General and Miscellaneous – Page 2

We’re ready.

Port Townsend, WA, 26-May-2023 – We bought tickets to go to Anchorage. We’ll fly up on the 26th of June and return in early September.

Jennifer will fly up the same day as me, which didn’t really click until I spoke to an old high school friend, Roberta Guzzone. Jennifer is flying up with me on those dates, she’ll be with me for two weeks while I get the boat ready to go into the water because she wants to be around me in case something happens. It’s an odd feeling.

I did a teleconference with a nurse practitioner at Harborview Medical Center. The nurse practitioner is from the stroke facility. I am, it seems, completely recovered from the stroke. I know that’s not completely true because I have a slight lisp when I say certain words that have an S in them. It’s not anything anyone else notices but I can.

Allegro, non-troppo

Written before the excitement, which does nothing to change the larger directions we are all chasing.

Port Townsend, 3-MAY-2023 – It’s been a heck of a year since we returned from Caro Babbo last fall.

I’m back from almost 3 weeks of bouncing around Europe seeing old true and good friends. Just before I left I started to feel the pressure of tasks to be accomplished before Caro Babbo can go in the water. I set all of that aside, other than to book my flight, then jetted around Western Europe seeing friends. It wasn’t a return to an old life, we’ve all more or less left that life. Franz, with another 10 years before he wants to call it quits, has decided he’s had enough of the newspaper industry and being a CEO. He starting a new venture with a new love and exploiting an untapped Italian market for which there are government monies looking for a place to go.

Ann is still in Paris having left Dublin 40 years ago. She’s called it quits and lives the Parisian life of leisure and magazines. Elena flew down from Moscow, she’s a travel writer, we traveled for a week around Milan and Lake Garda: travel if you can with a travel writer. I don’t need to say more.

One, Two, Three Strokes, you’re out at the ol’ ball game.

Port Townsend, WA, 8-May-2023 – Today feels like it is the end of the day that happened. But it’s not. That day was six days ago.

I remember sleeping much closer to Jennifer than I normally did, she was comfortable and quite warm. She had her hand on me, across my shoulders, then it felt a little uncomfortable. I also felt I needed to go to the bathroom.

Jennifer’d been gone for days, and I had been gone for weeks prior to that, so we hadn’t seen each other much in the last two months. It was nice to have her near, and very comforting that she should put her arm around me when she was sleeping. I scooted over leftward to the edge of the bed. She must’ve been closer than I thought because I could still feel her hand on me.

Summer 2022 prep starts NOW.

30-MAR-2022, Phoenix Arizona, USA – The preparation and crush to prepare for this summer sailing starts. It is no different than last year. The amount of work I expect that will need to be done before Caro Babbo can go in the water is much less than last year. But the number of non-boating tasks and leisure things that we are trying to get done before I fly to Alaska is an order of magnitude larger.

Caro Babbo Sleeps

Mitte, Berlin, German, 13-SEP-2021 – The return to Homer was smooth and uneventful. We sailed when we could, three times, perhaps. Each time Caro Babbo coming into her own, sailing faster than I remember, reaching hull speed easily. This may be because we were in fairly protected waters each time, but most likely we had current helping us.

For the entire trip, we saw only three other sailboats. The first was a marina-mate from Ko’Olina marina on Oahu. Yes, it is a small world.

Looking forward, looking aft: who was I, who am I, who will I become

Port Townsend Washington, 20 November 2020 – On Monday, the day after tomorrow, I’ll fly to Atlanta to work on my house there.

I’ll be flying on an Alaska Airlines buddy pass, courtesy of Grayson on X-Wing.

My life has changed. I’ve become so integrated into the sailing community that people don’t have last names anymore, just the name of the vessel they sail on.* It’s very much like the German or Dutch von or the French du, or even how Italian names came into existence as the place where they are from, my original surname, Giuliano, from the province of Giulia, which is no longer inside the Italian borders.

In giving me these buddy passes, Grayson told me I had to fly dressed appropriately, no ripped jeans.

Commercial grade gear

‘‘Until something breaks’’ is the watch phrase of all sailors.

Homer, AK, 9-Sep-2020 – We’ve been reading, watching, and talking about equipment failures. A typical ocean crossing is 15 to 35 days. On every boat, things break during a crossing. It’s something sailors have come to expect and prepare for. I’ve also come to realize we, as sailors, expect this very expensive equipment to fail after a very short duty cycle.

In small harbors, where we hang around with commercial fishing boats, I try to envision a commercial vessel living with the meantime between failure (MTBF) measured in days of service. The bits and pieces of their boats are up to the task and not generally pretty: Stainless steel in some places, aluminum in others, and galvanized steel wherever that makes the most sense. We rarely see full-chain anchor rodes.

Sit or Sail?

Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 5-MAY-2020 – The Clash song, should I stay or should I go, always echoes in my head at times like this. We’re vacillating between leaving the boat here and sailing to Alaska. Dutch Harbor by the edge of the Aleutians to be exact. It’s potentially a bunch of weeks at sea in a weather window.*

The major question is, would we be welcome and could we sail from place to place? The answers are all over the place, changing from day to day. The kicker is how might answers change while we’re at sea for three or four weeks?

It’s dropping to 70-degrees tonight, could you grab a sweater for me?

Livin’ la vida barco

Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 30-APR-2020 – Well, it’s happened. We’ve acclimated. About the time that I decided we were here and it’s time to connect up Alexa, 70 degrees became sweater weather.

When I was 11 years old, we moved from Toronto to Long Island. I remember the weather from that winter vividly. There was knee-high snow, and the weather for us kids from Toronto was mild. We wore windbreakers with a sweater underneath the entire winter.

The next winter was more typical and milder still. But, by then we had acclimated into winter coats and corduroy trousers.

Boat Jockeying, Staying Put, Protecting our slip.

Ko Olina Marina, Ko Olina, HI 20-MAR-20 — Yesteday morning Jimmy Cornell’s website, Noonsite, said French Pokynesia was completely open. In the afternoon, it said FP was completely closed.