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.

We have, since some time in the summer, been planning to see Kimi and James on Oahu, most likely in January. But Zingaro, James and Kimi’s catamaran, broke up west of Hawai’i in December while I was on Long Island. The coast guard escorted them into Kona. They managed to get the boat to Maui, where it is now. They have raised 60-some-odd thousand dollars towards a new boat through kickstarter, where they have taken deposits on cruises (they are now a charter company) and sold pictures from their travels.

On the kickstarter page, they showed a very nice plastic cat (Zingaro was plywood) in Australia, But, it seems that is not the cat they are buying. In a whatsapp chat group at least one user is pushing James and Kimi to buy a mono hull on Kauai.

In Hawaii, we saw this at Ala Wai, there are a surprising number of inexpensive sailboats for sale. Sailors sail them to Hawaii and then leave them. I’m told it’s the same all across the Pacific. Once across the Pacific is enough for many sailors.

I will probably make the jump to Alaska without Jennifer.

We went to dinner at Bob and Roberta’s house in Little Five Points (Atlanta). Roberta expressed her condolences and told me my dad’s death was best given how locked-in he was. My traumatic amnesia had kicked in, I guess, because I had pretty much forgotten that he was locked in. Perhaps that little motion in one hand was enough to cross the boundary for me to believe he was not locked in.

The dream the first night was a small-place dream: I was wrapped tight and couldn’t move. When I was a five-year old, kids piling one on top of another on top of me would leave me hysterical. This dream was the kind where near hysteria sets in followed by the realization that it is a dream. Wake up, wake up, I can wake up and then my eyes are open and I am neither sweaty nor wrapped tightly in blankets. Just awake.

Successive dreams have included dreams within dreams all ending in the push to wake up. Most often they are disappointment dreams: I have somehow disappointed my Dad. After a very young age, when as a young father he projected too much upon me, I don’t remember ever disappointing him, but then it is a classic male position to try to excel to please one’s father, even when it is not necessary.

Although many, many people have told me they speak to someone who has died, I’ve never done so, until now.

I found myself speaking to him for a week or so, and I expect I will again. He doesn’t answer, and so far, unlike Hilary, he has not been leaning over my shoulder. I mostly cluck and mumble about his death, how could this happen? And I take the lesson that not taking action can kill you… me, is who I am thinking of.

As my dad aged, he became less proactive in medical situations. When one of us kids was in the hospital and we had a bad MD, sometimes the police would be called to the hospital with my dad whispering to the doc, do your job, because I’ll get to you before they get to me. That sort of encouragement seemed to focus a doctor’s attention.

I have always been ambivalent about not taking a baseball bat to a doctor who kept my mom intubated for weeks on end because it paid him $700/day to keep her that way. He told me to my face that she was old and was going to die. (A college friend who was head of cardiology at a Louisiana hospital told me this doctor would kill her to keep his billings up.)

The head of pulmonary at Stony Brook Medical visited her at the community hospital where she was and moved her out that same night. She lived many more years until pancreatic cancer took her in six weeks.

But my dad, for whatever reason, did not investigate why a blood thinner was no longer in his medical regime. He stroked from a clot. He died because there was too little thinner in use at the hospital or too much. One of my brothers was told too much, and I was told too little. An autopsy would have answered the question but to what end?

My dad doesn’t visit me in these dreams, but they are about him, about his death and my mortality. He is off stage in some of them. These dreams are very much like the dreams where I realize that I have not prepared for a business meeting, but never get to the meeting; I never see my dad in my dreams. I suspect I will and perhaps he will someday answer when I mutter to him about his death.

In Port Townsend, we will pack up the house by storing all our clothing in the basement, turning off the hot water heater and closing all the blinds.
$400 of fisheries stuff needs to be packed into a suitcase. The thirty feet of ¾ inch hose is the only worry. The rest would fit in small shopping bag.

Oh wait, there is the additional bilge pump and all of Caro Babbo’s ship’s logs and the original ST4000+ wheel drive… hmm, there is a bit more.

At 5:30 am, a cab will take us over to the 5:58 bus that connects to the bus in Poulsbo, that connects to ferry that connects to the train, that connects to the plane that connects to rental car and Caro Babbo.

Zingaro broke up on the way to Hawai’i from Fanning Island, where we’d like to go. We’ve heard from our friend Steve that it was a rougher crossing than advertised, but Steve and Zingaro traveled in November and December. We’ll be traveling in March and April, if we go. At some point we’ll move Caro Babbo to Kauai, then Caro Babbo and I will make the jump to the Kenai Penninsula.

These next few weeks in Ko’Olina will be fixing the goose neck — I’ll do a post on that — installing a second bilge pump, and having the 135% Genoa repaired. We’ll get the bottom cleaned. I’ll go over the standing rigging and we should sail from island to island and perhaps even see James and Kimi.

Friday we’ll see our friends in Pearl Harbor, Tim and Trisha.

We’re back on board.

We’ve been loading charts into tablets (My laptop is caught up in a warranty issue.)

Its all about prep.