Sunday, March 17, 2024

Lake Forest: my worthless life; a secret to a good marriage; notes nevertheless to my future biographer

 


I have watched on Apple TV+ THE DYNASTY.  For those of you who do not live in the somewhat not quite United States this is a series about the New England Patriots’ domination of the National Football League as no team ever has under coach Bill Belicheck and quarterback Tom Brady who has won seven Super Bowls, the last with a different team.  Brady is often called the GOAT—the Greatest of All Time.  I do not believe in GOATs because different times cannot objectively be compared, but unquestionably he has won far more Super Bowls than any other quarterback, so we must accept his wisdom in all things, or be outcasts.

In the final episode of THE DYNASTY when Brady was being acclaimed on his return to the Patriot’s stadium he said, and this is an exact quote: It is one of my core beliefs that there is nothing significant in life that can be accomplished as an individual.  It is always about the team.

So, far too late I have learned that my life has been worthless.  I have believed in the individual and I have worked alone; but who can argue with a GOAT?  Given a second chance I would try to do better, but as someone else observed life is not a dress rehearsal, so I don’t get a second chance.  Sorry, Tom.  Sorry all of you.  I screwed up.



Despite my failed life, most accept that I know something about sailing boats alone across oceans.  A few even think I am a pretty good writer.  But until now no one has considered that I might also be able to offer advice about marriage.  Odd for I have been married more than most and to confuse some have now been married to one of the most intelligent and beautiful women of her generation for thirty years, so I offer free a rare secret of a good marriage.

Everyone knows the basics:  respect, compromise, kindness, communication, great sex, but few know that a key to a good marriage can be noise-cancelling headphones.  I have them on now.  

Carol and I agree on most things, but we have different tastes in music and television.  She watches what poses as the news on television which I find an intolerable combination of Entertainment Tonight and the National Enquirer where all the talking heads speak rapidly and breathlessly, deliberately creating fear which has long been proven the way to sell newspapers and the media’s subsequent descendants,  Descend indeed.

Our condo in Hilton Head is configured better to solve this problem.  Carol can be watching and listening to whatever she wants on the television which is located near the kitchen while I am reading or watching whatever I want sitting in front of the bedroom window and looking out at Skull Creek.  However in this apartment that is not possible.  Noise cancelling headphones are a technological salvation.



To my future biographer:  you are going to make your academic career by discovering a previously little known genius—not my word, I prefer ‘original’ but ‘genius’ will sell better— and one who has the advantage of being as exceptional physically as he was as a writer, who made voyages no one had ever even imagined and may still again, and repeatedly survived the seemingly unsurvival, and who defined some words—sailor, artist—better than any one ever had—plus understood as a teenager that to call ourselves homo sapiens is a cosmic joke, that we are homo insipiens or perhaps homo narcissus, so I don’t apologize that the record is split and that you are going to do some work and go to my main site, if it still exists, and to the various places the journal has been uploaded.  I like, no I love, simplicity and clarity, but this technology is not in my control and I can no longer update the main site, so here are two additions I would make if I could.

I would add to the Lines page:  

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lines.html

To life,

And pushing as hard as you can as long as you can and being grateful for whatever moments of peace you find.

And I would add to the Webb Chiles section of the photographs page

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/webb2.html

this one Steve Earley took last month while we were sipping drinks on the Hilton Head condo’s screened porch.




The top photo was taken by me a few decades ago at a cremation in Bali when I could still see well enough to use a camera beyond shooting videos and excerpting single frames.      







Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Lake Forest: patched; open boats

 


You can blame Michael for this.  He wrote that he would like to see a photo of me with an eye patch, so I searched and came up with this one.  It dates back to 2011.  You will probably be surprised to learn that my reaction to it is how young I look.  Now I don’t delude myself I was young.  I was seventy years old, but when I look in the mirror now as I occasionally must, to my eye I look a lot older.  At age 82 twelve years is about 15% of my life, so I should look 15% older and I do.

You can thank Michael for this one, which I happened across while looking for a patched me.


I include it just because.  It dates to 2005 when THE HAWKE OF TUONELA would have been on her mooring in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.  While Carol is prettier, that the camera focused on the flower is serendipitous.  

The first winter Carol and I were married THE HAWKE OF TUONELA remained on the hard in the Florida Keys and we lived in a rented apartment.  That next summer I sailed her up to Boston and that winter I insulated her interior so we could live on aboard and built a v-berth in the forepeak which had been empty and used for sail stowage when she was a racer.  I drove Carol to her office and then continued on Memorial Drive to Constitution Marina.  This being Boston usually the temperature was well below freezing and upon arrival I turned on the space heater and shivered until it warmed up enough for me to be able to hold tools.  Many of you are much better at building things than I, but I managed and doing the work myself had the great advantage that I could afford my wages.




