat on the rock and been wedged against the hull in its port-bound inclination.

Bad luck, huh? Bad seamanship, actually, had gotten us in this mess. After getting home and allowing my blood pressure to recede, I pulled the local charts. There between the known hazard and the familiar shoreline was one spot marked with a depth of six feet. There was no ominous name for it, no buoy to warn of its existence, no friendly fisherman anchored nearby to wave us off as we approached. Of course six feet was the low tide mark and Deb’s father’s boat drew less than that, by several inches. I calculated the time of the accident and checked the tide charts. Dead low tide. I then searched the sky for the moon. It was lovely, all of it. My mind buzzed with a slightly incongruous message: when all else fails, read the instructions. I proceeded to punch myself about the head with both fists.

The Coast Guard puts those cans there for all of us, not just the big guys, and we ignore them at our peril. Further, nature has a penchant for sneaking up on us in creative and insidious ways. Factors compound as the earth and moon perform their orbital dance through the cosmos, and man’s attempts to map the choreography can’t begin to capture the rich organic story. I had picked a bad moment to ignore nature’s show in my haste to see some manmade incendiaries. Had we chosen a path a few feet to either side we may have remained blissfully ignorant of our negligence. On the other hand, another knot or two of wind speed and the boat might have foundered where we struck.

I like to think I’ve learned a little since then, some of it necessarily the hard way, about the value of diligence due this enjoyable, yet demanding avocation. My father-in-law paid for that lesson in lost time on the water, as it took several weeks for all repairs to be completed. I paid for it in part out of my pride (my nickname now is Rock Hunter), a small tithe in the scheme of things. Others may take those kinds of chances, but I won’t again. Being ready for the challenge of sailing, even in “protected waters”, requires preparedness that shouldn’t diminish its enjoyment. If anything, for me it enhances the pleasure, for I feel I’ve earned it all the more.

Now that's a well prepared crewman!

The Pitch

Let's get this out of the way at the onset

On the Wind and a Prayer documents the yearlong "seabatical" Deb and I took beginning in the autumn of 2005. Living aboard our 34 Morgan sloop Laura Lynn, we overlooked a limited cruising background to set off for the Bahamas. What we discovered on the way, about life along the Eastern Seaboard, among the islands, and between two people sharing a floating shoebox for a home, provides the surf and turf of our story.

We shelved New York careers, Deb's thriving and mine foundering, to head off on a nautical adventure, our collective lack of experience be damned. While we'd been to the Caribbean on a few bareboat charters, where we rented the boats and sailed them ourselves, the bulk of our previous experience had consisted of day sailing on Manhasset Bay and the adjoining waters of the Long Island Sound, during predictably pleasant weather.

If the trip was to tax our experience and comfort levels on the water, our decision to go was made easier by a growing dissatisfaction with our professional lives. We were further goaded on by the words of another author:

"Twenty Years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
The guy who wrote those words went by the name of Mark Twain. It turns out that wasn't his real name at all, but a cleverly commandeered nautical term. These boaters types, they're a shifty lot.

The book is comprised of three sections. The first is a lead-in to the trip, beginning with recollections of some of my early life experiences around significant bodies of water. It includes the discovery of my mate-to-be, and culminates in our preparation for the trip. The second section is the recounting of the trip itself, which includes among its chapters the twenty logs we'd emailed to an ever-burgeoning fan base as we traveled along. A final section is a set of appendices giving additional information for readers interested in furthering research on the planning of this sort of trip.

About the Crew

Somebody help us. We're sinking and don't know it.

I've been a freelance cinematographer in the New York City area for over twenty-five years, having worked on television shows, commercials, documentaries, industrials, and the occasional low-budget feature. I do not do weddings, but I did once document a family's big-game safari. There was lots of blood strewn about, so in that way a safari can be said to resemble the job of working on a diesel engine in a rocking boat.

I've been fooling about in water since the womb. Only in recent years have I refined my aquatic habits to include the skills required to commute from one unfamiliar port to another.

My dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in my chosen profession provided a certain impetus for breaking away. During my darker moments, I'd found the television industry to be a mind-numbing, humanity-debasing, spirit-sapping cesspool of cult-pap. Were I to say something positive about it, I'd observe that it has provided for me a quarter century's worth of storytelling experience, since I've been visualizing others people's scripts all that while. Aside from this benefit to me, TV has also given the world Baywatch, an estimable artistic achievement that, if memory serves, promotes safe bathing practices for those drawn to the ocean's natural attractions.

