John RIley

Last Port Before Home

Eagle Island, WA, South Puget Sound, 26-SEP-2024 – In my past posts, I’ve tried to keep you up-to-date with where we’ve been as a setup for talking about the people we’ve met. People who I thought I would keep in touch with. People I thought were fascinating and worthwhile – a small subset of the people we’ve met.

Christmas is near, Jennifer is leaving, friends are coming and I start to think about boats and boating.

Port Townsend, 8-Dec-2023 — Tuesday, I’ll go down to Gig Harbor and install two additional solar panels on John Riley’s boat, this will give 320 watts, which is roughly what I have on Caro Babbo. Instead of two one hundreds, he’ll have four fifties to aim as he wants, in addition to the 130 on the dodger. It’s cold here and cloudy, there hasn’t been any sun in a few days and his house battery has died. I’ll buy him a new deep-cycle house battery for Christmas.

It is Christmas, at least for me. I’ve started shopping…on line… and figuring out money. I’ve spent a lot more this year than I had intended. I’ve helped friends, and have family to attend to. Jennifer is off to Berlin and Flora may come to visit for a day or two (or perhaps a week or two). My stepdaughter Samantha arrives on the 21^st, with all the attendant flurry that accompanies her, as well as her boyfriend.

Other people’s boats

SEATAC, 17-JAN-2022 – I was speaking to John Riley not too many weeks ago. I was telling John that being away from my boat meant that I don’t have much to write about. John said, write about other people’s boats.

And so I shall.

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.

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.

Where is Jennifer’s Car and When are we leaving?

Lee’s Landing, Lake Union, Seattle, WA, 14-Aug-2019 – A fast status as we’re finishing up getting ready to leave.

There is a heavy and unrelenting feeling of pressure to get everything done, but as I sit to write this fast and hurried post, I realize that there are five days to go and there is no need to feel this pressure. Everything on critical path is easily accomplished. Yes, the list is unending, but that it is because it is a boat, just like a house, there is always more to do.

Decatur, GA, 24-Jan-2019 – Jennifer and I flew from Seattle to Atlanta yesterday. We had traveled by bus and ferry from Port Townsend to Caro Babbo, on Lake Union, the day before.

Owning Caro Babbo introduces us to a greater cross section of the world than anything I have ever done.

We meet people who have bought new power boats for millions of dollars and people living on derelict sailboats that will never move again without a tow. Unlike doing business in New York or the third world where the mega-wealthy and the destitute live side-by-side, sailing Caro Babbo, we do not merely see the spectrum of wealth and social standing, we spend time with the socio-eco spectrum of mankind.

I lived in NYC during the dark Abe Beam years. The city was at its nadir: murders were around four per day. It was dangerous time, and a time to learn about people and gain street smarts.