Decatur, GA, 7-MAR-2019 – With the Edgemont house listed, there is time to get back to life and Caro Babbo. Jennifer and I have been celebrating by seeing friends in the afternoons. Yesterday, we went to Marlay’s in Decatur and drank beer.
Lastnight, I registered for a Captain’s license course that I will start later this month. There is an irony. The course was offered in Port Townsend, while I was here in Atlanta, and now that I will be back in Port Townsend, I will take the course in Seattle, 2½ hours away. Keeping Caro Babbo on Lake Union proves itself once again, as I will be able to stay in Seattle the evenings after the class. I can also tele-attend via an internet connection from Port Townsend.
In short, it’s time to get back to the fun stuff.
I restarted the celestial navigation course from Vanderbilt. I’ll also study the famous celestial navigation book by Mary Blewitt, and take the course my friend Don Sullivan gave me.
Blewitt’s book is very thin and quite concise. She is from a different time of better education. She explains, with the easy confidence of things that we all know from our school days, like classical Greek, that celestial navigation is nothing more than spherical geometry. But, I am in luck. At a dinner a few weeks ago, I met Lynn, a mathematician on the Oglethorpe College faculty whose great love is non-Euclidean geometry. When I learned what Blewitt was teaching about the mechanics of celestial bodies, celestial navigation became quite a bit easier to understand. With some coaching from Lynn, or at least some introductory text book recommendations, I might understand it all. Now I just need to be able to recognize heavenly bodies beyond the sun and the moon. Jennifer has a great love of the constellations, so I may have some help there beyond Google Sky – I do wonder if I say ‘‘Beetlejuice’’ three times fast, will Michael Keaton appear?
Work on my last house starts today – I have relegated myself to writing checks and receiving photographs, and hopefully receiving one very large check when all is said and done.
Aside from these two courses (Captain’s License and Navigation), I’ll be documenting Caro Babbo with the Feds, (buying and) installing a new electronic autohelm, new radar and a new circuit breaker panel. Truly, what could possibly be more fun (no sarcasm)?
Erwin will be visiting while we take on all of the electronics and figure out why the windvane rudder no longer fits into the transmission – The designer says that the insulator may have swollen. The first step will be to store it someplace very dry for a while and see if it shrinks back – We’ll address issues of using it (in water) later.
A friend, with whom I correspond, wrote that Jennifer and I have picked an active and strenuous retirement. It doesn’t feel that way.
It is exciting to get back to the sailing life. If we can make it happen, we’ll sail from Lake Union to Poulsbo on March 22nd to join the Cascadia Sail-in. This will be our third time.
The first year was a very large gathering with a full agenda, formal dinners and the like. We took Hilary, who was just getting into deeper dementia, with us. She aggressively went after unattended alcoholic drinks left on tables. It was a surprising dinner for the other guests but a very nice time for everyone. We had allowed Hilary to have a glass of wine and consequently learned not to do it anymore.
We went to the sail-in again in 2017. The group was much smaller and the only agenda item seemed to be me, because I volunteered to give a talk on sailing to Southeast Alaska. Pam, who had set up the previous sail-in we attended, was attending to her husband who, like Hilary, had started with dementia. This year, Pam’s brother, Skip, is running the sail-in: no agenda, meet people informally, have drinks, go out for dinner. There are far fewer boats, and Jennifer and I do not always succeed well breaking into groups who know each other but not us.
If the weather is good, it is a very nice sail over. We need to remember to bring the 135% Genoa back to the boat from Port Townsend before we leave.
This year I’ll also order a signal-orange colored storm jib from Jim Kitchen. Something I hope not to use. We’ll also complete our rigging of the Portland Pudgy as a life raft and do all sorts of cool stuff. (Do I spent $1200 for the life raft canopy?)
We’ve been away for a while. Our friends Carly and Jason have watched over Caro Babbo for us and in two weeks we’ll be back. We fly on March 19th!
Have a great time. I look forward to hearing tales of wonderful seafaring adventures.
Thanks, Martha. We’ll look for a house concert video from you. BTW, while looking for the house concerts on line, I came across a Vermont state university course example for the Cichelli hashing algorithm. I sort of knew about Richard’s involvement in such things. Trés, trés cool.
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358813
House Concerts: https://www.monocacycreekhouseconcerts.org/
Hate to see you go but go you must. I hope all goes well with Jennifer’s surgery. Keep the blogs coming, I love reading our your adventures. God Speed.
