May 2019 – Caro Babbo

I’m your (almost) Captain. Goings on ashore.

Port Townsend, Wa, 18-May-2019 – Call me Almost Captain. I’ve passed all the tests, taken a Red Cross-approved first aid course, had a physical. There is only getting a TWIC card (background security check), getting a drug test and assembling 720 days of sea time, and then, with the addition of another few hundred dollars I will have a 25-ton master’s license for near coastal. Oh yeah, I also will have sailing, and assistance-towing endorsements.

This will allow me to captain, for money, power vessels up to 25 tons gross vessel weight based on volume (not displacement); the vessels will weigh, empty, much less than 25 tons. I can also master a sailing vessel of unlimited weight and get paid for towing boats that need assistance. In the US, it seems I can do all of this on non-commercial vessels, for no pay, without any license. (In other parts of the world this isn’t true: one must actually have training before doing these things.)

Taking a few minutes to play Hooky

Lee’s Landing, Lake Union, Seattle, WA, 7-MAY-2019 – Tests for my Master’s (Captain’s) license start tomorrow evening. I’ll take a few minutes to play hooky and tell you about the experience before the reckoning.

I row to class in our Portland Pudgy each afternoon, a little after 5pm and then home at 9:30. The row is around 50 minutes, five or ten minutes longer than walking, but if I paid attention to where I am rowing, it might be the same or less. When rowing, I only see where I have been, rather than where I will be.

At night, I will see only three or fewer boats on the lake on my row home.

Lake Union and the PNW boating community is as much my home, as any I have had. I think of the three places I’ve lived where I would run into I people I knew: As a young adult on Long Island, I would always meet people I knew at Smith-Haven Mall. As a slightly older, young adult in New York’s west village, and now sailing here.

rough draft 4 minutes memoir

Jennifer is starting a memoir about our time sailing with Hilary. This is a four-minute piece, when read out loud, that Jennifer wrote for a seminar she attended. The event described took place in 2016.

Date: Friday, May 3, 2019 at 1:35 PM

Topic: rough draft 4 minutes memoir

Hilary is my mother.

At the deepest extent of our swing we were in over 60 feet, but when the tide reversed we had drifted and settled such that our keel was two feet above the bottom. The next low was forecast to be three feet lower, so John and I set up a double anchor system, one off the bow in deeper water and the Danforth off the stern in shallower. We could thus pull ourselves out into deeper water if the clearance between the bottom of the keel and the ground grew too nervous-making for me. Positioned in this way, with the golden sun filtering down through the clear water and hints of fantastic wildlife just around every bush and boulder, John started the task of fixing the Webasto heater.

I was looking through the binoculars at shore watching for bears or another wolverine, and Hilary was puttering in her way: untying the stopper knots in the jib sheets and coiling the lines into kinks. Why not let her, I thought, as we weren’t traveling that day and it was so serene and lovely.