johnjuliano – Caro Babbo

Christmas is near, Jennifer is leaving, friends are coming and I start to think about boats and boating.

Port Townsend, 8-Dec-2023 — Tuesday, I’ll go down to Gig Harbor and install two additional solar panels on John Riley’s boat, this will give 320 watts, which is roughly what I have on Caro Babbo. Instead of two one hundreds, he’ll have four fifties to aim as he wants, in addition to the 130 on the dodger. It’s cold here and cloudy, there hasn’t been any sun in a few days and his house battery has died. I’ll buy him a new deep-cycle house battery for Christmas.

It is Christmas, at least for me. I’ve started shopping…on line… and figuring out money. I’ve spent a lot more this year than I had intended. I’ve helped friends, and have family to attend to. Jennifer is off to Berlin and Flora may come to visit for a day or two (or perhaps a week or two). My stepdaughter Samantha arrives on the 21^st, with all the attendant flurry that accompanies her, as well as her boyfriend.

I’m still here

Port Townsend, WA 16-NOV-2023 – I’ve lost my sense of time: the unique feeling of how many days passed, or when something happened in the past, has left me. I attribute it to the stroke, but who knows? Like Billy Pilgrim, I’m adrift in time.

Last Week

Homer, AK, 12-Aug-2023 — lt’s dark here, it’s not night, the weather has changed, it’s blowing in Homer harbor. We’ve been up here four summers, and it’s difficult to say what typical Homer summer weather is.

The first year, 2020 was the lovely year, the year we based everything on. The next year we went to Prince William Sound, and the weather wasn’t bad, occasional storms blowing through. Year three was terrible, we sat and hid half the time. Year four we find we are tired of this: the weather hasn’t been bad, very little wind, but we find were just tired of being here.

Today it’s blowing, may be 20 in the harbor. It’s not bad. We don’t have a car this year, so we’re sort of stuck here, which isn’t bad, Jennifer and I like being together.

You and me riding somewhere, going nowhere….

Port Chatham, AK, 2-aug-2023 – We’re two days from Homer, nine hours sailing to be exact but we’ll stop in Seldovia for a day. There’s unlimited internet there, some restaurants, and a place to stop. We found we haven’t enjoyed this trip as much as others. We’re not entirely sure why, perhaps because we’ve done this part of Alaska for three years now and this is enough.Perhaps it is something to do with my stroke. Jennifer brought me here to get me out of the house to do things that I was familiar with. It was a very nice thing to do and these are things that I am familiar with and that came back to me easily.The weather here has been mostly no wind. The last three days, it is turning into summer weather and perhaps we will now be upset that we returned.

We sailed across the Barren Islands to get from Shuyak Island to the mainland where Port Chatham is. The weather is good for the first time in a while, not blowing hard and not dead calm. It was probably 15 knots in the morning and we sailed as far as the Barren Islands before the wind stopped. Continue reading “You and me riding somewhere, going nowhere….”

The raven calls

Blue Fox Bay, Afognak Island, AK — 18-Jul-2023 — The raven call is deep, dark, and humorous. It is the mad joker. Oftentimes, there are groups of them calling back and forth. Today, in the cherry-fruit of this labyrinth of water we are in, a single Raven calls from the west end over a stand of trees. I can’t see him, just hear him, alone.

We feel like we’re far away from things here. We’re not. Boats pass by outside of our sight, not often but they do. We keep the radio on 24 hours a day to channel 16. Once a day, sometimes less, we hear chatter. Generally, too far away for us to hear all of it, and never both sides of it, just the Coast Guard asking for latitude and longitude and how they will get a vessel to the caller. Rarely, we will hear two vessels passing by calling to each other.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, we downloaded a weather report about the clouds. It has been so dark here that we wanted to learn whether will it stay dark forever? The report is, no, not always, but the light will not lift for an entire day, just whisps of sunlight passing overhead, perhaps with lessened humidity, enough to, perhaps, dry out the boat. Continue reading “The raven calls”

Time is on my side, yes it is…

Big Bay, Shuyak Island, Alaska – July 16th, 2023 – We left Homer five days ago. It has been rainy, dark, except for two days.I’ve been sleeping 12 hours a day after the first two days. Jennifer has encouraged this much sleep, I was resistant the first few days, but gave in. We’ve been making about the same distance as normal, but we’ve only managed to sail about three hours one day. There just has been no wind, except when there is tons of wind from the wrong direction.Jennifer says I’m healing and have to let that happen. It is happening in that I can feel, or did feel changes in the first part of the trip. I presume I’m back because I’m not really feeling those changes anymore, or perhaps it’s because I’ve had one hell of a sinus infection and vertigo which either masks the changes or hides my feeling them.

The boat work in the yard went well. The engine mounts did not seem to need work; it was the screws holding in the cutless bearing that were the problem. I bought a tap and reamed out the holes, and the screws went all the way in. They did not the last time I worked on this.

The boat itself needed normal things. I rebuilt the water maker which works much better now. Continue reading “Time is on my side, yes it is…”

We’re going!

Port Townsend, WA, 19-JUN-2023 –We met with my cardiologist yesterday… Yes, I’ve said it, my cardiologist. I now have a cardiologist for the rest of my life, and who knows what other doctors, but that’s the way it is. It’s better than the reverse.

…We met with my cardiologist yesterday who told me everything is fine as far as going on the boat, and getting away from things. I do have Afib, and I seem to be constantly in Afib.

I’m changing

Port Townsend, 12-JUN-2023 – I’m changing. I think I’m changing back to whom I was; I am different. I know I feel the same things I used to feel, but I’m different.

Since the stroke, there have been changes in me. In the early days, the days would pass by without really an end to them. They were somehow continuous. Eventually, that stopped, but even now days don’t have the strong breaks that they used to. I seem to sleep heavier.

We’re ready.

Port Townsend, WA, 26-May-2023 – We bought tickets to go to Anchorage. We’ll fly up on the 26th of June and return in early September.

Jennifer will fly up the same day as me, which didn’t really click until I spoke to an old high school friend, Roberta Guzzone. Jennifer is flying up with me on those dates, she’ll be with me for two weeks while I get the boat ready to go into the water because she wants to be around me in case something happens. It’s an odd feeling.

I did a teleconference with a nurse practitioner at Harborview Medical Center. The nurse practitioner is from the stroke facility. I am, it seems, completely recovered from the stroke. I know that’s not completely true because I have a slight lisp when I say certain words that have an S in them. It’s not anything anyone else notices but I can.

Allegro, non-troppo

Written before the excitement, which does nothing to change the larger directions we are all chasing.

Port Townsend, 3-MAY-2023 – It’s been a heck of a year since we returned from Caro Babbo last fall.

I’m back from almost 3 weeks of bouncing around Europe seeing old true and good friends. Just before I left I started to feel the pressure of tasks to be accomplished before Caro Babbo can go in the water. I set all of that aside, other than to book my flight, then jetted around Western Europe seeing friends. It wasn’t a return to an old life, we’ve all more or less left that life. Franz, with another 10 years before he wants to call it quits, has decided he’s had enough of the newspaper industry and being a CEO. He starting a new venture with a new love and exploiting an untapped Italian market for which there are government monies looking for a place to go.

Ann is still in Paris having left Dublin 40 years ago. She’s called it quits and lives the Parisian life of leisure and magazines. Elena flew down from Moscow, she’s a travel writer, we traveled for a week around Milan and Lake Garda: travel if you can with a travel writer. I don’t need to say more.