Hilary, Spelling and the Camino; GPS, the Bahamas, and when will we ever get home to Caro Babbo.

Decatur, GA, 19-FEB-2019 – At times I’ve written that the true subject of this blog is Hilary.

I received this email from Dyna Kohler, the Doyenne of the Atlanta Orthographic Spelling Bee. Dyna saw a picture of our dinghy, the Hilary Hoffmann stored on Caro Babbo’s foredeck.

I am really dumbfounded now to learn Hilary’s full name.  Hilary Hoffman, did she walk the Camino in Spain in 2003?  If so, I met her.…

I noticed her in a tiny village, and wondered idly what a woman with a rolling suitcase and wearing flip-flops was doing in this tiny village in the Pyrenees.

Bingo! Wearing flip-flops, that’s Hilary.

It was a moment when the hair on the back of one’s neck rises.

It was a true Hilary adventure. She went on the spur of the moment with little planning arriving wearing flip flops and trailing a rolling suitcase.

I never heard Hilary speak about walking the Camino, but in her bedroom in the Phoenix house is a large knitted piece of art that is the Camino. The Camino cast its spell on Hilary.

Dyna and her husband, John, never saw Hilary after that first day. Hilary power walked, as she did, at more than 5 miles an hour, disappearing towards the end of the walk.

With time, the memory of the Hilary I met in 2005 is returning to Jennifer and me, while the woman living in a personal care home here in Atlanta continues her journey and diversion from that other Hilary.

Not surprisingly to us, Dyna concluded with: She was quite famous that year!

Jennifer and I fully expect that someday we’ll walk the Camino and someone will say with amazement, ‘‘You know Hilary?!’’

When Jennifer and I are in Atlanta on the Saturday after St. Valentine’s Day, we go to the spelling bee.

The first year I took Jennifer, as a dark horse, she came in third. The next year she came in third again. The following year, Jennifer had a beer and didn’t place. It’s been nine years since we’ve been, but we’ve kept in touch with Dyna. The Bee seems to be a gathering of Jennifer’s life with high school and college friends and acquaintances competing.

This year was a nail-biter. Jennifer harbors the all-too-credible fear that she has Alzheimer’s and dreaded coming to the Bee. She was afraid the competition would show how much cognitive loss she has suffered.

The first round of the Bee is twenty words.

At an orthographic bee, competitors spell a series of words on lined yellow sheets of paper. In the first round, the good spellers spell every word correctly. Twenty competitors move forward to the second round. Jennifer misspelt two words. A total of nineteen people spelt either no words wrong, or only one. Jennifer was saved. Everyone who spelt two words wrong moved forward to round two.

The second round is fifteen words, the third round ten, and the fourth five words. Jennifer gained ground and was tied for first place with college-acquaintance Vandy Beth coming into the fourth. During grading, the correct spelling is read out. In the fourth round, Jennifer didn’t get a single word right.

She no longer worried about her mental abilities, but cursed her inability to see the language roots of the words.

Dyna announced the results: No one had spelt a single word correctly. Dyna told the crowd that this was the first time this had ever happened.

Jennifer and Vandy Beth would enter a sudden death round.

In the first sudden-death round neither Jennifer nor Vandy Beth spelt the word correctly. In the second, they both spelt the word correctly. In the third round only one spelt the word correctly, 2019’s champion, Jennifer Severin.

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In 2019, older GPS devices will cease to function. Every twenty years the GPS clocks are reset. Like coders in the 1970s and 1980s, who assumed their code would not last until the turn of the millennium, certain GPS devices do not contain the twenty-year code. I think all of ours will be fine. We don’t plan to be underway on the first of April (nice choice of dates) when the clocks rollover.

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The Bahamas have been grabbing my attention lately.

I have stopped watching both Delos and La Vagabonde on Youtube, but had my attention grabbed by a video of the Lady K when the speedometer through hull gave way almost sinking the boat. Videos that followed showed the difference in construction between a coastal boat, like Lady K, and a blue water boat: one video featured a plastic through hull with no shut off valve (no Marelon).

During our Florida trip last month, we visited with Kimberly and Jeff aboard Pegu Club, who were Bahamas bound, and my friends Carter and Ann, who had always planned to sail to the Bahamas from Vero Beach, but never did. Carter and Ann’s Beneteau 44 has been on the hard for three years. Raising children is a full-time occupation.

Videos of the Bahamas reinforce our PNW sailing. All the anchorages are chock-a-block with sailboats. Even in 12 feet of water, there is little swing room.* The highlight for one of the boats is Cocktail Beach where everyone gathers to drink… cocktails. Am I becoming a curmudgeon?

In one of the cruising books I read,† the author mentions that the South Pacific cruising book-recommended anchorages are jammed, when the next cove over will generally be completely empty. Kimberly confirms that is the case in the Bahamas.

All of this begs the question: When are we going home‡ to Caro Babbo?

We’ve sold off one house at investor pricing. The second house will hit the market on the fourth of March, a third in Mid-April. Jennifer is starting work on her houses. We have discovered that we would only be able to accomplish one house every six months or so, if we did all the labor ourselves. We’re trading time against money – opportunity cost, as it was once called.

Houses are in Jennifer’s blood. She’s planning to have her next house purchase run by a management company. This has worked very well with the most recent rental property. The money given to the management company has been money well spent.

We must be in Seattle for Jennifer’s appointment with an orthopedic surgeon – Jennifer is having her second ankle redone. The recovery process is very long, but the results of the surgery on her other ankle were transformative.

We’ll be in Seattle by the fourth week in March, in time for spring.

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*With a 3:1 anchor scope (Three feet of anchor rode to one foot of water depth) a boat in twelve feet swings in a radius of 36 feet, plus the length of the boat. Boats are very tight when this is an issue. In some anchorages we use in Alaska, the water is 70 and even 100 feet deep.

† For a while I was reading one cruising book every few days. There are dozens, if not hundreds out there. After a while I learned what I thought I needed to learn and that was that.

‡No, Caro Babbo isn’t our legal home, nor our tax home, but it is my emotional home center.