Labor Day Weekend 2020, Homer, AK – Homer is not what we expect. Alaskans tell us, uniformly, that Homer is the Port Townsend (where Jennifer has a house) of Alaska. We feel blind, because we don’t see it.
Continue reading “Life in Homer”Category: People
Posts that focus on people. Generally, people we have met while sailing, but not always. We generally identify people with as much information as we have, but often times we leave out their surname, sometimes because we don’t know it, other times because it wasn’t something we thought to include.
Caro Babbo Sleeps, John Doesn’t
Port Townsend, WA, 1-OCT-2020 – In Homer, AK, Caro Babbo, resting on stacked wooden squares called cribs, winterized, locked and watched over, sleeps. I on the other hand toss and turn. Dryland, people, culture, and COVID are difficult transitions.
Give me a few minutes to catch you up.
Continue reading “Caro Babbo Sleeps, John Doesn’t”Back in Port Towsend, so much has changed in the US
Port Townsend, WA, 1-OCT-2020 — We spent a few days sleeping aboard, winterizing Caro Babbo, then drove our rental car† back to Anchorage airport and flew to Seattle’s SEATAC.
I can’t sleep well since we have been back: anxiety dreams. Recent dreams have been about missing meetings and other things from my business life. These dreams are, instead, generally about Caro Babbo being on the hard and improperly winterized.
But, I know it is also withdrawal and the social pressures I feel being around people.
Continue reading “Back in Port Towsend, so much has changed in the US”Our last anchorage; I do not look like a tadpole
Port Chatham, AK, 27-AUG-2020 — This is the last time we will anchor on this trip. Everything is mixed: Melancholia at having this long adventure end, and impatience to move on.
The day before yesterday and the day before that stick in the mind as embodying so much of an Alaska cruiser’s life. We motored and motored around a point from one anchorage to another: four hours, some of it dodging rocks and kelp. Much with no wind and some with wind that would have required beating to windward. Continue reading “Our last anchorage; I do not look like a tadpole”
William F and me
53° 18.93N 168° 27.14W 17-jul-2020 — I’ve started William F Buckley’s Atlantic High, a book I’ve known about since parts of it were printed in the New Yorker in 1981. The copy I have is the fifth printing, so the book did well.
I had, before I read the NY’er piece, determined I wanted to sail across the Atlantic. Buckley took a number of friends on this trip (he’d crossed before and written a well-regarded book, Airborne) and required his friends to keep journals of this trip that he would turn into a book.
It was different sailing then. Position was mostly by celestial navigation, though I think Loran may have existed. In celestial navigation you learn once or twice a day where you think you might be, generally based on where you thought you were yesterday, if you have clear skies. Otherwise, it may be a few days sailing by compass before you once again learn where you think you may be. Continue reading “William F and me”
Why are we still in Hawaii? We leave in the morning.
Hanalei Bay, Kuaui, HI, 25-JUN-2020 — If you’re asking why are we still in a Hawaii, it is the proper question.
We were to have left Tuesday, but will leave tomorrow instead.
I’ve wriiten that in a cruising boat, you, the skipper/owner/crew are the weak point: the boat will protect you. I am the weak link. I have been injured and then suffered from Vertigo. We waited while I healed.
Continue reading “Why are we still in Hawaii? We leave in the morning.”Rigger, Author, Friend: Brion Toss Dies
Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 8-Jun-2020 — Brion Toss died the night before last. The news arrived in an email from Scott Wilson, a mutual friend in Cambodia.
Sometimes, news like this hits you right between the eyes and the cumulative unspent emotion doesn’t want to stay unspent.
Continue reading “Rigger, Author, Friend: Brion Toss Dies”Greg James, The Accidental Village and the Binary Roller Coaster
Ko Olina Marina, Kapelei, HI, 24-MAY-2020 — The binary roller coaster we ride, we’re sailing to Alaska, we’re not sailing to Alaska, was turned on its ear and into trivia when we learned our friend Greg James drowned a mile from shore.
Jennifer learned about Greg’s death through a post by Kevin McBee (who you can see in the attached video) on a sailing group.
I called the local police, who were closed, and eventually the coast guard to try to get ahold of Greg’s family before they learned about his death on the internet.
Continue reading “Greg James, The Accidental Village and the Binary Roller Coaster”Our friend, Greg James, dies in boating accident one mile from harbor
Mooloolaba, Australia, 18-May-2020 — Jennifer and I had texted Greg the previous few days discussing what he expected to happen when he arrived unannounced in his 34-foot sail boat in Australia.
We watched his progress as his inreach satellite phone posted on the web. We teased him when it appeared his boat was in the surf off Mooloolaba, the site of a large marina. We figured Greg had carried his sat phone with him ashore in his pocket. When the posting stopped, we were certain he’d turned it off. Had the aussie border people taken exception to his arrival, we laughed.
But, Greg was dead by then.
Continue reading “Our friend, Greg James, dies in boating accident one mile from harbor”Pumps
Ko Olina Marina, HI, 4-APR-2020 – In the 1980s, the circle I lived in, mostly PhD psychologists of one stripe or another, mixed with some computer scientists, a bunch of neural network people, a physicist or two and who knows who else, looked at the current computer architecture as a model of how the brain works. A homologue for the CPU was easy, RAM was short term memory, disk storage was long term memory, we were certain we all knew how this fit together.
We were sure we were that first to find our current technology explained the least understood mysteries of the human body. A historian in the group pointed out that when pumps were the technology rage, technocrats of the day explained how the human body, including the brain, was just like a series of pumps.
Continue reading “Pumps”