What is called Mary Bryant’s open boat voyage has caused me to be thinking about open boat voyages.  I have tried to learn the size of the boat she, her husband, two infants and seven other escaped convicts sailed.  It seems it was about 25’ long.  That is a lot of people in a small boat, but then Capt. Blight had nineteen in the BOUNTY’S 23’ launch, including himself.  CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE could have floated inside both of those boats.  Here from Sailboat Data are the specifications of a Drascombe Lugger.



I would have much, much rather have been alone in the smallest boat.

Of the Bryant voyage, they had about 700 miles to sail from Sydney before they reached the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, which would have provided increasing protection as they continued the thousand miles north to Cape York.

I have sailed the last six hundred miles from present day Cairns to Cape York four times in four different boats:  CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, RESURGAM, THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, GANNET.  I have said that it is my favorite coastal sail in the world, but then I don’t do much coastal sailing.  Or I didn’t before I moved to Hilton Head.  Now I suppose I do.  From Marathon to Hilton Head.  Hilton Head to The Chesapeake and back.  Down to St. Marys.  Up to Cape Lookout.  And sometime this year I’ll sail to Charleston.  

The last five hundred miles along what is now northern Queensland  are still empty and would look much as they did when the Bryants passed. Still they were sailing into the unknown and I along that coast was not.  Cook and Bligh had passed that way, but it was a great feat of seamanship and determination. 















Monday, March 11, 2024

Lake Forest: THE FATAL SHORE and an epic open boat voyage; half price; death of a thousand cuts; relapse; and a poem

 I am rereading Robert Hughes’ excellent THE FATAL SHORE about the British colonizing of Australia.  Hughes was an Australian who went to England to make good and did as an art critic, writer and television personality.  I first read THE FATAL SHORE not long after it was published in the late 1980s and am enjoying it very much again.

There is something to be said for having sailed and experienced much of the world.  I have spent more than four years in Australia on my voyages, two of them in Sydney, and I have sailed an open boat around Cape York.  Recently I read Nathanial Philbrick’s MAYFLOWER, and I have anchored where the Pilgrims first did at present day Provincetown and at Plymouth, and so bring that knowledge to these books.

Here are some excepts from THE FATAL SHORE.  The first about scurvy.



It is estimated that between the 16th and 18th Centuries more than 2,000,000 sailors died from scurvy, far more than from all other causes, including drowning, combined.


And here are the observations on the Māori by Joseph Banks who was with Cook when he first reached New Zealand and found the Māori a far different people than the welcoming Tahitians.



I do not know if this observation by Hughes is true, but it is interesting and may be:  All people, but especially the young, tend to become what society says they are. 


Somehow I had forgotten one of the great open boat voyages of all time, that of Mary and William Bryant, their two infants, and seven other convicts, who stole an open boat to escape from Sydney and sailed more than 3,000 miles up the coast, around Cape York and across the Timor Sea to Kupang.

Here is a link to an article about that impressive voyage.

https://navyhistory.au/mary-bryants-open-boat-voyage-from-sydney-to-timor-in-1791-opportunist-convict-or-our-most-magnificent-heroine/



I had a routine eye exam this morning.  Having to exam only one eye, the doctor should charge me only half price, but doesn’t.

I also learned this morning that the growth removed from my lower right leg a week ago is a squamous cell carcinoma and I have to return next week for further chopping.  This is no surprise.  I have seen enough of these things to be able to diagnose them myself.  This was the third squamous cell on my right shin in the past year.  What I need is a full skin transplant.  In its absence it would be more efficient just to amputate my right leg at the knee instead of this death by a thousand cuts.  I could then have a peg leg.  I already have an eye patch, though I seldom wear it.  I would then need only an ear ring and a parrot to look like a real sailor, though I realized a long time ago that whatever I look like is what a sailor looks like.


I have been back in the upper flatlands less than two weeks and I am already suffering from my self named captiterraphobia—fear of being trapped by land.  I have detuned myself.  I am good for the duration, as is my nature, and we are making progress.  Retiring is complicated.  I am glad I never have.  But I am missing the coast and Skull Creek and GANNET.



From the BEING HUMAN anthology:















Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Lake Forest: a good book and a poor movie; imagine

I found myself wondering why I read and watch so much about war.  Both the book and film in this post are about war and of the fifteen books I have read so far this year five have been about war and of the remaining ten, five were books of poetry.  I have concluded that I read and watch so much about war because war is along with love and scrounging for a living one of the most fundamental human behaviors.  We are an aggressive species and that aggression has played a large part in our survival.  Probably all those of us alive today are because we had ancestors who were among the most aggressive in their times.  The meek have died out.

