Maxi 95 and Our Adventures
Ko Olina Marina, Ko Olina Hawaii, 15-MAR-2020 – This is the first time I’ve been alone for more than a few minutes since my dad died.
I’ve traveled on the bus to Honolulu a few times to the visit the Apple store and work on my TWIC card, but this is the first time I have been alone on board with time to think.
Tomorrow, we’ll fly to San Francisco to visit the French Consulate there. We’re not making the trip home we’d planned. Instead, we’re headed to French Polynesia, if they’ll let us in.
Ko Olina Marina, 12-MAR-2020 — It’s always interesting meeting someone with whom you have corresponded but never met.
I’ve been writing professionally, in one form or another for something approaching forty years, but I find I still get spooked writing for a new audience, and so I did writing this. The obvious audience is followers of my blog, but this post will also get read by the members of the WhatsApp group of Zingaro Patrons and other invitees. They know James better than I do. James is a celebrity with this group who are fiercely loyal. I find myself worried that I’d somehow lose face with them, or even with James.
James and I started corresponding off and on just after I discovered his Zingaro YouTube channel. There were few enough episodes that they could easily be watched back-to-back in a couple of hours. I think he had met Kimi by then, but perhaps not. James figured prominently in a piece I wrote about why there would never be a Caro Babbo Youtube channel. He has an easiness about him, mixed with competence that make him interesting and easy to watch. The first few episodes could have been titled this week’s pretty girl, because there seemed to be a new young woman in every episode. There wasn’t any mystery about why these women would spend time with James.
And then, at some point, an 18- or 19-year old named Kim shows up and James loses his heart. He and I corresponded about what a lucky man he was.
When we saw James this past week he talked about how much money he blew through in those early days of the romance. Unlike the eighties pop hit, Kim stayed after the money was gone.
Continue reading “We meet James, but not Kimi”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.
Continue reading “It’s All About Prep… and Dreams”DL SEA-ATL 12-Feb-2020 – it’s getting to be a more and more difficult time of life: in my email this morning was a notification that Jennifer’s and my dear friend, Judie Romeo, died.
Judie was loud, opinionated, and, I suspect, could be difficult to work with. She was, recently, on the wrong side of the backhand of the new Center for Wooden Boats (CWB).
Continue reading “This Time of Life”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”
