Two Caro Babbos, Two Johns

Scottsdale, AZ, 29-MAY-2021 – There are two pictures of Caro Babbo that have special significance to me. The first is Caro Babbo at anchor on our first trip north along the inside passage. In the scheme of things we didn’t go very far, only as far as the top of Quadra Island, but to us it was an unimaginable adventure. Caro Babbo is at anchor. Her transom is nearly naked and, in my mind’s eye, not even her name is there, but it is, so this picture must be from 2014. There is no windvane, there is no EPIRB, nor outboard engine. She is uncluttered.

In another photograph, taken from above in Campbell River, her wonderful flush foredeck is clean and uncovered. She still has her baby stay and no forestays: she is as Petterson designed her.

They are photographs taken in daylight hours.

There are a couple of paper copies of the first photograph. I gave one to my father, the Babbo of Caro Babbo. A second is on the bookcase in the Decatur, Georgia house that is my residence. I always think there is, but it turns out there isn’t, another that sits above the desk that I use at the Port Townsend house Jennifer owns.

In the second picture, Caro Babbo is bright in the harsh light of the Dutch Harbor small-boat marina in an inky dark night. The transom is laden with the equipment: the windvane, the outboard, the EPIRB, and a backup VHF antenna. Two solar panels lie loose on her afterdeck above the aft cabin, which is crammed to its roof with the necessary gear and unnecessary books, knickknacks, and souvenirs that we have collected since we left Lake Union in Seattle ten months earlier. Her name, Caro Babbo, and her city, Seattle are scratched from an earlier dinghy, two dinghies before our current dink. That earlier dinghy would bump up against transom as we towed it everywhere, being too large to fit on deck.

Not seen in this picture is the spray hood, worn and frayed, protected by a flexible 160 W solar panel necessary to provide the realistic amount of power we need, rather than the hopeful amount we thought we needed. Her bottom paint is different now, copper metal embedded in epoxy. Her stove is now kerosene-fueled. There is no longer a microwave, which is only usable at a dock. Her lovely flush deck rarely sees sunlight, the dinghy, Hillary Hoffman, is invariably lashed to it. Dyneema jack lines run permanently from her stern to her bow. She is older now with an extra 10,000 nautical miles under her keel. Her engine, which was not quite new and shiny and came with 800 hours, is now middle-aged with almost 3000. 

I haven’t printed this Caro Babbo picture, but it has become my avatar, slowly replacing the “Hollywood” shot that I’ve used for the last 15 years.

That ‘‘Hollywood’’ picture of me is how I think of myself. It is a picture of someone that I see as approachable, having confidence and expertise. I don’t know whether I really have any of those things, but it was the image I wanted to project.

The other picture was taken this past January (2021). It is an older, wizened man with a full beard that has no trim. It is black on my cheeks and white everywhere else. I like to think it has a certain gravitas and look of someone who, if he doesn’t have wisdom, certainly has experience. Today is May 29th, 2021, I never trimmed that beard until I cut it off the day before yesterday. I’m clean-shaven but have a ponytail of all things. An older bald man with a ponytail! A caricature: a look that I have always made fun of. With the beard, it was a look at that Jennifer liked very much. Jennifer likes me with a beard, the fuller the better.

Before I cut it off, I posed myself in an approximation of a picture taken the last time my beard was this long: I was not quite 20 years old, my hair was brown as was my beard with some red in it from the sun. I was a sailor, even then. In my 30s, my hair and beard both turned very black just before my hair decided to fade away.

At this moment I’m in Phoenix, Arizona. I’ll take a redeye tomorrow night back to Long Island to continue working to have my parents’ house physically ready to rent and legally ready to rent with all permits up-to-date and everything up to code. Some things are best done alone, which is how I’ve always worked. All the work on Caro Babbo has been done alone, the software products that made money were written by me alone, and all the construction work on any of the houses I’ve owned and flipped have been done by me alone. Coordinating with someone who has an equal say in decisions apparently lengthens a project by a factor of 4.

By July 1,* I must be back in Port Townsend. That will give me two weeks to have parts for Caro Babbo fabricated, the two dozen cartons of things from my parents’ house that I had shipped there, sorted and stowed. Two weeks in Homer, Alaska will allow me to install a new cutlass bearing and prop shaft seal, fix whatever else I can find that is broken, and install the fabricated parts before Jennifer arrives. I will return to being the person I now see myself as: A sailor moving as much as possible in places with very few people, always with Jennifer, with occasional brave friends joining us after their own adventure of planes, trains, and automobiles to arrive at some small dock in a place they have read about.

The bar raises over time: A trip up from Seattle to Quadra Island is now a lovely and relaxing small trip. Bluewater sailing is now the definition of adventure. While one can be as easily killed coastal sailing as offshore, the new friends with whom we stay in touch are members of the Bluewater community. It’s difficult to say or to realize that I am saying that we do things where dying is the result of a major mistake. As I’ve written, in the everyday life we live in modern Western society much smaller mistakes will kill you much quicker than any of the mistakes that come to mind sailing a boat whether coastal or offshore: step off a curb without looking, veer into coming traffic.

As a percentage of our lives together, Jennifer and I have spent an unexpectedly large amount apart from each other, but never as long a continuous time as we have spent this year. Normal is being together, living in 100 ft.² in someplace we have never been before. Jennifer will tell you she prefers to live in a house with a yard and a fence and a garden.

This year we are reminded that family takes precedent over everything. Our return to Caro Babbo is delayed while Jennifer and her daughter live together in Port Townsend and I attend to family matters on Long Island.

Jennifer and I did meet on Long Island and after two weeks of me finishing tasks that I promised would take a few days; we drove 6000 miles together from Long Island to the Denver area. A map of the trip looks like the random walk of a drunken sailor, but we did move roughly a mile westward for every three miles we drove north or south. It was a glorious, relaxed trip to see friends that we see so infrequently. The trip was, I suppose, a land cruise with only one mechanical and one electronic failure. Covid was still in force so hotels were empty and cheap.

We spent two weeks traveling and two weeks with family and friends in Scottsdale: a timeout with intentionally little accomplished.

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*Family matters are less easily solved than matters of the sea. After seven days I was on a plane to meet Jennifer in Port Townsend, arriving June 6th.