Maxi 95 and Our Adventures
Boat Haven Boatyard, Port Townsend, WA, 23-JAN-2020 – Winter time in PT is quiet. The tourists haven’t arrived, the harbor at Fort Hudson is full of boats wintering over, and the Boat Haven boat yard is full of boats being worked on.
Much of the conversation we had with other sailors about our crossing contained questions about whether, and oftentimes the assumption that, we were a full keel vessel.
Continue reading “A look at bottoms: A walk through the Boat Haven yard”16 Shamrock Rd, Rocky Point, NY, 1-JAN-2020 – This past Sunday, December 29th, 2019 at approximately 3:30 am, eastern time, my father, Babbo, died of coronary arrest after suffering a major stroke four weeks earlier.
There was no DNR (do not resuscitate) in place. He was on the Neurology ICU floor at Stony Brook Medical. All attempts to resuscitate him failed.
I had wanted to name our boat the Vincent A, after my dad, but Jennifer didn’t like all the pointy letters. I turned to a dear friend in Milan, Franz Rossi for a name. He suggested Caro Babbo, which is Dear Daddy in Italian. It was a name that fit and one in which he took great pride.
Continue reading “Babbo, My Father, Dies”[Updated] Stony Brook Hospital†, Stony Brook, NY, 27-DEC-2019 – My friends, if I may call them that, James and Kimi on the sailing catamaran Zingaro made it safely to Kona after basically having their boat break up.
I’ve written about their Youtube channel and struck up a long distance friendship with James.
Youtube channels are generally disjointed from the actual goings-on on the vessel. Most channels, including Kimi and James’, are months behind where the boat actually is. On the Zingaro channel, they are still in Central America, while they have been in French Polynesia for a while.
In the last bunch of weeks, they sailed to the Line Islands anchoring at Fanning Island with our friends Merv and Sharon aboard Southern Cross IV.
Two days ago this email arrived:
Continue reading “Zingaro makes it to Kona on Hawai’i, damaged. James and Kimi safe.”19-DEC-2019 – This was written last month. It is more depth on what broke than the most recent post.
Manele Bay, Lana’i Island 11-Nov-2019 – We’ve been in Hawaii a month now. It is a stretch to remember what broke on the passage. Things continue to break as others are repaired.
The major items that broke, and as a consequence changed Jennifer’s view of offshore sailing, were the two self-steering devices.
Fifty miles off Cape Flattery, about eight hours after leaving the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the wind vane self-steering broke, literally broke. When the boat went off course, I looked over the transom: the steering oar had broken off and was trailing by its leash.
Stony Brook Medical Center, Stony Brook, Long Island, NY, 15-DEC-2019 – I’m sitting in my Dad’s hospital room.
We’re in the belly of his recovery. The immediate recoveries have slowed. He is able to move is his right thumb and right index finger. If his right arm is supported, he can flex and extend that arm. He can inconsistently move both his legs a bit. Nothing in left arm. He is beginning to swallow a bit, but can still not move his tongue, nor move his eyes right to left.
More devastatingly, he has dropped into depression becoming difficult to engage. When asked if he thinks he will improve, he says No. He can show his emotions in his face and he cries. This morning during rounds when he started to cry his nurse started to cry, as did his doctor. When his doctor recovered she said to me quietly, he can show emotion, that is a good sign.
Continue reading “What broke when, 2019”Rocky Point, NY, 5-DEC-2019 – On a nondescript day in March, 1977, my mother drove towards McCarrick’s Dairy, the local convenience store, three blocks away. As she crossed Prince Road a car on her right ran the stop sign pushing her car into a LILCO light pole that was so far into the road way that the paving crew paved on both sides of the pole.
The impact of the car hitting the pole, together with the twisting force of the car on her right, caused her head to hit the “A” pillar between the windshield and the car door. She severed her spinal cord at ‘‘C4’’, the fourth cervical vertebrae. She was a quadriplegic for thirty-one years.
Continue reading “Locked In”UA334 HNL-LGA, 1-DEC-2019 – It isn’t often I let down my guard. I have an elderly father, Jennifer has children. We travel with satellite communications so that we can always be reached.
But yesterday, because we had spoken to the kids and my dad, who is the Babbo of Caro Babbo, when everything that was in imminent danger of failing on Caro Babbo was repaired, when both VRBO properties had paying guests and all the airline holiday-season tickets had been booked and paid for, we did relax. Continue reading “An Unexpected, Unwanted Flight Home”
Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor, Honolulu, HI, 25-Nov-2019 — Ever since Jennifer learned that the failures on Caro Babbo are not unusual, she has been reading more about equipment failures while cruising.
The idea of cascading failures has grabbed hold of her and sometimes awakens her from sleep.
Continue reading “Cascading failures, Repair Story #2”Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor, Honolulu, Hi, 22-Nov-2019 — For every story of breaking something, there is a story of fixing it. Most repairs on Caro Babbo are solitary endeavors, hopefully carried out on a dock with a reasonably priced chandlery near by. Many are carried out underway, and under pressure. All successful repairs are points of pride.
Continue reading “Repair stories, #1”Hilo, Hawaii, 10-NOV-2019 – After the preparation and finally leaving, there is being in the place that we’d read about: offshore, no land in sight, and, by some lights, nothing but danger.
As we were repeatedly told by our offshore sailor friends, who have been our biggest fans and supporters, we were now members of the family of Bluewater Sailors. Continue reading “Bravery, Preparation and Sailing, pt2”
