Maxi 95 and Our Adventures
27-FEB-2018, Jet Blue flight 598, SEA-BOS – There will be no Caro Babbo Youtube channel for the few people who asked for one, and for everyone who didn’t.
I did want one. As a narrative mechanism, videos are a great contrast to written words. There are two major, equal holdbacks: The amount of effort to edit a video and the amount of video content that must be captured to generate a good video episode. Continue reading “Caro Babbo Youtube Channel? I say no, no, no *”
Lee’s Landing Marina, Lake Union, Seattle, WA USA, 22-FEB-2018 – One of the faults I’m least proud of is falling out of touch with friends. I stay in touch with friends generally by writing to them. In this world of instant written communications, a phone call has become too intrusive, and by corollary Skype, Whatsapp, and Facebook messenger. So writing is the method through I use to keep in touch with friends.
Keeping in touch with friends is important. When I am overdue to communicate with friends, whether to initiate a written exchange, or respond to a message, I put myself into a spiral: it has been a while since I have written, therefore I can’t write something small. I need to write something that has taken some effort to make up for the amount of time that has passed. But, the amount of time to be put aside never appears, and the amount of effort that should be put into the correspondence grows, and along with it the amount of time necessary to expend that effort.
Recently, this blog is fallen into this trap, only more convoluted. Because, excessively long blog posts are not good either.
So please accept my apologies for the amount of time since the last post and either the large number of things that I leave out of this blog, or its excessive length because of the number of things that I do include.
Continue reading “The Less I write, the More I must write”
14-FEB-2018, Lake Union, Seattle – A mainsheet traveler adjusts where the mainsheet connects to the boat.
The mainsheet is the line (rope) that pulls the main sail towards the center of the boat. (It also places some downforce on the sail, specifically on the boom, but that is really a side effect.)
When CaroBabbo was originally sold the mainsheet connected to an eye in the center of the cockpit table. The problem with this is that when sailing very close to the wind, the boom should be very close to, or on the centerline of the boat. To make the boom come to the center line of the boat the attachment point of the mainsheet has to be past the centerline of the boat. The problem is that the attachment point must always be to windward. Continue reading “A new mainsheet traveler”
5-FEB-2018, Port Townsend, WA – Premium Ropes has some very good videos on splicing. They are my go-to place for videos.
Last spring, while the mast was down, I replaced all the sheaves in the masthead, cut a new opening for an additional headsail halyard. I also installed a messenger line so that when the halyard was complete I could merely pull it up and through.
The messenger line turned out to be less than a great idea: if I had installed the halyard relatively quickly, let’s say within two months, it would have worked out quite well. Instead, we went sailing across the summer in all kinds of weather. The messenger line jumped out of the sheave and wedged itself between the sheave and the masthead casting. Oh well. Continue reading “One hour per minute: turning two lines into one”
Feb 1, 2018, Port Townsend, WA – January was the longest month I remember in my entire life. Longer than months when I was a small child slogging through the school year waiting for summer vacation.
It was a month of unexpected travel, traversing the country and working on non-boat projects. It was also a month full of activities and friends: an unexpected sailor on his way to pickup replacement boat parts and a medieval music performance in a Victorian church in a Victorian Seaport. Continue reading “An Unending Month”