I’m so glad you’re studying celestial navigation. What an exciting time. I didn’t know about J’s surgery and will hold her in my heart. Xo
I’ll be posting about celestial navigation and the captain’s course.
It is a tougher time for Jennifer. Her cat, Falco, just died when we were here in ATL and Falco was in Seattle. She and her daughter, Flora, are taking it hard.
I’m looking forward to hearing about your courses. I’d like to get my captain’s license when I have enough sea time in. We’re also lusting after a Portland Pudgy. Does it work well in the strong currents you have out there?
Kimberly!
I’ll keep you posted on the course. It is known to be a lot of work. While you can study on your own and just take the tests, apparently the Coast Guard has been pushing these types of courses where the tests are included as part of the course. The course I’m taking is given by http://www.usmaritime.us/. It seems to be pretty much a one-man shop, which also means you get the best instructor. Jeff, the instructor, and I have met a few times, though he has no recollection each time we meet again. 😉
We love the Pudgy. It had been a very good boat, sails well, rows well and everything stows inside the boat. The hull is roto-molded plastic, which has pluses and minuses. On the plus, it is indestructible and the color is all the way through the plastic, so scratches from barnacle-encrusted beaches do not go through the color.
On the minus, it is heavy at 120 lbs (54 kg) dry, so you must use a halyard to raise and lower it from the deck. It also needs a long-shaft outboard. Having said that we love it. It also fits on our foredeck. (We fitted Pelican hooks to our life lines so the life lines can be easily dropped, which helps in general, and is necessary to get the boat over the side in an emergency when it is to be used as a life raft.)
Search CaroBabbo.com for the many posts that discuss it. There is also a Portland Pudgy keyword, but I don’t know how consistent I have been about linking articles to keywords. The newer revs of WordPress do not list the keywords, so you must work from memory – Though I supposed you know this already.
We’re enjoying your blog. We’ll be spending June sailing either in the San Juan’s/Gulf Islands and into the Sunshne Coast, or the west coast of Vancouver Island, if you’d like to hop on a plane and join us for a week or so.
Thanks for your input on the Pudgy. We may start keeping an eye out for a used one. We have enjoyed watching Ran’s videos of your cruising grounds. It looks gorgeous! Kimberly and Jeff
Wish I had realized you were in Decatur – we stayed overnight there on February 28th on our way to Florida. We came down later this year due to the damage from hurricane Michael – the place we usually rent was damaged by it. The eye landed at Mexico City Beach which is 15 miles west of where we stay – drove through there last week and, despite some clean up, it still looks like a war zone. We have chatted with a number of locals, the biggest issues seem to be lack of building supplies to rebuild, and lack of paying jobs for those who no longer have a building to go to work at. One gentleman we spoke with last night told us he just got his new job 3 weeks ago at a restaurant here in Cape San Blas, but up until then he has been busy repairing both his Dad’s and his Mother-In-Law’s homes. His wife is still out of work, as is her Mom.
Driving through the areas where no clean up has occurred makes it possible to see the ferocious power of the storm – many trees, some with trunks as thick as 14″, snapped halfway up, now looking like a right-angled triangle because the root system held the trunk upright, while the broken half fell over at a 45° angle. Still a few boats in places they were never meant to be.
I find viewing all of this destruction very interesting because I have never seen anything, in person, like this at home, and at the same time it is so sad when you think about the impact of it on people’s lives. I have also been reading about the environmental impact, as well. So sad.
Yes, I wish we had known. It has been what, only about 42, 43 years since we’ve seen each other. A pity, we were here.
I’ll write more in an email.
I’m delighted to see Port Townsend discussed as “home”. Makes me think we may actually end up in the same town sooner or later. We’re back around May 1.
Dennis
ps: I also took the captains course from the grandly titled US Maritime Academy, though I doubt that Jeff would remember me either. I found it a bit distressing to find out how little one needs to know to be a licensed captain. Set and drift were the most challenging things for me, but I have yet to have the occasion to use them on the water.
Dennis, yes, we should be there at the same time. Jennifer will most likely be scooter-bound from surgery, but for the first time enjoying her house in the warm months. She’s excited to see what flowers bloom in the garden. We’re sorry we didn’t make it down to see you. We had planned to, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
We did buy the exposure cover for the Pudgy, but it was $2300!