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.

I think of the things that need to get done when we return next year, and things that I said I might do while we sat here, and did not. Instead, we’ve listened to audiobooks, and read our own personal books. We started plotting out what I will do this fall (I must buy airline tickets to Atlanta, today).

We have a number of people coming to see us for the wooden boat Festival in Port Townsend. We’ve invited people every year, and this year they’re all showing up. Fortunately, two of them will bring their own boats and will hopefully stay on them.

Stop, children, what’s that sound?

Rain, heavy rain, unusual rain. When it’s been raining here, it’s been spitting. Rain you can walk around in and only come back slightly damp.

I’m a lost in time these days. I watched Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, about Dylan’s 1978 tour. A Dutch man shot footage, I suppose Scorsese put together some sort of narrative. Then he gave it over to a film editor. I’ve watched Fran Liebowitz, who is my age, bitch about the current NY, because it isn’t the NY when she arrived. An old person’s lament.

We sit here and read a lot. We’ve been doing that a lot of this trip: reading to each other, and listening to audiobooks. Normally we sail each day. This trip we did very little sailing. We normally cover 30 miles a day, this trip we covered about four hundred in two weeks. We like being together, the trouble is sailing didn’t work this year. Jennifer is afraid of sailing. Last year it started, and this year has taken full force.

I’m still working out of the stroke: I’m passive, I’m not thinking quickly, and I have had vertigo for four weeks now. Not bad, the vertigo, but it’s still there. I compensate with my eyes, but when it first started I took a tumble, banged up my shoulder and did some bruise on my back. It’s all gone now, but I’ve never had anything like that: I didn’t know where up was and I leaned towards up, which put me on my back on a rock beach.

Fortunately, being on a sailboat where everything is moving isn’t too bad with vertigo, since you can’t really trust your sense of direction much.

We only actually sailed two days, anyway. The second day was a nice day with the good strong wind, but not enough to need reefing. It was bright and sunny, and the wind started great. We put up the main, and then motored out, and then there was space for us to head up into the wind, we did so and I put up the 135.

Within a few minutes we were running wing-and-wing. I had left the preventer on the port side, which we quickly set it up. A pole out to starboard, and we were on our way. We had left very early morning because Jennifer had calculated the current, so we sailed between nine and eleven knots. It was lovely sailing.

That’s it for the sailing of the trip.

We walk the docks here. Yesterday was warm, high 60°. I roasted a chicken, made a banana cake, got stood up for dinner. Grace is a young woman he met on the dock with her cat, Pop Tart. Pop Tart is as big and fat as Grace is skinny. We met her before we left. She lives on a little 25 foot sailboat in Seward, and came down on her boat to Homer to find work. She’s independent and friendly, and the only new person we met this year.

She’s rebuilding the inside of her boat after a crash that banged up the inside, which insurance paid for. She’s been working on tour boats, and the day before yesterday when saw her she told us she had just quit one boat and starting another. The better ambience on the second boat was worth more than the more money she was being paid on the first boat.

We spoke for a few moments on the dock, Jennifer played with Pop Tart, and then I asked her if she wanted to join us for dinner last night. She said yes, and said she might bring her girlfriend. We agreed on 7 PM.

At 630 PM, we received a text message, that the weather was lovely and she and her girlfriend were going to go sailing. The chicken was already in the oven, stuffed. But I hadn’t made the salad, nor the mashed potatoes.

When I open the bag the chicken was there, there was the odor that it started to go over. But not really, so I salted the hell out of it, let it sit for a while, rinsed, stuffed and put in the oven.

After Grace called, I decided tortillas were in order. We just had the chicken and tortillas, and so we did. I’d also made a banana cake, with a filling made with fruit cocktail, and icing covered in very old sweetened coconut.

During the night I didn’t feel so hot, and this morning neither did Jennifer. The chicken? The banana cake. We’re not used to this stuff right now. The very old coconut?

Jennifer’s napping, and I dictate and read Elmore Leonard. The sun has broken through, the solar panels on the deck, leaning against the Portland Pudgy on generating electricity, and I’m going to return to reading Leonard. This book is written in the 70s and starts out in Israel. We’ll see where it goes.

Thursday at 415 PM they pull us from water; Friday at 9 PM Ravn flies us to Anchorage, 6 AM we arrive at SeaTac, 830 in the morning we meet Jennifer’s son Owen for dim sum, and then conclude our adventure for this year. I am disappointed.