Lady K nearly sinks, and a Saturday morning reflection

Port Townsend, WA, 5-JAN-2019 – It’s ten after seven on this Saturday Morning. It’s dark and won’t be light for another while. I’m trying to think where have we spent that last few winters such that I am surprised it is dark.

I remember winter sailing from Lake Union the first year we had Caro Babbo. We left the dock at 6.30; it was very dark.

This morning I have a bit of panic: I don’t know what to work on. For a moment, I had a ‘‘I’m retired’’ panic. What do I do with my time? I’m not head down in a house to be sold, I’m not literally head down in a boat bilge.

Work has translated into physically doing something. And I don’t have anything physically to do.

The great refuge is email and the web. An email from Darrel Walters suggests I watch a video of a Canadian pleasure boat sinking in the Bahamas. Their nightmare lasts ninety minutes and all is well at the end, but it makes me look at Caro Babbo in the light of their calamity.

The major awakening is that we have the same point of failure. A note goes onto the Caro Babbo todo list to remedy that.

I also get a smug relief that my batteries can’t flood as theirs almost have, nor will my electronics, but my engine would have flooded.

Most terrifying are their cockpit drains. Mine are two 1-1/2” drains, which I worry are too small. Their’s can’t keep up with two gallon buckets emptied into the cockpit. Or, have they sunk so low that their cockpit sole is below the water line?

As my panic of being retired subsides, I realize that I have a wall of cerebral to-dos to accomplish before I start work again on Caro Babbo in March and houses in February. I have courses to take on celestial navigation, weather forecasting and machine learning, which in itself requires remedial courses on an implementation language and a development environment, and then there are the three books I’ve outlined that I must write. Plus reading on sailing to Hawaii, books on world cruising routes.

My dad would say at this moment, ‘‘I’m so tired thinking about all of this, I need to go back to bed.’’

Me, I need to just get started.

There are 50+ knot winds in the pacific west of here with 20+ foot waves, so Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes, reaffirms itself as a must read.

So here’s to a busy life and full one, even when, at times, it doesn’t seem so.

All the best in the New Year everyone, and please come visit wherever we are, call and write.