The book, UNNOWN SOLDIERS by Vaino Linna, I mentioned while I was still reading it.  Now that I have finished I consider it to be among the finest of war novels.  Seemingly realistic to me who has not been in combat and so cannot truly judge and totally unsentimental.  I thank Michael for bringing it to my attention.

Since reading UNKNOWN SOLDIERS I have read more about Finland history.  The novel is about Finland’s part in World War Two fighting on the side of Germany from 1941 to 1944,, not in shared values, but a shared enemy.  Finland calls that The Continuation War because it followed The Winter War which lasted three months after the Soviet Union invaded Finland on November 30, 1939.  At that time the population of the USSR was 186 million.  The population of Finland was 3.5 million.  Nevertheless Finland inflicted significant defeats on the USSR until finally overwhelmed.  I have read elsewhere that the poor performance of the Soviet forces in that brief war influenced Hitler in his decision to invade the USSR.

In 1944 the Soviet Union had the Germans in full retreat and were able to turn some attention to what was to them a sideshow and again overwhelmed Finland’s army forcing the country to sue for peace.  Finland then had to fight The Lapland War against German troops in the north of their country who did not want to leave.

Considering its history, it is interesting that currently Finland is usually ranked among the happiest countries in the world.

With the caveat that there are some brutal scenes, I highly recommend UNKNOWN SOLDIERS.



Last evening Carol I concluded watching the recent Ridley Scott directed NAPOLEON.  I try to read reviews minimally before reading a book or watching a movie, but I did see some of this NAPOLEON which were unfavorable and unfortunately accurate.  A large part of this is due to the screen play which is incoherent and spends far too much time on Napoleon’s relationship with Josephine, which may appeal to prurient interests, but was hardly the most significant part of his life.  

There are many historical inaccuracies, among them that Napoleon deserted his army in Egypt because he learned Josephine was having an affair back in France.  That Nelson had destroyed his navy at the Battle of the Nile and left him isolated in the Middle East is never mentioned.  Nor that he returned to France because he was afraid in his absence others would seize power.

Napoleon also deserted another army, this the one he led into Russia, and left it to be destroyed while he again saved himself.  Estimates vary but of the 600,000 men he led into Russia it is generally agreed that fewer than 100,000 survived.

I suppose that Napoleon thought as have others like him that if these fools are willing to suffer and die for my glory, let them.

Again estimates vary, but Napoleon was responsible for millions of deaths.  A foremost current scholar puts the figure at 5,000,000.  Yet the French built a more grandiose monument to the loser than the British did to the winners, Nelson and Wellington, whose remains are in the crypt of St. Paul’s.  We are indeed a strange species of celebrity worshipers.

Don’t waste your time on NAPOLEON.



Imagine a time when two men have the power to destroy the world.  Imagine that those two men are Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.  Unimaginable.  But that time may soon be at hand.  















Sunday, March 3, 2024

Lake Forest: roughing it; odd; two poems

 



 






To call Cape Horn The Everest of the Sea is an insult to Cape Horn.

You have probably seen the obscene photos of dozens of ‘climbers’ standing in line waiting their turn to summit Mt. Everest.  The above photos were all taken at Base Camp to which you don’t even have to walk any longer.  You can be flown up by helicopter after, as an article in THE TIMES OF LONDON, recently reports preparing by sleeping in a pressurized chamber in your own home.  I wonder if soon it will be possible to ‘climb’ Everest and impress all your friends without the inconvenience of having to step outside.

Here is a link to the article:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/everest-base-camp-sprawl-triggers-backlash-against-luxury-treks-lcrd2vptd






This is a screen shot taken an hour ago of the Earth Wind Map which I look at each morning.

https://earth.nullschool.net/

Until recently hurricanes were unknown in the South Atlantic.  They are still rare, but that tight circle in mid-ocean certainly looks like it might become one, though the winds are presently only 45 knots.  As you may have noted, the times they are changing.



Two poems.  The first from BEING ALIVE.  The second from HOJOKI:  THE HERMIT’S HUT AS METAPHOR.









Thursday, February 29, 2024

Lake Forest: flew; Shackleton; Audubon; movement of cruising boats; the four components of war

18F when I woke this morning at 6 am.  Now in early afternoon a balmy 35F.  Obviously I am not on Hilton Head Island.  I am in Lake Forest, Illinois, having flown here yesterday.  Both my flights were delayed, but not disruptingly, and so it was merely a tiring day of sitting and waiting like obedient cattle.  I am glad it is over.

