By John – Page 6 – Caro Babbo

Sit or Sail?

Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 5-MAY-2020 – The Clash song, should I stay or should I go, always echoes in my head at times like this. We’re vacillating between leaving the boat here and sailing to Alaska. Dutch Harbor by the edge of the Aleutians to be exact. It’s potentially a bunch of weeks at sea in a weather window.*

The major question is, would we be welcome and could we sail from place to place? The answers are all over the place, changing from day to day. The kicker is how might answers change while we’re at sea for three or four weeks?

It’s dropping to 70-degrees tonight, could you grab a sweater for me?

Livin’ la vida barco

Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 30-APR-2020 – Well, it’s happened. We’ve acclimated. About the time that I decided we were here and it’s time to connect up Alexa, 70 degrees became sweater weather.

When I was 11 years old, we moved from Toronto to Long Island. I remember the weather from that winter vividly. There was knee-high snow, and the weather for us kids from Toronto was mild. We wore windbreakers with a sweater underneath the entire winter.

The next winter was more typical and milder still. But, by then we had acclimated into winter coats and corduroy trousers.

Pumps

Ko Olina Marina, HI, 4-APR-2020 – In the 1980s, the circle I lived in, mostly PhD psychologists of one stripe or another, mixed with some computer scientists, a bunch of neural network people, a physicist or two and who knows who else, looked at the current computer architecture as a model of how the brain works. A homologue for the CPU was easy, RAM was short term memory, disk storage was long term memory, we were certain we all knew how this fit together.

We were sure we were that first to find our current technology explained the least understood mysteries of the human body. A historian in the group pointed out that when pumps were the technology rage, technocrats of the day explained how the human body, including the brain, was just like a series of pumps.

Staying put for the duration

Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 31-MAR-2019 — The marina is where all the tourists come for whale watching trips and swimming with dolphins, for deep sea fishing charters and to spot turtles swimming among the docks. All of that is closed. The marina has settled down to a quiet neighborhood.

Boat Jockeying, Staying Put, Protecting our slip.

Ko Olina Marina, Ko Olina, HI 20-MAR-20 — Yesteday morning Jimmy Cornell’s website, Noonsite, said French Pokynesia was completely open. In the afternoon, it said FP was completely closed.

San Francisco is Closed

Ko Olina Marina, Ko Olina HI, 17-MAR-2020 — Yesterday an official announced that in San Francisco and seven surrounding counties all non-essential businesses would close and everyone was to remain in their homes.

Before we left for the airport we learned the Visa Office would abide by the rule and would also close.

Delta kindly credited us for the fare with no fees.

It is also unclear whether we would be able to land in French Polynesia or anywhere else.

Pondering

Ko Olina Marina, Ko Olina Hawaii, 15-MAR-2020 – This is the first time I’ve been alone for more than a few minutes since my dad died.

I’ve traveled on the bus to Honolulu a few times to the visit the Apple store and work on my TWIC card, but this is the first time I have been alone on board with time to think.

Tomorrow, we’ll fly to San Francisco to visit the French Consulate there. We’re not making the trip home we’d planned. Instead, we’re headed to French Polynesia, if they’ll let us in.

Continue reading “Pondering”

We meet James, but not Kimi

Ko Olina Marina, 12-MAR-2020 — It’s always interesting meeting someone with whom you have corresponded but never met.

I’ve been writing professionally, in one form or another for something approaching forty years, but I find I still get spooked writing for a new audience, and so I did writing this. The obvious audience is followers of my blog, but this post will also get read by the members of the WhatsApp group of Zingaro Patrons and other invitees. They know James better than I do. James is a celebrity with this group who are fiercely loyal. I find myself worried that I’d somehow lose face with them, or even with James.

James and I started corresponding off and on just after I discovered his Zingaro YouTube channel. There were few enough episodes that they could easily be watched back-to-back in a couple of hours. I think he had met Kimi by then, but perhaps not. James figured prominently in a piece I wrote about why there would never be a Caro Babbo Youtube channel. He has an easiness about him, mixed with competence that make him interesting and easy to watch. The first few episodes could have been titled this week’s pretty girl, because there seemed to be a new young woman in every episode. There wasn’t any mystery about why these women would spend time with James.

And then, at some point, an 18- or 19-year old named Kim shows up and James loses his heart. He and I corresponded about what a lucky man he was.

When we saw James this past week he talked about how much money he blew through in those early days of the romance. Unlike the eighties pop hit, Kim stayed after the money was gone.

It’s All About Prep… and Dreams

DL2680 ATL-SEA 18-FEB-2020 – We’re our way back to Port Townsend before making the hop to Honolulu on the 20th.

Jennifer and I often think we have few friends, but our week was full of seeing friends. It was a busy week with full days of house maintenance and full evenings with friends.

We’ve been following the travails of James and Kimi on Zingaro, and the dreams following my father’s death have begun.

This Time of Life

DL SEA-ATL 12-Feb-2020 – it’s getting to be a more and more difficult time of life: in my email this morning was a notification that Jennifer’s and my dear friend, Judie Romeo, died.

Judie was loud, opinionated, and, I suspect, could be difficult to work with. She was, recently, on the wrong side of the backhand of the new Center for Wooden Boats (CWB).