Deb has been an energetic and successful women's apparel salesperson since the day she left home at sixteen. As a business executive, she has succumbed with Swiss-like regularity to a seven-year professional itch, which near the end of her last cycle coincided with my increasing desire to shoot everyone on set with something more potent than a 35mm round of film. Boaters are quick to tell you it's all in the timing.

Deb and I have day-sailed for our fourteen years together, and we've enjoyed bareboat vacations in the British Virgin Islands and the Leewards. Yet I still find it difficult to label myself a sailor. I can sail, yes, but there has always been the gnawing sense that I haven't paid enough attention to what I've been doing. I'm of the opinion that we humans are not so much what we eat, as what we metabolize. As a result I feel experienced enough to have the right to pontificate to an audience of armchair adventurers while exhibiting enough antic hubris to make the exercise entertaining.

Each voyager we met out there had compelling stories, personal experiences that resonated with our own. “You ought to write a book, you know,” is the common refrain. So I did. With the boat journey came our chance to record our own reality-based narrative.

What we did was in and of itself not unusual. It's going on all the time. There are scores of crews out there far more accomplished and adventurous than us, and newbies join the parade each year, some as a one shot deal, some in it for life. I only hope that what I accomplished afterward with the book is memorable and entertaining.

I like to think that what I bring to the nautical genre is my own inimitable brand of, I don't know, je ne sai quoi? I think I already mentioned the hubris thing.

Fair Winds,

The Author

Mission Statement

Remove from prop before engaging engine

As if the sailing world needs another pontificating harbor pilot. As if the Internet needs another merry blogster. But stand down there sailor, until you get the whole poop.

See, my agent (Note to self: acquire agent), no, my therapist (never had, never will), would you believe my primary care physician, yeah, that’s it, he prescribed a blog for the treatment of my high LDL reading. So I’m doing this on doctor’s orders, okay? My wife, well she obviously would prefer that I seek gainful employment.

I will never be accomplished at anything. It is not in my nature. I flit about life’s offerings, passing on anything that requires too much practice, like chess, classical guitar, omlette-making.

On the other end of the spectrum, anything too easy to master will sap one’s interest quickly, such as step aerobics or motion picture production. I have on occasion dabbled in the latter. It’s a ridiculously simple formula: boy meets girl, girl disrobes, trailer inter-cuts promising shots of nude scene with footage of car chase and munitions detonation. Roll 'em, vroom, ooh baby, kaboom, cut. Cha-ching.

I think sailing fits somewhere in between. Now before you hardcore enthusiasts unclip from your hiking straps to fire up your comment windows, let me just say there is a vast range of skill sets that separate the casual daysailor from say, an off-shore racer or circumnavigator. Oh, who cares what I say. The site has three hundred eighty-seven hits so far, and I’m pretty sure I account for three hundred eighty-four of them. Clearly I’m writing for myself. Like cruisers, though, if you happen to find yourself on the same course, I welcome good-natured company.

A great inspiration to me has been the writings of paleontologist and educator, Stephen Jay Gould. In years of articles printed in Natural History Magazine, he explicated many of life’s mysteries by starting with a simple observation, and expanding to broader human themes. I think that’s what I’ll be doing here. I don’t expect to teach anybody anything in these posts. The most I hope to do is entertain. Laughter is truly the best medicine, and I’ll try to push as much of it down your gullets as I can muster. It’s cherry flavored. You like cherry flavored, don't you? Everybody likes cherry flavored.

I may not always stick to sailing themes. I may set off from the plotted course now and again, because that’s where a lot of life’s little intrigues are hiding. Sailors call this gunkholing. Sounds attractive, doesn't it?

Obviously if you don’t like where I’m taking you, you’re free to fill your own prescription. But this here’s my vessel, and I’m tossing off the bowline, so watch your toes.

I’ll now commandeer an old joke to get the ball rolling. What do you call one more blogger lying at the bottom of the sea? A drop in the bucket.

This is what we like to see: a happy passenger.

Now Hear This!

What's missing from this picture?

Ahoy All!

   
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. We finally got boarded by the Coast Guard, and upon their completion of a thorough inspection, I was cited for a single key deficiency. I did not have a working blog. 

   
Apparently I was the only one left. Human without a blog, I mean. So I've set about to rectify the oversight. Click. There. Done.

   
Expect to see posts, pix, and whatever else passes for bloggable material these days, sometime later this millenium. In the mean time, check your bilge.

Fair Winds,

Cap'n Paul