Lake Forest is a nice place, but I am not looking out at water and beauty.

I expect to be here for at least two months as Carol retires from a long and successful career and we get rid of a lot of stuff and close down her apartment, following which she will drive us east to Hilton Head for what should be the very last time.


I thank David for a link to a website of immense beauty, John J. Audubon’s Birds of America, which includes reproductions of 435 of his watercolors.  Almost everyone knows of Audubon, but I had never before studied his watercolors carefully.  They are wonders.  I have bookmarked the site and added it to my daily habits.  I now view four or five birds a day with awe and appreciation.


https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america



I thank James for a link to a nine minute film SOUTH about Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to reach the South Pole.  The film contains fascinating original footage but requires some previous knowledge of what the men endured.  If you do not know here is a link:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton

And here is the link to the film:

https://youtu.be/BJ-6RJkuLlQ?si=6TgbG_uJsrkQZRTf







I thank Doug for a link to Jimmy Cornell’s latest survey of the world wide movement of cruising boats which I had not seen.


I expect it still reflects residual effects of the pandemic, but perhaps people are truly becoming more timorous than they were.


It re-enforces my personal observations that the average cruising boat is now 45-50’ long and an increasing number are catamarans.


https://www.cruisingworld.com/destinations/global-movement-cruising-boats/





While sitting and waiting yesterday, I read a great deal of UNKNOWN SOLDIERS, a novel by Vaino Linna about Finland’s part in WW2 in which, having been earlier invaded by the Soviet Union, they fought as allies of Germany.  It is quite a good antidote to Horace’s Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.


A quote:


Besides being cold and hungry, the men were also sleep-deprived—so, of the four components we might say encapsulate the essence of war, fear was the only one missing.














Friday, February 23, 2024

Hilton Head Island: power boater videos

I shot two short videos at anchor on Port Royal Sound late Wednesday afternoon and uploaded them to YouTube yesterday.

If you are interested here are the links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59fyltf5Xwo&t=3s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yET1-awENNE&t=3s


In watching Power Boater 1 I saw that GANNET was indeed moving about a bit.  I did not even notice it at the time, but there was cause for me to still feel her motion for five or six hours after I stepped ashore.  

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Hilton Head Island: power boat

I powered away from the dock yesterday.  I powered back to the dock this morning.  In between I set the sails in a forlorn hope of wind.  It was a gesture.  There was none.  So I anchored a mile from land in Port Royal Sound, reorganized some things in the interior, sipped a glass of cabernet sauvignon and one of Laphroaig in the cockpit, while listening to music.  Had an excellent freeze dry dinner of Alpine Aire’s Creamy beef with noddles and mushrooms, and slept well.

This morning numerous odd glitches occurred, among them that I had no cell phone coverage, which I learned after returning to the condo and reading the news happened to many.  The Raymarine tiller pilot I used yesterday, this morning failed to respond to the port side buttons.  I went below and brought up another.  It did not respond at all.  A third didn’t either.  I brought up the Pelagic and it didn’t work either, though later at the dock it did.  There were more which I forget, although I do remember that as I was approaching our slip I did not see the orange ring I have around the piling at one side of the slip.  After I docked I found it stuck below the water.  I could not reach it with my boat hook.  I think it is stuck on barnacles.

Despite all this I enjoyed being on the water, which is even better than living next to it as we do, and living in that little space which so suits me.

Strangely, considering that GANNET only deviated from being level and rock steady on a couple of power boat wakes, I am still feeling her motion after five hours ashore.  I don’t know how it is possible to feel motion that never existed, but I do.

I am presently sipping a Webb and have a Netherland’s Bach Society video on the TV of Bach’s French Suite Number 1 in D minor.

L’Chaim.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Hilton Head Island: excellent company; EINSTEIN AND THE BOMB; a memento; prepared

Douglas has been repairing a family home in Scotland that will soon go on the market.  He plans to build a small cabin somewhere in the Highlands where he will live a solitary life.  He wrote to me recently, “Doubtless this will be considered crazy, but I will consider myself to be in excellent company.”  I smile and wish him well.  I know that alone he will indeed be in excellent company in the monastery of the land.


Last evening I watched an unexpectedly good movie on Netflix, EINSTEIN AND THE BOMB,  In begins by stating that it is based on true events in Einstein’s life and that all the words are his own, either spoken or written during his life time.  Among those words are his declaring his distrust of authorities and later in his life stating that he has been punished for that by being made an authority himself.

