Pastels. Peach. Rose. Smoke. Pewter. Powder blue. Gold. Champagne. Melding. Shifting. Fading. And then, between masts, the first sliver of a new moon.
The air is cool, crisp, washed clean.
I stand in the companionway, sipping chardonnay (boxed) and listening to Loreena McKennitt sing “The Dark Night of the Soul”, a beautifully passionate love song, and think of Pythagoras and Heraclitus. In the end I side with Heraclitus: like this evening sky, all is change. Life is flow.
From a hillside apartment of a woman I knew in Los Angeles more than forty years ago looking down on a freeway at night, flow of head lights. Some entering. Some exiting.
From the top of the series of escalators leading up from the Underground at Leicester Square in London on a Monday morning thirty years ago: an endless line of grim faced gray men and women going to work, some stepping off, as far below them others step on.
A river flowing endlessly toward an unknown and, perhaps unreachable, sea. New born tossed in, carried along; the old cast lifeless onto the banks.
We are swimmers together.
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The $10,000 ocean voyager is most definitely not GANNET. I paid $9,000 for her and spent that much again in the first few months. Paying cash as I go along I have no idea how much I have put into GANNET in the almost three years I have owned the little sloop, but I expect that she is one of the more expensive Moore 24s around, as well as the most uniquely equipped.
I had lunch today with Ronnie Simpson, an avid sailor who won his class in last year’s solo TransPac in a Moore 24.
Ronnie is about to sail from San Diego across the Pacific in a Cal 2-27, which he has prepared for ocean sailing for about $10,000, including the price of the boat. This is a significant achievement.
I wish him a fine voyage.
You can read more about Ronnie and MONGO, a skate-boarding term if I remember correctly, and find his tracking page here.
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From THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY
Cartesian: relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum—whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum—“I think that I think, therefore I think than I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
circus: a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.
clarinet: an instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarinet: two clarinets.
Conservative: a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