As has been stated here before I am among those who unequivocally believe that the atomic bombs should have been dropped on Japan.  I have related that I have met over the years four men, two British, one Australian, one American, who told me that but for the atomic bombs they would not likely be alive.  All were in mid-1945 being redeployed for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.  The willingness of the Japanese to die to the last man had been proven at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and many other places.  The estimated Allied casualties of the invasion of Japan was one million.  Many, many more Japanese would have died.  Only the atomic bombs enabled the Japanese to surrender without being obliterated.

The parts of the film about Hitler and the rise of Nazism and persecution of the Jews reminded me of a man I met many years ago.

He must have been born about 1930 in Hamburg, Germany.  In his early teens he was a member of the Hitler Youth.  That in itself does not mean much.  Membership was essentially mandatory.  Physically he was the image of the Nazi ideal.  Blood.  Blue eyed.  Handsome. Unfortunately he was small.  Less than average height.  Hardly an imposing member of the master race.

In 1945 while still a teenager he was among those too young and too old called into the army in Hitler’s last desperate and hopeless attempt to avoid defeat, which had been inevitable, unless the Germans developed the atomic bomb or some similar weapon before the Allies did, since Stalingrad and Kursk.  He survived a few weeks of combat and after Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s unconditional surrender walked I know not how many miles back to his family in Hamburg.

He studied and became a doctor of medicine and then, perhaps surprisingly, immigrated to the United States, one of the enemies against which he had fought, and had a successful medical career in Florida.

Hitler’s private yacht was confiscated at the end of the war and somehow ended up near Jacksonville, Florida.  From this photo of a sister ship, she was an elegant 85’ yawl, the OSTWIND.


I would have expected Hitler to have a huge power boat.  It is said that he was only on the OSTWIND a few times.

I met the man of whom I am writing on his own sailboat.  During our conversation he pointed at a small finely crafted wooden jewelry box beside the chart table and told me with pride that he had it made from wood taken from Hitler’s private yacht.

That is all there is to the story.  I find it strange.


I biked to a supermarket and liquor store this morning and then down to GANNET where I fit the Evo on the stern.  It started as it should and always has.  I tested a tiller pilot.  Moved the anchor and rode to under the forward hatch.  Tightened lifelines.  GANNET is ready to go sailing, but there is flat calm.  Skull Creek is glassy.  

Tomorrow I will go down to the little boat and take her from the dock, unless as is unlikely conditions prohibit that, and try to sail.  If there is no wind I will power slowly and anchor somewhere for the night.  I had planned to sail for a week or so in January, but COVID intervened.  I fly to Chicago a week from tomorrow.  This is my last chance for a while.








Saturday, February 17, 2024

Hilton Head Island: a little peace


Although the day in the marsh has been grey and cool, I put on a fleece and am having a martini and listening to music on deck.  It is always better to be outside.

I know I have said this many times, but the beauty here is always startlingly new.  And the quiet.

I sit looking out at gray and green and am at the moment at rare peace.

When Carol and I first met and married, which were almost simultaneous, she asked for thirty years.  We will have been married for thirty years this August, so I have willingly fulfilled my part of the bargain which has been the great chance grace of my life and will willingly extend the contract.

I am not quite halfway through my five year plan which if fulfilled will result in a voyage whose outcome cannot be known and may be fatal.  The willingness to undertake such an endeavor, after planning and preparation, is as some of you know my definition of nerve.  When you are 82 you don’t have much time left even if you seal yourself in a bubble.  

So I am enjoying this unexpected peace.  I am going to continue to enjoy this to me new marsh beauty.  I am going to enjoy my time with Carol.  And books.  And music.  And using my aged body.

In the previous entry about numbers, there are some that might be world records created not intentionally, but as casual byproducts of how I have lived.  The 3,000 mile first leg of the open boat voyage was later exceeded by a 4,000 mile passage from Singapore to Aden which might be the longest open boat passage ever.  Eight times in Force 12 might be too.  As might be putting the mastheads of four boats in the water.  And completing circumnavigations in five successive decades.  I don’t know that any of them are and I can’t prove them, other than the circumnavigations, but they might be.  They were not intentional but perhaps quantifications of a life that repeatedly over a very long time in our species terms but is a butterfly’s cough in terms of the universe pushed beyond the edge of human experience and put words together that too have pushed beyond that edge.  And if the body that has carried that life is still alive and healthy at the end of 2026 will again.

The image on my iPad is part of a music video, ‘Le vent nous porters’ which translates as ‘the wind carries us’ sung by Margarita Pirri.  You might enjoy it.  Here is the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyzBuo53u_0

To life.  

And pushing as hard as you can as long as you can and being grateful for whatever moments of peace you find.